acteristics do not furnish the secret of is the cocoanut-palm. Another peculMr. Lowe's downfall. It was not merely his contempt for others, but that contempt plus his admiration for himself, which proved fatal to him. He delighted in his own cleverness, and he could with difficulty be induced to abandon his ill-starred match-tax because he had invented the punning "Ex luce lucellum," as the motto to be placed upon the stamps. People bore his contempt, but they could not bear his self-adulation, and so in the end he fell fell more completely and suddenly than any other man of his time who had risen so high. In 1880 he was sent to the House of Lords and to him the Upper Chamber was no better than a tomb. A man of splendid intellectual force, of great eloquence, of gifts many and precious, but utterly lacking in that insight into character which flows from sympathy, and absolutely devoid of that spirit of reverence which is the hall-mark of the truly wise, Mr. Lowe was destined after achieving a wondrous triumph to see his inferiors pass him in the race, and to spend an old age of impotent regrets.

HAINAN.

From Nature.

THE great island of Hainan, off the south-eastern coast of China, is but little known to Europeans, although since 1877 there has been a treaty port there. Mr. Parker, the consul at Kiungchow, the port in question, lately made a short journey in the interior of the island, of which he gives some account in a recent report. He travelled about sixty miles up the Poh-Chung River, to within a mile or two of Pah-hi, which is, at most seasons of the year, considered the limit of navigation for all but the smallest craft. He walked round the walls of Ting-an city, one of the disturbed districts during the recent rebellions, on New Year's day (February 9); they are just one mile in circuit, and differ little from those of other Chinese cities. Wherever he had an opportunity of walking diametrically across lengthy curves of the river he found the inclosed

iarity of this region is the ubiquitousness of the dwarf Pandanus, probably the same as the P. odoratissima of Fiji, the fibre of which is used in the manufacture of grasscloth, and is usually known to foreign trade here as hemp. Much of the land was under sweet potato cultivation, and every household seemed to possess a few pigs, of the very superior and stereotyped Hainan variety, black as to the upper and white as to the lower part of the body, with a dividing line of grey running along the side from the snout to the tail. These wholesome-looking pigs are fattened on the sweet potato, and do not rely for sustenance upon precarious scavengering, as is the case with the repulsive and uncleanly animals of north China. Land contiguous to the river is irrigated by enormous wheels, forty feet in diameter, of very ingenious construction, moved by the current, needing no attention, and discharging perhaps one hundred gallons of water in a minute into the trough above, day and night without intermission. He passed several large pottery establishments; but as at the New Year all business and cultivation are suspended for a few days, the opportunity was not a very good one for gathering precise information. The temperature during the week ranged between 50° and 60° F. Game seemed plentiful everywhere, and he mentions that a German resident has recently made a very fine collection of about four hundred Hainan birds, embracing one hundred and fifty-four species, which will shortly be on their way to a Berlin Museum. One of the commonest birds in the river is a spotted white and black kingfisher of large size. Amongst the trees which attracted his attention was one locally called the "great-leafed banyan," which looks remarkably like the guttapercha tree; the natives seem to use its gum mixed with gambier, in order to make that dye "fast;" but there is some doubt whether it is not the sap of the real banyan-tree which is used for the purpose. A very strong silk is made from the grub called the celestial silkworm,' locally, "paddy-insect." This grub is found on a sort of maple. When fullgrown it is thrown into boiling vinegar, on which the "head" of the gut, or "silk," appears; this is sharply torn out with both hands drawn apart, and is as long as the space between them, say five feet; it is so strong that one single thread of it is sufficient to make a line with which to catch the smaller kinds of fish.

66

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From The London Quarterly Review. THE CHATEAUX OF THE LOIRE.*

66

the limestone rock and peering down
across the greensward to the river, where
later on was to rise the noble Abbey of
Marmontier, whose greatest abbot was the
famous Alcuin of York." Our Martinmas
still keeps alive the memory of the great
prelate's festival on the 11th of Novem-
ber. His tomb, says Mr. Cook,
was the
ancient sanctuary, the Delphic oracle of
France, the centre of the Merovingian
world, where its kings came to question
destiny at the shrine round which the
counts of Blois and of Anjou broke so
many lances. Mans, Angers, and all
Brittany were dependent on the See of
Tours, whose canons were the Capels and
Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, the
Count of Flanders and the Patriarch of
Jerusalem, the Archbishops of Mayence,
of Cologne, and Compostello."
prospered through the concourse of pil-
grims to its shrine. Its population multi-
plied tenfold; its mint became as famous
as that of Paris; its silks were finer than
any other part of France could produce,
until Nantes and Lyons began to vie with

Tours

THE famous town of Tours, on the banks of the rapid and sandy stream of the Loire, lies a hundred and forty-five miles south-west of Paris. The charms of its situation have been much overrated, but it is a place with a great history. Under the proud name of Casarodunum it is mentioned in the itinerary of Antonine, and in the third century holds rank as a free State. After three hundred years of ease and prosperity under its Roman masters, days of fighting began, when new walls had to be built round Tours, and the citizens, who had grown accustomed to peace, were compelled to buckle on their armor and defend their good town against its foes. All the tides of life in those early ages flowed by Tours. It was the centre of the great network of Roman roads which bound together Poitiers, Chartres, Bruges, Orleans, Le Mans and Angers. From this town Christianity spread throughout Gaul. Its first bishop, St. Gatien, was one of a party of missionaries sent from Rome to evan-its artificers. Charlemagne, eager to segelize the Gallic provinces; St. Lidorius, the second bishop, began the cathedral the oldest in Touraine — in memory of his predecessor. Before the end of the fourth century St. Martin was installed as metropolitan. He had served in the army under Constantine, had been imprisoned and flogged at Milan for denouncing Arianism, and had founded the convent of Ligugé in the wilds of Poitiers, probably the oldest monastic establishment in France. When Lidorius died, in 370, the clergy insisted on having him as their head. Their choice was justified by the rapid spread of Christianity. On every side the heathen of Gaul hasten to join the Church. At last St. Martin, worn down by toil, retreated for rest to St. Symphorien, on the opposite bank of the Loire, "backed by

1. Old Touraine: the Life and History of the Famous Châteaux of France. By Theodore Andrea Cook, B.A., sometime Scholar of Wadham College,

Oxford. Two volumes. London: Percival & Co. 1892.

