from the spots where the receding waters have left them, and they will thus remain a standing memorial of the Krakatoa disaster in August, 1883. To scientific men they will naturally be objects of no little interest, as being an index, to some extent, of the power which water has as an element of destruction, and also as gaug. ing the immense height of the unparalleled volcanic wave. Merak, the district though which our path thus far lay, was densely populated, and this will account for the great loss of life which here occurred. Our intelligent Malay guide told us something of the difficulties of his task in superintending the workmen who were engaged in recovering the bodies of the ill-fated victims. About three thousand he considered had been recovered in the neighborhood where we then were. Most of them were buried as near as possible to the places where they were discovered, so that there should be as little carrying about as possible. In some cases it was found necessary to burn the remains. We could scarcely take a step anywhere in one part of the district without walking on a grave. Wherever we saw a stake driven into the ground we knew that some unfortunate victim lay buried beneath. Nearer to Merak was the Chinese settlement. Their bodies were treated just the same as the Javanese buried or burnt, as was thought best at the time. The great difficulty of the superintendent was in finding workers for this sad task. It was only by sending to distant kampongs that the services of a sufficient number of coolies could be obtained. Some of these soon fell ill and died, and thus added a few more to the long roll of victims. From The Spectator. ANARCHISM IN SWITZERLAND. II. vast majority of the bourgeoisie whom he and his companions devoted to destruction. On the other hand, Huft was just the stuff out of which Anarchists are made, and may be regarded as a natural product of the age in which we live. Fairly educated, conscious of abilities above his position, vain and aspiring, with little moral principle, and without any sort of religious belief, it was almost inevitable that he should gravitate towards Socialism, and became a potential rebel against the existing order; for on the Continent, at least, Socialism is in the air, and in France, Germany, and Austria there are probably few of the younger generation of artisans whom it has not more or less infected. We say artisans advisedly, for it is a fact beyond dispute that the rural population of the countries in question is indifferent to Socialism, and that among the very poor Anarchists are rarely if ever found. In Switzerland, moreover, where property is so widely diffused that, albeit manhood suffrage prevails, a majority of the electors are landowners, Socialism, except among foreign refugees, is almost unknown; and of all the deputies who are returned to the Federal Assembly and the Cantonal Legislature, not one, we believe, avows himself a Socialist, much less an Anarchist. The danger of Anarchism arises not from the numerical strength of the party, but from the fanaticism of a few, and from the terrible mischief which may be wrought by a handful of desperate and unscrupulous men. Huft's motives for laying violent hands on himself have not been ascertained, and probably never will be. The police believe that they were either regret for having put the Federal Council on its guard, or that he feared the vengeance of his companions. But fear of assassination hardly seems a sufficient reason for committing suicide, and, as likely as not, Huft may have destroyed himself merely because he was tired of living. Scores of his countrymen commit self-murder for no better cause, and of late years suicide has IT is evident that Huft, like many other nowhere been so rife as in Germany. But shining lights of Anarchism, was moved whatever Huft's motives may have been, quite as much by a spirit of vanity as by his disappearance greatly hampered the that deep sense of the injustice of exist-investigation, and rendered it impossible ing social arrangements which is said to for the authorities to proceed judicially be the guiding principle of the sect. At against the conspirators, - for that a conany rate, society did not behave very badly spiracy to blow up the Federal Palace had to him. He had received a good educa- actually existed, and, save for the warning tion and learnt a trade which, as it would letters, might have been consummated, seem, enabled him to travel about at pleas- the police were fully convinced. The pa ure; and he probably got more enjoyment pers seized left little doubt of this, and out of life, or might have done, than the some of the men implicated being boon One of the results of the inquiry, says the report, was to show that the group in eastern Switzerland directed its action principally against Austria, promoting the Socialist agitation in that country by means of pamphlets and journals which, after being printed in Switzerland, were smuggled into the former country and se companions of those who had conspired | potassium, a revolver, and a list of forty to blow up the German emperor in the " companions." Neiderwald, and of others who had committed actual murder, there could be no question of their readiness to commit any conceivable atrocity. But the evidence obtained by the police was not such as would have justified a prosecution, and, except for the information it elicited, the investigation proved abortive. This in formation, however, was extremely curi-cretly distributed by their confederates