spoke and moved like an old woman, but the principal accompanied her, whispering a few words of sympathy.

"You are very kind,' said Miranda, in the same curiously feeble voice, but leave me now, please.'

She opened the door of the saloon, and went in with her tragic message plain upon her face. Esther rose and ran to her, supporting her to the settee upon which so much comedy had been played. Miranda sank upon it, stammering out the truth. Esther exclaimed: 'I can't believe it! I can't believe it!'

She looked wildly round her, as if entreating the familiar objects to speak, to contradict this outrageous statement. Then she saw the cards, neatly arranged in eight little packets. She pointed at them.

"They lied!'

'No,' said Miranda sorrowfully, 'I cheated.'

To Mrs. Tower, Sabrina had given three letters, to be delivered in the event of her death. The first and longest was addressed to her husband. It is likely that she expressed sincere regret for the blundering marriage in which, you may be sure, she accepted more than half the responsibility. Esther saw Tom at the funeral, a sturdy, gentleman-farmer-looking sort of person (Esther's description), with a red-brown, woodeny face, quite expressionless. Such men are not to be despised or underestimated. Many of them stood shoulder to shoulder when England's greatest battles were fought and won. Pioneers are made out of just such stuff. Undoubtedly he had the phlegmatic temperament of the successful golfer. He followed his wife, dry-eyed, to her grave in the pretty country churchyard where she had expressed a wish to be buried. And he said to Esther:

She was a good sort, too good for me, but I never understood her-never!'

The pathos of these blunt words moved Esther, not him. She recognised the type, common amongst Englishmen, of the husband who never does or can understand his wife, unless she happens to think precisely as he does upon matters vital to their unity and mutual happiness. Esther wondered whether he would marry again. Miranda predicted that he would, because he owned a small manor, and must deem it a duty to beget a son and heir. After some years he did marry-his cook-a young, pretty, and quite respectable person.

The second letter reached Miranda upon the evening of the day when Sabrina died. It was very short.

DEAR MIRANDA,—Keep an eye on Esther. With a little help she will learn to stand alone, without it she may tumble down. Do you remember teaching me to walk? Teach her. She wants to run.

Good-bye, my dear old friend, and God bless you!

Yours ever,

SABRINA.

Miranda placed the letter with a sprig of lavender in her desk, amongst other letters which she read from time to time, but she muttered to herself: If Esther runs, how am I, a waddling old woman, going to catch her?'

The third letter was for Esther. We print it reluctantly because it reveals the side of Sabrina which, during her lifetime, she hid from everybody:

MY DEAREST ESTHER,-Some instinct tells me that I must leave you, at the moment when you most need a friend. Against my will, you made me love you. It is a great power, the greater because exercised unconsciously in your case. Miranda, whom a hard life has turned into rather a selfish old woman, loves you, but not as I do. I go gladly, sorry only because I leave you alone to fight against odds which I can measure and you can't.

I have willed to you my interest in our business. It is worth more than I thought. Not considering a few bad debts, which I have marked in the ledger with a red cross, you could, if you would, sell out, and find yourself with enough to bring in a small income. But I fear you will not sell out. Nor have you the experience necessary to select an honest partner, cut to my pattern. You will insist on paddling your own canoe, because you are you.

I like the matron of this nursing home, to whom I shall give this letter, and I have spoken to her of you. If you were in dire trouble, you might do worse than go to her. She wouldn't gush, but I have the feeling she might do something. Bear her in mind. Then there is Miranda. Stick to her. She went to Margate on your account. My going will affect her, because she knows how much it will affect you. She is a pagan, but she walks straighter than many a Christian.

I have never spoken much of my life before we met, and it is too late to do so now. The words of a simple little song keep coming into my mind; they were written by a woman, who set them to music:

Think of me then as one who-much forgiven

Must needs love much, and fain would love still more.

Think of the rest to one who long has striven
'Gainst wind and tide to reach the farther shore.

Perhaps the farther shore is nearer than we think. I hope so.

POPE AND THE MODERN WOMAN.

BY G. J. ST. LOE STRACHEY

'

A GENERATION or two ago there was no more fruitful source of literary controversy than the question whether Pope was or was not a poet. Nowadays, however, the matter may, I think, be said to have been finally decided, and he would be a bold man who would challenge Pope's right to the immortal crown. For me, at any rate, the question is settled, and without cause for appeal, by Pope's work possessing the infallible mark of true poetry. It is infused with passion, and passion is the touchstone by which we may know poetry. Needless to say, in speaking of Pope's poetry being infused with passion, I do not mean passion in the narrow sense of love between human beings of the opposite sexes, any more than Milton did when he

defined poetry as that which is The passion which turns verse ardour of the mind akin to pain Whatever is passionate is alive,

