THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES ESSAYS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS ESSAYS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS BY JOHN ANDREW DOYLE LATE FELLOW OF ALL SOULS ; AUTHOR OF "THE ENGLISH IN AMERICA" EDITED BY W. P. KER WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE RIGHT HON. SIR WILLIAM ANSON, BART., M.P. WARDEN OF ALL SOULS COLLEGE, OXFORD WITH PORTRAIT LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 191 1 EDITOR'S NOTE THANKS and full acknowledgments are here rendered to those who have kindly allowed the following Essays to be reprinted : namely, to the editor and publishers of the Quarterly Review for the articles on " Freeman, Froude, and Seeley " (October 1895), "Francis Parkman " and "The Poetry of Sport" (which both appeared in April 1897), and "Rifle Shooting" (January 1897); the English Historical Review for the papers on Sir George Trevelyan (1899 and 1904), and Ezra Stiles (1904) ; Baily's Magazine for " Literature and the Turf" (November 1892), and the three articles on "Racehorse Breeding" (October 1894, January 1896, and May 1905) ; the Kennel Encyclopedia for the essay on " Harriers," written in the spring of 1907. Besides these, Doyle wrote many others, more particularly in the English Historical Review on American books between 1886 and 1906. He vii viii EDITOR'S NOTE contributed to the American Historical Review (January 1902) an account of the papers of Sir Charles Vaughan ; this might well have been included here but for the large number of quota- tions from Vaughan's MSS., which would have overloaded this volume. Some readers, it is true, might have chosen it rather than the very technical papers on "Race- horse Breeding " ; but many of Doyle's acquaint- ance will turn first to these, while others may be content to accept what the Warden of All Souls has said in the pages that follow about Doyle's serious interests. The book is dedicated to all his friends. W. P. KER. 19th September 1911. INTRODUCTION THE writer of the essays which form the con- tents of this little volume was one who left an enduring recollection of his personality upon those whose privilege it was to know him ; and the essays themselves will to some extent account for this in the testimony which they bear to his many interests, his wide knowledge, his sound common sense, and his abundant genial humour. John Andrew Doyle was born in 1844; he went to Eton when he was nine years old, and his Eton life extended from 1853 to 1862 a full nine years. At Eton he was not specially dis- tinguished ; his ability was recognised, but it was not of the sort which made for success on the lines on which success was in those days attainable. His scholarship was somewhat rough, he was a fair mathematician, and he was very unhandy at games, curiously so for one who was interested ix x INTRODUCTION in every form of sport, and who was, in after life at any rate, a sound critic of performance on the river and in the cricket field. As I first recollect him, though he had been at Eton for nearly four years before I went there, he was still a small boy of thirteen, conspicuously untidy, but always a pleasant companion. We recognised that his knowledge both of sport and literature was outside the range of the ordinary Eton boy. When he left Eton in 1862 he went for a year to a private tutor before coming up to Balliol, and so he somewhat drifted away from his immediate contemporaries at Eton, and lived in a different group of friends from theirs. So I did not see very much of him during the time that we were at Balliol together. It used to be said of him that he had enjoyed every sort of experience in examinations. In the final classical school he obtained a first class, and in distinguished company ; in moderations he was placed in the second class in classics, and in the third in mathe- matics ; while in responsions he failed on the first occasion to satisfy the examiners. In other and plainer words he formed one of the group of distinguished men, a solace to many weaker vessels, who were ploughed in Smalls. He INTRODUCTION xi obtained his first class in the autumn of 1867, and between that date and his election to a Fellowship at All Souls in November 1869, he resided a good deal in Oxford, reading for the Arnold Essay, and for the Fellowship. During this time he made many friends among a genera- tion of Balliol men junior to himself, so that his Oxford circle was a wide one. He won the prize for the Arnold Essay in the spring of 1869, the subject being " The English Colonies in America before the Declaration of Independence," and this essay was the starting- point of the literary work of his life. From the first he spent a good deal of time at All Souls, not as a regular resident but coming for days together, either for College business or for purposes of study. At that time a feeling had already arisen in the College that the Commis- sioners' Ordinance of 1857 had left room for further considerable change ; in the early seventies leases fell in, the College income increased, and All Souls became the playground of the academic reformer. Doyle threw himself with keen interest into the questions of College reform, and, among the various schemes of change propounded by our con- stitution makers, he steadily upheld the view xii INTRODUCTION that there was room for a college of an exceptional type, devoting itself through its professoriate and its library to University purposes, encouraging advanced study by the endowment of research, securing through a system of Prize Fellowships the continued interest in academic life of men engaged in professional or public work, and yet retaining its old character as a Collegiate Society. No better representative of the Fellowship system could be found than Doyle. Always available for the transaction of College business, the conduct of a Fellowship examination, the management of the Library, a real student, with wide interests outside Oxford life, he regarded a Fellowship as membership of a society. And thus the part which he played in the social life of the College for nearly forty years was not merely the outcome of a kindly and companionable nature, it was his contribution to the common stock of corporate good feeling which went to make up his conception of a college. The days when the last University commission was sitting were days of storm and stress, of strong though friendly difference of opinion as to the future of the College. Of the many who knew Doyle long and well as the link between successive generations of Fellows, INTRODUCTION xiii few know how strenuous a part he played in the making, as well as in the working, of the con- stitution of the College as it now is. But his home, while his father and mother lived, was the centre of his affections. He was an only child. His father, whom I recollect as a most courteous and genial host, died at the end of 1888. He had been editor of the Morning Chronicle when that paper was almost a rival of the Times. Then he became a Poor Law Inspector, and settled in North Wales. John Doyle's mother was one of the three daughters of Sir John Easthope who owned the Morning Chronicle from 1834 to 1847, and sat as a Liberal for various constituencies, before, and for a good many years after, the Reform Bill of 1832. Doyle's home, when I first knew him, was at Plas-dulas in Denbighshire, but, later, property was bought and a house built at Pendarren near Crickhowell in Breconshire ; there he lived during the greater part of his life, and there he died in August 1907. The house was very prettily situ- ated, looking up and down a wooded valley in the hills of Brecon, and the estate gave scope for Doyle's love of breeding cattle, sheep, horses, and dogs. His local interests, apart from his family xiv INTRODUCTION ties, were strong. His experiments in the breed- ing of animals were not merely speculative. He wanted to raise the standard and to improve the quality of stock in his own neighbourhood. As time went on he took his share in Local Govern- ment, and in that highly contentious branch of Local Government which is concerned with educa- tion. He was a member of the joint committee appointed for Breconshire under the Welsh Inter- mediate Education Act, and of the conference which formulated the Charter for the University of Wales. He did much useful work on the Brecon- shire Education Committee under the Act of 1902, and on the Council and Agricultural Committee of the Aberystwyth College. The "Idyll of Education," printed a little further on, is all that appears here to testify to his interest in the subject ; but it may be com- mended to the reader as showing how Doyle brought to bear upon the transaction of business the inestimable gift of humour. It may suggest how acceptable would be letters from him describ- ing the educational situation in Wales, addressed to an anxious Minister struggling with the difficulties of the administration of the Act of 1902, and written, as one old friend would write to INTRODUCTION xv another, during the years 1904 to 1905. They were indeed an oasis in the desert of official correspond- ence. Shortly one may say of this side of Doyle's life that though he had no ambition for a Parlia- mentary career, no great desire for public life, nor any of that liking which some men have for the transaction of business for its own sake, he gave his time and labour ungrudgingly to the service of the people among whom he lived. Apart from local business and College affairs, he devoted himself to serious historical study, with leisure for the acquisition of an almost in- exhaustible knowledge of all that pertains to the successful breeding of racehorses, and of dogs, and to a continuous and practical interest in rifle- shooting. The essays which follow may serve to give some idea of the range of his interests, and of his modes of treating the subjects that interested him. The papers on Parkman, on Ezra Stiles, and on Trevelyan, illustrate the wealth of his learn- ing in that part of history which he had made more especially his own. The essay on Freeman leads up to a comparison of his old friend with Froude and Seeley, and to an analysis of the qualities which go to make a historian. It is a good sample xvi INTRODUCTION of the judicial and appreciative qualities of Doyle's mind. Personal friendship and a certain intel- lectual sympathy did not blind him to the limita- tions and prejudices of Freeman. Froude's whole conception of historical treatment, his impressionist methods and his use of authorities, were alien to Doyle's habits of thought. Yet he makes an effort, though perhaps the effort is obvious, to appreciate the artistic value of Froude's work ; and he freely acknowledges that Freeman's assaults on his great contemporary were not merely clumsy and often unfair, but that they showed an incapacity to understand some qualities which a historian must possess if his work is to take a permanent place in literature. He gives full recognition to Seeley's genius for summing up and generalising the results of large tracts of history ; but he makes very good fun of the theory that history is only valuable, or even respectable, in so far as it bears upon present political issues. The essays on the Poetry of Sport, on Litera- ture and the Turf, and on the Breeding of Race- horses, bring out some of Doyle's most characteristic features ; his range of literary knowledge, his intimate acquaintance with most forms of sport, his keen appreciation of the humorous side of any INTRODUCTION xvii topic, and the extreme seriousness with which he would treat its serious side. Take the article on the " Poetry of Sport," one may note how easily he treats two poets so different in character as Drayton and Somerville, and how satisfactory is his explanation of the deficiencies of the poetry of the eighteenth century in its handling of sporting topics. When he criticises the choice of sporting poems in the Badminton series he complains, and with reason, that many of these are remote from any connec- tion with sport, while Sir Francis Doyle and Mr Bromley Davenport are left out of the collection ; but he also unearths, from back numbers of BclVs Life and the Saturday Review, ballads which testify to his own omnivorous reading, his retentive memory, and his shrewd critical sense of what is worth remembering. Again, in the paper on " Literature and Sport," he deals with the hold which the language of the turf has taken upon our vocabulary, and he draws his illustrations first from the correspond- ence in the " Rockingham Memoirs," and then from speeches to which he had listened at a Diocesan Conference. One may regret that he did not intervene, as he was half-minded to do, xviii INTRODUCTION in the last instance, in order to satisfy himself whether the reverend speakers "quite understood the difference between a handicap, and a weight for age race with penalties." In truth Doyle looked on sport as he describes it on page 173 ; to him it is "a subject which involves vivid passion and varied action, and which brings men into contact with all that is most beautiful in inanimate nature." "Vivid passion, and varied action" thus it was that a run, a race, a cricket match, became to him a living dramatic event. Therein he found a kindred spirit in Sir Francis Doyle, of whom he tells anecdotes which bring back pleasant memories of days when one might hear the two Doyles, in the Common Room at All Souls, dis- cussing the great races of the past ; where John Doyle knew the history and Sir Francis had witnessed the event. And a great race was to John Doyle a bit of history which should be treated with conscientious accuracy of detail. He will not admit the veri- similitude of the "bird -like dart" with which Sir Francis tells us that Matilda came to the front and won the Leger. "Did ever human being," he asks, "see the horse who could make INTRODUCTION xix running over the mile and three-quarters of the Leger course, and then muster speed for a * bird- like dart'?" And then he, with the scrupulous fairness of his nature, admits a possible excep- tion in the way that Throstle won the Leger in 1894. I well remember a conversation in which he tried to bring home to my untutored intelligence the finish of that celebrated race, how Ladas having made his effort and settled accounts with Matchbox was called on to meet the unexpected challenge of Throstle, and, as Doyle said, to win his race twice over, which he failed to do. If I have told the story aright it shows how real Doyle could make these things to a novice in racing. Doyle's experiments in breeding were on a small scale, but at the time of his death he owned a filly foal by St Frusquin out of his mare Rosaline, who trained on into the Oaks winner, Rosedrop, of the year 1910. The papers on the " Breeding of Racehorses " bring out a feature of Doyle's literary method, or I should say of his character, which has to some extent deprived him of his due as a historian. When writing on a subject, and under conditions which, in his opinion, justified treatment with a xx INTRODUCTION light hand, we get literature of the pleasantest sort; a topic of interest, treated with a constant sparkle of jest and allusion, and a vast range and reserve of knowledge easily handled. Facts are there in abundance, marshalled in admirable array, and we feel that as many more might be forth- coming as were wanted, but we are never over- whelmed either with the mass of the material or the gravity of the subject. But when Doyle thought it necessary to be serious he could be very serious indeed, in small things as in great. I have seen him called on, as judge, to decide on the merits of two belated fox terriers at a village show. A jesting con- versation was broken off midway; his counten- ance, which nature had invested with a quaint solemnity of feature, assumed the air of a counsel about to sum up in a grave criminal trial, or of an examiner called on to pronounce finally between two candidates for a fellowship. Every point was considered and weighed with anxious care, judgment was pronounced between two animals whose merits hardly justified the pains bestowed upon them and he took up his humorous tale at the point at which he had left off. Race horse breeding was, to Doyle, a serious INTRODUCTION xxi subject. He was as he tells us (p. 225) "precoci- ously well grounded in the * studbook,' " and knew all about Touchstone and his parentage, when, at the age of eleven, he was introduced to that distinguished horse. Many years ago I was his companion in a visit to the Cobham Stud Farm. The groom who showed us round was not at first impressed with our appearance as sportsmen, and assumed that we had no more than a cockney interest in what we saw. But I watched his face as Doyle discussed the parentage of one animal after another, and ran through its pedigree for generations. In half an hour he was like the Queen of Sheba after her interview with Solomon. There was no more spirit in him ; and we left the place with a reputation of which I hoped that by a judicious silence I had acquired some portion. But though this interest began early and lasted through his life, the knowledge which these chapters show, and the memory which could retain the bewildering intricacies of pedigree to which we are introduced, is amazing. And the knowledge was there for use. Doyle was always testing theory by practice, as the papers show. But they are not light reading, nor did Doyle xxii INTRODUCTION intend them so to be. He desired, for practical purposes, to criticise certain theories and to state his own. As a critic he would overlook nothing that might be said against his own opinion ; as an exponent of a theory he was careful to state its limitations. To inform those who wanted to know, and for that purpose to be full, and clear, and fair these were his objects, and these were the objects with which he set about writing his great work on the English in America. True it is that the subject of his choice does not lend itself to dramatic treatment ; nor does the growth of the individual colonies bring out, in respect of any one of them, events on a grand scale. The subject is broken up into histories of a number of separate groups. There is abundance of incident and adventure, but a lack of continuous and concentrated interest. Heroism and endurance may be found in plenty, but of the sort that makes history without obtaining individual recognition. The great personalities of the AVar of Independence and its sequel are outside the period with which he had undertaken to deal ; and we miss, too, that chain of family connection which contributes to the unity of our own history. Doyle would sacrifice nothing to display. All INTRODUCTION xxiii that has to be told is told in clear nervous English, admirably arranged as to matter, and with a judicial quality which is not a common character- istic of the historians of the United States. Fulness of detail is never allowed to overmaster the general scheme of each volume ; the vigour of thought which draws illustrations from historical events remote in time or place is never over- whelmed by the minutiae of the affairs of a struggling municipality. But these volumes are necessarily a series of separate narratives ; all, from an Englishman's point of view, leading up to the monumental incompetence of statesmanship and generalship which brought about, and brought to its bitter close, the War of Independence. The English in America is a storehouse of information ; it is probably destined to acquire a heightened value as time goes on; as the history of the colonies passes out of the region of political controversy, and is read as the story of the develop- ment of English institutions under diverse forms, amidst inhospitable surroundings and in constant conflict with savage life ; the small beginnings of a great nation. But Doyle devoted his life to a work which from its nature, as he well knew, could not take xxiv INTRODUCTION its place as a literary classic, and to this work he devoted literary powers of no common order. This was characteristic of the man. Whether the breeding of horses, or dogs, or cattle, or poultry was in question, or the encouragement of rifle- shooting, or the promotion of education in Wales, or the provision of a truthful account of a period of history, Doyle's methods were the same to do a piece of work which needed to be done, to do it thoroughly, without a touch of self-consciousness or a thought of display. Doyle's keenness about rifle-shooting, and his work in that line are evidenced by his paper on Modern Rifle-Shooting ; but it is a subject on which I am not qualified to speak, nor again is it easy for any one but a neighbour to describe what Doyle was to the people among whom he lived. He had no near relations, and his love of country life made him somewhat of a solitary. He was a man with many friends ; but few of them knew all the many sides of him. He is well described by an anonymous writer in the West- minster Gazette, who clearly knew him well. " Witty, deeply read, overflowing with sym- pathy, intelligently interested in an astonishing variety of subjects, modest and chary of self- INTRODUCTION xxv assertion, vigorous in his likes and dislikes, but always prone to take the generous view, swift to anger against any petty or mean act, quick in repartee, a perfect mine of good stories, he was a companion among a thousand, and as followed of necessity from the catholicity of his tastes, a companion to many kinds of men." This is a very true account of John Doyle as I knew him, and I had known him for a long time. It is not easy to write of an old friend in a way that satisfies oneself. Doyle had no near relations ; his house is sold ; the memory of his service to his neighbours will in due course pass away; in All Souls it will be many years before he is forgotten. But the man, so unassuming, so companionable, with his great powers of mind and memory, and the serious purpose which underlay his many interests and his abundant humour, made an enduring impression upon those with whom he lived, an impression more valuable perhaps, and more lasting in its influence than is made by many who play a more conspicuous part in the world's affairs, and occupy a larger space in the chronicle of their time. WILLIAM R. ANSON. August 1911. AN IDYLL OF EDUCATION THYRSIS : Chairman of Agricultural Education Committee (just returned from Shrewsbury). STEEPHON : Chairman of Intermediate Education Committee. DAMCETAS : Chairman of County Council. THYRSIS Sweet as to man long pent in dismal city Is flight to woodland shade and meadow green, Such, such to me this peace-begirt Committee To me fresh fled from a far stormier scene. Here education's bark may find a haven, A haven sought in vain by Severn shore, Where conferences endless, at the Raven, Suggest an altered motto ' Evermore. 1 DAM<ETAS Sing then, while thought of strife and turmoil slumbers, Proclaim the praises of the nymph adored : Sing thou too, Strephon, in alternate numbers, "I crown the victor from the County's hoard. THYRSIS Fair is the milk, the churn, the separator, Fairer the maids that list to Parrey's lay. Fairest is Phyllis. Ill can words translate her Beauty, while marching on her milky way. xxvii xxviii AN IDYLL OF EDUCATION STREPHOK Blue are the hose, ill-darned, of her I dote on, Blue as the glass that veils her beaming eye, She who knows all that ever Plato wrote on, She who evaluates, but makes not, pi (e). THYRSIS See Erin weep o'er casks of unsold butter, See Stilton tremble on her cheese-built throne, No grocer dare the name of Dorset utter, Camembert conquered, Roquefort overthrown. STREPHON Wretched the maid who wastes, howe'er expert, on Butter and cheese a heaven-descended soul. Better to roam through Somerville and Girton, Freshwoman, free from chaperon's control. DAMCETAS Verdict in this case would mean endless sitting, Far past my powers to decide the prize 'Twixt you who sing, observing language fitting, The nose of Phyllis, and sweet Chloe's eyes. Thyrsis, these notes, a sheaf, all equal mated, Ten, and each lettered ten, to thee belong. Take, Strephon, take this cheque, crossed, signed and dated, And know twice fifty pounds have crowned thy song. Thus each of you receives an equal bounty, And still while you, my shepherds, shall bear sway, The teacher shall perambulate the county, The maids shall study, and the rates shall pay. FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY 1 IN criticising the manner in which Mr Stephens has done his work it is not easy to avoid some- what conventional terms of praise. To say that a biography is sober, impartial, and well balanced sounds suspiciously like a euphemistic description of dullness. Yet, in truth, it does a biographer no little credit when this can be said about the life of one who held many unpopular opinions, who assuredly made no pretence of expressing those opinions in a modified or conciliatory fashion, and whose work even on topics which are not necessarily controversial often gathered about it an atmosphere of controversy. Mr Stephens has shown no wish to conceal the asperity with which Freeman often expressed his views. He has not 1 "The Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman," by W. R. W. Stephens, B.D., Dean of Winchester (2 vols.). London, 1895. " English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century," by James Anthony Froude. London, 1895. " Lectures and Essays," by Sir J. R. Secley. London, 1895. 1 A 2 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY done less than justice to the warm sympathies and strenuous love of right which, however warped in their action by prejudices, invariably underlay those views. To a great extent Mr Stephens has been willing to keep himself in the background. He has allowed his subject, the most copious, the most outspoken and most characteristic of letter- writers, to present himself in his correspondence, while the biographer has, in a great measure, confined himself to the work of selection and explanatory comment. To those who knew Free- man the book may not present many new lights. His mind and character had no inner chambers, no half-revealed recesses. What Mr Stephens's work will do, we think, is to amplify and illustrate what most of Freeman's friends already know. And there must be many to whom Freeman was personally unknown, but who, having learned from him either directly, or indirectly and un- consciously, will take no small interest in tracing the formation and development of views which thirty years ago were original, though they are now commonplaces of historical study. "The general reader" was a being of whom Freeman spoke with no good will, and probably the general reader will have his revenge by taking THE CHARACTER OF FREEMAN 3 no great interest in Mr Stephens's book. That will not be the fault of the writer. The life of Freeman was not rich in incident ; the character was not made interesting by complexities. And yet, while free from complexity, it is a difficult character to sketch in such a fashion as to make it live. It is not easy to bring home to people's minds that curious mixture of wide learning and great mental activity with an almost total in- difference to many sides of human life and thought. Mr Stephens is no doubt right in regarding Free- man as his own best biographer. The letters are a very full exposition of his beliefs, his hopes, his likes and dislikes. They are, as Mr Stephens says, written with a simplicity and directness which often remind one of a very clever child. And if Freeman was in a sense egotistic, he had no lack of self-knowledge. He could judge himself and his own works as he judged others, by a some- what narrow and peculiar, but exceedingly definite standard. Yet the allusiveness of the letters, the constant use of phrases not chosen for their ex- pressiveness, but consecrated in Freeman's mind by some peculiar association, will probably make them obscure and even distasteful to many readers. That capacity for self-judgment of which we 4 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY have just spoken is well illustrated by an article in the Forum, published in 1892, wherein Free- man sketched his own early life as bearing on the formation and growth of his opinions. The article is an interesting comment on what Mr Stephens tells us of his hero's childhood. When eighteen months old he became an orphan, and two years later he was left with no friend and companion save his grandmother and one sister twelve years older than himself. Freeman was not the man to magnify small grievances, or to be disloyal to his own flesh and blood, yet it is very plain that the old lady was exacting and often unsympathetic. Elsewhere he met with kindness and encouragement. Hannah More, as Mr Masson has pointed out, might have eloped with Chatterton, much to the benefit of both parties, and she declined a glass of old spirits from Macaulay. A liaison with Freeman, aged four, has now to be added to the scandalous chronicle. Under such conditions a quick - witted child, with an unbounded thirst for knowledge and with singular vigour and definiteness of mind, could hardly fail to develop symptoms of priggishness. His bent was to theology ; at fourteen he taught POLITICAL TENDENCIES 5 himself Hebrew, disputed over the translation of the Septuagint, and waxed wroth with a French writer who propounded a theory of Creation which Freeman deemed unscriptural. As a rule the political views of a schoolboy, if he has any, are determined by a process of reaction and contradiction. The associations of Freeman's house were Tory. His mother, Mary Anne Carless, claimed descent from a Royalist soldier who had shared the retreat of Charles in the Boscobel oak. Freeman, however, was impelled towards Liberalism by something more than the mere negative process of repulsion. His maternal aunt was married to Thomas Attwood, of Birmingham. He is probably best known to the present generation by his projects for paper money projects which have survived not by their own interest or merit, but as having furnished Mill with an opportunity of annihilating " currency juggles " once and for ever. Mill, however, in assailing the financier, pays a tribute of respect to the political leader. To the early teaching of Mr Attwood, Freeman himself attributed that sympathy with the efforts of small nations to maintain their independence which underlay all his political convictions. At fourteen Freeman 6 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY was sent to a somewhat rough preparatory school at Cheam, in Surrey, where he remained for two years. In his own opinion he gained more than he lost by not going to one of the great public schools. We may agree with the conclusion, with- out accepting the reasoning by which Freeman arrived at it. " Would Harrow or Eton, in 1836 or 1837, have set me to read the book which I was set to read in my private school ? That book was A. A. Taylor's ' History of the Overthrow of the Roman Empire and the Foundation of the principal European States.' ' Probably not ; nor can we suppose that the reading of this or that book in particular was essential to the formation of Freeman's mind. " You never will teach the oak or the beech to be aught but a greenwood tree." Freeman's passion for historical study was too deeply innate to depend on any one bit of teaching. And we can but feel that a great public school might have taught Freeman certain things about his fellow -men which he never learned, and the knowledge of which would have added a good deal to the effectiveness of his work in life. Yet it is not unlikely that he would have been among those whose after-lives bear witness to one of the worst sides of a public school. Probably he would have been forced from his books into games for which he had no aptitude, cobbed by his fagmaster as an incorrigible toast-burner, and, except when he was wanted to do verses or give a construe, hunted hatless round the school- yard as " mad Freeman," till a nature, thoroughly kindly and far more sensitive than it seemed to be on the surface, would have been warped and soured. Whatever doubts there may have been as to the good or bad fortune which governed Freeman's lot in his school-days, there can be none as to the conditions of his University career. He had good grounds for saying that he could never forget that he had been a Scholar and Fellow of Trinity. To a man of Freeman's cast of mind and temper, to have been the dominant spirit of his own society would have been fatal. Hardly less fatal would it have been if he had fallen under the influence of men of narrow views and strong prejudices. For with all Freeman's independence and originality he was throughout life fully amenable to the influence of others. Let him once recognise that a man spoke on his own subject with authority, Freeman would accept him as a teacher on that subject with loyalty and even docility. 8 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY It is clear that the scholars' table at Trinity was one of those little intellectual oligarchies which in those days were rendered possible and necessary by the ordinary conditions of a pass- man's life in Oxford. The atmosphere into which Freeman was admitted was one of plain living and high thinking ; and, as the career of many of its members showed, it included men of far too much vigour of mind and width of interest to be in any danger of deteriorating into a mutual admiration society. Freeman came up to Oxford with a bent towards Anglicanism, and Trinity helped to con- firm it. But it was only the more vigorous and dignified side of Anglicanism which commanded his sympathy. An austere and intelligent system of moral discipline, methods of church govern- ment and teaching which had their roots in the past and could ever justify themselves by a rational appeal to historical precedent, these were the aspects of Anglicanism by which it com- mended itself to Freeman. One can find no trace of any sympathy with those crudities and absurdities on which Newman heaped contempt in " Loss and Gain." Indeed, in Freeman's first published work, the " History of Architecture," CLASSICAL READING 9 of which we shall have occasion to speak again, he protests against the irreverent puerilities into which some of his Anglican contemporaries were led by their eagerness to find "symbolism" in Christian buildings. And if Freeman owed much to his college, he also owed, and acknowledged that he owed, much to his University. To a mind like Freeman's, diffuse in some directions, narrow in others, the school of Liter ce Humaniores offered just the necessary mixture of restraint and stimulus. In the domain of history it prevented him from be- coming a mere accumulator: it forced upon him those studies bearing on abstract thought for which he was disinclined rather than unfitted. At the same time Freeman's natural gifts of mind and temper saved him from the special dangers of the schools. The ordinary candidate for classical honours who has by nature no special turn for metaphysics or moral philosophy will become a retailer of half -understood formula?. There was no danger of that with one like Freeman, to whom half-knowledge was of all things the most abhorrent. How Freeman's mind was widened by his classical reading, and even imbued with a certain 10 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY artistic sense whereof nature had been none too bounteous, may be best understood from his unfinished work, the " History of Sicily." We feel that as the writer is transported back to the field of his early studies, so the habits of mind which these studies required instinctively and unconsciously reassert themselves. The poetry of Pindar furnishes the writer with illustrations. The crudity and ungainliness of style which reached their height in the " Reign of William Rufus " disappear or are modified. One incident of Freeman's early life preserved by Mr Stephens is thoroughly characteristic. Before he was of age he was in love, and as soon as he reached twenty-one he offered marriage and was accepted. Some opposition from Free- man's own kinsfolk seemed the only hindrance to a happy union. But another was created by the sensitiveness of Freeman's own conscience. " He had expectations of a sufficient income, but it was partly derived from coal mines, and the shocking disclosures recently made respect- ing the treatment of colliers made him doubt whether he could conscientiously draw an income from that branch of industry until the system was reformed." There we see the same temper -TO SEEK THE NOBLEST' 11 at work which in later days made Freeman throw up a pleasant and lucrative connection with the Saturday Review, because he disapproved of its foreign politics. His standard of right and wrong might sometimes be perverse, his judgments hastily formed. But seldom has any man lived to whom the call of duty, once made clear, was more absolutely imperative, in defiance of any pleas of convenience or of usage. His action was always in purpose the embodiment of George Eliot's fine lines : " Nay, falter not ; 'tis an assured good To seek the noblest ; 'tis your only good Now you have seen it, for that higher vision Poisons all meaner choice for evermore." The inability of ordinary men to enter fully into that view no doubt often led them to mis- understand Freeman. His own inability to see that a man may fail on one point and yet not be unscrupulous on all, was at times a hindrance to his perception of the attitude of others. Like all enthusiasts, too, he often thought that what convinced him must be self-evident to all men, and charged his neighbours with breaking a moral law when they really denied its existence. That special type of virtue which one may 12 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY claim for Freeman does not in a worldly sense bring very much reward. Yet one reward it did earn for him. His was in many ways a life of strife, and he awakened not a few strong dis- likes. But we doubt whether his bitterest oppo- nent ever regarded him with a shade of suspicion or distrust. In 1849 Freeman published his first substantial work, a " History of Architecture." Mr Stephens has been no more than just to the merits of a somewhat forgotten book in the space which he has given to an analysis of it, and in the one ex- tract which he quotes. One defect no doubt the book has. Freeman very imperfectly perceived the truth, which perhaps Viollet-le-Duc alone among architectural writers has fully worked out, that the development of Christian architecture has been throughout determined by structural conditions ; that the artistic spirit in its quest for beauty has had almost invariably to work in strict subordination to those conditions ; that an architectural tour de force, such as St Urbain at Troyes, is no more than the logical outcome of one or two leading principles of structure pushed to their extreme. It is hardly fanciful to say that Freeman's classification of buildings QUALITY OF FREEMAN'S WORK 13 is to Viollet-le-Duc's as the Linnean system of botany is to that which has superseded it. On one side we have a classification according to visible forms, on the other according to principles of growth, only that in the case of buildings the practical results of the two classifications are largely the same. From its own point of view Freeman's work shows a width of knowledge and a power of generalisation which put it in advance of anything written up to that time. Isolated passages, too, such as that quoted by Mr Stephens, show Freeman at his very best as a writer. They are not the work of a man who is straining after purple patches ; they are the work of a man of vigorous mind and sound though limited literary taste, stirred by real conviction and real sympathy with his subject. Freeman's Anglicanism shows itself in the whole line of the work, and here and there in a somewhat boisterous attack on the Renaissance. But, as we have said before, he never scruples to take an independent attitude. His historical sense rebels against arbitrary divisions of archi- tecture into orthodox and unorthodox. In one writing under the full spell of the Oxford move- ment, with its suspicion of everything which 14 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY savoured of the Renaissance, it needed insight to see and courage to assert the merits of Jacobean Gothic, and to sing the praises of such a church as St Eustache in Paris. Again, in opposition to most of his Anglican contemporaries, Freeman claims a high place for Romanesque, and largely anticipates one of the best of his later mono- graphs, in which he classifies the various groups and analyses the principles of that school. With Freeman's marriage began his life as a literary man with a tincture of country tastes and pursuits. The records of his strenuous and overwhelming industry are contained in the ten pages at the end of Mr Stephens's book which enumerate the bare titles of Freeman's various productions. The letters on which, as we have said, Mr Stephens has so largely depended are interesting and attractive from their freshness, their directness, their revelation of an exceed- ingly vigorous mind. They have not the interest which attaches to a disclosure of the growth of convictions or the development of beliefs. In these, as in Freeman's published writings, we always feel that we are watching principles and habits of thought formed once for all and applied to new sets of facts. PARLIAMENTARY AMBITION 15 There was little chance that the course of Freeman's life would be changed, as it would have been changed, by the fulfilment of his ambition to obtain a seat in Parliament. Most of Mr Stephens's readers will agree with him in not regretting the failure. The lighter aspects of Freeman's character and the texture of his mind alike unfitted him for the atmosphere of practical politics. A man who is at once self- reliant and shy is almost sure to pass for being wilfully discourteous. A man who pours forth copiously and spontaneously allusions to out-of- the-way subjects, with an air which suggests something of contempt for the less learned, is sure to be set down as a pedant, and in a member of Parliament pedantry is the unpardonable sin. Nor was it only in manner that Freeman would have failed. If a view was distasteful to him, he could not make the attempt to analyse it or even to understand it patiently. He was capable of travestying the opinions of his opponents, and that in all honesty, by talking of their " passionate hatred for Russia and romantic love of the Turk." One sees what a gulf sundered him in many of his views from the bulk of his fellow-countrymen when one reads such passages as these : " I believe 16 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY I hate the British army more than any institution in being," " William Rufus is my ideal gentle- man," "probus miles, preux chevalier, and all the rest of the humbug " ; or again, " If a man takes to gambling at all, I should think he would naturally take to cheating, and after all it is not so bad as selling yourself to the Turk or several other things that are called honourable." It is not the question what amount of truth there may be in each of these views. True or false, it is very certain that no man could hold them in that crude and unhesitating fashion and be a power in public life. The much-denounced "perish India" passage was no doubt really a harmless truism. But a wise man who seeks to influence others does not utter even truisms in such a form that they are certain to be mis- understood and misrepresented. Moreover, whole provinces of human thought and activity which nearly concern every practical politician were to Freeman a blank. Though he abhorred a town abode, he knew but little of the lives of his country neighbours, of how they bought and sold, tilled their fields and earned their bread. For him the life of a community was always a map, never a picture. Thus we find him in 1874 FREEMAN'S LIBERALISM 17 writing that he has become comparatively in- different to politics. "Then (in 1868) there were several great questions ahead into which I went heart and soul : now it seems to be all Contagious Diseases, Women's Rights, Per- missive Bills, 25th clause, and such like mere nuisances." In truth, foreign politics apart, Freeman's views belonged to that rather sterile type of Liberalism which concerns itself very much with political machinery, and very little with the detailed and concrete results which that machinery has to effect. Moreover, Freeman's habits of mind went far to cut him off from that comprehension of the views of others which is indispensable to a politician. One of the first duties of a politician is to understand half-truths uttered in a con- fused form. But for Freeman there was no such thing as a half-truth. The doctrine might itself be in the main sound, but if the mode of utterance betrayed ignorance or confusion of thought, woe to him who uttered it ! In these days when " Is not there something in it ? " formulates the view with which every person approaches every question, Freeman's attitude is no doubt refreshing and 18 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY wholesome. But it is not an attitude which can safely be taken up by one who seeks to influence his fellow-men. It weakened Freeman's actions as an outside critic of politics ; it would have been fatal to him if he had become an actual combatant. The stronger side of Freeman's mind and character would have been equally fatal to his practical success as a politician. Compromise is the essence of party politics, and compromise was the one thing of which, above all others, Freeman was incapable. He never could have learned that the practical politician must at every turn be bound in the expression of his views by the requirements of advocacy. In one of the last articles that Freeman ever wrote on practical politics, he pointed out certain obvious and glaring inconsistencies in the attitude of some of his Home Rule allies, and was astonished when his utterance was received in some quarters as a symptom of lukewarmness. He had not learned that to ask a professional politician whether his argument is logically or historically sound is like asking a salmon-fisher whether his fly is edible. Two of Freeman's main ambitions in life were a seat in Parliament and a chair at Oxford. The OXFORD 19 one was never fulfilled ; the other came late, and was thereby robbed in his eyes of some of its charm. He went back to an Oxford which to him, in all matters of taste and everyday life the most Conservative of men, was changed in a measure that made it at times unendurable. Freeman, with his exacting and methodical habits of work, his simple tastes and limited pursuits, had little sympathy with modern Oxford, many-sided, receptive, uncritical, strenuous in its organised pursuit of pleasure. One feels, too, that his rather limited knowledge of the Oxford of the past made him unconsciously unfair to the Oxford of the present. One cannot but see that he judged the Oxford of his own day by the one side of it which he knew Trinity and the scholars of Trinity, with their severe moral discipline and their high intellectual ambitions. He overlooked what such a book as "Tom Brown at Oxford" reminds one, that Oxford then had its passman's life of idleness and pleasure, with which at least the non- reading or half -reading life of Oxford to-day contrasts favourably. Freeman felt too, and with some justice, that the immediate requirements of the class list had overpowered all other considerations in an under- 20 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY graduate's course of study, and the meagre attend- ance at his lectures, due as he thought to that cause, embittered him. It must be admitted, however, that a good deal of his lecture con- sisted of the repetition of doctrines which had once in Freeman's mouth been original, but which had by that time become trite. He was fond of quoting, and certainly acted on Cuddie Headrigg's principle that " a gude tale's no the waur o' being twice told," and he would have despised any attempt to give a semblance of freshness to the matter by varying the turn of expression. Yet it would be unfair to speak as if Freeman's pro- fessorial career had done nothing for his reputation as a historical teacher. The two published volumes of lectures show some of the best qualities of his work. They show that with all Freeman's taste for somewhat diffuse detail, few men could seize the salient points of a wide period more clearly and forcibly or set them forth more emphatically. No one indeed who is familiar with Freeman's writings will doubt that Mr Stephens is right in his claim that Freeman could condense when he thought it expedient, and that his work when condensed was at its best. Freeman's antipathy to the examination system as he found it on his return to Oxford may be taken as illustrating a characteristic side of his mind. Examinations had been unnecessary in his case as a stimulus to study, though, as we have already said, one may believe that they were of value as restraining his studies and giving them definiteness. But as he could work without examinations, so could other men. And with characteristic inability to understand the existence of mixed motives, he argued as if men might be divided sharply into those who read, and in any case would read, from a genuine love of know- ledge, and those who only read from the inferior motive of a desire for honours, and who therefore gain little by their reading. He overlooked the large proportion of men who have not enough disinterested love of study to become students for learning's sake, but who, once constrained to work, gradually throw themselves into study with something of real zeal. Freeman's attitude towards the life into which he found himself cast on his return to Oxford is a good illustration of the indirect effect of those limitations of which Mr Stephens has spoken, and which formed such a conspicuous and curious element in Freeman's character. Few of his friends 22 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY can fail to remember some quaint instances where his familiarity with remote things and his ignorance of obvious things came in conjunction. "That sounds as if it came from Godwin," was the remark of one who was more familiar with Georgian times than with the eleventh or seventeenth centuries. "Which Godwin, the Earl or the Bishop?" was the answer. Freeman's " limitations " were made all the more conspicuous by his intense honesty, his horror of anything like pretence or half -knowledge. "I am a very illiterate person," was the frank con- fession which once startled some at least of the guests round the breakfast table at Somerleaze. Mr Stephens makes no attempt to gloss over this side of Freeman's character. " Outside the field of history his knowledge, tastes, and even his capacity were undoubtedly limited. Mental philosophy and political economy were subjects that he could not, or at any rate did not, attempt to understand, and no department of art had any interest for him with the single and signal exception of architecture. He did not care much for 'poetry except of the epic or ballad kind ; of Shakespeare he was almost wholly ignorant." LIMITATIONS 23 It would be easy to heap up instances from the letters confirming and even amplifying Mr Stephens's statement. Carlyle "babbles and blunders," and is plainly called what the Bible tells us we should not call a brother. There is a lament over Mrs Ward, who is forsaking the legitimate work of Spanish history to write novels. Some persons, inadequately careful of their own and their neighbours' souls, might perhaps share the regret in that particular instance. But we feel that it would probably have been the same if the work had been not " Robert Elsmere," but "Jane Eyre" or "Consuelo." Freeman's view of metaphysics was delightfully simple and direct :- "I am not at all convinced that Mansel and that lot know anything that I don't. They seem to me simply to bamboozle one with hard words I am not clear that the words have any meaning at all. They seem to me to be pure gibberish, which would be just as much to the purpose if you read it backward." One is reminded of another West -country worthy, Betty Muxworthy, who, as Mr Blackmore has told us, "never would believe in reading or the possibility of it, but stoutly maintained that 24 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY people just learned things by heart and then pre- tended to make them out from patterns done upon paper, for the sake of astonishing honest folk, just as do the conjurers." And it is really painful to find Freeman assailing Matthew Arnold as a "chatterer," when he should have seen that Matthew Arnold and he were fellow-fighters in the same battle, upholding the cause of scholarly exactitude and precision against vagueness and flimsiness. Mr Stephens hardly sees, we think, how much Freeman's own special work as a historian suffered by this narrowing of his interests. " But if these limitations were defects, his knowledge of those subjects which he loved was the more thorough, and his work in connection with them the fresher, because all his interests and energies were concentrated upon it." Stronger in a sense it may be, but can one say "fresher"? What part of human life is there which lies wholly " outside the field of history " ? Arnold and Macaulay were names of which Freeman always spoke with great respect. No one ever preached more emphatically than Arnold, no one ever practised more thoroughly than FREEMAN'S VIEW OF HISTORY 25 Macaulay, the duty of a historian in making himself familiar with every phase of the life of his own period. Should not a historian know how men thought, how they felt, how they fed and clothed themselves ? And can a historian understand those things if speculative philosophy, art, political economy are all sealed books to him ? And we venture to think that if a reader knew nothing whatever of Freeman's mental tastes and habits, these are precisely the defects which he would find patent in his work. What we have said already of his view of politics is true of his view of history. Few writers could describe the corporate action of men in their political character, or even the action of individuals in purely political relations, more effectively. The concrete facts of social and industrial life which are inseparably blended with the political facts disappear. The indirect loss was perhaps even greater than the direct. To do such work as Freeman had to do, the mind needs to be nourished from those very sources from which he turned away. " He was making himsell a' the time," said Scott's friend Shortreed, of those days in Liddesdale which Sir Walter's staider and more studious friends doubt- less thought wasted. All the ** making " that 26 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY Freeman deemed necessary was the acquisition and digestion of knowledge bearing on a certain limited class of phenomena. There is a character- istic passage in an article on Macaulay where Freeman comments on the fact that Macaulay never wrote a classical article, and says, "Very little came of all this Greek and Latin reading." No doubt, as Mr Stephens points out, the constitution of Freeman's mind made this limita- tion of interests less mischievous than it often would have been. The province of history as he saw it may have been in some respects bare, but it was a vast one and abundantly furnished with incident. His papers on towns and places show, even more perhaps than his larger works, how fully he valued biographical details. Nor did his mental narrowness carry with it any lack of moral sympathy. He was full of hearty and affectionate interest in all who had any sort of claim on his good-will. His kindliness of nature made him often tolerant in defiance of his theories. Like Bishop Thirlwall, he loved dumb animals, not in the half-hearted fashion of those who " like them in their proper place," and they as well as children instinctively recognised in him a friend. But if these things saved the man, they could THE INSTRUMENT OF WORDS 27 not wholly save the writer and still less the critic. No doubt Freeman did good service in his protest against those who " corrupt the language of the nation with long-tailed words in 'osity and 'ation." But in his own case a limited dialect was able to suffice because it had only to express limited con- ceptions. The tongue of the Saxon Chronicle may be sufficient or nearly sufficient for the mere description of external facts. It fails when one passes into that world of abstract ideas which Freeman heeded so little. Freeman denounced what he considered the jargon of physical science, forgetful that to all but specialists his own talk of "Gal -Welsh" and "Rum -Welsh" sounded very odd jargon indeed. This applies not merely to choice of words, but to style in its widest sense. Freeman was an enthusiastic admirer of Macaulay's style. He overlooked the fact that a definite, emphatic, uninvolved style is rendered comparatively easy by a limited range of thought. Perhaps one should rather say that Freeman hardly understood what a limited range of thought meant. With Freeman himself, as with John Austin, style was mainly regarded as a machine for pounding definite propositions into somewhat unreceptive minds. 