racter. At Gravesend, for example, instead of an ordinary charity-giver, we read of him

as

"even, practical, earnest, unemotional in his charity, full of sound common sense, hitting hard and straight at poverty and vice, even as he hit hard at Chinese city or stockade; no cheerier companion, no one with keener sense of humour or quicker power to catch the light and shade of life...... His life at Gravesend was that of a sound common sense Christian man, intent upon doing the best he could to better the misery that lay around him......He was too thorough a worker to be satisfied with patchwork benevolence. He began at the beginning, and did not leave off till the boy he had rescued from the gutter had found his billet on board ship or in a situation. Nor did his interest end even

with the safe placing of the boy in employment. 'In his sitting-room he had a big chart of the

world, with pins stuck in it, marking the probable position of the different ships in which his "kings" (as he called them) were sailing. He thus followed them in his thoughts.""

A good example of Gordon's rapid movements as Governor of the Soudan is to be seen in these pages :

"On May 19th Gordon left Khartoum ; on June 7th he reached the frontiers of Darfour, four hundred miles distant. He has a wonderful

animal that flies along faster than the mythical hygeen of the Prophet. The escorts are left behind; the secretaries and staff toil far in the

rear...... The Mudir of Fogia and the rest of the officials are completely out of time. There have been watchers set to give timely notice of the Governor-General's approach.... All at once two

specks are noticed by keen Arab eyes miles away to the east. All right, these are the advanced scouts sent on to give warning; there will be plenty of time for the Mudir to don his Stambouli coat an hour hence, and for the soldiers to fall in about sunset. The two specks draw nearer and nearer, and it is then seen that the leading camel carries a pale-faced man arrayed in gorgeous uniform, and that a Kababish Arab sheykh is the second figure. What can it all mean? Only this, that there has come into this vast dreary world a new man, and that, dressed in stately trappings of the highest Turkish military rank, the most restless spirit of the nineteenth century has come to thunder at the stronghold of African slavery."

Of the last great chapter in Gordon's life Sir William Butler gives a sympathetic account. The final months at Khartoum, the pathetic journal, the unhappy delays

in relief, the last awful revelation when the flag was no longer seen flying over the palace-all have their fitting and feeling record. No blame is laid on Sir Charles Wilson, but the delay, if any, which occurred

at Metemna, is distributed among the several

commanders, not omitting the head of the

naval division, who had the main charge of

the steamers. The last scene at Khartoum is told at once vividly and reverently.

The chief fault we have to find with Sir W. Butler is with his political bias. He is

always dragging in party politics; and the

Crimean War, the Mutiny, the Transvaal

and Zulu wars, and other enterprises afford him ample opportunities for attacks upon various governments, which have nothing to do with Gordon's life. He is rabid about officials in general, and the permanent staff of the Foreign Office in particular, and fills much valuable space in his little book with trite catchwords about "landlordism" in Ireland and English "vultures" in India, which simply discredit an otherwise highminded writer. No man would have been

more disgusted with such party spirit than Gordon himself, whose whole life was a protest against faction. Despite such errors of judgment, however, Sir W. Butler has told the life well, and we are glad to possess the first volume of what promises to be an interesting series.

The Coming of the Friars, and other Historic Essays. By the Rev. Augustus Jessopp, D.D. (Fisher Unwin.)

ALL who have read the papers on various subjects connected with the social state of England in the Middle Ages which Dr. Jessopp has published from time to time in the Nineteenth Century will be heartily grateful to him for letting them read them again in a collected shape. The only general criticism that occurs to us is one which may almost always be made upon a volume of reprinted essays, namely, that there is too much repetition in it. A volume of this sort infallibly betrays the joints in an author's harness, and shows how apt he is to say the same thing in different words, or indeed even in the same words. But when the essays are republished, as these profess themselves to be, "with some alterations, corrections, and additions," there is less excuse for the appearance of such glaring repetitions as the double account of the manorial system-an account admittedly inaccurate and to some extent misleading to the unlearned reader-which we find in

chapters ii. and iv., and the attack upon the monks as "the greatest church-robbers that the world has ever known," which occurs both in chapters ii. and iii. Also it is perplexing for the simple-minded to read in one page of Prof. Stubbs, in another of the Bishop of Chester; while it might even be questioned whether in a book dated 1889 yet a third style might not be preferable.

