George Bentinck. That most interesting and characteristic of all his works, shows more of his genuine self than any of his novels. Bentinck is only a peg. Peel and Disraeli or rather Disraeli and Peel, are the chief persons of the drama. No Peelite accepts the portrait of Peel as accurate. But, considering the fierce and frequent attacks of 1846, the judgment of 1851 is wonderfully impartial. Mr. Gladstone once said to me, no doubt justly, that when Disraeli called Peel the greatest Member of Parliament who had ever lived, he did not mean to, imply a compliment. At least, if he did, there was a sting in the tail. Disraeli, however, saw Peel's great merits quite as clearly as he saw his small defects, even if he did not adjust the proportionate balance. He was never a Protectionist, and his persecution of Peel had nothing to do with any political principle. He knew that the great Minister was conscientious, and first in his own line. But to him politics were a game, the most fascinating of all games, and at the bottom of his mind there lay a deep disdain for both English parties, for the issues which united, as well as for those which divided them. Progress and reaction, he says in his Life of Lord George, mean nothing, and are nothing. They are phrases, not facts. All is race. What he really did believe in was the indestructible, unalterable difference between East and West, between Gentile and Jew. "Young England!" exclaimed Wordsworth with fine indignation,

Young England! What is then become of old?

Disraeli did not care. He did not even regard it as old. His opponents, his supporters, even his colleagues, were epehemeral phenomena, creatures of a day, to be used for his own purposes by a representative of immemorial antiquity. Flattery, he observed, was the

way to get on in English politics. "And when," he added, "you come to the royal family, you must lay it on with a shovel."

Society, in the sense given to that elastic word by fashionable novelists. is the subject on which Lady Dorothy Nevill is best qualified to speak, and there is a quaint touch in her recollec tions of early days. Speaking of Lord and Lady Jersey, she says:

He was always so kind to us, and they used to give the most delightful evening parties-not as they are now; it was before the rank and file were admitted!

The rank and file, provided always that they adopted for the nonce Conservative principles, were freely admitted to the most magnificent of England's country houses.

"I remember," writes Lady Dorothy. "a great entertainment at Hatfield given to a number of Irish Conservatives; everything was, as usual, very well done, and the Irishmen were de lighted, doing, I may remark, full justic to the champagne; so much was this the case that one of the islanders. approaching Lady Salisbury (of whose identity he was unaware), said 'Pray. ma'am, will ye lead me to a seat, for if I don't sit down, I might disgrace me country! She conducted the some what tottering son of Erin to a bench. and a calamity was averted."

Dr. Johnson described patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel. It may evidently also be the first consideration of a toper. This particular victim of political hospitality, though he might have found a more sympathetic, could have hit upon no more appreciative confidant than the late mistress of Hatfield, whose perception of the ludicrous was as keen as her husband's.

Who first admitted the rank and file I am afraid that Lady Dorothy's Primrose League is not free from responsi

It

"I

to the scandal of many Tories, and some Whigs, that the working classes were "our own flesh and blood," his truism applied to the franchise. was the Primrose League, a most successful institution, that conceived the idea of merging the political with the social, of making snobbishness the handmaid to Conservatism. An evening party arranged on political grounds is apt to become a mob. Still, there are mobs and mobs. At the time of the Hyde Park riots, forty years ago, an eminent Whig was asked whether he thought it right to allow a mob in the Park. "There's always a mob in the Park," was his lordship's reply. can't see that it matters how they are dressed." When Cobden went to Cambridge House, for the simple reason that he had been asked, it was "fine ladies," not working women, who "stared at him through their glasses." Lady Dorothy is by no means exclusive. Her typical "aristocrat" is the second Lord Ellenborough, a mischievous firebrand with the gift of the gab, whose father the Chief Justice made his own way in the world by an unscrupulous use of brilliant talents. She has most wisely adapted herself to the changing habits of the time. If she occasionally takes it out in sarcasm. she does it so well that her readers will be the last to reproach her. After a reference to Hudson the "railway king," and to his exclusion from "Society," which must have been after his fall, she mentions "the mob of plebeian wealth which surged into the drawing-rooms," and then proceeds:

Since that time not a few of that mob have themselves obtained titles, and now quite honestly believe that they are the old aristocracy of England. No one deplores the inroads of democracy more than they, and their laments for the old days, when in reality their progenitors were engaged in pro

are

saic but profitable occupations, somewhat amusing to hear. Some, it is true, are quite tolerable imitations of the past; but could the real thing be placed side by side with its copy, the difference would easily appear. However, it must be said that, all things considered, this plutocratic class has not been undeserving of praise. Public-spirited and often generous, they temper such aristocratic vices as they practice with the sterner and more solid qualities inherited from the excellent tradesmen to whose industry and enterprise they owe their present position. Many are munificent patrons of the arts, surrounding themselves with the beautiful eighteenth century portraits of the class they have conquered, which willingly cedes them in order to have the wherewithal not to sink utterly out of sight.

