shall be the author of "Hamlet," but the English rights in the piece shall go to Shakespeare. In the same spirit of compromise Cruikshank might have been content to be the author of "Oliver Twist" in the Hebrides and the second-class saloons of Atlantic steamers. Herman should be sole author of "The Silver King" in Pall Mall, and Jones in Piccadilly. Some metropolitan streets belong by one pavement to one parish, and by the other to another; so that in the case of parochial celebrities it would be possible for the rival great men to glare at each other across the road--not, however, daring to cross it, for fear of losing their reputation. The Frenchman's long-standing assumption of Parisian rights in the victory of Waterloo would be put upon a legitimate basis. By a logical extension of the principle we could allow Homer to be born in Chios on Mondays, in Colophon on Tuesdays, and so with each of the seven cities which starved him. They use up the week nicely. On the odd day of leap year we might concede that he never existed, and allow him to be resolved into the pieces into which he was torn by Wolf. Had this pacificatory principle been discovered earlier, "The Letters of Phalaris" would never have fluttered Europe, and Swift would have had no need to write "The Battle of the Books." It is never too late to mend, however, and an academy of leading politicians and ecclesiastics should be at once formed to draw up an authoritative "Calendar and Topography of Belief," fixing once for all the dates and places on or in which it is permissible to hold any given opinion. Although, when I come to think of it, Science and Religion have long been tacitly reconciled on this principle, Religion being true on Sundays and Science on week-days. [Sidenote: The Creed of Despair.] I am convinced that optimism is exactly the wrong sort of medicine for our "present discontents." It is time to try homoeopathy. My suggestion is that the religion of the future shall consist of the most pessimistic propositions imaginable; its creed shall be godless and immoral, its thirty-nine articles shall exhaust the possibilities of unfaith and its burden shall be _vanitas vanitatum_. Man shall be an automaton, and life an hereditary disease, and the world a hospital, and truth a dream, and beauty an optical illusion. These sad tidings of great sorrow shall be organized into a state church, with bishops and paraphernalia, and shall be sucked in by the infant at its mother's breast. Men shall be tutored in unrighteousness, and innocence shall be under ecclesiastical ban. Faith and Hope shall be of the seven deadly virtues, and unalloyed despair of man and nature a dogma it were blasphemous to doubt. The good shall be persecuted and the theists tortured, and those that say there is balm in Gilead, shall be thrust beyond the pale of decent society.