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MACMILLAN'S

VOL. LII.

MAY 1885, TO OCTOBER 1885.

MACMILLAN AND CO.

29 & 30, BEDFORD STREET, CO VENT GARDEN ; AND

|W0 fork.

1885.

W . J . L I M T O :

The Right of Translation and 1,'eprodvction 'is Reserved.

RICHARD CLAY AND SONS,

BREAD STREET HILL, LONDON, Z.C.

and Bungay, Suffolk.

CONTENTS.

PAGS

Australian Appeal to the English Democracy, An. By BERNHARD WISE 161

Baths of Casciana in July, The. By JANET Ross 354

Bruno, Was Giordano, really Burned ? By RICHARD COPLEY CHRISTIE 435

Canadian Loyalty. By ROSWELL FISHER 26

Commonplaces on the Commonplace 272

Court Painters, A Prince of. By WALTER PATER 401

Day Schools and Boarding Schools, A Few Last Words on 64

Drink in England, The Question of. By R. E. MACNAGHTEN 348

Dymond, Mrs. By MRS. RITCHIE : —

Chapters IX.— xn 1

,, xiii.— xv 81

,, xvi.— xix 173

„ xx. — xxin 241

,, xxiv. — xxvi 321

,, xxvii.— xxxi 455

Educational Endowments, Scotch and English. By PROFESSOR G. G. RAMSAY ... 35

French Views on English Writers. By M. A. W 16

Inland Duties and Taxation 392

International Co-operation in Scandinavia 199

Landes, A Walking Tour in the : —

1 221

II 280

Local Government in Ireland, The Extension of. By PHILO-CELT 446

Local University Colleges 361

Macaulay and Sir Elijah Impey 422

"Maritis the Epicurean." By M. A. W 132

Marlborough. By A. G. BRADLEY 188

Modest Means, A Hint to People with. By CHARLES H. PEARSON 112

Mommsen's New Volume. By WILLIAM T. ARNOLD 140

Montevideo to Paraguay, From : —

1 96

II. . 204

•

vi Contents.

PAG?:

National Gallery at Amsterdam, The New 383

Political History, A Chapter of. By J. T. B 314

Review .of the Month : —

May 71

June 153

July 232

Rhodian Society. By J. THEODORE BENT • . . . . 297

Riel Rebellion, The, in North- West Canada. By R. MACKRAY 254

Rural Roads 371

Songs, Popular, of the Scottish Highlanders. By JOHN STTJART BLACKIE 304

Station, At the, on an Autumn Morning. By H. COURTHOPE BOWEN 68

Swiss Village, Notes in a. By MURROUGH O'BRIEN 415

Tarentum. By JANET Ross 473

Thrush, The, in February. By GEORGE MEREDITH 265

Trouting, Continental. By A. G. BRADLEY 441

Unexplained. By MRS. MOLESWORTH : —

1 49

II 119

Windward Islands, The 333

10

ARNOLD, WILLIAM T. BENT, J. THEODORE. BLACKIE, JOHN STUART. BOWEN, H. COURTHOPE. BRADLEY, A. G. CHRISTIE, RICHARD COPLEY. FISHER, ROSWELL. MACNAGHTEN, R. E. MACKRAY, R. MEREDITH, GEORGE. MOLESWORTH, MRS. O'BRIEN, MURROUGH. PATER, WALTER. PEARSON, CHARLES H. RAMSAY, G. G. RITCHIE, MRS. ROSS, JANET. WISE, BERNHARD:

MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.

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Reading Cases for Monthly Numbers, One Shilling. Cases for Binding Volumes, One Shilling.

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MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.

MAY, 1885.

MRS. DYMOND.

CHAPTER IX. JOSSELIN'S STEPMOTHER.

IT was not in Susanna's nature to dwell upon vague and melancholy sugges- tions. With the morning came a hopeful aspect of things, a burst of sunshine and youthful spirits. Crow- beck, notwithstanding the heavy cornices and hangings, began to look more homelike. The new mistress of the Place was down betimes ; her presence seemed already to brighten everything. She went out into the garden for a few minutes before break- fast ; as she stood on the lawn in her fresh morning dress the light seemed to set her hair aflame. The hills across the water seemed to be touched with some gentle mood of rainbow light. The green slopes beyond the lake were green, soft, silent as the sward on which she stood. George Tyson and his father came striding up from the boat-house across the dewy fields, trudging upon daisy-flowers with their heavy, hobnailed boots ; the little calves ran to meet them with play- ful starts and caresses. Jock, the sheep dog, leapt a fence and darted off after some imaginary sheep. Then came Jo, advancing from beyond the trees, with his rod and with fish in his basket.

" Good morning," said Jo. " Look here, I caught all these up by my

No. 307. — VOL. LI i.

uncle's boat-house this morning. Tempy was out ; she seems all right again. Aunt Fanny is always making scares about nothing at all."

Susy longed to ask more about Tempy and Aunt Fanny and life at Bolsover, but she found it difficult to frame her questions. Jo also seemed anxious to explain and yet reluctant to speak ; he, too, had something on his mind.

" I am afraid your sister is very unhappy," said Susanna at last.

"They are both very unhappy," said Jo ; then, with a heroic effort, for he did not like to hurt his pretty, shy stepmother, who seemed to him very gentle and only anxious to do for the best, notwithstanding all family warnings and ominous sug- gestions to the contrary. " I think," said Jo, turning red and looking into his basket, " if you had known more of Charlie you would have advised my father differently."

"I!" said Susy. "I never "

then she stopped short. She was a new-made wife and not yet used to her position, was it for her to disclaim all responsibility in her husband's actions? What did wives do under such circumstances 1 Susy, in her perplexity, fell back upon another question. " What has your cousin done to trouble your father so much ?" she asked, also with eyes cast down.

"He has been a fool," said Jo.

Mrs. Dymond.

11 He has spent his own money, and he once got me to back a lame horse — papa never could forgive that. I think this is about the worst, except that row at Oxford, when Charlie was caught and the others got off ; and — and I'm afraid there was something else in London," added Jo. " Papa tells me he was seen drinking, but Charlie was so cut up, poor fellow, he hardly knew what he was about."

" One can't wonder at your father's anxiety," said Mrs. Dymond gravely. " I saw your cousin for a moment in London. I felt very sorry for him."

Somehow, as Jo talked on, little by little she began to find her sympathies enlisted on Charlie's side. " Poor fellow ! " she said pityingly, forgetting her own determination to blame.

"There goes Hicks; papa has done his business. I must get ready for breakfast," cries Josselin, abruptly disappearing as the bailiff issued from the study window. The Colonel fol- lowed.

" Mr. Hicks, I want to introduce you to my wife," said Colonel Dymond, seeing Susanna there ; and Mr. Hicks, a friendly, brown, tattered man, who seemed bailiff to many winds and storms and moors, made a clumsy, smiling salutation to the smiling, graceful young lady.

The new family breakfasted as they had dined, in a triangle at the round table.

Susy poured out tea from behind the old-fashioned silver urn. The colonel looked round, satisfied, dis- satisfied.

"The place seems empty without Tempy," said he. ".You saw her this morning, Jo ; when is your sister coming back?"

Jo didn't answer ; he was not at ease with his father.

" I am afraid, from what Jo tells me, that she is very unhappy indeed," said Susy, blushing up ; " that is why she keeps away. She cannot bear to — to differ from you. John, don't you

think — do you really think — there is no hope at all for them? Is it pos- sible," she continued bravely, "that we may have done your nephew in- justice ? Boys are thoughtless and inexperienced, but Charles Bolsover seems to feel everything very deeply, and sincerely to love Tempy very, very much."

" My dear Susanna, my dear wo- man," said the colonel gravely, putting down his paper and looking fixedly at her, "pray do not let me hear you speak in this way again. Josselin," with a stern glance at his son, "has no doubt influenced you. Do you sup- pose he cares more than I do for his sister's ultimate happiness ? It is no kindness on his part or on yours to interfere — to urge me to consent to Tempy's life-long misery. My duty as a father, and as head of the family, is to decide upon what seems to me best and right for my children and for their good. Do you know that this fellow is a gambler, a drunkard ? He was seen drunk in a public eating- house in London the very night he had asked me for my child in mar- riage. Tempy's husband must be a good, true man she can look up to — a trustworthy, upright man, who will love her and make her happy and respected. You, Susy, know but too well the suffering that a man with a low standard of honour can inflict upon a high-minded lady." (Susy turned crimson ; she could not answer.) " We all have to face the truth and to act for the best," said the colonel. " I am sorry to speak of my own nephew so harshly, but I look upon Charles as an adventurer and not uninfluenced by mercenary motives. Why should I refuse my consent if I trusted him, or believed him in the least worthy of Tempy 1

" Papa," cried Jo, hotly, " indeed you are unjust to poor Charlie. He is desperately in love ; he has been silly ; he has no interested motives."

" I beg you will drop the subject, Jo," said the colonel, testily. " It is

Mrs. Dymond.

not your affair, it is mine and Tempy's. Charles Bolsover is penniless, except for what the Bolsovers may be able to do for him. Tempy is rich, as girls go. Even without your share of my property, the interest of your poor mother's money now amounts to a considerable sum, and, by the way," said the colonel, glad to change the subject, "I shall have to get you to help me, Jo, as soon as you are of age, to make a provision for Susy here, who hasn't any expectations or settlements," said the colonel, smil- ing and softening, "and who would be poorly left if anything happened to me." The colonel, as elderly people are apt to do, rather enjoyed discussing such eventualities ; neither Susy nor Jo found any pleasure in the conver- sation.

" Tempy doesn't want to be rich any more than I do ; she only wants to marry Charlie," grunts Jo, awk- wardly, getting up and preparing to leave the room.

And Susy meanwhile sat silent, looking at the walls of the room, at the Landseer stags, the showy Italian daubs, the print of the passing of the Reform Bill, with all our present Nestors and Ulysses as spruce young men in strapped trousers ; then she slowly turned her eyes upon her husband, as he stood with his back to the chimney, erect and martial even in retreat. Colonel Dymond was making believe to read the paper which had just come, in reality greatly agitated though he looked so calm.

He was one of those people who, having once made up their minds, never see any great reasons to alter them unless some stronger will en- forces the change. When Susy looked up with tears in her eyes, all troubled by his severe tone, her sweet, anxious, shy look seemed to absolve him, and it won his forgiveness, only Susy could not quite forgive herself.

John Dymond was a weak man, kind-hearted, hot-headed, honourable, and both obstinate and credulous, and

created to be ruled. For some years after his first wife's death he had con- stituted Aunt Fanny into a sort of directress — her unhesitating assump- tion suited some1 want in his nature at the time — perhaps of late he had changed in this respect. It most cer- tainly still suited Miss Bolsover that people should do as she told them. She should have been abbess of a monastery, prime minister of some kingdom where women govern the state. She had not imagination enough to correct the imperiousness of her nature, whereas Susanna had too much to allow freedom to her actions, and so to-day again she gave in with a sigh and pressed her husband no more ; the power of sulking persistence which some people can wield was not hers. That gift of adaptiveness which be- longed to Susanna Dymond, led her to acquiesce in the conclusions of those she loved.

Tempy did not come back, and the colonel said he should go over to Bolsover and see her there and make further arrangements ; Susy begged to be left at home. She spent the morn- ing unpacking, settling down, exploring her domain. She had a grand bedroom, with cornices, red damask curtains, and solemn mahogany furniture to match, there were prints of the Duke and Duchess of Kent on the wall, and of the Queen as a pretty little girl with a frill and a coral necklace. The young mistress of Crowbeck looked about, wandering along the passages of her new kingdom followed by an obsequious housemaid, who led her from room to room. Then she came back to her own pretty boudoir, where Susy's prints and her various posses- sions were lying ready to be set out : among them was that old drawing of Naomi and Ruth from Madame du Fare's ; how well she remembered it!

Josselin came up to her later in the day as she stood complacently among her girlish treasures. He gave a

B 2

Mrs. Dymond.

quick, asking look. Susy shook her head — "Your father is gone over to the Hall to see Tempy — he ordered his horse just now. He must know best," she repeated with some effort ; " we must trust to him, Jo."

" We can't help ourselves," said Josselin. Then he added shyly, " Would you care to come out with me, Mrs. Dymond 1 " (He had elected to call her Mrs. Dymond.) "I shall have to be back at my tutor's to-morrow, but I should like to show you about the Place to-day. Tempy told me she might be over in Tarndale — I could row you across." As he spoke some breeze came into the room, the whole lake seemed to uprise with an inviting ripple, and through the open window the distant shriek of the rail- way reached them from the station in the garden of sweetbriar.

"That is the afternoon up-train," said Jo in a satisfied tone. " Charlie is gone back in it. I did not like to tell papa, it would have vexed him too much. I thought how it was when Tempy went off to the Hall last night. . . . She knew he would be coming."

" Oh, my dear Josselin, how wrong — how could she ! " cried Susy. " Oh, Josselin, my dear Josselin, why didn't you warn us ? "

" He is gone again," said Jo doggedly ; " it was only to say good-by, poor fellow." And, as the young step- mother, troubled, bewildered, began to exclaim : " Don't you tell papa," her stepson interrupted. " You only know it because I thought I could trust you. You will get me into no end of trouble, and poor Tempy has enough to bear as it is. Let Aunt Fanny tell papa. She sent for Charlie, not I."

This was true enough, bat Susanna felt somehow as if the whole thing was confused and wrong, and jarring upon her sense of right and family honour. " Listen," she said with some spirit; "if ever Charlie comes here again, I shall tell your father. This time I do not feel as if I could inter-

fere. But even at the risk of getting into trouble, Jo, we cannot all be living in his house, acting parts and deceiving him. It is not for Tempy's happiness or yours or mine."

" I know that," said the young man impatiently. " Come along, I will show you the way to the boat-house."

CHAPTER X.

THREE ON A HILL-SIDE.

MEANWHILE poor Tempy sits high up on the mountain-side, on a spur of the " old man " that overhangs the village, and stares at the distant line of rail in the valley by which Charlie is travelling away. The little brook ripples by her with many sweet con- tentful sounds and chords, then a fresh breeze stirs the leaves of the oak trees round about, and many noises come to her with the rising breeze — the clang of the blacksmith's forge from the village below, and the cheerful voices of the school children striking like a sort of sunshine from beyond the wood ; a cock sets the wild echoes flying, then a cow passes -lowing across the road from one sloping pasture to another, followed by its calf, hurrying into green safety. The soft full wind of autumn seems suddenly to gain in life and will ; it blows up the ascent into Tempy Dymond's face, which looks so changed, so haggard ; it shakes the folds of her serge dress, together with the foxgloves and the straggling weeds that fringe the stream. Rain clouds are gathering overhead, and the rocks and boulders look grey and bright in turn amid the heather. Tempy^as she sits there, listless and depressed, can see the village below still bathed in sunshine, and the team of horses winding round the hill, and the water of the lake lying bright and restful, and a boat zig-zagging across from the Place. The boat disappears behind an elder bush, and Tempy, high perched, looking down upon her own short life, as it were, goes back to that day which will never be over any

Mrs. Dymond.

more, when she, too, rowed in the boat — with Charlie — that happy wondrous day, to be so soon clouded and followed by parting. But she had seen him once more, with his pale, changed looks and faithful tender vows and protests. " She would wait a life-time," thought Tempy ; "in time her father, surely, surely, would relent."

Meanwhile the boat has crossed the lake among the last, lingering swallows flying in sudden curves, the sculls dip the placid surface of the water, the boat's head thuds against the end of a long wharf. Jo first hooks the rusty chain to a convenient block of wood, then he gallantly hands out his pink dimity stepmother, who has been sitting in the bow, dreadfully frightened, but prepared to enjoy herself nevertheless. Susy still practised that sensible, youthful privilege of enjoying the present whenever the sun shone upon it, and leaving the shadowy ghosts and omens of apprehension to take care of themselves. Jo led the way across the flat and by the little village built upon the stream, looking about him for his sister. The place seemed deserted ; the men were at work in the fields and in the mines, the women were busy indoors. They met no one but Tim and Tom Barrow, who both stared and curtsied, as they had been taught to do by their mother.

" Have you seen Miss Tempy, Tim I " says Josselin.

" I - sa - err - a - gwoan - oop-t' - Auld - Mann," says little Tim, all in one word, " aaf ter- Mr.-Charles-gotten-into- t'-Barrow- train."

" Can you understand him I " Susy asked, laughing.

" Yes," says Jo. " He says she is gone on."

Susy trustfully followed her new stepson, holding up her pink dress. Their way lay through a farm-yard at the end of the village, where cocks and hens were pecking, and some lazy, comfortable cows were bending their meek horns over a trough supplied

by the running stream. Beyond the farm was a little climbing wood of ferns and ling — a wonder of delicate woodland — all in motion, all in life.

" What a lovely green place ! " cries breathless Susy. " Jo, please, don't go quite so quickly. Is this the foot of the mountain 1"

" Why, you are no good at all," says Jo, looking round. " Tempy can go twice as quick."

"I am very sorry," says Mrs. Dymond, laughing, and coming out of the shadow of the wood, and finding herself in the dazzling brightness of the mountain side.

The crest of the Tarndale " Old Man " towered overhead, the shadows of the clouds were crawling along its rocks and heathery flanks, the foreground opened out shining, beautiful boulders of purple rock were lying on the smooth turf, the stream hurried by, the air became keener and more keen, the country changed as they climbed, the nearer hills seemed to shift their place, to melt into new shapes ; under their feet sparkled ling, flowers, specks — delicate points of colour. Susanna's cheeks glowed. There was something exhilarating in the sense of the quiet moor all round about, of the wide fresh air, and the racing clouds over- head.

" There she is," said Jo, suddenly. " I thought we should come upon her." And so it happened, that Tempy, looking down from a rock above, sees the heads of two figures against the sky coming straight upon her from the valley. She cannot escape.

Why will not they leave her alone 1 All she wants is to be alone, to live over poor Charlie's parting looks and words an hour ago. How can they ask her to be smiling and complaisant and indifferent, they who are all happy and contented and together, while she is lonely and forlorn ? and then as Tempy looks up defiantly she sees them close both beside her. There is Jo with his friendly, home-like looks, and Susy, silent, shy, with those appealing

6

Mrs. Dymond.

glances, which Tempy scarcely knows how to escape.

The girl flushed up, and turned away ; she would not meet Susy's eyes.

"Here you are!" says Jo, cheer- fully. " I thought we should find you here."

" What have you come after me for?" says the girl, at bay. "Why won't you leave me ? I came here to be alone, Jo. I am too unhappy to be able to pretend, that is why I keep away," says Tempy, trembling exces- sively. " Why do you bring Susanna ? If it had not been for her, my father would never have interfered — never, never. Oh, it is cruel — cruel ! " Then she turned desperately upon Susy her- self : " Tell papa he can prevent our marriage, but what I am, what I feel, belongs to me and to Charlie — not to you or to him," cries the girl, some- thing in her old natural voice and manner.

After all, it was a comfort to her to speak — to complain, to upbraid, to be angry.

As for Susy, she flushed up and sighed, she did not know how to answer her stepdaughter's passionate appeal. Poor little Tempy !

" O Susy," Tempy continued, relent- ing, " I thought you would have helped us — I thought " — she burst into tears. " You are all wrong, you know," said Jo. " Mrs. Dymond did her very best to help you. Don't cry, Tempy."

How different words are out of doors on a mountain side to words shaped by walls and spoken behind doors ! Jo's matter-of-fact, Susanna's simple eloquence of looks, of pitiful feeling, touched Tempy more than any elaborate words, to which indeed she could scarcely have listened at first.

" Your father would consent if only he thought it right," Su- sanna was saying at last. " He knows — he must know better than you or I what is best. Ah, you don't know," she said, speaking not without that personal feeling which gives so much meaning to the most common-place

expressions, "you must never, never know, Tempy, what it is to be linked with a man for whom you are ashamed, whose life is one humiliation. I have lived this life," said Susy, turning very pale. " J know what your father dreads for you, and that even his dread is not so terrible as the reality. I bore it a year ; my mother has lived it ever since I can remember," her voice faltered. Tempy looked hard at Susy, and now it was Susy who began to cry.

" You don't understand, any of you — nobody can understand anything for anybody else," Tempy repeated doggedly; "but I should like to be with papa again, and with you, Susy ; only promise me to say nothing hard of Charlie — not a word — I cannot bear it, I will not bear it, I never will."

" 0 Tempy, that you may be sure of," said Susy, eagerly, "only come! " and she took the girl's not unwilling hand.

The three walked back in silence, Jo jogging a-head with his hands in his pockets, not absolutely satisfied with this compromise, and sorely tempted to whistle. Susanna and her stepdaughter, hand in hand, following silent, but reconciled in that odd in- tangible way in which people some- times meet in spirit after a parting perhaps as silent and unexplained as the meeting.

Some great events had been going on meanwhile overhead, the clouds were astir beyond the crests of the hills. Vapours were rising from behind vapours, strange shrouded figures were drifting and flying across the heavens, steeds and warriors fol- lowed by long processions of streaming fantastic forms ; while the southern hills were lying in a golden still- ness, the head of the valley was purple, black — angry. The summit of the mountain was half hidden in mysterious rolling clouds. Some- times from one break and another break in the rolling clouds, yellow streams of gold seemed battling with.

Mrs. Dymond.

the vapours ; you might almost imagine the wonderful, radiant figure of the lawgiver coming down out of the glorious haze.

"We had better make haste," said Jo ; "it looks like a storm," and he trudged faster and faster. The cows were whisking their tails and crowding together in the meadow as they crossed by a stile and a short cut back to the farm again. The opposite side of the lake above Crowbeck was calm and bright, with the sky showing through soft mists, midday shining through silver. They come round by the village with its straggling lodging-houses, built of country stone, with slated roofs from the quarries. Mrs. Tyson looks out from one of the cottages and drops a smiling curtsey ; it is civilised life .again after the solemn mountain side.

Doctor Jeffries dashes by in his gig. " You must make haste," he cries, flourishing his whip ; " the storm is coming."

Then they meet George Tyson from the Place, -coming with bread and provisions in a basket.

" Come down and help to shove off the boat, George," says Tempy, who, as usual, gives her orders with great authority, and so they come again to the sandy shore.

"Ye'll ha'e nobbut time to get hoam before the storm," says George, pushing them off with a mighty heave.

It took all Jo's strength to get the boat across, for the breeze was freshen- ing every moment.

The colonel was waiting anxiously at the other end. He helped out his wife with anxious care. "Jo, you should have come home by the road," he said severely. He held Tempy's hand for a minute as he helped her out. " I wanted you home, my dear," he said.

" Papa, I am glad to come home, but I shall never change to Charlie," said Tempy, looking hard at her father.

The colonel's face grew set and black — -" I am sorry to hear it," he answered,

and he dropped her hand, and turned abruptly away and walked a-head with Susy. The storm broke before they reached the house.

After her first warm greeting the girl seemed to draw back. She did not sulk, she did not refuse to join them, but every day seemed to divide her more and more from her father and step- mother. She used to go for long walks across the moors and come back tired and pale and silent. She took to sew- ing, a thing she had never cared for in her life, and she would sit stitching all the evening silent, gloomy : no longer monopolising the talk with cheerful vehemence, scarcely hearing what was said. Miss Bolsover used to come con- stantly then, and Tempy would brighten up a little. One day Susy came in and found them sitting hand in hand by the fire. Tempy seemed to be in tears, Miss Bolsover was wiping them with her lace pocket-handkerchief. Aunt Fanny looked up with her usual flutter as Susy came in.

" You mus'n't mind her liking to tell me her little troubles," she said.

" Tempy knows well enough I don't," said Susy, with a sigh.

" She must come and stay at the Hall ; we know how to cheer her up," Aunt Fanny continued.

Susy looked at her. Miss Bolsover turned away with a faint giggle. Generous eyes have looks at times which malicious orbs cannot always meet.

CHAPTER XI. DAY BY DAY.

THERE are bits of life which seem like a macadamised road. The wheels of fortune roll on, carrying you pas- sively away from all that you have done, felt, said, perhaps for years past ; fate bears you on without any effort of your own, you need no longer struggle, the road travels into new regions, time passes and the hours strike on, and; new feelings and

8

Mrs. Dymond.

new unconceived phases while you rest passively with your companions. Per- haps meanwhile some of us have left the romantic passes and horizons of youth behind, we may have reached the wider, more fertile plains of middle life.

Susy, who was young still, em- braced the calm of middle age with something like passion. By degrees she took the present in, and realised little by little where she was, who she was, how things were, in what relations the people among whom her lot was cast all stood to one another. She realised her husband's tender pride and affection for herself, and his anxious love for his children ; realised the deep pain and bewilder- ment which any estrangement between Crowbeck Place and Bolsover Hall would be to him. Susy no longer wondered, as she used to do in Paris, that the kind old colonel had not become more intimate with his son and daughter ; he loved them and they loved him, but too many rules and trivial punctualities seemed to stand in the way of their ease. It is as little possible to be quite natural with a person who is nervously glancing at the clock to see if it is time to do something else as it is to write unreservedly to a friend who dockets and dates your letters for future publication, or to talk openly to a superior whom you must not con- tradict. For Susy there was rest in these minor details, after her chaotic experience, the order, the tranquillity of all this suited her, and she tried more and more to suit herself to her husband's ways and habits, to show by her life the warm and loving grati- tude she felt in her heart. When Susanna Dymond first came to Tarn- dale as a bride she was not less hand- some than Mr. Bolsover had remem- bered her at Vivian Castle ; she was tall and harmonious in her movements, specially when she was at her ease, her face was of changing colour, her eyes were clear like two mountain

pools, her brown hair was thick and soft, the tint of the bracken in au- tumn, as the squire once gallantly said, with all the lights in it. There were two Susannas some people used to think, one young and girlish, with a sweet voice and smile, with a glad and ready response for those who loved her ; the other Susanna was Mrs. Dymond, stately, reserved, unexcep- tionable, but scarcely charming any more.

As the days passed on the neigh- bours began to drive up by basket- fuls and carriagefuls to make the acquaintance of the new lady of Crow- beck. Some came in boats, some on foot, some on horseback to pay their respects to the bride. They would be ushered into the drawing-room, with the glimpse of the lake without, with the stuffed birds and gorgeous chintzes within — those remaining tokens of Aunt Fanny's Oriental fancy. Not unfrequently the colonel would come in from his study, looking pleased and ready to receive his friends' congratu- lations, " brushed up " was the ver- dict passed upon the colonel. Miss Bolsover also was not unfrequently present, ready to meet the guests with a sad deprecatory smile, as if their visits were intended for a con- dolence to herself. Tempy, who kept out of the way, was pronounced " dreadfully changed," and finally the bride herself was to be commented on as she sat there, placid, reserved, in smartest Paris fashions.

Susy puzzled other people besides her neighbours, who hardly knew as yet what to think of her. To please her husband, who liked his wife to hold «her own, to be respected as well as admired, she tried to cultivate a stiff and measured manner, something in the style of her own newly-bought silks and laces ; she had lost her girl- ish look of wondering confidence and simplicity, nobody to see her would imagine that she had ever lived in anything but county society of the most orthodox description. Alone

Mrs. Dymond.

with Jo and Tempy, or walking in sunshine by the green shore of the lake, she would forget this lay figure made up of manners and fashions, but at the first sound of wheels in the distance all our Cinderella's grace of youth and gaiety vanished, all her bright gala looks were gone ; there she stood in milliner's rags and elaborate tatters, and fashionable bones, prim and scared and blurred by the decorum which oppressed her.

At Paris Colonel Dymond had laid his old habits and associations aside, but here, in his old surroundings, with Miss Fanny's pink eye to mark any- thing new or amiss, his idiosyncrasies returned with a renewed force. Mean- while, however wanting Susanna might seem to Miss Bolsover's ideas, to Miss Trindle's the vicar's daughter, or to Mrs. Jeffries the doctor's wife, Mrs. Dymond appeared the very personfica- tion of calm and successful prosperity. She was handsome without expression, well-dressed without much taste. She had been used to consult tbe colonel latterly about her dress, finding her own fancies for the picturesque not approved. Her clothes were expen- sive, her shoes were French, her gloves were always buttoned, her manners were well-made county manners, com- posed and somewhat starched. This was the Susanna of the neighbours, and many a girl envied her ; but this was not the home Susanna, who, little by little, day by day,and hour after hour melted and warmed and thawed the hearts of the two young people who had met her with such scrutinising looks and divided minds. How often Susy in her early married days had suffered from those glances. Jo had relented from the first moment he saw her standing shyly in the drawing- room, but Tempy used to have strange returns of suspicion. And whenever Susy by chance met one of Tempy's doubtful scrutinising looks she would shrink up suddenly into herself. Or if Mrs. Bolsover came in severe and in- coherent, or, worse still, if it was Miss

Bolsover sneering and civil, then the new married wife would turn into a sort of statue. Susanna used to feel the cold strike upon her heart, her blood seemed to creep more and more slowly in her veins, and her voice died away.

She rarely said much in company, for she had lived among talkative people all her life, but with these two women present she became utterly silent. Her nature was not an out- coming one, but very deep in its secret fidelity and conviction. She was not timid exactly, and yet she was apt to be too easily impressed and frightened by the minor details of life. She did not hold her own, when other more self-important people were ready to thrust themselves into her rightful place. She could not ignore the opposition which from the very first had met her, but she never spoke of it. She had a curious, instinctive sense of the rights of those she lived with. She dreaded to jar upon them, to be the cause of trouble or discus- sion. And little by little she got into a habit of always looking to her husband for a signal. He led the way, he started the conversation, he invited the people who came to the house — Dowagers from neighbouring dower- houses, well to do magnates, re- spectable rectors and rectoresses, colonels and generals of his own standing. With the colonel's old com- panions Susy felt more at her ease than with any one else. These com- rades in arms were invariably charmed with Mrs. Dymond's grace and gentle temper ; no wonder they lost their hearts to the beautiful young creature, so sweet to look upon, so modest and ready to listen to their martial prose.

" Just listen to her talking about the Punjaub," says Tempy, in amaze- ment to her brother.

Tempy used to wonder more and more about Susy. She seemed no longer able to understand her. But perhaps the truth was that Miss Tempy had never much troubled herself to understand her at all

10

Mrs. Dymond.

hitherto. She used to speculate about Susy now with an odd mixture of affec- tion, of pride, and jealous irritation. " Was she really happy ? did Susy really care for her father ? Was it for his money, Jo — as Aunt Fanny de- clares— or was it from affection of us all that she married him ? "

" What does it matter," Jo answers, impatiently. " You and Aunt Fanny are always for skinning a person alive, and I hate talking about people I'm fond of."

As for the colonel, he did not under- stand much, but he was delighted with everything Susy did, whether she spoke to others or held her peace. Because he loved her so well, because he spent his money so freely upon her, because she was so good a wife, he took it for granted she was a happy one. Susy never seemed otherwise to any one else, she appeared free to do as she liked in most things, or to sub- mit with good-will to her husband and her sisters-in-law. When these ladies contradicted or utterly ignored her, she would smile good-humouredly ; and yet in her heart she now and then had ex- perienced a strange feeling that she scarcely realised, something tired, d esperate, sudden, unreasonable, almost wicked — the feeling she thought must go, and she would forget it for a time, and then suddenly there it was again.

" What is it, my dear, is the room too hot1?" said the colonel one day, seeing her start up. Miss Bolsover was explaining some details she wished changed in the arrangements at the Place ; his back had been turned, and he had not noticed Susy's growing pallor.

"Nothing, nothing," says Susy, and she got up, but as she passed him took his hand in hers and kissed it, and went out of the room.

She hurried up stairs into her own room, she sank into the big chair, she burst into incoherent tears. Then when she had gulped them down she went to the basin and poured water to wash her troubles away — her troubles

— her ingratitude ! John who has been so kind, John so generous and good, was this how she, his wife, should requite him for his endless kindness and benefits ? By secret rebellion, un- kindness, opposition I Ah, no, never, never, thought the girl. And the young wife, whose only wish was to spare her faithful, chivalrous old colonel, did that which perhaps must have hurt and wounded him most of all had he known it. She was not insincere, but she was not outspoken, she did not say all she felt, she put a force and a constraint upon herself, crushed her own natural instincts, lived as she thought he expected her to live, was silent where she could not agree, obliged herself to think as he did, and suffered under this mental suicide.

There is something to me almost disloyal in some of the sacrifices which are daily made by some persons for others who would not willingly inflict one moment's pang upon any human creature, how much less doom those dearest to them to the heavy load of enforced submission, to a long life's deadening repression.

" I for one don't pretend to know what Susanna means or wishes," says Aunt Fanny.

But although Miss Bolsover did not understand, my heroine in the course of her life changed not, and therefore often changed ; she was loyal and therefore she was faithless ; loyal in her affection, faithless in her adher- ence to the creeds of those she loved. When she was young she believed and she doubted, when she was older she doubted less, but then she also believed less fervently ; but in one thing at least she was constant, and that was in her loving fidelity and devotion to those whose interests were in her keeping.

People did not always do her justice. Max du Pare was one of these. During the following spring, to please Mrs. Marney, his wife's mother, who had written over on the subject, Colonel

Mrs. Dymond.

11

Dymond (not over graciously it must be confessed) invited du Pare to spend a night at Crowbeck. The colonel's invitation reached the young man at the Tarndale Inn, where he was staying. He had come there to make an etching of a Turner in the collection at Friar's Tarndale, one of those pictures which M. Hase had been anxious to include in his pub- lication. Max, who had been hard at . work for Caron all the winter, and obliged to give up the volumes con- taining the London galleries, had still found time to superintend a smaller collection of drawings from country houses, and had come North for a few days. He felt some curiosity as to Susy's English home, and did not like to pain her good mother by refusing the Dymond s' somewhat stinted hospi- tality ; so he wrote a note of dry ac- ceptance and walked over to Crowbeck after his day's work, carrying his bag for the night. The party from the Hall had driven over for the occasion, and passed him on the way.

Susy had looked forward with some pleasure to entertaining her French guest, to showing him his own etchings hanging up in her room, to talking over all the events at the villa, and Madame du Pare, and Mdlle. Faillard, and all the rest ; but the guest, though brought to Crowbeck, would not talk, he would not be entertained, he came silent, observant, constrained, and alarming; he answered, indeed, when spoken to, but he never looked inter- ested, nor would he relax enough to smile, except, indeed, for a short time when Miss Bolsover graciously and volubly conversed in French with him after dinner. Du Pare left early next morning ; Susanna was vaguely dis- appointed, and a little hurt ; his shy- ness had made her shy; she had scarcely asked any questions she had meant to ask, she had not shown him the drawings she had wanted to show him, she had felt some curious reserve and disapprobation in his manner which had perplexed her.

" It is no use trying to entertain these foreign artists and fellows," said the colonel, a few days after Max's departure. "They want their tobacco, and their pipes, and their liberty ; they are quite out of place in a lady's drawing-room over here."

" M. du Pare certainly did not seem to like being here," said Susy, smiling.

" For my part, I like artists," says Miss Bolsover; "and we got on de- lightfully. I asked him to teach me argot ; he looked so amused."

" Well, Max ! " Mrs. Marney was saying, as she sat under the acacia tree in the little front garden at Neuilly (where the sun was shining so brightly, though its rays were still shrouded in mist by the waters of Tarndale), " tell me all about it 1 Have you seen my Susy ? Is the colonel very proud of her1? How did she look ? Is she very grand 1 Is she changed ? Wasn't she glad to see an old friend?"

" Yes," said du Pare, doubtfully, and lighting a cigar as he spoke. " She was very polite and hospitable (puff), she is looking forward to your visit (puff, puff), she told me to say so ; she sent amities to my mother (puff) ; she is changed — she is handsomer than ever ; she is richly dressed. Her life seems to be everything that is most respectable and tiresome ; she gave me a shake hands ; that young miss, her daughter, stared at me as if I was a stuffed animal. The son was away preparing for his college. There was an aunt, a beguine lady, who frightened me horribly ; an uncle in top-boots, a little man to make you burst with laughing. There was a second aunt, a red, old lady, who was kind enough to interest herself in me, to talk art to me, to take me for a walk in the park. She was even amiable enough to make some sentimental conversation. They are extraordinary, those English. Ah ! it is not life among those respectables ! it is ; funeral ceremony always going on. I give you my word," says Max.

Mrs. Dymond.

taking his cigar out of his mouth and staring thoughtfully at Mrs. Marney's knitting, " it seemed to me as if I was a corpse laid out in that drawing-room, as if all the rest were mourners who came and stood round about. Madame Dymond, too — she seemed to me only half alive — laid out in elegant cere- clothes."

" Oh, Max, you are too bad ! " cries his mother, in English. " How can you talk in that hogly way, making peine to Mrs. Marney ? "

" No, I don't think it at all nice of you, M. Max ! " says Mrs. Marney, re- proachfully.

" You are quite right, and I am not nice, and I don't deserve half your kindness," cried the young man, peni- tently, taking his old friend's hand, and gallantly kissing it.

"Ah, Max would have liked to be before'and," said Madame du Pare, laughing. " Susanna is a sweet crea- ture. We must find such another one day for my son."

Max looked black, and walked away into his studio.

CHAPTER XII.

A WELCOME.

BEFORE Susy had been a year at Tarndale she had the happiness of wel- coming her mother to her new home. The colonel kept his promise, and, not only the little boys, but Mrs. Marney came over for the summer holidays. Needless to say that it was all the colonel's doing, and that it was not without some previous correspondence with Mr. Marney, who, in return for a cheque, duly received, sent off a model and irreproachable "letter to announce his family's departure (vid Havre, not by Boulogne, as the liberal colonel had arranged for), and to consult with the colonel about the little boys' future education.

Mr. Marney wrote that Dermy had a fancy, so his mother declared at least, for being a doctor. " Charterhouse had

been suggested," says the correspondent, in his free, dashing handwriting. " I do not know if you have heard of my late appointment to the Daily Velocipede, and are aware that although I am not immediately able, my dear colonel, to repay you in coin of the realm for that part of your infinite kindness to me and mine which can be repaid by money, yet my prospects are so good and so immediate (the proprietor of my news- paper has written to me lately in very encouraging terms) that I feel I am now justified in giving my boys a gentle- man's education, and in asking you to spare no expense (in accordance with my means) for any arrangements you may think fit to make for their comfort and welfare. It is everything for them both to get a good start in life. I trust entirely to your judgment and experience. I have been too long a vagabond and absentee myself to be aufait with the present requirements. I know it is the fashion to rail against the old-fashioned standard of education, which is certainly not without objec- tions, and yet to speak frankly I must confess to you that, much abused as the time-honoured classics have been, I have found my own smattering of school lore stand me in good stead in my somewhat adventurous career. I am daily expecting a liberal remit- tance from my proprietors, and when it arrives I will immediately post you a cheque for any extra expense you may have incurred. As for the better part of your help, its chivalrous kindness, and generous friendship, that can never be repaid, not even by the grateful and life-long affection of mine and me. " Do not hesitate to keep Polly as long as your wife may require her mother's presence. I am used to shift for myself, and though the place looks lonely without the old hen and her chicks, it is perhaps all the better for my work and for me to be thrown on my own resources. A family life, as you yourself must have often found when engaged on" (here Mr. Marney rather at a loss for a word had erased

Mrs. Dymond.

13

" military " and written " serious ") " matters is a precious but a most dis- tracting privilege. May your own and Susanna's present and future pros- pects be continued, and afford you all that even your kind heart should require for its complete satisfaction. And above all remember that you are to keep my wife as long as you need her. I shall not run over with them. With all my regard and ad- miration for your country and its in- stitutions I do not wish for the pre- sent to set foot on English soil. The wrongs of my own down-trodden Ireland would cause the very stones to rise up in my pathway. I can also understand my poor wife's dislike to her native land after all that we endured while we still lived in London. When I compare this cheerful place, the brightness of the atmosphere, and the cheapness of provisions, with the many difficulties we have had to struggle through before we came, I feel how wisely for ourselves we acted in turning our back upon the ' ould counthree.' The one doubt we have ever felt was on the boys' account, and this doubt your most wise and oppor- tune help has now happily solved. Believe me, my dear colonel, with deep and lasting obligation,

" Yours most faithfully,

" MICHAEL MARNEY."

Mr. Marney's letters need not be quoted at length. The colonel used to read them with some interest and a good deal of perplexity, date them gravely and put them away in a packet. Susy shook her head when her husband once offered to show them to her. One day, not very long after- wards, with a burst of tears, she found them in a drawer, and she threw the whole heap into the fire.

Towards the end of June, therefore, Mrs. Marney, smiling and excited, in her French bonnet and French cut clothes, and the little boys, with their close cropped heads, arrived and settled down into the spare rooms at Crow-

beck. Jo took the little boys under a friendly wing, and treated them to smiling earth, to fresh air and pure water, and fire too, for a little rabbit shooting diversified their fishing ex- peditions, so did long walks across the moors. The two little fellows trudged after their guide prouder and happier than they had ever been in all their life before. Susy was very grateful to Josselin for his kindness. Tempy was absorbed, the Marneys coming made no difference to her one way or the other. If the colonel had not been so preoccupied about his wife he must have noticed how ill the girl was looking. But almost directly after Mrs. Marney's arrival another per- sonage of even greater importance ap- peared upon the scene, and a little girl lay in Susy's happy arms.

This little daughter's birth brought much quiet happiness to the Place. The colonel used to come up and stand by the pink satin cradle with some- thing dim in his steel-grey eyes. "Dear little thing," says Mrs. Bol- sover one day, following close upon her brother and speaking in her deepest voice, " what a lovely child, John. What shall you call her ? "

"I — I don't know," says the colonel ; " Frances, Caroline, are pleasing names."

"I should call her little bright eyes," says Mrs. Bolsover severely " Look here, Fanny " (to Miss Bol?# over, who had also come up); "ju/fc look at this dear infant, is it not a. lovely child 1" j

" Excuse me, my dear Car, you kijow I'm an old maid and no judge of babies," says Miss Bolsover airily. " It seems a nice little creature. Here, here, hi, hi," and she began rattling her chatelaine in the child's eyes, woke it up and made it cry, to the no small indignation of the nurse. "A pretty little thing, but not good- tempered, and dreadfully delicate," was Miss Bolsover's description of her infant niece. The report came round to poor Susy after a time, and might

14

Mrs. Dymond.

have frightened her if her mother had not been there to re-assure her. Mrs. Bolsover's speech also came round in that mysterious way in which so many insignificant things drift by degrees. Susy and her mother between them determined that the baby should be called bright eyes. Euphrasia was to be the little creature's name.

How happy Susy was all this time ; the day seemed too short to* love her baby, she grudged going to sleep for fear she should dream of other things. It was no less a joy to her mother to see Susy so happy, though poor Mrs. Marney herself was far from happy ; she was unsettled, she was "anxious, she was longing to be at home once more. Susy felt it somehow, and dreaded each day to hear her mother say she was going, and anxiously avoided the subject lest her fears should be confirmed. Madame used to write from time to time, and her letters seemed to excite and disturb her friend. " I am not easy about Mick, colonel," Mrs. Marney would say in confidence to her son-in-law ; "he is not himself when I am a way."

Susanna suffered for her mother si- lently, guessing at her anxiety, but not liking to ask many questions. She was also vexed by Miss Bolsover's treatment of Mrs. Marney, which was patronising and irritating to an unbearable degree, Susy thought, on the few occasions hen she happened to see them to- gether. Mrs. Marney, in her single- h»arted preoccupation, seemed abso- lutely unconscious. Already in those days rumours of war and trouble were arising ; they had reached Tarndale, and filled Mrs. Marney with alarm. But what did emperors, county families, plenipotentiaries, Bismarck, Moltke, generals, marshals, matter — what were they all to her compared to one curl of her Mick's auburn hair ? " It is not so much his profession that terri- fies me, it's his Irish blood, Susy, which leads him into trouble ! You English people don't understand what it is to have hot blood boiling in your

tS w

veins. Your colonel is not like my husband. I must get home, Susy dear, now that I have seen you with your darling babe in your arms."

Was it possible that Mrs. Marney was more aware of Miss Bolsover's rudeness than she chose to acknow- ledge ? One day, before Susanna was down, when several of the neighbours were present, calling on the colonel, Susanna's mother, in her black dress, had come by chance into the room, followed by the two noisy little boys, and carrying that little sleepy bundle of a Phraisie in her arms ; Miss Bols- over, irritated by her presence and the baby's flannels and the comfort- able untidiness of the whole proceeding, began making conversation, politely inquiring after Susy, asking Mrs. Mar- ney whether she and her children were contemplating spending the whole summer at Crowbeck. " But it must be a great pleasure to my brother having your boys for so long, and, of course, it is much more convenient for Susy, and less expensive too, than anything else."

" It has been a joy to me to be here, and to welcome my sweet little grandchild," said Mrs. Marney, hug- ging the baby quite naturally ; " and if it had not been for Susy wanting me, and for all the kindness I've met here from the colonel, I should never have kept away from Paris so long. A woman with a home and a husband should be at home, Miss Bolsover ; it it is only single ladies, like you, that can settle down in other people's houses. I am thankful to see my child happily established in such a warm nest of her own, but, dearly as I love her, I want to get back. Somehow I seem to know by myself how sorely my poor Mick is wanting me," she said, with a tender ring in her voice. The whole sympathy of the room was with the warm-hearted woman. Miss Bolsover was nowhere. The little boys, with their French-cropped heads, suddenly flung their arms round their mother's neck, calling out that she

Mrs. Dymond.

15

must not go — that papa must come and live here too. The colonel might have preferred less noise and demon- stration in the presence of callers. "Now then, Michael and Dermott, run away, there's good boys," said he ; " and, my dear Mrs. Marney, I think we will ring for the nurse and send baby up stairs to her mamma. The help and comfort it has been to us having you all this time I leave to your own kind nature to divine."

As soon as Susy was strong and well again, and the boys had been received at their school, Mrs. Marney departed ; nothing would keep her, and the good colonel went up to London to see her safely off, with her French box in the guard's van, and her friendly, handsome face at the carriage window, smiling and tearful. Poor Mary Marney, what a good soul it is ! he thought as he stood on the platform. What an extraordinary and most touching infatuation for that husband of hers !

" Have you got your shawl and your bag ? You know you can depend upon us to look after the boys."

" Good-bye ; God bless you, colonel. Write and tell me all about the dear babe," says Mrs. Marney, leaning eagerly forward from the carriage.

The colonel was already looking at his watch ; he was longing to get home. He had only come up from a sense of duty, and because he had some reason to fear that Mrs. Marney had received some slights from other quarters for which he was anxious to make amends. He looked at his watch as the train puffed off with his wife's mother ; at his Brad- shaw as soon as her white handker- chief had waved away out of the station. He found that by taking the express he might get home that night by midnight (driving across from Kendal) instead of waiting till the morning. He was too old to wait away from those he loved, he told himself ; he longed to see Susy again with little Phrasie in her arms. The colonel called a hansom then and there, dined hurriedly at the hotel, picked up his bag, and drove off to Euston Square station.

To be continued.

16

FRENCH VIEWS ON ENGLISH WRITERS.

"THE French mind," says a modern observer, " with all its facilities, is not really hospitable. It cannot repro- duce the accent of English, German, or Scandinavian thought without alter- ation and disturbance."

This is one of those judgments which make one think. On the whole there is at the bottom of our English con- sciousness something which yields as- sent to it. We who are so ready to believe in the width and the catho- licity of our own sympathies, who would smile at the idea that there is anything in French ideas or French literature that we cannot, if we will, understand — we have most of us, at bottom, a rooted belief that the French are by nature incapable of really pene- trating the English mind, of under- standing our poetry, of appreciating our art, or of estimating the true pro- portions and relations of qualities in our national genius. We have scarcely brought ourselves to believe even now in the reality of the French admira- tion of Shakespeare. Voltaire's second period of petulance towards him, which had practically no effect in France, has made a much deeper impression upon us than his first period of appreciation, which had great and lasting conse- quences. Or even, if the sincerity of the French professions has been admitted, if innumerable translations, the homage of the whole army of the romantics, and the testimony of every French writer of eminence since the Revolu- tion, of whatever shade of thought, have convinced our incredulity as to the reality of our neighbours' enjoy- ment, we are still inclined to protest that the incapacities of the French language remain, and that when, in these latter days, M. Richepin, a poet and an English scholar, translates

" How now, you secret, black and midnight

hags, What is't you do ? "

by

" Eh bien, mysterieuses et noires sorci&res de

minuit, Qu'est ce que vous faites ? "

he is but furnishing one more proof of that inevitable alienation between the French mind and the English poetic genius which the critic we have quoted attributes to a special quality of the French mind — its " inhos- pitality," its proneness to misplace and misunderstand the "accents" of other literatures.

Then again we, to whom the real Byron is known, and amongst whom his vogue has diminished to an almost unreasonable extent, we cannot get it out of our heads that he is still the only English poet for whom the French have ever had a real passion. We cannot forget, we find it even hard to forgive, the naivete with which the French took Byron and his despairs entirely at his own valuation, and we smile over the passion with which De Musset reproaches Goethe and Byron for their influence on the century and on him. " Forgive me, great poets, — you are demi-gods, and I am but a child in pain. But as I write, I needs must curse you ! Why could you not have sung the perfume of the flowers, the voices of nature, hope and love, the sunshine and the vine, beauty and the blue heaven ? I have perhaps felt the weight of griefs to which you were strangers, and still I believe in hope, still I bless God ! " Such a pas- sage as this sets one meditating on the weakness of the Byronic influence over our own later poets, on the fugitive and short-lived traces of it, for instance, in the work of the young Tennyson,

French Views on English Writers.

17

who published his first volume of poems only three years after Byron's death, and on the rapidity of its decay in the presence of other and greater forces; and as we recall the French ignorance of Wordsworth, of Keats and Shelley, we feel ourselves again in the presence of a sort of national blunder, of a kind of obtuseness to the characteristic notes of the English genius, which we are inclined to regard as inborn and therefore irre- mediable.

Is it so ? Is there really anything in the literary sphere into which the French mind, that sharp and subtle instrument of which the world has so often felt the edge, whether for good or evil, cannot penetrate if it will? The shallow disproportionate French criticism of the past from which Ger- many has suffered no less than our- selves, was it not simply the result, not of inherent lack of faculty, but of lack of knowledge ? The Frenchman of the eighteenth century, dazzled with his own brilliant tradition, and witness of its effect in other countries than his own, could not easily persuade himself that those other countries had any- thing worth his serious study in re- turn. The Romantic movement, with all its forcible irregular ways of awakening sympathy and enlarging taste, was needed before the barriers separating France from the rest of the world could be effectually broken through. The rage for Byron, for Walter Scott, for Shakespeare, for Teutonic fancy and Teutonic reverie, which it evoked, might be often un- reasoning and ignorant, might be capa- ble at any moment of disturbing or displacing the true " accent " of what it loved and praised, but still it was an expansive educating force, a force of progress. The imaginative tumult of the time was in reality but one as- pect of the central scientific impulse, which has in so many ways transformed European thought and life during the century, and those who were born in its midst have passed naturally and No. 307. — VOL. ni.

inevitably onward from a first period of stress and struggle, of rich and tangled enthusiasms, into a second period of reflection, assimilation, and research.

Nowadays the French are producing no great poetry and no great art. But in all directions they are learning, re- searching, examining. Their historical work has caught the spirit of German thoroughness ; their art is becoming technical and complicated to an al- most intolerable degree ; while, in the domain of the novel, the positivist passion of the moment shows itself under the strange and bastard forms of the roman experimental et scien- tifique. It is especially in their criti- cism that the modern spirit, with its determination to see things as they are, independently of convention and formula, and to see them not only from outside, but in all their processes of growth and development, has borne most excellent fruit. One has but to compare Chateaubriand's fantastic and ignorant Essai sur la Litterature Ang- laise, with Sainte Beuve's criticisms of Cowper, or Thomson, or Wordsworth, with the work of Mont^gut or M. Scherer, to realise the modern progress in exactness of knowledge, in con- scientiousness of spirit, in pliancy and elasticity of method.

Among living critics M. Scherer is the best successor of Sainte Beuve. He has the same solidity and width of range, the same love for directness and simplicity of style, the same command of striking and felicitous phrases and an element of grace besides, which is not often present in Sainte Beuve's more rapid and continuous critical work. And, to the profit of both countries, his at- tention has been specially drawn to England and to English subjects. He is, indeed, no stranger among us. We have admitted his claim to be heard among the authorities long ago. " A French critic on Milton," thanks first to Mr. Arnold and then to the in- trinsic interest of M. Scherer 's work is an old acquaintance to most of thoee

18

French Views on English Writers.

of us who care for literary matters. Still, books are many and life is short, and French criticism on English sub- jects, however good, is apt to be more overlooked than it should be in a society which teems with critics, stu- dents, and editions of English subjects and English books. Nor has M. Scherer yet collected in book form all or nearly all of those articles on English writers which he has been con- tributing for years past to the columns of the Temps, winding up with the long and elaborate analysis of George Eliot's life and work which has just appeared. In his last published volume, however, which is now three years old, among studies on Zola and Doudan and Eenan in his very best vein, there is an article on Words- worth and another on Carlyie, which are quite enough to keep our special English interest in his critical work alive until that new and fuller series ap- pears for which one would think there was already ample material. If we take these articles, and join to them a recent book by M. James Darmestetter (Essais de Litterature Anglaise), and another by M. Gabriel Sarrazin (Poetes Modemes de I' Angleterre), we shall find ourselves very well provided with materials for a short analysis and de- scription of the various kinds of criti- cism now being bestowed on English subjects in France.

For these three writers, M. Scherer, M. Darmestetter and M. Sarrazin, represent three typical modes of modern work. M. Scherer, as we have said, is the successor of Sainte Beuve. His criticism represents that union of adequate knowledge with long training and native literary in- stinct or flair, which belongs only to the first-rate man of letters. It is not only information we get from him ; we get a delicate individuality of style and judgment ; something both bien pense and bien dit. His work is essentially literary ; it belongs to the great lite- rary tradition of France ; it is stimu- lated by, and it ministers to that joy

in the things of the mind which is self-sufficient and independent of any scientific or utilitarian object. M. Darmestetter, on the other hand, belongs to that numerous class of workers who represent the scientific side in literature. He is a man of first-rate information, painstaking in all his ways, and gifted quite suffi- ciently with the higher critical sense to enable him to place his subject in its true relations, and to grasp in it all that is most vital and essential. But he is not a great writer ; there is no- thing strongly individual either in his judgments or in his way of delivering them ; he gives agreeable and adequate expression to the best research or to the general cultivated opinion of the moment on such topics as the stages of Shakespeare's development, or the poetical relations of Wordsworth and Shelley. He says what most cultivated people have come to think, and he says it fluently and with abundant power of illustration. But he has very little distinction, and very few of those strokes of insight, those anticipations of the common judgment which lift a writer well above the average. Occa- sionally, indeed, especially in the article on Shelley, he attains in separate passages a high level of literary excel- lence. Still, generally speaking, the book contains a great deal of admir- able statement ; it is clear, sensible and well-written ; but it is not in the author's power, as it is in M. Scherer's, to send us away with those fresh indi- vidual impressions which are the pro- duct only of the best kind of literary work.

M. Sarrazin's is a very different sort of book. He has certainly no command over the higher criticism, nor has he the wide and exhaustive knowledge of M. Darmestetter. He is an amateur, well meaning and some- times ingenious ; but still an amateur, that is to say, improperly equipped for the work he has undertaken, and set- ting out with a light heart to perform tasks of which the true range and

French Views on English Writers.

19

proportions are unknown to him. His faults are not so much faults of com- mission as faults of omission. What he tells us is, generally speaking, fairly well told. The misfortune is, that he has so little idea of the relative value of what he says to all that might be said on a given subject. He chooses Landor, Shelley, Mrs. Browning and Swinburne as four typical modern specimens of the " Anglo-Saxon race," and with them he contrasts Keats and Rossetti as " deviations from the Anglo-Saxon line." How French, one is inclined to say, and how false ! There is probably not a single compe- tent English person who, if he were asked to name four typical English poets of the century would dream of including Landor and Swinburne and excluding Wordsworth and Tennyson ; nor would it enter into any English head to make Landor the typical representative of English classicism, while reckoning Keats, in whom the spirit of the English renaissance found renewed and exquisite expression, as a " deviation " from the English line. The whole plan of the book therefore is arbitrary and voulu. It is an in- stance of literary caprice, and, in literature, to make a freak acceptable, one must have either the delicate irony of a Renan or the sheer force of a Carlyle. Above all, one must be sensible that it is a freak, an eccentri- city, that one is upholding. One must show a certain bright, defiant con- sciousness of having left the beaten path, whereas, M. Sarrazrn, all the time that he is floundering in mislead- ing cross-roads, so naively believes himself in the broad accepted way, that the reader is necessarily either provoked or amused. The book is an example of a kind of work which though still common enough, is every year becoming less common, both in France and England, as the standard of technical performance in the different branches of intellectual activity is being slowly and labori- ously raised. The ingenious amateur,

whether in literature or in science, has less and less chance of success. In one way or another, the public to which he appeals admonishes him as the haughty Hungarian youth ad- monished the English Dean, who, in a spirit of kindly patronage, was airing his college Latin upon the stranger : Discamus, et tune loquamur!

To return, however, to M. Scherer. The study of Wordsworth with which his last volume opens is a review of Mr. Matthew Arnold's Selections, and it opens with certain general reflec- tions suggested by sayings or judg- ments of Mr. Arnold's. In the first place, we have his view of the dictum that "poetry is a criticism of life, under the eternal conditions of poetic truth and poetic beauty." M. Scherer is not quite satisfied with it. He thinks it vague ; he wants to know what are the eternal conditions of poetic truth and poetic beauty, and he casts about for a new and more exact definition of " poetry " by which to test Wordsworth's artistic claims.

Finally, he decides that "the poetical element in things is the property they have of setting the imagination in movement, of stimulating it, and sug- gesting to it much more than is perceived or expressed. The poet is a man who sees by the imagination, and it is the characteristic of imagi- nation to amplify all that it sees and touches ; to push back or to efface the limits of things, and so to idealise. It will not do, however, to say that imagination beautifies, nor in general to confound the notions of poetry and beauty. A cathedral, for instance, is more poetical than beautiful, while the Parthenon is more beautiful than poetical. Imagination may intensify the horror of a thing as well as its charm. — Poetry, then, is the view of things by the eyes of the imagination, and poetical expression is their repro- duction under the form most capable of awakening the imaginative power of the reader. So that the natural language of poetry is a language of

C 2

20

French Views on English Writers.

images. Let the reader try to recall to himself the finest passages in his favourite poets, and he will see that it is the choice and the charm of the metaphors and comparisons used which enchant him. . . . And if to the imagi- native conception of things you add the expression best fitted to evoke this conception in others, and if you submit this expression to the laws of rhythm, and bestow upon it the cadence which by a secret force of association brings the nervous sensa- tion of the hearer into harmony with the movement of the poet's thought, you will have poetry in the full and concrete sense of the word."

There, then, is M. Scherer's defini- tion, that inevitable definition which every critic must attempt for himself sooner or later. Mr. Arnold's, beside it, has the merit of being terse and easily remembered, and he would perhaps maintain that, as such a complex idea as "poetry" is incap- able of exhaustive and satisfactory definition, the best that can be done is to " throw out " something approxi- mate, something suggestive. " Poetry is a criticism of life." It was, in the main, the view of Wordsworth ; it is certainly the view of Browning ; and whatever may have been the theory of a poet's youth, this tends commonly to become the theory of his maturity. Looking back over our poetical history we see that it expresses one of the two great strains of English poetical thought, the strain of moved philo- sophical consciousness, so characteristic of the national genius, which dictated Chaucer's " Me fro the presse and let thy ghost thee lead," or Shakespeare's "Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within 'his bending sickle's compass come," or Sidney's " Leave me, 0 Love, which reachest but to dust, and thou, my soul, aspire to higher things " — and still breathes through three-fourths of our poetry of the present.

But there is another strain, and for it s definition M. Scherer's phrases

will serve us best, " Poetry is the view of things by the eyes of t/ie imagina- tion. ' ' " The poetic element in tilings is the property tJiey have of setting the imagination in movement" Here you have something which at once brings before us the whole lovely dreamland of English poetry since the days when Chaucer clothed his " Mighty God of Love "

" In silke embroidered ful of grene greves, In-with a fret of rede rose leaves, The freshest syn the world was first begonne,"

to those when Keats in all the plenitude of his young imagination, sought in the illumined world which it revealed to him, a refuge from the ills of sickness and poverty :

" Yes, in spite of all,

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the

moon,

Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon For simple sheep ; and such are daffodils "With the green world they live in ; and clear

rills

That for themselves a cooling covert make 'Gainst the hot season ; the mid forest brake, Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose

blooms :

And such too is the grandeur of the dooms We have imagined for the mighty dead ; All lovely tales that we have heard or read. ' '

From first principles M. Scherer passes on to describe our English poetical development since Byron. He is especially struck by the fluctua- tions of English taste. " There is no country of the present day in which the succession of dominant poets, and with the succession of poets the suc- cession of influences, tastes, schools, and methods has been as rapid as in England. And the reason is, that in spite of the ideas which our conti- nental ignorance holds on the subject, the English nation is the most poetical nation in Europe, and that, moreover, the English being much greater readers than we, are seized much more fre- quently with a desire for change and novelty. We are still at Byron in France. But the English have passed

French Views on English Writers.

21

through Byronism long ago." Byron was dethroned by Wordsworth, and Wordsworth by Shelley and Keats, and if Tennyson has not effaced any of his predecessors he has at least " climbed on to their shoulders, and in certain directions reached a higher level than they."

In the course of his sketch of the country M. Scherer expresses several judgments which will hardly pass without remonstrance here. His gene- ral tribute to Shelley is warm and eloquent, but still he makes grave reservations. " The half of Shelley's work," he says, " at least, is spoilt by unbearable humanitarianism. — Poetry pure only obtained ascendency in his mind by moments, when he was governed by the sentiment of nature, or when, here and there, some earthly love mingled with his platonic dreams."

Compare with this Mr. Myers' ex- pression that we have in- Shelley "an extreme, almost an extravagant speci- men of the poetic character " ; or Mr. Swinburne's outburst — " He was alone the perfect singing-god ; his thoughts, words, deeds, all sang together." Per- haps the best answer we have to M. Scherer's various objections is to be found in the thoughtful study by Mr. Myers from which we have just quoted. Certainly Mr. Swinburne's dithyrambs will not be enough to con- vince a foreigner, especially a foreigner with ideas of sobriety in style. Mr. Swinburne says in effect, " Take it on my word, the word of a poet, that Shelley is the greatest of poets," and we who feel the full roll and splendour of Mr. Swinburne's marvellous sen- tences are inclined to accept his ver- dict entirely at his own valuation. But a foreign critic, not so sensitive as we to those influences of sound over which Mr. Swinburne has such extraordinary mastery, will probably maintain that a poet's place in his generation is not settled so easily or so high-handedly.

Such work as Shelley's, indeed,

before it can be finally classed passes necessarily and inevitably through a long period of debate. Generally speaking, a nation ap- proaches its great poets first on the intellectual side, and the majority of readers are affected by the presence or absence of an intellectual frame- work they can understand in a poet's work, by the intellectual coherence or incoherence of his general attitude, before they form any judgment at all on his purely poetical qualities. The strength of this tendency varies, of course, in different nations in propor- tion to the strength of their artistic gift. In modern Spain, where the commoner artistic gifts are very widely spread, and where the language places a certain facile brilliancy and music within the reach of almost every poetical aspirant, the enormous popu- larity of a poet like Zorrilla has nothing to do with any intellectual consideration whatever. From a Euro- pean standpoint Zorrilla's matter is beneath consideration. He has no ideas, no donnees, or almost none, that are not imitated or borrowed. And yet he is so facile, so musical, he plays so adroitly with all the common popu- lar sentiments of his country and time, that his countrymen, even when they are most conscious that he has nothing to say, are still enthusiastic, still carried away by a sort of passion of delight in him which does not admit of reasoning.

In France, it is not enough to be a master of facile and musical common- place. A poet's general position and leading ideas may be incoherent or shallow, but if he is to succeed he must at least be a master of detail, he must be original by lines and phrases, he must catch the subtle French ear, and satisfy the French rhetorical taste by a continual struggle with and a continual triumph over the diffi- culties of expression. Our English demand is rather different. Wo are more serious, more prejudiced, less artistic — sometimes for good, some-

22

French Views on English Writers.

times for evil. If the matter of a poet touches us we can pardon a great deal of inferiority of manner. There are one or two disastrous modern in- stances of the fact which will occur to everybody. On the other hand if the matter of the poet is in opposition to the dominant conceptions of the day, or if intellectually it offends our critical and logical instincts, we are not very ready to shift our point of view, and to give a writer, who seems to us, whether justly or unjustly, to have failed on the side of general conceptions, that is to say on the in- tellectual side, the triumph which may really belong to him on the artistic side.

Something of this kind has befallen Shelley. The ordinary English mind for one set of reasons, and a good many men of ability for another set of reasons, regard him as incoherent and rhapsodical, the preacher of a childish and contradictory philosophy. It is a purely intellectual judgment, and it is answered by 'the scorn of his de- votees, who ask what logic and philo- sophy have got to do with poetry? And indeed, as Shelley was a great poet, one who saw the world " with the eyes of the imagination," and whose visions are immortal, this ex- clusive sort of judgment of him, which prevailed for so long, has had to give way, and is giving way more and more. But it is of no use to pretend that there is no question in debate, or that the instinct which has found so many spokesmen among ourselves, and has lately inspired the sentences we have quoted from M. Scherer, is an absurd and unsound one. Shelley's opinions were crude and fanciful, and among his many masteries' he was not a master of large and clear philoso- phical expression. But he challenged the world as much by his opinions and his philosophy as by his purely poeti- cal qualities, and his slowly-widening audience has had to get behind the opinions and the philosophy, and to learn to approach him as the seer

and the singer. The final result may be certain, but a large amount of doubt and debate on the road thither was and is still inevitable.

Before we part with M. Scherer, we may quote from him the three follow- ing passages, also taken from the Wordsworth essay. (The articles on Carlyle and on Lord Beaconsfield's Endymion are short, and hardly lend themselves to extracts.) The first of the passages contains an estimate of Tennyson, and whether we agree with it or no, is certainly what criticism ought to be — the record of a real impression finely and delicately put.

" Keats and Shelley have certainly not been thrown into the shade by Tennyson, but still Tennyson has climbed upon their shoulders, and perhaps in certain respects has touched a higher level than they. If he is not stronger and greater than Shelley, the metal of his poetry is purer, the work- manship of it is more ingenious, more exquisite, and the work, as a whole, of a more astonishing variety. Tennyson has a consummate mastery of rhythm ; he has an extraordinary wealth of vocabulary ; he has taste, grace, dis- tinction, every kind of talent and re- finement ; he is the author of lyrical pieces unrivalled in any language, some breathing the subtlest melan- choly, others the most penetrating pathos, and some vibrating like a knight's bugle-horn : and he lacks only one thing, the supreme gift, the last flight, which carries Ganymede into the empyrean, and throws him breathless at the feet of Jove. He sins by ex- cess of elegance ; he is too civilised, too accomplished. There is no genre that he has not attempted, whether grave, or gay, or tragic ; whether idyl, ode, elegy, epic, or drama ; there is not one in which he has not brilliantly succeeded, and yet we may almost say of him that in no one direction has he sounded the deepest depths of thought. In passion there are ardours, in the mind there are troubles, in life there are bankruptcies of the ideal, which

French Views on English Writers.

the note of Tennyson is incapable of expressing."

The following piece describes the artist's attitude towards nature :

" The young man sees in nature an empire to take possession of ; the man of mature age seeks in her repose from anxiety and agitation, the old man finds in her a host of melancholy consolations — but the artist? Does not he, at least, love her for herself ? Does he not live by her alone 1 is it not her beauty, and nothing else, that he is in love with ? Is it not the whole of his ambition to understand and to render her, to feel and translate her, to enter into all her moods, to grasp all her aspects, to penetrate all her secrets ? Who then, if not the artist, may flatter himself that he is initiated into the mysteries of the great goddess ? And yet, no ! What the artist pursues is not so much nature as the effect to which she lends herself — the picturesque — art. He is only at her feet that he may hurry off to boast of the favours which she has bestowed upon him. The artist is the man who has the rare and fatal gift of a double existence, who feels with the half of his soul and employs the other to repeat what he feels — a man who has experienced emotion, but who has then slain it within him, that he may contemplate it at his ease and draw it at his leisure in strokes which ennoble and transfigure it."

The third and last describes the element of mannerism in Wordsworth.

" If ever a writer might have been thought sincere it is this genius at once so austere and so simple-hearted. And yet, there is no denying that all his work is not true metal. Words- worth has pretensions, and a manner he has consciously made for himself. He exaggerates his feeling, he pushes to an excess his own special methods of conception and of speech, he assumes an air and look which are certainly his own, but of which the features and expression are none the less studied and composed. . . . All Wordsworth's

defects spring from the same source and are of the same kind. He has an ideal of life, to which he involuntarily adapts his moral attitude ; he has an ideal of art and he overdoes what he admires."

M. Darmestetter's book is partly a collection of prefaces (to an edition of Macbeth, an edition of Childe Harold, and so on), and partly a reproduction of certain long and elaborate reviews which originally appeared in the Par- lement, the Revue Critique, and else- where. The whole is introduced by a letter to M. Guillaume Guizot, Pro- fessor of English Literature at the College de France, in which M. Darmes- tetter pleads for the study of English in France as against the now triumphant and wide-spread study of German. He agrees that for the soldier and the savant German is indispensable, but he argues that for the French man of letters and man of business, English is incomparably better worth having than German. As for literature, "where can our French public find more enjoyment or more inspiration than in England? I do not wish to disparage German literature. A lite- rature that has produced Goethe and Heine has a future before it. But it is none the less true that German literature has behind it but one single century. Its mediaeval period may furnish the savant with interesting and curious things, but we are not talking here of the men of research; we are talking of the men of letteic living within the range of modern thought. The French man of letters who reads English has three centuries of masterpieces in his hands, from Spenser to Shakespeare, from Milton to Pope, from Burns to Byron and Shelley ; the] French man of letters who reads German has but two books. ... To sum up, I should say that our savants have much^to learn from Germany, but that France in general has infinitely more to learn from

French Views on English Writers.

England. I am not protesting against the study of German, but only against the inferior position assigned to Eng- lish. German interests specialists ; English interests all the intelligent classes. We lived for a long time in the belief that there was only France in the world ; now we seem to believe that there are only France and Ger- many. Germany is but a very small part of the world, and if by force of accident we find ourselves obliged for some fifty years to taken a special and anxious interest in the movements of that part, that is no reason why it should hide from us the rest of the universe."

Certainly M. Darmestetter's own book is an excellent example of the sympathy and intelligence towards England which he desires to see in- creased. His studies of Shakespeare's development are based upon the most recent Shakespearian research, and state the conclusions of Mr. Furnivall and the New Shakespeare Society with an ease and lightness of touch which give them more general attractive- ness than they have commonly pos- sessed in English eyes ; while the careful study of Macbeth, and the articles on Byron and Shelley, are in every way up to the level of modern knowledge, and are lit up by a good deal of very fair critical re- flection. The article on Shelley con- tains the following happy description of the most characteristic quality of Shelley's genius : —

" There was one thing in Shelley which was lacking in Wordsworth, and which enabled him to understand the Lake poet, while Wordsworth could not understand him. This was that strange wealth and 'mobility of impressions and perceptions, which transformed his whole being into a flexible, ethereal mould, where all the changing forms of visible and living nature took shape and outline for an instant, awakening the sister images which slept within it, so that nature itself came to seem but a mirror of

the inward vision, an echo of all that wept in his own heart, the tissue which clothed the phantoms of his own brain. Add to this a strength of feeling and of love, of indignation against oppression, and of devotion to the cause of the feeble, which no poet's life perhaps has ever embodied so sincerely and so nobly — a ceaseless aspiration towards knowledge and the unknown, — a love of mystery which led him from alchemy to Spinoza, from Spinoza to Faust, — and finally that anguish born of knowledge, without which no poetry is complete, and which is itself only one of the highest forms of the poetical instinct of humanity. Thus there arose a poetry of an intensity and an infinity un- known before. Wordsworth indeed had been the high-priest of Nature, but together with the grandeur and the dignity of priesthood he had displayed all its narrownesses and all its weak- ness." Shelley's life and Shelley's poetry were one, to an extraordinary, to an unparalleled degree. "All his dreams were lived, as all his life was dreamed."

The essay on Wordsworth, which appeared in the Revue Critiqtte as a review of Mr. Myers' biography, is good and sufficient, though, as we have said, there is not the same high liter- ary pleasure to be got out of it as out of M. Scherer's. It ends with a strong expression of Wordsworth's limita- tions. " Stuart Mill," says M. Darme- stetter, " in trial and depression found peace and calm in the study of Wordsworth's poetry; but poetry which is made up of only light and peace does not render the whole of nature, or exhaust the human heart. And as nature has more shade than light, and the heart more of tempest than of peace, Wordsworth will never be the poet of the crowd, and even with natures akin to his own he will not be the poet of all hours.

" The gods approve The depth and not the tumult of the soul."

French Views on English Writers.

25

There is his characteristic note. But it was easy for the gods to say so ; they were gods."

M. Sarrazin's essays are well-mean- ing and often picturesque ; but there is very little in them which need detain an English reader. There is no perspective in them, no sense of the whole. The article on Shelley, for in- stance, is taken up almost entirely with an analysis of the Cenci, just as that on Keats dwells entirely upon Endymion, which M. Sarrazin pro- nounces Keats's masterpiece, having never apparently heard of Hyperion, of Lamia, or of any of the mediaeval pieces. And yet this half-knowledge of his is handled with so much energy, so much honest belief in itself, that it cannot but awaken misgivings in any one who has ever tried to concern himself with a foreign literature. One is so apt to take it for granted that one's own appreciation of foreign books is

as intelligent as M. Scherer's, as well- informed as M. Darmstetter's ! Yet all the while it may be only an appre- ciation of M. Sarrazin's kind, as one- sided, as full of misplaced enthusiasms and false emphasis. There is nothing so easy as this false emphasis, nothing so difficult as a true hospitality of thought. What we are all really aiming at in the study of foreign writers is a community of intellectual co\mtry with the great of all nations ; a mood of mind in which national diffe- rences shall exist no longer for purposes of separation, but only to quicken our curiosity and widen our sympathy. It is one of the worthiest of goals, but on the way thither let us not forget how easy it is to murder the accent, and to misunderstand the nuances of those new intellectual or spiritual dialects which we are trying to master !

M. A. W.

26

CANADIAN LOYALTY.

THE future political relationship of those various countries and peoples which form the widely-spread British Empire of to day, is undoubtedly at the present moment attracting in- creased attention on the part both "of practical and theoretical politicians. An analysis therefore by an unofficial Canadian of those interests and senti- ments which, together, make up what is known as Canadian loyalty, may not prove an ill-timed or uninteresting contribution to the general question.

If Canada were, like Australia, an isolated country with a people almost wholly drawn from Great Britain, the character and value of Canadian loyalty would be a com- paratively simple question. But Canada so far from being isolated is absolutely entangled with the largest and most populous English-speaking nation, the United States ; and at the same time almost a third of her people is a branch of the great French race ; consequently both the situation of the country and the origin and circum- stances of the people make the character and value of Canadian loyalty a somewhat complex problem. This will appear more clearly if the situation and the people are examined more closely.

Owing partly to political blundering on the part of British politicians in the past, and partly to natural cir- cumstances, the boundary between Canada and the United States is such that the Canadians are settled in four distinct, but unequal groups, so placed in regard to each other and to the United States that, if it were not for political obstacles, the natural inter- course of each group would be greater with the adjoining States of the Union than with its more distant and inaccessible fellow provinces.

The population of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick would thus be more

intimately connected with eastern New England than with their fellow Canadians, from whom they are com- pletely cut off by the great wedge of the State of Maine, penetrating Canada almost to the St. Lawrence, and by the compact mass of the French Canadians of Quebec. Ontario and Quebec would in turn be more intimately connected with New York, Ohio and Michigan than with the maritime provinces on the one hand, or with Manitoba and the other prairie provinces, from which they are separated by the wilderness north and west of Lake Superior, on the other hand ; while the latter provinces are the natural neighbours of the north- western states rather than of Ontario, or of the handful of whites in the south-west corner of British Columbia whose interests would naturally ally them to the states of the Pacific slope. With this unfortunate, and it may almost be said, fatal boundary and the consequent distribution of the popula- tion, the political union of the Canadian provinces is a continual struggle against the forces of nature, and therefore in spite of political separateness, they are profoundly in- fluenced by the United States, and this the more as the nearest counter- balancing influence, that of Great Britain, is three thousand miles away. I shall now turn from the peculiar position of the country to the origin and circumstances of the people, so far as they affect the question of their loyalty to Great Britain. At the last census, 1881, the population of the Dominion was in round numbers 4,300,000, who may be roughly divided into 30 per cent. French and 70 per cent. English-speaking Canadians, though, as a fact, an appreciable and growing proportion of the latter are of German, Scandinavian and other foreign origins, and are only learning

Canadian Loyalty.

to speak English. The interests and sentiments of these two great divisions of the Canadian people are so distinct, not to say hostile, that for the pur- poses of our inquiry they must be taken separately and the French Canadians, as representing the original European colonists, claim first attention. The position and expansion of the French race in Canada, so curious and seemingly so anomalous, is one of the most interesting social and political problems of the day. It is just a century and a quarter since the 150 years' contest between France and England for supremacy in North America was brought to a close by the issue of the battle on the plains of Abraham, between the forces of Wolfe and Montcalm. Since then the hand- ful of French colonists who remained in Canada, and their descendants, have lived under the same government with, and alongside of, the growing colony of British settlers ; and it might naturally be supposed that by this time the French would be absorbed, or at least be in process of absorption, into the British race. However natural, no assumption could be further from the fact. The French Canadians of to-day are as distinct and as French as were their ancestors in the days of Louis XIY. and Louis XV. ; or rather they are the true representatives of pre-revolutionary Frenchmen, and as such present, not only in their circumstances, but also in some of their characteristics a curious contrast to their French cousins. Unstirred by the century of revolutions and wars which have alternately stimulated and exhausted the latter, the former still to an almost incredible degree live the hardy, simple, unquestioning lives of the early colonists. For the most part lumbermen, farmers and fishermen, drawing almost all their poor but wholesome subsistence directly from the forest, the farm and the water, they are nearly altogether self-sustain- ing and contribute little to the general revenue of the country, but largely to

that of their Church. The mass of the French Canadians are either absolutely untouched by all those ideas and sentiments born of the Revolution, or under the rule of their priests they hate the Revolution and all its works with the zeal of the most reactionary French Legitimist. They are so Catholic that the French Canadian who forsakes the Church of his fathers is regarded as an outcast ; and yet they are so French that upon every possible occasion they unfurl to Canadian breezes the tricolor, the ensign of the hated Revolution. France, even the France of to-day, largely infidel and Republican though she be, is the country of their love, and a few years ago, when it seemed to them that Imperial France was about to under- take a Catholic and French crusade against the German heretic, the French Canadians exulted loudly in the anticipation of victory, and were correspondingly cast down at the ensuing defeat. Their sympathy with their beaten kinsmen even went so far at that time, that a number volun- teered to the Consul of France at Quebec to go and help their beaten cousins to expel the Germans from the sacred soil of France — an incident which a French-Canadian poet has commemorated in some spirited verses, the concluding stanza of which it may be worth while to quote as an apt illustration of the feeling of his countrymen : —

The spokesmen of the volunteers, a stalwart smith, says : —

" Oui, Monsieur le Consul, reprit il, nous ne

somnes Que cinq cents aujourd'hui ; mais tonnerre

des hommes Nous en aurons, allez : prenez tonjours cinq

cents Et dix mille deniain nous repondront,

Presents !

La France nous voulons epouser sa querelle ; Et fier d'aller combattre et de mourir pour

elle,

J'en jure pas le Dieu que j 'adore a genoux, L'on ne trouvera pas de traitres parrni nous — Le reste se perdit . . . car la foule en

demence Trois fois au quartre vents cria : Vive la

France ! "

28

Canadian Loyalty.

At the close of the war efforts were made to attract French immigration, moi>e especially from the conquered portions of Alsace-Loraine, but no great numbers came, and those that did come proved altogether too liberal to suit the French Canadians, who found that their love for the ideal France did not always translate itself into love for the modern Frenchman — at least unless of the purely ultra- montane type. During the last few years, and at the present moment, considerable efforts have been, and are being made, rather by politicians and speculative financiers than by the clergy, to interest the French in finan- cial schemes in Quebec, and in other ways to cultivate closer connections between the mother country and her alienated off-shoot.

In view of these facts it may well be asked how this intensely French and Catholic people can be truly loyal subjects of the British crown ; and the answer will appear the more important when it is remembered that the French Canadians, in another point unlike the French of to-day, are one of the most prolific races in the world. How pro- lific the following figures will show. At the conquest, 125 years ago, the French population left in Canada numbered about 70,000. At the last census they had grown, without ap- preciable immigration from Europe, to 1,300,000 in the Dominion, and had swarmed over the borders of the United States to the number of 250,000 more. And still they are growing so fast, that not only are they rapidly filling up their old limits in the province of Quebec, but are edging the British Canadians out of those parts of the province -which have hitherto been almost exclusively British, and are even pushing over the borders of New Brunswick on the east, and Ontario on the west. What are the aspirations of the French Canadians, and what is the value of their loyalty to Great Britain ? For- tunately it is not necessary to depend for the answer to these questions ex-

clusively on the opinion of an English Canadian, for only last June, on the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the society of St. Jean Baptiste, the national society, there was held at Montreal a great conference of repre sentative French Canadians from all parts of Canada and the United States. At this conference almost endless speeches were made by their clerical and lay leaders ; and their aspirations, and the means of attaining them, were proclaimed in no timid manner. The twofold object of the French Canadian nation, it was insisted, was to be in the future, as it had been in the past, the aggrandisement of the Catholic faith and the French nationality in North America. To stimulate this ambition the past history of the French Canadians was proudly dwelt upon by priest and politician. The assembled representatives were reminded with what heroism their earlier ancestors, under the kings of France, had waged an incessant contest for God and king, not only against the severities of na- ture, but also against the heathen Indian and the heretic Briton ; they were reminded how, when at last de- serted by their king, and overwhelmed by, and subjected to, the power of Great Britain, their later ancestors had, with hardly less heroism, strug- gled to the point of open rebellion against all attempts on the part of the conquering power or her colonists to break down their religious or national privileges. As one of their speakers proudly said : " All the political genius of England, all the astuteness and all the perseverance of her statesmen, eager to amalgamate the races, was shattered against the resistance of three-quarters of a century on the part of a handful of citizens, who are to-day a great nation." The result of this determined struggle is, as another speaker boasted, that " Providence has not only preserved our rights of wor- ship, our rights of language, our rights to the soil, but he has doubled them — I would say that on certain sides has even multipled them — in such a man-

Canadian Loyalty.

29

ner, that the largeness of the privileges which we enjoy to-day is such as our ancestors never dared aspire to." Their priestly leaders exhorted them never to forget that they were above all and before all French and Catholic, and that it was their great and noble mis- sion still to spread throughout North America the true faith and the French character. They were warned not to speak English too well. Said a vener- able prelate, " There is nothing I love like a French Canadian who speaks English badly. Never let us allow a foreign tongue to seat itself at our hearths." Another speaker illustrates their powers of aggressive expansion, which I have before remarked, in the following terms : — " Who does not re- member the English preponderance which existed there (in the eastern townships of Quebec) only some fifteen or twenty years ago 1 Yet twenty years have sufficed to render our com- patriots masters of a region where, twenty years ago, they did not exer- cise even a little municipal influence." My last quotation shall be from the speech of the leading French-Canadian poet, in the course of which he ob- served : " Some one said we were English-speaking French ; well, for me, I say we are Frenchmen who speak English when it suits us. This does not hinder us from being loyal subjects of Her Majesty, or prevent our admir- ing England, the mother of progress, and thanking her cordially for the political, civil, and religious liberty which she has granted us. Neverthe- less, gentlemen, our love and our affec- tion is for France, our glorious mother country." These quotations, which are not wrenched from, but form the key- note of the contexts of the leading speeches, sufficiently show the nature of the French-Canadian ambition. Several other speakers rendered their tribute of thanks, and affirmed their loyalty to Great Britain, who had, bon yre, mal gre, rendered them all the liberty they could desire. What is the ultimate object of thus perpetuating an exclusively French Catholic nationality

in North America, it is hard to say ; for even if the boastful prophecy of one of their leaders proves true, that in another century the French Cana- dians will number from fifteen to twenty millions, and dominate the north-east of the continent, they will still be a small and isolated people in comparison with the hundred or hundred and fifty million English- speaking Americans to their west and south. However, trusting probably to Providence and the chapter of acci- dents, their great present object is to resist absorption, and to advance their exclusive interests as rapidly and as widely as possible. How very exclu- sive are their interests and sympathies may be inferred from the fact that in no one of the speeches delivered at their great conference have I dis- covered one single expression of sym- pathy with their fellow English- speaking Canadians, or one^ patriotic aspiration for Canada, as a whole, in contradistinction to French Canada. In the eyes of the French Canadians, indeed, they are the only true Cana- dians, the sons of the soil ; the rest of the population are only English, Scotch, Irish, or other foreigners living in Canada, who are, if possible, to be pushed out of the province of Quebec at least ; or at any rate to be kept separate from the chosen people. In their connection with the British crown, the French Canadian leaders believe, lies the greatest safeguard of their national existence and growth. They fear with reason that, either if left face to face in an independent Canada with their Saxon and Irish fellow-Canadians, probably reinforced by a large Teutonic and Scandinavian immigration, or if absorbed in the great Republic, it would be much more difficult to preserve their national privileges and exclusiveness. What is the value to Great Britain of a loyalty which serves as a cover to protect and foster the growth of those interests and sentiments which are always hostile, and, where they largely prevail, are absolutely fatal to British

30

Canadian Loyalty.

interests and sentiments, your readers may judge for themselves.

Turning now from the French to the English-speaking Canadians, we are met by a totally different set of cir- cumstances and aspirations, of interests and sentiments. Here there is no homogeneous and compact race pos- sessing one absorbing interest and sentiment, but a mixed population of varying interests and sympathies. With these, loyalty to Great Britain is by no means a matter of self-preser- vation, but is an attachment springing from various roots, and displaying a corresponding variety of strength and character. The children of the United Empire Loyalist, of the English, Scotch, Irish, and German peasant or mechanic, and of the American trader, draw their loyalty from different sources, and hold it, if at all, in dif- ferent degrees. With the descendants of the United Empire Loyalists, who it may be well to remind English readers, were those loyal subjects of George III. who preferred poverty and exile in the wilds of Canada to wealth and honour in the United States; with those Britons, largely retired military and civil officers of the crown and their children, who settled in Canada because it was a British colony, and with the Irish Orangemen, loyalty to the British crown has hitherto been, and is even now, to a great extent a species of reli- gion. Family tradition, education, and external circumstances have all fed the sentiment, till it may be truly said of many of these Canadians that, as the French Canadians are more Catholic than the Pope, they are more English than the English. A very considerable number of Canadian public men and leaders of society-are drawn from these classes, and as in bygone days the officers of the garrisons, and to-day travellers of political and social position, usually meet and associate with public men and leaders of society, it is not wonderful that certain sections of English society should believe and represent the Canadians to be extra- vagantly loyal to Great Britain. The

loyalty, however, of the larger part of the British and foreign English- speaking Canadians, who did not emigrate to Canada so much because it was a British colony as because accidental or personal considerations took them there, is a much weaker, if often not less genuine sentiment than that of the classes just described, and does not continue to flourish so much from its inherent strength as from the influence of external circum- stances. This sentiment, largely due to birth or descent, is stimulated by the enthusiasm of the ultra-loyalists, by the fact that so far at least loyalty to the British crown has been the only sentiment common to all Canadians from Halifax to Winnipeg, and per- haps chiefly by the steady coldness and frequent hostility of the government of the United States. Owing to all these circumstances, it may be safely asserted that hitherto the English- speaking Canadians generally, though by no means so universally as is sup- posed, have felt and still feel a genuine sentiment of attachment to and affec- tion for Great Britain. With the majority, however, this is a pleasant emotion which is chiefly exhibited in holidays, and is not calculated to bear any great, strain in the workaday world. This was curiously shown when some six years ago the Canadian Conservative party were returned to power to establish a protectionist tariff, or, as it was generally called in Canada, a national policy. Among other arguments used by the free-trade or revenue tariff party was the plea that the establishment of a protec- tionist tariff might endanger the British connection, whereupon one of the leading organs of the Conservative and ultra-loyal party retorted that, if the creation of a Canadian national policy threatened the British connec- tion, so much the worse for the con- nection, or words to that effect.

Without attaching too much import- ance to such a statement made in a time of political excitement, and allow- ing that the great majority of Cana-

Canadian Loyalty.

31

dians, whether French or English, are either from motives of self-interest or from affection, in different degrees loyal to Great Britain ; and that even the Irish Catholics — a very important political element in Canada, as else- where— are as little actively hostile as may be ; the question at once arises as to whether the tendencies are in favour of strengthening and perpetuating, or of more or less quickly extinguishing this loyalty.

The loyalty of the Australians, in the absence of any great injustice on the part of the mother country is likely to yield only to the natural growth of a national individuality, and the con- sequent desire for a national autonomy. The loyalty of the Canadians is not only more nearly threatened by the growth of a similar ambition, but is even more greatly imperilled by other and less fortunate circumstances. Be- fore referring to these tendencies, which threaten to extinguish the political attachment of Canada to Great Britain, it will be well to shortly state those actual factors in Canadian progress which have a ten- dency to perpetuate the present slight connection.

These are first and foremost the continued freedom from an enforced liability on the part of the Canadians to tax themselves either in men or money for the purpose of aiding Great Britain in any foreign complications ; the continued rule of the priesthood over the French Canadians, and the continued conviction on the part of these rulers that the best chance for the preservation of their sway lies in the British connection ; an immense immigration of British capital and population into the Canadian north- west, purely on the ground of the British connection, and lastly, the continued coldness of the government of the United States towards Canada. The tendencies which are making, and are likely to make, against the perpetuation of Canadian loyalty are much more numerous and complicated. Already there are signs of disintegra- tion in the serried ranks of the French

Canadians ; growing numbers of young French peasants are seeking the factory and the workshops, not only in the manufacturing towns of Quebec and Ontario, but also in the New England states. These operatives are more ac- cessible to modern ideas than the habitant or peasant, and it is found im- possible, more especially in the United States, to keep them from contact with, and from the influence of the immense forces of modern life, which are inimi- cal to the power of the priesthood. In addition to this movement, the ranks of the old French Liberal or rouge party in Canada are being recruited by young men who are, either from residence in France or from literary sympathy, more or less open to the revolution- ary, not the anarchic, ideas prevalent in their mother country, and conse- quently the tendency even among the French Canadians is to divide, as in France, the people into Clericals and Liberals. Now, if the Clericals are par- ticularly loyal, it follows, as a matter of course, that the tendency of the Liberals is in the other direction. The growth of the French-Canadian Liberal party inevitably means the growth of a desire for an independent Canada, or even probably for annexa- tion to the United States as the best, or, at least, quickest means of getting rid of priestly domination.

In the case of the English-speaking Canadians, the desire for an early in- dependence is more marked. Already for several years past, from time to time, Canadian writers and even some well-known public men have declared with no uncertain note that it was almost time for Canada to assume the responsibilities of complete self-govern- ment, or at least that it was high time the people should look forward to and prepare for such responsibilities. The colonial condition is becoming irksome, sometimes to the politicians, always to the more ambitious and independent native Canadians. The latter, even many of the descendants of the United Empire Loyalists, are learning that the loyalty of the Canadian does not give him the status of the Briton even in

32

Canadian Loyalty.

Great Britain ; much less in the United States and in Europe ; and proud of the size of his country and the energies of his countrymen, he resents the un- sympathetic indifference of the English and the ignorant indifference of the rest of the world, and longs to establish a national individuality. It is said by the Imperial Federationists that this source of disloyalty will cease on the formation of a British Federal Empire, for then all subjects of the empire will have the same status. This I believe to be a mistaken pretension. The Briton's opinion of himself and the opinion of the foreign world of the Briton are not and cannot be shared by such remote communities as Australia and Canada, at least until these are so populous and powerful that they will not want to be confounded in that opinion. But although the desire for independence is certain to grow with the growth of the country, most Cana- dians are well aware that Canada for some time to come cannot, from inter- nal weakness stand alone, and conse- quently this danger to Canadian loyalty might be long postponed if it were not for the proximity of the United States. This may seem to contradict the state- ment that one of the roots ef Canadian loyalty lies in hostility to the big Republic. But Canadian hostility to the United States has been in the past, to a great extent, the reflection of the mutual ill-will between the latter power and Great Britain, stimulated by the frequent direct unfriendliness of the American government towards Canada. Now, however, Great Britain and the United States are, day by day, becoming better friends, and the people of Canada and of the United States are becoming all the time more inti- mately connected, commercially and socially. The economic and social circumstances of the United States and Canada are so much more alike than are those of either to Great Britain, that the average Canadian, in spite of political separateness, feels more at home in the United States and with Americans than in England or with the English. With almost

three-quarters of a million born Cana- dians in the United States, very many of whom visit and are frequently visited by their relatives, the social intercourse of the two peoples, with the consequent increase of intermar- riage and interchange of domicile, has a constant tendency to become more intimate. The great Canadian and neighbouring American lines of rail and steamers are in continual combi- nation or conflict with one another, and commercially as well as socially the Canadians and Americans are daily, sometimes in alliance, sometimes in rivalry, growing closer. For one Canadian that travels in Great Britain there are ten that travel in the United States, for one British there are many American journals read in Canada, and in short, for one point at which the Canadians touch Great Britain they touch the United States at ten points. Under these circumstances, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, the Canadians are more and more influenced by their great English speaking neighbour ; and as American influence grows, so must that of Great Britain relatively decline, not from lack of will or affection, but from mere remoteness. If this is the case now, when the government of the United States still plays towards Canada the part of the wind in the fable of the man and his cloak, what is this in- fluence likely to become when the Americans, learning that the chilling wind of their disfavour only makes Canada wrap herself the more closely in the cloak of her loyalty, shall de- cide to play the part of the sun and woo her with the warming rays of proffered reciprocity treaties, even, perhaps, with tempting offers of a complete customs union on favoura- ble terms 1 How long is it likely that Canadian loyalty to Great Britain could withstand such wooing in addition to all the other American in- fluences, which are, as we have seen, continually playing upon her sympa- thies and interests ? But if these con- siderations were not enough, there is yet another direction from which

Canadian Loyalty.

33

Canadian loyalty is threatened by the proximity of the United States. From the outbreak of the American Civil War, up to a late period, Canada's loyalty has not only been strengthened by her dislike to the American govern- ment, but also by the fact that the United States were suffering severely both in political embarrassments and in the creation of an enormous war debt, from both of which troubles, as well as from the war itself, Canada was saved by her connection with Great Britain. To-day the political embarrass- ments of the Union born of the war are in a fair way of settlement, while the debt of the United States is being reduced only too fast. At the same time, the political troubles of Canada are at least as great as those of her neighbour and her debt, owing to the magnificent extravagance of her people and politicians, has grown to be con- siderably greater per capita than that of the United States. Now in order to carry this growing debt it is abso- lutely necessary for Canada to draw a very large British and foreign immi- gration to her immense territory, for which she has to compete with her big neighbour. In the past the colonial condition has largely pre- vented the Germans, Scandinavians, and Irish from emigrating to Canada. They preferred to be citizens of the United States rather than subjects of Great Britain, even when Canada was in a much more favourable political and financial condition than the Republic. Is it likely so long, at least, as there is any good land within the boundaries of the latter, that the current of foreign as well as of British emigra- tion will be largely turned in the direction of the poorer and more heavily - burdened country 1 Yet Canada must in the near future divert to her side a much larger part of the current of emigration than she has ever yet done, or, failing so to do, will at no distant day be inevitably absorbed, debt and all, into the United States. At least unless the people of Great Britain will at that No. 307. — VOL. LIT.

crisis be so liberal as to assume at any rate that part of the Canadian burdens which has been incurred in building political railways.

Supposing, however, that Canadian loyalty escapes the Scylla of American attraction and the Charybdis of her own financial extravagance, it is still threatened by another danger in the shape of the aggressive expansion of French Canadians. Owing to their unity, up to the present time, this third of the population possesses an influence in Canadian politics out of proportion to its numbers, and several times greater than the proportion it con- tributes to the national exchequer. As this influence is always used for purely French-Canadian aims and purposes it naturally excites the jealousy of all the English-speaking Canadians, more especially of those who live in Quebec, where the French hold in no generous fashion the complete mastery. If the consolidation and expansion of the French- Canadian power in the valley of the St. Lawrence grows much greater, the English who are left in the province of Quebec, as well as those in the adjoining parts of Ontario and New Brunswick who feel more heavily the French pressure will, as not a few now do, favour annexation to the United States as the only pos- sible check to the French. When the people of Ontario and the prairie pro- vinces realise that there is great danger of the whole valley of the St. Lawrence, from Lake Ontario to the sea, falling into the hands of the French, they too will be likely to seek the same escape from danger. For if, as at present seems probable, the French Canadians do secure the ex- clusive mastery of the St. Lawrence valley, that river will cease to form one of the great highways from the interior to the ocean, and will be almost as dead to commerce in the height of summer as it now is in the depth of winter. In such a contin- gency, by no means impossible, the prophecy of a French-Canadian poli- tician, that the last shot in support of

Canadian Loyalty.

the British connection would be fired by a French Canadian, is likely to become true. In other words the presence of the French Canadians, which at the time of the American revolt saved Canada to Great Britain, is likely to be at least an important factor in losing Canada to Great Britain at no distant date.

Unless the foregoing picture of the situation of the Dominion and her peo- ple, of the character of their loyalty, and of the great preponderance of those tendencies which are adverse to the perpetuation of that loyalty, can be shown to be largely untrue, it is obvious that sooner or later the slight connection between the big colony and the mother country is almost certain to be broken. If the political con- nection between the old and the new countries is naturally closed in the fulness of time with the free will of both parties, then, whether Canada becomes an independent nation, pro- bably in close commercial alliance with the United States, or whether she throws in her lot altogether with the big Republic, the people of Canada will continued to love Great Britain and be ready to admire and esteem their British relatives. If, however, the connection is retained until some strain causes a rupture, then in a probably less violent manner and to a less lasting degree, the old story of the American colonies and their hate for Great Britain will be repeated. It will doubtless be urged by the Imperial Federationists that the decay of Cana- dian loyalty and the rapid growth of American influence is likely to take place so long as the present anomalous connection is kept up, but that if Canada, as well as Australia and South Africa, is really made an integral part of the British Empire, the process of disintegration will not only be arrested but will be repaired. No project could be so dangerous to the welfare of Great Britain as this well-meant proposal to consolidate her union with the self-governing colonies.

If the foregoing facts and considera- tions have any truth or force at all they must show that it is hopeless to expect Canada to become, or at any rate to remain, a party to any such political combination of the various and widely separated parts of the present British Empire, as would render her liable to any great tax for the maintenance of such a combina- tion. Let us suppose, however, that owing to temporary enthusiasm some kind of Federation was established, and that at an early stage in the history of the British Federated or Federal Empire, the French Cana- dians were called upon to tax them- selves in purse and person to help Great Britain to combat France, the country of their love, in North Africa or the East ; or that the German colonists whom Canada hopes to attract were called upon to aid Great Britain to contest the supremacy of the Pacific, or South Africa with Germany, their fatherland ; or that the very loyal British and Irish Canadians were required to add to their already over- grown burdens in order to assist Great Britain, three thousand miles away, to defend this, that, or the other threat- ened interest, an indefinite number of miles, and an infinite number of degrees removed from any interest of Canada ; the while the Canadians of all origins, French, German, Irish, American, and British being the next- door neighbours and daily associates of a mighty, a free and an unburdened people, minding their own business, and untroubled by foreign complica- tions. No Imperial Federation could long avoid — no Imperial Federation could for a day survive any such strain. To attempt, therefore, the close political union of countries which nature has placed so far apart is rash. To succeed in the attempt would be, at no distant date, to shatter the harmony which now exists be- tween those wide-spread but friendly members of the British family.

ROSWELL FISHER.

35

SCOTCH AND ENGLISH EDUCATIONAL ENDOWMENTS.

BY PEOFESSOR G. G. RAMSAY.

No apology need be made for drawing attention to the subject of Educational Endowments, whether in England or in Scotland. The true principles on which such endowments should be adminis- tered— in view especially of the great extension of State action in regard to education — are by no means finally settled for either country ; and though English statesmen, and the English public, find it difficult to interest themselves in purely Scottish ques- tions, here at least is one which interests both countries equally, and which should be solved on the same principles in both alike. Scotland has a right to demand that where the same wants and the same abuses have been proved to exist in Scotland as have called for legislation in England, they shall be dealt with in the same drastic manner, and for the good not of one class only, but of the whole community. The evils which led in England to the passing of Mr. Forster's Endowed Schools Act of 1869 are well-known. The public conscience had been roused by the disclosures made by the Schools' Inquiry Commission, and enlightened by the powerful treatment of the whole subject of middle-class education by the distinguished educationists of whom that commission was com- posed. Their report established two great facts : first, that England was wofully deficient in the means of supplying higher education for all classes except the wealthy ; secondly, that while the whole country was covered with rich educational founda- tions, these had been almost every- where rendered useless for any high educational purpose by unintelligent administration, by the close manage- ment of close corporations, by the tendency to degrade educational into

eleemosynary benefits, by narrow local or class restrictions, and by all the evils that follow in the train of job- bery, apathy, and ignorance. Having exposed these evils, the Commission sketched out a comprehensive scheme of reform ; laid down the true prin- ciples on which schools should be organised and conducted ; and showed how endowments should be opened up and utilised so as at once to confer a special educational benefit on the class or area embraced in a founder's intentions, and at the same time to raise the standard of education throughout the whole country. They insisted above all things, upon the necessity of grading schools ; they held that Lower, Middle, and Higher education were distinct things, and should be organised throughout upon distinct principles, and in separate schools '} and that, as a matter of course, the cost in each grade must vary according to the character of the article supplied.

The Endowed Schools Commission — now part of the Charity Commission — was called into existence by Mr. Forster's Act to carry out these re- commendations ; and their schemes have been throughout constructed on uniform and scientific principles. They consider first whether a school of the First, Second, or Third grade is most suitable for the endowment and for the locality with which they have to deal ; whether it should be mainly a classical, a commercial, or a scien- tific school ; and then construct their scheme accordingly. Certain general principles of management are common to all schemes alike : but as soon as details are reached, every school is strictly differentiated according to the character of work it will have to do.

D 2

36

Scotch and English Educational Endowments.

This differentiation is effected in four ways: — (1) By a specification of the subjects to be taught. (2) By laying down the limits of age for the pupils.

(3) By fixing, within certain limits, the salary of the head master ; and

(4) by fixing approximately the scale of fees. The last two points are essential ; for the quality of education, as of other articles, hinges upon finance. It is possible, no doubt, to have an education which is dear and bad also ; but it is impossible to secure a high standard of education except at its proper price.

If the school be one of the Third grade, the limits of age are placed at from 8 to 14 or 15 ; the fees at from 31. to 61. per annum. In a Second grade school, the age is fixed at from 8 or 9 up to 16 or even 17, and the fees range from 51. or 6£. to 101. and 1 21. In schools of the First grade, the education is carried on up to the age of 19 ; the fees run from 151. to 20£., or 301. over the whole school, and the head master's salary will be calculated to yield him from 8001. to 1,5001., or even more, according to the import- ance of the school.

To all schools alike, a definite num- ber of foundationerships, scholarships, and exhibitions are attached. These vary in amount, according to the scale of fees charged ; and wherever just and practicable, the system of open compe- tition is established. Where the case demands it, restrictions are retained, but only within due limits, and subject to competition amongst those qualified ; whilst in all cases alike the regula- tions are so drawn as to secure the double object of attracting good scholars to the school, as well as as- sisting beneficiaries and . applying a stimulus to the feeding schools below. In this way England is being covered all over with a system of carefully organised schools, each having a dis- tinct work to do, and each furnished with the means of doing that work well.

Meantime, how stands Scotland in the matter of Secondary Education? Our

newspapers, indeed, and public speakers are never weary of repeating that we alone have a " truly national system of education ; " that we are far ahead of England in education of every grade ; so far ahead, that Scotland must henceforth have her education separated from that of England, to be conducted upon superior principles, and by a superior minister, of her own. But those who know the facts tell a very different story. It is quite true that Scotch Elementary education was formerly very superior to that of Eng- land ; and that our parish or element- ary schools frequently taught, and taught successfully, the higher sub- jects— a thing quite unknown in Eng- land. It is also true that the Specific Subjects under the code are still taught more generally in Scotland, and that in consequence a large proportion of students join the universities, and even distinguish themselves there, on the basis of instruction received in public elementary schools. But such a system is at best a makeshift ; it can only be praised or tolerated because systematic secondary schools do not exist in sufficient quantity. In other respects, English education is rapidly gaining upon Scottish education ; in some points — notably as to infant schools, and as to the arrangements made for the teaching of science — it is distinctly ahead already ; and Scotland is in danger, even in the matter of elementary education, of having her vaunted supremacy wrested from her.

In the matter of higher education, the danger is far more pressing. The deficiencies of Scotland in this re- spect are universally acknowledged. There is no grading of schools. Some elementary schools, under great difficulties, and with imperfect re- sults, teach the higher subjects ; almost all secondary schools support, or rather are supported by, element- ary departments. Such secondary schools as exist are few and far be- tween ; if we except the High Schools and Academies of our principal cities,

Scotch and English Educational Endowments.

37

there are hardly any public schools that deserve the name. Such as exist are imperfectly organised, or organised on a wrong system ; they are crippled for want of funds ; and in none but the very best are the fees high enough to supply a high- class education. Higher salaries to attract first-rate masters; improved management and organisation ; better buildings and apparatus ; proper play- grounds and means of recreation ; above all, entrance scholarships and leaving exhibitions open to free com- petition so as to attract intellectual ability, and give a stimulus to the whole course — these are everywhere the needs of our schools, and the country looked to the long-demanded Endowment Commission to supply them.

And there were funds in abundance for the purpose. The history of en- dowments in Scotland has been similar to that in England. Repeated Com- missions had brought out the fact that, exclusive of the universities, there were endowments, mostly in- tended for higher education, to the amount of 171,000?. a year; and that this great sum had been so parochial- ised and misapplied, so jobbed and frittered away, so diverted from educa- tional to eleemosynary purposes, that it was doubtful whether it was not doing more harm than good, lowering the standard of education, and ac- tually demoralising whole commu- nities. Founders' wills had every- where been departed from. Free competition was unknown. In the great Hospitals alone, no less than 77,745?. a year was being spent in giving an elementary education, under cramped unhealthy conditions, to 1,232 children, most of them orphans, and mainly chosen for their poverty. In no single instance had these founda- tions been widened into fine open institutions like the great schools of England. The managers were mostly the town-councils. In Glasgow, rich in endowments for school purposes, only one endowed school could be

pointed to that even attempted to do higher work ; and it was reported by the late Commission that "of thir- teen endowed schools in operation in Glasgow only four are efficient, two are inefficient, while seven are ineffi- cient to the extent of being a gross waste of money." Added to all this, the whole condition of things had been altered by the Education Act of 1872, which had brought good element- ary education within the reach of every child in the country. Everyhere it was the same story, and the demand for an Executive Commission to deal strenuously with these endowments for the advancement of higher education generally could no longer be resisted.

At length, after many delays, after opportunities had been in vain offered to the governing bodies to reform them- selves, an act was passed on August 19, 1882, "To reorganise the Educational Endowments of Scotland."

The Scottish Act was originally framed on the lines of the English Act, but unfortunately it was seri- ously maimed in its passage through Parliament. Scotch legislation is invariably huddled into the odd corners of an expiring session, when any opposition, however frivolous, is formidable ; and as governments are always more anxious to pass their measures than to see that they deserve to pass, they will yield even vital points to noisy malcontents rather than find the time for a full and fair discussion of them. In this case an ignorant and interested cry was raised, to the effect that to assist higher education, and to place endow- ments under independent management, was to " rob the poor of their heritage." Before this unmeaning cry Mr. Mun- della, robust educationalist as he is, struck his colours, and emasculated his Bill by securing a predominant place in the future management of endowments to the very bodies who had been thrice convicted, by- three separate commissions, of neglecting and abusing their powers in the past, and whose removal from power in the

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future was one of the main objects for which it was worth while passing an Endowments Bill at all.

Other restrictive provisions were introduced into the Bill, which the Commissioners have unfortunately construed in a still more narrow sense than was intended. Thus, money actually left for free ele- mentary education, and still so ex- pended, was to continue to be so expended, " if required ;" and funds left for the education of the poorer classes, either " generally or within a particular area," were to continue to be applied for the benefit of such children, " so far as requisite." But the words italicised, in reality, left all to the discretion of the Com- missioners ; and section 7 expressly provided that —

"Nothing in this Act contained shall be taken to compel the Com- missioners to restrict any bursary or scholarship or other educational bene- fit" attached to or tenable at any educational institution, to the children of persons resident in the locality where that institution exists."

This clause, the wisest and most liberal in the Act, the Commissioners are everywhere disregarding : instead of opening up educational benefits to all comers, they are, in many cases, fastening on the yoke of local restric- tions more firmly than before.

In one important respect the Scottish Commission was to differ from that ap- pointed under the English Endowed Schools Act. It was to be unpaid ; it could not therefore be expected to give the sanre time to the work, or to do it in the sa^ careful, discriminat- ing manner as a Commission composed of men bound to make it the business of their lives.

The composition of the Commission, when made known, was not reassuring. For the chairmanship no better man could have been found than Lord Balfouv of Burleigh, and some of his colleagues are excellent men for the work. But the Commission contains no representative of either science or

learning — except the learning of the law ; and, what is probably unique in the history of such commissions, it com- prises no single member who has had practical knowledge of the work of teaching, and who is therefore quali- fied to form an opinion at first hand, from his own experience as a teacher, on the various educational problems brought before him. Some of its members are not known to have given previously any attention to the sub- ject of education at all.

Such as it was, however, the Bill became law in August, 1882 ; and the Commission, thus constituted, and with these powers, was expected to render the same services to the higher educa- tion of Scotland that have been ren- dered to that of England by the English Commission. The Commis- sioners have now published their schemes for some of the most im- portant endowments with which they will have to deal, so that a judgment can be formed as to how far these expectations are likely to be realised.

We will take first their three main schemes for Glasgow.1 In Glasgow alone there exist endowments, left ex- pressly to found schools, amounting to no less than 431,1712. Here, if any- where.it might have been expected that the establishment of new schools to be conducted on sound principles, or the strengthening of existing schools, would have taken precedence of every other object. This certainly was the view of the representatives of exist- ing trusts, who, after repeated con- sultations, had urged (ithat there should be established in suitable parts of the city not less than three schools for boys and two for girls, in which a complete and organised course of secondary instruction should be carried out ; " and that " two schools should be

1 I take no notice at present of the re- cently-issued scheme for combining a fresh group of endowments for purposes of technical education, which, good as it is in some respects, shows the same tendency on the part of the Commissioners to lower, rather than to raise, the standard of education.

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39

regularly organised with a view to science teaching."

Such being the facts, it is astonish- ing to find that the Commissioners' published schemes propose to do little or nothing to increase the supply, or improve the quality, of secondary schools. They are establishing no new schools : on the contrary, they are snuffing out a number of existing schools, and diverting to other uses funds specially left to build and main- tain schools. Their proposals will add nothing to the teaching resources of the city or country ; and even where they sanction or suggest the continu- ance of schools, they endorse and aggravate the very evils which have prevented those schools from doing really high work in the past. Their sole idea seems to be to throw all funds promiscuously into two or three large heaps, and to use these large funds to support a huge system of close and semi-eleemosynary bursaries, without taking any steps to secure that there shall be first-rate schools at which these bursaries shall be held.

Thus, ignoring the special wishes of founders, and wiping out wholesale all distinctions between the original purposes of foundations, they have lumped seventeen endowments into two groups ; and the aggregate income of this fund, amounting to over 7,000?. a year, is to be mainly spent upon school bursaries, mostly small in amount, and confined to particular classes. Out of the whole income a sum of 1,600?. a year may be expended in paying the school fees of " poor but deserving children " at elementary schools. This sum, properly speaking, is not spent in education at all ; it is a subsidy to poor children. About 2,100?. must be spent on bursaries of from 51. to 10?. in amount tenable only for two years, and to be competed for amongst children who have passed the fifth standard at elementary schools ; 1,200?. a year is to be spent on school bursaries of a higher kind, to be awarded under no special restrictions

amongst the pupils of State-aided schools ; while, lastly, 500?. is to be spent on university bursaries (half to be for schoolmasters), for poor students from State-aided schools in Glasgow. Bursaries to assist in payment of fees at evening classes, and special pay- ments towards an ideal school of domestic economy and a proposed technical college, absorb the re- mainder.

Now there is much to be said in favour of the creation of bursaries ; and all authorities agree that much good would be done by enabling clever scholars from elementary schools to carry on their education at some good secondary school, provided good schools are established to which to send them. But in expending nearly their whole funds on this one object, the Commis- sioners have run their hobby to death ; and, although the principle of com- petition is partially recognised, the con- ditions under which the various compe- titions are regulated are of the most narrow and parochial kind. In the great majority of cases candidates must be " poor and deserving," which will be interpreted as heretofore to mean "deserving because poor." In almost every case none will be eligible to bursaries but those who have been educated at State-aided schools in Glasgow ; so that instead of attracting to herself poor and deserving ability from every quarter, Glasgow, the wealthy Glasgow, will be strictly reserving " her ain fish-guts for her ain sea-maws." Nay, more: even that class which constitutes most em- phatically the " Glasgow " of to-day — the ship-building population — will be to a great extent excluded altogether, for the exigencies of the trade have caused it to slip down the river, and pass beyond the boundaries of Glasgow proper. In no single instance, amid all this flood of bursaries, have the Commissioners provided for an abso- lutely free and open competition.

Nor is this the only blemish in the scheme. These multitudinous bursaries are not to be held at any

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school in particular ; they are be- stowed, as it were, " in the air," and the holders may attend at any school which may suit themselves and con- tent the governors. Thus one of the main benefits of a bursary system — viz., that it supplies a good school with a certain number of able scholars — is lost altogether.

Next, let us see what the Com- missioners have done for those schools which are to be retained. In Glas- gow the Hutcheson Endowment, with an income of 4,000£. a year, has pro- duced hitherto a very moderate result in the way of higher education ; in Edinburgh, the magnificent Heriot Endowment, which was expressly de- signed by the founder to be a second Christ's Hospital, and has now an income of over 20,000£. a year, has done little, if at all, better. How are the schools attached to these foundations to be re-vivified by the Commissioners? The general arrange- ments which they have made for their government and discipline are good ; but in both schools they have permitted and perpetuated that inter- mixture of elementary with higher education, which is the bane of our Scottish system; and they have failed to grasp the fundamental fact that the quality of the education to be given in a school depends wholly upon its finance. We have seen how .strict the English schemes are upon this point, with the object of securing both that the education given shall be good, and that the fee-paying pupils shall pay the full price of what they get. The Hutcheson Grammar School and the Heriot Hospital School are both intended to be schools of the middle-class > sort, and at the latter it seems to be contem- plated that boys may remain till the age of seventeen. Yet for Heriot' s the minimum fee is fixed at \L 10s. for the year, for Hutcheson' s Gram- mar School at II. 10s. for the lowest class, and 21. for the higher classes No mention is made of any higher figure, and to suggest a low fee of this

kind is to enjoin it. It is evident that the Commissioners have never seriously considered what the expenses of a secondary school should be, and have fixed upon II. 10s. and 21. merely because those sums are just above the highest rate — 9d. a week — charged in Board Schools. They further over- look entirely the fact that Board Schools, besides having lower work to do, have Government grant and rates to support them as well as fees.

To expose the inadequacy of these proposals, let us consider at what price it is possible to provide a good secondary education of the different grades recognised in English schools. The following calculation, based on a careful examination of different types of schools, may be accepted as ap- proximately correct. In each case the buildings are supposed to be supplied free.

(1.) In a large, well-organised Board School it is possible, by means of good assistants and good organisa- tion, to carry on the education of a few select pupils to a very considerable height, and at a very low cost. I have before me the accounts of such a school, with 1,100 names on the register. Out of this number small classes of six or ten or twelve are being given advanced instruction in Latin, Greek, Modern languages, and Mathematics, at a total cost of less than 21. 10s. per head over the whole number in average attendance. But of course the great bulk of the work in this school is elementary ; and no school could carry on all its scholars to the same stage at anything like the same figure.

(2.) A well-managed school of 400 boys can furnish a really sound scientific and literary training between the ages of ten and fifteen — a very few able boys remaining a year or two longer — at a cost of 61. a year per head. The teaching-staff alone in such a school will cost over 41. per head.

(3.) A secondary school of the best Scottish type, containing from 600 to

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700 boys, and giving a complete classical course in the higher classes, cannot be carried on for less than from 10?. 10s. to 121. 12s. per head over the entire school. Were the school smaller, and confined to strictly secondary work, under masters of high standing, the fees would have to rise to fifteen and twenty guineas ahead.

To suggest therefore that a good secondary school can be conducted at the cost of 21. a head is simply absurd ; and the attempt must entail one, probably both, of the following re- sults : — The standard of the school will be kept low ; and the funds of the endowment — in spite of all provisions to the contrary — will be largely spent in supplementing the fees paid by the paying pupils. This is exactly what is being done at present at Hutcheson's Grammar-School, and the Commission- ers now sanction the arrangement. The accounts of the school for 1883 show that the cost of maintaining the school for the year, even on its present foot- ing, was at the rate of 4?. 12s. per head. There were 822 paying pupils; but these paid on an average only 21. 15s. per head. Thus no less than II. 17s. per head, or actually 1,520?. 17s. in all was paid out of the endowment as a present to the parents of boys who were supposed to be paying the whole cost of their education. In the girls school, 744?. was spent in a similar manner ; in all 2,264?. out of one en- dowment spent in artifically cheapen- ing education for the general public who can afford to pay the full price ! In addition, the foundation supplies the school buildings free to all. For all this the Commissioners have no word of blame, and provide no re- medy ; yet with strange inconsistency, when they come to deal with Fettes College, in which the existence of boarding houses with paying pupils is essential for the conduct of the school, they are filled with such a pious horror of allowing non-founda- tioners to reap any benefit out of the foundation, that they insist that they shall pay rent for the use of the board-

ing houses already erected out of the capital of the foundation. In this they have been needlessly squeamish. It is a perfectly legitimate thing for an endowment to provide and to maintain buildings for the use of all, foundationers and non-foundationers alike ; but it is not legitimate for the Commissioners to permit this principle in one set of schools and then to forbid it in another, merely because some of their number do not appreciate an education of the highest grade.

In one instance this feeling has shown itself in a manner which is probably without a parallel in the history of education. In the case of Heriot's Hospital School — and again in the case of Allen Glen's School in Glasgow — it is enacted that " Greek shall not be taught." It is re- freshing to know that there is such avidity to study Greek amongst the lower middle classes of Edinburgh that it has to be put down by law. Possibly the noble chairman was anxious to emulate the famous and unique example set by Mr. Gladstone, when he proposed to found a university in Ireland in which philosophy and history were to be forbidden subjects. But even with such a precedent, a proposal so retrograde and gratuitous as to prohibit any lawful branch of study, must surely be reconsidered, and could not, in fact, hold its ground were circumstances to call for its repeal.

The latest scheme put forth by the Commissioners is that for Fettes Col- lege. This scheme has been awaited with great interest. Fettes College is the solitary example among the endowed schools of Scotland of a school of the highest grade, completely equipped and organised for its work. It is known to be doing its work admirably, and it is turning out results worthy of being placed beside those of the best English Public schools. It has carried off many scholarships at Oxford and Cambridge ; and there is probably no school in the kingdom doing better work all round. But unhappily an

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ignorant and vindictive outcry has been raised against the school, mainly by those interested in the Heriot foundation, on the ground that the will of the founder has been wrongly interpreted, and that funds meant for the poor have been used to provide an education for the rich.

This ground is wholly untenable. There is not a word in the will to show that Sir William Fettes intended to benefit any special class, least of all a humble class. He conferred upon his trustees " the most ample and unlimited powers ; " and the sole condition which he imposed upon them was that they should erect a building near Edinburgh for the " maintenance, education, and outfit, of young people whose parents have either died withoxit leaving sufficient fundsfor that purpose, or who from innocent misfortune dur- ing their own lives are unable to give a suitable education to their children." These words show that the founder did not contemplate the poorer classes, but such persons as usually leave behind them sufficient means to edu- cate their children. The trustees— of whom the Justice-General is chair- man— wisely deeming that Edinburgh was overdone with endowments for the poorer and lower middle classes ; and considering that probably no class is so poor and feeble as those members of the middle or professional classes who have by misfortune fallen into poor circumstances, determined to found a high-class school after the model of the English Public Schools, to which foundationers from the class above described should be admitted free, while all others should be ad- mitted on payment of a full price.

Of all classes of the community, there is none that appeals more to our sympathy, and especially in the matter of education, than that of the poor and reduced gentry, though it is not a class which can make itself felt at the polling-booths, or which cares to parade its sufferings. The class which com- bines culture with straitened means is a source of special strength to the

nation, and has a special claim on it in return. It is composed of those who have engaged unsuccessfully in professions, in business, in literature, or art, or who have never found their way to any profession at all. Among this class "innocent misfortune" is not less common, it is perhaps more common, than in others ; and when it comes, it brings with it a sting keener perhaps than to any other. For its chief characteristic as a class, whether in failure or success is this — that it has known and appreciated the benefits of a liberal education ; and there is no privation so bitter to a cultured and high-minded parent as that of being unable to give to his own children as good an education as he has himself received.

If then the Commissioners can understand any kind of poverty but pauper poverty, we may ask them : May not one out of all the huge en- dowments of Scotland be justly and wisely allowed to remain for the bene- fit of this often bravely-struggling class? or is no voice to prevail with them but that of the average rate- payer, who is in fact far more wealthy than the member of the class for whom we plead 1 Educationally, and as regards the interests of the nation, there can be no doubt as to what their action should be. Here we have a school so good that in fifteen years it has pushed its way to a front rank among the schools of Great Britain, and its existence is a benefit to the whole country. Scotland is noto- riously deficient in such schools ; the Commissioners are doing nothing to create them ; it would be nothing short of a scandal and a national misfortune were they to introduce rash and inconsiderate changes which would lower its character and cripple it in its work.

Now there exists in many Scottish minds a prejudice against boarding- schools. Some deem the education given at Fettes College too expensive ; others object to the introduction of the English Public-School system as

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an attempt to " Anglicise " our institu- tions— an offence which in Scotland it little short of criminal. As the suc- cess of Fettes College is undoubtedly due to its system, it will be well to point out the main features of the English Public-School system, to show why it must be costly, and what ad- vantages it offers in return.

A day-school undertakes no duty but that of teaching and controlling a boy for a certain number of hours in the day. As soon as the teaching hours are over, the teachers are free, and the scholars no longer under school control. But a boarding-school not only teaches a boy, it also undertakes to regulate his life, to train his character, to consider specially . his intellectual wants, to provide for his recreation, his amusement, and his health. It stands absolutely in loco parenlis to every individual boy. The masters' labour and anxiety are not confined to school hours ; they have to study each character ; they have to be alive to, and to provide for, all the difficulties and temptations which sur- round boy-life. To do such work well, men are needed of strong and high characters, possessed of insight and refinement as well as knowledge, and devoted to their duty. Such men must be well paid : and for such work more masters are needed than would suffice for a day-school. Thus, at Fettes College at present, there is about one resident master for every eighteen boys ; at one of our best Scottish secondary schools, where the staff is considered ample, there are forty-one boys to each master.

To the cost of tuition, therefore, has to be added the cost of superintend- ence. Then comes the cost of keep, over a period of not less than thirty- eight or thirty-nine weeks : and growing boys must be well, if simply, fed. In the matter of buildings, it is obvious that a boarding-school has many more needs than a day- school. It must furnish sufficient play- grounds, and other means of re creation, both for summer and winter ;

a sanatorium, a gymnasium, a swim- ming-bath, fives-courts, a library in which boys may read in bad weather, are all valuable, indeed almost neces- sary, adjuncts : all these not only entail a heavy outlay at the outset, but also a regular yearly cost for maintenance. Such advantages as these have to be obtained for a day scholar, if he gets them at all, apart from the school ; so that the cost of his recreations does not figure in his school accounts. All this should be taken account of in considering what is a reasonable amount to pay for a boy's keep and education at a boarding-school.

Thus a boarding school, conducted on the principles of an English Public School, and thoroughly equipped to enable it to do its work well, must necessarily be a more expensive in- stitution than a day school ; and if it be not well equipped, then the whole system will break down, and all the evils which were connected with the old " monastic system," as it was carried out in some of our Scottish Hospitals, will reappear. Those evils were caused by boys being huddled together in a confined space, under strict discipline possibly, but without sufficient individual superintendence, in an atmosphere from which all the elements of freedom and natural en- joyment were absent. No life could be more different from this than that of an English Public School, in which, along with good teaching and careful moral guidance under the hands of cultured masters, the boys have a natural healthy life of their own, organised in such a way as to assist their social, moral, and physical de- velopment. The active energies, the organised interests, the carefully regu- lated self-government, and continual give-and-take of a public school life give an admirable training in manners and manliness, in honour and esprit de corps, and save many a boy from the selfishness and the narrowness, from the self-consciousness and touchi- ness, from the diffidence or the boorish- ness, which are so often to be seen in

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those who have not learnt from an early age to jostle with their fellows, and to take their part both in forming, and conforming to, the demands of a healthy public opinion.

The system, then, is necessarily costly : what are the special advan- tages which it provides? Are they worth having at the price]

(1) As to health. It is of the utmost importance for the health and development of growing boys, that they should have their meals not only at regular, but at suitable, hours ; that they should not be obliged or allowed to work too long at a sitting ; that they should have regular and systematic exercise ; and lastly, that the hours devoted to recreation should be distributed as evenly and judiciously as pos- sible amongst the hours devoted to work. Lungs need airing as well as class-rooms ; and it is a physiological law that in the young neither mind nor body can be worked long at a stretch without impairing the effici- ency of both, or even inflicting upon them permanent injury. No lesson should last longer than an hour : at the end of each lesson some relief should be afforded, some exercise taken, before the commencement of the next. Meals should not be de- ferred too long ; four, or at the most five hours, should be the maximum interval.

To carry out such arrangements as these in day schools, especially such as are situated in large towns, is al- most impossible. In Scotland it often happens that a boy leaves home after a hurried breakfast at eight in the morn- ing, and is kept at work till three in the afternoon, with insufficient inter- vals and without taking any exercise worthy of the name. He will then hurry home to dinner, after which in the winter months it will be too late to go out, even if the work to be pre- pared at home permitted him to do so. But the tired brain may have to set to work again at once with new tasks, and weary hours are spent over

work which could be better done, and done in half the time, had the mind been freshened by air and exercise, and were a set time fixed within which it must be done. Parents frequently permit or encourage over-work of this kind. Still worse is it when work is allowed to encroach upon the hours of sleep, and the mind, overtaxed to begin with, loses its last chance of recovering its natural energy for the work of the next day.

In other homes, again, too much indulgence is granted to the day scholar when at home. He is allowed to join in the grown-up amusements of the house ; he eats too much, sits up too late, has too much excitement. It is the old story —

"Quidquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi ;"

whether the parents be over-anxious or over-indulgent, the harm falls upon the scholar.

In a boarding school, the whole day is at the disposal of the masters ; the hours for work, for play, for meals, and for sleep can be arranged in what- ever manner experience shows to be most couducive to mental and bodily health.

(2) As to regularity of work and discipline. In a boarding-school, dis- cipline and instruction can be carried out with strictness and uniformity. School-work is not interrupted by scholars dropping in, or dropping off, at irregular periods. No irregu- larity of attendance (except for actual illness) is possible. In a day- school all these disturbing causes exist, and, worst of all, the discipline is constantly liable to be disturbed by the injudicious interference of parents. In some of our secondary schools — especially such as belong to the "gen- teel " sort — the head master's first care may be to please and gratify the parents ; exceptions are made in favour of particular boys, and care is taken that the discipline should not press too hardly on them. Some- times the headmaster, in appointing

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an assistant, will tell him that he must not draw the reins of discipline too tightly ; that he must be " judi- cious " and show " tact;" which means that he must not be too particular about discipline, and must, as far as possible, abstain from administering punish- ments of which parents would be likely to complain. What discipline can be kept up, what respect can be felt for the masters, under such a system ?

(3) Next, as to moral supervision. It is not easy to overrate the moral benefit which may be conferred upon a boy by placing him under the eye and influence of an experienced master — one who is a competent and im- partial judge of character, whose busi- ness it is to understand boy-nature, and who knows how to give it the warnings or encouragement that it needs. It is common in Scotland to speak of the importance of home influence, and to suppose that all parents are gifted by na- ture with one of the rarest of all powers — that of judging the young justly, and of knowing how to draw out what is good in them, how to deal wisely and firmly with their faults. Home influ- ence is indeed inestimable; but there are many important points in a boy's character which can be best dealt with by one who is less personally interested than a parent, and there are many trials in life which do not meet a boy until he is sent out in the world, and for which he may be totally unprepared, unless he has already made essays in a minia- ture life of his own, in which he has had to encounter similar trials, fore- seen and moderated for him, and through which he has had an ex- perienced hand to help him.

(4) A few words may be added as to the Sixth-Form or Monitorial system, by which a certain amount of authority over the other boys is given to the head boys of the school, under the title of monitors, praepostors, or prefects. Many persons entertain a prejudice against the idea of giving one boy authority over another boy ; but, in reality, the exercise of such authority is indispensable for securing due liberty

to the weak, for checking wrong and evil of every kind, and for creating not only a high level of public spirit, but also a high tone of morality and conduct throughout an entire school. Public opinion of some sort must exist in a school, and once formed, exercises the most powerful influence ; and the monitorial system is simply a mode of reducing this public opinion to rule — first thoughtfully considered and shaped by the masters in concert with the best boys, then enforced by those who have been directly influ- enced by the masters.

(5) It is sometimes^said that the edu- cation afforded by the English Public Schools, however excellent in itself for those to whom it is suitable, does not afford a good preparation for those who will have to make their own way in the world by hard, and perhaps dull, work ; and that it especially un- fits boys for the dull drudgery with which a business career, if it is to be successful, must necessarily begin. Ex- perience does not confirm this opinion. The life of a public school is busy and bracing ; boys' tastes as a rule are healthy ; their admiration is bestowed upon what is vigorous and manly ; they have little respect for self-indulgence, and have no re- gard for money for its own sake. There is nothing necessarily contract- ing in a business life : but if anything could make it so, it would be the practice of cutting off those who are to take part in it at a needlessly early age from the natural pursuits, the wider interests, the greater insight into life as a whole, which are enjoyed by those who go through a complete course in one of our Public Schools. Such boys are more fit, not less fit, to deal with any circumstances in which they may be placed ; they know life better ; they have been taught to face difficulties ; they have acquired a self- command and a power of influencing others which will serve them in good stead in whatever business they may be placed.

Such are the main features of the

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English Public School system ; and it is adopted more or less completely in all English schools of the first grade. Its advantages are obviously not within the reach of all ; and there will always be a large number of parents who will, on principle, prefer day schools to boarding schools. There is room enough for all in Scotland ; and the Trustees of Fettes College deserve the thanks of all friends of the higher culture for having taken a liberal view of their powers, for having aimed at a high standard, and for having proved conclusively that the English Public- school System can be worked as suc- cessfully in Scotland as in England, and, when established upon an adequate scale, will produce the same high scholarship, the same high moral tone, which distinguishes the best English schools. At Fettes, the system has become fully established ; and its establishment has been a benefit to the whole country. Any serious interference with the principles on which it is conducted would be a public misfortune.

The Commissioners have, happily, de- cided, by a majority of their number, to resist the pressure put upon them to lower the whole character of the school, and to maintain it, more or less, upon its present lines. But there are serious blots upon their scheme as it stands, and in the vain attempt to satisfy an ignorant outside clamour, partly supported by two of the Com- missioners themselves, changes have been introduced which, if not recon- sidered, will be seriously damaging to the efficiency of the school. We have only space to call attention, very briefly, to the leading defects of the scheme.

1. The governing body is too en- tirely local in its character. The foundation is happily to be a national, not a local one ; the governors should not therefore be appointed exclusively by Edinburgh bodies. In this, and other instances, it is much to be re- gretted that the Commissioners have not introduced the principle— almost universal in the English schemes — of

having a certain proportion of Co- optative governors. No bodies or persons are so likely to make choice of suitable persons to act as governors of a school as the members of the governing body itself.

It would further be just, as well as expedient, to give a distinct voice to the Assistant Masters in the manage- ment of the school. In the schemes of the English Public Schools, one of the members of the governing body is elected by the masters of the school. They usually appoint some person of acknowledged position as an educationist, and in this way mate- rially strengthen that body. None are more interested in the success of a school than the masters who conduct it, and their interests and opinions ought to be represented.

2. The inconsistency of making fee- paying pupils pay for the rent of the boarding-houses they occupy, and not applying the same principle to schools of a lower grade, has already been pointed out. As a matter of fact, the boarders are a source of great strength to the school ; without them, the foundation would be shorn of half its advantages. It is perfectly legitimate therefore that boarding-houses — and more of them are much needed for the development of the school — should be built out of the funds of the founda- tion, especially as all profit upon the boarding goes to the school fund, and not, as in English schools, to the boarding-house masters. Provision should expressly be made for building more boarding-houses.

3. The age of 18 has been fixed as that at which boys must leave, except under very special circum- stances. This age must have been fixed by inadvertence. The age for leaving all English public schools is 19, and it would be quite impossible for Fettes College to compete upon even terms with them for scholar- ships and similar competitions if a whole year were to be taken out of the school course.

4. The new arrangements for admis-

Scotch and English Educational Endowments.

si on to the foundation are good ; bat there can be no reason for limiting the number of those admitted to the ex- aminations (out of the total number of those qualified by poverty of circum- stances) to three times the number of the vacancies to be filled up. The competition should be free to all who satisfy the prescribed conditions.

5. The tendency towards narrow un- desirable restrictions shows itself again where it is least in place, in the regu- lation for entrance foundation scholar- ships. Here, if anywhere, competition should be absolutely free ; the main purpose of such scholarships is to at- tract ability and good training to a school wherever they may be found. Yet the Commissioners propose to re- strict the competition to boys who have spent three years in public or State-aided schools, or at schools sub- ject to Government inspection, under the Endowment Act of 1882. Such a restriction will be a fatal mistake, and is absolutely without justification or excuse, when imposed in addition to the other restriction that the candi- dates' "parents and guardians shall be in such circumstances as to require aid for giving them a higher edu- cation."

6. Day scholars are, in future, to be admitted to the school. To this, in itself, there is no great objection ; but it is further provided that the hours of attendance shall be so fixed as to permit the attendance of scholars residing in Edinburgh. Here again, from sheer inadvertence and want of familiarity with the practical working of schools, the Commissioners make a proposal which would upset the whole teaching arrangements of the school, and rob it precisely of those advan- tages in which the superiority of boarding-schools over day - schools mainly consists. The early hours uni- versally insisted on in boarding schools are essential to the proper working of the system, as has been already pointed out, and constitute one of its best features. Yet the Commissioners are prepared to sacrifice all these advan-

tages for the sake of theoretically admitting a few Edinburgh boys as day-scholars, for whom there are excellent day-schools in Edinburgh already, if their parents prefer that kind of education for them.

7. The head master should have the sole power of appointing and dismiss- ing assistant masters ; and he should also have power to dismiss or suspend any boy for any adequate cause, to be judged by him, subject only in the latter case to the condition of send- ing in a full report in writing to the governors. Such powers are granted to all head masters in English schemes, and they are essential to the proper management and discipline of a school.

8. Once more the local principle leaks out in the conditions as to the " Fettes Exhibitions " of 60J. a year. These are to be tenable only at the university of Edinburgh. On what pos- sible principle should the other univer- sities of Scotland, or even the English universities, be shut to the holders of these exhibitions ? Here once again we find the testator more liberal than his interpreters ; for he attached a codicil to his will expressly empower- ing his trustees to pay " such sums as they may think proper for finishing the education of such of the children as they may select by sending them to the University of Edinburgh, or such other university as nvy trustees may think proper." ]

It is earnestly to be hoped that the Commissioners will reconsider these points ; and that, as they have wisely determined to maintain the school as it is, they will do everything in their power to strengthen it to take its proper place as the first public school in Scotland.

These and other modifications of the proposed scheme are essential if Fettes' College is to maintain the posi- tion it has already secured for itself, and to fill with increasing advantage

1 We need scarcely point out that this clause again shows conclusively that Sir William Fettes contemplated a high-class education, leading right on to the universities.

48

Scotch and English Educational Endowments.

to the nation the unique place which it holds in the Scottish educational system. Let the endowments of Scot- land have at least one example to point to of a school of the highest class, organised in the best way, and producing results as high as those pro- duced by any school in the kingdom. If elsewhere the commissioners have held themselves bound to interpret their instructions in the narrowest way, to maintain or impose restric- tions which can only have the effect of lowering the quality of education given — if elsewhere they feel bound to for- bid Greek to be taught — let them at least, in the one case that admits of it, allow a great school to remain organ- ised on principles of absolutely open competition, teaching the highest sub- jects, attracting the best talent from every part of the country, and confer- ring a priceless boon upon a class which in a special manner deserves our sym- pathy. There are here no testator's wishes to be disregarded, no restrictive conditions imposed by the Act. The attempt to prove that the testator in- tended specially a school of the ordin- ary middle-class or lower middle-class type, has utterly broken down. He left to his trustees absolute discretion as to the kind of education to be provided ; and they have acted most wisely in not adding one more to that class of school which is too numerous in Edinburgh already. The legality of their action has indeed been questioned : but by whom? And who are the trustees whose law has thus been assailed? Two of them are judges in the Court of Session : the Chairman of the Trust, who has been its guide and moving

spirit, is the Lord Justice-General, the President of the Scottish College of Justice, known not only as a great lawyer, but as a master of the subject of education. He has himself ex- plained and completely vindicated the course pursued by the trustees be- fore previous Commissions. The im- pugner of the legality of that course is Mr. John Ramsay of Kildalton, Islay, M.P. for the Falkirk Burghs and a member of the Commission. In a note of dissent from the scheme of the commissioners, he says : — " I am not a lawyer, but reading Sir William Fettes's will, according to what I con- ceive to be its plain meaning, I am of opinion that the application of his funds for the purpose of estab- lishing an institution resembling one of the English Public Schools was not warranted by the provisions of his settlement." And so far does he hold the trustees to have mis-read and mis -used their powers, that he holds that none of them ought to be nominated by the commission to act on the governing body for the future. The Justice- General must feel deeply humbled by such a correction of his law coming from such a quarter. We are irre- sistibly reminded of the famous speech of Marcus Scaurus, when accused of treason by the tribune of the plebs, Q. Yarius : " Romans ! Q. Varius, the Spaniard, has accused M. jEmilius Scaurus, Chief of the Senate. Which do you believe ? " Nor can we doubt that were the people of Scotland similarly appealed to, the objecting Western voice would be not less summarily extinguished in one universal acclamation.

UNEXPLAINED.

" For facts are stubborn things."

SMOLLETT.

I.

" SILBERBACH 1 What in the name of everything that is eccentric should you go there for ? The most uninteresting, out-of-the-way, altogether unattractive little hole in all Germany ? What can have put Silberbach in your head?"

" I really don't know," I answered, rather tired, to tell the truth, of the discussion. "There doesn't seem any particular reason why anybody ever should go to Silberbach, except that Goethe and the Duke of Weimar are supposed to have gone there to dance with the peasant maidens. I certainly don't see that that is any reason why / should go there. Still, on the other hand, I don't see that it is any reason why I should not ? I only want to find some thoroughly country place where the children and I can do as we like for a fortnight or so. It is really too hot to stay in a town, even a little town like this."

" Yes, that is true," said my friend. "It is a pity you took up your quarters in the town. You might have taken a little villa outside, and then you would not have needed to go away at all."

" I wanted a rest from housekeeping, and our queer old inn is very comfort- able," I said. " Besides, being here, would it not be a pity to go away without seeing anything of the far- famed Thuringian Forest 1 "

"Yes, certainly it would. I quite agree with you about everything ex- cept about Silberbach. That is what I cannot get over. You have not enough self-assertion, my dear. I am certain Silberbach is some freak of Herr von Walden's — most unpractical man. Why, I really am not at all sure

No. 307. — VOL. LIT.

that you will get anything to eat there."

" I am not afraid of that part of it," I replied philosophically. " With plenty of milk, fresh eggs, and bread and butter we can always get on. And those I suppose we are sure to find."

" Milk and eggs — yes, I suppose so. Butter is doubtful once you leave the tourist track, and the bread will be the sour bread of the country."

"I don't mind that — nor do the children. But if the worst comes to the worst we need not stay at Silberbach — we can always get away."

" That is certainly true ; if one can get there one can, I suppose, always get away," answered Fraulein Ottilia with a smile, " though I confess it ib a curious inducement to name for going to a place — that one can get away from it ! However, we need not say any more about it. I see your heart is set on Silberbach, and I am quite sure I shall have the satisfaction of hearing you own I was right in trying to dissuade you from it, when you come back again," she added, rather maliciously.

"Perhaps so. But it is not only Silberbach we are going to. We shall see lots of other places. Herr von Walden has planned it all. The first three days we shall travel mostly on foot. I think it will be great fun. Nora and Reggie are enchanted. Of course I would not travel on foot alone with them, it would hardly be safe, I suppose? "

" Safe ? oh, yes, safe enough. The peasants are very quiet civil people — honest and kindly, though generally

50

Unexplained.

desperately poor ! But you would be safe enough anywhere in Thuringia. It is not like Alsace, where now and then one does meet with rather queer customers in the forests. So good by then, my dear, for the next two or three weeks — and may you enjoy yourself."

" Especially at Silberbach ]"

"Even at Silberbach — that is to say, even if I have to own you were right and I wrong. Yes, my dear, I am unselfish enough to hope you will return having found Silberbach an earthly paradise."

And waving her hand in adieu, kind Fraulein Ottilia stood at her garden gate watching me make my way down the dusty road.

" She is a little prejudiced, I dare say," I thought to myself. "Prejudiced against Herr von Walden's choice, for I notice every one here has their pet places and their special aversions. I dare say we shall like Silberbach, and if not, we need not stay there after the "Waldens leave us. Any way, I shall be thankful to get out of this heat into the real country."

I was spending the summer in a part of Germany hitherto new ground to me. We had — the " we " meaning myself and my two younger children, Nora of twelve and Reggie of nine — settled down for the greater part of the time in a small town on the bor- ders of the Thuringian Forest. Small, but not in its own estimation unim- portant, for it was a " Residenz," with a fortress of sufficiently ancient date to be well worth visiting, even had the view from its ramparts been far less beautiful than it was. And had the little town possessed no attractions of its own, natural or artificial, the extreme cordiality and kindness of its most hospitable inhabitants would have left the pleasantest impres- sion on my mind. I was sorry to leave my friends even for two or three weeks, but it was too hot ! Nora was pale and Reggie's noble appetite gave signs of nagging. Be- sides— as I had said to Ottilia — it

would be too absurd to have come so far and not see the lions of the neighbourhood .

So we were to start the next morn- ing for an excursion in the so-called " Forest," in the company of Herr von Walden, his wife, and son, and two young men, friends of the latter. We were to travel by rail over the first part of the ground, uninteresting enough, till we reached a point where we could make our way on foot through the woods for a considerable distance. Then, after spending the night in a village whose beautiful situation had tempted some enter- prising speculator to build a good hotel, we proposed the next day to plunge still deeper into the real re- cesses of the forest, walking and driv- ing by turns, in accordance with our inclination and the resources of the country in respect of Einspdnners — the light carriage with the horse invariably yoked at one side of the pole instead of between shafts, in which one gets about more speedily and safely than might be imagined. And at the end of three or four days of this, weather permitting, agreeably nomad life, our friends the Waldens, obliged to return to their home in the town from which we started, were to leave my children and me for a fortnight's country air in this same village of Silberbach which Ottilia so vehemently objected to. I did not then, I do not now, know — and I am pretty sure he him- self could not say — why our guide, Herr von Walden, had chosen Silber- bach from among the dozens of other villages which could quite as well — as events proved, indeed, infinitely better — have served our very simple pur- pose. It was a chance, as such things often are, but a chance which, as you will see, left its mark in a manner which can never be altogether effaced from my memory.

The programme was successfully carried out. The weather was magni- ficent. Nobody fell ill or foot-sore, or turned out unexpectedly bad-tempered. And it was hot enough, even in the

Unexplained.

51

forest shades, which we kept to as much as possible, to have excused some amount of irritability. But we were all sound and strong, and had entered into a tacit compact of making the best of things and enjoying ourselves as much as we could. Nora and Reg- gie perhaps, by the end of the second day, began to have doubts as to the delights of indefinitely continued walk- ing excursions, and though they would not have owned to it, they were not, 1 think, sorry to hear that the greater part of the fourth day's travels was to be on wheels. But they were very well off. Lutz von Walden and his two friends, a young baron — rather the typical " German student " in appear- ance, though in reality as hearty and unsentimental as any John Bull of his age and rank — and George Norman, an English boy of seventeen or eighteen, " getting up " German for an army examination, were all three only too ready to carry my little boy on their backs on any sign of over-fatigue. And indeed, more than one hint reached me, that they would willingly have done the same by Nora, had the dignity of her twelve years allowed of such a thing. She scarcely looked her age at that time, but she was very conscious of having entered " on her teens," and the struggle between this new importance and her hitherto al- most boyish tastes was amusing to watch. She was strong and healthy in the extreme, intelligent though not precocious, observant but rather matter-of-fact, with no undue develop- ment of the imagination, nothing that by any kind of misapprehension or exaggeration could have been called "morbid" about her. It was a legend in the family, that the word " nerves " existed not for Nora : she did not know the meaning of fear, physical or moral. I could sometimes wish she had never learnt otherwise. But we must take the bad with the good, the shadow inseparable from the light. The first perception of things not dreamt of in her simple childish philo- sophy came to Nora as I would not

have chosen it ; but so, I must believe it had to be.

"Where are we to sleep to-night, Herr von Walden, please ? " asked Reggie from the heights of Lutz's broad shoulders, late that third after- noon, when we were all, not the child- ren only, beginning to think that a rest even in the barest of inn parlours, and a dinner even of the most modest description would be very welcome.

" Don't tease so, Reggie," said Nora. " I'm sure Herr von Walden has told you the name twenty times already."

" Yes, but I forget it," urged the child ; and good-natured Herr von Walden, nowise loath to do so again, took up the tale of our projected doings and destinations.

" To-night, my dear child, we sleep at the pretty little town — yes, town I may almost call it, of Seeberg. It stands in what I may call an oasis of the forest, which stops abruptly, and begins again some miles beyond See- berg. We should be there in another hour or so," he went on, consulting his watch. " I have, of course, written for rooms there, as I have done to all the places where we meant to halt. And so far I have not proved a bad courier, I flatter myself? "

He paused, and looked round him complacently.

" No, indeed," replied everybody. " The very contrary. We have got on capitally."

At which the beaming face of our commander-in-chief beamed still more graciously.

"And to-morrow," continued Reggie in his funny German, pounding away vigorously at Lutz's shoulders mean- while, " what do we do to-morrow 1 We must have an Einspanner — is it not so? not that we are tired, but you said we had far to go."

" Yes, an Einspanner for the ladies — your amiable mother, Miss Nora, and my wife, and you, Reggie, will find a corner beside the driver. Myself and these young fellows," indicating the three friends by a wave of the hand, " will start from Seeberg be-

E 2

52

Unexplained.

times, giving you rendezvous at Ulrics- thal where there are some famous ruins. And you must not forget," he added, turning to his wife and me, " to stop at Griinstein as you pass, and spend a quarter of an hour in the china manufactory there."

" Just what I wanted," said Frau von Walden. " I have a tea-service from there, and I am in hopes of matching it. I had a good many breakages last winter with a dread- fully careless servant, and there is a good deal to replace.

" I don't think I know the Griin- stein china," I said. "Is it very pretty t "

" It is very like the blue and white one sees so much of with us," said Frau von Walden. " That, the ordi- nary blue and white is made at Blauenstein. But there is more variety of colours at Griinstein. They are rather more enterprising there, I fancy, and perhaps there is a finer quality of china clay, or whatever they call it, in that neighbourhood. I often wonder the Thuringian china is not more used in England, where you are so fond of novelties."

"And where nothing is so appre- ciated as what comes from a distance," said George Norman. " By Jove ! isn't that a pretty picture ! " he broke off suddenly, and we all stood still to admire.

It was the month of August ; already the subdued evening lights were replacing the brilliant sunshine and blue sky of the glowing summer day. We were in the forest, through which at this part ran the main road which we were following to Seeberg. At one side of the road the ground descended abruptly to a considerable depth, and there in the defile far beneath us ran a stream, on one bank of which the trees had been for some distance cleared away, leaving a strip of pasture of the most vivid green imaginable. And just below where we stood, a goat-herd, in what — thanks possibly to the enchantment of the distance — appeared a picturesque cos-

tume, was slowly making his way along, piping as he went, and his flock, of some fifteen or twenty goats of every colour and size, following him according to their own eccentric fashion, some scrambling on the bits of rock a little way up the ascending ground, others quietly browsing here and there on their way — the tinkling of their collar-bells reaching us with a far-away silvery sound through the still softer and fainter notes of the pipe. There was something strangely fascinating about it all — something pathetic in the goatherd's music, simple, barbaric even as it was, and in the distant uncertain tinkling, which impressed us all, and for a moment or two no one spoke.

" What is it that it reminds me of 1 " said Lutz suddenly. " I seem to have seen and heard it all before."

" Yes, I know exactly how you mean," I replied. "It is like a dream," and as I said so, I walked on again a little in advance of the others with Lutz and his rider. For I thought I saw a philosophical or metaphysical dissertation preparing in Herr von Walden's bent brows and general look of absorption, and some- how, just then it would have spoilt it all. Lutz seemed instinctively to understand, for he too for a moment or so was silent. When suddenly a joyful cry arose.

" Seeberg ! " exclaimed several voices. For the first sight of our temporary destination broke upon the view all at once, as is often the case in these more or less wooded districts. One travels for hours together as if in an enchanted land of changeless monotony ; trees, trees everywhere and nothing but trees — one could fancy late in the afternoon that one was back at the early morning's starting point — when suddenly the forest stops — sharply and completely, where the hand of man has decreed that it should, not by gradual degrees as when things have been left to the gentler management of nature and time.

So our satisfaction was the greater

Unexplained.

53

from not having known the goal of that day's journey to be so near. We began to allow to each other for the first time that we were "a little tired," and with far less hesitation, that we were "very hungry." Still we were not a very dilapitated-looking party when the inhabitants of Seeberg turned out at doors and windows to inspect us. Reggie, of course, -whom no considera- tions would have induced to make his entry on Lutz's shoulders, looking the freshest of all, and eliciting many complimentary remarks from the matrons and maidens of the place as we passed.

Our quarters at Seeberg met with the approval of everybody. The supper was excellent, our rooms as clean and comfortable as could be wished.

" So far," I could not help saying to my friends, " I have seen no signs of the ' roughing it,' for which you pre- pared me. I call this luxurious."

"Yes, this is very comfortable," said Herr von Walden. "At Silber- bach, which we shall reach to-morrow evening, all will be much more homely. "But that is what I like," I maintained stoutly. " I assure you I am not at all difficile, as the French say." " Still "—began Frau von Walden, " are you sure that you know what ' roughing it ' means 1 One has such romantic, • unpractical ideas till one really tries it. For me, I confess, there is something very depressing in being without all the hundred and one little comforts, not to say luxuries, that have become second nature to us, and yet I hope, I do not think I am a self-indulgent woman."

" Certainly not," I said, and with sincerity.

" Tf it were necessary' I hope I should be quite ready to live in a cottage and make the best4 of it cheer- fully. But when it is not necessary ? Don't you think, my dear friend, it would perhaps be wiser for you to arrange to spend your two or three weeks here, and not go on to Silber- bach ] You might return here to-

morrow from Ulrichsthal while we make our way home by Silberbach, if my husband really wishes to see it."

I looked at her in some surprise. What possessed everybody to caution me so against Silberbach ? Every- body, that is to say, except Herr von Walden himself. A spice of contra- diction began to influence me. Per- haps the worthy Herr had himself been influenced in the same way more than he realised.

" I don't see why I should do so," I said. " We expect really to enjoy ourselves at Silberbach. You have no reason for advising me to give it up 1 "

"No, oh no — none in particular," she replied. "I have only a feeling that it is rather out of the way and lonely for you. Supposing, for in- stance one of the children got ill there?"

" Oh, my dear, you are too fanciful," said her husband. " Why should the children get ill there more than any- where else ? If one thought of all these possibilities one would never stir from home."

" And you know my maid is ready to follow me as soon as I quite settle where we shall stay," I said. " I shall not be alone more than four- and-twenty hours. Of course it would have been nonsense to bring Lina with us ; she would have been quite out of her element during our walking expe ditions."

"And I have a very civil note from the inn at Silberbach, the Katze," said Herr von Walden, pulling a mass of heterogeneous-looking papers out of his pocket. " Where can it be 1 Not that it matters ; he will have supper and beds ready for us to-morrow night. And then," he went on to me, " if you like it you can make some arrangement for the time you wish to stay, if not you can return here, or go on to any place that takes your fancy. We, my wife and I and these boys, must be home by Saturday afternoon, so we can only stay the one night at Silberbach," for this was Thursday.

Unexplained.

And so it was settled.

The next day dawned as bright and cloudless as its predecessors. The gentle- men had started — I should be afraid to say how early — meaning to be over- taken by us at Ulrichsthal. Reggie had gone to bed with the firm intention of accompanying them, but as it was not easy to wake him and get him up in time to eat his breakfast, and be ready when the Einspawner came round to the door, my predictions that he would be too sleepy for so early a start proved true.

It was pleasant in the early morn- ing— pleasanter than it would be later in the day. I noticed an unusual amount of blue haze on the distant mountain tops, for the road along which we were driving was open on all sides for some distance, and the view was extensive.

" That betokens great heat, I sup- pose," I said, pointing out the appear- ance I observed to my companion.

"I suppose so. That bluish mist probably increases in hot and sultry weather," she said. " But it is always to be seen more or less in this country, and is, I believe, peculiar to some of the German hill and forest districts. I don't know what it comes from — whether it has to do with the im- mense number of pines in the forests, perhaps. Some one, I think, once told me that it indicates the presence of a great deal of electricity in the air, but I am far too ignorant to know if that is true or not."

"And I am far too ignorant to know what the effect would be if it were so," I said. " It is a very healthy country, is it not ? "

" For strangers it certainly is. Doctors send theirpatients herefrom all parts of Germany. But the inhabit- ants themselves do not seem strong or healthy. One sees a good many de- formed people, and they all look pale and thin — much less robust than the people of the Black Forest. But that may come from their poverty — the peasants of the Black Forest are pro- verbially well off."

A distant, very distant, peal of thunder was heard at this moment.

" I hope the weather is not going to break up just yet," I said. " Are there often bad thunder-storms here ? "

" Yes ; I think we do have a good many in this part of the world," she replied. " But I do not think there are any signs of one at present."

And then, still a little sleepy and tired from our unusual exertions of the last few days, we all three, Frau von Walden, Nora, and myself, sat very still for some time, though the sound of Reggie's voice persistently endeavouring to make the driver understand his inquiries, showed that he was as lively as ever.

He turned round after a while in triumph.

" Mamma, Frau von Walden," he exclaimed, " we are close to that place where they make the cups and saucers. Herr von Walden said we weren't to forget to go there — and you all would have forgotten, you see, if it hadn't been for me," he added complacently.

" Griinstein," said Frau von Wal- den. " Well, tell the driver to stop there, he can rest his horses for half- an-hour or so ; and thank you for re- minding us, Reggie, for I should have been sorry to lose the opportunity of matching my service."

The china manufactory was not of any very remarkable interest, at least not for those who had visited such places before. But the people were exceedingly civil, and evidently much pleased to have visitors, and while my friend was looking out the things she was specially in search of — a business which promised to take some little time — a good-natured sub-manager, or functionary of some kind, proposed to take the children to see the sheds where the first mixing and kneading took place, the moulding rooms, the painting rooms, the ovens — in short, the whole process. They accepted his offer with delight, and I wandered about the various pattern or show rooms, examining and admiring all that was to be seen, poking into cor-

Unexplained.

55

ners where any specially pretty bit of china caught my eye. But there was no great variety in design or colour, though both were good of their kind, the Griinsteiners, like their rivals of Blauenstein, seeming content to follow in the steps of their fathers without seeking for new inspirations. Sud- denly, however, all but hidden in a corner, far away back on a shelf, a flash of richer tints made me start forward eagerly. There was no one near to apply to at the moment, so I carefully drew out my treasure trove. It was a cup and saucer, evidently of the finest quality of china, though pretty similar in shape to the regular Griinstein ware, but in colouring infinitely richer — really beautiful, with an almost Oriental cleverness in the blending of the many shades, and yet decidedly more striking and uncommon than any of the modern Oriental with which of late years the facilities of trade with the East have made us so familiar. I stood with the cup in my hand, turning it around and admiring it, when Frau von Walden and the woman who had been attending to her orders came forward to where I was.

" See here," I exclaimed : " here is a lovely cup ! Now a service like that would be tempting ! Have you more of it ? " I inquired of the woman.

She shook her head.

" That is all that remains," she said. " We have never kept it in stock ; it is far too expensive. Of course it can be made to order, though it would take some months, and cost a good deal."

" I wish I could order a service of it," I said ; but when I heard how much it would probably cost it was my turn to shake my head. "No, I must consider about it," I decided ; "but I really have never seen any- thing prettier. Can I buy this cup t "

The woman hesitated.

" It is the only one left," she said ; " but I think — oh yes, I feel sure — we have the pattern among the painting designs. This cup belonged to — or

rather was an extra one of a tea ser vice made expressly for the Duchess of

T , on her marriage, now some

years ago. And it is curious, we sold the other one — there were two too many — to a compatriot of yours — (the gracious lady is English ? ) — two or three years ago. He admired them so much, and felt sure his mother would send an order if he took it home to shew her. A tall, handsome young man he was. I remember it so well ; just about this time of the year, and hot, sultry weather like this. He was travelling on foot — for pleasure, no doubt — for he had quite the air of a 'milord.' And he bought the cup. and took it with him. But he has never written ! I made sure he would have done so."

" He did not leave his name or address 1 " I said : for the world is a small place : it was just possible I might have known him, and the little coincidence would have been curious.

" Oh no," said the woman. " But I have often wondered why he changed his mind. He seemed so sure about sending the order. It was not the price that made him hesitate ; but he wished his lady mother to make out the list herself."

" Well, I confess the price does make me hesitate," I said, smiling. " How- ever, if you will let me buy this cup, I have great hopes of proving a better customer than my faithless com- patriot."

" I am sure he meant to send the order," said the woman. She spoke quite civilly, but I was not sure that she liked my calling him " faithless."

" It is evident," I said to Frau von Walden, " that the good-looking young Englishman made a great impression on her. I rather think she gave him the fellow cup for nothing."

But after all I had no reason to be jealous, for just then the woman re- turned, after consulting the manager, to tell me I might have the cup and saucer, and for a less sum than their real worth, seeing that I was taking it, in a sense, as a pattern.

56

Unexplained.

Then she wrapped it up for me, carefully and in several papers, of which the outside one was bright blue ; and, very proud of my acquisition, I followed Frau von Walden to the other side of the building containing the workrooms, where we found the two children full of interest about all they had seen.

I should here, perhaps, apologise for entering into so much and apparently trifling detail. But as will, I think, be seen when I have told all I have to tell, it would be difficult to give the main facts fairly and so as to avoid all danger of any mistaken impression without relating the whole of the siir- roundings. If I tried to condense, to pick out the salient points, to enter into no particulars but such as directly and unmistakably lead up to the cen- tral interest, I might unintentionally omit what those wiser than I would consider as bearing on it. So, like a patient adjured by his doctor or a client urged by his lawyer to tell the whole at the risk of long-windedness, I prefer to run that risk, while claim- ing my readers' forgiveness for so doing, rather than that of relating my story incompletely.

And what I would here beg to have specially observed is that not one word about the young Englishman had been heard by Nora. She was, in fact, in a distant part of the building at the time the saleswoman was telling us about him. And, furthermore, I am equally certain, and so is Frau von Walden, that neither she nor I, then or afterwards, mentioned the subject to, or in the presence of, the children. I did not show her the cup and saucer, as it would have been a pity to undo its careful wrappings. All she knew about it will be told in due course.

We had delayed longer than we in- tended at the china manufactory, and in consequence we were somewhat late at the meeting-place — Ulricsthal. The gentlemen had arrived there quite an hour before ; so they had ordered luncheon, or dinner rather, at the inn, and thoroughly explored the ruins.

But dinner discussed, and neither Frau von Walden nor I objecting to pipes, our cavaliers were amiably willing to show us all there was to be seen.

The ruins were those of an ancient monastery, one of the most ancient in Germany, I believe. They covered a very large piece of ground, and had they been in somewhat better preser- vation they would have greatly im- pressed us ; as it was, they were undoubtedly, .even to the unlearned in archaeological lore, very interesting. The position of the monastery had been well and carefully chosen, for on one side it commanded a view of sur- passing beauty over the valley through which we had travelled from Seeberg, while on the other arose still higher ground, richly wooded — for the irre- pressible forest here, as it were, broke out again.

" It is a most lovely spot ! " I said with some enthusiasm, as we sat in the shade of the ruined cloisters, the sunshine flecking the sward in eccentric patches as it made its way through what had evidently been richly-sculp- tured windows. " How one wishes it were possible to see it as it must have been — how many 1 — three or four hundred years ago, I suppose ! "

Lutz grunted.

" What did you say, Lutz ] " asked his mother.

" Nothing particular," he sighed. " I was only thinking of what I read in the guide-book — -that the monastery was destroyed — partly by lightning, I believe, all the same — by order of the authorities, in consequence of the really awful wickedness of the monks who inhabited it. So I am not sure that it would have been a very nice place to visit at the time you speak of, gracious lady, begging your pardon."

" What a pity ! " I said, with a little shudder. " I do not like to think of it. And I was going to say how beautiful it must be here in the moon- light ! But now that you have dis- enchanted me, Lutz, I should not like it at all," and I arose as I spoke.

" Why not, mamma ? " said Reggie

Unexplained.

57

curiously. I had not noticed that he and his sister were listening to us. " They're not here now : not those naughty monks."

"No, of course not," agreed prac- tical Nora. "Mamma only means that it is a pity such a beautiful big house as this must have been had to be pulled down — such a waste when there are so many poor people in the world with miserable, little, stuffy houses, or none at all even ! That was what you meant, wasn't it, mamma? "

" It is always a pity — the worst of pities — when people are wicked, wher- ever they are," I replied.

" But all monks are not bad," remarked Nora consolingly. "Think of the Great St. Bernard ones, with their dogs."

And on Reggie's inquiring mind demanding further particulars on the subject, she walked on with him some- what in front of the rest of us — a happy little pair in the sunshine.

" Lutz," said his father, " you cannot be too careful what you say before children : they are often shocked or frightened by so little. Though yours are such healthy-minded little people," he added, turning to me, " it is not likely anything undesirable would make any impression on them."

I particularly remember this little incident.

It turned out a long walk to Silber- bach, the longest we had yet attempted. Hitherto Herr von Walden had been on known ground, and thoroughly acquainted with the roads, the dis- tances, and all necessary particulars. But it was the first time he had explored beyond Seeberg, and before we had accomplished more than half the journey, he began to feel a little alarm at the information given us by the travellers we came across at long intervals " coming from," not " going to St. Ives ! " For the further we went the greater seemed to be the distance we had to go !

"An hour or thereabouts," grew into "two," or even "three," hours; and at last, on a peculiarly stupid

countryman assuring us we would scarcely reach our destination before nightfall, our conductor's patience broke down altogether.

" Idiots ! " he exclaimed. " But I cannot stand this any longer. I will hasten on and see for myself. And if, as I expect, we are really not very far from Silberbach, it will be all the better for me to find out the ' Katze,' and see that everything is ready for your animal."

Frau von Walden seemed a little inclined to protest, but I begged her not to do so, seeing that three able- bodied protectors still remained to us, and that it probably was really tire- some for a remarkably good and trained pedestrian like her husband to have to adapt his vigorous steps to ours. And comfort came from an unexpected quarter — the old peasant woman, strong and muscular as any English labourer, whom we had hired at See- berg to carry our bags and shawls through the forest, overheard the dis- cussion, and for the first time broke silence to assure " the gracious ladies " that Silberbach was at no great dis- tance, in half an hour or so we should come upon^the first of its houses.

" Though as for the ' Katze,' " she added, " that was further off — at the other end of the village ; " and she went on muttering something about "if she had known we were going to the 'Katze,' " which we did not under- stand, but which afterwards, "being translated," proved to mean that she would have stood out for more pay.

Sure enough, at the end of not more than three quarters of an hour we came upon one or two outlying houses. Then the trees, gradually here, grew sparser and soon ceased, except in oc- casional patches. It was growing dusk, but as we emerged from the wrr-i we found that we were on a height, the forest road having been a steady, though almost imperceptible, as- cent. Far below gleamed already some twinkling cottage lights and the silvery reflection of a small piece of water.

58

Unexplained.

"To be sure," said young Yon Trachenfels, " there is a lake at Silberbach. Here we are at last ! But where is the « Katze ' ? "

He might well ask. Never was there so tantalising a place as Silber- bach. Instead of one compact, sensi- ble village, it was more like three or four — nay, five or six — wretched ham- lets, each at several minutes' distance from all the others. And the "Katze," of course, was at the further end of the furthest off from where we stood of these miserable little ragged ends of village ! Climbing is tiring work, but it seemed to me it would have been preferable to what lay before us, a continual descent, by the ruggedest of hill paths, of nearly two miles, stumb- ling along in the half light, tired, foot- sore past description, yet — to our ever- lasting credit be it recorded — laughing, jor trying to laugh — determined at all costs to make the best of it.

" I have no feet left," said poor Frau von "Walden. " I am only con- scious of two red-hot balls, attached somehow to my ankles. I dare say tJiey will drop off soon."

How thankful we were at last to attain to what bore some faint resem- blance to a village street ! How we gazed on every side to discover any- thing like an inn ! How we stared at each other in bewilderment when at last, from we could not see where, came the well-known voice of Herr von Walden, shouting to us to stop.

" It is here — here, I say. You are going too far."

" Here," judging by the direction whence came the words, seemed to be a piled-up mass of hay, of proportions, exaggerated perhaps by the uncertain light, truly enormous. * Was our friend buried in the middle of it ? Not so. By degrees we made out his sun- burnt face, beaming as ever, from out of a window behind the hay — cartful or stack, we were not sure which — -and by still further degrees we discovered that the hay was being unloaded before a little house which it had almost entirely hidden from view, and inside

which it was being carried, apparently by the front door, for there was no other door to be seen ; but as we stood in perplexity, Herr vonj Walden, whose face had disappeared, emerged in some mysterious way.

" You can come through the kitchen, ladies ; or by the window, if you please." But though the boys, and Nora were got, or got themselves, in through the window, .Frau von Walden and I preferred the kitchen; and I remember nothing more till we found ourselves all assembled — the original eight as we had started — in a very low-roofed, sandy-floored, tobacco-im- pregnated sort of cabin which, it appeared, was the salle-a-manger of the renowned hostelry " zur Katze" of Silberbach !

Herr von Walden was vigorously mopping his face. It was very red, and naturally so, considering the weather and the want of ventilation peculiar to the " Katze " ; but it struck me there was something slightly forced about the beamingness.

" So, so," he began ; " all's well that ends well ! But I must explain," and he mopped still more vigorously, " that — there has been a slight, in short a little, mistake about the accommodation I wish to secure. The supper I have seen to and it will be served directly. But as to the beds," and here he could not help laughing, " our worthy host has beds enough " — we found afterwards that every available mattress and pillow in the village had been levied — " but there is but one bedroom, or two, I may say." For the poor Herr had not lost his time since his arrival. Appalled by the want of resources, he had suggested the levy of beds, and had got the host to spread them on the floor of a granary for himself, the three young men and Reggie ; while his wife, Nora and I were to occupy the one bedroom, which luckily contained two small beds and a sort of settee, such as one sees in old farmhouses all over the world.

So it was decided ; and, after all, for

Unexplained.

59

one night, what did it matter ? For one night 1 that was for me the question ! The suppeivwas really not bad ; but the look, and still worse the smell, of the room when it was served, joined no doubt to our excessive fatigue, made it impossible for me to eat anything. My friends were sorry, and I felt ashamed of myself for being so easily knocked up or knocked down. How thoroughly I entered into Frau von Walden's honestly expressed dislike to " roughing it " ! Yet it was not only the uncivilised look of the place, nor the coarse food, nor the want of comfort that made me feel that one night of Silberbach would indeed be enough for me. A sort of depression, of fear almost, came over me when I .•pictured the two children and myself alone in that strange, out-of-the-world place, where it really seemed to me we might all three be made an end of without any one being the wiser of it ! There was a general look of squalor and stolid depression about the people too : the landlord was a black browed, surlily silent sort of man, his wife and the one maid-servant looked frightened and anxious, and the only voices to be heard were those of half tipsy peasants drinking and quarrelling at the bar.

To say the least it was not enliven- ing. Yet my pride was engaged. I did not like to own myself already beaten. After supper I sat apart, re- flecting rather gloomily as to what I could or should do, while the young men and the children amused them- selves with the one piece of luxury with which the poorest inn in Thuringia is sure to be provided. For, anomalous as it may seem, there was a piano, and by no means an altogether decrepit one, in the sandy-floored parlour !

Herr von Walden was smoking his pipe outside, the hay being by this time housed somewhere or other. His wife, who had been speaking to him, came in and sat down beside me.

" My dear," she said, " you must not be vexed with me for renewing the subject, but I cannot help it : I feel a responsibility. You must not,

you really must not, think of staying here alone with those two children. It is not fit for you."

Oh, how I blessed her for breaking the ice ! I could hardly help hugging her as I replied — diplomatically — "You really think so ? " " Certainly I do ; and so, though perhaps he won't say so as frankly — so does my husband. He says I am foolish and fanciful ; but I confess to feeling a kind of dislike to the place that I cannot explain. Perhaps there is thunder in the air — that always affects my nerves — but I just feel that I cannot agree to your staying on here."

" Very well, I am quite willing to go back to Seeberg to-morrow," I replied meekly. " Of course we can't judge of the place by what we have seen of it to-night, but no doubt, as far as the inn is concerned, Seeberg is much nicer. I dare say we can see all we want by noon to-morrow and get back to Seeberg in the afternoon."

Kind Frau von Walden kissed me rapturously on both cheeks.

" You don't know, my dear, the re- lief to my mind of hearing you say so! And now I think the best thing we can do is to go to bed. For we must start at six."

"So early!" I exclaimed, with a fresh feeling of dismay.

" Yes, indeed ; and I must bid you good-bye to-night, for, after all, I am not to sleep in your room, which is much better, as I should have had to disturb you so early. My husband has found a tidy room next door in a cottage, and we shall do very well there."

What sort of a place she euphem- istically described as " a tidy room " I never discovered. But it would have been useless to remonstrate, the kind creature was so afraid of incom- moding us that she would have listened to no objections.

Herr von Walden came in just as we were about to wish each other good- night.

" So ! " he said, with a tone of amiable indulgence, " so ! And what

60

Unexplained.

do you think of Silberbach ? My wife feels sure you will not like it after all."

" I think I shall see as much as I care to see of it in an hour or two to-morrow morning," I replied quietly. " And by the afternoon the children and I will go back to our comfortable quarters at Seeberg."

" Ah, indeed ! Yes, I dare say it will be as well," he said airily, as if he had nothing at all to do with decoying us to the place. " Then good-night and pleasant dreams, and —

" But," I interrupted, " I want to know how we are to get back to Seeberg. Can I get an Einsptinner here?"

"To be sure, to be sure. You have only to speak to the landlord in the morning, and tell him at what hour you want it ; " he answered so confidently that I felt no sort of mis- giving, and I turned with a smile to finish my good-nights.

The young men were standing close beside us. I shook hands with Trachenfels and Lutz, the latter of whom, though he replied as heartily as usual, looked, I thought, annoyed. George Norman followed me to the door of the room. In front of us was the ladder like staircase leading to the upper regions.

" What a hole of a place ! " said the boy. " I don't mind quite a cottage, if it's clean and cheerful, but this place is so grim and squalid. I can't tell you how glad I am you're not going to stay on here alone. It really isn't fit for you."

""Well, you may be easy, as we shall only be here a few hours after you leave."

" Yes ; so much the better. I wish I could have stayed, but I must be back at Kronberg to-morrow. Lutz could have stayed and seen you back to Seeberg, but his father won't let him. Herr von Walden is so queer once he takes an idea in his head, and he won't allow this place isn't all right."

" But I dare say there would be nothing to hurt us ! Any way, I will

write to reassure you that we have not fallen into a nest of cut-throats or brigands," I said laughingly.

Certainly it never occurred to me or to my friends what would be the nature of the "experience" which would stamp Silberbach indelibly on our memory.

We must have been really very tired, for, quite contrary to our habit, the children and I slept late the next morning, undisturbed by the depart- ure of our friends at the early hour arranged by them.

The sun was shining, and Silber- bach, like every other place, appeared all the better for it. But the view from the window of our room was not encouraging. It looked out upon the village street — a rough, unkempt sort of track, and on its other side the ground rose abruptly to some height, but treeless and grassless. It seemed more like the remains of a quarry of some kind, for there was nothing to be seen but stones and broken pieces of rock.

" We must go out after our break- fast and look about us a little before we start," I said. " But how glad I shall be to get back to that bright, cheerful Seeberg ! "

" Yes, indeed," said Nora. " I think this is the ugliest place I ever was at in my life." And she was not in- clined to like it any better when Reggie, whom we sent down to recon- noitre, rcame back to report that we must have our breakfast in our own room.

