What scared ye? (ours, I think, of old) The sombre Fowl hatched in the cold? King Henry's Normans, mailed and stern, Smiters of galloglas and kern?1 Or, most and worse, fraternal feud, Which sad Iernè long hath rued? Forsook ye, when the Geraldine, Great chieftain of a glorious line, Was hunted on his hills and slain, And, one to France and one to Spain, The remnant of the race withdrew? Was it from anarchy ye flew, And fierce oppression's bigot crew, Wild complaint, and menace hoarse, Misled, misleading voices, loud and coarse?

GEORGE MACDONALD. From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry.

Come back, O birds, or come at last! For Ireland's furious days are past; And, purged of enmity and wrong, Her eye, her step, grow calm and strong. Why should we miss that pure delight? Brief is the journey, swift the flight; And Hesper finds no fairer maids In Spanish bowers or English glades, No loves more true on any shore, No lovers loving music more. Melodious Erin, warm of heart, Entreats you; stay not then apart, But bid the merles and throstles know (And ere another May-time go) Their place is in the second row. Come to the west, dear nightingales! The rose and myrtle bloom in Irish vales. 1 Native Irish warriors.

A Dream.

I heard the dogs howl in the moonlight night;
I went to the window to see the sight;
All the Dead that ever I knew
Going one by one and two by two.

On they pass'd, and on they pass'd;
Townsfellows all, from first to last;
Born in the moonlight of the lane,
Quench'd in the heavy shadow again.

Schoolmates, marching as when we play'd'
At soldiers once-but now more staid;
Those were the strangest sight to me

Who were drown'd, I knew, in the awful sea.

Straight and handsome folk; bent and weak, too;
Some that I loved, and gasp'd to speak to;
Some but a day in their churchyard bed;
Some that I had not known were dead.

A long, long crowd-where each seem'd lonely,
Yet of them all there was one, one only,
Raised a head or look'd my way:

She linger'd a moment-she might not stay.

How long since I saw that fair pale face!
Ah! Mother dear! might I only place
My head on thy breast, a moment to rest,
While thy hand on my tearful cheek were prest!

On, on, a moving bridge they made

Across the moon-stream, from shade to shade,

Young and old, women and men ;

Many long-forgot, but remember'd then.

And first there came a bitter laughter;

A sound of tears the moment after;
And then a music so lofty and gay,
That every morning, day by day,
I strive to recall it if I may.

His complete works, prose and verse, were published in six volumes in 1888-93, and a one-volume selection in 1892; and D. G. Rossetti's Letters to Allingham were edited by Dr Birkbeck Hill (1898). A Life by his wife was promised.

George Macdonald, born at Huntly in Aberdeenshire, of the Glencoe stock, in 1824, was educated at Aberdeen University and the Independent College at Highbury. He became pastor at Arundel and at Manchester, but ill-health drove him to Algiers and to literature. His first book, Within and Without (1856), a dramatic poem, was followed by another volume of Poems (1857) and by Phantastes, a Faerie Romance (1858). A long series of novels succeeded, including David Elginbrod, his first really popular success (1862), The Portent (1864), Alec Forbes (1865), Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood (1866), Guild Court (1867), The Seaboard Parish (1868), Robert Falconer (1868), Malcolm (1874), St George and St Michael (1875), The Marquis of Lossie (1877), Sir Gibbie (1879), Mary Marston (1881), Lilith (1895), and Salted with Fire (1897). From time to time he continued to preach most impressive sermons, and as a lecturer on Wordsworth, Shakespeare, and other literary topics he attracted large audiences at home and in the United States. His poetry is simple

but spiritual, instinct with a fresh and delicate fancy, and a tender and loving insight into nature. In his novels, to the essential story-telling and dramatic gift he adds a genial humour, a tolerant and kindly sympathy with most sides of life, especially that (so much exploited since his day) of Scottish country-folk. In the earnestness of his recoil from what he conceived to be the narrowness of Calvinism, he at times waxes too polemical and hortatory; even then the didactic manner is relieved by the romancer's power of dramatic dialogue, as well as by the revelation of exceptionally keen spiritual instincts, tolerance, and native fervour of faith, hope, and charity. It is perhaps characteristic of his Scottish temper that his eminently moral and Puritan criticism of life is softened and brightened by frequent gleams of tenderness. He is an original writer of delicate imagination and profound suggestiveness. His earlier books are indisputably his best; in them especially the characters do quite visibly develop. And in his handling of the dialect of his native district, in its vigour, vivacity, and truth to philology and nature, he has been equalled by no recent kail-yarder. His health was for many years very broken, and his home was mainly on the Riviera. His Alma Mater had given him her honorary degree of LL.D. in 1868; and in 1877 a Civil List pension was conferred on him.