Dr. Jessopp appears to have been rather ill advised in taking his title from what is on all accounts the least original and least valuable article in the book. Not that 'The

Coming of the Friars' is uninteresting-far

from it; but it says little that is new even to

is not always in Dr. Jessopp's best manner. the general reader of history, and what it says There is an element of exaggeration in it which sometimes becomes a little paradoxical. Thus, "The monk was by birth, education, and sympathy, one with the upper classes"; and then, "The Monk, as has been said, was an aristocrat. The Friar belonged to the great unwashed!" Surely

the contrast between monk and friar is quite

strong enough not to need the addition of colouring which is only partly true in

a

itself, and is not assisted by a half-quoted

and evidently misunderstood passage from the Assize of Clarendon. Of course Dr.

Jessopp cannot help writing with exuberant life and freshness; but when his subject gets the better of him, and when it belongs to his own county, it cannot be said that the result is always good for his style. Take the following passage, which in attempting a climax falls down a very steep declivity:

"In no part of England were the Franciscans

received with more enthusiasm than in Norfolk.

They appear to have established themselves at Lynn, Yarmouth, and Norwich in 1226. Clergy and laity, rich and poor, united in offering to them a ready homage. To this day a certain grudging provincialism is observable in the East

Anglian character. A Norfolk man distrusts the settler from 'the Shires,' who comes in with new-fangled reforms. To this day the home of wisdom is supposed to be in the East. When it was understood that the virtual leader of this

astonishing religious revival was a Norfolk man, the joy and pride of Norfolk knew no bounds. Nothing was too much to do for their own hero. But when it became known that Ingworth had been welcomed with open arms by Robert Grosseteste, the foremost scholar in Oxford-he a Suffolk man-and that Grosseteste's friend, Roger de Weseham, was their warm supporter, son of a Norfolk yeoman, whose brethren were to be seen any day in Lynn market-the ovation that the Franciscans met with was unparalleled. There was a general rush by some of the best men of the county into the order."

The papers which show Dr. Jessopp at his best are, without doubt, that on 'Village Life Six Hundred Years Ago' and the two on 'The Black Death in East Anglia.' These reveal that historic imagination, that power of making the past live again, of taking one beyond the record or the court roll to the man who signed the deed or the suitors who formed the court, and finding out how they lived and what they did, which Dr. Jessopp possesses, perhaps, in a unique degree. Nothing can be more telling than these essays, with their light touches of humour, given with an air of reality that almost persuades the reader that Dr. Jessopp went in and out among these villagers of old time, and not without a background of grave wisdom, which speaks the judgment of five or six hundred years later. Dr. Jessopp, with all his

quiet fun, is very much in earnest about the necessity of heightening the human interest in history and drawing human lessons from it; and certainly if any one can teach the art by example Dr. Jessopp is that man.

،

Village Life Six Hundred Years Ago' is a lecture delivered to Norfolk villagers, and describing the social condition of a neighbouring village about the beginning of Edward I.'s reign. Dr. Jessopp had the singular advantage of being able to ransack a collection of charters, court rolls, accounts,

and other documents relating to the village of Rougham, which apparently was arranged and in part bound up in the fifteenth century. Instances of local documents being kept in so complete a state of preservation are extremely rare; but it would be worth the while of any one who has access to the muniments of an old manor house, even

though grievously defective, to see how far he can go, on Dr. Jessopp's model, in writing the social history, with all the current gossip, of that particular village in any given time of the Middle Ages, when the documents in question really meant something, and said what they meant. Prof.

Thorold Rogers has dealt with many tens of thousands of accounts and other documents bearing upon the changes in price

and in methods of farming; but this is the only use to which they have been put, except where the professor has incidentally made notes bearing on other points. Dr. Jessopp now employs local records to write the history of a few years in a particular village, and then, in another essay, he gathers from them statistics of the mortality caused by the Black Death. The idea is Dr. Jessopp's own, and it deserves to be taken up, though it is to be feared there may be few able to read such life and interest in

William Butler's

convenienciliatis what actually did happen was a certain Sir Richard Bellhouse, and he lived at North Tuddenham, near Derebam. Sir Richard was High Sheriff for the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk in 1291, and his duties brought him into court on January 25th of that year, before one of the judges at Westminster. I suppose the court was crowded, and in the crowd some rogue cut off Sir Richard's purse,

and made off with his seal. I never heard he got it back again."

