book iii of his _Geographica_ to what we now call Spain and Portugal. In

iii. 5. 11 he says that the Cassiterides islands were off the coast of Spain and Portugal, and that the tin trade with these islands was formerly in the hands of the Phœnicians. In iii. 2. 9 he says that tin was found in Spain and Portugal and in the Cassiterides, and adds parenthetically “and it is brought also from Britain to Marseilles.” Diodoros is more explicit, v. 22, 38, saying that the British tin came from the western part of England, and went to Marseilles overland through France, a journey of thirty days with horses. I suppose people have forgotten Diodoros, and failed to see that Strabo is using a parenthesis; and have then mixed up the whole of what he says in iii. 2. 9 with what he says about the Phœnicians in iii. 5. 11. There is no suggestion in any ancient author that the Phœnicians ever had anything to do with this trade in British tin.

As for the Cassiterides, they must be the Burlings. These are the only noticeable islands on the outer coast of Spain and Portugal; and ancient authors say the Cassiterides were on that coast. Strabo and Diodoros, Mela and Pliny, Ptolemy, Dionysios and Avienus, all agree in putting them there, though they give them various positions from Cape Finisterre and Ferrol down to Cape St Vincent, and call them Hesperides or Œstrymnides as well as Cassiterides.

In the Scillies it is an article of faith that those islands are the Cassiterides, and this heresy of mine aroused the wrath of good Scillonians. (They never say Scilly Islanders themselves: it is too ambiguous.) Those islands seemed very remote, when I visited them first, in the autumn of 1886. The cable was broken, and the mail-boat did not waste her coal on making the passage in an equinoctial gale. But people told me I could get a pilot-cutter to take me off in any weather for £5. If it failed to make Penzance, it was sure of making Cork or Brest.

My going to the Scillies was indirectly the cause of Walter Besant’s going there and writing his novel of _Armorel of Lyonesse_. I was often talking of the islands after I came back, and he went in the spring of 1889. The novel pleased the islanders, and when I went there next (1896) there seemed to be an _Armorel_ in every house. It was a contrast to Tarascon and Alphonse Daudet’s book. I never saw a _Tartarin_ anywhere there.

Being at Tarascon, I inquired for the Tarasque--the dragon that was led captive by Saint Martha--and I found it locked up in a stable, 18 March 1891. It is not allowed out in processions now, as it has broken too many people’s bones by the waggings of its tail. Getting inside it, I found a tiller that worked the tail as if it were a rudder, and I made it wag.

The dragon at Tarascon is not unlike the dragon in one of Retzsch’s illustrations to Schiller’s _Kampf mit dem Drachen_, where the knight uses a dummy to accustom his horse and hounds to the look of a dragon in real life. He does this in France, and then goes back to Rhodes and kills the dragon there. The story is told of Dieudonné de Gozon; and he must have seen the dummy at Tarascon, as he was at Avignon from 1324 to 1332. But in one version the knight dressed up a bull to personate the dragon. In a version current at Rhodes it is a dervish, not a knight. He loaded forty donkeys with eighty sacks of lime, and drove them past the dragon’s den. The dragon swallowed them, lime and all, and then went down to drink.

The dragon at Rhodes was killed near Phileremos, the citadel of the ancient town of Ialysos; and Phorbas of Ialysos had killed a dragon there about two thousand years before. The old Greek legend was put into a mediæval dress; and another of those legends has been put into a dress that is completely modern. There are elevated beds of sea-shells in various parts of Rhodes, showing that the island has risen from the sea; and the story of its rising from the sea is told by Pindar in his ode in honour of Diagoras of Ialysos, _Olympia_, vii. 54-71. Either Thomson or Mallet copied this from Pindar into _Rule Britannia_, and now it is Britain that at Heaven’s command arose from out the azure main.

Many years ago I wrote a couple of volumes on the history of the island of Rhodes: they were published in 1885 and 1887, and now are obsolete. At first I only thought of writing about the Rhodian colonies in Sicily, but the subject led me on to Rhodes itself, and then to the adventures of the Knights after they had quitted Rhodes; but these were not included in the book.

The Knights were the Hospitallers, or Order of Saint John of Jerusalem; and their first home was at Jerusalem. But the Saracens drove them out of Palestine in 1291, the Turks drove them out of Rhodes in 1522, and the French drove them out of Malta in 1798. Malta was taken by the English in 1800; and by the tenth article of the Treaty of Amiens, 1802, England undertook to give up Malta to the Knights within three months. It is ancient history now that England held on to Malta, and thereby made a precedent for dealing with an inconvenient treaty as a scrap of paper.

In 1814 some of the French members of the Order formed a committee at Paris to see what could be done. But there were scamps among them, and these men admitted new members to the Order and made appointments in it--neither of which things had they any right to do--and pocketed the money that they took for entrance-fees, etc. The climax came in 1823 with an attempt of theirs to borrow money in the name of the Order. The office of Grand Master was vacant then, but the Lieutenant of the Mastery sent them a peremptory letter, 27 March 1824, saying that the committee was merely a self-appointed body without authority, and must forthwith be dissolved. The French Minister for Foreign Affairs also wrote a letter, 29 April 1825, saying that the admissions and appointments made by the committee were altogether illegal and could not in any way be recognized. And when the committee proposed to meet again in May 1826, the meeting was stopped by the Prefect of the Police.

France was now too hot for them, but the rogues found dupes in England. They began admitting new members to the Order and making appointments in it over here; and they appointed the Rev. Dr Peat as Prior. That was the foundation of the present Order of Saint John of Jerusalem in England.

All the English and Irish estates of the Order were confiscated by Act of Parliament in 1540, and the incorporation of the Order was dissolved in England and in Ireland, 32 Henry VIII, cap. 24. There was an attempt, 2 April 1557, to circumvent this Act by Letters Patent under a later Act, 4 & 5 Philip & Mary, cap. 1, but this was defeated by another Act next year, 1 Elizabeth, cap. 24. Of course, these proceedings had no effect outside the realm, and therefore did not touch the Order itself, as that was an international body with headquarters then at Malta. But they cut off revenue and practically closed a good recruiting ground; and there were few Englishmen or Irishmen among the Knights in after years. For administrative purposes the Order had been divided into Languages or Nations, one of which was English and included Ireland. But the members of the Order were simply Knights Hospitallers or Knights of Malta or of Rhodes, not Knights of any separate Nation or Language.

In 1834 Peat took an oath of office as “Prior of the Sixth Language of the Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem in London,” swearing “to keep and obey the ancient statutes of the said Sovereign Order,” and “to govern the said Sixth Language as Prior thereof under the provision of the statute of the 4th and 5th of Philip and Mary in the case made and provided.” By the statutes of the Order (which he promised to keep and obey) he was neither qualified for appointment nor appointed by the proper authority, and there could not be a Prior of a Language--the Languages were governed by Bailiffs, with Priors as their subordinates in the various priories. There is no statute of 4 & 5 Philip & Mary relating to the Order, only Letters Patent; and these make no provision for the government of the Language or the Priory. So he only bound himself to discharge the duties of an impossible office under an imaginary statute.

These people could not even make out mediæval Latin. If a candidate for admission proved his ancestry, he was admitted a knight by right, _de justitia_. If he could not prove his ancestry, he might be admitted a knight by favour, _de gratia_. Out of this they have made Knights of Justice and Knights of Grace. The _hospitale_ at Jerusalem was a place of hospitality where pilgrims were entertained. They mistook it for a hospital, and then went in for ambulance-work, first-aid, etc., on the strength of their mistake. No doubt, they have done much useful work, especially in this War. But you can very well do useful work without pretending to be something that you aren’t. And these non-combatants are posing as successors of the greatest clan of warriors in the age of Chivalry.

They were silly enough to apply for a Charter of Incorporation, and this brought them up against some lawyers with no love for false pretences. Instead of getting a charter as a branch of the real Order, or in some way connected with it, they only got a charter (14 May 1888) as a charitable society of fifty years’ standing.

Charity may cover a multitude of sins, but I doubt its covering lies as well; and their lies were multitudinous. They had a statement printed--“The English, or Sixth, Language of the Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem: a brief sketch of its history and present position, compiled by a committee appointed for that purpose by the Chapter of the Language.” It can hardly be surpassed in puerility. It talks of proceedings at the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and at Paris in 1816, as if there were no such things as the _Acten des Wiener Congresses_ and the _Archives Parlementaires_ to show that its statements are untrue in all essential points. It cites the Letters Patent of 2 May 1557 as saying one thing, when they say another, as anyone can see by looking at Dugdale’s _Monasticon_, where the document is printed. (I had Dugdale collated with the Patent Roll, and there is no mistake.) It says Peat’s oath of office was sworn in the King’s Bench, 24 February 1834, and is on the record. It would certainly be on the record, if it was sworn in the King’s Bench, as 9 George IV, cap. 17, was then in force. I had the record searched: it was not there.

Not long after I was called to the Bar, an old Queen’s Counsel said to me as we were coming out of court--“I can’t understand that fellow telling those transparent lies. The whole object of telling a lie is to deceive. If you don’t do that, you don’t attain your object, and you have the bad taste in your mouth the same.”

When the Knights left Malta in 1798, they took their greatest relic with them--the right hand of their patron saint, John Baptist. Having chosen the Czar Paul as Grand Master, they delivered this relic to him at Gatchina on 12 October 1799; and it has remained in Russia ever since. The anniversary is kept, and there is a service for the Translation of the Right Hand in imitation of the old service at Constantinople on the anniversary of its translation there from Antioch. It goes from Petersburg to Gatchina on 11 October and is carried to Saint Paul’s church there on 12 October, returning to Petersburg on 22 October. I saw it in the Winter Palace at Petersburg in 1889, and made some notes about it then--“The Right Hand is sadly dilapidated. The fourth and fifth fingers are gone, so that it can no longer gesticulate in response to inquiries about the harvest. There is a very large hole in the thumb, far too large for the little morsel of the thumb that choked the man-eating dragon at Antioch. And it is all very black indeed. The remaining fingers are long and slender, and the nails are delicately formed. It is the hand of an Egyptian, and a mummy.” It was at Constantinople when Sultan Mohammed took the city in 1453, and Sultan Bajazet gave it to the Knights in 1484.

Rhodes was besieged by Sultan Solyman in 1522, and at the great assault upon the city, 24 September, the garrison believed they saw John Baptist himself standing on the roof of his own church, waving a banner and encouraging them. It really was the prior’s French cook; and when they found this out, they accused him of making signals to the enemy, and nearly murdered him.

At the siege of Rhodes by Mithridates in 88 B.C. the garrison saw the goddess Isis standing on her temple and hurling down a mass of flame on the attacking force. And such apparitions have been common, from Castor and Pollux at Lake Regillus down to Saint George at Mons. Saint George, however, had no business there. He suffered martyrdom at Diospolis, twelve miles from Jaffa, where Perseus delivered Andromeda; and the old legend was transferred to him. It must have been a whale that Perseus killed, according to Pliny’s description of the bones; and, if Saint George had known his business, he would have abandoned Mons and gone out spearing submarines.

There is a treatise by Artemidoros on the interpretation of dreams, _Oneirocritica_, which (I believe) is not much read now, yet really is worth reading, as it shows what people used to dream about in the second century A.D. We do not dream now of being beheaded or crucified or becoming gladiators or fighting with wild beasts or being sold as slaves. But apparently these people dreamt oftener of such calamities than of the minor ills of life. Judging by what they dreamt, I should say their minds were not so complex as our own.

In interpreting their dreams Artemidoros tried induction, noting down the things they dreamt and what happened to them afterwards. Thus (iv. 31) Stratonicos dreamt he kicked the Roman Emperor: on going out he trod on something, and found it was a gold coin with the Emperor’s image on it. There were two kinds of dreams. If people dreamt of doing anything that they did habitually, it was nothing but a dream and needed no interpreting; but it became a vision, if they dreamt of doing things they seldom did, or could not do. Thus, it was only a dream, when they dreamt of lighting a lamp from the fire on the hearth; but it was a vision, when they dreamt they lit it from the Moon--after dreaming this a man went blind, v. 11, 34. Most people would be content with saying that the thing could not be done, because the Moon was too far off; but Artemidoros goes on to explain that nothing can be lighted from the Moon, as the Moon itself is not alight and shines only by reflexion.

They often dreamt odd things. Thus (i. 4) somebody dreamt he saw a man playing draughts with Charon, and he helped him to win the game: Charon did not like losing it, and went for him: he bolted off, with Charon after him, and got as far as an inn called the Camel; and he slipped into a shed there and closed the door, and thus dodged Charon, who ran past.--It is an uncomfortable sort of dream that might occur to anybody now, only the setting would not be the same. Instead of Charon, it would be the Devil; and instead of draughts, it would very likely be King Arthur and the Devil playing quoits. They played a game of quoits with Haytor Rocks about three miles from here--the Devil missed King Arthur with one rock, and then King Arthur got the Devil with the other, and sent him down below.

In dreams I have imagined myself in Rhodes, walking up the hill at Ialysos and finding Laon cathedral on the top. Laon stands on the same sort of hill: so this came from mixed memories. I have also imagined myself in Paris, driving to the Opéra and finding Milan cathedral there instead. They are both great staring buildings of about three acres each on similar sites: so this came from mixed memories also. But then I found the Louvre and Tuileries turned right round, with the east front of the Louvre looking westward down the Tuileries gardens; and I cannot think what mental twist did that. When I dream of being in those gardens, I usually see the west front of the Tuileries as it was before the war of 1870, not the ruin afterwards nor the vacant space there now.

I dream almost every night that I am travelling, sometimes on a ship but usually by train. In former years I travelled a good deal, and could ascribe the dreams to that; but since 1914 I have not travelled at all, and yet I dream of travelling just the same. As a rule, some little thing goes wrong--a few mornings ago I woke up very cross at finding that the Penzance dining-car did not go through to Brindisi, whereas the time-bill said it did. And these things usually happen at a station that could not possibly exist, being partly a big terminus and partly a junction and partly a wayside station with one signal-post. I can see a great deal of this station with my mind’s eye when I am awake, only there are misty bits just where the wayside station merges in the junction and where the junction merges in the terminus. But I do not see these misty bits in dreams, as my mind is occupied with one thing at a time and jumps from thing to thing like pictures on a film. This station has remained unaltered in my mind for twenty years at least, as I remember talking of it to a man who died in 1899.