" There's a lot of rough-looking men down there, smoking and drink- ing beer. You couldn't eat there," said the child.

But, after all, it was to be our last meal there, and we did not complain. The root coffee was not too unpalatable with plenty of good milk ; the bread was sour and the butter dubious, as Ottilia had foretold, so we soaked the bread in the coffee, like French peasants.

"Mamma," said Nora gravely, "it makes me sorry for poor people. I

Unexplained.

61

dare say many never have anything nicer to eat than this."

" Not nicer than this ! " I exclaimed. " Why, my dear child, thousands, not in Germany only, but in France and England, never taste anything as good."

The little girl opened her eyes. There are salutary lessons to be learnt from even the mildest experience of " roughing it."

Suddenly Nora's eyes fell on a little parcel in blue paper. It was lying on one of the shelves of the stove, which, as in most German rooms, stood out a little from the wall, and in its summer idleness was a convenient receptacle for odds and ends. This stove was a high one, of black-leaded iron ; it stood between the door and the wall, on the same side as the door, and was the most conspicuous object in the room.

" Mamma," she exclaimed, " there is the parcel you brought away from the china place. What is it 1 I wish you would show it me."

I gave a little exclamation of annoyance.

" Frau von Walden has forgotten it," I said ; for my friend, returning straight to Kronberg, had offered to take it home for me in her bag for fear of accidents. " It does not mat- ter," I added, " I will pack it among our soft things. It is a very pretty cup and saucer, but I will show it to you at Kronberg, for it is so nicely wrapped up. Now I am going down- stairs to order the Einspanner, and we can walk about for an hour or two."

The children came with me. I had some trouble in disinterring the land- lord, but at last I found him, of course with a pipe in his mouth, hanging about the premises. He listened to me civilly enough, but when I waited for his reply as to whether the Einspanner would be ready about twelve o'clock, he calmly regarded me without speaking. I repeated my inquiry.

"At twelve?" he said calmly. "Yes, no doubt the gracious lady

might as well fix twelve as any other hour, for there was no such thing as a horse, much less an Einspanner, to be had at Silberbach."

I stared at him in my turn. " No horse, no carriage to be had. How do people ever get away from here then ? " I said.

" They don't get away — that is to say, if they come at all, they go as they came, in the carriage that brought them ; otherwise they neither come nor go. The lady came on foot : she can go on foot ; otherwise she can stay."

There seemed something sinister in his words. A horrible, ridiculous feeling came over me that we were caught in a net, as it were, and doomed to stay at Silberbach for the rest of our lives. But I looked at the man. He was simply stolid and indifferent. I did not believe then, nor do I now, that he was anything worse than sulky and uncivilised. He did not even care to have us as his visitors : he had no wish to retain us nor to speed us on our way. Had we remained at the " Katze " from that day to this, I don't believe he would have ever inquired what we stayed for !

" I cannot walk back to Seeberg," I said, half indignantly, " we are too tired ; nor would it be safe through the forest alone with two children."

The landlord knocked some ashes off his pipe.

"There may be an ox-cart going that way next week," he observed.

" Next week ! " I repeated. Then a sudden idea struck me. " Is there a post-office here ? " I said.

Of course - there was a post-office ; where can one go in Germany where there is not a post and telegraph- office?

"The telegraph officials must be sadly over- worked here," I said to myself. But as far as mine host was concerned I satisfied myself with ob- taining the locality of the post-office, and with something like a ray of hope I turned to look for the children. They had been amusing themselves

62

Unexplained.

with the piano in the new empty room, but as I called to them, Reggie ran out with a very red face.

" I wish I were a man, mamma. Fancy ! a peasant — one of those men who were drinking beer — came and put his arm around Norah as she was playing. ' Du spielst schb'n,' he said, and I do believe he meant to kiss her, if I hadn't shaken my fist at him."

" Yes, indeed, mamma," said Nora, equally but more calmly indignant. " I certainly think the sooner we get away the better."

I had to tell them of my discom- fiture, but ended with my new idea.

" If there is a post-office," I said, "the mail must stop there, and the mail takes passengers."

But, arrived at the neat little post- house, to reach which without a most tremendous round we had to climb up a really precipitous path, so-called, over the stones and rocks in front of the inn, new dismay awaited us. The post-master was a very old man, but of a very different type from our host. He was sorry to disappoint us, but the mail only stopped here for letters — all passengers must begin their journey at — I forget where— leagues off on the other side from Silberbach. We wanted to get away ? He was not surprised. What had we come for ? No one ever came here. Were we Ameri- cans ! Staying at the " Katze " ! Good heavens ! " A rough place." " I should rather think so."

And this last piece of information fairly overcame him. He evidently felt he must come to the rescue of these poor Babes in the wood.

" Come up when the mail passes from Seeberg this evening *at seven, and I will see what I can do with the conductor. If he happens to have no passengers to-morrow, he may stretch a point and take you in. No one will be the wiser."

"Oh, thanks, thanks," I cried. "Of course I will pay anything he likes to ask."

" No need for that. He is a

Iraver Mann and will not cheat you."

" We shall be here at seven, then. I would rather have started to walk than stayed here indefinitely."

" Not to-day any way. We shall have a storm," he said, looking up to the sky. "Adieu. A uf Wiedersehen / "

" I wish we had not to stay another night here," I said. " Still, to-morrow morning will soon come."

We spent the day as best we could. There was literally nothing to see, nowhere to go, except back into the forest whence we had come. Nor dared we go far, for the day grew more and more sultry ; the strange, ominous silence that precedes a storm came on, adding to our feelings of restlessness and depression. And by about two o'clock, having ventured out again after " dinner," we were driven in by the first great drops. Huddled together in our cheerless little room we watched the breaking loose of 'the storm demons. I am not affected by thunder and lightning, nor do I dread them. But what a storm that was ! Thunder, lightning, howling wind, and rain like no rain I had ever seen before, all mingled together. An hour after it began, a cart standing high and dry in the steep village street was hidden by water to above the top of the wheels — a little more and it would have floated like a boat. But by about five, things calmed down ; the few stupid - looking peasants came out of their houses, and gazed about them as if to see what damage had been done. Perhaps it was not much after all— they seemed to take it quietly enough ; and by six all special signs of disturbance had disappeared — the torrents melted away as if by magic. Only a strange, heavy mist began to rise, enveloping everything, so that we could hardly believe the evening was yet so early. I looked at my watch.

" Half-past six. We must, mist or no mist, go up to the post-house. But I don't mind going alone, dears."

"No, no, mamma; I must go with

Unexplained.

63

you, to take care of you," saidlReggie ; " but Nora needn't."

" Perhaps it would be as well," said the little girl. " I have one or two buttons to sew on, and I am still rather tired."

And, knowing she was never timid about being left alone, thinking we should be absent half-an-hour ab mosst I agreed.

But the half-hour lengthened into an hour, then into an hour and a half, before the weary mail made its appear- ance. The road through the forest must be all but impassable, our old friend told us. But oh, how tired Reggie and I were of waiting ! though all the time never a thought of uneasi- ness with regard to Nora crossed my mind. And. when the mail did come, delayed, as the postmaster had sus- pected, the good result of his negotia- tions made us forget all our troubles ; for the conductor all but promised to take us the next morning, in con- sideration of a very reasonable extra payment. It was most unlikely he would have any, certainly not many passengers. We must be there, at the post-house by nine o'clock, bag- gage and all, for he dared not wait a moment, and he would do his best.

Through the evening dusk, now past replacing the scattered mist, Reggie and I, light of heart, stumbled down the rocky path.

" How pleased Nora will be ! She will be wondering what has come over us," I said as the "Katze" came in view. " But what is that, Reggie, running up and down in front of the house 1

Is it a sheep, or a big white dog ] or — or a child? Can it be Nora, and no cloak or hat ? and so damp and chilly as it is ? How can she be so foolish ! "

And, with a vague uneasiness, I hurried on.

Yes, it was Nora. There was light enough to see her face. What had happened to my little girl1? She was white — no, not white, ghastly. Her eyes looked glassy, and yet as if drawn into her head ; her whole bright, fearless bearing was gone. She clutched me convulsively as if she would never again let me go. Her voice was so hoarse that I could scarcely distin- guish what she said.

" Send Reggie in — he must not hear," were her first words — of rare unselfishness and presence of mind.

" Reggie," I said, " tell the maid to take candles up to our room, and take off your wet boots at once."

My children are obedient ; he was off instantly.

Then Nora went on, still in a strained, painful whisper —

" Mamma, there has been a man in our room, and "

"Did that peasant frighten you again, dear \ Oh, I am so sorry I left you ; " for my mind at once reverted to the man whom Reggie had shaken his fist at that morning.

" No, no ; not that. I would not have minded. But, mamma, Reggie must never know it — he is so little, he could not bear it — mamma, it was not a man. It was — oh, mamma, I have seen a ghost /"

To be continued.

64

A FEW LAST WORDS ON DAY-SCHOOLS AND BOARDING- SCHOOLS.

A WRITER on Catholic education, whose criticisms on English Protestant teach- ers are most suggestive, says in one of his pamphlets, " It has sometimes been remarked to me, ' You yourself have a school ; will it not seem indelicate to say that your brother grocers sand their sugar? Do you expect your school to flourish when you cry down the schools of others? You will find the enemy in front, flank, and rear.' And he goes on to reply, 'As to my own school it is my interest in life, my love, and my pride. But I would sooner see it blown into the air than hesitate to speak.' "

I cannot say that I regard my free- dom to speak as of similar importance to that of the warden of Woburn School. But having broken silence I do not wish to . be misunderstood, and with the permission of the Editor I will say a few last words. And first as regards what I did not say. I cer- tainly did not "protest," as an "Ex- Day Boy," in the March number of Macmillaris Magazine says, "against the continuance of the boarding-house system at Rugby." Perhaps in trying to write as impersonally as possible, I may have seemed to attack institu- tions which I only wished to supple- ment. Anyhow I am not unselfish enough to wish to pull down the most interesting work of my life, or to call in the public to assist at the operation.

Boarding-houses are an absolute ne- cessity at our great public schools ; it is a simple impossibility that many of the parents should be able to fix their homes at the residence of the school of their choice, and any one who pro- tests against their continuance, speci- ally at Rugby, which is two hours from London and at least one hour from any large town of business, would show that he did not realise English life.

And before I go further, I will be honest, and discount the value of my own remarks. I hold that there are many things that an assistant- master might think, which, however, he is bound only to say to his local chief or local council. If my readers are looking for " revelations," I warn them that here they will find nothing so exciting. If, in the article of last September, I seemed to ignore my own school, it was only because, to use the words of the editor of the Journal -of Education, I was conscious of my own " Rugby -olatry " and I wished sternly to repress it. Still there are one or two things that I should like to repeat now that I have read my critics.

Are not the boys of England suffer- ing from seeing too little of their homes? Are there not many homes where boys could be better educated than they are at present in many of the large barracks called boarding- schools ? And would it not be better for all boys that some of the period of education should be spent at home ?

To take the last question first. Is it not an astounding fact that in these days, when women are so carefully educated, mothers think it necessary to send their boys away from home, very often at the age of eight, to be brought up among strangers, in an atmosphere where the prevailing tone is set by a knot of bigger boys'? It is perfectly true that there are wives of schoolmasters who endeavour to " mother " their husband's fifty or hundred pupils as conscientiously as they do his sons, and it is marvellous how some of them succeed ; but, on the other hand, every schoolmaster must have very painful experiences the other way. It will be replied that so, too, has every schoolmaster ex- periences of homes where boys ara spoilt, or insufficiently taught, or mis-

A Few Last Words on Day-Schools and Boarding-Schools. 65

understood. But all that is contended here is that the good homes should not give way to a fashion, or that, if they do so, they should not expect to have what they cannot get for their money. Schools cannot give stillness and quietude ; they are afraid to give enough leisure for fear of its being abused ; and they must treat one boy very much as another. The small beginnings of interests in various sub- jects, which must vary with particular homes according to the profession of the father or the locality where he resides or the surroundings ; the atti- tude of being useful which a young mind will assume for a mother but not for a master; the opportunities of sympathy with other ages and other classes that a home can give and a school very often dare not ; the absence of the incessant appeals to competition as a motive for industry ; the contagion of intellectual or moral earnestness which is silently working when a boy sees much of his elder blood-relations in his early days — all these things, it is contended, are thrown away too indiscriminately in the England of to- day.

There are certain good qualities that a public schoolmaster can safely reckon on finding in the boys who come from some of our preparatory schools, but those qualities do not include literary interest, originality, variety of taste. How can they 1 The unfortunate wife of the schoolmaster cannot read to sets of threes the Arabian Nights, or the Waverley novels, or Masterman Ready — the family is on too large a scale; the exquisite sense of being the one consulted which a loving mother can convey to each member even of a large natural family cannot be given to a school. So they will not listen even if there be any to read to them ; and even if they do there is not the same uniform directness of aim, backed by family associations, in a school as is supplied by the accumulated store of knowledge and literature embodied in the family library and the family's advice as to choice of books.

No. 307.— VOL. HI.

In the same way with out- door life : neighbours soon draw a fence around a boarding-school, and the few nests that may be found on the grounds hardly make up for the loss of the parsonage garden, which an unreasoning fashion discards as a second-rate nursery. To study the natural delights of one spot till they are exhausted is one of the most ne- cessary ingredients in early education. But it may be said that all this is easily done in the holidays. There are two or three objections to this theory. The first is that parents who only receive their little boys for the holidays have lost the character of being educators; too often they de- scend into the rank of caterers for the amusement of their children ; either they think it necessary to break up the home and go to the seaside, or they suspend their ordinary occupa- tions, the sight of which is really valuable and should be interesting to their children, or in some way they flood the home with excitement. These are they whose worst specimen writes to the Times to protest against extra weeks being given for the holi- days. Of course if boys are allowed to upset the natural flow of their relations' lives, they are nuisances. Or, again, some parents from never having taught their boys in their early years have no idea of their capabili- ties, and if they do try to continue in a small degree the process of educa- tion during the holidays, commit such mistakes that they give the attempt up in despair, and fall to abuse of the unfortunate schoolmaster for not having brought young Hopeful more on. Or they find that they have so delegated their authority that in two months they cannot easily recover it. In such cases what is here maintained is that parents should take more personal interest in the education of their sons, and not be content to pay large sums to have the trouble taken off their hands, if by any sacrifice they can undertake it. It is not within the scope of the present article

66 A Few Last Words on Day-Schools and Boarding-Schools.

to show how such sacrifice improves the whole tone of the family life ; but it may fairly be remarked that the impa- tience or in judiciousness of parents who have uniformly boarded out their child- ren cannot fairly be quoted as evidence that they are less fitted for their early education than hired schoolmasters. Such parents have simply killed out the nobler side of the parental instinct by neglecting it, and it may fairly be argued that the sooner they deve- lop it afresh the better it will be for their descendants and for the nation. But enough has been said on the first point whether it be not better that some of the period of education be spent at home.

It is a far more difficult question whether as the boy gets older it is desirable that parents should live near a public school, supervising the studies of their sons, instead of sending them to a boarding-house. In the September number of the Contemporary last year an attempt was made to sketch the various duties of the boarding-house master. Fortunately the days are gone by when it was common for a house-master to court the cheers of his boys by saying that he knew nothing of what went on in their side of the house, and did not care to know. House masters do try to do their duty by both big and little boys, and do not leave the latter to the exclusive attention of the former. But the list of duties is sufficiently great for even the most Herculean constitution to be glad of assistance, and such assistance, it was argued, can be given by the neighbourhood of some family life with parents keenly watching the success or failure of the school, and gladly welcoming associates for their boys. It is perfectly true that " the number of parents who can afford to settle in the proximity of a great school is limited, and that few can spare the time from their daily business to exer- cise any real influence over their sons' studies." But all that is needed is an atmosphere of interest in the studies not unfavourable to the morals of the

boys. As Mr. Oscar Browning has well remarked, in a home "there is no need of that elaborate drilling into occupation which presses so heavily on the conscience of a boarding house- master ; " in a well-organised home there is no need of filling up every moment of a boy's time either with work or play ; there are more hands to help at any rate, sister or mother, only too glad to be called in ; it may be added that the grammar and the dictionary are less likely to have gone astray when the moment comes for their use. It is perfectly true that few parents are either able or present to superintend their son's lessons ; but the atmosphere is favourable to work, and that is all that is needed. Masters know well enough the difficulty of creating such an atmosphere in large boarding-houses, and so frequently have to sweep in the boys from their studies into one large room for " pre- paration." This is in many ways a good expedient, but it is open to two objections : it cannot be said to give stillness or quietude, and it tempts a master to give a boy more help than is good for his natural development.

Again there is the danger of loafing, for sports at a day-school are said not to be worth much. This is an ob- jection which it is entirely in the hands of the masters to remove. The " Ex-Day-Boy " who writes in Mac- millan's Magazine writes with sensitive exaggeration, but describes what took place in one of our public schools with accuracy. But a little organisation can arrange places of meeting to establish intimacy within the circle of the day-boys, and the head master can secure the co-operation of the parents, and games can be made part of the education of a school, to give which is as much the duty of the institution as it is to see that a boy attends his lessons. Clifton College and Bedford School are examples of what can be done in this respect.

Again it has been very ably urged that with the day-boy system life is too monotonous. This is true with

A Few Last Words on Day-Schools and Boarding-Schools. 67

certain natures, and has often been well met by sending a boy into a boarding-house about the age of six- teen. Of course, too, it cannot be repeated too often that a home which is not a home of character is no home at all. In many homes the petty gossip of school-life is allowed to dominate the conversation ; the sisters think it necessary to learn the football- shop ; the mother knows the masters by their nicknames ; the boy gains no freshness in such an atmosphere. But it is only homes where this is not the case that fulfil their proper function of offering wider interests and greater enthusiasms than a boarding-house. And where a boarding-house is ob- viously overshadowed by the influence of a really great man, as occasionally happens, no one could doubt that a few years' residence in such a society would improve the temper, widen the interests, and open the eyes of any older boy. Once a boy has a character of his own, and has acquired reading or thinking habits, the more he sees of other people's lives, and other people's ways of thought, the less trouble he will have in realising history, in throwing himself into fresh points of view, and in a word in jostling with the world at large. But many of our ablest public school men have picked this quality up by going to a boarding-house at the age of sixteen.

In conclusion, if it is necessary to remind good homes and the ever increasing body of well-educated mothers of the power they possess, and the duties they cannot delegate ; on the other hand, it must never be forgotten that there are some good qualities that a period spent at a board- ing-house invariably secures. Very

able authorities are of opinion that the stillness and quietude necessary for natural development of a boy of talent are lost nowadays in boarding-schools, not so much owing to the storm and tempest of the little world in which boys live there, as to the injudicious eagerness of schoolmasters who will not leave boys alone, but like to use up all . their willingness to learn by teaching them in their own fashion, and smoothing their way over difficul- ties. The reply that such constant interference is inevitable, as the one safeguard against immorality is to fill up time either with work or play, they regard as exaggerated. No school- master can wish to assert that it is not ; the present writer believes that with proper structural arrangements, some selection of preparatory schools from which boys are received, and absolute determination to get rid of any tainted boy at once, good boys can be entirely screened from hearing of evil ; but there remains the ques- tion what to do with the doubtful ones. They need to be interested ; is the home or the "house" the best place for them '{ The answer to that question must depend on the character of both.

On one point it must be confessed the boarding-house far surpasses any home. It checks eccentricity ; it un- masks that sham genius that a fond home mistakes for real ; it teaches a boy to know himself ; it removes affectation.

It is for these reasons that it is de- sirable that our public schools should have the admixture of both systems, so long as the masters will take the trouble to see that day-boys have a certainty of finding themselves recog- nised as equals in the community.

F 2

68

AT THE STATION ON AN AUTUMN MORNING. From the Italian of Giosue Garducci.

[THE first edition of the Odi JBarbare, from which the following poem is taken, appeared in 1877 : "No book," says Doctor Ugo Brilli, " has given rise to a controversy more ardent, more varied, more wide-spread, more serious, more learned, more fruitful of good results than the Odi JBarbare of Giosue Carducci." Into this controversy I do not propose to enter here, beyond noting that one German critic calls Carducci " the Italian Heine," and gives good reasons for the name. The strange mixture of romantic sentiment and startling realism is what will strike an English reader most, and it certainly renders the poems as unlike the rest of modern Italian poetry as they well can be. As to the metre, the example given will show that the poems attempt to revive in modern Italian the classical measures of antiquity. Carducci himself looked upon them as little more than experiments, and says, " I have called these Odes 'JBarbare ' because such would they sound to the ears and minds of the old Greeks and Romans." Later on in his interesting and beautifully written preface he adds : " I have thought that if to Catullus and Horace it was lawful to introduce the metres of the ,^Eolian Muse into the Roman tongue ; if Dante was able to enrich Tuscan poetry with the care rime of Provence ; if Chiabrera and Rinuc- cini might add to its wealth the verse-forms of France, I ought in reason to be able to hope that for what constituted the praise of the great poets and verse- makers I have mentioned, I should at least be granted a pardon. I ask pardon also for having believed that the classical revival of lyric measures was not condemned and finally brought to an end, with the more unpoetical experiments of Claudio Tolomei and his school, and the slender attempts of Chiabrera. I crave pardon for not having despaired of our noble Italian tongue, believing it well fitted to do for itself what the German poets from Klopstock onwards have been doing with happy enough results for theirs ; and I beg to be forgiven for having dared to introduce into our modern lyric measures some little variety of form, in which respect they are not by any means so well off as some of us seem to imagine."]

LAMP after lamp how the lights go trooping, Stretching behind the trees, dreamily yonder : Through the branches adrip with the shower The light slants and gleams on the puddles.

Plaintively, shrilly, piercingly whistles

The engine hard by. Cold and grey are the heavens

Up above, and the Autumn morning

Ghostlike glimmers around me.

Oh quei fanali come s'inseguono accidiosi la dietro gli alberi, fra i rami stillanti di pioggia sbadigliando la luce su '1 fango !

Flebile, acuta, stridula fischia la vaporiera da presso. Plumbeo il cielo e il mattino d' auttmno come un grande fantasma 11' e intorno.

At the Station on an Autumn Morning. 69

Whither and whence move the people hurrying Into dark carriages, muffled and silent ? To what sorrows unknown are they rushing — Long tortures of hopes that will tarry?

You too, oh fair one, are dreamily holding Your ticket now for the guard's sharp clipping — Ah, so clips Time, ever relentless, Joys, memories, and years that are golden.

Far-stretching the dark train stands, and the workmen Black-capped, up and down keep moving like shadows; In his hand bears each one a lantern, And each one a hammer of iron.

And the iron they strike sends a hollow resounding Mournful ; and out of the heart and echo Mournfully answers — a sudden Dull pang of regret that is weary.

Now the hurrying slam of the doors grows insulting And loud, and scornful the rapidly-sounding Summons to start and delay not : — The rain dashes hard on the windows.

Puffing, shuddering, panting, the monster Now feels life stir in its limbs of iron, And opens its eyes, and startles The dim far space with a challenge.

Then on moves the evil thing, horribly trailing Its length, and, beating its wings, bears from me

Dove e a che move questa che affrettasi a i carri oscuri ravvolta e tacita gente ? a che ignoti dolori o tormente di speme lontana ?

Tu pur pensosa, Lidia, la tessera al secco taglio dai de la guardia, e al tempo incalzante i belli anni dai, gl' istanti gioiti e i ricordi.

Van lungo il nero convoglio e vengono incappucciati di nero i vigili, com' ombre ; una fioca lanterna harnio, e mazze di ferro : ed i ferrei

freni tentati rendono un lugubre rintocco lungo : di fondo a 1' anima un' eco di tedio risponde doloroso, che spasimo pare.

E gli sportelli sbattuti al chiudere paiono oltraggi : scherno par 1' ultimo appello che rapido suona : grossa scroscia su' vetri la pioggia.

Gia il mostro conscio di sua metallica anima sbuffa, crolla, ansa, i fiammei occhi sbarra ; immane pe'l buio gitta il nschio che spida lo spazio.

Va 1' empio mostro : con traino orribile sbattendo 1' ale gli amor miei portasi.

70 At the Station on an Autumn Morning.

My love — and her face and her farewell Are lost to me now in the darkness.

O sweet face flushed with the palest of roses !

0 starlike eyes so peaceful ! O forehead Pure -shining and gentle, with tresses Curling so softly around it !

The air with a passionate life was a tremble, And summer was glad when she smiled to greet me ; The young sun of June bent earthward And kissed her soft cheek in his rapture.

Full 'neath the nut-brown hair he kissed her — But though his beauty and splendour might circle Her gentle presence — far brighter The glory my thoughts set around her.

There in the rain, in the dreary darkness

1 turn me, and with them would mingle my being ; I stagger ; then touch myself grimly — •

Not yet as a ghost am I moving.

0 what a falling of leaves, never-ending, Icy, and silent, and sad, on my spirit !

1 feel that forever around me

The earth has grown all one November.

Better to be without sense of existence — Better this gloom, and this shadow of darkness. Would I, ah, would I were sleeping A dull sleep that lasted forever.

Ahi, la bianca faccia e'l bel velo salutando scompar ne la tenebra.

0 viso dolce di pallor roseo,

o stellanti occhi di pace, o Candida

tra' floridi ricci inchinata

pura fronte con atto soave !

Fremea la vita nel tepid' aere, fremea 1' estate quando mi arrisero ; e il giovine sole di giugno si piacea di baciar luminoso.

In tra i riflessi del crin castanei la molle guancia : come un' aureola piu belli del sole i miei sogni ricingean la persona gentile.

Solto la pioggia, fra la caligine

torno ora, e ad esse vorrei confondermi ;

barcollo 'com' ebro, e mi tocco,

non anch' io fossi dunque un fantasma.

Oh qual caduta di foglie, gelida, continua, muta, greve, su 1' anima ! Io credo che solo, che sterno, che per tutto nel mondo e uovembre.

Meglio a chi '1 senso smarri de 1" essere, meglio quest' ombra, questa caligine ; io voglio io voglio adagiarmi in un tedio che duri infinite.

H. COURTHOPE BOWEN.

71

REVIEW OF THE MONTH.

IT is possible, though we are still un- willing to think it probable, that before these pages are published, the country may find itself committed either ac- tually to a great war, or to a position of suspended relations not far removed from war. For the last three weeks the public mind has undergone endless fluctuations between hope and appre- hension. To-day the mercury stands at its lowest in the glass. Ministers have demanded a vote of credit for six and a half millions for special prepara- tions. The demand was made with phrases of ominous gravity. The Russian government is believed to be holding its ground stiffly. To attempt now to forecast the outcome is not much better than waste of time. The result depends upon men at St. Peters- burg, in the Caucasus, at Pul-i-Khisti, at Cabul, but above all at St. Peters- burg. The best-informed people in England have very little trustworthy knowledge of the play of parties round the Czar. In lack of that, it is impossible to calculate the future with any reasonable confidence.

Anything comes easier to men than suspension of judgment ; and the graver the issue, the greater the readiness to hurry to a decision. The necessary uncertainty as to most of the facts of the Russo-Afghan crisis is partly answerable for the excitement of the last month. The ferment of opinion is constantly found in the inverse proportion to knowledge. Doubt as to the rights and wrong of the affair of the Khushk River increases public irritation; perhaps, if we knew the worst, we should take a calmer view of it than is possible while the mate- rial for judgment is so disputable and obscure. Fixed prepossessions rush in to fill the vacuum, and standing anti- pathies do duty for deliberate judg-

ment. All that is part of human nature ; it is idle to moralise over it.

Since we last wrote, this dangerous incident on the Khushk has taken place, and it will undoubtedly be taken materially to alter the case, and to alter it seriously for the worse. Until Kornaroff's attack upon the Afghans, the difference between the two Governments turned upon ques- tions of delimitation, debateable zones, and disputable frontiers. From such issues as these it was hardly pos- sible that war should arise, unless either of the two countries was de- liberately bent upon war. Negotia- tion in Europe would have settled the zone of survey, commissioners would have pursued their investiga- tions within it, and if agreement had been impossible, the matter was one eminently fitted for prompt decision by a neutral umpire. But the conflict at Pul-i-khisti raises a more delicate issue. And that is not all. That such a conflict should have occurred, in itself goes no small way towards showing that one of the two parties to the dispute has resolved either to have his own way, or else to make a quarrel of it. We have now the two versions of the story — not indeed in the most explicit shape imaginable, but suffi- ciently so to enable us to shape a decently satisfactory judgment — and it seems hard for any impartial per- son to avoid the conclusion that General Komaroff, presumably acting under orders from Donkakof-Korsa- kof or some other official superior, did enter upon a provocative course of proceedings, whatever that may ultimately amount to on a general survey of the whole situation. Even if we confine ourselves to the special pleas adduced by the Russians, their case is less than dubious and equivo-

72

Eemew of the Month.

cal. They are suspiciously vague. General Lumsden's story is precise. The Afghans had held a position on the left or west bank of the Khushk before March 17th. The Russian out- posts had never been nearer than a mile to Pul-i-Khisti ; Komaroff, for no reasons that have yet been made public, pushed forward 3,000 of his men face to face with the Afghans. This is an unexplained circumstance, and it is the key to the rest. As a consequence of that, the Afghans proceeded to strengthen their outposts, under " the military necessity of ex- tending their defensive position." On March 27th the Russians, still ignor- ant of the truce, of which they are alleged not to have heard until the next day, made a reconnaissance, which could evidently have no friendly object, whatever the excuse for it may have been. What is the explanation again of this reconnais- sance? Alikhanoff said it was a pleasure - trip ; but a pleasure - trip which took him with a force four miles south of the extreme point where he had any right to be, was a provocation and a source of just alarm to the Afghans. It is surely no wonder that a proceeding of such a kind on the part of such a man as Alikhanoff pro- duced a commotion. The next day the Afghans occupied a height com- manding one of the flanks of the Russian camp, to give notice of further movements, but their post was withdrawn again on the day following (29th). Meanwhile, the Afghans from the time of the advance of the Russians in force to Ak Tapa, had, in the words of Lumsden as quoted by the Prime Minister, " thrown out vedettes to their front and extended their pickets to Pul-i-Khisti, on the left bank of the Khushk, and gradu- ally strengthened it until on the 30th, the bulk of their force had been trans- ferred across the river. In his opinion, that does not properly constitute an advance, but was the occupation of a more advantageous position." This, of course, is the crux of the Afghan

case. Was their transfer of the bulk of their force across the river an offensive or a defensive measure, justified by Komaroff's advance, Ali khanoff's pleasure-trip, and the rest ? We do not see how there can be two opinions about that, among English- men who retain their capacity for reasonable judgment.

Now came the catastrophe. " On the 30th," says Komaroff, " to support my demands, I marched with my detach- ment against the Afghan position, counting still on pacific result, but artillery fire and cavalry attack com- pelled me to accept combat." In plain English, the Russians advanced to attack the Afghan position, and the Afghans were obliged to defend them- selves. In what possible sense a general marching out with force against a position could count on a pacific result, it is hard to guess. Such a sentence inevitably rouses suspicion. At the best, it is highly unsatisfactory to find a commander, instead of definite military statements, falling back upon general words like audacity and arrogance. But let that pass. Let pass Komaroff's account of the successive steps between his ad- vance in force and the final rout of the Afghans. Why did he advance in force at all 1 If the Russians had been sincere in their desire for a settlement with us, it could never have been sanctioned. There seems to be no reason whatever for discrediting the allegation of a correspondent with Sir Peter Lumsden. " The long and short of the matter is that the Russians believed that it was indis- pensable to deal a telling blow at the Afghans, if the Muscovite prestige, waning of late in the Turcoman country, was to be effectually restored, and as there was no justification for breaking the truce, a pretext had to be invented. The attitude of our allies was, in fact, studiously mode- rate. There is absolutely no colour for the pretence that their movements were irritating, much less aggres- sive."

Review of the Month.

73

What is serious in this, if, as we ex- pect, it be the true interpretation of what has happened, is the temper and the policy that it indicates. It means that the Russian war party has got the bit between its teeth, and is indif- ferent either to comity or concord. We may minimise the incident as much as we please, but it is childish to minimise the practical moral of it.

So far all seems to be only too clear. But it is at this point — even if it be carried from a presumption to a de- monstration that the Russian officers acting under orders were guilty of an " unprovoked aggression " — that an embarrassing suspicion comes into men's minds. On the special issue, England is in the right. If we were thirsting for a fight with Russia ; if we were prepared at all arms and with one or more effective allies ; if we saw clearly how we were going to get at Russia, and to prevent her from ever doing us any more mischief ; 'and if we thoroughly understood how a defeat of Russia's present designs would secure our Indian frontier for a long period — then the attack on the Afghans and their rout would, as the world goes, be a very tenable plea for demanding impossible reparations and despatching desperate ultimatums. We venture to think that some of the advocates of peace conduct their case very badly in blinking all the facts and probabilities that make for what we may call the English view of the case. There is no virtue in being unfair, even to one's own countrymen. On the special issue, we repeat, it seems to us that in com- plaining of Komaroff 's action, England has right on her side. But can it be possible that she is in the right, after placing herself in an essentially false position? That is the troublesome misgiving. The Russians may be as unscrupulous as possible ; but are we putting ourselves at the strongest point for resisting them] Do we start from a coign of vantage? The position may be a false one in various respects. Perhaps it was a mistake to accompany the Boundary Commis-

sioner with what captious people might consider an excessive military escort. Was it prudent — if you intended not to pass beyond a policy of reasonable conciliation — to have all that blowing of trumpets at Rawul Pindi ? Again, if we look at it more largely, our Afghan policy may be a mistaken policy on the merits. If not, if we are to fight Russia for the line of the Afghan frontier, we may not have made either the military or the diplomatic preparations that would on that alternative have been prudent or in- dispensable. In either of these cases we are in a false position, and in spite of our being right about the raid of the Khushk river, we have given the advantage to our adversary.

The difficulties of the case are well known, and they are hard to match. We have pledged ourselves to defend the territory of the Ameer; yet the Ameer has warned us that the people who live in it suspect and hate us ; that if we enter it, we shall probably have a rising of our trusty allies against us ; and that if we attempt to get a force into Herat, perhaps even if we only send a few British officers, the Heratis will declare against both us and the Ameer himself. We have, again, more or less definitely committed ourselves to the inclusion of this spot and that within the Afghan frontier. Then the Ameer suddenly warns us that he cannot hold them, nor be responsible for them, and that he does not want them, and we are left planted. But, if it be shown — so some will argue — that the right line on which to resist Russian projects for the invasion of India be the line of Herat and the Oxus, it would then be our business to make short work of our trusty allies, by reducing Afghan- istan to the pacific condition of the Punjaub. Perhaps ; but as we have found out twice before now, this would be much more easily said than done, and would cost an enormous sum of money, which the Indian finances are singularly unprepared to support. Sup- posing this difficulty to be met, another

74

Review of the Month.

question has been put by a writer who knows what he is talking about.

"What," asks Mr. Archibald Forbes, "con- stitutes the strategical reasoning or the neces- sity for the conversion of Afghanistan into a British province ? The present frontier line is penetrable but at four points by an enemy in any strength, and demands to be watched at only those four points. The frontier of Afghanistan looking towards Turkestan is much more open to an enemy ; we should have to picket it all along the line from the march with Persia to the Hindoo Koosh, even on the assumption that Russia would respect Persian soil. And to hold this line, and main- tain reserves in its rear, would lengthen to a portentous extent our line of communications from our base in India. That base could not be shifted forward into Afghanistan, because Afghanistan is a country unfruitful in supplies for the maintenance of armies. We might mitigate this condition, it is true, by strategi- cal railways, but at what a cost, and what a barren and even wanton cost when the alter- native is regarded ! We are a strange people. We are ever forward ; and the paradox is that we are forward because of funk. We have been guilty of a similar daring panic in regard to the Soudan, and have struggled up through the Nubian desert to get at our foe, instead of affably placing the luxury of that experience at that foe's disposal."

So strong and plain are considera- tions of this kind, that we find at the back of the minds of nearly every- body of the; warlike school, whether in England or Anglo-India, a very curi- ous impression. They all really assume as the essential condition of the dura- tion of Afghanistan as a buffer-state, not only that we shall have had a war with Russia, but that at the end of it, the war shall leave Russia driven back to the Caspian, broken, destroyed, and perhaps partitioned. In other words, the advocates of the buff er-state prac- tically give up their case by postulating as a condition precedent that the Power against which it was to have been a buffer shall have* in effect disappeared. If any man believes this, that England, not at the head of a European coalition, but alone, with- out Austria or France or even Turkey, is going to " smash Russia up " — to use the language of eight years ago — he is in a state of mind in which fact and reason have no bearings.

This, however, is not the time for

discussing things at large. If it should be the case that we have taken up what is substantially a false posi- tion, how are we to get -out of it? That question is not easy to answer. But it is safe to say that war, waged under such conditions as seem to be imposed upon us by our European relations and our other engagements in various parts of the world, seems the least promising of all possible modes of extrication. That it would be popular at first, there is little doubt* The Russian government is profoundly disliked and distrusted in this country, as it ought to be. That was the sentiment that suddenly turned public feeling round from Mr. Gladstone in the autumn and winter of 1876 to Lord Beaconsfield by the summer of 1877. There is a strong impression that Russia has long played fast and loose with her engagements in respect to Central Asia. This may be a prejudice, but it exists. The old brutalities of Russia in Poland and her malign intervention against Hungary are not forgotten : people are not even willing to set off against them the benevolent intervention against Turkish misrule in the Balkan Peninsula. But the favour with which war would be at first regarded could only endure if the case were a thoroughly good case all round, re- gard being had to the great contin- gencies of the future, no less than to the narrow emergencies of the present. We have still to hear what such a case would be.

Undoubtedly one of the most for- midable embarrassments of the central government arises from the pressure that is brought to bear upon it from the extremities and the frontier. Each province feels, judges, and acts as if the imperial authority had no other concern and no rival demand on its resources. Australia insists that we shall annex New Guinea for her, and New Zealand is as keen for Samoa. From Hong Kong we are told (April llth) that " Lord Northbrook's state- ment as to the defences of Singapore

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and the general disinclination of the Government to expend money on the navy and on our colonial defences have created an angry feeling." In India the military and official classes are wild with bellicose excitement, and their deliverances are quoted by the Excitables here, as if the opinion of Simla and Calcutta must be decisive. " For a month past/' we are solemnly told, " it has been commonly believed here (Calcutta) that the Russian object is solely to gain time to push up troops and supplies ; and the Ministry is often blamed for not having sent, in the beginning of March, an ultimatum, giving Russia a fixed time to choose peace or war." As if people at Cal- cutta had one bit better means of judging these grave matters than are possessed by decently-informed people in London. And as if they had not shown exactly the same temper and the same confidence when they de- clared enthusiastically in favour of the policy of the Afghan invasion of 1879 — a policy for which nobody now finds a word to say, and which at any rate was essentially different from the policy that finds favour to-day.

Out of all this evil one piece of good at least has come. The wretched series of mistakes that began with the despatch of General Gordon to Khar- toum, and reached a climax in the resolution in February last to de- stroy the power of the Mahdi at that place, is to be brought to an end. We are to hear no more of offensive operations in the Soudan, or of military preparations with a view to an early advance upon Khar- toum. The whole of that uncommonly bad debt is to be written off as soon as ever circumstances will permit. The whole of the objects which the Govern- ment announced on February 19th have vanished into limbo. The rescue of the persons to whom Gordon felt himself honourably bound — the possi- bility of establishing some orderly government in Khartoum — the im- possibility of excluding the slave

trade from our view — the question of aid to the Egyptian garrisons in the Soudan — are all clean gone, as they may well go. And the most wonderful thing is that the very jour- nals that were most violent against ' ' scuttling,"now assert with an adorable calm, which some have mistaken for consummate impudence, that they never were in favour of anything but scuttle, and that it is cruel calumny to say otherwise. Yet it was precisely these journals which fabricated the "public opinion" that, according to Lord Rosebery, made it impossible for the Government to adopt any policy save that which has to-day been mercilessly flung overboard amid loud and almost universal acclama- tions. Oh, vain minds of men ! 0 pectora caeca ! Let us pass on with what composure we may to other matters.

The royal visit to Ireland, and the more important circumstance that the question of renewing the Crimes' Act will have to be dealt with shortly after Whitsuntide, are once more bringing Ireland back to its familiar place in the foreground of politics. On the royal visit, the only remark to be made is that up to this moment it has been singularly devoid of incidents of real significance. Even in those quarters of Dublin which are most hostile to the English connection, the Prince was received with respect if not with accla- mation. In Cork, his progress was short and rapid, but there were symptoms that if it had been much longer the demonstration would not have been more agreeable. At Mallow, Mr. O'Brien, who represents a perfectly honest though passionate hatred of English misrule in Ireland, and who had been provoked by a foolish challenge in the Times, attempted to organize a Nationalist demonstration as the Royal party passed through the sta- tion. The police interfered, the Nation- alists were driven out of the station, and another grievance was added to the list. The Prince of Wales is known

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to be as manly as any other of the Queen's subjects, and perhaps it would have done no harm if a band or two had been allowed to play God Save Ireland in his hearing. It would at least have given more reality and an air of business to the whole affair.

To make any fuss about the success of the Prince's visit, or to raise a cry of triumph as the more silly of the Loyalists have been inclined to do, is perfectly futile. Mr. Parnell's power is the great thing, and this power seems to stand exactly where it did. Until the time comes when the in- fluence of the Irish leader can be as- sociated with executive responsibility in some shape or other, though the Prince's visit is extremely honourable to his own public spirit, there is no change in the hard facts of the situation.

Oddly enough, as it appears, the visit of the Prince has for some reason or another brought into cir- culation again the idea of abolishing the office of his host, the Viceroy. Nor is this circulation limited to irresponsible gossip. As everybody knows, Lord John Russell brought in a Bill for that purpose in 1850. As everybody does not know, but as some believe, Lord Spencer himself turned his thoughts in the same direction during his previous tenure of the most thankless of all public posts. On the other hand, Mr. Justin McCarthy brought in a Bill two years ago for abolishing the ofiice of Viceroy, and enacting that the Chief Secretary should always be the representative of an Irish constituency. The debate of 1883 was very brief, but it was not without interesting features. Mr. Trevelyan, after enumerating the vari- ous duties imposed by statute and custom upon the Lord-Lieutenant, wound up by declaring it to be obvious that no one but a man well acquainted with Ireland, and constantly resident there, could perform such multifarious functions. Of course it must have occurred to every one who listened, that Lord Cowper, who had filled a

post that required acquaintance with Ireland during a most critical period, was not acquainted with that country at all. As much might be said of most of the Viceroys since the Union. A further question put by Mr. Tre- velyan was — How could all these duties be discharged by a gentleman in an office at Storey's Gate, with a seat in the House of Commons, or by an offi- cial who was hurrying backwards and forwards between London and Dublin ? But an Irish official of great experience and with the most intimate familiarity with the working of the administrative machine, and who was, if we mistake not, Mr. Trevelyan's own private secre- tary, has just published an article, in which he contends that in many of the most important departments of the State, the Viceroy has no authority to interfere ; that these are the departments in which there is least friction and least agitation against them ; that, so far as the duties of the Viceroy are exercised in conjunction with the Irish Privy Council, they are of a kind that might easily be exercised partly by the English Council and partly by the Home Secretary ; that the most important patronage is already in the hands of the Crown, and that there is no peculiarity about the little that is left, such as demands the inter- vention of a deputy of the Crown ; that the various departments under the control and management of the Viceroy — prisons, fisheries, lunatic asylum, the registrar-general — are strictly analo- gous to the same department in England, and need no special supervision ; that the privilege of pardoning offenders and mitigating sentences, which has brought Lord Spencer into such odium, might just as well be transferred to the Home Secretary, as indeed is already done in the case of an Irish convict who chances to be deported to an English prison. But then the duties connected with the preservation of peace and order? The Viceroy has direct control over the military forces known as the Constabulary and the Dublin Metropolitan Police, and he can

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call on the military for aid ; he directs the movements of the seventy and more resident magistrates ; he has extraordinary powers of quartering and charging extra police, of restricting the possession of fire-arms, of prohibit- ing meetings, and so forth. There is no reason whatever, says Mr. Jephson, why these duties should not be dis- charged by a Secretary of State. "Supposing, for the sake of illustra- tion and argument, that certain counties in England were to become disturbed, and were ultimately to burst out into rebellion, it would be preposterous to imagine that a Viceroy would be created specially to restore order. Yet what would be universally acknowledged as preposterous in the one case, is in actual operation in the other, and people do not recognise the incongruity."

The Duke of Wellington's objection, which upset Lord John Russell's Bill for abolishing the Viceroyalty, was founded on the necessity for co-opera- tion between the civil and military authorities in case of popular dis- turbance. It would never do, argued the Duke, to give any Irish agitator who might happen to be Lord Mayor that voice in military arrangements which is now safely given to the Viceroy. This contingency Mr. Jephson would provide against by giving the lord mayor or the mayor only a voice among the other magistrates ; or else by entrusting the stipendiary magis- trates of the district with the duty of conferring with the military authorities as to the proposed arrangements.

It is not necessary to argue out the case here. What is remarkable is that an official of the hated Castle should agree with Mr. Parnell's friends. Mr. O'Brien, for instance, told the House of Commons that whatever else were the results of the abolition of the Viceroyalty, he believed the people of England and of Ireland would be able to understand one another better ; the Viceroy was neither sovereign nor subject, but the director of a vast network of secret and irresponsible

power of all kinds. Mr. Gray, how- ever, resisted the proposal as remov- ing a certain recognition of Irish nationality, and reducing Ireland still more completely to the condition of an English province ; what he desired was to see a Viceroy independent of party, like a colonial governor, ap- pointed for a term and not going out on a change of administration.

With these differences of view within the ranks of the party which must have an increasing share in settling Irish matters, we need be in no hurry to make up our minds. At first sight, it would seem that any change which tended towards the de- localisation of the Irish executive was retrograde, and counter to the domi- nant forces of the hour. What you want is, if possible, and so far as possi- ble, both to localise and to nationalise the executive.

The tiresome operations and nego- tiations of France and China have come, for the moment at any rate, to a sudden and dramatic end. The French arms suffered a reverse, and the very day after the unpleasant news reached Paris, the Chamber, by an overwhelming majority, and with every circumstance of passion and contumely, destroyed the Ministry. In the elegant phrase of an Irrecon- cilable journalist, three hundred pairs of boots kicked M. Ferry out of doors. The scene was profoundly unedifying. The Chamber had supported the policy up to the last moment. What hap- pened at Lang-Son was a mere military incident of the policy : the Minister was in no sense responsible for it ; the deputies and the public were only half-informed about it. The action must be pronounced vindictive, pre- cipitate, and unmanly. M. Ferry has not shown so much consideration for this country, that we are not able to bear his disgrace with a reasonable degree of Christian fortitude. But from the point of view of equity, his case was hard, and from the point of governmental stability in the

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Republic, there is much to deplore in the dismissal of the only decently stable administration that the Re- public has yet had. M. Ferry came into power in February, 1883. Neither Thiers nor Gambetta had so long a Ministerial life. After the sudden fall of M. Ferry, his predecessor, M. de Freycinet, made a laborious attempt to form an administration. But all his persevering negotiations and inge- nious combinations could not overcome the exigencies of some and the suscep- tibilities of others. Each group was more intent upon its special interest than on the working success of the whole. No strong sense of the neces- sity of union prevailed among the different sections, in face either of the enemy in the East, or the circum- stances of the approaching elections at home. A combination of the vari- ous Republican groups was effected, not however with even the silent approval of the least extreme of the Extreme Left, but at the eleventh ,hour new pretensions were raised, and all fell to pieces. The President next applied in succession to two personages whose names are hardly worth remem- bering. One refused without trying the experiment, and the other tried but failed. Then the idea was favoured of what the French call a Ministry of Business, corresponding very much to King George III.'s cherished system of • government by departments, as distinguished from government with the collective re- sponsibility of a Cabinet. But this plan was speedily dismissed, and eventually a Cabinet was formed by M. Brisson. He had been one of the leading men of the Radical Left, until the post of President of the Chamber imposed neutrality upon him. M. Ferry represented the great group of the Republican Union, and as the Radical Left is a shade more advanced, the substitution of M. Brisson marks a move, whatever it may ultimately amount to, still further in the Radical direction. In the same way, the post of President of the Chamber, vacated

by M. Brisson, was filled by M. Flo- quet, the nominee of the Radical Left in co-operation with the Extreme Left.

The most unsatisfactory feature in the arrangement for us in England is the return of M. de Freycinet to the Foreign Office ; a shifty egoist, who behaved shabbily in the negotiations about Dulcigno, Greece, and Egypt, and who may be trusted to lose no chance of wiping out his old Egyptian disgraces by new pretensions. While he was trying to form a Ministry of his own, he invited M. Spuller to join him. " I desire," he told M. Spuller, " to form a Ministry of energetic action abroad, and conciliation at home." A policy of energetic action abroad is about the most unpromising flag that could be unfurled at the French Foreign Office. The first effect has been felt in an alleged threat to send the French fleet to Alexandria, if we do not make reparation to the printer of the Bosphore Egyptien. If the French fleet is sent there on any such business, we predict that either three hundred pairs of boots will send M. Freycinet after M. Ferry, or else that some millions of electors before the summer is over will know the reason why.

Meanwhile, the military event that had made Paris lose its head, had no such effect upon the victors. With a grave self-possession from which fire- eating simpletons on the boulevards and in Pall Mall might take a lesson, the Chinese Government went on with negotiations for peace. The precise nature of these is still the subject of some mystification. The French Go- vernment were not so unwise as to insist either on washing off the stain of defeat in further bloodshed, or on the exaction of an indemnity which China would practically never have paid, and which would have kept up dangerous friction where it is the interest of the French in Tonkin to have a tranquil and friendly neighbour.

The bad impression that had been made by the circumstances of the fall of M. Ferry, made itself felt in a gain

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for the Anti-Republicans in depart- mental elections a fortnight after. The gain was extremely slight, but it has sufficed to put a little heart into both Orleanists and Bonapart- ists. The Republicans will be exposed to a severe test when the general election comes. That election will be held under the new system of scrutin- de-liste. Just as we are resorting to the single-member district, the French are exchanging the single- member dis- trict for the departmental ticket. "Will the Republican party concentrate its forces? Will the various shades unite on common lists, on which each shall be represented ? Or will each group insist on submitting a list of its own particular colour, and so run the risk by division of letting in the monarchical enemy? Will the Mode- rate compromise himself by figuring in the same list with the Radical, and will the Radical decline to march under the same flag as the Oppor- tunist ? It is too early in the cam- paign yet to judge whether the fatal tendencies of French parties towards internecine conflict will once more prevail, or will at last be overcome by counsels of moderation and good sense. As we have said, M. Brisson represents a coalition of the groups to the Left. Some shrewd prophets, however, pre- dict that before two months are over he will be caught between the exi- gencies of his allies of the hour and the attacks of the Right, and driven to lean for solid support on the old majority of the Opportunists and the Republican Union.

Prince Bismarck's seventieth birth- day was celebrated with demonstra- tions of enthusiasm by his countrymen, which all the rest of Europe very well understands even though not quite ready to share in it. The triumphant Chancellor received thousands of letters and hundreds of telegrams ; his door was encumbered with gifts ; the aged Emperor, his master, visited and em- braced him with tears in his eyes; and an ancestral estate was bought

back and presented to him out of a munificent national subscription from Germans all over the world. The re- collection of old feuds and griefs, not yet extinct, was brought back by the attitude of some of the States of Southern Germany. They declared that they had expected the patriotic subscription to be used for some great commemorative national work, and not as a personal donation to a Minister who had already substantial marks of public favour in the grants of 1866 and 1871. A compromise was hit upon by devoting the surplus, after the purchase of the Schbnhausen estate, to some national purpose to be indi- cated by Prince Bismarck ; but some of the committees in Bavaria and elsewhere refused to be pacified and held back their money.

Prince Bismarck has been fifty years in the service of his State. King Leopold II. was born just fifty years ago, and Brussels has celebrated the event with official rejoicings, which have been described as showing on the part of the population the affection of reason rather than a delirium of the heart. The passions that were raised by the political events of September last are lulled, but not quite extinct. The Liberals are rapidly recovering from their unjust anger at the King's refusal to violate the constitution by withholding his assent from an Education Bill that had been approved by Parliament ; and most Belgians, whether Clerical or Liberal, feel a certain modest satisfaction at the position in which the King placed their little country at the Conference in respect of the Congo.

A hundred years ago it was a favourite dream among en- lightened people that if statesmen could only confer the gift of free government on nations the reign of orderly progress would have come, and civil confusions would be no more. Yet so hard has it been found to establish constitutions that will march and work, that constitutional reform is everywhere the work of the hour.

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As we have said, an electoral change of the utmost gravity has just been effected in France, and in Great Britain too. A curious identity marks the problems of modern Europe. The Table of Magnates, or Upper House of Hungary, contains 800 mem- bers, of whom as a rule not more than one-tenth are found to take part in its proceedings. But last year it awoke from its slumber in order to defeat the Ministerial: measure in regard to mixed marriages. This sally of reactionary life made re- form necessary, and changes in the composition of the Table are now in progress. The body is not exclusively hereditary, but includes certain digni- taries, as well as thirty nominees .of the Crown for life. Nobody seems to expect that the new reforms will make the Magnates either much more or much less in accord with the Liberal- ism of the Chamber, but a curious social result may very likely follow. One of the provisions is that a heredi- tary Magnate must possess lands that pay a direct annual contribution of about three hundred pounds sterling a year. This, it is said, will encourage marriages for money, and so will in- crease the political influence of capi- talists— in other words of Jews, whose daughters (duly baptised) will be sought by the Magnates in marriage.

Again, like the Hungarian Table of Magnates and the British Parliament, the Swiss National Council has been discussing electoral reform and new registration Bills. It is proposed to require thirty days of domicile before putting a voter's name on the register ; if a bankrupt seeks to be restored to his electoral privilegs, he must show that his failure was due to ill-fortune and not to misconduct ; if a man is in receipt of public relief, in some cantons he loses his vote, in others not, and this variety of practice will probably remain. Among other proposals that

April 23.

strike the British politician as curious is one to make the vote compulsory ; and another to allow voting by proxy, as is already permitted in Zurich. Our old friends, too, the Cumulative and the Limited vote, which are in such dejected plight here, are almost lively in Switzerland. The discussion is adjourned, and the law will not be settled until the month of June.

In Denmark, parliamentary govern- ment has undergone, for the second time within eight years, what here we should regard as a dangerously rude shock. The two chambers which exist in Denmark as everywhere else save Greece — in superstitious deference to the English model — could not agree about the Budget. A deadlock fol- lowed, and the end of the financial year was close at hand. v The King prorogued the Rigsdag, and resorted to the curious expedient called the Provisorium. The Provisorium is a power conferred by the Danish consti- tution on the Sovereign, of levying taxes and duties, and authorising ex- penditure in case of emergency during which the chambers should chance not to be sitting. Obviously enough it was never designed that the chambers should be prorogued for the express purpose of making the device available. But as the provisional budget does not go beyond the limits within which the two chambers concur, no substantial harm is done in the special issue. That does not lessen the popular re- sentment. Not a single member of the Folksthing, or Lower House, went to congratulate the King on his birth- day ; great public meetings are being organised ; patriots will refuse to pay taxes that have not been voted by parliament ; then the aid of the courts will be invoked, and the tax-collector and the recalcitrant tax-payer will implead one another, with constitu- tional results not yet foreseen.

MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.

JUNE, 1885.

MRS. DYMOND.

CHAPTEE XIII. ABOUT PHEAISIE.

THE sound of children's footsteps pattering about the house is perhaps the sweetest music that has ever fallen on listening mothers' ears, or that their hearts have ever kept time to. When Susanna Dymond first heard her little Phraisie's merry heels stump- ing overhead her first waking hours seemed to brim over with happiness. The thought of her little one seemed to shine in her face, to beam from her eyes— some indescribable new charm was hers. She was shy, her beauty used to fade in the presence of strangers and uncongenial people ; it shone and gathered and brightened for those of her own home, for her husband, her step-children, her own little one. Small and young as Phraisie was, she seemed to fill the whole big house at Crowbeck from her early morning to her no less early evening, for Phraisie set with the sun in winter and went to roost in summertime with her favourite cocks and hens. She was a friendly, generous, companionable little soul. As soon as Phraisie was able to walk at all, it was her pleasure to trot up to the people she loved with little presents of her own contriv- ing, bits of string, precious crusts, portions of her toys, broken off for the purposes of her generosity. No. 308.— VOL. ui.

"Da," says she, stuffing a doll's leg into her big sister's hand.

Phraisie was rather bored when poor Tempy suddenly caught her up, hugged her passionately, kissed her.

" A-da-da-dad ; no, no," cries little sister, objecting and tearing out a handful of Tempy's red locks in self- defence.

Fayfay, as Phraisie called herself, was certainly one of the round pegs for which the round holes are wait- ing in the world — no hard sides, no square ill-fitting corners, but kind, soft nests, already lined with love and welcome. Miss Phraisie, perch- ing on her mother's knee, took it all as a matter of course. How could she, little baby that she was, guess at the tender wild love which throbbed in her mother's heart, at the wonder and delight her father felt as he gazed at his pretty shrine of home and motherhood, at the sweet wife, the round, happy, baby face, and the little legs and arms struggling with jolly exuberance ; and even old and wise and experienced as we are, and babies no longer, I wonder which of us could count up all the love which has been ours, all the fond looks, the tender, innocent pride which has been given. So Phraisie went her way, unem- barrassed by false humility.

Tempy was devoted to the child, and seemed to find her best companion- ship with that small and cheerful

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person. Tempy used to carry Fay- fay about in her arms all over the place, up into her room, oxit into the garden again, from the garden to the pigstye, from that fascinating spot to the poultry yard, where the chickens were picketing round about the chalets where their Cochin China mothers were confined, or to the stables where the puppies were squeaking in the straw. It would be hard to say, when the stable door opened, letting in the light and the crumbs of cake and Miss Phraisie and her capers, whether the puppies or Phraisie most enjoyed each other's society ; these youthful denizens of Crowbeck seemed made for one another. She was not very unlike a little curly puppy herself in her ways, confident, droll, eager, expecting the whole world, from her father down- ward, to have nothing better to do than to play with her, to hide behind doors and curtains, to go down on all fours if need be. Josselin was almost as devoted to her as Tempy, but for the first two years of Miss Phraisie's existence he was very little at home. The first year and a half after his father's marriage he spent at a private tutor's ; then came Cambridge and new interests and new life for the young man, while Tempy lived on still in the old life, and among the old thoughts and prospects. Phraisie was the one new life and interest in Crow- beck. For Tempy time did not efface old feelings, but only repeated those of the past more vividly each time. Perhaps her father took it for granted that because she was silent all was as he wished, and that she had ceased to think of Charles Bolsover, indeed one day he said as much with quiet satisfac- tion to Susanna, who looked a doubtful acquiescence. But Tempy was abso- lutely reserved about herself ; neither to her inquiring Aunt Fanny, nor to her step-mother would she say one word. I think Phraisie was the only person to whom Tempy Dyrnond ever made any confidences.

" Don't ty To-to," said Phraisie one day. " toz it's vezzy naughty." .

Tempy laughed, and began to play bo-peep behind the sheet of the Times which had made her cry ; it was a June day Times, with Oxford and Cambridge lists in its columns. Phraisie couldn't read, and had never heard of any prize poem, except per- haps " See-Saw, Margery Daw," or she might have seen that Charles Bolsover of St. Boniface, was the prize poet of the year.

It was later in the afternoon of that same summer's day, that the Dymond family, tempted out by the beauty of the weather, in company with numer- ous other families of the earth and the air and the water, might have been seen quietly walking by the field-way towards Bolsover Hall. A message had come up from Aunt Fanny, stat- ing that signs and tokens had arrived from the roving uncle, from the travel- ler— Peregrine Bolsover. These strange camphor-scented treasures used to ap- pear from time to time, giving some clue to the donor's travels, whereabouts and mode of existence. He hated writing and preferred this means of communi- cation with his friends. The colonel, who had business at Countyside and a dinner of county magnates at the Angel, meant to proceed thither by train after his visit to Bolsover, and the pony carriage had been ordered to fetch the ladies home at five o'clock. Poor Susy dreaded these tea-drinkings at Bolsover, but she could not always escape them.

Tempy was even more silent than usual, as she walked along the slope of the field, leading little Phraisie by the hand. At every step the child stooped to pick the heads of the delicate flowers that were sprink- ling the turf with purple and white and golden dust.

The colonel walked on with Su- sanna. The hour was full of ex- quisite peace and tranquillity, a sum- mer distance of gold moors and lilac fells was heaping against the pale blue heavens. As they cross the Crew- beck meadows (they lead by a short cut to the garden of the Hall), the soft

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wind meets them blowing from across the lake and tossing the fragrance which still hangs from every hedge and bank and neighbouring cottage porch into their faces ; white roses in sweet clusters, lilies from adjacent cot- tage gardens scent the highways ; a little stream dashes across watering the green meadows on either side, and Phraisie laughing and chattering is lifted over. The June fields are sumptuous with flowers and splendid weeds. Foxgloves stand in stately phalanx, full beds of meadow-sweet are waving, the blue heads of the for- get-me-not cover the water's edge. A broad plank crosses the bubbling rivu- let, and leads to the upslope and to the Bolsover farm beyond, where the cows are browsing or looking over the low walls that enclose their bounda- ries ; a colony of ducks comes down to the water from under the farm gate, waddling, with beautiful white breasts. " Dook, dook, pity 'itty quack- quacks, papa, ,/Jook," cries Phraisie, setting off after her parents ; and the colonel stops and looks at ducks with an interest he has not felt for half a century, while Susy, smiling, stands gazing at her little blue- eyed naturalist.

At Bolsover Hall Miss Phraisie was a no less important member of the family than at Orowbeck Place. The good-natured squire delighted in visits from the little creature. He used to waylay her as she was walking up the avenue to the hall door, and bring her by the back-way into his private room, where he used to detain her by many interesting and rapidly following ex- periments—the click of pistols, red balls from the billiard table, whips, spurs, shiny noisy whirling objects of every possible description, until pre- sently Mrs. Bolsover would appear, followed by a couple of Aunt Fanny's dogs, with a " Baby, baby, don't dis- turb your uncle ; " and then the fickle Phraisie, starting off in pursuit, would forget her uncle's past atten- tions, and leave him panting, but tidy as ever, to put by all the many charm-

ing objects he had produced for her benefit.

It would be difficult to imagine any- thing less congruous than the squire and his favourite gun-room, where he spent so many peaceful hours. It might have seemed at first view a terrific apartment. A death's head and cross-bones (stuck up by Charlie Bolsover) ornament the top of the old- fashioned clock. Along the fire-place nothing more terrible than a row of pipes' heads might be seen hanging from pegs, but everywhere upon the walls were murderous weapons shining in their places, revolvers, crossed foils and fencing implements. A great curling sword, all over orna- ments and flourishes, hung over the comfortable leather sofa cushions, where Uncle Bolsover loved to doze away the hours. The colonel had brought the sword back from India as a gift for the pacific little squire.

Day after day Uncle Bolsover used to go peacefully off to sleep over his Times, among all these trophies and ruthless weapons of destruction. There he lies to-day slumbering tranquilly, with a pair of boxing gloves hanging just over his round bald head ; the tranquillity, the soothing sunshine, all contribute to his happy dreams. The squire has earned his repose. He has been all the morning unpack- ing the huge case which has come jogging up from the other side of the world, whence Peregrine Bolsover, having heard of Colonel Dymond's marriage, has despatched an extra crate full of traveller's gifts to his family at home. He had heard the news from his sister Fanny, whose flowing streams of correspondence contrived to reach the wanderer even in those distant countries which he frequented, countries so far away, so little known, that it seemed as if they had been expressly created for his use. The gifts are of a generous, incon venient, and semi- barbarous character : elephants' tusks, rude strings of teeth, and gold beads for the bride ; carved

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ostrich eggs for the colonel ; a price- less bamboo strung with the spine bones of some royal dynasty for Mrs. Bolsover ; various daggers wrapped in rough paper, and marked "poison — very dangerous," for the squire ; a Spanish leather saddle all embroidered for Charlie, besides several gods of various religions and degrees of hide- ousness. Gratitude, natural bewil- derment, and hopeless confusion raise up mixed emotions in the family on receiving these tokens of their absent member's affection. The squire having conscientiously unpacked the chest, ranged the various objects round the room, and put the daggers safely in the cupboard out of the way, feels that he has earned his afternoon's siesta. As he sleeps the idoor opens gently, and a pale handsome young man comes in quietly. By his rings, by his black curls, by his shiny shoes and red silk stockings, it is easy to recog- nise Charlie Bolsover restored to his usual health and spirits, and profiting by his newly-gained honours and by the first days of his long vacation to come off uninvited, and even under prohibition, to the place where he is always returning in spirit.

" Good heavens ! Charlie," says Uncle Bolsover, waking up with a start.

" Aunt Fanny sent me in to wake you up, Uncle Bol," said Charlie, with a smile. " She says I may stay."

CHAPTER XIV.

UNDEE THE CEDAR TREES.

THE colonel and his wife had been met at the door, and told that the ladies were at tea in the garden ; and without entering the house or visit- ing the gun-room on their way, they passed by the side-gate that led to the velvet lawns, so greenly spread beneath the shade of those old trees which have always seemed to me the rightful owners of Bolsover Hall. The tea-table stood under a cedar which had sheltered three or four generations

of Bolsovers in turn, and which had seen grandparents and parents at play before Fanny Bolsover and her sister and her brothers had grown up from children. The eldest of the generation, Tempy's mother, the first Tempy, who married little Jacky Dymond, as the colonel was once called, was long since dead, and so was Charles, the youngest brother, the father of the present Charles. Peregrine, who came next to the squire, and who once climbed to the rook's nest on the upper boughs of the tallest cedar, was far away, and had returned no more to the old place. And the brilliant Fanny, the lovely spoiled girl who once thought all man- kind, all life was at her feet — was this what she had come to, this garish, affected woman, with her disappointed ambitions, her limited imaginations, her ostentatious cleverness, and domi- nating will. As for the good squire, in all his sixty years he has scarcely ever travelled beyond the shadow of his old trees, nor changed in heart since he first came out at the head of the brotherhood, to play hide and seek upon the lawn.

Miss Bolsover advanced to meet the little party — Susanna and Tempy, and Phraisie, running ahead, and Jacky Dymond, now sobered, sil- vered, settled, and no more like the youth she could remember than she resembled the Fanny - of forty years ago. Aunt Fanny was unusually gracious (so it, seemed to Susy). She sent the servant for a low table and a baby -chair for Phraisie ; she in- sisted on their remaining to tea ; she stirred and mixed milk and water, and divided sponge-cakes and straw- berries and cream with extra alacrity ; she would not hear of the colonel going into the house to look for the squire.

" We will leave poor Frederick to have his nap out," says Miss Bolsover ; " plenty of time, John, to see the presents. Do let us enjoy this*lovely afternoon in peace ! It is so good of poor dear Peregrine ; but I can't con- ceive what we are to do with all the eggs he sends home. Do look at that

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lovely effect of light upon the lake, Susanna ! What time is your train to Countyside, John ? Shall you call in on your way back? I hear Lord Neighborton is expected to speak. Poor you, you will have to propose his health. Little mademoiselle where are you going to 1 " in a high staccato voice. " Do keep the child quietly here and amused, Tempy dear. More strawberries, anybody ? Ah ! here comes Car from the schools. Well, Car, tired 1 What news ? When is the terrible inspector to come ? "

And Aunt Car wearily sinks down upon a chair, not without a benevolent iron grin of welcome to Phraisie, who runs straight up to her and climbs upon her knee and begins at once to pop strawberries into her mouth.

Miss Bolsover, for some reason or other, seemed absolutely determined that no one should move from the tea- table.

" Well ! have you seen the presents, Phraisie 1" Mrs. Bolsover was begin- ning.

" Car, Car, don't talk of poor clear Peregrine's horrors just yet?" cries Aunt Fanny. " You know they are always the same — claws, and teeth, and fusty bison-skins," and as she spoke the stable clock, soft and clear and deliberate, came to their ears, striking the three-quarters.

"A quarter - to six," says the colonel.

" Car," says Miss Bolsover, " the man was here this morning he says the clock is some minutes slow."

" It is all right by my watch," said the colonel, looking down at his gold repeater.

" I nearly missed my train yester- day," Miss Bolsover remarked, ab- sently stirring her tea ; " but most likely — of course your watch is right, John."

However, to the punctual colonel this most likely was not to be en- dured.

"I'll make sure of my train, any- how," says he, getting up leisurely. " Phraisie, will you give papa a kiss ?

Goodbye, Susy; expect me after dinner. Car, tell Bolsover I'll look in on my way home."

As the colonel was walking off across the grass on his way to the station the) figures of Mr. Bolsover himself and another person might have been seen at the drawing-room window, where the squire stood trying to undo the hasp. Aunt Fanny, who had eyes everywhere, caught sight of the two, for she suddenly seized little scared Phraisie up in playful arms and went flying, and rustling, and panting across the lawn towards the house in time to meet her brother-in-law face to face on the step.

" Here is our dear little Fayfay come to see Uncle Fred and all the pitty tings," says Miss Bolsover playfully, thrusting the child into her brother's arms. " Don't come out, Charlie boy, I want to speak to you, dear, most particularly. Come into my boudoir. Frederick, will you take the child into the gun-room ? Auntie will come for her directly."

Presently a servant came out from the house with a message to Tempy under the tree. Miss Bolsover wanted to speak to her. Then Miss Bolsover herself returned again, leading little Phraisie by the hand.

" Tempy is delighted with the eggs and things," says Aunt Fanny to Aunt Car. Then to Susanna, who was preparing to come into the house, "I brought the little one back. I don't know if you are at all afraid of keeping her out too late, Susanna ; I myself know nothing about it," says Miss Bolsover, with her merry tinkle of earrings and laughter ; " but if you would like to go we will send Tempy home in the t-cart and be glad to keep her a little longer."

" Tempy said she wanted to get back early," Susanna answered, quite unsuspiciously.

"Oh! we will see to that," cried Aunt Fanny, affectionately conducting Mrs. Dymond to the side gate where the pony- carriage was standing. " Dear me, you have never seen your beads

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after all, nor the scalps either. I'll send them back to you by Tempy."

Then Susy nodded and smiled and waved good-bye to Mrs. Bolsover, and was more than absorbed in making her little Phraisie kiss her hand and say good-bye too. Phraisie behaved beautifully and did all that was ex- pected of her, and chattered all the way home on her mother's knee.

" Nice gentypan in dere, mamma," said little Phraisie as they drove off. " Gentypan kissed Fay fay."

Susy did not quite understand what Phraisie meant.

" No, dear," she said, " there was no gentleman only papa."

" Ozzer ones," said Phraisie, per- sisting.

Susy waited dinner, but no Tempy came home, and Mrs. Dymond finished her meal by herself. All the bright, dazzling hours of the day seemed pass- ing before her still, shining, crowding with light and life — with Phraisie's busy little life most of all. Susy went up stairs on her way to her own room, and stood for a few minutes by Phrai- sie's little crib, where all the pretty capers and sweet prattle and joy and wonder lay in a soft heap, among the pillows. The child's peaceful head lay with a warm flush and with tranquil, resting breath ; the little hand hung over the quilt, half drop- ping a toy, some goggle-eyed, wide- awake dolly, staring hard, and with loops of tow and gilt ornaments, and not unlike Miss Bolsover, herself, Susy thought.

For once Mrs. Dymond had also enjoyed her visit to Bolsover Hall. Aunt Fanny had been gracious. She had spared those thrusts which used to sting, for all Susy's calm impertur- bability. As for Mrs. Bolsover, Susy had learnt to be less and less afraid

of her grim advances. Little Fayfay,

i i J . J

asleep or awake, was an ever-growing

bond between the two women. Susy had brought Fayfay down from the upper floor, and she had now only to cross a passage from the nursery to reach her own sitting-room, where she

found a green lamp burning and a fire burning. Even in summer-time they used to light fires at Crowbeck after the sun was set. She had no other company than that of Zillah lying asleep by the hearth, but she wanted none other. She settled herself comfortably in her sofa corner, where the lamp shed its pleasant light, and after writing a long, rambling pencil letter to her mother, Susy took up a novel and read assiduously for a time. Then she closed the book. Her little Phraisie's eyes and looks, and her button of a nose, and her funny sweet sayings, seemed to come between her mother and the print. What chance has a poor author with such a rival I " Funny gentypan," who could Phraisie mean by "funny gentypan?" her mother wondered. Then suddenly, as the baby herself might have done, Susanna, happy, thankful, resting and at ease, dropped off into a sleep, sound and long and deep as these illicit slumbers are apt to be. I do not know how long her dreams had lasted ; the nurse looked in, and not liking to disturb her went off to bed. The clock struck ten and the half-hour, and suddenly Mrs. Dymond started up, wide awake ; she thought she had heard a sound and her own name called, and she answered as she sat up on the couch, bewildered. Was it her husband's voice 1 Was it Marney come home 1 Where was her mother 1 Susy rubbed her eyes. All seemed silent again, but she had been startled, and looking at the clock she flushed up, ashamed of her long nap. Then she crossed the room to the bell and rang it, but no one came, for the maids had gone to bed and the men were in a different part of the house. I don't know what nervous terror suddenly seized her, but as she listened still, she grew more frightened. Then she thought of calling the nurse, and looked into the nursery again for that purpose, but gaining courage from the calm night-light and the peaceful cradle, she came quietly away ; only, as she crossed the passage, she now distinctly heard a low con-

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tinuous murmur of voices going on in some room not far distant. Then Susy reflected that housebreakers do not start long audible conversations in the dead of night, and summoning up courage, she descended the broad flight of stairs which led to the sit- ting-rooms below ; the voices were not loud, but every now and then the tones rose in the silence. As she came to the half-open drawing- room door (it was just under her dressing-room) she heard a man's voice speaking in eager tones, and then the colour rushed up into her face and once more her heart began to beat, for she seemed to recognise ITempy's low answer. She opened the door. There stood Charlie, who seemed to be destined to disturb the slumbers of his family. There stood Tempy beside him, in the glow of the dying embers — the two sadly, happily miserable, and yet together ! Susy could see poor Tempy's tears glistening in the red fire-light, and Charlie's rings and decorations, as they stood holding each other's hands in parting grief.

Mrs. Dymond came in like a beau- tiful fate, in her long white dress floating sternly across the room. She set her light upon the table.

" Tempy ! " she said. " Oh ! Tempy, I could not have believed it of you. And how can you come," Susanna said, turning to Charlie Bolsover, " how dare you come," she repeated, "disturbing us, troubling us with your presence ? Tempy has promised — has promised not to see you," she went on excitedly, " Why don't you keep away ? Do you not know that all our home peace and happiness depend upon your absence 1 You are not, you will never be, her husband. Do you want to part her for ever from her father?" cried Susy, passionately. "As for you, Tempy, I thought I could have trusted you as I trust myself. Was this why you stayed behind, why you deceived me ? "

Susy might have been kinder, she might have sympathised more, but that

her own youth had taught her so sad, so desperate a lesson ; and comfortable debonnair vices, easy-going misdeeds and insincerities, seemed to her worse and more terrible than the bitterest and most cutting truths, the sternest, baldest realities. That Tempy should deceive her, deceive her father, should be seeing Charlie by secret arrange- ment, seemed to Susy unworthy of them all.

Charlie turned round upon her in a sudden fury. Where was his usual placid indifference now ]

" If you knew what you were say- ing ; if you had ever been in love," he said in a rage, speaking bitterly, in- dignantly, " you would not be so cruel to her, Mrs. Dymond. You part us for no reason but your husband's fancy, and you divide us as if we were two sacks of potatoes — ' Go,' you say, forget each other.' You don't know what you say. You might as well say, ' Do not exist at all,' as tell us not to love each other. It may be easy enough for people who marry not for love but for money, or because they want comfortable homes or house- keepers, to part, but

"Oh, for shame, for shame, Charlie," cried Tempy, starting away and pull- ing her hand from her lover.

"Let him speak, it is best so," said Susanna very stern, and pale, and un- compromising. " He has a right to speak."

" I speak because I feel, while you all seem to me stones and stocks," cried the poor fellow. " I speak because I love Tempy with all my heart, and you are condemning her and condemning me unheard to sorrow and life -long separation."

There was something, some utter truth of reality in the young man's voice, something which haunted Su- sanna long after. This sharp scene had come upon her suddenly, unex- pectedly, but not for the first time did she feel uneasy, impatient with her husband.

A sudden indignant protest rose

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in her heart ; for the first time since her marriage she questioned and denied his infallibility. It might be true that Charlie Bolsover had been foolish, true that he was in debt, true that Tempy was rich and young, but was it not also true that these two people were tenderly, faithfully attached to each other 1 It seemed a terrible responsibility for the father to divide them; absolutely to say, "Death to their love, let it be as nothing, let it cease for ever." Susy thought of the boy's sad wild looks as he rushed past her in the passage of Eiderdown's Hotel.

She looked at him again. He was changed somehow ; he looked older, stronger, angrier, less desperate, more of a man. He stood fronting Tempy, not with the air of one who was ashamed and out of place, but as if he had a right to speak. Susy, Rhada- mantine though she was, covered her face with her two hands for a minute. She could not meet the young fellow's reproachful look. It seemed to her that it had all happened before, that she had known it all along, known it from the beginning, even when Charlie, exasperated, turned from her to Tempy saying,

" Tempy, I can't bear this any longer, you must decide between us. Send me away, if you have the heart to send me away."

Still Susy seemed to know it all, to know that Tempy would say, "I shall never give you up, Charlie, all my life ; but I cannot go against my father's cruel will."

The sound of wheels, of a horse's hoofs stopping at the front door, . brought the situation to a crisis.

"Listen! That must be papa," said Tempy, starting forward. " Go, Charlie, go ! there is still time ! You must not meet him ! " and she, all in tears, took his hand into both hers, and would have dragged him to the window through which they had entered together.

" Go ! Why should I go ? " cried Char-

lie, exasperated, holding his ground. " I am not ashamed of being here," and as he spoke Susy heard the hall door open.

"He is right, Tempy," she cried, with a bright look, and then with a sudden impulse Susanna ran to the dining-room door, threw it open, and called her husband by his name as he came into his house.

" John ! come here ! Charles Bol- sover is here," said Susy, standing in the dining-room door.

Then she saw that her husband was looking very pale. Instead of coming up to her he stood by the staircase holding to the bannister. He looked very old suddenly, quite different somehow.

" I know Charles Bolsover is here," he said, looking hard at his wife. " I heard it just now before you told me. Tell him I will not see him. Tell him and Tempy to carry on their plots else- where. You Susy, I can trust, thank God."

"Dear John, what is it?" Susy cried, running up to him. " Tempy, Tempy, come to your father ! Come and tell him he can trust us all ! " Susy cried in despair at her husband's strange manner and looks, and Tempy hearing Susy's voice also came out with her round face still bathed in tears.

"Oh! papa, what is it?" she said gently. " I didn't know Charlie was to be at the hall. Indeed, indeed, I didn't, though perhaps if I had, I could not have kept away. I hadn't seen him for, oh, so long ; he walked back with me just now, that is all ! Are you very angry 1 "

The poor colonel's face altered, changed, softened, the colour seemed to come back into his lips.

" I am not angry with you, my poor child," he said, and he sighed, and held out his hand. Tempy felt that it was cold like stone. " I am tired ; another time I will speak to you. I cannot see him. I thought — I thought you were all trying to deceive me," he re- peated, with an attempt at a smile.

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Tempy watched him step by step till he turned the corner of the staircase, still holding by the bannisters. Long, long afterwards she seemed to see him climbing slowly and passing on.

CHAPTER XV. "THE COLONEL GOES HOME."

SUSANNA was not happy about her husband next morning. He seemed unlike himself ; though he said he was well, he looked dull and out of spirits. Tempy's heart, too, was very heavy, and she hung her head over her sew- ing, setting one weary stitch after another as women do. Charlie was gone, she knew not when she should see him again ; and her father was there, and yet gone too in a way. She could not bear him to be so gentle, so reserved, so absent in his manner ; she was longing for an explanation with him, longing to speak and yet scarcely knowing how to begin. When the play of life turns to earnest, how strangely one's youthful valiance fails — that courage of the young, armed from head to foot with confident in- experience of failure and with hope all undimmed as yet.

The colonel was busy all the morn- ing, and closeted in his study with the bailiff. He came into Susy's room once or twice, where she was sitting with Tempy, and with little Phraisie playing at her knee, Phraisie was the one cheerful, natural person in the house this gloomy morning. The colonel's silence did not silence her. Tempy's depression seemed to vanish suddenly when the child came tumb- ling across the room from her mother's knee^ Tempy's black looks (so curiously like her father's) turned into some faint semblance of a smile as the little sister tugged at her dress to make her play.

Susy had left the room when little Fayfay, perching at the window, sud- denly began to exclaim something about " papa and his gee-gee," and Tempy, who had hoped that the mo-

ment for explanation had come, found that her father was starting for his morning ride, and now explanation must be again deferred. The explana- tion was not then, but it was very near at hand.

Presently Susy looked into the room, with her straw hat on. "Your father is gone to Ambleside. He has ordered James to meet him there at the station with the dog-cart ; they will bring Josselin home. Won't you come out now, Tempy 1 It will do you good ; or will you come with me to Miss Fletcher's after luncheon?"

But Tempy shook her head. She would not come, neither then nor later. She sat stitching away the morning, moping through the hours in a dreary, unsatisfactory sort of way. Susanna hoped that Josselin's return might cheer her up.

" What did papa say to you last night ? " Tempy suddenly asked, when she saw Susy getting up after luncheon to prepare for her walk.

" He said that he was glad that we had hidden nothing from him — that we had told him Charlie was here. He said he liked to feel that he could trust us," Susanna answered, and as she spoke she seemed to see her hus- band's kind face and his outstretched hand again.

•''Trust us, trust you/" said Tempy. "Did Aunt Fanny tell him Charlie was here ] "

" No," said Susy, blushing up. " It was Aunt Car who told him, she had gone to bed when your father reached the Hall. She came out of her room in her dressing gown, hearing his voice. Miss Bolsover assured your father it was I who had arranged it all," Susy went on : and as she spoke two in- dignant tears flashed into her eyes.

"Don't ! don't ! don't ! " cried poor Tempy. " My aunt knows how un- happy I am," and she turned and ran out of the room.

Susy, solitary, was glad to meet Wilkins and her little Phraisie at the garden gate that afternoon. She was starting for her walk before the travel-

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lers' return. Phraisie was armed cap- d.-pie and helmed in quilted white and starch as a baby should be who is meant to defy the sun. She had picked a bunch of flowers, and was hopping along the path, and chatter- ing as she went something about "De pussy and de kitty is in de darden, and de kitty is eaten de petty flowers, and please, mamma, take 'ittle Fayfay wid dou."

" I should like her to come with me, Wilkins," said Mrs. Dymond. " I am going to call at the Miss Fletchers'."

" Oh ! very well, mem," says Wil- kins, resigned. She prefers her own company to respectful attendance upon her mistress, but she is a good creature, and allows Susy to see a great deal of Phraisie. Perhaps the thought of Miss Fanny's various paragons hang- ing by hairs over her head inclines Wilkins to regard her mistress's fail- ings with leniency. Susy felt so sad and so much depressed that it was a real boon and comfort to be led along by the little one and to feel her warm hand in her own. Phraisie was sturdy on her legs, and thought nothing of the expedition.

Their walk ran high up above the roadside, along a bank cut in the shelving slopes, and shaded by big trees, of which the stems were wreathed and wrapped with ivy leaves. Beneath each natural arch formed by the spread of the great branches, lay a most lovely and placid world of cool waters and gentle mountain mist, of valleys full of peaceful, browsing sheep. A strange cloud hung along the crest of the Old Man flashing with light. Susanna remembered it long after- wards ; every minute of that day seemed stamped and marked upon her mind. Phraisie went first, still chat- tering to her mamma, who followed quietly, looking out at the tranquil prospect ; then came Wilkins. Once the nurse stopped short, and Susy, who had walked a little ahead, called to her.

" I thought there was a something on the other side of the lake, mem,"

says Wilkins. " There's a boat and a crowd."

Susy stopped, looked, moved on again after an instant's pause. " I cannot see clearly across the lake," she said ; " but the rain is coming, we must not be long," and she went on her way, still holding Phraisie's warm little hand. The Fletchers lived in a stone, slated cottage high up on the mountain side ; it was homely enough, scanty, but exquisitely clean and in perfect order. The little garden, in- closed by its stone walls, flashed lilac, gold, and crimson with the cottage flowers that were all ablaze — con- volvulus, floxes, sweet william, and nasturtium, opening to the raindrops that were already beginning to fall.

Martha Fletcher, the younger sister who kept the school, was standing out in the porch as her visitors arrived somewhat breathless with their climb ; and she came for- ward to welcome them with her smil- ing, peaceful looks and voice, and, calling to her sister, opened the cot- tage door and showed them in. There were two rooms on the ground floor, leading from one to another — pleasant rooms, scantily furnished, with slated floors and lattice windows and cross lights, and a few geraniums in pots ; they both opened to the garden. The first was a sort of kitchen, with a kettle boiling on the hob ; the second was a parlour, with a few wooden chairs, an oak chest, and a quaint old cupboard that would have made the fortune of a collector. "It is old ; it were never very much," said Martha. In front of the cupboard, Jane, the elder sister, was lying back in her big chair knitting, with a patchwork cushion at her back. She looked pale and worn by ill health, but she, too, brightened to welcome their visitors. Both these sisters had the calm and well-bred manners of people who live at peace, in the good company of great and lovely things. Susy herself had not such easy and dignified greetings for her guests, such kindness and un- spoken courtesy in her ways, as that

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with which these two women now met her.

Mrs. Dymond had come only intend- ing to remain a few minutes, but from behind the Old Man some sudden storm began to spread, and in a few minutes, swiftly, rapidly, the clouds had gathered, and the rain had begun to pour very heavily all round about.

Perhaps half an hour went by — a strange half-hour, which ever after- wards Susy looked back to with a feel- ing half of longing, half of miserable regret. It seemed to her as if some other Susanna had lived it, with its troubled apprehensions, with a heart full of pain, of dull excitement. She could not bear to disagree with her husband, but the sight of Tempy's dull pain stung her. So long as it had been her own self in question, she had felt no disloyalty in suppressing her own wishes, crushing clown the instinctive protest in her heart against the family thraldom and traditional subjection to conventionality. But now that Tempy's happiness and honesty of mind were concerned, it seemed to Susy that the time had come to speak. Ah ! John who was so good, so gentle and forbearing, he would understand her, he would yield to her entreaties, to Tempy's pleading.

Susy sat paying her visit in a curious, double state of mind. The rain had ceased, the cottage gar- den was refreshed ; the floxes, the zinias, the lupins, the marigolds, the whole array of cottage finery was refreshed and heavy with wet. The birds had begun to fly and chirp again ; little Phraisie stood at the door peep- ing ovit at an adventurous kitten which was cautiously advancing along the wooden bench. Martha sat erect on the well rubbed mahogany settle, Jane lay back in her big chair with an invalid's gentle eyes full of interest, fixed on their young visitor.

"How comely Mrs. Dymond du look," thinks Jane the fanciful, " there side- by-side wi' Martha on the settle."

Mrs. Dymond dressed in some

soft brown pelisse with a touch of colour in it, her loose country gloves, her lace ruffles, her coquettish brown felt hat with the shining bird's breast, all seemed to make up a pleasant au- tumnal picture, even more interesting to Jane than that baby-one in the door- way. After all, a tidy, well- dressed child is no prettier an object than any one of the little ones bare- legged and rosy and tattered, such as those Jane and Martha were used to teach and have up to play in the garden But a well-dressed, beautiful lady is an interesting sight to a country woman. Martha from habit, perhaps,kept watch over Phraisie, but Jane's eyes rested gently upon the young mother.

Susy lingered on. There was a sense of peace within as without the cottage, a feeling of goodness, of quiet duty ful- filled, and unpretending refinement. A thought crossed her mind, what a happy life she might have led if only these women could have been her sisters — true ladies indeed they seemed to be — tranquil, courteous in their ways, making no difference between persons, as gentle and as welcoming to tl^e shepherd's wife, who came drenched to the door in her clogs, to report of Mrs. Barrow, as to Susy herself, the lady of the Place. While the neighbours talked on, Susy, girl-like began to picture a life with John, in a pleasant cottage with a garden full of flowers. She seemed putting off the moment of return and expla- nation, and trying to think of other things. Susy dreaded going home dreaded the explanation before her dreaded the pain she must give her husband if she told him all she felt, and that his decision seemed to her unjust and arbitrary ; dreaded the concealment if she hid the truth. Some instinct seemed to tell her that Miss Bolsover, whatever happened, would make ill-will between them all, and that trouble was at hand ; and yet the heavy indefinable sense which had haunted her all the morning, was lighter since she had reached that peaceful home and seen the simple and

92

Mrs, Dymond.

comforting sight of two contented souls.

These fancies did not take long, a little ray of light came straggling by the lattice. Phraisie leaped and laughed in the door- way at the kitten's antics ; suddenly the child came run- ing back to her mother's knee, and hid her face in her lap and began to cry.

"My Phraisie, what is it?" said Susy, stooping and lifting her up. "Did the kitty scratch you?" but little Phraisie didn't answer at first, then looking up into her mother's face,

" Papa, Fay fay wants papa," was all she said.

"I think papa must be home by this," said Susy, going to the door with the child in her arms ; and she felt that with Phraisie in her arms she could speak, protest for Tempy's future rights. She could trust that kind and generous heart which had ever been so true to her, to them all. The rain was gathering again ; the sisters urged her to stay, but she was impatient — sud- denly impatient — to get back. A feeling which seemed strange, in- describable, outside every-day things and common feelings, had fallen on her once more ; was it the storm in the air ? As she looked at the oppo- site hills, she felt as if the very line of the clouds against the sky had terror in it. No tangible impression was in her mind, but a restless alarm and discomfort. • Susy wondered if she was going to be ill, though she was not given to fancies ; her one desire was to get home, and she took leave, hastily gathering up her skirts with Wilkins's help, tucking Phraisie safe into the folds of her pelisse. Jane and Martha looked gravely at her, and did not attempt to detain her. • " Take care of ye'sell," they said. Martha came with them to the garden-gate, and stood holding it open, and as they were starting, they heard a step hurry- ing up from below. It was one of the grooms from the Place, who, not seeing Susy, exclaimed —

" Oh ! Miss Fletcher, have you heard that there's been a' accident across the

lake? The colonel and Mr. Jo have been cast out of t' dog-cart. I'm seek- ing Mrs. Dymond."

11 An accident ! " said Susy, coming forward, holding Phraisie very tight. " Are they hurt, James ? Is the colonel "

" Neither o' the gentlemen had spoke when I came away to seek ye, mem," said the man, with a pale face ; and some wonder at seeing her so composed. " George Tyson brought them across in t' boat wi' doctor ; the parson is there wi' Miss Bolsover. We have been looking for you, m'a'am, a long while."

CHAPTER XVI.

THE DOCTOR AND THE LADY.

THE train came in in the early morn- ing, and the great London doctor got out ; he had travelled all night com- fortably enough in his first-class cor- ner ; he was there to see what could be done ; he had a confident, cheerful aspect, which gave hope to the by- standers. The porter began to think the colonel might recover after all ; the station-master also seemed to re- gain confidence. Mr. Bolsover, who had come to meet the train, and who liked to take things pleasantly, shook the oracle warmly by the hand. " I'm afraid you will find things as bad as can be," he said, as if he was giving a welcome piece of news, though his pale round face belied his cheery tones. " Jeffries has been up all night. I have brought the carriage for you. We telegraphed to you last night when Jeffries thought so badly of him, poor fellow. Get in, please ; drive hard, George."

" Is Mrs. Dymond aware of the danger?" said the doctor, as he got into the carriage, after seeing that his bag was safely stowed on the box.

" She is anxious, very anxious," said Mr. Bolsover ; " so are my wife and sister, who are nursing them all most devotedly. " You know the boy is hurt too; broken rib — concussion. They were driving home together ;

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93

they think poor Dymond fainted and fell, the horse was startled, the car- riage upset just by the forge. Luckily one of Dymond's own men was stand- ing by ; the poor fellows were brought straight home across the lake in the ferry boat. Mrs. Dymond was from home at the time. The boy recovered consciousness almost immediately, but my poor brother-in-law seems very ill, very bad indeed," said Mr. Bolsover with an odd chirruping quake in his voice ; then recovering, and trying to quiet himself. " Do you dislike this ? " and he pulled a cigar-case out of his pocket.

" Not at all — not at all," said the doctor, looking out of the window. "What a delightful place you have here ! "

" It is almost all my brother-in- law's property," said Mr. Bolsover ; " all entailed upon my nephew. We married sisters, you know."

" Oh, indeed ! " said the doctor. " I did not know."

" I was not speaking of the present Mrs. Dymond," says Mr. Bolsover, hastily. " The second wife is quite a girl ; some of us thought it a pity at the time. Poor child, it will be easier for her now, perhaps, than if they had been longer married."

The horses hurried on, the gates were reached, the neat sweep, the pleasant shade of trees ; the doors of the house flew open, and the servants appeared, as on that day when the colonel had brought Susy home as a bride. The doctor was shown into the colonel's study, where a fire had been lighted and some breakfast set out. The master was lying scarcely conscious on his bed up stairs, but his daily life seemed still to go on in the room below. The whips and sticks were neatly stacked against the walls, his sword was slung up, his belt, his mili- tary cap, everything curiously tidy and well-ordered. The Army List and Direc- tory, the Bradshaws and Whitaker, were each in their due place on the table in a sort of pattern. The book- cases were filled, and every shelf was

complete ; the writing apparatus was in order, with good pens and fresh ink, for Dr. Mayfair to write the pre- scriptions with. They could do little good now, for all the good pens and paper. The neat packets of letters, answered and unanswered, with broad elastic straps, lay on the right and left of the writing-book ; the post-bag was hanging on a nail, with a brass plate fixed above, on which the hours of the post were engraved. Every- thing spoke of a leisurely, well-ordered existence, from the shining spurs on their stands, to the keys in the despatch-box. The doctor had not long to wait ; the door opened, and a lady came in — a fat, florid lady, who seemed to have performed a hasty toilette, not without care. She was wrapped in a flowing, flowery tea- gown, a lace hood covered her many curls and plaits ; she had gold slip- pers, emerald and turquoise rings; she advanced with many agitated motions.

" Oh, doctor ! — oh, how we have looked for you ! You may imagine what this night has been. How am I to tell you all 1 A chair. Thank yo.i. Yes — oh, yes ! — our darling boy scarcely conscious — his father in this most alarming condition," and she laid her jewelled fingers on the doctor's sleeve. " Mr. Bolsover will have told you something, but he has no concep- tion of what we have suffered, what anxiety we have endured. My brain seems crushed," said the lady. "If you felt my pulse, doctor, you would see that the heart's action is scarcely perceptible."

" You are very anxious of course," said the doctor, rather perplexed, '' shall I come up stairs at once ? Is Mr. Jeffries up stairs ? "

" He will be here in a minute, if you will kindly wait, and you must be wanting some refreshment," said the lady, " Doctor Mayfair, do you prefer tea or coffee? Here are both as I ordered. One requires all one's nerve, all one's strength for the sad scene up stairs — the strong man cast down

Mrs. Dymond.

in his prime— let me pour out the tea."

The doctor somewhat bored by the lady's attentions, stood before the fire waiting for the arrival of Mr. Jeffries, and asking various details of the illness, of the accident, to which his hostess gave vague and agitated answers. " I was resting in my room before dressing to drive out, when my maid brought me word of the dreadful report. I lost not a moment, I told them to bring me a cloak, a hat, any- thing, the first come, to order the carriage, to send a messenger to say that I was on the way. But one has to pay for such efforts, nature will not be defrauded of her rights. You, doctor, know that better than I do."

" Oh, of course, no, yes," says the doctor with a vacant eye drinking his tea and looking round : was this the enthusiastic young girl disapproved of by the poor colonel's relations ! " Mr. Jeffries has been sent for, you tell me," said the great man, politely interrupt- ing.

"I hear him now," said Miss Bolsover excitedly, and rushing to the door she opened it wide. " Here, come in here, Doctor Mayfair is expecting you," said the lady in a loud whisper. " Oh, Mr. Jeffries you can tell him what we have all endured, you can tell him what a life-long tie it has been between us. How unlike that of a few short months ; how much deeper, how much." . . . Mr. Jeffries looked round uneasily, he was followed by Susanna, still strangely quiet, scarcely uttering a word but with anxious, dark encircled eyes trying to read from their faces what was written there. She heard Miss Bolsover' s speech, and crimsoned up as she turned a quick, reproachful glance upon her ; even at such terrible moments people are themselves, alas ! and their daily failings do not die when those they love lie down for the last time, but assert themselves, bitter, exaggerated. To reproach her at such a time ! Oh, it was cruel, Susy thought, and then she forgot it all — Miss Bolsover's

sneers, and the petty pangs and smarts of daily jealousies ; she caught sight of a glance which passed between Mr. Jeffries and Dr. Mayfair, and all her strength and courage seemed suddenly to go, and she sat down for a moment in the nearest chair, while Miss Bol- sover followed the doctors out of the room. Susy herself had no hope, Jeffries' deprecating look answered her most anxious fears, she had watched all through the night and each hour as it passed seemed to weigh more heavily upon her heart. Now for a moment the load seemed so great that she could scarcely bear it, she seemed suddenly choking, and she opened the window and went out into the open air to breathe. There — he was dying and all the garden was so sweet, so full of early green and flow- ers. He was doomed, she knew it, and a new day had dawned, and nothing was changed from yesterday ; only the beauty of it all seemed aching and stinging instead of delighting her, its very sweetness turned to grief, its peace jarred like misery, a great flash of brilliant pain seemed spread out before her. Why had they ever come there, Susanna thought. Oh, why. How happy she had been alone with him in London. How unhappy she had been among these cruel people. How dear and how kind he had been ; how little they knew her. All the spite- ful things Miss Bolsover had ever said came into her mind with a passionate exaggeration. Ah ! she was not ungrateful, she was not mercenary, she had not married for money and mean things. Her husband had been her kindest, tenderest friend, he had helped her in her sorest trouble, and she had come to him gratefully and with trust. And now all was over ; and they would no longer molest her. Poor Susy wrung her hands in a miserable impatience. She was a young creature still, exaggerated and uncharit- able as young warm-hearted people are. The lovely sweetness of the morning, the tender light upon the sky only seemed to sting her to fresh pain.

Mrs. Dymond.

95

Then she thought of his dear pale face upon the bed up stairs — of his look of wistful love with some sad terror of conviction. She had meant to speak to him that very day, to tell him all her heart, and now it was too late, it was over now. All was coming to an end for ever and she had not half loved him, half told him how she felt his goodness. Reader, forgive her if she with the rest of us is selfish in her great grief, so keen, so fierce, distort- ing and maddening every passing mood and natural experience. She could not stand. She fell on her knees, poor child, with a sudden over- powering burst of sobbing pain. There was an iron roller somewhere by the wall and she laid her poor head upon the iron with incoherent sobs and prayers for his life, for strength to love him as she ought, for forgiveness for the secret rancour which had poisoned her life. As she knelt

there two kind, warm arms were flung round her, " Dear Susy, don't, don't," sobs Tempy, who had come to look for her, " don't, don't, don't," was all the girl could say ; " be good, be brave, I've come to fetch you." Susy started up, quiet again, ruling herself with a great effort. Mr. Jeffries had also come down hurriedly into the drawing-room to look for her, and as the two women entered through the open casement, pale and shaking still, he looked very grave, and beckoned them up stairs. " He is come to himself, he is asking for you," he said to Susy ; " you must be very calm, dear Mrs. Dymond." Tempy was now sobbing in her turn, Susy was white, quiet, composed. Her husband knew her to the last, and looked up with a very sweet smile as she came to his side.

An hour afterwards she was a widow, and the grand London doctor went back to town.

To be continued.

96

FROM MONTEVIDEO TO PARAGUAY.

IT was a clear, mild spring evening in the latter part of the month designated in almanacks as October, but in Nature's annuary the April of this inverted antarctic world, when the Brazilian mail steamer Rio Apa was making her way cautiously up against the shallow and turbid waters of the River Plate, bound with cargo and a full complement of passengers, mostly Brazilians, some Argentines or Uru- guayans, a few Germans — where are not Germans to be met now? — and myself as a solitary specimen of the British sub-variety, from Montevideo to Asuncion, capital of Paraguay, and, indeed, further north yet, to the Bra- zilian capital of Mata-Grosso ; but with that ultimate destination the present narrative has no concern. Viewed from anywhere the prospect of Montevideo is a lovely one, but most so from the sea. However ill- advised the old Spaniards may gene- rally have shown themselves in their selection of sites for towns or sea- ports in South America, they, or their great captain, Don Bruno Mauricio de Zabala, chose well, could not, indeed, have chosen better, when, in!726, they laid, after two centuries of inexplicable neglect, the first foundations of Monte- video. As a town it is perfect ; as a harbour nearly so. With the lofty conical hill and the adjoining high lands of the "cerro" on the west, and the bold jutting promontory — itself a ridge of no inconsiderable elevation — on which the bulk of the town is built, to the east, the noble semicircular bay, deeply recessed in the rising grounds on the north, is well sheltered from every wind and sea, the south and the .south-west — this last, unluckily, the worst "of a' the airts," being none other than the dreaded "pampero,"

or pampas-wind of these regions — excepted ; at least until the long-pro- jected breakwater, which is to keep out this enemy also, be constructed. But pamperos, like most other ills of this best of all possible worlds, are exceptions, and for most days of the year few harbours afford a safer or a more commodious anchorage than Montevideo ; while landward a prettier sight than that presented by the white houses of the smokeless town, covering the entire eastern promontory down to the water's edge on either side, in- termixed with large warehouses, public buildings, and theatres, and crowned by the conspicuous dome and towers of the massive and, pace Captain Burton, fairly well-proportioned cathe- dral, would be hard to find anywhere else. Beyond, and all round the curve of the bay, countless villas of Hispano- Italian construction, one-storied the majority, and recalling in general form and arrangement the Baian or Pompeian pleasure residences of the Augustan age, but not unfrequently distinguished by lofty " miradores," or look-outs, gleam many-coloured from between thickly planted orchards and gardens, in which the orange-tree, the lemon, the acacia, the peach, the fig, the cherry-tree, the medlar, the vine, blend with the Australian eucalyptus, the bamboo, the banana, the palm, and other imported growths of the outer world, and shelter a perennial profusion of lovely flowers, and pre- eminently of luxuriant roses, worthy of the gardens of ancient Paestum and modern Damascus or Salerno. Ship- ping of every calibre and flag, steam and sail, make an apt foreground to the prosperous life implied by the landward prospect ; and a bright sky, stainless sunlight, and pure, healthful

From Montevideo to Paraguay.

air, supply those conditions of enjoy- ment so essential, yet so often want- ing, one or all, from the nebulous sea-side of northern Europe, or the treacherous beauty of equatorial coasts.

But Montevideo and the " Banda Oriental," to give the vigorous little republic of which it is the capital its prsedilect name, must not detain us now. Already the intervening mass of the "cerro" has hid them from our view, and we are far out on the monotonous waters of the sea-like Plate estuary. Night sets in calm and clear ; and I look for the four-fold stars, first visioned to the Florentine seer, when

" Coder pareva '1 ciel di lor fiamelle.

0 settentrional vedovo sito, Poiche private se' di mirar quelle ! "

But the Cross, partly veiled, is just skirting the southern horizon, and will not be visible in its full beauty till near midnight ; so that those strange, uncanny-looking nebulae, known, I believe, to British seafaring vulgarity as the " Coal-sacks," but more truly resembling, if anything, gigantic glow- worms, alone denote, by their prox- imity, the starless pole of the Austral heavens. Truly, in more senses than one, a pole-star is yet to seek in the southern hemisphere, west or east — a fixed fulcrum, a central idea, a con- trolling and co-ordinating force. Yet the slow precession of the equinoxes may in time supply it to the courses of the concave above ; but who or what shall give it to the seething, over-restless convex below ? South America has her 'Bucolics, nor least the First ; but the Fourth Eclogue is wanting from among the chaunted lays of Mantin Fierro and his peers. Does it bide a future date ] Let us be content with the present ; and trust, but not "feebly," the "larger hope."

And now, after ten hours, or there- abouts, of upward course, morning dawns for us on the world-famed New York of South America, the

No. 308.— VOL. LII.

memorial and honour of Don Juan de Garay — the residence for more than two centuries of Spanish vice-royalty, and now the political and, to a great extent, commercial capital of that southern reflex of the Northern Union, the vast Argentine Confederation, the city of Buenos Ayres. I remember how an Irish mate, when questioned on board a China-bound steamer, on which I happened to be a passenger, as to what was the first land we should sight of the Chinese coast, answering — and he could not have answered more appositely — " Faith ! the first land ye will sight is a junk ! " Were he now replying to a similar inquiry on board the Rio Apa, he might not less aptly say, "Faith! the first ye will see of Buenos Ayres is that ye will not see it at all ! " So low is the coast, so great the distance from shore at which the shallowness of the river-waters compels us to anchor, that a long low line of con- fused buildings, and behind them the summits, no more, of cupolas, turrets, and towers, seen at intervals over the warehouse fronts along the edge, is all Buenos Ayres presents to our eyes on first beholding. The view, or non- view, of Venice herself when ap- proached by rail from Padua is not more unsatisfactory. I long to land, and resolve the illusion in the oppo- site sense to that by which earth's illusions generally are dispelled, by finding, as I know I shall, the reality of the Argentine capital better than its introductory show. But the earli- ness of the hour, and the shortness of the time allotted for stay, do not for this occasion permit a nearer acquaint- ance with the most populous, the wealthiest, and in many or most ways the most important city of Republican South America. And, in fact, what knowledge worth the having could be acquired by an hour of hurried driving through square and street ? So I re- sign myself to circumstances, and defer the accomplishment of my desires till the promised opportunity of the return voyage ; — though the courtesy of the

From Montevideo to Paraguay.

Argentine " Capitan del Puerto," or harbour master, has hastened to place at my disposal the means of convenient landing, moved thereto by the sight of the distinctive flag that notifies the presence of a British official — rank and name, of course, unknown, nor to my readers worth the knowing — on board the Rio Apa. It is a courtesy which will be repeated, with scarce even a casual exception, at every Argentine or Paraguayan river station we halt at during the seven days of up-stream voyage yet before us.

There exists widely diffused in the Old "World, nor least in England, an opinion, the origin of which, correctly estimated or otherwise, is not per- haps far to seek, that a distinct want or even refusal of every-day courtesy, an ostentatious " I am as good as you, and better," bearing, a disregard of the social claims, or what are held to be such, of rank, office, station, age, and the like, are the habitual cha- racteristics of the citizens of non- monarchical states ; that, e.g. a re- publican boatman is more rudely extortionate, a republican porter more importunately aggressive, a re- publican official more neglectful of politeness than their counterparts elsewhere ; and so on to the end of the chapter. How far this may really be the case in some repub- lics, the United States for instance, I cannot say, never having had the fortune to visit them, nor trusting much to " Notes " where accounts vary so > widely. Thus much I can say, that, in my own limited experi- ence of men and things, when a traveller loudly and habitually com- plains of incivility met with on his wanderings, the probability' is that the traveller himself has been, at the least, deficient in courtesy towards those he has come across. In Repub- lican South America my own witness in these regards is, so far as it goes, of the most favourable kind. Cer- tainly I had much sooner, if desirous of obliging civility, have to do with an Uruguayan or Argentine, not

boatman or porter merely, but police- man, official, or any chance acquaint- ance whatever, low or high, than with his like in many a European land that I could, but will not name.

Again we are on our up-stream way, but now obliquely crossing over towards the north side of the mighty estuary, till what seems at first sight a continuous shore-line of swamp and brushwood, but what is in reality an aggregate of island banks, only just raised above the water-level, and covered with scrub, stretches across our path. These islands are, in fact, the secular bar at the mouth of the Parana River, before it broadens into the wider Plate. We shape our course to the right, where, at a little distance from the mainland shore of Uruguay — here a continuous succession of undu- lating downs, grazing-ground the most — the little granite island-rock known, like Cape Palinurus of Yirgilian fame, by the name of a pilot, Martin Garcia, guards the only available entry from Rio de la Plata and the sea, to the all- important navigation of the Parana and Uruguay rivers. Itself geogra- phically, no less than geologically, a fragment of Uruguay, it belongs territorially to the Argentine Con- federation by right of — well — the right of the stronger; a right too generally admitted for dispute or appeal. The channel on either side of it, deep enough for all mercantile navigation is sufficiently commanded by the guns and forts of the place to make a hostile passage no easy matter. As we leave Martin Garcia behind us, a broad wedge-like streak of darker colour, driven far ' into the nwiddy waters of the Plata, from its left or eastern bank, tells where the Uruguay, itself a mighty stream, merges in the great estuary, and marks the limit between the Argentine Confederation, between whose lands more than eight hundred miles of river-navigation lie before us, and the Banda Oriental, or east shore, of which we now take our definite leave. Soon we have entered the Guazu, or great pas-

From Montevideo to Paraguay.

sage, one of the many that thread between shoal and island, the Parana delta, and are by nightfall on the main river, here often whole miles in width ; though its real breadth can rarely be taken in by the eye, partly owing to the general lowness of its reedy banks, partly to the countless islands, which, for its entire course, line at brief intervals now one shore, now the other. They, and the shores too, often disappear for weeks together during the yearly floods, and, thus veiled, add not a little to the difficul- ties and dangers of the route. At present the water is at its lowest ; but even now the stream is rapid and strong ; its colour is turbid yellow ; its surface often specked with masses of tangled weed and floating drift- wood from forests yet far away.

For five days more we journey up the Parana ; passing, and occasionally stopping for cargo or passengers at many places of South American note — each one the outcome of some special activity or enterprise proper to the young and vigorous Confederation, between whose provinces the river flows. And first, Rosario, the city- capital, if fact fill up the outlines of forecast, of the Argentine commercial future ; and already the principal focus and dividing point of the widest- spread railroad system existent south of the Isthmus of Panama. Next we salute the memory of the able but ill-fated Urquiza, deliverer of his country from the tyrant Rosas, to fall himself a victim to treachery base as any imbedded in the ice of Dante's Tolommea ; as we sight the city of Parana, conspicuous by the ambitious dimensions of its public buildings, and the nine-years' memory of its dignity, as Urquiza' s choice as capital of the entire Argentine Confederation. Further up "Bella Vista," or "Fair Prospect," shines out on us worthy of its name, where its white houses crown the high white cliffs that overlook the mighty river ; and many other are the places of provincial or even national note, till we reach the confluents

or Corrientes of the Argentine- Paraguayan frontier. But it may, indeed must, be here enough for us to note that during these nine hundred miles of up-stream voyage, south to north, the scenery of either bank, while remaining essentially the same in its main geographical features all the way, is yet gradually modified by the progressive approach to the tropics into ever-increasing beauty and inter- est. The eastern length of shore, along the fertile provinces of Entre- Rios and Corrientes, gently rising from the river level into a succession of green uplands, studded with tree clumps, and brightened by white groups of cottages and farmhouses, with a tall church tower here and there, passes by degrees from pasture- land into agriculture, fields of maize, orange - groves, tobacco - plantations, and even sugar-cane ; a landscape which, allowance made for brighter colour and glossier vegetation, not without dwarf palms and Japanese- looking bamboo clusters here and there, often reminded me in its gene- ral, and even in its detailed, features of the noble backgrounds painted by Rubens, of which an example may be seen in the Judgment of Paris in our own National Gallery. There is some- thing Flemish, almost English, in their fertile repose ; but here the scale is grander. In this southern Mesopotamia — as " Entre-Rios " may be literally translated — nature has bestowed without stint whatever goes to make up those two solid and enduring bases of national prosperity — agriculture, and pasture ; the third foundation, indicated by our Laureate in his exquisite landscape scene, " Ancient Peace," is wanting here as yet. A few years, indeed, of com- parative security and quiet have already done much, as the glimpses of cattle-stocked meadows, and the dark green patches of Indian corn show us, as our steamer rapidly glides past the gully-indented banks ; but the peaceful years that have given these good things are, as yet, of recent

H 2

100

From Montevideo to Paraguay.

date ; a very different condition of tumult, insecurity, and not infrequent war prevailed here at a very short distance back from the present epoch. These evils are past, yet not so wholly as absolutely to bar the danger of their possible renewal, or to grant the desirable immunity from the agitations and vicissitudes consequent on the frequent and abrupt political changes of Buenos Ayres itself — com- municated thence like earthquake waves to the furthest provinces of the Confederation. Still, enough advance on the path of law and order has been made to give reasonable assurance that the days of Oribe and Rosas, of gaucho-leaders, and partisan plunders are, year by year — as the settled popu- lation of the land increases steadily in numbers, wealth, and strength — less, and ever less, likely to recur ; while the tale of those who have a vested interest in the tranquillity of the country continues to grow, and with it grows the best probability and pledge of that tranquillity itself. Meanwhile, many detail inventions, some of them undoubted improve- ments, of recent introduction, such as the increased use of machinery on the farms, the net-work of strong wire fences, now spread over the face of the pasture-land ; the extension of railway lines, and whatever other appliances tend to the facilitation of orderly communication, to the safe-guarding of property, and to the substitution of methodised labour for the once over- numerous troops of half-wild horse- men and cattle-drivers — ready allies in the cause of riot and plunder — all lead up to the same result. It would be difficult now for a " caudillo," or an adventurer-chief, however popular his name or cause — to gather round his standard the formidable gaucho bands, all ready armed and mounted for march or fray, that were, scarce a quarter of a century ago, the terror of farmers and proprietors, of land- owners and peasants, nay, even of townsmen and towns, of place-holding professionals and city officials through

the regions of La Plata and La Banda Oriental. But the surest guarantee of national stability is to be sought and found in the extension of agriculture, and in the yearly encroachment of peasant, or small farmer, proprietorship on the scantily peopled pasture-grounds and cattle-breeding lands.

Thus much for the east bank of the river. But on its western side a very different range of scenery, little modi- fied by man and his works, shows the gradual transition from cool to almost tropical climes. For here stretches back for hundreds of miles from the water's edge, up to the first outlying bulwarks of the great Andes Cor- dillera, the vast plain, level as the sea, of which it must have been the bed in times almost recent by geolo- gical computation, and known for the " Grand Chaco," the " Sahara " or Flat of South America, like in relative position and telluric formation to its African counterpart, yet most unlike in the all-important attributes of moisture and fertility. For this, the Chaco, is a land of streams and springs, of marsh even and swamp, with abund- ant growth of grass, plant, and tree, especially to the north ; its total ex- tent is roughly estimated as that of the British islands fourfold. Nomin- ally included, though not without rival claims on the part of Paraguay and of Bolivia, in the Argentine Con- federation, it is practically indepen- dent of all these, or of any other European-founded rule, being still, as of old times, the territory and dwelling- place of native Indian tribes, war- like the most part, tenaciously at- tached— and small blame — to their own autonomous existence, and re- sistent to the last — a " last " which can hardly now be far distant — against every Argentine attempt at civilis- ing — that is, in plain language, subjugating and ultimately effacing them. Passively strong in their unin- cumbered activity for escape even more than for attack, and protected by the vastness of the open space over which they wander at will, they have

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thus far not only succeeded in baffling the organised military expeditions, successively directed against them by the Buenos Ay res Government, but have even baffled all but the narrowest encroachments of settlement and colo- nial proprietorship on their borders. Known, or rather designated by vari- ous names — Tobas, Mbayas, Lenguas, Abipones, Payaguas, and others — the tribes, with a certain general simili- tude of features and habits, much like that existing, say, between the various subdivisions of Teutonic or Slavonic origins in Europe, yet differ widely in character, dispositions, and language ; some are pacific, and not unacquainted with agriculture and settled life ; others, more warlike, subsist, it is said, almost wholly on the chase and foray ; some are almost exclusively fishermen, others herdsmen or shep- herds. Their dialects, equally diver- sified, for each tribe has its own, can all, it seems, be without exception re- ferred to the two great mother tongues of South America, the Quichna, lan- guage of Peru and Bolivia, and the Guarani, spoken in one form or other over the entire eastern half of the continent, and of which more anon.

Such are, summarily taken, the in- habitants of the Chaco. Extending from the populous province of Santa Fe\ opposite to that of Entre-Rios northward, up to and beyond the furthest limits of Paraguay, its level surface, seldom modified, however slightly, by difference of elevation or by the hand of man, presents in its changing vegetation a kind of scale by which to measure, not incorrectly, the ever-ascending range of its ther- mometric temperature. The solitary, oak- like ombu-tree, and the dwarfish willow and light- leaved poplar of the neighbourhood of Rosario and Santa Fe, gradually associate themselves further up with more varied and vigorous South-American growths, and the tall outlines of forest-trees, worthy the name, trace themselves more and more frequently on the low sky-line, till, as we approach about half-way to

Corrientes, palms, at first sparse and stunted in structure, then loftier and grouped in clusters and groves, give evidence of a more genial tempera- ture ; while the bamboo, not, indeed, the feathery giant of the Philippines or Siam, but liker in size and fashion to the Chinese or Japanese variety, bends over the doubtful margin of river and swamp, often tangled with large-leaved water-plants and creepers, the shelter and perch of gay kingfishers and flocks of parti-coloured aquatic birds, the only visible inhabitants of this lone region, for the Indian tribes, shy, nor unreasonably so, of contact with the white races, keep aloof from the river coast, or, if they visit it, leave no trace of their having been there.

At last, on the sixth noon since we left Montevideo, we are off the shelv- ing banks and scattered houses of Corrientes, a large town, whose im- portance and future growth are sufficiently assured by its position close to the junction of the two chief est rivers of central and eastern South America, the Parana and the Paraguay^ Of these the former — now subdividing itself into a network of countless and ever-shifting channels and islands, now united in one mighty stream of turbid yellow, here, a few miles north of the town — makes a stately bend, that half surrounds the fertile grazing-lands of Corrientes, and passes upwards to the north-east, where the eye loses sight of it among the dense forests of either bank ; while from the north, exactly on the line thus far occupied by the Parana, de- scend the darker-coloured waters of the Paraguay, itself a noble river, here over half a mile in width, with an open, well-defined channel, few islands, and a current strong even now, at the lowest water-time of the year. At this junction of the three great streams, a scene surpassing in beauty and calm grandeur any other of the kind that it has been my lot to look on elsewhere, we reach the southernmost limits of the Paraguayan territory, separated from the Argentine, and in great part

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From Montevideo to Paraguay.

from the Brazilian, to the south and east by the Parana, while on the west the Paraguay divides it from the Grand Chaco, and northward the Apa, itself a tributary stream of the Paraguay, forms the boundary of the little but compact dominion. Thus surrounded, the land of Paraguay enjoys the ad- vantages of an almost insular position, a circumstance which has, no doubt, considerably influenced alike its his- tory and the character of its inha- bitants in all times.

Seen under the dazzling brilliancy of a South American sun, an adjunct rarely wanting here to the landscape, whatever the season of the year, Corrientes and its surroundings make up a panorama of rare loveliness and interest. To the east of us the glitter- ing slope rises from the water upwards, with a foreground of small steamers, sailing-vessels, and countless boats moored along its margin, and above, a long succession of white, flat-roofed buildings, varied by tall church towers and the high fronts of public edifices — among them the spacious government house, once a Jesuit college ; mixed with these are bright flower-gardens, dark green orange-groves and over- topping palms ; beyond lie long ranges of tilled land and rich pasture meadows, bordered by strips and patches of forest ; till, north-east, the majestic curve of the shining river, reaching miles and miles away into the distance, rests on and blends with the white horizon line. North the sight rests on the cool, dense forests of Paraguay, and, breaking forth from among them, the mighty river of that land, sweeping down to merge its name and itself in the Parana ; while eastward extends the boundless green of the fertile though scarce tenanted Chaco. And to the south flow and mingle the wide-spread meshes of the Argentine River, a net of silver cast over a plain of emerald. A region as yet only the cradle of nations ; worthy to be one day their abode and palace. Already, signs are not wanting of hopeful meaning for the future ; such

are the crowds of boatmen, sailors,, cattle-drivers, waggoners, peasants, townsmen, who give life to the wharves. The ceaseless loading and unloading as cargoes of hides, wool, maize, flour, wood, fruits, &c., are shipped or transferred from one hold to another ; the herds of large, sleek, long-horned cattle grazing ; the rich pasture-lands by the river ; the troops of half-tamed horses, a spirited and enduring breed, excellent for all kindsof work ; the many specks and patches of shining white, that tell of farm-houses and dwellings, scattered frequent, over the uplands beyond ; these and much more denote at once the energy and the rising fortunes of the " Corrientinos," as the inhabitants of the land are called, and who, though yearly recruited more and more with immigrants of various nationalities, yet form the bulk of the resident popula- tion and give their tone to the rest. A tall, sinewy, hard-featured, manly race, of north Spanish origin mostly, but with a frequent dash of Indian or " Guarani " blood — evidenced by the darkness of their hair, their com- plexion, and their eyes ; they make a good, not unpicturesque, appearance in their striped ponchos — how it comes that these most convenient articles of out-of-door dress, manufactured the most nowadays in England, are not a general European dress is a riddle to me — their slouched, broad-brimm ed hats of felt or straw, and their wide boots, often adorned, after the traditional South American fashion with huge silver-plated spurs, though these last are falling into gradual disuse, and bearing similarly adorned whips of cowhide in their hands. Hardy and enterprising in no ordinary degree, they are not always amenable to the restraints of law and government ; yet not of themselves wantonly turbulent or disposed to acts of violence ; they make up an excellent substratum and material for a state that cannot fail to hold high rank among those of the south equatorial world, whether it remain a component

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factor of the over-composite Argentine Confederation, or claim, as it is not wholly improbableit may, independence on its own account. The prevalent or, so to call it, official language through- out Corrientes is Spanish, but in the interior of the household, and out in the fields Guarani is widely spoken ; a link, among many others, of unity between these provincials and the neighbouring Paraguayans. The Chaco opposite is also, as to the tribes that roam over it and the dialects they employ, in great measure a Guarani country ; and, in spite of an expedi- tion, actually sent thither in view of subjugation by the central Argentine Government, whose transports were lying moored alongside of the right bank as we passed — likely to remain so for years to come ; nor have even the narrow encroachments of settlement and colonial proprietorship on its borders much success to boast of as yet.

"Here it was," said an Argentine passenger to me, as we stood together on the paddle-box of our steamer, gazing on the magnificent view before us, " here it was that the main army of the allies forced an entrance into Paraguay." He pointed to a strip of slightly rising ground on the northern bank of the Parana, just beyond its easterly bend ; the spot he indicated was backed seemingly by dense forest, and flanked by swamp and morass on either side. This was in fact Paso la Patria, the only available landing point for troops crossing the stream from Corrientes ; and here it was that a united army of Brazilians, Argen- tines, and Uruguayans, more than 60,000 men in all, well - trained soldiers and supplied with the best of modern artillery, arms, and ammuni- tion, and commanded by the best generals their respective countries could supply, were held for six long months at bay by considerably less than half their number of badly-armed, badly-clothed, worse fed Paraguayan recruits; and only at last succeeded in forcing the river passage at an

immense loss, thanks not so much to their own courage or skill as to the rash over-daring of the Paraguayans themselves, who, again and again, abandoned the shelter of their defences to assume an offensive action, for which neither their number nor their means were in any degree sufficient.

There is no need here to recount, even in abstract, the tragic story of the great Paraguayan war of 1865-70. Six disastrous years, which so nearly accomplished the avowed aim of Paraguay's bitterest enemy, Brazil — for the Argentine and the Oriental Republics were merely the instruments of Brazilian policy throughout, and shared less in the intentions than in the acts of the empire — that, namely, of wiping out of existence the most heroic, and, in many respects, the most hope-affording nationality of South America. Nor shall I recapitu- late the almost incredible follies and crimes of the selfish and parricidal madman, on whose behalf, simply because he was their lord and chief, the Paraguayans poured out their blood like water on the battle field, while their wives and children perished by thousands in the mountains and forests, till scarce a third of what had been so lately a prosperous and rapidly increasing population was left, naked, starving, houseless, within the dimin- ished limits of a land six years before a garden of Eden — now a desolate wilderness. Whoever wishes to know the details of that ruin may find them told, clumsily indeed and in writings devoid of literary merit, yet bearing sufficient evidence of general truth, by Thomson, Masterman, and others of their class, actors themselves or sufferers in what they describe. Enough at present to say that from the Paraguayan officer, who, borne wounded and senseless from the mad fray on board a Brazilian steamer, only regained consciousness to tear off the bandages, applied by pitying enemies to his wounds, and chose to bleed to death then and there rather than live an hour as a prisoner, down

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to the meanest private who, lying mangled and helpless on the field, had no answer for the offered quarter but a defiance or an attempted blow, one spirit only, that of devoted, all-ab- sorbing patriotism, of a determination to dare everything in the country's defence, and an equally firm resolution not to survive its downfall, was the spirit of the entire Paraguayan nation ; the spirit of Saguntum and Numantia, of Spartan Thermopylae and Theban Chseronea in one

But not the Paraguay of the past — if indeed events that occurred within the last twenty years only can historically be termed past — but the Paraguay of the present is our theme. Keeping straight on to the north we have left the wide expanse of the deflected Parana behind us on our right, and are now between the comparatively high and densely wooded banks of the Paraguay River, hereabouts turbid and swollen by the discoloured waters of the Vermejo, or "Red" River, its tributary from the Western Chaco, and the Bolivian hills far away. With a stream seldom subdivided, and a width equalling on an average that of the Lower Danube at Widdin or Roustchouk, the Paraguay has, at least to a European eye, much more of the appearance of a river than the seemingly shoreless Plata, or the in- definitely ramified Parana. The banks too are much more varied in character than those of the last-named stream : clay, rock, sandstone, limestone, basalt, succeeding each other in abrupt alter- nation ; the vegetation is also more abundant and diversified ; forest trees of great height and extent of branch, attesting the toughness of their wood fibre, and among them palms of every kind, some feathery, as the coco, some fan-leafed, some densely tufted, tall bamboos,tree ferns, resembling those of the Antilles, and a close undergrowth of shrub and plant, now starred with spring flowers, among which the white and pink predominate, as the yellow in many districts of China and the blue in European uplands. Along

the banks, among weed and drift- wood, half in, half out of the water, He huge, mud-coloured alligators. I am told that they are not alligators but crocodiles ; it may be so, though in what precisely an alligator differs from a crocodile I do not know ; any- how these amphibia of the Paraguay are, in outward appearance the very counterparts of their congeners in Siam. They watch us with dull, heavy eyes ; every now and then a pig-like " car- pincho," a sort of would-be-hippopota- mus, dives out of sight at our approach ; and we hear much of tigers, or rather panthers, said to abound hereabouts and to be good swimmers, but we do not meet any. To make up we see abundance of water-snakes, ugly speckled things, said to be poison- ous ; and birds of every size, descrip- tion, and colour. Frequent too, on either side of the river, but most so on the eastern, are the signs of human habitation ; pot-herb gardens, where gourds abound, fruit-trees, orange groves, now more golden than green in the lavish abundance of their sweet fruit ; little, almost country- English looking, cottages, singly or in small groups, with neighbouring inclosures for cattle, perched on the upper banks at safe distance from the yearly water- rise, while, moored under the shade of over-hanging brush- wood and creepers lie boats with mast or oar ; canoes too with paddles, Indian fashion, are not rare. Such for a hundred miles and more upward from its junction with the Parana is the general aspect of the Paraguay and its shores. Of the war that raged so fiercely over and along this very river district in 1866-68, of the terrible combat of Bellaco, when the flower of the Paraguayan nation- ality, and indeed, whatever was yet available of the Paraguayan army, pitted in utter defiance, alike of strategy and of tactics, against an enemy thrice over their superior in numbers, and ten times so in arms and every appli- ance of war, with all the advantages too of a strongly intrenched position, perished in its reckless daring — refus-

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ing quarter or surrender almost to a man. Of the battle of Curupati, a little higher up, and the fierce onslaught of Tuyuti, where some eight thousand Paraguayan recruits, the half of them mere boys of twelve to sixteen years, drove before them, panic-stricken, the best of the allied armies, burnt and sacked their camp, and reduced them to an inaction of months before they ventured on further advance, and of the countless skirmishes, ambuscades, surprises, bombardments, land-fights, river- fights, which, in league with famine, fire, and plague, made of these fair valleys one vast charnel house for at least a hundred and fifty thousand corpses, not a visible trace now re- mains.

" A thousand battles have assailed thy banks, But these and half their fame have passed

away ; And slaughter heaped on high his weltering

ranks ; Their very graves are gone, and what are

they ?

Thy tide washed down the blood of yesterday, And all was stainless, and on thy clear

stream

Glassed with its dancing light the sunny ray. "

So sang Byron of the Rhine ; so might he, with scarce the change of a word, have sung of the lower Paraguay. Nature's " work of gladness," an hour interrupted by man's equally appro- priate work of destruction and misery, is soon resumed ; with real or feigned indifference the mother-Sphinx smiles on, whatever betide the wayfarers of her domain.

Soon, however, we come on a break in the scene. The river, hemmed in to narrowness by high banks on either side, makes a sharp bend, or, rather, folds round upon itself, changing its direction from north to south-east, then south, then due east, then by west to the north again ; and amid these windings each shore, but prin- cipally the Paraguayan, is scarred by the traces of ruined batteries, range above range ; while some ruins of broken walls, that once were barracks and storehouses, amid dismantled field-

lines and earthworks, are overtopped by the tall ruins of a stately church — now a shattered shell of brick and stone. This is all that remains of Humaita, the important river-position fortified by Lopez to be the Cronstadt or Chatham of Paraguay, the outer- most and strongest bulwark of the interior and its capital, Asuncion. Nor could a better site have been chosen, had the means of defence been proportionate by land or water to the natural advantages of the position itself. Here, in 1868, a native garrison, scarce three thousand strong, held out, not by the strength of the outworks, which they were numerically insuffi- cient to man, nor by strength of artillery, of which, as of ammunition, they had little at command, and that of the worst quality, but by sheer dogged resolution and hand-to-hand fighting for four months of continual bombardment ; carried on by a besieg- ing force of at least twenty thousand men, backed from the river by 'a numerous fleet of iron-clads and moni- tors, Brazilian and Argentine, well supplied with whatever modern inge- nuity has supplied to destructiveness, nor yielded till starvation compelled the surrender of the survivors, now less than a third of their original number, and who, at the time of their capitulation, had been four days with- out food of any sort.

Never was a ruler, a chief, better served by his subjects than Solano Francisco Lopez, second of the family name ; and never did any one per- sonally less deserve such devotedness, and fidelity. While the Paraguayans, whom his reckless and disproportioned ambition, or vanity, alone had involved in a war with half, and more than half, the South American continent, a war of one to twenty, in which defeat and ruin might well from the outset have seemed foregone conclusions, were perishing for him by battalions in the field, or starving in the forest ; men women and children, during the six long years of a nation's agony, pre- ferring death in its worst forms to

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From. Montevideo to Paraguay.

foreign rule, or to any conditions of peace with the invaders of their land ; Lopez himself, sole cause and origi- nator of the war, well provided not merely with the necessaries, but even with the luxuries of 'life, lay hid behind the securest defences, or re- mained absent at safe distance from the scene of actual combat : nay, worse yet, exercised on those within his immediate reach, on the best and most faithful of his own officers and ser- vants, and ultimately on his nearest kinsmen, on his brothers, his sisters, his very mother, cruelties to which history, fortunately, supplies few paral- lels— I might almost say, taken in their totality, none. And yet it was for this man, sensualist, coward, tyrant, fratricide, matricide, that Paraguay lavished with scarce a murmur three- fourths of her life-blood ; saw her men, women, and children exterminated by war, by disease, by famine, by misery of every kind, or carried off as slaves into distant bondage ; saw her towns destroyed, her villages and fields wasted, her cattle harried, her wealth plundered to absolute bareness, nor even then submitted ; only ceased to strive when she had practically, and for all national purposes, ceased to exist. More yet, were Lopez himself, in the worst anger of the infernal gods, to revive to-morrow on Para- guayan territory, his reappearance would, there is every reason to believe, at once rally round him the obedience and the devotion of a vast majority among the yet surviving inhabitants of the land.

Rare even in Asia, rarer in Europe, rarest of all in the loosely-constituted, half-cemented societies of the New World, such fidelity as that of the Paraguayans stands out in history as a phenomenon hard to explain, an in- soluble riddle, an enigma, almost a scandal to those around. Many and far-fetched enough in all conscience have been the conjectures. Thus, for instance, I have heard Paraguayan loyalty to this last and most unworthy of chiefs, no less than the submission

shown to his far better and abler father, Carlo Lopez, and to the talented but half insane Francia of earlier years, attributed to — stupete gentes ! — Jesuit training ; and referred to an- cestral education in the celebrated but greatly exaggerated " missions," situ- ated, for the most part, outside of the Paraguayan territory, of the sons of Loyola, long since overthrown by Spanish jealousy, dead for more than half a century before the first appearance of Francia, and buried be- neath the ponderous verse of Southey, and the " Tale of Paraguay." A sup- position, betraying no small ignorance as of the merits, so also of the defects of Jesuit teaching, and a yet greater ignorance of chronology and of the local facts themselves. The much talked-of " missions," or "reductions," were almost wholly either in extra- Paraguay territory, that namely yet entitled " Misiones," south of the Parana, or in Uruguay, or, further off yet, in Patagonia ; and numbered at the most, taken conjointly, 170,000 souls. Besides, the disciples of the Jesuit Fathers were wholly and solely Indian, of Guarani race indeed the most, and so far identical with the Aborigines of Paraguay proper, but absolutely without, indeed carefully kept apart from, the Spanish element, which not only blends with but greatly preponderates over the " native," or Guarani in the Paraguay of later his- tory and of our own times. True the order of the Jesuits had, like other religious orders, its representatives in Spanish Paraguay, that is, down to the suppression of 1767 ; but their in- fluence there, as elsewhere, could have been at the most corrective, not for- mative of the national character.

Other theorists again, somewhat better, perhaps, acquainted with the history of these lands, " account for ' Paraguayan patriotism and loyalty, by attributing them to a kind of brutalisation supposed to have been induced by the tyranny of Francia and of the Lopez family ; a psycho- logical paradox that Godwin's self

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might have admired, but hardly sur- passed : to state is to refute it. Be- sides, the form of government volun- tarily adopted by an independent state, such as was the Republic of Paraguay ever since its final emanci- pation from the Buenos Ayres yoke in 1811, is not nor can, of its very nature, be an extraneous influence, a moulding force introduced from with- out, but, on the contrary, a self-con- sistent development, an expression of the national idea from within. It is the nation that creates the govern- ment, not the government the nation. The follies, the crimes of a Francia, a Solano Lopez are personal and their own ; the position they hold, the power they use or abuse, the honour paid, the obedience are the people's. Patriotism, loyalty, devotion to a cause, to a leader, may indeed be fostered, be encouraged, they cannot be given by others, however skilful, far less can they be enforced, they are not things taught, but innate, not acquired, but connatural to the race.

And thus it was with the Para- guayan nation. Half Basque, for such was the greater part of the original Spanish immigration in these regions, half Guarani-Indian, it united in it- self the tenacious courage, the uncon- querable fidelity of the countrymen of Pelazo, to the indifference to life, the dread of dishonour, and the unhesita- ting obedience to their chief that have at all times and in all lands distin- guished the Turanian, and, among the many off-shoots of that great stock, the Guarani race. And when, during the September of 1877, at the distance of half the globe, the Japanese Saigo, and his five hundred warriors of Satzuma, defended the heights of Shira-yama against fifteen thousand men, nor surrendered till death, they did but reproduce the heroism of their far-off Paraguayan half-cousins, alike out-numbered, alike unyielding to the last, at Humaita, at Yoati, at Cerro- Cora, eight years before. Nor is there any need to search further after the causes, the origin of that indomit-

able, more than Spartan, spirit : it is the undoubted heritage of a twofold race moulded into one, nor to be extin- guished but with the race itself.

Enough of this ; pleasanter scenes, suggestive of more cheerful thoughts and anticipations, await us in Para- guay. The Humaita ruins are already lost to sight among the graceful palms and dense orange-groves of the country around ; the narrow river-bend widens out again into a broad and easy water- way, with abundant evidence of re- viving happiness and prosperity along the green banks and meadows by its margin. Our next anchorage, for a few hours only, is off the nourishing little town of Pilar, the " neembuin," or " loud voice " of Guarani nomen- clature, prettily situated on its small hill, yet almost hid from river view by the dense orchard screen intervening : it numbers, with its outlying hamlets, over 10,000 inhabitants, many of them settlers from not-distant Cor- rientes, and gives us, in the aspect of its cottage-like houses and clean-kept streets and square, a foretaste of the neatness proper to Paraguayan vil- lages and homes. No South American race has cleanlier instincts in person, dress, and dwelling than the Para- guayan ; so far as my experience goes, cleanliness is the rule, not the excep- tion, throughout South America, Brazil, perhaps, in part, excepted. Pilar, at present the entrance harbour and commerce-gate of the Republic, was, in days not very far back, the only point of immediate contact between Paraguay and the outer world per- mitted by the jealous policy of Fran- cia ; and is even now, when the navigation and traffic of the Paraguay river are free from any exceptional restraints, an important wharf, thanks to its excellent position.

Doctor Francia's prohibitory sys- tem, by which he for many years iso- lated Paraguayan territory from what Carlyle has, graphically enough, move, suo, if not exhaustively, designated as a " bewildered gaucho world," has been made a favourite theme for wordy

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abuse by a troop of superficial soi- disant liberal writers and interested assailants, from the Robertsons down- wards. Nor would I for a moment wish even to palliate, much less to defend, the arbitrary and often cruel measures by which he carried out or supplemented his design. Yet in the main, and considering the isolation of the country as merely a temporary measure of protection against the fatal disintegration which must neces- sarily have ensued had Paraguay, with its yet unconsolidated and de- fenceless nationality, been left open to the irruption of the seething and surging deluge around, the Francian policy was right, and found ample justification in the astonishing vigour and concentrated patriotism of the little state, as displayed in the following generation ; a vigour not even yet, after the unparalleled disasters of the late war, wholly exhausted.

For about one hundred and fifty miles more we continue our upstream way by the noble river, somewhat lessened in bulk above the confluence of the Vermejo, and now in breadth and volume of water equalling, in its yearly average of fulness, the Danube at Orsova ; while in beauty of banks and scenery it much resembles the same river in its course from Regens- werth to Vienna, only that here the sub-tropical luxuriance of palms, bam- boos, cacti, ferns, and broad-leaved undergrowths of glossy green — for here the predominance of leaf over flower, so correctly noted by A. Wallace, as characteristic of the tropics, begins to make itself felt — impart to the Guarani landscape a special charm denied to the land of the southern Teutons. Several small towns, each with its nucleus of thirty or forty houses, the remaining dwellings being widely scattered around among gardens and orchards, peep, at safe distance from the annual floods, over the wooded banks. Of all these centres of reviving life none is prettier or livelier t.han Villeta, not far below the capital, Asuncion, and famous for its orange-

groves, whose produce suffices for the markets of Buenos Ayres and Monte- video both. It is a pleasant sight to see the fruit brought on board, as it always is, by long files of women, talking, laughing, singing as they trip along the planks that lead a con- siderable distance from the shore to the steamer, in their longwhite sacques, girt round the waist, and white cloths arranged mantilla-fashion over their heads — the invariable dress of the village daughters of the land. I had the good luck to be witness of the scene by torchlight, when dropping down the river on my return several weeks later.

Above Yilletu the east bank sinks to the water-level and opens out a scene of exquisite loveliness. Far in- land, across the plains, that here stretch to twenty and thirty miles distant from the river, field and orchard, farmhouse and cottage, with silvery glimpses of countless streams, tributaries of the Paraguay, and darker patches of forest : beyond, the blue serrated ranges of Mount Akai close in the view on the east ; to the north the quaint, conical hill of Lam- bari, covered with bright^green brush- wood from base to summit, rises iso- lated from the water's edge and hides from view the town of Asuncion close beyond it. This region is described, some years before the war, by Com- mander Page, of the well-known United States' expedition up these rivers, as one densely peopled in pro- portion to its fertility; and though terribly wasted during the later years of the great conflict and the Brazilian occupation that followed, it gives, in the frequency of its restored cottages, and the wide extent of its cultivation, clear evidence of returning prosperity and, if not wealth, at least sufficiency. Hour by hour, as we advance, the dwellings stand more frequent among the trees, the fruit or wood -laden boats and gliding canoes more and more enliven the river, till, rounding the basalt mass of Lambari, we come full in view of the Paraguayan capital ;

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and, making our way with caution — for the water is at this time of the year at its lowest, the highest being in April or thereabouts — among the shoals that here beset the widened channel, we cast anchor opposite the Custom-house landing-place, at the western extremity of the town, which, owing to a sudden bend in the river, lies west and east.

The scene before us makes a strik- ing contrast to that we have so lately witnessed. Nature soon re- pairs or conceals the traces of evil done by the wantonness of man ; fields, corpse-strewn and blackened with fire one year, may be waving in all the golden luxuriance of harvest the next ; orchard trees, though hewn and shattered, are not long in putting forth new boughs, clothed with fresh foliage and fruit ; more yet, peasant cottages and even villages are speedily rebuilt ; a few added years of peace, and the deficiency in the rustic population will have made it- self good and disappeared. And thus it is with the country sur- roundings of Asuncion. Not so the town ; its spacious edifices, churches, or public buildings, some disused and deserted ; others, in their half neglect, evidently all too wide for the shrunken requirements of a di- minished state and people ; others, sad monuments of ambitious and pre- mature vanity, now shattered and shamefully defaced ; everywhere empty shells of what once were happy dwell- ings, streets broken by wide gaps of ruin, and every token of havoc and spoil — these are wounds slow to heal, mutilations not easily replaced by fresh growth. But saddest of all sights in Asuncion is the very first and most conspicuous object seen from the river : the enormous palace of Fran- cisco Solano Lopez, barely completed before its lord's own downfall, now an empty shell, fronting the stream in long rows of dismantled portals and windows, black, ragged holes, like the eye-sockets of a skull. Its shattered turrets, shivered cornices, and broken

parapets announce only too faithfully the absolute devastation of the lone and dismantled interior, whence the Brazilian plunderers carried off what- ever they could lay hands on, even to the timber of the floors and the steps of the staircases, besides hacking and defacing whatever, from its nature, could not be carried away. Thus the palace has remained in appearance and condition, much resembling the Tuileries as I remember "seeing them as late as '77, and, like them, the wretched memorial of a sham Imperial- ism, cemented by immorality, and based on violence and fraud. For Lopez was one, nor the least, of the many foolish moths, lured on to their destruction by the false glitter of the second empire ; and the same year of 1870 that witnessed the overthrow of that colossal imposture at Sedan, wit- nessed, too, its new-world copy, Para- guayan pseudo-Imperialism, laid pros- trate with its dying chief on the bloody banks of the Aquidaban ; more fortunate indeed than its French prototype — because illumined at least by one bright ray of honour in the warrior-death of Lopez, who, in that last moment, showed himself worthy of the hero-race he had too long mis- governed, while nothing but shame attends on the memories of Sedan.

Within the town itself, the roofless •walls of a spacious but unfinished theatre, and the rough sketch, which, however, it would be a pity to leave as suchj for the proportions are good, of a domed oratory, near the centre of the city, are also memorials of the vaulting ambition that o'erleapt itself and fell. The cathedral, and the yet older church called of Encarnacion, where Francia sought but did not find a final resting-place, are heavy, un- graceful constructions of Spanish times. Nor have the government buildings, one of which was not the but a house of the terrible Dictator, for he had many, and continually shifted from one to another, for fear, it is said, of assassination, any preten- sion to beauty, hardly, to show. Nor

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are the remains of the old Jesuit college, now converted into barracks, any way remarkable. The streets, -wide and regular, are ill-paved and deep in sand ; the public squares un- decorated and bare. On the other hand, the dwelling houses, at least such of them as are constructed on the old Hispano- American plan, so ad- mirably adapted to the requirements of the climate, are solidly built and not devoid of that beauty which do- mestic architecture never fails to have when in accordance with domestic feeling and life : cool courts, thick walls, deeply recessed doors and win- dows, projecting eaves, heavy and pro- tective roofs ; the furniture, of native woodwork, solid and tastefully carved, the pavement not rarely of marble, local or imported. I may here re- mark, in a passing way, that hard forest woods, often ornamental, and susceptible of high polish and deli- cate work, and marbles of various kinds and colours, some not inferior in beauty of marking to any that Italy herself can boast, will, when Paraguay is herself once more, take high place on the lists of her productions and merchandise. Needless to say that the houses are all of them, as houses should be, in a healthy but hot situa- tion, one-storied, except where a mania for European imitation, encouraged by Lopez, among other shams of Parisian origin, has reared a few uncomfortable and ill-seeming dwellings of two or even three stories, flimsy, pretentious, and at variance alike with the climate and the habits of Paraguay. To these unlucky anomalies may be added the huge, ill-built, unshapely railway sta- tion (the railway line itself runs to the town of Paraguari, about forty-five miles south-east, and is the earliest in date among South American lines) at the east end of the town ; though this construc- tion fortunately possesses one good qua- lity which may avail to remedy all its many bad ones — the quality of evident non-durability. As to the railway it- self, it is, like most things involving complicated machinery and large capi-

tal in South America, a foreign under- taking, under foreign management ; with what benefit to the managers themselves and the shareholders I know not : a minimum of convenience and utility to the country and its in- habitants is, at present, anyhow, the most evident result. Nor is this either new or strange. " You must scratch your own head with your own nails," says the homely Arab proverb ; and if the resources of a land do not sufiice to its public enterprises, even the most urgently needed ones not excepted, without calling in the capital and aid of foreigners — well — it had better wait till they do sufiice. In this particular instance, however, amendment is pro- mised ; let us hope it will be effected.

Pleasantest and cheerf ullest of all out-door sights to the visitor of Asun- cion is the market-place, situated, as near as may be, in the centre of the town. It is a large square block of open arcades and pillared roof, whither the villagers from around daily bring their produce, intermixed with other wares of cheap price and habitual con- sumption ; the vendors are almost ex- clusively women. Maize, water-melons, gourds, pumpkins, oranges, manioca flour, sweet potatoes, and with these half-baked bread, cakes, biscuits, and sweets, such are the chief comestibles ; tobacco, of dark colour and strong flavour, and "yerva," the dried and pulverised leaf often spoken of as " Paraguayan tea," may be added to the list. Alongside of these a med- ley of cheap articles, for use or orna- ment, mostly of European manufacture, matches, combs, cigarette paper, pots and pans, water-jars, rope, knives, hat- chets, small looking-glasses, handker- chiefs, ponchos, native saddles, much resembling Turkish ones, and very commodious for riding in, coarse silver ornaments — I might fill a page more at least with the list — are exposed for sale. But the chief interest of the scene is the study of the buyers and sellers themselves. The men, who mostly belong to the former class, and are from the villages round about,

From Montevideo to Paraguay.

Ill

arrive mounted on small rough-coated horses, undipped of mane or tail. The rider's dress consists of a pair of loose cotton drawers, coarsely embroidered, and over them and round the waist a many-folded loin-cloth, generally white ; or else in a pair of loose, baggy trousers, much like those worn by Turkish peasants in Anatolia, and girt by a broad leather belt, almost an apron for width. These, with a white shirt, and over all a striped or flowered poncho, complete the dress ; boots are rarely worn, though the bare feet are sometimes, but rarely, equipped with silver-plated spurs. The features and build of the riders present every gradation of type from the light-complexioned, brown-haired, red- bearded, honest manliness of the ancestral Basque, to the copper hue, straight black hair, narrow dark eyes, obliquely set, beardless chin, flattened nose, and small wiry frame of the aboriginal Guarani. But it is not with the Spanish as with the Lusi- tanian breeds. For while the latter when crossed with Turanian, Aryo- Asiatic, or African blood passes at once into an inferior type of physical degeneration, as Goa, Macao, Timor, and Brazil, unfortunately prove beyond question, the Spanish seems, when similarly blended, to result generally in a progeny noway inferior in corporal strength and comeliness to the Iberian stock, and occasionally superior. The fact is one continually noticed, and much commented on ; yet I have never either heard or been able myself to supply any plausible conjecture of its cause. Nor again among the Creole descendants of Hispano-Indian parents is the trite, and, in too many other in- stances, over-true remark that the " mes- tizo" or half-blood generally exhibits in

himself the good of neither stock, the evil of both, in the least verified ; far more often the exact reverse, as here in Paraguay, where "Vascon honour, truthfulness, daring, and generosity, have blended with Guarani gentleness, endurance, and unquestioning loyalty, even to the death, into a type that is not the exception but the rule.

Such are the Paraguayans of the country. In Asuncion itself, under the combined influence of a large number of foreign residents, of a river- traflic that gives the town somewhat of the character of a sea-port, and of the evils, physical and social, insepar- able, it seems, from large towns and capitals, the national type is, neces- sarily, not so uniform or pure. In fact, to judge of Paraguay in general by the sights and experiences of Asuncion, would be no less unjust than to take Southampton, Liverpool, or even London, whereupon to form an exhaustive estimate of England and its inhabitants. Here, too, at the capital, the depression, or prostration rather, consequent on the late war, has been deepest, and is even now most persistent. Yet of the courtesy, the hospitality, the sociability, the cheerfulness, the music, the dancing, for all which Paraguay has long been celebrated, nor wrongly so, the visitor will even now find plenty to greet him in Asuncion, where, among the officials especially, he will meet the most highly endowed by birth and educa- tion that the nation can show. Still, after all, it is not here, but in the country districts that the distinctive patterns of Paraguayan life are clearest drawn ; and it is there ac- cordingly that my readers, if they care to accompany me, must seek them.

To be concluded in the next Number.

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A HINT TO PEOPLE WITH MODEST MEANS.

THERE are some classes of the com- munity to whom it ought to be needless to offer advice about emigrating to the Antipodes. The man who is not afraid of work, and who can handle pick, or spade, or an axe, must be strangely ignorant if he does not know by this time that his means of supporting a family, and his chances of getting on will be increased about four-fold by going out to Australia. He cannot earn less than 5s. a day, and is not unlikely to command 7s., even for rough work, while if he be a mason, a bricklayer, or a skilled mechanic, he may count on from 10s. to 12s., and may, in certain trades^and at certain times, get from 14s. to 16s. for the eight ^hours' work. Neither are these advantages counterbalanced by any real drawbacks. Food is cheaper than in England ; mutton selling for from 3d. to 4|c?. a pound, beef costing from 6d. to Sd., bread ruling a little less than in England, and tea being about 3d. a pound cheaper. The cost of fuel differs very much according to locality, but it is generally about as cheap to burn wood in Australia as coal in England, and the days when a fire is needed for mere warmth are incomparably fewer. House rent is apt to be dear for work- ing men, but one reason of this is that almost every man spends his first savings in building a house for himself with the aid of a building society, and the demand for hired houses is accord- ingly small and precarious. Clothes are nominally at English prices, but it must be admitted that this uniformity in the face of transport charges and sometimes of protective duties is apt to be obtained at some sacrifice of quality. Altogether, however, the cost of living is certainly a little less than in England ; and in Victoria, where the excellent primary schools are absolutely free, the father of a large

family saves a heavy sum on education. Then, again, the working man in the colonies has enormous advantages over his brother in England from the great ease with which he can invest his savings. There is always cheap land in the market, and the possession of land to the town dweller means that he can speculate in building allotments, while to the countryman it means that he may be farmer, carter, or grazier on a small scale as suits his taste and his capital.

On the other hand, it is very desir- able that the immemorial and con- venient custom of supposing that men who are not good enough for England will be good enough for Australia, should be discontinued with all pos- sible speed. There are still instances, from time to time, where a man of real ability coming out with first-class testimonials, or having relatives in the colonies, succeeds in establishing him- self as a professional man or in commerce. I have known several cases of medical men who have done this, and one where a banker's clerk, highly recommended, was able to get almost as good a place as he had left behind him. As a rule, however, Englishmen may take it for granted that our colonial universities and training schools have been turning out good men for years past ; and that the chances are enormously in favour of the native against the emigrant. The solicitor sends briefs to his university friend ; the physician hands over work to his old pupil ; and the civil service, which used to be a happy hunting ground for young gentlemen who came out with good letters of introduction, is now closed, or likely to be closed, in every colony to all who have not passed a local examination. The scientific man who has come out armed with two or three kindly letters, and has expected to find Australia

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unprovided with chemists or geologists ; the young engineer who has not learned, till he lands, that the state constructs all engineering works, and that it employs natives by preference ; the architect, whose specialty is to build poor-houses ; the governess who has excellent private testimonials but no certificate from a public body ; the clerk wrho speaks a little bad French, and who has left England because his employers would not promote him, are all familiar types of the most credit- able class of unsuccessful immigrants.

Formerly there was, no doubt, an opening for cadets of good family with a taste for country life, who found employment on country stations and gradually, in some cases, became wealthy landowners. Whether the instances of good fortune in this line have not been exaggerated by English tradition, which keeps no account of its failures, may perhaps be doubted. As a rule, the great properties in Australia have been formed by men accustomed from their youth upwards to hard work, who never quitted the station for their town club, and who regulated their expenses with an exact economy. At any rate, the time has long passed away since younger sons with small means and without local connection could do anything except on a small scale. Read the early books about settling in Australia, and you will find them assuming that the young sheep farmer begins with 500 or 1,000 sheep, and quickly doubles them year by year, having within reach unlimited land which he may take up. Now even the parts of Australia that still figure in Eng- lish maps as deserts are covered with sheep, or at the least are held on speculation by large firms, and can only be taken up by men who com- mand abundant resources. Twenty years ago a wealthy possessor of sheep- runs to whom young Englishmen used to be consigned, was supposed to set apart the least valuable of his runs as a place where they might see bush life at the smallest possible cost to

No. 308.— VOL. LII.

himself. At present it would need very good introductions to procure even as much as this for " a new chum." There is still some unoccu- pied territory in the north, but, as a rule, the owner of a squatting pro- perty is no more anxious than a London banker or merchant to take strangers into partnership.

It is only right to close this list of undesirable emigrants by the men- tion of " ne'er-do-weels." We get only too many of them, and it may be doubted if there is a single case where a man addicted to drink at home has abandoned the habit when he found himself in a colony, removed from the restraining influence of friends. The isolation, the lower companionship, the fits of despondency to which a comer of this class is exposed during his first struggles to achieve a posi- tion in a new society, are all terribly against his chances of reform. Neither is it the case, as a rule, that a man who has sunk into any moral depth at home has the vigour to begin life anew on the other side of the world ; more commonly he is haunted by the sense that his reputation has followed him, and prefers to decline upon a lower level of life, perhaps with a sort of feeling that in this way he may escape more completely from his old self.

Meanwhile there is a large class who seem to be out of place at home, and who would make excellent settlers in the British colonies, if they could only be induced to come out. The number of Englishmen wTho live on the Continent because they cannot afford to live in England is to be counted literally by thousands. A man with from four hundred to eight hun- dred a year finds that, as his family increases, he cannot keep his place in society in London or Brighton or Cheltenham. He does not care to settle in the country, where a gentle- man not a landowner is a very second- ary person, and he is even less inclined to migrate into a cheap suburb of London or a small country town. He

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is, in many cases, a retired officer, or a barrister, that is accustomed to work in some form, and he does not at first understand how completely life in a Continental town will shut him out from his old interests and from any possible form of activity. In some re- spects his change to Tours or Dresden or Florence is an extremely pleasant one. His income does a great deal more than it did ; his wife is a little less troubled with housekeeping; his children find good teachers at low rates ; and he himself has the English Club, at which he meets his country- men and reads the papers. Gradually, however, he discovers that time hangs very heavy on his hands, and his family find out that an idle man is a house- hold nuisance. In this dearth of some healthy excitement, there is tolerably certain to be a quarrel in the com- munity about the Church principles of the chaplain, or the social pretensions or the morals of some of the colony. When the boys grow up and ought to be entering professions, they are at a disadvantage from their foreign train- ing. They cannot compete on even terms with the English public school- boy for scholarships or for Civil Ser- vice appointments. They are not of the class which furnishes merchant's clerks, and their training as linguists serves them in little stead. At one time not a few of this class used to drift into foreign armies and especially into the Austrian service. Now even this door has been closed, and the chances are that they hang about for years, list- less and demoralised, till an opening presents itself or till they make up their minds to emigrate. Their sisters are scarcely more fortunate. If they are entitled to a little property, they are marked by small fortune-hunters of the countries in which they live, and marry to change their faith, to lose their nationality, and to endure all the discomforts of settlement for life among aliens. Even if the average Continental husband be as good as the average Englishman, his relations and friends are never likely to be quite as

cordial to the foreign wife as her own countrymen would be.

Now the Australian colonies at this moment offer peculiar advantages to a man of small fortune. Where his capital is in his own hands, the ten thousand pounds that produce him four or five hundred a year would yield him from six to eight hundred on first mortgages at the Antipodes. Let us take, however, the more com- mon case, where the English settler on the Continent is poor because his money is tied up, under settlements, in investments that only yield three or four per cent. ; and let us assume that what he has at Florence or Dinan will be the limit of his Australian income. Even so, he may live in the country or in a country town in the colonies as cheaply as he could live in Germany or Italy. It often happens that a good country house can be bought or rented cheap, and if the settler prefers to buy, he will easily be able to get the larger part of the purchase-money from a building society, or to arrange with the vendor for leaving it on mort- gage. If he wishes to farm, there will commonly be no difficulty in getting land. Of course, to make farming a, success, except in very exceptional years, the farmer, especially if he grows wheat, must concentrate his whole energy and time upon his fields, and must live, in fact, like the working farmers around him. Without going this length, however, a man may add a good deal to his comfort and a little to his income by taking a few acres into his own hands and growing the hay he wants for his horses and cows, while, if he be a good judge of stock, he may pick up a good many bargains in time of drought. The occupation that this will provide for him, in a country where a man may work with his hands with- out being disgraced by it or seeming odd, will not be its least advantage. Beyond this, however, a new settler, being a citizen from the day he enters the country, and by assumption an educated man possessed of some leisure,

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will find abundant work to his hands .as soon as his neighbours get to know him. He may serve on a school-board, or in a shire or municipal council ; or he may become a magistrate, or, if he makes himself increasingly useful and popular, a member of parliament. Neither, while he does all this, will he be shut out from society. Our country towns are, I think, better provided in this respect than average English towns of the same size. The local bankers, the police magistrate, and the local barristers or solicitors, the doctors, and the clergy, with a sprinkling of landowners in the neigh- bourhood, make up very much the same kind of social circles that used to be found in an English county town in the days when it was still possible to regard life out of London as endurable.

The children who come to Australia will run a risk of being a little less well educated than they would have been in France or Germany. The excellence of our primary schools has damaged the grammar-schools, except in such large towns as Melbourne and Sydney, and girls in a small country town cannot, of course, expect to find good music or drawing masters. Neither could a man with 400?., or even 600?. a year afford to send his sons to a first- class Melbourne grammar- school, or to give his daughters the advantage of the best teachers. What happens for the most part in country districts is that the children get the first part of their education at the costless and excellent state primary schools, after which the boys are roughly finished at the local grammar- school, and the girls, perhaps, by a governess. With the full knowledge that country boys now and again compete very successfully at the Uni- versity examinations, and that here and there a country grammar-school is really good, I admit this to be the weak point in my case, and can only express my hope that it may soon cease to be so. New South Wales has already tried the experiment of found-

ing State High Schools, and Yictoria will, no doubt, follow suit when the fierce opposition of the Catholic clergy to secular education shall have been abated or quelled. Meantime though the education the children get will be less liberal and showy than they would have received in Europe, it leads to something which can hardly be said of the other. In Victoria every Government appointment is now given by competitive examination, and this is getting to be the rule every- where. Therefore the Australian school-boy has a fair chance that he will win one out of many hundred Government appointments, going up from 60?. a year to 1200?., by seniority and merit. Let him fail in this, and the fact that he has passed a good ex- amination will recommend him for work in a bank or a merchant's office. Assume that he has no capacity for brain work. Even so, he will find a good eye and a strong arm more useful to him in a new country than they would be in an old ; and by the time his family has lived three or four years in their new home, will be much more likely to have secured friends and made an opening for himself, than if he was sent out from England with letters of introduction, and fifty, or, it may be, a few hundred pounds, in his pockets. As for the girls, their choice of marriage will certainly be no worse than it is in England, or on the Continent, and if nationality and a competence count for anything in domestic happiness, it will be an advantage that they marry their own countrymen, and that the struggle for life is not yet as severe in the colonies as at home. If they choose to remain single, they will have some rather good openings for work. Not a few highly educated young ladies prefer being state school teachers in the colonies to going out as gover- nesses. They do it without any loss of caste, and can earn as much as 200?. a year for five hours work a day on five days in the week. Certain other state departments, such as the post- office and telegraph-office are open to

i 2

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A Hint to People with Modest Means.

women ; and the degrees of art, law, and medicine at Melbourne University are now conferred without distinction of sex.

It is the mothers of families on whom the discomforts of life on a small income in the colonies will press most heavily. They know best what the drawbacks of life on the Conti- nent are. What they will suffer from in Australia in most cases will be a frequent change of servants, and an obligation to be able now and again to take part in household work them- selves. The native-born Australian servants are, to my mind, the best I have known anywhere ; intelligent, hardy, pleasant-mannered, and capable of going through any amount of work in an emergency. Three of them, as a rule, do the work of five in England, so that though wages are nominally high, servants really cost less to pay, and very much less to feed than at home. Unhappily their fault is that there are so few of them. Some of them only take service for a year, that they may learn household economy better than they could do at home. Others, and these, of course, are apt to be the most pleasant-mannered and best, get married at a moment's notice. In a country where places are so easily found, almost any servant will throw up her situation if she dislikes her fellow-servants. Therefore, the ladies of a family are now and again put to great shifts, and must either do some of the household work themselves, or take the first bad article that comes to hand in the shape of an importation from a London lodging-house, or a rough creature fresh from the tradi- tions of Connemara. The best that can be said about this difficulty is that it is less formidable in the country districts than in the large towns. People who treat their servants con- siderately and kindly can generally get supplied with the best class of girls from the small farmers in their neighbourhood, who are quite willing that their daughters should go to service, but very wisely prefer to keep

them within easy distance of home. It may be well to add that the Austra- lian servants are not infected with any American notions of equality, see no disgrace in blacking boots, and do not expect to sit down to dinner with their employers. Of course, when the facts that households are small and that servants do not remain long in their places are remembered, it will be understood that household work is not often carried out with as much finish as in England, and that the mistress often has to teach a good deal. The lady who is a chronic invalid, will do better perhaps by not setting up house in Australia.

There remains the question of amusement. Men with town tastes will certainly lose by coming to Aus- tralia. The average colonial town is incomparably better built, better drained, and better paved than the average Continental town of the same size; but everything about it is new and garish and prosaic, except that gardens are many and quickly formed. There are no old churches or frescoes or quaint bits of street over which the lover of art may linger ; no collections of bric-a-brac in which the virtuoso may pick up imaginary treasures ; the market-place is apt to be supremely matter-of-fact; and though holiday- makings and public gatherings are a little more frequent than in England, they do not make up for the church processions and military parades and swarming open-air life of an Italian town. Englishmen who migrate to the colonies must undoubtedly face the fact that they come to a land where art is really unknown, and where it would be much better for the popular taste if the art collections that exist had never been formed. Beyond the local club and a tolerably good lending library the settler will find nothing outside the society of his neighbourhood to occupy those idle hours which he does not care to spend out of doors. On the other hand he will be fairly well off as regards the amuse- ments that Englishmen mostly affect.

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Hunting has not been really natural- ised, though there are packs of hounds here and there ; but racing is so popu- lar and universal, that it has become a nuisance ; and a good shot can do a great deal, if he does not mind travel- ling from place to place. There are no game laws of the English type in Australia, but there is a close season enforced by law, and the land owner has the right to forbid trespass upon his land. Practically, it is very easy at present to get permission to shoot anywhere ; and a sportsman who did not disdain hare or rabbit shooting would find himself cordially welcomed in many parts of the colonies, and might, if he chose, pay his expenses in rabbit-infested districts by selling the skins. It has not been found possible thus far to acclimatise the pheasant and partridge. The Chinese pheas- ant succeeded for some time in New Zealand, but is said now to be dying out again. However, the wild turkey so-called, in reality a bustard, is excel- lent sport and good eating ; quails are numerous at times and in certain parts ; and the water-fowl that swarm in many of the rivers and lakes are now protected in Victoria by a law forbidding the use of swivel guns. Even for fox-hunting there is a good substitute in many parts of the bush, where the kangaroo is still hunted on horseback and run down like the deer; not driven in mobs into inclo- sures for a wholesale massacre. Ang- ling is of course almost unknown in the higher sense of the word ; but as trout and salmon are being rapidly natural- ised, there will soon be occupation for the fisherman, at least in Tasmania and Victoria.

Of athletic sports it seems almost needless to write. If, outside commer- cial circles, Australia is known in any way it is by the excellence of the elevens that have contested the cham- pionship of English cricket — not quite successfully — upon English ground. An attempt has been made to depre- ciate this success by a statement that cricket can be practised every day of

the year in Australia. This is not really the case. We have our cricket season and our foot-ball season like the mother-country. And there are many days, even in summer, when cricket is only pursued under difficul- ties, in a dust storm or with interrup- tions from rain. What is true is that our climate lends itself in a very remarkable degree to open-air exercise of every kind, and our young men have thrown themselves upon athleti cism with even more than the English ardour. Besides foot-ball and cricket, there are bicycle clubs and lawn- tennis clubs, and for the more seri- ously-minded rifle clubs and volunteer regiments. As for boating, Sydney just now possesses the champion oar of the world, and the contest for boat- ing honours between Sydney and Mel- bourne is apt to be a very close one. The young men of our communities are as well off in all these respects as their English cousins, and have no occasion to take refuge from ennui in dominoes or absinthe at a cafe.

There remains the question of cli- mate. In a general way it is tolerably exact to say, that the climate of Victoria resembles that of the Riviera, that the climate of New South Wales in the best-peopled parts is like that of Central or Southern Italy, and that the climate of South Australia is that of Spain. No general description however will do justice to countries that even where the wild and unsettled parts are excluded are about as big as Europe west of Poland. In South Australia, for instance, the resemblance to Spain is completed in the north by the fact that there are large plateaus at a level of 2,000 feet above the sea, where the nights are very cold in winter and comparatively cool in sum- mer. On the other hand Adelaide is found by most people oppressively hot in summer ; and the southern parts of the colony about Mount Gambier and Naracoorte are in the opposite ex- treme, being cold and moist to the level of Devonshire. So again in Vic- toria, the climate of Gippsland is

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almost English from its coolness, while the north-western plains lying north of the dividing range are at least as hot in summer as the country about Mar- seilles. In New South Wales there is a table-land known as New England, where the climate is temperate and where the specially English fruits, such as the gooseberry and the currant, are found to flourish. In Queensland the contrast between the elevated pastoral downs and the sugar-cane plantations on the coast represents the difference between a temperate and a tropical climate. Of all Australia, except of a few hill regions, which are, thus far, scarcely inhabited, it may be said that snow and ice are practically unknown ; but the settler may choose for himself whether he will live under a sky not much warmer than that of Devonshire or Cornwall, or in a region as hot as Andalusia and Armenia.

I hope I have made it clear that the life to which I invite the class I am addressing, is not that of hardship in the bush — of pine shanties for houses, and damper and interminable mutton for food — but very much the sort of life that may be led in an English county, and with certain advantages for a person of small means which an English county does not possess. The colonies at this moment are, in fact, quite as advanced in all material civilisa- tion as Yorkshire or Devonshire, and have a sense of manifest destiny which raises their politics above the level of county interests in the old country. Even twenty years ago the Australian legislatures were constantly debating questions of the highest interest — a suffrage system, a land system, or a judicature system, by the lights of Hare, Mill, and Austen — in a way that is scarcely possible in an old country with highly organised institu- tions and complicated interests. Now it seems as if we were being drawn suddenly into the vortex of European politics, and constrained to interest

ourselves in German plans of colonisa- tion and Russian designs upon India. We are English by connection and interest ; a fair portion of us are English by birth ; and all are English in the best sense of an unbroken tradi- tion of English breeding and association. Therefore it is, perhaps, allowable to suggest, that those who may elect to come amongst us for the future, should make up their minds to take us for what they find us, and should not assume over hastily that we are neces- sarily inferior to themselves, or at least to the English people at home. Mr. Lowell's admirable disquisition "upon a certain condescension in foreigners " has a wider application than to the United States ; and though it is not a matter of great moment to Australians, whetherthe British tourist condemns or patronises them from the observation of six weeks in the lead- ing clubs, half a dozen dinner parties, and two or three picnics in the bush, it may interfere a little with the happiness and success of intending colonists, if they carry a sense of magnificent superiority into their new homes.

Nevertheless, it will certainly be their own faults if they do not soon settle down into lives full of healthy activity. That, in fact, other conditions being fairly equal, is the great advantage Australia can offer. It holds out the offer of work and citizenship to men who are shut out from a discharge of the commonest civil duties while they live on the Continent. It offers partnership in a new world to their children. Surely for a few hundreds, at least, of those who are now living aimlessly out of England, it is worth while to consider whether the change to English communities — so highly favoured as the Australian and New Zealand — may not be profitable.

CHARLES H. PEARSON.

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UNEXPLAINED

For facts are stubborn things."

SMOLLETT.

II.

"A GHOST," I repeated, holdicg the poor trembling little thing more closely. I think my first sensation was a sort of rage at whomever or whatever — ghost or living being — had frightened her so terribly. " Oh, Nora darling, it couldn't be a ghost. Tell me about it, and I will try to find out what it was. Or would you rather try to forget about it just now, and tell me afterwards ? You are shivering so dreadfully. I must get you warm first of all."

" But let me tell you, mamma — I must tell you," she entreated pite- ously. " If you could explain it, I should be so glad, but I am afraid you can't," and again a shudder passed through her.

I saw it was better to let her tell it. I had by this time drawn her inside ; a door in front stood open and a bright fire caught my eyes. It was the kitchen, and the most inviting-looking room in the house. I peeped in — there was no one there, but from an inner room we heard the voice of the land- lady hushing her baby to sleep.

"Come to the fire, Nora," I said. Just then Reggie came clattering down stairs, followed by Lieschen, the taci- turn "maid of the inn."

" She has taken a candle up stairs, mamma, but I've not taken off my boots, for there's a little calf, she says, in the stable, and she's going to show it me. May I go ? "

"Yes, but don't stay long," I said, my opinion of the sombre Lieschen improving considerably, and when they were out of hearing, " Now, Nora dear, tell me what frightened you so."

" Mamma," she said, a little less white and shivering by now, but still with the strange strained look in her

eyes that I could not bear to see, " it couldn't have been a real man. Listen, mamma. When you and Reggie went, I got out a needle and thread — out of your little bag— and first I mended a hole in my glove, and then I took off one of my shoes — the buttoning up the side ones, you know — to sew a button on. I soon finished it, and then, without putting my shoe on, I sat there, looking out of the window and wondering if you and Reggie would soon be back. Then I thought per- haps I could see if you were coming better from the window of the place outside our room, where the hay and bags of flour are." (I think I forgot to say that to get to our room we had to cross at the top of the stair a sort of landing, along one side of which, as Nora said, great bags of flour or grain and trusses of hay were ranged ; this place had a window with a somewhat more extended view than that of our room.) " I went there, still without my shoe, and I knelt in front of the window some time, look- ing up the rough path, and wishing you would come. But I was not the least dull or lonely. I was only a little tired. At last I got tired of watching there, and I thought I would come back to our room and look for something to do. The door was not closed, but I think I had half drawn it to, as I came out. I pushed it open and went in, and then — I seemed to feel there was something that had not been there before, and I looked up ; and just beside the stove — the door opens against the stove, you know, and so it had hidden it for a mo- ment as it were — there, niamma, stood a man. I saw him as plainly as I see you. He was staring at the stove, afterwards I saw it must have

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been at your little blue paper parcel. He was a gentleman, mamma — quite young. I saw his coat, it was cut like George Norman's. I think he must have been an Englishman. His coat was dark, and bound with a little very narrow ribbon binding. I have seen coats like that. He had a dark blue necktie, his dress all looked neat and careful— like what all gentlemen are ; I saw all that, mamma, before I clearly saw his face. He was tall and had fair hair — I saw that at once. But I was not frightened ; just at first I did not even wonder how he could have got into the room — now I see he couldn't without my knowing. My first thought, it seems so silly," and Nora here smiled a little, " my first thought was ' Oh, he will see I have no shoe on,' " — which was very charac- teristic of the child, for Nora was a very " proper " little girl — " and just as I thought that, he seemed to know I was there. For he slowly turned his head from the stove and looked at me, and then I saw his face. Oh mamma ! " "Was there anything frightening about it?" I said.

" I don't know," the child went on. " It was not like any face I ever saw, and yet it does not sound strange. He had nice, rather wavy fair hair, and I think he must have been nice-looking. His eyes were blue, and he had a little fair moustache. But he was so fear- fully pale, and a look over all that I can't describe. And his eyes when he looked at me seemed not to see me, and yet they turned on me. They looked dreadfully sad, and though they were so close to me, as if they were miles and miles away. Then his lips parted slightly, very slightly, as if he were going to speak. " Mamma," Nora went on impressively, "they would have spoken if / had said the least word — I felt they would. But just then — and remember, mamma, it couldn't have been yet two seconds since I came in, I hadn't yet had time to get frightened — just then there came over me the most awful feeling. I knew it was not a real man,

and I seemed to hear myself saying inside my mind, ' It is a ghost,' and while I seemed to be saying it — I had not moved my eyes — while I looked at him —

" He disappeared 1 " " No, mamma. He <iid not even disappear. He was just no longer there. I was staring at nothing ! Then came a sort of wild fear. I turned and rushed down stairs, even without my shoe, and all the way the horrible feeling was that even though he was no longer there he might still be coming after me. I should not have cared if there had been twenty tipsy peasants down stairs ! But I found Lieschen. Of course I said nothing to her ; I only asked her to come up with a light to help me to find my shoe, and as soon as I had put it on I came outside, and ran up and down— it was a long time, I think — till you and Reggie came at last. Mamma, can you explain it1?"