The first part of this passage is, of course, the explanation of a familiar fact, which, however, required to be explained in a popular lecture. What is original is the

way in which to illustrate it Dr. Jessopp

hits upon a story in the 'Abbreviatio torum referring to the family of the person

in question, and then finishes it off with

quaint little bit of vraisemblance at the end.

manor.

The two papers on the Black Death in East Anglia attempt, as we have said, to collect from documentary sources some statistical evidence of the mortality in the Eastern Counties. Dr. Jessopp takes first the diocesan Institution Books, and next such court rolls as he had ready to hand, to show the extent to which benefices and holdings changed hands, and to establish, as far as possible, the proportion which these changes bore to the total number of clergy in the diocese or tenants in a given First of all we may note that Dr. Jessopp fixes with more accuracy than our professed historians the precise stages in the arrival and growth in severity of the plague in and about London, and this with the help of so well-worn an authority as the Rolls of Parliament. Then he goes into particulars about his own county, adding to the recital of figures and facts those vivid traits which Dr. Jessopp reads as though by nature in the documents. The human element that underlies and is presupposed by so simple a statement as the jurors' presentment "that he has no heir" is that which appeals to Dr. Jessopp's imagination: mentem mortalia tangunt. But such descriptions and comments will hardly bear being separated from their connexion. We quote a passage which is merely statistical; it refers to the manor of Cornard Parva, near Sudbury:

died since the last court was held two months before. This is the earliest instance I have yet met with of the appearance of the plague among us, and as it is the earliest, so does it appear to have been one of the most frightful visitations from which any town or village in Suffolk or Norfolk suffered during the time the pestilence lasted. On the 1st of May another court was held, fifteen more deaths are recorded [it need hardly be explained that only actual holders of property are mentioned] thirteen men and two women. Seven of them without heirs. On the 3rd of November, apparently when the panic abated, again the court met. In the six months that had passed thirty-six more deaths had occurred, and thirteen more households had been left without a living soul to represent them. In this little community, in six months' time, twenty-one families had been absolutely annihilated-men, women, and children-and of the rest it is difficult to see how there can have been a single house in which there

was not one dead."

We break off the quotation, and pass with reluctance from Dr. Jessopp's powerful

and vivid essay on a painfully interesting subject. There are several points that we should like to criticize in his estimate of the influence of the Black Death on the progress of English civilization; also we should like to join issue with Dr. Jessopp on what seems to us his exaggerated view of the fourteenth centuries. But we must draw to misery and lawlessness of the thirteenth and a close, only referring the reader to a charming and instructive paper on 'Daily Life in a Mediæval Monastery,' a bright but hurried article on 'The Building of a University,'

and an exceedingly readable life of LodoMuggletonians, which finds its place rather wick Muggleton, the founder of the sect of which Dr. Jessopp's admirers will be not oddly among its medieval neighbours, but the less glad to find there. In conclusion, we should like to express a hope that when this volume comes to be reprinted it will be possible to add to it the article on Matthew Paris, which appeared some time since in the Quarterly Review, and which an uncontradicted report attributed to Dr. Jessopp. Certainly it possesses some of his best characteristics of style and manner, and would come into fit company here.

Fifty Years of a Showman's Life; or, the Life and Travels of Van Hare. By Himself. (Allen & Co.)

As it is now the fashion for public entertainers of all sorts to advertise themselves and amuse their friends by writing autobiographies, Mr. George Van Hare must not be blamed for doing as others have done, and his book is none the less amusing because it lacks literary style and sometimes makes inordinate demands on the reader's credulity. He has a lively story to tell, and tells it in his own way. We need not believe all he says about himself and his achievements; but, if due allowance is made for slips of memory and the selfpraise almost proper to one of Mr. Hare's calling, a good deal may be learnt from his book. A better notion than the reader might get from a more sedate narrative is furnished by it of the ups and downs of a "showman's life," and it throws quite as much light on the tastes of the people successfully

catered for as on those of the caterer.