As a rule, I see things with my mind’s eye almost as distinctly as if I were looking at the things themselves; and I thought that everyone could do the same till I read Galton’s _Inquiries into Human Faculty_ and found how greatly people varied as to this. I also see some things with my mind’s eye as symbols for other things that cannot be seen at all, e.g. boot-trees for arguments. They are trees for shoes, without handles, and made of polished wood; and they are on a grey felt floor with an open doorway at the further end. When two arguments lead up to a third, the corresponding boot-trees turn their toes in towards the other’s heel; and I have seen as many as eight or ten boot-trees pointing like this to half the number in a line beyond them, these also pointing to others further on, and finally a boot-tree going through the doorway. I find it very convenient--I see more at a single glance than I could put into a page of print.

Galton speaks of numbers being personified, and gives several instances of children doing this. The son of an old friend of mine--an undergraduate now--tells me he did it when a child and sometimes does it still. His views are--“1 and 0 do not count, being inactive. 2, good-natured, always doing its best to please. 3, sometimes kind and condescending, hated by 8 when added, but not when multiplied to make 24: great friend of 9. 4, not very noticeable, but means well: great friend of 8 and 6. 5, much the same as 4, but no special friend except 2: rather meek. 6, inclined to be selfish: no great friend of 3, pals with 4 and 8. 7, unlucky and despised, bad luck in making such numbers as 49 and 63 when multiplied. 8, fat and good-natured, but inclined to be selfish: likes being made up to good round numbers such as 12, 24, 48, &c. 9, friend of 3, disagreeable and a bully, despised for making brutish numbers such as 27, 63, 81, &c.”

I now suspect Pythagoras of having done this as a child and then, instead of putting away childish things, making it a basis for much of his philosophy. Thus, amongst other things, he says that 8 is Justice itself, being _isacis isos_ or _bis bina bis_--in other words, it is composed of 4 and 4, and each 4 is composed of 2 and 2, so that there is even balance throughout. This reasoning must surely be an afterthought to justify some childish fancy.

Usually, when people think of numbers, they see the Arabic figures with their mind’s eye; and some people can see these figures manœuvring at each stage of a calculation. (I heard this from George Bidder, who was famous as The Calculating Boy a hundred years ago.) Within narrow limits I see this manœuvring myself; but, although they are mere figures, I feel that they are moving like soldiers on parade. And that comes very near personifying them.

I imagine that the people who see things very clearly with their mind’s eye, are the most likely people to see visions when their intellect has lost its balance through hunger or fatigue. In dreams the outward eye is closed, and the mind’s eye must rely on memories that are often mixed. But in visions both sights are at work, though the outward eye is working listlessly for want of physical strength; and I suspect that every vision is based on what the outward eye is seeing at the time.

There is a clump of trees upon the summit of a hill about three miles from here, and it stands out against the sky-line, when one looks up along the valley of the Wrey. It looked like any ordinary clump of trees until the undergrowth was cut a little while ago; but now one sees the sky between the tree-tops and the hill, and the line of tree-tops looks just like a prehistoric monster of the lizard type. I notice that it looks more life-like, when I am tired out; and with want of sleep and food as well, I might have visions of a dragon there.

Some years ago a woman said that she had seen the Devil, when she had only seen the Rural Dean. She lived in a lonely cottage; and, when the Devil went to Widdicombe on 21 October 1638, he called there to inquire the way, and he asked for water--which betrayed him by going off in steam. Now the Rural Dean was dressed in black and mounted on a big black horse; and it was a foggy day, so that he loomed up large. Not knowing the story, he called there to inquire the way to Widdicombe, and asked for water also, but did not get it, as the woman fled. I think she had a vision, merely based on what she saw, and going far beyond that. She said she saw his horns.

People who have seen the Devil, all say he is just like the pictures of him: so I suppose they carry these pictures in their mind, and see them with the mind’s eye, when they are in a fright. Pictures may also be the basis of many of our outlandish dreams. After a long look at a picture of some centaurs, a man here said to me--“Pity there bain’t such critters now: they’d be proper vitty on a farm.” I quite agreed with him, they would. A week afterwards he said to me--“I dreamed as I were one o’ they, and, my word, I did slap in.”

I have not heard of the Devil being seen about here very lately, nor of many witches. Seven or eight years ago two elderly people were complaining that someone had ill-wished them; but their misfortunes could be explained by their own want of foresight, without the intervention of an evil eye. They came from Cornwall. An old friend of mine tells me that his grandmother practised witch-craft there. She could bring down rain or bring in shoals of fish, but would seldom perform the rites until she had been asked repeatedly. In fact, she waited till the weather showed her what was coming.

My grandfather was called an atheist by several people here, because he scoffed at witch-craft, “a thing attested by the Word of God.” If you denied the Witch of Endor, you might as well deny John Baptist or Saint Paul. Witch-craft was as well attested as the miracles. But then they said that miracles had ceased, yet said the Bible showed that there was witch-craft still.

In very early life I felt certain that a woman here must be a witch, because she looked it. She lived in a cottage that had a great big open fireplace, and she sat there cowering over the fire on the hearth, with her walking-stick leant up across her knees. I had no doubts about her flying up the chimney on that stick, and always hoped she would while I was there.

We have substitutes for most things now, even substitutes for witches. My father noted in his diary on 7 April 1844, “Witch-craft a common belief to this day in Lustleigh, and prevalent even among the better-informed classes.” And now I note that alien-espionage has been just as common a belief from 1914 onwards, and especially among those classes. They scent spies and aliens as keenly as the old folk scented witches; but the mania is more expensive now.--Two young men had bought a lonely cottage in a wood, and were living their own life up there. Until the War nobody ever suggested that they were anything but English. Then people said that they were German, and would as readily have said that they were Japanese or Russian, if we had been at war with Russia or Japan. And then a more inventive person said they had a gun-platform of concrete underneath their lawn. In a careless moment the editor of a local paper put that in. It was a costly blunder, and the lawyers profited.

There are people everywhere just now with such a comprehensive hate of Germany that they tell us to abjure all German things for evermore; but I notice that the men who talk like this, are almost always wearing German hats. Instead of saying that the hat is Tyrolese or Homburg or whatever German type it really is, they say it is of English make and call it Trilby or some other name like that. Yet these same men are always preaching that a German is a German always, although he has been naturalized or born here and has assumed an English name.

In speaking of the politicians who governed France in 1871, Bismarck said that some of them had Jewish names but several more had Jewish noses. People here think only of the alien name, forgetting that the alien blood is just as active in descendants in the female line, though the name has lapsed on marriage. There is the progeny of a Dutchman who settled at Exeter in the reign of William the Third. Nobody bothered about the female line; but descendants in male line were hunted out as Germans by a pack of people who knew too little of language or of history to recognize the name as Dutch.

There is probably more alien blood in England than these people think. They say that so-and-so is tainted by having an alien ancestor some generations back. But in nine cases out of ten they cannot give a complete list of their own great-great-grandparents, or even their great-grandparents; and the completest lists may not be quite conclusive. There was a wonderful old lady on a Dartmoor farm, ostensibly of English ancestry, but born about the time when French prisoners-of-war were out on parole there. I have seen her towering form, with eagle eye and outstretched hand, directing geese into their pond; and I have fancied that I saw a Marshal in Napoleon’s army launching a charge of cuirassiers.

I have heard her say Bo to a goose. Few people say it now, and they never say it properly. If it is said in the right way, the goose turns round and waddles off at once, however much it may have hissed before. It is like Ahi with a horse in Italy. When the driver has flogged and progged in vain, as a last resort he says Ahi, and then the brute moves on.

In my early days my grandfather would often talk of the French prisoners-of-war whom he remembered here a century ago; and I never imagined then that I was going to have prisoners-of-war working for me here, and that these prisoners would be German. They were quartered at Newton Abbot in the workhouse, and came out each day to work, returning for the night. I had nineteen here in the summer of 1918, though never more than six at once. There were six from Bavaria, three from Baden, two from Wurtemberg and one from Saxony; and seven were reckoned as Prussians, but two of these were from the Rhineland, two from Hannover, two from Hamburg and the other one from Silesia. They were the same kind of people that I have always met in rural parts of Germany--good-tempered and good-natured countryfolk, exceedingly unlike the Huns depicted by our Propaganda.

However little we may like it, the Germans are our own kith and kin. Sixteen of those nineteen prisoners would certainly have passed as English, if they had been in English clothes and had not cut their hair so short. A person here confounded Hannover with Andover, and thought the Hannoverians were of English birth. Of course, language makes a gulf; and here it was not merely a matter of English and German. The prisoners spoke such different dialects that they could hardly understand each other, and the Yorkshire of the corporal in charge of them was not exactly like our Devonshire here.

Quite early in the War the people here discovered that all Belgians were not angels, and I think they are discovering that all Germans are not devils. But at first the prisoners were not welcome. Looking at them from the road, a man declared he would not stand in the same field with them. A girl who heard him, looked at him, and was unkind enough to say, “No, not in the same battle-field.”

Standing in the wheat field, I was watching two good-looking cheery youths at work there. They were the same sort and evidently liked each other; but one belonged to Lustleigh and the other one to Dueren near Cologne. I felt some doubts about the state of things that had put them into hostile armies, to maim or kill each other if they could.

On an outlying farm the clock went wrong, and struck one at three and two at four and so on. This was a nuisance, as people were unable to remember which was wrong, the striking or the hands. But the farmer settled it by keeping the clock an hour fast; and then, when it pointed to one and struck eleven, everybody knew that it was twelve.

There is much the same confusion now on every farm that has adopted Summer Time. Farm work must be regulated by the sun--some things cannot be done until the dew is off the ground, others cannot be done until the noon-tide heat has passed, and so on with other things all through the day; and the times for doing them have been fixed accordingly. It would be disastrous to do the things an hour earlier: so the times for doing them are all moved on. The clock says five instead of four, but what was timed for five is timed for six.

For many years past the Board of Agriculture has called for a return on 4 June in every year with the acreage of the crops and the quantity of live-stock on each farm, including horses but not including asses. In 1920 the War Office called for a return of horses and asses on 4 June. So (I suppose) asses must be useless in agriculture, but of some use in war. Just at that time the War Office was suspected of planning an expedition into southern Russia; and I wondered if a man of genius had been reading in Herodotos how a Persian army made an expedition there, and frightened the enemy clean away by the braying of the asses in its train.

Although the War Office and the Board of Agriculture were calling for returns on the same day, 4 June, the War Office did not apply for them direct, or through the Board of Agriculture, but through the Board of Trade. And these authorities differed over mules. The War Office had asked for a return of horses and asses, and said that ‘horse’ included ‘mule’; but the Board of Trade changed this into a return of horses, mules and asses. Seeing that the Board of Trade was acting under an Army Council Regulation made under section 114 of the Army Act, I doubted its having any right whatever to distinguish horse and mule.

In this part of Devon we all received a notice in the autumn of 1917, headed “Increased Food Production for 1918,” and informing us--“The area of corn and potatoes allotted to the Southern Division of Devon for 1918 is 86,000 acres. In order to get this quantity it is necessary for all farms to have 30 per cent. of their total acreage into corn and potatoes. This percentage has been adopted by the Executive Committee for the Division, who have power to enforce it. You are expected to have [number inserted] acres into corn and potatoes in 1918.” I suppose the fools imagined that an average of 30 per cent. on all the farms together was the same thing as 30 per cent. on every single farm. But they had the power, and they used it with disastrous results. They ploughed their 30 per cent. on dairy farms, destroying pasture that will not mature again for years; and on other farms with 60 per cent. quite fit for ploughing, they ploughed no more than 30. On some moorland farms they only got their 30 by ploughing such sterile ground that the crop was of less value than the seed that was put in.

There was a story of a successful advocate who was troubled on his death-bed by the thought of having got innocent men convicted, but at last found comfort in the thought of having also got guilty men acquitted, so that, upon the whole, he had got justice done. And this Committee will perhaps find comfort in the thought of having got the specified amount of ploughing done.

In some flat parts of England people might believe that all land was alike and one acre as good as another; but I cannot understand how anyone could think so here, in a district that runs up from sea-level to about 2000 feet above, with all sorts of soils and climates. The fools may say they had no time to make a survey of each farm; but that is no excuse. They had the figures at hand, and did not use them.

Under the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836 a map was made of every parish in England, and every field was numbered on the map; and the corresponding number on the Tithe Apportionment gave the acreage of the field and its state of cultivation. It is waste of seed and labour to put corn or potatoes into fields that were not arable then, for they were grown wherever it was possible to grow them, as they were paying crops--Potato Disease did not appear till 1845, and the Corn Laws were not repealed till 1846. The fools could easily have seen what fields were arable then, and based their regulations upon that. They had the figures in every parish, at Exeter for the whole of Devon, and in London for the whole of England, for the apportionments and maps were made in triplicate--one for the parson of the parish, one for the bishop of the diocese, and one for the Tithe Commissioners themselves, which last is at the office of the Board of Agriculture.

In the autumn of 1918 we had a notice that 35 per cent. of every holding must be ploughed, and “substitution of quota (from one holding to another) will not be allowed under any circumstances.” Suppose arrangements had been made for ploughing an acre of productive land on one holding instead of an acre of unproductive land upon another. It was forbidden by these fools, in the name of Food Production.

Farmers often blundered, and have been ridiculed for that; but after all they only blundered here and there and now and then. As things are, they have to blunder on a bigger scale, and may be prosecuted if they fail to blunder as prescribed.

As for the people who prescribe these blunders, it is charitable to think that they are merely fools: they may be something worse. The law assumes that everyone intends the natural consequences of his acts, and might very well assume that they intended doing all they could to damage agriculture, without increasing the supply of food. Such things have been done before. Thus, the London County Council wanted an excuse for running steamers on the Thames, and therefore made it impossible for the steamboat companies to carry on. It then ran steamers at a loss, using money from the rates, and finally came to grief with them.

These public bodies come to grief in the most foolish ways. I am one of the trustees of a property in London, and the County Council scheduled part of it for “betterment.” We could not comprehend how houses in one street would be bettered by the Council’s widening another street that ran parallel with it some hundred yards away. But the Council then decided on making a new street at right angles to the street that it had widened, and demolished these houses to make way for the new street. It wanted now to buy them at their market value, but we made it buy them at their “bettered” value--we could not, as trustees, sell property to the Council for less than the Council’s own valuation of it. So the Council paid us (with the ratepayers’ money) for a “betterment” that never existed except in some cranks’ brains.