Other novels are Adela Cathcart (1864); Wilfrid Cumbermede (1871); Thomas Wingfield, Curate (1876); Paul Faber, Surgeon (1878); What's Mine's Mine, Home Again, Our Elect Lady, and Heather and Snow between 1886 and 1893. Admirable books for the young were Dealings with the Fairies, Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood, At the Back of the North Wind, and The Princess and the Goblin, all between 1867 and 1871. Three series of Unspoken Sermons were issued in 1866, 1885, and 1889, and there was a work on The Miracles of Our Lord (1870). Dr Macdonald edited England's Antiphon, studies on English poets; Exotics, translated from Novalis and elsewhere; and Rampolli, also a translation. The Diet of Orts was a miscellany; and Hamlet, a Shakespearian study of originality and power. He collected and arranged his Poetical Works in two volumes in 1893, and issued in 1884 A Work of Fancy and Imagination, ten volumes of poetry and prose idyls. He also assisted his wife with her Chamber Dramas for Children.

Walter Chalmers Smith, born in Aberdeen in 1824, studied at Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and preached to a Presbyterian church in London ere as a Free Church minister he settled in his first country cure in Kinross-shire. Thence he passed to a charge in Glasgow, and from 1876 till his resignation in 1894 he was a minister in Edinburgh. During these years he published a series of volumes of verse, including The Bishop's Walk, by 'Orwell' (1861); Olrig Grange, by 'Hermann Kunst' (1872); Hilda among the Broken Gods (1878); Raban, or Life Splinters (1880); NorthCountry Folk (1883); Kildrostan, a Dramatic Poem (1884); and A Heretic (1890). These various books were collected in a one-volume edition in 1902, with the addition of some thirty Ballads from Scottish History, on subjects as various as Wishart and Montrose, the Scots abroad and the outlawed Macgregors, the persecuted Jesuits and the kid

napped Lady Grange. Dr Smith's poems (he was made D.D. and LL.D.) illustrate in simple, vigorous, homely, and often rather rough, shambling verse 'the varying shades of thought and feeling during the latter part of the nineteenth century;' his singularly catholic temper enabling him to represent with almost equal fairness the true-blue Presbyterian orthodoxy of the olden time, the hard but conscientious unfaith of the modern materialist, and the tolerant and only slightly unorthodox modern Christianity with which he was himself identified. In his works kindly satire, autobiographical reminiscence, exhortation, and encouragement towards a higher life are happily combined with the more directly poetic elements.

Thomas Woolner (1826-92), poet-sculptor, was born at Hadleigh, and studied at the Royal Academy from 1842. Already in 1843 his 'Eleanor sucking the Poison from Prince Edward's Wound' attracted much attention; it was followed by a long series of works in sculpture, including statues and portrait-busts of most of his famous contemporaries. He produced in all about a hundred and twenty works, and was successively A.R.A. and R.A. As a conspicuous member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (see the article on Rossetti) he contributed poems to The Germ, which with others were expanded into a volume as My Beautiful Lady (1863; 5th ed. 1892). Other poems were Pygmalion, Silenus, Tiresias, and Nelly Dale. If his sculptures were greatly praised as imaginative and poetic, it may with equal truth be said that his poems have some of the charms of sculpture-they were picturesque, sincere, and impressive.

Walter Horatio Pater (1839-94) was the son of an American of Dutch extraction who had settled as a medical practitioner in Shadwell (not then incorporated with London), but was brought up at Enfield. Neither at school in Canterbury nor at Queen's College, Oxford, did he manifest any exceptional literary gift or impulse, though he attracted Jowett and was stimulated by T. H. Green. He became a Fellow of Brasenose, read with pupils, gave up thoughts of taking Anglican orders, and through Unitarianism passed to a non-Christian scheme of philosophical eclecticism. His home alternated between Oxford in termtime and London. Throughout life he was, in thought as in style, the disciple of no one master. Already in a magazine article on Coleridge in 1866 his singularly polished style is as characteristic as it is in most of his later work. Other remarkable articles on Winckelmann, Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and others followed; and when collected and added to in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) attracted even more notice. But Marius the Epicurean (1885) is his principal legacy to the world; though his four Imaginary Portraits (dealing with Watteau amongst the rest), and his Appreciations of Lamb, Wordsworth, Rossetti,

Sir Thomas Browne, and Blake, accompanied by a very significant dissertation on style, would have made any writer famous. Gaston de la Tour, an unfinished romance of mediæval life, came out in Macmillan's; Emerald Uthwart was partly autobiographical; Plato and Platonism was an eminently suggestive disquisition; and there was a volume of Miscellaneous Studies (1895).

