following. For the country which has given them their huge majority is Imperialist at heart, and will not tolerate any repetition of the Majuba policy. The unseemly and unconstitutional motion of censure on Lord Milner for a minor blunder which he readily admitted, the disingenuous device adopted to evade its consequences, and above all the insolent tone of patronage in which Mr Churchill reflected on the conduct of one of the greatest of living public servants-whose assailants, moreover, he stigmatised, five years ago, as 'rebels, traitors, and pro-Boers'—have already done much to alienate the better class of public opinion from the Government. We have no desire to hurry them in their decision, for they have themselves admitted that time is of the essence of the question; and that, if things are not settled soon, they will not be settled at all. But their utterances before and since taking office have undoubtedly caused grave uneasiness in the Transvaal and among sober-minded people at home; and it is well that they should be alive to the gravity of the question with which they are dealing. Nor let it be forgotten that the appointment of a Commission of Enquiry in no way relieves them from their responsibility. Can it be that the appointment of this commission is merely intended to play out the time until the close of the session shall enable the Government to manipulate the franchise at its pleasure, without the risk of facing parliamentary criticism?

Nationalism is bound to come in South Africa, for it is the logical development; and our business is to see that it does not take a wholly anti-British character. The problem, let it be repeated, is not now one of the wisdom or folly of Chinese labour, but of our loyalty to those constitutional principles which have hitherto guided our colonial policy. If we create artificially a Dutch majority, nothing remains for the British element but to make their terms with Het Volk; and from the mind of our own colonists every particle of affection for the mothercountry will be expelled. The British-born will feel themselves betrayed by the power in whom they trusted; and the betrayal will never be forgiven or forgotten. Or if, after a grant of responsible government, we make that responsibility a farce by vetoing the decision of the Transvaal people on their chief problem, without any

justification in ethics or Imperial policy-by assuming, too, that their moral code is lower than ours, and that they are not to be trusted to refrain from wrong-doingwe shall make their loyalty incompatible with their independence. More, we shall have paved the way for a certain disruption of the Empire, for we shall have violated the central principle of Imperial unity. If the Government appeal to Lord Durham's Report, we are well content. From that charter of colonial freedom we quote what follows:

'It must henceforth,' Lord Durham wrote, 'be the first and steady purpose of the British Government to establish an English population, with English laws and language, in this province, and to trust its government to none but a decidedly English legislature.' And again, They do not hesitate to say that they will not tolerate much longer the being made the sport of parties at home; and, if the mother-country forgets what is due to the loyal and enterprising sons of her own race, they must protect themselves. . . The colony's connexion with the Empire is not strengthened, but greatly weakened, by a vexatious interference on the part of the Home Government with the enactment of laws for regulating the internal concerns of the colony.'

If the Government is guided by the Durham Report, let it be guided by the whole document, and by its spirit, not by an isolated paragraph. For the only arguments by which the immediate grant of self-government can be defended are also cogent as to the necessity of making that grant a substance and not a shadow. To declare a policy with one breath and deny it with the next-' suarum legum auctores ac subversores'-would be strange conduct in a party which has often claimed a monopoly of principle. We make all allowances for the difficulty of the situation and the ignorance and fanaticism of many of the rank and file, but we cannot believe that a British Ministry will ever make itself responsible for so startling a violation of British traditions.

Art. V. SOME LETTER-WRITERS, ANCIENT AND MODERN.

1. The Correspondence of M. Tullius Cicero. Arranged and edited by R. Y. Tyrrell and L. C. Purser. Seven vols. London: Longmans, 1885-1901.

2. The Letters of Cicero. Translated by E. S. Shuckburgh. Four vols. London: Bell, 1899-1900.

3. C. Plinii Cæcili Secundi Epistolarum Libri IX. Recognovit Henricus Keil. Leipzig, 1889.

4. Letters of Philip Dormer, Earl of Chesterfield. Edited by Lord Mahon. Five vols. London: Bentley, 1845-1853. 5. The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany. Edited by Lady Llanover. Six vols. London: Bentley, 1861-1862.

6. Lettres de la Marquise du Deffand à Horace Walpole et à Voltaire. Four vols. Paris, 1812.

7. Correspondance complète de Madame, Duchesse d'Orléans. Traduction, par Gustave Brunet. Paris: Charpentier, 1857.

And other works.

