No. 3.

science - that must have been what prompted me to tell him to go on. One might consider Travers as a psychological study, you know. "It's a book," he further informed me. "You waste a good deal of time in unneces

sary statements."

“Oh, I don't know: it might have been a poem, or a new magazine. But it's this way. How many books have you seen entitled, say, 'Mary, and Other Stories'?"

"I think about a million," I said, thoughtfully.

"Yes, so have I. That makes two million. You know I've never published any of my short stories in the magazines?"

"Magazines did n't want them?" I queried, with the sympathy born of experience.

"Don't know, I'm sure.

The magazines are like Jess Logan and her cloak—they no' got a chance of no' wanting them. They were n't good enough to send." I gazed on him in

silent admiration.

"No," he went on; "but I've always wanted to write a story, you know." I knew. I had heard of that story at all sorts of uncanny hours- the times Travers usually grew confidential for more than six years.

"Yes. Got your inspiration at last?" “Not in the least," with a sigh. "It's merely a case of wresting victory from defeat, don't you know. I'm not going to try to capture that yarn any longer, but I've got one or two other ideas that I can make good second-class stories of."

"Yes," said his one hearer, quite soberly. "Second-class for me, I mean, old man," he amended quietly. “You see he took his feet off the table, and, leaning forward, looked into the fire the implication being that it would n't

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tell him he couldn't write second-class stories. "You see-well, take a simile. If one had a pearl necklace, you know, fine pearls, but with one missing, the-what do you call it, the big one that comes in front - he'd be inclined to sulk. Now, if you laugh, I'll tell all the bores I know what good cigars you keep."

"Nevertheless, you mean to string the other pearls without the big fellow?"

'Yes, publish a collection of short stories, and call it Other Stories.' See? And I'd work off a semi-pathetic preface, signed with initials, on the confiding public, explaining."

"That would be interesting."

"Thank you. Sort of suggesting that I'd missed the jewel of my artistic life, as a fellow sometimes misses the what he wants most in other things." I nodded. "Then I'd amble on, 'When the glamour gets off life, and we settle down to enjoy it or endure it, as our luck happens to be, we see grace in the before-unendurable second best." Youth's haughty "All or Nothing" gives place to a saner and sadder motto, and, when we would offer a gift, we give, as I do now, not what we would, but what we have.' See, old man?"

"Yes; 'to-day my queen of beauty is not here.""

"Thanks yes. I'd have to work up to that by something which would leave the inference plain that 'to-day' meant my present

There is no subject of more vital importance to the man of letters than the care of his physical health. Regular habits of work and rest; proper clothing; the use of such desks and chairs as help him to withstand the natural tendency to stoop; wisdom in diet; systematic exercise; good ventilation, and all such things are to him matters of the greatest moment. wish to speak especially of one phase of this subject, and that is wisdom in diet. After all is said that can be said in regard to the value of different foods, it will be found that the bal

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ance of proof is on the side of a mixed diet for man. The assertion that extreme vegetarianism, "the potato gospel," as Carlyle called it, is detrimental to the welfare of the race receives added emphasis when we begin to look at the historical aspects of the question. And this is especially the case when we study the life-record of the great poet whose centenary occurred recently. I cannot better enforce my plea for care and wisdom in the choice of food than by a reference to Shelley. His life is full of lessons for every poet, novelist, or jour

malist who reads the pages of THE WRITER.

The whole character of the celebration of Shelley's birth proved that he has taken an abiding place both in English literature and in the hearts of the English people. One form which that celebration assumed was of an unusual nature. On a Saturday evening many notable men of letters in London sat down to a banquet in the poet's honor. The feast of reason and the flow of soul were the most important elements of this princely festival. It is perhaps possible that the philosophers present fared well in other respects, but the food was wholly of vegetable products, no meats, no game, no fish found favor with the guests. The speeches were brilliant and enthusiastic, tinged with the most aggressive and democratic thought of the age. The hero of the evening was extolled. His work as a poet received many just and beautiful tributes, and in harmony with the belief of those present, all the poet's excellences were attributed to his aversion to the fleshly morsels that have not been disdained by other poets.

