LITTELLS LIVING AGE. Sixth Series, T(T,~ 2713.July A ~QQ~ From Beg~ing, Volume XI. -,~ Vol. CCX. CONTENTS. I. LEIGH HUNT. By F. Warre Cornish, II. CAPTAIN FRANCIS LAWTON, III. ON THINGS PERSIAN. By C. J. Wills, IV. MEN AND MANNERS IN FLORENCE, V. A LIGHTNING TOUR. By Percy Fitz- gerald REMINISCENCES OF LORD BATH. By Malcolm MacCoil A GOSSIP ON GARDENS, THE COMPLETE LETTER WRITER.~7 By Sheila E. Braine, IX. LONDONS GREAT LANDOWNERS, VI. VII. VIII. Temple Bar, Blackwood s Magazine, Fortnightly Review, Cornhill Magazine, Gentlemans Magazine, Contemporary Review, Chambers Journal, Good Words, Chambers Journal, POETRY. POTTER FELL TARN, WESTMORE- LAND THE CATBIRDS WHISTLE, 2 0 TO RECALL! PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL & CO., BOSTON. TERMS OI~ SUBSCRIPTION. For Six DOLLARS remitted directly to the. Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for- -warded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or ebeck, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single copies of the LIVING AGE. 15 cents. 3 14 21 28 35 44 54 58 61 2 2 Potter Fell Tarn, Westmoreland, etc. POTTER FELL TARN, WESTMORELAND. Mere of the Moorland Boulder-environed, Lost in this secret Dip of the Fell, Desolate art thou, Severed from all things, All thy horizon Heather and ling. From the height yonder Distant a stones throw Fair to the view lie River and plain; Blue curls the smoke from Hamlet and homestead; Far to the westward Glimmers the sea. But, like a spirit Cloistered austerely, Shut in the narrow Walls of a creed, Thou in thy prison Sternly contented, Seemest a scorner Of the Beyond. Here in thy fastness Thou hast familiars; Round thee are voices Mystic and strange: Muttering cries of Grouse from the heather Weirdly recall the Speech of the Prime. Often the wistful Notes of the curlew Mingles in music Hope and despair; Poor were fruition After such yearning, Therefore he pleadeth Ever in vain. Mere of the Moorland Hear my recanting; Rashly I called l~hee Desolate, lone. On the still evenings Leap not the trout like Gold-flashing thoughts from Depths in thy heart? Though thou art grimly Set here in durance Why shouldst thou pine for Visions afar? Ever thy waters Look to the Heaven; Ever thy bosom Mirrors the skies! Spectator. R. H. Lxw. THE CATBIRDS WHISTLE. An old bridge stood with dust thick strewn, Where through a crooked country lane A brook flowed down, and out again Slow gurgling past with quiet croon; While sunshine kissed the cool grey stones And chequered every leaf and spray, And shallows sang, in feeble tones, Where pebbles in mosaic lay. And softly, from the deepest shade, A catbirds whistle low and clear Crept out as though the sound was made For only Natures listening ear; Like dripping water falling slow Round mossy rocks in music rare, So, mellowed by the summer glow The catbirds whistle echoed there. Far up along the short green sward The white sheep nibbled at the grass, And lightly, as the winds did pass Would come the catbirds minor chord A call that made all others mute, Soft thrilling thro the drowsy air; As some lost note from Orpheus lute So came the catbirds whistle there. ERNEST NOGAFFEY. O to recall! What to recall? All the roses under snow? Not these. Stars that toward the water go? Not these. O to recall! What to recall? All the greenness after rain? Not this. Joy that gleameth after pain? Not this. O to recall! What to recall? Not the greenness nor delight? Not these. Not the roses out of sight? Not these. O to recall! What to recall? Not the star in waters red, Not this; Laughter of a girl thats dead, O this! STEPHEN PHILLIPS. 2 Leigh Hunt. From Temple Bar. LEIGH HUNT. Leigh Hunt was one of the poets who have their portion of praise in this life. Such writers are riot always unjustly treated; they had their day, and en- joyed their credit; they were listened to by their own generation, and pitched their voices for its hearing, but they have not Fames speaking-trumpet to reach our ears too. It would be rash to say that Joanna Baillie, Hayley, Southey, Bailey (I name them at ran- dom), did not deserve the reputation which they once enjoyed because they are little read, or less read, now. The immortals will have their immortality, and those who have done some partic- ular thing supremely well will sit at their feet. Readers will always be found for Cowper, Jane Austen, Sterne, Charles Lamb. But Charles Lambs friendsLeigh Hunt among themare beginning to be forgotten, rather be- cause they have gone out of fashion than for any better cause. I remember some thirty years ago, in the pleasant suburb of Kensington, gay with elm-trees and hedgerows, where some of the streets had only one side, and in which you often passed from rows of new drab-colored houses to green fields and country lanes, a cottage facing the south, with a little gate in front of it, a bow window, a porch with creepers, a garden and trees at the back; and we were told that Jenny Lind once lived there. It has gone long ago; but whilst it stood it was the home of art and romance. It did not suit this spreading building age, but it served for beauty and use forty years ago. That cottage reminds me of the gentle suburban life of Leigh Hunt. He n~arked a moment in liter- ature, the transition from the aristoc- racy to the democracy of letters. He was only a mortal, though he lived with the immortals; but he has his place near them, and does not deserve to be altogether lost in the crowd. He was a vagabond of literature, a hack of genius. He wrote about everything: politics, economics, Shake- speare, Byron, Italy, scenery, art, the 3 Quattro Poeti, the modern writers, actors, and singers, the drama, the stage. He wrote so rapidly and indis- criminately, turning out his articles as the baker turns out his rolls, that the eommonplace of the printers boy, wait- ing below for copy, might have been invented for him. Writing was as easy to him as talk- ingand how he talked, Carlyle and Hazlitt have told us. He talked, says Carlyle, like a singing-bird. - His talk was often literary, biograph- ical, autobiographical, wandering into criticism, reform of society, progress, etc., - . . free, cheery, idly melodious as bird on high. Hazlitt writes: He has a fine vinous spirit about him, and tropical blood in his veins; but he is better at his own table. He has a great flow of pleasantry and delightful animal spirits; but his hits do not tell like Lambs you cannot repeat them next day. . He sits at the head of a party with great gaiety and grace; has an elegant manner and turn of features; is never at a loss aiiquando sufltamfnan4us erat. . - laughs with great glee and good humor - understands the point of an equivoque or an observation immediately. - . . If he have a fault, it is that he does not listen so well as he speaks, is impatient of interruption, and is fond of being looked up to, without considering by whom. Leigh Hunt was not an immense talker like Coleridge and Carlyle, a wit like Rogers and Sydney Smith, an au- thority like Johnson and Hallam, a detailer of reminiscences, a chronicler, an accepted critic of art and letters, an asker of questions, an arguer for victoryall acknowledged species in the category of talkers, and good in their placebut a talker who was never tedious, because he was always fluent and graceful, and talked with, not only to, his company. And when he sat down with his conversational pen to talk about his life, he was not in a hurry for the printer, and could call upon memory and imagination to reproduce the good company he had kept, and the memorable things which he had seen and heard. He gives us in his autobiography, not only his own Leigh Hunt. life, but what is the chief charm of a good biography, a picture of the time as well as the man. We should not care so much for even Boswells John- son if we did not find him in the com- pany of Burke, Goldsmith, Sir Joshua, and his other playmates. Hunt always kept good company. He was the inti- mate triend of Shelley and Keats, above all, of Charles Lamb; the asso- ciate of James and Horace Smith, of Fuseli, Campbell, Charles Mathews, iheodore Hook, and a score besides; of Byron, whose brilliancy scorched him, of Coleridge, whom he quizzed and admired, of Wordsworth, whom he quizzed and respected. To have had such friends is a sufficient testi- monial to his genius and his heart. We use the word genius advisedly. Leigh Hunt was a man of genius, not a mere product of literature and clever- ness. He had little creative power, not a high originality; he reflected more than he invented; his experience was limited by the circumstances of his life the desk, the prison, the comfortless homeand wasted over too wide a field of letters. But two qualities put him above the ranks of journeymen, and give him a share in the laurels of genius: insight into the character of persons and literary works; and vivid- ness of expression, never staled by the daily habit of writing, nor diluted with vulgar sentiment. What makes Leigh Hunt delightful reading is his own grace of style-felt most when he is least conscious of ithis gaiety, his appreciation of character, his kindli- ness, and, above all, his gift of love and admiration for the dear friends, his superiors in genius, but not his su- periors in humanity and generosity, and free~lom from envy or jealousy. And it is due to him to remember that, though Keats, Shelley, and Lamb dis- tanced him, he showed them the way over a new country. Since the object of this paper is to attempt some appreciation of Leigh Hunts character and personality, as well as of his place in literature, we will here try to recall something of the impression which he produced on those who knew him well. And first must come the picture drawn by Car- lyle in his Reminiscences: Dark complexion, . . . copious, clean, strong, black hair, beautifully-shaped head, fine, beaming, serious, hazel eyes, seriousness and intellect the main expres- sion of his face. . . . He would lean on his elbow against the mantelpiece (fine, clean, elastic figure, too, he had, five feet ten or more) and look around him nearly in silence before taking leave for the night, As if I were a Lar, said he once, or permanent household god here I (such his polite, aerial-like way). An- other time, rising from his Lar atti- tude, he repeated (voice very fine), as if in spirit of parody, yet with some- thing of very sad perceptible, While I to suiphurous and penal fire . . . as the last thing before vanishing. Poor Hunt! no more of him. Elsewhere Carlyle speaks of him as having a fine, chivalrous, gentlemanly carriage, polite, affectionate, respectful (especially to her), and yet so free and natural. . . - A gifted, gentle, pa- tient, and valiant human soul. Trelawny found him a gentle- man and something more. Emerson thought him and De Quincey the finest mannered of all the English men of letters. Lowell and Hawthorne enjoyed his company. William Bell Scott, who visited him at Chelsea with George Lewos, describes the old poet as he sat in his armchair by his frugal fireside, with his books, his piano, his bronze inkstand, and his pot of primrosesa mild, even-natured, and unfortunate man, talking still of Keats and Shelley, Fiesole, Kubla Khan and its author, and yet wel- coming youthful promise. To Brown- ing, when the public would neither read nor hear him, and to Rossetti, in his early essays in poetry, Leigh Hunts generous encouragement was worth something. Too much space is commonly given in biographies to parentage and origin. There is an inverted family pride, very little resembling that of Sir Walter Elliott of Kellynch, and based, unlike that, upon reason, which chronicles 4 Leigh Hunt. worth rather than nobility of blood, and sometimes pleases itself in finding in the vagaries of ancestors a justifica- tion for its own eccentricities. Partly in jest, partly with an idea that there may be something in it, Leigh Hunt, in his autobiography, introduces us to adventurers in the New World, a He- brew professor at Oxford, Cavaliers driven (perhaps transported) to the West Indies by Cromwell, Irish Kings, a mythical merchant theefe, who fought against Sir Andrew Barton, and more authentically to a family of Bar- badoes traders and clergymen, the last of whom, his father, had a narrow es- cape from being tarred and featbered at Philadelphia as a supporter of King George. It is easy to construct a ped- igree by judicious selection of pet ancestors. Leigh Hunt had himself no great belief in pedigrees, and we need go no further back than his father, who turns up in London, after his Pennsylvanian adventures, a rhe- torical and unorthodox clergyman, fond of good books, good company, and good living, with something of a Charles Honeyman incapacity for meeting his creditors, always schem- ing, never performing, a martyr for his opinions, and ill-consoled by a Loy- alist pension of 100which he soon mortgaged away for the loss of seven or eight times as much in America.~~ The first room which Leigh Hunt re- membered was a prison. We strug- gled on, he says, between quiet and disturbance, between placid readings his father had a fine voice and de- livery, and delighted in reading aloud passages from old English divines and frightful knocks at the door, and sickness, and calamity, and hopes, which hardly ever forsook us. His bringing i~ip was thus not unlike that of Sterneadversity in a humorous shape an education not pointing in the direction of the Roman or British virtues of economy, consistency, and regularity, subordination of hope to foresight, and of whims to designs; but likely to foster independence of thinking, animal spirits, that cutrapetia which Matthew Arnold translated as elasticity, and a readiness to turn to any form of intellectual interest which did not take the shape of busi- ness, or ticket and label this happy- go-lucky spirit among the acquies- cent. Hope, rather of a Micawber character, sprang eternal in the breasts of the Hunts, and tempered the troubles into which a faulty arithmetic too often brought them. His mother was a woman of a ten- der heart and a fine spirit. Her son records how, on a winter day, she took off her flannel petticoat and gave it to a poor womana better deed than that of St. Martin, for he only gave half his cloak and got no harm, whereas she gave all her garment and was rheumatic ever after. Saints have been made for cha4ties no greater. She stood at her husbands side in all the vicissitudes of fortune which brought him lower and lower, changed her opinions with his, and took the consequences, in a time when to be a Unitarian or a Republican was u~pop- ular and even dangerous. Leigh Hunt was sickly as a child, though he afterwards enjoyed good health, maintained by strict temperance. He was (he tells us) constitutionally timid, but had a stock of intellectual and moral courage which helped him to hold up his head among bigger and stronger boys at Christs Hospital, and which never forsook him. Courage of this kind has none of the gaiety of animal pugnacity. It is reflective, and combative on principle, not by temper, and it is apt to become pedantic and to be looked upon as conceited. Leigh Hunts martyrdoms always had a tinge of affectation, real or apparent, and we wonder why he should have chosen to go to prison when many a man as honest but more robust would have kept out. His natural gentleness, oddly combined with zeal for the oppressed, indignation at injustice, and a tender conscience, made him a political corn- batant on the unpopular side, and a sufferer in consequence. But we need not pity him too much, for he found a paradoxical pleasure in suffering, all 5 6 the more, it may be, because his friends did not always see the need of it. Leigh Hunt and his brother were three times prosecuted for attacks upon the government in the Examiner, and three timesat heavy cost to themselves acquitted. The passage which at last brought down the rigors of the law upon himnot unjustly, for libel must take the consequences, nor yet unhappily, for the memory of George IV. has never got over itruns as follows: What person, unacquainted with the true state of the case, would imagine, in reading these astounding eulogies, that this glory of the people was the subject of millions of shrugs and reproaches! that this protector of the arts had named a wretched foreigner his historical painter, in disparagement or in ignorance of the merits of his own countrymen! that this Ma~cenas of the age patronized not a sin- gle deserving writer! that this breather of eloquence could not say a few decent extempore words, if we are to judge, at least, from what he said to his regiment on its embarkation for Portugal; that this conqueror of hearts was the disap- pointer of hopes! that this exciter of desire (bravo! messieurs of the Post), this Adonis in loveliness was a corpulent man of fifty! In short, this delightful, blissful, wise, pleasurable, honorable, vir- tuous, true, and immortal prince was a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domes- tic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity. To prison he must go; andwhich he had not foreseen apart from his brother John, the sharer of his offence and its punishment. He tells the story of his gaol with much humor, though unconscious that the figure he himself presents is a trifle ridiculous. Charles Lambs admiration of it must have had a touch of irony. We cannot fancy him enjoying such a sentimental dungeon, or confusing fact and fiction as his friend did. I papered the wails with a trellis of roses; I had the ceiling colored with clouds and sky; the barred windows I screened with Venetian blinds; and when my book- Leigh Hunt. cases were set up, with their busts, and flowers and a pianoforte made their ap- pearance, perhaps there was not a hand- somer room on that side of the water. - Charles Lamb declared there was no other such room, except in a fairy tale. - . - But I possessed another surprise which was a garden. There was a little yard outside the room, railed off from another belonging to a neighboring yard. This yard I shut in with green palings, adorned it with a trellis, bordered it with a thick bed of earth from a nursery, and even contrived to have a grass plot. The earth I filled with flowers and young trees. There was an apple-tree, from which we managed to get a pudding the second year. As to my flowers, they were allowed to be perfect. Thomas Moore, who came to see me with Lord Byron, told me he had seen no such hearts-ease. I bought the Parnaso Italiano while in prison,(it cost him 30, and ten years later he talked of selling it for half the sum, to buy bread)and used often to think of a passage in it while looking at this miniature piece of horticulture: Mio picciol orto, A me sei vigna, e campo, e selva e prato. BALDI. My little garden, To me tliourt vineyard, field, meadow and wood. Here I wrote and read in fine weather, sometimes under an awning. In autumn my trellises were hung with scarlet- runners, which added to the flowery in- vestment.. I used to shut my eyes in my armchair and effect to think myself hun- dreds of miles away. So complacent a temper sweetens adversity; and if Leigh Hunt had been a bachelor of private fortune, no one could have objected to his amusing him- self with a Cockney Arcadia. But when we hear that his wife with her eldest boy, not only shared this cap- tivity, but that she actually gave birth to another child in these incongruous quarters, we are reminded, for all Dickenss disclaimer, of Harold Skim- pole, and inclined to think that if indeed Hunt was not in the novelists mind, the world was not very far wrong in seeing a likeness between the amaz- ing prisoner and invalid who issued out of a bower of roses, and the sen- timentalist of Bleak House. Leigh Hunt. I made him business proposals. I had him into my room. I said, You are a man of business, I believe ? He replied, I am. Very well, said I, then let us be business-like. Here is an inkstand, here are pens and paper, here are wafers. What do you want? . . . In reply to this he made use of the figurative ex- pressionwhich has something Eastern about itthat he had never seen the color of my money. My amiable friend, said I, I never have any money. I never know anything about money. Well, sir, said he, what do you offer if I give you time? My good fellow, said I, I have no idea of time; but you say you are a man of business, and whatever you can suggest to be done, in a business-like way, with pen and ink and paperand wafers, I am ready to do. Dont pay yourself at another mans expense (which is foolish), but be business-like. How- ever he wouldnt be, and there was an end of it. 7 life before I do marry; for I will not see a wife who loves me and is the comfort of my existence, afraid to speak to me of money matters; she shall never tremble to hear a knock at the door, or to meet a quarter-day. And in 1832: I never hear a knock at the door but I think somebody is coming to take me away from my family. Last Friday I was sitting down to dinner. . . when I was called away by a man who brought an execution into my house for forty shil- lings. And it must have tasted salt to him to ask and receive a pension from the representatives of the prince whom he had so courageously if unwisely at- tacked in his hot youth. We do not excuse the selfishness which this unthrift argues. Leigh Hunt might have given a practical proof of his love for his wife and chil- dren if he had mastered his constitu- tional dislike to hard facts, and cultivated justice rather than sensi- bility. But we claim for him an exemption from other and more com- mon forms of selfishness. His son Leigh Hunt had no sense either of time or of moneya grave fault, per- haps an unpardonable vice, in a man who had a wife and children depending upon him. As long as he lived he was thriftless and needy, a lender and a borrower, so generous that he could never afford to be just, bringing upon those whom he loved sincerely a con- attributes to him, as two especial stant burden of debt and care. How characteristics, an excessive wish to reprehensible this was he seems never abstain from causing pain, and an to have felt (though he blames himself ultra-conscientiousness which re- freely and light-heartedly); and if the suited in uncertainty of purpose; but reader of his autobiography is disposed though the consequence of this com- to feel sorry for Mrs. Hunt, it is not bination was too often a defective because her husband sets him the balance-sheet, in that affectionate example. This was Leigh Hunts one family there seems to have been little vice, never amended nor actively re- thought of reparation or forgiveness pented of. Yet he had had his warning, due on the part of creditor or of debtor. It is pathetic to compare with each Yet we feel that they might justly have other the two following passages, and complained of family interests post- to see how clearly Leigh Hunt foresaw poned to those of friendship, of hard- his danger, and how incapable he earned money lightly spent, sudden and proved of escaping it: capricious change of domicile, leng, painful, and expensive journeys, san- I have seen [he writes in 1808] so much guine schemes which cost money to of the irritabilities, or rather the miseries, begin and made none in the end, accruing from want of a suitable income, hospitality which could not be afforded, and the best woman of her time was so worried and finally worn out with the and generosity which gave out of an early negligence of others in this respect, empty purse; errors which are severely that if ever I was determined in anything judged by the hard English sense of it is to be perfectly clear of the world, and justice, and rightly so. But he would ready to meet the exigencies of a married have been easily forgiven by Uncle Leigh Hunt. Toby and the Vicar of Wakefield, and Sir Roger and Squire Aliworthy, and others of the dear ideal folk whom he liked nearly as well as his more sub- stantial friends; and, we may be sure, by Charles Lamb himself, and by Shelley too. He never spared his labor, nor even his health. If he spent fool- ishly, he earned industriously. His gentleness and cheerfulness melted Carlyle, though well aware of the hugger-mugger, comfortless existence of his neighbors family. Released from prison, with a consti- tution injured by confinement and finances hopelessly confused, Leigh Hunt struggled on for some years, per- haps the happiest of his life, for he was a poet, young and hopeful, bring- ing out his poems, the Story of Rimini and Foliage, and the Indicator, which contains many of his most brilliant prose essays; and he was enjoying the friendship and fighting the battles of Keats and Shelley. In 1821 came his visit to Italy, the rise and fall of his friendship with Byron, his ill-advised literary venture in that companythe earthen pot with the pot of brassShelleys death and lyric funerala period full of high tboughts and romantic fancies, only ill- starred because poets and their families must eat to live. The death of Shelley was an irrepara- ble loss to the friend who not only returned his love, but looked to him in everything as benefactor and coun- sellor. Not only did Leigh Hunt never forget Shelley, but we may almost say that as long as he lived Shelley was never absent from his thought. I cannot help thinking of him [he writes] as if he were alive as much as ever, so unearthly has he always appeared to me, and so serap~iiical a thing of the elements. And again: You see I write in spiritsI do so even though I never know what a mirthful thought is; but I think of dear, dear Shelley, and the want of his presence comes ou me like a chill. The bond which kept Byron and Hunt together was broken by Shelleys death. Byron was tired of him, and Hunt had not the tact to leave him alone. We give Byrons version of the estrangement rather than that of the other, for Leigh Hunts answer for him- self is a weaker apology, and had better have remained unwritten: Hunts letter is probably the exact piece of vulgar coxcombry you might expect from his situation. He is a good man, with some poetical elements in his chaos; but spoilt by the Christ-Church Hospital and a Sunday newspaper,to say nothing of the Surrey jail, which conceited him into a martyr. . . . But Leigh Hunt is a good man and a good fathersee his odes to all the Masters Hunt; a good husband see his sonnet to Mrs. Hunt; a good friendsee his epistles to different people; a great coxcomb, and a very vulgar person in everything about him. But thats not his fault, but of circumstances. Again, though with no direct allusion to Hunt, he writes: The pity of these men is that they never lived in high life nor in solitude; there is no medium for the knowledge of the busy or the stilt world. . . . If admitted into high life for a season, it is merely as spec- tatorsthey form no part of the mechan- ism thereof. Now Moore and I, the one by circumstances, and the other by birth, happened to be free of the corporation, and to have entered into its pulses and passions, quarum partes fuimus. Well might Shelley say, The vul- garity of rank and fashion is as gross, in its way, as that of poverty, and Byron has many generous and exalted qualities, but the canker of aristocracy wants to be cut out. Byron was to some extent in the right. Leigh Hunt was a vain man, whose self-assertion was sometimes exaggerated; he was a modest man, whose modesty is partly that of one who is not sure of himself, and does not always know what is a liberty and what an acceptable freedom; and modesty and vanity together made him sensitive and apt to take offence. It is almost incredible that he should have mis- understood Napiers request for a gentleman-like article, as a sneer at 8 Leigh Hunt. his birth; and when Macaulay put the matter right, Leigh Hunt showed as little dignity in his prompt reconcilia- tion as in his unnecessary offence. He was, indeed, seldQm dignified. In hits crusade against English laws and institutions he suggests to us Don Quixote mounted on Sanchos ass. His appreciation of his own deeds and sufferings is sometimes petty; his men- tion of the great is sometimes vulgar. On paper he could be as impudent as Monckton Mimes, without the fun and high spirits which commended impu- dence in that exuberant humorist. This want of taste was partly a natural defect, but much more the result of too early praise, followed by illiberal de- traction and savage abuse. Such treat- ment might have poisoned alithe honey on Hybla; but Leigh Hunt became neither sour nor bitter. We return to the autobiography, a work which no one can read without loving, or at least liking, the author. He was a master of the art of portrait- paintingclear, humorous, and sympa- thetic. Where, for instance, shall we find a more graceful and vivid represen- tation of the tragic and the comic muse than in these sketches of Pasta and Mrs. Jordan? (Pasta).She was a great tragic actress, and her singing, in point of force, tender- ness and expression, was equal to her act- ing. All noble passions belonged to her, and her very scorn seemed equally noble, for it trampled only on what was mean. When she measured her enemy from head to foot, in Tancredi, you really felt for the man at seeing him so reduced to nothingness. . . . And when, in the part of Medea, she looked on the children she was about to kill, and tenderly parted their hair, and seemed to mingle her very eyes in loviugness with theirs, uttering at the same time notes of the most wan- dering and despairing sweetness, every gentle eye melted into tears. . . . Per- fect truth, graced by idealism, was the secret of Pastas greatness. She put truth first always; and in so noble and sweet a mind grace followed it as a nai ural consequence. (Mrs. Jordan).In comedy nature had ne~er bEen wanting; and there was one comic actress who was nature herself, in 9 one of her most genial forms. This was Mrs. Jordan; who, though she was neither beautiful, nor handsome, nor even pretty, nor accomplished, nor a lady, noc anything conventional or comme i~ faut whatsoever, yet was so pleasant, so cordial, so natural, so full of spirits, so healthily constituted in mind and body, had such a shapely leg withal, so charming a voice, and such a happy and happy-making expression of countenance, that she appeared something superior to all those requirements of acceptability, and to hold a patent from Nature herself for our delight and good opinion. She made even Methodists love her. A touching story is told of her apologizing to a poor man of that persuasion for hav- ing relieved him. He had asked her name, and she expressed a hope that he would not feel offended when the name was told him. On hearing it the honest Methodist shed tears of pity and admira- tion, and trusted that he could do no wrong in begging a blessing on her head. Mrs. Jordan was inimitable in ex- emplifying the consequences of too much restraint in ill-educated country girls, in romps, in hoydens, and i~i wards on whom the mercenary have designs. She wore a bib and tucker and pinafore with a bounc- ing propriety fit to make the boldest spectator alarmed at the Idea of bringing such a household responsibility on his shoulders. To see her, when thus attired, shed blubbering tears for some disappoint- ment, and eat all the while a great thick slice of bread and butter, weeping and moaning and munching, and eying at every bite the part she meant to bite next, was a lesson against will and appetite worth a hundred sermons. His portrait of Wordsworth is full of humor, and the malice which inspires it wa~ not incompatible with genuine admiration: Mr. Wordsworth, whom Mr. Hazlitt designated as one that would have had the wide circle of his humanities made still wider, and a good deal more pleasant, by dividing a little more of his time be- tween his lakes in Westmoreland and the hotels in the metropolis, had a dignified manner, with a deep and roughish, though not unpleasing voice, and an exalted mode of speaking. He had a habit of keeping his left hand in the bosom of his waist- coat, and in this attitude, except when he turned round to take one of the sub- jects of his criticism from the shelves (for Leigh Hunt. his contemporaries were there also), he sat dealing forth his eloquent, but hardly catholic judgments. In his fathers house there were not many mansions. He was as sceptical on the merits of all kinds of poetry but one as Richardson was on those of the novels of Fielding. Under the study in which my visitor and I were sitting was an archway leading to a nursery ground; a cart happened to go through it while I was inquiring whether he would take any refreshment, and he uttered in so lofty a voice the words, Anything which is going forward, that I felt inclined to ask him whether he would take a piece of the cart. Lamb would certainly have done it. Walter Scott said that the eyes of Burns were the finest he ever saw. I cannot say the same of Mr. Wordsworths; that is, not in the sense of the beautiful, or even of the profound. But certainly I never beheld eyes that looked so inspired or supernatural. They were like fires, half- burning, half-smouldering, with a sort of acrid fixture of regard, and seated at the further end of two caverns. One might imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have had such eyes. The finest eyes, in every sense of the word, which I have ever seen in a mans head (and I have seen many fine ones) are those of Thomas Carlyle. Every word that Leigh Hunt wrote about Keats and Shelley is worth read- ing. This matchless fireside compan- ion, as Lamb called him, had, beyond all other points of genius, the genius of friendship. No man ever chose his friends more worthily, nor loved them more, nor was better loved in return. Keats and I might have been taken for friends of the old stamp, between whom there was no such thing even as obligation, except the pleasure of it. I could not love him as deeply as I did $helley. That was impossible. But my affection was only second to the one which I entertained for that heart of hearts. Keats, like Shelley himself, enjoyed the usual privilege of greatness with all whom he knew, rendering it delightful to be obliged by him, and an equal, and not greater, delight to oblige. It was a pleasure to his friends to have him in their houses, and he did not grudge it. When Endymion was published he was living at Hampstead with his friend Charles Armitage Brown, who attended him most affectionately through a severe illness, and with whom, to their great mutual en- joyment, he had taken a journey into Scotland. The lakes and mountains of the North delighted him exceedingly. He beheld them with an epic eye. After- wards he went into the South, and luxuri- ated in the Isle of Wight. On Browns leaving home a second time to visit the same quarter, Keats, who was too ill to accompany him, came to reside with me, when his last and best volume of poems appeared, containing Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes, and the noble fragment of Hyperion. I remember Lambs delight and admiration on reading this book; how pleased he was with the designation of Mercury as the star of Lethe (rising, as it were, and glittering as he came upon that pale region), and the fine, daring anticipation in that passage of the second poem: So the two brothers and their murdered man Rode past fair Florence. So also the description, at once delicate and gorgeous, of Agnes praying beneath the painted window. The public are now well acquainted with those and other passages, for which Persian kings would have filled a poets mouth with gold. Of Charles Lamb he writes: As his frame, so was his genius. It was as fit for thought as could be, and equally as unfit for action; and this ren- dered him melancholy, apprehensive, humorous, and willing to make the best of everything as it was, both from tender- ness of heart and abhorrence of alteration. His understanding was too great to admit an absurdity; his frame was not strong enough to deliver it from a fear. His sensibility to strong contrasts was the foundation of his humor, which was that of a wit at once melancholy and willing to be pleased. He would beard a supersti- tion and shudder at the old phantasm while he did it. One could have im- agined him cracking a jest in the teeth of a ghost and then melting into thin air himself, out of sympathy with the awful. His humor and his knowledge both were those of Hamlet, of Moli~re, of Carlin, who shook a city with laughter, and, in order to divert his melancholy, was recommended to go and hear himself. Of Shelley, Leonitius (as Shelley called him) saysbut the whole book is full of love and regret for his dearest friend: 10 Leigh Hunt. He was like a spirit that had darted out of its orb and found itself in another world. I used to tell him that he had come from the planet Mercury. When I heard of the catastrophe that overtook him it seemed as if this spirit, not sufficiently constituted like the rest of the world to obtain their sympathy, yet gifted with a double portion of love for all living things, had been found dead in a solitary corner of the earth, its wings stiffened, its warm heart coldthe relics of a misunderstood nature, slain by the ungenial elements. And in his Imagination and Fancy. A man idolized by his friends, studious, temperate, of the gentlest life and con- versation, and willing to have died to do the world a service. For my part I never can mention his name without a transport of love and gratitude. I rejoice to have partaken of his cares, and to be both suffering and benefiting from him at this moment; and whenever I think of a future state, and of the great and good Spirit that must pervade it, one of the first faces I humbly hope to see there is that of the kind and impassioned man whose inter- course conferred on me the title of the friend of Shelley. Shelley . . . might well call himself Ariel. All the more enjoying part of his poetry is Arielthe delicate yet powerful spirit, jealous of restraint, yet able to serve; living in the elements and the flowers; treading the ooze of the salt deep, and running on the sharp wind of the North; feeling for creatures unlike himself; flaming amazement on them, too, and singing exquisitest songs. Alas! and he suffered for years, as Ariel did in the cloven pine; but now he is out of it, and serving the purposes of Beneficence with a calmness befitting his knowledge and his love. And of Coleridge: Coleridge was as little fitted for action as Lamb, but on a different account. His person was of a good height, but as sluggish and solid as the others was light and fragile. He had, perhaps, suffered it to look old before its time for want of exercise. . . . Nevertheless there was something invincibly young in the look of his face. It was round and fresh- colored, with agreeable features and an 11 open, indolent, good-natured mouth. This boylike expression was very becoming in one who dreamed and speculated as he did when he was really a boy, and who passed his life apart from the rest of the world with a book and his flowers. His fore- head was prodigiousa great piece of placid marble and his fine eyes, in which all the activity of his mind seemed to concentrate, moved under it with a sprightly ease, as if it was pastime to them to carry all that thought. His room looked upon a delicious pros- pect of wood and meadow, with colored gardens under the window, like an em- broidery to the mantle. I thought, when I first saw it, that he had taken up his dwelling-place like an abbot. Here he cultivated his flowers, and had a set of birds for his pensioners, who came to breakfast with him. He might have been taking his daily stroll up and down, with his black coat and white locks, and a book in his hand, and was a great acquaint- ance of the little children. His main occupation, I believe, was reading. He loved to read old folios, and to make old voyages with Purchas and Marco Polo, the seas being in good visionary condition, nnd the vessel well stocked with botar- goes. Such portrait-painting as this is as good in its straightforward vision as the best bits of Carlyle. Here is no elaborate piecing out of ~mpressions to make up a paragraph, but the natural expression of a clear and true mental picture. Much of Leigh Hunts prose was written for the day, and meant to be forgotten to-morrow. His Men, Women, and Books, the transcriptions from Italian remances, the Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla (set off by Doyles delightful illustrations), and the Wit and Humor, served the purpose for which they were written, and may now be left on the shelf. The Essays remain, and have much of the felicity of the autobiography. As an essayist, Hunt will bear comparison with Haz- litt, if not with Lamb himself; though, indeed, it is only fa4r to remember that Hunt, Hazlitt, and Lamb did not copy one another, but used a common lan- guage. It seems strange, nowadays, that Leigh Hunt, as a poet, should have been 12 reckoned as the rival, if not the equal, of Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley. We would rather rank him, as a poet, with Lamb and Barry Cornwall. But he was one of the leaders of the natural schoola literary pre-Raphaelite or pre- Popeite, taking his starting-point from Dryden. He and his school were poets of fancy neither romanticists nor classicists; realists in a sense, but not students of the facts at their feet, like Crabbe or Wordsworth; and their departure from the well-worn ways of poetry brought them praise and blame, rather on account of their common principles than in proportion to their comparative merits as poets. It is so in the case of every new movement; the final verdictif there be such a thing is given by a later generation, which is not affected by the jealousies and friendships of to-day. Leigh Hunt had good authority for thinking himself a poet. His detractors in the Quarterly called him the hiero- phant of the new school of Cockney poetry, and spoke of Keats as his simple neophyte and copyist. The Whig reviewers, while they lectured him for affectation, negligence, and vulgar diction, awarded him the praise of genuine poetry, grace and spirit, and infinite beauty and delicacy. The Story of Rimini was much admired at the time; Byron commended it warmly; and Scott, gossiping in Mur- rays shop, put the volume into his pocket. Shelley praised The Nymphs,~ one of the pieces in Foliage, as truly poetical, in the intense and em- phatic sense of the word. Robert Browning many years later wrote: I have always venerated you as a poet. I believe your poetry to be sure of its eventual reward. it would be easy to make a selection from Leigh Hunts poems which would find an honorable place in a Parnaso Britannico. The poem by which he will be remembered is Abou Ben Adhem, which, well known as it is, may be here transcribed once more: Abou Ben Adhemmay his tribe in- crease! Leigh Hunt. Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace, And saw within the moonlight in his room, Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom, An angel writing in a book of gold; Exceeding fear had made Ben Adhem bold; And to the Presence in the room he said, What writest thou? The Vision raised his head, And, with a look made all of sweet accord, Answerd, The names of those who love the Lord. And is mine one? said Adhem. Nay, not ~ Replied the Angel. Abou spoke more low, But cheerily still, and said, I pray thee, then, Write me as one who loves his fellow- men. The Angel wrote, and vanishd. The next night He came again with a great wakening light, And showd the names whom Love of God had blest, And, lo! Ben Adhems name led all the rest! But the Chorus of Flowers, the Grasshopper and the Cricket, or the following passage from the Story of Rimini, will give a better idea of his style and its merits: One daytwas on a summer afternoon, When airs and gurgling brooks are best in tune, And grasshoppers are loud, and day-work done, And shades have heavy outlines in the sun The princess came to her accustomd bower To get her, if she could, a soothing hour, Trying, as she was used, to leave her cares Without, and slumberously enjoy the airs, And the low-talking leaves, and that cool light The vines let in, and all that hushing sight Of closing wood seen through the opening door, And distant plash of waters tumbling oer, And smell of citron blooms, and fifty luxuries more. Leigh Hunt. So far the theme is not too high for our poet; but when we approach the catastrophe, we wonder that he should have had the courage to transcribe into his pale water-colors the tremendous encaustic of Dantea poet, too, with whom he was so little in sympathy as to call him the great but infernal Dante, whom I am inclined to worship one minute and send him to his own devil the next. When all is said, it may be admitted that his poetry will not survive. His reputation was won, as he himself con- fessed, too early and too easily; and our age has been taught by Tennyson and Browning to disparage fluency and admire fulness of thought or perfection of manner. The generation of Byron, Scott, and Rogers allowed a larger dilution of sense and style, and was more tolerant of commonplace; and when the turn of fluency comes again, it will not be worth while to disinter Leigh Hunts flowing numbers and breezy sentiment. It is enough for his credit if a few poems be remembered to show what a fine poetical sense was his, tinctured with Keats and Shelley, Spenser and Ariosto, as his prose was tinctured with Lamb, Addison, and Steele. His verse, though neither deep nor strong, is delicate, fresh, sunshiny and original. He could, as Professor Dowden says, have passed his whole life writing eternal new stories in verse, part grave, part gay, of no great length, but just sufficient, as he himself writes, to vent the pleasure with which I am stung on meeting some touching adventure, and which haunts me till I can speak of it some- how. He turned the thoughts of English poets towards Chaucer, Spenser, and Dryden, and in so doing purified his native tongue, whilst he enriched It with echoes of Italy. He was an impor- tant element in shaping the course of Keats and Shelley. To him, more than to any one else, is due that modern study of Italian literature which was caught up and carried on by Landor, Tennyson and the Brownings, and has borne other fruit in the study of Dante. 13 and the poets whom Rossetti taught us to know. And indeed it is not far- fetched to put down to his score some- thing of that international feeling which took shape in Mr. Gladstones attack upon the Bourbon misgovern- ment at Naples, and the sympathy of this government and nation with Italy in the War of Independence in 1859 and 1860. Italy to Leigh Hunt was a poetical expression; but his latest thoughts were of her redemption, and he would have rejoiced, had he lived so long, to follow the career of Cavour and Garibaldi, and welcome Victor Emmanuel as liberator and king. Leigh Hunt was a true poet, if a small one, which is more than can be said of many of the craft who nowadays are so numerous and so unnecessary. In verse and in prose he spoke to his con- temporaries, anticipating and answer- ing their thought; and poetry which does this, though it may perish, has sweetened and elevated the life of its own time and increased the gladness of the world, like the plays, the pic- tures, the conversations, the loves and friendships of those whose eyes have long since sunk into their orbits. Poor Yorick did not live in vain, though his lips can charm no more. The greatest, perhaps the best, part of our lives is made up of perishing trifles; and Leigh Hunt, whose self-conceit was always bounded by modesty, would never have claimed or desired for himself the immortality of the half dozen great wits with whom he was privileged to con- sort. If Leigh Hunts own works fall short of his aspirations, and posterity is will- ing to let them die, it should not be for- gotten that he was the pioneer in poetry to Keats, in prose to Lamb; and that amongst the priesthood of freedom he holds a place by the side of Coleridge, Shelley, and those less transcendental patriots who prepared the English nation for the peaceful revolution of 1832, in that patient and irreconcilable enmity with domestic and political tyranny and imposture (as Shelley wrote), which the tenor of his life had illustrated. Captain Francis Lawton. Nursed and brought up in adversity, not understanding markets, incapa- ble of resisting the impulse which made him spend weeks and months in writing plays that were never acted, or damned on the first night (though he had somo legitimate dramatic successes), still- born poems, and a mass of literature which was ill paid, or of which the expenses exceeded the returns, Leigh hunt was never prosperous, and for the most part miserably poor He was always in debt, and often absolutely penniless; he sometimes wanted even bread. The death of one son and the mis- c-onduct of another did not make him misanthropic. In the midst of hard- ships and mistakes his home was not unhappy. Here were no Byron storms, no Carlyle moroseness, no Shelley amours and desertions, no Coleridge cloud-walking; all was sociable, gay, and genial. He did not understand the give-and-take of life; he took adversity too lightly, and prosperity with too little of its responsibilities. But nothing worse can be charged to him; and in his daily intercourse we may be certain that the balance of good done and pleasure given was not to be measured by a pecuniary standard. His spiritual and charitable balance far outweighed his worldly deficits; and where this is the case it requires no great charity to give him the name of a good and honest man. His best epitaph is the dedication to the Cenci: Had I known a person more highly endowed than yourself with all that it becomes a man to possess, I had solicited for this work the ornament of his name. One more gentle, honorable, innocent, and brave; one of more exalted toleration for all who do and think evil; one who knows better how to receive and how to confer a benefit, though he must ever confer far more than he can receive; one of simpler and, in the highest sense of the word, of purer life and manners, I never knew; and I had already been fortunate in friendships when your name was added to the list. F. WARRJi CORNIsH. From Blackwoods Magazine. CAPTAIN FRANCIS LAWTON. PART I. One afternoon in the autumn of 1813 two gentlemen entered the cathedral of an English city, and halted Within the threshold, looking from side to side with an air of curious scrutiny, which be- spoke the fact that it was their first visit to the building. They were old men, and in their quaintly made gar- ments would have cut but sorry figures in our modern eyes, but they bore them- selves bravely, as became officers in his Majestys army, and in both there was an air of dignity which made the verger hasten towards them, in answer to the summons of an uplifted finger. The strangers desired to be conducted to that part of the building in which a certain monument had been erected, and the vergers face brightened as he heard the request; for in his estimation the cathedral was his own, and all that was therein, and it pleased him well that visitors should come from afar to behold the most recently acquired of his treasures. The black-gowned figure shuffled forward, and the two old gen- tlemen followed, walking with careful, reverent footsteps. They were tread- ing upon graves of brave and good men who had long since been gathered to their fathers; the wall beside them was covered with tablets which the action of time had faded to a dull brownish hue, but the eye was attracted by the gleam of stainless white marble in the distance; and it was at this spot that the verger drew up, before a monument which, both in size and in beauty of design, surpassed any which had yet been seen. The strangers were close behind him when be paused, but there was a marked difference in the manner in which they greeted the object of their search. The elder of the two hung back a step, and there was a pained shrink- ing upon his face as of one who quails before a dreaded ordeal; the younger pulled his eyeglass from his fob, and hurried forward to read the words which were carved upon the marble scroll. 14 Captain Francis Lawton. The inscription consisted of a eulogy upon the brave and unselfish life of one Captain Francis Lawton, who had lost his life in India while gallantly attempting to take a fortress from an overwhelming force of the enemy, and the art of the sculptor had given an added meaning to the words; for over the figure of the dying man, whose torn clothingand wounded body told thestory of catastrophe and defeat, there stood an angel, with wings outspread, hold- ing in her hands a victors crown! It was a happy inspiration, for Francis Lawton had never appeared a greater hero in the eyes of his countrymen than when the news of the failure of his last enterprise sent a wail of lamentation through the length and breadth of the land. A nations memory is, however, a fickle quality, and at the close of the nineteenth century it is necessary to recall to memory some historical facts, in order that the reader may under- stand the circumstances attending Captain Lawtons defeat. The campaign in India which had as its object the relief of the rajah of Travancore against the attacks of Tippoo Sultan, commenced in the mid- dle of June, 1790, and one of its first operations was the establishment of a secure and easy communication with the Carnatic, in order to bring forward the battering-train, and the supplies for the service of the troops. The Muglee Pass, by which the army had ascended the Ghauts, being too far to the northwards, and not sufficiently connected with posts, it became an object of great importance to dispossess the enemy of the Poilcode Pass, and of the hill-forts which commanded it. These forts were numerous, and the natural strength of their position made them in many instances appear almost inaccessible; nevertheless the army set itself resolutely to the attack, and started on the march towards Oussour with undaunted spirit. Although the present campaign was in its infancy, Captain Lawton had already gained for himself a unique position in the service. Distinguished gallantry in one or two previous engage- ments had called him into public notice, but among his fellows he was even more renowned for a personal mag- netism which made him the most popular officer in the force, and the idol of his battalion; while his wonderful hold over his men was so well recog- nized by the commander, that he was frequently chosen to undertake duties of a specially hazardous nature. The army had marched some distance up the pass, and was about to advance to attack the fort of Kutnagheri, when it was discovered that there was a great want of water on the beaten road, and that it had the further disadvantage of passing within the range of the guns of the fortress. These, fired from the summit of a rock, could reach to a great distance and cause much damage; while the approach of the troops being seen from afar, all preparations would naturally be made for a defence. Under these circumstances the army halted, and Captain Lawton was sent forward to reconnoitre in search of a safer route. He had under his com- mand a company of men, and two lieutenants, and was empowered with authority either to halt or to advance and attack, according to his own dis- cretion. Some days later a messenger returned to the main body of the army bearing word that a path had been discovered, winding through the hills and woods, which, though unfit for an army or any large convoy, was yet eligible for a small detachment, and secure from observation. Captain Lawton was of the opinion that the best hope for suc- cess in storming the fort lay in a surprise under cover of darkness, when the force might be supposed to be much larger than it was in reality, and the kWedar be alarmed into surrender by the rapidity and vigor of the attack, as had already happened more than once. He had therefore decided to follow the hill-road as far as possible, find a good position for watching the movements of the enemy, and there await his oppor- tunity. He asked a certain time for the completion of his scheme, and when that time had elapsed the army ad- 15 Captain Francis Lawton. vanced in confident expectation of suc- cess. The guns of the fortress were silent as they approached; but no En- glish flag floated from the ramparts, and as the troops drew nearer they discovered with amazement and dismay that all that was left of the once mighty Kutnagheri was a deserted ruin. The enemy had abandoned their position, and, following their usual custom, had blown up the solid bastions of the fort behind them so as to prevent its further possession, while of the captain and his men not a trace could be dis- covered. The gravest fears were entertained, and a search-party was organized to explore the hill-paths, under the guid- ance of the messenger who had originally been a member of the cap- tains company. For one long day they searched in vain, and thenin a thickly wooded gorge, within half a mile of the fortress itselfthey came across the marks of a terrible struggle. Among the trees and rocks which blocked the narrow way lay a heap of dead bodies, many mutilated beyond recognition by~ the hands of the remorseless enemy; others exposed to the last indignity of having their bodies stripped, and left to furnish food for the birds of prey. It was evident that the captains hid- ing-place had been discovered, and that, caught in a trap and surrounded on all sides, the little company had been cut down and utterly annihilated; and also that dread of the vengeance which would certainly follow had induced the enemy to abandon their position, and retire to a safe distance. In one sense, therefore, Captain Lawton had, after all, succeeded in clearing the way for his comrades; but in the opinion of men and officers alike, Kutnagheri was dearly bought at the cost of one of the most valued lives in the army. The two strangers stood in silence before the monument, while passers-by came and went, casting curious glances at their pale, absorbed faces. Ay! ay! sighed the elder at length, and so it all ends! Little Lawton! poor little Lawton! for his thoughts had flown back, and he was not think- ing of the stalwart soldier, but of a curly-headed boy who had been his friend at Eton, the sharer and confidant of every youthful joy. He was getting an old man, and the days of his boy- hood were clearer in memory than those of middle age; his eyes dimmed with tears, which were shed half for his friend and half for the days of youth- the merry, glorious days which would never return again. His friend looked at him with quiet understanding. Nay, not ends! he said gently. It is impossible to limit the influence of a man like Lawton. The tone of the whole army is higher and purer to-day because he lived and died. It is the fashion to take dark views of things, and to think the worst of our fellow- creatures; but when one sees how ready men are to be fired by a fine example, it revives ones faith in human nature. It is there! the good is there, but it is often dormant for want of some- thing to fan it into a flame. He lit the spark in many a breast. God bless him. The other bent his head, and his lips moved as if in repetition of those last two words. Yes, he said reflectively, he had a wonderful power of drawing out the best that was in a man. He was an optimist, Huntly; that was the secret of it. He believed in his men, and expected great things of them, and his confidence inspired them to rise to the height of the occasion. That and his own splendid example. The man did not know the meaning of fear, Maurice. It was an unknown quantity. Such a nature is a grand inheritance.~~ Perhaps so, but I will tell you what is grander. To knew the meaning to the full, to have had bitter experience of its power, and to have overcome it by sheer force of will. That was Law- tons case. You are mistaken in your estimate of his character, as were most people who made his acquaintance in later years. He was in reality of a timid nature, and his dread of physical pain amounted to absolute terror. The 16 Captain Francis Lawton. 