contradict them," he went on. "A nice taste a man must have to marry Harriet Ord! If I lie passive under the imputation, it is for your sake."

"Were I sure you are deceiving me-that your attentions to Lady Harriet are real, I would-I would

"You would what, my dear? Let us hear."

"I would tell all to Lord and Lady Tennygal," she answered, bursting into tears. "I would tell Lady Harriet that she must not be your wife, for that you are under a solemn vow to marry no one but me.'

"Sophy, you'd do nothing of the sort, for you are no simpleton. But it is not coming to such a pass as that. She and Lady Tennygal, and all the lot of them, are deluding themselves into the hope that I shall have the old Chinese image, and I let them hug the delusion. But now that I have told you why I do, don't you put yourself into a fantigue over it, whatever you may hear. So dry your tears, and glide back to the house. I'll go first, and get in through the window, as I came, and it won't be known I have been out of the dining-room."

"Won't it, my gentleman!" ejaculated Mrs. Barry, who did not choose to leave her hiding-place till both had disappeared, and she peered still at the governess. Miss May had seated herself in the rude garden-chair; her eyes were strained on vacancy, seeing nothing, and her whole attitude bespoke pain and misery. Suddenly her mood changed, a frightful expression arose to her face, her eyes flashed fire; her teeth gnashed together, and her clenched hands were lifted to beat the air. It lasted but a minute, when she arose and departed.

"What a mercy that she's gone!" breathed the appalled Mrs. Barry. "If she did not look, for all the world, like a demon! Captain Devereux had better take care of himself, if he is playing her false.”

Of course there was a frightful hubbub; for Mrs. Barry, though she waited till the next day, did not bring her tale out so cautiously as she might have done. Accusings, and denials, and counter-accusings, and reproaches, and oaths: the latter, of course, from the angry Captain

Devereux.

Mrs. Barry persisted in her story, and Captain Devereux persisted in his-which was, that Mrs. Barry must have dropped asleep after dinner and dreamt it. In this he was supported by Miss May: she affirmed that she had been correcting exercises, in the study, at the hour mentioned; had never quitted it; and he swore he had never stirred out of the dining-room. Poor Mrs. Barry was completely dumbfounded; especially when Lady Harriet Ord expressed her opinion in favour of the dream.

In the midst of the discussion, arrived Passion-week and Lord Tennygal. He listened, in his calm, matter-of-fact way, to the two sides of the case. His wife, when they were alone, actually shed tears; the affair, she told him, had so worried her, between her anxiety to do what was right, and her fear to do what was wrong. Lord Tennygal took an opportunity of speaking to his brother-in-law.

"Devereux," he said, "this is very bad. Lady Tennygal's governess ought to have commanded your respect. Were it not for the dangerous position you are in, you should not remain in this house another hour." "There's nothing wrong," answered Captain Devereux—“ nothing at all; it is a delusion altogether. That old mischief-making cat fell asleep in her room, after dinner, and must have had a dream"

"Psha, man!" interrupted Lord Tennygal, "don't attempt to palm off your dreams upon me. Mrs. Barry heard Miss May say you could not marry Lady Harriet, because you were under a solemn engagement to marry her. If

"Mrs. Barry did not, then. She's a

"Hear me out, Captain Devereux, if you please. If you have been gaining Miss May's affections, under the promise of marriage, you are bound in honour to marry her, although she is but a governess. If, on the other hand, you have behaved ill to the girl, I will never forgive it, and I hope Lady Harriet will not. But whatever the truth is, I must be made acquainted with it, that I may know how to act."

"I have given my word once," sullenly replied Captain Devereux; "I don't see the use of repeating it ten times over. I deny it altogether, and I say that Mrs. Barry either invented or dreamt it."

Lord Tennygal proceeded to an interview with Miss May. She was as impervious as the captain, and his lordship was puzzled. That Miss May should not remain with his children, he was determined: more clear-sighted than his wife, he had never liked her. But there was a difference between turning a young lady out of his house instanter, and giving her due warning: which course would the real facts, which he could not come at, justify? Like his wife, he only desired to act justly by themselves and by her.

"Who were Miss May's references?" he asked of Lady Tennygal.

She had to look to Lady Langton's letters before she could answer. And found that Lady Langton spoke of a Mrs. Penryn, as having written in her favour, but who Mrs. Penryn was Lady Langton did not state.

"And probably did not know," observed Lord Tennygal. "She is the laziest woman in the world, is Lady Langton: just the one to be imposed upon with her eyes open."

