But Wakefield is not the only instance in which Mr. Kebbel's fondness for personality has led him dismally astray. He appeals in his first paper to Lord Wellesley's translation of a passage in Milton's Arcades to 'disprove the assertion that translation cannot be reasonably literal and yet retain the grace, vivacity, and classical spirit which may be found in original composition.' I will take the last ten or eleven lines, in which Milton closely paraphrases a magnificent passage near the end of Plato's Republic. The translation of these verses is reduced to solecistic nonsense by no less than five infinitives which have no construction whatever. His Lordship may have had vague notions of an historical infinitive, or it may be of one in indirect narration; but alas! none such has any business here. Again he has perversely mistranslated "That sit upon the nine infolded spheres to all appearance his Sirens are sitting close by, yet far away from, the swift-circling spheres. It is well perhaps that, though close by, they should be far away; or else this whirl would send them I know not where. Then 'aequato modulamine' has no meaning; then 'ternas sorores' and 'ipsas Parcas' represent in sorry wise the grand vagueness of Milton's 'And sing to those that hold the vital shears,' And lull the daughters of Necessity'; the fates, indeed, never once being called by their names. That as an English student of the 18th century he should have an imperfect knowledge of Latin, and that at the age of eighty he should reprint a version like this amid the plaudits of admiring friends and sycophants, is perhaps no great disparagement to Lord Wellesley's classical taste, which was truly most refined; but it is not well that a critic in 1875 should thrust such a translation in one's face as a model of grace and perfection.

This strange and unseemly love of personality on Mr. Kebbel's part forces

me to a final and painful criticism. A still better, he says, than Lord Wellesley's is Conington's 'own translation of the 'Swallow' in the Horae Tennysonianae. No one has a higher admiration of Conington's classical versions than I have, and I know much more about his scholarship than Mr. Kebbel knows. I say then that in this selection he has not been fortunate. Catullus was not greatly to Conington's taste, and in the present instance he has chosen to translate line for line, some of the verses scarcely allowing of this. Possibly too he may have thought that the occasion did not call for much trouble. However that may be, I could take exception to about one-half of the lines; but space compels me to confine myself to two: Dic Austrum nitidum, levem, ferocem, Dic nigrum Borean, pium, fidelem. This is meant for a translation of the beautiful lines, ' O tell her . . That bright and fierce and fickle is the South, And dark and true and tender is the North': here the 'South' brings before the mind at once the climate, the people that dwell under it, and the temper engendered by it. And the same is true of the North.' It would be hard indeed to reproduce this in Latin, at least in two lines; and Conington has quite failed to do so: his words mean simply this: 6 say the South wind is bright, fickle, highspirited; say the North wind is black, affectionate, faithful,'-something strangely different from the original. But Mr. Kebbel throws out his praise and dispraise at random. If he ever chant a paean to the empire of the mighty West, let him not translate West by Zephyrus; or if he try to throw a halo over my Lord Wellesley's youthful solecisms by singing his administration of the gorgeous East, let him eschew Eurus, or else the upshot will be bathos the most profound. Words are not mere counters: they ought to have a meaning and value even in 'Recent Latin Verse.'

PART IL

THE Howazin contingent had bad luck. After a long and toilsome journey across two-thirds of the broadest breadth of the Arabian Peninsula, in the hottest and droughtiest season of the year, with many incidental discomforts, such as sometimes an unexpected deficiency of water in the wells on their line of route, sometimes an unfriendly encounter with a rival Bedouin clan, they arrived at last within the territory of the BenooHarb; and found their friends, not prosperous, but on the contrary hard pressed, and much in need even of the slight succour that so small an auxiliary band as their own could afford.

