of them has not come to light. For the rest, I have put the book together, as (I think) he would have wished it done. All the finished chapters will be found between these covers, which he marked as portions of the book which he had written without knowing it.' In the letter I have quoted he proposed to cut down the essays on Plutarch and Shakespeare. This is a task too delicate for friendship to perform, and I have left them precisely as they came from his hand. Here, then, is a book planned by George Wyndham himself, marred by lacunae, which he would have filled up, but none the less complete in itself, and a fair picture of his mind and art.

George Wyndham possessed, in full measure, what Mallarmé once called la joie critique. Literature was for him no áρeруov, no mere way of escape from politics. If he was an amateur in feeling, he was a craftsman in execution. He loved books, and he wrote of them as though he loved them. His enthusiasm kept pace with his passion of discovery. He combined with what Hazlitt called 'gusto' a marvellous patience. If he wrote with excitement, he deemed that no labour in the collecting of facts went unrewarded. A new 'find' or a new theory' warmed him like wine. would turn it over in his mind enthusiastically and furiously discourse upon it. And sitting himself down, with pen and paper, he would test it and check it by all the means within his reach. When he first designed his Springs of Romance, he sketched what he would put into it. I shall stick it full of all I like,' he said, 'the "Regina Avrillosa" and the Border Ballads; The Castle of Clerimont, and the Lady of Tripoli, The Song of Roland and the Fall of Constantinople, Marco Polo, and Antoine Galand.'

He

As he came to the writing, he contracted his scope, but the design was grandiose, and the Address, which was its result, was all the better for the knowledge of many books, which he had read and did not quote. He worked all the more wisely because he had something in reserve. Moreover, as I have said, he brought a whiff of the open air into criticism. If he was happy among his books, he was happy also riding across country. And on hunting days he neither read nor wrote.

X

It may seem something of a paradox that George Wyndham, keenly alive as he was to all the changing controversies of the hour, should yet have found a lasting solace in the past; and yet the paradox soon disappears in the light of his character and his upbringing. He had a simple faith in the force of tradition; he was acutely conscious of the heritage that was his. This autumn I addict myself to Politics,' he wrote to a friend in 1907, 'beginning at Perth, on October 18th, and continuing at Hexham, Birmingham, Dover, Manchester, York, and Leicester. . . I do this from a sense of duty. The Gentry of England must not abdicate.' There was his creed in a phrase: The Gentry of England must not abdicate,' for the very reason that the gentry had its roots in the past, that it received from the past its duties and its privileges. He had not a profound belief in platform discourse, but it was the means, nearest to his hand, of carrying on the work which had been bequeathed to him by his ancestors. He knew that he was but a lanternbearer, and he was resolved that his lantern should

be handed to those who came after him, still alight and clear-burning. Even fox-hunting, in his eyes, was a glory of tradition. The hounds meet here to-morrow,' he wrote to his father from Saighton on the Christmas Day of 1907. 'Twenty-eight persons are coming out from Eaton. . . . And the local lights will try to hold their own against the paladins of Leicestershire and Meath. It is interesting-apart from the fun of it and the sport-to see this when political changes may abolish the gentry and their pursuits. Personally I back the gentry.' There is George Wyndham's view made clear as crystal. He felt within him that he came from afar,' that it was his first duty to defend the traditional order of things, and he accepted the existing plan of political warfare, with a full determination to make the best of it. And let it be remembered of him that his mind merged what is in what was, that he looked upon the past with the eye of the living present.

A man holding such a creed could not help finding his keenest interest in bygone times. Gladly he turned from the racket of the hustings to the calm of the settled past which yielded its secrets to his imagination. He delighted, as I have said, to be thought an 'archaistic barbarian.' He confessed, as we have seen, 'a ruder relish for the pagan horseflesh of the Sagas.' And gladly would he have gone back, if he could, still further into the childhood of the world. It was not mere propinquity which inspired him with a passion for Stonehenge. When he visited Wells, it was not the cathedral, not the library, with its Jensen's Pliny and the autograph of Erasmus, that held him most closely in thrall, it was Wookey Hole, that strange cavern

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of the Mendips, out of which flows the river Axe, and which was a place of refuge for our remote forefathers. Its corridors and galleries, its vast chambers, like chapter-houses,' filled him with an ecstatic wonder. It delighted him to think that there the Britons hid and defended themselves against the beasts of the fields and other foes, when the lake-village of Glastonbury was destroyed, that there in the soil their combs and their pottery, their coins and their needles and their bones were found. In a moment his fancy was at work. With the help of the excavator he was busy putting the past together from the poor fragments that remain, and divining the habits and ambitions of the ingenious lake-dwellers, who, I think, made but a poor exchange when they left their free homes in the marshes of Glastonbury for the dim-lit caves of Wookey Hole. And, when the excavator showed him a denarius of 124 B.C., he was all excitement. Now perpend,' said he, 'how is that? The Roman Conquest was in A.D. 70. I plumped at once for the theory that it has filtered through the dim, but civilised, Europe of which Morris tells his tales.' Here the archeologists are on his side, for Sir Arthur Evans is persuaded by the relics of the fen-settlement at Glastonbury to conclude that the more luxurious arts of the classical world were already influencing even the extreme west of our island in pre-Roman times,' that the little Western Venice' of Glastonbury may claim some direct heritage from a still older Venetian culture.'

ΧΙ

Since George Wyndham felt the ardent curiosity of the archæologist, since in politics he was a stout champion of tradition, since he knew well that we are but lantern-bearers, it is not strange that he turned his critical eyes towards the past, that he was intimately at home in the thirteenth century, that he bade his research halt at the first half of the seventeenth. His only outpost in the modern world was Sir Walter Scott, and Sir Walter was the great reviver of antiquity in our land. It is easy, therefore, to detect a unity of purpose in George Wyndham's work, and this unity prompts the question what more he would have done had a longer span of life been allotted to him. He died in the fulness of his strength and courage. His accession to an estate had filled him with new hopes and new ambitions. He had been disillusioned by politics. The old order, for which he had fought, was fast changing. The passage of the Parliament Bill and the method of its passage had persuaded him, as well they might, to take a grave view of the future. He knew that war was coming with Germany, and he knew that little or nothing was being done to meet the surely impending danger. Above all, he disliked the internationalising of our politics. He feared what he called 'the Ortolan brigade.' He saw that the cause of Progress and of the People versus the Peers' was led by curly-haired C—, "dear. old chappie and all the other bounding brothers of cosmopolitan finance and polyglot "Society," dining off truffles,' and imitating 'the Yiddish pronunciation

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