SEEING AND HEARING

SEEING
AND HEARING

BY

GEORGE W. E. RUSSELL

AUTHOR OF "COLLECTIONS AND RECOLLECTIONS," ETC.

LONDON
E. GRANT RICHARDS
1907

TO

WALTER SYDNEY SICHEL

1868-1907

"Ay, there are some good things in life, that fall not away with the rest,

And of all best things upon earth, I hold that a faithful friend is the best."

—Owen Meredith.

CONTENTS

I

THE CORONATION

And so the great Act draws near—the "high midsummer pomp" of Patriotism and Regality and Religion—the "one far-off divine event" to which the whole social creation has moved since the day was appointed and the preparations began. A thousand pens will picture the Coronation as it actually occurs. Writing in advance, I can only contemplate it as a magnificent ideal, and describe it as it strikes not the eye and ear but the heart, the imagination, and the historic sense.

First and foremost and above all else, the Coronation is a religious act. It is imbedded in the very heart of the great Christian service of the Holy Eucharist. Litany and Introit and Gospel and Creed lead up to it, and it in turn leads on to Te Deum and Offertory and Consecration and Communion. But though (or perhaps because) it is thus supremely and conspicuously religious, the Coronation is national and secular and historical as well. Other nations do not crown their Sovereigns. Some have no crowns to give, and others are in doubt about the rightful recipients; in some, revolutions have shattered the immemorial landmarks, or the sharp sword of civil war has severed the sacred thread of succession, or the State itself is a mushroom growth of yesterday, with no roots and fibres striking deep down to the bedrock of the national life.

But here in England we crown our kings as we have crowned them for a thousand years, and our act of crowning is the august symbol of a nation's story and a people's will. For before ever the ministers of God approach the altar, before the sacred emblems of sovereignty are hallowed, before the Christian's Mysteries begin, before the Eternal Spirit is invoked and the consecrating unction bestowed, the English people plays its part, and, through the mouth of its chief citizen asserts its fundamental place in the system of the Kingly Commonwealth.

"Sirs, I here present unto you King Edward, the undoubted King of this realm; wherefore all you who are come this day to do your homage, are you willing to do the same?" And, as the King stands up and turns and shows himself four times to the assembled freemen, they "signify their willingness and joy by loud and repeated acclamations, all with one voice crying out, 'God Save King Edward.'"

And here I borrow from one[1] who touches as no other living man can touch these dramatic solemnities of our national life (for I know he will consent to the borrowing), and I say that this is as noble as it is intelligible. "It embodies the splendid liberty with which a free people asserts its claim to have nothing imposed upon it in the dark, no tyrannous rule set over it which it has not measured and considered and acknowledged in the open light of Heaven." And then the whole great company falls to prayer, and the Archbishop, who has hitherto played his part as the first citizen of England and the greatest subject of the Crown, takes up a still higher function, and goes up, vested to the altar and begins the Service of the Eucharist, and, as a priest, invokes the supreme sanction of the Eternal. And then the majestic course of the rite is broken off in the very centre, and, with every act and feature and ceremony which can most forcibly express the solemnity of the transaction, the Archbishop demands of the King, in the face of God and the Church and the people, whether he will promise to rule England in due obedience to law and with sacred regard to Justice, Mercy, and Religion. And the King gives his promise, and, kneeling at the altar, confirms it with an oath upon the Holy Gospel.

"This free intercourse that passes between Ruler and Ruled is no child's play, no mere pretty ceremonial; it is the act of men in solemn earnest pledging their troth the one to the other. The act is broad and deep and strong as the national life. It embodies the experience of centuries. It has in it the stern breath of conflict and the anxious determinations of secured peace. The Great Charter is behind it, and the memories of Runnymede and Whitehall. It seals a concentrated purpose. King and people look each other in the face, and speak their minds out and give their word." And then, and not till then, the Archbishop will go forward with his hallowing office and perform the symbolic acts, and pronounce the benediction of the Highest upon the covenant between King and Commonwealth. He anoints with the sacred unction and girds with the kingly sword. He delivers the sceptre of empire and the emblematic orb which, "set under the Cross," reminds the King "that the whole world is subject to the power and empire of Christ our Redeemer." And then the crown, of pure gold enriched with gems each one of which is a history, is set upon the Sovereign's head, and the Archbishop blesses and the onlookers acclaim.

"Blow, trumpets; all your exultations blow!"

as King Edward VII. takes his seat on the throne of the Confessor and the Conqueror, of the Plantagenets and the Tudors, and receives by the mouth of all that is greatest in Church and State the proud homage of a self-governing people.

And then, once again, the splendid trappings of sovereignty are laid aside, and the King, uncrowned, kneels down like the lowliest son of Adam before the Mercy-seat of the Christian covenant, and the great action of the Eucharist is resumed, and the memories of the Upper Chamber at Jerusalem are renewed at the altar of Westminster. The Word is spoken and the Deed is done. A great cloud of prayer and aspiration and intercession floats up from the vast concourse of assembled worshippers; and, in the midst of them, the crowned and anointed King, kneeling by her who must aid him to bear his burden, seeks through the Divinely-appointed Medium supernatural strength for a more than human task. From a full heart and with the solemnest intent a united nation says, "God save King Edward."

The scene is changed from Westminster Abbey to a dining-room in Belgravia, and the date from Saturday, 9th August, to Sunday, 3rd. Thirty guests, male and female, are gathered round a too-bountiful board; and, amidst the rich fumes of mayonnaise and quails and whitebait and champagne-cup, there rise the mingled voices of the great "Coronation Chorus."

Enthusiastic Young Lady. "I can think of nothing but the Coronation. Where are you going to see it from?"

Facetious Young Man. "Oh! from Hurlingham. That's quite near enough. The whole thing is such a frightful bore. You know what they say London is just now. All Board and no Lodging."

New Peeress. "I really envy the duchesses. They have such good places in the front row. I shall be poked away under the gallery quite at the back. I don't believe I shall see a thing. But, after all, one will be able to say one has been there."

Facetious Young Man. "Oh! you could say that anyhow. It's not good enough to get up at four in the morning for the sake of saying that. Charley FitzBattleaxe thinks just the same as I do about it, but of course, as he's a peer, he's bound to go. He's a bad hand at getting up early, so he's going to sit up playing bridge all night, and then have his bath and go straight to the show."

Stout Peeress. "Our creation is rather old, so I have got a very good place, but the chairs are too dreadful. Such stiff backs, and only nine inches to sit on, and horrid wicker seats which will make marks on our velvet."

Thrifty Peeress. "Well, I really don't know where I shall have my luncheon. It seems monstrous to have to pay two guineas at the House of Lords for a sandwich and a glass of claret. The Watermans in Dean's Yard have most kindly asked me to go to luncheon with them, and it would be an immense saving. But they are strict teetotallers, and I feel that, after all those hours in the Abbey, I shall want something more supporting than lemonade. So I am rather divided. I dread the idea of a teetotal luncheon, but two guineas for a glass of claret and a sandwich is rather much."

Nervous Peeress. "I am so terrified of being faint in the Abbey. I am going to take chocolate and meat lozenges in my coronet, and some brandy and water in my smelling-bottle."

Chorus (confusedly). "Oh no, port wine is the thing. No—rum and milk. My doctor says whisky. Whisky? Oh no; sal volatile is much the best, and Plasmon biscuits. Not sandwiches—I hate sandwiches. Cold chicken. But can we eat in church? Isn't it rather odd? Oh, the Abbey isn't exactly a church, you know. Isn't it? I should have thought it was. Well—no—our Vicar tells me that it was never consecrated. How very curious! At least it was only consecrated by the Angels, not by the Bishop. Well, of course that makes a difference. Still, I don't like the idea of eating and drinking in it. So I shall have some pâté de foie gras and champagne in the carriage, and eat till the very moment I get to the Abbey, and begin again the very moment I get out."

Lively Young Lady. "I'm not afraid of being faint—only of being bored in that long wait. I shall take something to read while mamma is stuffing herself with her sandwiches."

Facetious Young Man. "What a good idea! Shall you take Modern Society or the Pink 'Un?"

Grave Young Lady (intervening). "Neither, I hope. People seem to forget that after all it is a religious service. If one must read, I think 'John Inglesant' or one of Miss Yonge's books would be more suitable than a newspaper."

Lively Young Lady. "Well, really, it is so difficult to think of it as a religious service. It seems to me more like a play. I saw one of the rehearsals, and certainly it was as funny as a pantomime. But still, of course, one wouldn't wish to do anything that was unsuitable; so I think I shall take a 'Guide-book to the Abbey' and learn all the history while we are waiting. One hears so much about it just now, and it seems stupid not to know. I never can remember whether St. Edward was Edward the Confessor or Edward the Sixth. Do you know?"

Facetious Young Man. "Oh, ask me an easier one. Those old jossers were all pretty much of a muchness. I tell you I'm not taking any. The whole thing is utterly out of date. Why couldn't he write his name in a book, or send a crier round with a bell to say he's come to the throne?"

The Host. "My dear Freddy Du Cane, I don't agree with you the least. I am bound to say quite honestly that all my life I have hoped that I might live to see a Coronation, and I am honestly thankful that I have got a place. It is all the things that interest me most rolled into one—Pageant and History and Patriotism and a great Religious Ceremony. I am a Liberal; therefore I like the Recognition and the Oath. I am a Ritualist; therefore I like the vestments and the Unction and the oblation of the Golden Pall. Above all I am an Englishman, and I like to see my Sovereign take up the duties of sovereignty at the altar of 'that Royal and National sanctuary which has for so many centuries enshrined the varied memories of his august ancestors and the manifold glories of his free and famous kingdom.' Those words are Dean Stanley's. Do you know his account of the Coronation in his 'Memorials of Westminster Abbey'? If you will let me, I will show it to you after luncheon. People ought at least to know what the service is before they presume to make stupid jokes about it."

Curtain.

II

SECRET SOCIETIES

When Lord Scamperdale was angry with Mr. Sponge for riding over his hounds he called him "a perpendicular Puseyite pig-jobber"; and the alliteration was felt to emphasize the rebuke. If any Home Ruler is irritated by Sir Robert Anderson he may relieve his feelings by calling him a "preaching political policeman," and each word in the title will be true to life. Sir Robert combines in his single person the characters of barrister, detective, and theologian. He began life at the Irish Bar, was for many years head of the Criminal Investigation Department in London, then became Assistant Commissioner of Police, and all the while gave what leisure he could spare from tracking dynamiters and intercepting burglars to the composition of such works as "The Gospel and its Ministry," "A Handbook of Evangelical Truth," and "Daniel in the Critic's Den."

A career so diversified was sure to produce some interesting reminiscences, and the book[2] which Sir Robert has just published is as full of mystery and adventure, violence and strategy, plot and counterplot, as the romances which thrilled our youth. In those days some boys thought soldiering the one life worth living; some, in fancy, ran away to sea. Some loved tales of Piracy, and were peculiarly at home in a Smugglers' Cave. Others snatched a fearful joy from ghosts and bogies. Others enjoyed Brazilian forests and African jungles, hand-to-hand encounters with gorillas and hair-breadth 'scapes from watchful tigers. The present writer thought nothing so delightful as Secret Societies, and would have given his little all to know a password, a sign, or a secret code. Perhaps this idiosyncrasy was due to the fact that in the mid 'sixties every paper teemed with allusions to Fenianism, just then a very active force in the political world; and to Smith Minus, in the Fourth Form at Harrow, there was something unspeakably attractive in the thought of being a "Head Centre," a "Director," or an "Executive Officer of the Irish Republican Brotherhood," or even in the paler glory of writing the mystic letters "F.B." or "C.O." after his undistinguished name. It is in his account of the earlier days of Fenianism that Sir Robert Anderson is so intensely interesting. He traces it, from its origin in the abortive rebellion of 1848 and that "Battle of Limerick" which Thackeray sang, to its formal inauguration in 1860, and its subsequent activities at home and abroad; and the narrative begins, quite thrillingly, with the biography of the famous spy Henri le Caron, who played so striking a part before the Commission on Parnellism and Crime. Those who wish to learn these incidents in our recent history, or as much of them as at present can properly be disclosed, must read Sir Robert's book for themselves. I will not attempt even to epitomize it; and, indeed, I only mention it because of the "sidelights" which it throws, not on Home Rule, but on the part which Secret Societies have played in the fortunes of Modern Europe.

As far as I know, the only Englishman—if Englishman he could properly be called—who regarded the Secret Societies as formidable realities was Lord Beaconsfield. As long ago as 1844—long before he had official experience to guide him—he wrote, with regard to his favourite Sidonia (in drawing whom he drew himself):—

"The catalogue of his acquaintance in the shape of Greeks, Armenians, Moors, Secret Jews, Tartars, Gipsies, wandering Poles, and Carbonari would throw a curious light on those subterranean agencies of which the world in general knows so little, but which exercise so great an influence on public events."

