Chapter 7

_Saturday's Letters_

(1) Sir,--H. Immemor's suggestion clears the air, and should persuade Mr. Dexter and his reactionary friends to think twice before again inaugurating a crusade which can only recoil upon their own heads. I enclose 5 shillings, if only as a protest against this un-English 'hitting below the belt,' and am:

Yours, etc., "PRACTICAL."

(2) Sir,--It is only occasionally that I get a glimpse of your invaluable paper, and (perhaps, fortunately) missed the issues containing Mr. Dexter's diatribes anent woman. But what astounds me is their cynical audacity. Your correspondents, though not in accord as to the name of the victim (can it be more than one?) agree that, after encouraging her to unbridled license, Mr. Dexter turned round and attacked her with a poker-- whether above or below the belt is surely immaterial. 'Tis true, 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true; but not once or twice, I fear me, in 'our fair island-story' has a similar thing occurred. The unique (I hope) feature in this case is the man Dexter's open boast that the incident is closed, and it is now 'too late in the day' to reopen it. 'Too late,' indeed! There is an American poem describing how a young woman was raking hay, and an elderly judge came by, and wasn't in a position to marry her, though he wanted to; and the whole winds up by saying that 'too late' are the saddest words in the language--especially, I would add, in this connection. But, alas! that men's memories should be so short! Is the reflection of:

"A MOTHER OF SEVEN."

[This correspondence is now closed, unless Mr. Dexter should wish to reply to his numerous critics. We do not propose to open a subscription list, at any rate for the present.--Ed. _Daily Post._]

FEBRUARY.

"O That I were lying under the olives!"--if I may echo the burthen of a beautiful little poem by Mrs. Margaret L. Woods. I have not yet consulted Zadkiel: but if I may argue from past experience of February--'fill-dyke'--in a week or so my window here will be alternately crusted with Channel spray and washed clean by lashing south-westerly showers; and a wave will arch itself over my garden wall and spoil a promising bed of violets; and I shall grow weary of oilskins, and weary of hauling the long-line with icily-cold hands and finding no fish. February--_Pisces?_ The fish, before February comes, have left the coast for the warmer deeps, and the zodiac is all wrong. Down here in the Duchy many believe in Mr. Zadkiel and Old Moore. I suppose the dreamy Celt pays a natural homage to a fellow-mortal who knows how to make up his mind for twelve months ahead. All the woman in his nature surrenders to this businesslike decisiveness. "O man!"--the exhortation is Mr. George Meredith's, or would be if I could remember it precisely--"O man, amorously inclining, before all things _be positive!_" I have sometimes, while turning the pages of Mrs. Beeton's admirable cookery book, caught myself envying Mr. Beeton. I wonder if her sisters envy Mrs. Zadkiel. She, dear lady, no doubt feels that, if it be not in mortals to command the weather her husband prophesies for August, yet he does better--he deserves it. And, after all, a prophecy in some measure depends for its success on the mind which receives it. Back in the forties--I quote from a small privately-printed volume by Sir Richard Tangye--when the potato blight first appeared in England, an old farmer in the Duchy found this warning in his favourite almanack, at the head of the page for August:--

"And potentates shall tremble and quail."

Now, 'to quail' in Cornwall still carries its old meaning, 'to shrink,' 'to wither.' The farmer dug his potatoes with all speed, and next year the almanack was richer by a score of subscribers.

Zadkiel or no Zadkiel, I will suspire, and risk it, "O that I were lying under the olives!" "O to be out of England now that February's here!"--for indeed this is the time to take the South express and be quit of fogs, and loaf and invite your soul upon the Mediterranean shore before the carnivals and regattas sweep it like a mistral. Nor need you be an invalid to taste those joys on which Stevenson dilates in that famous little essay in "_Virginibus Puerisque_" (or, as the young American lady preferred to call it, "Virginis Pueribusque."):--

"Or perhaps he may see a group of washer-women relieved, on a spit of shingle, against the blue sea, or a meeting of flower-gatherers in the tempered daylight of an olive-garden; and something significant or monumental in the grouping, something in the harmony of faint colour that is always characteristic of the dress of these Southern women, will come home to him unexpectedly, and awake in him that satisfaction with which we tell ourselves that we are richer by one more beautiful experience. . . . And then, there is no end to the infinite variety of the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate, and continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now grey, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like 'cloud on cloud,' massed in filmy indistinctness; and now, at the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken up with little momentary silverings and shadows."

English poets, too, have been at their best on the Riviera: from Cette, where Matthew Arnold painted one of the most brilliant little landscapes in our literature, along to Genoa, where Tennyson visited and:

"Loved that hall, tho' white and cold, Those niched shapes of noble mould, A princely people's awful princes, The grave, severe Genovese of old."

[I suppose, by the way, that every one who has taken the trouble to compare the stanza of 'The Daisy' with that of the invitation 'To the Rev. F. D. Maurice,' which immediately follows, will have noted the pretty rhythmical difference made by the introduction of the double dactyl in the closing line of the latter; the difference between:

"Of olive, aloe, and maize, and vine,"

And:

"Making the little one leap for joy."]

But let Mrs. Woods resume the strain:--

"O that I were listening under the olives! So should I hear behind in the woodland The peasants talking. Either a woman, A wrinkled granddame, stands in the sunshine, Stirs the brown soil in an acre of violets-- Large odorous violets--and answers slowly A child's swift babble; or else at noon The labourers come. They rest in the shadow, Eating their dinner of herbs, and are merry. Soft speech Provencal under the olives! Like a queen's raiment from days long perished, Breathing aromas of old unremembered Perfumes, and shining in dust-covered palaces With sudden hints of forgotten splendour-- So on the lips of the peasant his language, His only now, the tongue of the peasant."

Say what you will, there is a dignity about these Latin races, even in their trivial everyday movements. They suggest to me, as those lines of Homer suggested to Mr. Pater's Marius, thoughts which almost seem to be memories of a time when all the world was poetic:--

"Oi d'ote de limenos polubentheos entos ikonto Istia men steilanto, thesand d'en nei melaine . . . Ek de kai antoi Bainon epi regmini thalasses."

"And how poetic," says Pater, "the simple incident seemed, told just thus! Homer was always telling things after this manner. And one might think there had been no effort in it: that here was but the almost mechanical transcript of a time naturally, intrinsically poetic, a time in which one could hardly have spoken at all without ideal effect, or the sailors pulled down their boat without making a picture in 'the great style' against a sky charged with marvels."

One evening in last February a company of Provencal singers, pipers, and tambour players came to an hotel in Cannes, and entertained us. They were followed next evening by a troupe of German-Swiss jodelers; and oh, the difference to me--and, for that matter, to all of us! It was just the difference between passion and silly sentiment--silly and rather vulgar sentiment. The merry Swiss boys whooped, and smacked their legs, and twirled their merry Swiss girls about, until vengeance overtook them--a vengeance so complete, so surprising, that I can hardly now believe what my own eyes saw and my own ears heard. One of the merry Swiss girls sang a love-ditty with a jodeling refrain, which was supposed to be echoed back by her lover afar in the mountains. To produce this pleasing illusion, one of the merry Swiss boys ascended the staircase, and hid himself deep in the corridors of the hotel. All went well up to the last verse. Promptly and truly the swain echoed his sweetheart's call; softly it floated down to us--down from the imaginary pasture and across the imaginary valley. But as the maiden challenged for the last time, as her voice lingered on the last note of the last verse . . . There hung a Swiss cuckoo-clock in the porter's office, and at that very instant the mechanical bird lifted its voice, and nine times answered 'Cuckoo' _on the exact note!_ "Cuckoo, Cuckoo, O word of fear!" I have known coincidences, but never one so triumphantly complete. The jaw of the Swiss maiden dropped an inch; and, as well as I remember, silence held the company for five seconds before we recovered ourselves and burst into inextinguishable laughter.

The one complaint I have to make of the Mediterranean is that it does not in the least resemble a real sea; and I daresay that nobody who has lived by a real sea will ever be thoroughly content with it. Beautiful--oh, beautiful, of course, whether one looks across from Costebelle to the lighthouse on Porquerolles and the warships in Hyeres Bay; or climbs by the Calvary to the lighthouse of la Garoupe, and sees on the one side Antibes, on the other the Isles de Lerins; or scans the entrance of Toulon Harbour; or counts the tiers of shipping alongside the quays at Genoa! But somehow the Mediterranean has neither flavour nor sparkle, nor even any proper smell. The sea by Biarritz is champagne to it. But hear how Hugo draws the contrast in time of storm:--

"Ce n'etaient pas les larges lames de l'Ocean qui vont devant elles et qui se deroulent royalement dans l'immensite; c'etaient des houles courtes, brusques, furieuses. L'Ocean est a son aise, il tourne autour du monde; la Mediterranee est dans un vase et le vent la secoue, c'est ce qui lui donne cette vague haletante, breve et trapue. Le flot se ramasse et lutte. Il a autant de colere que la flot de l'Ocean et moins d'espace."

Also, barring the sardine and anchovy, I must confess that the fish of the Mediterranean are what, in the Duchy, we should call 'poor trade.' I don't wish to disparage the Bouillabaisse, which is a dish for heroes, and deserves all the heroic praises sung of it:--

"This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is-- A sort of soup, or broth, or brew, Or hotchpotch of all sorts of fishes, That Greenwich never could outdo; Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron, Soles, onions, garlic, roach and dace: All these you eat at Terre's tavern, In that one dish of Bouillabaisse."

To be precise, you take a langouste, three rascas (an edible but second-rate fish), a slice of conger, a fine 'chapon,' or red rascas, and one or two 'poissons blancs' (our grey mullet, I take it, would be an equivalent). You take a cooking-pot and put your langouste in it, together with four spoonfuls of olive-oil, an onion and a couple of tomatoes, and boil away until he turns red. You then take off the pot and add your fish, green herbs, four cloves of garlic, and a pinch of saffron, with salt and red pepper. Pour in water to cover the surface of the fish, and cook for twenty minutes over a fast fire. Then take a soup-plate, lay some slices of bread in it, and pour the bouillon over the bread. Serve the fish separately. Possibly you incline to add, in the immortal words of the late Mr. Lear, "Serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of window as fast as possible." You would make a great mistake. The marvel to me is that no missionary has acclimatised this wonderful dish upon our coasts, where we have far better fish for compounding it--red mullet, for instance, in place of the rascas; and whiting, or even pollack or grey mullet, in place of the 'poissons blancs.' For the langouste, a baby lobster might serve; and the saffron flavour would be no severe trial to us in the Duchy, who are brought up (so to say) upon saffron cake. As for Thackeray's 'dace,' I disbelieve in it. No one would add a dace (which for table purposes has been likened to an old stocking full of mud and pins: or was that a tench?) except to make a rhyme. Even Walton, who gives instructions for cooking a chavender or chub, is discreetly silent on the cooking of a dace, though he tells us how to catch him. "Serve up in a clean dish," he might have added, "and throw him out of window as fast as possible."

"O that I were lying under the olives!" And O that to olive orchards (not contiguous) I could convey the newspaper men who are almost invariably responsible when a shadow of distrust or suspicion falls between us Englishmen and the race which owns and tills these orchards. "The printing-press," says Mr. Barrie, "is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, one sometimes forgets which." I verily believe that if English newspaper editors would nobly resolve to hold their peace on French politics, say for two years, France and England would 'make friends' as easily as Frenchmen and Englishmen 'make friends' to-day.[1] One hears talk of the behaviour of the English abroad. But I am convinced that at least one-half of their bad manners may be referred to their education upon this newspaper nonsense, or to the certainty that no complaint they may make upon foreign shortcomings is too silly or too ill-bred to be printed in an English newspaper. Here is an example. I suppress the name of the writer--a lady--in the devout hope that she has repented before this. The letter is headed--

"THE AMENITIES OF RAILWAY TRAVELLING IN FRANCE.

"Sir,--As your newspaper is read in France, may I in your columns call attention to what I witnessed yesterday? I left Dinard by the 3.33 p.m. train _en route_ for Guingamp, having to change carriages at Lamballe. An instant before the train moved off from the station, a dying man belonging to the poorest class was thrust into our second class carriage and the door slammed to. The poor creature, apparently dying of some wasting disease, was absolutely on the point of death, and his ghastly appearance naturally alarmed a little girl in the carriage. At the next station I got down with my companion and changed into a first-class compartment, paying the difference. On remonstrating with the guard (_sic_), he admitted that a railway carriage ought not to be turned into an hospital, but added, 'We have no rules to prevent it.'

"I ask, sir, is it decent or human, especially at such a time, to thrust dying persons in the last stage of poverty into a second-class carriage full of ladies and children?"

There's a pretty charity for you! 'A dying man belonging to the _poorest class_.'--'_Our_ second-class carriage'--here's richness! as Mr. Squeers observed. Here's sweetness and light! But England has no monopoly of such manners. There was a poor little Cingalese girl in the train by which I travelled homeward last February from Genoa and through the Mont Cenis. And there were also three Englishmen and a Frenchman--the last apparently (as Browning put it) a person of importance in his day, for he had a bit of red ribbon in his buttonhole and a valet at his heels. At one of the small stations near the tunnel our train halted for several minutes; and while the little Cingalese leaned out and gazed at the unfamiliar snows--a pathetic figure, if ever there was one--the three Englishmen and the Frenchman gathered under the carriage door and stared up at her just as if she were a show. There was no nonsense about the performance--no false delicacy: it was good, steady, eye-to-eye staring. After three minutes of it, the Frenchman asked deliberately, "Where do you come from?" in a careless, level tone, which did not even convey that he was interested in knowing. And because the child didn't understand, the three Englishmen laughed. Altogether it was an unpleasing but instructive little episode.

No: nastiness has no particular nationality: and you will find a great deal of it, of all nationalities, on the frontier between France and Italy. I do not see that Monte Carlo provides much cause for indignation, beyond the _tir aux pigeons_, which is quite abominable. I have timed it for twenty-five minutes, and it averaged two birds a minute--fifty birds. Of these one escaped, one fluttered on to the roof of the railway station and died there slowly, under my eyes. The rest were killed within the enclosure, some by the first barrel, some by the second, or if they still lingered, were retrieved and mouthed by a well-trained butcher dog, of no recognisable breed. Sometimes, after receiving its wound, a bird would walk about for a second or two, apparently unhurt; then suddenly stagger and topple over. Sometimes, as the trap opened, a bird would stand dazed. Then a ball was trundled at it to compel it to rise. Grey breast feathers strewed the whole inclosure, in places quite thickly, like a carpet. As for the crowd at the tables inside the Casino, it was largely Semitic. On the road between Monte Carlo and Monaco, as Browning says--

"It was noses, noses all the way."

Also it smelt distressingly: but that perhaps was its misfortune rather than its fault. It did not seem very happy; nor was it composed of people who looked as if they might have attained to distinction, or even to ordinary usefulness, by following any other pursuit. On the whole, one felt that it might as well be gathered here as anywhere else.

"O that I were lying under the olives!" But since my own garden must content me this year, let me conclude with a decent letter of thanks to the friend who sent me, from Devonshire, a box of violet roots that await the spring in a corner which even the waves of the equinox cannot reach:--

TO A FRIEND WHO SENT ME A BOX OF VIOLETS.

Nay, more than violets These thoughts of thine, friend! Rather thy reedy brook --Taw's tributary-- At midnight murmuring, Descried them, the delicate, The dark-eyed goddesses. There by his cressy beds Dissolved and dreaming Dreams that distilled in a dewdrop All the purple of night, All the shine of a planet.

Whereat he whispered; And they arising --Of day's forget-me-nots The duskier sisters-- Descended, relinquished The orchard, the trout-pool, The Druid circles, Sheepfolds of Dartmoor, Granite and sandstone, Torridge and Tamar; By Roughtor, by Dozmare, Down the vale of the Fowey Moving in silence. Brushing the nightshade By bridges Cyclopean, By Glynn, Lanhydrock,

Restormel, Lostwithiel, Dark woodland, dim water, dreaming town-- Down the vale of the Fowey, Each in her exile Musing the message-- Message illumined by love As a starlit sorrow-- Passed, as the shadow of Ruth From the land of the Moabite. So they came-- Valley-born, valley-nurtured-- Came to the tideway, The jetties, the anchorage, The salt wind piping, Snoring in equinox, By ships at anchor, By quays tormented, Storm-bitten streets; Came to the Haven Crying, "Ah, shelter us, The strayed ambassadors! Lost legation of love On a comfortless coast!"

Nay, but a little sleep, A little folding Of petals to the lull Of quiet rainfalls,-- Here in my garden, In angle sheltered From north and east wind-- Softly shall recreate The courage of charity, Henceforth not to me only Breathing the message.

Clean-breath'd Sirens! Henceforth the mariner, Here on the tideway Dragging, foul of keel, Long-strayed but fortunate, Out of the fogs, the vast Atlantic solitudes, Shall, by the hawser-pin Waiting the signal-- "Leave-go-anchor!" Scent the familiar Fragrance of home; So in a long breath Bless us unknowingly: Bless them, the violets, Bless me, the gardener, Bless thee, the giver.

My business (I remind myself) behind the window is not to scribble verses: my business, or a part of it, is to criticise poetry, which involves reading poetry. But why should anyone read poetry in these days?

Well, one answer is that nobody does.

I look around my shelves and, brushing this answer aside as flippant, change the form of my question. Why do we read poetry? What do we find that it does for us? We take to it (I presume) some natural need, and it answers that need. But what is the need? And how does poetry answer it?

Clearly it is not a need of knowledge, or of what we usually understand by knowledge. We do not go to a poem as we go to a work on Chemistry or Physics, to add to our knowledge of the world about us. For example, Keats' glorious lines to the Nightingale--

"Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird . . ."

Are unchallengeable poetry; but they add nothing to our stock of information. Indeed, as Mr. Bridges pointed out the other day, the information they contain is mostly inaccurate or fanciful. Man is, as a matter of fact, quite as immortal as a nightingale in every sense but that of sameness. And as for:

"Magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn,"

Science tells us that no such things exist in this or any other ascertained world. So, when Tennyson tells us that birds in the high Hall garden were crying, "Maud, Maud, Maud," or that:

"There has fallen a splendid tear From the passion-flower at the gate: She is coming, my dove, my dear; She is coming, my life, my fate; The red rose cries, 'She is near, she is near'; And the white rose weeps, 'She is late' . . ."

The poetry is unchallengeable, but the information by scientific standards of truth is demonstrably false, and even absurd. On the other hand (see Coleridge's _Biographia Literaria_, c. xiv.), the famous lines--

"Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November, . . ."