Lawyers abbreviate trustees into trēēs, and a careless copyist will sometimes write trustees for trees, if the crossing of the _t_ is rather long. On looking into a deed, I found a power to cut down and sell trustees by public auction or by private treaty, etc., etc., and I was one of the trustees there. In another trust there were two sums of Consols in the joint names of myself and co-trustee. They were entered in the usual way as A and B accounts, and it happened that our B account went on long after our A account was closed. My co-trustee was a knight, belonging to various orders, and ‘B act.’ came next the groups of letters following his name. After a time this was altered into ‘Bart.’--an excusable mistake, as there was no ‘A act.’ and he was ‘Sir.’ Having thus become a baronet here, he was entered as ‘Bart.’ in other stocks standing in his name.

A friend of mine was being shown into a stockbroker’s room just as a shabby old man was coming out; and the old man turned back and said something which showed that he was speculating heavily. My friend remonstrated with the stockbroker for letting the man risk money that he manifestly could not afford to lose. But the answer was--“Don’t make yourself uneasy over him. He’s very fond of speculating, but he always keeps a hundred thousand in Consols, so that he may never be reduced to actual want.”

I doubt if many people understand the happiness of misers. It must be like the happiness of feeling thoroughly fit. There is a joy in knowing you can jump clean over any gate you see; and I think the miser has this joy in knowing he can pay for anything he likes. But he does not go buying things, any more than you go jumping over gates.

The air is often very buoyant here, especially upon the hill tops; and one morning on the top of Easton Down a friend of mine turned round to me and said--“Well, you know, I don’t think the Ascension was very much of a miracle after all.” And certainly one felt there was no saying where one wouldn’t go to, if one just gave a jump.

A man here said to me, “Her went up ’xactly like an angel,” as if he often saw them go, and thought I must have seen them too. (He was speaking of the finish of a play he saw in town.) Another person here was very certain of what angels did or did not do. A stranger came to the back-door one Sunday morning, and asked for a drink of cider to help him on his way. He was denied it by the maid who was in charge there, and thereupon he said to her--“You know not what you do. You might be entertaining angels unawares.” To which she answered--“Get thee’ long. Angels don’t go drinkin’ cider church-times.”

People sometimes ask me for advice on matters of which I am no judge, and a girl once asked me this:--She had been engaged to a young man for several years, but the engagement had just been broken off. She used to suffer dreadfully from toothache; and in the early days of his affection he sent her to the dentist, and paid for putting in a plate of teeth. Was that plate of teeth a present that ought to be returned? Rightly or wrongly, I said that it was not; and I see she has it still.

When teeth are drawn, young people here think nothing of the pain, but often speak with pride of the resistance of their teeth--“he scarce could stir’n,” or “he had a proper job to get’n.” In a letter to my father, 20 January 1860, my grandfather says--“I saw a man spitting out blood, and asked him the matter, when he said he had had a tooth drawn, and the doctor had torn the jaw.... I gave him brandy on lint, which soon stopped the flow of blood.... The old dentists or tooth-drawers used to apply salt and water, which was not bad, though a little brandy would have been better: but the fact is their charge was only sixpence, so they could not afford the brandy. But now, I hear, those new fashioned ones charge as much as five shillings: therefore there is no excuse.”

A man here who was born in 1852, tells me that he had whooping-cough when he was four years old, and that he was treated for it (if not cured of it) by being laid on a sheep’s forme. A forme is the imprint that a sheep makes on the grass by lying in one place all night; and when the sheep gets up in the morning, a sort of vapour rises from the warm ground underneath into the cold morning air. He was taken out into a meadow in the early morning, and was told to lie face-downwards on a forme and breathe this vapour in, not merely through the nostrils but with open mouth. He breathed it in until the ground was cold and there was no more vapour to be breathed (a matter of about five minutes) and then he was taken home to bed.

People now-a-days laugh at cures like that, but they laughed at Jenner when he first said that there was something about a cow that kept small-pox away. There may be something about a sheep that cures the whooping-cough; but there may be people who would rather have the whooping-cough than cure it in this way. I remember about fifty years ago a claret was being advertised as an antidote to gout; and the old three-bottle men who tried it, all said that they would rather have the gout.

I started drinking port when I was less than two years old. An injudicious friend remonstrated with my mother--if I had port when I was well, what could I take if I were ill and needed strengthening? She answered that it would prevent my ever being ill. I never was ill enough to spend a day in bed till I was fifty-five, and might never have been ill at all, if I had gone on drinking port proportionately; but I degenerated with the times and only drank two glasses, not two bottles, as I should. There is an entry in Dyott’s Diary, 10 November 1787--“There were just twenty dined, and we drank sixty-three bottles of wine.” I heard of a man going to a physician because he could not drink three bottles, as his father did before him. The physician said, “Perhaps it _was_ port that your father drank.” Even in my time it has become a different wine. If I can trust my tongue, the vintages of 1900 and 1904 are quite unlike the vintages of 1847 and 1858 at similar ages. Phylloxera attacked the Douro vineyards after 1878, and most of them have been replanted with a stronger sort of vine.

My grandfather was a little disturbed about my starting port so early in my life. He writes to my father on 22 November 1858, “My views are different from yours respecting the treatment of young children: however, I hope all will go right with him,” and again on 30 January 1859, “I hope he gets on well--but not too much port wine, mind.” All went right with me, and I got on as he hoped; and he writes on 25 December 1859 that a neighbour said I had “limbs strong enough for a wrestler.”

Wrestling was formerly as great a sport in Devon as in Cornwall; but it died out in this district about fifty years ago. My brother writes to my father, 2 August 1866--“I went to see the wrestling, but it was a rough and clumsy business.” This was at a festival at Lustleigh in honour of the opening of the railway. My grandfather writes to my father, 28 May 1858--“There was a grand wrestling match at Moreton on Saturday, set on foot by Mr *****, who said he would see one match more before he left the world.” A few years earlier there was wrestling at Moreton every summer. My grandfather notes, 22 June 1841, “Moreton Wrestling today,” 14 June 1842, “Wrestling at Moreton today and tomorrow,” and so on, and usually with a further note that so-and-so or so-and-so had gone off there instead of sticking to work.

Writing to my father on 10 November 1861, my grandfather says, “Football was a game much played in my youth, but cricket was my favourite game.” He was born in 1789; and the cricket and football of a century ago were very different from cricket and football now.

The chimney-pot hat used to be worn in playing cricket; and I have seen it worn in matches on village-greens and even at Lord’s. The distinction between Gentlemen and Players was much sharper then than now; and the Gentlemen wore chimney-pots, while the Players wore caps. Policemen also wore chimney-pots, a London fashion adopted in Milan and retained by policemen there. And the Channel Pilots wore chimney-pots. I remember them on liners starting from the Thames. The pilots were dropped off Dover or the Isle of Wight, and kept their hats on even when going down the ship’s side to the pilot cutter, and came on board in the same style on voyages home.

My father told me how he once got a lesson in the Continental way of taking off your hat to anyone. He met Louis Philippe strolling in the Tuileries gardens, and raised his hat to him as he would have raised it to Prince Albert or anyone like that in England. And in reply the King not merely raised his hat, but swung it right down to the level of his knees and up again.

He notes in his diary on 17 September 1840 that he was at Versailles that afternoon, and “there were no cheers or any sign of respect” when Louis Philippe drove out from the Trianon. He also notes on 15 September that “the Palais de Justice is strongly guarded, as young Bonaparte is imprisoned there.” Some years afterwards he saw ‘young Bonaparte’ in the Tuileries gardens and Louis Philippe at Kew.--Napoleon the Third had landed in France on 6 August 1840, and was sentenced on 6 October to imprisonment for life, not escaping until 1846.

After a visit to the Palais de Justice, 16 October 1839, he notes down in his diary--“An advocate on the right bench was addressing the judges as I entered. He used an immense deal of action and gesture, quite unknown at the English bar. Then the advocate on the other side replied. His action was much more violent, even when reading from documents.” He liked things quietly done. In his diary, 24 March 1838, he speaks of Lord Denman as “a judge more to my liking than any one I ever saw: quite a contrast to some of them, especially in his exclusive attention to the case in hand, instead of officiously meddling with every thing and body in the court.”

Some twenty years ago a very astute old man in Paris got into litigation in the English courts about a group of companies that he controlled; and he asked me confidentially how much I thought he ought to give the judge in order to secure the right decision. I felt it would be waste of time to tell him that we did not do this here: so I told him what huge salaries our judges got, and what big fortunes most of them had made while they were at the Bar. He saw their price would be prohibitive, and gave the notion up. He really had a very strong case that was bound to win upon its merits; but from what he said, I gathered that merits were not always the decisive point in France in litigation or in anything else.

I once saw a trial for brigandage in Sicily. (I think it must have been at Girgenti in 1885, but am not quite sure.) This band of brigands never made mistakes. They never tried to rob a man unless he happened to be carrying a good amount of money: they never held a man to ransom unless he was worth ransoming; and they never fixed his ransom at a higher sum than his people could just manage to pay. They evidently had good information; and there were comparatively few people from whom the various bits of information could have come. And now the police had not only got the band of brigands, but had got the members of the syndicate that ran the band. I saw the prisoners in court--they were all inside a great big iron cage like one of the aviaries at the Zoo--and I have never seen more respectable and pious looking people than some of the members of that syndicate.

There was a story going round Sicily then of some young scamp, who was hard up, and arranged with brigands to capture him and share the ransom that his parents were quite sure to pay. The parents paid up heavily, and the brigands kept their word and gave him half.

I was at Taormina in 1883--it was a quiet place then with only two small inns, not a suburb of hotels, as now--and I was reading in Goethe’s diary of his travels, 7 May 1787, how he sat there in a garden by the sea and planned _Nausikaa_, a five-act tragedy of which he wrote no more than sixty lines. I am only a _Wahrheit_ man myself, and have no _Dichtung_ in me: yet I have imagined Nausicaa in Corfu, when looking at the stone Phæacian ship there; and I have also imagined Ulysses in Sicily, when looking at the seven great rocks the Cyclops hurled at him at Aci; but Taormina brought me down to 735 B.C., with the first Greek colony in Sicily on the little headland there, and all that this portended for Carthage and for Rome. Being a real poet, Goethe only talks geology about the rocks at Aci, and rather regrets he did not picnic there and hammer off some specimens of zeolite. He says the Taormina scenery will provide him with a setting for his play: he will model Ulysses on himself, his own conversation being quite as entertaining and instructive as anything Ulysses can have said to the Phæacians; and he will model Nausicaa on the ladies he left broken-hearted at each place where he stayed.

A poet ought not to disclose the sources of his inspiration. One day Petrarch was thinking of Laura till his eyes were filled with tears, and he walked into a brook he did not see: hence _Del mar Tirreno_. And one day Toplady got underneath a rock and kept dry in a storm: hence _Rock of Ages_. Toplady was here the wiser man, and the better poet too, for he says nothing of the rain, whereas Petrarch talks of his wet feet.

Goethe has disclosed his sources here; and his setting for the play seems just as inappropriate as his heroine and hero. The ancients were convinced that Corfu was Phæacia, and there is a certain austerity about Corfu that exactly suits the theme; whereas Taormina is all riotous luxuriance, befitting a Cyclops or a Satyr, but not Nausicaa. And surely Ulysses and Nausicaa are worlds away from Goethe and the ladies who adored him. Croce has called him ‘gran poeta’ and ‘borghese’ also, that is, ‘bourgeois’ or ‘middle-class’; and I think it hits him off.

Tradition has made Homer old and blind, and knows nothing of his maturity or youth. And from this I gather that he made his reputation late in life; and I suspect he made it with his later work, the _Odyssey_, or rather with the striking part of it, the travels of Ulysses, v. 1-xiii. 184. I fancy that Ulysses was to Homer what Hajji Baba was to Morier--a character of whom he could narrate all manner of tales collected from all sources; and his tales of Southern Italy and Sicily were just the tales to take the fancy of the Greeks, when they first thought of planting colonies there.

For my own part I believe that he lived on until about 800 B.C.--as Herodotos avers, ii. 53--and that he heard the first explorers’ tales of all the places that Ulysses visits. I do not underrate the difficulties of this, and have read some cubic feet of books about them; but, where the critics trace the handiwork of different poets, I cannot see anything but Homer at different stages of his life. He must have reached a good old age; and an author’s point of view may shift a long way with advancing years. In the Vatican Library they show you Henry the Eighth’s treatise against Martin Luther with the author’s dedication to the Pope.

There is an amusing little volcano near Girgenti, and I once spent the best part of a day there playing with it, 26 March 1885. It is called the Maccaluba, which clearly is the Arabic _maklûbah_, ‘topsy-turvy,’ so that the name goes back to the days of Arab rule in Sicily. The mound is about 150 feet high, and on it there are little cones that shoot out gas and mud. You throw turf and stones into the mouth of a cone until you stop it up: then it wheezes and gurgles for a while, and finally shoots out the things you have put in; and you retire briskly, as the mud is scorching if it catches you. But the whole volcano was very quiet then, and seemed more bored than angry in the way it shot things out.

Apart from its great cone, Etna has always given me the notion of a big Bath Bun, the little cones being the lollipops. It covers more than four hundred square miles--twice the whole extent of Dartmoor--and it is only two miles high. It looks best at long distances, where the lower part is hidden and the cone stands out: the best view I ever had of it, was from a steamer going from Brindisi to Malta. With little more than a third of the height, Vesuvius made more show. But it is sad to see Vesuvius now, after the eruption of 1906: the cone fell in, and that has deprived the mountain of its former grace. Volcanoes have these ups and downs. I always wish I could have seen the rise of Monte Nuovo on the other side of the bay. It is 450 feet in height, and rose up from level ground in the course of a few hours.

We have an extinct volcano here, only half a mile from this house. One sees geologists going round there now and then with their little bags and hammers and going off with specimens. An eminent geologist came lecturing here in 1906, and he spoke of volcanoes breaking out again after long periods of calm, such outbreaks being usually most violent. One of the listeners was much disturbed at hearing this, and thought it hardly worth his while to go on putting in potatoes near such a dangerous place. So he inquired when that hillock were a-likely to be bustin’ forth. With the spaciousness of a true geologist, the lecturer replied, “In the science of geology a period of thirty thousand years is relatively....” The man went on with his potatoes.