The satire of this passage is almost worthy of Swift, and we must all wish that Lady Dorothy had given us more of it. What are the aristocratic vices I do not pretend to know. Vice is sadly human. But the plain fact that the British aristocracy is not a caste disposes of most things said either against it or in its favor. Except for political purposes it does not exist. If the House of Lords were not an integral part of the Legislature there would be no British aristocracy at all.

Lady Dorothy maintains, on the authority of her brother, that "it was the first Lord Lytton who brought about the fashion of universal and unchanging black for gentlemen's evening dress." If so the first Lord Lytton was a public benefactor. Men are not fit to choose their own clothes, and it seems a pity that there is not a morning dress as well as an evening one. In the cleverest of all his novels, his first I think, Bulwer Lytton has many remarks about dress which, despite Carlyle's scornful contradiction in Sartor Resartus, are perfectly true, though no doubt less important than their author, then a very young man, believed.

I wonder why more people do not read Pelham, or the Adventures of a Gentle

man.

It is extremely diverting, almost every sentence is an epigram, and it was written before Bulwer Lytton took to preaching, a task for which he was comically unfit. Although it was far from Lady Dorothy's purpose to write a manual of instruction for the young, they will find fragments of useful knowledge, besides the origin of the dress coat, scattered about her pages. For instance, they may discover, for I shall not tell them, when and whence the turnip was introduced into England. They may trace the origin of the foolish story about the haunted house in Berkeley Square. They may

also, and here I will assist them, see the origin of a very familiar, and without the explanation a very stupid saying. John Robinson, Surveyor-General of Woods and Forests under Pitt, was an ancestor of Mr. Nevill, Lady Dorothy's husband.

As a politician John Robinson was a great favorite with George the Third. His political career was a long one, for he was Member for Harwich for twenty-six years; being on one occasion bitterly attacked by Sheridan, who, denouncing bribery and its instigators, replied to cries of "Name, name" by pointing to Robinson on the Treasury Bench, exclaiming at the same time, "Yes, I could name him as soon as I could say Jack Robinson!" and thus originated the saying still current at the present day.

I suppose that any ancestor is better than none at all.

Besides the faculty of keen and penetrating observation, Lady Dorothy Nevill has the minor, yet valuable art of telling a good story in the best possible way, and in the fewest possible words. Take, for example, this:

Mr. Harrison Weir, besides being an excellent artist, possessed a very con

siderable knowledge of natural history. The keeping of pigeons was one of his special hobbies. He once gave me some, but carelessly enough, after confiding them to the charge of the head gardener, I paid little further attention to them. A week or so later Mr. Harrison Weir came to pay us a visit, and on his arrival inquired "Well, how are the pigeons I sent you?" "Quite well," said I, "and as happy as the day is long." To which he rejoined, "I know they are, for three days ago they all came back to their old home in my garden, and have remained there ever since."

A day spent by a pigeon with a gardener might prove even shorter than a day spent by a man with Lady Dorothy. But, with all respect for the memory of Harrison Weir, I cannot help thinking that the legitimate purpose of questions outside a court of law is to obtain information, and not to set traps. Although I am not quite sure that the story I am about to quote is altogether new, I am confident that the readers of the Independent will forgive me for repeating it:

There was George Payne, who dropped his worldly means broadcast into the treacherous quicksand which is euphemistically known under the name of the Turf. In some respects, perhaps, not altogether a very shining light, he was always unruffled and pleasant in conversation, with great aptitude of speech for extrication from any awkward situation. "Are you not coming to church, Mr. Payne?" was on one occasion the stern interrogation of his hostess, a very great lady, who descended upon him in all the severity of her Sabbath panoply. "No, Duchess, I am not," he replied, making swiftly for the door, but pausing, as by a polite afterthought, previous to his exit, he exclaimed with magnificent emphasis, "Not that I see any harm in it."

ple. It is at least satisfactory to know that he did not share the opinion of Thomas Carlyle. "Carlyle," said the late Lord Houghton, "always goes to church at Fryston; and it's really very good of him, because, you know, he thinks it a sin."

There is in this book a fine collection of miscellaneous things said by the way, what lawyers call obiter dicta. Archbishop Whately, who did not love High Churchmen, and whom High Churchmen did not love, exclaimed in the House of Lords, "A man may hold any opinions with honor, but I don't like to see a man holding the opinions of one Church with the revenues of another." His Grace might have added the old maxim that you may hold anything if you hold your tongue. Lord Winchilsea said, wittily but unjustly, of the Greville Memoirs, "It is as if Judas Iscariot wrote the private lives of the Apostles." Lady Dorothy's own judgment upon the policy which led to the South African War is interesting because it represents in popular language the sentiment expressed by the General Election in 1900:

I was not myself over-enthusiastic about the war in question, but, nevertheless, I suppose that, sooner or later, some sort of a conflict was bound to have come.