Those were the days when Disraeli, a genius whom no one treated seriously, was uttering his inmost thoughts through the medium of romances to which fancy contributed at least as much as fact. Then came twenty years of constant activity in politics—that pursuit which, as Bacon says, is of all pursuits "the most immersed in matter,"—and, when next he took up the novelist's pen, he was a much older and more experienced, though he would scarcely be a wiser, man. In 1870 he startled the world with "Lothair"; and those who had the hardihood to fight their way through all the fashionable flummery with which the book begins found in the second and third volumes a profoundly interesting contribution to the history of Europe between 1848 and 1868. One of the characters says that "the only strong things in Europe are the Church and the Secret Societies"; and the book is a vivid narrative of the struggle for life and death between the Temporal Power of the Papacy and the insurrectionary movements inspired by Garibaldi. Every chapter of the book contains a portrait, and every incident is drawn from something which had come under the author's notice between 1866 and 1869, when he was the leading personage in the Tory Government and the Fenians were making open and secret war on English rule. He was describing the men whom he knew and the things which he had seen, and this fact makes the book so extraordinarily vivid, and won for it Froude's enthusiastic praise. Every one could recognize Capel and Manning and Antonelli and Lord Bute, and all their diplomatic and fashionable allies; it required some knowledge of the insurrectionary movements to see in "Captain Bruges" a portrait of General Cluseret, commander-in-chief of every insurgent army in Europe or America, or in Theodora the noble character of Jessie White-Mario, whose career of romantic devotion to the cause of Freedom closed only in this year.[3]

"Madre Natura" in Italy, Fenianism in America and England, the "Mary Anne" Societies of France, and the mysterious alliance between all these subterranean forces, are the themes of "Lothair," and the State trials of the time throw a good deal of light upon them all. Even more mysterious, much harder to trace, and infinitely more enduring were the operations of the Carbonari—- beginning with a handful of charcoal-burners in the forests of Northern Italy, and spreading thence, always by woodland ways, to the centre and north of Europe. They promoted the French revolutions of 1830 and 1848. Even Louis Napoleon allied himself with them in his earlier machinations against Louis Philippe and the Republic; and in the Franco-German War of 1870 they rendered incalculable service to the German troops by guiding them through the fastnesses of the Ardennes. It is one of the characteristics of the Secret Societies that they attack the established order, without, apparently, caring much what that order represents. Their generals fought against England in Canada and in Ireland; against the Northern States in America; against Russia in the Danubian Principalities. It is not to be supposed that in 1870 the Carbonari had much sympathy with the military absolutism of Prussia; but Prussia was attacking the French Empire, and that was enough for the Carbonari.

Of course, as a general rule, the Secret Societies of the Continent were anti-monarchical and anti-Christian; but he who loves these mysterious combinations can find plenty to interest him in the history of organizations which were neither Republican nor Atheistic. Nothing could be more devotedly monarchical and orthodox than the "Cycle of the White Rose." This Society, profoundly "secret," was founded about the year 1727. It had for its object to unite all the Cavalier and Nonjuring families of North Wales and Cheshire, with a view to concerted action when next the exiled Stuarts should claim their own. The headquarters were always at Wynnstay, and the Lady of Wynnstay was always Patroness. The badge was a White Rose in enamel, and the list of members was printed in a circle, so that if it should fall into the hands of Government no one should appear as ringleader or chief. The Cycle was for some fifty years a real and definite organization for political ends; but, as years went on and the hopes of the Jacobites perished, the Cycle degenerated into a mere dining-club, and it expired in 1850. Its last member was, I believe, the Rev. Sir Theophilus Puleston, who lived to see the second Jubilee of Queen Victoria; and the last Lady Patroness died in 1905.

Another Secret Society which once meant practical mischief of no common kind was that of the Orangemen. Though Orangemen are nowadays vociferously loyal, their forerunners are grossly misrepresented if it is not true that, under the Grand-mastership of the Duke of Cumberland, afterwards King Ernest of Hanover, they organized a treasonable conspiracy to prevent Queen Victoria from succeeding to the Throne of her ancestors and to put her uncle in her place. For sidelights on this rather dark passage of modern history the curious reader is referred to "Tales of my Father," by "A. M. F.," and to a sensational rendering of the same story, called "God Save the Queen."

My space is failing, and I must forbear to enlarge on the most familiar and least terrifying of all "Secret Societies." I hold no brief for the "Grand Orient of France," even though Pius IX. may once have belonged to this or a similar organization; but I must profess that English Freemasons are the most respectable, most jovial, and most benevolent of mankind; and I trust that they will accept in its true intention Cardinal Manning's ambiguously worded defence of their craft, "English Freemasonry is a Goose Club."

III

THE IRISH PEERAGE

Dryasdust is proverbially a bore, and his forms are Protean. Thus there are the Jacobite Dryasdusts, who affirm that Queen Victoria had no higher dignity than that of Dowager Princess Albert of Saxe-Coburg, and deny that any act of sovereignty transacted in this country has been valid since that dark morning when James II., making the best of his way to the Old Kent Road, dropped the Great Seal into the Thames. Then there are the Constitutional Dryasdusts, who deny the existence of a Cabinet or a Prime Minister, and insist that the Privy Council is the only Ministerial body known to the law; and the Ecclesiastical Dryasdusts, who affirm that the Church of England is really free because the bishops are freely elected by the Chapters of their respective Cathedrals, acting under licence from a Sovereign who, having been anointed, is a Persona Mixta—part layman, part ecclesiastic. At the height of the South African War I chanced to meet an Heraldic Dryasdust, who moaned like a mandrake over the announcement that the Duke of Norfolk had just set out, with his Yeomanry, for the scene of action. "You mean," I said, "that a valuable life is needlessly imperilled?" "Not at all," replied Dryasdust, with a face as long as a fiddle-case. "A far more important consideration than the Duke's life is involved. As Earl-Marshal he is supreme commander of the forces of the Crown when engaged in actual warfare, and the moment he sets his foot on African soil Lord Roberts becomes subject to his command. There is no way out of that constitutional necessity, and I regard the outlook as very serious." And so indeed it would have been, had Dryasdust been right.

I am led to this train of reflections by the fact that an eminent genealogist has lately tried to frighten the readers of a Sunday paper by broaching the theory that all the Acts of Parliament passed within the last twenty years may have been invalid. He does not commit himself to the statement that they are invalid, but he insists that they may be, and he grounds his contention on a clause of the Act of Union. Concerning this clause he says, following Sir William Anson, that it requires that "the number of Irish peers, not entitled by the possession of other peerages to an hereditary seat in the House of Lords of the United Kingdom, shall never fall below one hundred." Now it seems that during the last twenty years the number has fallen below a hundred; therefore the House of Lords has not been properly constituted, and therefore its part in legislation has been null and void. It is a startling theory, and like most startling theories, will probably turn out to be nonsense; but the history of the Irish Peerage, apart from any consequences which may be deduced from it, is full of interest, and not wholly free from scandal. The Irish peerage, as it stands to-day, comprises 175 members; of these, 28 sit in the House of Lords as Representative Peers, elected for life by their brethren; 82 sit there because they hold English as well as Irish peerages; and the remainder, being merely Irish peers and not Representatives, do not sit in the House of Lords, but are eligible for the House of Commons. In this respect their state is more gracious than that of the Scotch peers, who cannot be elected to the House of Commons, and therefore, unless they can get themselves chosen to be Representative Peers of Scotland, are excluded from Parliament for ever. Still, though a seat in the House of Lords is a desirable possession, a mere title has its charms.

It used to be said that when Mr. Smith the banker, who lived in Whitehall, asked George III. for the entrée of the Horse Guards, the King replied, "I can't do that; but I wish to make you an Irish Peer." However, the true version of the story seems to be that which is given in the "Life of the Marquis of Granby."

"In 1787 the owner of Rutland House desired to increase the private entrée into Hyde Park to the dimensions of a carriage entrance, and asked Charles, fourth Duke of Rutland, to support the necessary application to the King. The Duke, who was then Viceroy of Ireland, replied, 'You will let me know whether ye application is to be made to Lord Orford, who is ye Ranger of ye Park, or to ye King himself: in ye latter case I would write to Lord Sydney att ye same time; if it be to the King a greater object might be easier accomplished than this trifle, as I know he is very particular about his Parks; at least he is so about St. James Park, for he made a man an Irish Peer to keep him in Good Humour for having refused him permission to drive his carriage through ye Horse Guards.'"

Lord Palmerston, himself an Irish peer, used to say that an Irish peerage was the most convenient of all dignities, as it secured its owner social precedence while it left him free to pursue a Parliamentary career. At the same time, greatly as he enjoyed his position, Palmerston never would take the oaths or comply with the legal formalities necessary to entitle him to vote for the Irish Representative Peers; and the reason for this refusal was characteristic alike of an adroit politician and of the unscrupulous age in which he lived. An Irish peer who has proved his right to vote for the Representative Peers, is eligible for election as a Representative, and Palmerston feared that his political opponents, wishing to get him out of the House of Commons into the comparative obscurity and impotence of the House of Lords, would elect him a Representative Peer in spite of himself, and so effectually terminate his political activities. In the days immediately succeeding Palmerston a conspicuous ornament of the Irish Peerage was the second Marquis of Abercorn. He had no need to trouble himself about Representative arrangements, for he sat in the House of Lords as a peer of Great Britain, but his hereditary connexion with the North of Ireland, his great estates there, and the political influence which they gave him, made him, in a very real sense, an Irish peer. He was Lord-Lieutenant from 1866 to 1868, and during his viceroyalty Disraeli (who subsequently drew his portrait in "Lothair") conferred upon him the rare honour of an Irish dukedom. It was rumoured that he wished, in consideration of his 80,000 acres in Tyrone and Donegal, to become the Duke of Ulster, but was reminded that Ulster was a Royal title, borne already by the Duke of Edinburgh. Be that as it may, he stuck to his Scotch title, and became Duke of Abercorn. Down to that time the Duke of Leinster had been the sole Irish duke, and went by the nickname of "Ireland's Only." To him, as an old friend, the newly created Duke of Abercorn wrote a mock apology for having invaded his monopoly; but the Duke of Leinster was equal to the occasion, and wrote back that he was quite content to be henceforward the Premier Duke of Ireland. When, six months later, Disraeli was driven out of office, he conferred an Irish barony on a faithful supporter, Colonel M'Clintock, who was made Lord Rathdonnell; and it was generally understood that, by arrangement between the leaders on both sides, no more Irish peerages were to be created. This understanding held good till Mr. George Curzon, proceeding to India as Viceroy and contemplating a possible return to Parliament when his term of office expired, persuaded Lord Salisbury to make him Lord Curzon of Kedleston in the Peerage of Ireland.

But, after all, the Irish Peerage of to-day is to a great extent the product of the Irish Union. "There is no crime recorded in history—I do not except the Massacre of St. Bartholomew—which will compare for a moment with the means by which the Union was carried." The student of men and moods, having no clue to guide him, would probably attribute this outburst to Mr. Gladstone at some period between his first and second Home Rule Bills; and he would be right. For my own part, I can scarcely follow the allusion to St. Bartholomew, but beyond doubt the measures employed by the English Government in order to secure the Union were both cruel and base. It is the baseness with which we are just now concerned. In order to carry the Union it was necessary to persuade the Irish Houses of Lords and Commons, and to capture the whole machinery of bribery and terrorism which directed the Irish Parliament. As that blameless publicist Sir T. Erskine May tranquilly observes, "corrupt interests could only be overcome by corruption." The policy of out-corrupting the corruptest was pursued with energy and resolution. Each patron of Irish boroughs who was ready to part with them received £7500 for each seat. Lord Downshire got £52,000 for seven seats; Lord Ely £45,000 for six. The total amount paid in compensation for the surrender of electoral powers was £1,260,000. In addition to these pecuniary inducements, honours were lavishly distributed as bribes. Five Irish peers were called to the House of Lords, twenty were advanced a step in the peerage, and twenty-two new peers were created. It would be invidious, and perhaps actionable, to attach proper names to the amazing histories of Corruption by Title which are narrated in the Private Correspondence of the Viceroy, Lord Cornwallis, and the published Memoirs of Sir Jonah Barrington. Even that sound loyalist Mr. Lecky was constrained to admit that "the majority of Irish titles are historically connected with memories not of honour but of shame." On the 22nd January 1799 one member of the Irish House of Commons took his bribe in the brief interval between his speech for, and his vote against a resolution affirming the right of the Irish nation to an independent Legislature. Another aspirant to the peerage "made and sang songs against the Union in 1799, and made and sang songs for it in 1800." He got his deserts. A third secured £30,000 for his surrendered boroughs, a peerage for himself, and for his brother in Holy Orders an archbishopric so wealthy that its fortunate owner became a peer, and subsequently an earl, on his own account. The scandalous tale might be indefinitely prolonged; but enough has been said to show why it is difficult to shed tears when these strangely-engendered peerages sink below the prescribed number of a hundred.

IV

OMITTED SILHOUETTES

Last year[4] I ventured to submit for public inspection a small collection of Social Silhouettes. From time to time during the last few months I have received several kind enquiries about Omitted Portraits. For instance, there is the Undertaker. Perhaps a friend will write: "Dickens made capital fun out of Mr. Mould and the 'Hollow Elm Tree.' Couldn't you try your hand at something of the same kind?" Another writes, perhaps a little bluntly: "Why don't you give us the Barrister? He must be an awfully easy type to do." A third says, with subtler tact: "I feel that, since Thackeray left us, yours is the only pen which can properly handle the Actor"—or the Painter, or the Singer, or the Bellringer, or the Beadle, as the case may be. Now, to these enquiries, conceived, as I know them all to be, in the friendliest spirit, my answer varies a little, according to the type suggested. With regard to the Barrister, I stated quite early in my series that I did not propose to deal with him, because he had been drawn repeatedly by the master-hands of fiction, and because the lapse of years had wrought so little change in the type that Serjeant Snubbin, and Fitz-Roy Timmins, and Sir Thomas Underwood, and Mr. Furnival, and Mr. Chaffanbrass were portraits which needed no retouching. I must, indeed, admit that the growth of hair upon the chin and upper lip is a marked departure from type, and that a moustached K.C. is as abnormal a being as a bearded woman or a three-headed nightingale; but the variation is purely external, and the true inwardness of the Barrister remains what it was when Dickens and Thackeray and Trollope drew him. So, again, with regard to the Family Solicitor; as long as men can study the methods of Mr. Tulkinghorn (of Lincoln's Inn Fields) and Mr. Putney Giles (of the same learned quarter) they may leave Mr. Jerome K. Jerome in undisturbed possession of his stage-lawyer, who "dresses in the costume of the last generation but seven, never has any office of his own, and (with the aid of a crimson bag) transacts all his business at his clients' houses."