Though living on the edge of a volcano, I do not worry about eruptions, but only about earthquakes. I can remember two earthquakes in England--I felt the shock in 1884 but slept through it in 1868--and I have seen what earthquakes do abroad (especially at Chios in 1881) and I do not want a heavy earthquake here. In these valleys it would be overwhelming. The hillsides are strewn with granite rocks that have weathered away till they have nearly lost their hold upon the ground--some actually are Logans and go seesaw--and a smart shock would send them racing down into the valleys below. Sometimes I see a rabbit start a stone off down a hill; and, when the stone comes bouncing by, I picture what would happen if the stone weighed ten or fifteen tons, and hundreds of such stones were coming like an avalanche.

A year or two ago the End of the World became a common topic of conversation, as a newspaper was exploiting some prediction of it. And a man here cleared the matter up with the remark--“In church it be World With_out_ End.” About fifty years ago my brother and I used to go to the Scotch Church in Crown Court towards the end of December, to hear Dr Cumming announce the End of the World for the ensuing year. But after a few years he grew more wary, and he hedged--“And if the World does not indeed come to an End, something else very remarkable will certainly occur.” (I quote from memory, and may have got the words wrong, but they were to that effect.) About the same date I heard a preacher in a country church declaring that the World, “having now lasted for close upon six thousand years, cannot reasonably be expected to last much longer.”

Coming into Jerusalem by the Damascus gate, 14 March 1882, I noticed two unfamiliar objects standing out above the city walls against the evening sky. Upon inquiry I found that they were ventilating pipes. A family (American, I think) had taken a house there, as they thought the Day of Judgement was at hand, yet wished to have a sanitated home meanwhile. And other families had likewise taken houses at Jerusalem, the notion being that the Last Judgement was going to be held there and residents would get priority.

On a Good Friday morning I found a small girl standing on my door-step here, eating a hot-cross-bun. I asked what she was doing there, and she curtsied and said, “Please, zir, I be fasting.” And generally the seasons of the Christian year were marked by buns, lamb, goose, plum-pudding, pancakes and salt-fish far more than by observances at church. There were no week-day services at Lustleigh except on Christmas Day, Ash Wednesday and Good Friday; and the only recognition of a saint’s-day was the transfer of its collect to the following Sunday. There was Communion four times in the year, each time with a fresh bottle of wine at ten shillings per bottle. It was heralded by the reading of the exhortation on the previous Sunday, and perhaps was held in more esteem for being so uncommon.

A new Rector came to Lustleigh at the end of 1844, and remained there till his death at the end of 1887; and at first the parish did not like his innovations. My grandfather writes to my father on 15 December 1844--“I am informed that the parishioners will not submit to any alteration in the service, and that the churchwardens have gone over the parish to ascertain their opinions, and it is supposed the parson will not attempt anything further to annoy them,” and again on 29 December 1844--“I saw Mr ***** on Thursday: he told me he had left the church for seven weeks until last Sunday, when he determined to go and shew his resentment by leaving the church on the parson going to the communion. He did so, and again on Christmas day, but no one followed him. They are opposed to the surplice and offertory, but have not spirit to resent it. His brother (who is churchwarden) says unless the parson goes back to the accustomed duties of the church, he will leave altogether. His father talks more than he does, but it appears he has stood the whole, offertory and all.”

He writes again, 20 January 1845, about people leaving the church--“What will they do then? I suppose they will dissent and erect more chapels, so we shall by and by have a plenty of ’Isms. I fancy we have quite enough already.” People left the church and went to chapel for very varied reasons. I remember an excellent old lady doing this because a child of hers had caught its death of cold by the parson a-baptizin’ of it without a-puttin’ of a kettleful o’ bilin’ water into that stoney font.

The new Rector was merely following the directions in the Book of Common Prayer. After the Sermon he is to “return to the Lord’s Table and begin the Offertory,” and then, “if there be no Communion,” he is to say a Prayer and Collect, concluding with the Blessing. And he kept his surplice on for finishing the service, instead of putting on a black gown to preach in, as was the custom when the Offertory and Prayer and Collect were omitted and the Blessing was given from the pulpit. He was right enough in what he did; but it was hardly worth doing, if it scared parishioners away.

The bishop was trying to stop all innovations. My grandfather writes to my father, 20 January 1845--“What do you think of the old bishop’s letter? I fancy it is very evasive: he gives them no direct instructions. They are to do as they are now doing: he does not tell them to withdraw any innovations.” It was only in more important matters that the bishop gave direct instructions to his clergy. My grandfather writes to my father, 27 October 1856--“The bishop has caused ***** to shave off his beard: he was like a Crimean soldier.”

Innovations might have been accepted here at any other time; but this was the period of Puseyism, and every innovation was supposed to be the outcome of a plot to Romanize the church. People generally knew nothing of ritual or doctrine, and would not have been so vehement about such things, had there not been another cause behind--they thought the clergy were not altogether honest over this. A few had gone over to Rome, and there was a notion that many others would have done the same, if they could have done it without giving up their livings. And from this point of view Anglicanism was merely a fraudulent device for holding on to livings, while assenting to the doctrines and ritual of Rome; or, as my grandfather puts it, 10 November 1850, “to remain in receipt of the Protestant pay while practising all the eccentricities of Romanism.”

However, there was not much sign of Romanism here, or of its eccentricities. Once a stranger came to church and crossed herself, and no one knew what she was at. It was described to me--“Her were a-spot-in’ and a-stripe-in’ of herself”--as if it were telegraphy by dot and dash.

There was a policeman who used to work here in the garden before he joined the force; and, when he was home on leave, he came round to see the gardener. I found them in the cider-cellar, looking at a dozen empty casks that I had lately bought. These were port-pipes of over a hundred gallons each; and, on seeing them ranged round the cellar, I began to think of Ali Baba and the oil-jars for the Forty Thieves. The policeman did not know the story, and listened very attentively and thoughtfully while I recounted it to him; and then he said in a regretful way, “We ain’t allowed to do that now.” Some years afterwards he had a murderer in his hands, and the murderer died. It was really a very satisfactory ending to the case, as it saved all the time and trouble that is wasted on the trial and execution of a murderer caught red-handed in the act. I presume the murderer died legitimately, but I thought about the Forty Thieves.

I have a planisphere, and a young carpenter noticed it when he was working in the house; and he showed an interest in it that astonished me until I saw what he was at. He learnt the names of the constellations and their places in the sky; and then, when he took damsels for romantic walks, he had a topic of conversation that his rivals could not touch.--An astronomer tells me that he has sometimes given a popular lecture and invited questions at the end, and more than once he has been asked--“You say the spectres [spectra] showed you what the stars be made of, but how did you get at their names?”

Some years ago I transferred a youthful maidservant from my house here to my house in town, and for several evenings after her arrival I heard thunderous noises overhead. At last I made inquiry, and was informed that she took exercise last thing at night by turning somersaults in her room. Another time two youths from here were staying at my house in town, while they were up for an examination; and the ample staircase tempted them to descend it on their heads. Coming downstairs in the twilight, I just saw the soles of their shoes, and could not imagine what those four objects were, hovering in mid-air far down below me. This method of progression is much in vogue at Lustleigh. On a hot day I have seen a dozen boys going along the mill-leet upside down. With sleeves tucked up, the water only wets the arms and scalp; but there is always a chance of overbalancing and going in full-length. That sends the water flying over anyone upon the path alongside; and sometimes, I think, they do it purposely for that. As an exasperated man once said, “they Lustleigh boys be hardly human.” Yet they might learn a little from the boys in Italy. When those boys go stealing fruit, they leave their clothes at home, as they run less risk of recognition, being naked. But the boys here keep their clothes on, and so are recognized at once.

On a Sunday morning I met a Lustleigh damsel on her way to church, wearing a new dress and evidently wishing it to be observed. For want of anything better to say, I said, “You don’t go in for hobble skirts, I see.” She answered, “No, not I: a proper fright I’d look in they.” And I inquired Why. The answer was, “Why, mother says my thighs be like prize marrows at a show.” Three old ladies, on their way to church, just caught the last remark, and passed on with averted eyes in consternation at our talk.

Some summers ago a young lady of about nineteen was lodging at a house near here; and, like many other townsfolk, she found the country more entrancing than the countryfolk find it themselves, “And her were proper mazed a-gettin’ up all hours of the mornin’ and goin’ out for walks. And her waked up everybody in the house a-bath-in’ of herself afore her went. And one of they mornin’s after her’d a-bath’d herself, her went off right across the valley without ever thinkin’ to put any of her clothes on. And Jim *****, he were a-goin’ early to his work, as he had a bit of thatchin’ to do four mile away, and he come sudden on her in that copse. And he saith, ‘Bide thee there ahind that rock, and I’ll tell my missis to bring’e a garment’.”

As a mid-Victorian bachelor, I was perturbed at post-Victorian spinsters coming down to stay with me unchaperoned. The custom is established now; but when it was an innovation, I wrote to one inquiring if she really meant to come alone. And she answered--“Yes, of course. Sans chaperon, sans culottes, sans everything.” Another one assured me that she could not possibly need a chaperon, as she was thirty and had three false teeth.

A man who often came to Lustleigh, was careless of the clothes he wore; and one of the Lustleigh people told him that he was lowering himself in everybody’s estimation by dressing in that untidy way. He was looking down the valley towards a house a long way off, as if he did not hear the other man’s remarks: then, nodding towards the house, he said--“Did you ever hear how old *****’s grandfather made all that money of his?” The other man pricked up his ears, and said he had not heard. The answer was--“Well, I can tell you, then. He always gave his whole attention to his own affairs.”

That was about sixty years ago, before the railway came here bringing fresh interests in. There were a good many people then who might have done much better in the world by giving as much attention to their own affairs as they were giving to other people’s. And in spite of all their curiosity they very often got things wrong. It was all ‘putting two and two together,’ drawing inferences and passing inferences on as facts. I hear echoes of it still. People tell me positively of things that happened in this neighbourhood at such or such a date, and I find diaries and letters and other papers contradicting them. Sometimes they tell me very unexpected things about myself, although they could have ascertained the facts at any time by merely asking me. I used often to go for a long Sunday walk, starting off along the Bovey road; and I was told I went to church at Bovey most Sunday afternoons.

This ‘putting two and two together’ is a ticklish process even for a careful man. I remember my father saying that he saw the Alabama at Calais and the Kearsarge waiting for her outside. Now, the Alabama never was at Calais: she went into Cherbourg, and the Kearsarge caught her coming out from there, 19 June 1864. I thought it was merely a slip of the tongue, Calais for Cherbourg; but his diary shows that he was not at Cherbourg at the time. There is an entry on 23 April 1864, “saw a Federal war-steamer lying off Calais, watching a Confederate vessel within the harbour,” and at that date the Alabama was about latitude 17° S. and longitude 32° W. I think he would have noted the ships’ names, if he had ascertained them at the time; and I suppose that some years afterwards he fancied that they must have been the Alabama and the Kearsarge.

My father was puzzled about a lady who lived at Moreton, where she could not possibly have many interests in life, yet seemed as active-minded and alert as if she mixed in the great world. He spent some time one afternoon in conversation with her, trying to discover where her interests lay; but the only thing that was elicited was this--she always made a point of knowing what everyone in Moreton had for dinner on a Sunday.

Very small things made a great commotion in a little town like that. There is a letter to my father from a friend there, 30 June 1843--“We had Sand’s Horsemen here on Friday last, who managed to take about 100_l_, which is a larger sum than they took in Exeter in one day or almost any other place. All the Beauty, Rank and Wealth of the neighbourhood for some miles were present--quite grand for Moreton--indeed I never saw so many persons in Moreton before. ***** and his wife came to my house and brought two Miss *****s, and I escorted one of them to the Horsemanship. Next day I was told that people said I was after Miss ***** and the cash--she has about 7000_l._ I am thoroughly sick of these reports.”

Not many years ago a man at Moreton said something slanderous about another man there. He was threatened with an action, and compromised it by agreeing to publish an apology and devote a sum of money to any public purpose that the injured party chose to name. The public purpose was chosen very astutely--taking the whitewash off the almshouses, a fine old granite building dated 1637. The building is mentioned in the guide-books, and many people go to see it. Finding it improved, they ask about it; and then (as the astute man had foreseen) they hear the story of the other man’s discomfiture.

In another country town a man did something that really was discreditable; but people went on exaggerating it until at last they dropped the real facts out, as these were much too trivial to be worth mentioning in such a lurid tale. And thus he found himself in a position to deny it all on oath. So he denied it, threatening prosecutions, and received a whitewashing that he did not at all deserve, the local papers denouncing “these unjustifiable aspersions on a man of blameless life.”

When people had to see a lawyer, they seldom told him the whole tale, and thus got bad advice, unless he knew enough of their affairs beforehand to enable him to get at all the facts. They would never trust a lawyer if he kept a clerk, and hesitated if he were in partnership, feeling that a clerk was sure to gossip and a partner might. And thus the little country towns were full of lawyers with small practices, each doing his own office work. There is a letter to my father, 12 September 1852, from a lawyer at Moreton, a very able man, who died in early life from no complaint but being bored to death. He says--“I copied 29 sheets draft and engrossed a deed and settled two mortgages and a lease yesterday: hard work that.”

There came a time when lawyers (and others) did not work so hard at Moreton. In his diary on 20 January 1870, two months before his death, my grandfather notes that he had been to Moreton in the morning to see the lawyer and the doctor--“neither at home, one hunting, the other shooting: so lost my labour.”

That lawyer who went hunting, used to tell his clients, when they had a good possessory title, they had much better burn their title-deeds, as these were certain to have some blunder in them that would cause trouble some day. He had drawn a good many of these deeds himself, so I suppose he knew what they were likely to contain.

Writing to my father on 3 December 1844, my grandfather says--“There is a literary society formed in Moreton. I suppose it must be a sort of mechanics’ institute. I fear the intellect of Moreton is too shallow to make much progress for some time. However, that is the way to make it better.”

A friend of my father’s writes to him from Moreton on 23 November 1844, “We have a meeting tomorrow for the purpose of establishing a Reading Room and Library for all classes,” and then on 13 December, “I enclose a copy of the rules of our Society for the promotion of knowledge.... We have £11 to lay out in books at once. We have expended a portion of that sum already in the purchase of selections from the ‘Family Library’ 2/6 per vol, Cabinet and Lardner’s Cyclopedia 3/-, and Chambers very useful elementary books on the sciences etc., all the nos (27) of Knights weekly volume 1/-each (the cheapest and best almost now publishing) and two or three of Murrays cheap edition etc. etc., in all nearly 90 volumes: cost about £7. We are going to take in weekly the ‘Athenæum’, Chambers Journal and Chambers Miscellany, some mechanics magazine and one or two other monthlys. Lectures once a week till April. The object of the Society is to benefit all classes and particularly tradesmen and their apprentices and mechanics etc. who will be much better in the reading room for a couple of hours than in a public house.” The reading room was to be open three times a week, and the librarian was to have £8 a year for the use of the room (it being in his house) including coals and candles and his own services.