28 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY At the same time, Freeman's sympathy with his subject, his early training in scholarship, above all, the resources of a mind intensely vigorous and original, and in certain directions not lacking imagination, made his practice often very much better than his theories. But where Freeman suffered most from his " limitations " was in the part which he sought to play in influencing public thought on practical questions. His range of interests gave him few points of contact with his neighbours. The every- day man, wholly ignorant of Freeman's own class of subjects, was apt to think that Freeman, when they did meet, regarded him with something of contempt and ill-will. That, assuredly, was not so, unless the person were so ill-advised as to affect a knowledge or interest which he did not possess. For Freeman's attitude was somewhat like Swift's : " True genuine dulness moved his pity, Unless it offered to be witty." But though Freeman had no ill-will towards the average man, he did look upon him as a somewhat unapproachable and unintelligible being. And the penalty which he paid was that the mind of the average man was a sealed book to him. Freeman's lack of mental width no doubt often LACK OF MENTAL WIDTH 29 made him a harsh critic. Small defects which he could perceive counted for more than substantial merits which were wasted on him. And his criticism was, no doubt, sometimes thought not merely harsh, but ungenerous and even jealous. Nothing could be further from the truth. His letters must convince any one that he could be heartily and even extravagantly appreciative. Nor do they show, any more than his conversation did, the slightest tendency to imply comparisons between himself and other writers. Let a man only show that he had any capacity for what Freeman considered good and sound work in the field of history, and he was certain of a cordial welcome and encouragement. In some respects, as we have seen, Freeman may have been im- perfectly equipped for his career as a man of letters, but assuredly in compensation he escaped many of the besetting faults of the profession. He was not one of those who claim to be kept at the public cost in the Prytaneum. In his latter days, during his Oxford professorate, we find some touch of discontent and even querulousness, but that was far more due to physical than to mental and moral causes. For the most part, Freeman was content to march on his way cheer- 80 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY fully and manfully, preaching his own gospel and heeding little of reward or acknowledgment. In that as in many of the leading features of his character, we find and who need ask higher praise ? something to remind us of Johnson. There is the same odd mixture of clear-sighted, vigorous common-sense and inexplicable prejudice. There is the same contrast between superficial harshness or impatience and a warmth of feel- ing which never failed when there was any real call for it. The conventional view of Johnson's bearishness is swept to the winds by the kindly courtesy of his letters. So we think the bitterest of Freeman's political or literary enemies would acknowledge the charm of such letters as those in the first volume at page 88, written when real grief called for sympathy, or of his answer at page 372 to a stranger who had written to discuss with him the morality of field sports. They exhibit those excellent things, the tenderness of a reserved man, the courtesy of a straightforward man. And Freeman, like Johnson, was liberal with limited means liberal, too, with that touch of spontaneity and unconsciousness which raises liberality into generosity. Nor can any one doubt after reading Mr Stephens's book, if he did not THE ULTIMATE JUDGMENT 81 know it before, that Freeman, like Johnson, had his reward in the real friendship of those whose friendship was not given lightly. We stand, perhaps, too near Freeman's work to be able to judge fairly of its abiding value and place in historical literature. His reputation will not, we think, depend greatly on the success or failure of attempts to find inaccuracies of detail in his work. No man ever covered so much ground without occasional slips, or dealt with such a mass of authorities without occasionally misinterpreting. In that respect we think that his fame has little to fear. He will be held, we believe, more than almost any other English historian to have laid down a severe and exacting canon of evidence, and to have striven through much toil to maintain it ; he will be looked upon as a strictly conscientious interpreter of his authorities, as one who went to them with an honest desire to find out what lesson they had to teach, not as one who sought the confirmation or illustration of any preconceived theory. Nor will it be Freeman's only title to remembrance that he did this himself. He may fairly claim to have so done it as to make clear to all what was meant by sound historical evidence. His notes and appendices, often cumbrous and, 32 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY from an artistic point of view, detrimental, have that value. They make clear to all men what was the exact nature of the process by which the writer reached his conclusions. Diffuseness, lack of a due sense of proportion, and other defects whereon we have already dwelt, will probably make it impossible for any one work to take rank as a historical masterpiece. Yet we think there is hardly one, if one, which does not contain much that will never be superseded. As Mr Stephens points out, with all Freeman's diffuseness some of his very best passages are those in which he sums up the characteristics of some special epoch in history. Besides the instances given by Mr Stephens, we may refer to the sketch of Greek city politics in the Introduction to the "History of Federal Government." Nor is Freeman's influence as a teacher to be measured merely by his solid historical works. In his occasional papers he constantly taught sound habits of historical thought, and made successful war against confusion of mind and slovenliness of speech. The "Revilers," to which there are so many references in the letters, were potent influences in indirectly forming the thoughts and language of ordinary men on historical subjects. ARCHITECTURAL WRITINGS 33 Freeman's lot as a teacher was not wholly unlike that of one with whom he had himself no great sympathy. Like Ruskin, he preached seeming paradoxes so effectively that at last he appeared to be preaching truisms. Of Freeman's architectural writings we have already said something. Some of the very best of them, the papers on Welsh Churches, written during his sojourn in Glamorganshire, are buried in the back numbers of the Archceologia Cam- brensis. Many of the churches wherewith he dealt have little architectural dignity or artistic beauty. But they have almost invariably indi- viduality of character, and Freeman's mode of looking at architecture without any pedantic pre- possessions in favour of the "orthodoxy" of this or that period, and his power of classifying build- ings according to their principles, and showing the connecting links between them, had here full scope. Indeed we think it would be generally allowed that his most interesting and attractive work is that where the two sides of his learning, the architectural and the purely historical, were able to work together. He himself, with that character- istic modesty which so often underlay a semblance 34 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY of self-assertion, used to profess that he had learned from his friend John Green to look upon a town as a being with an individual character of its own. If so, one can only say that there are qualities in the work of the self-styled pupil of which one can find little trace in the work of the supposed master. Here too, as elsewhere, Freeman's teach- ing is hardly less valuable in its indirect influence than in its direct lessons. Those who have made themselves familiar with his mode of looking at places, can find in a building, insignificant it may be in itself, in a local name, or a local tradition, illustrations of the principles which have deter- mined the history of the world. It is scarcely possible to avoid a comparison between Freeman and those two distinguished workers in the same field who have just been taken from us, Froude and Seeley. It would be difficult to imagine three men differing more widely in the original character and constitution of their minds. One point of community, and one only, seems to bind them together. To each of them history was something more than an inspiring and impressive drama. Each fully acknowledged the truth, more clearly perhaps laid down by Arnold than by any teacher who FREEMAN AND FROUDE 35 preceded him, that the things of history happened for an ensample ; that it is only by a knowledge of history that the citizen can attain to a clear understanding of the duties and responsibilities which lie about him. But that very point of agreement carries with it as an inevitable conse- quence wide differences in their historical work : for it would be hard to imagine political ideas or conceptions of national life differing more widely than did those held by Freeman and those of his two contemporaries. It would certainly be of no profit to review in detail the onslaughts of Freeman upon his successor. Freeman's best friends and warmest admirers would probably admit that as a controversialist he was often cumbrous and in- discreet, and not always courteous. They would admit that the professorial chair at Oxford was hardly the place in which to carry on what had, in the eyes of the public at least, resolved itself into a personal contest, any more than it was the place from which to preach a highly controversial doctrine on Eastern politics. But, after all, to say that is only to admit what no one questions, that Freeman was not one of those rare people who can hold very strong and definite convictions without any touch of fanaticism. 36 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY One may admit, too, that the whole con- stitution of Freeman's mind rendered him unfit to do justice to Froude. To Freeman, subtlety of any kind, whether in the good or the bad sense of the word, was repellent. It mystified him as it mystifies a child. And a complex mind like Froude's, with its curious mixture of cynicism and earnestness, scepticism and enthusiasm, was to him a sealed book. Nor were Froude's special merits the careful arrangement and just proportion of his work, his keen sense of the need of making his story an artistic whole qualities which Freeman could duly appreciate. At the same time we think that any one who has had occasion to study in original authorities the periods with which Froude dealt, and to compare his work with them, will make a good deal of allowance for his assailant. It is not easy to read his strange perversion of authorities, to witness the marvellous transforma- tion which a statement often undergoes during its passage from the original writer to Froude's pages, and then to bring to bear on the mere literary merits of his work the mind of a calm and judicial critic. If Freeman was unjust to Froude, he was FREEMAN AND FROUDE 37 perhaps even more unjust to those who admired Froude. In his eyes they were men given over to believe a lie, men who through sheer per- versity of mind preferred darkness to light, at best men who were tricked by certain specious qualities with which the true historian had little or no concern. The two sides of men's minds to which Froude's writings appealed, their sense of literary art and their militant patriotism, were in Freeman's eyes either unreal or contemptible. No doubt the method in which Freeman conducted his repeated attacks on Froude, taste and courtesy apart, tended to create a mis- conception as to the real issue. He was not confuting this or that detailed error, nor even any particular accumulation of errors. He was, rightly or wrongly, endeavouring to expose a habit of mind and a method of dealing with authorities, which must in its very essence and nature be the parent of errors. And indeed, as we have already implied, it is difficult to read any extensive portion of Froude's work, where one is acquainted with original authorities, and not feel that, if references are to be thus used, we should be better without references at all. Probably in his heart of heart Froude would have admitted that. Exactitude of detail, he might have said, that exactitude which refer- ences are supposed to ensure, is hardly to be got); and if it were got, the majority of men would be none the better for it. What a historian should give his readers is not accuracy of detail, but truthfulness of impression. Let a writer once for all, by study of contemporary writers, master the leading principles which determined the history of a period; then let him use his authorities so as to furnish himself with material for effectively and artistically illustrating the views at which he has arrived. We think that those who are qualified to judge will allow that this is not an unfair representation of Froude's attitude. We think, too, that many who are not insensible to Froude's literary merits will agree that, even if history can ever be dealt with thus, it can only be so dealt with by those who possess a more judicial mind than Froude's and a greater freedom from paradox. Froude's method, too, is not without its draw- backs from a merely artistic point of view; it begets a constant tendency, from which he is certainly not free, to write in a half controversial fashion, with a sort of underlying reference to FROUDE 39 supposed opponents. One feels that the writer is not simply telling his tale according to the evidence, but that he is emphasising certain sides of it, because he suspects that those for whom he writes have a bias in the opposite direction. There is a constant danger that the methods of the historian should give way to the methods of the pamphleteer. It may sound like a paradox to say that Froude's work suffers from want of imagination ; yet, so far as imagination is the power of seeing concrete persons with their individual character- istics, we think it is true. He fails to under- stand how all generalisations about classes of men are set at nought by individual peculiarities. Monasticism may have been an evil system ; the cause of Humanism may have been the cause of enlightenment and progress ; but it is a very different thing to hold, as Froude certainly holds by implication, that there is even a pre- sumption in favour of any individual monk being a dull sensualist, or any individual humanist a wise man. One sees this perhaps most where Froude had an entirely free hand, as in his historical novel, " The Two Chiefs of Dunboyne." There all that is wise and virtuous groups itself 40 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY on the side with which Froude sympathises. Not thus have the great imaginative writers dealt with history. Look at "Woodstock" and "Peveril of the Peak " ; how Scott with all his Cavalier sympathies has resisted the temptation " to take care that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it!" how in "Waverley" he has brought out the jealousies and meannesses of the Pretender's Court ! If Froude had been dealing with the same material from the same point of view, Bridgnorth and Everard would have been snuffling canters, and Fergus Maclvor a wise patriarch living for the good of his people. Take another instance. It is clear enough that Thackeray had no special sympathy with the American cause ; if he had ever written a history of the War of Independence, it would have prob- ably had the fate which Washington prophesied for Mr George Warrington's unpublished work and would have been "certain to offend both, parties " : yet where, in the pages of any American patriot or in any Fourth of July oration, can we find the glory of Washington measured out as it is in a few vivid sentences of the "Virginians"? Wide as is the gulf which severs Freeman THE DIDACTIC VIEW 41 from Froude, it is not wider than that which severs each of them from Seeley. On one point alone do the three agree. Each, as we have said, acknowledges what one may call the didactic view of history. None of them would be content with mere literary brilliancy nor with mere anti- quarian correctness. Each of them accepts for the historian the duties and responsibilities of a political teacher ; but if the goal be the same, the paths by which it is sought are widely divergent. Freeman is content for the most part to lay before the reader a clear and careful record of events, and then leave him to draw his own moral. With Froude, as we have said, the events are so grouped as to illustrate clearly and effectively a preconceived moral, while at the same time the writer's sense of dramatic effect and his artistic instinct at times keep his directly didactic purpose in the background. Seeley is of all the three the most definitely and avowedly didactic. There are passages in which he seems virtually to lay down the doctrine that no historical learning is of value unless it bears directly on the practical problems of the present day. Nor is this merely an ultimate end to be aimed at. It is to be the guiding principle of 42 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY even elementary historical study. Here the views of Seeley and Freeman respectively at once stand out in direct opposition to one another. " It is," says Seeley, in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge, " most desirable that studies should have an object not merely good but visibly and plainly good. Compare in your own minds the student who studies politics in the living time and him who studies them in the mirror of remote history. . . . That the history of the past is useful the student takes upon trust ; that contemporary history is useful must needs be palpably evident to him. It is useful, like past history, for the lessons it gives, the prin- ciples it illustrates : but, unlike past history, it is also indispensable to the politician for its own sake. He who studies contemporary history, therefore, at the same time masters the principles and becomes familiar with the age, while he who studies the past learns only the principles and remains a stranger to the age. . . . And this advantage being felt from the beginning cannot fail to give the student of contemporary history an ardour and an interest in his work which the student of the past must want." And the lecture ends with the declaration that, "if I succeed in any measure, I hope to do so SEELEY 43 by the method I have now indicated, by giving due precedence in the teaching of History to the present over the past." Surely to all this there is an obvious answer. It might be sound doctrine if the Professor and his audience could be transplanted to some happy region where there were no elections, no leading articles, no Union debates, no Palmerston and Canning Clubs. How in the world is a lad of twenty to apply the methods of scientific enquiry to problems which as soon as he has begun to think about them at all have been enveloped in an atmosphere of passion and controversy, where at every turn his prejudices are being stimulated by a machinery created for that special purpose? One would have thought that the very instances by which Seeley illustrates the change of teach- ing at which he aims would have brought home that truth to him. "We read in one sentence of the distress of the Roman peasantry and of the agrarian law by which Tiberius Gracchus tried to relieve them; and few readers pause to consider what were the possible solutions out of which Gracchus made his choice. Surely it is much more stimulating to the intellect to consider, as we have been doing for 44 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY some months, the distress of the Irish peasantry, and to conjecture the provisions of the agrarian law by which Mr Gladstone yesterday evening proposed to relieve it." It seems astonishing that Seeley should have overlooked the obvious truth that if University teachers worked on the lines he suggested, every professor would be regarded as an endowed electioneering agent. The view might be un- founded, but the suspicion would be only less bad than the reality. To that danger Freeman was fully alive, perhaps for the very reason that political parti- sanship had far more temptation for him than it had for Seeley 's judicial and scientific mind. As we have seen, when Freeman did touch on a controversial question, he did not wholly succeed in keeping clear of party issues ; but he at least saw plainly that, if history is to be of value as an educational instrument, it must be kept free from political controversy, and that it must therefore steer clear of those periods which are of necessity fertile in controversy. Seeley was, as it seems to us, too apt to trouble himself with the views of imaginary or insig- nificant opponents. He was haunted by the MEDIAEVAL HISTORY 45 dread of certain persons who valued the study of the Middle Ages, not because of their con- nection with modern history, but because of a supposed "romantic" or "picturesque" contrast to it. Freeman in his inaugural lecture at least purged himself wholly of any such charge by his defence of the study alike of so-called " ancient " and of mediaeval history. "We must proclaim that the real life of the history of those times lies not in its separation from the affairs of our own time, but in its close connection with them." Freeman was probably unconsciously drawn towards mediaeval history because it seemed less likely to entangle him in those social and eco- nomical issues with which, as we have seen, he had little taste or aptitude for dealing. No doubt, too, the class of questions on which the direct connection of ancient, mediaeval, and modern history depends are just those which attracted Freeman and wherein he was strong. The out- ward form of political institutions and the rela- tions of nation to nation have their roots far back in the past, and these were the matters which interested Freeman more than the "Expansion of England" or Irish Land Bills. But he also had a belief, and we think a well-founded belief, 46 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY that the man who has had a historical training in the non-controversial periods will be the best fitted to deal with the controversial periods. We quite agree who can fail to agree? with Seeley in the view that scientific political teaching is sorely needed. People ordinarily do not seem to perceive how great a danger it is that nine-tenths of our political teaching comes from men who are professedly and legitimately advocates; that such training as our instructors can give us in the science of government and the duties of citizenship has at best to cloak itself under the guise of some practical exhortation to voters ; that when a writer does deal with practical politics and yet detach himself from party issues, as did the late Mr Bagehot, his voice sounds strange and meaningless to an audience for which politician and advocate have become synonyms. But so far as the remedy lies, and we believe it largely does lie, in historical teaching, we think that the longest way round will prove the shortest way home, and that more is to be hoped for from the methods advocated by Freeman than from those advocated by Seeley. To say that is a very different thing from disparaging Seeley 's own work as a teacher. It would be difficult to praise too highly such a THE "EXPANSION OF ENGLAND" 47 piece of work as the " Expansion of England." It is not an epitome in the ordinary sense, but the condensed production of a man whose mind was fully stored with detail. How Seeley would have fared if he had ever tried to produce a continuous historical work on a larger scale one may perhaps doubt. His mind turned of choice almost entirely to general views of history. To expend literary effort or to concentrate the atten- tion of his readers in the telling of isolated events would have been a violation of his own principles. His "Life of Stein" also shows that while Seeley did not lack insight into character, the individual and biographical side of history had no great attraction for him. A very hearty admiration for Seeley 's own historical work is not inconsistent with dissent from some of the canons which he lays down as to the teaching of history. We have already touched upon his views on that point. They are further set forth in two addresses to a Historical Society at Birmingham which were republished in Macmillan's Magazine, and in their most definite and strongest form in the opening of the "Expansion of England." Seeley 's teach- ing on this point illustrates, we think, what 48 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY Freeman's also illustrates in a slightly different fashion the truth of Coleridge's doctrine, that men are generally right in their assertions, but wrong in their denials. No one can doubt the importance of that side of history for which Seeley pleads. We may doubt whether we can afford to lose all those sides of history which he by implication condemns. It is not altogether easy to formulate Seeley's views on this point, because they are largely couched in the rather baffling shape of attacks on certain undescribed and undefined opponents. And certainly, unless the critic were constructing dummies for the purpose of bowling them over, he had been singularly unfortunate or shall we say, fortun- ate ? in his experiences. Two persons are supposed to deliver themselves with what Seeley not inappropriately calls " quaint candour " in this wise: " * I was quite disappointed in that book,' says one, 'for I was told it was of first-rate infallible authority, but not at all. All I can say is, I found it so dull that I could not read fifty pages.' * That book,' says another, ' gave me quite a surprise. I had been warned against it as utterly untrustworthy and unsound, and did not intend TILTING AT WINDMILLS 49 to read it, but taking it up by accident I found it most delightful, really quite like a romance, and now I recommend it to every one I meet.' ' One is tempted to say, like the rector addressing his curate, who had just preached a controversial sermon on the evidences of Christianity : " Very good, Mr Jones. But next time get a better infidel." Such people may exist. Mr Collins may have become a widower and married Mary Bennet, and Seeley may have met some of their descendants. But if so, why could he not let them go, and thank God he was rid of a fool ? The real truth is that Seeley 's mind was so dominated with the importance of one side of history, that he almost brought himself to see in every other department of history a dangerous rival to be discredited and extirpated. In all his general criticisms on history as it has been written, there is in his tone something of " I alone serve the Lord." Take such a passage as this in one of the Birmingham addresses : "It" (history) "is supposed to be romantic and concerned only with remote times, because literary historians for the success of their books choose romantic subjects and dress them in poetical D 50 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY diction, and affect remote periods in which they can escape from political controversy." Does that fairly describe the attitude of Gibbon, of Arnold, of Grote, of Thirlwall, of Sismondi, of Ranke ? And if not, is not the critic tilting at windmills ? At times, indeed, Seeley fails to distinguish friend from foe. He quotes, as a leading in- stance of the perverse conceptions of history which exist, a familiar passage in which Thackeray claims for the Tatler and the Spectator the position of historical authorities, and declares that the real life of the time is to be found in them, not in so-called history. " Out of the fictitious book I get the exposition of the life of this time, of the manners, of the movement, of the dress. . . . The old times live again, and I travel in the old country of England. Can the heaviest historian do more for me ? " What is that more than a humorist's character- istically paradoxical statement of the truth that historians have concerned themselves too little with the facts of social and economical life ? A man must have read " Esmond " and the " Virginians " to very little purpose who does not POLITICS IN HISTORY 51 see that Thackeray's real conception of history was something very much higher than a chronicle of gossip and upholstery. Nor is it quite easy to see what Seeley meant when he told his hearers that "English history as it is popularly related not only has no distinct end, but leaves off in such a gradual manner, growing feebler and feebler, duller and duller, towards the close, that one might suppose that England, instead of steadily gaining in strength, had been for a century or so dying of mere old age." If historians have dealt inadequately and im- perfectly with the history of their own times, it is largely because they felt, and we believe felt rightly, that history must stand clear of the immediate and personal issues of politics, and that it could not be written until it was evident that the historian approached it judicially and not as a political partisan. In another point, we venture to think, excep- tion may be taken to Seeley 's views. Like Freeman, he was too apt to measure the wants of other men's minds by the peculiarities of his own. 52 FREEMAN, FROUDE, AND SEELEY " I cannot," are the words with which the " Expansion of England " closes " I cannot make history more interesting than it is except by falsifying it ; and therefore when I meet a person who does not find history interesting, it does not occur to me to alter history, I try to alter him." Is not the lecturer here, somewhat like another distinguished Cambridge professor, "damning the nature of things " ? It may be perfectly true that the main interest of history lies, not in episode nor in character, but in the sequence and causation of events. But it does not follow that the desire to have such episodes as have to be told graphically, and such persons as necessarily cross the stage drawn vividly, is otherwise than wholesome, or that a writer sacrifices, as Seeley would seem to imply, the real utility of his work by gratifying that wish. Macaulay no doubt for- feited much in his determination to be popular at all hazards. But is it not a very distinct triumph of art to have given the living interest which he has given to a subject so apparently unattractive as the recall and re -issue of the silver currency? Take writers of a far more austere and restrained type than Macaulay. Is not Arnold's account of the Second Punic War THE ART OF HISTORY 53 all the more effective for such a passage as that in which he tells of the death of Marcellus? Does Mr Gardiner's work gain or lose by his vivid presentment of the complex character of Strafford, or by that effective use of details with which he has painted such a graphic picture of Montrose's great campaign? Surely, too, there are times when it is the proper province of the historian not merely to inform the intelligence of his readers, but to appeal to their emotions. It will be a bad day, we think, when Napier and Kinglake are unread, and when a historian no longer deems it part of his task to "praise famous men and our fathers that begat us." THE HISTORICAL WRITINGS OF FRANCIS PARKMAN 1 THERE is probably no branch of the English- speaking race wherein heredity and identity of training have combined to produce a greater definiteness of type, not indeed won at the expense of individuality of character, than what the late Dr Wendell Holmes has called the Brahmin caste of New England. To that branch Francis Parkman belonged. He was the son of a Boston merchant, the inheritor, to use the words of his brother New Englander, Mr James Lowell, of wealth " patiently 1 " The Oregon Trail : Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life/' by Francis Parkman. London, 1893. " The Conspiracy of Pontiac," by the Same. " Pioneers of France in the New World," by the Same. ' e The Jesuits in North America/' by the Same. " La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West," by the Same. " The Old Regime in Canada under Louis XIV.," by the Same. " Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV.," by the Same. "A Half Century of Conflict" (2 vols.), by the Same. " Montcalm and Wolfe" (2 vols.), by the Same. 54 NEW ENGLAND 55 acquired in the wise fashion of (old) days." And throughout Parkman's writings we can trace the best moral and mental qualities of New England, earnestness, directness, vigour, and a keen love and admiration of moral good, freed indeed from those harsher features which marred the perfection and attractiveness of the earlier New England character. How the thoughtfulness and definite- ness of mind inherited from Puritan ancestors and confirmed by the training of a Boston home were combined with a wider culture, with graces and an insight learned elsewhere, is best expressed in the words of the writer quoted above : " It is rare to find, as they are found in him, a passion for the picturesque, a native predilection for rapidity and dash of movement, in helpful society with patience in drudgery and a scrupulous deference to the rights of facts. . . . " Though never putting on the airs of the philosophic historian, or assuming his privilege to be tiresome, Mr Parkman never loses sight of those links of cause and effect which give to the history of man a moral, and reduce the fortuitous to the narrow limits where it properly belongs." With a writer so self-restrained and free from egotism as Parkman was, it is but by inference 56 FRANCIS PARKMAN that we can trace the character of the man in his historical work. Only in the first of his books does the author himself directly come before us. When he was little more than twenty years old, Parkman had chosen the subject and was planning the scheme of the work of his life. He had to tell of the conflict of England and France for the dominion of the New World. To do that adequately he had to survey the battlefield, and even more to study the habits and life of those Indians whose precarious friendship and more persistent and calculable hostility formed so large an element in the conflict. The im- mediate literary result was Parkman's first book, " The Oregon Trail." In it is described a summer spent on the prairies. Starting from Fort Leaven- worth, on the Missouri, Parkman journeyed as far as what is now the western boundary of Colorado. For his main object of studying Indian habits and character, he sacrificed comfort and health and endangered life. For a portion of his journey he sojourned in an Indian village, at times without a single white companion, sharing the meals and joining in the sports of his savage hosts. Looked at merely as a book of travel and adventure, " The Oregon Trail " is full of "THE OREGON TRAIL" 57 charm and interest. There is no attempt at thrilling sketches of danger, yet throughout we feel that we are following the fortunes of men who carried their lives in their hands. There is ever present to one the greed, the cruelty, the suspiciousness, the childish levity and impulsive- ness of the savages. But the book has other and further interest. We see disclosed in it just those qualities which we trace in Parkman's matured historical work ; observation, balance of mind, a critical and not unkindly humour, a determination to repress personal prejudices and to do justice to all men, even if such justice in- volves the sacrifice of epigram and literary effect. In " The Oregon Trail," too, we see the education of the future historian, not only in method, but in the substance of his subject. More than once in Parkman's writings can we recognise, in descrip- tions of typical scenes and episodes of Indian life, the fruit of his personal experiences here recorded. The real effect, however, is something wider and deeper than is revealed in isolated touches. It gives definiteness and truth to Parkman's sketches of Indian character. If " The Oregon Trail " had never been given to the world, we should still feel that Parkman had learned the Indians from 58 FRANCIS PARKMAN life, not from books. His savage is never a creature of unmixed devilry, still less of senti- mental and impossible virtue. Therein Parkman resembles another American historian, not unlike him in original habit of mind, and trained by the same influences, Mr Theodore Roosevelt. In each, Indian life and frontier warfare have a reality which mere reading could never give, and which could only be reached by a writer who had been himself in contact with the scenes that he describes. Unhappily in Parkman's case, this gain was bought at a heavy price. The hardships which he met with during his summer in the wilder- ness wrought injuries to health which were never repaired. Nerves and eyesight suffered in a way which made continuous literary exertion impossible, and the whole of Parkman's historical work was done through effort and at the cost of suffering which made it heroic. A knowledge of that fact makes it almost impossible to criticise the result coolly and judicially. It assuredly goes far to explain Parkman's most pronounced failing, a certain lack of cohesion and continuity which at times mars his work. It enhances our admira- tion of some among his special merits, his kindly AMERICAN HISTORIANS 59 cheerfulness, his facility of style, his laborious and unsparing research, the entire absence of the tone of the querulous controversialist, too common among modern historians. With deductions for the inevitable roughness and incompleteness of a generalisation, we may divide American historians into three classes. There are what Mr Charles Adams effectively, if not very gracefully, calls the " filiopietistic " school, those who sing the sacred legend of America and with whom America means little more than New England. That school began in the last century with such comparatively simple chronicles as Belknap's " History of New Hamp- shire" and Trumbull's "History of Connecticut." It culminates in far more learned and elaborate writers, such as Bancroft and Palfrey. Widely differing from them in temper and method are the cosmopolitans, as we may call them, Prescott, Motley, and Kirk, who answer somewhat in litera- ture to the Europeanised American of social life, distracted from the interests of his own country by the mellower associations and, perchance only in semblance, the more picturesque scenes and incidents of the Old World. Lastly, there is yet in growth a school of writers, applying 60 FRANCIS PARKMAN to the problems of colonial history methods of research as laborious and canons of historical evi- dence as exacting as any recognised by historical writers of the Old World. A few of this school, such as Mr Henry Adams, Mr Rhodes, and Mr Lodge, have given us histories on a large scale. Its results have more often taken the form of careful monographs, too special in subject to appeal to the interest of the generality of English readers. In some of these writers, such as Mr Henry Adams and Mr Lodge, a certain portion of the spirit which animated Bancroft and Palfrey has lingered on, showing itself not so much in any exaggerated reverence for the founders of New England as in occasional outbursts of vehement anti- English feeling, which seem as inexplicable and as much out of place in such writers as they were in Mr Lowell. In others, such as Mr Charles Adams and Mr Ferguson, the writings of the patriotic New England school have begotten a somewhat violent reaction. The native independence and originality of Parkman's mind, perhaps even more his choice of a subject, forbid us to place him in any of these groups. Yet he has affinities with all three. In mere outward style he, in common with Motley, AMERICAN HISTORIANS 61 shows the influence of Prescott. There is the same tendency to diffuseness with a consequent loss of emphasis. Parkman's ornament is hardly ever florid, as Motley's too often was. It is occasionally out of place. In Parkman, too, the self-repression begotten of Puritan descent and confirmed by Boston training, existed in happy conjunction with a keen admiration for the width and diversity of old-world culture. Yet with all this he is as loyal to America and to New England as Bancroft or Palfrey. The main burden of his stoiy is to tell how the English race secured the keys of the North American continent. The course of his tale is often obscured by inevitable digressions ; the tide ebbs and flows, or breaks away to the right and left. But the leading thread of interest is ever there. The part which New England plays is always conspicuous and in the main honourable, and the patriotic satis- faction with which Parkman tells that part of his story is in no wise concealed. Yet he never forgets what he owes to England. If he is often compelled to be severe to British administrators, to the British nation he is always just and even sympathetic. The praise of Wolfe, of Forbes, and of Shirley is measured out in no grudging 62 FRANCIS PARKMAN spirit. The writer waxes as keenly enthusiastic over the fall of Quebec as he does over the capture of Louisburg by Pepperell and his New England militia, or over the many isolated deeds of heroism wrought in frontier skirmishes, and in the defence of forts or farmhouses against Frenchmen and Hurons. And when we pass from method to substance, Parkman's laborious studies among original authorities, mainly among manuscripts in the French archives, are fully up to the most exacting standard laid down by modern advocates of original research. All that they could find to complain of is that he does not consider it enough for a historian to present bald undigested details, and claims no exemption from those obligations of form and method which are acknowledged by his brethren in every other branch of the craft. Not long ago we read in an American historical magazine a criticism of Mr Hodgkin. His work, we are told, " is amateurish from beginning to end. The traces of accurate historical method are only a surface beneath which we constantly perceive the good old- fashioned literary man, who writes history as an elegant accomplishment." We have little doubt that this gentleman would extend his condemna- THE ART OF HISTORY 63 tion to Parkman and find in him "the good old - fashioned literary man," since he, like Mr Hodgkin, recognised the claim of style and finish, and enjoyed sketching a character or describing a stirring incident. Posterity will probably think none the worse of him that he was not of those who would stir up one of the noblest provinces in the kingdom of letters to rebel against its sovereign. The likeness that we have just suggested is something more than a mere superficial one. In the American and in the English writer we find the same simplicity, directness, and wholesome- ness of mind, the same freedom from the slightest tendency to paradox, and the same width of sympathy. There is a likeness, too, in their choice of subjects. Each is always close to the great highway of the world's history as generally known to historical students, yet often not actually in it ; and thus each is telling a tale which would have become provincial, had it not fallen into the hands of a writer gifted with wide culture and sound historical scholarship. The labours of Parkman, extending over a period of more than forty years, are embodied in the series of monographs of which the titles are 64 FRANCIS PARKMAN prefixed to this article. The first written, "The Conspiracy of Pontiac," is, somewhat singularly, the last in real order of time. It is, in fact, described by Parkman himself as a sequel, not an integral part of his work. His main subject was the conflict of England and France for the dominion of North America. That issue was settled when Wolfe prevailed on the heights of Abraham. Yet the Conspiracy of Pontiac is not altogether an isolated or detached episode ; it was the last systematic and connected effort of the Indian to beat back the wave of European invasion. The struggle of Englishmen against Frenchmen is blended at every turn with the battle between civilisation and barbarism, and Parkman's work would hardly have been com- plete if he had ignored the last act in that drama which made it possible for the English race to extend itself to the Pacific. Parkman's work really begins with " The Pioneers of France in the New World." In that are set forth the hideous tale of the treachery and cruelty whereby Spain extirpated the Huguenot colony in Florida ; and the stirring histories of Cartier, the first explorer of the St Lawrence, of Champlain, the founder of the first European FROUDE IN THE NEW WORLD 65 settlement in Canada, and of those devoted men and women who sacrificed lives of lettered ease or of fashionable luxury to carry the message of the Cross into a frost-bound wilderness. The writer's powers as a story-teller have full play in dealing with a subject well - nigh as rich in romantic incident as the Spanish conquests, and with men as strenuous and self-devoted as the pilgrims of the Mayflower. The next of the series, " The Jesuits in Canada," carries the tale of the Indian missions down to 1670. It also reveals to us the two great Indian powers who entered as factors into the strife between France and England. There stood on one side that ill-compacted group of tribes, belong- ing to the Algonquin division of the Indian race and known collectively as Hurons, who occupied Canada. France, through her missions, won an ascendency over them which did nothing to unfit them for serving as the instruments of an un- scrupulous and ruthless policy. Over against them stood the one unit among all the Indian races or tribes which had enough fixity of organisation and continuity of purpose to have any calculable and abiding influence, either as friend or foe, the Iroquois confederacy. As a rule, an Indian E 66 FRANCIS PARKMAN alliance was a broken reed, from the incurable levity and instability of the savage character, and the lack of any central authority which could be effectively responsible for the policy of the whole body. The alliance with the Five Nations was at times an embarrassment rather than a help to the English, but from precisely opposite causes. The Iroquois alone among the Indians could fight or stand aloof, not from an impulse of savage fury or in a fit of sullen indifference or discontent, but in conformity with a deliberate and settled policy. They alone saw that the complete ascendency of either civilised race meant the ultimate exclusion of the savage from his forests and hunting-grounds. Parkman's next work, " La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West," deals with an isolated episode in Canadian history, but one of overwhelming interest and importance. A single daring French explorer conceived the scheme of linking Canada to the mouth of the Mississippi by a continuous line of French occupation. In the story of La Salle we read, as summed up in a prerogative instance, what France might have achieved in the New World, and how and why she failed. La Salle's project would have hemmed in the disconnected, ill-governed, and unmilitary 67 colonies of England in a fashion which would have made expansion westward impossible. The next two books in the series, "The Old Regime " and " Count Frontenac," tell clearly and forcibly so much of the administration and economical history of Canada as it is needful for us to know, if we would understand how she fared in the last great struggle against England. That struggle itself is told in " Montcalm and Wolfe." No one can read Parkman without see- ing that he had an enjoyment of dramatic effect, albeit strictly kept in check by a severe and exact- ing love of truth. It is fortunate that he was able to gratify that taste without any sacrifice of facts in grouping the characters for the final act of his drama. The two protagonists are the real and not merely the titular heroes. Canada, alter- nately neglected and