Marius the Epicurean is the life of a noble Roman, the friend of Galen and of Marcus Aurelius, who is profoundly moved by the spiritual problems of that trying period, is attracted by what he sees of Christianity and Christians, and dies a kind of martyr by mistake without any joyous confidence in his own philosophy as a key to the riddle of exist

ence.

WALTER PATER.

From a Photograph.

His epicureanism is not that of the sty,' nor the book philosophy of the Greek texts, nor the syncretistic scheme of the imperial Romans, nor the revived and negative epicureanism of Gassendi and the Renaissance, but that of the nineteenth-century Englishman who had drunk from the wells of Oxford, had studied Goethe and Ruskin, and had essayed an even higher synthesis of culture and beauty and the spiritual life.

Pater's style is unique in English literatureexquisitely polished, perfected as an instrument for expressing every subtlest nuance of thought or feeling, brilliant and yet dignified in phrasing, but complex, over-elaborate, and wanting in directness and buoyancy. Yet the too obvious labor lima hardly detracts from his right to take rank at the head of the stylists of the latter part of the nineteenth century; and Marius was a spiritual maieutic to many of his younger contemporaries. In Mr Gosse's Critical Kit-Kats (1896) there is an interesting article on him.

Joseph Skipsey, the miner poet, was born in 1832 near North Shields, and had worked from childhood on the Percy Main Collieries there when in 1859 he printed a few songs. From 1863 he held posts such as librarian or care-taker. Between 1862 and 1892 he published half-a-dozen volumes of good, strong, tuneful verse (one called The Collier Lad, and another Carols from the Coalfields). In some of his poems friendly critics have noted an affinity to Blake. He edited a number of volumes of the 'Canterbury Series '-Blake, Burns, Coleridge, Poe, Shelley. He died in 1903.

Gerald Massey was born in 1828 at Gamble Wharf near Tring in Hertfordshire, and as a poor man's child had been earning his livelihood in a silk-factory and as a straw-plaiter ere at fifteen he came to London as a message-boy. Early privations had only invigorated his manhood and sharpened his wits; Christian Socialism and the friendship of Maurice and Kingsley encouraged him to literary efforts, and he contributed to and ultimately edited The Spirit of Freedom. He is believed to have been the original of George Eliot's 'Felix Holt.' His first volume of verse, Voices of Freedom and Lyrics of Love, appeared in 1851; The Ballad of Babe Christabel, and other Poems, in 1854; and War Waits, Craigerook Castle, Havelock's March, and A Tale of Eternity gave name to other volumes of poetry. My Lyrical Life (2 vols. 1889) contains an anthology from these works. He lectured on mesmerism and spiritualism; published volumes of an eminently speculative kind on spiritualism, and on the origins of myths and mysteries-The Book of the Beginnings (1881), The Natural Genesis (1883); and interpreted a secret drama out of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1866, 1888). His poetry is unequal, and often harsh and rugged; but it is full of rude vigour, displays a fertile imagination, and has at times a truly lyrical melody.

David Wingate (1828-92), the collier-poet, was born at Cowglen near Glasgow, and losing his father by a fire-damp explosion while still a child, descended the pit at the age of nine. He had a strong taste for country rambles and wild-flowers, contributed early verses to the Hamilton Advertiser, and was brought to notice in his twenty-third year by an article written by another Glasgow poet, Hugh Macdonald. His first volume, Poems and Songs, published in 1862, was made the subject of an article by Lord Neaves in Blackwood's Magazine; and his next, Annie Weir, in 1866, brought him not only further reputation, but the means of attending the Glasgow School of Mines. He was thus enabled, on the passing of the Coal-Mines Regulation Act in 1872, to assume the position of colliery manager. He had now leisure to contribute poetry and prose tales to a number of magazines and papers, and he published further volumes-Lily Neil, and other Poems (1879), Poems and Songs (1883), and Selected Poems (1890). Nine

years before his death, which took place at Tollcross, Glasgow, he received a Civil List pension of £50. By his first wife he had a large family; his second wife was a descendant of Robert Burns. Wingate's character retained to the end a sturdy independence, and much of his poetry almost justified the early criticism by Lord Neaves: 'There are few verses in the language more pure, tender, and musical, nor any love-utterance we can remember more refined and delicate in its simplicity.'

