POOR VALENTINE BAKER.

[Kansas City Times, January 6, 1888.]

It is all very well now to sing pæons over the grave where General Valentine Baker has been buried. He recks not now of any war-trumpet that may be busy with his name or fame. The poet may sing of his sorrowful and tempestuous life, and the novelist may make of him a hero to adorn many a tale and romance; but he is past all heeding now-he has crossed over the river to rest, it may be, with many another soldier under the shade of the trees.

General Valentine Baker, not long dead of a sudden heart trouble, was born in 1831. Joining the British Army in 1848, he served with brilliant courage and enterprise in Kaffir land, in India, and in the Crimea. His regiment then was the Twelfth Lancers. Afterward, when only 28 years of age, he was made colonel of the Tenth Hussars, one of the crack English cavalry regiments, and one which had seen service in the four quarters of the globe. The Prince of Wales was his steadfast friend-aye, more than friend, for they were roystering companions together. When the Prince made his somewhat celebrated visit to this country, the daring colonel of the Tenth Hussars was in his train, a confidential adviser and a constant attendant. It was remarked that the two men seemed inseperable.

Fate was weaving a web for the future, however, and poor Baker with his eyes wide open went straight to his destiny.

One summer night-flushed somewhat with the wine of the mess table and the wine of the glorious weather-he was riding up from the camp at Aldershot to London. In the same railroad apartment with him was a lady whom he did not know, whom he had probably never seen, and who was disposed to be friendly, at least, if not a little free. Some courtly conversation was held between the two, and Baker saw or imagined he saw an opportunity for an intrigue. Perhaps he pushed his suit. No doubt he would not take the first no for an answer. It may be that with the glamor over him he came too near for a man who came to be denied; but whatever he did, when the train reached London the woman called a police officer, told her story, and Baker was required to answer at a court of justice the next morning.

He made no defense publicly. He simply said to the magistrate, I have sinned, perhaps, and I will suffer. Let the law be satisfied." He was imprisoned for a brief period, but the Queen, when his sentence had been served out, took his regiment away from him, drove him from the army, and so branded him that he was octracised by society in all its mean, petty, abject and malignant ways, until Valentine Baker sought service with the Turk. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8 was just on the eve of outbreak, and the Sultan made him a major general and assigned him to the command of the gendarmerie or what would be called in this country home-guards. This he perfectly drilled and disciplined, and afterwards-when the war was becoming every day more bloody and desperate-he was given a division of regulars and sent rapidly to the front. At the Balkans he fought splendidly, was decorated by the Sultan, and undoubtedly saved the army of Suleiman Pasha, then in full retreat for Adrianople.

Over and over again appeals were made to Queen Victoria to reinstate him in the British army, but they might just as well have been made to a stone. The Prince of Wales never forsook him, and

made two touching personal requests of his mother in regard to him, but her obdurate heart never melted for a moment. Until his dying day the sentence of the court-martial stood over against his name unexpunged.

Once he told the true story of his railroad adventure, but not for the purpose of softening the Queen or begetting sympathy. His first advances, he said, were unobjectionable. The woman appeared rather to return his expressed admiration, and to be not averse to a little coquetry. Desiring to make the flirtation a little more emphatic on his part, she stopped him curtly, and that was the end. Afterward he spoke no word to her that was not perfectly proper and respectful. The entire British army believed him, as did as well almost the entire British public, outside of the army.

By and by there were troubles in Egypt, and thither went Baker, the soldier instinct still powerful upon him, and a great yearning still in all his being to fight for his country, even though he fought under a foreign flag.

At Tel-a-Kebir, Baker was among the first to storm the works of Arabi Pasha. Afterward Osman Digna grew bold, grew rampant, grew defiant, and Baker marched to encounter him with a small Egyptian force of ragamuffins. British soldiers were denied him, but he went forward without them. At El Teb the Arabs delivered one volley and charged home. The Egyptians did not even wait to receive the onset. They fled ignominiously, and the flight was a massacre. In the rear, and almost alone, Baker made heroic efforts to rally his men, but if he had been a desert sand dune talking to the wind he could have made no less impression. Finally he was shot in the leg. There were scars of a half dozen worse wounds on his body, and he paid no attention to this. When near to succor, and almost within shoulder touch of the British lines, an iron ball tore through his left jaw, destroyed the sight of one eye, knocked him from his horse, and knocked him insensible. In another moment he would have been speared to death, but of a sudden a defiant bugle note rang out loud and shrill and challenging, and, if he then could have looked up and looked forward, he might have seen his own idolized regiment, the Tenth hussars, rushing down to the rescue,

If he had lived until the Prince came regularly to the throne he would have been restored instantly to his own again; but, poor fellow, fate would not even let him do that. He died at Ismalia, far from his own sea girt land, and almost before he could say farewell to those about him or leave a single little message for the loved ones that were not by.

