The fruit of such a Conquest and the Host

Whose arms had reap'd it all. My fear was vain :

By my sole ruin may the jealous Gods

Absolve the Common-weal-by mineby me,

Of whose triumphal Pomp the front and rear

O scorn of human Glory-was begun And closed with the dead bodies of my Sons.

Yes, I the Conqueror, and conquer'
Perseus,

Before you two notorious Monuments
Stand here of human Instability.

He that was late so absolute a King
Now, captive led before my Chariot,

sees

His sons led with him captive — but alive;

While I, the Conqueror, scarce had turn'd my face

From one lost son's still smoking Funeral,

And from my Triumph to the Capitol Return-return in time to catch the last

Sigh of the last that I might call my Son,

Last of so many Children that should bear

My name to Aftertime. For blind to

Fate,

And over-affluent of Posterity,

The two surviving Scions of my Blood
I had engrafted in an alien Stock,
And now, beside himself, no one sur-
vives

Of the old House of Paullus.

Myself, on the whole, I greatly prefer this version to Mr Aldis Wright's: still, which is the later, which the earlier, it were hard to determine on internal grounds. For, as has befallen many a greater poet, FitzGerald's alterations were

we touch'd

One sees this in the various editions of his masterpiece, the 'Rubáiyát.” However, by a comparison of the date (1856) on the fly-leaf of my father's notebook with that of a published letter of FitzGerald's to Professor Cowell (May 28, 1868), I am led to conclude that father's my copy is an early draught.

FRANCIS HINDES GROOME.

STERNE is one of our immortal classics, whom everybody quotes and nobody reads. So far as the once popular 'Sentimental Journey' is concerned, sentimental journeys are gone out of date since sentimentalism is become the monopoly of passion-moving novelists. Moreover, sentimental disquisitions and Sterne's sentiment took a very wide rangewere all very well for the meditative traveller who picked up his cheap carriage at Calais, and plodded forward by leisurely stages through Paris to the Italian Peninsula. They are altogether out of place in these rackety railway days, with flying expresses doing a mile a minute, and porters running barrows, with "by your leave, against your legs. But en revanche, Continental touring on the welltrodden lines is full of suggestion as ever to the unsentimental tourist. His reflections are pretty sure to be commonplace, though rather speculative than practical. Nevertheless they must have a

sympathetic interest for many thousands of unemotional Philistines. We think of writing at more leisure in some future season

the story in two folio volumes of an Unsentimental Continental Tour. We should mention as matter of course in the preface, that we should never have dreamed of intruding ourselves on the notice of the world had not innumerable friends insisted on publication. We shall strive to disarm intelligent critics by indulging in nothing beyond simple platitudes, and when we describe cities and scenery which must be familiar to everybody, the impressions will be photographed with a realism and a flatness of language which must leave little to desire. Meantime we send out by way of pilot - balloon a few casual notes: which may serve to indicate our method. Taking a hint from enterprising American journalism, they are introduced with unsensational headings. First, for example, come

was as the gleams of the new life from the gates of Paradise; when, on the whole, we rather looked forward to being roused at 3.30 A.M. on a drizzling morning, to grind out an eighteen hours by diligence; when the digestion at every hour and on the shortest notice could defy the most insi dious devices of the rustic innkeeper; when we could safely swallow with blind credulity the tough old he-goat, strongly tinctured with vinegar, which did duty for chamois in the hostelries of the Oberland. We still believe in

the pleasures of travel when an impecunious youth does his best on next to nothing. He only sleeps the sounder for the shaking in the third-class carriage. When he is safely delivered towards the small hours from the slowest of slow trains, he can sup with light heart and an easy conscience on cheese and bread by way of soporific; and the buoyancy of his spirits is only enhanced by the sense of his triumphs over tribulations or discomforts. We may doubt whether he does much for the improvement of his mind, but it is certain that the knocking about is invigorating to his body. When a man has passed middle age it is very different, and all the more so if he be married and has given pledges to Fortune. As the platitudinarian is never tired of repeating, we can't have everything in this checkered life. Should the man of business be chronically hard-up, of course travel is a gratuitous aggravation of anxiety. But even if he have luck and a handsome balance at his banker's, the means of turning it to pleasant account has been gradually slipping away from him. "If I had only your appetite and digestion!" exclaimed the envious alderman when he saw the hungry youth cutting away at the tough leg of mutton. That is generally the feeling of the elderly man abroad, when he sees his juniors, to all appearance, thoroughly enjoying themselves. To the starving and struggling dock-labourer, for example, the discontented mortal would seem to live in a seventh heaven of delights. Practically, he has everything money can buy him. He takes carte blanche for all expenses without an after-thought, and although, of course, he is always grumbling as to his destiny, the total of his hotel bills is

a trifle to him. He ostentatiously parades a buxom wife and a brood of blooming daughters, who are attired, regardless of expense, in the clear-starched muslins and furbelowed petticoats which are boon and blessing to Continental washerwomen. But the pleasures of connubiality and paternity are by no means unmixed. In the lights and shadows that fall exceptionally across his foreign path, his wife has as many frowns as smiles for him. Though the girls pet and fondle and may be genuinely affectionate, he has always an uneasy suspicion that the ingénues are playing on his foibles. He takes some natural pride in the tributes paid to their charms. But, on the other hand, there is always the very deuce to pay in looking after their flirtations at the tables d'hôte and elsewhere. Fascinating foreigners will make sweet eyes at them, and stalwart but invariably ineligible young Britons beset them with obtrusive attentions. Then those tables d'hôte, and the other foreign meals and the foreign wines, play the mischief with a well-disciplined digestion. The "heavy father" sighs in vain for the British saddle and the sirloin, and, indulging in rare fits of sentiment, thinks fondly of his fiery sherries and fine old port. The foreign menu, with its essential variety of strange kickshaws, is a delusion and a snare. There are some caravansaries where a sumptuously-sounding menu is decently dressed and attractively served. But the meat is unhung, the scraps of truffle are impracticably indigestible, and the mushrooms which do duty in deadly profusion are only slower poison than deleterious funguses. As for the acid wines, they neither exhilarate nor inebriate; and he has not even the

satisfaction of a temporary oblivion of the sorrows which will infallibly await his awakening.

And the morning ought to find him up to the mark. For nowa days most men are their own travelling servants, and he has the family and all its impedimenta to look after. We shall have to say something afterwards as to the curse of cumbrous luggage; but setting this aside, he has to act as laquais de place, with no local knowledge and without the gift of tongues. Fancy an elderly gentleman set to the digestion of a somewhat unwholesome breakfast, by trotting about churches and galleries in which he does not feel the faintest interest. Goth as he may be, he cares nothing for Gothic architecture; he has probably never heard of the Renaissance, and he confounds Rubens with Raphael in a common comminatory service of AngloSaxon execrations. He had better have been condemned to out-ofdoors labour at Portland in comfortable double-soled boots, than be sent trotting about the ill-paved back-streets of Cologne or Nuremberg, with a touch of gout in the back sinews and a tendency to corns. Nor is he much happier of a hopelessly wet morning, when he tries to take his ease in his inn. At home he would be snoozing in his own easy-chair, over the wellaired morning papers. We know few more suggestive sights abroad than the struggle and jealous scramble for the solitary hotel 'Times.' It is a tribute to the intense vitality of the capitalists' journal with its unlimited capital. The Times' has fallen into the clutches of somebody,-perhaps a brainless American beauty, interested indirectly in the marriages and births; possibly one of those conscientious club-bores who spell

out successive sentences at the irritating pace of a badly trained beetle, The monopoliser is the centre and cynosure of some dozen pairs of eager eyes, whose owners civilly profess an interest in other papers. When the bone of contention is suddenly dropped, there is such a rush as occurred at the Pool of Bethesda, scarcely tempered by some superficial affectation of politeness. Not unfrequently there is serious trouble. We recollect on one occasion seeing a stern military veteran-we should have set him down as a committee man at the Senior United Service-stride up to a feeble-eyed and weak-minded clergyman, holding out his watch and offering an ultimatum. "Sir, I shall allow you just ten minutes more. When the time is up, I take the paper." But then the meek-minded Christian immediately collapsed, blushing so painfully as to extract a growling apology. Ere our friend has been driven to such desperate methods, he has been withdrawn from the scene of his torment by his impatient feminines. So he is doomed to set forth upon his dismal daily grind, knowing nothing of the latest fluctuations on the Stock Exchange, or of the prospects of "the weather and the crops."

For if the city man when dépaysé is to be pitied, the lot of the squire is still more lamentable. September abroad, in place of in the stubbles, seems nearly the acme of the irony of mortal injustice. Happily a good number of worthy country gentlemen find compensation for agricultural depression and falling rents in the fact that they are adscripti glebæ, like the medieval serfs, in that they are tied to their fields and farms by straitened circumstances. We need only make a casual allusion

to the novel horrors of the great French Exhibition where the squire or the quiet banker is cast adrift in the bustle of a Vanity Fair covering twenty times as much ground as the most successful of cattle shows, and making the Exchange in the turmoil of high noon seem a quiet city church by comparison. Then that boasted Parisian hospitality, always eager to take in any amount of strangers and do for them, has raised all firstclass hotel charges to extortionate rates. We have had the privilege of hearing a Rothschild complain of extortionate Viennese charges

in Exhibition time, but the "hospitable" Parisians in this present season have certainly beat all previous records. Even a liberally disposed man who has gone holidaymaking with a family, must feel in their clutches like a Christian martyr and saint writhing under the flaying-knives of remorseless pagans. So we may safely say, as the conclusion of the whole matter, that the elderly holidaymaker is so delighted when his Continental business has been despatched, that possibly he has got value for the money he has flung away.

We grant that the passage is a very different thing from what it was in the days of Sterne, or even of Byron-when your boat was on the shore and your bark upon the sea, and you shipped on a fore-and-aft-rigged schooner packet, trusting to Providence for turning up on the other side. But still the passage is a detestable pill to swallow, for half the horrors of the short sea-voyage are in melancholy apprehensions. We are in the habit of sleeping at Dover or at Folkestone before crossing, and have had many opportunities of studying the idiosyncrasies of expectant sufferers. Considering that it is patronised chiefly by precarious birds of passage, the Lord Warden is an excellently conducted house, and solidly built as well, with double windows on the sea side. But those salt-encrusted panes of the toughest glass are at once reassuring and suggestive. They keep out draughts in the gales, but they are ominous of imminent misery. Of a stormy evening, the counter-tides of travel at Dover are as easily distinguishable as the clay-stained flood of the

mighty Amazon from the pellucid waters of the Pacific. The travellers who have just arrived are offensively "cocky"-there is no other word for it. Scarcely recovered from the tremors or the horrors of sea-sickness, they indulge ostentatiously in entrées at dinner, and celebrate the crossing of the Styx with generous libations of champagne or Burgundy. The good dinner puts a gilding on cheeks that may still be somewhat livid. On the other hand, the complexions of those who have got the work cut out for them are generally sicklied with the pale cast of sad anticipations. Some may swagger on the strength of wave-proof stomachs; superior spirits may struggle with the shrinking nerves, and show a serene heroism; but most of the guests are unmistakably "funking." They indulge temperately in Scotch whisky and apollinaris, and shake their heads distrustfully at the sweets. In truth, it is an ominous night, and in the bedrooms at the Warden you hear the worst of it. The more humbly situated Pavilion at Folkestone