17 first years of school were torture to him, realize his danger, he had fallen, a limp and our rough games a severe ordeal; and helpless mass, upon the floor. yet he never shirked a dangerous duty, The major uttered an exclamation and the boy did not breathe who would of dismay, and with the assistance of have dared to call him coward! I the verger lifted the stranger and seated remember one day, when he was stay- him upon a chair which was close at ing with me in the holidays, we were hand. He was an old man, and pre- fired with a desire to be tattooed, and sented a pitiable spectacle when con- engaged an old boatman to perform the trasted with the two officers with their operation. It was a very simple device air of dignity and well-being. His which we chosean anchor and our clothes, though clean and whole, bore own initials; but I can see his face now marks of the extreme of. poverty; his as he stood watching me, waiting for frame was shrunken until it was his turn to comewhite to the lips, and scarcely larger than that of a child, and quivering with nervousness! We his hair hung in masses round a begged him to give it up, but no! he skeleton face, in which the outline of would not hear of such a thing, and the skull and the jaw were painfully held out his arm without flinching, apparent. So deathlike indeed did he though one could see that it was all appear at the moment, that the major he could do to keep from fainting more was seriously aiarmed, and would have than once. He overcame his weakness hurried off in search of a doctor had to a certain extent as he grew older, but not the verger reassured him. it was there all the same, and he must He will be better in a moment, sir. have had many a conflict with him- He is just a bit shaken with the fall. self which none of his comrades sus- You dont look very hale at the best of pected. times, do you, Johnson? The gentle- I, for one, never did. Most men man is afraid that he has hurt you, have an attack of nervousness now and but you will be none the worse after then, especially before an engagement; a little rest, will you now? but I imagined Lawton above all weak- The old man stared dumbly in the ness. We used to call upon him to majors face, but he waved his hand cheer us up. as if entreating to be left in peace, and And he would do it, no doubt, and the verger fell back a few paces and then go away and fight his own battle continued his explanations in a lowered by himself. That was always his way. voice~ Well, I am glad to see how highly his No need to be frightened by his townsfolk appreciate him. It warms appearance, sir. He looks very little ones heart to find that he is not for- different at the best of times. He isnt gotten. Dear fellow! dear fellow! long for this world, and thats the Reluctant as he had been to approach truth of it. He lodges with some the spot consecrated to his friends friends of mine close at hand, and I see memory, Major Maurice now seemed a good deal of him, for he spends half even less inclined to leave it. He un- his time in the cathedral. Hes a kind gered behind his companion, and cast of fancy for that monument youve so many backward glances over his been looking atsit and stare at it by shoulder, that he failed to notice a the hour together, he will, without ever small, bent figure which was approach- stirring, as if he were a stone image lag along the aisle, and had hardly himself! Its a pretty thing tooI like taken twenty steps forward when he to look at it myself, and Ive heard came into violent collision with the visitors say that they have never seen stranger. The major was a heavy anything to beat the expression on the man, and the new-coiner slight and angels face. Perhaps it comforts him, feeble in his gait; so it happened that poor old chapthinking of whats com- his stick slipped from his grasp, and ing. Hes been a sailor in his day, and before the onlookers had time to has saved a little moneyenough to LIVING AGE. VOL. XI. 522 18 keep him going as long as he will last. The major listened, his brow puckered with anxiety. I shall never forgive myself if my carelessness has any bad results. He looks shockingly ill! I must speak to him again before I go. There is some- thing I should like to say. He stepped forward and laid his hand upon the old mans arm. It pained him to note how he shrank at the touch, as if he were little in th~ habit of expecting kindness from his fellow-creatures. I am distressed at the results of my own carelessness, he said gently. ~Your good friend, the verger here, will look after you for the present; but I shall be staying in the city for some days, and if you are any the worse for your fall, I trust that y.ou will let me know, and allow me the satisfaction of serving you in any way that is in my power. A message to Major Maurice at the Crown Inn will be sure to find me, and I will come in person to answer it. He paused, but though the sunken eyes were gazing fixedly at him, there was no glimmer of comprehension upon the face to show that the meaning of his words had penetrated to the brain; and though he stood waiting for several moments, there was no attempt at an answer. The major straightened himself with a sigh, and turned back to the verger. Well, he said, I must just leave him in your hands. Send for me if he is ill or in need of assistance. In the mean time He is well cared for, sir. They are decent people where he lives, and will do what is right by him. I will give them your message, and if any- thing goes wrong you shall hear about it. Come then, Huntly! We can do no more. Let us get away from here.~ Major Maurice dropped a coin into the vergers hand and hurried towards the doorway. The incidents of the past few minutes had shaken his nerves. He heaved a sigh of relief upon regain- ing the fresh outer air. PART II. It was three days later that the major received the summons which he had been dreading. He was seated in his private sitting~room, enjoying the first fire of the season, when there came a tap at the door, and a stranger entered, in whom he instantly recog- nized the verger of the cathedral. He brought a message that the old man had taken to bed on the evening of the accident, and had failed so rapidly during the intervening days that the doctor had pronounced it impossible that he could live through another night. He had expressed a wish to see Major Maurice, and the messenger had come in haste, as no time was to be wasted if he were to be found alive. Unspeakably distressed, the major followed his guide through a labyrinth of narrow streets, until they reached their destination, and ascending a nar- row wooden staircase, found them- selves in the attic bedroom in which the dying man lay. The breath of winter was in the air, nevertheless the window was thrown wide open, and the patient had only one thin sheet by way of covering as he lay propped up against his pillows. It did not need a practised eye to see that his hours of life were numbered; but his eyes were fixed upon the doorway, and an expression of unspeakable relief passed over his face as the major entered. All the taciturnity of a few days before had disappeared, and he was now so anxious to speak that he would not pause to listen to the others earnest words of regret. No, no! It is not your doing. I was doomed before then,or if yoa have hastened the end by a few weeks, what then? You have done me the greatest service that was in any man s power to pay. But now I have some- thing to say to you. Send them all away and shut the door. I must speak to you by yourself for a few minutes. Then, as the verger and the woman of the house left the room, The doctor Captain Francis Lawton. tells me that I shall not live until the morning, he continued feebly. He asked me if I would like to see a clergy- man, and I told him no. I have con- fessed my sins to God, and I want no man to act as go-between. But there is a weight upon me,a heavy weight, and there is only one man in the world to whom I can unburden my soul. That man is yourself! The major drew back with a start of intensest astonishment, and for several moments the two men gazed steadily at each other, while the tick of the little clock sounded clearly through the silence. The eyes of the dying man were full of wistful ques- tioning, but in the face above him there was no shadow of recognitionnothing but blank bewilderment and surprise. No, he sighed wearily, you dont remember meI never imagined that you wouldbut you knew me once. It is a long time ago You remember the summer of 1790, when you were serving under Lord Cornwallis in India, when you set off on the march to Oussour and the Yes, yes, of course! And you were with us then? You were one of my men? My poor fellow, why did you not tell me before? And you recog- nized me the other day, even before hearing my name! Well, I am less altered than you, no doubtno praise to me! And what have you been doing with yourself ever since? You have had your pension, of course? The man waved his hand feebly. I am coming to that. I will tell you all by and by. Sit down beside me. It is getting difficult to speak, and I have so much to say Yes, I was with the army, but I was not of your men Oussour was garrisoned, and we moved nearer the pass. Kutnagheri lay before us. It was a small fort compared with others which we had taken, but the position made it difficult to approach. The road was exposed, and there was a want of water Aa company was sent forward. Yes! yes! The majors eyes were alight with eagerness, and he leant over the bed, as if fearful of losing one of 19 the faintly-uttered words. To find another road! I remember perfectly, of course I remember. Well? A company of men and three officers, two lieutenants and the captain. He was your friend; you were always together. That is why I speak to you now It was a difficult errand. The country was wild, and once off the beaten track there was constant danger of a surprise; but there was a hill-path, and after a long search we We! The major started violently, and the blood rushed to his face. You mean to say that you were there,that you were one of Lawtons men! Andy you escaped! We thought that every man of you had been cut to pieces.~ You escaped! You saw the last of him and can tell me how it came about! You were surprised, of course; but how did it happen that you He stoppel short as a sudden terrible suspicion flashed across his brain. Had there been a traitor in the midst of that gal- lant company?a man so base that for the sake of his own safety he had been willing to betray not only his own com- panions, but the most beloved and popular leader in the English army? As the thought passed through his mind he drew himself back from the bed, so that the clothing might not touch him where he sat, and his face hardened into the likeness of an iron mask. The change of expression was too eloquent to be misunderstood, and the sick man winced before it as in sudden pain. Dont judge me yet! he pleaded, not yetuntil you have heard my story. I will tell you all We fol- lowed the path until it ended, and hid ourselves among the rocks and trees. The fort was half a mile distant, and at night scouts were sent out to recon- noitre. The information which they brought back was insufficient; time pressed, and the captain was im- patient. ThenI had done good ser- vice before, and they trusted me I went out, with two others! We sepa- rated, and crept along, hiding behind the trees and bushes nearer and neareruntil suddenlyin a moment Gaptain Francis Lawton. Captain Francis Lawton, as it wereI found myself surrounded. It was dark, and the wind was high I had heard no movement. They car- ried me back to the fort, and thenfor they knew what my presence meant they would have me tell the number and position of our men. I refused! Oh yes, do not scorn me too soonI refused! If it had been a choice be- tween that and death I would have stood while every man among them fired upon me, and have been thankful thankful! I had been a soldier all my life, and had faced many dangers. lt was not death that I feared, but, the weak voice shrilled with agony, they tortured me! Do you know what that means, you who sit here calm and comfortable, and despise me for my weakness? The touch of the burning iron, the wrench of limb from limb? Oh, my God! a man is not himselfhe is mad! how can he be answerable? I told all~all! I lay there bound hand and foot, waiting until they should prove the truth of my words. If I lied, I should pay the price; if not, my life should be my reward. You know the rest. For me, I was sent up among the mountains and kept a prisoner, but by and by I had greater liberty. I could be of use to them in many ways; they sent for me to doctor them in their sicknesses, and I was free to go about from place to place. But when the years had passed on, it began to burn within methe longing to come home, to tread on English ground, to see En- glish faces, and hear the dear familiar werds again before I died. It grew and grew until I could fight against it no longer, and I worked my way across the country, trading with the natives as I went, until I reached the big towns. Then I saw my face for the first time for nearly twenty years, and it was as the face of a stranger. I had been sav- ing all this time, and had enough money laid by to bring me home, and to keep me from actual starvation. I came back to the old country, but the hunger was still in my heartI could not ease it. I drifted to this city, and have remained here ever since. You would never guess what is the attraction which keeps me here! It is that monu- ment in the cathedral! I have spent hours of every day gazing at it. It breaks my heart, and yetit comforts me! I look at the angels face as she bends *ver the dying man, and I read the werds wThch they have carved upon the marble, and I know that they are true! True, indeed! replied the major bitterly. If that thought comforts you, lay it to your soul that you have killed one of natures noblest gentlemen. A man who spent his life in the service of others, whose memory is sweet in the minds of his friends until this day- ay, and whose influence is strong within their hearts, though it is twenty years since those black brutes shed his blood! The grey hue of death was spread- ing over the old mans features, but, as he listened to the majors words, his face lit up with a smile of ecstatic happiness. He clasped his hands together, and his lips moved as if in prayer. Thank God! he cried thank God for those words! Then he did not lose everything It was a sad ending, but he did not lose every- thing God knows all, and he will rememberhe will remember His voice died away in inarticulate murmurings, and for a few moments the major believed that consciousness had left him; but presently the closed eyes opened, and he spoke again in a tone of great sweetness. It is coming very near. In a few minutes I shall be with God, and he will judge me; but you were his friend I think I could die in peace, if you could say that you forgive me! The major hesitated. Horror of that sin which a soldier is taught to count the worst of all was strong upon him even at this solemn moment. He looked into the wistful face, and for a moment he wavered; then the remem- brance of that awful scene at Kutna- gheri swept over him once more, he thought of a hundred homes left desolate, of a gallant life cut short in its prime, and sprang to his feet with a gesture of aversion. 20 On Things Persian. No, never! I cannot say it. It would be a lie. How could any honest man overlook such a sin?Judas! The sufferer drew in his breath with painful inhalation. No, nonot that! he cried, and his voice was as a wail of agony. Not Judasonly Peter. Peter whose enemy overcame him in an hour of weakness; who denied his Master, and then gave his life for the cause; who played the cowards part, and then went out into the darkness and wept bitterlymy God, bitterly! No pen could desciAbe the intonation of that last word. A broken heart breathed through it with irresistible eloquence, and at the sound the eyes which had been bright with anger melted into sudden tears. It was only a moment as we measure time; but in that moment the major had time to remember many thingsmoments of weakness when the right had not con- quered; secret sins unsuspected by the world, perhaps also unrepented; his own need of pardon and the divine for- giveness, which of old had transformed vacillating disciple into the rock of the Church. A great wave of tender- ness and pity filled his heart; he lifted the wasted hand and held it in a warm, close pressure. Forgive me, my poor fellow, for my hardness of heart Who am I that I should condemn you? If it will com- fort you in the slightest degree to receive my pardon, you have itfull and unstinted. And may the Lord have mercy upon your soul! The sunken eyes were raised to his; there was in them a shining depth of love, such as he had never seen upon a human face. The next moment they closed, and the last flickering breaths of life came from between the parted lips. The major tightened his grasp of the hand which he held between his own, so that while consciousness re- mained, the traveller into the great unknown might feel the presence of a comrade by his side; and when the peace of death was upon the still face, he laid it gently down, stretched at full length upon the sheet. 21 The next momeiat he fell back against the bedpost, and though the chilly wind still blew into the chamber, the sweat stood in beads upon his forehead. The sleeve of the night-shirt had fallen back from the dead mans arm, and upon the emaciated wrist was engraven an old tattoo-markan anchor and the initials F. L. From The Fortnightly Review. - ON THINGS PERSIAN. Until the accession of his present Majesty Mozaffer-ed-din, King of Kings and Asylum of the Universe, to give him his full title, the death of a shah of Persia was invariably the commence- ment of a Terror, if not of a struggle for the possession of the Peacock Throne and the Kaianian crown; the highroads would be impassable for travellers or goods, on account of swarms of marauders, who hurried to avail themselves of the traditional license of the time; agricultural opera- tions would be at a standstill, for what villager would dare to leave the security of his mud fortress? In the town the merchants and shopkeepers would quit the bazaars, and in all probability their shops and offices would be plundered; the streets, de- serted by day, were in the possession of the lutis (or thieves by profession) at night; no provisions of flesh or grain would be brought in from the outlying country, as the roads were patrolled by gangs of robbers, thus causing a sudden series of local famines, while the bakers would cease to ply their trade, save under compulsion. Now was the time for murder and rapine, the man with a blood feud slew his enemy if he got the chance, for a crime of this sort might be committed with impunity in the traditional shilifik or popular struggle which always took place at the death of a king of Persia. The Persians themselves have long foretold with confidence a desperate fight for the crown between the rivals Prince Sultan Massfid Mirza, the Zil-es 22 Sultan, the eldest son of the king, but not by a royal mother, and the Vail Ahd, Prince Moz~affer-ed-din, the pres- ent shah. Time was when such a struggle was indeed likely. The Zil-es- Sultan, governor of Fars and Ispahan, ruled over the whole of southern Persia, he accumulated a vast treasure, he commenced to raise and drill troops; what more congenial amusement for the impetuous and hot-blooded son of the tranquil Nussir-ed-din? But the shah grew suspicious, there could be but one reason for his sons military enthusiasm; he became alarmed, and ordered the Zil-es-Sultan to Teheran where he remained for some time in the cold shade of the kings displeasure, in a sort of honorable captivity. From being the most powerful man in Persia, H.R.H. Zil-es-Sultan became a quantit~ n6gligeable in the scheme of Persian politics, for the king had taken much of his sons vast wealth, while stripping him of his governorships; and in Persia, without money the bravest and most astute of pretenders is powerless, for political adherents have to be bought with gold tomans, promises being of little worth in the game in which fail- ure means death. The Zil-es-Sultan now saw that there was small likelihood of his ever attain- ing the throne, for the Vail Ahd, Prince Mozaffer-ed-din, had long been recog- nized as the shahs heir by the minis- ters of both England and Russia. His strong commonsense caused uim at once t~ change his tactics, and he proceeded to openly express his loyalty to his brother; for the Shah Nussir-ed-din was now an old man, and in the Persia of the present day, as in the Turkey of the time of Shakespeare, when Amurath an Amurath succeeds, possible rivals are shown little mercy. As a rule they are slain, generally privately strangled or poisoned, or after mutilation or deprivation of sight they linger out a miserable and forgotten existence in the fortress-prison of Ardebil. State prisoners for life, they are practically dead. It was a fortunate thing for the Zil-es-Sultan that he wisely and hon- estly accepted the changed situation. On Things Persian. After a time his father sent him once more as governor to Ispahan, but the rich province of Pars was given to another. In Ispahan the shahs eldest son remained politically quiet, a severe but clever governor, his province con- tinued tranquil, and comparative plenty reigned there; but as for popularity, the princes fall had been too apparent, and few Persian politicians of late years looked upon him as a serious candidate for the crown. On the late kings death, the Zil-es-Sultan hastened to express his loyalty to the new shah, and was duly rewarded by a message of confidence, in which Mozaffer-ed-din Shah graciously spoke of him as my elder brother. Had the kings death occurred after a long illness a few years ago, it is quite possible that there would have been a desperate struggle for the crown; the very suddenness of the shahs death rendered an attempt to seize the throne impossible, and the peaceful succession of Mozaffer-ed-din a certainty. Nowadays the prime minister is able to warn the governors of provinces to take the needful steps to prevent the lawlessness and mob rule that used to be a matter of course at the death of a shah of Persia, for he has the telegraphs at his disposal, and within a few hours he was able to assure the new shah that all was quiet, save in the neighborhood of unruly Shiraz, in which place the bazaars had to be closed for several days, while the Jews were besieged in their Ghetto, but had successfully defended themselves with stones. In Ispahan business was resumed three days after the news reached the town, and, save for the uprising of a few brigands from the wandering tribes, who have made the roads in southern Persia temporarily unsafe, and as a warning to whom four criminals were at once executed in Shiraz, Persia was tranquil. The body of the late shah was at once rudely embalmed and placed am& nati in a coffin covered with Cashmir shawls; it will be conveyed to holy Kllm, the burial-place and shrine of Fatima, the daughter of Iman Riza, the 1 Stored, as a pledge is stored. On Things Persian. 23 eighth imam; and beneath the great sovereigns and Russian imperials, and golden dome which glitters in the cen- bars and ingots of pure gold, all pass tre of the plain of Kfim, and can be seen with the bejewelled peacock throne, the for miles in every direction, and which spoil of the conqueror Nadir, to the is a favorite place of pilgrimage, the fortunate Mozaffer-ed-din, who corn- bones of Nussir-ed-din Shah, who in a mences his reign as the wealthiest mon- way was a father to his people, will lie, arch in the world. The late shah was a good king, an Nor was the great treasure left by the amiable despot, a firm, wise, and merci- late shah wrung by tyranny from his ful ruler, who had the welfare of ryots; he was able to accumulate vast Persia at heart, and was neither a sums in what is considered in Persia a tyrant nor a voluptuary. His pleasures perfectly legitimate manner. Just prior were simple in the extreme; he was a to the Persian new year the annual sportsman par excellence, a man who changes in the provincial governorships delighted in the hunting of big game, were made, and then the magnates of a fine shot with gun or rifle, one who, the kingdom would proceed to bid like the late king of Italy, rejoiced in against each other for place and powei-. violent exercise as a relief from town The actual cash value of the revenue of life and the cares of state. The late each province or district in a normal shah was no idle or vicious despot; he year was pretty well known; this sum did not smoke, and his diet was of the had to be paid or guaranteed to the simplest, and he was a merciful king. king; in addition a present, we should He it was who did away with the hate- call it a bribe, had to be laid at ~ils ful custom of the shah presiding in Majestys feet. Now came in the ele- person at executions. It was said out- ment of speculation. If the harvest side the country that the late shah was was likely to be good, if the province a monster of avarice; this was hardly should remain tranquil, the profit from so, for the vast sums exacted as fines surplus revenue would probably be and bribes from the grandees of the large, and the kings governor would kingdom were not spent in show and have a good chance of reaping a rich riotous living, but placed in the royal harvest, of being retained in office, of treasure-house as a nest-egg for the evil receiving a dress of honor, and a sort days that may come to his successors. of social promotion by means of a high- The long struggle that took place be- sounding title, as Sword of the State, tween the late king and an arrogant Pillar of the Kingdom, Shadow of priesthood lasted for many years, and the King (which latter phrase is the the shah succeeded in shaking himself translation of Zil-es-Sultan). These free of the mollahs, and in reducing are among the high-sounding ones in their enormous claims upon the present use; the recipient ceases to bear public purse. Persia is no longer a his ordinary name and is universally priest-ridden country. The vast wealth known for life by his title. Some of in jewels and specie left by the late these Oriental life peerages carry a title shah will be inherited by the new one, which, in Western eyes, is almost and fifteen millions are not too high an comic. One Mirza Riza, an officer in estimate of its worth, the great globe the service of the Zil-es-Sultan was of gold incrusted with huge gems being made Ban~n-ul-Mfilk, i.e., The Little valued at one million sterling, while Finger of the Province. In Persia, the historical diamond, the Deryah-i- however, a title means a great deal, Nflr or Sea of Light, and a vast treasure and confers nobility as well as prece- of gems, cut and uncut, among which dence. If, on the contrary, trade was are strings of perfect pearls as big as languishing, or a drought threatened, sparrows eggs, form part of the largest and once during the writers stay in and most valuable collection of precious Persia no rain felt for two years, the stones in the wo~rld; these and the eel- amount of the present offered for his lars full of coined gold, mostly English Majestys acceptance would be consid 24 erably lessened, and at times, when a province was much disturbed, no one would be daring enough to make an offer for a post the possession of which might result in a severe pecuniary loss to the purchaser, and possibly punish- ment in the shape of a fine of many thousand tomans, degradation, or the bastinado; for in Persia even the kings sons are liable to be beaten with sticks on the soles of their feet at the will of the shah. The punishment is painful; a man may even die under it or be lamed for life; but, like a birching at a public school, it conveys no loss of personal reputation. At such times the king of Persia was compelled to fall back upon a strong governor. Some great nobleman or royal personage, to whom fear or mercy was alike un- known, some terror to evil-doers. Such a man was the late Hissam-es-Sultaneb (the Sharp Sword of the State), the late kings uncle. At first the strong gov- ernor would coquet: he was ill, he was building a new house, he was growing old, he wished to retire from public affairs. Then the shah would offer to forego the customary present; this would be respectfully declined; and at length a greater or less proportion of the revenue would be actually remitted, and the strong governor, with full powers and a regiment or two, would start for the disaffected or starving province. On his arrival he orders a gaol delivery and a wholesale execution of malefactors, the bastinado is kept going continually on the feet of minoi offenders, criminals are blown from guns, or executed, and their quarters hung at the gates of the city, highway robbers are walled up alive in brick pillars; and in a few weeks tranquillity reigns, the villagers can till their fields, crimes of violence cease, caravans can travel without a guard, and the mer- chant and shopkeeper feel safe in the bazaars. They call me cruel, said the ilissam-es-Sultanch to the writer; I am the really merciful man; look at my last visit to Shiraz, as governor; twenty executions in the first week, and then only two more in a two years tenure of office, and the gaol well-nigh On Things Persian. empty. There was my predecessor, a merciful man, here his Excellency spat disparagingly; why, he had an execu- tion or two every week, and the people died in the gaol from overcrowding. Bah, what does an Ecliaut1 robber care about being executed in the ordinary manner? I blow him from a gun, or ~vall him up alive in a pillar; his friends can actually see his whitening bones in the latter case, and they keep quiet, of course they do, for they know that I will stand no nonsense. The old prince is dead; he was a strong gov- ernor; evil-doers trembled at his name. In Persia such men are a cruel necessity. In the present day the Persians can be hardly said to be fanatical, they have learned not only to tolerate, but to like the handful of Englishmen scattered through the country, employed in the English Government Telegraph Depart- ment, in Persian eyes a strange class of people, who pay their debts, do not lie,. and never go to church. The Arme- nians, of whom there are forty-five thousand in Persia, tillers of the land and small traders principally, are free from military service, and merely pay a small poll tax, and the usual dues on the produce of husbandry; they sell wine and spirits almost openly, though Persia is a Mahommedan country, as do the Jews, whose position is not an enviable one. The Jews, of whom there are twenty thousand, are taxed~ but considerably more is exacted from them than is legally due, and they are treated as without the pale; the small- est village boy makes a point of insult- ing and stoning these unfortunates, who in each large town have a special ghetto allotted to them, a place where the insanitary arrangements common in Eastern cities reach their climax. Some idea of the feeling towards the Jews in Persia may be gathered from their treatment at the annual royal Salaam; thin gold coins are thrown to the multitude, wrestlers exhibit their prowess and are rewarded; skilled 1 Ecliant, the wandering tribes, of whoim there are very many thousands in southern Persia On Things Persian. athletes wield the Indian clubs and perform feats of strength, and gold coins are tossed to them; the royal ele- phant from Hamadan, his face painted, makes his bow to the shah; and jug- glers, mountebanks, and tumblers, per- form for the amusement of the multitude. Then the end of the fete being reached, a crowd of ragged Jews, whose attendance has been ordered, are flung into the tank for the amusement of the kings subjects; the shah retires, and the ceremony endsbut no gold coins are flung to the unfortunate Jews; their actual persecution, however, save in time of famine, is little more than habitual hard words and mockery. The Guebres (fire-worshippers), who live principally at Yezd, are not mo- lested; they, too, are not subject to enlistment; they number some nine thousand, and are loyal and law- abiding subjects of the shah. The toleration shown to Christians is in a great measure due to the late shah. He has weakened the power of the priesthood year by year as a matter of policy, and the mollahs, as has been said, have little influence at the present day; when Nussir-ed-din came to the throne they were all-powerful. The present shah is said to be inclined to restore the old state of things, but this is very doubtful; as yet he has been entirely in the hands of his vizier, wisely pursuing a policy of masterly inactivity, which was certain not to arouse the jealousy of his late father. Persia being a Mohammedan country, polygamy is practised, but women have far more liberty than in Turkey; the women of the towns veil their faces, it is true, but go whither they will alone and unattended. They are almost invariably treated with great consider- ation, cruelty to women being a thing unheard of. Usually among the lower and middle classes, a man has but one wife; save in the case of those with childless spouses, monogamy is the rule. Two or more wives are the luxury of the very rich; and causeless divorce is exceedingly infrequent, on account of the heavy marriage settlements made upon the wife, which in the event of divorce have to be paid to her in cash. The mother of a family is treated with the utmost respect 1y her husband and children, and is invariably an autocrat in her own home; and there are many strong-minded and ambitious women who take an active part in politics. In no case is the Persian woman the mere toy of the voluptuary. She has her rights, her duties, and her pleasures, and at times indulges in amusing vagaries. One of the great ladies of Shiraz was requested by an aged and ill-favored mollah, to give him one of her waiting maids as a wife. The old man was already married to a terma- gant, who happened to be a friend of the great lady in question, who now saw the opportunity for a joke. I will give you my maid as wife, oh mollab, she said; and more than that, I will pay all the expenses of the wedding, and I will see that there is a suitable entertainment. A few days after- wards the old priest was actually mar- ried to a veiled bride at the house of the great lady, all the elite of the women of Shiraz were invited to the wedding; but when after the banquet the priest attempted to unveil his inamorata, the hideous face of a male professional buffoon, or jester, was disclosed to his astonished gaze, and the Lothario was chased out of the house, amid the laughter of the great ladys guests, among whom was the old mans own wife. Shiraz, the capital of the southern province of Pars, is inhabited by a light-hearted, free-handed, joyous race~ brave, turbulent, and handsome, very different from the bulk of the Persians. A Shirazi dearly loves a joke, and will go great lengths, as is seen by tht above anecdote, for the sake of one. The Ispahani is the trader par excel- lence in Persia; it is impossible to out- wit him, and he is quite ready to starve on a crust in the hope of acquiring a competence. The Ispahani has the credit of being a coward, and it is said that when the shah once raised a regi- ment in Ispahan, and ordered it to Teheran, the corps declined to move without an escort. 25 On Things Persian. In Azerbijan, where the heir-ap- parent, or Vail Ahd, habitually dwells at its chief city, Tabriz, the Persian language is seidom heard, for every one speaks Turkish. The inhabitants of this province are a sturdy and serious race, rather resembling Turks than Per- sians; they are much more fanaticai, but honester, than the rest of the nation. It must not be supposed that the late Shah Nussir-ed-din was in any way unpopular with the bulk of his sub- jects; he was reverenced as Gods vice- gerent upon earth by the Shiltes of Persia, just as in Turkey the sultan is looked upon as the Commander of the Paithfui, but the socialistic creed of Sayud Mahommed All of Shiraz has innumerabie proselytes throughout Iran, and his followers, who forty-six years ago unsuccessfully attempted the late kings life, have at length, it is generally supposed, succeeded in aveng- ing the many martyrs of their sect. As to the real tenets of the Banbis, opinions differ. They are socialists, and un- doubtedly adopt the system of com- munity of property, while the orthodox Persians persistently assert that they practise polyandry, and the strange ceremonies of the Cheragh Karmfish o served among the Yezeedis or Devil- worshippers of Karrind, a district near Kermanshah; be this as it may, it is quite certain that each Baabi looks upon himself as an incarnation of God, and reverences the Baab, i.e., Sayud Mahommed All, as the Prophet of God and the veritable incarnation of the deity himself. Unfortunately for the sectaries of the Baab, there is a very simple means of recognizing them. A man being suspected of Banbism is requested to curse the Baab; if he be a Baabi, he invariably refuses to do this, though he knows full well that the refusal will assuredly cost him his life. Imprisonment, torture, death itself fail to shake the steadfast believers in the mission of the Baab. The writer saw a Banbi led to prison in 1880, the man was a priest (moilah) who had been denounced by his wife. He was an old man, and though he was imprisoned and severely bastinadoed, and offered life if he would curse the Baab, yet he refused. When led to execution and entreated to curse the Baab, he replied, Curses on you, your prince (the Zil-es- Sultan, then governor of ispahani. your king, and all oppressors. I wel- come death and long for it, for I shall instantly reappear on this earth, and enjoy the delights of Paradise. When he ceased speaking, the executioner advanced and slew him. The Baabis seen by the writer wefe, he is bound to sa~y, invariably charitable and seeni- ingly inoffensive persons; they were naturally very reticent as to their reli- gious views, and the statements of Mohammedans as to the peculiar tenets of these people must be distrusted, they will probably never be exactly ascer- tamed. As for the founder of Banbism, he narrowly escaped becoming ben- emily accepted as a prophet. When he was led out to execution he was fired upon by a whole company of soldiers; strange to say, the bullets failed to strike him, while one happened to divide the rope that had secured his hands; when the thick smoke caused by so large a discharge of native gunpow- der had cleared away Saynd Mahom- med All had disappeared; but a search was made, the prophet was discovered hidden in a neighboring guardhouse, he was led out a second time and shot, the body was flung into the dry moat that surrounds the wails of Tabriz, that all men might see it, and was ultimately disposed of by the pariah dogs. In 1850 the flourishing town of Zinjan, celebrated throughout Persia for its silver work, was besieged for months by the shahs forces under Mirza Naim; this place was the chief stronghold of the Baabi movement. At length the walls were stormed, and the Baabis died sword in hand; even the women fought. A three days general mas- sacre was ordered, and not a man was left alive. Two years after the fall of Zinjan, an attempt on the life of Nussir- ed-din Shah was made by the Baabis; the shah was very slightly wounded. Ten of the conspirators, one being a young and handsome woman, were 26 On Things Persian. executed after tortureall these people met their death heroically, though life was offered them on the simple condi- tion of cursing their prophet the Baab. Such was the fear of the king~ s minis- ters lest the Banbis might avenge these executions by their assassination, that they arranged to divide the responsi- bility, each minister striking a first ~shot at the particular prisoner assigned to him; his secretaries and servants then hacked the victim in pieces. The Teheram Gazette describes this strange execution, and stated that The min- ister for foreign affairs, the minister of finance, the prime ministers son, the chief of the army, the master of the mint slew (here followed the victims name) and sent him to hell. A prisoner was slain in addition by the artillery, one each by the cavalry, the camel-artillery, and the infantry. Mahommed Riza, of Kerman, Nussir- ed-dins assassin, may be a Baabi; if so, the statement is probably incorrect that he has denounced his associates. The Sheikh Jamal-ed-din seems to have been an unsuccessful political adven- turer rather than a Baabi, and it is quite likely that he instigated the assassination, and that after its perpe- tration the courage of Mahommed Riza failed him. All this points not to Baabism, but to a political crime; for the Banbi meets death with a smile, and torture or promises of pardon and reward wring no confession from him. Unfortunately, a renewed and vigorous persecution of the Baabis is certain to be the result, while a dreadful death awaits Mahommed Riza, and no mercy will be shown to the Sheikh Jamal-ed-din should he be given up to the Persians by the sul- tan. The family of the late Shah Nussir- ed-din was a large one. He had three legitimate or Akhdi wives, and some fifty concubines. Many of these latter were merely wives in name, for a lady who has once entered the royal anderfin, or harem, only leaves it at death, ~r when the shah, as a special m rk of favor, gives her in marriage to a subject. The bride in this case gen 27 emily proves a mixed blessing. Each lady has a honse, or at least a suite of apartments, in the royal palace. The principal wife of the late shah was the Shukfi-es-Sultaneh, the glory of the empire, the mother of the present king, a royal princess, granddaughter of Fath All Shah. The second wife was the late kings own aunt; a royal princess, and childless. The third wife is the former favorite concubine, the Anys-ed-dowlet, or Companion of the Government. She was a millers daughter, and as the shah rode by she offered him some fruit, which he ac- cepted; and next day the millers daughter entered the royal anderfin, and she grew in favor till, nineteen years ago, the shah made her one of his four lawful wives. Three of her brothers became chamberlains to the king, the fourth preferred to pursue his old avocation, that of a muleteer. The Anys-ed-dowlet had the reputation of a kind-hearted woman, and gave away large sums in charity. The Amin-i-Akdas, a Kurdish slave, is the aunt of the little boy who was long known as the shahs Luck. The real history of the Luck is that when the king was on one of his sporting expeditions, he, while sleeping in a hunting-lodge of massive timbers, was aroused by the childs cries. He went out to quiet the child, and as he left the house it suddenly fell in a heap of ruins. The shah considered that the little child had saved his life, and he clung to the boy for several years as a pet and playfellow. As Persia was under the government of the late shah, so it will probably remain under Mozaffer-ed-din. The policy will be the sameRussia will be played off against England, England against Russia. In the north the Rus- sian influence will preponderate, while we shall continue to regulate matters in the Persian Gulf. Concessions will be given and afterwards retracted; a bribe will never be refused by any man, be he king or peasant; and Persia will remain a nation of highly civilized barbarians, ruled by a benignant despot. Persia changes not; she only Men and Manners in Florence. decays. As she was in James Moriers time, so she will continuea land of beautiful oases in the midst of howling deserts; a land which is a poor mans paradise, and where courtesy and hospitality, combined with every East- ern vice, will continue to make the sprightly Persian the extraordinary enigma that he is to the European mind. C. J. WILLS. 1 The talented author of Hajji Bala. From The Cornhull Magazine. MEN AND MANNERS iN FLORENCE. About three visitors of every six who come to fair Florence go straight to a pension. The city may be said to be made up of pensions and antiquities, with flower-girls and royal personages thrown in. Such an error of conduct is therefore excusable. For an error it certainly is, if you propose to feast instructively on media~val relics, paint- ings, and memories, and study the modern Florentines into the bargain. I know nothing more distracting men- tally than the drama of an Italian pension, in which a couple of dozen individuals of three or four continents, of incongruous ideals and different ages and stations (from dukes and duchesses Italianto retired butchers), herd together at one dinner-table, and in the drawing-rooms devote themselves to gossip and love-making. The pension is, in fact, just the stage of a theatre; and the life in it makes up a variety of plays, in which tragedy and farce predominate. This is especially true of Florence when the almond-trees are in blossom and the streets are perfumed by the flower-girls. And so, as a start, I went to a humble inn in Shoemaker Street, deferring my pension experiences for a week or two. I did not regret it. The common Italian is a much-misunderstood person in En- gland, where we form wrong ideas of the nation from the organ-grinders and ice-cream men it sends us. He is hon- est, amiable in the extreme, and as natural as Dame Nature herself. At this plebeian inn they gave me no fewer fleas than I ought to have expected at a lira the night. But their civility was unbounded, even as their linen was clean. My window looked across un- blushingly at the window of a room occupied by a couple of genial young women, who slept, worked at bonnet- making, ate, and sang as if they really rather enjoyed than disliked my invol- untary supervision of them. My land- lord was proud of mehe said so, never before having had an English Excel- lency under his modest roof. He him- self sat up to receive me when I stayed out late at nights, and smiled, even through his yawns, as he carried my candle for me. And the dark-eyed chambermaid who brought me my coffee of a morning could not have been more engagingly gentle and devoted if she had had to thank me for her life and ten times as many accompanying bless- ings as she possessed. Her buon giorno, Sinny, or her buona sera, as we clashed on the narrow stairs, was always emphasized by a winning smile of the kind one does not get out of King Humberts happy realm. Thus loosely tethered, I could do as I pleased in all essential matters. In fifteen days I had dined at fifteen restaurants and supped at fifteen others. I also made acquaintance with about a score of cafes. That is seeing life in Florence with a vengeance. At any rate, it taught me to lift my hat with ease in entering and leaving these public places of entertainment. The home-staying Englishman may mock at this simple courtesy, but to my mind it is somewhat educative, and the more so that it is violently against the grain of the British temperament. The flower-girls also were one of the salu- tary trials of the life. Perceiving that I did not wear a Florentine counte- nance, they invariably made me their victim. In the middle of my macaroni, for instance, one of them would assault me with a bunch of violets and a pin. Covering her attack with a smile all over her brown countenance, and show- ing a score of eager white teeth, she would fasten the nosegay in my coat 28 Men and Manners in Florence. ere I could say five serious words in opposition. The other guests beheld the encounter with pleased impartiality. Life in Florence is all pictorial. I thus contributed a commonplace yet bright little vignette on my own account. And so it happened that regularly as I dined was I adorned with flowers. It was the same with the mandoline players. How excellently these sweet strummers aid digestion in this city of the Medici! They and their stringed toys appear everywhere. Indeed, the more obscure the eating-house the more systematic their visitations. The music dignifies the viands. Not always was the wine good, nor the cutlet a la milanaise of the tenderest; but one forgets these defects in the plaintive spectacle of a white-bearded sightless mandolinist led into the room by an angel-faced (thoug~h not very clean) little girl, to add the sauce of harmony to the meal. I have seen a warm- hearted neighbor shed tears over his carciofi during the melody, and an- other let his meat go cold while he beat time to the musicians strumming. The Florentines are all sensibilityor nearly. Touch their hearts and you may be sure you have touched their pockets also, though there may be naught inside these. For my part, I reckoned the copper to the mandolinist as an integral part of my dinner bill. The flower-girl and the waiter were the only inevitable extras. Afterwards it was gay to go into the lively streets with the post-prandial cigar; to roam recklessly for a while among palaces, churches, and slums; or to watch the stars and lamplights in the Arno and Taddeo Gaddis quaint old bridge, with its shops and crowds of passengers. The evening air here in spring is often keen, thanks to the snow on the distant mountains; but it always reaches the lungs with a cachet of purity upon it that the dead dogs visible in the Arno by day- light may appear upon the whole to belie. The pensions and hotels of Lung Arno after the dinner-hour exhale an air of fascinating frivolity. One be- holds illuminated drawing-rooms and gleaming shoulders, and there is a clang of merry voices. Music, too, floats hence towards the gliding water, and whispers descend from amorous couples nestled in the balconies, with hearts steeped in the romance of their sur- roundings. And music ascends also to these love-makers; for the omnipresent mandolinist of the street finds them out, and serenades them one by one as fervently as a thrush its mate. The musicians words are often as torrid as his notes. It is convenient. The dis- creet wooer has only to murmur in the ears of his loved one that his sentiments are precisely those tongued by the melodious rascal below. Your typical Florentine is epicurean to the toe tips. His enthusiasm and yearnings are quite other than those of the northerner. Give him two francs a day for life and he will toil no more. He may be a marquis, and seventh or eighth in direct descent, but he will be content to forego the assertion of his rank so he may thenceforward enjoy the priceless boon of leisure and independence. His leisure he will dissipate at the cafe, with perhaps two three-halfpenny sweet fluids per diem; and you may study the effect of his independence itt his courtly manners, even though his hat be worn at the brim and his coat- back be deplorably shiny. He is a pellucid brookshallow as you please, yet engaging for his pellucidity. As he sits on the red velvet cushions and looks forth at the carriages and gowns of fashion in the Via Tornabuoni, he shows no trace of envy on his open countenance. What, in effect, have these rich ones more than he, save the ennui of modishness and the indigestion of high feeding? The monuments and blue skies of Florence (not to mention the glorious or stirring memories of its history) are rather more (his than theirs. And it is such ineffable bliss to be able to twiddle ones thumbs and defy all and everything (except death) to upset ones sweet tranquillity of soul. Call it vacuity instead of tranquillity, and no harm will be done. Through sitting twice or thrice as his neighbor, I came to know one of these 29 30 remarkable men. His salutations at meeting and parting were of the benign- est, but he had nothing to say between times. He sat with his hands folded in his lap, looking as happy as a pretty maid at her first balL Now and then he would comb his hair and moustache with an ivory pocket-comb, and now and then he would use a tooth-quill. Occasionally he hummed a popular air. His da:ily beverage was lemon and water. When he lifted his arm I could see the bare skin through the parting of his shirt. In the forenoon, towards evenil!Ig, and well on in the night, I caught him in the thrall of the same giddy diversion. Yet he was always radiant with innate felicity. And there were others, many, like him. This devotion to the pleasant shadows of propriety is quite a characteristic of certain of the Florentines. They skim the cream of existence, and care little or nothing for what lies underneath. Why should they distress themselves with doubts or unattainable ambitions? they seem to inquire with their in- genuous, unwrinkled countenances. The thing to do is to live easily. Thac achieved, all worth achieving is achieved. This explains much in modern Florence that has raised the furious ire of more or less illus- trious stranger-sojourners in her laughing midst. Our great Ruskin writes of the Devil-begotten brood of the Florentines of our day. They think themselves so civilized, for- sooth, he proceeds, for building a Nuovo Lung Arno and three manufactory chimneys opposite it, and yet sell butchers meat, dripping red, peaches, and anchovies side by side; a sight to be seen. The authoress of Moths also has not yet wearied of fusillading the tough hide of the citys rulers for their apparent disregard of the first principles of a~stheticism. But Florence will put up with worse and far more comprehensible abuse than this, so it may still sip its wine and twiddle its thumbs beneath the soft mantle of its all-enveloping self-esteem. The very raging of its celebrated aliens on such subjects is a tribute to its own beauty, which nothing can mar irre- trievably. Besides, is there not a necessary difference between the chil- dren of Arnos banks and these their- revilers from other lands? The latter are the slaves, the blind champions, of art. Your born Florentine knows bet- ter than to worry himself about the crumbling of one fresco among many,. or the incongruity of whitewashing what is called an immortal piece of stone-work. Due observation of these racial dissympathies is convincing on one point. In all physical struggles between the north and south the latter must go to the wall. There is a stern, almost ferocious pertinacity and strength in the Teuton that the mild or hectic seif-gratulatory enthusiasms of the modern Latins cannot stand against. One day I went with a fellow- countryman to the Church of S. Spirito. It was the saints festival. Outside, the morning was hot and still, and you could hear the larks over the red earth and blossoms of the distant fields and gardens. Across the churchs thresh- old, however, all was yellow with candle-light. The atmosphere was sickly sweet and hot, thanks to incense, flowers, warm humanity, and the multi- tude of untimely tapers. A woman knelt by my side and prayed for certain desirable blessings, with her bright eyes upon the richly garbed officiating clergy by the altar. Two or three amazed tourists stood and contemplated the candles, the worshippers, and the clergy through opera-glasses, passing remarks between their views. I heard a British youth whisper What rot! none too quietly. Anon the function at the altar reached its zenith. The crowd of worshippers seemed to hold their breath. What was coming next? Why, this: the reverend bishop showed symp- toms of fatigue or suffocation. In- stantly two of the lesser clergy relieved him of his mitre; the one then respect- fully wiped his episcopal brow, while the other, with the palm of his hand, smoothed his sleek hair at the back. Afterwards the function proceeded. I~ the evening this same church was Men and Manners in Florence. decorated externally also with count- less lights to its weather-vane. There was no wind to spoil the garish specta- cle. But there was a vast assemblage of the faithful and the dilettanti in the space about the church, and an infinity of tokens of joy. The word Bella! was bandied from tongue to tongue, and from their eyes you would have thought the people had received a national and personal boon of the highest kind. They were the lineal ancestors of those impulsive men and women who, six hundred and more years ago, when Cimahues Madonna was ready for its shrine, escorted it, with incredible re- joicing and the music of trumpets, from his studio to the church of S. Maria Novella. They recognized in this sad- faced Virgin the source of new emo- tions; and as such it was exceedingly welcome, quite apart from its religious character. So nowadays, when a monarch or two or three come to the city, their majesties are received in the piazza of the railway station with outcries of joy that may well deceive the visitors into fancying that they have some especially amiable quality which endears them to the Florentine heart. Nothing of the kind, in fact. They beget a new emo- tion, that is all. To the southern nature this is as if handfuls of gold and silver were to be scattered from a carriage. Nay, it is even more; for in the scram- bling for the coins some may receive injuries provocative of emotion of quite another kindand language in keeping. One evening, when I returned to my inn in Shoemaker Street, I found Cecca, the maid, voluble and pretty with excite- ment. I have seen your dear queen, sir, she said; and then she described the sight, with tears of rapture in her eyes. The innkeeper also referred to my countrys sovereign as La cara regina. The same sensibility on such an occa- sion pervades the city in all its parts, from the itinerant shirt-seller (who shows you his goods in a caf6) to the municipal rulers. These at once seize on the pretext for public revels. They issue leaflets in which the citizens are 31 implored to be conscious of the honor done them by the presence in tneir midst of these august personages. There is to be, for example, a Battle of Flowers on a certain Sunday, with illuminations to follow. The citizens and others who will hang out carpets and flags from their windows, and adorn their vehicles (or even the chaises they may hire for that purpose) with flowers in as tasteful a manner as possi- ble, will oblige the municipality and at the same time do their own hearts good in the recollection that they are pleas- ing royalty. The result is admirable. One spends an intoxicating afternoon in streets strewn with violets, apple- blossom, and lilies, and sees a thousand pretty girl-faces in the ears as happy as the blue May sky overhead. A race meeting in the park by the green Cascine shows us something more of the Florentine nature. Save among the wealthy sprigs of nobility and others who have the doubtful advan- tage of foreign travel, there is no betting. The horses run as best they can through the lush grass of the course, and the people clap their hands. It is a spectacle pure and simple; and it is also the glad occasion of other spec- tacles, such as Punch and Judy, the feats of acrobats, and the fine clothes. of fashion. The rich young men of Florence make themselves rather ridic- ulous in their high collars, primrose- yellow gloves, and legs clad in leather from the knees. They also excite the derision of the couple or so of enter- prising British bookmakers who cry the odds in their midst in English. For they are chary of their five-lire pieces, and do not lose with grace, even as they express themselves someWhat queerly in their business transactions in a tongue not their own. But they are not specimens of the true-born Florentine.. Their inherited nature has got more than a little adulterated. The very dogs. at their heels have been beateM into a mood that compels them to ape the sang froid that is believed to be a feature of the British dog as of the Englishman. They are totally unlike the ordinary dog of ~loren~ee,. which Men and Manners in Florence. 32 capers and barks and wags its tail in the grass and flowers of the park with all the vivacious abandon of its mas- ter or mistress. Between the unspoiled high-born Florentine and the ordinary native there is comparatively little difference on all material points. The one has more money than the otherthat is about all. He has a heart of just the same size, and is just as willing to let his heart be jihe monitor of his actions. From vulgar pride he is gloriously free. John Evelyn, who was here in 1644, makes a note of the conduct of the grand duke, who sold wine in the base- ment of the Pitti Palace and was not ashamed to do so: wicker bottles dan- gling over even the Ohiefe entrance into the palace, serving for a vintners bush. It does one good to think of such condescension, assuming, as one well may, that the wine was of fair quality. But Florence has never been disrespectful towards the tradesman since the days of the Medici, with their pawnbrokers sign for a coat of arms. She remembers, too, that more of her geniuses were lowly born than of lofty parentage, and she loves geniuses for the rare emotions with which they pro- vide her. These must, however, be of the first order of great men. Common- place cleverness is scarcely more than respectable here; and the mere clever person (man or woman) who makes a tiresome claim for recognition as a genius in Florence is likely to become only a butt for the glib jests that fall as easily from Florentine tongues as courtly phrases. I was privileged to bear a letter of introduction to a certain countess well to the front in society here. She re- ceived me with the grace one expects in Florentine ladies. But almost her first words were astonishing. I hope you are not intellectual, Mr. , she said, with rather an anxious smile. Her daughter and the young count, her son, also smiled. Having assured her that I was noth- ing of the kind, she sighed with relief. And yet she herself was distinctly intellectual, which made the matter Men and Manners in Florence. seem a trifle odd. The truth was she had but just said A rivederci! to one of the lights of English literature, who had, she confessed (and so did her daughter), bored her in a quite pitiable manner. The daughter was cruel enough to compare the poor gentleman to a cloud. One does not want clouds in May, she added. The young count (an unobtrusive adolescent) agreed. And then, I am afraid, some rather unkind censures were passed upon cer- tain others of my country people as we drank our tea and looked at the sun- light on the orange-trees in the little gar- den upon Which the room opened. I had to congratulate myself that I had gained my footing on the sober grounds of mediocrity. To recommend oneself in Florence it is necessary to be volatile and unpre- tentious. It isnt at all necessary tu a judge of pictures and statues. This, upon the whole, is a mercy, for Pro- fessor Ruskin has made it hard for the average Philistine to express an opinion about Florentine works of art without avowing his own ignorance. raise Florence in a general manner, and you will win the hearts of the Florentines. This is a simple and easy programme. As for the leisured young men of the city, these devote themselves stren- uously to but a couple of aims: the garnishing of their own dear persons and the pursuit of fair ladies. In the former particular they are not more eccentric than their peers elseWhere. But in their amorous adventures they are wonderful. One with whom I was acquainted was possessed by three infatuations at once. The ladies in question were entire strangers to him, but he knew their names, their circum- stances, the hotels at Which they were staying (with mammas, papas, or big brothers), and the shops they patron- ized. He was deterred by no false modesty from raising his hat to them whenever he met them in the Via Tornabuoni (his favorite lounge) and smiling his sweetest. He had tried a bfltet-doux on two of them, but had re- ceived no answer. He admitted that so far he had not had encouragement Men and Manners in Florence. from any one of the three; yet he was far from despondent. The most beau- tiful of them was soon to have a birthday (he had learnt that fact from the subsidized portiere at the hotel Heaven knows how), and he proposed to spend ten lire on her in a magnificent bouquet, in the midst of which there was to be a note containing an eloquent declaration of his hearts passion. He said he was sure he should succeed sooner or later with one of the three, because he had so often before suc- ceeded under similar circumstances. When I mentioned the perils he so audaciously faced at the hands of wrathful parents and brothers, he shrugged his shoulders in contempt of such petty obstacles. Amico mio, he remarked, with the air of a Solon, between two hearts that love there is always a way.