When I am asked why I do not describe the Painter, my reply is partly the same. We have got Gaston Phœbus, and Clive Newcome, and Claude Mellot, and the goodly company of Trilby, and we shall not easily improve upon those portraits, whether highly finished or merely sketched. But in this case I have another reason for reticence. I know a good many painters, who about this time of year bid me to their studios. I have experienced before now the delicate irritability of the artistic genius, and I know that a reverential reticence is my safest course. Conversely, my reason for not describing the Actor is that I really do not know him well enough. An actor off the stage is about as exhilarating an object as a theatre by daylight. The brilliancy and the glamour have departed; the savour of sawdust and orange-peel remains. Let us render all honour to the histrion when his foot is on his native boards; but if we are wise we shall eschew in private life the society of Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Crummles, nor open our door too widely to the tribe of Costigan and Fotheringay.

The mention of that great actress's name (for did not Emily Costigan, afterwards Lady Mirabel, figure as "Miss Fotheringay" on the provincial stage?) reminds me that, according to some of my critics, women played too rare and too secluded a part in my series of "Typical Developments." It is only too true, and no one knows as well as the author the amount of brilliancy and interest which has been forfeited thereby. But really it is a sacred awe that has made me mute. Even to-day, as I write, I am smarting under a rebuke recently administered to me, at a public gathering, by an outraged matron. This lady belongs to the political section of her tribe; holds man, poor man! in proper contempt; and clamours on Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's doorstep for that suffrage which is to make her truly free. At present she esteems herself little better than a Squaw, and has been heard to declare, in moments of expansive eloquence, that she was not created to be the Toy of Man—a declaration in which her hearers most heartily concurred. Well, this stern guardian of her sex's rights recently took me to task in a public place for the levity with which I had criticized a gathering of political ladies, and my nerve has scarcely rallied from the sudden onslaught. Had I been more myself I might even yet have tried my unskilled hand at female portraiture. Perhaps, in the spirit of that Cambridge professor who calls William II. "quite the nicest Emperor I know," I might have begun in the most illustrious circles, and have sketched the stone-laying and bazaar-opening activities of Royal Princesses. Or, yielding precedence to the Church, I might have discoursed of Episcopal ladies and have traced the influence of a tradition received from the beatified Mrs. Proudie. "We had a very nice Ordination this Trinity," says one lady of this class. "The Bishop and I were much disappointed by the poor response of the laity to our appeal," wrote another. When in May 1899 the Archbishops were playing at a Court for the trial of Ritualism, Episcopal ladies sat knitting by the judgment-seat, and stared at the incriminated clergymen, as the tricoteuses of the French Revolution may have stared at the victims of the guillotine, or as Miss Squeers peered through the keyhole at the flagellation of Smike. Or again, on a lowlier rung of the Ecclesiastical ladder, I might have drawn the Parochial Worker—the woman of waterproof and gingham, the distributor of tracts, the disciplinarian of the Sunday School, the presiding spirit of Mothers' Meetings. At a General Election this type of lady varies her activities—canvasses for the Conservative candidate, and tells the gaping washerwomen that Mr. Lloyd-George wishes to convert the Welsh cathedrals into music-halls for the Eisteddfod. Of all Parochial Workers the highest type is the Deaconess; and not long ago, in a parish with which I am conversant, the Deaconess and the Curate used to do their parochial rounds on a double bicycle, to the infinite amusement of the gutter-children and the serious perturbation of the severely orthodox. There was a picture worthy of the pen and pencil of Thackeray, but it faded all too soon into the blurred commonplace of matrimony.

The Deaconess may be called the Marine of the Church's army, with one foot on sea and one on shore—only half a Worldling, yet not quite a Nun. With ladies of the last-named type, my acquaintance has been prolonged and intimate. Of their excellence and devotion it would be impertinent to speak; but I may say without offence that some of the ablest, most agreeable, and most amusing women I have known I have encountered in the Cloister. But, alas! even into the Cloister the serpent of political guile will wend his sinuous way; nor could I, though her friend, commend the action of Sister G—— M—— when, in order to prevent a patient in a Convalescent Home from voting for a Radical candidate, she kept his trousers under lock and key till the poll was over.

"Old age," it has been bitterly said, "when it can no longer set a bad example, gives good advice;" and when, as sometimes happens, I am asked to hortate my younger fellow-citizens, one of my most emphatic lessons is a Reverence for Womanhood, even in its least ideal aspects. This, I declare to be an essential attribute of the ideal character—of that manhood, at once beautiful and good, to which the philosophers have taught us to aspire; and, lest I should seem to be violating my own oft-repeated precept, I tear myself from a fascinating theme.

V

DOCTORS AND DOCTORING

Sydney Smith, who was fond of quacking his parishioners, and had a poor opinion of "professional and graduated homicides," observes that "the Sixth Commandment is suspended by one medical diploma from the North of England to the South." Personally, I have experienced the attentions of the Faculty north, south, east, and west, and I began in London. In my first appearance on this planet I was personally conducted by a smart gentleman, who came straight from a dinner-party, in a large white cravat and turquoise studs. Those studs still exist, and have descended, with the practice, to his grandson. May they beam on births more propitious than my own.

My knowledge of the first act of life's drama is necessarily traditional. But, as I approach the second, memory begins to operate. I seem to remember a black silhouette of a gentleman in an elbow-chair, with a pigtail and knee-breeches; and this icon was revered as the likeness of "old Doctor P——." This "old Dr. P.'s" son, "Tom P——," was a sturdy stripling of seventy odd, who had never used a stethoscope, and dismissed a rival practitioner who talked about heart-sounds as "an alarmist." To these succeeded a third generation of the same drug-stained dynasty, represented to me by a gentleman in shiny black, who produced a large gold watch when he felt one's pulse, and said "Hah!" when he looked at one's tongue. These three generations, for something more than a century, monopolized all the best practice of Loamshire, were immensely respected, and accumulated a great deal of money. Echoes of the dialogue between doctor and patient still haunt the ear of memory:—

Nervous and Dyspeptic Lady. "Do you know, Dr. P., I felt so very uncomfortable after luncheon—quite a sensation of sinking through the floor. Of course I had some brandy and water—about half and half—at once, but I feel that I ought to have a little champagne at dinner. Nothing helps me so much."

Dr. P. "Your ladyship is no inconsiderable physician. I was about to make the same suggestion. But pray be careful that it is a dry wine."

All this was very comfortable and friendly, and tended to promote the best relations between doctor and patient. I do not recollect that the doctor was supposed to effect cures; but his presence at a deathbed created the pleasant sense that all had been done which could be done, and that the patient was dying with the dignity proper to his station. It may be remarked, in passing, that the two elder generations did all their rounds, early and late, summer and winter, on horseback; while the third subsided into a brougham drawn by a pair of horses afflicted with stringhalt, and presumably bought cheap on account of that infirmity.

So much for the men. What was their method? To my infant palate the oils of castor and cod were as familiar as mother's milk. I dwelt in a land flowing with rhubarb and magnesia. The lively leech was a household pet. "Two nocturnes in blue and an arrangement in black," as the Æsthete said, were of frequent occurrence. But other parts of the system were more palatable. I seem to have drunk beer from my earliest infancy. A glass of port wine at eleven, with a teaspoonful of bark in it, was the recognized tonic, and brandy (which the doctor, who loved periphrasis, always called "the domestic stimulant") was administered whenever one looked squeamish, while mulled claret was "exhibited" as a soporific. The notion of pouring all this stuff down a child's throat sounds odd to a generation reared on Apollinaris and barley-water, but it had this one advantage—that when one grew up it was impossible to make one drunk.

From childhood we pass on to schooldays. Wild horses should not drag from me the name of the seminary where I was educated, for its medical arrangements left a good deal to be desired. There were three doctors in this place, and they shared the care of some six hundred boys. Dr. A. was certainly very old, and was reputed to be very good, insomuch that his admirers said that, if they were dying, they should wish to have Dr. A. with them, as he was better than any clergyman. If, however, they were so carnally-minded as to wish to recover, they sent for Dr. B., a bluff gentleman, who told his patients that they were not half as ill as they thought, and must pull themselves together—a prescription which, if there was nothing the matter, answered admirably. The third was a grievous gentleman, who took a dark view of life, and, sitting by my sick-bed, would inform me of the precarious condition of a schoolfellow, who, to use his own phrase, was "slipping through his fingers," and "had no more constitution than a fly." Regarding this triumvirate in the light of my subsequent experience, I cannot affect surprise that there were fifteen deaths among the boys during the five years that I was in the school.

From the anonymous school I proceeded to an anonymous university, where the medical world was dominated by the bland majesty of Sir Omicron Pie (the name is Trollope's, but it will serve). Who that ever saw them can forget that stately bearing, that Jove-like brow, that sublime air of omniscience and omnipotence? Who that ever heard it, that even flow of mellifluous eloquence and copious narrative? Who that ever experienced it, the underlying kindness of heart?

A nervous undergraduate is ushered into the consulting-room, and the great man advances with a paternal smile.

"Mr. Bumpstead? Ah! I think I was at school with your good father. No? Then it must have been your uncle. You are very like him. We ran a neck-and-neck race at the University. I won the Gold Medal, and he was proximè. In those days I little thought of settling down in Oxbridge. I had destined myself for a London practice; but Sir Thomas Watson—you have heard of 'Watson's style'? He was the Cicero of Medicine—well, Watson said, 'No, my dear Pie, it won't do. In ten years you will be at the head of the profession, and will have made £100,000. But, mark my words, the blade will wear out the scabbard. You are not justified in risking your life.' I was disappointed, of course. All young men like the idea of fame. But I saw that Watson was right, and I came here, and found my life's work. The Medical School was then in a very decayed condition, and I have made it what it is. Why am I telling you all this——?"

(Enter the butler.) "Please, Sir Omicron, you've an appointment at Battle-axe Castle at four o'clock, and the carriage is at the door."

Sir O. P. "Ah! well. I must tell you the rest another day. Let me see, what was the matter? Palpitation? Let me listen for a moment. It is as I thought—only a little functional irritability. Lead a sensible life; avoid excess; cultivate the philosophic temper. Take this prescription, and come again next week. Thank you, thank you."

Fortified by four years of Sir Omicron's care, I came up to London somewhere between 1870 and 1880. The practice of the West End was then divided between three men—Sir A. B., Sir C. D., and Sir E. F.

Sir A. B. was bluff and brutal, fashioned himself on the traditions of Abernethy, and ruled his patients by sheer terrorism. He had an immense influence over hysterical women and weak-minded men, and people who might otherwise have resented his ursine manner were reconciled to it by the knowledge that he officially inspected the most illustrious Tongue in the kingdom.

His principal rival was Sir C. D., who ruled by love. "Well, my dear sir, there is not much the matter. A day or two's hunting will set you right. You don't ride? Ah! well, it doesn't much matter. A fortnight at Monte Carlo will do just as well. All you want is change of scene and plenty of amusement."

"As to your ladyship's diet, it should be light and nutritious. I should recommend you to avoid beefsteaks and boiled mutton. A little turtle soup, some devilled whitebait, and a slice of a turkey truffe would be the sort of dinner to suit you. If the insomnia is at all urgent, I have found a light supper of pâté de foie gras work wonders."

Sir E. F. operated on a theological system. His discourse on the Relations between Natural and Revealed Religion profoundly impressed those who heard it for the first time, and his tractate on Medical Missions in India ran into a third edition. In his waiting-room one found, instead of last month's Punch or the Christmas number of Madame, devotional works inscribed "From his grateful patient, the author." In his consulting-room a sacred picture of large dimensions crowned the mantelpiece, and signed portraits of bishops whom he had delivered from dyspepsia adorned the walls. Ritualistic clergy frequented him in great numbers, and—what was better still—recommended their congregations to the "beloved physician." Ecclesiastically-minded laymen delighted in him, and came away with a comfortable conviction, syllogistically arranged, that (1) one's first duty is to maintain one's health; (2) whatever one likes is healthy; therefore (3) one's first duty is to like exactly as one likes.

A water-drinking adherent of Mr. Gladstone once saw that eminent man crowning a banquet of champagne with a glass of undeniable port. "Oh! Mr. Gladstone," he exclaimed in the bitterness of his soul, "what would Sir E. F. say if he could see you mixing your liquors?" The great man's defence was ready to his hand: "Sir E. F. assures me that, if I let fifteen minutes elapse between two kinds of wine, there is no mixture."

Somehow these lively oracles of Sir E. F.'s, with which I was always coming in contact, left on my mind a dim impression that he must have been related to the doctor who attended Little Nell and prescribed the remedies which the landlady had already applied: "Everybody said he was a very shrewd doctor indeed, and knew perfectly well what people's constitutions were, which there appears some reason to suppose he did."

VI

MOURNING

My infant mind was "suckled in a creed outworn," in the form of a book called, by a strange misnomer, a "Book of Useful Knowledge." It was there stated, if my memory serves me, that "the Chinese mourn in yellow, but Kings and Cardinals mourn in purple." In what do modern English people mourn? That is the subject of to-day's enquiry.

