knocks with a rival as to bleed a Jew. And the descriptions are vivid enough to bring the scenes straight home to the reader. We seem to hear the breaking of lances, the ring of the quarterstaff, the twang of the bow, to follow the Black Knight and Gurth in their nocturnal adventures, to wait for the coming of the champion in the lists of Templetown, or to watch with Rebecca from the latticewindow of Torquilstone the deeds of the Black Knight and of Locksley and his merry men. And little will it weigh on the soul of the boy-reader if the hero really did, as Thackeray suggests, marry the wrong young woman. have a distinct recollection that in our school-days we were as orthodox as Friar Tuck, and not only were at one with him when he declined to champion Rebecca on the ground of her religion, but felt also that Athelstane had a legitimate grievance when he was apparently killed owing to the circumstance of his having mistaken a Jewess for a Christian. But if we could not in those days appreciate the beauties of Rebecca's character as we have learnt to do since, we never had occasion to refer to the number of the page if we were asked how far we had read in Ivanhoe.' In fact we "I do not rhyme to that dull elf Who cannot image to himself, That all through Flodden's dismal night Wilton was foremost in the fight; That, when brave Surrey's steed was slain, 'Twas Wilton mounted him again; 'Twas Wilton's hand that deepest hewed Amid the spearman's stubborn wood." As for his poems, so for his novels Scott took for granted or presupposed a certain amount of intellectual sympathy in his reader. The Wizard of the North is willing and able to transport the mortal into the realms of fairyland or the regions of romance, but the follower must be a willing disciple rather than a dull clown like Bottom, easily content to sleep by the way if only he has enough provender to satisfy his brute nature cravings when he awakes, and preferring to have his head scratched and his ears tickled by attendant elves rather than to listen to the soft whispers of the Fairy Queen. But what if we have to deal with a mind incapable of following these flights of imagination? what if "nil salit Arcadico juveni"? Are we to give up the encouragement of reading in despair, and allow the boy to remain of the earth earthy? Parents are only too often ready to throw off the burden of responsibility in these matters or shift it on to other shoulders,―to pack the boy off to school when the time comes, and say what practically amounts to this, "We give you this child to educate, and expect you to teach him Latin and Greek prose and poetry. You have virgin soil to work upon. For in all the years that he has been under our care, we have taught him neither to read or think or to employ his mind in any way what ever. We understand that they make a great point of Latin verses at Eton, and so we hope that he will begin verses at once." Might it not be as well if they occasionally did a little towards dressing that virgin soil, where ill weeds may otherwise grow apace? or do they imagine that, like the earth of the golden age period, it will of its own accord, and with no external culture, bring forth seasonable fruits? There are tonics for the mind as well as for the body. The child who is taught to read for himself in small doses at a time, and at eight or nine promoted to such excellent short stories as 'The Little Duke' or 'The Lances of Lynwood,' may reasonably be expected to tackle one of the Waverleys at ten. But why again, after all, this preference for the Waverleys? For people nowadays are at pains to tell us that Henty's books are more instructive and more interesting to boys, and that our generation only reads Walter Scott's novels faute de mieux. Now we have no possible ground for quarrel of any sort with Mr Henty. In fact we feel that we owe him a debt of deep gratitude for having compiled so many books which that fastidious and dilettante student, the boy of the latter part of this nineteenth century, will occasionally condescend to read. We envy the writer his marvellous power of research and his indefatigable industry, and we fully appreciate that in all the many thousand pages which he has written there is not one line which need be expurgated before the book is given in all confidence into the hands of our boys and girls. We will go still further and say that the boy who follows the fortunes of Mr Henty's heroes through all the foreign countries and all the historical periods which are introduced, will have imbibed a considerable amount of useful knowledge and sound information. He would, like Ulysses, know the manners and customs of many races of men, and we hope that he will be gifted with the memory of a Nestor and be able at the end of the course to assign the manners and customs as well as the incidents