Wordsworth here, and of the two I think Longfellow is the most popular. It marks a point in life that the generation now at school and college no longer look on Wordsworth and Walter Scott as contemporary-no longer feed upon them and are educated by them. I fear Dickens and Tennyson will hardly beget such a mascula proles as Scott and Wordsworth. . . . Well, it is something to be able to say Virgilium vidi-the next man to Milton in the noblest literature since Adam.' After reading Gosse's account of Gray in Mr. John Morley's series, he says of Gray: 'What letters! Cowper and Gray and Southey are our best, I think, for Horace Walpole and Pope, very good in their way, are too artificial. . . . Gray's letters are as near perfection as possible.' His affection for the Greek and Latin classics was hereditary and deep-rooted. In the volume of his poems entitled 'Verses during Forty Years,' there is a translation made by his father at the request of Lord Chief Justice Denman of the well-known passage in Catullus, beginning 'Si quicquam mutis gratum acceptumve sepulchris and quite at the end of his life he followed Lord Bowen's translation of the 'Eneid' with such an incessant stream of critical comments that Bowen with characteristic humour observed to Lord Justice Mathew, 'He shoots over me every morning as if I were a Scotch moor.' The friendship between the two men was very close, and death did not separate them for long, barely two months. On April 13, 1894, Lord Coleridge wrote to Sir M. Grant Duff: 'On March 20, Bowen borrowed a Horace of me. . . . I knew he had not a month to live, and that interview was hard work. You, dear old friend, according to your custom, immensely over-rate what I did for him-it was not a tenth or a hundredth part of what he did for me, but I did love him with my whole heart, and I thank God for the blessing of his friendship. Jowett might have given us an estimate of him, for no one has done it yet: but he is gone first. . . . How Bowen was loved, and how well he deserved it!" Lord Coleridge, after a brief illness, died on June 14, and was buried in the family vault at Ottery St. Mary on the 23rd, while the parish choir sang Cardinal Newman's exquisite hymn, Lead, kindly Light. A memorial service was held the day before in Westminster Abbey, at which all the Judges were present, and the pall-bearers were Lord Chancellor Herschel, Lord Selborne, the Bishop of Gloucester, VOL. CCI. NO. CCCCXII. сс Sir Frederic Leighton, Sir John Mowbray, the Right Hon. George Denman, Lord Halsbury, Lord Lingen, Lord Aberdare, and Lord Young. In laying down the Life and Letters of Lord Coleridge the general reader will probably agree in the criticism that the letters have not been selected or arranged with quite the care they might have been. Omissions may be capable of explanation only known to the biographer, but the insertion of some letters devoid of anything of public interest and of some passages in others reflecting upon persons or things dear to people still alive is not easy to justify. And the professional reader will be inclined to think that Mr. Ernest Coleridge has passed over too lightly what was felt to be a grave defect of the closing years of Lord Coleridge's judicial career, his increasing drowsiness on the Bench; though it is fair to say that Lord Justice Mathew gives it as his opinion that in a Divisional Court suitors did not suffer.' Unfortunately the Chief Justice had often to sit alone, when no brother judge could either help him or criticise him, and it would be folly to ignore the fact that embarrassing and unedifying situations did occur. It appears that one at least of his intimate friends, Mr. C. M. Roupell, pressed him to resign, and less than a year before his death Lord Coleridge wrote in reply to this remonstrance: 'You say the time has come for me to go. Very likely it has, but if I can, I want to stay on the Bench till 1896, before which time I am not entitled to my full pension, and my full pension is a serious object to me. . . . I am not conscious of doing my work worse or more feebly than before. . . . The first moment I suspect myself I shall go, and if you hear disparaging remarks (I mean more than usual) I entreat you, per amicitiam divosque, to tell me.' ... In the course of the same letter he admits that he knows that on such a matter no one will tell him the truth. And this fact must always be remembered in defence of holders of offices whose resignations seem to be unduly deferred. How far Lord Coleridge's life might have been prolonged if his tenure of office had been shortened it is impossible to say; but his biographer says that his illness was brought on by a chill caught on the occasion of his attending a State function in court dress. He, at any rate, died in harness, and after a long and honourable career in the public service, of which his biographer has given the world a faithful and striking picture. It may be doubted whether he was a popular man. His advanced political and religious opinions, his want of sympathy with most of what appeals to the average man under the name of 'sport,' and his highly cultivated and strongly marked tastes in art, literature, and music account for a good deal of that. But he had all his life a circle of devoted friends, all of them men of the highest character and intellectual distinction, to whom his attachment never wavered. They gave him in return affectionate and devoted friendship. And the general public recognised that he brought to the discharge of his high