Get yourselves killed.'

'Where?'

'In the cemetery.'

'Parbleu! but that's the very place to die.'

I had my gourd: he drank-I drank. The breeze Moaned through the leafless branches of the trees. 'Death is not far off, captain! As for me,

I love life-life is a reality.

However, none know better how to die
Than bon-vivants! I give my heart away,
But sell my skin: so let us drink to-day
To love and lady fair, and let them toll
The bell who will.'

'So that's good hearing: certes, let him crow,
And beat the charge at random, dark or light-
We must have noise when numbers lack in fight.'
I said, 'You hear, boy?' Nearly hid in snow,
He laughed, 'Ay, sir.'

"'Tis indispensable,

Mind you,' the colonel said, 'you do not leave
This place till six o'clock to-morrow eve.
Budge not, alive or dead; and so, farewell.'

I gave the word, and marching to the right,
We scaled the crumbling wall, and stood inside
The sombre cemetery, dark in night,
The little mounds of gravestones, scattered wide
Reminding of sea waves. The snow was deep.
Our cloaks in tatters, we lay down to sleep.
We slept well-sleeping is to practise death.
At dawn I woke upon my lips the breath

Was icy, something soft weighed down my eyes:
It seemed a grave from which I had to rise.

The snow had wrapped me round from head to feet
In tender whiteness, like a winding-sheet.

A bullet passing roused me.

'Sound the reveillée !'

Out of the snow.

'Ho !' I said,

Head rose after head

'To arms!' a sergeant cries.

The dawn rose red in depths of inky skies,

And looked like bleeding lips. When morning breaks
In war, 'tis very often Death that wakes.

At first a truce of silence reigned around :
'Twas but a signal shot upon the ground
That passed me by. The music at a ball
At first some vain and careless notes lets fall.
The night had iced the blood within our veins,
But thoughts of battle warmed us. On the plains.
The silent armies lay. For us the fight:
A handful upon which the enemy's might
Was safe to fall. Along the wall we stood,
Each for a step prepared to pay in blood.

In hot haste came the battle: on the air
Six hundred iron mouths poured thunder there,
And flung their lightnings forth from hill to hill.
My drummer beat the charge, and trumpets' blare
Gave answer. Shots upon the cemetery
Rained down as if their purpose was to kill
The tombs. Scared birds from out the ruins fly,
The tower and crumbling belfry circling round;
And I remember one shot tore the ground,
And started from his bier one lately dead,

As if awakened by the earthly din.

And then a darkness worse than death set in:
Nothing was seen but smoke that pall-like spread
And covered round the battle over all

The snow fell in a steady, ceaseless fall.

I saw my soldiers ranged against the wall

Like spectres: 'twas a grim and ghastly sight-
Pale ghosts above, and underneath-the slain.
Whole villages in flames upon the plain:

They looked in distance like one burning brand.

To us, it seemed as if some shadowy hand
Had seized us and entombed. At intervals
Into the night of gloom a phantom falls.

Till six at eve! the order burnt my brain.
'Morbleu ! We shall not have the chance again ;
Let us advance,' my young lieutenant said,

And then a bullet took him!

There had spread

A feeble light, but nothing yet was clear,
And nothing sure save that we waited here
For shot and shell to fall upon our head.

The Emperor had set us mid the tombs,

But why we knew not, mark for balls and bombs,
And all we had to do was just to try

Till six o'clock at even not to die.

I raised my sword and swung it round my head,
And shouted 'Courage!' I was blind and mad
With rage. Then suddenly my right arm fell,
The sword lay at my feet; I lifted it

With my left hand, and called out jestingly,
'You see, my friends, 'tis only fair and fit

To give both hands a chance!' Jests do no harm,
For soldiers grumble if they lose an arm,

And sometimes are not half displeased to see

The chief a little wounded.

Suddenly

The drum ceased beating. 'Fool, are you afraid?'
'No; but I'm hungry.' As he spoke, the land
Was shaken as with earthquake, and a cry
Went hoarsely up to Heaven. Victory!
Bleeding, I dragged myself upon my knee
And, dazed and fainting, echoed 'Victory!