How I longed to be able to do so ! But I would not deceive the child. Besides, it would have been useless.

" No, dear. As yet I cannot. But I will try to understand it. There are several ways it may be explained. Have you ever heard of optical delusions, Nora 1 "

" I am not sure. You must tell me ; " and she looked at me so appeal- ingly, and with such readiness to believe whatever I told her, that I felt I would give anything to restore her to her former happy fearlessness.

But just then Reggie came in from the stable.

" We must go up stairs," I said ; " and Lieschen," turning to her, " bring up our supper at once. We are leaving very early to-morrow morning, and we will go early to bed."

"Oh, mamma," whispered Nora, " if only we had not to stay all night in that room ! "

But there was no help for it, and she was thankful to hear of the success of our expedition to the post- office. During supper we, of course,

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121

on Reggie's account, said nothing of Nora's fright, but as soon as it was over, Reggie declaring himself very sleepy, we got him undressed and put to bed on the settee originally intended for Nora. He was asleep in five minutes, and then Nora and I did our utmost to arrive at the explanation we so longed for. We thoroughly examined the room ; there was no other entrance, no cupboard of any kind even. I tried to imagine that some of our travelling cloaks or shawls hanging on the back of a chair might, in the uncertain light, have taken imaginary proportions ; that the stove itself might have cast a shadow we had not before observed ; I sug- gested everything, but in vain. No- thing shook Nora's conviction that she had seen something not to be ex- plained.

" For the light was not uncertain just then," she maintained ; "the mist had gone and it had not begun to get dark. And then I saw him so plainly ! If it had been a fancy ghost it wouldn't have looked like that — it would have had a long white thing floating over it, and a face like a skeleton perhaps. But to see somebody just like a regular gentleman — I could never have fancied that ! "

There was a good deal in what she said. I had to give up my suggestions, and I tried to give Nora some idea of what are called "optical delusions," though my own comprehension of the theory was of the vaguest. She listened but I don't think my words had much weight. And at last I told her I thought she had better go to bed and try to sleep. I saw she shrank from the idea, but it had to be.

" We can't sit up all night, I sup- pose," she said, " but I wish we could. I am so dreadfully afraid of waking in the night, and — and — seeing him there again."

"Would you like to sleep in my bed — though it is so tiny, I could make room and put you inside?" I said.

Nora looked wistfully at the haven

of refuge, but her good sense and considerateness for me came to the front.

"No," she said, "neither of us would sleep, and you would be so tired to-morrow. 1 will get into my own bed, and I will try to sleep, mamma."

" And listen, Nora ; if you are the least frightened in the night, or if you can't sleep, call out to me without hesitation. I am sure to wake often, and I will speak to you from time to time."

That was the longest night of my life ! The first part was not the worst. By what I really thought a fortunate chance it was a club night of some kind at Silberbach — a musical club, of course ; and all the musically-gifted peasants of the country side assembled in the sanded parlour of the Katze. The noise was something indescribable, for though there may have been some good voices among them, they were drowned in the din. But though it prevented us from sleeping, it also fairly drove away all ghostly alarms. By twelve o'clock or thereabouts the party seemed to disperse, and all grew still. Then came some hours I can never forget. There was faint moon- light by fits and starts, and I not only found it impossible to sleep, I found it impossible to keep my eyes shut. Some irresistible fascination seemed to force them open, and obliged me ever and anon to turn in the direction of the stove, from which, however, before going to bed, I had removed the blue paper parcel. And each time I did so I said to myself, "Am I going to see that figure standing there as Nora saw it ? Shall I remain sane if I do ? Shall I scream out ? Will it look at me in turn with its sad unearthly eyes? Will it speak? If it moves across the room and comes near me, or if I see it going towards Nora, or leaning over my Reggie sleeping there in his innocence, misdoubting of no fateful presence near, what, oh ! what shall I do^"

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For in my heart of hearts, though I would not own it to Nora, I felt convinced that what she had seen was no living human being — whence it had come, or why, I could not tell. But in the quiet of the night I had thought of what the woman at the china factory had told us, of the young Englishman who had bought the other cup, who had promised to write, and never done so ! What had become of him? "If," I said to myself, "if I had the slightest reason to doubt his being at this moment alive and well in his own country, as he pretty cer- tainly is, I should really begin to think he had been robbed and mur- dered by our surly landlord, and that his spirit had appeared to us — the first compatriots who have passed this way since, most likely — to tell the story."

I really think I must have been a little light-headed some part of that night. My poor Nora, I am certain, never slept, but I can only hope her imagination was less wildly at work than, mine. From time to time I spoke to her. and every time she was awake, for she always answered without hesitation.

" I am quite comfortable, dear mamma. And I don't think I am very frightened;" or else, "I have not slept much, but I have said my prayers a great many times and all the hymns I could remember. Don't mind about me, mamma, and do try to sleep."

I fell asleep at last, though not for long. When I woke it was bright morning — fresher and brighter, I felt, jis I threw open the window, than the day before. With the greatest thank- fulness that the night was over at last, as soon as I was dressed 1 began to put our little belongings together, and then turned to awake the children. Nora was sleeping quietly ; it seemed u pity to arouse her, for it was not much past six, but I heard the people stirring about down stairs, and I had a feverish desire to get away ; for though the daylight had dispersed much of the "eerie" impression of

Nora's fright, there was a feeling of uneasiness, almost of insecurity, left in my mind since recalling the inci- dent of the young man who had visited the china factory. How did I know but that some harm had really come to him in this very place ? There was certainly nothing about the land- lord to inspire confidence. At best it was a strange and unpleasant coinci- dence. The evening before I had half thought of inquiring of the landlord or his wife, or even of Lieschen, if any English had ever before stayed at the Katze. If assured by them that we were the first, or at least the first " in their time," it would, I thought, help to assure Nora that the ghost had really been a delusion of some kind. But then again, supposing the people of the inn hesitated to reply — sup- posing the landlord to be really in any way guilty, and my inquiries were to rouse his suspicions, would I not be really risking dangerous enmity, besides strengthening the painful im- pression left on my own mind — and this corroboration of her own fear might be instinctively suspected by Nora, even if I told her nothing ?

" No," I decided, " better leave it a mystery, in any case till we are safely away from here. For allowing that these people are perfectly innocent and harmless, their even telling me simply, like the woman at Gruenstein, that such a person had been here, that he had fallen ill, possibly died here — I would rather not know it. It is certainly not probable that it was so ; they would have been pretty sure to gossip about any occurrence of the kind, taciturn though they are. The wife would have talked of it to me — she is more genial than the others," for I had had a little kindly chat with her the day before a propos of what every mother, of her class at least, is ready to talk about — the baby ! A pretty baby too, though the last, she in- formed me with a sort of melancholy pride, of four she had " buried " — using the same expression in her rough German as a Lancashire factory

Unexplained.

hand or an Irish peasant woman — one after the other. Certainly Silberbach was not a cheerful or cheering spot. "No, no." I made up my mind, "I would rather at present know nothing, even if there is anything to know. I can the more honestly endeavour to remove the impression left on Nora."

The little girl was so easily awakened that I was half inclined to doubt if she had not been " shamming " out of filial devotion. She looked ill still, but infinitely better than the night before, and she so eagerly agreed with me in my wish to leave the house as soon as possible that 1 felt sure it was the best thing to do. Reggie woke up rosy and beaming — evidently no ghosts had troubled his night's repose. There was something consoling and satisfactory in seeing him quite as happy and hearty as in his own English .nursery. But though he had no uncanny reasons like us for disliking Silberbach he was quite as cordial in his readiness to leave it. We got hold of Lieschen and asked for our breakfast at once. As I had told the landlady the night before that we were leaving very early, our bill came up with the coffee. It was, I must say, moderate in the extreme — ten or twelve marks, if I remember rightly, for two nights' lodging and almost two days' board for three people. And such as it was, they had given us of their best. I felt a little twinge of conscience, when I said good-bye to the poor woman, for having harboured any doubts of the establishment. But when the gruff landlord, standing outside the door, smoking of course, nodded a surly " adieu " in return to our parting greeting, my feeling of unutterable thankfulness that we were not to spend another night under his roof recovered the ascendant.

" Perhaps he is offended at my not having told him how I mean to get away, notwithstanding his stupidity about it," I said to myself, as we passed him. But no, there was no look of vindictiveness, of malice, of even annoyance, on his dark face.

Nay more, I could almost have fancied there was the shadow of a smile as Reggie tugged at his Tarn o' Shanter by way of a final salute. That land- lord was really one of the most incom- prehensible human beings it has ever been my fate to come across in fact or fiction.

We had retained Lieschen to carry our modest baggage to the post-house, and having deposited it at the side of the road just where the coach stopped, she took her leave, apparently more than satisfied with the small sum of money I gave her, and civilly wishing us a pleasant journey. But though less gruff she was quite as impassive as the landlord. She never asked where we were going, if we were likely ever to return again, and like her master, as I said, had we been stay- ing there still, I do not believe she would ever have made an inquiry or ex- pressed the slightest astonishment.

" There is really something very queer about Silberbach," I could not help saying to Nora, " both about the place and the people. They almost give one the feeling that they are half-witted, and yet they evidently are not. This last day or two I seem to have been living in a sort of dream, or nightmare, and I shall not get over it altogether till we are fairly out of the place," and though she said little, I felt sure the child understood me.

We were of course far, far too early for the post. The old man came out of his house and seemed amused at our haste to be gone.

" I am afraid Silberbach has not taken your fancy," he said. " Well, no wonder. I think it is the dreariest place I ever saw."

" Then you do not belong to it ? Have you not been here long 1 " I asked.

He shook his head.

" Only a few months, and I hope to get removed soon," he said. So he could have told me nothing, evidently ! " It is too lonely here. There is not a creature in the place who ever touches a book — they are all as dull

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Unexplained.

-and stupid as they can be. But then they are very poor, and they live on here from year's end to year's end, barely able to earn their daily bread. Poverty degrades — there is no doubt of it, whatever the wise men may say. A few generations of it makes men little better than — " he stopped. " Than ] " I asked. " Than," the old philosopher of the post-house went on, " pardon the ex- pression— than pigs."

There were two or three of the fraternity grubbing about at the side of the road ; they may have suggested the comparison. I could hardly help smiling.

" But I have travelled a good deal in Germany," I said, " and I have never anywhere found the people so stupid and stolid and ungenial as here."

"Perhaps not," he said. " Still there are many places like this, only naturally they are not the places strangers visit. It is never so bad where there are a few country houses near, for nowadays it must be allowed it is seldom but that the gentry take some interest in the people."

" It is a pity no rich man takes a fancy to Silberbach," I said.

" That day will never come. The best thing would be for a railway to be cut through the place, but that too is not likely."

Then the old postmaster turned into his garden, inviting us civilly to wait there or in the office if we preferred. But we liked better to stay outside, for just above the post-house there was a rather tempting little wood, much prettier than anything to be seen on the other side of the village. And Nora and I sat there quietly on the stumps of some old trees, while Heggie found a pleasing distraction in alternately chasing and making friends with a party of ducks, which for reasons best known to themselves had deserted their native element and come for a stroll in the woods.

From where we sat we looked down on our late habitation ; we could almost distinguish the landlord's

slouching figure and poor Lieschen with a pail of water slung at each side as she came in from the well.

"What a life!" I could not help saying. " Day after day nothing but work. I suppose it is not to be wondered at if they grow dull and stolid, poor things." Then my thoughts reverted to what up here in the sun- shine and the fresh morning air and with the pleasant excitement of going away I had a little forgotten — the strange experience of the evening before. It was difficult for me now to realise that I had been so affected by it. I felt now as if I wished I could see the poor ghost for myself, and learn if there was aught we could do to serve or satisfy him ! For in the old orthodox ghost-stories there is always some reason for these eerie wanderers returning to the world they have left. But when I turned to Nora and saw her dear little face still white and drawn, and with an expression half subdued, half startled, that it had never worn before, I felt thankful that the unbidden visitor had attempted no communication.

" It might have sent her out of her mind," I thought. " Why, if he had anything to say, did he appear to her, poor child, and not to me? — though after all I am not at all sure that / should not go out of my mind in such a case."

Before long the post-horn made itself heard in the distance ; we hurried down, our hearts beating with the fear of possible disappointment. It was all right, however, there were no pas- sengers, and nodding adieu to our old friend we joyfully mounted into our places, and were bowled away to Seeberg.

There and at other spots in its pretty neighbourhood we spent pleasantly enough two or three weeks. Nora by degrees recovered her roses and her good spirits. Still, her strange ex- perience left its mark on her. She was never again quite the merry, thoughtless, utterly fearless child she had been. I tried, however, to take

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the good with the ill, remembering that thorough- going childhood cannot last for ever, that the shock possibly helped to soften and modify a nature that might have been too daring for perfect womanliness — still more, want- ing perhaps in tenderness and sympathy for the weaknesses and tremors of feebler temperaments.

At Kronberg, on our return, we found that Herr von "VValden was off on a tour to the Italian lakes, Lutz and young Trachenfels had returned to their studies at Heidelberg, George Norman had gone home to England. All the members of our little party were dispersed, except Frau von Walden.

To her and to Ottilia I told the story, sitting together one afternoon over our coffee, when Nora was not with us. It impressed them both. Ottilia could not resist an "I told you so."

"I knew, I felt," she said, "that something disagreeable would happen to you there. I never will forget," she went on naively, " the dreary, dis- mal impression the place left on me the only time I was there — pouring rain and universal gloom and discom- fort. We had to wait there a few hours to get one of the horses shod, once when I was driving with my father from Seeberg to Marsfeldt."

Frau von Walden and I could not help smiling at her. Still there was no smiling at my story, though both agreed that, viewed in the light of unexaggerated common sense, it was most improbable that there was any tragedy mixed up with the disappear- ance of the young man we had heard of at Gruenstein.

" And indeed why we should speak of his ' disappearance ' I don't know," said Frau von Walden. " He did not write to send the order he had spoken of — that was all. No doubt he is very happy at his own home. When you are back in England, my dear, you must try to find him out — perhaps by means of the cup. And then when Nora sees him, and finds he is not at

all like the ' ghost,' it will make her the more ready to think it was really only some very strange, I must admit, kind of optical delusion."

" But Nora has never heard the Gruenstein story, and is not to hear it," said Ottilia.

" And England is a wide place, small as it is in one sense," I said. '•' Still, if I did come across the young man, I half think I would tell Nora the whole, and by showing her how my imagination had dressed it up, I think I could perhaps lessen the effect on her of what she thought she saw. It would prove to her better than any- thing the tricks that fancy may play us."

" And, in the meantime, if you take my advice, you will allude to it as little as possible," said practical Ottilia. " Don't seem to avoid the sub- ject, but manage to do so in reality."

"Shall you order the tea-service?" asked Frau von Walden.

" I hardly think so. I am out of conceit of it somehow," I said. " And it might remind Nora of the blue paper parcel. I think I shall give th& cup and saucer to my sister."

And on my return to England I did so.

Two years later. A very different scene from quaint old Kronberg, or still more from the dreary " Katze " at Silberbach. We are in England now, though not at our own home. We are staying, my children and I — two older girls than little Nora, and Nora herself, though hardly now to be de- scribed as " little " — with my sister. Reggie is there too, but naturally not much heard of, for it is the summer holidays, and the weather is delight- ful. It is August again — a typical August afternoon — though a trifle too hot perhaps for some people.

" This time two years ago, mamma," said Margaret, my eldest girl, " you were in Germany with Nora and Reggie. What a long summer that seemed ! It is so much nicer to be all together."

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Unexplained.

" I should like to go to Kronberg and all those queer places," said Lily, the second girl ; " especially to the place where Nora saw the ghost."

" I am quite sure you would not wish to stay there," I replied. " It is curious that you should speak of it just now. I was thinking of it this morning. It was just two years yesterday that it happened."

We were sitting at afternoon tea on the lawn outside the drawing-room window — my sister, her husband, Mar- garet, Lily, and I. Nora was with the school-room party inside.

" How queer ! " said Lily.

" You don't think Nora has thought of it?" I asked.

" Oh, no — I am sure she hasn't," said Margaret. " I think it has grown vague to her now.

Just then a servant came out of ;the house, and said something to my •brother-in-law. He got up at once.

"It is Mr. Grenfell," he said to his wife, " and a friend with him. Shall I bring them out here ? "

" Yes, it would really be a pity to go into the house again — it is so nice out here," she replied. And her husband went to meet his guests.

He appeared again in a minute or two, stepping out through the low window of the drawing room, accom- panied by the two gentlemen.

Mr. Grenfell was a young man living in the neighbourhood whom we had known from his boyhood ; the stranger he introduced to us as Sir Robert Masters. He was a middle- aged man, with a quiet, gentle bearing and expression.

"You will have some tea?" said my sister, after the first few words of greeting had passed. Mr., Grenfell declined. His friend accepted.

" Go into the drawing-room, Lily, please, and ring for a cup and saucer," said her aunt, noting the deficiency. " There was an extra one, but some one has poured milk into the saucer. It surely can't have been you, Mark, for Tiny?" she went on, turning to her husband. " You shouldn't let a

dog drink out of anything we drink out of ourselves."

My brother-in law looked rather comically penitent ; he did not attempt to deny the charge.

"Only, my dear, you must allow," he pleaded, " that we do not drink our tea out of the saucers."

On what trifling links hang some- times important results ! Had it not been for Mark's transgressing in the matter of Tiny's milk we should never have learnt the circumstances which give to this simple relation of facts — valueless in itself — such interest, speculative and suggestive only, I am aware, as it may be found to possess.

Lily, in the meantime, had disap- peared. But more quickly than it would have taken her to ring the bell, and await the servant's response to the summons, she was back again, carrying something carefully in her hand.

"Aunt," she said, "is it not a good idea? As you have a tea-spoon — I don't suppose Tiny used the spoon, did he 1 — I thought, instead of ringing for another, I would bring out the ghost- cup for Sir Robert. It is only fair to use it for once, poor thing, and just as we have been speaking about it. Oh, I assure you it is not dusty," as my sister regarded it dubiously. " It was inside the cabinet."

" Still, all the same, a little hot water will do it no harm," said her aunt — " provided, that is to say, that Sir Robert has no objection to drink out of a cup with such a name attached to it?"

" On the contrary," replied he, " I shall think it an honour. But you will, I trust, explain the meaning of the name to me ? It puzzles me more than if it were a piece of ancient china — a great-great-grandmother's cup, for instance. For I see it is not old, though it is very pretty, and, I suppose, uncommon ? "

There was a slight tone of hesita- tion about the last word which struck

me.

" I have no doubt my sister will be

Unexplained.

127

ready to tell you all there is to tell. It was she who gave me the cup," replied the lady of the house.

Then Sir Robert turned to me. Looking at him full in the face I saw that there was a thoughtful, far-seeing look in his eyes, which redeemed his whole appearance from the somewhat commonplace gentlemanlikeness which was all I had before observed about him.

" I am greatly interested in these subjects," he said. " It would be very kind of you to tell me the whole."

I did so, more rapidly and succinctly of course than I have done here. It is not easy to play the part of narrator, with five or six pairs of eyes fixed upon you, more especially when the owners of several of them have heard the story a good many times before, and are quick to observe the slightest discrep- ancy, however unintentional. " There is, you see, very little to tell," I said in conclusion, " only there is always a certain amount of impressiveness about any experience of the kind when re- lated at first hand."

"Undoubtedly so," Sir Robert replied. " Thank you very much indeed for telling it me."

He spoke with perfect courtesy, but with a slight absence of manner, his eyes fixed rather dreamily on the cup in his hand. He seemed as if trying to recall or recollect something.

" There should be a sequel to that story," said Mr. Grenfell.

" That's what I say," said Margaret, eagerly. " It will be too stupid if we never hear any more. But that is always the way with modern ghost stories — there is no sense or meaning in them. The ghosts appear to people who never knew them, who take no interest in them, as it were, and then they have nothing to say — there is no denotiment, it is all purposeless."

Sir Robert looked at her thought- fully.

" There is a good deal in what you say," he replied. " But I think there is a good deal r Iso to be deduced from the very fact you speak of, for it is a fact.

I believe what you call the meaning- lessness and purposelessness — the arbitrariness, one may say, of modern experiences of the kind are the surest proofs of their authenticity. Long ago people mixed up fact and fiction, their imaginations ran riot and on some very slight foundation — of ten, no doubt genuine, though slight — they built up a very complete and thrilling ' ghost story.' Nowadays we consider and philosophise, we want to get to the root and reason of things, and we are more careful to beware of exaggeration. The result is that the only genuine ghosts are most unsatisfactory beings , they appear without purpose, and seem to be what, in fact, I believe they almost always are, irresponsible, purposeless will-o'-the-wisps. But from these I would separate the class of ghost stories the best attested and most impressive — those that have to do with the moment of death ; any vision that appears just at or about that time has generally more meaning in it, I think you will find. Such ghosts appear for a reason, if no other than that of in- tense affection, which draws them near those from whom they are to be separated."

We listened attentively to this long explanation, though by no means fully understanding it.

" I have often heard," I said, " that the class of ghost stories you speak of are the only thoroughly authenticated ones, and I think one is naturally more inclined to believe in them than in any others. But I confess I do not in the least understand what you mean by speaking of other ghosts as 'will- o'-the-wisps.' You don't mean that though at the moment of death there is a real being — the soul, in fact, as distinct from the body, in which all but materialists believe — that this has no permanent existence, but melts away by degrees till it becomes an irresponsible, purposeless nothing — a will-o'-the-wisp in fact 1 I think I heard of some theory of the kind lately in a French book, but it shocked and repelled me so that I tried to forget it.

128

Unexplained.

Just as well, better, believe that we are nothing but our bodies, and that all is over when we die. Surely you don't mean what I say ? "

" God forbid," said Sir Robert, with a fervency which startled while it reassured me. "It is my profound belief that not only we are something more than our bodies, but that our bodies are the merest outer dress of our real selves. It is also my pro- found belief that at death we — the real we — either enter at once into a state of rest temporarily, or, in some cases — for I do not believe in any cut- and-dry rule independently of indivi- dual considerations — are privileged at once to enter upon a sphere of nobler and purer labour," and here the speaker's eyes glowed with a light that was not of this world. " Is it then the least probable, is it not altogether dis- cordant with our ' common sense,' — a Divine gift which we may employ fearlessly — to suppose that these real ' selves,' freed from the weight of their discarded garments, would leave either their blissful repose, or, still less, their new activities, to come back to wander about, purposelessly and aimlessly in this world, at best only perplexing and alarming such as may perceive them? Is it not contrary to all we find of the wisdom and reasonableness of such laws as we do know something about ?"

" I have often thought so," I said, "and hitherto this has led me to be very sceptical about all ghost stories."

" But they are often true — so far as they go," he replied. " Our natures are much more complex than we our- selves understand or realise. I cannot now go at all thoroughly into the sub- ject, but to give you a rough idea of my will-o'-the-wisp theory — can you not imagine a sort of shadow, or echo of ourselves lingering about the scenes we have frequented on this earth, which under certain very rare condi- tions— the state of the atmosphere among others — may be perceptible to those still ' clothed upon ' with this present body 1 To attempt a simile, I

might suggest the perfume that lingers when the flowers are thrown away, the smoke that gradually dissolves after the lamp is extinguished 1 This is, very, very loosely and roughly, the sort of thing I mean by my ' will-o'- the-wisps.' '

"I don't like it at all," said Margaret, though she smiled a little. " I think I should be more frightened if I saw that kind of ghost — I mean if I thought it that kind — than by a good honest old-fashioned one, who knew what it was about and meant to come."

" But you have just said," he objected, "that they never do seem to know what they are about. Besides, why should you be frightened 1 — our fears, ourselves in fact — are the only thing we really need be frightened of — our weaknesses and ignorances and folly. There was great truth in that rather ghastly story of Calderra's, allegory though it is, about the man whose evil genius was himself ; have you^ read it?"

We all shook our heads.

" It is ignorance that frightens us," he said. Just then his eyes fell on the table. " I cannot get over the impres- sion that I have seen that cup — no, not that cup, but one just like it — be- fore. Not long ago, I fancy," he said.

" Oh, you must let us know if you find out anything," we all exclaimed.

" I certainly shall do so," he said, and a few minutes afterwards he and Mr. Grenfell took their leave.

I have never seen Sir Robert again. Still I have by no means arrived yet at the end of my so-called ghost story.

The cup and saucer were carefully washed and replaced in the glass- doored cabinet. The summer gradu- ally waned and we all returned to our own home. It was at a considerable distance from my sister's, and we met each other principally in the summer- time. So, though I did not forget Sir Robert Masters, or his somewhat strange conversation, amid the crowd of daily interests and pleasures, duties and cares, none of the incidents I

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129

have here recorded were much in my mind, and but that I had while still in Germany carefully noted the details of all bearing directly or indirectly on "Nora's ghost," as we had come to call it — though it was but rarely al- luded to before the child herself — I should not now have been able to give them with circumstantiality.

Fully fifteen months after the visit to my sister, during which we had met Sir Robert, the whole was sud- denly and unexpectedly recalled to my memory. Mark and Nora the elder, my sister, that is, were in their turn staying with us, when one morning at breakfast the post brought for the latter an unusually bulky and im- portant-looking letter. She opened it, glanced at an outer sheet inclosing several pages in a different hand- writing, and passed it on to me.

"We must read the rest together," she said in a low voice, glancing at the children who were at the table ; " how interesting it will be ! "

The sheet she had handed to me was a short note from Mr. Grenfell. It was dated from some place in Nor- way where he was fishing, and from whence he had addressed the whole packet to my sister's own home, not knowing of her absence.

" MY DEAR MRS. DAVENTRY, — " it be- gan— " The inclosed will have been a long time of reaching its real destina- tion, for it is, as you will see, really in- tended for your sister. No doubt it will interest you too, as it has done me, though I am too matter-of-fact and prosaic to enter into such things much. Still it is curious. Please keep the letter, I am sure my friend intends you to do so.

" Yours very truly, " RALPH GRENFELL."

The manuscript inclosed was of course from Sir Robert himself. It was in the form of a letter to young Grenfell, and after explaining that he thought it better to write to him, not having my address, he plunged into the real object of his communication.

No. 308.— VOL. LIT.

" You will not," he said, " have for- gotten the incident of the ' ghost-cup ' in the summer of last year, and the curious story your friend was so good as to tell us about it. You may re- member— Mrs. - - will, I am sure, do so — my strong impression that I had recently seen one like it. After I left you I could not get this feeling out of my head. It is always irritating not to be able, figuratively speaking, ' to lay your hand,' on a recollection, and in this instance I really wanted to get the clue, as it might lead to some sort of ' explanation ' of the little girl's strange experience. I cudgelled my brains, but all to no pur- pose ; I went over in memory all the houses at which I had visited within a certain space of time ; I made lists of all the people I knew interested in ' china,' ancient or modern, and likely to possess specimens of it. But all in vain. All I got for my pains was that people began to think I was de- veloping a new crotchet, or, as I heard one lady say to another, not knowing I was within earshot, ' the poor man must be a little off his head, though till now I have always denied it. But the revulsion from benevolent schemes to china-collecting shows it only too plainly.' So I thought I had better leave off cross-questioning my ' col- lecting ' friends about porcelain and faience, German ware in particular. And after a while I thought no more about it. Two months ago I. had occasion to make a journey to the north — the same journey and to stay at the same house where I have been four or five times since I saw the 'ghost-cup.' But this was what hap- pened this time. There is a junction by which one must pass on this journey. I generally manage to suit my trains so as to avoid waiting there, but this is not always feasible. This time I found that an hour at the junction was inevitable. There is a very good refreshment room there, kept by very civil, decent people. They knew me by sight, and after I had had a cup of tea they proposed to

130

Unexplained.

me, as they have done before, to wait in their little parlour just off the public room. ' It would be quieter and more comfortable,' said either the mother or the daughter who manage the concern. I thanked them, and settled myself in an arm-chair with my book, when, look- ing up — there on the mantelpiece stood the fellow cup — the identical shape, pattern, and colour ! It all flashed into my mind then. I had made this journey just before going into your neighbourhood last year, and had waited in this little parlour just as this time.

" ' Where did you get that cup, Mrs. Smith ? ' I asked.

" There were two or three rather pretty bits of china about. The good woman was pleased at my noticing it.

" ' Yes, sir. Isn't it pretty ? I've rather a fancy for china. That cup was sent me by my niece. She said she'd picked it up somewhere — at a sale I think. It's foreign, sir, isn't it?'

" ' Yes, German. But can't you find out where your niece got it,' for at the word " sale " my hopes fell.

" ' I can ask her. I shall be writ- ing to her this week,' she replied ; and she promised to get any infor- mation she could for me within a fortnight, by which time I expected to pass that way again. I did so, and Mrs. Smith proved as good as her word. The niece had got the cup from a friend of hers, an auctioneer, and he, not she, had got it at a sale. But he was away from home — she could hear nothing more at present. She gave his address, however, and assurances that he was very good-natured and would gladly put the gentleman in the way of getting china like it, if it was to be got. He- would be home by the middle of the month. It was now the middle of the month. The auctioneer's town was not above a couple of hours off my line. Perhaps you will all laugh at me when I tell you that I went those two hours out of my way, arriving at the town late that night and putting up at a queer old inn —

worth going to see for itself — on pur- pose to find the man of the hammer. I found him. He was very civil, though rather mystified. He remem- bered the cup perfectly, but there was no chance of getting any like it where it came from !

" ' And where was that 1 ' I asked eagerly.

" ' At a sale some miles from here, about four years ago,' he replied. ' It was the sale of the furniture and plate, and everything, in fact, of a widow lady. She had some pretty china, for she had a fancy for it. That cup was not of much value ; it was quite modern. I bought it in for a trine. I gave it to Miss Cross, and she sent it to her aunt, as you know. As for getting any like it

' But I interrupted him by assuring him I did not wish that, but that I had reasons for wanting some infor- mation about the person who, I be- lieved, had bought the cup. ' Nothing to do any harm to any one,' I said ; ' a matter of feeling.' A similar cup had been bought by a person I was interested in, and I feared that person was dead.'

" The auctioneer's face cleared. He fancied he began to understand me.

" ' I am afraid you are right, sir, if the person you mean was young Mr. Paulet, the lady's son. You may have met him on his travels? His death was very sad, I believe. It killed his mother, they say — she never looked up after, and as she had no near relative to follow her, everything was sold. I remember I was told all that at the sale, and it seemed to me par - ticularly sad, even though one comes across many sad things in our line of business.'

" 'Do you remember the particulars of Mr. Paulet's death ? ' I asked.

" ' Only that it happened suddenly — somewhere in foreign parts. I did not know the family, till I was asked to take charge of the sale,' he replied.

" ' Could you possibly get any details for me 1 I feel sure it is the same Mr. Paulet,' I said boldly.

Unexplained.

131

"The auctioneer considered.

" ' Perhaps I can. I rather think a former servant of theirs is still in the neighbourhood,' he replied.

"I thanked him and left him my address, to which he promised to write. I felt it was perhaps better not to pursue my inquiries further in person ; it might lead to annoyance, or possibly to gossip about the dead, which I detest. I jotted down some particulars for the auctioneer's guidance, and went on my way. That was a fortnight ago. To-day I have his answer, which I transcribe : —

" 'SiR, — The servant I spoke of could not tell me very much, as she was not long in the late Mr. Paulet's service. To hear more, she says, you must apply to the relations of the family. Young Mr. Paulet was tall and fair and very nice-looking. His mother and he were deeply attached to each other. He travelled a good deal and used to bring her home lots of pretty things. He met his death in some part of Germany where there are forests, for though it was thought at first he had died of heart disease, the doctors proved he had been struck by lightning, and his body was found in the forest, and the papers on him showed who he was. The body was sent home to be buried, and all that was found with it ; a knapsack and its contents, among which was the cup I bought at the sale. His death was about the middle of August 18 — . I shall be glad if this informa- tion is of any service.'

" This," continued Sir Robert's own letter, " is all I have been able to learn. There does not seem to have been the very slightest suspicion of foul play, nor do I think it the least likely there was any ground for such. Young Paulet probably died some way

further in the forest than Silberbach, and it is even possible the surly land- lord never heard of it. It might be worth while to inquire about it should your friends ever be there again. If I should be in the neighbourhood I certainly should do so ; the whole coincidences are very striking."

Then followed apologies for the length of his letter which he had been betrayed into by his anxiety to tell all there was to tell. In return he asked Mr. Grenfell to obtain from me certain dates and particulars as he wished to note them down. It was the 18th of August on which " Nora's ghost " had appeared — just two years after the August of the poor young man's death !

There was also a postscript to Sir Robert's letter, in which he said, " I

think, in Mrs. 's place I would

say nothing to the little girl of what we have discovered."

And I have never done so.

This is all I have to tell. I offer no suggestions, no theories in explana- tion of the facts. Those who, like Sir Robert Masters, are able and desirous to treat such subjects scienti- fically or philosophically will doubtless form their own. I cannot say that I find his 'theory a perfectly satisfactory one, perhaps I do not sufficiently understand it, but I have tried to give it in his own words. Should this matter-of-fact relation of a curious experience meet his eyes, I am sure he will forgive my having brought him into it. Besides, it is not likely that he would be recognised ; men, and women too, of " peculiar ideas," sincere investigators and honest searchers after truth, as well as their superficial plagiarists, being by no means — to the credit of our age be it said — rare in these days.

LOUISA MOLESWOKTH.

(Conclusion.}

K 2

132

"MARIUS THE EPICUREAN."1

THIS is a book which has long been expected with interest by a certain circle of readers. The Studies in the History of the Renaissance, which Mr. Pater published twelve years ago, made a distinct mark in modern lite- rary history. They excited as much antipathy as admiration, perhaps ; they were the object of many denunciations, and, like some heretical treatise of the second or third century, received definite episcopal reprimand ; but at the same time they rose well above the crowd of books, and produced the effect which rightly belongs to all the heartfelt in- dividual utterance of literature. The utterance might be distasteful, but it represented an intellectual mood by no means within everybody's reach, a mood which was the result of high culture working on a sensitive and plastic nature, and of which the ex- pression had the force as well as some of the narrowness of passion. The object of the book was to reproduce, as vividly as possible, certain " special unique impressions of pleasure/' made on an individual mind by various beautiful things in art and literature, to " disengage the virtue of a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book," so as to pass on the experience of the author to the reader intact, and as it were still warm with feeling and-emotion. Such was the pro- gramme laid down in the preface to the Studies, while at the close of the book its general principles found still more bold and eloquent expression in sentences which were much quoted, and scandal- ised many to whom the rest of the book remained altogether unknown. " The service of philosophy," said Mr. Pater, " and of religion and culture, to the human spirit, is to startle it into a

the Epicurean : his Sensations and Ideas, by Walter Pater, M.A., Fellow of Brase- nose College, Oxford. 2 vols.

sharp and eager observation — not the fruit of experience, but experience it- self is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a varied dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest sense ? We are all con- damnes, as Victor Hugo says : ' Les hommes sont tons condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis' We have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest in art and song. For our one chance is in expanding that inter- val, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time."

Here was the characteristic note of the book. Mr. Pater, indeed, was careful to explain that among " high passions " he reckoned all the great motives, political, religious, or scien- tific, of mankind, and that what he asked was simply that life under whatever banner should be lived strenuously an<Ljiot listlessly, with ardour and not^^h apathy. Still it was felt that the foundation of it all was in the true sense epicurean. " Do good and be good," he seemed to say ; " learn and know, for one end only — the end of a rich experience. All other systems are delusive ; this only justifies itself perpetually. Choose and refine your experience ; cultivate and enlarge your receptive faculties, and make life yield you its best. There is no other system of living which at once commends itself to the reason and satisfies the feeling."

Since this remarkable exposition of what he himself in his later book calls " a new Cyrenaicism," Mr. Pater has published a certain number of scattered essays, on Greek and English subjects, of which the latter at least have showed a steadily widening and de- veloping power. The masterly essay

" Marius the Epicurean"

133

on Wordsworth, which appeared in the Fortnightly Review, some years after the Studies, must have taken some innocent Wordsworthians by surprise. The austere and yet tender feeling of the whole, the suggestiveness and preg- nancy of treatment, the deep sympathy it showed for the peasant life and the peasant sorrows, and a sort of bracing mountain-breath in it, revealed new qualities in the man whose name in certain quarters had become unreason- ably synonymous with a mere effemi- nate philosophy of pleasure. The two English studies which followed the Wordsworth, one on Measure, for Measure, the other on Charles Lamb, though less intrinsically weighty, per- haps, had even higher artistic merit, while in the articles on the Demeter myth, Mr. Pater employed extraordi- nary resources of style with results which were not wholly adequate to the delicate labour spent upon them. Then came an attempt in a totally new direction — the curious story The Child in t/te House, of which a fragment appeared in Macmillan in the course of 1879. The author never finished it; nor is the fact to be seriously regretted. The disguise furnished by the * story for the autobiographical matter, of which it was obviously composed, was not a particularly happy one; above all, it was not disguise enough. Some form of presentation more impersonal, more remote from actual life was needed, before the writer's thought could allow itself fair play. Such a form has now been found in the story of Marius the Epicurean.

The scene of Marius is laid in the second century, and the object of the book is to trace the development of a sensitive mind brought into contact with the various spiritual and intel- lectual forces which divided the Roman world under the Antonines. In the first place, the hero is brought up among the primitive beliefs and senti- ments of Latin rural life; his child- hood is deeply influenced by the pieties, the obligations, the venerable rites of

the old Roman religion, " the religion of Numa," as an antiquarian time, with a taste for archaic revivals, loved to fancy it. From this life, rich in survivals from a remote antiquity, Marius passes on to the study of rhetoric and philosophy at Pisa, study which ultimately results in his adoption of a delicate and refined form of Epicureanism. His pursuit of experience, of "exquisite sensa- tions," is to be limited only by the best sort of worldly wisdom, and by the determination, inherent in the gentle nature of the man, " to add nothing, not so much as a passing sigh even, to the great total of men's unhappiness in his way through the world."

" Nequ6 ille

Aut doluit miserans inopem, aut invidit habenti."

From Pisa he goes to Rome, and is deeply influenced by the life and char- acter of Marcus Aurelius, while his heart and brain are exercised by the different problems presented by the life and thought of Rome, its super- stitions, its cruelties, its philosophies. Although he holds himself proudly aloof from the common superstitions of the time, Marius becomes gradu- ally conscious of certain needs of feeling which his philosophy cannot satisfy, and from a shadowy contact with Theism he passes on to a sha- dowy contact with Christianity, pre- sented to him under its sweetest and most attractive form. The fair spec- tacle of Christian love and unity impresses him deeply ; he is invaded and conquered by the charm of Chris- tian sentiment, and his imagination is touched by the mysterious largeness of the Christian promises. Still, to the end, apparently, he remains intel- lectually free, and the ambiguity of his death, in which, while not a Chris- tian, he suffers with the Christians, fitly corresponds to the ambiguity of the life which has gone before it.

Those who know Mr. Pater's work will hardly need to be told with what delicacy and beauty he has worked

134

" Marius the Epicurean."

out the theme of Marius. The style has its drawbacks, but even in those passages of it which suffer most from a certain looseness and confusion of plan, elements of distinction and musical refinement are never wanting, while at its best the fascination of it is irresistible. There are some half- dozen scenes, which in their own way are unrivalled, where both thought and expression are elaborated with a sort of loving, lingering care, while yet the general impression is- one of subdued and measured charm, of a fastidious self-control in the writer, leading to a singular gentleness and purity of presentation. Then to the beauty of style, which springs from his own highly-trained faculty, Mr. Pater has added all that classical culture could supply in the way of adorning and enrichment. The trans- lations from the literature, both Greek and Latin, of the time, in which the book abounds, are in themselves evi- dence of brilliant literary capacity; the version of Cupid and Psyche espe- cially is a masterpiece. And there is also added to the charm of style, and deftly handled learning, a tenderness of feeling, a tone of reverence for human affections, and pity for the tragedy of human weakness worthy of George Eliot ; so that the book is rich in attractiveness for those who are content to take it simply as it is offered them, and to lose themselves in the feelings and speculations of the hero, without a too curious inquiry into the general meaning of it all, or into the relation of the motives and impressions described to the motives and impressions of the nineteenth century.

Most of those, however, who have already fallen under Mr. Pater's spell will certainly approach the book dif- ferently. They will see in it a won- derfully delicate and faithful reflection of the workings of a real mind, and that a mind of the nineteenth century, and not of the second. The indirect way in which the mental processes which are the subject of the book are

presented to us, is but one more illus- tration of an English characteristic. As a nation we are not fond of direct " confessions." All our autobio- graphical literature, compared to the French or German, has a touch of dryness and reserve. It is in books like Sartor JResartus, or The Nemesis of Faith, Alton Locke, or Marius, rather than in the avowed specimens of self- revelation which the time has pro- duced, that the future student of the nineteenth century will have to look for what is deepest, most intimate, and most real in its personal ex- perience. In the case of those na- tures whose spiritual experience is richest and most original, there is with us, coupled with the natural tendency to expression, a natural ten- dency to disguise. We want to de- scribe for others the spiritual things which have delighted or admonished ourselves, but we shrink from a too great realism of method. English feeling, at its best and subtlest, has almost always something elusive in it, something which resents a spectator, and only moves at ease when it has succeeded in interposing some light screen or some obvious mask between it and the public.

No one can fail to catch the auto- biographical note of Marius who will compare the present book with its predecessors. Marius, in fact, as a young man, starts in life on the prin- ciples expressed in the concluding pages of the /Studies. While still a student at Pisa, he reads Heraclitus and Aristippus, and resigns himself to the teaching of these old Greek masters. From Heraclitus, or from his school, he learns the doctrine of the " subjectivity of knowledge," ac- cording to which " the momentary sensible apprehension of the indi- vidual is the only standard of what is or is not;" while from Aristippus he learns how to cultivate and refine sensation, and how to make the philo- sophy of pleasure minister to the most delicate needs of the spiritual and intellectual life.

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"How reassuring, after assisting at so Ipng a debate about rival criteria of truth, ••> to fall back upon direct sensation, to limit one's aspira- tion after knowledge to that ! In an age, still materially so brilliant, so expert in the artistic handling of material things as that of Marcus Aurelius, with sensible capacities still unjaded, with the whole world of classic art and poetry outspread before it, and where there was more than eye or ear could well take in — how natural the determination to rely exclusively upon the phenomena of the senses, which certainly never de- ceive us about themselves, about which alone we can never deceive ourselves ! . . . not pleasure, but fulness, com- pleteness of life generally, was the practical ideal to which this anti-meta- physical metaphysic really pointed. And towards such a full or complete life, a life of various yet select sen- sation, the most direct and effective auxiliary must be, in a word, Insight. Liberty of soul, freedom from all the partial and misrepresentative doctrine which does but relieve one element of our experience at the cost of another, freedom from all the embarrassment of regret for the past and calculation on the future ; all that would be but preliminary to the real business of education — insight, insight through culture, into all that the present mo- ment holds in trust for us, as we stand so briefly in its presence."

In this frame of mind Marius goes up to Rome, makes acquaintance with Marcus Aurelius, and is brought across the Stoical philosophy then engaged upon that great effort for the con- quest of the Roman world, which was to be apparently defeated by the success of Christianity, and to find its ultimate fruition, as Renan points out, in the great system of Roman law, of which it influenced the development, and through which it has taken a partial possession of modern life. The effect of this contact with Stoicism on the flexible mind of Marius, is to lead to a certain modification of his main point of view ;

and in the remarkable chapter called "Second Thoughts," Mr. Pater de- scribes, in the person of Marius, what is evidently the main development of the mind which produced the Studies in the History of the Renaissance. In the first place there is an apology for the " philosophy of moments," an ex- planation of its naturalness, its in- evitableness, so to speak, at the outset of certain intellectual careers. " We may note," says Marius' s biographer, "as Marius could hardly have done, that that new Cyrenaicism of his is ever the characteristic philosophy of youth — one of those subjective and partial ideals, based on vivid, because limited, apprehension of the truth of one aspect of experience — in this case of the beauty of the world and the brevity of man's life in it — of which it may be said that it is the special vocation of the young to express them." Such a youthful fanaticism, " just because it seems to call on one to make the sacrifice, accompanied by a vivid sensation of power and will, of what others value — the sacrifice of some conviction, or doctrine, or sup- posed first principle — for the sake of that clear-eyed intellectual integrity or consistency, which is like spotless bodily cleanliness and nicety, or scrup- ulous personal honour, — has for the mind of the youthful student, when he first comes to appreciate it, itself the fascination of an ideal."

All sorts of incidents and influences tend in youth to develop the Cyrenaic theory. The changes of the seasons, "the new poem in every spring," "life in modern London even, in the heavy glory of summer," " the work- shops of the artist " with all their suggestions of beauty and refinement — all these quicken the covetousness of the artistic temperament, its eager- ness to seize " the highly-coloured moments which are to pass away so quickly," and the satisfaction of a natural passion becomes for a time a reasoned principle of action.

But after a while the glamour of youth dies away, and a man begins to

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see that a system which has only the worship and pursuit of "exquisite moments" to recommend as a rule of life, leaves three-fourths of life un- touched. Mankind has never been content to spend itself on a worship of "moments," or in a pursuit of fugitive impressions as such. Rather, with a tenacious and pathetic faith, it has sought for continuity, for what lasts and binds, and can be handed on from soul to soul. It has tried to fix and distil the essence of innumerable impressions in one great tradition — the ethical tradition — which is at once the product and the condition of human life. To live in the mere pursuit of sensations, however refined, is to live outside this tradition, so far as is possible, and therefore outside the broad main stream of human history. And more than this. As the stream is strong and tyrannous and fills a large bed, the wandering epicurean, bent on an unfettered quest of sensa- tions, may well find himself brought into hostile and disastrous contact with it, and may recognise, when too late, his own puniness, and the strength and masterfulness of the great cur- rents and tendencies of things. The individual bent on claiming "an entire personal liberty of heart and mind — liberty above all from conven- tional answers to first questions," finds all round him " a venerable system of sentiment and ideas, widely ex- tended in time and place, actually in a kind of impregnable possession of human life," and discovers that by iso- lating himself from it, he is cutting himself off from a great wealth of human experience, from a great possi- ble increase of intellectual " colour, variety, and relief," which might be gained by attaching himself to it.

Mr. Pater, it will be observed, still speaks of morals as it were in terms of aesthetics. His hero advances, or partially advances, from the aesthetic to the ethical standpoint, not because of any " conventional first principles " on which morals may depend for their sanction, but because of the enriched

experience, the " quickened sympa- thies " which are to be gained from the advance. Practically, the same motive power is at work in the second stage as in the first. But as the sphere of its operation enlarges, it tends to coalesce and join hands with other powers, starting from very different bases. The worship of beauty, carried far enough, tends to transform itself into a passion moral in essence and in aim. " For the variety of men's possi- ble reflections on their experience, as of that experience itself, is not really as great as it seems. All the highest spirits, from whatever contrasted points they may have started, will yet be found to entertain in their moral con- sciousness, as actually realised, much the same kind of company."

One feels as though one were read- another Palace of Art with a differ- ence ! Here, in Mr. Pater's system, the soul ceases to live solitary in the midst of a dainty world of its own choice, not because it is overtaken by any crushing conviction of sin and ruin in so doing, but because it learns to recognise that such a worship of beauty defeats its own ends, that by opening the windows of its palace to the outside light and air, and placing the life within under the common human law, it really increases its own chances of beautiful impressions, of "exquisite moments." To put it in the language of the pre- sent book, " Marius saw that he would be but an inconsistent Cyrenaic — mis- taken in his estimate of values, of loss and gain, and untrue to the well-con- sidered economy of life which he had brought to Rome with him — that some drops of the great cup would fall to the ground " — if he did not make the concession of a " voluntary curtailment of liberty " to the ancient and won- derful order actually in possession of the world, if he did not purchase by a willing self-control, participation in that rich store of crystallised feeling re- presented by the world's moral beliefs. Still, although the fundamental ar- gument is really the same as that on which Mr. Pater based a general view

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of life twelve years ago, the practical advance in position shown by the per- sent book is considerable. " That theory, or idea, or system," said the writer of the Studies, in 1873, " which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of experience in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract morality we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us." ISTow the legitimacy and necessity of some such sacrifice is ad- mitted ; for evidently the one mental process, in spite of the indirectness of its presentation, is but a continuation of the other. Marius carries on the train of reflection begun by the Studies, and the upshot of the whole so far is a utilitarian or Epicurean theory of morals. For, stripped of its poetical dress, the ethical argument of Marius is essentially utilitarian. After pro- testing against the curtailment of ex- perience in favour of " some abstract morality we have not identified with ourselves," Mr. Pater now presents obedience to this same morality as desirable, not because of any absolute virtue or authority inherent in it, but because practically obedience is a source of pleasure and quickened faculty to the individual.

There is nothing new, of course, in such an argument, though Mr. Pater's presentation of it is full of indi- viduality and fresh suggestions. But what makes the great psychological interest of the book, while it con- stitutes what seems to us its prin- cipal intellectual weakness, is the further application of this Epicurean principle of an aesthetic loss and gain not only to morals, but to religion. We have described the way in which Mr. Pater handles the claim of the moral system of the civilised world upon a mind in search of beauty. His treatment of the claim of religion on a similar order of mind is precisely the same in tone and general plan. Just as adhesion to the accepted moral order enriches and beautifies the experience of the individual, and so gives a

greater savour and attractiveness to life, so acquiescence in the religious order, which a man finds about him, opens for him opportunities of feeling and sensation which would otherwise be denied him, provides him with a fresh series of " exquisite moments," and brings him generally within the range of an influence soothing and re- fining, by virtue partly of its vene- rableness, its source in an immemorial past, partly of the wealth of beautiful human experience which has gone, age after age, to the strengthening of it. From the contention in the chapter, " Second Thoughts," that Cyrenaicism disobeyed its own principles, and neg- lected means of spiritual and intel- lectual joy which it might have utilised, by its contempt for all the established forms of ancient religion; — from the ex- pressions used in reference to Marius's first contact with Christianity, when the new faith appealed, "according to the unchangeable law of his cha- racter, to the eye, the visual faculty of mind; — " from the constant dwelling on the blitheness, and brightness, and sweetness of Christian feeling, on the poetry of Christian rites, and on the way in which the pathos of the Chris- tian story seemed to make all this visible mortality, death itself, more beautiful than any fantastic dream of old mythology had ever hoped to make it ; " — and lastly, from the persistent intellectual detachment of Marius, a detachment maintained apparently through a long subsequent experience of Christianity, and which makes him realise when he is compromised with the government, that for him martyr- dom— to the Christian, " the over- powering act of testimony that Heaven had come down among men," — would be but a common execution ; from all these different indications, and from the melancholy beauty of the death-scene, we gather a theory of religious philosophy, which is much commoner among us than most of us think, but which has never been ex- pressed so fully or so attractively as in the story of Marius.

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" Submit," it seems to say, " to the religious order about you, accept the common beliefs, or at least behave as if you accepted them, and live habitu- ally in the atmosphere of feeling and sensation which they have engendered and still engender ; surrender your feeling, while still maintaining the intellectual citadel intact ; pray, weep, dream with the majority while you think with the elect ; only so will you obtain from life all it has to give, its most delicate flavour, its subtlest aroma."

Such an appeal has an extraordi- nary force with a certain order of minds. Probably as time goes we shall see a larger and larger response to it on the part of modern society. But with another order of minds in whom the religious need is not less strong, it has not, and never will have, any chance of success, for they regard it as involving the betrayal of a worship dearer to them than the worship of beauty or consolation, and the sur- render of something more precious to them, than any of those delicate emotional joys, which feeling, divorced from truth, from the sense of reality, has to offer. All existing religions have issued from the sense of reality, from a perception of some truth ; certain facts or supposed facts of sense or spirit have lain at the root of them. It is surely a degradation of all religion to say to its advocates, " Your facts are no facts ; our sense of reality is opposed to them ; but for the sake of the beauty, the charm, the consola- tion to be got out of the intricate practical system you have built upon this chimerical basis, we are ready to give up to you all we can — our sympathy, our silence, our ready co-operation in all your lovely and soothing rites and practices, hoping thereby to cheat life of some of its pain, and to brighten some of its darkness with dreams fairer even than those which .^Esculapius inspired in his votaries."

It is useful and salutary to compare with such a temper as this, a temper like dough's — that mood of heroic sub-

mission to the limitations of life and mind which inspired all his verse, that determination of his to seek no personal ease or relief at the expense of truth, and to put no fairy tales knowingly into the place which belongs to realities. How full his work is of religious yearning and religious passion, and yet how eloquent of a religious fear lest the mind should hold its " dread communion " with the unseen " source of all our light and life," " in ways unworthy Thee," — how instinct at times with an almost super- human repudiation of the mere personal need !

" It fortifies my soul to know

That, though I perish, Truth is so ; That, howsoe'er I stray and range, "Whate'er I do, Thou dost not change. I steadier step when I recall That, if I slip, Thou dost not fall."

Here is one "counsel of perfection," and a nobler one, as we hold it, than the " counsel " which Mr. Pater has embodied as a main drift or moral in the story of Marius. But with this protest our fault-finding comes to an end.

There are many other minor points in the book which would repay dis- cussion. Has it clone justice to the complexities either of the Roman world or of Christianity in the second century? In fairness to Marcus A u- relius and the pagan world, ought there not to have been some hint of that aspect of the Christian question which leads Renan to apply to the posi- tion of the Christian in a pagan city the analogy of that of " a Protestant missionary in a Spanish town where Catholicism is very strong, preaching against the saints, the Virgin, and processions "? " "Would it not have been well, as an accompaniment to the ex- quisite picture of primitive Christian life, -to have given us some glimpse into the strange excitements and agi- tations of Christian thought in the second century ? As far as Marius is concerned, the different currents of Christian speculation at the time

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might hardly have existed. Then again, is there not a little humour wanting, which, according to the facts, ought to have been there, in such a description as that lovely one, of the temple and rites of ^Esculapius 1 But these questions we can only throw out for the reader of Marius to ponder if he will. However they may be an- swered, the value and delightful- ness of the book remain. It is so full of exquisite work, of thought fresh from heart and brain, that when the reader has made all his reservations, and steadily refused his adhesion to this or that appeal which it contains, he will come back with fresh delight to the passages and descriptions and re-veries in which a poetical and meditative nature has poured out a wealth of imaginative reflection. Two pieces especially he will lay by in the store-house of memory — the " pagan death " of Flavian, the half-Christian death of Marius. Let us give a last satisfac- tion to the feelings of admiration stirred in us by a remarkable book by quoting the beautiful concluding par$- graph which describes how the sensi- tive soul of Marius passes from the world it had sought so early to under- stand and enjoy : —

.... "Then, as before, in 'the wretched, sleepless nights of those forced marches, he would try to fix his mind — as it were impas- sively, and like a child thinking over the toys it loves, one after the other, that it may fall asleep so, and forget all about them the sooner — on all the persons he had loved

in life — on his love for them, dead or living, grateful for his love or not, rather than on theirs for him — letting their images pass away again, or rest with him, as they would. In the bare sense of having loved, he seemed to find, even amid this foundering of the ship, ' that on which his soul might assuredly rest and depend. ' ... It was after a space of deep sleep that he awoke amid the murmuring voices of the people who had kept and tended him so carefully through his sickness, now kneeling around his bed ; and what he heard confirmed, in his then perfect clearness of soul, the spontaneous suggestion of his own bodily feeling. He had often dreamt that he had been condemned to die, that the hour, with wild thoughts of escape, had arrived ; and awaking, with the sun all around him, in complete liberty of life, had been full of gratitude for his plac^ there, alive still, in the land of the living. He read surely, now, in the manner, the doings of these people, some of whom were passing away through the doorway, where the sun still lay heavy and full, that his last morning was come, and turn to think again of the beloved. Of old, he had often fancied that not to die on a dark and rainy day would itself have a little alleviating grace cr favour about it. The people around his bed were praying fervently: Abi! Abil anima Christiana ! In the moments of his extreme helplessness the mystic bread had been placed, had descended like a snow-flake from the sky, between his lips. Soothing fingers had applied to hands and feet, to all those old passage-ways of the senses through which the world had come and gone from him, now so dark and obstructed, a medicinable oil. It was the same people who, in the grey, austere evening of that day, took up his re- mains, and buried them secretly with their accustomed prayers ; but with joy also, hold- ing his death, according to their generous view in this matter, to have been in the nature of a martyrdom ; and martyrdom, as the Church had always said, is a kind of sacrament with plenary grace."

M. A. W.

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MOMMSEN 'S NEW VOLUME.

THE book for which the learned world has been waiting for thirty years has come at last. Dr. Theodor Mommsen has just published the fifth volume of his Roman History on TJie Provinces from Ccesar to Diocletian. Thus is picked up the thread dropped in 1855, when the third volume of the History was given to the world, but the thread is carried over a gap as yet unfilled. The fourth volume is yet to come ; the internal and constitutional history of the empire, as Mommsen can tell it, has not yet been told. In his view the history of the provinces presses more urgently for the telling, as it has nowhere been made accessible to the general public in a convenient form, and as the imperial system is wont in consequence to be incorrectly and unfairly judged. The fourth volume will follow ; perhaps there may even be a sixth, specially devoted to the later empire of Diocletian, who effected changes in the Eoman State at least as great as those effected by Augustus, and to that general survey and summary of results which the pre- sent volume, ending as it does abruptly with the details of the provincial government of Africa, nowhere sup- plies. It is not unreasonable to hope that this may yet be done. Mommsen has been working and writing on Roman history for over forty years — grande mortalis cevi spatium — since his first essay was published in 1843. But, for all this vast activity, he is yet hardly an old man. Madvig is eighty- one, Ranke is over ninety, Mommsen is only sixty-eight. He has yet to carry the great Berlin Corpus of In- scriptions, of which he is chief editor, to a fortunate conclusion ; his Consti- tutional History of Rome has yet to be completed by a volume on the senate ; and the Roman History, in which the

results of all this thorny erudition are made accessible to the general reader, is at present a splendid fragment. Students all over the world will wish to the great toiler the health and long life and unslackening energy needful to make his life's work a rounded and triumphant whole.

The present volume is the sign and consummation of the great centrifugal movement which has marked the study of Roman history for thirty years, and of which Mommsen himself has been the pioneer. Such a conception of the Roman empire as that presented in the pages of Suetonius, where the centre of interest is the character of the reign- ing emperor, is long out of date. The Orbis Romanus takes the place of Rome. The archaeologist feels a thrill of deeper interest at the sight of the grass-grown amphitheatres of Birten or Lillebonne, the camp at Housesteads on the bleak Northumbrian fell, or the lonely column of Avenches,than he feels at Verona or at Rome. The student of politics is sensible that he cannot know too much of the Roman system — how Rome administered, and assimi- lated, and civilised her heterogeneous subject world — and there are few coun- tries in Europe, if, indeed, pace Mr. Freeman, there is one, where such a student does not ever more strongly realise the greatness of the mark which Rome has left upon the present. Along with the displacement of the interest in Roman history — the transfer from centre to circumference — has gone an immense extension of our knowledge of the Roman world. With the growth of the interest have grown the means of gratifying it. The authors are microscopically studied from this point of view, but the authors did not as a rule share the point of view them- selves, and the complaint of an his-

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torian like Mommsen is that they tell us what does not signify, and leave out everything we want to know. Luckily new and boundless sources of informa- tion have been supplied by the inscrip- tions, which, for this period, when every successful soldier wrote every step of his career on stone, and cities entrusted their laws and constitutions to the imperishable bronze, are of over- whelming value and importance. The fifteen stately volumes of the Berlin Corpus are a mine into which only the first shafts have as yet been sunk, and the material supplied for the Greek East by the Greek inscriptions of the period is almost as considerable. The coins are only less important, and it is no exaggeration to say that a historian of the Roman empire who has not used this new material, and does not know at least its main results, is just as obso- lete as Rollin. New light has also been given by the deeper and closer study of topography. The Germans have worked out the whole system of the Roman roads, towns, and fortifica- tions along the Rhine, and a large part of the results has been embodied in maps, such as Paulus's magnificent archaeological chart of Wiirtemburg. In England the Roman wall — perhaps the most wonderful monument of themselves which the Romans have left in any province — has been investi- gated with the most assiduous patience and success. Mommsen pays the la- bours of men like Hodgson and Dr. Bruce a merited compliment when he declares that it is the only monument of the kind which has been properly examined, and expresses himself as by comparison dissatisfied with the corre- sponding work which has been done upon the Germanic and Rhsetian limites in Germany. Much light has also been thrown upon the road-system by a number of students, among whom Mr. Thompson Watkin has done par- ticularly good work. In France the results of the labours of innumerable inquirers have been summed up in the three volumes of Desjardin's Geography of Roman Gaul. In Spain almost

everything is still to do, but the second volume of the Corpus supplies the requisite basis, and there are signs of the rise of a serious school of histori- cal and archaeological students in that country. In North Africa the French have done much, and will do more. Some of the chief results have been put together by Boissiere, in his Roman Algeria, and by Tissot in his Geography of the Roman Pro- vince of Africa. For the Danubian lands there are books like Planta's Rhcetia, Milliner's Emona, Zippel's Illyria, Cons's Dalmatia, Kammel's Austria, and a young English scholar, Mr. A. F. Evans, who has already done good work in that district, will, it is to be hoped, some day produce an authoritative work upon Illyricum in its widest sense. In the western part of Dacia, the present Transylvania, much has been done by Gooss and others, but the eastern half of the province has been left almost un- touched ; and but little has been done in Bulgaria and Eastern Roumelia, Mcesia and Thrace. Great advances have of late been made in our know- ledge of Asia Minor by travellers like Perrot, Hirschfeld, Benndorff, and Mr. W. M. Ramsay, and the results so far obtained have been carefully mapped by Dr. Kiepert, who has always given special attention to the geography of Asia Minor. The Eng- lish military Consuls in Asia Minor are also believed to have done much. " Our mission," wrote Sir Charles Wilson, the Consul-General, a year ago, " was a political one, but we were determined to bring back as much in- formation as we could of a country at once so interesting and so little known. The geographical results were, briefly, a complete military survey of the Taurus range from the mountains of Lycia to the Persian frontier ; of the Anti-Taurus, and of Mount Amanus from the Taurus to the Beilan Pass. Sur- veys were also made of the Cilician Plain, of the country around Mount Argseus, of portions of Paphlagonia and Pontus, and every important road in the

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country was examined and sketched. . . I believe if our sketches were put together, as I hope they may be some day, we should be able to reconstruct the ancient road system of the country, to follow the marches of Cyrus, Alex- ander, Manlius, and Caesar in ancient times, and, in more modern, the march of the Crusaders to Palestine, to understand the mountain campaigns of Cicero, the long struggle of the Byzantine emperors with the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks, and to lay down with fair accuracy the boundaries of the ancient provinces." Such a statement is eminently calculated to make a geographer's mouth water, and it is not surprising that Dr. Kiepert should have applied to the War Office for leave to examine and utilise the sketches and plans brought home by the English Consuls. It is said that the War Office, no doubt for reasons connected with Sir Charles Wilson's reference to a " military survey," have not felt themselves at liberty to accede to the great geographer's request. But it would be disgraceful that such materials should be pigeon-holed for ever in the War Office. They are the only tangible result of the labours of the Consuls, who were appointed to " watch the introduction of reforms under the Anglo-Turkish Convention," and it is much to be hoped that Sir Charles Wilson's " some day " is not synonymous with the Greek Kalends. The map of the Orbis Romanus is thus being gradually built up. On the detailed history of almost every province an immense mass of know- ledge has been accumulated. It is possible to give the names of every regiment, of regulars or auxiliaries, that ever formed part of the garrison of Britain, and to indicate the head- quarters of almost every one of them. We know the site of every Roman villa in Southern England, and we also know, and can argue something as to the comparative Romanisation of Northern and Southern England from the knowledge, that not a single villa has been found north of Aldborough.

The great camps at Mainz, on the Saalburg, at Xanten, at Chester, and on Hadrian's Wall, have been explored. A whole district has been worked over for the site of a battlefield, and after a literature has been written on the defeat of Yarus, the scene of the battle is fixed (by Hofer and Momm- sen) no longer at Detmold but at Osnabriick. An amount of extrane- ous knowledge has thus been obtained which enables us to press with incom- parable power upon the texts, and to extract from them the last syllable they are capable of telling us. The new materials, epigraphic, numismatic, and topographical, enable us some- times to illustrate the texts, some- times to supplement them, sometimes even summarily to correct them. The specialists at work in each province have accumulated for the historian a mass of valuable information such as Dr. Arnold foresaw would be brought together when he wrote (in 1838) that " he who attempts to write history in the interval between the awakened consciousness of the defects of our knowledge and that fuller light which may hereafter remove them, labours under peculiar disadvantages." At the same time the work done has been in the main that of specialists, and it has had the defects of its qualities. " It is unfortunately the rule," wrote Mommsen, in an essay published in the course of last year, " for a writer on a province of the Roman empire to know as little of the empire as those who occupy themselves with the Roman empire are wont to know of the individual provinces." The time had come for a serious effort to sift this information, to piece out the story, and put the facts together in their true relations, and Mommsen was the man to do it. He knows the empire and he knows the provinces. His authority on the early history of Rome is no doubt considerable, but any one familiar with the work he has poured out in such profusion during the last twenty years was well aware that his real subject was the

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empire. He has prepared himself by editing the Digest, by a general editorship of the Corpus, to which he has moreover contributed from his own hand a good half of the 72,000 separate articles of which its fifteen volumes are composed, by the elaborate study of the Roman constitutional machinery in the Staatsrecld (the second part of the second volume deals exclusively with the Principate), and by countless essays on cognate sub- jects in the great classical reviews of Germany.

The biographer of Charles Tissot tells us that that excellent scholar and austere but admirable man " was not lavish with his praises ; even Borghesi seemed to him overrated ; but when he spoke of M. Mommsen, of the prodigious activity of this savant, who in the midst of his gigan- tic labours finds time to keep up a vast correspondence in four languages, never leaving a letter without answer or a problem without solution, he pro- nounced a word — the word ' genius ' — which was not accustomed to pass his lips. ' This man discourages one,' he once remarked to me, after reading one of the last numbers of the Ephe- meris, ' the novelties of a text which are obscurities for us are shafts of light for him ; when I see what he accomplishes I should like to break my pen.' "

The book to whose author's qualifi- cations such testimony is borne, is a stout volume of over 650 pages, and, bulky though it is, the reader will be struck quite as much by what it omits as by what it contains. It nowhere discusses the nature of the Roman provincial administration in general ; there is no account of the internal arrangements of those provincial towns whose self-government is so important and so interesting an ele- ment in the Roman system ; above all, there is no general discussion, such as Mommsen could have given us better than any living man, of the Roman system of taxation and finance. Chris- tianity is but slightly touched, though

there is a pregnant remark to the effect that the persecution of Christians was normal just as much as the persecution of banditti. Both were alike law- breakers, and if there was no persecu- tion for a long time together, that was not an affair of law at all, but merely of public policy and the character of the individual governor. There is a luminous hint, too, in the amusing passage on the Asiarchs, the high- priests of the province, who really were nothing less than pagan bishops with the spiritual interests of the province in their charge, and who, maintaining as they did a very stiff standard of orthodoxy, were naturally the first to bring the law into opera- tion against the Christians. But, speaking generally, the lack of any account of the new religion is one of the puzzles of the volume. So, too, the reader of the chapter on Spain will be disappointed to find no account of the municipal constitutions of Malaga and TJrsao, or of the very interesting mining communities of Lusitania, and the section on Dacia supplies no hints as to the much-debated question of Rouman nationality. Some of these omissions will no doubt be made good in the fourth volume, others are due to Mommsen' s strict limitation of his subject to the first three centuries. Beyond Diocletian he does not look. The reader must regard the book as a kind of glorified gazetteer of the Roman empire, in which almost all the great general questions are treated as if already handled or already known, and in which the results of much la- borious investigation are tacitly as- sumed, sometimes indeed stated with a certainty that hardly perhaps pro- perly belongs to them. He will find almost every point of Rome's foreign policy discussed. From no previous book could one get at a general notion of the frontier policy — or policies — of Rome. It is the only book which gives a statement of the frontier policy in Egypt, and, the geographical conditions of the problem being pre- cisely the same as they were when

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the Romans held Egypt, even the most matter-of-fact politician, and the one with the robustest contempt for his- torical analogies, may be glad to know, without having to hunt through Strabo, Pliny, and Procopius for the informa- tion, that the Romans resolutely held aloof from the Soudan, and thought the frontier sufficiently guarded with 1200 troops at Assouan. The book is greatly swelled by the space given to the wars — to the Jewish wars, for instance, the Parthian wars, the wars on the Rhine and Danube. It is not simply an account of the pro- vinces. That could have been done in half the space, or rather the space saved from the wars could have been utilised partly for some general chap- ters on the administration, partly for fuller details of the individual pro- vinces. If the foreign history of the empire is to be told over again in the fourth volume, there will be a good deal of inevitable repetition. If, on the other hand, the wars of the empire and its foreign relations generally are held to be sufficiently discussed in the present volume, then it must be al- lowed that the geographical basis of the book has its disadvantages, that it is impossible to gain from it a clear and comprehensive idea of the foreign policy of any given reign, and that it is, in fact, open to some of the objec- tions which the veteran French savant, M. E. Egger, urged long ago against the similar plan of Appian.

In a gazetteer — even a glorified gazetteer — the element of human in- terest is not to be expected. " Pic- turesque detail, studies of motive, and vignettes of character, my book," says Mommsen, "has not to offer. It is permitted to the artist, but not to the historian, to imagine the features of Arminius. With renunciation has this book been written, and with re- nunciation it must be read." "We should be grateful therefore for the few "vignettes of character," bitten in with a few sharp and vigorous strokes, from which the historian of the younger Cato, and Cicero, and

Pompey has been unable altogether to withhold his hand. Antony is briefly characterised : " One of those purely military talents which, in front of the enemy, and especially in a critical position, know to strike with equal courage and sagacity, he lacked the statesman's purpose, the sure grasp and resolute prosecution of the poli- tical end in view." Trajan is " a man of big deeds, and yet bigger words." Tiberius, " the most capable ruler that the empire produced," is painted as "the old lion" dying on his rock of Caprese, but capable of rousing him- self on occasion from the inaction that had crept over him with years, and of showing that he was " still formidable to others besides his courtiers, and not the man to allow himself, and in his person Rome, to be slighted without taking vengeance on the offender." Germanicus is slightly touched ; evi- dently Mommsen regards him as an overrated personage ; but there is a sympathetic portrait of the "heroic figure" of his father Drusus, the brilliant young prince who came so near to conquering Germany for good and all, and extending the Roman frontier and Roman civilisation per- manently to the Elbe. These, how- ever, are almost the only portraits in the book, and one cannot but regret that the historian's pen has passed so quickly over Corbulo, the veteran general of the Armenian campaigns ; Suetonius Paulinus, equally at home and equally resourceful on the hot Algerian plateau and amid the swamps and forests of northern Britain ; Lucius Quietus, that Othello of the second century, the Moorish sheikh who did such yeoman's service in Dacia under Trajan, and who rose at last to be consul and governor of Palestine ; and many another of those veteran war- riors and veteran statesmen whom Professor Seeley rightly calls " the glory of the empire."

But enough on what the book omits, or, rather, what the author deliberately refuses to give us. What he gives us is in all conscience wide

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enough. The detail of the book is inexhaustible, and it is impossible to follow the author through province after province. But a fair idea of its general bearings may perhaps be gathered from a brief examination of : 1. The foreign relations of the em- pire, with special reference to the frontiers and the army ; 2. The town- system ; and 3. The relations of Rome and Hellas.

1. " The Romans," says Appian, " sit round their empire in a circle with great armies, and watch all that vast expanse of land and sea as if it were a single town." The army was not in Italy — it was one of Augustus's main objects not only to get rid of any excuse for a military command in Italy, but to keep the legions well outside of the Alpine region — or in Gaul, or the civilised parts of Spain or Africa. The legions were on the fron- tiers— on the Rhine, the Euphrates, the Danube, and the edge of the Libyan desert. The Romans boasted that they needed not to keep troops in the interior of the provinces to hold their subjects down, and on the whole — though it is to be remembered that the troops on the Rhine could also be used, if need were, against the Gauls, and that Hadrian's Wall in Britain was so constructed as to be defensible against the Brigantes of Yorkshire and Lancashire as well as against the Caledonii — the boast was justified. Speaking generally, the Roman army of the early empire was the sum of the frontier garrisons, and its total strength — 250,000 men at the outside — was extraordinarily small. The greatest strength was on the Rhine, where, reckoning the outlying garri- sons of Vindonissa (Windisch, near Briigg in Switzerland) and Novio- magus (Nymwegen), the total force could not have been less than 80,000 men. There ought of course to have been an army over and above these garrisons, ready to be moved at any moment to a threatened point, and there is some ground for thinking that such an army entered into Ctesar's

No. 308. — VOL. LIT.

plans. But as a matter of fact there was nothing of the kind, and if the frontier was specially threatened at a particular point, its guard could only be strengthened by detachments from other legions, or, in extreme cases, by moving up whole legions for the time being from neighbouring provinces. That is, the frontier could only be strengthened at one point by being denuded at another, and it is needless to point out the disadvantages and dangers of such a system. In quiet times a given frontier was held by one or two great fortresses — Mogun- tiacum (Mainz) and Yetera (Xanten), for instance, on the Rhine — with a chain of smaller forts (castella) in between. There was an elaborate system of signalling both by night and day, and no effort was spared to make the whole line a living chain, so that the approach of danger at any point was instantaneously communi- cated, and troops came pouring in. The electrical condition of the frontier, which it was the object thus to bring about, made it unnecessary to keep the garrisons of the innumerable castella perpetually on a war footing. In time of peace there were only just enough men in each of them to patrol the roads and keep up the watch. An inscription found recently in Bulgaria gives the complete list of the garrison of one of these castella in Lower Mresia. It was held by just seventy- six men ; whereas, on a war footing, the garrison would probably be two cohorts, or 1000 men. Such was the way in which the Lower Rhine was certainly held, and it is very certain that the sixty-two castella which guarded the Germanic limes out beyond the Neckar were not garrisoned,as some antiquaries have vainly imagined, by 38,000 men. That is the general type of frontier defence — a couple of for- tresses of the first rank, numerous castella, weakly held, at intervals of five to ten miles, and every pre- paration made to concentrate a strong force at any moment on a given point. But it was to be expected

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that the idea should occur of convert- ing the pliant chain into a rigid bar, of bridging over the intervals between the castella, in short of making the physical obstacle to an enemy continu- ous. This was done in Germany, in lower Mcesia (where a wall was run from the Danube to Tomi — Kusten- dje — and another, further north, from the Pruth to the Dniester), and above all in Britain. The German wall, which was not more than ten or twelve feet high at the outside, started from Brohl (between Remagen and Ander- nach), in other words from the north- ern border of the province of Upper Germany, inclosed the Taunus range and the town of Friedberg, then turned south to the Main at Gross- krotzenburg and followed it to Milten- berg. It then took a bee-line across country to Lorch, where it joined the Rhsetian limes which ran from that place eastwards to the Danube near Ratisbon. The wall was not a physical obstacle in the full sense, and the line of country followed seems often to have been taken in defiance of purely military considerations. In peace time the wall served the purpose of keeping out brigands (as, even if they could get across it unperceived at night, they could not bring back the cattle and the booty-laden carts, which alone made the trouble and danger of a raid worth while), of facilitating the collec- tion of the customs, and imposing a barrier — moral rather than physical, but in ordinary times no doubt effect- ual— to the movements of population westwards. This was a very different affair to the formidable British wall, twenty feet high, with its numerous camps, towers, and small castella, which really Avas a physical obstacle of a very serious kind, and the garri- son of which, moreover, was kept always on a war footing. The constant dan- ger from the Caledonian tribes, com- bined with the smallness of the neck of land to be defended, made a real Chinese wall here possible. There were at least 10,000 troops along the line of the wall, and 2000 or 3000 in

strong positions to the rear, near enough to be called up at the approach of danger.

Where Rome came directly into con- tact with uncivilised races, and had to take upon herself the protection of the frontier, that was how she set about it. There was always the chain of forts, and sometimes the chain stiffened into a continuous bar. But frontiers of that kind all over the world were expensive in men and money, and Rome, having not too much of either, naturally and inevitably tried to save herself this burden by the expedient, where it seemed possible and not too dangerous, of buffer States. Thrace was at one time such a State. Augus- tus looked to the princes of the Odry- sse to see that the peace was not broken on the Lower Danube, and withdrew the legions from the north- ern frontier of Macedonia. The princes of Palmyra and Petra kept the peace for Rome, one on the lower Euphrates, the other on the edge of the Arabian desert. But the great and typical instance of such a State was, of course, Armenia, which occupied between Rome and Parthia much the position that Afghanistan occupies between England and Russia. Parthia was the only State which stood on anything like an equal footing with Rome. The East regarded them as rival and almost equal Powers, and the extraordinary place which Parthia occupies in the literature of the early empire — for instance, in the Odes of Horace — shows that at heart the Romans recognised the justice of such a view. The defeat of Crassus left a greater and more ineffaceable impression on the Roman mind than the defeat of Yarus. But the idea that an imperial Power like that of Rome could formally recognise another Power as entitled to treat with it on an equal footing, and to live side by side with it in peace, divided only by a mutually-accepted frontier, was foreign to antiquity, and foreign most of all to Rome. Rome would not be content to let Parthia come up to the left bank of the Euphrates, and exer-

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cise undisputed authority in Armenia, while she looked on with friendly equanimity from the left bank of the great river. She pushed her preten- sions accordingly across the Euphrates, and aimed at making of Armenia a buffer State, under her exclusive in- fluence, between herself and Parthia. But Armenia properly belonged to the East, not to the West. It had been never Hellenised. It had almost every- thing in common with Parthia, and nothing in common with Rome. The Romans, therefore, in face of the steady opposition of Parthia, which was sometimes active, sometimes passive, but always there, had their work cut out for them in Armenia. The Roman suzerainty could be asserted only by constant war, or the constant menace of war, and so there was unceasing friction, and no possibility of enduring peace between Rome and Parthia. There were only two sound alterna- tives— either to annex Armenia or to leave it alone, either to allow the Parthian dominion to come up to the Euphrates or to push forward the Roman dominion to the Tigris. With his usual love for half measures, Augustus would do neither. The con- sequence was that between B.C. 20 and A.D. 54, hardly a year passed in which Roman legions were not led across the Euphrates, and there was never-ending war with Parthia. The capable ministers who administered the empire in the first years of Nero's reign saw that there was no end or issue to the existing state of things, and deter- mined to take a new departure. They consented that Parthian influence should be as great in Armenia as that of Rome. Hitherto, Rome had always been willing to make war in order to prevent Armenia being made an appanage of the Parthian crown. It was now arranged that the crown of Armenia should be reserved for a member of the royal house of Parthia, but that the feudatory relation between Rome and Armenia should still out- wardly exist, and that every new Armenian prince should do homage to

the Emperor for his crown. This arrangement, while paying every regard to Roman susceptibilities, really handed Armenia over to Parthia ; but, failing annexation, it was, at least, a workable and consistent plan, and it had the effect of keeping the peace between Rome and Parthia for forty years. Parthia was the first to break the bargain. Trajan had as usual appointed a successor to the Armenian throne, at that time vacant, but his nominee was a member of the Parthian royal family. He was therefore with- in his right, and when the reigning King of Parthia appointed another Arsacid, Trajan declared war. He conquered Armenia, incorporated both it and Mesopotamia with the Empire, and even cherished the idea of over- running and reducing Parthia. His death put an end to these great designs, and Hadrian, finding that the new acquisitions could not be main- tained without a proportionate increase of the army, let them lapse. Severus, however, went back to Trajan's frontier, and after nearly a century of struggles with the neo - Persian empire of the Sassanidse, which had displaced the semi-Hellenised Parthian dynasty early in the third century, the wisdom of Trajan's forward policy was once more vin- dicated. Diocletian extended the frontier to the Tigris, and incorporated southern Armenia with the empire. This was the end of the policy of buff er States. The inherent difficulties in the way of this policy — the difficulty of maintaining paramount influence in a country while leaving it nominally independent; and the difficulty of securing that while not too strong for dependence, the buffer State should be strong enough to hold its own against any one but the suzerain — were strongly felt by Rome. Thrace had been bodily taken over by Claudius, and Trajan made a clean sweep of all the client- States left, beginning with Petra and ending with Armenia.

Armenia is not the only quarter in which Mommsen is strongly of opinion

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that the forward policy was right. In his view the clades Variana — the de- struction by the Germans of Varus and his legions in the neighbourhood of Osnabriick — is a riddle. It is diffi- cult to understand why it should have had such enormous consequences. " One can hardly conceive that the annihilation of an army of 20,000 men, unattended by further immediate military consequences, should have given a decisive turn to the high policy of a wisely-ruled world- State." A frontier constituted by the Danube and Elbe would have been shorter and better than one constituted by the Danube and the Rhine. Moreover to have put the great frontier armies on the Elbe instead of on the Rhine would have been to carry out the cardinal maxim of Augustus' s policy — the removal of the great commands to as great a distance as possible from Rome and Italy — and an Elbe army could hardly have played in the history of the empire the sinister part which was actually played by the army of the Rhine. Tiberius, the veteran of a hundred fights, had had so much to do with the conquest of Germany, that the renunciation of a forward policy beyond the Rhine could hardly have been agreeable to him personally. Perhaps a man living in those times could not have asked himself the further great question, which naturally occurs to the historian, who looks back, not only on the first century of our era, but on the fifth as well, and all tLat have come after. The ques- tion is, whether the incorporation of Germany as far as the Elbe would not have made the empire inexpugnably strong, and whether with the Roman- ised German races as a rampart and a vanguard, Rome could not have victo- riously beaten off the not less brave but infinitely less organised races that lay further to the east and north. If Rome's interests were to be the standard of the world's interests — which a Roman might well be excused for thinking — the forward policy in Germany was right. It was, probably,

also right in Britain, where it was strongly advised by the noblest Roman who ever took in hand the government of the country. Agricola wanted to annex the whole island, and Ireland into the bargain, and if this had once been done, the maintenance of Britain would in all probability have been much less costly in money and men. As things were, with the constant menace of the tribes beyond the wall, Rome found to her no small disgust that she had to occupy this poor and remote province with no less than three legions and an unusually large army of auxiliaries. In another region and at another time Rome had a still greater opportunity, and it was delibe- rately thrown away. After six years of incessant warfare M. Aurelius had subdued the Marcomanni (Bohemia), and they were followed by the Quadi (Moravia) and the lazyges (a frag- ment of the Sarmatian race settled in the basin of the Theiss, and who, after conquest, supplied a contingent of auxiliary cavalry, of which the greater part was sent to Britain, and stationed at Ribchester and other places in the north). It was his intention, and it was well within his power, to make two new provinces, Marcomannia and Sarmatia. Thus once more the upper Elbe was in the grasp of Rome. Dacia would no longer have been a mere outpost, hardly tenable in the long run if it continued to stand alone. It would have been one of a colossal ring of frontier provinces beyond the Danube and the Rhine. Marcus Aurelius was not the man to annex for annexation's sake, and Mommsen believes his policy to have been the right one. Yet Commodus renounced it at once, and apparently without hesitation, on his father's death. Commodus's name is a poor guarantee for any policy, and if his action stood alone it might merely be referred to his personal incapacity. But when we find Augustus and Tiberius refusing to make good the defeat of Varus, Domitian — " one of the most diligent

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administrators whom the empire pro- duced " — deliberately checking the advance of his victorious general in Britain, and Hadrian renouncing Armenia and Mesopotamia, it is natural to suppose that there were general and perhaps solid causes for this assiduous avoidance of any large extension of the responsibilities of empire.

The fact is that the empire was poor. This paid army of 250,000 long-service soldiers, though too small for the work it had to do, was large enough to be uncommonly expensive. Nothing either in money or men was to be got out of Italy, and the burden on the provinces was already about as much as they could carry. Augustus and Tiberius gave up Germany, Domi- tian Britain, Hadrian Armenia and Mesopotamia, CommodusMarcomannia and Sarmatia, mainly because each extension of the frontier would have demanded a corresponding increase in the army, which again could only be effected by a corresponding increase of the taxation. Finance was the weak spot of the Roman empire, as is it not the weak spot of every empire ? But the foreign policy of the empire was crippled by something more than want of means. The imperial system was from its very nature hostile to thorough military efficiency. Augustus had established the dynastic principle on a weak and insufficient basis, and directly it failed there was no reason why any successful soldier should not be emperor. As the army in fact made the emperors, the reigning prince was naturally slow to give great commands to any but members of his own house. Directly young Gaius was killed by a chance stroke in Armenia, Augustus renounced the forward policy in Ar- menia altogether, there being no member of his own family left to execute it. In the same way provinces were divided, in order to divide the military command, although military considerations enjoined its retention in a single hand. Mommsen for in- stance suggests that the reason for

dividing Britain into two commands, and keeping half the troops at Chester and Caerleon, whereas they were really Avanted a good deal further north, was to prevent a single provincial governor having the control of so large a force as three legions with an unusually full complement of auxiliary, horse and foot. Even these weaknesses would perhaps hardly suffice to explain the shortcomings of the empire in foreign policy, if we still cherished the delusion that the troops were "Roman." But the difficulties in the way of sending drafts all over the empire were of course enormous ; the tempta- tion to get the men as far as possible on the spot invincible ; and, probably not later than Hadrian, local recruit- ing was everywhere the rule. Not merely were the legions not composed of Italians, but the auxiliary cohortes Hispanorum or Thracum, were not ex- clusively or even largely composed of Thracians or Spaniards. Britain was held by Britons, the Rhine frontier by Germans, and — what is a good deal more important — Syria and Egypt by Syrians and Egyptians. The disgrace- ful history of the wars with Parthia is not explicable if we suppose the legions of the Euphrates to have been — except as regards the officers — in any sense Roman or even Western. They were composed of effeminate and undisci- plined Orientals, and at every serious crisis Western legions were brought up from the Danube or the Rhine to do the work for which the ordinary Euphrates army had shown itself incompetent.

2. It was typical of their whole treatment of the Greek East that the Romans allowed even the Euphrates army to become Greco-Oriental. Their object in the East was to diffuse not Romanism but Hellenism. They both were, and regarded themselves as, the successors of Alexander, and their ambition was to complete his work. Greek was the one language of the Empire which was recognised as official, side by side with Latin, and it appears to have been the long-

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cherished idea of the Romans to make no difference between Greece and Italy, but to incorporate Greece, ex- actly as Italy had been incorporated, with the Roman State. It is a pecu- liarity of Greece that its two chief towns, Athens and Sparta, along with the large tracts of territory belong- ing to each, were exempt from the provincial administration. Nero went so far as to declare all Greece tax- free and exempt from the Roman administration ; Hadrian gave Athens corn at the public expense, just as if it had been another Rome. When the organisation and civilisation of Thrace were seriously taken in hand by Trajan, the towns were organised on the Greek model. No attempt was made to Romanise a province, which had been drawn, however incompletely, within the Hellenic circle by the Macedonian kings. The same policy was pursued in Asia Minor. In the remoter parts of the province of Asia — for instance, in the Phrygian high- lands, and in Cappadocia — Hellenism seems to have first made its way under the empire, and the existing Hellenic civilisation was everywhere respected. In Syria the Romans found their work more than half done. Alexander and his successors had intended to make a new Macedonia of the country, and it was covered with towns of Greek con- stitution and Macedonian name, like Larissa, Pella, and Bersea. Only a few Latin islands were planted in this Greek sea — Berytus, for instance, in Syria, and Alexandria Troas in Asia Minor, and a few obscure colonies of Roman veterans were entrusted with the duty of keeping in check the banditti of the mountain border of Pisidia.

3. But whether Rome acted as the torchbearer of the Hellenic or the Latin civilisation, it was at bottom one and the same civilisation which she everywhere introduced. The Romans disliked the racial unit — the clan or tribe — as possibly dangerous. They could not conceive Civilisation without towns, and they wanted towns as the

basis of the administration. The town was the administrative unit under Rome, as the district collector is in India. The Romans were long in evolving an official class, the very idea of the " official," the trained specialist who is bound by rigid rules and still more rigid traditions, being alien to the Roman conception of public life. The extent to which the independence of the towns was everywhere respected under the early empire was due in part to the entire absence of any class of officials competent to do the work, and with the appearance of such a class dis- appeared the independence of the towns. But every reason led the early empire to increase the importance of towns where they existed, and to introduce them where they did not. Whether the province was Britain or Judaea — whether the town was called Cfesarsea or Yerulamium — in any case towns grew up under the footsteps of Rome as inevitably and almost as quickly as did camps and baths and amphi- theatres. This universal introduction of urban civilisation — Hellenic, in the east and Latin in the west (the west including Africa, where the pre-exist- ing civilisation was not Hellenic, but Phoanician) but always urban — was the great and characteristic work of Rome, and it was the merit of the empire that, by keeping the peace for so long a time, it enabled the task to be well and thoroughly performed. At the same time the Romans, who were the last people in the world to be over- mastered by a pedantic passion for uniformity, showed great ease and flexibility in the different ways in which they set about introducing the town system in different provinces. In Gaul, for instance, the Romans did not destroy the large race-units which they found in possession of the field. They changed the nomenclature, and made the town, which had no doubt hitherto existed, if only as a market, the centre of the administration. In- stead of the Remi they said Durocor- torum, instead of the Allobroges they said Vienna. But it is necessary very

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clearly to bear in mind that Durocor- torum meant great part of Cham- pagne, and Vienna meant all Savoy. In the strict administrative sense important towns like Geneva and Grenoble were nothing but dependent villages of Vienna. That is the es- sential peculiarity of Roman Gaul, that the enormous Gallic civitates con- tinued to exist, instead of, as in Spain, being broken into smaller units. The Spanish province of Tarraconensis had 293 separate communities ; in all three Gauls there were only sixty -four. The Romans found both countries divided into great tribal communities when they first annexed them. In Gaul they let these communities alone, while giving them the name and administration of towns ; in Spain they broke them up. The Astures, for instance, were not a political entity under Rome. The name lingered on merely as one of geographical con- venience. The Astures were made up of twenty-two separate communities. There is all the difference in the world between an official "ad census accipiendos civitatium xxiii. Vasco- num et Vardulorum " and a " censor civitatis Remorum fcederatse." It was not that the Astures or Can- tabri were reckoned more formidable than the Treviri or Remi. The dif- ference came from the fact that Spain was conquered much earlier, and that the Republic — as was shown, for instance, by the breaking up of the Samnite confederation — was more hostile to such large units than the Empire.

The last and deepest question of all remains. Was the government in the main a good one ? Were the pro- vinces fairly taxed, well governed, happy, and prosperous? Mommsen, who is very severe on the maladminis- tration of the Republic, its " short- sightedness and narrowness, one might even say its perversity and brutality," is lenient, and more than lenient to the empire. Certain deductions have to be made. The rule of the Senate

was but a poor one, not because it was ill-intentioned, but because it was in- competent. It lacked initiative, and governors of high birth, who were ap- pointed to the senatorial provinces by lot, naturally showed themselves as a rule inferior to the picked and tried le- gates of the emperor. It is noteworthy that very little was done for the roads in a senatorial province ; in every re- spect the administration was slacker and less competent than in the Imperial provinces. A great English historian who has made a special study of one of these senatorial provinces is severe upon the Imperial administration as a whole. But Finlay argues too hastily from the, in many respects, anomalous case of Greece. There were a number of reasons for the depopulation and decay of Greece, notwithstanding all the philhellenic sentiment of culti- vated Romans. The civil wars hit Greece frightfully hard. They were mainly fought out on Greek soil, and were preceded and accompanied by requisitions on a gigantic scale. The senatorial government of the province was not particularly good, but it was better than that of the free cities. Athens in particular governed itself very badly. Money was made by Greek artists, and Greek business men, but mainly out of Greece. It is true that the population of Greece decayed under the empire ; but so did the population of Italy, and in both cases the main reason was the same. The Italian population dispersed itself all over Europe. " Ubicumque vicit, Romanus habitat," says Seneca, and the Roman took the Greek with him. Mommsen says that the Jews were important and powerful in every country but Judaea ; he might have said much the same of Greece proper and the Greeks. The Greeks would no doubt have stayed in Greece if Delos and the Piraeus had continued to be the great emporia of the eastern trade. But all that trade was now diverted to Italy, and Greece was thrown back exclusively upon its own natural resources, which were not

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great. There are, in fact, special reasons for the decay of Greece under the empire. Other provinces were prosperous enough. There were great industries, even what we should call manufacturing industries, in Western Asia Minor, and the whole country is simply studded with the remains of great Greco-Roman cities. Syria was particularly flourishing and populous. There was a free population of 117,000 in Apamea, and in the last hundred miles of the Orontes valley before the river reached the sea, there was a town to every mile. Still more extraordinary is the contrast between the Batanea of the Roman Empire and the Haouran of to-day. There were 300 towns in a district where there are now five villages. In these border-regions, ex- posed to the frequent incursions of barbarous tribes, peace and prosperity could only be ensured by the strong hand of some external power. Under Rome they were governed as they ought to be, and as they have never been governed since. A kind of advanced post of Hellenic civilisation was here secured by Rome which may fairly be compared with the rich and prosperous Decumates *Agri across the Rhine. Similar facts meet us on the Arabian border, at Petra, and of course on a great scale in Egypt and northern Africa. The present condi- tion of Asia Minor, Syria, and northern Africa is one of barbarism compared to their condition under Rome. It is these countries which weight the scale

against the present, and which enable Mommsen to say, in one of the most rhetorical passages of his book, that "if an Angel of the Lord were bidden to determine whether the portion of the earth's surface ruled by Severus Antoninus was governed with greater sense and humanity then or now, whether morals and public happiness have in general advanced or gone back, it is very doubtful whether he would decide in favour of the present." That is a great question to which the present volume does not supply the materials for an answer. Apart from that spiritual discontent which is in- separable from a powerfully centralised despotism, and which is very real and, in the long run, very enfeebling, the answer to it very largely depends upon homely considerations of pounds, shil- lings, and pence. The vital question of the history of the empire is whether the taxation was excessive. In the first centuries of the Imperial Government the taxes were probably not — at least this is the conclusion to which Mommsen evidently inclines — as a rule excessive. But, in the long run, the provinces could not support both themselves and Italy, and there was always that drone in the midst of the hive — that Italy — to which all the world paid tribute — and which the richest of her subject- lands, the loamy valleys of the Med- jerda and the Nile, exhausted them- selves to feed.

WILLIAM T. ARNOLD.

EEVIEW OF THE MONTH.

ON the last Monday of last month the Prime Minister electrified the House of Commons by a speech which was understood to point to a war with Russia. The stroke was sudden. Men were not prepared for so rapid an evolution of the crisis. The public were surprised, "and a little , bewild- ered. On the Saturday evening of the same week the usual brilliant circle of eminent guests were gathered together at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy. Under the glitter of the scene was felt the presence of grave preoccupations. It was known that Ministers had been hastily sum- moned during the afternoon to a Council for the consideration of the decisive reply from Russia. They were the last to arrive, but before men had all found their places at table, the rumour ran half secretly around the hall that the Russian answer had been a compliance, that reasonable terms were within reach, and that there was good assurance of peace. Later in the evening the Foreign Secretary gave authority to the whisper.

If the affairs of an empire could be carried on by the arts that make the after-dinner speaker, Lord Granville would have been a statesman of the first force. The most felicitous speech that he ever made cannot have pro- duced a better effect than the not very felicitous sentence of May 2, in which he declared to the princes, ambassadors, soldiers, and all the rest of the illustrious world before him, his confident belief that nothing would happen to prevent men from continu- ing works of peace.

On the following Monday, Mr. Gladstone confirmed these good hopes by a specific declaration that Russia had : come to an agreement, or was ready to do so, upon the following

points. She was willing to submit to the judgment of the Sovereign of a friendly State the question whether the movements of Komaroff were con- sistent with the understanding of March 16 between the two Govern- ments : that is to say, whether the understanding made it incumbent on the Russian Government to issue to Komaroff other instructions than those on which he took such remarkable action. That much being settled, there was no reason why the two Governments should not at once re- sume their communications in London as to the main points of the line for the delimitation of the Afghan frontier. When the main points were settled, then the officers of the two Govern- ments would examine and trace the actual details of the line on the spot. This was on May 4. During the three weeks that have since elapsed the clouds have slowly to some degree gathered again. It was not indeed to be expected that negotiations contain- ing so many elements of detail should go on as if they were a transaction for the sale of a horse. The character of Russia is not good in the British politi- cal market. This makes the least delay a source of suspicion and uneasiness. The papers that have been laid before Parliament neither raise the credit of St. Petersburg for sincerity, nor of London for knowingness and foresight. The action of the Czar in sending a sword of honour to General Komaroff created a profound and most justifiable irritation. We do not expect a fine and chivalrous taste in the hard transaction of rough business ; it may be that the Czar sent Komaroff his. sword to console the military party for seeing submitted to arbitration the question whether the Czar had not broken an agreement in ordering

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Komaroff to undertake the exploit for which he decorated him. This may be. It only shows that on one side at any rate the conditions of peace still depend on the simple ethics of a Cossack camp. In all this unpleasant proceeding we are only reaping what we have sown, and undergoing the mortifications incident to a position that was not taken up with full consideration and well-devised pre- paration.

"When these difficulties are all settled, it is obvious that, on the theory of the buffer-State, a more serious and enduring one would re- main. Nobody can disguise from him- self that when the Afghan frontier is fixed, the Russians will only feel bound to respect it on condition that we make the Afghans respect it. As the Duke of Argyll put this point (May 12), the question of paramount importance is whether, in the absence of complete control over Afghanistan, we are to be practically responsible for their border-quarrels, of which there will be perpetual danger, and which it will be extremely hard to restrain. Opinion moves, for the most part, in one way as to the true policy in view of liabili- ties of this description. Lord Salisbury said —

" I hope we shall do all we can to conciliate and keep the Ameer of Afghanistan with us and to help him to the utmost of our power to defend his country. But do not let the desire of his friendship lead us into either of those two mistakes — either in making ourselves responsible for any of the excesses which the wild tribes under his control may commit upon his western frontier : nor, on the other hand, can we make any susceptibilities which any Afghan ruler may feel a reason for ab- staining from defending, and defending ade- quately, those positions we may consider absolutely necessary for the strerigth of our own position."

From the last, as a general propo- sition, there can be little dissent, though of course there is room for ample difference of opinion, whether military or political, as to the points at which this absolute necessity would begin. On both sides it was agreed, in the course of the debate in the

House of Lords, that Herat is not a very promising scene of British opera- tions. Lord Salisbury is of the same opinion as Lord Kimberley, that " the prospect of defending Herat by British troops is not one which seems to the non-military mind very attractive or very feasible. It may always be pos- sible for us, with assistance in the shape of arms and officers, to assist the Ameer in defending that place, but to defend it ourselves, I confess, seems to me a dangerous undertaking." The Secretary for India had said, with his well-known emphasis, that " the schemes which are put forward to the effect that we should create and make Herat a great Indian or British fort- ress, to be held by British and Indian troops at a great distance from our frontier, and among a population not under our direct influence, would in- volve us in great and serious dangers." But, then, Lord Kimberley went on to say that this would " not prevent us from doing what may be done to strengthen the Ameer's position at Herat, and to put the fortifications there in a condition to afford a reason- able amount of security. That is a different thing from making Herat an English frontier fortress." The dif- ference is hardly so plain as we could wish, though we may admit that the two British officers who are now actually in Herat with the full con- sent of Abdur Rahman may be there in virtue of our obligations to that prince. But, if our policy is to be consistent, the time is sure to come when those obligations will have to be revised. Supposing that, for reasons which it is easy to imagine, from hard roubles down to force majeure, an Afghan Ameer were to let the Russians into Herat, it would, in Lord Salisbury's judgment, which most sensible men will not dispute, be "a dangerous undertaking " for us either to turn them out or to prevent them from coming in. We have to face this con- tingency— of an unfriendly or pro- Russian Ameer. What then would be the policy?

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Lord Kimberley has given us the answer. " In that case," he said, "our defence would have to be based on a strictly defensive system within our own lines. One thing is certain — that we ought not to found our policy on the notion that we should construct a frontier line in Central Asia, for which this country would be entirely re- sponsible, several hundreds of miles distant from our base." Here, again, there followed the perilous qualifica- tion, arising from the present arrange- ment : "Of course by an alliance with the Afghans we must undertake a considerable responsibility for that frontier ; and we hope that a satis- factory frontier line will be drawn between Russian and Afghan territory. That would render it necessary that some of our officers should be present on that frontier." That is to say, the present alliance plants us in a position from which a change in the Ameer's way of thinking might make it indis- pensable that we should retreat, yet from which we could certainly not retreat without giving colour to the imputation that we had been worsted and driven back by Russia. Here is the element of danger in the half- policy, or the two-faced and ambiguous policy, to which we are now tem- porarily committed.

The policy of to-day, we say, can only be temporary. The zone and the buffer have had their day. However the settlement of the Afghan frontier may fall out, it is agreed that "it is impossible for us any longer to have the satisfaction of knowing that we are in an insular position in India." We may not have exactly reached the stage, so long anticipated by Cobden and others, when India and Russia are conterminous, but we are within a measurable distance of such a stage. The Government is framing new pro- positions in accordance with a new state of things. A project of frontier defence has been approved, and autho- rity has been given for the expenditure of a sum of 5,000,000?. on frontier rail- ways and military roads, including the

Quetta railway, which will cost some- thing like 2,000,0002. of that sum. Five millions are not supposed to be the final limit, but so much will at least be required for the railway and the military road. It is pretty certain to be found on further examination that further works will have to be undertaken. Lord Dufferin thinks it is a matter for serious consideration whether there should not be strong fortresses on the same line to give our army support. Peshawur, the Indus, and Quetta mark the general direction and the limits of the line. More detailed particulars were laid before the House of Commons by the Indian Tinder-Secretary, who (May 21) added the information that of the five millions required, a part would fall upon the revenues of India, and a part would be met by a loan to be issued by the Secretary of State with the sanction of Parliament. All this indicates an immense trans- formation in the position of the Indian Empire. The consequences may be more far-reaching than to careless observers may at first sight appear. The key to internal security in India is thrift. Heavy expenditure means heavy taxation, and that means dis- content. The cost of the new fron- tier must bring with it an augmen- tation of burdens, as well as the diversion to military defence of funds that might more fruitfully have gone, under a happier star, to the develop- ment of the productive resources of the country.

Some futile wrangling is still per- sisted in upon the vexed question whether the new policy of the Govern- ment is not a condemnation of their own proceedings in 1880. The charge is that they are resuming the Quetta railway which they ordered to be abandoned in a fit of triumphant spleen ; that this line would have been completed by now; that stores were left to be plundered by the tribes, rails pulled up, and earthworks levelled with the ground — all involv- ing vast waste of money, and still

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more serious waste of time. In 1883-4 the error of three years before was admitted, by the orders to resume the work that had been rashly stopped. The answer is, that the two sections of the line, as far as Quetta, were accepted by the new Government in 1880 ; that the line was not destroyed, nor the buildings dismantled, nor the rails lifted ; that very little loss of money was incurred at the time j and that as a result of the re-surveys, and of the consequent improvement of plans, there would be not a loss but a permanent saving.

The announcement of the with- drawal from the Soudan was treated in common opinion as some compensa- tion for the dire financial demand of a vote of credit for eleven millions. For a single instant the public had staggered under the dramatic shock of the fall of Khartoum. The Government un- fortunately hurried to a decision under the same influence, but the decision to go to Khartoum had hardly been declared, before it was evident that people had recovered their balance, and that our adventures in the Soudan were rapidly becoming violently un- popular. The troubles in Afghanistan clenched the matter. On the line from Merawi to Dongola 9,000 British troops were stationed. The British authorities had to choose between concentrating this force at Dongola until events had further developed themselves, and withdrawing them to the line of Wadi Haifa as the effective frontier of Egypt. The latter course was adopted. It was more easily adopted on paper than carried out in effect ; the movement has hardly begun and will be very slow ; and the flight of the population from Dongola threatens unforeseen difficulties. The Mahdi, overtaken by heavy disasters of his own, gives no trouble. The notion of an advance on Khartoum is finally abandoned. As a consequence of this, the expedition to Suakin is abandoned likewise ; the unlucky rail- way will, as part of a military opera- tion, be dropped; and to their ownlively

satisfaction, the bulk of the troops are already on their way to less desperate shores. The ultimate fate of Suakin is still undetermined. So is that of Dongola. Sir E. Baring has been instructed to consult the Egyptian Government as to the desirability of establishing some administration in the province of Dongola, or a portion of that province : also, whether it would be desirable to complete the prolongation of the Nile railway, which has been commenced, and whether it may be possible to find any means by which that railway may be completed and worked, as has often been suggested, as a commercial under- taking. The question of the Soudan, therefore, is not by any means a closed book. Foreign Powers cannot be left out of account. Much may depend on the turn of events in Egypt proper. Meanwhile we are grateful for the blessings of the day.

In Egypt proper things look as if a new departure in one direction or another were once more on the point of forcing itself rapidly and even vio- lently upon us. The detention of the Guards at Alexandria, on their way back from their bootless expedition to the shore of the Red Sea, naturally caused considerable commotion at home. The commotion was intensified, rather than lessened, when a story gained circulation and belief that this time it was not Russia but France. It would be rash to attach much im- portance to such tales as that a rising would be got up in the streets of Alexandria, and that then a force would be landed from French trans- ports, quite fortuitously passing with troops on their way to China. Of course, any French Minister is aware that a manoauvre of this sort would mean a war with Great Britain ; not improbably, too, he is aware that, with a general election in his country close at hand, this, in turn, would mean his swift expulsion from power. Be that as it may, France is evidently bent on making things as uncomfort- able for us in Egypt as she possibly

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can make them. The perorations with which we have been favoured about Egypt are beginning to sound as little substantial as the more familiar pero- rations to the same tune about Ire- land. Only two months ago a young Minister said that if the Financial Convention were once accepted by Par- liament, it would be the beginning of a permanent and satisfactory settle- ment, and he might venture to use the words of our great poet —

" But look ! the dawn, in russet mantle clad, Walks o'er the skirts of yon high eastern hill."

Alas, the Convention has not yet been ratified by the other Govern- ments joined with our own in the international guarantee of the new loan. On this plea, Germany, Austria, Russia and France have compelled the Khedive, — alias, Great Britain, — to withdraw the decree imposing a tax on the bondholder according to the terms of the Convention. So odious a piece of chicanery has seldom been perpetrated in European diplomacy, for in fact the protecting Powers had already virtually assented to this particular decree on the part of the Khedive, without reference to the ratification of the international guarantee. Using the same leverage, France and Germany are working against England in the matter of the regulation of the Suez Canal. As to the conditions of the working of the Canal there is no dispute. The ques- tion turns upon the body who shall see that these conditions are respected. The French proposal is that a Com- mission shall be appointed, consisting of representatives of the signatory Powers of the Declaration of London of March, 1885, along with a dele- gate of the Egyptian Government, and under the presidency of a special dele- gate of Turkey. The English proposal is that there shall be no body of this kind, but that the Egyptian Govern- ment shall take the necessary mea- sures, and that the ordinary agents of the Powers in Egypt shall make it

their business to inform their Govern- ments of any infraction, or danger of infraction, of the Canal Treaty.

The real objects and motives, of which such details as these are only the screen, are not easy to comprehend. That Prince Bismarck should wish to see a quarrel between France, his standing enemy, and England, against whom he is nursing a grudge that will pass, is intelligibly. But the impolicy of France is flagrant. She at any rate can have no object in forcing England to take a firmer grip upon Egypt. Yet that this will naturally be the result of these vexations, is as certain as anything can be. That Great Britain will continue for many months or even weeks longer, to endure a situation which' entails no- thing but loss and travail upon her, for the benefit of those who for purposes of their own never cease to frustrate her in the work, is not credible nor even- conceivable.

Though the Government have suc- cessfully surmounted their purely par- liamentary difficulties, the most critical of them remains. As the first storms that at so early a period disturbed the ministerial course broke upon them from Ireland, so will the last. The precise nature of the exceptional pro- visions for preventing and detecting crime which Lord Spencer insists that his colleagues shall require from Par- liament, has not yet been divulged. But the battle will be fought, less upon the ground of this or that par- ticular modification of the Crimes Act, than upon the deeper issue whether there should be any special, excep- tional, and temporary legislation at all. The opposition will spring from the general maxim, that to persist in exceptional criminal legislation, re- newed from time to time, is not worthy of the name of government, and is not compatible with settled and constitutional order. This prin- ciple is one that might be accepted equally in two very different quarters. It might be embodied in an amend-

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ment that, under certain party con- ditions, would unite both those who think that criminal procedure in Ire- land should be no more rigorous than it is in England, and those who think that Ireland needs to have, not fitful coercion acts, but a standing code of its own marked by its own peculiar severity.

The first session of the present Par- liament opened exactly five years ago this week (May 20). The Queen' s Speech contained a paragraph on the Peace Preservation Act for Ireland, which expired on the first of the following month. " You will not be asked," the Sovereign was made to say, " to renew it. My desire to avoid the evils of exceptional legislation in abridg- ment of liberty would not induce me to forego in any degree the perform- ance of the first duty of every govern- ment in providing for the security of life and property ; but while deter- mined to fulfil this sacred obligation, I am persuaded that the loyalty and good sense of my Irish subjects will justify me in relying on the provisions of the ordinary law, firmly adminis- tered, for the maintenance of peace and order." "Whether the lapse of the Peace Preservation Act had much or anything to do with the agrarian agita- tion that so speedily followed, is a question that no amount of contro- versy will settle. What is certain is, that the provisions of that Act were far too mild to have effectively re- pressed the violent forces that then broke loose over Ireland. In the winter of '80-81 the old turbulence made its appearance, but in a shape that was very moderate when compared with former outbreaks. English news- papers made the most of .it, party spirit became very shrill, and the Irish executive lost their heads. Mr. Parnell and other leading agitators were put upon their trial at Dublin, but a conviction was not procured. It was resolved to revert to the time- honoured device of Coercion. The session of 1881 was opened with the announcement that additional

powers would be asked for in the vindication of order and public law. Two bills were introduced, an Arms Bill, and what was called a Bill for the Protection of Life and Property. The latter was one of the most tremendous blunders ever made by any government. It empowered the Irish executive to arrest and de- tain for an unlimited period and with- out trial any one whom they should reasonably suspect of being concerned in disorder. This was the first Coer- cion Bill of the present administra- tion. Between 900 and 1,000 persons were imprisoned at one time, on the fiat of the Lord Lieutenant and his agents ; disorder increased, and crime put on a more virulent type. The Land Act had been passed, but the provocation of coercion hindered the tenants and their leaders from realising the boon. The ominous watchword of " No Rent " came into the air. The League pro- posed test cases for the Land Act — in good faith, as they contended, but really, as the Government feared, with the intention of breaking down the Act. Perhaps the Government were in too great a hurry to put this sinister construction on the doings of the League. In October (1881) they threw Mr. Parnell and others into prison. Matters grew worse. When the session of 1882 opened, the Chief Secretary was forced to admit that coercion had failed. His colleagues resolved to reverse the policy, to release Mr. Parnell and the mass of the suspects, and to try concilia- tion. A cruel calamity happened. A little gang of obscure conspira- tors murdered the new Chief Sec- retary, without knowing and with- out intending it. The curtain was lifted some nine months afterwards, and we then found out that this great crime was almost an accident. But in the lurid mystery of the hour, it is no wonder that the shock produced the violence of panic. Even Mr. Parnell and Mr. Dillon admitted that it was necessary to arm the Executive with some special power for dealing with

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the secret murder clubs, one of which had just given such horrible evidences of its activity. But the Crime Pre- vention Bill, which was introduced just three years ago from this month (May 11) went much further than almost anybody expected, and certainly further than anybody of cool judgment could approve. The superfluous and excessive rigour, the misconception, the vexatiousness of many of the pro- visions of the Crimes Act are esta- blished by the fact that so many of them have never been used. There was a vehement struggle for the power of trying prisoners under cer- tain conditions by three judges with- out a jury. The power has not once been resorted to. The Curfew clause enacts that if a person is out of his place of abode one hour after sunset and before sunrise, under circum- stances suggesting a reasonable suspi- cion of a criminal intent, the constable may arrest him. The clause has been practically useless and unused. The section giving power to the Lord Lieutenant to forfeit newspapers in- citing to treason or to acts of violence and intimidation, has kept a few journals from New York out of cir- culation, but it has been futile against hardly less choice literature of indi- genous origin. On one occasion, the Conservatives aided by a contingent of Fitzwilliams, Foljambes, Dvindases, Lord E. Fitzmaurice, Mr. George Russell, and others, actually defeated the Government by inserting a clause empowering search for arms at night. As might have been expected, a pro- vision that was too odious even for the draftsmen of the Irish office, has been virtually a dead letter. Another section provided for the payment of compensation out of the rates for persons murdered or maimed, but power was given of exempting par- ticular lands from liability to contri- bution. The faculty of exemption was too invidious to be generally exercised, and the large owners of land in their own hands have enjoyed little immunity from paying for vio-

lence which nobody execrates more heartily than themselves. The power of changing the venue, that is of bringing prisoners from the south and west, where convictions are not to be relied upon, to Dublin or to Belfast, is said to be greatly valued. But this power already resides in the Court of Queen's Bench, without special enact- ment. The right to quarter extra police in disturbed districts at the cost of the ratepayers is conferred by the Act. But the same right, with the difference that only half the cost could be imposed on the locality, already exists by an ordinary statute. Resort to special juries is declared to be indispensable by some Irish officials. Others set greater store on what the Nationalists have styled the Star- Chamber clause, by which a resident magistrate is able to summon and examine witnesses, when an offence has been committed, even though there may be no prisoner before him charged with the offence.

Of all these matters we shall hear enough and more than enough during the next few weeks. The courses open to the British Government seem to have been the following : — 1. To re- new the Act exactly as it stands. 2. To renew it partially. 3. To let it drop entirely. 4. To renew it for a short term of one or two years. 5. To incorporate the provisions of the Act, or some of them, in the perma- nent law of the United Kingdom. 6. To incorporate them in permanent laws with exclusive application to Ireland. 7. To sweeten the partial renewal of the Crimes Act by measures of re- medial legislation, such as the con- cession of local self-government, or the facilitation of the purchase of land by the tenants. The Cabinet at first took the course which involves the greatest number of parliamentary difficulties. The Ulster Liberals were disgusted at the omission of a bill for land purchase. Many English Liberals believed that it would have been but right and prudent to gild the pill of coercion with at least

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the semblance of remedial legislation. A memorial embodying some of these considerations was presented to the Prime Minister, and he announced a change of intention on the part of the Government. They would do their best to pass a Land Purchase Bill. This announcement is said to have brought on a Ministerial crisis, for some members of the Cabinet believe it impossible to deal with the land question effectually until local bodies have been created who should under- take certain responsibilities for the repayment of advances made from the national exchequer. Some way out of the deadlock will pretty certainly be found, for the prospects alike of the national fortunes abroad and of party combinations at home are too obscure to make any section of the Liberal leaders willing to precipitate a dis- solution of their union at an hour when its consequences would certainly be momentous, and might easily prove to be fraught with prolonged disaster.

As for the Crimes Act, the forces against its renewal may not prevail, but they are not insignificant. The Irish Liberals will oppose it. The Liberal who won a seat for County Antrim a few days ago, owed his vic- tory to his promise to resist excep- tional legislation. Some English and Scotch Radicals are offended by the paradox of imposing a disciplinary law of exceptional rigour on the same population whom you have just de- clared to be fit for an immense and decisive extension of political power. The numbers of this group will depend upon the degree of rigour in the re- vived law : if Lord Spencer asks for much they will be fairly numerous, and if he only asks for enough to allow him to give way with honour, they will be very few. For not very many Eng- lish and Scotch Radicals seem to per- ceive that a little coercion is as

hateful to Irishmen by way of sym- bol, as if it were a great deal. Efforts are known to have been made by the small but powerful group below the gangway on the Tory side to in- duce the Opposition to commit them- selves against the renewal of the Act. It is hardly possible that their efforts should succeed, but the group in ques- tion are half expected to act inde- pendently and join their forces to the other malcontent elements. There is little chance of a majority being formed against the Act, but there is still less chance of its passing without a considerable party dislocation.

The marvellous composition of the vast and heterogeneous fabric of the Empire, abounding as it does in in- finitely varying races and nationalities, only half incorporated in the huge whole, as Ireland is only half incor- porated, receives a little illustration in the recent trouble in Canada. The insurrection of the French half-breeds has collapsed with unexpected rapidity. The total number of the half-breeds does not exceed 5,000, and it is believed that not many more than one-tenth of them were concerned in the rising. But the immediate difnculty since the capture of Riel is rather political than military. He and his adherents are French and Catholic. As a con- tributor reminded us here last month, with significant reference to Canadian loyalty, imperial federation, and other bubbles of the hour, a good third of the population of the Dominion is French and Catholic. To condemn Riel to death would be to provoke a dangerous commotion in the Province of Quebec. On the other hand, attention to the agrarian grievances of his friends, whatever they may amount to, will be secured by the fact that their excite- ment has infected the Red Indians, who number, not 600, but between 80,000 and 90,000.

May 25.

MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE

JULY, 1885.

AN AUSTRALIAN APPEAL TO THE ENGLISH DEMOCRACY.

THE first difficulty which presents it- self to an Australian who would offer an opinion upon politics to English- men, is, that the only Australian questions which have attracted the attention of the English public are just those to which Australians are most indifferent. Imperial Union, Colonial Federation, Annexation in the Pacific, are matters of which it may be said that this country knows nothing, except through the letters of London correspondents. It is said, and the statement is probably true, that at the last general election in New South Wales only one candidate made any reference to any of these topics. In Victoria the case is differ- ent. But even in Victoria the question of Imperial Union has not yet been treated seriously by any political party, and the two other questions of Colonial Federation and Pacific Annexation ex- cite an interest for particular local reasons which an Englishman is apt to overlook.

This may be discouraging intelli- gence to earnest sympathisers with Australian progress. Nevertheless, in all probability, we know our own busi- ness better than the most enthusiastic advocate of colonial expansion ; and it is at least certain that colonists, al- though they may be too busy with pri- vate affairs to form opinions upon dis- tant matters of high policy, will deal with these subjects in a sympathetic

No. 309.— VOL. LII.

and liberal spirit whenever the oppor- tunity for action comes. The danger is lest our people should be disgusted by visionary schemes, or, still worse, be made the subject of crude experi- ments. Englishmen will have to watch our affairs much more closely than they have done if they wish to direct colonial opinion into wide channels, or to catch the drift of passing events. The mistakes of English opinion upon each of the three political questions already named will serve to point a moral to this warning.

First in importance comes the ques- tion of Imperial Union. With regard to this Australian sentiment is un- doubtedly changing. The recent de- spatch of troops from New South Wales to Egypt has been taken for the sign of an entirely new departure. It has brought the question of Imperial Union within the range of Australian poli- tics. But this does not mean, as some eager Federalists imagine, that any one of the difficulties in the way of Union has been removed by Mr. Dalley's offer. The question has sim- ply become ripe for discussion ; and it is to the course of that discussion that Englishmen should give attention.

In the first place, Australian opinion on the matter is by no means unani- mous. Even now,1 in the height of the war fever, and while the prepara- tions for the despatch of troops are still 1 "Written 3rd March, 1885. M

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proceeding, a growing murmur of dis- content is making itself heard. Sir Henry Parkes, our most experienced party leader, and a man of rare capa- city and knowledge, has declared against the course adopted by the Government, and is supported, so far as can be judged by the resolutions of public meetings, by the bulk of the working class. Probably, however, the despatch of troops will be approved by Parliament. Colonists are natu- rally disposed to favour an adventu- rous policy, and there is, no doubt, a strong British sentiment even among genuine Australians. But it has yet to be seen how the home-abiding tax- payer will regard the Expeditionary Bill, and it would be rash to infer from the warlike enthusiasm of the press, and the splendid quality and temper of the Soudan force, that Australia will be always ready to supply con- tingents to the British army.

To Englishmen it may seem a small thing to send 600 men to fight in an Egyptian war ; but in a country which has hitherto been working out a glorious destiny, removed from Euro- pean entanglements, and without a thought of warlike dangers, it is na- tural that political sentiment should be profoundly stirred by such an entry upon unknown paths. The anomalies of the position are obtrusive. In a country where every man is wanted to take his part, in some form or an- other, in colonising work, we seem to be going out of our way to encourage military ardour. With the right hand we are expending our revenues to im- port able-bodied men to subjugate the soil, while with the left hand we are sending away the hardiest of our youth to fight the Soudanese. We have to borrow money in England for our necessary public works, and yet with the stroke of a pen, and without the knowledge of parliament, a minister squanders on a warlike expedition one- twelfth of our annual revenue ! Our defenceless position is just beginning to excite alarm, when we remove three- quarters of our little army ! No won-

der that the measure has been strongly canvassed, or that it requires a full defence. For, after all, what have we done 1 Joined in a war, in the making of which we had no voice, which many of us disapprove, and which involves us in unknown responsibilities ; col- lected a body of 600 men, of whom only a 'minority are natives of Aus- tralia ; paid even the privates among them at the rate of 10s. a day, and undertaken to provide for the wives and children of those who are maimed. " C'est magnifiqiie, metis ce n'est pas la guerre ! "

If such things are always to be an incident of the English connection as it is at present, and if things cannot be put upon a different footing, it may happen that we shall yet congratulate ourselves on having learnt experience at so cheap a rate.

It lies with English Federalists to prevent this calamitous result. They have most unexpectedly obtained their opportunity. Will they prove them- selves capable of taking it ? The de- spatch of Australian troops to the Soudan is the first step along a bi- furcating road, which leads either to Imperial Union or to Separation. Having once surrendered the advant- age of our isolated position, we must henceforward be prepared either to take a proper part in European affairs, or else to hold aloof. The notion that Australia might remain a colony of England, and still be neutral if Eng- land were engaged in war, has lost what little vitality it ever had. Aus- tralia, having revealed her wealth and power to the enemies of England, must now be ready to protect herself against them, either by the help of England or by Independence.

Mr. Forster and the Imperial Federation League have told us that they are enemies of Imperial Union, who imagine schemes by which it might be brought about. But there is a preliminary to Imperial Union which is eminently pressing for a practical solution, namely, the question of Imperial Defence. Australia has

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at present some ten thousand men accustomed to bear arms distributed among the six colonies ; it has also a small naval force, which is perhaps sufficient to defend one harbour. For the rest we rely upon the English squadron. This, however, is notoriously wanting both in strength and speed ; and a German purchased cruiser, or the ships of the Messageries Maritimes, could clear the sea of Australian com- merce. Were this done, even for six months, the result to us would be national bankruptcy. A nation of less than three million people cannot do a trade of fifty millions annually without a free use of borrowed capital. Were the supply of this stopped, and were the wool clip, even of a single season, prevented from leaving our shores, it is no rash prophecy that nearly every bank would have to close its doors. Federalists must face this danger, and provide against it. The Separatists insist (although they overlook other considerations) that were Australia independent, our com- merce would be always safe, since we are never likely to be engaged in war upon our own account — iirst, because we have no neighbours, and, secondly, because foreign powers would never permit any of their own number to aggrandise himself by an attack upon Australia. Further, they say we could assist England better if we were independent, for we should then relieve her of the responsibility of protecting us, and should be able to help her with our own forces as occasion re- quired.

In the face of such arguments it is the duty of Federalists to show that the grave danger to Australian wel- fare, which is caused by the existing colonial relations, can be removed without the risk and inconvenience of another schism. And it is at least their immediate duty to recognise that an occasion has at last arisen for suggesting measures to remove one forcible objection to dependence, namely, its commercial insecurity. The details of any scheme for effect-

ing such an object must be worked out in England, and the impulse to- wards its acceptance must also come from there. For not only will England have to supply the requisite naval force, but it is, in reality, her com- merce that will be protected. Among all the vessels which are employed to carry to and fro the forty million pounds (40,000,000^) worth of goods, which represent our annual dealings with England, there is not a single line, and possibly not a single ship, which is owned entirely in Australia. Were Australia independent and Eng- land involved in war, we could find other carriers for our goods, and it would be England that would suffer most from the disturbance of Austra- lian commerce. By realising that, so long as the present colonial relations continue, any attack upon Australia will be felt with undiminished stress in England, Englishmen may grow accustomed to regard the safety of Australia as a matter of concern to them. We can at any time escape from danger, but England will remain exposed to it in either case. At pre- sent it is only a sentiment of loyalty which restrains us from obtaining a position of complete security ; and he is the wisest statesman who puts as little strain on sentiment as possible.

The two salient facts about Austra- lia which Federalists must keep in mind are, first, that we shall never need protection against land attacks, and secondly, that unless we are dragged into war by England, our sea- borne commerce is absolutely safe. It is out of the question that we should ever be at war upon our own account, so that, if we were an independent nation our commerce would always be protected by the laws of neutrality ; and since we could, with very little trouble, raise a disciplined militia of 200,000 men, our shores would be sufficiently protected against wanton aggression.

Nevertheless, union with England is worth some sacrifice. An indepen- dent Australia would undoubtedly be

M 2

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friendly to England, and might indeed have greater power to help her than if she were an English province. But, with independence there would come the risk of disagreement, together with the danger and the wasted power of separate Governments. The crea- tion of new separate states is opposed to the spirit of democracy, whose mission it is to reduce and not to multiply the elements of discord in the human family. Moreover, the feeling of nationality is growing every- where with immense rapidity, so that it could not fail to be injurious to the English race to fight against the force of nationality. It may be many years before an actual tie can be constructed ; but, in the meantime, causes of difference may be removed and en- couragement given to the sentiment of union. As the administration of English affairs becomes more inspired by popular ideas, the possibility of closer ties increases. For the spirit of democracy is union : and when that spirit has penetrated the English and Australian peoples, the political pro- blem of a Federal Constitution will be nearer to solution.

The present martial movement in Australia has its only justification in being an expression of this wish for union. It may not induce any politi- cal changes, but it offers Englishmen the opportunity of taking the only step towards political union which is at present practicable, namely, the construction of a Federal System of Defence.

If England were ready to provide a squadron, which should be devoted simply to the protection of Australia, and which should never be withdrawn from that particular duty, Australians could be depended upon to raise a sufficient force to protect their own country, and to secure the coaling stations in the Pacific for the English navy. The squadron must consist of cruisers fast enough to clear the seas of hostile ships, of torpedo boats for harbour defence, and of one or more ironclads. In return, Australia would

fortify her harbours, supply stores for the squadron, and be ready to send soldiers when they were urgently required. England might also provide material for the fortifications, and a sufficient number of instructors for the troops. The additional expense of this protec- tion would be trifling as compared with the extent of English commerce, which it would secure. Moreover, it cannot be too often repeated to those who murmur at increased expenditure, that Australia cannot and ought not to make costly naval preparations ; and that, in the event of a war between England and a foreign power, Australia will always have it in her power to make her trade with Europe safe, but England will lose it all.

It may be that the practical diffi- culties in the way of any joint defence will prove insuperable ; but this can only be established by experiment. The present is an unique opportunity for making the experiment, which Federalists in England will surely take advantage of, if they are politicians, and not visionaries. A message from the Queen would stir the colonies to action, and a mere executive order from the Admiralty would accomplish all -that is required upon the part of England. The larger schemes of Federal Union can stand over until the empire is secured against attack. If joint defence should prove impos- sible, we shall know what value to attach to the dreams of Imperial Federalists.

It is premature to offer an opinion on this larger question, but it is well to realise the nature of its difficulty.

The first condition of a closer union is that the people of England and Australia should understand each other better.

If such an understanding were once brought about, the English Democracy would immediately recognise that it was rejecting a powerful ally in loosen- ing the connection with Australia. And the people of Australia in their turn would gather strength to overcome the plutocratic spirit from the impulse

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of English culture and the example of English legislation. 1

The desire for a better understand- ing between the democracies of England and Australia is no mere sentimental longing, but is the out- come of a bitter experience of many mistakes. Even at the present moment events are illustrating in a very striking manner the disadvant- ages which arise from mutual mis- understandings, both to England and Australia.

The two Australian questions which have recently attracted English atten- tion are those of Australian Federation and of annexation in the Pacific Ocean ; and yet, with regard to each of these, the temper of the popular party in Australia has been greatly misunderstood.

The error has, perhaps, been greatest upon the question of Federation. It is generally believed in England that Victoria has been making efforts to form an Australian Dominion, and that she is only prevented from doing so by the provincial jealousy of New South Wales and New Zealand. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is at present but a single obstacle to the union of the Australian colonies, namely, the Victorian tariff. New South Wales ministries have (time after time) attempted to draw the colonies to- gether, but their policy has always been frustrated by the Protectionist party in Victoria. Now the roles seem changed. Victoria has come forward as the patriot, eager to remove pro- vincial jealousies. The explanation is simple. Fifteen years of protection have sufficed to choke her markets ; she must find new outlets for her pro- ducts at all hazards. Hence this agitation for a Federal Union and for annexation. The hope is, that if the colonies are once united, even under the semblance of a Federal Constitution,

1 In matters of social legislation, such as the Factory Acts, City Improvement Acts, Adulteration Acts, Legal Procedure, &c., Aus- tralia is about thirty years behind England.

a protectionist Zoll-verein will sooner or later be adopted. Negotiations in this direction have already begun ; and Tasmania has been induced to make a reciprocity treaty with Victoria upon a protectionist basis. In this way it is hoped to close the Australian market against any free-trade colony — a proof of a disinterested desire for union which requires no comment.

But, whether it is New South Wales or Victoria that is most eager for Australian Union is a comparatively unimportant local matter. It is far otherwise with the proposed new constitution. This, as may be well known, establishes what is called a "Federal Council," with limited power to legislate on matters of common interest. It is evident that the con- stitution of such a governing body is a matter of supreme importance \ and it happens that from the democratic point of view the constitution of the council, as it stands at present, deserves the strongest expression of ridicule and censure. Yet so little help do we get at present from the democracy in England, that not a single news- paper has even attempted a criticism of the clauses of the so called " Enabling Bill," which the Imperial Parliament may be called upon to pass at any moment. It may be fearlessly asserted that, had it not been for the ignorance of Australian matters which prevails in England, it would have been impossible that the draft Bill of the Sydney convention could have been approved by the Imperial Government. It can only have been accepted in England because it was believed to be an expression of Australian opinion.

But what are the facts 1 The Bill originated in no Colonial Parliament, and was suggested by no popular movement. The tale of its preparation reads like a passage from a burlesque ; yet, told in plain language, the framing of the Constitution of United Aus- tralia, which is intended, in the life- time of many now living, to provide for the governance of thirty millions of people, scattered over a country

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which is about the size of Europe, if we except the Spanish peninsula, is literally and exactly as follows : — Certain colonial ministers met in Sydney in November, 1883. They bore no credentials from their respec- tive parliaments, nor had any of them any authority to act in any way on behalf of their colonies. They were merely private individuals on a holiday trip. It occurred to them to frame a Constitution. They held five meetings with closed doors. At these meetings they drafted a Bill, which each of them pledged himself to submit to his particular Parliament. The instant the contents of this Bill were known it was assailed in every colony with a storm of criticism. No Parliament, it was thought, would pass such a Bill without radical amendment. But the members of the Conference had antici- pated this possibility, and had prepared for it by agreeing together not to sub- mit the Bill to their Parliaments in the ordinary way, to be discussed clause by clause, but to tack it, as a sort of schedule, to a resolution requesting the Queen to alter the existing Colonial Constitutions in the manner suggested. The Bill, there- fore, could not be amended, and had either to be rejected or accepted in !/lobo. The consequence was that in New South Wales and New Zealand the resolution was shelved by means of the Previous Question. But in the other Colonies Ministers staked their existence on the carrying of the resolu- tion, and calculated accurately that the Opposition could not turn them out on a matter upon which the outside public took so little interest. Those, who know anything of the working pf colonial politics, will understand how safe such a calculation was likely to be. Even with this difficulty in the path the opposition in Queensland and South Australia was so active, that it had to be pacified by the assurance, that the right time for proposing amendments would be on the return of the Bill from the Colonial Office. That time has now come. Yet again we are

witnessing, in a Democratic country, a spectacle which would be impossible even in Germany or Russia. Ministers in Victoria, South Australia, Queens- land and Tasmania have communicated their views to each other by means of private memoranda. Cabinet Councils are then held in the several colonies, and the alterations in the Bill, proposed by the Colonial Office, are said to be approved or disapproved, as the case may be, by the people of that colony. Not one of the Parliaments has been summoned to consider the alterations, and the amended Bill will return to the Colonial Office with the unanimous approval of the four colonies already named. The result is that a few men will have taken advantage of popular indifference to force a Constitution on the country which has never been discussed, never been approved, and never even been presented to the people. Assuredly Democratic forms, where the spirit of Democracy is sluggish, do offer the greatest oppor- tunities to despotism. But it is not yet too late for the English Democracy to help us. New South Wales and New Zealand have done their best to call attention to the sort of Constitu- tion Avhich is being foisted on Aus- tralia ; but the criticism of one colony seldom awakens more than angry irritation among its neighbours. The criticism which is required is a frank, sympathetic criticism in the English press and in the English Parliament. This would rouse attention here, and give the Opposition a foothold for re- sistance. At present electors regard Federation as a question which is out- side of politics. The political hacks do not understand or care for it ; and the people, except in New Zealand and New South Wales, have never had it before them.

A bare perusal of the Bill will show its faults. There is no occasion for lengthy criticism from this country.1

1 The Federal Council is to have " original " powers of legislation (paramount in cases of conflict with the local legislature of any fede- rated colony) on the following subjects, inter

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But let those who believe in popular institutions understand that this " En- abling Bill " transfers the supreme political authority over the whole of Australia to a non elective body of thirteen members, and their opposition to it is assured. This body, which has no representative basis, and is too small to generate within itself that healthy degree of public opinion which is indispensable to sound legislation, is to have the sole control of all our foreign policy, and to be the supreme authority over many matters of domes- tic concern. No wonder that it receives the vehement support of the Australian Tories, who fear popular government, and themselves love power. Still it is surprising that the " formal " defects of such a Constitution should have escaped the notice of its framers. This precious " Federal Council " is inferior in all the attributes of a governing body. It makes no provison for an executive ; it has no power of taxation ; it has no power to appropriate a penny of the Federal Revenue ; it contains no provisions for an appeal to the power to which it owes its existence ; or for an appellate judiciary to decide on any conflicts between federal or local autho-

alia .— (1) The relations of Australia with the Islands of the Pacific ; (2) Prevention of the Influx of Criminals ; (3) Fisheries in Austral- asian Waters beyond territorial limits ; ('4) The service of Civil and Criminal Process of the Courts of any Colony outside the jurisdiction of that Colony ; (5) The Enforcement of Judg- ments of Courts of Law of any Colony beyond the limits of that Colony. It is to have "derivative" powers of legislation (that is, by request of the legislatures of at least two federated colonies) on the following subjects : — (1) General Defences ; (2) Quarantine ; (3) Patent Law ; (4) Copyright ; (5) Bills of Ex- change and Promissory Notes ; (6) Marriage and Divorce Laws; (7) Naturalisation and Aliens; (8) Any other matter of general Aus- tralian interest, icith respect to which the legislatures of the several colonies can legislate within their own limits, and as to which it is deemed desirable that there should be a Law of General Application. This is plainly not an "Enabling" Bill, but a Constructive Bill of a bad kind. A true Enabling Bill is what we want. Give the colonies power to alter their own Constitution, and trust to them to take all possible steps towards a real union.

rity. It is thus a cabinet without responsibility, a government without authority, an executive without a revenue. Even those who may not be hostile to the principle of the measure must recognise that in its present form it must give .rise to numberless occa- sions for dispute, and that it offers no remedy for these except disruotion of the union.

The derivative power of legislation is also open to great objection. At first it seems reasonable enough that any two colonies may refer a question of common interest to be settled by the Federal Council ; but it is plain, upon reflection, that this power will work injuriously in practice. Suppose, for example, that the Federal Council frames a divorce law for the two Colonies of Tasmania and Victoria ; that law will then become the Federal Statute on the subject of divorce, and will have to be accepted in globo by any other colonies that may wish for the Federal legislation on the subject. Thus the indirect result of the action of any two colonies will be either to force a statute on all the other colonies, or else to compel them to accept the subject of that statute from the jurisdiction of the Federal Council. What the result of this may be if the matter referred to the council is the settlement of the tariff, it requires no power of political fore- cast to imagine.

The Federal Council, indeed, in these respects, goes too far, while in others it does not go far enough. Until the means of communication between the colonies are bettered, and the tariff difficulty is removed, a close Federal Union is impossible. But a Central Council for deliberative and consul- tative purposes would foster the spirit of union, and be, practically, very use- ful. The duties of such a council should be strictly limited to the sug- gestion of measures on matters of intercolonial interest. Their work might be that both of innovators and codifiers— either they might draft new measures, or harmonise those which

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already exist ; but in each case the actual legislative authority would re- main with the local Parliaments. Australia is quite ripe for such a council, and its work would be of an extremely useful character. Australian politicians often lack the power or op- portunity to prepare well-drafted measures on technical subjects, and the differences of local legislation arise quite as much from carelessness or ignorance as from any settled differ- ence in policy. The suggestions and supervision of a council of experts could not fail to improve colonial legis- lation, both in form and quality. The proposed Federal Council will do no- thing well. It does not pretend to give genuine Federation, but it substi- tutes a grotesque, amorphous phantom, which, by the irritating disputes between the colonies to which its existence will give rise, will create a new and almost insurmountable obstacle to the real union which all Australians desire.

Nor is the existence of such a coun- cil altogether without danger to Eng- land, since the first matter which the Enabling Bill surrenders to its control is " The relations of Australasia with the Islands of the Pacific ; " that is to say, the people of each colony are to surrender all control over the only matters of foreign policy which are likely to lead us into serious difficulties. By an amendment of the Colonial Office nothing can be done under this authority without the previous sanc- tion of the Imperial Government.

But the history of New Guinea shows how difficult it will be for the English Government to object to anything after it is done. The Federal Council will be able to force the hands of the English Government whenever it likes, just as it will also be able to force the hands of the Australian Parliaments. Sup- pose— and the supposition is not impro- bable— that a majority of the Council should agree to annex the greater part of the Pacific Islands. Such a measure might or might not be desirable. But are the people of each colony, who will have to pay the cost of annexation, to

have no voice in the matter 1 Small bodies of men are generally more ready for a " forward policy " than the masses, on whom the responsibility will ultimately fall. Let Englishmen put themselves in our place. Imagine that during the Russo-Turkish war the control of foreign affairs had been completely in the hands of the Beacons- field Cabinet. Is it not morally cer- tain that England would have been committed to a position from which it would have been impossible to with- draw peaceably 1 A foreign policy, more than a domestic policy, requires the constant check and pressure of public opinion. This, as English ex- perience has proved, can be brought to bear most effectually upon the Minister of a Representative Assembly, where every proposal can be publicly can- vassed. Foreign affairs, more than any other, require to be conducted in the light of day, and popular know- ledge of what is being done may often be the surest guarantee of peace.

Nor are we in Australia without a recent experience of the recklessness with which a certain party is ready, in the names of Christianity and com- merce, to disregard the rights of other nations. Late events have brought into a startling prominence a party which insists on the entire exclusion of foreigners from the Pacific Ocean. The headquarters of these narrow doctrinaires are naturally in Mel- bourne, where the zealous Christian is more pressed to find relief for pious feelings and for glutted markets. Their views, however, found some supporters at the Sydney Convention ; and it is quite likely, if the proposed Federal Council came into existence, that Victoria, in the absence of New South Wales, will be able to commit the associated Colonies to a policy which will seriously involve Australia, and which may complicate the relations of England with other European powers.

It is a mistake, however, to suppose that the compact body of Annexation- ists, with their definite interests to serve, and their opportunities for

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making themselves heard, accurately represent the feelings of the dis- organised and silent mass of Austra- lian voters. New South Wales, indeed, has already given an emphatic refusal to join in a demand for further an- nexation ; although, as usual, this difference of opinion is attributed in England to provincial jealousy. In reality, however, the older colony is, in this matter, the mouthpiece of Democratic sentiment, and ought, therefore, to receive the warm support of English Radicals.

It would seem from the arguments of Annexationists, that foreign settle- ments are deplored upon two grounds, namely, for the injury they will inflict on our material interests, and for the suffering they will cause to native races. The humanitarian argument is that which we have heard so often, and which is always trotted out to justify aggression. No one, who is acquainted with the missionaries of the Pacific Islands, could doubt that there are some of them who use this argument in all good faith. The widest extension of British rule would be desirable if it would strengthen the hands of men like Chalmers, Lawes, or Selwyn. But experience does not show that British rule is beneficial to a native race. With the best intentions, and with really heroic sacrifices, Englishmen have failed to win the regard of any nation that they rule. Everywhere they form a govern- ing class apart from the people ; and where Frenchmen or Spaniards would, by intermarriage with the natives, continue something of the national life, Englishmen only destroy what- ever society already exists. The Pacific Islands, in particular, are pain- ful witnesses to our disastrous pre- sence. Rum and disease have every- where carried to the natives more convincing proof of the nature of English benevolence than could be afforded by the best of wishes or by miles of missionary calico. Set Java and Tahiti on one side, and New Zealand on the other, and then let it be said whether we can claim a mono-

poly of charitable feeling towards the native races. Certainly, whatever may be our feelings, we have not surpassed either the Dutch or the French in the success with which we have exhibited them to the Pacific Islanders.

In one point only have the friends of the Pacific Islanders any real cause for alarm.

Prince Bismarck has proclaimed, in deference to the wish of German traders, that he aims rather at pro- tecting commerce than at founding colonies. In plain language, this means, in the Pacific, that German traders will be free to deal with native races as they please.

At present England is making a noble effort to protect the Pacific Islanders from the greed of. Europeans. The regulations of the High Commis- sioner endeavour to control the labour traffic, to stop the importation of rum and firearms, and to prohibit the purchase of land. Other nations have, as yet, been chary of assisting at this work ; and it is now feared that the occupation of new territory by France or Germany will give a shelter to the lawless practices which England has been struggling to put down. The Germans, in particular, have disre- garded their duties to native races with most shameless cynicism : and the German traders openly avow their disbelief in measures to protect the islanders, and their intention to govern their new territories upon purely com- mercial principles. The French have hitherto shown more humanity, and their colony of Otaheite is the only Pacific island under white control where the native population is in- creasing.1

1 This is one of the reasons in favour of the proposal to annex the New Hebrides to France. Those islands are already developed largely by French enterprise, and could without difficulty be brought under French influence. Moreover, the islands are geographically attached to New Caledonia, and their occupation by the Eng- lish would be likely to give rise to constant irritation between us and the French. If the French should pledge themselves (as they have declared their willingness to do) not to

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Accordingly, the honest members of the missionary party denounce the recent annexations, because they fear, not that the Germans will establish arsenals, but that they will neglect to govern. They take Prince Bismarck at his word, and they believe that it will be possible even for Germany, now that she has assumed at least a nominal authority, to decline the responsibility of preserving order. She will, un- doubtedly, require pressure to be brought upon her; but let her go- vernment be once established, and she will be compelled by the force of public opinion to give protection to her native subjects. Our object ought to be to bring the necessity for such protection strongly before the German Govern- ment ; and if the English journalists, when they are tired of abusing Lord Derby, would insist that we should have a common understanding with France and Germany as to the pur- chase of land from the islanders, and the traffic in labour, firearms, and rum, they would benefit Australia greatly, whilst serving the cause of humanity. What is wanted is an International agreement, such as that which was

use these islands for a penal settlement, their presence could not in any way injure or menace Australia, while it would be in the highest degree beneficial to the natives and to the increase of commerce in the Pacific Ocean. The agitation against the French has been got up by mining and land speculators, and by the Protestant missionaries, who are jealous of their Catholic rivals. It has actually been made a formal cause of complaint by the Eng- lish missionaries that the native children in the Loyalty Islands are instructed in the French language ; while it is hardly necessary to say that, while the French Protectorate continues, the missionaries cannot act as they have done in Tonga, and assume the reins of government. The alternative proposal, to "internationalise" these and every other island which England does not at present covet, is one which can only have emanated from an editorial armchair. To "interna- tionalise " in the Pacific Ocean is simply to create an Alsatia. An international arrange- ment between France, Germany, England, and America, for police purposes, having re- ference to the labour traific, the acquisition of land, and the sale of rum and firearms, would be very useful, but the international govern- ment of the islands ought to be under some one responsible power.

proposed at the Congo Conference, to the effect that all annexations of bar- barous territories should carry with them the responsibility for order and government. At present it is openly admitted by the German traders in Sydney that commerce is their only concern ; and unless strong pressure is brought to bear upon the Government by France and England, the Imperial flag will only float in the Pacific in order to conceal the present infamies.

But even supposing that the acts of Germany should justify the worst anticipations of those who have already seen the conduct of her traders ; yet, that will not impose upon our Govern- ment the duty of immediate annexa- tion. How often must it be repeated that we have no mission to redress the grievances of every native race, even were we able to do it ? Germany may fail to treat the natives well, but we ourselves are by no means certain to succeed better, although our points of failure might be different. Yet, in order to correct the possible faults of German rule, we are asked ourselves to assume the reins of government, before we have tried the efficacy either of official remonstrances or of the pres- sure of well-informed public opinion !

But this, the annexationists have said, is a begging of the question. Annexation by England would involve us, they say, in far fewer difficulties than those into which we shall cer- tainly fall if the annexation is made by any foreign power.

The most baseless assertion comes to be believed if it is frequently repeated ; so that it is possible that honest men may really believe that the presence of the Germans at New Britain, or the French at the New Hebrides, will be a source of danger to Australia ! Yet, how is such a view borne out by any facts ? Is the presence of the French at Pondicherry any danger to the Indian Empire? Or does the ad- jacency of Cuba menace the United States ? Yet, in twenty years Aus- tralia will be to the Pacific Islands as the United States are to Cuba or Jamaica They will just as little be

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a source of danger to our ports and commerce ; and, in the event of war, we could snap them up in a week — if we wanted to do so.

If, on the other hand, we annexed those islands, instead of leaving them to foreign powers, we should be scatter- ing instead of concentrating our re- sources. We should be offering a greater number of vulnerable points to any enemy, instead of leaving him to offer them to us.

But can we seriously believe that any islands taken by a foreign power are to be turned at once into fortified posts ? Let us show a little common sense in talking about foreign politics. Let us remember what these islands are — that they are tropical islands, with malarious climates, lying far from civilised settlement ; that they are places which offer no inducement to English settlers, and no work for European labourers. What, then, do we suppose that it would cost a Euro- pean power to establish and maintain a Malta at a place like one of these ? And if an annexationist is bold enough to face this question, let him be further asked to explain the motive for such waste of money.

But there is another side to the question. Suppose it to be granted, for the sake of argument, that the pre- sence of foreigners in the Pacific will cause some appreciable danger to Aus- tralia ! The risk from English an- nexation might still be out of all pro- portion to the danger which we would avoid. The Democratic party here believe that to be the case ; and that the exclusion of foreigners from the Pacific would not only involve us in responsibilities that would seriously hamper our material progress but would deprive Australia of great moral and material benefits.

It is certain that England is in no mood to acquire new responsibilities. If the islands are annexed, it is Aus- tralia that will have to be responsible. English journalists, particularly those who are most eager to display their friendship to Australia, talk of this as though it were a matter of no concern.

Yet the popular party in Australia takes a very different view.

In the first place, we have not got the men who could administer the islands. Our parliaments show no superfluity of administrative talent ; and we have not succeeded well in such a comparatively simple matter as the regulation of the labour traffic. Our own affairs still occupy us fully. Three-quarters of our own continent have still to be annexed. And yet we are advised by Englishmen to direct our energies into other fields !

Moreover, there is another argument in favour of foreign settlements, which can only, perhaps, be fully appreciated by those who are acquainted with Aus- tralia. We suffer at present from our isolation. We are outside the main current of European thought ; so that in spiritual and intellectual matters "vre are somewhat stagnant. We have but one type — that of the British " bourgeois," with " his sombre attire, his repellent manners, his gloomy wor- ship, his mechanic habitudes of toil." Is it better that the Pacific Islands should be kept for the perpetuation of this type, or that other types should settle there for our example and im- provement? France and Germany have, each of them, political and intel- lectual ideas which differ from the English ; and the observation of new ideas and other forms of social life cannot fail to stimulate a nation's mental growth. By the presence of foreign settlements in the Pacific, Australia would be brought more into the stream of modern thought, — and that is of itself a great advantage.

But besides the moral advantages of having in our neighbourhood the representatives of other civilisations, there are great material advantages to be derived from this propinquity.

Sydney is, by its position, the em- porium of the island trade. Whatever develops commerce in the islands must increase the wealth of Sydney. The only question is, whether this develop- ment is to be effected by introducing fresh capital and labour from new European sources, or whether it is to

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be effected by drawing on our own stores, which are already insufficient to properly develop our own country. No Australian, at any rate, is likely to deny, that had Fiji been exploited by a foreign power, millions of much- needed capital would never have been taken from Australia.

Penal settlement as it is, New Cale- donia has already caused a consider- able increase in the volume of Austra- lian trade. A similar result must follow the establishment of every new settlement. Whatever commerce may spring up in the Pacific, Australia must obtain the larger share of it. The Germans may attempt to exclude English trade, but the position of Australia, as the nearest source of supply, will prevent them establishing any insurmountable barriers.

Foreign annexation will also save us from another danger which English- men cannot be blamed for not appreci- ating. Those tropical islands can never form a coherent part of our political system. They can only be worked by coloured labour, and coloured labour will be a permanent source of disunion and difficulty to Australia. A foreign power can face this danger, because it has no white settlements close by; but workmen in Australia will never consent to be taxed for the govern- ment of coolie plantations. The coloured labour difficulty is at this very time threatening the disruption of Queensland, and we cannot forget that it is not twenty years since the same difficulty menaced the existence of the United States.

These are the ideas that we look to the English people, and especially to English Radicals, to enforce in their policy and writings. For it is in points like these that the influence of one democracy re-acts upon another. Yet, if a certain section of the Liberal party shall prevail in England, this is just the help that we shall not receive from the English democracy.

BEENHAED WISE.

Sydney.

ADDENDUM.

Since writing the above, a cablegram has been published declaring the inten- tion of the English Government to establish a joint scheme of maritime defence. It is proposed either to create a Federal Australian Navy, or to request the colonies to contribute a certain annual sum towards the maintenance of an English-Australian Squadron.

Each of these proposals is radically faulty. An Australian navy would be both costly and inefficient. Having no naval building yards, we should have to rely upon the Admiralty, both for the pattern and the quality of our ships ; and at the present rate of naval invention, these would certainly become antiquated in ten years. But we have no use for a reserve squadron, and the cost of a decennial renewal of our whole fleet would be stupendous. Moreover, it is certain that in the event of war, the federal fleet would be dispersed among the different colonies, since each colony would demand that the ships for which it paid should be specially devoted to its protection. The same demand would be made in respect of every particular quota of any Imperial Squadron. The federal navy would thus be broken up at the very moment that united action was required. Finally, it must be remembered that it would be no light matter to pass naval estimates through eight colonial legislatures. There will always be a risk that their rejection; should be made a popular cry. The people will insist, foolishly no doubt, upon having all the handling of the money that they vote. To have pro- posed otherwise, betrays great ignor- ance of the political sentiment of the colonies. The right principle of joint defence is, as has been pointed out, that each colony should provide for its harbour and coast defences, but that the ocean defences should be the sole concern of the Imperial navy.

B. W.

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CHAPTER XVI.

AFTERWARDS.

AMONG the many who appeared to show their respect to the good colo- nel's memory was Mr. Marney, in a shining and easy suit of deepest black, an appearance of prof oundest grief tem- pered by resignation, to which a new hat swathed in crape greatly contri- buted. Aunt Fanny, strange to say, was somewhat taken by Mr. Marney ; his frankness (how Susy loathed it), his respectful sympathy, his intelligent grasp of the situation, of the many youthful failings to which, with all his affection for his wife's daughter, he could not be blind, his full apprecia- tion of the good colonel's strange in- fatuation, his easy compliments, his amusing little jokes at his wife and family, uttered in a subdued voice as befitted the circumstances, all amused Miss Bolsover, who accepted his odious compliments to Tempy's indignant amazement.

Susy had not asked Mr. Marney to come ; he was no guest of hers ; she was unaffected in her grief, unselfish, anxious to spare others. She would have come down had it been necessary, but hearing of her stepfather's pre- sence, she kept away, up stairs by Jo's bedside, or in her own room, silent, and apart in her sorrow. Some in- stinct seems to warn simple and de- fenceless creatures of the dangers of beasts of prey.

Meanwhile, in Jo's absence, Miss Bolsover received the company, gave every possible direction. She was in her element. Pens, ink, and paper, her flowing hand and spreading sheets of platitude, surrounded by broad edges of black, filled the post bags to the brim. Mr. Bolsover, all crushed somehow, sat dolefully dozing or smoking in

his cozy gun-room. Mrs. Bolsover came there too for comfort, or moped silent and apart. Sometimes she went over to the Place. Susy liked to have her there. Aunt Car would come in looking old and scared into the little boudoir where Susy sat alone. The young widow used to run to meet her, and without a word would put little Phraisie on her knee.

Charlie Bolsover was present at his uncle's funeral, naturally and un- affectedly shocked and overcome, and yet not unnaturally thinking still more of Tempy than of his uncle, who had dealt hard measure to him and never done him justice. He had but a few hours to remain at Tarnclale, and he had determined to come and go without obtruding his own personal feelings either upon Tempy or her step- mother. But man's resolves, espe- cially Charlie's, are apt to be carried by the tide of the moment, and the sight of poor Tempy in her black with her wistful looks was too much for his philosophy. He came up to the house late in the afternoon of the funeral day, hoping for another sight of her. She was alone in the drawing-room.

And then it happened that when Charlie would have gone up to her, Tempy for the first time in all her life drew back, shrunk from him ; she glanced at him, and then dared not look again.

" Tempy ! " he said.

She did not look up, but she stood pale and frozen, with averted eyes.

" Go, Charlie," she said at last. " This is no time to think of our selfish wishes ; ours have been selfish. I see how wrong — how wrong I was ail along. Go, dear Charlie," she said, covering her eyes with her hand. " Go," she repeated angrily. " Do you hear me 1 " Her overstrung nerves were almost beyond her control.

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"I hear you," said Charlie, turning sick and pale ; " you do not mean it, Tempy."

" Yes, I mean it, I mean it," Tempy cried. " Why do you doubt it ? Go, I tell you ; go."

Charlie stood as if some gun had been fired at him ; he tried to speak ; no words came. With ono look he turned and walked straight out of the room. Tempy waited for an instant, heard the front door shut, then sank into the first chair. When Susy came to look for her, she found the girl still sitting in the semi-darkness on a chair against the wall. She had not moved since Charlie had left her an hour before. Seeing Susy she looked up.

" You are satisfied," she said ; " I have done as papa wished. I have sent Charlie away."

She spoke in a thick, dazed way, which frightened her stepmother.

" Your father wished it," Susy re- peated, faltering. " Dear Tempy, you could not go against his will. He loved us so— no wonder we loved him ; " and Susy took Tempy 's cold hand and put her arm round her neck.

" You did not love him as I did," said Tempy, tearing her hand away and flashing her blue eyes at her young stepmother. " He loved you, but you did not deserve it, and Charlie loves me and I do not deserve it." The girl was in a frenzy of grief and despair.

" Ah, papa thought I did not care for him because I loved Charlie," cried Tempy; "but I have given poor Charlie up for papa. I let him go, I let him go, and now I am all by myself. They are both gone, both gone ; they will never come any more," and she wrung her two hands.

Susy stood in silence listening to the girl's reproaches. Were they deserved ] She did not know ; she did not ask. For the first time she felt herself alone, silent, helpless, as people feel who have to learn to live anew, without the strength of long use to hold by.

" O Tempy ! " Susy said at last, " I do honour you ; I can only feel you have done right. Let us put all doubts and

perplexities away just for the present and wait. In a little time everything will seem more clear." And Tempy took heart somehow once more. Susy's cordials were more to her mind than Aunt Fanny's chloral.

The next day the blinds were up, Miss Bolsover in bugles and crape, was still occupied with her own and everybody else's feelings, giving every possible direction in the conduct of affairs. Charlie and Mr. Marney had departed. Tempy's tears were flow- ing ; but that explanation with her stepmother had taken some of the bitterness from her heart. She had done what she could. She sat in Jo's room, languid, by an open window, looking across the gardens and the lake, and the beautiful smiling valley. The valley itself, the fringed hills, the moorlands which inclosed them, were all a part of Jo's inheritance.

There are also other things entailed besides farms and country estates which parents leave behind them. They leave their lives to their child- ren, as well as their savings, and their looks and family characteristics. Jo and Tempy inherited among other things their father's directness and simplicity of character, and his upright and honourable name, and the memory of his many kind and liberal actions.

When the will was read, it was found that the colonel had left a legacy of £5,000 to each of his daugh- ters, and £1,000 a year to his widow during her widowhood. Subject to these charges, and various legacies enumerated, he bequeathed the whole of his property to his son. Jo and Tempy also inherited their mother's property, which had been settled on them at his marriage.

Strangely enough, the colonel had added a codicil to his will on the very day of the fatal accident, for he had called at his solicitor's while waiting at County side for Jo's train. By this codicil, the colonel executed a power of appointment contained in the settlement made on his marriage with his first wife, and appointed the trust

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funds in equal shares to his son and daughter ; but he made a proviso that the whole of that property should go to Josselin in the event of his daughter Tempy marrying under twenty-one without the consent of her guardian ; and he appointed his widow, Mrs. Susanna Dymond, to be the sole guard- ian of his three children.

In the event of Mrs. Dymond' s re-marriage, she was to give up her right to her jointure as well as to the guardianship of the elder children. This provision, which seemed of little importance, was not in the codicil but in the will, and had been suggested by the family solicitor. The good, loyal old colonel was indignant at the time at something his sisters had said, and which the family adviser had quoted ; and protesting his wife's indifference to money, had agreed to the clause without wasting much thought upon future possibilities. Susy had never cared for money, of that he required no assurance, and as for re-marriage, what should she want to marry again for ? she was much better at home at the Place, looking after Phraisie and the other two, thought the colonel to himself, to say nothing of poor Mrs. Marney and her boys. The kind old son-in-law had left Mrs. Marney a hundred pound legacy as a token of friendly regard, together with a small sum to each of the boys ; and there were legacies to his sister and her husband, and to his sister-in-law. Miss Bolsover was of- fended by the portion which came to her share. Mr. Marney was also dis- appointed, and made no secret of his irritation. It was a shabby concern, he said, from beginning to end. What is a hundred pounds ? A mere nothing ; and we owe it all and more too. The boys' £50 won't find them in boots for six months to come. As for Susy and her beggarly jointure, she may marry again and lose it all to-morrow.

"Susy won't marry; she knows there is her brother's education," said Mrs. Marney, with anxious con- viction. She has Miky and Dermy to

consider now, and she is not one to forget her own people. We all know the colonel's wishes, and that he meant them to be properly taught."

" It would have been more to the purpose if the old boy had written his wishes down on lawyer's paper, with a couple of witnesses to see them car- ried out," said Marney. " I call it a d — d unbusiness-like proceeding — to say nothing of having to pay madame, as you propose. I'm getting out of

patience with her endless "

" Oh, Michael ! " said poor Mary, reproachfully ; " Madame lent me £20 last month ; it is not for the rent only ! "

Not without difficulty was Miky's legacy reserved for Madame' s just claim. If it had not been for her genuine love for the little boys and their mother, Madame du Pare, the sturdy and methodical, would long ago have got rid of her unpunctual lodgers, but she had grown to love the children, and, above all, the poor lady, whose troubles, little by little, had become her own.

Susy wrote to her mother at once, telling her of herself and of all in her home, promising to provide for the boys' schooling as heretofore. She was to keep house for Jo, and she had no expense and plenty of spare money, she said, and she knew that John in his kindness would have wished her to continue what he had so generously begun. She missed him sorely, mourned him with a tender, grateful heart ; she seemed at first scarcely able to live without him, or to have a wish, or to to be able to settle the commonest things. He had been a man of methodical habits ; he had ruled his household, and drilled Susanna to his own ideas ; she had never stood alone. We know she was young and yielding and easy by na- ture ; she had learnt from him to sort out and arrange her life, her events and friends, her feelings and hospi- tality— to use certain stock phrases to herself, which she thought she believed in. Now that he was gone, it seemed

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to Susy as if she had become for ever what she had tried to be before.

" Elle etait plus femme que les autres femmes" has often been quoted, and never too often ; surely it applied to my heroine as she sat in her corner by Jo's sofa a few weeks after her hus- band's death. Jo looked haggard, but he was nearly well. Susy in black and in her widow's cap looked far more beautiful than in her coloured fashion- able dresses — younger, gentler, less reserved. The western sunshine was coming in at the open window. Jo had fallen asleep, and in the stillness, as Susy sat in the low chair by his couch, she could also hear the voice of her little Phraisie at play in the garden without, and the hum in the distant field, and the sounds coming across the lake.

Josselin liked to have his stepmother near him. Susanna had that gift which belongs to some people for taking care of sick people. Tempy was too abrupt and nervous from very affection. Miss Bolsover fussed ; she also wanted to do too much. Jo found in his stepmother the most comforting of nurses. " I do believe she's made of sticking plaster," he used to say. Day by day his strength seemed to return, his burning eyes became clear and soft. He rarely spoke of the accident ; but he told them once for all what he could remember of it. His father, who was driving, had suddenly fainted or fallen from his seat ; as he fell, the horse was startled ; Jo trying to catch the reins, had been thrown from his seat. He lost consciousness ; once he revived enough to hear George Tyson saying, "The boat be there, shall we take them home ? " and then all was as nothing once more, until- he awoke in his own bed with Tempy hanging over him.

Nobody pretended to be anxious any longer. Jeffries grinned satisfac- tion at his patient's progress. When Aunt Fanny suddenly appeared with the barouche, announcing that change was now necessary, and that she had come to carry Jo off then and there,

broken bones and all, to the Hall, Jo worked himself into a passion. He didn't want to go, he was much better at home. He gave an unearthly groan when his aunt advanced to persuade him in her most dulcet tones.

" You may as well say at once, Jo, that new things have bewitched you, that flattery has divided you from old friends, that your old home has lost all interest for you," said Aunt Fanny, greatly startled by his noise, and fairly losing her temper and her eter- nal melodious inflexions.

" I don't want to be tortured all the way from this to the Hall," cried Jo with condoning crossness. " Flattery ! why, don't you flatter me? you and Aunt Car too ! " And then Aunt Fanny leaves the room, followed by Tempy in tears trying to soothe her.

Poor Tempy ! tears came very easily to her eyes now.

"I don't know what has come to Jo and Tempy," said Miss Bolsover, exasperated on her return. " The in- fluence she has gained over them is most painful, and scarcely to be believed."

" Ha ! petticoat influence," says Mr. Bolsover rashly ; " we all know what that is — a very powerful thing; I my- self could imagine it difficult to resist Susanna at times." . . .

Miss Bolsover goes into a peal of silvery laughter. " Another victim ! I told you so, Caroline ; another of her victims."

"I don't know about that," says Mrs. Bolsover, speaking to herself, in her odd mumbling way. " Victims, victims ; Fanny has had plenty of victims in her days, now she is too old and too fat to charm people any more."

" H'm, h'm ! A-h'm, my dear ! " says Frederick with warning signs.

So Miss Bolsover fortunately kept away, indignant almost beyond words or expression. Mr. Bolsover did not come very often, but when he appeared it was generally with a chastened look, which suggested vicarious suffering.

Then things settled clown in their

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new state ; Charlie returned no more to Bolsover, Jo went back to college ; seasons passed on their course, winter followed the autumn. It was a cold and bitter season. Tempy and her stepmother kept indoors and by the warm fires, while the winds whistled shrill and the snow fell upon the sur- rounding fells and moors. But Phraisie, a frolicsome little breath of comfort and new hope would come flying to their arms, and when the winter was gone and the soft spring came, piercing the frozen ground, Jo, returning home for the Easter vacation, found Miky and Dermy also established for their holi- days at Crowbeck, and Susy, 'in some perplexity as to what she should do with them and how they were to be conveyed home to their mother. It was Josselin who suggested something which every one agreed to then and there without discussion. They all wanted change of scene, he said ; they all shrank from London and from Wimpole Street. " You would like to see your mother, wouldn't you, Mrs. Dymond ? " said he. " Why cannot we take the boys over." Even Tempy brightened up and approved of the suggestion.

CHAPTER XVII.

AT A WINDOW.

ONE night, as if by magic, the whole party found itself neatly packed away in a little omnibus at Paris, coming from the Northern Station, where Mrs. Marney had met her boys, and carried them off home to Neuilly in joyful triumph.

The rest of the party were mean- while jogging deliberately over the stones to the hotel, Phraisie asleep in her mother's arms. Wilkins was buried beneath the parcels and shawls and umbrellas which well-bred people always carry wherever they go.

Jo and Tempy, with their heads out of the windows, were exclaiming, while the shops jolted past, and people

No. 309.— VOL. LIT.

and lights and public buildings ablaze, followed by black spaces crossed with lines of lamps. Finally, the omnibus turned into a narrow street out of a wider thoroughfare. How familiar the echo of the wheels between the high houses sounded to Susy's ears !

More lights flash ; the omnibus stops; the landlord and landlady appear in the doorway, the newly-arrived com- pany is officiously escorted and assisted up the narrow staircase to its apart- ments ; the cloth is laid, the candles are lighted ; Phraisie's room and Susy's room are on either side of the sitting- room ; Jo and Tempy find themselves established across the landing, with tall windows shaded by muslin blinds and red curtains, and all the echoes of Paris without.

The hotel had been recommended by Madame du Pare as quiet and con- venient. Their apartments were on the third floor, small enough and shabby enough compared to the splen- dour of Crowbeck Place ; but Mrs. Dymond suddenly felt as if she should like nothing so well as to spend all that remained to her of her life in this little noisy place. She had seen her little Phraisie laid snug and peaceful in her bed ; she had unpacked some of the many bags and parcels (how many more she had to unpack of different shapes and sizes than when she had first come to Paris some four years ago !). Her own bed was in a cur- tained alcove, with griffin claws to hang the curtains to ; a grey marble table stood in the centre of the room ; the prints on the walls were of Napo- leon, and Poniatowski in Polish boots and a blue helmet ; the walls were of faded red, shabby even by candle- light. Susanna thought the place a little paradise. Shabbiness is as much of a treat to people overdone with luxury as a silk gown is to a little Cinderella out of the ashes.

Susy opened her casement wide and leant out, gazing straight down the dark precipice of walls and windows beneath her own with the sense of new breath and life which most people

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feel when they breathe the pleasant foreign air.

With a breath of relief she leant out farther and farther, looking up and down the chattering, half -lighted street, at the people passing by, so indifferent and unconscious of her existence, at the lamps radiating from the broad boulevard beyond. There was some heap of shadowy blackness at the other end of the street, but Susy had to wait till morning light to realise that the black shadow was that of the church of St. Roch.

" Susy, Susy, come to supper," cries Tempy from the next room, where she and Josselin are already hungrily es- tablished, and beginning to help the fishes and fried potatoes by the light of the two tall tapers.

Very early next morning Susanna woke again, for she had not closed her window all the night, and the sun was shining in with dazzling rays. All the world's voice seemed calling up to her from the street below ; water, fruit, flowers, old clothes, were being proclaimed with different intonations. Now by the bright daylight, as she leant against the wooden bar, she could see into the stone depths below on either side of the narrow street and the tall houses rising with their many balconies and shutters. The Rue du Dauphin is a sort of sunshine trap leading to the Tuileries gardens, all festive with spring behind the rail- ing and set with orange trees, beyond which the glittering mansard roofs and pinnacles of the old palace, where the Henries and Louises ruled so long, to be followed by the Napoleons. At the other end of the street the church of St. Roch was standing in the early shadow still, like some huge -mountain with flaming peaks. Already its doors were swinging, and people were ascend- ing and descending the great flights of steps ; the bells were tolling, the clocks were chiming, the people going in and coming out to their work again ; the old women were sitting huddled, with their cloaks and their foot- warmers, at the church doors, with

chaplets and religious newspapers to sell \ the carts and omnibuses had long since been rolling ; the inde- scribably gay and busy chorus reached the travellers in their high lodging.

The little party could scarcely tear itself away from the windows through which so much was to be seen and heard. Mrs. Marney had promised to come to Susy, for Marney was start- ing off on some one of his expeditions, and she meant to join her at the hotel with the boys. Josselin went out, but Susy and Tempy, with Phraisie between them, absorbed in the con- templation of another little girl at play on a balcony opposite, spent their first morning looking out of window. As the day went on the company be- came more and more varied ; they watched the Frenchwomen floating by, walking with quick and pretty steps and with neat black skirts, leading children drolly attired, elaborate and bedizened, and well-mannered. " Mam- ma, look at the funny boy," says Phraisie, pointing to a little fellow with an enormous collar covered with anchors and emblems, who was ad- vancing up the street with a dignified and monkey-like bearing. The coun- try nurses also go by with their bambinos and long cloaks and cap ribbons ; coachmen jog past with their white oil-cloth hats; a gendarme passes, cocked hat, epaulettes, white gloves and all, arm-in-arm with his wife ; finally, up come Dermy and Mikey at a trot. Susy, seeing the little boys down be- low, followed by her mother, who had stopped to speak to somebody in the street, went to the door and looked over the stairs, as people do who are on a holiday with time to look out for one another. Mrs. Marney came toil- ing up the winding staircase, breathless, but still conversing.

" Do come up. Come up, I tell you," Susy heard her say. " My daughter will like to see you, and we can arrange our plans."

She heard the little boys also join- ing hospitably from below : " M. Max, do — do come ; you shall not go," from

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Dermy ; and then Mrs. Marney, look- ing up, sees Mrs. Dymond on the landing, and calls —

" Here we are, Susanna ; we are bringing Max du Pare to see you."

Susanna retreated gently and rather shyly into the dignified safeguard of her own room, whither they all fol- lowed her, chattering and clattering up the wooden staircase. They brought with them Du Pare, who had not meant to come in, but who could not help himself, for Mrs. Marney went ahead announcing him, while one boy held firm by his coat tails, and the other by his hand. Susy, willing to please her mother, and to show her guest that she was not unmindful of all his kindness to her family, came forward in her crape and blackness with her handout. DuParc, who was shy and French, bowed very low without no- ticing the friendly gesture and the outstretched hand, and then Susy seemed to remember suddenly how stiffly he had always met her ad- vances. She blushed, withdrew, and turned shy in an instant, and the young man saw with surprise that the colour was rising in her pale cheeks. He had imagined her belonging to another world and phase of life far distant from his own simple estate, and absolutely indifferent to his pre- sence or absence. Was it possible that such blushes sometimes flashed out of marble statues — that such looks sometimes brighten and then die away, when the gods come in contact with mortal beings ?

The little party started forth that morning, as so many have done before and since, with open eyes for the new sights and men and manners — Jo, Tempy, Susanna by her mother, and the two boys walking on either side of Du Pare, who was on his way to a bookseller's in the Rue du Bac. What a walk it was across the gar- dens by the great Place of the Car- rousel, with its triumphal mythology ; then by the quais and the noble chain of palaces they reach the river, and so cross the bridge to the Quai

Voltaire, where Mrs. Marney had some mysterious business to transact for Marney at a furniture dealer's. It began with some discussion on the door-step, it had then to be carried on in private into the dimmer recesses of the store among the bloated chairs, the gilt and ornamented legs of the Capet dynasty, and the prim, slim, stinted graces of the early Napoleonic times. Whatever it was (Susy would not ask what it was), the discussion took a long and confidentially explosive turn, but the young folks waiting outside upon the quai were in no hurry. They watched the river and the steamers and the crowds upon the quai, where the lime- trees were coming into leaf — where shops were in full flower, and the many twinkling windows were full of varied hues and shapes. Curious, wonderful, century-old stores of goods, scattered from the past, lined these streets and shop fronts. Looking-glasses reflecting the blouses and the white caps passing by in the place of courtly splendours, silent music in tattered covers, time- less clocks, flower-pots empty of flowers, uncut books, fans which had been lying asleep for a hundred years still ready at a touch to start into fluttering life, wreaths of lovely old lace, there were wonders galore to amuse the country ladies. Susy looked with longing eyes at the delicate festoons and ivory-look- ing heaps. The Mechlin, with its light sprays flowering on soft net, care- lessly thrown into a china bowl ; the point d'Alencon, like jeweller's work, chased upon the delicate honeycomb, devised by the human bees, who had worked at it year after year. Perhaps some florid scroll from Italy would be hanging from a rusty nail, with care- ful pattern travelling from one tendril to another.

" What lovely lace ! " cried Susanna. " Look, Tempy, at the shells upon it ; how exquisite they are ! "

" Shall I ask the price for you ? " says Tempy, instantly bursting into the low shop with its dark panes, where an old Rembrandt-like woman sits keeping watch. " Combien ? "

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cries Tempy, in her confident British tones.

" Four hundred francs ! " " Bocoo tro ! " cries the young lady, dashing out again into the warm sunshine.

" Did you ever hear of such extor- tion?" cries Tempy, whose experience of lace does not reach very much beyond her tuckers.

"It is a great deal of money," says Susanna.

" Quite out of the question, Sus- anna," cries Tempy, decidedly, and her stepmother blushed a little at the rebuke.

Sometimes Tempy's voice sounds so like the colonel's that Susy could al- most imagine he was there to control her still.

" Why is it quite out of the ques- tion ? " says Jo, stopping short ; " six- teen pounds won't ruin the family altogether. What did your new habit cost, Tempy ? "

" A habit ! " says Tempy, with a laugh, " that is something one really cares to have ; but Sunanna will not care to wear lace again, Josselin."

" Aunt Fanny is all over lace, and stuffed birds, and things," says Jo.

" She is not a widow," said Tempy, gravely. " Jo, you should remember before you say such things."

Mrs. Marney came out of her shop at that minute, and Max du Pare, who seemed only to have waited for her return, took leave of the party. They asked him to come again. He hesi- tated, and suddenly said, yes he would come, and he walked away with a swinging step along the quay. They saw him disappearing under the lime- trees, looking across the river as he went along.

