knight never backed steed!" cried the
gallant Americans.

From their midst rode a courteous cavalier, Captain John Barry, the
scholar, the hero of sword and pen.

"Yield thee, Sir Knight!" he said, doffing his _kepi_ in martial
courtesy.

Four Hair-Brushes replied to his salute, and was opening his curved and
delicate lips to speak, when a chance bullet struck him full in the
breast. He threw up his arms, reeled, and fell. The gallant American,
leaping from saddle to ground, rushed to raise his head.

Through the war-paint he recognised him.

"Great Heaven!" he cried, "it is--"

"Hush!" whispered Four Hair-Brushes, with a weary smile: "let Annesley de
Vere of the Blues die unnamed. Tell them that I fell in harness."

He did, indeed. Under his feathered and painted cloak Barry found that
Annesley, ever careful of his figure, ever loyal in love, the last of the
Dandies, yet wore the corset of Madame de Telliere. It was wet with his
life-blood.

"So dies," said Barry, "the last English gentleman."

THACKERAY

"I thought how some people's towering intellects and splendid cultivated
geniuses rise upon simple, beautiful foundations hidden out of sight."
Thus, in his Letters to Mrs. Brookfield, Mr. Thackeray wrote, after
visiting the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral, with its "charming,
harmonious, powerful combination of arches and shafts, beautiful
whichever way you see them developed, like a fine music." The simile
applies to his own character and genius, to his own and perhaps to that
of most great authors, whose works are our pleasure and comfort in this
troublesome world. There are critics who profess a desire to hear
nothing, or as little as may be, of the lives of great artists, whether
their instrument of art was the pen, or the brush, or the chisel, or the
strings and reeds of music. With those critics perhaps most of us agree,
when we read books that gossip about Shelley, or Coleridge, or Byron.
"Give us their poetry," we say, "and leave their characters alone: we do
not want tattle about Claire and chatter about Harriet; we want to be
happy with 'The Skylark' or 'The Cloud.'" Possibly this instinct is
correct, where such a poet as Shelley is concerned, whose life, like his
poetry, was as "the life of winds and tides," whose genius, unlike the
skylark's, was more true to the point of heaven than the point of home.
But reflection shows us that on the whole, as Mr. Thackeray says, a man's
g