Some weeks passed in desultory skirmishing rather than fighting with their hereditary enemies, the tribesmen of Oteybah and Hodeyl, who were now under arms in the Egyptian cause. For a while nothing serious occurred on either side, till one morning early, Alkamah, and about twenty of his companions from Roweydah, who, in their ignorance of the localities had advanced dangerously far on the hostile ground, were surprised and surrounded by at least double their own number of the enemy's horsemen. So sudden and unexpected was the attack, that many of the Howazin were overpowered and killed before they had even had time to think of defence; the remainder, with a few warriors of Benoo-Harb who chanced to come up during the fray, behaved themselves like men. But it was no use, the odds were too many for them; and after half an hour of fierce contest they gave way and fled, leaving behind them more than a dozen dead or disabled on the field; and amongst the number Alkamah, who after receiving several severe sabre-cuts had fallen bleeding and

Oteybah remained masters of the day; while the vanquished, as was only natural, spread everywhere in their flight the most exaggerated accounts both of the number of their opponents and of their own losses. And thus it happened that when the report of the fray reached Roweydah a month later, it included the name of Alkamah in the list of the dead."

Dead, however, he was not; but, which was next bad, a prisoner. His dress, the goodness of his armour and horse, and the rich ornaments of his sword-hilt, led the victorious Oteybah, while they busied themselves with spoiling the slain and the wounded, to conclude that he must be a person of some consequence, probably belonging to a wealthy family, and for whose liberation accordingly a heavy ransom might in due time be demanded and obtained, according to Bedouin custom. Under this impression they neither gave him, as they did to two or three others of his less fortunate comrades lying beside him, the finishing stroke, nor left him where he was at the disposal of the vultures, which were already hovering impatient over the blood-stained plain. On the contrary they lifted him up with a care that a looker-on, unacquainted with the real motive, might have taken for tenderness, and conveyed him, still insensible, to a house in a neighbouring village, where the women of the tribe gave him the benefit of what nursing their experience, a pretty large one, of like cases, and their own compassionate feelings, certainly not diminished by the youth and good-looks of their helpless charge, suggested.

Fresh air, a sound constitution, and the absence of over much medical interference, are excellent conditions for a cure; and it was not long before Alka

cuts, were rather wide than deep, began to heal; so that a surgeon, had such been present, would have pronounced him not only out of danger, but progressing favourably towards

conva

lescence. This his captors, without being surgeons, observed; and lost no time in inquiring of him his name, his birthplace, his family, and the like.

But their calculations were deceived; for Alkamah had with a certain foreboding, determined long before what his conduct should be under such circumstances, did they occur, and had even taken his measures accordingly. How could he ever look Selma, and yet more her relations, the warlike Benoo-Murad, in the face, if he came before them as a ransomed prisoner, owing his life to the contemptuous pity or greed of his enemies, and the forced liberality of his own people? Loss of liberty, loss of life, anything would be preferable to this; he would return to Roweydah, if not successful, at least unshamed, or not return at all.

With this intention he had, the very day that he left his native town, taken off his signet ring, the same which Selma's fingers had touched, and, with a sigh, buried it out of the way, in a lonely place, where no eyes but his own were likely to search for it again. And as he was now the only prisoner of his clan alive in the hands of the Oteybah, nothing remained that could possibly identify him except his own avowal, and that he was resolved never should. So question him as they might, they obtained no answer.

This silence of his they were at first inclined to attribute to the moodiness consequent on pain, extreme weakness, and recent captivity; and in this belief desisted for a few days from their questionings, not doubting that with the return of strength, and the renewed longings after freedom that could not fail to accompany it, their prisoner would prove less reticent. But when But when in due course of time his wounds had healed over, and his recovery was complete or nearly so, his interrogators,

a whit more communicative than he had been before. Severity was then brought to bear; he was treated with increasing harshness; his allowance of food was curtailed, and his bonds tightened; while threats and even blows alternated daily with promises and fair speeches ; all directed to obtain from him the declaration of his name and family. But Alkamah held his own; threats and blandishments, blows and ill-usage were alike thrown away; and at last it became clear to his captors themselves that his resolution was not to be overcome, even by the fear of death itself.

