time. Contemporary history is always busy with the amours of monarchs; but King Humbert, if he has not altogether escaped an entry in the chronique scandaleuse of his time, is regarded as exceptional among monarchs for the fidelity of his relations to the woman of his affections. That that woman was not his lawful spouse was, perhaps, not altogether the unnatural consequence of his position. When at the age of twenty-four he married his cousin, the present Queen, there was no pretence of denying the fact that the marriage was, like most Royal marriages, a mariage de convenance. It was necessary for the dynasty that a legitimate heir should be born to the throne, and for one year King Humbert and his wife continued in conjugal relations. The fruit of this union was the Prince of Naples, who has now succeeded his father as Victor Emanuel III. After that year, the primary purpose of the marriage having been accomplished, it was understood that while the King and Queen remained good friends, lived in the same palace, and always kept up appearances, each lived their own life and went their own way. The Queen, highly educated, æsthetic, lived in a world of ideals, into which her husband, simple huntsman, soldier and sovereign, never entered. The extraordinary and unshaken hold which a lady twelve years his senior was able to maintain over the King to the last is a subject of universal comment in Italy. But upon this it is not necessary to dwell.

As a king Humbert has been praised by one party on the ground of his scrupulous attachment to the oath which he swore to the constitution, and by others he has been blamed not the less severely for his refusal to exercise those powers with which the constitution armed the Sovereign of Italy. I well remember discussing this question with leading Italian statesmen at Rome at the close of 1898. They maintained that the King had reduced the functions of a constitutional sovereign to a mere figurehead, and they were extraordinarily interested in hearing details as to the method in which our own Sovereign the Queen has contrived to use her influence to facilitate the working of the British Constitution. If only, they said, King Humbert had been as much a Sovereign as Queen Victoria, many of the difficulties which afflict modern Italy might have been easily and expeditiously removed. The King, however, until the latter days of the Pelloux Ministry, remained a strictly constitutional sovereign. As minister succeeded minister, whether Piedmontese or Sicilian, he found in the King a purely negative support. Only in the latter days of the Pelloux Ministry, when General Pelloux executed what was practically a Parliamentary coup d'état, and met obstruction by arbitrary decrees which the Supreme Court subsequently declared to be illegal, did the King extend his negative support to quasi-unconstitutional action. He believed, no doubt, that it was the only way out of an impasse, and he also hoped that when the General Election took place it would prove that the electorate approved of the action of the Ministry. When the result was made known that the Socialists and anti-monarchial party had increased their strength to a hundred members in the new Parliament, the King's confidence in General Pelloux disappeared, and it is said that it was the consciousness of this loss of the royal confidence which led to the resignation of General Pelloux before any proof had been affordel that he had lost the support of a majority of the new Parliament. One case in which the King would have acted more wisely if he had followed his own impulse was in the case of the amnesty of those who were convicted for participation in the

bread riots some years ago. The King, it was believed, was in favour of giving a general amnesty at the end of six months. His Ministers objected, preferring that the amnesty should be postponed till the end of the twelve months. In the meantime there sprang up an agitation accompanied with considerable demonstrations of passion, which had this result, that when the twelve months expired Ministers maintained that it was impossible to grant the amnesty as it would seem to have the appearance of capitulation under dictation. Hence fresh bad blood, ill-feeling, and unrest, which might have been avoided, had the King ventured to assert his influence in the direction of mercy.