There is now a Public Library at Moreton, an ostentatious building which must have cost at least a hundred times as much as the books that it contains. People can read newspapers there and bring away light literature to read at home. But such libraries are seldom of real use. There is not a library in Devon where real work can be done on very many subjects; and the buildings of these libraries might be turned to some account, if each one took a subject and acquired the proper books.

Being a Cambridge man, I can get books from the University Library--Oxford men cannot get books from theirs--and by going to the Reading Room at the British Museum, I can use the books in the immense collection there. That was all I needed when I had a house in town: if I wanted a book down here, I had only to wait till I went up. Now that I am always here, I feel the loss of it, and have to buy extensively. I have about four thousand books, and find I want quite eight or ten. If you have only a single subject, you may perhaps get the necessary books; but you can hardly manage that, if you have several subjects, and do not want mere books-of-reference or text-books, but the books containing the material on which such works are based. These books cannot always be obtained without delay, and therefore must be ordered in advance, as soon as you foresee that you will need them. And then, before a book arrives, you may perceive another way of dealing with the subject, and find you do not need the book at all.

I have tried to arrange my books by subjects, or alphabetically by author’s names--with Roger Ascham next to Daisy Ashcroft--but it always ends in my arranging them by sizes. If a book is higher or wider than the book alongside, it bulges at the edges where the other does not hold it in; and the slightest bulging lets the dust creep in between the leaves. Books are classed as 4to, 8vo, 16mo, &c., according to the folding of the sheets; but the sheets themselves are of all shapes and sizes, crown, royal, demy, and so on. And books come out in dozens of different heights and widths, as if they never were intended to stand in rows on shelves.

In the Pepysian Library at Cambridge the books are all arranged by sizes; and the arrangement is so rigid that the volumes of a work are separated if there is the slightest difference in their size. But then Mr Pepys had a catalogue of them that was “perfectly alphabeticall.” They are in the bookcases that Sympson made for him in 1666, and they number just three thousand. There is a story that he always kept that number, neither more nor less, turning one book out if he brought another in. But his catalogue has only 2474, and the other 526 were added by his nephew: so it must really be a story of his nephew, not of him.

There was a saying of Mark Pattison’s that no man can respect himself unless he has at least a thousand books, and I have heard it argued that no man need have more. But really it must all depend on what editions they are. There are ninety-four volumes in one edition of Voltaire’s works, and another edition is contained in three. I have these three volumes on my shelves: 6,250 pages with two columns to the page and 78 lines to the column, making about ten million words in all. Goethe’s works are only half that length, but they spread out into five-and-fifty volumes on my shelves: 18,000 pages of 29 lines each.

I have two dictionaries here, written by two old friends of mine--I have known one of them for nearly forty years and the other one for some years more. They both come down to stay with me, but I keep their works apart. Side by side upon a shelf, the dictionaries look like Dignity and Impudence in Landseer’s picture of the dogs. The dictionary of Egyptian Hieroglyphics is the mastiff, and the terrier is the dictionary of Colloquial Chinese. The mastiff is seven times the terrier’s weight and size. But the little one has 1038 pages, of which 1030 are vocabulary, with 45 lines of Chinese type per page. The big one has 1510 pages, of which 1065 are vocabulary, with 60 lines of Hieroglyphic type per page in double column of 30 lines apiece. So the little one is nearly three-quarters the length of the big one, measured in vocabularies, only the paper is much thinner and the type is small--in my eyes, much too small, the Chinese being only a third of the height of the Hieroglyphic, though the characters are more complex.

The author of the Chinese dictionary is also the inventor of a Chinese typewriter. The machine was built by Remingtons; but commercially it has not hitherto been much of a success, as there are no effective laws in China for securing an inventor’s rights. As a rule, it takes two taps to make a character complete, the left half coming with the first tap and the right half with the second. By combining each of the left halves with all the right halves in succession, it can produce a great variety of characters. These, however, are not the characters employed in classic Chinese writing, but more like modern characters evolved from them for ordinary use. Chinese is written in upright lines that are read from top to bottom and follow one another from right to left. Thus, instead of having the characters upright, the typewriter has them lying down. When the paper is taken out, the left edge is treated as the top, and the lines and characters then come in proper order, only the right halves are underneath the left halves instead of being beside them. And this defect could not be cured without making the machine much larger and more difficult to work.

The meaning of the characters varies with the tone in which they are pronounced; and there are similar tones in English. At the tea-party the little girl drawls out, “No, thanks”--tone 1: the hostess thereupon exclaims, “What, none”--tone 2: a friend remonstrates, “Oh, really, now”--tone 3; and the little girl then says what she has heard her father say, “Take the damned thing away”--tone 4. The typewriter puts down the number of the tone, and thus requires three taps in all, two for the character itself and one for this.

This led me into planning a Cuneiform typewriter. I did not have one built, but my plan was briefly this: I divided the wedges that are upright or slope down from the wedges that are level or slope up, and then picked out the commonest groups of each; and, instead of always moving on from left to right, I had a catch to check the automatic movement of the paper, so that one group could be printed on another with the level wedges running across the uprights. The compound groups are not exactly like the groups in printed books; but very often there is just as great a difference between these printed groups and their originals on the clay or stone. After studying Cuneiform in printed books, people are annoyed at finding that they cannot read a word of the real thing; and there are other kinds of print with that same fault.

Hebrew was written in letters that were practically the same as the Phœnician letters from which our English capitals have come: yet it is printed in letters that are not like ours nor like its own. In my Cambridge days the Regius Professor of Hebrew (the late Dr Jarrett) was trying hard to get this changed, and he brought out a Hebrew book in what he called a modified Roman alphabet. I think he might have gone a good deal further, and I do not know that anybody else has gone as far; but, really, something should be done. Hebrew type is just about as bad as any type can be, with half the letters so like others that they may be confused. Greek type is not so bad; but it is quite unlike the Greek of the inscriptions or the older manuscripts. And it expresses nothing that Roman or Italic type would not express as well. If anybody says Iota Subscript, I say iota was not subscript in good Greek, but kept its dressing in the line.

We write English in the same style as Italic type, yet print it with the Roman type that represents handwriting of four hundred years ago. If we are going to copy other writing than our own, we might as well adopt the Gothic type that still survives in Germany. Gothic and Italic both look well, but nothing can be uglier than Roman. I consider it clear proof of mania in a bibliomaniac, if he buys books in Roman type for anything but common use. We ought to scrap the ugly thing, and print English (as we write it) in Italic.

We should be merciful to children. There is quite enough for them to learn, without their learning to read English in one lettering and write it in another. And they might be spared some spelling. Why should they have to ‘proceed’ with _e_ and _e_ together, and ‘recede’ with _e_ and _e_ apart? Both words are based upon the Latin ‘cedere.’ Its participle ‘cessus’ is the base of ‘process’ and of ‘recess’ and also of ‘decease’: yet they may not write ‘decess’ to match, though French has ‘décès’ matching ‘procès.’ Italian always treats the Greek _ph_ as _f_, and they may do the same in ‘fancy’ and in ‘frenzy,’ but may not do it in ‘philosophy.’ We might at least abolish all anomalies, and also downright blunders like the _h_ in anchor. There are difficulties enough about our spelling without increasing them capriciously.

In early life the mind takes facts in and remembers them, but does not judge them critically, whereas it afterwards becomes more critical and less receptive. It would surely be good policy to feed the mind with facts in the years when it retains them, and leave the reasoning for the years when it can reason. But the policy has been to “make boys think”--at least, that was my experience at Harrow--and that policy defeats itself, as one cannot think effectively without a stock of facts to think about.

Looking back on my eight years of Harrow and Cambridge and judging them by results, I find that Classics have supplied me with a mass of interesting and amusing facts to think about, whereas Mathematics only taught me how to think on abstract things. Hardly any Mathematics linger in my mind. Sometimes, when I am going to sleep, I think of Space and wonder whether it is circumnavigated by the curves that go away to Negative Infinity and come back again from Positive Infinity, as if the two Infinities met. Sometimes I snap at people for saying Two and Two make Four as if it were an axiom, instead of being a result attained by rigid proof. And I sometimes lose my temper when they talk of what would happen if there were a Fourth Dimension. I tell them they can get a Fourth Dimension by putting Tetrahedrals for Cartesians, and it makes no more difference than putting Centigrade for Fahrenheit and thereby getting 15° of cold instead of 5° of heat.

Until I went to Harrow, I had a tutor at home, and he taught me to read Virgil as anyone reads Dante, not stopping over every word to consider it as grammar. But this did not assist me there. “Optative Future used where Indicative Future would be required in Direct Oration.” That is my note on Æschylos, _Persæ_, 360. I remember that my mind was far away at Athens, watching the gusts of passion sweep across the audience when the play recalled the battle they had fought at Salamis seven years before. And my mind came back to Harrow with a jerk at hearing the suave voice of Dr Butler addressing me by name, repeating this, and recommending me to note it down.

In my Cambridge days the Mathematical Tripos and the Classical Tripos were still in their primæval shape. It had gone on for half a century with little change, and lasted until 1882. If you were going in for either of these, you had no examinations (except Little Go) until the middle of your fourth year there, and then came these two Triposes with only four weeks interval between them. The system had worked well, but subjects were enlarged till it became unworkable--Electricity and Magnetism were reckoned as Mathematics, and so on with many other things. Down to 1850 nobody could go into the Classical Tripos unless he had already got honours in the Mathematical: in the next four years, 1851 to 1854, there were about thirty men each year who got honours in both; but in the four years I was there, 1877 to 1880, this average of thirty had fallen to an average of two, and in 1880 I was one of the two. I was a Senior Optime in the Mathematical Tripos and got a bad Third in the Classical--a result that always puzzles me, as I had a considerable knowledge of the Classics even then.

I knew Greek enough at Harrow to get the prize there for Greek epigram, but I did not go seriously into Greek until after I came down from Cambridge. A few years later on, German reviewers were remarking that I knew Greek inscriptions and Greek literature from Homer onwards to the Fathers of the Church and the Byzantine authors, and that nothing escaped me even in neglected writings like the Almagest. I was doing other things as well, and cannot imagine now how I found time for all.

But my interest in the Byzantines was not quite keen enough to satisfy Krumbacher. One day at Munich in 1896 he was advising me to read a book in Russian instead of its translation into French, and I said I knew too little of the language. He fired out--“You cannot read the Russian book? You go to Patmos. Go to Patmos.” I told him I had been to Jericho--or rather to its site--and had not found it very attractive; and Patmos had looked just as unattractive when I had seen it from a ship. But he meant it literally. I should learn good Russian from the monks, and could collate Byzantine manuscripts as well. It really was a first-rate plan, but somehow I did not go to Patmos.

He was remarkable to look at--his hair had turned snow-white when he was only twenty, and he had eyes like coals of fire. In his own line he was unquestionably the greatest man since Ducange; and there at Munich he was a colleague of Furtwaengler, the greatest since Winckelmann in one aspect of archæology. I knew Furtwaengler from 1885, when he was still at Berlin, and Krumbacher from 1891. They both died far too young, at 53 or 54. With a further twenty years of life, they might have achieved far greater things than they had yet attempted. They were unaffected men and never posed, as Mommsen sometimes did when he thought of his resemblance to Voltaire.

Once in Berlin I went to a sitting of the Archaeologische Gesellschaft, 3 March 1896. It was all plain living and high thinking there, and they debated Pheidias and Plato amidst great bursts of Wagner that came in from a concert-hall close by. I have a letter here that I wrote my brother next day--“They manage their meetings in a much more formal way than the people at the Institut at Paris; and they are more long-winded. One of the men last night got his notes in such a muddle that he made nearly all his statements three times over; but nobody seemed to mind.” In my next letter, Dresden, 10 March 1896, I said that I had been to call on Fleckeisen, and described him as “an old man with long white hair, toddling about his study in a dressing-gown.” I regret to see that in another letter I spoke of a society of learned men as “a cellar-ful of beer-barrels.”

Amongst the learned Germans whom I used to meet, some few talked politics quite freely; and I used to hear that everything that Bismarck did was right, and everything that the young Emperor did was wrong. I should like to hear what they are saying about the causes of this War.

I remember the abdication of the Emperor of the French in 1870; and now in 1918, at the abdication of the German Emperor, the feeling of relief is just the same. Both men had kept all Europe in alarm for years before their fall. In turn they had the greatest army on the Continent and a navy that was second to our own; and no one could foresee how they would use their strength, as their foreign policy was all adventure and sensation. There was very little sympathy with France at the disaster of Sedan. It is the fashion now to talk as if we sympathised with France all through. My recollection is that people were mostly against France in 1870 until Paris was besieged: then they realized that Germany was getting dangerous, and began to change their views.

After the war of 1870 the French did not get possession of their Lorraine frontier till the indemnity was paid and the occupying army was withdrawn. Then they fortified it so effectively from Belfort to Verdun that everybody said the Germans would come round through Switzerland or Belgium, if ever they came again. (I remember people saying this, about 1878 and onwards, quite as a matter of course.) Against Switzerland there was the fortress of Besançon, and against Belgium there was supposed to be a line from Verdun to Dunkirk through Lille. But this line never was made effective, and gradually fell into decay. That certainly was no affair of ours in the days of the Two Power standard, when we were building ships to fight the French and Russians. But after the Entente I thought we might request the French to pay attention to their Swiss and Belgian frontiers. No doubt, they could not make as strong a line from Dunkirk to Verdun as from Verdun to Belfort; but the Germans were not likely to embroil themselves by going through Belgium, if they had to face a line on the French frontier there of anything like the same strength as the French line in Lorraine.

One of those learned Germans was making a tour in England five-and-twenty years ago; and I met him at Portsmouth, and went over the Victory with him. He showed much emotion at it all; and when we reached the place where Nelson died, he quite broke down and burst out into tears. And the quartermaster said, “I’m blowed.”