My Little Wife.

My little wife has two merry black eyes—

Sweet little, dear little, daisy-faced Jane!

And fifty young lads always deemed her a prize,

And blamed the kind creature for causing them pain. They all knew her pretty,

And some thought her witty,

But sware of sound sense she was faultless and free,
Because the fair scoffer
Refused every offer,

And secretly cherished affection for me. . .

My little wife often round the church hill-
Sweet little, dear little, neat-footed Jane-
Walked slowly and thoughtful and lonely until
The afternoon bell chimed its call o'er the plain.
And nothing seemed sweeter

To me than to meet her,

And tell her what weather 'twas likely to be;
My heart the while glowing,
The selfish wish growing,
That all her affections were centred in me. . .

My little wife once-'tis strange but 'tis true-
Sweet little, dear little, love-troubled Jane--
So deeply absorbed in her day-dreaming grew,

The bell chimed and ceased, yet she heard not its strain.
And I, walking near her

(May love ever cheer her

Who thinks all such wand'ring of sin void and free),
Strove hard to persuade her
That He who had made her

Had destined her heart-love for no one but me.

My little wife-well, perhaps this was wrong-
Sweet little, dear little, warm-hearted Jane-
Sat on the hillside till her shadow grew long,
Nor tired of the preacher who thus could detain.
I argued so neatly,

And proved so completely
That none but poor Andrew her husband could be.
She smiled when I blessed her,
And blushed when I kissed her,

And owned that she loved and could wed none but me.

Francis Turner Palgrave (1824-97), son of Sir Francis Palgrave (page 265), became scholar of Balliol College at Oxford and Fellow of Exeter, was successively vice-principal of a training college, private secretary to Earl Granville, an official in the Education Department, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1886–95). As early as 1854 he had published a volume of songs and poems, in 1866 one of essays on art. In 1871

came another collection of Lyrical Poems, and in 1881 his most ambitious poem, Visions of England. Amenophis, a poem, appeared in 1892. He edited Shakespeare's sonnets and songs, and selections from Shakespeare, Keats, and Tennyson. But he is best known as the editor (with Tennyson's help) of the famous and unique anthology, The Golden Treasury of English Lyrics (1861; re-edited in 1896), supplemented in 1896 by a second series, selected with less perfect critical insight. There was also an admirable Children's Treasury of Songs, and a Treasury of Sacred Song. In the year of his death he issued a volume of his Oxford lectures as Landscape in Art. He had an extraordinary faculty of appreciating what was best in literature, and exceptional sensitiveness and subtlety as a critic; but though in his own poetry he showed both imagination and the gift of artistic form, he was lacking in creative power.

William Gifford Palgrave (1826-88), another of Sir Francis's sons, graduated at Oxford and joined the Bombay Native Infantry, but, becoming a Jesuit, studied at Rome, and was sent as a missionary to Syria. For Napoleon III. he went disguised as a physician on a daring expedition through Arabia (1862–63), described in his Narrative of a Year's Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia (1865). Quitting the Society of Jesus in 1864, he was sent by the British Government in 1865 to treat for the release of the captives in Abyssinia. He became consul at Trebizond, St Thomas, and Manila; was consul-general in Bulgaria and in Siam; and as British minister to Uruguay was reconciled to the Church. Other works were on the Eastern question and on Dutch Guiana; a volume of travel sketches; and an Eastern tale, Hermann Agha (1872).

Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-90) was born, the son of a colonel, at Barham House, Hertfordshire, and educated-somewhat desultorily -in France and Italy as well as in England. He spent nearly a year at Oxford, not very studiously, and got an appointment in the Indian army. In 1842 he served in Sind under Sir Charles Napier, and having mastered Hindustani, Persian, and Arabic, made (disguised as an Afghan pilgrim) the daring journey described in his famous Pilgrimage to El Medinah and Mecca (1855). After a visit to Somaliland and service in the Crimea, he in 1856 set out with Speke on the journey which led to the discovery (1858) of Lake Tanganyika, and afterwards travelled in North America. In 1861 he was consul at Fernando Po, and went on a mission to Dahomey. He was subsequently consul at Santos in Brazil, at Damascus, and (1872) at Trieste. In 1876-78 he visited Midian, and in 1882 Guinea; and he was knighted in 1886. Too original and too masterful to be a model official, he was frequently at feud with his superiors, was summarily recalled from his Damascus post, and, as he and his wife thought, badly used by home Govern