overgoverned, and through all misgoverned, handed over on the one hand to corrupt speculators, and on the other to officials so fettered that all freedom of action or sense of individual responsibility was impossible, fell a prey to inanition and internal dissension. By the time that the last struggle with England came, it was past the power of any civil adminis- trator to repair the past faults, or of any military 68 FRANCIS PARKMAN chief to atone for them ; but the daring and soldier- ship of Montcalm illumined the fall of Canada. " Si Pergama dextra defendi possent etiam hac defensa fuissent " might have been written on his tomb. Yet, moribund as Canada was, it seemed a well-nigh hopeless task to concentrate the power of the English colonies for the final blow. Wolfe did not, like Washington at a later day, wear down by steady persistence the discord, lethargy, and disaffection of the colonial governments ; but only his daring genius, animated by the kindred spirit of Pitt, could have won success independent of the grudging and half-hearted aid of the colonies. Parkman's last work, " Half a Century of Conflict," bridges over the period between " Count Frontenac" and "Montcalm and Wolfe." The writer himself says of it, apologetically, that "the nature of the subject does not permit an unbroken thread of narrative, and the unity of the book lies in its being throughout, in one form or another, an illustration of the singularly con- trasted characters and methods of the rival claimants to North America." Parkman's method of narrative, not by a con- tinuous history but by a series of monographs, ACADIA 69 brings with it obvious drawbacks. It may have been in a measure induced by that physical necessity which in so unhappy a fashion made continuity of work impossible. It throws on the writer the responsibility of a somewhat arbitrary choice of the incidents and characters which shall be brought into prominence. That danger was minimised by the catholicity of Parkman's interests and the sober, judicial balance of his mind. Another objection is that there must almost inevitably be overlappings and repetitions. Thus the expulsion of the Acadians is told twice over with some detail, once in "Montcalm and Wolfe," and once in " Half a Century of Conflict." The mention of Acadia suggests a passing remark. No better instance can be found of Parkman's fairness and independence of mind than the manner in which he treats the Acadian question. He scatters to the winds those myths of a pastoral people endowed with peculiar virtues and charms of character, which have so long done duty, not only in romance, but even in serious history. The Acadians, as Parkman describes them, were kindly, industrious, moral folk, boorish in habits and slavishly superstitious. That they were the victims of great and undeserved cruelty 70 FRANCIS PARKMAN cannot be doubted ; but Mr Parkman clearly transfers the responsibility for their suffering from the English Ministry to those priestly diplomatists who, in defiance alike of the letter and the spirit of the Treaty of Utrecht, insisted on making Acadia an outpost of France : " Although," Parkman says, " by the twelfth article of the Treaty of Utrecht, France had solemnly declared the Acadians to be British subjects, the Government of Louis XV. intrigued continually to turn them from subjects into enemies. Before me is a mass of English docu- ments on Acadian affairs from the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle to the catastrophe of 1755, and above a thousand pages of French official papers from the archives of Paris, memorials, reports, and secret correspondence, relating to the same matters. With the help of these and some collateral lights, it is not difficult to make a correct diagnosis of the political disease that ravaged this miserable country. Of a multitude of proofs only a few can be given here, but these will suffice. " It was not that the Acadians had been ill-used by the English : the reverse was the case. They had been left in free exercise of their worship as stipulated by treaty. It is true that from time ACADIA 71 to time there were loud complaints from French officials that religion was in danger, because certain priests had been rebuked, arrested, brought before the Council at Halifax, suspended from their functions, or required on pain of banishment to swear that they would do nothing against the interests of King George. Yet such action on the part of the provincial authorities seems, without a single exception, to have been the consequence of misconduct on the part of the priest, in opposing the Government and stirring his flock to disaffec- tion." ("Montcalm and Wolfe," vol. i. pp. 94, 95.) Such, seen in the sober light of history, were the events which culminated in the tragedy best known to many English readers through the pages of Evangeline. It was not Parkman's habit to indulge over- much in historical generalisations. For the most part he lets events and persons speak for them- selves, and if he acts as chorus it is in an under- tone. Yet few historians have succeeded better in making their work the exposition and illustration of broad general principles. We never lose sight of the vital difference which underlay French and English colonisation. The history of the English colonies is the history of corporations. The life of 72 FRANCIS PARKMAN the community is always stronger, fuller, richer in possibilities than the life of any individual within it. In Canada the case is wholly different. There we see men of dominant genius and energy, such as Cartier, La Salle, Frontenac, and Montcalm, struggling ineffectually and with a tragic sense of impotence against the numbing influence of political conditions. Opposed to them we have a centralising despotism, unintelligent, wholly unsympathetic, endeavouring to force social and economical life into certain fixed moulds, wanting continuity even in its errors, permitting and even undesignedly stimulating the grossest official cor- ruption. We see ever conspicuous and active a third power, that of the Church, at times acting independently and infusing into the life of the colony an element of genuine heroism and self- devotion, at times lending itself as the resolute and unscrupulous instrument of an aggressive foreign policy, at times joining hands with the central power, and in the domain of morals and manners exercising a tyranny as harsh, as petty, and as interfering as any that New England ever suffered from in the days of Endicott and Dudley. The reader of Parkman is never allowed to forget one essential difference between Canada CANADA 73 and the English colonies. The latter were often exasperating in their mutual jealousy, their narrow provincialism, their total inability to take a wide and statesmanlike view of imperial questions. But intrigues begotten of personal ambition or greed play a very small part in their political life. Where we find energy and intelligence, whether in officials or in private citizens, we usually find them under the control of public spirit. In Canada, on the other hand, self - seeking was rampant in everyday official life : men such as Frontenac, who morally and mentally rose far above the ordinary official standard, were not wholly free from the taint. One body of men, and one only, stand wholly free from this charge. Never was courage more devoted or toil more disinterested than in the early Jesuit missionaries commemorated by Parkman. Of the hideous perils which beset their path he says forcibly but with no exaggeration, " Not the most hideous nightmare of a fevered brain could transcend in terror the real and waking perils with which they" (the Iroquois) "beset the path of these intrepid priests." A passage which follows in which Parkman extenuates the ferocity of the savages is an instance of his judicial fairness, 74 FRANCIS PARKMAN characteristic enough to be worth quoting. They were, he says, "not so bereft of the instincts of humanity as at first sight appeared. An inexorable severity towards enemies was a very essential element in their conception of the character of the warrior. Pity was a cowardly weakness, at which their pride revolted. This, joined to their thirst for applause and their dread of ridicule, made them smother every movement of compassion, and con- spired with their native fierceness to give a character of unrelenting cruelty rarely equalled." And Parkman supports this view by giving in the course of his narrative several instances where prisoners, once spared the ordeal of torture and adopted into the tribe, were treated with a kind- ness which permanently attached them to their new associates. Parkman's admiration for the fortitude of the early Canadian missionaries, such as Brebeuf and Lallemand, does not blind him to the narrowness and inadequacy of their aims. Their whole policy was based on a simple definite theory. The unbaptized heathen was certainly doomed to ever- lasting fire : once baptized, he was at the least JESUITS IN CANADA 75 on the road to salvation. It would be unfair to say of the first Canadian missionaries, whatever might be the case with their successors, that they neglected the morals of their converts. They protested against cannibalism, against the incanta- tions of the medicine-man over the sick, against dances savouring of devil-worship, and indeed in some cases against what would seem to have been harmless and wholesome amusements. They did something to mitigate the ferocity of their converts. Under the influence of his Jesuit teachers, as Parkman says "the savage burned his enemies alive, it is true, but he rarely ate them, neither did he torment them with the same deliberation and persistency. He was a savage still, but not so often a devil." Two things also we must remember. The cruelties of the Indians were not so remote from the ideas and practice of civilised men in that age as they are now. Moreover, the missionaries accepted, not formally, but as realities and work- ing principles, the emptiness of this life and the worthlessness of the body. " What," Parkman asks, " were a few hours of suffering to an eternity of bliss or woe ? If the 76 FRANCIS PARKMAN victim were heathen, these brief pangs were but the faint prelude of an undying flame ; and if a Christian, they were the fiery portal of heaven." The same feeling made the Canadian mission- ary heedless of the material prosperity and the safety of his converts. Once let them accept baptism, then it was probably well if they fell victims to starvation, to small-pox or an Iroquois tomahawk, before they could relapse. It is clear that missions based on these principles, let them be never so successful spiritually, were wholly profitless or even hurtful to the material interests of the colony. In the latter part of " The Jesuits in Canada," Parkman describes the mission station which sprung up in the Huron country about the middle of the seventeenth century. He tells, too, how the labours of the missionaries did but intensify the wrath and facilitate the task of the still heathen Iroquois, how priest and convert alike fell victims, and how, in a happy hour for the New England colonies, the Huron nation was virtually annihilated. Missionaries of the heroic and high-minded type of Brebeuf and Lallemand were succeeded THE INDIANS 77 by men of altogether lower aims. As the seven- teenth century advanced the "epoch of saint and martyr passed away, and henceforth we find the Canadian Jesuit less and less an apostle, more and more an explorer, a man of science and a politician." The early missionaries may not have striven to the utmost to eradicate the ferocity of their converts. It is not too much to say that in many cases their successors deliberately stimulated that ferocity and utilised it as a political instrument. As Parkman says : " These so-called missions were but nests of baptized savages, who wore the crucifix instead of the medicine - bag, and were encouraged by the Government for purposes of war." And here one may not unfitly consider a question never formally discussed by Parkman, but on which various passages in his writings throw ample light, the extent to which French- men in a responsible position were to blame for the atrocities of their Indian allies. In the face of the facts stated by Parkman in various passages it is scarcely possible to give a verdict of ac- quittal. To employ the savages on their own terms, that is to say, to let them burn and torture 78 FRANCIS PARKMAN their native prisoners and sack English villages, massacring women and children, was the settled policy not only of civil governors like Frontenac, but of ecclesiastics such as Piquet and Rasle. Parkman gives an extract from the diary of a French officer, Villieu, in which he thus announces the designs of his Indian allies : " They mean to divide into bands of four or five and knock people on the head by surprise, which cannot fail to produce a good effect." This was written in 1694, when Villieu, in command of a party of Indians, attacked the English settlement of Oyster River, with the result thus described by Parkman : " A hundred and four persons, chiefly women and children half-naked from their beds, were tomahawked, shot, or killed by slower and more painful methods." The performance ended with a mass said by Father Thury, a Jesuit who accompanied the party. Parkman further quotes a passage from a despatch by Piquet, an eminent French missionary in the middle of the eighteenth century, wherein he exults over the prospect that an Indian party under his command will do their utmost (tout entreprendre] against the settlers in Virginia. That French priests clearly knew what that " utmost " meant is shown by a private letter THE INDIANS 79 from one of them written five years later (1757), and quoted by Parkman : " They kill all they meet ; and, after having abused the women and maidens, they slaughter or burn them." And one is un- willingly forced to admit that the massacre which followed the surrender of Fort William Henry was largely due to Montcalm's supineness in guarding against the ferocity of his Indian allies. It may be urged that connivance at such practices was a needful price to pay for that Indian alliance without which Canada could not exist. The plea at best amounts to this, that a savage was cheaper than a civilised soldier. In one set of cases at least the attitude of the French went beyond connivance. We more than once find them hand- ing over Iroquois prisoners to their savage allies, with the certainty of torture before them. There at least one may reasonably doubt whether the action of the French was not a blunder as well as a crime. Hardly any price would have been too heavy for the French to pay which could have detached the Iroquois from the English. The Five Nations were, as Parkman points out, the one obstacle which prevented the secure extension of French power along the valleys of the Missouri and the Ohio. More than once 80 FRANCIS PARKMAN that obstacle was all but overcome. In 1645 all seemed tending to alliance, thanks to the devo- tion and astuteness of a Jesuit missionary, Father Jogues, when the Hurons in their jealousy per- suaded the Iroquois that a box in which the priest carried his necessaries contained the small- pox, ready to be launched in their midst. Forty- three years later the alliance was again frustrated by the unscrupulous craft of a Huron chief, nick- named the Rat, to whom an Italian diplomatist of the sixteenth century could have taught little. He heard that an Iroquois embassy was on its way to the French outpost, Fort Frontenac. Determined to thwart it, he laid an ambush, slew one of the ambassadors, and made prisoners of the rest. He then told them that the French commander had instructed him to lie in wait for an Iroquois war - party. When they explained their errand, the Rat broke out into well-acted indignation at the treachery of which he had been made the instrument, and sent the prisoners to their homes with presents and fair words. The deception was undiscovered. As a consequence, before the year was out an Iroquois party of fifteen hundred warriors invaded Canada, ravaging and massacring up to the very walls of Montreal. THE INDIANS 81 Yet, as Parkman points out, the hostility of the Iroquois always just stopped short of actual destruction. "Canada was indispensable to them. The four upper nations of the league soon became dependent on her for supplies, and all the nations alike appear at a very early period to have con- ceived the policy in which they afterwards dis- tinctly acted, of balancing the rival settlements of the Hudson and the St Lawrence the one against the other. They would torture, but not kill. It was but rarely that in fits of fury they struck their hatchets at the brain, and thus the bleeding and gasping colony lingered on in torment." In another way, as Mr Parkman points out, the dependence on the Indian alliance was fatal to the colonies, and went far to account for the different fortunes of France and England in America. The need for securing the good- will of the savage gave prominence to two classes, the missionary and the fur-trader, and neither did anything to further what in a new country is an essential condition of well-being, the growth of population. The missionaries had no wives : the traders left theirs at home or took squaws F 82 FRANCIS PARKMAN whose half-savage progeny did nothing for the colony. Not only that, but the trapper and fur- trader themselves drifted into semi- barbarism, and lost all the qualities most needed in a colonist. The extension of a peaceful, settled agricultural community was adverse alike to their tastes and their interests. Thus we find that one of the main influences which thwarted La Salle's project was the jealousy felt by fur- traders to what they deemed his encroachments. Moreover, the material resources of the French colonies were not such as enabled them to enjoy a monopoly of the Indian trade. Their attempts to make it a basis for the Indian alliance were constantly thwarted by English traders. The latter were less enterprising than their French rivals ; but they had wealthier communities at their back, and they were free from the restric- tions with which the Canadian Government harassed its subjects at every turn, and thus were able to supply better goods. Parkman's readers are never allowed to forget that if the relations of Canada to her savage neighbour were so largely the source of her weak- ness, yet it was largely the inherent vices of her internal system which made her so dependent on CANADIAN GOVERNMENT 83 those relations. The whole civil system of Canada rested on a jealous division of power and avoid- ance of individual responsibility. What the main features of that system were is best told in Parkman's own words : " The Governor-General and the Intendant of Canada answered to those of a French province. The Governor, excepting in the earliest period of the colony, was a military noble, in most cases bearing a title, and sometimes of high rank. The Intendant, as in France, was usually drawn from the gens de robe, or legal class. " The Intendant was virtually a spy on the Governor- General, of whose proceedings and of everything else that took place he was required to make report. Every year he wrote to the Minister of State one, two, three, or four letters, often forty or fifty pages long, filled with the secrets of the colony, political and personal, great and small, set forth with a minuteness often interesting, often instructive, and often exces- sively tedious. The Governor, too, wrote letters of pitiless length; and each of the colleagues was jealous of the letters of the other. In truth, their relations to each other were so critical, and perfect harmony so rare, that they might almost be described as natural enemies." (" The Old Regime," pp. 265, 266.) 84 FRANCIS PARKMAN The full evils of the system were well illustrated when Canada was in the very crisis of her fate. It is clear that Vaudreuil, the Intendant, a born Canadian, looked with jealousy on Montcalm as a Frenchman and a newcomer. He did not actually venture to say that Canada could have defended herself with her own militia ; but he made it clear that he looked on the regular troops as at best a necessary evil. The difficulty was complicated, though probably not made worse by the difficulty of communication with France. We read how "Frontenac rarely began a new quarrel till the autumn vessels had sailed for France, because a full year must then elapse before his adversaries could send their complaints to the king, and six months more before the king could send back his answer. The Governor had been heard to say on one of these occasions that he should now be master for eighteen months, subject only to answering with his head for what he might do." Another element of discord was to be found in the presence of a stirring and ambitious priest- hood, owning no effective central authority. How devoted men and women formed at Montreal a community of secular priests and of nuns wholly RELIGIOUS FACTIONS 85 independent of the Jesuit missions, and sub- sequently affiliated to the French seminary of St Sulpice, is vividly told by Parkman in "The Jesuits in Canada" and "The Old Regime." But his admiration for the heroic spirit of self-sacrifice which animated these efforts does not prevent him from seeing their weaker side and the discord which they brought in their train. "Though a unit against heresy, the pious founders of New France were far from unity among themselves. To the thinking of Jesuits, Montreal was a government within a government, a wheel within a wheel. The rival Sulpitian settlement was, in their eyes, an element of dis- organisation, adverse to the disciplined harmony of the Canadian Church, which they would fain have seen, with its focus at Quebec, radiating light unrefracted to the uttermost parts of the colony ; that is to say, they wished to control it unchecked through their ally, the bishop. "The emigrants, then, were received with a studious courtesy, which veiled but thinly a stiff and persistent opposition. The bishop and the Jesuits were especially anxious to prevent the La Fleche nuns from establishing themselves at Montreal, where they would form a separate com- munity under Sulpitian influence, and in place 86 FRANCIS PARKMAN of the newly - arrived Sisters they wished to substitute nuns from the H6tel Dieu at Quebec, who would be under their own control. That which most strikes the non - Catholic reader throughout this affair is the constant reticence and dissimulation practised, not only between Jesuits and Montrealists, but among the Montrealists themselves. Their self-devotion, great as it was, was fairly matched by their disingenuousness." ("The Old Regime," p. 48.) The priestly influence with which Canada was permeated was exercised almost as unsparingly as in New England, in subjecting social life to severe discipline, and in repressing individuality of taste and character. The narrow asceticism of the Massachusetts ministry had, as Parkman shows, its match in the Canadian priesthood. We find La Motte - Cadaillac, the founder of Detroit, complaining that "nobody can live here but simpletons and slaves of the ecclesiastical dominion." Married women, he says, were whipped by order of the priests for attending balls and masquerades ; houses were forcibly shut at nine in the evening ; ladies were excluded from the Holy Table because they had worn unseemly finery. Another victim, a young French officer, RELIGIOUS DISCIPLINE 87 complains that he "can neither go to a pleasure party, nor play a game of cards, nor visit the ladies without the cur knowing it and preaching about it publicly from his pulpit." And he describes a domiciliary visit paid to his lodgings by his own cure, who, finding a fine copy of Petronius on the table, summarily expurgated the offending author by tearing out nearly all the leaves. One may allow something for rhetorical exaggeration in both these witnesses ; yet even so one cannot but see how exasperating such restraint must have been to the pleasure-loving French temper, confirmed by the adventurous freedom of colonial life. In this minute and exacting system of discipline, the clergy did but apply to the one department of morals the same principles on which the civil government of Canada dealt with the whole fabric of social and economical life. Colbert had intro- duced into the administration of Canada a system of minute and persistent government interference. Parkman, trained in the free life of New England yet a man of the world, free from any doctrinaire devotion to abstract principles, was eminently well qualified to deal with this question. In " The Old Regime " he brings together a number of instances 88 FRANCIS PARKMAN of the system of paternal government. One Intendant, specially moved by the desire and determination to play Providence, ordered that no farmer should move into Quebec under penalty of a fine of fifty livres and confiscation of goods and furniture ; and by the same edict to let houses or rooms in Quebec to people coming in from the country was made penal under a fine of a hundred livres. Another Intendant, thinking that horses were too many and sheep and. cattle too few, put out an order limiting every inhabitant to two horses and one foal. All above that were to be destroyed by a fixed date. Among its other func- tions the Government ran a matrimonial agency, exporting marriageable young women, sometimes a hundred in a year. An officer who had been quartered in Canada, writing in 1709, describes the intending husband choosing his bride out of a consignment " as a butcher chooses his sheep out of the midst of the flock," and on like principles. " The plumpest were taken first, because it was thought that being less active they were more likely to keep at home, and that they could resist the winter cold better." The same writer impugns the virtue of the girls so consigned ; but according to Parkman this is a calumny, at least so far as THE OLD REGIME 89 the intentions of the Government went. He admits, however, that errors were occasionally made ; that wives who had fled from their husbands and other discreditable characters occa- sionally appeared among the candidates for matri- mony. Manon Lescaut may have really crossed the Atlantic, though no doubt her case was exceptional. Not only was the horse taken to the water, but as far as law could prevail he was made to drink. A bounty was offered to all men under twenty and to all girls under sixteen if they married. For a father to have children above these ages unmarried was a crime punishable by a fine. Prolificacy was a highly - rewarded virtue, since the happy parent of ten children received an annual pension of three hundred livres ; two more children brought an additional hundred. Talon, the Intendant in 1670, issued an order prohibit- ing bachelors from hunting, fishing, or trading with the natives ; and Colbert approved his action, and even went further, suggesting "those who may seem to have absolutely renounced marriage should be made to bear additional burdens and be excluded from all honours ; it would be well even to add some marks of infamy." " The success of these 90 FRANCIS PARKMAN measures," Parkman adds, "was complete. . . . Throughout the length and breadth of Canada, Hymen, if not Cupid, was whipped into a frenzy of activity." Such a system must have given an air of grotesque unreality to the teaching and mythology of the Romish Church. As might be expected, every branch of in- dustry rested on elaborate systems of government aid and government restraint. To enforce by law and reward by bounties and a monopoly was the specific invariably proposed by Intendants for developing each successive form of production. Hemp-growing, fishing, the beaver trade, and the making of wood-ashes were all dealt with thus. We hardly need that Parkman should tell us the inevitable result : " In all departments of industry the appeals for help are endless. Governors and Intendants are so many sturdy beggars for the languishing colony. ' Send us money to build storehouses, to which the habitants can bring their produce and receive goods from the Government in exchange. Send us a teacher to make sailors of our young men ; it is a pity the colony should remain in such a state for want of instruction for youth. We want a surgeon : there is none in Canada who can set a THE OLD REGIME 91 bone. Send us some tilers, brickmakers, and potters. Send us iron-workers to work our mines. It is to be wished that his Majesty would send us all sorts of artisans, especially potters and glass- workers. Our Canadians need aid and instruction in their fisheries ; they need pilots.' ' Yet this government, which was expected to leave Providence without occupation, was all the while showing itself unable to fulfil one of its most obvious and elementary functions. No care of legislator or administrator could infuse prosperity into a community which was being drained at every pore by a horde of official bloodsuckers. Not every thief leaves the trace of his footsteps, and it is pretty safe to assume that what can be proved from records falls short of the reality. Yet Parkman is able from the data available to construct an appalling record of corruption. It would seem to have reached its climax in the last years of French rule. " Profit by your place ; clip and cut you are free to do what you please so that you can come soon to join me in France and buy an estate near me " : thus writes a depart- ing official in 1754 to his successor. Bigot, who gave this advice, was outdone by a colleague and friend, Cadet. He with the connivance of Bigot bought 92 FRANCIS PARKMAN for six hundred thousand francs stores belonging to the king, and then sold them back to him for one million four hundred thousand. The evil did not end with the mere loss of money. In 1758 several of the tribes who had before been allies of France deserted her because the gifts intended for them had been intercepted by corrupt officials. One essential weakness in the position of Canada was the lack of any clear and connected conception of material progress on the part of the colony as a whole. Honest and public-spirited officials there were, but they neither embodied nor identified themselves with the corporate life of the community. The clergy, when conscientious and scrupulous, taught in their home ministrations as in their Indian missions the worthlessness of the material world. The physical conditions of the country were all adverse to corporate life. The facility of water-carriage acted much as it did in Virginia : " Wherever the settlers were allowed to choose for themselves they ranged their dwellings along the watercourses. With the exception of Talon's villages, one could have seen nearly every house in Canada by paddling a canoe up the St Lawrence and the Richelieu. The settlements formed long LA SALLE AND FRONTENAC 93 thin lines on the edges of the rivers ; a con- venient arrangement, but one very unfavourable to defence, to ecclesiastical control, and to strong government." The authorities at home strove against the tend- ency, but natural conditions were too strong. The types of character which the two systems respectively produced were not wholly unlike. In the life of Canada, as in that of Virginia, there is a charm begotten of individuality and diversity of character which is wholly wanting to the cast-iron system on which New England, in her early days at least, was fashioned. To that charm Parkman, clearly as he perceives the deficiencies of Canada in those essential qualities which make a com- munity, is fully alive. He does ample justice to the high-minded and patriotic adventurousness of the discoverer La Salle ; to the happy mixture of diplomatic tact and dominant self-assertion with which Frontenac, almost alone among Canadian governors, made the alliance of the fickle savage into an effective and trustworthy weapon ; to the strenuous energy with which the same governor in his seventieth year, yet defiant of age, fashioned the resources of his disunited and misgoverned 94 FRANCIS PARKMAN colony into a military engine which threatened the British power in America with annihilation. Amid all the episodes of heroism and devotion commemorated by Parkman none are more im- pressive than the heroism of two French gentle- women, worthy successors of Jeanne de Penthievre and Jeanne de Montfort. Fort Vercheres on the St Lawrence, twenty miles below Quebec, was, as Parkman expresses it, "the Castle Dangerous of Canada." In 1690 the wife of the commander with a mere handful of men held it for two days against the Iroquois till relief came. Her daughter was more than worthy of such a mother. One day when the commander and his wife were both away, and the occupants of the fort were working in the fields, it was surprised by the Iroquois. Madeline de Vercheres, a girl of fourteen, fled to the fort with bullets whistling about her head, and just succeeded in shutting the gate on her pursuers. She found in the fort two soldiers, her two brothers, lads of twelve and ten, and a number of women and children. The soldiers, panic-stricken, had hidden themselves in a block- house attached to the fort. Not only was the fort ungarrisoned, but the palisades were in places broken down. Madeline at once had them MADELINE DE VERCHERES 95 repaired, helping with her own hands. Then visiting the blockhouse where the ammunition was, she found the two soldiers making ready to blow up the fort. She thereupon ordered them out of the blockhouse, and armed herself and her two brothers, bidding them remember their father's teaching, " That gentlemen were born to shed their blood for the service of God and the king." To attack a fort was a form of warfare for which the savages had always the greatest reluct- ance and incapacity, and for the present they confined themselves to killing any settlers whom they found scattered in the fields. One man and his family contrived in a canoe to reach the landing-place near the fort. But they would in all likelihood have been cut off if Madeline had not sallied forth herself to meet them, a task which the soldiers refused. Before night came she disposed her little garrison. The newcomer with the two soldiers was to guard the women and children in the blockhouse, while Madeline and her two brothers, with an old man of eighty, stood guard on the bastions. Passing the word as sentries and remaining continuously at their post day and night, they in all likelihood impressed the Iroquois with the belief that the fort was 96 FRANCIS PARKMAN effectively garrisoned, till after a week a relieving force appeared and the siege was raised. Such episodes redeem and even do something to excuse the baser and worse side of Canadian military history. That the Iroquois invading Canada and threatening peaceful settlers with death and torture were acting simply from their own instincts and policy and not at the bidding of their English allies, though in the main true, was a view of the case which the threatened inhabitants could hardly be expected to take. The Iroquois were the recognised allies of England, and the raids of the French Indians may well have seemed to be mere measures of retaliation. And if an immoral policy could ever be defended on the plea of expediency, the attempt to uproot the English settlements might be. Frontenac was not more distinguished by his administrative energy and diplomatic tact than by the clearness with which he saw that truth and the persistency with which he acted on it. Vast as the North American continent was, it had not room for the colonies of France and England : for the very existence of Canada, dependent as she was on the fur trade, required as one of its conditions the existence of a large FRANCE AND CANADA 97 tract of country peopled with savages, who must of necessity be brought into conflict with a rival civilised power. It was but fitfully and intermittently that the Home Government of France rose to a perception of the situation. As a consequence there was no consistent attempt to maintain Canada as a basis of military strength and a check on the English colonies. Once and again some comprehensive scheme of conquest would pass before the mind of French rulers. Such was the scheme projected in 1689 by Callieres, the Governor of Montreal, and approved by Louis. New York was to be invaded by the line of the Hudson, while French vessels were to co-operate from the sea. The inhabitants were to be replaced by French settlers, and thus New England was to be isolated. It was a faint copy on a smaller scale of La Salle's great project for hemming in the English colonies, with the substitution of the Hudson for the Mississippi. Parkman justly criticises the atrocity of the scheme and the grotesque inadequacy of the means by which it was to be effected. "Louis XIV. commanded that eighteen thousand unoffending persons should be stripped of all that they possessed and cast out to the 6 98 FRANCIS PARKMAN mercy of the wilderness. The atrocity of the plan is matched by its folly. The king gave explicit orders, but he gave neither ships nor men enough to accomplish them ; and the Dutch farmers, goaded to desperation, would have cut his six hundred soldiers to pieces. It was the scheme of a man blinded by a long course of success. Though perverted by flattery, and hardened by unbridled power, he was not cruel by nature ; and here, as in the burning of the Palatinate and the persecution of the Huguenots, he would have stood aghast if his dull imagination could have pictured to him the miseries he was prepared to inflict." (" Count Frontenac," p. 190.) The difficulties which beset France in her dealings with the insurgent colonies of Great Britain were singularly anticipated early in the eighteenth century. In 1776 Vergennes hesitated between the desire to cripple Great Britain and the dread of making America an independent power. So in 1710 we find two distinct lines of policy suggested by French politicians. We find Costebelle, a French officer commanding in New- foundland, proposing that negotiations should be entered into with " Les Bostonnais," and that it should be explained to them that the professed designs of the British Government against Canada FRANCE AND CANADA 99 were really a cloak for an attack on the republican institutions of New England. On the other hand, Parkman quotes a paper from the French archives pointing out that the growth of the English colonies was a far greater danger to Canada than the ambition of the English crown. With singular prophetic insight the writer points out that the fall of French power in America will surely be followed by the independence of the British colonies and their union as a single democracy. His practical advice is to make a vigorous attack on New England by sea and land, and wholly to destroy Boston and " Rhodelene." Mr Parkman points out that, amid all the schemes and devices of French statesmen on behalf of Canada, they overlooked the one great resource which lay ready to their hands, the Huguenot population of France. "From the hour when the Edict of Nantes was revoked hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen would have hailed as a boon the permission to transport themselves, their families and their property, to the New World. The permission was fiercely refused, and the persecuted sect was denied even a refuge in the wilderness. Had it been granted to them, the valleys of the West 100 FRANCIS PARKMAN would have swarmed with a laborious and virtuous population, trained in adversity and possessing the essential qualities of self-government. Another France would have grown beyond the Alleghanies, strong with the same kind of strength that made the future greatness of the English colonies." ("Count Frontenac," p. 396.) That criticism strikes us as either going too far or not far enough. It is another way of say- ing that Louis XIV. and his advisers should have been wholly other than they were. Such a colony as sketched by Parkman would hardly have served a single interest of France, as those interests were understood by her responsible rulers. One only of the French governors of Canada, the humpback La Gallissonniere, seems to have perceived that the colony was worth maintain- ing, quite independent of the direct advantages derived from it as a check on the great rival of France in Europe. From that policy France was led aside by the blindness of her king and the wounded vanity of a harlot. As Parkman says : " Louis XV. and Pompadour sent 100,000 men to fight the battles of Austria, and could spare but 1,200 to reinforce New France." Yet Englishmen can hardly throw stones. ENGLAND AND CANADA 101 Throughout his work Parkman shows how, with one or two exceptions, Englishmen, those in the colonies and those at home alike, were unable to grasp the issues involved in the continued existence of Canada as a French dependency. Pitt alone among English statesmen, William Shirley and Robert Dinwiddie, Governors of Massachusetts and Virginia respectively, alone among colonial officials, really saw the question in its full bearings, and did their utmost to force it on the minds of their fellow-countrymen. French raids might occasionally stir up the colonies immediately endangered to some resolute effort of resistance. But every attempt at a con- nected and continuous policy for checking French aggression was thwarted either by intercolonial jealousy and rivalry or by the factiousness of colonial Assemblies. The case could hardly be better stated than it is by Parkman. "The English colonies were separate, jealous of the Crown and of each other, and incapable as yet of acting in concert. Living by agriculture and trade, they could prosper within limited areas, and had no present need of spreading beyond the Alleghanies. Each of them was an aggregate of persons busied with their own affairs, and giving 102 FRANCIS PARKMAN little heed to matters which did not immediately concern them. Their rulers, whether chosen by themselves or appointed in England, could not compel them to become the instruments of enter- prise in which the sacrifice was present and the advantage remote. The neglect in which the English Court left them, though wholesome in most respects, made them unfit for aggressive action, for they had neither troops, commanders, political union, military organisation, nor military habits. In communities so busy and governments so popular much could not be done in war till the people were roused to the necessity of doing it, and that awakening was still far distant. Even New York, the only exposed colony except Massachusetts and New Hampshire, regarded the war merely as a nuisance to be held at arm's length." ("Frontenac," p. 394.) In justice to the colonists, one thing must not be forgotten. So doubtful were the claims to uninhabited territory that no colony could feel sure that its own expenditure in occupying and defending lands on the western frontier might not end in the profit of a rival. At best each colony felt that as the dangers and the possible gains involved were in a great measure common, so ought the burden of resistance to be common THE ENGLISH COLONIES 103 also. Thus the persistent refusal of Pennsylvania to co-operate in any way in military action, went far to paralyse the policy of every other colony. Moreover, it must be remembered that the retention of Canada and the occupation of the West by France affected the material interests of the different colonies in widely different fashions. For New England, drawing her wealth mainly from the fisheries and from foreign trade, the whole question was a military one. Let her be insured against the raids of the French Indians, and she asked no more. The conditions of a New England colony, like those of the Greek city State, imposed rigid limitations on her growth. Extension westward had to be carried out by the isolated efforts of settlers relinquish- ing corporate life and resigning themselves to a period of semi - barbarism, and to the New Englander that prospect was wholly repellent. The proximity of Virginia to the fertile valley of the Ohio was of singular good fortune for the future of America. The appeal to farmers, hunters, and fur-traders was made to the one colony with a population willing and able to profit by it. 104 FRANCIS PARKMAN The reader of Parkman needs to be reminded that it is of necessity the weaker and meaner side of colonial life which is being brought into the foreground. There could be no higher proof of Parkman's impartiality and self-restraint than the way in which the lethargy, the factiousness, the disunion of the colonies are unsparingly brought out, while the redeeming virtues which do not enter directly into the story have for the most part to be inferred. In the absence of any continuous corporate policy everything turned on the isolated efforts of individuals, and thus we are brought face to face with the most glaring contrasts of heroism and sagacity on the one side, of blundering sloth and cowardice on the other. This is specially true of the military policy of New England as portrayed by Parkman in the "Half Century of Conflict." On the one hand, we have the state of things described by the Rev. Benjamin Doolittle, the minister and chronicler of Northfield, a village in the frontier of Massachusetts specially exposed to attack from Canada. " He complains," Parkman says, " that plans are changed so often that none of them take THE ENGLISH COLONIES 105 effect ; that terms of enlistment are so short that the commissary can hardly serve out provisions to the men before their term is expired; that neither bread, meat, shoes, nor blankets are kept on hand for an emergency, so that the enemy escapes while the soldiers are getting ready to pursue them ; that the pay of a drafted man is so small that twice as much would not hire a labourer to take care of the farm in his absence, and that untried and unfit persons are com- missioned as officers ; in all of which strictures there is no doubt much truth." (" Half Century of Conflict," vol. ii. p. 249.) The helpless and appalling lack of discipline of which an English colony was capable is shown by the tale of the destruction of Schenectady, a village on the New York frontier. In 1689 the colony was in a state of civil war, and the chief magistrate of Schenectady as well as the com- mander of the troops were of the unpopular party. The result was that when the warning came that a party of French with their Indian allies was advancing on the village, the inhabitants turned the advice to ridicule, laughed at the idea of danger, left both their gates wide open and placed there, it is said, two snow images as mock sentinels. 