This, however, is attributed by some critics to his constitutional fatalism. He was never convinced that any action would alter things much either way, and as it was not clearly his duty as a soldier and a King to insist upon his own views, he fell back upon the advice of his ministers and left the responsibility with them. "The only initiative he ever displayed in affairs of state," said a shrewd observer, 66 was the initiative of negation. No one could say that he would do nothing with a more imperturbable and immovable decision." He was a negative King from first to last. But if this was true in home affairs, it did not characterise his foreign policy. The Triple Alliance entered into shortly after his accession to the throne was his policy as much as that of Crispi, and he has adhered to it with unswerving resolution through good and ill report. With equal tenacity he has maintained a policy of armaments which was a corollary of the policy of the Triplice. It was in his reign also that Italy embarked upon her illfated policy of colonial adventure in the Red Sea, the collapse of which, at the fatal battle of Adowa, will be remembered as one of the catastrophes of his reign. That it did not convince him that a policy of expansion was a mistake for Italy, may be assumed from the fact that when the scramble for China was initiated by his ally the Kaiser, the Italian Government showed a strong. disposition to press for the cession of Chinese territory, and even in the last days of his reign his Government showed a disposition to take part in the International Crusade against China.

In Italian politics the question of Rome dominates. everything. It was the Roman question and the need for safeguarding Italy against an attack from France for the purpose of re-establishing the temporal power which forced Italy into the Triple Alliance. Nothing has been done to effect an arrangement between the Vatican and the Quirinal, but the healing influence of time has told in favour of Italy, and Victor Emanuel III. succeeds to relations with the Pope much less strained than those which prevailed at the death of his grandfather. On the whole, King Humbert has not conferred any great and signal advantage to the kingdom over which he had been called to reign. Neither, on the other hand, with the exception of the misfortune in Abyssinia and the continual drain upon her economic resources entailed by the armaments necessary to a member of the Triple Alliance, will his name be associated with any national misfortune. As a soldier he did his duty bravely and well. As a sovereign he carried out his idea of duty without enthusiasm, but with the same steady adhesion to his obligations and responsibilities which characterised him in all the other departments of life.

He is succeeded by his only son, the Prince of Naples, now reigning under the title of Victor Emmanuel III., who at the time when he was called to the throne was yachting in the Levant. The Prince of Naples is a man

is an Italian, as was also the assassin of the Empress of Austria. Secondly, that his crime, whether prompted by the frenzy of an individual or by a criminal conspiracy, will be inevitably attributed to political motives, and will tend naturally, although illogically, to strengthen the reaction against the republicans and socialist parties in Italy. The Conservatives, who lost ground badly at the last election, will exploit the crime of Monza to the

small of stature, who has never given any indication of exceptional ability or statecraft. At the time when the King was pressed to exercise his Royal prerogative and assert himself more in the government of his kingdom, it was reported in Rome that the King had said: "If you want anything like that to be done let me abdicate and my successor will have less scruples than myself." The Prince was reported, not unnaturally perhaps, to have expressed very strong opinions against Crispi at the time of the disaster in Abyssinia. But for the most part he has kept himself out of politics, and the world waits with interest not unmixed with curiosity to see the note of the first words which he will address to his subjects. He has one speciality which does not shed much light upon the line of his future policy. He is a devoted student of numismatics, and his collection of coins is said to be one of the finest in Europe. He married four years ago the Princess of Montenegro, a beautiful woman, simple and unostentatious, who was little qualified by her training in the mountain hamlet of Cettinge to play the rôle of a great European queen. The marriage, unfortunately, has not been blessed by offspring, so that in case of the demise of Victor Emanuel III. the Crown would pass to his cousin the Duke D'Aosta, the son of King Amadeus of Spain, who married a sister of the Duke of Orleans. The Duke D'Aosta is an artillery officer of commanding presence and of considerable oratorical ability. He has a family-both sons and daughters-so that even in the case of another catastrophe the succession is secured. The younger brother of the Duke D'Aosta, the Duke of the Abruzzi, is in the Arctic regions on his way to the North Pole.

