and the leper leaning at its side devoutly heard mass. The priest, taking up a little earth in his cloak, threw it on one of the leper's feet, and put him out of the church, if it did not rain too heavily; took him to his hut in the midst of the fields, and then uttered the prohibitions: 'I forbid you entering the church.. or entering the company of others. I forbid you quitting your home without your leper's dress.' He concluded: "Take this dress, and wear it in token of humility; take these gloves, take this clapper, as a sign that you are forbidden to speak to any one. You are not to be indignant at being thus separated from others, and as to your little wants, good people will provide for you, and God will not desert you.' Then in this old ritual follow these sad words: When it shall come to pass that the leper shall pass out of this world, he shall be buried in his hut, and not in the churchyard.' At first there was a doubt whether wives should follow their husbands who had been leprous, or remain in the world and marry again. The Church decided that the marriage-tie was indissoluble, and so bestowed on these unhappy beings this immense source of consolation. With a love stronger than this living death, lepers were followed into banishment from the haunts of men by their faithful wives. Readers of Sir J. Stephen's Essays on Ecclesiastical Biography' will recollect the description of the founder of the Franciscan order, how, controlling his involuntary disgust, Saint Francis of Assisi washed the feet and dressed the sores of the lepers, once at least reverently applying his lips to their wounds. BOURCHIER-JAMES.] -- This ceremony of quasi-burial varied considerably at different times and in different places. In some cases a grave was dug, and the leper's face was often covered during the service. TO ULYSSES1 Mr. W. G. Palgrave, to whom the poem was addressed, was a brother of Professor F. T. Palgrave. Tennyson once said to the latter, 'I think your brother is the cleverest man I ever saw. Waugh, who records this, adds: 'He had, indeed, earned the title [of Ulysses], having been consul in 1866 at Sonkhoum Kale, in 1867 at Trebizond, in 1873 at St. Thomas, in 1876 at Manilla, and in 1878 consul-general in Bulgaria. To these he added, in 1879, the consulship at Bangkok, and in 1884 he was 1 'Ulysses,' the title of a number of essays by W. G. Palgrave. He died at Montevideo before seeing my poem. Wavers on her thin stem the snowdrop cold That trembles not to kisses of the bee. Come, Spring, for now from all the dripping eaves The spear of ice has wept itself away, What use to brood? This life of mingled And hour by hour unfolding woodbine leaves III Once more a downy drift against the brakes, Self-darken'd in the sky, descending slow! But gladly see I thro' the wavering flakes Yon blanching apricot like snow in snow. These will thine eyes not brook in forestpaths, On their perpetual pine, nor round the beech; They fuse themselves to little spicy baths, Solved in the tender blushes of the peach; They lose themselves and die On that new life that gems the hawthorn line; Thy gay lent-lilies wave and put them by, And out once more in varnish'd glory shine I saw beyond their snger, The steaming oicing, cranes, the Magic The slant sea the Mighty, Jssom; copse taught me in childhood, And surre on the border Abou'f boundless Ocean, And all but in Heaven IX Not of the sunlight, After it, follow it, ROMNEY'S REMORSE [I read Hayley's Life of Romney the other day - Romney wanted but education and reading to make him a very fine painter: but his ideal was not high nor fixed. How touching is the close of his life! He married at nineteen, and because Sir Joshua and others had said that 'marriage spoilt an artist' almost immediately left his wife in the North and Broaden the glowi |