and, as longevity was considerable in those patriarchal days, I should like to know how they got on together when Afrael Esquire was 195, and his wife, Noema, was 200.  Did Afrael never again take to his spirits?  Or, did he become miserable and hipped having entirely lost his spirits?  Did his wife never make sarcastic reference to the “stars” with whom he had formerly been acquainted?  And how about her boy, his step-son?  Did they have any family?  Whence came the money?

Perhaps Mr. ALFRED AUSTIN (whose works are being printed by MACMILLAN in a collected form, and among them The Satire now historic) will give us an entirely new volume on the same subject, telling an expectant public all about Mr. and Mrs. Afrael chez eux, and, in fact, something spicy about this strangely assorted couple; for Poet ALFRED will do well to remember and act upon his own dictum when, in the preface to The Satire, he observed, and with truth, that had he originally “written with the grave decorum of a secluded moralist, he would” by this time “have gone down into the limbo of forgotten bores.”

Into that limbo A.A. will never descend.  It is delightful to find him dedicating his book to Lord LYTTON, to whom—­when L.L. was OWEN MEREDITH, ALFREDO mio had pointed out that, “in one serious particular, he had overlooked parental admonition,” and observing on that occasion that, “had OWEN MEREDITH even a glimpse of the truth, we” (A.A. himself, in 1861, much “we"-er then than now—­“et alors, il grandira, il grandira!”) “should have been spared the final tableau of repentance and forgiveness which concludes Lucile.”  But, thank goodness, we (the Baron, and his literary friends) have not been spared the touching picture of repentance and forgiveness in ALFRED AUSTIN’s dedicating his latest poem to Lord LYTTON. Sic transit ira poetarum!

In The Season ALFREDO sang—­

  “I claim the precious privilege of youth,
  Never to speak except to speak the truth.”

But those lines were not written the day before yesterday, and as he can no longer “claim” the aforesaid “precious privilege,” he can in his more mature years “go as he pleases.”  And there is so much “go” in him that he always pleases; so the Baron anticipates the sequel to The Tower of Babel on the lines already suggested, presumptuous as it may seem to suggest lines to a poet.

Phra the Phoenician, a very clever idea, with which BULWER would have performed mysteriously thrilling wonders, but which Mr. ARNOLD has written at once too heavily and treated too lightly, in too much of a “so-called nineteenth century style;” which is a pity, as it is full of dramatic incident, and the interest well kept up through some two thousand years or so, more or less.  He is a wonder is Mister Phra, and might well be called Phra Diavolo instead of Phra the Phoenician.  Sir EDWIN