He may have pictured it more vividly than we did, for he was a veteran of 1870, and knew what warfare meant. A great-uncle of mine was on the Impregnable at the battle of Algiers in 1816, and I have heard him say that it was really nauseous to have two hundred killed and wounded all crowded up in such a narrow space.

Unless a naval battle has been fought close by the shore, no landsman can well picture to himself what it was like. Looking down upon the island and the straits of Salamis, I have seen the battle as vividly as Trasimene or Waterloo; but I have never been able to conjure up Trafalgar by thinking of the latitude and longitude that I was in. I have tried it several times and always failed.

There have been many naval battles in the Dardanelles, in ancient times and in the middle ages; but I did not think of these when I was there in 1880. Our fleet had gone up through the straits two years before; and that seemed much more real. People criticised some things that Hornby did, especially his sending ships right up the gulf of Xeros; but everybody seemed quite sure that the strategic point was in the throat of the peninsula, five miles north-east of Gallipoli, not in its toes at Suvla bay and cape Helles, more than twenty and thirty miles south-west. So, being out of date, I imagined that our Gallipoli expedition would try to land near Yenikli-liman.

When people say that the Thermopylæ epitaph would suit Gallipoli, I rather wonder if they see how very suitable it really is. It is not the namby-pamby thing they think, “Go, tell the Spartans, thou that passest by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.” It really is a stinging thing, and the sting is in the tail, the last word of the line. “Tell the Spartans it was _here_--in an untenable position, with a flank that could be turned--it was _here_ that, in compliance with their orders, our lives were thrown away.”

In a list of the books here that were acquired before 1846, the German books are the collected works of Goethe, Schiller, Richter (Jean Paul) and Koerner, as well as separate works of theirs, a few things by Niemeyer, Tieck, Werner and Wilmsen, and some translations into German from the Danish and Swedish of Andersen and Bremer. All this, of course, is what is known as literature; and there is nothing at all utilitarian except a volume of travels in Surinam, published at Potsdam in 1782. The later acquisitions show how Germany has changed since 1846. These books are crammed with information, but devoid of literary merit.--No doubt, the recent books were chosen by myself, and the others by departed relatives whose tastes and interests were not the same as mine; but this will not explain the change. There was not the same scope for choice: there were few books then of such appalling industry as those that come out now, and there has not been another Goethe.

It is fifty years since I first travelled in Germany, 1868, and I have watched the later stages of the transformation that had been foretold. “But the Ideal is passing slowly away from the German mind ... and the memories that led their grandsires to contemplate, will urge the youth of the next generation to dare and to act.” Old Bulwer Lytton wrote that in 1834 in his _Pilgrims of the Rhine_. I remember my father reading it out to me in very early years.

He had a very dexterous way of giving me glowing accounts of places on the Continent, and making me long to go there. And then, whenever I said that I should like to go, he said to me, “Of course, you shall; but it’s no good your going till you can talk to people there.” I commend that dodge to parents whose children are disinclined to learn.

When my brother was at Harrow, my father was dissatisfied at his learning so little German there, but my grandfather took quite another view, 8 February 1863, “I should say, Let him be a proficient in the French language first, for that is spoken nearly all the world over, while German is more a flash thing than useful: all very well, if time permits after learning the more useful. So let him get on with Mathematics and the Classics, for that is what he will gain Honours on (if any) and not the German language: that is merely an accomplishment.”

Foreign languages ought to be begun in nurseries, and not left for schools: all good linguists have begun by learning words in different languages as soon as they could speak. If children are only told that a certain creature is a cat, they will afterwards learn the word ‘chat’ as a translation of the word ‘cat.’ But if they are told that the creature is called ‘cat’ by some people and ‘chat’ by others, they are prepared to find that other people call it ‘katze,’ others ‘gatto,’ and so on. And they connect the creature with its foreign names at once, instead of indirectly through the English name.--However, these nursery lessons are not always a success. I remember a Parisian who learnt her English from an Irish nurse, and always spoke it with a brogue.

Good linguists sometimes get confused, when languages have words with similar sounds but different meanings. Thus, the German ‘nehmen’ sounds like the English ‘name’ and ‘dumm’ like ‘dumb’ and ‘bekommen’ like ‘become.’ A man once said to me at breakfast, “I shall name bacon”: then, seeing that I did not grasp what he had said, he hurriedly corrected it, “Ach, I am dumb. I shall become bacon.”

When I first went to Greece, they still spelled Byron’s name phonetically, Mpairon. They pronounce _b_ like our _v_, but _mp_ like our _b_--a fact unknown to many of the people who talk about the Mpret of Albania. Similarly, the Spaniards spelled O’Donohue’s name O’Donojo. He was Cuesta’s chief-of-staff in the Peninsula. The veterans of that war picked up the foreign names by hearsay, and usually got them right; but now our veterans can read, they see how foreign names are spelled and mispronounce them sadly. Leekatoo suggests a cockatoo, but really is Le Câteau.

There is always a temptation to turn foreign names into some English words with which we are familiar: we still say Leg-horn for Livorno, though we have dropped Lush-bone for Lisboa, and call it Lisbon now. I was looking for a ship at Devonport, the Hecate, and thought I spotted her; so I asked, “Is that the Hekaty?” and was answered, “She’s the He Cat.” In the gardens here the Gloire de Lorraine begonia is always called the Lower End. I hear people talk of the Cornice as the Cornish road, and make Hague rhyme with ague.

After the Kruger telegram _Punch_ printed an imaginary letter to the German Emperor (18 January 1896) signed Grandmamma, but attributed on internal evidence to the Duke of York, there being a nautical breeziness about it, e.g. “Solche eine confounded Impertinenz habe ich nie gesehen.” I saw this in Vienna, reprinted in the February number of _Progress_, the editor stating explicitly that it was “drollig.” In the ensuing War people on the Continent felt certain that our troops were using Dum-Dum bullets; and I saw a newspaper at Paris which said that we were slaughtering the Boers with our murderous Dam-Dams. And in 1912 or 1913 I saw one there which said that we expressed our highest hopes in singing “God shave the King.”

In looking through the obsolete music here I found the anthem in the good old form which should have been revived in 1910--“God save great George our King”--and also in a later form that seems to be forgotten--“God save Britannia’s King, William, our noble King.” There was also a good deal of dance-music, some “as performed at His Majesty’s balls, Almack’s, and the Court of France,” and some “as danced at Almack’s, the Nobility’s balls, and the Assembly Rooms, Ramsgate.” Judging by the music, the dancing was very animated then: in _Beauties of the Ball Room_ the first dance is the Sailor’s Hornpipe. Pop Goes The Weasel is described as “now become so popular in fashionable circles,” and directions are given for dancing it and exclaiming at the right moments “Pop Goes The Weasel.”

Amongst the old pamphlets and sermons here (mostly presented by their authors) there is _A Sermon preached in Trinity Church, Cambridge, on Feb. 1, 1857, the Sunday before the Bachelors’ Ball_. The text seems inappropriate--“neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.” The sermon is chiefly aimed at candidates for ordination. They are to shun the Bachelors’ Ball, not only for their own sake, but for the sake of others who might be led astray by their example. And it gives an awful instance. “He received a pressing invitation to a public ball.... In that ball-room he found, it is stated, no fewer than six clergymen. To stifle the reproaches of conscience, he went up to those six clergymen, and asked them, one by one, if they thought there could be any harm in attending a public ball.... To shelter their own inconsistency, they at once answered that such amusements were perfectly harmless.... That night’s dissipation removed all his former scruples.... He plunged into extravagance, had recourse to gambling, became a bankrupt in his fortunes, perpetrated forgery, administered poison, and at last expiated his crimes upon the scaffold, the precincts of the prison receiving his strangled body, and hell, it is to be feared, receiving his lost soul.”

There is also a volume of _Letters from Abroad_ by the man who preached that sermon. After a brief residence in France, he knows all about the French. “Like people in a fever, the French complain of everything outside them, whereas the evil is within them. Had they in their churches and schools sound Scriptural teaching, they would be contented. But, being without the knowledge of the Bible,” etc.... “As I come from our Protestant service on Sunday, I meet men and women carrying bundles of firewood, which they have been gathering in the forest. It all arises from their ignorance of God’s Word. Had they Bibles, I might refer them to Num. XV. 36, where Moses asked God what was to be done to a man who was found gathering sticks on the Sabbath; and God Himself answered, Let the man be put to death.”

Then there is a sermon on _The Great Exhibition_, preached by a much abler man, 4 May 1851. He also speaks of “our blessing of blessings, the opened Bible,” but is not so sure of its effects. “There is too much reason to apprehend that a vast increase of vice, and Sabbath-breaking, and profaneness, may be added to the iniquity already abounding in our demoralized metropolis ... and foreign visitors may leave our shores worse than when they arrived.”

Writing from Exeter, 23 October 1838, my father says, “I went to hear the Mayor preach on Sunday evening: he had an immense audience, and spoke for about an hour and a half. He holds up the Bible alone as the sole necessary book, condemns every creed and article framed by men, calls every system of religion in the world a money-getting system, etc., etc.” My father kept a copy of some verses on the Mayor, which were very popular in Exeter just then, especially the lines, “on Saturday sells gin to all, | preaches Sunday, | and on Monday, | sitting in judgment in the Hall, | inflicts the fine for fight or fray | caused by the gin of Saturday.”

I can still recall a conversation between my father and an old-fashioned country doctor at a place where we were staying in 1866. I had been reading _Tom Brown’s Schooldays_, and I began to listen attentively, when I heard the doctor denouncing Rugby and speaking of Arnold’s “presumption” in undertaking to bring up other men’s sons when he could not bring up his own: every one of them had turned out badly. My father looked surprised, and mentioned Matthew Arnold. The answer came with several slaps upon the table--“Matthew, indeed! A free thinker, sir, a Free Thinker.” And then the doctor went on to talk of the “impiety” of bishop Colenso in remarking that the Book of Numbers had arranged the Hebrew camp in such a way that the Levites’ quarters would be more than a sabbath-day’s journey from the lavatories.

Colenso had begun his criticisms of the Pentateuch in 1862, and had enraged the partisans of Verbal Inspiration. They could not deny that his conclusions were arithmetically right, and they did just what the Jesuits did in the days of Pascal and his _Provinciales_. In 1653 the Pope condemned some doctrines in a book, but mentioned the wrong book--the doctrines were not there. It was really no more than a slip of the pen; but, being in a Papal Bull, it could not be corrected. So the Jesuits cried “témérité” when anybody mentioned it, just as people like this doctor cried “impiety.” These people vindicated Moses as strenuously as Strabo vindicated Homer. They had no suspicion of misreadings in the Hebrew or the Greek, or mistranslations in the English version: they just adopted Burgon’s view, “every book, every chapter, every verse, every word, every syllable, every letter, was the direct utterance of the Most High.” In other words, the Most High would not merely send a message off, but would see that it got through.

Now-a-days superior persons scoff at these benighted folk, but very often seem to be astray in just as dark a night themselves. When I hear dignitaries talking of the _Filioque_ Clause, I sometimes wonder if they know how Shu “proceeded” from Neb-er-Tcher, when that deity transformed himself into a Trinity by the emanation of Tefnut and Shu. The legend is recorded (in Egyptian hieratic) in the papyrus of Nesi-Amsu, which is considerably earlier than the Christian Era. And anyone who wants to know it, will find it printed and translated in _Archæologia_, vol. LII.

For many years there was a steady sale of _Questions on Church History_ by my mother’s sister, Emma King, written in 1848 when she was twenty-seven. It begins with the church in Jerusalem, and deals with persecutions, councils, doctrines, heresies, schisms, sects, orders, missions, etc., ending with the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829; and every question is answered with brevity and precision and strictly in accordance with the Thirty Nine Articles. I have spoken of her water-colours in my former _Small Talk_; and she was well informed--knew Hebrew and Italian and many other things--but published no more books. She married a Fellow of Trinity, who accepted one of the College livings; and in that country Vicarage she spent the best part of her time in making garments for the poor. She did, however, find time to expurgate the _Ingoldsby Legends_, thus rendering them presentable at Penny Readings. I have her copy with her pencillings. ‘There’s a cry and a shout and a deuce of a rout’--_for_ deuce of a _read_ terrible. ‘The Devil must be in that little Jackdaw’--_for_ The Devil _read_ A Demon. And so on.

Like many books of that period, hers was “for Young Persons”. Others were “for Young Ladies,” not differing much from these except in the Use of the Globes, which was a subject for Young Ladies only. Few people realize how wide the subject was. ‘What is whalebone?’ ‘Who were the Sirens?’ ‘What are the properties of dogs?’ There are questions on Cetus, Eridanus and Canis on the celestial globe: pages 430, 431 in Butler’s _Exercises on the Globes_, 11th edition, 1827. On the terrestrial globe (page 40) it asks, ‘What is the difference of latitude between the places where Burns was born and Lazarus was raised from the dead?’

In my early years there were books “suitable for Sunday reading.” If the Young Persons’ books were milk for babes, these books were the slops. I have several that were given to me then; and with _Sunday echoes in week-day hours_ there is a letter from the man who gave it. He said that he was sure I should enjoy it, as his own children had enjoyed it so very much indeed. After reading it, I wondered if they really had. Happily for me, my father said authoritatively that the Continental Bradshaw was a Sunday book, and so also Murray’s Guides. I thus had pleasant Sunday afternoons, travelling in my easy chair.

Two friends of my father’s bought Livings in the Church, and consulted him about the prices of the Next Presentations and Advowsons that were offered to them. Here is the offer of a parish adjoining this, 17 May 1853, “The sum asked is £2250, of which £1250 may remain on mortgage of the Advowson at 3½ per cent.... The present incumbent is in his 67th year.” These men were of a sort that any parish would be glad to get: kindly, courteous, generous, with considerable means and very considerable learning--one had taken a First in Greats and the other had been a Wrangler. They deserved the fattest of Livings, and yet they had to buy; and they never had any preferment, though Canonries were given to those two men who preached the sermons (that I have quoted) on dances and the opened Bible. Of course, the traffic in Livings is indefensible in theory, but in practice it may often lead to happier results than public or official patronage.

There were some letters here that I destroyed, as they mentioned many people’s names, and compromised them. Somebody wanted a seat in Parliament, and was prepared to pay for it, if he could get it cheap. (This was nearly seventy years ago.) Inquiries were made in various boroughs of bad repute, and the replies were pretty much the same. ‘Bribery and corruption are intolerable things, and ought to be put down; but, as men of the world, we have to take things as they are. The seat will certainly be sold, and may as well be sold to you as sold to anybody else. It probably will cost you so-and-so.’ The prices varied very much, not having an open market to control them.

