amongst them standing six feet four | guess accurately as they were scatinches high, they would not compare tered about all over the country. favorably with an Englishman or a The sale of sites for the township of Boer of the same height. They are Buluwayo has been recently announced, mostly lean and loosely knit as far as and many men are already trooping up my observation went, and their legs from the south, but it is a case of each are thin, though it must be admitted one bringing his own necessaries at that they are capable of great endur- present, and the sole accommodation ance when put to it. The way in consists of huts run up quickly. One which they have intermixed them- building of this description is dignified selves with the Mashonas must account by the title of an hotel, and I had dinfor this to a large extent, and breeding ner here as I came through. On my with a miserable race as these Masho-way down I met the materials for a nas are is not calculated to improve large number of corrugated iron stores them, either morally or physically. and shanties; also, marvellous to reTheir sole wealth consists in cattle, and although these numbered many thousands, so precious were the animals considered that it was a most rare thing for them to slaughter cattle for eating purposes. They live almost entirely on grain, which they store up in large quantities in tubs, or rather big earthenware pots, which they bury in the kraals. We used, when destroying these kraals, to forage round with assegais, which we dug into the ground in every direction, and when we came on a store of grain we either appropriated it or destroyed it.

late, a billiard-table on a wagon in the Mangwe Pass, which had been stuck in the mud for some time, or rather, to be strictly accurate, was progressing at the rate of about three miles a week. Wagon after wagon was passed on our downward journey to the coast, and at this rate it should not be long before there is a township at Buluwayo, after the same style of those at Victoria and Salisbury, in Mashonaland. As I have already said, in my opinion, the success of those two big properties of the Chartered Company, Matabeleland and Mashonaland, depends on the amount of gold found there. As far as agriculture is concerned, pure and simple, there is land in abundance uncultivated much farther south, and unless the magnetic attraction of gold-mines continues to draw men up country, it will progress but slowly. The prospects of farming alone will certainly not draw men up there in large numbers. A MEMBER OF THE BECHUANALAND BORDER POLICE.

They managed to get most of their women and cattle away out of our reach before the war had fairly begun, but we often cut off parties of them marching their cattle off into more secure quarters. Altogether, at a rough estimate, I should put the capture of cattle by us at about thirty thousand head, more or less, but it is difficult to

The

PALMS FOR AFRICAN PICTURES. - At | see, the British public in dealing with the annual dinner of the Institute for Jour- Africa insists on having palm-trees." nalists, Major-General Sir F. Grenfell, in London branch of the Journalists' Instireplying to the toast of the army, navy, tute has largely increased in size, if not and auxiliary forces, told an amusing an- equally in accuracy of delineation, since ecdote. He sent a sketch of a small fight, that time. Mr. Rider Haggard, who proin one of the earlier South African wars, posed the toast of "the Institute," said to a London illustrated paper. The scene that it had grown in ten years from a was a sandy desert, but in the journal, membership of six hundred to nearly four when he saw it many weeks afterwards, thousand in number. Lord Kelvin, presithere were palm-trees all about. On his dent of the Royal Society, and other distinreturn to England he remonstrated with guished men, honored the dinner by their the editor, whose reply was, "Well, you presence and their speeches.

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"IF THOU WERT TRUE AS THOU ART | And Regulus hath fought nor vainly FAIR."

High towering o'er the tides of weal and How tonic were the words, how strange,

Ah, fain would we all we his country-"Behold!" I cried, "the inner touch

From The Fortnightly Review. THE POETRY OF ROBERT BRIDGES.

Society. All he has to tell is that he loves beauty and loves love; and all he has done is to praise God in the best of ways by making some beautiful things.

The body of Mr. Bridges' work is now considerable. A volume of lyrics, a volume of sonnets, a narrative poem, the libretto for an oratorio, au historical tragedy, a tragedy "in a mixed manner,' a comedy "in the Latin manner, ," several other dramas, classical or romantic, and a searching study of the prosody of Miltonthis is no inconsiderable achievement. And Mr. Bridges has published nothing that is not carefully considered, and wrought to such excellence as can be conferred on it by studious and delicate workmanship. He is, doubtless,

FATHER GERARD HOPKINS, an English priest of the Society of Jesus, died young, and one of his good deeds remains to the present time unrecorded. We were strangers to each other, and might have been friends. I took for granted that he belonged to the other camp in Irish politics, on the outskirts of which and not on the outskirts only a motley crew of traders in crime have squatted. I learn from a notice of his life that among other distresses "the political dishonesty which he was forced to witness in Dublin, so tortured his sensitive spirit that he fell into a melancholy state; " and soon afterwards he died. Father Hopkins was a lover of literature, and himself a poet. Perhaps he did in many quar-known best by his "Shorter Poems," ters missionary work on behalf of the poetry of his favorite, Robert Bridges. He certainly left, a good many years since, at my door two volumes by Mr. Bridges, and with them a note begging that I would make no acknowledgment of the gift. I did not acknowledge it then; but with sorrow for a fine spirit lost, I acknowledge it now.