CHAPTER XVIII.

INCENSE AND VIOLETS.

Du PARC came, shyly at first, because they had asked him to do so, but very soon he got into the habit of coming as a matter of course. The English ladies were not used to Paris and its

ways. Du Pare acted as their guide and leader, thanks to whom they en- joyed many a pleasant expedition and sight of the old city, many an amus- ing experience. They had one other acquaintance, a Mr. Bagginal, at the Embassy, who was from their own country and glad to be of use to them ; but Max knew more of Paris and of its aspects than the young attache, who moved in fashionable and restricted circles, and brought invitations, and callers, and bouquets, but who was of little use as a cicerone.

How delightful is the dinning sound of a melodious church bell going in the early morning sunshine ; it comes floating into the room and seems to be a part of the very morning and of its joy, a hint of other things to heighten the feast of life.

" Well," says Mrs. Marney, who has just come in as usual with her boys and her friend Du Pare, " what are we going to do ? "

An exclamation from Tempy, who is still leaning from the window, replies to this pertinent question.

"Come here! What is this?" she cries.

All along the Rue du Dauphin, from every quarter people are assembling in crowds that gather thicker every mo- ment— youthful white figures led by parents and relations in their Sunday clothes, boys in shiny shoes and white trousers, girls dressed like brides.

" It is the premierecommunion," says Mrs. Marney all in one word. " Susy, you should take them to see it. Let Wilkins go too, dear, and I will mind Phraisie."

Phraisie thought herself quite old enough for any amount of sight-seeing, but she was never happier than when alone with her grandmother, and she made no objection.

" But all of us in this crowd, mamma 1 " said Susy, doubtfully.

"Max will take the boys. Won't you, Max, like a good fellow ? " cries Mrs. Marney, determined that every- body shall see everything that is to be seen anywhere ; and so the party, after some further demur, starts off.

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Max goes first with the boys, then come Susy and Tempy in their black dresses ; then follows Jo, with his hands in his pockets. He wears a Scotch cap, a rough, cut-away coat, a pair of knickerbockers, less commonly worn in those days than they are now. The tidy French people turn to stare at him, ejaculate "Anglais ! " They also look at Susy with more respectfully-admiring eyes. Old St. Roch had prepared a welcoming bene- diction for them all, heretics and Catholics alike, that morning. The centre aisle was full of a white snow- storm of muslin figures. The church was crowded from end to end ; the altars were lighted, the candles were burning, hundreds and hundreds of heads were bent in childish adoration, the little restless snowy figures swayed and tossed their white veils. The chorister boys were clustering round about the altars, the priests were pass- ing up and down the middle of the church. The old abbe, in his silver and embroidered shining dress, leant from the pulpit and seemed to be call- ing a blessing upon the eager con- gregation. By the high altar stood the cure of the Madeleine, a noble looking figure, also in splendid robes. The sisters and nuns who had had the teaching of so many of the chil- dren were keeping guard over their flock from beneath their bent white coiffes as they knelt. The priests beat time, processions come swaying from one chapel and another bearing virgin and saints on satin with golden fringes. The great organ strikes up, and all the children's voices break out into a shrill sweet morning hymn, as the whole dazzling tide sweeps in proces- sion towards the high altar, carrying its thousand lights and emblematic candles, and followed by crowding parents, friends, sightseers. Then after a pause another discourse begins in sing-song from another pulpit. A monk, in his Benedictine dress, stands up to address the assembled congregation. His words are full of affectionate warnings, exhortations, incitements to

religious life in the midst of the world and its temptations. He raises his worn hands as he appeals to his lis- teners— to the pale motionless sisters, the rosy awe-struck children. It struck one man present strangely and sadly to hear these passionate warn- ings from those who had not lived, to those whose life was not yet begun. He looked round at the sea of faces, at the blooming company of youthful postulants, at the nuns who stood with bent coiffes and folded hands by the column where he was standing. Poor souls ! what hearts had they wounded, what unfair advantages had they grasped from the world ? What had all this to do with them? . . . And a sudden revolt rose in his mind, an indignant outcry against the creed which superadded these cruel mortifi- cations and sufferings to the stresses and starvation of daily life, where the poor day by day are expiating the ease of the rich. He thought of Caron's teaching, of his wider horizons, some strange impatience came over him, he would wait no longer in this at- mosphere of artificial light and smoke ; the incense stifled him ; he had an odd feeling that if he stayed he should find himself standing up protesting against the golden pulpit. What was that written up on the wall, Mene, mene ? Was the church feasting in pomp while multitudes were dying of hunger and ignorance ] There stood his English friends in a shy group, the beautiful young mother with eyes full of tears, the young lady with an odd scowling expression ; let them look on ; how could they know the meaning of it all, or realise the commonest truths of life ? Du Pare repeated to himself, " May they never know." " Go to your sister," he said, suddenly, to the boys, " I will wait outside."

Susy saw Du Pare go ; she was not surprised ; but she was glad neverthe- less to find him still standing in the doorway when she came away followed by her little court. Her eyes were dazzled, her ears ringing with the music and the voices of the people : the

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great clouds of incense, the thousand lights of the tapers, all intoxicated and excited her. Her heart beat, 'she looked up with almost childish delight. Du Pare looked grave, impenetrable, very handsome as he stood in the shadow of the arch. As Susy turned to Tempy, who was following, she wondered to find her cold, with a look of something which was almost disgust in her face. Good old Wilkins herself could not have seemed more scandalised by "them popes and virgins," as she called them. Jo followed, he had been well amused, admiring and scru- tinising the ceremony from a more artistic and dilettante point of view ; now he was staring at the church, at the people, at the crowds in the street. Susanna stood for a moment on the steps looking out. Not long after- wards she remembered this minute, so strangely to be repeated by a grim freak of chance. Here were peaceful crowds in a fanciful excitement and ecstasy, in a rapture of white muslin and candlelight, shaken by the echoing organ-sounds. The next time she stood there, she was watching these same people fighting for their lives, flying from death — worshippers at another shrine, fiercer, more terrible, and yet not less remorseless in its expiations and demands.

" Here you are ! " said Du Pare, with a sort of impatient cheerfulness. " Well, now you have seen the great ceremony and the abb6 and his eleven hundred virgins. They call him 1'Abbe des Demoiselles in the Quartier."

" Why did you go away 2 " Susy asked.

" I cannot stand it — the smell of in- cense always disagrees with me. You, madame, look as if you did 'not mind being half suffocated; but you will like the lilacs down in the gardens better still."

"It seemed to me very beautiful," said Susy, with dancing eyes. " My daughter here disapproves of it as much as you do. It seemed all so wonder- ful to me — so beautiful, so full of interest."

Ternpy looked daggers. She had a vague idea Susanna was going over to the Roman Catholic persuasion, that Du Pare was a Jesuit pretending indifference, that the whole thing was a plot got up to influence and persuade her too-yielding, too-persuadable step- mother. She too came down step by step with the crowd, following the stream of people. Some seemed still in a sort of dream, some, on the con- trary, wide awake and most keenly alive to the dignity of the moment, to the splendour of their sons in varnished boots, with fringed ribbons on their arms, of their daughters in white muslin, with veils and white caps, and a general unction of new clothes and new blessings. And indeed there can be but one feeling when the boys and girls at the outset of life come up one by one with beam- ing faces to ask a blessing upon their future from the old time-worn bishop and pastor, whose own life is so nearly at an end. This was what Susy said as they walked down the crowded street which led to the Tuileries gar- dens, when Du Pare again made some bitter joke. "I am like the gamin, who put aside the faith of a Pascal with a joke," said du Pare. " I'm afraid it is no use talking to me."

The little shops were bristling with their treasures, the people were stand- ing in their doorways to see the company disperse, the carts and carri- ages cumbering the road. They passed a flower cart standing in a gutter ; a country woman with a red handkerchief on her head was chang- ing the beautiful bunches of fragrance into halfpennies and pennies. It was another version of the old lamps for new. Many of the flowers were delicate, such as we grow with elaborate care in greenhouses and hothouses — white lilacs, and pink carnations with their long blue stalks, some sort of early flowering poppy, pale and feathery, and then narcissus and roses in heaps, and white daisies in their modest garb, looking as if they too had been to their first communion.

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The violets in their fragrant heaps were piled together, all their sweetness tied with a wisp of straw. Susanna stopped, exclaiming, but Du Pare hurried her on. " Pass on, pass on Madame," he said almost impatiently ; " you are stopping the way." Again Tempy drew herself up with a look of absolute amazement and impatience ; what did this man, this drawing- master, mean by speaking in this im- perious tone to her stepmother ? She deliberately stopped and began to ask the price of the flowers, and bought a bunch of somewhat faded rosebuds which the flower woman thrust into her hand ; the others waited while she bargained, not that she cared for pennies, but from an Englishwoman's sense of duty.

" Why didn't you get violets ? " said Susy ; " they seemed so sweet."

A minute after they were crossing the Rue de Rivoli to the side gate of the Tuileries gardens.

"One crosses at the risk of one's life," said Susanna, smiling and turn- ing to speak to Du Pare, — but he was gone. When he rejoined them a minute after at the iron gate he was carrying a huge bunch of the sweet violets Susanna had liked.

" I ventured also to add some lilies of the valley ; such flowers were created for you," he said.

There was something indescribable in his tone which startled her; she looked up, she saw a look of such bright admiration, such pride and homage combined, that her thanks suddenly failed her.

"Violets and lilies," said Tempy, wanting to say something to break the momentary silence, which seemed al- most significant ; " violets are not so nice as roses after all."

"Unhappy France has heard more than enough- of them, mademoiselle," said Du Pare, recovering himself quickly, but with a very well-pleased expression still showing in his dark eyes. " This is the first time for years I have cared to buy any of them ; but to-day they have seemed to me em-

blems of peace and sweetness, instead of greed and wicked rapacity."

Susy could not answer all this. She, a mother, a widow who should have known life, to be silenced suddenly, confused like a very school girl, it was not to be endured.

CHAPTER XIX.

ST. DAMIAN AND OTHEES.

ALL their time was not given to Paris, delightful as Paris was ; it was a pleasure to escape the city on those glorious spring days. Marney was still away, and Susy and her children often found their way to the Villa du Pare, and from thence to the Bois de Bou- logne or the outlying country places. Little Phraisie used to remain with her grandmother ; the others used to stroll further afield, and Du Pare, who so rarely left his work, who never allowed himself a holiday, now seemed to have nothing better to do than to escort his mother's friend and her companions. One afternoon he took them to a village about a mile off ; he led the way with his big stick along the high road for a time, then across a dirty field, then by a country cross- road leading to a village not far from the Seine. There was an old church, one of the very oldest in the neigh- bourhood, that he wanted them to see. He had done an etching of it for the Beaux Arts.

The lamp was burning dimly in the little church before the high altar, where a black verger stood in his robes. There was a silver dove hang- ing from the middle of the roof, and a gilt sun, with brassy rays like an organ, which shone upon the altar. Little pictures, bright coloured, mira- culous, covered the bare walls with representations of benevolent marvels — heavenly hands and protruding arms interposing from the clouds to pre- vent disaster here on earth ; runaway horses arrested, falling houses caught in the act. There was a huge black crucifix with a coloured figure of Death

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— a somewhat terrible and strik- ing reminder to the living of the future and the past. More cheerful tinselled ornaments were piled upon the altar, whose fine cloth was guarded by a chequered linen top. The wooden pulpit was painted to look like pre- cious veined marble, so was the bat- tered old confessional with the thumb marks of the penitents. Outside the little church, in the Place, the cocks and hens cackled, becketed in the grass ; a little stream ran close by the opened door with a pleasant wash of water. They had passed the cure's house close at hand, with its labur- nums, and the field beyond where the linen strips were bleaching, and the children squatting in the dust, and the man with the wooden shoes and the oilskin hat and the torn blouse, breaking flints in the sunshine. Everything outside looked hot and bright and delicate and business-like, while everything inside was dark and dreamily fervent. To people ac- customed from childhood to Catholic chapels, the scent of the lingering in- cense seems to be the breath of the prayers and hymns of the pious who have lingered here generation after generation on their way from the streets and the sunshine outside, to the quiet churchyard across the field.

Max looked round to-day with friendly eyes at his old playmates, St. Cosmo and St. Damian, those fa- vourite martyrs — at St. Dominic in his black robe, St. Catharine with her pointing finger, St. Barbara with her wheel, good St. Ursula with a de- tachment of maidens, standing by the well-remembered sketch of the Day of Judgment, where six or seven just persons escorted by two virtuous little angels were being trumpeted up to heaven, while over a dozen wicked were being swallowed then and there by aVhuge green monster. All these quaint familiar things hung undisturbed as they had hung in the young man's re- collection for the quarter of a century he could look back to. The bright silver hearts and tokens, the tallow

candles peacefully smoking on the triangle — all meant childhood and familiar faces and everyday innocent life to him. He did not feel here in the little village church as at St. Roch on the day of the great celebration. There he had chafed and revolted. Tempy herself could not have felt more repelled than Max du Pare ; but this was his whole childhood, one of his simplest and most intimate asso- ciations. How curiously the same emblems affect different minds. To Tempy they meant terrors and super- stition ; to Jo a picturesque and cha- racteristic episode of foreign travel ; and to Susanna they meant something like a strange dream of reality, like an image of all that was in her heart just then. There was the charm, the in- tense attraction of that which was not and must never be her creed ; and also a terror of that remorseless law which spared not, which accepted martyrdom and self-renunciation as the very be- ginning of the lesson of life — -of that life which since the world began had been crying out so passionately for its own, for its right to exist, to feel, to be free. This afternoon Mrs. Dymond seemed to have caught something of du Parc's antagonistic mood on that day at St. Roch's ; she was thinking how these pale saints had turned one by one from the sunshine and the storms of daily life, from the seasons in their course, from the interests and warm fires of home, to a far-away future, of which these ead tapers, winking and smoking, these glittering silver trinkets, were the symbols ; they had given earnest and passionate prayers in the place of love and living desires and the longing of full hearts ; they had taken pain and self-inflicted sufferings in place of the natural sub- mission and experience of life, and the restraints of other's rights and other's needs.

" I can't think how people can endure such superstition," said Tempy, flouncing out into the porch. " Come, Jo, it makes me sick," and she nearly tumbled over an old couple who had

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been kneeling in the shadow of the doorway.

Susy blushed up, as she often did, for Tempy's brusquerie, and looked anxiously at Du Pare, who had caught the young lady by the arm as she stumbled.

Tempy seemed to rouse some latent opposition in Max du Pare.

" Take care," he said in English ; " g° gently> and don't upset those who are still on their knees. After all there are not many people left upon their knees now," he added as they came out together, " and I don't see that much is gained by having everybody running about the streets instead."

"At all events it is something gained to hear people speaking the real truth, and saying only what they really think, as we do in our churches," said Tempy, with one of her stares.

Du Pare made her a low bow.

" If that is the case, mademoiselle, I shall certainly come over to England and get myself admitted into your religion by a reverend with a white tie."

Tempy didn't answer, but walked on.

Jo burst out laughing. Susy didn't laugh ; she was in this strange state of emotion, excitement, she could not laugh. Something had come to her, something which in all her life she had never felt as now, a light into the morning, a tender depth in the even- ing sky, a meaning to the commonest words and facts. There is a feeling which comes home to most of us at one time or another ; philosophers try to explain it, poets to write it down only, musicians can make it into music, it is like a horizon to the present — a sense of the suggestion of life beyond its actual din and rough shapings. This feeling gives a meaning to old stones and fluttering rags, to the heaps and holes on the surface of the earth, to the sad and common things as well as to those which are brilliant and suc- cessful. Had this supreme revelation come to Susanna, now 1 or was it only

that in France the lights are brighter, the aspects of life more delightful — that with the sight of all this natural beauty and vivacity some new spring of her life had been touched which irradiated and coloured everything?

But it was not France, it was the poetry of to-day and the remem- brance of yesterday which softened her sweet looks, which touched her glowing cheek. It was something which Susy did not know, of which she had never guessed at until now, widow though she was, mother though she was.

Susanna for the last few years had been so accustomed to silence, to a sort of gentle but somewhat condoning courtesy, that it seemed to her almost strange to be specially addressed and considered.

Tempy could not understand it either. Once or twice Susanna met the girl's surprised half laughing, half dis- approving glance, and the elder woman would blush and look amused, appeal- ing ; she seemed to be asking her step- daughter's leave to be brilliant for once — to answer the friendly advances of the French gentlemen who called with red ribbons, and the French ladies with neatly-poised bonnets. One or two invitations came for them through Mr. Bagginal. Sometimes Susy, animated, forgetting, would look so different, so handsome, that Tempy herself was taken aback. Mrs. Dy- mond's black dignities became her — the long lappets falling, the silken folds so soft, so thick, that moved with her as she moved. She had dressed formerly to please her husband, who, in common with many men, hated black, and liked to see his wife and his daughter in a cheerful rainbow of pink and green and blue and gilt buttons. Now that she was a widow she wore plain long dresses, soft and black, suiting her condition and becoming to her sweet and graceful ways. She had bought herself a straw hat, for the sun was burning in the avenues of Neuilly, and with her round hat she had given up her

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widow's cap. A less experienced hand than Max du Pare might have wished to set this graceful blackness down for ever as it stood on the green outside the little chapel that summer's day. The children were still playing, the geese were coming up to be fed, the dazzle of light and shade made a sweet out-of-door background to the lovely light and shade of Susy's wistful pale face as she stood facing them all, and looking up at the carved stone front of the shabby little church.

They walked home slowly two by two. Tempy, who had not yet for- given Du Pare his religion or his bow, took her brother's arm.

Two figures that were hobbling along the path a little way in front of them, stopped their halting progress, and turned to watch the youthful company go by. They were forlorn and worn and sad, and covered with rags and dirt ; the woman carried a bundle on a stick, the man dragged his steps through the spring, limping as he went.

" Yes," said Max, answering Susy's look of pity, " one is happy and for- gets everything else, and then one meets some death's-head like this to remind one of the fact. Think of one man keeping all that for himself," and he pointed back to a flaming villa with pink turrets beyond the field, "and another reduced to such shreds of life."

"I don't think people in England are ever quite so miserable," said Susy.

" You think not 1 " said Max. " I have seen people quite as dirty, quite as wretched in London. I remem- ber. ..."

Susy wondered why he ' stopped short. Max had suddenly remembered where and when it was he had seen two wretched beggars thrust from a carriage door, and by whom. " And in Soho near where you lived," the young man continued after a moment, speaking in a somewhat constrained voice and tone. " Any night, I think, you might have seen people as sad and

wretched as these. I used to go to a street in that quarter for my dinner very often, and while I dined they walked about outside. Once," he added more cheerfully, as another remembrance came into his mind, " I met a member of your family, madame, at my dining-place, Monsieur Charles Bolsover. Poor fellow," said Max, returning to his French, " I hope he is in happier conditions than he was then — lie had a friend whom I met afterwards. He seemed in a doleful state."

" Were you there on that dreadful occasion ? " said Susanna, turning pale. " Oh ! Monsieur du Pare, he had been drinking to forget his trouble 1 "

" What, madame, even you," said Max, " do you find nothing kinder to say of the poor boy ? Drinking ! He had not been drinking any more than I had — he was ill, he was in a fever for a week afterwards. I used to go and see him in his friend's lodgings. . . They told me the story." . . . Max glanced ahead at Tempy laughing, and twirling her parasol — " Forgive me," he said, " I am meddling with what is not my concern ! "

" But it concerns me, Monsieur du Pare," said Susy, trembling very much. " It concerns me very very nearly ; if Charlie has been unjustly accused — if he was ill, poor boy, and we did not know it."

" It is a fact, madame," said Max, dryly; "if you were to ask his friend, the Reverend White, he will tell you the same thing Your nephew is not the first of us who has been overcome by an affair of the heart. I gathered from him that your . . . that you dis- approved of his suit."

"My husband was afraid to trust his daughter's happiness to any one of whom we had heard so much that was painful," said Mrs. Dymond coldly, and remembering herself.

Max civilly assented.

"A father must judge best for his child," she continued, melting as he froze, and speaking with an uncon- scious appeal in her voice and her

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eyes. Why we, s it that she felt as if Du Fare's opinion mattered so much ? She could not bear him to misjudge things ; to think any one cold, or hard.

" Of course you have to consider what is best," said the young man, softening to her gentleness ; " but be- lieve me that is not a bad young fellow. Poor boy, it was a heart of gold. I can scarcely imagine the young lady having inspired such a devotion," he said, for a moment forgetting the near relationship between the two women ; " but to me she seems strangely fortu- nate,"

"Ah! You don't know her," said Susy eagerly ; " you don't know how noble she is, how good, how lovable."

" What would you have, madame 1 " said Du Pare, laughing. " Of you I am not afraid, but of the Miss I am in terror, and she detests me too. Ask madame, your mother."

They had come to the gates of the villa by this ; Phraisie appeared in the

doorway with madame to welcome them back. Mrs. Marney's loud voice was heard calling from within. Max was not over-pleased to see a visitor under the tree waiting the ladies return. It was their north-country neighbour, Mr. Bagginal from the Embassy, who had been making him- self agreeable to madame in the mean- while. He had a scheme for a walk in the wood at St. Cloud, and a dinner. The Court was there, and the gardens closed, but the young man with some pride produced an order of admission.

" Thank you, we shall like it very much indeed," says Tempy.

Susy looked at Du Pare. "Shall you have time to come, too ? " she asked,

" Monsieur Caron is in the studio waiting for you, Max," said his mother; " he has got his pocket full of procla- mations, as usual," and without an- swering Mrs. Dymond, Du Pare slowly turned and walked into the studio.

To be continued.

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MARLBOKOTJGH.

THE old town of Marlborough and the school which now carries its name into every quarter of the globe are unques- tionably under great mutual obligations to each other. The former has to thank the latter for coming to the rescue just as the collapse of coaching threat- ened a stagnation that would have possibly deepened into something like actual decay. The school in its turn may feel that the crudeness of its youth has been much softened by the quaint old town which, unpolluted by villa, terrace or parade, terminates at its gates — one of the most picturesque streets in England. Mellowness, too, was supplied, and tradition ready to hand in the very walls that welcomed its first scholars forty years ago ; while the peculiar freshness, and the wild freedom of the regions which divide it from the outer world would seem as if they were especially made for the development of youthful brain and youthful muscle. But where, after all this, the reader may remark, is Marlborough ? To say that it lies in the eastern part of Wiltshire, just north of the line that divides the southern from the northern portion of the county, is rather geo- graphically accurate than suggestive to the general reader. Moreover, I have always had an impression that Wiltshire as a county, in spite of its size and position, and in spite of the Chronicles of Barset, has a somewhat faint hold upon the public mind. As a matter of fact, however, it is a most characteristic county. There are deep lanes in Wiltshire, it is true, where the violet and the primrose nestle round the roots of elms that later on shut out the summer sun. There are, as elsewhere, heavy, low-lying lands where big crops of mangolds grow, or in the good times used to grow, and where steam - ploughs and

steam-harrows wrestle in wet seasons with the stubborn clods of deep clay soils. There are pasture lands, too, as fat as those of Cheshire, broken into small areas by blooming hedges and rows of elms as symmetrical as those of Warwickshire ; but the Wiltshire that comes to the mind of most men, familiar with that part of England, recalls wilder and ruder scenes than these — a country rather of great dis- tances and of swelling downs streaked with the white lines of chalk roads that go ever rising and falling till they dis- appear over some bleak horizon. A land where the winds riot over bleak uplands, with nothing to mark their violence but the whitening leaves of vast turnip-fields in autumn, and no- thing to break their force but here and there some clump of tall and naked firs that roar and groan as if in pro- test of their inability to bend their stiff and shattered tops to the gale ; a region of tinkling sheep-bells and of wattled hurdles; of stout hares that run for ever, and of partridges that ignore all conventional limits of flight ; of yokels not yet wholly " unsmocked," whose gait and accent in these level- ling days are a delight to see and hear, and of red-roofed gabled boroughs that the tide of progress has left untouched, as it has left few other parts of acces- sible England untouched, to stand as monuments of a time gone by. Nor, in recording Wiltshire memories, either would it be possible to forget those huge relics of a prehistoric age — those grass-grown mounds and giant stones that lie scattered over the land with a thickness that has no parallel else- where in England. Nor yet again would the picture be complete if we forgot those rich green valleys that here and there break the long mono- tony of down-land, where in summer

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time the perpetual scent of hay-fields hangs among the elms that shoot up tall from the alluvial soil, and where clear, willow-bordered streams, famous in Waltonian lore, steal down from hamlet to hamlet and from mill to mill.

It is in one of these green oases in the very heart of the down-country that Marlborough lies. To put it more plainly : as the traveller upon the Great Western Railroad approaches Swindon, he will see upon his left hand a long bank of downs bounding for many miles the southern horizon. On leaving Swindon, a place whose reputation as a busy workshop is forgotten in its wider associations of sandwiches and bath-buns, this high rampart of hills will be seen to abandon the course of the railroad and to trend away to the south-west. This is the high step by which the Marlborough Downs drop into the valley of the Thames, and when the traveller's eye lights upon a solitary clump of firs, crowning what seems to be their loftiest crest, it will have struck a point that is "within measurable dis- tance" of the town itself; for that crest of pines is popularly known in Marlborough as the " six-mile clump." The face of the down once scaled at this point, a two hours' walk through a wild region, haunted only by sheep and shepherds, brings you to that dip in the hills where, on the banks of the Kennet, the ancient borough stands.

Marlborough, from its isolated posi- tion in the midst of a thinly-peopled and purely agricultural or pastoral region, has been long in emerging from a state, so far as railroads go, of total inaccessibility to a condition of communications that is at least of an average description.

Twenty-five years ago, and twenty after the founding of the school, no railway whistle was heard within a radius of a dozen miles. In those scarcely remote days, all travellers from the west, and most of those from London, found themselves on the plat-

form of Swindon station, with thirteen miles of hilly road yet between them and their destination. Here, it is true, the more exclusive passenger of those days with some patience and per- severance might procure an ancient fly that, for a consideration commen- surate with the task, would undertake the expedition. To the initiated, how- ever, there was known to be an element of adventure in this course : for, if the horses and the vehicle were equal to the strain, there was always a doubt whe- ther the moral principles of the driver were proof against that line of public houses which from point to point almost alone lit up the chilly solitude of his way.

There was. moreover, if memory serves me right, a traditional dog-cart, which many a rash, unwary traveller lived to curse, as with the fall of a winter night he mounted the downs and faced the bleakest drive insouthernEngland. But whatMarlburian of that epoch, whether schoolboy or citizen, is there who does not connect it with one immortal name? Who is there that could re- call that period, between the collapse of coaching and the tardy advent of the steam-horse upon the Marlborough Downs, without a tear of tribute for that illustrious worthy who for so long maintained the connection be- tween the ancient borough and the outer world.

Historic Marlborough, as we shall presently show, commences with the name of King John. It may be said to terminate with that of "Jerry 'Ammond," whose purple-faced lieu- tenant's " Be you for Maarlborough, zur1?" has cheered many a lonely heart gazing helplessly into the dark- ness from the railway stations of Swindon, Hungerford, or Devizes.

How well I can recall the venerable omnibus that painfully but regularly crawled over the thirteen hilly miles to Swindon in the morning and back again to Marlborough in the darkness of the night. The sensations of a ride in that primeval chariot come vividly back to me from a time in life when

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hours seemed to be days and miles leagues. How hopeless then the look of the distant downs, fast settling into the gloom of a winter's night — thrice murky perhaps with storms of driving rain. .How reassured and close to the goal one used to feel for a deceptive moment as the familiar voice and ac- cents beckoned us, " This way for Maarlborough ; any loogidge, zur ? " How hope again grew cold, and the long miles in anticipation longer, as the lights of the train vanished into the darkness, and the vehicles for Swindon town disappeared, one after the other, with their loads of com- mercial travellers intent on smoking suppers. How we sat and sat on the well-worn seats of the omnibus, kick- ing our heels upon the straw-strewn floor, long in to the night as it used to seem, till the sense of desertion, intensified by the drear beating of the rain against the windows and occasional hollow echoes from the now empty sta- tion, was terminated by the advent of the "loogidge." What "Ohlawkeses! " and " Lord a' mussys ! " used to be forced from the inevitable old lady passengers, as each trunk was hurled on to the roof with a crash upon our very crowns, as it seemed, that might well have made the stoutest heart quail. And when that fearful per- formance was over, when the tarpaulin was stretched upon the towering pile, and we were congratulating ourselves, or one another, that the expedition was in the act of setting out — just as our hopes, in fact, were wrought up to the highest pitch of expectation — there would come an ominous slam of the inn door. The gin-laden stream of light that had shone upon us from that festive haunt would become on a sudden quenched. The suspicion that we were abandoned by our crew ripened into a certainty, and as the slow mi- nutes dragged on, we began to realise that we were in the power of a mono- polist to whom time, at this end of his journey at any rate, was of little moment. What survivor of those long night rides to Marlborough does not

recall their weary details. The long drag from Swindon town to the sum- mit of the far-away downs ; the slow transition from the heavy, grinding roads of the valley to where the sticky chalk highway shone white in our track on the darkest of nights ; the gradual cessation of the hedge-row trees that passed, one by one, in end- less procession, across the disc of our lanterns, seen glistening with rain- drops for a moment and then vanishing into the gloom ; the final tug up to the crest of the downs, when the steam from the horses floated like clouds of smoke across the lantern's rays : the groans of the labouring caravan as at last it lumbered forward with an energy all too brief on to the wild plateau, where no tree or hedgerow caught our light, and no roadside house but some isolated tavern, where the mere force of habit brought the steaming horses to an invariable halt. What spots were those wan-faced houses of good cheer upon such nights as these ! None of your fine old coaching inns, but poor, thatch- roofed, weather-beaten publics, where melancholy ploughmen from the downs might be imagined sadly shaking their heads over sugared small beer and the rate of wages, on Saturday nights, to the music of the storms without. On such occasions they were quite capable of suggesting to the youthful mind more dismal scenes even than these ; for as their faded sign-boards swung to and fro in the night wind, creaking on rusty hinges, they might without much effort of fancy have seemed to echo the stifled groans of some entrapped wayfarer with the knuckles of a wicked landlord at his throat.

Not that the average inmates of the Swindon " bus " were disturbed by such fancies as these. The old women prattled in the dark about their neigh- bours, and the solid burghers, return- ing from Swindon market, crooned over the price of barley and of ewes till the effects of the day's good cheer gradually lulled them into still more uninteresting music. The last crest was surmounted, the old shoe-drag was

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dropped for the last time under the wheel, and down the steep street into Marlborough town we used to go at a speed unprecedented, straining and creaking and rattling past the lighted shops, and turning the sharp corner into the High Street with a reck- lessness that owes something, no doubt, to the frequent halts upon the road. Such was the approach to Marl- borough in the year of grace 1860. The last coach that ran along the edge of the Kennet valley from Hun- gerford to Marlborough and on to Devizes and Bath, and woke the echoes of their streets with its cheery horn, became about that time, if I remember right, a roosting-place for fowls. Four years later Marlborough had a railway of its own, and now the traditions of the road, which clung to the town till quite lately, have been finally destroyed by a new railway from Swindon to Andover, that runs through it.

The town of Marlborough is one of those quiet old-world spots upon which the tide of modern progress has made no visible impression. Just as the pure air of the surrounding country is polluted by no smoke more noisome than that of a steam plough or a threshing machine, so the old town itself has little that would startle the shade of a Camden, or be obvious to the first gaze of a Jacobin Rip van Winkle. Nowhere, it always seems to me, is the real history of an earlier England — the history of the people as opposed to that of kings and courtiers so eloquently presented as in the bricks and stones, and lanes and churchyards and traditions of old towns such as this — towns which, like Marlborough, have covered almost the same ground, and contained almost the same popula- lation for generations. The historical interest of Marlborough, however, is by no means merely domestic, while its prehistoric traditions are illustrious. Its very name, one of the earlier forms of which was Merlin-berge, justify its claim to connection with the great enchanter, more especially

as the huge prehistoric monuments of the immediate neighbourhood mark it as a spot of most supreme importance in those misty times which that name recalls. From the times of the Norman conquest, and probably even long before that, a castle of some sort stood at the end of the town in the grounds now occupied by the College. In the reign of Henry I. Marlborough Castle is first mentioned as a royal residence, that monarch on one occasion holding his court there. In the Stephen and Matilda wars Marlborough, like most of the West, held for the Queen, and was more than once the head-quarters of her armies. After this the castle became a favourite dower residence of the Plantagenet queens. In 1267 Henry III. held there his twenty- fourth parliament, and enacted the " Statutes of Marleberge." It is with the reign of King John, however, that the present site of Marlborough is most intimately connected, and it is his name, and that of his queen, that are the most prominent upon the earlier pages of its history. A hospital dedicated to St. John the Baptist — transformed in the time of Edward VI. into a grammar-school — traces its origin to this reign. A formerly existing priory of Gilbertine canons, with a hospital of St. Thomas of Canterbury dates from the same period, while a house of Carmelite friars was established in the reign of Edward II. It was at Wolfhall in the immediate neighbourhood of Marlborough that Henry VIII. married Jane Seymour. Her father was ranger of the royal forest of Savernake which occupied then a large slice of the country con- tiguous to the town. To Jane Sey- mour's brother, the Protector Somerset, was afterwards granted the whole of the forest, and the Marlborough pro- perty as well. A small principality was then established with Marlborough as its centre, which at this day is still owned and presided over by a repre- sentative of the old Seymour family, the present Marquis of Ailesbury. The typical English squire, has little place

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in the annals of Marlborough. Sug- gestive as its steep gables and quiet old streets are of his burly form we should have listened generally, I think, in vain for his broad jests and loud laugh in the inn parlours, and in vain for the cry of his hounds upon the hills around. Farmers and corn factors, lawyers and traders, doctors and divines lie by scores in the long disused churchyards. Kings and queens, great nobles and fine ladies, historic figures are scat- tered plentifully enough all through its history, but the social gap between has never been filled. The connecting link that in most places there would have been between the great house beyond the town and the burghers within it, has scarcely had an exist- ence in the Marlborough country. Marlborough, in short, has always been without what people are pleased to call " a neighbourhood," and for many miles upon every side the country — without noteworthy exceptions — still belongs to the representatives of the great Protector.

In the civil war the " men of Marie- berg " were ferociously roundhead, and it was hotly besieged by the king's forces whose cannon balls to this day have left their mark on its church towers. The town was partially burned during this siege, but a few years later an accidental fire swept it almost away. " Thus," concludes a local chronicler of the time, " was the stately and flourishing town of Marleberge consumed with fire on a sudden. It would make a heart drop tears of blood that had but heard the doleful cryes and heavy moanes that pass be- tween men and their wives, parents, and their children." In the days when England was the Australia of Europe, and wool was its principal export, Marlborough, doubtless, as the centre of a famous sheep district had no difficulty in retaining its modest prosperity. Later on, too, when the wealth of the nation increased, and with it the desire and facilities for travel it became a famous posting and coaching depot on the great highway

which connected the metropolis with the west. There are plenty of people still living who can recall the stir and bustle, the cracking of whips, the rumbling of wheels, and the notes of coach horns that all day long, and night too, used to wake the echoes of that now quiet street.

Marlborough may be almost said to consist of that one broad highway which springing from the College gates upon the west stretches itself for half a mile towards the east along the banks of the Kennet. It is said to be the widest street in England. However that may be, the large church dedicated to S. Peter in the fifteenth century which stands at its western end leaves ample room for the traffic of a country town ;to pass with- out inconvenience on either side. It is not only the breadth of the Marl- borough High Street that at once arrests the stranger's attention, but the slope upon which it lies is so steep that rival towns who register perhaps a few more quarters of barley at their weekly markets, but are a trifle jealous may be of the presence of the school, are wont to make huge jokes at the expense of the famous Marlborough highway. The people of Devizes, for example, are wont to declare that a bicycle is the only machine that can be driven down the street which is the pride and joy of their neighbour town without a risk of capsizing.

Marlburians, however, may regard such facetiousness with complacency, as they stand at their doors and look up the charming old street. Upon the upper side especially, the long half- mile of gabled houses are scarcely two of them alike, while for some distance they are still further set off by an old " pent house," which called forth the remarks of seventeenth-century tra- vellers. There is nothing behind these two long rows of quaint houses that stand facing one another, so far apart, and upon such different levels. The back windows of the one look on to green fields that trend upwards till they melt away in the downs. The

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gardens of the other slope down to where the clear slow waters of the Kennet wind under rustic bridges and rustling poplar trees.

At the head of the broad street there is the town-hall, standing in front of the rugged and time-beaten church tower of St. Mary's. At its foot, facing the former, and occupying the same central position, the church of St. Peter shoots its tall tower heavenwards, and still flings the notes of the curfew on winter nights far over the distant downs.

Here at the foot of the High Street, beneath this tall church tower, the town of Marlborough comes abruptly to an end. Before a high barrier of iron gates the close-built street sud- denly ceases, and parts into two country roads, leading to the right and left — to Bath and the Pewsey vale respectively. Stepping through the gates, the stranger finds himself amidst that curious combination of the past and the present — of the new and the old — which to-day represents the flourishing school of Marlborough.

The large modern building that immediately overlooks the town, and first arrests, unfortunately, the stranger's gaze, is perhaps an object rather of affectionate association than of architectural pride to Marlburians. The ivy, it is true, has long been desperately struggling to hide its homely face, and a row of tall and venerable lime trees, which rustle their leaves above the roof, do much to atone for its artistic failings. Follow the broad gravel walk, however, a little further on, and you will forget and forgive the rash erection of 1843 in the beautiful old mansion of Inigo Jones, which rises before you, and constitutes the main building of the school — ithe nucleus from which it sprang.

It is not the tine old house alone, with its time-mellowed bricks, its tiled roofs, its big stacks of chimneys and wide sunny windows, that Marl- burians recall with fond memory, but the scene also over which it looks :

No. 309.— VOL. LIT.

the soft and yielding lawns ; the quaint yew-trees, cut generations ago into fantastic shapes ; the noble ter- race, the mossy banks, and the tall groves of elm and lime, noisy with the sound of countless rooks; the mea- dows, fresh and green the summer long with the waters of a hundred rushing rills ; the old mill under the trees, and the lasher where the Kennet churns and foams with ceaseless sound over the heads of lusty and expectant trout ; and behind all, the soft swell of the overhanging down, with its hazel thickets, dear to generations of nutters; with its honoured, if not ancient, white horse, and its tinkle of innumerable sheep bells.

If the College at Marlborough can lay no claim to an academic history such as that of Eton or Winchester, it has at least been grafted on a stem whose roots run more back beyond the reach of dim tradition, much less of history. This might be true, indeed, and yet the record and the figures it contains might be so insignificant and obscure as to fail in interest. Marlborough, however, from the pre- sent time back for centuries, generally keeps touch, in some shape, with the leading event and the noted characters of successive periods. The only ob- scurity into which it sinks is the ob- scurity that experts try in vain to- pierce as they stand before those vast and silent monuments that mark it as a metropolis of some prehistoric age.

Rising above the roof of the western end of the college, and so close that it darkens the very windows, stands a gigantic tumulus. With the exception of its fellow, a few miles up the Ken- net valley, this huge mysterious mound has no equal in Europe. Who shall say of what people — of what warriors — of what mysterious rites this gi- gantic work of unknown hands stands as a silent and imperishable witness 1 Whether a vast altar of Druidical sacrifice, or the resting place of some mighty chief, are questions for the archaeologist who wanders with de- light through this corner of Wiltshire,

0

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so incomparably rich in prehistoric relics. To the " Arcadian " age of the early Georges the Marlborough mound owes the spiral terraces which ascend its grassy sides, and probably to the same period the trees, which now give it the distant appearance of a wooded hill.

These earliest monuments of man's dominion are more enduring than the walls of masonry which heralded in the period when this spot first appears upon the page of authentic history. From the time that Marlborough Castle is first mentioned, soon after the Conquest, figures famous in history find refuge and hold state within its walls. As if, too, in derisive testimony to the change of human fortunes, a Norman keep towered high upon the summit of the British mound, and commanded the old Roman road from Cunetio — three miles east of Marl- borough — to Bath, twenty-seven miles to the westward. Immediately be- neath it stood the royal residence that for five centuries belonged to the crown, and for two was the fre- quent habitation of kings and queens. To touch upon the stirring scenes of sieges and of battles — from the arrows of the Stephen and Matilda wars, to the cannon balls of Prince Rupert — is not here possible ; nor perhaps would such details be interesting to other than those who have associations with the place itself.

Times have changed. Where once upon a time a Norman dungeon de- scended into the depths where lay perhaps the bones of British chief- tains, the exigencies of modern needs have placed a water cistern. Where the moat once ran between rows of fierce warriors — a long pool formed by the inducted waters of the Kennet — reflects the tall limes and grassy banks of the College gardens, and in summer days resounds with the splash and shout of a hundred youthful swimmers.

Katherine Parr was the last name that connected Marlborough Castle with the reigning house. She married into the Seymour family, who then were,

and whose representatives still are, the grand seigneurs of Marlborough. At this period the castle, as a fortified stronghold, disappears from history. Leland, visiting Marlborough in 1538, says, " There is a ruin of a great castle hard at the west end of the town, whereof the dungeon tower partly yet standeth." It was to Wolf Hall, in the neighbourhood of Marlborough, I have already said, that Henry VIII. — when the tower guns proclaimed the death of Anne Boleyn — rode at post haste to his nuptials with Jane Sey- mour. An old barn is still in exist- ence that is said to have witnessed the wedding ceremonies of that insatiable monarch.

Wolf Hall stands near to the pre- sent station of Savernake, between Hungerford and Devizes, and is only separated from Marlborough by the wooded dells and beech avenues of Savernake forest.

The latter, in the sixteenth century, was probably twice the size it is now — and was royal property, though even to-day it is sixteen miles in circumfer- ance. The Seymours of Wolf Hall were then comparatively obscure. They held, before the King's wedding, the " rangership " of Savernake, and their horn of office is still in the hands of their representatives, the Ailesbury family, who now own the estate which was granted in the reign of Edward VI. to the Protector Somerset, the brother of the queen. In the reign of Charles II., Francis, Lord Seymour, received that monarch in the stately mansion already alluded to, which had been erected upon the ruins of the ancient castle by Inigo Jones. Of all its Seymour owners, however, none are so intimately connected with its fortunes as the well known Countess of Hertford. The rural charms of her seat at Marlborough enraptured to ecstasy this celebrated lady, who was one of the chief exponents of the Arcadian mania that raged during the beginning of the eighteenth century. Hither came courtiers and fine ladies to pose as Strephons and Chloes. amid

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the green paradise where the famous Countess held her court. Hither, too, came poets and authors. Dr. Watts, Pope, Thomson, were summoned to aid with their lyres in the worship of this unequalled Arcadia. The latter, his biographers tell us, took more pleasure in carousing with his lordship than in assisting her ladyship's poetical com- positions. That he had, however, his lucid intervals and his romantic moods, may be inferred from the fact of his poem of Spring having been composed here. "Here," says that poetical bon vivant,

" Let me ascend

Some eminence, Augusta, in thy plains, And see the country far diffused around, One boundless blush, one white empurpled

shower Of mingled blossoms." . . .

In bygone days a stone used to mark the spot upon the down above the College where the poet was supposed to have sat and received his inspirations. It was during this period, probably, that the wide terraces were made, and one can easily picture the dainty figures passing up and down upon them, or grouped upon the velvety banks, in- dulging in the astounding fiction that they were Wiltshire swains. The mill still stands silent in the foreground, whose dusty occupant stirred, accord- ing to her letters, the Countess's Arcadian emotions to their very depth a century and a half ago. The sheep still bleat and cluster on the adjoin- ing hill behind their shepherds as they did when these aforesaid tinsel shepherds enacted the cant of their day in the groves below; but times have changed. The white lines of the ubiquitous tennis court now desecrate the shadow-chequered turf, where even twenty years ago the twang of the bow and the click of the bowl used to seem so much more in keeping with the bygone age, whose memory the aspect or the spot so eloquently pleads. The grottoes and the spiral walks upon the mound, the dark shades of the over- arching groves are the haunt no longer

of impassioned swains, but of Marl- borough prefects intent on nothing more romantic than scholarships and cricket scores.

In the reign of the second George the Marlborough manor house passed through the female line of the Sey- mours into the Northumberland family. Solitude now reigned in its panelled halls, and money from dis- tant and grudging Percy coffers was required to arrest dilapidations that came rather of neglect than age. In 1753 a quaint and characteristic adver- tisement announced to the travelling public that the stately mansion of Inigo Jones had been opened as an hostelry. Thenceforward for nearly a century the Castle Inn at Marl- borough was the favourite halting place between London and the west, and during the latter part of that period was one of the most celebrated and best managed coaching inns in England.

Travellers must indeed have been glad to exchange the chalky dust of the Bath road for the refreshing shades and the cool oak corridors of the old Marlborough house. There are scores of men still living who can recall the time when over forty coaches thundered daily down the now quiet street of the old town — when the echoes of one horn had scarcely died away upon the London road when others came sounding down the roads that enter the town at its western end from the directions of Salisbury and Bath.

As coaching and posting gradually withered before the inroads of the iron horse, the future of the. historic borough began to look very blue in- deed ; and when the Great Western railway left Marlborough far to the south and no other lines seemed to think that the town was on the road to anywhere, certain stagnation and very probable decay stared its people in the face.

Most happily for Marlborough cer- tain philanthropic gentlemen in London o 2

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conceived about this time the then novel idea of founding a great school that should give an economic but high class education to the sons of gentle- men and of clergymen more especially. The idea very soon took practical shape. The deserted Seymour mansion and the now lifeless town of Marl- borough stood gazing blankly at one another, wondering doubtless what in the world they were to do next. Here the founders of Marlborough College saw their opportunity, and happily for all concerned seized upon it. But alas ! the Seymour mansion and Castle Inn, huge as it was, could be but the nucleus of such an establishment as these well-meaning founders contem- plated, and large buildings were at once and hurriedly erected at the back and on the town side of the old house.

Not all the tender associations of nearly half a century; not the most des- perate attempts of perennial creepers or the frantic endeavours of modern art to relieve their blank walls with oriel windows ; not the contiguous shade of the venerable limes nor the mellowing neighbourhood of the old mansion house — nor the mossy lawns, nor the clipped yew trees. Alas ! not all these modifying influences can make even the most patriotic Marl- burians blink those rash creations of the early founders. The exact work- house that supplied a model for the one block, or the particular house of cor- rection which inspired the designs of the other has ever been a mystery. He can only look on them with mingled feelings of personal regard and vain regrets, and inwardly hope that they may with even greater celerity follow the example of their predecessor, the vanished Norman keep rather than of that other one — the imperishable mound of the Druids.

August, 1843, was a date of import- ance not only to Marlborough, for I think I may say the founding of that school marked the commencement of a new departure in English higher edu- cation. The important schools of that

date had grown from old foundations ; but now there was about to commence an era of ready-made rivals, of which Marlborough was the first. Many of these have swept past both socially, numerically, and intellectually all but three or four of the most distin- tinguished of their seniors, and forced some of these even to reforms that seemed almost humiliating at the time to their admirers. Rossall, Wellington, Haileybury, Malvern, and many other now prosperous and influential schools, may in some sort regard as the germ of their own existence that August day, forty-two years ago, when 200 boys from every part of England crossed the Wiltshire downs and took possession of the old halls of the Sey- mours.

It is not my purpose to enlarge on that decade of turbulence and misfor- tune by which Marlborough bought her experience, or to dwell on the thorny, untried paths through which she groped in the dark to a success that gave heart unquestionably to a host of imitators, and that I think I may say has never for a moment waned.

Those early days of trial, however, had doubtless their good uses, and taught their lesson not to Marlborough only, but, as I have said, to her younger rivals. A greater contrast in every particular between the past and the present could hardly be con- ceived. Indeed the survivor of those Spartan days, who now and then re- turns with grizzled hair from some distant clime to look upon the scene of his youthful adventures, is apt to gaze with as much scorn as bewilder- ment on the transformation that meets his eye.

The Marlburian of '45 is apt to be- little the civilisation of '85, as the Calif ornian " forty-niner " deplores the vanished rowdyism of the Pacific coast. Whether he be a war-scarred colonel or a respectable incumbent it is noticed that he generally betrays a species of pride in having borne a part

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in an epoch of public school life that probably -has no equal for lawlessness in modern academic history. He is apt to look with a feeling something akin to contempt on the law-abiding exemplary young man who constitutes his remote successor. He seems not unfrequently to regard with some- thing like regret the long series of boarding-houses and masters' resi- dences that stretch up the valley of the Kennet, and the tasteful gardens, long shorn of their crudeness tha,t cover the slopes where forty years ago he used to poach hares. " Those were days, sir, in which young fellows were made hardy," he is often heard to mutter, while his eye marks with evi- dent disapproval the flower-beds that bloom over spots in the court-yard that in his day were sacred to dog- fights and pistol shooting. He even breathes forth a sigh of real regret as he looks fondly up at the high window- ledges from which he declares, as a small boy he used to be dangled by ropes on winter nights in the " brave days of old."

Turning once more to the town and its neighbourhood one remembers that the name of Marlborough is insepar- able from the great forest of Savernake, whose northern limits crown the hills immediately above the town. I have already mentioned this as the remnant of the old royal forest granted to the Seymours in the reign of Edward VI. It is, however, a great and no insigni- ficant remnant covering from fifteen to twenty square miles of ground. Grand avenues of immense beech-trees run for miles this way and that, crossed by green drives which lead the traveller for hours through what Monsieur de Lesseps declared to be the finest forest scenery of the kind in Europe.

Some half a dozen miles above the town, almost at the head of the Kennet valley, stands the gigantic tumulus of Silbury — the largest in Europe. From its summit you look down upon what is left of the scarcely less wonderful

temple of Avebury. Before the once vast proportions of this ancient shrine the now more celebrated monuments of Stonehenge (twenty miles distant) shrink into an almost insignificant place. The local vandalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which built farm-houses and paved roads with these gray veterans of un- numbered years, is minutely chronicled. The process by which the vast stones were crumbled by fire into blocks suit- able for the new house of Farmer Green, or shivered into fragments for the new road to Farmer Browne's, can be read in detail by the curious.

This whole country, indeed, from Devizes to Marlborough, and fi'om Marlborough to the fir-crowned crests that look down upon the Pewsey vale, teems with imperishable records of an unknown age. Silbury and Avebury are but the centre of a host of lesser satellites. Turn almost where you will the grass-grown mounds of those mysterious days crown the summits of the lonely hills, and grey boulders clustered or piled in shapes uncanny lend terror in the rustic mind to many a lonely dell.

It is hard for an angler to say fare- well to the banks of the Kennet with- out a word as to the delights of that renowned stream. I use the word " renowned," of course in reference to initiated brothers of the angle only. I feel that I have already given a somewhat formidable list of possessions which are a source of honest pride to the people of Marlborough. It would never do, however, to forget the trout, for the Kennet is accredited in the most august angling quarters with the three largest English brook trout that have been placed on record — namely, a nine- teen and two seventeen pounders.1 That such leviathans are in the habit of lurking beneath the mill-dams, by which the infant Kennet descends by slow degrees from the hill of Silbury to the groves of Marlborough is not,

1 Within the last month a trout of 16| Ibs. has teen taken in the Kennet.

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I need hardly say, the case. As a matter of fact, however, the largest fish in a river celebrated for large fish, haunt these rich feeding grounds far up among the downs. But these four and five pounders are fat, lazy, and luxurious fellows, who scorn the efforts of the greatest expert to bring them to the top when such ample provision lies below. It is immediately below Marlborough — in the broader waters — that the angler who is privileged to do so most rejoices. There are people who cannot separate the habitat of the trout in their minds from the neigh- bourhood of beetling crags and rushing torrents, and are apt to speak even with contempt of the finny denizen of more homely scenes. The former sen- timent is of course only a matter of taste and habit. The latter would be returned with interest by your Kennet trout on the head of any uninitiated gentleman from the north or west, who came randomly nicking at him with a cast full of flies. The clear slow stream in which the veteran two pounder lies eying the surrounding landscape with eagle glance, is a differ- ent field of attack from the whirling tail of a mountain pool alive with three ouncers. Let the surface of the stream be churned into mimic waves

by the western breeze, let the willows'

" Whistling lashes, wrung By the wild winds of gusty spring,"

whiten against a background of sun- less sky — then, if it is late enough in the season, almost any one can at least hook trout upon the Kennet.

But in the still summer days, when no air is stirring, or only light puffs that barely shake the bulrushes ; when the sun is shining bright, and the feeding fish can be seen trailing their long length above the streaming weeds twenty yards away — then it requires something more than a slayer of Devonshire doyens to drop a sedge fly again and again lightly above that wily fellow's nose, so that it floats with dry wings and life-like look across his vision. And if he should be good enough to accept the snare, what a five minutes ensues ! what a leap- ing and splashing and whizzing of reels ! what moments of breathless suspense, as desperate rushes for banks of weeds or roots of trees have to be stopped by an absolute reliance on the strength of the thin gut ! what triumph and relief as at last he measures his bright length on the grass ! and scales a pound and three quarters.

A. G. BRADLEY.

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INTERNATIONAL CO-OPERATION IN SCANDINAVIA.

"THERE never was a time," a pessi- mist might say, " in which the so-called civilised nations of Europe were more cynical than now in their strivings to- wards self-aggrandisement. The old political doctrine of the balance of power had at least sometimes the effect of a principle of protection to- wards the weak. The eighteenth century would not have allowed the tearing asunder of little Denmark on so false a pretence that the jurists of Prussia afterwards solemnly pro- nounced their sovereign to be entitled to Schleswig - Holstein, because the King of Denmark, whom he had robbed of the Duchies, had been their rightful owner. The snappings and snarlings of the so-called great powers over sick Turkey are as those of beasts of prey over a wounded ox or camel. Any pretext is good for Russia towards swallowing up a Central- Asian Khanate ; or for France to appropriate Tunis, or Tonquin, or Madagascar ; whilst Italy will yelp like a discontented jackal when mightier claws than hers carry off the prey before her eyes. And look at Africa or the Pacific. The eigh- teenth century stole the black man from his country ; the nineteenth steals his country alike from black, brown, and yellow. Was there any- thing ever more shameless than the scramble which we have just witnessed between a few European powers for every foot of coast which the African dared yet to call his own? unless it be that Congo Treaty, by which a number of powers — all but one pro- tectionist at home — combine to force free- trade on poor savages ? We may pharisaically flatter ourselves that we are better than our neighbours. But what power ever displayed such in-

sanity of insolence as we in the second Afghan War? In breaking up the Zulu monarchy have we done any- thing but enlarge the sphere of anarchy in South Africa 1 Did Russia or France ever commit such folly as Englishmen when the loyal Basutos were driven into rebellion and crushed with dynamite for the sake of a petty tax 1 Did we do more mischief by seizing the Transvaal, or by giving it up ? Can any human creature under- stand what we have done, are doing, or are about to do in Egypt ? What we have been doing in the Soudan — butchering in their own country tribes whom we at the same time declared to have a full right to it ; wasting the precious lives of our own countrymen for a purpose which, since the death of Gordon, was altogether spent and gone 1 "

" E pur si miiove," might another answer. "The death-throes of the old order are the birth -throes of the new. Side by side with all this snatching and grabbing, these no doubt cynical and shameless out- bursts of national rapacity, there is at the same time a growing tendency among the nations towards concert in matters of common interest. The era of separate treaties between two or three states for offensive or defensive purposes has well-nigh passed away. The era of Conventions among large numbers of states for the settlement of particular details of national life is setting-in more and more. Look at our Postal and Telegraph Conventions. Do you suppose that Aristotle, with all his wisdom, would have been able even to conceive of such a thing as that, by common agreement between nation and nation, a letter should travel safely, regularly, day by day,

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not only through all the world as known to him, but from America, a continent which he had never heard of, to Japan, islands which he had heard of as little ? or yet that money should be paid by the official of one country on the direction of an official, wholly unknown to him personally, in another country thousands of miles away ? The Monetary Convention among the Latin nations is no less remarkable. The Congo Conference, and the rules laid down for occupa- tion and protectorates in Africa, what- ever the natives may have to say against them, show again this wonder- ful tendency towards European con- cert. The late Sanitary Conference in Rome represents another attempt, though not apparently a very success- ful one, in the same direction. The International Control in Egypt, to whatever extent exercised, and how- ever little we may nationally relish it, represents another step out of mere self-willed national individualism. The time is probably not far distant when the nations of Europe will be compelled in self-defence to agree upon common measures against dynamite and its congeners. Opportunity may very likely be taken to transform the numberless extradition treaties be- tween state and state into a general International Convention. The De- claration of Paris, the Geneva Con- vention, exhibit the sense of the necessity of concert to mitigate war's horrors. Switzerland has already taken the lead, though unsuccessfully as yet, in proposing an International Convention for mitigating the evils of the social warfare of competition by fixing the hours of labour."

And now from Northern Europe have come attempts in an entirely new direction towards what may be called International Co-operation, in the shape of a " draft of a law on registers of trades, firms, and pro- curations, prepared by the Danish- Swedish - Norwegian Commission " x

1 Udkast til lov om Handelsregistre, Firma log Prokura, udarbeitet of de Dansk- Norsk-

(composed of six members, two from each country)— -a law, be it understood, which, with occasional agreed-upon modifications to suit the circumstances of each country, is proposed to be put in force in all three. It is not, indeed, the first step of the kind. As far back as 1877, a Joint Commission was appointed to prepare a law on bills of exchange and promissory notes, which became law in all three kingdoms in 1880. The present Commission has already (in 1882) prepared a law for the common protection of trade-marks in the three kingdoms, which has been enacted in Sweden and Norway, but not yet, owing to political dissensions, in Denmark. The present Report of the Commission, dated November 22nd, 1884, contains, besides the pro- posed law itself, an "Expose de Motifs" in Danish and Swedish, and a long appendix containing a digest of the law of foreign countries on the sub- ject, prepared by the Secretary of the Commission, Mr. V. C. Thomson, a young Danish official, who, during a visit which he paid to this country in the year 1883, impressed all those who met him with a sense of his marked ability.

Now, let it be observed, that this International Scandinavian Commis- sion has pursued and carried to an end its peaceful labours, while two out of the three nations represented upon it were being subjected to the gravest national crises — whilst the Norwegian ministry were being im- peached and found guilty, and during that yet pending struggle in Denmark between the crown and the Folksthing which probably nothing but the per- sonal popularity of the sovereign has prevented from breaking out into open violence. Yet whilst either country might seem on the edge of revolution, its jurists were quietly carrying on a work which essentially

Svcnske Kommitterede. — Forslag till lag an- gaende Handclsregister, Firma oeh Procura, ittarbitadt af de Damk- Norsk- Svenske Komi- tcrade. Stockholm. 1884.

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belongs to peace, and implies trust in the mutual amity of nations.1

The special provisions of the draft law (or, as we should call it, Bill — though there appears to be no doubt that it will pass into law in all three countries) are of course of much less importance than the fact of its pre- paration, although the subject is one of interest both to traders and to students of comparative jurisprudence.

That registration of firms, which in England has been so long called for and never yet carried out, our Scandi- navian cousins are prepared to esta- blish by common agreement in all their three kingdoms. The Bill provides in the first place for the establishment of district registers, for the insertion by the registrar in certain newspapers of a notice of all matters entered on the register, and the publication of a general abstract and annual index. Every person or partnership carrying on certain specified trades (which ap- pear, however, only to exclude com- panies established by statute, mere handicrafts, and those who carry on a trade subject to laws answering to our Workshop and Factory Acts) is bound to send to the registrar con- cerned a memorandum, specifying the name or firm in which the trade is carried on. It is, very wisely, pro- vided that the designation of any single trader should contain his own name, and should not contain anything leading to the inference that the con- cern is that of a partnership. The firm of a partnership proper, again, must contain the name or names of one or more partners responsible for the liabilities, with something added, in the event of there being partners with limited liability, to indicate the existence of such. Lastly, the desig- nation of a company with limited liability should either contain no in-

1 There has been, indeed, also appointed a third Joint Commission with the more ambi- tious object of preparing a Scandinavian Maritime Code, but it does not appear to have made much progress as yet in fulfilling its task.

dividual name, or if it contains such, must contain something to indicate that it is a limited company (a few exceptions are allowed for the sake of preserving old-established names). Any person, partnership, or company whose name has been duly registered acquires the exclusive right to the same, within certain local limits. The form of the memorandum and its con- tents are next fixed, for the different cases of a single trader, a partnership proper, a commandite partnership, a company limited by shares, or any other company with limited liability ; the object being that the register should show clearly who is responsible for the engagements of the concern, and in what manner, and who is en- titled to enter into contracts. Notice is required to be sent to the registrar of any change taking place in any of the particulars registered. Every person authorised to sign for a firm or concern is required either to sign on the register the official trade signa- ture, or to send it to the registrar, duly verified. The register is made primd facie notice to all persons of all matters entered in it, subject to proof that a person could not possibly be cognisant of the particular matter. The Bill then goes on to regulate com- mercial procurations, and to provide for registering such, as well as all revocations of the same. Fees and matters of procedure are also regu- lated.

" A very small matter after all," some may say. To which it may be an- swered in the first instance : " Nothing is really small, from a European point of view, which tends to bring closer together the Scandinavian kingdoms. A strong, united — not unified — Scan- dinavia, holding with a firm hand the keys of the Baltic, penning up Russia, capable of holding Germany in check, would be one of the most powerful factors in the maintenance of Euro- pean peace ; more especially if at some future time the ' rising nationality ' of Finland were able to enter the union on equal terms. What can do

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more to promote such union than unity of legislation, worked out by the com- mon deliberations of the representa- tives of all three kingdoms ? "

But it is chiefly as an example that the work of the Scandinavian jurists is of promise to the world. There is not the least reason why what has been done in the three northern king- doms should not be done in any three other states, or any thirty. Viewing law as the rules under which mankind do their work, it cannot but be con- ducive to the intercourse of men among themselves that trade should be car- ried on under the same rules in as many countries as possible. The joint legislation in Scandinavia on some particular matters of trade thus leads up to the idea of a common com- mercial code, not only for Scandinavia, but for civilised nations generally. And the idea of such a code is already in the air. It is to be seriously dis- cussed this very autumn, at an inter- ternational congress to be held in Brussels. Should an agreement be come to and bear fruit, the time may be when the year 1885 will be re- membered, not for any slaughter of men that may have taken place in the Soudan or in Central Asia, in Tonquin, Madagascar, Central America — not for the downfall of a French Cabinet or an English Redistribution of Seats Act, but for the birth of an international commercial code. And with the story of that birth, the fact of joint legis- lation in Scandinavia on certain points of commercial law will be inseparably connected.

" As if trade," growls again the pessimist, "were itself anything but warfare between trader and trader ! As if half, at least, of all the actual wars that have ever taken place had not had trade either for an open pre- text, or for a secret cause ! As if the most commercial nations, from the days of Carthage downwards, had not been engaged in the most bloody wars ! As if the vast development of modern commerce had not been accompanied pari passu — nay, outstripped, by the

development of the means of destroy- ing human life ! Much less than half a century ago, there were fools who saw in the Hyde Park International Exhibition of 1851 the forerunner of the millennium. Where was the peace-making power of trade when the ' stars and stripes ' were rent from top to bottom by the "War of Secession ? Where was it, when Para- guay was virtually blotted out from the list of nations by the coalition of two republics and an empire ? Where was it during the Franco-German war 1 Where was it when the Paris Com- mune gave to the world the hideous spectacle of a nation lacerating itself with its own hands beneath the mock- ing eyes of an enemy encamped before its capital? Where is it now, when England and Russia are all but flying at each other's throats for the sake of a strip of virtual desert1? Where is it, when meanwhile every capital in Europe feels itself secretly but con- tinuously threatened by a few hand- fuls of desperadoes, who literally glory in having anarchy for an object ? "

Most assuredly, so far as trade is mere competition, it never will help to put down warfare, for it is nothing else. And that is why no International Exhibition can ever hold the promise which some have seen in it. It is no- thing if it is not competitive. The exhi- bitor's main hope is, by the excellence or the cheapness — real or apparent — of his own wares, to drive his rivals out of the market, which he either pos- sesses or seeks to appropriate. But international agreements for the regu- lation of trade stand on a wholly different footing. These represent the co-operative, not the competitive side of trade, the side by which it ex- hibits itself to us, not as the selfish striving of the individual to draw money into his own out of other men's pockets — or it may be only waistbands — but as the orderly inter- change of services and commodities between man and man, nation and nation. When traders ask for or ac- cept a law on trade- marks, that means

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that they agree, for the benefit of all, that none should palm off his own goods as those of another. When they ask for or accept a law for the registration of firms, that means that they agree, for the benefit of all, that a creditor should know precisely whom he is dealing with, should feel certain that his money will not vanish away into the pockets of some unidentifiable nominis umbra. When such laws are made international, that means that the fair dealing which they seek to secure from man to man, is extended from country to country. Compare such international agreements with the old commercial treaties, and you will see that they belong to a different moral world. The old commercial treaty aims simply at securing to the subjects of the one contracting power as against all the world besides, cer- tain advantages either exclusive, or at all events special, in dealing with the subjects of the other contracting power. In the new international

agreements there is nothing antago- nistic to any nation. On the con- trary, it is to the interest of every contracting power that as many other states as possible should enter into the same compact of fair dealing ; and at the same time the whole world is bene- fited, although the compact should be confined to two or three. For the practice of righteousness between man and man is a common human in- terest, and international agreements to secure that righteousness are the recognition that it is such.

Hence it is no anti-climax to say that a modest little Scandinavian law, with what may unfold itself out of it, may be of more weight ultimately in the history of the world than all the more stirring events of its time. To the eye that can see, it bears witness that — quarrel and fight as they may — an unseen force, mightier than artillery or ironclads, than nitro-glycerine or panclastite, is drawing the nations to- gether for their good.

204

FROM MONTEVIDEO TO PARAGUAY.

II.

THE neighbourhood of Asuncion is not ill-described by C. B. Mansfield in a letter dated from Asuncion thirty -three years ago, but which might, for correctness in what it states, have been written yesterday. "The country," says Charles Kings- ley's friend, "round the town is the very perfection of quiet, rural beauty ; the scenery has the beauty of some of the prettiest parts of England, en- hanced by the richness of the verdure of the palm-trees, with which the whole country is studded. The great- est part of the country here seems to have been originally covered with wood, a good deal of which still re- mains ; but now its general aspect is one of tolerably industrious cultiva- tion. The cultivated land is all divided into fenced fields, wherein grow maize, manioca, and sugar-cane ; and the cottages dotted about com- plete the pleasantness of the aspect of nature. There are roads in every direction, not kept in first-rate con- dition, but still decently good ; the cross-roads, which are not so much worked, are beautiful green lanes, or rather lawns, for they are often of considerable width, and for the most part perfectly straight. In some places the country presents the appearance of a splendid park, stud- ded with rich coppices, &c." To which, if we add a diminutive race- course, situated in a kind of public garden, and several pretty " quintas," or country-villas, of the same Pom- peii-like construction as those of Montevideo, but larger, and less ela- borately furnished, and a few tenta- tive plantations of coffee, not likely, I think, to come to much in this extra-tropical climate, we have a tolerable general likeness of the

suburban surroundings of the capital of Paraguay.

It is here, nor could it be otherwise, in the capital, here in the chief resort of traffic and strangers, that the fatal contagion of a mimic Europeanism, the mania for discarding whatever is not in accordance with the stereo- typed monotony and tasteless con- ventionalism of Boulevard or Fifth Avenue existence, the blight that, like Tennyson's "vapour, heavy, hue- less, formless, cold," creeps on with Western-European intercourse over land after land, withering up and ob- literating in its advance all individual or local colour, form, beauty, life ; this pseudo-civilisation or progress, by whatever name it be called, has done most to obliterate the national and characteristic features of the Para- guayan race, and to substitute for them the servile imitation of affected cosmopolitanism and denationalised uniformity. Happily the evil has but partially and superficially infected Asuncion itself as yet ; while beyond its radius, and the actual line of the Paraguari railway, life in the bulk of Paraguay, and life's accessories, differ but little, if at all, from what they were and have ever been from the first days of the compound nationality, down to the constituent assembly of 1870. Long may they remain so.

But an up-country journey in Paraguay, let us own, has its difficul- ties ; many of them, indeed, relative merely, or imaginary — others real and positive enough. The latter are to be summed up chiefly, if not wholly, in the want of organised inter- communi- cation, both in regard of roads and conveyances, between district and dis- trict ; a terrible want, which the vigorous administration of the Lopez

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dynasty had already done something to remedy, but which long war and succeeding desolation have renewed and intensified by destroying what- ever that ill-fated family had organised or constructed. Bad inns, or none, and in their defect a copious and freely-offered hospitality, which, how- ever, of necessity, supposes in those who accept it a readiness to be con- tent with Paraguayan fare and lodging such as is rarely found among the " fat and greasy citizens " of European or even South American towns ; hot suns, frequent thunder-showers, rough way- tracks, streams to be swum or forded, mosquitoes, foot-perforating chigoes, here called " piques " — though these are of such rare occurrence as to be- long rather to the purely imaginary catalogue of disagreeables — and other insects ; and last, not least, difficulty of converse with a population to which Guarani, or " Indian," is much more familiar than Spanish. Such are what may be called " relative " obstacles, things to be accounted or disregarded by the traveller according to his own individual acquirements and idiosyn- crasies ; while lions, tigers, alligators, wild Indians, poisoned arrows, &c., however terrible in the lively fancy of many narrators, may be safely classed among imaginary perils. Lions, that is pumas ; tigers, that is leopards ; Indians more or less wild, poisoned arrows too, exist, doubtless, in the mountains and among the deep forests of Paraguay, but of these, and such as these, the traveller, so long as he keeps to the inhabited districts, or, if beyond their limits, to the ordinary routes of transit, will hear little, and see less.

Still the negative difficulties — want of means of conveyance, want of roads, want of occasional interpreters, want of sufficient lodging — have, each in some measure and degree, to be taken into account ; and against these the Asuncion administration, with the true courtesy and hospitable liberality of Paraguayan tradition, hastened to provide on my behalf. An officer, well acquainted with the country, a soldier

for attendant, and three good horses, were placed at my disposition for the proposed journey, and a programme, or carte de voyage, was supplied, of a nature calculated to make me acquainted with as much as circumstances might allow of village life and land.

Having but a short time, barely four weeks in fact, at my disposal, I determined, at the advice of my kind hosts, to select for my visit what I may best summarily designate as the south-centre of the country ; a district of hill and dale, rivers and lakes, thickly — for Paraguay, that is — set with villages, and having on its east the high forest-clad mountain ranges, beyond which flows the Parana, here the frontier of Brazil ; on the south the rich plains and reedy marsh-lands of the province of Misiones, so named from the well-known Jesuit missions of former times, which here attained their fullest development; northward the successive hill ranges and wide mate plantations of Upper Para- guay ; west, a low screen of broken ground and copse, behind which flows the great river that gives its name to all the rest. After which geographi- cal outline, I will only add, by way of general description, that if any of my readers have had the good fortune to visit beautiful Auvergne, in Central France, and the scarce less beautiful Eifel district by the Moselle, they may, by blending the chief topo- graphical characteristics of these two, clothing the surface of hill and dale with the graceful yet vigorous growths of a half-tropical vegetation, and over- arching the whole with a sky borrowed from Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne — a sky, pace even Mr. Ruskin, by no means " impossible " in Paraguay, though I can well believe it so in Western Europe, — having done this, I say, they will have before their mind's eye at all events a tolerable likeness of the country I would gladly sketch, though I cannot worthily paint.

One name, judiciously selected from among the rest, may often serve

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From Montevideo to Paraguay.

as a peg whereon to hang a whole chain of ideas, or, if the comparison be preferred, as a centre round which the vagueness of general description may crystallise into definite form. A secret of mental chemistry well known to poets ; few readers of the Paradise Lost have, probably, hunted out " Imans " on the map, yet all have the picture of Milton's mountain- dwelling vulture distinct in their imagination ; nor is it for nothing that the " sons of Eden " were inha- bitants of " Telassar," though I have not been able to discover the where- abouts in any atlas-index as yet. But we all feel that a place with such a name must have been worthy of the race. For us, wanderers in an else unlocalised region, the mountain of Akai shall serve our turn.

The word itself, in aboriginal Guarani, means " burning " or " con- flagration ; " and the mountain that bears it is a water- formed mass of comparatively recent volcanic debris, situated in the midst of a region studded with at least a dozen smaller lava-cones, over which Akai towers to a height of 2,000 feet and more. Its abrupt sides, partly clothed with patches of thorny brushwood, partly bare, are made up of loose masses of laterite and volcanic tufa, among which huge angles of harder lava project far out, rendering the ascent of the slope very difficult, indeed almost impractic- able ; while the few points at which an upward path, though no easier than " Tra Lerici a Turbia, lapiu diserta, La piu ruinita via " of Dante's experience, is yet possible, are guarded by colonies of wasps, the " Spanish soldiers " of the Antilles, long, gaunt, bronzed, vicious-looking creatures, df a tenaci- ously spiteful disposition, who have, for reasons best known to themselves, made of these rocky gullies their favourite homes, and resent intrusion. The peasants of the neighbourhood are, as a matter of course, little disposed to the labour — from their point of view a very unprofitable one— of scrambling up barren heights ; but some German

tourists had, I was informed, about two years before climbed the mountain, and, on their re-descent reported a large and well-defined crater at the summit, long since, it seemed, quiescent, and strewed at the bottom with a heavy metallic-looking kind of sand, whereof they brought back with them a sample. This, for whatever cause, they left in a house of the village, close by, where I saw and, so far as I could, examined it ; finding it in the result identical with the Sicilian Palagonite described by Lyell in his Elements of Geology. That volcanic energy is still at work within, or, more probably, at some depth below the mountain, though of active eruption no record survives in that most brief and inaccurate chronicle termed " human memory," this narrative as it proceeds will sufficiently show.

Round Akai the soil, deep furrowed with rain-torrents, is almost exclu- sively composed of volcanic ash and decomposed lava, reminding me not a little of the neighbourhood of " Aghri Dagh," or Mount Argaeus, in Csesarea, of Asia Minor, like that region too in its wonderful fertility, almost, though not quite, rivalling the prodigal luxuri- ance of plantation, field and grove at the base of the ever-burning Mayon pyramid in Philippine Albay. Most of the ground-springs hereabouts — and if each of them has a naiad of its own, the country must be thickly peopled with the daughters of Zeus — are ferruginous, some strongly so ; thermal springs too were reported to me, but with the true vagueness of localization proper to the Hodges of every land and country, nor did I myself come across any.

It is just a short half-hour before sunset, and a large yellow moon, nearly full — for it is the thirteenth or four- teenth day of the lunation — balances on the east the yet larger orb of clear gold now near the western margin, while our party, some seven in all, myself, my military escort, and four chance companions of the road-side, ride our unkempt, but clean-limbed,

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spirited, and much enduring Para- guayan nags into the village of .... I have my motives for not giving the name. We are all of us, the riders at least, well-tired, for the afternoon has been intensely hot, and we have come from far. Paraguayan villages, or country towns if you choose, though perhaps the title of " town " should be reserved to such as are the residence of a " Jefe Politico," or sheriff of the county, are all, large or small, much of a pattern ; and that, in its general outlines, a Spanish one. Central is a large open grass-plot or square, and in the midst of that again the church, 'a barn-like building, utterly plain out- side ; the ornament within is of wood- work, sometimes very old and curiously carved ; painting — if there be any — is of the crudest ; occasionally relieved by dingy silver ornament, recalling Byzantine or Armenian reminiscences, an unartistic whole. Whatever may have been the case in the days of clerical or Jesuitical leadership, religion has long since ceased to be the central occupation of the Paraguayan mind. It is, now at all events, an accessory, rather than a principle, of life, nor, I am inclined to think, was it ever, in spite of outward and, to a certain extent constrained appearances, anything more among the Guaranis. Yet so far as it goes it is quite genuine, and its influence beneficial, much in the same degree, and to the same result, as Buddhism in Burmah or Siam. Happily too it is here, as there, practically undisturbed either by missionary meddling on the one hand, or anti-clerical fanaticism on the other.

Close by the church is the bell- tower, square, and, with its cage-like wooden upper-story, twice the height of the building or more. In this land of electricity, for such is the entire Paraguay, Parana, and La Plata valley from Asuncion to Montevideo, that belfries should be often struck by lightning need excite no surprise. Jove of old had a noted predilection for thus demolishing his own temples ;

perhaps he remembered Semele. Next to a belfry, the most frequent victim — sadly frequent indeed — of a thunder- bolt in Paraguay is a white horse, its rider included ; not only did I hear of many such catastrophes, but one actually happened, the human victim being a widow's son of eighteen or thereabouts, close by a village where I was taking shelter during the storm. Should a dog, as is very generally the case, be of the party, it escapes unhurt. Of all which I can suggest no explana- tion ; doubtless it is " for the best," nor do the Paraguayans, a very practical race, greatly vex their souls about that over which they have no control.

The houses that make up the square itself, are all one-storied cottages, in English nomenclature, but with several rooms inside, and almost invariably fronted by a verandah — good shelter against sun or rain ; the roof is of thatch ; the flooring of trodden earth, and scrupulously clean. Cleanliness is the rule in Paraguay, and it extends to everything, dwellings, furniture, clothes, and person, nor are the poorer classes in this respect a whit behind the richer. Above all, the white sacques and mantillas of the women, and the lace-fringed shirts and drawers of the men, are scrupulously clean ; nor is any one article in greater demand, though fortunately with pro- portional supply, throughout the country than soap. But to return to the village itself. Each house has behind it a garden, small or large as the case may be, in which flowers are sedulously cultivated : they are a decoration that a Paraguayan girl or woman is rarely without, and one that becomes the wearer well. Without pretensions 'to what is called clas- sical or, ethnologically taken, Aryan beauty, the female type here is very rarely plain, generally pretty, often handsome, occasionally bewitching. Dark eyes, long, wavy, dark hair, and a brunette complexion do most prevail ; but a blonde type, with blue eyes and golden curls, indicative of Basque descent, are by no means rare. Hands

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From Montevideo to Paraguay.

and feet are, almost universally, delicate and small ; the general form, at least till frequent maternity has sacrificed beauty to usefulness, simply perfect ; as to the dispositions that dwell in so excellent an outside, they are worthy of it ; and Shakespeare's "Is she kind as she is fair?" might here find unhesitating answer in the affirmation that follows, " Beauty dwells with kindness." A brighter, kinder, truer, more affectionate, more devotedly faithful girl than the Paraguayan exists nowhere. Alas that the wretched experiences of but a few years since should have also proved, in bitter earnest, that no braver, no more enduring, no more self-sacrificing wife or mother than the Paraguayan is to be found either !

My readers will, I am sure, pardon this digression. Let us back to our village ; and first of all, as in duty bound, to the " Jefatura " or govern- ment house ; in general appearance and architecture no way differing from the dwellings to its right and left, except that it is less subdivided internally, and consists of only one or two large apartments; to which sometimes a lock-up with a pair of stocks in it for minor offenders is added. Criminals are sent under guard to Asuncion. But crime is rare in Paraguay ; though petty larcenies, and some trifling offences against village decorum and law are not in- frequent. The authority of the " Jefe " or sheriff, is chiefly that of a police magistrate ; though a general superin- tendence of roads and bridges, or, to speak more exactly, of where roads and bridges were or ought to be, but in the present poverty of the land are not, falls also within his depart- ment. " Evidently these Guarani- Vasco Paraguayans have, like their Malay half-cousins a wonderful talent for quiet self-government, and little need of state-machinery or official direction and control," was a reflection forced on me by what I heard or saw at every step of my journey, but not least when visiting the sanctuaries

themselves of provincial authority or law.

Prefect, commissioner, judge, and so forth, have each of them his private and family dwelling somewhere else in the square. An omnium-gatherum shop or store, combining ironmongery, drapery, grocery, liquor, dry goods, toys, everything useful or, in its degree, ornamental, is sure to occupy a much-frequented corner — it is certain to be kept, not by a Paraguayan, but a foreigner ; generally an Italian, some- times a Spaniard or a Corrientino. Indeed, of such shops the larger villages Boast up to three or more. Adjoining the principle square may be a second, of which the central object is an open, wood-supported shed with a raised floor, doing duty as market-place, whither meat, fish, vegetables, and so forth are brought for sale ; or this useful construction may be situated in a straggling, irregular street, which in such case forms the backbone of the village. Somewhere in the neighbour- hood is the public burying-ground, sur- rounded by a wall, and with a large wooden cross in the centre ; monuments or inscriptions denoting the stories of the several dead are, I think, unknown.

We have made for the prefect or sheriff's house, and have, by his readily- given invitation, alighted in front of the door. A further invitation, to enter the house, is temporarily declined in favour of the lovely evening out- side ; and we seat ourselves in the verandah, looking out on the open square before us, and over its low roof-lines on a fringe of palm and orange-groves, above which, in the dark purple shadows of a deepening twilight, rises the serrated range of Akai, some fifteen or twenty miles distant. But our attention is first claimed for the Alpha, though by no means the Omega, of Paraguayan hospitality, the national mate. What coffee is among the Arabs, tea among the Japanese, that or more is mate to the Paraguayans, and, I may add from my experience of all three, to their guests.

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True, the word mate though commonly used by Europeans, and even occasionally by South- Americans, to designate the drink itself, is a mis- nomer ; its proper signification being the small, dry, oblong gourd, generally dyed black, and sometimes compelled by bandaging, while yet green, to assume a fantastic shape, out of which the infusion of the "yerva" itself, or " Paraguayan tea " is taken. The leaves of this tea plant, if an ilex may so be denominated, are gathered amid the wide plantations of its growth on the borders of, or within the tropics of, Northern Paraguay, and having been dried by a careful and elaborate process, of which, not having myself witnessed it, I omit the description, are reduced to a coarse, light -green powder. With this the gourd, or mate is more than half-filled, and hot or boiling water poured in upon it. Almost ^immediately afterwards, with as little time left for " standing " as may be, it is presented to the drinker, who imbibes it through a silver tube, plain or ornamented, from eight to ten inches in length ; one extremity is somewhat flattened for convenience of suction, the other expands into a bulb, or bombilla, pierced with small holes, which acts as a strainer to the liquid in which it is immersed. The servant who has brought it stands by waiting till the infusion has been drawn out, when he goes to refill it, and returns to present the apparatus to the next of the com- pany in turn, and so on, till after two or three rounds a " £asta," " enough," or " Gracias," " thanks," gives the signal for its final removal.

Taken by itself and unsweetened — for those who add sugar to it, or, yet worse profanation, milk, put them- selves merely out of court, as incapa- ble of appreciating its merits — this drink is of all light and refreshing tonics that I know, Arabian coffee itself hardly excepted, the pleasantest and the most effective. The taste is aromatic and slightly bitter, not much unlike good Japanese tea. But rightly

No. 309.— VOL. LII.

to esteem and enjoy it, one should have^earned it by a long day's ride, in a sub-tropical sun, and drink it re- posing in the cool shade, to feel fatigue pass into memory only, and vigour return with rest to every limb.

Meanwhile, others of the village magnates have come up to salute the new arrivals, and talk, occasionally in Spanish for the benefit of the strangers, more often in Guarani when between the Paraguayans themselves, is freely entered on. Though cautious, and wonderfully secretive where secrecy befits, a Paraguayan is by nature cheerful and even open, fond of a jest, a laugh ; free, in a degree I have seldom met among the natives of any other land, European or not, from prejudice or antecedent ill opinion ; free too from shyness or any constraint except that of inbred courtesy and manly self-respect ; slow to give his entire trust ; slow to distrust also. Hence his acquaintance is easily made, and often ripens into real friendship. The expansive part of his nature may, probably, be due to Yasconian, Astu- rian, or Cantabrian descent, the more cautious and self-contained to Indian ; his courage and endurance to both.

Slight as is my knowledge of the Guarani language, my readers may perhaps care to hear the little I have been able to ascertain about it, more by practice than by set study, by ear than by books. Spoken in one dialect or another over the entire eastern half of South America, Uruguay (whence every vestige of its Indian occupants, the brave Charruas, has unfortunately disappeared) being the only terri- torial exception, Guarani belongs to the yet wider-spread polysynthetic language-system, common to every in- digenous American race, north, central, or south .from Alaska to Patagonia. How far this system, with the almost countless dialects comprehended in it, stands out, in Mr. Keane's words, as " radically distinct from all other forms of speech," I cannot say. In Guarani, at all events, the amount of

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permutation, elimination, or aggluti- nation of consonants or syllables, affixes and particles, is not more irregular, hardly even more complex than in old-Turkish, or Japanese. Where no native system of written characters exists, it is of course free to a stranger, employing his own alphabetic symbols, to run together as many words as he pleases into one ; in pronunciation Guarani words are dis- tinct enough and strongly accentuated, most often on the last syllable. Of gutturals there is a moderate, of nasals a more liberal allowance ; in copious- ness of vowels Guarani hardly yields to Italian itself. Lastly it is a pleasant language to the ear, and easily picked up, as the facility with which English, Germans, and other strangers acquire it sufficiently proves. Whether, however, the speech itself be autocthonous, as Mr. Keane opines, or derive a trans-oceanic origin from some far back Mongolian or Turanian stock, no one acquainted with Kalmuk or Nogai Tartars, or Tagal Malays on the one hand, and with pure-blooded Guarani-Indians on the other, can an instant doubt their community of race. It is not the complexion, the hair, the eyes, the general form of body and limb only that bear witness to as near an approach to identity, as long ages of diversity in climate and surround- ings can admit, but, more yet the sameness of mind, of moral standard, of dispositions and tendencies indivi- dual or collective, of family and social organisation, of ideas and beliefs, all of these strictly in accordance with those of the Mongolian branch of what Mr. Ferguson, with sufficient accuracy at least for our present purpose, deno- minates the " Turanian " .division of the human race. How the first Mon- golians— parents of the manifold " Red-Indian " families by whom the new world was over-spread — came to emigrate hither, at what epoch, by what route, in one band or in many, are questions little likely ever to be solved; monuments and tradition afford but confused and contradictory

hints at most ; and conjecture is not less idle than easy, to make. Nor, again, would a solution, even if absolutely negative, much affect the existing facts. Identity of nature is one thing, community of origin is another ; the beginnings of human existence are unknown, nor is the Darwinian theory of descent better supported by proof than the mythological ; nor does it appear why the same cause or causes, whatever it or they may be, which originated the Mongolian race in Asia should not, simultaneously or at a different period of our planet's exist- ence, have originated another race of mankind in America, identical or nearly so with the first, yet wholly independent of it in genealogical descent. Anyhow the resemblance is a certainty, though the " how " and " why " may be, and are 'likely ever to remain, uncertain and unknown.

Seated as we are in the verandah, and, by this time, a group of a dozen or more, including the head authori- ties of the district, besides others who are not authorities at all, but merely small farmers or peasants, the talk turns chiefly on local interests, agri- cultural topics, and the like ; the events of the capital and politics, generally so favourite a topic in many others of the South-American Re- publics, being here seldom discussed. The right to be well governed, the right to cultivate his own land, tend his own cattle, and to enjoy in peace the fruits of his labour, is the only right the Paraguayan greatly cares for ; what form of administration, what government, what party, what policy assure him these, he heeds very little. There is no content like that of a land-owning population ; and such from the highest to the lowest is the country population of Paraguay. Large estates are rare, and where they exist are cultivated by tenants whose fixity of possession is not less undis- puted than the general proprietorship of the owner in chief ; rent is paid in produce ; and the share retained by the actual cultivator of the land is in

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the fullest sense his own. It is a state of things in which wealth, as understood in Europe, is rare ; desti- tution, like that too frequent in many parts of Europe, unknown. The capi- talist is absent ; but his train, hired labour, eviction, landlessness, home- lessness, destitution, discontent, re- bellion, revolution, are absent too.

Politics, the occupation of the idle or the dissatisfied, being thus ignored, we have free leisure for the far more profitable, as also pleasanter topics of agriculture, its resources, its develop- ment, its prospects. I may as well here remark, once for all, that although both horses and cattle are reared to a considerable extent within the Para- guayan territory, yet the country neither ought to, nor can ever, become a cattle-breeding one in the sense of the vast pasture-lands of the South Argentine Confederation, or even of Southern and Western Uruguay. Here, between degrees 27°-22° of latitude, with an average yearly temperature somewhat above 70° F. ; and with pasture copious enough, but rank and overgrown — the consequence of a winterless climate — horned cattle can never attain, either in size or quality, to a successful competition with those reared in cooler lands ; while sheep, for whatever reason — the presence of a poisonous herb, called " mio-mio " among the grass, is often assigned as the cause, but it does not seem to me a wholly sufficient one — are as complete a failure here as in the Philippines or Japan. Horses breed well ; but except for local use are in little request ; besides, these two are better reared in the south. Mean- while the agricultural capabilities even of those districts hitherto in some measure set apart for pasture, are infinite, and the produce less liable to preponderant competition. Putting all which together it is clear that the Georgic of Paraguay must always be the first rather than the third of the Virgilian series.

In this Georgic three different kinds of cultivation take precedence as

capable of yielding the largest and most advantageous results : the sugar- cane, tobacco, and the "yerva" or Paraguayan tea. . Of these the first is grown extensively ; but, in the absence of fit machinery for extract- ing and ripening the sugar, " cana," or an inferior kind of rum, obtained by a coarse distillation of the unrefined molasses, is the principal result. The sugar-mills in use are small, and of the roughest kind, worked by hand or cattle, after a fashion that may still be seen in the small negro holdings of Dominica ; the boiling and cooling— - for crystallisation is, of course, out of the question — are equally primitive. Yet from the vigorous growth of the cane, and the amount of saccharine yielded, it is evident that the material exists for more profitable purposes ; and if the highly-perfected and costly sugar-factories of Martinique, of De- merara, be for the present beyond the means of Paraguay, there is no reason why the simpler yet sufficient methods successfully adopted in Barbados should not meet with equally good results here. The experiment would be worth the making ; the project is one I have often heard discussed among the peasantry, with much desire for its realisation.

But no subject is more popular, none more readily entered on, than the cultivation of tobacco. Much in- deed is actually grown in Paraguay, and the quality of the leaf is excel- lent, by no means, in my judgment, inferior to that of Cagayan, or, to give it its commercial title, of Manila itself. But the art of drying and pre- paring the leaf, no less than that of making it up, when prepared, into proper form, has yet to be learnt in Paraguay ; both processes are at pre- sent conducted in a very unsatisfactory and hap-hazard manner ; and the result is defective in proportion. Unseasoned, unprepared, unselected, badly dried, worse rolled, Paraguayan cigars only avail to tantalise the smoker with the suggested contrast of what they might be and what they are.

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I myself, for many decades of years a habitual smoker, could easily recog- nise at once the innate superiority of the wisp-like tobacco roll that no care availed to keep steadily alight for five minutes, over the elegant- looking Brazilian — labelled " Havana " — cigar in my pocket-case ; while painfully made aware at the same time of the artificial advantages that rendered the latter preferable for use to the former. The Government that shall introduce a few skilled operatives of the Arroceros factory and the Cagayan tobacco-plantations to teach, by ex- ample and practice, the arts of tobacco- growing and cigar-making to Para- guay will deserve a public memorial and a marble statue of the hand- somest in Asuncion, as a true bene- factor primarily of his country, and indirectly of South America, and the world at large. For what blessing can excel a good cigar ?

At present of all the "mystery," to use an old phrase, of tobacco grow- ing, no less than of that of cigar making, the Paraguayans, whose edu- cation in this really important regard has been sadly neglected, are practi- cally ignorant ; and many were the questions asked me about the cultiva- tion of the plant, the proper manuring of the soil, the harvesting and drying of the leaf, and so forth. For attached, and most justly so, as they are to their own country and its usages, they are by no means incu- rious as to what is done elsewhere, nor averse to adopt or copy what may be suited to their requirements. Nor are the Japanese themselves apter scholars to useful teaching; though, happily for the Paraguayans, the greater steadiness of their national character would hardly admit of the childish imitativeness and unwise parody that has so much damaged and perverted Japanese improvement of late years.

Of the " yerva" cultivation, for many generations the principal, almost the exclusive, source of Paraguayan re- venue, my village friends in the Akai district hvae not much to say. The Ilex

Paraguayensis is a shrub of tropical growth, and we are at present little north of lat. 25°. But I may here remark that the article itself, though still in considerable, is not in increas- ing request, rather the reverse ; partly because of the Europeanising mania widely diffused through the adjoining states, and which has included the use, once universal, of mate in its ana- thema of "uncivilised" pronounced on whatever is South American and is not Parisian, be it dress, usage, amusement, dance, music, or what- ever else ; and partly from the compe- tition of Argentine and Brazilian "yerva," both much inferior in strength and flavour to the Para- guayan, but also cheaper in their respective markets.

For my own part I do not see — climate, soil, and local conditions taken into account — why tea, so suc- cessfully cultivated in Northern India and, to a certain extent, in Japan, should not be introduced into, and thrive in, Paraguay also. Every favourable condition, every requisite, seems, to the best of my observation, to be present ; and were the experi- ment made, the chances of success are, I think, far greater than those of failure. I should recommend the hill- ranges — now coveredVith mere forest — towards the Brazilian frontier as fit ground for a first attempt. The ulti- mate result would probably be the substitution of tea plantation for that of "yerva" to a considerable extent, to the permanent advantage of the Paraguayan market at all events ; the ilex continuing to maintain itself, but on a diminished scale.

Maize, here no longer the stunted, small-eared plant that we see it in Italy or Southern Uruguay, but rivalling in luxuriance and produce the vigorous growths of the Trans- Caucasus and Asia Minor, is a favourite crop ; rice also, both the irrigated and the up- land variety. Both are pleasing to the eye, the dark glossy green of the Indian corn plant making an effective set-off to the bright emerald of the

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rice fields. But more graceful than either in form and shape of leaf, though duller in tint, is the "manioca," or, to give it the name best known to European commerce, "tapioca" herb, with its countless little domes of deli- cate leaves, each on its slender stalk ; the root, reduced into flour, is the staple food of the peasants, who make it up with sugar and yolk of egg into cakes and rolls, very nutritious, but some- what cloying to a foreign taste. A wider range of cultivation, such as, however, is at present beyond the reach of the half -re-peopled land, and a judicious use of the facilities given for washing the pulp by the lavish copiousness of pure running water in sources and streams throughout Para- guay, might easily make of tapioca an important item on the national export list. But oraDge trees and palms, both native growths, valuable for their pro- duce, though requiring hardly any care on the part of man, are of all others the distinctive features, the ornaments too, of a Paraguayan country land- scape, which, taken altogether, comes nearer to the ideal of a habitable Eden, a paradise adapted to man as he is, in this working-day existence of our race, than any other region it has been my fortune to visit in the old world or the new.

Much might be added to the agri- cultural list just given, but those mentioned are the foremost in interest to the children of the soil. Or perhaps our conversation — for supper is not yet ready, and the tempered coolness of the evening invites us to prolong our out-of-doors soiree — wanders to the minerals of the land, unexplored as yet to any serious purpose, though the frequency of chalybeate waters testifies to the abundance of iron in the soil ; copper, too, is often met with; gold and silver are talked of, but, fortunately perhaps for the country, little verified. Marbles of every kind, the pure white excepted, could be, but seldom are, quarried in the hills ; porcelain clay abounds, and finds partial use.

The best product, however, of Para- guay, and that without which all the rest, however varied and precious, would be of little avail, is, to borrow Blake's strangely significant phrase, the "human abstract." That "the Paraguayans are a lazy lot ; " that " the men in Paraguay do nothing — all the work is done by women ; " that the said men "pass their time in drinking mate, smoking cigars, eating, and sleeping ; " nay, that "there are hardly any men in Para- guay, nine-tenths of the population being female," with the not illogical corollary, to which I regret to see that Mr. Bates has, in his Central and South America, lent the sanction of his high authority, that everything everywhere " in this unfortunate country " is in " a state of complete demoralisation," I had heard repeated usque ad satietatem by Europeans and Americans alike — both, in most in- stances, absolutely guiltless of any personal experience of Paraguay, or having passed a few days in a hotel at Asuncion at most — before I made my own visit to that country. Hear- ing, I, of course, neither believed nor disbelieved, but waited the surer evi- dence of presence and sight. How far these last confirmed or contra- dicted the evil report brought up by others on the land, my readers will, if I have written to any purpose, sufficiently apprehend. In few words, then, the men and women, both of them, and either class within its proper limits of occupation, through- out Paraguay, are as industrious, hard-working, diligent, painstaking, persevering a folk as any I know of ; nor are the women more so than the men, nor the men than the women. Of course the traveller will, in the villages, see more of the female than of the male sex, because the former, very naturally, stays more at home, the latter is more scattered abroad. That, when resting, men, and women too, drink a good deal of mate, or " yerva " rather, I quite admit, but not so much by near as North Euro

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From. Montevideo to Paraguay.

peans do beer and gin, or South Europeans wine ; and the Paraguayan drink is, at any rate, not the most harmful on the list. In eating they are assuredly very moderate and simple ; that they often take a nap at noon is the necessary result of very •early rising, a hot sun by day, and late hours — these, too, the consequence of climate and the delicious night tem- perature to follow. As to " complete demoralisation " what the phrase may mean in a country where crime is almost unknown, violence unheard of, where the sacredness of a plighted word habitually dispenses with the ne- cessity or even the thought of a written bond, where the conjugal fidelity of the women is such as to be in a manner proverbial, and family ties are as binding as in China itself, where sedition does not exist, vendetta has no place, and every one minds his own business and that of his family with- out interfering with his neighbours or the public order and law, I am at an utter loss to comprehend. But if this state of things — and it is that of Paraguay at large — be "demoralisa- tion," I can only wish that many other countries that I know of, not to mention my own, were equally de- moralised too.

Not, however, that all is the Byronic "old Saturn's reign of sugar-candy," even in Paraguay. For though poli- tics, in the generally accepted sense of the word, rarely find place among the preoccupations of a Paraguayan landowner — and all the inhabitants here are landowners, some greater, some less— it cannot be supposed that past revolutions, changes of rulers and governments, a wasting war, a hostile occupation, years of such utter desola- tion that the nation seemed not pros- trate merely but destroyed, have not left behind them memories of bitter- ness, local and family feuds, party watchwords, party hates. To define or explain these would be to retrace the entire history of the state for at least a century back, a task far beyond the scope of the present writing.

Enough for the present that the two well-known colours which have from prse-Islamitic times downwards ranged the rival elements of Arabia under the red banner of Yemen and the white standard of Nejed, which counter- distinguished the symbolical roses of the longest and most • fatal of our own civil wars, and which are yet recognised as badges of civil dis- sension and war in many South American states, have also, though with special and local significancies omitted here, divided the Parguayans into " Blancos " or Whites, and " Colo- rados" or Reds, for aims, primarily and originally ethnico-political, now embodied in family feuds or personal wrongs. Curiously enough in this remote oasis of the world's desert, no less than in the Arabian peninsula, the Albion of the fifteenth century, and the sub-littoral America of the present, the red flag has mustered under itself what may best be defined as the distinctively national or patri- otic party, while the white has been a signal for extra-national sympathies and alliances — a mere accidental coincidence, yet a remarkable one. Happily for Paraguay, the patriotism of her children, their loyalty to their mother-country is so general, so fer- vent, that any less national feeling, however symbolised, however dis- guised, has comparatively but few to represent it, or support ; fewest of all in the purely country districts, for example, in Akai.

The last pale streak of sunset has faded in the west, and a silvery gauze of moonlight spreads unstained over the purple darkness of the deep sky, just pierced by the steel blue point of Sirius, or the orange glow of Canopus, now high in mid-heaven, lord of the southern hemisphere. Before us, touched by the deceptive light, the " luce maligna," as Virgil with deep meaning calls it, of the large moon, the sharp peaks of Akai stand out in jagged relief against the sky, part black, part edged in glittering silver, as though they were immediately be-

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hind and above the village roofs ; a startling contrast to the palm and orange groves, really near at hand, but almost lost to view in black shadow. No one is by us now but the "Jef Politicio " or sheriff of the vil- lage-town and district ; lights glimmer here and there in the house-windows before us ; but the grassy square, with its ghostly white church and spectral bell-tower, is lonely as a desert, as silent too.

" That mountain," said our host, and pointed to the strange ridges of Akai, " that mountain bears an evil name in all this neighbourhood. Gob- lins of malignant will, shapes as of men, but ^reefer-human in size and horrible to sight, are said to frequent its slopes, and fires that leave no trace by day are seen there at night." And he went on to recount, as having lately occurred, a ghastly story ; how a party of benighted wayfarers had, only a short time before, taken up their quar- ters in a copse on the mountain rise ; how after midnight they were awak- ened by a near glare through the trees ; how two or three — I am not sure of the number — from among them boldly ventured to find out the cause, and after threading their way through the thicket came on a small stony depres- sion, bare, but girt by brushwood, and in the midst of it a great fire, fiercely burning, and tended by giant figures, black and hideous, who warned them off with threatening gestures from nearer approach ; how when they on their return told the tale to their com- panions in the wood one of the band, a lad of eighteen or so, seized as it appeared by a sudden madness, de- clared he would go whatever might betide and fetch fire from the blaze ; how the others tried to detain him in vain ; he broke from them and dis- appeared in the brushwood : how after a while they heard his screams, and forced their way with difficulty through the thicket to the little rock-strev>n hollow, just as the first dawn was breaking ; how they found no trace of fire on the ground, nor any living

semblance or thing, only their unfor- tunate comrade, horribly disfigured and burnt in body and limbs, who told how the goblins had seized him, thrown him into the mid-blaze and held him there ; and having told this, died in agony before the sun rose.

Stories, of this kind especially, lose nothing in the telling ; the adventure was referred to wayfarers from a dis- tance and to a date of some months back ; and to inquire into the accuracy of the narrative, in whole or in detail, would have been very superfluous labour. Still it is notable that the tale should be, so our friend said, one of many similar in kind, and all relat- ing to the same neighbourhood and region. Can these strange tales be the distorted and transformed tra- ditions of volcanic outbursts, long since quiescent ? Or may they be due to some phenomena of inflammable vapours escaping from time to time, and bursting into light, or even fire, as atmospheric conditions may determine? That subterraneous heat is still actively, though invisibly, at work here was evidenced this very year, when, on the 18th October last, just a month or so before my visit to the place, a loud rumbling noise was heard from underground about ten o'clock in the morning, and all the villages of the district, to a distance of ten to fifteen miles round the mountain of Akai, from which — that is of course, from under which — all agreed both the noise and the shock proceeded, were suddenly and violently shaken ; some, they said, by a single concussion, as if artillery had been discharged close by, others by a longer continued and vibrating movement, but all at the same hour and instant ; all too heard the noise, though, it seems, with some difference of clearness and dura- tion. Nothing of the kind, said our informant, had ever within man's memory occurred before. However, in the fact of the earthquake shock, and the sensation that it proceeded from Akai as a centre, all were agreed ; it did not reach beyond this seemingly

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From Montevideo to Paraguay.

volcanic Eifel-like region, nor was any- thing of the kind observed in Asun- cion then or afterwards. But that in the fact itself may lie an indi- cation of what the weird tales of Akai and its night fires point to, seems to me not impossible, not improbable perhaps.

The teller of the tale was himself a remarkable man ; one of those who are in a manner the type and compen- dium of the nation they belong to, summing up in themselves alike its physical and its mental characteris- tics, its merits and its defects. Spanish, like the greater number of Paraguayans by name, and in part by origin, he bore in his dark complexion, nearly beardless features, and slight frame, evidence of a considerable admixture, more than half, probably, of Guarani blood. A mere boy, almost a child in years, he had joined the national army soon after the outbreak of the unequal war in 1865, and had been present in almost every one of the land battles where his countrymen, victors or van- quished, in life or death, held their own without thought of flight or quar- ter against the triple alliance of their foes. Nor even then, when Humaita was lost, Angostura taken, Asuncion sacked, and the last army — that what yet survived of Paraguay could muster — surrounded and slaughtered almost to a man, did the lad abandon his cause and his leader, but accom- panied the ill-fated and, by this time, half-insane despot during the whole of that last year, when gradually driven towards the frontier he carried on an obstinate but useless guerilla war against the invaders of his country, till, hemmed in and at bay, he turned on his Brazilian pursuers on 'the banks of the Aquidaban, and, fighting to the last, died, with his eldest son Panchito at his side, more nobly than he had lived. Such of his few companions — they were not above three hundred in all — as had yet physical strength enough left to make any kind of resist- ance, died almost to a man like their chief ; a few, unable either to fight or

to fly, were made prisoners by the enemy ; but others, disarmed though not wholly disabled, and resolved not to submit themselves as captives to the abhorred Brazilians, escaped to the woods and the yet uncivilised Indian tribes of the further mountains, where they remained sharing the huts and leading the life of their half-barbarous but faithful hosts and protectors, till another year had seen what remained of Paraguay — after her conquerors had partitioned the spoils — free of foreign occupation, and allowed them to re- turn to where their homes had been, and to the fortunes of their country, then seemingly at its last gasp. One of these refugees, of Cerro-Cora and Aquidaban, was my friend, the narra- tor of the tale. Well aware, and often eye-witness of the cruelties and crimes that stained the latter days of Solana Lopez, he yet spoke of him with loyal respect, almost with affection, as the head and representative of the national cause ; and would gladly, he said, yet give his blood and his life for his former leader ; though unable to share, contrary to the evidence of his senses, in the still extant popular belief, that refuses to admit the reality of Lopez's death, and hopefully awaits his re- appearance from some hiding-place in the mountains even now.

From talk like this we are summoned by the mistress of the house, who is, also, like Milton's Eve, ex-officio chief cook, to our dinner, in the materials of which vegetables, maize, pumpkin, sweet potatoes, beans, &c., bear a larger proportion than they would in the almost exclusively carnivorous regions further South. Table service, cooking, and so forth, are all more or less after Spanish fashion ; the wines are Span- ish too, and good. But Paraguayan appetite is not nice as to delicacy of food : and the gastronomic skill attri- buted by our great poet to his Eden hostess is decidedly wanting in the ministrations of this earthly paradise ; — a want, it may be, preferable to the observance. Anyhow, there is plenty on the board, and of sound quality too.

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In the country districts the women, as a rule, take their meals apart from the men, not on any compulsion, but because they themselves prefer it so : in Asuncion a more European style prevails.

Dinner, or supper, over, our host proposes that we should adjourn to a baile, or ball, the one favourite di- version of Paraguay, which has been got up to do honour to our arrival in one or other of the most spacious houses of the village, or, very possi- bly, in the " Jefatura," or government offices themselves. We cross the square, and find a large gathering of men, women, and children — for early hours are no part of childhood's diur- nal discipline here, any more than elaborate dress — some, as direct parti- cipators in the amusement within, others, as lookers on, without the brightly lighted-up building, and the band — no Paraguayan village is with- out its musical band, all much of a pattern — consisting of a harp, a clario- net, a violin or guitar, a fife, a drum, and very likely a tambourine or a triangle, in a group near the entrance, already engaged in tuning up and preluding to the music of the dance. The room, or rooms, within are or are not laid down with mats, as the case may be, and are well illuminated ; chairs and benches are ranged against the walls, and doors and windows all wide open to the night insure coolness, spite of the flaring lamps and gathered crowd.

The women, dressed in Paraguayan fashion, with the long white " tupoi," or sacque, deeply embroidered round the borders, and often fringed with the beautiful home-made lace of the country, with silk skirts, or brightly-coloured petticoats, and a broad coloured sash, some of them wearing slippers, others bare-footed — no harm where feet are so delicate as theirs — are seated around, waiting each her turn of the dance. Their stock of Spanish is apt to be limited ; and any pretty speeches which you naturally wish to make them had best, for fear of misappre-

hension, be made in Guarani ; the smile with which you will be rewarded will quite repay the trouble of learning a phrase or two. The men are, some of them, especially if anyhow " offi- cial," in European afternoon or evening dress, which, I need hardly remark, is no advantage ; some, however, are attired more becomingly in country style — ponchos, girdles, loose trousers, silver chainlets, and so on ; the linen of all is scrupulously clean and white. The assembly is almost exclusively made up of small farmers, graziers, and peasants from the village and its neighbourhood, with their families ; but rich or poor, official or private, whatever be the social class they be- long to, no difference is perceptible in manner or bearing ; the same easy, though deferential politeness, the same freedom alike from obtrusive forward- ness or awkward shyness, characterises each and every one, whatever be the rank or sex, in speech and intercourse ; at least they are gentlemen and ladies all in the fullest sense of those so often misappropriated terms.

The dances are either merely of the pan-European kind — quadrilles, waltzes, polkas, mazurkas, and lancers — or of, 1 think, Andalusian origin, though some- times denominated " Paraguayan " ; the cielo, the media cana (a great favourite, and very lively), the Montenero, and some variations in- troduced into the contre-dansa, belong apparently to this class. Whether the aboriginal Indians or Guaranis had any dances or music, properly speaking, of their own, and antecedent to the Spanish conquest, I do not know ; but from the entire absence of any traces of such among the Paraguayans, I should think not.

Cigars, cigarettes, sweets, refresh- ments, drinks, among which last cana, the rum of the country, comes fore- most, are freely distributed in the intervals of the dances, and the ball is kept up till morning light. Of all social amusements, for a minimun of expense and trouble, and a maximum of real enjoyment, commend me to a

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Paraguayan village ball. The cyni- cism of Prosper Merimee himself could not be proof against it, and must have for once admitted that even for a desillusione society may still have some attractions, life some pleasures.

Beautiful rather than grand, con- tinually varying, but without violent or sudden contrasts, the scenery which I traversed from village to village and day by day was of a kind better adapted to sight than to description ; besides, the account already given of its general character and products may serve, at all events to those who have ever visited sub-tropical lands, to fill up the outlines of my sketch more truly than direct word-painting could do. Yet there are two features rarely wanting in a Paraguayan landscape that require some more special, though brief, mention : the forests and the lakes. The former, dispersed in patches amid the cultivated lands, and thickly gathered on the hill- ranges to the east, are of singular beauty ; and the trees, though inferior in dimensions and height to the giants of the tropical zone, have the advan- tage over them in greater variety of foliage and form of growth — now re- sembling the oak, now the beech, now the ash, with interspaces between them of bright greensward, unchoked by the rank bush of hotter climates ; while a sufficient admixture of palms, some fan-leaved, others feathery, with bam- boos, twining creepers, and orchids, give what a European might call an exotic tint to the picture. Many of these trees supply timber of great value : such is that of the mahogany and cedar, red or yellow ; of the lapacho and quebracho, both hard as iron, and more durable ; of the timbo, a tall, straight trunk, much used for car.oe-biiilding; of the urundei, good for house-timbers and ships ; of the jacarundd, with its ornamental yellow grain ; of the polo di rosa, or rosewood, and fifty more, all destined to no unimportant part in the commerce of the future —

whenever that shall be. The boughs of many of these trees are wide- spreading and fantastically contorted, the leafage generally small, prettily serrated, and of a dark glossy green, agreeable to the eye.

As to the lakes, they are liberally dis- tributed over the whole of Paraguay, and vary in size and character from small marshy pools of little depth, to the wide water-sheets of Ipoa and Ipecarai, each considerably exceeding in size any of our own English lakes, and proportionately deep ; both be- long to the central district through which I travelled. Each of them has, in popular tradition, a story attached to it, telling of its origin ; that of Lake Ipoa, as related to me, was not dissimilar to the tradition memo- rialised in the Dead Sea, though for- tunately the waters of Ipoa are not salt, but sweet and abounding in fish. The Ipecarai lake is, on the contrary, said to be brackish. But the shores of both are lovely, gently shelving in most places, and clothed with alter- nating wood and meadow down to the silvery mirror's edge. These lakes are the favourite resorts of water-fowl — wild-duck, and teal iu particular — in shoals resembling floating islands from a distance. Partridges and snipe are the principal winged game by land ; I heard of bustards too, but saw none ; ostriches, or, more properly, emus, abound everywhere. Of four-footed game there is plenty too by plain and forest, from lions, tigers, panthers, and deer, down to hares and rabbits, besides other South -American quad- rupeds— all declared by the peasants "good to eat," but tastes differ.

How far the varied and ever-lovely country in which they live, the " pleasure situate in hill and dale," nowhere more lavishly bestowed by nature than here — the abundance of wood-flowers and fruits, the fern- margined fountains and sparkling streams, the stately trees and deep waving meadows, and all the peren- nial beauties that make of Paraguay the wonder and the delight of all who

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visit it, how far, I say, these things may have contributed towards making up the peculiarly cheerful, contented, genial character of those who live among them, I cannot tell ; theories of the kind are the veriest card-houses, lightly set up, as lightly thrown down. Yet I have noticed, not once, but often, and in many regions wide apart, how much more serious, more unexpansive, more sombre, in fact, more unamiable a type of dweller is generally found in open, treeless, objectless lands of monotonous downs or wide level, whether such be under an Asian, an African, or a European sky— whether the denizens of the landscape be agri- cultural, as in Lower Egypt, or pastoral, as in the Dobruja and the Eastern Steppes, or mixed, as in Holland ; the absence of what may be termed the ornamental side of human nature is still the same. For the habitual sight of beauty in some form or other, and its frequent contact seem to be neces- sary to the development of the beau- tiful in man's nature itself ; and where the surroundings are bare and dull, the inner life is apt to share in the bareness and dulness of its dwell- ing-place. It is not only exceptional natures, as a Giorgione or a Turner, that grow incorporate with, and repro- duce in themselves, the scenes of their childhood and youth- — all men, I think, do it, more or less; and the advan- tages enjoyed by a high-born child, carefully brought up, and supplied with every opportunity for the fulfil- ment of every innate power, over the poverty-hampered, stunted, starved child of destitute parents, are not more than those which the native of a fair land, a bright sky, and a genial climate possesses over the offspring of a harsh heaven and an unlovely earth. Nature, like too many other mothers, has her favourite children, and the Paraguayans are in this respect, the Benjamins of her family.

My riding-tour, during which I visited four out of the twenty-three districts into which Paraguay is now divided, being over, I returned, not

without some regret, to Asuncion ; and thence, after a short interval al- lowed to the kindness of my hospitable entertainers, re-embarked on the main river for an up-stream voyage of about two hundred miles more to Conception, the chief town of northern Paraguay, situated just within the tropic of Capricorn, and the principal centre and depot of the mate or "yerva" traffic. But of this section of the river, its villages and its scenery, also of the " yerva " groves, or forests rather, I must defer the description till another opportunity.

Much too I have omitted, even in what concerns that section of the country which I have to a certain extent described, not because unim- portant or wanting in interest, but as reaching too far beyond the limits of my present scope, and fitter for a complete work on Paraguay as it was, or is, than for a slight sketch of the superficial impressions made by a few weeks passed within the territory. The form and tenure of the actual government, as established in 1870, and maintained, at any rate, to the letter, since then ; the condition of the army — that army which not many years since, alone and unassisted, held the invading forces of half South America at bay ; of the navy, whose small wooden steamers so long made good the river defence against nearly double the number of gunboats and ironclads ; the newly -created judicial organisation and legal tribunals ; the position of the clergy ; the system of popular education, the elementary schools established throughout the country ; all these are, I think, better here passed over altogether, than touched on after a slight and possibly misleading fashion. Nor have I, for similar reasons, said anything about the various co-operative enterprises — agricultural, pastoral, or industrial — undertaken of late years, chiefly by foreigners, within the Paraguayan territory, with varying failure or success ; nor about the yet " un- civilised," that is un-Europeanised or

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neo-Americanised Indian tribes, some scattered through the riverine districts and the adjoining villages, " among them, but not of them ; " others keeping more apart, and tenanting the mountains and forests of the east and north towards the Brazilian frontier ; but all on good terms with the Para- guayans as such, though little inclined, it seems, to modify their own ancestral habits or occupations.

Leaving these things aside for the present, enough has, I think, been written here to show that Paraguay, no less than her sister Republics of the south, is a country with a future ; that the Paraguayan nationality, though reduced to scarce a third of its original numbers, and left houseless and home- steadless on a desolated land, has yet, in a few years of comparative, peace and quiet, already sufficiently, thanks to its intense and inherent vitality, recovered itself enough to bring a large portion of its territory under cultiva- tion, to restock its pastures with cattle, and, best of all, its villages with con- tented, happy, and increasing families — the surest pledge of complete restora- tion and lasting prosperity in time to come. Assertions like those, made and repeated but fifteen years ago, by Masterman and others of his kind, that the Paraguayans "exist no longer," that "their destruction was inevit- able " that they were "the tree which will bring forth no fruit," and should accordingly be in due course " hewn down and cast into the fire ; " they being " incapable of civilisation ; " winding up with the Cassandra predic- tions that, " the foreigners whom they distrusted and despised will till the ground which they abandoned, to tares and brambles, and enjoy the fair heritage which they were unworthy to possess ; " that, " the Teuton and the Anglo-Saxon will soon fill the void," or, more wonderful yet, that the Paraguayans themselves will "per- force ask Brazil to take the little she has left of their habitable territory,

and annex it as the smallest province of the empire," show very little knowledge in those who have uttered them either of the country or of its inhabitants. That the Paraguayan nation has by no means ceased to exist, that neither its past, which culminated in a state which, weighed in the balance of a six years' struggle, proved almost a counterpoise for the greatest empire and the greatest Republic of the south conjointly, nor its present with its vigorous outcome of new energy, new life, bear either of them the most distant resemblance to barren fig- trees, tares, brambles, or any other combustibles of the biblical list, are facts that whoever cares to visit the land as I visited it may easily assure himself no less completely than I did. As to Paraguayan civilisation, he will find it what I found and have described it ; and he must be hard to satisfy if it does not content him. With regard to "Teuton" and "Anglo-Saxon" immigrants, by whom I conjecture Germans and Englishmen to be meant, they and their labours are, and always will be, welcomed, protected, encour- aged in Paraguay ; but I do not foresee any likelihood of their superseding the vigorous race that forms the bulk of the existent nationality, nor would it be desirable that they should. Far better, as far more within the compass of probability, that they should, by adopting that nationality for their own, contribute a fresh and most valu- able element of industry and persever- ance to the born children of the soil. As to Brazil, the only favour Paraguay has to ask of her is to be a just and friendly neighbour ; more than that neither she nor any other state will, I trust, have the unwisdom to attempt, nor would the Paraguayans, betide what might, for an instant allow. Paraguay is yet herself ; and her sons and daughters are yet, as they ever have been, true to themselves and to her. JEsto perpetua !

(Conclusion.}

221

A WALKING TOUR IN THE LANDES.

THE morning sunlight was flashing on the broad Garonne, the rigging and hulls of the big vessels anchored or moored in the river, and touching with warmer gold the sails of the little craft that looked but half awake on the still sleeping water. It was seven o'clock, and I was waiting at Bordeaux for the first train that would take me to Arcachon.

Crowds of working people were hastening towards the Southern Rail- way Station from all roads and paths. A little wooden bridge that spanned the line resounded with the incessant tramp of boots and sabots, the toes of which were all turned one way. Up one side of the bridge's curve and down the other they went, men, women and children, helter-skelter. The women and girls wore a ker- chief of silk generally bright coloured, folded around the back part of the head, with one end left hanging as low as the shoulder — the character- istic coiffure of the Bordelaise which, with all its picturesqueness, has the fault of hiding the hair just where it is most beautiful. The men differed but little in appearance from the Paris work- men except by the darker hue of their skin and the brighter gleam of their eyes.

Those whose experience of an ex- cursion train is confined to the British institution so called can have but a feeble notion of the enjoyment of being shut up for several hours in a French train de plaisir that has been crammed to the railway company's satisfaction. If, however, the journey is a short one and the country is new, and the traveller is sufficiently enthu- siastic in the study of his fellow- men to be reckless of the combined odours of sausages, shrimps, pepper-

mint, garlic, and wine, he ought to be thankful, as I was, for the oppor- tunity of riding in a train de plaisir. Three long trains crept out of the station on the line to Arcachon, and I was in one of them. We made ten in our compartment, but the prisoners could look over a long row of parti- tions each way, toss bunches of grapes to friends at a distance, wave hand- kerchiefs, waft kisses, shout the full- flavoured jest that made the women scream, and otherwise prove their heroic determination to be happy although they were suffocating. A draught, even of the heated air from without, would have been like a breeze from Paradise, but it was not to be had. One head would fill a window, and there were always two competing for it. The two heads nearest me were soon engaged in a very gentle sort of conflict. They belonged to two lovers, and the face that was bronzed by the sun was every other minute bringing itself into accidental contact with the face that was soft and peach - like. The other passengers pretended not to notice these little collisions. In France lovers are treated with the ut- most consideration. They may be pitied but they are not laughed at. Kindness is the secret of all true politeness. It is not in their hat-lifting, their bowing, their gracious smiles, and their neatly- turned compliments that the French are the most polite nation in the world. These things may be mere accomplish- ments, tricks of the born actor, who sagaciously knows their value as cur- rent coin of life. It is their innate kindness, their tolerance of one another's weaknesses, their horror of the jest that pains for the sake of pain- ing, their keen sensitiveness to the roughshod ridicule that rides ruthlessly

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over their own tender places, which make the proverbial politeness of the French a reality.

There were several women in the car- riage, and all, except the girl in the corner, looked as if they had been dipped in walnut-juice. One of them, probably not thirty years old, although in England she would be given ten years more — a woman with big black eyes, glistening teeth, and crow-black hair, richly oiled and decked with a bright-yellow kerchief, would have passed for a handsome gipsy. Like the others, she wore much jewelry on her hands and in her ears, of massive gold and quaint design.

The peasant women of France think more of gold ornaments than fine clothes. Hence it is that in the French provinces English travellers are fre- quently struck by the contrast (violent to them) in the same individual of very mean garments with jewelry that is neither mean nor pretentious, but solid and beautiful.

We are now on the outskirts of the sandy Landes, and are already in the great pine forests which have so changed the face of the country during ohe last century that our English fore- fathers would not recognise to-day this part of their province of Aquitaine. A phenomenon quite new to me enables me to realise that these dark woods are even now only a green mantle thrown over an arid desert of sand. There is a great change in the sky, and it is so sudden that I should have supposed that I had been travelling with my eyes shut for the last hour did I not know that I had been keep- ing a keen look-out through the little open space left of the carriage window. All at once I perceive that the sky is no longer a clear blue; that it is not blue at all, but of a soapy grey colour. The sun that shines through it is so dimmed that the eye can bear its light. Flocks of fleecy clouds are rushing up to the zenith like vapoury coursers lashed and spurred by spirit-riders. Lower down and to windward is a motionless mass of slatey vapour

tinged here and there with copper, and underneath it, white and smoky, are well-defined patches of cloud hovering with gilded edges or scudding all froth and fury towards the sun. The train stops at La Teste. We can hear a low wail coming up through the pines, growing louded and louder until it is almost a shriek when the wind strikes the nearmost crests. Then the forest disappears or shows like the spars of shipping through a fog ; boughs crack, cones rattle to the ground, twigs and branches fly through the air ; up go all the carriage windows, and the panes sound as though they were struck by volley after volley of fine shot. My fellow - passengers think nothing of all this. To my questioning as to the darkness and the rattling against the windows somebody replies, " It is only the sand."

The storm has lifted the sand from the earth, and is hurling it back to- wards the sea from which it came. Before the soil was fixed to a great extent by the pines, this duel between the sea-wind and the land-wind was the chief cause of desolation in the melancholy Landes. There were a few peals of thunder and a few drops of rain ; then the sand-clouds moved farther on, the sky cleared, and the sun shone forth again in all his strength. We were at Arcachon.

A collection of toy-houses, apparently intended for extra-sized dolls, ranged along the beach of what resembles more a salt lake than an arm of the sea, with the pine-forest for back- ground stretching almost without a break seventy or eighty miles towards the south, is Arcachon. It is a good place for fishermen, but a bad one for shoemakers. Here all covering for the feet, at least in summer, ap- pears to be regarded as a graceless superfluity. Ladies from Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Paris pass the whole day bronzing their naked feet and ankles on the yellow sand. I met a family of visitors taking a country walk. The children were barefooted, as a matter of course : madame not

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being in bathing costume, kept her boots on her feet, but monsieur carried his in his hand.

On leaving Arcachon I hoisted my knapsack on my back, and began my walking tour. The day was more than half spent, but I had resolved to reach the little village of Cazau by the lake of the same name before night. Al- though I had marked out for myself no definite itinerary, and was prepared to allow my movements to be deter- mined in a great measure by the acci- dental and unforeseen, my general plan was to traverse the Landes from north to south. Now, in walking southward from Arcachon I had to choose one of two courses. The first was to follow the coast, and the second was to keep on the eastern side of the chain of lakes extending from six to ten miles inland. The more adventu- rous journey would have been by the coast, but there were serious difficulties in the way of undertaking it. A more desolate and forbidding coast than that of the Bay of Biscay between Arcachon and Vieux Boucan it would be hard to find in Europe. For six or seven miles inland the country can scarcely be called inhabited. Two or three hotels and bathing establishments have sprung up near the sea in response to the ever-growing need of quiet places, whither the sick, the weary, and the economical can flee from the world ; but during the greater part of the year they are closed. One may walk thirty miles, either along the coast or on the western shores of the lakes, with- out finding a human habitation, unless it be a resinier's hut. The resin-gatherers are the only men who dispute these solitudes with the wild boar.

The cause of this supreme desolation is the dunes or sandhills which in the last century threatened to transform the whole of the western Landes with their towns and villages into a French Sahara. The maritime pine was the salvation of this region. By undaunted perseverance, the seed was made to take root in the shifting sand, and

thus dune after dune was fixed. It was one of those long battles with the forces of nature in which human pur- pose, often discouraged, but never turned from its object, triumphs at last over seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Before the dunes were covered with pines they were con- stantly changing their shape and place, ebbing and flowing like the sea ; but always gaining in the sum of years upon the mainland ; and fatally, irresistibly drinking up the springs of fertility — the life-blood of civilisation. The ancient port of Mimizan lies under the dune of Uclos, and Mimizan of to-day is cut off from the sea by a hill of £and. Although the high dunes did not travel much beyond the chain of lakes, their devastating in- fluence was felt many a league east- ward. The sand caught up from them by the storms rushing in from the Bay of Biscay fell upon the whole region like showers of volcanic ashes. Thus were formed the Grandes Landes, in the midst of which lies the town of Sabres, where the land is flat, and in winter marshy, and where the use of stilts by the inhabitants is still very general. But even the flat Landes are now mostly covered with pine woods, and probably before the century dies the last pair of Gascon stilts will be used to make a pot boil.

I have said there were serious diffi- culties in the way of my following the coast-line. The worst was the diffi- culty of walking. Only by great ex- ertion could I have managed to cover ten or twelve miles a day, and at the end of the first, and maybe the second, twelve miles I should have found my- self still in the forest, with no prospect of shelter unless I chanced to light upon a resinier's cabin. I had, there- fore, to consider also the difficulty of finding food, and, what was of still greater moment, water. The prudent pedestrian, especially if he has no companion, must weigh such matters as these before trusting himself to a vast and pathless forest, where the undergrowth of hawthorn, holly,

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heather and furze, all on a gigantic scale, is frequently impenetrable. Hav- ing decided to leave the dunes on my right, and keep to the plains, where I should have better opportunities for observing the life of the people, I turned my back to the ocean, and commenced walking in the direction of Cazau. As far as La Teste the road skirted the Basin of Arcachon, and a dark green fringe of tamarisk crept down to the blue water. The calm in- land sea was dotted over with many little fishing craft, whose sails flashed back golden gleams as they turned to the sun. The afternoon was very warm, and the bright sand threw back the hot rays. After La Teste the road left the sea and ran straight as an arrow through the forest. Now the subtle spirit of gladness that dwells in the pine woods and fills all living things with joy, from the dove that swings in the breeze as it pecks the seed from the ripe cone, to the grass- hopper that springs from tuft to tuft of flowering heather, was upon me, and I rejoiced at the thought that for at least four days I should see no town and should breathe the breath of the forest. Now and then the fragrance of the pines was overborne by that of peppermint, where the little aromatic flowers showed their blue whorls, like beads strung on threads by fairies, in patches along the wayside. Grass- hoppers darted in every direction. Those I saw along the roadsides of Auvergne had scarlet wings; these had bright - blue wings. There was not a scarlet one amongst them. But I noticed one of a pale green colour, that looked as large as a wren as it flew from tuft to tuft.

For a few miles the silence of the woods was only broken by the chirrup- ing of grasshoppers. Then I heard a loud grating chirrup from the top of a tree. It was not the note of a bird, although quite loud enough to be so, but that of the cicada — the cigale so dear to Frederic Mistral and his bro- ther poets of Provence. It is not a musical sound, but it is full of the joy

of nature. The little creature sings on one note the everlasting song of southern life, the song of passion and sun-worship. When the sky is clouded it is silent, but when the sun breaks forth it seems intoxicated with plea- sure, and in the crest of every pine is a blithe spirit that pipes upon an in- visible reed, "-Sadness is gone ; joy ! joy for ever ! "

The undergrowth of the forest on each side of me was, as far as I could see, of heather and furze. Both these shrubs frequently rose to the height of ten feet. The man who walked through such brushwood, unless he had stilts, would soon be bleeding from the prickly spines of the gorse and be worn out with fatigue. I tested the experiment and soon returned to the road. I had walked several miles from La Teste, and the only person I met was a rustic Nimrod with his gun strapped to his back. The shooting season had just opened, and even in these solitudes the hares and the turtle doves have to keep a watchful eye on the local sportsmen. I was thirsty and there was no water. In this part of the Landes during the summer heats it is useless to look for a spring. The wandering herdsmen know this so well that they carry gourds of water in their wallets. The water is only reached by wells, and it is usually of a bad colour and often brackish. Such as it is, it can gene- rally be found at no great depth, be- cause underneath the invariable bed of sand there is a very solid layer of tuff composed of sand conglomerated with organic matter, so impervious to mois- ture that the rain which quickly soaks down to it cannot escape into the strata below. This explains why the land is so marshy during the winter that in some districts stilts are then absolutely indispensable. The Landais are such adepts in the use of these artificial legs that they can travel over marshy ground by stepping from tuft to tuft of heather as fast as a horse can trot over a good road. The marshes caiise malarial fever when the

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strong evaporation sets in, but of late years scientific drainage has been car- ried on to such an extent that the Department is no longer unhealthy.

I quenched my thirst as well as I could with blackberries, which grew in abundance along the wayside, until, as evening was coming on, I reached a well-built wooden cottage. In the porch a peasant and his wife were looking at me with a puzzled expres- sion and whispering to each other. Supposing that the cottage might be an auberge, I asked them if they sold wine. " No, no," was the answer. " Can you give me some water, then ? " "Yes, come in." I entered. The interior was very pleasant — very dif- ferent from the living rooms of the cottages and auberges of Auvergne. The floor was not of stamped earth, but of good pine, and spotlessly clean. The man wore the dark blue beret of Gascony, which is so curiously similar to the bonnet of the lowland Scotch, and the woman a bright-coloured ker- chief wound around the back of her head. She said something to the man in a patois of which I did not understand a word, but I quickly guessed the meaning, for he took a pitcher and went to the well. When he returned with the water, the woman brought out a glass and a litre of wine. 1 took no notice of the wine, but poured out some water. "Take some wine with it," said the woman in French. " We don't sell it, but we can give it." I declined it, saying I preferred water. " But the cold water will do you harm. Put at least some sugar in it." I assured her that the water would not do me harm, and that I liked it much better without sugar. My entertainers looked at one another, and the puzzled expression I noticed at first gave place to one of confidence and hospitality. The idea had dawned upon them that I was not a genuine tramp, a Prussian spy, or a crafty pedlar with a trick of getting round women's hearts by asking for water. My best recommendation was a bunch of flowers — mere weeds — which I car- No. 309— VOL. LII.

ried in my hand. " Monsieur her- balise ? " said the man. " Sometimes," I replied. " Ah ! then you are going to Lake Cazau 1 " " Yes, but why do think so?" "Because people come a long way to Cazau to ' do botany.' A little flower that is very rare grows near the lake, and there are persons who spend whole days in looking for it." The ice being now thoroughly broken, the peasant went to a cup- board and brought out another bottle. " If you don't care for wine," said he, " perhaps you will take a little cognac." Again I declined, perhaps wrongly, for it hurt the feelings of these good people to see me emptying a pitcher of cold water in their house. I thanked them, and bade them good-bye. When my form must have been to them a dusky splash against the fading sky, I looked back and saw them watching me out of sight.

From afar off came the tinkle of many bells. At first it was very faint, but as I walked on, now at a quick pace, for I had loitered greatly, it grew clearer. 1 knew that I was nearing a village and that the cattle were going home for the night. The sound waxed louder and louder ; the forest fell back and yielded to fields of green maize, gardens with fruit- trees, and cottages. This was Cazau. The village square was filled with cattle, each animal wearing a bell tied to its neck. From all directions other herds were approaching, as I knew by the clanging of the bells and the songs of the herdsmen. I stopped at the first inn I found, and was soon put in possession of a comfortable bedroom, and had the satisfaction of knowing that some dinner was being cooked in the kitchen. While the cooking was going on I strolled round the house. It was a long, low, one- floored building, with a row of acacias in front, kept short and bushy, and an old weeping willow half hiding a well. There was also a kitchen garden, with little in it besides a bed of toma- toes, covered with red and green fruit, and a patch of melons. Beyond was

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a broad field of maize, which blended its bright green leaves in the distance, now getting rapidly dim in the brief twilight, with the deeper green of the forest. There was a subdued glow of light over the house, the acacias, the willow, the maize-field, the tomatoes, and the melon plants, that was not so much light as the remembrance of it, and the calm was so deep as to be almost impassioned.

Having dined on stewed eels and fowl with tomato sauce, I went outside again, and sat under the acacias, smoking my pipe and listening to the cicadas in the nearest pine trees, and the herdsmen who, having gathered all their cattle about them, were sing- ing in chorus songs that sounded like canticles. The Landais are a much more musical people than the northern French. They have rich, sonorous voices, and singing seems to be their chief pastime. The songs of these wandering herdsmen have a melan- choly cadence that harmonises well with the vastness and mystery of the forest. The voices of the men rising and falling in concert, the distant chorus of cicadas, the richness of the pine-scented air, the peacefulness of the little auberge, and the luxurious sense of rest after a fatiguing walk, made me loth to leave the garden-seat. One by one the voices were hushed ; the singers went home to bed, and the cattle got too drowsy to shake their bells. At length I roused myself, and very soon the widow who kept the inn, and her two sons who farmed the land, myself, and the little barefooted ser- vant, were all in bed.

No sooner was my light out than I heard the familiar song of that small demon -insect the mosquito, whose presence I had invited by leaving the window open. He persisted in blowing his trumpet a few inches from my nose. Outmanoeuvred and vanquished, I covered my head with the sheet and fell asleep. I was awakened by the roaring of thunder. From my window I saw the lightning rending the clouds and illuminating the wondrous depths

of the forest. ~ Beyond the fiery leaves and stalks of the maize-field, the trunks of the pines gleamed like molten steel. The storm raged far into the morning, then went away as suddenly as it came, and the sun was soon shining in a cloudless sky.

While I was breakfasting on bread and cafe au lait I took counsel of the landlady and her two sons respecting the day's journey. The hostess was an elderly widow. I could not help noticing that she had a pair of lean, bare legs, and that her feet were thrust into old espadrilles — heelless shoes with soles of hemp, common in Lower Gascony, and especially in the Basque country. Her sons had thrown off a great deal of the peasant, both in their dress and their manners, and they seemed to have little taste for the life they led. I was bent upon reaching Biscarosse before night, not by the direct road, nor by any road at all, but by rounding the western shore of the lake. Mother and sons broke to me, in as delicate a manner as possible, that the project was not that of a sane person. I was told that if I kept to the open shore of the lake I should find the sand very loose and the heat overpowering, and that if I chose the forest the walking would be still worse. But the water difficulty was the most perplexing. I was assured that I should find no water fit to drink unless I chanced to meet a resinier, who might be able to give me some. Knowing from the map that the distance must be less than twenty miles, the obstacles of which these people drew such a for- bidding picture seemed to me rather fanciful. I, however, thought it pru- dent, before starting, to take a bottle of wine and some food with me. The only food that the house could supply at that moment was bread and four or five sardines. With my wine, bread, and sardines I faced the terrors of the desert with my knapsack un- pleasantly heavy.

As I neared the sheet of water which had for me such an attraction,

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I came to a pillar surmounted by a statue of the Virgin, and read that it was dedicated to " Our Lady of the Lake." For the first two or three miles the walk along the shore of the lake was delightful, for the morning's freshness still resisted the sun's power. I met a young lady tramping over the sand with naked feet and accom- panied by a servant carrying bathing dress and towels. Like all well conducted young Frenchwomen in the presence of an unknown male, mademoiselle stared fixedly in the direction of her pretty toes. I passed herds of cattle nibbling the short grass that grew where the ground was marshy ; but the strip of land between the forest and the water became narrower and narrower, and I was soon struggling through high heather at the foot of the sandhills. Innumer- able dragon flies darted through the air. Some of them had bright yellow bodies which gave them a very fierce and wicked look ; others — a smaller variety — were, excepting the all but invisible wings, the colour of rubies. I disturbed colonies of frogs basking among the reeds. They waited until I was within a few yards of them, then rose like a flight of birds and dropped into the water, their green backs glittering just a moment in the sunlight. More cows — these were wading breast-high far out in the shallow water and ringing their in- separable bells. Little brown lizards, from three to four inches long, darted over the sand, and in the winking of an eye were lost among the rusty roots of the heather. The knapsack now felt like a mountain on my back, the perspiration dropped from my face, and one of my hands — -that on the side of the sun — had turned lobster red and smarted with the blistering heat. Still I plodded on over the hot and yielding sand, or through the tangled brushwood, and could have convinced myself that everything was for the best in the best of worlds, were it not for the thirst that parched me. This is a sensation which the animal spirits,

though they leap like a mountain stream, cannot wash away. I turned to the wine which my forethought made me bring. It was hot — mulled by the sun, and I could not drink it. I cast longing looks at the blue lake that seemed so cool. It was really tepid, and I had been told that the water was unfit to drink. When French people say that certain water is undrinkable one may be sure that it is so, for they are not at all fastidious in such matters. I had only walked about ten kilometres, and there were some twenty more to cover before I could reach Biscarosse by the way I had chosen. As I went on, the sand became terribly fatiguing. Why did I not learn to walk on stilts like the Landais before undertaking this journey1? I was told at Cazau that half a day's practice would have made me quite an adept. But my neck might have been broken during the lesson. While I was hesitating whether I would drink the wine or the water from the lake, I nearly walked into a well. It was a real well, sunk deep into the sand at the edge of the forest. I could see the shine of the water in the cool depth where no sunbeam had ever penetrated, but I could not reach it for there was neither rope nor bucket. It was evident that those who used the well had hospitably hidden these utensils. Imitating the philosophy of the fox in the fable, I was trying to persuade myself that this water must be brackish or con- taminated by the lake, when I heard " tap, tap, tap," in the woods not far away. It was the sound of a resin gatherer's axe.

I climbed the dune. The shadow of the pines was deep but not cool. These trees shut out the sun's rays, but very little of their heat. Oak, beech, or chestnut shade is cool, but a pine forest is always hot in summer weather. That " tap, tap, tap," was a perfect will o' the wisp. Now it sounded quite near, and now much farther away. It was leading me deeper and deeper into the forest. Presently I

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caught a glimpse of a man's body flattened like a squirrel's against the trunk of a tree. He was standing about ten feet from the ground upon a notched piece of timber that he had planted against a pine. This piece of wood was the resinier's ladder. The man was barefooted like all his class when at work, and he was knocking off, with his axe the sugar-like lumps of resin from the yellow streak where the bark had been lately stripped. Near the foot of the tree was affixed a little earthen pot to catch the more fluid resin, on which greater value is set. The man saw me coming towards him, but he was either morose or suspicious, for he took no notice of me. Only when I was battling with his dog — a vicious shaggy little brute with a tail as bushy as a fox's, but curled over his back, did he give a sign of friendly feeling. He rebuked the animal in a few short grunts, still keeping his eyes fixed upon the tree. I then asked him if he could give me some water. " Yes," he replied, but went on tapping with his axe. Presently he walked down his pole with the stealthy certitude of a cat, and beckoned me to follow him. I did so, and the dog brought up the rear, with his lips curled up at each side and showing his white teeth. In a few minutes we came to a little clearing where there were three or four very low, but solidly built huts of pine wood with long eaves. We entered one of these, and my new acquaintance trustfully left me there while he went to the well. I was not sorry that he took his ill-conditioned dog with him. While he was away I noticed that the room was comfortably floored, that there was a broad open fireplace with iron dogs on the hearth, almost buried in wood ashes, that there were two rough chairs and a rougher table and a piece of ham hanging to a beam. There were two more rooms, one of which, as I after- wards learnt, was used as a bedroom, the other for storing resin.

The forester quickly returned with a jar — one of those jars so frequently

seen on approaching the Pyrenees, and which look like degenerate descendants of classic amphorae. He set it down on the table, and bringing one of the two glasses which he owned from the cupboard, filled it with water clear and cold. I emptied it and refilled it, and emptied it again. Then I unpacked the bread and sardines and wine which I had carried on the top of my knap- sack. The wine I gave to my host, who, however, insisted upon my taking some before he would touch it. While I was engaged upon my bread and sardines, the resin-gatherer lit a fire of cones and split pine which needed no coaxing to burn. In two minutes the flames were rolling up the wide chimney. Then he unhitched a frying- pan from the wall, and set it on the fire with a lump of grease in it. Next he took a few small fish which he had netted in the lake, and dropped them into the boiling fat. He then fetched a huge round loaf of rye bread, almost black, and spreading his fish upon a slice of it, proceeded to eat his meal. He grew communicative, and I found that so far from being a morose or suspicious character, he was as simple and genuine as a child. He was a lean, agile man of about forty-five, with shaven dark face, aquiline nose, broad prominent chin, and frank hazel eyes. The pinched smooth features and lean body gave him the air of an ascetic monk. I soon learnt that his asceticism was compulsory. He was a poor man, and his diet from necessity was often as simple as that of a Trappist. Fortunately for him his tastes did not go beyond the life to which he had grown, and he was con- tented with fare on which a town workman could not exist except in a state of misery. This resinier told me that one of the great loaves of rye bread such as he had before him lasted him about four days, and he apologised for his appetite by explaining that inasmuch as he drank no wine and rarely touched meat he was obliged to eat a great deal of bread to keep up his strength

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" You drink no wine ? "

"No; this is not a grape country, and wine is too dear for us."

" And are all the resiniers water- drinkers ? "

" All ! except when they go into the villages."

" And do you pass all your life alone in the forest ? "

" No, I go every Saturday night to Biscarosse where my wife lives, and spend Sunday there."

He finished his meal in about ten minutes, and was ready for work again ; but I handed him my tobacco pouch, at which his eyes lighted up like a very hungry child's at the sight of a cake, and we sat outside the hut on the heathery slope of the dune under an old pine, and resumed our talk as we smoked.

" Do you earn much money in return for leading this solitary life in the woods ? "

" We used to do well enough when the price of the barrique of resin was up to forty or fifty francs, but this year is bad — very bad."

" Haven't the pines yielded well ? "

" Oh ! yes. It is not the fault of the pines. It is the fault of the market. The price is down to twenty-four francs."

" How many barriques do you fill in a year? "

" We reckon a hundred."

" And you get ? "

" Half the market price ; the rest goes to the proprietor. We divide with him. That is the system on which we work all through the Landes. Each man has generally 1,000 trees to look after."

" So with the market price at twenty- four francs you will get for your year's work 1,200 francs (48Z.). And have you nothing else to look to ? "

" In the winter evenings we split wood, and sometimes we hunt."

" What do you hunt — boars 1 "

" A— ah ! No " (with a grin). " That's dangerous. We hunt snipe, wild duck, and hares. Sometimes we kill five or six snipe a day, and they sell for two francs fifty centimes each."

Not such a bad life after all thought I, notwithstanding the state of the resin market.

One need not ask why since the collection of resin has been one of the chief industries of the Landes, wild creatures of all kinds have become much scarcer than formerly through- out this region, which is still very attractive to the adventurous sports- man, especially if he be likewise a naturalist. The resiniers have had a great deal to do with driving the wolf back to the Pyrenees ; not so much by making war upon him, as by worrying his nerves by the incessant tapping of their axes. A wolf has aldelicate nervous system. A line of railway run through his district is quite sufficient to make him move elsewhere. The boar, a less nervous animal than the wolf, and a more formidable one when attacked, is frequently met in these forests. He has nothing to fear from the resiniers, who when they see him, have the pru- dence to let him go on his way, and they treat his spouse when followed by her young with even greater respect. If the boar on the other hand becomes imprudent, and makes nightly raids upon a maize field on the outskirts of a village, the villagers organise a hunt. His taste for sweet maize stalks frequently costs him his life ; but he sells it dearly, ripping open dogs and sometimes men, fighting as long as he has strength to strike with his tusks. Curiously enough the boar has a rival here in his congener, the domestic pig, which having found the air of the forest and freedom sweeter than that of the stye or farmyard became a self- emancipated porker. A few years ago these wild pigs — they are known as cochons sauvages — were so numerous in the neighbourhood of Cazau, and wrought such destruction upon the young pines that the Government took energetic measures to exterminate them. The wild pig of the Landes is of the same breed that supplies Paris with its much prized Bayonne hams. Formerly troops of wild horses roamed the Landes just as wild horses and cattle

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still roam the Camargue — that desert of Provence and Languedoc. They have entirely disappeared. Roebucks, which •were once plentiful, are getting scarce. Smaller quadrupeds, such as foxes and hares, are very numerous, and the wild cat is found in the forests. The Landes are peculiarly rich in ornithology. Birds which have almost if not quite disappeared from other parts of Western Europe, such as the bustard, the wild goose, and the wild swan linger in these solitudes. Flamingoes are occasionally seen in districts where the marshes have not been drained, and there are wild pheasants about the banks of the Leyre. There are tortoises in the sand, and the lakes contain a great variety of fresh-water fish. Sportsmen to whom the pleasure of shooting something in old Europe that is really wild is heightened by natural obstacles, such as thickets that can only be penetrated by means of the axe, sand sloughs into which they may step unawares, and not be heard of more, and forest flies capable of in- flicting positive torture, would find in the Marensin, the district imme- diately south of Lake Cazau, an ideal hunting ground. If the visitor takes out his shooting license at the mairie of the commune which he chooses for the scene of his exploits, he may blaze away without fear of hindrance ; but it is necessary that he should pay this local tribute, for the commune has the right to stop people from shooting within its bounds unless they are provided with one of its own licenses. The license costs twenty-five francs. Half of the money goes to the com- mune in which it is taken out, and the other half to the state.

My project of reaching Biscarosse by skirting the lake soon became a subject of earnest conversation between me and the resin-gatherer. The de- scription he gave of the journey was anything but seductive. He put the distance at sixteen kilometres. Know- ing by experience the inveterate habit of the country people of under estima- ting distances I added four to his six-

teen. He told me that it would take him, with his knowledge of the country, six hours to do the journey. A new idea struck me. Between the trunks of the pines I could see a boat lying on the near shore of the lake, and I asked my dark friend if it would be possible to get across by water to Bis- carosse ?

" Certainly," said he. " That is my boat, and I can take you across." " Well, name your price," After reflecting a few minutes he said —

" I shall have to pay one of my comrades to do my work. It's about four hours' sail, for there is scarcely any wind, and I must stop the night at Biscarosse. Do you think five francs too much 1 "

" No ; make your arrangements and let us start."

He walked to a neighbouring hut, outside of which two other resiniers who had returned for their mid -day meal were now seated. In a few minutes he had arranged the matter and was ready to start.

He left his cabin door unlocked, for it never enters a resinier's head to doubt the honesty of another resinier. These men pass their lives in perfect com- panionship, without rivalry, jealousy, or distrust. Nothing would be easier than for one of them to steal the fruit of another's labour — to abstract resin from his neighbour's pots — but I have been assured that such practices are unknown in the Landes. On reaching the lake I found that the boat had been beached some ten yards from the shore. The resin gatherer tucked up his trousers and waded in. This was a trifling matter with him, for he had bare feet. He carried his sabots in his hand, because he was about to enter his village, and he wished to look re- spectable there. Seeing me hesitating on the shore he made excuses for his own f orgetf ulness, and quickly returning insisted upon carrying me to the boat on his back. Rather reluctantly I assumed the undignified position. We were now in the boat, and a few pushes

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of the sail -pole sent it gliding into deeper water. I took my seat on a plank in the centre and the resinier placed himself in the stern, where he could ply the rudder with one hand and hold the sail cord with the other. The dog settled himself between his master's naked feet, and although he pretended to sleep he kept one glisten- ing half-closed eye fixed on me. The little brute had grown more amiable since he ate the tails of my sardines, but was still very surly.

The mast was set, the sail was un- furled and napped lazily in the light breeze. We hardly seemed to move. There was scarce a ripple on the glassy water, and I could see the golden sand at the bottom when we were half a mile from the shore. There was no shelter here from the sun's rays, which smote down with almost tropical force ; but the sensations which the novelty of the situation and the beauty of the scenery awakened were enchanting. Now I could take in the whole loveliness of this delightful lake, which is just large enough to mimic the sea but not so large as to shut out the impressions of the land. All around, above the glittering margin of sand stretched the unbroken forest, vast and undulating like the ocean. In the narrow valleys between parallel dunes were sombre depths of dusky green, over which floated a pale blue mist. There the pines looked like trees accursed with- out hope of sunshine and light, with no breeze to unbosom their agony in sighs, but brooding in solemn and awful silence for ever. But where the storms of ages ago had written their history in the sands rolled high into the shape of mountain ridges the joyous pines were all luminous with the summer glory of the sun, and there I knew the doves must be swinging on the topmost boughs where the wind and leaves sing for ever.

After about an hour's very slow sail-

ing, a broad ripple breaking from the shore we had left ran across the face of the lake. Before it reached us the sail suddenly bulged, the cord was nearly tugged from the forester's grasp and the boat sprang forward with a motion altogether new. Then we noticed that the sun was shining through a dun-coloured vapour and that smoky masses of cloud were hover- ing over the dunes on the southern shore.

"A storm ! " said my companion.

" Will it break before we reach the land?"

" Very likely."

It was soon blowing a stiff breeze that drove the boat along at a grey- hound's speed, with occasional gusts which made the foam fly over the bows. A pleasant and exciting change this, but if the dose was to be increased the sail would need very judicious handling. The boat, moreover, was very old and leaky. My boots were already half under water. The dog having at length taken his eye off me was devoting all his attention to the problem of finding a dry place to sit upon. I noticed his discomfort with satisfaction. Our little ship might be filling with water, but she was making splendid way. The wind, which caused us to tack considerably at first, was now carrying us straight as an arrow to a point in the south-eastern corner of the lake which the resinier wished to reach. The storm did not really strike us, but rolled away to the east, and the lumpy water was settling down again as the boat ran up a little creek. Here the resinier moored her, and we set off walking to Biscarosse, which was about three miles distant. The land here was flat and marshy, and less thickly wooded than on the opposite shore of the lake. Two bullocks harnessed to a waggon and separated by a very long beam, were the first signs of approaching civilisation.

To be concluded in the next Number.

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REVIEW OF THE MONTH.

THE Ministerial proposals for raising the year's revenue were rejected by a majority of the House of Commons early in the morning of June 9. On the same day Mr. Gladstone informed the Queen of the desire of the Cabinet to surrender office. The letter reached the Queen on June 10. On that day other communications took place be- tween the Sovereign and her Ministers, the precise purport of which has not yet been made public. Whatever they may have been, on the day following, that is, on June 11, the Queen with a curious alacrity that will no doubt be explained when the time comes, ac- cepted the resignation of Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues, and summoning Lord Salisbury to Balmoral, intrusted him with a commission to form an administration. The Conservative leader reached London and began his task on June 15. The crisis lasted for a week, and until the very after- noon of the 22nd the expectation gradually gained ground that Lord Salisbury would give up his task. This expectation was at its strongest an hour or two before the public was informed that he had resolved to per- severe. The precise nature of the communications that were exchanged between the two sets of leaders and the Sovereign is not as yet before the world. It is possible that when they come to be known they may raise some interesting constitutional points. As the situation was unique, owing to the impossibility of a dissolution of Parliament, precedents were not available, and it may be that new maxims have been resorted to.

In other respects the fall of the second Gladstone administration will probably be a remarkable date in our history, for however we are inclined to make little of the events that pass

before our own eyes and are due to actors who are too close to us to be rightly measured, it is too obvious that we are entering for good or for evil on a new era. Our external re- lations are undergoing a change and taking on new proportions. So are the internal conditions of party, alike in organization and in creed. So is the distribution of political power.

The new Premier's first difficulties, for instance, were found in his own camp. The younger, more aggressive, and more popular wing, headed by Lord Ran- dolph Churchill, and more or less furtively reinforced by Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, insisted on the super- session of Sir Stafford Northcote. The intrigue was made into a public scandal by a scene of flat mutiny in the House of Commons, and in a few hours Lord Salisbury was induced — after the use, as is suspected, of little more pressure than is needed to force an open door — to go so far as to agree that, if somebody else would tell his old friend and colleague that he was no longer wanted, then he would gladly make the various arrangements that were required from him. Who was the emissary intrusted with the bow string or the fatal cup of coffee, is unknown outside the confederates. But the issue was the deposition of the last chief of the old school of Conservatism, and the installation of Lord Randolph Churchill as practically the dictator of a reno- vated, a highly astonished, and not wholly pleased party. To call him dictator is hardly at all too strong. Lord Salisbury may be superior to his ally in grasp of mind, as he obviously is in knowledge and experience. But Lord Salisbury sits in the House of Lords, while political power resides in the House of Commons. The Minister who has the supremacy in

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the House of Commons, if he have as strong a will and as vigorous an initi- ative as Lord Randolph Churchill has, will undoubtedly in the last resort have the supremacy in the Cabinet. The energy and the penetration which have raised Lord Randolph in the short course of five years from being nobody to this commanding elevation, may justify his present position by future performances. But that a politician of his temperament and his views should have attained that position marks a decisive transformation in one of the two great parties of the State.

A second point that cannot escape attention in the crisis, is the peremptory dissipation of favourite illusions as to the Irish vote "not counting." The notion that the two English parties should establish an agreement that, if either of them should chance to be beaten by a majority due to Irish auxiliaries, the victors should act as if they had lost the division, has been cherished by some who are not exactly simpletons in politics. We now see what such a notion is worth. It has proved to be worth just as much as might have been expected by any onlooker who knows the excitement of the players, the fierceness of the game, and the irresistible glitter of the prizes. When it suits their own pur- pose, the two English parties will unite to baffle or to crush the Irish, but neither of them will ever scruple to use the Irish in order to baffle or to crush their own rivals. This fancy must be banished to the same limbo as the similar dream that Ireland could be disfranchised and reduced to the rank of a Crown colony. Three years ago, when Ireland was violently disturbed, and the Irish members were extremely troublesome, this fine pro- ject of governing Ireland like India was a favourite consolation, even to some Liberals who might have been expected to know better. The ab- surdity of the design, and the shallow- ness of those who were captivated by it, were swiftly exposed. A few months after they had been consoling

themselves with the idea of taking away the franchise from Ireland, they all voted for a measure which extended the franchise to several hund- reds of thousands of the inhabitants of Ireland who had not possessed it before, and who are not at all likely to employ their new power in the direc- tion of crown colonies or martial law or any of the other random panaceas of thoughtless and incontinent politi- cians. As for the new Government, sharp critics — and some of the sharpest are to be found on their own benches — do not shrink from declaring that they come into power as Mr. Parnell's lieutenants. His vote has installed them, it can displace them; it has its price, and the price will be paid. In the whole transaction, the Irish not only count; they almost count for everything.

The present crisis hag brought into view a far more amazing example of the political levity with which we handle Irish difficulties. A fortnight ago the imperative necessity of renew- ing the Crimes Act or some portions of it was one of the firmest articles of belief among Conservative peers and members of parliament, and, for that matter, among the bulk of Liberal peers and members too. With the exception of a few members on the extreme left, and Lord Randolph Churchill and one or two of his band, the whole of the English and Scotch parties were intent on renewing exceptional legislation Mr. Gladstone had announced a Bill reviving some " valuable and equitable provisions " of the Crimes Act. When he fell, it was almost universally expected that Lord Salisbury would make the re- newal of the Crimes Act one of the subjects on which he would require assurances of support from his prede- cessors. In a few hours it became known that, if he should come into power, he would let the Crimes Act drop, and trust to the vigorous execu- tion of the ordinary law. The decision, if it be acted upon, is a very sensible one. But what are we to say of the

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motive that has notoriously and unde- niably prompted it ? If the Gladstone Government had failed to propose a revival of this exceptional legislation, it is notorious and undeniable that they would have provoked the most energetic and persistent declaration that their policy meant nothing less than a winter of murder and outrage in .Ireland. We may assume that the gentlemen who talked in this way were, and would have been, sincere. Then what are we to think of the political morality which deliberately accepts a policy that avowedly, in their judgment, leads to a winter of murder and outrage ? The levity of all this matches the levity of 1846. In January, 1846, thePeelite Government declared the necessity for a Coercion Bill to be urgent. But they took no steps whatever to secure the measure that was &o urgently needed until June. Then in June the Whigs turned Peel out, on the principle of Non-Coercion. Having thus triumph- antly established the principle, and got themselves into office on the strength of it, they straightway forgot what manner of men they were, and before they had been a month in power brought in a Coercion Bill of their own. So consistently is Ireland made the shuttlecock of English parties.

It is perhaps not an extravagant dream to hope that this curious turn of affairs in the present crisis may have put an end to Coercion as one of the regular instruments at the dis- posal of the Irish Executive. By Coer- cion we mean exceptional legislation, on principles not applied in England and Scotland, for disorders in Ireland. The abandonment of the Crimes Act by both parties, including the pro- visions which seemed valuable and equitable only a few days ago — though its abandonment is only excused on grounds of temporary expediency — will make it very difficult for either Whig or Tory dog to return to its vomit another day. It is true that political fatuity is not likely to be altogether

silent. Already one counsellor pub- licly urges Lord Salisbury to " tell the Irish Parliamentary party that he will try to prevent crime by using only the provisions of the common law, but that if he fails, if a bloody winter again stains the soil of Ireland with frequent assassination, he will ask for an Order in Council and pro- claim martial law." As if martial law, of all things in the world, could do any more good now — even if it were possible — than on the last occa- sion when something like it was tried in Ireland, and proved an egregious failure. Government by state of siege has not been a success in Ireland, and government by state of siege is not only unsuccessful ; under parliamen- tary institutions it is impossible.

We have spoken of the transforma- tion in the Tory party. Irish affairs seem likely to be the immediate agency for testing the chances of a similar transformation in the opposite camp. Mr. Gladstone informed the Queen, in historic words, on the part of the Cabinet, " that their resignation grew out of the vote which had been given by the House of Commons on Monday night, and that it sprang from that source and was founded upon that reason alone." That this was a true and accurate statement, must of course be taken for granted. A defeat on cardinal elements of fiscal policy has always been held to be a valid reason for throwing the responsibility of government on the party who inflicted the defeat. The question of the number of lines on the whips, and of the exact degree of pressure that was brought to bear by official upon non- official members of the Ministerial party, has interesting bearings of its own. But it does not affect the right and duty of Ministers to resign upon a defeat which they had taken reasonable means to avert. What is certain is that, resignation or no resignation, the Cabinet were not of one mind, and were not likely to become so, in respect of the Bill to replace the Crimes Act. To what limits the divergence had been

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narrowed, and whether it would have been successfully adjusted before the time for positive decision had actually arrived, only members of the Cabinet can know or conjecture. All that has for the moment receded into ancient history. The significant element in the episode was the attitude of the Whig section of the Cabinet. Suppos- ing common surmises not to be devoid of foundation, and supposing that on June 9th or 10th the Cabinet had been unable to come to a working agree- ment about the Crimes Act, it would have been the Whigs who had upset the coach. Lord Spencer would rather have broken up the Government than continue to govern Ireland without exceptional powers. With his convic- tion that these powers were indispens- able, this was the only course open to an upright Minister. But the convic- tion itself is the singular thing. The singular thing is that Lord Spencer should have shrunk from thinking Irish government without coercion impossible, and that Mr. Gibson, who is a Tory, and who knows Ireland much better than even Lord Spencer, should think government without coer- cion quite possible and worth trying.

This was not all. The Whigs have fallen off sadly in courage, virility, and sympathy with popular principles since the time of Mr. Fox. They were not the timid party in those days. Fox was not afraid to denounce the Union as "one of the most unequivocal attempts at establishing the principles as well as the practice of despotism." The new Whigs will not even attempt to ameliorate either the despotic principle or the despotic practice that Fox so wisely foresaw. Lord Spencer has been an upright, assiduous, and efficient officer. His hard and firm hand delivered us from the wild and impotent distractions of the Irish administration of 1881. But his regime has been from first to last without flexibility and without initia- tive. It has not been of cast iron, as some pretend, but it has been, and it promised for ever to remain, purely

wooden. Compare it with Drummond's ; it has not had, and was not apparently going to have, a single new idea or fresh impulse in it from beginning to end. For some time this was intelli- gible. It was necessary to appease the confusions that had been left by the preceding regime. Apparently, however, the temporary restoration of superficial order was to mark the limit of Lord Spencer's statesmanship. Even in the stormiest hours of 1881 the Government deliberately promised in the Queen's Speech to introduce a measure for extending local govern- ment in Ireland. The promise had been dropped, but the prospect of a strong reinforcement of the Nationalist party in parliament made its revival indispensable. There were two ways of going to work. One plan was to introduce a few paltry tinkering changes that would neither have in- terested nor satisfied anybody. The tinkering tentative method has been followed in dealing with the Land Question, ever since the report of the Devon Commission, forty years ago, with results that are only too familiar. The other plan was to face the danger boldly, and to oppose a thoroughgoing solution to a deep reaching problem. It is commonly believed that a plan of this kind was desired by the Radical members of the Cabinet (not excluding the most important of them), and re- sisted by some at any rate of its Whig members. The given proposal may have been defective. The public does not know what the proposal was. But the Whigs are believed to have shrunk not only from the proposal but from the principle, and to have been content to face another five years of Irish diffi- culty with the pottering and dawdling methods that have done more than the Penal Laws themselves to create that difficulty, and to make the malady in- veterate. Of course there are grave perils in any attempt to decentralise and to nationalise the Irish Govern- ment. But so there are grave perils in leaving things as they are. They cannot be left as they are, and that is

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what some of the younger members of the late Government clearly perceive. Whether the reform of the Irish system of government will be the great issue at the general election is still uncertain. It is inevitable that it must be one of the issues. The significance and the drift of the gene- ral election must naturally depend very much on the position taken by Mr. Gladstone. If he consents to lead the campaign once more, it will be for him to decide the watchword, and to in- scribe the victorious device on the party standard. The strong general impression is that he will be induced to return to the field. In that case, it is impossible to conceal that policy will be entirely secondary to his per- sonality. The Liberal victory will then be due primarily to the wish of the majority of the electors to have the country governed by Mr. Glad- stone. It will be the " Old Cause and the Old Man," but the Man will figure more largely in 'men's imaginations, than the Cause in their understand- ings. Anybody can preach a mightily impressive and extremely cheap homily on that fact, if he has nothing better to do, but a fact it is, and there is no more to be said. At least it gives more time for such a ripening of Libe- ral opinion as ought to prevent the mischiefs of division. Those are not merely party mischiefs. The substi- tution of isolated and antagonistic groups for parties, will be a tremend- ous misfortune not only for sectional leaders but for the country. A foreign observer, more intelligent than most of his class, already sees the gloomy prospect opening out before us. "Triste perspective," he cries, "et telle qu'on se demande malgre soi si 1'Angleterre, apres nous avoir donne le spectacle de 1'affaiblissement de sa puissance politique a 1'exterieur, n'est pas destinee a nous faire voir a 1'in- terieur le declin des institutions qui ont si longtemps ete sa couronne d'honneur parmi les nations."

Among other illusions that have re-

ceived a check in the recent proceedings must be counted the famous idea of a great fusion that should bring the so- called Moderate Liberal over to the Conservative lines. No whisper of a proposal has been made by the Tory leader to the suspicious or dissatisfied Whigs. Lord Salisbury has not given Mr. Goschen the same invitation that the late Lord Derby gave to Lord Palmerston on one occasion, and to Mr. Gladstone on another. If Glad- stonian Liberalism is too doubtful to politicians of this stamp, they are themselves too good or not good enough for the new Toryism. We see the curious spectacle of the two extreme wings of either party agree- ing more with one another, both in specific views and in political temper, than each of them agrees with its own Centre. It has been said a thousand times that between Mr. Goschen and4Sir Staff ordNorthcote, between LordHart- ington and Sir Michael Hicks Beach, there is little substantial difference of opinion on the actual policy of the day. Lord Randolph Churchill, on the other hand, has boldly propounded a scheme that the Radical leaders openly tax him with appropriating from their private baggage. Yet no attempt has been made, or even dreamed of for a single moment, to bring parties into relations better adjusted to professions and principles. What surprises time may yet have in store for us in the re-composition of our great political groups, it would be fruitless now to inquire. But the next time that Advanced Liberals are menaced with a secession of their Moderate allies, it will be worth re- membering that on this important occasion the Conservatives did not appear to think it worth while to broaden their base in this sense, but, on the contrary,deposed those of their own foremost men with whom Mode- rate Liberals would have found them- selves least, or not at all, out of sympathy. To call a party led by Lord Randolph Churchill Conserva- tive, and a party led, say, by Lord

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Ilartingfcon Radical, is a humorous paradox of the first force. It must be that we are in the midst of a movement of a very remarkable kind of which the evolution is still incom- plete, and for the full development of which we must wait not only for the result of the new elections, but for the further differences and transforma- tions that will follow the final retire- ment of Mr. Gladstone from the scene. That retirement is not expected by those who have the best means of reading that eminent man's mind, but the conditions of party advance are not quite silently preparing in the interval.

It is curious to note that, though Mr. Gladstone is the undoubted dic- tator of his party, and by far the most powerful and popular personage in the realm, the most marked mishaps of his late administration have been due to his backwardness in insisting on his own views. His failures have been of two kinds. In the first place, foreign business has been badly done as busi ness. It has been dilatory, indecisive, slovenly, and flaccid ; things have not been screwed up tight, and clenched. What we may call the secretarial side of our dealings with foreign Govern- ments has been poorly handled. But, in the second place, every false step that has been taken has been a step at variance particularly and especially with Gladstonian principles. The follies in the Soudan, for instance, must have been perpetrated in each of their successive phases, in opposition to the Prime Minister's own most decisive leanings. The plea for this is obvious enough. The Minister of the day must deal with the House of Commons, and in foreign policy the House of Commons, in spite of the tide of pacific sentiment on which it was chosen in 1880, was less patient, less pacific, less resolutely disinclined to military adventures — was more inclined to Jingoism, in a word — than either Mr. Gladstone himself, or, as we believe, than the constituencies. The Minister shrank until the present

session from putting his back to the wall, and loudly defying either a com- posite majority in Parliament or flaming writers in the public prints, to coerce him into courses of military adventure. At last occasion came, when he courageously faced the forces to which he had so long yielded. When the difficulties with Russia came to a point, and after even he had by a certain memorable speech seemed to place himself at the head of the military and forward party, he suddenly recovered himself, and almost at a moment's notice, in spite of the newspapers, in spite of the always excitable feeling in the House of Commons, and in spite of anti- Russian prepossessions which are always strong in the English mind, and which his speech had so directly and powerfully stimulated, he declared for arbitration and a pacific settle- ment. Did the shock unseat him ? Not the least in the world. The majority, which would have rallied to him if he had gone to war, rallied to him when he insisted on peace. It is impossible to imagine a more decisive test of the strength and the stability of his authority. It is impossible to think of a sharper strain. That he should have carried his Russian policy, and emerged from the process without a whit of serious damage to his popu- larity, is the best proof that we could have of the power that he has possessed all these five years, and that he has not always used so freely and per- emptorily as he might perhaps have been expected to do.

It is too soon to estimate the effect of a Conservative administration on the views and leanings of foreign Powers. The one country where the expressions of satisfaction at the change were most prompt and un- mistakable was Germany, and it may be admitted that Germany happens at this moment to be the most im portant Power in the diplomatic world. To us, no doubt, our direct relations with Russia are just now at

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any rate of more pressing moment than any that we have, or are likely to have, with Germany. The recep- tion of the fall of Mr. Gladstone's cabinet -by Russia — that is to say, by the Russian bureaucrats and the half- gagged editors — has been rather various. " Only one answer," says one, " can be expected from us in reply to the news of the appointment of the Conservative leader in the House of Lords as Mr. Gladstone's successor, and that answer must be given in the shape of calm, serious, and significant measures of precaution taken in Central Asia." " We must profit," cries another, "by the change in the English Government, regardless of diplomatic ceremony. It is highly necessary for us to recover our freedom of action. We should now reject all the pretensions of England to interfere in our affairs on the Afghan frontier." But there is a third note struck. Russia, we are told, in spite of its recollection of Mr. Gladstone's friend- liness a few years ago, had become irritated by his " tergiversations and the slowness of his negotiations." Now, may not some more durable combina- tion be settled 1 Why should not the idea spread " that it would be better for Russia, as well as for England, to come frankly to an understanding by substituting for the present delusive and superannuated neutral zone con- terminous frontiers, which could be effected by a reasonable division of Afghanistan." Whatever else may be said of Lord Salisbury, no one who remembers his course during Lord Beaconsfield's government, and his changes of view between the confer- ence at Constantinople and the con- gress at Berlin, can doubt that he possesses remarkable suppleness of mind. It is not impossible that the Russophobe who talked about bank- rupts and swindlers, may turn back again into the Russophil, who walked up and down the streets of Pera arm in arm with Ignatieff . Lord Salisbury may be in some respects a dreamer, but he is substantially a man of business,

and he will in one way or other drop the bad language of the platform, just as Mr. Disraeli apologised for his over bold references to Prince Bismarck.

Then it is argued that Prince Bis- marck will make things smooth for Lord Salisbury, instead of making them rough as he did for Mr. Glad- stone. This is possible, but it is not at all so certain as is assumed. There is no secret about the principle — the very sensible principle for a German statesman — of all Bismarckian diplo- macy. He will give to Lord Salis- bury, if Lord Salisbury will give to him. But what has the British Minister to offer? He is an interim Minister, almost avowedly expecting his dismissal within six months at the hands of the sovereign people, and in the meantime working under as vigi- lant a supervision as skilful and well- informed opponents can manage to exercise. Even if Prince Bismarck could father his thought on his wish, — could persuade himself that a Conservative Government is at all likely to survive a general election, — is he likely to get himself into uneasy relations with Russia, who will still be his neighbour to-morrow, for the sake of obliging a Minister who to-morrow may have disappeared from power for the rest of his natural life ] Then again, even if Lord Salisbury's retention of power for a twelvemonth were certain, instead of being almost impossible, how can he repay the diplomatic favours which his friends are promising to us, and which, as we know too well by this time, will not be given gratis, but must be bought at a round price? Lord Salisbury is supposed to have said to France, when complaining of our appropriation of Cyprus, " Take Tunis ! " — advice that France followed, with pretty considerable consequences in Egypt and other parts of the world. But he is not likely to bid Germany take Zanzibar; on the contrary, Zan- zibar will bring him into relations of an equivocal kind with Germany before he has been at the Foreign Office a single month. The truth is

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that the Powers have been brought by circumstances into waters that are too deep to be sounded by the little plum- met of the persona grata. Events, interests, half-blind movements of material forces — as we have .just been saying about the British Power — have too much impetus just now to be arrested by the personal partialities of even the most wilful of sovereigns or statesmen. If Germany wants Zanzi- bar, any English Minister, whether persona grata or ingrata, will believe that his country has a strong interest in not making the operation particu- larly easy.

Italy, our one ally, has had a lesson. Like M. Ferry and like Mr. Glad- stone, the Italian Ministers have been beaten in the Parliament, and though Signer Depretis may return, Mancini who has had the direction of foreign affairs will remain out of the new combination, whatever it may be. The Italian Parliament resented the ad- ventures to which, as it supposes, Great Britain tempted Italy in the Red Sea. Egypt has been as fatal to the Italian Government as to our own, and as Tonquin was to that of France. It is doubtful whether Lord Salisbury or any other Minister will be able to reckon on very effective co-operation on the part of Italy.

In France all depends upon the coming elections, which may be held as early as the middle of August, and cannot be held later than the middle of October. Just as Lord Salisbury will ratify the arrangement with Russia which Mr. Gladstone has made — probably even giving up the point about the Zulfikar pass, for which Lord Granville was contending — so M. Freycinet has profited by the treaty with China which was virtually due to M. Ferry. This will, of course, free the hands of France in Egypt, if Prince Bismarck allows, and if the news from the constituencies does not forbid. But M. Freycinet exists by consent of the French Radicals, and they are as much opposed to foreign adventures, in spite of the costly

success of the new treaty, as the corresponding party in Italy and in Great Britain. Lord Salisbury would hardly be likely to get on particularly well with the French Republic, but at least the French Government cannot be more awkward, stiff, and difficult with him than it has for five years proved itself to be in respect of his Liberal predecessors.

It is well enough for the rhetorical purposes of party debate to charge the recent Administration with having weakened the great Empire over which they were placed. Foreign observers are naturally at liberty to take stock of our repulses and to count over the tale of our diplomatic mystifications. The Sovereigns of the three Great Empires of the North, as they taunt- ingly remind us, met and deliberated on the affairs of Europe without com- municating a word of their plans and their decisions to the Cabinet of Saint James's. Your diplomatic conference, they say, convoked in London itself on your own initiative, broke up and came to naught without a single Power rallying to the propositions of Eng- land ? Another conference assembled at Berlin with the express design of subjecting the external expansion of Great Britain to the control of Europe. All this is very true, and it is certainly not over- palatable even to the most pacific of patriots.

