THE
LIBRARY MAGAZINE

OF

Select Foreign Literature.

VOLUME 1.

NEW YORK:
JOHN B. ALDEN, PUBLISHER,
1883.

[THE FUTURE OF INDIA.]
[A COUP D'ÉTAT.]
[THEATRICAL MAKE-SHIFTS AND BLUNDERS.]
[I.—WINTER-MORN IN THE COUNTRY.]
[II.—WINTER-MORN IN TOWN.]
[THE HAPPY VALLEY.]
[THE PHŒNICIANS IN GREECE.]
[SOME GOSSIP ABOUT LEICESTER SQUARE.]
[A WOMAN'S LOVE.]
[AN IMPERIAL PARDON.]
[CHRISTMAS IN MOROCCO.]
[THE HOMES AND HAUNTS OF THE ITALIAN POETS.]
[THE VAQUERO.]
[TWO MODERN JAPANESE STORIES.]
[SUPPOSED CHANGES IN THE MOON.]
[RECOLLECTIONS OF THACKERAY.]

CONTENTS.

THE

LIBRARY MAGAZINE

JANUARY, 1879.

THE FUTURE OF INDIA.

Speculation as to the political future is not a very fruitful occupation. In looking back to the prognostications of the wisest statesmen, it will be observed that they were as little able to foresee what was to come a generation or two after their death, as the merest dolt amongst their contemporaries. The Whigs at the beginning of the last century thought that the liberties of Europe would disappear if a prince of the House of Bourbon were securely fixed on the throne of Spain. The Tories in the last quarter of that century considered that if England lost her American provinces she would sink into the impotence of the Dutch Republic. The statesmen who assembled at the Congress of Vienna would have laughed any dreamer to scorn who should have suggested that in the lifetime of many of them Germany would become an empire in the hands of Prussia, France a well-organized and orderly republic, and the "geographical expression" of Italy vitalised into one of the great powers of Europe. Nevertheless, if politics is ever to approach the dignity of a science, it must justify a scientific character by its ability to predict events. The facts are too complicated, probably, ever to admit the application of exact deductive reasoning; and in the growth of civilised society new and unexpected forms are continually springing up. But though practical statesmen will not aim at results beyond the immediate future, it is impossible for men who pass their lives in the study of the difficult task of government to avoid speculations as to the future form of society to which national efforts should be directed. Some theory or other, therefore, is always present, consciously or unconsciously, to the mind of politicians.

With respect to British India it may be observed that very different views of policy prevail. Native writers in the Indian press view their exclusion from all the higher offices of Government, and the efforts of Manchester to transfer 800,000l. per annum raised on cotton goods to increased taxation in India, as a policy based on mere selfishness; and a Russian journal, apparently in good faith, assured its readers the other day, that India pays into the British treasury an annual tribute of twenty to twenty-five millions sterling. On the other hand, some advanced thinkers amongst ourselves hold that India is a burden on our resources, and the cry of "Perish India!" so far as relates to its dependence on England, is considered to be not unsupported by sound reasoning. One of the ablest publicists of India, in a published letter to Sir George Campbell, has declared his conviction, after twenty years' experience in that country, that good government by the British in India is impossible.

It may be admitted that exaggerated notions as to the pecuniary value of India to England prevail, and it must also be confessed that, with all our self-complacency as to the benefits of British rule, we have to accuse ourselves of several shortcomings. Nevertheless, it may be affirmed with confidence that the national instinct as to the value of our possessions in the East coincides with the views of our most enlightened statesmen. My colleague, Colonel Yule, has pointed out, I think with entire justice, that the task which we have proposed to ourselves in India, unlike that of the Dutch in Java, is to improve and elevate the two hundred millions under our charge to the utmost extent of our powers. The national conscience is not altogether satisfied with the mode in which some of our possessions have been acquired, but impartial inquiry demonstrates that unless a higher morality had prevailed than has ever yet been witnessed amongst the sons of men, the occasions for conquest and acquisition of territory that have presented themselves to the British during the last hundred years would not have been foregone by any nation in the world. But the feeling I allude to quickens the sense of our obligations to the inhabitants of India. Having undertaken the heavy task of their government, it is our duty to demonstrate to posterity that under British rule we have enabled them to advance in the route of civilization and progress. We recognise that in all probability so distant and extensive an empire cannot permanently remain in subjection to a small island in the West, and therefore our constant task is to render the population of India at some day or other capable of self-government. Is such a problem susceptible of a favourable solution? I propose to discuss this question in the following pages.

I.

The late Sir George Lewis once observed to me that in his opinion, it was labour lost to endeavour to make anything of the Hindus. They were a race doomed to subjection whenever they came into collision with peoples more vigorous than themselves. They possessed, in short, none of the elements which are requisite for self-government. Any opinion of that philosophic observer is entitled to grave consideration, and undoubtedly there is much in the history of the past that tends to justify the above desponding conclusion. The Persians, the Greeks, the Parthians, the Huns, the Arabs, the Ghaznivides, the Afghans, the Moguls, the Persians a second time, and the British have successfully entered India and made themselves masters of the greater part of it. But Sir George had never been called upon to make any particular study of Indian history, nor indeed was it open to him during the earlier period of his life, which was devoted exclusively to study, to acquire the knowledge of India which later erudition and research have brought to light. It is possible that a closer attention to what has occurred in the past may enable us to regard the future in a more favourable aspect. It will, I think, be found, after such a study, that more intrinsic vitality and greater recuperative power exist amongst the Hindu race than they have been generally accredited with. Unfortunately the ancient and copious literature of the Hindus presents extremely little of historic value. The tendency of the Indian mind to dreamy speculations on the unseen and the unknown, to metaphysics, and to poetry, has led to a thorough disregard of the valuable offices of history. Accordingly, we find in their great epic poems, which date back, according to the best orientalists, at least seven centuries before Christ, the few historical facts which are mentioned so enveloped in legends, so encumbered with the grossest exaggerations, that it requires assiduous scholarship to extract a scintilla of truth from their relations.

Our distinguished countrymen, Sir William Jones and Mr. Colebrooke, led the way in applying the resources of European learning to the elucidation of the Sanscrit texts. And the happy identification, by the former, of the celebrated Chandragupta of the Hindus with the monarch of Pataliputra, Sandracottus, at whose court Megasthenes resided for seven years in the third century before Christ, laid the first firm foundation for authentic Indian history. Since that period the researches of oriental scholars following up the lines laid down by their illustrious predecessors; the rock inscriptions which have been collected from various parts of India, the coins, extending over many ages, of different native dynasties—all these compared together enable a student even as sceptical as Sir George Lewis to form a more favourable idea of the Hindus in their political capacity than he was disposed to take.

Early European inquirers into Hindu antiquity, with the natural prejudice in favour of their studies in a hitherto unknown tongue, were disposed to lend far too credulous an ear to the gross exaggerations and reckless inaccuracies of the "Máhabhárat" and kindred works. James Mill on the other hand, who was a Positivist before Auguste Comte had begun to write, rejected with scorn all the allusions to the past in these ancient writers as entirely fabulous. Careful scholarship, however, working on the materials of the past which every day's discoveries are increasing, demonstrates that much true history is to be gathered from the works of the Sanscrit writers.

The celebrated granite rock of Girnar[1] in the peninsula of Guzerat presents in itself an authentic record of three distinct dynasties separated from one another by centuries. And we owe to what may be justly called the genius of James Prinsep the decipherment of those inscriptions of Asoka which have brought to the knowledge of Europe a Hindu monarch of the third century before our era, who, whilst he has been equalled by few in the extent of his dominions, may claim superiority over nearly every king that ever lived, from his tender-hearted regard for the interests of his people, and from the wide principles of toleration which he inculcated.

Horace Wilson, who may be safely cited as the most calm and judicious oriental scholar of our times, asserts that there is nothing to shock probability in supposing that the Hindu dynasties, of whom we trace vestiges, were spread through twelve centuries anterior to the war of the Máhabhárat.[2] This leads us back to dates about 2600 years b.c. We have, therefore, the astounding period of over four thousand years during which to glean facts relating to the Hindu race and their capacity for government, such as may form foundation for conclusions as to the future. The characteristics which have most impressed themselves on my mind after such study of Indian records as I have been able to bestow are, first, the very early appearance of solicitude for the interest and welfare of the people, as exhibited by Hindu rulers, such as has rarely or never been exhibited in the early histories of other nations; secondly, the successful efforts of the Hindu race to re-establish themselves in power on the least appearance of decay in the successive foreign dynasties which have held rule among them. It is only with the latter phenomenon that I propose now to deal, and a rapid retrospect may be permitted.

We learn from European records that Cyrus made conquests in India in the sixth century b.c., and the famous inscription of his successor Darius includes Sind and the modern Afghanistan amongst his possessions. But when Alexander entered India two centuries later he found no trace of Persian sway, but powerful Indian princes. Taxiles, Abisares, and the celebrated Porus ruled over large kingdoms in the Panjáb. The latter monarch, whose family name Paura is recorded in the Máhabhárat, is described by the Greek writers to have ruled over 300 cities, and he brought into the field against Alexander more than 2,000 elephants, 400 chariots, 4,000 cavalry, and 50,000 foot. Against this force Alexander was only able to bring 16,000 foot and 5,000 horse; but the bulk of the troops were Macedonians, and the leader was the greatest general whom the world has seen. We have full particulars of the celebrated battle which ensued, and which ended in the complete discomfiture of Porus. The conduct of this Indian king, however, in the battle extorted the admiration of the Greek historians. He received nine wounds during the engagement, and was the last to leave the field, affording, as Arrian remarks, a noble contrast to Darius the Second, who was the first to fly amongst his host in his similar conflict with the Greeks. Alexander, as in the Macedonian conquests generally, left satraps in possession of his Indian acquisitions. But a very few years ensued before we find a native of India had raised up a mighty kingdom, and all trace of Greek rule in the Punjab disappears. Chandragupta, or Sandracottus, is said by a Greek writer to have seen Alexander in person on the Hydaspes. Justin relates that it was he who raised the standard of independence before his fellow-countrymen, and successfully drove out Alexander's satraps. He founded the Maurya dynasty, and the vast extent of the kingdom ruled over by his grandson Asoka is testified by the edicts which the latter caused to be engraved in various parts of his dominions. They also record the remarkable fact of his close alliance with the Greek rulers of Syria, Egypt, Macedon, Cyrene and Epirus. We next find that one of the Greek princes who had established an independent dynasty in Bactria, Euthydemus, invaded India, and made several conquests, but he also was met in the field and overcome by Galoka, son of Asoka, who for some time added Cashmir to his possessions. The Bactrian dynasty was put an end to by Mithridates, 140 b.c., and consequently the Greeks were driven eastwards, and they planted themselves in various parts of India. We find clear traces of them in Guzerat, where the town of Junaghur (Javanaghur) still records the name of the Greeks who founded the city. The coins and inscriptions of the Sinha rulers of Guzerat furnish us with some particulars as to the Greek holdings at this period, and they seem to have extended from the Jumna on the east to Guzerat and Kutch on the west. The Macedonians seem here, as elsewhere, to have placed natives at the head of their district administrations, and the Sinha rulers call themselves Satraps and Máha Rajahs, and use Greek legends on their coins, but evidently they soon acquired complete independence. Simultaneously or nearly so with these Indo-Greek principalities, we find invasions of India by the race commonly called Scythians, but more accurately Jutchi, Sacæ, and White Huns. These also formed independent kingdoms. But again native leaders of enterprise arose who put an end to foreign dominion. Vikramadit, who founded an era 57 b.c., and whose exploits have made a deep impression upon the native mind, is thought to be one of the Hindu leaders who succeeded in expelling a foreign dynasty. And it would appear that towards the middle of the third century after Christ all foreign dominion had disappeared from the soil of India, except perhaps some small settlements of Jutchi, on the banks of the Indus; and except the temporary conquest of Sind by the Arabs in the seventh century, from which they were soon expelled by the Sumea Rajputs[3]. Thus, during a period of 600 years, we have encountered a series of invasions and conquests of portions of India by foreign rulers, but all successively driven out by the energy of native leaders. Thereupon followed the establishment of native dynasties all over India. It was chiefly during the 700 years that now ensued, up to the invasion of India by Mahmud of Ghazni, that the great works of Sanscrit literature in poetry, grammar, algebra, and astronomy, appeared. During this period also the Rajputs, who have been well called the Normans of the East, seem to have found their way to nearly every throne in India. Their acquisition of power has never been fully traced, and probably the materials are wanting for any full or accurate account of it; but the subject is well worthy the attention of an Indian student.

The Mahomedan conquests which, with the fanaticism and savage intolerance introduced by them, commenced a.d. 1001, seem to have exercised most depressing effects on the Hindu mind. But here again we meet with the same phenomenon. So soon as the Mussulman rule becomes enfeebled, a native chief rises up who is enabled to rally his countrymen around him and form a dynasty. Sivaji in 1660-80 established an independency which his successors, as mayors of the palace, enlarged into a kingdom, out of which arose the native powers of Sindia, of the Gaekwar, and of the Bhonslas of Berar. Exactly the same occurrence has been witnessed in the present century by the success of Ranjit Sing in forming an independent principality in the Panjáb. This remarkable man, who was absolutely illiterate, by his own energy of character raised himself from the head of a small Sikh clan to the head of a kingdom with a revenue of two and a half millions sterling.[4] We may be sure that, if the British had not been in force, natives of soldierly qualities like Jung Bahádar of Nepal, or Tantia Topi of the mutinies, would have carved out in the present day kingdoms for themselves in other parts of India.

II.

It may be thought that in the preceding sketch I have been aiming at the conclusion that British dominion is in danger of extinction either by foreign invasion or internal insurrection. Nothing is more foreign from my views. I firmly believe that British rule in the East was never so strong, never so able to protect itself against all attacks from without or from within, as at the present moment. In a foreign dominion such as ours, where unforeseen contingencies may any day arise, and where a considerable amount of disaffection must always exist, constant watchfulness on the part of Government is no doubt required; but this position is thoroughly recognised by all statesmen who occupy themselves with Indian affairs. I do not for a moment delude myself with the idea that we have succeeded in gaining the affections of the natives. No foreign rulers who have kept themselves apart as a separate caste from the conquered nation have succeeded in accomplishing this feat. There is something of incompatibility between the European and Asiatic, which seems to forbid easy amalgamation. Lord Stowell, in one of his fine judgments, has pointed out the constant tendency of Europeans in the East to form themselves into separate communities, and to abstain from all social intercourse with the natives around them, and he illustrates his position with the happy quotation—

Scyllis amara suam non intermiscuit undam.

The English perhaps are distinguishable among all European nations by the deep-rooted notions of self-superiority which their insular position and great success in history have engendered. The southern races of Europe, the Spanish and Portuguese, have shown no reluctance to intermix freely with the native races of America, India, and the Philippines, such as has always been exhibited by inhabitants of the British Isles when expatriated to the East or West. But where race, color, religion, prejudice intervene to prevent social intercourse between the English in India and the natives, what a wide gulf is placed between them!

In justice, however, it must be stated that, although the haughtiness of demeanour and occasional brutality in manners which the aristocratie de peau sometimes engenders in our countrymen are much to be deprecated, the estrangement which exists in India between the English and the natives is not wholly, nor even principally, attributable to the former. A Hindu of very humble caste would think himself polluted if he sat down to dinner with the European governor of his Presidency. In this instance, as in so many others, Hindu opinions have permeated the whole native community; and other races transplanted to India, such as Mahomedans and Parsis, are equally exclusive in their social life. When I was in Bombay I made an attempt to break through the barrier which the latter caste had voluntarily erected for themselves. Sir Jamshedji Jijibhai, an able, self-raised man, was then the acknowledged head of the Parsi community, and was distinguished for his benevolence and enlightened views. I endeavored to persuade him to set his countrymen an example, and to come to a dinner at which I would assemble the chief authorities of the island; and I proposed to him as an inducement that he should send his own cook, who should prepare for him his wonted fare. But the step was too startling a one for him, though I was glad to find that his son, the second baronet, was able to get over his prejudices on his visit, some years after, to London. A ludicrous example of the same exclusive feeling has been related in connection with a Governor-General. His lordship, desirous to break down any notion of social inferiority on the part of a distinguished native who was paying him a visit, placed his arm round his neck as they walked up and down a verandah engaged in familiar conversation. The high-bred Oriental made no sign, but as soon as he could extricate himself from the embraces of his Excellency, he hastened home to wash away the contamination of a Mlecha's touch.

It may also be observed that the mutual repugnance of the two races to such close social intercourse as intermarriage, for example, would produce, gives rise to two excellent results. First, there is every reason to suppose, judging by what we see of the native Portuguese in India, that the English and Hindu would make, in the language of breeders, a very bad cross; and it is therefore satisfactory to find that English rulers in India, unlike the Normans in England, or the Moguls in India, have never intermarried with the natives of the country. The second result is closely connected with the first. What has led to the downfall of previous foreign dynasties has been that the invaders of the country had become effeminate by their long possession of power, and had lost the original energy and vigour which had enabled their predecessors to gain a throne. The constant recruitment of English rulers from their fatherland wholly prevents this cause of internal decay from making its appearance among the British.

It is not, then, by our hold on the affections of the people that we maintain our dominion in India. The strength and probable endurance of our rule are based on our real power, on our endeavours to do justice, on our toleration. The memory of the excesses committed under Mussulman rule has probably become dim with the great bulk of the people, but it is very vivid among educated Hindus. A strong conviction prevails among them that if British rule were to disappear in India, the same rise of military adventurers, the same struggles for power, and the same anarchy as prevailed during the first half of the last century would again appear. The latest expression of Hindu opinion on this subject which I have met with is contained in a pamphlet published in the present year by Mr. Dadoba Pandurang.[5] He is an aged scholar, and though not a Brahmin, well versed in the Vedas, but, above all, he is distinguished by his devout views and by his desire to elevate and improve his fellow-countrymen. He writes:—

If there is a manifestation of the hand of God in history, as I undoubtedly believe there is, nothing to my imagination appears more vivid and replete with momentous events calculated for the mutual welfare and good of both countries than this political union of so large, important, rich, and interesting a country as Hind in the further south-east with a small but wisely governed island of Great Britain in the further north-west.... Let us see what England has done to India. England, besides governing India politically, has now very wisely commenced the important duty of educating the millions of her Indian children, and of bringing them up to the standard of enlightenment and high civilization which her own have obtained. She has already eradicated, I should add here, to the great joy of Heaven, several of the most barbarous and inhuman practices, such as Sutti,[6] infanticide, Charak Puja,[7] and what not, which had for ages been prevalent among a large portion of the children of this her new acquisition. These practices, which had so long existed at the dictation of an indigenous priesthood, except for the powerful interference of England could not have been abolished.