ous, and the police of Germany and Aus- over the border. In this group there were tria have doubtless found it very valuable. men, in the opinion of the police, quite In nearly every town of the Confederation capable of committing "criminal acts" there is a 66 group " of Anarchists, who, against Switzerland, and by no means in. if not numerous, are extremely active, disposed to do so; but there was no eviand, judging by the language of their dence to show that any of them were organs, are animated with a spirit of fero- implicated in the plot to blow up the Fedcious hatred against all existing institu- eral Palace. The man supposed to have tions, as well as against every member of taken the most active part in its organiza. society above the condition of a day-la- tion was Klinger, Huft's particular friend; borer. Not long ago, the Freiheit de- and much was hoped from his avowals. scribed the German emperor as the Unfortunately, however, the examining "crowned scoundrel who murdered Hoe magistrate could not prevail on him to tell del," and stigmatized the Rothschilds and anything worth knowing; and though he Vanderbilts, "and their like," as villains contradicted himself flagrantly, told a "for whom hanging is too good." On great many lies, and the letters found in the person of an Anarchist named Cha- his possession were eminently suggestive ritat, arrested at Geneva, was found a of a criminal plot, there was no evidence signed and printed proclamation, which forthcoming that would have ensured his ran thus: "Down with the exploiters! conviction. Even after his arrest money Let us take all they have, shoot them, rob came to him for "travelling expenses them! Death to the bourgeoisie! Death from "the famous Anarchist Knauerto all the agents of authority!" Anar- hase," then in London; and though the chists have no more respect for a demo- police entertained shrewd suspicions that cratic republic like Switzerland than for a for "travelling expenses" should be read despotic monarchy like Russia. "Uni-"dynamite plot," they had no means of versal suffrage," says the Freiheit, "has no other end than to give to reciprocal servitude a show of freedom. A prison does not become a temple of liberty, simply because these words are written over the door." proving the fact. Klinger was a man of fair education, and, like Huft, a contributor to the press. After the conclusion of his examination, he was expelled from the territory of the Confederation, the same measure being dealt out at the same time to most of the other Anarchists under arrest, and to all whom the police considered dangerous. None of them were Swiss citizens, and it is a significant fact that the Révolté, which for years had been the organ of anarchy at Geneva, has lately removed to Paris, from which it would appear that the efforts of the sect to convert Genevans to their peculiar doctrines have met with scant success, and this, seeing that, excluding strangers, two men out of every three in the canton are either landowners or bank depositors, is perhaps not very surprising. One of the Geneva group was a man called Schultze, whose brother lives at New York, and is on intimate terms with Most, the editor of the Freiheit. At Lausanne there was an especially active group directed by a man of the name of Heilmann, of which Lieske, the murderer of Councillor Rumpff, was once a member. Schaffhausen, which, owing to its proximity to the German frontier, is naturally much resorted to by German refugees, had also its group, chief among whom was a certain Daschner, a close friend of Kammerer (in whose company he had been seen at Winterthur), lately Whatever view we take of the action of convicted of committing a murderous out- the Swiss authorities in relation to the rage at Stuttgart. Novotny, an Anar-plot against the Federal Palace, it cannot chist arrested at Rossbach, had in his be doubted that the precautions they took possession a great quantity of cyanide of were fully warranted, nor that the inquiry they instituted has served a useful pur- which is so often caused by the mingling pose. It has shown that militant An- of opposites. In politics he first suparchists, the party of action, as they like ported the Conservatives in a great Liberal to call themselves, are far from numer-policy, Sir Robert Peel, in establishing ous; that they are composed for the most free trade, - and next supported a Liberal part of men whose leading motives are in his Conservative policy, Lord Palmvanity and a passion for notoriety; and erston, in teaching the nation to "rest and that, desperate as some of them are, it is be thankful." In regard to the Church, not difficult, with an efficient police sys- Lord Houghton was the great representatem, to nip their enterprises in the bud. tive of the idea that it is the good of a Socialism in Germany and France num- bishop to be more or less worldly; in fact, bers its votaries by the hundred thousand, he used to eulogize the episcopal bench in and their influence on legislation and the House of Lords on the ground that public opinion is certainly not on the it helped to teach the Church what the wane; but the social revolution of which attractions of the world were like, and fanatical philanthropists of the stamp of also helped it to appreciate them at their Elisée Reclus (according to the report, the true worth, which, in his estimation, principal supporter of the Révolté) dream, was by no means nil, but something very and upon which they look as imminent, is considerable. In