outside an arched and grated window, is a pile of masks and heads, hideous, grotesque, impossibly ruddy or lividly white, a heap of crude staring color; in the street, which is barely wide enough to be called a street, is a gay crowd laughing, struggling, screaming, singing, clowns and jesters in gaudy red and green, tall black seminarists, soldiers, sailors, peasants in blouses, white caps from all the country-side; and ever as a background the tottering houses on either side, which have looked down on such a sight year after year for three centuries. Scraps of the Marseillaise or of the latest ditty from Paris hum through the air. The bells ring for vespers; and the blue Sisters, with their huge white flapping coiffes, convoy long files of the quaintly gowned town-orphans on their way to church.

The earlier Sundays of Lent had formerly their special customs and ceremonies, which have only of recent years fallen into disuse. Shooting the goose and shooting at the papageai were always Lenten sports, while running at the Quintain took place variously at Mid-Lent or on Easter Monday. On Pancake Sunday, till some twenty years ago, all Saint-Malo went out to the great beach to shoot the goose. In old times the bird was tethered alive by its head to a pole or peg fixed in the sand, and became the property of the man skilful enough to free it by severing its neck, which seldom happened till it had been quieted by successive wounds. If the winner was a poor man, he received along with the goose a few silver sols, which were called a Lenten gift; if rich, he was expected to give the town a sum to be divided among the sick or the needy. In more recent times, and till the sport fell into abeyance, the goose was a dead one, hung by its neck from a tall pole, and the Lenten gift had become a pitcher of cider, which the winner in return was expected to offer also to the other competitors. The game is very ancient, even more ancient than its fellow, the papageai, which was introduced to Saint-Malo by the good Duchess Anne herself, but which, for all her patronage, never became so dear to the people as their own goose-shooting. And yet the papageai was a popular sport, and

perhaps a more courtly one; and early in the fifteenth century it was no empty honor, during the first fortnight of Lent, to be King of the Papageai and decorated as such by the Duchess herself. The papageai was generally a pigeon roughly carved in wood and set up on the highest tower of the castle; and he who shot it away needed considerable skill, whether he used bow or arrow, as in the early days, or later a clumsy gun resting upon a high stand. Not only was the King decorated by the Duchess with a silver chain from which hung medals of all the former Kings of the Papageai, but he received also from the town an allowance during his year of royalty, which varied at different times from £60 to £100, a very considerable sum in those days; so that, one may repeat again, it was no empty honor some four hundred years ago to become King of the Papageai on Pancake Sunday. As to the quintain, it too is an ancient Lenten or Easter sport at Saint-Malo, where for centuries it was represented by a mannikin dressed as an English soldier; and indeed, though in a less picturesque form, it is popular still, but it is removed to the national holiday in July, and has no longer a share in the Easter merrymakings.*

Another ancient game proper to the Third Sunday in Lent was the soule, which is said to date back to a period beyond the Christian era. However that may be, the soule was played everywhere, though less at Saint-Malo than in the country around, at this season of the year; and there seems reason to believe that the game had a certain religious character. The youngest, bridegroom of the parish offered a garlanded soule (an inflated leather ball) to the church on the Third Sunday of Lent; and after it had lain dur

ing High Mass upon the altar, and had been specially blessed, it was given back to the parish for the traditional game. One remembers in this connection the Shrove-tide football so common in England; and the soule seems undoubtedly to have been closely akin to it. Its special peculiarity was that the game was originally played only, as it seems, on religious fasts and festivals, on the Third Sunday in Lent, on Saint John's Day, sometimes on the Fête-Dieu (Corpus Christi), when it always received a preliminary benediction at the altar; while its sole temporal use appears to have been as a traditional gift at Easter to the feudal lord of the district.

And Lent, the mourning season of the Church, is not only in High Brittany a time of gayety, but also a time of much business. It is the season of fairs, and if fairs are a fine occasion for merry-making they always begin in a seriously commercial way. It is only after one has sold one's cows, shorn one's sheep, got rid of the cartful of little pink pigs or the sacks of corn or bundles of long slim fruit-trees-only after an infinity of bargaining, wrangling and drinking (for no sale holds good till one has drunk upon it) that one is ready to amuse one's self; which is so true that, though a fair may begin at six in the morning, it is only toward noon, when business slackens, that the shows and roundabouts open in a leisurely way. From the first week in Lent the fairs begin in a long succes. sion; without going far afield, one could find one for each of the Forty Days, even, as at Croisty, for Good Friday; and the famous fair of Dinan, called the Liège, runs through nearly the whole of Lent up to Palm Sunday. At Saint-Malo itself the Saint-Ouine, as it is named, is held on the Sunday before Passion, though there is not much now remaining of the great spring assembly which has a history of its own during the centuries that it has existed. It has travelled in its time, the Saint-Ouine. It was once held within the walls, when it was called the Periwinkle Fair from the bowlfuls of periwinkles that were sold at it, or sometimes the Whistle Fair, because, it seems, of the innumerable whistles and