Opinions like these, I am persuaded, prevail throughout the educated community, and the presence of British rule amongst them is recognised as indispensable in the present state of Hindu society.

III.

With respect to a successful invasion of India, it must be confessed that the English mind has always been keenly susceptible of alarm. The wide plains of Hisdustan, which offer so ready an access to aggressive armies, the absence of fortified places, and the frequency with which India has been won and lost in a single pitched battle, all tend to encourage the belief that some day or other British domination will be in danger from some incursion of this sort. It may be observed that for nearly a century past the English nation has been subjected to periodic fits of Indian panic. Sir John Kaye, in his "History of the Afghan War," states that in 1797 the whole of India was kept "in a chronic state of unrest" from the fears of an Afghan descent upon the plains of Hindustan. In 1800 the Emperor Paul of Russia and Napoleon conceived "a mad and impracticable scheme of invasion," which greatly increased local alarm. In 1809 these fears assumed even larger proportions when an alliance between Napoleon and Persia was on foot with a view to the proposed invasion; and the mission to Persia under Sir John Malcolm was inaugurated. In 1838 Russia took the place which Zeman Shah, Persia, and Napoleon had previously occupied, and the disastrous invasion of Afghanistan was commenced by Lord Auckland from his mountain retreat at Simla.

Since that period the suspicions of the nation have been continually directed against Russia by a small but able party, who, from their chiefly belonging to the Presidency of Bombay, have been termed the Bombay school. The late General John Jacob was the originator of the anti-Russian policy inculcated by them. He was a man of great ability and original views, and, if he had moved in a wider sphere, he might have left a name equal to that of the most illustrious of his countrymen in India. But he passed the greater part of his life on the barren wastes of Sind, and rarely came in contact with superior minds. In 1856 General Jacob addressed a singularly able paper to Lord Canning, then Governor-General, and which Sir Lewis Pelly afterwards published to the world.[8] This was just at the close of the Crimean War, when England was about to undertake an expedition against Persia to repel her aggression on Herát. It was Jacob's firm conviction that, unless India interposed, Russia, having Persia completely under her control, could, whenever she pleased, take possession not only of Herát, but of Candahar, and thus find an entrance to the plains of India, on which our dominion was to disappear. To thwart this contingency, and render the approach of a European army towards our frontier impossible, he would, as an ultimate measure, garrison Herát with twenty thousand troops, but in the first instance would occupy Quetta. These proposals were carefully considered by Lord Canning's Government, but were rejected.

The same arguments were brought forward eleven years later by Sir Bartle Frere, whilst Governor of Bombay, and were laid before the Government of India. That Government was then remarkably strong, consisting of Lord Lawrence, Sir William Mansfield (Lord Sandhurst), Sir Henry Maine, Mr. Massey, and Major-General Sir Henry Durand; but the proposals to improve our frontier by extending our dominions westward, and by the annexation of independent foreign territory, were unanimously disapproved of.

About the same time that Sir Bartle Frere was endeavouring to stimulate the Government of India to occupy Quetta, my distinguished colleague and friend, Sir Henry Rawlinson, published two articles in the "Quarterly Review,"[9] in which he called the attention of the public to the rapidly increasing extension of the Russian dominions in the direction of our Indian frontier, and to the necessity of maintaining outworks such as Herát and Candahar for the protection of our Eastern Empire. But he raised the question in a more solemn form in the confidential memorandum which he transmitted to the Government of India in 1868, and which he afterwards published in 1875,[10] with additional matter, forming a complete conspectus of the aggressive policy to be adopted to guard against a Russian invasion. The views of the Government of India on these papers have not, I believe, been given to the world, but it is well known in Indian circles that the masterly activity therein advocated did not find acceptance.

At the present moment Russophobia is raging to a greater extent than at any previous period; but this is ground on which for the present I am precluded from entering. It is gratifying to observe, however, that in the great conflict of opinion which, as it will be seen, has thus been raging for the last forty years, as to the best method of protecting our north-western frontier from an invading foe, both schools have ultimately agreed on one conclusion, namely, that a successful invasion of India by Russia is in nowise probable. The one side would avert any possibility of an attack by the occupation of Afghanistan, the Suleiman mountains, and probably the Hindu Kush; the other would husband the resources of India, and not waste blood and treasure in anticipation of a conflict that may possibly never occur, and that certainly never will occur without years of warning to the nation.

I cannot pursue this interesting question further at a moment when the whole question of our policy on the Indian frontier is ripening for discussion, and when the materials on which a sound conclusion can be drawn are not yet laid before the public. It is sufficient for my present purpose to repeat that the probability of British dominion in the East being terminated by a Russian invasion is rejected on all sides.

IV.

If the views which have been now put forward are at all sound, we may perhaps conclude that whilst our Indian empire requires on the part of its rulers the utmost watchfulness to guard against dangers and contingencies which may at any moment arise, yet that with ordinarily wise government we may look forward to a period of indefinitely long duration during which British dominion may flourish. That sooner or later the links which connect England with India will be severed, all history teaches us to expect; but when that severance occurs, if the growing spirit of philantrophy and increasing sense of national morality which characterise the nineteenth century continue, we may fairly hope that the Englishman will have taught the Hindus how to govern themselves. It is England's task, as heretofore, "to teach other nations how to live." A very long period, however, is required before the lesson can be fully learned, and the holders of Indian securities need not fear that the reversionary interests of their grandchildren will be endangered. Our rule in India dates back little more than a century; and although from the first a wise spirit of toleration and an eminent desire to do justice have prevailed, it is only within the last thirty or forty years that any serious attempts to elevate the character of the nation have been manifested.

The educational movement, which is silently producing prodigious changes in India, received its first impulse from England, and the clause in the Act of Parliament[11] which recognised the duty of educating the masses, enabled men like Lord Macaulay, Sir Edward Ryan, and others, to lay the foundations of a system which has since established itself far and wide. But the Court of Directors never took heartily to this great innovation of modern times, and it was only under the direction of English statesmanship that the Indian authorities were induced to act with vigour in this momentous undertaking. Sir Charles Wood's celebrated minute on education, in 1858, laid the foundation of a national system of education, and the principles then inculcated have never since been departed from. Some generations will require to pass before the Oriental mind is enabled to substitute the accurate forms of European thought for the loose speculations that have prevailed through long centuries. But already happy results are appearing, and in connection with the subject of this article it may be noticed as a most hopeful sign of the future that our English schools are turning out native statesmen by whom all our best methods of government are being introduced into the dominions of native princes.

The administration reports of some of these gentlemen may vie with those of our best English officers; and the names of Sir Dinkar Rao, Sir Madava Rao, Sir Salar Jung, and others, give full indication that among the natives of India may be found men eminently qualified for the task of government. Wittingly or unwittingly, English officials in India are preparing materials which some day or other will form the groundwork for a native empire or empires. I was thrown closely into contact with the Civil Service whilst I was in India, for I employed all my vacations in travelling through the country, mostly at a foot's pace. Everywhere I went I found a cultivated English gentleman exerting himself to the best of his ability to extend the blessings of civilisation—justice, education, the development of all local resources. I firmly believe that no government in the world has ever possessed a body of administrators to vie with the Civil Service of India. Nor do I speak only of the service as it existed under the East India Company, for, from all that I have heard and observed, competition supplies quite as good servants of the State as did in earlier days the patronage of the Court of Directors. The truth is, that the excellence of the result has been attributable in nowise to the mode of selection, but to the local circumstances which call forth in either case, in the young Englishman of decent education and of the moral tone belonging to the middle classes of this country, the best qualities of his nature. But in these energetic, high-principled, and able administrators we have a danger to good government which it is necessary to point out. Every Englishman in office in India has great power, and every Englishman, as the late Lord Lytton once observed to me, is in heart a reformer. His native energy will not enable him to sit still with his hands before him. He must be improving something. The tendency of the English official in India is to over-reform, to introduce what he may deem improvements, but which turn out egregious failures, and this, be it observed, amongst the most conservative people of the world. Some of the most carefully devised schemes for native improvement have culminated in native deterioration. A remarkable illustration of this position is afforded by the late inquiry into the causes of the riots among the cultivators of the Deccan. It has been one of the pretensions of British administration that they have instituted for the first time in India pure and impartial courts of justice. And the boast is well founded. In the Presidency of Bombay also the Government has substituted long leases of thirty years on what may be called Crown Lands for the yearly holdings formerly in vogue. They have also greatly moderated the assessment. The result has been that land in the Bombay Presidency from being unsaleable has acquired a value of from ten to twenty years' purchase. But the effect of these two measures upon the holders of these lands has been disastrous. Finding themselves possessed of property on which they could raise money with facility, they have indulged this national propensity out of all proportion to their means; and the money-lenders in their turn drag the improvident borrowers before a court of justice, and obtain decrees upon the indisputable terms of the contract, which no judge feels competent to disregard.

Another danger of the same sort arises from the short term of office which is allowed to officials in the highest places in India. When the Portuguese had large dominions in India, they found that their Viceroys, if permitted to remain a long time in the East, became insubordinate, and too powerful for the Government at Lisbon to control. They accordingly passed a law limiting the tenure of office to five years. This limitation seems to have been adopted tacitly in our Eastern administrative system, and has undoubtedly been observed for more than a century. But the period of five years is very short to enable either a Governor-General, or Governor, or member of Council to leave his mark on the country; and there is a temptation to attempt something dazzling which would require for its proper fulfilment years to elaborate, but which, if not passed at the moment, would fail to illustrate the era.

It is needless to observe that a series of ill-considered changes, a constant succession of new laws to be followed by amended laws in the next session, attempts to change manners and practices (not immoral in themselves) that have prevailed for centuries, all tend to make a government, especially a foreign government, odious. But there is one other rock which it is above all essential to avoid when we are considering the problem how best to preserve the duration of British government for the benefit of India. Every ardent administrator desires improvements in his own department; roads, railways, canals, irrigation, improved courts of justice, more efficient police, all find earnest advocates in the high places of government. But improved administration is always costly, and requires additional taxation. I fear that those in authority too often forget that the wisest rulers of a despotic government have always abstained from laying fresh burdens on the people. It is, in fact, the chief merit of such a government that the taxes are ordinarily light, and are such as are familiarised by old usage. New taxes imposed without the will, or any appeal to the judgment, of the people create the most dangerous kind of disaffection. But if this is true generally, it is especially true in India, where the population is extremely poor, and where hitherto the financier has not been enabled to make the rich contribute their due quota to the revenue of the country.

It has been said by some that we have not yet reached the limits of taxation in India, but to them I would oppose the memorable saying of Lord Mayo towards the close of his career. "A feeling of discontent and dissatisfaction existed," in his opinion, "among every class, both European and native, on account of the constant increase of taxation that had for years been going on;" and he added: "The continuance of that feeling was a political danger, the magnitude of which could hardly be over-estimated." The Earl of Northbrook quoted and fully endorsed this opinion in his examination before the House of Commons in the present year.[12]

But although this constant aim at improvement among our English administrators too often leads to irritating changes, harassing legislation, and new fiscal charges on the people, causes are at work which tend to eliminate these obstacles to good and stable government. In our experimental application of remedies to evils patent on the surface, our blunders have chiefly arisen from our ignorance of the people. Institutions that had been seen to work well in Europe might, it was thought, be transplanted safely to India. Experience alone could teach that this is often a grievous error; but experience is being daily afforded by our prolonged rule, and by our increasing acquaintance with the habits, wants, and feelings of the people. The tendency also to change and improvement, which I have before observed upon as leading to ill-considered measures, operates here beneficially, for there is never any hesitation in a local government to reverse the proceedings of its predecessors when found to work injuriously for the community.

But the most cheering symptom of future good government in India is the increased disposition of British rulers to associate natives of character and ability with themselves in high offices of administration. Parliament so long ago as 1833 laid down the principle that no native shall by reason of his religion, place of birth, or colour, be disabled from holding any office. Her gracious Majesty also in 1858 proclaimed her will "that so far as may be, our subjects, of whatever race or creed, be impartially admitted to offices in our service, the duties of which they may be qualified by their education, ability, and integrity duly to discharge."

Many obstacles have hitherto prevailed, chiefly arising out of the vested interests of a close Civil Service, to prevent full operation being given to a policy so solemnly laid down. But it is no breach of official propriety to announce that Lord Cranbrook has earnestly taken up the proposals of the present Viceroy to clear away the difficulties which have hitherto intervened, and has sent out a despatch to India which it may be fairly anticipated will meet the aspirations of educated natives, and will greatly strengthen the foundations of British government in the East.

It will thus be seen that several factors are at work which cannot fail, under the continued rule of the British Government, to have most beneficial effects on the national character of India. A system of education is being established which is opening a door for the introduction of all the knowledge accumulated in Europe, and which sooner or later must greatly dissipate that ignorance which is at the bottom of so many obstacles to good government in the East. Equality before the law and the supremacy of law have been fully brought home to the cognisance of every inhabitant of India, and they form a striking contrast, fully appreciated by the Hindus, to the arbitrary decisions and the race prerogatives which characterised their former Mahomedan rulers. Continuous efforts at improvement are witnessed in every zillah of India, and if they sometimes fail in their operation it is still patent that the permanent welfare of the people is the constant aim and object of Government. Moreover, the ready ear tendered to any expression of a grievance, the minute subjection of every act of authority in India, from the deputy magistrate up to the Governor-General, to the scrutiny of the Home Government, secure to the meanest inhabitant of India a hearing, and inspire the consciousness that he also is a member of the State, and that his rights and interests are fully recognised. The association of natives with ourselves in the task of government, which has been commenced in the lower branches of the judicial administration with the greatest success, and which is now about to be attempted on a larger scale, as I have before noted, is also a fact of the greatest gravity. On the whole, after very close attention to Indian administration for nearly forty years, of which about twelve were spent in the country itself in a position where I was enabled to take an impartial view of what was going on around me, I am of opinion that a bright future presents itself, and, if I could see my way more clearly on the very important questions of caste and of the future religion of India, I should say a brilliant future, in which perhaps for centuries to come the supremacy of England will produce the happiest results in India.

V.

But I must not close this article without reference to the very different views which have been lately put forth in this Review under the sensational title of the "Bankruptcy of India." Mr. Hyndman, after much study of Indian statistics, has arrived at the conclusion that "India has been frightfully impoverished under our rule, and that the process is going on now at an increasingly rapid rate." The revenue raised by taxation is about 36,000,000l., and "is taken absolutely out of the pockets of the people," three-fourths of whom are engaged in agriculture. The increase of 12,000,000l. in the revenue which has occurred between 1857 and 1876 "comes almost entirely out of the pockets of the cultivators," and "the greater part of the increase of the salt, stamps, and excise is derived from the same source." The cost of maintaining a prisoner in the cheapest part of India is 56s. a head, or, making allowance for children, 46s.; but the poor cultivator has only 31s. 6d., from which he must also defray the charges "for sustenance of bullocks, the cost of clothing, repairs to implements, house, &c., and for taxation."

He states the debt of India to be "enormous," amounting to 220,000,000l. sterling, principally accumulated in the last few years. The railways have been constructed at ruinous cost, for which the "unfortunate ryot has had to borrow an additional five or ten or twenty rupees of the native money-lender at 24, 40, 60 per cent., in order to pay extra taxation." Irrigation works "tell nearly the same sad tale. Here again millions have been squandered—squandered needlessly." Moreover, the land is fast becoming deteriorated or is being worse cultivated. In short, through a long indictment of twenty-three pages, of which I omit many counts, he cannot find a single act of British administration that meets his approval. All is naught. It is true that the Civil Service of India is composed of men who have gained their posts by means of the best education that England can supply, and who from an early period of manhood have devoted their lives to the practical solution of the many difficult problems which Indian administration presents. But Mr. Hyndman finds fault with them all.

The article itself is couched in such an evident spirit of philanthropy that one feels unwilling to notice pointedly the blunders, the exaggerations, and the inaccuracies into which the writer has fallen. But Mr. Hyndman has entered the lists so gallantly with a challenge to all the Anglo-Indian world, that he of course expects to encounter some hard knocks, writing, as he does, on a subject with which he has no practical acquaintance. He has already received "a swashing blow" respecting the agricultural statistics on which he bases the whole of his argument. On data supplied to him by an able native writer, whom I know intimately and for whom I have the highest respect, he has drawn conclusions which are so manifestly absurd, that all practically acquainted with the subject are tempted to throw aside his article as mere rubbish. But Mr. Dádobhai, like himself, has no knowledge of the rural life of India, or of agriculture generally, or of the practical business of administration. He is a man who has passed his whole life in cities, an excellent mathematician, of unwearied industry, and distinguished, even among his countrymen, for his patriotic endeavours to improve their condition. But the mere study of books and of figures—especially of the imperfect ones which hitherto have characterised the agricultural statistics of India—is not sufficient to constitute a great administrator; and when Mr. Dádobhai, after making himself prominent by useful work in the municipality of Bombay, was selected to fill the high office of Prime Minister to the Gaekwar of Baroda, he was not deemed by his countrymen to have displayed any great aptitude in statesmanship.[13]

The alarming picture drawn by Mr. Hyndman on data thus supplied attracted the attention of the greatest authority in England on agricultural matters; for intrinsic evidence clearly shows that the letters signed "C.," which appeared in the Times of the 5th of October and the 9th of October, can proceed from no other than Mr. Caird. His refutation of Mr. Hyndman's pessimist views is so short, that I give the pith of it here:—

The conclusions arrived at are so startling that though, like Mr. Hyndman, I have never been in India, I, as an alarmed Englishman, have tried to test the strength of the basis upon which they rest. The only data I have at hand are taken from the figures in the last year's report of the Punjab. The number of cultivated acres there agrees with those quoted by Mr. Hyndman—say 21,000,000 acres—and I adopt his average value of 1l. 14s. per acre.