The sale of seats was hindered by prospects of disfranchisement. These offers all stipulated that, whatever happened, there must be no petition. Things would come out on petition that would lead to a commission; and the commissioners would find out things enough to make disfranchisement a certainty. And that would be the death of the goose that laid those golden eggs.

After the general election of 1865 one of the commissioners was dining with us, and after dinner he told my father what he thought about it all: not in the measured terms of his report, but quite colloquially. I learnt a lot of practical politics that night before I was sent off to bed.

At the general election of 1868 the Liberal party was committed to disestablishing the Irish church; and many good Liberals disapproved of this, as they thought that disestablishment was not a matter for party politics at all. A county constituency (not very far from Devon) was in the hands of Liberals of that sort; and they refused strong candidates and picked out one who was so weak that he was sure to lose the seat. He lost it; and scrupulous people found fault with them for taking his money (£3000, I believe) when they knew quite well that he would be defeated.

These men cared more for Church than State, and thought the end might justify the means; but I have known seats lost without excuse. A breezy sailor was looking for a seat in 1885, and tried a London constituency in which I had a vote. He was a very strong candidate; but the local Conservative Association would not adopt him unless he paid them £400 a year. I cannot say (verbatim) where he told them all to go to; but he went elsewhere himself and was elected. They got their £400 a year from a nincompoop who lost the seat.

I remember a City man who was Vice-Chairman of one of the biggest undertakings there, but found he had no chance of being Chairman unless he was in Parliament--they wanted someone who could put their views before the House. He was a first-rate businessman, but not a showy speaker; so he got a brilliant young barrister to join him in contesting a borough with two seats. He paid the second candidate’s expenses, only “it must be understood that in his canvassing for himself, he of course supports me as senior Liberal candidate.” I remember that young barrister then--and also as a Judge long afterwards--and he was much too big a man to be subordinate to anyone. He made such brilliant speeches there that the senior Liberal candidate was totally eclipsed.

But his speeches did not really make much difference. A man writes to my father, 7 July 1864, “I was twice solicited to contest this most rotten borough, and will undertake to say that, whatever ***** may do, the best bidder will gain the day. I never was so disgusted with any place. They stipulate for 2 or 3000_l_ and leave you to be prepared to double this sum or more. Depend upon it, nothing but money will do, and with a free use of that, all is safe.”

Two incidents in that election are imprinted on my mind.--The senior Liberal candidate was past the prime of life, but very tall and dignified, with a charming face and silvery hair, which really was a wig. Not having stood for Parliament before, he got a little flurried on the hustings; and, meaning to wave his hat, he waved his wig as well.--A voter happened to be coachman to a strong supporter of the other side, who was at his London house just then. The coachman said it was “as much as his place was worth” to ask his employer for leave to go down to record his vote. And, with very little scratching of his head, that man was able to reckon up, within a pound or two, how much his place was worth.

Barefaced bribery is not a bad thing, in its way. The voter got hard cash, and the candidate provided it; whereas the voter only gets wild promises now, and these always cost the country a good deal, even if they do no good to anybody. Moreover, when the voter could be bought, there was not the same necessity for cramming him with lies. With his pocket full of money and no illusions in his mind, he went gaily to the poll, feeling that it was all a festival at which he was an honoured guest. And in very many places it was very little else.

An old friend of the family writes to my mother from Brighton, 6 July 1841, “I was at Shoreham on Saturday. During the heat of the polling the scene was more amusing and lively than what you saw here. Lord Howard (who by the bye had on a shocking raffish dirty white hat) had between thirty to forty men and boys drest in white with pink bands round their bodies with ‘Howard for ever’ on them, shoulders and legs and hats also decorated with pink ribbons, and each with a wand with flag attached. There were also eight with huge flags, and two bands of music similarly drest. They altogether formed a very pretty tableau. Their province was to meet the voters coming up at the bridge, then form in procession and escort them to the polling booths. Sir Charles Burrell’s were in white with orange decorations: Goring’s white with red and ethereal blue. They of course had music, and neither party was idle: so what with four bands of music, a multitude of flags, vociferous cheers, horrid yells and groans, and now and then a shindy, it made as spirited and lively a contest as one would wish to see.”

Writing from Reigate on Sunday 13 May 1849, my father says, “I walked over to Bletchingley, a rotten borough and much gone to decay, and there I went to church. With the exception of about twenty well-dressed people, the congregation was composed of hard-featured rough farmers with lots of young girls and urchins belonging apparently to the parish school: the choir was a fiddle, bass-viol and clarionet; and every body and thing looking as uncouth as in the most remote districts.” Bletchingley was one of the rotten boroughs that were disfranchised by the Reform Bill of 1832. Till then it had two members. Shoreham had two members until 1885.

He came up to London from Carshalton on the morning of 10 April 1848 and “met Chartists all round Kennington.” Among my family relics I have a truncheon: there were 150,000 special constables then, and they stopped any Chartism. But the Charter itself seems harmless now: we have accepted five of its six points, and might very well accept the other one--annual parliaments. If we had general elections every year, they would soon cease to be such great events, and such great nuisances; and there might be greater continuity in our public policy. A moderate loss of seats would warn the Ministers, if they were taking a wrong course; and then they probably would alter course at once, instead of keeping on for several years, and then losing so many seats that they are superseded and their policy reversed.

We badly need a word (say Pleistarchy) for government by majority. We call it Democracy, but use that word in quite another sense. The arguments for democracy are embodied in stock phrases, ‘the will of the people,’ ‘vox populi,’ and so on, all implying that the people or populus or dêmos is always going to be unanimous, just like a jury. It may be necessary that the will of fifty-one should thwart the will of forty-nine; but it cannot be justified by saying that the will of the people must prevail, as that means the will of the whole hundred, if it means anything at all. We should come nearer to democracy by stipulating for majorities of two-thirds or three-fourths, as in America; but we ought to have majorities of nine-tenths or nineteen-twentieths before we talk about democracy here. And we might talk less nonsense, if we had a word like Pleistarchy expressing what we really mean.

Corruption was not confined to politics. A friend of my father’s writes to him from Torquay, 29 January 1845, about a younger brother who was causing him anxiety. “You perhaps are aware that I have endeavoured to obtain him a cadetship in the East India Company’s service.... I have been thinking that his best course is to purchase the appointment I have mentioned. These things are to be done, and are daily done, and it is far better for him to pay £500 or £600 than continue in his present course of life. I have strained all the efforts in my power with political friends, but in vain, and there is now but one course left--his purchasing the appointment. I am well aware that it is illegal, but there is little doubt that it can be done.”

Another friend also had a younger brother who caused him much anxiety, and he unburdens himself in his letters to my father--Dick has been getting drunk, Dick has been making love, Dick has been borrowing money, Dick is dragging our good name in the mire. Thirty years afterwards he writes, “The assizes are just over, and Richard has tried the cases here with great ability and dignity.” I need hardly say that I have changed his name.

There is a letter to my father from a friend of his who had just been made a judge--“I like my new occupation hugely. Whilst removing all strain and pressure, it gives the mind full play and exercise, and up to the present time it seems to suit body as well as mind.” Speaking of the necessity of going in procession in his robes, another one exclaims, “I often long to give a Whoop and cut a Caper in the midst of this Tomfoolery.”

Some of these letters to my father are very outspoken in their criticism of distinguished lawyers. Thus, 18 June 1876, “That ignoramus, the Attorney General, whose opinion I would not take on the title to an ant-heap....” Again, 20 December 1868, “Think of Collier being a judge. He was a capital caricaturist on circuit, and made his best speeches in cases of breach of promise _et id genus_. But beyond that....” My father’s own criticisms were much more restrained. He writes to my grandfather, 18 July 1850, “Yesterday morning I saw Wilde take his seat as Lord Chancellor. He looked rather confused: he cannot possibly know much about Equity, and how he is to get on I cannot understand.”

In 1920 the parish-clerk of Lustleigh was convicted of stamping an insurance-card with stamps that had been used on another insurance-card the year before. Notwithstanding his good character, he was sentenced to nine months imprisonment; and this sentence was upheld by the Court of Criminal Appeal in London. The sentence was manifestly out of all proportion to the crime. The loss could not amount to more than 15_s._ 2_d._ on a card, even if all the stamps on it were used a second time; and, if nine months imprisonment is commensurate with 15_s._ 2_d._, I cannot conceive what punishments would be sufficient for big frauds of £50,000 or £100,000 that bring scores of families to destitution. The 15_s._ 2_d._ would be public money; and here was the Law fussing about a loss of shillings at a time when hundreds and thousands of pounds of public money were being obtained all round on the flimsiest of false pretences, the Law being satisfied if some incompetent official had been bamboozled into sanctioning the payment.

There is, of course, a theory that the punishment of crimes should be proportionate to the difficulty of their detection, the chances of immunity being counterbalanced by the risks of heavy punishment. But with these insurance-cards there is more difficulty in committing the crime than in detecting it. The cards are collected every half-year; and, if the collection is efficient, there are not any cards about from which old stamps can be detached. I suppose the Legislature understands the workings of the criminal mind, but I sometimes wonder whether men can be deterred from crime by dread of seven years penal servitude, if they are not deterred by dread of five. If they reckon things up at all, they probably pick out the biggest crime they can commit for any specified sentence--“may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb”--and then act accordingly.

Fines would be far better than imprisonment in very many cases, that is, substantial fines with time allowed for payment by instalments. If this man had been fined £50, it would have helped the public revenue. As it was, the public had to maintain him for nine months and stopped his doing any useful work--and he was a hard-working and pains-taking man. Prisons are expensive things; and many of our prisons might be closed and a big revenue raised from fines, but for this silly craze for sending everyone to gaol.

I have a letter to my grandmother, 1 June 1843, from a nephew who had gone out to Australia and settled at Sydney. “Our county, Cumberland, in which Sydney is placed, will next month be the arena of a very spirited contest. We send two members, and there are four candidates, one of whom (the most monied man, a large distiller) tho’ now Free, was sent a Convict. We immigrants think it impudence of him to offer as a candidate, and the other party are as strong in his favour. I really think he will be elected, tho’ the Press teems with his crimes, the number of lashes received, and so on: his five associates were hanged. These people have an hatred to immigrants, and will not support them if they can deal with one of their own sort, and so frequently we see them get on much better than if they had come to the colony of their own free will.”

In spite of Convict competition this relative of mine did pretty well out there. In a letter to my father, 9 July 1874, he says that he has managed to put by £100,000 in the course of thirty years: all of it made by steady work, and none by speculation.

In his letter of 1 June 1843 he says, “The colony is labouring under temporary difficulties, but altogether it is advancing most rapidly: every downfall drives people to some fresh resources. Keeping sheep used to be almost the only employment: now that does not pay, agriculture is gaining ground, and instead of sending our coin to America for wheat, we grow our own. Altho’ sprung up like a mushroom in relation to the older towns of England, Sydney is as large as Exeter, its market buildings as good, its streets wider and the houses (that is, those recently built) as good as any: our George Street is fully two miles long, with all the bustle of Exeter Fore Street.”

Another first-cousin of my father’s went out to the colonies in very different style. He was a Chancery barrister in London, and was so cantankerous that they made him Attorney General of a colony in order to get rid of him, and then made him Chief Justice there to prevent his coming back--at any rate, that is what ill-natured people said. He had plenty of ability, but little experience in criminal law. He felt that pirates wanted hanging, and he hanged them; but I fear that he was technically wrong.

There were three brothers at Moreton who went out to America. They were not relations of mine, but were connexions by the marriage of their eldest brother to one of my great-great-aunts, a sister of my father’s mother’s mother. So far as I know the family history, it begins with Clement Jackson of Moreton and Honor his wife, and goes on through their son Abraham, born 1678, their grandson Jabez, born 1700, and their great-grandson James, born 1730, to their great-great-grandsons Jabez, born 1756, James, born 1757, Abraham, born 1767, and Henry, born 1778. The last three went to America in 1772, 1783 and 1790, married there, and died there in 1806, 1809, and 1840. They all settled in Georgia. Their father had a friend out there, John Wereat; and Wereat looked after James, and James looked after his young brothers.

James sided with the colonists in the War of Independence. He was in a law-office at Savannah in the spring of 1776, when the British ships came down from Boston commandeering; and he joined in the resistance there and went on through the war, becoming a colonel then and a major-general ten years afterwards. He was in the House of Representatives in the first Congress of the United States, 1789 to 1791, and (after a disputed election) again till 1793, and then in the Senate from 1793 to 1795, when he resigned and went back to Georgia to attend to matters there. He was Governor of Georgia from 1798 to 1801, and a Senator again from 1801 until his death (at Washington) in 1806. It was a strange career for anybody born at Moreton.

His brothers Abraham and Henry did not go out to America until the war was over. Abraham became a colonel. He fought a dozen duels, and in the last one he and his opponent shot each other through the legs. They had no seconds and no doctor, and were fighting on a lonely island in a stream; and both were nearly dead when they were found. That was the story that my father always told me; but I see there is a similar story in Charlton’s _Life of James Jackson_, page 18--“They went upon the ground without seconds, and fought at the desperate distance of a few feet.... Mr Wells lost his life, and Major Jackson was badly wounded in both of his knees.” That was in 1780, and the Major was James, not Abraham, who was still in England then.

The youngest brother, Henry, came over to Paris in 1814 as secretary of legation under Crawford, the United States minister-plenipotentiary; and, when Crawford left, he stayed on as chargé d’affaires till a new minister came. And his son, Henry Rootes Jackson, came over to Vienna as chargé d’affaires in 1853, and was United States minister-resident there from 1854 till 1858. At that time Francis Joseph was quite young, and had not yet acquired the kindly dignity that graced his later years; and H. R. Jackson told my father how very difficult it was, in speaking to that great raw boy, to realize that one was speaking to an Apostolic Majesty.

He was staying in London with my father in July and August 1854, and was talking of coming down to stay here, but I am not certain that he ever came. In an undated letter from Vienna he says, “If you could get my father’s likeness for me, I should be most grateful.” And my grandfather writes to my father, 31 December 1854, “I have Mr Jackson’s picture and have paid a pound for it. It is a much better thing than I expected: it is very well done, and the colours are very good; but the paper is rotten. He has but one eye: his dress resembles more of the nobility than of the middle classes.” This suggests some earlier member of the Jackson family; but I do not know which one had lost an eye.