It is perfectly arguable, moreover, we admit, if any body be bent upon so arguing it, that it is all due to the want of firmness and management in the British Government. But there is another reading of it, which to us seems not only more lenient to a par- ticular Government, but more just on the merits, and far more significant, instructive, and even momentous for Englishmen at large. Our reading is, that the apparent decline in the sup- posed ascendency of Great Britain, arises from a change in external con- ditions, which no statesman in Down- ing Street could by any skill control or prevent. The German desire for colo- nial extension, for instance, whether

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it be a temporary caprice or the out- come of a permanent necessity, is in- dependent of anything that we can do or say — unless, indeed, we are prepared to publish boldly that the earth is ours and all the emptinesses thereof. Again, it is impossible to deny that the immense hosts of armed men now maintained on the Continent of Europe impose on a State which does not, will not, and cannot enter into rivalry with these gigantic forces, an inferiority in relation to the Continental Powers which did not come into such promi- nence in the days of small armies. It is not to be denied, either, that the employment of steam in navigation, and the various inventions for destruc- tion on the sea, have altered the old terms of our maritime supremacy. We are far from saying under this head that such an alteration cannot and ought not to be met by corresponding efforts. But the fact that these efforts have to be made is certainly not an addition to the elements of our national strength ; and what we are saying is that time and circumstance have, for the hour at any rate, effected a change which is, and under any Ministry whatever must have been, a diminu- tion of our national strength in rela- tion to the Great Powers with whom we have to deal.

Whether these and kindred facts mark a permanent transformation in our national position might well be the subject of long and well-weighed consideration. One would have to ask whether what, in the dialect of con- troversies about the currency may be called the appreciation of certain foreign Powers, is permanent or tem- porary. Germany which holds the position of pre-eminence held less than twenty years ago by the French Empire, may much less than twenty years hence have followed the French Empire into confusion and nothingness. However this may be, there has been an un- doubted transformation for the time, and if any statesman of less modera- tion, equity, and credit for desiring

June 24th.

peace than Mr. Gladstone had presided over our affairs, the process would have ended in disaster. It may be that the force of events would have imposed an equally moderate and patient spirit upon Lord Salisbury and his friends. Sages have often told the world that sovereigns and states- men are not so mighty as they seem, and sages ought to know. In any case, do not let us be frightened by the reproach of fatalism from perceiving that occasions of difficulty arise for States which no statecraft can avert, though statecraft may make all the difference between difficulty and peril, and between peril and disaster.

While noisy Excitables have been going about with loud declarations that the worst government that the world ever saw was allowing Germany to take the pick of the habitable globe, it appears that the territory of the British Empire has been increased by a piece of Africa as large as France in area, temperate and healthy in climate, abounding in rich soil, suspected to contain valuable minerals and metals, and opening a trade-route to the vast interior of the dark continent. It would be more satisfactory if this enormous accession of territory and of responsibility could be traced to any settled and consistent design. As it is, it looks like one more of those fated accidents that have made South Africa the most confusing, trouble- some, and thankless of our posses- sions. Already, we are told that we have annexed the wrong piece, or at least that we should have included another piece to the north, though it is clear from the information of those who know that we shall have to fight for it with its native occupants. Nor is the prospect very satisfactory to east and south of the new possession. The new colony of Bechuanaland, if so it is to be called, hems in the Transvaal on the whole of its western, and most of its northern border, and that important fact certainly contains the seed of many troubles.

MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE

AUGUST, 1885.

MRS. DYMOND.

CHAPTER XX. ALMSGIVING.

As the actors pass across the stage of life and play their respective parts, it is not difficult at the outset to docket them with their different characters — a soldier, a parson, an artist, a lawyer, a lover, a heroine, a law-giver, a widow, and so forth.

But presently, after the play has gone on for a little while (on the stage of life it is not the play that ends, but the actors who come and go), we begin to see that, although some of us may be suited to our parts, there are others whose natures are ill-fitted to their role, and very often we find the performers suddenly playing away in their own natural characters instead of those which they are supposed to represent, to the very great confusion of the drama which is going on.

Here is the lawyer making love to his client instead of drawing up her will ; the parson fighting his bishop instead of guarding his flock ; the soldier preaching sermons ; the actor taking his part in serious earnest, and blessing his people with unction. A hundred instances come to one's inind of fiddlers and tailors set to rule great kingdoms, with what tragic ill- luck, alas, we all remember. Was not one mechanician born to a throne, whose life paid for his idiosyncrasies ? And, again, have we not heard of a

No. 310. — VOL. LII.

Spinoza patiently at work upon his lenses earning his daily pittance, a true king among men, whose wise and noble thoughts still rule the minds of succeeding generations? Other instances will occur to us all, of tra- vesties still more incongruous. A priest serving his king before his God, a poet, with wilder blood and genius than his compeers, sitting with them at St. Stephens upon a dusty cushion, which he presently flings in their faces, and, in generous wrath and excitement, goes off to die, fight- ing for liberty, under the blue sky of Greece.

When Max du Pare, the son of a dreamer and of a downright and prac- tical woman, found himself started in life in the little studio at the end of his mother's garden, he was certainly to blame in that he did not keep with peaceful devotion to the career into which Fate had launched him, with so little effort on his own part. His en- gravings were excellent, but still more so were his etchings, boldly worked out, remarkable for their force, their colour (and such a term may often be used with justice even where black and white alone are used). He had received his red ribbon with the rest of them for work done during the last two years, for medals gained at ex- hibitions for etchings, some of which were now hanging in gilt frames at St. Cloud among the eagles. Among

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others he had worked for money as well as for love. The day before Su- sanna, seeing one of his most successful prints in a shop window, had blushed up painfully and looked away. Du Pare saw her turn crimson ; he guessed that she had recognised his work ; he felt as if he could gladly tear the picture with its insolent Bacchantes from its place and destroy it then and there for ever.

Susy guessed what was passing in his mind.

" I have never lived among artists," she said. "I know there are many things I do not understand ; but I have lately learnt," she added, gently, " how beautiful, how wonderful it all is ; and I shall 'i always be grateful to you for teaching Jo."

And Du Pare turned a searching look upon her, though he did not answer. Perhaps if his art had meant less to him it might have led him further still ; it was something beyond colour, beyond form that he wanted, in his work as in his life, which haunted him at times and made him ashamed of mere clever successes.

All this moralising equally applies to my heroine, Susanna, a woman of natural aptitude and impression- ability, placed by no unkind fate in a peaceful and prosperous position. And now the moment had come when she was to play her touching part of a mourning Dido no longer, and lo ! flinging away the veils and the dignity of widowhood, wiping the natural tears, she found herself true to her nature — not false to her past ; alive, not dead, as she imagined, ex- isting still, not having ceased to feel, a human being, not an image in a look- ing glass ; not remembering only, but submitting to the great law of life, which is stronger and less narrow than any human protest and lamen- tation.

Once more Mrs. Dymond was lean- ing from her_high window, impatiently scanning the figures coming and going along the pavement. Why did he keep them ? The day was passing, the

hours were waning. She was the most impatient of the party. There sat Jo, absorbed in his painting. He was trying to copy the great blue china pot he had brought home from the Quai, and the pink poppies that Tempy had stuck into it, with their blue shadows and their silver-green leaves ; Jo had a natural taste for still life. His stepmother was grate- ful beyond words to those squares of colour, to those never-failing interests of form, of light, of arrangement, which interested him ; she herself had no such natural gift ; she was all the more glad when Jo, under Du Parc's guidance, had tried his hand at art. Mrs. Dymond was less pleased when she heard her stepson announcing that he had also adopted some of Mon- sieur Caron's doctrines. Jo had met Caron once or twice at the studio, where the good old man used to call with the various handbills and tricolor announcements which he was having printed to announce the coming book. Tempy, who had wanted to start half an hour before, now sat half- asleep upon the red couch with its red cushions. The faint aroma of the poppies in the sunlight seemed to taint the drowsy air in the little room, where time passed to the slow ticking of the clock, and where Apollo in his car was for ever galloping beneath his crystal dome. Little Phraisie was in the next room, also sleeping, on the bed with drawn cur- tains. When the heat of the day was over, Henrietta Wilkins was to take her into the Tuileries Gardens close by. It was her pride to sit there at her work, and to hear the people admire the "little Cherubim," while she piled her gravel pies at her nurse's knee.

Mrs. Dymond had insisted on waiting for her mother and Du Pare. As the flood of people passed on down below in vain she scanned the figures — seek- ing for the persons for whom she looked. A vague sense of uneasy dis- appointment came over her. So ab- sorbed was she watching the endless

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-procession that she did not hear the door open, nor become aware that Du Pare was in the room, until Jo's loud cries of " Mrs. Dymond ! Mrs. Dy- mond ! " made her look round.

A dark figure, was standing in the doorway. Tempy started up, Jo put down his brush, and Susanna, with a sudden sense of ease and tran- quillity, turned from her window and faced her new friend, blushing a little, looking more beautiful than he had ever seen her.

"Madame," said Du Pare, bowing very low as usual.

"How do you do, M. Max?" said Mrs. Dymond, welcoming her visitor. "Where is my mother? Is she not coming?"

" I was not able to see her when I called — Madame Marney was in her room. She sends a message," and Du Pare brought out a folded scrap from his waistcoat pocket : —

" Mr DABLIN& Susr, — Do not wait for me to-day ; I had rather not come. I am keeping the boys, for I expect their father home.

" Your loving Mother.

" P.S. I will call if I can, and see the darling baby in the course of the day."

The note was disappointing, but it was no use delaying any longer.

" We are late," says Tempy, starting up. " We ought not to have waited so long. Mr. Bagginal will be quite tired out."

"I have been with M. Caron. I am sorry you delayed for me," said Du Pare, as usual only addressing Susanna, who was giving Wilkins some parting directions as she took her cloak and her parasol from her faithful attendant.

Max seemed preoccupied at first and unlike himself, as they all walked along the street to the Quai whence the steamers started.

Susanna and the pursuit of pleasure were not at this moment the great preoccupations of his mind ; other

things less peaceful, less hopeful were daily closing up around him. There was a terrible reality to him in his apprehensions, all the more vivid because from his artistic qualities he belonged to the upper and more pre- scient classes, while from experience and birth he was near enough to the people to understand the tones of its voice, the wants of its daily life, its angry rising, and its present mood. But by degrees, being in Susanna's company, he brightened up. Love requires time and space, if it is not able to accomplish absolute impossi- bilities, but it certainly makes the . most of the passing lights and mo- ments of life.

" M. Caron detained me over the proofs of his book ; it is coming out immediately," said Du Pare.

" You need not explain. We have nothing to do but to amuse ourselves, you have your work to attend to," said Susy gaily.

Susanna had felt of late as if her relations with Du Pare were changed, and it seemed quite natural that he should give her details of his day's work. Max, too, realised that he was some one in her life, not a passer-by, but a fellow traveller. The two might very well have walked out of one of the galleries of the Louvre hard by. She with her Grecian goddess looks, he of the dark, southern head with the black hair, that beaked nose, the dark, sudden eyes, so deeply set, eyes that were hard and soft by turns. He had scarcely ever talked to her before, and now at this moment, not for the first time, a sense of his reality, of the importance of his presence, of his goodwill, of his approbation and acquiescence with her conclu- sions came over her. There was a curious simplicity about Du Pare which impressed people ; either he said what he meant, or he let you see that he mistrusted you and was silent. He had great powers of work and a gift for enjoyment as well, which is perhaps more rare, and as he had walked along by Susy's side,

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with his bright looks and his odd swinging gait, he had seemed the very impersonation of a holiday maker, of a man at one with the moment. They were crossing the great court of the Louvre when a shadow came from behind a statue, and a frightened woman, starting out into the sunshine, suddenly put out a trembling white hand for alms. Susanna and her young people, from their English train- ing, were passing on, they had a vague idea it was wrong to give to casual beggars, but Du Pare stopped short, and a curious little dialogue ensued.

"Why are you begging, Madame Lebris?" said he roughly, "Are you ill ? "

" I am dying," said the woman quietly ; " my children are starving." " Where is your husband ] " " You know better than I do," she answered.

" Go home at once," said Du Pare. " I will come and see you this evening." He thrust a napoleon into her hand. She took it with a weary look, and he nodded and hurried after the others. They were standing a few yards off waiting for him.

" I kno.w the woman, she is the wife of a man who worked for me," he said in French, looking vexed and confused. He had paid away his last gold piece, and he had but a few sous left in his pocket. How was he to pay for his share of the dinner ? Max had hardly recovered himself when he saw Mr. Bagginal. " Ah ! " said he, " there is your friend ! " and, as he spoke, our attache, with an-umbrella, a grievance, and a flower in his button- hole came up to meet them from the steamer-steps.

The holiday of the year had begun, and with the sunshine the shores had quickened with green, with song, with the stir of spreading life. There were two or three young men and women and some children on board, one or two experienced excursionists, some housekeepers, carrying their baskets, a village wedding, returning home after the ceremony ; as the steamer stopped

at each landing place in turn, the company passed off the boat. Scarcely any one remained by the time they were nearing St. Cloud. Jo was practising his French upon the man at the wheel. Tempy, much amused by the smoothly talkative and attentive Mr. Bagginal, sat somewhat mollified and relenting on a bench, red hair and Parisian checked cotton dress and her big white ombrelle open to shade her pink cheeks. Susy, at the other end of the same bench, sat smiling, watching the lights and the shadows, listening to the song of the birds and the wash of the ripples, answering a word now and then when Du Pare, who had been smoking at the other end of the boat, came up to speak to her.

At first, under the restraint of Mr. Bagginal's presence, he had kept silent and aloof. Now he began to talk again ; he told her stories along the shore, pointed out the prettiest walks, the pleasantest chalets where the Parisians go on summer afternoons, and dine and enjoy the sunsets in the sky, while the fish come leaping from the river into their plates, and the white wine flows into the glasses which the damsels bring with serious smiling looks, and the white boats slide by, and birds fly home to rest, and the glorious sunset says, " Come, clink the glasses and quaff the golden wine."

" Ah ! do you know that place ? " interrupted Mr. Bagginal, as Max pointed out a restaurant with wide balconies standing by the water's edge. " I'm told it is first-rate ; shall we dine there? "

" You will find a very good dinner," Max said.

The steamer travelled on between the shores in the new sunshine. It was so early in the season that but few people were on board. One of those glorious bursts of spring had overtaken them.

Susy saw villas amid budding syca- more trees, with fringing poplars, white-washed walls, terraces, gardens breaking into flower, high roads, whence people hailed the steamer with

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friendly signs. She watched the pale blue spring sky, the high floating clouds.

" Are you not afraid of being burnt ? " said Du Pare.

Susy opened her sunshade, though she loved the sun. Was she awake or asleep ; was this herself, the sad, har- assed, bewildered, lonely widow, this happy being basking in this delightful, invigorating present ? Yivid admira- tion is a disturbing element some- times, we thankfully absorb the hour tranquilly, exist to the utter- most while it lasts, scarcely under- stand it all. So sits Susanna while the water beats fresh against the sides of the big boat and the warm sunlight comes quickening ; everything flows into the very soul of the hour, that mysterious natural soul, which people share with one another, with place, with time.

They travelled on peacefully in this floating companionship and sympathy, while the new life stirred along the banks.

CHAPTER XXI.

ST. CLOUD BEFORE THE STORM.

" I wish my mother had come with us," said Susy, as the steamer stopped at the landing place of St. Cloud, just where the public place and the bar- racks and the terraces all meet, while beyond these slate roofs and balus- trades, the tufted green and lilac, and silver and gold of the lovely hanging gardens rise, and the white walls and windows of the palace. A flag was flying, for the court was there, and indeed as they landed the soldiers were presenting arms to some smart open carriages, which were rolling by with glittering outriders, a flashing of harness, a waving of plumes, a click of arms ; it was a pretty, brilliant sight.

" Shall we dine first, or walk first ? " said Mr. Bagginal, gaily. " M. du Pare, you know the place better than I do."

Du Pare hesitated.

" If ces dames are not afraid of a long walk," said Du Pare, " we might stroll back through the woods to Sevres ; and I can recommend that little restaurant you were looking at just now," he said, finishing his sen- tence to Susanna herself.

Susy agreed at once. She was in childish spirits, and behaving like a child, thought Tempy, severely, some- what in Mrs. Bolsover's frame of mind. Jo stared at Susanna ; he did not know her ; he too liked her best in her old subdued condition, though he was glad to see her happy.

There was a pretty little girl in a village night-cap on board, about little Phraisie's age, and as the steamer started, Susy stood looking after the child, and thinking of her own with some natural maternal solicitude ; then she turned and found Max as usual waiting by her side and watching her with something the same expression as that with which she had looked at the departing child.

" I should like to have made a sketch of that child,'' he said, a little confused at being surprised. " No wonder women are pious," he added, "wfeen they have pretty bambinos of their own to worship. I should think for you, madame, the difficulty must be, not to believe, but to keep rational in your convictions."

Then Max moved on again and joined the others, for he had seen, though Susy did not notice it, a somewhat gloomy exchange of looks pass between Tempy and her brother as they stood waiting on the slope above.

It was a general holiday of sunshine, lilacs, lime trees ; dazzling, blossoming flowers on every slope and terrace. The steep sides were heaped with colour ; the wrought iron railings were overhung with garlands, with ivy and laburnum and sweet flowering bushes pushing through the bars. Whitsuntide had come with an ex- quisite burst. All these French people, natural lovers of beauty and sunshine, were out basking in the flood of sudden happiness. At the gate of

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the great court stood a girl, with a half-penitent, half-laughing face ; she had stolen some overhanging branches of lilac and May blossom, and had been called sternly to account by one of the old veterans in uniform and metal buttons, guardian angels of this earthly paradise.

The girl, undaunted by the buttons, looked up with merry, entreating eyes, the brave old veteran, unconquered in a hundred fights, seemed hard put to it now, for all his stripes and gold braid. Just overhead from a second terrace, bordered by scrolled iron rails and ivy creepers, hung an anxious audience of girls, also provided with the plunder of spring, and wondering what their own chance of escape would be.

" She will come over him," said Mr. Bagginal laughing. " Look, he is yielding."

Max shrugged his shoulders in an irritating way.

" Why do you look so angry ? " said Susy.

" She will get as a veniality what is her natural right," said Max. " That is how morality is taught in our schools."

"But if you think everybody else has a natural right to pick everything there will be only broken stalks for you and me," says Mr. Bagginal with his usual drawl.

"I don't know about you," said Max laughing, "I myself have long ago made up my mind to broken stalks," and as he spoke he flung a little spray of lilac he had picked over the railings of the terrace.

"M. Caron should be here," said Jo. " What is it he was saying in the studio last night, that an equal sub- division of material was an absurdity — that all gifts should be spiritual. . . and capable of infinite division ? "

"I don't suppose even Caron could tell you the difference between material and spiritual/' said Max, shrugging his shoulders. "He cer- tainly doesn't practise his precepts, but I suppose the Patron meant that if you give a man a fish he is hungry

again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn. But these very elementary principles are apt to clash with the leisure of the cultivated classes. Will Mr. Bagginal now produce his ticket — the result of favour and the unjust subdivision of spiritual enjoyments 1 " said Du Pare, with a smile.

Mr. Bagginal stared at Max for a moment. Max stared back. Du Pare had a quiet, confident manner, which did not, however, always put people at their ease. He actually seemed to feel his own right to exist and to speak.

Mr. Bagginal' s order was pro- duced, and the veterans unlocked the gates and admitted these wan- derers into deeper and sweeter glades and beauties. They skirted the- avenues, advancing by the stately green arcades, walking under the chestnut trees in flower, climbing from one ivy-bound terrace to another — from stone flight to stone flight, from avenue to avenue again, and so onward through the glorious spring into greener and yet greener places. The larks were singing overhead, nightin- gales and thrushes were answering from end to end with notes so sweet, so loud, so mellow that all these human beings, with one accord, ceased talking to listen to the sweet pertinacious melody. After a time they found themselves coming out into an open place where a lake lay glistening in the spring.

" There is a terrace somewhere near this," said Mr. Bagginal. " Who knows the way to it ? " And Du Pare went to inquire of some women with flowers in their hands, who stood smiling, and pointing out the road.

" One certainly gets a capital pano- rama of Paris here," says Tempy, breathlessly, and ascending the steps of the terrace, and talking in her loud, cordial voice to Mr. Bagginal. " I should like to sketch it, but I'm not good at sketching ! Jo could do it, couldn't you, Jo 1 "

" Would you also like to see me

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stand on my head on the dome of the Invalides ? " said Jo gravely.

" What do you mean, you silly boy ? " said Tempy. " You sketch beautifully ; doesn't he, Monsieur du Pare ? "

But Max didn't answer. He had not yet reached the others, and stood leaning against the lower end of the stone parapet by Mrs. Dymond, and looking out at the wondrous circle of hills. Susy lingered for an instant, she had almost forgotten that such happi- ness was possible — such a moment, such a spring-tide ; the whole air was full of a wonderful perfume, the very branches of the trees all seemed to be singing and flinging their incense upon the air.

As Mrs. Dymond stood, flushed and motionless, a new sense of the uni- versal community of life reached her, was it her sorrow that died away in the flame of the sunshine 1 Her black gown turned to purple in the light. Suddenly she seemed to know that she was young, that she belonged to the world in which she was breathing, to now, not only to the past ; that the present claimed her, that the past was past.

" Come up this way. Come ! come ! " cries Jo, looking back, and in a sort of dream Susanna moved on, still followed by Du Pare. At their feet spreads Paris in its sober robe of white, with its thousand domes and roofs and spires, pale, shining and beautiful, delicately outlined and shaded ; while the hills lie like a charm inclosing all, and the silver turns of the river are flowing on into the very heart of the great city, as though to wash away every shadow and stain from its stones.

There are some things can scarcely be remembered, much less written down ; among these is the quality of moments which come to us now and again, the complexity and multiplica- tion of happiness and beauty which can give these life.

" And what about dinner ? " says M. Bagginal. "How does one get away?"

" There should be a path somewhere through this wood," says Max, looking about him.

He found the way presently, along the shade and the sunshine under the trees, past a sunny glen where some milk-white goats, like creatures out of an idyll, were disporting themselves. Pan was perhaps hidden among the bushes or Acteon was sleeping among the ivy. The little wood led down hill to iron gates.

CHAPTER XXII.

A LA PECHE MIEACULEUSE.

As they came jogging gaily along the lane Jo leaped up in the air, broke a branch of lilac from one of the over- hanging trees, and coming up to his stepmother flung it to her.

" Take it home for me," said Jo ; " put it in your parasol. I'll try and paint it when I get back," and he hurried past her to overtake the others.

"Don't you think he has great talent 1 " said Susanna, with a thought- ful look, which brightened as it fell on Jo's red shock head.

" He must work on and find out for himself what he is capable of," said Du Pare, looking not at Jo but at Susy herself with unconcealed kind- ness and admiration.

Even for Susanna, or perhaps because it was Susanna (to him the sweetest, fairest woman he had ever known), he could not say more than he felt. Her concerns seemed to him next to his own the most important things in all the world. Perhaps his own also gained in importance from her coming, her interest in them. They were reaching the gate where the sentry was standing, armed to the teeth, and Susy, with a woman's disregard of lawful authority, drew a fold of her dress over the lilac blossom.

The iron gates led by a lane to the village green of Sevres, where the children were at play and where many people were coming and going, while old people talked in the sunshine. The

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green led to the river, spanned by the bridge soon to be the scene of so many desperate encounters, of unavailing appeals, and hopeless parleys, the boundary line between victory and defeat. Who could have realised that day the piteous tragedy, already near, while the children danced and the peaceful elders rested at the end of their long day's work, and the young people advanced gay with the mirth of the hour ?

Neither Jo nor Tempy as they went along noticed a strange - looking figure, who, however, seemed greatly interested in them. It was a tall, pale man, in a workman's dress, with long fair hair reaching to his shoulders. He had been resting on a bench ; he got up, seeing Du Pare, and laid his hand heavily and familiarly upon his arm.

" Ah ! at last. I hoped we might meet," he said, drawing him a little aside. Then quickly and excitedly, " Hast thou heard the news 1 The police have paid a domiciliary visit to Papa Caron : they found nothing ex- cept some of thy caligraphies. Hap- pily art is privileged. The com- missaire was told that thy Goddess of Liberty was the portrait of the late Madame Caron. I have seen Lebris," the stranger went on. " He tells me Dombrowski is in Paris. He will be in the Rue de la Hotte to-night, are we to expect you 1 Mademoiselle vous es'cusera," said the long-haired man somewhat familiarly, with a stare at Susy.

Du Pare looked at his acquaintance with a very haughty air, which took him of the long hair somewhat aback.

" Lebris had much better be looking after his family than meddling in things he does not understand," said Du Pare, and turning away without a further answer he rejoined Mrs. Dymond and almost hurried her away.

"Is that an artist?" said Susy, rather awe-stricken.

" An artist, no ; that is one of our

rising politicians," said the young man, with a shrug of the shoulders as they walked on. " I confess that if it was not for M. Caron' s sake I could gladly knock him down for his impertinence to you. His name is Jourde, he is one of the best of them. But — ah ! the whole thing seems like a bad dream now as I walk along by your side," cried Du Pare, suddenly forgetting his reserve and realising the utter gulf, the absolute distance, the impassable barrier which divided him from the sweet and gracious being whose looks rested so kindly on his, whose voice filled his ears, whose every word and motion seemed to him touched with peace, beauty, goodwill upon earth, some harmony almost more than human.

And was all this to be put aside, thrust away, for what 1 For a hopeless cause, a nightmare, for these dirty hands holding out a grotesque semblance of liberty and justice. Then he thought, with a bitter pang of self-reproach, of his dear old master and friend, of that lifelong sacrifice and devotion, that patient following of Truth in its many disguises, and that aspiration after greater things than tranquillity and ease. Suddenly shaken and stung back to the reality of life Max put a hard and dogged control upon himself for the rest of the walk ; he would not let himself think, and yet he could not enjoy the present any more. Mrs. Dymond wondered what had come to him. His manner, his voice, his face had changed, he seemed no longer her friend and companion, but one strange and far removed from their simple merry- making.

The others saw no difference, and came up laughing and in high spirits, when Max called to Jo to hasten, or they might not get their table at the inn where they were to dine. They turned down along the river - side, again, the Peche Miraculeuse stood at a silver turn of the Seine, and the hungry excursionists were coming up from various sides to the many tables

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which were set ready, some in the dark dining-rooms down below, some on a broad balcony or terrace from which the river could be seen, floating into those glorified distances, where the sweet resounding woods and visions through which they had been passing lay hidden in the sunset.

The lady in the camisole sitting in the little lodge below smiled an affable welcome, and put out five ivory counters for her guests.

"Will you take your entrance tickets!" said Du Pare, holding out four of the counters.

" And what will you do ? " says Mr. Bagginal, rather relieved to find Max was not to be at the dinner.

" I am not coming. I must go back," he answered.

Susy exclaimed in disappointment.

Max heard her exclaim as, lifting his hat, he turned away quickly. He could not explain to them all that when he had thrust his last napoleon into Madame Lebris' trembling hand he had given his share of the feast to the poor woman who had appealed to him as they started. At the time he had regretted the sacrifice, now he was glad to get away — his mood had changed. He was in no difficulty about his meal. There was always a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine in his mother's cupboard at home, and he now started to walk back to the villa and to partake of this frugal repast before joining Caron at the appointed place.

Dombrowski had been sent on some mission — Du Pare knew not what, only that it was of vital influence to the cause, so, at least, Caron's friends affirmed. Max himself had little faith in these mysterious expeditions and conspiracies. He was ready to do his part, even to go on missions if need be ; at all events, to help those that wanted help, to send a share of his own strength and goodwill to others, but he had no fancy for plots and secret societies ; and it may as well be explained at once, that, although he lived in the company of schemers and

plotters, he himself belonged to no secret societies. His godfather had promised the sturdy madame that Max should not be involved. Caron was scrupulous to keep his word and his promises. He was absolutely trusted and respected ; introduced by him, Max was welcomed, although bound by no promises. He was even courted by many of those who were able to see his utility to their cause if he once heartily joined any one of the many cliques and brotherhoods which were secretly growing round about. But, in truth, his mind just then was full of other thoughts and preoccupations, and one's own experi- ence perforce comes before that of others however unfortunate. As he walked along in the dusk by the river- side towards home, something seemed calling to him — calling from the little eating-house where the lights were beginning to kindle up. " She is going from you," said a voice. " Who knows, she might remain, she might be yours ; but she is happier as she is, and you would not have things altered." He knew enough of the world to realise that Susy and her surroundings were utterly unsuited to him and to his life. Max was not over-diffident ; modesty was not one of the qualities with which nature had endowed him, and something in Susanna's eyes and voice and manner told him that to her he was beginning to be no less interesting than she had long been to him. Poor child ! she had better go before she knew the truth, return to her home, her com- forts, her religion, her friends, the reverends in their white ties, to her narrow prejudices, her well-mounted household. Hie thee to a monastery ! What had induced this lamb from the flock to come in innocence and thrust itself into his gueule de loup ? Dear woman, she should go as she had come. She should not know how near he had been to asking her to make the sacrifice of peace and home, and country, and consideration, " for she might accept me. She is a woman

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just like any other." So reasoned Max, who was himself a man just like any other.

Meanwhile Susanna sat silent in her darkening corner, also changed and silenced, disappointed and angry with herself for the difference she found in everything ; wondering why Du Pare had left them so abruptly, where he was gone, what his going meant. The western light shone on still, but with long radiations ; the fisherman's boat, catering for the guests, pushed out across the river to the reservoir of trout, the oars flapped with a sad, chilling sound. Tempy's spirits rose as Susy's fell, and she and Jo and M. Bagginal joked and laughed with an extra gaiety and noisy enjoyment which jarred upon poor Susy, sitting lonely and motionless, with all the fading glory of the sunset for a back- ground to her depression. It was the same thing on board the steamer in the evening grey, where their youthful sports offended not only Susy but a little French couple sitting by the wheel. "Anglais" said the man, " Barbares," hissed the pretty little lady, to Jo's immense amusement.

CHAPTER XXIII. SUSANNA'S CORRESPONDENCE. SUSY came home still, tired, and dis- pirited. She left the others to their cheerful interminable leave-takings down below, and hurried up the stairs to her own room. As she passed through the sitting-room she saw some letters lying on the round table, and she carried them with her candle into her own room to read. It was nearly dark, the light was dying out of the sky, and she untied her bonnet and sat down in the chair by her bedside with some sense of rest and peace. The first letter was from Mrs. Bolsover, and in her own hand- writing : —

" BOLSOVER HALL, April 22nd. "My DEAR SUSANNA, — We are all glad to think the time for your return is so near, though I am afraid you will

find us very humdrum after your foreign friends and amusements. I only write to say that we are expect- ing you. News concerning such old fogies as we are is generally nothing but a catalogue of ills, more or less tiresome. Happily we are all much as usual, with nothing more to com- plain of than when you left the Place. A_unt Fanny has been up in town, and has brought back a couple of white rats, which Phraisie will approve of.

" The squire is very well satisfied with his lambs and the look of the spring crops. He goes over to the Place on Tuesdays, and says all is as it should be. He brings us back cart- fulls of fruit and vegetables, which the gardeners might otherwise appro- priate.

" Our nephew Charles has been staying with us, and left us this morning. He is thinking of trying for the Civil Service. I was delighted to get your letter contradicting the un- favourable accounts which had reached us of his conduct in London, and which, as you know, I never believed. I was glad to tell him how completely you had justified him.

" We are rather anxious at the last accounts from Paraguay, where my brother Peregrine is now living. The country seems in a very unsettled state. He has written us a very long, and, no doubt, interesting letter on the subject of the last ministerial changes there. He promises to send us another box of curiosities before long.

" Pray remember us very kindly to your mother and her family. Give our fond love to Jo and Tempy, and, with a hug to the precious child, believe me, my dear Susy, ever your affectionate old sister-in-law,

"CAROLINE BOLSOVER.

" Tell Phraisie we shall be looking out for her by the end of the week, and that we shall keep the rats till she comes for them."

The second letter was also stamped with the Bolsover crest, but it bore the London post-

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mark, and was directed in a dashing and blotted handwriting at which Susy wondered as she opened it. Then she began to read attentively, and having finished she read the letter through a second time ; and then, still holding it in her hands, she sat motionless trying to think, to realise how much it might mean. The words were simple enough, and to the point : —

"RATTLE STEEET, SOHO, April 23rd.

"MY DEAR MRS. DYMOND, - Many months have passed since I have troubled you, either by writ- ing or by coming. When I last saw Tempy, I felt she would prefer that I should absent myself for a time. I think, however, it will be better for all our sakes to get to a definite understanding. My time at Oxford is at an end, and it is necessary to make some plans for the future. My Aunt Fanny has been in town, visiting Jamracs and the spring exhibitions, and kindly exerting herself on my behalf. A former admirer, she tells me, has promised her to give me a nomina- tion for the Foreign Office, and this, with what my uncle allows me will enable me, I trust, to pay my wash- ing bills, and keep me not only in crusts but in cigars. My Aunt Caroline has also shown me a letter which you have been kind enough to write, contradicting a report which I never heard of till now, and which certainly confirmed my poor Uncle John in his prejudice against me. I will not dwell upon this unexpected eclaircissement, for although in this particular instance appearances were hard upon me other facts (that I am heartily ashamed of now) may not have reached his ears, which would have undoubtedly seemed to him good reasons for opposing my marriage with my cousin Tempy. But at the same time I protest that I was hardly dealt with on the whole ; if he had lived I should have appealed

once more to him, to his sense of justice, to his great affection for his daughter. He is gone, leaving you her guardian in his place, and I come to you. If you could see my heart you would understand that I am sincere, you would see how truly I love her. I also think that no one else could ever make her so happy as I could. If she still loves me, I will come at once and meet you anywhere you like ; to her I would rather speak than write. Meanwhile, I can only ask you to believe me.

" I am yours very sincerely,

"C. P. BOLSOVER."

As Susy sat there her mind was quickly made up; something in Charlie's letter rang true and seemed to find a ready answer in her feeling. Ah ! she knew now as she had never known before what it [was to divide yearning hearts. John would forgive her even if he did not approve ; but he would approve ; true himself, generous, con- siderate for others, how could he not approve? Why should she mistrust his unvarying goodness? As she sat there she found herself almost speaking, almost appealing to her husband, and a feeling of oneness [with him in her wish to do right seemed to set her mind and her heart at ease.

Her dreams of the past and of Tempy's future were not altogether dispersed by the voices coming into the next room. Jo and Tempy, having taken leave of Mr. Bagginal, had come up stairs after her.

"It would have been a delightful day if it hadn't been for that tire- some M. du Pare," said Tempy very loud and cheerfully, dropping down once more on the red divan which she had left some eight hours before. "I can't think what. Susy finds in him. He is a thoroughly disagree- able man, ard so are all his friends. He has scarcely the manners of a gentleman ; do you think so, Jo?"

252

Mrs. Dymond.

" I don't know ; I like him and I like his friends," said Jo, lighting the candles. "They are rather rough to be sure, all except Mon- sieur Caron ; but I don't care so much about manners. You like super- fine cream -laid people, like Baggi- nal and Charlie." Jo said all this walking noisily about the room looking for matches, soda-water, opening windows, &c., as people do after a day's absence. " Mrs. Dy- mond likes them rough," he went on, " without too much polish, like me and Du Pare." He looked up and stopped short, for " Mrs. Dy- mond " had come back, she was there, she had heard what they said. She was blushing crimson and waiting in the doorway.

Jo gave one glance at Tempy, then another at Susy, as she stood quite still looking down, and ner- vously smoothing the ribbons of her cloak which she had not laid aside, then he took up his hat and was pre- paring to go out again for an evening pipe in front of the house.

" Don't go yet, Jo," said Susanna, in an odd voice. "I have something to say to you and Tempy. Some- thing which has been on my mind for some days." Tempy sat bolt up- right on her sofa, and wondered what on earth was coming.

"M. du Pare, whom you dislike, Tempy, so much," said Susy, with a touch of severity in her voice which Tempy had never heard before, " has done us a service for which we ought all to be grateful. He has cleared away a cruel injustice. Do you not both remember the things which were said of your cousin, Charlie, that sad time when — when he first spoke t6 your father ? They were all false. Monsieur Max knows it was all untrue about the drinking. Your father never knew it. M. du Pare used to go and see your cousin who was ill in his lodgings. He hears from him some- times now, and I too have heard from Charlie — the letter was here when I came in. Tempy," said Susy, trem-

bling, but recovering herself and speaking more quickly, and looking very sweet, "it is for you to answer the letter. I should no longer feel I was doing right if I continued to oppose your marriage. I think — I cannot say for certain — but I think your father would agree to it now. He used to say," and Susy turned to her stepson, " that her husband must be a good man, Jo, a man to be trusted and that she could depend upon — and surely Charlie has proved himself faithful and to be trusted."

Susy's voice failed her from sheer emotion and excitement, her eyes were full of tears, she felt terrified by the responsibility she was taking, and yet she had no doubt in her mind. She came up to the divan, and sitting down by Tempy, in her excitement she caught her hand in both hers, but Tempy started to her feet and shook off the gentle fingers which Susy had laid upon her own. The letter between them fell to the ground.

" You will not oppose ! You want to get rid of me, that is what you mean," cried the girl in a sudden jealous fury, speaking with volubility and vehemence. " You want to be free to marry that Frenchman — and you expect me to be grateful to him and to you — for months and months you have looked on at my misery, and now because that man tells you to change your mind, to forget my father's wishes, you — you — Oh, Susy, Susy, I don't know what I am saying," cried Tempy breaking down suddenly, fling- ing herself back upon the cushions and bursting into wild passionate sobs.

Susanna sat, scared, terrified, too deeply wounded to speak or to show any sign. Jo, greatly embarrassed, came forward and stooped to pick up Charlie's letter which was lying at Susy's feet.

" Yes, read it, Jo," said Mrs. Dymond, in an odd chill voice. " You can show it to her when she is more reasonable. You can tell her that I did not look on unfeelingly ; I

Mrs. Dymond.

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have tried to be sincere with your father and with his children. Tempy ought to trust me, and to know that I have no secret reasons — though I understand better than I did once, perhaps, what she has had to suffer."

As Susy spoke the meaning of her own words seemed to overcome her. She started up. She was wanting to get back to her own room, to be alone, to hide her agitation, to rest from her fatigue and exhaus- tion of spirit. Her tears were gone, but as she stood up, suddenly everything became dim to her eyes. In one instant life's perplexities, joys, and agitations, ceased for Susy Dymond, except, indeed, that in some utter depths of unexplored dark- ness, something was still struggling, amid strange and distant clangings and reverberations, struggling and float- ing back towards life — a something which became herself once more as Susy opened her eyes to find herself in Tempy's repentant, loving, trembling arms, dabbed and fanned, sprinkled

and dribbled over by tears, Eau de Cologne, and wet sponges. Jo was rubbing her hands, Wilkins was present. Susy found herself lying back in a chair by the open window, the moon and stars were looking in at her, a soft wind was blowing in her face. The windows of the opposite balcony were lighted up, a chance spectator in a white waistcoat leaning over the rails was watching the incident with interest. This was, the first trivial fact which impressed itself on Susy's reviving senses.

" Another sup of water, mem," says Wilkins, sympathetically. " Them expeditions is too much for her ! Ah ! your colour is coming back, let Miss Tempy fan you."

" Darling, sweet Susy," whispered Tempy, in a tender voice, like a child's treble. " Oh, my Susy, I nearly killed you."

"Well," said Jo, who looked still quite white and frightened, "I thought you had, Tempy, and no mistake."

To be continued.

254

THE KIEL REBELLION IN NORTH-WEST CANADA.

DURING the winter of 1869-70, there took place in the upper valley of the Red River, which lies north of the International Boundary between the United States and Canada, that rising of the Metis or French Half-breeds against the Dominion Government which is known as the Red River Rebellion. The scene of that episode now forms the most important and populous portion of Manitoba, which was subsequently organised as a province of the Dominion upon the collapse of the rebellion. The flourish- ing city of Winnipeg now extends for a considerable distance on all sides from what were the rebel head- quarters, Fort Garry, at one time the chief post of the Hudson's Bay Com- pany. In the general prosperity of that part of Canada, the whole affair had well-nigh passed away from the public memory, but the events which have recently occurred in the district of Saskatchewan bring it back vividly. It is hardly possible to understand the rebellion which has just been sup- pressed by General Middleton, with- out a glance at the former rising of the Metis.

In 1869, Louis Riel appeared at; the head of an armed band of the Metis to compel the Dominion to give them what they considered their just rights. After a lapse of fifteen years, and five hundred miles from the scene of the former disturbance, this is exactly what has taken place again. The only absolutely new feature of the re- cent rebellion, and one that is not without a dark hint of terrible possi- bilities, was the fact that it was aided by Indians from reserves in the vicinity of the disaffected district. It is also the case that various tribes, mainly belonging to the Cree family, through- out the north-west territories, have

been stirred up to an ominous rest- lessness unknown before. One band of Indians, under a turbulent chief called Poundmaker, who had already given trouble to the authorities, ac- tually broke out and went on the war- path. It was the terror felt in pre- sence of a threatened Indian war, far more than any fear inspired by the movement under Riel, which roused Canada from Halifax to Winnipeg.

To understand the position of the Half-breed and the nature of his claims, it is necessary to go back. By the British North America Act, the Dominion of Canada, whose western frontier was then Lake Superior, ac- quired from the Imperial Government the enormous area of territory gene- rally known at that time as Rupert's Land, or the Hudson Bay Company's territories. This vast region, lying between the province of Ontario on the east and the rocky mountains on the west, which will probably in time come to be known by the appropriate name of Central Canada, has been divided off into the province of Mani- toba, and the districts of Keewatin, Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Athabasca. With the exception of Keewatin, they are wholly or par- tially situated in what is sometimes designated the "Fertile Belt." The soil is, for the most part, rich and capable of supporting an immense population ; and though the country labours under the great disadvantage of a severe winter climate, there can be no reasonable doubt but that Canada gains enormously by the possession of this splendid territory.

When the Dominion entered upon its occupation, there were sundry prior claims which had to be considered. There was first of all the Hudson's Bay Company, which held certain ill-

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defined rights over the whole region. What these rights exactly were was a matter of dispute, but an agreement was made by which they were handed over to the Canadian Government on the payment of 300,000?. sterling to the company, which at the same time received a large and valuable grant of lands.

Then came the claims of the Indian population ; and it was proposed to deal fairly and generously with them. Yarious treaties have from time to time been made with the different tribes, and until recently it was be- lieved that the Indians were satisfied with the treatment they had received. This illusion has been rudely dispelled by the occurrences of the past few months. It has been the custom of Canadians to point with a pride which took a keener edge as they looked southwards across the " Line," to the loyalty and contentment of their Indians. Loyal most of them still are, but whether they will remain so must be regarded as uncertain. Dis- contented many of them certainly are.

But in addition to the claims of the Hudson's Bay Company and the Indians, there had to be taken into account the fact that some parts of the newly- acquired country were settled ; and the settlers desired to be confirmed in the possession of their lands. These settlers, for the most part, were to be found along the banks of the Red Biver and its chief tributary, the Assiniboine. At the time of the transfer, as the cession of Rupert's- land to the Dominion is usually called, there were upwards of 12,000 people in the Red River Settlement, of which Fort Garry was the centre both of government and trade. Half this number were French Half-breeds or Metis, and a majority of the other half were English or Scotch Half-breeds. There was only a sprinkling of pure whites, mostly retired officers and em- ployes of the Hudson's Bay Company. At Kildonan, three or four miles from Fort Garry, there existed and still

exists a considerable settlement, which was originally established by the Earl of Selkirk some seventy years ago, and which consisted of Scotch families of pure descent. The people lived to- gether quietly and peacefully a life of almost patriarchal simplicity. Many of them were intelligent and educated ; every parish had its church and school. The government was in the hands of a council of local mag- nates, the nominees of the Hudson's Bay Company, but who fairly repre- sented the population.

In 1869 it looked as if the Dominion were going to ignore the existence of the settlement by the precipitate action it took. Without any reference to the wishes of the settlers, it drew up a scheme of government from which they appeared to be excluded. Before the country had actually come into its possession, surveyors were sent to ex- amine the land, and it can hardly be a matter of surprise that their presence excited suspicion. By the manner in which they dealt with the unoccupied lands close to the existing holdings it seemed not only as if they were about to allot them according to their pleasure, but as if they intended to deny the old settlers any room for growth and expansion in the future.

The Half-breed advanced a double claim upon the Dominion. Not only did he ask that the land on which he had squatted should be made over to him, but he demanded also that the title which came to him from his Indian ancestry should be acknowledged and an adequate compensation made for it. At first it appeared as if this claim were going to be completely passed over ; and the rebellion of 1869 was the result. Another, though secondary, cause was the desire for a local repre- sentative legislature, which it was feared was to be withheld. The situa- tion was further complicated by dif- ferences of race and religion. The English Half-breed, though sympathis- ing to some degree with the French, did not go so far as to join in the rebellion.

256

The Riel Rebellion in North- West Canada.

The insurgents held possession of Fort Garry, where were the central depot and warehouses of the Hudson's Bay Company during the winter. In the following spring an expedition, composed of a British battalion, some artillery, and two regiments of Canadian militia, was equipped and sent to suppress the rebellion. When Lord (then Sir Garnet) Wolseley, who was in command, marched into Fort Garry, he found that it had been abandoned. The insurrection had melted away. But the victory lay with the rebels, as all their demands were conceded. It has even been maintained that a general amnesty was promised them, but this the Canadian Government denied, and Riel and the other leaders were subsequently condemned to various punishments. Riel was outlawed from the Dominion, and has since become a citizen of the United States. The claims of the Metis and of other Half-breeds, how- ever, were satisfied by grants of land or its equivalent. Every head of family received so much land for himself and each of his children ; and patents were issued for such lands as were already occupied.

With a little forethought all the difiiculties might have been arranged before Canada had taken possession of the north west territories. It was afterwards contended by the Dominion that all claims upon it made by residents in the territories would have been satisfied had there been no rebellion in '69, but with what has just passed before our eyes in the Saskatchewan it is idle to say that all such matters would have been equit- ably adjusted " in due course." It is impossible to imagine that the'Dominion desired then to withhold justice from any of its citizens any more than it desires to withhold it now; but the wheels of government move but slowly unless there is some extraordinary force brought to bear upon them. The arguments which appeal to govern- ments have various degrees of influence ; and the Metis were not likely to forget

what kind of argument had greatest weight on the former occasion. Whether their grievances were such as to justify their rising in open rebellion then is another thing, but its result was so favourable to them that they could not regret it. The genuine success which attended it, no doubt contributed greatly to encourage that rebellion which has just been crushed. The district of Saskatchewan, which has been the theatre of the rebellion, lies nearly sin the middle of Central Canada. Its boundaries have been made by lines drawn by the surveyor and are not marked out by any great natural features. On the south it touches Assiniboia and Manitoba, on the west Alberta, and on the east Keewatin — names, with the exception of Manitoba, little known to the world. It takes its name from the Saskat- chewan River, the two main branches of which, known as the North and South Saskatchewans, meet at a point within the district a little above the Hudson's Bay Company's trading post of Fort a la Corne. The sources of the two rivers lie at no great distance from each other in the Rocky Mountains ; but on leaving the mountains the North Saskatchewan curves away with a grand sweep in a northerly direction, while the South Saskatchewan, a rapid-running stream, bends south- wards for several hundred miles and then, after a sharp turn at a point known as The Elbow, flows almost due north till it joins the other stream. When united they form a broad and some- times splendid river, which ultimately empties itself into Lake Winnipeg. For the greater part of their course both of the Saskatchewans flow through a prairie country of which the soil is described as excellent. Both rivers are navigable by steamers of the usual Western type — flat-bottomed stern- propellers, but navigation is rendered difficult by shifting sand-bars. Where yesterday a steamer found a clear channel may to-day be choked up with sand. Although several places of interest connected with the Riel

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rebellion, such as Prince Albert, Battleford and Edmonton, are on the North Kiver, the scene of the recent military movements was chiefly laid in the small wedge-shaped piece of land lying between the forks — at the junc- tion of the two streams. The Metis settlement, where the insurgents met and were defeated and dispersed by the Dominion troops, is on the south river.

The part of the district of Sas- katchewan more immediately affected by the recent disturbances is, roughly speaking, about 500 miles north-west of Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba. The nearest railway station, Qu'Ap- pelle, 325 miles west of Winnipeg on the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway, is about 200 miles south-east of Fort Carlton which lay — it was destroyed during the rebel- lion— about the centre of the scene of the troubles. A stage road runs across the prairies from the railway to the settlements on the Saskatchewan. The journey from Qu'Appelle to Carl ton is in the spring of the year difficult and tedious, but in summer it is a pleasant enough trip across the plains. Leaving the station the trail goes northward to a trading post of the Hudson's Bay Company called Fort Qu'Appelle, at the head of a region famous for its beautiful lakes. Here there is a considerable settle- ment, with a mixed population of whites and Half-breeds, but beyond it, with the exception of a few home- steads thinly scattered over the Touch- wood Hills' some thirty miles from Fort Qu'Appelle, the long lines of the prairie are only broken at wide intervals by the solitary shanties at which the Saskatchewan stages stop on their way northwards. The country is, for the most part, a rich rolling prairie, with wavelike undulations, interspersed here and there with bluffs of poplar. There are very few streams of any size, but there are numerous lakes and pools which in spring and autumn are alive with great quantities of water- fowl of all kinds. The No. 310.— VOL. LII.

prairie chicken (pinnated grouse) is found in abundance. The soil is a uniform black loam, not so deep as that of Manitoba, but fertile and well suited for the growth of cereals, until the Salt Plains lying between Touch- wood Hills' district and the stage stopping-place at Humboldt are reached. These plains are an alkaline desert about thirty miles across from north to south, and of varying width. They are covered with grass, but no trees are to be seen — only a few stunted bushes. They are the home of innumerable pelicans, swans, geese and cranes, and other wild fowl. Hum- boldt, which is some seventy miles from Carlton, is the point on the road from which the different trails going to various crossings of the South Saskat- chewan diverge. That called Clark's Crossing, which General Middleton made the basis of his operations against the rebels under Riel, lies some miles south of the Metis settlement. The two principal crossings " Bato- che's " (a half-breed nickname) where the insurgents made their final stand and were dispersed, and " Gabrielle's " are in the midst of the disaffected district.

The Metis settlement consists of a long, continuous row of farms lying on both sides of the South Saskat- chewan, and the most important part of it is called the parish of St. Laurent. It is entirely settled by French Half-breeds to the numbers of 2,000, many of whom have been in the country for a long time, others have more recently come from Manitoba and elsewhere. It is difficult to say how many men were in arms belong- ing to the Metis proper, as there is an Indian reserve close by, most of whose braves under their chief Beardie aided the rebels. But it is doubtful if more than 700 or 800 men bore arms on the insurgent side ; and the whole Riel rebellion, properly speaking — for the attitude of the Indians elsewhere should be viewed separately, was made by this comparatively insignificant body of men. The settlement of St.

s

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The Eiel Rebellion in North- West Canada.

Laurent is of the same general charac- ter as other Metis settlements in the United States and Canada. The Metis occupy long narrow belts of land having what they consider an essen- tial, some frontage on the river bank. All the older settlements along the Red River and the Assiniboine in Manitoba are of a similar description. These holdings are in their shape quite contrary to the plan pursued by the Government surveyors in laying out new lands, and consequently are not regarded with favour. The cot- tage of the Metis, usually an unpre- tending white-washed log-hut of two compartments, stands on the edge of the river ; and generally one or two small fields near the house are culti- vated. But the Metis is no farmer. His habits and traditions are alike against it. So he is not very desirable as a settler in an agricultural country, if the likelihood of his adding to its wealth be considered. In St. Laurent some very simple farming was done. Formerly its inhabitants were buffalo- hunters, but the buffalo has for ever disappeared from these regions. Now they depend almost entirely for their subsistence on " freighting " merchan- dise across the plains for the Hudson's Bay Company or other traders. The goods are drawn by native ponies in " Red River carts " — light wagons on a single pair of heavy wheels entirely made of wood, held together by shagganappi, i.e. deerskin, and without any iron being used in their construction. In the early pioneer days of Minnesota, Dakota, and Mani- toba a procession of these carts was a familiar sight, but, of course, they have been replaced by superior wagons. A specimen of the Red River cart is preserved in the Smith- sonian Institute at Washington. But in the north-western plains of Canada, where there is no steamboat transpor- tation available, they are still used. They carry from six to eight hundred pounds, and the usual charge for "freightage" is a cent per mile for a hundred pounds. The wealth of the

Metis really consisted in the number of ponies and carts he possessed.

Twelve miles north of St. Laurent stood the Hudson's Bay Company's post of Fort Carlton, formerly an important distributing depot for a great extent of country. It lay in a hollow on the south bank of the South Saskatchewan, and immediately behind it there rises a thickly wooded hill 200 feet in height. Here the mounted police concentrated at the beginning of the rebellion, but it was occupied by them for a short time only. Upon their withdrawal the fort was burned. The police retired northwards to Prince Albert, by far the most important settlement in the district of Saskatche- wan. This settlement is at the extreme north of the disturbed country, and though its people to some extent sympathised with the rebels it re- mained loyal. One reason for that was that the settlers are chiefly English or English Half-breeds ; the antipathy of race came in to separate them from their French brethren. Prince Albert is situated on the north branch of the Saskatchewan, and consists of a suc- cession of farms extending for about ten miles along the south bank of the river. The Hudson's Bay Company have one of their chief trading posts at the eastern extremity of the settle- ment. There are, besides, numerous stores, several churches, Emmanuel College of the Church of England Diocese of Saskatchewan, and several schools. In this settlement, the valley of the Saskatchewan is very pictur- esque and beautiful. The river is about 300 yards wide, with its northern side high and thickly wooded ; on the south side the country is open and rises away with a gradual slope from the river. Prince Albert, from its centre, is about forty miles from Fort Carlton, and thirty-five miles from the junction of the north and south branches of the Saskatchewan. This settlement has been in existence for many years, but recently it has grown very considerably.

For twelve or thirteen years back

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the settlers in the district of Saskatche- wan have urged upon the Dominion Government the consideration of cer- tain grievances. Deputations were sent to the heads of departments, and various representations were made, but without success. The distance from the seat of the Federal Government, the imperfect information possessed by it, and the comparative insignifi- cance in number of those pressing their claims upon it, perhaps account for the extraordinary and fatal dila- toriness there was in the investigation of the demands made. However good a case the Dominion may make out, the result of its conduct — policy is not the word — in regard to the Saskatche- wan, can hardly be said, even by its friends, to be other than unfortunate. Proceeding upon the basis furnished by the unsettled land questions, the restless character of the Metis was worked upon until the rebellion was brought about. Then not only will the cost of its suppression be a heavy tax upon the resources of Canada — already somewhat tried by the expen- diture which it has incurred in the construction of its great national and necessary undertaking, the Canadian Pacific Railway — but the attitude of the Indians will henceforth have to be closely watched, and always will give some ground for uneasiness.

The grievances of the settlers may be classified under two heads — those of the old settlers, and those of the Metis. The former complained that patents for the holdings on which they have squatted had not been issued to them ; the latter made certain demands for land qud Half-breeds.

In the case of the old settlers, who are not Half-breeds, some patents had been granted prior to the rebellion. And no one can doubt for a moment but that patents would have been given eventually to all who were in actual occupation of the lands they claimed. But the delay has been fatally, ruinously long, resulting in bad feeling, and in some instances in a heavy loss in money. Two or three

years ago there was a violent " boom" in land and property throughout the whole north-west of Canada. Farms at Prince Albert and elsewhere in the Saskatchewan were sold and trans- ferred, but no sales were valid unless a clear title to the property — such as the patents of course give — existed. The absence of such indisputable titles clouded the transactions and led to serious losses. It appears that many of these unsettled claims are of very old date — that is, old, when the new- ness of the country is considered. Some of the holdings were taken up twenty years ago — five years before Canada acquired the north-west. Last year a commission was sent from Otta- wa to investigate the claims advanced, and in the report made by the head of that commission it was stated that nothing could have been done earlier in regard to giving patents for lands, as only a few of the holdings had been surveyed. There is nothing said as to why surveys were not made long before ; nor does any notice appear to have been taken of the exasperated feeling there was in the settlement on account of the tardy working of the land department. Though the old settlers did not actually aid the rebels, and even supplied volunteers to fight against them, they participated in the agitation which immediately preceded the armed rising.

The demands made by the Half- breeds, qud Half-breeds, were precisely similar to those advanced by the Half- breeds of Manitoba in 1869.

About the beginning of last winter a petition was forwarded to the Governor-General of Canada setting forth the grievances of the whole settlement. The following is the pith of it. It begins by noticing a point to which we shall return later, viz., that the Indians are so destitute in many localities that settlers are com- pelled to furnish them with food to keep them from starving, and to pre- serve the settlements from the acts of men made desperate by famine. Then comes one of the chief demands — that

S 2

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The Riel Rebellion in North- West Canada.

the Half-breeds of the district of Sas- katchewan receive 240 acres of land each, as did the Manitoba Half-breeds after the Red River rebellion. Next it is stated that Half-breeds in pos- session of tracts of land have not been given patents for their holdings, nor have the old settlers of the north- west territories received the same treatment as the old settlers in Mani- toba. Some of the other grievances are that settlers are charged dues on timber, rails, and firewood required for home use, and that customs are levied on the necessaries of life. It is complained that contracts for the public supplies and works, and posi- tions in the public service, are not given as far as possible to residents in the district. Voting by ballot at elections is also demanded. Then it is asked that the district of Sas- katchewan be organised as a province, with its own local representative legis- lature. At present the control of affairs in the territories is vested in a lieutenant-governor, assisted by a council, some of the members of which are elected by the people, and the rest are officials of the Government. This council, styled the North- West Council, meets at Regina, in the district of Assiniboia, and, with the exception of Manitoba and Keewatin, has the ad- ministration of the whole of Central Canada, that is, as far as the Domi- nion Government has delegated it the powers of administration. With all questions relating to land settlement the North- West Council has nothing to do, as the public lands are managed entirely from Ottawa by a cabinet minister. It is a far cry from Prince Albert in the Saskatchewan to Ottawa in Ontario ; and it may be doubted if this system of centralisation works smoothly and efficiently. Still it may be fairly urged that the district of Saskatchewan is not ripe for local government. It is not yet thickly settled, and could ill bear the expense of supporting the necessary machinery of government.

With the exception of the demand

for a local parliament, it is evident that the claims and grievances ad- vanced by the Half-breeds were all connected with land questions. Claims and grievances almost identical led to the Red River rebellion ; and after that episode, and as a result of it, the demands of the Metis were granted. The policy pursued then by the Dominion Government of the day in satisfying these demands gave a good basis for pressing similar claims upon its attention and for expecting similar compensation. Prior to the recent rebellion the Dominion Govern- ment were not prepared to give the Metis of the Saskatchewan the same treatment as was given to the Metis of Manitoba, if the following state- ment made in the Canadian House of Commons by Sir John A. Macdonald, the premier, and who until a short time ago was himself minister of the in- terior, is accurately reported : —

" The Half-breeds," he said, " have been told that if they desire to be considered as Indians, a most liberal reserve will be set apart for them. If they desire to be considered white men, they can get 160 acres of land as homesteads. But they are not satis- fied with that. They want to get up- wards of 200 acres and then get their homesteads as well." In other words, the Metis did not regard their being treated as Indians, or simply being confirmed in their holdings, as suffi- cient compensation for the title they claim to the lands of the territories which comes to them both by right of descent and by right of possession. But it should be said, in justice to the Dominion Government, that its action was embarrassed by the fact that many of the Metis of the Saskatchewan had already been treated with when resident in Manitoba. Of course the Half-breed who had eaten his cake in Red River could not expect to have it to eat over again in the Saskatchewan. The sense of the injustice, however, of any arrangement which did not fully compensate those who had re- ceived no acknowledgment of their

The Riel Rebellion in North- West Canada.

261

claims, was worked upon by Kiel and others until the rebellion was brought about. When the gravity of the situa- tion was at length grasped by the Canadian authorities, a commission was at once appointed and sent in hot haste to the various settlements of the Metis. The main business of this commission has been to grant what the Metis asked — the same com- pensation that the Metis of Manitoba obtained fifteen years ago. But promptly as the commission went about its work, the mischief had al- ready been done. The Metis of St. Laurent were in open insurrection, had organised a provisional govern- ment, and had even met and defeated a force of police. It then became necessary to put down the rebellion by force of arms.

The Metis of the Saskatchewan were led in their revolt by Louis Kiel, who was at the head of the Red River rebellion in 1869. For the part he played in that episode the Metis regard him as their patriot leader. Sir John Macdonald referred to him in the Canadian Commons as the " Mahdi of the Metis." Riel is a man of some education, and he has been described as the equal in ability of the average public man of Canada. In his own language he is a fluent and powerful orator, and his speeches have a great effect upon his countrymen. By some he is regarded as a mere mischief- maker, and an adventurer whose busi- ness is insurrection and disturbance ; by others he is considered something of a " crank," who believes that his mission is to procure for the Metis their full rights, as he understands them. He is now about forty years of age ; is in person short and stout ; he is energetic and has plenty of pluck, but his mind is wanting in balance. Since his capture by the Dominion troops he has played the rdle of a religious enthusiast. His manner in ordinary conversation is pleasant, but during the time of the Red River rebellion, when he was in power, he assumed an air of great

importance. He has a good deal of restless vanity, which in the old Red River days showed itself in his fine black capote and the brilliant colours of his L'Assomption belt — character- istic features of the Metis costume. Riel is a man who thinks he has a personal 'grievance against the Dominion. He maintains that he was outlawed, notwithstanding that a solemn pledge had been made him that he would share in the general amnesty to be granted to those who took part in the Red River Rebellion. This may or may not be the case as there is a conflict of testimony on the subject, but such is the contention of the rebel leader.

Some time ago Riel became a citizen of the United States, and settled in Montana. While residing there he states that a delegation of the Metis of the Saskatchewan came to him last summer to invite him to take part in pressing their claims on the Dominion Government. He went to St. Laurent, where he found several of those who had been concerned with him in the rising of 1869. Many meetings were held throughout the settlements in the district, and the Metis were inflamed by his speeches. At the outset he disclaimed any intention of inciting the people to rebel, and this secured the sympathy of the " whites " who, as already stated, had grievances against the Government. All winter the agitation went on, until about the middle of March rumours reached Winnipeg that an armed rising was imminent. Winnipeg, as the nearest large town, has always had a consider- able intercourse with the settlements in the Saskatchewan ; and to those acquainted with the country and the agitation which had been developing, the rebellion occasioned little surprise ; but upon the people of Eastern Canada, to whom the Saskatchewan was a far- off, little-known district, marked only on the newer maps of the Dominion, it came with a sudden shock. Nor was the fact that there was a rebellion at all grasped until blood had been shed.

262

The Kiel Rebellion in North- West Canada.

So far as can be gathered from the imperfect information at present open to the public, the following are the chief occurrences of the rebellion.

About the beginning of last March a great meeting of the Metis was held in the parish church of St. Laurent ; and a Bill of Rights, drawn up by Kiel, was read and adopted. (This Bill of Rights simply recapitulates the state- ments made in the petition addressed to the Governor-General, which is mentioned above, so it need not be given here.) It was thereupon resolved that a provisional government should be formed, based upon the principles enunciated in the Bill of Rights. Riel, on being nominated president of the Saskatchewan, announced that no hos- tile movement would te made unless the Dominion Government persisted in refusing to grant the demands of the Metis. It was even stated that if reasonable guarantees were given that their grievances would be immediately investigated, the provisional govern- ment would be forthwith dissolved. In the meantime, however, the autho- rity of the Dominion was repudiated, some of its officials and others were made prisoners, and supplies were col- lected, i.e. seized, from the stores of traders in the vicinity, to provide against the emergency of war. A band of Cree Indians, under their chief, Beardy, many of whom were kinsmen of the insurgents, joined Riel.

The administration of most of the civil and criminal affairs of ordinary recurrence in the territories is in the hands of local magistrates, whose authority is maintained by the North- West mounted police, a semi-military force. At the time of the outbreak there were five hundred of these police stationed at various important centres, and two detachments, amounting in all to seventy-five men, were in the disturbed district. As soon as it was seen that there was to be serious trouble, an additional force with ar- tillery was despatched from Regina, the head-quarters of the police, to Carlton, under their chief commis-

sioner, an officer who had been with with General Wolseley in the Red River expedition in 1869. Imme- diately before this force reached Carlton, an encounter took place be- tween the rebels and the police at Duck Lake, in which the latter were worsted and compelled to retire, with a loss of twenty-four killed and wounded. A day or two later the mounted police retreated from Fort Carlton north- wards to Prince Albert. Immediately on their withdrawal the fort was burned, but whether by accident or design is uncertain.

The news of these events created the wildest excitement in Canada. And when intelligence was received that bands of Indians at Battleford, Fort Pitt, and elsewhere on the north branch of the Saskatchewan had risen in revolt, this excitement became a fever. In addition, the spectre which haunts the thoughts of Canada, a Fenian invasion, was conjured up by an alarmed people. Rumours flew about that Riel had been in commu- nication with well-known Fenian leaders in the United States, and that they had promised him men, arms and money. It was even said that prepa- rations had been made by them in Chicago and St. Paul in aid of the rebellion. Meanwhile, the Canadian Government acted with the greatest promptness. Two batteries of artillery — almost the only "regular" force at the disposal of the Dominion — were sent on by the Canadian Pacific Rail- way via the north shore of Lake Su- perior to Winnipeg. General Middle- ton, an experienced officer, who had seen active service in the British army, and who held the chief command of the Canadian militia, was hurriedly despatched to that city to organise an expedition to suppress the rising. Various militia regiments were called out, and the call to go to the " front " was everywhere throughout Canada responded to with the utmost enthu- siasm. All parties combined in pre- sence of a common danger. Whoever was to blame, all agreed that now one

The Eiel Rebellion in North- West Canada.

263

thing was to be done. When Mrs. Blake, the wife of the leader of the Opposition in the Canadian House of Commons, presented the Toronto regi- ment, the " Queen's Own," on its de- parture with a flag, the act was typi- cal of the universal Canadian senti- ment. The rebellion had to be put down, and put down thoroughly.

In less than a month the Canadian Government had put upwards of 4,000 citizen soldiers into the field. The main division under General Middle- ton, after a terrible march amid snow and frost and mud, from Qu'Appelle to Clark's Crossing of the South Sas- katchewan, was in the district which was the chief scene of the Metis re- bellion by the third week in April. A second division relieved Battleford, which had been closely invested by the Cree chief, Poundmaker, about the end of the same month. A third division proceeded to the extreme west, and overawed the Indians of Calgary, and then going north to the Saskatchewan river, occupied the im- portant Metis settlement of St. Albert (not to be confounded with Prince Albert) near Fort Edmonton. The speed with which all this was done — considering how entirely unprepared Canada was for anything of the kind — is simply wonderful. Some of the troops had to be sent a distance of 2,000 miles ; they were for the most part local volunteer regiments, whose members were in business ; the tran- sport service had to be organised from the beginning ; and it must be said that the whole North- West field force proved splendidly efficient.

The main interest centres around the movements of General Middle- ton's command. Advancing from Clark's Crossing, the general met the rebel forces under Gabriel Du- mont, Kiel's lieutenant, an able and determined man, on the 24th of April, at Fish Creek. Though the Dominion forces were victorious, and compelled the Metis to retire, their success was somewhat dearly purchased with a loss of fifty killed and wounded. The rebel leader had placed his men with great

skill in an almost impregnable posi- tion— a deep, thickly-wooded ravine, a natural rifle pit : and the nature of the ground made it difficult for the troops to use their artillery to much advant- age. The fight lasted for several hours, and was hotly contested throughout. Both in this encounter and at Batoche the rebels fought well, taking advan- tage of every inch of cover. The Dominion troops, most of them raw soldiers, behaved splendidly, and re- ceived the warm praise of the general.

After the battle of Fish Creek, the rebels withdrew to Batoche' s Crossing where they had determined to make their final stand. Meanwhile General Middleton halted for a few days' to await supplies of men and ammuni- tion which were being sent to him by steamboat down the South Saskat- chewan now open for navigation.

The expected reinforcements having arrived, General Middleton advanced upon Batoche on the 9th of May. The rebels held a strongly entrenched position and made a determined re- sistance. The fighting went on for four days. In the afternoon of the 1 2th, the rebel position was, in a magni- ficent charge, captured at the point of the bayonet. The loss of the Domi- nion troops was slight compared with that of the rebels, who had many killed and wounded. Kiel surren- dered a day later with some of his prominent supporters, and the rebel- lion was practically at an end.

The prisoners he had made at the beginning of the rising were set free by the troops, and everywhere the Metis hastened in to make their peace with the general. Kiel was sent to Regina to be tried for treason, but his lieutenant, Dumont, succeeded in making his escape into American territory.

Meanwhile another division of Cana- dian troops had met and beaten Poundmaker and his braves. How- ever, this engagement would not have been decisive, but the news of the fall of Batoche and the surrender of Kiel disheartened the Indians. So when

264

The Riel Rebellion in North- West Canada.

General Middleton, after a hurried visit to Prince Albert, went down the North Saskatchewan to Battleford, Poundmaker and his band about the end of May gave themselves up to him unconditionally. Another chief, Big Bear, who took Fort Pitt, and who had committed some horrible outrages in the usual style of Indian warfare, is the only Indian at present iu arms against the Government, and the reckoning with him will no doubt be short and severe.

This paper may now be fitly closed with some remarks on the position of the Indians in the Dominion.

The Indians are the " wards " of the Government, and as such have received special treatment. In the past, the title of the Indians to the lands they hunted over has been " extinguished " by the payment of a trifling perpetual annuity, usually five dollars per head. The different bands have been located on reserves set apart for them, which are poor and insignificant compared with the magnificent area of their ancestral hunting grounds. On these reserves 160 acres are allotted to a family of four. Some attempts have been made to instruct the Indians in the cultiva- tion of their reserves, and farm- iraplements, cattle and seed have been furnished them. Men have been sent to teach them how to farm, but their efforts have not been particularly suc- cessful. It is hardly to be expected that they would be. The Indian is by his instincts and traditions a hunter and not a tiller of the soil. Since the time that the red man has been known to the white his main subsist- ence has been the buffalo — and the buffalo, alas for the Indian ! 'will soon be as extinct as the dodo. At one time, indeed, vast herds of buffalo were to be found as far south as the lower valley of the Mississippi. But the advance of settlement in the West, and the construction of the Union and Northern Pacific Railways confined them between the Missouri and the Saskatchewan. When Canada

acquired the north-west territories fifteen years ago, the larger part of the herds were found north of the international frontier. Now the buffalo is hardly to be seen south of the "line," and they are rapidly disappearing in Canada. Soon, fatally soon for the Indian, will the western prairies no more resound with the thunderous tread of the mighty herds. Then, not only is the buffalo failing, but other kinds of game are getting scarce. On many of the reserves in North-West Canada the misery of the Indians is said to be pitiable. There seems to be little doubt but that the recent outrages at Battleford, Frog Lake, and Fort Pitt, perpetrated during the last few months, are the desperate deeds of men maddened by famine. That they were incited to rebel by Riel is no doubt true, but their chief grievance is the want of food. There does not seem any reason for suspecting the Indian agents of cheating the Indians, whose cry against the paternal government is that they are not able to live on the allowance made them, and that their reserves are insufficient, not that they do not receive what was promised them. When the Dominion took over the north-wes£ from the Hudson's Bay Company the Indians everywhere were contented, loyal, happy. But the situation now is entirely changed. Then the whites lived in an Indian country, now the Indians are in a white country ; and it is more than possible in these circumstances that the Indian is being ungenerously dealt with. One effect of the recent troubles will be a thorough examina- tion of the whole Indian question. It may be hoped that a more liberal policy will be i inaugurated, otherwise the Indian may suspect that it is the intention of the white to starve him out, and his suspicions once thoroughly roused will be hard to set at rest.

R. MACHKAY, C.

WINNIPEG, May 31, 1885.

265

THE THRUSH IN FEBRUARY.

BY GEORGE MEREDITH.

I know him, February's thrush,

And loud at eve he valentines

On sprays that paw the naked bush

"Where soon will sprout the thorns and bines.

Now ere the foreign singer thrills Our vale his plain-song pipe he pours, A herald of the million bills ; And heed him not, the loss is yours.

My study, flanked with ivied fir

And budded beech with dry leaves curled,

Perched over yew and juniper,

He neighbours, piping to his world :

The wooded pathways dank on brown, The branches on grey cloud a web, The long green roller of the down, An image of the deluge-ebb :

And farther, they may hear along The stream beneath the poplar row. By fits, like welling rocks, the song Spouts of a blushful Spring in flow.

2(iO The Thrush in February .

But most he loves to front the vale When waves of warm South-western rains Have left our heavens clear in pale, With faintest beck of moist red veins :

Vermilion wings, by distance held To pause aflight while fleeting swift And high aloft the pearl inshelled Her lucid glow in glow will lift :

A little south of coloured sky ; Directing, gravely amorous, The human of a tender eye Through pure celestial on us.

Remote, not alien; still, not cold; TJnraying yet, more pearl than star ; She seems a while the vale to hold In trance, and homelier makes the far.

Then Earth her sweet unscented breathes; An orb of lustre quits the height; And like broad iris-flags, in wreaths The sky takes darkness, long ere quite.

His Island voice then shall you hear, Nor ever after separate From such a twilight of the year Advancing to the vernal gate.

The Thrush in February. 267

He sings me, out of Winter's throat, The young time with the life ahead ; And my young time his leaping note Recalls to spirit-mirth from dead.

Imbedded in a land of greed, Of mammon-quakings dire as Earth's, My care was but to soothe my need; At peace among the littleworths.

To light and song my yearning aimed ; To that deep breast of song and light Which men have barrenest proclaimed ; As 'tis to senses pricked with fright.

So mine are these new fruitings rich The simple to the common brings ; I keep the youth of souls who pitch Their joy in this old heart of things :

Who feel the Coming young as aye, Thrice hopeful on the ground we plough ; Alive for life, awake to die ; One voice to cheer the seedling Now.

Full lasting is the song, though he, The singer, passes : lasting too, For souls not lent in usury, The rapture of the forward view.

2C8 The Thrush in February.

With that I bear my senses fraught Till what I am fast shoreward drives. They are the vessel of the Thought. The vessel splits, the Thought survives.

Nought else are we when sailing brave Save husks to raise and bid it burn. Glimpse of its livingness will wave A light the senses can discern

Across the river of the death, Their close. Meanwhile, 0 twilight bird Of promise ! bird of happy breath ! I hear, I would the City heard.

The City of the smoky fray ; A prodded ox, it drags and moans: Its Morrow no man's child ; its Day A vulture's morsel beaked to bones.

It strives without a mark for strife ; It feasts beside a famished host : The loose restraint of wanton life, That threatened penance in the ghost !

Yet there our battle urges ; there Spring heroes many : issuing thence, Names that should leave no vacant air For fresh delight in confidence.

The Tlirush in February. 269

Life was to them the bag of grain, And Death the weedy harrow's tooth. Those warriors of the sighting brain Give worn Humanity new youth.

Our song and star are they to lead The tidal multitude and blind From bestial to the higher breed By fighting souls of love divined.

They scorned the ventral dream of peace, Unknown in nature. This they knew : That life begets with fair increase Beyond the flesh, if life be true.

Just reason based on valiant blood The instinct bred afield would match To pipe thereof a swelling flood, Were men of Earth made wise in watch.

Though now the numbers count as drops An urn might bear, they father Time. She shapes anew her dusty crops ; Her quick in their own likeness climb.

Of their own force do they create ; They climb to light, in her their root. Your brutish cry at muffled fate She smites with pangs of worse than brute.

270 The Thrush in February.

She, judged of shrinking nerves, appears A Mother whom no cry can melt ; But read her past desires and fears, The letters on her breast are spelt.

A slayer, yea, as when she pressed Her savage to the slaughter-heaps, To sacrifice she prompts her best : She reaps them as the sower reaps.

But read her thought to speed the race, And stars rush forth of blackest night : You chill not at a cold embrace To come, nor dread a dubious might.

Her double visage, double voice, In oneness rise to quench the doubt. This breath, her gift, has only choice Of service, breathe we in or out.

Since Pain and Pleasure on each hand Led our wild steps from slimy rock To yonder sweeps of gardenland, We breathe but to be sword or block.

The sighting brain her good decree Accepts : obeys those guides, in faith, By reason hourly fed, that she, To some the clod, to some the wraith.

The- Thrush in February. 27 1

Is more, no mask ; a flame, a stream. Flame, stream, are we, in mid career From torrent source, delirious dream, To heaven-reflecting currents clear.

And why the sons of Strength have been Her cherished offspring ever ; how The Spirit served by her is seen Through Law ; perusing love will show.

Love born of knowledge, love that gains Vitality as Earth it mates, The meaning of the Pleasures, Pains, The Life, the Death, illuminates.

For love we Earth, then serve we all Her mystic secret then is ours : We fall, or view our treasures fall, Unclouded, as beholds her flowers

Earth, from a night of frosty wreck, Enrobed in morning's mounted fire, When lowly, with a broken neck, The crocus lays her cheek to mire.

272

SOME COMMONPLACES ON THE COMMONPLACE.

THE other day a bust of Gray was, now in late time, placed in the hall of Pembroke College, Cambridge, where most of the poet's tranquil life was passed, and in which he died. On that occasion Mr. Lowell, adding one more to the many benefits we owe to him, and the many regrets with which we bid him good by, uttered these me- morable words : —

"I know that sometimes criticisms are made upon Gray. I think I have heard him called by some of our juniors ' common- place.' Upon my word, I think it a com- pliment. I think it shows a certain generality of application in what Gray has done, for if there is one thing more than another — I say this to the young men whom I see seated around both sides of the hall — which insures the lead in life it is the commonplace. I have to measure my poets, my authors, by their lasting power, and I find Gray has a great deal of it. He not only pleases my youth and my age, but he pleases other people's youth and age ; and I cannot help thinking this is a proof that he touched on human nature at a great many periods, and at a great many levels, and, perhaps, that is as high a compliment as can be paid to the poet. There is, I admit, a certain commonplaceness of sentiment in his most famous poem, but I think there is also a certain commonplaceness of sentiment in some verses that have been famous for more than three thousand years. I think that when Homer saw somebody smiling through her tears he said, on the whole, a commonplace thing ; but it touched our feel- ings for a great many centuries, and I think that in the Elegy in a Country Churchyard Gray has expressed a simple sentiment, and as long as there are young men and middle- aged men, Gray's poem will continue to be read and loved as in the days when it was written."

Let us hope so. But what a shock to the young generation to hear that if there is one thing more than another which insures the lead in life, it is the commonplace ! A generation brought up to believe, and to proclaim its be- lief somewhat fanatically, that the special glory of the age into which it has been born is to have done with all

the old world illusions, to have broken the fetters of the Philistine, to toil no longer,

"Eyeless, in Gaza, at the mill^with slaves,"

but to stand in the light of the new day, regenerate and free, surveying all things, daring all things,

" As a young eagle soars the morning clouds among."

With what feelings must the ardent spirits of the time have heard this ac- complished and urbane American, a man of culture, surely, if one there be, openly avowing this ancient, and, as one had surely thought, uprooted heresy !

And yet, when the first shock is passed, and one comes to consider calmly all the possibilities of these tremendous words, there may be found some comfort. Some mode of recon- ciliation may be discovered between the new faith into which the world has been baptised, not indeed without some workings of the rack and stake, and this sudden return upon the old. The age of prose may have given place to the age of poetry, but the age of reason, perhaps, though in another guise, may still be lingering on. Some compromise may yet be possi- ble ; and so the last echoes of that kindly and eloquent voice to which we have so often listened with delight and profit may yet keep a sweet remem- brance in our hearts when the speaker shall have left us for his own place.

What is the commonplace, the con- ventional ? Are we not apt now and then to use these words a little reck- lessly 1 All history teaches us that men, unused to freedom, will sometimes play strange pranks. We are entering now, so we are told, on a blessed state of freedom. " The Dawn," lately sang

Some Commonplaces on the Commonplace.

273

a poet, who sang better, and of better things, once,

"The Dawn and the Day is coming; and forth the banners go."

Very strange are the mottoes borne on some of these banners ; and the advance is all along the line. No man, nor woman neither, but shall be free to say the word that pleases them on all things that are in the heavens above and in the earth be- neath. The bestialities of French fic- tion are gravely praised as a "pas- sionate conviction," "a great plan," which " helps us to know." English girls plead in the newspapers for simple representations of the naked body ; their older and bolder sisters cry aloud, and spare not, for Free Trade in prostitution, as in all other trades ; and the revisers of our Bible have abolished Hell. " All the earth is gay,

And with the heart of May Doth every beast keep holiday."

But though the new order of things is undoubtedly large, it is not yet, as is but natural, on all points perfectly lucid. There are so many new things to be talked and written about, so many fresh ideas, and new guesses at truth, to be arranged and classified, that our poor old vulgar tongue is not always equal to the work : and, as Tacitus tells us was the case at a cer- tain point in the history of Eome, new words have to be coined, or to the old words new meanings given not easily " understand ed of the people." And so it is possible that not every one is quite agreed on the qualities which give its true stamp to the conven- tional, the commonplace.

It is not easy to define the common- place. Does an idea, a sentiment, become commonplace through fami- liarity ? If this be so, where would our poets be! Where would Shake- speare be, with his —

"A rose By any other name would smell as sweet " ?

Where Wordsworth, with his —

"Dear God! the very housas seem asleep"? No. 310. — VOL. LII.

Where Keats, with his — " For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair " ?

Some, I suppose, would call that saying commonplace which warns us that no man can really be the good poet without first being the good man. It is certainly a familiar saying,. and, like many other familiar things, seems rather to have come into con- tempt. Yet Milton thought well enough of it to borrow it from Ben Jonson, who in his turn was indebted for it to the Greek historian Strabo. Cardinal Newman has elaborated it in an essay on poetry ; and the two greatest of living critics have ac- quiesced in its sentiment, M. Edmond Scherer and Mr. Matthew Arnold. Yet there must be, or a good deal of our current literature leads one to fancy so, a considerable number of peo- ple about who would call it narrow, pedantic ; something old-fashioned, in a word, commonplace, and therefore not only to be ignored, but opposed as well.

John Ford, in what, despite the odiousness of its subject, one must call the best of his plays, has written —

"Far better 'tis To bless the sun than reason why it shines."

This is a thought common to almost every age. We can trace it upward through Empedocles to the writer of the book of Job, and downward through Pope to Mr. Kuskin. " God thundereth marvellously with his voice ; great things doeth he which man cannot comprehend." " Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion 1 " " Have the gates of death been opened unto thee ? or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death ? " " Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge ? " " What men dream they know," said Empedocles, " is but the little each hath stumbled on in wandering about the world ; yet boast they all that they have learned the whole — vain fools ! for what that is no eye hath seen, no ear hath heard, nor can it be conceived

T

274

Some Commonplaces on the Commonplace.

by mind of man. But, 0 ye Gods, avert the madness of those babblers from my tongue ; and thou, great Muse of Memory, maiden with the milk-white arms, I pray thee to teach me things that creatures of a day may hear." All through the Essay on Man the same thought runs in words every one can recall for himself, to be summed up thus in the Universal Prayer : —

" Thou Great First Cause, least understood,

Which all my sense confined To know but this, that thou art good, And that myself am blind."

" To know himself and his place ; to be content to submit to God with- out understanding Him ; " this, says Mr. Ruskin, man will find is "to be modest towards God, and wise for himself." A commonplace, then, this thought must surely be ; and yet, if it will not actually insure the lead in life — and no doubt that part of life's triumph which consists in being a popular writer for the magazines it will not insure — from how much con- fusion, perplexity, and disquiet, from how large a part of " this strange disease of modern life," would not its acceptance have saved men ! Then, instead of doing our little foolish best to realise Lichtenberg's prophecy that " the time will come when the belief in God will be as the tales with which old women frighten children ; when the world will be a machine, the ether a gas, and God a force," we should all be—

"Free from the sick fatigue, the languid

doubt,

"Which much to have tried, in much been baffled brings " —

comfortably resting ourselves in the assurance of Socrates that,, as the three wisest men in Greece could show him no better life, he desired only, renouncing the honours at which the world aimed, to live as well as he could, and, when the time came, to die. But we go on darkening counsel with words tvithout knowledge, forgetful, among the few truths we have, of this most wholesome one, " that in our present condition we ought not to

give ourselves airs, for even in the most important subjects we are always changing our minds ; and what a state of education does that imply ! "

If then we allow that an idea does not become commonplace by familiarity, may we say that the commonplace is not made, but born ? It is hard for us to entertain conjecture of a time when the inevitableness of death was not a familiar idea to man. When the Preacher wrote that " man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the street ; " when Homer put in Sarpedon's mouth the assurance that " ten thousand fates of death do every way beset us, and these no mortal may escape nor avoid ; " even then one fancies the idea can hardly have struck home with the force of a new conviction. And when Silence essays to console Shallow for the loss of so many an old acquaintance, and the mourner accepts the consolation with a pious acquiescence in the words of the Psalmist, death is certain to all, we feel that the Justice was indeed rightly named, and that an essentially commonplace man has given voice to an essentially commonplace thought. Yet when Guiderius and Arviragus raise the dirge over the seeming Fidele—

" Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust " :

when Gray reminds us that —

" The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er

gave, Await alike the inevitable hour ;

The paths of glory lead but to the grave " :

we have not, I think, the sense of reading only so many variations of one primarily commonplace theme.

And yet it is to this very quality of commonplace that Mr. Lowell assigns the great and lasting popularity of Gray's famous poem. He praises him for it. It is clear that his words bear their meaning on the surface ; that no sneer at the commonness or triviality of Gray's poetry was implied, or at the commonness or triviality of hu- man nature which could admire Gray's

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poetry. This would be clear even had he not exhorted his younger hearers to the cultivation of the common- place as the capital road to success. Homer, he said, expressed a common- place sentiment when he described Andromache, 8a.Kpv6ev yeXdaaa-a, smil- ing through her tears, and yet he has touched therewith the general heart of humanity through all the centuries since. By commonplace, then, it would appear that he meant some- thing simple and obvious, something that requires no great intellectual profundity to grasp and comprehend it, some natural truth that goes straight to every heart, and stays there. And so, by "his daring assertion that, " if there is one thing more than another which insures the lead in life it is the commonplace," Mr. Lowell seems to have really meant that to be simple, straightforward, natural, sincere, is the way to get on in life ; and that to aim at the opposites of these qualities is not the way. He was not just then, we may suppose, confining himself to a literary life ; but it is clear that he designed his words to apply to litera- ture no less than to the general con- duct of human affairs. On both sides they are equally remarkable, equally opportune, and to some at least whom they may have since reached, if to none who received them fresh from the fountain-head, must, one fancies, be equally unpalatable. The virtues Mr. Lowell commends are certainly not, in our literature as elsewhere, the pre- vailing virtues of the age. For what in effect are they ? May they not all be summed up in one word1? Are they not all contained in one virtue — the great rejected virtue of Sanity ? But Sanity, our young geniuses would say, is the especial virtue of the Philistine.

The Philistine ! What is this un- known quantity in the great sum of human existence ? Is it not strange that our great ethical and literary teacher, who has passed so much of his life, and known so many sorrows, as he himself has told us, in unending warfare with the Philistine, should

now, in the sweet Indian summer of his days, see growing up around him a generation who rejects his teaching as being that which pre-eminently makes for Philistinism ! For what has the burden of Mr. Arnold's teaching been but Sanity ? Sanitas Sanitatum, omnia Sanitas. Three and thirty years ago, in that preface to the first acknowledged edition of his poems which, if the humblest of his admirers may venture on the embarrassment of a choice, I should name as the finest expression of his literary creed, three and thirty years ago, I say, he first (unlike Gray) " spoke out," and never since has he wearied, or gone back from warning us against our cardinal foes, eccentricity and caprice. And yet, how few seem to have heard him ! They have looked in his glass, and seen, or fancied that they have seen, their own face there ; and then they have gone their way, and straightway forgot what manner of man they saw. Will the seed Mr. Lowell has sown fall also on stony ground ?

What makes the Philistine 1 Some one, with a sense of humour struggling through his perplexity, once said, "that he who thought differently from you on any given subject was a Philistine." And this, indeed, does seem to be the definition accepted by some of our young children of light. To differ in every conceivable way from the com- mon mould of humanity, if not in great, then in small things, even in the fashion of one's clothes, of one's speech, of one's behaviour; in any way to show that one is not as others are ; this it is to be a child of light, this to be a true heir of the promised land. To do in all things, or haply even in any one thing, as others do; this it is to be in bondage to Dagon, of such is the kingdom of Philistia. Originality is the only note of genius.

And yet how hard it must be to get originality. When one thinks for how many centuries men have been thinking, talking, writing, guessing, discovering, if one is to do, or say, or write — let us put thinking out of the question — nothing that his fathers,

T 2

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before him have turned their minds to, how shall any man be saved ? These gay young champions of the new age,

" Loitering and leaping,

With saunter, with bounds — Flickering and circling In files and in rounds,"

are they original? Not a whit. All the history of all the ages shows how common has been the acceptance of eccentricity for genius, how grateful the fancy that to differ from one's fellows is to surpass them. The riot of folly takes, perhaps, more ungrace- ful and more witless shapes now, for folly has been rioting so long that all the most alluring masques have been played through long ago ; but the fountain and source are the same.

" Children of an idle brain, Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,"

our young men and maidens tread to the same tune that their forerunners used, the same measures round the same vacuous painted image, and still from their unmeaning lips rises the same prayer,

" From thee, great God, we spring, to thee

we tend, Path, motive, guide, original, and end."

But then, it may be said, these too have, it seems, the saving virtue of commonplace, and so may be, after all, insuring their success in life on their own lines. No doubt, at first sight, some such dilemma seems to be peep- ing at us. But a little reflection will serve to dispel it.

The correspondence on the necessary relations in pictorial art between the body and the senses was suffered by the good-natured editor of the Times long enough to allow one gleam of reason to break through the nebulous veil of sentiment in which pious or petulant disputants had enwrapped the interesting and delicate subject. A newspaper correspondence, even when Mr. Herbert Spencer, Mr. Frederick Harrison, or Sir Edmund Beckett, are covering the columns, rarely yields anything so good as the letter in which "H." graciously essayed to bring comfort to the perplexed and fainting

soul of the " British Matron : " and in all that letter there was nothing better than this admirable sentence, " Convention is tJie prosody of Art."

Admirable, indeed ; and none the less so because it, too, is a common- place. It was the Alpha and the Omega of all Sir Joshua Reynolds's teaching ; and though it has pleased one of those clever young gentlemen who seem able to find no better mark for their cleverness than in sneering at their fathers who bore them, to call them old and pedantic and narrow, and their writer greatly ignorant of the facts of art, for my part I know not where wiser or clearer teaching, so far as any teaching can avail, is to be found by the young apprentice to art. Goethe, we are told, was a greater poet than Byron, because, behind his poetry there was a great critical effort nourishing and strengthening it ; behind Byron's there was no such critical effort. " The many-sided learning and widely-combined criti- cal effort of Germany," not only gave Goethe materials to work with, but gave him also " a quickening and sus- taining atmosphere to work in." These advantages Byron, in common with all his English brotherhood of poets, lacked, and, in consequence, the poetry of that time had about it " something premature," and but little of it will really last. Now, the critical effort of the present age is confessedly im- mense, and the poetical and artistic product generally of the next should be "in concatenation accordingly." But will the atmosphere engendered hereafter by the critical forces now working be altogether quickening and sustaining ? A large part of the cri- ticism of our day is certainly very eloquent, very curious and wide-rang- ing; but is it always very sound in its choice, clear in its sight, lucid in its expression 1 Consider the follow- ing passage on Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of Monna Lisa, the famous " Giaconda " :—

" The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to

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•desire. Hers is the head upon which all 'the ends of the world are come,' and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of anti- quity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed ? All the thoughts and experiences of the world have etched and moulded these, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the out- ward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age, with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits ; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave ; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her ; and trafficked for strange webs with eastern mer- chants ; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anna, the mother of Mary ; and all this has been to her but as the soiinol of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. " l

The dullest cannot but confess the eloquence of this criticism, its curious- ness and subtlety. But has it not also something a little fantastic, some- thing of caprice ? Would a young un- trained intelligence, seeking " to see things as they really are," be much quickened or sustained by it? Per- haps, to borrow a phrase from the young gentleman we have seen so scornful of poor Sir Joshua, perhaps he might be fired by it ; but would he be instructed ? Some of our budding young poets seem to have been not a little fired by this sort of writing, and the result has not been always agree- able. Yasari says of this picture, through the mouth of his English translator : —

"Mona Lisa was exceedingly beautiful, and while Leonardo was painting her portrait, he took the precaution of keeping some one con- stantly near her, to sing or play on instru- ments ; or to jest or otherwise amuse her, to the end that she might continue cheerful, and so that her face might not exhibit the melan- choly expression often imparted by painters to the likenesses they take. In this portrait of Leonardo's, on the contrary, there is so pleas- ing an expression, and a smile so sweet, that

1 The Renaissance, by Walter Pater.

while looking at it one thinks it rather divine than human, and it has even been esteemed a wonderful work, since life itself could exhibit no other appearance."

About this there is certainly nothing eloquent or subtle ; but I really am not sure that it would not be better for a young apprentice to carry in his mind on his first visit to the Louvre Mr. Pater's melodious sentences. Let me take a passage descriptive of another picture, by one who was a painter as well as a critic ; in short, by the re- jected Sir Joshua. The picture is at Cologne, "The Crucifixion of St. Peter " by Rubens—

' ' The body and head of the saint are the only good parts of the picture, which is finely coloured (broad light and shade) and well drawn ; but the figure bends too suddenly from the thighs, which are ill-drawn, or rather in a bad taste of drawing ; as is likewise his arm, which has a short interrupted outline. The action of the malefactors has not that energy which he usually gave to his figures. Rubens, in his letter to Geldorp, expresses his own approbation of this picture, which he says was the best he ever painted ; he likewise expresses his content and happiness on the subject, as being picturesque : This is likewise natural to such a mind as that of Rubens, who was perhaps too much looking about him for the picturesque or something uncommon. A man with his head doivnwards is certainly a more extraordinary object than in its natural place. "

Not eloquent this, but how very sens- ible ! And as such, how quickening and sustaining to a young mind ! How excellent, too, is this : " However ad- mirable his taste may be, he is but half a painter who can only conceive his subject and is without knowledge of the mechanical part of his art." Nay, and might it not even be of more value to a young painter visiting the Yerossi Palace for the first time to know that Poussin's landscapes "are painted on a dark ground made of Indian red and black," than to deco- rate his memory with the most gor- geous arabesques of words modern criticism ever devised ?

Mr. Arnold, criticising M. Scherer's criticism of Goethe, remarks on the pompous roundabout diction in which even Goethe, following his natural German instincts, would sometimes

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Some Commonplaces on the Commonplace.

indulge: and he quotes a certain very high-flown address from the Natural Daughter to the Court phy- sician with this comment : " Shake- speare would have said Doctor." This comment often comes home to me in reading some of our modern criticism. But it may be said I have rather wandered from my field ; that I began with literature and have strayed into painting, and that criticism on paint- ing is notoriously an impossible thing. Well, let us go back to literature. Let us take our Shakespeare, who would have said Doctor, and see what a modern critic says about him. Hear this on Pericles from Mr. Swinburne, himself a poet, and one who has written well on poetry, besides writing poetry well : —

" But what now shall I say that may not be too pitifully unworthy of the glories and the beauties, the unsurpassable pathos and sublimity inwoven with the imperial texture of this play ? the blood-red Tyrian purple of tragic maternal jealousy, which might seem to array it in a worthy attire of its Tyrian name ; the flower-soft loveliness of maiden lamentation over the flower-strewn seaside grave of Marina's old sea-tossed nurse, where 1 am un virtuous enough (as virtue goes among moralists) to feel more at home and better at ease than in the atmosphere of her later lodg- ing in Mitylene ? What, above all, shall be said of that storm above all storms ever raised in poetry, which ushered in a world of such wonders and strange chances, the daughter of the wave-worn and world- wandering Prince of Tyre ? "

How the young neophyte's head would swim in this tossing sea of syllables ; and with what a grateful sense of rest, such as the " wave-worn and world- wandering prince " himself might have felt when landed at last, would be read on the calm and judi- cious page of Hallam (the byeword and reproach of our young geniuses !) —

"It is generally believed that he [Shake- speare] had much to do with the tragedy of Pericles, which is now printed among his works, and which external testimony, though we should not rely too much on that as to Shakespeare, has assigned to him ; but the play is full of evident marks of an inferior hand."

" If there is one thing more than another which insures the lead in life, it is the commonplace" and, " convention is

the prosody of art." Here be two blasts, of doom, indeed ! They can both, I think, be reduced to one common measure : for on reflection it will be seen that they are both in effect but different voices uttering one common truth. In all works of art, in poetry, painting, music, sculpture, there are certain immutable and inevitable laws by which the greatest genius is bound equally with the humblest journey- man ; and only he who is neither, who cannot soar with the genius, and will not creep with the journeyman, affects to despise them. By convention in art is meant of course something more than the mere observance of mechani- cal rules. It will not — to take an example familiar to the comprehen- sion of the " English Girl " — it will not be enough for the painter to give his presentment of the human form its proper complement of fingers and toes ; it will not be enough for the poet to see that his lines have the proper complement of syllables, or the proper assonance of rhymes. There are cer- tain ethical, certain moral conventions, every whit as indispensable to art as the mechanical ones. It will, of course, be understood that I do not use these epithets, ethical, moral, distasteful to so many ears, in their rigid puritanical sense. Neither (Edipus Rex nor Othello would be called by Mrs. Grundy so moral a play as Mr. Gilbert's Broken Hearts, or Mr. Merivale's Wldte Pilgrim; yet they both of them conform far more strictly to the conventions of art than do either of the modern works I have named.

In that preface of Mr. Arnold's al- ready alluded to are some words which form a very apt comment both on Mr. Lowell's saying and on the saying of " H." As they were written so long ago I may quote them to-day ; indeed they are so good that had they been written yesterday no excuse were needful for quoting them to-day or for ever : —

"What are the eternal objects of poetry among all nations, and at all times ? They are actions ; human actions ; possessing an

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inherent interest in themselves, and which are to be communicated in an interesting manner by the art of the poet. Vainly will the latter imagine that he has everything in his own power ; that he can make an intrin- sically inferior action equally delightful with a more excellent one by his treatment of it. He may indeed compel us to admire his skill, but his work will possess, within itself, an incurable defect. The poet, then, has in the first place to select an excellent action ; and what actions are the most excellent ? Those, certainly, which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections : to those ele- mentary feelings which subsist permanently in the human race, and which are indepen- dent of time. These feelings are permanent and the same ; that which interests them is permanent and the same also."

This, then, as I take it, is what Mr. Lowell meant when he praised Gray's poem for its " commonplaceness of sentiment." That poem treats of " the great primary human affections." It is not a poem of action, but of medi- tation j but its meditations are on the actions which through all ages have gone to swell the great stream of human life. It expresses itself in familiar language, simple, sweet, and solemn. It indulges in no freaks, no fantasies, no caprices : it conforms to the prosody of art. This is its value for the younger members of the audi- ence Mr. Lowell was addressing, for a generation which has turned to other models, and to the expression of other affections, which do indeed belong to humanity, as madness or the plague belong to it, but which no art can make interesting, and which attract, where they do attract, solely by their defiance of art. The affections which stir a Dolores or a Nana are those which human nature shares in common with the ape and the tiger ; and the " great plan " which treats of such affections only helps us to that know- ledge which increaseth SOITOW. An ingenious writer l has lately essayed to prove that the most splendid genius inevitably treads close on the heels of insanity. It is easy to imagine with what lively satisfaction, what a sense

1 In the Nineteenth Century magazine for June.

of comfort and hope, the scorners of the commonplace must have laid this flattering unction to their souls. But their consoler seems somehow curiously to have failed to see that all his arguments and illustrations really make, not for, but against his case ; that the geniuses in whom the mental twist was most perverse were pre- cisely those who came short of the goal to which their natural gifts might have borne them — they failed pre- cisely because they had not the con- trolling and balancing power, because they did not recognise the saving vir- tue of the commonplace, because, in a word, they had not sanity. Originality, it has been said, must come unlocked for, if it comes at all. Certainly it will not be found by raking in the dunghills either of the past or the present. It is a virtue which cannot be assumed ; and, least of all, can it be assumed by vulgar affectations of singularity, or impudent essays on public credulity. And if it be a virtue doomed still to fade

" For ever and for ever when we move,"

we may perhaps assuage our dis- appointment with the consolation one of the great rejected of the age of prose and reason found in his work : " It seems not so much the perfection of sense to say things that have never been said before, as to express those best that have been said oftenest." There is, in good truth, plenty still to be done that way — plenty for cm- critics, and for the next generation — the generation which is to be quickened and sustained by the atmosphere en- gendered by the motive powers of those critics. It were no bad thing to remember the words addressed to a pupil by a great teacher of an earlier time than ours, a teacher who assuredly did not want sanity, whatever else he may have wanted : " If you wish to exercise influence hereafter, beyin by dis- tinguishing yourself in the regular way, not by seeming to prefer a separate way of your own."

280

A WALKING TOUR IN THE LANDES.

WE entered Biscarosse just as the children were trooping out of the communal school, each pair of sabots making as much clatter on the pave- ment as a pair of bird-clappers. We stopped at an inn the merits of which my companion had been painting for the last half -hour in glowing colours. So anxious was he to have all the honour of introducing a stranger that he ran on ahead and announced my approach to a lank and red-haired girl who was exhibiting a pair of naked feet on the threshold. The red-haired damsel did not seem at all overcome by the apparition of a tourist. One tramp to her was as good or as bad as another. As I entered she merely moved a little on one side, doubtless to place her brown toes where they would be safe from my boots. It was a straggling, sprawling, uninteresting, cheerless auberge, but it was the best in the place. Having ordered dinner, I asked the resin-gatherer what he would drink before we parted. "A little absinthe," said he. Oh ! green- eyed demon, so you had found your way even to this Ultima Thule ! The aubergiste poured some of the familiar spirit into a glass. Then my un- sophisticated man of the woods took the water-bottle, lifted it up, and let a slender stream trickle into the glass ; the demon at the bottom showed his green eye immediately, and the mix- ture as it rose rippled and sparkled with prismatic hues. My innocent friend knew the trick as well as any boulevardier. Well, I ought not to have been surprised, for he had been a soldier, and the military educa- tion is not confined to the use of arms. As we parted company he shook my hand hard and long, hoped that I would visit him again, and actually proposed that I should go back with

him to his hut and pass the night there, promising to show me the next day all the curious things in the forest between the lake and the sea. I some- times regret that I did not accept his offer.

While the dinner was being cooked I roamed about the village, where I found two objects of interest — a church with a spire entirely roofed with strips of wood, and a tree. As it was getting dusk I postponed my visit to the church until the next morning, but the tree I examined at once. It was a pollard elm of immense girth, and so old that about a dozen children were playing in the hollow of it. No- thing but the shell of the great trunk remained except a few gnarled branches and a crown of leaves. This tree I found had a local celebrity, not only on account of its great age, on which speculation was silent, for it was an " immemorial elm," but because it had the peculiarity of putting forth white instead of green leaves every spring. The white leaves ap- peared near the trunk and the green leaves came afterwards. This was no village myth, for I could see clusters of hoary leaves still hanging underneath the green. The children wondered much what there was in the venerable tree to interest me.

On my return to the inn I found a much more sumptuous dinner awaiting me than I had expected. First I had tomato soup, then an omelette, next the beef that helped to make the soup ; afterwards macaroni, roast turtle-dove, cheese, grapes, and pears. The red- haired domestic, who had put on stately manners with a pair of slip- pers, told me as she set the macaroni down that a turtle was coming. I told her I would have the roast first. She insisted that I must eat the

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macaroni first. We had a regular battle on the point, but in the end I carried the day, and she took the macaroni back to the kitchen. Pre- sently she brought in the poor little dove, with its pretty rose-coloured feet turned towards heaven. To eat a turtle-dove seemed very like sacrilege, but the voice of conscience was soon hushed and the deed was done.

At half-past seven the angelus rang, and at nine there was scarcely a light to be seen in the village. I went to bed because everybody else did so, and such is the force of example that I was as sleepy as if it were midnight. At four o'clock the angelus rang again. Two hours later I was up and about. I visited the church. It was a six- teenth century building, with nothing peculiar to mark it except the wood- covered spire. The interior was strongly scented by the bunches of peppermint flowers that had been gathered by children and placed upon the altars. The church stood in the midst of the burying-ground — a piece of rough field, without trees, or shrubs, or garden flowers ; without monuments and memorial emblems, excepting a few stone slabs and little wooden crosses stuck here and there among the long grass, wild»carrots, camomile, tow brambles glistening with black- berries, and flowering mallows.

My dinner, bed, and breakfast at Biscarosse cost me 5f. 50c. I put these details down for the informa- tion and guidance of other tramps. I do not mention gratuities to red- haired girls and others. One can travel through the Landes on foot for eight francs a day, and still afford to be liberal according to the local notions of liberality.

The hour came for the knapsack to be hoisted again and the journey re- sumed. I had recovered from the fatigue that one always feels for the first two days of a walking tour after several months of comparative inacti- vity. The knapsack now seemed as light as a feather, and the consciousness of renewed strength gave an appetite

for fresh exertion. From Biscarosse I took a south-easterly course to Parentis, and had the lake of Parentis, which is about two-thirds as large as that of Cazau, on my right. It was completely hidden, however, by the pines. The road, which ran through a dense forest, was a good one. After passing an army of geese drawn up in battle array, I met a party of women with wide-brimmed straw hats on their heads, which gave them the appearance of being thatched. Their curiosity was so much aroused by the sight of me that they stopped still and stared. One of them asked me a question in her patois. I told her that I did not understand ; and she replied, " Je com- prenais pas Franqais." This is an example of the funny French spoken hereabouts, even by people who use the language fluently enough. The woman who wished me to drink eau sucree on the road to Cazau, in speak- ing to her husband, used the form " Souvinse-tu ? " for " Souviens-tu ? " These corruptions, however, must not be confused with the patois of the country, which is a distinct dialect, differing as much from French as French does from Italian or Spanish ; but the Latin idiom is common to all. Even in the Landes the patois varies according to geographical conditions. Thus, the farther one goes south the more one is struck by the open vowel sounds and full accentuation of syl- lables. In the Chalosse, the district south of the Adour, the patois con- tains many words of Basque origin. In the larger villages of the Landes, it is very unusual now to find people who cannot speak French fluently. But the French of Gascony is not un- like the French of " Stratford-atte- Bowe," so despised by Chaucer. For instance, the Gascons give almost the English pronunciation of train and pine and franc to the French words train, pin, and franc. Many other examples of this similarity might be mentioned. Now I saw what I had been anxi- ously looking out for — men on stilts. They were a party of three herdsmen,

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A Walking Tour in the Landes.

and their cattle were browsing among the heather. The men stood about four feet from the ground. Their well- developed sinewy legs were bare to the knee, but the soles of their feet were protected from the wood of the stilts by a piece of 4' sheep's or goat's skin, the woolly side turned upwards. On their backs were wallets, also of sheep's or goat's skin, for carrying food and water. One man had a great green umbrella strapped to his back. Before I reached the spot where the stiltmen were standing, I was accosted by a shabby-genteel looking tramp with along beard, who, claiming me, no doubt, as a brother of the road, tried to draw me into conversation on the advantages of using stilts in this sandy region. He was not long in discovering that I was an Englishman, and he assured me that he had had the honour of counting among his most esteemed friends many of my countrymen whom he met in his native place, Boulogne-sur-Mer. It was a relief when he came to business, and told me he was sans-le-sou and had passed the night on the heather. I gave him some sous and wished him bon voyage. " Tank you, sir," he said, as he continued his journey. In a few minutes he turned round again and shouted, " Tank you, sir ! " This performance he repeated at intervals until he was out of hearing. The stiltmen observed this little comedy with quiet wonder. One of them asked me if " that monsieur " was an old acquaintance of mine. I replied that he was not. "I was then asked if I was a merchant — a polite term for a pedlar. " No, I am travelling like this for my pleasure." Great amuse- ment and equal incredulity* of the stilted gentlemen, who stared alter- nately at one another and at me, but said no more. I saw plainly enough that it would be easier for me to con- vince them that I was a ghost than that I travelled on foot through the wilderness of the Landes with a knap- sack on my back for the sake of pleasure.

I went on my way, but I soon met another stilted mortal who had a numerous flock of goats, most of them black and all very long in the leg. His dog's suspicions were deeply stirred by seeing me stop and make a note in my book, and he barked furi- ously. Like other dogs he had care- fully studied all the movements of the human being, Trat this one was new to his experience.

Occasional breaks in the forest, showing fields of maize, patches of tobacco and melons, cottages with trellised vines for porches, told me that Parentis was not far off. Further on I came to clumps of old oaks and sweet chestnuts. Whenever an oak is seen in this part of the Landes it is a pretty certain indication that a town or village is near. In ancient days, long before the pine was sown, the country was fairly wooded with oak. Was the timber destroyed in the wars of which Aquitaine was such a bloody theatre for centuries ? or was it simply used up for housebuilding and firewood by a people that had not yet learnt that there are duties which communi- ties owe to their most distant posterity ] Such questions are more easily put than answered. Remnants of the ancient oak forests remain in the Landes, but rarely north of the Adour, except in the neighbourhood of towns and villages.

Parentis- en-Born is the chef -lieu of six communes, but it has not quite 2,000 inhabitants. It is very pic- turesque, for its wooden houses with red - tiled roofs are mostly nestled among trees and vines. The early Gothic church is falling into ruin. The tiled floor is so dilapidated that unless you pick your way as you walk up the aisle your feet sink into the sand. The ledge round the rail where the communicants kneel is as full of holes as Mirza's Bridge. The ceiling is beautifully groined, and the vaulting is supported by graceful clustered columns. The building, roofed with stones, except where these have been blown off, is capped by a broach spire

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very broad and low. An ancient wooden image of Christ to be found in this church is a very interesting ex- ample of quaint sculpture.

I stop at an auberge. It is a strange place, with great rooms and many passages, but solemn, silent, and seemingly deserted. No dog runs forward to sniff the stranger, no cat cocks its tail and rubs against the table-legs ; not even a clock ticks. I knock on the table with my stick, and a woman appears so suddenly that I think she must have popped up through the floor like a stage fairy. As it is nearly noon, and I see a ham hang- ing to a beam, I ask the phantom hostess to fry me some of the ham — which is the least ghostly-looking object in the place — together with some eggs. All she says is " Eien," but the word is quite to the purpose. She goes into the kitchen, blows some life into the whitened embers on the hearth and sets to work with the frying-pan. Ah ! now the flame leaps up, the jocund frying-pan hisses, the absent cat comes in stretching its legs after a long doze in the sun, the pinched faces of ghostly guests, with their noses in ghostly glasses, vanish from the imagination, and the phantom inn is humanised by the crackling fire and the genial odour of frizzling ham. All honour to the pig, for he is a merry beast when alive, and when dead and properly cured his body inspires homely sentiment. I have a cheerful lunch after all, in spite of the flies which have been lavishly cooked with the ham and eggs, and I am in such a good humour now that I can be amused by the glass water-bottle on the table — a dolphin standing on its head and using its tail to make a neck.

I soon left Parentis, for I had only walked eight miles before lunch, and nearly twice that distance lay between me and Escource, where I proposed to pass the night. After leaving behind me a stone cross with the inscription, "O Crux, Ave! Mission 1860," the country became very wild and solemn. Many miles of forest were before me,

and there was not a sign of human life except the earthen resin pots fixed to the pines. The road was a mere sandy track. At length I came to a clearing and a small farm. Seeing a man on stilts I asked him for some water. He led the way, stepping like an ostrich, to the cottage, where a pretty, dark- eyed girl, with dazzling teeth, and the soft profile of a woman in her first youth — the sole example of female beauty I had yet seen in the Landes — held the pitcher to me like another Rebecca. But my Rebecca's naked feet, although they were as shapely as Psyche's, were as dingy as a monkey's, and the luxuriance of her chestnut tresses was the luxuriance of the garden of Eden after the fall of the gardener. The background harmonised well, but not sweetly with the chief figure in the picture. The interior of the wooden dwelling — the girl was standing on the threshold — was squalid and smoke-begrimed. It had become so impregnated with the odours of the dirt demon that had made it his tabernacle, that it was past all purifying except by fire. I felt that I was in a part of the Landes where the few inhabitants had made scarcely any effort to keep up with the cen- turies in their course, and who had been left far, very far, behind in the race.

Finding that the road took me a good deal out of my southernly course I let myself be guided by compass and map, and struck off by a much nar- rower and rougher track where the sand was as loose as on the sea shore. Now I was once more utterly alone with nature. There was not even the sound of a forester's axe to rouse the solitude with a note of human sentiment. I heard nothing but the sighing, the everlasting sighing, of the pines. Only those who have listened to this sound hour after hour in the midst of a vast forest, without even the voice of a friend to break the sameness of its perpetual rising and falling, know what it is to be alone with the sibyl.

The pine is the high priest of the

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forest, to whom nature is ever whisper- ing her deepest mysteries. In all its aspects it responds symbolically to the inner life of man. It is the most joyous and the most melancholy of trees. Its crest is filled with the ra- diance of heaven, but its trunk dwells in such an earthly shadow of death that its own leaves cannot live there. It is for ever reaching towards the sun and stars, but the more it feels their beauty and light the deeper grows the shade about its roots. Who that has walked long among the pines and kept his eyes fixed upon their naked trunks, has not found an irresistible melancholy steal over him — a tender and gracious melancholy, perhaps, but strangely weird and solemn? And who that has let his sight wander aloft where the branches wave their leafy harps against a sky that is bronzed by the flaming noon or dyed by the evening rose, has not felt his mind overflow with delight? No sound, I have said, but the sighing of the pines. Ah ! yes, there was another sound ; it was that of the dropping cone — a sound which, when evening is coming on, and the arcades of the forest are getting dim as cathe- dral aisles in the dusk, makes the soli- tary wanderer start, and half expect to see the puckered face of Pan peer- ing out of the unreal twilight. The first notice one has of a cone dropping is the sharp metallic ring it gives out as it strikes a branch in its downward course, or the dull thud when it meets the earth. The noise would be hardly remarked in a wood resounding with the songs of birds, but in the silent forest it is capable of sending a shud- der through the frame.

But if there were no birds nor ci- cadas to cheer me on my way this afternoon, there was no lack of insect life. I was greatly worried by those pests of the forests known in France as mouches grises. For voracity and impudence these long-bodied grey- winged flies are unrivalled, except by the mosquito. One is compelled to be constantly battling with them, or they

will work havoc with the face and hands. Their cool effrontery is only equalled by the cunning which enables them invariably to beat a safe retreat, and without any apparent effort, when attacked. They are far too sagacious to make their buzz heard above the steady hum of insect life. They drop upon your neck or nose or back of your hand without giving any warning. A bottle of diluted ammonia is a useful thing to carry in the forests, for the bites of these insects may cause great irritation and ugly swellings.

I was glad when I reached Les Forges, a pretty hamlet on a small lake, and embowered in trees. It was a blessed thing to be able to rest a while in the cool room of an auberge, and have a talk with a human being over a bottle of wine. This human creature was the landlord, a smart, sturdy man of about thirty, with an air of prosperity. Everybody I saw at Les Forges had the same air. I was in the presence of a new and thriving civilisation, very similar, I should think, to that of a backwoods' settlement in America, while the future town is still in the seed. This hamlet owes its existence to the iron-foundry which has given it its name. All its buildings are made of pine planks, and are scattered around the lake under the shadow of the trees. My host told me that in winter the country for miles around was under water, and that everybody then went on stilts. "Don't you find your life rather mournful during those months?" said I. " Comme $a," said he. " We get used to it. And then, if we have too much water sometimes, !we have never any hail or cholera." In this inn I saw a newspaper, the first since I left Bordeaux. It was the Petite Gironde, and it contained in big type an account of the bombardment of Foochow.

As I had still about seven miles to walk before reaching Escource, and the day was far spent, I only took a short rest at Les Forges. As I left the hamlet, dogs of all sizes rushed after

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me growling and barking with great spirit. They kept a few yards from my heels. But for my big stick they would have come nearer. Dogs can judge by its appearance the kind of sensation which a stick would produce on their backs with truly wonderful sagacity. The little dogs were the greatest nui- sance. The big dogs would have seldom put themselves to the trouble of run- ning after me if they were not excited by the bad example of their small brethren. In the same manner little men often lead big men into mischief. The evening was settling down as I reached Escource. The principal inn was a low wooden building, with a row of fine plane trees in front. The name Angelos over the door was a sign that my three day's tramp had brought me nearer the region where the difference between French and Spanish blood is chiefly the Pyre- nees. The entrance to the hostelry was not at all inviting. It was a dark scullery reeking with soapsuds, and filled with steam, for the family washing was in full swing. Pere Angelos, a man of about sixty, with large florid face deepening to the colour of wine lees on the cheek bones, a heavy grizzly moustache and imperial, a graduated series of chins, shrewd dark eyes, and a body that by long association with hogsheads had begun to mimic the shape of one, was stand- ing in the steam and encouraging with severe looks his wife and daughters to distinguish themselves at the wash- tubs.

As my form darkened the thres- hold, he stared at me with an ex- pression of blank astonishment that contrasted wofully with the legendary picture of the stout innkeeper stepping forward to greet the stranger with cordial words and smiles suggestive of the fat turkey which by a happy in- spiration had already been placed on the spit.

But father Angelos is not in reality a sour-tempered man ; he had simply been thrown off his guard, for he is as much a farmer as an innkeeper, and I am a stranger whom he wishes to

understand before he cares to welcome. I, however, treat him as an old ac- quaintance, and compel him to thaw. He then asks me to come into the inner room, and as if to apologise for the steam and soapsuds, remarks, " Aujourd'hui on fait la lessive." The inner room is the public room and kitchen — an almost invariable combination in these country inns. The lowness of the ceiling traversed by heavy beams makes it look larger than it really is. There is the wide fire-place with chimney open to within three feet of the ceiling, with the pine- wood fire blazing on the hearth that one sees throughout the Landes in all seasons. The furniture consists of a great dresser and several long tables and benches for the convenience of the family and the public. Everybody and everything, from host Angelos to the jugs and platters, seem to have been carefully smoke-dried for better pre servation.

To my usual inquiry about a night's lodging I received an affirmative an- swer, but it did not come from the heart. I imagined Angelos inwardly growling, " Yes, you can stop here, since you have come ; but I had rather you had gone elsewhere, especially as it is washing day." Washing day is a dreadful family earthquake all the world over. Having expressed a de- sire to see my bed-room, Angelos called one of his daughters, and said some- thing to her in patois. She made a sign to me, and I followed her up a wide uneven staircase and along a white-washed passage from which other and narrower passages branched off to the right and left ; for the house, although entirely of wood, was built upon an ambitious plan. She led the way into a room.

" Voilfk votre chambre," she said, and left me to my reflections before I had time to look round. Prepared as I always am to make the best of things when on the tramp, I did not like this bedroom. It was not the extreme poorness and scantiness of the furni- ture, but the dirty appearance of the bed linen that disheartened me. I per-

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ceived at a glance that the previous occu- piers had been travelling labourers or tramps. Having resolved to lie in my clothes on the outside — it was useless to think of seeking better quarters in the village — I returned to the kitchen, and invited the landlord in the cheeriest voice I could muster to drink a glass of his best cognac with me. I have always found it good policy to be convivial with landlords. Under the warming influence of the brandy, father Angelos's mercury rose twenty degrees. In the course of ten minutes he became quite genial. He then remembered that he had a better bedroom than the one I had just been shown into, and he again called his daughter and told her to lead the way to it. This room pleased me. It was evidently the best one in the house, and intended for distinguished visi- tors, such as commercial travellers. The old-fashioned furniture was still good, the bed linen was white, the walls were embellished with coloured prints of a religious character, and the window looked out upon a row of luxuriant plane trees, whose branches touched the panes. I opened the rickety and worm-eaten casement, and let in the pine-scented breath of evening. The sun had set ; the sky was still blue, but blue with a dash of indigo, and the deep shadows of night issuing from the crypts of the forest were chasing the fleet twilight towards the last western glow. The only sound that broke the calm was one that hushed it too. The youngest daughter of the inn, a little creature of five or six years, was sitting alone on a damp green bench in the dusk, under the broad motionless leaves of the plane trees. She was singing to a doll, with the soft warble of childhood that has forgotten human neighbour- hood, an old song that has been sung by many generations of French children : —

" Frere Jacques, dormez-vous ?

Dormez-vous ? dormez-vous ? Sonnez les matines, sonnez les matines — Bim, baum, baum ! ' '

The child was only two or three

yards beneath me, but she had no thought that anybody was looking at her brown head swaying between the leaves, and her small sunburnt feet dangling over the lighter sand. Some- thing reminded me that these pretty pictures were not food for the hungry, and I retraced my steps to the kitchen. " What is there for dinner? " "Pas grand' chose. Part of a fowl that was cooked this morning, and a pigeon if you wish."

"A pigeon, by all means." A boy, whom I noticed then for the first time, went into the yard and returned in a minute with a fluttering pigeon.

" Have you killed it ? " " Not yet ; I am just going to." "Don't do it. Let it go again. I don't like pigeons quite so fresh as that."

The boy was nothing loth to do as I bade him, for the bird was his own. Having commenced the evening with a good action, I was rewarded with the company of my host at dinner in an adjoining room. Father Angelos had made himself beautiful. He had taken off his blouse and put on a black coat in my honour. The dinner turned out better than Madame Angelos had led me to expect. A snowy cloth had been laid on the table, together with two linen napkins that" with little stretch- ing might have served for sheets. The repast was not confined to the remnants of the mid- day fowl, for we had also soup and boiled beef (bouilli, which I can only appreciate when on a walking tour). We were waited upon by the eldest daughter, a girl with a face as mild and submissive as a nun's. She did not venture to say a word throughout the meal, for Angelos inspired his family with awe when he put on his best coat and society manners. When the dessert came his mercury had risen as high as it would go, and that was a long way. He talked incessantly, and so fast, and with such a full-flavoured Gascon accent that I had some difficulty in following him. The fact of my being an Englishman brought back to his

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mind pleasant memories of his soldering days — the days of the Crimean war. When he talked of English soldiers and sailors he held his sides and roared so loud with laughter that his timid daughter looked scared. I did not at first take these explosions of mirth as complimentary, hut I soon found that they were caused by a genuine admira- tion of the only British qualities which had left a lasting impression on my host — love of fighting and capacity for drinking. The good wine that he brought from " behind the faggot " helped down his stories, but after a while neither his thunderclaps of laughter nor his old wine would keep me awake. So I excused myself on the ground of fatigue and went to bed.

I was up early the next morning, for I had had visitors during the night which made me keenly alive to the attractions of the outer world. The radiance of the morning and the lightness and sweetness of the air soon enabled me to throw off the depressing effects of a night spent in battling with innumerable foes. I strolled into the church, a building of the worst taste. Just inside the door a village urchin was tolling the bell. Each time the rope slid up through the hole in the ceiling the boy's naked heels rose out of his sabots. The bell stopped, and an old priest with long white hair began to sing his mass in a voice of beautiful tone, and the acolyte who gave the responses had a bass of tremendous power. The altar boys, seven or eight in number, wore their blouses and sabots. No pomps and vanities there.

I returned to the auberge for my cafe au lait, and to take leave of my friend Angelos. He only charged me 4 francs 50 centimes for my dinner, bed, breakfast, his company and all his anecdotes. I hope I may never fall into worse hands than his! From Escource I took the road to Onesse. The general features of the country remained the same. The seemingly illimitable forest was on each side of

me, and in front was a long, narrow stretch of sand called a road. Here and there moss and cut heather had been laid upon it. However curious it may seem, this method of paving is not to be despised in a sandy region. I met no human kind, except a party of charcoal burners, until I reached Onesse, a larger and busier village than Escource. It being nearly noon I stopped to lunch at an inn of some importance. I had a companion at table ; a young man with a face like a red apple full ripe, and eyes like black glass beads. He told me that he was " in the cognac," a state to which his looks conformed, and that he represented a firm at Bordeaux. Wishing to be very friendly, he opened a mahogany case which I thought must have contained some musical instru- ment. Instead of flute or clarinet I saw a row of little bottles. These contained his samples of brandy. Taking one of them he poured a few drops into a glass and insisted upon my drinking them. Then he took another and another, repeating the same experiment each time upon me until he reached the highest note of the gamut. I saw by the protuberance and glitter of his black beads that he expected me then to give signs of ecstasy. So not to disappoint him I exclaimed " Magnificent ! superb ! " — all the adjectives most dear to the French heart. He then shut up his case with the air of a missionary who had just baptised a heathen. For lunch, the piece de resistance was a roast fowl— a fowl that had been killed weeks or months before and preserved in grease. This is a very common method of treating poultry in Gascony. It enables people always to have a fowl in the house ready for use at a moment's notice. In the better class of rural inns, large provision of hams and preserved poultry is generally made for the winter. In passing through the kitchen I noticed that the spit on which the fowl was roasting close to the hearth before a wood fire was turned by clockwork fixed to the

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side of the chimney and moved by a heavy weight. There were two other noteworthy dishes at this meal : one was stewed mushrooms that had been preserved in oil, and the other was green capsicums fresh cut from the garden and mixed with olive oil and red wine vinegar.

The walk from Onesse to the next village, Lesperon, gave me some very rough work. I had fallen upon a range of dunes running at right angles with the coast line about twenty miles inland. The country was even more desolate than the wilderness between Parentis and Les Forges ; but the forest was less dense, and the brush- wood of furze and heather was some- times varied by broad masses of bracken.

After some hours of difficult walk- ing I came to a stream running with crystal clearness at the bottom of a gully of its own making. It was evident from this that the tuff lay much deeper here than in much of the Landes which I had already traversed ; consequently the water would pro- bably be better. On each side of the stream was a steep bank of almost snow-white sand. Here I may remark that this is the true colour of the Landes sand, from the large propor- tion of quartz crystals which it con- tains, and that its generally dirty appearance is due to the vegetable soil that has become mixed with it. Although the stream was spanned by a rough wooden bridge I could not resist the temptation of sliding down the nearest sand bank in that elegant posture which mountaineers frequently assume in travelling down the snowy flanks of the Alps, for the sparkle of that water at the bottom of the gully would have fascinated any thirsty wanderer. It was just as I expected, pure and cold. But the most lasting impression which the spot will leave upon my mind is the difference be- tween climbing up a steep sand bank, and sliding down one.

The evening was so young when I reached Lesperon, my stopping place

for the night, that I had time to look at the church before dinner. This building is one of great interest, especially to Englishmen, for it was raised by their . forefathers. Local authority is unanimous on this point. The portal nearly corresponds to Eng- lish Norman, but the interior arches are slightly pointed, and supported by low and massive round pillars without capitals. The side aisles and choir have been partially renewed. Over the west front, strengthened by but- tresses, rises a broad tower capped by a very low broach spire in two angles. On the slanting top of one of the buttresses is a self-sown pine, several feet in height, which adds greatly to the picturesqueness of the building. But the most characteristic feature of the church — one that compels the modern to stand still and wonder at the strange contrasts of the turbulent times in which it was raised — is a square tower built out on the south side with narrow loopholes for defence. I put up for the night at a great comfortless auberge, and dined upon a couple of turtle doves, and about a dozen small birds, suspiciously like tomtits, which an old woman with nose and chin bent by time to the shape of sugar-nippers was threading on a spit as I entered. After dinner the schoolmaster dropped in to smoke his evening pipe. As he was dressed like a countryman, it was some time before I learnt that I was in the pre- sence of so distinguished a person. One after another his cronies came in and joined him in a game of cards. They were small tradesmen or farmers — men of rough exterior, but of pleasant, kindly manners. They called for beer — a boisson de luxe in these parts — and invited me to join their party. I did so, but only as a spectator, for the game they played, called " manillf," was quite new to me. When not talking to me they spoke the language of the country, which I thought at first was Basque. I was mistaken. The schoolmaster described the Basques as tetus et bourrus, but the Landais he

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said were quiet, amiable people who, when they quarrelled — which very seldom happened — never drew murder- ous knives from their pockets and blew out the candles. He was a Landais.

This genial schoolmaster was so anxious that I should visit the Chateau de Lesperon in the neighbourhood, that I accepted his offer to conduct me thither the next morning. We started at an early hour. My new friend was so transformed by black cloth that I scarcely recognised in him the card-player of the night before. The Chateau de Lesperon merits no de- scription. It is an uninteresting ruin of a castellated mansion built at the close of the fifteenth century. In one of the rooms is a framed manu- script giving some extracts from the Commentaires of Blaise de Mont Luc. Certain passages of these ex- tracts are stamped by a very quaint humour, and tell us what sort of man it was who -built this house in the desert. Blaise, after referring to the services he had rendered by bearing arms for " the kings, my masters ' makes the following curious observa- tion : — " Croyez moi que les playes qtie j'ay regues m'ont plus donn6 de recon- fort que d'ennuy ; et m'asseure quand je serai mort qua grand peyne dira on que j'emporte au jour de la resurrec- tion en Paradis tout le sang os et veines que j'ay apporte au monde du ventre de ma mere."

But although the sturdy old soldier professes to have no cause to regret his devotion to his royal masters, he records with evident relish, not un- mixed with malice, the following local anecdote: — "Le roy Louis douzieme allant a Bayonne logea en un petit village nomme 1'Esperon, lequel est plus pres de Bayonne que de Bordeaux. Or, sur le. grand chemin, Le Cayle eust fait bastir une tres belle maison. Le roy trouva estrange qu'en un pays si maigre et dans les landes et sables qui ne portoient rien ce Cayle eust fait bastir une si belle maison ; de quoy il entretint pendant son souper No. 310. — VOL. LII.

son Mareschal des Logis qui luy fait responce que Le Cayle estait un riche homme, ce que le roy ne pouvait croire veu le miserable pays ou la maison estait assise ; il 1'envoya querir sur 1'heure mesme et luy dit ces mots : ' Yenez §a, Cayle, pourquoy n'avez vous fait bastir cette maison en quelque endroit ou le pays fust bon et fertile?' 'Sire,' dit Le Cayle, ' je suis natif de ce pays et le trouve prou bon pour moy.' ' Estes vous si riche,' dit le roy, 'comme Ton m'a dit?' 'Je ne suis pas pauvre,' dit-il. ' Graces & Dieu j'ay de quoy vivre.' Le roy dit lors, ' Comment est-il pos- sible qu'en un pays si maigre et sterille tu sois peu devenir si riche 1 ' ' Cela m'a este bien ayse,' dit Le Cayle, 'sire.' 'Dites moy done comment,' dit le roy. ' Par ce, sire, que j'ay tous jours plustost fait mes affaires que celles de mon maistre et de mes voisins.' ' Le diable, ne m'emport,' dit le roy (ainsi estait son serment), ' ta raison est bonne, car en faisant de ceste sorte et te levant matin tu ne pourrais faillir de devenir riche.'

0 combien d'enfants a laisse ce Cayle heritiers de ses complexions ! Je n'ay jamais est6 de ceux-la."

I took leave of the friendly school- master under the wide-spreading oaks which surround the Chateau de Les- peron, ajid soon struck the high road to Bayonne. As I wished to pass through Dax, it was not long before I quitted the excellent national road for one of those narrow sandy tracks through the forest of which

1 had already had so much experience. The morning was glorious, and the cicadas were scraping on their one note like insect fiddlers that had lin- gered too long over the sun's naming beaker. Seeing one of these happy creatures low down on a pine, a school-boy's inspiration seized me. I would try to catch it. I was within a yard of it, and the insect, still playing upon its fiddle, was not aware of my approach. It was full in the sunlight, and the rays falling on its back made it shine like burnished

u

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gun-metal. As I raised my hand away it went to another pine, with a heavy flight and a strident scream of fear or anger. At the same moment a lizard, about eight inches long, which I had not noticed before because it was nearly the same colour as the pine bark, ran up the tree with the speed of lightning, and was instantly lost to view. Had I disturbed these crea- tures in a friendly tete-a-tete, or in a bitter quarrel for the possession of the tree ?

My next stopping-place was Taller, a pretty village, where the people seemed to spend their lives basking like lizards. I arrived here in the full blaze of noon, and the shade of host Lassalle's back room was so re- freshing that I soon began to shiver, and was obliged to go outside again and sun myself against the southern wall.

While I am standing here the aubergiste's young wife is engaged on the problem of preparing an accept- able meal from such ingredients as the house affords. I have no misgivings on this subject, for there is scarcely a Frenchwoman from Dunkerque to the Pic du Midi who cannot produce in half an hour a savoury and attrac- tive repast with next to nothing, if her heart is in it. And I can see that Madame Lassalle's heart, is in her work. It is a pleasure to her to cook for a genuine stranger, from whom she may hear some news of the outer world. In almost no time she appears on the threshold, and says with a smile, " Monsieur est servi." In the cool back room a white cloth has been spread over a little table, and a napkin has been laid beside a plate. In the centre is a tureen full of steaming soupe aux choux. Cabbage soup has a barbarous sound in Eng- lish ears, but more than one hungry Englishman has, I expect, felt his heart glow with gratitude towards the clever Frenchwoman who has set it before him. Do not turn up your fastidious noses, English housewives, but humble yourselves before the

French menagere until you have learnt her secret for making cabbage soup. I can tell you that the ingredients are a cabbage, a piece of ham or bacon, and a dry sausage with garlic in it ; but this knowledge is only half the battle. If no woman not bred in England can boil a potato or grill a chop, so no woman not bred in France can make a soupe aux choux or an ome- lette au cerfeuil. After the soup I have the ham that was boiled with it, and a little dish of green capsicums with oil and vinegar. The next course is a fowl, cut up, and served with a sauce which is another secret of the Frenchwoman. Then, for dessert, I have a plate of figs just picked from beneath the cool broad leaves that droop from the wall of the little inn, and beautiful in their purple bloom. Hitherto in the Landes I have found the wine bad, for the aubergistes have bought it of the Bordeaux dealers, who have knavishly counterfeited nature ; but host Lassalle's wine is a sound and generous liquor — real blood of the grape. It comes from the Chalosse, an excellent wine-growing country, where he has a vineyard. It has the strong, sweet, and full flavour of all the red wines of the south. If it is less pleasant than the light wines of the Gironde, it is vastly superior to the compounded liquor that is so often called Bordeaux.

I had a long talk with Lassalle, who, when he perceived that I was an Englishman, became strangely ex- cited. He first told me that Taller was named after Tallas, an English- man, and then that he too was "a sort of Englishman." I asked him to sit down and take his coffee with me, and explain how it was that he was a sort of Englishman. While we were drinking our coffee he told me that he was descended from an Eng- lish mendicant friar, who came over to Gascony during the religious wars (his mind was very misty as to dates), and was a long while concealed in the house of a woman of Taller. He was at length discovered and killed, but

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his blood continued to flow in the veins of a son whom his benefactress gave to the world. The son took his mother's name, which was Lassalle. While my host told me this story, with the pride of a man who endeavours to prove that he is descended from John of Gaunt or Robert Bruce, his wife, fidgeting uncomfortably, said she did not see the good of repeating " such histories," and looked as if she would like to place a hand over her hus- band's mouth. She evidently did not think that the mendicant friar was an ancestor to be proud of, notwithstand- ing his English nationality. But Lassalle was much too full of his family tradi- tions to pay any heed to her.

The church at Taller, like the one at Lesperon, was built by the English during the three hundred years' occu- pation. It has all the appearance of having been originally designed for a fortress, and subsequently used for re- ligious purposes. The walls are of great thickness, and are pierced in places by narrow loopholes. The low and mas- sive portal is in the form of a tre- foiled arch. After leaving Taller, a two hours' walk through a forest of beautiful young pines, their colour that " living green " of which Dante speaks, brought me into the high road to Dax. Parched with thirst, and half dazed by the fierce light of the afternoon sun, I read with thankful- ness the word " Aubergiste " in un- couth letters over the door of a way- side hovel. I knocked with my stick against the closed door. No answer, no movement from within. I knocked with increased force, and presently I heard a shrill voice from the farther end of a field of maize, and saw the head of a human being coming towards me, just above the green leaves and yellowing spikes. In a few minutes a woman struggled into full view. What a woman ! There was nothing to mark her sex except a piece of tattered stuff about her body that looked as if it would be left on the first bramble that touched it, and which barely covered her knees. Her face,

arms, and legs were as brown as the sand — a living woman in terra-cotta. All she had to sell was a white wine, but the drinkers called so seldom that she shut up her house nearly all day while she worked in the field.

I take no pleasure in recalling my sensations during the tedious trudge along the hot and dusty road to Dax. I looked wistfully at the milestones. Every kilometre now seemed a league. Oxen, with fringes of string bobbing over their faces, dragging their creak- ing wains along at a snail's pace that neither goads nor curses would quicken ; troops of panting cattle with drovers and dogs ; country carts spinning over the road in a cloud of dust and drawn by fleet Landais horses, and tramps like myself, all wending southward — were so many proofs that I was near- ing some centre of human activity : but the hours passed, the sun sank low, and no town was in sight. Ah well ! I reached Dax at last, covered with dust, and as weary as any pil- grim. I entered the town at the hour when all the Dacquoises were dropping the last pinch of salt into the evening soup.

It was my luck to fall upon a good- old-fashioned inn with a table d'hdte and a merry company. Those who have not known the happiness of reaching a good inn and genial society after a long day's walk may console themselves with the thought that they have not yet tasted one of the chief pleasures of life.

Dax, like many an old town with a stirring history, builds up expectations in the mind of the stranger which are not realised on the spot. Not a ghost of any Roman, Vandal, Yisigoth, Sara- cen, Frank, Norman, or Englishman among its old masters could feel at home in Dax of to-day. As far as I could discover there are but two things in the place which visibly connect it with antiquity. These are the hot springs, as hot and abundant as in the days when they attracted the Romans thither, and the Gallo-Roman wall that still surrounds a portion of the u 2

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old town. The springs to which Dax owes its corrupted Latin name are certainly very curious and remarkable. They rise in the centre of the town in a large basin inclosed by railings. Over the water is a perpetual cloud of steam that completely obscures the view when the weather is cold. At other times one can see the holes in the ground from which hot water and air bubbles are eternally rising. So great is the flow of water that the municipality can only employ a very small portion of it for bathing and drinking purposes. People are allowed to bring pitchers and pails and tap it as they please for household use. Its temperature is 158° Fahr. These ther- mal springs cause a moist heat that makes the climate of Dax very enjoy- able to mosquitoes. Like all mineral waters put to commercial purposes these are credited with marvellous medicinal properties. All the ills to which flesh is heir, except death, they are supposed to cure. The ancient wall already mentioned was almost perfect until 1858, when the intelli- gent Dacquois, finding it greatly in the* way of their desire of expansion, proceeded to pull it down. They would have completed the task they set themselves had not the govern- ment interfered in time to save just " enough of the past for the future to grieve." To these people, in whom the blood of their temporary rulers — the Vandals — still courses gaily, belongs the honour of nearly destroying a work of unique interest. What remains of the wall is a marvellous piece of solid masonry. . Although post-Roman the construction is on the Roman model — a simple parapet strengthened with round towers. Planted with trees in boulevard fashion this fragment of the ancient ramparts has become the favourite promenade of the people of Dax. The fourteenth-century castle on the left bank of the Adour is a noticeable object, but it is not an im- posing specimen of a mediaeval strong- hold. From its position it could never have been worth much as a fortress.

It is now used for soldiers' barracks. In the matter of ecclesiastical build- ings the town can show nothing of interest.

I dropped into Dax on the eve of its annual fete. The next day at an early hour the town was fast filling with sightseers and revellers from all the country side. The majority came from the villages and hamlets of the rich valley of the Adour in carts drawn by horses, donkeys, and oxen A spec- tacle had been announced for the afternoon, the most irresistible form of amusement that these southerners know. It was announced as " Courses de taureaux ; landaises et espagnolles." I had heard about the courses lan- daises, but had never seen them, so I paid for a seat in the great wooden amphitheatre, where the feats of prowess and agility were to take place. The building had been con- structed hastily, but with consider- able science. In general design it was almost identical with that of the Roman amphitheatres, such as we see them at Nimes and Aries. The arena was inclosed by planking about five feet high. Around this ran a pas- sage, and then after another parti- tion the seats for the spectators began, and were continued upward in receding tiers to a height sufficient to afford accommodation for several thousand people. Some ten or twelve doors opening into the arena indicated the stables where the beasts that were to provide the amusement were kept. The building was open to the sky, which was of that dusty blue so characteristic of a burning day in southern Europe. The sun struck full upon the assembled multitude, but everybody was too intent upon the programme to care about the heat.

The exciting moment comes. A band of Spanish bull-fighters step into the arena, for politeness decrees that the foreigners shall have the first in- nings. They are all fine specimens of the human animal, tall, square-built, strong, and agile as panthers — perfect

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athletes. They wear the picturesque and showy costume of the toreador. One of the stable doors is now thrown open, and a thick-set, broad-horned Spanish bull rushes into the arena. He stops in the middle and glares round. The Spaniards walk leisurely towards him, and one of them shakes open a red scarf just before his eyes. The man steps on one side with the studied movement of a dancing master, and the bull rushes past with the scarf on his horns. This performance is re- peated by each of the Spaniards in turn, until the bull, finding that all his efforts to gore his adversaries only cover him with ridicule, begins to think it beneath his dignity to take any notice of his tormentors. He needs waking up, and the Spaniards soon give him the necessary fillip. While one engages his attention by fluttering a red scarf before his eyes, another glides up to him with a ban- derilla — a short barbed spear about two feet long — in each hand. These, by a most adroit movement, he plants in the bull's hide just behind the neck. Then the animal stamps and roars with fury, as the banderillas, with their streaming ribbons, hang by their barbs, and dangle one on each side of his neck. He makes a few frantic efforts to shake them out, but finding he cannot do so gives up the attempt, and with all his nerves quickened by pain, turns once more upon the gaudy human insects that dart before his eyes. For a moment he paws the ground, and roars again, while the foam gushes from his mouth. He does not know which of his enemies to single out. A waved scarf decides the poor fool. He goes at it with a mighty rush. In a moment he has the piece of fluttering silk upon his horns, and while he is madly, blindly trying to toss it, two more banderillas are thrust into his neck. The whole scene is repeated, and now he has six bande- rillas dangling to his hide. He no longer hesitates to single out a victim. He fixes his lurid eyes on the nearest Spaniard, and follows him up. The

man, hard pressed, vaults the barrier, and the bull almost at the same in- stant leaps the planking also. The man again vaults the barrier and drops this time into the arena. The bull in im- potent fury runs round the narrow passage until he also returns to the arena by the door that has been opened for him. His stable is now thrown open, for he is supposed to have per- formed his share of the programme. He is, however, in no humour to go home ; he is still anxious to wet his horn in blood. But a bull can gene- rally be led, although he refuses to be driven. A little stratagem is all that is necessary. A black cow is drive u into the arena. The bull turns round sharply, believing the sound to come from an enemy, and is ready for an- other rush. Suddenly his whole de- meanour alters. I would not have believed that the expression of a savage brute could have so quickly changed from ferocity to gentleness had I not seen it. The* blood-glare vanishes from his eyes, and with mild looks the poor bull trots after the cow, forgetting the banderillas that still hang to his hide, and allows himself to be led by the trained deceiver into his stable, to wait there until again called upon.

How the multitude of men and women cheered and shouted and waved their caps and handkerchiefs as the banderillas were planted upright in the quivering hide, and when the bull leapt the barrier ! In a tribune reserved for the notables of the district were several ladies whose rich toilets showed all the cachet of the Hue de la Paix. These ladies must have had southern blood, for their beautiful dark eyes grew round and gleamed with excitement. If they had known that the bull would have driven his horn through the man's body, they could not have raised their fans before their faces — so fascinating is the horrible, so intoxicating is the prospect and the very fear of bloodshed to these meridionals. The assemblage was a thoroughly mixed one, repre-

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senting all classes of society in the province ; but not a cry of pity, not an indignant protest was heard as the barbed darts were thrust into the necks of the bulls. People who could watch such acts of barbarity unmoved except by the excitement of the duel between brute rage and man's com- bined intelligence and agility, would, I fear, have been equally eager to see the end of the spectacle had horses been disembowelled and bulls slaughtered in real Spanish fashion. But the last Spanish bull fight in France took place only a few months before my visit to Dax. There was such an agitation in Paris in consequence of some unusually revolting courses espagnolles at Nimes that the Minister of the Interior was compelled to send a circular to the provincial prefects forbidding the use of horses and the slaughter of bulls in the arena. Further than this he did not go, for high political reasons.

Bull fighting, properly so-called, is not one of the national pastimes of France. It is a Spanish importation. But the courses provenc^ales and the courses landaises are national French sports, and it would be carrying senti- mentality much too far to denounce them on the score of barbarity. No picture of life in the Landes would be complete if the courses landaises were left out of it.

The Spaniards having retired, their place is taken in the arena by the etwrteurs of the Landes. They are much smaller men than those from beyond the Pyrenees, but they are younger and more active. They wear the ordinary costume of acrobats. A cow bounces into the arena with a long cord tied to her horns, and a man at the end of it. Cows are much more frequently employed than bulls for the courses landaises, not because they are less dangerous, but because they afford better sport than bulls by the greater facility with which they can turn round and follow up an enemy. It is the "wicked cows " which are selected for this purpose, and thus their bad

qualities are turned to good account. As a rule they have never calved. They are lean, sinewy brutes, remark- ably active, and always eager for a fray. One after another the ecarteurs attract the attention of the cow, and induce her to rush at them. When her horns are so close to a man's body that his escape seems impossible to the spectator unaccustomed to such sights, he springs on one side with amazing agility and perfect composure. The beast continues her furious course until she feels the tug of the rope; then she wheels round and rushes at the same or another man. Each ecarteur strives to make a reputation by running the greatest possible risk without actually coming to harm. There are hairbreadth escapes. One man slips and falls, and is only saved from being gored or trampled upon by a jerk of the rope, so vigorous as almost to upset the cow. Another is momentarily between the horns, but frees himself and is unhurt. Some of the ecarteurs are also sauteurs. One of these, the son of a pork butcher, has become famous throughout the Landes ; when therefore he takes his stand the buzz of voices is unusually loud. As the cow lowers her head to strike he leaps into the air and drops on the other side of her.

The Landais and the Spaniards having succeeded one another several times in the arena, the programme was brought to a close with showers of cigars.

The next day I started for Peyre- horade, which lies near the boundary line between the Landes and the Basses Pyrenees. The distance by the road is about twelve miles, but I greatly exceeded this by taking a short cut. I was anxious to move in a straight line, but I forgot I had a river to deal with, and that bridges are not always conveniently placed for those who quit the beaten track. So I managed to lose myself completely along the banks of the winding Adour. When I be- lieved that I was walking south the compass told me that I was going

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north - west. There was, however, nothing for it but to follow the river until I came to a bridge or ferry. The scenery was charming, but alto- gether different from that to which I had lately grown accustomed. The sand had quite disappeared, and been succeeded by an alluvial or argilla- ceous soil. I had also left the pines behind me, and had entered a district broken up into fields and oak woods. For so rich a part of the Chalosse I was surprised to find it so thinly popu- lated. For some miles the only in- habitants I met were three bare-legged women and a troop of turkeys. After many windings the river reached away in a southernly course, and by dint of perseveringly following it I came at length to a bridge. This led to a road which I found would take me to Peyrehorade, but it was even more tortuous than the river. It seemed to twist in every direction but the right one. I left the valley] and began to climb the outer spurs of the Pyrenees. The maize gradually disappeared, but vineyards became frequent. The vines were about ten feet high, bushy and spreading at the top, and trailed over sticks. Although it was the beginning of September the grapes were far from being ripe. I was in quite another climate from that of the sandy Landes. Forgetting the vines, I could imagine myself among the Devonshire hills. The air was cool and moist, streams trickled by the wayside, the road was soft with wet clay, and clouds charged with rain chased one another across the blue sky. As I ascended, the landscape became wild and mournful. Pasturage and vineyards gave place more and more to forests of stunted oak or moorland covered with tall bracken and broom. There was not a chateau or good-sized house to be seen ; indeed, there was no sign of the influence either past or present of a territorial aristocracy. Such land as was cultivated was in the hands of peasant proprietors, and their houses were few and far apart and frequently mere hovels. I took refuge in one of

these cabins from a smart storm. It was a little auberge, far more wretched than any English hedge-tavern that I have seen. It was kept by two old women, one of whom, judging from her appearance, must have been born some time in the last century. She was seated, or rather doubled up, in a cavernous arm-chair as antique in style as herself. She could scarcely under- stand a word I said, but the other old woman, who I took to be her daughter, poured me out the white wine I asked for, and which she said was grown in the little vineyard at the back of the cottage. I was sure I could detect an uneasy and distrustful expression on the faces of these women. The per- sons whom they ordinarily served with wine were well known to them, or they bore the stamp of an occupation which inspired confidence. But I was a puzzle to them. I read this in their faces. I might have been a robber and an assassin, and they had heard of lonely women like themselves being murdered by mysterious strangers. I relieved their suspense by quickly pay- ing and going.

I noticed that over the door of every house I passed was a bunch of driedi grass or herbs, and being curious to know the meaning of this custom, 1 questioned the first man I met on the subject. He told me that the dried herbs were in honour of St. John, and that on St. John's Eve and the follow- ing night bonfires were lighted on all the hill-tops in the district. The cus- tom of lighting bonfires, or rolling wheels of fire down hills on St. John'&- Eve has astonished travellers in the- Ardennes and in Normandy. It is. unquestionably of Scandinavian origin, and was connected with the worship of the sun. Its survival to this day among the hills of the Pyrenean region is strong presumptive evidence of northern blood in the population. At any rate, it is a trace of the Gothic tribes who are supposed to have been lost in Spain.

The dreariness of my walk to Peyrehorade was much enlivened by

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the marked hostility of the dogs. They were all of the same breed — spotted dogs like English foxhounds, but smaller. I have read that travellers in the Pyrenean districts should carry revolvers to defend themselves against dogs. Of course it is always well for the foot-traveller to be armed with a revolver, for, although under ordinary circumstances it is not a useful com- panion, but rather an incumbrance, one never knows what may occur in the way of unpleasantness to render its services invaluable. But it is more difficult to know how to deal with an aggressive dog than with an aggressive man, or with animals reputed wild. A dog may bark at you and cause you much annoyance and yet have no bad intentions, while another may silently creep up behind you and seize you by the leg. The silent dog is the worst, but to fire at him with a revolver be- cause he is silent would be an act that his master would be sure to resent.

At length I saw the ruined feudal castle of Orthe perched on a height, and immediately below it, in a bright valley watered by the Gave, the white houses of Peyrehorade. This town, which can only boast 2,500 inhabit- ants, has a tasteful modern Gothic church, and a curious wooden bridge thrown across the Gave on piles. My kindly star led me as usual to a good inn, where I dined in the company of commercial travellers, one of whom

wore such an air of dignity that I mis- took him for a juge de paix. I gathered from his conversation that I was in error, and that he was " in the drapery." After dinner I became one of the spectators of a Punch and Judy show. It was set up in the corner of the market-place,which, but for the candles fixed to the portable theatre, would have been in absolute darkness. I was in the midst of all the gaminerie of Peyrehorade. It is always a pleasure to witness that tragi-comedy of Punch and his prosperous rascality, which re- calls that rapturous sensation of child- hood, when, following the pan-pipes and drum, we first knew what it was to be stage-struck. It is especially pleasant to meet in some obscure corner of a foreign land our old friend Punch, who made our bare legs run so many miles in the far-off days. He will speak a different language from the one he spoke long ago, but his squeak is the familiar squeak of yore, and his looks and dress and cheerful depravity are everywhere the same. They make us feel that time and distance and language have no power upon the festive follies which knit the world together.

The next morning I crossed the beautiful valley of the Gave by a road whose sides were brilliant with great cornflowers and marshmallows, and left the Landes for the Basses Pyrenees.

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RHODIAN SOCIETY.

IF an invalid, that is to say an inva- lid whose malady merely necessitates his removal to an excellent climate, wishes to strike out a new line for himself, and to get rid of the conven- tionalities of popular health resorts, he could do no better than plunge into society in the Turkish Island of Rhodes. He will probably find that he is the only Englishman there; he will be as safe as anywhere in Europe ; he will enjoy a climate where winter is unknown and summer heats are tempered by sea breezes ; he will be made much of at the snug little inn ; and he will be received with open arms by as conglomerate a society as the world can well produce.

In the bazaar of a morning he will be able to chat with exiled Turkish pashas, who are paying the penalty of their misfortunes in the Russian war ; he will meet Italians and Greeks, Spanish Jews, Levantine English, and Asiatics — nay, even Egyptian exiles will be on his visiting list, which will afford him a wonderful and diversified study of humanity. When tired of the town he can wander through mountain villages and study the sim- plicity of the Greek peasantry, whose homes have been undisturbed by the successive occupation of Italians, Knights of St. John, and Turks.

Rhodes is an open roadstead now, for the Turks have allowed the excel- lent harbour to become choked up with rubbish, so there is often some difficulty attending the landing there ; not unfrequently during stormy weather the steamers on their way north and south have to pass without touching. This is an obvious incon- venience, especially in winter when storms are of frequent occurrence. A Smyrniote lady a few months ago had

to pass her destination three times, and spend three weeks on the sea between Smyrna and Alexandria before she could be put ashore at the haven where she would be.

The portly hotel keeper, Nicholas, is sure to appropriate the stranger on the steamer, and carry him to his hostelry in the Greek quarter, built on a sandy promontory about half a mile from the old walled town. It is as quaint an inn as one could possibly desire, with snug little rooms giving on to a balcony which overhangs a courtyard paved with pebbles. As he enters the dark archway he will be confronted with the larder, for here junks of meat are hung from the rafters by pulleys so that they can be let down when a slice is required. Granny, Nicholas's mother, is the moving spirit of the inn. She toils from morning to night with her legs bare, and her head enveloped in a dirty black handkerchief. She cuts the wood ; she tills the vegetable garden ; she answers every clap of the hands, for there are no bells. She is the recognised slave of the establish- ment. It is always the same amongst these Greeks ; old age is treated with no respect. It is to them a recognised law of nature that when the body is decaying it must give way to the rising generation. It is a common sight to see a gaily-dressed young married woman riding a mule, accom- panied by her tottering old mother on foot as muleteer. This evil is in a measure atoned for by the devotion which exists between brother and sister. No brother thinks of marry- ing until he sees each sister provided with a husband, and many romantic stories occur in this respect ; perhaps it is the same with all primitive socie-

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ties, that the useless aged are deemed of no account.

Everything is pebbled in Nicholas's hotel — the courtyard, the dining-room, the balcony, are all laid out in patterns of black and white. These pebbles are quite a trade in Rhodes ; veiled Turkish women wander along the shore in search of them, and deposit their treasures in little heaps along the beach. In the good time of the Khedive Ismail in Egypt, very large quantities were exported to Cairo, and large fortunes were realised thereby. Even now the trade is a good one, and every Rhodian house is adorned with them. If you go out into society, you will find before long, to your cost, that you have to dance on a pebbled floor.

The Turkish element in Rhodes is larger than in most towns of the Turkish Empire ; the whole of the old walled town which the Knights of St. John built and fortified is inhabited by Turks and Spanish Jews. No Christians are allowed within the gates after they are shut at sunset. No beasts of burden are allowed in- side the town at any time, for there is a current tradition amongst the Turks that the Christians will follow in their wake as conquerors. Yery few Turks live outside in the villages, and when they do they can hardly be distin- guished from the Greeks, whose dress, customs, and in many cases religion, they have adopted. It is a curious feature in these degenerate descend- ants of Mohammed, that they are not content to trust to their own prophet alone for succour. If they hear of a miracle-working Madonna, they are not above sending her a present, and worshipping at her shrine.

The Turk of Rhodes, curiously enough, is a more energetic individual than the Greek. Many of them are fishermen, and possess light sailing vessels for this purpose. Others are blacksmiths, tanners, painters and joiners. The bazaars are chiefly con- ducted by their industry, and they may be seen plying their various

trades all day long in tiny boxes along the streets. The Greek is an idle vagabond for the most part, whose great ambition is to become proprietor of a sweet shop, to which is added, as time goes on, a bar for spirits and sometimes a cafe. They pass their days in complete inactivity in the midst of tobacco fumes, listening to the shrill sound of a lyre, and singing bacchic songs. In these establishments the oft-recurring feast days are ob- served with rigorous fidelity, and from morning till night drunken revelry is conducted therein. As for the Greek women, they never seem to have any thing to do ; they sit on their door- steps and gossip from morning to night. They are a degraded lot ; and the ease with which a husband can get a divorce on the merest caprice cannot tend to elevate them.

It is not difficult to make your way into the society of Rhodes. If you stroll down the bazaars of a morning, enter the druggists' shops and talk to the first person you meet, you will immediately be welcomed as an addi- tion to the circle. You are sure to come across the stout florid ex-minister of war, Rigdoff Pasha, who was sent off here after the Russian affair, and has not yet succeeded in obtaining leave to return to Constantinople ; he will be taking a cup of coffee in the principal druggist's shop, and will be complaining in bitter terms of the narrow limits of his present society as compared to what he was accustomed to in " the city."

Mohammed Pasha has been more for- tunate ; he was recalled from this exile a short time ago to the sphere of his former labours. When in Rhodes he bought for 2501. a most charming residence, with lovely grounds, and views over the mountains of Caria, and sheltered from every wind by Mount Smith, which rises just behind the town, and still retains the name and memories of Sidney Smith, who lived there for a short time.

But the aged Suleiman Pasha is per- haps the most fortunate of all these

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Turkish exiles. After being known as the Victorious, the Invincible, he belied his epithets at the Shipka Pass, and was banished for life; to Rhodes. This life came to a close at the advanced age of ninety-six, when we were in Rhodes, and we attended his simple but impressive funeral.

Khamel Bey is governor of Rhodes. He is an invalid, and does not often appear in the bazaars or at the bath, and he now lives in Mohammed Pasha's charming house. He is a man of ex- traordinary literary attainments for a Turk, and is considered the best poet they have ; but his writings are too liberal and European to suit the Sultan, who pays him 501. a year to keep his pen quiet — quite a novel and oriental way of making the profession of literature pay. He has one son, Khem Bey, a youth of twenty, who affects most oppressively dilettante manners. We asked him why we had not seen him at any of the social gatherings, and if he liked dancing. " No," he replied, " I always remember what Napoleon the Great said of dancing— that it was too trivial for a soldier. But," continued he, "for some years I gave way to a life of pleasure, the chase, riding, &c., but now my papa has impressed me with the necessity of work, and my only diversion is a little walk." He is not a pleasant youth to look upon, being fat and pasty, and as he talks to you he cracks his knuckle joints in a most irritating fashion.

Many of the Turks are the pro- prietors of gardens and houses on the slopes behind the town, just outside that dismal belt of Turkish tombs which entirely hems in the town on the land side. These gardens they cultivate with truly oriental laziness. We were surprised occasionally to see their wives assisting in the garden, hewing wood, drawing water, and making themselves generally useful. Turkish women are not so strict about veiling themselves as they used to be ; some indeed affect very thin gauze veils, whilst others do not mind show-

ing their faces to a Frank, and only cover themselves when they see a red fez coming along. Owing to the poverty which reigns in Turkey, harem life is not what it used to be ; most men can only afford one wife, and she must be useful as well as ornamental. All the lovely em- broideries which travellers see in the show harems of Constantinople or Smyrna have long since disappeared from ordinary homes, and have found their way to European markets.

As a rule the Greeks and Turks of the upper class do not amalgamate so well as those of the lower. The better- class Greek is aware of the state of politics in Europe, and looks ardently for the day when he will cease to be a Turkish subject ; such matters do not trouble the peasant population, who live like beasts iu the darkest igno- rance. But the upper-class Greek is essentially an astute time-server. He knows well how to make himself indispensable at the Konak, and treats the governor with flattery and respect, reserving his remarks on freedom for the bosom of his own family or the ears of an Englishman. He is the personification of the traditional old Greek woman, who always in church lit one candle before the picture of St. George and another before a pic- ture of the devil, and, in reply to inquiries, stated it as her principle always to be well in with both parties.

Sometimes at a Greek party you may meet a few Turks, but they sit together in the smoking-room, growl- ing away at their narghiles. They never join in the dance, and if one may judge from their faces, one would say that they are internally laughing at what they see; and well they may, for a Turkish gentleman is always a man of refined manners and gcod breeding, and that cannot be said of the Greeks of Rhodes. A ball in a Greek house is a thing for ever t o be remembered. The dresses of the la dies would provoke a smile from even the most indifferent beholder. Rou ncl

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dances are not much appreciated ; but what they really love is a species of romping quadrille with most compli- cated figures, through which a master of the ceremonies puts you in vile French. On one occasion this ofiicial insisted on directing us to dance a variety of the Lady's Chain, which he called Chame de Chevaliers, and which my partner naively remarked was ex- cusable in a place which is everywhere haunted by reminiscences of the Knights of Rhodes.

When the romp was over we con- ducted our partners to the smoking- room, where the chaperones were sitting, smoking cigarettes, and where the air was dense with the fumes of tobacco. I noticed that the younger ladies did not venture on the entire control of a cigarette themselves, but pressed their partners to do so, with a view to enjoying an occasional pull. Supper was provided on the most primitive principles. A large dish of tinned lobster salad was put on a table, round which every one crowded ; those who were not lucky enough to secure a knife did not hesitate to plunge their fingers into the tempting dish. Glasses of wine circulated freely, and after the repast was over the ball degenerated into a scene worthy of a Parisian music-hall. No wonder the Turks smiled a little as they watched this scene, and retired as soon as politeness would permit.

Another easy method of studying this conglomerate society is afforded by the bath. Every Ehodian, of whatever nationality, indulges in the Turkish bath on some day or another in the week, from the lowest menial to the exiled pashas, and every one pays according to his rank. The common soldiers — of whom there are many in Rhodes — only pay a penny a piece ; they go to the bath in companies, and they shampoo and rub each other. Anybody who has travelled in the Turkish dominions will have been struck with the wretchedness of the soldiers' uniform, but this is nothing to their underclothing, any portion of

which a London beggar would reject with scorn. When a pasha is coming to take a bath they clear the place of all such objectionable people, and the pasha is then supposed to leave a pound after he has bathed. This must be a great tax on their limited incomes, and if Khamel Bey were to be regular in his ablutions he would more than exhaust all the income that he derives from not writing, in this way. This Turkish method of making the rich pay for washing the poor cer- tainly has decided merits, worthy of the consideration of reformers, who might enlarge upon it. For instance, if every time we bought a new pair of trousers we had to supply a pauper with a pair of corduroys, our poor-rate might be so elegantly disguised in tailors' and other bills that we should cease to grumble.

The Spanish Jews are not a pleasing element in Rhodian society. With the usual astuteness of their race they have managed to secure for them- selves the best quarter of the walled town, and they are as far as possible removed from the Greeks, for there is always enmity between Greek and Jew. In Greece, properly so called, a Jew is rarely seen ; and a Greek, if he mentions a Jew in conversation, always apologises for alluding to so despicable a personage. These Jews, however, have interesting costumes, and a most astonishing patois, being quite the most polyglot I ever strug- gled with ; and the Jewish children in Rhodes are far more inquisitive than those of the other nationalities. If you venture into the Jewish quarter you are sure to be mobbed by them ; and this you must do, for these Israelites have secured for themselves the best houses in the old town, containing wood carving and decora- tions dating from, the days of the Knights.

The Jewish " Sunday " is the recog- nised beggars' day in Rhodes. Beggars from the country villages invade the town on Saturday afternoon, and they do not disguise their expectations, for

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they all carry on their shoulders many- coloured mule bags in which to deposit the alms which they collect from door to door; and to judge by what one sees, the Rhodians appear to be very generous ; a beggar is never refused. On Saturday morning the house- wife collects in the corner of the yard scraps of food which she doles out to each beggar as he comes ; and most of the peasants when they come into the town with their market produce de- posit a gift of fruit or vegetables by what is commonly known as the lepers' well.

As spring comes on — and spring

comes on early in Rhodes — the invalid

will doubtless feel anxious to see what

the Rhodian peasants are like in their

mountain villages. The lovely slopes

around the town, the old walls and

fortifications around the harbour, the

gay scenes in the bazaar will pall in

time ; he may try his strength by

hiring one of the tiny Rhodian

donkeys, no bigger than a large

Newfoundland dog, which will take

him to Mount Philermo, from which

he will enjoy one of nature's most

lovely views, and whet his appetite for

a more extended tour. If he would

see the peasant in his full simplicity,

he must go some days' journey inland

to the village of Embona, on the slopes

of Mount Atabyros, the ancient hill of

Jupiter, where two temples stood in

olden times, and where was the bronze

ox which bellowed whenever any evil

was in store for Rhodes — a story of

antiquity which has lately been in a

measure substantiated by the discovery

of numerous little bronze votive figures

of bulls, near the site of the supposed

temple. Doubtless the bellowing bull

was something like ,the oracle of

Delphi, over the utterings of which

the priests had entire control.

The country folk of Rhodes cannot be said to be either rich or poor. Every one has a house which he has probably built for himself, and a plot of land, containing olives, figs, and vegetables. The ordinary peasant's house consists of one square room ; the roof is made

by placing rough branches of cypress trees on the walls, on which are spread reeds and oleander branches, with the leaves left on. Upon this foundation is deposited a certain kind of earth, which they press with rollers and with the foot until it attains the firm consistency of cement, and is usually impervious to rain. The interior of this house is humble enough : the floor is of pressed manure, and the furniture of the simplest. A sort of platform, supported by four stakes fixed in the ground, and surrounded by planks, answers two purposes; within is the family store-room, above is the family bed — not that the family trouble the bed much, except on the three import- ant occasions of birth, marriage, and death. They chiefly lie down to sleep wherever night --overtakes them — in winter on their home-spun cloaks, and in summer on the grass. Against the bed is placed a great chest, which also serves for two purposes, firstly, as a step by which to climb on to the platform, and secondly, as a wardrobe for the family clothes, the gay costumes which are only brought out on feast days and marriages. Along the wall runs a long sort of settee, the top of which is covered with many-coloured cushions, and inside which is the granary, and the receptacle for all sorts of horrible luxuries, in which the frugal Rhodians indulge when their lengthy fasts do not compel them to abstain — rancid lard, which they dignify with the name of " pig's butter," to distinguish it from "milk butter ; " red caviare and old twisted rolls of bread, which have developed more or less of green mould, according to the lapse of time that has inter- vened since they were made for the last festival.

Then there is a hole in the wall in which the water-jar is leaning, for these primitive mountaineers still adhere to the same shape of jars, made on the principle of soda-water bottles with no foot, in which their forefathers rejoiced. The inconvenience of these is great, and why the Greeks should have been

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so conservative in this respect for so many centuries is unaccountable. The walls are surrounded by plates and jugs for household use. Once upon a time these utensils consisted of Lindos ware, but now these have all found their way to the museums and draw- ing-rooms of Europe. The greatest feature of a peasant's house is the decoration of the wall opposite the door as you enter. In the middle of this wall is a large painting in nume- rous compartments, the work of some local artist, the subject of which it is often very difficult to discover ; they are always devotional, illustrating some quaint legend in a highly gro- tesque fashion.

For example, on one wall we saw the legend of St, Gregory Thauma- tourgos (the miracle worker) repre- sented in the following fashion : The saint in one portion of the picture was followed by two individuals dressed in Phrygian caps ; they entered a forest, which was represented by three trees, like those of a child's farmyard, reaching up to the waists of the men. Another portion of the picture represented them as cutting off a branch, which act is for the benefit of the uninitiated described in writing. Again the branch is next represented as having grown too big for the men to carry, so they dig a hole, plant it, and watch it growing to an enormous size. Next we saw St. Gregory and his friends filling gourds at a stream so as to water their new plant, and on their return they found to their surprise that a church had sprung up where the branch had been planted, and the holy men were so amazed at this phenomenon that they did not perceive the devil sneaking up behind and drinking the water in the gourds so that they might not be able to water the newly-planted church ; but in this extremity the final portion of the picture depicted St. Gregory's horse as appearing on the scene, and before the devil had time to empty the gourds he was kicked back into hell.

This picture is always painted in startling colours, and rejoices in surprising contrasts, and it is the special property of the master of the house ; all the rest, the house, the furniture, and the plate, are the wife's property, and will go to her eldest daughter. No Rhodian peasant girl is eligible for the marriage market until her parents or next of kin have pro- vided her with a house and furniture. Under the great picture are hung the wedding crown, a profusion of plates, bottles, images of saints, scraps of illustrated European papers — any- thing, in short, that is deemed to possess decorative merit. An oil lamp, suspended from the roof, hangs before this picture, and is lighted every night in honour of the saint re- presented thereon. Chairs and tables are deemed superfluous in these houses ; they sit on the ground, and eat out of a big bowl placed in their midst.

If the hardships of a few days in this mountain village are not too much for our invalid he will revel in the simplicity of these people. He will be treated with that primeval hospitality which teaches that to place before the guest the best of every- thing is a duty imposed by the gods. Before he has partaken of food he will not be asked whence he has come or whither he is going. From all the cottages round the peasants will bring gifts to assist the host in entertaining ; one will bring a fat sucking pig, another wine, another fruit, eggs, and milk ; the best embroi- deries will be spread over his bed, and in that hyperbole, which finds such favour amongst Greeks, he will be pressed to stay a thousand years under the hospitable roof. If this lengthy invitation be commuted for by pro- mising to stay a few days the guest will see much to amuse him. He will assuredly be asked to stand as god- father to any unbaptised infant that the place may produce — a doubtful compliment indeed when it is con- sidered that the godfather has to pro- vide quite a trousseau for the child :

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but in this delicate way he will be able to repay the hospitality with which he has been received, for a direct offer of money would be con- sidered rather an insult than other- wise.

Then again the guest is sure to develop a hitherto unknown talent — he will find that he has quite an extensive knowledge of medicine as compared to these poor peasants. In a remote corner of the world where doctors do not exist, and where the people are too poor to send for one from the town, it is extraordinary to find how the inhabitants live and die without the most rudimentary know- ledge of physic. Charms and incan- tations abound, to be sure ; traditional remedies for both external and in- ternal use, in which garlic and onions are the chief ingredients, are nume- rous ; and there will always be found an old crone who visits the invalids with a sickle in her hand, and executes certain passes around them as she mutters her incantations in an awe- inspiring voice ; but of the use of the simple remedies with which the country abounds the aromatic herbs, camo- mile, rue, &c. — this old crone is pro foundly ignorant. And the stranger who comes amongst them with quinine, pills, vaseline, and the ordinary stock of a traveller's medicine chest, will be embarrassed not only by the multi- plicity of his patients, but also by the nature of his fees — hard boiled, coloured Easter eggs, stale bread, snails, and kindred luxuries will be showered upon him by his grateful patients.

The village priest will soon be dis- covered to be the ringleader of all superstitious practices he, of course, is only a peasant himself, and he has no income except what he gets from

reading liturgies, consequently it is only natural that he should seek to multiply the occasions for these liturgies by every means in his power, even though his bishop has given strict orders to the contrary.

Many of these liturgies are per- formed under cover of night, and at the dark of the moon. A mother may be seen secretly carrying a sickly child to church, that the priest may read an exorcism over it to drive away the demon which she thinks possesses it ; for this he receives twice as much as for a liturgy during the day. The priest again will be summoned by a farmer whose shed is infested by rats an'd mice, to exorcise the same. Under an ancient olive (with gnarled stem and creeping branches he will read the \ liturgy to St. Tryphon ; the farmer will say the following words —

" Rats and mice, and vermin vile, Hurry away full many a mile ; That I may gather in my seed Free from such a hurtful breed."

The priest has a cure for fever, too ; he writes on a scrap of paper " Mother of God, divine miracle ; " this he ties round the sufferer's neck with a red thread, and goes away with a fee in his pocket, or with a basket of bread and figs on his arm. No wonder the priests support superstitions which pay so well, and that they and the old crone are great allies, and throw work into one another's hands. Perhaps they will look suspiciously at the traveller's quinine and pills as commodities likely to interfere with their practice ; but I don't think they need be afraid as long as the Turks rule in Rhodes, and education is at a discount.

J. THEODORE BENT.

304

POPULAR SONGS OF THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDERS.

THE Highlands of Scotland is a coun- try of which the great army of tourists and travellers know as little as one might know of a celebrated character when he had merely counted the buttons on bis coat. Of the Bens and the glens and the waterfalls they take a flying note, of the regions immortalised by the picturesque genius of Scott they may even make a minute register, but of the people who inhabit, or who once inhabited, those charmed regions, after they have discovered that they neither show bare legs nor walk unshod, they know no- thing. Into their social condition and moral estate they would no more think of inquiring than they would into the economy of a few sparrows on the road- side, or a troop of starlings whirring out of an old ruined keep. Nor are they to be blamed ; they are only flying birds themselves, and have neither leisure nor opportunity to make profitable advances into the soul of a people living behind the bristling barricade of a language which no man knows any- thing about, and which is supposed to have as little in common with the sounds familiar to every civilised ear as the cry of the peewit on the moor, or the plash of the cormorant on the reef. Nevertheless, the people have a soul, a very distinct and emphatic soul, and a language also, which, how- ever stunted for lack of culture, is, like the Scotch dialect, as an organ of popular song in some important respects, decidedly superior to the imperial English. This is a truth which is now gradually coming to light ; and comparative philology is prepared to go hand in hand with an enlarged public sympathy in welcom- ing the popular poetry of the Cale- donian Celts into the great sisterhood of the British Muses.1 Towards this

1 A promising overture to what maybe done in this field we gladly welcome in Songs of the

appreciation we propose here making a small contribution, in the way of translation from some of the best known collections of the Celtic lyre recently published.

In the palmy days of the High- lands, when there existed that essen- tial element of every well-constituted society, a native resident middle class, to^stimulate and draw out the talent of the whole people, every considerable district had not only its own school of pipers, who belonged to the chief, as naturally as a choir does to a cathe- dral ; but its own bard, whose busi- ness it was to celebrate the exploits of the great man of the clan, to cherish the legendary traditions of the glen, and to elevate to the platform of rhythmical beauty whatever events of the day might rise noticeably above the level of common life ; and this bard of the district, though reft of social pomp and circumstance, is to be found even at the present day in his old haunts, the representative of the lyrical genius so characteristic of the British Celt. One of these the present writer had the good fortune to encounter in the neigh- bourhood of Connell Ferry, shooting right across the bay northward from Dunstaff nage Castle, at a place called Ledaig. The name of this man, as was natural to expect in such a place, was Campbell. He had chosen for himself a most picturesque habitation, hollowed out of the live rock on the broad and beautiful bay of Loch Nell, looking westward towards the lofty mountains of Mull, and there, with the usual open hospitality so characteristic of Highlanders he received us, and to the creature comforts of the national beverage added the intellectual de- light of popular song of his own

North, by Annie Macleod, Harold Boulton, and Malcolm Lawson, with illustrations. An elegant volume dedicated to her Majesty the Queen. London, Field and Tuer, E.G., 1885.

