was, I think, thoroughness. This gave force and directness to whatever he said, and deepened while it narrowed his sympathy. Sparing himself no trouble in verifying a name or a date in the dim past, he seemed unable to appreciate the same concentration of energy on very minute things in other departments of knowledge. He would insist again and again that "Karl," not "Charlemagne," is right, that almanac and calendar should be spelt with a k, that Hastings should be "Senlac," but he would not see that the same thoroughness is needed even about a butterfly's wing or a beetle's thigh. What he saw he saw with a clearness and distinctness almost unique, and could express with equal lucidity of style. His mind was like a map. When his other writings are forgotten, his Historical Geography will live on. Perhaps none but himself could have made such a synopsis of the ever-changing frontiers of nations, comprehensive, exact, alive with human interest. What he knew he knew thoroughly, and he knew when he did not know. He was especially intolerant of metaphysics. To him everything was either concrete or not at all. He abhorred cloudland. Freeman had the centrical point fixed and definite towards which every radius of the circle, unless life is to be purposeless and desultory, must converge, but he wanted the circumference. This narrowness, remarkable in so lively and energetic a nature, Freeman-I think not altogether unconsciously-fostered instead of combating. He would often profess utter ignorance if the subject lay beyond his own special range. On the other nand, he would be impatient and surprised if his own allusions to out-of-the-way incidents in history were not understood immediately. "Who is Alma Tadema?” he asked at a time when the artist's name was everywhere. Green of Oxford was to him as a matter of course his friend and fellow-worker, "Johnnie Green," as he called him, the historian; he shut his eyes to the fame of another "Green of Oxford" of the same date equally famous in another way. To Freeman, during his residence in Trin ity, the commoners were as though they were not. President, fellow, scholars to him were the college; passmen had no raison d'être for him. The words "Trinity College" to him meant Trinity College, Oxford, as if the great sister foundation at Cambridge, the greatest college in Christendom, had no exist ence. I have tried to illustrate what seems to me the idiosyncrasy of my friend, an individuality more strongly marked than any other which I have known. An Italian once epitomized Garibaldi to me as, "Gran cuore, piccola intelligenza." No one could apply the latter part of the description to Freeman, yet in many ways he reminded one of the Italian hero. There was the same leonine aspect, the same generous, unselfish ardor, the same nobleness of soul too rare among men. The world is poorer, darker, colder, when men like these pass away. I. G. S. From The Speaker. THE ART OF GEORGE DU MAURIER. The world of pictorial satire is still lamenting a grievous loss. Mr. Punch has not yet replaced Charles Keene; he will have still more difficulty in finding a successor to George Du Maurier. There are clever pencils at his command, but none of them has either the sphere or the particular breeding we associate with the creator of Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns, Sir Gorgius Midas, Postlethwaite, and a dozen more types of the society in which Du Maurier found his quarry. Far inferior to Keene in technique, he had more origi al humor, a closer observation, a more distinct faculty for disentangling individuality from the crowd. Critics of black-and-white were apt to speak disdainfully of his later drawing. While Charles Keene is a draughtsman of European fame, Du Maurier constantly offended the canons of his art with his Minerva-like demoiselles, beetle-browed and ponderous in the chin, and usually about ten feet high. Mr. Phil May could give him points in artistic workmanship, and Mr. Bernard Partridge easily surpassed him in pure dexterity. But these young artists would be the first to admit that the Du Maurier tradition, like the Leech tradition, is a monument that overtops them. It belongs to the continuity of pictorial history, to that larger discourse which is occupied with the subject rather than the treatment. When we think of Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns, we remember her as a social figure admirably observed, and forget the occasional defects of technical handling. Du Maurier's purely literary sense stood him in such stead that the shortcomings of his pencil were of comparatively little moment. We have a suspicion that the physiognomy of Sir Gorgius Midas is all wrong. Instead of looking like one of the least prepossessing denizens of the "Zoo," he ought to he a very sleek, well-groomed, not ill-educated animal, with plutocratic vulgarity exuding from all the fastidious appointments of a man about town. But