Though packed with trustworthy information, are quite as demonstrably unpoetical. The famous senior wrangler who returned a borrowed volume of _Paradise Lost_ with the remark that he did not see what it proved, was right--so far as he went. And conversely (as he would have said) no sensible man would think to improve Newton's _Principia_ and Darwin's _Origin of Species_ by casting them into blank verse; or Euclid's _Elements_ by writing them out in ballad metre--

The king sits in Dunfermline town, Drinking the blude-red wine; 'O wha will rear me an equilateral triangle Upon a given straight line?'

We may be sure that Poetry does not aim to do what Science, with other methods, can do much better. What craving, then, does it answer? And if the craving be for knowledge of a kind, then of what kind?

The question is serious. We agree--at least I assume this--that men have souls as well as intellects; that above and beyond the life we know and can describe and reduce to laws and formulas there exists a spiritual life of which our intellect is unable to render account. We have (it is believed) affinity with this spiritual world, and we hold it by virtue of something spiritual within us, which we call the soul. You may disbelieve in this spiritual region and remain, I dare say, an estimable citizen; but I cannot see what business you have with Poetry, or what satisfaction you draw from it. Nay, Poetry demands that you believe something further; which is, that in this spiritual region resides and is laid up that eternal scheme of things, that universal _order_, of which the phenomena of this world are but fragments, if indeed they are not mere shadows.

A hard matter to believe, no doubt! We see this world so clearly; the spiritual world so dimly, so rarely, if at all! We may fortify ourselves with the reminder (to be found in Blanco White's famous sonnet) that the first man who lived on earth had to wait for the darkness before he saw the stars and guessed that the Universe extended beyond this earth--

"Who could have thought such darkness lay conceal'd Within thy beams, O Sun! or who could find, Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood reveal'd, That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind?"

He may, or may not, believe that the same duty governs his infinitesimal activity and the motions of the heavenly bodies--

"Awake, my soul, and _with the sun_ Thy daily stage of duty run . . ."

--That his duty is one with that of which Wordsworth sang--

"Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong."

But in a higher order of some sort, and his duty of conforming with it, he does not seem able to avoid believing.

This, then, is the need which Poetry answers. It offers to bring men knowledge of this universal order, and to help them in rectifying and adjusting their lives to it. It is for gleams of this spiritual country that the poets watch--

"The gleam, The light that never was on sea or land. . . ."

"I am Merlin," sang Tennyson, its life-long watcher, in his old age--

"I am Merlin, And I am dying; I am Merlin, Who follow the gleam."

They do not claim to see it always. It appears to them at rare and happy intervals, as the Vision of the Grail to the Knights of the Round Table. "Poetry," said Shelley, "is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."

If this be the need, how have our poets been answering it of late years? How, for instance, did they answer it during the South African War, when (according to our newspapers) there was plenty of patriotic emotion available to inspire the great organ of national song? Well, let us kick up what dust we will over 'Imperial ideals,' we must admit, at least, that these ideals are not yet 'accepted of song': they have not inspired poetry in any way adequate to the nobility claimed for them. Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Henley saluted the Boer War in verse of much truculence, but no quality; and when Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Henley lacked quality one began to inquire into causes. Mr. Kipling's Absent-minded Beggars, Muddied Oafs, Goths and Huns, invited one to consider why he should so often be first-rate when neglecting or giving the lie to his pet political doctrines, and invariably below form when enforcing them. For the rest, the Warden of Glenalmond bubbled and squeaked, and Mr. Alfred Austin, like the man at the piano, kept on doing his best. It all came to nothing: as poetry it never began to be more than null. Mr. Hardy wrote a few mournfully memorable lines on the seamy side of war. Mr. Owen Seaman (who may pass for our contemporary Aristophanes) was smart and witty at the expense of those whose philosophy goes a little deeper than surface-polish. One man alone--Mr. Henry Newbolt--struck a note which even his opponents had to respect. The rest exhibited plenty of the turbulence of passion, but none of the gravity of thoughtful emotion. I don't doubt they were, one and all, honest in their way. But as poetry their utterances were negligible. As writers of real poetry the Anti-Jingoes, and especially the Celts, held and still hold the field.

I will not adduce poets of admitted eminence--Mr. Watson, for instance, or Mr. Yeats--to prove my case. I am content to go to a young poet who has his spurs to win, and will ask you to consider this little poem, and especially its final stanza. He calls it--

A CHARGE

If thou hast squander'd years to grave a gem Commissioned by thy absent Lord, and while 'Tis incomplete, Others would bribe thy needy skill to them-- Dismiss them to the street!

Should'st thou at last discover Beauty's grove, At last be panting on the fragrant verge, But in the track, Drunk with divine possession, thou meet Love-- Turn, at her bidding, back.

When round thy ship in tempest Hell appears, And every spectre mutters up more dire To snatch control And loose to madness thy deep-kennell'd Fears,-- Then to the helm, O Soul!

Last, if upon the cold, green-mantling sea Thou cling, alone with Truth, to the last spar, Both castaway, And one must perish--let it not be he Whom thou art sworn to obey.

The author of these lines is a Mr. Herbert Trench, who (as I say) has his spurs to win. Yet I defy you to read them without recognising a note of high seriousness which is common to our great poets and utterly foreign to our modern bards of empire. The man, you will perceive, dares to talk quite boldly about the human soul. Now you will search long in our Jingo bards for any recognition of the human soul: the very word is unpopular. And as men of eminence write, so lesser wits imitate. A while ago I picked up a popular magazine, and happened on these verses--fluently written and, beyond a doubt, honestly meant. They are in praise of King Henry VIII.:--

King Harry played at tennis, and he threw the dice a-main, And did all things that seemed to him for his own and England's gain; He would not be talked to lightly, he would not be checked or chid; And he got what things he dreamed to get, and did-- what things he did.

When Harry played at tennis it was well for this our Isle-- He cocked his nose at Interdicts; he 'stablished us the while-- He was lustful; he was vengeful; he was hot and hard and proud; But he set his England fairly in the sight of all the crowd.

So Harry played at tennis, and we perfected the game Which astonished swaggering Spaniards when the fat Armada came. And possession did he give us of our souls in sturdiness; And he gave us peace from priesthood: and he gave us English Bess!

When Harry played at tennis we began to know this thing-- That a mighty people prospers in a mighty-minded king. We boasted not our righteousness--we took on us our sin, For Bluff Hal was just an Englishman who played the game to win.

You will perceive that in the third stanza the word 'soul' occurs: and I invite you to compare this author's idea of a soul with Mr. Trench's. This author will have nothing to do with the old advice about doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly before God. The old notion that to conquer self is a higher feat than to take a city he dismisses out of hand. "Be lustful be vengeful," says he, "but play the game to win, and you have my applause. Get what you want, set England fairly in sight of the crowd, and you are a mighty-minded man." Now the first and last comment upon such a doctrine must be that, if a God exist, it is false. It sets up a part to override the whole: it flaunts a local success against the austere majesty of Divine law. In brief, it foolishly derides the universal, saying that it chooses to consider the particular as more important. But it is not. Poetry's concern is with the universal: and what makes the Celts (however much you may dislike them) the most considerable force in English poetry at this moment is that they occupy themselves with that universal truth, which, before any technical accomplishment, is the guarantee of good poetry.

Now, when you tell yourself that the days of 'English Bess' were jolly fine empire-making days, and produced great poets (Shakespeare, for example) worthy of them; and when you go on to reflect that these also are jolly fine empire-making days, but that somehow Mr. Austin is your laureate, and that the only poetry which counts is being written by men out of harmony with your present empire-making mood, the easiest plan (if you happen to think the difference worth considering) will be to call the Muse a traitress, and declare that every poem better than Mr. Austin's is a vote given to--whatever nation your Yellow Press happens to be insulting at this moment. But, if you care to look a little deeper, you may find that some difference in your methods of empire-making is partly accountable for the change. A true poet must cling to universal truth; and by insulting it (as, for example, by importing into present-day politics the spirit which would excuse the iniquities of Henry VIII. on the ground that 'he gave us English Bess'!) you are driving the true poet out of your midst. Read over the verses above quoted, and then repeat to yourself, slowly, these lines:--

"Last, if upon the cold, green-mantling sea Thou cling, alone with Truth, to the last spar, Both castaway, And one must perish--let it not be he Whom thou art sworn to obey."

I ask no more. If a man cannot see the difference at once, I almost despair of making him perceive why poetry refuses just now even more obstinately than trade (if that be possible) to 'follow the flag.' It will not follow, because you are waving the flag over self-deception. You may be as blithe as Plato in casting out the poets from your commonwealth--though for other reasons than his. You may be as blithe as Dogberry in determining, of reading and writing, that they may appear when there is no need of such vanity. But you are certainly driving them forth to say, in place of "O beloved city of Cecrops!" "O beloved city of God!" There was a time, not many years ago, when an honest poet could have used both cries together and deemed that he meant the same thing by the two. But the two cries to-day have an utterly different meaning--and by your compulsion or by the compulsion of such politics as you have come to tolerate.

And therefore the young poet whom I have quoted has joined the band of those poets whom we are forcing out of the city, to leave our ideals to the fate which, since the world began, has overtaken all ideals which could not get themselves 'accepted by song.' Even as we drum these poets out we know that they are the only ones worth reckoning with, and that man cannot support himself upon assurances that he is the strongest fellow in the world, and the richest, and owns the biggest house, and pays the biggest rates, and wins whatever game he plays at, and stands so high in his clothes that while the Southern Cross rises over his hat-brim it is already broad day on the seat of his breeches. For that is what it all comes to: and the sentence upon the man who neglects the warning of these poets, while he heaps up great possessions, is still, "Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee." And where is the national soul you would choose, at that hasty summons, to present for inspection, having to stand your trial upon it? Try Park Lane, or run and knock up the Laureate, and then come and report your success!

Weeks ago I was greatly reproached by a correspondent for misusing the word 'Celtic,' and informed that to call Mr. Yeats or Mr. Trench a Celt is a grave abuse of ethnical terms; that a notable percentage of the names connected with the 'Celtic Revival'--Hyde, Sigerson, Atkinson, Stokes--are not Celtic at all but Teutonic; that, in short, I have been following the multitude to speak loosely. Well, I confess it, and I will confess further that the lax use of the word 'Celt' ill beseems one who has been irritated often enough by the attempts of well-meaning but muddle-headed people who get hold of this or that poet and straightly assign this or that quality of his verse to a certain set of corpuscles in his mixed blood. Although I believe that my correspondent is too hasty in labelling men's descent from their names--for the mother has usually some share in producing a child; although I believe that Mr. Yeats, for instance, inherits Cornish blood on one side, even if Irish be denied him on the other; yet the rebuke contains some justice.

Still, I must maintain that these well-meaning theorists err only in applying a broad distinction with overmuch nicety. There is, after all, a certain quality in a poem of Blake's, or a prose passage of Charlotte Bronte's, which a critic is not only unable to ignore, but which--if he has any 'comparative' sense--he finds himself accounting for by saying, "This man, or this woman, must be a Celt or have some admixture of Celtic blood." I say quite confidently that quality cannot be ignored. You open (let us say) a volume of Blake, and your eye falls on these two lines--

"When the stars threw down their spears And watered heaven with their tears,"

And at once you are aware of an imagination different in kind from the imagination you would recognise as English. Let us, if you please, rule out all debate of superiority; let us take Shakespeare for comparison, and Shakespeare at his best:--

"These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep."

Finer poetry than this I can hardly find in English to quote for you. But fine as it is, will you not observe the matter-of-factness (call it healthy, if you will, and I shall not gainsay you) beneath Shakespeare's noble language? It says divinely what it has to say; and what it has to say is full of solemn thought. But, for better or worse (or, rather, without question of better or worse), Blake's imagination is moving on a different plane. We may think it an uncomfortably superhuman plane; but let us note the difference, and note further that this plane was habitual with Blake. Now because of his immense powers we are accustomed to think of Shakespeare as almost superhuman: we pay that tribute to his genius, his strength, and the enormous impression they produce on us. But a single couplet of Blake's will carry more of this uncanny superhuman imagination than the whole five acts of _Hamlet_. So great is Shakespeare, that he tempts us to think him capable of any flight of wing; but set down a line or two of Blake's--

"A robin redbreast in a cage Puts all heaven in a rage . . . A skylark wounded on the wing Doth make a cherub cease to sing."

--And, simple as the thought is, at once you feel it to lie outside the range of Shakespeare's philosophy. Shakespeare's men are fine, brave, companionable fellows, full of passionate love, jealousy, ambition; of humour, gravity, strength of mind; of laughter and rage, of the joy and stress of living. But self-sacrifice scarcely enters into their notion of the scheme of things, and they are by no means men to go to death for an idea. We remember what figure Shakespeare made of Sir John Oldcastle, and I wish we could forget what figure he made of Joan of Arc. Within the bounds of his philosophy--the philosophy, gloriously stated, of ordinary brave, full-blooded men-- he is a great encourager of virtue; and so such lines as--

"The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action . . ."

Are thoroughly Shakespearean, while such lines as--

"A robin redbreast in a cage Puts all heaven in a rage . . ."

Are as little Shakespearean in thought as in phrasing. He can tell us that:

"We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep."

He can muse on that sleep to come:--

"To die, to sleep; To sleep; perchance to dream; aye, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause."

But that even in this life we may be more truly ourselves when dreaming than when waking--that what we dream may perchance turn out to be more real and more important than what we do--such a thought overpasses his imaginative range; or, since to dogmatise on his imaginative range is highly dangerous, let us be content with saying that it lies outside his temperament, and that he would have hit on such a thought only to dismiss it with contempt. So when we open a book of poems and come upon a monarch crying out that:

"A wild and foolish labourer is a king, To do and do and do and never dream,"

We know that we are hearkening to a note which is not Shakespearean at all, not practical, not English. And we want a name for that note.

I have followed the multitude to call it Celtic because in practice when we come upon this note we are pretty safe to discover that the poet who utters it has Celtic blood in him (Blake's poetry, for instance, told me that he must be an Irishman before ever I reflected that his name was Irish, or thought of looking up his descent). Since, however the blood of most men in these islands is by this time mixed with many strains: since also, though the note be not native with him, nothing forbids even a pure-blooded Anglo-Saxon from learning it and assimilating it: lastly, since there is obvious inconvenience in using the same word for an ethnical delimitation and a psychological, when their boundaries do not exactly correspond--and if some Anglo-Saxons have the 'Celtic' note it is certain that many thousands of Celts have not; why then I shall be glad enough to use a better and a handier and a more exact, if only some clever person will provide it.

Meanwhile, let it be understood that in speaking of a 'Celtic' note I accuse no fellow-creature of being an Irishman, Scotsman, Welshman, Manxman, Cornishman, or Breton. The poet will as a rule turn out to be one or other of these, or at least to have a traceable strain of Celtic blood in him. But to the note only is the term applied, Now this note may be recognised by many tokens; but the first and chiefest is its insistence upon man's brotherhood with bird and beast, star and flower, everything, in short, which we loosely call 'nature,' his brotherhood even with spirits and angels, as one of an infinite number of microcosms reflecting a common image of God. And poetry which holds by this creed will hardly be subservient to societies and governments and legalised doctrines and conventions; it will hold to them by a long and loose chain, if at all. It flies high enough, at any rate, to take a bird's-eye view of all manner of things which in the temple, the palace, or the market-place, have come to be taken as axiomatic. It eyes them with an extraordinary 'dissoluteness'--if you will give that word its literal meaning. It sees that some accepted virtues carry no reflection of heaven; it sees that heaven, on the other hand--so infinite is its care--may shake with anger from bound to bound at the sight of a caged bird. It sees that the souls of living things, even of the least conspicuous, reach up by chains and are anchored in heaven, while 'great' events slide by on the surface of this skimming planet with empires and their ordinances.

"And so the Emperor went in the procession under the splendid canopy. And all the people in the streets and at the windows said, 'Bless us! what matchless new clothes our Emperor has!' But he hasn't anything on!' cried a little child. 'Dear me, just listen to what the little innocent says,' observed his father, and the people whispered to each other what the child had said. 'He hasn't anything on!' they began to shout at last. This made the Emperor's flesh creep, because he thought that they were right; but he said to himself, 'I must keep it up through the procession, anyhow.' And he walked on still more majestically, and the Chamberlains walked behind and carried the train, though there was none to carry."

This parable of the Emperor without clothes can be matched, for simplicity and searching directness, against any parable outside of the Gospels, and it agrees with the Divine parables in exalting the wisdom of a child. I will not dare to discuss that wisdom here. I observe that when the poets preach it we tender them our applause. We applaud Vaughan's lines:--

"Happy those early days, when I Shin'd in my angel-infancy . . . When yet I had not walk'd above A mile or two from my first love, And looking back--at that short space-- Could see a glimpse of His bright face; When on some gilded cloud or flow'r My gazing soul would dwell an hour, And in those weaker glories spy Some shadows of eternity. . . ."

We applaud Wordsworth's glorious ode--

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! . . ."

We applaud even old John Earle's prose when he tells us of a Child that--

"The elder he grows, he is a stair lower from God; and, like his first father, much worse in his breeches. He is the Christian's example, and the old man's relapse; the one imitates his pureness, the other falls into his simplicity. . . . His father hath writ him as his own little story, wherein he reads those days of his life that he cannot remember, and sighs to see what innocence he hath outlived. . . . Could he put off his body with his little coat, he had got eternity without a burden, and exchanged but one heaven for another."

But while we applaud this pretty confident attribution of divine wisdom to children, we are much too cautious to translate it into practice. "It is far too shadowy a notion," says Wordsworth prudently, "to be recommended to faith as more than an element in our instincts of immortality;" and he might have added that, while the Child may be Father of the Man, the Man reserves the privilege of spanking. Even so I observe that, while able to agree cordially with Christ on the necessity of becoming as little children as a condition of entering the Kingdom of Heaven, we are not so injudicious as to act upon any such belief; nay, we find ourselves obliged to revise and re-interpret the wisdom of the Gospels when we find it too impracticably childish. When Christ, for instance, forbids oaths of all kinds, we feel sure He cannot be serious, or we should have to upset a settled practice of the courts. And as for resisting no evil and forgiving our enemies, why, good Heavens! what would become of our splendid armaments! The suggestion, put so down rightly, is quite too wild. In short, as a distinguished Bishop put it, society could not exist for forty-eight hours on the lines laid down in the Sermon on the Mount. (I forget the Bishop's exact words, but they amounted to a complete and thoroughly common-sense repudiation of Gospel Christianity.)