poetry, again, catholic as remote as the millennium. Law and as were his tastes, and generous as was opinion, the virtues and the forces, are his help to poorer brethren of the craft, equally against them. to him we probably owe in great measure the delightful poems of David Gray, his bias always was towards throwing cold water on the high-flown estimate of poetry in which poets occasionally indulge. His last speech, we believe, a speech made in July at the meeting of the Wordsworth Society, held in his own house, sort of wet blanket for thorough Wordsworthians. He dwelt gently on all the defects he could find in Wordsworth, tak ing evidently some pleasure in using such epithets as "vulgar" for the familiar language of Wordsworth's lyrical ballads, and he made his address, in fact, rather a eulogy on Shelley and Keats than on Wordsworth, whose great "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" was the only poem of Wordsworth's which won from him genuinely enthusiastic praise. Lord Houghton, disliked, no doubt, the didactic side of Wordsworth, not only as every poet must dislike direct didactism in poetry, but as a man one of whose chief interests in life was the skilful blending of the unworldly with the worldly, would especially dislike all stern exhortations such as Wordsworth poured forth so freely, to shake off from the soul the tyranny of the world. From The Spectator. RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES, whom Carlyle once described as "a pretty little Robin Redbreast of a man," and who certainly could sing in the days in which that description was applied to him a very taking little song of his own, died on Monday evening at Vichy, and with him there vanishes from London society one of its most unique figures. Lord Houghton may be said almost to have discovered the value of antipathy as a social interest. He was great in bringing together those who were or were supposed to be most utterly hostile to each other, and at his breakfast parties you could always find both the acid and the alkali by which a moral effervescence is produced. He would very much have shared the pleasure expressed by Satan in the prologue to Goethe's "Faust," at his occasional intercourse with the divine adversary of Satan. Indeed, this feeling of Lord Houghton's extended far beyond a mere theory of social intercourse. He had, apparently, some notion that all absolute hostility is a mistake, even though it be the hostility of moral good to moral evil. He wanted to reconcile the Church and the world. He wanted to reconcile Conservatism and Liberalism. He wanted to reconcile idealism and materialism. He wanted to reconcile mysticism and commonplace. He seems to have enjoyed the shiver As a poet, Lord Houghton would have been greater had he succeeded in expressing in his poems his own characteristic desire to catch the effervescence of opposite moods of feeling. But this he can hardly be said to have done. In some early lines, written in a miserably sing. song rhythm, he did to a certain extent embody the leading conception of his life. We cannot say that the following are good verses; but they are very characteristic verses, and are marked by a thought which PLEASURE AND PAIN. Who can determine the frontier of pleasure? Ye who have felt the delirium of passion, I would believe not; for spirit will languish, And life will be dearer and clearer in anguish, See the fakeer as he swings on his iron, No! in the kingdom these spirits are reaching Hell! And letters of mere formal phrase Alas, that love was not too strong The goal of mutual bliss beside! Yet what no chance could then reveal, When truth could bring remorse alone. Even that does not, in our judgment, illus. trate Lord Houghton's most perfect verse. The exquisite lines on Wilkie's conversation with the Geronomite monk, about the picture of the Last Supper in the refectory of one of the Spanish monasteries, touch, perhaps, the highest point he reached; but as they were suggested by the actual saying of a Spanish monk, and Lord Houghton only versified the monk's thought, perhaps these lines are hardly a fair specimen of the substance of his poetry, though they are a good the poem which has certainly been more specimen of its form. It is curious that popular than any other in all Lord Hough. That is not good poetry, nor perhaps en ton's works, and which almost every one tirely true teaching, but it has a great deal connects with Monckton Milnes's name, of truth in it, and it was the one truth was the little love poem called "The which Richard Monckton Milnes really Brookside." That is happily expressed, embodied in his own social life. If all no doubt, but it is wholly without the emotions are not thus shot with threads of brand of Lord Houghton's personal charapparently contrary and inconsistent feel-acter, and in a poet who has usually ing, still many are, and no doubt amongst them are to be found some of the most memorable in human life. As we have quoted verse of Lord Houghton's which seems to us very poor poetry, though verse distinguished by a characteristic thought, we must quote something which shows him as a genuine poet, which he was, though not by any means a great one, for all his verse seems to have come from too superficial a plane to lift the reader up to the height of the higher poetry. In the following little poem there is a subtlety of insight which shows how well Lord Houghton could delineate the mixed feelings of which he was so acute a student: They seemed to those who saw them meet, But