106 FRANCIS PARKMAN The result was a surprise ending in the destruction of the village and the massacre of the inhabitants, of whom more than a third were women and children. It would be hard to imagine a more con- temptible record of treachery and cowardice than the story which Mr Parkman tells of Pascho Chubb, the commander of Pemaquid, who first killed a number of Indian envoys who had come as a conference, and then with an adequate garrison surrendered the fort entrusted to him at the first sound of the French cannon. On the other hand, we have isolated efforts of heroism worthy to rank with those selected by Parkman from the annals of French Canada. Such was the exploit of Hannah Dustan, the wife of a settler at Haverhill, on the northern frontier of Massachusetts. A week after her lying-in, her house was attacked by Indians, while her husband with their seven young children was working in the fields. The husband hearing the attack sent the children to a place of safety, and rushed to the rescue, but before he could arrive, his wife, with the babe and a neighbour who was nursing them, were carried off. The child was immediately killed. There were other English prisoners, some NEW ENGLAND BRAVERY 107 of whom were slain, the rest divided among their captors. One party consisting of two warriors, seven children, and three squaws, took possession of Hannah Dustan, her companion and an English boy, and with them marched through the forest to a point some 250 miles to the north. At length the prisoners, rendered desperate by their captors' tales of the atrocities in store for them, rose silently in the night, tomahawked ten out of the twelve savages as they slept, and made their way home through the wilderness with the scalps of their victims. In 1746 a party of New England militia, numbering but thirty combatants, held Fort Number Four for forty-eight hours against a mixed force of French and Indians, sixty times their own number, and finally capitulated on safe and honourable terms. In the following year another force of thirty New England militia, holding Fort Massachusetts, defied and successfully resisted an attacking party of seven hundred. One incident in the siege is specially characteristic of the New England temper and habits of mind. Stephens, the commander, being summoned to surrender, went out to hold a parley with the besiegers. He declined to take any definite course till he had 108 FRANCIS PARKMAN consulted his garrison. On his return he, to quote Parkman, " acted as if he had been the moderator of a town meeting. ' I went into the fort and called the men together, and informed them what the General said, and then put it to the vote whether they would fight or resign, and they voted to a man to stand it out, and also declared that they would fight as long as they had life." We find somewhat the same contrast between blundering incapacity at one time, and heroic and effective daring on the other, in the two attempts made by New England to strike a decisive blow at the enemy. In 1690 a naval force was sent out from Boston to attack Quebec under the command of Phipps, afterwards Governor of the colony. A combined land force from the New England colonies and New York was to co-operate. Small-pox, dissensions with the Indian allies, those difficulties of transport which in the next century thwarted Burgoyne, made the land expedition a failure. Phipps sailed up the St Lawrence. He learned from French prisoners of the existence of the footpath up the heights by which Wolfe led his troops to victory. The town was ill-garrisoned, the inhabitants alarmed and dispirited. A sudden PHIPPS AT QUEBEC 109 attack offered the one chance of success. Phipps, personally brave, but wholly lacking in judgment and administrative power, hesitated, held council after council, and delayed till the uproar of a cheering crowd and the noise of fifes and drums within the town told him that a strong reinforce- ment had arrived from Montreal. There was no lack of personal courage, but at every stage the operations were marked by alternations of purpose- less delay with reckless but ineffectual daring. After an absence of three months the fleet re- appeared at Boston with the tale of its discomfiture. " Had Phipps come a week earlier or stayed a week later," Parkman says, apparently with justice, "the French themselves believed that Quebec would have fallen, in the one case for want of men, and in the other for want of food." How fully Parkman had outgrown the prejudices of an earlier New England generation is shown by his summary of Phipps's failure. " Massachusetts had made her usual mistake. She had confidently believed that ignorance and inexperience could match the skill of a tried veteran, and that the rude courage of her fisher- men and farmers could triumph without discipline or leadership. The conditions of her material 110 FRANCIS PARKMAN prosperity were adverse to efficiency in war. A trading republic without trained officers may win victories, but it was then either by accident, or by an extravagant outlay in money and life." ("Count Frontenac," p. 285.) At a later stage of his story Parkman has to tell of one of these " accidental " victories. The capture of Louisburg in 1745 was an exploit which assuredly could never have been achieved without an amount of good fortune on which no one had the right confidently to reckon. Yet none the less did it do credit to the tenacity of purpose of the Massachusetts' democracy and the courage and endurance of her citizen soldiers. They threw themselves, too, with all the more zeal into the enterprise, that it was in a great measure of their own devising. " A Mad Scheme " is the title of the chapter in which Mr Parkman tells the planning of this attempt. " Louisburg," he says, " was a standing menace to all the Northern British colonies ; it was the only French naval station on the continent, and was such a haunt of French privateers that it was called the American Dunkirk. It commanded the chief entrance of Canada, and threatened to ruin the fisheries, which were nearly as vital to New England as was the fur trade to New France. LOUISBURG 111 The French Government had spent twenty-five years in fortifying it, and the cost of its powerful defences, constructed after the system of Vauban, was reckoned at thirty million of livres. " This was the fortress which William Vaugham of Damariscotta advised Governor Shirley to attack with fifteen hundred raw New England militia." ("Half Century of Conflict," vol. ii. p. 83.) The advice was given to the one man likely to accept it, and capable, with much aid from fortune, of bringing the attempt to a good issue. Shirley, Governor of Massachusetts, was in many ways the typical man of the eighteenth century ; energetic, practical, something of an egotist and a self-seeker, yet full of public spirit and touched with the love of enterprise which so fully redeems that age from the shallow charge of being prosaic and unimaginative. With a thorough understand- ing of the men with whom he had to deal, Shirley brought his scheme before the Assembly, and accepted its defeat with much inward sorrow, but without any sort of official remonstrance. By sober patience, by the use of his influence with individual members, by enlisting strongly the sympathy of the New England traders, all of whom, Parkman says, "looked on Louisburg as 112 FRANCIS PARKMAN an arch-enemy," Shirley at length induced the Assembly to reverse its decision. Even then the scheme was only carried by a single vote, and it is said would not have been carried at all but for an accident which befell a member on his way to the division. It does no little honour alike to Shirley and to the men of Massachusetts that when once the scheme was taken up all previous opposi- tion was forgotten. Of the commander chosen, William Pepperell, Parkman says that he "joined to an unusual popularity as little military incom- petency as any one else who could be had." The expedition, he goes on to say, " had something of the character of broad farce, to which Shirley himself, with all his ability and general good sense, was a chief contributor. He wrote to the Duke of Newcastle that, though the officers had no experience and the men no discipline, he would take care to provide against these defects." Grotesque as the expression sounds, there was just an element of truth in it. Only under a Governor who understood the New England temper could it have come about that the personal good qualities of a general, not merely LOUISBURG 113 his zeal and courage, but his kindliness and liberality, made his troops wholly forget his lack of professional skill and training, and that the impetuous and sanguine temper in which the siege was begun remained proof against the toil and hardships and sickness with which it was attended. On the 1st of May Pepperell landed before Louisburg, and on the 15th of June the garrison, straitened for powder and with no hope of assistance from without, surrendered. The result was no doubt largely due to the infatu- ated supineness of the French Government, nor could the town have been taken unless three vessels of the British Navy had come to the aid of the colonial force. Yet the very fact that the fleet, under a commander with a some- what exaggerated sense of his own dignity, was able to co-operate without friction or hindrance, showed that Pepperell had some of the most valuable qualities of a leader. After all deduc- tions for exceptional good fortune, the result ought to have saved English statesmen of the next generation from so fatally underrating the soldiership and the tenacity of purpose of the colonists. Parkman's task in one way became easier as H 114 FRANCIS PARKMAN it advanced. The struggle between France and England in America in the seventeenth century is bewildering, from the wide area over which it raged and from the lack of any definitely central point of interest. " The contest for territory was fourfold : First, for the control of the West ; secondly, for that of Hudson's Bay ; thirdly, for that of Newfound- land ; and, lastly, for that of Acadia. All these vast and widely sundered regions were included in the government of Frontenac. Each division of the war was distinct from the rest, and each had a character of its own." (" Count Frontenac," p. 335.) Parkman clearly points out how adverse to the interest of England was this diffusion of the field of conflict : "One marvels at the dissensions, the short- sightedness, the apathy which had left the key of the interior so long in the hands of France without an effort to wrest it from her. To master Niagara would be to cut the communications of Canada with the whole system of French forts and settle- ments in the West, and leave them to perish like the limbs of a girdled tree." ("Montcalm and Wolfe," vol. i. p. 318.) CHARACTERS 115 As the end draws near operations become more concentrated, and Parkman's story gains in definiteness and in dramatic effect. His bio- graphical power, his strong sense of the value and importance of individual character, have full play. Of his presentments of Montcalm, of Wolfe, and of Shirley, we have already spoken. Slighter, but hardly less effective, are his sketches of Forbes, the " Scotch veteran, forty - eight years of age, who had begun life as a student of medicine, and who ended it as an able and faithful soldier," and whose patient toil in road -making through the forest, battling with colonial obstinacy and corruption, yet not despising colonial experience and military traditions, " opened the great West to English enterprise, took from France half her savage allies, and relieved the Western frontier from the scourge of Indian war " ; and of Johnson, the genial, resolute, free-living Irishman, who pos- sessed the gift so common among the French Canadians, so rare among the English settlers, of assuming something of the tastes and habits of the savage, yet without any sacrifice of ascendency. Another character of the war to whom Parkman does ample justice is Lord Howe, that Marcellus of the eighteenth century, whom Wolfe 116 FRANCIS PARKMAN generously described as " the noblest Englishman that has appeared in any time and the best soldier in the British army." "The army," Parkman says, "felt him, from General to drummer-boy. He was its soul, and, while breathing into it his own energy and ardour and bracing it by stringent discipline, he broke through the traditions of the service, and gave it new shapes, to suit the time and place. During the past year he had studied the arts of forest warfare, and joined Rogers and his rangers in their scouting parties, sharing all their hardships and making himself one of them." ("Montcalm and Wolfe," vol. ii. p. 90.) "This Lycurgus of the Camp" washed his linen in the brook with his own hands, and, when he invited his officers to dinner, seated them on logs, fed them on pork and peas, and expected every man to bring his knife and fork in his pocket. Yet it is clear that these were no touches of affectation, but only the visible symbol of the spirit in which he wished and meant forest war- fare to be carried out. With his death, wrote a contemporary, " the soul of General Abercromby's army seemed to expire," and, as Parkman adds, LORD HOWE 117 "the death of one man was the ruin of fifteen thousand." The colonists were nowise backward in recog- nising his merits, and in the evil days of the next generation the name of Howe, even when borne by those with few of his gifts, was not without its influence on colonial feeling. As Parkman says " he made himself greatly beloved by the provincial officers, with many of whom he was on terms of intimacy, and he did what he could to break down the barriers between the colonial soldiers and the British regulars." That comment calls to mind one feature of the war, in nowise a pleasing one for Englishmen to dwell upon, which Parkman brings out clearly, though with no exaggeration or bitterness : " The provincial officers . . . and especially those of New England, being no less narrow and prejudiced, filled with a sensitive pride and a jealous local patriotism, and bred up in a lofty appreciation of the merits and importance of their country, regarded British superciliousness with a resentment which their strong love for England could not overcome." 118 FRANCIS PARKMAN "The deportment of British officers in the Seven Years' War no doubt had some part in hastening on the Revolution." That is not an unfitting extract with which to take leave of Parkman. For it is the com- bination of feelings which he describes, " a strong love for England," "a lofty appreciation of the merits and importance of his own country," which, aided by indefatigable toil, inspired and controlled by genuine zeal and love for letters, makes his work what it is. TREVELYAN'S "AMERICAN REVOLUTION" 1 THE general character of Sir George Trevelyan's literary work, and especially of the book to which this is a sequel, is a guarantee for certain definite literary merits. His narrative is sure to be ani- mated, his presentment of characters vivid, and his estimate of them intelligent. His actors are always living personages. No one who remembers his picture of that brilliant and reckless oligarchy which in the last century formed the fashionable world of London could doubt his power of bring- ing before his readers, distinctly and attractively, the social and intellectual life of a period. In that respect indeed, Sir George was more fortunate in the subject of his earlier than of his later work. 1 "The American Revolution," part i. 1766-76, by the Right Hon. Sir George Otto Trevelyan, Bart. London, 1899. Longmans, Green & Co. (Engliih Historical Review, vol. xiv. pp. 696-604. 1899.) 119 120 SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN It is in the outward aspects of life that his style finds its most appropriate material, and no one would contend that the world in which Washing- ton and Adams and Franklin moved was as rich in diversity of incident, in variety of motive, in picturesqueness of colouring as the world of Fox and Fitzpatrick. Nor, I venture to think, does Sir George Trevelyan understand it with the same sympathetic familiarity. Still, the old gifts of technique, as one may call it, are there. And here and there the technical skill is used on a newer and in some sense a wider canvas. Sir George Trevelyan shows that he can describe not only social and political movements, but the actual drama of war clearly and forcibly. Here and there, indeed, he presses a hereditary antipathy to " the dignity of history " rather far. It is somewhat flippant to describe Warren as going into the battle of Bunker's Hill "with a head- ache soon to be cured." It is not only flippant but cumbrous to say of those Connecticut militia- men who Ephraim-like, being armed, turned back in the day of battle, that they were "convinced that unless they returned straight away to their regiment before the public opinion of their village took shape in action, they would AMERICAN REVOLUTION 121 have to travel at least the first stage of their journey to Cambridge by a mode of conveyance neither easy nor dignified, and in a costume not unsuited to people who had chosen to display the white feather." But a book is not to be condemned for occa- sional lapses of good taste, and as far as mere style goes the directness and effectiveness of the narrative more than outweigh its shortcomings. Yet, despite the merits which I have acknow- ledged, I cannot think that Sir George Trevelyan has succeeded in producing a satisfactory history of the American Revolution. For one thing he seems wholly lacking in sense of proportion, and in the relative importance of incidents. The space which is needed for those main issues which are often very incompletely dealt with is freely given to what is irrelevant and immaterial. The author's impressions of characters are almost always con- veyed by the accumulation of biographical detail, picturesquely set forth, with little or no attempt at a summary of the result. This process is applied not only to the central but occasionally to the minor figures of the drama. In fact, if the minor characters interest the writer and furnish material for a picturesque description or 122 SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN episode they are suffered to crowd out the main actors. Thus Burgoyne, soldier, politician, and man of letters, is an interesting character and an attractive study. But his personal qualities had no great share in determining the fate of the Revolution, and, considering the space at Sir George Trevelyan's disposal, he is hardly justi- fied in telling at full length how Burgoyne once when on his travels in England discomfited a rude practical joker. Again, Sir George Trevelyan is too apt to allow his interest in the mere scenery and still- life, as one may call it, of his subject to overlay the real political issues. With him, as with the historian whose traditions and methods he has inherited, research is too apt to mean, not judicial enquiry, but an elaborate quest for details to illustrate a position already taken up. There is a conspicuous instance of this sacrifice of the essential to the accidental in the account taken from John Adams's diary of the journey made by the Massachusetts delegates on their way to the Congress of 1774 held at Philadelphia. Adams was an acute observer of trifles, partly because to his sensitive and egotistical mind trifles were apt to seem important, and he was also a JOHN ADAMS 123 vigorous, original, and at times even a profound political thinker. In his diary we see both sides of him reflected. He notes carefully every social peculiarity of those middle colonies which differed so widely from his beloved New England. Sir George Trevelyan reproduces at some length these detailed experiences of travel. But Adams has also recorded other things a good deal more important of which we learn nothing here. He has told us how he and his colleagues had been warned that in New York they would be looked upon as Republican incendiaries, how with a painful and unwonted effort at opportunism they watered down their political sentiments to the standard which they supposed would suit their hearers, and how as a consequence they were set down as mere Laodiceans. All this has more to do with the Revolution than the steeples and statues which Adams saw and recorded. Nor would any one suspect from Sir George Trevelyan 's account that the Congress was any- thing but a perfectly harmonious and homo- geneous body. In reality the main interest of Adams's diary lies in the fact that it records how the divisions which resulted from wide divergence of interest and from diversity of social habits and political training were overcome through patience and self-restraint and by the mastering sense of a common purpose. The question which any intelligent reader at once and of necessity asks is, How did these colonial delegates, knowing little of one another, with no pre-existing forms or pre- cedents, with their deliberative machinery all to make, work out their appointed task ? And to that question Sir George Trevelyan gives no answer. The main faults of the book are, as it seems to me, almost inevitably inherent in the method on which it is framed. As Malebranche saw all things in God, so Sir George Trevelyan sees the American Revolution in Fox and the Whig party. It is primarily interesting to him because it was for a time the chief field on which his hero and those with whom he acted displayed their powers. One result is an almost inevitable tendency to underrate what one may call the purely colonial side of the question. As Brindley thought that navigable rivers existed for the purpose of feeding canals, so in Sir George Trevelyan's mind there is an underlying feeling that Washington and Adams existed in order to give full scope for the display of Whig virtues. This is specially a danger in the case of a writer whose tendency certainly is to THE COLONIES 125 be drawn aside from his main issue by picturesque and interesting episodes. The method adopted also often brings about an arbitrary choice of incidents and a lack of pro- portion in the treatment assigned to them. There is certainly nothing in this book to show that the writer has made a careful study of the early constitutional history of the colonies or of their relations to the Mother Country. Yet without such study it is simply impossible to understand the final struggle. And it certainly seems to me that even where Sir George Trevelyan has made any such study he has not made it in the spirit of an impartial enquirer, but rather in that of an advocate seeking for arguments on behalf of a case which he has already prejudged. Sir George Trevelyan has read and refers to works of that most fair-minded writer, the late Mr Parkman. He is ready enough to quote them when they emphasise the way in which the narrowness, the arrogance, the unsympathetic hardness of English officials and English soldiers alienated the colonists. Yet it is scarcely conceivable how any fair-minded student of Parkman could have written such a passage as this : "Throughout a splendid and fruitful war Americans had fought side by side with English- 126 SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN men as compatriots rather than auxiliaries. They had given him (Pitt) cheerfully in men, in money, and in supplies whatever he had asked to aid the national cause and secure the common safety." Those were the very things which, as every page of Parkman shows, the colonists had not done. In isolated instances they had shown military qualities of a high order. But it is not too much to say that the conduct of the colonial Legislature, throughout, was marked by inertness, by faction, by inability to see the real issue. Resolute and patriotic governors such as Dinwiddie and Shirley were driven to despair by the conduct of the colonial Assemblies. That tale is told plainly enough in the pages of Mr Parkman's greatest work, "Montcalm ind Wolfe." It is told more fully but not more plainly in the official corre- spondence of the time. It would, no doubt, be unfair to make all this matter of grave moral blame to the colonists. There was nothing in their history to give them any strong sense of common interests and purpose ; there was nothing in the existing colonial system to make effectual united action possible. But there remains the fact that the war with France had filled the minds of English administrators with a belief that the OMISSIONS 127 colonists were deficient in energy and in capacity for military organisation and, above all, for united action. Events showed that such an estimate was unjust, but I do not think any one can study the history of the colonies and not see that it was not wholly unfounded or unreasonable. The same lack of previous study seriously impairs Sir George Trevelyan's estimate of the individual actors whom he brings upon the scene, and therefore of the affairs in which they took part. That his view of the Revolution should specially concentrate itself on Boston is natural. That was a stage on which all that was most stirring in the early scenes of the drama was enacted. Massachusetts was, above all the colonies, the chosen home of those political principles which it is Sir George Trevelyan's purpose to glorify. Yet an account of the Revolution is a very maimed and incomplete one which does not tell us of the influences at work in other colonies, and especially in Virginia. And there at the outset no actor played so conspicuous and effective a part as Patrick Henry. That his name should occur only once in Sir George Trevelyan's book, that we should hear nothing of his antecedents and per- sonal character, is a strange omission. And it is, 128 SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN I think, all the more strange because there is a very distinct individual likeness between Henry and Sir George Trevelyan's own hero. Henry, like Fox, won by the charm of a lovable nature the toleration and goodwill of many who had neither sympathy with his views nor confidence in his public character. Like Fox, he combined rhetorical brilliancy and boisterous energy with a real capacity for sustained work. He made his first conspicuous entry on public life in his character of an advocate acting as counsel on the popular side in one of those administrative disputes which preceded and in a great measure brought about the final rupture. It was then, in a Virginia law court, that the young orator made that often- quoted comparison in which it was plainly hinted that George III. might expect the fate of tyrants such as Caesar and Charles I., and then extricated himself by a dexterous evasion. The case turned on the right of the laity to pay their tithes in tobacco at a fixed rate when tobacco was cheap and in money when tobacco was dear. That right had been conferred on them by an Act of the Assembly. The king in council vetoed that Act. Nevertheless the Virginia tithe-payer claimed the right to act upon it, and that right was defended PATRICK HENRY 129 by Henry not so much on legal as on moral and equitable grounds. This is how the Act is described by an impartial American writer, Mr Coit Tyler, the biographer of Patrick Henry : " Such then, in all its fresh and unadorned rascality, was the famous 'option law,' or 'two- penny act/ of 1758 : an act firmly opposed, on its first appearance in the Legislature, by a noble minority of honourable men ; an act clearly indicating among a portion of the people of Virginia a survival of the old robber instincts of our Norse ancestors ; an act having there the sort of frantic popularity that all laws are likely to have which give a dishonest advantage to the debtor class and in Virginia, unfortunately, on the subject of salaries due to the clergy, nearly all persons above sixteen years of age belonged to that class." 1 These, be it observed, are the words of a writer whom Sir George Trevelyan refers to with deserved approval. Constitutionally, it may be said, the morality of the law and of Henry's defence of it had nothing to do with the subsequent struggle. But they had much to do with the ethics of that struggle, with the frame of mind in which the 1 Tyler's " Life of Henry/' pp. 37, 38. combatants entered upon it: and it is with the ethical side of the struggle that Sir George Trevelyan is largely, if not mainly, concerned. A like instance may be found in his treatment of the incident of Hutchinson's letters. I would say at the outset that Sir George Trevelyan does not seem to me to have any comprehension of the peculiar and characteristic attitude and temper of Hutchinson. Hutchinson furnishes as good an instance as could be found of the extent to which an honest, thoughtful, and public-spirited citizen of Massachusetts could without any keen admira- tion for George III.'s methods of government, yet through distrust of the anti-English faction at Boston, throw his lot in wholly with the Loyalists. As an administrator, and especially as a financier, he had done good service to his colony by acts which, though they incurred immediate unpopularity, were in the opinion of all men vindicated by the result. He had expressed his disapproval of the Stamp Act. Yet in the riots which that measure produced he had seen his house sacked and an invaluable collection of archives scattered to the winds. His own life would have been in great peril if it had not been for the dauntless conduct of his HUTCHINSON 131 daughter, who forced him to withdraw by declaring that if he did not she would remain with him and share the danger. He and certain other officials had written letters home strongly hostile to the views of the popular party. There was, however, nothing in Hutchinson's letters which was a novelty or could have been a surprise to those who knew his opinions. They advocated measures for which his preference had never been concealed. These letters, as is well known, were intercepted by Franklin and by him sent to Boston. Sir George Trevelyan defends some- what elaborately the action of Franklin. It may be, as Sir George considers, that Franklin in this act did not in any way fall below the recognised moral standard of his own day. At all events, one may safely admit that such oppo- nents as Wedderburn were perfectly ready to trade on moral indignation which they did not in the least share. But Sir George Trevelyan does not appear to see that the matter of Hutchinson's letters touched upon much graver moral and political issues than those involved in Franklin's conduct. No incident in the whole struggle more fully illustrated the resolute, far- seeing, unscrupulous policy of Samuel Adams 132 SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN and those who acted with him. Care was taken that the letters should not be publicly and for- mally produced till the minds of men had been thoroughly poisoned against them by two pro- cesses. It was implied Sir George Trevelyan's language sanctions the implication that there was a plot between certain Government officials, of whom Hutchinson was one, for the injury of Massachusetts. As a matter of fact, there is nothing whatever to show that the Governor was in any way acting in concert with any other official. Furthermore, men were led to believe that Hutchinson was hatching some secret plot, whereas he was in fact merely making recom- mendations in conformity with the policy which he had over and over again publicly advocated. I cannot, 1 think, do better than quote the words used by the biographer in the main the admiring biographer of Samuel Adams : " This transaction, which has been dwelt on at considerable length, deserves attention because it is probably the least defensible proceeding in which the patriots of New England were concerned during the Revolutionary struggle. Nothing can be more sly than the manoeuvring throughout. ... It is hard to palliate the conduct of the HUTCHINSON 138 patriots. Had the leaders lost in the excite- ment of the controversies the power of weighing words properly, and did they honestly think Hutchinson's expressions deserved such an inter- pretation ? Did they honestly believe that it was right to hold him responsible for what Oliver and Paxton had said? Unfortunately there is some testimony to show that their conduct was due to deliberate artifice. Says their victim : ' When some of the Governor's friends urged to the persons principally concerned . . . the un- warrantableness of asserting or insinuating what they knew to be false and injurious, they justified themselves from the necessity of the thing; the public interest, the safety of the people, making it absolutely necessary that his weight and influence among them should by any means whatever be destroyed.' Further, if Hutchinson's testimony in his own case is not to be received, what are we to say of Franklin's suspicious hint, who, in transmitting the letters, counsels the use of mystery and manoeuvring, that, * as distant objects seen only through a mist appear larger, the same may happen from the mystery in this case.' There never were cooler heads than stood on the shoulders of some of those leaders ; it is impossible to think that they were blinded." l I would not for a moment conceal my own 1 Hosmer's " Life of Samuel Adams," pp. 229, 232, 233. 134 SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN opinion that if a historian must needs take sides Sir George Trevelyan has taken the right one. His view is nearer the truth than that strangely paradoxical one which at times ventures to show its head, and which represents the colonists as ungrateful rebels against a wise and well- intentioned ruler. Neither Sir George nor any other writer can exaggerate the blundering in- capacity of the British policy, civil and military alike. But it is a very different thing to say, as Sir George Trevelyan does, often in words and always by implication, that all the moral and civic virtue was on the side of the colonists. He represents, indeed, a phase of thought which American writers themselves have by this time wholly outgrown. On this subject I would quote two of them, to one at least of whom Sir George Trevelyan himself refers with just praise : " Hardly have we known, seldom have we been reminded, that the side of the Loyalists, as they called themselves, of the Tories, as they were scornfully nicknamed by their opponents, was even in argument not a weak one, and in motive and sentiment not a base one, and in devotion and self-sacrifice not an unheroic one. . . . May we not now hope that it will not any longer cost IMPARTIAL HISTORY 135 us too great an effort to look calmly, even con- siderately, at least fairly, upon what, in the words and acts of the Tories, our fathers and grandfathers could hardly endure to look at all ? And, surely, our willingness to do all this can hardly be lessened by the consideration that, 'in dealing with an enemy, not only dead, but dead in exile and defeat, candour prescribes the fullest measure of generous treatment. 1 At any rate, the American Revolution affords no exemption from the general law of historic investigation that the truth is to be found only by him who searches for it with an unbiassed mind. Until we shall be able to take, respecting the problems and the parties of our own Revolution, the same attitude which we freely and easily take respecting the problems and parties of other revolutions, that is, the attitude, not of hereditary partisans, but of scientific investigators, will it be forbidden us to acquire a thoroughly discriminating and just acquaintance with that prodigious epoch in our history." 2 Or again : " Impartial history will not palliate the bar- barities that were committed by either party ; 1 Quoted from Wmthrop Sargent, Preface to "The Loyalist Poetry/' etc., p. vi. a Tyler's " Literary History of the American Revolution," vol. i. pp. 296, 297. 136 SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN but there can be no doubt that the Tory wrong- doings have been grossly exaggerated, or at least have been dwelt upon as dreadful scenes of depravity to form a background for the heroism and fortitude of the patriotic party whose mis- deeds are passed over very lightly. The methods of the growth of popular mythology have been the same in America as elsewhere ; the gods of one party have become the devils of the other. The haze of distance has thrown a halo around the American leaders, softening their outlines, obscur- ing their faults, while the misdeeds of Tories and Hessians have grown with the growth of years. But it is an undoubted fact that there were outrages upon both sides, brutal officers on both sides, bad treatment of prisoners on both sides, guerrilla warfare with all its evil concomitants on both sides, and in these respects the Tories were no worse than the Whigs. There was not much to choose between a Cowboy and a Skinner, very little difference between Major Ferguson's command and that of Marion and Lumter. There was no more orderly or better behaved troop in either army than Simcoe's Queen's Rangers ; possibly there was none on either side as bad as the mixture of Iroquois Indians and Tory half- breeds who were concerned in the massacres at Wyoming and Cherry Valley. . . . " These convictions were undoubtedly strength- IMPARTIAL HISTORY 137 ened by the abominable treatment which many of them personally received. They were not apt to look with greater favour upon a cause whose votaries had tried to recommend it to their liking by breaking their windows, plundering their houses, constantly insulting them, their wives and their daughters, to say nothing of tarring and feathering them, or of burning them in effigy. The penal measures imposed by the Parliament upon the town of Boston and the colony of Massachusetts had been called upon themselves by the so-called patriots. One rather wonders at the slowness and mildness of the British Government, and at their miserable inefficiency, than at any repressive measures that they undertook. They deserved to lose the colonies for their invincible stupidity, which led them from one blunder into another ; they irritated when they ought either to have crushed or conciliated ; they tried half-measures when vigorous action was necessary ; they persisted in affronting all the other colonies while they failed in chastising sedition in Massachusetts. The result was that they drove many men, who were loyal subjects of Great Britain in 1774, into revolution in 1776, while they allowed the rebels of Massachusetts to wreak vengeance at their will upon those who had been faithful in their allegiance to their king." 1 1 Ferguson's " Essays on American History," pp. 169-176. 138 SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN Indiscriminate praise and indiscriminate invec- tive invariably bring their own Nemesis by miss- ing the real points where praise and blame are appropriate. Sir George deals with the colonists as the writer of a fairy tale deals with the hero, on whom he bestows a flying horse, magic armour, and a cap of darkness. He so loads them with the virtues needful for success that all the credit due to their rulers in the council chamber and their leaders in the field vanishes. Washington and Franklin were great, not because they were simply advancing to a pre-ordained success, but because with supreme patience they were striving against sloth, disunion, ignorance, and presumption. So, too, it seems to me that Sir George misses the whole moral of such incidents as the Boston Massacre and the Tea Riots. What they did show was the astounding capacity of the Boston leaders for using edged tools without cutting themselves, for making an instrument out of anarchy, for discerning the exact point at which mob violence would become dangerous to their own cause and at once checking its further course. In the same way Sir George shows but little per- ception of those individual gradations of character which mark off men fighting under the same flag. AMERICAN PATRIOTS 139 All Americans are enlightened patriots; all the adherents of George III. are ignorant and wrong- headed oppressors. Thus praise and blame alike miss the mark. Washington and John Adams deserve something better than to be grouped with a heady rhetorician like Warren, who desired revolution and strife for their own sake. Political vermin like Sandwich and Rigby escape unhurt under a general condemnation which includes an honourable and well - intentioned man such as North. There are, moreover, two important aspects of the matter which Sir George Trevelyan wholly overlooks. There was, as has been clearly pointed out by Mr Lecky, and as is fully acknowledged by the biographer of Samuel Adams whom I have quoted above, a section of the American patriots headed by Adams who were fully determined to thwart any attempt at conciliation. That section was not numerous, but it was able, influential, well organised, and unscrupulous. Those who belonged to it clearly showed that it was their policy to stimulate and intensify every germ of disaffection, to press to the very utmost every ground of dispute. It may be that the blunder- ing tyranny of the king, the subservience of 140 SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN ministers, the ignorance and corruption of Parlia- ment would have brought about disruption in any case, and would have driven moderate men among the colonists into the ranks of the revolutionary party. But it is certain that those who, like Dartmouth and North, were anxious for a com- promise which should not be a surrender were throughout thwarted by the action of the extreme party among the colonists. Again, Sir George Trevelyan does not seem to perceive how largely the trouble was due, not to the incapacity or misconduct of individuals, but to defects in our parliamentary system. It is impossible to read the various debates on the great colonial questions, such as the Stamp Act and the Declaration Act, and not see how in such a crisis the party system is beset with dangers. Harmless proposals and necessary criti- cisms become inevitably tainted with suspicion when delivered by men whose avowed position is that of advocates. It is painful to think how different might have been the result if questions of colonial administration had come, as they would at the present day have come, before a competent and responsible department, detached from party influences, largely governed by official traditions, PARTY POLITICS 141 and informed by the knowledge and intelligence of trained experts. That, however, is a view to which Sir George Trevelyan, trained in the party system and steeped in reverence for parliamentary government, could hardly do justice. And with that side of his work before us, one is tempted to ask, Can a strong party politician write the history of a period in which party issues meet him at every turn? The practical exigencies of politics leave no place for those nicely - balanced judgments, or for that thoughtful and discrimin- ating analysis of actions and motives, which are the first duty of the historian. It is not in human nature suddenly to discard mental habits which it has been a duty to cultivate and develop. Lastly, I would say that there seems to me to be one strange incongruity between the bio- graphical and the historical side of Sir George Trevelyan 's work. As a historian he preaches the doctrine that the determining forces which gave success to the colonists were mainly moral forces. England was steeped in profligacy ; America was the home of Republican simplicity. The view is in itself, I think, somewhat exaggerated. London was not England, any more than Boston was America. Drinking and gaming were not all un- 142 SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN known among New York merchants and Virginia planters. But apart from that, how is this view to be reconciled with the glorification of Fox ? In him, more perhaps than in any contemporary public man, were embodied those very tendencies to which Sir George Trevelyan ascribes the mis- fortunes of his country. In real truth, Sir George Trevelyan has too much sympathy with his hero, and the class to which he belongs, to estimate justly their place in history. Filled with Whig traditions, he keeps his real affections for the Whig aristocracy and their life a life in which the prizes of politics were fought for strenuously and not always too scrupulously, yet in the main with honesty and public spirit. At the same time, like those whom he admires, he offers a tribute of conventional respect to republican ideals of life which never had any actual existence. There is so much in Sir George Trevelyan's attitude towards history and towards letters which is attractive that it neither seems a gracious task, nor is a pleasant one, to criticise him unfavour- ably ; but magis arnica veritas. "THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION" 148 II 1 AT the very outset of the present volume there is a passage which I think goes far to confirm the views already expressed : "A curious tribute to their point of view has been paid of late years by ingenious writers in the United States, who have raised a protest against the spirit and the style in which the story of their Revolution has too often been told. Under the impulse of a wholesome reaction against the inflated panegyric and overloaded denunciation which in past days have formed the stock in trade of too many American chroniclers, they especially insist on bringing to a test the estimation in which the heroes of that Revolution have been popularly held. The biographies of those heroes, it is con- tended, were to a large degree legends ; the best of them were human, and the worst very bad indeed ; and from these premises the conclusion has been deduced that George III. and his cabinet could not have been so greatly in the wrong. Samuel Adams, we are told, showed himself un- 1 "The American Revolution," by the Right Hon. Sir George Otto Trevelyan, Bart., part ii. (2 vols.). London, Longmans, 1903. (English Historical Review, vol. xix., 1904, pp. 367-373.) 144 SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN scrupulous as to the means which he employed in the pursuit of public ends ; John Adams was vain and sensitive ; Arthur Lee, when an envoy from congress in Paris, insinuated that his colleague, Silas Deane, was a rascal, and Deane openly said the same of Lee, while Franklin distrusted and disliked them both ; the merchants of Boston were smugglers, the mob was ruffianly, and throughout New England no serious efforts were made by the more respectable citizens to exact retribution for violence and cruelty committed against partisans of the crown. All this may be valuable history. It may all be worth telling. It is quite in place as an explanation of the sentiments excited in the British Parliament by the transactions in America, but as an argument for or against the wisdom of British policy it is of no account at all" (i. 18). Surely the questions with which Sir George Trevelyan and his readers are primarily concerned are the very questions which he rather contemptu- ously thrusts into the background. If this is valuable history, "if it is worth telling," why criticise the telling of it as "a curious tribute " to some view? Does Sir George Trevelyan think that the primary business of historians is to supply political partisans with ready-made argu- ments, or that a writer of history must be always DIFFICULTIES 145 looking round the corner to see what use may be possibly made of his statements ? A passage which immediately follows seems to me to show how Sir George has overlooked the most essential features of his subject : " The question," he says, " to be determined at successive points of the American controversy was in every case a clear and simple issue. Whether Boston should be subjected to a military occupa- tion ; whether the tea duty was to be retained or removed ; whether the Port Bill was to be passed and the charter of Massachusetts broken ; whether the petitions and remonstrances from the congress were to be respectfully considered or contemptu- ously thrown aside wert problems demanding nothing beyond good sense and good feeling for their right solution" (i. 21). I venture to think that a good deal more was needed. One thing at least was needed local knowledge, knowledge of the currents of Ameri- can thought and of the character and influence of individual men. Nor can it be fairly claimed for the opposition that in this matter they were greatly superior to the ministry. Chatham no doubt brought to bear on the problem an imagina- tive insight into the wants and aspirations of the K 146 SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN colonists, as Burke brought to bear a clear con- ception of general principles of government, which had no parallel among their opponents. Yet, taking the parliamentary debates as a whole, we cannot but feel that the opposition contributed little towards an effective solution of the question. Government and Parliament were alike moving in a mist, and we may not forget, though Sir George Trevelyan does, that the mist was largely the creation of the colonists themselves. As I pointed out in my previous review, it is a sheer delusion to speak of the colonists as men goaded into revolt and straining to the utmost and to the last to remain loyal. Sir George Trevelyan quotes the words of congress, officially delivered in 1774 : " You have been told that we are seditious, impatient of government, and desirous of independence. Be assured that these are not facts but calumnies." Samuel Adams was not an irresponsible free lance, but the recognised and authoritative leader of a party in Massachusetts. In September 1773 Samuel Adams openly advo- cated in the Boston Gazette the formation of "an independent state, an American common- wealth." Sir George Trevelyan says that " before blood had been shed and towns burned and half AMERICAN PATRIOTS 147 a score of petitions thrown into the royal waste- paper basket colonists of every shade in politics had scouted as a libel the charge that they aimed at separation from the Mother Country." Has he forgotten that in the autumn of 1774, before a single town had been burned, a body of Massachusetts citizens met at Suffolk and passed resolutions, drafted by that irresponsible fire- brand James Warren, declaring their intentions of resisting the obnoxious Acts of Parliament by force, and of retaliating upon those officials who tried to execute the law ? Has he for- gotten, what is even more important, that congress, while it was uttering professions of loyalty, had formally approved these resolutions ? It is difficult to think that Sir George Trevelyan has overlooked such an incident ; it is perhaps even more difficult to understand how, if he knows it, he can reconcile it with the views which he expresses. Sir George Trevelyan endeavours to strengthen his case by calling as an independent witness to colonial loyalty Thomas Paine. It would be difficult to overrate Paine's force, dexterity, and effectiveness as a political controversialist. But those who know Paine as revealed even in his 148 SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN own writings, apart from external report, will think twice before they accept him as a witness to character. " I found," he says, " the dis- position of the people such that they might have been led by a thread and governed by a reed." One is reminded of a passage in the early life of Mr Midshipman Easy. "'What a dear, good, obedient child it is!' exclaimed Mrs Easy; 'you may lead him by a thread.' 'Yes, to pick cherries,' thought Dr Middleton." Sir George Trevelyan very rightly calls atten- tion to an aspect of the dispute between the Colonies and the Mother Country which has hardly received due notice from previous writers, the effect which the proposal for an episcopate had in alarming and embittering the colonists. Sir George's treatment of the subject is fair and temperate. Yet he hardly sees how largely the errors of those responsible for the ecclesiastical policy of the Mother Country were due to ignor- ance of the wide diversity of needs and condi- tions in different colonies. And certainly a fuller knowledge of colonial history would, I think, have saved him from one error. He says : "As early as 1691 the full right of citizen- ship and the free exercise of public worship had TOLERATION 149 been (in Massachusetts) extended to all Christians, with the exception of Roman Catholics " (ii. 310). This is stated as though it was a mark of tolera- tion on the part of the citizens of Massachusetts, and is contrasted with the bigoted attitude of the Church of England towards Nonconformists. As a matter of fact, this relief was not granted by legislation, but by the Royal Charter of William and Mary, a charter regarded by the most in- fluential and representative citizens of Massa- chusetts, with great disfavour. Again, Sir George appears to me to be confounding the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when he says : "Not John Lilburn or Baillie of Kilwinning had a stronger and more present faith in the personal government of the universe than that which in the year 1776 animated the congrega- tions of America " (i. 234). That is only true even approximately of New England, and New England was but a section, though, no doubt, in the crisis of revolution the most strenuous and influential section, of British America. And even of New England it is a statement which needs a good deal of 150 SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN qualification. It is a sentiment of which we see no trace in the writings of such a typical New- Englander as John Adams, and which would have seemed as strange to Franklin as to any of the French wits and philosophers with whom he associated. When he has to deal with action Sir George Trevelyan is always animated, and his description of the battle of Long Island is no exception. Yet he seems to me to have rather missed the main military lessons of the story. It would be hard to defend the statement that "nothing could be better planned than Washington's scheme of battle." The central conception of that scheme was to hold a line over eight miles long with less than twelve thousand raw troops. Sir George Trevelyan says but little of the general character of the ground. The clearing of woods, the lower- ing of hills, and the filling in of hollows have materially altered it. Yet this at least can be seen at a glance, that the advance of the British had to be made over ground where communica- tion was easy, while the constituent parts of the defending force were by comparison isolated. To take up such a defensive position could only be justifiable when a commander possessed a marked WASHINGTON 151 superiority both in numbers and fighting power. Again, Sir George does not seem to perceive the extent to which he has himself condemned the strategy of Washington. The wind prevented the British fleet from co-operating with Howe's land force, entering the strait which separates Long Island from New York, and cutting off the American retreat. As Sir George puts it, "when once the wind changed and the leading British frigates had passed within Governor Island and taken Brooklyn in the rear, the independence of the United States would have been indefinitely postponed." In securing the retreat of his beaten and demoralised army Washington was, no doubt, greatly aided by the culpable supineness of Howe and the opportune intervention of a fog. Still, after these deductions, we may fairly say that the retreat brought out Washington's best qualities, his mixture of impetuosity and patience, his power of controlling and guiding men, his mens aequa in arduis. Yet we must not forget that he was only saving his country from a danger of his own creation, and that he had staked her fortunes on an almost desperate hazard. 152 SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN One can hardly blame an historian of the War of Independence if, surveying Washington's career and character as a whole, he deals some- what leniently with special phases of them. The tenderness with which Sir George Trevelyan treats Howe is, I venture to think, much less deserved. Once at least was the whole of Washington's army absolutely at Howe's mercy. If he had postponed his attack till his ships were ready to co-operate, nothing could have saved Washington. There was no need for haste on Howe's part. The situation was not unlike that at York Town, with this all-important difference, that there was no possibility of naval co-operation to help the beleaguered force. The one thing which could have justified Howe's precipitate attack would have been a strenuous following up of his advan- tage. On the battle of Haarlem Sir George Trevelyan comments : "Not one of the retreating battalions would ever have reached the American lines in military order and with half its full numbers if Howe had promptly thrust his troops across the peninsula. When all allowance has been made for exaggera- tion the semi-mythical narratives of that Sunday morning and afternoon have their value, as HOWE 153 embodying the indelible impression left on the public mind by Howe's untimely inactivity." Yet in his second volume Sir George says : " This month of December " (that of the Trenton campaign) "ruined once and for ever Howe's repute as a strategist." Long Island and Haarlem had not, even on Sir George's own showing, left much to ruin. No doubt Howe was by temper inert, and although personally brave, yet, as other brave generals have been, too cautious of the lives of his soldiers. Still it is difficult, when one reads the history of the war as a whole, not to think that Howe was hampered by his political convictions and by his dread of a crushing success. Perhaps the best justification for the risks which Washington ran at Long Island, and at a later day at Germantown, was his reliance on the for- bearance of his opponent. One of the least credit- able incidents in Howe's career, the demoralisation of his troops during their stay in Philadelphia, is glossed over by Sir George Trevelyan with airy geniality. " Howe," he says, " might love ease and pleasure, but he was no selfish voluptuary, and he liked to see others comfortable and happy about him." Whether that is inconsistent with the character of a selfish voluptuary is a question 154 SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN for the moralist rather than the historian. It is at least certain that Howe was a deplorably bad disciplinarian. Sir George Trevelyan has read Stedman's history. Has he forgotten the writer's lamentations over the demoralisation of our officers during their winter in Philadelphia, the havoc wrought alike in character and in fortune by the seductions of the faro table ? I had occasion in my former review to criticise Sir George Trevelyan 's strange deficiency in sense of proportion, the manner in which important incidents are hurried over and unim- portant episodes elaborated. There is an astonish- ing instance of this in the account of the unsuccessful invasion of Canada by Montgomery and Arnold. Just six lines are devoted to the unsuccessful attack on Quebec, in which Mont- gomery was killed and Arnold seriously wounded, and which in all likelihood determined the fate of Canada. Nearly three pages are allotted to describing the journey of Franklin and John Adams from Philadelphia to Amboy, where they went to confer with Lord Howe. Of this space about a fifth is taken up with describing how Franklin and Adams disputed whether their bed- room window should be shut or open. Nor SUPERFLUITY 155 are we spared a single detail in the menu of the lunch which Lord Howe prepared for the American envoys " good bread, good claret, cold ham, tongues, and mutton." Indeed, Sir George Trevelyan's passion for culinary details is worthy of an American novelist of domestic life. The habits of the Westchester settlers are but a minor matter in a history of the War of Independence. Nevertheless, we are told with a conscientious regard to detail that "at Christmas the stupendous brick ovens were filled three times a day first with generous loaves of wheat and rye, then with chicken, quail, and venison pasties, and lastly with long rows of fruit and mince pies." Sir George Trevelyan's study of authorities is undoubtedly extensive, and yet it seems to me to be somewhat incomplete. There is very little material bearing on the biographical aspect of his work, especially on the side of English biography, that he has not studied. On the other hand, he appears to have entirely missed one or two recent and valuable contributions to the history of the war. He would have dealt more fully and more effectively with the invasion of Canada if he had 156 SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN read Mr Codman's monograph on that subject, with its invaluable appendix of diaries. Sir George has also missed a real mine of information in the diary of Ezra Stiles, published in 1901. Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College, was a man of extraordinary mental activity and quickness of observation, combined with soundness of judgment and a clear sense of what was not worth recording. His record from day to day of military affairs, as the news of them reached him, is of no little value, and is, for the work of a civilian, surprisingly lucid and thoughtful. The book is even more important as a record of what intelligent New-Englanders were saying and doing during the years of strife. Sir George Trevelyan deals severely, though not a whit too severely, with the character of that discreditable adventurer, Charles Lee. He was one of those who talk the commonplace jargon of revolutionists, without any sort of that under- lying conviction which gives stability of purpose and makes egotism impossible. Though, as I have said, Sir George Trevelyan appraises Lee at his real value, yet he seems to be ignorant of far the worst feature in his whole career. In 1860 Mr Moore published a pamphlet entitled The Treason of Charles Lee. In this he reproduced OMISSIONS 157 a document, which he attributed, apparently on good grounds, to Lee, in which he, while still in the American service, was giving the English Government advice as to the best method of carrying out their campaign. There is at times a rather provoking indefiniteness about Sir George Trevelyan's references to authorities. He refers, for example, to an article by Mr Charles Francis Adams the younger on the battle of Long Island; but he omits to tell his readers where the article is to be found, and thereby give them an opportunity of studying it for themselves. This is all the more to be regretted since even the exhaustive bibliography of American history compiled by Mr Lamed contains no reference to the article, and any historical work from Mr Adams's pen deserves attention. Sir George Trevelyan takes exception, why I do not understand, to " Tories " in England who held certain opinions about Arthur Lee "a Virginian, so they described him." Why should they describe him as anything else ? It is true that he was educated at Eton and spent much of his early life in England, but that does not destroy his nationality. EZRA STILES 1 MR CABOT LODGE in one of his essays speaks of Sewell as a New-England Pepys. There might perhaps be better ground for describing Ezra Stiles as a New-England Evelyn. There are in both the same restless curiosity, the same diver- sified interest alike in human life and in the phenomena of the external world. The scholarly repose of the Englishman, the vigorous partisan- ship of the New-Englander were fully as much the result of circumstance and training as of natural temperament. Thus the interest of the book is in part historical and in part biographical. While free from any touch of marked or ex- aggerated egotism, Stiles has the self - revealing temper needed to make autobiography effective and interesting. From an historical point of 1 "The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, D.D., President of Yale College." Edited by F. B. Dexter, M.A. (3 vols.). New York: Scribners, 1901. (English Historical Review, vol. xix., 1904, pp. 595-599.) 158 NEW ENGLAND CULTURE 159 view the book has a twofold value. It forms an important part of the literature of the war, and that not merely as a record of events but as showing us the working of men's minds during the struggle. It is hardly less valuable as show- ing how widely the New England of Otis and the Adamses differed from the New England of Bradstreet and Increase Mather. We see this in the width and diversity of Stiles's intellectual interests, just as we see it in those of a greater New-Englander, Franklin. No subject of study comes amiss to Stiles, and he approaches each with a mental fearlessness and absence of preju- dice wholly alien to an earlier generation of New- Englanders. He does not believe in alchemy, but he investigates its literature with keenness. Judaism specially interests him. He converses " much and freely " with a learned Jew, and asks his opinion of the Septuagint. Two days later Stiles attends the synagogue, and records some- what minutely the details of the ceremonial and the vestments worn by the rabbi. Between the two entries are notes upon the production of silk in Pennsylvania and on the population of France. Later on we find Stiles reading one day the life of Cagliostro and on the next the so-called 160 EZRA STILES " Blue Laws of Connecticut." The catholicity of his literary taste is further illustrated by his study of Apuleius. He is actively interested in any new mechanical invention of which he may hear, and not less in economical statistics. At the age of fifty-seven we find him corresponding with learned men in Sweden. Age does not bring any distaste to change any more than it does with Franklin. When Yale College is partially secularised by the addition of a lay element to the governing body, he not merely accepts but even welcomes the change. His liberality of view in educational matters is shown by his treatment of the suggestion to substitute a translation of the Psalms in Greek, executed by a French Protestant, Suranus, for the classics. " If," says Stiles, " a stranger was to learn English, he would not need an English book wrote by a German or Italian, but by a Pope or an Addison. So that I rather incline to the antients, banishing the unchaste tribe." It is a little painful to find Horace included in that condemnation, but Puritanism was not to be exorcised bodily at a single effort. And no one can find fault with the choice of Homer, Plato, YALE 161 Xenophon, Cicero, Tacitus, and Virgil, while the inclusion of Dionysius and Justin is an illustra- tion of the unexpectedly wide range of Stiles's own studies. The change of mental habits to which I have referred is strikingly illustrated by the subjects chosen for the approved and formal disputations between the students at Yale. It is startling to find such matters as the lawfulness of poly- gamy, the descent of mankind from Adam, and the existence of eternal punishment treated as open questions. An earlier generation of New- Englanders would have been hardly less shocked by the discussion "whether theatres ought to be encouraged" and "whether deists and Roman Catholics ought to be admitted to a share in government." We find the students also invited to discuss not merely those general questions which are the stock subjects of debate, such as the utility or otherwise of standing armies and the relative merits of monarchy and democracy, but also practical questions concerning politics and education. Ought the national securities to be redeemed at the nominal value? Ought the President to have independent military power? What was the best method of ratifying the new L 162 EZRA STILES constitution? Ought medical and legal studies to be included in a college course ? Is literature too much cultivated in Connecticut? The last question seems not wholly inappropriate when we read the following entry : " I examined Miss Lucinda Foot, 12. act., daughter of the Rev. Mr Foot of Cheshire. She had learned the four orations against Cataline (sic), the first four books of the ^Eneid, and St John's gospel in Greek. I examined her not only where she had learned, but indifferently elsewhere in Virgil, Tully, and the Greek Testament, and found her well fitted to be admitted into the freshman class." It is a little surprising to learn from a footnote that this portentous creature married seven years later and lived to be fifty-six. But the main value of the book lies in its contributions to our knowledge of the struggle between the Colonies and the Mother Country. More than once Stiles has preserved important facts which have for the most part escaped the notice of historians. He records, for example, how in April 1771, a printed scheme found its way to New England, proposing that the Irish Parliament should be dissolved and an imperial Parliament, as it would now be called, should be COLONIAL POLITICS 163 created, in which the American colonies should have fifty members. Two and a half years later Stiles tells us that he has seen the draft of an Act for gradually extinguishing the Roman Catholic religion by the substitution, as vacancies came, of an Anglican clergy for the existing priest- hood. The Canadians are to be reconciled to this by a reduction of tithe. We need not believe that either of these schemes ever came within the range of practical politics. But it is of no small interest to know that the possibility of such changes was before men's minds. It is significant that almost from the outset of the struggle, Stiles, sober and well-judging as he was by natural temper and training, was swept away in the current of vehement and unreasoning partisanship. What- ever might be the real merits or demerits of British administration, it is clear that those who were responsible for it had utterly failed to win the goodwill and confidence of men not naturally inclined to be incendiaries and revolutionists. Every act of the British Government or its American supporters is seen by the diarist through a distorting medium of partisanship, and con- demned. When Lord Dartmouth, at once the most moderate and conciliatory and the most 164 EZRA STILES honest of politicians, makes proposals for accom- modation, they are stigmatised as " insidious." Carleton's wise generosity in releasing the prisoners taken in Canada is explained away on a series of more or less discreditable hypotheses. It may be to avoid giving up certain Indians who had been guilty of atrocities ; or it might be to " wipe off the disgrace with which their treatment of our prisoners has tarnished the glory of the British troops " ; or it was a design to obtain a complete surrender of prisoners on both sides, in which case the balance would have been in favour of the British ; or, despairing of conquest, the British " wish so to mix generosity with rigour that they may tempt and captivate America and so heal the breach." British statesmen might well despair in dealing with an enemy who could thus find equal matter for dissatisfaction in a policy of coercion and a policy of conciliation. Again, Stiles is indignant with the ministry for insisting that remonstrances and petitions must come not from congress, but from various pro- vincial assemblies. The reason is not far to seek, nor was the claim an unreasonable one. The assemblies were, what congress was not, bodies whose composition and forms of procedure were PARTY SPIRIT 165 definitely known to the ministry. The same temper shows itself in the uncompromising bitter- ness with which Stiles denounces any approach to loyalist feeling among his countrymen and in the credulity with which he accepts stories to the discredit of the British troops. It is made a matter of reproach to the Baptists and Quakers that they turned to the British Government for relief and redress under the undoubted hardships which they had suffered from the Presbyterians of Massachusetts. Without the faintest note of dis- approval Stiles describes the proceedings at the funeral of a leading Loyalist, Lieutenant- Governor Oliver. Boys cheered over the grave, an un- popular custom-house officer was publicly insulted, and one patriot publicly expressed the hope that within a fortnight the public might be attending Hutchinson's funeral. " Parricide " is the term applied by Stiles to a New York official and to an Episcopalian clergyman in the same colony who had in private letters expressed their sympathy with the British Government and approval of its policy. In the same spirit Stiles quotes without any question a letter published in the Pennsyl- vanian Gazette. The writer, who dates from Hartford, states that the British troops during 166 EZRA STILES their advance to Concord searched a house for Hancock and Adams, and failing to find them deliberately killed the woman of the house and her children. Stiles also publishes a letter purport- ing to have been written by a British soldier and intercepted, in which it is said that during the same advance a number of women and children were burned in their beds. We may, I think, safely say that the silence of American writers on what must have been matter of notoriety is an ample refutation of these stories. Yet on three important points Stiles's evidence disposes of the case set up by American partisans. He describes the colonial army at Roxbury in May 1775. There is "a general seriousness and sense of religion, and much singing of psalms and anthems through the army, especially morning and evening prayers." Also there are present "fourty Stockbridge Indians." In the face of that, Chatham's rhetoric about the tomahawk and scalping knife of the savage loses some of its force. Another incident may also be given in Stiles's own words : " Gov. Hutchinson, now in England, has written a letter of 4 Nov. last to Rev. Dr Pemberton of Boston. He says it was about HUTCHINSON 167 being resolved by the king in council to moderate matters with the Americans by adopting a plan in which taxation and legislation should be left to the American assemblies, the parliament reserving a general power to regulate commerce. But upon receiving the news that the continental congress had adopted the resolves of the co. of Suffolk they had suspended any further consideration of matters." The Suffolk resolutions, it may be remembered, were drafted by that reckless firebrand Joseph Warren; they declared that "no obedience was due to the recent acts of parliament, the attempts of a wicked administration to enslave America," and they declared that political arrests should be met by retaliation. Stiles also makes it clear that the dread of episcopacy being introduced into the Colonies was a purely imaginary alarm. He relates a conver- sation in which Lord Hillsborough assured an English Nonconformist, friendly to the Colonies, that not only were ministers but also the English Episcopate unfavourable to any such scheme. Stiles more than once notices the fact that whereas in the northern colonies the Episcopalians were almost to a man Loyalists, there was not in the 168 EZRA STILES south any such connection. The reason is not far to seek : from the very earliest days in New England Episcopacy and Dissent were sharply opposed forces, the one as naturally connected with the party of prerogative as the other with that of civil liberty. In the south Episcopali- anism was too dominant for its influence to be limited to a single party, and too languid to assert itself as a principle of action. Throughout the war Stiles kept an observant eye on all military operations, and in dealing with them he shows insight and prescience beyond what are ordinarily found in civilian critics. In many cases, too, he appends rough plans of the ground, which are not without value. After the war the interest of the diary of necessity falls off. It is noticeable that one of the principal contemporary incidents, Shay's rebellion, is fully recorded, yet Stiles makes no sort of comment, condemnatory or otherwise, on the conduct of the actors. One cannot help suspecting that Stiles, like other New- Englanders, felt embarrassed by a certain incom- patibility between the principles which they had been lately professing and the requirements of effective government. Stiles's references to the formation and ratification of the new constitution ALWAYS LEARNING 169 are not without historical value. And to the last there is no abatement in the diarist's keenness of observation, or in the diversity of his intellectual interests. It was in no spirit of self-deception that Stiles prefixed to one of the volumes of his diary the motto, u r/pd0vcfc> <5e ael TToAAa THE POETRY OF SPORT 1 A VOLUME on the Poetry of Sport forms a fitting conclusion to this complete and deservedly popular series. In his preface to this volume, Mr Watson, the sub-editor of the series, tells us how it has grown far in excess of the limits originally designed for it. Intended at the outset to include some half-dozen books on the more popular and generally recognised form of field sports and pastimes, it has grown into a library of twenty- eight volumes, dealing with well-nigh everything that can by the most comprehensive and catholic application of the term be brought under the head of Sport. This expansion was no doubt in part due to the success of the earlier volumes. Mr Watson dwells in this preface on that success with no undue self-complacency, and is generously enthusiastic in acknowledging the services of his 1 "The Poetry of Sport." The Badmintou Library. Selected and edited by Hedley Peek. London, 1896. 170 "THE BADMINTON LIBRARY' 171 editor-in-chief and their contributors. The experts in whose hands the work was placed proved capable of bringing to bear on their own subjects a power of literary expression beyond what had been hoped for. Success begat confidence, and it soon became clear that the series might be made into something like a complete and exhaustive encyclopaedia of all reputable pastimes. The growth of the series, too, was stimulated by the development of new sports. Between the first planning and the final execution of the series, football had risen from a schoolboy's game, carried on at the universities by a few enthusiasts, to the dignity of a national pastime, with its own news- paper and its own public of devotees and critics. Golf, when the Badminton editors began their labours, was still in the stage described by Mr Watson, when "in a few out-of-the-way places men were occasionally met carrying what to the casual eye looked like overgrown walking-sticks with fantastic handles." Thus an ever-increasing number of popular pursuits claimed admission to the series. Moreover, there was on the part of those who planned the series an ever-increasing readiness to enlarge its boundaries, which probably reached 172 THE POETRY OF SPORT the final point when places were assigned to " mountaineering " and " dancing." In short, the Badminton series became, to borrow the title of an earlier work, the library of "A gentleman's complete recreation." That all parts of it should be equally good was not to be looked for : but the editor may fairly claim that no pursuit to which the name of sport could by the widest liberality of expression be given has been excluded ; that in arrangement, expression, and not least pictorial illustration, some have been dealt with brilliantly and all adequately. New sports may, as Mr Watson points out, give birth, as time goes on, to new volumes. But for the present the series may be regarded as complete, and it was, as we have said, a happy thought to wind up with a volume showing the place which sport has occupied in national literature, and the spirit in which it has been regarded by English men of letters through suc- cessive generations. The volume has a short introduction by the departmental editor, Mr Peek, on the subject, " Is sport a fitting subject of the poet ? " and another by Mr Lang, on " Classical Sport." Of the first, one is inclined to say, Solvitur ambulando. CLASSICAL SPORT 173 No one would claim that the subject of sport gave scope for the poetry of reflection or of emotion in its highest form; but it would have been indeed strange if a subject which involves vivid passion and varied action, and which brings man into contact with all that is most beautiful in inanimate nature, had not gathered round it much poetry of a high order. Mr Lang's excursus is, as might be expected, full of scholarly learning, coupled with the keenest appreciation of his subject, and expressed with delightful freshness and unconventionality. He points out that in Homer's time the chase had hardly passed from the phase when it is under- taken, not as a self-imposed toil for exercise and pastime, but of necessity for self-defence or for procuring food. He contrasts the definite realism of the boxing matches in Theocritus and Virgil with the vagueness of Pindar. The latter "was obviously bored by his task and shirked the sporting details," drifting away into mythological genealogies, "as if one were offered five pounds to celebrate Mr G. O. Smith, and then wrote an ode on Hephaestus." Mr Lang, too, taking Xenophon as his text, adds some words of wisdom on the general subject of sport in its social and moral bearings. 174 THE POETRY OF SPORT "These are very English reflections. Xeno- phon's is a protest against a purely urban life, an existence of pleasure, lawsuits, ' culture,' politics, and * hearing or telling some new thing,' as St Luke has it. Sport keeps alive the original wholesome barbarian in our nature, as it did, he confessed, in the apostle of culture in Matthew Arnold. But ' sport ' does not mean betting on horses, nor looking on at billiard matches. The labour and toil of sport endear it to Xenophon, that illustrious commander, the most English of the Athenians. . . . Sport is best when most natural and least accompanied by hot luncheons. Xeno- phon would have despised, not unjustly, the luxuries of many modern marksmen who have a name to a sportsman 'falsely so called.' He would rather have esteemed the hardy hunter and the pursuer of big game in Asia and Africa." The main body of the work consists of two parts ; the first a collection of passages in which English poets, more or less classical, have touched upon sporting subjects. Of these one or two, such as Somerville's Chase and Gay's Rural Sports, deal avowedly and specially with sport. The greater part, however, are incidental refer- ences to sport embodied in literature of a more EARLY ENGLISH AUTHORS 175 general kind. This is followed by a collection of avowedly sporting songs and ballads. To us the first half of Mr Peek's task seems the better discharged. In one or two cases, how- ever, we think that an editorial footnote telling us something more about the writer or about the position which the poem quoted occupied in general literature would not have been out of place. And we must protest against the hope- lessly confusing fashion in which some of the earlier extracts are dated. The dates appended are probably those of the particular edition or editions which Mr Peek has used. We acquit him of supposing that Chaucer wrote in 1532, or that Sir Eglamour of Artoys dates from the reign of Elizabeth ; but if those dates refer to editions, that should be stated. And why could not Mr Peek give the date of the original pro- duction of Sir Eglamour for the benefit of those who may not have an Early English library to refer to? It is somewhat bewildering to find poems of the fourteenth century packed in between Chaucer and Gascoigne. However, we can forgive Mr Peek a good deal for some of the extracts that he has brought before us. One may pardon a reader who, while 176 THE POETRY OF SPORT admiring the trumpet notes of Drayton's shorter Agincourt poem or the stately swell of the longer one, and delighting in the graceful pedantry of the Nymphidia, has yet never steered his barque over all the winding, and it must be confessed at times somewhat wearisome, waters of the " Polyolbion." And one should therefore be duly grateful for the admirable description of a course which Mr Peek has exhumed. The passage is Drayton at his best, brilliant in colouring and definite in detail : " The greyhounds forth are brought for coursing then in case, And choycely in the slip, one leading forth a brace. The Finder puts her up and gives her coursers law. When each man runnes his horse with fixed eyes, and notes Which dog first turns the hare, which first the other cotes ; They wrench her once or twice ere she a turn will take. What's offered by the first the other good doth make, And turn for turn again with equal speed they ply, Bestirring their swift feet with strange agilitie. A hardened ridge or way which if the hare doth win, Then as shot from a bow she from the dogs doth spin, That strive to put her off; but when he cannot reach her, This giving him a coat about again doth fetch her To him that comes behind, which seems the hare to bear, But with a nimble turn she casts them both arrere ; Till oft for want of breath to fall to ground they make her, The greyhounds both so spent that they want breath to take her." DRAYTON'S COURSING MATCH 177 The man who wrote that had watched many a course, we may be sure, and knew the meaning and value of a greyhound's work. We should like to point out by the way that the explana- tion of " coting," supplied by Mr Peek in a footnote as simply "passing," is somewhat in- adequate. The cote, now no longer recognised, was made, so far as we can understand the not very lucid words of the old rules, when a dog scored a point without any previous advantage of position, or, to put it in another way, when he turned the hare to his opponent and then by superior speed again turned it himself. We do not know what opinion Shakespeare may have had of his contemporary Drayton, but we rather fear that he would have stigmatised him, as Sir James Chetham did Mr Vincy, as " a coursing fellow " : for it is clear from the stock passage in Venus and Adonis of "poor Wat upon a hill," which Mr Peek duly quotes, that Shakespeare was a keen and appreciative hare-hunter. And as his only coursing man is Master Page, who seems to have quibbled rather about the undecided course which his fallow grey- hound ran on Cotsale, it is likely that Shakespeare looked on coursing as a somewhat bourgeois sport. M 178 THE POETRY OF SPORT Another passage which Mr Peek quotes from Drayton, where in the Muses' Elysium the hunts- man Silvius and the fisherman Halcius chant the praises of their respective pursuits, shows at once a fine catholicity in its love of sport and a keen appreciation of all its picturesque incidents and surroundings. From the sporting poetry of the Elizabethan to that of the last century there is, as Mr Peek's selection reminds one, a great falling away. One could hardly expect that it should be otherwise, whether one looks to the literary conventions of the age or its underlying sentiments. If sporting poetry is to be worth much, it must be, as Drayton's is, vividly and naturally descriptive, or it must carry with it the drum and trumpet note of the ballad. Neither in the school of Pope nor in the school of Collins was there room for either of these qualities. It may sound like a strange paradox to say that the one man in the last century who could have written sporting poetry was Cowper. Yet he had a good part of the needful equipment, a style vividly and directly realistic in the best sense of the word, and a keen enjoyment, so far as joy was allowed him, of homely English life and scenery. Somer- COWPER 179 ville could not divorce rural life from frippery and pedantry. Diana walks in his woods and Naiads haunt his streams. The England that Cowper knew and loved was the England of Walton and Cobbett, the England of farmstead and copse and trout stream. But one hardly need say that moral conviction, and even more intense tenderness of feeling, made such a choice of subject impossible. The lover of sport, if he be also a lover of Cowper, is apt to be haunted with recollections of Puss, Bess, and Tiny, and to feel deteriora sequor. The change of which we have spoken was something more than a mere change in literary form or fashion. It was part of that movement whereby the relations of town to country under- went so great a revolution between the age of the earlier Stuart kings and that of their Hanoverian successors. Country life became somewhat vulgar- ised ; letters became, if one may coin a word, even more decidedly Cockneyised. No doubt the country gentleman in 1630 was not always a Hampden or an Elliot, any more than in 1750 he was always a Squire Western or a Tony Lumpkin. But the tide ran that way, and that public opinion which largely decides the literary 180 THE POETRY OF SPORT fashions of the day exaggerated the change. How the lettered Londoner regarded the man whose talk was of bullocks may be seen from Horace Walpole's description of the Norfolk squires, " mountains of roast beef just roughly hewn out into the outlines of human form " ; better perhaps from the kindly tone of patronage with which Steele and Addison treat Sir Roger and with which Johnson writes of Somerville. Mr Peek has, we think, been decidedly less fortunate in his selection of sporting poems proper than in the extracts which we have already criticised. No doubt the composition of an anthology is one of those matters of which every one thinks, as King Alfonso of Spain did of the construction of the world, that "if he had been consulted several errors would have been avoided." We cannot, however, but think that there would be a consensus of opinion among those who take any interest in the subject that this part of Mr Peek's task has been somewhat inadequately per- formed. One need not be a specialist in sporting literature to detect a good many of his sins of omission. One need not have a highly cultivated or peculiarly susceptible taste to be offended by a good many of his sins of commission. Too SOME FAILURES 181 often, it seems to us, he has cumbered his pages with poems which merely touch the fringe of the subject, in which sport furnishes nothing more than a vague background. The editor, for example, tells us that one of the best hunting songs in the collection was written by Bishop Heber. The song in question is called The Rising of the Sun. It begins " Wake, wake, wake to the hunting " ; but, once the Bishop has got his sportsman out of bed, he leaves him wholly to his own devices. So, too, with a poem of Cullen Bryant's called The Hunter's Legend. The hero, being tired, we are told, with a long stalk, lies on a rock overlooking a precipice. The unfortunate youth, an outdoor Eutychus, goes to sleep, dreams of his sweetheart, falls over the cliff, and is killed. Now in what sense is this a sporting poem ? We are quite willing to take Mr Bryant's word for it that his hero was a hunter ; but for all that appears in the action of the poem he might have been canvassing the county or composing a University extension lecture. Take, again, the poem called Trout Hall. We ask for fish, and we are given a party of 182 THE POETRY OF SPORT anglers, with "humming ale," "Nantz," tankards and pipes ; but of sport not a word. We are tempted to plagiarise from the speaker who, in a discussion on political crime, asked whether the murder of a fiddler would be a musical felony ? Of the so - called humorous poems which occupy the last seventy pages, especially of those by a Mr Outwood, it is charitable not to speak. We will only say that if the aspects of sport presented to us in the Badminton series had in the least resembled those given us in these pieces, it would have been very far from achieving that assured success which the editor justly claims for it. It is all the more strange that Mr Peek should have cared to pad out his pages with inferior and irrelevant matter, when there was so much with which he must have been familiar and, one cannot but believe, very loth to exclude. A volume of sporting poetry in which Sir Francis Doyle's St Leger and the ringing ballads of Lindsay Gordon and Bromley - Davenport find no place seems a strange anomaly. There is hardly a better bit of sporting verse in the language than the last- named writer's Dream of an Old Meltonian, with its description of that run, RIDING AND RACING 183 " too speedily over, A century's joys all condensed in its course, From the find till we ate him by Woodwellhead Cover, In thirty quick minutes from Ranksboro' Gorse." Indeed the riding poems of Lindsay Gordon, of Bromley - Davenport, and of Kingsley have the merit of being written by men who could do with their own hands the very feats that they sing. That is a merit which a racing poem is hardly likely to possess. We have never heard of a poetical jockey, and we fear that any tendency to woo the Muses, as our ancestors called it, would find as little favour with trainers as we believe it does with attorneys. Even with Sir Francis Doyle's poem, vivid and spirited as it is, we at times feel that we have the literary man looking at the subject from outside, and analysing the crowd and its emotions rather than actually seeing the struggle. One stirring passage is marred by a "little rift within the lute," a lack of reality. At the very crisis of the finish, when the southern horse is on the point of out- raging Yorkshire patriotism by bearing off the prize, the northern mare, who has been in front throughout, comes to the rescue : " With bird-like dart she shoots away, And by half a length has gained the day." 184 THE POETRY OF SPORT Did ever human being see the horse who could make running over the mile and three-quarters of the Leger course, and then muster speed for a " bird-like dart " ? Probably the nearest approach ever seen to such a "dart" was in that singular and dramatic Leger finish some three years ago, when Throstle, after sulking and shirking for five- sixths of the distance, suddenly, as Bohn's Homer would say, "remembered her impetuous might" and shot past Ladas. But then she, with what appeared like temper, but may have been deep- laid strategy, unappreciated by her rider, had been husbanding her strength, and, moreover, we suspect that the appearance of great speed was only relative to the pace of her exhausted opponents. The turf indeed fares poorly in this collection. We could wish the editor had republished an old Yorkshire ballad which was reprinted or perhaps printed for the first time in BelVs Life not very long before the decease of that respectable journal. It described a match run in the latter part of the seventeenth century between Sir William Strickland's Merlin, trained and ridden by a Yorkshire groom, Heseltine, and a horse belonging to Tregonwell Frampton, afterwards MERLIN'S RACE 185 Master of the Horse to Queen Anne. The chief interest of the matter lies in the fact that the race is the earliest of which we know anything beyond the barest details as to the description and ownership of the horses. We feel ourselves in the real ballad atmosphere when we read how " Little Merlin won the race, And all to his owner's gain, And four-and-twenty Yorkshiremen Guarded him to his stable again ; And as they rode through Newmarket, Many curses on them did fall : 4 A curse light on each Yorkshire knight, Their horses and riders and all. ' ' The same race is referred to in a spirited passage occurring in one version, unhappily not the best known, of Sir Francis Doyle's poem, as " Our first victory handed on Through the long years from sire to son, When subtle Frampton schemed in vain, And from Newmarket's baffled plain Our triumph leapt like beacon fires Across the sullen Midland shires, To fill with glee our reeling spires ; When children started from their beds, Those joy-bells clanging round their heads, To hear through shouting Yorkshire run The news that Merlin's race was won." 186 THE POETRY OF SPORT Another racing ballad which might well have found a place, not altogether for its merits but from its historical interest, is the very vigorous doggerel describing how Careless "beat his Grace's Atlas that never was beat before." The ballad is interesting, firstly as showing that the Cavendish racing colours were then as now yellow, and secondly because the line which tells how " Brave Careless then did head the Crack " shows that a living piece of slang is of venerable antiquity. 1 Atlas, by the way, was the horse of whom Dr Johnson, on his visit to Chatsworth, said that he was the only one of the Duke of Devonshire's possessions whom he coveted, a remark which shows fine sportsmanlike possibilities latent in that vigorous John Bull nature. Mr Peek does give us a ballad of somewhat the same order, but in every way poorer, more modern, and of much less interest, concerning Lady Peeswing\ and we must say that in so doing he shows that he is either somewhat poorly equipped for his task or has a comfortably easy 1 The ballad is to be found in the letter-press accompanying Mr Tavmton's "Portraits of celebrated Race-horses." THE WILD DEER 187 view of the duties of an editor. It is startling to find the Trial Stakes at Chester figuring under such an inexplicable name as the " Tyrol " Stakes ! It is more startling to read that Beeswing in the Newcastle Cup beat Lanercost and Eclipse. Heroine though she was in her own county, we can hardly think that the most patriotic bard would have brought Eclipse out of the grave in which he had reposed for more than half a century to swell her triumph. The mystery is solved when we find that Calypso, probably spelt by the local poet Calipso, figured in the rac% referred to. No doubt the error was either with the printer or reprinter ; but, after all, it is the business of an editor to edit. In the hunting department the Billesdon Coplow Hunting song might, we think, have found a place, not so much from its poetical merits as from its historical interest. One of the most picturesque forms of all field sports, the chase of the wild deer, is wholly unrepresented, for we cannot accept Whyte-Melville's " Lord of the Valley," " fresh from his carriage," as a sub- stitute for the wild stag of Exmoor. Why could not Mr Peek have preserved that rattling lay of the Exmoor Stag Hunt which appeared in the 188 THE POETRY OF SPORT Saturday Review some three years back, with its vivid description of the scene when " The tufters on a find Are turning to the norrard. Hark back ! Hark back, it is a hind ! The stag himself hark forrard ! " through the incidents of the run, in which " We chucked a City swell to the pig By the mixen in Cloutsham corner ; We hung our artist by the wig Like Absalom, in Homer " ; to the last scene when " His foes with fury facing, Back, back he hurls the pack, Or heaves them neck and crop, boys, Till now, now down goes brow, Bay, tray and three on top, boys." And what sportsman could ask for higher im- mortality than that given in the concluding lines ? " Yet only five of all the hive That set on foot the sport, boys, Rode straight and true the whole hunt through, And mingled in the mort, boys. Now name, name those sons of fame, Who'll match them near and farther ? Jim Scarlett, Bassett, and Bissett were there, With Parson Jack Russell and Arthur." The writings of Mr H. H. Dixon ("The Druid ") are the very A B C of sporting literature, "THE DRUID" 189 and we think that a careful study of them might have put Mr Peek on the track of more than one poem or song worth preservation. There is, for example, a genuine ring of what one may call latter-day Borderdom, as of Hogg or Wilson a little artificial, it may be, yet full of vigour and spirit in the commemorative lines inscribed on a stone somewhere in the Cheviots : " Reared by a veteran sportsman's hand, Through sunshine and through mist I stand, To tell the time and show the place Where high-born beauty led the chase, And gentle lady's graceful steed Won from the field its hard-earned meed. I mark the spot on this wild fell That sires to their sons may tell How once a youthful English bride Taught the rough borderers to ride." We do not know whether Mr Peek is him- self a fisherman. Certainly his selections in that branch strike us happier than in others. Stoddart, of whom the editor has made good use, is known to most men as the Laureate of the fishing-rod. But probably the merits of Thomas Doubleday, a Scotchman from whose " Fisher's Garland "Mr Peek quotes two charming poems in Lowland Scotch vernacular, will be new to many English readers. 190 Cricket has, we think, fared very poorly in Mr Peek's hands. Two thin ballads, two mock heroic poems, cumbrous and pompous specimens of last - century humour, though not without historical interest, are all that we get: and this was not for lack of material. Why could not the editor have given us what one of his colleagues in an earlier volume justly called "the best cricket- ing poem yet published," Mr Prowse's lines on Alfred Mynn? We should also have welcomed Lord Lyttelton's Song of Hagky Cricket, which tells how " the peer and all his clan Grasped the bat to guard the wicket As no other household can." There is a pleasing autobiographical candour in the description of the total failure of all the older members of the family to make runs, somewhat redeemed by the fact that " The peer to mend his glory One and eke another caught, While the parson, doleful story, Missed the pair his hands that sought " ; and there is a foreshadowing of future greatness in the lines which tell how the two youngest of the house, CRICKET 191 " the pair of infant heroes Trained in Walker's school of fame, Scorned papa's and uncle's zeros, Swelled the score and stayed the game." There is no exact record of the result, but we have no doubt that it justified the boast with which the poem ends, that, " come whate'er eleven may, I and my eight boys will lick it, My stout sons will gain the day." Again, we think that some of Mr Cochrane's lyrics might find a place. A cricketing poet who bowled for his University for three years, and who had a large share in getting rid of an Australian eleven for seventy and thirty-eight, surely has special claims. Not that Mr Cochrane's would have been a succes cCestime. How many bowlers could avenge themselves of their adversary as he does in the delightful Ballade of the Corner Stroke, wherein he deals with the presumption and downfall of "the man who snicketh the length ball"? " It was my best, no better one I crave, To bowl ; it hurtled like an autumn gale, And yet withal a crafty twist I gave, Sufficing, as I fancied, to prevail. 192 THE POETRY OF SPORT " Then, as I looked his exodus to hail, Expectant to behold his timbers fall, It went for four hard by his inner bail. This is the man who snicketh the length ball. " Sirs, I was taken off* ; expletives fail : He never used the weapon's face at all : They bowled him with an under like a snail ! This is the man that snicketh the length ball." We trust that we have, at the risk of some weariness to our readers, piled up enough instances of Mr Peek's omissions to justify what we have said in our preliminary remarks. Yet we fully admit that, maimed and incomplete though this anthology may be, it is one from which every man who is at once a lover of sport and a man of letters may derive much pleasure. And, wishing to part from Mr Peek in a spirit of friendship, we would thank him for at least one good thing. He has rescued from Peacock's Maid Marian that most delightful duet between the heroine and Friar Tuck : " Though I now am a gray, gray friar, Yet I once was a gay young knight, And the cry of my dogs was the only choir In which my spirit did take delight." It is rather sad that one should have to talk PEACOCK 198 of " rescuing " a fragment of Peacock, yet we fear it is so. We once heard the War Song of Dinas Vawr quoted, and the author thereof named, in the presence of a man not unknown in the world of learning and letters. He asked whether the author was not the Dean of Ely ! Even Dr Johnson might with such provocation have forgiven the reply, that the two birds spread very different tails. And if Mr Peek brings back some lost sheep to the Pavonian fold, he will not have worked in vain. We cannot take leave of this book without referring to some of those wider issues which are suggested by Mr Watson in his Introduction and by Mr Lang in his prefatory moralisings. The Badminton series as a whole not only reminds us of the charm of sport ; it also bears witness to the comprehensiveness of sport as at present understood, of the width of its claims and therefore, we venture to think, of its dangers. The twenty-eight volumes whereof Mr Watson boasts are beyond doubt a proof of the catholicity and popularity of sport, but it must not be for- gotten as a set-off that they multiply vulnerable faces. We have already quoted some of the whole- some words of warning which Mr Lang addresses N 194 THE POETRY OF SPORT to the friends of sport, real and so-called. They certainly are not its true friends who are ready at once to raise a howl against every one who questions the morality, the humanity, or the expediency of this or that sport as a kill-joy and a Puritan forgetful in their use of the latter term that Cromwell raced and Hutchinson hunted. What is really to be regretted is that those, who might reform sport and keep in check its meaner and worse sides, should squander their energy and discredit their influence by protests which only show their ignorance of the subject with which they are dealing. Not long ago we read a protest signed by some who might at least have been expected to weigh their words, in which the Royal Buckhounds were denounced, on the plea that, if cruelty to the stag was avoided, it was avoided at the expense of suffering to the horses of the whips who rescued him. Now we certainly do not hold a brief for the chase of the carted deer. Our own view of that sport is somewhat like that of an old-fashioned Baptist minister of whom we have heard. One of his flock about to be immersed on a cold winter's day insisted on the tank being warmed. When the operation was completed, he exclaimed : " O REFORMERS OF SPORT 195 minister, I am so much happier since I have descended into Jordan ! " " Jordan ! " was the retort, " biled Jordan ! " Carted deer, bag-foxes, and the like seem to us to savour largely of " biled Jordan." But when we read of the " suffering " inflicted on a well-trained hunter by a smart gallop for the purpose of whipping off hounds, we are reminded of Mr Bromley-Davenport's anticipated millennium of humanity, "when the oyster will not be eaten without an anaesthetic." The Turf, again, has had some rude attacks and denunciations to endure of late. There are one or two questions which we should like to put to those who would suppress racing. Have they ever considered whether the evils which they aim at uprooting do not really lie, not in any special conditions or external circumstances, but in human nature and character, and whether they are not simply checking symptoms instead of really striking at the root of the evil ? It is more than likely that, if Tattersall's and betting on horses were abolished to-morrow, we should see an outburst of speculation in stock and shares more demoralising and far more widely pernicious in its influence than the Turf. We would further ask headlong reformers to reflect whether it is not exceedingly 196 THE POETRY OF SPORT likely that their efforts would do away with the Turf as it exists, voluntarily accepting the control of the Jockey Club, and substitute a Turf wholly anarchical and disorganised. For the Jockey Club, be it remembered, is a responsible body, which has shown plainly enough by its action of late years that it is fully alive to the possible abuses of racing, and that its members have no sympathy with gambling. At all events, we would ask those who denounce the Turf, alike in fairness and in their own interests, to confine themselves to that side of the question with which they are familiar, and not to seek to bolster up their case by wholly exaggerated pictures of racing as honeycombed with fraud. The internal morality of the Turf is one thing; its effect as an influence for good or evil on those interested in it, but outside it, is something very different. The latter is a point on which the clergyman, the philanthropist, the employer of labour, and every one who really has opportunities of studying the habits and tempta- tions of the poor, have a perfect right to express an opinion and to claim a hearing. When, on the other hand, they endeavour to show that every owner, trainer, and jockey is a knave, they are going wholly beyond their brief, and in ninety- THE ENGLISH TURF 197 nine cases out of a hundred are displaying their ignorance. And lastly, we would ask, whether it is certain that, if racing were abolished, a good deal of wheat would not come up with the tares? Burke was not afraid to defend his chief, Rockingham, against those who " charged him with jockeyship, as they were pleased to style it, as though any diversion could become noblemen in general better than that by which the breed of one of the noblest and most useful of animals is so much improved." Does not Kinglake tell us that Louis Napoleon, though not by nature reticent, had, " partly from habits acquired in the secret societies of the Italian Carbonari, partly from long years passed in prison, and partly too, as he once said, from his inter- course with the calm, self-possessed men of the English Turf, derived the power of keeping long silence." Not many men were better judges of human nature or shrewder observers of English life than the late Mr Cory. And in his exceedingly suggestive book, " A Guide to modern English History," he wrote thus: " Lord Palmerston was sufficiently philosophical and literary for political life. But he was in the 198 THE POETRY OF SPORT main a country gentleman, a sportsman, a racing man. Out of this set of habits there grew in him a wholesome sympathy with warriors." And thereto is appended the following footnote : " In the species sportsman, one expects courage, cheerfulness, and a frank, plain manner; in the variety racing man, one expects also powers of calculation and reticence." Nevertheless, while we think that the anti- gambler, like the Temperance reformer, is pursuing aims, many of them good in themselves, by short- sighted and ineffectual means, we do not think that in any trial of strength the friends of sport as such will feel any special call to take a side. They will probably accept the view which we have already quoted as pithily set forth by Mr Lang, and will feel that the discouragement of gambling by legitimate means is so much clear gain to the cause of sport. Again, those who protest against the prominence and publicity given to athletics are not to be dis- posed of by venerable references to mens sana in corpore sano, or to the Duke of Wellington and the playing-fields. We may be quite willing to admit that schoolboys, yea and undergraduates, cannot row, or play cricket and football, too AVOIDABLE DANGERS 199 strenuously or too thoughtfully. At all events, we may say generally of athletics as Mistress Alison Wilson said of matrimony, "They maun either marry or do waur." The real danger lies, not, we think, in the actual devotion to field sports or athletic games, but in the evils, often attendant but not really inherent, of laborious and exacting organisation, of publicity, of continuous existence in a feverish atmosphere of small excitements. LITERATURE AND THE TURF NOT the literature of the Turf. If I thought of venturing on so vast a topic, I should have to bespeak the monopoly of several numbers of Baity in advance. I have no intention of