Schiller and Goethe. It seems strange to find two poets in a vault otherwise occupied solely by members of a German ducal house.

It is a popular belief that Karl August rests between his two poets, but this is an error. Karl August occupies the place of honour among the members of his race, and Goethe and Schiller repose together, side by side, apart from the royalties.

A circular opening in the floor of the chapel gives admission to the dead into the vault, into which you can descend, and stand among the coffins which contain the earthly remains of poets and of princes. You can touch any of the coffins. On those of the two poets lie flowers, ribands, wreaths. The Duchess Maria Paulowna (died 1859) wished to rest beside her husband, and yet to be buried with the consecration of the Greek Church, so that over her remains rises a Greek chapel. On one side of the vault repose the poets; on the other many princes and princesses, who are, comparatively, of but little interest. I thought of Preller's admirable and noble drawing of laurel-crowned Goethe lying on the bed of death; and of Jagemann's picture of dead Schiller; and here they lay, the poets whom, thanks to art, we have looked upon in death.

The cemetery contains many whose names and memories belong to the life-records of the two poets. Madame von Stein, Eckermann Alma von Goethe (the grand-daughter of the great Goethe), and now his two grandsons, beside many others, rest in this Weimar cemetery. All the life of that great time has passed into the death of that which was mortal. This Friedhof is now almost the most truly living part of the little city of the Muses.

Our delight in Goethe's writings leads us first to seek to know the man; and fortunately we possess the fullest record of that fullest life. Of no man so great does there exist a record so ample and so trustworthy. In his correspondence, as in his diaries, he has depicted himself, and many memoirs add to our knowledge of Goethe. A thorough acquaintance with Goethe, alike in the events of his life, in his workings and strivings, is attainable, though it cannot be attained easily or quickly; and how supreme is the interest in knowing fully the greatest man, short of and after Shakspeare, that has lived upon the tide of time !

Hence the study of the manifold "Goethe literature" becomes one of the most fascinating of all studies, and we wish regretfully that we could know as much of Shakspeare. We find a subtle harmony between Goethe the man and Goethe the writer; and in both qualities he has unfolded himself completely. He is as genuine as he is genial and full of genius. Schiller said with true modesty,

Er hat weit mehr Genie als ich; "he has far more genius than I have"; and Goethe is incontestably the greatest thinker and writer of his land and of his century. In him there is no shadow of antagonism between that which a man is and that which he does. His works are the essential outcome of the man; and we can know the man as well as we know his works. The man is one to be loved and revered. His power of will is always set to high aims, and he became sovereign over life as over himself. He is full of all fine and noble courtesies ; he works ever in the good, the beautiful, the true; he rises always on stepping-stoncs of his dead self to higher things, until his age seems to be an incarnation of noblest, serenest wisdom and goodness. He is full of dignity and sweetness, of nobleness and sympathy. He is always generous, helpful, magnanimous; and he is devoid of any taint of jealousy or hatred. He lived down the early envy of Schiller, the rancour of Herder; he despised enmity, and never descended to antagonism. He conquered enemies by wit and patience, by tolerance and love. His character is so great and lofty that we rise, as we contemplate it, to the glow of a generous ardour of admiration and delight; we cease to look for the blemishes of mortality, and are elevated to an ideal sympathy with the heights to which humanity-in rare cases-may attain. The only difficulty in the study of Goethe arises from the altitude and the complexity of the subject-though the mass of material requires labour to master it but the study is its own exceeding great reward, and uplifts our conception of humanity.

As a poet, his one want was the impulse of a nation behind him. Im eigentlichen Volke ist alles stille. Not Weimar, not even Germany, in his day was a nation.

He belongs to the few greatest poets; but he is not only poet. His studies extended over the whole range of human faculty; and he is a man of science, of art, of politics, of learning, of criticism; while he knows well, and discharges fitly, the duties of a ruler of men. Whatsoever his hand found to do, he did with the hand of a man, and not of a phantom. Learning itself may be rendered comparatively barren where there is an absence of those developed mental qualities which alone can put learning to vital use. Goethe used learning itself to elevate his life itself. His qualities and faculties are singularly balanced. His physique is of rare force and beauty; and his genius is supreme. The fire and fervour of his temperament were impelled by a glowing imagination, and he was a born poetlover. He was the idol of women whose characters and emotions contained a strain of idealism, and he was sorely tempted. Of course

he never found the one woman who could obtain and retain his entire constancy; he was too full of gifts, of grace, of genius for that; but he gave in love more than he received-though he received much. Those who judge him by the standard of to-day, mistake him grossly. Lili, who was not fully worthy of his love, was yet ennobled by it. Christiane played contentedly the part of Bayadere to Goethe's Gott. Frederike was happier in having loved and lost than she would have been had she never loved him at all. Frau von Stein was grande dame-elegant, aristocratic, coquettish, capricious, heartless. He deceived himself in her. At the beginning of their amour she may not have fully recognised the greatness of her immortal lover; but she was yet proud of his homage, and exacting in her demands upon it. She tortured and ultimately repelled him. She was not genuine, not unselfishly devoted enough to hold him. But for her coquetry and desire to retain her empire, she might have married him. The naïve Christiane suited him better, as a wife, than the fantastic great lady would have done. A poet, and such a poet— could he help loving women? Women are born hero-worshippers; and a poet must needs love the loveliness of women.