to the rightful proprietors. There is the danger-for such is the nature of boyhood-that the historical part will be skipped or soon forgotten, and the adventures only of the hero be studied or remembered which, so far as instruc tion goes, might almost as well have happened to him here in England as in New Zealand, South Africa, or the Punjab. As we compare one of Henty's books with a Waverley novel, we seem to be contrasting the work of a laborious and painstaking artist who rather sacrifices effect to accuracy of detail, and that of the rapid and brilliant painter who dashes off in a minute something of which the general effect is so vividly striking that the spectator abandons himself to that wholly and forgets to criticise the details. In our childhood we were occasionally set down to read a story with a moral. The story came first and the moral followed: provided that the former was pass. ably amusing, we seldom troubled our head about the latter-indeed we regarded it as an unnecessary appendage, and could have dispensed with it altogether. As it came at the end, there was no special obligation to read it; had it come elsewhere we might have resented the intrusion, but until we saw it actually staring us in the face, we often never suspected its existence. It was, we feel now, owing to the obtrusiveness of a whole chain of "morals" that we entirely failed to get up any enthusiasm over the perusal of 'Sandford and Merton,' and cordially hated Mr Barlow as the moral-monger. The moral in Mr Henty's historical story-book is of course the history. The accuracy of the history has to come first, and when that is once firmly established, the story is obviously invented as an after-thought to drive the moral home, with the result that there is an air of artificiality about the one main character round whom the subsidiary dramatis personæ circle like the lesser stars around the moon. And again the leading character in any one book of the whole series is monotonously similar to the leading character in the preceding or the following volume. The whole generation of boy-heroes introduced into the world of fiction by Mr Henty instinctively reminds us of a song we have occasionally heard, "The boy who was born to be King." For from the moment that the "dear lads " have read in the introductory epistle that there is an interesting part of the world called India, and that there was once a famous war, to that interesting part of the world and to that famous war they are sure that the boy, who is at school in the first chapter of the book, will have to go. He may not suddenly be called upon to act as commander-in-chief, but he will in all certainty be endowed with that rare gift, an old head on young shoulders; he will fairly win his spurs by the time that he is twentyone, and long before that age will probably lose his heart to the girl he is destined to marry, who will have been miraculously rescued by him from some extremely unpleasant predicament. Instructive, if seriously read, Henty's stories most distinctly are, but the temptation is to avoid the instruction as we used to avoid the moral, and picking out the places of adventure, to leave on the plate the history part of the pudding. Scott, on the other hand, in his historical novel painted the map of history with such artistic finish, and laid on the colours with so deft a brush, that we hardly suspect the draught of the outline. The history he gives us is told incidentally, and only to such an extent as the development of the story requires. As we do not at first look too closely into the details of the picture that attracts our view on the line in the Academy, so too the reader of Walter Scott has no occasion to weary himself by vainly searching for missing details in his pictured history, but must be content to accept it for what it is a vivid sketch of the spirit of the age. How true to life the pictures are in our textbook, 'Ivanhoe'! John, as we can fancy him on the eve of signing Magna Charta, sulkily acquiescing or feigning to acquiesce in the caprice of his turbulent followers, but consoling himself with the thought that, even if the worst comes to the worst, he will still have his revenge: Richard, the rollicking adventurer, a knight-errant rather than a king, a fine figure of a man, but tainted with a double portion of the old Plantagenet wilfulness and impetuous temper: a country overrun by turbulent spirits, barons and outlaws both, ready to fly at each other's throats on any or every possible occasion, the haughty and lascivious Norman, the avaricious and time-serving churchman, the Saxon thane still clinging to his ideas of re-establishing an extinct royalty, the festering iniquity lurking beneath the semi-priestly garb of the Knight Templar, and with it all a prophecy, conveyed in the fall of Torquilstone, of