Du Maurier rarely failed to catch the mental attributes of his characters with exceptional acumen; and it is just that important gift which is possessed in far less degree by the men who have carried the art of black-and-white to a perfection he never approached. On his literary side he had a portentous vogue which must have astonished him not a little. Charles Reade did not write novels till he was forty. Du Maurier turned to story-telling when he was nearly sixty, and achieved a popular success that Reade never dreamed of. That "Trilby" owed something to the author's drawings is likely enough, though his earlier novel, "Peter Ibbetson," which he also illustrated, did not attract any widespread attention. But the story of the model in the Quartier Latin, who, while in hypnotic trances, became the greatest singer Europe had ever heard, and remained totally unconscious of this celebrity to the day of her death, did unquestionably make an extraordinary appeal to the great mass of readers in England and America. Even Miss Marie Corelli, who is also a portent, has not enjoyed so prodigious a popularity. Mr. Du Maurier's head was not turned. He did not battle with his hostile reviewers, nor write splenetic letters about the gossips. Parsons with fashionable congregations did not write articles on "George Du Maurier as I know him," suggesting that his work was a Sinaitic revelation. He turned some reminiscences of his student days into a romance, which, with no pretension to literature, has a charm of its own even to mau who find its renown inexplicable. With absolute disregard for accuracy in his creation of a musical prodigy, he contrived, nevertheless, to convey the emotional effect of music as it has rarely been expressed in language. Moreover, there is something in Trilby herself which is singularly fresh and winning-something in the true roman tic manner that atones for many pages of irritating commonplace and cheap sentiment. In his story, "The Martian," which is just begun in Harper's, Mr. Du Maurier describes his schooldays with that mixture of French and English which is one of the agreeable characteristics of his artless method, though he was too fond of writing French-admirable French-as if he were giving lessons in that tongue. A great master of English fiction set Mr. Du Maurier the example of this manner, though it would be absurd to make comparisons between the efforts of the deferential pupil and certain scenes in "The Newcomes." It is evident that the plot of "The Martian" is to be still more incredible than that of "Trilby," for the idea of a young gentleman who becomes the greatest writer in England by means of some inspiration from the planet Mars evidently belongs to fairy tale of the childlike kind. But although "Trilby" brought Mr. Du Maurier fortune, and the hysterical raptures of readers and playgoers in the British Islands and the American continent, he must have felt that his real reputation was bound up with Punch. A few years hence the name and fame of "Trilby" will be buried beneath heca tombs of similar successes-the "Rec- punctual crowd of frock-coated men in reation of Lucifer," and the like; but the pictures of Victorian "society" which Du Maurier drew with so much humor and knowledge will always be prized by the historians of manners. In the foibles of artists and musicians he found an inexhaustible vein. There was not a contretemps of the drawing. room that escaped him. The awful appositeness of the enfant terrible, the self-sufficiency of the gilded youth, the exquisite maladroitness of conventional speech-(who has forgotten the sublime remark of the young man, eager to be agreeable to the ladies in his auditory, "I think she's the ugliest woman I have ever seen, present company always excepted"?)—these lighter aspects of our social intercourse were touched by Du Maurier with genial skill. Every "craze" has found in him a humorous chronicler. The sudden passion in Belgravia for "slumming" has left many mementoes in his drawings. Only the other day we saw the Ladies Ermyntrude and Hildegarde cleaning their own bicycles, while Jeames stood haughtily aloof. These humors were handled with admirable taste and unfailing kindliness. We shall miss them sorely; we shall miss, too, the children and the dogs that were a constant delight. Memory regretfully summons the aristocratic youngsters who passed some of their little companions with their tongues out. "Those are the Joneses, mamma; they are so exclusive!" It was a happy spirit that caught these amiable incongruities for thirty years and the public for which Du Maurier worked is not ungrateful. From The Spectator. The eruption of red-brick villas, which spreads yearly wider over the home countries, like a new scarlet-fever, is a visible sign of the great change which has come over the habits of the London professional man in the course of the last ten years. Every morning a tall hats is deposited