No; it is obvious that, in so far as the Divine teaching touches on conduct, we must as practical men correct it, and with a special look-out for its indulgent misunderstanding of children. Children, as a matter of experience, have no sense of the rights of property. They steal apples.

And yet--there must be something in this downright wisdom of childishness since Christ went (as we must believe) out of His way to lay such stress on it; and since our own hearts respond so readily when Vaughan or Wordsworth claim divinity for it. We cannot of course go the length of believing that the great, wise, and eminent men of our day are engaged one and all in the pursuit of shadows. 'Shadows we are and shadows we pursue' sounded an exquisitely solemn note in an election speech; but after all, we must take the world as we find it, and the world as we find it has its own recognised rewards. No success attended the poet who wrote that--

"Those little new-invented things-- Cups, saddles, crowns, are childish joys, So ribbands are and rings, Which all our happiness destroys. Nor God In His abode, Nor saints, nor little boys, Nor Angels made them; only foolish men, Grown mad with custom, on those toys Which more increase their wants to date. . . ."

He found no publisher, and they have been rescued by accident after two hundred years of oblivion. (It appears, nevertheless, that he was a happy man.)

And yet--I repeat--since we respond to it so readily, whether in welcome or in irritation, there must be something in this claim set up for childish simplicity; and I cannot help thinking it fortunate and salutary for us that the Celtic poets have taken to sounding its note so boldly. Whatever else they do, on the conventional ideals of this generation they speak out with an uncompromising and highly disconcerting directness. As I said just now, they are held, if at all, by a long and loose chain to the graven images to which we stand bound arm-to-arm and foot-to-foot. They fly far enough aloof to take a bird's-eye view. What they see they declare with a boldness which is the more impressive for being unconscious. And they declare that they see us tied to stupid material gods, and wholly blind to ideas.

P.S.--I made bold enough to say in the course of these remarks that Euclid's _Elements_ could hardly be improved by writing them out in ballad metre. A friend, to whom I happened to repeat this assertion, cast doubt on it and challenged me to prove it. I do so with pleasure in the following--

[In the original text, there is shown a geometrical diagram which consists of two equally sized circles superimposed so that they each intersect the other's centre which points are marked A and B. The outermost points on the two circles in line with AB are marked D and E. The upper point where the two circles intersect is marked C and an equilateral triangle is shown by joining points A, B and C.]

NEW BALLAD OF SIR PATRICK SPENS.

The King sits in Dunfermline toun Drinking the blude-red wine: "O wha will rear me an equilateral triangle Upon a given straight line?"

O up and spake an eldern knight, Sat at the King's right knee-- "Of a' the clerks by Granta side Sir Patrick bears the gree.

"'Tis he was taught by the Tod-huntere Tho' not at the tod-hunting; Yet gif that he be given a line, He'll do as brave a thing."

Our King has written a braid letter To Cambrigge or thereby, And there it found Sir Patrick Spens Evaluating PI.

He hadna warked his quotient A point but barely three, There stepped to him a little foot-page And louted on his knee.

The first word that Sir Patrick read, "_Plus_ x," was a' he said: The neist word that Sir Patrick read, 'Twas "_plus_ expenses paid."

The last word that Sir Patrick read, The tear blinded his e'e: "The pound I most admire is not In Scottish currencie."

Stately stepped he east the wa', And stately stepped he north: He fetched a compass frae his ha' And stood beside the Forth,

Then gurly grew the waves o' Forth, And gurlier by-and-by-- "O never yet was sic a storm, Yet it isna sic as I!"

Syne he has crost the Firth o' Forth Until Dunfermline toun; And tho' he came with a kittle wame Fu' low he louted doun.

"A line, a line, a gude straight line, O King, purvey me quick! And see it be of thilka kind That's neither braid nor thick."

"Nor thick nor braid?" King Jamie said, "I'll eat my gude hat-band If arra line as ye define Be found in our Scotland."

"Tho' there be nane in a' thy rule, It sail be ruled by me;" And lichtly with his little pencil He's ruled the line A B.

Stately stepped he east the wa', And stately stepped he west; "Ye touch the button," Sir Patrick said, "And I sall do the rest."

And he has set his compass foot Untill the centre A, From A to B he's stretched it oot-- "Ye Scottish carles, give way!"

Syne he has moved his compass foot Untill the centre B, From B to A he's stretched it oot, And drawn it viz-a-vee.

The tane circle was BCD, And A C E the tither: "I rede ye well," Sir Patrick said, "They interseck ilk ither.

"See here, and where they interseck-- To wit with yon point C-- Ye'll just obsairve that I conneck The twa points A and B.

"And there ye have a little triangle As bonny as e'er was seen; The whilk is not isosceles, Nor yet it is scalene."

"The proof! the proof!" King Jamie cried: "The how and eke the why!" Sir Patrick laughed within his beard-- "'Tis _ex hypothesi_--

"When I ligg'd in my mither's wame, I learn'd it frae my mither, That things was equal to the same, Was equal ane to t'ither.

"Sith in the circle first I drew The lines B A, B C, Be radii true, I wit to you The baith maun equal be.

"Likewise and in the second circle, Whilk I drew widdershins, It is nae skaith the radii baith, A B, AC, be twins.

"And sith of three a pair agree That ilk suld equal ane, By certes they maun equal be Ilk unto ilk by-lane."

"Now by my faith!" King Jamie saith, "What _plane_ geometrie! If only Potts had written in Scots, How loocid Potts wad be!"

"Now wow's my life!" said Jamie the King, And the Scots lords said the same, For but it was that envious knicht, Sir Hughie o' the Graeme.

"Flim-flam, flim-flam!" and "Ho indeed?" Quod Hughie o' the Graeme; "'Tis I could better upon my heid This prabblin prablem-game."

Sir Patrick Spens Was nothing laith When as he heard "flim-flam," But syne he's ta'en a silken claith And wiped his diagram.

"Gif my small feat may better'd be, Sir Hew, by thy big head, What I hae done with an A B C Do thou with X Y Z."

Then sairly sairly swore Sir Hew, And loudly laucht the King; But Sir Patrick tuk the pipes and blew, And _played_ that eldritch thing!

He's play'd it reel, he's play'd it jig, And the baith alternative; And he's danced Sir Hew to the Asses' Brigg, That's Proposetion Five.

And there they've met, and there they've fet, Forenenst the Asses' Brigg, And waefu', waefu' was the fate That gar'd them there to ligg.

For there Sir Patrick's slain Sir Hew, And Sir Hew Sir Patrick Spens-- Now was not that a fine to-do For Euclid's Elemen's?

But let us sing Long live the King! And his foes the Deil attend 'em: For he has gotten his little triangle, _Quod erat faciendum!_

[1] This was written some time before the _entente cordiale_.

MARCH.

How quietly its best things steal upon the world! And in a world where a single line of Sappho's survives as a something more important than the entire political history of Lesbos, how little will the daily newspaper help us to take long views!

Whether England could better afford to lose Shakespeare or her Indian Empire is no fair question to put to an Englishman. But every Englishman knows in his heart which of these two glories of his birth and state will survive the other, and by which of them his country will earn in the end the greater honour. Though in our daily life we--perhaps wisely--make a practice of forgetting it, our literature is going to be our most perdurable claim on man's remembrance, for it is occupied with ideas which outlast all phenomena.

The other day Mr. Bertram Dobell, the famous bookseller of Charing Cross Road, rediscovered (we might almost say that he discovered) a poet. Mr. Dobell has in the course of his life laid the Republic of Letters under many obligations. To begin with, he loves his trade and honours the wares in which he deals, and so continues the good tradition that should knit writers, printers, vendors and purchasers of books together as partakers of an excellent mystery. He studies--and on occasion will fight for--the whims as well as the convenience of his customers. It was he who took arms against the Westminster City Council in defence of the out-of-door-stall, the 'classic sixpenny box,' and at least brought off a drawn battle. He is at pains to make his secondhand catalogues better reading than half the new books printed, and they cost us nothing. He has done, also, his pious share of service to good literature. He has edited James Thomson, him of _The City of Dreadful Night_. He has helped us to learn more than we knew of Charles Lamb. He has even written poems of his own and printed them under the title of _Rosemary and Pansies_, in a volume marked 'Not for sale'--a warning which I, as one of the fortunate endowed, intend strictly to observe. On top of this he has discovered, or rediscovered, Thomas Traherne.

Now before we contemplate the magnitude of the discovery let us rehearse the few facts known of the inconspicuous life of Thomas Traherne. He was born about the year 1636, the son of a Hereford shoemaker, and came in all probability (like Herbert and Vaughan) of Welsh stock. In 1652 he entered Brasenose College, Oxford, as a commoner. On leaving the University he took orders; was admitted Rector of Credenhill, in Herefordshire, in 1657; took the degree of Bachelor of Divinity in 1669; became the private chaplain of Sir Orlando Bridgman, at Teddington; and died there a few months after his patron, in 1674, aged but thirty-eight. He wrote a polemical tract on _Roman Forgeries_, which had some success; a treatise on _Christian Ethicks_, which, being full of gentle wisdom, was utterly neglected; an exquisite work, _Centuries of Meditations_, never published; and certain poems, which also he left in manuscript. And there the record ends.

Next let us tell by how strange a chance this forgotten author came to his own. In 1896 or 1897 Mr. William T. Brooke picked up two volumes of MS. on a street bookstall, and bought them for a few pence. Mr. Brooke happened to be a man learned in sacred poetry and hymnology, and he no sooner began to examine his purchase than he knew that he had happened on a treasure. At the same time he could hardly believe that writings so admirable were the work of an unknown author. In choice of subject, in sentiment, in style, they bore a strong likeness to the poems of Henry Vaughan the Silurist, and he concluded that they must be assigned to Vaughan. He communicated his discovery to the late Dr. Grosart, who became so deeply interested in it that he purchased the manuscripts and set about preparing an edition of Vaughan, in which the newly-found treasures were to be included. Dr. Grosart, one may say in passing, was by no means a safe judge of characteristics in poetry. With all his learning and enthusiasm you could not trust him, having read a poem with which he was unacquainted or which perchance he had forgotten, to assign it to its true or even its probable author. But when you hear that so learned a man as Dr. Grosart considered these writings worthy of Vaughan, you may be the less apt to think me extravagant in holding that man to have been Vaughan's peer who wrote the following lines:--

"How like an Angel came I down! How bright are all things here! When first among His works I did appear how their Glory me did crown! The world resembled His Eternity, In which my soul did walk; And everything that I did see Did with me talk.

"The streets were paved with golden stones, The boys and girls were mine, O how did all their lovely faces shine! The sons of men were holy ones; In joy and beauty they appeared to me: And everything which here I found, While like an angel I did see, Adorned the ground."

'Proprieties.'--

That is to say, 'properties,' 'estates.'--

"Proprieties themselves were mine, And hedges ornaments, Walls, boxes, coffers, and their rich contents Did not divide my joys, but all combine. Clothes, ribbons, jewels, laces, I esteemed My joys by others worn; For me they all to wear them seemed When I was born."

Dr. Grosart then set about preparing a new and elaborate edition of Vaughan, which, only just before his death, he was endeavouring to find means to publish. After his death the two manuscripts passed by purchase to Mr. Charles Higham, the well-known bookseller of Farringdon Street, who in turn sold them to Mr. Dobell. Later, when a part of Dr. Grosart's library was sold at Sotheby's, Mr. Dobell bought--and this is perhaps the strangest part of the story--a third manuscript volume, which Dr. Grosart had possessed all the time without an inkling that it bore upon Mr. Brooke's discovery, "though nothing is needed but to compare it with the other volumes in order to see that all these are in the same handwriting."

Mr. Dobell examined the writings, compared them with Vaughan's, and began to have his doubts. Soon he felt convinced that Vaughan was not their author. Yet, if not Vaughan, who could the author be?

Again Mr. Brooke proved helpful. To a volume of Giles Fletcher's, _Christ's Victory and Triumph_, which he had edited, Mr. Brooke had appended a number of seventeenth-century poems not previously collected; and to one of these, entitled 'The Ways of Wisdom,' he drew Mr. Dobell's attention as he had previously drawn Mr. Grosart's. To Mr. Dobell the resemblance between it and the manuscript poems was at once evident. Mr. Brooke had found the poem in a little book in the British Museum entitled, _A Serious and Patheticall Contemplation of the Mercies of God, in several most Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings for the same_ (a publisher's title it is likely): and this book contained other pieces in verse. These having been copied out by Mr. Dobell's request, he examined them and felt no doubt at all that the author of the manuscript poem and of the _Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings_ must be one and the same person. But, again, who could he be?

A sentence in an address 'To the Reader' prefixed to the _Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings_ provided the clue. The editor of this work (a posthumous publication), after eulogising the unnamed author's many virtues wound up with a casual clue to his identity:--

"But being removed out of the Country to the service of the late Lord Keeper Bridgman as his Chaplain, he died young and got early to those blissful mansions to which he at all times aspir'd."

But for this sentence, dropped at haphazard, the secret might never have been resolved. As it was, the clue--that the author of _Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings_ was private chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgman--had only to be followed up; and it led to the name of Thomas Traherne. This information was obtained from Wood's _Athenae Oxonienses_, which mentioned Traherne as the author of two books, _Roman Forgeries_ and _Christian Ethicks_.

The next step was to get hold of these two works and examine them, if perchance some evidence might be found that Traherne was also the author of the manuscripts, which as yet remained a guess, standing on Mr. Dobell's conviction that the verses in the manuscripts and those in _Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings_ must be by the same hand.

By great good fortune that evidence was found in _Christian Ethicks_, in a poem which, with some variations, occurred too in the manuscript _Centuries of Meditations_. Here then at last was proof positive, or as positive as needs be.

The most of us writers hope and stake for a diuturnity of fame; and some of us get it. _Sed ubi sunt vestimenta eorum qui post vota nuncupata perierunt?_ "That bay leaves were found green in the tomb of St. Humbert after a hundred and fifty years was looked upon as miraculous," writes Sir Thomas Browne. But Traherne's laurel has lain green in the dust for close on two hundred and thirty years, and his fame so cunningly buried that only by half a dozen accidents leading up to a chance sentence in a dark preface to a forgotten book has it come to light.

I wonder if his gentle shade takes any satisfaction in the discovery? His was by choice a _vita fallens_. Early in life he made, as we learn from a passage in _Centuries of Meditations_, his election between worldly prosperity and the life of the Spirit, between the chase of fleeting phenomena and rest upon the soul's centre:--

"When I came into the country and, being seated among silent trees and woods and hills, had all my time in my own hands, I resolved to spend it all, whatever it cost me, in the search of Happiness, and to satiate the burning thirst which Nature had enkindled in me from my youth; in which I was so resolute that I chose rather to live upon ten pounds a year, and to go in leather clothes, and to feed upon bread and water, so that I might have all my time clearly to myself, than to keep many thousands per annum in an estate of life where my time would be devoured in care and labour. And God was so pleased to accept of that desire that from that time to this I have had all things plentifully provided for me without any care at all, my very study of Felicity making me more to prosper than all the care in the whole world. So that through His blessing I live a free and kingly life, as if the world were turned again into Eden, or, much more, as it is at this day."

Yet Traherne is no quietist: a fervent, passionate lover, rather, of simple and holy things. He sees with the eyes of a child: the whole world shines for him 'apparell'd in celestial light,' and that light, he is well aware, shines out on it, through the eyes which observe it, from the divine soul of man. The verses which I quoted above strike a note to which he recurs again and again. Listen to the exquisite prose in which he recounts the 'pure and virgin apprehension' of his childhood:--

"The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold; the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The Men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal Cherubim! And young men glittering and sparkling angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street were moving jewels; I knew not that they were born, or should die. . . . The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins, and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine; and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it. . . ."

All these things he enjoyed, his life through, uncursed by the itch for 'proprietorship': he was like the Magnanimous Man in his own _Christian Ethicks_--'one that scorns the smutty way of enjoying things like a slave, because he delights in the celestial way and the Image of God.' In this creed of his all things are made for man, if only man will inherit them wisely: even God, in conferring benefits on man, is moved and rewarded by the felicity of witnessing man's grateful delight in them:--

"For God enjoyed is all His end, Himself He then doth comprehend When He is blessed, magnified, Extoll'd, exalted, prais'd, and glorified."

Yes, and 'undeified almost, if once denied.' A startling creed, this; but what a bold and great-hearted one! To Traherne the Soul is a sea which not only receives the rivers of God's bliss but 'all it doth receive returns again.' It is the Beloved of the old song, 'Quia Amore Langueo;' whom God pursues, as a lover. It is the crown of all things. So in one of his loveliest poems he shows it standing on the threshold to hear news of a great guest, never dreaming that itself is that great guest all the while--

ON NEWS

I.

News from a foreign country came, As if my treasure and my wealth lay there: So much it did my heart enflame, 'Twas wont to call my soul into mine ear, Which thither went to meet The approaching sweet, And on the threshold stood To entertain the unknown Good. It hover'd there As if 'twould leave mine ear, And was so eager to embrace The joyful tidings as they came, 'Twould almost leave its dwelling-place To entertain that same.

II.

As if the tidings were the things, My very joys themselves, my foreign treasure, Or else did bear them on their wings-- With so much joy they came, with so much pleasure-- My Soul stood at that gate To recreate Itself with bliss, and to Be pleased with speed. A fuller view It fain would take, Yet journeys back again would make Unto my heart: as if 'twould fain Go out to meet, yet stay within To fit a place to entertain And bring the tidings in.

III.

What sacred instinct did inspire My Soul in childhood with a hope so strong? What secret force moved my desire To expect my joy, beyond the seas, so young? Felicity I knew Was out of view; And being here alone, I saw that happiness was gone From me! For this I thirsted absent bliss, And thought that sure beyond the seas, Or else in something near at hand I knew not yet (since nought did please I knew), my bliss did stand,

IV.

But little did the infant dream That all the treasures of the world were by: And that himself was so the cream And crown of all which round about did lie. Yet thus it was: The Gem, The Diadem, The Ring enclosing all That stood upon this earthly ball; The Heavenly Eye, Much wider than the sky, Wherein they all included were, The glorious Soul that was the King Made to possess them, did appear A small and little thing.

I must quote from another poem, if only for the pleasure of writing down the lines:--

THE SALUTATION.