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uttermost, declaring that it is the natural outcome of the teachings of their political opponents. This may be true or it may be false, but it will be used unsparingly by the Conservatives of Italy. The crime of the assassin will probably tend to defeat its own ends by strengthening the hold of the dynasty upon the population, which, whether it be republican or monarchist, has little sympathy with political murder. Although the sad event has cast a gloom over Europe and has led to the cancelling of the fêtes and popular entertainments which were arranged in Paris in honour of the Shah and the InterParliamentary Conference, it is not expected to have any immediate political results. It may increase the clamour for repressive legislation, and some French journalists are already using it in order to upbraid the Italian Government for refusing to support the demand for exceptional measures of international repression against the modern Thugs. What is too probable is that the crime is only the latest illustration of the lawless spirit of violence which is abroad in the earth at the present time. The attack upon the Dutch Republics is one illustration of this spirit, the assassination of the King is another. We are far from seeing the end of the unchaining of the spirit which makes the will of the individual or of the nation the sole law of right or wrong, and justifies an attack upon the government of a state or the life of a sovereign on the ground that either one or the other stands in the way of the immediate realisation of ambitions or of aspirations which cannot be gratified within the limits of law private or international.

[Giacomo Brogil.

EW things are more mysterious than the rules by which the Press is guided in the reporting of public events. For the last two months the Paris Exhibition has been the centre of a series of congresses, which for variety, range and interest are unparalleled in the history of the world. The Paris Exhibition itself is an universal museum, and the congresses of the Exhibition are a kind of international parliament upon all matters that interest the human race. Yet, although these congresses are attended by picked experts from all nations, and discuss matters for the moral, social and material welfare of mankind, they have been treated by the English Press with almost absolute contempt. It might have been thought that the mere conception would have commanded attention. In the heart of the Paris Exhibition stands the Hall of the Congresses, in which every day meet together representatives of all the nations, who compare notes and exchange the conclusions arrived at by the study of the various problems which perplex the human race. Science has its representatives; education, labour, peace-almost every department of human activity holds during the period of the Exhibition a universal conference or parliament, largely composed of experts whose deliberations might have been thought at least as worthy of attention as the latest lying rumour telegraphed from Shanghai, or hackneyed speeches upon threadbare subjects of political controversy.

But, so far as the British public are concerned, they are practically non-existent. The following list of the subjects of the congresses held in the last fortnight illustrates better than anything else that can be said as to the nature of the interests represented :

say; but in view of the special nature of this assembly I thought it well to ask a valued contributor to furnish the readers of the REVIEW OF REVIEWS with brief sketches of two of the most distinguished medical men who will represent British medicine at the Paris Exhibition. The writer has the pleasure of their personal acquaintance, but has written, needless to say, without thei sanction or co-operation.

1.--DAVID FERRIER.

Curious is it in these days of universal advertisement that the men whose greatness endures beyond death, and whose services to humanity are immeasurable, should be less known to their contemporaries than the author of a sensational novel or ephemeral music-hall ditty. Go into any circle of educated cultivated persons conversant probably with the latest dramatic achievements of Europe, and it is a question whether they have even heard the name of David Ferrier, and none at all as to their complete ignorance of the nature of the life work that has made his name honoured amongst the savants of the world and forever inseparably associated with the achievements of the century in the science and surgery of brain diseases.

To realise how great has been the contribution of Ferrier to the astonishing advance made in this direction during the latter part of this century, it is only necessary for a moment to recall how little was known fifty or sixty years ago of the pathology of the brain and nerve centres and the localisation of brain diseases, by means of which alone surgical treatment of some of the most distressing maladies-tumours, paralysis, and a host of other nerve complaints-was made possible. Men at this time in London, Berlin, and Paris were making every kind of experiment and research, but the results were so dubious and the views of some of the older physicians so hostile that to take up the work required both courage and selfdenial as well as exhaustless patience and a conviction of the value of the object in view. These qualities David Ferrier possessed in their highest degree, and whatever modifications have to be taken into consideration with regard to the validity and value of his investigations and conclusions, it is indisputable that he was the pioneer of the great discovery of cerebral localisation, whose future no man can predict, and whose influence in the relief of a class of diseases hitherto almost untouched by medical or surgical skill is one of the most triumphant achievements of modern science.

