you cannot object to her witnessing our jousts. This room," glancing down it, "does not seem far short of the regulation distance. Take your choice of either of these toys. I will give you every advantage, since I forced the game upon you! You are in evening dress; stand against the open window and button up your coat. I think this costume will give you mark enough against the wall there. Bearer! Call the servants. We must have a gallery, if not for plaudits, that they may not call it murder! Now then, are you ready?" as Manners, walking mutely and impassively as in a dream, takes the weapon and the place assigned to him. He feels it is too late, too hopeless, to contend with Fate.

But as he turns about, he murmurs, "Oh! My God, My God, poor Gladys!"

"When I dash this cup against the floor, fire! and may your bullet reach the heart you have broken," are the hissing, scorching words hurled at him by the man beside himself with overmastering passions.

The next minute a single pistol-shot and a woman's frightful scream pierce the midnight air, and the unhappy cause of so much. misery drops senseless-and henceforth mindless. While poor

Manners, stretching out his hand, fires his shot into empty space, gasps out: "You have judged hastily, falsely, foully. I am innocent of all intent or deed to do you wrong. May God forgive-as-I-do -you-"; and prone on his face the victim of a wretched creature's folly falls, and dies.

Letters to and from Hans Christian Andersen.

WHEN Andersen died in 1875, it was found that he had left to his sole legatee, his oldest friend, Edward Collin, a vast and disorganised mass of papers of every kind. They consisted of letters, newspapercuttings, reviews, play-bills, pamphlets, every conceivable species of written or printed matter. These collections were stored away in as many chests and trunks as those which the peripatetic De Quincey left behind him as he journeyed from lodging to lodging, but with this difference, that while De Quincey abandoned his treasures to the mercy of landladies, Andersen dragged his ever-increasing and Atlantean load jealously about with him wherever he went. During the last years of his life he ever and anon bethought him of this heap of material, the earliest fragments of which dated as far back as his childhood, and he made repeated efforts to put it into working order himself. But no sooner did he plunge into one of the vast and musty chests, than he evoked so many ghosts of his past life, so many fascinating and bewildering memories, that he was fain to read scrap after scrap, letter after letter, with the tears gathering to his eyes; and when he was called away to other matters, the task lay as unattempted as ever. Once or twice he did seriously set himself to prepare the papers for his future biographer, but in each case the pressure of poetic inspiration, which was never long separated from him, forced him on its return to quit these labours for the more obvious duty of authorship. Hence, when Herr Collin came into possession of the MSS., and became desirous of using them, he found himself quite unable to cope alone with such a distracting mass. He called to his assistance two men of letters, intimate friends of the deceased, Herr C. S. A. Bille, and the young companion of Andersen's later travels, Herr Nikolaj Bögh. But the three gentlemen soon found that they had no light labour before them. It was a peculiarity of Andersen to preserve every scrap of paper with something like the superstition of an Oriental, who will not destroy any fragment lest it should happen to contain the name of Allah. Even when the communication was one personally distressing or humiliating to him, Andersen scrupled to destroy it, and it was eventually hidden in the great common heap. But if the mass of papers so bequeathed was a tedious one to overhaul, it certainly gave opportunities for the compilation of an admirable biography of the poet. Such advantages,

probably, no biographer has ever had before, for although many eminent persons have collected particulars of their own life as exact, or almost as exact, as these of Andersen's, yet no one but he, and perhaps Rousseau, have had the naïveté or the candour to preserve the dark with the bright, the ignominious incidents of their career no less truthfully than the honourable. In the pure and beautiful career of Andersen, to be sure, there was nothing to conceal except a few innocent gaucheries, a few amusing outbursts of temper and wounded vanity. As a first step towards the production of that exhaustive biography that we may sooner or later expect, Messrs. Bille and Bögh have selected what seemed to them most important and characteristic from the bulk of the correspondence. In 1877 they published the letters written to Andersen (Breve til Hans Christian Andersen,' Reitzel, Copenhagen), and in 1878 they supplemented this by two thick volumes of letters from Andersen (Breve fra Hans Christian Andersen,' Reitzel, Copenhagen). These collections deserve to be known outside the narrow circle of Danish readers, and we propose to give some extracts from them in the following pages.

Among the letters written to the poet, those addressed to him by his mother are of especial interest. They throw quite a new light upon her character. In later life Andersen was accustomed a little. to depreciate his mother. The poetic temperament and early death of his father threw a sort of romantic halo around Andersen's memory of him, while the coarse ways and rough uneducated exterior of his mother, wounded somewhat his vanity and susceptibility. In his own account of his childhood, he, quite unconsciously, contrives to give us the impression that his mother was dull and shrewish. We are not attracted to her by his account of her. But in these letters she comes out in a new light. It must be recollected that she never learned to write and that she dictated all her letters to one of those amanuenses who get a scanty livelihood by writing for the poor. Unfortunately none of her very earliest letters seem to have been preserved the earliest is dated 1822, when her son was seventeen, and had already been some time in Copenhagen.

