Man presently comes himself upon the scene,
and describes himself in stanzas that might pass
for a very good political description of the
Obstinate Man of our own day, who, sitting in the
same chair, troubles Italy with his tenacity, and
has even condescended to keep brigands in his
pay:

    I cannot keep my hands from doing ill;
    Thieves, gallows-birds, and liars work my will,
    Brigands are my allies, whose purse I fill.

Every stanza ends with the refrain, "Look at
me, all! I am the Obstinate Man." Careless
of the threats of Divine Punishment, Gringoire's
Obstinate Man took for his helpers two redoubtable
demons, Simony and Hypocrisy, the
latter describing himself as "given wholly to
God, except body and soul." Punishment still
threatens. Even Simony and Obstinacy repent;
but the Obstinate Man holds to his course. The
end is a resolve to assuage the griefs of the
People of Italy without regard to the Obstinate
Man, and at his expense.

Gringoire's new farce of "Saying and Doing,"
drawing its merriment from coarse jesting, ended
the trilogy.

Pierre Gringoire, however, was not a great
moral satirist. He fought the king's battle
against the Pope when that was the battle of
France, and after laughing as Foolish Mother
at all courtiers, received, as part of his reward
for political service, the post of Herald-at-Arms
to the wife of the Duke of Lorraine, Renée de
Bourbon. Then he ceased to write himself
Foolish Mother Gringoire, but assumed the
territorial style of Vaudemont, and profited so
much from royal favour, that he had to defend
himself against the questioning of friends, who
asked why he was gone into that voluntary
servitude. It was, he said, to get a better
point of view for the study of shams;—wherein
he proved himself a sham. Again, in spite of
his earlier arguments against papal ambition,
after the concordat, being paid by the religious
fraternity of St. Louis to write a "Mystery of
St. Louis," he therein satisfied the priests by
exaltation of the Pope, and personification of
the laity under the name of "Outrage." That
Mystery, except that it retains some allegorical
personages—Good Counsel, Chivalry, Populace,
Outrage, Church—is a historical drama, running
over the events of the life of the sainted king,
and introducing historical characters, all with
addition of a full measure of legend and miracle.
A bear falls dead after having defiled a cross,
raised by some captives in the Holy Land, and
of two Turks, Brandeffer and Billonard, who
raise their swords against it—one has his arm
dried up, the other perishes. Among the
episodes in this Mystery, is the story of a spoilt
son who runs into excesses, and disdains the
counsels of his mother. Many a time, she says,
I have bought you from prison—if you are
seized again by the law, by my soul I shall die
of sorrow. "Eh!" he replies, "the justice is
my cousin, that sets my mind at ease." But
the cousin is Etienne Boileau, ancestor of the
poet, and that Boileau was famous for his rough,
stern justice. The mother in despair goes at
last to take counsel with Etienne, and ask him
to reason with her boy. He receives her roughly,
accuses her of having lost him by her own weakness,
and promises to take him to task on the
first opportunity. Occasion comes. The prodigal
son asks money of his mother. "I have
none," she answers. "Borrow," is his reply.
She then herself sends him to borrow of their
cousin the justice. But as the youth talks to
his cousin in the strain he is used to hold
towards his mother, and replies lightly to counsel,
"Every one to his taste; nothing can change
me," the justice changes him to a dead man,
by having him hanged upon the stage for the
edification of the audience. In another scene,
three little children are also, before the people,
piteously slain with the knife by order of the
Sire de Coucy, for having killed a hare on his
preserves. The king talks of hanging the Sire
de Coucy, but he is a gentleman, and game is
game. So he is spared to die at last, mourned
by Church, Good Counsel, and even Populace.

Rough old days are reflected from Pierre
Gringoire's Mirror of his Age. These present days
are not altogether smooth days yet, and in some
form the figure of the Obstinate Man still passes
across what mirrors are held up to show the
form and fashion of the time in France and
Italy.

COMMITTED TO THE DEEP.

IF a landsman threatened with consumption
take a long sea-voyage, say to Australia and
back, he probably comes home with a new lease
of life. The pure open sea air is of all air the
wholesomest; and though at river mouths in
some hot climates, fevers and dysenteries may
fairly enough be expected, yet those hot climates
tend rather to cure than to cause lung disease.
Who would suppose, then, that consumption,
which has been so fatal in the army, is the great
scourge of the British navy too? Dr. Gavin
Milroy, with whose name and services as a
medical inspector and sanitary commissioner
in Jamaica, in the Crimea, and elsewhere, most
people are familiar, has just issued, in the
pamphlet form of a letter to Sir John Pakington,
some valuable considerations on the health of
the Royal Navy.

The subject is one of great interest as a mere
question of national economy. By disease alone
we lose every year out of the navy—out of a
population of able-bodied men exempt from the
tenderness or the infirmities of either childhood
or old age—fifteen or sixteen men in every
thousand; while the estimate for sickness
amounts to the average loss of rather more than
three weeks in a year from every man's duty.
That is to say, from the whole available working
power represented by the sailors of the navy
one-seventeenth has to be struck out or
cancelled by sickness. Of the men not on the sick
list, it is to be remembered that on board ship
every sick man's work must be distributed
among the diminished number of the sound; and