connected and fascinating youth, and a sincere sentiment of philanthropy allured him to try his hand and the power of his voice in the ever terrible slums.

But the course of legal study in London was too long and the ways of London lawyers were too slow for this young citizen of the world, who had also come out as an author by publishing some extracts from the diary which he had kept during his Indian expedition of the year before. He therefore decided, in the summer of 1852, to try the easier ordeal of an examination for the Scottish bar, which was rather a close corporation in those days, and numbered among its members a good many relatives and friends of the Oliphant family. "I have been introduced to all my examiners," he writes, " and have buttered them properly, and they look goodnatured enough. Robert Oliphant has been overwhelming me with kindness, introducing me right and left, propitiating my examiners, and puffing me splendidly as a colonial lawyer, a young author, and altogether an interesting young personage, that it would be folly to pluck for the want of a little smattering of Latin.”

His confidence was justified by the event, and he consoled himself for the dullness of Edinburgh society after London with the beauty of the place and its romantic associations. He felt a natural need of change in the autumn, however, and started with a young English sportsman, Mr. Oswald Smith, to go salmonfishing on the rivers of Russian Lapland, with ulterior designs upon the white bears of Spitzbergen. But their accoutrements having been confiscated at St. Petersburg, or rather retained for a duty much larger than these wild huntsmen chose to pay, they decided instead on exploring the inland territory of Russia in Europe, with a view on Oliphant's part to writing another book. Again chance favored him. They made

-on

their way to the Crimea, saw with their own eyes the lay of the land in that fatal peninsula, the fortifications in process of construction at Sevastopol, and all the vast military preparations going forward there; so that a year later, when the conflict in the East had become inevitable, Oliphant's little book, The Russian Shores of the Black Sea, projected and produced in gaieté de cœur, became almost the only authority accessible concerning the configuration of the seat of war; and Laurence was called to the councils of cabinet ministers, and his opinions were asked — and freely and graciously given, we may be sure the most momentous questions of policy. He thought he should at once have received some important appointment in the East, but this did not immediately come, and in the interval he was fain to accept the offer of Lord Elgin to go as the private secretary of that accomplished nobleman on a special mission to the United States and Canada. It is curious to find this novice in diplomacy, who, by natural gifts and the accidents of his training, or absence of training, had so much in common with the typical son of the universal Yankee nation, characterizing American civilization with that peculiarly candid contempt which is always affected by the English swell. A facetious and very readable account of his Washington experience may be found in Laurence Oliphant's Episodes in a Life of Adventure, from which it would indeed appear that the society of our national capital in those ante bellum days was, if anything, faster in its pace than it is now. But Lord Elgin's methods were adapted to his environment, and his enemies used to say that the treaty which he went to negotiate was "floated through on champagne."

Abundant use was found for the same great political agent after the embassy had moved on to Canada, where Laurence, who had reconciled himself in a degree to the freedom of Western man

ners, entered with much enthusiasm into the round of social gayeties wherewith the wily Lord Elgin surrounded all his goings. Yet the young attaché was not without searchings of heart on the score of these festive entertainments, and he tells his tender mother unreservedly what obstacles he found to spiritual progress in wine, woman, and song. We may love him for the rare ingenuousness of the avowals that his temperament, "though not precisely amorous," was "joyous," and that he should not mind taking a good deal of champagne, in the way of business, if he did not like it so well. But when it comes to confiding misgivings of this nature to his chief in Quebec, we cannot wonder that the good-natured man of the world should have replied: "All these comments of yours upon our proceedings distress me very much. After all, we are only amusing people; and if you have got anything to repent of, I wish you'd wait and do it on board ship." The humor of this appealed to Lord Elgin's secretary, and he duly reported it to his mother.

Laurence Oliphant returned to Europe in 1855, with his mind full of a new and original plan of campaign for the besieging armies in the Crimea. He was permitted rather than formally authorized to proceed to the East, and lay before Lord Stratford de Redcliffe this plan, of which the principal feature was coöperation with the forces of the native Prince Schamyl in the eastern Caucasus, and he also obtained a place as Times correspondent. His amateur strategy came to naught, though he never ceased to believe and aver that the whole course of the war might have been changed had his views been adopted. While the fighting blood in his veins, of which there was plenty, leaped at the sight of armies in action, and he did some gallant volunteer service, the dread realities inseparable from war, the incalculable anguish, the irremediable NO. 407.