~~ The Briton is disposed to laugh to scorn such barefaced impertinence in the Florentine youths. But not infre- quently impudence gains the day. A lamentable instance of this occurs to my mind. The victim was a convent- bred American girl, visiting Florence with her mother. She was beautiful, with strange light-brown eyes, a coquet- tish demeanor mysteriously out of keeping with the manners one is dis- posed to believe are inculcated in con- vents, and a sufficiency of dollars. The rascal who wrecked her was precisely one of these young ruffians of the Via Tornabuoni. He was a count, of course. They are all that, at least. He bored his way into her young heart with the assiduity of a bookworm and the singleness of purpose of a ferret. When sihe and her mother ate tarts in the swell confectioners shop near the club, he also was there, with sad, wist- ful eyes. He won the driver of their hired car to slip something into her hands from ii Signor Conte. He bribed tihe porter at the pension where they were staying, and so established a channel for his love-letterson superb thick paper embellished by an insidious gilt coronet. And after a fortnights wooing of this kind, he got so far that the girl was not unwilling to sit at the LIVING AGE. VOL. xx. 523 open window of her ground-floor room and accept his smiles and greetings from the roadway, and even his letters. The affair ended in a wedding, and a year later in a divorce. This precious count, like so many others of his kidney, was a mere adventurer. The tale of his iniquities would astonish a world used even to the reports of our home divorce proceedings. While I write, I have before me one of his letters to this unfortunate girl. He takes credit in it for the ardor of his Italian heart and the eternity of its passion. But it is a pity some one did not pinch the life out of him as a babe ere he began his career of blind brutish subservience to the dictates of this same heart. Since the time of the Decameron, love or the semblance thereof has played what one may term an inordi- nate part in Florentine life. Let the visitor be on his guard when he comes to this beautiful city, with its Fair Ladies Street and its expansive smiles; and let him be so especially if he have with him a susceptible and pretty wife, sister, or daughter whom he wishes to leave Florerbce with her affec- tions in much the same state as when she first walked, open-eyed and eager, among the pictures and antiquities of the place. In one of the citys enchant- ing cemeteries you may read the follow- ing epitaph under the marble bust of a girlBorn for heaven. After eighteen years of life and forty days of love, fled to her home. These words are an epitome of more than one young life upon which Florence has brought the first rough shock of disillusionment. Tame says of the Florentines that they are actifs sans ~tre affair6s. It is a significant phrase. The late lamented Dr. Watts could have given us a fine didactic stanza or two on such a text in such a city. I learnt more on this subject when I left the inn in Shoemaker Street and took up my abode in one of the Lung Arno pensions. There were no fleas here, and the furniture in my room was a charming study in green and gold. From my window, instead of a couple of absorbed little milliners, I looked 33 Men and Manners in Florence. upon a barrack exercising ground. The bugling was rather a nuisance at times, but the strong colors of the troops, the tight breeches of the lieutenants and captains in command, and their resonant voices were not alto- gether a change for the worse. And, though the pension was of the best class, it did not need a lynx eye to see that a good deal of an interesting kind was going on in it. There were about fifty of us. Of course we included six or seven unat- tached English spinster ladies with white hair who knew all that was worth knowing about the rest of us. Also there were two German families; the one from Hamburg, the other headed by a baron and baroness from some small Schloss. Americans, two English parsons and their wives, a newly married and very modest pair from London, a marchese from Naples, two Roman counts, a Dutchman, and a round dozen others made up the housefull. Every room in the pension was occupied, and the dinner-table was a sight to warm the heart of the signora iVho ran the pension. I never breathed such an atmosphere of ill-suppressed antagonisms as in this establishment. To me, as unattached as the spinsters themselves, it was highly diverting when I was in the humor to amuse myself at the expense of poor human nature. At table I sat between a parsons wife and the eldest daughter of the Hamburg merchant. The latter was a fine statuesque young woman and very candid in certain matters. She could not bear the daughter of the German baron, whose manners were so much more polished than her owx~, and she liked better to whisper about the girls deficiencies and pride (so she regarded it) than to discuss the churches and pictures she had visited en famifle in the course of the day, Baedeker scrupulously in hand. She was also much put about by the extraordinary number of frocks in which one of the American girls in- dulged. That, too, she considered bad form, and she asked her stout father if he did not think a mere half-dozen gowns per lady made up enough travelling luggage. Papa said, Ach, yes, very decidedly. Nor did the fair Hamburgher like the powder on certain faces. It is only when they require it that they use it, she told mea state- ment not so self-evident as it may seem. She said much more when we were in the drawing-room of evenings; and sometimes she said it in the privacy of one of the pension balconies, towards which she loved to steal when the stars were very bright and there was mando- line music underneath more moving than the piano flourishes indoors. For, though critical in company, she was not devoid of enthusiasm when the right time offered. Being the daughter of a practical man and a German, she contrived not to waste any of the im- pressions made upon her by the sunny south. It is bold in a man to pass judg- ment upon a girl, but I believe this Hamburg maiden was a downright good lass in spite of her prejudices and limitationsperhaps, indeed, because of them. There were times subsequently when I thought of profiting by her fathers and mothers warm invitation to visit them at their villa on the Elbe. But I bave not yet used the oppor- tunity. The parsons wife also was not above being divertingly critical of our com- pany. Several times, however, her husband pulled her up in her remarks with a gentle Hush, my dear! of horror, though It was as plain as could be that in his heart he thought her none too severe. I made friends with one of the spin- ster ladies, a dear old soul with snow- white hair brushed high from her forehead. She recalled Carmen Sylvas royal words in one of her novels: White hairs are the flakes of foam which cover the sea after a storm. For I know not how many successive years she had been accustomed to spend the spring months in Florence. Thus she had all the citys gossip at her tongues end, and delighted to tell it in driblets to my sympathetic ears. It was she who first discerned that the young Dutchman was in love with the 34 A Lightning Tour. prettiest of the American girls; and it was from her that I learned of the prog- ress of this little love affair between two people, each ignorant of the others language, and none too well acquainted with Italian. There was a scare one day in the pension vestibule. The Dutchman had proposed and been treated rather badly by the young ladys mamma. The scene was be- tween the two ladies. The next morn- ing the Dutchman was absent. He had, said my venerable informant, gone to Venice to recover his senses. The one duke in our company was an interesting personage. He was stout and about fifty. Far from communica- tive as a rule, he seemed, like my spinster friend, to find his pleasure mainly in calm contemplation of his neighbors. However, one evening he and I smoked cigarettes together on a lounge, and he confided to me that these English are a bizarre nation! He took me for a Frenchman. I did not undeceive him, and coaxed him to continue. And then, after a while, he amazed me by hinting that he thought a certain one of my countrywomen in the pension a sufficiently handsome lady. Fat and fifty though he was, and possessed of a large dark duchess with a moustache, he had proved sus- ceptible to the charms of the wife of one of the clergymen. But he was philosophic withal, and nourished him- self on no delusions. She appeals to me, he said, like a portrait I saw in one of the galleries this morning. Nothing more, parole dhonneur, and then he laughed a short dry laugh and puffed blue smoke into the air. There was also an Oxford gentleman who was wont, for his accents sake, to talk with the countrypeople beyond the Santa Croce district of the city. He declared that the purest Tuscan was to be heard there, and that they used pretty much the same phraseology as Boccaccio wrote. He kept himself serenely above the transient bickerings and drama of the pension, and what time he did not give to the galleries and churches he gave to a very big book. It was edifying to see him thus engrossed ~of an evening, when music, love-mak- ing, and gossip held the ascendant on all sides of him. The duke said he did not know what to make of that kind of man. But for my part I fancied he might be right to hedge himself about with his intellectuality. There was a certain grand duke here who, when he travelled, always carried about with him Raphaels Madonna del Cardi- nello, now in the Ijifizi Gallery. That~ too, was perhaps an ennobling, or at least a protective, proceeding. The pension served its turn with me~ as well as with the kindly signora who owned it. At any rate it was never tedious, and it was always a notable contrast to such places of pilgrimage as the monastery of S. Marco and Michael Angelos tombs of the Medici. The past is so very dead in Florence that one is apt the more therefore to enjoy even the vibrating sense of actuality in its present. On the rare occasions when I yearned for an evening soporific in con-- trast with the pensions drama, I had. but to go to the theatre or to my favorite humble caf6, the Antica Rosa, where Giovanni the waiter passed his spare minutes in playing cards with the gen- tle lady who sat at the counter and smiled on her clients as they came and. went. From The Gentlemans Magazine. A LIGHTNING TOUR. The current of our life, especially In travelling, is nowadays conventional enough. Welcome, therefore, any- thing in the form of adventure, any- thing out of the common, and out of the way, and different from the humdrum rails on which we roll along so smoothly every day. Perhaps it is not life, but ourseif, that Is monotonous; life is full of turns, changes, and sur- prises. We can find the dramatic if we look for it. It has been justly said that nowadays we do not travel, but we arrive.~~ In the old times the enjoy- ment was found in the journey itself, in the sort of panorama that greeted the travellers eyes as he posted along. 35 36 Now the aim is to obliterate or abolish the intervening space, and join the two points as speedily as we can. And again: Our daily life has now become so crammed full of things and doings that the day seems scarcely long enough to contain them all. While the measure of things to be done is en- larging hourly, the measure of time remains the same. No Procrustean method has been discovered to stretch it. Being thus compelled to take it as it is, we must only make of it what we can, and make the most. Johnsons advice to take short views of things may be extended to travel, and one method of expanding the hours may be to concentrate our view. It was some reflections of This kind, over the friendly, ever-soothing pipe. that led me to take my lightning tour, and thus prove to my fellow-creatures how much. can be made of a single difficult day, as Alice Meynell has it. A pleasant walk to the station in the steel-blue morning brought me to Victoria Street, with some minutes to spare. The train was to start at 5.45. Wandering down a short way, I had a glimpse of the Abbey, the first of the many cathedrals I was to see in the c.~urse of my long day. This departing by an early morning train is always a new experience. There is a bleakness in the incidents; you have the place nearly entirely to yourself. The ticket-taker or snipper gazes at you with but a doubtful air. On this occasion a single porter was my fellow-passenger. As we went along the day seemed gradually to get life and warmth. It is always dramatic and scenic to find Rochester approach- ing, with the passage across the silvery, open river, the noble castle rising so sad and forlorn and abject on the other bank. For a draught of genuine old fashion, commend us to Rochester, and tl~at first promenade up its ancient High Street. It was close on seven oclock. Nothing as yet was open, or, indeed, stirring. A most picturesque stroll that was; all the objects were brought together within small compass the cathedral just behind the High Street, which, however, had little open- ings broken here and there; an old gate-house or two, with an arch through which could be seen the Close. Here was the richly-colored, rubicund old Guild Hall; the fine old Clock House, the statue of Sir Cloudesley Shovel, and good old framed houses in profusion, overhanging the causeway. Nothing can be imagined more piquant than this High Street, which stands exactly as it did a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago, all its color faded and mellowed and harmonized. Feelings of any kind in these shrewd, practical days of ours are precious, and it is not an expensive thing to nourish and culti- vate them. Long after they will return to us again and again, and supply re- newed pleasure. Thus I shall always look back to that early morn in the Rochester High Street. Near the entrance to the town I found myself pausing before the inn, The Bull Inn, a long, sad-colored building with an archway and courtyard and perhaps a mouldy tone, like an old piece of furniture. We could imagine that, in the old pre-raliway days, this was a stately establishment enough, and, indeed, Bozs tone is that of respect almost reverential. What associations of another time, suggested by his name, come back on me! with the image of the bright, genial, and energetic novelist striding along the High Street, and doing the honors of the place. The spirit of Boz, indeed, pervades every corner of the place. Every building and notable spot has been quickened into life by his magic pen. It is ex- traordinary the vivifying and general interest this gives, for those who are deeply read in his books. A sort of hallucination, against which you vainly struggle, seems to convey that all the incidents of the fiction have actually occurred in these places. With this feeling, then, I entered The Bull, passing under its spacious archway, and began to think of Mr. Pickwick and his friends, and of all the quaint, merry doings that occurredit must be sounder its roof. Everything seemed in tone and in keepingthe A Lightning Tour. A Lightning Tour. great courtyard where the posting car- riages used to lie up in ordinarythe queer little offices and hutches. That row of long windows on the left, with a sort of arcade which spoke for itself, signified the ball-room. Like the morn- ing after the ball itself, the whole had a sort of shut-up air. The boy Dickens, living at Chatham, close by, had seen the inn in its palmy days, when the balls and assemblies were given and the post carriages were pass- ing through. It seemed to him very imposing. We have heard him tell of his disappointment, when he returned in later years, at the small size and general poorness of everything. We often stayed with him at Gadshill, and well recall the first walk into Rochester, when he introduced us to all the lions. The snow was on the ground, and he tramped along with his favorite energy. There was something piquant in hearing him talk to the matron of The Seven Poor Travellers, who took it easily enough; though it was he who has raised it from obscurity, and has made it celebrated all the world over. In The Bull, while waiting break- fast, I almost expected to see some of the old characters walk in. There was a little bar, all framed and glazed, and a little kitchen in the corner of the yard. Only one or two retainers were to be seen. I wandered into the faded coffee-room, and an amiable maid cheerfully undertook breakfast, though things were not quite ready. Carry- ing out the whimsical realization of the book, I realized that it was in this room that Captain Tappleton was left to wait, and was looking out as I was doing into the street, after he had sent up the challenge to Mr. Winkle. It was a long, low chamber, with the usual feeble framed prints, that seem painted, engraved, framed, and sold to adorn coffee-rooms. I expected to find the face of Boz himself, who has made the inn immortal. The paper was dingy enough to have been on the wall in the days of the Pickwickian party. I could see the ham and eggs frying merrily in the little kitchen off the yard; it was 37 like a caboose on a yacht, and to fill up the time I begged to be shown the ball-room. Ardent Pickwickian as I am, I never can bring myself, at these various inns, to ask to see Mr. Pick- wicks room, though it is always ready, and there is a perfect willingness to show it. But the ball-room! How strange the feeling of ascending the stair, with its three short flights, exactly as in the pic- ture. I only wanted Jingle leaning jauntily against the balusters and gibing the doctor below. The door was thrown open, and there it was, not a very large ball-room certainly, to modern ideas; more of a large dining- room. It might have been last night! I could follow the guests up-stairs, see the great folk standing at the top. There was the little balcony at the bottom, some six feet above the floor; a little room or closet behind for the musicians, which Boz has taken care to note. This room is used still for dances, assemblies, dinners, etc. It was now eight oclock. I de- spatched the breakfast, paid the moder- ate bill, and went forth again. A day might be comfortably spent in Roches- ter, for there is much to see, but, like all such picturesque things, they are not to be seen within a measured period. We must live with themgrow familiar then we begin to be interested and learn their particular charm. It is impossible to know or understand, say, a cathedral such as Canterbury or Antwerp, any more than we know any living person by a mere single visit. These monuments do not give up their charm to the first careless comer. There must be the feeling, too, that we can return and see it again and yet again. There should be the sense of residence. Rochester, it need not be said, lives again in the stories of Dickens, Pickwick, Great Expecta- tions, Edwin Drood, and The Seven Poor Travellers. Between them all there is scarcely left a corner unde- scribed. He has perfectly caught the sentimental side of the place. In one of the Pickwick episodes there is a sketch of the castle from the bridg.~, 38 A Lightning Tour. which leaves a sort of sad impression, to good old Dover. Here we find the The cathedral is interesting and worthy same show that is renewed morning, a sight-seers attention; but it is only noon, and night in sempiterna; the em- after reading Edwin Drood that we barkation, ever dramatic and pictur- look at it with a sort of tragic feeling esque, which has been going on for and curiosity. I wandered in, finding some hundreds of years. the doors open even at that hour. It Ten oclock. It was a delightful seemed bald, but was pleasing. Round travelling morning. There were not it and from off it meandered away de- many passengers. Always fresh and lightful little old-fashioned lanes and novel is the Bay of Dover, with streets, with a charming row of cheer- its amphitheatre and crested cliffs ful little brick houses, with white crowned by the castle. It would need sashes and carved doors, Minor Canon a Ruskin to interpret the feelings the Row, like its sister at Richmond, the scene inspires, which no doubt rest on Maid of Honor Row. a sense that here is the grand entrance- There are various gate-houses about gate to old Englandsecure place of the cathedral, and I make out an im- shelter and reception for the traveller. posing Restoration House in the dis- There is always the air of movement tance. Best of all, and perhaps the with one, too, of patronage and protec- finest thing of the kind in the way of tion, different, perhaps, from the open, wattle and daub, framed timbers, low-lying French ports, where you seem high roof and overhanging stories, was to intrude on some scenic gala going on, the imposing and gloomy-looking East- and feel you had better get out of the gate House in the High Street. The way. proper house for a story, I thoughtit By half past eleven we were at Calais, is so sombre, and the garden round it so that ever picturesque port, though now dismal. altered out of its old shape. I can All this time I was wending along never lose my interest in the scene at Chatham-way, through the cosy High landing: the strange faces, uniforms, Street, which it has been truly said has etc., have always a novelty. I dare quite an air of bag-wig and ruffles. swear no traveller, no matter how often Here at No. 47 you are told that James he passes to and fro, gets over this first II., escaping from (his son-in-law, was surprise. A landing in foreign parts hidden, and made his way out at the to me is always new. With Sterne, one back to the river, where he embarked. pities the folk that go from Dan to All the red houses are dingy enough: Beersheba, finding all things the same the pathways are raised high, here and and monotonous. In this fashion of there with railings, the road lying far being pleased with little things, we not below. Here we come to the Lines; only keep from rusting, but have a and see, on the right, slightly swelling perpetual feast of entertainment. downs with corners of bastions, forts, What you look for you will find. I etc.in short, where was the review found a piquancy which wiled away attended by the Pickwickians. One of the moments in watching the French these is Fort Pitt, where Mr. Winkle sailors, gay, good-looking gaillards, and met Dr. Slammer. The whole tone in noticing their relation to the three of the scene seems to have been exactly or four English salts who were caught by the novelist. Here is the among them. The forced good-humor, row in which he lived during his hard the attempts to be sympathetic on the childhood, Ordnance Row, a poorish side of the Britishers, showed that sort of terrace, the houses small the relations were delicate enough. enough. But time was shortening, and Thus puss and the fox terrier are some- I had to quicken my pace, for the morn- times compelled to be harmonious at ing express which I had anticipated was the fireside, and nothing is more comical nearly due. than their wary, distrustful looks. It was 8.45. Now we whirled down At Calais I had time to see my second A Lightning Tour. cathedral: a fine old church which Ruskin has interpreted and almost sung. It is grimness itself, and, as he has pointed out, its old English steeple has become blanched and dried by the blasts and storms of centuries. As we wind slowly round the town in the circuit taken by the railway, the little place looks quite brilliantwith its clustered houses afar off the ever charming and piquant steeple of the Town Hall, now hiding, now showing itself among the tiled roofs. This notion of a central object, spire, belfry, etc., belongs to the foreign town. Ours are all crowded, piled-up masses. The cathedral turning its back to us, I noted the fine bastion-like masonry that rose from the ground, the buttresses, etc. We came at last to Calais-Ville, the fine, new, and spacious station, which really belongs to the new semi- English town of S. Pierre, and to make which Richelieus fine gate was levelled. We now set off merrilyat 12.15 through the French countrythe day bright, the fields laughing. The look of those spreading fields is a sort of sur- prise, with the women in glazed hats standing at the level crossings, carry- ing their flag to the present. Bozs little paper, A Flight, is one of the most perfect photographs of the journey from London to Paris. He has missed notning. The reader feels as though he were being whirled along, and notes the changes in the day, the weary drawing on to evening, the look of the towns, etc. In about an hours time we were passing those enormous cement factories which line the railway as we near Boulogne; the chimneys, houses, factory, and warehouses, all seemed smirched and splashed with this rich compost. We do not descend into Boulogne, and halt at the bright little Tintilleries Station far up the hill, so well known to the English. Many a pleasant dance we have looked on there, the lights sparkling among the trees. Here is my third cathedral the strange fantastic pile in the High Town, so extravagant and ignorant in its design and details; and yet, as Mr. 39 Fergusson has said, so full of honesty of purpose, that it carries off these gross defects~ That High Town, hack- neyed as it is, is ever charming from it antique tranquillity and simplicity. It is a curious feeling, passing into such an enclosure. Once in the old days I came by a diligence from Boulogne to Calaisan ancient ramshackle three horse thing. We were walking up and down hills all the time, and were the whole day on the march. We pass Wimmille and Wimereux, those curious little ragged places by the sea which are striving hard to become watering- places. They seem merely a number of sheds and boxes, with a few villas in- land yclept, or miscalled, chMets. About two oclock the ground round us begins to grow leafy and luxuriant; we are drawing near to what seems an important town. Looking up, I see rising above the gay-looking houses some cream-colored, rich-looking cathe- dral towers, that seem lacework, and recognize that we are at Abbeville. I descend at the busy station, which is full of modern life, from which I walk away towards the pleasantly old- fashioned town in the distance. I won- der that people do not oftener give themselves such pleasant little treats as this. That seemed a perfect rural avenue, half a mile long, with fields and trees on each side and a few houses. The avenue continued till it came to the entrance of the street of the town, which invited from afar off. The road was crossed twice, once by one of the pretty canals of the Flemish sort, and, farther on, by the river. Houses rose at the edge of the water like those at Bruges. This walk was a foretaste, for there were constant glimpses of the soft, fairy-like towers inviting you on. The little town which we now enter was a surpriseSamuel Prout all over. We do not find such places on the beaten track. It has stood where it did, and is of the old Provincial pattern, bringing back to me the French towns of childhood~5ay, the hill over Havre, where everything was in a sort of torpid, old-world condition. The en- trance tQ tbe high Street, or Great 40 Street, as the French have it, is bright and parti-colored, and the lines pleas- antly broken, owing to the houses being built one by one. We are led on gradually until we come to the beautiful cathedral, which is at one side of the street, only lying a little back; its charming tracery and lacework seem as though wrought in sugar. It is true Flamboyant, and on to the flanking towers are encrusted small corner ones. It must be an education for the natives to have such an object always before them not put away, or out of the way in a close, but actually within their touch as it were. I at once feel the truth of Ruskins description: The very threads of the now thin and nervous stonework catch an ague of mingled wantonness and terror, and, Flam- boyant with a fatal glow, tremble in their ascent as if they were seen through troubled and heated air, over a desert horizon; and lose themselves at last in the likeness, no more as the ancient marbles, of the snows of Olympus, but of the fires of condemna- tion. Perhaps this is a little too troubled an image, where all seems perfect repose, but it is true and forcible, and also poetical. Entering, however, there is a sad shock; it seems like passing into some ruined old shanty. Only a portion, that to the front, has been completed, the rest has been patched up and covered in somehow. It is, in- deed, a disastrous spectacle of neglect, and the contrast to the outside is ex- traordinary, and even painful. I had a pleasant three-quarters of an hours stroll through this scenic town, which at every turn glinted with color, and suggested the perfect truth of Prouts delightful water-color drawing. There was the grand Place of Arms, half filled or blocked up by a monstrous marble monument to Admiral Courbet, a worthy sailor of whom the world knows little. He is perched aloft, giv- ing orders from his deck, on a sort of marble ~pergne, while below him are a number of struggling figures express- ing admiration. He is out of keeping with the whole place, of which he was a A Lightning Tour. native. At Calais I had found out that the honest old street in which Dessin s is situated had had its name changed violently from that of Rue Neuve to that of Rue Admiral Courbet. I wish he were away. There is a fine old inn here, where I should have liked to put upthe Tote du Bo?uf or Bulls Head it was called. It had been an old mansion belonging to some great lord, and had a charming courtyard with an archway for entrance, and many handsome chambers. I lingered long before it, and could fancy the worthy natives trooping in at one or two oclock for dinner every day, as is the custom in these primitive towns, and as I had seen it at the capital Chapeau Rouge in Dunkirkthe snuggest hotel I wot of, and I wot of many; the wine and fowls superlative. I remember asking the host for some of his wine to take away, which he declined in a rather suspicious fashion. I found myself next in an old street where was a framed house with carved doorway, and covered with vines appar- ently; the mansion or residence of Francis the First, it was said. It was framed in black and white, tottering over the street in a decrepid way, as was natural in one of its great age. In these old French cities there are always forlorn, retired streets, rows of sound private houses with gardens behind, and quaint old doorways. These have a sort of solemn attraction, as though life were closing in for those who live in them. At the end you see the trees and rich greenery of the open country. At the bottom of one of them was an imposing old church which I had not time to explore. There is a quaint and pleasing belfry here beside the Town Hall, of the fifteenth century or there- abouts, which gives note of the Flemish origin of the place, for we are in French Flanders. The shops here have that gay, sparkling look which we often see in these old towns. I was tickled with the name Prucihomme over a shop one which I had never seen out of the famous novel. I noted, too, that every butchers shop was adorned with a A Lightning Tour. pair of well-modelled golden bulls heads. Had I had time I should have liked to wander, on this fresh sunny day, in the outskirts, crossing the little bridges, getting views of the town from the back, playing hide-and-seek with the fairy-like towers of the cathedral, but I had not many minutes to spare, so I turned back to the station. It was now 2.47 P.M., and certainly it will be admitted I had not been losing time. The train now came up, and we flew on our way, reaching the great cathedral city of Amiens at 3.30 P.M. This was rather a change; here we were among the up-to-date moderns. There was the Grand Avenueau attempt at a new boulevardand in rather a raw condition. There was the savor, too, of the manufacturing town. The streets as I made my way up seemed rather dirty and uninteresting. Not very acceptable either were the new trim squares, close to the hotels, where the natives were sitting, trying to imitate the Parisians. The glory of the place, our old friend the cathedral, contrives to hide itself in the most successful way. In nearly every other town the towers or spires are always deliberately asserting themselves. You cannot shut them out. Here you would not find them even on looking hard. It is, of course, a noble, overpowering thingvain to praise and idle to con- demn. I relished much the Bishops Palace and its fair gardens, and that quaint brick building in the Close, very old-fashioned and piquant. But within, how noble and superb! the first glance taking in the whole interior. Some- thing novel always strikes you on every fresh visit to such places, and on this occasion I was impressed by the sense of its being richly and variedly fur- nished, as it were. Here there were compartments framed off with flue brass and iron grilles, paintings, marble altars, and the rest. I once heard a mass here betimes of an ordinary morn- ing, when the cathedral was shown at its proper function. It was a dramatic sight, the honest natives scattered aboutthe general stillness, the devout 41 air. Some of the violet-caped canons were in the superbly carved stalls. The richly carved and decorated altar was put to its proper use. The cathe- dral seemed to come to life and move- ment. The starers or travellers who come in at noon with their guides never see the cathedral. It is then, as it were, covered up and at rest. Who that has seen the glorious Antwerp, or the still more glorious S. Gudule, at Brus- sels, at such an hour, when the richly- colored panes, the carved columns, the oak and the shadows all fall into a sort of background for the ceremonial, will ever forget it? Even the old Flemish- faced sacristanwho comes and looses a rope under the tower and pullsadds to the picturesque effect. You hear the tone of the great bell, muffled as if high up, and lost in the clouds and shadows of the tower. Outside in the town one notes the full clang. When service is over the canons get up and go home. Some are very aged and decrepid, and totter as they lean on some younger brother. I watched some one or two enter what seemed their little poorish lodging in the Close. Their stipend, some forty or fifty pounds a year, would make our canons of York and Westminster smile. I now wandered about for some time, not very much recreated. The Town Hall, where a great treaty of peace was signed, is a heartless building enough, tamely modern, and dispirit- ing. I turned away, and sought the station. This Amiens station has a nightmare sort of existence, and never goes to bed; the buffet seems to be eternally open, trains are always com- ing up, and the English perpetually passing to and fro. I note a lady and her daughters getting out her boxes, and directing a porter in true Stratford- at-Bow French, which he respectfully accepts. She finishes with Own poo rnarcher?that is, to the hotel: as who should say, Can one use ones feet to get to the hotel? Aller a pied, I pre. sume, would be more correct, but he understood her. I liked, however, her air of perfect self-satisfaction, and fancy her saying, One should know A Lightning Tour. French to go abroad. Seated in the carriage, I noted also a bluff old red- faced colonelwas it ?who was seeing off his dapper, bright son, in gay uni- form, with whom he talked jovially to the last moment, and then embraced him cordially. By 4.18 P. M. we are hurrying south- wards. No longer on the beaten track and through route, we jog along, stop- ping comfortably at every station in a very tedious fashion. Every station seemed the same as the last, and at every station one or two persons get in or out. Still, I like the provincial, out of the world tone of our progress. At one halting-place a stoutish, elderly matron, in deep black, and with strong- smelling baskets, is hoisted in, and begins almost at once, in querulous strain, to ask, When, 0 when, sir, shall we get to Beauvais? By and by she weeps to herself, and breaks out with exclamations, Oh, the sad voyage, the sad voyage! I begin to fancy that if there be anything triste, it is le yin, as our lively neighbors are fond of call- ing it when describing this maudlin, sorrowful stage. But I did the worthy woman wrong, for she told me her whole story, which was pathetic enough. She had been burying her daughter, beyond Paris, and was now returning to a desolate household. As we were over two hours together, I had every detail, and seemed to have assisted in person at the departure of the poor girl. Not until a quarter past eight did we reach Beauvais. It was now the gloam- ing, which I did not regret, as it lends a picturesque atmosphere for the first acquaintance with an old town. This seemed a fine, impressive, fat-looking place. Between it and the station was a belt of trees and canals, which I found entirely surrounded the town, making a charming promenade. I could see per- fectly where the old wails had been, the place of which had been taken by this verdant promenade. These old cities can never quite obliterate the mark of their fortifications. Now, this was to be the most enjoyable visit of the day. It was all a novelty. I took my way up the street, on speculation, as it were, that opened before me, and saw that I was in a very old and picturesque place indeed. The street was narrow, and wound a little, but every step was a surprise. The houses were all mysterious and melancholy, broken up into shadowsmost of them capped by heavy dormers of an odd pattern. They were in the shape of deeply recessed hoods, and had a curious shadowy tone about them. I strolled on and on, and at last de- bouched in the noble, astonishing Place of Arms, a most truly picturesque expanse, quite like the opening scene in an opera, of vast size and variety, of irregular shape, and intruded on by projecting buildings. Here was many a striking house, with gabled roofs; the Town Hallmodern it seemedjutting out in the centre, and a bronze heroine in the middle. Numerous little dark by- streets led off from it in all directions. The scene, too, was full of associations numbers were crossing the Place, or stopping to talk in groups, a regular va-et-vient. The lights were beginning to glitter. It seemed the old provincial France all over. All were honest country-town folk. I could not make out a single restaurant, and, indeed, as Mr. Penley used to say in the play, I wanted that badly. For during this long day I had only been able to snatch something at stray buffets. On light- ning tours you must eat as you can. I was delighted with this dramatic scene, and could have lingered, but I followed a turning that led me straight to the literally overpowering cathedral. It was the most astonishing thing of the kind that I have ever seen. It is diffi- cult to furnish an idea of this mass of stonea mere fragment of a cathedral, which rises like some huge cliff or crag. The effect was more astonishing and vast from its being seen through the ~hadows. There was something original in making its acquaintance in this fashion. Astonishing, too, were the enormous crags that did duty as buttressesperfect buildings, and seem- ing themselves to require to be but- tressedwhich gave it support. It was 42 A Lightning Tour. really not like a cathedral, but more like some beetling tower or bastionall height, and no length. It was too late to see the interior. We are told that this great monument was intended to eclipse Amiens, and was carried up so high as to overpower its supports, and fell in. It had then to be propped up with added pillars; the ambitious scheme, like other ambitions, oer- leaped itself, and the work stopped short on the favorite church-building excuse, lack of funds. Encrusted on to it I found a gloomy, frowning build- ingan ancient, stiff, and unadorned church of the eleventh century, which is called La Basse ~IEuvre: I have no doubt a great curio. Its simplicity con- trasted strangely with the elaborate work beside it. I was more interested by the curious old building which rambled away to the backa low, antique structure, with vast and huge blackened eavesa genuine antique, full of shadow and color; it is really piquant, and is, it seems, the Town Museum. Time was passing away rapidly in these entertainments, so I took my way down one of the winding streets, in the direction of the station, trusting that something would turn up on the road and it did. I came suddenly into a large open place, and found myself confronted with a magnificent abbey church, which stretched right across from end to end. The Place was the Saint Stephens and the church that of the same saint. The variety of details the broken lines, the towers, spires, and gables, were all in profusion. I could have liked to have lingered and gazed and walked round it; but I must push on. I came to the Promenade, which circled the town, and here were abundance of trees and flowers and grass and flowing water, all, too, lit up with lamps; behind, the shadowy old town. I passed the large building, which I was told was the great Tap- estry Works. I came to the station. I had made friends with a burly ticket- taker during the process of passing in and out several times, and asking ques- tions. He showed me about, and also 43 the way to the restaurant, where there was a dinner at fixed pricewine includedneither wine, nor dinner, nor fixed price very good. At the side next the platform little tables were set out, where you could have your coffee, chasse, and cigar, and look on at the passengers passing and repassingnot a bad idea. As I sipped and smoked I recalled all I had seen in this busy day. Now the train was ready, and I set off on my return journey through the night. It was about 9 P.M.; there was noth- ing eventful, and I had the carriage to myself and my thoughts. I find them generally not very bad company, and might say, as the old Dumas did at a party, Je me serais bien emb~t6 sans moi. Here, at half past ten, was Amiens again, and the railway-station, with the devouring tunnel at one end. I paced the platform patiently until the Paris express came clattering in. Then we flew on and on in right good style, until at 1.30 A.M. good old Calais was once more reached. I always relish that half hours wait on the pier, as the trunks are being got on, the moon shining, the sea calm, the electric lights competing with the moon, the pretty station as background. The hotel here, brilliantly lit and comfortable, seemed to woo you to stay. But the word is on and yet on, through the night, away with a shriek, a rattle, and a roar, as poor Boz used to write it. There was a crowd of passengers, and very welcome was the gentle doze after the long and what ought to have been fatiguing day. It seemed but the usual forty winks, when with the dawn we were entering Dover Harbor the slate-colored sky breaking with gold and purple. Here were the two ponderous trains waiting to welcome us. It was just four oclock. So long and leisurely was the packing into the two trains, that being unburdened with luggage I set off to walk it up to the town, and a curious promenade it was. There is, of course, a certain section of the Dover community always awake and moving at these small hours. I passed numbers of living beings. Reminiscences of Lord Bath. Lights were everywhere. Here was Divers Dover Castle Hotel right in the way, its door hospitably open, and all lit up ready to capture any one like myself that passed. The crowded vessels seemed to be slumbering in the harbor. There was a perfect stillness, and the air and light were clear and inspiring. On the way I had a rather bizarre encounter, and met what was perhaps the last thing one would have thought of meeting at such a timea young fellow on a bicycle! He stopped to ask, Which was the road to London? I told him, and we fell into talk. He had come over, he told me, in the boat, had been riding in Belgium. He had an appointment on business in town at noon. He did not know the number of miles which he would have to cover. He then mounted his machine and set off cheerily. It was a curious feeling to find oneself in that lonely station, where, however, the restaurant and other offices were all duly open, lights flaring, the tea and coffee getting hot, and waiting girls bustling about. They seemed to be taking things leisurely down at the Pier, for it was long before the well-laden trains at last came rolling in. At half past four oclock or so we set off, the day being now well declared and bright. We flew through the pleasant Kentish country. I looked out for Can- terburyalways inviting, and saw the elegant snowy-looking cathedral, re- vealing afar off a thing of grace and pleasure. Cathedral town it is called, but it is so placed as always to seem a little village, clustered round the feet of the cathedral. The green luxuriant country seems to come up to it quite close. This was the eighth cathedral I had seen in the twenty-four hours: Westminster, Rochester, Calais, Bou- logne, Abbeville, Amiens, Beauvais, and Canterbury! Finally, a little after six we were entering Victoria Stationonly a few minutes after the train I had departed by on the day before had started; and thus my lightning tour of twenty-four hours came to an end. PERcY FITZGERALD. From The contemporary Review. REMINISCENCES OF LORD BATH. In the premature death of Lord Waterford and Lord Bath within six months of each other, the House of Lords and the Conservative party have sustained a greater loss than the world in general is aware of. It is true that failing health had for .the last few years withdrawn both of them, to some extent, from active participation in public affairs. But they continued to exercise considerable influence in the counsels of the party. Lord Waterford was practically the leader of the Con- servative party in Ireland, and his influence was generally exercised in favor of moderation. He was singu- larly free from personal prejudices and political animosities. Thoroughly hon- est himself, he was ever ready to give his political opponents credit for honest intentions. To the surprise of not a few of his political friends in Ireland, he entertained Mr. John Morley as an honored guest at Curraghmore; and, much as he differed from Mr. Gladstone as a politician, he was far too large- minded not to recognize the greatness of the man. Strong Conservative as he was, too, he did not believe that loyalty to his party was inconsistent with taking an independent line when he conscientiously differed from the leaders of his party; and he never hesitated to practise what he believed. These qualities, combined with great abilities, high rank, and fine estate, made Lord Waterford a greater political force than appeared on the surface, even after the accident which disabled him for active political life. In character and general tone of mind, Lord Bath was a very different man from Lord Waterford. But they had this in common, that neither ever held any position commensurate with his Parliamentary talents and territorial influence. Lord Waterford, I think, never held any office. Lord Bath held one or two subordinate offices early in his political career, and then dropped out of official life. Probably this was partly due to his independence of 44 Reminiscences of Lord Bath. character and his impatience of official trammels, but also in some degree, I fancy, to the entire lack of sympathy between himself and Lord Beacons- fieldantipathy would be too strong a word; the feeling on both sides was negative. No two characters could be more unlike. There was nothing in either that attracted the other, and they seemed to keep apart as if by instinct. In 1875 Lord Beaconsfield paid his first and only visit to Longleat, and Lord Bath said afterwards that he was the dullest guest he ever had in his house; he hardly ever sj~oke. Undoubtedly Lord Beaconsfield could be most agreeable when in the humor; but he needed apparently the stimulus of congenial companionship, or of some end which was worth the effort. By all accounts, he was given to fits of taciturnity, and although he was known in his youth as a voluble and persistent talker, it was impossible to watch his sphinx-like immobility in the House of Commons, sitting with folded arms and seldom speaking, without feeling that silent meditation was more natural to him than speech and the turmoil of debate. And that seems to have been his own opinion. One of those who heard Lord Baths remark on the silence of his distinguished guest was Mr. Richard Doyle (Dicky Doyle). I believe, he said, that talking was always more or less of an effort to Disraeli; and, indeed, he once told me as much. Circumstances, he said, have forced me to talk a great deal, but nature intended me to be a silent man. But whatever may have been the cause, it is certain that Lord Bath never filled the place in public life to which his capacity and position entitled him. He had read much, travelled much, observed much, thought much, and had a singularly retentive and accurate memory. I never heard him speak in Parliament, but I believe he spoke well. Lord Waterford told me more than once that he considered Lord Bath one of the best speakers in the House of Lords. He was certainly a good platform speaker; thoughtful, lucid, cogent. A 45 thorough Conservative in politics and a good party man, he nevertheless took his own line even on critical occasions. He joined Lord Salisbury and Lord ~Jarnarvon in disapprobation of Mr. Disraelis policy on reform in 1867. He followed the same peers in support- ing the disestablishment of the Irish Church in 1869. An Irish landlord him- self, he supported Mr. Gladstones Irish Land Bill in 1881 as a necessary corollary of the Act of 1870. And he supported the Arrears Bill against his leader, and carried the majority of the peers with him. But the question on which he broke away from his party most completely, and almost alone among the peers, was Lord Beacons- fields foreign policy in 1876-1880. He threw himself heart and soul against the whole of that policy, whether in Turkey or in Afghanistan. Wher- ever he had any influence he used it cordially against his party in the general election of 1880. But although his detestation of Turk- ish misrule made him earnestly desire the defeat of Lord Beaconsfields government, the completeness of the debacle alarmed him, and he expressed his fears in a letter to Mr. Gladstone, who replied, with Lord Baths consent, in a form that might help to reassure the Conservative partythat is in the form of a letter published as an anony- mous article in one of the monthly magazines. The nature of Lord Baths misgivings and the drift of Mr. Glad- stones reply may be gathered from the first two paragraphs of this interesting article, the authorship of which need no longer be a secret: You have stated to me with the ability, clearness, and frankness, which all who know you would expect from you, the apprehension infused into your mind by the nature and extent of the present Con- servative collapse. You think that, with a Liberal Ministry, a strong Conservative Opposition is necessary in our Parliamen- tary government. You anticipate changes in the franchise and in the redistribution of seats, such as will even extend that devastation in the party, which has been wrought by the elections just concluded. You think that property may lose its voice 46 in the government of the country, and may be left at the mercy of the multitude; and that taxation may take such a form as to be highly embarrassing to the owners of landed property in particular. Upon the whole, you anticipate that Con- servatism may be coming near the day of its annihilation. Although you may be termed an Old Conservative, while I am of a school of Liberalism not commonly esteemed to be backward or lethargic, I can at least assure you that you have not altogether mistaken your man in addressing me. If a Liberal deserves his name, it ought to be peculiarly his characteristic to be capable of projecting his care and his sympathies beyond the precincts of the party whose uniform he wears. On wider grounds, it is the characteristic of every sensible man to know that party exists only as an instrument for the benefit of the country, and that he has an interest in the character of his opponents only less vital than in that of his allies. The ex- tinction, or extreme depression, of the Conservative principle and party would tend certainly to disorganize, and prob- ably to demoralize, the Liberal party. Both progressive and stationary, or at the least stable, elements appear to be essen- tial to the health of the body politic; and the two parties may be, not literally but generally, compared to the two oars right and left of a boat, by the intermixture and counteraction of whose forces she is pro- pelled in a straight course. In a general way, then, I accede to your thesis, that a strong Conservative Opposition is needed for the well-being of a Liberal govern- ment, and for the due and safe perform- ance of its work. We shall see presently how the danger to the Conservative party which Lord Bath anticipated from changes in the franchise and in the redistribution of seats was avoided; but it may be doubted whether any manipulation of the constituencies would have brought Conservatism near the day of its annihilation. The Conservative col- lapse of 1880 was succeeded by a Liberal collapse in 1886, repeated on a more disastrous scale in 1895. What the Parliamentary history of Great Britain seems to show, since the grant of household suffrage, is that the forces of Conservatism and Liberalism throughout the country are pretty Reminiscences of Lord Bath. evenly balanced, the pendulum swinging to one side or the other under the influence of some burning question or some menaced interest, or under the magnetic spell of a great leader. This goes to show that there is for the present no prospect of creating either a Liberal or Conservative majority that can be relied upon beyond the existing Parliament. Gratitude does not count. Lord Beaconsfield imagined that the first household electorate would gratefully send him back to power with a majority of seventy, instead of which they gave his rival a majority of more than one hun- dred. Mr. Gladstones offer to abolish the income-tax and reconstruct local government did not avail him at the polls in 1874; and it is probable that Sir W. Harcourts budget did not gain a single seat for his party last year. What, however, partieularly struck both Mr. Gladstone and Lord Bath in 1880 was the fact that the elections had been carried by the lower classes ogainst the upper and middle classes in the towns, and in the teeth of the landlords in the counties. . - . Never, perhaps, did the peerage, never cer- tainly did the landed gentry and the wealthy class at large rally round Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Welling- ton with as near an approach to unanimity as they have now rallied round Lord Beaconsfield. This phe- nomenon, one of the most curious of the day, waits historical explanation, which Mr. Gladstone proceeds in part to supply. He believed that the neo- Toryism invented by Mr. Disraeli especially in the sphere of foreign politicswas largely responsible for the disaster of 1880. But there is this con- solation, he says, for those now undermost in the great paZa3stra of the day, that something in the nature of Toryism or Conservatism is not only an essential condition, but is also a large substantive constituent factor of our national life. A monarchy as such is Conservative, and the popularity of the British monarchy increases its Conservative influence. The Estab- lished Church is naturally Conservative, and so are the military, naval, and legal professions, and the bulk of the Civil Service. So that the wonder is that the daring host of the Liberals should ever have succeeded in storming so strong a position. The Conservative party, therefore, has nothing to fear if only it revert to its better traditions and policy. It was the Conservative party of 1844 that Lord Beaconsfield de- nounced as an organized hypocrisy; an epoch when it may be safely as- serted that the Conservative party was at the zenith, perhaps, of its character; certainly of its prosperity. It is in a return to that policy, Conservative yet Liberal, that Mr. Gladstone sees the safety of the Conservative party. The following quotation from the article is interesting: This extraordinary victory has been won by the nation against an extraor- dinary man. The time probably has not arrived, and certainly my ambition is not bold enough to attempt a full or exact protraiture of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. He is too big for a little critic. He is passing, as others have passed, before the tribunal of history. He is not a man of mere talent, but of genius. The moment of his great down- fall is not the moment for dwelling on the matters, grave as they may be, which will be put down on the wrong side of his account. This much is certain, that in some of his powers he has never been surpassed; and his career, as a whole, is probably the most astonishing of all that are recorded in the annals of Parlia- ment. Certainly the force of genius and indomitable perseverance were never more signally displayed than in Lord Beaconsfields triumph over the appar- ently insuperable obstacles that barred his path to the goal of his ambition. The following authentic anecdote shows his own appreciation of the task that lay before him, and the method of procedure which occurred to him as the most likely to succeed. It shows also that his brilliant and sustained invec- tive against Sir Robert Peel was not inspired by political animosity, or personal resentment, or affection for 47 Protection, but was a skilfully arranged episode in the programme which this daring aspirant to the premiership of the British Empire, as the elect of the aristocracy of England, had sketched out for himself. Well did he earn the right to place under his gartered earls coronet the proud motto: Forti dtywile nihil. Here is the anecdote: When at the summit of his fame and power, he chanced to dine at a house where it fell to the lot of a daughter of the first Sir Robert Peel to arrange the table. She arranged that Lord Beaconsfield should sit at such a dis- tance from herself as would make any conversation between them impossible. He preceded her into the dining-room, and when she reached her chair she found to her surprise and annoyance that he was seated by her side. He soon essayed conversation with her, and she answered as curtly and frigidly as courtesy would permit. At last he said: Do you knowthatof all the public men of my time your father was the man I admired most? You took an uncommonly odd way of showing your admiration, she replied. A very natural observation for his daughter to make, said Sir Robert Peels assail- ant. But consider my position. I was ambitious; but I was poor and friend- lers, and I belonged to a despised race. Gn reflection, I came to the conclusion that my best chance was to attach my- self to the foremost man of the time. He was your father. I did my best to attach myself to him as a friend, and he spurned me. I was therefore obliged to attach myself to him as an adver- sary. There was not a tinge of cynicism in the explanation. It was evidently a simple statement of fact, with as little of anything like personal feeling in it as there would have been in the description of a skilful move in chess. One of the dangers which Lord Bath feared from the Conservative over- throw in 1880 was, as we have seen, changes in the franchise and in the redistribution of seats. That danger he had himself no small share in avert- ing. Reminiscences of Lord Bath. 48 In the summer of 1884 the House of Lords, on the advice of Lord Salisbury, threw out the County Franchise Bill. This led to an agitation in the country which was gradually taking the form of an attack on the House of Lords. Mr. Gladstones government announced that the County Franchise Bill would be again sent up to the Lords in an autumn session; and a crisis seemed imminent, for even so moderate a statesman as Lord Hartington hinted, in a public speech, at the creation of Liberal peers to overcome the Tory majority in the event of the rejection of the County Franchis& Bill a second time. The controversy went on with increasing heat and acrimony, and the autumn session opened in the beginning of November with all the omens of a stormy struggle. The controversy, in so far as Lord Salisbury and Mr. Glad- stone were concerned, may be summed up in a few words. It was not to the County Franchise Bill itself that Lord Salisbury objected, but to the possible mischief contained in the Redistribu- tion Bill which was to follow, and which, skilfully manipulated, might, in his opinion, efface the Conservative party for thirty years. He insisted therefore on knowing the character of the Redistribution Bill before he suffered the Franchise Bill to pass. Mr. Gladstone, on the other hand, had no intention to deal unfairly with the Conservative party in the Redistribu- tion Bill; but he believed that there was no chance of passing the Franchise Bill through the Commons in the face of organized obstructionthat was before the days of closureunless the Opposi- tion had such a strong motive for self- restraint as a Redistribution Bill in petto would supply. The opposing hosts were thus facing each other when Mr. Gladstone an- nounced in the House of Commons that he was willing to show his hand pri- vately to Lord Salisbury. The two leaders had an interview that evening, with the result that a small committee of Liberals and Conservatives, under the guidance of Mr. Gladstone and Lord Salisbury respectively, was formed to draw up a scheme of redis- tribution. The Franchise Bill encoun- tered no further serious opposition, and it was followed by a Redistribution Bill which aimed at dealing fairly by all parties. What caused this sudden transforma- tion scene? The gossips said that it was due to the intervention of the queen, who got the Duke of Richmond to arrange the interview between Lord Salisbury and Mr. Gladstone. But the gossips were, as usual, wrong. There was no intervention either of the queen or the Duke of Richmond. A gentleman unconnected with politics, whom I shall call Outis, took the liberty of writing on the subject to Lord Salisbury, with whom he had some acquaintance. He urged the danger of a conflict on such a subject between the Lords and the Commons, and made use of arguments which a less amiable man than Lord Salisbury might well have resented. Lord Salisbury, on the contrary, replied in a letter which ex- plained his own position with admi- rable force and clearness, and which at the same time exhibited his charac- ter in so attractive a light that Outis felt a strong desire to bring himself and Mr. Gladstone together, believing that an exchange of views between them in private would speedily settle the difficulty. Failing this, he was anxious that the two leaders should at least understand one another, and should appreciate each others motives. Lord Salisburys letter was one which could not fail to strike a sympathetic chord in Mr. Gladstones nature, and just because it was marked confidential, and therefore obviously not meant for the eyes of a third party, Outis sent it for Mr. Gladstones private perusal, with an intimation that he would tell Lord Salisbury what he had done, which he did forthwith. Mr. Glad- stones reply showed that Outis had not miscalculated the effect of Lord Salis- burys letter. The controversy has be- come ancient history; and, as there is nothing in Mr. Gladstones letter which need not now see the light, I subjoin a copy of it in illustration of Reminiscences of Lord Bath. Reminiscences of Lord Bath. the spirit in which the two men meant to fight, if fight they must: I have read Lord Salisburys letter with a great deal of interest and with consid- erable sympathy on important points. 