We were aware of the claims now being made that, if he had lived a little longer, the Queen, taking advantage of her jubilee year, would have restored him to the ranks of the British army-in fact, making such restoration a crowning act of mercy and grace. If she ever entertained an intention so righteous as this, red tape prevented its fulfillment. How pitiful sound the remarks made about him by a distinguished general officer, who was also his intimate friend: "It is sad to think of the poor fellow lying upon his sick bed, heartbroken with the many disappointments he had experienced. All his hope had centered on the jubilee year, yet it seemed drawn to a close without the Queen having shown any sign of relenting. It is then easy to understand how, in Baker's weakened condition, desire to live may have died out, for he knew nothing of the pleasant surprise in store for him. Could he but have realized the certainty of his restoration, the poor fellow would probably have been

living still. The Queen's pardon came too late, and all that his sorrowing friends can now do is to join in raising a tribute to the memory of one who was a far better man than many whom the world delights to honor."

It certainly can not be denied that after life's fitful fever he will sleep well.

ROSCOE CONKLING.

[Kansas City Times, April 18, 1888.]

"A great man has fallen this day in Israel."

At the grave's side no one should write of him except as a typical American citizen. If there had been anything of dross, death's crucible left only the gold in its value and purity. On the shroud there was no place for hands that might have smutched it with partisanship; in the coffin there was no place for the cold formula of political creeds-no place for the cold presentment of any Nemesis born of the fierce struggles and passions common to all men who follow a flag and fight its party's battles.

Conkling was a proud man-proud of his clean hands, his clean public record, his clean professional life, his clean personal character. He lived in an atmosphere where scandal never came. Under the terrible stress and strain of fifteen years of war and reconstruction, with his armor scarcely ever off, and his naked blade scarcely ever at rest in its scabbard, he fought a savage fight, but always in the open. Others tortured; he desired to draw the line at the not unreasonable utilization of the North's unmistakable victory over the South. Jobbers swarmed about him; he barred the treasury doors the best he could through all those terrible days of rapine, confiscation, and the gathering together of the birds of prey. Others, sodden with the thrift which follows the fawning of demagogues, cringed constantly at the feet of Lincoln and Grant; Conkling stood splendidly erect as some huge column supporting an edifice wherein Solomon might have greeted and reveled with the Queen of Sheba.

And how he hated a little, a mean, a sneaking, or a contemptible thing. The man's whole nature seems to have had wings especially granted to soar above the partisan hogs in their sties; the partisan bullocks horning one another off from the troughs of public plunder. No margins tempted him; no ring allurements, seductive at every step with valuable spoils, ever attracted his attention; no lobbyist ever dared to approach him with a special plea; across the black page of the De Golyer contracts, and the infamous pay-roll of the Credit Mobilier thieves, no mortal eye ever saw written thereon the white name of Roscoe Conkling. Can the same be said for the apostolic sniveler who tried to humble him, to break that proud spirit, to shear the locks from that stalwart Samson, to chain him to the chariot wheels of a detested secretary of state, to insult him in the house of his friends, to crack a master's whip and bid him surrender, to banish from all part or lot in a Republican administration this heroic Warwick, only knowing how to spend millions for defense but not a cent for tribute?

Conscious of the perfect rectitude of a life so far spent in the service of his friends and his party, not capable of becoming a dwarf, that he might escape the volleys of that pigmy brood which had come into ephemeral life through the last bloody-shirt foment of reconstruction politics, and unable to consort with the man-buyers

of the Pension Bureau and the two-dollar inundators of Indiana, with Star-route Dorsey opening the sluices and the dykes, he put away politics and went proudly out into the ranks of the honest working people, where he knew the air to be pure, and where he was positive that he could still maintain his consoling self-respect and his spotless honor.