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He fell ill at last of that wasting Crimean fever which claimed more victims than the sword, and had to return to England early in 1856. There he amused his convalescence by standing for Parliament, contesting unsuccessfully the burghs of Stirling, for which he afterward sat. In the spring of that year he revisited America along with the famous Mr. Delane of the Times, made a tour of the Southern States with a view to writing a book on negro slavery, prophesied the desperate struggle which was to come five years later, as well as the disruption of the Union which was not to come, and wound up this particular "episode in a life of adventure" by joining the filibustering expedition of Walker to Nicaragua. I do not think that Laurence Oliphant's biographer puts the case too strongly when she describes this latter feat as affording 'practical evidence of his extreme impatience with the as yet undetermined lines of his own life." It calmed that impatience, no doubt, when a British squadron intercepted the vessel on which Oliphant had embarked, and the commander, who chanced to be Admiral Erskine, a distant cousin of his, took summary possession of the young man

every department of Her Majesty's service both at home and abroad." But surely this is an inverted moral. Why not say that if you belong to a family of kent folk it is better not to compromise them by getting into risky positions at all?

But the witchery which Laurence Oliphant exercised over all those who knew him well, and the faith in his capacities which he inspired, prevailed over any passing mistrust of his "steadiness; and the next year — 1857 saw him on his way to China, once more as the private secretary of Lord Elgin. Their mission was delayed, and partially thwarted, by the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny. They surrendered the contingent of troops which had convoyed them to the East, and had to sit, as Laurence expressed it, "kicking their heels" in Hong-Kong, until a fresh detachment could be spared to accompany them.

During this period of inaction he fell again into his old ways of religious musing and speculation. Oliphant revolted from the phase of Christianity which he encountered in the English colony at Hong-Kong, the "worldly holiness" of merchants and chaplains, and missionaries most of all. He freed himself completely at this time, or fancied that he did so, from the strait bonds of the evangelical creed in which he had been brought up, and to which, thus far, he had fitfully but sincerely striven to conform himself. Thorndale, or The Conflict of Opinions, fell in his way, a book long since outgrown, but a thoughtful work which did certainly mark one of the lower levels in the rising flood of rationalism. This ephemeral book seemed to the young seeker for truth a veritable revelation, and he was unspeakably touched and relieved when he found that his mother, to whom he had dreaded owning the change in his views, had also been much impressed by Thorndale, and had sent it to him at the precise moment when he was sending it to her.

His own peculiar simplicity and candor are in all that he says in his private letters concerning the workings of his mind at this time of transition; but the depth of his experience, as well as the range of his researches, may be judged by the fact that Longfellow was his favorite poet (he could not read Tennyson), and Theodore Parker his favorite theologian.

The evolution of theoretic heresy was interrupted by the exciting scenes which accompanied the bombardment of Canton; and when, through the help of this crushing argument, the "mission" of Lord Elgin had been brought to a successful termination, we find our adventurer paying a flying visit with his chief to Japan, and being quite fascinated by his first glimpse of that unearthly paradise. In 1860 he came back to Europe, turned up at Nice just at the critical moment of the cession of Nice and Savoy to France, espoused Garibaldi's quarrel with Cavour, and did his best, but happily in vain, to incite both Niçois and Savoyards to an armed resistance against the new arrangement. His diplomatic associations had already procured him an introduction to Count Cavour, with whom he had the honor of dining at Turin, and it would be difficult to find, even in Laurence Oliphant's own collected writings, a more striking instance of inadequate judgement than this on the one great creative statesman of our time, one of the few impassioned and absolutely selfless patriots of any time: "A thick-set, solid man, with a large, square head and spectacles, an able, mathematical, practical sort of head, without chivalry, principle, or genius." We are glad at least to be told of the casual agitator that he afterwards modified this opinion; and meanwhile he furnished some very entertaining articles to Blackwood, conceived in the spirit of the naïve remarks that "it is great fun to have another object in Italy than churches and picture galleries," and that one cannot

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stand by and see a good cause ruined, and such blackguards as the Emperor carrying all before him, without wagging a finger."

A deeper sense of responsibility awoke in this impressionable being when, in June of 1861, he received for the first time an important diplomatic appointment, and was made chargé d'affaires at Yeddo. The unfortunate result of that first English mission to Japan is well known, but Oliphant behaved with great coolness and gallantry on the occasion of the night attack upon the English Embassy, and as he lay severely wounded on board the British gunboat Ringdove, in the stifling July heat, he experienced a peacefulness and exaltation of spirit which find affecting expression in the few lines he succeeded in scrawling to his mother with his bandaged fingers: "My only thought that night was for you. For myself I am glad; it made me know I could face death, which at one time seemed inevitable. I found my creed or philosophy quite satisfactory. I take everything as in the day's work, and that is why, in one sense, I do not feel thankful like others. I have such a profound feeling of being in God's hands, and having nothing to do with my own fate, that gratitude even would be presumption. . . . It must all end; one has only to hold on and feel sure that the use and object of it all will be evident."