These little limbs, These eyes and hands which here I find, These rosy cheeks wherewith my life begins-- Where have ye been? Behind What curtain were ye from me hid so long? Where was, in what abyss, my speaking tongue? When silent I So many thousand, thousand years Beneath the dust did in a chaos lie, How could I smiles or tears Or lips or hands or eyes or ears perceive? Welcome ye treasures which I now receive!

These poems waited for two hundred and thirty years to be discovered on a street bookstall! There are lines in them and whole passages in the unpublished _Centuries of Meditations_ which almost set one wondering with Sir Thomas Browne "whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembered in the known account of Time?"

I am tempted, but will not be drawn to discuss how Traherne stands related to Vaughan on the one hand and Cowley on the other. I note the discovery here, and content myself with wondering if the reader share any of my pleasure in it and enjoyment of the process which brought it to pass. For me, I was born and bred a bookman. In my father's house the talk might run on divinity, politics, the theatre; but literature was the great thing. Other callings might do well enough, but writers were a class apart, and to be a great writer was the choicest of ambitions. I grew up in this habit of mind, and have not entirely outgrown it yet; have not so far outgrown it but that literary discussions, problems, discoveries engage me though they lie remote from literature's service to man (who has but a short while to live, and labour and vanity if he outlast it). I could join in a hunt after Bunyan's grandmothers, and have actually spent working days in trying to discover the historical facts of which _Robinson Crusoe_ may be an allegory. One half of my quarrel with those who try to prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare rests on resentment of the time they force me to waste; and a new searcher for the secret of the Sonnets has only to whistle and I come to him--though, to be sure, that gentleman almost cured me who identified the Dark Lady with Ann Hathaway, resting his case upon--

SONNET CCXVIII.

Whoever hath my wit, thou hast thy Will: And where is Will alive but _hath a way?_ So in device thy wit is starved still And as devised by Will. That is to say, My second-best best bed, yea, and the gear withal Thou hast; but all that capital messuage Known as New Place goes to Susanna Hall. Haply the disproportion may engage The harmless ail-too-wise which otherwise Might knot themselves disknitting of a clue That Bacon wrote me. Lastly, I devise My wit, to whom? To wit, to-whit, to-whoo! And here revoke all previous testaments: Witness, J. Shaw and Robert Whattcoat, Gents.

After this confession you will pardon any small complacency that may happen to betray itself in the ensuing narrative.

Mr. Dobell followed up his discovery of Traherne by announcing another _trouvaille_, and one which excited me not a little:--

"Looking recently over a parcel of pamphlets which I had purchased, I came upon some loose leaves which were headed _A Prospect of Society_. The title struck me as familiar, and I had only to read a few lines to recognise them as belonging to [Goldsmith's] _The Traveller_. But the opening lines of my fragment are not the opening lines of the poem as it was published; in fact, the first two lines of _A Prospect of Society_ are lines 353-4 in the first edition of _The Traveller_. . . . A further examination of the fragment which I had discovered showed that it is not what is usually understood as a 'proof' of _The Traveller_, but rather the material, as yet formless and unarranged, out of which it was to be finally evolved."

Now--line for corresponding line--the text discovered by Mr. Dobell often differs, and sometimes considerably, from that of the first edition of _The Traveller_, and these variations are highly interesting, and make Mr. Dobell's 'find' a valuable one. But on studying the newly discovered version I very soon found myself differing from Mr. Dobell's opinion that we had here the formless, unarranged material out of which Goldsmith built an exquisitely articulated poem.[1] And, doubting this, I had to doubt what Mr. Dobell deduced from it--that "it was in the manner in which a poem, remarkable for excellence of form and unity of design, was created out of a number of verses which were at first crudely conceived and loosely connected that Goldsmith's genius was most triumphantly displayed." For scarcely had I lit a pipe and fallen to work on _A Prospect of Society_ before it became evident to me (1) that the lines were not "unarranged," but disarranged; and (2) that whatever the reason of this disarray, Goldsmith's brain was not responsible; that the disorder was too insane to be accepted either as an order in which he could have written the poem, or as one in which he could have wittingly allowed it to circulate among his friends, unless he desired them to believe him mad. Take, for instance, this collocation:--

"Heavens! how unlike their Belgic sires of old! Rough, poor, content, ungovernably bold; Where shading elms beside the margin grew, And freshen'd from the waves the zephyr blew."

Or this:--

"To kinder skies, where gentler manners reign, We turn, where France displays her bright domain. Thou sprightly land of mirth and social ease, Pleas'd with thyself, whom all the world can please, How often have I led thy sportive choir With tuneless pipe, along the sliding Loire? No vernal bloom their torpid rocks display, But Winter lingering chills the lap of May; No zephyr fondly sooths the mountain's breast, But meteors glare and frowning storms invest."

Short of lunacy, no intellectual process would account for that sort of thing, whereas a poem more pellucidly logical than _The Traveller_ does not exist in English. So, having lit another pipe, I took a pencil and began some simple counting, with this result:--

The first 42 lines of _The Prospect_ correspond with lines 353-400 of _The Traveller_. The next 42 with lines 311-352. The next 34 with lines 277-310. The next 36 with lines 241-276. The next 36 with lines 205-240. The next 36 with lines 169-204. The next 38 with lines 131-168. The next 28 with lines 103-130. And the remaining fragment of 18 lines with lines 73-92.

In other words, _The Prospect_ is merely an early draft of _The Traveller_ printed backwards in fairly regular sections.

But how can this have happened? The explanation is at once simple and ridiculous. As Goldsmith finished writing out each page of his poem for press, he laid it aside on top of the pages preceding; and, when all was done, he forgot to sort back his pages in reverse order. That is all. Given a good stolid compositor with no thought beyond doing his duty with the manuscript as it reached him, you have what Mr. Dobell has recovered-- an immortal poem printed wrong-end-foremost page by page. I call the result delightful, and (when you come to think of it) the blunder just so natural to Goldsmith as to be almost postulable.

Upon this simple explanation we have to abandon the hypothesis that Goldsmith patiently built a fine poem out of a congeries of fine passages pitchforked together at haphazard--a splendid rubbish heap; and Mr. Dobell's find is seen to be an imperfect set of duplicate proofs--fellow, no doubt, to that set which Goldsmith, mildly objurgating his own or the printer's carelessness, sliced up with the scissors and rearranged before submitting it to Johnson's friendly revision.

The pleasantest part of the story (for me) has yet to come. We all know how easy it is to turn obstinate and defend a pet theory with acrimony. Mr. Dobell did nothing of the sort. Although his enthusiasm had committed him to no little expense in publishing _The Prospect_, with a preface elaborating his theory, he did a thing which was worth a hundred discoveries. He sat down, convinced himself that my explanation was the right one, and promptly committed himself to further expense in bringing out a new edition with the friendliest acknowledgment. So do men behave who are at once generous of temper and anxious for the truth.

He himself had been close upon the explanation. In his preface he had actually guessed that the "author's manuscript, written on loose leaves, had fallen into confusion and was then printed without any attempt at rearrangement." In fact, he had hit upon the right solution, and only failed to follow up the clue.

His find, too, remains a valuable one; for so far as it goes we can collate it with the first edition of _The Traveller_, and exactly discover the emendations made by Johnson, or by Goldsmith after discussion with Johnson. Boswell tells us that the Doctor "in the year 1783, at my request, marked with a pencil the lines which he had furnished, which are only line 420, 'To stop too faithful, and too faint to go,' and the concluding ten lines, except the last couplet but one. . . . He added, 'These are all of which I can be sure.'" We cannot test his claim to the concluding lines, for the correspondent passage is missing from Mr. Dobell's fragment; but Johnson's word would be good enough without the internal evidence of the verses to back it. "To stop too faithful, and too faint to go," is his improvement, and an undeniable one, upon Goldsmith's "And faintly fainter, fainter seems to go." I have not been at pains to examine all the revised lines, but they are numerous, and generally (to my thinking) betray Johnson's hand. Also they are almost consistently improvements. There is one alteration, however,-- unmistakably due to Johnson,--which some of us will join with Mr. Dobell in regretting. Johnson, as a fine, full-blooded Jingo, naturally showed some restiveness at the lines--

"Yes, my lov'd brother, cursed be that hour When first ambition toil'd for foreign power,"

And induced Goldsmith to substitute--

"Yes, brother, curse with me that baleful hour When first ambition struck at regal power,"

Which may or may not be more creditable in sentiment, but is certainly quite irrelevant in its context, which happens to be a denunciation of the greed for gold and foreign conquest. It is, in that context, all but meaningless, and must have irritated and puzzled many readers of a poem otherwise clearly and continuously argued. In future editions of _The Traveller_, Goldsmith's original couplet should be restored; and I urge this (let the Tory reader be assured) not from any ill-will towards our old friend the Divine Right of Kings, but solely in the sacred name of Logic.

Such be the bookman's trivial adventures and discoveries. They would be worse than trivial indeed if they led him to forget or ignore that by which Goldsmith earned his immortality, or to regard Traherne merely as a freak in the history of literary reputations, and not primarily as the writer of such words as these--

"A little touch of something like pride is seated in the true sense of a man's own greatness, without which his humility and modesty would be contemptible virtues."

"It is a vain and insipid thing to suffer without loving God or man. Love is a transcendent excellence in every duty, and must of necessity enter into the nature of every grace and virtue. That which maketh the solid benefit of patience unknown, its taste so bitter and comfortless to men, is its _death_ in the separation and absence of its soul. We suffer but love not."

"All things do first receive that give: Only 'tis God above That from and in Himself doth live; Whose all-sufficient love Without original can flow, And all the joys and glories show Which mortal man can take delight to know. He is the primitive, eternal Spring, The endless Ocean of each glorious thing. The soul a vessel is, A spacious bosom, to contain All the fair treasures of His bliss, Which run like rivers from, into, the main, And all it doth receive, return again."

"You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars."

[1] Early editions of Goldsmith's poem bore the title, _The Traveller; or, A Prospect of Society_. Later editions dropped the sub-title.

APRIL.

"Thus, then, live I Till 'mid all the gloom By Heaven! the bold sun Is with me in the room Shining, shining!

"Then the clouds part, Swallows soaring between; The spring is alive And the meadows are green!

"I jump up like mad, Break the old pipe in twain, And away to the meadows, The meadows again!"

The poem of FitzGerald's from which these verses come was known, I believe, to very few until Mr. E. V. Lucas exhumed it from _Half-hours with the Worst Authors_, and reprinted it in that delightful little book _The Open Road_. I have a notion that even FitzGerald's most learned executor was but dimly aware of its existence. For my part, at this time of the day, I prefer it to his Omar Khayyam--perversely, no doubt. In the year 1885 or thereabouts Omar, known only to a few, was a wonder and a treasure to last one's lifetime; but I confess that since a club took him up and feasted his memory with field-marshals and other irrelevant persons in the chair, and since his fame has become vulgarised not only in Thames-side hotels, but over the length and breadth of the North American continent, one at least of his admirers has suffered a not unnatural revulsion, until now he can scarcely endure to read the immortal quatrains. Immortal they are, no doubt, and deserve to be by reason of their style--"fame's great antiseptic." But their philosophy is thin after all, and will not bear discussion. As exercise for a grown man's thought, I will back a lyric of Blake's or Wordsworth's, or a page of Ibsen's _Peer Gynt_ against the whole of it, any day.

This, however, is parenthetical. I caught hold of FitzGerald's verses to express that jollity which should be every man's who looks up from much reading or writing and knows that Spring has come.

"_Solvitur acris hiems grata vice veris et favoni Trahuntque siccas machinae carinas_ . . ."

In other words, I look out of the window and decide that the day has arrived for launching the boat--

"This is that happy morn, That day, long wished day!"

And, to my mind, the birthday of the year. Potentates and capitalists who send down orders to Cowes or Southampton that their yachts are to be put in commission, and anon arrive to find everything ready (if they care to examine), from the steam capstan to the cook's apron, have little notion of the amusement to be found in fitting out a small boat, say of five or six tons. I sometimes doubt if it be not the very flower, or at least the bloom, of the whole pastime. The serious face with which we set about it; the solemn procession up the river to the creek where she rests, the high tide all but lifting her; the silence in which we loose the moorings and haul off; the first thrill of buoyant water underfoot; the business of stepping the mast; quiet days of sitting or pottering about on deck in the sunny harbour; vessels passing up and down, their crews eyeing us critically as the rigging grows and the odds and ends--block, tackle and purchase--fall into their ordered places; and through it all the expectation running of the summer to come, and 'blue days at sea' and unfamiliar anchorages--unfamiliar, but where the boat is, home will be--

"Such bliss Beggars enjoy, when princes oft do miss."

Homer, who knew what amused men, constantly lays stress on this business of fitting out:--

"Then at length she (Athene) let drag the swift ship to the sea, and stored within it all such tackling as decked ships carry. And she moored it at the far end of the harbour. . . . So they raised the mast of pine tree, and set it in the hole of the cross plank, and made it fast with forestays, and hauled up the white sails with twisted ropes of oxhide."

And again:

"First of all they drew the ship down to the deep water, and fixed the oars in leathern loops all orderly, and spread forth the white sails. And squires, haughty of heart, bare for them their arms,"--but you'll observe that it was the masters who did the launching, etc., like wise men who knew exactly wherein the fun of the business consisted. "And they moored her high out in the shore water, and themselves disembarked. There they supped and waited for evening to come on."

You suggest, perhaps, that our seafaring is but play: and you are right. But in our play we catch a cupful of the romance of the real thing. Also we have the real thing at our doors to keep us humble. Day by day beneath this window the statelier shipping goes by; and our twopenny adventurings and discoveries do truly (I believe) keep the greater wonder and interest awake in us from day to day--the wonder and interest so memorably expressed in Mr. Bridges's poem, _A Passer By_:--

"Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding, Leaning across the bosom of the urgent West, That fearest nor sea rising, nor sky clouding, Whither away, fair rover, and what thy quest? Ah! soon when Winter has all our vales opprest, When skies are cold and misty, and hail is hurling, Wilt thou glide on the blue Pacific, or rest In a summer haven asleep, thy white sails furling?

"I there before thee, in the country so well thou knowest, Already arrived am inhaling the odorous air: I watch thee enter unerringly where thou goest, And anchor queen of the strange shipping there, Thy sails for awnings spread, thy masts bare.". . . .

"And yet, O splendid ship, unhailed and nameless, I know not if, aiming a fancy, I rightly divine That thou hast a purpose joyful, a courage blameless, Thy port assured in a happier land than mine. But for all I have given thee, beauty enough is thine. As thou, aslant with trim tackle and shrouding, From the proud nostril curve of a prow's line In the offing scatterest foam, thy white sails crowding."

Though in all human probability I shall never be the first to burst into a silent sea, I can declare quite seriously that I never steer into an unfamiliar creek or haven but, as its recesses open, I can understand something of the awe of the boat's crew in Andrew Marvell's "Bermudas;" yes, and something of the exultation of the great Columbus himself!

In a later paper I may have to tell of these voyages and traffickings. For the while I leave the reader to guess how and in what corner of the coast I happened on the following pendant to Mr. Dobell's _trouvaille_.

It may not challenge comparison with Mr. Flinders Petrie's work in Egypt or with Mr. Hogarth's Cretan explorations; but I say confidently that, since Mr. Pickwick unearthed the famous inscribed stone, no more fortunate or astonishing discovery has rewarded literary research upon our English soil than the two letters which with no small pride I give to the world this month.

Curiously enough, they concern Mr. Pickwick.

But, perhaps, by way of preface I shall remind the reader that the final number of _Pickwick_ was issued in November, 1837. The first French version--which Mr. Percy Fitzgerald justly calls 'a rude adaptation rather than a translation'--appeared in 1838, and was entitled _Le Club de Pickwickistes, Roman Comique, traduit librement de l'Anglais par Mdme. Eugenie Giboyet_. With equal justice Mr. Fitzgerald complains (_The History of Pickwick_, p. 276) that "the most fantastic tricks are played with the text, most of the dialogue being left out and the whole compressed into two small volumes." Yet, in fact, Mme. Giboyet (as will appear) was more sinned against than sinning. Clearly she undertook to translate the immortal novel in collaboration with a M. Alexandre D--', and was driven by the author's disapproval to suppress M. D--'s share of the work. The dates are sufficient evidence that this was done (as it no doubt had to be done) in haste. I regret that my researches have yielded no further information respecting this M. Alexandre D--'. The threat in the second letter may or may not have been carried out. I am inclined to hope that it was, feeling sure that the result, if ever discovered, will prove in the highest degree entertaining. With this I may leave the letters to speak for themselves.

(1)

"45 Doughty Street," "September 25th, 1837."

"MY DEAR MADAM,--It is true that when granting the required permission to translate _Pickwick_ into French, I allowed also the license you claimed for yourself and your _collaborateur_--of adapting rather than translating, and of presenting my hero under such small disguise as might commend him better to a Gallic audience. But I am bound to say that--to judge only from the first half of your version, which is all that has reached me--you have construed this permission more freely than I desired. In fact, the parent can hardly recognise his own child.

"Against your share in the work, Madame, I have little to urge, though the damages you represent Mrs. Bardell as claiming--300,000 francs, or 12,000 pounds of our money--strikes me as excessive. It is rather (I take as my guide the difference in the handwriting) to your _collaborateur_ that I address, through you, my remonstrances.

"I have no radical objection to his making Messrs. Snodgrass, Winkle, and Tupman members of His Majesty King Louis XIII.'s corps of Musketeers, if he is sincerely of opinion that French taste will applaud the departure. I even commend his slight idealisation of Snodgrass (which, by the way, is not the name of an English mountain), and the amorousness of Tupman (Aramis) gains--I candidly admit--from the touch of religiosity which he gives to the character; though I do not, as he surmises, in the course of my story, promote Tupman to a bishopric. The development--preferable as on some points the episcopal garb may be considered to the green velvet jacket with a two-inch tail worn by him at Madame Chasselion's _fete champetre_-- would jar upon our Anglican prejudices. As for Winkle (Porthos), the translation nicely hits off his love of manly exercises, while resting his pretensions on a more solid basis of fact than appears in the original. In the incident of the baldric, however, the imposture underlying Mr. W.'s green shooting-coat is conveyed with sufficient neatness.

"M. D--' has been well advised again in breaking up the character of Sam Weller and making him, like Cerberus, three gentlemen at once. Buckingham (Jingle) and Fenton (a capital rendering of the Fat Boy) both please me; and in expanding the episode of the sausage and the trouser-buttons M. D--' has shown delicacy and judgment by altering the latter into diamond studs.