trumpets and horns which children bought there four hundred years ago as they still buy them to-day; but it was turned out after the great fire in the sixteenth century, which burned half Saint-Malo to the ground. Then it betook itself to the island of the Grand Bey, where was then a chapel dedicated to Saint Ouen, or, as he was called by the people, Saint Ouine, about which the fair was held, and where the wives of Saint-Malo sailors prayed for fair winds to bring their men home, turning the chapel cross toward the quarter whence the wind should come, so that the saying arose," As changeable as the cross of Saint-Ouine." Lastly, and not till the middle of this century, long after the last ruins of the chapel on the Grand Bey had been swept away or overgrown, the SaintOuine was transferred again to the broad quays outside the town, where it is now held every year on the Sunday before Passion. But its importance has gone from it, and even compared with its neighbors it is a poor thing indeed; from its ancestor, the great Whistle Fair, it has only inherited one quality, and that is noise.

They are all the same, these fairs or assemblies, in their degree roundabouts, lotteries, innumerable varieties of gaming-tables, shooting-booths, and phonographs; small shows of inconceivable squalor where women, thin, unwashed, and half-starved, shiver in a hideous undress; tumblers, cheapjacks; huge quaint baskets of the very ancient cakes of High Brittany, the cracquelins, and the fouaces, buckwheat cakes made not too cleanly on griddles over charcoal stoves, pans of steaming sausages: one does not fast nowadays with conviction. And in the midst of the noise, the crowding, the shooting, the gambling, the din of drums and cymbals and the braying of mechanical organs, there may be at the larger fairs such a show as the Passion, which is, according to its advertisement, ly recommended by the Cardinal-Archbishop ;" and where the Passion of Christ is given in living pictures, and the audience, with a sprinkling of priests in it, looks on with a quiet and pleased attention, as far distant from indifference as from devotion. They

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do not applaud, neither do they criticise they observe it with the same placid approval that they give to the crèche in their own church at Christmas; and one comes away presently with a memory of Roman soldiers, of Pontius Pilate on his high seat, of a pale slender Mary in blue and white, and of a central Figure; wondering that a thing that cannot be well done is done so little ill.

But already the gay days of Lent are over and it is the eve of Passion. Tonight before Vespers in every church. the crucifixes and the figures of Saints will be covered with long purple draperies. And, if one asks of the people why this is so, one is told with intense conviction that the Saints are all dead between Passion and Easter, because le bon Dieu Himself died then. There is a certain impressiveness about the hanging veils of purple beneath which the statues are dimly outlined in a strangely human fashion; a certain solemnity in the absence of glitter and color, save that of mourning, in these churches that are usually so full of rich and vivid brightness. There is a dramatic touch about it that calls to mind the old and close connection between religion and drama in the days when, for instance, a company of authors and actors took to themselves the name of the Brotherhood of the Passion and received from Charles the Sixth of France the exclusive right of playing sacred pieces in theatres or churches about the country. And long after this right had been rescinded the plays, in perhaps a simpler form, lingered among the people, lingered almost till to-day, if indeed in the byways of High or Low Brittany they do not still exist. At the village near Nantes called the Bourg de Batz the Passion was played regularly, under the name of the Tragedy, till some eighteen or twenty years ago; it was given in a disused chapel, and the priests of the parish, with the mace-bearer, the singing-men and the servers, attended in cassock and surplice. At many other places similar plays were popular during the first half of this century; and at a chapel near Saint-Servan, barely four miles from Saint-Malo, they are said to have been very finely presented no more than

thirty years ago. But probably, if the Passion plays still exist anywhere, it will be in the form of corrupt and almost incoherent dialogues chanted by children who scarcely know what they are saying; as, in their season, the Christmas dramas have sunk into an unintelligible formula. But in Brittany another custom existed alongside with the Miracle-play, and it has proved more long-lived. It was usual till very recently, even in Saint-Malo, to sing songs of the Passion from door to door as in England carols are sung at Christmas; and if the Pastoral or the Complaint, as it was called, has died out in the town, it is still alive, though dying fast, in the country. Here is one of these Complaints that was sung till a few years ago in the district; it is incomplete, but none of these songs are now more than fragments. This one, it is believed, has never been published, and it is rare to find one so coherent and so long; but a translation unfortunately gives little of its quaint uncouth charm, or of the pathos of the refrain.