The Government assessment is 1,905,000l., to pay which one-sixth of the wheat crop [the produce of 1,120,000] would have to be sold and exported. There would remain for consumption in the country the produce of 5,500,000 acres of wheat and of 12,000,000 acres of other grain, the two sufficing to yield for a year 2 lb. per head per day for the population of 17,000,000, which is more than double the weight of corn eaten by the people of this country. Besides this, they would have for consumption their garden vegetables and milk; and beyond it the money value of 845,000 acres of oil-seed, 720,000 acres of cotton and hemp, 391,000 acres of sugar-cane, 120,000 acres of indigo, 69,000 acres of tobacco, 88,000 acres of spices, drugs, and dyes, 19,000 acres of poppy, and 8,800 acres of tea; the aggregate value of which, without touching the corn, would leave nearly twice the Government assessment.

Mr. Hyndman has committed the error of arguing from an English money value at the place of production upon articles of consumption, the true value of which is their food-sustaining power to the people who consume them.

When an argument is thus found so completely pecher par sa base, it is needless to pursue it further. But I conceive that Mr. Hyndman, when studying this overwhelming refutation, must feel somewhat conscience-stricken when he reperuses such sentences of his own as the following:—"In India at this time, millions of the ryots are growing wheat, cotton, seeds, and other exhausting crops, and send them away because these alone will enable them to pay their way at all. They are themselves, nevertheless, eating less and less of worse food each year, in spite, or rather by reason, of the increasing exports." Thus a farmer is damaged by finding new markets for his produce! And he sells his wheat, which is the main produce of his arable land in those parts of India where it flourishes, to buy some cheaper grain which his land does not grow! The youngest assistant in a collector's establishment could inform Mr. Hyndman that the food of the agricultural population of India consists of the staple most suitable to the soil of the district: in the Punjab wheat, in Bengal and all well-watered lowlands rice, on the tablelands of the Deccan jowári (holcus sorghum) and bájri (panicum spicatum), on the more sterile plateau of Southern India the inferior grain rági (eiuesyne coracauna).

It must have been under the dominion of the idea produced by Mr. Dádobhai's statistics as to the thoroughly wretched state of the agricultural population of India that Mr. Hyndman has been led into exaggerated statements which his own article shows he knew to be inaccurate. A dreadful case of misgovernment existed in India, and, thoroughly to arouse his countrymen to the fact, it was necessary to pile up the agony. Thus, in one part of his article he states that the "enormous debt" of India amounts to 220,000,000l., but in a later portion he admits that it is only 127,000,000l., and he knows full well that the amount of 100,000,000l. of guaranteed railway debt is not only not a present debt due from Government, but is a very valuable property, which will probably bring in some millions of revenue when they exercise their right of buying up the interests of the several guaranteed companies.

Again, he speaks throughout his article of the excessive taxation imposed on the poor, half-starved cultivators; and he gives the following table as showing the amount "taken absolutely out of the pockets of the people:"—

He thus maintains that the portion of the rent paid to Government for occupation of the land is a tax upon the cultivator, which is about as true as to state that the 67,000,000l. of rental in the United Kingdom is a special tax on the farmers of this country. The amount derived from excise is chiefly produced by the sale of intoxicating liquors, the use of which is forbidden by the social and religious views of the natives; and any contribution to the revenue under this head is clearly a voluntary act on the part of the transgressor. The revenue from stamps proceeds chiefly from what may be called taxes on justice; they are, in my opinion, extremely objectionable, but weighty objections may be urged against nearly every tax, and a large portion of this tax falls on the wealthier class of suitors. The amount contributed by the population under the head of customs, although it may take money out of the pocket of the rayat, actually adds to his store; for, unless he could buy in the bazaar a piece of Manchester long-cloth cheaper than an article of domestic manufacture, it is manifest that he would select the latter. There remains only the single article of salt on which the cultivator undoubtedly is taxed, and which forms the sole tax from which he cannot escape. This tax also is extremely objectionable in theory, more perhaps than in practice, for it amounts to about 7-1/2d. per head. But even if we take the whole amount of taxation as shown by Mr. Hyndman, excluding the land revenue or rental of the land, the average per head is only 1s. 6d., of which more than one-third can be avoided at the pleasure of any individual consumer. It is not, then, a misstatement to aver that the population of India is more lightly taxed than any population in the world living under an orderly government.

I have thus far thought it my duty to expose what I believe to be grave errors in Mr. Hyndman's sensational article. But I should do him great injustice if I did not admit that he has brought out in vivid colours some very important facts. It is true that these facts are well known to Indian administrators, but they are facts disagreeable to contemplate, and are therefore slurred over willingly; but they have such important bearing on the proceedings of Government in India that they cannot be too frequently paraded before the public eye.

The first of these truths is the undeniable poverty of the great bulk of the population. But here Mr. Hyndman does not appear to me to have taken full grasp of the fact, or to have ascertained its causes. The dense population of India, amounting in its more fertile parts to six and seven hundred per square mile, is almost exclusively occupied in agricultural pursuits. But the land of India has been farmed from time immemorial by men entirely without capital. A farmer in this country has little chance of success unless he can supply a capital of 10l. to 20l. an acre. If English farms were cultivated by men as deficient in capital as the Indian rayats, they would be all thrown on the parish in a year or two. The founder of a Hindu village may, by aid of his brethren and friends, have strength enough to break up the jungle, dig a well, and with a few rupees in his pocket he may purchase seed for the few acres he can bring under the plough. If a favourable harvest ensue, he has a large surplus, out of which he pays the jamma or rent to Government. But on the first failure of the periodical rains his withered crops disappear, he has no capital wherewith to meet the Government demand, to obtain food for his family and stock, or to purchase seed for the coming year. To meet all these wants he must have recourse to the village money-lender, who has always formed as indispensable a member of a Hindu agricultural community as the ploughman himself.

From time immemorial the cultivator of the soil in India has lived from hand to mouth, and when his hand could not supply his mouth from the stores of the last harvest he has been driven to the local saukár or money-lender to obtain the means of existence. This is the first great cause of India's poverty. The second is akin to it, for it exists in the infinite divisibility of property which arises under the Hindu system of succession, and which throws insuperable obstructions to the growth of capital. The rule as to property in Hindu life is that all the members of a family, father, grandfather, children, and grandchildren, constitute an undivided partnership, having equal shares in the property, although one of them, generally the eldest, is recognised as the manager. It is in the power of any member to sever himself from the family group, and the tendency of our Government has been to encourage efforts of what may be called individualism. But the new stock is but the commencement of another undivided family, so strong is the Hindu feeling in favour of this time-honoured custom. It is obvious that where the skill, foresight, and thriftiness required for the creation of capital may be thwarted by the extravagance or carelessness of any one of a large number of partners, its growth must be seriously impeded.

It will be seen, if the above arguments are sound, that the obstructions which oppose themselves to the formation of capital arise out of immemorial usages, and are irremediable by any direct interference of Government. But whatever may be the causes of this national poverty, the fact is undoubted, and it cannot be too steadily contemplated by those who desire to rely on fresh taxation for their favourite projects, whether it be for improved administration, for magnificent public works, or for the extension of our dominions. Mr. Hyndman also points out the great expensiveness of a foreign government, and his remarks on this subject are undoubtedly true. The high salaries required to tempt Englishmen of suitable qualifications to expatriate themselves for the better part of their lives, and the heavy dead weight of pensions and furlough charges for such officials, form, no doubt, a heavy burden on the resources of India. The costliness of a European army is, of course, also undoubtedly great. But these are charges which, to a less or greater degree, are inseparable from the dominion of a foreign government. The compensation for them is to be found in the security they provide against a foreign invader or against internal disturbances, and the protection they afford, in a degree hitherto unknown in India, to life, property, and character. But Mr. Hyndman's diatribes are useful in pointing to the conclusion that all the efforts of Government should be directed towards the diminution of these charges, where compatible with efficiency, and his striking contrast of the home military charges in 1862-63, which then amounted to 28l. 3s., and now have risen in the present year to 66l., deserves most serious consideration.

There is only one other statement of Mr. Hyndman which I desire to notice. He declares the general opinion of the natives to be that life, as a whole, has become harder since the English took the country, and he adds his own opinion that the fact is so. Mr. Hyndman, as we have seen, knows but little of the actual life of the agricultural population, and of their state under native rule he probably knows less. But I am inclined to think he fairly represents a very prevailing belief amongst the natives. A vivid indication of this native feeling is given in the most instructive work on Hindu rural life that I have ever met with.[14] Colonel Sleeman thus recounts a conversation he held with some natives in one of his rambles—

I got an old landowner from one of the villages to walk on with me a mile and put me in the right road. I asked him what had been the state of the country under the former government of the Jâts and Mahrattas, and was told that the greater part was a wild jungle. "I remember," said the old man, "when you could not have got out of the road hereabouts without a good deal of risk. I could not have ventured a hundred yards from the village without the chance of having my clothes stripped off my back. Now the whole country is under cultivation, and the roads are safe. Formerly the governments kept no faith with their landowners and cultivators, exacting ten rupees where they had bargained for five whenever they found their crops good. But in spite of all this zulm (oppression) there was then more burkul (blessings from above) than now; the lands yielded more to the cultivator."

Colonel Sleeman on the same day asked a respectable farmer what he thought of the latter statement. He stated: "The diminished fertility is owing, no doubt, to the want of those salutary fallows which the fields got under former governments, when invasions and civil wars were things of common occurrence, and kept at least two-thirds of the land waste."

The fact is that, under an orderly government like ours, the causes alluded to above as impeding the growth of capital become very much aggravated. Population largely increases, waste lands are brought under the plough, grazing grounds for stock disappear, and the fallows, formerly so beneficial in restoring fertility to the soil, can no longer be kept free from cultivation. All these considerations form portions of the very difficult problems in government which day by day present themselves to the Indian administrator. But does Mr. Hyndman think they are to be solved by recurrence to the native system of government; by the substitution of a local ruler, sometimes paternal, more frequently the reverse, for the courts of justice which now administer the law which can be read and understood by all; by civil contracts being enforced by the armed servant of the creditor, instead of by the officers of a court acting under strict surveillance; by the land assessment being collected year by year through the farmers of the revenue according to their arbitrary will, instead of being payable in a small moderate[15] sum, unalterable for a long term of years? If he thinks this—and his allusion to the system of the non-regulation provinces favours the conclusion—he will not find, I think, an educated native in the whole of India who will agree with him.

There are great harshnesses in our rule, there is a rigidity and exactitude of procedure which is often distasteful to native opinion, there are patent defects arising out of our attempts to administer justice, there is great irritation at our constant and often ill-conceived experiments in legislation, there is real danger in the fresh burdens we lay upon the people in our desire to carry out apparently laudable reforms. But with all these blemishes, which have only to be distinctly perceived to be removed from our administrative system, the educated native feels that he is gradually acquiring the position of a freeman, and he would not exchange it for that which Mr. Hyndman appears to desiderate.

E. Perry, in Nineteenth Century.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] This rock on its eastern face contains the decrees of Asoka, who began to reign 263 b.c.; on the western face is the inscription of Rudradáman, one of the Satrap-rulers under an Indian Greek dynasty, circa 90 b.c.; and the northern face presents the inscription of Skandagupta, 240 a.d.

[2] Preface to Vishnu Purana.

[3] Elphinstone, History of India, vol. i. p. 511.

[4] See Aitcheson, Treaties, vol. vi. p. 18.

[5] A Hindu Gentleman's Reflections. Spiers, London, 1878.

[6] Widow-burning.

[7] The swing-sacrifice.

[8] Views and Opinions of General John Jacob. London, 1858.

[9] October 1865, and October 1866.

[10] England and Russia in the East. Murray.

[11] 59 Geo. III. c. 55, s. 43.

[12] Report on East India Public Works, p. 85.

[13] The career of Mr. Dádobhai Naoroji illustrates in a remarkable manner the operation of the system of education introduced under our government. A Parsi, born in Bombay of very poor parents, he received his education at the Elphinstone College, where he displayed so much intelligence that in 1845 an English gentleman, desirous to open up a new career for educated natives, offered to send him to England to study for the bar if any of the wealthy merchants of his community would pay half the expenses. But in those days the Parsis, like the Hindus, dreaded contact with England, and the offer fell to the ground. Dádobhai continued at the College, where he obtained employment as a teacher, and subsequently became professor of mathematics, no native having previously filled such a post. In 1845 he left scholastics and joined the first native mercantile house established in London. This firm commenced with great success, and Dádobhai no sooner found himself master of 5,000l. than he devoted it to public objects in his native city. The house of Messrs. Cama subsequently failed, and Dádobhai returned to Bombay, where, as above noted, he took an active part in municipal affairs, and was subsequently appointed Dewan to the Gaekwar. He is now carrying on business as a merchant on his own account in London.

[14] Rambles of an Indian Official, 1844.

[15] So long ago as the period when Colonel Sleeman wrote, the principle was fully established as to the moderation to be observed in the Government assessment. He says: "We may rate the Government share at one-fifth as the maximum and one-tenth as the minimum of the gross produce." (Rambles of an Indian Official, vol i. p. 251.) In the Blue Book laid before Parliament last Session on the Deccan riots, it will be seen that the Government share in the gross produce of those districts where a high assessment was supposed to have created the disturbances was only one-thirteenth.

A COUP D'ÉTAT.

If little seeds by slow degree
Put forth their leaves and flowers unheard,
Our love had grown into a tree,
And bloomed without a single word

I haply hit on six o'clock,
The hour her father came from town;
I gave his own peculiar knock,
And waited slyly, like a clown.

The door was open. There she stood,
Lifting her mouth's delicious brim.
How could I waste a thing so good!
I took the kiss she meant for him.

A moment on an awful brink—
Deep breath, a frown, a smile, a tear;
And then, "O Robert, don't you think
That that was rather—cavalier?" [London Society.

THEATRICAL MAKE-SHIFTS AND BLUNDERS.

It is a generally received opinion that all stage wardrobes are made up of tawdry rags, and that the landscapes and palaces that look so charming by gaslight are but mere daubs by day. But there are wardrobes and wardrobes, scenery and scenery. The dresses used for some great "get up" at the opera houses, or at the principal London and provincial theatres, are costly and magnificent; the scenery, although painted for distance and artificial light, is really the product of artists of talent, and there is an attention to reality in all the adjuncts that would quite startle the believers in the tinsel and tawdry view. A millionaire might take a lesson from the stage drawing-rooms of the Prince of Wales and the Court theatres, and no cost is spared to procure the real article, whatever it may be, that is required for the scene. These minutiæ of realism, however, are quite a modern idea, dating no farther back than the days of Boucicault and Fechter. Splendid scenery and gorgeous dresses for the legitimate dramas were introduced by John Kemble, and developed to the utmost extent by Macready and Kean; but it was reserved for the present decade to lavish the same attention and expenses upon the petite drama. Half a century ago the property maker manufactured the stage furniture, the stage books, the candelabra, curtains, cloths, pictures, &c., out of papier mache and tinsel; and the drawing-room or library of a gentleman's mansion thus presented bore as much resemblance to the reality as sea-side furnished lodgings do to a ducal palace. Before the Kemble time a green baize, a couple of chairs and a table, sufficed for all furnishing purposes, whether for an inn or a palace.

In these days of "theatrical upholstery," we can scarcely realize the shabbiness of the stage of the last century. There were a few handsome suits for the principal actors, but the less important ones were frequently dressed in costumes that had done service for fifty years, until they were worn threadbare and frequently in rags. Endeavour to realise upon the modern stage such a picture as this given by Tate Wilkinson, of his appearance at Covent Garden as "The Fine Gentleman," in "Lethe." "A very short old suit of clothes, with a black velvet ground, and broad, gold flowers as dingy as the twenty-four letters on a piece of gingerbread; it had not seen the light since the first year Garrick played 'Lothario,' at the theatre. Bedecked in that sable array for the modern 'Fine Gentleman,' and to make the appearance complete, I added an old red surtout, trimmed with a dingy white fur, and a deep skinned cape of the same hue, borrowed by old Giffard, I was informed, at Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, to play 'King Lear' in." When West Digges appeared at the Haymarket as Cardinal Wolsey, it was in the identical dress that Barton Booth had worn in Queen Anne's time: a close-fitting habit of gilt leather upon a black ground, black stockings, and black gauntlets. No wonder Foote, who was in the pit, exclaimed, upon the appearance of this extraordinary figure, "A Roman sweep on May-day!" When Quin played the youthful fascinating Chamont, in Otway's "Orphan," he wore a long grisly half-powdered periwig, hanging low down each side his breast and down his back, a huge scarlet coat and waistcoat, heavily trimmed with gold, black velvet breeches, black silk neckcloth, black stockings, a pair of square-toed shoes, with an old-fashioned pair of stone buckles, stiff high-topped white gloves, with a broad old scolloped lace hat. Such a costume upon a personage not in his first youth, and more than inclined to obesity, must have had an odd effect. But then, as is well known, Garrick played "Macbeth" in a scarlet coat and powdered wig; John Kemble performed "Othello" in a full suit of British scarlet regimentals, and even when he had gone so far as to dress "Macbeth" as a highlander of 1745, wore in his bonnet a tremendous hearse plume, until Scott plucked it out, and placed an eagle's feather there in its stead. The costumes of the ladies were almost more absurd. Whether they appeared as Romans, Greeks, or females of the Middle Ages, they dressed the same—in the huge hoop, and powdered hair raised high upon the head, heavy brocaded robes that required two pages to hold up, without whose assistance they could scarcely have moved; and servants were dressed quite as magnificently as their mistresses.

In scenery there was no attempt at "sets;" a drop, and a pair of "flats," dusty and dim with age, were all the scenic accessories; and two or three hoops of tallow candles, suspended above the stage, were all that represented the blaze of gas and lime-light to which we are accustomed. The candle-snuffer was a theatrical post of some responsibility in those days. Garrick was the first who used concealed lights. The uncouth appearance of the stage was rendered still worse on crowded nights by ranges of seats raised for spectators on each side. The most ridiculous contretemps frequently resulted from this incongruity. Romeo, sometimes, when he bore out the body of Juliet from the solitary tomb of the Capulets, had to almost force his way through a throng of beaux, and Macbeth and his lady plotted the murder of Duncan amidst a throng of people.