"Alas! madam, I wish the same could be said for his treatment of my female puppets, which not only shocks but bewilders me. In her earlier appearances Mrs. Bardell (Milady) is a fairly consistent character; and why M. D--' should hazard that consistency by identifying her with the middle-aged lady at the great White Horse, Ipswich, passes my comprehension. I say, madam, that it bewilders me; but for M. D--'s subsequent development of the occurrences at that hostelry I entertain feelings of which mere astonishment is, perhaps, the mildest. I can hardly bring myself to discuss this with a lady; but you will allow me to protest in the very strongest terms that Mr. Pickwick made that unfortunate mistake about the sleeping apartment in the completest innocence, that in ejaculating 'ha-hum' he merely uttered a note of warning, and that 'ha-hum' is _not_ (as M. D--' suspects) an English word from which certain syllables have been discreetly removed; that in thrusting his head through the bed-curtains he was, as I am careful to say, 'not actuated by any definite object'; and that, as a gentleman should, he withdrew at the earliest possible moment. His intercepted duel with Mr. Peter Magnus (De Wardes) rests, as I fondly imagined I had made clear, upon a complete misunderstanding. The whole business of the _fleur-de-lys_ on Mrs. Bardell's shoulder is a sheer interpolation and should be expunged, not only on grounds of morality, but because when you reach the actual trial, 'Bardell _v_. Pickwick,' you will find this discovery of the defendant's impossible either to ignore or to reconcile with the jury's verdict. Against the intervention of Richelieu (Mr. Nupkins) I have nothing to urge. M. D--' opines that I shall in the end deal out poetical justice to Mrs. Bardell as Milady. He is right. I have, indeed, gone so far as to imprison her; but I own that her execution (as suggested by him) at the hands of the Queer Client, with Pickwick and his friends (or, alternatively, Mrs. Cluppins, Mr. Perker, and Bob Sawyer) as silent spectators, seems to me almost as inconsistent with the spirit of the tale as his other proposal to kidnap Mr. Justice Stareleigh in the boot of Mr. Weller's coach, and substitute for his lordship the Chancery prisoner in an iron mask. I trust, madam, that these few suggestions will, without setting any appreciable constraint on your fancy, enable you to catch something more of the spirit of my poor narrative than I have been able to detect in some of the chapters submitted; and I am, with every assurance of esteem, Your obliged servant, Boz."

"P.S.--The difference between Anjou wine and the milk punch about which you inquire does not seem to me to necessitate any serious alteration of the chapter in question. M. D--'s expressed intention of making Master Bardell in later life the executioner of King Charles I. of England must stand over for some future occasion. The present work will hardly yield him the required opportunity for dragging in King Charles' head."

(2)

"MADAME,--Puisque M. Boz se mefie des propositions lui faites sans but quelconque que de concilier les gens d'esprit, j'ai l'honneur de vous annnoncer nettement que je me retire d'une besogne aussi rude que malentendue. Il dit que j'ai concu son _Pickwick_ tout autrement que lui. Soit! Je l'ecrirai, ce _Pickwick_, selon mon propre gout. Que M. Boz redoute mes _Trois Pickwickistes!_ Agreez, Madame, etc., etc., Alexandre (le Grand)."

I am told that literary aspirants in these days do not read books, or read them only for purposes of review-writing. Yet these pages may happen to fall in the way of some literary aspirant faint on a false scent, yet pursuing; and to him, before telling of another discovery, I will address one earnest word of caution. Let him receive it as from an elder brother who wishes him well.

My caution is--Avoid irony as you would the plague.

Years ago I was used to receive this warning (on an average) once a week from my old and dear friend Sir Wemyss Reid; and once a week I would set myself, assailing his good nature, to cajole him into printing some piece of youthful extravagance which he well knew--and I knew--and he knew that I knew--would infuriate a hundred staid readers of _The Speaker_ and oblige him to placate in private a dozen puzzled and indignant correspondents. For those were days before the beards had stiffened on the chins of some of us who assembled to reform politics, art, literature, and the world in general from a somewhat frowsy upstairs coffee-room in C--' Street: days of old--

"When fellowship seem'd not so far to seek And all the world and we seem'd much less cold And at the rainbow's foot lay surely gold. . . ."

Well, these cajoleries were not often successful, yet often enough to keep the sporting instinct alive and active, and a great deal oftener than F--'s equally disreputable endeavours: it being a tradition with the staff that F--' had sworn by all his gods to get in an article which would force the printer to flee the country. I need scarcely say that the tradition was groundless, but we worked it shamelessly.

In this way on January 9th, 1897 (a year in which the Westminster Aquarium was yet standing), and shortly after the issue of the New Year's Honours' List, the following article appeared in _The Speaker_. The reader will find it quite harmless until he comes to the sequel. It was entitled--

NOOKS OF OLD LONDON.

I.--THE WESTMINSTER SCUTORIUM.

Let me begin by assuring the reader that the Westminster Scutorium has absolutely no connection with the famous Aquarium across the road. I suppose that every Londoner has heard, at least, of the Aquarium, but I doubt if one in a hundred has heard of the little Scutorium which stands removed from it by a stone's throw, or less; and I am certain that not one in a thousand has ever stooped his head to enter by its shy, squat, fifteenth-century doorway. It is a fact that the very policeman at the entrance to Dean's Yard did not know its name, and the curator assures me that the Post Office has made frequent mistakes in delivering his letters. So my warning is not quite impertinent.

But a reader of antiquarian tastes, who cares as little as I do for hypnotisers and fasting men, and does not mind a trifle of dust, so it be venerable, will not regret an hour spent in looking over the Scutorium, or a chat with Mr. Melville Robertson, its curator, or Clerk of the Ribands (_Stemmata_)--to give him his official title. Mr. Robertson ranks, indeed, with the four pursuivants of Heralds' College, from which the Scutorium was originally an offshoot. He takes an innocent delight in displaying his treasures and admitting you to the stores of his unique information; and I am sure would welcome more visitors.

Students of Constitutional History will remember that strange custom, half Roman, half Medieval, in accordance with which a baron or knight, on creation or accession to his title and dignities, deposited in the king's keeping a waxen effigy, or mask, of himself together with a copy of his coat of arms. And it has been argued-- plausibly enough when we consider the ancestral masks of the old Roman families, the respect paid to them by the household, and the important part they played on festival days, at funerals, &c.--that this offering was a formal recognition of the _patria potestas_ of the monarch as father of his people. Few are aware, however, that the custom has never been discontinued, and that the cupboards of Westminster contain a waxen memorial of almost every man whom the king has delighted to honour, from the Conquest down to the very latest knight gazetted. The labour of modelling and painting these effigies was discontinued as long ago as 1586; and the masks are no longer likenesses, but oval plates of copper, each bearing its name on a label. Mr. Robertson informed me that Charles I. made a brief attempt to revive the old practice. All the Stuarts, indeed, set store on the Scutorium and its functions; and I read in an historical pamphlet, by Mr. J. Saxby Hine, the late curator, that large apartments were allocated to the office in Inigo Jones's first designs for Whitehall. But its rosy prospects faded with the accession of William of Orange. Two years later the custody of the shields (from which it obtained its name) was relegated to the Heralds' College; and the Scutorium has now to be content with the care of its masks and the performance of some not unimportant duties presently to be recounted.

A reference from the Heralds' College sent me in quest of Mr. Melville Robertson. But even in Dean's Yard I found it no easy matter to run him to earth. The policeman (as I have said) could give me no help. At length, well within the fourth doorway on the east side, after passing the railings, I spied a modest brass plate with the inscription _Clerk of the Ribands. Hours 11 to 3_. The outside of the building has a quite modern look, but the architect has spared the portal, and the three steps which lead down to the flagged entrance hall seem to mark a century apiece. I call it an entrance hall, but it is rather a small adytum, spanned by a pointed arch carrying the legend _Stemmata Quid Faciunt_. The modern exterior is, in fact, but a shell. All within dates from Henry VI.; and Mr. Robertson (but this is only a theory) would explain the sunken level of the ground-floor rooms by the action of earthworms, which have gradually lifted the surface of Dean's Yard outside. He contends the original level to be that of his office, which lies on the right of the adytum. A door on the left admits to two rooms occupied by the _nomenclator_, Mr. Pender, and two assistant clerks, who comprise the staff. Straight in front, a staircase leads to the upper-apartments.

Mr. Robertson was writing when the clerk ushered me in, but at once professed himself at my service. He is a gentleman of sixty, or thereabouts, with white hair, a complexion of a country squire, and very genial manners. For some minutes we discussed the difficulty which had brought me to him (a small point in county history), and then he anticipated my request for permission to inspect his masks.

"Would you like to see them? They are really very curious, and I often wonder that the public should evince so small an interest."

"You get very few visitors?"

"Seldom more than two a day; a few more when the Honours' Lists appear. I thought at first that your visit might be in connection with the new List, but reflected that it was too early. In a day or two we shall be comparatively busy."

"The Scutorium is concerned then with the Honours' Lists?"

"A little," replied Mr. Robertson, smiling. "That is to say, we make them." Then, observing my evident perplexity, he laughed. "Well, perhaps that is too strong an expression. I should have said, rather, that we fill up the blanks."

"I had always understood that the Prime Minister drew up the Lists before submitting them to Her Majesty."

"So he does--with our help. Oh, there is no secrecy about it!" said Mr. Robertson, in a tone almost rallying. "The public is free of all information, only it will not inquire. A little curiosity on its part would even save much unfortunate misunderstanding."

"In what way?"

"Well, the public reads of rewards (with which, by the way, I have nothing to do) conferred on really eminent men--Lord Roberts, for instance, or Sir Henry Irving, or Sir Joseph Lister. It then goes down the List and, finding a number of names of which it has never heard, complains that Her Majesty's favour has been bestowed on nonentities; whereas this is really the merit of the List, that they _are_ nonentities."

"I don't understand."

"Well, then, _they don't exist_."

"But surely--"

"My dear sir," said Mr. Robertson, still smiling, and handing me his copy of _The Times_, "cast your eye down that column; take the names of the new knights--'Blain, Clarke, Edridge, Farrant, Laing, Laird, Wardle'--what strikes you as remarkable about them?"

"Why, that I have never heard of any of them."

"Naturally, for there are no such people. I made them up; and a good average lot they are, though perhaps the preponderance of monosyllables is a little too obvious."

"But see here. I read that 'Mr. Thomas Wardle is a silk merchant of Staffordshire.'"

"But I assure you that I took him out of _Pickwick_."

"Yes, but here is 'William Laird,' for instance. I hear that already two actual William Lairds--one of Birkenhead, the other of Glasgow-- are convinced that the honour belongs to them."

"No doubt they will be round in a day or two. The Heralds' College will refer them to me--not simultaneously, if I may trust Sir Albert Woods's tact--and I shall tell them that it belongs to neither, but to another William Laird altogether. But, if you doubt, take the Indian promotions. Lord Salisbury sometimes adds a name or two after I send in the List, and--well, you know his lordship is not fond of the dark races and has a somewhat caustic humour. Look at the new C.I.E.'s: 'Rai Bahadur Pandit Bhag Rum.' Does it occur to you that a person of that name really exists? 'Khan Bahadur Naoraji ('Naoraji,' mark you) Pestonji Vakil'--it's the language of extravaganza! The Marquis goes too far: it spoils all verisimilitude."

Mr. Robertson grew quite ruffled.

"Then you pride yourself on verisimilitude?" I suggested.

"As I think you may guess; and we spare no pains to attain it, whether in the names or In the descriptions supplied to the newspapers. 'William Arbuthnot Blain, Esq.'--you have heard of Balzac's scouring Paris for a name for one of his characters. I assure you I scoured England for William Arbuthnot Blain--'identified with the movement for improving the dwellings of the labouring classes'--or is that Richard Farrant, Esq.? In any case, what more likely, on the face of it? 'Frederick Wills, Esq., of the well-known tobacco firm of Bristol'--the public swallows that readily: and yet it never buys a packet of their Westward Ho! Mixture (which I smoke myself) without reading that the Wills's of Bristol are W. D. and H. O.--no Frederick at all."

"But," I urged, "the purpose of this--"

"I should have thought it obvious; but let me give you the history of it. The practice began with William III. He was justly scornful of the lax distribution of honours which had marked all the Stuart reigns. You will hardly believe it, but before 1688 knighthoods, and even peerages, went as often as not to men who qualified by an opportune loan to the Exchequer, or even by presiding at a public feast. (I say nothing of baronetcies, for their history is notorious.) At first William was for making a clean sweep of the Honours' List, or limiting it to two or three well-approved recipients. But it was argued that this seeming niggardliness might injure His Majesty's popularity, never quite secure. The Scutorium found a way out of the dilemma. Sir Crofton Byng, the then Clerk of the Ribands, proposed the scheme, which has worked ever since. I may tell you that the undue _largesse_ of honours finds in the very highest quarters as little favour as ever it did. Of course, there are some whose services to science, literature, and art cannot be ignored--the late Lord Leighton, for instance, or Sir George Newnes, or Sir Joseph Lister again; and these are honoured, while the public acclaims. But the rest are represented only in my collection of masks--and an interesting one it is. Let me lead the way."

But I have left myself no space for describing the treasures of the Scutorium. The two upper stories are undoubtedly the least interesting, since they contain the modern, unpainted masks. Each mask has its place, its label, and on the shelf below it, protected by a slip of glass, a description of the imaginary recipient of the royal favour. One has only to look along the crowded shelves to be convinced that Mr. Melville Robertson's office is no sinecure. The first floor is devoted to a small working library and a museum (the latter undergoing rearrangement at the time of my visit). But the cellars!--or (as I should say) the crypt! In Beaumont's words--

"Here's a world of pomp and state Buried in dust, once dead by fate!"

Here in their native colours, by the light of Mr. Robertson's duplex lantern, stare the faces of the illustrious dead, from Rinaldus FitzTurold, knighted on Senlac field, to stout old Crosby Martin, sea-rover, who received the accolade (we'll hope he deserved it) from the Virgin Queen in 1586. A few even are adorned with side-locks, which Mr. Pender, the _nomenclator_, keeps scrupulously dusted. In almost every case the wax has withstood the tooth of time far better than one could have expected. Mr. Robertson believes that the pigments chosen must have had some preservative virtue. If so, the secret has been lost. But Mr. Pender has touched over some of the worst decayed with a mixture of copal and pure alcohol, by which he hopes at least to arrest the mischief; and certainly the masks in the Scutorium compare very favourably with the waxen effigies of our royalties preserved in the Abbey, close by. Mr. Robertson has a theory that these, too, should by rights belong to his museum: but that is another story, and a long one. Suffice it to say that I took my leave with the feelings of one who has spent a profitable afternoon: and for further information concerning this most interesting nook of old London I can only refer the reader to the pamphlet already alluded to, _The Westminster Scutorium: Its History and Present Uses_. By J. Saxby Hine, C.B., F.S.A. Theobald & Son, Skewers Alley, Chancery Lane, E.C.

This article appeared to my beloved editor innocent enough to pass, and to me (as doubtless to the reader) harmless enough in all conscience. Now listen to the sequel.

Long afterwards an acquaintance of mine--a barrister with antiquarian tastes--was dining with me in my Cornish home, and the talk after dinner fell upon the weekly papers and reviews. On _The Speaker_ he touched with a reticence which I set down at first to dislike for his politics. By and by, however, he let slip the word "untrustworthy."

"Holding your view of its opinions," I suggested, "you might fairly say 'misleading.' 'Untrustworthy' is surely too strong a word."

"I am not talking," said he, "of its opinions, but of its mis-statements of fact. Some time ago it printed an article on a place which it called 'The Westminster Scutorium,' and described in detail. I happened to pick the paper up at my club and read the article. It contained a heap of historical information on the forms and ceremonies which accompany the granting of titles, and was apparently the work of a specialist. Being interested (as you know) in these matters, and having an hour to spare, I took a hansom down to Westminster. At the entrance of Dean's Yard I found a policeman, and inquired the way to the Scutorium. He eyed me for a moment, then he said, 'Well, I thought I'd seen the last of 'em. You're the first to-day, so far; and yesterday there was only five. But Monday--_and_ Tuesday--_and_ Wednesday! There must have been thirty came as late as Wednesday; though by that time I'd found out what was the matter. All Monday they kept me hunting round and round the yard, following like a pack. Very respectable-looking old gentlemen, too, the whole of 'em, else I should have guessed they were pulling my leg. Most of 'em had copies of a paper, _The Speaker_, and read out bits from it, and insisted on my searching in this direction and that . . . and me being new to this beat, and seeing it all in print! We called in the postman to help. By and by they began to compare notes, and found they'd been kidded, and some of 'em used language. . . . I really think, sir, you must be the last of 'em.'"

MAY.

I was travelling some weeks ago by a railway line alongside of which ran a quickset hedge. It climbed to the summit of cuttings, plunged to the base of embankments, looped itself around stations, flickered on the skyline above us, raced us along the levels, dipped into pools, shot up again on their farther banks, chivvied us into tunnels, ran round and waited for us as we emerged. Its importunity drove me to the other side of the carriage, only to find another quickset hedge behaving similarly. Now I can understand that a railway company has excellent reasons for planting quickset hedges alongside its permanent way. But their unspeakable monotony set me thinking. Why do we neglect the real parks of England?--parks enormous in extent, and yet uncultivated, save here and there and in the most timid fashion. And how better could our millionaires use their wealth (since they are always confiding to us their difficulties in getting rid of it) than by seeking out these gardens and endowing them, and so, without pauperising anyone, build for themselves monuments not only delightful, but perpetual?--for, as Victor Hugo said, the flowers last always. So, you may say, do books. I doubt it; and experts, who have discussed with me the modern products of the paper trade, share my gloomy views. Anyhow, the free public library has been sufficiently exploited, if not worked out. So, you may say again, have free public gardens and parks been worked out. I think not. Admit that a fair percentage of the public avails itself of these libraries and parks; still the mass does not, and they were intended for the mass. Their attractiveness does not spread and go on spreading. The stream of public appreciation which pours through them is not fathomless; beyond a certain point it does not deepen, or deepens with heart-breaking slowness; and candid librarians and curators can sound its shallows accurately enough. What we want is not a garden into which folk will find their way if they have nothing better to do and can spare the time with an effort. Or, to be accurate, we do want such gardens for deliberate enjoyment; but what we want more is to catch our busy man and build a garden about him in the brief leisure which, without seeking it, he is forced to take.