When Palm Sunday comes High Brittany is at its devoutest. One takes to church a sprig of box or of laurel (the conventional palm) to have it blessed; and it is carried home again to be put in its place in front of the plaster Virgin, that is certainly above the fireplace or somewhere against the wall, till next Ash Wednesday comes round; when, as has been said before, it is burned upon the altar by the priest who presently gives the ashes." Formerly sprigs of palm were stuck in the earth of garden or field to ensure fertility; but this, with much else that is quaint and graceful, has long died out. There is little now that is curious or particular in Holy Week. In the days when Saint-Malo was a cathedral town, and its Chapter as rich as it was haughty, it was the custom for the senior Canon to go in state to the Croix du Fief, or Bishop's Cross, where all Church proclamations were made, when the midday angelus was sounding on Holy Wednesday. As soon as the bells had ceased, the Canon, surrounded by his chaplain, his acolyte, and his four mace-bearers, read out the order of the Bishop and Chapter, that "all unclean Jews and other pagans should quit the town, under pain of the goad and whip, before the first sound of the evening angelus," with forbiddance of return before Easter Wednesday at midday, so that during the holy time of Easter the town should not be made vile and foul" by their presence within it. It may be added that it was not till so recently as 1708 that Saint-Malo, in tak

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ing in a new piece of ground, permitted the Jews to build themselves a quarter from which henceforward they were not turned out even during Holy Week. On this same day also, Holy Wednesday, at the office of the Ténèbres, a curious custom existed till the Revolution swept it away with so much else that was better worth preserving. At that passage in the Scriptures, read at this service, where mention is made of a great noise, not only did the priests. overturn their stools, but the congregation (who had gone prepared) made a hideous din by rattling iron pots, metal bars, or anything else of the sort; which was, as a historian of the town quaintly observes, "a means whereby the faithful were encouraged to take part in the service."

On Good Friday (when, by the way, a special service is said and not a Mass, because, as the people explain, the bon Dieu is dead) it was till quite recently the invariable rule that women should go to church with the wings of their caps unstarched and hanging loose on their shoulders, in sign of mourning, as is still done in the country, and as widows wear them during the earliest days of their widowhood. And on this same day there is still no man so profane and impious as to stir or disturb the ground with any sort of tool there are even many who will not do such work throughout Holy Week; and on this "grievous day" it is quite certain that if touched the earth would open, groaning, in a bottomless gulf, and that all sorts of misfortune would follow. On Good Friday also, as all good Malouin children believe and know, the church-bells have flown to Rome, to be blessed by the Pope himself; and when they begin to ring again on Easter Eve one says with joy, "Ah, they have come safe home again!" One says it with joy, for when they come back from Rome their great metal skirts are full of beautiful eggs, red and green and yellow, that taste like no other eggs in the world; the eggs that in older times were carried to church on Easter Day to be blessed at High Mass by the priest.

And already in the corners of the country they are singing from door to door, as once they did here in Saint

I've a little bird in my breast,
Not long has left the nest :
So sweetly sings,

So sweetly rings,

Allelujah!

It is not very intelligible, but it serves its purpose from house to house the sound of Allelujah is carried gayly, and from house to house the eggs are gath

full; for at Easter all the world is generous in High Brittany.

But Lent is over, the Forty Days are done; and with them winter has gone, and spring sits in the woods and the fields in all her bravery of primrose and green. The great festival of religion is the festival of spring, and winter is over. Allelujah!-Macmillan's Magazine.

LEIGH HUNT was one of the poets who have their portion of praise in this life. Such writers are not always unjustly treated; they had their day, and enjoyed their credit; they were listened to by their own generation, and pitched their voices for its hearing, but they have not Fame's speaking-trumpet to reach our ears too. It would be rash to say that Joanna Baillie, Hayley, Southey, Bailey (I name them at random), did not deserve the reputation which they once enjoyed because they are little read, or less read, now. The Immortals will have their immortality, and those who have done some particular thing supremely well will sit at their feet. Readers will always be found for Cowper, Jane Austen, Sterne, Charles Lamb. But Charles Lamb's friends-Leigh Hunt among them-are beginning to be forgotten, rather because they have gone out of fashion than for any better cause.

I remember some thirty years ago, in the pleasant suburb of Kensington, gay with elm-trees and hedgerows, where some of the streets had only one side, and in which you often passed from rows of new drab colored houses to green fields and country lanes, a cottage facing the south, with a little gate in front of it, a bow window, a porch with creepers, a garden and trees at the back; and we were told that Jenny Lind once lived there. It has gone long ago; but while it stood it was the home of art and romance. It did not suit this spreading building age, but it served for beauty and use forty years

ago. That cottage reminds me of the gentle suburban life of Leigh Hunt. He marked a moment in literature, the transition from the aristocracy to the democracy of letters. He was only a mortal, though he lived with the Immortals; but he has his place near them, and does not deserve to be altogether lost in the crowd.

He was a vagabond of literature, a hack of genius. He wrote about everything: politics, economics, Shakespeare, Byron, Italy, scenery, art, the Quattro Poeti, the modern writers, actors, and singers, the drama, the stage. He wrote so rapidly and indiscriminately, turning out his articles as the baker turns out his rolls, that the commonplace of the printer's boy, waiting below for copy, might have been invented for him.

Writing was as easy to him as talking-and how he talked, Carlyle and Hazlitt have told us. "He talked," says Carlyle, "like a singing-bird. His talk was often literary, biographical, autobiographical, wandering into criticism, reform of society, progress, etc., .. free, cheery, idly melodious as bird on high."

Hazlitt writes :