"MY DEAR, GOOD SON-I thank you very much for your affectionate letter of Saturday; I don't know the date. But I am happy to see that you remember what year it is: and you write it plain enough for a halfblind person to see without spectacles. You reproach me about various things in your letter, that you cannot properly understand me, and you think that I complain of this and the other that I ought not, and I can't say that you are quite wrong about that; for the people that hitherto have written for me have not always quite understood me, and so have often written after their own devices what I in my simplicity have taken to be very good and reasonable, and so in my ignorance I have blamed my son,

which I ought not to have done. No, son, I have nothing to reproach you with, and my highest and best wish is that God may lead you on the way you are now treading, and give you strength, happiness, hope and courage to pursue it to the end... You are now a beginner; that you will be industrious and deserve the kindness of your protectors, I do not doubt; but I will beg you this: do not lose your way in this great gulf of learning, but use your time sensibly, and think each thing out well for itself, and do not gallop before you can walk-that is my motherly counsel to you; and when you have learned some one thing thoroughly, then it will be time enough to talk big about doing honour to literature and adorning public taste. You will feel this yourself, my son; if not now, in time you will. . . From your great patrons I have no message to send you; for I have not spoken with one of them, nor has Mr. Schou written any letter for me, as you suppose. Those grand gentlemen I am not going to visit; they may be good people enough in their way, but a poor woman like me, everybody knows, is just sent away with a good-natured smile. My good Christian, learn to know men, and do not be so proud of your own little I, for it is not yet of much importance; but learn to be grateful and humble, and then everything will go well with you in the world."

This was good sense and good counsel; and it is noticeable that the shrewd old woman had already put her finger on her son's one grave fault, his inordinate vanity, and pride in what she calls his own little I." She showed no less perspicacity in writing directly that she heard of Collin's kindness to her son: "You need now have no more anxiety for the present or the future, for he is a man who can and will do great things for you." One more extract will show the condition of the home at Odense, when Andersen was just beginning to be an author at Copenhagen. His mother writes::

"I have written to you by young Lohmann, and I cannot understand why you have not answered for so long. I am very much grieved about it, and almost think illness must be the cause of your forgetfulness, and it is very wrong of you indeed to wound my tender, feeling, motherly heart with your long silence, for you know that I, if you will only think it over, never have denied you anything, however difficult it has been for me to procure it. And in those days you could be easily pleased, for you were contented with a few potatoes . . . Your Ghost at Palnatoke's Grave,' a tale, and Alfsol,' a tragedy, I have asked for at Hemfrel's shop, and wanted to borrow it, but he refused it to me, as it was so costly, namely eight marks, which I could not afford to pay for it; but possibly you, as the author, could perhaps get a copy. If so, I should be very grateful to you."

As late as 1833, when Andersen was twenty-eight, and a tolerably successful author, his mother's letters reveal a curious thoughtlessness on his part. She says:

"You write, good Christian, that I must let you know if I have not been yet to see the comedy; but how could I do so? For without paying I could not go, and to give money to go I cannot possibly do, as a poor woman, for every farthing I get has to be spent on the necessities of life

and not on its enjoyments. I hear every now and then that your books are praised in the newspapers, which delights me.

That last Christmas you amused yourself so much, and received so many presents, cannot but please me too. As for myself, under the circumstances I am pretty well, thank God; I go now every day to Miss Lohmann's, where I am very comfortable; but I receive no money, but a little clothing, what can be spared, and now and then I get some washing to do. Dear Christian, as the market is now open, and I am extremely in want of a pair of shoes and a petticoat, that I may go decently to the Lord's table, I beg you, if possible, before the market closes to send me a little, and if possible rather more than usual, that I may buy myself a pair of shoes and a petticoat, for I need them very much. . . I have made a nice jacket out of the coat you sent me, so that now I hope to keep the cold out a little better."

A few weeks after this querulous letter reached him, Andersen started on his three years' tour in Europe, a journey which was to be absolutely critical in the history of his development. Although he was in his twenty-ninth year, he was still so inexperienced and childlike, that his friends stuffed the pockets of the ship's captain with letters to be delivered to him piecemeal upon the voyage. Here is one of these notes, dictated by a rare delicacy of sympathy:

:

"DEAR FRIEND—I suddenly got the idea that it might please you to receive a letter from me before you reached Hamburg, and when you could not expect to get a letter. What have I to write to you about? Nothing! In this moment I cannot collect my thoughts; believe me, I am deeply dejected at your going away; I shall miss you dreadfully. I shall miss not seeing you as usual come jumping up to my room to chat with me, especially on Thursday I shall miss you from your place at dinner; yes, I know it, your feeling of loss must be greater still, because you are alone; but as truly as it is a consolation to know that there are friends at home thinking about one, so truly you have this consolation, for we are all constantly and lovingly remembering you. Good-bye, my dear, dear friend! God grant that we may see one another again, happy and merry, in two years' time. Your

"E. COLLIN."

Turning to the other collection, that of letters from Andersen, we find one of the same period which forms an extraordinary commentary upon his condition of mind and temperament. The first poetical result of his exile was the composition of 'Agnete; or, the Merman,' a poem which he wrote at Le Loch, a village in the Jura. He sent this work, which was in some respects an advance upon his previous works, but still very jejune in style, home to Copenhagen to be published, and it did not enjoy any success. When he commenced the following letter to his friend, Miss Henriette Wulff, he was not aware of this latter fact. In his biography he gives some account of the frenzy of depression into which his temporary