Our race is created infirm and erring; not one is perfect; no, not one; but after making all allowances, Goethe impresses us as having been one of the greatest, wisest, best of men. We regard him, if we have really attained to knowledge of him-and we regard him especially in his calm and kingly age-with a loving awe and with a reverent wonder. In so short an essay, I can only hope to reach to imperfect suggestion on such an infinite subject. The greater part of his long life was spent in the city of his adoption; and this is why I have here tried to picture Weimar-as a background to Goethe.

H. SCHÜTZ WILSON.

HISTORICAL MONUMENTS OF

OF

CALCUTTA.

F all the many visitors who in yearly increasing numbers spend a few bright weeks in Calcutta, the brilliant capital of British India, it is only now and again that one leaving the beaten track turns aside from the round of gaieties, and stands for awhile in the old cemeteries among the tombs where lie the illustrious dead of the early years of English occupation. And yet in these quiet cities of the dead lie the men who were makers of the Empire that to-day rises firm and strong, a finished work; and passing on from tomb to tomb the thoughtful visitor may read in the long roll of names an epitome, as it were, of England's history in the East. Here they lie, a great company of men who toiled and died for England's sake, and with them lie their wives and little ones.

Man, or woman, or suckling;

Mother, or bride, or maid,

Because on the bones of the English

The English flag is stayed.

The oldest English tombs in Calcutta are those to be found in St. John's Churchyard. The church was built under the auspices of Warren Hastings, when Governor-General, by public subscription, aided by a grant from the Court of Directors of the Hon. East India Company. It was completed in 1787, and remained the Cathedral Church of Calcutta till St. Paul's Cathedral was built in 1847. The ground which now forms St. John's Churchyard was used as a burial-ground by the English from the time of their first settlement in Calcutta in 1690, and it has been surmised that it was in use from an even earlier period, and that several persons who died while voyaging up or down the river Hooghly were interred on this spot. However this may be, the first interment of which we have record is that of Job Charnock, the founder of Calcutta, who died on January 10, 1692, less than a year and a half after he had

established the little settlement which was destined to become the chief city of India.

This remarkable man spent thirty-six years in Bengal in the service of the East India Company, and was held in the highest regard by the Directors, his employers. His marriage was the romance of his life: his wife was a Hindu widow, and the story goes that she was about to be burnt on her Hindu husband's funeral pyre, when Charnock, moved by her youth and beauty, led his own body-guard of soldiers to her rescue, and, dispersing the Brahmin priests and her relatives, carried her away to be for twenty-five years his companion and the sharer of his many trials.

The old records show that many of the English in the early years of their settlement in Bengal were married by the rites of the Roman Catholic Church to native women who became converts to that faith, and the probabilities are that Charnock was really married to the Hindu lady who was the mother of his children, two daughters, who both married Englishmen.

It is not certain when and where Charnock's wife died, but it has always been popularly believed that she died at Chuttanutty, the name by which Calcutta was first known; that Charnock buried her in the burial-ground of the settlement, and was himself laid in the same grave, over which a monument was erected by his elder daughter Mary and her husband Charles Eyre, who succeeded his father-in-law in the agency. The Charnock mausoleum still stands in excellent preservation, and is the oldest piece of masonry in Calcutta. It was one of the earliest masonry buildings erected by the English, as they lived in houses built in the native style with clay walls and thatched roofs till they obtained a grant of land on which to build, and the monument was probably erected at the same time and with the same materials as the fortifications of the original Fort William, begun in 1696, four years after Charnock's death.

The old burial-ground remained in use till a new cemetery was opened in 1766; up to that date it has been estimated that, with the terrible yearly mortality among the English in the then pestilential climate of the settlement, over twelve thousand bodies must have been buried in that small plot of ground. Under such conditions, monuments can only have been erected over a few of the number, and by 1802 most of these had fallen into such a ruinous condition that they were taken down and such inscription slabs as remained in good preservation were arranged in the form of a pavement round the Charnock mausoleum. There they remain to this day, the long and often quaint inscription in raised lettering as clear and fresh as