Mr. Hare, who was the son of a well-to-do Yorkshire farmer, tried many trades before

he fell in with the business for which he was best fitted; but his leanings to it appeared at a very early age. He ran away from school when he was eight, and after that he had most of his training in stables and alehouses, with special diversion when any mountebanks or strolling players came to the village in which he lived. The chief friend of his youth, he says, was Mr. Wilton, the father of Mrs. Bancroft, who found the combined occupations of schoolmaster and rent-collector more profitable than acting, and with whom he passed many evenings at the inn while the uncle who had charge of him thought he was in bed. At the age of eighteen he went to try his fortunes in the United States and Canada, where he was employed, first as treasurer and afterwards as ring-master, by a circus-manager. Then he returned to England, was for a time a commercial traveller, next, on inheriting 3,000l., a seed merchant, and finally a clerk in the Audit Office before he settled down

to the career most congenial to him if that

can be called settling down which was perpetual turmoil and ceaseless search for new ways of attracting pleasure-seekers. He was about thirty when, in 1850, he became a partner in "Phillips's Irish Entertainment, Apollonicon Rooms," in St. Martin's Lane, and began so well that the takings were from 90l. to 150l. a week during the first season. In the second season "our receipts got worse and worse, till one night we only took 12s., so says I, 'This won't do, we must shut up the shop.' " Other "shops" in quick succession were opened and shut up. "Van," as he was called by E. T. Smith, Chatterton, "Paddy" Green, and his other friends, was a man of infinite

resource. He tried his hand at all sorts of

entertainments, making money by some and losing by others, but on the whole obtaining enough profit to satisfy him. Of his occasional misfortunes he makes light, and if worse disasters sometimes befell those in whom he traded he appears to have had no qualms of conscience on their account. One of his numberless "speculations," for instance, was "a Tableau Vivant Troupe," consisting of "twelve ladies, four gentlemen, and two children," whom he took to Antwerp. "I then," he says, grew quite tired of the concern. I went to Spa and amused myself a few days looking on the green cloth, and returned to London." What became of the ladies, gentlemen, and children is not recorded. His next experiment was with a party of North American Indians, who were exhibited at St. Martin's Hall and elsewhere, until "the Canadian Yankee speculators" with whom he was in partnership "skedaddled without paying anybody, leaving the poor Indians up at Camden Town to starve." Luckily for them, however, "they were taken care of by the Missionary Society, and sent back to their own country." The climax of the history of another of Mr. Hare's "speculations," a "Female Blondin," is recorded in a very matter-of-fact way :

"At the latter part of the season, whilst appearing at Highbury Barn, she fell from the rope and injured her hip, which disqualified her from appearing again on the rope; after which she got married and kept a pub."

Mr. Hare has travelled far in search of curiosities and monstrosities to be exhibited in England as well as in seeking people to

be amused by them. Several chapters are occupied with his adventures as a gorilla hunter and guest of cannibals in Africa; but these must be read with special caution. He appears during several years past to have been travelling about in Russia, Sweden, and Norway; but he says on his last page, "When I have got my exhibition completed to my mind so as to astonish the Britishers, I shall return to my native country to try my luck once more."

NOVELS OF THE WEEK.

The Bulbul and the Black Snake. By L. D. Jackson. 2 vols. (Spencer Blackett.) Nigel Fortescue. By William Westall. (Ward & Downey.)

Aroer: the Story of a Vocation. By the Author of Uriel.' 1. (Burns & Oates.)

Le Rêve. Par Émile Zola. (Paris, Charpentier.)

PERSONAL grievances seldom make good fiction. The Bulbul and the Black Snake' is on this wise, and is no exception; it hardly pretends, however, to do more than recount the barest of facts in the baldest and bitterest of fashions, and with just enough of veiling and no more. The writing and the arrangement are crude, inexperienced, and unhumorous, yet the book has about it a touch of unconscious individuality and strangeness that goes some way to diminishing the exceeding commonplace. The matter consists of certain experiences in the career of a young subaltern in India. The writer's care is to present what he believes to be, or to have been, the plain truth about the ways and manners of "Haileybury men" and of Indian officialism generally. He seems wonderfully free from the vices of exaggeration, point-making, or over-colouring of situations and incidents. All he asked was fair play, and this, it appears, is just what he could not get. That there is need for reform in most branches of the service is not doubtful, but what our author has to say of it all is old as the Mutiny, and far more tiresome.

'Nigel Fortescue' fulfils very well the requirements of what are called in the trade

"adventure books." Such books are not to be judged from a literary standpoint, being written to catch what one must call the taste of a class of readers who have no literary taste. But much ability may be shown by

the purveyors of adventure books, and Mr.