And now he is dead in his prime. Possessed of an intellect equal to that of any of the great ones gone. Quiet, studious, and devoted to his profession. Not, perhaps, what in these days might be called a popular leader-because his standard was too high and his will too unbending-he would have been wise in counsel, masterful in a cabinet, and superb in the field. Intolerance of shams made him appear at times lordly, supercilious, and dictatorial; but behind the semblance was the substance, and in extremity everything else was unreckoned of except the iron. There was much in common between himself and General Grant, and this fact will go far to explain their unselfish and unbroken friendship. Grant never whined; neither did Conkling. Grant was firm, resolute and indomitable; so was Conkling. Very late in his second term Grant had at last discovered the snares and the pitfalls prepared for him by his toadies and his flatterers; Conkling long before had foreseen their danger and hastened to his chief with heartfelt and valuable warnings. Grant confided in many, Conkling in few; but the middle ground upon which they both met and fraternized was the loyal respect one had for the other. This, being always the bond of communion, no matter the separate road each took in response to its bidding, each always reached it simultaneously. Hence, amid the wreck of all things dear to Grant's ambition at Chicago, Conkling went down with the colors.

He died too soon. There would have been a mighty work for him to have done in the near future. To many thinking men the nation is on the eve of a crisis. There are elements this day at work which are yet to make patriotism once more as precious as when our forefathers pledged to freedom whatever they had of life, of property, and of sacred honor. There will come by and by questions to be settled-some of them pressing, some undeniable, some perhaps perilous-which will need for their grappling some such intellect as Conkling's-clear, incisive, luminous; imbued somewhat with omniscience; not afraid of the knife, still less of the caustic; seeing the entire Union, unobscured as to the paltry efficacy of partisan panaceas, serene even with the ship in the breakers, pontifical like a priest's, aggressive like a soldier's-where is there such an one left for such emergencies in New York, where indeed in the United States?

There be makeshifts in abundance-doughty political physicians who treat symptoms but never the disease itself. The land is full of inanities that gambol on the political green as lambs do in blue-grass pastures, when April is in the air, and the south wind tells what it yet intends to do for the buds and blossoms. There are quacks, and formulas, and nostrums by the shipload. There are babblers of finance, and men in buckram to organize and utilize labor movements. There are multitudinous makers of trusts, eating up the substance of the people, and feeding competition on husks and shavings; but where are the giants to keep the faith and keep this blessed land from mortal injury? One has just fallen prostrate as some great oak falls, never to rise again.

ON SOUTHERN POETS.

[Kansas City Times, September 14, 1888.]

The Atlanta Constitution, in dealing quite lengthily the other day with Southern poetry and poets, seems only to know and put forward three: Father Ryan, Sidney Lanier, and Paul H. Hayne. It is well. No word is said amiss of these. If in a garden of flowers, they would have been roses; i£in a forest of trees, they would have been oaks. But the horizon was not far enough away, the vision was too much contracted. Any Southern sky with only three stars in it is not a benignant sky. Neither is it a sky under which the mocking birds will sing their merriest and the young lovers linger out longest, none nearer to listen to the old, old story than the passion flowers at the gate.

Where is Poe, that strange, weird, and still undefinable genius, whose every verse was a wail, whose every heart-beat was supernatural, and whose every gesture took hold upon death? Not a poet, you say? If this be so, then what is poetry? If it be poetry to make the flesh creep and to be cold and hot by turns, then Poe was the wizard of such emotions. He was the man who conjured up ghosts, he was the man who so peopled the imagination with horrors that it became haunted. Hayne never did this. His flight was too near the earth to hear songs that were never sung and words that were never spoken.

Where is Dr. F. O. Tickor and his "Little Giffen of Tennessee," a lyric which will remain immortal while the language lasts.

"Out of the focal and foremost fire,
Out of the hospital walls as dire,
Smitten of grapeshot and gangrene,
Eighteenth battle and he sixteen
Spectre! such as you seldom see,
Little Giffen of Tennessee."

Where is Harry B. Flash, the lyrical music in him as splendid as in a military band playing as it might play if it were playing for Leonidas? Where the poems indeed from which we make an extract?

"By blue Patapsco's billowy dash,
The tyrant's war shout comes,
Along with the cymbals' fitful clash,
And the growl of the sullen drums."

Where is James R. Randall with "Maryland, My Maryland," and fifty other ungathered fugitives just as exquisite ?

Where is John R. Thompson-tender, musical, a ballad maker as perfect as Rossetti, a weaver of words as unequaled as Tennyson? Where is Henry Timrod, death's hand on him at nineteen, with enough odes to make a gold mine out of a sassafrass thicket?

Where is W. W. Harney with his "sudden stabs in groves forlorn," and that "Blockade Running," where one old classmate striving for Wilmington called out to another old classmate who was pursuing :

"You'll want boots to follow me

All night," said the master,

"With your wrought iron roster,
Old Geordie of Maine."

Where is Samuel Minturn Peck, who can be as quaint as James Whitcomb Riley, as exquisitely tender as Riley, and as full of that rare pathos which makes the fingers of poetry take hold of the heartstrings?