Mr. Bridges, more than some other men of letters, needed in those days a mediator between his work and the public. He has never learnt the art of self-advertisement. The interviewer has not appeared at Yattendon, or captured him in some shy nook on his beloved Thames. Among poets he has been somewhat of a scholar-gipsy For most, I know, thou lov'st retired ground!

seen in the rare glimpses of limited

black-letter issues from Mr. Daniel's Oxford press

In type of antique shape and wrapper grey. But to-day Mr. Bridges shows his face in the Royal Academy; and happily no critic has to discover him, for he has gradually revealed himself. There is comfort for the critic in this; and perhaps there is comfort also in the fact that he is not a poet with a mission; he has no new creed to proclaim to the age; he need fear no Robert Bridges

to which in the popular edition must
be added on its next appearance a
fifth book at present in the hands of
the possessors of Mr. Daniel's limited
issue. And it is not ill that he should
be first thought of as a writer of lyrics.
So much excellent lyrical verse has
been written by poets born within the
last half century that it is difficult to
conjecture an order of merit; but some
persons will incline to believe that
Mr. Miles exercised a sound judgment
when he named the eighth volume of
his poetical encyclopædia (in which
writers younger than Mr. William
Morris and younger than Mr. Swin-
burne appear), Robert Bridges and
Contemporary
The
Poets."
clan,
though agile and shapely, are not of
pre-eminent stature (I speak as one of
the minor poets) but to overtop them
should secure the respect of all.
emperor of Lilliput," said Gulliver, "is
taller, by almost the breadth of my
nail, than any of his court, which alone
is enough to strike an awe into his
beholders." Such an awe many of the
writers in Mr. Miles's eighth volume
may well feel in presence of the author
of "There is a Hill beside the Silver
Thames" and "The Winnowers."

"The

a lyric which is the expression of pro- reaches of the Thames supplies a suitfound and ardent contemplation-such | able environment for such moods. Mr. are some of Wordsworth's poems; a Bridges is a most exact observer of lyric, which is architectonic in charac- these natural phenomena which accord ter, the product of an elaborate evolu- with his temper of mind; but his obtion such are some of the odes of servation is not in the manuer of a Gray. Mr. Bridges' poems are seldom realism hard and crude; it is guided mere outcries of passion; they do not by a delicate instinct of selection; it often explore the heights and depths of is subject to a law of beauty; it is a thought; they are in general of fault- quest, not for fact, but for delight. less evolution, but their design is His eye can read the details, the minion rarely (save in the choral odes of his type in the book of nature; and it also dramas) complex and of large dimen- can find rest or excitement in breadths sions. Elements of many and various of prospect — the still solitude of Enkinds enter into his volume of "Shorter glish downs, a woodland after the havoc Poems" delicate observation, delight of autumn gales, the scourge of the in external nature, delight in art, de-surf and sweep of the tides seen from light in love, gladness, and grief, eth- the cliff. Spring and summer are dear ical seriousness, pensive meditation, to him. No one who has read the graceful play of fancy. But all are "Shorter Poems" will forget the exsubdued to balance, measure, harmony;quisite personification of spring as the and sometimes our infirmity craves for virgin-mother clad in green, some dominant note, some fine extravagance, even some splendid sius. Mr. Walking the sprinkled meadows at sunBridges' audacities are to be found in occasional phrases - often felicitous and of true descriptive or interpretative power, sometimes not felicitous-and The Growth of Love"), and one of in his metrical experiments. But in his most admirable pieces of observahis metrical experiments there is noth- tion is the description of the London ing revolutionary; they are extensions streets at morning after a night of of a true tradition in English verse; snow. I will set side by side, as conthey amount to little more than nicely trasted pieces of pictorial poetry, calculated variations of stress. No a stanza from "The Garden in Sepwriter of verse understands his busi- tember and a stanza from 66 The ness better than Mr. Bridges; and Downs:

if finer and subtler harmonies are

down.

But he can also celebrate the joys of winter in a fine sonnet (No. 10 of

beams

attained unconsciously or half-uncon- Now thin mists temper the slow-ripening sciously by greater poets, our ear soon adapts itself to the delicate surprises

Of the September sun: his golden gleams
On gaudy flowers shine, that prank the

rows

Of high-grown hollyhocks, and all tall

shows

bowers:

and delicate satisfactions which he has thought out and felt out as a skilled craftsman. He is no representative in English poetry of M. Réné Ghil's That Autumn flaunteth in his bushy école évolutive instrumentiste; he has it is likely -a prejudice against talking nonsense; but he has made curious inquisition into the sources of Milton's metrical effects, and in that great school he is an ingenious pupil.

Pleasure rounded with peace, a tender tranquillity with sudden impulses of joy give origin to some of the most beautiful of these lyrical poems. And the scenery of the upper and unsullied

Where tomtits, hanging from the drooping
heads

Of giant sunflowers, peck the nutty seeds,
And in the feathery aster bees on wing
Seize and set free the honied flowers,
Till thousand stars leap with their visiting:
Unpiloted in the sun,
While ever across the path mazily flit,
The dreamy butterflies,
With dazzling colors powdered and soft
glooms,