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It is well for David Ferrier and for his brilliant colleague, Victor Horsley, that they did not live in the days when witchcraft flourished, for the authors of such miracles would assuredly have been burnt as wizards. Go to the National Hospital in Queen Square, which is thronged from year to year with afflicted humanity, and—if have sufficient courage and philosophy for the taskwatch the transcendent cures effected by the genius of Ferrier, who diagnoses and localises the diseases, and by Victor Horsley, who with something of almost demon-like skill performs the operation of trepanning, an operation which does verily often give back a man his faculties of mind and sight and hearing. Many of the most woeful maladies that afflict the human race-epilepsy, paralysis, brain tumours, etc.- have thus been brought within the reach of alleviation, if not of cure, since the memorable day when Ferrier, just thirty years ago, gave the results of his researches in a paper con

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SOLITUDE IN LONDON. This first year in Londor Dr. Ferrier, the now far sought and honoured cor sultant, looks back upor with horror. Poor, friend less, unassured of his posttion, and at times barely able to keep his heat above water, he has con fessed to the writer that he was more than once tempted to flee from the loneliness and indifferenc of the unfriendly vast city back to the warmth an camaraderie of the cir of friends he had made for himself in Edinburgh It is perhaps this perio of unrest, of struggle, of Sturm und drang, that, even more than the profound studies of his maturer life, have left imprinted their stamp upon the great physician's strange, uncommon physiognomy, which at first sight may seem, as I have once seen it stated, "unremarkable" and "insignificant." 11S FFFFCTS ON THE PHYSIOGNOMY.

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Insignificant in feature, perhaps, and unremarkable. the correct and thoughtful gravity of the consulting-room, where men of the most marked individuality as a rule wear a mask, but in the highest degree striking to those who have an en ortunity of penetrating beneath the professional mask and discerning the other side of the personality. Ce to see Dr. Fermer, revit as the world-wide authority Peces diseases and ts ten to one O will come

away with the impression that this singularly fragile and small slender man, with his grave serious face, curiously Jewish in its general cast of expression, is primarily and essentially the scientific man, masterly in his methods of examination, his swift, unerring decisions, his keen, hawklike glance that seems to dive deep into the recesses of your being, and like magic bring up all kinds of amazing discoveries about your physical foibles, temperament and the rest. Perhaps you may even go away and make another professional visit without catching a single glimpse of what is the vital characteristic of David Ferrier just outside and beneath his professional manner that is, an almost southern quality of vividness and alertness, a something in his gesture and look that makes his face curiously apart from the stolid physiognomy of his countrymen. Nothing sturdy or robust or wooden about this personality; nothing, I should say, in the world quite like those hands of his, so unerring in their localisation of painful spots, so merciless, so dæmonic in their pursuit of disease, so charged themselves with sensitive nervous energy.

THE PARADOX OF HIS PERSONALITY.

It is this twofold suggestiveness which makes the personality of the man interesting and inscrutable. Embodying every attribute of the modern man of science, his Paganism, his analytical spirit, his materialistic standpoint, his belief in the logic of might (his views on the Boers might be appropriately entertained by a mediæval Turk!), he is the breathing denial of his own intellectual theories. There is no living man more kind and humane to the sickly, the unfortunate, and the uninteresting. Himself full of honours, the recipient of every sort of scientific homage in the shape of honorary degrees and medals, and the like, he will devote an hour's patient and careful examination to some working man or woman whose nervous breakdown is due to

anxiety, overwork and poverty. A typical little incident of his humanity! The writer of this article a few years ago was one of a group of weary-looking women waiting for an hour or two in Dr. Ferrier's consulting-room. An interchange of conversation took place, with the result being elicited that not one of the five women, all working women, had ever been asked for a fee. And if they express gratitude he will meet them with banter, or hasten, if the mood of mischief be on him, to discover a weak spot in your spinal column and give you what is known as the "jumps." For though he is a genius he is a modern man, and to show intense feeling is with him not matter for dislike, but for amusement, for an easy half-mocking tolerance that perpetually leaves you in doubt as to the true inner nature of a complex being of this type. But assuredly there is no doubt that amongst the century's great names in medicine there are few greater than that of David Ferrier.