Now, Shelley was undoubtedly one of the greatest lyrical poets of the world. There was a personal charm and magnetism about him which fascinated all who knew him well, and even now, so many years since his mortal part vanished from sight in that treacherous storm -on an Italian sea, the mere mention of his name has power. But there were many things about Shelley which at first seem totally at variance with his unselfish, pure, and gracious character. It cannot be denied that he sometimes disregarded the strict truth; that he was subject to delusions; that his views of duty and of personal obligation were sometimes strange and perverted; that he was changeable, inconstant, and erratic; impulsive and visionary, often proposing reforms which had no practical value, and writing poetry as unsubstantial as the rose and violet-tinted clouds. It is true that, after all is said against Shelley that can be said, it will be found that the balance upon which good and evil rest dips far down on the side which contains the qualities which win our admiration and respect. And yet is it not reasonable to assume that the poet's physical condition was the primary cause of many of his most startling

idiosyncrasies? He was blessed or cursed (whichever way we look at the matter) with a peculiarly sensitive, nervous temperament; was subject to rapt, excited moods when his mind hovered dangerously on the verge which separates perfect sanity from its opposite; and he suffered constantly from illness and pain. Is it unreasonable to assert that Shelley's physical and intellectual condition, if not directly dependent upon, was largely influenced by his peculiar diet?

It was not until he left Oxford that Shelley became a strict vegetarian, though from his youth he strongly objected to the shedding of the blood of beast or bird for the purpose of obtaining food. His mother, perhaps to harden him, insisted on his fishing in the streams of his native Sussex; but the imaginative and poetic boy, who much preferred a solitary walk under the stars, or a row in his boat accompanied only by books, certainly not fishing lines or hooks, often took the gamekeeper with him on the expeditions planned by his mother. Shelley would sit in his boat and read while the gamekeeper fished for him. The spoil would be given to Mrs. Shelley afterward as the product of her son's industry. Later, in his Oxford vacations, he hunted to some extent, but this was also owing to outward pressure, not to any sanguinary propensities.

We see the good effects of Shelley's mixed diet at Oxford in his, for him, vigorous health. He was not troubled by the nervous excitement which was so conspicuous later, nor was he haunted by those strange hallucinations which perplex his different biographers. But Shelley's favorite food was, at all times, bread. It seemed as if he could live on that alone, without complaint or weariness. Sometimes in walking through the crowded streets of London, he would rush away from his companion's side, dart into a baker's shop, thence emerge with a loaf under his arm, from which he would, as he walked, break off pieces, not only to eat himself, but to offer to his friend. If the offer were declined, he was both perplexed and surprised.

"Do you know," he said one day to Hogg, "such a one does not like bread."

In Shelley's pockets would usually be found

the fragments of a loaf, and Hogg tells how a circle upon the carpet, clearly defined by an ample verge of crumbs, often marked the place where he had long sat at his studies, his face nearly in contact with his book, greedily devouring bread at intervals amidst his profound abstractions.

Shelley ate with great relish a queer mixture of bread and boiling water called "Panada." The bread was steeped in the hot water, then squeezed, and sprinkled with nutmeg and sugar. Tea remained Shelley's favorite to the very end of life. In his famous "Letter to Maria Gisborne," that poem written in a style which Shelley adopted nowhere else, he speaks of

tea as

"The liquor doctors rail at, and which I

Will quaff in spite of them; and when we die
We'll toss up who died first of drinking tea,

And cry out,' Heads or tails?' where'er we be." After Shelley became wholly converted to vegetarianism, he looked back with horror upon his occasional indulgence at Oxford in a glass or two of negus. "I ought to have been shot for it," he says. At Newton's charming vegetable dinners, even the water had to be distilled before it could be drunk; but when Shelley dined in his own house, we fear that Harriet Westbrook was scarcely a careful enough housekeeper to attend to this important matter of distillation.

Dowden says that when the physiology of the poets has been studied we shall perhaps know why Wordsworth and Shelley were waterdrinkers; why Keats loved an exquisite claret; why Southey soothed himself to sleep with a tumbler of domestic currant rum; why Byron in his later days craved the more fiery and fiercer stimulants.

Soon after Shelley's marriage he became a vegetarian. Occasional lapses into his former habits are recorded. He never was under oath to abstain entirely from meats, but, on the whole, his life was modelled according to the simpler principles which were with him instinctive. "You do not know," wrote Harriet to Miss Hitchener, "that we have foresworn meat and adopted the Pythagorean system. We are delighted with it and think it the best thing in the world." But the new converts were neither

narrow nor intolerant. When a certain friend came soon afterward to talk with Bysshe and Harriet about virtue, they did not scruple to set before her at dinner "a murdered fowl."

But alas, alas! for the housekeeping of poor Harriet Shelley! It is really surprising that Shelley waited till 1814 before he wrote a poem about his sad and silent home, his desolated hearth. Even a poet must eat, and should he believe that he must eat only vegetables or cereals, there is all the more reason that they shall be prepared so that he may become healthy, even if he cannot become wealthy or wise. It taxed Hogg's patience to dine with the Shelleys, and long years afterward the memory of those dinners remained with him like a nightmare. They would, indeed, make concessions to his coarser taste and place before him meats or fish, but oh, how atrociously cooked they were! If it were proposed to Shelley that he should order dinner, he stood aghast in speechless trance; when recovered from the outrage to his feelings, "Ask Harriet," he would cry, with a desponding, supplicating mien. The good Harriet herself was no proficient in the culinary art. "Whatever you please," was her ordinary answer.