simple, sensuous, passionate.' into poetry is an exaltation and from its intensity and energy. and causes life in that with which it comes into contact. A poem is a thing made, a creation, and the vital and enkindling spark is passion. A great French artist, Jean François Millet, has told us l'art ne vit que de passion, and though he meant his words to apply to painting, they are quite as true of all the other arts. No matter what the subject chosen by the poet, if he can infuse it with passion he has made poetry. We may find passion in satire, passion in didactic dissertation, passion in the treatment of philosophy, of religion, of science, of history, even of political economy, and in many another subject which as a rule is treated not with passion. but with dull and cold statement or formal description. What makes the poetry of Pope so interesting is the fact that he touches subjects which as a rule seem inapplicable to passion. He brings his precious and illuminating gift into the most unexpected places. Pope, partly by temperament, and partly by the accident of his age, was essentially a student of mankind, and an analyst of human society. It was in weighing human nature and human

A lecture delivered in London on December 4, 1908.

motives and discovering their elements, their causes and effects, that Pope and the men of his time specially delighted. This by itself would but have made him a social and political philosopher like Hobbes in the generation before, or like Bolingbroke in his own day, or Hume a generation later. As it was, the gift of passion, coupled with that second essential of poetry, the sense of rhythm and harmony and the delight in language tuned to enchant the ear and the sensuous portion of the mind, made him first of all a poet. A poet, whatever his theme, is under covenant with the Muses to treat it poetically.

It is true that all great poets, from Shakespeare to Browning, have been anatomists of the human heart, and, therefore, in one sense there was nothing strange in much of Pope's attempts to lay bare man's nature, and to depict him in his social environment. There is, however, an element of originality in Pope. Though his greatest admirer could not venture for a moment to suggest that he has sounded the depths of feeling and lifted the veil of motive as did Shakespeare or even as Browning, he has, at any rate, reached originality on a narrower field. In this narrower field and within certain well-defined limits he is supreme. No one has surpassed him as the poet of society—the poet, that is, who shows man as he is affected by the State and in relation, not simply to his fellows but to the conditions created by a complex civilisation. As the poet of public morals and manners none has ever approached him. Perhaps the best illustrations of what I mean are to be found in the Moral Essays, and best of all in that culminating work of Pope's genius as an analyst, the Essay on the Characters of Women.' The astonishing thing about these characters is their modernness. Except for an occasional peculiarity of language Pope's pictures seem to have been designed to fit types of women which we in our ignorance or arrogance are inclined to regard as essentially newmodern of the modern.

We all know or have heard about the woman who has carried intellectual independence to its very farthest point, and has abandoned absolutely the notion of prayer, or, indeed, of any religious exercise. All she asks is liberty-freedom to live her own life in exactly her own way, and to live every minute of it. But look a little closer and we note that the same woman, oppressed by circumstances, is equally vehement for the anodyne of death. If life will not give her just what she wants, and at the moment, then she will have none of it. And what little things bring her from

one extreme to the other!-an inconstant lover or a tiresome husband. Restlessness is the very essence of her being; but her electric flashes of thought are too quick and too eccentric ever to enlighten. She does not even gain the worldly happiness for which she is always striving, and which she asserts is the absolute right of every man and woman. The very passion of her search for life betrays her, and she dies before she has plucked the golden flower of joy. How exactly Pope has portrayed this New Woman in the character of Flavia !

Flavia's a wit, has too much sense to pray;
To toast our wants and wishes' is her way;
Nor asks of God, but of her stars, to give
The mighty blessing, while we live to live.'
Then all for death, that opiate of the soul !
Lucretia's dagger, Rosamonda's bowl.

6

Say, what can cause such impotence of mind?

A spark too fickle, or a spouse too kind.

Wise wretch! with pleasures too refin'd to please,

With too much spirit to be e'er at ease;

With too much quickness ever to be taught;

With too much thinking to have common thought;
You purchase pain with all that joy can give,
And die of nothing but the rage to live.

Take next the woman beloved by the latter-day novelist-the woman who, without good looks, is yet the most fascinating of her sex. We are inclined to think that the woman without regular beauty and without the more obvious attractions of sex, who yet proves the conqueror of the conquerors of the world, is a purely modern product. Yet we find her drawn by Pope as no modern pen has ever portrayed her :

'Twas thus Calypso once each heart alarm'd,
Aw'd without virtue, without beauty charm'd;
Her tongue bewitched as oddly as her eyes;
Less wit than mimic, more a wit than wise :
Strange graces still, and stranger flights, she had;
Was just not ugly and was just not mad;

Yet ne'er so sure our passion to create

As when she touch'd the brink of all we hate.

Another type of woman of whom most of us know examples is she who seems the spirit of universal kindness. Soft as the softest silk, she does not offend by a boisterous championship, and yet she is always ready to speak up for those who are attacked, or to help the weak. The kindly wise-woman of the world is her