1 have always believed, and expressed the belief, that he is not governed by personal ambition; and I agree strongly with him as to the unsatisfactory character of polit- ical life. There is something to which every heart must answer sympathetically in his remarks on his own qualities. It has repeatedly occurred to my mind of late that his judgment on a Redistribu- tion Bill may be (in my view) warped from his using the lights of his personal experience in the House of Commons, with the very natural assumption that they are a safe guide to the present situation. But the fact is, that since he carried his very brilliant gifts to the House of Peers, a change which may be called funda- mental has come in among us through the growth of business, in a measure, but mainly through the arts of obstruction. These arts it is not necessary for the leaders to practise. The vain, or obstrep- erous, or ambitious men, under a silent permission, do it all for them. The con- sequence of that state of things is that no very wide and complex bill can now be passed in defiance of the Opposition. Hence flows my doctrine that we have not a chance for a Redistribution Bill unless the Opposition has some motive for treat- ing us with mercy. Lord Salisbury, on the other hand, while not suspecting Mr, Gladstone himself of any design to deal unfairly with his political opponents in his Redistribution scheme, felt that he was not entirely his own master, since even the strongest men in politics sometimes have to carry out ideas that are not their own. It would not be safe, there- fore, in his view; to let the Franchise Bill pass till he got security for a fair Redistribution Bill. All this made Outis still more anxious to bring Lord Salisbury and Mr. Glad- stone quietly together on this question, and he suggested to a Conservative peer of historic name to invite Lord Salis- bury and Mr. Gladstone to meet at his house in the country. Mr. Gladstone accepted the invitation end went; but Lord Salisbury was unable to do so. So that opportunity of settling the question without conflict failed. Outis, how- ever, was still in occasional corre- spondence with Lord Salisbury on the subject, but without Mr. Gladstones knowledge. For Lord Salisbury be- lieved that any interchange of views between himself and Mr. Gladstone, however indirect, would be sure to leak out, breeding suspicions and resent- ments on both sides, and, therefore, likely to do more harm than good. Outis, however, was permitted to assure Mr. Gladstone that he had information which made it certain that Lord Salis- bury would not allow the Franchise Bill to pass until he had indubi- table evidence that the Redistribution Bill would deal fairly with his party. Mr. Gladstone, on the other hand, was most anxious to avert a second rejec- tion of the Franchise Bill, as that would necessitate a dissolution, in which the question of the House of Lords, would, in his opinion, take precedence of all others. In this crisis the writer of this article received a most able letter from Lord Bath, reviewing the whole situa- tion. According to his information, the Conservative party was, in the mass, quite as anxious as Mr. Gladstone to avoid a dissolution, and Mr. Gladstone, he thought, was making a mistake in dealing with its leaders, who would probably be glad if he played over their heads with the main body. After giving at some length his reasons for this advice, he added, with his usual modesty: Please only communicate this in one quarter, and there only if you think it can be of use. I can do little good, and do not want to be thought to be trying to mix myself up in these affairs. I sent the letter at once to Mr. Gladstone, who acted on Lord Baths advice that evening in the House of Commons. Within two hours of his short speech he had an inter- view with Lord Salisbury and offered terms, which the latter was able to accept. The closing of this dangerous controversy was thus mainly due to the wise intervention at a critical moment (4 the Marquis of Bath. Why should it be impossible to settle other contro LIVING AGE. VOL. XI. 524 49 50 versies after the same fashion? If Lord Salisbury and Mr. Gladstone could draw up between them in a private room a scheme of Redistribution which their respective parties deemed equi- table, why could they not have dealt similarly with the Irish and other ques- tions? The gain from such an arrange- ment would be immense all round, aai the difficulty, I am persuaded, is not with the leaders on either side, but with the free-lances, camp-followers, and place-hunters. I have instanced Lord Baths action in the controversy on the Eastern question in 18761880 as a proof of his honesty and political independence, and I may add, of his generosity; for I be- lieve that his contributions to the cause of the suffering Christians amounted to thousands of pounds. His conduct was the result of deep conviction, based on wide reading and personal observa- tion. He had been travelling in differ- ent parts of the Turkish Empire just before the Crimean War, and had noted the devastation, iniquity, and cruelty which are invariable products of Otto- man rule. He arrived at the Darda- nelles while the combined fleets of France and England, under command of Admiral Dundas, were anchored there, waiting for a favorable wind to take them to Constantinople. The admiral begged Lord Bath to call on the British ambassador as soon as he reached Constantinople, and tell him that the Anglo-French fleet was at the Dardanelles, and would proceed to Con- stantinople as soon as the wind per- mitted. On receiving the message, the ambassador jumped off his chair and apparently forgetting the presence of his visitorwalked up and down the room muttering to himself, AhI the fleet will soon be here. Once its here there must be war. It cant be avoided. I shall take care that it is not avoided. I vowed to have my revenge upon that man, and now, by God, Ive got it. This story I received from Lord Baths own lips, with permission to publish it. Coming on the top of his own expe- rience in Turkey, it confirmed his con- viction of the impolicy and injustice of the Crimean War. Our policy with regard to Turkey since then was abhorrent to him. He believed it to be as foolish politically as it was morally indefensible. With such convictions It was inevitable that, casting party ties aside, he should strenuously oppose any government which upheld Turkish rule wherever there was a chance of ending it. He travelled after the Russo-Turk- ish war through the emancipated provinces, and embouied his expe- riences in a little volume full of in- formation and acute observation. The book is interesting and, but for its authors natural reserve and fastidious taste, would have been more so. He was an excellent raconteur and had a capacious memory, exceedingly well stored with anecdotes and miscel- laneous information. He might have made a very amusing book out of his experiences in Turkey if his modesty had allowed him to put his conversa- tions into literary form. Inter aUa he had a number of good stories told him by the editor of an Arab paper pub- lished at Constantinople, and circulat- ing widely through the Musulman world. The editors principal difficulty was caused by the main source of his profitshis advertisements, which he could not get the bulk of his readers to understand. Some of his subscribers in the interior of Arabia wrote: We dont care for the lists of things which you put in your paper. If you cannot fill it with news, then print poetry; but not a lot of things which dont interest us. Others held him responsible for the quality of the goods advertised. A mollah wrote from the interior of India to complain that, on his recomnienda- tion, he had bought a box of Hollo- ways pills for one of his wives, and she had not been well since. For this he held the editor responsible. Lord Bath was a man of wide and va- rious reading. There are three libraries at Longleata valuable library which he inherited, and which contains some rare editions; the library belonging to the saintly Bishop Ken, and a fine 1 His charities to the unhappy of all persua- sions, says Macaulay, had been so large that Reminiscences of Lord Bath. Reminiscences of Lord Bath. library of which Lord Bath was proud, not only because it was all collected by himself, but chiefly because he had read most of its contents. It is particularly rich in works bearing on the Musulman system in general and the Ottoman Empire in particular, and is probably unique in the fulness of its literature on the Eastern question from the period of the Crimean War. Lord Bath, how- ever, was not a man who kept his goods in his window. You had to know him pretty well before you discovered how able he was, or how well-informed. A keen politician, he was thoroughly conversant with the history of his own country. Though an absentee, he was an excellent Irish landlord, and took care to have good agents to manage his Irish property. He dismissed a well- known agent because he could not imbue him with his own equitable and kindly feelings towards the tenantry. He was fond of metaphysical studies and theology, and was well able to hold his own in discussions of that sort. I remember a beautiful night in June, when he formed one of a party which included two distinguished men of letters, two distinguished painters, a witty and literary diplomatist, and Browning the poet Before I had the privilege of knowing Browning person- ally I was warned against making his acquaintance. He will disappoint you, I was told. You will find him just his whole private fortune consisted of seven hun- dred pounds, and of a library which he had not been able to sell, lint Thomas Thynne, vis- count weymouth, though not a Nonjuror, did himself honor by offering to the most virtuous of the Nonjurors a tranquil and dignified asylum in the princely mansion of Longleat. Hist. iv. p. 40. Ken acknowledges this kindness more than once. In the dedication of his poems to Lord weymouth he says: when I, my Lord, crushed by prevailing might, No cottage had where to direct my flight, Kind heaven me with a friend illustrious blest, who gave me shelter, affluence, and rest. In the splendid park of Longleat there is a spot called Heavens Gate, which commands a wide and beautiful view. Tradition says that it was a favorite haunt of Ken, and that he composed his Evening Hymn there. He sold his Irish property after the Land League troubles. an ordinary society man. Certainly Browning did not pose as a poet, or as anything in particular. He was well- washed, well-dressed, well-brushed, and talked well, and sometimes amus- ingly. This particular night he was singularly brilliant. He discussed po- etry, ancient and modern, British and foreign; and I remember that he ex- pressed a poor opinion of John Brights critical judgments on poetry. From poetry he passed on to painting, then to the doctrine of evolution, and then to Platos Phisdo as an argument for immortality; to his Republic as a study in politics; and to his dialogues in general as superb exhibitions of literary style. Brownings enthusiasm seemed to inspire Lord Bath, and I think he was allowed to be the best talker of the evening next to Browning. One of the guests having made a move towards the door, Browning looked at his watch, and finding that it was past two oclock in the morning, he proposed that we should make a real Greek symposium of it, and continue the dialogue till breakfast. Lord Bath was sometimes thought cold and haughty by those who knew only the outside of him. In reality he was one of the most simple and unaf- fected of men; but he was constitu- tionally reserved and shy with strangers. By no means insensible to the claims of birth and rank, few men valued less than he did the exterior trappings of a man when weighed in the balance against intrinsic merits. He was a charming host, and at his beautiful home in Wiltshire his guests, no matter what their differences might be in rank or political opinions, met on a footing of equality, and felt at home. The shyness, which sometimes was mistaken for hauteur, vanished amidst the genial surroundings of his family, and in the society of his friends. Yet I remember an amusing instance of it at Longleat. Soon after the marriage of the Duchess of Albany, she chanced to be spending a few days quietly at a house some miles distant from Long- leat. Her hostess drove her over unex- pectedly one afternoon in August to see 51 Reminiscences of Lord Bath. the place. There happened to be no one at home except Lord Bath, his second daughter (then a young schoolgirl), and a visitor. Lord Bath, I believe, had never met the duchess before, and after the first formal greeting and an expres- ~ion of regret for the absence of Lady Bath, there was an awkward pause. At that moment a loaded hay-cart passed, some way off, opposite the room, and the silence was broken by the duchess gleefully asking Lady Catherine Thynne, Did you ever jump on a hay-cart? I used to be so fond of jumping on a hay-cart when I was your age. The spell was broken, there was a laugh, and conversation went on without any more shyness. Describing the Duke of Monmouths progreas through Somersetshire and Devonshire in 1650, Macaulay says that he was sumptuously entertained at Longleat Hall, then, and perhaps still, the most magnificent country-house in England. Yes, still; and perhaps more indisputably than in 1680. The late marquis, a man of exquisite taste, devoted some years to the interior decoration of the house, under his own careful supervision; and the grace and dignity of its architecture, the design, it is said, of John of Salisbury, are now matched by the beauty of its interior as well as by the varied attractions and princely dimensions of the park in which it stands: fields and grassy knolls, gentle hills and woodland slopes, ponds, and lake, and river, stocked with fish, and the splendid mansion standing well out in its glorious setting, combine to retain for Longleat still the primacy among English country-houses which Lord Macaulay assigned to it. And perhaps it may be added, without intruding on the sanctities of private lifeby one who writes this without their knowl- edgethat it would be hard indeed to place in the midst of such surroundings a family more worthy of the scene in personal attraction and charm of character than the happy family which has now lost its head. One of them, the second son, pre-deceased his father by several years by a violent fall from his horse, which slipped on a tram-rail in York, where he was stationed with his regiment. In beauty of person and loveliness of character he was the most attractive youth whom I have ever known. Two traits of his character may now be related which his own sensitive purity would have concealed. While he was preparing for the army, after leaving Eton, he came one day from the country to consult me on a matter on which he felt very strongly. His experience at Eton, he said, im- pressed him with the sore need of creating a public opinion among school- boys in favor of purity. A boy was disgraced who was known to have told a lie. Was it not possible to make schoolboys feel that any violation of moral purity was also disgraceful? And could I get some influential friends to join me in starting guilds of purity in our public schools? His beautiful face was aglow with enthusiasm as he spoke. Some people, who know lttth~ of the noble side of human nature, are apt to associate moral purity in men with constitutional defect or with un- manliness. Lord John Thynne was as brave and manly as he was pure in heart and affectionate in disposition; a good rider, and devoted to athletic sports and outdoor .exercise. Tennysoa understood the invigorating influence of purity on the whole man when he wrote of his hero, His strength is as the strength of ten, becanse his heart is pure. Not less characteristic of Lord John Thynne was the other trait to which I have referred. While on a visit to me a short time before his tragic death he asked me, with the engaging diffidence of one who was afraid of being thought better than he was, whether I could do him a great favor. Since his father had made a regular allowance to him, he confided to me, he had put aside the tenth part of it as belonging to God, and took out of what remained whatever he was able to give away in charity. Would I take charge of his tithe and dispense it as 1 pleased? Perhaps it might help some poor fellow through the university, or be useful in some other way. When I come of age, he added, the tithe of 52 Reminiscences of Lord Bath. my income will then be really worth something. Had he lived a few months longer he would have become the possessor of a fine estate. But it was not to be. The stumble of a gallop- lug horse put a sudden end to a life exceedingly beautiful during its brief span on earth, and very full of promise. He made me promise to keep these indications of a rare character secret even from his dearest relations; but I think I do not violate the spirit of my promise by revealing them now. The day before his accident he spent an hour in hospital, reading to and com- forting in other ways a soldier of his troop who was seriously ill. The soldier survived him but a few hours, his death hastened if not caused by the shock of the fatal accident. I do not think that Lord Bath was ever quite the same again. Never of a robust constitution, he seemed to age prema- turely. He was an admirable man of business, and discharged sedulously his duties as lord-lieutenant of his county and chairman of the county council; but during the last few years he was obliged to winter abroad, sometimes on the Nile and sometimes in Algeria. This brief and crude sketch of a man, whose real self was little known beyond the circle of his private friends, would be even more incomplete if no mention were made of hi.s keen sense of humor and playfulness of temper. Haughty and cold as he sometimes seemed to strangers, no one could unbend morc readily among friends or in congenial society. He enjoyed with genuine zest the fun and merriment of the young, and dearly loved a good joke. Perhaps I may give an example. On November 9, 1878, I chanced to breakfast alone with a Liberal peer, now a Liberal Unionist. That evening Lord Beacons- field was to dine at the Gulidhall, and we wondered what he would say, for it was the year of the Berlin Treaty and the Cyprus Convention. Would it not be fun, said my host, if some one were to write out Lord Beaconsfields speech beforehand and send it to an evening paper? I thought it would, and suggested that my host shouid do 63 it. He declined, and advised me to try my hand at it. In the course of the morning accordingly I wrote the speech, interlarding it liberally with cheers, and laughter, and dropped it into a letter-box for one of the evening papers. It was headed Lord Beaconsfields Speech, and there was a footnote ex- plaining that it was from a clairvoyant correspondent. About 8.30 in the evening I heard the newsboys crying, Lord Beaconsfields Speech, and on sending for the paper found a report of my own speech in fulL I sent a copy to Lord Bath, who was entertaining a party at Longleat. He read it out to his guests at breakfast as the genuine speech, and most of them, he wrote to me, applauded it as able and states- manlike. To show how peoples preju- dices are apt to govern their judgment, I subjoin an extract from this fictitious speech. Had it not been fathered on 1 Let us, therefore, prove ourselves worthy of our ancestors. (Loud cheers.) Let us not be weary of well doing. we have inherited a great and glorious empire. (Loud cheers.) Let us guard our heritage~(cheers)aud let us he- queath it to our children, not merely nuabridged, hut wideued. (cheers.) In Southeru Africa a territory larger than France has lately come under the beneficent sway of the imperial crown of England. (Cheers.) Later still we have taken upon ourselves to defend the frontiers and develop the resources of a region as large as France and Germany put together. It is a re- gion full of historic memories, the home of extinct civilization. But it is more than that. It abounds in mineral and agricultural wealth buried, indeed, and fallow, hut still there. (Cheers.) we read in sacred story of a land flowing with milk and honey. Asia Minor not only flows with milk and honey; such is the exuherance of its soil that its herhage may al- most he said to exclude fat. Since her Maj- estys government have undertaken the protec- torate of that country I have naturally turned my mind to the history of its natural resources, and I find that they are as varied as they are abundant and remunerative. The farmers of Scotland, for example, will see what a fine field there is for their capital and energy, when I assure them that the sheep of Asia Minor grow so fat upon their mountain pastures that they are ohliged to carry their enormous tails in a go-cart. (Loud laughter.) My Lord, I am not in the least surprised at that outburst of mer- riment. Our own Bacon has told us that won- der is at once the child of ignorance and the precursor of knowledge. The gentlemen who are accustomed to aid me in my researches have positively assured me that the fact which has 54 Lord Beaconsfield everybody would have seen the absurdity of it. It was long before Lord Bath let them hear the end of what they considered able and statesmanlike, for the speech was really a transparent burlesque. But that speech nearly got a friend of mine, a member of the diplomatic corps, into serious trouble. I sent him a copy, and received a note in reply thanking me and saying that he had telegraphed a summary of the speech to his govern- ment. Luckily, I had hit off some of the leading points in the real speech, and these, without the burlesque set- ting, were not too wildly discrepant to betray the hoax. MALCOLM MACCOLL. caused the mirth of this illustrious assembly may be found related in a work on Asia Minor, by a learned American missionary of the name of Lennap. Indeed, I am told that the hook has a picture of the animal, with its tail and go- cart. But, my Lord, for the development of all this wealth capital is necessary, and the en- terprise and governing qualities of an imperial race. Her Majestys government will not shrink from doing their part in this great and impera- tire workfor Imperative it is. India Is the brightest jewel in our gracious sovereigns im- perial crown. (Loud cheers.) Do you wish to place that jewel beyond the reachI will not stoop to say of capturebut even of perilous cupidity? (Prolonged cheering.) Then see that your route to India Is so visibly secure that nobody shall be tempted to encroach on your just rights. (Cheers.) That is the policy of her Majestys government; and hence the acquisi- tion of Cyprus and the protectorate of Asia Minor. I am told that Cyprus is useless for strategical purposes. But what are strategical purposes? Strategy is the art by which you baffle an opponent; but you may do that by other means than military roads. You do It often more effectually, and certainly less expen- sively, by showing him in an unmistakable man- ner that you mean to fight. (Loud cheers.) There you have the value of Cyprus. (Cheers.) what matters it, therefore, that the isle of Aphrodite has no harbor, and that It is useless as a military depot? we knew all that as well as our critics. A thing is good or bad accord- ing as it answers or not the purpose for which you intended It. We mean Cyprus to be a per- petual Nemo me impune lacessita material guarantee for the due execution of the imperial mandate proclaimed by me some months ago from the coign of vantage of this ancient city: Thus far, and no farther. How captious, then, Is the objection that Cyprus is worthless because it has no harbor! (Cheers.) The flag of England waves on that classic strand, and that flag is the victorious symbol of an empire which stretches From Chambers Journal. A GOSSIP ON GARDENS. It was a pretty sentiment of Nestor Roqueplan that God gave blonde hair to the women of the North to console the men for having no sun ; and it would seem to be a somewhat similarly beneficent dispensation of Providence that Britain, which is denied the lavish luxuriance of nature enjoyed by the favored nations of the South, should produce the best gardens and gardeners in the world. The British gardener has to fight against a wayward, depressing, and uncertain climate. He has to bring all the resources of horticultural science to his aid to enable him to contend successfully against the cold winds and unkindly skies, the damp fogs and dreary rainfall, which succeed one another in such rapid and variable alternation, that at no season of the year can he be sure of seasonable weather for two consecutive days. But the very difficulties in his way have quickened his energy, and inspired him with a stubborn determination to overcome them. And he is encouraged by the high repute which his vocation enjoys. There are few countries in the world Its sceptre over four continentsor rather over five, for what Is Australia, with Its Island satel- lites, but a continent In Itself? (Great cheer- ing, with waving of hands.) Such is the world. embracing empire over which our empress-queen wields an undisputed sway. (Enthusiastic cheers.) But, remember, the key of that em- pire is Asia Minor. Egypt Is out of the ques- tion, for France, as you have doubtless learnt from the correspondence published the other day, has put her veto on an English protectorate there. The only alternative, therefore, is Cy- prus and Asia Minor. There lies our mission, and we have the good-will of Europe in the arduous task of fulfilling it. One thing only Is needed to bring our venture to a successful issue. We enjoy the favor of our empress-queen; we have the confidence of a great and understand- ing people. But the first momentum for the reformation of Asia Minor must come from the British capitalists. Nothing can be more admi- rable than the intentions of that enlightened but unfortunate prince whose empire was so skil- fully concentrated by the Congress of Berlin. But intentions are unavailing in the absence of means to give them effect. The occasion is urgent, and her Majestys government feel that they may confidently rely on the wisdom and patriotism of a united people. (Prolonged cheer- ing.) A G0S8%p on Gardens. A Gossip on Gardens. in which the pleasures of the garden are more needed, and none in which they are more keenly appreciated, than in our own. And probably from the time the Romans first introduced gardening into Britain, its popularity was assured. One of the many reasons we have to be grateful to the old monks of the dark ages is that they assiduously cultivated the art of gardening, and spread the taste for this kindly art. In one of his most delightful essays, Lord Bacon discourses Of Gardens, and opens with this high eulogy of his subject: God Almighty first planted a garden, and indeed, it is the purest of human pleasure. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man, with- out which buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks; and a man shall ever see that when ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come to build stately, sooner tiian to garden finely, as if gardening were the greater perfec- tion. And Abraham Cowley in his epistle to John Evelyn says: I never had any other desire so strong, and so like to covetousness as that one which I have had always, that I might be master at last of a small house and a large gar- ~i1en. Milton, Pope, and Thomson were all enthusiastic lovers of gardens. Indeed, Byron used to say that he had a pride in thinking that our national taste, as it is conceived to be shown in what is called an English garden, had grown up less under the influence of iur landscape-painters than under that of our descriptive poets, more especially Milton and Pope. Let us glance then for a moment at the history of the British garden, and the various phases through which it has passed before reaching its present stage. In the essay on gardens to which we have already referred, Bacon gives us a picture of the beau ideal of a garden in his day. The principal and most noteworthy feature of the English garden then was the aim to make it perennial, a garden for all the months of the year, with something to please the eye in winter, spring, summer, and iiutumna source of perpetual refresh- ment and delight, from one end of the year to the other. And the great philosopher gives a list of all the plants and flowers suitable for each month, from January to Decembera list which even your modern scientific Scotch gardener might do well to study. A square garden, encompassed on all sides with a stately arched hedge, covering thirty acres of ground, divided into three parts; a green in the en- trance, a heath or desert in the going- forth, and the main garden in the midst, besides alleys on both sides, that was Bacons ideal. All elaborate trickery and device he despised, but he liked order, and system, and elegance. Above all, he made much of the perfume of flowers, a point on which, to our thinking, far too little stress is laid in the gardens of the present day. And because, says he the breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air (where it com- eth and goeth like the warbling of musick) than in the hand; therefore nothing is more fit for that delight than to know what be the flowers and plants that doe best perfume the air. And then he goes on to enumerate those sweet-smelling old English flowers, which, alas! modern fashion too often banishes to make room for the gaudy glare of bedding out. So enamoured was Bacon of the perfume of flowers, that he was ready to go to any extrava- gance to secure it. He gravely recom- mended opening a turf or two in the garden alleys, and pouring therein a bottle of claret to re-create the sense of smelling, being no less grateful than beneficial! On the whole, then, we gather that a garden in the Tudor style must have been most thoroughly what the old writers term a pleasaunce, a place in which a man might take his pleasure, full of all that was bright in color and sweet in perfume. This was the old English garden which had its day from the reign of Henry VII. to nearly the close of Eliza- beths. It was during this period that most of our common garden flowers were introduced from abroad. The oldest of them appears to be the lily, which was brought from Italy in 1460. 55 56 Provence, Flanders, Italy, and the Netherlands seem to have simultane- ously sent us our choice garden roses in 1522. From the Alps came the ranunculus, and from Italy the mignonette in 1528, rosemary from the south of Europe in 1534, the jasmine from Cireassia about 1548. The year 1567 saw the introduction of four time- honored favorites, the auricula from Switzerland, the pink from Italy, the gillyflower and carnation from Flan- ders. Spenser, by the way, in the Shepheardes Calendar (1579), classes the carnation, which he calls corona- tion, with the purple columbine and the gillyflower as lovers flowers. Now the carnation is generally supposed to have derived its name from the earua- tion or flesh color of the original species. But the word used by Spenser suggests that carnation is merely an abbrevia- tion of coronation in allusion to the crown-like appearance of the flower, and its specific name, Betonica coro- naria. The Philological Societys~ New English Dictionary does not decide which of the derivations is the only true one, though one must have originated in a mistake. Anyhow, the shorter form was common in Shakespeares time, and we have it on Dame Quicklys authority that Sir John Falstaff could never abide carnation; twas a color he never liked. Lavender was imported from the south of Europe not later than 1568, and the laburnum from Hungary about 1576; while Sir Walter Raleigh is credited with having brought the snowdrop back with him from his short- lived colony of Roanoke, an island off North Carolina, in 1584. But the old English style, towards the end of Elizabeths reign, was super- seded by the Italian. The Italians loved embellishment, and liked a mixture of architecture in their gardens. Statues temples, alcoves, porticos, were com- bined with terraces, balustrades, flights of steps, alleys, broad paved walks fountains, beds of flowering shrubs, thick walls of box and fern, secluded bowers, and grottos buried in the dense shade of over-arching trees. There are still examples of the Italian garden to A Gossip on Gardens. be found up and down England. But in Charles II.s time, this style, in its turn, was put out of fashion by the French, a style which may be tersely described as the Italian reduced to a system of mathematical precision. Everything was confined to rigidly geometrical forms squares, straight lines, rhomboids, parallelograms everything was measured out with the compass, and docked into uniformity with the shears. The gardens of Ver- sailles still give some idea of the stiff ugliness which was the product of this style. But the Dutch, with characteristic ingenuity, contrived to graft an even more hideous style on the outlines of the Italian. Nature was more sternly suppressed than ever. The rectangle was the Dutch beau ideal of shape, and the line of beauty was of rigid straight- ness. Fish-ponds took the place of fountains, and canals of terraces; the yew-trees were cut into the shapes of peacocks or monkeys, the box-trees into the figures of men or elephants. Of course, when William of Orange came over, the Dutch fashion rose into the ascendant, and English gardens were laid out in strict imitation of the angular regularity of the flower-beds of Haarlem and the Hague. Traces of the Dutch style may still be seen at Hampton Court; and Sir William Tem- ple has, in his Essay on Gardening, left us a minute and vivid picture of a model garden of this type, that of the Countess of Bedford at Moor Park, which he said was the perfectest figure of a garden, and the sweetest place he had ever seen at home or abroad. Thus, on the originally magnificent Italian style had been grafted the severe formality of the French, and the grotesque meanness of the Dutch. Artificiality had now been carried to its extreme, it could go no further, and then came the inevitable reaction. It would be difficult to assign a pre- cise date to this reaction; but we can trace the first symptoms of it in Addi- sons time. In his essay on the Pleasures of the Imagination, he A Gossip on Gardens. notes how much less entertaining to the fancy, and how much less charming to the eye, are the neatness and elegance of English gardens than the artificial rudeness of the Italians with their mixture of.garden and forest. And in a subsequent letter to The Spectator, he describes a homely, old-fashioned English garden of the style which pre- vailed before foreign tastes had become acclimatized here. A garden, he tells us, altogether after the Pindaric manner, and run into the beautiful wildness of nature, without affecting the nicer elegance of art. It was, however, about the middle of the last century that this reaction in favor of nature reached its climax. But the Nature whom it then became fashionable to worship was a mere ideal goddess, evolved out of the emotional sentimentality of certain poets and philosophers. The first rule of the new school was in everything to go exactly contrary to their predecessors. Elab- orate design had been the great object and main feature of the French and Dutch styles; elaborate absence of design was, therefore, adopted as the first principle of the new style. The most excruciating minuteness was ob- served in copying the careless profusion and rude grandeur of nature. Poor Sir William Temple was bitterly ridiculed for his panegyric of the model garden of Moor Park. Caractacus Mason in his dreary poem, The English Gar- den, Horace Walpole in his elegant Essay on Gardening, satirized unmer- cifully that faultless specimen of the prosaic Dutch style. Hugh Miller has called William Shen- stone the Prince of landscape-garden- ers. He became more celebrated for his gardening than his poetry, and carried out his whims and taste in gardening at the Leasowes, near Hales- owen, Worcestershire. There was a mania for the picturesque, and Sir {Jvedale Price and Capability Brown had it all their own way for a time as the inaugurators of landscape-gardening. They prided themselves on being much more natural than Nature herself. There was no landscape, they held, which was not capable of being im- proved under their manipulatior~. A group of trees added here, an elab- orately artificial natural rock there, an accurately constructed ancient ruin in one place, a cunningly devised im- promptu waterfall in another, a vista here, a liowery retreat there there was no end to the improvements effected by the new landscape-garden- ers. They inaugurated an age of shams and surprises, such as Thomas Love Peacock has so happily satirized in Melincourt. A tawdry, paltry, cock- ney imitation of nature became the rage. Horace Walpole made Straw- berry Hill a perfect type of the new style, and he and those like him plumed themselves on their love of nature, while they were really patronizing a grosser and more affected form of artificiality than their predecessors, who were the professed worshippers of art. The new picturesque school made the designiess beauty of nature their model, and as an example of their fidelity to that model, we may take William Kent, the designer of Ken- sington Gardens, who, the more effect- ually to conceal every vestige of a plan, had some deut trees planted so as to give a natural appearance to the whole! This mock-natural system became known as the English style, though it is a moot-point whether it would not be more correct to term it the Chinese style; for the supposition is that the idea was derived from the Celestial Empirethe Kingdom of Flowers, as the Chinese poets call it. The Chinese were believed to have possessed great skill in landscape- gardening from a very early period, though, if we are to judge from the illustrations on the famous willow pattern plates, there is some excuse for doubting the extent of that skill. It i~s true that a very ancient Chinese writer, Lieu-Tscheu, has some ex- tremely sensible remarks on the pleasures of a garden, in the course of which he says: The art of laying out gardens consists, therefore, in con- 57 The Complete Letter Writer. triving cheerfulness of prospect, luxu- riance of growth, shade, retirement and repose, so that the rural aspect may produce an illusion. . . . Symmetry is wearisome, and a garden, where every- thing betrays constraint and art, be- comes tedious and distasteful. But it was the letter rather than the spirit of Lieu-Tscheus advice that his country- men followed when they elected to patronize the natural and the pic- turesque, and they soon reached a stage of cockneyfied imitation of nature which Horace Walpole himself could not have surpassed. In 1843, the Royal Horticultural Society sent out the eminent Scottish botanist, Robert Fortune, to visit these famous gardens of Chinathe land to which we owe the peony, the chrysan- themum, the azalea, and the camellia. He was enchanted by the magnificent azalea-clad mountains of Che-Kiang, one blaze of gorgeous bloom from foot to summit, but he saw little of the renowned landscape-gardens, though enough to show him that much that was fashionable in English gardening was merely a relapse into Chinese barbar- ism. Indeed, as a matter of fact, the hideous system of bedding out, which has in recent years been so popular in thts country, is simply a plagiarism from the Chinese. Those detestable cockney riband gardens, with their bands of red, yellow, and bluea blaze of gorgeous but incongruous and inhar- monious colorare a slavish imitation of Chinese tastethe taste to which we owe such artistic masterpieces as the willow pattern and the illuminated tea-chest! The truth is, that we are letting the scientific gardener tyrannize over us now as previous generations allowed in turn the picturesque, the mock- natural, and the pseudo-artistic gardeners to tyrannize over them. The costly exotics of the hothouse, which take prizes and bring kudos, are too often cultivated at the expense of the good old homely, hardy, British flowers, which in beauty and perfume yield to none. We are not unmindful of Cow- pers catholic sentiment: Who loves a garden loves a greenhouse too. But we would have the greenhouse play a much more subordinate part than it does. The glory of a garden is not, to our thinking, in its glass-houses but in its outdoor bedsin its smooth- shaven lawns, and trim terraces, and shady paths, bordered with sweet- smelling flowers, not striped with scent- less gaudsin the refreshing fragrance and color with which it gratifies the senses both of sight and smell. In fine, to come back to the point with which we started, if a garden is to fulfil its true purpose it should be not a show- place but a pleasaunce. From Good Words. THE COMPLETE LETTER WRITER. BY 5HEII~A E. BRAINE. It is. the fashion to observe in a tone of gentle regret that letter-writing is one of the lost arts. In a measure this is true. This is an age of hurry, con- sequently we scribble; a letter is no longer a grave undertaking, but the affair of half an hour at the most. (Extra allowance for lovers!) The path of the modern scribe is made very smooth for him; everything he needs is close to his hand, and a stationer lives round the corner. Not that it occurs to him to be grateful for his mercies, to be thankful for ready- made ink, for the pen that comes as a boon and a blessing to men, for envelopes that stick with a lick, for the handy pillar-box, the punctual postman, and all the other items connected with modern correspondence. Nay, verily, being a child of the century, he takes these things as a matter of course, and grumbles freely if his mail, as the Americans have It, be five minutes behind time. To arrive at a fitting sense of his own manifold advantages, our scribe should be his own great-grandfather, or a more distant ancestor even. Glancing through a pile of ancient copybooks and letter-writers, one dimly realizes what N~e Complete Letter Writer. an awful thing it used to be to compose and put upon paper a thoroughly cor- rect epistle. It was not an affair to be lightly taken in hand any more than matrimony. No, not even if one had learned penmanship from the immortal Cocker himself, in his house in Pauls Churchyard, betwixt the Signes of the Sugar-Loaf and the Naked Boy and Shears.~~ Cockers fame rests on his arithmetic, now obsolete; but the worthy man, be- sides being a ready reckoner, was also a mighty penman. Doubtless, many a seventeenth century youth toiled along with inky fingers under his direction. Hearken to what the master says to him: Let not your breast lie on the desk you write on, nor your nose on the paper, but sit in as majestical a posture as you can; with practice you may do brave things. Treatises on caligraphy by professors of the art began to multiply from the rei,,n of Elizabeth downwards. These in~,enious penmen were extremely jealous of each others performances, and sometimes challenged each other to single combat with the pen. Fre- quently in their publications did they drop into verse. Here is a poetic recipe for ink, given by John de Beau Chesne, in 1602: To make common ink of wine take a quart, Two ounces of gumme let that be a part, Five ounces of gals, of copres take three. Long standing doth make it better to be. If wine ye do want, rain water is best, And then as much stuffe as above at the least. If inke be too thicke, put vinegar in, For water doth make the color more dimme. Richard Gethringe dedicated his copy- book, Calligraphotechnia, to no less a person than Sir Francis Bacon, while Peter Bales presented Queen Elizabeth with a microscopic manuscript set in a gold ring, which is said to have highly delighted the maiden monarch. Within the compass of a silver penny this ingenious Peter had contrived to write the Lords Prayer, Creed, Ten Com- mandments, a prayer to God, a prayer for the queen, his posy, name, the day of the month, and the year. Another writing master, John Mat- lock, mentions five best hands in use for a man, and one, only one for a woman. Alas for the equality of the sexes! It is comforting to remember that before Master Matlocks time, there lived in the reign of James I. a lady, Esther Inglis by name, who was t marvellous pen-woman. Many of the volumes written and ornamented by this dame of the piume votante are still extant. To be a successful practitioner in the art of writing was only half the battle, and well did the compilers of Com- plete, Polite, and Accomplishd letter-writers know this. It was no easy matter to pile up a noble structure of complimentary phrases and fine moral sentiments, such as the spirit of the age demanded; to begin with elegance and end with dignity. News was a minor detail. Indeed, the introduction of chirpy, chatty bits, such as that Timothys Dorcas was down with the ague, or that a pig was killed last Tuesday, would have destroyed the harmony of the whole composition. You could never fit them in properly, if you followed the lines laid down by your stately Letter- writer. One of the earliest of these Guides, dated 1615, was styled A President for young Pen-men. It was advertised as full of variety, delight, and pleasure. The former quality it undoubtedly possessed, as will be seen from the following headings. There is A letter from a friend to a fantastical, con- ceited madcap; A byting letter to a clamorous gentlewoman, with a byting answer to the same, which must have relieved the feelings of the writer. Also a Melancholy, discon- tentive letter upon the frowne of a kinsman, and, as a variation, A kind of quarrelsome letter, upon a frowne of a friend. A letter to an unkle to borrow a horse, strikes one as being of more practical value than all the rest put 59 60 together, and infinitely to be preferred as a model, to the epistle of Miss Molly Smith to her cousin, giving her an account of a very remarkable instance of envy, in one of her acquaint- ance, who lived in the City of York. How a distracted scribe was to get help or comfort from Miss Molly Smith is more than we are prepared to say. Some of the shorter Models must have been of great assistance to people desirous to do the correct thing. For instance, if you were a single lady with a carriage and you thought you might as well take another single ladypoor thing for a drive. Accordingly you wrote: Miss Willis sends her compli- ments to Miss Byron, and desires to know how she does; and if well enough to see company and it will be agreeable, will wait on her this afternoon in the coach, and give her an airing for an hour before tea. Reply. Miss Byron, without a com- pliment, is very agreeably obliged to Miss Willis, whom she would be ex- tremely glad to see, and accepts her kind salutary offer of an airing in the coacb, at the time proposed. Then, what a vision of old world gaiety does the following note conjure up! Mr. Lamberts compliments wait on Miss Norris, to beg the very great favor of being her partner to-morrow evening at the Assembly. Her Partner! She was to have only one, and dance with him the whole night! How improper this sounds to nineteenth-century ears. The answer to this polite invitation was brief and to the point. Miss Norriss compliments to Mr. Lambert, and she is engaged. After the Assembly, it was evidently the duty and privilege of a polite swain to call and inquire after his partners health. If prevented, his Letter writer was all ready with the proper form of excuse. Mr. Bedford, after the honor of dancing last night with Miss Hammond, is concerned that he is prevented waiting on her this morning by a sudden call to town; begs his com- pliments may be acceptable, hopes this message will find her in perfect health and that she took no cold. The Complete Letter Writer. This epistle is interesting as showing the fact that even as early as the eigh- teenth century urgent business took gentlemen to town at unexpected moments. A queer little book, entitled The Ladies Help to Spelling, 1722, was written by a Scotch dominic. The in- formation is put in the form of a dia- logue between a young lady and her schoolmaster. Miss begins with the announcement that she reads like a parrot, for that her education was too like that bestowed upon most of her sex, viz., sewing, dancing, musick and paistry. After a lesson upon orthog- raphy, the schoolmaster discourses con- cerning what he is pleased to call missive letters, and gives some suit- able beginnings and endings. Hav- ing the opportunity of this bearer, 1 cannot but tell you that your friendship is so necessary to me that all my creature comforts would be tasteless without it, and therefore, etc., etc. A different style altogether: If you think me not worth your while to answer, please send back my own letter, and let us shut up corre- spondence, etc. This was before the days of envelopes, and the dominie would have all letters folded in the easiest way possible, with no odd, foolish fashions, for such maggots are very troublesome. The letter writer did not leave lovers out in the cold; and some of its effusious in this line are extremely funny. Some- times there would be a series of epistles showing how a courtship might, could, would, or should be con- ducted by a genteel couple. There would be: A gentleman to a lady, professing an aversion to the tedious formality in courtship. Next would come: The ladys an- swer, encouraging a further declara- tion. Then, the gentlemans reply, more openly declaring his passion,~ and the ladys answer to his reply, putting the matter on a sudden issue,~ i.e., referring him to her solicitor. This concluded the matter as far as the letter writer was concerned; but it would give a sad extasie for the Londons Great Landowners. absence of a mistress, or a letter of kindnesse from a gentleman to his love beyond seas, or a lady, by way of an extreme defiance to a late servant, all, no doubt, valuable under certain cir- cumstances. That those circumstances were un- likely to happen more than once in a lifetime, if at all, was naturally not the fault of the author of these remarkable epistles. One feels that a person with a turn for moralizing must have thoroughly enjoyed compiling a letterwriter. Even the dear little boys and girls at school were expected to write in a high-falutin style to their honored parents. Are you resolved, asks a model mother, to embark in the fashionable follies of the gay and unthinking world ? My dear Madam, replies the daughter from her boarding-school, I love religion, I love virtue, and I hope no consideration will ever lead me from those duties in which alone I expect future happiness. Let us put them back on their dusty top shelf, queer little ancient volumes, for their day is over. They belong to a vanished past; to an age of powder and patches, laced coats and clouded canes; when people were more ceremonious, butwe will at least hope itless truly polite than they are now. From Chambers Journal. LONDONS GREAT LANDOWNERS. Little could the owners of the rural manors which encircled the London of media~val times have foreseen the almost fabulous value which would one day attach to their lands. The vast increase in the numbers of those who are drawn, whether by business or pleasure, to the capital of the empire, has caused every available spot in close proximity to town to be covered with houses, whereby an artificial value has been given to land the agricultural worth of which is little more than a quarter of a million. To-day, through pressure of population, it is said to be worth three hundred millions, without the buildings upon it. The oldest land- owners in Middlesex are the Russells, and it may be convenient to begin with them in giving some account of Lon- dons greater landlords. At the disso- lution of the religious houses, the garden of the Abbey at Westminster, and the lands belonging to it, was granted by Edward VI. to his uncle the Duke of Somerset, and, upon his attainder, came back to the crown. Then in May, 1552, we find a patent granted to John, Earl of Bedford, of the convent garden lying in the parish of St. Martins-in-the-Fields, with seven acres, called Long Acre, of the yearly value of six pounds six shillings and eightpence. The right to the market which had come to be held here, was granted by Charles II. to William, Earl of Bedford, by letters-patent in 1671. At the present day the gross revenue derived from it is said to be somewhat over twenty-five thousand pounds a year, a considerable portion of which sum is laid out in market expenses. Besides Covent Garden, the Russell family possesses considerable property in the districts of Bloomsbury and St. Giles. At one time this estate belonged to the Earls of Southamptonthe manor of St. Giles having been sold for six hundred pounds to the trustees of Henry, Earl of Southampton, in the reign of James I. This, together with the manor of Blemund, formerly be- longing to a Leper Hospital, descended to the fourth Earl of Southampton, at whose death in 1668 it became the property of his daughter and co-heiress, Lady Rachel Wriothesley, who by her marriage with the celebrated William Lord Russell, brought this estate of about two hundred and forty-five acres into the Bedford family. The old manor-house of the Blemunds stood on the site of the present Bedford Place. Another large property in this neighbor- hood, owned by Lord Northampton, is situated in the parishes of St. James, Clerkenwell, and St. Mary, Islington, much of it consisting of very poor 61 62 houses in a working-class district. Canonbury Manor came into the Comp- ton family by the marriage of the heiress of Sir John Spencer, a citizen of London, who died in 1609, with Wil- liam Lord Compton. The owner of the most fashionable district of London is the Duke of Westminster. This extensive property at the West End was acquired by the marriage in 1676 of Sir Thomas Grosvenor with Miss Mary Davies, the only child of Alexander Davies of Ebury Manorwhich, roughly speak- ing, is represented by the Grosvenor estate of to-day. The boundary of the estate, which is situated in the parishes of St. George, Hanover Square, and St. John, Westminster, begins at the Marble Arch on the south side of Ox- ford Street, runs down the centre of Oxford Street, almost to South Molton Street, and passing down Davies Street, takes in a small portion of Berkeley Square (with Thomass Hotel), and in- cluding both sides of Mount Street, runs up the middle of Park Lane to the Marble Arch again. The Beigravia part of the estate begins at St. Georges Hospital, runs down the centre of Grosvenor Place to the Buckingham Palace Road, and passes down the western side of Vauxhall Bridge Road almost in a straight line to the river Thames, thence running along the river bank eastward as far as the Grosvenor Canal. The property does not comprise Sloane Square, Cadogan Place, or Lowndes Square, but includes all Beigrave Square and Wilton Cres- cent, the boundary running up again almost to the Knightsbridge Road. The Milibank estate near the Houses of Parliament also belongs to the Grosvenor family. The collection or pictures now at Grosvenor House began to be formed here at Peterborough House, which was pulled down in 1809, to make way for Milibank Prison, now demolished in its turn. Many of the leases on the Grosvenor part of the estate have recently fallen in, and a great deal of rebuilding has taken place, the aspect of this neighborhood being completely changed. Probably no other London estate has been so much improved of recent years. Grosvenor Gardens were rebuilt when the erection of the Grosvenor Hotel and the Victoria Railway Station necessitated broad approaches and handsome houses in this vicinity. Later on, Hereford Gardens, half of Grosvenor Place, part of Gros- venor Crescent, and so forth, have been rebuilt, as well as nearly the whole Oxford Street frontage of the estate. The names of the streets and squares in both districts are connected in some way with the history of the family. Thus Eccieston, Chester, and Beigrave Squares are named after different por- tions of their Chester estates. Davies Street recalls the heiress of Ebury Manor, which in its turn gives its name to a street in Beigravia. The Dorset- shire mansion of a dowager-duchess gives us Motcombe Street, while Halkin Street is named after a property in Flintshire. The value of the Grosvenor portion of the estate must have recently been greatly augmented by the falling in of so many leases, and by the erection of better built and more spacious residences in Mount Street, Duke Street, Aldford Street, and so on. An estate adjoining the Beigravia part of the Duke of Westminsters property belongs to Earl Cadogan, and has recently been much developed. The fine red brick houses in Hans Place. Cadogan Square, Pont Street, Lower Sloane Street, and so forth, have at- tracted many of the rich and fashion- able to this district; and an old inhabitant would hardly recognize the semi-rural aspect of Chelsea under its. changed conditions. This estate, which bids fair to rival that of the Duke of Westminster in value and importance, was brought into the family by the marriage of General Cadogan, a cele- brated officer of Horse Guards in the wars of Marlborough, with the daugh- ter and heiress of Sir Hans Sloane, wh4~ had acquired the manor of Chelsea in 1712 from the family of Cheyne. More details are available as to Lord Portmans London estate, which con- sists of about two hundred and sixty acres. The estate commences at the Londons Great Landowners. Londons Great Landowners. junction of Richmond Street and the Edgeware Road, and includes Montagu and Manchester Squares, Great Cum- berland Place, Baker Street, part of Marylebone Road, and other well- known localities, as well as the poor neighborhood of Lisson Grove. It is let, generally speaking, upon ninety- nine years building leases, dating from the years 1816 to 1822. In the year 1512, the lord prior of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem at Clerkenwell granted a lease for fifty years to John and Johan Blennerhasset of a farm exactly conterminous with the present Portman property. In 1532 Chief- justice Portman bought the reversion of their house from the executors of the Blennerhassets, the land being subse- quently acquired in fee-simple in the reign of Mary. The Seymour family at one time possessed the property on the termination of the male line of the Portmans. Eventually, however, it reverted to William Berkeley, whose mother had been a niece of the last Portman. These changes give us a clue to the names of various streets in the locality, such as Seymour Street, Berkeley Street, and Portman Square. Bryanston Square recalls the name of a village near Blandford in Dorsetshire, as Orchard Street does that of Orchard Portman in Somersetshire. The two Quebec Streets furnish us with the approximate date of their building, that is to say, during the war in Canada in the middle of the last century. Much of the estate is occupied by the shops of West-End tradesmen, and various improvements have been carried out, though not to so large an extent as on other large London estates. Leases are generally renewed for a period of twenty-five years. A large contiguous estate belongs to the Portland family. To trace the manner in which it descendeitl to its present owners, we must go back a couple of hundred years to the time when John Holles, Duke of Newcastle, purchased the lands of Tyburn or Marylebone for the sum of seventeen thousand five hundred pounds. The Park at Marylebone, known to-day as the Regents Park, was specially re- served to the crown. The daughter of this nobleman, the Lady Henrietta Cavendish Holles, married to Robert Harley, afterwards Earl of Oxford, inherited the lands of Tyburn in 1711. Her only daughter Margaret married William Bentinck, second Duke of Port- land, thus bringing the estate into that family. At the present time its north- ern boundary takes in a large portion of the Marylebone Road, including Madame Tussauds, where the last part of the property is situated. The boundary then runs down the eastern side of Marylebone Lane as far as Oxford Street. That street, between Wells Street and Marylebone Lane, forms its southern boundary. The lower part of Portland Place and the upper part of Regent Street belong to the crown. The Portland Marylebone estate does not belong to the present duke, but to the daughters of the fourth duke. The history of the devolution of the estate upon its present owners ex- plains the origin of most of the street names in the locality. Thus we have Portland Place, Holles Street, Harley Street, and Oxford Streetthe last named in honor of the accession of Robert Harley to that title. The wife of John Holles, Duke of Newcastle, was an heiress of the Cavendishes of Wel- beck, which explains the names of another street and square. The Har- leys were originally of Wigmore Castle, which name survives in a principal street in this neighborhood. Another portion of the Portland estates em- braces nearly all Portland Town, that is, the district bounded on the south by Regents Park, from Primrose Hill to St. Johns Wood Chapel, embracing Avenue Road. One other family in the central dis- trict of London may be mentioned as owners of an estate bordering on the Euston Road and recording their name in Fitzroy Square. The manor of Tottenhall or Tottenham was held on lease in the reign of Charles II., by Isabella, Countess of Arlington, who married the Duke of Grafton, son of Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland. 63 Londons Great Landowners. Later on, one of the Fitzroys was created Earl of Southampton, and acquired this manor in fee-simple. The eldest son of the Duke of Grafton, the Earl of Euston, has his name recorded in Euston Road and Euston Square, though the Southampton branch of the Fitzroy family are the present owners of the estate. A small but important estate in the Strand, including Norfolk Street, Surrey Street, Howard Street, and other thoroughfares between the Stand and the Embankment, belongs to the Duke of Norfolk. The Howard family is one of the oldest landowners in Middlesex, being preceded by the Russells and Cecils only. The value of this estate since the formation of the Thames Embankment must have been greatly increased. The site adjoining the Outer Templethe former residence of the Earl of Essexwas occupied by the Bishops of Bath, whose rights were usurped by that Seymour who was brother to the Protector Somerset At his death, Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, bought it for forty-one pounds six shillings and eightpence, and in 1579 it devolved upon the Howard family. The Savoy estate belongs to her Majesty, having been settled with otherproperty of the Duchy of Lancaster on the sovereign for the time being by the son of John of Gaunt, the first Duke of Lancaster. Cecil Street, Salisbury Street, and neighboring property still belong to Lord Salisbury. A few words in conclusion as to tne large landowners in outlying districts of London, such as Lord Amherst. The Tyssens were formerly merchants in Holland, who settled at Hackney near London in the reign of James II., and purchased the manor in the year 1600. The property passed in the latter part of the last century by marriage to the Amhursts of Rochester, and subse- quently to the Kentish family of Daniel, who thereupon assumed the surname and arms of Tyssen. The additional name of Amhurst was then taken. The present head of the Tyssen Amhurst family was recently created a peer under the style of Baron Amherst of Hackney. De-Beauvoir Town to the north of Hoxton is part of this estate, and records the marriage of a certain Francis Tyssen of Shacklewell to a daughter of Richard de Beauvoir of Guernsey. Another landowner, pos- sessing states in Bermondsey, South- wark, Camberwell, and Newington, has been recently ennobled as Lord Llangat- took, better known as Mr. Rolls of th~ Hendr~. The Rolls property includes the thoroughfare (recently celebrated in noble verse!) known as the Old Kent Road. The property of the Pratt family is situated in the St. Pancras district. Charles Pratt, Earl Camden, became possessed of the estate which now is called Camden Town by his marriage with the daughter of Nicholas Jeifreys about the middle of the last century. St. Pancras seems to have been one of the many prebendal manors around London, and was held by a Canon of St. Pauls. A separate manor appears to have passed into the hands of the Cantlo or Cantilupe family, and under its present corrupted name of Kentish Town is practically owned by the Pratts, though it is said to be subject to a nominal rent to the prebendary. Another hamlet of St. Pancras, known as Somers Town, is named after the family of its present proprietor, Earl Somers. It will be seen that the corporation of the City of London, the Livery Com- panies, and the Ecclesiastical Commis- sioners have been omitted from the foregoing account of Londons great landowners. Lightning and Trees.Investigations made by Dr. Carl MUller, and reported in Himmel und Erde, show that light- ning prefers to strike certain kinds of trees. Under the direction of the Lippe- Detmold Department of Forestry, statis- tics were gathered showing that in eleven years lightning struck fifty-six oaks, three or four pines, twenty firs, but not a single beech tree, although seven-tenths of the trees were beech. It would seem, then, that one is safer in a storm under a beech tree than under any other kind. 64