dis- cussing the various writers whose theme has been racing and the racehorse : from the time of that eccentric theorist, Osman, who waxed indignant at the term " blood," and at the idea of hereditary qualities. I shall only ask your readers to accom- pany me through a few of the byeways which the racing man and the man of letters have trodden together. Not long ago a certain Mr Eagles probably a lineal descendant of Solomon Eagles, and, if so, a valuable illustration of the doctrine of heredity for "Borderer" and other people who deal in pedigrees announced, through, of all places, the columns of the Sportsman, that the Turf was a doomed institution. Need it be said that 200 REFORMERS 201 the Gladstonian majority which is to be as industrious and as versatile as the servant of M. Harpagon was to be the instrument for sweeping away the hideous abuse, with all its immorality and cruelty. The cruelty, by the way, was illustrated by the conduct of the racehorse Judith who had " hurled herself out of the course to escape from her tormentors." I fear Mr Eagles has a little deteriorated from the standard of his Puritan ancestors. They, as Lord Macaulay tells us, hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. Will not Mr Eagles be reconciled to Judith's sufferings when he thinks of the acute annoyance which she inflicted on her backers ? Well, at all events, when Mr Eagles, with the help of the London County Council, and, of course, with the approval of Lord Rosebery, has sown salt on the polluted sites of the Ascot and Epsom grand stands, he still will have a pretty heavy job before him in obliterating all the traces which the national love of the Turf has left on our literature and our speech. It will take a good deal to uproot " making running," and " answering to the whip." Probably more than one schoolboy will still walk 202 LITERATURE AND THE TURF in the footsteps of the translator who rendered Dido vento reditura secundo, "Dido will come again when she gets her second wind." Turf slang has an odd way of cropping up in unlooked-for places. Not more than a year ago I sat at a Church Congress. I remember how one speaker illustrated his views about Church and Dissent by the case of one horse giving away weight to another, and called forth from an archiepiscopal punster in the chair some remarks on his racy illustration. I felt inclined to intervene, having some doubts whether the speaker quite understood the difference between a handicap and a weight- for-age race with penalties. But the interruption might have seemed pedantic, and I am glad that I forbore. What, however, first suggested to me this train of thought was a passage whereon I lit in the Rockingham " Memoirs," where that honest Yorkshireman, Sir George Savile, gives Lord Rockingham some sound political advice as to the advantage of coming out boldly on a line of his own. "You advertise that G. G. (George Grenville) should have continued Minister if you ride the heat as he did. He waited, and lay in a good SAVILE AND ROCKINGHAM 203 place till he came to the ending-post. I beseech you make the play if you are stout" Clearly the general principles of race-riding were as well understood then as now. " Make the play if you are stout." Cannot we imagine the very same counsellor giving Rockingham the same advice nine months later as the saddling bell rang for " That stern struggle ended well When strong of heart, the Wentworth Bay, From staggering Herod, strode away." That is not the only passage in Savile's letters to Rockingham where the racing man stands con- fessed. " It is like a child pulling against a runaway horse ; let him alone, and he will stop the sooner." That sounds like a prophecy of the slack-rein method, for which Chifhey, with his patrons, was nearly laughed off Newmarket Heath, till he confuted his critics on Knowsley and Eagle. " Didn't a sick horse once pay forfeit to a dead one ? " Surely here we have an early version of an oft- told tale ; I will not say the earliest version, for who ever yet ran a good story or saying to earth in its original form? The memory of the writer and that of him whom he addressed are associated with some stirring scenes in later Turf history. Rufford was 204 LITERATURE AND THE TURF the country seat of Savile, and as he wrote he may have had under his eyes the very paddocks where Skirmisher and Cremone sported in their foalhood. The green jacket of Lord Rockingham, which Bay Malton and Allabaculia carried to victory, was handed down together with the lands of Went- worth to the owner of Catton and Mulatto. Rockingham himself was an honest and consistent performer, and always answered gamely to the calls of that clever Irishman, Mr Burke, who trained and rode him. But I fear that history can hardly rank him as more than " useful," and not to be named with classical winners like Walpole and Chatham. While I am on the subject of Turf antiquities, I should like to say a word though it is rather a digression on the exceedingly interesting article which appeared in Bailys Magazine on thorough- bred horses in war. It was there assumed, as it usually is, that the Duke of Wellington's charger, Copenhagen, was thoroughbred. As a matter of fact, the entry of his dam in the second volume of the Stud Book runs thus : " Lady Catherine, got by John Bull, her dam by the Rutland Arabian out of a hunting mare, not thoroughbred." There is not, as far as I know, any other instance where a horse avowedly not thoroughbred has passed the SIR FRANCIS DOYLE 205 equine College of Heralds in Burlington Street. Copenhagen's admission may be looked upon as a special case where a title of nobility was granted for military services. Any one whose lot it was to reside in Oxford between 1868 and 1878, and to know the then Professor of Poetry, Sir Francis Doyle, must have learned what a wealth of illustration might be got out of the language of the racecourse. I was, I remember, one of a band of intending listeners on our way to his lecture. By some blunder, the place in which he was to hold forth was otherwise engaged : and we met Sir Francis, wandering through the streets with some more punctual disciples at his heels, in quest of a lecture room. Some one was ill-advised enough to ask if he still intended to lecture. " Lecture ? of course ! Do you think I should not go to the post after my number was put up ? " On another occasion he was found by a brother Fellow, just as the college chapel bell was on its last stroke, searching for his surplice. Those who knew the Professor's occasional forgetfulness about details would not have been surprised if the surplice had changed places with the window curtain. His friend sug- gested that it was late, and he had better go in 206 LITERATURE AND THE TURF his gown. " Go in my gown ! I shall be fined for riding in the wrong colours ! " The morality of declarations to win is an often-disputed question of Turf ethics. It cropped up prominently when, in the One Thousand, Memoir made way for Semolina. Those who upheld the Duke of Portland's action may be gratified by Sir Francis Doyle's comment on a certain candidate for the Newdigate, who, rather to the disgust of the examiners, had sent in two poems. "Did he declare to win with one?" was the not unnatural question. "No? Most unsportsmanlike ! " The lectures of the Professor of Poetry have never commanded a large academic audience : whereby, in Sir Francis Doyle's time, people lost the chance of hearing much humour and much enthusiastic and appreciative criticism. Such hearers as there were came mainly from the lady population of the Parks, even then a factor of some importance : with a few members of the Professor's own college, and occasionally one of his own colleagues who, I fear, did not always get a return in kind. One utterance, at least, that I remember was rather startling to such a body of listeners. It came in a lecture on MATILDA 207 Sir Walter. The lecturer illustrated some point or other by an experience of his own an accident which had befallen him in his youth when on a visit in Yorkshire. " I recovered," he told us. " I completed my journey, and reached Doncaster, where I had the honour of a conversation with Scott." Divers enthusiasts fogies, and frumps, no doubt, for I am told that in these days enthusiasm about Scott is limited to such drew their breath. It was not quite clear what had brought their idol so far from Abbotsford: but, at all events, there was one before them who had touched the hem of his garment. Then opened an awful gulf of learned frivolity. "Yes, with Scott not the mere poet and novelist, but that far greater, that immortal, man, the trainer of Matilda ! " I heard Sir Francis afterwards explain, sine ulla sollemnitate, how each Scott had a Matilda: but that there was no doubt which was the superior creature. For my own part, I should say that each was very lucky to pull off a good engagement: and that it was well, for the fame both of the master of Whitewall and the author of Rokeby, that both could produce worthier heroines. Sir Francis Doyle's special talents certainly 208 LITERATURE AND THE TURF fitted him to act as " horse-godfather," to modify Rowley's phrase. I do not know whether his services were often called in in that capacity. I can call to mind his speaking with satisfaction of the success of "his godson" Triermain. For a son of Gwendoline that was adequate. But one might use a phrase which I remember in one of Sir Francis's own lectures. He was cor- recting some rather inaccurate reminiscences of Lord Houghton's, concerning a Union debate at which Mr Gladstone was present. " All that Mr Gladstone did was to help to eat the supper afterwards, a part which might have been played with equal success by a less distinguished man." But if Sir Francis Doyle did not specially shine in this line himself, he had a keen enjoyment of the efforts of others. I do not know whether he was ever privileged to see the unpublished records of that conference at Whitewall where the late Lord Derby amused himself and his hearers by suggesting names for the offspring of that strangely-assorted couple, Ithuriel and Cyprian. If so, he was more lucky than the present writer. But I well remember his delight over that happiest of all combinations, St Augustine by Wild Oats out of Faith. " Who," as he said, " would have THE HORSE-GODFATHER 209 expected such theological accuracy in the Racing Calendar?" He would no doubt have heartily congratulated the sponsor who christened the daughter of Trappist and Festive after that most unclerkly Churchwoman, L'Abbesse de Jouarre. Has it, by the way, ever occurred to any one how completely the same idea was anticipated by Sir Joseph Hawley when he gave the name of Chaucer's frisky prioress to the daughter of Cowl and Diversion ? "She was cleped Madame Eglantine." The mere index of names in the Stud Book leads one into many a forgotten by-path of literature. How many people could say offhand why a son of John Bull should have been Job Thornberry : or who was Sir Harry Dimsdale ? A pleasant morning, I doubt not, might be spent in a library in hunting for the prototypes of Lady Cramfeazer and the Duchess of Limbs. In a good many instances the adapted name has had more vitality than its original. When Tim Whiffler carried all before him over long courses in 1862, there were, I daresay, not many who remembered his namesake the son of Voltaire and Cyprian who won some celebrity as a plater and hunter sire in the West of England. But o 210 LITERATURE AND THE TURF still fewer, I suspect, could have found the whereabouts of the stage character from whom the name was taken. How many of those who read the pedigrees of Springfield and Hermit could localise Monimia ? I have always suspected that any one familiar with the stage between 1830 and 1840 could identify the originals of Alice Hawthorne and Madame Pelerine. But they have no share in the immortality of their equine name- sakes. In these days when " M'Call " has ten readers for one who reads Orton or " The Druid " Mandane is probably pretty well forgotten. But of those who do remember the name, a good many more, I fancy, connect it with the paddocks at Bishop Burton than with the pages of Herodotus or Scuderi. I wonder, by the way, whether any classical scholar can speak as to the quantity of the second a confidently. There is authority on the point, though possibly not of a very high order. If any one wants to find it, let him search the pages of Crabbe. He may miss the passage in question, but he will at least make the acquaintance of a too little-remembered poet ; and he will learn that Englishmen need not cross the Channel to search the pages of Balzac and his disciples for the tragedy of common life. EMILIUS 211 I once saw a novel- reader of no common range brought to grief over the name of a horse not, indeed of a racehorse. He was one of those omnilegous persons, to whom an examina- tion in Scott or Thackeray would have been, in police-court phrase, a little lot to be done on his head. He was at home in the byeways of Mrs Trollope and Mrs Gore. But he was fairly beaten when asked why a runaway mare should have been named Fanny Hamper. I do not know whether he has solved the problem yet. I certainly have not. I do not know whether the process has often been reversed : and whether many human beings have owed their names to racehorses. We have, of course, a notable instance in that jockey, " born and bred," Mornington Cannon. Tradi- tion has it that a reverend baronet, a pillar of Eton cricket in his day, was vowed in his cradle to bear the name of the Derby winner in 1828. The legend may be true, but one or two purely mythical accretions have attached themselves to it. One hears that the second horse was called Soapsuds. A pretty careful search through Stud Book and Calendar has failed to reveal such an animal at any date. I have been gravely told 212 LITERATURE AND THE TURF and that, too, by a man who had enjoyed what is called a liberal education that the issue lay between Emilius and PotSos ! That, I think, was worse than the Soapsuds error : as half- knowledge is worse than total ignorance. What, I wonder, would my friend (who gave that in- formation) think of a candidate in history who should tell him that William Tell shot Richard Coeur de Lion with an arrow as they were hunting together in the New Forest? As a matter of fact, I have always thought how kindly fate melior fortuna parente used the future Eton captain in giving him the alternative of Emilius and Tancred. Still, the father, if he outlived the victory of Emilius by eight years, must have felt himself a modern Jephthah in his rashness. What could there have been in store for a Sir Lapdog Jones or a Sir Spaniel Smith ? Would either of them have made a hundred and fifty against Harrow ? I trow not. And what revulsions of feeling would the maker of such a vow have gone through during the Derby of 1845 ! His alarm would not be disposed of thougli Mr Greville's might be when the son of Venison and Fortress came down the hill, riderless and wounded. For was not Squire Gratwicke waiting POWER OF NAMES 218 ready to catch the rash parent between his anti- thetically-named pair, the Jean qui pleure and Jean qui rit of the racecourse ? He would have escaped Doleful only to fall a victim to Merry Monarch. And with what eyes would a father have beheld the finish of 1857, and seen his offspring on the brink of being launched on life as Black Tommy? If such a vow should be made for any unhappy child between now and May 1893, what will be his fate? Will he be saved by Raeburn or Buckingham ? Or is he doomed to go through life as Isinglass, Inferno, or Meddler? Prophecy is not my line: but I should incline towards hope. RACEHORSE BREEDING I. IS RACEHORSE BREEDING A LOTTERY? I WONDER how many of those who have asserted this have ever really analysed what they meant. If they did so I think they would soon see that the aphorism, literally applied, would carry them a good deal further than they really intended to go. A man who held that doctrine would, if he were logically consistent, simply buy the cheapest mares and use the cheapest sires, and would believe that he was nevertheless starting on equal terms with his neighbours. As a matter of fact, it is certain that if we went to one of the advocates of the " lottery " doctrine and asked him, " To which of these two horses shall I put my mare?" he would in three cases out of four express a prefer- ence, and would in doing so surrender his whole case. Again, the analogy of any other domestic 2J4 A LOTTERY? 215 animal makes dead against this view. A success- ful breeder of hounds, of Shorthorns, of Shrop- shire sheep, would rather open his eyes if he were told that his pursuit was the mere sport of chance. We read in the pages of " The Druid " of Mr Watts' "endless searching of hearts and pedigrees." Let any one study the breeding opera- tions of Mr Garforth, of Lord Egremont, Lord Grosvenor, or Lord Jersey, or in later times of Lord Falmouth, and I think he will be convinced that they worked on fixed principles. " My pork pies don't turn out well by chance," said Miss Pris cilia Lammeter, and I suspect that any of the breeders whom I have named would have said the same about their horses. Interpreted in its bald and literal form, the " lottery " theory is not, I think, hard to confute, and certainly does not offer much material for profitable discussion. The practical question is not whether breeding is altogether a matter of chance, but whether we can arrive at anything like systematic principles, sound enough and exact enough to be a useful guide to breeders ? Or is racehorse breeding a mere matter of common- sense and rule of thumb, for which judgment of make and shape, and a fair knowledge of 216 RACEHORSE BREEDING performances, are all that is needed? This view was set forth not long ago by Mr Strickland Constable in a book which he wrote on the subject. His view was that theories as to par- ticular strains nicking, and the like, were all moonshine. One horse was better than another because he was more truly made. Now, it seems to me that Mr Constable was in a great measure playing the part of Balaam, and blessing where he meant to curse. For he himself contended very stoutly for the transmission by certain sires of well-defined family characteristics of make and shape, while he also admitted that these character- istics were often almost imperceptible. Surely that is another way of saying that excellence depends, not on the obvious and easily recognised points of make and shape, but on pedigree. More- over, Mr Constable quite overlooked the fact that temper, constitution, and nervous energy have as much to do with success as external shape. I remember, after the Biennial at Ascot in 1889, remarking to a friend what a wonder it was to see a bit of a filly like Semolina tackle such a colt as Surefoot. " Ah ! " he answered, " these St Simons are built differently from other horses inside I " THEORISTS 217 There are one or two other arguments in favour of the " lottery " view which may, I think, be pushed aside without much difficulty. We hear that view asserted whenever a " fashionably "-bred young one, i.e., the offspring of a distinguished sire and dam, fails, or when one bred out of a cheap mare, or got by some neglected sire, turns up trumps. The very thing which the breeding theorist would deny is that a fashionably-bred one need be a good one. The man who picks up a cheap mare, such as Deadlock, or breeds from an out-of-the-way sire and produces a North Lincoln, a Tim Whiffler, or a St Gatien, may be in the position of M. Jourdain with his prose, and may be practising scientific breeding without knowing it. On the other hand, the breeding theorists, I think, not unfrequently prejudice their own case by writing or talking as though horses could be bred according to mere theoretical rules, without regard to the peculiarities of individual animals. They often forget, too, that the thing which needs to be proved is not merely that certain conditions are accompanied with success, but that when those conditions are removed success ceases. The question to be considered is not whether 218 RACEHORSE BREEDING some particular mode of crossing or in- breeding has produced good horses, but whether it has produced more than the average proportion of successes to failures ? Now, I certainly do not cherish the ambitious project of putting forth any full-blown theory of breeding. What I propose to do is rather to suggest the possibility of working out such a theory by giving a few detailed instances of the kind of generalisation which one can make. When we have done that it will be time to consider, what is really a different question, whether those generalisations can furnish a practical breeder with any useful working principles ? And I would ask any one who desires to go into the matter carefully to take each set of cases, and to consider for him- self how far it is reasonable to think that the success which has attended a particular method is a mere chance coincidence, and how far a case of cause and effect. The class of cases to which I would call atten- tion may be conveniently grouped under two heads. Firstly, those where a particular sire has shown a marked liking for one, or, if not for one, at least for certain selected and, generally, related strains of blood ; secondly, when two BAY MIDDLETON 219 strains have shown a permanent aptitude for combining. Mr Kent, in one of his articles in Baity, pointed out how, in defiance of make and shape, Bay Middleton hit conspicuously well with Velocipede mares. A very cursory view of the Stud Book confirms that theory. The two best brood mares that Bay Middleton ever got were the dams of Saunterer and Wild Dayrell. The dam of the former mare was by Velocipede, that of the latter by his brother Malek. Other successful brood mares by Bay Middleton were Nun Appleton and Rose of Cashmere, the former from a Malek mare, the latter from a sister to Velocipede. And, pointing further in the same direction, we find Bay Middleton's son, Autocrat, getting Queen Elizabeth from a granddaughter of Velocipede. It seems to me that to set this down as a succession of chance coincidences would be an instance of the credulity of scepticism. I should myself be disposed to say that, inasmuch as no similar tendency is to be found in the other Blacklock strains such as Voltaire and Brutandorf, the result is due to the in-breeding to Whiskey, Sorcerer, St Peter, and PotSos, every one of these strains being found in Velocipede's dam, and also 220 RACEHORSE BREEDING in Bay Middleton's dam, Cobweb. But this I admit is no more than an hypothesis. This, again, can, I think, hardly be matter of chance. Out of those daughters of Melbourne who have been conspicuously successful as brood mares, the dams of Lord Clifden, Ely, Fazzoletto, La Toucques, St Mungo, Thunder, and Martinique, and the granddam of Sterling, all go back direct to Blacklock. The pedigree of Secret (Lady Audley's dam), of Midsummer, of Blink Bonny, and of Mentmore Lass show a liking for a strain akin to that of Blacklock, i.e., Emilius. Sterling, again, got Isonomy, Paradox, Geo- logist, and Energy in fact, at least sixty per cent, of his successful offspring from mares in- bred to Birdcatcher. Yet such mares must have formed a minority of all those put to him. His son Isonomy furnishes even a better instance. Wherever a mare has hit conspicuously well with him, save in the one case of Satiety, the Bay Middleton blood, which he already inherits from Sterling, has been present. This applies to Seabreeze, Isinglass, Ingram, Ravensbury, and Prisoner, while in Common it occurs twice. I now come to a case where two particular strains have shown a continuous aptitude for 221 uniting. No one who has studied the early pedigrees can have failed to be struck with this in the case of Selim and Orville. Some of my readers may have heard of a schoolboy who described one of the tragedies of English history in this wise : " And so, by the order of the cruel queen, the head of Lady Jane Grey, including that of her husband, fell upon the scaffold " ! The figure has always seemed to me a convenient one, and I would premise that in Selim I " include " his own brothers Castrel and Rubens, and in Orville his own sister Orvillina. The following is a list of animals where the two parents were descended each from one of these, not further back than three generations : Pleni- potentiary, Oxygen, Emiliana, Preserve, My Dear, Miss Anne, Pocahontas, Flying Dutchman, Heron, Redshank, Barbelle, Touchstone, Medora (the dam of Ion), and Hester. Now here I would offer a suggestion which may propitiate Mr Constable. Few breeders of any domestic animals would deny that judicious in-breeding is the keystone of success, while at the same time it can be practised only where there is robust material to work upon, and where care is taken not to repeat and thereby intensify any marked faults. Now, 222 RACEHORSE BREEDING Selim and Orville are made up of much the same material, both being in-bred to Herod and Regulus through Eclipse and Highflyer. They were also both large, powerful horses. Moreover, while Selim and his stock were high - couraged and excitable, Orville was a slug. It seems to me, then, not at all mysterious that each should have specially suited the other. Another instance, which can hardly be due to chance, is the success of Defence mares with Venison. That cross produced Alarm, Miami, Joe Miller, Marlborough Buck, and Tame Deer ; Caractacus was by a son of Venison out of a Defence mare ; and again the strains of Defence and Partisan came together in Gladiateur, and more remotely in Favonius. Can it be an accident that Ion's best son was out of a Bay Middleton mare, that his son Tadmor made his best hit with a Cowl mare, and that St Angela (Ion's granddaughter) bred St Simon to a great- grandson of Bay Middleton? Again we find Rosicrucian and his brother The Palmer hitting with Gladiator blood in Beauclerc, Geheimniss, Pilgrimage, and her brother Pellegrino, and last, but not least, Ladas. Indeed, one may say that, if Gladiator blood were blotted out of the Stud IN-BREEDING 223 Book, Rosicrucian would have been a dead failure. I now come to another class of cases which I must deal with very compendiously, inasmuch as a full examination of them would be little less than an analysis of the Stud Book. I do not believe that there is any cut-and-dried theory or formula which will meet all the complex problems of horse-breeding. But I believe Mr Cookson got as near it as any one ever did in his simple rule, " Pay a mare back with the best strain in her own pedigree." I quite admit that in some cases the application of the principle is a matter of difficulty. Why should Isonomy have hit with Bay Middleton blood better than with that of Birdcatcher or Touchstone, both of which enter into his pedigree ? I can only point out that Bay Middleton blood has shown a somewhat special aptitude for in-breeding, as illustrated by the fact that The Miser was, for his chances, the best sire Hermit ever got, and Goldfinder the best horse that he, in turn, ever got, while Galopin's blood has hit specially well with that of Hermit and Scottish Chief. But I quite admit that it would have been difficult to foresee the precise lines on which Isonomy's stud success would run. 224 RACEHORSE BREEDING There are, however, a few instances over and above this where the superiority of in-breeding over other methods stands out with a distinct- ness which forbids us to suppose that chance is at work, and where a strain has only retained its merit by being replenished from the fountain- head. This, as 1 have endeavoured to show, is in a great measure true of Sterling. It can hardly be chance that the Rataplan blood has been kept alive solely through the exceedingly close alliance of Blinkhoolie with a Stockwell mare, with Wisdom for the result. It can hardly be chance that of all the families which have come from Voltigeur one only seems likely to survive, that of Galopin, whose sire was the most in-bred of all Voltigeur's sons, while Galopin himself was closely bred back, not only to Voltaire, but also, through another line, to Phantom and to Catton. I think that any one who makes a careful study of the Touchstone family will agree that there, too, the same theory is illustrated. But I admit that the plethora of Touchstone blood in the Stud Book makes it less easy to work out such a theory. It may plausibly be urged that Touchstone's in-bred descendants have been the best only because they are in a majority. TOUCHSTONE 225 While I am on the subject of Touchstone may I, though it is a digression, supplement "Borderer's" account of the old Eaton hero by an incident described to me by, I believe, an eye-witness. There was once staying at Eaton a certain well - known and, not to put it too strongly, eccentric nobleman. Touchstone was led up on the drive before the house for inspection. The visitor in question looked him over, and then asked, with an air of languid curiosity : "Is he thoroughbred?" A certain schoolboy of eleven, who alas ! as long ago as Wild Dayrell's year was introduced to the old brown, might have made a similar blunder, if he had not been some- what precociously well grounded in Ruff" and Sell's Life. Nancy and Black Doctor were the heroine and hero of his one day's racing, and he looked with wonder on the very different figure before him with its massive crest, rather heavy shoulders, and round barrel. The benign-looking head, with its broad forehead and crooked blaze, is as vividly remembered as if it had been seen yesterday. And now comes the very important question, How far can we out of all this deduce any practical rules for the guidance of breeders ? I am quite willing to admit that in a good many 226 RACEHORSE BREEDING cases the generalisation can only be arrived at when it is too late for breeders practically to profit by it. Who could foresee that the presence of Bay Middleton rather than of Touchstone or Birdcatcher blood would be the keystone of success in the case of Isonomy? By the time that one had the material for forming such a conclusion Isonomy was in his grave. So again with Venison's liking for Defence mares. On the other hand, I would point out that I do not for a moment pretend to have exhausted the generalisations which an observant man will, I think, deduce from a careful study of pedigrees. My object in choosing the instances which I have taken was not to select those which bear on the breeding problems of the present day. That would have necessarily involved complicated and perhaps controversial enquiry. I have simply chosen the most obvious instances of which I could think to illustrate compendiously the possibility of laying down general rules; and even if any one should think that in one particular instance I may have arrived at an unsound conclusion, that does not undermine my position. At the same time, I am quite willing to concede this much : in mating a mare or endeavouring PRINCIPLE AND DETAIL 227 to forecast the merits of a horse from his pedigree, there must always be a large element of guesswork. The cases where a man can say, " This and no other must be the right sire to use," are very few. What a rational man may, I think, say is : " With this alliance I have very little chance of success ; with that a good chance." And one general principle may allow a good deal of latitude of choice in detail. It has sometimes been said that Lord Falmouth was a haphazard breeder because he would vary considerably his choice of mates for the same mare in successive seasons. Yet I venture to think one can always trace a common element running through his choice. It fell to my lot this year to mate three thoroughbred mares. In two cases I was limited by considerations of age, make and shape, and the like ; but in the third I had a free hand. Yet I am quite ready to admit that I could have chosen at least three sires in the limited ranks of the " fashionables " who might have suited as well as the one whom I chose, if not better. I quite admit, too, that good management in detail is every whit as important as system in mating. I should have far more faith in the future of a well-appointed and well-managed stud 228 RACEHORSE BREEDING farm, where the master had really good judgment of make and shape, than in one administered in a slovenly fashion by a man who relied on a paper knowledge of pedigrees. Moreover, I should attach even more importance to having mares of winning blood than to mating them correctly. I would sooner buy a yearling who went back in the female line to Paradigm or Queen Mary, even though I saw no special congruity in the pedigree of his sire and dam, than one the result of a more judicious cross, but springing from an inferior source. That, however, is no concession to Mr Constable or to the " lottery " doctrine. To sum up, I fully admit that only a lucky conjunction of favourable conditions can produce an Isinglass or a Ladas. But I believe, and I have endeavoured to show grounds for my belief, that the breeder who studies pedigrees can mini- mise his chances of failure, and will, therefore, in the long run get a higher average result than his unscientific rival. THE FIGURE SYSTEM 229 II MR LOWE AND THE FIGURE SYSTEM 1 I CANNOT help thinking that Mr Lowe's choice of a title for his work was a little unfortunate. The figure system may be a convenient form, and once one has read Mr Lowe's book, it is intelligible enough. But, on the face of it, it is hardly calcu- lated to disarm the prejudices of those who look with suspicion on all general theories of racehorse breeding. It suggests to irreverent minds thoughts of Apocalyptic speculations, after the fashion of the late Dr Cumming's as to the number of the Beast and the four - and - twenty Elders, and it may beget an idea, quite unfounded, that Mr Lowe was offering to provide his readers with some formula by which, without detailed know- ledge of individual animals, they would produce good horses. The figure system is simply another name for the reckoning of descent through females instead of males. Mr Lowe's view, expressed rightly and practi- cally, is that we ought to speak and think, not 1 " Breeding Racehorses by the Figure System." Compiled by the late C. Bruce Lowe ; edited by William Allison. London, Horace Cox, Field Office, 1895. 230 RACEHORSE BREEDING of the Stockwell, Touchstone, Melbourne, and Voltigeur strains, but (let us say for illustra- tion) of the Prunella, Mandane, Pocahontas, and Martha Lynn strains. He would, in short, apply to blood stock the principle which, as most people know, has from the beginning been applied to Shorthorns. There, we need hardly say, descent has always been reckoned as going from cow to cow ; no number of Duchess crosses will make a cow into a Duchess who does not trace back through an unbroken line of females to the original Duchess. Mr Lowe adopts this view in the case of racehorses, on the ground that descent through females is more tenacious than that through males. He does not deny the great importance of the sire, nor that it may be at times convenient for discussion to group animals together according to paternal descent; but, according to his view, the female line is the more essential. One has been accustomed to regard (let us say for example) Ladas as a representa- tive of Touchstone blood, modified by successive crosses of Melbourne, Rataplan, and Tramp. In Mr Lowe's view we should regard Ladas as a representative of Prunella, modified by all the intervening crosses. GREAT FAMILIES 231 The classification on which Mr Lowe's theory rests is that adopted in that new edition of the first volume of the Stud Book issued in 1891. There, as my readers will no doubt remember, all sires of note were classified under the original female from which they had sprung. Mr Lowe works out this classification with great complete- ness. He takes in forty-three families, which he classifies in order, according to their supposed merit. His estimate is formed, in not wholly satisfactory method, by reckoning the number of winners of so - called " classical " races produced by each family. One instance may show how far this is from being a wholly adequate test. Isonomy, Vedette, Alarm, Plaisanterie, Monarque, and Cambuscan, all belong to one family, yet not one of them scores a point, so to speak, according to Mr Lowe's method of conducting the competition. Yet any one of these is worth an Andover and a Sefton put together. This, however, is, after all, a detail, and does not touch the essence of Mr Lowe's theory. It is not difficult for any one who is well up in the Stud Book and Racing Calendar to modify that theory so as to meet these facts. One of the most important practical points 232 RACEHORSE BREEDING brought forward by Mr Lowe, that perhaps which more than any other may claim to be regarded as a really valuable discovery, is this : that certain horses have almost a monopoly of the power of producing great sires, that where a great sire is met with outside these families it will be found that a large preponderance of his male ancestors on each side belong to these families. Nor is this all. That quality, whatever it may be, which enables certain families to produce great sires is a quality which must never be far distant in the case of a high-class racehorse, and the absence of it in the sire may be in some measure compensated for by its presence in the dam. It may at this stage be convenient to give in a summarised form Mr Lowe's principal families. There are, according to him, five great racing families : 1. Tregonwell's Natural Barb Mare, from whom came Snap, Prunella, and Wood- pecker. 2. Burton's Barb Mare, from whom came Sir Hercules, Blacklock, Voltigeur, Crucifix, and Marcia. 3. The dam of the Two True Blues, whence came Sir Peter, Stockwell, Galopin, GREAT FAMILIES 233 Flying Dutchman, Lanercost, Musket, and a host of good brood mares. 4. The Layton Barb Mare, represented mainly through Matchem, Ion, Maniac, Rebecca, and Sacrifice. 5. The daughter of Massey's Black Barb, the ancestress of Hermit, Doncaster, Gladiateur, and Diversion. Of these, however, only No. 3 is conspicuous for the production of sires. For those we must go to the following families, as placed by Mr Lowe : No. 8, whence come Marske, Orville, Sultan, Humphrey Clinker, Newminster, Cer- vantes, Cain, Sir Paul, and Paulowitz. No. 11, whence come Squirt, Regulus, Bird- catcher, Brutandorf, Lottery, Belshazzar, Venison, Pelion, Golumpus, and St Simon. No. 12, which gives us Eclipse, Young Marske, Filho da Puta, Voltaire, Tad- mor, Lexington, Sterling, Adventurer, Weatherbit, Marsyas, Scottish Chief, and Ethelbert. No. 14, to which belong Trumpator, Touch- stone, Buccaneer, Leamington, Macaroni, and Saraband. 234 RACEHORSE BREEDING Whatever may be thought of other portions of Mr Lowe's theory, it must be granted, I think, that the production of all these sires from such a limited number of families, and the very marked tendency of the members of these families to reproduce and even intensify their own merit, in direct opposition to the habit of certain other families, can hardly be a matter of chance. These are the outlines of Mr Lowe's system, and before discussing it further I should like to anticipate a few objections to the form in which the system is here presented by the author. Firstly, I would say that, in my opinion, the book must be regarded not as setting forth a scientific theory, but rather as setting up a number of valuable empirical generalisations. When Mr Lowe attempts to connect his teaching with scientific theories of heredity, he does not seem to me to be successful. As regards his general style, one must remember that we are criticising a posthumous work. Mere detailed errors of fact can be corrected, as no doubt they often have been corrected, by the editor. But he would have been going beyond his province if he had endeavoured to fill in omitted links in Mr Lowe's train of reasoning METHOD 235 and confused or obscure expressions, such as not infrequently occur. These, I have little doubt, would have been removed or diminished by the author if he had lived to revise his work. These, however, are not the only defects whereby Mr Lowe prejudices his own case. One is reminded sometimes of the judge's admonition to a dis- cursive counsel. " Do, sir, arrange your facts in some order alphabetical if you like." A pedigree is discussed, not in connection with the theory which it illustrates, but because it is incidentally called up by some chance reference. An argument is suddenly interrupted by some not very relevant personal reminiscence. It is often difficult to understand whether a particular case is adduced as proof of a principle, or merely to illustrate a principle which has already been proved. In fact, it is not very often that Mr Lowe definitely states a proposition, and then accumulates the proofs of it. The instances in which he has done this most successfully, and to which I would refer my reader for a favourable specimen of Mr Lowe's treatment of his subject, are where, at pages 52, 55, and 56, he brings together all the successful alliances of the three sires, Herod, Eclipse, and Matchem, showing in each group 236 RACEHORSE BREEDING respectively a common principle holding good ; and again at page 156, where he illustrates briefly, but, I think, successfully, his general principle from more than thirty pedigrees. One objection to Mr Lowe's theory, as he states it, will probably occur to many readers. It is highly improbable that the various founda- tion strains which he treats as distinct really are distinct. He himself, indeed, candidly calls attention to the fact that his No. 2 and No. 3 strains are, according to the Stud Book, probably identical. Considering, too, the very imperfect material from which the Stud Book was compiled, one can hardly doubt that there are other cases of this. Again, Mr Lowe often writes as though there were a hard-and-fast line between " sire- producing " and " non-sire-producing " strains. As I have said before, there seems to me to be overwhelming evidence to show that the theory of "sire" blood is sound, and, as I shall try to show later on, it explains what have hitherto been some of the most awkward stumbling-blocks which students of pedigrees have encountered. But I think it is probable that the quality is not one which is present in some families and wholly absent in others, but one which presents SIRE FAMILIES 237 itself in graduations. For example, the family of which I spoke before, that which produced Isonomy and Vedette, is not among Mr Lowe's sire families, yet almost every great horse whom it has produced has shown himself capable of begetting first-class stock, under special conditions. For it is to be noticed and this, I think, is a very strong verification of Mr Lowe's main theory that whenever successful results have been got from this family they have been the consequence of very strong in-breeding to some representative of high-class running blood, such as Whalebone or Blacklock. I think the same may be said of Mr Lowe's No. 7 family, which in recent times, with the help of two successive crosses of Stockwell, produced Wisdom. If these cases are at variance with the letter of Mr Lowe's teaching, it seems to me that they furnish strong undesigned proof of its essential soundness. The origin of the racehorse is now only a matter of speculative interest. Mr Lowe, in direct contradiction to the statement of the Stud Book and to all tradition, holds that the Royal mares were English, not Eastern. He also, at page 41, argues that a certain mare could not have been of Eastern blood, because she was described 238 RACEHORSE BREEDING as dun. Mr Lowe can never have read the correspondence extracted from the Harley manu- scripts, and published in the Field, concerning the Oxford Dun Arabian, one of the few early Eastern sires of whose importation we have full particulars. Now to pass from detailed criticism of Mr Lowe's book to the more general consideration of his theories. Three questions at once suggest themselves : Does he teach anything new ? Is his teaching sound ? And is it likely to be of practical service to breeders ? The first of these questions is the one which can probably be answered affirmitively with most confidence. The difference between all previous theories of racehorse breeding and that put forward by Mr Lowe is practically this : hitherto we have considered the sire as the main element. Now, from this point of view, there has always been one difficulty. All our existing thoroughbreds branch off from three sires Eclipse, Matchem, and Herod. Whatever differences exist must have arisen from a process of rapid individual variation. And the difficulty inherent in this view is intensified by the fact that the three main lines above-named are now handed down MR LOWE'S CRITERION 239 only through a very limited number of sub- families. All modern horses, good, bad, and indifferent, are in-bred to Whalebone, Blacklock, Orville, and Sir Peter, and any theory which rests on the superiority of these strains at once breaks down, because it furnishes no criterion whereby we can discriminate the good from the bad. The same argument practically applies to strains much nearer our own time, such as Touchstone and Stockwell. But if we accept Mr Lowe's theory, we have (practically) over twenty different elements to deal with, all vary- ing in merit. Every sire whose name occurs in a pedigree has a distinctly graduated value, and we are at once furnished with an effective means for calculating the different values of pedigrees. I can probably make myself understood better if I translate this into the language of concrete facts. Let us suppose two horses both got by Stockwell. The dam of one is by Newminster, granddam by Gladiator. The dam of the other is by Orlando, granddam of Venison. The re- maining elements in their pedigree are wholly diverse. In one case the great-granddam, we will say, belongs to family No. 1, and is got by a horse of No. 2 ; in the other she belongs to 240 RACEHORSE BREEDING No. 35, and is got by a horse of No. 36. Now, according to accepted ideas, these two pedigrees are virtually the same. Both animals are by Stockwell, dam by a son of Touchstone, grand- dam by a son of Partisan. The difference is unimportant. But, according to Mr Lowe's view, the difference is essential and all-important, the resemblance little more than accidental. I do not say that Mr Lowe's theory, thus repre- sented, necessarily offers a correct solution of the difference between a good horse and a bad one. I only say that it offers a solution, a definite criterion ; to test the correctness of the criterion we must go a step further. It is wholly out of my power within the limits of a magazine article to test the practical sound- ness of Mr Lowe's theory as a whole. All I can do is rather to follow up the line of thought which I suggested to the readers of Baity in October last year to point out the manner in which the theory may be tested, and at the same time to adduce a few noticeable facts which, if they do not prove it, are at least consistent with it, and cannot, as far as I know, be explained by any other theory. Most Oxford men know the story of a certain distinguished classical PROBABILITY 241 scholar who, emerging from the mathematical schools, assured his friends complacently that if he had not proved any of the propositions set him, he had at least given most of them an air of great probability. Now, when we come to a practical question, where results do not admit of exact measurement and proof, we must often be content with that amount of probability on which reasonable men are prepared to act. To begin with, I would say that whenever any sire has exercised a wide-reaching influence for good, such, for example, as have Whalebone, Blacklock, Stockwell, Bay Middleton, or Touch- stone, it will be found that his pedigree is built up by persistent in-breeding to the lines which Mr Lowe puts at the top of his graduated scale. Further, if we take any individual sire, we shall find that if he has been himself deficient in high- class running blood, he has required an extra supply of it in his mates. There is a con- spicuous deficiency of high-class running blood in Newminster's dam, especially in her sire, Dr Syntax a fact, by the way, which fits in with a very slight permanent influence which Dr Syntax has exercised. Now, of Newminster's best sons, Hermit comes from family No. 5, Q 242 RACEHORSE BREEDING Lord Clifden from a direct union of No. 2 and No. 1, Victorious from a mare whose sire as well as herself belonged to No. 3. Of the peculiar conditions of Cambuscan's breeding I have already spoken. It is also noticeable that no large family of mares have done less in pro- portion to their number and opportunities than the daughters of Newminster. Almost the same phenomena are repeated in Newminster's son Adventure. He takes on board a good deal more inferior running blood, while his dam belongs to a sire family, and is also in-bred to a great sire-producing line, since she is on one side a granddaughter, on the other side a great-grand- daughter, of Orville. Here, too, we find Adven- ture getting two great winners, Wheel of Fortune and Apology, from mares of the first and fourth family, Bal Gal and A venturiere from mares of the second family. His daughters, too, like those of Newminster, have been distinctly unsuccessful as brood mares. In the article to which I have before referred, I called the attention of the readers of Baity to the fact that Isonomy had shown a most marked preference for mares descended from Bay Middleton. I cited this as illustrating the SIRE BLOOD 243 doctrine " breed back to the best strain in the parent's pedigree." At the same time I admitted that it was difficult to see why Bay Middleton should in this instance answer better than Bird- catcher or Touchstone, which equally entered into Isonomy's pedigree. But it is perfectly clear that, measured by Mr Lowe's standard, Bay Middleton is a better strain than either of these, because it contains a smaller leaven of inferior families. As to Mr Lowe's theory of sire families, I venture to think that the mere list of names which I have adduced raises a very strong pre- sumption in its favour. His contention, amply justified by pedigrees, that it is quite the excep- tion to find any great horse who has not among his eight ancestors in the third generation at least one member of one or the other of the great sire families, is a canon of much practical value. No doubt, the absence of that condition may be compensated for by a plethora of such blood a stage further back. The practical sense of a breeder will be shown in thus modifying and adapting the theory. The best proof, perhaps, of the soundness of this portion of Mr Lowe's theory is to be found 244 RACEHORSE BREEDING in cases of horses such as Gladiateur, who have wholly failed to reproduce their own excellence. Without attempting to work that out in detail, I would just call attention to two groups of cases which are, I think, instructive. No one can have failed to notice how the combination of Stockwell and Touchstone, excellent for the production of racehorses and brood mares, has failed to produce good sires. The Marquis and Asteroid are leading cases. So, in different degrees, are Caterer, Vespasian, Hubert, The Duke, and Robert the Devil. Now, the main common element which co-exists in Stockwell and Touchstone is the Whalebone blood, and Whalebone was neither of a sire family nor well supplied with sire blood. Ft is further to be noted that far and away the best sire that ever came out of the No. 1 family that to which Whalebone belonged was Melbourne, who was otherwise completely bred away from that family, and that when his blood was re-united with Whalebone, as in the cases of West Australian and General Peel, the produce were unsuccessful as sires. If Barcaldine be quoted as an instance to the contrary, it should be noticed as, indeed, it is by Mr Lowe that Barcaldine was exception- SULTAN 245 ally in-bred to a great sire-producing line, of which Birdcatcher and Brutandorf were both members. The union of Orlando and Emilius is another instance of a cross excellent for racing purposes, but incapable of producing a great sire ; and here, again, is a conspicuous want of what Mr Lowe calls sire blood. These are negative instances. Let me give a positive one pointing in the same direction. The pedigree of Sultan was built up on the strongest foundation of sire blood possible. Marske and Vixen were common grandchildren each in the direct female line of a mare belonging to the No. 8 family, whose capacity for producing great sires I have already noticed. Folly, the daughter