One night, Hamlet, upon the appearance of the Ghost, threw off his hat, as usual, preparatory to the address, when a kind-hearted dame, who had heard him just before complain of its being "very cold," picked it up and good-naturedly clapped it upon his head again. A similar incident once happened during the performance of Pizarro. Elvira is discovered asleep upon a couch, gracefully covered by a rich velvet cloak; Valverde enters, kneels and kisses her hand; Elvira awakes, rises and lets fall the covering, and is about to indignantly repulse her unwelcome visitor, when a timid female voice says: "Please, ma'am, you've dropped your mantle," and a timid hand is trying to replace it upon the tragedy queen's shoulders. Of another kind, but very much worse, was an accident that befell Mrs. Siddons at Edinburgh, at the hands of another person who failed to distinguish between the real person and the counterfeit. Just before going on for the sleep-walking-scene, she had sent a boy for some porter, but the cue for her entrance was given before he returned. The house was awed into shuddering silence as, in a terrible whisper, she uttered the words "Out, out, damned spot!" and with slow mechanical action rubbed the guilty hands; when suddenly there emerged from the wings a small figure holding out a pewter pot, and a shrill voice broke the awful silence with "Here's your porter, mum." Imagine the feelings of the stately Siddons! The story is very funny to read, but depend upon it the incident gave her the most cruel anguish.

It is not, however, to the uninitiated outsiders alone we are indebted for ludicrous stage contretemps; the experts themselves have frequently given rise to them. All readers of Elia will remember the name of Bensley, one of "the old actors" upon whom he discourses so eloquently—a grave precise man, whose composure no accident could ruffle, as the following anecdote will prove. One night, as he was making his first entrance as Richard III., at the Dublin Theatre, his wig caught upon a nail in the side scene, and was dragged off. Catching his hat by the feather, however, he calmly replaced it as he walked to the centre of the stage, but left his hair still attached to the nail. Quite unmoved by the occurrence, he commenced his soliloquy; but so rich a subject could not escape the wit of an Irish audience. "Bensley, darlin'," shouted a voice from the gallery, "put on your jaisey!" "Bad luck to your politics, will you suffer a whig to be hung?" shouted another. But the tragedian, deaf to all clamour, never faltered, never betrayed the least annoyance, spoke the speech to the end, stalked to the wing, detached the wig from the nail, and made his exit with it in his hand.

Novices under the influence of stage fright will say and do the most extraordinary things. Some years ago, I witnessed a laughable incident during the performance of "Hamlet" at a theatre in the North. Although a very small part, consisting as it does of only one speech, the "Second Actor" is a very difficult one, the language being peculiarly cramped. In the play scene he assassinates the player king by pouring poison into his ear. The speech preceding the action is as follows:

Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and time agreeing;
Confederate season, else no creature seeing;
Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected,
With Hecate's ban thrice blasted, thrice infected,
Thy natural magic and dire property
On wholesome life usurp immediately.

Upon which follows the stage direction—"Pours poison into his ear."

In a play of so many characters as Hamlet, such a part, in a second-class theatre, can be given only to a very inferior performer. The one to whom it was entrusted on the present occasion was a novice. Muffled in a black coat and a black slouched hat, and with a face half hidden by burnt cork, he looked a most villainous villain, as he stole on and gazed about in the most approved melo-dramatic fashion. Then he began, in a strong north country brogue,—

Thoughts black, hands apt,—

then his memory failed him, and he stuck fast. The prompter whispered "drugs fit;" but stage fright had seized him, and he could not take the word. He tried back, but stuck again at the same place. Half-a-dozen people were all prompting him at the same time now, but all in vain. At length one more practical than the rest whispered angrily, "Pour the poison in his ear and get off." The suggestion restored a glimmering of reason to the trembling, perspiring wretch. He could not remember the words of Shakespeare, so he improvised a line. Advancing to the sleeping figure, he raised the vial in his hand, and in a terribly tragic tone shouted, "Into his ear-hole this I'll power!"

Some extraordinary and agonising mistakes, for tragedians, have been made in what are called the flying messages in "Richard III." and "Macbeth," by novices in their nervousness mixing up their own parts with the context; as when Catesby rushed on and cried, "My lord, the Duke of Buckingham's taken." There he should have stopped while Richard replied, "Off with his head! so much for Buckingham!" But in his flurry the shaking messenger added, "and they've cut off his head!" With a furious look at having been robbed of one of his finest "points," the tragedian roared out, "Then, damn you, go and stick it on again!" Another story is told of an actor playing one of the officers in the fifth act of "Macbeth." "My lord," he has to say, "there are ten thousand——" "Geese, villain," interrupts Macbeth. "Ye—es, my lord!" answered the messenger, losing his memory in his terror.

But a far more dreadful anecdote is related of the same play. A star was playing the guilty Thane in a very small company, where each member had to sustain three or four different characters. During the performance the man appointed to play the first murderer was taken ill. There was not another to be spared, and the only resource left was to send on a supernumerary, supposed to be intelligent, to stand for the character. "Keep close to the wing," said the prompter; "I'll read you the words, and you can repeat them after me." The scene was the banquet; the supper was pushed on, and Macbeth, striding down the stage, seized his arm and said in a stage whisper, "There's blood upon thy face." "'Tis Banquo's, then," was the prompt. Lost and bewildered—having never spoken in his life before upon the stage—by the tragedian's intense yet natural tones, the fellow, imitating them in the most confidential manner, answered, "Is there, by God?" put his hand up to his forehead, and, finding it stained with rose pink, added, "Then the property man's served me a trick!"

Once upon a time I was present at the performance of the celebrated dog piece, "The Forest of Bondy," in a small country theatre. The plot turns upon a well-known story, the discovery of a murder through the sagacity of the victim's dog. The play-bill descanted most eloquently upon the wonderful genius of the "highly trained" animal, and was sufficient to raise expectation on tip-toe. Yet it had evidently failed to impress the public of this town, their experiences probably having rendered them sceptical of such pufferies, for the house was miserably bad. The first entrance of "the celebrated dog Cæsar," however, in attendance upon his master, was greeted with loud applause. He was a fine young black Newfoundland, whose features were more descriptive of good nature than genius. He sat on his haunches and laughed at the audience, and pricked up his ears at the sound of a boy munching a biscuit in the pit. I could perceive he was a novice, and that he would forget all he had been taught when he came to the test. While Aubrey, the hero, is passing through a forest at night, he is attacked by two ruffians, and after a desperate combat is killed; the dog is supposed to be kept out of the way. But in the very midst of the fight, Cæsar, whose barking had been distinctly heard all the time, rushed on the stage. Far from evincing any ferocity towards his master's foes, he danced about with a joyous bark, evidently considering it famous fun. Aubrey was furious, and kicked out savagely at his faithful "dawg," thereby laying himself open to the swords of his adversaries, who, however, in consideration that the combat had not been long enough, generously refused the advantages. "Get off, you beast!" growled Aubrey, who evidently desired to fight it out without canine interference. At length, when the faltering applause from the gallery began to show that the gods had had enough of it, the assassins buried their swords beneath their victim's arms, and he expired in great agony; Cæsar looking on from the respectful distance to which his master's kick had sent him, with the unconcern of a person who had seen it all done at rehearsal and knew it was all sham, but with a decided interest of eye and ear in the direction of the biscuit-muncher. In the next act he was to leap over a stile and ring the bell at a farm house, and, having awakened the inhabitants, seize a lantern which is brought out, and lead them to the spot where the villains have buried his master. After a little prompting Cæsar leaped the stile and went up to the bell, round the handle of which was twisted some red cloth to imitate meat; but there never was a more matter-of-fact dog than this; he evidently hated all shams, even artistic ones; and after a sniff at the red rag he walked off disgusted, and could not be induced to go on again; so the people had to rush out without being summoned, carry their own lantern, and find their way by a sort of canine instinct, or scent, to the scene of the murder. But Cæsar's delinquencies culminated in the last scene, where, after the chief villain, in a kind of lynch law trial, has stoutly asserted his innocence, the sagacious "dawg" suddenly bounds upon the stage, springs at his throat, and puts an end to his infamous career. Being held by the collar, and incited on, in the side scene, Cæsar's deep bark sounded terribly ferocious, and seemed to foreshadow a bloody catastrophe; but his bark proved worse than his bite, for when released he trotted on with a most affable expression of countenance, his thoughts still evidently bent upon biscuits; in vain did the villain show him the red pad upon his throat and invite him to seize it. Cæsar had been deceived once, and scorned to countenance an imposition. Furious with passion, the villain rushed at him, drew him up on his hind legs, clasped him in his arms, then fell upon the stage and writhed in frightful agonies, shrieking, "Mussy, mussy, take off the dawg!" and the curtain fell amidst the howls and hisses of the audience.

Another laughable dog story, although of a different kind, was once related to me by a now London actor. In a certain theatre in one of the great northern cities business had been so bad for some time that salaries were very irregularly paid. It is a peculiarity of the actor that he is never so jolly, so full of fun, and altogether so vivacious, as when he is impecunious. In prosperity he is dull and melancholy; the yellow dross seems to weigh down his spirit, to stultify it; empty his pockets, and it etherialises him. At the theatre in question, the actors amused themselves if they failed to amuse the audience. Attached to this house was a mongrel cur, whom some of them had taught tricks to while away the tedium of long waits. "Jack"—such was his name—was well known all round the neighbourhood, and to most of the habitues of the house. Among his other accomplishments he could simulate death at command, and could only be recalled to life by a certain piece of information to be presently mentioned. One night the manager was performing "The Stranger" to about half-a-dozen people. Francis was standing at the wing waiting for his cue when his eye fell upon Jack, who was standing just off the stage on the opposite side; an impish thought struck him—he whistled—Jack pricked up his ears, and Francis slapped his leg and called him. Obedient to the summons Jack trotted before the audience, but as he reached the centre of the stage the word "dead!" struck upon his ear. The next moment he was stretched motionless with his two hind legs sticking up at an angle of forty-five degrees. The scene was the one in which the Stranger relates to Baron Steinfort the story of his wrongs, and he had come to the line, "My heart is like a close-shut sepulchre," when a burst of laughter from the front drew his attention to Jack. He saw the trick that had been played in an instant. "Get off, you brute!" he growled, giving the animal a kick. But Jack was too highly trained to heed such an admonition, having learned beforehand that the kicking was not so bad as the flogging he would get for not performing his part correctly. "Doan't tha' kick poor Jack," called out a rough voice, "give un the word." "Ay, ay, give un the word," echoed half-a-dozen voices. The manager knew better than to disregard the advice of his patrons, and ground out between his teeth, "Here's a policeman coming." At that "open Sesame" Jack was up and off like a shot. It must have been one of the finest bits of burlesque to have seen that black-ringlet-wigged, sallow, dyspeptic, tragic-looking individual, repeating the clown's formula over a mangy cur.

The failure or forgetfulness of stage properties is frequently a source of ludicrous incidents. People are often killed by pistols that will not fire, or stabbed with the butt ends. In some play an actor has to seize a dagger from a table and stab his rival. One night the dagger was forgotten and no substitute was there, except a candle, which the excited actor wrenched from the candlestick, and madly plunged at his opponent's breast; but it effected its purpose, for the victim expired in strong convulsions. It is strange how seldom the audience perceive such contretemps, or notice the extraordinary and ludicrous slips of the tongue that are so frequent upon the stage.

A playbill is not always the most truth-telling publication in the world. Managers, driven to their wits' ends to draw a sluggish public, often announce entertainments which they have no means of producing properly, or even at all, and have to exercise an equal amount of ingenuity to find substitutes, or satisfy a deluded audience. Looking through some manuscript letters of R. B. Peake's the other day, I came across a capital story of Bunn. While he was manager of the Birmingham Theatre, Power, the celebrated Irish comedian, made a starring engagement with him. It was about the time that the dramatic version of Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein"—done, I believe, by Peake himself—was making a great sensation, and Power announced it for his benefit, playing "the Monster" himself. The manager, however, refused to spend a penny upon the production. "You must do with what you can find in the theatre," he said. There was only one difficulty. In the last scene Frankenstein is buried beneath an avalanche, and among the stage scenery of the Theatre Royal, Birmingham, there was nothing resembling an avalanche to be found, and the avalanche was the one prodigious line in the playbill. Power was continually urging this difficulty, but Bunn always eluded it with, "Oh, we shall find something or other." At length it came to the day of performance, and the problem had not yet been solved.

"Well, we shall have to change the piece," said Power.

"Pooh, pooh! nonsense!" answered the manager.

"There is no avalanche, and it is impossible to be finished without."

"Can't you cut it out?"

"Impossible."

The manager fell into a brown study for a few moments. Then suddenly brightening up, he said, "I have it; but they must let the green curtain down instantly on the extraordinary effect. Hanging up in the flies is the large elephant made for 'Blue Beard;' we'll have it whitewashed."

"What?" exclaimed Power.

"We'll have it whitewashed," continued the manager coolly; "what is an avalanche but a vast mass of white? When Frankenstein is to be annihilated, the carpenters shall shove the whitened elephant over the flies—destroy you both in a moment—and down comes the curtain."

As there was no other alternative, Power e'en submitted. The whitened elephant was "shoved" over at the right moment, the effect was appalling from the front, and the curtain descended amidst loud applause.

Not quite so successful was a hoax perpetrated by Elliston, during his management of the Birmingham Theatre, many years previously. Then, also, business had been very bad, and he was in great difficulties. Let us give the managers their due. They do not, as a rule, resort to swindles except under strong pressure; then they soothe their consciences with the reflection that as an obtuse and ungrateful public will not support their legitimate efforts, it deserves to be swindled. And a very good reflection it is—from a managerial point of view. No man was more fertile in expedients than Robert William Elliston; so after a long continuance of empty benches, the walls and boardings of the town were one morning covered with glaring posters announcing that the manager of the Theatre Royal had entered into an engagement with a Bohemian of extraordinary strength and stature, who would perform some astonishing evolutions with a stone of upwards of a ton weight, which he would toss about as easily as another would a tennis-ball. What all the famous names of the British drama and all the talents of its exponents had failed to accomplish, was brought about by a stone, and on the evening announced for its appearance the house was crammed to the ceiling. The exhibition was to take place between the play and the farce, and scarcely had the intellectual audience patience to listen to the piece, so eager were they for the noble entertainment that was to follow. At length, much to their relief, the curtain fell. The usual interval elapsed, the house became impatient, impatience soon merged into furious clamour. At length, with a pale, distraught countenance, Elliston rushed before the curtain. In a moment there was a breathless silence.

"The Bohemian has deceived me!" were his first words. "That I could have pardoned; but he has deceived you, my friends, you;" and his voice trembled, and he hid his face behind his handkerchief and seemed to sob.

Then, bursting forth again, he went on: "I repeat, he has deceived me; he is not here."

A yell of disappointment burst from the house.

"The man," continued Elliston, raising his voice, "of whatever name or nation he may be, who breaks his word, commits an offence which——" The rest of this Joseph Surface sentiment was drowned in furious clamour, and for some minutes he could not make himself heard, until he drew some letters from his pocket, and held them up.

"Here is the correspondence," he said. "Does any gentleman here understand German? If so, will he oblige me by stepping forward?"

The Birmingham public were not strong in languages in those days, it would seem, for no gentleman stepped forward.

"Am I, then, left alone?" he exclaimed in tragic accents. "Well, I will translate them for you."

Here there was another uproar, out of which came two or three voices, "No, no." Like Buckingham, he chose to construe the two or three into "a general acclaim."

"Your commands shall be obeyed," he said bowing, and pocketing the correspondence, "I will not read them. But my dear patrons, your kindness merits some satisfaction at my hands; your consideration shall not go unrewarded. You shall not say you have paid your money for nothing. Thank heaven, I can satisfy you of my own integrity, and present you with a portion of the entertainment you have paid to see. The Bohemian, the villain, is not here. But the stone is, and You shall see it." He winked at the orchestra, which struck up a lively strain, and up went the curtain, disclosing a huge piece of sand rock, upon which was stuck a label, bearing the legend in large letters, "This is the stone."

It need scarcely be added that the Bohemian existed only in the manager's brain. But it is a question whether the audience which could be only brought together by such an exhibition did not deserve to be swindled.

An equally good story is told of his management at Worcester. For his benefit he had announced a grand display of fireworks! No greater proof of the gullibility of the British public could be adduced than their swallowing such an announcement. The theatre was so small that such an exhibition was practically impossible. A little before the night Elliston called upon the landlord of the property, and in the course of conversation hinted at the danger of such a display, as though the idea had just struck him; the landlord took alarm, and, as Elliston had anticipated, forbade it. Nevertheless the announcements remained on the walls, and on the night the theatre was crowded. The performance proceeded without any notice being taken by the management of the fireworks, until murmurs swelled into clamour and loud cries. Then with his usual kingly air, Elliston came forward and bowed. He had made, he said, the most elaborate preparation for a magnificent pyrotechnic display; he had left nothing undone, but at the last moment came the terrible reflection, would it not be dangerous? Would there not be collected within the walls of the theatre a number of lovely young tender girls, of respectable matrons, to do him honour? What if the house should catch fire—the panic, the struggle for life—ah, he shuddered at the thought! Then, too, he thought of the property of that worthiest of men, the landlord—he rushed to consult him—and he now called upon him—there he was, seated in the stage box—to publicly state, for the satisfaction of the distinguished audience he saw before him, that he had forbidden the performance from considerations of safety. The landlord, a very nervous man, shrank to the back of his box, scared by every eye in the house being fixed upon him; but the audience, thankful for the terrible danger they had escaped, burst into thunders of applause.

The stories are endless of the shifts and swindles to which country managers, at their wits' end, have had to resort to attract a sluggish public. How great singers have been advertised that never heard of such an engagement, and even forged telegrams read to an expectant audience, to account for their non-appearance. How prizes have been distributed on benefit nights—to people who gave them back again. How audiences, the victims of some false announcement, have been left waiting patiently for the performance to commence, while the manager was on his way to another town with their money in his pocket. But there is a great sameness about such stories, and one or two are a specimen of all.

H. Barton Baker, in Belgravia.

I.—WINTER-MORN IN THE COUNTRY.

The Sabbath of all Nature! Stillness reigns
For snow has fallen, and all the land is white.
The cottage-roofs slant grey against the light,
And grey the sky, nor cloud nor blue obtains.