LITTELLS LIVING AGE. Sixth Series, Volume XI. I No. 2714.July 11, 1896. From Beginning, Vol. CCX. CONTENTS. THE POETRY OF THE DE VERES, THE ROMANCE OF A STALL,. THE ASSASSINATION OF NASIRUD-DIN SHAH. By Edward G. Browne, LETTERS ON TURKEY. By G. Max Miii- ler, ARTHUR YOUNG. By Leslie Stephen, AN EVENING IN BOHEMIA. By Henriette Corkran, HENRY. By Elsa DEsterre-Keeling, BIRDS AT THE AMSTERDAM Zoo, Quarterly Review, Macmillans Magazine, New Review, Longmans Magazine, National Review, Temple Bar, Gentlemans Magazine, Spectator, POETRY. A KENTISH SCENE IN MEMORIAMHEINRICH PREISIN- GER 66 66 IN A DEVONSHIRE LANE, AS I TROTTED ALONG, PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL & CO., BOSTON. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. For SIX DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for -warded for a year, free of postGge. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, it possible. H Tleither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be mad. payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single copies of the LIVING AGE. 15 cents. I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. 67 85 93 99 105 119 124 126 66 A Kentish Scene, etc. A KENTISH SCENE. Just where the London road dips down To rise once more through Harbiedown, Where, underneath the woods of Blean, The sheltered hops grow dark and green, Where Chaucer, with his pilgrim crew Riding, immortal portraits drew (For here in Canterbury way Our host began to ape and play), Where many a knight, returning home From wars in France or prayers at Rome, With a light heart and easy vein, Breathing the keen, pure air again, Saw the bright land with doubled zest, And thought, Old Englands aye the best, Here Hopebourne lies, and, to my mind, A prettier scene you will not find. To north and east the curving hill Keeps off rude winds that blow too chill; The garden slopes to the winter suns; Below, the Neilbourne brooklet runs; Beyond it lies our valleys bound, The cheerful rise of hop-clad ground, And in the distance high plough lands, Where seaward the chalk ridge expands, Orchards, a windmill, fields of wheat Make the old Kentish scene complete. Spectator. B. H. H. IN MEMORIAMHEINRICH PItEISINGEB. The blue waves dance in southern glee, The purple mountains clasp the strand; Shines all around, on shore and sea, The splendor of the sunny land. They gambol, these gay southern waves; With them my heart would fain be gay: But, ah! I see a field of graves Beside a northern city grey. For there he sleeps, the friend I knew, The tender heart, the gracious mind: A soul more generous, just, and true I have not found, I shall not find. Oh, true and tried, be sound thy sleep And sweet! Perchance thy lot is best: Yet I in thought must stand and weep Beside the mansion of thy rest. C. E. T. Mataga. Academy. In a Devonshire lane, as I trotted along T other day, much in want of a subject for song, Thinks I to myself, I have hit on a strain, Sure marriage is just like a Devonshire lane. In the first place, tis long, and when once you are in it, It holds you as fast as a cage does a linnet; For howeer rough and dirty the road may be found, Drive forward you must, there is no turn- ing round. But though tis so long, it is not very wide, For two are the most that together may ride; And een then tis a chance but they get in a pother, And jostle and cross, and run foul of each other. Oft Poverty greets them with mendicant looks, And Care pushes by them, oerladen with crooks; And Strifes grazing wheels try between them to pass, And Stubbornness blocks up the way on her ass. Then the banks are so high, to the left hand and right, That they shut out the beauties around them from sight; And hence youll allow tis an inference plain, That marriage is just like a Devonshire lane. But thinks I, too, these banks, within which we are pent With bud, blossom, and berry, are richly besprent; And the conjugal fence, which forbids us to roam, Looks lovely, when deckd with the com- forts of home. In the rocks gloomy crevice the bright holly grows, The ivy waves fresh oer the withering rose; And the evergreen love of a virtuous wife, Soothes the roughness of carecheers the winter of life. Then long be the journey, and narrow the way, Ill rejoice that Ive seldom a turnpike to pay; And whateer others say, be the last to complain, Though marriage be just like a Devon- shire lane. REV. JOHN MAXtEIOTT. 66 The Poetry of the de Veres. 67 From The Quarterly Review, disappoints and wearies, save in the THE POETRY OF THE DE VERES.1 way of parody or comedy, when there The Wordsworthian tradition has is nothing intense or emphatic to ex- fared ill in poetry since 1850. That press; when an attempt is made to tradition lays emphasis upon the atti- transmute the trite, the fanciful, or the tude and habit of mind involved in commonplace, to disguise them in the poetic composition, and thus upon its robes of sovereign thoughtthe truly substance; to language, however skil- intense and emphatic by tricking fully handled it denies any sufficient them out in metrical dress. If it were virtue to elevate or of itself make poetic possible to constitute a Supreme Court the ordinary material of thought. With of Appeal in matters poetic before Wordsworth it was the impassioned which aspirants for the poets bays and truthful view of things that was were by law compelled to appear, such essential; when that was lacking, the a court might fairly demand in the first accomplishment of verse was a instance from each candidate some trivial copy-book matter. Poetry for work in prose, not as an exercise in him was the breath and finer spirit of language, but as a witness to intellec- knowledge, the impassioned expression tual or imaginative power, as witness that was on the face of science, and to a way of regarding things, to mental against all theories of poetic diction, methods at once rational and sugges- against any effort to construct poetry tive, to types of thought or feeling for out of words in the absence of the the perfect representation of which inspiring idea he had set his face from verse was the natural and proper the first. The root-conception in the medium. Did such a court exist, we Wordsworthian, as in the classical should be spared the frequent necessity theory of poetry, is that the employ- of the judgment best delivered in ment of rhythm, and more especially Heines words, Das hattest du Alles of the complex rhythms of lyric verse, sehr gut in guter Prosa sagen k~nnen. presupposes some depth of meaning, But the decrees of such a court would some intensity of emotion which prose condemn a vast number of our poets to at its best can but imperfectly and the exile of perpetual silence. inadequately render. It is certain that Wordsworth denied then that poetry verse attracts because verse is an can boast any celestial ichor that dis- intense and emphatic form of expres- tinguish her vital juices from those of sion. It is equally certain that verse prose. But in the superlative loll- 1 ~ Julian the Apostate and The Duke of pops of his early verse Tennyson once Mercia. By the late Sir Aubrey de Vere. Lon- more asserted the inexhaustible charm don, 1858. of cunning modulation and verbal 2. Mary Tudor. An Historical Drama. In Two melody, even when but slightly in- Parts. New Edition. By the late Sir Aubrey de formed by any real force of thought or Vere. London, 84. feellng. The course of the later stream 3. Sonnets. By Sir Aubrey de Vere, Bart. A of poetry has flowed in other channels New Edition. London, 1875. 4. The Poetical Works of Aubrey de Vere. than those in which Wordsworth Three Vols. London, 1892. would have had it run. The sover 5. Legends of the Saxon Saints. By Aubrey eignty of the spirit is no longer recog- de Vere. London, 1893. nized, and, with exceptions few and 6. Medlieval Records and Sonnets. By Aubrey honorable, the poets have sworn alle- de Vere. London, 1893. 7. Legends and Records of the Church and the giance to Our Lady of Music. The Empire. By Aubrey de Vere. London, 1887. poetry approximating to music, expres 8. The Legends of St. Patrick. By Aubrey de sive of half-articulate emotion not yet Vere, LL.D. London, 1892. definitely yoked with or transmuted 9. May Carols; or, Ancilla Domini. By Au- into mental images,this poetry, de- brey de Vere. London, 1881. 10. Odes and Epodes of Horace. Translated by pendent for such value as it may Sir Stephen de Vere, with Preface and Notes. possess upon its expression rather than London, 1893. upon its spirit, is the characteristic 68 poetry of the latter half of the present century. In Mr. Swinburne, its leader, and the popular choir, the view of things taken by the poet, his philosophy, his imaginative grasp and interpreta- tion of life count for little. In their place delicate turns of phrase are zealously sought out, the dainty effects of collocated vowels, the ripple of alliteration, the aromas and the colors that fascinate the sense. We are presented by the poets of to-day with phials full of odors, and he is the best ~poet whose distillations catch the breath and sting the nerves with the most pungent perfumes. Yet, however far we are tempted to wander from it, the severe magnificence of pure as distinct from decorative art never fails to recall us, and we know that to it the final success indisputably belongs. Read but diligently enough in Mr. Swinburnes many volumes, and after a time the charm begins to fail, it ceases to have its early effects; we are taking in nothing, we are simply marking time musically. In the verse of the majority of our poets it is the same., Nothing is to be found there 1hat is not very pleas- ing, but in the end we are not pleased. The hungry sheep look up and are not fed. There is nothing to hold or to keep, and we recognize that beyond the mark- ing of time musically we have been unemployed. A critic who abides by the Wordsworthian tradition essays to distinguish between poets by the inter- nal differences in their work due to divergent mental methods and sym- pathies, by the intellectual and emotional framework upon which the artist builds. Such a critic seeks for the soul of the work, which is the foun- tain of its power; his endeavor must be to find the individual character, the man in the poem. lie will recognize a poem as Shelleys or as Byrons by the unmistakable internal evidences of its anthorship, by the spirit that is abroad in it. In the poetry of our own time what guidance from internal evidence is possible? The critic will trace a recent poem to its source by an investi- gation of the vocabulary, the structure of the rhythm, and it may be by echoes of the poetry other than his own read by the author. They are past as a slumber that passes, As the dew of a dawn of old time; More swift than the shadows on glasses, More fleet than a wave or a rhyme. We know this style; not by its heart of thought, but by its parti-colored raiment. The voice is the. voice of Mr. Swinburne, but the commonplace is the commonplace of the general choir. Now we maintain that in the case of the Di majores the commonplace is their own commonplace, it is part of the general stock that they have appropri- ated and assimilated; the spirit that is abroad in them shines throughout their speech. These thoughts may startle well, but not astound The virtuous mind, that ever walks at- tended By a strong siding champion, Con- science. The voice is undoubtedly the voice of Milton; but though no very great thing in itself, it expresses Miltons habitual way of thought. Six feet in earth my Emma lay, And yet I loved her more, For so it seemd, than till that day I eer had loved before. The voice of Wordsworth not at hiS best, but Wordsworths intellectual method is displayed here. The great mass of modern poetry offers on the contrary nothing to give the clue to any unique individual pattern of mind possessed by the poet. It confines itself to saying nothing in particular with delicate perfection, in an exquisite key of words. The office of the modern poet seems to be that of carpet-minstrelsy the heroic lyre is tuneless now, the manly voice is seldom heard. An enduring truth, a true instinct lies at the root of Wordsworths theory that greatness in art is greatness in conception, that fundamental brain- work is the secret of its power. The Poetry of the de Veres. The Poetry of the de Veres. Speaking of Tennyson, Wordsworth struck upon the weakness which the splendor of his robe of language not infrequently concealed: He is not much in sympathy with what I should myself most value in my attempts, viz., the spirituality with which I have endeavored to view the material uni- verse, and the moral relations under which I have wished to exhibit its most ordinary appearances. Its most ordi- nary appearances are for the great poets pregnant with meaning; their sulijects lie ready to hand. Languagc is the medium in which they work, but the substance is more than the medium. And the subjects of modern poetry, its criticism of life? How needful after it all, as Sainte-Beuve would say, to take up some wise book, where common sense holds the field, and where the simple and sound language is the reflection of a delicate and manly soul! We exclaim, Oh for the style of manly men, of men who have revered the things worthy of reverence, whose feelings have been governed by the principles of good taste! Oh for the polished, pure, and moderate writers! A little of the bracing air of the dawn of the century after this enervating breathless time of its decline, an hour or two with plain good sense and simple diction and human beings that belong to the real world! Than such exclusive devotion to form as is conspicuous in the Victorian era there is no surer sign of the absence of inspiring motive and imaginative wealth. No large canvas is attempted even by the successful artists. We have often lamented, for example, that the great series of En- glish historical portraits begun but left unfinished by Shakespeare have not attracted the poets who followed him. Tennyson, it is said, was of opinionan opinion apparently abandoned later- that the great subjects had all been treated and were exhausted, and chose for himself the artistic embellishment of slighter themes. But the confession, though a proof of individual weakness, afterwards confirmed, has no warrant in reality. It was not prompted by a judgment of insight. In Brownings 69 Ring and the Book, Sir Aubrey de Veres Mary Tudor, and Mr. Aubrey de Veres Alexander the Great, we have abundant confirmation of the opposite view, which finds in the great artist sufficient cause for the great work. When lesser men complain of the cramping influences of the age, of the blighting conditions, the unpro- pitious environment, the great work is unexpectedly produced, and the appar- ently impossible is achieved. It is of the very nature of genius to achieve the unexpected, the impossiblefor other men. Little encouragement as there is in these days for those Musas severiores qui colunt, yet to read the poetry of our own times is a species of intellectual necessity, and hence perhaps the vein of indignation in certain minds arising out of personal disappointment. Some of us, like Tantalus, sick with hunger and thirst, yet never able to satisfy our appetites, are terribly tried in temper. That poetic representations, estimates, interpretations of the life and thought and movement of the world in which we are active agents as well as spectators, with which we are nat- urally most in sympathy, and of compulsion have exclusively to do, that these are needful for us we feel keenly. In each age too there are revised estimates of the persons, the intellectual, moral, and spiritual ten- dencies, and the actions and move- ments of past ages; and with many of these the poet alone is competent to deal. It is therefore no fictitious de- mand which each succeeding epoch makes for a poet to express its deepest convictions. The great poets doubtless are for all time, but to be without poetical interpreters of insight in the present is a want in the age for which no excellence in the poetry of the past can compensate. Nevertheless, it is a thousand times better to confess our wants than to suffer ourselves to be deluded miserably by the fashionable make-believe criticism, that will per- suade us in terms of impudent assertion that half the respectable verse-writers of the day are great poets. The daily 70 discoveries of great poets by the eminent critics of the literary jour- nals wake the ancestral savage in the blood of sane and honest men. But though the Wordsworthian tradition has fared ill at the hands of the majority, it has been carried on and nobly. In the poetry of the de Veres, father and son, there is, we believe, a richer mine of inspiring thought, a subtler vein of reflection, infinitely wider dramatic range and power, a purer sensibility, and a simpler, more forcible diction than in the work of any living poet. To escape from the region occupied by the poets who are fanciful rather than imaginative, striking rather than truthful, brilliant in restatement of the ordinary poetic sentiment rather than illuminating,to escape the thirst after outrageous stimulation, if we read the poetry of to-day, it must be that of Mr. de Vere. Take almost at random a passage in Alexander the Great to illustrate the spontaneous elastic expression of fine thought, the larger utterance that distinguishes Mr. de Vere from his contemporaries. Craterus describes the character of Alexander: He wills not opposition to his will. Since first he breathed this Asian air of kingship, Divinity of kings hath touchd him much; First in his blood it playd like other lusts; It mounted next to fancys seat, and now His eye usurping purples all his world. Or take the same speakers description of Ptolemy: A speculative man that knows not men, A man whose blood flows sweetly through his veins, Leaving at every point a sleepy pleasure That needs must overflow to all our race In vague complacent kindness. All his thoughts In orbits as of planets curving go, And grasp, like them, blank space. Your minds majestic, Like Ptolemys, are oft but stately triflers. How unlike the twitterings to which we are accustomed! This is a manner distinctive and fine in itself, the instru- ment of a mind at once subtle and com The Poetry of the de Veres. prehensive, at home in the region of human heart and life. Sir Aubrey de Vere, who was a con- temporary of Byron and of Sir Robert Peel at Harrow, was like Words- worth, his friend, cradled into poetry by Nature, amid the same scenes as that poet, beside the peaceful mountain stream that flows from Grasmere and Rydal into Windermerethe Rotha. But human nature claimed him and the historict spectabilis of the drama. Julian the Apostate and The Duke of Mercia were his first considerable compositions; Mary Tudor, by far his greatest work, was not published until after the authors death in 1846, and as a consequence was never revised. Sir Aubrey de Veres life was by no means wholly devoted to poetry. We are told by his son that probably not more than two years of his life, scattered over its various portions, were spent in the composition of his longer works. They must necessarily have occupied his mind for more extended periods of time than is here indicated, but Sir Aubrey de Vere cannot be regarded as in any sense a poet by profession: His reading was discursive, military works interesting him not less than poetry or history. From his boyhood he had approached military subjects with the ardor of a soldier, studying campaigns ancient and modern, with the aid of maps as well as books, a habit to which he probably owed his minute geographical knowledge, and a singular power of realizing, as a tactician might, the relative positions of remote places. By birth an Irishman, Sir Aubrey de Veres sympathies were divided be- tween his native country and England, the home ef his remoter ancestors, sympathies Which found expression in his historical sonnets and in these com- posed upon scenes of natural beauty in Ireland. In the brief memoir written by his son which appears in the volume containing Mary Tudor, there is put 1 Peel on one occasion, to save his friend trouble, wrote a copy of Latin verses so good that the fine Roman hand was well-nigh detected, and the two boys with difficulty escaped punish- ment. The Poetry of the de Veres. on record an estimate of the man by one who bent over him after his death, an estimate which harmonizes well with any that can be passed upon his poetry, In that brow I see three things Imagination, Reverence, and Honor. Among the fragments left behind him, the following now serves as a motto to his work as a poet: An if I be a worm, mine office is Like his which spins a thread that shall attire The noblest of the land; and when his task Is rightly done, sleeps, and puts forth again His powers in wings that waft him like an angel, Onward from flower to flower and up to heaven. It is a somewhat difficult task to criticise Sir Aubrey de Veres early dramas, a task made still more difficult in the case of poems which can hardly be said ever to have had a spell of life in public favor. With many of the qualities that compose greatness and compel admiration, they fail to com- mandas poetry must do or drop into oblivionthe attention, it may be said, in its own despite. The reader cannot fail to acknowledge their power, but he is not taken captive. With Mary Tudor it is quite another matter; no escape is possible there from the poets net; we are enmeshed in its magic toils from first to last. For our part we should be content to rest Sir Aubrey de Veres reputation upon his sonnets, pronounced by Wordsworth amongst the most perfect of our age, or upon that magnificent creation just spoken of, Mary Tudor, which two such dif- ferent minds as those of Mr. Gladstone and the late Cardinal Manning agreed in placing next to Shakespeare. Prob- ably no critical panegyric would induce any but a stray student of poetry in these hurrying days, to read Julian or The Duke of Mercia. Yet, if once read by him, that they would be read a second time is almost certain. But, like Southey, the author seems to have held the unpopular theory that poetry 71 ought to elevate rather than affect; and his early dramas, like Southeys epics, move on a plane above that in which the drama of life proceeds for ordinary human beings. To the few who read Southeys epics these dramas can be confidently recommended as sustaining like them, with apparent ease, the weight of a difficult subject, and rising at times to incontestable displays of passion and of power. The high level sustained in Sir Aubrey de Veres poetry is one of its most striking characteristics. If not inspiring throughoutand what poet is inspiring throughout? he is never paltry, and the verse moves with a conscious unflagging dignity that corre- sponds to the grave and luminous cur- rent of thought beneath. That so fine a subject for historical tragedy as Mary Tudor, treated with such dra- matic and poetic force as Sir Aubrey de Vere possessed, should be compara- tively neglected, suggests several re- flections. It seems clear that the repu- tation of a poet must be built up; Lilat an enduring popular recognition of his genius is impossible unless he have laid a foundation broad enough to permit of appreciation from a circle wider than the circle of culture. For, after all, it is not to the critics nor even to the students that the gods have granted the disposal of fame, but to the people. The man in the street is little of a critic in any eyes other than his own, but upon his knees lie the final dooms of authors. That Sir Aubrey de Vere wrote little poetry which appealed to the general circle of readers militated against his acceptance as a representa- tive poet of his epoch. And indeed he was not its representative. His inter- ests were not sufficiently local and temporary, nor in the fashion of the time. He interpreted few feelings, faiths, or aspirations of his day, and thus missed the path which Tennyson, in whose brain the man of the world was not unrepresented, took,the path that leads direct to fame. Sir Aubrey de Vere chose too for his longer works a poetic form, the dramatic, to which readers had grown unaccustomed, and 72 by whose unfamiliarity they were at the outset discouraged. But whether recognized by the vox populi or not, the delineation of Mary Tudor ranks indisputably as the finest delineation of royal character since Shakespeare. The note of the charac- terization is that it presents a queen who is a woman, a woman who was also a queen; for royal, with all her faults, Mary Tudor was: royalty sat visibly upon the Tudor brow. To re- store womanliness to that queen of England whom history, as it was writ- ten, had presented as an impossible personification of bloodthirstiness, was a dramatic aim, noble in itself, and splendidly successful. The author of Mary Tudor, writes Mr. de Vere, in the fine preface to his fathers play, used to affirm that most of the modern historians had mistaken a part, and that the smaller part, of the sad queens character for the whole of it. Sir Aubrey de Veres conception of Marys character deserves consideration, not only as poetic, but as in reality the most authentic portrait we possess, historically more correct as taking in a larger group of facts, and morally deeper and more convincing as consis- tent with real human nature. We here claim for it the respect due to greater truthfulness and insight, as well as the admiration due to a more powerful artistic presentaflon than can be found in any other, whether painted by histo- rian or rival poet. No criticism of Mary Tudor can avoid comparing it with the Qucen Mary of Tennyson, published twenty- eight years later. While neither of the dramas dealing with Queen Mary can be charged as pieces of special pleading, both attempt a revision of the historic estimate passed in her disfavor by popular English traditions. Were it necessary to sum up in a sentence the relative impressions produced by these companion pictures, it might fairly be said, Mary Tudor is the work of a dramatist and a poet, Queen Mary the work of a poet; the first is dramatic in the fullest sense throughout, the latter poetic throughout, and only in parts dramatic. That Sir Auhrey de Vere had more of a native dramatic instinct than Lord Tennyson cannot be ques- tioned. The grasp of character in his plays is firmer, the action and move- ment more inevitable, more grandly and simply natural. The dramati8 personx move and speak as in the meve- ment and speech of real life. The diahgue is vital, not a conversation issuing from the mouths of puppets; the groups are natural groups, and the action unfolds itself as the necessary outcome of the circumstances and characters involved. Nowhere does Sir Aubrey de Vere fritter away dramatic effects by indulgence in pettinesses, nowhere seek opportunities for poetical descriptions; but, when such arise, the poetry is as pure and sweet as any in Lord Tennysons drama. Take this from the scene on Wanstead Heath, exquisite in itself, and full of pathos from the lips of the loneliest queen that ever sat on throne: Mary. How name you this fair prospect? By Epping Chase. Arun4el. Wanstead Heath, Mary. How blest these breezy downs, With purple heath and golden gorse enamelld; Each bosky bank with dewy windflowers strewn, Each deli with cowslip and rathe violet, And the sun-loving daisy on hill-tops Drinking the light! Ah, happy shepherds life! He this sweet solitude, without con- straint, Explores, his chosen damsel at his side; Recounting tales of love and plighted faith; Or from his pipe pours such delicious song That the wild hare in the close bitten lane Pauses with ear erect, and timorous deer That down the labyrinthine forest glade Goes bounding, starts aside, and turns to gaze. Sir Aubrey de Veres blank verse is the blank verse of the English drama, the panharmoaion, as Symonds called it, the universal instrument as used by the The Poetry of the de Veres. The Poetry of the de Veres. Elizabethans. Tennysons blank verse is the verse of the Idylls of the King, arranged to suit dialogue. Sweetness and an ornate beauty it possesses, but nowhere, in our judgment, the dramatic ring, the broken pause of power, the alternate gravity and swiftness of liv- ing speech. In making this comparison, we make it with the minds eye upon the first of the two dramas that compose the tragedy of ~Mary Tudor. Sir Au- breys second drama, though a fine work in itself, loses by following the first, and, if compared alone with Queen Mary, might not without ques- tion bear away the palm. The reader fresh from a perusal of the first play, who has felt its condensed power, finds a certain diffuseness, and experiences less distinctly a unity of impression. The delineation is not so sharp nor arresting, the action somewhat languid, and, to some degree, the sentiment and thought seem to return upon them- selves. Had Sir Aubrey de Vere lived to publish the work himself, there can be little doubt that much would have been altered, and the whole shortened. The weakness, if weakness there be in the second drama, is only weakness by comparison with the first. So fine a tragedy was produced by the author of the early part of the queens reign that it was hardly possible to add another. The second play contributes little to our knowledge of Mary; the horror of re- morse with which the first drama closes is in itself intensely tragic; and to the tragedy of a broken heart, the ac- cumulation of sorrows or the advent of death lends no additional terrors. After the scene in which Mary sees from her window in the Tower the executioner hold up to view the once lovely head of Jane Grey, and the un- happy queen in her delirious frenzy cries: PahI I am chokedmy mouth is choked with blood! no scene remained in her life of such terrible and overpowering agony. Life contained for her henceforth only 73 Sorrows faded form and Solitude behind. Marys failure and death are far less toudaing, fraught far less with the pity and terror of tragedy, than her remorse in the moment of final triumph over her enemies. Throughout this play, which opens with Northumber- lands plot to seize the crown for his sons wife and ends with Jane Greys execution, the poet with the finest instinct retains our sympathy for the queen no less than for her innocent rival. In weaker hands the play would undoubtedly have become the tragedy of Lady Jane Grey, the guiltless victim of her fathers ambition; but Sir Aubrey de Vere makes us realize, and it is a dramatic achievement of the first order, that the real suffering, the weight upon the heart which makes tragedy, is Marys. Lady Jane suffers, indeed, innocently; but her whiteness of soul and devotion of love make her sorrows less sorrowful, and death a release from a world of troubles. That Sir Aubrey de Vere could give us such a picture a~ this of Lady Janes last short interview with her mother, and still command our deepest grief for the queen who signed her death-warrant, seems to us a proof of the highest tragic genius: What shall I give thee?they have left me little What slight memorial through soft tears to gaze on? This bridal ringthe symbol of past joy? I cannot part with it; upon this finger It must go down into the grave. Per- chance After long years some curious hand may find it, Bright, like our better hopes, amid the dust, And piously, with a low sigh, replace it. Heretake this veil, and wear it for my sake. And take this winding sheet to him; and this Small handkerchief, so wetted with my tears, To wipe the death-damp from his brow. This kiss And thismy lastprint on his lips, and bid him Think of me to the last, and wait my spirit. 74 Farewell, my mother! Farewell, dear, dear mother! These terrible moments I must pass in prayer For the dyingfor the dead! Farewell! farewell! The gentleness, fortitude, and con- stancy of Jane Grey, her solicitude for her husbands life, her quiet acceptance of her own fate, the singleness of pur- pose and the beauty of her character, act as a foil to the political craft and pusillanimous shrinking from the result of his own acts displayed by Northum- berland, and no less to the stormy passion and thirst for revenge in Mary alternating with womans weakness and remorse. The delineation of the struggle in which the queens soul is tempest-tost among the winds and waves of passion and native inclination, driven at one time by her imperious will, fortified by the resolve to keep guard over the true cross and the authentic faith, at another swayed by a passionate craving, a wistful longing, infinitely pathetic, for some real affec- tion, or by an inclination towards clemency and a milder policy,this delineation can hardly fail to recall the tragic elevation, the high passions and high actions, of the Elizabethan drama. How finely this recalls the accent of an elder day! The queens passion is fairly alight, and the sword has been thrown into the scale of yen- geance; the demon wakes within her heart, and her mood passes into frenzy and madness: Mary. I want To see Jane Greyafter her widowhood. Fakenham (aside). After ?She then shall live. Uardiner (aside). Observe, she raves. Mary. Well sit together in some forest nook Or sunless cavern by the moaning sea, And talk of sorrow and vicissitudes Of hapless love, and luckless constancy, And hearts that death or treachery divides! Whats the hour? Be quick, be quick, Ive much to do. Gardiner. Just noon. Mary. There will be death soon on the air, With outspread pinions making an eclipse. Ha! ha! brave work we queens do! Destiny Is in our handsyea, in these very veins The spirit of the fatal Sisterhood Riots! The snakes of the Eumenides Brandish their horrent tresses round my head! Of the minor characters, or rather the characters other than protagonist, Northumberland, Jane Grey, and Car- dinal Pole are the most finely drawn; and, for the worthless Philip, Sir Au- brey de Vere compels a hatred akin to that which Shakespeare compels for a stronger though hardly more hateful villain in lago. Marys passion for Philip cannot be read as a passion real in itself, but as centred on the only possible object for her lifelong re- pressed affections. She sought some outlet for the sweeter springs beneath he bitter waters of her soul. Gardiner and Cranmer are great historical por- traits, worthy of their place in a drama which, with admirable impartiality, describes a pcriod so full of religions passions, and, within the narrow cir- cumference of its acts and scenes, depicts the very life and figure of the times as no historian has given or ever can give it,England vexed with fierce religious discords and civil strife, stained with innocent blood, aflame with hatreds as with martyrs fires, England, in whose borders the spirit of independence of an already ancient and free people was even now astir, but in which the various elements of the national life were not yet fused, and had not yet been unified as they were to be unified in the reign of Eliza- beth. Like characters drawn by all great artists, Sir Aubrey de Veres portraits are at once individual and typical, at once persons and types. To each indi- vidual belongs a personality that diffecs from all others in the world; but it rests The Poetry of the de Veres. upon a human foundation, an under- structure which is the same for all men. It is a comparatively easy task for the painter to limn a face which we recognize as in the abstract beautiful, or,if possessed of the observant eye, to reproduce features we know and recog- nize; but to see in every human countenance not its distinguishing lines alone, but those more fleeting which mark a special type, or to inform with human expression some abstract ideal of beauty, argues a power that belongs to the highest imaginative, combined with the highest observant and execu- tive, genius. In Sir Aubrey de Veres portraiture in Mary Tudor, a thought- ful student will read the features not of individuals alone, but of individuals who belong to a certain age, a certain epoch in the history of England and of the world. Human and personal, they are also racial and peculiar to an epoch. Mary and Jane Grey, English to the core, though of natures widely differing; Northumberland and Car- dinal Pole, types of the Englishmen of the period; Philip, the representative of Spain; and Gardiner, of the narrower, stronger Churchmen whose religion consumed their humanity, and so on throughout the play. To us it seems that it would be difficult to find among English dramas one which would serve better as a gallery, wherein to study the prevailing types of mind during the period of which it treats, than Mary Tudor. Sir Aubrey de Vere is greater in the old tradition of the drama, in the representation of action and of charac- ter displayed in action. Mr. de Vere, as we shall see, excels, like Browning. in the intellectual drama, the internal development of character amid circum- stances rather than its delineation by action, in the actual conflict and clash of forces in the external world. Taken together, they represent the highest reach in the pre~ent century of the drama of action and the drama of thought. Of the drama of thought. or the intellectual drama, Ham- let may serve as an example, where the character of the hero dis 75 plays itself in the life of his mind rather than in the field of action, since he is in action uncertain and wavering, and acts from sudden impulses instead of along definite lines of policy. The proper instrument of the intellectual drama, which is mainly concerned with crises in the history of the soul, seems to be, as with Browning, monologue, and it is noticeable that in Hamlet the monologues are more frequent and more lengthy than in any other of Shakespeares tragedies. Mr. de Veres method is somewhat different. In his finest play he makes a gradual revela- tion of the character of Alexander, largely by a chronicle in dialogue of the impressions made by his personality upon those in contact with him, partly by Alexanders own words and partly by his actions. How admirable is this when Parmenio, King Philips old general, corrects his son Philotas con- ception of Alexander, and the causes of his success in war: Philotas. One half his victories come but of his blindness, And noting not the hindrance. Parmenio. At Granicus But that was chance. At Issus he was greater; I set small store on Egypt or on Tyre; Next came Arbela. Half a million foes Melted like snow. To him Epaminondas Was as the wingless creature to the wingd. Philotas. I grant his greatness were his godship sane! But note his brow; tis Thoughts least earthly temple: Then mark beneath that round, not human eye, Still glowing like a panthers! In his body No passion dwells; but all his mind is passion, Wild intellectual appetite and instinct That works without a law. Parmen4o. But half you know him. There is a zigzag lightning in his brain That flies in random flashes, yet not errs: The Poetry of the de Veres. The Poetry of the de Veres. His victories seem but chances; link those chances, And under them a science you shall find, Though unauthentic, contraband, illicit, Yea, contumelious oft to laws of war. Fortune that as a mistress smiles on others, Serves him as duty bound; her blood is he, Born in the purple of her royalties. If this be not in the manner of the great masters, we are at a loss to adduce examples of their manner. This passage serves well to illustrate Mr. de Veres characteristic diction at its best,a style, to use Matthew Arnolds luminous description of Wordsworths best writing, a style of perfect plainness, relying for effect solely on the weight and force of that which with entire fidelity it utters. It is a diction which aims at no sur- prises for the reader. It does not care to goad him into excitement if his imagination or his feelings are dull, and it thus elects to suffer comparative neglect amongst the styles of the day, which ask nothing from the reader, but take upon themselves to electrify his already over~stimulated nerves by the surprising and the ostentatious. During the last century, writes Mr. de Vere, in his preface to ~Alexander the Great, it was thought philosophi- cal to sneer at the Macedonian mad- man, and moral to declaim against him as a bandit. Maturer reflection has led us to the discovery that a fools luck helping a robbers ambition could hardly have enabled a youth but twenty-two years of age when he began his enterprise to conquer half the world in ten years. The ancients made no such mistake. They admired, and therefore they understood. Mr. de Veres study and presentation of the person and achievements of Alexander bring before us the greatest captain of the ancient world, with the sharpness and reality of outline that time, when counted by centuries, in despite of all historical records does so much to efface. One imperative demand is made upon fictional art,it must be convincing. And this whether it works in the field of pure invention and repro- duces types, or in the field of history and clothes the skeleton records with flesh and blood. The creative artist makes what we may call his onlyfor it is his fatalfailure, when he fails to be convincing. However roughly his material be handled, however ineffec- tively he executes detail, if the result leaves the impression of reality, if it convinces the eye and mind, the high- est success has been achieved. Verisi- militude can hardly be gained at too dear a cost. Because it must be gained at all costs, an artist who works upon a period other than his own burdens himself with preliminary study. He must himself live the life of the period; he must not only know its outward shows, the dress it wore, its life of field and hearth, its pomp and circumstance, but he must know its inner life, sym- pathize with its ways of thought, expe- rience its emotions, and feel the truth of its beliefs. Perhaps Mr. de Vere of all living men, partly by natural affinity of mind and partly by reason that he is a poet, has the closest knowledge of, the fullest sympathy with, that period of Euro- pean history which we are accustomed somewhat vaguely to denominate the Middle Ages. Much of his finest poetry is steeped in the spiritual mood, and might have been composed in the en- vironment, of those ages. He has written what might almost be termed an apology for the Middle Ages in the preface to his Medheval Records. But it is a proof of the breadth and intellectual range of his genius that he has produced no greater work than that which deals with the Pagan world and a type of such distinctly Pagan heroism as Alexander. True it is that Mr. de Vere finds in pride the great vice in his character, the all-pervading vice, as he writes, which, except in the rarest instances, blended itself like a poison with Pagan greatness, and penetrated into its essence. But in so doing he is not judging Alexander by the stand- ard of Christian virtue, but by a standard which the highest minds among the ancients, such as Alex- anders master, Aristotle, might have 76 The Poetry of the de Veres. applied, and by his admiration for Alexanders heroic and intellectual qualities he proves for himself the pos- session of that openness and indepen- dence of mind which are so essential in judgments upon the persons and actions of ages other than our own. Broadly human and sympathetic treatment of any period, however far removed from the present, could hardly fail to be successful; but in Alexander the Great our admiration is felt, not alone for the poet, but for the student whose alert eye caught sight of the finer details and possibilities of poetic and dramatic material in the compara- tively scanty records of the year 323 B.C. From the hints in Plutarch, Shakespeare reconstructed the main characters in the Roman plays. Mr. de Vere gleaned a like precious harvest in the same field; but took the incident which is in some respects the most interesting in Alexanders life, his visit to the Temple in Jerusalem, from Josephus. Of this incident Mr. de Vere makes a poetic and legitimate use in tracing the effect of the religions of the East, and especially of the monotheism of the Hebrews, upon the imperial mind of the soldier-statesman. Alexanders sublime idea of an universal empire, redeemed from barbarism and irra- diated with Greek science and art, proceeded from a mind far other than that which guides the designs of the successful general. As Mr. de Vere says, His intellect was at once vast and minute, his mind was at once idealistic and practical, and he was keenly susceptible of the reality and moral depth of the religions held by the peoples whom his genius overthrew. But Alexanders pride of power, minis- tered to by a dazzling series of suc- cesses, choked the spiritual fountains of his nature. So self-centred he stands, even in his moments of doubt and in the company of his only friend Hephestion, that his thought cannot travel beyond the circle of the one supreme ambition of his life. From the religions of the conquered peoples he extracts material to feed his quenchless pride; or, if that be impossible, he can 77 at least, by resource to scepticism, set aside their appeals to higher ideals, and at the worst he can cut the tangled knot with his resistless sword. This only know we We walk upon a world not knowable Save in those things which knowledge least deserve, Yet capable, not less, of task heroic. My trust is in my work; on that I fliag me, Trampling all questionings down. The many aspects of Alexanders character, beside that of its overmas- tering pride, his poetic mysticism, soldierly decision, marvellous foresight, consummate coolness and dexterity, passion and ardor, subtlety, and an instinct almost animal, are all revealed by Mr. de Vere in firm but delicately contrived strokes; and much more than these. How much of insight he gives us into the heart of the man in this contemptuous reference to Philotas, whom he has put to death on a sus- picion of treason unproven: I,in his place, Had taen small umbrage at my days abridged; There lived not scope nor purpose in his life Which death could mar. How affectingly, and with what ex- quisite appropriateness of scene, does Mr. de Vere introduce us to the only expression of Alexanders feelings which were not wholly centred in him- self! With Hephestion, Alexander visits the tomb of Achilles and anoints the pillar that marks the grave; He- phestion lingers: Alexander. The night descends. Hephestion, I depart. You tarried; wherefore? Hepkestion. For justices sake and friendships. Is there room For nothing, then, but greatness on the earth? I crownd that other tomb. Alexander. What tomb? The Poetry of the de Veres. Jlepkestion. It stood Close by, the loftier; greater love had raised it; Patroclus tomb. Alexander. Tis strange I markd it not. HephesUon. These two were friends. Alexander. Ayl not in death divided. Hephestion. Therefore, despite that insolent cynic sect, The gods have care for things on earth. Alexander. Hephestion! That which Patroclus to Achilles was Art thou to memy nearest and minc inmost. In them, not lives alone, but fates were joind; Patroclus died, Achilles followd soon. The character of Alexander, whose one human affection, his friendship for Hephestion, did not escape the alloy of pride, has an historic and philosophical interest; that of Hephes- tion an interest more near, human and personal. Without Hephestion the drama could not but have lain some- what outside the realm of ordinary human nature, so far removed are Alexanders character and achieve- ments from those possible for the average man. But in the juxtaposition of these two figures Mr. de Vere has produced a striking contrast of wide intellectual and moral bearings. Alex- ander touches earth in his love for his friend; Hephestion is ennobled by his preservation of every virtue, especially those distinctively Christian, of sim- plicity and humility, like Marcus Aurelius, even on the steps, as we may say, of an imperial throne. Alexander, like another Achilles, gathers around his person all the glories of intellect and of power which make him an incarna- tion of almost divine greatness; and, like Achilles, the dazzling brightness of his day is inimagination still more bright, because the night of death descended upon it all too soon and sudden, with no twilight interspace of lessening great- ness to prepare the eye. Alexander may stand for us as the supreme power of intellect, soaring in contemplation, resistless in action, and the worshippers of mind could hardly enthrone a greater deity chosen from among mortals. Hephestion, around whose head play less dazzling lights than those of imperial intellect and power, is a type of moral grandeur, of the beauty of virtue. Mr. de Veres design, we doubt not, in this contrast was to make com- parison between the Greek and the Christian ideals, the glory of the mind, and the greater glory of the soul. It is barely conceivable that any care- ful student of this drama can assign to it a place second to any produced in the nineteenth century. Nearly all the great poets of the century have essayed drama; almost without exception they have failed. Scotts genius, supreme in narrative fiction, proved too discursive for dramatic bounds. Wordsworth failed because his intellect was con- templative, out of any close sympathy with action. Coleridge, metaphysician and mystic though he was, came nearer success, but did not reach it. Byron was too rigidly confined within the iron circle of his own personality to succeed in dramatic characterization. Landor produced with the statuarys art noble groups of men and women, but could not call them from their pedestals into breathing life. Keats rioted in the glow and passion of color and of music, and the Fates gave him no lease of life wherein to study the world that lay around him. Shelley achieved success in one instance, but his is a drama of hateful night unvisited by the blessed light of day. Tennyson, after a brilliant career in almost every other branch of the poetic art which raised high expec- tations, gained only a respectable mediocrity in thisthe highest. The honors in nineteenth-century drama are all divided between Sir Henry Taylor. Browning, and the de Veres, and to the de Veres the future will confirm the laurel. Mary Tudor and Alex- ander the Great, as we have said, rank side by side as the highest limits in the 78 drama of action and of thought reached in later times. Alexander is full of fine, of memorable, of durable things; it is a poem large in conception, tri- umphant in execution. Mary Tudor, less striking in single lines and pas- sages, less daring in its subject, has the grand processional movement suited to its subject, and in harmony with the great traditions of English historical drama. Mr. de Veres diction is richer and more varied than Sir Aubreys, and rises in dignity with the difficulty of the theme. Alexanders address to his troops after the mutiny among them has been put down, beginning: Ye swineherds, and ye goatherds, and ye shepherds, That shamelessly in warlike garb usurped Your vileness cloak, my words are not for you; There stand among you others, soldiers sons, Male hearts, oerwrit with chronicles of war: To them I speak is a truly magnificent oration, only matched by passages from the same play, as where Alexander crowns the tomb of Achilles and apostrophizes the dead hero, or where, looking out from the cliff opposite new Tyre, he sees in vision the city that was to bear his name, Alexandria. There the Euxine Thaws in the hot winds from the Arabian gulfs, There meet the East and West; dusk Indian kings Thither shall send their ivory and their gold, And thence to far Hesperia! The imagery is throughout arresting and in the highest degree poetic, as here where Hephestion speaks of Philo- tas:- Coldness in youth is twice the cold of eld; Beneath the ashes of a fire burnt out Some heat may lurk; but from the unfuelld hearth And dusk bars of a never-lighted fire The chillness comes of death. Or here where Philotas is awaiting death after condemnation, and has 79 drawn from Phylax an oath to revenge him by the assassination of Hephes- tion: Remember An ice-film gathers on my shivering blood. Oh, happy days of youth! Theyll laugh at me, A shadow mid the shades, as I have laughd At Homers ghosts bending to victim blood, A sieve-like throat incapable of joy! Tell me these things are fables. Id not live A second time; for lifes too dangerous! We come from nothing; and another nothing, A hoary Hunger, couchant at Deaths gate, Wait to devour us. A critics duty towards this play would be unfaithfully performed, if he failed to call attention to the fine scenes in prose which it contains, scenes which, almost to a greater degree than those in verse, fill the reader with admiration for the authors subtle psychological power and com- mand over the resources of language. Into Mr. de Veres dramas, Alex- ander the Great and St. Thomas of Canterbury, enters a philosophical in addition to their historical, personal, and poetic interest. The hero of each figures forth in his own person a great world-moving idea, such ideas as emanate from individuals who stand head and shoulders above their fellows, are in advance of their own times, and often powerful agents in the develop- ment, so slow and yet so certain, of human society. To Alexander must be ascribed of right the first inception of the idea which in our day has become the familiar one of the parliament ot man, the federation of the world. He first conceived the possibility of an universal empire, which should em- brace the nations and gather the whole human family under the rule of a single sceptre. It was not to be cx- pected that he should conceive it as a commonwealth or as ruled by any other than its imperial founder. He would have thrown the peoples into the melt- The Poetry of the de Veres. 