the bastardy befalls? The decivilised have every grace as the antecedent of their vulgarities, every distinction as the precedent of their mediocrities. . . . They were born into some tendency to derogation, into an inclination for things mentally inexpensive."
But oftener the word has been spoken gently, almost casually; that the multitude seeing might not see, and hearing might not understand. Yet this attitude of Mrs. Meynell's is as far as possible from disdain. For the "narrow house," the obtuse mind baffled and inarticulate, for the shackled body, the groping soul, she has spoken with largest sympathy. Further than Charles Lamb's goes her defence of beggars—since she pleads their right not simply to free existence but to a common and fraternal courtesy. All the great and elemental things of life have claimed allegiance from Alice Meynell; her mind, like Raphael's, "a temple for all lovely things to flock to and inhabit." Love and the bond of love, the grace and gaiety of life, the woman's need of a free and educated courage, the delicacies of friendship—one finds their praise upon her reticent lips: these, with unflinching truth to self, and a faith lofty and exquisite. For the pathos of the sentimentalist (ubiquitous and not without a suspicion of the ready-made) our artist has shown slight patience. She will not laugh at her fellow-men; neither will she insist upon weeping over them. There is restraint, "composure" in her dream of life. Yet perchance we open the fortuitous page, and some such lines as these face us:
"It is a curious slight to generous Fate that man should, like a child, ask for one thing many times. Her answer every time is a resembling but new and single gift; until the day when she shall make the one tremendous difference among