yet if one the other's name In some unguarded moment heard, so little of the magic of form as Lord Houghton, one needs the impress of character even more than in a poet who adorns everything that he touches, and transfigures it merely by passing it through the medium of his thought. We should, indeed, find few of Lord Houghton's poems so little characteristic of him as The Brookside;" though it may have been that poem, or a poem of that kind, which suggested to Carlyle the comparison to "a pretty little Robin Redbreast." On the whole, Monckton Milnes's genius was embodied in a certain determination to blend the insight of the man of the world with the sentiment of the poet, and not to allow the sentiment of the poet to run away with the insight of the man of the world. Perhaps we could hardly express better what we mean than by quot ing these verses from his picture of "The Patience of the Poor:". No search for him of dainty food, But coarsest sustenance of life; No rest by artful quiet wooed, But household cries, and wants, and strife. Affection can at best employ Her utmost of unhandy care; Pity herself at such a sight Might lose her gentleness of mien, And clothe her form in angry might, And as a wild despair be seen; Did she not bail the lesson taught, By this unconscious suffering boor, To the high sons of lore and thought,The sacred Patience of the Poor, This great endurance of each ill, As a plain fact whose right or wrong They question not, confiding still That it shall last not over long; Willing from first to last to take The mysteries of our life as given, Leaving the time-worn soul to slake Its thirst in an undoubted Heaven. That is not the highest poetry, but it is not without power, and it has on it the mark of Lord Houghton's unshrinking vision in its least nonchalant mood. From The Spectator. been pleased to think that a merciful providence had prevented the recognition from taking an embarrassing personal form. From his modest point of view it was, possibly, a kind of triumph - Veitch was a son of the Border, and all its sons are athletes in one way or another-to have distanced in the race of life the great majority of his contemporaries. He was at college with Edward Irving and Thomas Carlyle, being a year or two younger than the one, and, unless the belief of his friends is wrong, slightly the senior of the other. An excellent fellow-Borderer who, in the jargon of redistribution, may be described as a Wilson-cum-Wordsworth poet, and whose best work would be more widely appreciated but for the vein of mysticism in it- he was in the habit of calling "Tom Aird," as being, so to speak, quite a young man. Not only has Veitch survived these, but he has survived most of his juniors by a generation, men such as the late James Hannay, who were attached to him by their sympathy with the classical side of culture, and perhaps by the feudal conservatism which sat so well upon him, a secular, never-to-be-questioned orthodoxy. A SCOTCH PORSON. The life of this, the latest and perhaps BUT little notice has been taken, even the last of our scholars of the Alexannorth of the Tweed, of the death, which drine type, was absolutely uneventful. took place a few days ago in Edinburgh, Born in a Roxburghshire village in 1794, of the most painstaking of Scotch, per- he passed from the parish school of Jedhaps indeed the most remorsely accurate burgh to the University of Edinburgh. of all recent, classical scholars. Accord."Intended" for the ministry of the Church ing to report, which ought to be true if it is not, an eminent German philologist, who visited Edinburgh a few years ago, asked one of its citizens to whom he had an introduction to take him to "the most illustrious of living Scotchmen." The worthy man, on inquiring who this was, and on being informed that it was Dr. Veitch, author of "Greek Verbs, Irregular and Defective," said he had never heard of such a person. The old scholar, had the story been told him, would not have been at all aggrieved. Probably he would have chuckled at the success with which he had lived his quiet, self-contained life amid the ecclesiastical and municipal activities of Edinburgh, obeying the injunction of Donne, As Fishes glide, leaving no print where they pass, Nor making sound, so closely thy course go, Let men dispute whether thou breathe or no. While he would have been gratified to learn that his efforts in the interests of scholarship were recognized by the countrymen of Buttmann, he would also have of Scotland, he attended both the arts and divinity courses of college study. He even took orders; but his younger acquaintances, of whom the present writer is one, never heard him preach, and never, indeed, heard in any reliable way of his having preached. There was a vague tra dition that he had "officiated" in an Edinburgh pulpit on some extraordinary occasion; but the occasion, when any attempt was made to find a date for it, seemed to vanish hopelessly into the mists of for gotten history. Not that Veitch was troubled with theological doubt, or ever wavered in his loyalty to his Church-andState Conservatism. He had simply found both his pleasure and his vocation in devotion to the minutiae of classical criticism. His wants were few; he elected to remain a bachelor; and it was understood - for, as already said, he was an essentially self-contained man, and even to his intimate friends did not speak much of his affairs - that he added to his private means by coaching" students in the classics. In 1848 Veitch published his |