80 ing-pot of his own ambition and created a terrestrial planetary system of nations, with himself as central sun. But the magnificence of the idea is scarcely marred by the splendid ego- tism of the man, who not alone con- ceived but went far to realize it, to make, in Drydens words, one city of the universe. Had he lived [says Mr. de Vere] he must have created it. The Romans, whose legions with difficulty resisted the phalanx when wielded by Pyrrhus of Epirus, must have sunk, despite the patriotic confidence of Livy, before the conqueror. The imperial series would then have been far otherwise completed; the consummating empire, which resumed all its predecessors, inheriting their gifts, and exaggerating at once their good and their evil, the virtues that win power, and the earthly aim that degrades it, would have been an empire of intellect, not of law; and over its subject realms there would have been scattered, not Roman municipalities, but Greek schools. What the world has lost, what it may have gained, by the early death of the world-dissolving, world-creating Mace- donian, he would be a bold speculator who would venture to affirm. In the person of Becket, Mr. de Vere also represents an idea of wide-reaching national importance. Becket stands in the history of his epoch as representa- tive of the Church, a truly moral power espousing the higher national interests against a tyrannous control, and so as a pillar of the peoples cause, a pioneer in the movement towards true freedom and the higher civilization. As a great reformer of clerical abuses, one indeed regarded in his own day as secular in his views, and as defender of the Church against the crown, he was in reality the upholder and guardian of the cause of liberty, so hardly won in council hall and tented field by the people of England from their hereditary kings. The poetry of Mr. de Vere, to one fresh from the perusal of modern verse, seems almost overweighted, over- charged with thought. The error, if error there be, lies certainly in excess The Poetry of the de Veres. rather than deficiency; he sows less with the hand than with the whole sack. Or it might be more truthfully said that the fault is in over-refinement, such refinement as can hardly be cen- sured in itself, but is rarely achieved without expansion beyond the limits of emphasis, or without sacrifice of that breadth of effect which is essential to the highest beauties of verse. But though refined beyond necessity, the informing ideas of his poetry are never abstract, but spring spontaneously from some ground of universal expe- rience, and are vitally connected with human feeling and the real world. Like the poetry of Wordsworth, it lives and moves in the peopled city of the pure humanities, not in the world of phantasy derived, it may be, from an- dent legend or saga where we are housed in dreams. It is poetry whose source is very near the heart, whose appeal needs not therefore to be couched in the language of exaggera- tion, so simple, direct, and winning are the truth and justice of its natural claims. As with Wordsworth, too, the level of Mr. de Vere s verse is deter- mined by its immediate subject; as the wind of inspiration blows strongly or faintly, the verse rises or falls, but it must be noticed that the language re- mains the same throughout; it is never by trick of phrase or cunning effects of word-melody that Mr. de Veres poetic power displays itself. The subjects of which he makes choice are subjects upon which he feels strongly and treats for their own sake, not merely such as afford facilities for poetic handling or the production of surprising beauties, that we may be caused to exclaim, How ingenious an artist! It is poetry not by reason of its ornate splendor, but because its thoughts are sincere, its impulses spontaneous, its passion authentic. We have already noticed that the poetry of the de Veres is characterized by its independence of contemporary fashion, than which there are few surer tests of true poetic genius. We have remarked their success in the dramatic form. a form in which the representative poets of the century fell short. There is yet another field of poetry, cultivated indeed by many modern poets, but by few among the greatest with eminent success, in which the de Veres have attained a notable uia~tery, a INastery acknowledged by all competent critics. Minds of the discursive order, like Wordsworths, working in the medium of measured language, are apt to run on to undue lengths, to spread their thought over too large a surface. For this reason Mr. de Vere, like Wordsworth, is indisputably at his best in the poems composed in fixed forms; in the drama, because compression is essential, and in the sonnets scanty plot of ground, where prolixity is impossible. A poet who is exclusively a poet, whose busi- ness in life is poetry, naturally pours into verse all his impressions of life, makes the Muse his confidante in swall matters as in great. But enduring poetry is occasional, it comes into being at unexpected moments only when a perfect balance of mind and heart are attained, when speech and I idea are in the closest harmony. Throughout a long poem it is barely possible that this perfect harmony can remain unbroken. A strict form, such as that of the drama or the sonnet, seems to aid some poets, compelling them to a severer guard over them- selves than they care to exercise when moving in freer, more liberal forms. In the art of sonnet-writing Mr. de Vere inherited to the full his fathers genius. If less massive than the sonnets of Sir Aubrey, Mr. de Veres are as delicately chiselled, are more varied in melody, and embrace a wider range of subject. Of his fathers sonnets it is difficult indeed to speak too highly. Their weight of thought and corresponding dignity of movement remind us irre- sistibly of the organ note to be heard in Miltons Captain, or Colonel, or Knight at Arms, or in his Avenge, 0 Lord, thy slaughtered saints; while in singleness or unity of effect, LIVING AGE. VOL. XI. 526 81 in chaste beauty of language, they can best be compared with Wordsworths. Of the one hundred sonnets in the vol- ume published in 1875, many deal with aspects of scenery, in the main Irish; some may be classed among poems inspired by patriotism, others among those inspired by religious feeling. Take this as an example of the grave splendor for which almost all are con- spicuous GOUGAIJN BARRA. Not beauty which men gaze on with a smile, Not grace that wins, no charm of form or hue, Dwelt with that scene. Sternly upon my view, And slowlyas the shrouding clouds awhile Disclosed the beetling crag and lonely isle From their dim lake the ghostly moun- tains grew, Lit by one slanting ray. An eagle flew From out the gloomy gulf of the defile, Like some sad spirit from Hades. To the shore Dark waters roll3d, slow heaving, with dull moan; The foam-flakes hanging from each livid stone, Like froth on deathful lips; pale mosses oer The shatterd cell crept, as an orphan lone Clasps his cold mothers breast when life is gone. Or this, as representative of the sonnets dealing with national themes: THE TRUE BA515 OF POwER. Powers footstool is Opinion, and his throne The Human Heart; thus only kings maintain Prerogatives God - sanctiond. The coarse chain Tyrants would bind around us may be blown Aside, like foam, that with a breath is gone: For theres a tide within the popular vein That despots in their pride may not restrain, Swoin with a vigor that is all its own. The Poetry of the de Veres. The Poetry of the de Veres. Ye who would steer along these doubtful seas, Lifting your proud sails to high heaven, beware! Rocks throng the waves, and tempests load the breeze; Go search the shores of Historymark there The Oppressors lot, the Tyrants des- tinies; Behold the wrecks of ages and despair! Mr. de Yere, in his memoir of his father, tells us that the sonnet was with him to the last a favorite form of composition. This taste was fostered by the magnificent sonnets of Wordsworth, whose genius he had early hailed, and whose friendship he regarded as one of the chief honors of his later life. For his earlier sonnets he had found a model chiefly in the Italian poets, especially Petrarch and Filicaja. Like Filicaja also, who so well deserved the inscription graven on his tomb, qui gloriam litera- rum honestavit, he valued the sonnet the more because its austere brevity, its severity, and its majestic completeness fit it especially for the loftier themes of song. It may be remarked, however, that the sonnet has been in recent years so assiduously cultivated as a poetic form, so much careful attention has been given to the minutest details of its structure, and, as a result, such metrical perfection is now required of the writer of sonnets, that many of Sir Aubrey de Veres most finished poems in this form might from. one point of view be regardedin the good company, however, of Shakespeareas inferior to those of poets not for one moment com- parable with him. Mr. de Vere had the advantage of experience not oper~ to his father, and his work has perhaps gained in technical qualities. He is best known probably as a sonneteer, and we therefore quote only two of his many faultless poems cast in this mould. The first is very characteristic of the refinement, the grave wisdom, the stateliness of his mind. sol~Row. Count each affliction, whether light or grave, Gods messenger sent down to thee; do thou With courtesy receive him; rise and bow; And ere his shadow pass thy threshold, crave Permission first his heavenly feet to lave; Then lay before him all thou hast; allow No cloud of passion to usurp thy brow, Or mar thy hospitality; no wave Of mortal tumult to obliterate The souls marmoreal calmness; grief should be Like joy, majestic, equable, sedate; Confirming, cleansing, raising, making free; Strong to consume small troubles, to com- mend Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to the end. The following in a different key dis- plays the ample sweep of his imagina- tion: THE sUN-GOD. I saw the Master of the Sun. He stood High in his luminous car, himself more bright; An archer of immeasurable might: On his left shoulder hung his quiverd load; Spurnd by his steeds the Eastern moun- tains glowd; Forward his eager eye, and brow of light He bent; and while both hands that arch embowd, Shaft after shaft pursued the flying night. No wings profaned that god-like form; around His neck high-held an ever-moving crowd Of locks hung glistening; while such per- fect sound Fell from his bowstring, that th ethereal dome Thrilld as a dewdrop, and each passing cloud Expanded, whitening like the ocean foam. We have dwelt thus long upon the dramatic quality, the solidity of sub- stance, the wealth and melody of lan- guage to be found in Mr. de Veres poetry, because it seems to be p~puiarly supposed that be is a poet of purely meditative mood whose sympathies are almost exclusively engaged with as- The Poetry of the de Veres. pects of religious faith or aspiration. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the work of the poetic sire and son alike there is a healthy variety of interests, a hearty appreciation of all that can gladden or beautify or ennoble life, a fulness of pulse such as rarely beats in the poetry of mature life, and is conspicuously absent in the pessimistic period we have lately traversed. The enthusiasms of Mr. de Yeres nature have free course; its joys and sorrows, noble in themselves, have a noble out- pouring in his verse, and not seldom does it render with perfect fidelity the inmost cry of the heart When the ploughshare of deeper passion Tears down to our primitive rock. 83 seem to us in all respects satisfactory we are confident that the critic of the future would view with some astonish- ment and contempt any verdict of the present which ranked before it a vol- ume by any living writer. It has been sufficiently proved that Mr. de Vere is an original author. Alone among living poets he certainly stands, if only by reason of the strik- ingly impersonal character of his work. Like Byron and Tennyson, the later singers are rarely successful save when intensely personal, when they depict moods they have themselves experienced. It will be granted, how- ever, that by far the highest triumphs of imaginative art are achieved by those poets, rare indeed in their appear- Next to Brownings, Mr. de Veres ance, whose sphere of operation is not poetry shows, in our judgment, the limited by the narrow boundary of a fullest vitality, resumes the largest single lifes experience, but who cast sphere of ideas, covers the broadest themselves abroad upon universal intellectual field since the poetry of human nature, sound its depths and Wordsworth. But with his versatility shallows, sympathize with its multi- of manner and wealth of ideas he has form interests, and, entering through not combined that poetic parsimony knowledge and native insight into the which gives only of its best, and which long history of man, are, in a very has its reward at the hands of time. positive sense, citizens of the world Had he been less facile, it is probable rather than the slaves of environment that his reputation as a poet would have in any age or country. Mr. de Vere been even higher than it is. Only the has indeed lived abroad, a mental life diligent student of poetry cares to dis- untrammelled by space or time, of cover for himself the pleasantest singular variety and depth; but perhaps places in a poets garden. If it be a he has felt himself most in unison, and, garden so carefully cultivated as that it may be, almost desired to make his of Gray or Tennyson, where every inch home with the ages which he charac- of ground has been scrupulously tended, terizes as eminently Christian ages, where the poet has, to change the when life was at once gay and serious, metaphor, been his own editor and represented in one aspect by Dante, made his own selections, the visitors the most spiritual of poets, and in will be more numerous and the critics another by Chaucer, the most mirthful disarmed ere they enter the sacred and human-hearted. enclosure. With poets like Browning In these latter days of science and and Wordsworth, the part is often scientific enquiry, necessary progress greater than the whole, and in these has done much to remove into the region days of many writers only the choicest of discarded legend and mystic un- work of an author can hope for sur- reality many of the largest and most vival. Most of the poets of our own penetrating conceptions, many of the times and those to come will be read noblest truths regarding it that could only in anthologies, and brief space inform and illuminate human life. In will be granted to few among them save that body of Mr. de Veres work which the highest. Were a judicious selection we may call distinctively religious, as made from Mr. de Veres poetry dealing with the spiritual part of man, neither of the two already published he has chosen for poetic treatment cer 84 tam great spiritual conceptions, and has illustrated them at work in the formation of saintly character, produc- ing lovely and perfect lives, and as pro- ductive of that self-forgetfulness, the passionate surrender to the service of humanity of those who, loving God, loved man the more, which shines in the devoted missionary labors of the ancient Roman and Celtic churches. The gladsome and luminous wisdom, the childs heart within the mans. maturer mind, the quiet yet expectant trustfulness that belongs to unques- tioning faith, the intense glow of an unquenchable fire of aspiration,these are but dim and remote to us in a sea- son that seems by contrast the dull November of the world. So wise are we grown that we can scarce be joyful, and, though heirs of all the ages, can reduce only a small portion of our patrimony into actual ownership. Mr. de Vere would have us recover the ancient wealth of our fathers, while we retained what is exclusively our own; and in his verse the neglected truths, once in actual possession of the Chris- tian peoples, are reverently and nobly emphasized. In reading Mr. de Veres Legends of the Saxon Saints, Med- ia~val Records, and Legends of St. Patrick, we confess that with us the uppermost feeling has beena feeling which Mr. de Vere was doubtless desirous of inspiringhow much our material and scientific progress, our advance in civilization, has lost us. That there have been compensating gains Mr. de Vere would himself be the first to insist, but the loss is no less certain. It almost seems as if the human race lay under the blighting necessity of paying for its greatest gains by the abandonment of other and no less priceless possessions. In a fine poem written at Lugano, we have Mr. de Veres message to the present age: Teach us in all that round us lies To see and feel each hour, More than Homeric majesties, And more than Phidian power; Teach us the coasts of modern life With lordlier tasks are daily rife Than theirs who plunged the heroic oar Of old by Chersonese; But bid our Argo launch from shore Unbribed by golden Fleece: Bid us Da~dalean arts to scorn Which prostituted ends suborn! That science slave of sense which claims No commerce with the sky, Is baser thrice than that which aims With waxen wings to fly! To grovel, or self-doomed to soar Mechanic age, be proud no more! Of that department of Mr~ de Vere s work dealing with chivalry, the lives of saints and the records of the Chris- tian Church, we have not left ourselves space to write. We omit a lengthened criticism with the less regret since this part of his work is most widely known. To a volume of selections, recently published under the editorship of Mr. Woodberry, an appreciative and excel- lent essay stands as preface, in which full justice is done to these Christian poems. They succeed one another, as the poets memory wanders back to the legends of the empire on the first estab- lishment of the faith in Roman lands and along Asian shores, or moves through medi~eval times with Joan of Arc and episodes of the Cid that recall Cuchullain in their light-hearted performance of natural deeds, now under the cross. The beauty of these separate stories is equable and full of a softened charm; but in them too, as in the Bardic myths, there abides that distance of time which makes them remote, as if they were not of our own. They are highly pictorial; and in reading them, each secluded in that silent, old- world air that encompasses it, one feels that here is a modern poet, like those early painters of pious heart who spent their lives in picturing scenes from the life of Christ; and one recalls, perhaps, some Convent of San Marco where each monastic cell bears on its quiet walls such scenes from the shining hand of the Florentine on whose face fell heavens mildest light. These poems of Aubrey de Vereto characterize them largelyare scenes from the life of Christ in man; an~ there is something in themin their glad- ness, their luminousness, their peace which suggests Fra Angelico, the halo of Christian art. TA e Poetry of the de Veres. Before we take our final leave of Mr. de Vere, we would illu~strate by one quotation the felicity with which he moves in lighter and more lyric meas- ure. There are few poets of the present generation, despite their almost exclu- sive devotion to the lyric Muse, who can write more charming verse than this: In Spring, when the breast of the lime- grove gathers Its roseate cloud; when the flushd streams sing, And the mavis tricks her in gayer feathers; Read Chaucer then; for Chaucer is Spring! On lonely evenings in dull Novembers, When rills run choked under skies of lead, And on forest-hearths the years last embers, Wind-heapd and glowing, lie, yellow and red; Read Chaucer still! In his ivied beaker With knights, and wood-gods, and saints embossd, Spring hides her head till the wintry breaker Thunders no more on the far-off coast. From Macmillans Magazine. THE ROMANCE OF A STALL. I. One fine April morning, in the year of our Lord, 1880, Peter Morero awoke from the sound healthy sleep which was his nightly portion, and began hastily to dress himself for first mass. It was nearly four oclock, and the bells were ringing when he came out into the keen morning air, and ran across the green which divided his little weath- erbeaten house from the great white church which invests the mountain village of Cavalese with a prestige un- shared by any other in Tyrol. When mass was over, Peter left the church with the other worshippers, but he did not follow them out of the churchyard. Instead, he stood a moment looking at the brightening east, then taking the brush out of the stoup of holy water 85 attached to the outer wall of the church, he bestowed a conscientious aspersion upon two graves which lay side by side in the shadow of the eastern portico, and after replacing the brush in the stoup, and laying his hat beside him on the grass, he knelt down and prayed for the souls of his father and mother. And may they too pray for their poor orphan, he murmured, as he rose from his knees. Peter always thought of himself as an orphan, although he was forty-eight years old (a late hour in the hard-worked life of a Tyrolese peasant), and his parents had died only the year before at a very advanced age. But he had never been married, or even be- trothed, and his affection for his good, loving parents, and his grief at their loss, had been the single emotion of his uneventful life. Now that the old couple slept in the churchyard he lived on alone, in contented bachelorhood, in the low, two-roomed cottage they had bequeathed to him; and notwithstand- ing the fact that it was by many de- grees the poorest in Cavalese, and let in the summer rains and winter snows, he felt for it all the pride of a propri- etor. It was a very modest and, so to speak, humble pride, however, for never, even in early youth, had Peter merited the description given in Holy Writ of certain characters, and of Jeshurun in particular, of whom we are told that they waxed fat, and kicked, and were in consequence duly disci- plined by adverse fate. It was true, indeed, that all opportunities to wax fat, either in a material or moral sense, had been denied him; but it was equally true that no amount of prosperity could have made him aggressive or boastful. He was an unobtrusive, silent, sym- pathetic little man, and though dingy and wrinkled, physically wizened and unhandsomely hirsute, he was yet so honest and kindly that there was some- thing pleasant in his aspect, notwith- standing his ugliness. The clock was striking five as he is- sued from the churchyard, and he made haste home, for he had yet several things to do before his departure for the summer. His green fustian bag lay The Romance of a Stall. 86 ready strapped beside his staff, but it was still necessary for him to arrange his few poor sticks of furniture, and to leave everything in readiness for Anna Morero, his cousin Pauls widow, who, with her two boys, was to occupy his cottage during the summer. When all was in order, he carefully locked the door, put the key in his pocket, and began to water some fine carnations which stood on a bench placed against the outer wall of the cottage. Peter was considered to have a lucky hand with carnations, and he now looked lov- ingly at these, and cut off one really splendid blossom which he fastened ;in his hat. Then he took up the two big pots and carried them across the street to the postwoman, who had promised to care for them during his absence, and also to keep the key of his house until Anna Morero came to claim it. It was not without some qualms of con- science that he confided his plants to the postwoman. He felt that he would have dealt more handsomely by his cousin and her children had he left the carnations to their care. But, as he told himself, Anna had never been care- ful with plants, and her two boys, aged respectively thirteen and sixteen, were much more likely to spoil flowers than to care for them. To be sure, there was Luisa Badi, Annas daughter by her first husband, she who was, until she could get something hetter, cow-girl at a farm some miles away. But Peter had never seen her since she was a baby, and though he knew her to be twenty-one years old, he still consid- ered her too young to be trusted with his carnations. He fulfilled his errand to the postwoman therefore, and after due thanks and farewells, went his way. He had a days journey before him, for he was lc~ound to the distant heights on the other side of the Adige; and as he walked on, now casting a glance at the mountains, and now at the val- ley to which he was descending, his thoughts were busy with the work which awaited film, for he had engaged himself to the landlord of the inn at Kiobenstein as cowherd, and had after- like Romance of a Stall. wards learned that he was a master whom it was not easy to please. Now Peter liked his work, and understood it, but it annoyed him to be followed up and interfered with, because, when he had any spare time he liked to rest in the quiet stall and dream his fill. He would not have called it dreaming. Though in reality much given to day- dreams, he had never heard the phrase; he called these long daily meditations remembering. In truth he did de- light in remembrance. He could neither read nor write, but he possessed an extraordinary memory, and it was richly stored with the folk-lore of the mountains. To lie on the warm straw in the cow-stall, and listen to that soothing sound, the chewing of the cud; to feel the gentle, sympathetic, but not importunate friendliness of the cows about him; to gaze idly at the motes dancing in the rare, slanting rays of sunshine which cleft the shadowy darkness of the interior, and through the slightly open door to see in the far distance the splendid pageant of lights and shadows and prismatic colors upon the fairy peaks of the Dolomitesall these delights were dear to the soul of t eter Morero, who, though he did not know it, was a poet and a sybarite in his own humble way. Poor Peter, stepping steadily down the mountain, with all his personality packed into the green bag he carried on his back, with his jacket on his shoulder, his staff in his hand, and his pipe in his mouth, his mind full of a gentle, modest contentment, delicately tempered by a faint anxiety as to the well-being of Herr Mairs cows, and a slight apprehension as to that individ- uals treatment of his cowherd, was surely too modest a figure to invite, much less to deserve, a fling from des- tiny. Peter ventured to hope for noth- ing in the future that he had not had in the past, and feared nothing but the poor-house, and too long a stay in pur- gatory. Yet his last tranquil day lay behind him. He had walked for about three hours when a turn in the rough mountain road brought into view a narrow and like Romance of a Stall. steep path which branched off abruptly. Some cows were slowly climbing this path, and making their way one by one into the field which overhung the road. Peters eyes instinctively followed the cows, and his ear lent itself half uncon- sciously to the shouts of the cow-girl, who as yet was invisible to him. Sud- denly she appeared above his head, fol- lowing her cows. She dropped her stick for a moment to pick a sprig of pear-blossom which she put between her teeth, and taking her handkerchief from her head, turned and shook it, preparatory to putting it on again. The action showed to advantage her tall, youthful figure and the fine poise and beautiful shape of her head; while the broad sunlight set off the rich bloom oi her complexion and bronzed the locks on her temples, now ruffled up and wav- ing, although the mass of dark hair was closely braided and bound with the maiden snood. As with all cow- girls her feet were bare, and she wore the ordinary peasants dress. But she was like no peasant girl Peter had ever seen; and as he stood looking up at her his staff slipped out of his hand, and fell noisily on the stony road. In- stantly, the girl threw up her head like a listening deer; then she came forward to the edge of the field, and let her glance fall upon him for the first time. Her eyes were large and. long, and in color like pools of clear water on a bed of brown autumn leaves. A dancing light, a ray, a laugh, played forever in the corners of the eyes, and produced an indescribably elusive, puzzling, but fascinating expression. Such eyes look out of Mona Lisas portrait on the wall of the Louvre, and they have ever been troubling to the sons of men. Our poor hero was no exception to the rule, and he stood mutely gazing upward, while the girl ~with a slight laugh, instantly suppressed, resumed the task of shaking and folding her handkerchief, replaced it on her head, and adroitly catching the ends in her teeth, without letting go her sprig of pear-blossom, she picked up her stick and turned away, glancing out of the corners of her eyes as she did so. Then Peter had an inspiration. lie called aloud, Are you Luisa? She turned with a leisurely, noncha- lant grace, and answered, but without looking at him, There are so many Luisas; long Seppels Luisa, and the millers Luisa, and Anton the shoe- makers Luisa, and many more. How do I know which Luisa you want? Peter laughed: I want Anna More- ros Luisa. Well, what do you want of her? answered the girl, with a careless- ness which would have been wounding but for the mysterious smile in her eyes. I am your cousin, Peter Morero, said Peter. My brothers cousin, not mine, re- turned the girl promptly. Where are you going? she added. To Kiobenstein, plenty of cows, a good place. I shall be there until No- vember. If the landlord wants a cow- girl, will you come? You would be better paid there than here. Who knows ? replied the girl with a sweet indifference, as she turned more decidedly away and began to fol- low her retreating cows. She had not said good-bye; it was apparently not her habit. Peter, left standing in the road, scarcely knew what he did as he called aloud, Luisa I Well! said Luisa, glancing over her shoulder as she retreated slowly. Will you have this? and taking the carnation from his hat, he threw it up to her. Now she turned, came back and picked it up, still with the same enchant- ing, piquant nonchalance. Pretty! she said, as she turned it over in her hand, but she did not thank him. She pushed back her handkerchief, placed the carnation over her right ear, ad- justed her handkerchief again a~nd pre- pared to go her way. Luisa! Well! Will you give me that flower you have in your mouth? Luisas only answer was to tighten her lips upon the sprig of pear-blossom, and to pull her handkerchief further over her head. 87 88 Luisa! Luisa laid hold of the cow nearest her, and began to rub its horns with her apron. Luisa! There was no reply. Luisa was still busy with the cows horn. Luisa, will you give me that flower for my hat? A shake of the head was the only answer, and after waiting a little Peter went his way. He had been walking some ten min- utes when he stopped as if an invisible hand had been laid upon him, stood a moment absorbed in thought, shook himself and walked on a few steps, then halted again, and unslung the pack he carried on his back, which was com- posed of a rough pastrano or cloak, and the coarse fustian bag which held his personal property. When the bag lay before him on the road, he stooped to open it, and then suddenly hesitated; once more he stood still, looking with unseeing eyes at the distant landscape, and turning over a problem in his mind. These vacillating movements repre- sented a struggle with the temptation of improvidence, a temptation which now assailed him for the first time. He had in his bag an enormous, rosy- cheeked, shining apple, an apple as round and perfect as if it had been made of wax, and this treasure was intended for his new masters little daughter. He had expatiated upon its beauty when he promised it to her, and therefore must buy another in Bozen if he now gave it away. The one in ques- tion (which had been given to him) was expensive, he knew; and to pay money for fruit had always seemed to him the wildest extravagance. But even while combating these scruples he had taken the apple from his bag, and was polish- ing it on his sleeve and holding it up to the light, the better to admire its exquisite color and smooth perfection. Suddenly he slung his pack on his shoulders again, picked up his staff, and began to climb the hill with fever- ish energy. He had feared that Luisa would be gone, but she was still in the field with her cows. The green edge of The Romance of a Stall. the field made a long, grassy, horizontal line against the sky, and her slow walk, as she followed her cows along this iine, had a certain rhythmic beauty in it. Luisa! She turned her head, stopped, and stood looking down upon him. Luisa, look! And he held up the apple. Catch! and he threw it. She caught it dexterously, laughed, threw it in the air, caught it again, and put it in her pocket with a smile. When the smile had left her lips, she still stood looking down upon him with smil- ing eyes, but she did not speak; perhaps because the sprig of pear-blossom which she held between her teeth rendered speech impossible, perhaps because a natural indolence predisposed her to silence. Meanwhile, Peter, standing on the stony road, wished for the pear- blossom, but dared not ask again for it; wished to begin a conversation but knew not how; and so after two or three uneasy minutes bade the girl farewell and resumed his journey. But after walking fast for twenty minutes or more he halted at a ceri am turn in the winding path, and gazed upward. He was far below Luisa now, too far for speech, but he could see her distinctly, as she sat on the edge of the field with the apple in her hand. She had removed her handkerchief, and her beautiful dark head and charming face stood out in strong relief against the sky. Peter looked long at her, but he did not possess powers of divina- tion, and the three weird sisters, who stood behind her and with grim, im- passive countenances twisted his skein of lire, were invisible to him. He only saw girlish grace and youthful bloom glowing against vast depths of infinite azure; and yet it was with a deep sigh that he at last went his way. Meanwhile Luisa tossed the sprig of pear-blossom, unasked, to a passing swineherd, and turning the pink apple in her hand with a laugh, set her strong white teeth deep in it. II. Peter found his place at Klobenstein satisfactory, and the work quite within his powers; but he was not happy. Rememberiag was no longer the never- failing source of delight which it had been hitherto. He lingered little now in the cow-stall, but spent all his spare time either sitting or lying on the hill outside, and gazing across the valley to the mountains beyond, where on fine days he could see Cavalese like a small white spot in the blue distance. In for- mer years memory would have peopled the rocks and hills, the vast pine forests which clad the mountain-side, and also tee vineyards low down in the valley, with dancing nymphs and satyrs, with fairy kings and queens; but now he only saw a dark-haired girl driving her cows, or standing still and looking at him with the mysterious smile in the corners of her long brown eyes. He saw her again at night, in the troubled dreams which had taken the place of his former quiet slumber. What leagues and leagues he walked in those dreams behind Luisa and her cows! Always within call, yet never within reach; forever moving on before him through vast stretches of green fields, yet always eluding nearer ap- proach, until he would groan aloud for very weariness, and turn on his hard pallet and dream again, more painfully than before, for now he made his way through interminable pine forests, fol- lowing Luisa as she flitted in and out among the red tree boles, playing an endless game of hide-and-seek; forever following, but never finding, for though now and again the bright face seemed near, in an instant the vision had dis- solved into the wavering lights and shadows of the forests. Then with a sigh Peter would awake and toss, and turn and dream once more, the dream which always came just before the dawn. It never changed. In this dream he was with Luisa on the upper Alp, above the forest line, with the short, perfumed grass underfoot and the limitless sky overhead. No one was near, nor was there any sound, but of the cows cropping the soft grass and the summer wind whispering by. There was the round, fiat stone, deep in heather and fern, where she had 89 spread their simple meal; but always, just as she raised her hand to beckon him to a seat by her side, the dream broke, and he had to rise, weary and aching, and go about his daily task. Now, too, apart from dreams by day and night, certain grave anxieties per- plexed him. He wondered perpetually and uneasily whether Luisa were well- placed, well-housed, well-fed, above all, whether she were well guarded. She was so pretty, and men, especially boys, were such rascals; if he could only have her under his own eye! And the fat landlord seemed an angel in disguise when he one day bade him seek for a cow-girl, offering at the same time wages which were far beyond anything paid on the other side of the Adige. III. The journey back to Cavalese, to fetch Luisa and her belongings to Kioben- stein, seemed like the fulfilment of years of longing. And yet it was but six weeks since he first set eyes upon her, when he once more left the village in the early morning with Luisas bag strapped upon his back, and Luisa her- self moving lightly on beside him. The June morning smiled as never morning had smiled before in Peters life, and yet before the day was over a vague uneasiness had taken posses- sion of his soul. It was not Luisa s fault, of course, but all the way down the mountain she had not spoken a word to him, and she had laughed and joked with every man they met. And then, when they reached Atzwang and prepared to climb the precipitous hill, she had sprung on like a young deer, only now and then glancing back and asking the way, but never halting for an instant, and only replying in mono- syllablez when addressed. But ever and anon her eyes smiled upon him, and Peter would take heart of grace and trudge on patiently. They reached Kiobenstein before night-fall, and after Ave Maria sat down, together with a dozen other peas- ants, at the round table upon which smoked the evening meal in a huge platter. Each peasant was provided The Romance of a Stall. 90 with a long iron spoon to dip in the dish. Luisa was quite at her ease; but though she had been put by her mother under Peters care, she would not sit next him, but slipped into a place on the opposite side of the table. All these trifling acts distressed and puzzled him; but he had voluntarily sought the office of guardian, an office not a sinecure at any time, and, as he was soon to dis- cover, fraught with indescribable mis- ery to a man in love. That mortal malady was upon him, but he did not recognize its symptoms. When he rose the next day, an hour before the early summer dawn, in order to do the heavier part of Luisas work before she should come over to the stall; when, Later in the day, the sun was hot on the fields, and he bade her sit still, while he ran about collecting the cows for the re- turn to the stallthese acts would have enlightened many men as to their own feelings, but Peter was naturally un- selfish, and really believed that he only wished to save the girl trouble. Luisa was apparently devoted to her work (it was not her fault if Peter did most of it), quiet, taciturn even, and with a tranquil indifference and indolence in her movements which was the reverse of flaunting; and yet she had not been twenty-four hours in the village before every marriageable peasant was aware of her presence, and more or less agi- tated by it. Although the nature of their avocations threw Peter and Luisa constantly together they were never alone. There was always a third and often more, for nearly every young peasant in or near the village managed to pass the cow-stall once or twice a day; and when the cows were led forth to the upper fields for their daily airing, youths seemed to crop up like mush- rooms, even in the most solitary places, youths at whom Luisa would glance half shyly and half mockingly as she went by, and who ever after haunted her footsteps. Peter began to know the beating heart, the throbbing pulses, the ceaseless unrest, which is the por- tion of those who love in vain. In truth, his passion for the girl raged in his veins like a devastating fever. He was transported by jealousy too, and this led him to commit many follies. He followed and watched Luisa perpet- ually, and for his reward had the pain of seeing young Lieutenant von Stend- horst hold his gold watch to her ear that she might hear it tick, and Prince Giovanellis dignified white-haired valet try his respectable cap with its gold band on her pretty head, while he sub- mitted to be Laughed at by her as she tied her own kerchief under his chin. After such scenes Peter would heap reproofs, reproaches, and warnings upon Luisa; and then, when she, with undisturbed calm, had let fall a few large, bright tears, his heart would melt within him, and he would go to the shop and buy her a present. It was in this way that, in the course of a few weeks, he bought her a fine white cot- ton handkerchief with a border of pink roses for her neck, a Sunday gown of black woollen stuff, and a blue silk apron. Each gift meant repentance on his part, and forgiveness on Luisas. Peter always felt like worshipping her when she forgave him and accepted his gifts; and then, she was always so calm; she never answered him angrily. But if she did not show temper, she still did as she pleased, and the tale of her admirers increased daily, while Peters jealousy grew in proportion. When, after scolding her because of the attentions of the millers Johann in the evening, he found long Seppel, from the upper Alp, at the cow-stall the very next morning, he might have seen that it was best for him to let the girl alone. But love laughs at logic, we are told, and Peters way out of the difficulty was to ask her to marry him. He had not intended to do so, and did not know how he did it; the demand escaped from him unawares, and then he trembled at his own temer- ity. Luisa said nothing at first, but went on with her milking; then, when pressed for an answer, she murmured her usual, Who knows? At any rate, she did not say no, murmured foolish Peter, and thereupon he felt himself betrothed. Now I shall be easy in my mind, he thought. But The Romance of a Stall. ease was not to be his portion. A ray of sunlight is not more quiet or more elusive than was Luisa; and poor Peter, whose love for her racked him like a tor- turing pain, was worn away between uneasy dreams by night and fruitless surveillance by day, till he grew ill, feverish, and irritable. One Sunday morning he rose before the dawn in order to clean the stall be- times, thus leaving Luisa free to dress herself for the procession which was to take place after ten oclock mass. When, at five oclock, the girl came over, he thought she looked pale and tired, and that she replied even more absently than usual. He therefore of- fered to take her work upon himself, and thou,~h he was very tired when he at length went to mass, he was re- warded for his fatigue by the sight of Luisa walking in the procession, and clad in the gown, apron, and kerchief that he had given her. She had never looked so lovely nor rcgarded him so kindly, and he enjoyed that morning a few moments of real happiness. In the afternoon, knowing her to have gone to a neighboring village with the land- lady.s sister, a middle-aged and serious married woman, he permitted himself a quiet rest on the straw in the cow- stall. He had been sleeping for two hours or more when he dreamed that he was stroking Luisas hair, a privi- lege never yet accorded to him. How soft ii was, and how she was laughing! Nohe was stroking the kitten, and it was a mans laugh which ha.d wakened him, lie sat up on the straw and lis- tened; another loud laugh rang upon his ear; then a voice said: Old fool! Shell lead him a pretty dance. It was the voice of the millers Johann, and he heard Rudolf Stein, one of the guides, make some reply. Then Johann went on: A cunning fox! She was dancing all night at Wolfsgruben, when the old fool thought she was asleep. Peter wondered vaguely of whom they were talking, but he did not care much; and then the voices reached him again in fragmentary utterances. Been to Badseis with him this afternoonsit- ting under the tree behind the stall 91 now, billing and cooing. Lucky fel- low! I wish it may be my turn next, answered Rudolf with a laugh. Then the steps and voices retreated, leaving Peter a prey to strange palpi- tations and conjectures. Who was sit- ting under the tree behind the stall now? Only one window looked out upon that tree, and tnat window was merely a pane of glass, high up in the loft. If he climbed up, he could see. Pshaw! What did it matter to him? Then suddenly he heard a kiss, and then a little rippling laugh he knew well, and then more kisses; and then, he knew not how, he had climbed the wall and was looking out. There under the tree sat Luisa, with long Seppels arm round her waist, and her hand in his. Some sound must have disturbed them, for they sprang apart with the adroitness of long habit, Seppel going negligently up the hill, and Luisa pick- ing up her milking-pail. When Peter dropped panting and gasping to the ground, she was standing quietly beside him in all her Sunday bravery. The passions that make tragedy pos- sessed poor Peter then and the only excuse for what he did is to be found in the fact that he was in such a whirl- wind of emotion that he lost conscious- ness of his own existence. It was a madman who now rushed upon the girl and struck her, and then in an instant was on the ground at her feet clasping her knees and praying her to Forgive forgive! Luisa. at the first blow, had thrown down her milking-pail and screamed aloud; scream followed scream until the peasants came rushing in, and after them the landlord and landlady, in high indignation at such a scandal, and the bells ringing for the Ave Maria, and the Herrschaften going by to church! Peter seemed to be listening to a cho- rus of reproach and contempt as the sobbing Luisa was led off by the land- lady, and he himself hustled and kicked out of the stall. At nine oclock he crept out of the hayloft, in which he had taken refuge, heart-broken, con- trite. and quite calm. He went first to the stall, but it was shut and locked, The Romance of a Stall. 92 and he knew that he should never tend Herr Mairs cows again. Then he crossed the green and looked in at the window of the inn. Luisa was sitting at the round table with the other peas- ants; her eyes were swollen, and her cheeks reddened with crying; but she looked lovelier than ever, and his soul melted within him as he gazed. He did not dare to approach her; and when, after receiving, together with his dis- missal, a torrent of reprimand and abuse from the landlord, he again looked in at the window, she had van- ished. In the grey dawn of the next morn- ing, impoverished in purse and injured in rep atation, Peter left Kiobenstein to seek his fortune elsewhere. Luisa had refused to see him, although he had, through the landlady, implored her for- giveness with bitter tears, and had again and again acknowledged that she was too young for him. His tears and entreaties were vain, however, and he went his lonely way with bitterness in his soul. Disappointment, remorse, re- gret, lashed him on like whips; and under their stinging impulse he fled down the mountain, and reached Bozen at nine oclock. Once there, a new thought revived hope and lent him wings; the thought that Anna Morero would perhaps not allow her daughter to keep her place now that he was no longer cowherd. He had left Kiobenstein at four in the morning, and by a miracle of walk- ing, difficult and dangerous in the hot sun, he reached Cavalese at three in the afternoon. Anna was knitting at the door of the cottage, and received him with much surprise. She knew nothing of what had happened, nor did Peter tell her of the blows which tor- tured his own soul in remembrance. When she heard that he had left his place, however, she had nothing but blame for him, and laughed to scorn the idea of removing her daughter. She also ridiculed his attachment to Luisa without mercy. When Peter rose to go, she did indeed offer him food and drink; but she forgot to ask him to step inside the doorway of his own house, and be was too agitated to notice the ommis- sion. Youve been an old fool, Peter, and thats the truth, was her farewell, and in the depths of his soul the poor fel- low knew that she was right. Then the hammers began to beat in his head again, and the thought that now Luisa could be with long Seppel as much as she pleased drove him on. In the blaz- ing noontide sun he had climbed the mountain; in the face of the declining sun he again descended it. Descended! that is hardly the word for the way in which the raging, panting maniac dashed headlong down, bruising hini- self against rocks and trees but never pausing in his mad flight. Dusk bad fallen when he reached Bozen, and a hot, breathless stillness was in the air. Save for the fever in his blood Peter would have dropped exhausted; but he looked at the heights which rose be- yond him, and the thought of Luisa with long Seppel lashed him like a whip. He was crossing the railway- track now, and a loud roaring was in his ears, but he had heard it all day; shouts, too, he heard, but they only con- fused him. He hastened on, hearing more shouts; then suddenly came a crash and a grinding pain, which how- ever was but momentary, and then he found himself lying on his back, and looking up at the stars with a great calm upon him. He was vaguely con- scious of being surrounded by kindly, compassionate faces, and of hearing voices no longer speaking in tones of reproach; but he fainted as he was being carried to the hospital, and was put under the influence of chloroform while his legs were being amputated; and it is doubtful if he were ever really clear in his mind after that. On the fourth day after his accident gangrene set in, and on the fifth he died. At nine in the morning he had received the last sacraments, and as the priest stood beside his bed, a ray of sunshine shone on the crucifix he held, and Peter had a momentary gleam of consciousness. Am I so ill as that? he cried, then relapsed into uncon- sciousness an~ a silence never after- The Romance of a Stall. ward broken. At a quarter to eleven he began to breathe loudly and irreg- ularly with frequent halts. The priest had gone; only the sisters were in the crowded ward. The heat was intense, and through the open windows the dust entered in clouds. The buzzing of in- numerable flies, the vibration of the window-panes caused by the continual passing of heavy drays, the shriek and whistle of the locomotive, as trains en- tered and left the railway station, made a confusion of coarse sounds which so filled the air that it was difficult to hear that long-drawn, laboring breath. At twenty minutes past eleven it ceased altogether, and the curtains were drawn about the bed where Number Eighty- one had breathed his last. No one had known his name. While Peter was dying, Luisa was sitting in the pine wood which bordered the upper field, where her cows were grazing. The heat in the field was in- tense, but she sat in deep shade, dab- bling her feet in a pool of water, and holding up in a slanting ray of sunlight a string of yellow beads which long Seppel had just given her. Long Sep- pel himself was lying at full length on the bank beside her, and, propped up on his elbows, was playing a tune on the mouth-organ, that instrument so dear to the Tyrolese peasant. Pretty! said Luisa, as she looked at the transparent yellow beads. Do you love me, Luisa? Will you marry me ? said long Seppel abruptly, ceasing to play. Who knows ? said Luisa glancing sideways at him out of her long eyes. But she leaned her round cheek towards him as she said it, and Seppel kissed her, and knew. From The New Review. THE ASSASSINATION OF NASIRIJD-DIN SHAH. It is hard at times to resist the belief that for certain families certain dates, days. or months possess a strange fatality., For the K~j~r Dynasty, 93 which has exercised undisputed sway over Persia for more than a century, and of which Mtsirud-DIn Shah was the fourth la succession, the Muham- madan month of Zul-Kada seems thus fateful. On the twenty-first of that month, in the year of the Flight 1211 (18th May, 1797), Ak~ Muhammad Kh~n, first of the dynasty, fell by an assassins hand. On the twenty-second of that month, A.H.12f34 (20th October, 1848), N~sirud-Dfn was crowned king. And now, on the eighteenth of the same month (which, by the retrogression of the Muhammadan lunar year, has again returned to May) comes the news that he, too, has fallen by the hand of an assassin, when already throughout Persia, and in every Persian colony, the preparations for the celebration of his Jubilee were almost complete. The assassin, MIrz~ Muhammad Riz~ of Kirm~n, was taken red-handed, ere he had time to accomplish his avowed intention of turning his weapon against himself. An evil thing for him that he failed! He has made admissions, we are told, implicating others; but as to the means whereby these admissions were extorted we hear nothing, nor is it a question on which the mind cares to dwell. Meanwhile, speculation is rife as to the motives which prompted the mur- der. Were they religious, personal, or political? Does.the assassin stand alone, or is he one of an organized party? If so, what are the aspirations and designs of that party, who are they, and what is their numerical strength? The ques- tion is of importance, if we would forecast the future; for the existence of a revolutionary association, and of the discontent which this implies, would evidently be a serious menace to the tranquillity of the new kings reign. It was stated in the first telegrams that the assassin was supposed to be- long to the B~bf sect. What the grounds for this assumption may have been, if, indeed, there were any grounds, does not appear. Presumably it was thought that because in the year 1852 three Btibfs did actually make an The Assassination of N6sirud-Din Shah. 94 attempt on the late shahs life, as he rode forth to the chase one August day from his palace of Niy~1var~Ln, therefore, on the principle that history repeats itself, any similar attempt must proceed from the same source. This shallow and superficial view, based on analogies altogether false, could hardly have commended itself to any thoughtful person who was at all conversant with the present attitude and position of the B~bIs, and would (now that positive evidence of its falsity is forthcoming), be scarcely worth re- futing, but for the suffering it may entail on innocent persons. Even now, notwithstanding all that has been written about the B~bi:s, so much misconception exists, that one evening paper of reputation described them as a secret criminal association, and another asserted that they had on four occasions attempted the shahs life. They are, then, essentially a religious, not a political, sect. They take their name from the title B~b (Gate) assumed by their Founder, MIrz~ AH Muhammad of Shfr~z, who suffered martyrdom at Tabrfz on 8th July, 1850, in his thirtieth year. Him they venerate as a prophet and more than a prophet, the bringer of a revela- tion and a law which abrogate the Kur~n and the Law of Islam. They are not, therefore, so much Muham- madan schisrnatics as the adherents of a new faith designed to replace Islam altogether. They stand in the same relation to the Muhammadans as the Christians do to the Jews; and if they preserve such rites as circumcision, the Meccan pilgrimage, and the fast of Ramazcin, it is rather from expediency or habit than from any belief in their efficacy. On more important questions, too, such as the future of the human soul, rewards and punishments after death, and the like, they hold views widely divergent from those of the Mussulmans. Their religious litera- ture, partly in Persian, partly in Arabic, is extremely voluminous. Their doctrines, though sufficiently characteristic, are not in all points fully fprmulated. That which they all possess in common is an entire devotion to their spiritual chiefs, an ardent zeal for the spread of their faith, a strange contempt of death, and, as a rule, a high degree of morality and intelligence. The sect, though open to all, consists almost entirely of Persians, and is represented in Turkey, Russia, India, Syria, Cyprus, and Egypt, though its main strength is naturally in Persia, where the number of its adherents has been estimated by a recent authority at from half a million to a million. But, it may be asked, what is there in all this against the assumption that these B~ubis are responsible for the shahs death? He killed their prophet, he slew them by hundreds, he laid waste their homes, he drove them into exile. You say that they are essentially a religious sect, but the annals of most religious sects in the East are defaced by histories of assassinations; nay, for the very word Assassin are we not indebted to a sect of Persian origin and essentially religious character? Above all, have not the B~bis once already attempted the life of N~sirud- Din Shah? All this is perfectly true, but circum- stances have changed. The attempt of 1852 was an explosion of despair, pro- voked by several successive years of unrelenting and ruthless persecution, culminating in the execution, with circumstances of great barbarity, of the founder of the new faith. Even that attempt was, and ever has been, strongly condemned by the responsible leaders of the movement. These lead- ers, men of great ability, whose influ- ence over their followers is unbounded, have steadily and systematically ex- horted their adherents to patience, meekness, and submission, even under the severest provocation, and have entirely declined to associate them- selves with the various disaffected per- sons and parties who have from time to time sought to gain their alliance. Since the year 1852 the sect has been perfectly quiet, and has consistently pursued a policy of conciliation towards the Persian government. What they desired was toleration and recognition, The Assassination of N4sirud-if9in Shah. The Assassination of N4sirud-Din Shah. and these they hoped to gain by proving that they were honest and law-abiding citizens, asking no more than liberty to hold their faith. Still more stress must be laid on the total absence of motive for such an act at the present time. For many years the B~lbfs have only been subjected to occasional persecutions, which have in all cases been due either to the fanaticism of the orthodox Shiite doctors, or to the enmity or greed of individual governors, or to these two causes combined. For most of them, not the tate shah, but his eldest son, the Zillus-Sult~n, was responsible. Indeed, the shah himself seems latterly to have recognized that the B~bis were guiltless of seditious designs, and even on some occasions to have interferred in their favor, as in the case of the persecution of Naja- f~bftd, near Isfahf~n, in the spring of 1890. From the shahs death, then, the B~bfs had nothing to hope and very much to fear. For, in the first place, suspicion might fall, as it has fallen, on them, and cause a fresh outbreak of persecution, besides discrediting them in the eyes of the world, imperilling the security of their settlements in Turkey and elsewhere, and undoing all the good effected by the policy of peace and patience which they have for so long adopted. And, in the second place, they knew that the shahs death must be followed by the accession of his second son, Muzaffarud-DIn, hitherto known as the Yalf-ahd, or crowii prince; or by the accession of his eldest son, the Zillus-Sult~n, who was at one time supposed to have designs on the throne; or by a period of war and anarchy. Of these three contingencies each is, from the B~bi point of view, fraught with danger, especially the two last. Little is yet known of the character of Muzaffarud-DIn, but, though personally liked by all who have come in contact with him, he is believed to be under the influence of the Mull~is, or Shiite clergy, who are the fiercest foes of heretics in general and of the Bflbis in particular. As for the Zillus-Sultfin, no one has used the Bfibis worse; and, so far as the