The sun is moonlike, as a maiden feigns
To veil her beauty, yet sends glances bright
That fill the eye, and make the heart delight,
Expectant of some wonder. Lengthened trains

Of birds wing high, and straight the smoke ascends.
All things are fairy-like: the trees empearled
With frosty gem-work, like to trees in dream.

Beneath the weight the slender cedar bends
And looks more ghost-like! 'Tis a wonder-world,
Wherein, indeed, things are not as they seem.

II.—WINTER-MORN IN TOWN.

Through yellow fog all things take spectral shapes:
Lamps dimly gleam, and through the window pane
The light is shed in short and broken lane;
And "darkness visible" pants, yawns, and gapes.

From roofs the water drips, as from high capes,
Half-freezes as it falls. Like cries of pain
Fog-signals faintly heard, and then again
Grave warning words to him who rashly apes

The skater, nearer. All is muffled fast
In dense dead coils of vapour, nothing clear—
The world disguised in mumming masquerade.

O'er each a dull thick clinging veil is cast,
And no one is what fain he would appear:
Nor any well-marked track on which to tread,

Alex. H. Japp, in Belgravia.

THE HAPPY VALLEY.

A REMINISCENCE OF THE HIMALAYAS.

The privilege which the families of officers in the service of the State may be said exclusively to possess, of reproducing in Upper India—and especially in the Himalayan stations, and valley of Dhera Dhoon—the stately or cottage homes of England, is perhaps one, to a great extent, unfamiliar to their relatives at home; and it is scarcely too much to say that the general public, which, as a rule, considers the Indian climate an insuperable barrier to all enjoyment, has but a faint idea of that glorious beauty, which is no "fading flower," in this "Happy Valley," with its broad belt of virgin forest, that lies between the Himalayas proper and the sharp ridges of the wild Sewalic range. The latter forms a barrier between the sultry plains and the cool and romantic retreats, where the swords of our gallant defenders may be said to rest in their scabbards, and where, surrounded by the pleasures of domestic life, health and happiness may, in the intervals of piping times of peace, be enjoyed to their fullest extent.

In such favoured spots the exile from home may live, seemingly, for the present only; but, in truth, it is not so, for even under such favoured circumstances the tie with our natal place is never relaxed, and the hope of future return to it adds just that touch of pensiveness—scarcely sadness—which is the delicate neutral tint that brings out more forcibly the gorgeous colours of the picture.

The gaieties of the mountain stations of Mussoorie and Landour were now approaching their periodical close, in the early part of October, when the cold season commences. The attractive archery meetings on the green plateaux of the mountain-spurs had ceased, and balls and sumptuous dinner-parties were becoming fewer and fewer; while daily one group of friends after another, "with lingering steps and slow," on rough hill-ponies or in quaint jam-pans, were wending their way some six or seven thousand feet down the umbrageous mountain-sides, watched from above by those who still lingered behind, until they seemed like toilsome emmets in the far distance.

Now that our summer companions were gone we used to while away many an hour with our glasses, scanning in that clear atmosphere the vast plains stretched out beneath us like a rich carpet of many colours, but in which forms were scarcely to be traced at that distance. Here, twisted silver threads represented some great river; there, a sprinkling of rice-like grains, the white bungalows of a cantonment; while occasionally a sombre mass denoted some forest or mango tope. Around us, and quailing under fierce gusts of wind from the passes of the snowy range rising in peaks to nearly twice the altitude of the Alps, the gnarled oaks, now denuded of their earlier garniture of parasitical ferns, that used to adorn their mossy branches with Nature's own point lace, seemed almost conscious of approaching winter.

Landour, now deserted, save by a few invalid soldiers and one or two resident families, had few attractions. The snow was lying deep on the mountain-sides, and blocking up the narrow roads. But winter in the Himalayas is a season of startling phenomena; for it is then that thunder storms of appalling grandeur are prevalent, and to a considerable extent destructive. During the night, amidst the wild conflict of the elements, would, not unfrequently, be heard the bugles of the soldiers' Sanatorium, calling to those who could sleep to arouse themselves, and hasten to the side of residents whose houses had been struck by the electric fluid.

Still, we clung to our mountain-home to the last, although we knew that summer awaited us in the valley below, and that in an hour and a half we might with ease exchange an almost hyperborean climate for one where summer is perennial, or seems so—for the rainy season is but an interlude of refreshing showers.

At length an incident occurred which somewhat prematurely influenced our departure.

As we were sitting at an early breakfast one morning with the children, Khalifa, a favourite domestic, and one who rarely failed to observe that stately decorum peculiar to Indian servants, rushed wildly into the room, with every appearance of terror, screaming, "Janwar! Burra janwar, sahib!"[16] at the same time pointing to the window.

We could not at first understand what the poor fellow meant; but on looking out, were not a little disconcerted at the sight which presented itself.

Crouched on the garden-wall was a huge spotted animal of the leopard species. It looked, however, by no means ferocious, but, on the contrary, to be imploring compassion and shelter from the snowstorm. Still, notwithstanding its demure cat-like aspect, its proximity was by no means agreeable. With a strange lack of intelligence, the brute, instead of avoiding the cold, had evidently become bewildered, and crawled up the mountain side. As we could scarcely be expected to extend the rites of hospitality to such a visitor, the harmless discharge of a pistol insured his departure at one bound, and with a terrific growl.

Wild beasts are rarely seen about European stations. Those who like them must go out of their way to find them. But perhaps stupefied by cold while asleep, and pinched by hunger, as on the present occasion, they may lose their usual sagacity.

Having got rid of our unwelcome visitor, we determined at once to leave our mountain-home.

The servants were only too glad to hasten our departure, and in the course of an hour everything was packed up, and we were ready for the descent into the plains.

Notwithstanding the absence of a police force, robberies of houses are almost unknown; and therefore it was only necessary for us to draw down the blinds and lock the main door, leaving the furniture to take care of itself.

The jam-pans and little rough ponies were ready; the servants, although shivering in their light clothing, more active than I had ever before seen them; and in the course of another hour we were inhaling the balmy air of early summer.

The pretty little hotel of Rajpore, at the base of the mountain, was now reached; and before us lay the broad and excellent road, shaded with trees, which, in the course of another twenty minutes, brought us to the charming cantonment of Deyrah. All Nature seemed to be rejoicing; the birds were singing; the sounds of bubbling and splashing waters (mountain-streams diverted from their natural channels, and brought into every garden), and hedges of the double pink and crimson Bareilly rose[17] in full bloom, interspersed with the oleander, and the mehndi (henna of Scripture) with its fragrant clusters, filling the air with the perfume of mignonette, presented a scene of earthly beauty which cannot be surpassed.

"How stupid we were," I remarked, looking back at our late home, now a mere black speck on the top of the snowy mountain far above—"how very foolish and perverse to have fancied ourselves more English in the winter up there, when we might all this time have been leading the life of Eden, in this enchanting spot!"

"Indeed we were," replied my companion. "But it is the way with us in India. We give a rupee for an English daisy, and cast aside the honeyed champah."

In India there is no difficulty in housing oneself. No important agents are necessary, and advertising is scarcely known. Accordingly, without ceremony, we took quiet possession of the first vacant bungalow which we came to, and our fifteen domestics did not seem to question for a moment the propriety of the occupation. Under our somewhat despotic government, are not the sahib lög[18] above petty social observances?

While A. was busily employed getting his guns ready and preparing for shikari in the adjacent forest and jungles, which swarm with peafowl, partridges, quail, pigeons, and a variety of other game, my first care was to summon the resident mali (gardener), and ascertain how the beautiful and extensive garden of which we had taken possession[19] might be further stocked.

"Mem sahib,"[20] said the quiet old gardener, with his hands in a supplicatory position, "there is abundance here of everything—aloo, lal sag, anjir, padina, baingan, piyaz, khira, shalgham, kobs, ajmud, kharbuza, amb, amrut, anar, narangi—"[21]

"Stay!" I interrupted; "that is enough."

But the old mali had something more to add:

"Mem sahib, all is your own, and your slave shall daily bring his customary offering, and flowers for the table; and the protector of the poor will not refuse bakshees for the bearer."

I promised to be liberal to the poor old man, and then proceeded to inspect the flower-garden.

Here I was surprised to find a perfect fraternisation between the tropical flora and our own. Amongst flowers not unfamiliar to the European were abundance of the finest roses, superb crimson and gold poincianas, the elegant hybiscus, graceful ipomœas, and convolvuli of every hue, the purple amaranth, the variegated double balsam, the richest marigolds, the pale-blue clusters of the plantago, acacias, jasmines, oranges, and pomegranates, intermixed with our own pansies, carnations, cinerarias, geraniums, fuchsias, and a wealth of blossoms impossible to remember by name.

"If there is a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this!"

Far more beautiful to the homely eye are such gardens than those of Shalimar and Pinjore, with their costly marble terraces, geometrical walks, fountains and cascades falling over sculptured slabs.

Nor are we in India confined to the enjoyment of Nature. Art[22] finds its way to us from Europe, and literature here receives the warmest welcome. Our pianos, our musical-boxes—our costly and richly bound illustrated works, fresh from England—the most thrilling romances of fiction, and all the periodicals of the day, are regularly accumulated in these charming Indian retreats, and keep up the culture of the mind in a valley whose "glorious beauty" is, as I have said, no "fading flower," but the home of the missionary, and the resort of the war-worn soldier or truth-loving artist.

Nor is this all. Around Deyrah is some of the most exquisitely beautiful cave scenery, comparatively unknown even to Europeans; such, for example, as the wondrous natural tunnel, whose sides shine with the varied beauty of the most delicate mosaics, and are lit up by rents in the hill above; the "dropping cave" of Sansadhara, "bosomed high in tufted trees;" and the strange ancient shrines sculptured in the romantic glen of Tope-Kesur-Mahadeo.

Of these, Sansadhara has lately been made the subject of a beautiful photograph, which, however, fails to convey the exquisite charm of the original; but the natural tunnel and Tope-Kesur-Mahadeo have never been presented by the artist to the public, although there are unique sketches of them in the fine collection of a lady[23] who, as the wife of a former Indian Commander-in-Chief, had opportunities afforded to few of indulging her taste.

One might exhaust volumes in attempting to describe such scenes, and even then fail to do them the faintest justice. The Alps, with all their beauty, lose much of their grandeur after one has been in daily contemplation of the majestic snowy range of the Himalayas, while the forests and valleys that skirt its base have no counterpart in Europe. In these partial solitudes we lose much of our conventionality. The mind is to a certain extent elevated by the grand scale on which Nature around is presented. The occasional alarm of war teaches the insecurity of all earthly happiness. Our life is subject to daily introspection, and before the mind's eye is the sublime prospect, perhaps at no very distant period, of a Christian India rising from the ruins of a sensuous idolatry in immortal beauty.

L. A., in London Society.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] "Wild beast! Big wild beast, sir!"

L. M.—I.—2.

[17] A remarkable plant. It is in constant bloom. On every spray there is a central crimson blossom, which only lasts one day, surrounded by five or six pink ones, which remain for many days.

[18] Dominant class.

[19] House-rent is paid monthly in India, in arrear.

[20] My lady.

[21] Potato, spinach, fig, mint, egg-plant, onion, cucumber, turnip, cabbage, parsley, melon, mango, guava, pomegranate, orange.

[22] There is no intention of disparaging beautiful native art.

[23] Lady Gomm.

THE PHŒNICIANS IN GREECE.

Herodotus begins his history by relating how Phœnician traders brought "Egyptian and Assyrian wares" to Argos and other parts of Greece, in those remote days when the Greeks were still waiting to receive the elements of their culture from the more civilized East. His account was derived from Persian and Phœnician sources, but, it would seem, was accepted by his contemporaries with the same unquestioning confidence as by himself. The belief of Herodotus was shared by the scholars of Europe after the revival of learning, and there were none among them who doubted that the civilization of ancient Greece had been brought from Asia or Egypt, or from both. Hebrew was regarded as the primæval language, and the Hebrew records as the fountain-head of all history; just as the Greek vocabulary, therefore, was traced back to the Hebrew lexicon, the legends of primitive Greece were believed to be the echoes of Old Testament history. Ex Oriente lux was the motto of the inquirer, and the key to all that was dark or doubtful in the mythology and history of Hellas was to be found in the monuments of the Oriental world.

But the age of Creuzer and Bryant was succeeded by an age of scepticism and critical investigation. A reaction sat in against the attempt to force Greek thought and culture into an Asiatic mould. The Greek scholar was repelled by the tasteless insipidity and barbaric exuberance of the East; he contrasted the works of Phidias and Praxiteles, of Sophocles and Plato, with the monstrous creations of India or Egypt, and the conviction grew strong within him that the Greek could never have learnt his first lessons of civilization in such a school as this. Between the East and the West a sharp line of division was drawn, and to look for the origin of Greek culture beyond the boundaries of Greece itself came to be regarded almost as sacrilege. Greek mythology, so far from being an echo or caricature of Biblical history and Oriental mysticism, was pronounced to be self-evolved and independent, and K. O. Müller could deny without contradiction the Asiatic origin even of the myth of Aphrodite and Adonis, where the name of the Semitic sun-god seems of itself to indicate its source. The Phœnician traders of Herodotus, like the royal maiden they carried away from Argos, were banished to the nebulous region of rationalistic fable.

Along with this reaction against the Orientalizing school which could see in Greece nothing but a deformed copy of Eastern wisdom went another reaction against the conception of Greek mythology on which the labours of the Orientalizing school had been based. Key after key had been applied to Greek mythology, and all in vain; the lock had refused to turn. The light which had been supposed to come from the East had turned out to be but a will-o'-the-wisp; neither the Hebrew Scriptures nor the Egyptian hieroglyphics had solved the problem presented by the Greek myths. And the Greek scholar, in despair, had come to the conclusion that the problem was insoluble; all that he could do was to accept the facts as they were set before him, to classify and repeat the wondrous tales of the Greek poets, but to leave their origin unexplained. This is practically the position of Grote; he is content to show that all the parts of a myth hang closely together, and that any attempt to extract history or philosophy from it must be arbitrary and futile. To deprive a myth of its kernel and soul, and call the dry husk that is left a historical fact, is to mistake the conditions of the problem and the nature of mythology.

It was at this point that the science of comparative mythology stepped in. Grote had shown that we cannot look for history in mythology, but he had given up the discovery of the origin of this mythology as a hopeless task. The same comparative method, however, which has forced nature to disclose her secrets has also penetrated to the sources of mythology itself. The Greek myths, like the myths of the other nations of the world, are the forgotten and misinterpreted records of the beliefs of primitive man, and of his earliest attempts to explain the phenomena of nature. Restore the original meaning of the language wherein the myth is clothed, and the origin of the myth is found. Myths, in fact, are the words of a dead language to which a wrong sense has been given by a false method of decipherment. A myth, rightly explained, will tell us the beliefs, the feelings, and the knowledge of those among whom it first grew up; for the evidences and monuments of history we must look elsewhere.

But there is an old proverb that "there is no smoke without fire." The war of Troy or the beleaguerment of Thebes may be but a repetition of the time-worn story of the battle waged by the bright powers of day round the battlements of heaven; but there must have been some reason why this story should have been specially localized in the Troad and at Thebes. Most of the Greek myths have a background in space and time; and for this background there must be some historical cause. The cause, however, if it is to be discovered at all, must be discovered by means of those evidences which will alone satisfy the critical historian. The localization of a myth is merely an indication or sign-post pointing out the direction in which he is to look for his facts. If Greek warriors had never fought in the plains of Troy, we may be pretty sure that the poems of Homer would not have brought Akhilles and Agamemnon under the walls of Ilium. If Phœnician traders had exercised no influence on primæval Greece, Greek legend would have contained no references to them.

But even the myth itself, when rightly questioned, may be made to yield some of the facts upon which the conclusions of the historian are based. We now know fairly well what ideas, usages, and proper names have an Aryan stamp upon them, and what, on the other hand, belong rather to the Semitic world. Now there is a certain portion of Greek mythology which bears but little relationship to the mythology of the kindred Aryan tribes, while it connects itself very closely with the beliefs and practices of the Semitic race. Human sacrifice is very possibly one of these, and it is noticeable that two at least of the legends which speak of human sacrifice—those of Athamas and Busiris—are associated, the one with the Phœnicians of Thebes, the other with the Phœnicians of the Egyptian Delta. The whole cycle of myths grouped about the name of Herakles points as clearly to a Semitic source as does the myth of Aphrodite and Adonis; and the extravagant lamentations that accompanied the worship of the Akhæan Demeter (Herod. v. 61) come as certainly from the East as the olive, the pomegranate, and the myrtle, the sacred symbols of Athena, of Hera, and of Aphrodite.[24]

Comparative mythology has thus given us a juster appreciation of the historical inferences we may draw from the legends of prehistoric Greece, and has led us back to a recognition of the important part played by the Phœnicians in the heroic age. Greek culture, it is true, was not the mere copy of that of Semitic Asia, as scholars once believed, but the germs of it had come in large measure from an Oriental seed-plot. The conclusions derived from a scientific study of the myths have been confirmed and widened by the recent researches and discoveries of archæology. The spade, it has been said, is the modern instrument for reconstructing the history of the past, and in no department in history has the spade been more active of late than in that of Greece. From all sides light has come upon that remote epoch around which the mist of a fabulous antiquity had already been folded in the days of Herodotus; from the islands and shores of the Ægean, from the tombs of Asia Minor and Palestine, nay, even from the temples and palaces of Egypt and Assyria, have the materials been exhumed for sketching in something like clear outline the origin and growth of Greek civilization. From nowhere, however, have more important revelations been derived than from the excavations at Mykenæ and Spata, near Athens, and it is with the evidence furnished by these that I now propose mainly to deal. A personal inspection of the sites and the objects found upon them has convinced me of the groundlessness of the doubts which have been thrown out against their antiquity, as well as of the intercourse and connection to which they testify with the great empires of Babylonia and Assyria. Mr. Poole has lately pointed out what materials are furnished by the Egyptian monuments for determining the age and character of the antiquities of Mykenæ.[25] I would now draw attention to the far clearer and more tangible materials afforded by Assyrian art and history.

