Storeys of Old.

amongst them. What's the good of such things?' What ignorance will accomplish by the aid of fire is simply amazing! Whether this servant was fool or idiot, it is hard to say."

Still in the prime of life, Alfred Thomas Story has already a large record of literary labours. He has been a worker in many fields, but such is his versatility that he has gathered golden produce from them all. It is chiefly as a votary of the poetic muse, however, that we must view him. Possibly his success as a writer of prose exceeds even that which he has achieved as a poet. If he had never written epic, elegy, ballad or song, his romances of "Only Half a Hero" and "Fifine," his brief, or miscellaneous tales, his numerous magazine sketches of men and things, and his philosophical homilies - often cynical, but always on the humanitarian side - would have marked him out as a man of high talent, worthy of a lasting place in the literature of his country. With all his variety of gilts he has a special aptitude for narrative; and this is shown still more in his prose productions than in the poetic effusions that have come under our review. His writings are numerous, and among his works must be mentioned "From Punch to Padan Aram," "The Martyrdom of Labour," "William Blake, his Life, Character and Writings," "Swiss Life in Town and Country."

All his life (since entering journalism) he has been undergoing a process of self-culture in the university of experience, the lessons of which were sometimes to him bitter in the mouth, however profitable they might prove to be morally and intellectually. A few years ago, in company with another congenial spirit, he wrote "Wayside Thoughts," under the title of "Low Down" - showing a new sympathy with the social waifs of our large cities, many of the character sketches being drawn from life, and showing some of its shadiest aspects. As Mr. Story's career has had both its ups and downs, he was all the more competent for the task of producing these ballad annals of the poor. Not that he ever became a Bohemian in the literary sense; many though the difficulties were which he was fated to encounter, he was enabled to maintain his upward and onward career.

As a poet Mr. Story is fond of dealing with out of the way subjects. He has produced several sketches in which the grotesque and picturesque in moral life are graphically depicted. One of these has for its hero John Ambler, the village Icarus, who made wings for himself, hoping thereby "to get right up above the earth and heaven's free breath to draw," but after a flight of nine or ten feet fell in the mire, amid the jeers of his matter-of-fact neighbours. Another humorously relates how "Samwell's Mare, Maggy," was the pride of her master, though she was never done playing him mischievous pranks.

Now and again Mr. Story falls into a misanthropic mood as he contemplates the sufferings of the masses; and at other times he applies the satiric lash to the shoulders of the oppressors; or, rising into a superior atmosphere, heralds the good times coming with strains of hope and joy. We like him best of all, however, when he communes with Nature at large, or celebrates her floral pets or feathered favourites, making them his own in virtue of his poetic intincts and privileges; or when he meditates on the past as recalled to his fancy by the relics of castles and abbeys old and grey.

A provincial journal had the benefit of his first efforts in the newspaper line, and, these being deemed full of promise, off he hied to the great metropolis to occupy the sub-editorial chair of Human Nature, a monthly periodical to which he contributed his first poetical effusions - one of them on children having had the honour of being extensively quoted in the American press. Subsequently our adventurous journalist went to Germany to study. To him the Fatherland was a new world, and he levied tithe on everything that was within his reach for the purpose of increasing his hoards of knowledge and of being turned to account by him as a professional author. He saw much that was painful as well as pleasurable during the course of his sojourn abroad, witnessing horrors on horrors' head accumulate on the battlefields of the Franco-German war, the pictures of which he reproduced in "Only Half a Hero," respecting which a reviewer noted "that it was superior in