Stand up who live!' The drummer answered 'Here!'
The sergeant 'Here!' and now the lights burnt clear.
The colonel came, his red sword in his hand.
'By whom was won the day?' I cried. 'By you.
How many of you live?'

I answered-'Two!'"

C. E. MEETKERKE

IMITATORS AND PLAGIARISTS.

N'

66

IN TWO PARTS.-PART II.

EXT let us look at Shakespeare. Everybody knows the spiteful passage in which the cantankerous Greene refers to the upstart crow, beautiful with our feathers, that, with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is, in his owne conceit, the only shake-scene in a country." There can be no doubt that in his early years of dramatic authorship he recast, rewrote, and revised the writings of his predecessors and of some of his contemporaries.

Farmer was the first critic who recognised the fact that some of the Shakespearian plays were not written originally by the master. Steevens, in his time, printed six old plays from which Shakespeare had borrowed the general plot, but he was content to indicate those expropriations, without showing how their rude prosaic sketches were transformed into noble poetic creations; how the original of Sir John Falstaff is hinted at in the old drama of "Sir John Oldcastle"; how Greene's romance of "Dorastus and Faunia" is developed into "The Winter's Tale"; how the "Rosalind" of Lodge suggested the beautiful Arcadian dream of "As You Like It." Shakespeare's method of working may be traced in "Twelfth Night." There he has woven together two separate threads. The romantic loves of Viola, Olivia, and the Duke, he borrowed from "The Historie of Apolonius and Silla" in Barnaby Rich's "Farewell to Militaire Profession" (1581), while some additional details and the names of some of his characters he obtained from the English version, then extant, of "Gli Ingannati" (The Deceived).

The plot of " Measure for Measure" he found in George Whetstone's drama of "The Right Excellent and Famous Hystorye of Prumas and Cassandra." But I pass away from a subject which has been exhausted by commentators and critics.

A glance may be hazarded at Milton.

It is certain that from the earliest ages of Christianity the poets indulged in reveries upon the Creation of the World, the Earthly

Paradise, and the Fall of Adam. In the fifth century Dracontius composed a "Hexameron," for which he was reprimanded by the Church, because he had neglected to sing the seventh day on which the Creator rested from His work. In the following century, Avitus, Archbishop of Vienne, sang of the Creation, the Fall of Man, and the Deluge; while Cadmon composed a singularly noble poem on the Creation, known as the "Paraphrase." And this is how he sang of the fallen Star of the Morning a thousand years before Milton:

Satan discoursed, he who henceforth ruled Hell,
Spake sorrowing.

God's angel erst, he had shone white in Heaven,
Till his soul urged, and most of all its pride,
That of the Lord of Hosts he should no more
Bend to the word. About his heart his soul
Tumultuously heaved, hot pains of wrath
Within him.

Then said he, "Most unlike this narrow place

To that which once we knew, high in heaven's realm,
Which my Lord gave me, though therein no more
For the Almighty we hold royalties."

Cadmon's fine composition, in which so lofty a note is struck, was well-known from the sixth to the twelfth century; after which it fell out of the people's memory until the middle of the seventeenth, when F. Junius, a philologist of note, obtained a manuscript copy, and printed it at Amsterdam, in 1655, without notes or translation. The elder Disraeli compared the Old English text, word for word, with the Miltonic epic, and discovered some curious similitudes, which are not very easily explained, inasmuch as Milton, who had become blind in 1654 (a year before Junius's publication, and four years before he began his "Paradise Lost "), did not know the Old English or Saxon tongue.

Nearer the time of Milton, this subject was treated very frequently, and no doubt with his precursors one part was more or less familiar. It is said that the French Mystery of "The Conception," of which Les Frères Parfaits have given an analysis in their "Histoire du Théâtre François depuis son origine" (1745), offers some remarkable resemblances to passages in "Paradise Lost." Milton seems to have done little more than translate the speech of Lucifer to his subjects.

In the first half of the sixteenth century, the macaronic poet Folengo presented on the stage at Palermo dramatic spectacles representing the Creation of the World, the Contention between the Powers of Good and Evil, the Garden of Eden, the Fall of Man, and other events in Genesis history.