Westall, so far as one can judge, knows what is wanted, and supplies it of a good quality. Perhaps it is unwise to set a story in a story, because a writer who does so runs the risk of having his book flung down before he has got a fair hearing. 'Nigel Fortescue,' however, begins with a meet of the Essex Hunt, and works up an interest which should keep readers on the alert for the real business of the romance of the

Andeter fastidious reader is annoyed by

a writer who calls "the long-tailed denizens of copse and covert," and who

lose in interest directly the object comes into prominence-in interest, that is to say, to the general reader, for probably only the most devout and visionary of Roman Catholics would find themselves in sympathy with the final development of the characters of the story. The story of a vocation, or, as the author elsewhere calls it, the history of a human soul, would certainly appeal more forcibly to our sympathies were the soul in question of a less uncommon type and the vocation of a more obvious character. The picture of Norbertine in the early pages of the book is charmingly drawn, and to most minds it will seem little less than revolting that a creature so naturally innocent and so well framed for human happiness should find the supreme end of life to lie within the walls of a convent. Our author is tolerant after his fashion, and admits that there are many forms of vocation in the world as well as in the cloister, and that the only special mark of all vocations is their devotedness to a good end. Then why did he not marry Norbertine to his hero, the young man of great possessions, and let them live happily ever afterwards, instead of making one a nun and causing the other to die a "Poor Brother" in the hospital of his own founding? Of course the other ending would be very commonplace, but how much more comfortable for the reader! Unfortunately the author does not wish to make it com

fortable for the reader; he is writing with an object. Nevertheless the story is most pleasantly written, shows much shrewd insight into character, and contains a good deal of bright and clever conversation perhaps rather too clever sometimes to be altogether natural. The religious views are put forward quietly and unostentatiously, and never degenerate into a dull and dreary sermon preached by the author himself. It is to be regretted that one who writes so well should address himself to so small

an audience.

In 'Le Rêve' M. Zola has attempted to

Rêve' with dulness. It is dull because, in its own way, it is not real; and it is not real because M. Zola has tried to make it so by allusions and touches which do not harmonize with the leading motive of his book. We will justify our criticism by a single instance. This heroine, made of "spirit, fire, and dew," is, we are told, the offspring of the abominable Madame Sidonie, the most filthy, perhaps, of all the filthy personages in 'La Curée,' and what is more, a child whom she had had "sans savoir au juste où elle l'avait prise" - an indication which is not only false to the truth of the situation, but runs, one would say, directly counter to M. Zola's own most cherished theories of heredity.

OUR LIBRARY TABLE.

We have received from Messrs. Bentley & Son The Wanderings of a Globe-Trotter, by the Hon. Lewis Wingfield, a book on China, Japan, and the Philippines, which is readable, but contains nothing very new. There is a disagreeable chapter on a Chinese torture chamber and execution place which might have been omitted with advantage. The best thing in the book is Mr. Wingfield's account of Li-Hung. Chang. Interesting letters have been received in London during the last few days from the latest foreigner who has seen the great Chinese minister; but Mr. Wingfield has told the truth in pointing out that Li-Hung-Chang, with all his power of making use of European talents, is suspicious of all whites, and sees them only for the purpose of picking their brains; that he is always ready to receive in audience any

foreigner, but that when the interview is over European is humiliated to find that he has "imparted a good deal of information to the urbane man of middle age with the bright eyes and intellectual brow, and that you have yourself reaped nothing in exchange. He has sucked you like an orange, and when there is no more juice, calmly flings away the skin with a polite

bow of dismissal."

show that his studies of the lowest forms of life have not unfitted him to treat a theme of mystical purity, but it is impossible to congratulate him on having achieved a complete success. There are passages of marvellous beauty in his picture of the

girl bred in the shadow of an old cathe

dral, who develops

a

which, fed on the glories of the Church

and the legends of the saints, absorbs her whole being, and culminates in an ecstasy of love for one almost as

on the anvil. Even the essay on 'A Day at Monte Carlo' might be made something of, but it would have to be reduced from ten pages to

In The Strangest Journey of my

Life (Ward

when he gets to the Andes that Mr. Westall can still tell an exciting story as well as

ever.

