384 



The Review of Reviews 



April SO. ISOS. 



perialism. Lord Hugh proceeds to point out the 

 effect of Catholicism in modifying the strong Im- 

 perialistic sentiment. Love of countr\ and love of 

 Church may dwell, he says, as kindred in the same 

 breast, but " the ardent Catholic cannot feel to- 

 wards his country as though he had never known 

 somt-thing more august and more inspiring still. 

 There car. be but one first place in his heart, and to 

 onlv one object can his highest enthusiasm and 

 supreme faith be given." The man who knows no 

 higher enthusiasm lets his patriotism run beyond all 

 limits, and becomes a Jingo. As Catholic Mr. 

 Gladstone had, so the writer urges, a mediseval sense 

 that all the peoples of Christendom were citizens of 

 a Christian Commonwealth. " Xor was he so much 

 inspired as others by the world-wide greatness of the 

 British Empire. Was his eye not familiar with a 

 still grander vision ?" 



Lord Salisbury moved the House of Lords to tears 

 in his obituarv^ tribute to Mr. Gladstone. There is 

 an echo of the same pathos in Lord Hugh's farewell 

 words on a great biography : — 



Most of all. the true son of the Cliiirch will rejoice to 

 read of one whose ability, whose conrage. and whose re- 

 nown are for ever among the trophies of her glory. 



THE LETTERS AND THE IDEALS OF HEINE. 



Two little articles in the German reviews for Feb- 

 ruar}' commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of 

 Heines death (Februar)- 17th, 1856). 



Gustav Karpales, the author of a Life of Heine, 

 contributes to Nord und Siid an article on Heine 

 and Elisa Ponsin (Madame Amaut). The lady in 

 question was an old friend of Heine's wife, and 

 Heine became much attached to her two children. 

 The friendlv relations continued for about fifteen 

 vears after Heine's marriage, but the catastrophe 

 came in 1852, when Madame Amaut insulted 

 Madame Heine in such a manner that it became 

 necessar>- to break off all further intercourse. Heine's 

 letter, explaining his action in the matter, which is 

 given in the article, shows how dignified and serious 

 the poet could be when the occasion arose. 



In the Deutsche Rundschau, Ernst Elster writes on 

 the friendship of Heine and Heinrich Straube at 

 Gottingen University, and publishes two of Heine's 

 letters of the early part of the year 1821. In one of 

 these Heine tells his friend of his unhappy love for 

 his cousin Amalie Heine, while the writer of the 

 article has been enabled to give some new details 

 concerning the unhappy love affair of Straube and 

 the poetess Annette von Droste-Hiilshoff. 



In the February Bookman, Miss Elizabeth Lee 

 publishes a sketch of Heine's life. She writes : — 



Heine dreamed bis own dreams. Poet«. nowadays, with 

 few exceptions, dream the dreams of others. . . . Heine 

 lived in the present. He looked life in the face, rebelling 

 asrainst what hurt, enjoying to the full what pleased, and 

 his mav not be the loftiest of ideals, but it is a very 

 human attitude, and one that will make it3 appeal to man- 

 kind so long as this world shall endure. 



THE "PIED PIPER" AND THE DANCE OF 

 DEATH. 



The Pied Piper of Hameln, best known 

 in England by Brownings version, has been a 

 favourite legend with poets and illustrators, and one 

 poetical version at least has been set to music several 

 times. In the Februar)- issue of Velhagen, Dr. R. 

 Salinger endeavours to explain the origin of the 

 legend. 



That the legend is in part a true story he willingly 

 admits. He thinks it quite conceivable that Hameln 

 became infested with rats, that a ratcatcher in some 

 extraordinary manner managed to drive the rats into 

 the sea, and that the mayor may have declined to 

 pay the man the promised reward for his pains. 



The mythical part of the story is that the rat- 

 catcher should have piped such magic tones as to 

 attract the children, that the parents should have 

 allowed them to follow him, and that the whole 

 procession should have disappeared in a hill or 

 mountain outside the city. 



K D.\NCE OF DEATH. 



In explanation of the myth he suggests that the 

 ratcatcher represents Death. In those days the 

 •■ Dance of Death " was a favourite subject, and one 

 of the best-known representations of it at that time 

 was a glass-painting (about 1312) in St. Mary's 

 Church at Liibeck. Here, Death was depicted as a 

 skeleton with a pipe, opening the dance, while the 

 Pope, the Kaiser, and members of all classes, in- 

 cluding children, followed. Death appeared in a 

 dress of brilliant colours, and only the hands and 

 the face repealed the skeleton. "The writer thinks 

 it must have been a votive picture, representing the 

 exodus of the children under the leadership of the 

 pip)er, a " dance of death ' picture to commemorate 

 the death of the children. 



From this picture, he thinks, grew the later form 

 of the legend. The colours which the mediaeval 

 glass-painter used were red, blue, yellow, and violet 

 From these colours the gay dress of Death the piper, 

 and his popular name of Bunting, may be explained. 

 But the question remains ; How did the player be- 

 come a ratcatcher? Probably rats and mice were 

 both depicted in the painting, and the people may 

 have come to regard the mice as an attribute of the 

 player, a catcher of mice as well as of rats. Whether 

 mice w^re really included in the picture it is now 

 impossible to ascertain, but very probably they were. 



THE MOUSE AS THE SYMBOL OP DEATH. 



Now the mouse is the symbol of death, and the 

 gnawing of a mouse or of a rat is to the superstitious 

 a death-omen. In Ancient Rome we come across 

 this belief, and in Egyptian hieroglyphics the mouse 

 is the symbol of destruction. Also in the Middle 

 Ages the mouse is variously associated with death. 

 On the wall behind the altar in St. Mary's Church at 

 Liibeck there is the figure of a mouse sitting on the 