2. The Renaissance of Art in France. By Mrs.

Mark Pattison. London: Kegan Paul & Co. 1879.
3. A Handbook for Traveliers in France. Part
I. London: John Murray. 1892.

cure a worthy man for the See, summoned Alcuin, who had been trained under our own Bede, from Rome, and made him bishop. The emperor's three sons were taught in his famous school. He begged Charlemagne's permission to send England for some books, the "flowers of British learning; so that they may be found not only in the garden close of York, but that Touraine also may have its share in the fruits of Paradise."

to

Dark days came when the Northmen rowed up the Loire and burned St. Martin's Abbey, but the Counts of Anjou restored the place and granted many privileges to the brave citizens. Fulk the Good might now be seen sitting beside the dean in the abbey. He waged no wars and cared little for politics. Legend has gathered round his memory. Once, it is said, after all had refused the man's appeal, he bore a loathsome leper on his shoulders to the shrine of St. Martin, to find whilst sitting in the choir that the leper was Christ himself. But it is another count - Fulk Nerra, the Black Falwho has left his stamp most deeply

con

on Touraine.

Every town in the region | his widowed daughter, whom the loss of

has its legend of this dashing soldier. the White Ship had driven to the cloisters. He was a born fighter, who led his cavalry Other members of the house gathered to again and again on the foe at Conquereux, bid farewell to the count. Geoffrey Plan"as the storm wind sweeps down upon tagenet, who wore a spray of the golden the thick cornrigs." That victory made broom which brightens the fields of his him master of the lower reaches of the native province, was there, his "fair and Loire. He already held Amboise through ruddy countenance lit up by the lightning his mother's right; Loches had come to glance of a pair of brilliant eyes." His him through his wife. Both these for- broad shoulders and active frame bore tresses became centres from which he witness that he was no unworthy scion of kept up his fierce struggle with Odo, his brave house. But Geoffrey was also a Count of Blois. He now built a long man of culture, whose intellectual gifts crescent of forts from Angers, on the west lifted him far above the ordinary fighting of Tours, to Amboise on the east, with a baron of those turbulent times. A few view to cut out Touraine from the do- years after the scene at Fontevrault Mamains of Odo. An occasional visit to the tilda bore a son at Le Mans, who afterHoly Land, and the erection of an abbey wards became King Henry II. of England. at Beaulieu, beneath his high tower at The old feud between Anjou and Blois Loches, were meant as atonement for broke out again when Stephen, third son many a deed of blood. Mad bursts of of the Count of Blois, succeeded in grasppassion, which would have wrecked most ing the English crown. It was not till men's lives," seem scarcely to have made 1154 that Henry Plantagenet was crowned a break in his cool, calculating, far-seeing at Westminster. He was the true depolicy; a rapid and unerring perception scendant of the Black Falcon, and made of his own ends, a relentless obstinacy in his court "a very pandemonium of energy." pursuing them." Fulk had turned north- His power steadily grew on both sides of wards to Maine - thus giving the first the Channel. Thomas-à-Becket filled a sign of the advancing wave of Norman large place in the history of those days. conquest - when he was called home to In 1163, as Archbishop of Canterbury, he repel a sharp invasion from Blois. The attended a council held by the pope at Black Falcon retook two of his captured Tours; in 1170 he met his royal master, fortresses and seized Chinon. All Tou- to whom he had been reconciled the preraine, except its capital, now belonged to vious year, at Tours. Henry was on his the Counts of Anjou. The conqueror way to Amboise, whence he wrote, in paid a pilgrimage to Palestine, and died Becket's presence, a letter instructing his near Metz on his way homeward. It was son to restore the archbishop's estates. left for his son, Geoffrey Martel, to stretch the boundary of his realm over Maine and capture Tours after an obstinate siege. More than seventy years later, in 1119, Matilda of Anjou married our Prince William, son of Henry Beauclerc. The future lord of England, Normandy, and Anjou was drowned next year in the White Ship, amid the lamentations of three kingdoms. Henry I. now married his daughter Matilda, widow of the Emperor Henry V., to Geoffrey Plantagenet, son of Fulk, Count of Anjou. A family gathering was held in the great Abbey of Fontevrault. Fulk had received the cross from Archbishop Hildebert in the Cathedral of Tours, and had come to the abbey to see

Tours is the best centre from which to visit “the myriad châteaux of the Loire," which still bear "witness to the skill and training of the architects and sculptors of Touraine." The slow trains to Chinon give the traveller ample opportunity to study the scenery. "The sands that line the river-beds are fringed with willows, bending down as if to sip its waters; poplars, aspens, and acacias shade the stream, where countless little islets break the silver current." It is strange to think that from the soft sunshine of this afternoon land of idleness and laughter sprang the martial Counts of Anjou, and our own fiery Plantagenets. Balzac speaks of "the sentiment of beauty which breathes