Killing him was, however, no part of their plan. The Oteybah, though halfbarbarous in their habits, were not wantonly cruel; like other Bedouins they would, except under special provocation, have recoiled from putting a prisoner to death in cold blood; and besides they were much too prudent to throw away with his life their only chance of turning him sooner or later to profit. But their expectations by being deferred became less keen; new incidents of foray and plunder drew away their interest from the old; by degrees they almost ceased to watch over the captive, or rather made over that duty in great part to the women of the village. By their compassion his bonds, though not absolutely taken off, were slacked to such an extent that he was able to move about; he was even occasionally allowed to leave the narrow hut, so long his prison, and stretch his cramped limbs, for a short distance, and under guard, in the open air. At last, he came to be employed along with others in fetching water, in collecting firewood, in milking the camels, and so forth all occasions of which he availed himself to look about him as much as possible, till he ended by getting into his head a fairly accurate idea of the place itself, as also of the direction in which he conjectured that his own region of Nejd and the town of Roweydah must lie, and to what point of the compass lay the route that might if followed take him back thither.

Long he waited, till in the early

dark with clouds, wind, and rain, coinciding with the temporary absence on some business or other of those to whose particular keeping he had been intrusted, gave him the wished-for oppor tunity. Cautiously he rid himself of the cords that still, though loosely, bound his limbs; more cautiously yet he made his way out of the house; most cautiously of all, lest alarm should be given by dogs or men, he threaded the precincts of the village by paths that he had observed and marked out for himself in the daytime; and then, eastward ho!

The adventures that befell him on his long and difficult journey across the wide tract that lay between the Hejaz and Roweydah need not here be narrated in detail. For the first three days he was followed, and only escaped recapture by plunging into the wildest and most inaccessible regions of the rocky Teyma desert. He met with many dangers, sometimes from wild beasts, sometimes from roving Bedouins; of hunger, thirst, cold, heat, watchfulness, fatigue, he had full share. Even when comparatively safe from pursuit, prudence compelled him to avoid the more frequented tracts, and instead to make wide circuits which often prolonged what would have been the journey of one day to that of two or more; not rarely, too, he was compelled to halt where he might from sheer weariness and exhaustion. harder to bear than all the rest was that the thought of Selma, once his only but sufficient support, now no longer cheered him but tormented. Night and day her image moved before him; she was the goal towards which he must strive, though hopeless to attain; for he felt sure, though why he could not say, that on his arrival at home he would not find her there; and this gloomy presentiment from which, do what he might, he could not free himself, not merely depressed his spirits but unnerved his limbs, and rendered every privation, every suffering, doubly painful.

But

In fact, he must have broken down altogether, and ended his labours and

his love alike by the side of some stony hillock, or under the thorn-bushes of some torrent bed, had not the hospitable generosity of a Bedouin chief near the frontier of Nejd, in whose encampment he sought a couple of days' repose and food, provided him with a camel; mounted on which he was able to continue his journey. With this seasonable help he went on for ten more days, not quite certain of his direction; till one afternoon he suddenly found himself among well-known landmarks that assured him of his near approach to his native town, which he had left almost a year before in very different plight.

Having fully ascertained his whereabouts, he halted his camel in the most secluded spot he could find, and remained there till evening, as the afternoon was of all times of day the most likely for falling in with some chance acquaintance among the shepherds or herdsmen without the walls; and he wished to avoid this sort of premature recognition before entering the town. There was indeed less risk of it than he thought; for he himself was only half aware of the change wrought in his appearance by the last few months. His face was now lean, weather-worn, and almost black; his dress scanty, of the coarsest quality, and all in rags; there was neither lance in his hand nor sword by his side; nothing, in a word, to announce the son of the wealthy Aamir, the prosperous Alkamah of former days. A relation or intimate friend might just have recognized him; an acquaintance scarcely.

The first half of the night he passed alone under the starlight, wrapped in the tattered cloak which was now almost his only covering; but he did not attempt to sleep, his eyes were open, gazing up at the spangled heaven overhead. The stars seemed to have been caught in the sky and stood still: would they never slope westwards? Midnight came: there was yet some distance to go; and it was not till about halfway between dawn and noon that he halted a second time on the summit of a long ascent,