duties a lofty standard, high ideals, and consummate ability. In these latter days, when our country has been rent by sectarian strife and conflicts about dogma, it is surely wholesome to be reminded of the great Chief Justice's wise words of charity and toleration written more than forty years ago: 'It is not latitudinarian, it is Christian to point out . . . how holy men of all times and of all Churches have agreed in the elements of faith, in the principles of practice, in the foundations of religion. Surely when all is done, when warfare has ended in victory, and desire is swallowed up in fruition, we shall wonder at the simplicity of the truth, at the plainness of the one thing needful . . . and shall marvel how the breadth of God's law failed to strike the narrowness of man's eyesight. "I see that all things come to an end : but Thy commandment is exceeding broad."' 1. Le Sahara. ART. VI.--THE ARAB. Par HENRI SCHIRMER, docteur ès lettres. Paris Librairie Hachette et Cie, 1893. 2. L'Algérie de 1830 à 1840. Par CAMILLE ROUSSET, de 4. La Chute de l'Empire de Rabat. Par EMILE GENTIL. IT T is difficult to believe that the gay and comfortable town of Algiers, with its roomy boulevards and fine hotels and gardened villas and busy port and railways, and all its residences of modern luxury and civilisation, can be the same town which only the other day was the centre of a great system of piracy: a system carried on with as much energy and consistency as if it had been a legitimate trade, which was the State's regular source of revenue, on which it lived and maintained itself, and which was continued down to a time almost within the memory of persons still living. Taking one morning the electric tram, which winds down the hill, through the gardens of Mustapha Supérieur and the town below, we found ourselves sitting next to an aged Moor with beady black eyes and parchment skin, the countless wrinkles in which seemed traced with the point of a needle. His memory, it struck us, might conceivably go back to the days before Algiers closed for ever her career of mischief. The Exmouth bombardment took place in 1816, and the release of 1,200 Christian slaves followed it. But this was not the end. Algiers was used to these interruptions. The damage done by the British was swiftly repaired, and the buccaneering business was carried on down to the time of the French blockade which ended in the fall of the town in 1830. The man, therefore, whose memory could go back a stretch of three-quarters of a century about, might recall something of that now extinct industry, and as a child might have actually seen the corsair fleets ruffling the waters of the bay on their outward or homeward voyages. Possibly, we amused ourselves with speculating, the ancient Moor in the corner, who looked ninety if a day, might have been equal to such a retrospect. We turned a corner and the bay lay beneath us. A Messageries mail boat was slowly pulsing seaward, attended by the usual retinue of small craft that tossed in her wake or clung to her skirts as though loath to let her go. The dark eyes of the old Moor dwelt on the scene with imperturbable composure. Immediately opposite to him sat an English girl, tennis-racquet in hand, to whom he presumably was merely one of those local curiosities which had outworn the interest of novelty and were no longer worth the snap-shot of a kodak, but who to him was, as we fancied, a representation of that race whom his fathers had bought and sold like pigs in the slave-market below. We would have given much to have been able for a moment to look at that scene through his eyes and to clothe it in his memories and associations. But if it is difficult to believe in the past of Algiers while we are among the villas of Mustapha Supérieur or the boulevards of the French town, the case alters when we attain the Arab quarter. To pass into this is to pass into Arab life and all the intricacies of Arab history. Winding, tortuous alleys meander aimlessly in all directions, flanked by little dens of shops with piles of merchandise obtruding on the pavement, and interiors like the lairs of animals, at the mouths of which the merchants squat, conning the passers-by with an air of serious indifference. Above, the zigzag cliffs of white walls, latticed with faded shutters, rise irregularly, and, tottering towards each other as if for support, block out all but a narrow and crooked thread of blue above and shroud the dim creeks beneath in an unnaturally cold twilight. And through this gloom mysterious figures move with noiseless footfall, in white flowing garments, with twisted turbans or veiled faces, who, as you tell yourself, are leading a life in all respects real and matter of fact, with the usual every day duties and worries, but whom no effort of your feeble imagination can make to seem other than curious and fantastic and outside the natural order of things, and who look at you with eyes in which all you can read is the depth of the abyss that lies between you. Like all Oriental towns, Old Algiers leaves on the memory an impression of a haunt of animals or insects rather than of men; a warren, corroded and eaten through in all directions by a network of countless passages and tunnels. We have the same sensation when we stand or wander in such a labyrinth as this as when we turn the pages of an Arab history. There is the same richness of detail, the same striking individual figures and incidents, the same brilliant glimpses and vivid little scenes. And behind and |