Lord Acton, in one of his most impressive passages, speaks of England as living under "institutions which incorporate tradition and prolong the reign of the dead." But the very notion of "prolonging the reign of the dead" is an anachronism in an age which forgets its friends the moment it has buried them. "Out of sight, out of mind" is an adage which nowadays verifies itself with startling rapidity. Mourning is as much out of date as Suttee; and, as to the Widow's Cap, the admirable Signora Vesey Neroni in "Barchester Towers" was only a little in advance of her age when she exclaimed, "The death of twenty husbands should not make me undergo such a penance. It is as much a relic of paganism as the sacrifice of a Hindoo woman at the burning of her husband's body. If not so bloody, it is quite as barbarous and quite as useless."

In days gone by, a death in a family extinguished all festivity. Engagements were cancelled, social plans were laid aside, and the mourners went into retreat for a twelvemonth. Men wore black trousers; women swathed themselves in black crape. "Mourning Jewellery"—hideous combinations of jet and bogwood—twinkled and jingled round the necks of the bereaved, and widows wrote on letter-paper which was virtually black, with a small white space in the middle of the sheet. Harry Foker, we know, honoured his father's memory by having his brougham painted black; and I have known a lady who, when she lost her husband, had her boudoir lined with black velvet, after the fashion of Lord Glenallan in "The Antiquary."

But nowadays people shrink (with amiable considerateness) from thus inflicting their griefs on their friends; and if (as we must in charity assume) they feel emotion, they studiously conceal it in their own bosoms. The ball follows the funeral with a celerity and a frank joyousness which suggest a Wake; and the keen pursuers of pleasure protest, with quite a religious air, that for their own part they would think it absolutely wicked to sorrow as those without hope. Weedless widows, becomingly "gowned," as Ladies' Papers say, in pale grey or black and white, sacrifice to propriety by forswearing the Opera or the Racecourse for twelve months or so, but find a little fresh air on the River or at Hurlingham absolutely necessary for health; and, if they dine out quietly or even give a little dance at home, are careful to protest that they have lost all pleasure in life, but must struggle to keep up for the sake of the dear children. Surely, as Master Shallow says, "good phrases are, and ever were, very commendable." The old-fashioned manifestations of mourning were no doubt overdone, but the modern disregard of the dead seems to me both heartless and indecent.

The supreme exemplar of Mourning was, of course, Queen Victoria. During her reign, and in her personal practice, the custom of Mourning reached its highest point of persistence and solemnity. In 1844 Lady Lyttelton, who was governess to the present King and his sister the Princess Royal, wrote from Court, "We are such a 'boundless contiguity of shade' just now." The immediate cause of that shade was the death of Prince Albert's father; and although in Queen Victoria's life there was a fair allowance of sunshine, still, as Ecclesiastes said, "the clouds return after the rain"; and, in a family where cousinship is recognized to the third and fourth generation, the "shade" of mourning must constantly recur. The late Duke of Beaufort, head of the most numerous family in the Peerage, always wore a black band round his white hat, because, as he said, one of his cousins was always dead and he would not be wanting in respect for the deceased; and, similarly, a Maid of Honour once said to me, "I never see the Queen's jewels, because she is almost always in mourning for some German prince or princess, and then she only wears black ornaments." Of course, in a case where there was this natural predisposition to mournful observance, the supreme loss of a husband meant a final renunciation of the world and its gaieties. I suppose it is no exaggeration to say that from her bereavement in 1861 to her death in 1901 Queen Victoria lived in unbroken communion with the unseen but unforgotten. The necessary business of the State was not, even for a week, laid aside; but pomps and ceremonies and public appearances are profoundly distasteful to shattered nerves and broken hearts. Yielding to the urgent advice of her Ministers, Queen Victoria emerged from four years' seclusion to open the new Parliament in 1866; and her reward was reaped in the following December, when a peculiarly rancorous politician rebuked her at a great meeting of reformers in St. James's Hall for a lack of popular sympathies. It was then that, on the spur of the moment, John Bright, who himself had known so well what bereavement meant, uttered his chivalrous defence of the absent and lonely Sovereign:—

"I am not accustomed to stand up in defence of those who are possessors of crowns. But I could not sit and hear that observation without a sensation of wonder and of pain. I think there has been, by many persons, a great injustice done to the Queen in reference to her desolate and widowed position. And I venture to say this—that a woman, be she the Queen of a great realm or be she the wife of one of your labouring men, who can keep alive in her heart a great sorrow for the lost object of her life and affection, is not at all likely to be wanting in a great and generous sympathy with you."

Admirable and reverend as was this abiding sorrow, contemporary observers felt that its outward manifestations were not always harmonious. The Mausoleum at Frogmore is not a "poem in stone," and the Monument of Gilt opposite the Albert Hall has supplied the frivolous with an appropriate pun. Landseer, who, when once he forsook his stags and deerhounds, was surely the most debased painter of a hideous age, attained his worst in a picture of the Slopes at Windsor circa 1862. Under an inky sky, in the forefront of a sunless landscape, stands a black pony, and on its back is a lady dressed in the deepest weeds, with a black riding-skirt and a black bonnet. A retainer in subfusc kilt holds the pony's head, a dingy terrier looks on with melancholy eyes, and, in the distant background, two darkly-clad princesses shiver on a garden-seat. The only spot of colour in the scene is a red despatch-box, and the whole forms the highest tribute of English art to a national disaster and a Queenly sorrow.

Black, and intensely black, were all the trappings of courtly woe—black crape, black gloves, black feathers, black jewellery. The State-robes were worn no longer; the State-coach stood unused in the coach-house. The footmen wore black bands round their arms. It was only by slow degrees, and on occasions of high and rare solemnity, that white lace and modest plumes and diamonds and decorations were permitted to enliven the firmament of courtly woe. But we of the twentieth century live in an age of æsthetic revival, and, though perhaps we do not mourn so heartily, we certainly mourn more prettily. One lady at least there is who knows how to combine the sincerity of sorrow with its becoming manifestation; and Queen Alexandra in mourning garb is as delightful a vision as was Queen Alexandra in her clothing of wrought gold, when she knelt before the altar of Westminster Abbey and bowed her head to receive her diamond crown.

Queen Victoria's devotion to the memory of those whom she had lost had one definite consequence which probably she little contemplated. The annual service, conducted in the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore on the anniversary of the Prince Consort's death, accustomed English people to the idea, which since the Reformation had become strangely unfamiliar, of devotional commemoration of the Departed. To the Queen's religious instincts, deeply tinged as they had been by Prince Albert's Lutheranism, such commemorations were entirely natural; for German Protestantism has always cherished a much livelier sense of the relation between the living and the departed than was realized by English Puritanism. The example set in high quarters quickly spread. Memorial Services became an established form of English mourning. Beginning with simple prayers and hymns, they gradually developed into Memorial Eucharists. The splendid, wailing music of the Dies Iræ was felt to be the Christian echo of the Domine, Refugium; and the common instinct of mourning humanity found its appropriate expression when, over the coffin of Prince Henry of Battenberg, the choir of St. George's Chapel sang the Russian hymn of supplication, "Give rest, O Christ, to Thy servant with Thy Saints."

VII

WILLS

If there is any one still left who knows his "Christian Year," he will remember that Keble extolled "a sober standard of feeling" as a special virtue of the English Prayer-book. I have always thought that this "sober standard" is peculiarly well exemplified by the rubric about Will-making in the Order for the Visitation of the Sick: "If the sick person hath not before disposed of his goods, let him then be admonished to make his Will and to declare his Debts, what he oweth and what is owing unto him, for the better discharging of his conscience and the quietness of his Executors. But men should often be put in remembrance to take order for the settling of their temporal estates whilst they are in health." There is something in these directions which is curiously English and commonplace and unrhapsodical, and therefore exactly congruous with the temper of a people who have never set a high value on unpractical religions. To this general duty of Will-making there may, of course, be exceptions. Thus Dr. Pusey in his old age, when his family was reduced to one and he had no possessions left except his books, said: "In a case like mine, the Law is the best willmaker." A pietistic admirer, who had caught the words imperfectly, in relating them substituted "Lord" for "Law"; but the substitution did not really affect the sense. In cases where no great interests are involved and the requirements of justice are not altogether clear, we can wisely leave the eventual fate of our possessions to "God's scheme for governing the Universe, by men miscalled Chance."

There is, I believe, a certain school of economic reformers who would wholly abolish the prerogative of Will-making, and would decree that whatever a man leaves behind him should pass automatically to his children, or, failing them, to the State. On the social and fiscal results of such a system I forbear to speculate; but, as a sincere friend to Literature in all its branches, I would ask, if that were law, what would become of the Novelists and the Playwrights? The law of Stageland has been codified for us by the laborious care of Mr. Jerome K. Jerome, and among its best-established principles seem to be these: If a man dies without leaving a will, then all his property goes to the nearest villain; but, if a man dies and leaves a will, then all his property goes to whoever can get possession of that will. Here are the raw materials of dramatic litigation enough to hold the Stage for a century; and ill would it fare with the embarrassed playwright if a mechanical process of law were substituted for the strange possibilities of Will-making, with its startling caprices, its incalculable miscarriages, and its eventual triumph of injured innocence. Then again, as to Fiction. Foul fall the day when our fiction-writers shall be unable to traffic any longer in testamentary mystification. How would their predecessors have fared if they had laboured under such a disability? I am by nature too cautious to "intromit with" the mysteries of Scotch law, and in the romances of the beloved Sir Walter the complications of Entail and of Will-making are curiously intertwined. Certainly it was under the provisions of an entail that Harry Bertram recovered the estates of Ellangowan, and I am inclined to think that it was an Entail which prompted the Countess of Glenallan to her hideous crime; but it was by will that Miss Margaret Bertram devised the lands of Singleside, and it was under old Sir Hildebrand's will that Francis Osbaldistone succeeded to Osbaldistone Hall.

Even greater are the obligations of our English novelists to the testamentary law. Miss Edgeworth made admirable use of it in "Almeria." Had Englishmen no power of making wills, the "wicked Lord Hertford" could not have executed the notorious instrument which gave such unbounded delight to the scandalmongers of 1842-1843, and then Lord Beaconsfield could not have drawn his Hogarth-like picture of the reading of Lord Monmouth's will in "Coningsby." Thackeray did not traffic very much in wills, though, to be sure, Jos Sedley left £1000 to Becky Sharp, and the opportune discovery of Lord Ringwood's will in the pocket of his travelling-carriage simplified Philip's career. The insolvent swindler Dr. Firmin, who had robbed his son and absconded to America, left his will "in the tortoiseshell secretaire in the consulting-room, under the picture of Abraham offering up Isaac." Dickens was a great Will-maker. We know that if Dick Swiveller had been a steadier youth he would have inherited more than £150 a year from his aunt Rebecca. That loyal-hearted lover Mr. Barkis, in spite of all rebuffs, made the obdurate Peggotty his residuary legatee. Mr. Finching left "a beautiful will," and Madeline Bray was the subject of a very complicated one. Mr. Dorrit's unexpected fortune accrued to him, I think, as Heir-at-law; but the litigation in Jarndyce v. Jarndyce arose, as all the world knows, out of a disputed will; and the Thellusson Will Case, on which Dickens relied, in later years supplied Henry Kingsley with the plot of "Reginald Hetherege." Perhaps Dickens's best piece of Will-making is given in the case of Mr. Spenlow, who, being a practitioner in Doctors' Commons, spoke about his own will with "a serenity, a tranquillity, a calm sunset air" which quite affected David Copperfield; and then shattered all poor David's hopes by dying intestate.

Anthony Trollope made good use of a Will and a Codicil in the plot of "Orley Farm." George Eliot, whose disagreeable characters always seem a good deal nearer life than her heroes and heroines, made Mr. Casaubon behave very characteristically in the odious will by which he tried to prevent Dorothea from marrying Will Ladislaw; and her picture of the disappointment which fell upon the company when Peter Featherstone's will was read is perhaps her best achievement in the way of humour. "Nobody present had a farthing; but Mr. Trumbull had the gold-headed cane," which, considered as an acknowledgment of his professional services to the deceased, he was ungrateful enough to call "farcical."

The Law of Settlement and Entail is no part of our present study; but it may be remarked in passing that the legal Opinion on the Base Fee by which Harold Transome in "Felix Holt" held the Transome Estates was written, at George Eliot's request, by a young Chancery Barrister, who still survives, a brilliant figure in the world of Letters.

This is enough, and perhaps more than enough, about Wills in fiction; but Wills in real life are fully as interesting. The late Sir Charles Butt, who presided over the Divorce Court and the Probate Court, once told me that, though the aspect of human nature which is exhibited in Divorce is not ideally beautiful, it is far less repulsive than that which is disclosed by Probate. None of the stories which one has read about forged wills, forced wills, wills made under pressure, wills made under misrepresentation, are too strange to be true. A century ago the daughter of a great landowner in the North of England succeeded to his wealth under circumstances which, to put it mildly, caused surprise. In later life she had a public quarrel with a high-born but intemperate dame, who concluded the colloquy by observing, with mordant emphasis, "Well, at any rate I didn't hold my dying father's hand to make him sign a will he never saw, and then murder the Butler to prevent his telling." "Ouida," or Miss Braddon, or some other novelist of High Life might, I think, make something of this scene.