MANY persons, even among the more cultivated classes, vote the reading of letters dull work; and a still larger number neglect the writing of them. The chief agents at work to bring about the latter result are facility of locomotion and the penny-post; for, on the one hand, what can be done with too great frequency is apt to be ill done, a sense of ease being thereby engendered, which in its turn breeds slovenliness; and on the other, the constant hope of a speedy meeting not unnaturally tends to relegate to the confidences of conversation what would otherwise have been anticipated upon paper. The excessive stress of life and society to-day has also its share in this particular form of literary decadence; but we recognise the weakness of this apology when we reflect that most of the letters of Cicero, and all the best of them, were written in the midst of that political turmoil which gave birth to the Roman Empire; and that the sprightly correspondence of Mrs Delany and her group of charming female friends represented precious hours admirably stolen from the thousand-and-one 'impertinencies' which, in London and great country-houses alike, invaded the

leisure of all the highly-placed women of their time. It is possible that many a collection of letters, as yet unknown or unborn, may one day redeem our own society of the last and the next thirty years from a charge of inarticulate intimacy; but this hope is unhappily slight.

Another cause which has contributed to the decay of letter-writing, and, for the matter of that, of conversation too, is the multiplication of magazines and the growing fashion of signed articles. Good talkers are reluctant to give up to a dinner-party what they mean for mankind; and friends are apt to reserve material, which would have made a delightful letter, for less valuable though more lucrative amplification in the pages of some weekly newspaper or monthly review. It is not given to everybody to show that generous jollity of Charles Lamb, which led him to anticipate his more elaborate essay on Roast Pig by his equally immortal, if slighter, letter to Coleridge upon the same succulent and savoury topic. Yet, if sympathy be worth more than notoriety, the recognition which begins with privately reaped esteem is better at the moment, as it may well be more enduring in the long-run, than that temporary effervescence of public praise which, after a brief sparkle, leaves nothing in the goblet of self-consciousness save a few flat and sour dregs of disappointment and oblivion. That fame is best which grows slowly; and there is a thrift peculiar to the laying-up of renown.

There is one great claim which letter-writing may urge upon the attention of the world. Nothing else makes manifest in the same direct and domestic fashion the kinship of the ages. How much better should we know, and how much more closely related should we feel to the ancient Athenians and Corinthians than we do, if such a series of Greek letters were extant as we possess in those of Cicero, Pliny, Symmachus, and Apollinaris! And how are the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries lighted up and made akin to us by the correspondence of Madame de Sévigné, Lord Chesterfield, Horace Walpole, Voltaire, Gray, Madame du Deffand, Cowper, the Duchess of Orleans, Mrs Delany, and Madame de Staël !

A family likeness is apparent among the letters themselves, for kindred conditions of society created them all; and the lack of such conditions, whenever and

wherever it has existed, has left society unproductive. Leisure, the unconscious heritage of generations of culture -for bon écrivain,' like 'bon chien, chasse de race'-a due sense of social position, wit and wits of course, good taste, and a certain seriousness and soundness of heart, never obtruded and easily worn, are one and all essential to good letter-writing. All these can only be found together in a long established aristocracy, in the best sense of that term. To write letters which the world hereafter shall value, not as ethical, scientific, or political essays, like many of the letters of Fénelon, Montaigne, Bossuet, and Swift, or the Epistolæ ad Lucilium' of Seneca, but as social records bringing epochs together, people must be well-placed, well at ease, and sure of themselves and of each other. One special charm attaches itself to the letters of persons so seated in the world. Their sense of security makes them generous in the expression of reciprocal appreciation. Theirs is no mere 'mutual-admiration society.' The quality is at once spontaneous and earnest, gracious and graceful, and makes a refreshing contrast to that half-cold, half-critical reception of things well done which is supposed to spring from reserve, but, if it does, begets in its turn a frugality of acknowledgment that easily degenerates into spleen.

Little reflection is needed to see that the age which produced the letters of Cicero and those of the many distinguished Roman gentlemen to whom they were addressed, had equipped its society with most, if not with all, of the qualifications we have mentioned. The correspondents were all well-born, for even Cicero himself, though not a Roman patrician, came of an ancient family of Arpinum, and his father was of equestrian rank; they were mostly, too, men of ample fortune, and, though frequently in political danger, were at least socially sure of themselves and their position. They were, further, in full course of endowment with the fast growing literature of their own country. To its poetry Ennius, Nævius, Plautus, and Terence had already made their contributions; Catullus was even then happily acclimatising some of the lyric measures of Greece, and Lucretius, with still greater success, her mighty hexameter; while Sallust, and their own great protagonist