"Whatever you please' did not produce a dainty menu. . . A leg of coarse mutton boiled to rags with half-raw turnips. . . . I dropped a hint about a pudding," continues Hogg, "but Bysshe said dogmatically: A pudding is a prejudice.'" When supper time arrived the only resource these three unfortunate people had against total starvation was the baker's shop.

"We will have some muffins and crumpets for tea," the famished Harriet would say.

"They will butter them," Bysshe would exclaim, in a voice thrilling with horror. In that case comfort was sought in a supply of penny buns.

"Get a shilling's worth of penny buns, Bysshe," said Harriet.

"He would rush out with incredible alacrity, like a wind god," says Hogg, "and return in an instant with the bag of buns, open at the top, in his hand."

That Shelley lost so little time in obeying his wife's orders proves that the poet, who, when

under the dominion of the ideal, lived upon political justice and alluring theories, and asserted that a pudding was a prejudice, had yet, under the pressure of hunger, to acknowledge the terrible power of the material. There are other interesting cases where Shelley's dominant idealism was forgotten under the pressure of a quite natural and excusable hunger. When he aroused Mrs. Southey's ire by despising the tea cakes her husband was enjoying with so much relish, Shelley did not really know how good they were. After he himself had devoured plate after plate of these same cakes he had to return home and tell Harriet with a burst of enthusiasm that they must have tea cakes in their menage forever. Could Mrs. Southey have foreseen how this act of Shelley's was to render famous her housewifely skill, she might have been less angry with the poor, blundering poet.

Once Shelley so far forgot Pythagoras as to partake largely of eggs and bacon at a country inn, after a long tramp over the hills. At first he refused to taste the dish ordered by his companion, but the delectable aroma penetrated his senses and he began with a small portion held on the end of his fork. He found it good, and so he attacked the plate, then called in the waiter and ordered more. He repeated this till the despondent waiter had to inform him that there remained no more bacon in the house. Thereupon the poet left in haste, informing Harriet on his return home that they must have eggs and bacon henceforth forever.

In 1813 Shelley published that eloquent plea on behalf of "Vegetarianism, — A Vindication of Natural Diet."

It is just to remember that Shelley was very impractical. He totally disregarded times and seasons, for he took no thought of dinner-hours, would eat only when he was hungry, and then, as Trelawny says, would eat much as the birds do, if he saw something edible lying about. Shelley's individual case cannot, therefore, be cited as an argument either for or against vegetarianism. His case proves only that when he yielded to natural impulses and indulged in a liberal mixed diet, his health certainly improved. He wrote to Godwin that his physical condition was such that he could not hope for a

long life. He spoke of his nervousness, of his being at the age of nineteen affected by any slight fatigue, and so he said he must husband his powers. But he really seemed to have very little wisdom in his care of his personal welfare. A few years afterward he wrote to Leigh Hunt that he suffered as much as ever from the pain in his side; " but do not mention this," he said, "for the advocate of a new system of diet is held bound to be invulnerable by disease."

It would be, of course, absurd to attribute the sensitiveness of Shelley's imagination to the fact that he was a vegetarian and a waterdrinker. But a careful study of his biography will show that his natural sensitiveness was much intensified by his disregard of the simplest laws of hygiene; that he was the freest from strange delusions and thrilling fancies when his friends took him in hand and reminded him of the claims of his physical nature. When he started out on that famous excursion to explore the source of the Thames, Shelley was weak and pale, but after he had been for some time on the water Charles Clairemont wrote to his sister that there was a remarkable change in the manner and in the appearance of the poet. "He has now the ruddy, healthy complexion of the autumn upon his countenance, and he is twice as fat as he used to be." Peacock attributed the change to the fact that he became Shelley's physician for the time and prescribed a salutary change in his diet. “He had been living chiefly on tea and bread and butter, drinking occasionally a sort of spurious lemonade, made of some powder in a box, which, as he was reading at the time The Tale of a Tub,' he called the powder of pimperlimpimp." Shelley seemed quite willing to take what Peacock told him to three mutton chops, well peppered. Other good things followed in the wake of these honest, well-disposed chops, and he began to be quite a different man.

We see the fine result of Shelley's restored health and of the manifold impressions derived from the beautiful scenery he witnessed during this wonderful journey in that great poem "Alastor." Here Shelley, for the first time, showed the hand of the master.

In the last year of his life Shelley appeared to Trelawny to be strong and vigorous. But