'Aroer' is a story with an object, and, like many other such stories, it begins to

We can

Gorchakov or in the manifesto of the Porte. What Omar Pasha wrote under instructions from the Turkish Government was this :

"Il ne reste par conséquent à celle-ci que l'indispensable obligation de recourir à la guerre. Mais puisque l'invasion des Principautés et la violation des Traités qui l'accompagne sont les causes inévitables de la guerre, la Sublime Porte, pour dernière expression de ses sentiments pacifiques, propose à votre excellence par mon intermédiaire l'évacuation des deux provinces, et offre pour votre décision un terme de quinze jours à dater de la réception de cette lettre. Si, dans ce délai, une réponse négative me parrenart de la part de votre excellence, le commencement des hostilités en serait la conséquence naturelle." - Eastern Papers,' ii. 601, 8vo. edition.

How, after reading this paragraph, it can be contended that the declaration of war was not

It

provisional, I am at a loss to understand. was explicitly provided that war should not take place unless the Russians failed to evacuate the Principalities in a fortnight, or gave a negative reply sooner. When I am further taxed with having taken my “erroneous view of this transaction" from Mr. Kinglake, I must confess to some amusement. Mr. Kinglake and I had an exhaustive discussion of the question, and it ended in my being reluctantly obliged to maintain the chief difference of opinion with which I started. Mr. Kinglake holds that overt war began on October 24th, on the expiration of the fortnight. I believe that the true date is October 10th, when the "réponse négative" was received at the headquarters of the Turkish army, though I admit that the Turks did not act up to their theory that war began on the 10th, any more than they acted up to their other perfectly justifiable position that war began technically upon the entry of Russian troops into the Principalities.

The reviewer proceeds to remark that

"it is not only on this point that we are compelled to differ from him [Mr. Lane-Poole] in his interpretation of the State Papers relating to these transactions, and especially in what we conceive to be an entire misapprehension of both Lord Stratford's share in the proceedings, and also of Lord Clarendon's."

I think I have the right to protest against the vagueness of these terms. The reviewer, I conceive, is bound to refer to explicit errors, and not to announce in airy generalities my "misapprehension" of "these transactions" and "proceedings." What "transactions"? Which "proceedings"? The criticism might be so construed as to apply to the whole of my "interpretation of the State Papers" throughout the Crimean War. That it does not so apply is, I suppose, proved by the fact that the only part of my interpretation which the reviewer traverses is that concerned with the summons to the fleet in October, 1853. He quotes a passage in which I refer to the amazing recklessness with which Lord

Clarendon

"was induced by the representations of a foreign Government, based upon a single telegraphic report, to take the serious step of ordering the advance of the squadron through the Dardanelles, without waiting for Lord Stratford's despatches";

and then he comments thus:

"And in the following pages he dwells repeatedly on the fatuity of Lord Clarendon in issuing these positive, untimely, ill-judged orders, and on the embarrassment they caused to Lord Stratford. Assertions and implications such as these, coming from one who, as he wrote, had the original documents, before him, we find it truly amazing to

But why? Does the reviewer mean to contend that Lord Clarendon's despatch of September 23rd, instructing Lord Stratford to bring up the fleet, was not based upon an

alarmist telegram from M. De la Cour, and

was not sent before the arrival of Lord Stratford's reassuring despatches, which showed

that the British colony was not in danger? If so, I can only refer him to the State Papers. Or does he mean that Lord Clarendon's despatch did not positively order Lord Stratford to call

I maintain that the instruction was wholly uncalled for and embarrassing. Earlier despatches, notably that of June 2nd ('Eastern Papers,' part i. p. 227), left no doubt whatever as to Lord Stratford's powers to bring up the fleet at the Sultan's request, and there was no necessity for strengthening them in deference to foreign panic or intrigue; and in view of these circumstances I cannot understand how the ambassador could have "doubted his powers" or been "anxious to receive instructions" as "we know from his own conversation at the time." My experience of many personal recollections of Lord Stratford's sayings does not lead me to place implicit confidence in impressions of conversations held thirty-five years ago, and while the reviewer is, of course, justified in relying on his memory, I must be forgiven if I prefer the evidence of the documents before

me.

