judice (which, however, is not a musical or even artistic prejudice, but something else and something different) against both.

"It was a mistake to go from the Burne-Jones exhibition to an afternoon concert where the attraction was a player on the pianoforte. Only by rare good fortune could it be the soothing change required, and that should have been considered in time. But it was not, and the consequence was injustice not only to myself, but perhaps to the young man who was the attraction. Had it been necessary to hear him play that afternoon, so soon after leaving the New Gallery, the fair thing to him would have been an hour of preparation at at the Bath Club: a bracing douche, a mutton-chop, a glass of fortifying burgundy. In any event that could not have been harmful; for, let the performer be who or what he may, no concert-room Broadwood should be encountered by persons in an irritable or lapsing condition of the nervous system. Set wide open, and with a shock-haired young man advancing toward it with swinging hands, it immediately becomes more object of terror than delight. The machine we know: what is to be expected of those hands? The hall is large; in it are many, many ladies; two violins and a 'cello await the doom of the drowned; and the Attraction has yet to make an English reputation: how much, then, there is to fear! Yet it is possible to hope, for with skill, touch,' and restraint,

an

very pleasing music may be drawn from an instrument which in that form is the most brutal that genius has anything to do with. Does genius, or genius not in want of bread, ever write now for the concert

grand? Would genius ever have written for the pianoforte had it come into existence as the concert grand? If these are foolish questions, explain their folly by an ear that finds more soul in the drum than in the concert grand, when banged as no professor of the humbler instrument thumps out its truer voice of nature.

"With studied awkwardness, the shock-haired young man takes his place; the stringed instruments lead off, their lovely voices no more strained, no more conscious, than the perfume streaming from the rose, the brier-rose, and the violet; and it goes to my heart to mark how humbly the 'cello the 'cello, which hasn't its match in this world as a singing instrument-seems to wait upon the mechanical monster by which it is to be devoured. He begins, the distinguished Attraction, very playfully, very prettily; but not without the nimbleness which is one of the most admired and detestable characteristics of a performance on the concert grand. grand. Why, I cannot tell ; but it reminds me of the male opera-dancers who, in days that I remember, figured in the ballet in attire shaped like Harlequins, but cut low in the neck! (Is this an extravagant resemblance? Do you suppose it put into my head by the BurneJones collection?) It was some

time, indeed, before the crash came; but it was foreseen, foreknown, its place in the score fatally provided years ago by a composer whose deafness would have been much less afflicting to him in these days than it was in his own. The Attraction, his opportunity arriving, justified expectancy to the full. From the time when the thumping began legitimately, his action was the action of a man who would shampoo an unwilling tiger. At every stroke the artist's head was jerked forward from the second vertebra (vertebra dentata, the pivot-bone, you know), so violently did he throw himself upon the keyboard; and when dislocation seemed possible in consequence, the music which might have soothed and compensated our alarms was a mere ill-mixed noise of percussion and reverberation. The thump was more audible than the note.

pity of the violins, and for the cello's sake and my own (for we are lovers) could have murdered the concert grand. Yet I would not have you think me contemptuous of the pleasure of the audience. It was sincere and improving in every way; and I hope to die in the opinion that the sensitive taste which is also supercilious is in the first place stupid, in the second place vulgar, in the third inhuman. We rise upon the stepping-stones of our dead selves to higher things.' It is the hammerer of concert grands, not even the grand itself, that really offends, and what cares he for music, or anything but marvellous execution? If he would only make it all léger-demain!

6

"But it pleased. The au dience applauded vehemently, and again applauded and again. But I-I could have cried for

"But perhaps if I had not gone to the New Gallery that morning, or if the Bath Club had been subsequently visited

However, it is useless to follow out these speculations, and herewith concludes-Yours very faithfully,

66 CHAS. WINTERLEY."

IT is a mark of the nature of the British empire, and of the conditions under which we hold it, that hardly a month passes, certainly never so much as half a year, but some place which the average well-educated person cannot even find on the map leaps into sudden publicity, and is on every newspaper placard and in every one's mouth. Yesterday they were unknown, to-morrow probably they will be forgotten. Fashoda made a somewhat deeper impression; yet for a week or so last year eyes were fixed on Borgu and Mossi just as keenly as they were later on the Bahr-el-Ghazal-and with good reason, for there was more serious danger of a conflict over the Niger than ever arose over the Nile. Now the strain has been forgotten the men out there who were doing the empire's work on its frontiers are no longer actors before a great theatre; but the work goes on all the same, and it is just as well to set on record what was done and is being done.

The Convention signed last July in Paris between Great Britain and France ended suddenly and summarily a chapter of history which has not yet been written the story of French aggressions on territories claimed by us in West Africa, and of our too-long-deferred resistance to those aggressions. The encroachment proceeded steadily

VOL. CLXV.-NO. MI.

from the Berlin Conference in

1884-85. Within ten years from that date the French, working south and south-east from Senegambia and the Upper Niger, had interposed themselves between the protectorate of Sierra Leone and the Niger so completely that there was nothing to be done but fix a frontier by joint commission, which left that colony practically resourceless; and they were pushing with feverish activity into the regions north of the Gold Coast. In the meanwhile Dahomey, conquered in 1890, had become another base, and expeditions from it were moving northward. Thus in the acute period of the struggle the French were making their way southeast from their posts of Ségu and Bandiagara in the French Sudan, and north and northwest from Carnotville in Upper Dahomey. By 1896 their forces had joined hands behind the Gold Coast, and were striving to retrench as far as possible the hinterlands of that colony, and of German Togoland, while at the same time they endeavoured to make themselves masters of the west bank of the Niger and secure a port on its waters accessible direct from the sea. Thus there were two distinct points of friction between English and French: first, the hinterland of the Gold Coast (Mossi, 2 R