Where are these gardens? Why, beside and along our railway lines. These are the great public parks of England; and through them travels daily a vast population held in enforced idleness, seeking distraction in its morning paper. Have you ever observed how a whole carriageful of travellers on the Great Western line will drop their papers to gaze out on Messrs. Sutton's trial-beds just outside Reading? A garish appeal, no doubt: a few raying spokes of colour, and the vision has gone. And I forestall the question, "Is that the sort of thing you wish to see extended?--a bed of yellow tulips, for instance, or of scarlet lobelias, or of bright-blue larkspurs, all the way from London to Liverpool?" I suggest nothing of the sort. Our railway lines in England, when they follow the valleys--as railway lines must in hilly districts--are extraordinarily beautiful. The eye, for example, could desire nothing better, in swift flight, than the views along the Wye Valley or in the Derbyshire Peak country, and even the rich levels of Somerset have a beauty of their own (above all in May and June, when yellow with sheets of buttercups) which artificial planting would spoil. But--cant about Nature apart--every line has its dreary cuttings and embankments, all of which might be made beautiful at no great cost. I need not labour this: here and there by a casual bunch of rhododendrons or of gorse, or by a sheet of primroses or wild hyacinths in springtime, the thing is proved, and has been proved again and again to me by the comments of fellow-passengers.

Now I am honestly enamoured of this dream of mine, and must pause to dwell on some of its beauties. In the first place, we could start to realise it in the most modest fashion and test the appreciation of the public as we go along. Our flowers would be mainly wild flowers, and our trees, for the most part, native British plants, costing, say, from thirty shillings to three pounds the hundred. A few roods would do to begin with, if the spot were well chosen; indeed, it would be wiser in every way to begin modestly, for though England possesses several great artists in landscape gardening, their art has never to my knowledge been seriously applied to railway gardening, and the speed of the spectators introduces a new and highly-amusing condition, and one so singular and so important as to make this almost a separate art. At any rate, our gardeners would have to learn as they go, and if any man can be called enviable it is an artist learning to express art's eternal principles in a new medium, under new conditions.

Even if we miss our millionaire, we need not despond over ways and means. The beauty-spots of Great Britain are engaged just now in a fierce rivalry of advertisement. Why should not this rivalry be pressed into the service of beautifying the railway lines along which the tourist must travel to reach them? Why should we neglect the porches (so to speak) of our temples? Would not the tourist arrive in a better temper if met on his way with silent evidence of our desire to please? And, again, is the advertising tradesman quite wise in offending so many eyes with his succession of ugly hoardings standing impertinently in green fields? Can it be that the sight of them sets up that disorder of the liver which he promises to cure? And if not, might he not call attention to his wares at least as effectively, if more summarily, by making them the excuse for a vision of delight which passengers would drop their newspapers to gaze upon? Lastly, the railway companies themselves have discovered the commercial value of scenery. Years ago, and long before their discovery (and as if by a kind of instinct they were blundering towards it) they began to offer prizes for the best-kept station gardens--with what happy result all who have travelled in South Wales will remember. They should find it easy to learn that the 'development' of watering-places and holiday resorts may be profitably followed up by spending care upon their approaches.

But I come back to my imaginary millionaire--the benevolent man who only wants to be instructed how to spend his money--the 'magnificent man' of Aristotle's _Ethics_, nonplussed for the moment, and in despair of discovering an original way of scattering largesse for the public good. For, while anxious to further my scheme by conciliating the commercial instinct, I must insist that its true beauty resides in the conception of our railways as vast public parks only hindered by our sad lack of inventiveness from ministering to the daily delight of scores of thousands and the occasional delight of almost everyone. The millionaire I want is one who can rise to this conception of it, and say with Blake--

"I will not cease from mental fight,"

(Nor from pecuniary contribution, for that matter)

"Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land."

For these millionaires are bediamonded all over with good intentions. The mischief with them is their lack of inventiveness. Most of my readers will agree that there is no easier game of solitaire than to suppose yourself suddenly endowed with a million of money, and to invent modes of dispensing it for the good of your kind. As a past master of that game I offer the above suggestion gratis to those poor brothers of mine who have more money than they know how to use.

The railway--not that of the quickset hedges, but the Great Western, on to which I changed after a tramp across Dartmoor--took me to pay a pious visit to my old school: a visit which I never pay without thinking-- especially in the chapel where we used to sing 'Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing' on the evening before holidays--of a passage in Izaak Walton's _Life of Sir Henry Wotton_:--

"He yearly went also to Oxford. But the summer before his death he changed that for a journey to Winchester College, to which school he was first removed from Bocton. And as he returned from Winchester towards Eton College, said to a friend, his companion in that journey, 'How useful was that advice of a holy monk who persuaded his friend to perform his customary devotions in a constant place, because in that place we usually meet with those very thoughts which possessed us at our last being there! And I find it thus far experimentally true that at my now being in that school, and seeing the very place where I sat when I was a boy, occasioned me to remember those very thoughts of my youth which then possessed me: sweet thoughts indeed, that promised my growing years numerous pleasures without mixtures of cares: and those to be enjoyed when time--which I therefore thought slow-paced--had changed my youth into manhood. But age and experience have taught me that those were but empty hopes: for I have always found it true, as my Saviour did foretell, 'Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.' Nevertheless, I saw there a succession of boys using the same recreations and, questionless, possessed with the same thoughts that then possessed me. Thus one generation succeeds another, both in their lives, recreations, hopes, fears, and death.'"

But my visit on this occasion was filled with thought less of myself than of a poet I had known in that chapel, those cloisters, that green close; not intimately enough to call him friend, yet so intimately that his lately-departed shade still haunted the place for me--a small boy whom he had once, for a day or two, treated with splendid kindness and thereafter (I dare say) had forgotten.

"T. E. B."

Thomas Edward Brown was born on May 5th, 1830, at Douglas, in the Isle of Man, where his father held the living of St. Matthew's. Sixty-five years later he wrote his last verses to aid a fund raised for a new St. Matthew's Church, and characteristically had to excuse himself in a letter penetrated with affection for the old plain edifice and its memories.

"I was baptised there; almost all whom I loved and revered were associated with its history . . . 'The only church in Douglas where the poor go'--I dare say that is literally true. But I believe it will continue to be so. . . . I postulate the continuity. . . ."

I quote these words (and so leave them for a while) with a purpose, aware how trivial they may seem to the reader. But to those who had the privilege of knowing Brown that cannot be trivial which they feel to be characteristic and in some degree explicative of the man; and with this 'I postulate the continuity' we touch accurately and simply for once a note which sang in many chords of the most vocal, not to say orchestral, nature it has ever been my lot to meet.

Let me record, and have done with, the few necessary incidents of what was by choice a _vita fallens_ and "curiously devoid of incident." The boy was but two years old when the family removed to Kirk Braddan Vicarage, near Douglas; the sixth of ten children of a witty and sensible Scots mother and a father whose nobly humble idiosyncrasies continued in his son and are worthy to live longer in his description of them:--

"To think of a _Pazon_ respecting men's vices even; not as vices, God forbid! but as parts of _them_, very likely all but inseparable from them; at any rate, _theirs!_ Pitying with an eternal pity, but not exposing, not rebuking. My father would have considered he was 'taking a liberty' if he had confronted the sinner with his sin. Doubtless he carried this too far. But don't suppose for a moment that the 'weak brethren' thought he was conniving at their weakness. Not they: they saw the delicacy of his conduct. You don't think, do you, that these poor souls are incapable of appreciating delicacy? God only knows how far down into their depths of misery the sweetness of that delicacy descends. . . . He loved sincerity, truth and modesty. It seemed as if he felt that, with these virtues, the others could not fail to be present."

Add to this that the Vicar of Kirk Braddan, though of no University, was a scholar in grain; was, for example, so fastidious about composition that he would make his son read some fragment of an English classic to him before answering an invitation! "To my father style was like the instinct of personal cleanliness." Again we touch notes which echoed through the life of his son--who worshipped continuity.

From a course of tuition divided between his father and the parish schoolmaster, Brown went, at fifteen or over, to King William's College, and became its show scholar; thence, by the efforts of well-meaning friends (but at the cost of much subsequent pain), to Christ Church, Oxford, as a servitor. He won his double first; but he has left on record an account of a servitor's position at Christ Church in the early fifties, and to Brown the spiritual humiliation can have been little less than one long dragging anguish. He had, of course, his intervals of high spirits; but (says Mr. Irwin, his friend and biographer) "there is no doubt he did not exaggerate what the position was to him. I have heard him refer to it over and over again with a dispassionate bitterness there was no mistaking." Dean Gaisford absolutely refused to nominate him, after his two first classes, to a fellowship, though all the resident dons wished it. "A servitor never has been elected student--_ergo_, he never shall be." Brown admired Gaisford, and always spoke kindly of him "in all his dealings with me." Yet the night after he won his double first was "one of the most intensely miserable I was ever called to endure." Relief, and of the right kind, came with his election as Fellow of Oriel in April, 1854. In those days an Oriel Fellowship still kept and conveyed its peculiar distinction, and the brilliant young scholar had at length the ball at his feet.

"This is none of your empty honours," he wrote to his mother; "it gives me an income of about 300 pounds per annum as long as I choose to reside at Oxford, and about 220 pounds in cash if I reside elsewhere. In addition to this it puts me in a highly commanding position for pupils, so that on the whole I have every reason to expect that (except perhaps the first year) I shall make between 500 and 600 pounds altogether per annum. So you see, my dear mother, that your prayers have not been unanswered, and that God will bless the generation of those who humbly strive to serve Him. . . I have not omitted to remark that the election took place on April 21st, the anniversary of your birth and marriage."

How did he use his opportunity? "He never took kindly to the life of an Oxford fellow," thought the late Dr. Fowler (an old schoolfellow of Brown's, afterwards President of Corpus and Vice-Chancellor of the University). Mr. Irwin quotes another old friend, Archdeacon Moore, to much the same effect. Their explanations lack something of definiteness. After a few terms of private pupils Brown returned to the Island, and there accepted the office of Vice-principal of his old school. We can only be sure that his reasons were honourable, and sufficed for him; we may include among them, if we choose, that _nostalgia_ which haunted him all his days, until fate finally granted his wish and sent him back to his beloved Argos "for good."

In the following year (1857) he married his cousin, Miss Stowell, daughter of Dr. Stowell, of Ramsay; and soon after left King William's College to become 'by some strange mischance' Head Master of the Crypt School, Gloucester. Of this "Gloucester episode," as he called it, nothing needs to be recorded except that he hated the whole business and, incidentally, that one of his pupils was Mr. W. E. Henley--destined to gather into his _National Observer_, many years later, many blooms of Brown's last and not least memorable efflorescence in poesy.

From Gloucester he was summoned, on a fortunate day, by Mr. Percival (now Bishop of Hereford), who had recently been appointed to Clifton College, then a struggling new foundation, soon to be lifted by him into the ranks of the great Public Schools. Mr. Percival wanted a man to take the Modern Side; and, as fate orders these things, consulted the friend reserved by fate to be his own successor at Clifton--Mr. Wilson (now Canon of Worcester). Mr. Wilson was an old King William's boy; knew Brown, and named him.

"Mr. Wilson having told me about him," writes the bishop, "I made an appointment to see him in Oxford, and there, as chance would have it, I met him standing at the corner of St. Mary's Entry, in a somewhat Johnsonian attitude, four-square, his hands deep in his pockets to keep himself still, and looking decidedly _volcanic_. We very soon came to terms, and I left him there under promise to come to Clifton as my colleague at the beginning of the following Term; and, needless to say, St. Mary's Entry has had an additional interest to me ever since. Sometimes I have wondered, and it would be worth a good deal to know, what thoughts were crossing through that richly-furnished, teeming brain as he stood there by St. Mary's Church, with Oriel College in front of him, thoughts of his own struggles and triumphs, and of all the great souls that had passed to and fro over the pavement around him; and all set in the lurid background of the undergraduate life to which he had been condemned as a servitor at Christ Church."

Was he happy in his many years' work at Clifton? On the whole, and with some reservation, we may say 'yes'--'yes,' although in the end he escaped from it gladly and enjoyed his escape. One side of him, no doubt, loathed formality and routine; he was, as he often proclaimed himself, a nature-loving, somewhat intractable Celt; and if one may hint at a fault in him, it was that now and then he soon _tired_. A man so spendthrift of emotion is bound at times to knock on the bottom of his emotional coffers; and no doubt he was true _to a mood_ when he wrote--

"I'm here at Clifton, grinding at the mill My feet for thrice nine barren years have trod, But there are rocks and waves at Scarlett still, And gorse runs riot in Glen Chass--thank God!

"Alert, I seek exactitude of rule, I step and square my shoulders with the squad, But there are blaeberries on old Barrule, And Langness has its heather still--thank God!"

--With the rest of the rebellious stanzas. We may go farther and allow that he played with the mood until he sometimes forgot on which side lay seriousness and on which side humour. Still it _was_ a mood; and it was Brown, after all, who wrote 'Planting':--

"Who would be planted chooseth not the soil Or here or there, Or loam or peat, Wherein he best may grow And bring forth guerdon of the planter's toil-- The lily is most fair, But says not' I will only blow Upon a southern land'; the cedar makes no coil What rock shall owe The springs that wash his feet; The crocus cannot arbitrate the foil That for his purple radiance is most meet-- Lord, even so I ask one prayer, The which if it be granted, It skills not where Thou plantest me, only I would be planted."

"You don't care for school-work," he writes to an Old Cliftonian. . . . "I demur to your statement that when you take up schoolmastering your leisure for this kind of thing will be practically gone. Not at all. If you have the root of the matter in you the school-work will insist upon this kind of thing as a relief. My plan always was to recognise two lives as necessary--the one the outer Kapelistic life of drudgery, the other the inner and cherished life of the spirit. It is true that the one has a tendency to kill the other, but it must not, and you must see that it does not. . . . The pedagogic is needful for bread and butter, also for a certain form of joy; of the inner life you know what I think."

These are wise words, and I believe they represent Brown more truly than utterances which only seem more genuine because less deliberate. He was as a house master excellent, with an excellence not achievable by men whose hearts are removed from their work: he awoke and enjoyed fervent friendships and the enthusiastic admiration of many youngsters; he must have known of these enthusiasms, and was not the man to condemn them; he had the abiding assurance of assisting in a kind of success which he certainly respected. He longed for the day of emancipation, to return to his Island; he was impatient; but I must decline to believe he was unhappy.

Indeed, his presence sufficiently denied it. How shall I describe him? A sturdy, thick-set figure, inclining to rotundity, yet athletic; a face extraordinarily mobile; bushy, grey eyebrows; eyes at once deeply and radiantly human, yet holding the primitive faun in their coverts; a broad mouth made for broad, natural laughter, hearty without lewdness. "There are nice Rabelaisians, and there are nasty; but the latter are not Rabelaisians. I have an idea," he claimed, "that my judgment within this area is infallible." And it was. All honest laughter he welcomed as a Godlike function.

"God sits upon His hill, And sees the shadows fly; And if He laughs at fools, why should He not?"

And for that matter, why should not we? Though at this point his fine manners intervened, correcting, counselling moderation. "I am certain God made fools for us to enjoy, but there must be _an economy of joy_ in the presence of a fool; you must not betray your enjoyment." Imagine all this overlaid with a certain portliness of bearing, suggestive of the high-and-dry Oxford scholar. Add something of the parsonic (he was ordained deacon before leaving Oxford, but did not proceed to priest's orders till near the end of his time at Clifton); add a simple natural piety which purged the parsonic of all "churchiness."

"This silence and solitude are to me absolute food," he writes from the Clifton College Library on the morning of Christmas Day, 1875, "especially after all the row and worry at the end of Term. . . . Where are the men and women? Well, now look here, you'll not mention it again. They're all in church. See how good God is! See how He has placed these leitourgic traps in which people, especially disagreeable people, get caught--and lo! the universe for me!!! me-- me. . . ."

I have mentioned his fine manners, and with a certain right, since it once fell to me--a blundering innocent in the hands of fate--to put them to severest proof. A candidate for a scholarship at Clifton--awkward, and abominably conscious of it, and sensitive--I had been billeted on Brown's hospitality without his knowledge. The mistake (I cannot tell who was responsible) could not be covered out of sight; it was past all aid of kindly dissimulation by the time Brown returned to the house to find the unwelcome guest bathing in shame upon his doorstep. Can I say more than that he took me into the family circle--by no means an expansive one, or accustomed, as some are, to open gleefully to intruders--and for the inside of a week treated me with a consideration so quiet and pleasant, so easy yet attentive, that his dearest friend or most distinguished visitor could not have demanded more? A boy notes these things, and remembers. . . . "If I lose my manners," Mr. Irwin quotes him as saying once over some trivial forgetfulness, "what is to become of me?" He was shy, too, like the most of his countrymen--"jus' the shy "--but with a proud reserve as far removed as possible from sham humility--being all too sensible and far too little of a fool to blink his own eminence of mind, though willing on all right occasions to forget it. "Once," records Mr. Irwin, "when I remarked on the omission of his name in an article on 'Minor Poets' in one of the magazines, he said, with a smile, 'Perhaps I am among the major!'" That smile had just sufficient irony--no more.

To this we may add a passion for music and a passion for external nature-- external to the most of us, but so closely knit with his own that to be present at his ecstasies was like assisting a high priest of elemental mysteries reserved for him and beyond his power to impart. And yet we are beating about the bush and missing the essential man, for he was imprehensible--"Volcanic," the Bishop of Hereford calls him, and must go to the Bay of Naples to fetch home a simile:

"We can find plenty of beauty in the familiar northern scenes; but we miss the pent-up forces, the volcanic outbursts, the tropic glow, and all the surprising manifold and tender and sweet-scented outpourings of soil and sunshine, so spontaneous, so inexhaustibly rich, and with the heat of a great fire burning and palpitating underneath all the time."

Natures more masterfully commanding I have known: never one more remarkable. In the mere possession of him, rather than in his direct influence, all Cliftonians felt themselves rich. We were at least as proud of him as Etonians of the author of "Ionica." But no comparisons will serve. Falstaffian--with a bent of homely piety; Johnsonian--with a fiery Celtic heat and a passionate adoration of nature: all such epithets fail as soon as they are uttered. The man was at once absolute and Protean: entirely sincere, and yet a different being to each separate friend. "There was no getting to the end of Brown."