He wrote my father letters of rather ponderous jocosity: thus, Vienna, 8 December 1855, “I have determined, on the whole, not to take immediate notice of the aspersions which you have felt yourself called upon to launch at my country in general, and at the hogs of my native state in particular. If I recollect aright, there are certain points in the British Isles where persons, who raise hogs, are in the habit of tying knots in their tails to prevent them from getting entirely through such holes as may be accidentally left in barn walls. I leave it to be determined whether these would, or would not, be apt scholars in the art of snake killing.” On sending her one of these letters to read, 11 December 1856, my father remarks to my mother that it is “a strange contrast to the refined and classic taste of his poems.” His poems, I believe, were never much known in England; or even in America, outside the southern states. And the best of them, _My wife and child_, was attributed to T. J. Jackson, usually called ‘Stonewall.’

H. R. Jackson had been a colonel in the Mexican war, and was made a brigadier-general in the Confederate army at the beginning of the War of Secession; and he went through it all, surrendering at last at Nashville. He had a son whom I remember very well; and the boy went all through it too, from the beginning (when he was under sixteen) down to the bitter end. So late as 31 May 1864 he writes from Savannah, “I am confident of our ultimate success.” Thirty years afterwards, when he talked of it to me, he said the Southerners had not been beaten by the Northerners themselves, but by an alien force: there were comparatively few real Yankees amongst the prisoners and dead. No doubt, the South would have enlisted foreigners too, had not the blockade excluded them.

People in England mostly saw things from the Southern point of view; and when the Northern point of view was put before them, it was not always put persuasively. A certain Dr Jephson of Boston, U.S., delivered an address at the Athenæum at Exeter on 17 March 1863. “The present murderous and fratricidal war in the United States has been fomented by the American slave-holders and the cotton-brokers in England.... This plot on the part of the American slave-holders and the cotton fraternity in England conjointly, to destroy the American Union, has served to evoke such a bitter feeling on the part of the American people against England....” Here was a red rag for John Bull. What right had the Northerners to call themselves the American people? They were only part of it, and the Southerners were part as well. If this had been a cotton-spinning district, there would have been a riot. In those years I was often staying with an aunt of mine not far from Macclesfield and Bollington, where there were cotton mills; and I saw something of the misery and destitution there, when the mills ceased work for want of raw material. No one cared a bit about the merits of the quarrel between the North and South; but everyone could see it was the Northerners who caused all this distress--the supply of cotton was stopped by their blockade.

It usually was called a fratricidal war; but in many of the letters here I find it called ‘this stupid war,’ and perhaps that was the better epithet. Had the northern states said Go In Peace, the Wayward Sisters would have been home again by now.

My father writes to my grandfather, Basle, 8 August 1849, “Mr Elihu Burritt, the American writer, is travelling to get converts to the Peace Congress, who are going to hold their next meeting at Paris on the 22nd. I had several hours of conversation with him about America.... Four Americans arrived here with us last evening, for a rapid run thro’ the country and then on to attend the Peace Congress. They cannot speak anything but English, and I had to translate for them at the stations, else they would have got nothing to eat all day.”

My father always wrote home an account of little things to entertain the old folks here. Thus, he writes from Exeter, 30 October 1838, “I went to the Cathedral on Sunday morning: the Bishop seemed wonderfully devout. He always is so in appearance, but there was less parade of it on Sunday. I hope his sins, or at least a few of them, were wiped away by his humility.”

He writes to one of his aunts, 19 August 1839, that he had been to Windsor the day before (Sunday) and a friend at court had given him a seat in the inner part of St George’s Chapel, and the Queen “wore a white bonnet placed very far back over the head,” and “seemed tolerably attentive to the service.”... “Afterwards she came out to walk on the terrace, and walked all round amongst the people: we all made way, and divided into two rows to let her pass between: she bowed to the people as she passed, but walked through with a most royal air. She wore the same little bonnet, and a blue gown and shawl. The Duchess of Kent walked behind, occasionally by the side of her, but generally the Queen walked on in front, very boldly, and seemed not to mind going in amongst the crowd.”

He writes to my grandmother, 11 June 1840, “There has been a good deal of talk here today in consequence of a young fellow having last evening fired two pistols at the Queen as she was riding out: he was within eight yards of her carriage, which was a low open one: the bullets passed very near, but both missed her: he is in custody.... Last week I had a ticket given me and was at the great Slave Trade Abolition meeting at Exeter Hall. Prince Albert was in the chair: he looks at least 24 or 25, and has a regular German expression of face. He managed very well and was not at all puzzled or frightened at facing so large a meeting. He read his speech off his hat. There were some good speeches, Archdeacon Wilberforce, Dr Lushington, Sir Robert Peel, the latter much cheered, altho’ the applause to O’Connell beat everything else. It was tremendous. I met him walking in Fleet Street a day or two previously. He was then looking rather meanly dressed, but at the Meeting he was in prime order, his best wig all nicely curled, a new hat, good coat, and his face red and shining as a schoolboy’s.”

At that time of life my father thought a good deal of the way that people dressed. I have seen two letters of his to young men coming up to town: he tells them what things should be done and what things left undone; but, before all things, they must not fail to wear black satin stocks. The satin gleams in a daguerreotype of him, taken at Daguerre’s on 7 or 8 October 1842, “on the roof of a seven story house, whence there is a splendid view of Paris.” Later portraits of him show the gradual decline of the stock into a chequered neckerchief, and then into a lavender necktie taking only one turn round the neck.

He writes to one of his aunts, 9 May 1839, “We went to the National Gallery and saw all the new paintings of the year.” From 1838 to 1868 the Royal Academy exhibitions were held at the National Gallery--I went to several of them there--but they had previously been held at Somerset House. He notes in his diary, 13 July 1832, “Went to Somerset House, saw all the paintings,” and on 25 July, “Went to Angerstein’s paintings.” The present National Gallery was not built then, and the pictures were still at Angerstein’s in Pall Mall.--He also notes, 31 July, “Saw Perkins’ steam gun, which fired 78 bullets in one minute against some very thick iron plates at 30 yards distance, where the bullets were immediately flattened with the force.”

He writes to her again from the Belle Vue at Brussels, 27 July 1839, “The interior of the inn is all good, excepting as to carpets, which are scarce, being of English manufacture and a heavy duty paid on them.” Yet we talk of Brussels carpets: also of Vienna glass. I have a letter here that I wrote to my mother from Vienna, 15 August 1875, “Not a bit of Vienna glass to be seen anywhere.”

My father writes from Louvain, 11 October 1843, “We went out after the rain to see the most remarkable object in the town, the magnificent Hôtel de Ville: far surpassing the idea I had formed from the engravings of it. The whole of the exterior is most elaborately and finely carved, and delicate beyond description; and it is absolutely perfect as regards repair, not one inch of carving being broken.”--Happily it is quite perfect still, in spite of our great Propaganda lie of the Destruction of Louvain.

He writes from Braine-le-Comte, 3 August 1849, “I don’t notice the slightest difference in France caused by the Revolution: all seems just as it used to be.” And from Basle, 8 August, “All the Baden territory is under martial law and full of Prussian troops, but agriculture goes on just as if nothing had happened.”

He writes from Dinan to my grandfather on 12 August 1847, “This morning we went through the market and saw pigs there as tall and thin as greyhounds.” And to my grandmother on 15 August, “You would be surprised to see how exemplary the parish priests are here in their conduct: it beats everything I have ever seen in England. Their whole time is devoted to their flock. They have service _every_ day, and spend the rest of it in calling on the different members of their congregation, the poorest as well as the richest.”

Though my father’s letters were pretty full, my grandmother detected gaps. She writes, 15 January 1840, “You don’t say who you were with at Covent Garden seeing out the old year and bringing in the new. I should like to know.” And then she gives him a little bit of good advice--“Youth passes rapidly away: therefore, my dear son, make the most and the best of it.” Later on she feared that he was making a little too much of it. She writes him, 20 November 1842, “I hope never to hear you express a wish to go on the Continent more. I recollect your saying when you came to Wreyland that you had not been in bed for two nights.” I see from his diary that it was three: one in the diligence, Paris to Boulogne, the next in the steamer, Boulogne to London, and the next in the train, London to Taunton, and in the coach from there. I see also from his diary that he was at Covent Garden with persons of complete respectability.

I have nearly a thousand letters that my grandfather and grandmother wrote to him from here, and I suppose he wrote as many in reply; but few of these survived. My grandfather writes to him, 29 October 1848, “I looked all the house over for your letter, but could not find it, your mother having destroyed lots of my papers, as she does when it takes her in head, without asking whether it is of importance or not: which very often inconveniences me.” I wish my grandfather had locked his papers up.

People have told me that they have destroyed old parchments, “as nobody could read such things.” And out of ignorance or wantonness people have been destroying things year after year. In 1837 my father was taking notes and copying documents, as if he meant to write a history of the neighbourhood. On coming to Wrey Barton he observes, “The late owner is said about fifteen years ago to have burnt all the deeds which were then more than sixty years old.” In the winter of 1838-39 he copied out a document of 20 August 1607 with a copy of a document of 21 September 1342 annexed to it, “which roll is now shewed forth to the said commissioners, and the copy thereof is filed unto these presentments.” The old roll sets out the customs of the manor of South Teign. That manor extended into the parishes of Chagford, Moreton and North Bovey, and first belonged to the Crown and then to the Duchy of Cornwall. Under an Act of 13 July 1863 (26 & 27 Victoria, cap. 49) the Duchy was empowered to sell the manor; and there is a letter from the Duchy office, 4 November 1863, asking my father for a copy of his copy. I suppose the original had disappeared since 1839.

My father once sent a friend a ‘short-copy’ of an article on the interaction of the Anglo-Saxon and the Celtic languages. A ‘short-copy’ is a reprint of such pages in a publication as make up an article; but the venerable man was not aware of this, and wrote back in a rage, Moreton, 28 July 1857, “Some confounded rascal has torn away 38 pages from the beginning of the work, and how many from the latter part I cannot say, it ends at 94. If I could get hold of the ears of the scoundrel, I would make them tingle. Such a gratuitous piece of mischief is enough to make a saint mad, for I dare say the fellow could make no more of his plunder than a pig.”

In the English edition of Hanotaux’s _Contemporary France_ there is a footnote, vol. 1, page 127--“Demander a Bertrand le text Billet.” Bertrand was the librarian at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and I suppose Hanotaux wanted to quote the document at first hand from the archives instead of quoting it at second hand as printed in Lamberty. And his editor did not understand.

The ancients also made mistakes like that. There is a Greek inscription at Stratoniceia, engraved in Fellows’ _Asia Minor_, pages 255, 256. It looks just like a table of accounts--the words begin at the left end of the lines, and at the right end there are figures, with an interval of varying length between the figures and the words. It really is a set of verses, and the figures give the number of letters in each line. They probably were meant to guide the mason in his work, but he has carved it all up on the temple wall. On the temple wall at Denderah there is a long inscription in Egyptian hieroglyphics with portraits of the deities who are mentioned in the text. At the portrait of Isis the hieroglyphics say “wood: gold: eyes of precious stone: two cubits high,” at the portrait of Heqit (the frog goddess) they say “silver overlaid with gold: five spans high,” and so on--it is engraved in Mariette’s _Denderah_, vol. IV, plate 88. The mason has carved his instructions on the wall, not knowing the meaning of the hieroglyphs.

Goethe used often to dictate, but did not always look at what was written down; and years afterwards (_Werke_, vol. XLV, pp. 158 ff., ed. 1835) he found that Tugendfreund had been taken down as Kuchenfreund, John Hunter as Schon Hundert, and so on.

Printers sometimes make mistakes. In a proof that I was reading for a friend, the nomen and pre-nomen of Rameses II had become his women and pre-women. But very often it is not the printer’s fault. In my former _Small Talk_ I wrote Anaxagoras for Aristagoras, and passed it in the proofs, page 76. Had it been anybody else’s work, I should have seen the error at once; but I suppose my mind was running on what I meant to say, and I thought I saw it there. And this may also be the reason why amateur artists very often fail to see the faults in their own work. They see the picture that they meant to paint, and not the daub that they have done.

Poets, I presume, use verse in preference to prose because it suits their thoughts; and yet they often sacrifice the substance to the form. In _Ye mariners of England_ Campbell wants a rhyme for ‘seas,’ and therefore says their flag has braved ‘the battle and the breeze.’ It ought to be ‘the battle and the blast’--the breeze needs no more braving than sham-fights. In _Dies iræ_ Tommaso da Celano (or whoever it was) had to find a rhyme for ‘favilla’ and ‘sibylla,’ and thus came down to ‘dies illa,’ which is much too mild a term for Doomsday. Translators have avoided this by putting in some stronger term--Macaulay makes it “On that great, that awful day.” And in translations this is possible, though not in the original, as there is no fit word that rhymes.

According to Macaulay’s _Ivry_, the knights had only one spur each, “a thousand spurs are striking deep, a thousand spears in rest, a thousand knights,” etc. Tennyson says Six Hundred in _The Charge of the Light Brigade_, but that was not actually the strength. If I were editing him, I should put in a note in proper form--“six hundred: compare ‘sexcenta’ in Latin and ‘hexacosia’ in late Greek, a round number based on the Babylonian sexagesimal system and used indefinitely, like myriad.”

Annotations and translations may explain things, but are never so neat as emendations that make an author say just what you think he should have said. Why should Saint Paul want ladies to cover their heads, ‘dia tous aggelous,’ because of the angels? Listen to Jeremy Taylor, his _Liberty of Prophesying_, section 3, “If it were read ‘dia tous agelous,’ that the sense be, women in public assemblies must wear a vail, by reason of the companies of young men there present, it would be no ill exchange for the loss of a letter, to make so probable, so clear a sense of the place.”

And very often emendations may be made without touching the letters at all, Shakespeare says in his _Sonnets_, 107, “The prophetic soul of the wide world, dreaming on things to come.” Homer might likewise say that the future is in the dreams of the gods, ‘theôn en g’ounasi,’ instead of saying that it is on their knees, ‘en gounasi.’ An apostrophe is all you want. Change the vowel-points, and you may connect Magdalene with ‘megaddela,’ and so get Mary the Masseuse.

When Aristotle’s _Constitution of Athens_ was brought to light and printed, I made some observations on it in the _Athenæum_, 7 February 1891, a few days after it came out. The editor had cited the passage in