When Lord Derby, the Foreign Secretary, was told that, sooner or later, war with Russia was inevitable, he replied promptly that he would have it later. That was in 1876, and we have not had it yet. Was Lady Dorothy quite serious when she wrote, "The present Poet Laureate, however, in addition to verse, has written some delightful prose"? Or was she thinking of Whistler's comment on a catalogue of Leighton's numerous accomplishments? "Paints too, I believe," quoth the caustic American. If Lady Dorothy has a fault as a compiler. it is a

fondness for quoting bad poetry. It is therefore with inexpressible solace and relief that one comes upon the lines written for her dead dogs and horses by a Chancellor of the Exchequer:

Soft lie the turf on these, who find their rest

Upon our common Mother's ample breast.

Unstained by meanness, avarice, and pride,

They never cheated and they never lied.

No gluttonous excess their slumbers broke,

No burning alcohol nor stifling smoke; They ne'er intrigued a rival to displace; They ran, but never betted on, a race. Content with harmless sports and temperate food,

Boundless in love and faith and gratitude.

Happy the man, if there be any such, Of whom his epitaph can say as much.

To find anything better of their kind than these twelve verses of Robert Lowe's one must go to Dryden or to Pope.

Drawing a moral from this lively and kindly book would be breaking a butterfly upon a wheel. Lady Dorothy Nevill makes no attempt to teach, or to improve, mankind. Perhaps she knows them too well. At any rate her knowledge has not made her morose or severe. She always gives the sinner the benefit of the doubt, and cheerfully admits that the vulgarest people are sometimes the most philanthropic. She writes like one incapable of hatred, without an enemy in the world. If she takes nothing, not even Toryism, very seriously, her judgments are charitable, and her survey is serene. Sydney Smith, the shrewdest of men, observed in his old age that people were stupider and more good-natured than he thought when he was young. Lady Dorothy has not had much to do with stupid people. While no society comes amiss to her. for it is all human, she

has associated with the wittiest and the wisest men and women of three generations. The London Society of her youth, which was exclusive in the sense that it excluded mere wealth, has disappeared, perhaps for good, perhaps for evil, certainly for ever. In place of it there are an infinite series of sets, and a not inconsiderable number of people who do their work, and eat their dinners, without caring whether there are any sets at all. To be smart, or fast, or even vulgar, requires an income which very few of Queen Victoria's subjects drew when she came to the throne. If there is nothing quite so boring as the worship of the golden calf, the calf cannot compel even the poorest to bow down before it. In describing Claude's picture of the original image, and its Semitic adorers, Ruskin pointed out that two persons, apparently uninterested in idolatry, were rowing in a pleasure-boat on the river. Whether there was a river in the desert of Sinai we need not pause to inquire. These things are an allegory. That pleasure-boat still exists for the lovers The Independent Review.

of good books, and real talk, who take no stock of multi-millionaires, and wor ship no human being, at least of their own sex. I was once told in a solemn whisper that the richest man in the world was approaching. He looked almost as insignificant as he was, and I have forgotten even his name. Very likely he was generous, and charitable. and just, and kind. But interesting. no. When Lady Dorothy Nevill brings out a new edition of her book, she might append to it the first and last stanzas of a poem written by an accomplished scholar, who was also a thorough man of the world.

How happy is he born and taught Who feareth not another's will; Whose armor is his honest thought.

And simple truth his utmost skill. That man is free from servile bonds. From hope to rise, or fear to fall. Lord of himself, though not of lands. And having nothing yet hath all.

When will Eton again have such a Provost as Sir Henry Wotton?

Herbert Paul

The rank smoke of the newlyquenched torches trailed up, reluctantly, into the flawless morning air. One brand still blazed, a red smirch in the dawn sunlight, and in the glance of the man who carried it smouldered another unsatisfied fire. He stood with his followers, some twenty of them massed behind him, and confronted his prisoner eye to eye.

"No," said the captive softly, in answer to that wordless menace and question, and he lifted his bound hands as though in readiness for the threatened torture of the match. The clubman met the mute defiance with a snarl of anger, but he made no move

ment. Hugh Griffith smiled faintly: he was used to rule men; he had swayed them in either of the hostile camps and at the Court of the King. and even in this extremity his sense of power did not fail him.

A pause followed, while the early light fell with a searching and pitiless purity on the score of clubmen, baggard, half clad, seamed and knotted with toil and gaunt with the misery of finding toil no longer. It drew a meaning gleam along the curved blades of scythes wielded for no harvest of grass or grain, and dulled yet more the tawny torch-flame. Behind the huddled figures stretched the moor, surge