ments. Wherever he was he contrived to visit the most outlying regions of his jurisdiction, to study the ways of the people, and to write articles and books thereon. He was a copious and vigorous writer, for whom the East had a fascination; and he thought it his main mission to interpret that East to the West. Amidst his fifty works on the most various subjects are First Footsteps in East Africa (1856); Lake Regions of Equatorial Africa (1860); City of the Saints, on Salt Lake City (1861); Wanderings in West Africa (1863); The Nile Basin (1869); Vikram and the Vampire, a story (1869). He also wrote Sind, Goa, Abbeokuta, Paraguay, Brazil, Syria, Zanzibar, Iceland (Ultima Thule, 1875), Bologna,

SIR RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON. From the Portrait (1876) by Lord Leighton in the National Portrait Gallery.

on

and Midian; on Falconry, the Sword and Swordsmanship; and translated Camoens into vigorous English verse (1880), with a Life and Commentary (1881). The master of thirty-five languages, he published in 1885-88 an audaciously literal translation of the Arabian Nights (10 vols. and 6 of supplement, comprising extraordinarily frank notes and dissertations), of which his wife issued an expurgated edition. Lady Burton, the companion of his wanderings from 1861, wrote on the Inner Life of Syria (1875) and on Arabia, Egypt, India (1879). A devout Catholic, she caused Catholic rites to be celebrated over her husband on his deathbed, and had him buried with full ceremonial. As his literary executor she destroyed his translations in MS. of other Oriental works with annotations like those to the Arabian Nights; as also his private diaries. She authorised the publication of a translation of the Neapolitan Pentamerone, of a verse translation of Catullus, and

of a book on The Jew, the Gypsy, and El Islam (issued after her death in 1896). Her Life of her husband (1895; re-edited 1898) dealt with debatable matters, and was followed by a counterblast from Sir Richard's niece, Miss Stisted (1897). There is also a Life of Burton by Mr Hickman (1897).

Sir Samuel White Baker (1821-93) spent nine years hunting and planting in Ceylon, and in 1859 laid a railway across the Dobrudja. In 1860 he married a Hungarian lady, and with her he undertook the exploration of the Nile sources. Setting out from Cairo in 1861, at Gondokoro they heard from Speke and Grant about the Victoria Nyanza, which they had discovered; as also of another great lake reported by natives and named Luta Nzige. Baker and his wife resolved to reach this lake, and after many adventures beheld the great inland sea to which Baker gave the name of the Albert Nyanza. In 1869-73 he commanded an expedition, organised by the pasha of Egypt, for the suppression of slavery and the annexation of the equatorial regions of the Nile Basin. He explored Cyprus in 1879; visited Syria, India, Japan, and America; and was knighted in 1866. Baker wrote easily and well, and besides some tales and many contributions to reviews, published The Rifle and the Hound in Ceylon (1854), Eight Years' Wanderings in Ceylon (1855), The Albert Nyanza (1866), The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia (1867), Ismailia (1874), Cyprus as I saw it (1879), and Wild Beasts and their Ways (1890). Several of these have been frequently reprinted. There is a Life of Baker by Murray and White (1895).

Captains Speke and Grant were associated in the famous 1860-63 expedition to explore the sources of the Nile. John Stanning Speke (1827-64) was born at Jordans, Ilminster, and in the Indian army saw service in the Punjab. In 1854 he joined Burton in a hazardous expedition to Somaliland; in 1857 the Royal Geographical Society sent out the two to search for the equatorial lakes of Africa. Speke, whilst travelling alone, discovered the Victoria Nyanza, and convinced himself— rightly, as it afterwards appeared-that he saw in it the head-waters of the Nile. In 1860 he returned with Captain Grant, explored the lake, and tracked the Nile flowing out of it. Before his death in a partridge-shooting accident he had published his Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863) and What led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1864). James Augustus Grant (1827-92), born at Nairn, was bred at Marischal College for the Indian army, and in Gujerat, during the Mutiny, and in the Abyssinian expedition gained distinction. Colonel, C.B., and F.R.S., he had a full share with Speke in the exploration of the Victoria Nyanza, and wrote A Walk across Africa, The Botany of the Speke and Grant Expedition, and Khartoum as I saw it in 1863.