of Marske and Vixen, produced a filly who, in her turn, was put to Marske's grandson, Mercury. More Marske blood was brought in through Ditto and Selim : the result was Sultan. The virtual and, I think, most unfortunate ex- tinction of the Sultan line in tail-male in Eng- land has caused the merits of its founder to be rather forgotten. But probably no sire of the present century has ever begotten such a brace of sons as Glencoe and Bay Middleton not even Parmesan when he got Favonius and Cremorne 246 RACEHORSE BREEDING to say nothing of such minor lights as Augustus, Beiram, Galata, and Ibrahim. The really note- worthy feature, however, is that Sultan blood very essentially, according to Mr Lowe's theory, a sire-producing strain has had a history exactly opposite to that of Whalebone. It cannot be said that in-breeding to Sultan has specially tended to produce good racehorses. But an infusion of Sultan blood has helped almost every strain in turn to produce its best sire. Thus we have Sterling's sire, Oxford, from a grand- daughter of Bay Middleton ; Stockwell, Rataplan, and King Tom from a daughter of Glencoe; Galopin from a daughter of the Flying Dutch- man, and Hermit from a mare who inherits Sultan blood both through sire and dam ; while the blood of Cain is only kept alive by the union of Ion with a Bay Middleton mare in Wild Dayrell. And I believe that nothing better could befall English blood-stock breeders than for some enter- prising man to emulate the example set by the importers of Carbine and Carnage, and to reclaim from the Americans some good if possible some in-bred representatives of the Glencoe blood. It would be unfair to leave Mr Lowe's work IN-BREEDING 247 without noticing one or two other theories, apart from his main system, but interesting, and, I think, valuable. He points out that it is exceptional to find a really high-class brood mare who has not at some portion of her pedigree, generally among her dam's ancestors, some very close in-breeding, while the same is seldom to be found in a successful sire. He further points out in what a very large propor- tion of mares distinguished as runners we find the same line of blood existing in the sire's sire and the dam's dam. We have, for example, Thebais and Jannette, got by sons of Newminster, from mares whose dams were by Touchstone. As other instances of this method of in -breeding, Mr Lowe quotes Wheel of Fortune, Canezou, and Reve d'Or. When one considers that he might have added Virago, Crucifix, Cobweb, Galata, Alice Hawthorne, and Industry, it is difficult not to believe that Mr Lowe has hit on a sound doctrine. Another part of Mr Lowe's teaching will probably, if received at all, be received with con- siderable modifications. He attaches great import- ance to the influence of a sire, not only on his own progeny, but on the subsequent progeny of the dam, whether by other sires or by himself. By the latter phrase I mean that, according to Mr Lowe's 248 RACEHORSE BREEDING view, the influence of the sire is an increasing quantity. Each alliance leaves behind an increased tendency to resemblance. Mr Lowe endeavours to prove this in, I think, a somewhat unsatis- factory and certainly unscientific fashion, by citing instances, equine and human, where the earlier progeny have resembled the dam, the later the sire. I have not much doubt that one could find instances where this has been exactly reversed. No practical breeder will deny that "previous influence " may often come in as a disturbing force. Few, I think, will agree with Mr Lowe, who actually regards it as a controllable force, which a breeder can reckon upon and even utilise. Indeed, it seems to me that the very fashion in which Mr Lowe states this part of his case goes far to upset it. " The stud master may say with truth, ' If this theory be correct, a mare may not be all she is represented to be." Logically, it would mean that every single animal in the Stud Book represents the accumulated blood of all the sires with whom the dam has been previously allied. If so, the Stud Book becomes a chaos, and the sooner we burn our pedigrees the better. What I think we may admit is that the influence of a previous alliance is a factor which a breeder BEND OR; ISINGLASS 249 will do well to take into account, not as certainly, but as possibly, operative. And I am inclined to think, though I do not put forward the view dogmatically, that in some cases when a mare is put to a sire closely related to her, her power of transmitting the character of the common ancestor to her subsequent produce is increased. Two instances strike me as tending in that direction. Before producing Bend Or, Rouge Rose had six successive foals by Lord Lyon. Now, Lord Lyon's granddam, Ellen Home, was also Rouge Rose's dam, and was a mare of exceptionally good blood all through, and I think it not unlikely that this in-breeding, unusual alike in its closeness and its repetition, may have had an effect on Bend Or. Deadlock, again, was twice put to Isonomy; the first time she produced that very moderate horse Islington, the second time Isinglass. Between the two came a foal by Crafton. Now, Deadlock's sire, Wenlock, and Crafton's sire, Kisber, were both sons of Mineral, than whom one could hardly find a better-bred mare in the Stud Book ; while Crafton himself was also through his dam descended from Mineral's sire, Rataplan. I have already, I think, pretty well answered incidentally the third question which I propounded 250 RACEHORSE BREEDING How far does Mr Lowe's book contain any- thing likely to be of practical service to breeders ? Take the first thing which a breeder has to con- sider choice of mares. Mr Lowe has shown the very great advantage of selecting mares belonging to the great families, not because they have a monopoly of producing high - class racers, but because they give a breeder far greater latitude in his choice of sires. No doubt there has been an increasing sense among breeders generally of the importance of having a good " tap-root." As Mr Lowe says, " There have been certain mares selected by reason of their great excellence, and these have served the purpose of milestones along the path of students." I will give an instance of the kind of way in which Mr Lowe has, as it seems to me, widened our knowledge. I know a breeder with a small stud, whose practical rule has been never to take any mare that did not go back at no long interval to the dam of a great winner, for choice to the own sister of a great winner. As a matter of fact, all the five mares who make up his stud are within the pale of Mr Lowe's four head families. But this is a mere accident. He had done, crudely and unscientifically, what Mr Lowe would have taught him to do systematically. PRACTICAL RULES 251 What Mr Lowe aims at showing is not that the excellence of a few families is in individual cases of a higher kind, but that it is far more certain, and far more continuous. As to choice of sires, Mr Lowe's theory of sire blood, if we accept it, furnishes the breeder with a succession of beacon lights warning him off dangerous shoals. Any one who carefully reads Mr Lowe's book, and then looks through the list of sires, will see that, whether his teaching is correct or not, it is thoroughly practical and definite somewhat alarmingly definite. And, as I have said before, 1 think, if any one will take the trouble to search the past annals of the Turf, he will see not a few wrecks which might have been saved if Mr Lowe's theories had been known before. When it comes to the actual question of mating any particular mare, I am not sure that Mr Lowe's teaching is as satisfactory, or, at least, as definite. It is not difficult to say, " This cross is distinctly wrong," " That cross fits in with Mr Lowe's views." But I think that it would still be possible that in a good many cases Mr Lowe's teaching would leave a latitude of choice in dis- tinctly different directions. I am not sure that 252 RACEHORSE BREEDING this does not tend to prove that the author is a reasonable man, not a doctrinaire. In a good many instances considerations of make and shape and temperament would settle the question. Still, I am bound to say that, whether it be obscurity on Mr Lowe's part or obtuseness on mine, I can- not altogether understand the positive principles of mating which he lays down. I think, too, that he sometimes sees what is remote and over- looks what is near. He is so absorbed in his consideration of horses as falling into groups based on female descent that he forgets that it is possible and very often useful to classify them otherwise. In some cases the union of particular male families may be the best practical guide for the breeder to follow, though the success of such union may be ultimately explained by Mr Lowe's theories. I may give an instance of this. Mr Lowe speaks of Stockwell as "catholic in his matings." It is generally received, and I think a sound doctrine, that Stockwell showed a very marked preference for mares of Touchstone blood. Though Mr Lowe does not furnish breeders with anything like a cut-and- dried formula for mating applicable to each mare, I can hardly imagine any breeder reading his book carefully, PREDICTION 253 and without prejudice, and not in future seeing his way a good deal clearer. It would be unfair not to point out that Mr Lowe does not in the least underrate the importance either of make or shape, or of conditions of rearing and management. He does not go into these questions in detail, but all that he does say about them is sensible and practical. All that he claims all that any sensible man who theorises about breeding will claim is that he can point out certain conditions which must be obeyed if symmetry, physique, and good management are to have fair play. It is an old doctrine that prediction is the test of science. It is a test which unfortunately theories of racehorse breeding are apt to evade. The practical breeder no doubt has his errors brought home to him by lengthening forfeits, or by " the law of diminishing returns," as exemplified in Mr Tattersall's yearling sales. But when the newspaper critic glibly prophesies that " this grand - looking and grandly-bred young sire cannot fail to get racehorses," how often is the scribe con- fronted four years later with the grim reality as disclosed in the list of winning stallions? It may not, therefore, be out of place to jot down a few of the conclusions as to the future which 254 RACEHORSE BREEDING would seem to follow as necessary deductions from Mr Lowe's teaching, and to cast in accordance with his principles the horoscope of some of the young aspirants to fame at the stud, taking only those whose career has not begun, or, at least, has not gone far enough to be a key to their probable future. If our author's ideas are sound, no horse ever began stud life with better prospects than Isinglass. It is, perhaps, hardly fair to speak of St Serf, who has already given us a taste of his quality. But he, too, pre-eminently fulfils the conditions laid down. Mr Lowe could have had nothing but praise for Orme and Best Man ; while, among minor lights, Blue Green and that very honest, if not very comely, horse Queen's Birthday, would surely have his good word. Ladas, Sir Hugo, Oberon, Ravensbury, our two Australian visitors, Carbine and Carnage, and Childwick, should each in their degree do well, though probably within a much narrower circle of alliances than those named above. Galeazzo, too, is worth mentioning as one who, if all goes well with him in his Turf career, should help St Simon in keeping up the line of Voltigeur. This does not, of course, in the least pretend to be an exhaustive application of Mr Lowe's THE PROBLEM DISCUSSED 255 principles to the sire list. But I think it may furnish a rough test by which, as time goes on, the soundness of these principles may be measured. III. HAVE OUR RACEHORSES DETERIORATED AND, IF SO, WHY? A WELL-KNOWN writer in the daily Press, the special commissioner of the Sportsman, has lately been discussing this subject, and his views have been commented upon, partly with approval, partly with dissent, in the Field. In each case the question is treated with an amount of care and a fulness of knowledge which at least raises a presumption that the matter is worth considering. The case put forward in the Sportsman may, I think, be summed up in the following propositions : 1. That our racehorses have of late years deteriorated and are likely to go on deteriorating. 2. That this deterioration is due to excessive in-breeding. 3. That this in-breeding has been forced upon us by the ascendency of the Eclipse lines 256 RACEHORSE BREEDING and the weakening, approaching to extinc- tion, of the Herod and Matchem lines. 4. That the remedy for this is to be found in the resuscitation of the Herod blood in the direct male line. Every one of those propositions seems to me sufficiently important to deserve consideration, and also to be so general as to need a certain amount of definition and limitation. I. The first is one on which it is scarcely possible, as far as I can see, to arrive at any definite conclusion. How is it possible to measure the relative merits of the great horses of different epochs ? Who could decide the supremacy between, let us say, Camarine, Alice Hawthorne, Virago, and Pretty Polly ? The cry of deterioration has always been heard. The late Sir Francis Doyle was a stout advocate of that view. Yet, as it always seemed to me, he himself furnished one of the strongest arguments against it. In an article which he wrote in the Fortnightly he took up his parable, and effectively, against those optimists, such as Admiral Rous, who maintained that the development of the racehorse had been in the direction of continuous improvement. He took for his example Medoro, a good, though not quite SIR FRANCIS DOYLE 257 first-class Cup horse, who was running in 1829. Now, Medoro himself and his immediate forebears were all begotten by old horses, and he therefore belonged to one generation in point of time, but to an earlier one in point of descent. How, then, was it, Sir Francis asked the advocates of the improvement theory, that Medoro held his own well among his contemporaries ? It did not, apparently, occur to him that the argument could be turned round. As it happens, Touchstone, the Flying Dutchman, and Thormanby were all descended by an equal number of removes from Selim and his brother Castrel. If we accept the deterioration theory in full, then the Dutchman and Thormanby, instead of being merely the best of their year respectively, as the former certainly was (in a very bad year) and the latter possibly (in a very good one) should have been far and away the best of their decades. There should, for example, have been no comparison between Thormanby - - three removes from Castrel and St Albans, six removes (through Pasquinade and Camel) from Selim. I am quite prepared to admit that the last few years have not given us all that we have a right to wish for or expect ; but then, good horses have a it 258 RACEHORSE BREEDING curious way of coming together, in pockets, as a miner would say, and years of brilliancy alternate with years of mediocrity. We have years which give us nothing better than Andover and Knight of St George, Beadsman and Sunbeam, Jeddah and Wildfowler. Then we have Ormonde, Mint- ing, and The Bard, coming on us in a heap, or Blair Athol followed home at Epsom by General Peel, Scottish Chief, Ely, and Cambuscan, any one of them good enough to win most Derbies. So I am not going to despair because Pretty Polly reigns alone, with only such minor stars as Rock Sand and Zinfandel in her train. At the same time, reasonable dissatisfaction is a much safer frame of mind than blind optimism. The practical question is not so much, Are our horses deteriorating ? as, Are they as good as they might be and ought to be ? I once heard a gallant Irishman defend a certain measure of reform by the plea that to stand still was a retrograde move- ment. Like many bulls, the statement concealed a sound truth. It does seem to me to be open to grave doubt whether racehorse breeding at present is as successful and progressive as it ought to be. I have always held that horse breeding cannot be reduced to anything like an exact INSTANCES NOTED 259 science, that we must be content to ascertain tendencies and to build upon probabilities. I venture to think that a careful study of the subject will show that breeders are at present very probably on a mistaken and dangerous track. II. The next point to be considered is, Are our racers too much in-bred ? Now certainly, if any one was asked to name the two most successful sires of the present day, he would in all likelihood name Flying Fox and Gallinule, and if a further quartette had to be chosen, two of them would certainly be Sainfoin and Cyllene. Now of these, Flying Fox is quite exceptionally iii-bred, while Gallinule is got by a grandson out of a great- granddaughter of Stockwell. Cyllene's sire and dam are both great-grandchildren of Stockwell. Sainfoin is by a grandson of Stockwell, his dam is a granddaughter of Stockwell and is by Wenlock, whose dam was by Rataplan, Stockwell's own brother, and out of a daughter of Birdcatcher. Birdcatcher, I need hardly remind readers of Baity, was the paternal grandsire of Stockwell and Rataplan. What is more, every one of these sires has succeeded, not by avoiding those lines to which he was himself in-bred, but by carrying in-breeding 260 RACEHORSE BREEDING to them still further. Flying Fox is a grandson and great-grandson of Galopin, and the dam of Jardy has Galopin blood in her. Pretty Polly's dam is a direct descendant of Stockwell, and her dam goes back to Rataplan. Rock Sand's dam brings in more of the two leading strains in Sainfoin's pedigree Stockwell and Newminster. The same is true of Cicero's dam. Under these circumstances I do not see how it can be contended that in-breeding, in itself, has had a deleterious effect. If it were so the most in-bred horses would be the worst. It would be much nearer the truth to say that they are the best. III. I just said in-breeding in itself. There, I venture to think, is the keynote of the whole business. While mere consanguinity does not do any harm, it does seem to me that there is one form of in-breeding which undoubtedly does lead to deterioration, that is in-breeding continuously to the. same family in tail -male. For, be it observed, the two things, in-breeding and in- breeding in tail-male, are not at all necessarily the same. At this stage I had better, perhaps, make it quite clear what I mean when I . speak of in - breeding, or cross - breeding in tail-male. Most people know that all our racehorses are A NECESSARY DISTINCTION 261 descended from three male lines, those of the Darley Arabian, the Byerley Turk, and the Godolphin Barb, or to bring it nearer to our own times, of Eclipse, Herod, and Matchem ; and it may save my readers trouble and enable me to avoid circumlocution if I say now, that where- ever in this article I use the expression " descended from " or " descendant," I am speaking of descent in direct male succession, and that when I refer to other forms of descent, I shall specially indicate them. Now, as I just said, it is obvious that in- breeding generally is one thing and in-breeding in tail-male quite another. Let me exemplify what I mean. Cadland and Galopin were exception- ally in-bred in the one sense. Cadland was by a grandson of Sorcerer out of a daughter of Sorcerer. Galopin's parents were both grandchildren of Voltaire ; but in each case sire and dam belonged to different families. On the other hand, Vedette and Ladas might fairly be called in the ordinary sense cross-bred horses, since there was no near relationship between sire and dam in either case ; but each of them had four grandparents, all of the same line. I may have been somewhat prolix in my manner of setting this forth, but I want 262 RACEHORSE BREEDING my readers clearly to understand what is really the very central feature of my case, that while the results of the past raise no presumption what- ever against merely consanguineous alliances, they do, as I shall try to show, raise a very strong presumption against continuous in-breeding in the male line. I venture to put forward this view with all the more confidence, because when I started on this enquiry my presumptions were all the other way. I regarded the preponderance of Eclipse blood in the male line as simply an instance of the survival of the fittest. I argued, here we have the Herod and Matchem lines embodied in great sires through the dams. As long as we cross them and their descendants in such a fashion as to preserve fairly the balance of strains, the mere fact that the majority of our horses go back to Eclipse in tail-male can do no harm. There are, I fear, not a great many readers of Baily at the present day who remember much of what appeared in Belfs Life. In the latter days of that excellent journal a gentleman named, I think, Robinson, but I am not sure on that point published some letters on blood - stock breeding. He had got access, if I remember LORD EGREMONT'S SYSTEM 263 rightly, to some private memoranda of Lord Egremont, the breeder of Gohanna, etc. Accord- ing to this gentleman, Lord Egremont worked on an exceedingly simple system. He continuously crossed the descendants of the three great lines, so that the sire and dam should always come from different lines, and that every pedigree should include among the four grandparents one direct representative of each of the three lines. I can perhaps make the matter clearer by a practical illustration. Newminster would have conformed to this theory. His sire was of the Eclipse family, his dam's sire of the Matchem, his dam's dam of the Herod. Hermit, again, having a Herod dam, was correct. Lord Clifden was not, as Herod was wanting. Blair Athol again fulfilled the requirements even better than Newminster or Hermit, since his sire was by an Eclipse horse from a Herod mare, and his dam by a Matchem horse from a Herod mare. It was no hard matter to show that something like 50 per cent, of successful horses were bred in defiance of this formula, and that there were various other conditions of success which were entirely ignored. Nevertheless, I think that the writer was on the track of a truth, and if, insteacj 264 RACEHORSE BREEDING of trying to make a hard and fast formula he had contented himself with saying that tolerably frequent crosses in the male line were necessary, he would have had a good case. I have taken the trouble to look out the pedigree of all Derby winners back as far as 1800, and I find that there are only twelve who can claim four grandparents all belonging to the same line. Of course, Derby winners do not of necessity give a sample of what is best in thorough- bred stock. I will not weary my readers with those dismal things, statistics ; but, taking the best ten or twelve horses of every decade, and trying to pick them fairly, and not cook the facts, I find that a slight majority, about 60 per cent., are the result of a direct cross between two of the three families. This, coupled with the statistics of Derby winners given above, seems to me to raise a strong presumption that continuous in- breeding in tail-male to one line is attended with danger. It is very often the best way of understanding a rule to study it in its exceptions. I find, according to my reckoning, four animals of un- doubtedly first-class excellence, all of whose four grandparents are descended from Eclipse. These EXCEPTIONS CONSIDERED 265 are Alice Hawthorne, Vedette, Isonomy, and Isinglass. Well up in the next rank come Weatherbit, Beadsman, Longbow, Cotherstone, Blue Bonnet, Governess, Blue Gown, Throstle, Sir Hugo, Royal Hampton, Paradox, Ladas, Sainfoin, Flying Fox, Ardpatrick, and Rock Sand. The only instance that I can discover of a really good horse whose four grandparents were all of the Herod line are Elis and his brother Epirus. In the case of Elis's great rival, Bay Middleton, none of the four grandparents go back to Eclipse. I can find no instance where all four grandparents are of the Matchem blood. The first thing I would notice about this list is that of the four names it contains two, Governess and Throstle, who were failures at the stud at least Throstle is so far. Blue Bonnet only deserves inclusion by virtue of a very lucky Leger victory, and the only good she did at the stud was to produce that very smart two-year-old, Mary Copp, by a Herod horse, the Flying Dutchman. Alice Hawthorne was a failure when put to Eclipse horses, though to Windhound of the Herod and to Melbourne of the Matchem line she produced Thormanby and Oulston respectively. Vedette's fame as a sire rests on his union with a Flying 266 RACEHORSE BREEDING Dutchman (Herod) mare. Sir Hugo, for all his good looks, has done very little at the stud. Blue Gown was a total failure. Cotherstone, Royal Hampton, and Ladas only rank in the second class of sires, and the success of Isinglass has hardly been in proportion to his opportunities. Longbow, again, must stand or fall by Toxophilite, from a mare whose four grandparents were all of Herod blood. These practically leave us with Isonomy, Weatherbit, Beadsman, Sainfoin, and Flying Fox as making against my theory. At this stage I would fain pause and make two somewhat general remarks, one of them rather an admission against myself. In the first place I would remind my readers that horse breeding is not like an exact science. If a man professes to get beyond tendencies and proba- bilities he is, in my opinion, only discrediting his own theories. But tendencies and probabilities are quite good enough to be a very valuable guide to the practical man. I will promptly admit that in what one may call an inexact and largely conjectural science one is no doubt in great danger of straining facts to suit one's conclusion, and of explaining away those cases which do not fit with one's theories, ORVILLE AND CATTON 267 Having thus honestly given the reader notice that I may be in this matter a suspicious character, I will set forth a few considerations which seem to me to show that the apparent exceptions admit of some discounting. I would begin by pointing out that certain lines of Eclipse have been so leavened by Herod or Matchem blood that it is not unreasonable to suppose that they do not stand in the same need of a complete outcross as those in which two or three lines of Eclipse are brought together in close proximity. Touchstone and Sir Hercules are instances of the latter, Orville and Catton of the former. I can perhaps best explain what I mean by tracing in some detail the process by which the two last-named strains have been constructed. Let us begin with Orville. A granddaughter of Tartar (a horse of the Byerley Turk blood and sire of Herod) is put to Eclipse, and breeds King Fergus. He is put to a Herod mare and gets Beningboro', and he, from a mare by Highflyer (son of Herod) gets Orville. So far there is no further introduction of Eclipse blood. Orville, from a direct descendant of Herod, begets Emilius. Emilius is put to a mare whose sire and dam are both of the Herod line, and 268 RACEHORSE BREEDING gets Plenipotentiary. Take, again, the Catton line. Mercury is by Eclipse from a Tartar mare, Gohanna by Mercury from a Herod mare, Golumpus by Gohanna out of a mare by Wood- pecker, son of Herod. So far, too, there is no fresh infusion of Eclipse. Catton is by Golumpus from a mare of the Herod line. Then, again, we must remember that the various lines of Herod differ greatly in the extent to which they have been modified by Eclipse crosses. Bay Middleton, for example, as I have already pointed out, has four grandparents, not one directly descended from Eclipse. Sultan, Langar, Tadmor, and Macaroni may be taken as specimens of what one may call double Herod horses. On the other hand, in Thormanby's case the main line of Herod is kept in check by an immense preponderance of Eclipse blood elsewhere. The same may be said of Parmesan. We should, therefore, expect that those strains in which Herod not only furnishes the direct line, but also preponderates in the contributory lines, would be the most effective as correctives to an excess of Eclipse blood. Let us apply these considerations to cases which I singled out as exceptional. Take Alice Hawthorne her sire is a grandson of Orville, LADAS; ISONOMY 269 with a second cross of Beningboro', while her dam is descended not actually from Orville, but from both of his parents. Again, in the case of Ladas we have on the dam's side four crosses of Emilius, one in each quarter of the pedigree, and two "of them coming through Plenipotentiary, with yet another line of Plenipotentiary in Ladas's sire Hampton. Let us take the case of Isonomy. In his paternal grandsire Oxford we have Plenipotentiary and Bay Middleton, and Isonomy gets more Sultan on the dam's side. Isonomy also showed a marked partiality for Hermit mares. Now Hermit's dam was by Tadmor (just referred to), out of a grand- daughter of Bay Middleton. Hermit blood is not present in Isinglass, but his dam inherits three strains of Sultan, one through Bay Middleton. Still, I am quite ready to admit that Isinglass does show the extent to which in-breeding to one family in tail-male may be carried, and one may, I think, say the same of Rock Sand. Gallinule may be quoted as another instance of a son of Isonomy whose dam derived three out of her four principal lines from Eclipse. But it should not be forgotten that Gallinule's two best offspring, Pretty Polly and Wildfowler, were 270 RACEHORSE BREEDING from mares whose dams were of the Herod line, while that brilliant filly, Gamechick, was from a mare by Barcaldine (a Matchem horse), granddam by Knight of Kars of the same line. Another son of Isonomy, Fortunio, deserves notice as the sire of one of the speediest horses of modern times. His dam was by Hermit out of a Buccaneer mare. Buccaneer's sire, Wild Dayrell, was by Ion out of a Bay Middleton mare, and thus the very lines through which Hermit got his Herod blood were duplicated. Now let us turn to the Galopin family, and apply the same considerations to it. I spoke above of Orville and Catton. Mulatto was by Catton, dam by Orville, out of a mare with no Eclipse blood in her. Voltigeur is by Voltaire (of the Eclipse line), dam by Mulatto ; but both his granddams are of the Herod line. Vedette's dam is by Birdcatcher, her dam by Inheritor, granddam by Comus. Birdcatcher and Inheritor were of the Eclipse line but from Herod mares, while Comus was by a Matchem horse out of a Herod mare. Vedette's son Galopin was not only, as I have already pointed out, from a Herod mare, but Galopin was also strongly in-bred to Phantom, of the Herod line, and to Catton. Flying Fox is, TOUCHSTONE 271 of course, almost incestuously in-bred to Galopin, and this must modify any conclusions based on his in-breeding to Eclipse in the male line. It may be, I think, worth while to look at the matter from another point of view, and to see by what process the Touchstone line has been carried on. Touchstone himself went back to Eclipse through three out of his four grand- parents. His best sons on the Turf were Surplice and Cotherstone. Their dams were both in the Eclipse family ; Cotherstone's dam doubly so. But it is not through these that the blood has been successfully handed on. In the case of Cotherstone this may be explained in part by the fact that he came of what Mr Lowe regards I think with perfectly good grounds as a " bad sire family." I believe, too, that he was mismanaged at the stud, and he certainly did get one very good horse in Stilton. But Surplice, with good chances, never got a horse within a stone of his own form. The three lines through which the Touchstone blood has been carried on are Newminster, Orlando, and Lord of the Isles. Let us take the four grandparents of each, and what do we find ? In Orlando's case all four lines coming from Herod ; 272 RACEHORSE BREEDING in Newminster's two from Herod, one from Matchem and one from Eclipse ; in Lord of the Isles two from Herod, two from Eclipse. How the Newminster line was carried on through Hermit I have already described. But it is also worth notice that Newminster's other son, who has founded a line probably more durable than that of Hermit, Lord Clifden, was out of a Melbourne (Matchem) mare, while her dam was an own sister to Voltigeur, of whose debt to Herod I have already spoken. I am content to leave it to my readers to say whether the facts which I have set forth in, I fear, rather a prolix fashion do not justify the view that excellence cannot be maintained by continuous in-breeding in the male line. It may, of course, be said that I have, like the man in Hogarth's picture, cut through the bough on which I am sitting by the admission that when a line of Eclipse has been strongly crossed with Herod or Matchem the evil of in-breeding is lessened. Lessened, I admit, but only lessened. The statistics I have quoted seem to me clearly to show that it is scarcely possible to dispense with an outcross in the second, or at furthest in the third, generation. And unless the three strains of Eclipse, Herod, WHAT IS EXPEDIENT 273 and Matchem are all kept alive in tail-male, how is that cross to be got? IV. This brings me to the practical question of the remedy. On this point the writer in the Field to whom I have referred has expressed decided opinions. He admits the expediency of an outcross from Eclipse, but he takes the view that the Herod line is practically worn out, that it had its full chance in the palmy days of the Sweetmeat blood, when that strain was carrying all before it, and that we must therefore rely for our outcross on the Matchem line. Up to a certain point I quite agree with him. It would be folly to overlook the great possibilities of the Melbourne blood as it stands. Its present posi- tion may not be a brilliant one, but it is a line with marvellous power of unexpected recovery. Between 1820 and 1830 the Sorcerer branch of the Matchem family was represented at the stud by two Derby winners, Smolensko and Tiresias, and three Leger winners, Soothsayer, Reveller, and Jerry. By 1850 Jericho and Nutwith were their only representatives at the stud. The task of perpetuating the line had devolved on a much less distinguished horse, Humphry Clinker, whose son Melbourne, with two Derbies, two Legers, and s 274 RACEHORSE BREEDING three Oaks to his credit (to say nothing of the Derby and Leger, which Sir Tatton Sykes and Blink Bonny respectively did not win), stands out as one of the greatest sires of his century. Then again, when General Peel and Pall Mall had failed, it was left for an obscure son of West Australia, Solon, to resuscitate the blood through Arbitrator and Barcaldine. It is rather the fashion to dis- parage Barcaldine as a sire. Surely Morion, Sir Visto, Mimi, The Rush, Marco, and Wolfs Crag is a pretty good quiverful for one sire to claim, with Winkfield's Pride, St Maclou, Elopement, Gamechick, and First Principal in the next genera- tion. It must not be forgotten that Plebeian, also of the West Australian line, was the grandsire of St Frusquin and Matchbox. Breeders who put their trust in mares by any of the Barcaldine horses whom I have mentioned will probably not be disappointed. I also quite agree with the view expressed in the Field, that it is idle to talk of resuscitating the Sweetmeat blood. There is, however, one Herod line still with us which seems to me well worth preservation. In Loved One and Dinna Forget we have two representatives of a line which cannot be regarded as decadent. From what Buccaneer BUCCANEER 275 did during his too short stay in England we may well believe that he would in a few more seasons have stood out at the very top of the tree. I have seen a good many Ascot Cups, but I have seen few more dashing victories than that of Buccaneer's daughter, Brigantine, with a Derby winner, an Oaks and Leger winner, and those two good stayers, Thorwaldsen and Trocadero, behind her. And did not Buccaneer revenge himself on Mr Cookson for selling him by send- ing us back Kisber to beat Forerunner? Seesaw was not a Kisber, but he was good enough to win the Cambridgeshire under 8st. 2lb. Loved One was a Wokingham winner, and Dinna Forget was one of those honest, handy horses to whom no course comes amiss. I do not think that breeders who try to keep the Buccaneer line alive through these sires need be afraid that they are sacrificing themselves to an illusory theory. But the possibilities of a Herod revival do not end there. The greatest gain that our Australian cousins ever scored at our expense was their im- portation of Fisherman. Quite apart from the value of the blood as a cross, Fisherman was the very horse to give the qualities in which our modern blood-stock is lacking hardness, sound 276 RACEHORSE BREEDING limbs, and wear-and-tear constitution. Where- fore I sincerely hope that the breeder who has just brought over a good Fisherman horse, The Victory, may find imitators. There are other branches of Herod well worth considering. From France we may get Glaucus and Flying Dutchman blood, from Hungary more Buccaneer blood, from America descendants of Glencoe. Of course, if such importations are to do good, they must be picked animals. We do not want mere tag-rag and bobtail because it happens to claim descent from Herod. There is just one other point which I would notice in conclusion. Pending a fuller supply of fresh blood, breeders can make the most of such partial crosses as we have got. If my conclusions are correct, mares in whom no outcross from Eclipse is to be found for two or even three generations had best be mated with horses such as St Frusquin, St Maclou, Elopement, St Serf, and the like, whose dams strain back to lines other than Eclipse, MODERN RIFLE-SHOOTING 1 To those who follow with any interest the records of the chief shooting competitions at Bisley the names of the two writers who head our list will at least carry with them a voucher for practical familiarity with their subject. The late Mr Foulkes from his schooldays onward played a con- spicuous part in the chief matches at Wimbledon and Bisley; Mr Fremantle has done so too; and though " A Marksman " has chosen to remain anonymous, his work bears on it plainly the stamp of practical experience. The aim of Mr Fremantle's book is to sketch 1 " Notes on the Rifle/' by the Hon. T. F. Fremantle. London, 1896. " The Theory and Practice of Target Shooting," by A. G. Foulkes, M.A. London, 1895. " Modern Rifle Shooting," by " A Marksman." (Reprinted from the Volunteer Service Gazette.) London, 1895. " Infantry Fire Tactics," by Captain C. B. Mayne, Royal Engineers. Second Edition. Chatham, 1895. "Text Book for Military Small Arms and Ammunition." London, 1804. " Report and Proceedings of the Rifle Congress." London, 1864. 277 278 MODERN RIFLE-SHOOTING the development of rifles and the projectiles belonging to them, and to set forth, in a clear and unpretending fashion, the mechanical principles which have controlled that development. The writer, too, has not only a sound knowledge of the practical sides of his subject, but his book shows, so far as the limits of it allow, a careful and exhaustive study of the literature of the rifle. Here and there the style bears traces of what one may call amateurishness. But these are few, and the book throughout displays a noteworthy power of dealing with a technical subject in such a way as to make it intelligible and interesting to the ordinary layman. The special language of mechanical science is used sparingly and judiciously. Mr Foulkes's book and that by "A Marks- man " are in a sense more practical. They contain, that is to say, a good deal more in the way of advice and suggestions as to the use of the rifle. At the same time each writer clearly understands that a man cannot be a successful rifle-shot if he trusts merely to natural skill and to good luck, and is ignorant of the mechanical conditions which limit his efforts. Accordingly, each of these writers has given a sketch, less elaborate than VOLUNTEERS 279 Mr Fremantle's, but clear and business-like so far as it goes, of the laws which must govern the construction of rifles and ammunition. Indeed, this part of " A Marksman's " work strikes us as a singularly happy attempt at stating scientific truths in a clear, practical fashion. These three books are, we think, a very satis- factory illustration of what the Volunteer move- ment and the labours of the National Rifle Association have done for the country. It is not the least among their services to have called into existence, outside the Army, a number of persons keenly interested in gunnery and capable of bringing to bear on the problems of the subject both trained intelligence and practical experience. We greatly doubt whether, forty years ago, civilians would have been found with the practical knowledge needful to produce books. We are very certain that, forty years ago, such books would have found but few civilian readers. Captain Mayne's book on " Infantry Fire Tactics" is more distinctly didactic in purpose than either of the three already mentioned, and, as might be expected in the work of a professional soldier, it deals with the subject more exclusively from a military point of view. It may be looked 280 MODERN RIFLE-SHOOTING on as in a measure supplementing them. Under- lying the whole of Captain Mayne's work is the thoroughly-sound contention that effectiveness in individual shooting, whether due to personal skill or to improvements in firearms, is valuable only so far as it enables the marksman to play his part more efficiently as part of an organised force. It is clear, therefore, that, in all attempts to develop individual skill or to improve the rifle, no condition should be introduced which is inconsistent with the end to be finally sought, that of effective organised fire. And no one can have carefully followed the history of rifle-shooting since the foundation of the National Rifle Associa- tion and not see that there have been times when the search for mere accuracy at the target has led to forgetfulness of military conditions, and that the considerations set forth by Captain Mayne must be constantly kept in view alike by rifle-shots and rifle-makers. The book which appears last but one on our list, "The Official Text Book of Military Small Arms," carries the detailed history of the subject back to a point earlier than that chosen by Mr Fremantle. It gives contemporary sketches of the " gonnes " used by foot and horse soldiers THE RIFLE 281 respectively in the middle of the fifteenth century. One is tempted to think that they must have demanded even greater courage from the shooter than from the recipient. But it is with rifles, not firearms generally, that we are concerned. As a military weapon the rifle first came to the front in America, where the value of an arm of pre- cision soon made itself felt in woodland warfare. Braddock's defeat was due, not only to his own contemptuous ignorance of the peculiar condi- tions under which he had to fight, but also to the effective marksmanship of French irregular troops and their Indian allies, armed with hunt- ing rifles. At Saratoga, the deliberate aim of an American rifleman deprived Burgoyne of his best subordinate, Fraser. The years which separ- ated Waterloo from the Crimea were not years of military inventiveness ; nevertheless, the result of the battle of the Alma gave the old smooth bore its death-blow. Readers of Punch will re- member the horrified face of the elderly spinster in Leech's picture as she listens to the letter in which the writer announces that he has abandoned his old Brown Bess in favour of his "beautiful MinieV' But as a pastime for civilians rifle- shooting then was as much the exclusive hobby 282 MODERN RIFLE-SHOOTING of a few enthusiasts as golf was south of the Tweed twenty years ago, and even among them long-range shooting was unknown. With the Volunteer movement, and as a consequence the formation of the National Rifle Association, came a revolution. The Volunteers had not been in existence two years when it became clear that target-shooting was definitely taking its place among the manly exercises of Englishmen ; and that whatever might be the deficiencies of the Volunteer force in drill, in organisation, or in commissariat, it had in it the making of an effective body of marksmen. And it soon became clear, too, that the Volunteer movement, acting mainly through the National Rifle Association, which it had called into exist- ence, was destined to do another work, and, esti- mating its services at their very lowest, to give the military authorities of the country invaluable help in the task of supplying the Army with a weapon of precision. As we have already implied, rifle-shooting previous to the Volunteer movement had been the pursuit exclusively of the deerstalker and of a few enthusiasts whose prowess was wholly unknown to the general public. One such HORATIO ROSS 283 formed a noteworthy link between the past and future of rifle-shooting. Thirty years before the Volunteer movement few names had been more conspicuous in the world of sport than that of Captain Horatio Ross. To the general public he was best known as probably the finest living game-shot and the owner of the famous steeple- chasers Clinker and Smasher. But he had fully as good titles to fame as a deerstalker and a target-shot. His son Edward, then a lad just about to matriculate at Cambridge, showed how thoroughly he had inherited and learned his father's craft by carrying off the Queen's Prize at the first Wimbledon Meeting in 1860. Captain Ross himself, with nerve and eyesight unimpaired by nearly sixty years, himself at once appeared on the scene as a conspicuously successful com- petitor in the extra - military competitions at Wimbledon, and his example was followed, not only by Edward, but by two more sons. In fact, it may be doubted whether a long-range competi- tion between England and Scotland could have taken place at all in those early days if the Ross family had not furnished the nucleus of a Scottish Eight. If the National Rifle Association had confined 284 MODERN RIFLE-SHOOTING itself to its obvious and primary duty, that of fostering Volunteer shooting, it would no doubt have done something to make our auxiliary forces more useful, but it would not have contributed anything towards solving the important problem, what should be the arm of the future? For the Enfield rifle was inaccurate at any distance beyond five hundred yards, and hopelessly un- trustworthy at such a range as eight hundred, and no practice with it could have done any- thing to develop an arm of precision. But happily the rulers of the National Rifle Associa- tion took a wide view of their duties, and long- range competitions, with rifles deviating from strict military conditions, at once formed part of their programme. The Queen's Prize, too, was not merely a competition with the service arm at the ordinary military distances. The second and more important stage of it was shot with small-bore rifles, conforming in other respects to military regulations, chosen by a competition among gunmakers. Furthermore, the cause of long-range shooting was greatly advanced by the establishment of a competition to which we have already referred. In 1862 that staunch friend to rifle- shooting, the present Earl of Wemyss, THE ELCHO SHIELD 285 gave the Elcho Shield to be competed for at long ranges between England and Scotland, and in 1865 Ireland was admitted as a third com- petitor. The position of the last-named country in the match is not without interest as illustrating the value of strict co-operation in rifle-shooting. The absence of Volunteers in Ireland, and con- sequently the small number of those who turned their attention to rifle-shooting, seemed at first likely to be fatal hindrances to success. This, however, was counterbalanced, firstly, by the fact that there was no short-range military shooting to distract the attention of competitors, but probably even more by the fact that the competitors, being drawn almost exclusively from two small clubs, those of Dublin and Belfast, had a knowledge of one another's shooting, and felt an esprit de corps hardly to be found among competitors chosen from a wider area. How this acted is best proved by the fact that between the years 1873 and 1890 Ireland was no less than eleven times successful. Another important step towards the further- ance of long-range shooting was taken in 1864. The Cambridge Volunteer Corps had then the good fortune not only to number among its 286 MODERN RIFLE-SHOOTING members Edward Ross, but also to have for its commanding officer one of the finest long-range shots ever known, Colonel Baker. Furthermore, it possessed perhaps the best range in England, extending to 1100 yards. This happy conjunc- tion of circumstances led to the formation of a long-range club, not limited to members of the University, and holding an annual competition. It was at one of these competitions that Captain Ross, of whom we have already spoken, beat, when in his sixty-sixth year, a field which in- cluded nearly all the first-class long-range shots in the kingdom. And it is also worth noticing that the Metford rifle, which with its shallow grooves and increasing spiral marked an entirely new development in the practice of rifle-making, made its first public appearance when in 1865, in the hands of Colonel (afterwards Sir Henry) Halford, it won the Cambridge Cup. The records of the first Elcho Shield match furnish as good a gauge as one could find of the general progress of long-range shooting. With- out going into statistical details, which to the generality of readers would convey no definite meaning, we may shortly state the case thus. In the first match, that shot in 1862, no com- LONG-RANGE SHOOTING 287 petitor hit the bull's-eye more than thirteen times, and one competitor only hit it five times. No competitor completed his score without missing the target seven times, and one competitor missed it no less than thirty-three times. The condi- tions of wind and light under which the match is shot vary so much that statistics can hardly be said to give even an approximate guide to what are normal results. But, speaking generally, one may say that under ordinary conditions any competitor would be endangering the success of his side who did not place two shots out of every three in the bull's - eye, and that the prospects of a team would look very black if, not a single competitor, but the whole eight competitors together, missed the target as often as seven times. It need hardly be said that only a portion of this change, probably not the chief portion, is due to advance in individual skill. Rifling, projectiles, sights, have all been revolutionised. The marking in those days only indicated the value of the shot, and left the exact position to be ascertained somewhat conjecturally by a man at the firing-point with a telescope. The art of " coaching " that is to say, of utilising to the 288 MODERN RIFLE-SHOOTING utmost all that can be learned both by direct observation and also inferred from the result of each shot as to changes of wind, light, and so on instead of leaving each competitor to his own guidance, has been brought to perfection. The universal adoption, too, of the back position, a change due mainly to the brilliant results achieved by American marksmen who made use of it, has had an even more important result on matches, such as the Elcho Shield, than on individual scores : for the superiority of the back position lies not so much in the fact that each individual shot is fired with greater steadiness, as that there is less danger, and indeed with competent and experienced shots no danger, of an erratic shot being unknowingly fired. Thus each successive shot may be taken as a guide to the strength of the wind, with a degree of certainty which never could be attained when competitors shot in the prone position. While on the subject of the back position, we may notice a somewhat interesting discovery which Mr Fremantle has unearthed. He quotes (page 19) from " A History of the War of Independence," written in 1785, the following description of Colonel Ferguson, a leader of THE BACK POSITION 289 irregular troops on the Loyalist side, who fell at the battle of King's Mountain, fought in North Carolina in 1780. " He was perhaps the best marksman living, and probably brought the art of rifle-shooting to its highest point of perfection. He even invented a gun of that kind upon a new construction, which was said to have far exceeded in facility and execution anything of the sort before known ; and he is said to have greatly outdone even the American Indians in the adroitness