I have said that we--those of us, at any rate, who were not of Brown's House--were conscious of a rich and honourable possession in him, rather than of an active influence. Yet that influence must not be underrated. Clifton, as I first knew it, was already a great school, although less than twenty years old. But, to a new-comer, even more impressive than its success among schools, or its aspirations, was a firmness of tradition which (I dare to say) would have been remarkable in a foundation of five times its age. It had already its type of boy; and having discovered it and how to produce it, fell something short of tolerance towards other types. For the very reason which allows me with decency to call the type an admirable one, I may be excused for adding that the tradition demanded some patience of those who could not easily manage to conform with it. But there the tradition stood, permanently rooted in a school not twenty years old. Is it fanciful to hold that Brown's passion for 'continuity' had much to do with planting and confirming it? Mr. Irwin quotes for us a passage from one of his sermons to the school: "Suffer no chasm to interrupt this glorious tradition. . . . Continuous life . . . that is what we want--to feel the pulses of hearts that are now dust." Did this passage occur, I wonder, in the sermon of which I rather remember a fierce, hopeless, human protest against 'change and decay'?--the voice ringing down on each plea, "What do the change-and-decay people say to _that?_"

"I postulate the continuity." Vain postulate it often seems, yet of all life Brown demanded it. Hear him as he speaks of his wife's death in a letter to a friend:--

"My dear fellow-sufferer, what is it after all? Why this sinking of the heart, this fainting, sorrowing of the spirit? There is no separation: life is continuous. All that was stable and good, good and therefore stable, in our union with the loved one, is unquestionably permanent, will endure for ever. It cannot be otherwise. . . . When love has done its full work, has wrought soul into soul so that every fibre has become part of the common life-- _quis separabit?_ Can you conceive yourself as existing at all without _her?_ No, you can't; well, then, it follows that you don't, and never will."

I believe it to have been this passion for continuity that bound and kept him so absolute a Manxman, drawing his heart so persistently back to the Island that there were times (one may almost fancy) when the prospect of living his life out to the end elsewhere seemed to him a treachery to his parents' dust. I believe this same passion drew him--master as he was of varied and vocal English--to clothe the bulk of his poetry in the Manx dialect, and thereby to miss his mark with the public, which inevitably mistook him for a rustic singer, a man of the people, imperfectly educated.

"I would not be forgotten in this land."--

This line of another true poet of curiously similar temperament[1] has haunted me through the reading of Brown's published letters. But Brown's was no merely selfish craving for continuity--to be remembered. By a fallacy of thought, perhaps, but by a very noble one, he transferred the ambition to those for whom he laboured. His own terror that Time might obliterate the moment:

"And all this personal dream be fled,"

Became for his countrymen a very spring of helpfulness. _Antiquam exquirite matrem_--he would do that which they, in poverty and the stress of earning daily bread, were careless to do--would explore for them the ancient springs of faith and custom.

"Dear countrymen, whate'er is left to us Of ancient heritage-- Of manners, speech, of humours, polity, The limited horizon of our stage-- Old love, hope, fear, All this I fain would fix upon the page; That so the coming age, Lost in the empire's mass, Yet haply longing for their fathers, here May see, as in a glass, What they held dear-- May say, ''Twas thus and thus They lived'; and as the time-flood onward rolls Secure an anchor for their Keltic souls."

This was his task, and the public of course set him down for a rustic. "What ought I to do?" he demands. "Shall I put on my next title-page, 'Late Fellow of Oriel, etc.'? or am I always to abide under this ironic cloak of rusticity?" To be sure, on consideration (if the public ever found time to consider), the language and feeling of the poems were penetrated with scholarship. He entered his countrymen's hearts; but he also could, and did, stand outside and observe them with affectionate, comprehending humour. Scholarship saved him, too--not always, but as a rule--from that emotional excess to which he knew himself most dangerously prone. He assigns it confidently to his Manx blood; but his mother was Scottish by descent, and from my experience of what the Lowland Scot can do in the way of pathos when he lets himself go, I take leave to doubt that the Manxman was wholly to blame. There can, however, be no doubt that the author of "The Doctor," of "Catherine Kinrade," of "Mater Dolorosa," described himself accurately as a "born sobber," or that an acquired self-restraint saved him from a form of intemperance by which of late our literature has been somewhat too copiously afflicted.

To scholarship, too, imposed upon and penetrating a taste naturally catholic, we owe the rare flavour of the many literary judgments scattered about his letters. They have a taste of native earth, beautifully rarefied: to change the metaphor, they illuminate the page with a kind of lambent common sense. For a few examples:--

"I have also read a causerie on Virgil and one on Theocritus. So many French _litterateurs_ give me the idea that they don't go nearer the Greek authors than the Latin translations. . . . Sainte Beuve [_Nouveaux Lundis_, vii. 1--52, on 'The Greek Anthology'] is an enthusiastic champion for our side, but, oddly enough, he never strikes me as knowing much about the matter!"

"Your Latin verses [translating Cowley] I greatly enjoy. The dear old Abraham goes straight off into your beautiful lines. Of course he has not a scrap of modern _impedimenta_. You go through the customs at the frontier with a whistle and a smile. You have _nothing to declare_. The blessed old man by your side is himself a Roman to begin with, and you pass together as cheerfully as possible. . . ."

"I have also been reading Karl Elze's _Essays on Shakespeare_. He is not bad, but don't you resent the imperturbable confidence of men who, after attributing a play of Shakespeare's to two authors, proceed to suggest a third, urged thereto by some fatuous and self-sought exigency?"

"Did you ever try to write a Burns song? I mean the equivalent in ordinary English of his Scotch. Can it be done? A Yorkshireman-- could he do it? A Lancashire man (Waugh)? I hardly think so. The Ayrshire dialect has a _Schwung_ and a confidence that no-English county can pretend to. Our dialects are apologetic things, half-ashamed, half-insolent. Burns has no doubts, and for his audience unhesitatingly demands the universe. . . ."

"There is an ethos in Fitzgerald's letters which is so exquisitely idyllic as to be almost heavenly. He takes you with him, exactly accommodating his pace to yours, walks through meadows so tranquil, and yet abounding in the most delicate surprises. And these surprises seem so familiar, just as if they had originated with yourself. What delicious blending! What a perfect interweft of thought and diction! What a _sweet_ companion!"

Lastly, let me quote a passage in which his thoughts return to Clifton, where it had been suggested that Greek should be omitted from the ordinary form-routine and taught in "sets," or separate classes:--

"This is disturbing about Greek, 'set' Greek. Yes, you would fill your school to overflowing, of course you would, so long as other places did not abandon the old lines. But it would be detestable treachery to the cause of education, of humanity. To me the _learning_ of any blessed thing is a matter of little moment. Greek is not learned by nineteen-twentieths of our Public School boys. But it is a baptism into a cult, a faith, not more irrational than other faiths or cults; the baptism of a regeneration which releases us from I know not what original sin. And if a man does not see that, he is a fool, such a fool that I shouldn't wonder if he gravely asked me to explain what I meant by original sin in such a connection. . . ."

So his thoughts reverted to the school he had left in 1892. In October, 1897, he returned to it on a visit. He was the guest of one of the house masters, Mr. Tait, and on Friday evening, October 29th, gave an address to the boys of the house. He had spoken for some minutes with brightness and vigour, when his voice grew thick and he was seen to stagger. He died in less than two hours.

His letters have been collected and piously given to the world by Mr. Irwin, one of his closest friends. By far the greatest number of them belong to those last five years in the Island--the happiest, perhaps, of his life, certainly the happiest temperamentally. "Never the time and the place . . ." but at least Brown was more fortunate than most men. He realised his dream, and it did not disappoint him. He could not carry off his friends to share it (and it belongs to criticism of these volumes to say that he was exceptionally happy in his friends), but he could return and visit them or stay at home and write to them concerning the realisation, and be sure they understood. Therefore, although we desire more letters of the Clifton period--although twenty years are omitted, left blank to us--those that survive confirm a fame which, although never wide, was always unquestioned within its range. There could be no possibility of doubt concerning Brown. He was absolute. He lived a fierce, shy, spiritual life; a wise man, keeping the child in his heart: he loved much and desired permanence in the love of his kind. "Diuturnity," says his great seventeenth-century namesake, "is a dream and folly of expectation. There is nothing strictly immortal but immortality." And yet, _prosit amasse!_

The railway took me on to Oxford--

"Like faithful hound returning For old sake's sake to each loved track With heart and memory burning."

"I well remember," writes Mrs. Green of her husband, the late John Richard Green, "the passionate enthusiasm with which he watched from the train for the first sight of the Oxford towers against the sky:" and although our enthusiasm nowadays has to feed on a far tamer view than that which saluted our forefathers when the stage-coach topped the rise of Shotover and its passengers beheld the city spread at their feet, yet what faithful son of Oxford can see her towers rise above the water-meadows and re-greet them without a thrill?

In the year 1688, and in a book entitled _The Guardian's Instruction_, a Mr. Stephen Penton gave the world a pleasing and lifelike little narrative--superior, in my opinion, to anything in _Verdant Green_-- telling us how a reluctant father was persuaded to send his son to Oxford; what doubts, misgivings, hesitations he had, and how they were overcome. I take the story to be fictitious. It is written in the first person, professedly by the hesitating parent: but the parent can hardly have been Penton, for the story will not square with what we know of his life. The actual Penton was born, it seems, in 1640, and educated at Winchester and New College; proceeded to his fellowship, resided from 1659 to 1670, and was Principal of St. Edmund's Hall from 1675 to 1683. He appears to have been chaplain to the Earl of Aylesbury, and, according to Antony a Wood, possessed a "rambling head." He died in 1706.

The writer in _The Guardian's Instruction_ is portrayed for us--or is allowed to portray himself--rather as an honest country squire, who had himself spent a year or so of his youth at the University, but had withdrawn when Oxford was invaded by the Court and the trouble between King Charles and Parliament came to a head: and "God's grace, the Good example of my parents, and a natural love of virtue secured me so far as to leave Oxford, though not much more learned, yet not much worse than I came thither." A chill testimonial! In short, the old squire (as I will take leave to call him) nursed a somewhat crotchety detestation of the place, insomuch "that when I came to have children, I did almost _swear_ them in their childhood never to be friends with Oxford."

He tried his eldest son with a course of foreign travel as a substitute for University training; but this turned out a failure, and he had the good sense to acknowledge his mistake. So for his second boy he cast about to find a profession; "but what course to take I was at a loss: Cambridge was so far off, I could not have an eye upon him; Oxford I was angry with."

In this fix he consulted with a neighbour, "an old grave learned divine," and rigid Churchman, who confessed that many of the charges against Oxford were well grounded, but averred that the place was mending. The truth was, the University had been loyal to the monarchy all through the Commonwealth times; and when Oliver Cromwell was dead, and Richard dismounted, its members perceived, through the maze of changes and intrigues, that in a little time the heart of the nation would revert to the government which twenty years before it had hated. And their impatient hopes of this "made the scholars talk aloud, drink healths, and curse Meroz in the very streets; insomuch that when the King came in, they were not only like them that dream, but like them who are out of their wits, mad, stark, staring mad." This unholy 'rag' (to modernise the old gentleman's language) continued for a twelvemonth: that is to say, until the Vice-Chancellor--holding that the demonstration, like Miss Mary Bennet's pianoforte playing in _Pride and Prejudice_, had delighted the company long enough--put his foot down. And from that time the University became sober, modest, and studious as perhaps any in Europe. The old gentleman wound up with some practical advice, and a promise to furnish the squire with a letter of recommendation to one of the best tutors in Oxford.

Thus armed, the squire (though still with misgivings) was not long in getting on horseback with his wife, his daughters, and his young hopeful, and riding off to Oxford, where at first it seemed that his worst suspicions would be confirmed; "for at ten o'clock in the inn, there arose such a roaring and singing that my hair stood on end, and my former prejudices were so heightened that I resolved to lose the journey and carry back my son again, presuming that no noise in Oxford could be made but _scholars_ must do it,"--a hoary misconception still cherished, or until recently, by the Metropolitan Police and the Oxford City Bench. In this instance a proctor intervened, and quelled the disturbance by sending 'two young pert townsmen' to prison; "and quickly came to my chamber, and perceiving my boy designed for a gown, told me that it was for the preservation of such fine youths as he that the proctors made so bold with gentlemen's lodgings." The squire had some talk with this dignitary, who was a man of presence and suitable address, and of sufficient independence to deny--not for the first time in history--that dons were overpaid.

Next morning the whole family trooped off to call upon the tutor whom their old neighbour had recommended. Oddly enough, the tutor seemed by no means overwhelmed by the honour. "I thought to have found him mightily pleased with the opinion we had of his conduct, and the credit of having a gentleman's son under his charge, and the father with cap in hand. Instead of all this he talked at a rate as if the gentry were _obliged_ to tutors more than tutors to them." The tutor, in short, was decidedly tart in his admonitions to this honest family--he did not forget, either, to assure them that (_generally_) a college tutor was worse paid than a dancing-master. Here is a specimen of his advice--sound and practical enough in its way:--

"I understand by one of your daughters that you have brought him up a _fine padd_ to keep here for his health's sake. Now I will tell you the use of an horse in Oxford, and then do as you think fit. The horse must be kept at an _ale-house_ or an _inn_, and he must have leave to go once _every day_ to see him eat oats, because the master's eye makes him fat; and it will not be genteel to go often to an house and spend nothing; and then there may be some danger of the horse growing _resty_ if he be not used often, so you must give him leave to go to _Abingdon_ once every week, to look out of the tavern window and see the maids sell turnips; and in one month or two come home with a surfeit of poisoned wine, and save _any farther trouble_ by dying, and then you will be troubled to send for your horse _again_. . . ."

The humour of college tutors has not greatly altered in two hundred years. I have known one or two capable of the sardonic touch in those concluding words. But conceive its effect upon the squire's lady and daughters! No: you need not trouble to do so, for the squire describes it: "When the tutor was gone out of the room, I asked how they liked the person and his converse. My boy clung about his mother and cry'd to go home again, and she had no more wit than to be of the same mind; she thought him too weakly to undergo so much hardship as she foresaw was to be expected. My daughter, who (instead of catechism and _Lady's Calling_) had been used to read nothing but speeches in romances, and hearing nothing of _Love_ and _Honour_ in all the talk, fell into downright _scolding_ at him; call'd him the _merest_ scholar; and if this were your _Oxford_ breeding, they had rather he should go to _Constantinople_ to learn manners! But I, who was older and understood the language, call'd them all great fools. . . ."

On the tutor's return they begged to have his company at dinner, at their inn: but he declined, kept the young man to dine with him, and next day invited the family to luncheon. They accepted, fully expecting (after the austerity of his discourse) to be starved: "and the girles drank chocolette at no rate in the morning, for fear of the _worst_." But they were by no means starved. "It was very pleasant," the squire confesses, "to see, when we came, the _constrain'd_ artifice of an unaccustomed complement." There were silver tankards 'heaped upon one another,' 'napkins some twenty years younger than the rest,' and glasses 'fit for a _Dutchman_ at an _East-India Return_.' The dinner was full enough for ten. "I was asham'd, but would not disoblige him, considering with myself that I should put this man to such a charge of forty shillings at least, to entertain me; when for all his honest care and pains he is to have but forty or fifty shillings a quarter; so that for one whole quarter he must doe the drudgery to my son for nothing." After dinner, our good squire strolled off to a public bowling-green, "that being the onely recreation I can affect." And "coming in, I saw half a score of the finest youths the sun, I think, ever shined upon. They walked to and fro, with their hands in their pockets, to see a match played by some scholars and some gentlemen fam'd for their skill. I gaped also and stared as a man in his way would doe; but a country ruff gentleman, being like to _lose_, did swear, at such a rate that my heart did grieve that those fine young men should _hear_ it, and know there was such a thing as swearing in the kingdom. Coming to my lodging, I charged my son never to go to such publick places unless he resolved to quarrel with me."

And so, having settled the lad and fitted him up with good advice, the father, mother, and sisters returned home. But the squire, being summoned to Oxford shortly after to "sit in _parliament_" (presumably in the last Parliament held at Oxford, in March, 1681), took that opportunity to walk the streets and study the demeanour of the "scholars." And this experiment would seem to have finally satisfied him. "I walk'd the streets as late as most people, and never in ten days ever saw any scholar rude or disordered: so that as I grow old, and more engaged to speak the _truth_, I do repent of the _ill-opinion_ I have had of that place, and hope to be farther obliged by a very good _account_ of my son."

Old Stephen Penton may have had a rambling head; but unless I have thumbed the bloom off his narrative in my attempt to summarise it, the reader will allow that he knew how to write. He gives us the whole scene in the fewest possible touches: he wastes no words in describing the personages in his small comedy--comic idyll I had rather call it, for after a fashion it reminds me of the immortal chatter between Gorgo and Praxinoe in the fifteenth idyll of Theocritus. There the picture is: the honest opinionated country squire; the acidulous tutor; the coltish son; the fond, foolish, fussing mother; the prinking young ladies with their curls and romantic notions; the colours of all as fresh as if laid on yesterday, the humour quite untarnished after two hundred years. And I wonder the more at the vivacity of this little sketch because, as many writers have pointed out, no one has yet built upon University life a novel of anything like first-class merit, and the conclusion has been drawn that the elements of profound human interest are wanting in that life. "Is this so?" asks the editor of Stephen Penton's reminiscences in a volume published by the Oxford Historical Society--

"In spite of the character given to Oxford of being a city of short memories and abruptly-ended friendships, in spite of the inchoative qualities of youths of eighteen or twenty, especially in respect to the 'ruling passion' so dear to novelists, yet surely in the three or four years spent at Oxford by an incredible company of young students 'fresh from public schools, and not yet tossed about and hardened in the storms of life'--some of them Penton's 'finest youths,' some obviously otherwise--there must be, one would think, abundance of romantic incident awaiting its Thackeray or Meredith. For how many have these years been the turning point of a life! . . ."

There at any rate is the fact: _the_ novel of University life has not been written yet, and perhaps never will be. I am not at all sure that _The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green_ do not mark the nearest approach to it-- save the mark! And I am not at all sure that _The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green_ can be called a novel at all, while I am quite certain it cannot be called a novel of first-class merit. _Tom Brown at Oxford_ still counts its admirers, and has, I hear, attained the dignity of translation into French; but Tom Brown, though robust enough, never seemed to get over his transplantation from Rugby--possibly because his author's heart remained at Rugby. 'Loss and Gain' is not a book for the many; and the many never did justice to Mr. Hermann Merivale's 'Faucit of Balliol' or Mr. St. John Tyrwhitt's 'Hugh Heron of Christ Church.' Neither of these two novels obtained the hearing it deserved--and 'Faucit of Balliol' was a really remarkable book: but neither of them aimed at giving a full picture of Oxford life. And the interest of Miss Broughton's 'Belinda' and Mr. Hardy's 'Jude the Obscure' lies outside the proctor's rounds. Yes (and humiliating as the confession may be), with all its crudities and absurdities, _Verdant Green_ does mark the nearest approach yet made to a representative Oxford novel.