Two facts must first be kept well in view. One of these is the Semitic origin of the Greek alphabet. The Phœnician alphabet, originally derived from the alphabet of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and imported into their mother-country by the Phœnician settlers of the Delta, was brought to Greece, not probably by the Phœnicians of Tyre and Sidon, but by the Aramæans of the Gulf of Antioch, whose nouns ended with the same "emphatic aleph" that we seem to find in the Greek names of the letters, alpha, beta, gamma, (gamla). Before the introduction of the simpler Phœnician alphabet, the inhabitants of Asia Minor and the neighbouring islands appear to have used a syllabary of some seventy characters, which continued to be employed in conservative Cyprus down to a very late date; but, so far as we know at present, the Greeks of the mainland were unacquainted with writing before the Aramæo-Phœnicians had taught them their phonetic symbols. The oldest Greek inscriptions are probably those of Thera, now Santorin, where the Phœnicians had been settled from time immemorial; and as the forms of the characters found in them do not differ very materially from the forms used on the famous Moabite Stone, we may infer that the alphabet of Kadmus was brought to the West at a date not very remote from that of Mesha and Ahab, perhaps about 800 b.c. We may notice that Thera was an island and a Phœnician colony, and it certainly seems more probable that the alphabet was carried to the mainland from the islands of the Ægean than that it was disseminated from the inland Phœnician settlement at Thebes, as the old legends affirmed. In any case, the introduction of the alphabet implies a considerable amount of civilizing force on the part of those from whom it was borrowed; the teachers from whom an illiterate people learns the art of writing are generally teachers from whom it has previously learnt the other elements of social culture. A barbarous tribe will use its muscles in the service of art before it will use its brains; the smith and engraver precede the scribe. If, therefore, the Greeks were unacquainted with writing before the ninth century, b.c., objects older than that period may be expected to exhibit clear traces of Phœnician influence, though no traces of writing.

The other fact to which I allude is the existence of pottery of the same material and pattern on all the prehistoric sites of the Greek world, however widely separated they may be. We find it, for instance, at Mykenæ and Tiryns, at Tanagra and Athens, in Rhodes, in Cyprus, and in Thera, while I picked up specimens of it in the neighbourhood of the Treasury of Minyas and on the site of the Acropolis at Orchomenus. The clay of which it is composed is of a drab colour, derived, perhaps in all instances, from the volcanic soil of Thera and Melos, and it is ornamented with geometrical and other patterns in black and maroon-red. After a time the patterns become more complicated and artistic; flowers, animal forms, and eventually human figures, take the place of simple lines, and the pottery gradually passes into that known as Corinthian or Phœniko-Greek. It needs but little experience to distinguish at a glance this early pottery from the red ware of the later Hellenic period.

Phœnicia, Keft as it was called by the Egyptians, had been brought into relation with the monarchy of the Nile at a remote date, and among the Semitic settlers in the Delta or "Isle of Caphtor" must have been natives of Sidon and the neighbouring towns. After the expulsion of the Hyksos, the Pharaohs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties carried their arms as far as Mesopotamia and placed Egyptian garrisons in Palestine. A tomb-painting of Thothmes III. represents the Kefa or Phœnicians, clad in richly-embroidered kilts and buskins, and bringing their tribute of gold and silver vases and earthenware cups, some in the shape of animals like the vases found at Mykenæ and elsewhere. Phœnicia, it would seem, was already celebrated for its goldsmiths' and potters' work, and the ivory the Kefa are sometimes made to carry shows that their commerce must have extended far to the east. As early as the sixteenth century b.c., therefore, we may conclude that the Phœnicians were a great commercial people, trading between Assyria and Egypt and possessed of a considerable amount of artistic skill.

It is not likely that a people of this sort, who, as we know from other sources, carried on a large trade in slaves and purple, would have been still unacquainted with the seas and coasts of Greece where both slaves and the murex or purple-fish were most easily to be obtained. Though the Phœnician alphabet was unknown in Greece till the ninth century b.c., we have every reason to expect to find traces of Phœnician commerce and Phœnician influence there at least five centuries before. And such seems to be the case. The excavations carried on in Thera by MM. Fouqué and Gorceix,[26] in Rhodes by Mr. Newton and Dr. Saltzmann, and in various other places such as Megara, Athens, and Melos, have been followed by the explorations of Dr. Schliemann at Hissarlik, Tiryns, and Mykenæ, of General di Cesnola in Cyprus, and of the Archæological Society of Athens at Tanagra and Spata.

The accumulations of prehistoric objects on these sites all tell the same tale, the influence of the East, and more especially of the Phœnicians, upon the growing civilization of early Greece. Thus in Thera, where a sort of Greek Pompeii has been preserved under the lava which once overwhelmed it, we find the rude stone hovels of its primitive inhabitants, with roofs of wild olive, filled with the bones of dogs and sheep, and containing stores of barley, spelt, and chickpea, copper and stone weapons, and abundance of pottery. The latter is for the most part extremely coarse, but here and there have been discovered vases of artistic workmanship, which remind us of those carried by the Kefa, and may have been imported from abroad. We know from the tombs found on the island that the Phœnicians afterwards settled in Thera among a population in the same condition of civilization as that which had been overtaken by the great volcanic eruption. It was from these Phœnician settlers that the embroidered dresses known as Theræan were brought to Greece; they were adorned with animals and other figures, similar to those seen upon Corinthian or Phœniko-Greek ware.

Now M. Fr. Lenormant has pointed out that much of the pottery used by the aboriginal inhabitants of Thera is almost identical in form and make with that found by Dr. Schliemann at Hissarlik, in the Troad, and he concludes that it must belong to the same period and the same area of civilization. There is as yet little, if any, trace of Oriental influence; a few of the clay vases from Thera, and some of the gold workmanship at Hissarlik, can alone be referred, with more or less hesitation, to Phœnician artists. We have not yet reached the age when Phœnician trade in the West ceased to be the sporadic effort of private individuals, and when trading colonies were established in different parts of the Greek world; Europe is still unaffected by Eastern culture, and the beginnings of Greek art are still free from foreign interference. It is only in certain designs on the terra-cotta discs, believed by Dr. Schliemann to be spindle-whorls, that we may possibly detect rude copies of Babylonian and Phœnician intaglios.

Among all the objects discovered at Hissarlik, none have been more discussed than the vases and clay images in which Dr. Schliemann saw a representation of an owl-headed Athena. What Dr. Schliemann took for an owl's head, however, is really a rude attempt to imitate the human face, and two breasts are frequently moulded in the clay below it. In many examples the human countenance is unmistakable, and in most of the others the representation is less rude than in the case of the small marble statues of Apollo (?) found in the Greek islands, or even of the early Hellenic vases where the men seem furnished with the beaks of birds. But we now know that these curious vases are not peculiar to the Troad. Specimens of them have also been met with in Cyprus, and in these we can trace the development of the owl-like head into the more perfect portraiture of the human face.[27] In conservative Cyprus there was not that break with the past which occurred in other portions of the Greek world.

Cyprus, in fact, lay midway between Greece and Phœnicia, and was shared to the last between an Aryan and a Semitic population. The Phœnician element in the island was strong, if not preponderant; Paphos was a chief seat of the worship of the Phœnician Astarte, and the Phœnician Kitium, the Chittim of the Hebrews, took first rank among the Cyprian towns. The antiquities brought to light by General di Cesnola are of all ages and all styles—prehistoric and classical, Phœnician and Hellenic, Assyrian and Egyptian—and the various styles are combined together in the catholic spirit that characterized Phœnician art.

But we must pause here for a moment to define more accurately what we mean by Phœnician art. Strictly speaking, Phœnicia had no art of its own; its designs were borrowed from Egypt and Assyria, and its artists went to school on the banks of the Nile and the Euphrates. The Phœnician combined and improved upon his models; the impulse, the origination came from abroad; the modification and elaboration were his own. He entered into other men's labours, and made the most of his heritage. The sphinx of Egypt became Asiatic, and in its new form was transplanted to Nineveh on the one side and to Greece on the other. The rosettes and other patterns of the Babylonian cylinders were introduced into the handiwork of Phœnicia, and so passed on to the West, while the hero of the ancient Chaldean epic became first the Tyrian Melkarth, and then the Herakles of Hellas. It is possible, no doubt, that with all this borrowing there was still something that was original in Phœnician work; such at any rate seems to be the case with some of the forms given to the vases; but at present we have no means of determining how far this originality may have extended. In Assyria, indeed, Phœnician art exercised a great influence in the eighth and seventh centuries b.c.; but it had itself previously drawn its first inspiration from the empire of the Tigris, and did but give back the perfect blossom to those from whom it had received the seed. The workmanship of the ivories and bronze bowls found at Nineveh by Mr. Layard is thoroughly Phœnician; but it cannot be separated from that of the purely Assyrian pavements and bas-reliefs with which the palaces were adorned. The Phœnician art, in fact, traces of which we find from Assyria to Italy, though based on both Egyptian and Assyrian models, owed far more to Assyria than it did to Egypt. In art, as in mythology and religion, Phœnicia was but a carrier and intermediary between East and West; and just as the Greek legends of Aphrodite and Adonis, of Herakles and his twelve labours, and of the other borrowed heroes of Oriental story came in the first instance from Assyria, so did that art and culture which Kadmus the Phœnician handed on to the Greek race.

But Assyria itself had been equally an adapter and intermediary. The Semites of Assyria and Babylonia had borrowed their culture and civilization from the older Accadian race, with its agglutinative language, which had preceded them in the possession of Chaldea. So slavishly observant were the Assyrians of their Chaldean models that in a land where limestone was plentiful they continued to build their palaces and temples of brick, and to ornament them with those columns and pictorial representations which had been first devised on the alluvial plains of Babylonia. To understand Assyrian art, and track it back to its source, we must go to the engraved gems and ruined temples of primæval Babylonia. It is true that Egypt may have had some influence on Assyrian art, at the time when the eighteenth dynasty had pushed its conquests to the banks of the Tigris; but that influence does not seem to have been either deep or permanent. Now the art of Assyria is in great measure the art of Phœnicia, and that again the art of prehistoric Greece. Modern research has discovered the prototype of Herakles in the hero of a Chaldean epic composed it may be, four thousand years ago; it has also discovered the beginnings of Greek columnar architecture and the germs of Greek art in the works of the builders and engravers of early Chaldea.

When first I saw, five years ago, the famous sculpture which has guarded the Gate of Lions at Mykenæ for so many centuries, I was at once struck by its Assyrian character. The lions in form and attitude belong to Assyria, and the pillar against which they rest may be seen in the bas-reliefs brought from Nineveh. Here, at all events, there was clear proof of Assyrian influence; the only question was whether that influence had been carried through the hands of the Phœnicians or had travelled along the highroad which ran across Asia Minor, the second channel whereby the culture of Assyria could have been brought to Greece. The existence of a similar sculpture over a rock-tomb at Kumbet in Phrygia might seem to favour the latter view.

The discoveries of Dr. Schliemann have gone far to settle the question. The pottery excavated at Mykenæ is of the Phœnician type, and the clay of which is composed has probably come from Thera. The terra-cotta figures of animals and more especially of a goddess with long robe, crowned head, and crescent-like arms, are spread over the whole area traversed by the Phœnicians. The image of the goddess in one form or another has been found in Thera and Melos, in Naxos and Paros, in Ios, in Sikinos, and in Anaphos, and M. Lenormant has traced it back to Babylonia and to the Babylonian representation of the goddess Artemis-Nana.[28] At Tanagra the image has been found under two forms, both, however, made of the same clay and in the same style as the figures from Mykenæ. In one the goddess is upright, as at Mykenæ, with the polos on her head, and the arms either outspread or folded over the breast; in the other she is sitting with the arms crossed. Now among the gold ornaments exhumed at Mykenæ are some square pendants of gold which represent the goddess in this sitting posture.[29]

The animal forms most commonly met with are those of the lion, the stag, the bull, the cuttle-fish, and the murex. The last two point unmistakably to a seafaring race, and more especially to those Phœnician sailors whose pursuit of the purple-trade first brought them into Greek seas. So far as I know, neither the polypus nor the murex, nor the butterfly which often accompanies them have been found in Assyria or Egypt, and we may therefore see in them original designs of Phœnician art. Mr. Newton has pointed out that the cuttle-fish (like the dolphin) also occurs among the prehistoric remains from Ialysos in Rhodes, where, too, pottery of the same shape and material as that of Mykenæ has been found, as well as beads of a curious vitreous substance, and rings in which the back of the chaton is rounded so as to fit the finger. It is clear that the art of Ialysos belongs to the same age and school as the art of Mykenæ; and as a scarab of Amenophis III. has been found in one of the Ialysian tombs, it is possible that the art may be as old as the fifteenth century b.c.

Now Ialysos is not the only Rhodian town which has yielded prehistoric antiquities. Camirus also has been explored by Messrs. Biliotti and Saltzmann; and while objects of the same kind and character as those of Ialysos have been discovered there, other objects have been found by their side which belong to another and more advanced stage of art. There are vases of clay and metal, bronze bowls, and the like, which not only display high finish and skill, but are ornamented with the designs characteristic of Phœnician workmanship at Nineveh and elsewhere. Thus we have zones of trees and animals, attempts at the representation of scenery, and a profusion of ornament, while the influence of Egypt is traceable in the sphinxes and scarabs, which also occur plentifully. Here, therefore, at Camirus, there is plain evidence of a sudden introduction of finished Phœnician art among a people whose art was still rude and backward, although springing from the same germs as the art of Phœnicia itself. Two distinct periods in the history of the Ægean thus seem to lie unfolded before us; one in which Eastern influence was more or less indirect, content to communicate the seeds of civilization and culture, and to import such objects as a barbarous race would prize; and another in which the East was, as it were, transported into the West, and the development of Greek art was interrupted by the introduction of foreign workmen and foreign beliefs. This second period was the period of Phœnician colonization as distinct from that of mere trading voyages—the period, in fact, when Thebes was made a Phœnician fortress, and the Phœnician alphabet diffused throughout the Greek world. It is only in relics of the later part of this period that we can look for inscriptions and traces of writing, at least in Greece proper; in the islands and on the coast of Asia Minor, the Cypriote syllabary seems to have been in use, to be superseded afterwards by the simpler alphabet of Kadmus. For reasons presently to be stated, I would distinguish the first period by the name of Phrygian.

Throughout the whole of it, however, the Phœnician trading ships must have formed the chief medium of intercourse between Asia and Europe. Proof of this has been furnished by the rock tombs of Spata, which have been lighted on opportunely to illustrate and explain the discoveries at Mykenæ. Spata is about nine miles from Athens, on the north-west spur of Hymettos, and the two tombs hitherto opened are cut in the soft sandstone rock of a small conical hill. Both are approached by long tunnel-like entrances, and one of them contains three chambers, leading one into the other, and each fashioned after the model of a house. No one who has seen the objects unearthed at Spata can doubt for a moment their close connection with the Mykenæan antiquities. The very moulds found at Mykenæ fit the ornaments from Spata, and might easily have been used in the manufacture of them. It is more especially with the contents of the sixth tomb, discovered by Mr. Stamatáki in the enceinte at Mykenæ after Dr. Schliemann's departure, that the Spata remains agree so remarkably. But there is a strong resemblance between them and the Mykenæan antiquities generally, in both material, patterns, and character. The cuttle-fish and the murex appear in both; the same curious spiral designs, and ornaments in the shape of shells or rudely-formed oxheads; the same geometrical patterns; the same class of carved work. An ivory in which a lion, of the Assyrian type, is depicted as devouring a stag, is but a reproduction of a similar design met with among the objects from Mykenæ, and it is interesting to observe that the same device, in the same style of art, may be also seen on a Phœnician gem from Sardinia.[30] Of still higher interest are other ivories, which, like the antiquities of Camirus, belong rather to the second than to the first period of Phœnician influence. One of these represents a column, which, like that above the Gate of Lions, carries us back to the architecture of Babylonia, while others exhibit the Egyptian sphinx, as modified by Phœnician artists. Thus the handle of a comb is divided into two compartments—the lower occupied by three of these sphinxes, the upper by two others, which have their eyes fixed on an Assyrian rosette in the middle. Similar sphinxes are engraved on a silver cup lately discovered at Palestrina, bearing the Phœnician inscription, in Phœnician letters, "Eshmun-ya'ar, son of Ashta'."[31] Another ivory has been carved into the form of a human side face, surmounted by a tiara of four plaits. On the one hand the arrangement of the hair of the face, the whisker and beard forming a fringe round it, and the two lips being closely shorn, reminds us of what we find at Palestrina; on the other hand, the head-dress is that of the figures on the sculptured rocks of Asia Minor, and of the Hittite princes of Carchemish. In spite of this Phœnician colouring, however, the treasures of Spata belong to the earlier part of the Phœnician period, if not to that which I have called Phrygian: there is as yet no sign of writing, no trace of the use of iron. But we seem to be approaching the close of the bronze age in Greece—to have reached the time when the lions were sculptured over the chief gateway of Mykenæ, and the so-called treasuries were erected in honour of the dead.

Can any date be assigned, even approximately, to those two periods of Phœnician influence in Greece? Can we localize the era, so to speak, of the antiquities discovered at Mykenæ, or fix the epoch at which its kings ceased to build its long-enduring monuments, and its glory was taken from it? I think an answer to these questions may be found in a series of engraved gold rings and prisms found upon its site—the prisms having probably once served to ornament the neck. In these we can trace a gradual development of art; which in time becomes less Oriental and more Greek, and acquires a certain facility in the representation of the human form.

Let us first fix our attention on an engraved gold chaton found, not in the tombs, but outside the enceinte among the ruins, as it would seem, of a house.[32] On this we have a rude representation of a figure seated under a palm-tree, with another figure behind and three more in front, the foremost being of small size, the remaining two considerably taller and in flounced dresses. Above are the symbols of the sun and crescent-moon, and at the side a row of lions' heads. Now no one who has seen this chaton, and also had any acquaintance with the engraved gems of the archaic period of Babylonian art, can avoid being struck by the fact that the intaglio is a copy of one of the latter. The characteristic workmanship of the Babylonian gems is imitated by punches made in the gold which give the design a very curious effect. The attitude of the figures is that common on the Chaldean cylinders; the owner stands in front of the deity, of diminutive size, and in the act of adoration, while the priests are placed behind him. The latter wear the flounced dresses peculiar to the early Babylonian priests; and what has been supposed to represent female breasts, is really a copy of the way in which the breast of a man is frequently portrayed on the cylinders.[33] The palm-tree, with its single fruit hanging on the left side, is characteristically Babylonian; so also are the symbols that encircle the engraving, the sun and moon and lions' heads. The chaton of another gold ring, found on the same spot, is covered with similar animal heads. This, again, is a copy of early Babylonian art, in which such designs were not unfrequent, though, as they were afterwards imitated by both Assyrian and Cyprian engravers, too much stress must not be laid on the agreement.[34] The artistic position and age of the other ring, however, admits of little doubt. The archaic period of Babylonian art may be said to close with the rise of Assyria in the fourteenth century b.c.; and though archaic Babylonian intaglios continued to be imported into the West down to the time of the Romans, it is not likely that they were imitated by Western artists after the latter had become acquainted with better and more attractive models. I think, therefore, that the two rings may be assigned to the period of archaic Babylonian power in western Asia, a period that begins with the victories of Naram-Sin in Palestine in the seventeenth century b.c. or earlier, and ends with the conquest of Babylon by the Assyrians and the establishment of Assyrian supremacy. This is also the period to which I am inclined to refer the introduction among the Phœnicians and Greeks of the column and of certain geometrical patterns, which had their first home in Babylonia.[35] The lentoid gems with their rude intaglios, found in the islands, on the site of Heræum, in the tombs of Mykenæ and elsewhere, belong to the same age, and point back to the loamy plain of Babylonia where stone was rare and precious, and whence, consequently, the art of gem-cutting was spread through the ancient world. We can thus understand the existence of artistic designs and other evidences of civilizing influence among a people who were not yet acquainted with the use of iron. The early Chaldean Empire, in spite of the culture to which it had attained, was still in the bronze age; iron was almost unknown, and its tools and weapons were fashioned of stone, bone, and bronze. Had the Greeks and the Phœnicians before them received their first lessons in culture from Egypt or from Asia Minor, where the Khalybes and other allied tribes had worked in iron from time immemorial, they would probably have received this metal at the same time. But neither at Hissarlik nor at Mykenæ is there any trace of an iron age.

The second period of Western art and civilization is represented by some of the objects found at Mykenæ in the tombs themselves. The intaglios have ceased to be Babylonian, and have become markedly Assyrian. First of all we have a hunting scene, a favourite subject with Assyrian artists, but quite unknown to genuine Hellenic art. The disposition of the figures is that usual in Assyrian sculpture, and, like the Assyrian king, the huntsman is represented as riding in a chariot. A comparison of this hunting scene with the bas-reliefs on the tombstones which stood over the graves shows that they belong to the same age, while the spiral ornamentation of the stones is essentially Assyrian. Equally Assyrian, though better engraved, is a lion on one of the gold prisms, which might have been cut by an Assyrian workman, so true is it to its Oriental model, and after this I would place the representation of a struggle between a man (perhaps Herakles) and a lion, in which, though the lion and attitude of the combatants are Assyrian, the man is no longer the Assyrian hero Gisdhubar, but a figure of more Western type. In another intaglio, representing a fight between armed warriors, the art has ceased to be Assyrian, and is struggling to become native. We seem to be approaching the period when Greece gave over walking in Eastern leading-strings, and began to step forward firmly without help. As I believe, however, that the tombs within the enceinte are of older date than the Treasuries outside the Acropolis, or the Gate of Lions which belongs to the same age, it is plain that we have not yet reached the time when Assyro-Phœnician influence began to decline in Greece. The lions above the gate would alone be proof to the contrary.

But, in fact, Phœnician influence continued to be felt up to the end of the seventh century b.c. Passing by the so-called Corinthian vases, or the antiquities exhumed by General di Cesnola in Cyprus, where the Phœnician element was strong, we have numerous evidences of the fact from all parts of Greece. Two objects of bronze discovered at Olympia may be specially signalized. One of these is an oblong plate, narrower at one end than at the other, ornamented with repousse work, and divided into four compartments. In the first compartment are figures of the nondescript birds so often seen on the "Corinthian" pottery; in the next come two Assyrian gryphons standing, as usual, face to face; while the third represents the contest of Herakles with the Kentaur, thoroughly Oriental in design. The Kentaur has a human forefront, covered, however, with hair; his tail is abnormally long, and a three-branched tree rises behind him. The fourth and largest compartment contains the figure of the Asiatic goddess with the four wings at the back, and a lion, held by the hind leg, in either hand. The face of the goddess is in profile. The whole design is Assyro-Phœnician, and is exactly reproduced on some square gold plates, intended probably to adorn the breast, presented to the Louvre by the Duc de Luynes. The other object to which I referred is a bronze dish, ornamented on the inside with repousse work, which at first sight looks Egyptian, but is really that Phœnician modification of Egyptian art so common in the eighth and seventh centuries b.c. An inscription in the Aramaic characters of the so-called Sidonian branch of the Phœnician alphabet is cut on the outside, and reads: "Belonging to Neger, son of Miga."[36] As the word used for "son" is the Aramaic bar and not the Phœnician ben, we may conclude that the owner of the dish had come from northern Syria. It is interesting to find a silver cup embossed with precisely the same kind of design, and also bearing an inscription in Phœnician letters, among the treasures discovered in a tomb at Palestrina, the ancient Præneste, more than a year ago. This inscription is even briefer than the other: "Eshmunya'ar son of 'Ashtâ,"[37] where, though ben is employed, the father's name has an Aramaic form. Helbig would refer these Italian specimens of Phœnician skill to the Carthaginian epoch, partly on the ground that an African species of ape seems sometimes represented on them;[38] in this case they might be as late as the fifth century before the Christian era.

During the earlier part of the second period of Phœnician influence, Phœnicia and the Phœnician colonies were not the only channel by which the elements of Assyrian culture found their way into the West. The monuments and religious beliefs of Asia Minor enable us to trace their progress from the banks of the Euphrates and the ranges of the Taurus, through Cappadocia and Phrygia, to the coasts and islands of the Ægean. The near affinity of Greek and Phrygian is recognized even by Plato;[39] the legends of Midas and Gordius formed part of Greek mythology, and the royal house of Mykenæ was made to come with all its wealth from the golden sands of the Paktolus; while on the other hand the cult of Mâ, of Attys, or of the Ephesian Artemis points back to an Assyrian origin. The sculptures found by Perrot[40] and Texier constitute a link between the prehistoric art of Greece and that of Asia Minor; the spiral ornaments that mark the antiquities of Mykenæ are repeated on the royal tombs of Asia Minor; and the ruins of Sardis, where once ruled a dynasty derived by Greek writers from Ninus or Nineveh, "the son of Bell," the grandson of the Assyrian Herakles,[41] may yet pour a flood of light on the earlier history of Greece. But it was rather in the first period, which I have termed Phrygian, than in the second, that the influence of Asia Minor was strongest. The figure of the goddess riding on a leopard, with mural crown and peaked shoes, on the rock-tablets of Pterium,[42] is borrowed rather from the cylinders of early Babylonia than from the sculptures of Assyria; and the Hissarlik collection connects itself more with the primitive antiquities of Santorin than with the later art of Mykenæ and Cyprus. We have already seen, however, the close relationship that exists between some of the objects excavated at Mykenæ and what we may call the pre-Phœnician art of Ialysos,—that is to say, the objects in which the influence of the East is indirect, and not direct. The discovery of metallurgy is associated with Dodona, where the oracle long continued to be heard in the ring of a copper chaldron, and where M. Karapanos has found bronze plates with the geometrical and circular patterns which distinguish the earliest art of Greece; now Dodona is the seat of primæval Greek civilization, the land of the Selloi or Helloi, of the Graioi themselves, and of Pelasgian Zeus, while it is to the north that the legends of Orpheus, of Musæus, and of other early civilizers looked back. But even at Dodona we may detect traces of Asiatic influence in the part played there by the doves, as well as in the story of Deucalion's deluge, and it may, perhaps, be not too rash to conjecture that even before the days of Phœnician enterprise and barter, an echo of Babylonian civilization had reached Greece through the medium of Asia Minor, whence it was carried, partly across the bridge formed by the islands of the Archipelago, partly through the mainland of Thrace and Epirus. The Hittites, with their capital at Carchemish, seem to have been the centre from which this borrowed civilization was spread northward and westward. Here was the home of the art which characterizes Asia Minor, and we have only to compare the bas-relief of Pterium with the rock sculptures found by Mr. Davis associated with "Hamathite" hieroglyphics at Ibreer, in Lycaonia,[43] to see how intimate is the connection between the two. These hieroglyphics were the still undeciphered writing of the Hittite tribes and if, as seems possible, the Cypriote syllabary were derived from them, they would be a testimony to the western spread of Hittite influence at a very early epoch. The Cypriote characters adopted into the alphabets of Lycia and Karia, as well as the occurrence of the same characters on a hone and some of the terra-cotta discs found by Dr. Schliemann at Hissarlik, go to show that this influence would have extended, at any rate, to the coasts of the sea.

The traces of Egyptian influence, on the contrary, are few and faint. No doubt the Phœnician alphabet was ultimately of Egyptian origin, no doubt, too, that certain elements of Phœnician art were borrowed from Egypt, but before these were handed on to the West, they had first been profoundly modified by the Phœnician settlers in the Delta and in Canaan. The influence exercised immediately by Egypt upon Greece belongs to the historic period; the legends which saw an Egyptian emigrant in Kekrops or an Egyptian colony in the inhabitants of Argos were fables of a late date. Whatever intercourse existed between Egypt and Greece in the prehistoric period was carried on, not by the Egyptians, but by the Phœnicians of the Delta; it was they who brought the scarabs of a Thothmes or an Amenophis to the islands of the Ægean, like their descendants afterwards in Italy, and the proper names found on the Egyptian monuments of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, which certain Egyptologists have identified with those of Greece and Asia Minor, belong rather, I believe, to Libyan and Semitic tribes.[44] Like the sphinxes at Spata, the indications of intercourse with Egypt met with at Mykenæ prove nothing more than the wide extent of Phœnician commerce and the existence of Phœnician colonies at the mouths of the Nile. Ostrich-eggs covered with stucco dolphins have been found not only at Mykenæ, but also in the grotto of Polledrara near Vulci in Italy; the Egyptian porcelain excavated at Mykenæ is painted to represent the fringed dress of an Assyrian or a Phœnician, not of an Egyptian; and though a gold mask belonging to Prince Kha-em-Uas, and resembling the famous masks of Mykenæ, has brought to the Louvre from an Apis chamber, a similar mask of size was discovered last year in a tomb on the site of Aradus. Such intercourse, however, as existed between Greece and the Delta must have been very restricted; otherwise we should surely have some specimens of writing, some traces of the Phœnician alphabet. It would not have been left to the Aramæans of Syria to introduce the "Kadmeian letters" into Greece, and Mykenæ, rather than Thebes, would have been made the centre from which they were disseminated. Indeed, we may perhaps infer that even the coast of Asia Minor, near as it was to the Phœnician settlements at Kamirus and elsewhere, could have held but little intercourse with the Phœnicians of Egypt from the fact that the Cypriote syllabary was so long in use upon it, and that the alphabets afterwards employed were derived only indirectly from the Phœnician through the medium of the Greek.

One point more now alone needs to be noticed. The long-continued influence upon early Greek culture which we ascribe to the Phœnicians cannot but have left its mark upon the Greek vocabulary also. Some at least of the names given by the Phœnicians to the objects of luxury they brought with them must have been adopted by the natives of Hellas. We know that this is the case with the letters of the alphabet; is it also the case with other words? If not, analogy would almost compel us to treat the evidences that have been enumerated of Phœnician influence as illusory, and to fall back upon the position of O. K. Müller and his school. By way of answer I would refer to the list of Greek words, the Semitic origin of which admits of no doubt, lately given by Dr. August Müller in Bezzenberger's "Beitrage zur Kunde der indogermanischen Sprachen."[45] Amongst these we find articles of luxury like "linen," "shirt," "sackcloth," "myrrh," and "frankincense," "galbanum" and "cassia," "cinnamon" and "soap," "lyres" and "wine-jars," "balsam" and "cosmetics," as well, possibly, as "fine linen" and "gold," along with such evidences of trade and literature as the "pledge," "the writing tablet," and the "shekel." If these were the only instances of Semitic tincture, they would be enough to prove the early presence of the Semitic Phœnicians in Greece. But we must remember that they are but samples of a class, and that many words borrowed during the heroic age may have dropped out of use or been conformed to the native part of the vocabulary long before the beginning of the written literature, while it would be in the lesser known dialects of the islands that the Semitic element was strongest. We know that the dialect of Cyprus was full of importations from the East.

In what precedes I have made no reference to the Homeric poems, and the omission may be thought strange. But Homeric illustrations of the presence of the Phœnicians in Greece will occur to every one, while both the Iliad and the Odyssey in their existing form are too modern to be quoted without extreme caution. A close investigation of their language shows that it is the slow growth of generations; Æolic formulæ from the lays first recited in the towns of the Troad are embodied in Ionic poems where old Ionic, new Ionic, and even Attic jostle against one another, and traditional words and phrases are furnished with mistaken meanings or new forms coined by false analogy. It is difficult to separate the old from the new, to say with certainty that this allusion belongs to the heroic past, this to the Homer of Theopompus and Euphorion, the contemporary of the Lydian Gyges. The art of Homer is not the art of Mykenæ and of the early age of Phœnician influence; iron is already taking the place of bronze, and the shield of Akhilles or the palace of Alkinous bear witness to a developed art which has freed itself from its foreign bonds. Six times are Phœnicia and the Phœnicians mentioned in the Odyssey, once in the Iliad;[46] elsewhere it is Sidon and the Sidonians that represented them, never Tyre.[47] Such passages, therefore, cannot belong to the epoch of Tyrian supremacy, which goes back, at all events, to the age of David, but rather to the brief period when the Assyrian king Shalmaneser laid siege to Tyre, and his successor Sargon made Sidon powerful at its expense. This, too, was the period when Sargon set up his record in Cyprus, "the isle of Yavnan" or the Ionians, when Assyria first came into immediate contact with the Greeks, and when Phœnician artists worked at the court of Nineveh and carried their wares to Italy and Sardinia. But it was not the age to which the relics of Mykenæ, in spite of paradoxical doubts, reach back, nor that in which the sacred bull of Astarte carried the Phœnician maiden Europa to her new home in the west.

A. H. Sayce, in Contemporary Review.

FOOTNOTES:

[24] See E. Curtins: Die griechische Götterlehre vom geschichtlichen Standpunkt, in Preussische Jahrbucher, xxxvi. pp. 1-17. 1875.

[25] Contemporary Review, January, 1878.

[26] See Fouqué's Mission Scientifique á l'île de Santorin (Archives des Missions 2e série, iv. 1867); Gorceix in the Bulletin de l'Ecole francaise d'Athènes, i.

[27] See, for example, Di Cesnola's Cyprus, pp. 401, 402.

[28] Gazette Archéologique, ii-. 1, 3.

[29] See Schliemann's Mycenæ and Tiryns, pl. 273.

[30] Given by La Marmora in the Memorie della Reale Academia delle Scienze di Torino (1854), vol. xiv., pl. 2, fig. 63.

[31] Given in the Monumenti d. Instituto Romano, 1876.

[32] Schliemann: Mycenæ and Tiryns, p. 530.

[33] See, for instance, the example given in Rawlinson's Ancient Monarchies (1st edit.), i. p. 118, where the flounced priest has what looks like a woman's breast. Dancing boys and men in the East still wear these flounces, which are variously coloured (see Loftus: Chaldea and Susiana, p. 22; George Smith: Assyrian Discoveries, p. 130).

[34] See, for example, Layard: Nineveh and Babylon, pp. 604, 606; Di Cesnola: Cyprus, pl. 31, No. 7; pl. 32, No. 19. A copy of the Mykenæan engraving is given in Schliemann's Mycenæ and Tiryns, pl. 531.

[35] More especially the examples in Rawlinson's Ancient Monarchies, iii. p. 403, and i. 413. For Mykenæan examples see Schliemann's Mykenæ and Tiryns, ppl. 149, 152, &c. Some of the more peculiar patterns from Mykenæ resemble the forms assumed by the "Hamathite" hieroglyphics in the unpublished inscription copied by Mr. George Smith from the back of a mutilated statue at Jerablûs (Carchemish).

[36] LNGR. BR. MIGA'.

[37] ASHMNYA'R. BNA' SHTA.

[38] Annali d. Istituto Romano, 1876.

[39] Kratylus, 410 a.d.

[40] Exploration Archéologique de la Galatie et de la Bithynie.

[41] See Herodotus, i.7.

[42] Texier: Description de l'Asie Mineure, i. 1, pl. 78.

[43] Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology, iv. 2, 1876.

[44] I have given the reasons of my scepticism in the Academy, of May 30, 1874. Brugsch Bey, the leading authority on the geography of the Egyptian monuments, would now identify those names with those tribes in Kolkhis, and its neighbourhood.

[45] i. pp. 273-301 (1877).

[46] Phœnicia, Od. iv. 83; xiv. 291. Phœnicians, Od. xiii. 272; xv. 415. A Phœnician, Od. xiv. 288. A Phœnician woman, Od. xiv. 288; Il. xiv. 321.

[47] Sidon, Sidonia, Il. vi. 291; Od. xiii. 285; xv. 425. Sidonians, Il. vi. 290; Od. iv. 84, 618; xv. 118.

SOME GOSSIP ABOUT LEICESTER SQUARE.

In old-world London, Leicester Square played a much more important part than it does to-day. It was then the chosen refuge of royalty and the home of wit and genius. Time was when it glittered with throngs of lace-bedizened gallants; when it trembled beneath the chariot-wheels of Beauty and Fashion; when it re-echoed with the cries of jostling chairmen and link-boys; when it was trodden by the feet of the greatest men of a great epoch—Newton and Swift, Hogarth, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and a host of others more or less distinguished. Mr. Tom Taylor, in his interesting work entitled "Leicester Square," tells us that the vicissitudes of a London quarter generally tend downwards through a regular series of decades. It is first fashionable; then it is professional; then it becomes a favourite locality for hotels and lodging-houses; then the industrial element predominates, and then not infrequently a still lower depth is reached. Leicester Square has been no exception to this rule. Its reputation in fact was becoming very shady indeed, when the improvement of its central inclosure gave it somewhat of a start upwards and turned attention to its early history.