on the platforms of the great London stations, and every evening the same men, the majority now carrying the small "bass" bag which contains the fish for dinner, again throng the outgoing trains which will take them to sleep in the country. "I hear you live in the country now," says one business man to another in the columns of an American comic paper. "No; my wife and the children live in the country. I live on the cars." And unfortunately it is only by taking perpetual journeys that London professional men can enjoy country life at all. No one can call the passing of a few weeks of holiday in a farmhouse lodging "enjoying country life." To get the real true pleasure out of English country, you must live in the same place year after year, and the place must be, temporarily at the very least, your own. There are no flowers so sweet as those which spring from the seed planted by the master of the house in his scanty leisure, and no vegetables half so good as those anxiously watered and tended in the long summer evenings to the manifest contempt of the gardener who remarks with an audible sniff "Master won't let them peas alone till he's drownded them outright." Indeed, the possibilities of delight in a garden are endless, even if its owner can only be in it in the early morning and the late evening, with Saturday afternoons and an occasional whole day off thrown in. But it is not only in what are in the strictest sense of the word country pleasures that the man who lives out of town will be the gainer. His knowledge of men outside the narrow limits of his particular class will also be immensely widened. In London he may believe that the artisans and working men have, in a modified degree, the same tastes and amusements as he has himself; in the country he knows that this is so. For every summer evening he sees the cottagers, after working hours, digging in their gardens and attending to their "lotments," while the younger men practise cricket, and the women sit outside their cottage doors "vor to chatty and zee volks go by,"the rustic equivalent to paying a round of calls. If, indeed, a man has had the good fortune to be brought up in the country, he will possess an invaluable knowledge of the class below him, for he will have mixed with it on an equality almost impossible in later life. Himself a dirty little imp of six or seven, he will have chased butterflies with the village boys, and have felt a respect for the boys of eleven or so quite uninfluenced by the amount of their fathers' incomes. Did not those of the elder boys who were "not on my side, father," threaten to ravage the garden at midnight in revenge for some outbreak of "cockiness" on the part of their youthful neighbors? This wider sympathy and comprehension between man and man may be put down as not one of the smallest of the advantages of living in the country. But there is always the wrong side of the tapestry, and two capital objections to life in the country come to mind at the moment. One is, of course, the weather, which invariably does the wrong thing at the wrong moment. "Providence," said the farmer, when told that Providence had sent the drought which was spoiling his rootcrop, "Providence mostly does things wrong, but sometimes the Almighty is too much for him." Unfortunately, the occasions when Providence is overcome in the matter of weather are few and far between. The other terrible drawback is the universal prevalence of the village spy. People who live on breezy commons or "in silent woody places" may be exempt from this plague, but it may almost be said that for the man who lives in a country village there is no such thing as privacy. Who knows or cares, if you live in London, how many joints of butcher's meat are consumed every week at your dinner-table? In the country, on the contrary, the local butcher will mention the fact to the cook next door, who will tell her mistress, who will tell the curate's wife when she comes to tea and muffins at half past four. Miss Ferrier gives us in "Destiny" a picture illustrating this ... very point in village life, and it is as accurate now as it was when it was drawn sixty years ago. One of her characters always spends the morning hour when the tradesmen are making their rounds looking out of the parlor window for the better convenience of spying on the purchases of the neighbors, on which he comments to his wife in the following terms: "Kitty, my dear, there's a leg of pork, a calf's head, and a rump steak gone to Mrs. Martha Budgell. What can she be doing with three meats? Single lady-bad healthonly two servants-very rich, to be sure and three meats. Very odd, ain't it, Kitty, my dear. And there, there, I declare, is a delicate little turkey poult to Mr. Mogg. Sure there must be some mistake there! white meat! white fowl! ... Good la! come here, my dear, only see! here's the fishmonger, and sure if he ain't taking a pair of soles to the Moggs!-well, this is the very strangest thing-ain't it, Kitty, my dear. . . to think of the Moggs, with three hundred thousand pounds, having white meat, white fish, white fowl! I declare I should not wonder if their soup was white too!" There are many men who find it really impossible to live under the constant scrutiny of their neighbors. They lead the most blameless and open of existences, and yet the knowledge that the petty details of their households are being spied and commented on makes life absolutely intolerable to them. These sensitive people will certainly be more at ease as insignificant items in a crowd, than in the prominence of living in one out of the half-a-dozen "gentlemen's houses" in the ordinary English village. The London neighbor is too busy with his own work to care what is happening next door, while in the country there are sure to be people whose only way of killing time is to take a deep interest in the domestic details of their own and others' lives. For whether he lives in the country or the town, man's great object during the whole of his short life is to kill time as effectually as possible by work or play, and he thinks that he has passed a well-spent day, who can say to himself at night, "What, evening the purposes of talk? And the answer already; I had no idea it was so late." Of course, one great argument against living in the country is the absence of society. And if society must always mean parties in great houses, this is quite true. You cannot expect very young people to enjoy living all the year round in the country. In the summer, with tennis, picnics, boating, and now bicycling, the country is bearable enough,-but in winter "Towered cities please us then, and the busy hum of men." For the noise of a crowded room, the bright lights, the flowers, and the general air of gaiety are immense factors in the enjoyment of the very young. But for people whose pleasure in society consists in liking "good talk," the country is no such bad place. A country house party is one of the most favorable places for talk imaginable, and even the humble two or three guests, who are all the dweller in the small villa is able to assemble, will sometimes make conversation decidedly worth listening to. But, it will be urged, where in the country can you meet people who will be worth inviting for must certainly be, "In London." Which brings us to the conclusion that the real way to make the most of country life is to be a Londoner, and to live in the country near enough to town to enjoy the society of London friends who will form at any rate a welcome seasoning to the indigenous neighbors. And if you can persuade some of your London friends to settle near you, your happiness will be greater still. This applies chiefly to the inhabitants of villadom. The man who inherits an estate of his own has duties and pleasures of quite a different kind, into which it is not proposed to enter here. But to be the contented inhabitant of a villa it is well to be a Londoner, to whom the mere escape from bricks and mortar will be a pleasure unknown to those who take country surroundings as a matter of course. Add to the pleasures more properly belonging to the country a certain amount of social life, partly supplied by London friends, and you will have the satisfaction to a very great extent of eating your cake and having it still. Cycling and Heart Disease.-It is calculated that more than a fourth of our adult population "cycles" or meditates cycling. Of this fourth a very considerable proportion have reached or passed middle age. It cannot but be that a number of these are the victims of "heart disease." What is the effect of cycling upon a person with a heart affection? The answer is that everything depends upon the nature of the affection. We have long ceased to regard all heart affections as of an identical degree seriousness, and long left off the unscientific practice of wrapping all victims of heart disease in metaphorical cotton wool. It is now understood that most sufferers from cardiac trouble profit by exercise, and that some are advantaged by a good deal of exercise, and that of a vigorous kind. Cycling, whilst dangerous in affections of the aortic valves, is often of great service in uncomplicated mitral disease. Of course it must be cycling in moderation. Hill climbing and fast riding are peremptorily excluded, as is also riding which causes an approach to breathlessness. The great point for the beginner in such cases is, we hold, that he should spend adequate time and money in preliminary tuition, and not be in too great a hurry to be "off on his own account." Whilst on this subject we cannot but express surprise at the general incompetence and want of intelligence of the average "cycle" tutor. As a rule he is one of the stupidest creatures breathing. There would appear to be an excellent opening for both men and women tutors in this new amusement and recreation. |