"There was another recommendation from some solicitors; they wrote most strongly in her favour, Lady Langton said. They were friends of Miss May's late father's, I remember; partners, or something of that. Miss May was stopping there at the time."

"What was their name?"

The countess ran her eyes down Lady Langton's letter. 'Lyvett, Castlerosse, and Lyvett.""

"I shall write to them," said the earl.

"Here it is.

He proceeded to do so at once, and his wife wrote to Lady Langton. The answers came, both on the same day.

Lady Langton, an exceedingly indolent woman, bestirred herself for

once.

She strove to find out where and what the Mrs. Penryn was who had written to her. But of Mrs. Penryn she could obtain no tidings whatever: nobody, at the address given, seemed to have heard of or known her. Her Ladyship then drove down to Lyvett, Castlerosse, and Lyvett's, but the information they afforded her was not of a nature to appease her anger.

"You wrote, unasked, and recommended Miss May to me," urged Lady Langton, wrathfully; who, being conscious that her own carelessness was to blame, wished to find somebody else to throw it upon.

"We never wrote at all to your ladyship," replied Mr. Lyvett, "and so we are about to inform Lord Tennygal, from whom we have received a communication."

"But the letters to Miss May were addressed here, to your care," she next urged. "But

66

Certainly not, so far as we are aware," rejoined Mr. Lyvett. May, her father, may have had letters left here for him without our knowledge." And upon inquiry, it proved that the postman had received instructions to deliver all such letters into the hands of a Miss Jenkins next door, who had forwarded them to the Mays.

The following was the answer to Lord Tennygal.

"MY LORD,—In reply to the communication with which you have favoured us, we beg to acquaint your lordship that we know nothing of the matter you allude to. We never had a partner' or 'friend' of the name of May. Until recently, a man of that name lived at our offices as porter, but we found cause to discharge him. This occurred last July, and we know nothing of his movements since that period. May had a daughter, and we deem it not impossible that she may be the party who has imposed upon your lordship by a false recommendation in our name. She was educated above her station, and her name is Sophia.

"We have the honour to be, my lord,

"Your lordship's obedient servants,

"LYVETT, CASTLErosse, and Lyvett.

"The Right Honourable the Earl of Tennygal."

"Take better

Easy

Lord Tennygal threw the letter into his wife's lap. care in future, Bessie," was all he said. "Miss May must leave to-day." So the whole plot was discovered, and there remained not a shadow of doubt that Miss May had cleverly furnished her own letters of reference. The Countess of Tennygal was in a state of consternation. natured as she was, her indignation was aroused now. She would not see the governess, but deputed her housekeeper to pay and discharge her. "I could not have believed such a thing possible," she exclaimed. " I have heard of servants obtaining places under false pretences, but for a governess to do so seems incredible."

Lord Tennygal smiled a half smile: perhaps at his wife's want of knowledge of the world. Many a governess has done it ere this," he said," and many will again."

"But they can have no principles !"

"That's another thing."

Lord Tennygal was not far wrong.

There are governesses in families,

even now, who have entered them under auspices as false as those by which Miss May obtained admittance to his.

Captain Devereux came off the best. He not only contrived an interview with Miss May in the hour of her departure, and told her he should soon see her in London, but he also succeeded in persuading another credulous heart that he was not a wolf in sheep's clothing, but a falselyaccused, meek lamb and in less than a month after Easter, the public papers recorded the marriage of Theodore Hugh Devereux, Esq., third son of the Right Honourable Sir Archibald Devereux, with the Lady Harriet Ord.

NOTES ON NOTE-WORTHIES,

OF DIVERS ORDERS, EITHER SEX, AND EVERY AGE.

BY SIR NATHANIEL.

And make them men of note (do you note, men ?)—Love's Labour's Lost, Act III. Sc. 1.

D. Pedro. Or, if thou wilt hold longer argument,

Balth.

Do it in notes.

Note this before my notes,

There's not a note of mine that's worth the noting.

D. Pedro. Why these are very crotchets that he speaks,
Notes, notes, forsooth, and noting!.

Much Ado About Nothing, Act II. Sc. 3.

And these to Notes are frittered quite away.-Dunciad, Book I.
Notes of exception, notes of admiration,

Notes of assent, notes of interrogation.—Amen Corner, c. iii.

VII.-NICIAS.

HARDLY less antagonistic to received notions was Mr. Grote's systematic censure of the public character and career of Nicias, than was his systematic defence of, or apology for, the policy and tactics of Cleon. Indeed the strictures on the former were an almost inevitable consequence upon the eulogy of the latter. To approve the war policy of Cleon involves your condemnation of the peace-advocacy of Nicias; just as your approbation of Mr. Pitt's foreign diplomacy implies your opposition to that of Mr. Fox.

After the death of Cleon-who fell, like that most admirable and perhaps faultless of Lacedæmonian commanders, the high-minded and single-hearted Brasidas, at the battle of Amphipolis (B.C. 422)-Nicias was left in what Bishop Thirlwall calls the "undisputed possession of the influence due to the mildness of his disposition, to the liberal use which he made of his ample fortune, and to his military skill and success, which after the downfal of his presumptuous rival, were perhaps more justly appreciated." Nicias was desirous of peace, adds the historian, both for the sake of Athens, and on his own account. He desired peace, because it was the state which seemed exposed to the fewest risks, and in which private interests would be most secure, under the shade of universal prosperity. "As one step towards this end, he had endeavoured to conciliate the confidence of Sparta, by the good offices with which he softened the captivity of her citizens at Athens; and he was thus enabled to assume the character of a mediator between the two states."* The result of which was, that, in homely phrase, he fell between two stools. His mediation was a via media that led him whither he would not. Medium measures, by a somewhat mediocre man, were out of time, at that critical stage of the Peloponnesian war; and out of place, in the fermenting politics of Athens. In medio not always tutissimus ibis; thou, Nicias,

*Thirlwall's Hist. of Greece. May-VOL. CX. No. CCCCXXXVII.

D

least of all. Unless indeed by in medio we understand the tranquil obscurity of middle-class existence-the safest of social positions in those times of clamour and public excitement when, as the Addisonian Cato has it,

The post of honour is a private station.

Plutarch, whose estimate of Cleon is of that contemptuous and indignant kind against which Mr. Grote so vigorously protests, sometimes goes as far as Mr. Grote himself in his strictures on Nicias. Contrasting

in one of his parallels-Nicias and Crassus, he says, that if Crassus was too violent and tyrannical in his proceedings, Nicias was as much too timid. "His poltroonery and mean submission to the most abandoned persons in the state, deserves the greatest reproach."* Plutarch's maxim is, that he who wants to stand at the helm, should not consider what may expose him to envy, but what is great and glorious, and may by its lustre extort homage of some sort from envy itself. Whereupon he proceeds to apostrophise Nicias: "But, if security and repose are to be consulted above all things; if you are afraid of Alcibiades upon the rostrum, of the Lacedæmonians at Pylos, and of Perdiccas in Thrace, then, surely, Nicias, Athens is wide enough to afford you a corner to retire to, where you may weave for yourself a soft crown of tranquillity." Nevertheless, the old biographer is fain to confess that the love Nicias had for peace was indeed a divine attachment, and that his endeavours during his whole administration to put an end to the war, were worthy of the Grecian humanity; nay, that this alone places him in so honourable a light, that Crassust could not have been compared with him, though he had made the Caspian Sea or the Indian Ocean the boundary of the Roman Empire.

It is shown, clearly and in full, in the pages of Mr. Grote's history, how the pacific dispositions of Nicias, Laches, and what he calls the "philo-Laconian" party-the party favourable to Sparta, and averse from the policy which cried Hellas for the Athenians-had begun to find increasing favour at Athens after the battle of Delium; while the unforeseen losses in Thrace, coming thick upon each other-every new triumph of Brasidas apparently increasing his means of achieving moretended to convert the discouragement of the Athenians into positive alarm. During the winter of 424-423 B.C., negotiations for peace appear to have been in progress. "The continual hope that these might be brought to a close, combined with the impolitic aversion of Nikias and

"Besides, Crassus showed some magnanimity and dignity of sentiment, in contending, not with such wretches as Cleon and Hyperbolus, but with the glory of Cæsar, and the three triumphs of Pompey."-(Plutarch's Lives. Nicias and Crassus compared.)

Why Plutarch should pitch on Crassus to pair off with so unlike a partner as Nicias, it is hard to guess. But Plutarch's "Parallels " are often curiously arbitrary in the selection of heroes to be placed in juxtaposition. Mr. Grote, in a note appended to the sixtieth chapter of his admirable History, refers to the portraiture of Galba by Tacitus, as suiting, in a good many of the features, the character of Nicias-" much more," he justly asserts, "than those of the rapacious and unprincipled Crassus, with whom Plutarch compares the latter." Of the more striking features of resemblance, may be mentioned, family position, wealth, overcaution mistaken for wisdom-ut quod segnitia fuit, sapientia vocaretur—and the tersely graphic significance of the well-known passage: major privato visus, dum privatus fuit, et omnium consensu capax imperii, nisi imperasset.