Popular Songs of the Scottish Highlanders.

305

composition. The song which he sang was on that favourite theme of all Highlanders, the beauties and the glory of their country, and we are pleased to find it receiving a prominent place in a neat little volume of the author's effusions, recently published.1 Mr. Campbell is not, like Mrs. Makel- lar,2 an accomplished bilingual rhymer, utriusqiw linguae docta, as Quintilian phrases it ; but he has had the wis- dom and the good luck to append to this song an English translation from the pen of a Lowland friend, which reads smoothly enough, and, though a little free in some passages, represents fairly the spirit and the hue of the original.

THE GAEL TO HIS COUNTRY AND HIS COUNTRYMEN.

A SONG.

" My heart's in the Highlands, I love every

glen, Every corrie arid crag in the land of the

Ben, Each brave kilted laddie, stout-hearted and

true, With rich curly locks 'neath his bonnet of

blue.

" A brave Highland boy, when light-footed

he goes, With plaid, and with kilt, dirk, sporan, and

hose ; Oh, who will compare with my Highlander

then, When he comes fresh and fair like a breeze

from the Ben !

" When foemen were banded to spoil and

annoy, Who then fronted death like my brave

Highland boy ? For his cause and his country, in battle's

rude shock, When kingdoms were reeling he stood like

a rock.

" And the dear Highland lasses, bad luck to

the day, When I look in their faces and wish them

away ;

I'll cross the wide seas to the far coral isles, With Mary to lighten the road with her smiles.

" And the songs of the Gael on their pinions

of fire,

How oft have they lifted my heart from the mire ;

1 Poems by John Campbell. Edinburgh, McLachlan and Stewart, 1884.

2 Gaelic and English Poems. By Mrs. Mary Makellar. Edinburgh, 1880.

]STo. 310.— VOL. TIT.

On the lap of my mother I lisped them to

God ; Let them float round my grave, when I

sleep 'neath the sod.

" And dear to my heart are the chivalrous ways,

And the kindly regards of the old High- land days,

When the worth of the chief, and the strength of the clan,

Brought glory and gain to the brave High- landman.

" But now with mere sheep they have 'peo- pled the brae,

And flung the brave clansmen like rubbish away ;

But should foes we have vanquished the struggle renew,

They'll sigh for the boys with the bonnets of blue !

" At Alma's red steep, and at red Waterloo, The Gael still was first where hot work was

to do! And when Ganga and Jumna revolted, who

then Were more loyal and true than the sons of

the Ben?

" Where the East and the West by broad

billows are bounded, The Gael shall be known and his fame shall

be sounded ; While thrones shall have honour, and right

shall prevail, Long ages shall echo the praise of the

Gael.

" And when need comes again for the law of

the sword, Though few now the clansmen that follow

their lord, The brave kilted boys for defence will be

nigh, And shoulder to shoulder will conquer or

die ! "

The man who cannot sing such a lay as this with hearty sympathy some rainy day beneath the Bens, is not worthy to start a grouse from the heather, or to lie in wait for the antlered lord of the braes behind a block of grey granite. Those who wish to sing it will find the music in Logan's well-known collection.3

From Mrs. Makellar, who is a ban- bhard of elevated genius, and, as we have already said, of admirable bilingual dex- terity, we make no extracts, because,

3 Popular Gaelic Songs with English Trans- lations, Symphonies and Accompaniments. Logan & Co., Inverness.

306

Popular Songs of the Scottish Highlanders.

though a genuine Highlander in all her sentiments, and with a strong flavour of the heather in all her utterances, she stands on a platfo rm considerably higher than the volkslied, or floating popular song, which is our present theme.

On the value of the purely popular song, even in its most rude form, the great Weimarian poet -thinker has delivered himself thus : — " The special value of national songs and ballads lies in this, that their inspiration always comes direct from Natxire ; in this, no doubt, the poet of culture, when he knows how, may often vie with them : but there is always one respect in which the popular bard maintains his superiority. The un- sophisticated man is more the master of direct effective expression in few words than he who has received a regular literary training."1 There could be no better example of this effective curtness in the most rude form of popular song, of course ac- companied with its natural music, than the following cry of alarm, played by a piper who came from a distance early in the morning of the infamous massacre of Glencoe, to rouse the sleeping inhabitants of the glen, and warn them of the approach- ing danger : —

" 0 women of this glen, 0 women of this glen, 0 women of this glen,

"Pis time that you were rising.

"Then I rose with the day dawn, Then I rose with the day dawn, Then I rose with the day dawn,

More need was yours than-mine then.

" They have slain the herd hoy, They have slain the herd boy, They have slain the herd boy, The boy that watch'd tlie cattle.

1 Wisdom of Goethe, p. 136.

2 Gaelic Songs with English and Gaelic Words and Pianoforte Accompaniments. By Margaret Campbell-Pattison. Swan & Co., London. Miss Pattison has given words to this air composed by her brother, the author of a well-known volume of Selections from the Gaelic Bards (Glasgow, 1866), no doubt wisely for saloon use ; but for our purpose we have preserved as literally as possible the unsophisticated original.

" The cattle they ha'e lifted, The cattle they ha'e lifted, The cattle they ha'e lifted, And cut down all the keepers.

" It's black John, bitter black, Black John, bitter black, Black John, bitter black That drove away the cattle.

" 0 women of this glen, 0 women of this glen ; 0 women of this glen, 'Tis high time{"you[were rising."

On this blood -red blot on the 'scutcheon of our glorious revolution, there is a more detailed and more finished lyrical wail in the Killin collection, with which Mr. Charles Stewart, a well-known Celtic archae- ologist, has recently enriched our musical literature : — 3

" Merry came we in the gloaming

Lilting the light-hearted lay : Little recked we what was coming

Us to part ere break of day : Some in beds sore wounded lying,

Some in snow-wreaths frozen stiff, Through the woods the remnant flying,

In the madness of their grief."

And so on ; to which treatment, of course, we have nothing to object ; but this is certainly one of the cases in which, according to the doctrine of "Wordsworth, the plainest prose is the best poetry ; a case in which decora- tion may diminish but certainly never can heighten the effect of the pathetic iteration of the simple volkslied — al- ways, of course, with its native music, which belongs as necessarily to the volkslied as the wings to a bird.

In war-songs, though a warlike race, the Highlanders do not seem to be so rich as the Germans ; but in that best department of military song which clusters round the feats of a romantic adventurer, they beat not only the Germans, but all military poetry whatever. We need scarcely say that we refer here to the Jacobite songs, some of the most popular of which no doubt were composed by Lowlanders in the Scottish language ; but Lowland ers, it must never be for- gotten, singing under a stirring Celtic

3 The Killin Collection of Gaelic Songs. By Charles Stewart, Tigh-'nduin, Killin. Edin- burgh, 1884.

Popular Songs of the Scottish Highlanders.

inspiration, and not a few of them with a strong infusion of Highland blood in their veins. The Jacobite songs in fact, whether in Scotch or Gaelic, must be regarded historically, as the very blossom and crown of the poetry of the Scottish Highlanders ; and they will continue to inspire all the generations of British subjects, as long as the British monarchy lasts, with that feeling of loyalty and devo- tion to the majesty of the throne which is our great safeguard against the violence of rival factions and the horrors of a possible revolution. One of the most popular of the Jacobite war- songs, and which has achieved a wide currency in the Lowlands by a comical adaptation,1 is known in the Highlands by the familiar words of the chorus, Gabhaidh sinn an rathad mor — " We will take the good old way" — of which a spirited translation was made by the Reverend Dr. Alexander Stewart, of Nether Lochaber, a gentle- man well known for his lively and graphic contributions to an influential northern journal. The song appears in Logan's collection, and is as follows : —

WE WILL TAKE THE GOOD OLD WAY.

i.

" Let Maclntyres say what they may, Let Maclntyres say what they may, We'll take and keep the good old way, Let them say their will 0 !

" We will take the good old way, We will take the good old way, We'll take and keep the good old way, Let them say their will 0 !

Up the steep and heathery ben, Down the bonny winding glen, We march, a band of loyal men, Let them say their will 0 !

We will take, &c.

in.

We will march adoun Glencoe, We will march adoun Glencoe, By the Ferry we will go, Let them say their will 0 !

We will take, &c.

1 In the well-known Ka/oosleum.

IV.

" To Glengarry and Lochiel, Loyal hearts with arms of steel, These will back you in the field, Let them say their will 0 !

We will take, &c.

" Cluny will come down the brae, Keppoch bold will lead the way, Toss thine antlers, Cabar Feigh, Let them say their will 0 !

We will take, &c.

VI.

" Forward, sons of bold Rob Roy, Stewarts — conflict is your joy, We'll stand together, pour le Roy, Let them say their will 0 !

We will take, &c."

This has the genuine ring of a marching song made on the march, like the celebrated German song of Bluchers March, struck out by Maurice Arndt from the glowing materials of the Liberation War. In this import- ant respect both the Gaelic and the German song have the advantage over Scots who, hae, inspired no doubt by the field of Bannockburn, but which had nothing to do with the actual fight.

Among the devotees to the dash- ing plunge of the unfortunate young Stuart, the more impassioned sex were naturally in the van ; and of this tendency we may take the fol- lowing effusion as a fair specimen : —

TO PRINCE CHARLIE.

i. " Thou gallant young prince with thy foot on

the heather, Where the brave ones that serve thee are

gathered together, My heart is with thee, and I'd follow thee

fairly,

Through Glencoe, and Strath Fillan thou bonnie Prince Charlie !

Hillirin ho so ho bha hd t 'S na hillirin ho so ho bha hi, Na liillirin ho so, ho bha hb\ Soon was our joy turned to sorrow for Charlie !

" I'd go with thee late, I'd march with thee

early, O'er crags, woods, and mountains, thou

bonnie Prince Charlie ; Where the claymores were flashing to wel- come thee rarely,

And the big heart of Scotland was beating for Charlie !

Y 9

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Popular Songs of the Scottish Highlanders.

' ' Cub of the lion, thou gallant young Charlie, Not with yesterday's love, I loved thee so

dearly ; No duke, and no earl could have won me

so fairly, But now it were well I had never seen

Charlie !

IV. " As he stood in the glen, that brave young

fellow, While streamed o'er his neck his locks so

yellow, Like the call of the cuckoo in May month

early Was the voice to me of bonnie Prince

Charlie !

v.

" Sweet was thy kiss like French wine glow- ing, Thy cheeks like bright berry on mountain

growing, Thy full' blue eye with eye-brows arched

rarely, Who could behold and not follow Prince

Charlie ?

VI.

" 0 son of King Jamie, royal Charlie, Up hill and down dale they are hunting thee

rarely ; With shout and halloo, but my eyes late

and early Are dimmed with the tears that are flowing

for Charlie !

" They killed my father, and my two

brothers, They harried the land that was my

mother's, They crushed my kin, and they ruined us

fairly, But less were my woe, if 'twere well with

my Charlie ! " x

That the kisses here alluded to were genuine, and no doubt much more warm than any cold French claret could be, we are not left to conclude merely from the realism which belongs to all Gaelic poetry ; for history records of one lady at least that she. had the honour of receiving a sounding salute from Charlie in the following fashion. On his march from Perth to Edinburgh, the Prince halted shortly at Doune,

1 From Sar Obair nan Bard Gaidheal. By John Mackenzie, 5th Edition. Edinburgh, 1882. This admirable collection we owe to the pious devotion of an honest Highlander, whose monument the tourist looks down upon from the conveyance that carries him from the steam- boat to the New Inn at Gairloch.

near Stirling, where he was hospitably entertained by Mr. Edmonston of Cam- bus. On arrival he stopped before the house, and drank a glass of wine to the health of all the fair ladies present. The Misses Edmonston, daughters to the host, performed the function of servitors to his highness ; and after finishing their ministerial duty grace- fully, begged in respectful terms the honour of kissing the royal hand. This request of course was granted, and in the most gracious manner possible. But it was not to end here. Along with the daughters of the house, a Miss Clementina Edmonston, their cousin, who had taken part in the ministrations, was suddenly seized with the inspiration that it would be a much more satisfactory thing to kiss the prince's lips ; so trusting to nature, and altogether regardless of propriety, she requested leave to " pree his Royal Highness' mou." Charles, whose education in France had been, of course, sadly neglected, did not understand Scotch; but the moment the request was made intelligible to him by an interpreter, he, without the slightest hesitation, took the loyal damsel kindly in his arms, and kissed her so empha- tically that she blushed from ear to ear, and from neck to crown like a rose on fire. What the other ladies felt, who from a stupid modesty had contented themselves with a formal osculation of the hand, the historian does not say, but it may be easily conceived.2

This kissing exploit is really very romantic ; perhaps next to Flora Macdonald's services in Skye the most romantic incident in that romantic rising. But romance is better in a novel than in history ; and sentiment which can create a poem may help, but can never maintain, a war, and is always perilous when it aspires to dictate a policy. The brilliant romance of the '45 was not long of achieving its natural consummation in bloody tragedy ; and the momentary shout of triumph was turned into long years of lamentation and wail. The following 2 Chambers's Rebellion of the '45, chap. viii.

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song, which comes immediately next in Mackenzie's collection, may serve as a terrible lesson to all time how much innocent blood a gallant young prince may cause to flow when he hastily stirs the flame of a crude insurrection ; not to mention the unavoidable sequence in the historical chain — that every rebellion when unsuccessful can end only in nailing down the fetters of the suffering party with greater firmness and sharper pangs. This pathetic lament — in Gaelic Cumha, a depart- ment in which the bagpipe is pre- eminent— arose out of an incident in the fatal battle of Culloden, which we cannot do better than state in the patriotic editor's own words :

"Christiana Fergusson was a native of the parish of Contin, Ross-shire, where her father was a blacksmith, chiefly employed in making dirks, and other implements of war. She was married to a brave man of the name of Chis- holm, a native of Strathglass (a near kinsman of the chief of that name). On the memorable day of Culloden, William was flag-bearer, or banner-man of the clan, and the task of pre- serving the bratach choimheach from the dis- grace of being struck down, could not have fallen into better hands. He fought long and manfully ; and even after the rout became general, he rallied and led his clansmen again and again to the charge, but in vain. A body of the Chisholms ultimately sought shelter in a barn, which was soon surrounded by hund- reds of the red coats, who panted for blood. At this awful conjuncture, William literally cut his way through the government forces. He then stood in the barn door, and with his trusty blade high raised, and in proud defiance guarded the place. In vain did their spears and bayonets aim their thrusts at his fearless heart ; he hewed down all who came within reach of his sword, and kept a semi-circle of eight feet clear for himself in the teeth of his desperate enemies. At length he was shot by some Englishmen who climbed up to the top of the barn from behind, where he fell as a hero would wish to fall, with seven bullets lodged in his body. His wife forthwith com- posed the following beautiful and heart-touch- ing lament, which is altogether worthy of a high-hearted and affectionate woman : —

' Who will draw the sword for Charlie ? Who will fill his chair to-morrow ? Little cares me now to ask, Pining here in widowed sorrow. And yet, and yet, I may not blame thee, Though by thee I'm ruined fairly, Though by thee my lord lies bleeding, Thou art still my king, my Charlie !

' ' ' Oh, but thou wert tall and comely, From top to toe equipped completely, Never swan more stately fair, Never honey flowed more sweetly Than thy kisses ; with thy brown locks Down thy neck so richly flowing ; Thou didst draw all eyes, the honour Of thy manly beauty showing.

' ' ' Broad thy shoulders ; and thy waist Nicely shaped for supple beauty ; Not a prentice hand was his Who did for thee the tailor's duty. Who for thee would trim the trews, He must cut the cloth not scanty ; No light work to fit short hose, To thy stout legs with step so jaunty.

" ' Thou didst lay the finny people Glancing on the river's border ; Lightly, lightly on the heather Trod thy foot with gun in order. When the deer were on the hill, No man rated thy delaying ; Sweetest music to my ears Were thy hounds when they were baying.

' When the social cup was circling Thou wert ever stout and able ; Thou didst stand and pay thy scot When all weak brains were 'neath the table Never o'er the foamin* ale Didst thou teach thy wits to maunder, Never gave thy foot loose rein From thy faithful wife to wander.

VII.

' 0 waly waly woe, my sorrow, Would the truth might be a lie now ! Far from me be mirth and joy When thou in death dost lowly lie now ! Who will show another like thee, Brain and brawn well joined together ? No red blood from veins more loyal At Culloden stained the heather.

' 0 Charlie, brave young Stuart, From thee came my heart's sore bleeding ! All my best, my all I gave thee In the battle for thy speeding. Not for sheep, and not for cattle, Now I give my tears not sparely ; Who was all the world to me, Him I gave to die for Charlie.

' ' ' Many a silken-vested lady, Titled dames, and dainty misses, Envied me the right to claim, As a wife may claim, thy kisses. All the wealth of Guinea mines Might not make me to disclaim thee ; I'd sooner break all God's commands Than say amen to who should blame thee !

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Popular Songs of the Scottish Highlanders.

" ' Woe's me, woe that I must drag

Days and nights in groans and moaning ; Weary, weary, wakeful nights, With no hope for thy returning. Nevermore shall fife or fiddle Rouse my love where he is sleeping, Never more his dear voice whisper Kindly words to stay my weeping.

" 'When he left me I was hoping — Hoping nightly, hoping daily — He would come back from the battle With his banner floating gaily. But the time is past for hoping ; I shall see thee never, never ; 'Neath the turf my hopes I bury With my dear heart's love for ever.

' There's many a widow weeping sore From Trotternish to Sleat in Skye now ; But never widow wept a lord So worthy of hot tears as I now. When he was here how bright my life, How dim, how dark, with him departed. No sorriest wight would envy me In Skye this day so dreary-hearted ! ' "

We now turn to love songs of which, of course, as in all popular poetry, the name is legion ; but we have only room for two, one with that touch of sadness in it, which love in the absence of the beloved one can never be with- out, and the other where love lies bleeding in the tragic style to which only the breath of prayer and the voice of sweet song can bring allevia- tion.

GED THA MI GUN CHRODH GUN AIGHEAN.

CHORUS.

" Though I have nor sheep nor oxen, Scant my goods, and few my chattels, Yet with me to fight life's battles I may get a 'braw young man !

" Sailor brave that ploughs the ocean, When the boisterous blast is beating, Bear my blessing, give my greeting To my curly-headed boy !

" Weary-footed wight that travels Through the pass, and o'er the mountain, Tell the boy that I lie counting Weary hours, alone, alone !

" Not the proudest laird in Suineart Showed more gallant than my laddie ; I could sleep beneath his plaidie Warm through coldest winter night.

" Though the sheep that crop sweet clover In my meadows are not many ; I can boast a dower like any Richest heiress in the land.

" When thou comest from thy roaming, I've a smile to greet thee brightly, I can a weave a plaid that tightly Wraps my handsome soldier boy.

" ' Have not I good cause for weeping ? Sitting in a lonely chamber ; With him sitting last December, Now with my lean self alone !

" ' Have not I good cause for smarting For my curly-headed soldier ? For the red coat on his shoulder Bore the thorn that made me bleed !

" ' They have marched him to Jamaica, Me they leave my lone watch keeping O'er my spindle, weeping, weeping Vainly for my soldier boy.' " 1

The tragic nature of the next ballad demands for full appreciation the following recital of the facts, out of which, as a blood-red blossom, it grew.

' ' This beautiful song was composed by a Highland officer, who had served under King William on the the Continent after the revolution. He was the son of a respectable tenant in the highlands of Perthshire, and while a youth cherished a desperate passion for a beautiful young lady, the daughter of a neighbouring proprietor. Their love was mutual, but such was the disparity in their circumstances that the obstacles to their union were regarded, even by themselves/ as insuper- able. To mend matters the gallant young High- lander enlisted, and being a brave soldier, and a young man of excellent conduct, was promoted to the rank of an officer. After several years' absence he came home to see his old friends, and to try whether his newly-acquired status might not remove the former objections to the union. The lady was still single, and her beauty was the theme of universal admiration. Othello-like, the young officer told her of 'hairbreadth 'scapes by land and flood,' and so enraptured the lady that she readily agreed to elope with him.

" Having matured their arrangements they fled on a Saturday night, probably under the

1 From The Gaelic Songster, Glasgow, 1879, p. 167, music in the Celtic Lyre, parti. — , Messrs. Lachlan and Stewart, 1883 — a publication which puts the most popular Gaelic songs, English and Gaelic, within the reach of everybody, and deserves to be en- couraged. By the same publisher, in the same style, Songs of the Gael ; also for schools with the sol fa notation —Grain agus Luinn Gaidhelach, by Roddie and Macbean.

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belief that the non-appearance of the young lady at her father's table on a Sabbath morning would excite no surmises in the hurry of going to church. She, indeed, had complained to her father of slight headache when she retired to rest, and instructed her maid to say next morning that she was better, but not dis- posed to appear at the breakfast table. Not satisfied with the servant's prevarication, who was cognisant of the elopement, the father hurried to his daughter's room, and not find- ing here there, he forcibly elicited the facts from the maid. He immediately assembled his men, and pursued the fugitive lovers with all speed. After many miles' pursuit he overtook them in a solitary glen, where 'they had sat down to rest. The lover, although he had no one to support him, was determined not to yield up his mistress, and being well armed, and an excellent gladiator, he prepared to resent any attack made on him. When the pursuers came up, and while he was defending himself with his sword — which was a very, heavy one — and loaded with what is called a steelapple, she ran for protection behind him. In preparing to give a deadly stroke the point of the weapon accidental!} struck the lady so violent a blow that she fell down and expired at his feet. Upon this he surrendered himself, saying that he did not wish to live, his earthly treasure being gone. He was carried to prison, where he composed the song, a few days before his execution.

'"MALI BHEAG OG. ' ' ' Oh, look with eyes of weeping

On me, my bonnie May, Whom thy harsh friends are keeping

In bonds for thee, this day ; Oh, thou smooth-eye-browed maiden,

Thy mouth with kisses laden, Ne'er dropt a word to harm me, My bonnie young May.

" ' On Sunday in the glen there,

My bonnie young May ! I talked beneath the Ben there - To thee, my bonnie May. I ^lifted up my eyes there,

And saw with dread surprise there A troop of armed horsemen

In clattering array.

" '.I started up confounded,

My bonnie young May ! To see myself surrounded

By foes in stern array. Oh, would my nerveless arm then,

Had dropt with palsied harm then, Before that blind-stroke smote thee,

My bonnie young May !

" ' Oh, fairer than the fairest

Flower in garden gay, Than rose or lily rarest

Wert thou, my bonnie May ! Like sunlight in the morning

The soft green slopas adorning, Thy light of love streamed o'erjine,

My bonnie young May !

" ' And I was thine for ever,

From that bright hour, my May, From thy love parted never,

My bouuie young May. Thy locks in gold were flowing,

Thy cheeks like rowans glowing, Thy bright eyes' queenly survey,

Thy speech with gentle sway.

" ' With thy sweet love I'd wander,

Myjworld's joy, my May, To far sun-rise, or yonder

Behind the westering ray. No deer o'er height and hollow

My flying track might follow, If thou wert ever with me,

My own true love, my May !

" ' Oh! cruelly they used thee,

Thy friends, my bonnie May, My true love who refused thee,

My heart of hearts, my May! Oh, had their pride been wise then,

My honest worth to prize then, Sore doom had not been mine now

For lovejof thee, my May !

" ' And if to draw live breath here

Stern law might grant to-day, Life were a living death here,

Without thy love, my May. Oh ! batter far above there,

Upon thy face of love there To look, and clean forget there

The wound that harmed my May ! ' " J

The Highlanders of the far west, as inhabiting either islands or long narrow stretches of land, with a tongue of salt water on both sides, naturally move about as much on the sea as on the dry land ; and boat songs accordingly will come in for a promi- nent place in their amphibious life. The favourite song, Bhir a Bhata, or " The Boatman " — has to do with the sea no doubt, but is rather a love song than a sailor's song. It will be found in all the collections. The iorram, or boat song proper, is a stirring composition in a light dactylic or proceleusmatic metre, where the plash of the oar and the hiss of the waves are distinctly heard, respondent to the clear call of the lusty-throated rowers. In the Killin Collection will be found a spirited lay of this kind, composed by that masculine and manly Celt, the late Dr. John Macleod, of Morven ; for in^those remote parts of

1 Mackenzie, p. 367. The music, with a diti'erent translation, in Miss Pattison's Col- lection.

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Popular Songs of the Scottish Highlanders.

the Highlands the minister is not seldom as good at boating as at preach- ing ; he cannot visit his parish without crossing some two or three distinct waters in a day, and in doing so, not seldom having to encounter a stiff blast from the south-west, as hard to deal with as the gainsaying of sturdy sinners when Gospel truth is flung broadly in their face. Such a life is the best possible school of physical and moral manhood. Long may it survive ! Here follows the song, in which the reader will observe that the patriotic writer has chosen to use the Celtic assonance, which serves the Highlander for rhyme — a character- istic feature, no doubt, which has its value ; but for popular purposes in the Lowlands, at least, the habit of the popular ear ought to be consulted ; and in lyric poetry, where blank verse is not tolerated, the English ear does not willingly reconcile itself to the abro- gation of rhyme.

"HO HO, CLANSMEN!"

' Send the biorlinn on careering, Cheerily, and all together,

Ho ro, clansmen ! A long, strong pull together, Ho ro, clansmen !

" Bend your oars and send her foaming O'er the dashing, swelling billows, Ho ro, &c.

" Give her way and show her wake,

'Mid showering spray and curling eddies, Ho ro, &c.

" Through the eddying tide we'll guide her, Round each isle and breezy headland, Ho ro, &c.

" O'er the wave we'll send her bounding As the staghound bounds o'er the healher, Ho ro, &c.

" See the diver as he eyes her Dips with wonder under water, Ho ro, &c.

" The gannet high in midway sky Triumphs wildly as we're passing, Ho ro, &c.

' ' The sportive sunbeams gleam around her As she bounds through shining waters, Ho ro, &c.

' ' Clansmen, cheer ! the wind is veering Soon she'll tear and clear the billows, Ho ro, &c.

" Soon the flowing breeze will blow, "We'll show the snowy canvas on her, Ho ro, &c.

" Wafted by the breeze of morn "We'll quaff the joyous horn together, Ho ro, &c.

" Another cheer ! our isle appears, Our biorlinn bears her on the faster, Ho ro, &c.

" Ahead she goes ! our biorlinn knows

What eyes on shore are gazing on her, Ho ro, clansmen !

" Ahead she goes ! the land she knows, She holds the shore, she holds it bravely,

Ho ro, clansmen ! Stoutly did we pull together, My brave clansmen ! "

We conclude with what has to do with a boat in a very different style from this spirited boat-song : we mean the boat which accompanies the poor crofter to the emigrant ship, that dark- sailed ship of which such a pathetic tale is told by the father of that large- hearted and large-limbed bishop of the Morven glens whom we have just quoted. * All emigration, of course, even with the most favourable pro- spects and kindly accompaniments, cannot be without sorrow — must be with a sore wrench generally to every well-constituted mind ; but to the High- landers it is doubly sad, dear to him as his native hills are, by their picturesque shows, and breezy virtues, and con- secrated by the loyal memories and kindly feelings of the clan system, not even now extinguished by the march of a heartless commercial spirit and a cold doctrinaire economy into the inmost refuges of the pious cotter. It is a common remark that the beauties of mountain scenery and their power over the imagination do not affect the mountaineers who are born and bred in their midst, whom custom has dulled to the sight. But with the Highlanders assuredly it is not so. They not only love their country with all the affection of children to a good mother, but they admire its

1 Reminiscences of a Highland Parish, by Dr. Norman Macleod. Translated from Caraidh nan Gaidhel. Second part, Longmhor nan Eilthircach.

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beauties with the eye of a lover, and describe its characteristic features with the touch of an artist. There is no finer landscape painting in any language than in Duncan Ban's famous poem of " Ben-Doran," quoted in the book on " Deer-Stalking " re- ferred to below ; : and, though the poetical painting of Nature simply as Nature, of which we have such a clas- sical specimen in Tennyson's " Brook," does not belong to the genius of purely popular poetry, in all the Highland songs, as in the best of Burns's, it is impossible to tear away the incident and the emotion from its natural sur- roundings. In the following song we have an emigrant, rising with the first streak of day, and brushing the freshness of the early dew in order to climb for the last time the lofty Ben which flung arms of majestic shelter around the home of his infancy : —

GUR MOCH RJNN MI DUSGADH.

' ' 'Twas early I rose on a fresh morn of May, To climb all alone the steep face of the

brae ; The sun had gone forth on his march

through the blue, And the light waving birches were dripping

with dew.

" 0 sweet was the sound as I paced up the hill,

Of the bright-bubbling well and the clear- tinkling rill ;

Where the dew-laden roses were glistening bright,

And the white vapours rose in the fresh morning light.

" The copse-wood was thrilled with sweet

warbling, and high The lark on proud wing poured his hymn to

the sky ;

The cattle were lowing to welcome the day, And echo replied from the crag on the

brae.

' ' 0 fair is the rich leafy dress of the Ben, And sweet is the breath of green growth

from the glen ; But the glory of growth shines in vain from

the brae

On my heart that is clouded with sorrow to- day !

1 A Handbook on Deer- Stalking, by Alexander Macrae. Edinburgh, 1880.

" But why am I sad, when all Nature is

gay?

I will say the true thing, though it grieves me to say —

Nevermore, nevermore shall I climb the grey Ben,

Nor wander in joy through the green-wind- ing glen.

" No glen in the world so lovely you'll find, So snug and so safe from the biting north

wind ; In the gloom of the winter no tempests may

roar Through the green-sheltered glen I shall

see never more !

" But vainly I linger, complaining is vain ; No charm hath my rhyme to bring balm to

my pain :

I see the sail spread of the boat on the shore That bears me far hence to return never

more.

" This last look I give to the Ben and the

brae,

The dark-gaping pass, and the lone-winding way ;

1 go — take my blessing, thou bonnie green

glen—

Never more, never more to behold thee again ! "

We have no space, and indeed little inclination, to pursue this so sadly characteristic field of the popular poetry of the Celt's into its harrowing details. A Farewell to My Country, by a Highland emigrant, in a much more extended form and with greater breadth of handling, will be found, by those who care to seek it, in the work quoted below. 2 The prin- ciple that ought to guide a High- land landlord in regard to these sor- rowful incidents of his property is pretty plain — ever to esteem the care of his people his first duty, and never to part with them, unless when he feels assured that it is as much for their good as for his own that the wrench should be made; never to sacri- fice them for his mere personal in- dulgence, to gratify the cupidity of a Lowland adventurer, the ease of a perfunctory factor, the fancy of a doctrinaire economist, or the anti- social mania of a professional deer- stalker.

2 Language and Literature of the Highlands, p. 300. Edinburgh, 1876.

314

A CHAPTER OF POLITICAL HISTORY.1

THE Radical party, understanding by that name the successive groups of men who have striven for more than two centuries to establish the principle of popular self-government in opposi- tion to the principle of royal prero- gative and aristocratic authority, has not hitherto received special atten- tion from historians. Scattered re- ferences appear here and there in our historical narratives ; these are fre- quently, perhaps usually, hostile, for the writers of English history — those, at least, who have commanded the larger share of public appreciation — have been strongly tinged with parti- zanship, or have permitted themselves to be swayed by prepossessions in favour of one or the other of the great political parties. Taking them as types of their class, Macaulay and Alison, as political historians, are so distinctly Whig and Tory as to pre- clude all chance of the Radicals re- ceiving fair treatment at their hands. Nor do the earlier philosophical his- torians redress the omission ; for ex- ample, Sir James Mackintosh is Whig to the backbone. In later days, some attempt has been made to do justice to the Radicals by Miss Martineau, Mr. Buckle, and Mr. Lecky, while our best " popular " history, that of Mr. Charles Knight, brings out with picturesque force the gradual development of Radical aims and the movements of advanced politicians, though without endeavouring to discriminate either, with clearness, from the general course of the narrative of events. It is the same with the diarists and the memoir writers. With the exception of Barn- ford's Life of a Radical and Mr. Thomas Cooper's Memoirs of a Chartist, which deal with the stronger and humbler

1 The History of the Radical Party in Parlia- ment. By William Harris. London : Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co. 1885. Pp. 510, 8vo.

phases of political strife, external to Parliament, there are no traces of Radical sympathies in the range of autobiography ; and we can hardly regard Duncombe's Memoirs as afford- ing a broad and connected view of the action of Radicals in Parliament. Mr. Villiers's Free Trade Speeches (in the chapter prefixed to them), and Mr. Morley's Life of Richard Cobden, deal incidentally with particular phases of Radical efforts at reform within the limits imposed by Parliamentary forms ; but neither of these works professes to describe the history of the Radicals as a party. For such a book as that now under notice there was therefore a distinct place ; it fills a void in English political history, and for the first time brings into one view the rise, progress, aims, and personality of the Radicals as a party in Parlia- ment, traces their influence upon statesmen, and records their successes in legislation. While the author of the book has thus a clearly-defined work before him, he is by sympathy and by political training well fitted to undertake it. That much-abused and greatly misunderstood organization, known popularly as " the Caucus/' may be accepted as the visible mani- festation of Radicalism. It rests upon and embodies the Radical principle of self-government by direct popular re- presentation. The Caucus, indeed, as Liberals know it, is nothing more nor less than the union of persons of one way of thinking, in each con- stituency, in a representative organi- sation, freely and openly chosen, ad- ministered by elected officers, and charged with the business of deciding who shall stand as candidates for the party, and with the consideration of broad principles, towards the mainte- nance of which party organisation shall be directed. Now Mr. Harris

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315

is the author of the Caucus. The system had its origin in Birmingham, and was primarily designed for the organisation of the Liberal party in Birmingham. Before the method of choosing candidates by a representa- tive assembly was adopted, the choice was either, so to speak, accidental, or was effected by a small number of in- fluential politicians. Mr. Harris's method changed this system into one which afforded the great body of the electors, middle class and artisans act- ing together, the means of transacting their own political affairs, by common consultation, finally decided by a ma- jority of votes; and thus Radicalism was organised and regulated in action. Other towns followed the example of Birmingham, county districts adopted the new method, and finally — in their own way, but with large modifications favouring central guidance — the Con- servatives imitated the Liberal method ; so that now, in some form or other, we have a representative system esta- blished as the general rule of political party organisations. Out of the local representative councils arose the great union of Liberal organisations in the National Liberal Federation, and this also, in its origin, was the work of Mr. Harris. It is proper to mention these facts, because the statement of them does justice to a thoughtful and far-seeing politician, who, though not in Parliament, has exercised a wider and deeper influence than many per- sons who have been conspicuous in the Legislature ; and also as indicating that the author of the History oftJie Radical Party does not approach his task with- out special qualifications, by training, by experience, and by sympathy, for the discharge of it.

It must not be supposed, however, that the book has been written in a merely partisan spirit. Mr. Harris is a Radical, beyond all question ; but he has now aimed, and with success, at being not so much the apologist as the historian of the Radical party; and in the prosecution of this design he has, in a true philosophical spirit,

dealt candidly and fairly with Whigs and Tories as well as with Radicals. There is no misrepresentation in the pages of his volume ; no distortion or suppression of facts ; no painting one side as wholly black and the other as entirely white. The motives, the aims and the policy of all parties, and of the chief leaders of all parties, are taken into just account ; full allow- ance is made for the changing circum- stances of the times described ; and the differences of principle which have guided and modified the action of poli- tical parties are stated, both generally and in regard to particular occasions, in such a manner as to give no cause for complaint of unfairness. Perhaps no better illustration could be cited of the temper in which the author deals with these matters than the fol- lowing quotation, descriptive of the animating principles of parties at the time of the war of American Inde- pendence, the period at which the Radicals first made their appearance as a distinct party : —

"There was an abstraction, called the nation, which was separated in the minds of the rulers from the people of whom it con- sisted, and tended more and more to mean the particular classes who, by birth or wealth, by aristocratic connections or court influence, were brought into immediate contact with the Government. The men in office then could aim at advantages to the nation, in the way of military glory, territorial additions, or inter- national influence, without counting the cost in loss, and want, and misery, to the people who paid the taxes and filled the armies. To the same officials, the security of the nation meant the stability of the existing form of government, and any extension of popular power seemed to threaten revolution and na- tional disaster. Therefore, in order to pre- serve the nation, the people were to be kept in subjection, and even in ignorance ; and men so unlike in character and ability as Windham and Eldon combined to resist and defeat the first attempt to establish by law a system of popular education. This, it may be said, was the Tory idea of national policy. In its best aspect, it may be stated as the government of the people for the nation, by prerogative. The Whig view was different in theory, but not so much unlike in practice. It recognised, in- deed, the happiness and welfare of the people as the direct objects at which governments should aim, but it refused to give to the people any active share in the work of their own im-

316

A Chapter of Political History.

provement and progress. Whilst, therefore, it often appealed siiccessfully to outbursts of public opinion on behalf of particular measures, it refused to place any permanent constitutional power in the hands of the people. The Whig theory was the government of the people, for the people, by existing privileged classes ; that was, practically, by the aristo- cracy. We have now evidence of the more definite formation, within the bounds of what we call Liberalism, of a party, the individual members of which would have called them- selves Whigs, and are, some of them, still re- garded as characteristic leaders of that body ; but who aimed at objects, and would have adopted means, which were distinctly be- yond the Whig programme. Even now there was no conscious attempt to form a new party. The old lines were followed. The Kadicals supported, and often were members of, Whig Cabinets, only they desired that the party should travel quicker and further in the direc- tion of democratic reform. Those who were most impressed with the evils which existed, the waste of the national resources, tlie corrup- tion and jobbery in all departments of the public service, the pressure of taxation, the reckless conduct of the war, the repression of all attempts to improve the moral and intel- lectual condition of the people, were the most convinced that no essential change could be effected whilst the whole power of government remained in the hands of a limited class, to every member of which a share in the spoils of corruption seemed within reach. "

This passage furnishes the key-note to the book. The writer limits him- self to a review and exposition of the movement and development of the Radical party in Parliament — not wholly omitting to take into account the occurrence of popular agitations, but subordinating these to the record of Parliamentary procedure, because, as he observes, "it is only in the legislature that direct and immediate influence can be exercised over the principles and policy of the Govern- ment. Until it can find expression there, no cause and no party can be said to be within the range of prac- tical politics, A_ny change forced upon the nation by powers extraneous to Parliament would, if possible at all, be revolution, and not reform." Within the limit thus indicated, Mr. Harris has fully and effectively traced the growth and action of Radicalism as a Parliamentary force. He finds the real origin of the Radical prin-

ciple and that of government of the people for the people and by the peo- ple in the conflicts of the Civil War and in the Commonwealth ; he follows its development, often obscured yet never indistinguishable, through the Revolution of 1688, and the century which succeeded that event ; he recog- nises in the reign of George III. the period at which the opposite and irreconcilable principles of sovereign authority and popular right entered upon their final conflict ; and then by well-ordered degrees he recounts the varying fortunes of Radicalism in Ministries and Parliaments, from the death of Chatham down to the Reform Act of 1867 — fortunes now distinctly advancing, now seemingly receding, making rapid progress at one period, and at another falling almost into abeyance, yet when closely examined, and regarded by the light of popular opinion, steadily becoming more defi- nite, increasingly powerful, and more strongly self-assertive, until estab- lished, in our own day, upon a basis too solid to be shaken, resting upon national conviction, and firm enough to sustain a still wider and nobler fabric of social advance, material progress, and popular freedom. On such a review of the past, the author founds an exposition of the duty of Radicals in the future, and with this a prediction of their success in so shaping legislation and conducting administration as to insure the sta- bility of national institutions, by establishing them upon the basis of ordered liberty. Speaking of the duty of the Radical party, as indicated by recent measures of reform, he says : —

"For more than a century the way had been pointed out to all practical reforms by the advocacy of Radicals, before the indiffer- ence of AVhigs and the opposition of Tories were overcome. Yet even after accepting the policy of the Radicals, it had been the custom of the governing classes to assume that outside of the narrow limits of their circle, the coun- try could not look for men to direct its action and carry on its government. Radicals might originate, but Whigs and Tories must adminis- ter. That assumption is to a great extent dis- pelled, and a practical equality is now admitted.

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But in such a case equality can only exist on the condition that something more is possible. No party can permanently maintain such a position in the government of a great country unless it can, on the necessity arising, under- take to govern alone.

" This is a position which, especially since the passing of the Franchise Act of 1884, the Radical party will be justified in occupying. They have a definite policy, both in home and foreign affairs, they possess a number of skilled politicians and administrators, and all they want is that very steady cohesion which can be acquired only by the consciousness of power and the opportunity of effective action. It does not follow that this power of separate action need be exercised ; the demonstration that it exists may be sufficient for the purpose. The Liberal party always has been, and prob- ably always will be, composed of men differ- ing to some extent as to the rate of progress which should be made in the direction in which all desire to go. If it is no longer desirable that all its movements should be directed by the section which is least advanced, it does not follow that the counsels of men who call them- selves moderate should not be listened to. What is essential is that any Government which is constituted should be in accord with the opinions and wishes of the majority of the people. As this ground-root of representative institutions forms the very essence of Radi- calism, it is certain that Radicals ought to be prepared to give it effect by accepting the re- sponsibilities and exercising the powers of government."

It is impossible, within the space of this necessarily brief review, to do more than state the aims of the author, and to explain the principle by which he has been guided. To see see how the work is done, and how full of interest is the narrative, the reader must be referred to the volume itself. It is worth reading with care, and deserves to find a worthy place amongst our political histories, both as a stirring and encouraging record of effort, of sacrifice, of progress, and of ultimate success, and as an autho- rity on the events and incidents of Parliamentary labours for reform. As a literary performance it has con- spicuous merits — those of clearness, method, ease of diction, and occasion- ally (though the writer has steadily resisted the temptation to fine writing) picturesqueness and even brilliancy of description. Some of the sketches of statesmen and politicians of note are

remarkably effective, and we meet with analyses of character which exhibit a marked faculty of observa- tion and insight. A study of Mr. Joseph Hume, a politician to whom justice has rarely been done, may be cited as a sample; and other illus- trations are afforded by similar sketches 'naturally occurring in the course of the narrative, such as those of Fox and Pitt in the earlier sections, and of Sir William Molesworth, Mr. Grote, Colonel Perronet Thompson, and Mr. Fawcett in the later por- tion. While considerations of space forbid an attempt to recall by name the chief workers in the cause of reform, they forbid also a record of the measures aimed at by Radical reformers during the period covered by Mr. Harris's History of the Radical Party — aims which included not alone the reform of the constitu- tion of Parliament, but the removal of restrictions and the enlargement of national, class, and individual freedom in everything which could be affected by legislation — the freedom of religion, of trade, of association for political or social objects, the liberties of the press, the promotion of education. The out- come of effort at amendment in these and kindred matters, and the strenu- ous and prolonged labours necessary to effect such reforms, are summed up with striking force in the following passage : —

"During the comparatively short time in which the united Liberals have been in office since the Reform Act [of 1867] increased the Radical power, every department of national life — religious, social, commercial, industrial, and intellectual — has been invigorated and improved. The Irish Church has been dis- established. The churchyards of England have been made national instead of sectarian property. A system of national education has been created, and the national universities have been widened and popularised. The land laws of Ireland have been remodelled, by which the injustice of ages has been removed, and the foundation for national peace and unity has been laid. The laws affecting the combination of workmen have been changed, the relations between employers and employed have been placed upon fair and equitable terms, and protection has been given to the lives of

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the men. The army has been made national by the abolition of purchase. The game laws have been amended ; and the law of landlord and tenant improved, by the recognition of the tenants' rights in [the improvement of their holdings. The protection of the ballot has been given to electors. Trade has been purified by the adoption of a sound bank- ruptcy law. A nearer approach to absolute freedom of commerce has been secured, and the last remains of the old corn laws removed. There are, perhaps, none of these great works in which some defects may not be pointed out, which have been the result of a compromise, avowed or understood, between the two sec- tions of the Liberal party ; but in all of them is to be found the spirit of Radical policy, and the ability of Radical statesmanship."

While it is not possible for us to examine here the details of the reforms thus broadly sketched, there is one episode, little known in our political history, which deserves particular record. The curious and interesting fact is brought out by the author of the volume, that the latest measure of Parliamentary reform was anti- cipated in its essential features by a proposal made almost exactly a hundred years ago, and this not by an individual theorist, or by an organi- sation of obscure and uninfluential persons, but by an association which included a large number of peers and members of the House of Commons, of which Burke, Fox, and Sheridan were leading members, and with which the younger Pitt was practically in sympathy if not actually in agreement. This body was the memorable West- minster Committee of Correspondence, the name of which was at a later period changed for that of the Westminster Committee of Association. The origin of the Committee was notable. The sacrifices imposed by the war with the American colonies, the rapid addition to the national debt, the lavish outlay of the court, and the notorious cor- ruption of placemen, combined to arouse a strong feeling on behalf of economical reform, and, united with this, though subsidiary to it, there arose also a demand for Parliamentary reform. The close of the year 1779 witnessed a remarkable manifestation of the national feeling. A great

meeting was held at York — a county meeting, described by Sir George Savile, when he presented its petition to the House of Commons, as repre- sentative of the intelligence and the property of the whole county. The Yorkshiremen demanded a redress of grievances : the kind of redress after- wards set forth in Burke's famous resolutions. The example of Yorkshire was quickly followed by other coun- ties. In all twenty-five county meet- ings were held. They covered almost the whole of England. Middlesex and Surrey represented the home counties, the seat of the Legislature, and the depository of regal and administrative authority. Cumberland and Northum- berland spoke for the extreme north. Dorset, Somerset, and Devon gave expression to the views of the south. Gloucester and Hereford stood for the west ; Norfolk and Suffolk for the east ; and Nottingham and Derby for the midlands. These names — selections from the list of protesting counties — show how the demand for reform extended over the kingdom. In each county which held its meeting a Committee was formed, to con- duct a general correspondence and to enforce a common opinion. In Feb- ruary 1780, the City of Westminster held a meeting for the same purpose. and established its Committee of cor- respondence. Many Whig noblemen and gentlemen, members of both Houses, joined it ; many others, more advanced than Whigs, associated themselves with it. In February 1783, a complete list of the members was made out, and recorded in the minutes of the Committee. The list contained the names of sixteen peers and of fifty- one members of the House of Commons. From the beginning of the Committee in 1780 until its close in 1785 Fox was the chairman, and the minutes show that he presided at most of the meetings, and signed the record of the proceedings. These minutes, not until now known to be in existence, have been made available for Mr, Harris's History of the Radical

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Party. They are in the possession of Mr. Timmins, a Birmingham collector of MSS. and other matters of literary and political interest, who by a fortu- nate purchase, rescued them from possible destruction. As a record of a most important chapter of political history, and as a direct memorial of Fox, and other statesmen associated with him, the minutes of the West- minster Committee might well find a secure resting-place in the national collection.

We have to do, however, only with the light thrown by the Westminster minutes upon early efforts to promote Parliamentary reform. It has been mentioned that in the original scheme of the Corresponding Committees, the reform of Parliament, in the sense of establishing popular representation, held a subordinate position. By degrees the Westminster Committee seem to have perceived that such a reform was really the basis of all measures of progress ; that so long as the House of Commons failed ade- quately to represent the nation, there could be no hope of effectually con- trolling administrative abuses, of checking wasteful and profligate ex- penditure, of expelling corruption from high places, or of advancing popular freedom. Accordingly, in March 1783, the Committee passed a resolution which is thus recorded on its minutes : " That by the resolution of the general meeting, directing this Committee to prepare a plan of an association on legal and constitutional grounds to support the laudable reform, and such other measures, as may conduce to restore the freedom of Parliament, this Committee conceive themselves bound to enter into the consideration of every question tending to establish the independency of Parliament on a solid and durable basis." A Sub- Committee was therefore appointed to inquire into the state of the repre- sentation of the country, and to pre- pare a report upon it. Sheridan was chairman of the Sub-Committee, and its report, presented on the 20th of

March, 1783, bears his signature. Mr. Harris condenses from the MS. minutes the substance of the report : " It defends annual Parliaments as constitutional, and as having been illegally altered ; states that by the statute of 8 Henry VI. the Parlia- ment, then elected by the commonalty at large, passed an Act to disfranchise the greater part of its constituents by establishing the forty shillings qualifi- cation ; and then refers at length to the decay of old boroughs, the repre- sentation of which is controlled cor- ruptly either by the Crown or by hereditary owners, whereas new and large communities had grown up which are entirely unrepresented ; and it ends by the declaration that, whether as regards population or property, the representation is essentially unequal." On receiving the report the West- minster Committee resolved that " annual Parliaments are the right of the people, and that the present state of the representation is inadequate to the object, and a departure from the first principles of the Constitution." A little later, at a meeting presided over by Fox, and attended amongst others by Burke, Sheridan, and Alder- man Beckford, a resolution was passed affirming the principle of the ballot.

The Committee thus began vigor- ously. Nor did its zeal slacken, or its efforts expire in the passing of general resolutions. In April, 1783, a plan of an association was publicly adopted, the corresponding committees merged in the newly-constituted body, and one of the first acts of the reformed organisation was to elect Fox as its chairman, and then to appoint a com- mittee to prepare a scheme of parlia- mentary reform. This committee reported at the end of June, and the report, as it appears on the minutes, is described as " long, elaborate, and rhetorical, but as concluding with a definite scheme, as comprehensive and as thorough-going as any which has been put forward by the most advanced Radicals at any time." The statement above quoted is justified by an exami-

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nation of the scheme of the committee, which is so interesting in itself, and so relevant to recent debates and con- clusions on electoral and parliamentary reform, that the sixteen recommenda- tions of the committee merit quota- tion. They were these : —

" 1. Each county to be divided into as many districts as it is entitled to elect representatives, each district choosing one representative. [Here followed a statement of the number of members allotted to each county, such number to be subject to periodical revision according to the relative in- crease of population.]

"2. Each district as far as possible to contain an equal number of males ; the name of the district being taken from the parish containing the great- est number of electors.

" 3. Annual Parliaments to be elected on the first Tuesday in July each year ; the election to commence between eight and eleven, and close before sunset of the same day.

"4. All male inhabitants of this country (aliens, minors, criminals, and insane persons excepted) to vote.

" 5. Makes first allotment of mem- bers to counties ; in all 513.

" 6. Provides regulations as to registers.

" 7. Grand inquest in each county to allot members to districts.

" 8. Election to take place in prin- cipal town or village of district.

" 9. Votes to be taken by ballot.

" 10. Churchwardens to declare poll to sheriff of county, who returns writ.

"11. The annual session of Parlia- ment to commence on the first Tuesday in November.

"12. Session to end in April; or, if necessary, may be continued by Crown to first Tuesday in July.

" 13. Declaration [of allegiance] to be taken by members.

" 14. All members to be paid.

"15. All election causes to be de- cided by jury before judges of assize.

" 16. Every person competent to vote to be eligible for electioo."

The scheme above described was evidently looked upon as a kind of counsel of perfection in the matter of parliamentary reform, for although it was approved by the committee, and ordered to be printed and sent out to other committees in correspondence with that at Westminster, no serious effort was made to put the plan before Parliament, nor did it lead to any sus- tained agitation in the country. If it had only been acceptable and accepted, how much trouble might have been saved to Parliament and to the nation, and how much faster and more cer- tainly might the progress of reforms of all kinds have been secured ! For this project of a hundred years ago — agreed to by men such as Fox, Burke, Sheridan, Townshend and Shelburne, and in principle assented to by Pitt— - not only covers, but exceeds, all that has been since accomplished in the reform of Parliament. The Westmin- ster scheme of 1783 alike anticipated and surpassed the Reform Act of 1832, the Chartist proposals of 1839, the second Reform Act of 1867, and the measures by which in the present year the Franchise has been made co-exten- sive with householders, and electoral districts have been re-arranged sub- stantially though not exactly on the basis of population. Take the broadest of the schemes since proposed as the standard of comparison — the six points of the People's Charter. These are : universal suffrage, equal electoral dis- tricts, payment of members, vote by ballot, no property qualification, annual Parliaments. The whole of these are embraced in this forgotten scheme, authorised by the signature of Fox and the concurrence of Sheridan, which has been buried for a century in the minutes of the Westminster Association, and is now made public by the historian of the Radical party, as indicating the prescience, the patriotism, and the courage of those who, in principle, if not by profession, are entitled to be classed amongst the earliest leaders of Radicalism.

J. T. B.

MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.

SEPTEMBER, 1885.

MRS. DYMOND.

CHAPTER XXIV.

SUSANNA AND HER MOTHER.

EARLY next day Susy was standing at the gate of the villa. After the events of the night before, they had all come to the conclusion that it would be best to go home at once. And Tempy, agitated and surren- dering, had written to her lover to meet them. Susy knew that her mother would approve of the engage- ment, but she was doubting how she could best break to her the news of their approaching departure. She her- self was loth enough to go. Her heart was not light, she could not feel as Tempy did, whose new life was waiting for her on the English shores. Whereas it seemed to Susy as if she was leaving all hers behind — her true interest, her truest self ; as she drove along she wondered whether she should see Max presently, and be able to tell him of all that had happened, and of the great determination they had come to. She wondered what he would say, how he would look — approving ? disapprov- ing 1 Would he be in the same mood as when he had left them the night before? She found no answer to her question. The villa was silent and deserted, and as she crossed the garden she saw that the studio windows were closed, as well as Madame' s kitchen doors. She went in at the passage, passed through the Marneys' dining- room, where the breakfast things were still upon the table, and so came into No. 311. — VOL. LII.

the little sitting-room where she found her mother. Mrs. Marney was lying on the old yellow sofa ; for once she was not at work. Mikey and Denny's piles of underclothing lay ripped unheeded, seams opening wide, upon a chair. Their mother was leaning back with her hands upon her lap, a pair of horn spectacles and a newspaper lay upon the table.

" I think I am better, dear," said Mrs. Marney peacefully, like a person going on with a sentence already begun. " Madame has been in to sit with me. She has been reading to me. I have heard all about St. Cloud. Max du Pare came for a minute last night, and brought me news of you all. What a lovely day you have had for your walk ! Marney is at the Tuileries to-day. Yes, indeed, M. de Morny sent for him. You don't know how much they all think of his opinion. Nobody knows more about politics than he does ; I wish he under- stood his own affairs half as well as those of Europe," said Mrs. Marney, with a sigh and something of her old manner. As Susy stood in the summer light, against the green of the windows, with all her black rippling round her, the mother looked fondly and proudly at her daughter. " What a beautiful cloak that is, my child, how well your widow's mourning becomes you." Susanna blushed up crimson.

" Oh, don't, mamma, don't say such things."

" Why, the colonel always liked you

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to look well and becomingly dressed," said Mrs. Marney. " I used to tell him it was he, not you that cared for the bonnets. I myself like pretty things, I can sometimes think of your clothes, Susy, when I can't look at my own for worry. I was upset yesterday ; the police came just after Max was gone. Madame was in a terrible taking, and talked some nonsense about Marney."

"What nonsense mamma?" Susy asked.

" Oh ! we have made it up," Mrs. Marney said, taking Susy's hand and stroking it. " Max, like a good fellow, brought her in this morning. Well, what have you got to tell me ? I see there is something by your face."

When Susy began, with no little reluctance, to break her own news she found that her mother received it better than she had dared to hope. " So you have made it all right for the poor girl. I am glad of that, my Susy ; it's ill work parting those whom God has joined together. I shall miss you sorely ; but promise me to come back if ever I want you. Promise, Susy, and I shall not fash over the parting," and Susy eagerly promised. " Oh, mamma, any time, any time."

" I can keep the boys a few days longer," Mrs. Marney continued. " Caron is going over to England next week, and he will leave them at school for me." Mrs. Marney was very tender, very motherly, but absent in manner. " Is that Madame's voice?" she said un- easily. " Don't wait, Susy, you must have so much to see to." But almost as she spoke, Madame appeared upon the threshold, concentrated, forbidding in aspect. When she saw Susanna standing near her mother's sofa Madame stopped short, stared fixedly, and immediately turned and walked away out of the room. Mrs. Marney flushed up, then laughed at Susy's look of bewilderment. " I did not want her to see you here, Susy." And when Susy asked what it meant. " She has got some nonsense in her head — people trouble themselves too much about other people's affairs," was all Mrs.

Marney said, and then she kissed her daughter's face, holding it between both her hands and looking into her eyes as tenderly as if Susy had still been a child depending on her for everything. Mrs. Marney promised to come up with the boys, and to say good-bye next day in the afternoon, when Marney was gone. Susy would gladly have remained longer, she hoped to have seen Max before she left ; she wanted an explana- tion with Madame ; but her mother seemed only anxious to hurry her away ; for one moment at the door did Mrs. Marney detain her wistfully, and in that moment Susy found courage to say in a low voice, " Mamma, you will tell Mr. Max we are going. We expect him too, to say good-bye." Then Mrs. Marney flung her arms around Susy's neck and began to cry.

"Ah, poor Max ! he will miss you, but not so much as I shall. Oh ! re- member, I must always count on you for my boys, Susy ; you are young, but no younger than I was when I was left a widow, and I took my own course, and it has been a hard life, but indeed I would not change it," said the faithful, inconsequent woman. ' ' Go, darling, go. "

Poor Susy drove home disappointed and perplexed by her visit, and wonder- ing at the meaning of it all. She was used to her mother's ways, used to the mysteries of that household from which she had so thankfully escaped, she could imagine, alas ! what good reason her mother might have to try to avoid a meeting between Mr. Marney and herself, but Madame du Parc's be- haviour distressed and troubled her. Some crisis had occurred, of that she was assured. They were all against her, her mother and Madame and that hateful Marney. People in an excited and abnormal condition are quickly suspicious, and Susy crimsoned at the thought that it must all have to do with her friendship for Max. Ah ! what business was it of theirs. If only she could have seen him once more. If only he had come to her. Then she felt that everything would have been plain.

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Mrs. Dymond found active prepara- tions for their departure going on when she reached the hotel, and a general confusion of Wilkins among the bandboxes, of parcels without number, and milliners - in - waiting. Tempy was writing in the drawing room, and looking up with a face so changed, so radiant with transient beauty and happiness that Susy could scarcely believe that was the Tempy she had known all along. " I have had a telegram," said Tempy. "Charlie will meet us at Folkestone the day after to-morrow ; " and, " oh ! Susy, Mr. Bagginal came this morning and Monsieur Du Pare. I was very civil indeed, and nice to them both. They want to take us somewhere to breakfast to-morrow, and Mr. du Pare is coming on to the Louvre afterwards, so he will have all day long to say good-bye, as we don't leave till after dinner."

Susy didn't answer. She sat down rather wearily, he had been there, she was glad of that, even though she had missed him ; but at the same time she had an odd feeling of some intangible, unrecognised trouble at hand, one to be avoided, not faced, to be fled from, never to be realised. All day long the thought possessed her while she packed and paid and parted, and settled the various details of their going.

Du Pare saw Susy again that evening though she did not see him. Susy and Tempy, with Phraisie between them, were driving at foot pace along the Champs Elysees. They were rolling home from the Arc, behind which the sun was setting, a huge dropping globe of limpid fire. Max had been staring at the glories that were lighting up the Arc, and its stony chariots, and heroic memories, while the triumphal clouds above were heaped in a present apotheosis of splendour and com- memoration. The victors and vic- toresses of this present generation were complacently driving out in the soft evening air, after the heat of the day, and issuing from their houses, or

strolling leisurely or resting on the benches along the way. Many of the passers by looked up at the two English ladies in their equipage with the pretty blue-eyed child between them. Among these came Max du Pare, trudging home from M. Caron's with a portfolio under his arm contain- ing his completed work. Susy did not see him, but he saw her, and the pros- perous serenity of the little party struck him painfully, and the carriage seemed to him somehow to be rolling and rolling away right away out of his life.

CHAPTER XXV.

SAYING " GOOD-BYE."

ME. BAGGINAL was also of the fare- well party. They were to break- fast at a certain old-fashioned caf6 near the Pantheon, which du Pare had recommended, and to adjourn to the Louvre for one last morning in the galleries which already seemed so familiar. That last day in Paris, the lights, the streets, the cafe" with its shining tables and deep windows and criss-cross shadows, the blazing gar- dens without, long haunted Susy, who was destined to live so many of these hours again and again, in other scenes and other surroundings. She had met Max with an effort, trying to be calm. Alas ! her effort to be wise and calm only revived for him the memory of that stiff, doll-like Susanna who used to seem so meaningless once. Now he knew better, he did not think her meaningless ; on the contrary, he attached too much meaning to her coldness.

As they all sat at their table with the snowy cloth by the grated window, Mr. Bagginal and Jo kept up the ball ; Tempy was too happy, Susanna was too sad to talk very much.

" I shall be coming over to see my people in a few weeks," said the attache. "I hope I shall find you at Crowbeck, Mrs. Dymond."

" That is all right," said Jo. " You must come and see us, and you too,

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Du Pare. When shall you be in England again?"

But Du Pare did not respond very warmly. He felt some jar, some con- straint in this semblance of a meeting. " I don't like making plans," he said abruptly ; " plans are for landed pro- prietors and diplomats ; we working men are obliged to take things as they come."

" Here come the cutlets/' cried Bagginal, who thought Max's sallies not in the best taste. Susy, too, was vaguely vexed by his roughness. Things mended a little when they reached the Louvre. The work of great men, which makes a home for us in strange places, is often not un- like a living presence, influencing us, just as some people do, calling some- thing that is our best selves into life.

There is something in the highest art which is like nature, bringing people into a different state of being, sweeping away the reticences, the hesi- tations, of the different grades of life. The different manners and ways of men and women are realities in their way, but they scarcely count when the greater truths prevail.

Max walked ahead, suddenly more at home and more at ease ; he led the way from room to room, from one eventful picture to another, and yet all the time as he went along the voice of that night before was haunting him still, and even while he was speaking he sometimes broke off abruptly to listen to it. " She is going from you," this voice still said ; " she might be yours, she might remain." Perhaps some vein of English blood had taught Max to feel for women some deeper, more tender sentiment than the pas- sionate ferment of romantic admira- tion and excitement which seems to play an all-important part in France (if we are to judge by its yellow and bilious literature) ; some gentler and more noble instinct was in his heart than that strange emotion which, according to these same observers, belongs to any one but to a wife — to

a passing dream, to a flaunting veni- ality. . . . Whereas (according to these same records) for the mothers of their homes, for the companions of their life, a family lawyer's acquiescence, their parents', their grandparents' approba- tion is to be considered first and foremost — human nature, instinctive feeling, last and least.

But Max was but half a Frenchman, after all, as he walked along by Susy's side through the long galleries. They came down from the glowing pictures into the cool, stony halls below, and passed from one century to another with a few lingering steps. The tombs of Egyptian kings and warriors lined their way ; then came the tokens and emblems of the great Roman empire, with all its pomp of funereal rite; followed by the bland and lovely emblems of the Greeks, those stately figures still treading the earth in some immortal fashion, while the present waves of life flow on, washing away the relics of the past as they flow.

Max looked at the woman he loved, as she was standing before the statue of some bygone nymph. The young man, who was an artist as well as a lover, made a mental note of the two — the stony, impassive nymph, the noble human being so wistfully radiant. Susy felt his eyes upon her, and as some feel the sunshine kindling their chilled veins, so to her unacknow- ledged perplexities that bright odd glance, part sympathetic, part scru- tinising, seemed to bring reassurance and to give life to her very soul. That one moment was the best of all those moments; almost immediately a look, a something, a nothing, seemed to come between them again.

Long after, an eau forte, signed Maxwell, had a great success, and was for a time to be seen in the window of every art shop in London. It was very slight, but also very complete. The stony statue was faithfully copied, its grace and solemn life were repeated as it stood upon its pedestal with its finger on its lips ; and a woman, also draped in flowing folds, also bare-

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headed, and with a strange likeness to the marble, stood with innocent eyes gazing up at the stone that re- called her who once was a woman too, who was now only a goddess, but still somehow whispering of the beauty and of the love of two thousand years ago.

Mr. Bagginal, loth to go, had to say good-bye presently, and return to his embassy. His departure scat- tered them all. Susy felt a strange impatience of this long- drawn leave-taking. She wanted to get it over, and to escape from Tempy's eyes and Jo's ; she was not herself, her nerves were irritated, and the restraint she put upon herself only added to this nervous impatience.

" Shall we walk home through the gardens?" said Mrs. Dymond with an effort, in her stiff and formal manner ; and without a word Du Pare turned and led the way to the entrance gates. The great doors let a blaze of light into the cold marble galleries ; the cocked-hat of the Swisse was resplen- dent and reflected the fine weather as it flashed in the doorway; the great place without looked like a triumph of summer ; the rearing stone horses and chariots rose high against the deep blue of the sky. Short black shadows marked the arches and the pedestals, and Susy breathed deep as she passed out, followed by Jo and Tempy. Oppo- site was the piazza of the Louvre, where the lovely lights were floating from pier to pier, while high overhead one or two diaphanous clouds were mounting in the air.

As they came out of the shade of the portico they seemed almost blinded by the glaring sun ; the place was burning with scorching heat ; it flashed from every arch and pinnacle and window.

" It is a furnace," said Tempy ; " hadn't we better wait another hour in the gallery 1 " "I have to go home," Susy said, hurriedly. "Tempy, I can- not stay longer; I have to pack, to wind up. Don't come ; you will find me at home. Jo will come with me."

But Tempy clutched Jo fiercely by the wrist. She did not want to be left alone with Du Pare in the gallery.

The heat seemed to confuse them all. Susy found herself crossing the burning place alone, as she thought, but when she looked round, Du Pare was striding by her side, while she hastened to the more shady gardens of the Tuileries. It was the ordeal by fire through which they were passing.

" Everything seems on fire," said Susy, looking about. " See, we shall escape over there," and she pointed with her hand.

The young man was unconcerned by the heat, and chiefly conscious of the cool shadow of her presence. He re- membered her words and her action one day long after, remembered them for an instant amidst the flash of fiercer conflict than that which stirred him now ; and yet at the time he scarcely seemed listening when she spoke, and now and again forgot her presence in the sudden realisation of what her absence would be to him. He had imagined once that she under- stood him — cared something for him. It must have been a mistake. How quietly she spoke of her departure. " These Englishwomen are made of tougher stuff than a poor French- man is aware of," Max thought bitterly.

The sentry in his shady box stared at Mrs. Dymond and her companion quickly passing in the burning silence. They reached the gardens, almost de serted in the midday heat.

If it had not been for Tempy's jealous words the night-before, Susanna might have parted from Max naturally with regret, sadly, but without this cruel pang, this self-reproach. As it was, she could not trust herself to be sorry ; she must take leave coldly. She must not allow herself to feel.

Then she looked up suddenly, just once to remember him by when she was gone, when this cold unmeaning good-bye had been said ; and she saw Du Parc's keen brown face turned upon her with a look which seemed

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somehow to stab her, and she started as if she had been hurt.

"What is it?" said Du Pare. "What is it, madarue?"

Susy's heart began to flutter oddly. She could not answer. Her face had been pale before — was now burning with her self-betrayal. Was the final decision to be made already 1 Was there no escape from it? Tempy's words had shocked her the night be- fore. It seemed to her as if the girl had cruelly taken down the shutters, and let bright daylight into a darkened room. Now for the first time Susy seemed to know that the daylight was something so clear, so beautiful, that all other lights and flickering tapers were but as shadows before it.

Susanna's changing looks touched Max with some odd mixture of pity and alarm. He had been angry with her for her coldness all the morning. But this was no cold indifference. Had she, too, felt this estrangement? If it was so he forgave her, took her into his confidence, once more began to speak naturally.

" Yes, madame, this vile good-bye has come already," he said, " and yet too late for me. Good-byes come most easily to those who, like you, take everything with them — almost everything," he repeated, with a sigh. " I cannot pretend to know how it all may seem to you ; we belong to dif- ferent worlds. It is best we should part. Ah ! you could not face poverty," he went on suddenly. " You are not made for sufferings ; you belong to the wealthy, happy, placid people, not to us who are struggling for our lives." Susy felt hurt by his strange tone. " What do you mean ? " she said. "I have been poor too."

"You have been poor," he said, looking hard at her, and smiling coldly ; " but you have never known what it is to suffer, nor to be bound and helpless watching others day by day, condemned by their race, and dying from sheer incapacity for the struggle of life. Pass on — pass on," he said, almost fiercely.

Susy's eyes filled up suddenly, and again her tears softened his mood. "You have courage and you have heart, but you cannot help these things any more than I can," he went on more gently. "To have known you is a possession to those you leave behind. When I remember you after you are gone, it will be with a thought of peace in the midst of noise and con- fusion."

Susy, as many a woman before and after her, stood listening, scarcely taking in the words, only the sense of the moment. All she knew for certain was that they were parting, that he was there still, that he was unhappy, that presently she would see him no more. They had reached one of the stone benches of the Tuileries, which stood in the shade of a tree, almost opposite a little gate that led to the Rue du Dauphin.

" 1 must go," said Susanna, speak- ing very quietly ; and he nodded, and yet detained her, absently holding her hand, which she had given him.

" Ah, yes," he said, suddenly drop- ping it, " it is indeed time we parted."

She did not dare to answer or to comfort him ; she did not dare tell him that for her too the parting had come too late.

" Good-bye," she said, still in the same quiet everyday manner. As she moved away slowly he sat down upon the bench.

The time had come, as she had known it would, and she walked on as she had drilled herself to do ; with what sad steps she climbed the street none but herself could tell. She walked till she reached the door of the hotel, where the waiter was stand- ing. He asked her some trivial ques- tions about her bill, and an omnibus. She looked at him without understand- ing what he said. Then she mounted the wooden stairs, up and down which they had so often happily clattered on their way in and out. She might have been kinder, this was what she kept thinking over and over again ; she might have been kinder ; how sad and

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stern he looked, was it her fault she had only thought of herself, not of him, in all she left unsaid ? Every sound, every touch seemed to jar upon her nerves and to reproach her. As she opened the sitting-room door, she was met by a loud discordant crash. Little Phraisie was passing the long, hot morning by thumping on the keys of the piano in tune to her nurse's packing.

" I'se playing," says Phraisie, triumphant.

" 0 Phraisie, Phraisie, don't make such a noise," said her mother irri- tably, stooping over the child and try- ing to lift her down from the chair.

" I'se not done," protested Phraisie struggling.

" Leave off, Phraisie," Susy repeated; and the child looked up surprised by her mother's tone. She ceased strug- gling instantly.

" Mamma," said she, " are I so very naughty ? is that why you's crying ? " and then Susy found that her own eyes were full of tears — she had been selfish and unjust to Phi'aisie as she had been to Du Pare.

Wilkins came in hearing the dis- cussion, also heated and cross with packing, and asking one question after another about her overflowing boxes. Susy could scarcely force herself to listen ; Du Parc's wild sad looks were before her eyes, his bitter words in her heart ; she might have had the courage to speak the truth to him. She might have been kinder — was it even yet too late 1 " Phraisie, darling," she said suddenly, " You may play a little bit longer. I have forgotten some- thing, Wilkins; I shall come back. I — I am not feeling very well, I must leave the packing to you." And before Wilkins could ask another question she was gone again, hurrying as she went.

"Madame! Madame!" cried Auguste, flying after her with his napkin ; but Susy did not turn, and only hastened out into the street, tying the long ribbon of her silk cloak as she went. She thought she heard her name

called, she would not look back. She must see him once more, if only to leave him more happy, if only to tell him that she was not ungrateful for his friendship. It seemed to her as if he was wanting her, as if it was her least duty to go to him, to say to him, "Ah, you do me injustice. It is not that I am rich, and prosperous and heartless, but because I am poor and have others to think of, others depend- ing on me that I leave you." Yes, others to whom she was bound by a thousand ties ; but in her secret heart she knew, that never again would she feel for any one what she felt for this stranger.

Surely two less propitiously matched people never came together than this man and this woman, who seemed to suit each other so well. She, tender, practical, humble and yet exacting, as diffident people are who are not sure of themselves and require constant convictions and reassurance. He, reserved, over confident, with a courageous power of self-command, perhaps somewhat blunted to the wants and pains of others by circum- stance. For him the real material wants of life existed chiefly. The hunger for affection, the thirst after sympathy was a fancy not worth con- sidering. He was suffering now ; but he also knew — perhaps better than Susy did — that his pain would pass in time. . . .

He was still sitting on the bench, he had not moved since she left him. He was not conscious of the minutes which had passed. He loved her. He knew it. Whether or not she loved him seemed to be but a secondary thing. A man loves, a woman longs for response. Max had not stirred except to light a cigar. For a few minutes he had gloomily puffed at the smoke, then he took it out of his mouth and sat holding it between his fingers. Then he heard her quick step advanc- ing, he [did not look up or turn his head, but when she came close up and sat down on the bench beside him he turned at last. He was all changed,

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Susy thought. It was as if an east wind had passed over some landscape. She was not shy now. She was not thinking of herself any more, only of him, and her sweet eager face was lighted with solicitude and kindness.

" Won't you speak to me ? " she said, after a moment, forgetting all her dig- nity, all her gentle pride ; " I want to say a real good-bye — since we must say good-bye. I came back, for I could not bear to part as we did just now. I, like you, am not free, to think only of my own happiness. I — I wanted to tell you this. I have my mother, my brothers, my children depending on me. I should forfeit all means to help them if I married again. I too have my duty. I want to hear you say you forgive me," she went on more and more agitated. She spoke in her pretty English-French. He was silent, and she turned very pale as she realised how little her words must mean to him.

He looked up with dull eyes and spoke at last.

" I have nothing to forgive," he said ; "I do not complain ; you have judged wisely ; you are perfectly justi- fied. There is nothing to regret, no- thing to forgive."

" Oh, Max ! " she said reproachfully, unconsciously calling him by his name, " when you speak to me like this how can I answer you ; how can I feel you are my friend 1 "What am I to say to make you understand 1 "

She wrung her hands with sudden pain, for indeed his pain seemed to her harder to bear than her own, his hap- piness seemed to her to matter far more than hers could ever matter. She felt herself in some way account- able for this man's happiness. The thought was almost more than she could bear, but he would not help her.

" Yes ; I understand well enough," he answered ; " and you have also to understand me," he continued, in a hard, commonplace voice. " Don't you know that graves have to be dug ? Do you expect me to grimace and make phrases while I am digging a grave ? "

Then he looked up at last, and his eyes met hers for one moment. Then, still dully and wearily, he rose from the bench.

" Your stepfather is coming," he said, " and his family. I cannot stay here any longer."

And as Susy looked up, in that bitter moment, she too saw Marney advanc- ing, and the little boys running towards her, and her mother following through the iron gate by which she herself had come into the gardens but a moment before.

Max du Pare had got up deliberate- ly, without hurrying ; he stood for an instant still looking at her ; then he took off his hat without a word, and turned and walked away. The clocks were clanging four o'clock ; he crossed the stiff shadow of the orange tree, and with long swinging steps reached the shade of the avenues be- yond, he was gone. She had longed to help him ; she had only disgraced herself , she had done nothing for him — nothing, nothing. Was it the sun's heat sickened her ? Was it some over- powering sense of shame, of hopeless regret, that seemed to burn into her very heart ?

Some children who had been watch- ing eagerly from behind the orange tree came running up and established themselves upon the vacant bench and began to play an eager game with stones and sticks, while the Marney party cheerfully closed round Susy, the little boys were specially loud in their demonstrations. " Sister Auguste told us you were here. Didn't you hear us calling? We knew we should find you."

" I am only come for one moment, just to take leave, Susanna," said Marney, with extra heartiness, ad- vancing with both hands extended ; " but here is your mother for the rest of the day. Is not that Du Pare going off ? I may as well catch him up. Well, take care of yourself, my dear girl, and don't forget to write."

Susy was still in a sort of dream ; she scarcely returned her stepfather's

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easy salutations. She met her mother, but without a smile. The poor woman had lingered behind. Had she guessed something of what had happened ?

Mrs. Marney more than once looked anxiously at her daughter as they walked back together to the hotel. As the day went by the elder woman seemed silently to be asking Susy's forgiveness. She took up her daughter's hand and kissed it.

" Don't, mamma," said Susanna, pulling her hand away.

All the same she was glad to have her mother near her until the moment of departure came. They sat side by side on the old red sofa, saying little, but grateful to be together. Once they heard a man's step in the passage outside, and Susy wondered whether Max after all had come back again for a few last minutes, but it was only Mr. Bagginal with some flowers and bonbons for Phraisie. Then the train carried them all away, and Susy looked from her sleeping child to Jo peacefully nodding in his corner, to Tempy sitting absorbed and radiant, and then, some- thing within her suddenly cried out, in despairing protest, in tune to the wheels of fate as they carried her away. To have so much, yet to be so utterly disheartened and alone ; to have felt as if the world itself could scarce contain her happiness, and now it seemed to her that the worst of all was yet to come. What would he be doing? Who would he be talking to ? Of what would he be thinking ? It was well for her that she did not know what the future had in store.

CHAPTER XXVI. WAE AND RUMOURS OF WAR.

To all of us who were safe at home in 1870, the distant sound of the cannon, the cry of the ousted, sorrow- ful inhabitants of a country but a couple of hours' journey from our own shores came, softened by distance, and by that stultifying sense of our own safety. It was not indifference ; our

neighbour's trouble was present to us, and keenly realised ; but we know that the good Samaritan himself after walk- ing by the ass and upholding his sick and wounded neighbour, left him to recover alone at the inn. With the first alarm Michael and Dermy ap- peared in Tarndale, sent by their mother, to finish their holidays, in safety. Mr. Marney, whose trade was flourishing for the moment, for- warded a letter by the boys, in his dashing handwriting. " I send the boys, my dear Susanna, trusting to your sisterly care. I cannot bring them myself. This war gives absorbing occupation to men of my trade. I am trying to per- suade my wife to pack up her boxes and also rejoin you in your luxurious home. Poor Polly has some impres- sion that her presence at the Villa du Pare acts as a pledge for her unworthy husband's safety. ' Think of the Prus- sians !' says I. 'Let them come on,' says she. ' I will not desert my post.' Though what good she can do me here, and I at the other end of France, is past my comprehension. ' Your home will be always ready,' says she. ' You can come back at any hour of the day or night,' and when I represent to her that I can do that anyhow with a latchkey and a couple of sovereigns, she bursts into tears. Madame du Pare being of a less valorous constitution, has chosen the better part under pre- sent circumstances, and discreetly retires to her vineyard near Avignon. Seriously speaking, my dear Susan, I do intreat you, who have more influence over Polly than most people, to per- suade her that there is no advantage to me whatever in her remaining here, only great inconvenience. Even though the Prussians should not advance beyond the frontier, there are all sorts of ill-looking adventurers and Franc Tireurs hanging about the place just now. . , ."

Poor Mrs. Marney ! she scarcely knew how to withstand the united commands of her husband and her daughter. Crow- beck seemed so far away, so utterly out

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of reach. There was no one there, not even Susanna, to whom she could speak of Marney. What should she do there ! If he was ill or wounded, Susy would never let her go, she would keep her from him. The poor thing wandered about the empty villa, pale, anxious, huddled in an old cloak, wistfully watching Madame's independent ar- rangements as she prepared for her own departure. Torn with terrors for Marney, unable to decide for herself, Mary Marney was utterly miserable and wearying to others. Susy's letters, full of entreaties and of the prepara- tions for Tempy's wedding, only elicited a faint return from her mother. Phraisie's printed messages, the boys round-hand, seemed alone to bring some gleam of interest to the poor soul. She studied the papers for news ; she cross-questioned everybody. Marney had been ordered to the front to join the emperor's head-quarters at Chalons, to be in the triumphant train of the journey to Berlin. Marney used to sbrug his shoulders when his wife ap- pealed to him as to his probable desti- nation.

"I don't mind taking the odds against setting up my quarters in the Royal palace at Berlin, if that is what you mean, my dear," he said. "Heaven knows where we shall all be this day month. You will be more in the way of news at Crowbeck than anywhere else. They take in the Velocipede, don't they ? — county big- wigs, as they are, crowing on their dung-heaps."

Mrs. Marney only turned away to hide her tears. One day, Madame, at once touched and irritated beyond measure by her friend's imploring looks, suddenly said, emerging from a huge caisse of cooking utensils, which she was carefully packing,

" I believe you would be happier, after all, if you came with me, Madame Marney. If your husband joins the camp at Chalons, you will be nearer at Avignon than anywhere else, not that you need fear anything for him. He is not one of those who get drowned

or shot," mutters Madame, with her head in the saucepans again.

But Mrs. Marney did not care what Madame muttered ; she clutched at her offer as a child might seize upon a toy. Marney, who was absolutely indifferent to his wife's movements, did not oppose the scheme, except by the usual shrug.

"You know your own mind best," he said.

When he took leave of her soon after, her beautiful sad eyes, her mute, tender, passionate farewell touched him. " Poor Polly," he thought, as he turned away, " what the devil pos- sesses her to be so fond of me ? "

Marney actually took the trouble to write to his wife once or twice during the first few days; and when his letters came, Mrs. Marney, radiant and delighted, would send on long quotations to Susy at Tarndale.

For once Susy was thankful to re- ceive news of Mr. Marney, and to know his whereabouts, and that he was prospering. For this also meant that her mother's mind was at ease and able to rest. When Marney took the trouble to write to his wife, he would send brilliant accounts of his own doings, and graphic descrip- tions of the events as they occurred. Other news there was which Susy read quietly, turning a little pale as her eyes followed the straggling lines of her mother's correspondence, which was not all confined to chronicles of her husband's doings. Madame du Pare was, it appeared, actively engaged in a lawsuit with a neighbouring pro- prietor. She was indignant with her son for leaving her to bear the brunt of it all alone. "Why did he stop away among all those cutthroats and conspirators'? " The first news of him came from Tours, where he had joined General D'Aurelles. Then Mrs. Marney wrote that he had been sent back to Paris with a regiment of Mobiles in which he had enlisted.

How many things happen to us up in the air ! Whole seasons of life seem to

Mrs. Dymond.

pass not on the ground, not ruled by hard tangible things and details, such as events, and chairs and tables, but overhead in some semi-mysterious region, where we turn to the vague inscrutable fancies which belong no less to our lives than its facts and statistics ; where amid the chimes and the song of birds, or among storms and clouds, so much of our secret life is passed. Susanna Dymond was a timid woman in some way ; half educated in the art of feeling, of living beyond. She would not let herself face the thoughts which she could not always dispel, nor dared she try to measure the load of anxiety at her heart, with which she lived through all the long months of that glaring summer time, with its cruel, arid hours dividing her from the soft dreams of the spring. Those past days had been so lovely, so natural, and easy, and now it seemed so unnatural to be un- happy. From day to day, from hour to hour, she never knew what the fate might be of that one person who had changed her life's secret course. What was it that had come to her, a sense of the nothing in life, a bitter impatience of that terrible decree by which time after time we are swept away from our nearest and truest. . . . And then there would dawn for her the sense of possi- ble happiness, of companionship which might have made a heaven for her of all those anxious days and heavy hours, and she dared not even think of it ; she must not even realise the tender blessing. Every material comfort was hers. Tempy's affection touched her deeply. She had means to help those she loved; she had been faithful to her husband's trusts. All round about her were grateful sights and sounds, his legacy of comfort and happiness. The beacons of golden gorse lighting along the high moors; as the sun sets, the sky turns to gold and Crow- crag to purple. Suddenly a great burst of evensong comes from the birds over head. All is peace except for the melodious din of whisperings and chirrupings and sweet repeated

notes. She can hear the church bell across the lake ringing for evening service ; it is a strange confusion of light and sound, of rest and life. But nature is often like the children piping in the market-place. There are times when beauty only jars, and aches, and stings. No one seeing Susy all through these months could have guessed at the hard fight she made, struggling to put aside vain regrets, to live in that wholesome hour the pre- sent, which is so much better for all of us than the past moods and future tenses to which so much of our life is strained. No one seeing her calm and smiling on Tempy's wedding-day would have guessed at the longing strange pain and self-reproach in her heart. Indeed, some of the neighbours could not help contrasting her coldness with Miss Bolsover's warmth of over- flowing tears and feelings.

Tempy's wedding had been fixed for the 4th of September, a day peaceful and of good omen for the inhabitants of Crowbeck Place, one full of terror and alarm for the dwellers in a city not twenty-four hours distant from Tarndale.

While Tempy put on her travelling dress with Susy's help, a weeping wo- man, standing among other women, also in tears, overwhelmed by dis- aster upon disaster, by desperate news of armies flying and broken, terrified by the angry cry of the gathering populace outside the windows, was also taking leave of her home for ever. Her attendants came up one after another to kiss her hand ; one of them hurriedly tied a black hood over the lady's beautiful hair, helped her off with her gold embroidered mantle, and flung a darker wrap upon her shoulder : then, followed by one of her faithful women only, the empress came out of the golden gate of the palace, trembling, because some passing urchin called her name. Meanwhile the Tarndale bells were ringing across the lake for Tempy Bolsover's wedding- day, and the young couple were speed- ing northward on their happy wedding

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journey ; Aunt Fanny, in garments gorgeous beyond compare, stood taking leave of the wedding guests ; good Mrs. Bolsover sat subdued and emo- tioned in a corner. Jo had gone off for a solitary walk over the hills, and when the last of the company was gone, including Uncle Bolsover, who had lately started a tricycle, and who departed zig-zagging along the road, Susy went up stairs to her own room and changed her wedding-dress for a grey country gown. She called the children, Phraisie and the little brothers, and crossing into the wood beyond the road, she took the wood- land path leading upwards to the moors. Phraisie, trotting along the lane, looked like a little autumn berry herself. The leaves were turning brown upon the trees and sparkled, repeating the light ; tiny leaves of gold, amber- brown, crimson, or lingering green overhung the winding way. Presently they came to a little pool of all colours — gold with the reflection of the ash- trees, crimson where the oak-trees shone — into which the boys flung their stones and then set off running ahead once more. Susy still followed in silence ; Tempy's happiness had warmed her heart, and she was thank- ful to be quiet in the unconscious com- pany of the happy children ; glad to be recalled from her sadder world by their happy voices.

From the shade of the wood, with

its nuts and birds and squirrels, they come out upon the moor, whence they can see the silent tumult of the moun- tains beyond, crest and crescent, and sweeping ridge and delicate sunlit peaks silent and very still, yet shifting perpetually and changing with every minute's light. As Susy stood there the old cruel feeling which she had hoped to subdue suddenly came over her again. Everything seemed so con- fused, so short, so long ; so many things to do. so many to undo ; there were so many words to say, so many to unsay. Ah ! why had she ever tried to explain to one who would not under- stand ? Ah ! how gladly she would have waited for years had he but agreed to it. But with him it was a man's strong passing feeling, with her it had been a new self only then awak- ened. Now she knew what it all had meant as she went back in mind to those early spring days, remembering the new light in the sky, the beauty of the world, the look in people's faces, the wonder of common place. She understood it all.

"Susy," cries Dermy, "come ! come ! Phraisie wants you ! "

Little Phraisie had tumbled into a furze-bush, and refused to be comforted by her uncles ; and her mother, sud- denly awakening from her dreams, now hurridly ran to pick her up, to kiss away her tears, and wipe her wet cheek with her handkerchief.

To be continued.

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THE WINDWARD ISLANDS.

ABOUT the middle of the year 1882 reports and despatches crowded into the Colonial Office from the greater number of our West Indian Colonies, telling of scandals and unpleasant- nesses, deficits and deadlocks, which showed pretty clearly that things were not going on quite as they should. Jamaica, by right of superiority, alike in area and extent of mischief, took the first place, the Leeward Islands were not far behind, and the Wind- ward Islands shared the second place with the Leewards. As the year wore on things grew worse instead of better, and the Windwards, by virtue of very scandalous proceedings in Grenada, the second island of the group as then constituted, bade fair to outstrip Jamaica. Then the Colonial Office be- stirred itself to apply the universal panacea for all administrative evils, and a Royal Commission was ap- pointed to inquire into the public revenues, expenditure, debts, and lia- bilities of Jamaica, the Leeward Islands and the Windward Islands, ex- clusive of Barbados ; which last, enjoy- ing representative government and being at that time highly prosperous, stood, unlike her crown-colony go- verned sisters, in no need of such min- istrations. This step taken all pro- gress, as is usual in such cases, came to a standstill in the places concerned. It was of no use to ask if this or that might be done ; the answer was al- ways the same, viz., that the Secretary of State would reply when the Report of the Commissioners had been received. Estimates, repairs to buildings, those present stitches which save nine in the future, all were postponed alike. The colonial authorities on the spot were at first inclined to be indignant, but they were quite helpless ; and so there was nothing for it but to force the report of the Royal Commission down

the throats of all, from highest to lowest. At the beginning of the year 1883 the Commissioners — two gentle- men, to the great good fortune of those concerned, of tried experience and ability — arrived and commenced their labours in Jamaica, proceeded thence to the Leewards, and on the 1st of April began their inquiry in the Windward group. Their coming caused in some cases considerable ex- citement, and raised not a few false hopes. In one island, where expendi- ture, public and private alike, main- tains normally an excess over revenue, the poorer part of the population imagined that the millennium was come. But no — it was only the Royal Commission. By the 23rd of April the Commissioners had finished their inquiries and inspections, and they sailed on the 31st for England, bear- ing with them a vast quantity of papers and a goodly show of island pro- duce (including a live snake in a hat- box), the gifts of the many friends and admirers that their uniform kindness and courtesy had gained for them. Then the colonial authorities, some- what weary of furnishing returns and answering questions, sat down and waited for the report till April, 1884. At last, however, it appeared, and then was explained the reason of the delay. In the Windward Islands (with which alone we are here con- cerned) the Commissioners, while denying the general condition to be retrogressive, admitted that things were backward and progress slow, and hit unerringly on the true causes thereof, viz., bad government and want of capital and labour. They accordingly recommended that the group should be confederated and the centre of government fixed at Grenada. And they prepared a most exhaustive scheme of administrative and financial

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reform, which they had just reason to hope would insure greater economy, greater efficiency, and increased pros- perity. All, however, depended on the confederation of the group, to which, at the time of their visit, the island governments appeared to be favourably inclined ; but now the several islands refuse to be united, and the result is, that although the head-quarters of the group have been transferred, as recommended, to Gre- nada, the old system continues in force — a system so foolish and futile that no advance can be expected until it is swept away.

But before going further it will be better to state definitely that the Windward Islands (as hinted above) form one group of our insular posses- sions in the West Indies; their several names being St. Vincent, Grenada, Tobago, and St. Lucia. Being wind- ward, i.e. trade-windward, they are the nearest to England, and they lie in the form of an obtuse-angled tri- angle, between 60° and 62° long, and 11° and 14° lat., Grenada being situate at the west or obtuse angle, St. Lucia at the north, and Tobago at the south angle ; while a line drawn from the centre of Grenada would pass through St. Vincent, traversing on its way the chains of islets which run be- tween the latter island and Grenada, and, though bearing the name of Gre- nadines, are shared as dependencies of both. In a line due west from St. Vincent, and 110 miles distant, lies Barbados, once the chief of the group, but this year separated and made a distinct government to herself.

The history of these four islands is full of interest, but it must suffice here to say that they have been more or less in our possession for the last 100 or 120 years. I say "more or less," because in the closing twenty years of the last century and the opening ten of the present they were in a chronic state of capture and recapture, now French and now English. Grenada and St. Lucia were, however, originally settled by France and St. Vincent by

England; while the first settlers in Tobago — though this island was, like St. Vincent, granted by an English king to a favourite — were Zealanders sent out by a Dutch merchant com- pany. Once the richest of our colonies they were reduced to insignificance by the emancipation of the slaves and the equalisation of the sugar duties, and have never recovered their former prosperity. As a consequence they have been neglected by England; and though the scene of much hard fight- ing, both by sea and land, during the great war with France, and of not a few glorious victories, few now know or seek to know anything of them.

Up to the year 1876 each of these islands, except St. Lucia, enjoyed the blessing of representative government. Each had its governor or lieutenant- governor, its little house of commons (sixteen to twenty-six members), and its little house of peers (not hereditary), with the title of " honourable." In places so small and unimportant such a form of government could not but be inefficient and ridiculous. Elections were a farce, and the transactions of the house puerile and absurd. It was found impossible to persuade honour- able members to take a proper interest in the business of the colony, and the result was that none attended save a few verbose and not over respectable individuals, who, having a distaste for work, and being withal aspirants to importance, sought to gratify these aspirations by bringing forward absurd notions in ungrammatical speeches, passing unconstitutional acts, and generally converting the floor of the house into a fishless Billingsgate. One such individual divided the house (seven members present if I recollect aright) no fewer than forty-four times in one afternoon ; and I have seen a despatch from the Colonial Office where- in out of five acts sent up for confirma- tion two were disallowed as unconsti- tutional. Thus constitutional govern- ment in these islands, however valu- able for purposes of public diversion, became useless for its true object, and

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hence, in 1876, it was swept away by the voluntary act of each, regretted only by those who, having lived on its abuses, now found their occupation gone.

The new form of government, that now existent, is of course the opposite pole to the old : being that known as Crown Colony Government by which all power is vested in a governor or administrator, assisted by an execu- tive council, comprising the two chief officials, treasurer and attorney- general, with occasionally an unofficial member or two ; and by a legislative council, including all the above, with the addition of an official or two more and an equal or less number of un- official members nominated by the Crown. Thus provision is made for rapid if not for sensible legislation, and, as may be seen, the Colonial Office can procure at any time the passage of any measures that it wishes : a power not always appreciated in the colony. But in respect of the civil service, which needs reform at least as urgently, each kept and keeps, as under the old regime, what is described by a "West Indian as " the parapher- nalia of a kingdom with the popula- tion of a fourth-rate English town." Each of the four has its own adminis- trator, chief justice (except St. Lucia and Tobago, which share one judge between them), attorney - general, treasurer and staff, auditor and staff, colonial engineer, chief of police and police force, with medical officers and minor officials innumerable, to say nothing of separate prisons, and other institutions, widely different tariffs, and its own distinct and very diffuse statute book. The islands average the Isle of Wight in size, and the total population is about 110,000 souls ; the number of salaried officials in 1881 (and no great reduction, if any, has since been made) was 403, of whom perhaps forty were efficient, costing 50,889^. Nor does the ma- chinery of administration end here. The administrators can do little or nothing without the sanction of the

governor-in-chief, and the governor- in-chief in his turn little or nothing without the sanction of the Colonial Office, always particularly jealous in the" matter of Crown Colonies ; while the Colonial Office in its turn is subject to the influence of two more independent bodies — the West India Committee, and, most potent of all, Exeter Hall. "The West India Committee in London (to use the words of the Royal Commissioners), a body interested in but certainly not resident in the islands, has on occasions claimed (and, it might have been added, successfully claimed) sufficient influence to advise the Imperial authorities that ordinances passed by the local legislatures be disallowed as being opposed to what the Committee consider to be to the best ? interests of the islands." This body is made up of gentlemen or re- presentatives of firms with estates situated and money invested in the West Indies, and it would hardly be too much to say that the great majority of the planters are in debt to one or other of the gentlemen or firms therein represented. What it considers to be to the best interests of the islands coincides with that which it considers best for its own interests : where the two interests are identical it does good work, but experience shows that this is not invariably the case.

On the spot, however, the only bond of union for the group is the governor-in-chief. It is true that after the reforms of 1876 an attempt was made at confederation, but it was then proposed to incorporate Bar- bados also, and Barbados firmly declined. Then came mismanagement and rioting, so the scheme was given up. The union, sxich as it is, should be closer now that the governor-in- chief has only four islands instead of five to manage and those all under the same form of government. When the head-quarters were at Barbados the union was purely nominal, for the simple reason that he was utterly

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unprovided with a proper staff. In every island, of course, there were officials without end, but for the man- agement of the group as a whole (and it must be remembered that the governor-in-chief is the medium of communication between the various administrators and the Colonial Office) he had nothing but his own private office, consisting of a private secretary and two clerks. No provision has been made for any alteration of this system ; the necessity for it having apparently been overlooked, though, as will, I think, be seen from the refusal of the islands to be united, now more urgent than ever.

While the head-quarters were at Barbados (and things cannot have changed much in three months) the work in the Crown Colony Islands was most inefficiently done, and had to be done anew in the governor-in- chief's office. This, of course, caused an immense amount of correspondence which might otherwise have been avoided, besides a vast deal of trouble and unpleasantness. The variety of questions that came for solution to an office entirely destitute of technical assistance was extraordinary ; finan- cial, legal, medical, and, of course, legislative ; estimates to be recast, plans for public works to be examined, ordinances to be amended, sometimes almost redrafted, all by this hard- worked little body. Happily, for the last ten years, the governors-in-chief have been singularly able men and aided by exceptionally able assistants on the permanent staff of the office : and it is due to the chiefs of depart- ments in Barbados to say that when technical help was absolutely indis- pensable, none could have given it more loyally and willingly than they did, though such aid formed no part of their regular duties. Hence it was that this makeshift lasted so long ; and it is no slight compliment to the members of the governor-in-chief's office that its reform should have seemed unnecessary. None could have done the work more efficiently than

the two gentlemen who, though young and underpaid, held the post of chief clerk between 1877 and the present year; but the labour was far too severe for so small a staff, and it was not right (though I do not think it did any harm) that such important work should have been intrusted, as it was at one time, to a chief clerk of twenty- three, a private secretary of twenty- two, and a second clerk of nineteen.

Meanwhile it may be asked how it was that the men who swallowed up 50,889?. of salaries showed so little value for the money. The answer is simple enough, and is equally true now : a great many are incompetent and some dishonest. Then it may be asked why not rid the service of them and obtain competent men 1 The answer is again perfectly simple : they are not to be obtained at the salaries offered. The fact has long been recognised, and it was brought forward by the commissioners in three pithy and telling sentences. " The low salaries are presumably in pro- portion to the quantity of the work, but altogether inadequate if the quality be taken into consideration. We are of opinion that the recent scandals in Grenada and elsewhere are due to causes always possible and indeed probable where officials gene- rally have to accept such low salaries, while the duties they are called upon to perform are of the highest order. Even if bona fides be secured, as it often is, such salaries are certainly insufficient to attract the necessary training, ability, or independence." The insertion of the words "as it often is," perhaps intended to modify the severity of the preceding sen- tences, indicates most happily the character of the civil service of the Windward Islands, and the sarcasm, even if unconscious, is certainly not unmerited.

Let us examine first the highest paid officials — the administrators. The salaries were, when the commissioners made this report, as follows : — Grenada, 1,300?. ; St. Yincent and St. Lucia,

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1,0001. ; Tobago, 800/. Well, it may be said, that is not bad pay ; there must be plenty of men ready to accept such salaries. Quite so ; there is no lack of men ready' to accept 1000Z. a year, but the question is whether they are fit to govern a colony. As to the work, that depends in great measure on the administrator himself ; the busiest are not always the best, and the best are apt to com- plain, in these little islands, that time hangs heavy on their hands. The first duty of an administrator in a small Crown Colony is, I take it, to keep a balance in the treasury ; the next to make his officers work, and keep them from quarrelling — neither the easiest of tasks in the West Indies. If he succeed so far he does pretty well, but to be of real value he must have a good constitution, energy, tact and common sense ; he must be as ubiqui- tous as an estate-agent, and watch every department with vigilance. Now, considering the difficulty there is in finding men so gifted for pleasanter and better paid places, no one need be surprised that few are ready to exchange such qualifications for 1UOO£. a year and exile in a wretched little island. But the fault in the matter of the administrators was not attri- butable to salaries only. There was a strong tendency, not yet wholly extinct, on the part of the Colonial Office to utilise these small adminis- tratorships as quasi-pensions for men of a certain standing in the colonial service, or with certain claims on it, who were, either through age or natural defects, totally unfit for the work. Any one is supposed to be good enough for the poor West Indian Islands, and so they were (I hope it is a thing of the past) made a refuge for placemen and others, who, having failed in other positions, not so much for want of uprightness as want of sense, had to be provided for some- where. It has long been a standing complaint in the West Indian Civil Service that men seem to think failure in all other callings adequate qualifi- cation for employment therein. The No. 311. — VOL. LII.

complaint is well grounded, but when the Imperial Government sets the example in the highest colonial places, the colonists can hardly be blamed for following suit. The consequences to these islands have been most disas- trous, and their present backward condition is doubtless due quite as much to bad government as want of labour and capital. Nor does it seem probable that any improvement is to be expected at present, since, owing perhaps to the necessity for retrench- ment, the administrators' salaries in these islands are to be reduced instead of increased as the commission recom- mended. This, however, may possibly attract young men who are far the most desirable .for these posts : from them some energy and active co-opera- tion with an able governor-in-chief, may be expected, which cannot be from men who have got through the best part of their lives and have no hope of promotion. It must, however, be admitted that some of the older among the recent administrators in the Windward Islands displayed an activity in certain directions which was the amazement even of those who knew them best. There were men, wonderful men, with Saxon blue ribbons and scarlet stripes, who could always be relied on to show an annual deficit in the treasury, half yearly scandals in the public service, and quarterly quarrels among the prin- cipal officials, in which they themselves frequently took a prominent share. Thus time which should have been devoted to active supervision of all public work was given up to writing long despatches with bulky inclosures, full of false arguments, pointless re- crimination and bad grammar. Sub- ordinate officials of superior capacity, delighting to see their chiefs go wrong, made no effort to set them right in palpable mistakes : and so the public business floundered on. Then the governor-in-chief had to set matters right, meting out knuckle-rappings all round ; whereupon the parties would sometimes unite in a common griev- ance against him, and the adminis-

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trator, elated at finding his advisers for once at his back, would write an impertinent despatch maintaining his own position by illogical conclusions, drawn, in obscure language, from doubtful premisses, and concluding sometimes with such a sentence as this, " In this opinion the Executive Council concur, copy herewith." Then, of course, the knuckle-rappings were dealt out afresh with increased severity and the council, somewhat scared, would rescind its obnoxious resolu- tion ("copy herewith "); and there- upon internal dissension, recruited by a short rest, arose anew with still greater activity.

The next in rank among the active officials are the crown law officers, or, as they are called, attorneys-general. The work assigned to them, including as it does the draftirg of all ordi- nances, is most important, and calls especially for able and trustworthy men ; for, owing to the governor- in- chief's lack of a legal assistant, little or no supervision can be given to it short of the Colonial Office. The salary in each of the four islands is 400?., and as it would obviously be impos- sible to obtain men of any legal stand- ing whatever for this sum, it is neces- sary to allow them private practice ; a system obviously pernicious, and in such small places perilous in the ex- treme. Nevertheless, the positively evil effects have been fewer than might have been expected.

Next after these rank the treasurers, with salaries varying from 400?. to 500?. per annum. Although the treasurer has always charge of the revenue department, the work is not heavy, and the salaries are in so far adequate, but to insure the employ- ment of properly-trained and inde- pendent men, far too small. Hence gentlemen are frequently selected, from occupations utterly unconnected with finance, to fulfil these duties, simply because they can be depended on not to rob the till. This of course is a great desideratum, and it is a great relief to be sure that it is attained ; but the colonies suffer none the less

from such appointments, for financial ability is of the last importance to them, and no crude zeal, however honest, can supply the omission. For the audit of accounts there are four auditors, with salaries from 200?. to 300?., but, unlike the treasurers, with- out a seat ex-officio in the council. As the auditors are charged with the pre- paration of the estimates, and their functions are really of at least equal importance to those of the treasurers, this undervaluation of their office is a mistaken and mischievous policy. Among the minor officials of the re- venue department embezzlement is of frequent occurrence, and may be ex- pected to continue so ; cases are not unknown in the post-office also, and sometimes, though more rarely, even among the higher officials. Minor salaried officials are, in all cases, of a piece with their superiors ; gaol scandals, hospital scandals, coolie im- migrant scandals are common, and cause no great surprise.

As to the legislative machinery, the legislative council includes, of course, members of all kinds. Of the officials mention has already been made ; among the unofficial, then, are gentle- men who work for the good of the colony (rare in most islands), indi- viduals who combine with officials to rob it, men who always support the administrator, men (sometimes vete- rans of the old assembly) who, on principle, oppose him ; men who sup- port him when sober and oppose him when drunk, and vice versd ; all some- what fond of airing their opinions and embodying them in the form of long- written protests to the Secretary of State. The proceedings at the sittings, held weekly or fortnightly, are not always of a very dignified character, and the rapidity, not to say apathy, with which ordinances are passed is startling. The attorney-general intro- duces bills, as a rule, though sometimes preceded by the administrator, and beyond a few not always pertinent questions, the measure, unless the spirit of opposition is unusually strong, passes without debate. Sup-

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pose, for example, that for public con- venience, and in the ulterior hope of obtaining a small revenue, an ordi- nance is proposed, say for the regis- tration of cats, the minutes of the council, if given with rather more ful- ness and faithfulness than usual, would often run somewhat as follows : —

The minutes of the previous meet- ing having been read and confirmed, the administrator rose to move the second reading of the Cat's Registra- tion Ordinance. The council would remember (he said) that at the last meeting the attorney-general, on intro- ducing this measure, had explained its object and entered into some of its provisions. These he (the adminis- trator) would now briefly recapitu- late. He had taken, throughout a not uneventful life, a peculiar interest in cats, and might, he thought, fairly say, without undue arrogance, that he understood those animals better than most men. Thus he was happy to say that, with the assistance of the attorney-general on a few technical points, he had been able to draft a bill, which, in his opinion, amply pro- vided for a simple, thorough, and effi- cient census of the cats in the island, with a view to their careful preserva- tion for the extinction of rats and other vermin, whose abundance exer- cised a highly deleterious influence on the staple crop of the colony, the sugar cane. (The council here exchanged meaning smiles.) This would be done at a nominal cost, which it was reason- able to expect would be made good, and more, by the small registration fee exacted under the provisions of clause — . He was confident that such an enactment would go far to enhance the prosperity of the island, and would be another step in the ad- vance of commerce, civilisation, and liberty, which they all held dear. He would not detain them longer, but heartily commended the bill to the favourable treatment of the council.

The attorney-general seconded the motion.

The clerk rose to commence the

second reading, when an unofficial member rose, and, in husky and broken tones, protested against this hasty legislation. He had never seen the bill before, and entertained the strongest objections to it. He took this opportunity of complaining of the laxity of the clerk in sending copies of draft ordinances to members of council.

The clerk (with permission) ex- plained that he was quite sure he had sent the honourable member a copy of the ordinance in question a fortnight ago, this with all respect to the honour- able member.

The honourable member said he had never seen it — no, nor any other draft ordinance for a year before that date.

The administrator begged the hon- ourable member's pardon, but he could bear out his clerk's statement. The honourable member appeared to have forgotten that at the last meeting he supported this bill, and spoke in high approval of it.

The honourable member had no recollection whatever of the fact.

The administrator said he was in the recollection of the council ; he feared the honourable member's memory was a short one.

The honourable member, after smil- ing blandly on the council for some seconds, said that this circumstance reminded him of an anecdote which he had forgotten. (After struggling for some minutes with recollections that seemed to overpower him, the honour- able member sat down abruptly with some violence, and was silent.) The bill was read a second time. The attorney-general moved that it be read a third time and passed.

The honourable member aforesaid rose suddenly, and said that His Honour ' had insulted him. — (Cries of " Order," interspersed with soothing ejaculations, amid which the bill was read a third time, and passed.)

1 An Administrator is by regulation "His Honour;" by adulation only, "His Excel- lency."

z 2

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Thereupon, it would be sent up to the governor-in-chief, and by him transmitted to the Colonial Office, from which, after a month or two, a de- spatch would arrive, saying that the meaning of the word " cat," for pur- poses of the ordinance was insuffi- ciently explained in the definition clause, and ordering an amending ordi- nance to be passed, inserting the word " puss " between the words " torn " and "tabby," or some such thing. Then the scene would be repeated over, "An Ordinance intituled, an Ordinance to amend an Ordinance to provide for the Registration of Cats," containing a preamble and one clause. This may be thought an exaggeration, but it is not so ; the imaginary ordinance is not more ridiculous, and might be found of greater value than some of those passed by these island legislatures.

Such was the administration of the Windward Islands generally, in spite of all the efforts of able and ener- getic governors-in-chief. Nevertheless, under a good administrator, much use- ful work could be done, but this was unfortunately the exception. In some cases it was impossible to obtain the execution of the simplest orders aright, and little confidence could be placed in men who, often with the best inten- tions, invariably chose the worst of two alternatives, and never failed in a dis- pute, even if originally in the right, to place themselves in the wrong. And if any one would know what distrust of the government can do in these little places, let them learn that two years ago government by French Radicals of the worst type, drove 56,000£. of capital (a large sum in those little places) from Martinique . into St. Lucia, and obliged the bank to raise the rate of discount.

The reforms suggested by the Com- mission were on so uniform a system, that a short explanation will suffice. First, the four islands were to have been confederated, the central govern- ment being fixed at Grenada, with a council, including representatives from each. In regard to the departments, the

same plans were to have been followed throughout ; one well-paid chief at head-quarters, with subordinates, whom he would be bound to visit constantly, in each island. Thus for four adminis- trators under the old regime were to be substituted one governor, with suffi- cient salary to attract good men, and three resident magistrates, with half the salary of the old administrators; similarly there was to be one treasurer- in-chief, and one attorney-general for the group, with double the present salaries. Further, gaols, hospitals, and other public institutions were to be centralised, the laws consolidated, the tariffs and shipping dues made uniform for the group. These mea- sures were justly expected to produce increased revenue, greater prosperity, and more efficient service ; decreased expenditure was also counted upon, though not with such good reason. But one thing is certain, that the proposed scheme would have been a great im- provement on the present system, and it is much to be regretted that the colonists should have rejected it. That they should have done so is, however, matter of no surprise, so deep-rooted is the distrust of the executive and the Colonial Office, owing to years of mis- government.

Before examining each island sepa- rately, it is necessary to look at the other causes to which the backward- ness and slow progress of these islands is due, viz. the want of labour and capital. As regards capital, the diffi- culty of obtaining labour is one great deterrent, and the other (which does not apply to St. Lucia) is the restric- tion of its influx by the priority given to consignees' liens by the rule of the West India Encumbered Estates Court, " which prevents capitalists advancing money on the security of real property mortgages." St. Vincent, Grenada, and Tobago in the Windward group placed themselves under the court, and this rule of priority has been the ruin of many planters. Its effects as generally understood in the islands themselves, are exactly those summed

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up by the commissioners in their report as to the working of the court.

" Leading lawyers, warn their clients that mortgages on estates are worth- less as securities. Planters can only obtain money from the one, two or three firms who happen to be con- signees, as well as to have command of capital. These firms thus obtain the monopoly of the supply of money. And in some of the islands the greater part of the cultivatable land has fallen into the hands of one mercantile firm in London, which has made such ad- vances. We may instance the island of St. Vincent, where by far the greatest part of the available land is now in the hands of one London firm."

"The ultimate price of these advances varies in different cases. Usually the consignee undertakes the sale of the sugar, demanding a certain kind of sugar, and deciding on the time and place of sale. He also supplies the estate with all stores and machinery, and obliges the planter to use his ships. The planter thus loses all advantages of choice of time, and place of sale, all advantages of change in the kind of sugar made. He has to pay a varying ' extra ' as commission on sale, extra freight, extra profit on stores and machinery, which the con- signee charges, or may charge, in virtue of his monopoly. It has been calculated that in some cases the planter is forced ultimately to pay twelve to fifteen per cent, for the money he borrows. As we shall see in detail those colonies in which the consignee enjoys the priority of lien are the very colonies which suffer from a want of capital. In these colonies there is less progress, less prosperity, less profit."

To show how it is that estates accu- mulate in the hands of a London firm, the following remarks of an ex-attorney general in the West Indies will suffice : — "The consignee having advanced money has only to insist on new ma- chinery being put up, or some other large outlay, and then suddenly to demand repayment. The estate is put

through the court and bought by him at a low price."

The report of the commissioners has given this court its death blow, and it is shortly to be abolished. In its time it has done some good, but for many years it has been simply a burden, and the planter will rejoice to be freed from it.

As to the question of labour the answer is simple enough. The negro will not work on estates. This may be questioned by those who, from igno- rance of the facts, or confusion of East Indian with African coloured men, hold that the negro is irreproachably industrious ; but none the less it is the truth, and serious enough. The reasons advanced to account for it are various, — low rate of wages, oppression of planters— but, in reality, it is simply the negro's distaste for work in the abstract. I do not mean to imply that he is in this respect singular, but cer- tainly his enjoyment of absolute idle- ness is marvellously keen, indeed really enviable. His strength is to sit still, in the shade, if it be hot — in the sun if it be cool. It is per- fectly true that some labourers are always preferring complaints against the planters, more especially against the employers of coolie immigrant labour ; but a negro's accusations are always to be received with caution, the more so as planters prefer negro-labour to that of coolies, and are ready to pay higher -for it. Nor is the remuneration inadequate, though, perhaps, to English notions small, Wd. to Is. 3d. being the usual daily wages, (though more can be earned), generally supplemented by as much sugar-cane as the labourer can eat, rations of rum and sugar juice, and very often a plot of ground, sometimes granted for rent and some- times free. Considering that a shilling will in most places feed a man for a week, this cannot be deemed illiberal or insufficient, but even where the cost of living is so small, there is a great deal of poverty, due simply to the preference given by the negro to a pig's life. Again, even those that do work

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for wages will not work regularly ; a St. Lucia planter stated to the commis- sion that he doubted if regular negro labour could be obtained at 18s. a week.

Squatting is a very serious mischief, so serious that nothing but effete administration would have suffered it to exist so long. In every island there are large tracts of Crown land, or land owned by nobody in particu- lar ; for boundaries of estates are ill- defined and titles not always clear. In these tracts flourish the squatters and riff-raff of the island. The first step is to cut down the trees which cover the ground, often valuable woods, and burn them for charcoal ; then the newly cleared plot is planted with plantains and other food crops, which, owing to the fertility of the soil require little or no cultivation, and there sits our friend idle till the little plot is cropped to death, when he moves on and clears another such, leaving the exhausted soil to be covered with rank useless jungle. Thus the land is wasted (for as soon as it ceases to produce food sponta- neously it is abandoned), and the rain- fall seriously impaired — the removal of a dozen tall trees on a hill-top being quite enough to make the difference of abundance or drought in the valley adjoining. In St. Lucia the mischief was checked by a thorough survey of the island, by which all boundaries were defined and titles properly ascer- tained, so that no squatter was safe ; but in St. Lucia only of the Wind- ward group. The whole question, in- volving as it does that of forest con- servation, is of vital importance to these islands, and should be taken in hand as early as possible before it is too late. I believe there is more wealth in some of these untouched forests than many dream of.

Smuggling is very profitable and very popular. The facilities for it are great, owing to the number of little inlets all round the islands, the thin- ness of the population and the practi- cal absence of prevention. It is im-

possible to provide a proper remedy against it without co-operation on the part of all the islands, Windward and Leeward, French and English, and even so the cost of an efficient preven- tive service would probably be too heavy. Something may be done, and latterly has been done, by stationing police at favourite spots, and assimi- lation of tariffs might also help some- what by making smuggling less profit- able. But there is too much reason to fear that planters profit by it as well as the lower classes, and if this be the case, the difficulties of putting a stop to illicit traffic will necessarily be greatly increased.

Thus the mischief due to these three causes, which might with proper government have been considerably reduced, is done ; and now much of it is past healing. It must, however, be said in justice to the negroes, that as peasant proprietors they are industri- ous and add materially to the pros- perity of the islands where such a class exists ; but at present it is found in Grenada alone of the Wind- ward group. Meanwhile, it has been necessary to import coolie labour from the East Indies at heavy expense, which isolation and bad administra- tion have not served to make lighter. In the first place, the islands, being disunited, cannot afford to keep their own immigration agent in India, and so have to depend on those of other colonies ; and secondly, owing to mis- management and helplessness on the part of the local executive, planters have frequently been put to great ex- pense and received not a coolie in return. Then again, coolies do not as a rule stay in these small islands, but either claim their return passage to India or go across to Trinidad and British Guiana, where their brethren exist by tens of thousands and rise, in many cases, to affluence. Further, there is at present another distinct attraction which draws the labour- ing population away from the West. Indies generally, viz., the Panama Canal Works. The company offers

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a dollar a day to negroes, and its agents are busy in every island. This is practically remediless, though some thing may be done, by warning all who go, that if they return as paupers the colony will not be burdened with their support. A notice to this effect was issued in Barbados in 1882, and was found a most successful deterrent. But now it is time to pay a short visit to the several islands of the group, and Grenada being the head- quarters let us begin with that. There she is, like all her sisters from Trini- dad to Guadaloupe (and further for aught I know), a rugged mass of red rock and soil hurled up from the beautiful blue water, tumbled into lofty mountains and deep precipitous valleys, and clothed with a mantle of green ; wondrously beautiful, won- drously fertile, and reminded even now by occasional gentle earthshak- ings of her origin. The capital town of St. George's is, of course, on the lee- ward or western side, and the harbour is of the loveliest. The entrance is narrow and commanded by an old fort, a hundred feet above the sea, on the left thereof (for Grenada has changed hands more than once, and has seen some fighting in her time), and the quaint little town with its red French roofs curves round a steep hill-side at the head of the inlet. The streets are narrow and paved with cobble-stones, but there is no- thing that is interesting and a good deal that is unsavoury, so it is better to go at once to Government House, a hundred feet or so above it, and look inland. What is then to be seen ? Mountains and forest, and apparently only one house ; a wooded Dartmoor : but there are houses for all that, and what you take for forest is not all forest, but partly cacao plantations. And if you take a ride along the roads southward or westward (always assuming them to be passable) you shall find plenty of sugar-cane fields, though not so many as you would have years ago, and a great many hill-sides planted ap-

parently with bananas, but in reality with cacao, for young cacao-trees are delicate and each must have its banana to shelter it from the sun. In a word Grenada is become a cacao instead of a sugar-growing island, and should do well. You shall find also nutmegs, a crop which pays well when the trees begin to bear, but, as with cacao, you must wait a few years and keep the ground clean. Nor is it every nut- meg-tree that will bear fruit, but only the female tree, and the percentage of males to females is remarkably small. Still, nutmegs pay well, and there is talk of trees being worth 40£. or 501. annually. Pretty fruit it is too when ripe : the colour of an apri- cot, but smaller, with a deep split in one side, showing a clot of blood red. That clot is mace, or allspice, which thinly overlays one side of the kernel or true nutmeg. Both are valuable commercially, and the outer rind makes excellent preserve. What would you more ? Here is an isolated cocoa-tree, low but wide-spreading, with black trunk and long leaves like those of the Spanish chestnut, but darker and glossier, amid which you can see the great yellow pods shining like lamps. This also is a crop that pays well (if anything pays in these hard times) ; no continual need of skilled cultivation as with sugar, and no expense in working up the raw material. Here is a whole plantation of bearing trees : push on a little and you will find the estate buildings. Watch that negro as he cuts open the pods ; there you see a number of purple brown beans, between thirty and forty if you count, each about the size of a filbert, floating in what ap- pears to be liquid tallow. Now all those beans will be buried in leaves to ferment and " sweat out" that starchy, tallow-like matter, and then laid on the trollies, which are simply large trays on wheels, to dry in the sun. If rain should come on the trollies will be run under the house for shelter. That is the whole process here, except the packing of the beans in bags of,

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roughly, a hundred pounds weight, which, in good times, are worth from 45s. to 80s., according to quality. Then, besides cacao and nutmeg, we have vanilla, cloves, ginger, Liberian coffee, and Tonquin beans in small but increasing quantities ; while of oranges, guavas, mangos, and other fruits we take no account.

With all this Grenada should be a nourishing island, and so in a certain sense it is, but there is plenty of room for further development. Not above three-eighths of the land are cultivated, and there are but 43,000 inhabitants to a total area of 133 square miles. It is curious to note the difference that a century has made in these islands. In the four years 1878-1882 the annual exports from Grenada average as follows : — Sugar, 4,250,000 Ibs.; mo- lasses, nil ; rum, 10, 000 gallons; cacao, 4,450,000 Ibs.— valued at 210,000?. without any deduction. In 1776 ths exports were : — Sugar, 23,285,764 Ibs. ; rum, 818,700 gallons ; cacao, 457,719 Ibs.; coffee, 1,827,166 Ibs.; cotton, 91,943 Ibs.; indigo, 27,638 Ibs. — valued at the port of shipment after the deduction of freight duties, insurance and other charges, at 600,000?. In the same year 72,141 acres paid land-tax, and it was esti- mated that 50,000 were actually culti- vated ; in 1883 17,780 acres only were under cultivation, and yet the popula- tion in 1776 was 37,000 as against 43,000 at present, but of these 35,000 were slaves.

Still, the comparison would not tell so adversely to the present were it not that the revival of the island has been retarded by bad government. Grenada has been peculiarly unfortunate in her rulers : intemperance, incompetence, and imbecility have played a leading part latterly in her administration, and private enterprise has been greatly hampered thereby. Money liberally voted by the Legislative Council has been squandered and misappropriated. Grenada may be thankful that her central position has secured for her the headquarters of government ;

henceforth she may possibly be safer from scandals and the demoralisation consequent thereon.

From Grenada let us pass north- ward, along the chain of the Grenadines, to St. Vincent. The capital, Kings- town, can boast of no harbour ; nothing but an open roadstead, a narrow bay between two lofty horns. On the left horn is Fort Charlotte, 1100 feet above the sea, once renowned as impregnable ; for St. Vincent has seen more fighting than some islands, and at one time needed four English generals and 7,000 men to put down the French and insurgent blacks. From this fort, now used as police barracks, there is a good view of the town as it lies in a gentle curve along the narrow plain adjoining the beach. Its construction is simple : three streets a mile and a half long parallel to each other and to the sea, and as many running at right angles to them ; the town ceasing abruptly where the ground begins to rise towards Mount St. Andrew, which towers up 2000 feet behind the whole. St. Vincent is rather larger than Grenada, equally beautiful and fertile, and nearly half of it is cultivated. Sugar, unfortunately, constitutes the staple product, but there is also con- siderable cultivation of arrowroot to the value of 30,000?. to 40,000?. annually. The island has suffered much owing to the accumulation of the greater part of the land in the hands of a single English firm, which, having the monopoly of capital and hence pre- ponderating influence, holds the island practically in the hollow of its hand. These large proprietors will permit of no small holdings : they will let land for rent, but they will not sell ; and they insist on the cultivation of sugar only, desiring to keep the people de- pendent on them — a vicious system fostered by the West Indian Encum- bered Estates Court. Now the English sugar market has collapsed, and what will happen to St. Vincent no one knows. It is most probable that, unless some new convention be con-

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eluded with the United States, the land will go out of cultivation, and the colony be ruined owing to the short-sighted and selfish policy of the monopolist consignees. They, of course, will suffer as well as the island, but they deserve no pity, for it is they that have for so many years drawn large incomes from the West Indian Colonies giving nothing countervalent in re- turn, and have done, with their peers, incalculable injury, not in St. Vincent only but throughout the length and breadth of the Caribbean Archipelago. And poor St. Vincent is in other respects also an unlucky place : she has suffered above her sisters from wars, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, and bad government. Once the botanic garden of the West Indies she has given place to Trinidad, and though some of the finest known nutmeg trees still flourish around the Govern- ment House to tell of past glory, yet they have latterly served only to put another hundred pounds a year into the pockets of an unsuccessful admi- nistrator.

But we must leave St. Vincent and away, still northward, to St. Lucia. Our point is the two peaks visible many miles away over the sea-line : these are the Pitons, at the south-west corner of the islands, two sugarloaf- like mountains rising side by side sheer out of the sea to a height of near 4000 feet ; the finest sight, some say, that is to be seen in the West Indies. Castries, the capital, is further to the north, tucked away in a long, deep inlet, snug and safe. Look away a mile or two to your left as you enter the harbour and you will see a bay with a small conical islet, barely apart from the mainland, at one end thereof ; that is Pigeon Island and the bay is Gros Islet bay. You know the names, of course ? No ! Well, it was from that bay that Rodney started on the 8th April, 1782, in pursuit of the the French fleet under the Comte de Grasse, beginning on that day the action finally decided by the great victory of the 12th; and it was on

that island, once strongly fortified and still covered with ruins of large barracks, that he stood and watched and longed for the appearance of the enemy. Nay, it was by Rodney's advice (so it is said) that we took St. Lucia, instead of Martinique, at the final conclusion of peace with France, for the sake of the harbour of Castries, which no hurricane can render unsafe. As usual there are lofty hills all around the inlet ; that on the right as you enter, with the ruined fort at the summit, is the Morne Fortunee. That name is, at any rate, familiar ] No ! Well, this same Morne was in April and May, 1796, the scene of fierce fighting between the English and French. The English, under Sir Ralph Abercrombie, were the assailants, and actually drove the French from that terribly strong position ; in which operations Brigadier John Moore so greatly distinguished himself that he was left to complete the subjugation of the island and to govern it when subdued. Moore remained in St. Lucia till 1797, refusing, meanwhile, the government of Grenada, and went home after two attacks of yellow fever ; from the second of which he was saved, almost literally from his wind- ing sheet, to be buried, as every one knows, after years more of fighting, in his cloak at Corufia. Government House is still at the top of the Morne, and a military cemetery, until the advent of another soldier Governor four years ago, neglected and uncared for, is within a stone's throw. The road leading to it is so steep that a carriage can hardly ascend it, and how Moore got his guns up not only here, but also to higher hills behind, is a marvel. St. Lucia is still French in everything but name ; the cheery hospitable planters speak French or at all events prefer it, and the negroes have, as in Grenada, their own extraordinary patois. It is really a thriving little place, on a larger and grander scale than the rest of the group, nearly twice the size, in fact, of Grenada, but with a smaller population. Neverthe-

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less, though far harder to traverse than the rest, owing to excessive ruggedness and not quite so healthy as they are, it is far happier, quieter, and more prosperous, and its exports considerably exceed theirs. But then St. Lucia has never had a parody of representative government, nor the benefit of the West Indian Encumbered Estates Court, and, more important than all, has been fortunate in her administrators. Hence it was that the old families of Martinique, feeling no confidence in their own govern- ment, brought capital exceeding a year's revenue into St. Lucia, and thought it worth while to give 56,000?, for a valley sold but five years previously for 4,000?. Close to Castries is a Usine or Central Sugar Factory on the French system, and very good sugar it produces ; but here again the state of the sugar market must hit St. Lucia hard, yet not, it is devoutly to be hoped, fatally hard. Though sugar is the staple crop, cocoa is rising in popularity, and logwood forms also an article of export ; moreover, efforts are making to cultivate tobacco, for which the soil is well suited. Then again the harbour is naturally very good and with some expenditure may be greatly improved ; already A-tlantic steamers can coal alongside the wharfs, and no fewer than eight lines make Castries a coaling station. To make the harbour perfect, elaborate plans and estimates prepared by a celebrated English engineer, set down the cost at 100,000?. ; but for a fifth of that sum much could be done. Then the neces- sary defences would take another 50,000?. and Martinique being but thirty miles away, some think it would be well for them to be taken in hand at once. One disadvantage only, and that greatly exaggerated, renders St. Lucia somewhat unpopular to planters in other islands, viz., the abundance of snakes, especially of that venomous kind known as the fer-de-lance. The deaths from snake-bite, however, are not very many, and advancing cultiva- tion will go far towards diminishing

the number of these reptiles. At one time Government offered a reward for every snake killed, but the astute negro used to take ship and hie him to Martinique, whence he returned with a boat-load of snakes which that island could very well afford to dispense with, and depleted the reward fund ; so the practice had to be stopped. For all this St. Lucia, if the present crisis in the sugar trade be successfully passed, may be expected to rise in importance and, outstripping the rest of the group, to take her place eventually at their head.

The distance to Tobago from Gre- nada is eighty-three miles, south and east. Tobago is the least of the Wind- ward Islands, with a total area of 73,000 acres, less than half of which are cultivated. The population is about 18,000 and stationary ; the revenue about 13,000?. and decreasing ; the general condition bad and growing worse. There is no denying the fact that Tobago is a miserable place ; its very capital contains little over a thousand people, and the public officers live in houses which hardly keep the rain out, and work in offices which are falling to pieces for want of repair. Who would think that Tobago was ever worth fighting for, as she is now ? and yet we know that she was fought for. Can we not see as we look over Scarborough town from the dangerous roadstead, outside, a fort on the right hand hill and a great square-topped mountain behind it? and do we not know that the square top is another fort to which the French dragged their guns in some marvellous way and then smote us out of the island ? But now, after many years' monopoly of land by a London firm that never gave back a tithe of what it received, after the unparalleled misfortune of government by two in succession of the worst administrators that ever turned a place upside down, and eter- nal bickerings among subordinates, what can be said for Tobago 1 Have not three years of vastly improved administration failed to do more than

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keep her head above water and that only by severest retrenchment ? And yet the island is as fertile and as lovely as any. Humbler than the rest, more hilly than mountainous, it is easier to make roads and, through a fortunate abundance of good metal, easier to keep them up than in St. Vincent, Grenada and St. Lucia — a great advantage and a great economy to any island. Further, there is plenty of pasture and some exportation of cattle, while Tobago ponies are well known and in considerable request. Latterly, moreover, there has been an increasing exportation of cocoa-nuts (N.B., Cocoa-nut palms and cacao trees are not, as some think, identical), which are very abundant, cost nothing to cultivate, and pay well. But few vessels call at Tobago, the mail indeed but once a month ; and so, even if pro- duce be ready, it is hard to get it shipped. Sugar, of course, is conveyed in the bottoms of the consignees ; but these are not available for those who wish to keep out of their clutches. And, unless I am mistaken, the Tobago monopolist firm failed some months since, and in that case the greater part of the land must have gone out of cultivation. In any case the re- striction of the cultivation to sugar only must tell heavily in this island as in St. Yincent, and the outlook is very dismal.

Such are these Windward Islands ; once, with their sisters to Leeward, as fair and rich possessions as ever were owned perhaps by any country. Ruined forts, ruined barracks, neglected ceme- teries remain to show the price we were willing to pay for them ; but of the former prosperity not a trace. Once with no fear for aught save war and hurricane, they have lived to dread Exeter Hall and the Manchester School more than either of these : for their overthrow was not by storm nor by the sword, but by two Acts of the British Parliament passed in 1833 and 1846, which are remembered by

Englishmen as the triumphs of eman- cipation and free trade, but by the West Indians as times of ruin and distress. Ever since the West Indies have struggled to recover themselves, and now a third great crisis is on them — the admission of bounty-fed sugar on the same terms as free sugar has destroyed their trade, the rejection of Mr. Lubbock's Convention with the United States for the free admission of West Indian produce has shattered their last hopes, and ruin stares the vast majority, whose staple produce is sugar, in the face. What the ultimate effect will be, none can tell ; the imme- diate effect is open disaffection and outcry for annexation to the United States — a sad sign in Colonies which plumed themselves on their loyalty. The question is too long for treatment here, but it is certain that the danger is serious and pressing, and unless something be done, and that quickly, the report of the Royal Commission must go for naught and the present condition go from bad to worse. Thus with sad misgivings for the future I take leave of these beautiful and un- happy islands. Their former prosperity was doubtless artificial : freedom and free trade destroyed it utterly ; but the downfall is real enough. Success and failure were alike of our making ; but both turned to our advantage, while, so far from helping the islands in their need, we have gradually with- drawn every privilege ; the garrisons so highly prized have been removed, incapable governors have been en- trusted with the administration, and consignees and money-lenders, secure under an Act of Parliament, have taken the lion's share of the prod vice to let themselves live in plenty in Eng- land. It is a sad story : when they piped unto us we danced, when they mourned unto us we lamented not. This is the complaint of the West Indies against England. Will she listen ? I fear not.

348

THE QUESTION OF DRINK IN ENGLAND.

MY reasons for venturing to write on this subject are, briefly stated, these. Being a moderate drinker myself, I am unable to see why some should make a merit of total abstinence ; for while I freely admit that drunkenness is a very real and national vice, I am inclined to think that a natural re- action has led many too far in the oppo- site direction. In accordance with this view I have tried to discover whether there might not exist certain conditions at the present time which served only to promote excessive drinking and might be easily removed. And after some reflection I am convinced that the state of the public-houses them- selves is very greatly answerable for the present frequent habit of drunken- ness among the poorer classes. My attention- was first drawn to this during a stay of some months in France and Germany, where I was greatly struck with the difference of the public-houses when compared with our own (the advantage being especially on the side of Germany) — a difference which it seemed to me might partly account for the greater sobriety of the people. I determined therefore to visit a certain number of public-houses in London at night, appearing as far as possible like an ordinary customer, in order to see whether the view I had taken of the question was justified by the result. I visited in all ten public- houses, taking mental notes of what I saw at the time, which I committed to writing as soon as I got home.'

I propose here to give an account of some of them, suppressing for obvious reasons the names and localities.

A. was one I selected for an early visit, as I was by no means eager to venture far at first, and I had heard of it as a very quiet and respectable pub- lic-house. When I first entered there were six or seven men inside, chiefly

of the groom or coachman class. Three of them were seated, the rest were standing, but all of them were convers- ing in a friendly manner. There was more accommodation than I had seen in a previous visit to another " public," as there was a bench in the corner, capable of holding five, with a small table adjoining. But as at least twenty men were there during the half hour that I remained, the accommoda- tion was obviously insufficient ; and here as elsewhere nearly half of the whole room was taken up by the bar. The favourite drink seemed " bitter," though the three men who were seated were drinking something which I con- cluded to have been whisky. Nearly all who visited this public-house stayed longer than I, and certainly were there for the sake of social enjoyment, and not chiefly for the sake of drinking. The division into compartments is a feature in all public-houses, the number of compartments differing according to the size of the " public."

B. A low public-house in whose win- dow absinthe was advertised. The atmosphere was so intolerable that the friend with whom I went insisted on going after five minutes. There were altogether (in the compartment which we entered) about sixteen persons ; there was one small seat, capable of seating five, where four men were playing dominoes. There were — as far as I could see — no newspapers or any means of social enjoyment ; and the beer was extremely bad.

C. In this public-house, which was divided into six or seven compart- ments, there were no seats of any kind (of course I can only state this posi- tively as regards the compartment I entered). At one time, however, there were twenty people inside this one compartment ; while the barman had nearly as much room for dispensing

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liquor as we twenty customers for drinking it. Amongst those present were two soldiers, two postmen, and three or four women. There was only one man who was really drunk — so at least I inferred from his addressing the most idiotic remarks to any one who would listen to him, and also, perhaps unfairly, from his buying two halfpenny buns for a dog, which be- longed to the man whose beer I had drunk ; I must add, however, that the owner did not appreciate his kindness, as he tried to set the dog on him. There were no papers or any means of social recreation. The one point in favour of this public-house was that the ventilation was good. Most of the people were drinking beer ; one or two were drinking mysterious-looking com- pounds whose component parts 1 could not investigate.

D. A public-house in the immediate vicinity of a large station ; conse- quently there were several porters there. It was divided into four com- partments ; in the one which I entered there were ten persons, and during the short half-hour that I was there there were never more than twelve at one time. There were altogether seats for five or six, and the atmosphere was very good, but I cannot say that the place was well ventilated, as it was exceed- ingly draughty. There were several newspapers within the bar, which I did not notice till some one asked for one ; and here I must remark that this may have been the case in the other places which I have; before de- scribed, but I certainly did not observe it. Most of the people were drinking beer, and I did not notice that any one took more than one glass or pewter. (One or two, however, ordered spirits of some kind or other, and several people brought jugs to take away what they ordered.) But while the place was good so far as public- houses go at present, it was really scandalously deficient when compared with what might be done. The chief faults were a great draught, want of sitting accommodation (there were

only two small benches squeezed up close to the wall), and very little elbow-room, though inside the bar there was abundance of space.

E. was rather a small public-house, divided into three compartments ; in the one which I entered there were only four persons. The space was extremely limited in this compart- ment, but there were seats all round it, capable of containing seven or eight persons. The ventilation was very bad ; there was no supply of fresh air, and plenty of gas, but, on the other hand, there was no draught. In the third compartment a loud voice suddenly exclaimed, "You're an old swindler, you are ! " — words'which were repeated thirty or forty times in ex- actly the same loud monotonous tone. I fully expected a row, but the " old swindler," whoever he was, made no reply, and in a few minutes all was silent again. At first I thought there were no papers in the place, but after- wards I found that they took in the Daily Telegraph, the Standard, and, I believe, one or two other papers also. The principal beverage was beer of one kind or another, but one man seemed to be taking whisky, and another some kind of cup.

F. As it wasj Saturday night, and this public-house was in a poor neigh- bourhood, I expected to find some of the poorest classes there ; and, sure enough, when I entered, I found the compartment full of workmen, smoking short clay pipes. (This public-house was divided into four compartments.) There were about twelve persons when I first went in. The atmosphere was fair, but the place was draughty. The men were all drinking beer (and dis- cussing racing) ; one woman who came while I was there ordered gin. There were two or three papers, but scandal- ously little accommodation — no more than one seat near the side wall, capable of containing only three persons.

In other ways I have observed many public - houses, and, judging from what I have been able to see

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The Question of Drink in England.

of their internal arrangements, all public-houses are pretty much of the same character. In fact the public- house of the present time is a public house merely in name — conducted, as it is, wholly for the gain of private persons, whose sole idea is consequently to sell as much liquor as possible to every customer. It is a place without comfort, with hardly any sitting ac- commodation, small, dirty, ill-venti- lated, affording scarcely any facilities for literary or social enjoyment ; where all the attraction is intentionally confined to the bar, and where the liquor is in many cases drugged to increase the thirst of the unfortunate customer.

The first thing, then, which seems imperative towards diminishing the general tendency to drunkenness among the poorer classes is to pro- vide some decent public building or house to which they may go. I have endeavoured to show that the public- house as it at present exists in Eng- land is a disgrace to a civilised country i but it exists because it sup- plies (though imperfectly) a real and natural want. That want is the craving for society — a want which teetotalers seem to have totally ignored in their exertions in this field.

I give here a report of one of their meetings, taken from the Daily News of April 16th :—

"Yesterday afternoon a conference was held at Exeter Hall, under the presidency of the Bishop of London, to receive and discuss the reports of the enumerators who have been engaged in taking a census of the people visiting public-houses on Satur- day night from 9 P.M., to 12 o'clock.- — The Chairman, after the meeting bad been opened with prayer by the Rev. J. F. Gladstone, called upon the sec- retary, Mr. George Calvert, to read the returns that had been made. From these it appears that in a given dis- trict in the north of London (St. Pancras) fifty-two public-houses were watched one Saturday night, with the result that 11,403 men, 7,731 women, and 1,958 children, or a total of

21,092 persons were seen to enter between nine and twelve o'clock. In another district, in the south, the total number of persons going to the fifty public - houses watched was 29,357, made up of 17,347 men, 10,665 women, and 1,645 children. In the west forty-nine houses were visited by 21,962 persons, of whom 12,809 were men, 7,455 women, and 1,698 children. In the east, repre- sented by forty-nine houses, there were 7,246 male visitors, 4,933 female, and 1,718 children, making a total of 13,897. The total for the 200 public- houses watched for the same three hours was 86,608 visitors. Following up this inquiry, they had made a small one as to the number of women visit- ing public-houses in the morning be- tween the hours of ten and twelve ; and last Monday twelve houses were watched near Tolmer Square, with the result of finding that as many as 1,250 women went to them between those hours. — The Chairman said they had heard these figures, and it was for them to say what their personal con- duct was to be, and what they should urge on the legislature. These facts could not be put aside for a moment. At the present time the Government were inquiring into the condition and the housing of the poor. It was clear that the two inquiries were very much akin, and that it was almost impossible to separate them. He was quite ready to admit that the poor suffered by fluctuations in trade and from other causes, and was willing to call on the nation at large to give them a helping hand ; but the man must be stone blind who did not know that a great deal of the distress and misery was due to intemperance. If we could stop this we should do more in the way of charity than by any muni- ficence. No gifts of money could help the poor more than the sacrifice of their own personal gratification in this and other ways. An inquiry like this drink census touched directly on the most painful causes of the state of things they all deplored, and they

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could not help considering what their part, as Christian men. should be in view of such facts as these. All ministers of the Gospel find nothing stand so much in their way in trying to reach the masses as this one great, terrible sin. — The Rev. Canon Fleming moved, ' That this conference, having had under its consideration the start- ling returns of the Saturday-night public-house census recently taken in each quarter of the metropolis, would urge upon the devout and earnest attention of all Christians the im- perative necessity of personal absti- nence from the use of all alcoholic liquors as a beverage.' "

Now this meeting seems to me to give a very fair example of the general action of the total abstainers. They are thoroughly in earnest, and are de- termined to do something, but their method of proceeding is absolutely illogical. Their idea of subjecting public-houses to a minute inspection is a good one. But all they have really done is to get some very good statistics as to the amount of people who enter public-houses. What does this prove I Surely nothing more than this, that the public - houses supply a real want. They have no right to deduce any other con- sequence from these statistics. The argument that public-houses are ob- jectionable because many people use them might be applied equally to any public building whatever. If they had proved how many of those who went came out the worse for drink — that would have been a valuable piece of evidence. Again, if they could have shown that most of those who entered merely stayed a short time, and that therefore their main object was drink, that also would have had a direct bearing on the question. But this they have not attempted : and yet what they now apparently wish is to urge on the legislature to suppress public-houses without attempting to provide any substitute. They would wish, I suppose, that these multitudes of people should stay quietly in their

homes. Is this possible 1 It may, of course, be argued that these people can go to coffee-palaces. But the coffee-palaces which I have seen so far are nothing but feeble imitations of public-houses. In size, accommoda- tion, ventilation, means of recreation, and beverages, they are lamentably deficient. When once a decent place of accommodation and recreation has been provided, the public -houses will be deserted.

I now propose to examine the faults of the public-houses one by one, and to endeavour to show how they may be corrected.

(a.) The first fault of public-houses (one shared I believe by all other countries) is that they are conducted for profit. I can imagine no better object for charity than the establishment of places where proper accommodation might be provided for the working classes without any profit being made. Such a place, considering the enormous profits made by the present iniquitous system, would very soon make its way, and the profits would probably, in time, be large. These should be devoted, first, to increasing the comfort of the place, and secondly, to help to found similar establishments. Thus in time there might be attached to each public-house a room for non- smokers, a library, a reading-room, a public assembly room, &c., &c.

(6.) Secondly, no public-house should be allowed to exist where the principal room was not above a certain defined size, both as regards length, breadth, and height. I have some idea that there is a law to this effect now, but it is certainly never put into force. If such a law were made (or, if existing, put into force) nine-tenths of the present public-houses would cease to exist ; and the existence of many small public-houses in one street (as is now often the case) would be rendered impossible.

(c.) Proper ventilation is also most important. By ventilation I mean the continual supply of fresh air with- out a draught. There are several

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systems by any of which this could be done ; while the electric light might also be with advantage introduced. At present the public-house is either intolerably hot, or cold and draughty ; the former is [more often the case, for the profit-seeking owner finds that heat is an additional incentive to drinking.

(d.) Everything should be done to avoid making drinking the attraction, both by banishing the bar altogether, and also by encouraging the sale of non-intoxicating liquors. (If any one were to enter an ordinary public-house at the present time, and ask for a cup of tea or coffee, he would be regarded as a lunatic; and his demand would probably be met with a roar of laughter.) Spirits should be absolutely excluded, and the beer should be both light and pure. As to this, I hope to say more further on. In connection with the subject of drinking I may, perhaps, suggest that some plan should be devised by which a man, by paying a trifling sum weekly or monthly, should be allowed to make use of the place as a club without being obliged to order anything for the good of the house.

(e.) As the public-house should be par excellence the club of the poor (men and women alike), the accom- modation should be of a simple but comfortable kind, and the room should be tastefully furnished. The furnish- ing of such a room would be an excellent object for charity. Seats should be scattered freely up and down ; probably the best method would be to have small tables with chairs around them, as in the cafes at Paris.

(./!) Lastly, great efforts should be made to render the public-house as bright and pleasant as possible. All the best papers and magazines should be taken in ; and on holidays, such as Saturdays, entertainments, concerts, &c., should be given in the public hall attached to the building.

It may be urged that some such reform is certainly needed, but why include the beer? Because without it you will not get the attendance of the

moderate drinkers. Indeed, it is one of the chief mistakes of the Church of England Temperance Society, that they have put beer and spirits (in other words temperance and excess) under the same ban. For while the smallest quantity of spirits may pro- duce the most dangerous effects, it is practically impossible to get drunk on undrugged beer alone. Indeed, beer, when pure, is both a wholesome and nourishing drink. The principal substi- tute that the teetotalers would offer is tea, which I cannot but think unsatis- factory. But the mistake of confound- ing beer and spirits is not confined to the temperance society. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, in his recent speech on the income-tax, said, "that if the duty on spirits was to be increased, he would not be a party to such a pro- posal unless a fair increase were made in the duty on beer." Now I believe, that from a commercial point of view, any increase of the tax on beer is most disastrous for the country ; tending as it does to convert more corn-land into pasture-land, and there- by depopulating the agricultural dis- tricts. But, putting aside that view, the fact remains that while beer is almost as great a necessity for the poor man as tobacco, spirits are a dangerous luxury. Pure beer, on the other hand, is neither dangerous nor a luxury. Of course I am quite ready to admit that the beer at present drunk in many public-houses is a far from wholesome beverage : but surely that is only an additional reason for endeavouring to promote the use of beer of a better kind. That beer of such a kind can be made, is, I believe, perfectly certain. The lager beer, as drunk generally by the German nation, and sold in England, though at prohi- bitive prices, fulfils the requisite con- ditions. It is extremely light, ex- tremely pure, and can, I believe, be made both easily and cheaply. A German gentleman has most kindly f urnished me, after considerable labour, with the most ample particulars on the subject, of which I may be here

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allowed to give some extracts. He writes : " The ' lager bier,' the almost common beverage all through Ger- many, contains about 1 cwt. of hops to 30 cwt. of malt, and 80 cwt. of water. The different quality of the water is said to exert a great influence upon the quality of the beer. Of course there are stronger beers brewed, as for in- stance in Bavaria, where the propor- tion of malt and the percentage of alcohol contained in it is much greater ; there the percentage of alcohol comes to about five per cent., while in your English beer it is eight to ten per cent. I am told. Our people do not like English beer, because they cannot con- sume great quantities without get- ting inebriated, and their object is to drink a great deal, and to enjoy drink- ing for its own sake, without running the chance of even getting half tipsy." He also remarks that with lager beer, to reach even a state of partial intoxi- cation, it requires ten to twelve to fifteen glasses ; the price of a glass being fifteen pfennigs.

I had asked him the following four questions : —

1. Whether there was a law against adulteration of beer in Germany, and whether it was strictly enforced.

2. Whether there was a heavy tax upon beer.

3. Whether the beer depended much on the quality of the water ; and whether such beer could be easily made in England.

4. Whether lager beer could be easily exported.

These he answers thus : —

1. There is a law concerning adul- teration of beer, and it is strictly enforced. Breweries are fined occa- sionally for using bad ingredients.

2. The tax upon manufacture of beer is not a heavy one. Malt is taxed about the rate of two marks the hectolitre. There is no other tax.

3. The quality of the beer depends very much on the quality of the water,

but in what way I can hardly tell. That the same beer may be made in England admits of no doubt. In London there are a great many beer- houses where you get it.

4. Lager beer is exported to all parts of the world ; but then it requires some particular kind of preparation, of which I cannot give you any particu- lars. I think it is the same thing as with porter and ale.

To this I may add, that the glass which costs fifteen pfennigs (lg<^.) con- tains nearly a pint, so that its cheap- ness in Germany is evident. There seems no doubt therefore that if we follow the example of the German nation, a pure, light, and cheap beer can be made.

And now to sum up briefly the main points of my argument. I believe that the remedy for drunkenness lies in the hands of the moderate drinkers: and that, if they will but bestir themselves to provide decent places where the poor man may meet his friend without the temptation to get drunk, but at the same time with the power of drinking a glass of good, pure beer if he so wishes, the vice of drunkenness will die a natural death, without there being any necessity of appealing to the legislature. State control is always dangerous, and in this case the remedy can certainly be best admin- istered by private exertion.

One thing is certain, that the places at present used for the leisure hours of the poor are a disgrace to the country ; and it is the duty of teetotallers and moderate drinkers alike to see that proper places shall be provided, where the poor may be able to resort after their work without being made the prey of private gain. Whether beer shall be allowed there or not is a mat- ter of secondary importance, except in so far as the question arises whether without it the poor will come at all.

E. E. MACNAGHTEN.

No. 311. — VOL. LII.

A A

354

THE BATHS OF CASCIANA IN JULY.

ALL the forestieri (strangers) have flown north, for ray countrymen have a knack of leaving Italy just before she is clothed in her full beauty. June, when it does not rain, is a lovely month ; the hay has been got in, and the fields are all bright with fresh, green grass ; the corn is turning golden yellow, and waiting for the 24th of June, before which day no well-thinking Tuscan — who all wor- ship St. John, the protecting saint of Florence, most devoutly, chiefly, I believe, on account of the fireworks and fun which celebrate his day in the City of Flowers — ever thinks of reap- ing. Many a baroccio, piled high with openwork baskets and boxes full of yellow and rose-coloured cocoons, is met, going from the various fattorie or farms to the silk mills at Pecsia. The fireflies glint and glance all over the country, causing the moon to look pale, and in the daytime the cicale buzz and drum from every tree.

On the 1st of July we left Florence for Pontedera — a clean, prosperous little town on the Pisan line of rail- way— where we found a wonderful ramshackle carriage awaiting us. The procaccia, or carrier, of the Bagni di Casciana, imagined that English people could not stand the sun, and so had brought a kind of enormous square box on wheels, which went at a capital pace along the excellent road, as smooth as a bowling green, in the valley of the little river Era.

At the village of Ponsacco one leaves the high road and strikes up towards the hills. In old times Ponsacco was a fortified town, and in 1363 was taken, during the wars between Pisa and Florence, by the Florentines, after a desperate resistance. It reverted, how- ever, to its old ruler, and in 1406 stood

another siege, and capitulated, with military honours, to Florence, which governed it mildly and increased its prosperity. But, according to the old proverb, " Fiorentini ciechi, Pisan tradi- tori, Senesi matti, Lucchesi signori" (the Florentines are blind, the Pisans traitor- ous, the Sienese mad, and the Lucchese fine gentlemen), the Pisans sent a certain Ser Niccolo Piccinino to raise the population against their new mas- ters, who were nearly all murdered. Florence, furious at this insult, marched with a large force against Ponsacco and again took it, after a tremendous fight. The Council of Pisa, many of whose members had possessions in the valley of the Era, called the Venetians to their aid and re-conquered the place. They, however, took the precaution of dismantling the fortress and throwing down the walls, and were left in quiet possession until the times of the Medici, when Ferdinando gave Ponsacco, with the fine Medicean villa of Camugliano, to the Marquis Filippo Niccolini, one of his devoted courtiers.

The fields are cultivated like a market garden, and the crops of corn, maize, hemp, flax, and vines were most luxuriant. The canes grew from eight to ten feet high, stout and vigorous, while the mulberry trees are all pol- larded at four feet from the ground, and in many places formed hedges. We gradually rose to 500 feet above the sea, which is about twenty miles away, and one feels the influence of the sea-breeze in the delicious, cool, invigorating air. The banks and hedges were ablaze with wild roses, honey- suckle, a brilliant chrome-yellow chry- santhemum, large white convolvolus, and a mallow with mauve-pink flowers of most graceful growth.

A nine miles' drive through this laughing landscape brought us to the

The Baths of Casciana in July.

355

Baths of Casciana, known to the Romans as a health-restoring place.

Bagno di Casciana is a small village with a piazza, where stands the Casino and a church, Sta. Maria de Aquis, which existed as a priory in 823 ; it has been, however, so often repaired that little of the ancient structure is left. In old times the place was called Castrum de Aquis, or ad Aquas, and afterwards Bagni d'Acqui, till some forty years ago its name was changed by an edict of the municipal council of Lari to Bagni di Casciana, thus coupling it with the little town of Casciana which is on the hill about two miles away, and whose inhabitants most cordially dislike the people of the Bagni, who return their hatred with interest.

Bagno d'Acqui (or di Casciana) is mentioned in various ancient docu- ments, chiefly belonging to Volterra and to the Abbey of Morrona, which was founded in 1089 by Ugoccione, son of Count Gugliemo Bulgaro and of the Countess Cilia, and given to the order of the Camaldoli, together with all the land, streams, and aque- ducts lying between the Sora and the Caldana. Twenty years after this the sons of Ugoccione increased the dona- tion, and made over to the monks half of the land in the district of the Corte Aquisana, and " "Vivaja cum acquis and acqueductibus, etc. ; " so that the baths came into the possession of the Church in 1109. The convent of the Badia held this large extent of country until 1135, when the Abbot Gherardo sold to Uberto, Archbishop of Pisa, part of the hill, and the castle and district of Acqui called Yivaja. In 1148 Pope Eugenius III. confirmed Guidone, Abbot of Morrona, in all his privileges, and in the possession of what remained of the district of the Corte Aquisana, of the baths and acqueducts as far as the Cascina (Balneum et aquseductus usque in Casinam). In 1152 the Abbot Jacopo of Morrona sold the possessions of Montevaso and Montanino to the Archbishop of Pisa, to raise funds for

building the monastery of Morrona, which still exists, and in 1316 the Abbot Silvester d'Anghiari added the cloisters. The abbey church is of far more ancient date, and possesses a quaint picture, said to be anterior to Cimabue.

In 1482 the monastery was sup- pressed in spite of the opposition of the Camaldolese order, and all their possessions were bestowed on the bishops of Volterra, who had long hankered after them ; they turned the monastery into a dwelling house and the church into a private oratory.

Popular tradition assigns the foun- dation of the baths to the famous Countess Mathilde, who, the country people say, was guided to the place by her pet hawk, who had lost his feathers, and regained them after dipping in the waters. In 1311 the Republic of Pisa ordered the baths to be re-built, and, with some modifications, they ex- isted till seventeen years ago, when the present Casino and baths were erected. Formerly the men bathed in the basin of the warm spring itself, and from thence the water overflowed to the women's bath, losing a considerable portion of heat in the transit. The lepers' bath was further off, and last came a place for horses. The women rebelled against using the water after the men, and petitioned to be allowed to bathe all together, if a dress per tutelare la decenza (for the tutelage of decency) was worn. This was refused, but the basin where the mineral water comes bubbling up out of the earth, was divided in half by boards, and thus the women were placed on an equality with the men.

Now there are good baths of white marble, with an incessant stream of water direct from the spring always flowing, a doctor is in attendance, and the whole thing is comfortable and well arranged.

In the Archives of Florence there is a very amusing document, dated 7th September, 1575, and emanating from —

" Li Magnifici Signori Nove Conser- vatori della Jurisditione et Dominio A A 2

356

The Baths of Casciana in July.

Florentine," who were very irate at the disorder and inconvenience which arose because the inhabitants of Bagno ad Acqua did not observe the statutes drawn up, and had no care of the baths nor prevented the insolence practised by evil-minded persons, who went to the said baths more to air their caprices than for any need of curing aches and pains. The said magistrates, seeing that the Divine Majesty and nature had bestowed such a treasure on their dominion as these most salubrious baths, desire that all men should aid in maintaining them unsullied from every kind of evil custom and insolence practised by the aforesaid people, who only sought amusement, &c.

The ancient tower, part of which is still inhabited by poor people, at Petraja, as the upper portion of Bagno di Casciana is called, was doubtless part of the Castello di Acqui, chief centre of the district Corte Aquisana, which existed in 1090, before which date no records exist, they having perished in a fire, following a pestil- ence which occurred about that time.

One skirts round the cluster of small cottages surrounding the old tower, on the winding road from Bagno di Casciana up to the ruin of the castle of Parlascio on the summit of the hill. It is a good climb, but the road is, as usual, excellent. Leav- ing Yivaja on the right, a quaint little hillock, on which stood a church which was utterly destroyed by the earthquake of 1846, one passes under some fine chestnut and cherry trees. The undergrowth is fern and heather, and the yellow tiger lilies glowed in the broken sun-light.

Parlascio is a huge bluff , of rock, rising sheer out of the hill. On a plateau near the summit is a little church and three or four cottages. A marble head with a Gothic inscription is let into the wall on the right hand of the church door, and on the other a long Gothic inscription surrounds a small bas-relief of a bishop. As a handsome contadina told me : —

" Ah ! poverini, sono morti tanti anni fa ; erano sacerdoti."

( " Ah ! poor things, they died many years ago ; they were priests.")

The view from the platform of rock on which the little church stands is magnificent. To the left Monte Moro, behind which lies Leghorn, stands out black against the sky; and the sea, with here and there a white sail glint- ing in the sun, stretches far away. Pisa, with the Carrara mountains behind, lies in the soft green plain, and in front is a curious, broken land- scape, rounded, waterwashed hillocks, each crowned by a grey townlet with its tall campanile ; the haze caused by the heat made the whole land look like a large opal. The nearest grey town is Morrona, standing on the peak of a hill, near which, further along the ridge, lies the Abbey, now the villa of a rich Livornese. To the far right Volterra rears her weather-beaten towers to the sky, perched on the extreme edge of a high hill like an eagle's nest.

Behind the church a steep little path leads up to the summit of the ancient castle of Parlascio, whose ruins are now covered by a vineyard. All memory of its history has vanished from among the peasantry, and I could find no mention of it prior to the thirteenth century in the archives of the Abbey of Morrona. Over the door of the church is an inscription, saying that it was consecrated on the 26th May, 1444 (Pisan style), and built by the Counts of Upezzinghi of Pisa, lords of the castle.

We skirted the top of a long ridge of hills and drove through, or rather round, Casciana to Lari, the seat of the pretor, or magistrate, and of the muni- cipal council, and chief place of the commune. Lari is a nice little town, perched on the top of a hill ; and out of the centre of the market place rises a quadrangular castle, built of red brick. The massive walls, rising at an acute angle, stand frowning some hun- dred feet above one, perfectly smooth — no bastion, no tower breaks, the line.

Ths Baths of Casciana in July.

357

In 1067 Lari is mentioned in a judicial sentence given at Pisa as a Corte and castle of Gottfredo, Mar- chese di Toscana. It must then have become Pisan, as the people of Lari took part in the rising against the Re- public of Pisa in 1164, who sent a small army to enforce obedience. In 1230 the Upezzinghi retired there from their possession of Mazzagamboli, and it is believed that they built the first castle on the summit of the hill, afterwards considerably enlarged and strengthened. It appears that they made over to the Archbishop of Pisa all their rights over Lari, for in 1375 the inhabitants deliberated that it was most inconvenient to hire a house every six months for the Captain of the Colle Pisane, or Pisan Hills, who came to distribute justice, so they deter- mined to buy a residence for that purpose.

Lari and its dependencies came into the possession of the Republic of Florence in 1406, at the same time as Pisa ; but for a long period the Grand Dukes of Tuscany paid a small annual tribute to the Pisan Archbishop. The governors of Lari after that time were called Vicario, and the first Floren- tine who held the office was Angelo di Giovanni da Uzzano.

On the south side of the castle a flight of ninety-five steps leads up to the gateway of the courtyard ; half- way is a large cistern, hollowed out of the rock, decorated with the Pitti and Delia Scala arms, made in 1448 for the public benefit. The courtyard is very picturesque, an old well is at one end, and the walls of the houses are covered with escutcheons and coats-of-arms of the various Vicarii. Several famous Flo- rentine names are there, their arms done in Delia Robbia ware and surrounded by the well-known wreaths of fruit and flowers. Rinuccini, Peruzzi, Cap- poni and Delia Stufa recalled the su- premacy of the old Republic ; and above all were the balls of the Medici, ever-present on anything grand or in- teresting in Tuscany.

It is recorded that, in 1414, the

Vicario Niccolo di Roberto Davanzati ancestor of Bernardi, whose transla tion of Tacitus is celebrated, reformed the communal statutes. In 1523 Jacopo di Bongiann Gianfigliazzi was the Vicario, and at a later date the following maccaronic lines were in- scribed under his escutcheon : —

" Ero casa caduca, abbietta e vile, Minacciavo rovina ad ogni vento, In me non era loggia ne cortile, Ma ogni cosa piena di spavento. Or surge come casa signorile, Non fu dal ciel favor mai tardo o lento, Per grazia d'esso nobil Gianfigliazzo, Di viltugurio di vento palazzo."

("I was a fallen house, abject and vile, Threatening ruin with every wind ; I possessed no colonade, nor courtyard, And everything was full of horror. Now I rise like a noble house, Ne'er did the favour of Heaven come too

late.

By your grace, noble Gianfigliazzo, From a vile hole I became a palace. ")

The writer of this must have over- looked the distich under the Delia Robbia arms of Bartolomeo Capponi, who was Vicario in 1525 : —

" Temporis et muri ssevas subitura ruinas

Transtulit intutum signa benignus amor. Qui struxit fastu longe, remotis ab omni Nomine Capponius Bartholomeus erat."

("With great love he rendered safe these walls, which threatened instant ruin. Bar- tholomew Capponi, for such was his name, was the man who had this thought, without seeking for fame.")

In 1524 Alessandri di Pietro di Mariotto was Vicario, and his arms are repeated on a most lovely altar- piece by Luca Delia Robbia in the little chapel. It represents the Virgin and Child and an angel, and is sur- rounded by a splendid garland of flowers and fruit. The garrulous old custode showed us the prisons — very ghastly places — and then, opening a postern door, took us to an outside walk all around the top of the castle walls. We then saw that the houses in the courtyard were mere shells, only containing one room in depth, and we looked down the dizzy height into the tortuous streets below, and beyond

The Baths of Casciana in July.

over the sunny plain at Pisa, whose leaning tower could be distinctly seen.

Sun-dials are frequent on the farm- houses, and some had most poetical conceits written around or over them. Profoundly sad is : —

" Segno le ore si, ma non piu quelle " ("I mark the hours, 'tis true, but no longer those gone by ").

" Per i felice ed i tristi, segno ugual- mente le ore " (" For the happy and the sad, I equally mark the hours "), is also pretty, but less original and terse.

Next day we drove through Soianella and Soiana up to Morrona, a grey, old- world, weather-beaten place, with no traces of itsancient splendour left.TJnder the walls of Soiana Pier Capponi fell — the contemporary and friend of Savona- rola, and one of the most strenuous defenders of Florentine liberties against the Medici. He is famous for his an- swer to Charles VIII. of France, who tried to conquer Florence, and to obtain from her large sums of money when on his road to Naples in 1493. To the threats of the King, Pier Capponi proudly replied : —

" Voi suonerete le vostre trombe, noi suoneremo le nostre campane." ("You may sound your trumpets, we will sound our bells.")

The fortifications have long since vanished, but these small villages are picturesque enough, the stairs being outside the houses, and various small loggie and balconies making deep patches of shade, where the inhabi- tants sit at their work. The views were magnificent, particularly from the high platform on which stands the small church of Morrona, rising some 500 feet above the plain, built where in ancient times stood the castle.

Geologically, the whole country is extremely interesting ; here and there blue grey cliffs rise perpendicularly, apropos to nothing at all, 100 or more feet out of the red earth, and the roads are in some places formed of the re- mains of huge oyster shells and queer fossils. The contadini are pleasant and civil in manner, delighted to tell one the names of the various villages and

towns, and evidently unused to visi- tors. Our advent at Morrona caused quite a commotion, and, as we stood near the church, admiring the pano- ramic view, I had a circle of small children sitting on their heels, staring open-mouthed, while their mothers smiled and hoped I did not mind such bad manners. "E un gran diverti- mento per loro " ("It is a great amusement for them).

Some of the girls are strikingly beautiful — very dark, with jet-black hair, fine eyes, and delicate features. The men, too, are good looking, and have small and curiously round heads. They have a frank, nice way about them, and, though terribly poor, will show the very little there is to see in their villages with a graceful kind- liness of manner quite deprecating the idea of being paid for their trouble.

From Morrona we went on to Terricciola, a clean townlet with houses which had once seen better days. The church, a fine red-brick building, has been spoiled, and they were adding a chapel on to one side and destroying the little that was left of the old building. The piazza and the church occupy the site of the ancient castle, which was taken and re-taken several times during the wars between Florence and Pisa. Over the door of the sacristan's cottage was built into the wall the front of rather a fine Etruscan Cinerary urn, with a reclining female figure above, and " un Pagano con animali " ("a Pagan with animals "), as the old man carefully explained it to be, under- neath, which had been dug up there long ago.

From Terricciola we descended a winding road into the valley of the Cascina, and skirted the base of the bare, water-washed hill on which stands the monastery of Morrona, an enormous square edifice built around a courtyard, with some fine trees near it. The olives grow to a large size all over this part of Tuscany, the tufa soil suiting them well. There is a tradition that an underground pas-

The Baths of Casciana in July.

359

sage connects the monastery with the Villa of San Marco, the residence of the bishop of the diocese. All the country around is tunnelled with caves, and at Terricciola the farmers still keep their grain in the old buche di grano, or corn cisterns, hollowed out of the rock. The stone-cutters, whose name is legion, have a way of breaking the stone into long slabs, used as sup- ports to the pergole of vines, which I never saw before. They cut a slight channel in the stone and insert flakes of iron ; between these are placed wedges, and then the man gives little taps with a hammer, very much as though he were playing on a gigantic giglira, to the long row of wedges. On a sudden the stone gives a hollow sigh and starts asunder. Petrified shells and plants are of frequent occur- rence in the rock, and some are very fine.

Reaping is also different here from other parts of Tuscany. The contadini cut off the ears of corn with a sickle in small handfuls, leaving two or three feet of straw standing, which is after- wards mown with scythes. An old peasant, seeing me watch his opera- tions, ceased work for a moment, and, with a twinkle in his eye, quoted, like a true Tuscan who knows and loves his old proverbs —

La sa, Signora, " Quando il grano e ne' campi, 13 di Dio e de' Santi."

("You know, ma'am, when the coi'n is in the field, it belongs to God and the saints. ")

The contadini work hard ; in the fields at daylight — they often do not return home till nine in the evening ; and we met women and young girls staggering under huge loads of green grass, cut on the hills and carried down on their heads, after the day's work, to sell for a few centimes in the village. This habit of carrying jars of water, baskets of fruit, and bundles of fodder on the head, gives the con- tadine an easy, graceful walk, recall- ing the peculiar swing of the Arab women. The men just now look very

spruce and neat, as a new straw hat and, if possible, a new shirt, is " the thing " before reaping. The women never wear hats : they tie a handker- chief under the chin, and pull it over their eyes like a hood, folding another several times thick on the top of their heads, to keep off the sun.

To the east of Bagno di Casciana, on the Colle Montanine, rises a steep hill, called the "Rocca della Contessa Mathilde," and of course said to have been one of her castles. It is rather fatiguing to get at, as, after a two miles' drive up hill, one has to walk another mile and a half up a rough road to the foot of the " Rocca," which rises like half a huge apple out of the very top of the line of hills. The view from the summit was magnifi- cent ; for forty miles and more one sees the country on every side, and while we were standing entranced with the landscape, an inky- black cloud suddenly swept up from no one knew where, and blotted Yolterra en- tirely out of sight, while the thunder growled ominously, and the wind rose. It was a most impressive sight, par- ticularly when suddenly the clouds rolled asunder and a flash of light- ning shot as straight as a plummer's line down to the earth. We expected a drenching, but the storm disappeared as quickly as it had risen, and after inspecting the remains of two small round towers, a wall about three feet high with traces of a curtain wall beyond, and settling in our own minds that the great countess certainly never lived in such an eagle's nest, \ve wended our way down hill to the carriage. One does not see a human creature all the way ; the only sign of civilisation was a pile of sacks filled with oak bark, awaiting the donkeys who alone could face such a path. The butterflies are numerous and very beautiful. There was a large orange fellow flitting about whose wings faded off to lenion yellow j another, very big, was the colour of a magpie's wing, blue-black shot with green; and one was very odd, as it seemed to fly

360

The Baths of Casciana in July.

the wrong way, having two tails to the hind wings which looked like antennae. I am afraid my description is most unscientific ; all I noticed was the great variety of butterflies and moths, and their colours, so gorgeous in the brilliant sunlight.

Bagni di Casciana can be reached also from Fauglia, on the Maremma line, about the same distance as Pontedera, but a more hilly drive. Fauglia is a bright, clean place, with fine villas and country-houses in and near it. A picturesque old church on the outskirts of the town, stands on the very end of a small hill ; its elegant campanile, rather Lombard in style, is fast going to ruin, having been struck by lightning and shaken by the earthquake of 1846. From Fauglia one descends through a gorge clothed with stunted oak, chestnut, and nut copse ; fern, tall Mediterranean heath- er, gum cistus and anisette forming the undergrowth, with the familiar yellow broom and gorse, into the valley of the Tara, a small, brawling stream, crossed by a good bridge. From there begins a three-mile hill, up a capital road, across a queer, bare country, with great fissures and rents in it, as though it had been torn with a large rake. Much land has been reclaimed and put under vine-cultivation. The waste land is overgrown with lentisk and wild myrtle, which scented the warm air and glittered in the bright sun. Larks innumerable arose as we drove along, hovering like large moths high in the air, and singing aloud. To the right, lying on the slope of the hill, is the old castle of Gello Matta- cino, lately restored and inhabited. There are records of a church there in the archives of Lucca as early as 764, and the castle used to be called Gello delle Colline, or, " of the hills," until a Florentine, Alessandro di Matteocini, bought it, and gradually his name was given to the castle and lands. A short dip brings us near to Casciana, and

then another hill, into the Parlascio road, whence we bowled merrily down to the Baths.

Horses and carriages are good and wonderfully cheap. We had a capital mare, an open pony chaise which would have held four, and paid at the rate of fivepence a mile ; the houses are fairly comfortable, and the chief administrator of the baths, Dr. Bimediotti, is most courteous and kind. We found the mineral baths quite as efficacious as Aix-les-Bains, and witnessed some really marvellous cures of rheumatism, gout, and paralysis. For the information of any medical reader I give an analysis of the waters, done by a competent chemist : —

IN 300 LITRES.

Cubic centimetres.

Nitrogen 444,010

Carbonic acid 967,770

SALINE MATTERS, &c.

Grammes.

Sulphate of lime 523-17

Carbonate of lime . . . 100 '35

Carbonate of magnesia . 6 '96

Carbonate of iron .... 1 '02

Sulphate of magnesium . 90 '48

Sulphate of sodium . . 127 '80

Chloride of sodium . . 7 '80

Chloride of magnesia . . 5 '40

Ammonium 0'45

Silica 11-55

Alumina 2*46

Organic matter 0-63

Eesidium of complex com- position 878 '07

Litres.

Pure water 299 '12

Density 1, 003-02

Traces of lithia.

The water is quite limpid, and has a peculiarly soft feeling; the skin feels almost slimy after remaining some time in the bath, and is stained slightly red, owing, I suppose, to the iron.

The maximum temperature of the water is 35°'20 (Centigrade) ; the minimum 33°'90.

JANET Boss.

361

LOCAL UNIVERSITY COLLEGES.

THOSE whose interest in education is keen have watched with no little anxiety the efforts made to provide London with a university which shall be a teaching corporation as well as an organisation of examiners. The move- ment is being made none too soon. The reproach that London University can do nothing but examine is only true enough to set one thinking ; we must not be allowed to under-esti- mate the immense part played by systems of examination in directing study and teaching into this channel or that.

There is one result of incalculable value likely to come out of the esta- blishment of a London teaching uni- versity ; the university as at present constituted is in sore need of being saved from itself. Teachers engaged in arming students with weapons to face the attacks of London examiners know only too well how difficult it is to make such preparation thorough enough to promise any result worth welcoming in the shape of general intellectual strength and suppleness. A university that both teaches and examines soon finds this fact out ; and the older universities and those younger corporations which have formed themselves on matured models have recognised it by increasing the number of subjects a candidate may take, whilst reducing the number he needs must.

But some such change in the methods of the London organisation will be wel- come not only to schoolmasters, who deal with a very plastic material, capa- ble of receiving, if not retaining long, many diverse impressions. The boon would also immensely lighten the heavy burden that weighs down and weakens the younger provincial col- leges and embryo universities that are

struggling up the educational moun- tain. I propose in the following notes to call attention to the important rela- tion borne by these institutions to the intellectual and industrial progress of this country, and to the peculiar diffi- culties with which they have to contend.

Two main tendencies have contri- buted to their foundation and de- velopment. First of all, the University of London offered its valuable certifi- cate to a very large class of students who, owing to unfulfillable conditions of residence or tests, were debarred from the degrees conferred by the Universities of Oxford and Cam- bridge. Young men were able to take the first grade university exami- nations— for matriculation — after a sufficiently comprehensive cramming at the various high schools in London and in the large provincial towns ; their passage through the subsequent stages they had, for the most part, to manage for themselves. The particu- lar defects attributed to this system everybody knows. No doubt the London University can claim as graduates many men of more than ordinary mark ; but post hoc is, of course, not propter hoc, and perhaps the system dear to London has only failed to spoil them.

But besides this mass of unorganised and unattached intelligence, which London has sealed to itself, partly welcoming as existing, partly calling into existence, there has sprung up of late years another body of students, who in their turn are obeying a natu- ral impulse in seeking some systemisa- tion and organising bond ; these are the nondescript elements of intellectual life for which provision has been sought in the various working schemes of uni- versity extension. University exten-

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sion was a very natural and much- needed movement, if only for the purpose of supplying England with some — even itinerant — institution at all comparable with the university systems of most other advanced Euro- pean nations. When the German Empire contains twenty-four univer- sities, Austria nine, and Switzerland five, surely England has not yet her fair share.

The classes attending instruction under the university extension scheme include, besides genuine students to whom books and book-labour are them- selves subjects of real interest, many middle-class dilettanti, to whom the lectures are often merely a means of relaxation ; often young women of leisure, who are past school age and yet are loath to rust in unbookish domesticity ; sometimes these are sup- ported by the presence of older ladies, to whom a lecture often supplies a form of intellectual amusement from which physical infirmity or active life ordi- narily separates them.