Spiteful Wills—wills which, by rehearsing and revoking previous bequests, mortify the survivors when the testator is no longer in a position to do so viva voce—form a very curious branch of the subject. Lord Kew was a very wealthy peer of strict principles and peculiarly acrid temper, and, having no wife or children to annoy, he "took it out," as the saying is, of his brothers, nephews, and other expectant kinsfolk. One gem from his collection I recall, in some such words as these: "By a previous will I had left £50,000 to my brother John; but, as he has sent his son to Oxford instead of Cambridge, contrary to my expressed wish, I reduce the legacy to £500." May the earth lie light on that benevolent old despot! Eccentricities of bequest, again, might make a pleasant chapter. The present writer, though not yet in tottering age, can recall an annuitant whose claim to £20 a year was founded (in part) on the skill with which he had tied his master's pigtail, and that master died in 1830. The proverbial longevity of annuitants was illustrated in the case of a grey parrot, for whose maintenance his departed mistress left £10 a year. The bird was not very young when the annuity began to accrue; and, as years went on and friends dropped off, he began to feel the loneliness of his lot. With a tenderness of heart which did them infinite credit, the good couple to whose care the bird had been left imported a companion exactly like himself to cheer his solitude. Before long one of the parrots died, and the mourners remarked that these younger birds had not half the constitution of the older generation. So, as long as they lived, the parrot lived, and the pension lived also.

Let my closing word on Wills bear the authority of a great name. To a retailer of news who informed him that Lord Omnium, recently deceased, had left a large sum of money to charities, Mr. Gladstone replied with characteristic emphasis: "Thank him for nothing! He was obliged to leave it. He couldn't carry it with him."

VIII

PENSIONS

"There is no living in this country under twenty thousand a year—not that that suffices, but it entitles one to ask a pension for two or three lives." This was the verdict of Horace Walpole, who, as Sir George Trevelyan antithetically says, "lived in the country and on the country during more than half a century, doing for the country less than half a day's work in half a year." Talleyrand said that no one could conceive how enjoyable a thing existence was capable of being who had not belonged to the Ancienne Noblesse of France before the Revolution; but really the younger son of an important Minister, General, Courtier, or Prelate under our English Georges had a good deal to be thankful for. It is pleasant to note the innocent candour with which, in Walpole's manly declaration, one enormity is made to justify another. A father who held great office in Church or State or Law gave, as a matter of course, all his most desirable preferments to his sons. These preferments enabled the sons to live in opulence at the public charge, their duties being performed by deputy. The Clerk of the Rolls and the Clerk of the Hanaper had no personal contact with the mysterious articles to which they are attached. The Clerk of the Irons, the Surveyor of the Meltings, and the Accountant of Slops lived far remote from such "low-thoughtéd cares." The writer of this book deduces his insignificant being from a gentleman who divided with a brother the lucrative sinecure of Scavenger of Dublin, though neither ever set foot in that fragrant city. A nephew of Lord-Chancellor Thurlow (who survived till 1874) drew pensions for abolished offices to the amount of £11,000 a year; and a son of Archbishop Moore was Principal Registrar of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury from his boyhood till the abolition of his Court in 1858, when he was pensioned off with £10,000 a year.

When the sands of life were running in the glass, it was customary for a filial placeman to obtain further pensions for his sons and daughters, on the obvious plea that it was cruel to cast young men and women, who had been reared in comfort on the mercies of a rough world. Thus the golden chain of Royal bounty held at least three lives together. The grandfather was First Lord of the Treasury or Chancellor of the Exchequer or Paymaster-General, and into his personal profits it would be invidious, even indecent, to enquire. He might make his eldest son, while still a boy at Eton, Clerk of the Estreats, and his second, before he took his degree at Cambridge, Usher of the Exchequer. Thus Lord-Chancellor Erskine made his son Secretary of Presentations when he was eighteen, and Charles Greville was appointed Secretary of Jamaica (where he never set his foot) before he was twenty. And then when, after fifty or sixty years of blameless enjoyment, the amiable sinecurist was nearing his last quarter-day, a benevolent Treasury intervened to save his maiden daughters or orphan nieces from pecuniary embarrassment. It was of such "near and dear relations" of a public man that Sydney Smith affirmed that their "eating, drinking, washing, and clothing cost every man in the United Kingdom twopence or threepence a year"; and, to the critics who deprecated this commercial way of regarding the situation, he replied, with characteristic vigour: "I have no idea that the Sophias and Carolines of any man breathing are to eat national veal, to drink public tea, to wear Treasury ribands, and then that we are to be told that it is coarse to animadvert upon this pitiful and eleemosynary splendour. If this is right, why not mention it? If it is wrong, why should not he who enjoys the ease of supporting his sisters in this manner bear the shame of it?" In thus writing of the Pension List as it stood in 1807, the admirable Sydney was at once the successor of Burke and the forerunner of Lord Grey. In 1780 Burke had addressed all the resources of his genius to the task of restoring the independence of Parliament by economical reform. It was, as Mr. Morley says, the number of sinecure places and unpublished pensions which "furnished the Minister with an irresistible lever." Burke found that "in sweeping away those factitious places and secret pensions he would be robbing the Court of its chief implements of corruption and protecting the representative against his chief motive in selling his country." His power of oratory was reinforced by a minute knowledge of all the shady and shabby abuses, all the manifold and complicated corruptions, which had accumulated under the protection of the Royal name. The reformer's triumph was signal and complete. Vast numbers of sinecures were swept away, but some remained. The Pension List was closely curtailed, but pensions were still conferred. No public servant ever more richly earned a provision for his old age and decrepitude than Burke himself; but when, broken by years and sorrows, he accepted a pension from the Crown, a Whig Duke of fabulous wealth, just thirty years old, had the temerity to charge him with a discreditable departure from his former principles of economic reform. The Duke was a booby: but his foolhardiness enriched English literature with "A Letter to a Noble Lord on the Attacks made on Mr. Burke and his Pension." To read that Letter, even after the lapse of 110 years, is to realize that, in spite of all corruption and all abuse, pecuniary rewards for political service need not be dishonourable or unreasonable.

But corruption and abuse there were, and in sufficient quantities to justify all the bitter fun which "Peter Plymley" poured upon the Cannings, the Jenkinsons, and the Percevals. The reform of the Pension List became a cardinal object of reforming Radicals; and politicians like Joseph Hume, publicists like Albany Fonblanque, pursued it with incessant perseverance,

"Till Grey went forth in 'Thirty-two to storm Corruption's hold."

In 1834 the first Reformed Parliament overhauled the whole system and brought some curious transactions into the light of day. Whereas up to that time the Pension List amounted to £145,000 a year, it was now reduced to £75,000; and its benefits were restricted to "servants of the Crown and public, and to those who by their useful discoveries in science or attainments in literature and the arts had merited the gracious consideration of their Sovereign and the gratitude of their country." Vested interests were, of course, respected; for had we not even compensated the slaveholders? Two years ago one of these beneficiaries survived in a serene old age, and, for all I know, there may be others still spared to us, for, as Mr. G. A. Sala truly remarked, it never is safe to say that any one is dead, for if you do he is sure to write from the country and say he is only ninety-seven and never was better.

A typical representative of the unreformed system was John Wilson Croker (1780-1857), whose literary efforts Macaulay trounced, and whose political utterances were thus described by Lord Beaconsfield:—

"There never was a fellow for giving a good hearty kick to the people like Rigby. Himself sprung from the dregs of the populace, this was disinterested. What could be more patriotic and magnanimous than his jeremiads over the fall of the Montmorencis and the Crillions, or the possible catastrophe of the Percys and the Seymours? The truth of all this hullabaloo was that Rigby had a sly pension which, by an inevitable association of ideas, he always connected with the maintenance of an aristocracy. All his rigmarole dissertations on the French Revolution were impelled by this secret influence; and, when he moaned like a mandrake over Nottingham Castle in flames, the rogue had an eye all the while to quarter-day."

It was an evil day for those who love to grow rich upon the public money when Mr. Gladstone became the controller of the National Purse. One of his first acts was to revise the system of political pensions, which by an Act of 1869 was reconstituted as it stands to-day. There are now three classes of persons entitled to pensions for services rendered in political office; and the scale is arranged on that curious principle which also regulates the "tips" to servants in a private house—that the larger your wage is, the larger your gratuity shall be. Thus a Minister who has drawn £5000 a year is entitled after four years' service to a pension of £2000 a year; he who has drawn £3000 a year for six years is entitled to £1200 a year; while he who has laboured for ten years for the modest remuneration of £1000 a year must be content with a pittance of £800 a year. Qui habet, dabitur ei; but with this restriction—that only four pensions of any one class can run concurrently.

Politicians who had been brought up in the "spacious days" and generous methods of the older dispensation were by no means enamoured of what they used to call "Gladstone's cheeseparing economies." Sir William Gregory used to relate how, when, as a child, he asked Lord Melbourne for a fine red stick of official sealing-wax, that genial Minister thrust it into his hand, together with a bundle of quill pens, saying, "You can't begin too early. All these things belong to the public, and your business in life must be to get out of the public all you can." An eminent statesman, trained in these traditions, had drawn from very early days a pension for an abolished office in Chancery. In due course he became a Cabinet Minister, and, when he fell from that high estate, he duly pocketed his £2000 a year. Later he came into a very large income, but this he obligingly saved for his nephews and nieces, living meanwhile on his twofold pension.

I will conclude with a pleasanter anecdote. Until half-way through the last century it was customary to give a Speaker on retiring from the House of Commons a pension of £2000 a year for two lives. It is related that in 1857 Mr. Speaker Shaw-Lefevre, on his elevation to the peerage as Lord Eversley, said that he could not endure the thought of imposing a burden on posterity, and would therefore take £4000 a year for his own life instead of £2000 a year for two. This public-spirited action was highly commended, and, as he lived till 1888, virtue was, as it ought always to be, its own reward.

IX

THE SEASON AS IT WAS

The subject is worthy to be celebrated both in verse and in prose. Exactly sixty years ago Bulwer-Lytton, in his anonymous satire "The New Timon," thus described the nocturnal aspect of the West End in that choice period of the year which to us Londoners is pre-eminently "The Season":—

"O'er Royal London, in luxuriant May,
While lamps yet twinkle, dawning creeps the day.
Home from the hell the pale-eyed gamester steals;
Home from the ball flash jaded Beauty's wheels;
From fields suburban rolls the early cart;
So rests the Revel—so awakes the Mart."

Twenty-four years later Lord Beaconsfield, in "Lothair," gave a vivid sketch of the same scenes as beheld by daylight:—

"Town was beginning to blaze. Broughams whirled and bright barouches glanced, troops of social cavalry cantered and caracolled in morning rides, and the bells of prancing ponies, lashed by delicate hands, gingled in the laughing air. There were stoppages in Bond Street—which seems to cap the climax of civilization, after crowded clubs and swarming parks."

It is curious that of the two descriptions the earlier needs much less revision than the later. Lamps still "twinkle" (though, to be sure, they are electric, whereas when Bulwer-Lytton wrote gas had barely ousted oil from its last fastness in Grosvenor Square). "Hells," though more euphemistically named, still invite the domiciliary visits of our much-aspersed police. "Beauty" dances even more vigorously than in 1846, for Waltzes and Kitchen-Lancers and Washington Posts have superseded the decorous quadrilles which our mothers loved. And still the market-gardens of Acton and Ealing and Hounslow send their "towering squadrons" of waggons laden heavens-high with the fruits and vegetables for to-morrow's luncheon. In this merry month of May 1906 an observer, standing at Hyde Park Corner "when the night and morning meet," sees London substantially as Bulwer-Lytton saw it.

But, when we turn to Lord Beaconsfield's description, the changes wrought by six-and-thirty years are curiously marked. "Bright barouches glanced." In the present day a Barouche, the handsomest and gracefullest of all open carriages, is as rare as an Auk's Egg or an original Folio of Shakespeare. Only two or three survive. One, richly dight in royal crimson, bears the Queen, beautiful as Cleopatra in her barge. In another, almost imperially purple, Lady Londonderry sits enthroned; a third, palely blue as the forget-me-not, carries Lady Carysfort; but soon the tale of barouches ends. Victorias and landaus and "Clarences" and "Sociables" make the common throng of carriages, and their serried ranks give way to the impetuous onrush of the noxious Motor or the milder impact of the Electric Brougham.

"Troops of social cavalry" were, when Lord Beaconsfield wrote "Lothair," the characteristic glories of Rotten Row; but horses and horsemanship alike have waned. Men take their constitutional canter in costumes anciently confined to rat-catching, and the general aspect of Rotten Row suggests the idea of Mounted Infantry rather than of "Cavalry." Alongside the ride forty years ago ladies drove their pony-phaetons—a pretty practice and a pretty carriage; but both have utterly disappeared, and the only bells that "gingle in the laughing air" are the warning signals of the Petrol Fiend, as, bent on destruction, he swoops down from Marble Arch to Piccadilly. Does a captious critic gaze enquiringly on the unfamiliar verb to "gingle"? It was thus that Lord Beaconsfield wrote it in "Lothair"; even as in the same high romance he described a lady with a rich bunch of "Stephanopolis" in her hand. It is not for the ephemeral scribbler to correct the orthography of the immortal dead. As to "stoppages in Bond Street," they were isolated and noteworthy incidents in 1870; in 1906, thanks to the admission of omnibuses into the narrow thoroughfare, they are occurrences as regular as the postman's knock or the policeman's mailed tread.

