miliar with classic literature and classic history; moreover, they are artists, able to appreciate the beauty of what they see. At the time of the eruption, which occurred nearly two thousand years ago, many people perished by being smothered under the rain of ashes; but their bodies were encased in the deposit so that the form was perfectly preserved as in a mould. Some of these moulds are to be seen in the museum mentioned; and one is the mould of the body of a beautiful young woman. The younger of the three students sees this mould, and romantically wishes that he could see and love the real person, so many centuries dead. That night, while his companions are asleep, he leaves his room and wanders into the ruined city, for the pleasure of thinking all by himself. But presently, as he turns the corner of a street, he finds that the city looks quite different from what it had appeared by day; the houses seem to have grown taller; they look new, bright, clean. While he is thus wandering, suddenly the sun rises, and the streets fill with people-not the people of to-day, but the people of two thousand years ago, all dressed in the old Greek and Roman costumes. After a time a young Greek comes up to the student and speaks to him in Latin. He has learned enough Latin at the university to be able to answer, and a conversation begins, of which the result is that he is invited to the theatre of Pompeii to see the gladiators and other amusements of the time. While in this theatre, he suddenly sees the woman that he wanted to see, the woman whose figure was preserved in the Naples museum. After the theatre, he is invited to her house; and everything is very delightful until suddenly the girl's father appears on the scene. The old man is a Christian, and he is very angry that the ghost of his daughter should deceive a young man in this manner. He makes a sign of the cross, and immediately poor Arria crumbles into dust, and the young man finds himself alone in the ruins of Pompeii. Very beautiful this story is; but every detail in it is dream study.

time to the reading of books having nothing to do with the university course. The ancient Norse literature especially interested him; he read everything relating to it that he could lay hands upon. He had hard work to pass his examinations, and his fellow-students never imagined that he would be able to do anything great in the world. But presently, after leaving the university, this dreaming young man suddenly developed an immense amount of unsuspected intellectual energy. He became a journalist, which, of all professions, is the worst for a man of letters to undertake; and in spite of it he produced a wonderful novel, within quite a short time, which attracted the attention of all Europe and has been translated into most European languages. This novel was "Synnövé Solbakken," a story of Norwegian peasant life. Björnson himself was a peasant's son, and he had lived and seen that which he described in this novel. But the wonder of the book was not in the story, not in the plot; it was in the astonishing method of the telling. The book reads as if it had been written by a saga man of the ninth or tenth century; the life described is indeed modern, but the art of telling it is an art a thousand years old, which scholars imagined could never be revived again. Björnson revived it; and by so doing he has affected almost every literature in Europe. Perhaps he has especially affected some of the great French realists; at all events, he gave everybody interested in literature something new to think about. But this first novel was only the beginning of a surprising series of productions,-poetical, romantic, historical and political. Björnson went into politics, became a statesman, did honour to his country, did a great many wonderful things. But his chief merit is that he is the father and founder of a new literature, which we may call modern Norse. The study of the modern Norse writers ought to be of great service to Japanese students, for this strong and simple style accords remarkably well with the best traditions of Japanese prose. Moreover, the

works of these writers have been put into English by scholarly men-masters of clear and pure English, who have been able to preserve the values of the original. This is easy to do in the case of the Northern dialects proper, which are very close to English-much closer than French, much closer even than German. The simpler the style, the less it loses by translation.

Moreover, you will find in the work of this man the most perfect pictures possible to make of the society and the character of a people. The people ought to interest you— ought to interest any student of English literature; for it was out of this far north that came the best element in the English race, the strongest and a good deal of the best feeling that expresses itself in English literature. You will find in these stories, or studies from real life, that the race has remained very much the same from ancient times. It is true that to-day in all the schools of Norway the students learn English and French; that modern science and modern philosophy are most diligently acquired; that Norway has produced poets, dramatists, men of science, and men of art, well worthy of being compared with those of almost any other country. It is true that writers like Björnson and Ibsen (the only other Norwegian man of letters of to-day who can be compared with Björnson) have been actually able to influence English literature and European drama in general. But it is not in the cities nor in the most highly cultivated classes that the national distinctiveness in the character of a people can be judged. You must go into the country to study that; you must know the peasantry, who really form the body and strength of any nation. Björnson well knew this; and his university training did not blind him to the literary importance of such studies. The best of his fiction, and the bulk of it, treats of peasant life; and this life he portrayed in a way that has no parallel in European literature with the possible exception of the Russian work done by Turgueniev and others. He has also

spiration. Trust to your own dream-life; study it carefully, and draw your inspiration from that. For dreams are the primary source of almost everything that is beautiful in the literature which treats of what lies beyond mere daily experience.

CHAPTER VI

ENGLISH BALLADS

FIRST of all let us attempt to define what a ballad is. In different languages the word has not the same meaning. A French man of letters uses the word ballad in a much narrower sense than the German; and even the German does not always give to it the same breadth of meaning that the English poets attached to it. Furthermore, exact scholars give narrower interpretations to the name than do men of letters generally. But we can not restrict the significance of the word as certain scholars would have us do, simply because all attempts to establish a sharp line between ballads proper and other forms of poetry closely resembling them, have proved futile. The best way for us to do will be to take the word "ballad" in its very largest English meaning, as signifying a short narrative story in simple verse. Although the majority of ballads take certain forms, many do not; and it would not be correct to say that a poem is not a ballad because it happens to be in one kind of verse rather than another. It has been among my own pupils a matter of difficulty sometimes to distinguish a long narrative poem or epic from a ballad; they have observed with good reason that certain English ballads are very long. But they are not so long as to be compared with other forms of narrative poetry; and in a general way it may be stated that a ballad tells one simple story or incident only. Epics, in some cases, not only tell a great many different stories related to each other, but form what we might call a romance or a novel in verse.

We may at once attempt to state what a ballad is not. It is not a romance, nor is it necessarily a complete story. It