II. MALCOLM MCHARDY.

No greater contrast in externals the world over could be found between David Ferrier and his friend and colleague at King's College Hospital, Professor McHardy, the renowned eye surgeon, big, burly, unconventional, the soul of straightforwardness and integrity, the terror of sticklers for professional etiquette, of which he is sublimely disregardful, the living symbol of bold seas, stormy skies, and the free wildness of nature, of which he a passionate worshipping son.

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A GENIAL ESCULAPIUS.

The critic who complained a few years ago that individuality of character was much commoner in fiction

than in real life would congratulate himself upon an acquaintanceship with Malcolm McHardy. He is as real as Sir John Falstaff, and as full of humour as the old knight himself. Anyone who wants an afternoon of entertaining humour, rich, naïve, and abundant in its essence, and mingled with the true pathos of naked real life, should pay a visit to the Royal Eye Hospital at Southwark upon the afternoons-pretty nearly every afternoon of the week-when Professor McHardy is the visiting surgeon. I have visited dozens of hospitals on "out patients' day," and invariably come away tragically impressed by the cold, almost brutal atmosphere that characterises these occasions, during which a procession of wrecked human creatures receive the business-like attention and admirable skill of great physicians and surgeons.

66

THE COSTER'S TRIBUTE.

It is the absence of this coldness, this formalism, this tacit recognition on both sides of the barrier between the medical gentleman" and the povertystricken cases," which strike one upon Professor McHardy's day at the Royal Eye Hospital, and fill the heart with warmth and geniality. "Treats a chap as 'e would isself!" I have frequently heard repeated by a dirty "coster bloke." "E ain't no toff, Mc'Ardy," with ejaculations of astonished gratification that a swell gentleman from the West End should know the precise kind of marine oath that would reassure a poor bargee awaiting his operation with a trembling, sinking spirit; or the exact form of welcome that would go to the heart of a sweep. "Must 'a bin in the line hisself!" was the verdict of one exponent of the chimney sweeping art after being asked by the Professor a question that betokened a knowledge of the inner mysteries (and villanies) of the trade; and the same high praise will be tendered by the carpenter, instantly addressed by the name of "Chips," by the engineer, the bargee, the seamstress, and other craftsmen. Humanity that is the keynote of McHardy's success, and the passionate affection bestowed upon him by the South London artisan, to whom the Professor, in and out of the splendid hospital, not at fixed hours, but at all hours of the day or night whenever man, woman, or child needs his care and superb skill, is a familiar and welcome figure. The hospital, one of the most complete and perfectly equipped in England, rebuilt a few years ago, owes its existence to Professor McHardy's dauntless energies, and-characteristic of the man-is one of the few hospitals all the world over that is never in debt and never advertised.

OF FAMOUS ANCESTRY.

In its way, Malcolm McHardy's career has been as striking as any could well be. The son of Admiral McHardy, and grandson of Nelson's famous flaglieutenant, who suggested that the word expects should be signalled instead of "relies," he has held his ground, fighting abuses from the day when he was a student at St. George's and insisted that hospital appointments should be free and open, and adjudged according to merit instead of by purchase, at no matter what risk to his popularity and professional prestige. And his unpopularity amongst his correct and conventional brethren is indisputable, though he boasts the friendship of the noblest.

WHY AND WHERE HE IS UNPOPULAR.

A man who treats coster patients with far more kindly indulgence than he would extend to a millionaire mayor, a man who is perfectly honest and outspoken even when