After all, whether the reviewer is right or I, the conclusion of his argument is singularly lame. It is not asserted for a moment that Lord Stratford was wrong in summoning the fleet when he did so, not, however, on the strength of Lord Clarendon's despatch of September 23rd, but on that of his original instructions. Nothing whatever comes out of the criticism but the suggestion that I have been unfair to Lord Clarendon: "Mr. Lane-Poole's impression that on this and other important points at this conjuncture grave differences of opinion had arisen

between Lord Stratford and Lord Clarendon is

distinctly contradicted by the documentary evidence and by our own personal knowledge." The reviewer has not seen the private corre

spondence, which I have before me, between these two statesmen, and without this advantage

it is rash to contradict what I am able to state

as positive fact. So far from being unfair to the late Lord Clarendon, I have scrupulously abstained from using his private and semiofficial correspondence against him. That dif

ferences existed between him and the ambas

sador is, however, patent from many passages in my work, and was notorious to the "inner circle" of the time.

On the other hand, one of the matters on

which the two were perfectly agreed is, curiously enough, the necessity for sending the fleets out of the Bosphorus into the Black Sea, as to which the reviewer seems to be under a total misapprehension.

STANLEY LANE-POOLE.

AMERICAN PUBLISHERS.

THE letter of Mr. George Moore published in the Athenœum of January 12th, in which he repeats the expression of his belief in the general wickedness of American publishers, is

worded in such a manner as to demand an

answer.

If it were not that my failure to reply to this demand might be misconstrued as an admission

of the accuracy of Mr. Moore's conclusions, I

should prefer to let the matter rest where it is, as well on the ground of the uncalled-for attack

he has permitted himself to make upon the

reputation of a large class of reputable business

men, of whose business methods he evidently has little knowledge, as because the task to

which he challenges me, of specifying the names of the American publishers whose dealings with their authors are honourable, is in itself an invidious one, as much so as would be that of making a similar list of reputable English publishers.

The reply to Mr. Moore's demand for the names of "even two American publishers" whe are not addicted to piracy could safely be left to the hundreds of English authors who have had satisfactory business relations with such houses as the Appletons, the Scribners, the Houghtons, the Holts, the Roberts, Little & Brown, and many similar concerns, among whom (at the risk of being personal) I must, as a matter of justice, include the firm founded by the lats G. P. Putnam. To the best of my knowledge and belief these publishers (and many like them) deal with their English authors with precisely the same methods as those in force with their American authors, and they issue American editions only of such English works as have been duly authorized under purchase or under royalty arrangement; and of such firms this method of dealing has, from the outset, been the uniform practice. In fact, the bulk of the unauthorized "reprinting" on this side has for a number of years been done by five concerns, of four of which the members are Canadians, who began their "reprinting" business in the Dominion.

Mr. Moore speaks as if the "appropriation of American books had been entered upon by English publishers only comparatively recently, and as a matter of necessary retaliation. Asa matter of fact, the practice of such "appropriation" dates from the beginnings of American literature, and has steadily increased in direct proportion to the increase of the American literature available for the purpose. As far back as 1847 the volume 'American Facts, published in London and New York, calls attention to the fact that every American bock worth "pirating" had been "pirated," and gives a long list of the books so taken.

Mr. Moore contends that an English publisher would be "quixotic" who in the present coll dition of affairs would think it necessary to make payment for American material. This is as if should claim that, because I had had my pocket picked by one Englishman in the Strand, I should be "quixotic" if I hesitated to avail myself of the opportunity of picking the pocket of another Englishman whom I might catch in Broadway. Fortunately the large majority of both English and American publishers are not willing to conduct their business by any such standard of ethics as that here defended by Mr. Moore.

As Americans, we may frankly admit our regret for the mortifying delay in securing from our Congress legislation recognizing the rightfu claims of authors. As individual publishers who have done and who are doing all that is in our power to bring about such legislation, and

who use no English literature without paying for it, we contend that the "appropriation" in Eng land of our own literary material is indefensible and that from writers who have given intelligen attention to the present status of internationa publishing relations we ought not to be sub jected to indiscriminate abuse.

It is the present expectation that the pendin Copyright Bill will be passed by by Congress eithe this session or next. It is in order to explain that the present measure will not be accepte by the believers in international copyright as i any way a finality, but is considered merely a one step in the right direction. It was foun essential for the purpose of securing the nece sary support for the Bill to include in it certai restrictions, disapproved of alike by the author

and by by the publishers. It is believed, howeve that when the principle

of protection for th

literary property of aliens has once been estat lished, it should prove a comparatively easy tas to eliminate such restrictions and condition and in the end to secure a general recognitio