We have seen the aspects in which the London Season presented itself to two great men of yore. Let me now descend to a more personal level. We will imagine ourselves transported back to the year 1880, and to the month of May. A young gentleman—some five-and-twenty summers, as Mr. G. P. R. James would have said, have passed over his fair head—is standing near the steps of St. George's Hospital between the hours of eleven and midnight. He is smartly dressed in evening clothes, with a white waistcoat, a gardenia in his button-hole, and a silver-crutched stick in his hand. He is smoking a cigarette and pondering the question where he shall spend his evening, or, more strictly, the early hours of next day. He is in a state of serene contentment with himself and the world, for he has just eaten an excellent dinner, where plovers' eggs and asparagus have reminded him that the Season has really begun. To the pleasure-seeking Londoner these symptoms of returning summer mean more, far more, than the dogrose in the hedgerow or the first note of the nightingale in the copse. Since dinner he has just looked in at an evening party, which bored him badly, and has "cut" two others where he was not so likely to be missed. And now arises the vital question of the Balls. I use the plural number, for there will certainly be two, and probably three, to choose from. Here, at St. George's Hospital, our youth is at the centre of the world's social concourse. A swift and unbroken stream of carriages is pouring down from Grosvenor Square and Mayfair to Belgrave Square and Eaton Square and Chesham Place, and it meets as it goes the ascending procession which begins in Belgravia and ends in Portman Square. To-night there is a Royal Ball at Grosvenor House, certainly the most stately event of the season; a little dance, exquisitely gay and bright, in Piccadilly; and a gorgeous entertainment in Prince's Gate, where the aspiring Distiller is struggling, with enormous outlay, into social fame. All these have solicited the honour of our young friend's presence, and now is the moment of decision. It does not take long to repudiate Prince's Gate; there will be the best band in London, and ortolans for supper, but there will be no one there that one ever saw before, and it is too sickening to be called "My boy" by that bow-windowed bounder, the master of the house. There remain Grosvenor House and Piccadilly, and happily these can be combined in a harmonious perfection. Grosvenor House shall come first, for the arrival of the Prince and Princess is a pageant worth seeing—the most gracious host and the most beautiful hostess in London ushering the Royal guests, with courtly pomp, into the great gallery, walled with the canvases of Rubens, which serves as the dancing-room. Then the fun begins, and the bright hours fly swiftly, till one o'clock suggests the tender thought of supper, which is served on gold plate and Sèvres china in a garden-tent of Gobelins tapestry. And now it is time for a move; and our youth, extricating himself from the undesired attentions of the linkmen, pops into a hansom and speeds to Piccadilly, where he finds delights of a different kind—no Royalty, no pomp, no ceremony; but a warm welcome, and all his intimate friends, and the nicest girls in London eager for a valse.

As day begins to peep, he drinks his crowning tumbler of champagne-cup, and strolls home under the opalescent dawn, sniffing the fragrance from pyramids of strawberries as they roll towards Covent Garden, and exchanging a friendly "Good night" with the policeman on the beat, who seems to think that "Good morning" would be a more suitable greeting. So to bed, with the cheerful consciousness of a day's work well done, and the even more exhilarating prospect of an unbroken succession of such days, full of feasting and dancing and riding and polo and lawn-tennis, till August stifles the Season with its dust and drives the revellers to Homburg or the moors.

But I awake, and lo! it is a dream, though a dream well founded on reality. For I have been describing the London Season as it was when the world was young.

"When all the world is old, lad,
And all the trees are brown;

And all the sport is stale, lad,
And all the wheels run down;

Creep home, and take your place there,
The spent and maimed among:

God grant you find one face there,
You loved when all was young."

X

THE SEASON AS IT IS

That delicate critic, the late Mr. William Cory, observes in one of his letters that Virgil's

"Sunt lacrymæ rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt"

has its modern equivalent in Wordsworth's

"Men are we, and must grieve when even the shade
Of that which once was great is passed away."

The full luxury of that grief is reserved for those who, a decade hence, shall moralize on "the London Season," for the thing which now we so describe will then have utterly perished, and its name will only arouse a tender and regretful emotion. Even now we have seen its glories fade, and soon it will have shared the fate of those Venetian splendours which Wordsworth mourned. But in the meantime it still exists, though in a vastly different form from that which it wore in mid-Victorian years. Just now I was describing some of the changes which have occurred since the distant days when Bulwer-Lytton and Lord Beaconsfield described London in May; and, following humbly in their wake, I endeavoured to depict it as it was when I had my part in it. But change only yields place to change. Society, like the individuals who compose it, passes onward in perpetual vicissitude. As Shelley says, "Naught may endure but mutability." So the London Season of 1906 differs as notably from the Season of 1880 as the Season of 1880 from that of 1846. Let me catalogue some of the changes and try to account for them. In the first place, the Season is much less exactly circumscribed by dates. In days gone by, it began with the Opening of Parliament, which was always about the 7th of February, and it lasted, with its regular intermissions for Easter and Whitsuntide, till the last week of July. Then Society transported itself in turn to Goodwood, to Cowes, and to a German watering-place or a Scotch moor, according to its physical condition, and it was darkly rumoured that, if people found themselves compelled by domestic or financial reasons to remain in London during August, they sought to escape detection by keeping the windows fronting the street closely shuttered, and lived in their back rooms in unbroken contemplation of the leads and the mews. If you chanced to meet a man in Piccadilly in September, you might be sure that he would be wearing country clothes and would assure you that he was only "passing through" between Doncaster and Scotland. Nowadays the Season has no particular limits. London is nearly as full in December as it is in May. Dinners and plays and suppers at restaurants are as frequent, and, barring the fogs, as bright, at Christmas as at Midsummer. Even in September Clubland is not deserted; and there are people bold enough to defy the world by returning from their summer exodus as early as October. The reason for the change, as for many others like it, is the reduction of territorial incomes. 1880 may be taken as, roughly, the last of the good years for agriculture. The incessant rains of 1879 had even then begun to tell their tale. Tenants were asking for big reductions, and farms hitherto eagerly sought were becoming unlettable. I know a landowner on a great scale who, a year or two later, only pocketed 10 per cent. of his income from land, whereas five years before he would have thought an abatement of 10 per cent. disastrous. All this has told increasingly on social life, for people found themselves unable to keep both a country house and a London house going at the same time, and, being driven to choose between the two, often decided to let the country house and its shooting and make London their headquarters for the whole year. So, by degrees, autumn faded imperceptibly into winter, winter into spring, and spring into summer. Each season in its turn found people dwelling peaceably in their urban habitations, entertaining and being entertained; and so "the Season" lost its sharp edges. The meeting of Parliament brought no perceptible change in the aspect of the town. "High Midsummer Pomps" were no longer so "high" as in former years, but, per contra, there was much more gaiety in the autumn and winter and early spring.

Another cause which has contributed to the effacement of the ancient time-marks is that the Court tends to disregard them. Under the present reign, Windsor Castle has become as much a social centre as Buckingham Palace. There are banquets in St. George's Hall in December, as well as garden-parties on the the Slopes in June; and so, under the action of Royal influence, the social seasons melt into one another, like the hues of the prism. Then, again, the practice of the "Weekend," imported from Lancashire and sanctioned by Westminster, helps to denude the town in summer; for the "end" tends naturally to prolong itself till it overlaps the beginning, and Friday-to-Tuesday parties, treading on the heels of Whitsuntide and to be followed in quick succession by Ascot, make mish-mash of what was aforetime "an entire and perfect chrysolite"—a complete and continuous whole.

In describing my hero of 1880 as he surveyed his evening's amusements and chose the most rewarding, I took for granted that he had at least three balls to choose from. Nowadays he is lucky if he has one. Here again, and conspicuously, agricultural depression has made its mark. In the years between 1870 and 1880, during an unbroken spell of good trade and good harvests, rich people struggled with one another for a vacant night on which to entertain their friends. For example, Lady A. had just brought out a daughter, and wished to give a ball for her benefit. Say that she set her affections on Monday the 28th of May. Before she issued her cards she took counsel with all her friends, for in those days ball-giving mothers were a sort of Limited Company, and all knew one another. She found that Mrs. B. had mentally fixed on Tuesday, 29th, and, if Mrs. C. had thought of Monday, she would be so kind as to take Wednesday, 30th. So all was amicably agreed; there would be no clashing, which would be such a pity and would spoil both balls; and the cards were duly issued. Directly afterwards, as if moved by some occult and fiendish impulse, the Duchess of D—— pounced on Monday, 28th, for a Royal Ball at D—— House, or, worse still because more perilously tempting, for a "very small dance," to which all the nicest young men would go, and where they would stay till three. In the face of such mortifications as these, the emulous hospitalities of the aspiring Distiller were of no account; for the "nice men" would either disregard them, or, having looked in for half-an-hour, would come on to spend the night at the houses where they felt themselves at home.

The hero of 1880, if only he was well connected, well mannered, and sufficiently well known, might fairly reckon on dining six nights out of the seven at a host's expense. Indeed, if he was at all popular, he could safely afford to decline the invitation which old Mr. Wellbore issued six weeks in advance and reserve himself for a livelier meal at shorter notice. Not so to-day. Our young friend, if he has a constitutional objection to paying for his own dinner, must take what he can get in the way of invitations, and not be too particular about the cook or the company. Here the cause of change is not decrease of wealth. As long as there is a balance at the bank, and even when there is none, people will dine; and dinner-giving is the last form of hospitality which Society will let die. But nowadays dinners are made ancillary to Bridge. If our friend cannot afford to lose £50 in an evening he will not be asked to dine at a house which reckons itself as belonging to "the Mode"; or if, for old acquaintance' sake, he is allowed to find a place at the dinner-table, he is compelled to sit all the evening by the least attractive daughter of the house, or to listen to some fogey, too fossilized for Bridge, discoursing on the iniquities of Mr. Birrell's Bill. "Tobacco," said Lord Beaconsfield, "is the Tomb of Love." If he were with us now, he would pronounce that Bridge is the Extinguisher of Hospitality.

Yet once again I note a startling discrepancy between the Season as it was and the Season as it is. Then a young man who wanted air and exercise in the afternoon played tennis at Lord's, or skated at Prince's, or took a gallop in Richmond Park, or, if he was very adventurous and up-to-date, sped out to Hampton Court or Windsor on a bone-shaking bicycle six feet high. All these recreations are possible to him to-day; but all have yielded to motoring. Dressed in the most unbecoming of all known costumes, his expressive eyes concealed by goggles, and his graceful proportions swathed in oilskin, he urges his mad career to Brighton or Stratford or Salisbury Plain. No doubt he has the most fascinating companions in the world, for girls are enthusiastic motorists; but I fancy that Edwin and Angelina presented a more attractive appearance when, neatly dressed and beautifully mounted, they rode in the cool of the evening along the shady side of Rotten Row.

However, I am a kind of social "Old Mortality" rummaging among the tombs of what has been and can be no more, and I fancy that Old Mortality's opinions on youth and beauty would have been justly disregarded.

XI

THE SINS OF SOCIETY

In the year 1870 a flame of religious zeal was suddenly kindled in the West End of London. In that year the Rev. George Howard Wilkinson (now Bishop of St. Andrews) was appointed Vicar of St. Peter's, Eaton Square. The church in the Belgravian district was as dry as tinder; it caught fire from Mr. Wilkinson's fervour, and the fire soon became a conflagration. This is Matthew Arnold's description of the great preacher at the height of his power: "He was so evidently sincere, more than sincere, burnt up with sorrow, that he carried every one with him, and half the church was in tears. I do not much believe in good being done by a man unless he can give light, and Wilkinson's fire is very turbid; but his power of heating, penetrating, and agitating is extraordinary." This description belongs to the year 1872, but it might have been written with equal truth at any date between 1870 and 1883. In all my experience of preaching (which is long, wide, and varied) I have never seen a congregation dominated by its minister so absolutely as the congregation of St. Peter's was dominated by Mr. Wilkinson. I say "congregation" advisedly, for I should think that at least half the seatholders belonged to other parishes. The smartest carriages in London blocked the approach to the church. The great dames of Grosvenor Square and Carlton House Terrace rubbed shoulders with the opulent inhabitants of Tyburnia and South Kensington, Cabinet Ministers fought for places in the gallery, and M.P.'s were no more accounted of than silver in the days of Solomon.

And this was not a mere assemblage of hearers. The congregation of St. Peter's were pre-eminently givers. £4000 a year was the regular product of the alms-bags, let alone the innumerable sums sent privately to the Vicar. "I want a thousand pounds." This simple but emphatic statement from the pulpit one Sunday was succeeded on the following Sunday by the quiet announcement, "I have got a thousand pounds." What was the secret of this attraction? It was entirely personal. It did not in the least depend on theological bias. Mr. Wilkinson belonged to no party. He had begun life as an Evangelical, and he retained the unction and fervour which were characteristic of that school at its best; but he was feeling his way towards a higher churchmanship, and had discarded most of his earlier shibboleths. The fabric was frankly hideous, and the well-meant attempts to make it look less like a barn and more like a church only resulted in something between a mosque and a synagogue. There was no ritualism. The music was too elaborate for the choir, and the curates were feeble beyond all description. The Vicar was everything; and even he had none of the gifts which are commonly supposed to make a Popular Preacher. He was not the least flummery or flowery. He was reserved and dignified in manner, and his language was quite unadorned. His voice was a monotonous moan, occasionally rising into a howl. He was conspicuously free from the tendency to prophesy smooth things, and he even seemed to take a delight in rubbing the pungent lotion of his spiritual satire into the sore places of the hearers' conscience. If Jeremiah had prophesied in a surplice, he would have been like the Prophet of Belgravia; and as for Savonarola, his sermon, as paraphrased in chapter xxiv. of "Romola," might have been delivered, with scarcely a word altered, from the pulpit of St. Peter's.