Such words make one feel that the root of the matter was in him, even in his most dubious enterprises and lawless escapades. It is this which arrests a too easy criticism, and forbids one lightly to cavil at what came later. After three years more of piquant experience, meteor-like apparitions in London society, where he was always warmly welcomed, cruisings in the Mediterranean with the Prince of Wales, solitary rambles in the Abruzzi, in the Turkish provinces, in Poland, then convulsed by the throes of its last revolution, where we find him

lending the power of his generous lungs to the insurgents, as they raised their national anthem within hearing of the Russian camp, this modern knight-errant seems to have resolved to range himself once for all, and fulfill the expectations of his friends. After coquetting with several Scottish constituencies, he was returned to Parliament for the burghs of Stirling. His place was found; his innocuous wild oats were sown; he had nothing now to do but help himself to the dainties of life and make the most of this world. Instead, he renounced it.

But first he had signally disappointed the prophecies of those friends who, accustomed to his vivid writing and his fluent and persuasive eloquence in private talk, had expected him to make a great figure in the House of Commons as an orator and debater. During the two years he sat there, he never opened his lips on any question of national or international policy. Afterwards he said that he had been forbidden to do so by the obscure teacher of whom he was already a secret disciple. He was, however, suffered to express himself in the pages of Blackwood, where he came out as a satirist of social follies and hypocrisies in Piccadilly, Fashionable Philosophy, and other contributions of a similar character. Writing of this kind, if done even tolerably well, is sure to amuse and be popular; and Laurence Oliphant's was far more than tolerable. But it was never superlatively good, and his biographer, we think, praises it excessively and without discrimination. He lacked somewhat of the literary touch; he worked with a blunt instrument, and just missed oftentimes, through ignorance of books and imperfection of training, the effect at which he aimed so earnestly. His novels and satires are already unreadable. A little more skill, a better style and method, might have made them classic. He is at his best in statements of fact and tales of teeming incident which he tells

without reflection or affectation, speaking freely and offhand, as a man of the world to men of the world. But his equipment of language was quite inadequate to render intelligible the visionary beliefs and metaphysical subtleties which occupied his later years, and those who most incline to accept as supernatural the origin of the message he had to deliver in Sympneumata and Scientific Religion have really most reason to regret his eminently unscientific habit of mind and the frequent confusion and difficulty of his utterance.

The apostle and director whose guidance Laurence Oliphant thus implicitly accepted was an American named Harris, originally a Swedenborgian preacher, some of whose printed sermons had fallen in Lady Oliphant's way, and impressed her very much by their strain of artless and fervent piety, as early as when Laurence was in Italy. Harris was at this time lecturing and preaching in England, in provincial halls, dissenting chapels, wherever he could obtain a hearing for his views concerning the higher life. Afterwards he returned to his native land, and established at Brocton, on the shores of Lake Erie, a small community of his disciples, who were to exemplify his doctrines in their simple, self-denying, and laborious lives. The "life," Harris taught, was far more essential than the doctrine: it was to live a life of humble "use," not to adopt a creed of any kind, that he summoned the selfish children of men, and summoned them, as he claimed, by direct warrant from heaven. There were to be no distinctions of days or public religious services in his community; nevertheless, its members were all understood to accept certain of the tenets of the so-called New Church, such as the duality of God, consisting of a union in one person of the masculine and feminine principles, in place of the Trinity of the popular theology, a belief in the constant intervention in human affairs of

both good and evil spirits, and, more distinctively, that the second coming of Jesus Christ is even now being accomplished in the world by means of a transfusion of his divine life into the bodily frame of his true disciples, the witness of whose conversion, or election, is a certain peculiarity of respiration, recognizable by other disciples, but by those alone. those alone. Mrs. M. O. W. Oliphant gives a striking account of the very interesting circumstances under which she herself first came to converse rather intimately with the subject of her memoir. It was in the House of Commons, the night when Disraeli brought forward the very measure of reform on which the Gladstone ministry had lately been defeated, and when it became evident that the Liberal leader was preparing to oppose as a party measure what he had previously advocated on the lofty ground of principle. The upright and candid soul of Laurence Oliphant - a disinterested Liberal if ever there was one, and indeed always and most conspicuously disinterested in all thingsrevolted from the adroit jugglery of both famous leaders. He expressed himself sick of his part in so false a business, and, though he was very guarded in his manner of replying to certain inquiries of his kinswoman concerning his new spiritual teacher, she was less amazed than the world in general to learn, a few months later, that he had turned his back on all his advantages and prospects of promotion in England, and thrown in his lot with the colony on Lake Erie.

"A man," says Mrs. Oliphant, "who thus abandons the world for religious motives is almost sure, amid the wide censure that is inevitable, to encounter also a great deal of contempt; yet had he become a monk, either Roman or Anglican, a faint conception of his desire to save his soul might have penetrated the universal mind; but he did not do anything so comprehensible. He