and quickness of firing and loading and in the certainty of hitting the mark, lying upon the back or belly and every other possible position of the body." Mr Fremantle also reproduces from a book written early in the present century by Ezekiel Baker, and called " Remarks on Rifle Guns," two singular and interesting prints. One repre- sents a Volunteer in uniform on his back, aiming, with the sling of his rifle twisted, as it is occasion- ally in the present day, round one foot. The other print represents a startling form of the prone position. The marksman has divested himself of his shako, which, placed on the ground before him, serves as a rest for his rifle barrel 1 A reviewer of Mr Fremantle's book has ingeniously T 290 MODERN RIFLE-SHOOTING and plausibly suggested that the height of the shako was designed to fit it for this purpose. In the year 1864 a Congress of Rifle-shots was held in London. It appears to have been open to all who cared to pay half a guinea for a ticket, and it had no executive powers. Never- theless, their debates seem to have been carried on in a conspicuously sensible and practical spirit. Their deliberations occupied three days, and it is noteworthy that the opening day's discussion was held under the chairmanship of Mr William Forster, not yet a Cabinet Minister. The Report is of very great interest, as showing what the leading rifle-shots of that day thought on a good many questions which have since been warmly debated, and how far their anticipations and their fears have been fulfilled. It is also worth noticing that, on more than one important point, the National Rifle Association has, in some cases rather tardily, and as the result of warning failures, adopted the methods recommended by this Congress. There was, for example, a con- sensus of opinion that the minimum number of shots should be seven instead of five, and the Association, after some years, definitely adopted that change. The Conference furthermore recom- RIGHT AND WRONG CONDITIONS 291 mended the encouragement of second-rate shots, not as was then often suggested by handicapping, but rather by diminishing the individual value and enlarging the number of prizes, and the policy of the Association has steadily tended in that direction. The Conference, too, expressed a decided opinion as to the expediency of making each competition, or at least each distinct stage of every competition, take place on the same day, so that all competitors might, as far as possible, shoot under the same conditions of wind and atmosphere. From this policy the National Rifle Association gradually drifted away. Long-range competitions were established, increasing year by year in importance, which ran on for several days, and for which a competitor might enter any number of times with the one limitation that he could not shoot twice on the same morning or afternoon. As a consequence a few first - rate scores made in easy weather paralysed subsequent shooting, and during a spell of wind or wet the targets might have been seen standing idle for hours, if not for days together. Moreover, the system bore hardly on busy shots who were occupied in various competitions, and who con- sequently could not pick their time. Such was 292 MODERN RIFLE-SHOOTING the disaffection created by the system that in 1892 the Association thrust back these "bi- diurnal " competitions into a secondary place, and arranged all the principal matches throughout the meeting on what has been called the " shoulder to shoulder" system, whereby all the competitors for any one prize are shooting at the same range simultaneously. In doing this they were simply reverting to a principle which had been clearly and emphatically laid down by the Congress of 1864. It is also interesting to find that the battle had already begun on behalf of strictly military shooting as against so-called "fancy" shooting: we shall endeavour to show that we use the latter term in no invidious sense. The case for the former was put tersely and effectively by Lord Ducie, himself no mean performer with the match rifle fitted with aperture-sights. That weapon, he said, would be useful "if the British soldier were always certain of meeting with a black enemy, if the ground upon which that enemy stood were always covered with snow ; and further, if the enemy would be so complaisant as to dispense with his clothes." And it has been added to this criticism, that TWO POLICIES 293 since long-range shooting does not test the power of judging distance, it would be needful for the nude enemy to mark time while sighting- shots were being fired. Nevertheless, we think that Lord Ducie, in a somewhat Balaam - like fashion, removed half the sting of his curse and changed it into some- thing like a blessing, by another passage in his letter : " I am convinced that it is now no longer the steadiest hand or clearest eye that will win. " Lying down gives practically a perfect rest ; the aperture-sight clears off all haze (in tolerable weather), and makes my short sight equal to your long sight. " The real skill now lies in watching the wind and the light, in keeping the rifle in good condition, in careful manipulation in loading, and in having the best ammunition." Is not that another way of saying that aperture- sights get rid of the personal element of error, and furnish the best means of testing systems of rifling and varieties of ammunition, and so of working by experiment towards an ideal military weapon ? That side of the case was well put in a paper 294 MODERN RIFLE SHOOTING read at the Congress by Mr John Rigby, lately the Superintendent of the Government Small Arms Factory at Enfield. The paper was further noteworthy as setting forth very clearly what the whole aim of the National Rifle Association ought to be, and what, we think, allowing for certain deviations and imperfections, it in the main has been. "There is one further matter, which, as it comes strictly under the head of general principles, I feel I cannot pass over altogether, and that is, the rule by which we ought to be guided in laying down the conditions of any match. It appears to me manifest that in every case we should first ascertain the object which the match is intended to promote. If it be to encourage Volunteers to attain proficiency with their regi- mental rifles, then manifestly that rifle only should be used, and all the rules should be modelled on the military standard, with the addition that as shooting at a target at measured distances is only the first step towards the efficient use of the rifle in war, far more attention should be given than has hitherto been done to matches so arranged that the proficiency of the competitors in judging distances, calculating the elevation for intermediate ranges, and the allowance for wind, delivering their fire with rapidity and accuracy MILITARY AND MATCH RIFLES 295 as in file-firing, etc., etc., may be tested and rewarded. I cannot but think that such contests are of more practical value in a military point of view than the unvarying succession of matches at 200, 500, and 600 yards. "Among the other objects which are well worthy that special matches should be arranged for their promotion, are the encouragement of rifle-shooting as a healthy, manly, and scientific pastime. And again the stimulation of improve- ments in the manufacture of rifles. If, therefore, it be proposed in any contest to unite these two last-named purposes, the greatest latitude should be given in the matter of aperture or other sights, of special and costly projectiles, etc., etc. ; and of such a nature are the small-bore contests at Wimbledon. "There is, however, another and a most im- portant object which may and ought to be promoted by means of matches, with conditions suitable to that end. And this is the improvement of our military arm. There should be the matches with rifles suitable for service alluded to in the pro- gramme, and the existence of such matches would stimulate powerfully the improvement of military rifles. Fine screw adjustments, wind-gauges, sight- covers, aperture-sights, ammunition such as would not be suitable for service, should be prohibited, and the conditions should be so arranged as to 296 MODERN RIFLE-SHOOTING supply a test of the efficiency of the weapon in a military point of view, such as easy and quick loading, durability, non - liability to foul, etc. These matches would, I think, be highly popular. They would open a fair field to many a skilful shot, who, not finding sufficient reward for his skill in the use of the Enfield rifle only, is yet unwilling to enter the lists with the small-bore competitors under the present rules." (Report of Congress, pp. 177, 178.) It is hardly too much to say that the whole experience of the Association, during the time which has intervened, illustrates the soundness of the views set forth in the above extract. The competitions for rifles of an intermediate character military arms, that is to say, but not conform- ing to all the existing Government regulations were gradually and tentatively introduced till they became one of the most conspicuous and interest- ing features of the annual meetings. If they are doomed to extinction, it is only because they have done their work thoroughly, and have in con- junction with other influences called into being a Government rifle which treads close on the heels of the match rifle. Mr Rigby also furnishes a full justification for AN EPISODE 297 the match rifle, with its elaborate sights and appliances, unfit for actual service in the field. But it must always be borne in mind that the long-range rifle, though it need not be itself a military arm, must be such as to carry us onward in the process of discovering and testing the best military arms. The non-military conditions super- imposed must be designed merely to get rid of chance and to test more exactly the military fitness of the weapon ; they must be such that their removal will merely diminish the accuracy and not destroy the efficiency of the weapon. There was a time when the Association, and indeed the friends of long-range shooting, gener- ally forgot that wholesome truth, and when the cause was very much endangered thereby. The episode forms a somewhat interesting and in- structive chapter in the history of rifle-shooting, and we will venture, therefore, to tell it in detail. In 1874 a team composed of six Irishmen crossed the Atlantic to shoot a match at New York against a team chosen from the whole of the United States. The match was to be identical in distance conditions with that for the Elcho Shield. Little was then known in this country as to the powers of the Americans at long ranges ; 298 MODERN RIFLE-SHOOTING indeed, it was generally thought that accurate marksmanship at short distances, standing, was their strong point. The Irish were all armed with Rigby muzzle-loading rifles ; their opponents with American breech-loaders. The Irish team, though a strong one, was not absolutely the best that could be found ; they were shooting under new and somewhat trying atmospheric conditions, and they probably held their opponents rather cheap. Consequently the defeat of the Irish by the very narrow margin of three points could hardly be looked on as conclusive either as to the merits of the competitors or their respective arms. By far the most significant feature of the match was that the Americans owed their success to the shooting of one man, Mr Fulton, who made eight points more than any of the Irish, and whose score had up to that time never been approached in any of the Elcho Shield matches. He shot, as we have said, with a breech-loader and also on his back. The lesson given by Mr Fulton's performance was soon most emphatically enforced. In 1875 and in 1880 American teams visited Ireland, and each time defeated a carefully chosen and repre- sentative Irish team on its own ground ; and this, AMERICAN SUCCESSES 299 it should be observed, was at a time when Ireland was more than holding its own in the International competitions at Wimbledon. Nor was that all. In 1876, the year of the Philadelphia Exhibition, a competition was held at New York, in which teams from Scotland, Ireland, and Canada all competed and were beaten by the Americans, while the result was subsequently confirmed by a match in the same year between the Irish and an American team. In the following year a team from Great Britain and Ireland, carefully chosen and well organised, tried its luck against the Americans and fared no better. This series of reverses taught British riflemen two lessons. The Americans all shot in the back position, which previous to 1874 had only been adopted by a few competitors here and there. The success of the Americans effectively gave the death-blow to the old prone position except with military rifles. English riflemen, too, had been in a complacent and somewhat unintelligent fashion plodding on with the muzzle-loader as a target weapon, regardless of the fact that it was already regarded as obsolete for military purposes. The conviction that no cartridge could be invented which would clean the barrel as 300 MODERN RIFLE-SHOOTING effectively as the wad used with the muzzle-loader, was so firmly rooted that no serious attempt was being made to develop a breech-loader for long- range practice. The success of the Americans annihilated the muzzle-loader as it had annihilated the prone position. But, unhappily, the breech- loader as used by the Americans was every whit as much a toy, void of all practical use except for target purposes, as the muzzle-loader : for after every shot an elaborate process of cleaning was gone through before another shot was fired. In fact, the reasons which led the Americans to adopt the breech - loader had absolutely no con- nection with the reasons which made it valuable for military purposes. It was preferred as a target weapon simply because it could be cleaned between the shots, and thus the barrel could be brought every time to a state of uniformity un- attainable with the muzzle - loader. The writer remembers hearing one of the most distinguished long-range shots in America say that if he wanted to make a big score he must use his breech-loader ; if he wanted an enjoyable day on the range, he took his muzzle-loader. An incident which occurred in 1874 ought to have warned all parties of the thoroughly unsatisfactory nature of the A LESSON 301 American system of long-range shooting. After the match at New York above mentioned, a second match was arranged, rather to test the merits of the rifles than of the men. The Americans were to shoot their breech-loaders, this time without cleaning. The distance was a thousand yards, and each competitor was to fire twenty-five shots. The result was an utter and hopeless breakdown on the part of the breech- loader. The best American score was below the worst Irish. One American competitor only hit the target four times, and had to retire from the contest with an incapacitated gun, leaving ten shots still unfired. It seems astonishing that British riflemen should, after such a lesson, in their desire for mere target accuracy, have adopted not only the breech-loader, but the American method of using it. Nevertheless, the legitimate aim of long-range shooting, the development of a military rifle, was set aside in favour of high scoring. By 1881 the muzzle-loader had virtually disappeared from all high - class competitions at Wimbledon, and an assortment of rods and long - handled brushes, a handful of patches and a can of water, were to be seen among the appliances of every long-range 302 MODERN RIFLE-SHOOTING shot. A pursuit carried on under these conditions was not likely to enlist recruits, and we can hardly doubt that, if this state of things had been suffered to continue, long-range shooting would have died out here, as it has, we believe, on the other side of the Atlantic. The discom- fort and cumbrousness of the system forced men, however, to look for a remedy. It was found that by careful treatment of the cartridge satis- factory results could be got, and in 1883 clean- ing between shots was definitely abolished at Wimbledon. At the same time, one can hardly say that the whole abuse was got rid of, since the cumbrous and unmilitary practice of blow- ing through the barrel to moisten the fouling was still permitted and very generally practised. Nevertheless, since the abolition of cleaning one may fairly say that the long-range competitions of the National Rifle Association, and those throughout the country which are indirectly dependent upon it, have been doing their legiti- mate work in testing systems of rifling and ammunition for military purposes. Nor is there any doubt that much experimental work of the greatest value has been done by amateurs whose training as riflemen has been mainly gained at THE LEE-METFORD 303 Wimbledon and Bisley, and whose interest in the subject has been created and kept alive by the meetings of the Association. By the introduction of the Lee-Metford as the accepted Government arm the whole situation has been greatly changed. There is no longer any wide gulf between the match rifle and the regulation arm. Competitions for long-range rifles other than those of Government pattern, yet con- forming to military requirements, seem to have lost their meaning. In the days of the Martini such competitions were the only means whereby the skill of the marksman using a purely military weapon could be tested at long distances ; now the Lee - Metford is amply sufficient for that purpose. If the object be to test systems of breech action, or a calibre or cartridge other than those of the Lee-Metford, that can be perfectly well done by competitions where aperture-sights are allowed. That has not been the case hitherto. So long as a maximum bore of *450 was allowed in the match rifle, as has been hitherto the case, any of the foreign military rifles, such as the Mannlicher or Mauser, carrying a light bullet, were in strong or variable winds so severely handicapped as to be practically out of the 304 MODERN RIFLE-SHOOTING competition. The National Rifle Association has, however, now definitely accepted the reduction of bore as final ; and though the precise condi- tions which will be required in 1897 are not yet declared, it may safely be assumed that no bore exceeding '315 will be permitted. In accepting this bore, both the military authorities and those of the National Rifle Association are adopting the principle clearly and forcibly set forth by Captain Mayne, that mere target accuracy is not the only thing to be sought in a military rifle, and that, even apart from such considerations as the weight of the arm and the ammunition, the greater susceptibility of the bullet to lateral winds is not too heavy a price to pay for a flatter trajectory : for, as any one will see on a moment's reflection, the flatter trajectory lessens the effect of an error in judging the distance of the object fired at ; and it is not less obvious that as in war the object fired at is as a rule extended laterally, lateral accuracy as compared with vertical is a comparatively unimportant matter. If any one should be tempted to think that because the Lee-Metford reaches the maximum of accuracy needed for military purposes, there- fore long-range shooting with aperture-sights has THE BULLET 305 served its practical purpose and become a mere ornamental accomplishment, it is not, we think, difficult to disabuse him. The question of rifle may in its main outlines be settled ; that of cartridge is assuredly very far from a final solu- tion. At present the Lee - Metford cartridge labours under two defects the deficient stopping power of the bullet and the corrosive effect of the explosive, cordite. Mr Fremantle has a good deal to say on the first of these points. He quotes several instances where the Lee- Metford bullet has passed right through a man and done but little injury. In the Chitral campaign a native is said to have received six wounds, and two or three days later to have walked nine miles into hospital complaining of a stiff neck ! And, as Mr Fremantle points out, this is of peculiar importance to the British soldier, much of whose fighting has to be done against savages, since it is " a well-recognised fact that it requires a much more severe wound to stop the rush of a savage enemy than that of a well-cared-for European soldier." Now, target experiments such, at least, as those to which the Bisley competitions lend them- selves cannot measure the stopping power of the bullet ; indeed, this is just one of the points where u 306 MODERN RIFLE-SHOOTING the criterion of accuracy as tested at the target is inadequate ; but target practice can show whether changes made for the sake of increased stopping power have or have not impaired accuracy. Again, the deleterious influence of cordite in the barrel may have been exaggerated, and it may be possible by prompt and careful cleaning to neutralise it ; but the soldier being what he is, it is very certain that the influence will be felt, and whoever can invent an explosive free from the drawbacks of cordite will be doing an incalculable service, for the use of an explo- sive which destroys the barrel is manifestly not merely extravagant in time of peace, but actually dangerous in war. And here again, in the long- range competitions at Bisley, Government can have this work of experiment done to their hand without cost. We have dwelt so fully on one side of the question of rifle-shooting that we can only con- sider other aspects of it somewhat cursorily. Mr Rigby, in the paper from which we have already quoted, speaks of " encouraging Volunteers to attain proficiency with their regimental rifles," as one of the objects to be sought. A study of the programme of one of the National Rifle VARIOUS COMPETITIONS 307 Association meetings will show how that body has accepted this object as its primary end. No doubt one hears from time to time complaints that even in the so-called strictly military depart- ment of the meeting too much stress is laid on accuracy, often obtained by a sacrifice of the conditions which would have to be observed in real warfare. To that criticism there are, we think, two answers to be made. In the first place a careful study of the programme will show that in the last year, which was not marked by any special innovation in this way, over five hundred pounds, to say nothing of challenge cups, was given to be competed for with regulation rifles, in matches where mere accuracy was not the sole, often not the chief object, but where it had to be combined with rapidity, simultaneity of fire, power of judg- ing distances and aiming at moving objects, or with running, riding, or cycling. It is true that the public does not hear much of such competitions as compared with the Queen's or Prince of Wales's Prizes, and why? Largely because in most of these competitions excellence is only collective and not individual. Let the display of skill be in what department one may choose, cricket or 308 MODERN RIFLE-SHOOTING athletics, conspicuous individual excellence is what the imagination of the public fastens upon. The precise proportion in which the too scanty prize funds of the Association should be allotted is of course a reasonable matter for discussion. All that we would point out is that individual shoot- ing, though the most prominent feature of the Bisley meetings, is far from monopolising the prize list. There is another side to the matter. The winner of the Queen's Prize is probably for practical military purposes very little more valu- able than the man who can just get his marks- man's badge. But the capacity of the individual winner is a very incomplete measure of the value of such a competition. If a very estimable body of men will forgive so degrading a comparison, a Queen's winner is in the shooting world what a Smithfield prize ox is in the farming world. The prize beast is probably not what the epicure would choose to dine off, certainly not what the farmer would choose for profit. But he serves to show what can be done, and he fixes a standard to try for. So the existence of a great competition like the Queen's, with its long string of prizes culminating in what is virtually the championship NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION 309 of the year, stimulates shooting in every corps which comes under its influence, and affects in- directly many who never take part in it. It is the old story of the husbandman and the pot of gold. In reaching for a success which is only within reach of the few, the many attain that amount of mastery over their rifle which is a needful condition of efficient soldiership. No doubt that does not meet the argument often urged, that the Volunteer force is divided into a little aristocracy of skilled shots and a great mass who can hardly shoot at all. That can only be remedied by extended action operating in different localities, and wholly beyond the resources of the National Rifle Association. What that body may, we think, claim for itself in the matter is, that it does not a little to remedy that state of things. And this brings us to the third and last requi- site laid down by Mr Rigby in his paper, "the encouragement of rifle - shooting as a healthy, manly, and scientific pastime." (The Italics are Mr Rigby 's.) In that, it seems to us, lies the answer to a good deal of vague talk that one hears as to the policy of the National Rifle Association. There are those who denounce its 310 MODERN RIFLE-SHOOTING meetings as "picnics," and who clamour for a larger amount of military administration in the conduct of them. We should remind such critics, in the first place, that the competitors at Bisley consist largely of Volunteers who are already freely giving up a good deal of time to the public service. To many of them the Bisley meet- ing is their one annual holiday ; it is to them what six weeks in Scotland or among the Alps are to their more favoured neighbours, and they have surely a right to ask that nothing should be grudged which makes their holiday brighter and more attractive, provided it no way interferes with the main purpose of the meeting, the display of the highest order of skill with the rifle. As for the increase of discipline, we would remind our readers that a section, and a not unimportant section, not only of the competitors, but even of those who control it, are civilians (using the word not in its ordinary sense, but as excluding Volunteers), while even the Volunteers there are merely brought together for the occasion and not bound together by any organic tie. How is a body so composed to be made subject to any- thing that can be called discipline, to parades, practice in tent-pitching, strict mess regulations, BISLEY 311 or any of the incidents which properly enough belong to the conduct of a regimental camp ? We cannot help thinking that the mere term " camp " somehow misleads persons as suggest- ing something military. They forget that the camp in this case simply means the cheapest and most convenient way, indeed the only way, of housing a large body of competitors and those who have to manage the competitions, close to the range. Under such circumstances the utmost that the Association can do is to permit, within its own bounds, the formation of regimental camps, which can practise such amount of drill as seems good to their respective members. If any one chooses to say that a large national Volunteer Camp for mixed purposes of drill and shooting would be better than the present mixed camp of Volunteers and civilians for shooting solely, one can only answer as Mr Bingley answered his sister when she suggested that a ball "would be much more rational if conversation instead of dancing were made the order of the day " : " Much more rational, I daresay, but not near so much like a ball." It is at least very certain that such a meet- ing would not be, what the Association meetings are compelled to be, practically self-supporting. 312 MODERN RIFLE-SHOOTING This view, of course, does not ignore the fact that all the shooting requires to be conducted under strict regulations, and therefore with strict discipline, that much of it is military, and that to such shooting strict military discipline is appli- cable. Apart from that, it seems to us that all which the Association can reasonably be asked to do is, to see that the Volunteers do not learn any unmilitary habits, and that such general discipline is enforced as is needful for the main object in hand, good shooting. As to the first point, no one who remembers the slovenly costumes, half-uniform, half-mufti, which were to be too commonly seen at Wimbledon some fifteen years ago, and notes their present disappearance, can doubt the improvement which has been wrought. On the latter point it is, we think, not too much to say that all the Association has to do is to help the many to protect themselves against the few. The competitors are not children. Though the Volunteer often comes to Bisley, as we have said, for a holiday, yet he also comes there with a very definite and serious purpose, and not once in five hundred times is he such a Hippoclides as, after months of practice, to dance away his chance in ill-timed revelry. THE UNIVERSITIES 313 No one who has the interest of the Volunteer movement at heart can but regret that neither the National Rifle Association nor any other influence has succeeded in giving rifle - shooting a higher place among the recognised athletic pursuits of the country. Our Universities have never been the homes of rifle-shooting that they might be expected to be. Not, indeed, that they have been wanting in individually distinguished shots. In 1871, the Queen's Prize fell to the lot of a Cambridge undergraduate, Mr Humphry. Only as late as 1895, an Oxford freshman, Mr Ranken, shooting for Scotland, made the highest score in the International match ; and in previous years, Oxonians, shooting for England and Ireland respectively, have achieved the same success. Yet it cannot be said that the Inter- University matches have ever excited anything like the same interest which attaches to other contests. Rifle-shooting, no doubt, suffers in popularity from its total lack of what one may call spectacular interest. Let us suppose a man looking on at the Elcho Shield match. What does he see? A knot of people are sitting together. One looks at the target through a telescope. Another is closely watching the motion of the flags through 314 MODERN RIFLE-SHOOTING a binocular. A third is poring over a register of figures in a fashion which suggests that he is en- deavouring to find Easter by means of the Sunday letter ; as a matter of fact, he is considering the force of the wind as shown by the last half-dozen shots. After a minute or so of whispered consultation, a report is heard and a puff of smoke seen some- where among the feet of the group which we have described, and the spectator then learns that the real performer, he whose name will appear in the morrow's paper with the whole glory of success or disgrace of failure attached to it, is the one whose prostrate figure surrounded by counsellors has hitherto escaped his notice. No doubt in a great competition, such as the Queen's Prize or the Elcho Shield, when the end is near and the struggle runs close, excitement becomes intense and contagious. But that is because " That needs must be a mighty minute When a crowd has but one soul within it." The interest is that of a contested election rather than of an athletic contest. There is no outward and visible mark of individual skill. Except by the marking on the target there is nothing to tell the looker-on whether he is watching the efforts EXPENSE 315 of a Queen's Prize winner or a man who has struggled out of the second class. Another drawback to the popularity of rifle- shooting has been that by far the most attractive form of it, long-range shooting, has been hitherto attended with considerable initial expense. A good long-range rifle with its appurtenances costs at least twenty-five pounds, and a young man thinks twice before he invests that sum in a pursuit in which his interest and his capacity are as yet virtually untried. The substitution of the Lee-Metford for the Martini may do not a little to obviate this. It will put an arm of precision adapted to long ranges in the hands of every one who shoots at all. What will be its effect in the competitions at present open to match rifles that is to say, to rifles fitted with aperture-sights and movable wind-gauges it is not very easy to foresee. On the one hand, the cost of fitting a Lee-Metford with these appliances will be but small. On the other hand, the effective- ness of the Lee-Metford, even with its ordinary military sights, will perhaps diminish the desire for a more exact weapon. Unhappily, there is a serious set - off to the advantage which rifle - shooting will derive from 316 MODERN RIFLE-SHOOTING the new service arm. As is well known, the extra distance travelled by the Lee - Metford bullet, albeit not more than three hundred yards, has already led to the condemnation of many ranges as unsafe. It is possible that a partial remedy may be found in the adoption of a bullet with more "stopping power" than that now in use: for the same quality which will make it more effective, its tendency to become deformed or to break up on striking an object, will obviously lessen the tendency to ricochet. And it is to be observed that it is really only from ricochets that danger is to be expected. Misses over the target can be intercepted by a sufficiently high butt : the chance of a rifle being let off pointed high in the air is simply one of a number of contingencies, all of which imply either some fault in the construc- tion of the rifle or gross carelessness on the part of the shooter. No range can guard against such accidents : the superiority of a range which guards against 1 per cent, of them as against one which makes no provision is not worth considering. One measure that has been suggested is the use of a reduced charge. We will not say that the remedy is worse than the disease, but we certainly do say that it would be but a feeble RANGES 317 palliative for a thoroughly unsatisfactory state of affairs. It is scarcely possible to overrate the evils which might result from the existence of two sets of ammunition of widely different force, "practice "ammunition and "service" ammunition. Imagine a battalion going into action without a single man knowing the sighting of his rifle with the full charge. Imagine the panic if a rumour got about that two or three regiments had by mischance had the "practice" ammunition served out to them. Let it be supposed that by a large expenditure of Government money safe ranges are found for the regular forces. What would be the fate of the great Volunteer competitions at Bisley when one- half of the force were trained on safe ranges with " service " ammunition, while the other half had only been allowed "practice" ammuni- tion? And be it remembered that anything which lowers the standard of Volunteer shooting at Bisley will in all likelihood carry with it a lowering of the standard of shooting throughout the whole of our forces. Those members of the regular service who have formed the Army Eight Club, and have thereby done much to raise the standard of military shooting, would, we are sure, be the first to acknowledge the value of the 318 MODERN RIFLE-SHOOTING lessons learnt at Wimbledon and Bisley, and the stimulus which the shooting there has given to their efforts. The annual match between the different branches of the service has acted in the same way. If ranges cannot be found, and the reduced charge must be employed as a means of utilising those already in existence, it is at least not too much to ask that it should be only used by tyros from whom wild shots may be expected. Allow at least every man who has shot into the first class to use the full charge ; then at the worst there would be in every corps a certain number of men who know the sighting for the full charge. Want of ranges and want of officers seem to be the two difficulties under which Volunteer corps, especially in country districts, now labour. The leisured and landed classes can do some- thing to supply both wants, and there are few services by which they can more certainly and more effectively secure the gratitude of their countrymen. HARRIERS l IT is a well-known fact in history and in human nature, that the nearer to one another two forms of religion come, the greater is the mutual intoler- ance. This probably explains the severe criticism which hare-hunting has at times received from the worshippers at the chief rival shrines of Diana. " I understand that hare-hunting is a highly scientific sport," was the criticism of one of the most enthusi- astic and competent Masters of Foxhounds that Yorkshire ever produced. " When I see a chap on the road with a strong pair of shoes and a good cudgel, 1 say, ' There is a man well mounted for the 'arriers,' " was one of the dicta of Mr Jorrocks 1 "John Andrew Doyle died August 3rd, 1907. Few of the readers of this article will be able to realise that, at the time of its being written, its author was suffering from the illness which was to prove fatal. In his last letter to me he said that he hoped to be able to finish it How well he accomplished the task and with what breeziness of expression and scholarly style all can see. It is indeed sad to think that the world of Letters has lost so great a scholar, the world of Sport so keen and able an exponent, and all who knew him so true a friend." GENERAL EDITOR of The Kennel Encyclopaedia. 819 320 HARRIERS in the immortal after-dinner speech. Let it be noticed, however, in passing, that the creator of Jorrocks was here speaking dramatically and impersonally. The run with the " Goose and Dumpling Harriers," in one of Surtees's less known works, Hawbuck Grange, shows how admirably he understood the real merits and characteristics of hare-hunting. All, however, that the hare- hunter need claim is that the two sports are in their essence incomparable. The keenest M.H. who ever watched his hounds puzzling through doubles and with supreme patience and self- control working out a slow line on a bad scenting day, would never claim for his sport that it is what Mr Bromley Davenport, in the best hunt- ing poem ever written, calls " the sublimest of ecstasies under the sun." As well compare a day in the stubbles and roots with two steady pointers to the excitement of lowering rocketer after rocketer, or the patient filling of a basket with trout under a pound in a Welsh stream to the semi-delirious joy of a battle with a thirty- pound salmon. One thing, however, the hare-hunter may claim. His is at least the older sport, and compared with it fox-hunting is a mere parvenu. Many will HARE AND FOX 321 remember the stock passage in St John's speech impeaching Strafford and defending some possible irregularity in proceedings. The worthier beasts of chase, deer and hare, are the objects of legiti- mate sport, the fox is vermin to be killed as best he may. As Scott paraphrases it " Who cares how or when The prowling fox is trapped or slain ? " In other words, in the seventeenth century hare- hunting was a recognised branch of scientific " venery," while fox-hunting had not yet emerged from what one may call the Dandie Dinmont stage. No doubt the seventeenth century was bringing in a change. When the Duke of Buckingham Dryden's Zimri was brought home to die, "in the worst inn's worst room," he owed his death either to an accident in the hunting field or to a chill caught in digging out. It was a fox-hunt which gave Frank Osbaldiston, some twenty years later, his first view of Diana Vernon. Yet it is significant that in Blome's " Complete Gentleman's Recreation," printed in 1691, four and a half pages are devoted to the details of hare-hunting, one and a half to the fox. In Shakespeare we have many well - known x 322 HARRIERS references to the chase of the stag and the hare none explicitly to that of the fox. In that delightful and life-like scene in the prelude to the Taming of the Shrew where the Master and the huntsman, as they are jogging home, discuss and wrangle over the work of the hounds, there is nothing to show whether stag or hare has been the quarry. But the explicit and classical hare- hunting passage is that of "poore Wat upon a hill" in the Venus and Adonis. The man who wrote that had watched more than one run with thoughtful observation. To the fox there is one significant reference which has probably puzzled not a few readers. It certainly puzzled the present writer till he met with the explanation given by Judge Madden in that most charming and illuminating book, " The Diary of Master William Silence." When the conspirators against Malvolio are rejoicing over the perversity with which he clings to the belief of Olivia's passion for him, Sir Toby exclaims " Sowter will cry on't though it be as rank as a fox ! " One's first inclination is to say, surely the ranker the scent, the easier to hold the line. But it is clear that "it" refers not to the object of pursuit but to that which may possibly foil the line. He will itick to the line though a fox comes across it. Clearly the fox presents himself to Sir Toby not as a possible quarry, but only as a cause of interruption. We pass over a century and we find another locus classicus, as one may call it, dealing with hare-hunting. When "the quiet gentleman" of the Spectator went down to pay Sir Roger a visit in the country, his remarks on hare-hunting show no lack of observation or interest. He at once notices the discernment with which the pack reckon up the value of each individual hound and the amount of attention and of deference which they pay to each individual cry. " If they were at fault and an old hound of reputation opened but once, he was immediately followed by the whole cry, while a raw dog or a noted liar might have yelped his heart out with- out being taken notice of." It is true that one rather wonders when one reads that Sir Roger declined the present of a good-looking hound because his voice was a bass, and he wanted a counter tenor. Peterborough was not yet, but there must have been already those who protested against a tendency to sacrifice hunting power to extraneous considerations. 324 HARRIERS Again, does not Sir Roger err on the side of tender-heartedness when he occasionally rescues a live hare, just as hounds are about to run into her ? Loveable though Sir Roger is, I think we there have the sportsman seen through the spectacles of the cultured scholar. Let us hope that the hounds had had plenty of blood already. Sir Roger, too, was what his own generation caUed a humorist, and to such much must be forgiven. In one respect the silent gentleman of the Spectator showed better judgment than the yokels who made up the field ; acting up to his name, when he viewed a hare, he " marked the way she took, which I endeavoured to make the company sensible of by extending my arm, but to no purpose till Sir Roger, who knows that none of my extraordinary motions are insignificant, rode up to me and asked me ' If puss was gone that way ? ' Upon my answer- ing * yes,' he immediately called in the dogs, and put them upon the scent. As they were going off I heard one of the country fellows muttering to his companion 'that 'twas a wonder they had not lost all their sport for want of the silent gentleman crying " Stole away ! " THE OLDEST PACK 325 Would that we had more silent gentlemen out. "Dogs" no doubt betrays the Cockney, but I think that Eustace Budgell (for to him is the paper ascribed) had the root of the matter in him, and if he did forge a will, as is said, let us grant him benefit of venery. As the eighteenth century advances fox-hunting steadily gains ground on the rival sport. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that by 1800 " hunting " without qualification would have meant fox - hunting. By the days of " Nimrod," fox- hunting had become, as one may say, cosmo- politanised under the influence of rival Masters, as Hugo Meynell, Ralph Lanetta, and Lord Darlington. The great packs exchanged blood and experience. No such process was at work on the harrier. Here and there were to be found local types the Devonshire blue mottles, with a cry such as that which gladdened the heart of Hippolyta, and with legs and feet which to a modern critic would suggest an alliance with the dachshund ; or the Holcombe, said to be the oldest pack with a continued existence, huge hounds, yet so heavily built as to be hunted on foot. It would be, by the way, most interesting if some one could give the complete records of 326 HARRIERS the lines on which these hounds have been bred, and of the methods by which fresh blood has been introduced without destroying the original type. But we may be sure that the majority of packs were bred on no very well-defined system. Foxhound blood was used without scruple, and in many cases foxes were hunted. At last, by the energy of certain enthusiasts, the Masters of Harriers' Association was created, and order evolved out of chaos. Conspicuous among those who led this reform were Mr Barclay, who owned a private pack in Epping Forest, and Mr Rickards, Master of the Aldenham, and their work has been carried on by such Masters as Mr Gibbon, of the Boddington, Mr Kemp, of the Foxbush, and others. With a practical common sense and a freedom from pedantry which was, I venture to think, most judicious, and has been most fortunate in its results, the Association did not attempt at the outset to close its stud against all alien blood. A hound might be admitted to the Harrier Stud Book provided it could show pure harrier blood in three out of his four parents. Purists, who value words more than things, might protest. But I venture to think that few of those who have had practical experience of harrier PURE-BRED 327 breeding will deny that there are certain essential points of make and shape which could never be obtained without a dash of foxhound blood, and that such disadvantages as that brings with it may be controlled and finally got rid of by care. Can any one doubt that in the comparative chaos of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there must have been a constant mixture and exchange of harrier and foxhound blood ? If I deny the existence of a pure-bred harrier, I only deny it as I would deny the existence of a "pure" type of any domestic animal, if by " pure " we mean one who owes nothing to any alien blood. Besides, is there not a very real danger that if we wholly taboo the foxhound cross, we offer a very great temptation to Masters of harriers to smuggle it in surreptitiously ? The real value of stud books and the like is not so much to hall-mark certain animals and give them a certificate of "purity," often a very vague and deceptive term, as to enable breeders at once to understand what is the material with which they are working. This naturally brings me to a crucial point in my subject. What is the essential difference between foxhound and harrier? No one will, 328 HARRIERS I think, deny that size counts for a good deal. It must never be forgotten that the hare and the harrier do not exist to give us an exciting gallop, but to show hound work. We want something a little faster and brisker than beagle work. Indeed, there are countries where the strength of the hares and the difficulties of natural obstacles would make the killing of a hare with beagles on a bad scenting day impossible. Nor can it, I venture to think, be truly said foxhound blood in moderation in any way unfits a hound for hare - hunting. The writer had two hounds, brother and sister. Their dam was by a dwarf foxhound, though neither she nor they showed it in appearance. The dog hound always enjoyed a turn at a fox. His sister would turn con- temptuously back from the line of a fox. In this matter I never knew her mislead us. While I am so near it I may perhaps say a word on that vexed question should harriers ever be allowed to hunt fox ? Now, I have not the slightest doubt that hunting foxes frequently and promiscuously does impair the faculty of hare - hunting. It makes hounds impatient and flashy. Instead of having before their mind the constant possibility of the line coming round, they A TURN AT FOXES 329 instinctively drive forward. Consider the differ- ence of the scent! Would any man be fit to taste a delicate claret whose palate had been saturated with whisky? But I think that when hare-hunting is over, there can be no objection to having a turn at foxes, if all the local conditions are favourable. In this way the hounds will have had plenty of time to forget any bad lesson which they may have learned. When I say "the con- ditions should be favourable," I mean first and foremost that there should be no semblance of interference with foxhounds who have in every way the first claim in the country. But it not infrequently happens that there may be some wild and unenclosed country where foxhounds cannot get with either pleasure or profit, yet where it will be greatly for the benefit of the country to give the foxes a good routing out. The writer does not anticipate very much pleasure from such hunting. It is impossible to stop earths, it is probably too fast for the foot man, too rough for riding. But it probably earns the gratitude of the farmers, and to be killed even by harriers is a nobler death for the august animal than to be shot or trapped. It is not inappropriate that a writer on hare- 330 HARRIERS hunting should pursue his course through a good many turns and doubles ; so perhaps it may be fitting that I should now come back to the question of the essential differences between the foxhound and the harrier not merely in work, but in make and shape. It is, in my opinion, easier to recognise than to describe. The harrier should, I venture to think, be less tightly and solidly built. He should be more flewed and looser in skin. Above all, he does not need I could put it more strongly and say he is better without those ideally straight legs which I venture to think an exaggerated fashion pre- scribes for the foxhound. I know this will seem to some blasphemy. But first of all, let it be remembered that a harrier needs to turn and to check himself when almost at full speed ten times for once that a foxhound has. Now a perfectly true formation of shoulder and elbow is best of all. But if shoulders are upright and a trifle heavy, a compensation is sometimes to be found in a certain looseness of elbow. That at least is far better than the deceptive appearance of straightness given by clean - looking shoulders pinned in at the elbow. Again, owing to the necessity for "coming round" without strain or TWO MAXIMS 331 effort, and also the fact that so much of his work has to be done on sloping ground, well - laid shoulders are even more essential in the harrier than the foxhound. And I think no one can doubt that though the fashionable foxhound type of leg with bone down to the toes may not be inconsistent with good slope of shoulder, yet the two do not naturally go together. It is much to expect from Nature that she should give us a shoulder well sloped from wither to elbow and then continue the limb plumb down from elbow to toe. So, too, a certain slope of pasterns may be dispensed with in the foxhound. In the harrier it is absolutely indispensable. In conclusion, just one word about the moral and mental qualities which we should aim at cultivating, and, therefore, the method on which harriers should be hunted. Two leading maxims to my mind stand out. Never excite them. Make them independent. There is no excuse for hurry with harriers. The hare will always wait for them. That is what the fox-hunting man does not know or forgets. I remember the expostulations of one when the huntsman of a pack of harriers announced his intention of trying back to a view " Why, that was twenty minutes 332 HARRIERS ago." Again, there is seldom such a field of horse- men as to make it necessary to hurry hounds from under the feet of the horses. Moreover, in proportion as a harrier "gets his blood up," his capacity for proper work is surpassed. The mere sight of his huntsman racing, whether on horse or foot, as a preliminary to a cast, unsettles him. Then, as the whole pleasure of hare-hunting is in watching hounds work, cultivate the indepen- dence of your hounds. As an excellent amateur huntsman once said to me, " If you must cast, lead the hounds into the belief that they are doing it themselves." Lastly, a word on the subject of riot, in its most serious and perilous form sheep-hunting. Here and there you may get an incorrigible ; but if you have any serious trouble, it means an incompetent huntsman or whip, or both. 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