Now, in any generous scheme of middle-class education, none of these, for various reasons, can well be left out of account. The man or woman whose bread will have more or less butter, according to success in some examination for a certificate ; the intel- ligent reader who would fain get the guidance of some person more expe- rienced than himself ; the young man or woman who has carried out of school some respect for great books and the rarer quality of intellectual activity ; even the older people whose eyes are not good, or who crave some literary or scientific discourse by double way of reminder and rest — none of these may be forgotten. And in these days we have also to deal with a more difficult and exacting person than all these — the working man with his hun- dred heads, who would be a much more tractable creature for education to tackle if only he knew himself what he lacked.

To account for all these is the ter- ribly various task of the provincial

university college. The professor here cannot, like his brother tutor at Oxford or Cambridge, confine himself to looking over text-books, calling at- tention to valuable notes, correcting exercises at his leisure, and sometimes not passing beyond the curriculum pre- scribed by his own university. The provincial professor has indeed to pre- pare many of his men and women for examinations, but he probably has to keep in view not one or two, but a dozen different examinations. London itself will provide him with at least three, the matriculation, the inter- mediate, and the final B.A. examina- tions ; and he will have students reading for the same stage, but for different dates of examination, and therefore taking different subjects, or at all events, reading at a different pace. In this way he may have to hold two different matriculation classes, two classes for the help of intermediate students, and an indefinite number for those taking the highest stages.

But besides the London contingent, he will probably have to shape his course so as to keep in sight a certain number of aspirants who are present- ing themselves for this or that local examination, senior or junior ; here and there a candidate for a Civil Service appointment ; and not unfrequently young men who have left school, and still want gentle help up to the stan- dard of matriculation required at the colleges of Oxford or Cambridge.

"Without doubt, too, there will be a certain number of persons, engaged in teaching during the day, who come to classes in their dinner-hour at mid- day, or to the night classes ; for it must be understood that one of the most important features of the work of these colleges is the holding of classes during the winter evenings.

In many respects these students are the most satisfactory and, not unfre- quently, the most intelligent of ali- as, to be sure, we should expect in the case of people engaged in teaching others. As a rule, they belong to public elementary schools, and apply

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themselves to this extra work, because the School Boards supply better posts to those who can produce the highest certificates of proficiency in learning. Although most people are beginning to be satisfactorily aware of the truth that a man may carry a high degree and yet be an inefficient teacher, School Boards in large towns, to whom the fact is of vital importance, are among the last to recognise it and carry its lessons into practice. A little less examining, however, a little less driving to secure a good return in marks and passes, a little more time allowed to the unfortunate teachers to add to his or her stock of knowledge, would not seriously injure schools under their charge, if, indeed, it would not bring them to the fulfilment of their daily tasks with more healthy vigour of body and soul.

Occasionally an over-worked and over-inspected elementary teacher is found venturesome enough to scale the heights of learning for the sake of the finer air he hopes to breathe there, rather than for the "decoration" which is the load-star of most climb- ers. This, however, is to be the spirit of all elementary schoolmasters in the happy future awaiting them, under the results of Mr. Mundella's efforts for their improvement. The right honour- able gentleman is reported to have said at the first annual meeting of the Teachers' Guild of Great Britain and Ireland, " that he agreed there should be an opportunity for the transition of the accomplished teacher to a higher position than the elementary schools, and he had done the best he could to open out a career for the elementary teacher. . . . the elementary teacher should have a better training and larger and more liberal education than he had received up to the present ; he should come more into contact with university men, and he should obtain some of the advantages which the uni- versities of this country and of Scot- land could afford for the services of the teacher." In the meantime it would be well if the Committee of Council

on Education could see its way to shortening the hours exacted un- necessarily from elementary teachers for the sake of getting high percent- ages of classes, and if it could allow and encourage them to use without loss to their own pockets the educational appliances ready to their hands in the local university colleges.

In certain centres, it is found that these local colleges are useful additions to the teaching capabilities of institu- tions specially theological. At Firth College, for instance, an important Con- gregationalist college, thirty minutes distant by rail, gets its classics, mo- dern languages, science, and mathe- matics ; and a local college of the New Connection Methodists sends its stu- dents there for classics. How much this means can really be understood only by those whose work brings them into close contact with men who are preparing for ministerial appointments in dissenting bodies. As a rule, of course, theological colleges belonging to the Church of England are mostly of old foundation, and in possession of endowed wealth that enables them to provide within their own walls for the arts training of their men. But out- side these latter it is very hard to find any great excellence even in the dead languages among students of theology. The sceptre is certainly in the hands of the Church. It is hardly necessary to point out — for reasons which it is not the purpose of this paper to examine — that most of the clergy of the Established Church are drawn from classes of higher social status than the ministers of dissenting bodies, and the most obvious consequence of this is, that candidates for admission into dissenting ministries are less well drilled in classics, as in other things, than candidates for ordination in the National Church — some less than others. To such men local col- leges bid fair to be of the utmost use ; at all events they should there find their sympathies and culture consider- ably quickened. The professors at such colleges are mostly men from Oxford

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or Cambridge, who very probably have a wholesome faith in the methods and traditions of the old homes of learning to which they are themselves indebted, and it is natural that they should try to reproduce these under the altered conditions required in busy manu- facturing towns.

Some of the theological students, I have said, present themselves already better equipped for work than others. Indeed the greatest possible variety exists. In the first place, connection differs from connection ; in one you will have men of a clearly higher social grade than in another, and for teach- ing purposes this must often be taken to determine their intellectual standard as well. The conditions under which men are selected must naturally result in most striking contrasts in regard to intellectual qualifications. The first recommendation of a candidate for a license is the power to preach, and there will be no suspicion of irony in the reminder that great mental polish is not necessary to a fervent and effec- tive preacher. Now, to meet such cases as these, most local colleges have found it necessary to form classes for persons wishing to begin at the very beginning, with /jiova-a and mensa them- selves : and here the teacher is met with a very curious and serious diffi- culty. He is sure to have in his class two or three — may be more — with whom the beginning is at the begin- ning in very truth ; they have to be accustomed to the altogether (to them) strange fact of accidentic and syntactic differentiation of languages. Boys who begin to learn Latin and Greek when very young are never troubled with this difficulty, or, if it occurs, as it may perhaps somewhere in the vague wonder-world of youth, it is not noticed and passes away. But a grown man, just being introduced to the study, cannot be expected to appre- hend idiomatic difference without great mental effort, and the more conscien- tious he is, the greater will his diffi- culties be. This notable fact will go far to explain the greater readiness

and plasticity which distinguishes such people as the Welsh. Accustomed to differences of idiom owing to the necessities of bilingual life, to them the apprehension of a new language is nothing more than another acqui- sition in a series of similar mental efforts ; it is not an effort quite different from everything else in their mental experience. For like reasons, Board School examiners have observed how much more easily languages are ac- quired and their theories mastered by the children of the great Jewish set- tlement in the east of London. Most of these are of German or Polish origin, and many know something more of Hebrew than is necessary for the understanding of their copious daily prayers ; therefore English or any other language is easily acquired. In considering the relations of these colleges to national education, we must first note the important bearing of "founders' intentions." Most of the founders had it in their minds to do something for the great mass of middle- class people who were (they supposed) craving for the light of learning. There must be very many men, thought they, who will gladly attend, at all events, evening classes in physical and moral science, in modern or " dead " lan- guages. It is not found, I imagine, that these sanguine and kindly hopes have been generally fulfilled. In the institution with which the writer of this article is most familiar, such stu- dents have been conspicuously few. We may not say, as the late Mr. W. E. Greg would probably have said, that such is the case because that kind of fool, with the zealous clerk who studied Cocker in the even- ing, is dying out. He never really flourished in any great abundance ; nor has the wise man of the " middle- class " given study a sufficiently serious trial to justify his consigning it, with other vanities, to the fools. The con- spicuous few known to the writer have certainly not addled their brains, after the probable fashion of Mr. Greg's clerk ; indeed, the regular though little

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time devoted to st\idy has given them, as might have been expected, pleasant relaxation, with the addi- tional grace and advantage that, being pursued for its own sake and for no material gain, it has brought the ap- propriate gifts of knowledge and re- finement. But these, I say, are the few, the very few. The tradesman will certainly not spend many of his evenings at the local college, and the working man is even less likely to do so. In the first place, many employ- ments are so exhausting that mental strain out of working hours would do much more harm than good ; and this surmise is well borne out by the fact that a far greater number of working men and women present themselves in districts where the work is more seden- tary than in districts, like Sheffield, where the staple industries tax physical strength to the utmost. It may be very safely laid down that the several local colleges will find their working-men students fewer in pro- portion to the " heaviness " of the local trades, and that of students who do come from the working classes there will rarely be many from the heaviest crafts. The class of small shopkeepers and others who have sundry oppor- tunities of looking into books, generally produces a few good students ; for, odd as it may seem, here and there an English shopkeeper will sometimes filch a few minutes from his counter, like the Mussulman tradesman who says his prayers in the intervals of rest that occur in the process of bar- gaining with an obstinate customer.

Of course there are many other points to be considered in relation to the question as it affects technical teaching : this subject has its special difficulties. Let us for the present see under what conditions the local col- leges bring the best gifts of the old universities to those who cannot go to the fountain-heads.

It may be expected that local col- leges are not without their enemies, and these are of two chief kinds. Before all, the part of enemy has not

unfrequently been played by friends. Founders themselves have occasionally dealt hardly with their foundations. We saw above the various classes of persons to whom the university col- leges were to bring help, but we have not yet considered the subjects which such institutions were to teach. The university lecturers under the univer- sity extension schemes of course taught what the university had taught them ; a very large part, therefore, of the lecturing was on " literary " subjects. Many local colleges, accordingly, the foundation of which was suggested by the success of the extension lecturers, determined to make provision for the continuance of such teaching, and to extend the privilege of being taught to Latin and Greek, as subjects not without some literary interest. But at least one important local institution was founded " to the exclusion of mere literary education and instruction," and accordingly Latin and Greek were without further ceremony refused re- cognition in the college "courses." But it was at last discovered that Latin and Greek had other claims be- sides those peculiar to literary antiqui- ties, and now (except when the instruc- tion is entirely technical) Latin and Greek are taught in every college.

One of the most obstinate foes of these institutions is occasionally the employer of labour, who is irritated to think that culture, which he himself may have acquired unaided, should be offered at so low a price to his work- men. If we dismiss this kind of op- ponent at once from consideration we shall give him no less than his deserts; he may go with those who discourage elementary education out of terror Jest there should be no one, at the end of time, left to black their boots. The stars in their courses fight on the other side ; facts and natural laws are against them. It is satisfactory to note that where the education of employes has been actively and systematically promoted by managers, employers have often been demonstrably the richer for it.

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But the lukewarmness and even active opposition of workmen them- selves is a much more serious matter. Efforts have been made on behalf of local colleges in sundry places to win the sympathy of the trades unionists, or rather of their guiding spirits. It might naturally be supposed that these societies would understand their own interests to be bound up with the in- terests of the education of their class, an d that whatever advantage they might gain would remain theirs only so long as they knew how to keep it. But no ; they regard university colleges for the most part as gift horses of more than uncertain mouths ; the Greeks may bring gifts, but your Trojans will have none of them.

For what does not appreciably and at once affect their stomachs or their pockets the stolid and ignorant care not at all ; the wiseacres, for their part, shrewdly suspect that they have here merely cunningly-contrived en- gines of secret oppression.

In a certain institution, with the working of which the writer of these notes is familiar, an energetic princi- pal thought it well to invite the heads of the local trades' unions to a con- ference for the purpose of securing their interest with their fellows on behalf of the local college. In the course of conversation he pointed out the possible value of lectures on English history to workmen whose intelligent co-operation indicated, he thought, an inquiring spirit. But the sages shook their heads, and their spokesman pointed out "that there had already been too much English history, and that it was all going to be undone." This was not promising, and, indeed, the conference was followed by a cor- responding result — nothing.

I may be allowed to call attention to the following abstract from the Report of the Royal Commission on Technical Instruction (vol. i. page 525) to show how the commissioners were struck by the apathy of the working classes. " Your commissioners fear that the belief in the efficacy of train-

ing of this highest character is, in Eng- land, at present, small amongst those whom it will ultimately benefit ; and yet there are few countries in which so many investigations have been made, the practical bearings of which were not at the outset apparent, but which have in the end led to the most important practical results. The dis- covery by Faraday of magneto-electri- city, and by Joule of the mechanical equivalent of heat, at once occurred as examples. The Englishman is ac- customed to seek for an immediate return ; and has yet to learn that an extended and systematic education up to and including the methods of origi- nal research, is now a necessary pre- liminary to the fullest development of industry. It is, amongst other ele- ments of progress, to the gradual but sure growth of public opinion in this direction that your commissioners look for the means of securing to this country in the future, as in the past, the highest position as an industrial nation."

The founders of most local colleges seem to have fallen into the very great error of not interesting the people themselves in the work as proprietors. Generous men have lavished large sums on buildings without coming directly to the people they wish chiefly to benefit, and asking them to share in the work by sparing some little from their own pockets. This has been a great mis- take, and the mistake lies just in the point that the "lower" classes have been allowed to regard these institu- tions as eleemosynary, as free gifts from their betters. It has never been pro- perly made clear to them, for some reason or other, that though the gifts are mostly free gifts yet they are merely encouragements to them to help themselves. Let them be asked to contribute ever so little. Men love nothing so well as what they spend their pains and money on.

In England, unfortunately, we can- not appeal to any keen national senti- ment of competition in the matter of education; Wales is luckier. Not

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only can it, in the interests of education, make successful raids on the public purse, but it justifies itself by pro- ducing ready money itself for the same wise end. The quarrymen of Penrhyn found scholarships ; bursaries are made up out of farthing subscrip- tions.

Human nature is differently, and perhaps better understood in Holland than in England and Wales, or even France and Belgium. In Holland there is positively no room for the scholars at the evening classes in most of the great towns. The Dutch autho- rities, however, make their students pay 13s. 4:d. per semester, as they think " that the pupils place a greater value on the instruction for which they have to pay."

It will be very readily understood that there is no local university col- lege that does not make provision for technical education, adapted in each case to supply the best possible help to the industries of the districts served. One would think that in these days there is hardly need of demonstration to prove the value of such teaching in a country whose prosperity depends on the excellence of its manufactures ; but all speakers and writers on the subject of technical education in Eng- land must needs take up the apologetic or justificatory tone, for in this country the recommendations of tech- nical teaching have yet to meet with adequate success.

We may not be unfamiliar with reflections on the evils effected by machinery, but, machinery or no, we must understand machinery, and understand well, if we are to live ; moreover, other things are taught in technical schools besides the construc- tion and manipulation of machines. If industrial processes are to be im- proved, they must be understood ; and rule of thumb has done its best. It is not unusual to hear rule of thumb extolled, and therefore it is not out of place here to reckon the prejudice it embodies as a serious difficulty in the way of technical schools in districts

where one might have looked for better things. Manufacturers of the " old school " assert that rule of thumb has done well enough for them, and must serve for their children ; but less than a generation will be needed to show that it is a rival ill-fitted to contend with modern science. Bradford, for instance, is well to the fore in technical teaching, and the Royal Commissioners saw there " merinos manufactured and finished in this country, which would bear comparison in texture and in colour with the best of those of the French looms and dye-houses," and, " in the delicate fabrics of Nottingham and Macclesfield (thanks, in great measure, to their local school of art) we no longer rely on France for designs " (vol. i. page 507). This is very strong testimony, and those who are most confident of the value of the old methods will do well to remember that the prosperity which has made the wealth of England famous, is not due merely to the excellence of the work done, but in very large measure to a number of economic and physical con- ditions which are now the property of all our rivals, because of the very facilities of intercourse which our good luck and enterprise have placed at the world's disposal.

On the other hand, there is a reason- able apprehension in the mind of the employer of labour that in promoting the cause of technical education he is pickling a rod for his own back. There is justice in this ; ultimately, no doubt, the best man will win. But little is gained by barring the progress of rational improvement if one of the inevitable effects of such attempts is to leave the market in the hands of the foreign producer. Peter, to be sure, is robbed, but Paul is still unpaid. The obviously best plan is, of course, not to be last in the race, and our continental friends seem to be well alive to it, for the Royal Commis- sioners already quoted " cannot repeat too often that they have been impressed with the general intelligence and technical knowledge of the masters

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and managers of industrial establish- ments on the Continent. They have found that these persons, as a rule, possess a sound knowledge of the sciences upon which their industry depends. They are familiar with every new scientific discovery of importance, and appreciate its applicability to their special industry. They adopt not only the inventions and improvements made in their own country, but also those of the world at large — thanks to their knowledge of foreign languages and of the conditions of manufacture pre- valent elsewhere." At Wurtemberg the Commissioners found that em- ployers take so much interest in the night-schools that they are supplied with registers of attendance to see whether their apprentices are diligently " improving themselves." Employers and parents gladly co-operate to secure the attendance of the apprentices, and when one absents himself without due cause, the employer expects to be informed of the fact.

There is yet another direction in which local university colleges are doing work which ought to be useful, though it is odd that the facts are by no means always readily recognised in quarters to which one would have naturally looked for instant approba- tion. The giving of " popular lectures " at nominal charges for admission has, in many places, been a very great success. The local institution is often fortunate enough to secure the hon- orary services of distinguished men of science or letters, and in some towns these lectures for the people have attracted huge crowds. Elsewhere, owing, without doubt, to local causes, the lectures have been given to audiences in which the working-class element has been so small as to have been conspicuous. In some towns there is a kind of tradition that makes lecture-going a popular amusement ; in others, those who would be most welcome at popular lectures, the people, are notoriously shy.

It has suggested itself to some persons actively engaged in organis-

ing such matters that from religious teachers and preachers of the people, local university colleges do not always receive the support to which they are fairly entitled, considered merely as adjuncts and aids to the reforming work of the clergy. This is by no means entirely the fault of the clergy themselves. In some cases, perhaps, the courtesies due to the old custodians of national education have not been remembered, and the necessary exclu- sion of divinity from the curricula, for the sake of concord, has not always, may be, been effected very gracefully or even unostentatiously. But clergy- men will surely do well to welcome in university colleges, especially in regard to their " popular " work, very power- ful allies in the war against ignorance and class-isolation and selfishness. The absolute exclusion of theology is inevitable ; it is not yet generally regarded as possible, with all deference to Professor Bryce, to have chairs of unsectarian divinity even in the older, and therefore wiser, universities.

In dealing unconsciously with class- isolation, university colleges are likely to have considerable influence ; they are helping to break down class barriers by the best, the only good means possible. It does not, of course, very often happen that young men come thither to prepare for Oxford or Cambridge, but it is not very un- common. Nor, on the other hand, is it to be expected that the new colleges shall take the place and do the work of higher-grade schools. On the contrary, the local colleges must be fed by the schools ; receiving from them those pupils who for various reasons do not go into residence at Oxford or Cam- bridge or other great universities. This ought to be their chief aim ; it is only an accident that they have now very generally to perform the duties of Mechanics' Institutes on behalf of men and women beginning from the beginning. But in discharging all these various functions, they attract people of every social rank, and so do in the midst of busy industrial life

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what Oxford and Cambridge during the last half-century have been doing in true academic retirement. A university where men do not meet in the lecture-room, and at social gather- ings, open to all alike as students, is a university only in name ; it may examine well ; its degrees may be valuable guarantees of capacity ; but to smooth social differences, to rub off angles, it does little indeed. The London University has given the testimonial of its parentage to men of all creeds and classes ; but they have left their unsympathetic alma mater without knowing anything of their foster-brothers ; without any sympathy for new interests communicated in social intercourse ; without any soften- ing of prejudices or kindlier toleration for forms of opinion before unknown and unwelcome.

Again, notable contribution should be made by local colleges towards solving whatever remains of the pro- blem of female education. It is now very generally conceded that, if only on grounds of fair play, women so minded should have the same educa- tional chances as men ; those who think women will achieve and maintain solid ground of their own are glad that there is a prospect of justice being done, and the battle going to the strong ; those who think that the sex, hitherto considered weaker, will suffer severely in the struggle, must get what consolation they can from the reflection that only the fit will survive. In many classes the bulk of the students are women, usually young women, some of them working for the sake of their subjects, some mainly with a view to passing examinations. Men, unless reading with some special end, or giving all their time to pre- paration for professions in which "learning " is of some account, do not come in great numbers to classes held in the day-time. On the other hand, the night students are mainly men. The reasons for this are many. In the first place, it is obvious that women will prefer attendance at classes which No. Oil. — VOL. LIT.

do not require them to leave their homes at night ; the male students, on the other hand, have often to spend their day in manufactories, warehouses, and shops, and are glad to change their atmosphere at night. Again, the fees for the day courses are higher than those required for attendance at the evening courses, so that many who would hesitate to spend the full day fee are well able to pay the very small sum that secures admission to night instruction. Besides, the day classes meet twice a week, and the night classes usually once only ; and it is found that • the preparation required for this one lesson is quite as much as the average night-student can manage. But whether the classes meet during the day or in the evening, the women are certainly better than the men ; not only are individual women superior to individual men, but the female students at local colleges are on the whole intellectually higher than men who there take like subjects. A little reflection, however, will show the naturalness of this. The women are picked women, the best of their sex ; the men are mostly of the ordinary sort. Had the women students been men, they would have been at Oxford or Cambridge. If, therefore, com- parisons are to be made, the women students at local colleges must be matched against honour men at the universities. But even under these conditions of rivalry they will hold their own, and it is just because the local college gives such women some- thing of a university, which they would lack without such provision, that it has a very strong claim on those who profess to be anxious in the cause of female education. For various reasons women will not be able to fulfil the conditions fulfilled by men at Oxford and Cambridge, not to the end of time ; but we may hope that local colleges will gradually be recognised as giving them a chance of the best intellectual exercise, whilst not depriv- ing them of the more valuable domestic training to which they have hitherto

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(as it is usually supposed) been gener- ally confined. The fact that the women's colleges at Oxford and Cam- bridge are too small for the numbers of matriculating students is proof enough of the utility of the new scheme which allows women to be at least examined, although it still leaves virtue to be its own chief reward. So far, local colleges are not inefficient, but, of course, residence in or near university towns places within the reach of students the best academical help available.

From the foregoing notes the reader will probably be struck, first, by the great want of system in our schemes of national education, and then, by the chaotic state of those agencies whose business it is to provide for the higher instruction of the classes below those who are able to use the great univer- sities. From this may be seen clearly enough the severity of the task imposed on local university colleges, and should, gain for them the sympathy,

and something more, of all those who wish well to education in England. At present university colleges are trying to perform most incongruous duties ; they are mechanics' institutes, tutorial agencies, universities, tech- nical schools. So much is expected of them, and they have usually so little money, that some, at least, of their work must be badly done ; and what is well done is done with a great expen- diture of effort, sometimes on puny tasks. The advanced subjects of " arts," in the academical sense, are necessary ; the highest technical teach- ing is necessary ; and these should be separately provided for. But adequate provision there will never be until, on the one hand, the English people generally recognise the value of some training in letters, and until, on the other hand, both employers and employed are agreed in seeing the interests of all furthered, if not recon- ciled, in schools of national industry.

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THERE are certain patents, or rather copyrights, which it would be a blunder verging on crime to infringe. The sight- seeing of the British isles must be left to our American cousins ; charioteer- ing chronicles to the cosmopolitan millionaire, or members of the Four- in-Hand Club, and the discovery of new holiday haunts to the legions of enter- prising tourists, whose most difficult problem at present is how to get out of each other's way. The " log " of a bond fide traveller who has occasion to trot leisurely through the rural roads of half a dozen counties in our native land must be acquitted of any rash ambition to compete with these esta- blished literary properties ; but it is not claiming too much for the British isles to say that within the length and breadth of them no continuous stretch of 150 miles can be traversed without pleasure and some kind of instruction, most likely unforeseen ; and if the chapter of accidents puts such a stretch of road within our reach, the invita- tion to follow it should not be neglected.

A glance at Bradshaw's map will show that, notwithstanding the de- velopment of railway enterprise, there is no direct route from the north-west corner of Hampshire to the south-west end of Lincolnshire, so that if a horse, trap, and human appendages have to be conveyed from one point to the other, it is economically possible to prefer the road to a day's rail round the corner through London. It is the second week in June, but owing to the late spring the hawthorn is still only in its prime ; the buttercups in the Hampshire meadows make a broader and brighter sheet of gold than usual, and the little villages which nestle mostly in cosy, wooded hollows, round about the " neat and solid market town " of Andover, still justify Cob- bett's assertion that " this country has its beauties, though so open," and we

must now add, so turnip-ridden. Sixty years since, Cobbett's harangues to the farmers were among the attractions of the great October fair at Weyhill, which he describes as " a village of half a dozen houses on a down, just above Appleshaw." It is not much larger now, but the fair buildings, long, low sheds, with chalk walls and slate roofs, separated by green lanes, with down outside, and a picturesque ex-inn and farm-house in the centre, give a curious individuality to the place.

The weather is cloudy, and we only start at six P.M., intending to sleep at Newbury, after a short stage of six- teen miles. Weyhill is known paro- chially as Penton Graf ton, and part of the parish belongs geographically to the neighbouring village of Penton Mewsey, through which we start. Penton is not on the high road, and we follow lanes that meander gently right and left, up and down, with a leisurely, rustic slouch. A couple of miles brings us to a little corner public house ; one boy represents the population of five cross lanes ; presently we find ourselves on the high road from Andover to Newbury ; here are milestones, mostly illegible, an unin- habited turnpike hut, two labourers going home from work, one wayside cottage, a country parson and a gig crawling up the hill down which our old horse prefers to zig-zag cautiously. The rain lifts, and only the distant views of Berkshire hills are spoilt ; the brown atmosphere seems to harmonise with the silence ; all the hedge that is not snowy white is a moist, feathery green, uncontaminated by shears and bill-hook, and even without the shadow of the wood upon the right, one might mistake these rural solitudes for the lotus eater's paradise, a land of long, lazy, drifting, through silent fragrant afternoons.

Five miles from Andover we come B B 2

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to Hurstborne Tarrant, again a fa- vourite haunt of Cobbett, though he prefers the local and corrector pronunci- ation of Up-husband, a largish village with near 900 inhabitants. "Wages here in 1822 were 6s. weekly ; in the same part of the country they are now 12s., but children no longer go to work at six or eight, so that the man with a "long family" has gained in money wages perhaps half-a-crown. They have thus increased in the interval by about a halfpenny per annum, a truly magnificent pace of progress, at which rate, if continued 300 years heuce, Hodge will be earning just about the 621. per annum which Cobbett calcu- lated to be sufficient to find a labourer's family in home-grown bread, meat, and beer, without any such new-fangled luxuries as tea, school-pence, or pota- toes. Perhaps, as Beranger says —

" Celles-ci sont pour 1'an trois mil, ainsi soit-il ! "

More copse and hedges. A steep pull up the ridge which culminates in Beacon and Sidown Hills, above Lord Carnarvon's Park. The famous rhodo- dendrons of High Clere are in bloom, but we pass by on the other side, through the village, the third and last upon the road to Newbury, which we reach, through its modest fringe of villas, about half-past eight. The little town is strange to us, and we seek guidance from an opportune police- man, and though the discreet guardian of the public peace looks as if, like the undergraduate pressed to discriminate between the major and minor pro- phets, he " liked not to make invidious distinctions," we gather from him that it will be on the safe side to " put up " at the White Hart. But for the quarterly utterance of the church clock, the paved market-place is as silent as the hedgerows through the nights.

These first fifteen miles were not by any means the most solitary of the road before us, but they happen to be those as to which it is easiest to " quantify " the impression we receive of traversing a scantily peopled

country. It would be troublesome to ascertain for the whole distance the exact acreage of every parish traversed, but for these sixteen miles the popula- tion in a strip of country averaging about a mile and four-fifths wide along the road, averages about seventy-seven to the square mile. The soil is not poor ; the land is almost entirely in- closed, is all cultivable and apparently all cultivated, except the pleasure-grounds at Doleswood and High Clere. Whether under these circumstances the above population can be considered normal in a civilised and crowded country may be judged from the fact that the general average for Great Britain is 289 to the square mile ; the average in Ireland before the famine was 249 ; that of Bengal is 440 ; that of the eastern province of China, including the great plain, is 458 ; while three of the most populous of these provinces, with an area half as large again as Great Britain and Ireland, had, at the beginning of the century, an average of nearly 750 to the square mile. Unless our agricultural labourers are ten times as well off as John Chinaman we must have a good deal to learn in the way of rural economy ; and, un- fortunately, it is an open question whether the agricultural labourer is even as well off with us as he is (except in famine years) in the land of Mencius, where the test of good government has always been, that the aged agricul- turalist is able to " eat flesh and wear silk," the latter of course for warmth, not ostentation. Most of the villages we reach have a stationary or declining population, and as Cobbett's personal experience of so many different coun- ties gave a similar result, except about the then modest little town of London, it is easy to understand his disbelief in the return of the second and third census (1811 and 1821), which represented the population of the whole country as increasing. With all his hatred of the " war," he hardly realised how many villages could be emptied into it with- out making much impression on its apparent size.

The next day's journey must take

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in fifty-six miles to Banbury, so an early start is prudent. A. pretty chambermaid keeps exemplary faith, and we are off at seven, through a quiet downpour suggestive of one of the few weather proverbs that experi- ence justifies rather oftener than not. " Rain before seven, fine before eleven " in this case meant dry by nine and sunny by noon, and for the rest of the way we had only to congratulate our- selves on the showers which had laid the dust and cooled the roads for three days ahead. A shady road leads out of Newbury through Domington vil- lage ; not being sightseers we leave the castle of that ilk on our left, cross the Lambourn on its way to join the Kennet, pass an old road-side inn dedicated to the Fox and Hounds, catch a glimpse of Chievely church and village on the left, and admire a long row of laburnum trees in full flower which some one has planted alternately with firs along a sloping meadow top. No hay is cut or carry- ing ; one threshing machine is at work, but John opines that if the farmer has been holding back for a rise he is likely to be disappointed when he gets to market. About six miles from Newbury, with thedisregard for horseflesh common to English road makers, we charge straight up and down Beedon hill.a round outwork of the Berk- shire downs, avoiding the village which lies on a by road at the western foot.

On the north side of Beedon Hill we descend upon the interesting and picturesque village of Market Ilsley, where sheep and lamb fairs are held fortnightly for several months. The village lies in the hollow between Beedon Hill and the range of downs which stretches west above the vale of the "White Horse to Ashdown. Half the village street is taken up en permanence with the sheep pens re- quired for the recurring fairs or markets, and the adaptation of the whole village to a special and unusual purpose gives it the same half exotic air in Weyhill, which it also resem- bles in the number of its public- houses — there are seven inns besides

beer-shops to a population under 600 — and in the presence of racing stables, brought by the fact that the grass of this down furnishes the best exer- cising ground for young horses. We had determined at starting to follow the custom of Swiss and Italian vetturini, and make two short halts in the morning and afternoon, as well as the longer one at mid-day, and at Ilsley horse and man tried the hospi- tality of one of the seven inns while the driver strolled up to the Ridgeway. Flocks of sheep were grazing in hurdled inclosures under the slope, the clouds were breaking, and gleams of sunlight flitted over the country, resting, as it seemed, by preference on the little market-place. The summit of the hill is open, and as lovely a bit of down as one need wish to see. The dim grass track of the Ridgeway stretches alluringly to the west, and it would be a sacrifice to remain in sight of the high road but for a copse or thicket on either side of it. Here the gorse in flower, with hawthorn trees in the midst, made a perfect group with earth and sky ; the delicate green, gold, and white — hues fit for fairy-land — harmonise and blend with each other and the land- scape, with a look of naturalness as well as beauty that the best arrange- ment of the best horticulturalists never quite come up to. It is not by acci- dent that primroses, wood anemones and violets, cowslips and purple orchises, wildrose and honeysuckle, loosestrife and meadowsweet, and many another floral pair, not only grow together, but set off each other's beauty as they do so. Nature's groupings are the best in our eyes, not merely because they are natural, but also because our eyes have not yet altogether unlearnt the unconscious lessons of primeval life by which man adapts his taste to what is best in nature instead of adapting nature to what is worst in man. The inhabitants of the village, it is said, have the right of cutting furze upon the downs, but inclosures have crept up so far that the privilege cannot be worth much.

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As the crow flies, the Thames, just below Moulsford, is only six or seven miles off, but the view due east is blocked by the shoulder of the down, and the open country, watered by the obscure streamlets which debouch into the Thames at Abingdon, has no more charm than belongs to every wide outlook over cultivated land. A pond and farm-house betoken the neighbour- hood of the little village of Chiltern, which, like three villages out of every four, stands off the high road. About seven miles from Ilsley we cross the Great Western Railway by Steventon station and village, the latter of which, no doubt, owes to the presence of the former the fact that its population is slightly on the increase. As if to assure us that, after all, the plains of merrie England are a little more populous than the Spliigen, we find the village street beyond the gate of the level crossing engaged in the wild dissipation which betokens a "club feast." There is a small booth by the wayside, and a red-coat is having a shy at " Aunt Sally ; " fathers of families, in their Sunday best, saunter up by twos and threes ; and a flag is flying at the inn, where the proceed- ings will terminate with the usual minimum of benefit to the club funds. Steventon, however, rejoices in attractions more permanent than those of Aunt Sally. On the Abingdon side the road passes through what at first sight seems only an unusually large and pretty village green, but a second glance shows that the avenue of tall trees around it belongs to the green and edges a raised path, like those along the Oxford meadows, skirt- ing the green. Admiration is mixed with wonder, for we seldom meet a village seised of such a pretty bit of landed property. On inquiry it seems that a trust fund, somewhat under 40£. per annum, has been bequeathed for keeping up the causeway and avenues; but while such pretty pos- sessions are the exception, and the custom of the country is to do without them, their owners will not know what to do with them, and accordingly

we find the wild festivities of Steventon going on in the street, with as little picturesqueness as if no founder and benefactor had ever thought of its pleasures. After this the road passes through Drayton village, and in four miles reaches Abingdon. It is only on entering and leaving a town that any question as to the route arises. From Abingdon to Oxford there is a choice, and in following the high road we come in by Christchurch instead of over Magdalen bridge. The number of notices to trespassers about Bagly Wood and elsewhere suggests that we are in the neighbourhood either of peculiarly illiberal landlords or a very destructive native population. We reach Oxford at noon, but these centres of civilisation concern us not.

Along the Banbury Road we see some haymaking at last, and the scent of bean-fields is in the air. For a mile or so beyond Summerstown a few nurses and children, and further on a youth or two, taking their constitu- tionals on wheels, break the transition. We touch the corner of the straggling village of Kidlington, and then the road settles down into the pretty agricultural solitude which we are learning to look upon as the traveller's right. Road-side trees, rare in Hamp- shire, grow steadily commoner as we proceed, their shade the welcomer as the sky clears ; but one cannot have every- thing at once, and with them we lose a type of road which at least once a year is full of charm ; it is edged with turf on either side, and the wheat or turnip-fields are almost shut out of sight by the hedge of branching haw- thorn, seldom less than ten or twelve feet high. Tackley parish produces " Sturdy Castle," an old junction inn, where the high road forks to Wood- stock ; but in Steeple Aston we find a better half-way house, owned by a farmer and still called " Hopcroft's Holt," after some ancient occupier of equal wisdom. This is the typical or rather the ideal way-side inn, quiet and white and neat, with flowers before the porch and a little parlour, which is also the family's best sitting-room,

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commanding a still and pleasant view of the copse and finger-post where four unfrequented roads diverge ; here, at least, between five and six the wayfarer may rejoice in afternoon tea (though even then bread and cheese will be proffered first) and either try his hand at a well- bound novel, dedicated in 1830 to the newly confessed " author of Waverley," or meditate on the con- firmation given by our village inns to the thesis of England's uninhabited estate. Some of these little hostelries are pretty and pleasant enough to com- pare with ought of their size in Switz- erland or Bavaria or the Black Forest ; but their pleasantness is in no case supported or suggested by the custom which they receive. "Pis not for guests or customers that flowers are set in the window and sweet peas trained up the door. If mine host and his womenfolk come of a comfort- able stock acccustomed to these amenities, the inn will have the homely prettiness of a country farm ; if not, the farmer and his nag will respectively eat and drink in due season, the waggoner will stop to bait and Hodge turn in to swallow silently as much beer as his meagre budget will admit ; and more exacting customers are too few to count. If the inn looks prosper- ous, the odds are that the landlord is a farmer, or, may be, postmaster and tailor as well, or, as in Deddington just ahead, a blacksmith or a butcher, or sperhaps, proprietor of the mowing or threshing machine which serves the district. Civilised travellers will be- ware of the man who lives by beer alone and the effective demand for bread and cheese, to say nothing of bacon, is evidently inadequate to evoke a constant supply.

At six o'clock the best of the summer evening is before us ; the low hill en the right, with the churches of Steeple Aston and North Aston, shields the road which presently crosses the little river Swere, and climbs the hill to Deddington, once a market town now in appearance a rather overgrown village, and not the worse for that, since English villages are generally

pretty, and small English towns almost always ugly, unless their growth was arrested a century ago. Handsome old timbered houses survive to tell the tale of departed glory, and a bicycle gyrating down the hill casts a slender ray of hope on the immediate future of these rural roads and decaying village inns. Deddington has under 2,000 and Adderbury under 1,500 inhabit- ants ; they are only two miles apart and not unlike in situation, having each a hill and each a stream, and each a sleepy high street, though the green side of the hill sloping to the water meadows is of unequal steepness and beauty. Here again we meet signs of life : no fewer than three carts, of various degrees of pretension, bearing ferns and flowers and more or less hilarious drivers canter by us ; there must have been a flower show in Banbury, and we ourselves are in the parish of Bodlicote, a spot of some bo- tanical interest, for medicinal rlrubarb is grown here. Apropos of rhubarb, we pass to-day some plants of the common sort in flower, and wonder why it is not grown as a foliage plant in Hyde Park ; the heads are finer than pampas grass. Drugs and flower shows notwithstanding, the Eng- lish settlements to the north of Banbury (to borrow the language of a dispassionate explorer) are in a declining state. Deddington has lost its market and Easington its parish church, or rather the church is still there but the parishioners are made over to the adjoining cure of Cuxham ; a flock of twenty-eight sheep left in the wilder- ness cannot expect to have a shepherd to itself, and, as every traveller knows, the ruined and deserted temples of an ancient faith are always to be met with as picturesque ornaments on the site of former prosperity and cultiva- tion.

The crimson sun sets behind Ban- bury, a quiet, comfortable little town with about 10,000 inhabitants, just — so to speak — a size larger than New- bury, and not too large for a good contingent of the inhabitants to enjoy a summer evening's stroll along the

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shady roads outside the town, which are not without hospitable benches. By comparison with the roads we have been following we seem again in an inhabited country, but as at Newbury we compared our own impressions of England's uninhabitedness with Chinese statistics of population, we may now compare with both the im- pressions received by travellers in that really populous country. An Arab traveller of the ninth century attempts to give an idea of the popul- ousness of the fertile plains in southern China, by saying that the villages seem so close as almost to touch, and the cocks answer each other continuously from hamlet to hamlet for 100 leagues together. In England we speak of " barn door " fowls, and our peasantry have no barn and but rarely fowls, so the music of Chanticleer is less con- spicuous a feature in village life than might be wished ; but though every village kept wild cocks enough to spoil the slumbers of a score of Carlyles, along our high road their voices would not reach to make an echo in the nearest hamlet, but would die away desolately in the void. The Spanish and Portuguese travellers who visited China in the sixteenth century use corresponding expressions : pagodas stood within a stone's throw of each other and continuously for eleven days' journey they see "cities, towns, villages, boroughs, forts and castles not a (-hot's flight distant from one another." The Jesuit missionaries of the eighteenth and the Protestants of the present century tell substantially the same story, describing agricultural China as we should describe the manu- facturing parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, where the smoke of one town meets its neighbour in the sky. One recent traveller ' tried to explain the difference by the choice of more productive crops, " one acre of wheat will in Europe support two men ; one acre in China will probably support twenty ; " but if one acre of wheat supported two men, a parish contain- ing 1,920 acres half laid down in 1 Gill's River of Golden Sand, p. 277.

wheat would support 1,920 inhabitants, or at the rate of 640 to the square mile, and still have a surplus to spare for Deddington market. The true secret of the matter is that the Chinese agriculturist does, and the English does not feed and clothe him- self directly out of the produce of his own labour. The consequence is that, as English travellers observe, with a surprise that would itself be surprising to a Chinaman, the country people of China are well off in a fat, fertile district, and only poor when the soil and climate are against them. We manage these things differently in England ; and it might still be said, almost as absolutely as by Cobbett, that " the richer the soil and the more destitute of woods, that is to say, the more purely a corn country, the more miserable the labourers."

At Banbury the rights of chamber- maids are respected, and we are not "entitled," as the Scotch landlord says, to tea at 6.30, except by private arrangement with the damsel, who agrees to curtail her lawful slumbers for a consideration. We are off at seven, with a clear and cloudless sky ; and begin now to diverge from the straight road to Lincolnshire, and make a sweep westward, in order to touch at Coventry.

Outside the town we have a choice 'of roads — one to Warwick and Leam- ington, the other to Leamington ; and, as the latter is our destination, we fol- low its guidance, and do not repent, though it proves not to be the one we had predetermined on. Close to the road, at our left, is the pretty church and village of Mollington, half in Ox- ford and half in Warwickshire. The country here is exceedingly pretty — finely timbered, with fat, sloping pas- tures, ridged from old ploughing or draining. There is a Fenny Compton station, near which we cross the line, but the village is safe out of sight ; it used to be famous for its yeomen, whose substantial houses are now divided and let to labourers. Pretty as the road is here it has once been prettier, for al) along one side of it there is one of

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those narrow slips of fields that in such a place tell the tale of unmistakable stealing — the inclosure of the wayside grass by some bold bad man. The curi- ous thing here is that telegraph posts stand upon the stolen ground. Does the Commons Preservation Society know whether the Post Office is the thief 1 The last Ordnance Map (1815) marks the road as uninclosed, and 'tis visible to the naked eye that the fence is now where no fence can have a right to be.

After the railway for as near as may be four miles there is not a single house of any sort upon the road ; in 1815 there was one at least, but it has disappeared, and we have to go two miles beyond the halfway to Leaming- ton before coming to a stable for the morning halt. In compensation, the little village of Ladbroke reached at last, has gates upon which one may lean away an hour in bucolic bliss. There is a big house with timbered grounds bounding the view on one side, one or more middle-sized dwellings set back in gardens, besides the church, the rectory, and a tiny cluster of cottages, beginning with the very humble inn and ending with the black- smith's forge, 250 souls in all. The church is apparently a fine one, partly fourteenth century, with an older chancel, and a fifteenth century clere- story, the latest feature, except a new lych gate dedicated to the memory of the last incumbent. The churchyard is open, but the church is locked. Do the country clergy who stand aloof from politics, and keep their parish churches locked, know that they are doing what little in them lies to further the cause of disestablishment ? Half- a-dozen paths converge at the church, three at least crossing one broad meadow where the long grass rivals the billowy radiance of ripe corn ; can anything be more truly democratic 1 In the dim ages when this church was built none doubted that the one build- ing that every one wished to walk to should be made accessible to every one by a direct short cut ; it may be doubted whether, but for the number

and popularity of these "church paths," there would be a single footway in England open now ; there is a homily in their defence, wherein strong words are not lacking : inter alia, " God is not bound to defend such possessions as are gotten by the devil and his counsel," and the preacher, not content with denouncing the flagrant sin of those who "grind up the ancient doles and marks," to the disinheriting of rightful owners, laments too the im- moral, though never illegal, covetous- ness of those who " plough up so high the common balks and walks, which good men before made the greater and broader, partly for the commodious walk of his neighbour, partly for the better shack in harvest-time, to the more comfort of his poor neighbour's cattle." Then, in more special re- ference to these church paths, he goes on : " It is a shame to behold the in- satiableness of some covetous persons in their doings ; that, where their ancestors left of their land a broad and sufficient bier-balk to carry the bier to the Christian sepulture, now men pinch at such bier-balks, which by long use and custom ought to be in- violably kept for that purpose ; and now they either quite ear them up, and turn the dead body to be borne further about in the high streets ; or else if they leave any such meer, it is too strait for two to walk on." Here is by impli- cation the social doctrine " to every man according to his wants " ; the one thing no man can do without is the bit of earth that opens to receive his bones, and Church and State, law and reli- gion, agree to assure his right to a decent journey thither. But church- yards have, perhaps, before now been the chosen scene for a reflection that all our life is a journey to the grave : this being so, it is consolatory to learn from another Elizabethan homily that by divine right we may make the journey decently. But these pretty radical paths were never meant to lead to a locked door ; and a village church is good for something more than for the rural congregation (when there is one),

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to say its prayers in on Sunday. It is a monument of ancient faith, of a long-lost fraternity of purpose through- out the land, of a liberality lavish enough to bestow on hamlets finer buildings for the common use than many a large town now erects with much pother of subscription lists and beggary. For the present the nation has no common creed to profess, no common worship to perform — we do not say public prayers to Mammon — in these national edifices, but that is only the more reason why the church doors should stand open wide, that all who list may enter and breathe a prayer in passing.

The moral is plain, that whensoever the whole nation shall be as unani- mously resolved to bend its steps any- whither as our ancestors were, to be christened, married, and entombed within the precincts of the parish church, then again as of yore, custom, religion and law will lend their sanction to the claim and the good will of the people shall be done on earth.

" Celles-ci sont pour 1'an trois mil, ainsi soit-il ! "

The sermon of the locked church door lasts a long hour by the June sun- shine, and there are appointments to be kept ahead. Again upon the road, we make a sharp turn to the west, leaving the respectable town of Southam, with its spires on our right. Beyond the little village of Ufton, perched on its little hill, we cross the Roman" Foss- way," which will meet us again beyond Leicester, as its line is the chord of the arc we are describing. Interest in Rad- ford Semele cools as we learn that the King's name has to do with nothing more mythological than the whilom presence of a family that might just as well have spelt itself " Simely." Long before Leamington is in sight sure tokens herald the vicinity of a water- ing-place, a town laid out for the pleasure of its residents; the well kept roads have a soft "ride" on one side, the wide raised footpath is fur- nished with benches and tall trees on

either hand give shade and freshness. In his wrath at the kindred fopperies of the " tax-eaters " of Cheltenham, Cobbett would not deign to look at the expensive town, but the extreme pret- tiness of Leamington may suggest another moral to a milder age. Here are over 5,000 inhabited houses, 25,000 and odd mortal specimens of our ugly species, and yet a good fourth or fifth of the area they occupy is by no means ugly — some of it is positively agreeable to behold. We shall have occasion to remember this lesson in Leicestershire. Private and hired carriages by the score frequent the ornamental drives leading to Warwick and Kenilworth. For the sake of "John," or rather of his child- ren, to whom it is fitting that he should take back some traveller's tale, the law against sightseeing is relaxed and Kenil- worth Castle included in the route. With cockneyfied surprise we note an unbridged streamlet | across the most frequented road. From Kenilworth to Coventry there is a long reach of much admired highway, wide and bordered with trees like a great park avenue, and for once in a way the effect is fine ; but the Fenny Compton solitudes are really prettier, and we suspect that the other is mainly admired for being public while looking so much more like private property.

To-day's stage is a short one and we halt at Coventry, but have little leisure to " watch the three tall spires," one of which alas ! was about to be vested in scaffolding and virtually rebuilt, not in wantonness, but because the fabric is really insecure. An ugly but ser- viceable steam-tram groans and pants through the venerable city and up its steep hill, but as we pass out of it on Thursday morning, by the Foleshill side it is hard to realise that we are leaving behind a larger population than that of Oxford. This district is sacred to the memory of George Eliot. Foleshill itself, a straggling manufacturing vil- lage with nearly 8,000 inhabitants lies to the right of the road which passes through fair wooded pastures before reaching the ugly little town of Bid- worth, with about the same population

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as Abingdon, but with a squalid, coal- dusty look ; a very coal-dusty little public invites custom pathetically under the sign of " The Old Black Bank ; " where will not sentiment find itself a hook to hang itself on? Thrice be- tween Coventry and Griff the road crosses the " brown canal " where half a century ago, the little sister caught her fish and learnt —

" Such was with glory wed."

The old church of Chilver Colow, once abandoned to the ministrations of the Rev. Amos Barton, is in the angle where the road turns eastward to Nun- eaton and Leicester. The former is a clean, pretty little country town about the size of Abingdon and Bidworth, but like the former, dating from ages when the aggregation of men for in- dustry did not necessarily imply the mere multiplication of mean brick buildings all alike in ugliness. From Coventry to Leicester is about twenty- five miles, and we propose to sleep at Melton Mowbray seventeen miles fur- ther, so this time the day's journey has to be divided into three stages. Hinck- ley, a small manufacturing town (about 8,000 inhabitants) is halfway to Leices- ter, but with memories of Market Ilsley and Ladbroke churchyard still fresh we cannot willingly contemplate a halt at the " Old Black Bank " or hostelries of similar associations. Leicestershire, as we enter it by turn- ing for a few yards down Watling Street, has a somewhat naked look, a country with open reaches of land and sky, which needs the contrast of a few smiling, sheltered human settle- ments to make one call it open and breezy instead of bare and bleak ; for half an hour, leaving more to fear than hope, we resolve the anxious question, will Hinckley prove a blot or an orna- ment to the landscape? Slowly, in silent sadness, we pass through — in by the Coventry and out by the Leicester road, and choosing mercy to man rather than beast we trust ourselves to the chance of villages a-head rather than waste a summer hour in these dingy streets. Allow something for the

hasty judgment of an irresponsible wayfarer spoilt by the bonnes fortunes of former days. I am fain to hope that all the domestic, social, and politi- cal virtues nourish at Hinckley; it has co-operative stores and building soci- eties, there is a hill behind it with a view, and though rich in modern ugli- ness, the town is old, and the ringing of the curfew bell is provided for by an endowment of land to pay the ringer. But when all possible justice has been done to all the sterling virtues we know of or can imagine, the fact remains that the town of Hinckley is not a gracious spot. The stocking loom was introduced here at an early date, and the place was comparatively more important at the end of the eighteenth century than it is now ; the population was between four and five thousand, and as a proof of its singular healthiness it was stated that for eight weeks not a single death had occurred. Since then the place has not quite doubled in size, but as we remember Leamington that is no valid reason why it should have lost its good looks ; for it had good looks to lose.

So we turn our backs on Hinckley, and faring three or four miles further, reach the younger and smaller and so far more inoffensive settlement of Earl Shilton, where a church spire rises hopefully among trees on the crest of the hill up which the village street appears to straggle. Since we accepted the hospitality of the villagers at the sign of King William the Fourth, it would be ungrateful to prophesy that Earl Shilton quadrupled will be another Hinckley ; leaving man and beast to King William's tender mercies we steer for the church spire and emerge upon a green meadow leading up to the churchyard. This is planted upon the very brow of a little cliff- like descent, and from this vantage ground a fresh reach of slightly varied open country is spread out before us to the north-east. The churchyard gate is locked, but the wall is low ; . . . the church of course is locked ; but that grievance has been

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exhausted already; there is a wide porch with stone seats both at the north and south door, and from the welcome shade of the former we look out in peace upon a scene of beauty. 'Tis the second cloudless day, and the sun's heat has been gathering strength ; now at high noon it bathes the plain in a white haze, to which the cool stone porch and bright green turf on the foreground serves as a frame. Earl Shilton, though not beautiful itself, looks out on beauty enough to let us part from it in charity.

The nine miles of road between it and Leicester are solitary again ; a park or two and the "highway spin- nies " survive as relics of what old maps call Leicester Forest, though it was really a royal chase, and as such alienated in the days of Charles I. Presumably we pass through Glenfield parish, formed of three hamlets three miles apart, and with a total popula- tion of about 1000 souls, but the high- road gives them all a wide berth. The approach to Leicester is rather fine, and the allotment gardens, carved out of the common pastures of the Leicester "freemen " are very interesting. Only townsmen could so covetously make the most of every inch of the tiny plots, and one's heart warms to the microscopic greenhouses and liliputian arbours, where one can imagine happy families sitting on Sunday afternoon, each under its own scarlet-runners ; unless, indeed, the local puritanism which wages a holy war against Sun- day cricket closes the allotment gardens on that day. In English towns of a certain size a tourist's inquiries after the best hotel are apt to receive alter- native replies, according to the blue or buff shade of informant's 'political sympathies. A clerical referee re- members that "the archdeacon" stays at the King's Head, while a liberal resident is still more confident in re- commending the "Queen's." In Leicester we follow Bradshaw to the "Bell." Here the decoration of the coffee-room is political but ambiguous. A large photograph represents a spacious hall, with dinner-tables spread

for many guests, while a handful of spectators contemplate the empty seats, title — " The Great Conservative Ban- quet." Is this meant for subtle irony, and are we amongst Radicals who thus commemorate a fiasco on the other side ? Apparently not. The waiter's gravity rebukes the frivolous thought, as he condescends to explain that the photograph represents M. le Proprie- taire and a few friends, like a general and his staff surveying the future field of battle.

Leaving its hospitable portals be- tween five and six, we pass out through Belgrave, a kind of suburb connected with the town by tramways. Factories and manufacturing villages are dotted about the neighbourhood, and as we pass through the streets of Thurmaston and Syston, women are seen at the windows and on door-steps at work at the " seaming and stitching " of the hosiery woven in the town. Their earnings average under a shilling a day, and they have to fetch the work or pay a commission to the middleman. In 1874 a trade union of the women seamers and stitchers was formed, and the society succeeded in getting a list of prices adopted by arbitration, which raised the prices of the worst paid work twenty-five per cent. But the difficulties in the way of organisation can be imagined when it is said that the halfpence which form the sub- scriptions have to be collected from members scattered in twenty- seven villages. Ten and twenty miles a day was often tramped in winter by the energetic women who formed the first committee of the society, which numbered nearly 3,000 members in its first year. Apparently the ladies of Leicestershire are an energetic race, for in Thurmaston a Mistress Ruth Somebody combines the function of post-mistress, shopkeeper, and parish clerk.

Beyond Syston we pass again almost suddenly into rural solitudes, a land of " spires and squires," with fine churches, cosy villages, with from sixty to 600 inhabitants, spacious parks and fat pastures, which the red

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cattle share with sheep, who look oddly out of place in the long grass to eyes fresh from Hampshire downs and turnip-fields. The abundant finger-posts testify that we are in the heart of Daneland ; between Bears by and Brooksby the road runs along the top of a round ridge or wold, not too broad to allow those who pass along the summit to look down into the green valleys on either side, where are Hoby, Bothesby, Frisby, Symes- by, and Kirby Bellairs, with Gaddesby, Kettleby, Saxelby, Welby, Brentingby, and many more with the same termination in the middle and remoter distance. This effect of the road along the upland — which is on too small a scale to be called a down, and yet has all the breeziness of one and more view than a good many — is characteristic of the neigh- bourhood, and will meet us again beyond Melton Mowbray, where we have found quarters for the night before the curfew bells begin to ring. Here, as every one knows, pork pies are turned out by the ton weekly, and, as a great hunting centre, there is stabling for 700 horses.

There only remains a stage of thir- teen miles to be taken before break- fast next morning. One small and pretty village — Thorp Arnold — lies between Melton and Waltham-on-the- Wolds, the name of which speaks for itself. The counti-y is of the same character as it has been since Bearsby. Waltham, which used to have a market, still holds an annual horse and cattle fair ; the old " Bell Close " lets for 151. a year, which pays for the bell which rings at eight o'clock, morning as well as evening. Croxton Park (pronounced Crozton), between Wal- tham and Croxton Kerrial, belongs to the Duke of Butland, and a modest manor-house, picturesquely situated but of no use to the owner of Belvoir, has been half destroyed, half converted into a farm. Finely-antlered deer graze upon the racecourse above the park, and some three miles off, on the other side of the road, Belvoir Castle towers impressively through the morning

haze. The drive through Croxton Park opens on the high road just opposite the gate of the drive to Belvoir ; the traveller may thus, ac- cording to his taste, either pity the sorrows of a poor duke whose landed property is cut in two by the public road, or marvel at the instinct of " agglomeration," as the Chinese called the practice while they suffered from it. Since the schoolmaster has been abroad the natives of this region have learnt to pronounce the name of the duke's castle as it is spelt — Bel — bell and voir to rhyme with choir. Popular educa- tion has the same tendency every- where. Board-school children in the Borough talk about South-wark instead of South'ark as well-to-do Londoners used to do, and in general those to whom reading is a new art, insist on reading as they think correctly all those proper names which have ac- quired a traditional mispronunciation. The point is a little curious as a matter of social psychology, for the mispro- nunciation probably originated with an aristocracy that could not spell the names of the places and people it habitually spoke of. When the mis- pronunciation had become established it was regarded as a refinement of education to know what names should be mispronounced and how. The middle-class was more anxious to talk like its betters than to read more cor- rectly than they. To make Chol- mondeley or Marjoribanks into quadri- syllables and to pronounce Belvoir as it is written was supposed to show an ignorance worse than that of letters, namely, that of the manners and customs of " county families." But this ambition passes over the heads of elementary schools, A little further on and the journey ends at one more pretty, well-spired and squired village. The reader has not seen the May blossom nor basked in the silent sun- shine, and he may find the unad ven- turous progress dull. But seeing is believing, and it is worth while for those who live in towns and suffer the costs of over population to realise what is meant by the statistics which

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tell of a falling off in all the agricul- tural counties. Oxford, Coventry, and Leicester are the only towns of any importance upon this 150 miles of road ; if Leamington is added to these, there remain only eighteen towns and villages with a population ranging from one to ten thousand ; deduct- ing these and a proportionate amount of the whole route, say, to be on the safe side, as much as half, there will remain seventy-five miles of high road in the middle of southern England with an average population around that may be approximately calculated at forty-five to the square mile ; to be on the safe side, say fifty, for we certainly traversed districts that are much less populous than the part of Hampshire where the exact area of the parishes as well as the population was ascertained. Explore what part of rural England you will, the result will be found much the same, and it is not one creditable to our practical sagacity.

Treble the population of the purely agricultural districts, treble the amount of labour spent upon the land, and re- arrange the distribution of the pro- duce, the gross produce will be in- creased, the trade of country towns will revive, and the revival of local markets will further stimulate agricul- tural production. The artisans of Lei- cester are not millionaires, but they probably invest as much capital per acre in their allotments as a market gardener ; what we want is to have village lands cultivated up to market garden pitch. John, the paterfamilias already mentioned, has something to say on the subject of why we do not get it. He has lived for fifteen years as groom and gardener with, a country clergyman. When his enfranchise- ment as a county voter became immi- nent, we had the curiosity to inquire into his political opinions ; needless to say that he disclaimed the indiscreet pretensions to anything of the kind. However, we tried him with the land question. Good cottages, he thought, were very well, but a man wants a bit of ground of his own. A reference to

Mr. Stubbs's contention that the land is " labour-starved," set the stream of his eloquence loose ; the state of this and this piece of land is " something shameful," and, in fact, bad farming and bankrupt farmers are more plentiful than bad harvests can in any way ac- count for. To continue the subject, the rector lends John Mr. Stubbs's little book to the man, and a year or two later when he leaves the parish, John an- nounces his desire to stay behind and take Absalom's farm of thirty odd acres. A man with six children only just growing up has saved very few pounds, but the fifty pounds he con- siders indispensable are promised as a loan by a friend of fifteen years standing. The negotiation goes off upon the question of rent, the farm contains some of the land which has been " used shameful," the fences are all in a bad condition. We induce John to correct his too hopeful estimate as to the price of crops, and warn him against ruining himself by undertak- ing to pay a rent beyond what the land will bring in after he has kept his family. Thus encouraged he asks for a reduction for the first year, which we privately think insufficient, but the agent (it is shanty land) calmly tells him that if anything is taken off the first year as much again will be put on the second, and the more he thinks of it the worse the bargain seems ; so John will stay among the wage-earners. The rent he is asked to pay is close on two pounds an acre for a small farm in bad condition ; a large farm in the same neighbourhood has been let in despair, " he hears say," at Is. Qd. an acre ; he is a silent, mild man, wanting in no due reverence for the powers that be, but as we trot along the lanes he allows himself to observe that " it do seem rather unreasonable."

Emigration meetings in White- chapel and depopulation in Wiltshire " do seem rather " unreasonably near together ; and it is a suggestive exer- cise to look with the bodily as well as the mind's eye " first on this picture, then on this."

383

THE NEW NATIONAL GALLERY AT AMSTERDAM.

A FEW weeks ago there were great rejoicings at Amsterdam. The city was en fete ; the shops were gaily dressed with flags ; salutes were fired, and there were visible all the signs of national and municipal rejoicing. Yet the occasion was not a Royal Marriage or the conclusion of a Peace — it was the opening of the Rijks Museum, which, long promised, was at last completed. As almost every English tourist who visits Amsterdam does so, more or less, for the purpose of studying Dutch art in its native place, it is pretty generally known that the condition of the public gallery there has up till now been something of a scandal. The " Trip- penhuis," the old building by the side of the canal, in which the master- pieces of Rembrandt and his followers have been housed, was a building in no way worthy of its high calling. Not that it is wanting in picturesque- ness or character. It would have served very well for a third-rate public office ; but it was never designed for the purpose of a picture gallery, and not more than a fragment of its wall space was properly lighted. For many years the appeal of artists and critics had gone up to the Dutch Government and the municipal autho- rities to take the matter in hand, and to do something adequate for the art which in the eyes of mankind at large has ever been the glory of Holland. About ten years ago the decision was taken to begin ; and the work of providing a new building which should be a National Gallery and South Kensington Museum in one was intrusted to Mr. Cuypers, a gentleman well known in the Nether- lands and in Belgium as the architect of several important Roman Catholic churches. The new building was actually begun in 1877, and it is now

structurally complete, though more than half of it remains empty, or almost empty, of the art treasures with which it will some day be filled.

The arrangement of the new museum will be something after the following order. The two central courts will be devoted — one to a museum of casts illustrating not only classical but also mediaeval and modern sculp- ture, and the other to part of the " National Netherlands Museum," which will include all kinds of furni- ture, tapestry, metal work and faience produced in the country from the earliest times. Several of the rooms on the ground floor surrounding the central courts will also be given up to this class of objects, whilst others will be assigned to the schools which, after the example of our Science and Art Department, the Dutch Govern ment is about to establish. Thus far, however, the organisation of the museums is a matter for the future ; at present only one of the ground-floor galleries and the greater part of the upper floor are completed and ready for visitors. The former is occupied by the very celebrated collection of prints and drawings which have long been received with inhospitable shelter in the " Trippenhuis." Above are the pictures, viz. : — (1) The old Trippen- huis collection including the Dupper and the Van der Poll bequests ; (2) The famous Van der Hoop collection removed from the separate quarters where it has been kept since Mr. Adrian van der Hoop left it to the town, in 1854; (3) A number of important pictures, mostly of large size, removed from the Town Hall, where, as has been known to a few adventurous tourists, they have been housed in dark and very unsuitable quarters for some long time; (4) The modern pictures

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The New Natiojial Gallery at Amsterdam.

from the Royal Villa at Haarlem. As to the mode of arrangement, there are large galleries and small ones ; the former lighted from the top, and the latter, which consist of a series of small rooms communicating one with another, by high side windows. As is natural, the large galleries are chiefly occupied by the larger pictures and the small rooms by the innumer- able little masterpieces of the painters of genre and landscape which were the chief artistic output of the seventeenth century.

Passing up a wide, but not very effective staircase, the visitor finds himself in a broad and lofty gallery, floored, like the whole museum, with mosaic, and adorned by a series of stained glass windows by an English artist, Mr. W. J. Dixon. Out of this gallery, which serves as a kind of Salle des pas perdus, he turns into a long and somewhat gloomy passage, on either side of which are recesses filled with pictures, while at the end he is faced by Rembrandt's famous Night Watch. The pictures in the recesses are mostly of the class known in Holland as Schutterstukken, or Doelen- stukken, or those large life-size portrait groups in which painters like Frans Hals, Van der Heist, Flinck. and De Keyser immortalised sometimes the guilds and sometimes the charitable committees of their day. Most of these pictures have practically never been seen before ; they were, most of them, in the upper rooms of the Town Hall, where visitors were extremely rare, and where the light was never such as properly to display them. To this class also belongs the fine collec- tion of masterpieces which adorns the spacious " Salle Rembrandt;" at the end of this approach. The Night Watch occupies the place of honour. To the right is the no less famous Syndics, the crowning achievement of Rem- brandt's later years, and to the left is a group by Frans Hals, which, to the few who saw it at the Town Hall, and to the multitudes who have never seen it till now, will be a source of

great attraction. Opposite the two last named are other pictures, also of high quality, by Govert Flinck and Jacob Bakker, whilst the two remain- ing walls are covered, one by an im- mense picture of Van der Heist, and by a painting of great interest by Thomas de Keyser, a brilliant artist, whose rare handiwork is only besides to be seen in a few small portraits or groups, such as the famous Burgo- masters, in the museum of the Hague. When we have added that the large gallery on the left is occupied by a miscellaneous and not very good col- lection of foreign paintings ; that afterwards we pass more or less chronologically from the beginnings of the Dutch school through a special gallery of portraits to the little rooms and the little pictures of which we have spoken ; and that on completing the circuit of this floor we find our way back to the starting point through the rooms now given up to modern . pictures, we have said enough to give a general idea of the arrangement of this remarkable collection.

Before speaking of the pictures in detail, a word may be said about the building in which they have now found a permanent home. It is convenient, generally well lighted, and as fire- proof as modern resources can make it ; and to that extent it is all that could be desired. But as far as archi- tectural beauty or dignity are con- cerned, we must frankly confess that it has very little of these qualities about it. Holland surely has not done well to abandon the traditions of its solid, dignified, seventeenth-century style in building a home for Rem- brandt and Ruysdael, for Terburg and de Hooch, which in point of style and decoration reminds an Englishman of the least happy ventures of his neo- Gothic fellow-countrymen.

What is the character of the art which is preserved for us in these galleries 1 The time has gone by when a critic like Biirger could think it necessary to speak apologetically for Dutch art on the ground that in

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France it was un art implement mau- dit. Probably when Biirger wrote it the phrase was simply an exaggera- tion ; and certainly now, when the amateurs of Paris contend against those of the world for the possession of Terburgs and Metzus, it would be absurd to say that Dutch art does not meet with its full share of appre- ciation from the people who, in matters aesthetic, give the keynote to Europe. For ourselves, too, in England, we have gradually found our way into a saner state of mind than when we used to applaud Mr. Ruskin as he eloquently decried " the Bak-somethings and Van-somethings " of Holland. It is quite true that Holland does not rival Italy in the estimation of those English people who care for pictures. But, at the same time, we have begun to do jus- tice once more to the masters whose works were so eagerly collected by our great-grandfathers ; we are begin- ning to see something more in their canvases than vulgarity of feeling re- deemed by unrivalled manual skill. The opening such a collection as this in the Rijks Museum, covering as it does the whole period of Dutch supre- macy in art, gives us an admirable opportunity for once more asking our- selves what were the problems which these painters tried to solve, and with what degree of success they solved them.

Eugene Fromentin, the best of all the critics who have ever written on the art of Holland, opens his observa- tions on the subject by pointing out what was the condition of things in the Netherlands in the first decade of the seventeenth century. In Catholic Flanders, where the long struggle against Spain had ended favourably to monarchy and the Bourbons, an art of great power and magnificence was just beginning to arise — the art of Rubens. To a dis- interested spectator at the time it would have seemed highly probable that Holland, if it were to have an art at all, would follow humbly in

No. 311.— VOL. LII.

the train of the great Catholic and Flemish master. Fate decided other- wise. The revolution won the day in Holland. Independence and Protest- antism secured their ground ; and in art, as in politics, the foreigner was beaten back. An extraordinary group of painters seemed to spring out of the earth; and from 1596, the birth-year of Van Goyen, to 1639, the birth-year of Adrian Van de Velde, scarcely a year passed without bringing into the world a man who was to help to make his country illustrious. As these grew up, the elder of them found that the great events which had echoed round their cradles had changed the current of men's thoughts and aspirations ; they found that if art was to exist at all in an enfranchised Holland it must have different aims and objects from those of the previous genera- tions, feebly inspired as they were by the Catholic traditions of Italy and Flanders.

"The problem," says Fromentin, " was this : given a people practical, unaddicted to reverie, very busy, op- posed to mysticism, of an anti-Latin cast of mind, with their traditions broken down, their churches stripped of ornament and images, their habits thrifty — to find an art which would please them, would satisfy their sense of suitability, and would represent them. A modern writer of enlight- enment on these matters has an- swered, with fine truth, that a people in this condition had only to impose upon itself the very simple duty which in the preceding fifty years it had always undertaken with success, viz., to ask its painters to paint its own portrait. In point of fact, all that is to be said on the subject is contained in that one word. The painting of Holland, as was quickly seen, would not and could not be anything else but a portrait of Holland — a faithful, exact, complete, and life-like portrait, a portrait with- out embellishment, of the men, of the places, of the markets, of the manners of the people, of the streets, the fields.

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The New National G-allery at Amsterdam.

the sea, and the sky. To accomplish this was, to put the matter in its simplest form, the programme fol- lowed by the Dutch school from the day of its birth to the day of its decline."

How early and how strongly this character of portraiture was impressed upon Dutch art is evident as one walks through the two rooms devoted to les primitifs — the painters of the sixteenth century. "What distinguishes these rooms is the curious groups of life-size heads, sometimes twenty or thirty in a single frame, which have found their way here from the houses of various dissolved corpora- tions. They are heads, nothing more ; the artist has made no attempt to paint bodies or limbs, and, from the nature of the case, there is no question of composition or arrangement. For all their iiaivete, for all their want of learning, they are admirable as the beginnings of a school ; their unknown painters were the true ancestors of Hals and Ravesteyn. In another sense, too, these pictures are interest- ing. They are the seeds out of which grew that noble plant of seventeenth century art, that plant which has sprung spontaneously nowhere else but in Holland, the corporation-pic- tures. Every one who has passed through Holland knows how abun- dant these are, and with what uni- form success even second-rate painters, like Jan de Bray, have set round their tables the life-size groups of sober-look- ing " regents " or the gayer companies of feasting arquebusiers. The Am- sterdam Gallery now boasts a collec- tion of them, such as has never been brought together till now. Rembrandt, of course, is among them with his Syndics — " De Staalmeesters " — of which we shall have more to say, and, with his Company of Frans Banning Cocq, the so-called Night-Watch. Yan der Heist, infallible in the matter of a likeness, a master of smooth sur- faces, supreme in facile and conven- tional arrangement, is there with his vast, almost unknown. Company of

Captain Sicker, and with others, be- sides his over-famous Arquebusiers celebrating the Peace of Munster. Hals, too, is there, with a picture of thirteen figures, dated 1637, when his brilliant, wayward genius had scarcely passed its prime. But what is of special interest is the fact that many other artists are represented here by pictures of the same class, whose fame has been won in quite other lines. Not Jacob de Bakker, whose fine Regents in the Hoop collection is the masterpiece of a man who could do nothing else so well ; but Thomas de Keyser, and Flinck, and even Karel du Jardin, the painter of Italianate pastorals, and Jacob Ochterveldt, the pupil (it would seem) and almost the rival of Metzu in highly-finished scenes of genre. They are not all equally good, of course ; the two last named are a little out of their depth in this kind of work ; but they are all marvellously competent. Moreover, the competence never seems to leave the school till we come to the days of full decadence, when Troost, the clever pastellist, famous for his scenes of comedy, attempts his vast Regentenstuk of the eleven hospital governors, decked out in Louis Quinze periwigs and smart laced coats that seem to sit strangely on the descendants of Bol's sturdy burghers. Till this period, when art in Holland had resolved itself into a mere feeble echo of the past or a copy of some foreign present, the men who paint these corporation pictures never fail. They have a fine subject ; they have a great tradition ; and, as it were by instinct, they fix their sitters firmly on the canvas, they group them easily, they seize the dominant cha- racter of each face ; in a word, they are masters to whom the art of por- traiture has given up all its secrets.

Can more or less be said of the painters to whose work we uncon- sciously refer when we speak of " Dutch pictures " — the painters of character and incident, for which un- fortunately we have no word so ex- pressive as the French word genre ?

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Can more or less be said about those who, with no traditions to bind them, with no object but to relate exactly what they saw, invented the modern art of landscape painting ? There can be no question that in both these respects the painters of Holland were original, and that they were moved entirely by the same impulse as that which had already stirred the portrait painters. Among the many surprises of Dutch art none is more conspicuous than the suddenness with which, in these two characteristic aspects, it came into the world. By the middle of the century we have it nourishing at more than half a dozen different centres — at Utrecht, at Leyden, at Amsterdam, and, above all, at Haar- lem ; and it is impossible to regard any one man or group of men as strictly the founder. If, however, we can point to any names entitled to be described as the beginners of the school, they must be those of Dirk Hals, of Jan Yan Goyen, of Solomon Ruysdael, and of the elder Cuyp. In the excellent book Les Artistes de Haarlem — a perfect storehouse of facts about the less known of the D utch artists — Dr. Van der Willigen has printed some extremely interesting documents which bear upon the early stages of the art ; and among them some lists of picture lotteries held at Haarlem in the years 1634 and 1636. These lotteries, organised by the Guild of St. Luke, under the authority of the burgomasters, appear to have been one of the principal modes by which the painters of that time sent their pictures out into the world, and it is but natural that we should find in the lists the names of those who were most popular in their day. Here and there occur the titles of some seemingly large religious or classical pictures by men now forgotten, which were highly priced and regarded, doubtless, as the masterworks of the time. But what interests us more than these is the discovery in the two lists of several landscapes, large and small, by Solo- mon Ruysdael and Jan Van Goyen,

whilst in the first list there are no less than ten pictures by Dirk Hals, each described in the French version of the catalogue as " Un tableau ovale repre- sentant des figures modernes." What has become of them 1 one might well ask. The museums of Europe pos- sess very few of Dirk's pictures, and the only one at Amsterdam is the small but very exquisite Woman Play- ing, to be seen in the Van der Hoop collection. But it is evident from the Haarlem records that when Adrian van Ostade, Dou, and Metzu were only beginning to paint, and when Jan Steen was but a noisy school-boy, Dirk Hals had been long accepted by his fellow townsmen as the creator of a new and charming style of art. Van Goyen appears to have begun his work at a still earlier period, as well as Solomon Ruysdael, whom Dr. van der Willigen has proved to be the uncle and not the brother of Jacob, and as nearly as possible Van Goyen's contemporary. A year or two scarcely matters in the estimate, and we shall not be far wrong if we place 1620 as the date when Dutch art in genre and landscape took its definite character. As yet, of course, it is not marked by all the wonderful qualities which soon came to belong to it — a little crude, a little wanting in drawing, sometimes a little harsh in its contrasts, some- times a little weak in its colour, but still impressed with those features of frankness and sincerity, of simple, natural joy in rendering exactly what the artist saw, which are its distin- guishing marks throughout the century.

The ten or twelve small rooms in the Amsterdam museum, which con- tain the bulk of the genre and land- scape pictures, with the separate galleries in which are displayed the Van der Hoop, the Dupper and the Van der Poll bequests, form together what is probably the largest collection of this kind of art in Europe. It would be tedious to mention even the names of the numerous artists who are here represented by their best ; it will c c 2

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be enough, perhaps, to say that De Hooch is strongly represented, Terburg not quite so abundantly as at the Hague or at the Louvre, Metzu fairly, Jan Steen magnificently, Nicolas Maes extremely well, and Adrian Van Ostade adequately. There is, besides, in the Hoop collection one of the rare pictures by the fascinating and mysteri- ous artist for whom Burger's researches have done so much, Van der Meer of Delft. As regards landscape, there are better Van Goyens to be seen elsewhere than in Amsterdam. Eng- land is in reality the great storehouse of this artist's works, and during the past season there came under the hammer at Christie's some half a dozen of his pictures which would bear favourable comparison with any to be found at present in Holland. Solomon Ruysdael, too, is only moderately represented in the museum ; but few finer examples of Jacob Ruysdael are in existence than the two which are in the Van der Hoop collection ; the large landscape which the late owner purchased at Sir Charles Blount's sale in 1837, and the famous "River view with a mill," which came from the Noe collection in 1841. There are also two beautiful de Konincks, and two or three Paul Potters which are very admirable in their way. Of Adrian Van de Velde, the Trippenhuis collection contains three beautiful ex- amples, and in the Van der Hoop room he is represented by the brilliant " Family group," which many consider to be the gem of the collection.

As one stands before such examples of Terburg and de Hooch as the cele- brated Conseil Paternel, or one or two of the Interiors in the Van der Hoop collection, one feels that the objects after which Dirk Hals was striving have been finally achieved. To paint the world as it lies before him ; to depict faithfully life as it is lived ; to set within the four corners of the canvas a scene which represents some daily human experience in all its material surroundings, to grasp and reveal the secrets of light and shade

— this is what the Dutch painter has attempted, and he has succeeded as none before or after him has been able to do. In the first place, he knows how to draw ; like Ingres, he regards drawing as " the probity of art." Whether it was habitual or not for men like Terburg and Metzu to make preliminary studies in pencil or in chalk can only be guessed ; the probability is that they did not, and few "studies" strictly so called can be found in the unrivalled collection of Dutch drawings under the care of of Mr. Van der Kellen in the print- room on the ground floor of the museum. But, however the art was learned, learned it was, and to a degree of perfection that leaves nothing to be added. There are nuances indeed amongst the artists ; Jan Steen, for example, is supreme above all his countrymen in this respect ; and, as Sir Joshua Reynolds said, can only be compared to Raffaelle in the freedom and accuracy of his hand ; but what is specially remarkable is the diffusion of this skill — the fact that it is shared almost equally by the painters of conversation pieces, by the painters of street scenes like Van der Heyden, by the painters of animals like Berchem, by the painters of still life like Van Huysum and de Heem. It is a part of their sincerity. If the aim of art is to portray the world as we see it, then the first qualification of the artist must be the knowledge of form, and the power of exactly expressing it. It is all the same whether the thing to be painted be a face, or a satin dress, or the bricks of a courtyard, or a group of trees with cattle reposing under them. To draw them exactly is the first step ; there must be no trusting to the general impression, as Sir Joshua too often trusted, or to the colour, as Delacroix, that most over-rated of the moderns, invariable trusted, and as, it is to be feared, almost all the modern English school are apt to trust. "If a man cannot draw," one seems to hear the Dutch artists all say, from Van der

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Heist to Mieris, "he had better not try to paint."

There is the same precision in their painting, that is, in the use of their palette ; and, what is of equal import- ance, there is in their colouring the same firm unwavering intelligence of their medium. But to discuss all this as it should be discussed, and as some Slade professor would do well to dis- cuss it, would be too technical for our purpose. Fromentin, who could have explained the whole matter as few can explain it — for he, besides being an exquisite writer, was a painter hors ligne — thus puts the questions that such a technical discussion should answer : — " One should study the Dutch palette, examine its founda- tions, its resources, its mode of em- ployment ; one should say why it is often almost monochromatic, and yet so rich in its results, the common property of all the painters, and yet so varied ; why the lights are few and restrained, the shadows dominant ; what is, generally speaking, the law of this mode of lighting, which seems to conflict with the natural law, espe- cially in the open air ; and it would be interesting to determine to what ex- tent this painting, conscientious as it is, is subject to artifice, to combina- tions, to partis pris, and as was almost always the case, to ingenious systems. Then would come the question of the handiwork itself ; of the painter's skill in the use of his tools ; of the care, the extraordinary care with which he worked ; of his use of smooth sur- faces, of the thinness and sparkle of his paint, of the sheen of his metal and his precious stones. How, one would have to ask, did these excellent mas- ters divide the stages of their work ? Did they paint on light grounds or dark1? Did they, after the example of the early schools, colour in the ma- terial or above it ] " These are the questions which a professional treatise would have to consider ; and it would have also to try to fathom another secret of the Dutch painters, and one which is, more, perhaps, than any

other single quality, the secret of their charm — that of their mastery of what painters call values. Values, in painting, mean the relations which the colours of a picture bear to one another ; and it is easy to see how, if they are wrong, the whole picture is wrong with them. To set in their proper relations foreground, tree, sea, and sky is the last word of landscape painting ; and this last word surely Ruysdael has spoken.

We must not, however, attempt to turn a report of the new Rijks museum into a disquisition upon Dutch painting in general ; and it is better to stop while there is yet time, and to say something as to the pictures that are actually to be found here. The kings of portrait and genre painting we have mentioned already ; we need say no more now than that, with the Van der Hoop collection for the first time brought into the same building with the other pictures, there is a better opportunity than has ever been given before for a study of these men. Jan Steen espe- cially ; a building that contains the St. Nicolas and the Malade d' Amour, not to mention the ugly but miracu- lous Drinking Scene of the Van der Hoop gallery, must rank among the first existing displays of this great painter's work. Never was artist so unequal ; never was so strange a mix- ture of technical mastery and of simple carelessness, of a delight in beautiful line and surface and of a taste for the vulgar and the base. Nothing could be more delightful than the St. Nicolas- fest, the child to whom Santa Claus has been kind, the whining boy to whom have fallen the shoe and the birch-rod, the laughing sister, the happy mother in the foreground ; a scene in which human life is caught at one of its brightest, most natural mo- ments, and rendered once for all. No- thing again could be more brilliant in execution than the odious figure of the sleeping woman in the third of the pictures we have named. Watteau could not have drawn an arm so well, nor Metzu painted better drapery.

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But, as every collector knows, it is only too possible to come across Steens as coarse in sentiment as this, and in execution rougher and feebler than Molenaer, save for some one dazz- ling bit of colour that reveals the master. On the other masters of genre, the men of the first rank, we need not dwell, except for a moment on Jan Van der Meer, or Yermeer, of Delft, one of whose interesting pictures is here, the Lady Reading — not so fine a picture as the Milkmaid, of the Six collection, but still a work of high interest. For the last fifteen years, since Burger published in the Gazette des Beaux Arts the results of his in- quiries into this painter's life and works, Van der Meer has been a name to stimulate curiosity and to whet the appetite of collectors. Of his life we know next to nothing ; even less than we know of Terburg's, and not more than v?e know of Jacob Ruysdael's. He was a pupil of Fabritius ; he may have been a pupil of Rembrandt ; he lived at Delft, and painted its walls and roofs, in the View now at the Hague, with a combined breadth and subtlety that no painter of that day has quite equalled. But more than this we hardly know ; only that his work has a tenderness, a charm, a mastery of the secrets of light, which no other Dutch painting possesses, except that of De Hooch. Two things are to be hoped about Van der Meer ; one, that' a fine example of his handiwork may some day find its way into our National Gallery ; the other, that amid the scores of vellum-covered volumes of Archives now unworthily housed in the garrets of the Stadhuis at Amster- dam some keen searcher may yet dis- cover much more than is now known of the life of so charming, so person- ally interesting a painter.

A few of the lesser lights of the school may detain us a moment ; men scarcely known, but to be seen in this gallery in aspects which prove them to have had elements of distinction. Such are the portrait-painters Ver- spronck and Van Hemert ; the former

of whom signs a fine bust of a burgo- master in the great portrait room, and the latter the picture of a young man in the very interesting Van der Poll collection. Johannes Verspronck is another of the Haarlem artists on whose personality Dr. v. d. Willigen has thrown light ; he has shown that the painter was born in 1597 and died in 1662. He is said to have been a pupil of Hals ; and indeed the handling of this noble portrait, as well as the picture of the Lady-regents of the heilige geesthuis in the Haarlem museum, shows that he followed closely in the steps of the great master. His work is rare, or seems to be ; perhaps — who knows 1 — it may before long be- come the fashion to collect it. The other painter, Van Hemert, is entirely unknown. No museum, it is believed, has anything from his hand ; and his fame for the present must rest on this beautiful portrait of Dirk Hendrik Menlenaer, an ancestor of the Van der Poll family. Another painter whose repute will be heightened by the consolidation of the gallery is Brekel- enkam, a Leiden man, whose work, of curiously unequal quality, has long been known to students, but whose name has never become, so to speak, the property of the public. There is a fine picture by him in the Dulwich Gallery, and another was lately bought at auction for Dublin. Now that the Van der Hoop pictures are before the world the brilliant interior called The Tailor's Shop will put Brekelen- kam very near the first rank of genre painters. Again, if all the works of Hoogstraten were like the Sick Lady of the same gallery, he too would take a place almost as high as any one ; but as it is, the picture only proves of painters, as many a single poem has proved of poets, that a second-rate man may now and then do a piece of first-rate work by accident.

Passing through the modern rooms, which, however excellent they may be, it is impossible to enjoy after the eye has become trained to the older pictures, we come to the point at

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which we started, opposite the two great Rembrandts. How magnificent they are, and how different ! How interesting the comparison between them, and with what certainty does one come — now that the Night Watch (the false title will stick to the picture still, in spite of critical catalogues) and the Syndics hang side by side and can be seen — to the view that the soundest critics has always held : that the Syndics is the great picture, and the Night Watch the brilliant mistake ! Sir Joshua, who, in spite of the " grand style," had so true an eye for Dutch art, declared in 1781 that the Night Watch was "painted in a poor manner ; " and Fromentin, a trained artist as well as critic, places this splendid tour deforce by the side of Titian's Assump- tion and Veronese's Europa, as among the malentendus of the history of art. Ill-composed, ill-drawn, impossible in lighting, unintelligible in motive, this dazzling picture represents rather the romantic aspirations of Rembrandt, his longing to paint light at all hazards, than the reasoned work of the master. With the Syndics, that noble portrait group of five grave masters of the Drapers' Guild, the case is different altogether. The date is 1661, when Rembrandt was fifty- three, and when for some years he had been under the influence — to him a sobering influence — of misfortune. His vogue was almost over; Amsterdam no longer regarded him as the crown- ing glory of the city ; had said farewell to such extravagances as those in which he had revelled ten and twenty years before. Forgetting him- self altogether, he throws his whole soul into the picture of the Syndics ; he aims at no astonishing effect, at no problem as yet unattempted of light and shade, but simply at portraying as they are these five grave citizens, symbols of all that was best and most

enduring in the municipal life of Hol- land. And with what result ! The picture is a masterpiece ; and one of those rare masterpieces which invest the character of the man who painted it with an undefinable charm.

The Syndics is the picture which of all others in the museum is the best worth remembering ; and the visitor will do well to see it last as well as among the first. But he must return another day ; for it will not do to leave Amsterdam without a visit to Mr. Van der Kellen and the prints and drawings. Admirably arranged in a dozen handsome oak cabinets, the treasures of this rich department lie in their portfolios, all but one or two hundred that are set in chronological order, and exhibited to public view. These are of great interest, and cover a wide field ; the prints, from the ex- traordinary achievements of the pre- decessors of Lucas van Ley den — " The Master of 1480," "The Master of the Crab," and the rest — down to some fine works of yesterday ; the drawings, mostly those slight but masterly per- formances of the men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that are now so eagerly sought for. To show how complete the collection is, even in departments where it might well be poor, we may mention that it contains many portfolios of fine English mezzotints, including almost complete sets — in fine states — of the works of Earlom, McArdell, and J. R. Smith. But its strength lies in the Dutch school, and no one who has not looked through the multitudinous gathering of the etchings of Paul Potter, of Karel Du Jardin, of Ruysdael, of Ostade, Bega, and all the other masters, great and small, can fully realise the comprehen- siveness, the activity, the enthusiasm, and the power of the school of artists which the wonderful seventeenth cen- tury brought into existence in Holland.

392

INLAND DUTIES AND TAXATION.

WRITING some time in the year 1755 Dr. Johnson libellously described the prototype of the modern Inland Reve- nue official as a sort of "ruffian " hired to extort what he evidently regarded as very questionable items of taxation. Writing on the 6th of July, 1885, a figure as towering as that of the great dyspeptic lexicographer himself —the Right Honourable W. E. Glad- stone, the greatest master of finance, perhaps, that ever lived, certifies that during his thirty-three years' experi- ence he has always found the modern Inland Revenue official " a model of enlightened ability and untiring zeal." A great change certainly in the " spirit of the dream," even for a span of one hundred and thirty years, and this change to a great extent is correlative with the alteration in the basis, scope, and incidence of our national fiscal system.

The Twenty-Eighth Report of the Commissioners of Inland Revenue, just issued, throws considerable light on the transformation which has taken place, whilst the facts and figures given afford a mine of wealth for the shap- ing hand of the reformer. We have at a glance the whole history of Inland Duties from 1660 to 1885, from the Restoration of Charles II. to the zenith of the Victorian reign. We are carried back to the very root of our fiscal system ; to the early im- position of poundage and tonnage in the reign of Henry V. ; to the un- successful effort of Charles I. in 1626 to obtain supplies other than those hitherto yielded by the Crown lands and the voluntary contributions of the nobles ; how the resistance which the Commons offered, Parliament after Parliament, to any new imposts culminated in the Civil War of 1642 ; how the Parliamentarians the follow- ing year raised supplies by the very means they had previously condemned ; how the Royalists at Oxford followed suit, thus in many instances making

the much distracted people " double debts to pay." After the Resto- ration what was regarded as an ex- ceptional burden during war time was permanently established under the title of Excise, " as full com- pensation to the Crown" for duties hitherto yielded by land alone. Little by little the people were accustomed to it, but we may take it that down to Johnson's time the somewhat one-sided bargain was regarded as anything but final or equitable. Only about half-a- dozen duties were first imposed.and these of trifling amount. Beer was charged 1 s. 3d. per barrel and mead ^d. per gallon. What is described as " strong water " was charged duty at the rate of Id. per gallon, and evidently temperance principles were not very popular in those days, for on every gallon of coffee made and sold there was charged a duty of 4c£., and double that amount on every gallon of chocolate, sherbet and tea. Like the first scent of blood, however, these duties opened a vista to the rapacity of the king and the selfishness of the great land- owning and governing class. Year after year we find new duties intro- duced till a culminating point was reached about the year of the battle of Waterloo. In the very year of that battle there was raised from excise alone over thirty millions ster- ling, some three and a half millions more than was levied from the same source in 1884-85, though our popu- lation has nearly doubled since then, leaving altogether out of account the great growth of industrial and private property. Every conceivable trade and every imaginable article was taxed, so much so that a noted pamphleteer of the day said it was the ineffable blessing of every Briton to be reared in a taxed cradle, fed on taxed food, and buried in a taxed coffin. Even.the linings of men's hats were taxed. In 1813 the wine duty stood at the highest point it has ever

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reached, being within three half-pence of a pound per gallon on the French product — twenty times what it is at present. Even Spain and Portugal in those days, much as they grumble at the half-a-crown duty now, paid no less than 9s. \\d. per gallon, but Cape wines were admitted at one-third of that figure. Even the spirit duty originally fixed at twopence per gallon rose to 8s. Q±d. in 1811. Beer, the great national beverage was worse off still. It bore a double tax. The malt duty rose from sixpence per bushel to 4s. 5d. in 1804, and besides this there was a beer duty of ten shillings per barrel, so that the good honest squires who drank the health of Lord Wel- lington in June, 1815, did so in beer taxed to the extent of 18s. lOd. per barrel, exactly three times as much as at present.

Better times, however, were now at hand. Peace was restored, and the fiscal shackles which were strangling the infantile industrial instincts of the people were one by one cast off. The salt duty was the first to go, and when we turn f,o Indian needs at the present time, this fact should be borne in mind. In patriarchal as well as modern times salt has always been a prime necessary of life, and none but the sorest needs justify resort to it as an instrument of taxation. The beer duty was abolished in 1830, the malt duty, its correlative, still being kept on. The duty on vinegar was abolished in 1844, that on glass and on auction duties in 1845, and the brick duty went the way of all flesh in 1850.

We now enter upon the third era of excise taxation or rather freedom from such. In December, 1852, Mr. Glad- stone took the reins as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and it is no exaggera- tion to say, that in matters financial the country has been under his spell since then. In 1853 he knocked off the soap duty, in 1861 free paper was proclaimed, in 1862 brewers had to thank him for free hops : in 1869 the fire insurance duty and stage carriage duties were abolished ; in 1874 the duty on race horses was taken off by

Sir Stafford Northcote, as well as the Customs duty on sugar; and in 1880, again by Mr. Gladstone, agricultural industry was relieved from the incubus of the malt duty. Leaving out of ac- count his proposal, made in 1874, for the entire abolition of the income tax, it is a brilliant record, enough to grave the name of any statesman in the roll of those who "are not born to die." Save in respect of tea, cocoa, coffee, and dried fruit, practically we now have a free breakfast table, thanks to the broad enlightened liberal-minded fiscal policy steadfastly pursued by the country during the past thirty odd years.

Progress is, however, the life-breath of a people. The resources of reform are by no means yet exhausted, nor has the need of it disappeared. It would yet take five and a half millions sterling annually to secure us an absolutely free breakfast table, and a free trade nation will not rest content until that modest goal is reached. Fruit alone yields over half a million a year duty, whilst the tea duty, low as it is at sixpence a pound, brings in four and three quarter millions ster- ling. Besides this, the new Parliament will undoubtedly take a wide view of the national balance sheet. It will inquire into what is and what is to be ; how taxation may be more equit- ably distributed, where, when and how retrenchment may be effected. In the year ended 31st March, 1885, we raised altogether a little over eighty- eight ' millions sterling. And in the current year the national and imperial requirements will entail an expendi- ture of close upon a hundred millions sterling. Magic figures these, but ponderous with responsibility. Our Laureate may entreat us not to fail through " craven fear of being great ; " but let any thinking man reflect for a moment on these hundreds of millions of hard sovereigns, which must be got together somehow out of the pockets of the people from March in one year to March in another, and say if the problem is not a momentous and intricate one. Trade is sound now, if

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Inland Duties and Taxation.

somewhat circumscribed ; but think what an expenditure like this would mean in a period of acute depression, such as would result from a series of bad harvests or a gigantic war in any corner of the world. Think of it if we ourselves were in the throes of a European or Asiatic conflict, for be it remembered, these ninety or a hundred millions would have to be met apart from the stupendous cost of a conflict. Not a few think that this heavy liabi- lity is a dangerous millstone round the neck of the commonwealth, but it is far easier to point to it and moralise than suggest any royal road out of the difficulty.

We may just state the items which go to make up this huge bill of fare. The contributions are :— -

Customs £20,321,000

Excise 26,600,000

Stamps 11,925,000

Land Tax 1,065,000

House Duty 1,885,000

Income Tax 12,000,000

Post Office Telegraph Service . Crown Lands . . . Suez Canal Interest Miscellaneous .

7,905,000 1,760,000 380,000 1,027,349 3,174,760

£88,043,109

There is one consolation, that the items are fairly well distributed, so that partial paralysis would by no means cripple the whole working body.

Customs is a dwindling source, and it is desirable in a free trade nation that it should be so. Excise is principally concerned with the inland duty on spirituous liquors ; and despite the storm which upset the late Ministry, in all probability, especially as regards the beer duty, if the pinch in right earnest came, this is the branch that would be' mainly relied upon. Stamps constitute a growing source, and as they include the Succession Duties, there are great future possibilities in this quarter. We fancy twenty years' time will see a different total to eleven millions from this source. Of the Land Tax we shall speak further on. The House Duty and Income Tax are pliable con- tributors, especially the latter — prime

favourites with finance ministers — but by no means so with the people. The Post Office is making rapid strides as a source of profit ; but ideal re- formers look to the maximum of accommodation in this direction rather than absolute money getting : six- penny telegrams are a step in this latter direction, though no doubt telegraphic rates lower still will yet constitute a source of profit, despite the admittedly exorbitant price the nation paid for the rights of the old companies.

And now we come to the Income Tax and all the contentious matter it entails. The Report does not enter into the polemical aspect of the case, but some of the historical facts stated will prove highly valuable at the time when the question of a "graduated" Income Tax is under serious discus- sion. The tax dates from 1798. Mr. Pitt is the author of it. At that time he was at his wits' end for money for carrying on the war. He had failed in the attempt to treble the assessed taxes, and the happy thought struck him that he could indirectly obtain the same result by stealthy and less unpalatable means. He therefore brought in a bill " Granting to his Majesty an aid and contribution for the prosecution of the war," promising that when the war was over there would be an end of the " aid and con- tribution." It was not a tax upon income or property in the proper sense, but simply an elaborate scheme for raising the old assessed taxes — those on houses, windows, men-ser vants, carriage-horses, and other articles of luxury — to such an extent as would represent a certain per cent- age on incomes. This was in every sense of the word a "graduated" Income Tax, so that those who now advocate the principle have at least antiquity and parental authority in their favour. Under it, incomes under 60£. a year were exempted, a sliding scale was applied to incomes between QQL and 200?., and 10 per cent, was expected on incomes of the latter amount and upwards. The scheme proved impracticable, but it is pos-

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sible that this was owing more to the fact that it was based on the old assessed taxes than to any inherent defect in the principle itself. During the next four years another scheme was tried and abandoned ; and this scheme, too, to some extent, recognised the " graduated principle." All per- sons were required to make return of their incomes from whatever source derived. Incomes under 60£. a year were exempted, varying rates were charged between 6(W. and 2001. and 10 per cent, above that. The only differ- ence between this scheme and the short- lived one-year one was, that under the old scheme only those already liable to assessed taxes, that is the wealthier classes, came in for charge, whilst the second tax brought all classes into the net. In 1803 the present system of Income Tax was introduced, and for the third time we find the "graduated" system recognised. In- stead of persons being charged in the lump, as it were, on the whole of their incomes from whatever source de- rived, they were charged separately, so that a professional man who owned a house, farmed some land, had an an- nuity from the funds, and held a local appointment, would be charged under five separate heads. The house rent charge would be under A, the profit on farming B, the tax on his income from the funds C, that on his pro- fessional earnings D, and that on his salary in connection with the local appointment E. The motive was ob- vious. It was to check evasion as much as possible, so that if a man suppressed one source of income he would at least be caught under some other. A poundage rate varying from 3d. to lid. in the pound was imposed upon all incomes between 60Z. and 1501. a year, and 5 per cent, upon sums above that. In 1806 the " gradu- ated " principle was dropped after eight years existence, but in lieu of it we find a principle equally subversive introduced. It is no less than a differ- entiation between income from realised property and that derived from trades and professions. How some of the

advocates of the principle at the present time could have missed this point is a mystery. The Report, cautiously worded as it is, states the facts plainly enough. It says —

Between the years 1803 and 1806 several Acts were passed relating to the income tax which made no alteration in the principle, but in the latter year, by 46 Geo. III. cap. 65, the rate of duty was again increased to 10 per- cent. The exemption on incomes from realised property under 601. a year (which before ex- isted) was, with a few exceptions repealed, entire exemption was limited to incomes under 501., and a graduated scale imposed on in- comes "between 501. and 1501., but limited to pro/its of trades, professions, and offices.

Since then the main principles of the tax have been entire exemption for incomes of a certain sum, abatement more or less, up to another point, and a uniform charge on the whole. One fact to be noted is that the gradu- ated scale in its integrity never ap- plied to incomes above 2001. Another is that the principle was tried and found wanting. But, after all, what is the pre- sent exemption under 150/. but a grad- ation from 0 to 8d. in the pound ? What is the abatement on incomes under 4:001. but the same principle in a less accentuated shape? The great argu- ment in favour of the graduated scale is that income above what is necessary to supply the necessaries of life should be taxed more than income barely necessary for such. Opponents of the scheme ask where are we to stop if we once introduce the principle of differen- tiation at all. The authority of M'Cul- loch is invoked warning us against the thin end of the wedge. The late Chancellor of the Exchequer says it would impair the wage-spending power of the wealthier classes, and thus re- act injuriously on the very poorest section of the population. John Stuart Mill was certainly in favour of what he termed " equality of sacrifice," and the views of Mr. Chamberlain, M.P., Lord Randolph Churchill, and Prince Bismarck in the same direction are widely known — in fact we see it stated that a graduated income tax has been in force in Germany since April last ; but pitted against all this

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we find the name of a reformer like Adam Smith who states that " Every man should contribute to the support of the State in proportion to the in- come he enjoys under it."

Passing from theory to practice from the " dismal science " to figures usually regarded as " more dismal," we come to what have not inaptly been termed "the marvellous Income Tax returns." Here, again, we find the doctors differing. Figures, it is said can be made to prove anything. Nothing, say cynics, is falser than facts except figures. Certainly the figures in these marvellous returns have been lately called upon to prove some strange post-prandial things. In 1868-69 the gross amount of property in the United Kingdom assessed under all schedules was 430,000,000^. In 1883-84 the figures had amounted to 630,000,000/. These 200,000,000/., ac- cording to Lord Derby, represent the growth of commerce, manufactures, and foreign trade in fifteen years. Not at all, says Mr. Goschen. They only represent the work of the " jerry " builder in multiplying doubtful pro- perty, the additional investments in railways canals, mines, telegraphs, and other securities which may or may not be doubtful, leaving only 60,000,000^. or 70,000,000^. as the growth of " commerce, manu- factures, and foreign trade " ; and he further went on to show, in a masterly, exhaustive manner in his Manchester speech, that the profits of the retail trader would account for the most even of this. In fact, broadly speak- ing, he laid it down that the retailer, grumbler though he be, was the only person doing well during these fifteen years, as the public had not' got the benefit of the fall in cost prices, so that the difference must have gone into his pockets.

Let us see what these marvellous returns say. Some startling facts may indeed be deduced from them. One thing first of all is proved, and that is, that the rent or gross annual value of land has nofc decreased during these fifteen years, taking the United King-

dom as a whole. In the United King dom there is an increase of a million and a quarter sterling, no less than three quarters of which goes to Ireland. Scotland, strange to say, shows a decrease of 250,000^. The explanation of all this must be, that voluntary abatements of rent rather than permanent reductions have taken place in England ; that deer forests are encroaching on the arable soil of Scotland ; that in Ireland either the returns must be better obtained or the total nominal rental must be still about the old pre-Land League level, for the inclusion of farm houses in the returns since 1876 would not quite account for the apparent increase shown. No doubt, however, the new assessment taking place this year will show a different result. In house rentals there is, as Mr. Goschen has pointed out, a striking increase of 47,000,000^. j whether this is a healthy development is another matter. It means the flow of population from healthy villages to crowded cities, suggestive of the warning given many years ago that

" 111 fares the land to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates and men decay. "

Schedule B., or what is supposed to be the farmer's profit, has occasioned as much bone-breaking these last few weeks as the famous " graduated income tax" itself. It is a sort of will o' the wisp, entrapping alike a wary financier like Mr. Gosohen and an exact economist like Mr. Leone Levi. The returns year after year show sixty odd millions sterling charged under this head, and poli- ticians comfortably sat down well contented with the good times these ever - grumbling farmers had. Now the fabric melts away like last year's snow. For all any income-tax return in the world can tell, there is no such thing as a farmer's profit. These sixty odd millions simply mean the rental paid. The income-tax au- thorities assume that half this is profit, and charge it whether a profit is act- ually made or not; but since 1851 the

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right of appeal has been allowed. The proportion in Ireland and Scotland is one-third, but in England a deduction of one-eighth is allowed. In prosper- ous times no doubt this was a rough and ready, and, on the whole, fairly equitable, way of arriving at the dif- ference of rental, plus cost of produc- tion, and the sums realised by the produce, but during the past seven years in all probability rental has been a better clue to loss than to gain. Farmers, as a rule, are poor book-keepers, and very often prefer to pay the tax rather than go to the trouble of appealing. It would be difficult, however, to devise any better system. Lord Howick once suggested that the profits from land tillage should be treated like profits from any other trade, but the proposal did not meet with any measure of support. Under the Act of 1803 the profit was supposed to be three-fourths of the rental in England and one-half in Scotland, the reason of the reduction in 1842 being stated to be the increase in rentals and the loss consequent on the importation of foreign corn.

The items under schedule D un- doubtedly constitute the most im- portant part of the income-tax returns. They represent the profits from trades and professions, and the dividends from public companies — broadly speak- ing, as returned by the people them- selves. Schedule A. may be delusive as representing the nominal growth of property, an incumbrance rather than an addition to the national wealth ; schedule B may be worse than delusive, being more or less bucolic fiction of the rarer sort ; but here with schedule D, we have ad- mitted income and profits beyond yea or nay, received in hard cash. What say they ? Most satisfactory the ac- count is. The days of Old England evidently are not yet numbered, nor is that much-abused New Zealander putting in a sketching appearance yet a while, as far as can be judged by this official Blue Book. The gross profits of the United Kingdom have swollen from 173,000,000^. in 1868-9 to

291,000,000^. in 1883-4, an increase of 118,000,000^, or 68 per cent. This does not look like decadence ! This large increase is as nearly as possible divided equally between trades and pro- fessions and public companies.

Pursuing the subdivisions further we get some instructive facts. Taking incomes under 3001. a year, for in- stance, we learn that the recipients have doubled in fifteen years. Could we have better evidence of substantial middle- class progress ? The number of persons with incomes under 4:001. have likewise doubled. Under 5001. the increase is from 12,000 to 19,000, and so on, till we come to the colossal fortunes — to the millionaires — and here we find perhaps, the most astonishing facts in the whole of the returns. Persons and corporations in receipt of incomes vary- ing from 10,000£. to 50,0001. per annum have increased from 704 to 1,192 in the fifteen years ; and of 50,0001. and upwards, from 52 to 104 — exactly double. Of these 104 no less than sixty are assessed in London. Could any other country in the world show such progress in the same time 1 A certain German general once remarked of London, " What a city to plunder ! " Did he peruse this Blue Book he well might say, "What a subject for an indemnity ! " No wonder French admirals look with greedy eyes to our coast towns, and dream of sup- positions requisitions in time of war.

An analysis of the gross profits from public companies would show equally satisfactory results. The development in fifteen years is about 60,000,000^., contributed somewhat in the following rates : —

Profit, increase of

Quarries £238,000

Mines 1,600,000

Ironworks 1,000,000

Gasworks 3,000,000

Canals 2,300,000

Waterworks 1,200,000

Fishings Foreign Securities . . Home Railways . . . Foreign Railways . , Interest out of Rates . Various undertakings

400,000 8,300,000

14,000,000 3,000,000 2,000,000

23,000,000

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These figures speak for themselves. The income from foreign securities may not be very certain. A good deal of it represents colonial borrowings, legitimate no doubt, but there is the danger — however remote — that the borrowing may proceed too rapidly. The additional money sunk in home railways in many instances means competitive schemes useless, or im- provements profitless. The develop- ment in foreign railways — in India, the Argentine country, Canada and Brazil — is a healthy item.

Shall we ever get rid of the income tax ? Could the mode of charge be amended ? Pregnant questions these. In its present shape it is an acquaint- ance of forty years standing, and it is questionable if the opportunity of 1874 will ever again come round. Two objections are raised against the tax : its inquisitorial character and the inequitable nature of its incidence. It is generally alleged that real property does not bear its proper share, but the Commissioners of Inland Revenue very properly point out that real property has to bear probate and other financial burdens other than the income tax proper. As regards its inquisitorial nature it only applies where local collectors are employed, and this suggests the advisability of transferr- ing the collection as well as the charging of the duty entirely to the government officials. It would lead to considerable economy, as clerks to local commission- ers, local assessors, or local collectors, figure largely in the civil service vote. A revenue official by the sheer force of habit alone is inured to secrecy, apart from that honour which pervades all professions. The local collector is often a local shopkeeper, and would be more than human if he were not in some instances inquisitive. At present the income tax in some of the large towns is entirely managed by Inland Revenue officials, and with the most satisfactory results.

Touching on economy at all, the public may well ask what need of one Board for Customs and another for Excise. Why not have one Revenue

Board for the entire kingdom, with a responsible minister in the House of Commons, just as there is at present for the Board of Trade ? In these days of hundred million budgets there is not room for both. Already the pro- cedure of the two departments has been assimilated, so that the final act of fusion could at any moment be carried out. At first the saving would be small ; owing to superanuations, there may even be a loss, but in a few years it would result in a saving of half a million per annum. The Excise Board has already swallowed up the stamp and tax establishments, there- by effecting a total economy of 74,000£. a year, and there is no reason why the Customs Board should not share the same fate as these two. The Excise collect 54,000,000?. against the Customs 22,000,000?., and at a cost of 3 -4 per cent, against 4-4 by the Customs. The Excise employ 6,000 officials, against 6,209 in the Customs. Each Excise official collects 9,000?. per annum, and each Customs official 3,680?. The Customs officials are better paid, as the frequent public complaints of the Inland Revenue officials would testify, but great im- provement has been effected in the working of the latter department with- in the past few years, and no doubt if public economy be effected, everything short of an increase in the estimates will be done under the present regime to place the department in a thoroughly equitable and contented position.

The public favour which the depart- ment as a whole enjoys, is alluded to in the Report with pardonable pride. Sore as the income tax is, complaint against the system of administration is never heard. Every stage of the distiller's operation is watched, every scrap of his goods locked, and yet if he were given the option, he would retain both the lock and the custodian of it as a check against the possibility of pecula- tion on the part of his own servants. We enjoy the finest spirit in the world, thanks to the admirable system devised for the collection of the duty on it. Y/hen the paper duty was

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repealed, a Scotch manufacturer hoisted a flag with a quotation from a well- known song by Burns — himself a revenue officer — " The deil's awa', the deil's awa', the deil's awa' wi' th' exciseman." Yet it is an historic fact that the maltster, much as he grumbled, parted with reluctance with the tape and the dipping rod. No greater fiscal change was ever introduced than the transfer of the duty on malt to beer, with the necessary interference with the course of manufacture which it entailed. It would lead to a revolu- tion in Russia. Yet not the slightest hitch occurred, the brewers them- selves, bearing testimony to the tact, courtesy, and enlightened knowledge displayed by those entrusted with the carrying out of the Act of 1880.

Still harping on the key of reform, let us see what public charges are looming. We have 1,400,000^. as the produce of carriage and kindred licences. There has been some talk of transferring this in relief of local rates. Liquor licences now yield 1,900,000. If local option were carried it would be in- teresting to speculate what' would become of this item. The plate duties are still on the tapis. The arguments for and against retention are stated with great clearness and impartiality in the Report. It appears that the manufacturers themselves are not at all anxious for repeal, no doubt having an eye to monopoly, but in all pro- bability the claims of Indian workman- ship must outweigh all considerations. It is doutbful, indeed, if the tax will survive the Colonial Exhibition of next year. Hall marking should, how- ever, be retained and its provisions made more stringent.

For some years past the Financial Reform Association has been assidu- ously preaching that land is not bear- ing its proper quota of taxation, that all the land of the kingdom was primarily the property of the sovereign as the re- presentative of the State, that the Convention Parliament of Charles II. fraudently converted landholders into landowners, that these landowners shifted the burdens which land hither-

to bore, and bore alone, on to the general body of the people — first, in the shape of excise ; secondly, in unfair manipulation of the land tax ; and thirdly, in the imposition of the in- come tax. The specific charge respect- ing the land tax is that it was fixed on a valuation (tainted, it is said, with fraud) made in 1692, that this skeleton valuation has never since been dis- turbed, so that a nominal quota fixed at 4s. in the pound now produces a little over a million, whereas if it were levied on the actual yearly value of the same property, it would yield about 19,000,000, thereby inferring that the nation in this respect alone is cheated out of 18,000,000 per annum. Some historical facts now unearthed, and quoted in this report, to some extent weaken this contention. It is not our province to decide which view is the more correct. No doubt the issue now raised as to the original scope of the tax will lead to further investigation. Up to the middle of the seventeenth century, the necessities of the realm were chiefly met by subsidies, land chiefly bearing the burden. Instead of hand-to-mouth levies of this kind, the Long Parliament resorted to regular assessments. This was the first Land Tax. In 1692 a general valuation of all estates was made, and a poundage fixed upon it, thus laying the basis of the land-tax as known to us at present. Five years later it appears to have dawned upon the " landowners " that a rate levied upon property, increasing year by year in value, would be a very dangerous screw, so they drew a fixed line of demarcation beyond which the total payment was not to go, fixing upon 1,484,015^. as the quota of Eng- land and Wales. The plain English of this was that the assessment fixed in 1692 was to be accepted as the basis, no matter what the rise in value of the respective properties may have been. During the next 105 years this system continued, the rate varying from Is. to 4s. in the pound, the old assessment always taken as the basis. In 1798 the tax was made permanent at 4s. in the pound, and the old valuation

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Inland Duties and Taxation.

of 1692 was thus irrevocably fixed. This quota at this valuation produced something over 2,000,000^., and of this 856,469Z. has been redeemed on the basis of a scheme, devised by Mr. Pitt, in 1798, and remodelled in 1853. The fresh matter now unearthed for the first time in this report, shows that this ad- herence to the old partial valuation of 1692 has benefited all kinds of property and all kinds of income quite as much as it has land, that the English people as a whole must plead guilty to the filch- ing of this 18,000,000^. ; in short, that it is a sort of good-natured family fraud, by which Peter is robbed to pay Paul. And this is proved in a very simple way, by showing that the Act of 1692 ordained that estates, merchandise, chattels, incomes, and profits of every description should be assessed at 4s. in the pound. This would make it in reality a 4s. income tax, so that it would follow that the " estates, mer- chandise, chattels, and incomes," are the real backsliders, the real robbers of the nation, since land alone bears the quota of the tax still extant. A strong case this, difficult to rebut. But there are some weak points in the armour. It is a most suspicious fact that the " other estates, chattels, and incomes " were never in reality as- sessed. If they were there is no record left. In 1799, in the Tower division of London, where, be it re- membered, most of the shipping of the day would be assessed, we find per- sonal estate yielding only 227/. against 29,964£. from land. The report sug- gests that the final fixing upon land may have arisen from the fact that the tax was a fixed one, that those origi- nally charged upon personal incomes would naturally shift from' time to time, and thus slide out of the assess- ments. It is possible. But is it not more probable that the commissioners charged with the carrying out of the Act of 1692 — in most instances land- holders themselves — would have a lively sense of the spirit of the tax, would be imbued with the feeling that they were giving a composition for the

burdens which the land for centuries bore — such as military service, purvey- ance, aids, relief, premier seisin, ward- ships, &c., and with that thorough sense of justice which has always character- ised the administration of purely English affairs, put the saddle on the right horse, knowing that " other- estates, incomes and chattels " had to yield liberally in indirect ways, in the shape of the newly instituted excise.

In conclusion, thanks are due to the Commissioners of Inland Revenue for the publication of this valuable and interesting report. As Mr. Leone Levi says, they might have been con- tent with the presentation of the scan- tiest details. Instead of that they have given us a living sketch of their department as it is, and as it has been, in a report free from the lugubrious, reader-scaring, ill-digested mass of statistics too often found in official publications. And they do well. The new electorate will be all the more contented, all the better qualified to exercise their functions with self thinking discretion, by knowing the real nature of the items which the tax- man demands, why he demands them, how the money is got, and how the money is spent. Working men show sound judgment in the manage- ment of their weekly wage. Would not the same broad sound mass of popular common sense be a healthy fulcrum in national affairs, if national finance only were made more popular 1 Lord Salisbury tells us that human nature is averse to figures. There is no reason why a nation should be. Figures have made Germany what she is. The slide rule and the loga- rithmic table led to the crowning vic- tory of Sedan. When men know what they are paying, directly and indirectly, they will begin to inquire why they are paying it. They will want to know how and for what purposes it is spent. They will pay all the more cheerfully, if satisfied, and will thus bring valuable influence to bear on the administration of affairs at home and abroad.

MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.

OCTOBER, 1885.

A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS.

Extracts from an Old French Journal.

VALENCIENNES, September, 1701.

THEY have been renovating my father's large workroom. That delightful, tumble-down old place has lost its moss-grown tiles and the green weather-stains we have known all our lives on the high whitewashed wall, opposite which we sit, in the little sculptor's yard, for the coolness, in summertime. Among old Wat- teau's work-people came his son, " the genius," my father's godson and namesake, a dark-haired youth, whose large, unquiet eyes seemed perpetually wandering to the various drawings which lie exposed here. My father will have it that he is a genius indeed, and a painter born. We have had our September Fair in the Grande Place, a wonderful stir of sound and colour in the wide, open space beneath our win- dows. And just where the crowd was busiest young Antony was found, hoisted into one of those eiripty niches of the old Hotel de Ville, sketch- ing the scene to the life ; but with a kind of grace (a marvellous tact, of omission, as my father pointed out to us, in dealing with the vulgar reality seen from one's own window) which has made trite old Harlequin, Clown, and Columbine, seem like people in some fairy-land ; or like infinitely clever tragic actors, who, for the humour of the thing, have put on No. 312.— VOL. LII.

motley for once, and are able to throw a world of serious innuendo into their burlesque looks, with a sort of comedy which shall be but tragedy seen from the other side. He brought his sketch to our house to-day, and I was present when my father questioned him and commended his work. But the lad seemed not greatly pleased, and left untasted the glass of old Malaga which was offered to him. His father is a somewhat stern man, and will hear nothing of educating him as a painter. Yet he is not ill-to-do, and has lately built himself a new stone house, big, and grey, and cold. Their old plastered house with the black timbers, in the Rue des Cardi- naux, was prettier ; dating from the time of the Spaniards, and one of the oldest in Valenciennes.

October, 1701.

Chiefly through the solicitations of my father, old "Watteau has consented to place Antony with a teacher of painting here. I meet him betimes on the way to his lessons, as I return from mass ; for he still works with the masons, but making the most of late and early hours, of every moment of liberty. And then he has the feast- days, of which there are so many in this old-fashioned place. Ah ! such gifts as his, surely, may once in a way make much industry seem worth while .

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He makes a wonderful progress. And yet, far from being set up, and too easily pleased with what, after all, comes to him so easily, he has, my father thinks, too little self -approval for ultimate success. He is apt, in truth, to fall out too hastily with him- self and what he produces. Yet here also there is the "golden mean." Yes ! I could fancy myself offended by a sort of irony which sometimes crosses the half -melancholy sweetness of manner habitual with him ; only that, as I can see, he treats himself to the same quality.

October, 1701.

Antony Watteau comes here often now. It is the instinct of a natural fineness in him, to escape when he can from that blank stone house, si peu historic, and that homely old man and woman. The rudeness of his home has turned his feeling for even the simpler graces of life into a physical need, like hunger or thirst, which might come to greed ; and methinks he perhaps over- values those things. Still, made as he is, his hard fate in that rude place must needs touch one. And then, he profits by the experience of my father, who has much know- ledge in matters of art beyond his own art of sculpture ; and Antony is not unwelcome to him. In these last rainy weeks especially, when he can't sketch out of doors, when the wind only half dries the pavement before another torrent comes, and people stay at home, and the only sound from without is the creaking of a restless shutter on its hinges, or the march across the Place of those weary soldiers, coming and going so inter- minably, one hardly knows whether to or from battle with the English and the Austrians, from victory or defeat- Well ! he has become like one of our family. " He will go far ! " my father declares. He would go far in the literal sense, if he might — to Paris, to Rome. It must be admitted that our Valenciennes is a quiet — nay, a sleepy place ; sleepier than ever, since

it became French, and ceased to be so near the frontier. The grass is grow- ing deep on our old ramparts, and it is pleasant to walk there — to walk there and muse ; pleasant for a tame, un- ambitious soul such as mine.

December, 1702.

Antony "VVatteau left us for Paris this morning. It came upon us quite suddenly. They amuse themselves in Paris. A scene-painter we have here, well known in Flanders, has been engaged to work in one of the Parisian playhouses ; and young Watteau, of whom he had some slight knowledge, has departed in his company. He doesn't know it was I who persuaded the scene-painter to take him — that he would find the lad useful. We offered him our little presents ; fine thread- lace of our own making for his ruffles and the like ; for one must make a figure in Paris ; and he is slim and well-formed. For myself, I presented him with a silken purse I had long ago embroidered for another. Well ! we shall follow his fortunes (of which I for one feel quite sure) at a distance. Old Watteau didn't know of his de- parture, and has been here in great anger.

December, 1703.

Twelve months to-day since Antony went to Paris ! The first struggle must be a sharp one for an unknown lad in that vast, over crowded place, even if he be as clever as young Antony Watteau. We may think, however, that he is on the way to his chosen end, for he returns not home ; though, in truth, he tells those poor old people very little of himself. The apprentices of the M. Metayer for whom he works, labour all day long, each at a single part only — coiffure, or robe, or hand — of the cheap pictures of religion or fantasy he exposes for sale at a low price, along the footways of the Pont Notre - Dame. Antony is already the most skilful of them, and seems to have been promoted of late to work on church pictures. I like

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the thought of that. He receives three limes a week for his pains, and his soup daily.

May, 1705.

Antony Watteau has parted from the dealer in pictures b, lion marche, and works now with a painter of furniture pieces, (those head-pieces for doors and the like, now in fashion,) who is also concierge of the Palace of the Luxem- bourg. Antony is actually lodged somewhere in that grand place, which contains the king's collection of the Italian pictures he would so willingly copy. Its gardens also are magnificent, with something, as we understand from him, altogether of a novel kind in their disposition and embellishment. Ah ! how I delight myself, in fancy at least, in those beautiful gardens, freer and trimmed less stiffly than those of other royal houses. Me- thinks I see him there, when his long summer-day's work is over, enjoying the cool shade of the stately, broad- foliaged trees, each of which is a great courtier, though it has its way almost as if it belonged to that open and un- built country beyond, over which the sun is sinking.

His thoughts, however, in the midst of all this, are not wholly away from home, if I may judge by the subject of a picture he hopes to sell for as much as sixty livres — Un Depart de Troupes — Soldiers Departing — one of those scenes of military life one can study so well here at Valenciennes.

June, 1705.

Young Watteau has returned home ; — proof, with a character so independent as his, that things have gone well with him ; and (it is agreed !) stays with us, instead of in the stonemason's house. The old people suppose he comes to us for the sake of my father's instruction. French people as we have become, we are still old Flemish, if not at heart yet on the surface. Even in French Flanders, at Douai and Saint Omer, as I understand, in the churches and in people's houses, as may be seen from the very streets,

there is noticeable a minute and scru- pulous air of care-taking and neatness. Antony Watteau remarks this more than ever on returning to Valencien- nes, and savours greatly, after his lodging in Paris, our Flemish cleanli- ness, lover as he is of distinction and elegance. Those worldly graces he seemed as a young lad almost to hunger and thirst for, as if truly the mere adornments of life were its necessaries, he already takes as if he had been al- ways used to them. And there is something noble — shall I say ? — in his half-disdainful way of serving himself with what he still, as I think, secretly values over-much. There is an air of seemly thought — le bel serieux — about him, which makes me think of one of those grave old Dutch statesmen in their youth, such as that famous William the Silent ; and yet the effect of this first success of his, (greater in- deed than its actual value, as insuring for the future the full play of his natural powers,) I can trace like the bloom of a flower upon him ; and he has, now and then, the gaieties which from time to time, surely, must refresh all true artists, however hard-working and " painful."

July, 1705.

The charm of that— his physiog- nomy and manner of being — has touched even my young brother, Jean-Baptiste. He is greatly taken with Antony, clings to him al- most too attentively, and will be nothing but a painter, though my father would have trained him to follow his own profession. It may do the child good. He needs the expan- sion of some generous sympathy or sentiment in that close little soul of his, as I have thought, watching some- times how his small face and hands are moved in sleep. A child of ten who cares only to save and possess, to hoard his tiny savings ! Yet he is not otherwise selfish, and loves us all with a warm heart. Just now it is the moments of Antony's company he counts, like a little miser. Well ! that may save him perhaps from develop- D D 2

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ing a certain meanness of character I have sometimes feared for him.

August, 1705.

We returned home late this sum- mer evening — Antony Watteau, my father and sisters, young Jean-Bap- tiste, and myself — from an excursion to Saint-Amand, in celebration of Antony's last day with us. After visiting the great abbey-church and its range of chapels, with their costly encumbrance of carved shrines and golden reliquaries and funeral scut- cheons in the coloured glass, half seen through a rich inclosure of marble and brass work, we supped at the little inn in the forest. Antony, look- ing well in his new-fashioned, long- skirted coat, and taller than he really is, made us bring our cream and wild strawberries out of doors, ranging our- selves according to his judgment (for a hasty sketch in that big pocket- book he carries) on the soft slope of one of those fresh spaces in the wood, where the trees unclose a little, while Jean-Baptiste and my youngest sister danced a minuet on the grass, to the notes of some strolling lutanist who had found us out. He is visibly cheerful at the thought of his return to Paris, and became for a moment freer and more animated than I have ever yet seen him, as he discoursed to us about the paintings of Rubens in the church here. jHis words, as he spoke of them, seemed full of a kind of rich sunset with some moving glory within it. Yet I like far better than any of these pictures of Rubens a work of that old Dutch master, Peter Porbus, which hangs, though almost out of sight indeed, in our church at home. The patron saints, simple and standing firmly on either side, present two homely old people to Our Lady enthroned in the midst, with the look and attitude of one for whom, amid her "glories," (depicted in dim little circular pictures, set in the openings of a chaplet of pale flowers around her,) all feelings are over, except a great pitif ulness ; and

her robe of shadowy blue suits my eyes better far than the hot flesh-tints of the Medicean ladies of the great Peter Paul, in spite of that amplitude and royal ease of action under their stiff court-costumes, at which Antony Watteau declares himself in dismay.

August, 1705.

I have just returned from early mass. I lingered long after the office was over, watching, and pondering how in the world one could help a small bird which had flown into the church but could find no way out again. I suspect it will remain there, fluttering round and round distractedly, far up under the arched roof, till it dies ex- hausted. I seem to have heard of some one who likened man's life to a bird, passing just once only, on some winter night, from window to window, across a cheerfully - lighted hall. The bird, taken captive by the ill-luck of a moment, repeating its issueless circle till it expires, within the close vaulting of that great stone church — human life may be like that bird too !

Antony Watteau returned to Paris yesterday. Yes ! — Certainly great heights of achievement would seem to lie before him — access to regions where one may find it increasingly hard to follow him even in imagination, and figure to one's self after what manner his life moves therein.

January, 1709.

Antony Watteau has competed for what is called the Prix de Rome, de- siring greatly to profit by the grand establishment founded at Rome by King Lewis the Fourteenth, for the encouragement of French artists. He obtained only the second place, but does not renounce his desire to make the journey to Italy. Could I save enough by careful economies for that purpose ? It might be conveyed to him in some indirect way that would not offend.

February, 1712.

We read, with much pleasure for all of us, in the Gazette to-day, among

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other events of the great world, that Antony Watteau had been elected to the Academy of Painting under the new title of Peintre des fetes Galantes, and had been named also Peintre du Roi. My brother, Jean-Baptiste, ran to tell the news to old Jean-Philippe and Michelle Watteau.

A new manner of painting ! The old furniture of people's rooms must needs be changed throughout, it would seem, to accord with this painting ; or rather, the painting is designed exclusively to suit one particular kind of apartment — a manner of painting greatly prized, as we understand, by those Parisian judges who have had the best opportunity of acquainting themselves with whatever is most en- joyable in the arts — such is the achievement of the young Watteau ! He looks to receive more orders for his work than he will be able to execute. He will certainly relish — he so elegant, so hungry for the colours of life — a free intercourse with those wealthy lovers of the arts, M. de Crozat, M. de Julienne, the Abbe de la Roque, the Count de Caylus, and M. Gersaint, the famous dealer in pictures, who are so anxious to lodge him in their fine hotels, and to have him of their company at their country houses. Paris, we hear, has never been wealthier and more luxurious than now : and the great ladies outbid each other to have his work upon their very fans. Those vast fortunes, how- ever, seem to change hands very rapidly. And Antony's new manner? I am unable even to divine it — to conceive the trick and effect of it — at all. Only, something of lightness and coquetry I discern there, at vari- ance, methinks, with his own singular gravity, and even sadness, of mien and mind, more answerable to the stately apparelling of the age of Lewis XIV., or of Lewis XV., in these old, sombre Spanish houses of ours.

March, 1713.

We have all been very happy — Jean- Baptiste, as if in a delightful dream.

Antony Watteau, being consulted with regard to the lad's training as a painter, has most generously offered to receive him for his own pupil. My father, for some reason unknown to me, seemed to hesitate at the first ; but Jean-Baptiste, whose enthusiasm for Antony visibly refines and beauti- fies his whole nature, has won the necessary permission, and this dear young brother will leave us to-morrow. Our regrets and his, at his parting from us for the first time, overtook our joy at his good fortune by surprise, at the last moment, just as we were about to bid each other good-night. For a while there had seemed to be an uneasiness under our cheerful talk, as if each one present were concealing something with an effort ; and it was Jean-Baptiste himself who gave way at last. And then we sat down again, still together, and allowed free play to what was in our hearts, almost till morning, my sisters weeping much. I know better how to control myself. In a few days that delightful new life will have begun for him : and 1 have made him promise to write often to us. With how small a part of my whole life shall I be really living ai; Valenciennes !

January, 1714.

Jean-Philippe Watteau has received a letter from his son to-day. Old Michelle Watteau, whose' sight is failing, though she still works (half by touch, indeed) at her pillow-lace, was glad to hear me read the letter aloud more than once. It recounts — how modestly and almost as a matter of course ! — his late successes. And yet ! — does he, in writing to these old parents, whom he has forgiven for their hard treatment of him, purposely underrate his great good-fortune and present happiness, not to shock them too much by the contrast between the delicate enjoyments of the life he now leads among the wealthy and refined, and that bald existence of theirs in his old home t A life, agitated, exi- gent, unsatisfying! — That is what this letter discloses, below so attractive

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a surface. As his gift expands so does that incurable restlessness, one supposed but a humour natural to a promising youth who had still every- thing to do. And now, the one realised enjoyment he has of all this, might seem to be the thought of the inde- pendence it has purchased him, so that he can escape from one lodging- place to another, just as it may please him. He has already deserted, some- what incontinently, more than one of those fine houses, the liberal air of which he used so greatly to affect, and which have so readily received him. Has he failed really to grasp the fact of his great success and the rewards that lie before him? At all events, he seems, after all, not greatly to value that fine world he is now privileged to enter, and has certainly but little relish for his own works — those works which I for one so thirst to see.

March, 1714.

We were all — Jean-Philippe, Mi- chelle Watteau, and ourselves — half in expectation of a visit from Antony ; and to-day, quite suddenly, he is with us. I was lingering after early mass this morning in the church of Saint Vaast. It is good for me to be there. Our people lie under one of the great marble slabs before ihejube, some of the memorial brass balusters of which nre engraved with their names and the dates of their decease. The settle of carved oak which runs all round the wide nave is my father's own work. The quiet spaciousness of the place is itself like a meditation, an acte de recueillement, and clears away the confusions of the heart. I suppose the heavy droning of the carillon had smothered the sound of his footsteps, for on my turning round, when I sup- posed myself alone, Antony Watteau was standing near me. Constant ob- server, as he is, of the lights and shadows of things, he visits places of this kind at odd times. He has left Jean-Baptiste at work in Paris, and will stay this time with the old people, not at our house : though he has spent

the better part of to-day in my father's workroom. He hasn't yet put off, in spite of all his late intercourse with the great world, his distant and pre- occupied manner — a manner, it is true, the same to every one. It is certainly not through pride in his success, as some might fancy, for he was thus always. It is rather as if, with all that success, life and its daily social routine were somewhat of a burden to him.

April, 1714.

At last we shall understand some- thing of that new style of his — the Watteau style — so much relished by the great world at Paris. He has taken it into his kind head to paint and decorate our chief salon — the room with the three long windows, which occupies the first floor of the house.

The room was a landmark, as we used to think, an inviolable milestone and landmark, of old Valenciennes fashion — that sombre style, indulging much in contrasts of black or deep brown with white, which the Spaniards left behind them here. Doubtless their eyes had found its shadows cool and pleasant, when they shut themselves in from the cutting sun- shine of their own country. But in our country, where we must needs economise not the shade but the sun, its grandiosity weighs a little on one's spirits. Well ! The rough plaster we used to cover as well as might be with morsels of old arras a personnages, is replaced by dainty panelling of wood, with mimic columns, and a quite aerial scroll-work, around sunken spaces of a pale-rose stuff, and certain oval openings — two over the doors, open- ing on each side of the grand canape which faces the windows, one over the chimney-piece, and one above the bahut which forms its vis-a-vis — four spaces in all, to be filled by and by with " fantasies " of the Four Seasons, painted by his own hand. He will send us from Paris fauteuils of a new pattern he has devised, suitably covered, and a painted clavecin. Our old silver flambeaux look well on the chimney

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piece. Odd, faint-coloured flowers till coquettishly the little empty spaces here and there, like ghosts of nose- gays left by visitors long ago, which paled thus, sympathetically, at the de- cease of their old owners ; for, in spite of its new-fashionedness, all this array is really less like a new thing than the last surviving result of all the more lightsome adornments of past times. Only, the very walls seem to cry out — No ! to make delicate insinuation, for a music, a conversation, nimbler than any we have known, or are likely to find here. For himself, he converses well, but very sparingly. He assures us, indeed, that this new style is in truth a thing of old days, of his own old days here in Valenciennes, when, working long hours as a mason's boy, he in fancy reclothed the walls of this or that house he was employed in, with this fairy arrangement ; — itself like a piece of " chamber-music," methinks, part answering to part ; while no too trenchant note is allowed to break through the delicate harmony of white, and pale red, and little golden touches. Yet it is all very comfortable also, it must be confessed ; with an elegant open place for the fire, instead of the big old stove of brown tiles. The ancient, heavy furniture of our grand- parents goes up, with difficulty, into the grenier, much against my father's inclination. To reconcile him to the change, Antony is painting his portrait in a vast perruque, and with more vigorous massing of light and shadow than he is wont to permit himself.

June, 1714.

He has completed the ovals — The Four Seasons. Oh ! the summer-like grace, the freedom and softness of the " Summer " — a hayfield such as we visited to-day, but boundless, and with touches of level Italian architecture in the hot, white, elusive distance, and wreaths of flowers, fairy hayrakes and the like, suspended from tree to tree, with that wonderf ul lightness which is one of the charms of his work. I can understand through this, at last, what

it is he enjoys, what he selects by pre- ference from all that various world we pass our lives in. I am struck by the purity of the room he has refashioned for us — a sort of moral purity ; yet, in the forms and colours of things. Is the actual life of Paris, to which he will soon return, equally pure, that it relishes this kind of thing so strongly 1 Only, methinks 'tis a pity to incor- porate so much of his work, of himself, with objects of use which must perish by use, or disappear, like our own old furniture, with mere change of fashion.

July, 1714.

On the last day of Antony Watteau's visit we made a party to Cambrai. We entered the cathedral church ; it was the hour of Vespers, and it hap- pened that Monseigneur le Prince de Cambrai was in his place in the choir. He appears of great age, assists but rarely at the offices of religion, and is never to be seen in Paris ; and Antony had much desired to behold him. Cer- tainly, it was worth while to have come so far only to see him, and hear him give his pontifical blessing, in a voice feeble but of infinite sweetness, and with an inexpressibly graceful movement of the hands. A veritable grand seigneur ! His refined old age, the impress of genius and honours, even his disappointments, concur with natural graces to make him seem too distinguished (a fitter word fails me) for this world. Omnia Vanitas ! he seems to say, yet with a profound re- signation, which makes the things we are most of us so fondly occupied with seem petty enough. Omnia Vanitas ! — Is that indeed the proper comment on our lives, coming, as it does in this case, from one who might have made his own all that life has to bestow 1 Yet he was never to be seen at court, and has lived here almost as an exile. Was our " Great King Lewis " jealous of a true grand seigneur, or grand monarque by natural gift and the favour of heaven, that he could not endure his presence?

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July, 1714.

My own portrait remains unfinished at his sudden departure. I sat for it in a walking-dress, made under his direction — a gown of a peculiar silken stuff, falling into an abundance of small folds, giving me " a certain air of piquancy " which pleases him, but is far enough from my true self. My old Flemish faille, which I shall always wear, suits me better.

J notice that pur good-hearted but sometimes difficult friend said little of our brother Jean-Baptiste, though he knows us so anxious on his account — • spoke only of his constant industry, cautiously, and not altogether with satisfaction, as if the sight of it wearied him.

September, 1714.

Will Antony ever accomplish that long-pondered journey to Italy? For Lis own sake, I should be glad he might. Yet it seems desolately far, across those great hills and plains. I remember how I formed a plan for providing him with a sum sufficient for the purpose. But that he no longer needs.

With myself, how to pass time be- comes sometimes the question ; — un- avoidably, though it strikes me as a thing unspeakably sad in a life so short as ours. The sullenness of a long wet day is yielding just now to an outburst of watery sunset, which strikes from the far horizon of this quiet world of ours, over fields and willow-woods, upon the shifty weather-vanes, and long- pointed windows of the tower on the square — from which the Angelus is sounding — with a momentary promise of a fine night. I prefer the Salut at Saint Vaast. The walk thither is a longer one ; and I have a fancy'always that I may meet Antony Watteau there again, any time ; just as, when a child, having found one day a tiny box in the shape of a silver coin, for long afterwards I used to try every piece of money that came into my hands, expecting it to open.

September, 1714. We were sitting in the Watteau

chamber for the coolness, this sultry evening. A sudden gust of wind ruffled the lights in the sconces on the walls ; the distant rumblings, which had continued all the after- noon, broke out at last : and through the driving rain, a coach, rattling across the Place, stops at our door ; and in a moment Jean-Baptiste is with us once again ; but with bitter tears in his eyes ; — dismissed !

October, 1714.

Jean-Baptiste ! he, too, rejected by Antony 1 It makes our friendship and fraternal sympathy closer. And still, as he works, not less sedulously than of old, and still so full of loyalty to his old master, in that Watteau cham- ber, I seem to see Antony himself, of whom Jean-Baptiste dares not yet speak,- — to come very near to his work, and understand his great parts. And Jean-Baptiste 's work may stand, for the future, as the central interest of my life. I bury myself in that.

February, 1715.

If I understand anything of these matters, Antony Watteau paints that delicate life of Paris so excellently, with so much spirit, partly because, after all, he looks down upon it, or de- spises it. To persuade myself of that, is my womanly satisfaction for his preference — his apparent preference — for a world so different from mine. Those coquetries, those vain and perishable graces, can be rendered so perfectly only through an intimate understanding of them. For him, to understand must be to despise them ; while (I think I know why) he yet undergoes their fascination. Hence that discontent with himself which keeps pace with his fame. It would have been better for him — he would have enjoyed a purer and more real happiness — had he remained here, obscure ; as it might have been better for me !

It is altogether different with Jean- Baptiste. He approaches that life, and all its pretty nothingness, from a level no higher than its own ; and,

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beginning just where Antony Watteau leaves off in disdain, produces a solid and veritable likeness of it, and of its ways.

March, 1715.

There are points in his painting (I apprehend this through his own per- sistently modest observations) at which he works out his purpose more excel- lently than Watteau ; of whom he has trusted himself to speak at last, with a wonderful self-effacement, pointing out in each of those pictures, for the rest so just and true, how Antony would have managed this or that ; and, with what an easy superiority, have done the thing better — done the impossible.

February, 1716.

There are good things, attractive things, in life, meant for one and not for another — not meant perhaps for me ; as there are pretty clothes which are not suitable for every one. I find a certain immobility of disposition in me, to quicken or interfere with which is like physical pain. He, so brilliant, petulant, mobile ! I am better far beside Jean-Baptiste — in contact with his quiet, even labour, and manner of being. At first he did the work to which he had set himself, sullenly ; but the mechanical labour of it has cleared his mind and temper at last, as a sullen day turns quite clear and fine by imperceptible change. With the earliest dawn he enters his atelier, the Watteau chamber, where he remains at work all day. The dark evenings he spends in industrious preparation with the crayon for the pictures he is to finish during the hours of daylight. His toil is also his amusement ; he goes but rarely into the society whose manners he has to reproduce. His animals, pet animals, (he knows it !) are mere toys. But he finishes a large number of works, dessus de portes, clavecin cases, and the like. His happiest, most genial moments, he puts, like savings of fine gold, into one particular picture (true opus magnum, as he hopes) La Ealan^oire. He has the secret of surprising effects with a

certain pearl-grey silken stuff of his predilection ; and it must be confessed that he paints hands — which a draughts- man, of course, should understand at least twice as well as all other people — with surpassing expression.

March, 1716.

Is it the depressing result of this labour, of a too-exacting labour? I know not. But at times (it is his one melancholy) he expresses a strange ap- prehension of poverty, of penury, and mean surroundings in old age ; remind- ing me of that childish disposition to hoard, which I noticed in him of old. And then — inglorious Watteau, as he is ! — at times, that steadiness in which he is so great a contrast to Antony, as it were accumulates, changes, into a ray of genius, a grace, an inexplicable touch of truth, in which all his heavi- ness leaves him for a while, and he actually goes beyond the master ; as himself protests to me, yet modestly. And still, it is precisely at those mo- ments that he feels most the difference between himself and Antony Watteau. In that country, all the pebbles are golden nuggets, he says ; with perfect good humour.

June, 1717.

'Tis truly in a delightful abode that Antony Watteau is just now lodged — the hotel, or town-house of M. de Cro- zat, which is not only a comfortable dwelling-place, but also a precious museum lucky people go far to see. Jean-Baptiste, too, has seen the place, and describes it. The antiquities, beautiful curiosities of all sorts — above all, the original drawings of those old masters Antony so greatly admires — are arranged all around one there, that the influence, the genius of those things may imperceptibly play upon, and enter into one, and form what one does. The house is situated near the Rue Richelieu, but has a large gard- en about it. M. de Crozat gives his musical parties there, and Antony Watteau has painted the walls of one of the apartments with the Four Seasons, after the manner of ours,

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but doubtless improved by second thoughts. This beautiful place is now Antony's home for a while. The house has but one story, with attics in its mansard roof, like those of a farm- house in the country. I fancy Antony fled thither for a few moments, from the visitors who weary him ; breathing the freshness of that dewy garden in the very midst of Paris. As for me, I suffocate, this summer afternoon in this pretty Watteau chamber of ours, where Jean-Baptiste is working so contentedly.

May, 1717.

In spite of what happened, Jean- Baptiste has been looking forward to a visit to Valenciennes which Antony Watteau proposes to make. He hopes always — has a patient hope — that Antony's former patronage of him. may be revived. And now he is among us, actually at his work — rest- less and disquieting, meagre, like a woman with some nervous malady. Is it pity, then, but pity, one must feel for the brilliant one 1 He has been criti- cising the work of Jean-Baptiste, who takes his judgments generously, grate- fully. Can it be that, after all, he despises, and is no true lover of his own art, and is but chilled by an enthu- siasm for it in another, such as that of Jean-Baptiste 1 — as if Jean-Baptiste over-valued it, or as if some ignoble- ness or blunder, and a sign that he has really missed his aim, started out of his work at the sound of praise — as if such praise could hardly be alto- gether sincere.

June, 1717.

And at last one has actual sight of his work — what it is. He has brought with him certain long-cherished de- signs to finish here in quiet, as he protests he has never finished before. That charming noblesse — can it be really so distinguished to the minutest point, so naturally aristocratic ? Half in masquerade, playing the drawing- room or garden comedy of life, these persons have upon them, not less than the landscape he composes, and among the accidents of which they group

themselves with such a perfect fitting- ness — a certain light we should seek for in vain, upon anything real. For their framework they have around them a veritable architecture — a tree- architecture — of which those moss- grown balusters, termes, statues, foun- tains, are really but members. Only, as I gaze upon those windless after- noons, I find myself always saying to myself involuntarily, "The evening will be a wet one." The storm is always brooding through the massy splendour of the trees, above those sun-dried glades or lawns, where delicate children may be trusted thinly clad : and the secular trees themselves will hardly outlast another generation.

July, 1717.

There has been an exhibition of his pictures in the Hall of the Academy of Saint Luke ; and all the world has been to see.

Yes ! Besides that unreal, imagi- nary light upon these scenes and persons, which is a pure gift of his, there was a light, a poetry, in those persons and things themselves, close at hand, we had not seen. He has enabled us to see it : we are so much the better-off thereby, and I, for one, the better. The world he sets before us so engagingly has its care for purity, its cleanly preferences, in what one is to see — in the outsides of things — and there is something, a sign, a memento, at the least, even in that. There, is my simple notion, wholly womanly perhaps, but which I may hold by, of the purpose of the arts.

August, 1717.

And yet ! (to read my mind, my experience, in somewhat different terms) methinks Antony Watteau reproduces that gallant world, those patched and powdered ladies and fine cavaliers, so much to its own satisfac- tion, partly because he despises it : if this be a possible condition of excellent artistic production. People talk of a new era now dawning upon the world, of fraternity, liberty, humanity, of a

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novel sort of social freedom in which men's natural goodness of heart will blossom at a thousand points hitherto repressed, of wars disappearing from the world in an infinite, benevolent ease of life — yes ! perhaps of infinite littleness also. And it is the outward manner of that, which, partly by anticipation, and through pure intel- lectual power, Antony Watteau has caught, together with a flattering something of his own, added thereto. Himself really of the old time — that serious old time which is passing away, the impress of which he carries on his physiognomy — he dignifies, by what in him is neither more nor less than a profound melancholy, the essential in- significance of what he wills to touch in all that ; transforming its mere pettiness into grace. It looks cer- tainly very graceful, fresh, animated, " piquant," as they love to say — yes ! and withal, I repeat, perfectly pure ; and may well congratulate itself on the loan of a fallacious grace, not its own. For in truth Antony Watteau is still the mason's boy, and deals with that world under a fascination, of the nature of which he is half-conscious methinks, puzzled at " the queer trick he possesses," to use his own phrase. You see him growing ever more and more meagre, as he goes through the world and its applause. Yet he reaches with wonderful sagacity the secret of an adjustment of colours, a coiffure, a toilette, setting I know not what air of real superiority on such things. He will never overcome his early training ; and these light things will possess for him always a kind of worth, as characterising that impos- sible or forbidden world which the mason's boy saw through the closed gate- ways of the enchanted garden. Those trifling and petty graces, insignia to him of that nobler world of aspiration and idea, even now that he is aware, as I conceive, of their true littleness, bring back to him, by the power of association, all the old magical exhil- aration of his dream, his dream of a better world than the real one. There,

is the formula, as I apprehend, of his success — of his extraordinary hold on things so alien from himself. And I think there is more real hilarity in my brother's fetes champetres — more truth to life, and therefore less dis- tinction. Yes ! the world profits by such reflection of its poor, coarse self, in one who renders all its caprices from the height of a Corneille. That is my way of making up to myself for the fact that I think his days too, would have been really happier, had he remained obscure at Valen- ciennes.

September, 1717.

My own poor likeness, begun so long ago, still remains unfinished on the easel, at his departure from Valen- ciennes— perhaps for ever ; since the old people departed this life in the hard winter of last year, at no distant time from each other. It is pleasanter to him to sketch and plan than to paint and finish : and he is often out of humour with himself because he can- not project into a picture the life and spirit of his first thought with the crayon. He would fain begin, where that famous master, Gerard Dow, left off, and snatch, as it were, with a single stroke, what in him was the result of infinite patience. It is the sign of this sort of promptitude that he values solely in the work of another. To my thinking there is a kind of greed or grasping in that humour ; as if things were not to last very long, and one must snatch opportunity. And often he succeeds. The old Dutch painter cherished with a kind of piety his colours and pencils. Antony Watteau, on the contrary, will hardly make any preparations for his work at all, or even clean his palette, in the dead-set he makes at improvisation. 'Tis the contrast perhaps between the staid Dutch genius and the petulant, sparkling French temper of this new era, into which he has thrown himself. Alas ! it is already apparent that the result also loses something of longevity, of durability — the colours fading ex- changing, from the first, somewhat

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rapidly, as Jean-Baptiste notes. 'Tis true, a mere trifle alters or produces the expression. But then, on the other hand, in pictures the whole effect of which lies in a kind of harmony, the treachery of a single colour must needs involve the failure of the whole to outlast the fleeting ! grace of those social conjunctions it is meant to per- petuate. This is what has happened, in part, to that portrait on the easel. Meantime, he has commanded Jean- Baptiste to finish it ; and so it must be.

October, 1717.

Antony Watteau is an excellent judge of literature, and I have been reading (with infinite surprise ! ) in my afternoon walks in the little wood here, a new book he left behind him — a great favourite of his ; as it has been a favourite with large numbers in Paris. Those pathetic shocks of fortune, those sudden alternations of pleasure and remorse, which must always lie among the very conditions of an irregular and guilty love, as in sinful games of chance ; — they have be- gun to talk of these things in Paris, to amuse themselves with the spectacle of them ; set forth here, in the story of poor Manon Lescaut — for whom fidelity is impossible ; so vulgarly eager for the money which can buy pleasures such as hers — with an art like "Watteau's own, for lightness and grace. In- capacity of truth, yet with such ten- derness, such a gift of tears, on the one side : on the other, a faith so absolute as to give to an illicit love almost the regularity of marriage ! And this is the book those fine ladies in Watteau's " conversations," who look so exquisitely pure, lay down on the cushion when the children run up to have their laces righted. Yet the pity of it ! What floods of tears ! There is a tone about it all which strikes me as going well with the grace of these leafless birch-trees against the sky, the silver of their bark, and a certain delicate odour of decay which rises from the soil. It is all one half-light ; and the heroine (nay ! the hero himself

also, that dainty Chevalier des Grieux, with all his fervour) have, I think, but a half-life in them truly, from the first. And I could fancy myself half of their condition this evening, as I sit here alone, while a premature touch of winter upon it makes the outer world seem so inhospitable an enter- tainer of one's spirit. With so little genial warmth to keep it there, one feels that an accidental touch might shake it away altogether : so chilled at heart it seems to me, as I gaze on that glacial point in the motionless sky, like some mortal spot whence death begins to creep over the body.

And yet, in the midst of this, by mere force of contrast, comes back to me, very vividly, the true colour, ruddy with flower and fruit, of the past summer, among the streets and gardens of some of our old towns we visited ; when the thought of cold was a luxury, and the earth dry enough to sleep upon. The summer was indeed a fine one ; and the whole country seemed bewitched. A kind of infec- tious sentiment passed upon one, like an efflux from its flowers and flower- like architecture — flower-like to me at least, but of which I never felt the beauty befor-e.

And as I think of that, certainly I have to confess that there is a wonder- ful reality about this lovers' story ; an accordance between themselves and the conditions of things around them, so deep as to make it seem that the course of their lives could hardly have been other than it was. That comes, perhaps, wholly of the writer's skill ; but at all events, I must read the book no more.

June, 1718.

And he has allowed that Made- moiselle Rosalba — ce bel esprit — who can discourse upon the arts like a mas- ter, to paint his portrait — has painted hers in return ! She holds a lapful of white roses with her two hands. Rosa Alba ! himself has inscribed it ! It will be engraved, to circulate and perpetuate it the better.

One's journal, here in one's solitude,

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is of service at least in this, that it affords an escape for vain regrets, angers, impatience. One puts this and that angry spasm into it, and is delivered from it so.

And then, it was at the desire of M. de Crozat that the thing was done. One must oblige one's patrons. The lady also, they tell me, is poitrinaire, like Antony himself, and like to die. And he who has always lacked either the money or the spirits to make that long-pondered, much-desired journey to Italy, has found in her work the veritable accent and colour of those old Venetian masters he would so willingly have studied under the sun- shine of their own land. Alas ! How little peace have his great successes given him — how little of that quietude of mind, without which, methinks, one fails in true dignity of character.

November, 1718.

His thirst for change of place has actually driven him to England, that veritable home of the consumptive. Ah, me ! I feel it may be the coup de grdce. To have run into the native country of consumption — strange caprice of that desire to travel, which he has really indulged so little in his life — of the restlessness which, they tell me, is itself a symptom of this terrible disease.

January, 1720.

As once before, after long silence, a token has reached us — a slight token that he remembers — an etched plate, one of very few he has executed, with that old subject — Soldiers on the March. And the weary soldier him- self is returning once more to Valen- ciennes, on his way from England to Paris.

February, 1720.

Those sharply-arched brows, those restless eyes which seem larger than ever — something that seizes on one, and is almost terrible in his expres- sion— speak clearly, and irresistibly set one on the thought of a summing- up of his life. I am reminded of the day when, already with that air of

le bel serieux, he was found sketching, with so much truth to the inmost mind in them, those picturesque moun- tebanks at the Fair in the Grande Place ; and I find, throughout his course of life, something of the essen- tial melancholy of the comedian. He, so fastidious and cold, and who has never " ventured the representation of passion," does but amuse the gay world; and is aware of that, though certainly unamused himself all the while. Just now, however, he is finishing a very different picture — that too, full of humour — an English family- group, with a little girl riding a wooden horse ; the father, and the mother, holding his tobacco-pipe, stand in the centre.

March, 1720.

To-morrow he will depart finally. And this evening the Syndics of the Academy of Saint Luke came with their scarves and banners to conduct their illustrious fellow-citizen, by torch- light, to supper in their Guildhall, where all their beautiful old corpora- tion plate will be displayed. The Watteau salon was lighted up to receive them. There is something in the payment of great honours to the living which fills one with apprehen- sion, especially when the recipient of them looks so like a dying man. God have mercy on him !

April, 1721.

We were on the point of retiring to rest last evening when a messenger arrived post-haste, with a letter on behalf of Antony Watteau, desiring Jean - Baptiste's presence at Paris. We did not go to bed that night ; and my brother was on his way before daylight, his heart full of a strange conflict of joy and apprehension.

May, 1721.

A letter at last ! from Jean- Bap tiste, occupied with cares of all sorts at the bedside of the sufferer. Antony fancying that the air of the country might do him good, the Abbe Haranger, one of the canons of the Church of Saint Germain 1'Auxerrois,

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A Prince of Court Painters.

where he was in the habit of hearing mass, has lent him a house at Nogent- sur-Marne. There he receives a few visitors. But in truth the places he once liked best, the people ! nay, the very friends, have become to him nothing less than insupportable. Though he stills dreams of change, and would fain try his native air once more, he is at work constantly upon his art ; but solely by way of a teacher, instructing (with a kind of remorseful diligence, it would seem) Jean-Baptiste, who will be heir to his unfinished work, and take up many of his pictures where he has left them. He seems now anxious for one thing only, to give his old " dismissed " disciple what remains of himself, and the last secrets of his genius. His property — 9,000 livres only—goes to his relations. Jean-Baptiste has found these last weeks immeasurably useful.

For the rest, bodily exhaustion, perhaps, and this new interest in an old friend, have brought him tran- quillity at last, a tranquillity in which he is much occupied with matters of religion. Ah ! it was ever so with me. And one lives also most reasonably so.

— With women, at least, it is so, quite certainly. Yet I know not what there is of a pity which strikes deep, at the thought of a man, a while since so strong, turning his face to the wall from the things which most occupy men's lives. 'Tis that homely, but honest cure of Nogent he has cari- catured so often, who attends him.

July, 1721.

Our incomparable Watteau is no more ! Jean-Baptiste returned unex- pectedly. I heard his hasty footstep on the stairs. We turned together into that room ; and he told his story there. Antony Watteau departed suddenly, in the arms of M. Gersaint, on one of the late hot days of July. At the last moment he had been at work upon a crucifix for the good cure of Nogent, liking little the very rude one he possessed. He died with all the sentiments of religion.

He has been a sick man all his life. He was always a seeker after some- thing in the world, that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all.

WALTER PATER.

415

NOTES IN A SWISS VILLAGE.

•"THESE people, when you come to know them, are as much worth study as their Alps and lakes," wrote a once popular author in his preface to The Switzers ; yet the Swiss people attract but little attention in comparison with the physical features of the country, the comfort, cookery, and prices at hotels. The impending re- organisation of English and Irish local government gives a special in- terest to the examination of the systems which prevail in other parts of Europe, particularly to systems which have been found so efficient and satisfactory that no radical change in them is contemplated. Swiss arrangements in this matter are very different from those in Eng- land— almost the reverse. Govern- ment is very much decentralised. The lowest local governing units are small, land possess very great independence, subject to some few general laws ; they are symmetrically grouped into larger districts, so that the overlapping areas, conflicting jurisdictions, numer- ous taxing authorities levying separate taxes at different times from the same individual, with which Englishmen are familar, are unknown ; in fact, there is order instead of chaos.

The independence of the Swiss com- munes has survived from the days of the primitive village community, re- spected by the State, designedly pre- served by legislation, and jealously guarded by the inhabitants.

Valais is a Catholic canton, there being less than 1,000 Protestants in a total population of 100,000. Its constitution declares it to be a demo- cratic republic, and that the sove- reignty is vested in the people. The State religion is Catholic, but liberty of belief, conscience, and worship is

accorded to every citizen. All are equal before the law ; no privileges of birth or any other kind may exist. Inviolability of persons and property, and the freedom of the press, are fundamental articles of the constitu- tion. No perpetual and irredeemable rent can be placed on land. Primary education is obligatory on all, and gratuitous. All male citizens are subject to military service, but the periods of service are short, and ar- ranged to meet the convenience of the people. Drill begins at school. From the age of twenty to thirty-two about a month's service in most years is required ; from thirty to forty-f our only a few days in each year ; after forty-four training ceases, and service would only be required in cases of national emergency. Continual rifle practice is encouraged by the State : a range, targets, and other appliances are found in almost every village.

There is only one legislative as- sembly, le Grand Conseil, the members of which, or deputies, are elected by manhood suffrage in the proportion of one to every 1,000 of the population. This assembly appoints the execu- tive government, or Council of State, and the High Court of Appeal. Mem- bers of the executive cannot also be deputies ; they sit in the Assembly, take part in debates, but cannot vote, or hold any other public office. No member of the executive may be at the same time director of a bank or railway company. Persons related in the undei'mentioned degrees may not be members at the same time of the executive government of the State, or of any other local governing body : — 1. Father and son. 2. Father-in-law and son-in-law. 3. Brothers. 4. Bro- thers-in-law. 5. Uncle and nephew.

416

Notes in a Swiss Village.

The executive makes a detailed re- port each year of all its operations to the Assembly.

No revision of the constitution, no law conflicting with it, no measure involving an expenditure in excess of the ordinary revenue by 2,400?. can take effect unless submitted to the popular vote, and approved of by a majority of the electors. This pro- vision makes the sovereignty of the people real and effectual.

The canton is divided into thirteen districts, and these into 165 communes or townships. The commune is the division of the most importance. Their average population is 665 ; that of the smallest is only 22 ; that of the largest under 5,000.

Each commune is governed, and its revenues administered, by a council of not less than five or more than seven- teen members, of whom one is the mayor, or, as he is termed in Valais, "president." The council is chosen for four years, the president for two, every male citizen over twenty years of age being entitled to vote.

This council is charged with the care of roads, bridges, public build- ings, markets, water supply, schools, poor, public health of man and beast, fire prevention, police, management of the common lands, and communal re- venues. To supplement the produce of the common lands it levies a direct tax on real property and on every household. Nearly every householder is also a proprietor ; all are therefore interested in the economical and efficient administration of the public property and municipal revenue.

Every commune possesses public lands, often of great extent ; these are chiefly upland pastures used in common, forests, and occasionally farms or pastures let to tenants.

The communal council cannot im- pose more than a certain amount of taxation, nor sell or mortgage the com- mon property without permission of the Council of State ; it presents each year to the electors a statement of accounts, and budget for the ensuing

year. In the larger communes these are printed and circulated before they are formally presented ; in all cases they must be read aloud to the assembled electors.

Owing to the small size of the communes, the frequent elections, the necessity for submitting measures to- the popular vote, and the wide distri- bution of property, the citizens are practically acquainted with the con- stitution, revenues, and management of their commune ; consequently they take an intelligent interest and part in its affairs.

Numa Droz, member of the Federal Council, and author of Instruction Civique, one of the text-books in public schools, says of the commune :

" La commune est presque 1'Etat en petit ; c'est, pour employer une expression empruntee & 1'histoire naturelle, une des cellules dont le corps social se compose. 11 est certain qu'une vie locale tres developpee con- tribue a la prosperite et a la force de 1'Etat. Les communes doivent avoir la liberte de rivaliser d'efforts pour la satisfaction, des interets qu'elles ont a soigner. II faut done se garder de les soumettre a un niveau uniforme qui etouff erait chez elles tout esprit d'initi- ative, tout desir de perfectionnement.

" Les communes ont ete les premiers et principaux foyers de la democratie, et le sont encore dans bien des pays. C'est dans leur sein que les citoyens peuvent le mieux se former a la vie publique, se familiariser avec les ques- tions administratives, et apprendre a les traiter. Elles sont les pepinieres naturelles dans lesquelles 1'Etat trouve ses legislateurs, et ses hommes de gou- vernement. Un citoyen eleve a 1'ecole pratique de la vie conimunale connaitra tou jours mieux les besoins populaires que celui dont 1'education politique aura ete faite exclusivement dans les bureaux de 1'administration gouvern- mentale " (Instruction Civique. p. 110).

This passage expresses well a radical distinction between the Swiss and Eng- lish systems of government, namely, the encouragement and preservation

Notes in a Swiss Village.

417

of habits of self-government in vil- lages, both as nurseries of independ- ence and as training schools for higher politics. The result in Switzerland is almost universal political contentment. Conservatives may be discontented because the Liberals are in power, or vice versd,, but there is nothing in Valais, or in any part of Switzerland, like the deep and dangerous discon- tent with the governing classes that is known in England as well as in Ireland and even in France — demo- cratic republic as she is called — where government is so much more central- ised, so controlled by bureaucratic wire-pullers, Paris financiers, and the military party.

Some details of the population, tax- ation, and expenditure in a commune of average size, and of a single pro- prietor's possessions, will give a clearer idea of the constitution and social organisation of a Valaisan commune than any general statements.

The village of Champery lies about 3,000 feet above sea level, the terri- tory of the commune occupying some seven miles in length at the head of a narrow valley, between two ranges of mountains from 6,000 to 10,000 feet in height. As yet there are few com- munal surveys in Valais, and the area is not ascertainable. The resident population is 590, of whom 500 are born citizens, with a right of settle- ment in, and a right to a share in, the common property belonging to the township.

There are 159 heads of households, and 162 proprietors, so that the pro- portion of landowners to population is as one to three and a half. In Ireland the corresponding proportion is about one landowner to 200 of the population.

The capital value for taxation of real property within the commune is 76,000?., but as this is admittedly from one-fourth to one-third below the selling value, a more correct esti- mate of the market value of the com- mune would be 100,000?., giving an average of about 600?. as the value of individual properties.

No. 312. —VOL. ni.

The communal pastures are included in this estimate, but not the woods, which are extensive. Every citizen, who is also a householder, has a right to put on the common pastures — which are available from June to September — fifteen head of cattle and twenty-five sheep. The pastures would probably not be sufficient if every one put on his full quota, but the grazing season being short and the winters long, the quantity of stock that can be kept in the commune is limited to what can be supported in winter. Moreover, some citizens have no stock, and scarcely any one puts on his full allowance.

For each head of cattle depastured one franc must be paid to the munici- pality, and one day's work given re- pairing fences, roads, &c. For every sheep ten centimes is paid. The owner may attend to his own cattle, or he may hire the milch cattle to others, or he may put them under the charge of the communal herd for a small pay- ment ; but no citizen can let or sell his right to pasture, nor can cattle not belonging to citizens be hired and put on the pastures. The communal forests are managed by the council, who employ one or more woodrangers, qualified by examination or training in the State forestry schools.

After a provision of wood has been set apart for such public purposes as construction, repairs, and heating of schools, church, and communal build- ings, an allotment is made to every citizen householder. Extra timber, to be paid for, may be allotted on appli- cation for any special purpose, but it must be used within a fixed time for the special purpose, and no other, under a heavy penalty.

Preservation of the forests being a matter of national importance, the communal management is subject to State inspection. The Forest Depart- ment gives advice, and points out the necessity of renewal, replanting, and maintenance of trees necessary for shelter, or protection against ava- lanches, earthslips, and falls of rock.

Every citizen, therefore, who is also E E

418

Notes in a Swiss Village.

a householder, has besides his indivi- dual property an inalienable right to the use of the communal pastures, and to at least as much wood as will supply his necessary wants. He cannot divest himself of these rights by sale, letting, or mortgage, and so far as these are valuable he is raised above the possi- bility of being a pauper.

The possession of this common property is one of the strongest ties of the community ; it makes it im- portant that evidence of citizenship should be preserved, and the registra- tion of marriages and births is care- fully attended to by a special officer (I'officier d'JZtat civil) whose books are annually inspected by the State.

Taxation in Valais may be best ex- plained by the instance of a single individual ; the village blacksmith is an example of an average citizen neither rich nor poor. His forge is the under part of a small house on the confines of the village. He is tenant of this, paying 25s. a year rent. His house, a hundred yards distant, belongs to him in fee — no other form of ownership is known in Valais — a solid, wooden, three-storied building about sixty feet square ; the eaves project eight feet or more, and under their shelter balconies run round the front and sides of the house ; in the rear there is but one story, a capacious hay barn open to the roof. In winter the cattle occupy part of the lower story, and all around under shelter of eaves and balconies are ample stores of wood, suggestive of warmth, comfort, and plenty. Most of the houses in the village are like this, and owned by their occupants ; there are no really bad or ruinous buildings ; no slums or reeking courts. The blacksmith owns about thirteen acres around and near the house, besides an unmeasured plot five miles away adjoining the common pasture. On this latter pro- perty he has another dwelling-house which he lets for the summer, reserv- ing the land for his own use. The selling value of the blacksmith's pro- perty is 600£., its value for taxation

360/. or 9,000 francs, houses being taxed on two-thirds only of their assessed value.

For assessment purposes land is divided into thirty-five classes, valued at a farthing a yard for the worst, up to 7s. Qd. a yard for the best class. The blacksmith's best land is meadow of the twentieth class assessed at 1 30£. an acre, which is less than the usual selling price of the best meadow and tillage land around the village. His worst land is a stony slope valued at 51. an acre.

The assessment is made by a local commission, and revised by three ex- perts appointed by the State.

Two taxes are levied on real pro- perty in Valais : — 1. A cantonal tax of one franc fifty centimes on each 1000 francs of capital value; fifty centimes of this tax is allocated by the constitution to the extinction of the public debt. 2. A communal tax, varying according to the needs of each commune ; in Champery it is one franc per 1000 ; this latter tax may be paid in work, by arrangement with the municipality.

If real property is mortgaged a reduction is made from the assessed value equal to one half the amount of the mortgage. The cantonal tax on capital values is levied not only on real property but on all securities, on salaries and pensions capitalised at ten times, and on incomes capitalised at twenty times their annual value.

A register of all these taxable values is kept in each commune, and furnished by it to the cantonal authorities.

Besides these direct taxes licence duties are payable to the State on the exercise of every kind of industry, trade, occupation or profession, from that of a banker to an ordinary artisan. For each occupation there are five or six classes with a maximum and minimum duty.

A banker of the first class pays 4:001., of the lowest class 151. ; the lowest class of artisans pays Is. 8d. ; sawmills pay from Is. Sd. up to 20£. ;

Notes in a Suriss Village.

419

wholesale timber merchants from

4:1. tO 401.

Proprietors selling the produce of their own land are the only important exception to this law.

The blacksmith is also a guide, and in both these capacities he pays this taxe industrielle.

His whole taxation is as follows : —

Frs. Cen- times. On real property to the State at 1 "50

per 1,000 on 9,000 francs 13 • 50

To the commune at 1 per 1,000 9 • 00

License as blacksmith 10*00

„ guide 10-00

Total taxation 42 • 50

There is no tax on tobacco, which he consumes largely, nor on Swiss wines, beer, or spirits ; there is a small duty on imported alcoholic drinks, but the blacksmith is a teetotaller, and makes no contribution to the State in respect of liquor. His entire contribution, therefore, to local and State taxation is about thirty-five shillings a year — a very small amount in comparison with what a man in similar circumstances in England or Ireland would pay.

The commune is economically man- aged ; its income amounted in 1884 to 380?. ; but this figure does not repre- sent the annual value of its property, as the common pastures and forest produce are enjoyed for a nominal payment. The management expenses were less than 501., including salaries of police, wood rangers, payments to president, councillors, and others.

The principle on which most of these officials are paid is to give a small salary as a retainer, and daily wages when employed ; for example the constable (sergent de police) receives 31. a year, and is paid three or four francs a day when employed. The president and councillors get three francs for each sitting, and for every day when attending to public business. This does not, of course, compensate them for their loss of time, but it is obligatory on those elected to serve in their turn, and such posts of honour- able service are willingly accepted in

general. Council meetings are held on Sunday, except in cases of emer- gency.

Pauperism is unknown as an insti- tution ; the general appearance and dress of the people and their houses, show no indications of poverty in the English or Irish sense ; but poverty is a comparative term, and there are poor who are recognised as such. Improvi- dence, drunkenness, debt, and want exist, but rarely and fitfully. An habitual drunkard or improvident citizen may be made a ward ; the sale of drink to him is forbidden, and tJie control of his property taken away by a commission (la chambre pupillaire) appointed by the municipality. Wages of unskilled labour are three and a half francs a day in summer ; work cannot always be got in winter, but this is not of vital importance where almost every head of a family is also a proprietor ; the burden and anxiety of rent to be met weekly or half yearly does not harass the population. There is no poor-rate, but a poor fund of 900?. value exists, and is managed by the council. Paupers and criminals belonging to other places may be re- turned to their commune d'origine. In 1884 305 vagrants and beggars were arrested in Valais, but of these only sixty-one were citizens of the canton.

There are persons to whom life and society in a Swiss commune appear in some respects mean. There are no in- stances of great wealth ; no household has the appearance of great ease and luxury ; there is no " rich, refined, and splendid aristocracy." In England the commune would be an estate • the landlord of an estate equivalent to the commune of Champery would have a rental of 3,000?. or 4,000?. a year ; the 150 householders who earned and paid this rental might be dispossessed and left homeless at the caprice of a single man ; at best they would live in a state of continual anxiety as to the terms upon which they might remain as tenants ; the labouring class would have no idea of what a home meant, for they would probably have lived all E E 2

420

Notes in a Swiss Village

their lives in tenements or single rooms rented by the week. The landlord would be charged with certain public duties as magistrate, poor-law guardian, grand juryman. He might attend to them or not, as he liked ; if the duties were performed, it would be without any direct remunera- tion, but not always to the satisfaction or advantage of the community, who would have no power of expressing its dissatisfaction by putting some one else in his place.

The Swiss peasant gets on very well without a squire ; it seems incredible to him that such a state of affairs as an Irish estate of 100,000 acres with 4,000 tenants should exist in this century. The expulsion of the baillis and seignewrs is as favourite a fireside theme with him and his children as William Tell and the oath of Griitli. Of what possible use would a landlord be in Champery 1 He would cost the community 3,0001. a year ; every duty that he would be expected in England to perform is better attended to by the citizens themselves, at a trifling ex- pense and to the general satisfaction. The independent commune with its numerous proprietary,popularly-elected mayor, magistrate, and council, is the Switzers ideal of a social and political system ; not that he is ignorant of others, for a comparison of different systems is part of the ordinary school instruction, but because under the commune he and his fellow-citizens are independent and contented. Such a system has been the ideal of others than peasants. Victor Hugo looked forward to seeing France so re- organised ; his ideal, which is almost literally realised in some of the Swiss cantons, is this : —

" La commune souveraine, regie par un maire elu ; le suffrage universel partout. subordonne seule- ment en ce qui touche les actes generaux, a 1'unito nationale, voila pour I'administration. Les syndicats et les prud'hommes reglant les differends prives des associations et des indus- tries ; le jure magistrat du fait,

eclairant le juge magistrat du droit ; le juge elu ; voila pour la justice. Le pretre hors de tout, excepte de 1'eglise, etranger au budget, ignore de 1'Etat, connu seulement de ses croyants, n'ayant plus 1'autorite, mais ayant la liberte : voila pour la religion. La guerre bornee a la defense du terri- toire ; la nation garde nationale, divisee en trois bans, et pouvant se lever comme un seul homme. La loi toujours, le droit toujours, le vote tou jours, le sabre nulle part." l

Immediately the frontier is crossed from France into Switzerland, the absence of soldiers, police, and uni- formed officials of all kinds, who abound in every French town, is perceived. There are only fifty-five cantonal police in the whole of Valais ; the communal police wear no dress distinguishing them from their fellow citizens, but have a small badge which is produced when necessary.

The attention of a stranger is apt to be drawn to the excellences rather than the defects of a system new to him, which are naturally not so obvious. The annual report of the Valaisan Council of State to the Assembly of Deputies exhibits some of the defects and shortcomings of the communal system. The State, even where it cannot control, inspects and suggests ; its business is to find fault and propose amendment. There are complaints of badly-kept accounts ; negligent man- agement and deterioration of public property ; of government inspectors' remarks not attended to, of sugges- tions not complied with. Some of these complaints are due rather to State interference being resented by the communes, some to the imprac- ticable nature of official suggestions ; but no change in the system or in the relations between the commune and the State appear to be contemplated or desired. The adjoining canton of Yaud has got over one of these difficulties by prescribing a fixed form on which all communal accounts are kept.

1 Napoleon le Petit, p. 224.

Notes in a Swiss Village.

4-21

The chief differences to be remarked in Valais, as contrasted with England or Ireland are : —

The orderly and systematic arrange- ment of the governing bodies and areas ; communes grouped into dis- tricts, districts into cantons, cantons into the confederation.

The small size, great independence, and many functions of the commune : and the good results in contentment, order, economical administration, and light taxation.

The general feeling of responsible citizenship, due to universal suffrage, and the right of all to take part in local government.

The wide distribution of landowner- ship, the absence of any rich leisured class and of their amusements, which are such a prominent feature in Eng- land.

Absence of pauperism, as an institution, and of that inequality which in England, as Mr. Matthew Arnold says, " materialises the upper class, vulgarises the middle class, and brutalises the lower."

Above all, the possession by almost every head of a family, however humble his circumstances, of a home belonging to him in fee, with its civilising influence. Such an influence is unknown to the labouring classes and artisans in Ireland. In my neigh- bourhood— and it is the same almost everywhere — they live during their whole lives in rooms or tenements rented by the week, in cabins often ruinous and unwholesome in the ex- treme. There is no escape from this life, no possibility of buying the site of a house, in building on which they might invest their savings of money and time, and make comfortable homes. They have no inducement to accumulate household furniture, books, or any objects of a durable nature. In fact, it is a disadvantage to a person, whose lodging is rented from week to week, to have a store of such things.