writer can recollect, every recent persecution to which they have been subjected has taken, place in the districts of which he is governor. Lastly, should a period of anarchy supervene, all the smaller religious communities, Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Bf~bfsespecially the lastwould be certain to suffer at the hands of the rabble which exists in every large Persian town, and which is only too prone to make religious zeal a cloak for all manner of excesses. Even assuming, then, that the B~bis would not shrink from assassination if it served their ends, is it to be supposed that they would deliberately and with- out irresistible provocation, precipitate an event fraught with peril, and devoid of even the possibility of advantage? These considerations, to my mind, render untenable the hypothesis that the assassin was an emissary of the Bdbfs, though it is likely enough that attempts may be made, especially by the Mull~s, to fix the crime upon them. We come next to the question: Was the assassins motive wholly personal and private? Was it the desire to re- venge some real or fancied wrong suffered at the hands of the shah or his government which prompted the deed? Personal motives may have existed; nay, did exist, if it be true, as stated in later telegrams, that Mfrzf~ Rizft had been imprisoned on account of his attacks on the Persian government; yet they can hardly be regarded as in themselves adequate, especially as the assassin had, subsequently to his re- lease, been assigned a pension by the shah. The murderers of Ak~ Muham- mad Kh~n, the first Kftj~r king, were indeed actuated by personal motives; but then they, being already under sentence of death, could hardly make their case worse, and thought, perhaps, that there was some truth in the Per- sian proverb, Marg-i-anbfih jashnf d~rad (The death of a company has something of festivity). Assuming the sanity of the assassin, where is the motive sufficiently strong to make him face the certainty of death and the 96 96 probability of torture, for the sake of gratifying his revenge? If the above reasoning be sound, we are driven back to the third hypothesis, that, namely, of a more or less wide- spread political discontent, finding its expression in this deed of violence. Now, for some rimecertainly since the year 1889 or 1890there have not been wanting signs that such discontent existed pretty widely amongst the Persian people. How far back beyond that time its growth can be traced, only residents in the country familiar with the feelings of the people can say. Its external manifestation, 50 far as I know, began with the publication of a newspaper called the Kdrnin (Law), which, printed in London, was widely circulated in the shahs domains. The first issue was dated 20th February, 1890, and it continued to appear monthly for some considerable time. The later numbers differ in some re- spects from the earlier, in that they bear neither date, printers name, nor Euro- pean title. Under the Persian title stood three words, signifying Union, Justice, Progress. Needless to say that it contained no mention of the editors names, and no signed articles or letters. This newspaper at first directed its attacks chiefly against the shahs prime minister, the Amfuns-Sultan, whom it commonly alluded to as the mule- teers son. Of the shah himself it spoke during the first period of its existence in terms of praise, as of one sincerely desirous for the welfare of his subjects, and especially for the estab- lishment of a fixed and equitable code of law. As for its complaints, they were manifold. The control of all State affairs in the hands of ignorant and low-born men; national rights bartered away to please dragomans of legations our army the laughing-Stock of the world; our princes deserving of the pity of beggars; our divines and doctors driven to seek justice from unbelievers our cities sinks of filth; our roads not fit for cattle. In brief, the Persians were reminded of their an- cient greatness. and invited to prove themselves men by insisting on re- dress. Attempts were naturally made by the shahs government to stop the circuh- tion of this paper in Persia, and a number of persons in whose possession it was found, or who were suspected of corresponding with its editors, were arrested and imprisoned. Probably in consequence of this the tone of the paper grew more violent, and it began to speak of the shah himself, first with con- tempt, as a king only in name, entirely subject to the influence of the prime minister, and latterly with declared hostility, as a determined enemy to the national welfare, and a foe to liberty, progress, and constitutional government. The later numbers, too, exchanged in great measure the charac- ter of the newspaper for that of political tracts, and the fiction of corre- spondence and discussion was suffered to drop. In the same year, 1890, the Tobacco Concession granted to an English coni- pany caused widespread discontent amongst the Persian people. This dis- content was natural and excusable. The poorer classes have few luxuries, except tobacco. They saw this one luxury taxed and restricted, and a host of small retail tobacconistS ruined, to enrich foreigners, and to put fifteen thousand pounds a year, and a quarter of the companys profits, in the pockets of the shah and some of his advisers. Even the usually docile Persian press, as soon as the provisions of the Concession were made known to it, spoke out with extraordinary boldness. The A1chtai~ (star), published weekly at Constanti- nople, in its issue of 11th November, 1890, quoted from the Turkish Sabdh (Morning) the terms of the agreement, on which it animadverted strongly. In consequence of this it was suspended for a while, because it had ventured to give expression to the discontent which was smouldering in the hearts of the Persian people. The boldness of the Akhtar was sufficient to suggest to any attentive observer that the discontent aroused by this unfortunate Concession was much The Assassination of N6sirud-Din Shah. JY~e Assassiuatiou of Nyuisirud-Diu 811a11. greater and more serious than was generally supposed. Two great mis- takes are commonly made by English- men in their estimate of the factors involved in any problem of Persian politics. They regard the priests and the people as a negligible quantity, conceiving that the good-will of the autocratic monarch and his chosen ministers is all that is necessary for the success of their schemes; and they arc apt to think (if they think about it at all) that whatever is good for English commerce is good for Persian happiness. Now, the endurance of the Persian people, patient, long-suffering, and indifferent to politics (as w-e understand the word) though they be. ha~ its limits, and those limits do not alw:mv S lie exactly where European statcs:ut a and men of business expect. They hay c no opportunity of ventilating their grievances, but, brooding over them in silence, are apt at long intervals to sur- prise the world by the sudden vigor of their action. Patriotic feeling in our sense of the term, they do not perhaps possess, save in. a rudimentary form; but they have strong religious emotions of the other-worldly, Celtic type (widely different from the rather utilitarian and common-sense English kind), with which they combine a cer- tain silent pride in their own nation- ality. and a latent, but easily roused, distrust and dislike of foreigners. The Muilds, or clergy (to use this term for want of a better), whatever their faults, are a truly national class. Sprung, as a rule, from the people, they understand them thoroughly, and exer- cise over them an enormous influence. Interest, as a rule, ranges them on the side of the government, but woe betide that shah who has the misfortune to array them against himself! Now, in this matter of the Tobacco Concession, the Muilds were at one with the peo- ple. Other concessions were in the air, concessions to the English in the south and south-west, and to the Russians in the north and north-west, concessions for railways tramways, mines, lotteries, and the like. The Persian people. burdened with taxes, unhelped. and LIVIN AGE. VOL. XI. 527 97 unregarded, were weary of these con- cessions, which they regarded as detri- mental to their interests; while the Muiltis watched with jealous eyes the increasing influence of foreign infidels. The smouldering fire of discontent was cunningly fanned, especially by one man of remarkable ability and restless ambition. As a result, forces hitherto inchoate and undirected w-ere blended and co-ordinated; the shah had to give way before them; the Tobacco Conces- sion was revoked, and the company indemnified at the expense of Persia. Russias proposal to lend the Persians the money required for this indemnifi- cation was the subject of some fine diplomacy, and of much talk in the press about the conflict of English and Russian interests in the East, and our commercial supremacy; and then the matter passed out of the public mind. Its real significance lay in the fact that for once the Persian people had exerted its w-lll, and had got its way in the teeth of the shah and European enterprise. The man to whom I have alluded al)ove as one of the chief fomenters of the popular discontent, was the man whose name the shahs assassin is re- ported to have invoked as he fired his fatal shotSheykh Jemdlud-Dfn. Within the last few days, since sus- tidelon turned on him, and the Persian government has been endeavoring to obtain his extradition from Constanti- nople, some account of his past achievements has appeared in the daily papers. Here is more, derived in part from a biography by one of his admirers, prefixed to a tract on refuta- tion of free-thinkers. His full name is Seyyid Muhammad Jemdlud-Din, son of Seyyid Saftar, and he was born in 1838, SO that he is now tifty-cight years of age. He calls bun- self an Afghan of Kanar. near Kdbul, but is said to he in reality a Persian of Ilamaddn. After studying Arabic, law, traditions, Muslim theology, and phi- losophy in. all their branches, astron- omy. medicine, and mathematics, he left his country at the age of eighteen, and went to India. where he remained rather more than a year. After per- 98 forming the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1856, he returned to Afghanistl~n and entered on a political career, which was brought to a close by the defeat of Muhammad Azam (whose cause he had espoused) by ShIr Ali. Thinking it prudent to retire from the scene, he again (in 1868) set out on his travels, and, after a short sojourn in India, pro- ceeded by way of Egypt to Constanti- nople, where he succeeded in gaining the favor of All P~sh~, then grand vizier. He was, however, unfortunate enough to incur the enmity of the Sheykhul-Isl~m, Hasan Febml Efendl, in consequence of which he found it advisable to leave Constantinople in March, 1871, for Egypt. There he re- mained till 1879, when Tewffk P~sh~ (acting, says the biographer, on the advice of Mr. Vivian, the English con- sul-general) ordered his expulsion. He therefore returned to India, where he settled at Haidarabad, in the Deccan; but, on the breaking out of Art~bI Pttsh~s revolt, he was summoned to Calcutta, and there detained by the Indian government until the conclusion of the Egyptian War in 1883. He now determined to visit Europe, and came first to London, but soon crossed over to Paris, where, in conjunction with Sheykh Muhammad Abdo the Egyp- tian, he began to publish an Ara- bic newspaper entitled el- Urwatul- wuthkd (Le Lien Indissoluble). The object of this journal, which was dis- tributed gratuitously in the East, was to stir up Muhammadan feeling against the English, whom the editors attacked in the most violent language. Eighteen numbers in all were published, but the stoppage of its circulation in India eventually caused its collapse, and Sheykh Jem~lud-Dfn, after a sojourn of more than three years in Paris, again set out for t~e East in February, 1886. He visited Persia, from which in due course he was expelled, as he had been expelled from almost every other country which he had visited. In 1891 he was back in London, holding forth in the press and at drawing-room meet- ings on what he was pleased to call the Reign of Terror in Persia, and The Assassination of N4sirud-14n Shah. attacking the Persian government, and in particular the shah and his prime minister, the Amfnus-Sult~n, with the same violence which he had formerly displayed against the English. Since then he has resided chiefly at Constanti- nople, favored by the sultan, whose fancy is pleased by schemes of a Muhammadan world united under one caliph, but subjected to a supervision of varying stringency. Whether the sultans favor will continue, and will protect him from the resentment of the Persian government, is a very interest- ing problem. Of pleasing manners and command- ing personality, eloquent in speech, able, and accomplished, it is to be deeply regretted that Sheykh Jem~lud- DIn should have exercised his really remarkahie talents chiefly for seditious ends. That he actually compassed the death of the late shah we will not ven- ture to assert; nay, it may be that he will deplore the deed of violence wherein the agitation which he pro- moted has culminated. Agitators possessed by a great ideal do not always remember that they may set in motion forces beyond their control. And Sheykh Jem~lud-DIn, apart from his personal enmities, has without doubt a great idealthe desire to unite in one mighty nation all Muhammadan peo- ples, and to restore the ancient power and glory of Isl~(m. To check European encroachment in the East is a necessary part of this scheme; and any Muham- madan potentate who encourages, or acquiesces in, an extension of Western influence in his domains must be re- garded by the promoters of the move- ment as an enemy to their cause. Thus, the blood of N~sirud-Dln Shah is the price paid for successive triumphs of English and Russian diplomacy in P,~rsia. That royal blood which leaves its crimson stain There in the mosque, beyond the inner chain, Thou deemest shed by Eastern lust for blood: Not so! twas shed by Western greed for gain! EDWARD G. BROWNIC. From Longmans Magazine. LETTERS ON TURKEY. I. THE SELAMLIK. We must all of us during the past year, when every newspaper para- graph from Constantinople was eagerly scanned, have observed such expres- sions as the sultan received the ambassadors after the Selamlik, or H.I.M. the sultan attended the Selamlik as usual. Those who have never had the opportunity of witness- ing a Selamlik may be interested in an account of this gorgeous weekly pag- eant. We had not been more than a few days at Constantinople, when our am- bassador told us that he had received a message from the sultan that he was bien facbe at not having been in- formed of my husbands arrival, and that after so gracious a notice we must not fail to attend the next Selamlik that is, the ceremony of the sultan going in state to the mosque on Fridays, attendance at which is looked on by H.I.M. as a mark of respect. Friday came, and about eleven oclock our son, secretary at the British em- bassy, called for us in a carriage with an embassy kavass on the box. A kavass is a native servant appointed by the sultan to the various embassies and legations. They are paid and clothed by their employers, and are answerable to the sultan for the safety of those on whom they attend. In old days if any accident happened to a member of a legation or embassy, the wretched kavass, whether in fault or not, forfeited his life. Those who have read Paul Patoff will remember the terror of the kavass on Alexander Patoffs mysterious disappearance from St. Sophia. There are six kavasses at the British embassy. Their undress uniform is dark blue cloth, thickly braided in black, with a broad gold belt and gold straps over the shoulders. They all carry a sword, and have a revolver in a gold pouch slung from the waist-belt. The dress uniform is a- fine shade of crimson, also thickly braided, 99 and only worn on State occasions when in attendance on the ambassador. We were all in morning dress, uni- form being worn but seldom by the diplomatic corps at Constantinople. Our way was along the new part of the Grande Rue, the only hand- some street in Pera, rebuilt after the great fire of 1870, which destroyed the British embassy. Here are all the best shops, the Club House, and the Spanish ministry. A sharp turn to the right led us to the Grand Champ des Morts, still used for burials. This was our first sight of a Turkish cemetery with its turban-crowned tomb-stones, standing at any and every angle from the perpen- dicular, many even fallen down, and giving one that general impression of neglect conveyed by all Turkish ceme- teries. The redeeming points are the huge cypresses planted by hundreds in every cemetery, large and small, and of a size quite unknown in England. They form a striking feature in every distant view of the city, as they sur- round each mosque, their dark foliage forming a strong contrast to the glittering white minarets. On the hills, as at Scutari and the Grand Champ des Morts, they stand out like black pillars against the bright blue sky. The Turkish women are fond of spending whole days, sitting on their carpets in the cemeteries, not from any deep affection for the dead, for the Turk cares little for the body when once buriedthe soul, the true being they loved, is safe in Paradise, though only from the moment that the body is laid in the ground. For this reason the funerals take place as soon as possible after death, and if you meet a Turkish funeral, the procession is hurrying along in what appears to us the most indecorous haste, so that the soul may the more quickly attain to its final bliss. A devout Turk, passing a coffin, will give his aid to the bearers, exhausted by the speed at which they go. This aid, if only given for forty paces, secures the pardon of a heavy crime. The sweet scent of the cypresses is said to prevent any ill effects from pro- longed visits to the cemeteries. Opposite the Grand Champ is the Letters on Turkey. Letters on Turkey. huge palace of the German embassy with its unrivalled view across the Bos- phorus. A steep zigzag road led us down to the fine marble Palace of Dolmabaghcheh on the Bosphorus now only used twice a year, at the great Bairam receptions. Built by Sultan Abdul Medjid, it was a favorite residence of its builder and of the unfortunate Abdul Aziz. It was from this palace that he was carried off, after his dethronement in 1876, first to the Seragilo and then to the Palace of Cheragan, a little further up the Bos- phorus, where his life soon came to its untimely end. From this point the road alon~ the whole suburb of Beshiktash was crowded with troops on their way to the Selamlik. At each cross street we passed whole companies standin~ at ease after a lonb and dusty march, wiping their accoutrements and dusty boots, their officers in fullest uniform resting outside the many cafes which line the street, smoking and sipping coffee. A sharp turn to the left and inland led to the steep ascent to the Palace of Yildiz, where the sultan always lives and which he now only quits to visit the mosque, a stones throw from the gates of Yildiz, or when, twice a year, he receives the dignitaries of the kingdom on the occasion of the Bairaim festivals at Dolmabaghebeb. The latticed windows of the houses show that all this quarter is Turkish. In the poorer houses, where the women of the family do the work, the whole house is latticed. In the richer houses, where slaves are kept, only the harem is thus guarded, whilst in the selamlik, or mens part, where the women never enter, the windows are free. The active little Arab horses take a steep hill at a gallop, and we had scarcely time to notice the various groups of foot passengers, all pressing up the hill to the same spot: Arabs in their turbans and long shapeless coats; solemn Turks in fez and frock-coat, sometimes leading a little boy whose dress was the ditto of their own; women of the lower classes, with their white headgear; dervishes in their tall brown caps, like Irish hats without a brim; gaily dressed Turkish grooms leading exquisite horses, splendidly caparisoned, whose masters, equally splendid, awaited them above near the palace; ulemahs, sheikhs, muftis, all bent on a sight of the sultan, whom they reverence not merely as their sovereign, but as the caliph, the successor or vicar of the Prophet. At last we drew up opposite the mosque, before a low, white building, from the windows of which those intro- duced by the diplomatic corps can see the ceremony. We passed across a ter- race on which stood those who had not secured tickets of admission, and where crowds of pashas and aides-de- camp were waiting till the time came to take their appointed places. After giving our visiting cards at the door of the building, we entered and found we were in good time to secure front places in one of the windows. The scene was already full of life and interest. Exactly opposite across the road rose the small white mosque, standing in the midst of a large gray- elled space. To the right, just beyond the road by which we had climbed the hill, were massed two large bodies of cavalry, one mounted on grey, the oLiler on brown horses. They were what we should call lancers, and their red pennons shone in the bright sunlight. In front of them were many hundreds of Turkish women, their heads covered with the large white linen covering which marks the poorer classes, as distinguished from the yashmak, or fine muslin headdress worn by ladies. A corner of this linen is drawn over the mouth. The male spectators in their varied garments stood where they could. And now the first band was heard, and the line regiments one after another marched swiftly up the hill and took up their positions all down the various roads that surround the mosque. Immediately under our win- dows were two regiments of Zonaves,. with green turbans and loose red trousers, and white gaiters. They came down the hill from the direction of the palace, with a fine, swinging, elastic step, preceded by their band. Opposite across the road were the regiment of marines, with their large 100 Letters on Turkey. sailor collars. In all about eight thou- sand troops are massed each week round the mosque, a splendid sight in itself, for the Turkish soldiers are well drilled, and well clothed, whilst the officers uniforms are resplendent with gold lace and generally covered with orders. Men and offices alike wear the fez. A brilliant company of mounted officers had gradually been gathering under our windows, and opposite us were a group of boys in rich uniforms. These were the princes, the sultans sons, and the boys who are educated with them. Whilst the troops are wait- ing, the water-carriers pass to and fro among them, and we saw the tin cups eagerly held out and passed by the front rows to those in the back. At this moment some one near us exclaimed: Here comes his Excellency, and looking out, we saw our ambassador drivin,. up the hill, his carriage pre- ceded by two mounted kavasses in their state crimson uniforms. Presently a number of small carts drawn by don- keys or ponies. and filled with gravel, came past, and the contents were quickly spread over the road in front of us, down which the sultan will pass. This is the last act of preparation, and now every one below us is on the qui vive. Servants hurry towards the mosque, carrying small black portman- teaux in which are the epaulette~, orders, etc., of their masters, who have marched or driven up without their decorations, and who will meet the sultan at the mosque without joining the procession. The chief eunuch is pointed out to us, a very tall, stout, elderly negro who, preceded by his ser- vant bearing the portmanteau, descends leisurely towards the mosque. He ranks as third Altesse in the kingdom, taking precedence even of the young khedive of Egypt. Just then a mes- sage came that we were to go to the ambassadors kiosk nearer the palace, which we did, and found we had a far better view, looking on one side to the gates of Yildiz, and on the other to the hill which rose behind the cavalry. We had hardly taken our places when some one said: Here come the ladies of the 101 harem, and a procession of about six closed carriages, splendidly appointed, descended from Yildiz, and, passing in front of our windows, turned in at the iron gates of the court of the mosque. Here they are drawn up one behind the other, the horses are taken out, and the ladies see what they can from under the half-drawn blinds. Each carriage has its own hideous black attendant. The valideh sultan, the sultans mother, takes precedence. The present valideh sultan is really Abdul Hamids nurse, his own mother died when he was born. As the carriages passed us, we could only catch a glimpse of the brilliant pink and blue and yellow brocades worn by the ladies, except that on one occasion a young daughter of the sultan, not yet old enough to be veiled, passed in one of the carriages and looked up at us, with an expression of great curiosity and interest. By this time the court of the mosque was filled by pashas, aides- de-camp, and officials of all sorts in glittering uniforms, only leaving room for the sultans carriage and those who are in his procession. And now we look up at the minaret, and see that the muezzin has appeared on the gallery, which runs round it high up, for it is some time past twelve, and he only awaits the moment of the sultan leaving his palace to begin his shrill call to prayer. All this time various bands have been playing one after another, entirely European music; but now they pause, and we hear faintly borne on the breeze, for he has turned towards the south, and has the minaret between us and him, the muezzins first call: God is great. I bear witness there is no god but God. I bear witness that Moham- med is theApostle of God. Come hither to prayers. Come hither to salvation. God is great. There is no god but God. As the muezzin moves round the cry becomes more audible. Hark! there is a tramp of feet on the fresh- strewn gravel, it is the long line of pashas who head the procession, all in splendid uniforms, covered with orders, marching one behind the other on each side of the road, down the hill from the palace to the entrance of the mosque, 102 Letters on Turkey. where they draw up in front of those last cry, addressed to the sultan, and already waiting there. They are only used on this occasion, Remember followed by some five or six officials, there is One greater than thou. And ministers who walk together in the so the sultan passes into the mosque middle of the road. Then we hear the and is lost to sight, and the pashas first notes of the rlamideyeh, the hurry in at the public entrance to join sultans march. His Imperial Majesty in the prayers. When the attendance is has passed the gates of Yildiz, and very large and the small mosque is every neck is turned to catch the first overcrowded, prayer-carpets are brought glimpse of his magnificent carriage, out into the court of the mosque, that Listen to the cheers, taken up by each all may join in the service. Faintly regiment as he passes, not the ringing through the open doors we hear the cheers of the English, nor the Rah-rah nasal sing-song of the prayers, and we of the Swedes, nor the loud HocI& of the can watch the worshippers outside as Germans, nor the quick Viva of the they prostrate themselves at the name italians, but something like a deep, of Allah, rising and falling in perfect earnest, prolonged hum, solemn, yet unison. heart~stirring. And now the green Now we have time to talk to our enamelled and richly gilded barouche friends, and are made acquainted with comes in sight, drawn by two glorious the French ambassador, the Swedish black horses covered with gold harness, minister, and others. Black-robed driven by a man in bright blue and gold attendants bring in the most excellent livery, on each side the grooms in blue tea and carry round cigarettes, and the and gold, and every man in sight, naval, time of waiting passes pleasantly away. military, civil, master, or servant, in After a while the grand master of cere- the all-pervading, but all-becoming fez! monies enters, charged with his im- In the carriage sits a small yet stately penal masters greetings. To our sur- man, in a simple cloth military over- prise, he tells us that we are to be coat, with no order or decoration of any received in private audience after the sort, only his curved sword, and a fez sultan has seen the French and English like all the rest; his large hooked nose ambassadors. When the weather is proclaims his Armenian mother, his cooler, the troops march past the sultan, piercing eyes are raised to our window who appears after the prayers at the as he passes, and one feels he recog- window of a small building which joins nizes some of the faces there, but his on to the mosque, as a vestry does in our face is still and immovable, and he churches. But it is too hot to-day, and salutes no one, though his whole person the troops begin slowly to move away, has a faint swaying motion, so faint without music. A cloud of dust to the that it may only be caused by the move- right shows where the cavalry are ment of the carriage. Opposite his passing, and soon the various regiments Imperial Majesty sits Osman Ghazi, have dispersed, except those lining the the hero of Plevna, almost his only inti- direct road to the palace. As we look mate friend, whom he trusts implicitly, out we see that they all turned towards The carriage is followed by six superb the mosque as soon as the sultan had riding horses, pure Arabs, each led by passed by. In a little over half an hour a groom, the prayer-carpets are taken up, and Slowly the glittering cort~ge passes, the pashas inside the mosque begin to turns in at the mosque gates, amid thc reappear and crowd the court. Then a cheers of the surrounding pashas, and low open phaeton with two fine horses, draws up at the marble steps to the snow white, a present from the em- left of the public entrance. As the peror of Austria, is led round to the sultan steps out of his carriage in his marble steps, and the sultan comes out, simple dress, the centre of this gorgeous whilst the pashas bow to the very pageant, the muezzin above leans over ground. He gets in, the hood is pulled the gallery of the minaret and utters his up, and his Majesty, driving himself, Letters on Turkey. starts for the palace at a smart trot, grooms, aides-de-camp and pashas, thin and stout, all running behind. His Imperial Majesty looks now neither to right nor left, and quickly disappears behind the palace gates, and the Selamlik is over. H. TIlE PALACE OF YILDIZ. I have already mentioned that we were to be received in private audience by the sultan after the Selamlik. We were shown through one or two rooms, into a small audience chamber, simply furnished except for the rich carpets, where we found H.I.M., the grand master of ceremonies, the English am- bassador, and the first dragoman, who acted as interpreter, for it is not etiquette for the sultan to speak, or even to appear to understand, any language but Turkish, though he is a good French scholar. Nothing could be more tiattering than the reception accorded to my husband or more gracious than H.I.M.s manner to me and our son. Cigarettes were offered, the sultan himself striking and handing on the match. We were all seated on chairs in a circle, the sultan placing me immediately on his right. He had read one of my husbands works in a French translation, and seemed much gratified at our expressions of admiration of what we had already seen of his beautiful capital. On rising to dismiss us, he presented my husband with the Order of the Medjidich, high- est class, and, offering me his arm, led me to the door of the room, a mark of the greatest condescension, and much commented on as such in the papers the next morning. The sultan had said that we were to see his private museum, library, and garden, and accordingly when we left we found one of the chamberlains and the grand ecuyer1 waiting to show us those parts of the palace to which no strangers are admitted. I believe we were the first foreigners (except the 1 A most attractive man, now in banishment as an active member of the Young Turkey party. famous traveller Vamb~ry, who is an intimate friend of the sultan) who had ever visited these parts of the palace. Leaving the kiosk where we had been received, immediately behind the room used by the ambassadors at the Selamlik, we walked up the steep hill down which the sultan drives to the mosque, and passing through the principal entrance to Yildiz, we turned to the left. On our right rose the high bare harem walls, higher than any prison walls in England; a closed and carefully guarded doorway admitted us inside these walls. Leaving a beautiful kiosk to our left, and passing through a narrow passage, we came suddenly on a scene of marvellous beauty. Yildiz stands on the summit of the highest hill of the capital, and here before us lay a large lake or arti- ficial river, covered with caiques and boats of all shapes, an electric launch among others. The gardens sloped to the lake on all sides, the lawns as green, the turf as well kept as in the best En- glish gardens. Exquisite shrubs and palms were planted in every direction, whilst the flower borders were a blaze of color. The air was almost heavy with the scent of orange blossom, and gardeners were busy at every turn sprinkling the turf, even the crisp gravel walks, with water. The harem wall, now on our right, rose no longer bare, but covered to the very top with yellow and white Banksia roses, helio- trope, sweet verbena, passion flowers, etc. Thousands of white or silvery- grey pigeonsthe Prophets birdflew in and out of a huge pigeon-house, built against the walls, half hidden by the creepers, and the whole scene was lighted up by the brilliant Eastern sun- light, in which every object stands out so clearly that ones sense of distance is almost lost. At the end of the lake is a duck decoy, where H.LM. often amuses himself with shooting, and far beyond this we could catch glimpses of the park sloping away towards the Bosphorus. Beyond the pigeon-house we entered a building consisting of one long room, filled with treasures. This is the sul 103 104 Letters on Turkey. tans private museum. Here are about in all directions, and we walked collected and beautifully arranged all down the middle, admiring the beauti- the presents that he has received, as ful creatures in their stalls, on both well as innumerable valuable objects sides, with their sleek coats, their that belonged to some of his predeces- graceful limbs, their soft and intelligent sors. Countless clocks and watches, eyes. The grand ecuyer ordered the inlaid armor, objects in jade, caskets, most beautiful of thema snow-white wonderfully bound books, china of all mare, with a long, curved tail, exactly sorts, pictures, miniatures, jewelled like the pictures of Turks and their onaments of every kind, all so arranged horsesto be saddled and put through in their cases that one could examine her paces for us. She knew she was and enjoy them, a delightful contrast being shown off, and acquitted herself to the confusion in which the treasures admirably, like any stately beauty well of the old Seragilo are heaped together. aware of her own charms. We then On~ upright case contained four dozen drove on to another large stable filled of the most perfect deep blue S~vres with horses, all stallions, and most of plates, a present from the Emperor them as vicious to strangers as they Napoleon, sunk into velvet, twenty-four are beautiful. Here were horses of on each side of the stand. Each plate various breedsamong others the two was a picked and perfect specimen, white Austrians, driven by the sultan The right names were not always at- from the mosqueand some very tached to the objects, and w-e found a powerful black Russian horses, which miniature painting which we recognized we were warned not to approach. All as Lord P;almerston marked as the the arrangements of the stables were of prince consort! We could have spent the most modern and improved fashion. hours in examining everything, but Another fine horse was saddled here, time was limited, and we were taken on and ridden up and down by one of the to the private stables, still within the grooms. Outside this stable were harem walls, holding twelve of the several large buildings, roofed in, but most perfect Arabs, used by the sultan open at the side; these are for sheltering for ridin~ and driving in the park of the countless multitudes of poor people Xildiz. They were all white or grey. whom the sultan feeds at the Bairam Of course we saw no dogs anywhere festival which ends the long fast of they are held of no repute in the East; Ramazan; many thousands are enter- but I was told the sultan possesses a tamed each night. We drove back as peculiarly fine breed of white Angora we had come, and taking leave of the cats, to which he is devoted, and whose grand ecuyer at the gate of Yildiz, and progeny he sometimes gives to friends, expressing our delight with all we had but I saw none of them. The only pet seen, we ~ot into our carriages and we saw was a large cockatoo at the drove home. harem gate, who uttered some unknown Two nights afterwards, when my sounds I suppose Turkish as we husband and son were dining at the passed. palace, the sultan said to my husband, On leaving the harem bate, where the when he expressed his interest in all chamberlain took leave of us, we found that had been shown us at Yildiz, You two carriages, which were to take us to have not seen my private library, which the stables. We drove round outside I particularly wish you to visit. We the harem walls, but still inside the mentioned this to Sadik Bey, the boundary wall of Yildiz, through a park charming palace aide-dc-camp ap- full of fine trees, that, but for the dis- pointed by H.I.M. to attend us every- tant views of the Bosphorus, recalled where and show us everything dur- many a park at home, till we reached ~ ing our whole stay, and to whose long stone building, the stables, where unfailing friendliness and attention we all the mares are kept. Black and owe so much of the pleasure of our white grooms in fine liveries stood time at Constantinople. Sadik Bey Letters on Turkey. at once arranged a visit for the next day. Again we passed the chief entrance of Yildiz, but turned at once to our right, outside the harem walls, and soon reached a kiosk, of one long and lofty room, the private library of the sultan. Here we found a charming old Turkish librarian, speaking no language but his own, but proud of and devoted to the books under his care. He had six or eight intelligent assistants. We were soon seated at a table, a carefully pre- pared and very full catalogue before us, and our friend Sadik Bey at hand as interpreter, lit was touching to see the genuine anxiety of the old librarian to find any book my husband wished to see, and he was ably seconded by his assistants. They first brou~,ht us some exquisite Persian manuscripts, beauti- fully illuminated and bound; and when we made them understand that my hus- band would like to see any books in the library from India, they eagerly pro- duced all they had, but they proved to be chiefly modern works on music. After they had brought us some fine manuscripts of the Koran with glosses and commentaries, they asked us to walk about and examine the general contents of the building. The book- cases were of the best construction, with movable shelves, and at one end we found a very good collection of En- glish, French, and German classics. The centre of the room was occupied by glass cases, filled with gorgeously bound, illustrated works, chiefly gifts to the sultan. Whilst my husband, with the aid of Sadik Bey, was talking to the old librarian, the assistants showed my son and me some fine photographs of places in the sultans dominions and of public buildings in Stamboul. Nothing could exceed their courtesy and attention and evident wish to make our visit pleasant to us. The sultan had sent word that we were coming, and we heard from the librarian that H.I.M. takes deep interest in all the arrange- ments of the library, and visits it almost every day, and that he had already ordered that my husbands books, 105 which he had begged leave to present to the sultan, should occupy a promi- nent place when they arrived. We left most unwillingly, accompanied to the door by the venerable librarian and all his staff, who took leave of us with the usual graceful Eastern salutation of the deep bow, with the right hand laid first on the heart, then on the head a sign of devotion which we felt they had fully carried out in their courteous attention during the two hours of our visit. IT. THE QUEBAN BAITIAM RECEPTION. Of course you must see the Qurban Bairam reception, said Sadik Bey to us. Your ambassador cannot admit you, but as guests of the sultan it can easily be arranged.~ Before we left Pera for Therapia, we had for some days constantly passed rams being led about the streets; some of them magnifi- cent animals, with thick white fleeces, others looking poor and thin. These were the victims to be sold for the Qurban Bairam, or Feast of Sacrifices, which is a day of rejoicing throughout the whole Mussulman world, and is celebrated on the tenth day of the twelfth lunar month. This fell, when we were in Turkey, on June 24. Every householder must provide one or more rams, according to the size of his house- hold, which he must kill himself directly after uie morning prayer. It is afterwards eaten, part being given to the poor. The feast is thought to be in memory of the sacrifice of Isaac. As the reception is very early in the morning, we had to sleep in Fern. At 8.30 P.M., or sundown, a great gun proclaimed the opening of the feast, and from that moment the noise of bells and guns, shouts and singing, never ceased. We went to bed early, but not to sleep; the guns, and bells, and fire- works went on all night, and the dogs, disturbed from their usual scavenger- lug expeditions, kept up one wild yell. About 2 AM. the various regiments which were to line the road down which the sultan passes from Yildiz to Dolmabaghcheh, began to march past 106 our hotel, each regiment with its band playing, and, as the streets are not lighted, accompanied by hundreds of men carrying lanterns, looking like glow-worms as they came up the hill past my windows. After breakfast the carriage came, at 5.30, and we drove rapidly along the Grande Rue and down the hill by the German embassy, reach- ing the palace just at its foot soon after six. It was a glorious morning, already hot, and we found our faithful friend, Sadik Bey, in his grandest uniform and covered with orders, awaiting us. He took us at once to the diplomatic wait- ing-room, which was rapidly filling, we being the only people present not be- longing to an embassy or legation; and we heard afterwards our good fortune had excited the envy of other English visitors to Pera. It was past seven when the second master of ceremonies appeared to summon us, and then began a hurried rush across the garden and up the countless stairs to a long gallery on one side of what is the largest audience hall in the world. We found on crossing the garden that the sultan had already arrived, and we had not seen what is the most beautiful sight of the Bairam reception earlier in the year, his riding into the palace on a white horse covered with jewelled trappings, surrounded by all his court officials, superbly mounted. As the sultan slays his ram directly he dis- mounts on this occasion, no infidel eye may witness the arrivaL The ram, a huge animal of the Angora breed, with snow-white fleece, lay dead as we passed at the foot of the steps by which the sultan reaches his own apartments. On arriving at our gallery we found that we were so high above the floor, and the hall of audience so vast, that we could scarcely distinguish the features of those below us. But for a few attendants hurrying about, the hall was empty, except that the throne, a large armchair and footstool in cloth of gold, already stood in its place at the upper end of the hall facing the grand entrance doors. Over these doors was a smaller gallery, where the band was placed, which played beautifully till the Letters on Turkey. ceremony began. Our gallery, though not much more than half the length of the hail, was large enough for a good ball-room. The ladies sat in front, looking over the balustrade, the gentle- men stood behind, and at the back, beneath the lofty windows, was a buffet, with gold plate laden with every delicacy. Gradually the hall began to fill, and as every one of the rank of a colonel upwards throughout the whole empire has a right to attend the Bairam receptions, the crowd of magnificent uniforms was very great. They stood in ranks, one behind the other, forming three sides of a square, leaving the centre of the hall facing the throne free. The imperial household, headed by the chief eunuch, stood across the hall behind the throne in order of prece- dence, all in magnificent uniforms, and most of them with orders. The second eunucha very tall, thin fellowstood about the thirteenth, and above two of the sultans sons-in-law. It would be difficult to imagine a more gorgeous scene than the hall presented when all had entered and were awaiting the sultans entry. Every variety of uni- form, sheiks from the desert in burnous and turban, priests, ulemahs, ministers all alike blazing with orders. I asked Sadik Bey why there was so long a delay, as it was nearly eight oclock. He told me that the sultan, tired with the early prayers, had gone to sleep, and no one can venture to disturb H.I.M. At length the band ceased, and the small, stately man appeared through a door near the throne, followed by Osman Ghazi only. The sultan wore a plain military frock-coat, a fez, like all the rest of the brilliant throng, with a curved gol& hilted swordno decoration of any sort. As he entered every one in the hall bowed to the very ground, and remained so till he had taken his seat. Osman Ghazi stood at the right of the sultans throne, with a gold- embroidered scarf over his right arm, which was kissed by the less august members of the assembly, who had no right to touch the sultan. As soon as the sultan was seated the court ulemah stepped up on his left and Letters on Turket,. uttered a low prayer, the whole assem- bly standing in the prayer attitude, with the hands raised and the palms turned towards the face, as if forming a book. Directly the priest stepped back, the reception began at once iii perfect silence; the pashas passing upon the sultans right, prostrating them- selves and kissing the scarf, and then backing away on his left in a crouching attitude, and saluting as they backed by touching the ground, their heart, and their forehead with the right hand. Those who were well accustomed to court life executed this movement with perfect grace, but most of the provincial pashas were exquisitely awkward, and, instead of pausing between each salu- tation, continued the movement inces- santly, and long after they were hidden from the sultan by those following them. The pashas who were personal friends of the sultan were not allowed to fall at his feet; a very, slight move- ment of the imperial hand showed that they were only to bow low; and old Raoulf Pasha, who had lost a leg at Plevna, was not expected to back across the room, but was permitted to pass away at once behind the throne. No one else left the hall. Two incidents excited great attention. The Bulgarian envoy had been treated a few days before with considerable hauteur by the Russian ambassador, on which the sultan had said he should not run the chance of any indignity in the diplo- matic gallery at the reception, but should stand below with the royal household; and there he was in plain evening dress, most conspicuous among all the uniforms. The other notable incident was the reception of the ex-khedive, Ismael Pasha, who was known to be in great disgrace owing to some marriage intrigue in which he had been engaged. As the old man approached no sign of recog- nition was visible on the sultans countenance, and Ismael was allowed to grovel at the sultans feet, and back away at the side, without one kind look. At length all had passed by, and taken their places again in ranks round the hail. And now the silence was broken for the first time, the grand master of ceremonies, Munir Pasha, stepping into the centre of the hall and announcing in a loud voice, The Sheik-ul-Islam. Immediately a tall, dignified old man, in a long white robe and turban, with the Grand Cordon of the Medjidieh, approached up the open space in the centre, and as he neared the throne the sultan rose and bowed his head, whilst the Sheik-ul-Islam raised his hands in blessing and uttered a prayer, all the pashas reassuming the attitude of prayer. He then stood aside and the sultan resumed his place, and all the other ulemahs present came forward up the centre and made their obeisance. Their dresses were most brilliant black, green, purple, and blue satin robes mixed with whiteand many of them wore orders. As soon as the last ulemah had passed, the sultan rose, without any sort of salutation to any one, and whilst all present bowed again to the very ground, passed out of the hall, with only Osman Ghazi in attendance. The hail quickly emptied itself, and we were glad to turn to the inviting buffets, for though it was only nine oclock, most of us had breakfasted soon after five. On our way from the palace to the landing- place, where the various embassy steam launches were waiting, we passed innu- merable cafes full of pashas and officers in full uniform sipping coffee and smok- ing after the fatigues of the reception. Sadik Bey bade us farewell at the hall, having to attend the audience granted to all the household officials. When will that be? I asked. It is impossible to say, he replied. His Majesty is going to sleep; we can- not say when he will wake. We were glad to accept the offer of places in the Austrian launch, and, though it was but little past ten oclock when we reached Therapia, we felt as if we had already had a long and ex- citing day. G. MAX MIJLI~ER. 107 108 From The National Review. ARTHUR YOUNG. BY LESLIE STEPHEN. The name of Arthur Young suggests to most readers a discussion of the causes of the French Revolution. The importance of the famous Travels in France is in fact sufficiently shown by the frequent references of the most competent writers, both French and English. Mr. Morley, for example1 declares that Youngs evidence is of more value than all the speculations of Burke and Paine, and Mackintoshthe English protagonists in the great con- troversy of the time. Young, again, had a great deal to say upon the state of Ireland in his day, besides being a leading authority upon agricultural de- velopment in England. No one, how- ever, need fear that this article will lead them into profound economical, or polit- ical, or historical discussions. For the present purpose, I have rather to pro- test against a too probable inference suggested by these topics. Youngs connection with them may probably lead those who know only his name to put him down summarily in the great class bore; to assume that he was a pon- derous professor of the dismal science or an early example of that most estimable but not always lively species, the highly intelligent politician who travels in vacation time, storing his mind with useful information to be radiated forth in lectures and essays, and excite the admiration of parliamen- tary constituencies. Young, no doubt, deserves that kind of glory in a high degree. What I wish to do is to call attention to the fact that he was also a human beingor what in our disagree- able modern slang is called a per- sonalityof great interest. He was not a walking blue-book, but a highly sensitive, enthusiastic, impulsive, and affectionate man of flesh and blood, whose acquaintance one would have been glad to cultivate. His last biographer congratulates the world upon the fact that he did not, as he was tempted to do, become a clergyman or a soldier. In either capacity his pecul- iar talents would no doubt have been Arthur Young. comparatively wasted. As a soldier, he would probably have been known only by some ingenious but futile expe- dition. Had he taken orders he might have rivalled the charm of some of his amiable contemporaries, Gilbert White, of Selborne, for example, and would have been a model clergyman of the good old patriarchal type; but he would hardly have made a mark upon theo- logical speculation. Yet, his actual career, however appropriate to his talent, xvas such as to draw a certain shade over his personal qualities; and, as unfortunately he was not commem- orated at his death in an adequate biography, they have, perhaps, not been sufficiently recognized. That any recognition is possible is due in great part to Miss Betham-Edwards, who pre- fixed a shor.t memoir to the last edition of his Travels in France (1892). Miss Betham-Edwards did her duty excel- lently; she not only appreciated his qualities but had access to unpublished sources, including diaries and letters of great interest. Unluckily the necessary limits of a preface have prevented her from doing more than drawing a sketch, lifelike as far as it goes, which tan- talizes the reader by brief glimpses of possible filling up of details. I depend upon her statements for most of what follow-s, so far as it is not drawn from his own writings. I hope only to intro- duce a few more readers to a personal acquaintance whom I have found to be very charming. Arthur Young was born on 11th September, 1741. He was the son of a respectable prebendary, who was chaplain to Speaker Onslow, and both squire and rector of the parish of Brad- field, near Bury St. Edmunds. His mother, whose maiden name was Couss- maker, was the descendant of a Dutch- man who had followed William III. to England. Miss Betham-Edwards sug- gests that the pleasant rural district ~n which Young passed his infancy may account for his love of scenery. Some- thing more would be required to explain whence a man, descended from Dutch and East Anglian ancestry, derived the mercurial temperament which we do Arthur Young. 