And here we touch the pith and core of Mr. Wilkinson's preaching. He rebuked the Sins of Society as no one had ventured to rebuke them since the days of Whitefield and the Wesleys. The Tractarian Movement, so heart-searching, so conscience-stirring at Oxford, had succumbed in the fashionable parts of London to the influences which surrounded it, and had degenerated into a sort of easy-going ceremonialism—partly antiquarian, partly worldly, and wholly ineffective for spiritual revival or moral reformation. Into this Dead Sea of lethargy and formalism Mr. Wilkinson burst like a gunboat. He scattered his fire left and right, aimed high and aimed low, blazed and bombarded without fear or favour; sent some crafts to the bottom, set fire to others, and covered the sea with wreckage. In less metaphorical language, he rebuked the sins of all and sundry, from Duchesses to scullery-maids, Premiers to pageboys, octogenarian rakes to damsels in their teens. Then, as now, Society loved to be scolded, and the more Mr. Wilkinson thundered the more it crowded to his feet. "Pay your bills." "Get up when you are called." "Don't stay till three at a ball and then say that you are too delicate for early services." "Eat one dinner a day instead of three, and try to earn that one." "Give up champagne for the season, and what you save on your wine-merchant's bill send to the Mission Field." "You are sixty-five years old and have not been confirmed. Never too late to mend. Join a Confirmation Class at once, and try to remedy, by good example now, all the harm you have done your servants or your neighbours by fifty years' indifference." "Sell that diamond cross which you carry with you into the sin-polluted atmosphere of the Opera, give the proceeds to feed the poor, and wear the only real cross—the cross of self-discipline and self-denial."

These are echoes—faint, indeed, but not, I think, unfaithful—of thirty years ago, and they have suddenly been awoke from their long slumber by the sermons which Father Vaughan has just been preaching at the Jesuits' Church in Farm Street, Mayfair. The good Father, exalting his own church, perhaps a little unduly, at the expense of the Anglican churches in the district, observed complacently that "Farm Street, in spite of its extension, was all too small" for its congregation. For my own part, I do not belong to that fold, and I never wander to strange churches for the pleasure of having my ears tickled; so I only know Father Vaughan's utterances as they reach me through the newspapers. A report in the third person always tends to enfeeble rhetoric; but, in spite of that hindrance, Father Vaughan's style seems to lack nothing in the way of emphasis or directness. Here is a fragment of his sermon preached on Sunday the 10th of June 1906:—

"It was no easy task for the votaries of pleasure when Sunday came round to all of a sudden forget their class distinctions, their privileged sets, their social successes, their worldly goods, and to remember that they were going into the presence of Him before whom man and woman were not what they happened to have, but what they happened to be—that the debutante beauty might be before God less than her maid who waited up half the night for her, nay, less than the meanest scullery-maid below stairs; while the millionaire with means to buy up whole countries might be in God's sight far less pleasing and very much more guilty than the lowest groom in his stable yard."

Not less vigorous was the allocution of June 17.

"If Dives, who was buried in Hell, were to revisit the earth he would most surely have the entrée to London's smartest set to-day. He would be literally pelted with invitations. And why not? Dives, so well groomed and turned out, with such a well-lined larder and so well-stocked a cellar, would be the very ideal host to cultivate. He would 'do you so well,' you would meet the 'right people at his place,' and you could always bring your 'latest friend.' Besides, what a good time one would have at his house-parties, where there would be no fear of being bored or dull!"[5]

And yet again:—

"It was well when the winning-card fell into their hands, for then there was just a chance of some dressmaker or tradesman being paid something on account before becoming bankrupt. With such examples of the misuse of wealth before their eyes, it was a wonder there were not more Socialists than there actually were."

All the memories of my youth have been revived by Father Vaughan. Instead of 1906, 1876; instead of the Gothic gloom of Farm Street, the tawdry glare of St. Peter's, Eaton Square; instead of a Jesuit Father in the pulpit, a vigorous Protestant who renounces the Pope and all his works and glories in the Anglicanism of the Church of England. Grant those differences, which after all are more incidental than essential, and the sermons exactly reproduce those stirring days when the present Bishop of St. Andrews "shook the arsenal" of fashion, "thundered over" London, and achieved, as his admirers said, the supreme distinction of spoiling the London Season.

I am convinced that the Higher Critics of a later age, collating the Wilkinsonian tradition with such fragments as remain of Father Vaughan's discourses, will come to the conclusion that "Wilkinson" never existed (except in Wordsworth's ode to the Spade), but was a kind of heroic figure conceived by a much later generation, which had quivered under the rhetoric of a real person or persons called Vaughan; and the opinion of the learned will be sharply divided on such questions as whether Vaughan was one or many; if one, whether he was a Priest, a Cardinal, a Head Master, or an Independent Minister; or whether he was all four at different stages of his career.

XII

OXFORD

"Once, my dear—but the world was young then—
Magdalen elms and Trinity limes,—

Lissom the oars and backs that swung then,
Eight good men in the good old times—

Careless we and the chorus flung then.

Under St. Mary's chimes!

"Still on her spire the pigeons hover;
Still by her gateway flits the gown;

Ah, but her secret? You, young lover,
Drumming her old ones forth from town,

Know you the secret none discover?

Tell it—when you go down."

What Matthew Arnold did for the interpretation of Oxford through the medium of prose, that Mr. Quiller-Couch has done through the medium of verse. In the poem from which I have just quoted two stanzas he conveys, as no one else has ever conveyed it in poetry, the tender and elusive charm of that incomparable place.

"Know you her secret none can utter—
Hers of the Book, the tripled Crown?"

It is a hard question, and susceptible of some very prosaic and therefore inappropriate answers. The true answer can, I think, only be given by those for whom Oxford lies, half hid, in the enchanted past: "Tell it—when you go down."

Some parts of the spell which Oxford exercises on those who are subjected to her influence are in no sense secret. We perceive them from the day when we first set foot within her precincts, and the sense of them abides with us for ever.

"If less insensible than sodden clay
In a sea-river's bed at ebb of tide,"

all sons of Oxford must realize her material beauty, her historical pre-eminence, her contribution to thought and culture, her influence on the religious life of England.

"Ah, but her secret? You, young lover."

There is nothing secret about all this; it is palpable and manifest; and yet it does not exhaust the spell. Something there is that remains undiscovered, or at best half-discovered—felt and guessed at, but not clearly apprehended—until we have passed away from the "dreaming spires"—the cloisters and the gardens and the river—to that sterner life for which these mysterious enchantments have been preparing us.

"Know you the secret none discover?"

If you do, that is proof that time has done its work and has brought to the test of practical result the influences which were shaping your mind and, still more potently, your heart, between eighteen and twenty-two. What that "secret" is, let an unworthy son of Oxford try to tell.

To begin with a negative, it is not the secret of Nirvana. There are misguided critics abroad in the land who seem to assume that life lived easily in a beautiful place, amid a society which includes all knowledge in its comprehensive survey, and far remote from the human tragedy of poverty and toil and pain, must necessarily be calm. And so, as regards the actual work and warfare of mankind, it may be. The bitter cry of starving Poplar does not very readily penetrate to the well-spread table of an Oxford common-room. In a laburnum-clad villa in the Parks we can afford to reason very temperately about life in cities where five families camp in one room. But when we leave the actualities of life and come to the region of thought and opinion, all the pent energy of Oxford seethes and stirs. The Hebrew word for "Prophet" comes, I believe, from a root which signifies to bubble like water on the flames; and in this fervency of thought and feeling Oxford is characteristically prophetic. It is a tradition that in some year of the passion-torn 'forties the subject for the Newdigate Prize Poem was Cromwell, whereas the subject for the corresponding poem at Cambridge was Plato. In that selection Oxford was true to herself. For a century at least (even if we leave out of sight her earlier convulsions) she has been the battle-field of contending sects. Her air has resounded with party-cries, and the dead bodies of the controversially slain have lain thick in her streets. All the opposing forces of Church and State, of theology and politics, of philosophy and science, of literary and social and economic theory, have contended for mastery in the place which Matthew Arnold, with rare irony, described as "so unruffled by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!" Every succeeding generation of Oxford men has borne its part in these ever-recurring strifes. To hold aloof from them would have been poltroonery. Passionately convinced (at twenty) that we had sworn ourselves for life to each cause which we espoused, we have pleaded and planned and denounced and persuaded; have struck the shrewdest blows which our strength could compass, and devised the most dangerous pitfalls which wit could suggest. Nothing came of it all, and nothing could come, except the ruin of our appointed studies and the resulting dislocation of all subsequent life. But we were obeying the irresistible impulse of the time and the place in which our lot was cast, and we were ready to risk our all upon the venture.

"Never we wince, though none deplore us,
We who go reaping that we sowed;

Cities at cockcrow wake before us—
Hey, for the lilt of the London road!

One look back, and a rousing chorus!

Never a palinode!"

It is when we have finally sung that chorus and have travelled a few miles upon that road, that we learn the secret which we never discovered while as yet Oxford held us in the thick of the fight. We thought then that we were the most desperate partizans; we asked no quarter, and gave none; pushed our argumentative victories to their uttermost consequences, and made short work of a fallen foe. But, when all the old battle-cries have died out of our ears, we begin to perceive humaner voices. All at once we realize that a great part of our old contentions was only sound and fury and self-deception, and that, though the causes for which we strove may have been absolutely right, our opponents were not necessarily villains. In a word, we have learnt the Secret of Oxford. All the time that we were fighting and fuming, the higher and subtler influences of the place were moulding us, unconscious though we were, to a more gracious ideal. We had really learnt to distinguish between intellectual error and moral obliquity. We could differ from another on every point of the political and theological compass, and yet in our hearts acknowledge him to be the best of all good fellows. Without surrendering a single conviction, we came to see the virtue of so stating our beliefs as to persuade and propitiate, instead of offending and alienating. We had attained to that temper which, in the sphere of thought and opinion, is analogous to the crowning virtue of Christian charity.

"Tell it—when you go down."

Lately it has been my privilege to address a considerable gathering of Oxford undergraduates, all keenly alive to the interests and controversies of the present hour, all devotedly loyal to the tradition of Oxford as each understood it, and all with their eyes eagerly fixed on "the wistful limit of the world." With such an audience it was inevitable to insist on the graces and benedictions which Oxford can confer, and to dwell on Mr. Gladstone's dogma that to call a man a "typically Oxford man" is to bestow the highest possible praise.

But this was not all. Something more remained to be said. It was for a speaker who had travelled for thirty years on "the London road" to state as plainly as he could his own deepest obligation to the place which had decided the course and complexion of his life. And, when it was difficult to express that obligation in the pedestrian prose of an after-dinner speech, he turned for succour to the poet who sang of "the secret none discover." Wherever philosophical insight is combined with literary genius and personal charm, one says instinctively, "That man is, or ought to be, an Oxford man." Chiefest among the great names which Oxford ought to claim but cannot is the name of Edmund Burke; and the "Secret" on which we have been discoursing seems to be conveyed with luminous precision in his description of the ideal character: "It is our business ... to bring the dispositions that are lovely in private life into the service and conduct of the commonwealth; so to be patriots as not to forget we are gentlemen; to cultivate friendships and to incur enmities; to have both strong, but both selected—in the one to be placable, in the other immovable." Whoso has attained to that ideal has learnt the "Secret" of Oxford.

XIII

SCHOOLS FOR SHEPHERDS

"The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed."

Why not? Because the Shepherds are so imperfectly trained for their business. This, at any rate, is the testimony of a Canon (sometime Examining Chaplain to a Bishop) who at the Diocesan Conference at Ely the other day declared that the clergy were "not qualified to provide instruction in Church Doctrine for the laity because they were not properly trained"; and further testified that "Nonconformist Ministers were much better trained" than the English Clergy. This testimony from a superior Shepherd is rather startling for the Sheep, and it suggests some interesting comparisons. It is, I take it, unquestionable that Nonconformist ministers and Roman Catholic priests alike have much more of a technical education than is thought necessary for their Anglican brothers. They are, so to say, caught early, and their studies from seventeen or eighteen onwards are directed steadily towards their appointed work in life. A Roman Seminarist learns his Latin and Greek as subsidiary to higher studies; he spends, I believe, two years in Philosophy and four in Theology, and is harassed by incessant examinations. The training of the youth who aspires to the Nonconformist ministry is of much the same kind. "Moral Theology," in other words the Science of the Confessional, he naturally does not learn; but, on the other hand, he is sedulously trained for the work of public speaking and preaching. "If you can't preach," said Spurgeon to his students at Stockwell, "it is a clear proof that God doesn't mean you to be a preacher, and you must choose some other occupation."

Vastly different is the training of the English Curate. Private School, Public School, and University: cricket, football, rowing: elementary Greek and Latin, and a smattering of Law or History—these constitute his "atmosphere," his moral and mental discipline, between the ages of ten and twenty-three. Even more remarkable is his theological equipment. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, he knows absolutely nothing about the Church of which he is to be a minister, her doctrines, history, or practical system. He has been enveloped from his youth up by a hazy atmosphere of Undogmatic Religion. I well remember that an Undergraduate friend of mine, who came to Oxford from Dr. Temple's Sixth Form at Rugby, declined to believe that there are two Sacraments. That there was a religious ceremony called "The Sacrament," for which some people stayed after the ordinary service, he was well aware, as also that infants were ceremonially sprinkled; but that this latter ceremony was a Sacrament he could not be induced to believe. During his last year at Oxford he informed himself better on this and some similar topics, and a year afterwards was preaching, with great acceptance, to a fashionable congregation. From what I knew of my friend's theological attainments, I should imagine that the Bishop's Examination could not have been a very terrifying process; but forty years earlier it must have been even less formidable. The Hon. and Rev. George Spencer (uncle of the present Lord Spencer) was destined from an early age for the Family Living in Northamptonshire. He hunted and shot, and danced, and travelled on the Continent, and held a commission in the Yeomanry. After two years at Trinity College, Cambridge, he took a "Nobleman's Degree," and, when he neared the canonical age of twenty-three, he wrote to the Bishop of Peterborough's Examining Chaplain offering himself for Ordination and asking advice as to his preparation. The examiner—ah, would that there were more like him!—wrote back:—

"It is impossible that I should ever entertain any idea of subjecting a gentleman with whose talents and good qualities I am so well acquainted as I am with yours to any examination except as a matter of form, for which a verse in the Greek Testament and an Article of the Church of England returned into Latin will be amply sufficient."