Some of my acquaintances earning weekly wages have saved from 100Z. to 200/. They may put it in a savings bank at 2 or 3 per cent, interest, or place it on deposit with a friendly society — and probably lose it, as some have done. Land cannot be obtained in small parcels, either on lease or to buy. This is not the fault of the landowners — except so far as they have resisted reform — but of the law, with its heavy costs, complicated deeds, and doubtful titles. The prices obtained for land in Switzerland, where it can be sold by the yard, are amazing ; and no one would benefit so much as owners by any change which made land easily saleable with a secure title in the United Kingdom. Lord Salisbury lately said that the costs of land trans- fer could not be reduced below 7 per cent, of the price. But for the purchase of small plots suitable for building sites, the costs of transfer at present would probably be nearer 700 per cent ; if it were only 7 per cent, on small lots, such an expense would be no obstacle whatever to the sale. Where a good system of registration of titles prevails, the expenses of transfer of land do not reach 1 per cent, exclusive of the duty which is imposed in some cantons. In canton Vaud, where registration of titles prevails and good surveys exist, a duty of 3 per cent, is charged by the State on transfers, and inclusive of this I have found the total expense of transfer in many instances to be under 4 per cent. In the report of H.M.'s representatives abroad on the tenure of dwelling-houses in the countries in which they reside, Mr. C. C. Thornton says, " Absolute ownership is the only condition known to the Swiss, and they possess no idea of such tenures as exist in England, viz., building leases for ninety-nine years, copyhold, estate in tail, and so forth." Happy are the people in such a case !

MURROUGH O'BRIEN.

422

MACAULAY AND SIR ELIJAH IMPEY.

THE essay on Warren Hastings is perhaps the most brilliant, as it is certainly the most captivating, of all Macaulay's historical and biographical studies. In the hands even of a far inferior writer the subject could hardly have been made uninteresting. The high dramatic interest of the events with which it deals, the singular fas- cination of the character and career which it describes might avail of them- selves to hold the reader as complete a prisoner as the wedding guest until the story has been told. But in the hands of such an artist as Macaulay the dramatic element in such a narra- tive was certain to be indefinitely strengthened, and the interest of its hero's exploits and personality inde- finitely heightened by a thousand of those pictorial touches, legitimate and illegitimate, which he had the secret of adding. In his hands accordingly the story of Warren Hastings becomes a veritable epic : in which the master- ful, resourceful, unscrupulous, inde- fatigable, undaunted proconsul figures as a sort of administrative Ulysses, with Nuncomar for his Polyphemus, his English political enemies for the suitors over whom he obtains the long-delayed triumph, and Dayles- ford for the Ithaca of his restful old age. Certainly there is ho essay of Macaulay's— not even that on Clive — which is calculated to impress more powerfully the imagination of the young ; and the experience of Sir James Stephen,1 who says that these two essays gave him in his youth " a feeling about India not unlike that which Marryat's novels are said to have given to many lads about the sea," could doubtless be easily matched.

1 The Story of Nuncomar and the Impeach- ment of Sir Elijah Impey. By Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, K. C.S.I. In two vols.

But if the essay on Hastings makes the strongest appeal of all Macaulay's writings to the imagination of the boy, it is also, perhaps, the first to arouse the critical suspicions of the adult. As his knowledge of men and things increases, and the range of his first-hand historical study is enlarged, he begins to be sadly conscious that the events of real life do not arrange themselves in so delightfully dramatic a fashion, or its personages group themselves in such picturesque atti- tudes of contrast. Above all he begins to doubt the full villainy of Macaulay's villains ; and as no such villain is anywhere described by him as Sir Elijah Impey, nor any such villainy as Impey 's dealings with Nuncomar, it is on the sketch of this personage and of his conduct that the nascent critical faculty of the reader is likely first to exercise itself. If he should then have chanced to come across Mr. Elijah Impey's transparently honest, but pathetically ineffective, attempt to vindicate his father's memory, and should by that time have learned not to mistake a feeble advocate for a weak case, he will probably have long ere this rejected Macaulay's account of the Chief Justice and his relations with Hastings as a tissue of cruelly calumnious fiction. None the less warmly, however, should he be dis- posed to welcome the elaborate and exhaustive vindication of Sir Elijah Impey which a far abler hand than his son's has just given to the world.

With all his admiration, which is great, for Macaulay, Sir James Stephen starts from a well-founded distrust of his biographical methods. " I have not," he says, " in my own experience of persons holding a con- spicuous position in life met with any of the fiends in human shape, or

Macaulay and Sir Elijah Impey.

423

even with any of those parti -coloured monsters with characters like the pattern of a shepherd's plaid, half black, half white, which abound in Macaulay's histories, and form one of the principal defects in those most delightful books." Nor is Sir James Stephen's experience in this matter by any means singular. To most men indeed in whom a love of the curious is chastened by any faculty of dis- passionate observation the generally neutral tint of humanity, whether " in conspicuous positions in life " or else- where, must appear one of the most disappointing things about it. Men differ from each other very widely, indeed, in mental capacity, and still more widely perhaps in the half physical, half moral attributes of ecergy, perseverance, and firmness of resolve ; and Fate, acting upon these very commonplace and unromantic distinctions of character, is able to lead two men quite as far apart from each other as regards the quality and effect of their acts as if they respec- tively started from the standpoint of saint and devil. The stupid man blunders into misdeeds ; the lazy man drifts into them ; the weak man is thrust into them ; and though all mis- deeds, no doubt, react upon the doer, adding at each repetition a slightly darker shade to his character, they never succeed in reducing it to that deep rich black which is frequently required to made him useful for the pictorial purposes of a Macaulay. The historian has to add the deepen- ing touches for himself, and then it is a mere accident of the position and circumstances of the individual per- sonage under delineation whether he becomes the " fiend in human shape " or the "parti-coloured monster." If the historian is only concerned with one episode in his life, and that of a nature which places or is supposed to place him in an unfavourable light, he appears, of course, in the former guise ; if on the other hand his whole career or a considerable proportion of it comes under review, and it becomes

impossible to ignore the fact that some of his actions had at least a virtuous appearance, the " shepherd's plaid " pattern has, in that case, to be adopted. The latter, it is unnecessary to say, is, though an equally unnatural, a less unjust mode of treatment. Fiends in human shape are rare indeed ; but most of us have the makings of " parti-coloured monsters " about us. That is to say, we are com- posed of black and white, and in, per- haps, toleraby equal proportions ; only the two colours are not distributed in squares over our characters, but are agreeably blended together into a becoming grey.

Sir Elijah Impey, unfortunately for his posthumous reputation, was one of those biographical subjects with whom Macaulay was concerned in respect of only a single episode in their lives ; and this was, in his case, an episode which Macaulay's political sympathies prompted him to view in the light in which it was generally regarded by the Whig party. Such a circumstance, however, would only have sufficed to expose Impey's con- duct to the general condemnation of a Whig biographer of Hastings, and it is probable that nothing worse would have befallen it had the bio- grapher of Hastings been any one else but Macaulay. The " fiend in human shape " was an idiosyncratic addi- tion of the pictorial essayist, who required a villain of the all-black description, in order to throw up the white in Hastings's shepherd's plaid character. Impey accordingly appears, to quote Sir James Stephen on Macau- lay's famous essay, as " one of the most odious and contemptible of human beings, committing the most abomin- able crimes from the basest of motives, or even without any motive at all. For, if Macaulay's account of him is to be believed, he began by committing the most execrable of all murders — a judicial murder under the forms of law — simply out of gratuitous subserv- iency to Hastings. He proceeded for no obvious reason to erect a system of

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tyranny and oppression all over Ben- gal, attempting with his colleagues to usurp 'supreme authority through the whole of the vast territory subject to the presidency of Fort William.' He gave up this monstrous pretension in consideration of an enormous bribe, and he abetted crimes said to have been per- petrated in Oudh under the authority of Hastings, simply ' because there was something inexpressibly alluring, we must suppose, in the peculiar rank- ness of the infamy which was to be got at Lucknow.' In short, he was a fiend in human shape, and a very con- temptible one." And a very unin- telligible one too, we should be disposed to add. "Gratuitous" indeed is the subserviency to Hastings, which Macaulay attributes to him : so gratui- tous as to have struck all readers, we should imagine, of the incredible story. Even the least critical among them must have noticed the singular break in the logical concatenation of the narrative at the point at which Impey appears upon the scene as the deus, or rather the diabolus ex mashind who is to rid the Governor-General of the obnoxious Nuncomar. Excellent no doubt were Hastings's reasons — at least, on Macaulay's theory of his character and the situation — for de- siring (and with him desire meant determination) to crush the Maha- rajah. Nor could there be a more effectual or impressive way of dispos- ing of him than by a judicial murder. But what interest Impey had in con- senting to play the part of judicial murderer is a question which we may search Macaulay's pages in vain to answer. Of course, if you start by assuming that no Chief Justice would hesitate to do an innocent man to death in order to stand well with a Governor -General, the process of proof is easy ; and equally easy, of course, is it if you start as Macaulay appar- ently does, by assuming that no such hesitation was to be looked for from the particular Chief Justice in question. But, in default of such assumptions, we ought at least to be favoured with

some specific ground for believing — or at least with some suspicious cir- cumstance tending to suggest — that the governor did, in fact, stand to the judge in the relation of suborner to suborned.

Now this, Macaulay nowhere offers us — neither this nor anything resembl- ing it. Prior to the point above referred to, the name of Impey only occurs in two passages in the narrative : one, a reference to his schoolfellowship with Hastings, the other, merely recording his arrival at Calcutta as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. " Hastings," runs the first passage, " had another associate [besides Cowper] at Westminster, of whom we shall have occasion to make frequent mention, Elijah Impey. We know little about their school days, but we think we may safely venture to guess that, whenever Hastings wished to play any trick more than usually naughty, he hired Impey with a tart or a ball to act as fag in the worst part of the prank." This is amusingly characteristic of Macaulay's method. He first unjustly represents a particular person as a wicked man, and then "safely ventures to guess" therefrom that he was a bad boy. From his adult aptitude for the prank of judicial murder, he infers his juvenile readiness to lend himself, for a consideration, to the setting of a booby trap for his schoolmaster. It is not suggested however that Impey would have assisted Hastings in his schoolboy pranks except for a consideration, and we have therefore all the more right to inquire with what particular tart or ball he was tempted to make away with Nunco- mar. The second reference to Impey is as follows : — " With the three new councillors came out the judges of the Supreme Court. The Chief Justice was Sir Elijah Impey. He was an old ac- quaintance " (something more than an old acquaintance surely if he had been his dme damnee as a schoolboy) " of Hastings ; and it is probable that the Governor-General, if he had searched

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through all the Inns of Court, could not have found an equally serviceable tool." It was "probable," we suppose, in just the same sense in which it was probable that Impey was Hastings' serviceable tool at Westminster ; that is to say. with a probability founded exclusively on Macaulay's own theory of their subsequent relations. No other ground of probability is, at any rate, alleged. Neither Impey nor his colleagues are again referred to until we come to the moment when Nunco- mar, encouraged by the support of a majority of the Council in his accu- sations of corruption against Hastings, had proceeded to convert his house into what Macaulay describes as " an office for the purpose of receiving charges against the Governor-General ; ' ' who, according to the essayist's theory, thereupon determined to destroy him. All that is said here, however, about the judges, is that "the Supreme Court was, within the sphere of its own duties, altogether independent of the Government;" that "Hastings, with his usual sagacity, had seen how much advantage he might derive from possessing himself of this strong- hold and had acted accordingly ; " that " the judges, especially the Chief Justice, were hostile to the majority of the Council," and that " the time had now come for putting this formidable machinery in motion." This is liter- ally all. Not a word more is offered to explain the fact that an English lawyer of repute, abetted we must assume by three other equally respect- able colleagues, is found on his next appearance in the narrative " dis- honouring the ermine as no other judge had done since Jeffries drank himself to death in the Tower" — an act, by the by, which was rather in the nature of a tardy reparation to the ermine and is therefore somewhat ill- chosen for its rhetorical purpose. There is no evidence to our knowledge, there seems to be none even to Sir James Stephen's much wider knowledge, that " the judges, especially the Chief Jus- tice, were at this date hostile to the

majority of the Council ; " and though perhaps " the time had now come for putting this formidable machinery into action," the question is not one of time but of means. The utmost oppor- tuneness of the moment for starting a locomotive engine will not of itself supply the boiler with water and the furnace with coal. Where, we want to know, was the steam of motive and the fire of incitement which set this particular machine in motion for the purposes for which Hastings is assumed to have needed it ?

Let us, however, waive the question of motive, and pass on to Macaulay's account of the facts. His narrative of the actual arrest, trial, .and convic- tion of Nuncomar is remarkably con- densed, the whole business being dis- posed of in a couple of short para- graphs. " On a sudden," he says, " Calcutta was astounded by the news that Nuncomar had been taken up on a charge of felony, committed for trial, and thrown into the common gaol." It is curious that no mention what- ever should have been made of the previous prosecution instituted some three weeks earlier by Hastings and Barwell (his sole supporter on the Coun- cil) against Nuncomar for conspiracy. " The crime imputed to him was that six years before he had forged a bond. The ostensible prosecutor was a native. But it was then, and still is, the opin- ion of everybody, idiots and biogra- phers excepted, that Hastings was the real mover in the business." Among the idiots and biographers we have now to include a judge of the High Court of Justice, a man of the keenest judicial intellect, and the most learned criminal lawyer of the day. Sir James Stephen has no belief at all in Hastings having been the real mover in Nuncomar's prosecution, and has furnished the strongest rea- sons for believing that " the idiots and biographers " were justified in their doubts. The civil cause out of which the prosecution arose had been pend- ing in the Diwani Adalat for two years previously ; the plea imputing

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forgery to Nuncomar had been on the record for more than a year. In March, 1774, the attorney for the plaintiff, and afterwards prosecutor, Mohun Persaud, had moved in the Mayor's Court, which then had the custody of the papers alleged to be forged, for their production and de- livery to the plaintiff for the purpose of founding an indictment upon them ; but the application, by reason, as was alleged by the plaintiff's attorney, of the Mayor's Court being subject to undue influence, was rejected. In October of that year the Supreme Court of Judicature arrived in Bengal, and Mr. Driver, Mohun Persaud's attor- ney, advised his client to renew his ap- plication before that more independent tribunal. Motions to this effect were accordingly made on the 25th and 30th of January, 1775 ; and on the 24th of March in that year it was peremp- torily ordered that the papers should be delivered up to the proper parties within one month. Supposing the de- lay in producing them to have been prolonged, as probably enough it was, till the latest day possible, this would bring us to the 24th April ; the com- mittal of Nuncomar for trial on the charge of forgery took place on the 6th of May. In other words, the first proceedings in the Supreme Court to obtain the materials necessary for the prosecution of Nuncomar took place some seven weeks before Nun- comar had given Hastings any injury to avenge, and still longer before he had begun to menace him with any danger to be averted ; and these pro- ceedings were prosecuted in a regular and perfectly normal fashion to their natural issue. Of course it is conceiv- able that Hastings may have inter- vened in the case after the committal of Nuncomar, or even between the date of the delivery of the papers and the application for Nuncomar's committal. But why conceive so when the facts do not require it ? This is surely a case within the philosophical maxim which enjoins the economy of hypotheses. If every-

thing which did happen in Nuncomar's case could have happened without the interference of any executive officer, why assume any such inter- ference at all ? But to proceed with Macaulay's account. " In the mean- time," he continues, " the assizes commenced ; a true bill was found ; and Nuncomar was brought before a jury composed of Englishmen. A great quantity of contradictory swear- ing, and the necessity of having every word of the evidence interpreted, pro- tracted the trial to a most unusual length. At last a verdict of guilty was returned, and the Chief Justice pronounced sentence of death upon the prisoner."

Sir James Stephen — as indeed was necessary in order to meet one of the charges in the projected impeachment of Impey by the House of Commons — has collected elaborate and most con- vincing proofs that Nuncomar had a scrupulously fair trial ; but we do not understand Macaulay to have either here or elsewhere alleged the contrary. His charge against Impey is not that of pressing unfairly upon the prisoner in the matter of admitting or inter- preting evidence, or in determining incidental points of law ; it is a charge of oppressively refraining from the employment of his judicial discretion in the matter of passing sentence. Macaulay might even, from his own point of view, have admitted, though we do not observe that he does any where directly admit, the justice of Nuncomar's conviction on the facts ; for he could still accuse the judge of straining the letter of the law to visit the offence with an inapplicable and excessive punishment. Although the unfairness of the trial had not been alleged by Macaulay, it was of course open to Sir James Stephen, and judi- cious also from the dialectical point of view, to show that the judge who has been charged with putting a man unjustly to death to serve a political purpose, displayed at any rate no undue solicitude to obtain a verdict against him ; but, on the contrary (it may sur-

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prise many people to learn), an excep- tional anxiety to bring before the minds of the jury every point in his favour. The court consisting of Impey, with his three puisnes, Hyde, Le Maistre, and Chambers, sat con- tinuously through the whole seven days of the trial, Sunday included, from 8 A.M. till late at night, and on the last day till 4 A.M. The month was June. " The judges then wore heavy wigs, and (tradition says) re- tired three or four times daily to change their linen. One of the judges was always in court or in an adjacent room open to it. The jury from time to time retired to another adjacent room to take refreshment or sleep. It must he remembered that in those days punkahs were not invented, nor had the importation or manufacture of ice been thought of." Sir James Stephen devotes a whole chapter to an analysis of the evidence, and sets out Irnpey's charge in full. Its pa- tient and even laborious effort to hold the balance fairly between the prisoner and the prosecution is visible in every line. If Macaulay ever read it, he must have persuaded himself that Impey felt so sure of a conviction that he could afford to give Nuncomar every chance that the evidence allowed him, and had concluded that so lucrative a quality as judicial dishonesty might with safety be economised until after the verdict had been rendered. Be that as it may, however, Impey's charge to the jury was equity itself. The friends of no prisoner convicted in England after such a trial and sum- ming up would think for a moment of impugning the uprightness of the judge. To quote Sir James Stephen's own summing up of this part of his

" Putting _ all these matters together, my own opinion is, that no man ever had or could have a fairer trial than Nuncomar, and that Impey in particular behaved with absolute fairness and as much indulgence as was com- patible with his duty. In his defence at the bar of the House of Commons he said, ' Con- scious as I am how much it was my intention to favour the prisoner in everything that was

consistent with justice, wishing as I did that the facts might turn out favourable for an ac- quittal, it has appeared most wonderful to me that the execution of my purpose has so far differed from my intentions that any ingenuity could form an objection to my personal con- duct as bearing hard on the prisoner.' My own earnest study of the trial has led me to the conclusion that every word of this is abso- lutely true and just. Indeed, the first matter which directed my attention to the subject was the glaring contrast between Impey's con- duct as described in the State Trials and his character as described by Macaulay. There is not a word in the ^summing-up of which I should have been ashamed had I said it myself, and all my study of the case has not suggested to me a single observation in Nuncomar's favour which is not noticed by Impey. As to the verdict I think there was ample evidence to support it."

"Whether, however, it was in fact correct is a point on which, Sir James Stephen adds, it is impossible for him to give an unqualified opinion; "as it is, of course, impossible now to judge of the credit due to the witnesses, and some of the exhibits are un- intelligible."

But, of course, the correctness or in- correctness of the verdict is not the question. The question is as to the good faith of the judge ; and this, so far as the trial itself is concerned, Sir James Stephen must be held to have amply proved. But the real gist of Macaulay's indictment relates to Impey's conduct subsequent to the trial, and this has still to be con- sidered : —

"That Tmpey," he says, "ought to have respited Nuncomar we hold to be perfectly clear. Whether the whole proceeding was not illegal is a question. But it is certain that, whatever may have been, according to technical rules of construction, the effect of the statute under which the trial took place, it was most unjust to hang a Hindoo for for- gery. The law which made forgery capital in England was passed without the smallest reference to the state of society in India. It was unknown to the natives of India. It had never been put in execution among them, cer- tainly not for want of delinquents. It was in the highest degree shocking to all their notions. They are not accustomed to the distinction which many circumstances peculiar to our own state of society have led us to make between forgery and other kinds of cheating. ... A just judge would beyond

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doubt have reserved the case for the considera- tion of the Sovereign. But Impey would not hear of mercy or delay. "

No more characteristic example of Macaulay's intrepid method of defend- ing any untenable position to which he had once committed himself could perhaps be cited than the foregoing passage. It consists of ten sentences, every one of which contains either a positive misstatement or a ground- less assumption or a dialectical sophism. For combined inaccuracy and irrelevancy it is probably not to be matched in the whole wide range of its author's writings ; and it might confidently be recommended for a place in an examination paper set for the purpose of testing the analytic capacity of a candidate in the school of logic. The first sentence which affirms that Impey ought to have respited Nuncomar conveys a false implication. The second sentence is, in this connection and in the absence of the averment necessary to make it material, a mere irrelevance. The third conveys a false implication in its dependent clause, and is either meaningless or an abuse of terms in its main allegation. The fourth rests upon an implied syllogism which does not bear its weight, and, if it did, would be bad for having " four terms " ; and the same criticism ap- plies to the sentence which follows it. The sixth is an irrelevance ren- dered colourably relevant by a sug- gestio falsi. The seventh is an irre- levancy left uncoloured. The eighth is a misstatement of fact ; the ninth conveys another false implication ; and the tenth is once more a misstatement of fact.

As to the first allegation' that Impey " ought to have respited Nun- comar," it implies, of course, that Impey could have respited him ; and this Macaulay must, or, at any rate, ought to have known was not the case. The trial, which is absurdly spoken of throughout as if the Chief Justice had been the sole judge presiding at it, was held before the whole court,

and to separate the chief from his col- leagues in respect not merely of the purely judicial function of conducting its proceedings, but also of the execu- tive function of granting or withhold- ing a respite is even more preposter- ously unjust. Impey had precisely the same power in this matter as Hyde, Chambers, and Le Maistre, neither more nor less ; and though it is, of course, possible that, had he seen cause to interest himself on Nuncomar' s be- half, he might have persuaded one or more of his colleagues to join him in granting the prisoner a reprieve, it cannot be for a moment contended that the bare existence of this possi- bility is a justification for Macaulay's words. They must imply, according to their natural meaning, that Impey had an absolute and not a conditional power of respiting Nuncomar, and that for reasons of his own he declined to exercise it. " Whether the whole proceeding was not illegal is a ques- tion." Perhaps ; but it is a question which has no connection whatever with the proposition just laid down. Assuming that the whole proceeding was illegal, its illegality does not in any way affect the question of Impey's good faith, unless it was illegal to his knowledge; and if it were illegal to his knowledge it becomes a ridiculous understatement of the case to say that Impey " ought to have respited " Nun- comar. He ought to have quashed the indictment. " But it is certain that, whatever may have been, according to technical rules of construction, the effect of the statute under which the trial took place, it was most unjust to hang a Hindoo for forgery." Two offences against controversial ethics are committed in this sentence. First it suggests that the doubts subse- quently (and only subsequently) raised with regard to the application of the statute under which Nuncomar was tried were doubts arising as to the construction of its terms, whereas they had no such origin, as, again, it seems impossible that Macaulay should not have known. Secondly, it asserts broadly

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that, however this may be — that is to say, whether the statute was applicable and the trial legal or not — it was un- just to hang a Hindoo for forgery. Now, to say of a judge that he acts unjustly in permitting the execution of a legal sentence following upon legally held judicial proceedings, is either to use language which has no meaning or to substitute a question- begging word for the one which ought to be employed. In the strict sense of the word "injustice," the assertion that a judge acting as above described has acted unjustly is meaningless ; whereas, if what Macaulay intended to convey was that, not justice, but hu- manity, clemency, policy, or what not, was opposed to the hanging of a Hindoo for forgery, he was bound to use one of these words, and not to ap- propriate the benefit of one which stands for a duty of far more authori- tative obligation upon a judge. "The law which made forgery capital in Eng- land was passed without the smallest reference to the state of society in In- dia." What then ? The question — even the political question — governing the applicability of the law was not whether it . was passed with any or how much reference to the state of society in India, but whether it had any or how much appropriateness to the state of society in Calcutta. The argument, therefore, involves the illicit assumptions, first, that laws not speci- ally passed for a community cannot be properly applied to it ; and secondly, that laws inapplicable to the great mass of a vast community, cannot be properly applied to a limited class of that community living under certain special and artificial condition of life. " It was unknown to the natives of India." Possibly to the natives of India at large ; but it was known to as many of them as it was proposed to apply it to. "It had never been put in execution among them." No : because a sentence previously passed under it was not carried out ; but this fact alone, and, as Sir James Stephen observes " the turn of his

phrase shows that Macaulay knew it," deprives the sentence entirely of its fictitious semblance of value. Obviously it has been added as in pretended confirmation of the preceding state- ment, that the law was " unknown to the people of India " — a pretence which could only be kept up by en- couraging an incurious reader to interpret " never put into execution " as equivalent to " never enforced by criminal proceedings." Otherwise, of course, its direct conflict with the sentence which it follows would have been at once perceived : since all that is necessary to render a law " known " to the people governed by it is that people who break it should be prosecuted to conviction, whatever punishment, or whether any or none, be inflicted 'upon them. That " the law was in the . highest degree shocking to all their notions," was equally true of the law against suttee — a practice which, as Sir James Stephen felicitously points out, was first made penal all over India by Lord William Bentinck, under whom Macaulay, not long afterwards, held the office of legal member of council. "They were not acquainted with the distinction which circumstances peculiar to our own state of society have led us to make between forgery and other kinds of cheating." The inhabitants of Calcutta, on the contrary, were distinctly proved to be well acquainted with them, and Parliament on two occasions — namely, in 1813 and after- wards in 1827 — made forgery in the Presidency towns punishable with transportation for life. " Macaulay, himself, legislating for the whole of India, makes this very distinction. By Article 444 of the draft penal code the maximum punishment for forging a valuable security is fourteen years' imprisonment with a minimum of two years. By Article 394, the maximum punishment for common cheating is one year's imprisonment. If Parlia- ment thought it necessary to punish forgery at the great commercial towns by the severest secondary punish- ment, if Macaulay himself thought it

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right to extend a similar rule to all India, how can it be said that the judges of the Supreme Court must have been, not only unjust, but corrupt when they considered that the English law on this subject was not unsuitable for Calcutta?" To say that "a just judge would, beyond all doubt, have reserved the case for the consideration of the Sovereign " is again to imply falsely that the sole discretion as to reserving the case was vested in the Chief Justice. To say that Impey would not hear of mercy or delay, is to carry suggestio falsi to the verge of positive misstatement of fact. A man who " will not hear " of mercy must be a man who has been solicited to extend mercy. No such solicitation had been addressed to the Court from any quarter. A man who will not hear of delay in the execution of a capital sentence, must be a man who has been urged to respite a prisoner and who has nevertheless hurried him to his death with indecent haste. No petition or application in any form was made to the Court, as has been said, for a reprieve. As to haste, the sentence was passed on the 24th of June, the prisoner was executed on the 5th of August. That Nuncomar was, in the lawyer's sense of the word, " well " convicted, sentenced and hanged, is, indeed, open to doubt ; as Sir Jarues Stephen candidly admits, though he himself seems to lean slightly to the opinion that the conviction -was good. The question as to whether the statute under which Nuncomar was tried — the Act of George II. making forgery capital — was " a part of that part of the English law " which was in force in Calcutta in 1775, is of too much technicality and intricacy to be entered upon here, and as between Macaulay and Impey the question does not arise. For it is quite certain that the point upon which alone the pro- ceedings could have been invalidated was never formally raised at the trial. "There is not," says Sir James Stephen, "the smallest trace in any part of the argument on this subject,

or in any of the speeches on the impeachment of Impey, that any one took the point about the date at which English law was introduced into Cal- cutta." The doubt momentarily, but only momentarily, expressed by Mr. Justice Chambers was simply "as to the suitability of the English law of forgery for Calcutta." Consequently, whether the trial was or was not bad in law, there is no pretence for saying that Impey and his brethren acted otherwise than in good faith.

The trial of Nuncomar, however, is, as is well known, only one count in Macaulay's tremendous indictment against Sir Elijah Impey. He also violently attacks his conduct with regard to the alleged undue extension of the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. Here Macaulay's case against the Chief Justice stood in less need of the assistance of actual misrepresenta- tion, and, except in the wholly per- verted description of the merits of the quarrel between the Court and the Council, mere exaggeration serves the great rhetorician's turn. There was in reality, of course, no attempt on the part of the judges to " draw to themselves supreme authority, not only within Calcutta, but through the whole of the great territory subject to the presidency of Fort William." It was common ground between the Executive and the Judici- ary that beyond the limits of Calcutta no native not in the employment, direct or indirect, of the East India Company was subject to the jurisdic- tion of the Court. The sole question in dispute was whether any native claiming exemption from its authority was or was not entitled to decide for himself upon the validity of that claim, and — instead of appearing in answer to the summons of the Court to plead to the jurisdiction— to ignore and contemn the process altogether. The affirmative of this proposition was maintained by the Council, the nega- tive by the Court, and whatever may have been the political inexpediency or inconvenience of their insistence

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on their opinion, it is difficult to contend that any judicial body could, consistently with their duty, have taken any other view of their rights. The results of the quarrel, however, as illustrated in the persons of the natives of India, have, as is well known, been depicted by Macaulay in his most lurid colours. The famous passage in the essay on Warren Hastings com- mencing with " A reign of terror began, of terror heightened by mys- tery," and closing with the monstrous assertion that "all the injustice of former oppressors, Asiatic and Euro- pean, appeared as a blessing when compared with the justice of the Supreme Court," is a truly marvel- lous example of disproportion between amount of material and height of scenic effect. A comparison of the sensational periods of Macaulay with Sir James Stephen's cold and bare enumeration of the few facts which have sufficed to furnish forth this feast of horrors is almost too much for a reader's gravity. "There were in- stances," said Macaulay, "in which men of the most venerable dignity, persecuted without a cause by extor- tioners, died of rage and shame in the grasp of the alguazils of Impey." This is the essayist's way of recording the fact that a cazi, a native law officer, who had been sued for gross oppression and corruption in the Supreme Court, and judgment given against him, died on board a boat on the Ganges while being conveyed to Calcutta in execution of the judgment. ' 'The vile alguazils of Impey" were not officers of the Supreme Court at all ; they were a guard of sepoys set over him by the provincial council, which had given bail for him, and with special directions to treat him as kindly as might be. " There were instances" in which "noble Moham- medans shed their blood in the door- way of the harem while defending, sword in hand, the sacred apartments of their women." There was, it seems, one instance in which a Mohammedan of some rank took up his position,

sword in hand, before the door of a friend's zenana. " He shed his blood," but not in defending the zenana, which was not attacked, but in a fray which took place in another part of the house. There were two other cases in which a zenana was either forced or reported to have been so, and in one of them a slave girl was wounded ; and it is on the strength of these three cases that Macaulay invites his readers to imagine " what the state of our country would be if it were enacted that any man by merely swearing that a debt was due to him should acquire a right to insult the persons of women of the most shrink- ing delicacy," and "to treat ladies in the way which called forth the blow of Wat Tyler."

So far, however, there was, even in Macaulay's theory of the case, no worse charge to be brought against Impey than that of a high-handed attempt to enforce a mistaken view of his judicial powers. The necessary touch of depravity was wanting to the picture, and Macaulay adds this in his singularly unscrupulous perver- sion of the circumstances attending Impey's appointment as judge of the Sudder Diwani Adalat — an unsatis- factory transaction, as we still think, even after Sir James Stephen's qualified defence of it, but utterly unsusceptible of the colour which Macaulay endea- vours to put upon it. This appoint- ment is described by him in terms which distinctly imply that it was made at the crisis of the dispute be- tween the Court and the Council, and with a view to avoiding a physical collision between the two. According to him it was a device adopted to pre- vent the necessity of an appeal to arms. " Hastings was seldom at a loss for an expedient, and he knew Impey well. The expedient in this case was a very simple one — neither more nor less than a bribe. Impey was by Act of Parliament a judge independent of the Government of Bengal, and entitled to a salary of 8,OOOZ. per year. Hastings proposed

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Macaulay a'fid Sir Elijah Impey.

to make him also a judge of the Com- pany's service, and to give him in that capacity about 8,000^. a year more. It was understood that in consequence of this new salary Impey would desist from urging the high pretensions of his Court. If he did urge those pre- tensions the Government could at a moment's notice eject him from the office which had been created for him. The bargain was struck ; Bengal was saved ; an appeal to force was averted. The Chief Justice was rich, quiet, and infamous." Who would suppose from this that an " appeal to force " had al- ready taken place, and that the Coun- cil had restrained the jurisdiction of the Court by military violence ; that sheriff's officers executing the process of the Court had been taken prisoners by two companies of sepoys ; that natives had been informed by proclamation that they were at liberty to set its orders at defiance ; and that all this had taken place at least nine months before any proposal was or would be made to Impey ? Such, however, are the facts, and no doubt they amply suffice to refute the particular charge which Macaulay brings against the Chief Justice, which is in substance a charge of having corruptly waived the claim of jurisdiction previously advanced by him on behalf of the Supreme Court in consideration of an appointment to another highly salaried judicial office under the East India Com- pany. But whether these facts entirely bear out Sir James Stephen's larger contention that there was nothing in the nature of a " bargain " between Hastings and Impey in respect of this second appointment, we venture, with submission, to doubt. We do not at any rate see our way to his apparent conclusion that this appointment stood in no consequential relation to the previous conflict between the Supreme Court and the Council. Sir James Stephen's argument on this point is that in that conflict the Council had got so signally the best of it that they might well be content to leave matters as they stood. They had succeeded in

effectually restraining the judges from enforcing their own views of their jurisdiction ; and in that state of things " it is difficult to see what the Court had to give for which it was worth the Council's while to offer a bribe." But it seems to us that Hastings's own minute of September 29, 1780, shows what the Court "had to give," and also at the same time indicates that Hastings thought it to be something worth the Council's while to purchase. Among his reasons for recommending that Impey should be requested to " accept of the charge and superintendency of the office of Sudder Diwani Adalat under its present regulations " he adduces the follow- ing : "It will be the means of lessen- ing the distance between the Board and the Supreme Court, which has perhaps, been, more than the undefined powers assumed to each, the cause of the want of that accommodating temper which ought to have influenced their intercourse with each other. The contest in which we have been engaged with the Court bore at one time so alarming a tendency that I believe every member of the Board foreboded the most dangerous consequences to the peace and resources of the Govern- ment from them." And then follows this very significant passage : " They are at present composed, but we can- not be certain that the calm will last beyond the actual vacation, since the same grounds and materials of dis- cussion subsist and the revival of it at a time like this, added to our other troubles, might, if carried to extremities, prove fatal."

Surely these observations indicate that, however physically complete may have been the victory of the Executive over the Judicature, it was not regarded as morally satisfactory by the chief of the Executive, and that the mere possi- bility of a renewal of the strife was more than sufficient to qualify the complacency with which he might otherwise have been disposed to re- gard his triumph. " Who," asks Sir James Stephen, " would venture

Macaulay and Sir Elijah Impey.

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[after the course taken in the Cossi- iurah cause] to sue any one whom the Council had taken under its protection 1 The plaintiff could not serve his writ. He could not execute his judgment if he got one." It is clear that such il priori arguments to prove the im- possibility of a fresh collision between she Court and the Council had not convinced Hastings, or he would not have said that " we cannot be certain that the calm will last beyond the actual vacation." Evidently he feared that, as soon as the Court re-opened for business, suitors would be found to set its processes in motion again, as Sir James Stephen thinks no one would venture to do ; and in considering his motives to action, the question is not whether this fear was reasonable, but whether it existed. His language, already cited, seems to us to indicate plainly that it did exist, and what fol- lows makes his meaning, we think, un- mistakable ; " The proposition which I have submitted to the Board may, nor have I any doubt that it will, prove an instrument of conciliation with the Court ; and it will preclude the necessity" [that is, will relieve the Court of the necessity] " of assum- ing a jurisdiction over persons ex- empted by our construction of the Act of Parliament." Surely the Go- vernor-General must be here under- stood as saying in effect to his colleagues : " It is a matter of high public importance to prevent the renewal of the struggle between the Supreme Court and the Executive. It is true that we have had, and should again have, physically the best of that struggle ; but what then 1 We cannot be always sending companies of sepoys to make prisoners of sheriff's. We should endeavour, if possible, to avert a fresh collision ; but so long as the Supreme Court is known to insist on its present views of its jurisdiction, we cannot prevent suitors aggrieved by the action of the inferior tribunals from having recourse to its process, nor can we prevent the Court itself from bringing about a fresh collision No. 312.— VOL. LIT.

by an attempt to put its process in force. We can, however, largely re- duce, if not altogether extinguish, the risk of this by giving to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court an ap- pellate jurisdiction over these inferior tribunals. We may then expect that suitors aggrieved by their decisions will cease from resorting to the Supreme Court, and will take their cases before the chief of that court, sitting in his capacity as judge of the Sudder Diwani Adalat." That these were Hastings's main motives for the appointment is, moreover, to be gathered from the very objections raised to it by Francis. Francis argued that it would be everywhere understood by the natives as a " re- instatement of the Court in the exercise of the jurisdiction which it had claimed," even if they did not draw the inference that " some greater evil was to befall them." He further urged that the appointment would place the Chief Justice in an incon- sistent position ; as "he might do some act as judge of the Diwani Court which would subject him to an action before the Supreme Court, or he might, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, be called on to issue a habeas corpus for the release of some one whom he had committed as judge of the Diwani Court." That in the face of these objections the appointment was never- theless made, appears to us a good reason for concluding that Hastings succeeded in convincing the Council that, though formidable in theory, they would not be likely to arise in prac- tice ; and as no one but Impey could have previously convinced Hastings himself of this, there must have been something like a " bargain " between the two men. Even so it would be hard to call it a corrupt bargain, though it might be one which a man of more scrupulous delicacy of principle than Impey would have hesitated to engage in. It was cer- tainly far from being the profoundly immoral compact which Macaulay represents it as being. Impey did

434

Macaulay and Sir JElijah Impey.

not sell the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court for the emoluments of a judge of appeal over the inferior tribunals ; on the contrary, he may rather be said to have purchased the control of those tribunals by his consent to render the services of a judge of appeal. It was not " understood that in con- sideration of this new salary Impey would desist from urging the high pretensions of his Court." The pre- tensions remained exactly where they were; and if it was understood that for the consideration aforesaid Impey should do his best to prevent the occurrence of any necessity for assert- ing them, that is an altogether different and obviously a much less reprehensi- ble arrangement.

Admirably as Sir James Stephen has executed his self-appointed task, his final review of its value is curiously desponding. A belief in the infamies ascribed to Impey has become, he com- plains, through Burke and Fox, a "part of the Whig tradition, and has thus found its way into the only writings upon Indian subjects which have ever been popular — as regards Hastings, with considerable modification, but as regards Impey in a compact, condensed form which has irretrievably damned his memory. I am sorry for him. I believe him to have been quite inno- cent ; but this book will be read by hardly any one, and Macaulay's para- graphs will be read with delighted conviction by several generations. So long as he is remembered at all, poor Impey will stand in a posthumous pillory as a corrupt judge and a 'judicial murderer. " This is rather a sad modern variant of magna est veritas et prcevale- bit. Let us hope it is not the true reading, and all the more because, if it should be so, or if Sir James Stephen should be confirmed in thinking it

so, the literary public are likely to be deprived of a study of even higher interest than that which he has just given us. For these volumes on the story of Nuncomar and the impeach- ment of Sir Elijah Impey are, so to speak, but chips from their author's workshop. He had resolved to give an account of the impeachment of Warren Hastings, but found the materials so voluminous, and the sub- ject so intricate that he began to* doubt, he says, " whether I should be able to finish it in any reasonable time, and whether, if I did, the public would care enough about it to read what I might write." He decided ac- cordingly to make the experiment of giving an account of one branch of the subject — -the story of Nuncomar ; con- ceiving that " the degree of the in- terest which may be felt in the smaller subject will be some index to the in- terest likely to be felt in the larger one, of which it forms a part." We are not ourselves clear that the test is quite a safe one, and incline to think that the interest felt in the smaller subject may, just because it is the smaller one, be no accurate index to the interest likely to be felt in the larger. Certainly it can hardly be said that the name of Elijah Impey conveys a definite idea to anything like as many minds as would be reached by the name of Warren Hastings. And it would certainly be a matter of serious regret if any erroneous in- ference as to its chances of popularity were to deprive us of the promised re- view of so deeply interesting a chapter of English and Indian history from the hand of the man whom a rare com- bination of legal learning, adrninistra tive experience, and literary power has so exceptionally qualified to write it.

435

WAS GIORDANO BRUNO REALLY BURNED?

IN the month of January, 1593, Giordano Bruno, then a prisoner in the Inquisition of Venice, charged with heresy and apostasy, was handed over, with the sanction of the govern- ment, to the Papal Nuncio, in order that he might be sent to Rome to be dealt with by the Inquisition there. From this time he completely disappears from view, unless we accept the state- ment, which has been generally be- lieved, that he was burned alive at Rome seven years later. About the year 1620, there first appeared in print a letter, purporting to be writ- ten from Rome by Gaspar Schoppe, or Scioppius, on the 17th of February, 1600, to Conrad Rittershusius, pro- fessor of law at Altdorf, giving a detailed account of the trial of Bruno by the Inquisition, and of his burning, which, as the writer alleged, had oc- curred that day, and at which he was present. In this letter, after giving an account of the life, the travels, and the heretical opinions of Bruno, the writer continues : —

"Finally, at Venice, lie fell into the hands of the Inquisition, and after being retained there for some time he was sent to Rome. In- terrogated on many occasions by the Holy Office, and confuted by eminent theologians, forty days were given him to reflect ; he pro- mised to abjure his errors, then he commenced again to maintain them, then he demanded another delay of forty days. In fact he thought only of playing with the Inquisition and the Pope. Accordingly, on the 9th of February last, about two years after his arrest, in the palace of the Grand Inquisitor, and in the presence of three illustrious cardinals, of the theologians who had been consulted, and of the secular magis- trates, Bruno was introduced into the Hall of the Inquisition, and there, on his knees, heard the sentence pronounced against him. It set forth at length his life, studies, opinions, the zeal which the Inquisition had displayed in trying to convert him, and the obstinate impiety of which he had given proof. Finally he was degraded, excommunicated, and de- livered to the secular magistrates with the

prayer that he should be punished with as much clemency as possible and without the shedding of blood. To all this Bruno only replied with a threatening air : ' The sentence you pronounce, perhaps troubles you more at this moment than it does me.' The guards of the governor then conveyed him to prison. There another effort was made to induce him to abjure his errors, but in vain. To-day then he was led to the stake. "When the image of the Crucified Saviour was shown to him he repelled it with disdain, and with a savage air. The wretch died in the middle of the flames, and I have no doubt that he has gone to relate in those other worlds which he had imagined, how the Romans are accustomed to treat the blasphemers and the impious. You see, my dear friend, in what manner we pro- ceed here against this species of men, or rather of monsters."

Ever since the appearance of this letter in print, it has been all but universally admitted to be genuine, and though doubts have been occasion- ally expressed, no serious attempt has been made until recently to impugn its substantial accuracy or its authen- ticity. Certainly after being handed over to the Roman Inquisition Bruno entirely disappears from view, and unless he was burned, as the letter relates, his fate is an entire mystery.

M. Desdouits, Professor of Philo- sophy at the Lycee of Versailles, the writer of several philosophical treatises which have brought to their author a considerable reputation — two of them, on Metaphysics, and the Philosophy of Kant, having been crowned by the French Institute — has lately published a pamphlet of 27 pp., the title of which sufficiently indicates its object and the motive of its argument — La Legende tragique de Jordano Bruno — comment elle a ete forme — son origins suspecte — et son invraisemblance.

To treat the burning of Bruno as a legend resting on no solid foundation of fact, but invented by a Protestant propagandist, with a view of throwing discredit on the Church of Rome gene- F F 2

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Was Giordano Bruno Really Burned?

rally and the Roman Inquisition in particular, requires at least some bold- ness, and to support this theory with arguments of so much plausibility and ingenuity as to induce the editor of a journal of great influence and deserved reputation, the Manchester Guardian, besides several French periodicals, to reproduce them without a word of dissent, but with an evident opinion that they are well grounded, makes it expedient, in the interests of historical truth, to inquire whether the theory rests on any solid foundation, and to state for the first time (at least in English) the evidence which exists on the subject.

According to M. Desdouits, the sole piece of evidence on which the burning of Bruno rests, is the letter to which I have referred, purporting to be written by Scioppius. It was first printed (in Germany) in or about 1620, at the end of an extremely rare pseudonymous tract, which bears the title Machia- vellizatio.1 No writer, according to the belief of M. Desdouits when he printed his paper, quoted this letter, or had any knowledge either of the Machiavel- lizatio or the fate of Bruno, until J. H. Ursin referred to it in 1661, in the preface to his Commentaries on Zoroaster. But in a supplement M. Desdouits tells us that a friend has called his attention to a line of Mer- senne, who, in his Impiete des Deistes, printed in 1624, speaks of Bruno as " un athee brUle en Italie." (This shows that M. Desdouits has not even

1 Of the many writers who have quoted this book I cannot think that any of them have seen it, except Ursin, Toland, C. A. Salig, and, perhaps, Vogt. Brucker is the authority from whom M. Desdouits and most writers for the last century and a half have taken its title. But I am satisfied that Brucker merely derived his knowledge of it from Ursin and Toland. A reprint (or possibly the original) of the first part of the tract is in the British Museum, but unfortunately it does not con- tain the letter of Scioppius. The only writer who gives what seems to me to be the com- plete or accurate title is Vogt in his Cat. Lib. Rar. (Hamburg, 1747). It would be interest- ing to ascertain where a copy containing the letter of Scioppius is to be found.

read Bayle's article on Bruno, to which nevertheless he often refers, for Bayle cites this very line of Mersenne.) Nicodemo, in his Addizioni alle Bibli- oteca Napoletana, 1683, quotes Ursin, but only to throw doubts on the state- ment of Scioppius, and it was not until 1701 that the letter of Sciop- pius was really made known to the world, having been reprinted in full by Struvius, in his Acta Litter aria. " It is from that date, and from that work," says M. Desdouits, " that the tradition of the punishment of Bruno, up to that time uncertain and nebulous, takes consistence and reaches its full development." In 1726, Haym, in his Notizia dei Libri rari nella Ling. ItaL, expressed an opinion that Bruno was only burned in effigy ; and before this time, Bayle had cited Nicodemo, and had seemingly shared his doubts.

" There are two grave reasons against the authenticity of the letter of Scioppius ; first, it has been found in mysterious circumstances which do not allow us to mount to its origin ; secondly, it contains many passages which it is difficult to attribute to a friend of the Court of Rome. Printed first in this obscure and unknown book, Machiavellizatio, where it was discovered seventy-five years later by Struvius, there is no sort -of external evidence that it was written by Scioppius, while the internal evi- dence from the letter itself is altogether the other way. That the style is in harmony with that of Scioppius is no proof of its authenticity, for a clever forger would take care that no suspicion on that score could arise. But in other respects it is not such a letter as Scioppius would be expected to write. Why does he re- late to Rittershusius in detail the life and ad- ventures of Bruno during the last eighteen years, as if Rittershusius would not be well ac- quainted with them ? It is clear that this is put in, in order that the tissue of falsehoods with which the letter concludes might be preceded by the accurate recital of facts. But in the year 1600, Scioppius was entirely devoted to the Church of Rome, which it was only two years since he had formally joined. All his writings at this time show a great zeal for orthodoxy. How improbable, then, that in a letter written to the Protestant Rittershusius to justify the Church of Rome from the re- proach of cruelty he would add to the aggravating circumstances, calumnies of a nature to augment the fury of the Lutherans against the Church of Rome. But, in fact, the letter contains one manifest falsehood and atrocious calumny. ' Bruno, ' says the letter,

Was Giordano Bruno Really Burned ?

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"will be able to relate in other worlds, how the Romans are accustomed to treat the blas- phemers and the impious. ' Would any friend of the Church of Rome have written the words ' are accustomed ? ' for every one knows that it is a falsehood ; every one knows that the rigours which were habitual in other countries in Europe, were not habitual at Rome. No doubt plenty of victims will be found in Spain, in England, and in France, but at Rome how many can be discovered ? What were the rigours of the ecclesiastical authority when one compares them with the lay tribunals ? It is clear that the letter is not that of a friend of the Church, it is prob- ably the work of a German Lutheran, and this explains the impossibility of discovering its origin, and it seems probable that some details of the letter were borrowed from the account given by the President de Grammond in 1619, of the punishment of Vanini. Turning from the letter itself, the punishment of Bruno is, a priori, improbable ; the absolute silence of contemporaries is inexplicable ; if Bruno were really burnt publicly at Rome, where the spec- tacle of burning at the stake was unusual, any such punishment would be sure to be noticed, especially when the victim was one of the most illustrious philosophers in Europe, the most re- doubtableenemy of the Papacy and the Christian faith. When nineteen years later Vanini was executed at Toulouse, the attention of the whole literary world was drawn to it, but no contem- porary makes the least mention of the tragical death of Bruno. The absolute silence of the ambassadors of Venice in their despatches to their government, is alone an irrefutable argu- ment against the punishment of Bruno, nor is the absence of any official record of Ms trial and execution at Rome less important or less decisive. The probability is then that he finished his life at Rome in a convent of his order. No- thing proves that Giordano Bruno was burnt at Rome, and the hypothesis of his punish- ment is not only uncertain but improbable (inmaisemblable). "

Such, in a somewhat abbreviated form, are the arguments of M. Des- douits, and they are maintained with much ingenuity and ability. Taken by themselves they seem to be, if not absolutely conclusive, at least highly probable, and to deserve the detailed examination which I proceed to give them. And first of the letter of Scioppius. The Machiavellizatio is cer- tainly now very scarce, but it was a well-known book for some time after its appearance. It had the honour to be placed in the Index. At least two answers were given to it within a year after its appearance — one by no less

a person than Balasti, Bishop of Bosnia — and an account of it is given by Salig, in his History of the Augsburg Confession. Now, as the book was printed, at the latest, in 1621, it is strange if it never came to the knowledge of Scioppius, who lived until 1649, and it is quite certain that if he had learned that a forged letter purporting to have been written by him was contained in the Machia- vellizatio, or in any book, the world would very soon have heard his loud and furious complaints. But that Struvius dug the letter out of the Machiavellizatio, as stated by M. Desdouits, is incorrect. Had he re- ferred to the book of Struvius, in- stead of merely deriving his knowledge of it from Brucker, or some other secondhand source, he would have known that the letter was communi- cated in manuscript to Struvius by Gottlieb Krantz, a professor of Breslau, and it is clear that both of them be- lieved it to be unpublished.

M. Desdouits inquires why the author of this forged letter should have attributed it to Scioppius, and addressed it to Rittershusius, and he replies that it was necessary that it should take the name of some writer who was at Rome at the date of the pretended burning, that Scioppius was the best known of those then residing there, and that as he had himself written and printed, in 1599, an epistle to Rittershusius, this suggested the name of the person to whom the letter was to be addressed. But M. Desdouits seems to be ignorant that Scioppius was at this very time in close correspondence with Rittershusius, and that Struvius published in his Acta Litteraria from the original a .tograph, nine other letters from Scioppius to the Altdorf professor. All these were written between January, 1599, and February, 1600, and the letter of February 17, 1600, not only contains the long account of Bruno and his execution, but also much matter of general literary interest, precisely of the same character as the earlier letters,

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Was Giordano Bruno Really Burned ?

to which it forms a consistent sequel. The same persons, the same books, the same subjects are spoken of. The Vatican manuscript of Sulpicius Severus, which was being copied for Rittershusius under the directions of Scioppius, is referred to in the letter of the 17th of February just as we should expect from the mention of it in the previous letter of the 29th of January. But when Struvius published the letter of the 17th of February, he was not acquainted with the existence of the nine other letters, which he only printed sixteen years later in the fifth part of his second volume. If, there- fore, the letter in question is a forgery, the forger must have had before him these earlier letters which remained unknown for a century after the pub- lication of the Machiavellizatio. But among the letters first printed in 1717 is the angry letter of Rittershusius renouncing the friendship of Scioppius and declining all further intercourse. This letter, written on the 14th of February, 1600, must have crossed Scioppius's letter of the 17th, and thenceforward all intercourse between the two men absolutely ceased. If, therefore, the (Bruno) letter is a for- gery, the forger must have accidentally hit upon the very latest date at which it was possible for Scioppius to write to Rittershusius in friendly terms, or he must have been acquainted with this letter of Rittershusius which was not printed until a century after- wards, and he must have fixed the date of the burning, so as to harmo- nise with it.

Next as to the tone of the letter itself. Is it the kind of letter likely to have been written by a friend of the Church of Rome to a Protestant, or is it clearly the work of an enemy ? (I pass over M. Desdouits' indignant comments on the words " are accus- tomed," for I have been unable to find a complete list of the heretics burned at Rome from 1580 to 1620, but certainly, though they were not so numerous as in Spain, they were not so rare at Rome as to cause much

sensation when they occurred.) Sciop- pius, it must be remembered, was at this time a recent convert, and what- ever the motives of his conversion, he was at least full of that ardour for his new faith, which neophytes pro- verbially display, and he was certainly desirous of commending it in every way possible, to one who had long been, and whom he was most anxious to retain as his most intimate friend. Scioppius commences by saying that if his correspondent were then at Rome, he would no doubt hear *it commonly reported that a Lutheran had been burned, and would thus be confirmed in his opinion of the cruelty of the Roman church. For the com- mon people in Italy did not distinguish between Lutherans and other heretics, calling every kind of heresy Luther- anism, " but in fact," he continues, " neither Lutherans nor Calvinists are in the slightest danger at Rome, on the contrary the Pope has given direc- tions that they should be treated with extraordinary attention and civility, and nothing is attempted against them ; they are only exhorted to investigate the truth." Then he proceeds to give the history of Bruno and his doctrines, showing that there was hardly any heresy, old or new, which the philosopher did not hold, and he is evidently quite satis- fied that Rittershusius would agree with him that the punishment was entirely justifiable. He adds, in a very different tone from that which he used of the same eminent person a dozen years later, that Casaubon was setting an excellent example (it was then rumoured that the great scholar was about to join the Church of Rome), and he prays that his correspondent may follow the same course.

The tone of the letter is exactly what we should expect from a friend and adherent of the Church of Rome. Romanists, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anglicans, differing upon almost every other doctrine were all agreed upon this one, that it was a Christian duty to burn atheists and heretics. The

Was Giordano Bruno 'Eeally Burned ?

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only point as to which they differed was the definition of heresy. It was less than half a century since Calvin and the Grand Inquisitor, Orry, had vied with each other which was to have the credit of burning Servetus, and that the Genevan Reformer had sneered at the primate of primates for allowing so notorious an atheist to live unharmed within the confines of his cathedral city.

When we read the earlier corre- spondence with Rittershusius, the argu- ment of the Bruno letter becomes still more clear. In the epistle printed by Scioppius himself in 1599, which so seriously offended Rittershusius, as well as in several subsequent letters, the mildness and gentleness with which Lutherans were treated at Rome is much insisted upon. Scioppius was now endeavouring by every means in his power, but in vain, to smooth the justly irritated professor, and he felt that when his correspondent should hear, as he probably soon would do, that a Lutheran had been burnt at Rome, he would believe that all the specious statements of his correspond- ent, as to the gentleness of the Court of Rome and the favour shown by it to Lutherans were mere pretence, and that in urging Rittershusius to visit Rome, Scioppius desired to place him in the power of the Inquisition, when possibly he might share the fate of Bruno.

Nor is it the fact that until this letter was unearthed by Struvius,the terrible fate of Bruno was not generally known, or, that except the single reference to it by Mersenne, Ursin was the first to announce it. Not only does Mersenne, in 1 624, refer to Bruno, in the line cited by Bayle and M. Desdouits, as " un athee brule en Italie," but in the same work — a work, by the way, that had a large circulation, and is cited by nearly every writer on atheism in the 17th century — in a long chapter devoted to Bruno, which M. Desdouits has evi- dently not read, Mersenne remarks (p. 363), in speaking of the dialogue De la causa principio et uno, " ce sont

ces dialogues pour lesquels il a est6 brusle & Rome comme quelques uns m'ont assure" implying that it was not from the Machiavellizatio, but from con- temporary information that his know- ledge was derived. But if any doubts remain as to the genuineness of the letter, and as to the fact of the presence of Scioppius himself at the execution of Bruno, they are resolved by Scioppius himself, who in one of the best known of his books, the Ecclesiasticus, printed in 1611, and solemnly burned by order of the Parliament of Paris on the 24th of November, 1612, refers to the burning of Bruno, almost in the same words as occur in the letter of Rittershusius (p. 264). " It happened to me about ten years since,- at Rome, to be a witness of this memorable obstinacy in the case of Giordano Bruno, of Nola, who, rat/ter than recant, preferred to fie burnt alive in a blazing fire surrounded by miserable faggots (infelicibus sar- mentis circumsceptus luculento igne vivus ustulari maluit). But a still more re- markable piece of evidence remains, in the Correspondence of Kepler and Brengger, first printed in 1858. On the 30th of November, 1607, Kepler wrote, "Nor was that unfortunate Bruno who was burnt (prunis tostis) at Rome the only one who held the opinion that the stars were inhabited ; my friend Brabeus took the same view." Brengger replies on the 7th of March, 1608, "When you write of Giordano Bruno prunis tostis, I understand you to mean he was burned (crematum). I beg of you to tell me whether this is so, and when and where this happened." On the 5th of April, Kepler replies, " I learned from Wacker that Bruno was burned at Rome, and that he suffered the punishment with firmness, asserting the vanity of all religions, and turning God into the universe, into circles, or into points." A further letter of Brengger of the 8th of June refers to the same subject. (Kepleri Opera, edidit Frisch, 1858-70, vol. ii., pp.591, 592,596.)

Now there could not possibly be a

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better authority than J. M. Wacker, who in February, 1600, was residing at Rome as the imperial Ambassador, and was also, curiously enough, one of the chief patrons of Scioppius. His name frequently occurs in the corre- spondence with Rittershusius.

I could cite other references to the burning of Bruno, from writers of an earlier date than Struvius, amongst others, Charles Sorel and G. Spitzel (Spizelius), but I think sufficient has been said to prove that the fact of the burning of Bruno was generally known in the seventeenth century to those interested in the matter, and that it was as generally believed.

I now turn to the second head of M. Desdouits' arguments, namely, that which refers to the absence of all official record of the trial or execution. His studies have evidently stopped short with the excellent work of Bartholmess printed at Paris in 1846, and he seems to be entirely ignorant of the investigations of several Italian scholars during the last twenty years in the Archives of the Vatican, and of the Inquisition, the results of which have been published by Signer Berti in the two following works — " Coper- nico e le vicende del sy sterna Copernicano in Italia con documenti inediti intorno a Giordano Bruno e Galileo" (Rome, 1876), and " Documenti intorno a Giordano Bruno " (Rome, 1880). The Records of the Inquisition state that on the 27th of February, 1598, Giordano Bruno arrived at Rome, and was incarcerated in the prison of the Holy Office ; that in February, 1599, his trial commenced ; that on the 20th of January, 1600, the Pope ordered the sentence to be passed, which terminates with those 'well- known words, so terrible in their opera- tion, so vague in their terms, " dictus Fr. Jordanus tradatur curice seculari ; " that on the 8th of February this sentence was actually pronounced, and the prisoner forthwith delivered to the Secular Court. So much for the Records of the Inquisition. Among

the manuscripts of the Vatican, is a collection of news-letters (Avvisi di Roma), which in those days did duty as gazettes or newspapers. In one, dated Saturday, the 12th of February, 1600, the gazetteer writes that they were expecting that day a solemn act of justice on a Dominican of Nola, who, on the Wednesday previous, had been condemned to be burnt alive. But it seems the pious multitude were dis- appointed of their entertainment for several days. In the Avviso of the 19th of the same month, it is written that " on Thursday morning, in the Campo de Fiore, that wicked Domini- can friar of Nola, of whom mention was made in the last letter, was burnt alive. A most obstinate heretic, and having of his own caprice formed divers dogmas against our faith, and in par- ticular against the most holy Virgin and the saints, in which the wretched man was obstinately determined to die, saying that he was dying as a martyr and willingly, and that his soul would ascend with the smoke into Paradise." Signer Berti has further discovered in a book of accounts, an entry of a payment of twenty scudi to the Bishop who performed the ceremony of the degradation of Bruno.

Most persons will probably consider that the facts here stated are sufficient to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Giordano Bruno was burned alive at Rome. But it is understood that M. Desdouits does not accept as final or conclusive the evidence from the Archives of the Inquisition, and the Avvisi di JKoma, which have been brought under his notice by the Italian press. I have therefore thought it not inexpedient to point out, at what may seem unnecessary length, that apart from the discoveries which have been given to the world by Signor Berti, there is abundant proof of the fact in the writings of the seventeenth century, and that the genuineness of the letter of Scioppius is not open to the suspicions which have been cast upon it.

RICHARD COPLEY CHRISTIE.

441

CONTINENTAL TROUTING.

How delightfully irresponsible in sport- ing matters is the average continental tourists' handbook ! It would almost seem at times as if the author sought premature revenge on the angling fraternity, whose weakness he foresaw would render them half-hearted fol- lowers of the complete programme in mountain waterfall and cathedral that he had so laboriously sketched out, cab fares included. With what off- hand levity do these manuals invite " piscator " to alight and try his luck between trains on some stream from which the last trout vanished a quarter of a century ago ! With what guileless generosity these publications recommend the " lover of the gentle craft " to spend a few hours on some river whose owner will scarcely allow his nearest relations to tread its banks.

There is a patronising way, too, of treating poor piscator in such volumes that might goad him to some- thing like irritation were he not such a proverbially sweet-tempered person. He is not only recommended to flog rivers sacred to the very gods, and to devote himself to streams in which there are no fish, but the language in which these useful suggestions are couched is a mixture of the paternal and the contemptuous. It is quite evident he is regarded as a species of degenerate tourist on whom the water- falls and the cab fares will be to a great extent wasted. Reading between the lines the conviction seems plain in the author's mind that our friend, if only he have a rod in his hand and a basket at his back, will be perfectly happy and need nothing more. The experienced fisherman, however, fortu- nately for himself, does not, as the Americans phrase it, " take much stock " in the optimistic generalisms

of such books. His professional eye detects their vagueness in a moment, and probably he has been bitten again and again in his youth.

Is not, however, continental trouting to most of us somewhat like the tradi- tional mine of Wicklow that Moore sings of ? Who is there among the fraternity that has not at some time or other pursued in France or Belgium or Germany that ideal river which his own imagination, his friends' tales, or their friends' affidavits have conjured up, and found it only to exclaim with equal fervour, if with less elevated emotion, than the gentle Words- worth— -

' ' And is this Yarrow ! this the stream My waking fancy cherished " ?

What roving angler does not recall some Normandy brook or Ardennes stream that was always better either above or below the spot at which you study it, and always inferior to some still more distant water beyond the hill?

Yet there is a fascination, to many of us at any rate, in continental trouting that makes us to a great extent oblivious of defeat, sanguine of the future, and inclined to deal gently with the light baskets that for the most part make up the records of the past. There is at least the happy element of mystery in your first essay upon a continental brook. If past experience tends to weight the scales very heavily in favour of the most modest expectations, still there are the three plump half-pounders which the landlord lays upon the breakfast table ; for he does not tell you they were caught with a drag net- in the grey of the morning. On the contrary, he swears that Jean or Pierre in the village took them with a fly the night

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before just below the bridge. But then " Jean is a bon pecheur," and this significant remark indicates that monsieur has got only himself to blame if he go not and do likewise. The enthusiasm, however, which in the kitchen greets your arrival at dinner time with half-a-dozen three-ounce fish is too genuine, to be attributed entirely to national politeness. You have evi- dently performed a feat, and the story of Jean's half-pounders assumes a legendary aspect, or, to quote our cousins again, begins to look " alto- gether too thin."

" How as to the liberty of fishing?" you have previously inquired of the landlord of some still unexplored hostelry and water. You pore over the crabbed handwriting, and with much difficulty make out that monsieur has the liberty of fishing over the commune water above the village, and over that of Le Comte, below. On arrival that statement proves to be substantially correct, but as far as the eye can see — up and down the stream in this the height of the May -fly season — are fields of waving grass not two weeks off the scythe. Venture only along the edge of one of these meadows, my friend, and not all the counts or all the communes will save you from the vengeance of an infuriated peasantry.

" Well," says our host with a shrug apologetic, " monsieur can fish at any rate from the orchard below the house, and from the road in the village ; (cheerful consolation after travelling a hundred miles) ; and another year monsieur must come earlier — in April — before the meadows are put up." We don't go ourselves in April, but we recommend a friend to do so with the best intention in the world. He comes back in a white heat with things in general and us in particular. Not a fish was moving, and the land- lord told him that it was a late river, that he ought to have waited till the mouche de mai (the May-fly) was on (grand old scamp), " and then, mon- sieur, would catch all the fish he

wanted." Then again, not very far off, there is the water of the Baron de

B , two miles off, as fine a stream

as you ever laid your eyes on. A keeper, too, and sport, weather per- mitting, apparently guaranteed. Yes ! there is the keeper in his blue blouse and black-cloth cap — an exceedingly pleasant person — neither cynical nor servile, and eager with the landing net, which he carries as if he was looking out for a fish every throw, sly rascal ! He compliments the English nation generally, and you in particular on your casting, which is probably wasted toil ; but if you do fluke a decent fish "an' you love it" take the net yourself, and do not let that amiable man approach the bank. If you don't deprive him of it your whole French vocabulary will vanish in fumes of rage ere you can stop him from lunging furiously at the lightly hooked fish, and breaking everything in the wild impression that he is assisting in its capture.

You are not very likely, however, to require such assistance often, for this very custodian of the preserve himself is about as salutary to the fishing as a cart load of otters or a few thousand pike would be.

His energy is boundless, but it is misdirected. If an unfortunate gentle- man with a " Farlowe " rod and a card-case in his pocket were to put his foot over the boundary of Monsieur le Baron's preserve, the eagle eye of our garde would mark him, and his swift foot hunt him down with all the terrors of continental provincial law. Monsieur le Baron, who lives away in Brussels, should know what a faithful protector of his interests lives at the chateau gate. But in the dark of the night what quiet netting parties of the village neighbours are arranged, upon distinct and profitable under- standings upon the part of the former with that conscientious bucolic ! It is by no means extraordinary that your basket is a light one, on the contrary, when the sad truth leaks out the feeling that is uppermost in

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your breast is one of self-satisfaction and surprise that there is anything in it at all.

There are red-letter days occasion- ally in these continental fishing trips, and some of us have streams, no doubt, hid away in remote spots whose secrecy we have sworn a solemn oath to hold inviolate. Fish or no fish, however, there is a charm in the continental brook that encourages perseverance. In face of the unequalled delights of English pastoral scenery, one can only attribute this aforesaid charm to the novelty and consciousness of exploring hidden nooks and meeting odd folks that the general tourist passes by. Perhaps also there is something in the absence of the postman's bag.

Then, too, there are those foreign water-mills ! We have nothing — or nothing, at any rate, but isolated exceptions — to compare to them, and the true angler is, or should be, an epicure in the matter of mills. What your educated trout fisherman does not know about the "points" of a mill, the whole of South Kensington and Chelsea certainly cannot teach him.

What a contrast, for instance, in a a Normandy landscape between the present and the past ! On the bare hill-side, under the single line of poplars that borders the broad, admi- rably-graded road, glares the big white milestone of the French Eepublic, bristling with kilometres and deci- mals of kilometres. Below, in the rich and leafy valley, an old mill, grey with age and patched with the mellowed masonry of every age but this, lifts its high walls above the foaming stream. Memories of old feudal mill-rights, that died with the revolution, and lingered among the seigneuries of French Canada till twenty years ago, seem in fancy to lurk be- neath the quaint, fantastic gables. The pigeon towers on the hills have gone. The old-time chateaux are only here and there preserved where some towered and turreted farm-house, half- buried amid stacks of wheat and hay,

and echoing to the sounds of rural life, retains in its gray stones the names of some proud, forgotten race ; but in the slow throb of the mill- wheels the pulse of old France seems still to beat. Nor to find that it is necessary to penetrate inaccessible regions. Among the quiet and un- pretending hills of Picardy — nay, in the very Pas de Calais itself, within sight even of the Cathedral of Boulogne or the frowning ramparts of Mont- reuil — the mill-wheel sings in cool, quiet nooks that the ordinary traveller may never see, but where the angler, if his creel be light and trout be scarce, may find his consolation in the heat of a summer noon.

Our English mills, if taken in detail, will generally be found to owe their picturesqueness very much to their surroundings. If they are large and prosperous, their walls are as neat as those of the county jail, their slate roofs are in as good repair as those of the rectory close at hand. The little stone mill in tthe narrow valley of the north or west is, it is true, no un- pleasing foreground to the boiling stream, the strip of emerald meadow, and the hanging oak wood ; but with- out its flashing wheel and without its natural surroundings — taken, so to speak, out of its frame — our rough stone mill would seldom stir the emo- tions of either angler or artist. The French mill, however, is most fre- quently a thing of beauty by itself, and is independent of the aspens and the beeches and the sycamores whose shadows quiver in its restless pool — a venerable pile of time-worn stone and mellowed brick, patched in a happy makeshift way by the hands of a dozen generations ; stained every hue by the spray and the rain and the sun of un- numbered years. Tufts of grass and trailing weeds wave from the cracked walls and catch the bright drops ever rising from the foam below. The gabled roof waves in quaint fashion over the twisted rafters. Tiles rich in colouring, and slates, chipped and silvery with age, droop in promiscuous

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fashion over the rows of swallows' nests that cluster beneath the over- hanging eaves. Odd windows and dark, mysterious loopholes break here and there the tall pile of masonry. Clouds of pigeons circle in the air or cluster and coo in the hanging boxes where, midway between the roof and the foaming mill-tail, they make their home. Here, too, the air is full of life with the swift rush of martins and swallows that revel amid the gnats and flies which come out to dance in this the broadest and sun- niest spot upon the otherwise narrow stream.

Upon the opposite bank, behind an old brick wall which, half-buried in ivy, stems the rush of the current, stands the miller's house. Its blue- washed walls and green shutters, its grey thatch and bright tiles, half seen through a wall of fruit blossoms and gay old-fashioned flowers, light up with pleasing contrast the more sombre hues of the mill itself.

The miller himself, too, is a hearty, jovial fellow, and comes out for a chat as soon as he sees from his dusty haunts the gleam of our rod waving backwards and forwards in the sun- shine. For he was a conscript at the Alma, and has a regard for English- men as being connected with the chief event of his life. The international loves and hates of the Paris boulevards have no more influence upon him than if he were a Chinaman. General opinion has. I think, agreed that English tour- ists have ceased to be popular upon the Continent, but in the almost un- beaten paths which the more adven- turous angler treads, he will find no sign of this. In remote villages, where the English name has been almost wholly in the keeping of his craft, the angler will find his predecessors re- membered, for the most part, with something like affection. Old reels and well-worn flies and much be- spliced top-joints, crop up everywhere as relics of the munificence of some bon pecheur, Monsieur le Colonel Anglais.

If the scenery of the French brook- side is a thought too true, it has at any rate characteristic charms of its own. The alders trail unlopped it is true above the current, and here and there leave scarcely room for even the expert to drop his fly safely in mid- stream. But everything beyond is seen through interlacing lines of tall straight stems, crossing and recrossing one another, and growing finer and apparently denser as the distance and the foot of the hill that bounds the valley is approached. The shadows of the whitening rustling leaves from their lofty tops play upon the grass, and that of their tall limbless trunks as day declines, convert into stripes of black and emerald the soppy meadows, where rushes and wildflowers threaten in May days to choke the springing grass. The slender thorn hedges, set and trimmed in the diamond fashion of the Continent, run this way and that, dividing the little meadows from one another and from the large stretch of commune land, where blue-bloused peasants and their short-skirted wives and daughters are planting the late potatoes in the warm red soil. Then peeping through the teeming forest of slender tree-stems, and almost smoth- ered in apple blossoms, are the bright red roofs of the little hamlet. Nearest of all to the stream is the cottage of the garde de chasse — stalking at our side with the landing net, up a deep rutted lane leading thereto, that good man insists on our visiting his home. His two stalwart daughters are hitched up to a big barrow in the garden, which they pull with a steadiness that would do credit to a pair of Normandy mares. But in the dark recesses of the huge chimney a row of curly heads gradually dawn upon our vision, as the latter gets used to the gloom, and olive branches of a tenderer age, armed with slates and books, come shyly out to stare at the gentleman from across the sea. The buxom matron herself would be deeply hurt if you refused the proffered petit verre of cognac, and the good garde himself would still

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more keenly feel it as the loss would be his own also. The high chimney- piece is laden with the gay shep- herdesses and white poodles in china that seem to gladden the heart of the poor in all countries alike. On the heavy smoke- darkened rafters, that support the ceiling, hangs, as else- where, the emblem of the goodman's craft — a ponderous double-barrelled gun. Framed in glass upon the wall is the certificate of his military ser- vice and discharge. " But why the cumbrous sabre that hangs upon a nail above the door ? Infantry pri- vates, even if they were allowed to carry away the weapons of the republic do not wear cavalry sabres."

" Ah ! monsieur doesn't understand, the sabre is for the braconniers — the poachers." It is, in fact, our friend's weapon of defence and attack, as he follows his profession upon the river- banks or among the rye- and wheat- fields and clover patches, which cover the 600 acres constituting the chasse. One has to imagine then our harmless- looking friend skipping over the hills at a safe distance from his village acquaintances and friends, the bracon- niers, and brandishing this appalling weapon at their departing figures.

In France too, no matter how remote the angler's path may be, there is the little village auberge, almost always at hand where some consolation for indifferent sport may be found in a bottle of good ordinaire, and perhaps a fillet of veal, or at any rate an excel- lent omelette. Unlike most other countries, however, extreme rural inno- cence is by no means incompatible in France with a talent for extortion.

" As grasping as a man of Picardy," is an old French ^saying that the wanderer in that portion of the country at any rate, will do well to bear constantly in mind. In rural Belgium you may generally dispense with preliminary agreements in small inns. Across the border, however, never be tempted among the most guileless seeming communities to put yourself outside the reach of black and white.

One great source of inconvenience to English anglers upon French streams is the number of persons or corporations, whose permission has to be gained to secure enough water for a good day's fishing. The smallness of properties — whether owned by communes or individuals — is of course the cause of this. To the peasant, whose idea of fishing is sitting xipon a stump with a worm and a float, a kilometre of river seems almost bound- less space for sporting purposes. You may be given to understand that the water, for which you have with some difficulty succeeded in getting leave, is practically without limit. Your land- lady, by waving her hands out towards the distant horizon and shrugging her shoulders, will check further inquiry and lull you into a perfect sense of security on this point. Even the garde himself discusses the boundary ques- tion with such confidant levity, that it is with the bitterest disappointment you find that worthy man in an hour or two's time drawing your attention to a white board nailed on to a poplar- tree, bearing the ominous inscription, " Defense pour pecker."

A. G. BRADLEY.

446

THE EXTENSION OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN IRELAND.

ONE of the most intricate and difficult, and at the same time one of the most pressing problems with which the new Parliament will have to deal, will be the measure of extension of Local Go- vernment in Ireland. That there must be some extension is more or less cer- tain, but how far it will go and upon what principles it will be based are questions upon which the constitu- encies will have much to say, and upon which, therefore, they may rea- sonably search for anything which throws light. Hotly as the Irish question has been for many years, it would be almost safe to say for many generations, discussed, there are few, either among our statesmen or our public writers,, who have intimate knowledge with the many-shadowed difficulties which surround it. By some it is approached with a hopeless dread of its insolubility. Such men think that the utmost we can hope for is a prolonged postponement of a crisis. To keep Ireland quiet even at the cost of some theoretically indefensible concession, to produce temporary peace at even a high price, is with them the highest and the only object possible of attainment. There are others who have bright ideas as to a near future for Ireland, who hope that by some change of policy, by some course of conciliation, Ireland may, in a very brief period, be brought into such a state that she not only will be no source of difficulty or delay to national administration, but may be actually an element of strength to those responsible for the conduct of imperial affairs. A third party, again, go to the other extreme of despair. With them Irishmen are centuries be- hind the rest of the Queen's subjects in all that has contributed to the national greatness, are unfit to have

the " bounds of freedom wider yet," and are unable to use the opportuni- ties, the privileges, and the powers which may with advantage be placed in the hands of those who live on this side of the Irish Channel. With such men the sole desire is to rule Ireland with a rod of iron, to govern her by force, to repress all extension of national aspiration. They would en- trust her people with no influence, her local council, with no power. They would firmly fix the centre of her Govern- nent in London, and would part with no jot of parliamentary control. They see in every furtherance of religious equality the possible development of priestly bigotry, in every extension of Local Government the sure ferment of rebellion and dismemberment of the empire.

With this last party the readers of this paper will find no sympathy ex- pressed. The time when such a policy could find any strong support in Parlia- ment or in the press is gone. But it may be useful to present a few con- siderations to those who only hope for temporary palliation of Irish troubles as well as to those who think that Ireland can be made happy and pros- perous by a coup de main.

And in the first place I would urge that nothing can be more dangerous in approaching the Irish question than to treat Irishmen as wholly different from Englishmen, in nationality, in prejudice, or in caste. It has lately been the fashion, stimulated by a cer- tain section of Irishmen, to speak of, if not to think of, Irishmen and Eng- lishmen as foreign to each other. Much has been said of the imperial rule of Ireland as if it were an alien rule. It may have once been reason- able to speak of the ascendency of the Protestant class as the hateful ascend-

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ency of a religious minority. But it is a grave mistake to speak of the present regime in Ireland, faulty though in some respects it may be, as a foreign supremacy full to the brim with all the terrible evils insepar- able from a rule of aliens. That there are elements of distinction, linguistic, religious, ethical, between Englishmen and Irishmen, I admit, but they are not one whit stronger than those be- tween Irishmen and Scotchmen, or Scotchmen and Welshmen. And to press these distinctions is a mistake of which the consequences must be dis- astrous to the progress, nay, even to the existence of the British empire. If Irishmen and Englishmen were really as foreign to each other in all those characteristics and idiosyncra- cies which go to make national unity as in some quarters it has been at- tempted to show, the sooner there came about total disunion between the two countries the better it would be for both. In such a case the problem of united government would indeed be hopeless, and political, financial, and commercial severance, speedy and total would be the only method of treat- ment which would have the slightest prospect of success. From such a policy Irishmen would be the first to suffer, and their suffering would be severe. If in the administration of Irish affairs all were forbidden to play a part save those who could claim to be Irishmen, then from administration of English affairs Irishmen would be compelled to abstain ; and not only this, but the thousands of Irishmen who in various parts of Great Britain make their influence deservedly and worthily felt would at once be branded with the impotency of alienism, and would be grievously affected by dis- qualifications now non-existent. To the extreme members of the Parnellite party such a policy may possibly com- mend itself, they may be willing to take the risks with what they con- sider the advantages. But few dis- passionate friends of Irishmen would wish to see them liable to the conse-

quences of a pressure to its logical con- clusion of the principle of " Ireland for the Irish," while to the imperial statesman who sees in the solid weld- ing together of the interests of all classes of her Majesty's subjects the best prospect of the progress of the Queen's empire and the best chance of success in the huge national compe- tition of modern days, the splitting up of Celt and Saxon, Cymric and Gael, can only be regarded with despair.

Upon the present system of govern- ment in Ireland, the most lavish abuse has been showered on the score of its being " alien." Much has been made of the fact that the last three viceroys have been Englishmen and that the present under- secretary is a Scotch- man. But the principle on which men are selected for high administra- tive posts in this country is that the best man is chosen for each place ir- respective of his place of birth. And on the whole it is a wise principle. The viceroyalty of India is not con- fined to Anglo-Indians, or the go- vernor-generalship of Canada to Cana- dians. For the most important offices in England Irishmen are not disquali- fied. And in the present Cabinet, the office which has influence on the position and power of the British Empire second to none, is held and deservedly held by an Irishman. It would be a fatal hindrance to the proper selection of high officials if birth-place were an all important ele- ment of choice. The same rule applies to the permanent service of the State, in all parts of which Irishmen hold positions of influence and trust, with credit to themselves and advantage to the community. There would there- fore be little weight in the argument, even if it were true, that several of the principal places in the Irish Civil Ser- vice were occupied by Englishmen. But it is not true. The under-secre- tary to the lord-lieutenant is indeed a Scotchman, one who has gained experience in many departments and in many parts of the world. But his

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predecessor was an Irishman, and his nationality did not save him from the knife of his countrymen. The present assistant under-secretary is an Irish- man. The head of the constabulary is an Irishman. The vice-president of the Local Government Board is an Irishman. The chairman and his two fellow commissioners on the Board of Works are Irishmen. The head of the Prisons Board is an Irishman, so is the head of the Industrial Schools. The resident commissioner of National Education is an Irishman and a zeal- ous Catholic, enjoying the confidence of the heads of his Church as well as that of all friends of education. The Inspectors of Lunatics are Irishmen, and one was O'Connell's private secre- tary. The Registrar of Petty Sessions Clerk is an Irishman, who represented an important constituency on advanced Home Rule principles. How it can be said with the slightest show of truth that these men press Ireland under the domination of an alien race, I am at a loss to understand. The fact is that in their several ways they have a knowledge of the circumstances of their country, and an, appreciation of the peculiarities of their country- men, which can never be attained even by the cleverest of distant critics. It may be said, that as " Castle " nominees, they can never enjoy the confidence of the people. What does this mean ? That there can be no con- fidence in the administration of officers not selected by popular vote ? If so I totally deny the statement. The higher positions in the civil service of the whole country are filled by men appointed by the parliamentary heads of departments, who are themselves answerable to Parliament ' and the constituencies. The system is gener- ally approved, and the result is good work. No one has yet been found to propose that the chief civil servants of the State should be appointed by popular vote. Such a plan would lead to chaos of administration in England, and in Ireland would rapidly produce terrible disaster. Does it mean that

considerations other than of efficiency enter into the selection 1 Generations ago this may have been the case, but the days of sinecures and jobbery are gone by. For the last ten or fifteen years, the qualifications sought for in the principal civil servants in Ireland have been ability, integrity, and per- severance. The chief posts are in the gift of the viceroy, who usually, as regards the most important, consults the prime minister. As the viceroy goes out with the Cabinet, he is sub- ject to the same control of Parliament direct and indirect as other ministers, and his appointments are open to like criticism and like influence. Even if he had the will he has not the power to foist upon the service of the State incapable officers. Those who know anything of the manner in which appointments have been made in Ire- land during the last few viceroyalties are aware of the intense pains which are always taken to find men — and, as a rule, to find Irishmen — who are best able to discharge in a true spirit of love for Ireland the duties of the -department concerned. The proof of the success attained is to be found in the inability of the most searching critics to find fault. For many years the government of Ireland has been subjected to a bitter hostility, which is not the hostility of the people but the hostility of a self-interested party. There is no single act of the recent Irish executive which has not been subjected to a severe examination by men anxi- ous to pick holes. Yet, in spite of the liability to error, from which not even the most upright civil servant is free, no instances of wilful mal-administra- tion have been brought to light and very few mistakes of judgment or pro- cedure. That the system of civil government in Ireland has been cruelly and fiercely assailed cannot be denied. But its assailants have not been the people on whose behalf the work is done ; but a parliamentary party, the breath of whose nostrils is agitation, and whose only hope of existence lies in the keeping up of discontent. If the

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present method were as entirely wrong as its enemies aver, if the men who carried it out were so entirely un- worthy of the confidence of the people for whom they work, it is absolutely certain that some grave blunder or some huge injustice would have been brought to light. But this has not been the case. The impartial historian of the future will assuredly allow that the charges so lavishly made have not been proved, and will not only acquit but applaud the system and the men of the civil service of Ireland of the present day.

But if the contempt passed on the Irish executive and the Irish civil ser- vice is unwarranted on the one hand, equally unfounded is the mistrust of Irish local authority which is displayed on the other. One class of politicians can see no good in the government of Ireland as at present constituted ; the other hold the Irish people to be utter- ly incapable of self-government. The latter would not only not extend the powers of local authorities but would curtail those already exercised. They would keep all the administration of the Boards of Guardians out of the hands of the elected members, and would raise rather than lower the municipal franchise and the qualifica- tion for town councils and local boards. Such a policy is opposed to the whole spirit of recent legislation : it is based on a want of knowledge of the charac- teristics of Irishmen and of the good work for many years carried out with- out clamour and without boast by a large number of local authorities in Ireland ; it is founded on the intoler- ance, that in bygone years opposed Catholic Emancipation, kept up State sanction of the religion of a minority, repressed agriculture by oppressing occupying tenants, and in a word sowed the seed of evil of which the present generation has reaped a plen- tiful crop. I earnestly believe that it is not likely to find support in the coming Parliament, and that as was stated at the head of this paper, the question for future 'decision is not

No. 312.— VOL. LII.

whether there should be any extension of Local Self-government in Ireland, but what form it should take and how far it should go.

And here it will be convenient to refer to a proposal which has been put forward by what is believed to be high authority. It is suggested that, in addition to the setting up of county, or perhaps provincial, councils, there should be a National Elective Council established in Dublin, and wielding the powers of all the principal central departments as at present constituted. Details of this proposal are not forth- coming, but it would seem to be con- templated that such a council should be formed by either direct or second- ary election, that is to say, either direct election by the ratepayers, or election by bodies chosen by the ratepayers, with or without crown nominees ; and that to it should be transferred the powers and the respon- sibilities of the Local Government Board, the Education Board, the Board of Works, the Fishery and Lunacy Boards, the Prison Board, certain financial functions of the Treasury, and certain functions of private legislation now vested in Par- liament itself. It has been urged that such a scheme would be sup- ported by those who claim to be the exponents of all Irish opinion, and would be a wide, if not final, step to the complete pacification of Ireland : that by it the Irish people would be fixed with the responsibility of their own affairs ; and that under it they would cease to trouble themselves unduly with imperial concerns : that peace and contentment would speedily replace agitation and hate.

If such a scheme were carried out it would be impossible to maintain for a decade the union between the coun- tries, and the severance would be brought about with an amount of turbulence far in excess of that con- sequent upon any other plan leading to the same goal. Let us see what would be the early effect of such a system. The National Council would

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claim at once to represent the national will, and to speak with the voice of the people. Upon every matter affect- ing Ireland directly or indirectly, whether properly within its discretion or not, the national council would be urged to express an opinion, and — who that knows Ireland can deny it ] — would do so. It is not proposed that the imperial executive respon- sible to Parliament should be divested of military and police control, or that the collection and disbursement of imperial funds should cease to be in the hands of imperial officers. Yet every act of every member of the con- stabulary would be criticised by the national council, and the interference of Parliament demanded with a force compared with which modern obstruc- tion would be pitiably weak. Irish members are ready enough now to call the attention of the House of Commons to whatever fails to com- mend itself to their good pleasure ; what would be .their course of action if there were a national council behind them 1 If Parliament finds it difficult now to resist concession after concession to importunate obstruction, what would be the state of affairs when whatever representations were made came with the sanction of a national council? The statutable limitation of the functions of such a body might be as precise as possible, but Irish ingenuity would evade it. Every pretext would be made for an expression of opinion which would suffice to sway the decision of Parlia- ment. It is not too much to say that no regiment could be moved in Ireland, no arrest made, without interference by the national council. Whatever action of the imperial executive de- pended on the collection of local funds would be liable to be thwarted by the veto of the national council. Even foreign affairs would not escape. For is it reasonable to suppose that an Irish national council would abstain from offering an opinion in the event of Great Britain being concerned in a European war ? There is not one

single step which Parliament could take in which it would not be necessary to consider the opinion and possible action of the Irish national council. Instead of pacifying the relations be- tween the two countries, the establish- ment of the Irish national council would embitter them, for it would invite and compel conflict, not upon minor matters of local administration, but upon grave affairs, in regard to which discussion would be difficult and dispute full of the most terrible risk.

The object of the Parnellite party is either (1) Legislative independence or (2) Entire separation. As they have not even now formulated their demand it is not possible from their own utterances to say which is their real aim ; but if reliance may be placed on the speeches made and the arguments used at the numerous meetings held throughout Ireland under the auspices of the National League, nothing short of entire separation from England will satisfy the extreme leaders of the present movement. In all considera- tions of the action which they are likely to take upon any particular policy, it is far safer to start with the assump- tion that they are working for separa- tion than that they are working for anything short of it. And any states- man who hopes to obtain their lasting support by something less than the absolute autonomy of Ireland, and the consequent dismemberment of the empire, must be prepared for disap- pointment. Let us, however, assume for a moment that legislative inde- pendence and some undefined plan of federation is the goal to which the Parnellites are directing their steps. Are they likely, even if this is the case, to be satisfied and weaned from further action by the setting up of such a national council as has been referred to I Would not such an elected administrative body be used solely as an instrument for obtaining legislative powers 1 Would it not be a powerful instrument for such a purpose] The aspirations of such a council would not be satisfied by

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powers of local legislation. They would speedily adopt the position of declining to carry out laws for which they were not responsible and in the framing of which they had no voice. They would be content with nothing less than the entire administration of all affairs in Ireland, whether imperial or local ; and they would rapidly agi- tate for the power of legislating on all subjects of whatever magnitude. Such a movement could only be met by Par- liament with resistance. Repressive measures would become necessary, and these would be met by more energetic action on the part of the Irish council. The controversy would grow hotter, feeling on each side more and more exasperated. And the end, whatever it might be, would be reached after a tenfold increase of the distrust and hostility between the two coun- tries which I believe there is not the slightest necessity for incurring.

If legislative independence were necessary for the prosperity of Ire- land, it would be far better to concede it voluntarily and without delay than to wait till it is forced from an unwilling Parliament. It would be wiser to be too soon than too late in such a move- ment. But there is nothing whatever to show that the connection of Ire- land with Great Britain is to the legislative detriment of the former. For several years the Imperial Parlia- ment has shown the greatest readiness to deal with Irish questions legis- latively, and any measure upon which there has been anything approaching agreement on the part of Irish mem- bers has been fully - accepted and readily dealt with. Irish speakers delight to speak of Irishmen as serfs, and the fashion has been followed. But it is difficult to find the serfdom. In every relation of life the Irishman is as free as air, bound only to respect the equal rights of his neighbour. His religion is free. He has provided for him education in schools of his own denomination for his children. His commerce is free ; and if he is an agriculturist he cannot be dispossessed

against his will of his tenant right, the value of which has, in many parts of the country, approached if not outgrown the value of the fee simple of the holding. Moreover, money is freely given to encou- rage all praiseworthy movements in Ireland, and some of very doubtful expediency. One of the very last acts of the expiring Parliament was to apply five millions of the national capital to loans for the purchase of their holdings by Irish agricultural tenants. For the development of tramways, for the improvement of land, for the extension of inland navi- gation, money is made available in a way to which the taxpayers would never consent if Ireland were to achieve the legislative independence for which some of her friends un- wisely clamour.

And this touches one of the chief diffi- culties in dealing with Ireland and the Irish. It requires not only the greatest care but much experience of men and manners to separate real grievances from imaginary, matters of fact from matters of sentiment ; nor only so, but to know what importance is to be attached to sentiment when sentiment cannot with safety be entirely disre- garded. On the one hand it is fatal to mistake the shadow for the sub- stance, to put aside sound principles and break laws of universal applica- tion which are founded on general ex- perience, in order to attempt to satisfy that which is at best an unreal and an unenduring complaint. On the other hand, it is foolish to ignore sentiment on matters about which sentiment is all-powerful. Let me give briefly an instance of the latter. Irishmen are urged to be loyal to the throne and the constitution, to pray for the wel- fare of the Queen and the royal family. Yet for many years Ireland has seen nothing of the Queen, and very little of any member of her Majesty's family. With Mr. Parnell and his followers all parts of Ireland are thoroughly acquainted. Loyalty to them is a realty which Irishmen G G 2

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can understand. Loyalty to the Queen is a shadowy thing which has for too long been left without any substantial encouragement.

Though Irishmen have little to gain and much to lose by entire legislative independence, and though both Ireland and England (the latter, perhaps, far the least) would suffer from entire administrative separation ; it would be for the advantage of each country that Irishmen should have a greater share of self-government than is at present accorded to them. The desire of influence which now finds vent in a tendency to intrigue, in the formation of unions and leagues, which endure for a time and after effecting little good and much mischief split up into fragments, should be turned into proper channels. The energy dis- played in moonlight drills, in the banding together of men to exert improper and more or less useless in- fluence on local affairs, should be at- tracted to the many purposes with re- ference to which local opinion should have proper sway. At present the recognised exercise of local authority is confined to too small a class, and consequently the classes outside the favoured few show their discontent by combinations for the exercise of un- recognised authority. These not being properly formed or properly guided do more harm than good, even from the point of view of their promoters. They ferment a needless antagonism between the law of the land and the wishes of the people ; they give an appearance of divergence between what is and what ought to be, for which there is no real reason. The comparative suc- cess of the National League in forming local branches has proved the exist- ence of a power of self-government among Irishmen, which wise states- manship will use and not ignore. If the men who form these branches were entrusted with responsibility for matters concerning themselves, and over which their control would be useful, they would be far less eager than now to interfere in matters in

which their influence is not wanted, and can do no good. A very brief ex- perience would make them aware of the difficulties inherent in all adminis- tration, and a knowledge of their own perplexities and their own obstacles would soon set up a respect for the difficulties and obstacles of others.

Ireland, like England, suffers from a complexity of areas of local adminis- tration. Inasmuch as the poor-law, upon which local government in both countries is more or less built, was later in Ireland than in England, the confusion is, perhaps, not so con- founded in the former as in the latter ; but still the intricacy of local jurisdic- tions, as well as the overlapping of local powers, calls loudly for simplifica- tion. The incidence too of local rating is involved. The county cess differs in its incidence from the poor-rate. Rural rating differs from urban rating. The poor rate is not a union charge as in England, but a charge on electoral divisions. It will need a firm hand as well as a wise head to deal with these various anomalies, with due considera- tion of vested interests on the one hand, and without yielding to the vis inertice on the other. But the task should be resolutely faced ; and if it is success- fully accomplished will be of wide and lasting benefit ; for upon it depends the building up of a sound system of Local Government in Ireland.

It is impossible within the limit of a paper to discuss the many details of such a system. Briefly, I may say that in Ireland the county should be made the basis of administration. County councils should be formed by a care- fully framed system of election, in the consideration of which the principle of voting to be adopted should be an all- important element.1 To these councils should be transferred the powers of

1 If, as is now the case with the poor-rate, the incidence is to be half on ownership, half on occupancy, provision must in fairness bi^ made for the due representation of each. But it is a groat question, which I have no space here to examine, whether occupancy should not for the future be made the sole source both of liability and of power.

The Extension of Local Government in Ireland.

the grand juries, and, with opening for delegation, of baronial sessions. They should have the management of lunatic asylums, and of all poor-law institutions. Upon the county should be thrown the cost of all indoor relief of the poor, leaving outdoor relief as a charge upon a smaller area. The sani- tary administration of the county should be in the hands of the county councils, save that in this respect large urban districts should be autonomous. Licensing powers, and all powers of taxation for purposes connected with the county should be vested in then county councils. Inasmuch as there would probably be many men of ability and power who would not obtain seats on the county councils, there should be smaller local bodies subordinate to the county councils, and acting over precisely defined areas wholly within the county boundary. Because much local work has to be done in which more than one county is interested, there should be ample power of combi- nation of counties, and ultimately, if perhaps not at first, provincial boards might be formed with fiscal powers over the whole area of each province. The county councils, and still more the provincial boards, might safely be entrusted with many of the powers of inspection and control now wielded by the several central departments. It would perhaps be impossible to do away with all imperial check on ex- penditure. The interests of the gene- ral taxpayer and of the future rate- payer should be guarded against lavish and improper pledging of the present rates, or greedy calls on the present taxes. But many of the functions of the Treasury, the Board of Works, and the Local Government Board on fiscal matters might safely be left to the county councils and provincial boards. Lastly, Parliament might well part with much of the work now done in the committee rooms. If county coun- cils were not held large enough bodies to deal with all private-bill legislation affecting their own counties, then, pend- ing the establishment of provincial

boards, the control exercised over private-bill legislation in London should be either transferred to Dublin, or a system be set up of itinerant courts. There should be no longer any excuse whatever left for the complaint that the cost of promotion of or opposition to private Bills in Westminster is pro- hibitive as far as Ireland is concerned. In this respect Parliament has shown itself very tenacious of control. But it is quite clear that the time has come when this tenacity, valuable enough in the past, may safely be abandoned.

It is, I have said, quite impossible in a paper like this to attempt to set out what must be an intricate and ought to be a comprehensive scheme. The above is the briefest possible sketch of such a system as I believe would be of enormous advantage to Ireland. Every detail of it must be carefully thought out by men capable of forming a valuable opinion, and boldly worked out by men of construc- tive ability. If based on a wise gradation of power, opportunity would be given for the exercise of all degrees of local statesmanship. There is quite enough work to do for a share to be available for every one able to take it. The difficulty will be far greater to find men for work than work for men ; and a full demand would be made on the local energy which is now either wasted or used for valueless or mischievous objects.

I have explained what I consider would be the danger certain to arise from the establishment of a general national council. But there is one sphere of administration in which a central elective board would do much good without liability to the same danger. Ere long education in Ireland must be made compulsory. The present educational system is not suited to the requirements of the day. The Board of National Education, though its members are selected from among the wisest in the land with sole regard to their ability to do their work in the interests of the people, has less popu- larity and consequently less sanction

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than there would be in the case of an elected board. If a central board were set up upon some well considered suffrage entrusted with the carrying out of the new law a great concession would be made to local self-govern- ment at very little risk. Such a body would be limited to one purpose and unable to speak with authority on others. It would do much to remove friction in the spread of education. It would be necessarily economical. It would have to do with many ques- tion of difficult detail, and yet be able to avoid shipwreck on matters of principle. The lines of its action should be so laid down by Parliament as to reduce as much as possible all danger from religious disputes, but with- in these lines there would be plenty of room for broad and valuable work.

The course of Local Government in Ireland must be cleverly steered. There are rocks on either hand. But if it is cleverly steered, without weak abandonment of sound principles or equally weak mistrust of local honesty, with a firm determination to maintain imperial unity and with an equally firm desire to extend local responsi- bility, I earnestly believe that much may be done to wean the Irish people from mischievous agitation — the pur- suit of a will-o'-the-wisp which is leading them to ruin — and attract them to spheres of usefulness in which their wit, their keenness, and their love of combination may be of real and lasting benefit to their country.

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MRS. DYMOND.

CHAPTER XXVII. THE BLACK SHADOWS.

As disasters thickened and closed in Mrs. Marney's letters became more scarce. She was still alone with Madame, whose chief anxiety was for Max, little as he deserved it. " All those friends of his were drdles, and he should tell them so," said the old lady, who seemed to think that this was the way to settle matters at once. Then came the news of the siege of Paris. Max was there shut up with the rest of them, but Mrs. Marney wrote in happy excitement, for that same post had brought a letter from her husband. He was safe at head quarters, and day by day the readers of the Daily Velocipede might trace his brilliant career. Emperors, princes, marshals, diplomats, Marney seemed to be the centre, and the lead- ing figure of them all.

It was not till January was nearly over that the confirmation of the surrender of Paris reached Tarndale. This news was followed by rumours of every sort, and finally by a long ram- bling letter from Mrs. Marney, full of many laments. She had seen little of Marney, who had been at Chalons and Metz most of the time, and who was returning to Paris now that the siege was being raised. Did Susy know that poor Max had been wounded at Champigny ? They had had a letter by a balloon from Mademoiselle Fayard, who had seen him in the Wallace ambulance. Madame du Pare also was determined to nurse her son, and talked of return- ing to the house at ISTeuilly, which they heard was safe and scarcely injured.

" Do not be surprised if you see me after all," wrote Mrs. Marney. " I

cannot stop here alone with all I love so far distant from me. Ah ! Susy ; I should have done better to come to you, as you wished, but with my hus- band in danger how could I leave the country ? "

Susy was full of alarm at the thought of her mother's dangerous journey through such a country at such a time. She wrote at once to Neuilly and to Avignon, imploring Mrs. Marney to wait until things were more settled, promising to meet her later in Paris if need be. To her letters she received no answer ; and a week passed full of anxiety. Jo was at Cambridge, she had no one but Mr. Bolsover to consult. She might as well have talked to a looking-glass as to the sympathising little man who invariably reflected her own expression of face. One day Susy thought of telegraphing to Neuilly to ask if her mother had arrived ; the answer came sooner than Susanna had dared expect it, early next morning before she was up:—

' Madame du Pare, Neuilly, to Mrs. Dymond, Crowbeck Place, Tarndale.

" Your mother is here very ill ; pray come."

Susy did not wait to consult Mr. Bolsover again ; she wrote a line to Mrs. Bolsover, sent her little Phraisie to the hall with the nurse, and started at once by an early train to town.

And thus it happened that at three o'clock in the morning awakening out of a common-place dream, Susy found herself on board a steamer nearing the shores of France ; with the stars shining through the glass in the roof of the cabin. A lamp is swinging, some of the".: passengers are preparing to land, wrapping

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rugs and parcels together. There are dull sounds and tramplings over head, and a couple of low voices are whispering to each other such things as people whispered in that disastrous year of 1871, when all voices were telling of changes and death, and trouble, and people gone away and families ruined and separated. "We shall be in directly," says the first voice, that of the stewardess, " but I don't think you will find one of them left as you expect."

" Ah ! those Prussians ! " says the second speaker in that whispering voice which people use in darkened places and at night; and still the steamer paddles on. Susy's own thoughts are too anxiously travelling ahead for her to take so keen an interest as she might have done at any other time in this new and unexpected phase of life. Is her journey too late she wonders, or is her mother still alive, still calling for her, and wanting her ? Susy is superstitious, as anxious people are. The two melancholy voices depress her, and seem like an echo of evil things to come ; the look of her own hands lying listless in her black lap, frightens her. She starts up im- patiently, and begins to hope again as unreasonably as she had feared. Is everything changed, is nothing changed 1 Can it be that she shall find it all as in old days when troubles were not, nor wars to call men from their quiet toil to join the ranks of devastating armies 1 Presently they reached the French coast, it is time to go up on deck with the rest of the passengers. Susy keeping to the protection of the other two women comes up on deck and sees the dark line of the quai ; lights go by, ropes are hauled in, and once more Susanna hears the familiar French sing-song of the people exclaim- ing and calling to one another. The voices sound melancholy, but that may be her fancy, or because it is a cock- crow sort of hour. Mrs. Dymond carrying her hand-bag walks along to the hotel in company with her fellow travellers. She had come across by

chance with a party of Cook's tourists availing themselves of the escort of the great circumnavigator of our days whose placards and long experience seemed to guarantee the safety of his adventurous followers. The only other ladies of the party were English- women like Susanna herself, and also evidently travelling with a purpose. One, the friend of the stewardess, an old bedizened creature belonging to the race of the wandering British spinster, walked ahead still bemoaning herself as she went, the other a hand- some young woman, of sober dress and appearance, stopped short suddenly as she crossed the quai by Mrs. Dymond' s side.

"Look!" she said, "a German!" and with a thrill they recognise a brazen spike and the gleam of a helmet as the sentinel passes steadily up and down under a lamp-post in front of a garish -looking restaurant of which all the doors and windows are awake and flaring with gas, and evidently expecting guests.

Susanna for all her sad preoccupa- tions stopped short with the rest of them, and experienced a curious thrill seeing the first ripple of that brazen tide which had overspread the desolate country of France. There the whole story seemed told as she watched the spike of the helmet and the big boots steadily pacing the pavement. She wondered at the courage of the English girl who went straight up to the sentry and asked him in abruptest German, "How soon was he going back to Berlin ? " The helmet stopped and answered good-naturedly enough, " He didn't know, the King was at Rheims, they expected to leave in a day or two." He was a big tawny young fellow with a handsome heavy face. Mademoiselle Celestine, the waitress at the Hotel et Restaurant des Etrangers, pouring out her cafe-au-laits told the passengers that he and his companions were tres gentils, they had done no harm. They had good appetites but the mayor paid for all they ate ; she didn't believe the stories

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people told. They were there with the general and his staff. . . . Made- moiselle Celestine would have gone on blessing her enemies at greater length but people from above, from around, from below, from within, from with- out, began calling out ' •' Gar$on, gar$on ! ' ' bells rang violently, Cook's tourists shouted, and Britons demanded their suppers.

The house was so crowded, so noisy and uncomfortable, that Susy and her two casual acquaintances, after listen- ing for some minutes to the landlady's glowing descriptions of blazing fires and velvet sofas at the railway station close by, started boldly into the night to find this haven, and to await the six o'clock train there.

A few gas becks were flickering at the station, where they found looking- glasses and velvet sofas according to promise. In the first-class waiting- room a group of oificers in white uni- forms with many accoutrements were dozing away the time, with their boots and swords extended upon the chairs and couches.

Susy looked at them and instinc- tively left them to their slumbers, and went into the second waiting-room with her companions and sank down into the first-come seat.

A lady and a little girl were already sitting upon the wooden bench beside her. It was too dark to see their faces, but not too dark to hear the lady's plaintive voice — " What a jour- ney ! what nervous terrors ! what delays ! after six months' enforced absence to return to a country in such a state — no lamps, no omnibus, no trains to depart, Germans every where." (Two tall jangling officers with great cloaks and boots come in from the next room, look round and walk away.) "Ah!" shrieks the lady with fresh exclamations of alarm, " and I without a passeport ! I could not get one where I was, at Vittington, a little village in the Eastern Conte ; nor have I one for that child who only yesterday was study- ing her piano at a school, for why

should she lose her time because her country is being ravaged ? " And so the poor lady talks on unheeded, finally nodding off to sleep. The time passed slow and strange and chill, the dawn began to grow, Susy was sitting by a window looking on the platform. A veil of early dew was upon everything, and figures began to move like dreams across the vapour. At last a train arrived with snorts and clamour about five o'clock, conveying among other passengers some wounded Prussians. Then for the first time, Susy, forgetting her own preoccupation, realised the horrors of war ; and as she looked again she saw that these were the victors, these wounded, wearied men, scarce able to drag themselves along. Some were carried in their compan- ions' arms, some sick and languid came leaning on their guns, some again were loaded with spoil and bags. One soldier passed the window carrying a drawing-room clock under his arm, and a stuffed bag like an old- clothes-man's upon his back. The wounded were to change carriages, and went hobbling from one train to another ; among the rest came a poor Prussian soldier, pale, wasted, with one leg amputated, slowly, painfully dragging on a single crutch, with another man to help him, and in the crowded rush the crutch slipped and the soldier fell to the ground half fainting. His companion tried in vain to raise him ; not one of the shadowy figures moved to his help. Susy, with a cry of pity started up ; but the glass door was locked and she could not get out. It was a Frenchman, at last, who came forward and picked the poor fellow up, helping to carry him with looks of aversion and deeds of kindness.

And then, at last, the way being clear, the weary Prussians having de- parted, another train drew up in the early morning light, and Susy found herself travelling towards Paris and her journey's end. The light grew, and with it came the thought of the coming day, what would it bring to her, of good or evil? This much of

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good it must bring that she should be with her mother. And Du Pare, did she hope to see him ? She could not have answered or acknowledged, even to herself, what she hoped. From her mother she hoped to hear something of his doings, and to get news of that one person in all the world who seemed most to exist for her. She longed to see him, to speak to him once more, to get some certainty of his well-being, to be reassured by one word, one look. She dreaded the meeting, its inadequate explanation, its heartbreaking, disappointing silence.

The English girl opposite had taken off her hat and smoothed her long plaits of hair, and now, with a Testament in her hand, was read- ing her early orison. The morning grew, the sunrise touched the wide country, they passed orchards in flower, green spring shining upon every cottage and pleasant garden and spreading fields. One little orchard remained fixed- in Susanna's mind, pink with blossoms, and in the midst upreared the figure of a Prussian sol- dier in full uniform, stretching his arms while the children of the house- hold clustered round about him, and the rays of the rising sun flashed from his brass helmet.

As they travelled on, stopping at the various stations, more pas- sengers got in, all with the same miserable story, sometimes piteous, sometimes half-laughable. An old lady with frizzed curls described her home as she had found it after eighty Prussians had inhabited her house, the linen, the crockery, the clocks, all stolen and spoilt, the flowers down-trampled. " They even took my son's • cigars, which I had hidden in my wardrobe," said the poor lady, waxing more and more wrath ; " and the monsters left a written paper in the box, ' Merci pour les bons cigars ! ' Ah ! that emperor," says the old lady, " to think what he has brought us to, with his flatteries, and his vanity, and his grand army."

Another woman, dressed in black, sadder, more quiet, who seemed to be

returning home, utterly worn out, now spoke for the first time.

"One thing we must not forget," she says, " we have had twenty years of peace, and yet only one man in France has had the courage to adhere to the fallen emperor."

Susy's heart failed her as they neared their journey's end, for they came to a desolate country of broken bridges, of closed houses, of windows and palings smashed, of furniture piled in sheds along the line ; and as they neared Paris, to a wide and devastated plain across which the snow was be- ginning to drift. The plain spread dim and dreary, sprinkled with ghosts of houses, skeletons of walls that had once inclosed homes, now riddled and charred with burnt beams, and seams, and cracks, telling the same sad story, reiterated again and again, of glorious conquest and victory.

CHAPTER XXVIII. THREE MILES ALONG THE ROAD.

WHEN Susy stepped out of the train and looked around, she was struck by the change in the people standing all about the station. They had strange, grave, scared faces ; they were more like English people than French people ; every woman was in mourn- ing, which added to the sadness of the place. A cold east wind was blowing up the silent street and across the open place in front of the railway. A man came to offer to carry her bag ; when she told him she wanted a car- riage to take her to Neuilly, he shrugged his shoulders — " A carriage," said he ; " where am I to find a car- riage 1 the Prussians have made cutlets of our horses."

Susy looked round, there were porters and trucks in plenty, but not a carriage was to be seen. It was a long weary tramp after a night spent in travelling ; but there was no help for it, and after a minute's hesitation, Susy told the man to take up her bag. She had walked farther

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in old days when she was coming and going and giving her music lessons.

The man trudged in silence ; it was a good three miles' walk across the boulevards, and by streets and shops ; some were open, some were not yet reassured enough to let down their closed shutters. One of the very first sights which met Susy along the road was a dispirited, straggling regiment marching into Paris from the frontier, torn, shabby, weary, the mud-stained officers marching with the men. These men were boys, for the most part half grown, half clothed, dragging on with a dull and piteous look of hunger and fatigue, while the piercing wind came whistling up the street. " They are disarmed, that is why they look so cold," said the porter stopping for a moment to look after them. "There is one who can keep up no longer ; " as he spoke one of the poor fellows fell out of the ranks, too much exhausted to go on any farther ; a halt was called, and many of them sank down on the pavement just where they stopped.

The way seemed longer and longer ; more than once she was obliged to rest upon the benches along the road. It was now about twelve o'clock, the sun had come out bright though with- out warmth, and it somewhat cheered the shivering city. They reached the Arc at last, still swathed in its wooden shields. Susy thought of her last sunset drive, and of the glories in which the stony heroes of the past had then brandished their spears. Here Susy saw an empty carriage coming out of a side street, and she told the porter to secure it.

The man thanked her for the money she pxit into his hand as she sank tired out into a corner of the coach. The driver leant back upon his seat, and seeing she was tired and prepared to pay, began to make difficulties.

"Villa du Pare, Avenue de Neu- illy 1 " says the coachman ; "you will not find any houses standing in the Avenue de Neuilly. The Prussians have taken care of that. I will drive

you if you like ; but you will have your course for nothing."

" Pray drive on," said Susy wearily, " I will tell you when to stop."

''•When I tell you that there are no houses left to drive to ! " persists the coachman, " but I must be paid all the same, whether the house is there or not."

"Yes, of course you shall be paid," said poor Susy, utterly tired, fright- ened, impatient, scarcely knowing what to fear or to expect.

Madame Du Fare's letter had been dated from the villa, but Susanna's heart began to fail her as she drove on. They drove past blackened walls, by trees half destroyed and charred, and breaking out into pale fresh green among the burnt and broken branches ; and by gardens all trampled and ravished.

Susanna was almost too weary to think, too sadly impressed to be frightened. She seemed to herself to have gone through some great battle, some long and desperate siege, and now again, when the victory had been so sorely won, the enemy re- pulsed with such desperate resolution, now that she was so tired, so worn, came a fresh assault more difficult to withstand than anything that had gone before. Should she see him again, would he be there at home once more, was he well of his wound, was it — was it Max or her mother that she had come for ? she suddenly asked herself with an angry, desperate effort. Mrs. Dymond, absorbed in her own thoughts had driven past the house without seeing it, and the coachman had stopped of his own accord in a sunny, windy corner, where three ruined streets divided from the broad avenue.

" Well ! " says he, " I told you how it would be."

She looked blankly up and down the road ; she scarcely knew where she was. Then, as she looked again, she remembered once seeing Du Pare coming up one of these streets in his workman's blouse.

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" Am I to turn up these roads — am I to go on ? " cries the coachman, again stamping his wooden shoes upon the box to warm his feet.

"I will get out, follow me," says Susy, suddenly remembering where they had come to, and she sprang out and walked back along the avenue to the villa, which was not far distant. It seemed like a miracle to see the old green gates actually standing, and the villa unaltered in the shaded garden. The gates were splintered and half broken down, the garden trampled over, but the house was little changed and stood in the cold spring sunshine, with no sign of the terrible wave of war which had passed over the village. Even the weather- cock was safe, glittering and quivering changefully, for the east wind had gone round to some warmer quarter. A sick woman, propped up by pillows, was sitting out in the garden, a stout old lady was trotting backwards and for- wards from the house with wraps and bottles and all that miserable para- phernalia of sickness. (How well one knows the look of it, one could almost believe that pain and suffering and sleepless nights came in those bottles and round china pots. Nervous mise- ries, brown studies, blue devils, pink, yellow, white decoctions, there they all stand waiting to be taken at bed- time or dinner-time, or whatever the proper time may be.)

Poor Mary Marney was looking wild and worn, and strangely changed in these few months.

" The wind blows chill," she was saying, querulously. " If only I could get into that patch of sunshine, but I can't move, I can't get there," she cried, suddenly breaking down.

" La ! la ! la ! la ! " says Madame du Pare, extra noisy, trying to be cheerful. " What is there to prevent you being in.the sunshine. A'ie /" adds madame, " if it was not for this rheumatic arm I could carry you there myself. Denise ! what are you about ? "

Susy stood frozen in the gateway for a moment, too shocked to move.

Was this her mother, this her busy hard-working mother, thus changed, thus terribly altered in so short a time?

While she paused, Mary, looking up, saw her daughter, and gave a faint scream. Madame also looks up.

"A la bonheur/" says the one cheerful, unemotional person present. " You see she come at once, and 1 was right," cries the old lady, rushing to the front, and bestowing two hearty kisses on Susy's pale cheeks.

All madame's preventions were gone. Susy was in her highest favour.

" You are a googirl to come," she repeated, pronouncing it as if it was one single word.

" Mamma, my dear ! my dear ! ".. Susy whispered, kneeling down by her mother's side ; for she could not stand. " I have come to fetch you, I have come to make you well again, mamma ! mamma ! " She hardly knew what she said in her low, tender whisper ; but Mary saw her looks of love, felt her warm, panting breath, and the quick beat of the pulses, and asked no more.

Madame took Susy up stairs after a while. The house had been used as an ambulance. There were beds everywhere — in the dining-room and the drawing-room. Most of the appliances of the ambulance had remained.

Susy followed her hostess into one of the rooms; it had been the little boys' nursery ; it was now full of empty iron bedsteads.

The old lady made her sit down on one of them, as she told her, not with- out kindness, but plainly enough, what the doctor had said.

" He had declared Mrs. Marney to be suffering from an aneurism ; her very life depended on perfect calm and quiet — Calm ! quiet ! I ask you how is that to be procured ? And that vile husband ! Oh ! I could tell her how deceived she is in him, but she will not hear reason ; " and madame, in that peculiar voice in which people repeat scandal and bad news, assured

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Susy that Marney was not far off, he was comfortably established in the neighbourhood, and absenting himself on purpose. Max had heard things in his ambulance. A wounded man there had had dealings with Marney. We will go together," says madame, " we will make inquiry. When we are chased from this, as my son declares will be the case, your dear mother must not be abandoned. I must go back ; I have no rents, nothing to depend upon here. In the south Max has a little 'farm, which will keep us both. I sent for you, my poor child, when I heard the doctor's ter- rible announce, and we will arrange presently what we should do. Here is your old room ; the doctor of the ambulance has been living here ; you see nothing is new. It is all the same."

There is something which appeals to most imaginations in places scarcely altered, when those who inhabit them are so changed. Susy looked round as she sank wearily down upon the old creaking wooden bedstead. How often before this had she cried herself to sleep upon it. She looked at the whitewashed walls, at the shadow of the window bar travelling across the tiles ; then a curious shock reminded her of the difference of the now and of the time to which she had travelled back again. . . .

She came down to find her mother im- patiently waiting for her. Mrs. Marney had been carried into the sitting-room, and Susy's hope sank afresh as she looked at the changed face turned to the door, and expecting her so eagerly. One little crisp, familiar wave of curly hair beneath her cap seemed the only thing which remained of Susy's mother as she had been but a few weeks ago. Poor Mrs. Marney was worn by many sorrows and anxieties besides her illness. Of Marney she knew scarcely anything, and that was the chief of her many pains.

' ' Oh, Susy ! I would not trouble you with my troubles." she said, " but I have gone through more than I could

bear. After the first weeks at Avignon he scarcely wrote ; he scarcely gave one sign, and I knew not what to fear. I have been mad to see him. Madame has said cruel things which I seem to have no strength to hear. I wrote to him when I first came here. And now I hear nothing, I know nothing," Susy turned scarlet ; but she soothed her mother again, with many gentle words and caresses.

CHAPTER XXIX. ADIEU LES SONGES D*OE.

THINGS come about simply and na- turally which seem very terrible and full of emotion before hand. Here was Susanna, after all that had hap- pened, standing with Madame du Pare by Max's bedside, and neither of the three seemed moved beyond their ordinary looks and ways. Had they parted yesterday in a garden of roses they could not have met more quietly, though they met with disaster all about, among omens and forebod- ings of worse evil to come. For a moment the room seemed to Susy to shake beneath her feet, but it was only for a moment. The sight of his pale worn face, so sad and strangely marked with lines of care, and yet so familiar withal, called her back to the one thought of late so predomi- nant in her mind : what she could do for him, how she could help him best. Of sentiment and personal feel- ing she could not think at such an hour.

Great events carry people along into a different state of mood and being, to string them to some greater chord than that of their own personality. In all these strange days and stirring episodes Susanna seemed to herself but one among the thousands who were facing the crisis of their fate, a part of all the rest, and yet at the same time she knew that every feeling she had ever known was there keenly alive, unchanged by change.

" Ah ! we have had a narrow escape," said madame. " They got

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the ball out of his chest ; a little more and it was in his lungs. But he is well now, and he was able to save his man. Eh! Max?"

" Save my man, mamma 1 " said Max, smiling faintly. " There was not much of him saved, poor fellow. I pulled what was left of him from under his horse, then some one helped me up. By the way, can you arrange for Adolphe to return to the villa to- morrow ? Caron will bring a carriage for us."

" Why, of course, comment done. I will speak to the sister at once," said Madame du Pare, jumping up. Then she paused. " Susy has something to ask you," she said. " Who was it, Max, who saw Marney at St. Cloud ? Who can give us his address ? "

"It was Adolphe," said Max, shortly. " You had better leave Mr. Marney to his own affairs."

" I wish it were possible," Susy said with a sigh ; " but my mother cannot rest day or night. I am driven to look for him. It is only to help her that I am here."

" You will find Adolphe in the next room," said Du Pare, looking disap- pointed. " My mother will guide you. Good-bye; do not stay now," and he put out his hand.

He spoke advisedly. He was still weak from illness. This meeting was almost too much for his strength, and he dreaded one kind word from Susy, lest, like a woman, he should break into tears. These were not times for • tears of sensibility. There had been too many tears shed, Max used to think. Statesmen wept when they should have resolved ; made speeches where silence would have been more to the purpose ; and Du Pare felt that for the present, for Susy's sake and for his own, they must be as strangers together. His was a some- what old-fashioned creed, but one which, after all, has kept the world going in honour and self- respect since the beginning of all honour, and Du Pare, having made up his mind, was not in the habit of

wasting his time by undoing it again. He was but half a Frenchman, but he loved his country, its welfare, its good name beyond all other things. For the last four weeks he had laid patiently waiting for his wound to heal, now that his strength was returning he longed to be at work once more. It was little enough, but it was something. One more pair of arms to help to keep order in the chaos, one more recruit on the side of justice and of law.

Max followed Susanna's tall re- treating figure to the door with his sick man's wistful looks. She stopped for a moment, looked back, faintly smiled, and passed on. The two were in deeper sympathy in their silent estrangement than in any romantic pro- tests and explanations. The next room had been a grand lady's boudoir once. It was still hung with a few smart pictures and ornamental glasses. A young soldier, in undress, with a wounded shoulder, who was standing in a window, greeted them cheerfully and immediately began fumbling with his good arm at his red trousers pocket.

" Good-morning, Madame du Pare," he cried. " Your son told me he was expecting you. I want to show you this." And he produced a purse, in which, with some coppers, was a piece of his own bone wrapped up in news- paper.

The next man to him who was bedridden brought a bit of his knee- cap from under the pillow. He had a handsome brown face, and lay looking up wearily ; he couldn't sleep, he was never at ease, he said ; his comrade had been writing home for him. " He won't tell them of his wound," cried the man in the window. " He made me say that he had a slight sprain in the leg," and the good-natured young fellow roared with laughter at the joke. " Never mind, we shall see thee a captain yet, Jean ! " he said gaily.

"A captain! not even a corporal,' answers poor Jean.

Some other men who were playing

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cards and dominoes at a table in the centre of the room looked up and greeted Madame du Pare, who seemed to know them all. One poor fellow, who was looking over a comrade's cards, came striding forward with both hands in his trousers pockets. This was the Adolphe whom Max had saved at the risk of his own life. He was a sergeant, a superior sort of man, with a handsome face. He had been a carpenter when the war broke out. He had been wounded in the side. He had a wife and three little children, he told Susanna. He was going home to them, " but I shall never be able to work for them again," he said sadly, and Susy could hardly repress a cry of compassion as he showed her his stumped lingers — they had been clean cut oft' both hands.

" Tu vivras de tes rentes " cried one of the card players cheerfully, and again the poor fellows all laugh, not heartlessly, but with the real courage and humility of endurance, which is more touching than any bitter complaints. Adolphe, who had been taken prisoner, had seen Marney at Versailles in the Prussians' head- quarters, and it was Marney who had helped his escape, giving him money and also certain commissions to execute in Paris. Adolphe, being questioned, told Susy of a place where Marney was always to be heard of ; he had often carried letters for him there — a cafe at St. Cloud, it was easy enough to find. While they were talk- ing madame, who hated being quiet, was walking round the room with her basket on her arm, distributing various things which she thought might be useful to the patients. She offered a ' newspaper to one of them, who refused it gaily with thanks.

" I never read them," said he, " since the war began, they are nothing but lies. Holloa ! Who wants the last number of the Fausse Nouvelle ?" he shouts.

A few beds off lay a poor English- man. He had enlisted in the line. He had been with General Failly at Lyons. " He has been very ill, poor fellow,"

said madame, as Susy joined her. "John Perkins! here is an English lady come to see you ! "

" See me ! There is not much of me fit to see," muttered poor John Perkins, wearily, pulling up the sheet over his face.

The sister-in-charge now came up. She was dressed in her sisters' dress, with a white coiffe and loose grey sleeves. She had a fine and sensitive face, and spoke like a person of some distinction, but she seemed distressed and over-tasked.

" Your son has a home to go to ; he is ready to go, the doctor tells me. So many of my patients would be the better for a change, but I have no- where to send them. Everything is in ruins. Our convalescent hospital has been wrecked ; the furniture has been given for ambulances. All is gone, all is destroyed. We do all we can for them. Mr. Wallace says they are to have anything they want."

It was a handsome house, polished and shining, there were Englishmen to wait, carved ceilings, tall windows, and yet it was a sad place to think of. Susy came away haunted by pain. Madame was not a comforting com- panion, the consciousness of all this suffering rendered her morose and irritable. She was anxious about her son, and she had the fate of her old friend, Mademoiselle Fayard, on her mind. Mademoiselle Fayard, after being driven from Neuilly, had lodged over an undertaker's shop in the same street as the hospital, and thither madame insisted on going.

The young undertaker received them in the uniform of the National Guard. " Mademoiselle Fayard and her brother were gone," he said, " but their address was always to be had at the convent of the Petite SMUTS." In reply to inquiries about himself, he answered blushing, that he had volunteered. He had been in three battles, and had got his discharge ; he had been wounded. His wife had given him up for dead. He found her in mourning for him when he got back. . . .

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It was but a few hours since Susy had left her home, and already it seemed to her natural to hear all these histories, to see ruin and trouble on every side, and incongruous things which no longer surprised her. A few minutes later she was standing with Madame du Pare in the old courtyard of a convent. A pile of knapsacks was heaped against the old grey wall, some soldiers were coming in at the gateway, and two nuns were advancing to receive them. The soldiers looked well pleased, and the nuns, too, seemed amused. They were all on the best of terms. The nuns smile and fold their hands, the soldiers laugh and nod and scamper up stairs to their allotted cells. " Poor fellows ! they would have had to sleep out of doors all night if we had not taken them in," said the nuns. " We had one ward of the infirmary empty, and the Superior said the soldiers might occupy it." The sister went on to tell Madame du Pare how they had kept their infirmary open almost all through the siege until one morning when a poor old fellow had gone out early to get a drink at the fountain in the garden, and an obus fell and killed him, "just there where the sun is shin- ing," said the Sceur Marie Joseph. " All of the nuns wanted to go to him, but Bonne Mere ordered us down on our knees and went alone. The Prussians seemed to have got the range of our convent, for the shells fell at intervals all that day, and we moved the old men, not without diffi- culty and danger. We had hardly got them out when a great bomb came crashing into the infirmary. You can see for yourself," says the sister, open- ing the infirmary door.

All was restored again, the holes were mended in the floor with squares of new wood, the orderly beds were in their places, and the old men safe back in their beds.

"Nothing happens to us," said an old fellow, with a long white beard, sitting up in bed ; " here we lie, tied by the leg ! "

"I have been to Prussia," says

another, in an arm-chair, beside him, with a white nightcap pulled over his ears, talking on continuously whether anybody listened to him or not, " I have pillaged, too, in my time, but, thank God [Diod marchi he pronounced it], we are not bad men like those Prussians. We used to take to eat because we were hungry. We didn't pillage for nothing at all. No, no ; we are soldiers, not bandits," says he bringing his hand down upon his knee. "If we hadn't been be- trayed we should have smashed those Prussians."

" Yes, we should have smashed them ! " cries a third old feeble fellow on his pillow just beyond.

A lady in black was sitting by his bedside, a sweet-faced woman. A dame de charite they called her, an Englishwoman, living in Paris, who gave herself up to visiting the poor. When they asked the nuns about Mademoiselle Fayard, they said she too was well known at the convent, and often came to read to the old men. She was lodging close by with her brother, next door to the Carmelite convent in the adjoining street. Mrs. Dymond was longing to get home to her own sick woman again, and Madame du Pare promised that this should be their last visit. Susanna could not help thinking of Dante's journey as she followed madame's steady steps. They came out into the street, and presently found themselves standing in the Rue d'Enfer in front of an old grim house, with grey and silent walls, against which came the beating sleet and the cutting winds. Two men were at work in the yard carting away a heap of stones and plaster. A little girl was standing at the door, too much engrossed by the bombshells to understand what they said at first. " Look ! they are removing the ruins from the chapel, the bombs fell just there, mesdames, piercing right through into the cellar beneath. The director of the ladies escaped as by a miracle. We only came home yesterday. Our lodge

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is in an indescribable state." By degrees the little girl was made to understand what it was they wanted, and after consultation with her mother, who was at work indoors, she came back with the news that Mademoiselle Fayard was at home, up stairs at the very top of the house, and Susy and her old guide now climbed flight after flight of stone steps, bound together, as in old French houses, by wrought iron banisters. At the very top of the house, under the sky- light, they found the door to which they had been directed, and rang a bell, which echoed in the emptiness. Presently they heard steps, and the door was opened, and Mademoiselle Fayard, the shadow of herself, so thin, changed, worn, limp, opened the door. Madarne's grunts of compassion- ate recognition nearly overcame the poor lady as she fell weeping into her old friend's arms. She flitted before them exclaiming, and hastily opened the door of the room where she had been sitting with her brother. It was a long, low room in the roof of the old house, littered with books and pack- ing cases. They had prepared to fly at one time, Mademoiselle Fayard explained, and had commenced to pack.

" Brother ! brother ! here is Ma- dame du Pare," cries the ghost of Mademoiselle Fayard to the skeleton of her brother, who was sitting in an old dressing-gown by a smouldering stove in the semi-darkness of the room. ^The old lady had already lit up her lamp, and as they came in she hospitably turned it up with her trembling hands, while he disencumbered two chairs for the ladies. " Oh ! my poor frens," says madame, sitting heavily down. " What have we all suffered ! " Susy could only look her pity as she listened to the sad reiteration of cold, hunger, hope deferred, darkness and anxiety.

The Fayards were both speaking to- gether ; they described their past alarms, their weary waiting, how the food and the fuel failed first, and then the light ; they used to go

No. 312.— VOL. LII. '

to bed at seven o'clock, and lie awake the long hours listening to the boom of the guns ; how towards the end of the siege the bombs began to fall in their street and upon the houses all around them ; the old lady and gentleman felt the crash of the first that fell into the linen-closet of the ladies of the Carmelite Convent next door ; the pompiers had hardly put out the tire when another bomb broke into the chapel. The petite soeur towriere, who was arranging the altar, stood alone and unhurt in the midst of the falling timber and glass, but the pulpit was destroyed, and the marble columns were injured, the sisters could not escape because of their vow, and had to remain in the cellars. For a whole fortnight, every day, the priest went down to say mass, though it wa? dangerous to cross the court, for bomb after bomb kept falling there.

"Once we went away," said Mademoiselle Fayard, in her extin- guished voice, " but we had to come back for food. Our ticket was of no use in any other district, and we thought it best to remain at home. Many days I have waited for three hours in the pouring rain to obtain our daily allowance of food. We could hardly cook it, we had no fuel left. Oh ! it was bitter cold," said she ; " we have endured very much; and if only it had been to some good end we should not have felt our sufferings." The old people promised to come over very soon. They asked affectionately after Max. Mademoiselle Fayard had been to see him in the ambulance as soon as she heard of his wound. He, too, had been to see them during the siege. He had brought them a couple of new-laid eggs "as a present," said the old lady. " I know he paid fifteen francs for the two. Oh, madame, the price of everything ! Cabbages were five francs apiece ! Elephants, monkeys, cats, all were at exorbitant prices."

As the two women turned home- wards, the streets were full of peo- ple in black, with sad faces ; they

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passed soldiers and more soldiers, all disarmed and ragged to look upon, and Franctireurs in top-boots lined with old newspapers. As they passed the Luxembourg Gar- dens they could see the tents of the shivering soldiers sleeping within. Many of them were sick, just out of ambulance, some had not even tents.

Madame du Pare walked on steadily, and Susy hurried after. They were both anxious to get home, but as they passed a bookseller's shop on the quay, Madame du Pare went in for one minute to ask some questions about M. Caron, who was a friend of the shopkeeper. M. Caron was down near Corbeil looking after his mills ; he was coming up next day ; nobody was doing any business. The bookseller himself had only opened his shop for company. He directed them to a coach-yard close by, where they now went in search of a carriage, and thought themselves lucky to find one. Their journey home was enlivened by the coachman's remarks. What did they think of his horse ? It was one of three left out of a hundred and fifty. The man stopped of his own accord before the column of victory. A flag was flowing from the top, garlands had been twined about its base. " A mirliton, that is what it looks like," he cried, cracking his whip gaily.

As he spoke a little cart was slowly passing by, in which sat two women dressed in black.

CHAPTER XXX. ST. CLOUD AFTEE THE STORM.

MAX and Adolphe came back next day in the carriage M. Caron had sent for them. They were a pale and depressed - looking couple. As their strength returned day by day, in common with many of the wounded they seemed to feel their country's cruel wounds more and more keenly. Bourbaki was not alone in his despair and passionate regret. Many

men committed suicide, many lost their senses, but others pulled them- selves together and bravely by degrees began to reconstruct their lives once more. Max tried to make a rally when he came in to see his old friend, Mrs. Marney. But he could not put away the lines in his face, the hollow rings round his eyes ; he laughed, but it was but a melancholy echo of long- past gaiety.

" Why, Maxwell, ye look thin and half-starved, and yet none the less handsome for that," said Mrs. Marney, smiling faintly, and indeed what she said was true enough. As he stood there in his torn and shabby uniform, he seemed to the three women more stately than any general in brilliant orders and triumphant prosperity.

" We must keep him with us, and make him strong and fat ! " says madame, who was the least changed of the party as she stood beside her son in her Rembrandt-like old age.

" Are ye a general, Max, or only a colonel 1 " said Mrs. Marney. " I wish you would tell them to cease firing their cannon and to leave us in peace !"

"I am neither a general nor a colonel," said Max gravely, " and as for telling them to leave off, I might as well speak to the winds and the seas. Our troubles are not over ; you must let your daughter take you to her home, madame ; this is no place for women. There is no time to lose. She should be away from here."

And yet he was glad that Susy had come ; he had doubted her at one time, tried to do her cruel injustice, to put her away out of his thoughts with some hatred mixed with his feeling, some angry resentment for those very quali- ties for which he had loved her. Now they met with an abyss between them, but he could not see her unmoved even at such a time as this, and as Max went on packing, ordering, arranging, the thought of her was in all he did ; she looked worn and tired, the worst had not yet come. Max stopped to consider what would be best for them all. His

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mother must go into safety and chance had favoured him there. Susy must be sent back without delay taking her mother with her.

But Mrs. Marney would not hear of going away, she almost screamed when her daughter gently and tenderly sug- gested it, and repeated what Max had said. The mere hint of a move threw her into a state of such hysteric grief, that Susy feared she might die then and there in her arms.

" Go without seeing Mick, Susy, are you made of stone1? Don't you know that he is my husband, my love, my life ? Go home yourself, — and indeed your child must be wanting you, — leave me, only leave me, in peace to die. Madame must go, I know that well enough ; has she not said so a dozen times a day 1 I only ask to be left ; my husband might come back and find me gone, I who never failed him yet." It was all so piteous, so incoherent, so tragical, that neither Susy nor her old friend knew how to reason with it.

Madame du Pare was preparing to start at once, her " affairs " were weighing on her mind. " If I delay there are those who are ill-disposed, who are hungering to lay their 'ands on our propriety. I must have a 'ome for Max." In despair, and scarcely knowing what to suggest, Mrs. Dy- mond determined to go and find Mar- ney at once, if he could be found. He would be the best person to persuade his wife.

Madame du Pare had been talking to Maxwell's coachman. It happened by chance that the carriage Caron had engaged belonged to Versailles, and was returning that afternoon. Carriages were rare, and Susy, finding that she could hire this one, after a couple of hours' rest for the horses, determined to set off on her quest without loss of time. Denise was left in charge of the sick woman ; madame, availing herself of the oppor- tunity proposed to accompany Mrs. Dymond.

" Max is at home," she said ; "your

mother is used to him ; he will go up if he is wanted, and that Adolphe is very handy, poor fellow." It was Adolphe who saw them off, and who told the coachman where to drive when they reached St. Cloud. So they started along the desolate road. Madarne's grunts, groans, and ex- clamations, seemed the most lively and cheerful sounds by the way.

"Oh! Oh! Oh! Only look at the ruined houses ! That is poor Made- moiselle Fayard's apartment up there, right up there."

Mademoiselle Fayard's late apartment was now nothing but a sort of hang- ing grotto in the air, and consisted of three sides of a blackened room, of which the floor was gone, the ceiling was gone, although by some strange freak of chance and war the gilt looking-glass still hung upon its nail in which Mademoiselle Fayard had been used to crimp her curls. All the rest of the tidy little home had crumbled and fallen away.

"Ah! Susy— I must call you Susy still — how terrible it all is. Only just now I say to my son, ' Let us go together, Max ; come away to the South — bring your tools and your work and let us live rational lives once more.' But he will not. He say to me, ' Go, mother ; you go, I will follow when my work here is done.' His work, what is it, I ask you ? He have finished M. Caron's book, and now, when I go into the studio I see nothing on the walls. Why does he not come away ? If only your dear mamma could travel with us she too might enjoy the peace, the beautiful clime of Avignon. But she have you now ; you are a better cure than an old patraque like me ; you must take her to your home, and make her happy with you."

Susy looked away, her eyes were heavy with tears, she felt that no nurse, no care could ever make her mother happy again. Madame went on talking and exclaiming ; when Susy could listen to her again, she found she had gone back to the war, to her ter- rors, to her joy, when she found her H H 2

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house spared by miracle. They floated their ambulance flag over the roof, and those abominable Prussians did not dare fire upon the villa. " And now they say there is still danger, and we must go. It is horrible."

So the voice monotonously droned on, and meanwhile they drove their way by a desolate road, a Pompeii of the nine- teenth century, past deserted houses, open to the winds, past fallen walls, between the blackened homes, all alike forsaken and abandoned. The pleasant country seats, the schools, the shops were all empty and wrecked. Here and there they passed soldiers leading horses; and carts, loaded with household goods, slowly labouring along the way. Men and women came slowly dragging trucks piled with whatofew possessions they had saved from the storm.

At last they reached St. Cloud itself, and once more madame ex- claimed in consternation. Overhead the sky shone blue and the clouds were floating gaily, but the village of St. Cloud looked like a pile of children's bricks overthrown by a wayward hand, so complete was the change and confusion. The stones were heaped in the streets, only the shells of the tall houses were standing still, with strips of paper fluttering from the ruined walls. Here and there were relics and indications of the daily life of the inhabitants. In one place a bird-cage was found hang- ing unharmed among the ruins. At the corner of the principal street (how well Susy remembered standing there little more than a year before with Max, when the Imperial carriages rolled by and all seemed so prosperous) a tall pile of ruined houses upreared their black walls. High up overhead a kitchen range, with its saucepans, was still fixed, and some toppling chairs were wedged into a chimney stack. At the foot of the ruin, three women in country cloaks were standing to- gether looking up vacantly at the charred houses. They had but just come home to find their homes gone and utterly destroyed.

A few steps farther on Susy saw a child playing battledore and shuttle- cock in front of the blown-up houses. High up against the sky she could see the gutted chateau, still standing on its terrace, while the sky showed pink through the walls. Some sight- seers were standing looking about. " Papa, monte par id, si tu veux voir quelquechose de beau," cries a boy, springing up on a heap of bricks, and pointing to a falling street. Although the whole place was thus ravaged and destroyed, by some odd chance the spire of the church and its bells remained xintouched.

The cafe was also little harmed, and some people were sitting as usual drinking at the little tables in front of the windows.

For once the presence of these in- different philosophers was reassuring ; one of them, who had already imbibed more drink than was necessary, to prove his philosophy began a song with a chorus in which two or three of his companions joined.

" Listen to them," said a workman going by ; "they drink and sing while their country is in ruins." And he flung some common word of disgust at them, and trudged on his way.

Madame was looking at the address Adolphe had given her.

" This must be the very place — see, ' Cafe de 1' Empire ' is painted outside. Here, garcon ! " and she beckoned to the waiter.

The waiter professed to know no- thing of M. Marney. He had never heard the name ; no Englishman was staying there. In vain madame ha- rangued and scolded.

Madame was not to be repulsed by a little difficulty. She slipped a five- franc piece into the waiter's hand.

" Try and find out Monsieur Marney's address within," said she, "and I will give you a second piece."

" His wife is very ill," said Susy, bending forward ; " he is sadly wanted at home. We have come to find him."

" Can it be the capitaine you want ? " said the waiter, suddenly relenting,

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as he looked at her entreating face ; " a fine man, not tall, but well-dressed, and well set-up, curly hair, moustache en croc-? " And as they assented, " I did not know his name ; our patron sends all his letters to Versailles. Wait ! " And the man ran back into the house.

"Ah, you see, he knew very well," says Madame du Pare, with satisfac- tion, and in a minute the waiter re- turned with a paper, on which was written, in Marney's writing, " 15, Rue des Dominicains, Versailles."

• " Ah ! That is just what we wanted; and now the coachman must take us on quickly," said madame. " Good morning, young man."

The waiter refused the second five- franc piece that Susy would have given him as they drove away.

" One is enough," said he. " If the captain comes I will do your commis- sion." And spreading his napkin wings he flew back again to his work.

CHAPTER XXXI.

AT VERSAILLES.

THE carriage rolled on along by the banks of the river, by more ruin, by desolation in every form ; a few people were out, a few houses and shops were opening once more ; the gardens bloomed with spring, and lilac, and laburnum ; the skies were bright, and the ruins black.

The coachman stopped at a village to give his horse a drink. A great pile of crockery stood in the middle of the street ; all about houses, wine-shops, wayside inns, alike aban- doned, a blacksmith's forge, empty and silent, a great seared barrack standing gaunt and deserted. It was one con- tinuous line of desolation all along. Here and there a face looked out of some rifled home, and disappeared into the ruins. A cart went crawling by, piled with household goods. Out of one big broken house, with shutters flapping and windows smashed, issued a grand carriage, with a coachman and

groom in full livery, and twinkling harness, and horses looking strangely smart and out of place. A little further on was a china shop that seemed to have escaped by miracle ; its broken panes were mended with paper. Then came children two by two. They reached Versailles in less time than they expected. It was barely five o'clock, the sun was sinking in a warm and cheering stream of light. As they drove into the city, they heard the distant sound of a military band. Great changes were taking place, not the least being that the Germans were leaving. As they came up the street they met a company, spiked and girt, tramping out of the town. The soldiers marched past the old palace that had sheltered so many dynasties with stony impartiality, bearing in turns the signs of each invading generation. The noble gar- dens were flushed with blossom and growing summer ; the shops were all open, the children were at play in the streets. On the walls were affixed papers in French and German, sales of horses, of camp furniture. Susy read of the approaching departure of the - — Company of the Hessian Division, with a notice requiring any claims to be immediately sent up, and a list of the articles to be disposed of by public sale. As they waited to let the soldiers pass, some more Germans came out of a stable across the road, carrying huge bundles of straw upon their backs and talking loudly to one another. How strange the echo of their voices sounded, echoed by the stately old walls of Versailles !

The soldiers were gone ; they were driving on again along the palace gardens, when Madame leant forward with a sudden exclamation. "There is Marney ! " she said. " I see him ; he turn in there at the palace gate." And the old lady, leaning forward, loudly called to the coachman to stop. "We will go after him," she said to Susy ; " there is no time to lose."

Susy did not say a word. It had to be gone through, and she silently fol-

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lowed Madame, who was crossing the great court with heavy rapid steps in pursuit of the figure she had recog- nised. They met with no opposition. The guardian of the galleries stared at them as they hurried by ; the place was nearly empty ; they saw a distant figure rapidly retreating, and Madame hurried on in pursuit from one echo- ing gallery to another, past the huge pictures of Napoleon and his victories, past a great gilt frame boarded care- fully from view. One or two people were passing and re-passing along the gallery, but Marney (if Marney it was) vanished suddenly, and was no- where to be found. Madame severely questioned a guardian standing by a doorway. He had seen no one pass within the last few minutes, but there were many exits ; there was one door leading to the great hall, which had been turned into an ambulance, and people were constantly going out by it. The officers . were gone, he told them ; a few of the men still remained, and one young lieutenant, whose sister had come from Germany to nurse him. Susy had hardly patience to listen during Madame's various questions and observations, to which the custodian, being a cautious man, returned guarded answers. " That was a portrait of the Queen of Prussia, boarded over by command ; now that the Prussians were going it was to be unboarded, by order." "Yes, he had been there all the time. He had faithfully served the Emperor. He was prepared as faithfully to do his duty by any one who came." A Coriolanus could not have uttered sentiments more noble and patriotic. At last, finding it was hopeless to inquire further, they got into the carriage once more, and drove to the address in the Rue des Dominicains. "No. 15! This must be No. 15," says Madame, stopping before a low white house, with a high roof and a door opening to the street. She knocked with two loud decided raps, raising the heavy scrolled knocker. In a little while the heavy door was opened by a stupid-looking girl in a

white cap, who seemed utterly be- wildered by her questions.

" Yes," she said, " Mr. Marney lived there. He was not at home ; he was gone to St.. Cloud."

" When will he be in 1 " says Madame in her loud voice. " I will wait for him. I am Madame Marney's friend."

The girl looked more and more stupid. "Madame is here, I will call her," she said, and she went into a ground-floor room.

Almost immediately a woman, with strange glittering eyes and yellow tawny hair, and some sort of a pink dressing-gown, flung open a door upon the passage. " You are asking for Madame Marney 1 " she said, with a defiant air. " What do you want 1 "

" I come from Madame Marney," said the old lady, looking very terrible. " She is ill, seriously ill. She wishes to see her husband at once, and I must insist "

But before the old lady could finish her sentence the woman screamed out to the girl, " What are you doing, Marie ? Turn out these German spies," and, with a look of furious hatred, sprang forward, violently thrusting poor old Madame backwards out of the doorway and banging the heavy door in her face. Susy, who had not come in, had just time to catch Madame du Pare, or she would have fallen. It was a horrible scene, a hideous de- grading experience.

The old lady was a minute recover- ing her breath ; then the two looked at one another in silence as they stood together outside the closed house.

"Oh, what abomination!" said Madame, shuddering and putting up her hands. '•' Oh, my poor, poor fren' ! Oh, Susie, my poor Susie, I have long feared how it might be ; I have now the certainty.''

Susanna, who had turned pale, rallied with a great effort. She would not acknowledge, even to herself, much less to Madame, what a miserable revelation had come to her in that brief moment. " That woman had

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been drinking," she said, very coldly ; " she seemed half mad. Dear Madame, we will go no farther. Mr. Marney is sure to receive my mother's mes- sage from one person or another, and perhaps, to make sure, you will kindly write to both his addresses when you get back. Let us go home now, mamma will be waiting." And then, telling the man to drive them to the station, they drove away in the rattling car- riage, with the tired horses, scarcely speaking a single word.

The wreck of her sweet mother's generous love and life's devotion seemed to Susy sadder and more ter- rible than any crash of war, any destruction and ravage. What were broken stones, what were overturned walls and fortunes, so long as people could love and trust each other 1 Once more that idea came into her mind, which she would never let herself dwell upon, a thought of what two lives might be/ even tried, even parted, but with trust and love and holy confidence to bind them together.

They were too soon for the train, and had to wait some few minutes at the station ; as they stood there in the sunset, two deputies were walking up and down the platform talking gloomily. " So ! the young men of Metz and Strasbourg are to wear the Prussian helmet," said one of them as they passed; " it is of a piece with all the rest."

" I don't know what there is left for us now," said the other, speaking with emotion. " Where is our safety? Paris is at the mercy of the first comer. I have seen as many as two hundred young men in a week passing in a file through my village to avoid conscription." And the voices passed on.

The train arrived at last, puffing along the line, and Susy and Madame got into the first vacant carriage. There they found a trio — a father, a mother in a smart bonnet, a son, a pink-faced youth holding a huge cane and tassel. All these, too, were talk- ing eagerly — they paid no attention

whatever to the entrance of the two women.

FATHEB. " Yes, yes, yes ! talk to me of change ! what does change mean 1 A Revolution. Quick, add 2,000,000 or 3,000,000 to the national debt. Do you know what the debt was thirty years ago when the minister of finance pro- posed to pay it off ] Now it is just four times the sum ! Give us another revolution and we double it again. Liberty ! Oh yes ! Liberty, or every man for himself. As for me I vote for the man in power because I love my country, and I wish for order above all ; I voted for the Emperor and now I shall vote for a Republic, and believe me the only way to preserve a Republic is to take it out of the hands of the republicans."

SON (angrily). "But, father, our armies were gaining, if only we re- publicans had been allowed to have our way."

FATHER (sarcastically). " Yes, every- body gained everywhere, and mean- while the Prussians advanced."

MOTHER (shrilly echoing the father). " Pyat ! Flourens ! these are your republicans, Auguste. They are mud, do you hear, mud, mud, mud."

Enter an old lady, handed carefully by the guard. " Ah ! sir ! many thanks ! Madame ! I thank you. I am a poor emigr<ie returning after six months absence, alas ! I had hoped to be spared the sight of a Prussian, but that was not to be."

MOTHER (proudly). "We, Madame, remained. When one has a son fighting for his country, one cannot leave one's home." (Son looks conscious and twirls his cane.)

OLD LADY. " Alas ! you have more courage than I have. For my part I am grateful from my heart to Trochu for his surrender, for sparing useless slaughter."

FATHER. " What could he do alone 1 he was driven on by your so called patriots. This is the result of your free press."

SON. " But, papa, give us progress, you would not refuse us progress."

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MOTHER (vehemently echoing the son). " Yes, progress and liberty of discus- sion. ..."

" FATHER (desperately). " I give you progress but I do not give you leave to talk about it. Progress comes best alone. When people begin to talk nonsense, and pass votes in favour of progress, they show they are not ready for it. ..."

Sad and preoccupied as Susy was, she could not but listen to the voices on every side ; they interested her though they were anything but cheer- ing. When she and Madame du Pare reached the villa, tired and dispirited, a figure was standing at the gate, and evidently looking out for them. It was Jo, only a little more dishevelled than usual, and bringing with him a feeling of home and real comfort of which poor Susy was sadly in need at that moment.

It was the simplest thing in the world. He had started off then and

there, hearing that Susanna was gone to her mother ; he had come to see if he could help to bring Mrs. Marney back ; he had left his bag in the train. . . . While Susy walked on with her arm in his, listening to his explana- tions, Madame du Pare poured out her pent-up indignation to Max who also came out to receive them. He had been at home all day finishing a couple of sketches ordered by M. Hase for his pictorial newspaper ; he had been up once or twice to see Mrs. Marney, whom he thought very ill.

" You must tell her nothing, except that you failed to find Marney," he said compassionately, " but for God's sake, mamma, leave this place and try to get your friends to go. The sooner the better for us all. The Federals are sure to come down upon Neuilly another day, and it may be too late. I must go back to my work now, for I have no time to lose."

To be continued.

473

TARENTIJM.

L'antica storia cui non e conta Del gran Taranto ? " . . .

— Delizie Tarantine, CARDUCCI.

THE modern town of Taranto occupies the site of the Acropolis of the famous and splendid Tarentum, already a place of some importance when the Spartan Parthenii arrived there 707 years B.C. Of the queen of the Ionian sea, once so rich that the value and magnificence of the spoils taken by Fabius Maximus astonished the Roman citizens, little now remains but the name and immense mounds of rubbish, which are at length being scientifically examined by Professor Viola, on behalf of the Italian Govern- ment.

Taranto lies like a ship on the water, an island town. The streets are narrow and tortuous, and the houses high ; some of the palaces in the upper town are handsome in a baroque, rococo style, and being all built of white stone, recall Malta. A feature peculiar to Taranto is the elaborate carving of the lunettes above the doorways, all made of wood and most fantastic in design ; a baboon's head is a favourite centrepiece. There are a few fine gargoyles, and here and there an old balcony suggests serenades, and flowers fluttering down, and poignards gleaming.

The most important ruin of ancient Tarentum is a fine column of a Doric temple, and a fragment of its com- panion, encased in the wall of a little courtyard in the Oratory of the Con- gregation of the Trinity in the Strada Maggiore. Professor Viola tells me that the measurements exactly corre- spond with those of the columns of the temple of Diana at Syracuse. The height of the column is 27 feet 8 inches, of which 9 feet 10 inches are buried underground. The abacus measures 1 foot 10 inches in height, and 10 feet

7 inches in width. It probably be- longed to the temple of Poseidon, the titular deity of Tarentum, and was evidently one of the most important buildings of the Acropolis. The size of this column may be imagined by two people having lived on the top of the capital in a small house, which was only demolished a few years ago, and replaced by a pergola overgrown with vines, and with seats underneath for enjoying the bel fresco.

San Domenico, with a fine Norman doorway, stands high above the steep street of the same name, on the top of a treble flight of steps, flanked by two quaint old saints. Unfortunately the Tarentines have the eastern passion for whitewash, and have whitened the doorway and the rose window above. The ceiling is all painted, and the pilasters of the church bear the cross of the Knights of Malta. The seats of the choir are of fine intarsia work, and in the centre is the following modest inscription : —

" Qualunque sia dell' opra il lavorio, Jl difetto e dell' norn, il buon di Dio.

" RAPHAEL MONTEANNI, " Terrse Lequilarum, F.H. A.D. MCCLXXXVII."

(" "Whatever is the fatigue of this work, The faults are due to the man, the good is of God.")

Just as we were coming out of San Domenico the impressive strains of a funeral march rose from the street below, and we waited on the top of the steps for the procession to pass. All the confraternities were there in their quaint mediaeval dresses, as it was the burial of a person of some consequence. First came the " Addolerati," who wore long white cotton robes with a hood tight over the face, and holes cut

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for the eyes ; they looked most ghostly figures, quite unfit to be abroad in the bright sunlight. Then followed the " Carmeliti," with cream-coloured mohair capes, and large, black, broad- brimmed hats, trimmed with blue silk ribbon. After them came the " San Gaetani " in blue silk capes and white hoods covering the face ; and then the bearded Capucine monks, and the Pasquilini monks who are clean shaven. The regular clergy and the canons of the cathedral in capes of ermine and purple silk preceded the coffin, borne on the shoulders of members of the different confraternities.

I was lucky enough to be in Ta- rento during Holy Week, and thus saw the procession on Good Friday, which is very curious, and a source of great pride to the Tarentines. The crowd were most orderly and good tempered, and anxious to explain everything to a foreigner. A pleasant young sailor lad told me that he had heard that at. Rome, where the Pope was, they once had processions, but never one to be compared to this.

The sight was most picturesque as the procession wound round down the hill from the " Borgo Nuovo," as the new part of Tarento is called, a mot- ley, many-coloured crowd, the 'brilli- ant yellow, red, and salmon-coloured handkerchiefs the women wear tied over their heads and under their chins, and the heavy gold chains and neck ornaments they delight in, glistening in the fitful sun ; the life-size painted figures swaying high above the crowd, and ever and anon stopping as the bearers rested.

The municipal band playing a solemn funeral march headed the procession, followed by a large black flag ; then came two of the confraternity of the " Carmeliti," they were bare-foot, and bore long white staves in their hands, representing the apostles. Then, borne high on the shoulders of four brothers of the confraternity of the " Addolerati," in white cotton flowing robes and bare legs and feet, was a platform with the instruments

of the Passion. The next Mistero, as they call the painted images, was a life-size statue, either of wood or papier-mache, of Christ kneeling, His hands extended and His face turned towards heaven ; a small, winged angel, by some arrangement of wires, hovered over Him, bearing a gold cup in one hand. Two of the repre- sentatives of the apostles walked between this figure and the next, which was a most ghastly representa- tion of Christ being scourged — an emaciated figure tied to a pillar, with the flesh all livid, lacerated and bloody. The bearers of this figure and of all the following ones had crowns of thorns on their heads, as had also the four at- tendants, who, dressed in their holi- day best, carried strong staves with an iron crescent at the top to rest the poles of the platform upon, which was a considerable weight and hurt the bearers' shoulders, for they borrowed handkerchiefs from friends in the crowd to bind round the poles as they staggered along with difficulty.

Christ in a long crimson robe, with His hands tied and crowned with thorns, was the next figure, attended as usual by two bare-footed apostles. After this came the crucifix, so heavy that ten bearers had evident difficulty in carrying it. All round the base of the cross were stuck petroleum lamps, to be lit at sundown, and which were strangely incongruous in such an old- world scene.

An immense black cross, with yards upon yards of white drapery most artistically arranged upon the arms, was the next Mistero, and now the crowd, which had been rather apathet- ic, showed signs of interest and some slight emotion. All the men bared their heads as a huge bier, borne by some twenty men, came slowly along. It was covered with a black velvet pall, and on this was laid the body of our Lord, covered with a fine muslin veil, all embroidered with large golden rosettes, rather the shape of sun- flowers. Four apostles attended at the corners of the bier, and on either

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side walked two Tarentine nobles, in full evening dress and bare-headed. They are called the " Cavalieri di Cristo," and were as much out of keeping as the petroleum lamps. A crowd of priests of different grades followed behind, and the procession wound up with a figure of the Virgin Mary in a black silk dress, holding a heart pierced with an arrow in her right hand, and an elaborately em- broidered handkerchief trimmed with lace in the other. She was attended by the two last apostles.

My pleasant young Tarentine sailor told me that the privilege of carrying the Misteri and having bruised shoulders for many a long day afterwards, was put up to auction, the average price being fifty francs, which went towards the expenses. Another curious cus- tom is that one church steals from another the honour of starting and ar- ranging the procession. Each church has its own confraternity, out of whose member the twelve apostles are chosen. They must never leave their places near the Misteri in a procession, and are jealously watched by all the less fortunate confraternities. Some six years ago there was a most violent storm, and two of the unhappy bare- legged and bare-footed apostles took refuge for a moment in a cafe. The " Carmeliti " instantly rushed into their places, and have held the privi- lege for their church in the Borgo Nuovo ever since.

It is obligatory for the precession to visit the little church attached to the convent " Delle Pentite," where the figure of the Madonna Addolerata is placed on a table near her altar, and all the the other Misteri defile before her, making the round of the church one by one. Unfortunately the rain had begun to fall fast, and the thunder growled ominously before the proces- sion could reach the " Pentite," and it crowded pell-mell into another church. We went on to the convent, and saw the ghostly figures of the nuns flitting hither and thither be- hind the lattice ^windows high above

the church. I was evidently an ob- ject of some curiosity to them, as well as to the small boys, who speculated as to whether I was a princess or a man from some " far countrie."

Meanwhile the rain fell heavily out- side, and the sky looked like lead, so we determined to go to dinner, and asked our nice sailor lad to join us. He appeared astonished, and at first refused, but on my pressing him he accepted, and was a most pleasant companion, behaving with that charm- ing, easy good breeding so character- istic of the lower classes in Italy, whose innate courtesy might serve as a model to most gentlefolk.

From him I learnt that the un- happy bearers, the apostles, the Cava- lieri, and, in short, all who belonged to the procession, would have to stay in the small church where they had taken refuge until the next morning at ten, if the rain did not cease before eleven that evening and admit of the performance at the " Pentite," which took an hour, and must be concluded before midnight. It poured all the night, and I did not envy the crowd of people who were stewing in the little church.

The Marina, re-christened Via Gari- baldi, is picturesque but decidedly dirty ; the side streets are so narrow that it was a perpetual source of specu- lation to me what a Tarentine does when he becomes fat. Some of these alleys are only two feet wide, and populous as rabbit-warrens. The in- habitants do not look healthy, their faces are pale and pasty, but the teeth are splendid, and the hair black as a raven's wing, while the Greek blood comes out in the almost uni- versally beautiful ears and graceful head so well poised on the shoulders. Now and then one meets a girl who might have posed for Praxiteles, or a youth who looks as though he had stepped out ; of a Greek vase. Occa- sionally the Saracen blood shows strongly, as a swarthy fisherman strolls along, his brown net thrown over one shoulder.

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Tarentum.

Earrings are generally worn by the men in and about Taranto. The trainieri or carters have very charac- teristic gold circlets, shaped like a half moon, which stand out from the face and are decidedly becoming.

Taranto was made into an island by Ferdinand I. of Arragon, who in 1480 cut through a narrow tongue of land to secure the town from the attacks of the Turks after the storming of Otranto and the massacre of the inhabitants. The noble castle built by Charles V.- — now, alas ! being de- stroyed by the Italian Government, in order to build an Admiralty — flanks the canal at its entrance into the Ionian Sea. At the other end the fine round tower which guarded the Mare Piccolo has disappeared under the crowbar and pickaxe. The canal is to be widened and deepened to admit the largest ironclads, and Taranto is destined to become what it once was — the great seaport of Southern Italy, and to see the Mare Piccolo again teem with shipping as of old. The canal is cut where Hannibal dragged the ships across the land, when the Roman garrison held the citadel and prevented the Tarentine vessels from leaving the inner port.

Near the village of Statte on the slope of the hill is a masseria or farmhouse called Triglio, where there is an enormous cistern which collects the infiltrations from a very large extent of country. The aqueduct is tunnelled through the rock for about four miles, and its course is marked by spiracoli or air-holes. It is a marvellous piece of work as the labourers must have cut their way through the living rock, bent double, the measurements being only four feet high and two feet three inches wide. The last three miles of the aqueduct is supported on 203 arches of irregular size, and of modern construction. The water is excellent and the supply unlimited.

The peasants have a curious legend relating to the aqueduct ; they say that the wizard Virgil disputed with

the witches for the dominion of Taranto, and tried to gain the affec- tion of the inhabitants. A most dire drought afflicted the whole country, so Virgil thought water would be the greatest boon he could confer on the city. One night he set to work and made the aqueduct ere morning. Before he had finished the witches discovered what he was doing, and they began to construct the aqueduct of Saturo, but dawn broke ere they had got half way to the city, and they heard the applause and joyous acclamations of the Taren- tines at the sight of the clear, bright water brought into their town by Virgil. The Avitches were beaten, and their aqueduct still remains half finished and in ruins.

The first date we can establish in the history of Tarentum is the defeat of its inhabitants by the Messapians mentioned by Diodorus in B.C. 473. The city suffered considerably on its capture by Hannibal, but nothing in comparison to the degradation it under- went when taken by Fabius Maximus in 207. He, however, opposed its proposed reduction to a condition similar to that of Capua, and Taren- tum remained the seat of the Praetor and the chief town of Southern Italy. During the civil wars between Octa- vian and Antony and S. Pompeius it is often mentioned as a naval station of importance, and in B.C. 36 an agreement between Octavian and Antony was arranged to which Tacitus alludes as the Tarentinumfoedus.

Brundusium rather destroyed the importance of Tarentum, and we do not find any mention of the city until after the fall of the Western Empire, when it played an important part in the Gothic wars. Taken by Belisarius and retaken by Totila in A.D. 549, Tarentum remained in the hands of the Goths until wrested from them by Narses. In 661 Romoaldus, Duke of Beneventum, took it from the Byzan- tine Empire, and it fell successively into the hands of the Saracens and of the Greek Emperors, until taken by Robert Guiscardi in 1063. Ever since

Tarentum.

477

Taranto has formed part of the kingdom of Naples.

The view seawards off " La Ring- hiera," now called Corso Cavour, is most beautiful. At a little distance from the high sea-wall on which one stands is a powerful fresh-water spring, rising with such force in the sea that a small boat cannot get near it, and a ship loses her anchor if let go beside the " Ring of Saint Cataldo." Shoals of porpoises race and tumble, glinting in the bright sun, and the gulls flap lazily over the sea, which literally swarms with fish. Watching the por- poises gambol below, Taras, the son of Poseidon and of the lovely nymph Satura, the fabled founder of the city, rises in one's imagination on his dol- phin from the waves, and irresistibly one recalls the splendour of the proud Tarentum, whose schools were so famous that Plato came from Athens to visit them, and was received by Archytas, the mathematician, the astronomer, the philosopher, and the brilliant writer, who was seven times named Strategos, and who, by the ascendency of his eloquence, his vir- tues, and his talents, improved the laws of his country and made them respected. A great general, he held the Lucanians in check, and the Tarentine arms, during his supremacy, were victorious ; her navy swept the Ionian sea and the whole basin of the Adriatic, and the political and com- mercial influence of Tarentum was at its highest point.

One thought of the great city which could send forth an army of 30,000 foot and 5,000 horse, and whose citizens dared to insult the Roman ambassador, Lucius Posthumius Me- gellus, who went to Tarentum to demand reparation for grievous in- juries. The Roman spoke bad Greek and roused the laughter of the flip- pant Tarentines, who at length hissed him out of the theatre, as though he had been a bad actor. A buffoon, known as the Pint-pot, from his constant drunkenness, with indecent

gestures, bespattered his senatorial gown with filth. Lucius held it aloft, saying, "Men of Tarentum, it will take not a little blood to wash this gown."

For ten years Tarentum, aided by Pyrrhus, maintained the war against Rome, and at first, thanks to the superior talents of their ally, and still more to his elephants, so finely de- scribed by Lord Macaulay —

' ' Beside him stalks to battle The huge earth-shaking beast, The beast on whom the castle With all its guards doth stand ; The beast who hath between his eyes The serpent for a hand — "

the Greeks had this advantpge , but near Beneventum Pyrrhus was com- pletely defeated, and Tarentum lost its independence for ever.

The names of Pythagoras, who founded an asylum with Archytas ; of Livius Andronicus, the Tarentine Greek, who gave the first rudiments of the regular drama to Rome ; of Rinthon, the founder of a new kind of burlesque — farce ; of the philosopher and musician Aristoxenes, pupil of Xenophilus and of Aristotle, of whose 453 volumes we only possess the Elements of ffar- inony, the oldest treatise extant on music, come before our minds, and we search in vain for a modern counter- part to so much that is glorious in story. Modern Taranto can only boast of one famous child, the graceful and charming musician Paisiello.

To the east of the town of Taranto, overlooking the Mare Piccolo, which is divided into two basins by the pro- montories of " II Pizzone " and " Punta della Penna," are hills formed almost entirely of shells of the murex. The Tarentine red-purple dye was cele- brated, and is supposed to have owed its peculiar hue to the use of two kinds of shell-fish, Murex trunculus, which was the one used at Tyre, and Murex brandaris, used at Laconia. ' Pliny says the murex were caught by pandering to their greediness. Small nets with a fine mesh were used, and

Tarentum.

into these were put small shell-fish called mitole, which had been kept out of the water until half dead. When lowered into the sea they gape wide open with thirst and delight, when the murex rushes up, and find- ing that he cannot push his long spiny snout through the meshes of the net, he thrusts his lance-like tongue into the open shells of the mitole, which instantly closes, catch- ing the enemy in a vice. When the nets were drawn up the murex hung in clusters, and were sorted according to size. The small ones were pounded and the larger broken, and the fish extracted with an iron hook ; the colour -bags were cut out and thrown into salt. Three days were sufficient for maceration, and the fresher the murex the finer was the dye.

Sixteen miles in circumference, the Mare Piccolo resembles an inland lake ; its sapphire-blue water reflects the sun's rays, and it is so perfectly clear that one can. distinguish the founda- tions of many an old building far beneath the boat. Fragments of fine Greek vases are often hauled up in the nets, and now and then an old coin is found along the beach. Fish- ing-boats, piled high with faggots of lentisk covered with the spawn of oysters and mussels, are perpetually snooting from under the bridge, com- ing in from the open sea to deposit their precious burden in the quiet depths of the inner port. The wealth of shell fish is astounding ; there are over 150 different species, and ninety- three kinds of fish come at different times of the year to spawn in the inland sea. The fishing is worth over 5,000,000 francs per annum. Tall poles stand out of the Mare Piccolo in every direction, whence are sus- pended, under the water, row upon row of rope made of grass, into the strands of which are stuck the spat of oysters and mussels. The ropes of mussels, called cozze nere at Taranto, are sold all over Italy ; razor-fish, cockles, date-mussels, sea-urchins, the

various murex, and other shell-fish are eaten raw, and go by the generic name of frutti di mare, or sea fruit. The little market-place is picturesque, but dirty, and all kinds of fish and shells are on sale. The elegant little sea-horses are common, and the beau- tiful shells of the Pinna nobilis, for which they still fish with the peculiar net called penuetico, identical with the pernilegum described by Pliny.

The silky beard of the lana-pesce, as the fishermen call the pinna, is woven into gloves and scarves as a curiosity ; in ancient times the trans- parent robes of the dancing girls were made of it, and it was valued as a costly and beautiful material, being either dyed purple or left the natural beautiful golden-brown hue. Fish culture and fishing have been culti- vated in Taranto by thejigli del mare (sons of the sea), as the guild of fishermen are called, from time im- memorial, and the ancient laws were codified in the fifteenth century by the last prince of Taranto, John An- tony de Balzo, in the Libra JRosso, or Red Book.

On calm summer days the fairy-like argonaut sails about on the Mare Piccolo, and one is tempted to regret that a scene so peaceful and so fraught with classical memories should be des- tined to become a busy arsenal and seaport.

At the further extremity from the town, two small brooks, the Cervaro and the Rascho, enter the Mare Piccolo ; and opposite the Monte de' Coccioli, the hill formed of murex shells, stands the church of the " Ma- donna del Galesio," on the little stream of Le Citrezze, the ancient Galesus. Formerly it was well wooded, but now the flat banks of the tiny river are but scantily cultivated with cotton. Two hundred yards from where the Citrezze flows into the Mare Piccolo rise two powerful fresh-water springs, now called Citro and Citrello, with suffi- cient force to prevent any small boat from approaching close. On the left

Tarentum.

479

bank of this streamlet Virgil met the old Corycian swain, who

" With unbought dainties used to pile his

board,"

thanks to his skill in agriculture. Horace sings of

" Galerus, thy sweet stream I'll choose, Where flocks of richest fleeces bathe : Phalantus there his rural sceptre sway'd, Uncertain offspring of a Spartan maid.

" No spot so joyous smiles to me

Of this wide globe's extended shores ; Where nor the labours of the bee Yield to Hymettus' golden stores, Nor the green berry of Venafran soil Swells with a riper flood of fragrant oil."

Martial and Pliny talk of the excel- lent leeks of Tarentum ; Varro praises its honey as the best in Italy. The salubrity of the climate and the fer- tility of the soil were celebrated. Pears, figs, oil, wine, corn, and fine white salt were among the products ; and the breed of horses was famous, and supplied the Tarentine light cavalry (Tapavrlvof) so noted in the armies of Alexander the Great and his successors.

The Tarentine wool has been praised by many classical writers. Varro speaks of its softness, while Strabo praises its lustre ; Pliny, Horace, and Martial all laud it, and Columella de- scribes the great care taken of the sheep. They were never allowed to graze with their heads turned towards the sun, for fear of blindness, or let out while the dew was on the grass. Their wool was washed with wine, oiled and combed, and then covered with a cloth. The breed had degene- rated in the time of Queen Joan II., who in 1415 issued an edict to relieve the guild of wool manufacturers from various imposts and taxes, in order to improve the quality of the produce.

The sheep now seen in Apulia are small, and give little wool ; they are almost universally black, with curiously brilliant yellow eyes, and agile as deer.

Tarantismo is still implicitly be- lieved in, not only by the common

people, but by most of the Apulian gentry. I have never seen a case, as the tarantola only becomes venomous when the weather is hot. The women gleaning in the corn-fields are most liable to be bitten, as they wear but scant clothing, on account of the in- tense heat. The .following account, which differs considerably from any hitherto given, is from an eye-witness, a Tarentine gentleman, who has seen many cases.

There are various species of the in- sect, and two different kinds of tarantismo, the wet and the dry. A violent fever attacks the person bitten, who sits moaning and swaying backwards and forwards. Musicians are called, and begin playing ; if the air does not strike the fancy of the tarantata, as the patient is called, she moans louder, and says " No, no, not that." The fiddler instantly changes, and the tambourine beats fast and furious to indicate the difference of the time. "When at last the tarantata gets an air to her liking, she springs up and begins to dance frantically. If she has the dry ta- rantismo, her friends try to find out the colour of the tarantola that has bitten her. and adorn her dress and her fingers with ribbons that recall the tints of the insect — white or blue, green, red, or yellow. If no one can indicate the colour, she is decked with streamers of every hue, which flutter wildly about as she dances and tosses her arms in the air. The ceremony generally begins in the house, but what with the heat and the concourse of people, it often ends in the street.

If it is a wet tarantismo the musicians choose a spot near a well, and the dancer is incessantly deluged with water by relays of friends, who go backwards and forwards to the well with their picturesque brown earthen- ware jars. My informant tells me that it is incredible what an amount of water is used on these occasions. He spoke feelingly as drought is the great enemy of the Apulian landowners,

480

Ta/rmtwrn.

£

who occasionally lose their crops and their cattle from want of rain.

When the tarantata is quite worn out, she is undressed and put to bed. The fever lasts seventy-two hours, and the state of nervous ex- citement must be intense to sustain a woman under such fatigue as dancing for three whole days. If the musicians are not called in, and the person bitten is not induced to dance, the fever con- tinues indefinitely, and is in some cases followed by death.

There is a master-mason living near Taranto who mocked at the whole thing, threatening to beat any of his female belongings, who, if bitten by a tarantola, dared to try the dancing cure. As ill-luck or Saint Cataldo would have it, he was himself bitten, and after suffering great pain, and being in a high fever for several days, he at last sent for the musicians „ to his own house, carefully locking the doors and closing the windows. But the frenzy was too strong, and to the malicious delight of the women he was soon seen bounding about in the middle of the street, shrieking " Le femmine hanno ragion ! " (The women are right.)

A favourite ornament at these mad dances are vine branches decked with ribbons of various hues, which makes one suspect that there may still linger vestiges of the old Bacchanalian orgies in these Apulian dances.

The small terra-cotta figures and heads, of which many thousands have been dug up lately at Taranto, have a distinct type of their own, and are occasionally very beautiful. The heads are remarkable for the rather

theatrical exuberance of the head- dress ; heavy wreaths and large flowers like rosettes entwine the male heads as well as the female. The tine gold ornaments in the museum at Naples, which were found at Taranto, show the same love of exaggerated magnificence. Ancient writers mention many works of art ordered by the Tarentines from the great Greek artists for the deco- ration of their city ; the Heracles and the Poseidon, by Lysippus ; the Winged Victory, which was taken to Rome, where it became one of the chief ornaments of the Curia Julia ; Eu- ropa on the Bull, by Pythagoras of Rhegion, and many others. Let us hope that some of these treasures, and the great candelabra of bronze, with 365 burners sent by Dionysios the younger, to be placed in the senate- house, as a proof of his friendliness for Archytas, as well as the " irate gods " left by Fabius Maximus to the con- quered Tarentines, may come to light in the excavations now going on. The coins of Tarentum are among the finest in the world, the most beautiful are of the fifth and fourth century B.C. Taras astride on his dolphin, holding the trident in one hand, figures on many ; in others he stands in a chariot driving two horses, which probably refer to an Agonistic victory. Shell-fish figure largely on the reverse sides of these coins, showing that the fishery was a matter of great import- ance even in those days. Mionnet gives a list of 125 different coins of the city, a proof of the importance and richness of " imbelle Tarentum."

JANET Ross.

END OF VOL. LII.

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