How comes this? Well, to begin with, _Verdant Green_, with all his faults, did contrive to be exceedingly youthful and high-spirited. And in the second place, with all its faults, it did convey some sense of what I may call the 'glamour' of Oxford. Now the University, on its part, being fed with a constant supply of young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty, does contrive, with all its faults, to keep up a fair show of youth and high spirits; and even their worst enemies will admit that Oxford and Cambridge wear, in the eyes of their sons at any rate, a certain glamour. You may argue that glamour is glamour, an illusion which will wear off in time; an illusion, at all events, and to be treated as such by the wise author intent on getting at truth. To this I answer that, while it lasts, this glamour is just as much a fact as _The Times_ newspaper, or St. Paul's Cathedral, just as real a feature of Oxford as Balliol College, or the river, or the Vice-Chancellor's poker: and until you recognise it for a fact and a feature of the place, and allow for it, you have not the faintest prospect of realising Oxford. Each succeeding generation finds that glamour, or brings it; and each generation, as it passes, deems that its successor has either found or brought less of it. But the glamour is there all the while. In turning over a book the other day, written in 1870 by the Rev. Robert Stephen Hawker, I come on this passage:--

"When I recall my own undergraduate life of thirty years and upwards agone, I feel, notwithstanding modern vaunt, the _laudator temporis acti_ earnest within me yet, and strong. Nowadays, as it seems to me, there is but little originality of character in the still famous University; a dread of eccentric reputation appears to pervade College and Hall: every 'Oxford man,' to adopt the well-known name, is subdued into sameness within and without, controlled as it were into copyism and mediocrity by the smoothing-iron of the nineteenth century. Whereas _in_ my time and before it there were distinguished names, famous in every mouth for original achievements and 'deeds of daring-do.' There were giants in those days--men of varied renown-- and they arose and won for themselves in strange fields of fame, record and place. Each became in his day a hero of the Iliad or Odyssey of Oxford life--a kind of Homeric man."

To which I am constrained to reply, "Mere stuff and nonsense!" Mr. Hawker--and more credit to him--carried away Homeric memories of his own seniors and contemporaries. But was it in nature that Mr. Hawker should discover Homeric proportions in the feats of men thirty years his juniors? How many of us, I ask, are under any flattering illusion about the performances of our juniors? We cling to the old fond falsehood that there were giants in _our_ days. We honestly believed they were giants; it would hurt us to abandon that belief. It does not hurt us in the least to close the magnifying-glass upon the feats of those who follow us. But this generation, too, will have its magnifying-glass. "There were giants in our days?" To be sure there were; and there are giants, too, in these, but others, not we, have the eyes to see them.

Say that the scales have fallen from our eyes. Very well, we must e'en put them on again if we would write a novel of University life. And, be pleased to note, it does not follow, because we see the place differently now, that we see it more truly. Also, it does not follow, because Oxford during the last twenty years has, to the eye of the visitor, altered very considerably, that the characteristics of Oxford have altered to anything like the same extent. Undoubtedly they have been modified by the relaxation and suspension of the laws forbidding Fellows to marry. Undoubtedly the brisk growth of red-brick houses along the north of the city, the domestic hearths, afternoon teas and perambulators, and all things covered by the opprobrious name of "Parks-system," have done something to efface the difference between Oxford and other towns. But on the whole I think they have done surprisingly little.

Speaking as a writer of novels, then, I should say that to write a good novel entirely concerned with Oxford lies close upon impossibility, and will prophesy that, if ever it comes to be achieved, it will be a story of friendship. But her glamour is for him to catch who can, whether in prose or rhyme.

ALMA MATER.

Know you her secret none can utter? Hers of the Book, the tripled Crown? Still on the spire the pigeons flutter; Still by the gateway flits the gown; Still on the street, from corbel and gutter, Faces of stone look down.

Faces of stone, and other faces-- Some from library windows wan Forth on her gardens, her green spaces Peer and turn to their books anon. Hence, my Muse, from the green oases Gather the tent, begone!

Nay, should she by the pavement linger Under the rooms where once she played, Who from the feast would rise and fling her One poor _sou_ for her serenade? One poor laugh from the antic finger Thrumming a lute string frayed?

Once, my dear--but the world was young then-- Magdalen elms and Trinity limes-- Lissom the blades and the backs that swung then. Eight good men in the 'good old times-- Careless we, and the chorus flung then Under St. Mary's chimes!

Reins lay loose and the ways led random-- Christ Church meadow and Iffley track-- 'Idleness horrid and dogcart' (tandem)-- Aylesbury grind and Bicester pack-- Pleasant our lines, and faith! we scanned 'em: Having that artless knack.

Come, old limmer, the times grow colder: Leaves of the creeper redden and fall. Was it a hand then clapped my shoulder? --Only the wind by the chapel wall. Dead leaves drift on the lute; so . . . fold her Under the faded shawl.

Never we wince, though none deplore us, We, who go reaping that we sowed; Cities at cock-crow wake before us-- Hey, for the lilt of the London road! One look back, and a rousing chorus! Never a palinode!

Still on her spire the pigeons hover; Still by her gateway haunts the gown; Ah, but her secret? You, young lover, Drumming her old ones forth from town, Know you the secret none discover? Tell it--when _you_ go down.

Yet if at length you seek her, prove her, Lean to her whispers never so nigh; Yet if at last not less her lover You in your hansom leave the High; Down from her towers a ray shall hover-- Touch you, a passer-by!

[1] "The Quest of the Sangraal," R. S. Hawker.

JUNE.

The following verses made their appearance some years ago in the pages of the _Pall Mall Magazine_. Since then (I am assured) they have put a girdle round the world, and threaten, if not to keep pace with the banjo hymned by Mr. Kipling, at least to become the most widely-diffused of their author's works. I take it to be of a piece with his usual perversity that until now they have never been republished except for private amusement.

They belong to a mood, a moment, and I cannot be at pains to rewrite a single stanza, even though an allusion to 'Oom Paul' cries out to be altered or suppressed. But, after all, the allusion is not likely to trouble President Kruger's massive shade as it slouches across the Elysian fields; and after all, though he became our enemy, he remained a sportsman. So I hope we may glance at his name in jest without a suspicion of mocking at the tragedy of his fate.

THE FAMOUS BALLAD OF THE JUBILEE CUP.

You may lift me up in your arms, lad, and turn my face to the sun, For a last look back at the dear old track where the Jubilee Cup was won; And draw your chair to my side, lad--no, thank ye, I feel no pain-- For I'm going out with the tide, lad, but I'll tell you the tale again.

I'm seventy-nine, or nearly, and my head it has long turned grey, But it all comes back as clearly as though it was yesterday-- The dust, and the bookies shouting around the clerk of the scales, And the clerk of the course, and the nobs in force, and Is 'Ighness, the Prince of Wales.

'Twas a nine-hole thresh to wind'ard, but none of us cared for that, With a straight run home to the service tee, and a finish along the flat. "Stiff?" Ah, well you may say it! Spot-barred, and at five-stone-ten! But at two and a bisque I'd ha' run the risk; for I was a greenhorn then.

So we stripped to the B. Race signal, the old red swallow-tail-- There was young Ben Bolt, and the Portland colt, and Aston Villa, and Yale; And W. G., and Steinitz, Leander, and The Saint, And the German Emperor's Meteor, a-looking as fresh as paint;

John Roberts (scratch), and Safety Match, The Lascar, and Lorna Doone, Oom Paul (a bye), and Romany Rye, and me upon Wooden Spoon; And some of us cut for partners, and some of us strung to baulk, And some of us tossed for stations--But there, what use to talk?

Three-quarter-back on the Kingsclere crack was station enough for me, With a fresh jackyarder blowing and the Vicarage goal a-lee! And I leaned and patted her centre-bit, and eased the quid in her cheek, With a 'Soh, my lass!' and a 'Woa, you brute!'--for she could do all but speak.

She was geared a thought too high, perhaps; she was trained a trifle fine; But she had the grand reach forward! _I_ never saw such a line! Smooth-bored, clean-run, from her fiddle head with its dainty ear half-cock, Hard-bit, _pur sang_, from her overhang to the heel of her off hind sock.

Sir Robert he walked beside me as I worked her down to the mark; "There's money on this, my lad," said he, "and most of 'em's running dark; But ease the sheet if you're bunkered, and pack the scrimmages tight, And use your slide at the distance, and we'll drink to your health to-night!"

But I bent and tightened my stretcher. Said I to myself, said I,-- "John Jones, this here is the Jubilee Cup, and you have to do or die." And the words weren't hardly spoken when the umpire shouted "Play!" And we all kicked off from the Gasworks end with a "Yoicks!" and a "Gone away!"

And at first I thought of nothing, as the clay flew by in lumps, But stuck to the old Ruy Lopez, and wondered who'd call for trumps, And luffed her close to the cushion, and watched each one as it broke, And in triple file up the Rowley mile we went like a trail of smoke.

The Lascar made the running: but he didn't amount to much, For old Oom Paul was quick on the ball, and headed it back to touch; And the whole first flight led off with the right, as The Saint took up the pace, And drove it clean to the putting green and trumped it there with an ace.

John Roberts had given a miss in baulk, but Villa cleared with a punt; And keeping her service hard and low, The Meteor forged to the front, With Romany Rye to windward at dormy and two to play, And Yale close up--but a Jubilee Cup isn't run for every day.

We laid our course for the Warner--I tell you the pace was hot! And again off Tattenham Corner a blanket covered the lot. Check side! Check side! Now steer her wide! And barely an inch of room, With The Lascar's tail over our lee rail, and brushing Leander's boom!

We were running as strong as ever--eight knots--but it couldn't last; For the spray and the bails were flying, the whole field tailing fast; And the Portland colt had shot his bolt, and Yale was bumped at the Doves, And The Lascar resigned to Steinitz, stale-mated in fifteen moves.

It was bellows to mend with Roberts--starred three for a penalty kick: But he chalked his cue and gave 'em the butt, and Oom Paul scored the trick-- "Off-side--no-ball--and at fourteen all! Mark cock! and two for his nob!"-- When W. G. ran clean through his lee, and yorked him twice with a lob.

He yorked him twice on a crumbling pitch, and wiped his eye with a brace, But his guy-rope split with the strain of it, and he dropped back out of the race; And I drew a bead on The Meteor's lead, and challenging none too soon, Bent over and patted her garboard strake, and called upon Wooden Spoon.

She was all of a shiver forward, the spoondrift thick on her flanks, But I'd brought her an easy gambit, and nursed her over the banks; She answered her helm--the darling!--and woke up now with a rush, While The Meteor's jock he sat like a rock--he knew we rode for his brush!

There was no one else left in it. The Saint was using his whip, And Safety Match, with a lofting catch, was pocketed deep at slip; And young Ben Bolt with his niblick took miss at Leander's lunge, But topped the net with the ricochet, and Steinitz threw up the sponge.

But none of the lot could stop the rot--nay, don't ask _me_ to stop!-- The Villa had called for lemons, Oom Paul had taken his drop, And both were kicking the referee. Poor fellow! He done his best; But, being in doubt, he'd ruled them out--which he always did when pressed.

So, inch by inch, I tightened the winch, and chucked the sandbags out-- I heard the nursery cannons pop, I heard the bookies shout: "The Meteor wins!" "No, Wooden Spoon!" "Check!" "Vantage!" "Leg before!" "Last lap!" "Pass Nap!" At his saddle-flap I put up the helm and wore.

You may overlap at the saddle-flap, and yet be loo'd on the tape: And it all depends upon changing ends, how a seven-year-old will shape; It was tack and tack to the Lepe and back--a fair ding-dong to the Ridge, And he led by his forward canvas yet as we shot neath Hammersmith Bridge.

He led by his forward canvas--he led from his strongest suit-- But along we went on a roaring scent, and at Fawley I gained a foot. He fisted off with his jigger, and gave me his wash--too late! Deuce--vantage--check! By neck and neck, we rounded into the straight.

I could hear the 'Conquering 'Ero' a-crashing on Godfrey's band, And my hopes fell sudden to zero, just there with the race in hand-- In sight of the Turf's Blue Ribbon, in sight of the umpire's tape, As I felt the tack of her spinnaker crack, as I heard the steam escape!

Had I lost at that awful juncture my presence of mind? . . . but no! I leaned and felt for the puncture, and plugged it there with my toe . . . Hand over hand by the Members' Stand I lifted and eased her up, Shot--clean and fair--to the crossbar there, and landed the Jubilee Cup!

"The odd by a head, and leg before," so the Judge he gave the word: And the Umpire shouted "Over!" but I neither spoke nor stirred. They crowded round: for there on the ground I lay in a dead-cold swoon, Pitched neck and crop on the turf atop of my beautiful Wooden Spoon.

Her dewlap tire was punctured, her bearings all red-hot; She'd a lolling tongue, and her bowsprit sprung, and her running gear in a knot; And amid the sobs of her backers, Sir Robert loosened her girth And led her away to the knacker's. She had raced her last on earth!

But I mind me well of the tear that fell from the eye of our noble Prince, And the things he said as he tucked me in bed--and I've lain there ever since; Tho' it all gets mixed up queerly that happened before my spill, --But I draw my thousand yearly: it'll pay for the doctor's bill.

I'm going out with the tide, lad.--You'll dig me a humble grave, And whiles you will bring your bride, lad, and your sons (if sons you have), And there, when the dews are weeping, and the echoes murmur "Peace!" And the salt, salt tide comes creeping and covers the popping-crease,

In the hour when the ducks deposit their eggs with a boasted force, They'll look and whisper "How was it?" and you'll take them over the course, And your voice will break as you try to speak of the glorious first of June, When the Jubilee Cup, with John Jones up, was won upon Wooden Spoon.

"To me," said a well-known authority upon education, "these athletics are the devil." To me no form of athletics is the devil but that of paying other people to be athletic for you; and this, unhappily--and partly, I believe, through our neglect to provide our elementary schools with decent playgrounds--is the form affected nowadays by large and increasing crowds of Englishmen. The youth of our urban populations would seem to be absorbed in this vicarious sport. It throngs the reading-rooms of free public libraries and working men's institutes in numbers which delight the reformer until he discovers that all this avidity is for racing tips and cricket or football "items." I am not, as a rule, a croaker; but I do not think the young Briton concerns himself as he did in the fifties, sixties, and seventies of the last century with poetry, history, politics, or indeed anything that asks for serious thought. I believe all this professional sport likely to be as demoralising for us as a nation as were the gladiatorial shows for Rome; and I cannot help attributing to it some measure of that combativeness at second-hand--that itch to fight anyone and everyone by proxy--which, abetted by a cheap press, has for twenty years been our curse.

Curse or no curse, it is spreading; and something of its progress may be marked in the two following dialogues, the first of which was written in 1897. Many of the names in it have already passed some way toward oblivion; but the moral, if I mistake not, survives them, and the warning has become more urgent than ever.

THE FIRST DIALOGUE ON CRICKET.

1897.

Some time in the summer of 1897--I think towards the end of August--I was whiling away the close of an afternoon in the agreeable twilight of Mr. D--'s bookshop in the Strand, when I heard my name uttered by some one who had just entered; and, turning about, saw my friend Verinder, in company with Grayson and a strapping youth of twenty or thereabouts, a stranger to me. Verinder and Grayson share chambers in the Temple, on the strength (it is understood) of a common passion for cricket. Longer ago than we care to remember--but Cambridge bowlers remember--Grayson was captain of the Oxford eleven. His contemporary, Verinder, never won his way into the team: he was a comparatively poor man and obliged to read, and reading spoiled his cricket. Therefore he had to content himself with knocking up centuries in college matches, and an annual performance among the Seniors. It was rumoured that Grayson--always a just youth, too-- would have given him his blue, had not Verinder's conscientiousness been more than Roman. My own belief is that the distinction was never offered, and that Verinder liked his friend all the better for it. At the same time the disappointment of what at that time of life was a serious ambition may account for a trace of acidity which began, before he left college, to flavour his comments on human affairs, and has since become habitual to him.

Verinder explained that he and his companions were on their way home from Lord's, where they had been 'assisting'--he laid an ironical stress on the word--in an encounter between Kent and Middlesex. "And, as we were passing, I dragged these fellows in, just to see if old D--' had anything." Verinder is a book-collector. "By the way, do you know Sammy Dawkins? You may call him the Boy when you make his better acquaintance and can forgive him for having chosen to go to Cambridge. Thebes did his green, unknowing youth engage, and--as the _Oxford Magazine_ gloomily prophesied--he bowls out Athens in his later age." The Boy laughed cheerfully and blushed. I felt a natural awe in holding out an exceedingly dusty hand to an athlete whose fame had already shaken the Antipodes. But it is the way of young giants to be amiable; and indeed this one saluted me with a respect which he afterwards accounted for ingenuously enough--"He always felt like that towards a man who had written a book: it seemed to him a tremendous thing to have done, don't you know?"

I thought to myself that half an hour in Mr. D--'s shop (which contains new books as well as old) would correct his sense of the impressiveness of the feat. Indeed, I read a dawning trouble in the glance he cast around the shelves. "It takes a fellow's breath away," he confessed. "Such a heap of them! But then I've never been to the British Museum."

"Then," said I, "you must be employing researchers for the book you are writing."

"What?" he protested. "_Me_ writing a book? Not likely!"

"An article for some magazine, then?"

"Not a line."

"Well, at least you have been standing for your photograph, to illustrate some book on Cricket that another fellow is writing."

He laughed.

"You have me there. Yes, I've been photographed in the act of bowling-- 'Before' and 'After': quite like Somebody's Hair Restorer."

"Well," said I, "and I wish you had contributed to the letterpress, too. For the wonder to me is, not that you cricketers write books (for all the world wants to read them), but that you do it so prodigiously well."

"Oh," said he, "you mean Ranji! But he's a terror."

"I was thinking of him, of course; but of others as well. Here, for instance, is a book I have just bought, or rather an instalment of one: _The Encyclopaedia of Sport_, edited by the Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire, Mr. Hedley Peek, and Mr. Aflalo, published by Messrs. Lawrence and Bullen: