IX.  Louis XVII

COX’S DIARY.

The Announcement

First Rout

A Day with the Surrey Hounds

The Finishing Touch

A New Drop-Scene at the Opera

Striking a Balance

Down at Beulah

A Tournament

Over-Boarded and Under-Lodged

Notice to Quit

Law Life Assurance

Family Bustle

NOVELS BY EMINENT HANDS.

GEORGE DE BARNWELL

By sir E. L. B. L., Bart.

VOL I.

In the Morning of Life the Truthful wooed the Beautiful, and their offspring was Love.  Like his Divine parents, He is eternal.  He has his Mother’s ravishing smile; his Father’s steadfast eyes.  He rises every day, fresh and glorious as the untired Sun-God.  He is Eros, the ever young.  Dark, dark were this world of ours had either Divinity left it—­dark without the day-beams of the Latonian Charioteer, darker yet without the daedal Smile of the God of the Other Bow!  Dost know him, reader?

Old is he, Eros, the ever young.  He and Time were children together.  Chronos shall die, too; but Love is imperishable.  Brightest of the Divinities, where hast thou not been sung?  Other worships pass away; the idols for whom pyramids were raised lie in the desert crumbling and almost nameless; the Olympians are fled, their fanes no longer rise among the quivering olive-groves of Ilissus, or crown the emerald-islets of the amethyst Aegean!  These are gone, but thou remainest.  There is still a garland for thy temple, a heifer for thy stone.  A heifer?  Ah, many a darker sacrifice.  Other blood is shed at thy altars, Remorseless One, and the Poet Priest who ministers at thy Shrine draws his auguries from the bleeding hearts of men!

While Love hath no end, Can the Bard ever cease singing?  In Kingly and Heroic ages, ’twas of Kings and Heroes that the Poet spake.  But in these, our times, the Artisan hath his voice as well as the Monarch.  The people To-Day is King, and we chronicle his woes, as They of old did the sacrifice of the princely Iphigenia, or the fate of the crowned Agamemnon.

Is Odysseus less august in his rags than in his purple?  Fate, Passion, Mystery, the Victim, the Avenger, the Hate that harms, the Furies that tear, the Love that bleeds, are not these with us Still? are not these still the weapons of the Artist? the colors of his palette? the chords of his lyre?  Listen!  I tell thee a tale—­not of Kings—­but of Men—­not of Thrones, but of Love, and Grief, and Crime.  Listen, and but once more.  ’Tis for the last time (probably) these fingers shall sweep the strings.

E. L. B. L.

NOONDAY IN CHEPE.