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lève without being played, the player loses a stroke."

The number and difficulty of the rules will be highly esteemed by those metaphysical golfers who bombard the Committee of the Royal and Ancient Club with questions passing the wit of man to solve ! The Committee would be grateful if those inquirers would expend their subtlety in translating the rules of the jeu de mail.

My author says nothing about lady players, and does not even contemplate their existence. He gives suggestions for the making of short Malls in the grounds of country houses, but this appears to be an invention of his own. Ladies did play. Queen Mary was accused of amusing herself at jeu de mail a few days after the decease of her husband, Darnley, who was so unfortunate as to die early, when his house was blown up, in circumstances never satisfactorily explained. Probably she used a private Mall at the house of Lord Setoun. The little Dutch girl in Flinck's portrait has so many jewels that her father may have been a rich man, able to afford a small private Mall of his own.

In our own Mall the Duke of York (James II.) played constantly, and conversed with Mr Pepys on National Defence. James was a very long driver; he could drive the Mall in one stroke, and an iron shot short stroke at least, and he was also a famous golfer and a keen curler. After Dutch

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William came I do not know that the game of Pall Mall continued to be played in England; and except in the Montpelier form of la chicane, across country or along a road, it is quite extinct on the Continent. Nevertheless it was, as Lauthier says, "a noble game," and croquet seems to be its very dull and decadent descendant. SaintSimon says that the jeu de mail was going out when he wrote, about 1730-1740, and tennis also was ceasing to be the great game of France. People took to an indoors life of flirting, playing cards, and talking philosophy, and the great age of games in France was the fifteenth century, though I do not know any mention of jeu de mail till a century later.

(Here I must confess that I am not perfectly certain about the lève of the little girl in Flinck's portrait. Some may see in it a miniature form of the curious spud which the shepherds of Bethlehem carry in miniatures in fifteenth-century MSS., as does Philip Lord Wharton in Vandyck's famous portrait. Madame de Pompadour, in a portrait of her as a shepherdess, has such a spud. But that shown in Flinck's portrait would have been useless for the practical purposes of a spud-it is much too slim and light. In Lauthier's sketch of a man playing at passe the slim club has certainly a deep narrow spoon-head, but it is not distinctly made of iron.)

THE CICALAS: AN IDYLL.

BY HENRY NEWBOLT.

Scene-AN ENGLISH GARDEN BY STARLIGHT.

Persons-A LADY AND A POET.

THE POET.

DIMLY I see your face: I hear your breath
Sigh faintly, as a flower might sigh in death:
And when you whisper, you but stir the air
With a soft hush like summer's own despair.

THE LADY (aloud).

O Night divine, O Darkness ever blest,
Give to our old sad Earth eternal rest.
Since from her heart all beauty ebbs away,
Let her no more endure the shame of day.

THE POET.

A thousand ages have not made less bright
The stars that in this fountain shine to-night:
Your eyes in shadow still betray the gleam
That every son of man desires in dream.

THE LADY.

Yes, hearts will burn when all the stars are cold;
And Beauty lingers-but her tale is told :

Mankind has left her for a game of toys,
And fleets the golden hour with speed and noise.

THE POET.

Think you the human heart no longer feels Because it loves the swift delight of wheels? And is not Change our one true guide on earth, The surest hand that leads us from our birth?

THE LADY.

Change were not always loss, if we could keep Beneath all change a clear and windless deep: But more and more the tides that through us roll Disturb the very sea-bed of the soul.

THE POET.

The foam of transient passions cannot fret
The sea-bed of the race, profounder yet:
And there, where Greece and her foundations are,
Lies Beauty, built below the tide of war.

THE LADY.

So-to the desert, once in fifty years-
Some poor mad poet sings, and no one hears:
But what belated race, in what far clime,
Keeps even a legend of Arcadian time?

THE POET.

Not ours perhaps: a nation still so young,
So late in Rome's deserted orchard sprung,
Bears not as yet, but strikes a hopeful root
Till the soil yield its old Hesperian fruit.

THE LADY.

Is not the hour gone by? The mystic strain,
Degenerate once, may never spring again.
What long-forsaken gods shall we invoke
To grant such increase to our common oak?

THE POET.

Yet may the ilex, of more ancient birth,
More deeply planted in that genial earth,
From her Italian wildwood even now
Revert, and bear once more the golden bough.

THE LADY.

A poet's dream was never yet less great
Because it issued through the ivory gate!
Show me one leaf from that old wood divine,
And I perchance might take your hopes for mine.

THE POET.

May Venus bend me to no harder task!
For, Pan be praised! I hold the gift you ask.
The leaf, the legend, that your wish fulfils,
To-day he brought me from the Umbrian hills.

THE LADY.

Your young Italian-yes! I saw you stand
And point his path across our well-walled land:
A sculptor's model, but alas! no god:
These narrow fields the goat-foot never trod!

THE POET.

Yet from his eyes the mirth a moment glanced
To which the streams of old Arcadia danced;
And on his tongue still lay the childish lore
Of that lost world for which you hope no more.

THE LADY.

Tell me!-from where I watched I saw his face,
And his hands moving with a rustic grace,
Caught too the alien sweetness of his speech,
But sound alone, not sense, my ears could reach.

THE POEТ.

He asked if we in England ever heard

The tiny beasts, half insect and half bird,

That neither eat nor sleep, but die content

When they in endless song their strength have spent.

THE LADY.

Cicalas! how the name enchants me back
To the grey olives and the dust-white track!
Was there a story then?-I have forgot,
Or else by chance my Umbrians told it not.

THE POET.

Lover of music, you at least should know
That these were men, in ages long ago,—
Ere music was,-and then the Muses came,
And love of song took hold on them like flame.

THE LADY.

Yes, I remember now the voice that speaks-
Most living still of all the deathless Greeks-
Yet tell me how they died divinely mad,
And of the Muses what reward they had.

THE POET.

They are reborn on earth, and from the first
They know not sleep, they hunger not nor thirst:
Summer with glad Cicala's song they fill,
Then die, and go to haunt the Muses' Hill.

THE LADY.

They are reborn indeed! and rightly you
The far-heard echo of their music knew!
Pray now to Pan, since you too, it would seem,
Were there with Phædrus, by Ilissus' stream.

THE POET.

Beloved Pan, and all ye gods whose grace
For ever haunts our short life's resting-place,
Outward and inward make me one true whole,
And grant me beauty in the inmost soul.

THE LADY.

And thou O Night, O starry Queen of Air,
Remember not my blind and faithless prayer!
Let me too live, let me too sing again,
Since Beauty wanders still the ways of men.

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