109 not generally associate with either earthly thing should prevail with him to country. Both father and mother, how- marry. On the whole, one might ex- ever, were handsome and intelligent, pect that a youth, who is bound to an and we do not know enough of the laws uncongenial wife and proposes to make of heredity to account for the appear- his living by farming, chiefly because ance of this brilliant contrast to the he knows as little of any other employ- ponderous squires of Suffolk and the ment as he does of agriculture, has three-breeched merchants of Holland. made an unpromising start in life. But Anyhow, Arthur Young showed his those who may have made such a qualities early. He learnt little at his prophecy had not taken into account school, Lavenham, partly, he thinks, Youngs marvellous elasticity. He was because he became so much a favorite one of the men who, if in the depths of with his teacher as to be spared the depression at one meeting, are sure to usual discipline. When he was about be at the height of exhilaration at the ten, however, he was already writing next. Nothin~ could permanently sup- a history of England, and at thirteen press or daunt him. Compensations learning to dance and falling in love were sure to turn up. If his wife was with the beautiful daughter of a village occasionally a thorn in his flesh, he was grocer. He was taken from school at at least a most affectionate father. His an early age and apprenticed to a mer- own farming operations were as little cantile firm at Kings Lynn. There successful as thou~h his lot had been he again fell in love, his first idol being cast in the worst days of depression; the black-eyed daughter of a partner in but they entitled him to set up almost the firm, who was taking music lessons at once as an authority upon the theory from Burney, then organist of Lynn, of agriculture. He made tours and and father of the future Mine. dArblay. published accounts of his observations. He was already writing pamphlets and The result of his own experience was, getting them published, receivin~ pay- as he puts it, nothing but ignorance, ment in books, but apparently learn- folly, presumption, and rascality (the lug nothing of his proper business. At rascality, we hope, in spite of the any rate, on his fathers death in 1759, grammar, was that of his neighbors); he left Lynn without education, pro- but he learned to judge of other peoples fession, pursuits, or employment, and farms, and his books were of most for want of other occupation took a farm singular utility to the general agricul- belonging to his mother at Bradfield. ture of the kingdom. He failed at his To improve his prospects, he married native place, after a short time, and at the age of twenty-four (in 1765) a immediately took a larger farm, and Miss Martha Allen of Lynn, neither the had to pay 100 to another man to take first nor second object of his adorations, it off his hands, when his successor which apparently it would not be easy made a fortune out of it. At a third to enumerate. He mi~ht, it would farm he spent nine years, with the sen- seem, have made a better choice. Mrs. sation of having been all the time in Young is said to have been shrewish, the jaws of a wolf. He had, he says, and Young certainly regretted his pre- tried three thousand experiments; and cipitancy. The lady was sister-in-law must therefore be reckoned wise if we of Mrs. Stephen Allen, Burneys second may invert Darwins criterion that a wife, and stepmother of Miss Burney fool is a man who never tried an experi- who has left some characteristic ment. There is, however, such a thing touches. Young confided to Miss Bur- as being wise for others instead of ney a few years later, either from con- for oneself. Whether Youngs general fidence in her prudence, she says, or views were sound is more than I know. from his general carelessness of conse- They were at least stimulating. He quences, that he was the most miser- 1 There is some discrepancy between the facts able fellow breathing, and that if he as given by Miss Betham-Edwards and in Youngs were to begin the world a~ain, no account in the Annals qf Agriculture, vol. xv. Arthur Young. was becoming well known to agricul- tural reformers, and from 1773 to 1776 he travelled in Ireland, where he was, for a short time, agent to Lord Kings- boroughs estates in County Cork. Whatever was the result to Lord Kings- borough, Youngs experience was em- bodied in a book upon Ireland second only in value to the French travels. He settled again at Bradfield upon his mothers property, and there, after a time, started a new project. Next to the farming, without experience, one of the most promising roads to ruin that can be suggested is starting a solid periodical. Young accordingly in 1783 set up the Annals of Agriculture, which was to be the organ of all benevolent men and good farmers. It certainly succeeded in so far as it at- tracted notice; and it is worth turning over, not only for Youngs own articles, but because it contains contributions from many of the most distinguished men of the time upon important topics. The poor-laws, for example, are dis- cussed by Jeremy Bentham and Sir F. Eden, the author of the leading book upon the subject. Another contribu- tor who conceals himself under the modest name of Ralph Robinson, farmer at Windsor, is said to have been no less a person than George III. himself. Young, however, has still to complain of his financial results. His circulation only amounts after seven years to three hundred and fifty; and he is still engaged in the familiar em- ployment of flogging a dead horse. The Annals only just paid their way; but they spread his fame. His name on the title-page is followed by a list of titles which shows that he had received honors in France, Russia, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. Among his ad- mirers was the philanthropic Duke de Liancourt the Anglomaniac French nobleman who announced to Louis XVI. that the fall of the Bastille was not a Bentham, I may note, firmly believed that his favorite scheme had been discouraged by George Ill, because the king had been his anonymous antagonist in a newspaper controversy. The let- ters of Junius, it is also said, have been ascribed to the same author. But I have my doubts in both cases. revolt but a revolution. On Liancourts invitation, Young made his famous French tours from 1787 to 1790. The travels are deservedly very f a- mous, but they have hardly been popu- lar in proportion. They owe such popularity as they achieved to the advice of a very sensible friend. The tour in Ireland, said this adviser, had no great success, because it was chiefly a farming diary. It was filled with elaborate statistics and tables of prices which presupposed a strong appetite for information in the reader. The right plan to gain readers was to put down the notes made at the moment as they occurred to him. The book might lose in solidity, but would gain in vivacity. Young fortunately took this advice, which deserves to be recorded as one of the few known instances of advice by which an author has actually profited. It was, in fact, singularly appropriate, for Young was essentially a man whose first impressions were the most valuable, as well as the most amusing. It is often better to know what a man thought than to know what he afterwards thought that he ought to have thought. I was totally mistaken in my prediction, as he quaintly re- marks in a note to his travels, and yet, on a revision, I think that I was right in it. That is, the facts which really happened were those which, at the time, were the most unlikely to happen. Few historical facts are more interest- ing than the motives and expectations which prompted the originators of movements really calculated to produce opposite results. Young, too, was bet- ter at observation than at reflection. When he revised his old journals and cut out the personal elements, he was substituting a set of statistical dia- grams for a concrete picture; and he filled the vacant space by economic speculations of very inferior merit. Miss Betham-Edwards, indeed, de- clares, as it is natural for an enthu- siastic biographer to declare, that Young instinctively anticipated Adam Smith, and Mill, and Cobden, and all the pundits of economy. He was, if I may be pardoned for saying so, much 110 Arthur Young. too charming a person to deserve that equivocal praise. He is delightful by reason of his vivacity, his amiable petulance, and unconscious inconsist- encies. The wisest philosopher, if he honestly put down his first thoughts, would be always contradicting himself. We get the appearance of consistency only because we take time to correct, and qualify, and compare, and exten- uate, and very often we spoil our best thoughts in the process. What would Mr. Ruskin lose if he cared for con- sistency? The price of suppressing first thoughts may be worth paying by a man whose strength lies in logic, but with a keen, rapid, impetuous observer like Arthur Young we would rather do the correcting for ourselves. His best phrases are impromptu ejaculations. Oh, if I were legislator of France for a day, he exclaims, at the sight of estates left waste for game preserving, I would make such great lords skip again! These sentiments, he assures the reader, were those of the moment, and he was half inclined to strike out many such passages. It was because they were of the moment that they are so impressive. Had he omitted them he would have taken off the edge of his best passages, though he might have expressed his later views more correctly. This temperament, I need hardly argue, is not the ideal one for a political economist. His views should be ex- pressible in columns of figures, and he should never let a vivid impression guide him till he has reduced it to tangible statements of profit and loss. He must deal in sober black and white, and be on his guard against the brilliant shifting colors which are apt to generate illusions as to the real pro- portions of the objects of vision. Young, indeed, was a sound economist and that, no doubt, is what Miss Betham-Edwards meansin so far as he was a thorough Freetrader. The whole system of monopoly, he de- clares, is rotten to the core, and the true principle and vital spring and animating soul of commerce is Liberty! That, however sound may be the doe- trine, is the utterance of an enthusiast, not of a sober, logical reasoner. He was animated by the spirit of the con- temporary philosophy. The great ob- ject of his idolatry was Rousseau. In his French travels he visits the tomb of that immortal and splendid genius, whose magic is teaching French mothers to nurse their children, and French nobles to love a country life. He denounces the vile spirit of bigotry which hunted Rousseau dur- ing his life as though he had been a mad dog. At Chambery he turns even from his economical speculation to something still more interesting, the cause of the deliciously amiable Mine. de Warens, and described by the inimitable pencil of Rousseau. He sought for informa- tion about the lady and could only dis- cover that she was certainly dead. In fact, as he produces a certificate of the occurrence of that event some thirty years before there seems to be no reason for doubting it. With this enthusiasm Young found a keen interest in the writings of the French economists, whose theory of the surpassing impor- tance of agriculture was more congenial to him than Adam Smiths rival doc- trines. One of the most amusing episodes in his French travels records his visit to the scene of the labors of the great Marquis de Turbilly. The reader who is ashamed of not remem- bering the name may be comforted by finding that even in his own country the great mans memory had faded within twelve years of his death. Young, however, boldly introduced him- self to the new proprietor of the estates, was introduced to one of Turbillys old laborers, and went off happy with an autograph of the great marquis to be placed among his curiosities. Other pilgrimages of the same kind, to places connected with names faintly remem- bered, it is to be feared, in England, prove the keenness of Youngs interest in the literature of his favorite subject. Youngs belief in Free Trade implies his acceptance of the chief doctrine of the French Economists, and his sym- pathy with the general movement of the time. Any one who should be sur 111 112 prised that Young as the staunchest of agriculturists was not a Protectionist, would, of course, he guilty of an anachronism. In those days Adam Smith ohserves that the landowning classes were far more liberal than the manufacturers. England was only just ceasing to export corn, and Young was roused to his most indignant mood by the desire of the clothmakers~ to main- tain restrictions upon the exports of En- glish wool. What he really illustrates, indeed, is the spirit which we generally associate with the great revolution of manufacturers, as applied to the con- temporary development of agricul- ture. Another variety of Youngs enthu- siasm makes a pleasant and character- istic contrast to his discussions as to the prices of corn and rates of wages. A genuine love of scenery breaks out in his English tours, though it is generally consigned to the notes, the text being preserved for the graver purposes of statistical information. It has, too, a peculiar turn which marks the man. It may be doubted whether our admiration for Nature is really so new as we sometimes fancy. The old squire or country parson may have loved the forest or the moor as well as his descendants, though his love was unconscious. The scenery may have given a charm to his favorite pursuits, his fishing or his hunting, though he did not tal~k about it, or even know it. Scenery, even in poetry, was kept in the background of human figures, but was not less distinctly present. In Youngs time, however, the country gentleman was becoming civilized and polished; he was building mansions with clas- sical porticoes, filling them with pictures bought on the grand tour, and laying out grounds with the help of Kent or a capability Brown. He was beginning, that is, to appreciate the advantage of adapting the environment to his dwell- ing-place; and the new art of land- scape gardenin~ was putting the old formal gardens out of fashion. Popes garden at Twickenham had become famous, and Shenstone, as Johnson puts it, had begun to point his pros- Arthur Young. pects, to diversify his surface, to entangle his walks, and to wind his waters; which he did with such jude- ment and such fancy as made his little domain the envy of the great, and the admiration of the skilful. Johnson will not enquire whether this demands any great powers of mind, but he admits that to embellish the form of nature is an innocent amusement. Young, who was a most determined and indefatb,able sightseer, had no mis- givings about the powers of mind required. He visits the houses of the nobility most conscientiously, gives little criticisms of their pictures, xvhich have at least the merit of perfect sini- plicity, and falls into ecstasies over the embellishments of the form of nature. He visited the lakes mostly at the time when Gray was writing his now cele- brated letters, and his descriptions are equally enthusiastic, if not of equal literary excellence. He does the neiahborhood of Keawick in the ost systematic way; and, I am glad to say it to his honor, is not content without climbing to the top of Skiddaw. He complains gently, however, that art has not been properly called in to the aid of nature. He would like winding walks and properly-fenced seats, which should enable him to look comfortably from the edge of precipices, and be led to them as a well-arranged surprise. His eloquence is stimulated to the highest flights when he visits Persfield on the Why (as he spells the rivers name). There a judicious improver has laid out an estate in the most skilful way, so as to display the glories of the Wynd- cliff and its neighborhood. Young is almost carried off his feet by his delight, but he recovers sufficiently to intimate some gentle and apologetic criticisms. He gives us an resthetic discussion as to the correct method of mixing the sublime with the beautiful in due proportions. Youngs contem- porary, Gilpin, remarks of the same place that it is not picturesque, but extremely romantic, and gives a loose to the most pleasing riot of the imagina- tion. Nothing in the way of literature seems to keep so ill as ~sthetic crit Arthur Youn9. icism; and we must not be hard upon these poor old gentlemen. They held that nature wanted a little judicious arranging and dramatizing. At Went- worth Young pronounces that the woods and waters are sketched with great taste, and that the woods in particular have a solemn brownness which is gratifying to the connoisseur. Young had not read Wordsworth, for obvious reasons, and when he wants a bit of poetry has generally to resort to Popes breathes a browner horror oer the woods. He much approves of a statue of Ceres and a Chinese temple which temper the rawness of nature at Wentworth; and elsewhere he gives another of his artless msthetic disquisi- tions upon the proper theory of sham ruins. They ought, he thinks, to repre- sent the real thing, and should not be made into mere places for tea-drinking. Whatever may be Youngs limitations, however, it is impossible to doubt that his enthusiasm for the beauties of nature is as hearty and genuine as that of Gray or of any of the generatiou which learned its canons of taste from Wordsworth. At Killarney, for exam- ple, he is thrown into raptures of the most orthodox variety, and when he comes within sight of the Pyrenees Mr. Ruskin himself could not accuse him of deficient feeling. This prospect (from Montauban), ~ie says, which contains a semicircle of a hundred miles in diameter, has an oceanic vastness in which the eye loses itself; an almost boundless scene of cultivation; an animated, but confused, mass of in- finitely varied parts, melting gradually into the distant obscure, from which emerges the amazing frame of the Pyrenees, rearing their silvered heads far above the clouds. Young, one can- not doubt after reading this and other passages, would have been in these days an honorary member of the Alpine Club, as well as of his numerous foreign agricultural societies. There is, indeed, one exception to his enthusiasm. He would not have ac- cepted Scotts love of the heather. He always speaks of lieather and ling with a kind of personal animosity. LIVING AGE. VOL. XI. 528 113 They are signs of the abomination of desolation. His criticism of French chateaux shows both sentiments. He is shocked, and with sufficient reason, at the game-preserving wastes which surround them, but he is also disgn4ed, in a minor degree, by the want of proper landscape-gardening. Their great houses are often built in the purliens of a town; and what might be made into beautiful grounds aban- doned to the base~r purposes of stables or other utilitarian erections. Young naturally has the eye of the country gentleman as his successor Cobbett had the eye of the practical farmer. Neither could take the simply senti- mental view; and in each, therefore, a most genuine love of country scenery is combined with an almost fanatical horror of a waste. Young would have sympathized with Cobbetts denun- ciation of the accursed hill of Hind- head, which some of us now find to possess certain charms; or have ap- proved Defoes remark, that Bagshot Heath had been placed by Providence so near to London in order to rebuke the pride of Englishmen by showing that the heart of their own country could be as desolate as a Scottish moor. Young, however, approved what Cob- bett has begun to dread, the application to agriculture of the same spirit which was creating the manufacturing sys- tem. His ideal was the improving landlord. He accepts Gullivers maxim that the man who could make two blades of grass grow where one had grown before, could deserve more of his country than all the politicians put together. Young had, as he said, passed his life up to fifty in trying to fulfil that duty; and he was not less energetic in his later life. It sums up his whole code of conduct. Every political and economical project was to be estimated by its tendency to increase the produce of agriculture. Other ends are second- ary. The sight of land which might bear corn and only produced ling vexes his very soul. He regarded Enfield Chase as a simple nuisance a scandal to the government of the countryand he calculates that Sails- 114 bury Plain might be made to grow food for the whole population. For sym- pathy, again, he looked to the country gentleman. Not one farmer in five thousand, he complains, ever read a book; he is not foolish enough to waste his missionary zeal upon them; but the country happily abounds with gentlemen-farmers, and they are the sources of all improve- ment. His heroes are Tull, who intro- duced turnips; and Weston, who intro- duced clover; and Lord Townsend and Mr. Allen, who introduced marling into Norfolk. Wherever he sees a gentle- man who has the sense to devote him- self to such labors he pours out bless- ings on his head. I do not know whether he is most enthusiastic over the Marquis of R.ockingham, who had taught the farmers of Yorkshire to grow better crops, or over the Duke of Bridgewater, whose great canal was among the first symptoms of the great manufacturing development of Lan- cashire. He was an incarnation of the spirit of improvement which was trans- forming England in his days; and there is something pleasant in his sanguine optimism as to public affairs, when his own little enterprises were anything but prosperous. The darker side of the great industrial resolution which was to alarm Cobbett was still hidden from him. The growth of pauperism, which began with war and famine at the end of the century, was still in the future. In the earlier period all patriots were still lamenting over an imaginary de- cline of the population, which could ~ot be disapproved by the imperfect statistics of the time. Young has to meet their Jeremiads by rather conjec- tural figures as well as by his own observations of growing prosperity on all sides. His views are often oddly different from those which came up with the next generation. He de- nounces the poor~lawspartly on the familiar ground that they are demoral- izing incentives to idleness. But he hates them still more because they were, as he puts it, framed in the very spirit of depopulation. He reckons it as one of the great advantages of Ire- land that the absence of poor-laws encourages a rapid increase of the numbers of the people. No one could speak more warmly of the importance of improving the condition of the poor in Ireland and elsewhere, but he has no thought of the dangers which alarmed Maithus and the later economists. The one merit of the old poor-laws accord- ing to them was that the parishes had an interest in checking the growth of the population. That, according to Young, was the cardinal vice of the system. The great aim of the states- man should be an increase of popula- tion. The way to increase population is to take all fetters from industry. Cultivate waste lands, turn Salisbury Plain into arabic fields, carry cultiva- tion, as Macaulay hoped we should do, to the top of Helvellyn and Ben Nevis; make roads and canals, introduce threshing-machines and steam-engines, and population will increase with the means of employment. He is a little puzzled at times by the conflict of interests. Low wages, he remarks, are good for the employer; and he ob- serves that, in London, wages are high. Therefore, he argues, the states- man should limit the size of London. There are other reasons for this. Lon- don is a devouring gulf; the deaths greatly exceed the births; it is actually eating away population, and should somehow be kept down in the interests of agriculture. Another symptom which vexes Youngs soul is the enor- mous consumption of tea. Tea, in the first place, is debilitating generally, and therefore tends to diminish numbers; and, in the second place, it is unfavor- able to agriculture. If all the money spent upon tea were spent upon corn enough corn could be raised, as he calculates, to support four millions of people. Finally, the money spent upon tea is all thrown away upon the Chinese instead of supporting British industry. Young was evidently rather vague in his political economy; though it would be unfair to take some of these obiter dicta, thrown out on the spur of the moment, as his definite conclusions. Iii another respect, Young is very unlike Arthur Young. Arthur Young. his followers. How are we to get rich? he asks; and his answer is, by increas- ing our debt of one hundred and forty millions to two hundred millions. The additional sum, he explains, is to be spent on reclaiming waste lands. He wishes government to interfere ener- getically, and complains bitterly that English statesmen have always neg- lected agriculture. England, as he tells a French friend, has had many Col- berts but not one Sully. Our hus- bandry has flourished in the teeth of our ministers, and is far from what it would be had it received the same atten- tion as trade and manufactures. Once more, to make two blades grow in the place of one is the ultimate object of all rational conduct, the tendency to pro- duce that result the criterion of all policy and energy in bringing it about the duty of all ministers, politicians, and private persons. All good things will follow. Youngs devoted and unflagging zeal, and his sanguine confidence in his principles is equally attractive, what- ever the inconsistencies or rashness of his speculations. This must be remem- bered in reading his French travels. Young is generally cited as justifying the Revolution; and his later recanta- tion regarded as one of the many instances of inconsistency due to the Reign of Terror. It must be observed, however, though it certainly does not diminish the value of his evidence, that Young was never a political follower of the revolutionists. His real sympathy was with his Anglomaniac friends, Liancourt and his like. The question is, as he says in 1789, whether the French will adopt the British Constitution, with improvements, or listen to specu- lative theorists. The result, in the latter case, would be inextricable con- fusion and civil wars. Youngs great merit Is precisely that he records his impressions of facts so vividly and candidly that the value of his evidence is quite independent of the correctness of his political conclusions. I will not ask what those conclusions should be. Youngs point of view is the character- istic point for us. The French condi tions inverted his English experience. In England he has to be constantly lamenting the want of roads; but what roads there were were thronged. In. France there are magnificent roads, but. circulation is stagnant. In Langue- doc he passes an incredible number of splendid bridges and many superb~ causeways, but a certain Oroia~ B~anche~ is an execrable receptacle of filthy vermin, impudence, and imposition, presided over by a withered hag, the demon of beastliness. Not a carriage to be had. In England you have towns of three thousand people, cut off from all highroads, yet with clean inns, civil hosts, and a post-chaise ready at a moments notice. Young wishes to have both the energetic government and the energy of private enterprise. He admires the great public works of France, but is stirred to wrath by the apathy of the individual Frenchman. Though he is constantly acknowledging the courtesy of Frenchmen, and their superiority in many points of refine- ment, he is oddly annoyed by their taciturnity. He can never get any adequate conversation at a table dhOte. Possibly the excellent Young, who was clearly ready to talk to.. anybody, was a little impeded in France by the fact that (as we learn from Miss Burney) his knowledge of the language was limited, and he filled up any gaps by inserting English words with an imitation of the French accent. He could certainly make a speech under pressure, for ha describes how he once pacified a sus- picious mob, which thought that the inquisitive traveller must be devising- schemes for taxation. He pointed out that in his own country the rich were taxed for the poor,there was some good in the poor-laws, after all! But a further explanation is suggested front his lamentation over the surprising ignorance of their own affairs in the provinces. There were no newspapers and no political talk, even at the excit- ing times of the Revolution. Petty En- glish tradesmen, he declares, were talking about the last news from France all over the country, before any interest In the matter had spread to the 115 Arthur Young. people directly affected. In English counties the newspaper circulated from the squires hail to the farmer or the small artisan; but the French 8eig~eur8 formed no centres of superior enlight- enment. They crowded into the towns and spent their rents upon the theatres; they only visited the country when they were banished; and then they turned great districts into mere wildernesses to be roamed over by boars, wolves, and deer. They made one blade grow where two had grown before. Young admired the English country gentleman as the active supporter and originator of all improvements. His French rival was a mere incubus, an effete survival. In France, according to Young, half, if not two-thirds, of the land was already in the hands of small proprietors. The peasants supplied the industry, and carried out what improvements there were. They illustrated his famous phrase, The magic of property turns sand to gold. Meanwhile, the great seigneurs do nothing; they receive quit rents and enforce tallies and corv6es, and all the oppressive inci- dents of feudal tenure. Young accord- ingly transfers to the peasantry the sympathy which in England he felt for the country gentleman. He did not object to the large proprietor as such; but to the proprietor, large or small, who did not do his duty by his property. He draws up an indictment against the French nobility, which is all the more impressive because it does not imply any preconceived political theories. At one moment he approves of the French peasantry for seizing waste lands by force; and even wishes that the English peasantry were authorized to take similar steps. After all, waste land is the great evil of the world. But it is quite intelligible that from his point of view the actual course of affairs in France should have convinced him that too high a price might be paid even for the appropriation of a waste. In En- glai4 Youngs zeal for agricultural improvements was never qualified. It must, he was clear, be good for every- body. He tells landlords that they are foolish for boasting of not raising their rents. To raise rents (within limits, he admits) is the best way of stimu- lating industry. His ideal person is a certain wonderful collier. The owner of the property had tried to improve the condition of his workmen by giving them small allotments of waste land. One of them worked from midnight till noon in the mine, and after his twelve hours, spent eight more upon improving his bit of land, removing gigantic rails, and finally turning nine or ten acres into cultivated fields. Young celebrates this extraordinary feat of working twenty hours a day for several years, with characteristic enthusiasm, and offers to receive subscriptions for the hero, which, we will hope, enabled the collier to relax his industry. Ait a splenetic moment during his French travels, Young, riding on a blind mare, just misses a meeting with Charles Fox, who had excited the won- der of the natives by his modesty in travelling with nothing but a post- chaise, a cabriolet for his servants, and a courier to order horses. A plague on a blind mare! exclaims Young; but I have worked through life, and he Talks ! Young had talked a good deal, too; especially on paper; but his momen- tary grumble was pardonable. His three thousand experiments, and his various attempts to get out of perpetual anxiety had brought him little but repu- tation. George III., indeed, sent him a merino ram, much to his satisfaction; it proved that the king had just views of glory, and that a period was coming when more homage would be paid to a prince for giving a ram to a farmer than for wielding a sceptre. George III. soon found it necessary to devote more time to his sceptre than to his rams; but Youngs path was happily crossed by a congenial and more useful friend. Sir John Sinclair was an ideal representative of the dismal science. He atoned for being an intolerable bore by doing some excellent work. He inherited a large estate in Caithuess, and began his reign by assembling his tenants and making in one day a road over an inaccessible hill; and he Arthur .Young. set to work enclosing, rearrang- ing farms, introducing fisheries, and generally rousing the primitive Gaelic population to a sense of the advantages of civilization. He promoted agricul- tural societies, and introduced the long sheep into the Highlands. His son tells us that due regard was paid in his improvements to the interest of the poor; that a tide of prosperity set in and population increased rapidly. At any rate, Sinclair translated into practice Youngs most cherished principles. Sinclair sat at the feet of Adam Smith; and travelled to Sweden and Russia in search of information: and wrote a History of the Revenue, and became a member of Parliament. He began, in 1791, to publish a book of great value, the Statistical Account of Scotland. He is said to have been the first person to introduce the word statistical into English and this book, a collection of reports from the ministers of all the Scottish parishes, was of great importance at a time when people did not even know for certain whether population was in- creasing or declining. Sinclair, in 1793, persuaded Pitt to start the Board of Agriculture. Arthur Young had bet the nineteen volumes of his Annals against the twenty-one of Sinclairs Statistical Account that Pitt would not consent. He lest the bet, to his great satisfaction, for, though the minister would only allow 3,000 a year, Young was made secretary with a salary of 600. Now, with the congenial Sinclair, he would set to work and, on however modest a scale, government would at last set about producing those two blades of grass. Their first aim was to do in England what Sinclair had done in Scotland. The English clergy were to be asked to rival the Scottish ministers. But here occurred a signifi- cant difficulty. One of Youngs pet theories was that tithes were an intoler- able burthen to agriculture. He would not confiscate them; but would com- mute them for an increase of glebe. The English clergy, he explains, had so little to do that they naturally took to dancing and sporting, if not to still less 117 decorous pursuits. Agriculture was the natural employment for them, as, indeed, it was the ideal occupation for every one. The clergy, however, sus- pected, not unnaturally, that gentlemen of these views might be insidiously attacking the tithes and would prob- ably be putting awkward questions. The Archbishop of Canterbury pro- tested; and the board had to be less inquisitive, and confined itself in this direction to publishing a number of reports upon the agriculture of coun- les. They tried, however, to promote their grand object by other means. The worthy Sinclair once made a joke not, it is true, of the first water; but still, as it was his only joke, he naturally repeated it as often as pos- sible. This was to give as a toast, May commons become uncommon! He fully shared Youngs mania. What is the use, he would inquire, of conquer- ing colonies? Let us first conquer Finchley Common and compel Epping Porest to submit to the yoke of im- provement. His son claims for him the merit of actually making the sug- gestion which led to the enclosure of Hounslow Heath. With all their energy, Sinclair and Young could never persuade Parliament to pass a General Enclosure Bill; but they claimed to have facilitated the process which went on so rapidly in their time. They helped in the break-up of the common field system, the source of all slovenly agriculture according to their views. Meanwhile, it is to be feared, the board became rather a nuisance. It was a rather anomalous body, with no very definite functions; and it went about like an intrusive busybody, trying to stir up people in general by every means in its power. It offered pre- miums for inventions, and encouraged scientific writers to give lectures and produce books, and held meetings where good agriculturists might make each others acquaintance; but it is said to have ultimately become a kind of political debating society, and finally expired a few years after the peace. Sinclair had by this time returned to Scotland, where he was liberally be- 118 stowing his tediousness upon his countrymen and the world. He got up Highland games, promoted the use of the bagpipes, and defended the authen- ticity of Ossian. He expounded his opinions in numerous pamphletshis son gives a list of three hundred and sixty-seven of these productionsand, finding the employment insufficient, spent his spare time in composing four gigantic cyclopedias, which were to codify all human knowledge upon health, agriculture, religion, and polit- ical economy. The first two alone were published, and I confess that I have not read nor even seen them. It ap- pears, however, from the Ed4nburgl& Review (October, 1807) that the first fills four volumes of eight hundred closely printed pages apiece; marked, as the reviewer asserts, in the good old style, by indistinctness, incredible credu- lity, mawkish morality, marvellous ignorance, and a display of the most diffuse, clumsy, and superficial reason- ing. The reviewer gives as specimens Sinclairs remarks upon the advantage of taking butter with fish; and his elaborate proof that, although the stomach is an organ not remarkable for external elegance, it not the less requires careful attention, in conse- quence of its delicate structure. Sin- clair probably opposed a good solid stolidity to this heartless levity. He proposed that his work should be trans- lated into the principal languages of Europe, and promised that it should add from ten to thirty years to the life of every attentive reader. Apparently he had the reward appropriate to gentle dulness, for it is said that five editions were solda sufficient answer to any review. Sinclair survived till 1835. Meanwhile Arthur Young had a more pathetic end. His secretaryship had taken him to London. There his hand- some presence and open-hearted, cordial ways made him acceptable in society, which he heartily enjoyed. But his life was soon darkened. He was tenderly attached to his youngest daughter Bobbin, to whom, in her infancy, he wrote pleasant little letters, and whom he never forgot in his travels. I have more pleasure, he says at the end of his first tour in France, in giving my little girl a French doll tilan in viewing Versailles, and viewing Versailles was no small pleasure to him. Her death in 1797 struck a blow after which he never quite recovered his cheerful- ness. His friends thought that a blind- ness which soon followed was due to excess of weeping. I do not know whether physicians would regard this as a possible cause of cataract. An operation for this disease was per- formed eleven years later, and recovery promised on condition of calmness. Wilberforce coming to see him told him of the death of the Duke of Grafton, now chiefly remembered by the abuse of Junius. The duke, however, became serious in his later years, and was, perhaps, one of Youngs improving landlords. Anyhow, the news, or Wil- berforces comments, provoked a burst of tears which was fatal to Youngs hopes of recovery. He retired to his native village, and sought for consola- tion inreligiouspractices. He published little selections from the works of Baxter and Owen; and preached on Sunday evenings in a hall at Bradfield. There is still living (1889) a nona- genarian at Bradfield, writes Miss Betham, who remembers his ser- mons. The blind old man would get his back turned to his audience and have to be put straight by his daughter and secretary. He still worked at his favorite pursuit and left ten folio vol- umes in manuscript of a History of Agriculture. He died 20 April, 1820. The nonagenarian of 1889 is by this time, if he survives, probably a cen- tenarian; but it is curious to reflect that we have still among us men of active minds whose careers overlap Youngs. His enthusiasm refers to a strangely altered state of things. What he would think of the present state of England, of modern London, of the imports of tea, of the growth of population and of agricultural depression it is needless to conjecture. No doubt he would admit that some of his predictions have turned out badly, but he would perhaps hold not the less that he was right in Arthur Young. An Evening in Bohemia. making them. The shortsightedness of the most intelligent observers suggests comfort when one studies some modern prophets. From Temple Bar. AN EVENiNG IN BOHEMIA. Though it is many years ago, the first Sunday evening I spent at the pleasant house of the Late poet and dramatic writer, Dr. Westland Marston, has made an indelible impression upon me. I had lately come from Paris, my birthplace, so this particular Sunday evening was my first introduction into London lit- erary and artistic society. My chaperon was .an authoress who had, more or less, a feeling of contempt for the weaker sex and a strong partiality for the lords of creation. I remember that the loud rat-a-tat at the hail door was not an- swered with the celerity she evidently expected, for when the servant at last let us in, the hawk-like stare of my literary duenna had the effect of mak- ing the maid-of-all-work wince, and fal- ter out in a timid, apologetic tone of voice: I was in the kitchen, mum, pre- paring the tray. And what a place to deposit it in! retorted my friend, glaring at the floor, on which reposed the tray covered with glasses and soda-water bottles. I was nearly walking into it and smashing the whole concern. I was in such a hurry, faltered the poor girl, growing crimson. There is so much to do up-stairs as well as down-stairs on Sunday evenings. She flounced into the drawing-room with the tray and left us standing in the hail. There was a varied collection of mas- culine hatsbillycocks, soft felt wide- awakes, more or less battered and greasy-looking; the top-hat was conspic- uous by its absence. The greatcoats and woollen comforters were decidedly shabby, but I gazed at them with a feel- ing akin to reverence, for at that youth- ful period of my existence I considered shabbiness a special attribute of genius. We took off our wraps in a dusty den 119 filled with books and periodicals; a few feminine garments were piled up on an old horsehair sofa. There was a loud hum of voices, some burly laughter mingling with the clink of glasses and the popping of soda- water bottles. As we entered the draw- ing-room it was filled with the perfume of tobacco; a haze of blue smoke hung Like a thick veil over everybody and everything. The scene recalled a pic- ture I had lately noticed by Teniers, but this time it was not boors, but au- thors, drinking. Nearly every man had a tumbler in his hand and a cigar or a pipe in his mouth. Dr. Westland Marston greeted us with genial courtesy. There was dis- tinction in the voice and manner of the author of The Patricians Daughter. He introduced me to his eldest daugh- ter, Miss Nellie Marston, a dark-eyed, dark-haired lady with a spirituefle ex- pression. After a few seconds talk she pointed out to me her brother Philip, remarking, The tall, handsome girl standing by his side is his fianede, Miss Nesbit. Is she not charminglike a graceful lily? My brother is now so happy. Poor fellow, his blindness is such a terrible misfortune! He needs, more than any one, sympathetic com- panionship. Philip Bourke Marston looked a poet such a fine, intellectual head and brow. The sightless eyes gave a pathetic in- terest to his face. Miss Nesbit was a sweet fiancee. They sat in a window recess beaming with happiness. Alas! how rapidly this romance terminated! Shortly after Miss Nesbit left I had an opportunity of speaking to the young poet. He had a peculiar choppy utter- ance, a slight hesitation of speech; but what surprised me most, while gazing at his sightless eyes, was the way in which he constantly alluded to his keen sense of beauty and horror of ugliness. he spoke of his admiration for color, of his love of flowers. I remember, when telling him that I had lately been to the National Gallery for the first time, he exclaimed, It is a pity to go there by St. Martins Lane; that neigh- borhood makes me shudder. I go a long 120 way to avoid ugly streets, but when I get inside the gallery then I expand with delight. How I revel in Turner! And many of the old masters fascinate me. That portrait of Andrea del Sarto, by himself, exercises a kind of spell. I stand in front of it, always with more and more admiration; it is a marvel. Our talk ceased, the room became crowded, and many people gathered round Philip Marston. Who is that dark, mysterious look- ing man standing near the door? I in- quired of Miss Marston. He is neither smoking nor drinking, and looks so in- tellectual. I should rather think so, she an- swered, smiling. It is Dante Rossetti, a great painter-poet, and such a kind friend of Philips. I stared at the great man; his per- sonality struck me at once; there was a look of power about him. The dark eyes shining out from the olive-skinned face, the wide, sensitive nostrils, the full under-lip and rather heavy jaw, denoted the sensuous, artistic tempera- ment; the brow and sweep of the head bespoke high intellect. A smallish man, with a large tawny head, was talking to him and gesticulating a good deal. What contrasts, I remarked; one so dark and massive, the other so fair and slight. Both great poets, for that is Swin- burne. I moved in the direction of the poets corner. Dante Rossettis voice was pe- culiarly beautiful; there was a magic in it. I listened with rapt attention to what he was saying. They were dis- cussing early Italian art. I suppose the eager expression of my face attracted the attention of Rossetti, for be suddenly addressed me, asking me if I was fond of pictures. I told him that I was studying art, and had lately been copying pictures in the Louvre; had attempted La Belle Joconde (Mona Lisa), Leonardo da Vincis chef 4ceuvre. ~ what a picture! he exclaimed; so full of mystery, so subtle, and that wonderful inner smile I cannot remember all that Dante An Evening in Bohemwz. Rossetti said to me, but the impression w.as delightful. His language was glowing, his manner kindly and cour- teous. He invited me to visit his studio in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, and see his picture of Dantes Dream. There was a galaxy of celebrities that evening. Earthly Paradise Morris, in a rough grey coat, and blue, collarless shirt, looking handsome and unconven- tional; Home, author of Orion; Hep- worth Dixon, Madox-Brown, and his gifted young son, Philips bosom friend; Mr. Harwood, then the editor of the Saturday Review, so genial and gentle, accompanied by his wife and clever daughter, Ross Neil. The lovely ac- tress, Adelaide Neilson, in a white silk dress, coquetting with a dramatic critic, whose limbs seemed to totter from emo- tion, Miss Glyn (Mrs. Dallas), Miss Mathilde Blind were there; also a great sprinkling of budding poets, wearing their hair long, and who attitudinized a greai~ deal, as they hovered round the masters. Arthur OShaughnessy (then engaged to be married to Miss Nellie Marston) looked particularly spick and span; his shirt-front was capacious, his black coat well brushed, his eyes beam- ing through gold-rimmed spectacles. He was so neat and precise, just as if he had stepped out of a band-box, that I never then would have taken him for a poet. The editor of a high-class lit- erary periodical, looking formal and wearing kid gloves, appeared supremely uncomfortable while trying to avoid a couple of authoresses who evidently wanted their novels to be noticed. They pursued him quite round the room. At last he was captured by an- other young person, who had a Botti- celli appearance, reddish brown fluffy hair (like a haystack on fire), a white, intense face, crimson lips, and a very square jaw. She wore a loose, faded, olive-green garment, cut low at the neck. Her peculiar drooping attitudes impressed me then; it was the first time I had seen such a being, and I fan- cied she was consumed by sacred fire. However, the poor editor like the fly was caught in the spiders net, for he relapsed into a chair by An Evening in BohemIa. her side and listened. When the talk was at its highest pitch there was a particularly loud knock at the front door. Oh, that is Wills! I know his knock, exclaimed Philip Marston. Now you will see the very King of Bohemiathe Oliver Goldsmith of our time; kind-hearted, generous, simple; no ones enemy but his own; full of oddities and inconsistencies; a true gen- tleman, an author and an artist, cried our host; but here he comes. There are people whose mere en- trance into a room diffuses an atmo- sphere of geniality and bonhomie, an aura of kindliness (as the Theosophists express it). The pleasant, burly voice: How are you, my friend? or How are you, old fellow ? rang cheerily through the room; there was a general shaking of hands, a flutter of expecta- tion in the feminine camp; the Botti- cclii maiden blushed and threw herself into a more picturesque pose as the eyes of W. G. Wills were directed towards her. Though the atmosphere of the room was like a hothouse, Mr. Wills kept on his thick grey ulster. His head was Shakespearian, with a good brow; the grey, kindly eyes had just a suspicion of cunning in one of them; the bow of his blue necktie nad slipped under his earindeed, he looked particularly un- tidy, and there was a streak of char- coal (he had evidently been drawing) across his nose. My chaperon whispered: Mr. Wills is so absent-minded that he probably forgets that he has two sides to his face, so he washes one cheek and omits the other! Does he not remind you of a semi-restored picture by an old mas- terone side in light, the other in the shade ? From one pocket bulged a roll of paper, evidently manuscript; from an- other a long clay pipe peeped out, em- bedded in loose tobacco; his boots were splashed, his clothes unbrushed. Not- withstanding these disadvantages Mr. Wills had the unmistakable air of a gentleman. Have a glass of whiskey, Wills? and here is a good cigar. You are rather late, old fellow, said our host. I have had an accident; my hood has been picked, answered the ~~ing of Bohemia. What do you mean by your hood been picked, answered the King of mation. The Botticelli maiden now threw her lithe body more forward, and clasped her knees (she had long, xvell-shaped white hands); her whole get-up and atti- tude was too picturesque not to be no- ticed, especially by artists. I mean, my friends (Mr.Willss voice was so ripe and mellow that we could all hear what he was saying), that my hoodindicating the appendage which hung loosely and limply behind his backhas been picked of its contents. I had filled it with dainties for poor old D , who has been very ill, and is now convalescent; so to give him a little cheer I put a woodcock, a bottle of port, grapes and oranges in the hood of this ulster. It is rather foggy to- night, and I was thinking of a play I am writing, so noticed nothing till I got to his lodgings. When I arrived I sud- denly perceived that the hood was un- cor nionly light; everything had been stolen except one tiny orange! A general exclamation of Too had! mingled with laughter, greeted this speech. How characteristic! exclaimed Dr. Westland Marston. This is a worthy pendant of the fowl episode. Oh, what was the fowl episode ? murmured the Botticelli girl in a deep contralto voice. I am not going to speak any more about my unfortunate absence of mind, remarked Wills; but if my peccadil- loes amuse you, here is Mr. H. He was the sufferer, so he can relate the incident with feeling! A whitoheaded man with a long beard, suggestive of Father Christmas, now came forward. Yes, I can speak from experience, for I was the victim. Now, you know I made up for it, exclaimed Mr. Wills, puffing away at his cigar. 121 122 Yes, indeed; I never had a better din- ner than the one you gave me at the Cafe Royal. But tell us the fowl incident, re- marked the Botticelli damsel; we are dying to hear all about it. Well, continued the long-bearded man, Wills invited me to dinner one afternoon when I met him in the Strand. I accepted, reminding him that, as he was absent-minded, hed better make a note of the evening. As he had no paper in his pocket he wrote the date of it on his shirt-cuff. When the appointed evening arrived I went to his studio; the door was opened by Wills. I could see by the blank expres- sion of his face that he had forgotten all about the appointment. Ah, old fellow! exclaimed Mr. Wills, do not be too hard upon me; the cuff went to the wash and the date with it. Mr. H threw back his head and laughed, and I then noticed that he had no collar; the long beard hid a multi- tude of omissions. But Wills was up to the occasion, continued Mr. H. All right, says be; you are in time. There is a fowl in the pot boiling here. Just come in and wait a few minutes. I have a model posing for me an Ophelia; she is draped. Come in and smoke a pipe. The fowl will soon be done. I had my misgivings, but walked in- side, and sat upon the only chair that was not crowded with paints, brushes, or palettes, while Wills proceeded with his painting. I may add that the golden-haired model was perched upon a throne, and a more saucy hussy I never did see. After puffing away at my pipe for at least twenty minutes, feeling deucedly hungry, I groaned. This sound had the effect of reminding Wills that I was present. He ex- claimed in a dreamy voice, The fowl must be boiled by this time, and com- ing forward he lifted the lid of the pot and peered inside. it is very odd, he remarked, but I cannot see the fowl! Just come here, Elsie, says he to the model, who de- scended from her perchand look. I can see nothing, she exclaimed, laughing. Did you not witness my putting the fowl in here, Elsie? No, I did not, says she; but you told me you had done so.~ Extraordinary! ejaculated Wills. No one has been here, so the bird can- not have been stolen. Well, the long and short of it is that a wee~ or two later I called again at the studio and noticed a peculiar odor. I said to Wills, What is it that smells so queerly? Oh, says he, it is noth- ingmerely some oil-study drying by the stove. But I was curious, and, if I may so express myself, went in the direction indicated, and tuereguess what I discoveredthe old fowl in a piece of brown paper behind one of the large canvases, in a state of decompo- sition! Ah,~~ said Wills, now I know how it all happened. When the fowl was brought In there came a smart visitor, Lady G, about sittings for her por- trait. I must have thrown the fowl behind a canvas, and forgot all about it. But now, old fellow, do shut upi We all laughed, and Wills ensconced himself in another armchair, and I heard him say to the Botticelli girl: I want you to do me a great favor. What is it?anything to help your art? stretching out her long neck. Yes; I want you to give me some sit- tings for my Ophelia. You have the mouth, chin, and throat I require, and the eyes would be perfect if you had a more crazy expression. I can put that in, she answered. Yes, anything to help a painter in his glorious mission, turning her eyes up to the ceiling. Ah, my dear young friend, art is heaven or hell. I am generally attend- ing the funeral of my own ideals. It is a delightthe creation of beauty; but I cannot paint to order. Unfortunately I have commissions to execute babies in pastelssuch a nuisance! Oh, nonsense, Mr. Wills! remarked a fat lady with a shrill voice. You must be more practical. Babies in pas An Evening in Bo/iemta. An Evening in Bohemia. tels are more paying than Ophelias in oils. You speak as if art was a mere grocery store! Talking of babies in pastels, her Majesty the queen has com- manded me to paint one of the royal grandchildren. I congratulate you, retorted the plump lady. Do yourself justice and your fortune will be made if you exe~ cute worthily the royal commission. I certainly did not jump at the order, for I telegraphed to Windsor saying that I was engaged, and cou7ld not just then execute the royal order. How preposterous! Great heavens, how terrible !worse than a crime! It was a b6vue, as Talleyrand would have said. You must be as mad as the Ophelia you are painting to throw away such a magnificent chance. Do not get excited, my friend, said Mr. Wills with a bland smile; it is all right now. I have since been to Wind- sor, and even had a littlejoke with the queen about the imperial baby. But I loathe the notion of becoming a fash- ionable portrait painter; that, indeed, would be the death of art. How can one do justice to ones real talent? You are prejudiced; and if you really think so, Mr. Wills, why dont you get up a company for improving the upper classes ? remarked the plump lady. Or a company to abolish bores remarked a supercilious long-haired youth in a brown velveteen coat, who had recently produced a volume of poems. I think that a company to suppress mild poems and weak novels would be very welcome, added the Lady sotto voce. I want a society to suppress the so-called shrieking and dissatisfied womanthe woman with emotions, misunderstood. It would be a grand thing to put them all under a big pump and give them iced shower- baths, added my chaperon, glaring angrily at the feminine portion of the community. But this threatened civil, or rather uncivil, war was suddenly put a stop to by the entrance, at long past midnight, 123 of a peculiar looking man, wearing top- boots, a belt round his waist, and flow- ing hair. Is he a lunatic, or a poetical gen- ius ? I whispered. A poet. He hails, I believe, from California, answered my chaperon. His name is Joaquin Miller, and he has written The Poem of the Sierras.~ This gentlemans entrance prAnced a sensation, especially among the younger ladies. He affected the airs of the noble savage. I saw him pat the hair of a lady, and in an enthusiastic tone of voice exclaim, It reminds me of the locks of one of my squaws! The clock struck one. My friend and I bade good-night to our hosts. It was with regret that I left that delightful Bohemian gathering. Many of the peo- ple I met there for the first time, be- came friends later on. But, alas! how many of those bright, intellectual peo- ple have now joined the great majority so many of them in early middle life. Both of Dr. Westland Marstons daugh- ters, and Arthur OShaughnessy, who died less than two years after his wife; then the blind poet Philip, who lost every one he cared for before he had reached middle lifehis fiancee died of rapid consumption shortly after their engagement. The following pathetic lines are addressed to her memory: Oh my sweet one, sweetest! Love of loves, supreme! This has been the fleetest, Sweetest, brilliant dream! Only for me to go from gloom to gloom, And at the end, dark Death for bride. Then he lost his sister Cecily, who was a modern Antigone for loving de- votion, leaving him more desolate than ever. In densest midnight of my life I stand. The light which lightened it is darkened now. Thy love cruel Death would not to me allow. Again went forth the inexorable com- mand. And in thy place he sits, at my right hand, A still, sad ghost, thine absence to avow. Henry. 124 Perhaps now that Philip Marston has passed into another world he may see the faces of those he loved on earth. Madox-Brown and his gifted son are dead; Dante Rossetti lies in the pretty churchyard at Birchington-on-Sea; the lovely Adelaide Neilson died suddenly and alone in Paris; the chief of the house, Dr. Westland Marston, is also gone, and the genial, whimsical, tal- ented W. G. Wills has breathed his last in a London hospital. And yet it is not so many years ago that they filled that drawing-room in Regents ParK Road with their vivid intelligence. As I re- call their voices, gestures, play of fea- tures, it is difficult to realize that they are now mere handfuls of dust. But their memory lives, bright and sharp, far more living than many of the figures that move about in the conventional drawing-rooms of so-called fashionable society. HENBIETTE COEKEAN. From The Gentlemans Magazine. HENRY. You may know, says a writer of London, the men with a million of money, or thereabouts, by their being ordinarily very shabby, and by their wearing shocking bad hats, which have seemingly never been brushed, on the backs of their heads. This is a case in which extremes meet, for you may know the men and boys, with no money at all, by the very same tokens. The whole individuality of the youth to whom this sketch is dedicated centred in hisveritablyshocking bad hat, which had been seemingly never brushed, and which he wore on the back of his head. Why the men with a million of money affect this style of headgear, this manner of treating it, and this mode of wearing it Mr. George Augustus Sala may have known it; it is not known to me, but I know, or think I know, why the youth who walked before me up North End Road, Kensington, one day last week affected these things. He wore a shocking bad hat, because he had not money to purchase a better one; he did not brush it, because the conception of dirt as matter in the wrong place was un- known to him, and soil on his hat dis- pleased him no more than soil under his foot; and he wore it on the back of his head, intending to challenge, as thereby he did challenge, attention, with the result that his hat was no less than three times in the course of his walk up this London road tilted by passers-by. This thing, it was evident, tickled agreeably his sense of the com- ical, and presumably to add to the amusement thus obtained, he lifted his hat to every ladyas there is strong reason to believenot of his acquaint- ance, met by him. In a word, this youths singularity was wholly and solely bound up with his hat. If this article could have been pinned or other- wise fastened to his hair, he would have presented an entirely normal ap- pearanceas seen from behind. As seen from in front, his appearance was isso singular that considerable curi- osity is felt concerning him. It is with the aim of appeasing, if only in a meas- ure, that curiosity that what follows is made public. To impress upon the world the idea that he is a sort of Mephistopheles has long been the chief object in life of Henry. He rejoices in this appropriate name, being called by the Cockney form of it, which undergoes vowel change with elision of the aspirate and sup- pression of the n. As befitting this assumed character, he assiduously cul- tivates certain facial peculiarities, among them a wide, set gaze and a curious straightness of the lips. The grimace thus achieved is considered by Henry to impart to him a wholly Sa- tanic air; and when, as pretty often, there comes to him an irresistible im- pulse to do a kind act, these manner- isms and others similar are strongly emphasized, lest any one should con- ceive that the act in question has had its origin in anything nobler than freak. In fine, Henry is, what Napoleon, with all due deference to Thomas Carlyle, was nota portentous mixture of quack and hero. His weekly walk through the North Henry. End Road takes him to a kinswoman who is blind, and whom, for that rea- son, he pilots to chapel morning and evening. He has done this since early childhood, and he still receives the re- ward which was meted out to him on the first day of doing it, to wit, a bag of sweets apportioned in two halves, one being given to him in the morning, and one being given to him in the even- ing. In that great darkness in which his kinswoman lives, that the times have changed, and that Henry has changed with them, is a fact which apparently has passed unnoticed. For a youth with Byronic proclivities to be made the recipient of a half-filled bag of sweets at a chapel door twice on every Sunday of the year must be something of an ordeal. It is probably the greatest ordeal to which Henry is ever subjected. The calling which this youth follows is one which seems to be peculiar to these islands he is a cats-meat hawker. It will nave been noticed by some, if not, perhaps, by all readers of this, that the cats-meat man is a per- son not to be looked for in the grandest, and also not to be looked for in the lowliest, placesthat is, in his profes- sional capacity. In his private charac- ter he may be met anywhere, even in the old court suburb of London. If any ca~s-meat man here plies his trade, however, it is only with moderate suc- cess; the great field of action for this commercial body is in more northerly regions. There is one North London suburb where the calling of cats-meat man could probably not be overstocked. The reason of this is that there, more than in any other region of London, there is a delightful preponderance of the class which is not rich and is not poor, but is an intermediate English thing for which there is, unfortunately and unaccountablyno name. This class is the one which gives out its washing and buys cats-meat, and which, on the score of being able to do this, considers itselfand, mayhap, rightly considers itselfa credit to En- gland and the whole earth. Henry, who is gifted witn business talents of 125 no mean order, plies his calling among this class, and that he does not make his fortune by so doing, but remains bitterly poor, can only be explained on the ground of his large philanthropy. Not only is he to all his friends that friend indeed who is friend in need, and that, when at all possible, in a very practical way, but at twenty years of age he wholly supports two persons besides himself. One is his blind kins- woman, the other is a kinswoman in the possession of all her senses, except when, as on one or two days of every week, she goes on what he calls euphe- mistically, visits to her friends. That way madness lies, and she becomes for that time a mad woman. Inquiries con- cerning her made by persons of plainer speech are usually made in the formula, Maria on the drink again? a formula this which does not offend Henry, though he is sufficiently attached to Maria to hold his home open to her. It also does not offend him when the facetious among his familiars ask after his blind kinswoman in the words, How is the Old Hundredth? words containing an allusion either to her great age or great piety. Levity never displeases him, yet so little is his soul a clod that he has visions. In these visions he sees himself the happy man that he will be when these two women are gathered to their fwegoers, for then he means to marry a young lady to whom he is warmly attached. This young lady is one of twelve damsels in the employ of a collar-dresser, who takes out their work and disposes of it, for he does not work himself, being a sweater. She is paid miserably, how- belt she refuses to allow Henry to con- tribute an iota towards her sustenance while she is a maid. One could not say that all this is sweet and commend- able in her nature, but this in it is sweet and commendableshe loves Henry to ecstasy, and by a curious de- fect of mental vision sees in him not a hero, which in some respects he is, but a thing which he is really in no respect, a brilliant and fascinating gentleman. ELSA DE5TERRE-KEELING. Birds at the Amsterdam Zoo. From The Spectator. BIRDS AT THE AMSTERDAM ZOO. Visitors to the London Zoo must often be struck with the difference in condi- tion and plumage of the various species of birds in the collection. Some, such as the waterfowl, pheasants, and par- rots, are usually in good health and fine plumage; others, more particularly the hawks, eagles, and vultures, are too often moping and unhealthy. Among the birds in the Zoological Gardens of Amsterdam the standard of health is maintained among all species indifferently, and those remarkable for fine plumage or brilliant hues are exhibited with as much regard to effect as if they were pictures. The parrots and macaws take the place of the tulip- beds of the London Zoo, and are used for decorative purposes out of doors. In front of each of the trees in the main avenue is a ha