a day when the baronial power should be a thing of the past, and the Commons of England should strike home for their liberties. Well could he dress his tackle yeomanly; His arrows droopèd not with feathers low, And in his hand he bore a mighty bow." And as we read in those same lectures that "Robin Hood and his companions represented the national struggle of the AngloSaxons against the Normans and of the natives against foreign favourites," we recognise the truth of the novelist's historical sketch. And yet, as we said before, the fact that he is teaching us history is nowhere paraded by Walter Scott: it is rather that we insensibly imbibe the historical information as we follow the fortunes of his realistic characters. There is room, however, in our libraries for a Henty as well as a Scott, and the reading of the one need in no degree interfere with the reading of the other. We seem to know of no book of the living writer which goes over quite the same ground as that which the great novelist almost sanctified to his use. We think of Mr Staple's speech at the memorable cricket dinner in 'Pickwick': "If I were not Dumkins, I would be Luffey; if I were not Podder, I would be Struggles ;" and we congratulate the rising generation on the fact that they can be Dumkins and Luffey, Podder and Struggles, readers of Scott and readers of Henty, in one and the same boyhood, and we hope at least that they will read the one or the other. But we doubt whether in days to come, as they sit middle-aged men in their studychairs, the books of these latterday writers will have made quite as deep an impression on their memories, or retain quite such a lasting hold on their affections, as Walter Scott's works have done in many other cases besides our own. DEATH IN THE ALPS. THERE was bustle and excite- he did not look his six feet of ment inside of the principal hotel height. But for his head and face in Vargues, for a party was pre- you would have taken him for a paring to attempt the ascent of the soldier, so erect was his carriage. formidable Pic d'Aube. Once upon But his broad white forehead and a time the attempt to ascend the thoughtful cast of face spoke of dreaded Pic had caused a wave of the intellectual life. Hugh Rainer emotion to run through the little in his day had been a great athlete. community and a fierce sensation But there is in these days a belief to agitate the hotels. The depar- or a superstition-which you will ture of the daring band-looked upon as curiosity's forlorn - hope -was something between a funeral procession and a triumphal march. Gentle eyes gazed tenderly after them, and telescopes lay heavily upon them till the mountain hid them from view. Small wonder that many have climbed to heaven up this snowy ladder of the sky. Nowadays the good people of Vargues only shrug their shoulders when they see a party with guides pass through their quiet streets, and wonder if life is so unattractive in their own country that these foreigners care to risk losing it to hear an avalanche roar. So, not unlikely, thought the guides and porters who hung waiting, ready booted and furred, and carrying in their hands the ropes with which some have played the part of their own executioners. But they laughed and talked, and thought chiefly of the golden guineas which would jingle in their pockets when the toil was over. In the doorway a man stood smoking. His dress and general air of aloofness proclaimed him to be a Briton. His age could not have been accurately determined, so much did he contradict himself. He seemed to be in his prime, but his prime had evidently come early. He was so well-proportioned that that brawn and brain do not go together, and that whoever holds by the latter must slight his biceps and calves. The minister's robe must hide thorax and thigh discreetly out of sight, lest religion be scandalised; and in later years he had demurely dropped his gown over his early ways. But a week ago he had kicked gown and bands into a dark cupboard, and had started for that happy corner of the North dropped by nature in the South as a playground and a refuge for the peoples that cluster about its knees. To him the Pic d'Aube was as familiar as Ben Lomond-or more so. Every year he struck a match on the loftiest rock in Europe, and every time he left on the summit of the Pic a handful of earth brought from his garden at Perth, that he might have something of his own there, and thus feel a sense of proprietorship in it. Presently he looked round as a man lounged out to join him, cigar in mouth. The new-comer was a man of fifty, clean-shaven, military-looking, heavily moustached, with the unmistakable look of a cavalry officer in undress. His was a suggestive figure, and fired the imagination. A man of many continents, as a British officer must be: Asia, Africa, and America |