Of old, many of these grand doings took place at Leicester House, which was the first house in the Square. It was built by Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester, a staunch Royalist, somewhere about 1636. His sons, Viscount Lisle and the famous Algernon Sidney, grew up less of Royalists than he was; and to Leicester House, with the sanction and welcome of its head, came many of the more prominent Republicans of the day, Vane and Neville, Milton and Bradshaw, Ludlow and Lambert. The cream of history lies not so much in a bare notation of facts as in the little touches of nature and manners which reproduce for us the actual human life of a former age, and much of this may be gleaned from the history of the Sidneys. They were an interesting family, alike from their rank, their talents, their personal beauty, and the vicissitudes of their fortunes. The Countess was a clever managing woman; and her letters to her absent lord when ambassador in France convey to us many pleasant details of the home-life at Leicester House. Still more charming is it to read the pretty little billets addressed to the Earl by his elder girls. Of these six beautiful daughters of the house of Sidney, four were married and two died in the dawn of early womanhood. Of the younger of these, Lady Elizabeth, the father has a touching entry in his journal. After narrating her death, he adds: "She had to the last the most angelical countenance and beauty, and the most heavenly disposition and temper of mind that I think were ever seen in so young a creature."

With her death the merry happy family life at Leicester House drew to a close. The active bustling mother, whose influence had brought the different jarring chords into harmony, died a few mouths afterwards; and the busy years as they sped onwards, while consummating the fall of Charles and consolidating the power of Cromwell, also put great and growing disunion between the Sidney brothers. At the Restoration, Algernon was in exile; Lord Lisle's stormy temper had alienated him from his father; the Earl's favourite son-in-law was dead; of the three who remained he was neither proud nor fond; and lonely and sick at heart, he grew weary of the splendid home from which the fair faces of his handsome children had gone for ever, and made preparations to leave it. He was presented to Charles II.; and immediately afterwards retired to Penshurst in Kent; and Leicester House was let, first to the ambassadors of the United Provinces; and then to a more remarkable tenant, Elizabeth Stewart, the ill-fated Princess and Queen of Bohemia. She had left England in 1613 a lovely happy girl, the bride of the man she loved, life stretching all rainbow-hued before her. She returned to it a weary haggard woman of sixty-five, who had drunk to the dregs of every possible cup of disappointment and sorrow. Her presence was very unwelcome, as that of the unfortunate often is. Charles II., her nephew, was very loath indeed to have the pleasure of receiving her as a guest; but she returned to London whether he would or not, and Leicester house was taken for her. There she languished for a few months in feeble and broken health, and there, on the anniversary of her wedding-day, she died.

The house immediately to the west of Leicester House belonged to the Marquis of Aylesbury; but in 1698 it was occupied by the Marquis of Caermarthen, who was appointed by King William III. cicerone and guide to Peter the Great when he came in the January of that year to visit England. Peter's great qualities have long been done full justice to; but in the far-off January of 1698 he appeared to the English as by no means a very august-looking potentate; he had the manners and appearance of an unkempt barbarian, and his pastimes were those of a coal-heaver. His favourite exercise in the mornings was to run a barrow through and through Evelyn's trim holly-hedges at Deptford; and the state in which he left his pretty house there is not to be described. His chief pleasure, when the duties of the day were over, was to drink all night with the Marquis in his house at Leicester Fields, the favourite tipple of the two distinguished topers being brandy spiced with pepper; or sack, of which the Czar is reported to have drunk eight bottles one day after dinner. Among other sights in London, the Marquis took him to see Westminster Hall in full term. "Who are all these men in wigs and gowns?" he asked. "Lawyers," was the answer. "Lawyers!" he exclaimed. "Why, I have only two in my dominions, and when I get back, I intend to hang one of them."

In January 1712 Leicester House, which was then occupied by the imperial resident, received another distinguished visitor in the person of Prince Eugene, one of the greatest captains of the age. In appearance he was a little sallow wizened old man, with one shoulder higher than the other. A soldier of fortune, whose origin was so humble as to be unknown, his laurels were stained neither by rapacity nor self-seeking; and in all the vicissitudes of his eventful life he bore himself like a hero, and a gentleman in the truest and fullest acceptation of the word. Dean Swift was also at this time in lodgings in Leicester Fields, noting with clear acute unpitying vision the foibles and failings of all around him, and writing to Stella from time to time after his cynical fashion, "how the world is going mad after Prince Eugene, and how he went to court also, but could not see him, the crowd was so great."

A labyrinth of courts, inns, and stable-yards had gradually filled up the space between the royal mews and Leicester Fields; and between 1680 and 1700 several new streets were opened through these; one reason for the opening of them being the great influx of French refugees into London, on the occasion of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Many of these exiles settled in and around Leicester Fields, and for their use several chapels were built. The neighbourhood has ever since been a resort of French immigrants.

In one of these streets opening into Leicester Square, St. Martin's Street, Sir Isaac Newton lived for the last sixteen years of his life. The house in which he lived looks dingy enough now; but in those days it was considered a very good residence indeed, and Like Leicester House was frequented by the best company in the fashionable world. The genius and reputation of its master attracted scientific and learned visitors; and the beauty of his niece, Mrs. Catharine Barton, drew to her feet all the more distinguished wits and beaux of the time.

Between 1717 and 1760 Leicester House became what Pennant calls "the pouting-place of princes," being for almost all that time in the occupation of a Prince of Wales who was living in fierce opposition to the reigning king. In 1718 the Prince of Wales having had a furious quarrel with his father George I., on the occasion of the christening of the Prince's son George William, left St. James's, and took Leicester House at a yearly rent of five hundred pounds; and until he succeeded to the throne in 1727, it was his town residence.

Here he held his court—a court not by any means strait-laced; a gay little court at first; a court whose selfish intrigues and wild frolics and madcap adventures and humdrum monotony live for us still in the sparkling pages of Horace Walpole; or are painted in with vivid clearness of touch and execution, but with a darker brush, by Hervey, Pope's Lord Fanny, who was a favourite with his mistress the handsome accomplished Caroline, Princess of Wales. Piloted by one or other of these exact historians, we enter the chamber of the gentlewomen-in-waiting, and are introduced to the maids-of-honour, to fair Mary Lepell, to charming Mrs. Bellenden, to pensive, gentle Mrs. Howard. We see them eat Westphalia ham of a morning, and then set out with their royal master for a helter-skelter ride over hedges and ditches, on borrowed hacks. No wonder Pope pitied them; and on their return, who should they fall in with but that great poet himself! They are good to him in their way, these saucy charming maids-of-honour, and so they take the frail little man under their protection and give him his dinner; and then he finishes off the day, he tells us, by walking three hours in the moonlight with Mary Lepell. We can imagine the affected compliments he paid her and the burlesque love he made to her; and the fun she and her sister maids-of-honour would have laughing over it all, when she went back to Leicester House and he returned to his pretty villa at Twickenham.

As the Prince grew older his court became more and more dull, till at last it was almost deserted, when on the 14th of June 1727 the loungers in its half-empty chambers were roused by sudden news—George I. was dead; and Leicester House was thronged by a sudden rush of obsequious courtiers, among whom was the late king's prime-minister, bluff, jolly, coarse Sir Robert Walpole. No one paid any attention to him, for every one knew that his disgrace was sealed; the new king had never been at any pains to conceal his dislike to him. Sir Robert, however, knew better; he was quite well aware who was to be the real ruler of England now; and he knew that the Princess Caroline had already accepted him, just as she accepted La Walmoden and her good Howard; and so all alone in his corner he chuckled to himself as he saw the crowd of sycophants elbow and jostle and push poor Lady Walpole as she tried to make her way to the royal feet. Caroline saw it too, and with a flash of half-scornful mischief lighting up her shrewd eyes, said with a smile: "Sure, there I see a friend." Instantly the human stream parted, and made way for her Ladyship.

In 1728 Frederick, the eldest son of George and Caroline, arrived from Hanover, where he had remained since his birth in 1707. It was a fatal mistake; he came to England a stranger to his parents, and with his place in their hearts already filled by his brother. It was inevitable that where there was no mutual love, distrust and alienation should come, as in no long time they did, with the result that the same pitiful drama was played out again on the same stage. In 1743 Frederick Prince of Wales took Leicester House and held his receptions there. He was fond of gaiety, and had a succession of balls, masques, plays, and supper-parties. His tastes, as was natural considering his rearing, were foreign, and Leicester House was much frequented by foreigners of every grade. Desnoyers the dancing-master was a favourite habitué, as was also the charlatan St-Germain. In the midst of all this fiddling and buffoonery the Prince fell ill; but not so seriously as to cause uneasiness to any one around him; consequently all the world was taken by surprise when he suddenly died one morning in the arms of his friend the dancing-master. After his death his widow remained at Leicester House, and like a sensible woman as she was, made her peace with the king her father-in-law, who ever afterwards shewed himself very kind and friendly to her.

In October 1760 George III. was proclaimed king; and again a crowd of courtiers thronged to Leicester House to kiss the hand of the new sovereign. For six years longer the Princess of Wales continued to live at Leicester House; and there in 1765 her youngest son died, and the following year she removed to Carlton House.

While the quarrel between George II. and Frederick was at its fiercest, the central inclosure of Leicester Square was re-arranged very elegantly according to the taste of the day; and an equestrian statue of George I., which had belonged to the first Duke of Chandos and had been bought at the sale of his effects, was set up in front of Leicester House, where it remained, a dazzling object at first, in all the glory of gilding, which passed with the populace for gold; but latterly a most wretched relic of the past, an eyesore, which was removed in 1874 in the course of Baron Grant's improvements.

Leicester Square had other tenants beside Sir Isaac Newton, compared with whom courtiers and gallants and fine gentlemen and ladies look very small indeed. Hogarth lived in this street, and so did Sir Joshua Reynolds. Hogarth's house was the last but two on the east side of the Square. Here he established himself, a young struggling man, with Jane Thornhill, the wife with whom he had made a stolen love-match. In this house, with the quaint sign of the Golden Head over the door, he worked, not as painters generally do, at a multitude of detached pieces, but depicting with his vivid brush a whole series of popular allegories on canvas. When he became rich, as in process of time he did, he had a house at Chiswick; but he still retained the Golden Head as his town-house, and in 1764 returned to it to die.

In No. 47 Sir Joshua Reynolds lived, and painted those charming portraits which have immortalised for us all that was most beautiful and famous in his epoch. He was a kindly genial lovable man, fond of society, and with a liking for display. He had a wonderful carriage, with the four seasons curiously painted in on the panels, and the wheels ornamented with carved foliage and gilding. The servants in attendance on this chariot wore silver-laced liveries; and as he had no time to drive in it himself, he made his sister take a daily airing in it, much to her discomfort, for she was a homely little lady with very simple tastes. He was a great dinner giver; and as it was his custom to ask every pleasant person he met without any regard to the preparation made to receive them, it may be conjectured that there was often a want of the commonest requisites of the dinner-table. Even knives, forks, and glasses could not always be procured at first. But although his dinners partook very much of the nature of unceremonious scrambles, they were thoroughly enjoyable. Whatever was awanting, there was always cheerfulness and the pleasant kindly interchange of thought. In July 1792 Sir Joshua died in his own house in Leicester Square; and within a few hours of his death, an obituary notice of him was written by Burke, the manuscript of which was blotted with his tears.

In No. 28, on the eastern side of the Square, the celebrated anatomist John Hunter lived. Like most distinguished men of the day, he sat to Sir Joshua Reynolds for his portrait; but was so restless and preoccupied that he made a very bad sitter. At last one day he fell into a reverie. The happy moment had come; Sir Joshua, with his instinctive tact, caught the expression and presented to us the great surgeon in one of his most characteristic attitudes. The other celebrated surgeons, Cruickshank and Charles Bell, also lived in this Square. The house in which Bell resided for many years was large and ruinous, and had once been inhabited by Speaker Onslow. Here he set up his Museum, and began to lecture on anatomy, having for a long time, he writes, scarcely forty pupils to lecture to.

During all the later portion of its history Leicester Square has been famous for shows. In 1771 Sir Ashton Lever exhibited a large and curious Museum in Leicester House. In 1796 Charles Dibdin built at Nos. 2 and 3, on the east side of Leicester Square, a small theatre in which he gave an entertainment consisting of an interesting medley of anecdote and song. In 1787 Miss Linwood opened her gallery of pictures in needlework, an exhibition which lasted forty-seven years, for the last thirty-five of which it was exhibited at Savile House, a building which was destroyed by fire in 1865.

After Miss Linwood's, one of the best shows in Leicester Square was Burford's Panorama, which is now numbered with the things that were, its site being occupied by a French chapel and school. In 1851 a new show was inaugurated by Mr. Wylde the geographer. It consisted of a monster globe sixty feet in diameter, which occupied the central dome of a building erected in the garden of the Square. The world was figured in relief on the inside of it, and it was viewed from several galleries at different elevations. It was exhibited for ten years, and was then taken down by its proprietor, owing to a dispute concerning the ownership of the garden. Out of this case, which was decided in 1867, the proceedings originated which resulted in the purchase and renovation of the garden by Baron Grant, who having once more made it trim and neat, handed it over to the Board of Works.—Chambers's Journal.

A WOMAN'S LOVE.

A SLAVONIAN STUDY.

Those races that have not undergone the beneficial and domesticating influences of civilisation, and that are isolated from the more cultured nations, possess to an excess the different qualities or impulses inherent to our nature. Amongst the emotions that move the heart of man, love is certainly the one that has the greatest empire over him; it rules the soul so imperiously that all the other passions are crushed by it. It makes cowards of the bravest men, and gives courage to the timid. Love is, indeed, the great motive-power of life.

Our passions and our emotions are, however, more subdued than those of the semi-civilised nations; for, in the first place, we undergo the softening influences of education, and secondly, we are more or less under the restraint of the rules which govern society. Besides this, our mind is usually engrossed by the numerous cares which our state of living necessitates; for we are not like them, contented with little; on the contrary, instead of being satisfied with what is necessary, we require luxuries and superfluities, the procurement of which takes up a considerable portion of our energy and our mental activity.

The Slavonians, and more especially those belonging to the southern regions, such as the Dalmatians and Montenegrins, are, as a general rule, very passionate; ardent in their affections, they are likewise given to anger, resentment, and hatred, the generic sister passion of love.

The Slavonian women are, however, not indolent, nor do they ever indulge in idle dreams; for they are not only occupied with the household cares, but they also take a share, and not the smallest or the slightest, of those toils which in other countries devolve upon the men alone. They therefore, in the manly labours of the field, not only get prematurely old, but they hardly ever possess much grace, slenderness, or delicate complexions. No Slavonian woman, for instance, is ever mignonne. They, in compensation, acquire in health, and perhaps in real æsthetic beauty of proportions, what they lose in prettiness or delicacy of appearance, consequently they never suffer from vapours or from the numerous nervous complaints to which the generality of our ladies are subjected; the natural result of this state of things is mens sana in corpore sano; this is doubtless the reason why Slavonian women are, as a general rule, fond mothers and faithful wives.

They are certainly not endowed with that charming refinement, the morbidezza of manners which but too often is but a mask covering a morbid selfish disposition, a hypocritical and false nature. Though ignorant, they are neither void of natural good sense nor wit; they only want that smattering of worldly knowledge which the contact of society imparts, and which but too often covers nothing but frivolity, gross ignorance, and conceit. Their conversation is, perhaps, not peculiarly attractive; for being simple and artless, speech was not given to them as a means of disguising their thoughts; their lips only disclose the fullness of their hearts. Conversation is, besides, a gift conferred to few; and even in our polite circles not many persons can converse in an interesting manner, and fewer can be witty without backbiting; moreover, if man were suddenly to become transparent, would he not have to blush for the frivolous demonstrations of friendship daily interchanged in our artificial state of society?

The different amusements that absorb so much of our time and occupy our minds are unknown in Slavonian countries; the daily occupations and the details of the toilet do not captivate the whole attention; so that when a simple affection is awakening in the heart of a man or of a woman, it by degrees pervades the whole soul and the whole mind, and a strong and ardent passion usually ensues. Moreover, amongst those simple-minded sincere people flirtations are generally unknown; yet when they do love, their affections are genuine; they never exchange amongst each other those false coins bearing Cupid's effigy, and known as coquetry; for their lips only utter what their hearts really feel. People there do not delight in playing with the fire of love, or trying how far they can with impunity make game of sentiments which should be held sacred. Amongst the virile maidens of Slavonia many of them therefore have virgin hearts, that is to say, artless souls, fresh to all the tender sentiments; the reason of this is, that from the age of fifteen they do not trifle with their affections until they have become so callous and sceptical that marriage is merely wealth or a position in life. Men do not first waste away all the tender emotions which the human heart is capable of, and then settle down into a mariage de raison.

The following story, which happened about a century ago, will serve as an illustration of the power of love amongst the Slavonians; it is, indeed, a kind of repetition of the fate which attended the lovers of Sestos and Abydos. This, however, is no legend, but an historical fact; the place where this tragedy happened was the island of St. Andrea, situated between those of Malfi and Stagno, not far from the town of Ragusa.

Though no Musæus has immortalised this story by his verses, it is, however, recorded in the "Revista Dalmata" (1859), in the "Annuario Spalatino" of the same year, as well as other Slavonian periodicals.

The hero of this story, whose Christian name was Teodoro, belonged to one of the wealthiest patrician families of Ragusa, his father being, it is said, Rector of the Republic. He was a young man of a grave character, but withal of a gentle and tender disposition; he not only possessed great talents, but also great culture, for his time was entirely given up to study.

One day, the young patrician having gone from the island of St. Andrea, where he had been staying at the Benedictine convent, to one of the other two neighboring islands, he in the evening wished to return to his abode. He met upon the beach a young girl who was carrying home some baskets of fish. Having asked her if she knew of anybody who would take him across to the island of St. Andrea, the young girl proffered her services, which the young and bashful patrician reluctantly accepted.

The young girl was as beautiful, as chaste, and as proud as the Arrabiata of Paul Heyse; and for the first time Teodoro felt a new and vague feeling awake in his bosom. He began to talk to the girl, asking her a thousand questions about herself, about her home; and the young girl doubtless told him that she was an orphan, and that she lived with her brothers. Instead of returning to his family, the young nobleman remained at the Benedictine convent, with the purpose of studying in retirement; his mind, however, was not entirely engrossed by his books, and his visits to the island where Margherita lived daily became more frequent.