This reassuring letter was written on the 12th of October 1822, and on the 22nd of December next ensuing George Spencer was ordained Deacon and a year later Priest. "On the evening before the ordination, whilst the Bishop and various clergymen and their ladies and the candidates amused themselves with a rubber of whist, Mr. Spencer refused to play." And the refusal was considered, as perhaps it was, noteworthy.

The Movement which issued from Oxford in 1833 introduced some improvement into the method of conducting ordinations, as into other departments of the Church's work. The examination became, though not yet very serious, at least a little less farcical, and some attempt was made in charges and sermons to urge upon the candidates the gravity of what they were undertaking. But, according to the late Bishop Woodford, "the evenings, during which they were left to themselves, became evenings of social enjoyment, if not of boisterous merriment, in which the features of an old college supper-party were reproduced, rather than intervals of solemn thought and retirement."

Bishop Samuel Wilberforce raised the standard of what was expected in the way of Scriptural and theological knowledge; he made the examination a reality; he laid special stress on sermon-writing; and he made the Ember Week a season of spiritual retirement in which men about to take the most decisive step in life might be brought face to face with the responsibilities involved in their decision. The example set by Wilberforce was followed, sooner or later, by every bishop on the bench; the requirements have been raised, and the system has been developed and improved; but the credit of initiation belongs to that epoch-making episcopate, which began in 1845 and ended, through a false step made by a horse on the Surrey Downs, on the 19th of July 1873.

It soon became apparent to those who had the spiritual interests of the Church at heart that something more than twelve months' book-work and a week of religious retirement was required to wean the ordinary B.A. from the puerilities—if nothing worse—of his Undergraduate life, and to equip him for a life of Pastorship and Teachership. The sense of this need gave rise to the creation of Theological Colleges, where a man who looked forward to Holy Orders might, after taking his ordinary degree at Oxford or Cambridge, apply himself to the studies more specially necessary for his chosen work, and—even more important still—might acquire the habits of methodical and self-disciplined life. The idea took shape in such foundations as the Theological Colleges of Wells, Cuddesdon, Sarum, and Ely, the Scholæ Cancellarii at Lincoln, and the Clergy School at Leeds. Fighting their way through all manner of strange misrepresentations about Monasticism and Mediævalism, they have in the course of years attained to recognition, popularity, and apparent stability. The bishops patronize them warmly, and incumbents who desire curates not wholly ignorant of their craft are increasingly unwilling to engage one who has not passed through a Theological College. That the broad result of the training given in these seminaries is a general increase in clerical efficiency I cannot doubt, but perhaps a layman may be permitted to point out some curious gaps and lapses in that training which go some way towards making clergymen less esteemed, and therefore less influential, than they ought to be.

1. The Clergy are not taught to be courteous. If they are courteous by nature and habit, well and good; but a rough Undergraduate, destitute of sympathy and tact and ignorant of social usage, passes through a Theological College and comes out as rough as he entered it. A Bear in Holy Orders is as destructive as a Bull in a China Shop.

2. The Clergy are not taught to manage money; they muddle their public accounts; they beg money for one object and use it for another; they seldom acknowledge what they receive by post; and they have absolutely no notion of cutting their coat according to their cloth. "Spend and beg, and the money will come from somewhere" is their simple and sufficient creed.

3. The Clergy are not taught business. They have not the faintest notion of conducting a public meeting. They lose their way in the agenda-paper of the most insignificant committee. They break appointments at their will and pleasure. They seldom answer letters, and are frankly astonished when their correspondents are annoyed.

4. The Clergy are not taught the Science of Citizenship. Outside their strictly professional studies (and, in some cases, the records of athleticism) they are the most ignorant set of young men in the world. They work hard and play hard, but they never read. They know nothing of books, nothing of history, nothing of the Constitution under which they live, of the principles and records of political parties, of the need for social reform or the means of securing it. They have a vague but clinging notion that Radicals are Infidels, and that Dissenters, if they got their deserts, would have their heads punched.

Sixty years ago an Italian critic said that, in spite of all their defects, the English clergy were "Un clero colto e civile." Could as much be said to-day?

XIV

PILGRIMAGES

I use the word in something wider than Chaucer's sense, and yet in a sense not wholly different from his. For, though we no longer make an annual visit to the Shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, still we all feel bound, at least once a year, to go somewhere and do something quite out of our normal course. Perhaps, like Chaucer's friends, we "long" to do this in April, but the claims of business are generally too strong for us; so we have to content ourselves with admiring the peeps of greenery which begin to invade the soot of our urban gardens, and, if we are of a cultured habit, we can always quote Browning's Thrush or strain the kalendar so as to admit Wordsworth's Daffodils.

This notion of a yearly Pilgrimage as a necessity of rightly-ordered life seems to have fallen into a long abeyance. "Dan Chaucer" (for I love to be on easy terms with great men) described the social customs of the fourteenth century, and then the Pilgrimage seems to have been an established institution: "Tom Hughes" described those of the eighteenth, and this is what, writing in 1862, he says about the annual Pilgrimages of his own time:—

"I have been credibly informed, and am inclined to believe, that the various Boards of Directors of Railway Companies agreed together some ten years back to buy up the learned profession of Medicine, body and soul. To this end they set apart several millions of money, which they continually distribute judiciously among the Doctors, stipulating only this one thing—that they shall prescribe change of air to every patient who can pay, or borrow money to pay, a railway fare, and see their prescription carried out. If it be not for this, why is it that none of us can be well at home for a year together? It wasn't so twenty years ago—not a bit of it. The Browns did not go out of the county once in five years."

The Browns, as we all know, stood in Mr. Hughes's vocabulary for the Upper Middle Class of England—the class to which the clergy, the smaller squires, and the professional men belong; the class which in Chaucer's time contained the "Man of Lawe," the "Marchande," the "Franklyne," and the "Doctore of Phisyke"; and, although Mr. Hughes, who ought to know, says that in the earlier part of Queen Victoria's reign they were a stay-at-home class, they are now the most regular and the most zealous of Pilgrims. It was the majestic misfortune of the Duke in "Lothair" to have so many houses that he had no home. People so circumstanced do not need to go on Pilgrimages. After the autumn in a Scotch Castle, the winter in a country house in the Midlands, the spring in another in the Southern Counties, and the season in Grosvenor Square, people are glad of a little rest, and seek it in some "proud alcove" on the Thames or a sea-girt villa at Cowes. Unless their livers drive them to Carlsbad or their hearts to Nauheim, they do not travel, but display what Lord Beaconsfield called "the sustained splendour of their stately lives" in the many mansions which, in the aggregate, represent to them the idea of Home. I might perhaps on another occasion sketch the Grand Tour of Europe, on which, for educational purposes, the Earl of Fitzurse used to send his eldest son, young Lord Cubley; compressed, with his tutor and doctor, into a travelling-carriage, with a valet and a courier in the rumble. The Duke of Argyll's Autobiography has just told us what this kind of Pilgrimage was like; but to-day I am dealing with the present rather than the past.

It is the people with one house who go on Pilgrimages nowadays—the impoverished squire, the smoke-dried clergyman, the exhausted merchant, the harried editor. To these must be added all the inhabitants, male and female, of Lodging-land and Flat-land,—all "the dim, common populations" of Stuccovia and Suburbia. There are mysterious laws of association which connect classes with localities. Tradesmen love Margate; to clerks Scarborough is dear. The Semitic financier has long claimed Brighton for his own. Costermongers go hop-picking in Kent; artizans disport themselves on the nigger-haunted pier of Southend. Governed by some mysterious law of their being, schoolmasters make straight for the Alps. There they live the strenuous life and brave the perilous ascent; climb and puff and pant all day; rush in, very untidy and not very clean, to table d'hôte; and season their meal with the "shop" of St. Winifred's or the gay banter of Rosslyn Common-room. It is agreeable to watch the forced cordiality, the thin tutorial humour, with which they greet some quite irresponsive pupil who happens to have strayed into the same hotel; and I have often had occasion to admire the precocious dexterity with which the pupil extricates himself from this dreaded companionship. Of Mr. Gladstone it was said by his detractors that he had something of the Schoolmaster in his composition; and this trait was aptly illustrated when, during the summer holidays some fifty years ago, he met the late Duchess of Abercorn in a country house accompanied by her schoolboy son, Lord George Hamilton. Not many mornings had elapsed before Mr. Gladstone said to the boy's mother, "Duchess, don't you think it a pity that your son should spend his holidays in entire idleness? I should be happy to give him an hour's Homer every morning." The offer was accepted, and the foundation of Lord George's lifelong hostility to the Liberal leader was securely laid. It is the nervous dread of some such awful possibility which supplies wings to the boy's feet and lies to his tongue when he encounters Dr. Grimstone or Basil Warde in a Swiss hotel.

While the Schoolmaster limits his aspirations to the Alps, the Oxford or Cambridge Don, having a longer vacation at his command, takes a more extended view, and urges his adventurous Pilgrimage along roads less trite. A few years ago an Oxford Don resolved to strike out what was then a quite new line, and spend his Long Vacation in Portugal. Conscious of insufficient acquaintance with the Portuguese language, he repaired to Mr. Parker's excellent shop in the Turl and enquired for a Portuguese Phrase-book. After some research, that never-failing bookseller produced "The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English." The book had an instant and a deserved success. The preface sets forth that "a choice of familiar dialogues, clean of gallicisms and despoiled phrases, it was missing yet to studious Portuguese and Brazilian youth; and also to persons of other nations that wish to know the Portuguese language." To supply this felt want Pedro Carolino compiled his hand-book for "the acceptation of the studious persons, and especially of the Youth, at which we dedicate him particularly." Among those studious persons was our Pilgrim-Don, who naturally turned in the first instance to a dialogue headed

"FOR TO TRAVEL

When do you start?

As soon as I shall have to finish a business at Cadiz.

Have you already arrested a coach?

Yes, sir, and very cheap.

Have you great deal of effects?

Two trunks and one portmanteau.

You may prepare all for to-morrow. We shall start at the coolness.

The way, is it good?

Very good.

At which inn shall stop us?

In that of the Sun, it is the best. The account mount is little. The supper, the bed, and the breakfast shall get up at thirty franks.

That seems to me a little dear."

The next dialogue follows in the natural order:—

"FOR TO BREAKFAST

John, bring us some thing for to breakfast.

Yes, sir; there is some sausages and some meat pies. Will you that I bring the ham?

Yes, bring him, we will cut a steak.

Put an nappe cloth upon this table.

Give us some plates, any knifes, and some forks, rinse the glasses.

I have eaten with satisfaction some pudding, sausages, and some ham. I shall take some tea.

Still a not her cup?

I thank you it is enough."

Breakfast over, the traveller engages a guide and starts out

"FOR TO SEE THE TOWN

We won't to see all that is it remarquable here.

Come with me, if you please. I shall not folget nothing what can to merit your attention. Here we are near to cathedraly. Will you come in there?

We will first go to see him in oudside, after we shall go in there for to look the interior."

A day of sight-seeing concludes happily with the ever-welcome dialogue—

"FOR TO DINE

Give us a rice soup.

What wine do you like best?

Bourgogne wine.

Give us some beef and potatoes, a beefsteak to the English.

What you shall take for dessert?

Give us some Hollande cheese and some prunes.

I will take a glass of brandy at the cherries.

Gentlemen, don't forget the waiter."

Parsimony is a bond which makes the whole world kin, and it is interesting to find embedded in 182 closely-printed pages of "despoiled phrases" two such characteristic specimens of sound English as "That seems to me a little dear" and "Don't forget the waiter."

XV

THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

"Gentlemen," said Dr. Blimber to his pupils on the eve of the holidays, "we will resume our studies on the twenty-fifth of next month." But that adjournment, I think, was for Christmas, and we are now in what Matthew Arnold's delicious schoolboy called "the glad season of sun and flowers." Very soon, in Dr. Farrar's romantic phrase, "the young life which usually plays like the sunshine over St. Winifred's will be pouring unwonted brightness into many happy English homes." Or, to take Mr. Snawley's darker view of the same event, we shall be in the thick of one of "those ill-judged comings home twice a year that unsettle children's minds so."

The associations of the moment, so different in their effects on different natures, have awoke the spirit of prophecy in the late Head Master of Eton, Dr. Warre, who, projecting his soul into futurity, sees dark days coming for the "Public Schools" as that phrase has been hitherto understood. It was clear, said Dr. Warre, after distributing the prizes at Shrewsbury, "that ere long the Public Schools would have to justify not only their curriculum, but, it might be, their very existence. The spirit of the age seemed to be inclined towards Utilitarianism, and it was now tending to undervalue the humanities and the culture that attended them, and to demand what it appreciated as a useful and practical training—i.e. something capable of making boys breadwinners as soon as they left school. He did not say that view would ultimately prevail, but the trend of public opinion in that direction would necessitate on the part of Public Schools a period of self-criticism, and very probably a reorganization of curricula. But there was another problem to be faced which would become more serious as the century waxed older, and that was a new phase of competition. As secondary education expanded, secondary day-schools would be provided regardless of expense, and it was idle to think this would have no effect upon great Public Schools. What would be weighed in the balance, however, was the value of the corporate life and aggregate influence of the Public Schools upon the formation of character."