was then reduced within a small compass-not to save himself trouble, for he at once gave himself up to the duties of his office. His good humour, frankness, and sincerity pleased, and yet inspired a respect which he took no other pains to

attract.

The great and indelible blot on the fame of Fox was his coalition with Lord North. No such blot besmirched the escutcheon of Lord Randolph. Once or twice,' he said, 'as in the case of Pigott, I broke out against folly and ineptitude; but I never opposed my party as a policy.' Abandoned by his colleagues on his resignation; thwarted by them at the time of the Birmingham election, a treatment he felt keenly; his advice as to the Parnell Commission wholly disregarded; snubbed on the occasion of his Licensing Bill-to the last he was loyal to the party whom he educated far more successfully than ever Disraeli did in the arts and moods of the Tory democracy, and thereby contributed largely to their triumph in 1895. Disraeli had idealised it long ago in Sybil, but Lord Randolph hardened the idealised material into good practical concrete. At Dartford, Birmingham, and elsewhere he laid great stress on the power of the democracy, and at the Carlton Club at Cambridge he told his audience that we had an hereditary monarchy, an hereditary Chamber and a representative Chamber; but what, he asked, is the foundation of this very ancient and curious structure?

The foundation is totally new, purely modern, absolutely untried; you have changed the old and gone to a new foundation. Your new foundation is a great seething, swaying mass of some five million of electors, who have it in their power, if they should so please, by the mere heave of the shoulder, if they only act with moderate unanimity, to sweep away entirely the three ancient institutions which I have described, and put anything they like in their place; and my state of mind when these problems come across me, which is very rarely, is one of wonder-or I should say, of admiration and hope, because the alternative state of mind would be one of terror and despair. . . . My especial safeguard against such a state of mental annihilation and mental despair is my firm belief in the ascertained and much tried common-sense of the English people. That is the faith of the Tory democracy, in which I shall now abide. It is not many years since the most prominent man in the present Cabinet said he did not believe in a Tory workingHe had challenged a meeting at Birmingham if they could produce such a thing. 'I am one,' said a man, and a shout went up-'Ah, he's the Parish Beadle!'

man.

But that triumph and the harvest of the seed he had sown he did not live to see. From his fall to his tragic end he bore with him to the grave much affection, much admiration, and many regrets of true friends and political opponents. He might have used the words put into the mouth of the unfortunate Queen Mary by Schiller: 'I have been much hated, but I have been much beloved.'

Nothing, I am sure, is more curious in political biography than the fascination Lord Randolph Churchill possessed over his political opponents. Notwithstanding his exaggerated invective, Mr. Gladstone could not altogether resist the charm and sympathetic genius of his

younger opponent. He frankly and fully admired Lord Randolph's short leadership of the House of Commons, his insight, and his dash and courage, and he sympathized with his not unsuccessful struggles over his loved economy. Modesty is not, perhaps, among the virtues attributed to Lord Randolph; but there was some far off touch of it in a letter he wrote to me, in which he says: 'I am not so conceited as to suppose that Mr. Gladstone could care for or even notice any speech of mine.' But Mr. Gladstone did notice the rising man, and, turning to a colleague on the occasion of one of Lord Randolph's early speeches, he said prophetically: 'That is a young man you will have to reckon with one of these days.' They met several times, and Mr. Gladstone often spoke in warm terms about the power Lord Randolph possessed of making himself loved and respected by the various heads. of departments in which he worked, of his aptitude for learning, of his admirable and courageous work towards economy, of his personal courtesy and his pre-eminent qualities as a host, which could not be exaggerated. And Lord Randolph's admiration for Mr. Gladstone was unbounded and sincere. I recollect on one occasion when Mr. Gladstone had been talking after dinner, as the men were leaving the room, Lord Randolph said to a Unionist friend: And that is the man you have left. How could you have done it?'

Dr. Johnson said: When I was beginning the world and was nobody and nothing, the joy of my life was to fire at all the established wits, and then everybody loved to halloo me on.' Disraeli followed the great Doctor's example in his attacks on Peel; and Lord Randolph, probably with similar motives, attacked Mr. Gladstone with an exaggeration we now all deplore. But if Lord Randolph was violent and even unscrupulous at times in his attacks, when a conviction came to him that he had been mistaken he was generous in acknowledging it. In language of real eloquence he had denounced the policy of Mr. Gladstone's Government in the Transvaal. But when years afterwards he was face to face with the facts on the spot, he wrote a letter to a London newspaper which attracted great attention at the time, and which contained a retractation of the rash judgment he had pronounced, so complete and at the same time so judicious that it is well worthy of being remembered at the present critical juncture in our relations with that Republic.

The surrender of the Transvaal [he wrote] and the peace concluded by Mr. Gladstone with the victors of Majuba Hill, were at the time, and still are, the object of sharp criticism and bitter denunciation from many politicians at home, quorum pars parva fui. Better and more precise information, combined with cool reflection, leads me to the conclusion that had the British Government of that day taken advantage of its strong military position and annihilated, as it could easily have done, the Boer forces, it would indeed have regained the Transvaal, but it would have lost Cape Colony. . . . The actual magnanimity of the peace with the Boers concluded by Mr. Gladstone's Ministry after two humiliating military reverses suffered by the arms under their control, became plainly apparent to

any hostility

the just and sensible mind of the Dutch Cape Colonist, atoned for much of past grievance, and demonstrated the total absence in the English mind of or unfriendliness to the Dutch race. Concord between Dutch and English in the Colony from that moment became possible.

A retractation so generous and hearty as this covers a multitude of rash vituperations.

In his strongest political animosities Lord Randolph ever retained his sense of humour. Shortly after he had written a letter to the Times containing a violent attack on Lord Granville, he was crossing the Channel and was dreadfully sea-sick. 'How Granville would like to see me now,' he said. Indeed I should have thought that no one could ever have doubted his sense of humour; yet in the obituary notice in one of the leading papers it was said he was totally devoid of it. Not only had he a sense of humour, but he is one of the few parliamentarians who have left sayings that have become proverbial. The elder of his colleagues were known as 'the old gang.' The Unionists as the crutch of the Tory Party.' His was the mint from which came 'the mediocrities with double names,' 'the old man in a hurry,'' the duty of an Opposition is to oppose,' and many more.

It seems a paradox in God's providence that a man of genius, great talent, and splendid promise should in the prime of his life have been stricken down by a disease which appears cruel to us who see only through a glass darkly. 'But as in a piece of tapestry, where on one side all is a confused and tangled mass of knots and on the other a beautiful picture, so from the everlasting hills will this earthly life appear not the vain and chanceful thing men deem it here, but a perfect plan guided by a divine hand unto a perfect end.'

When present at his funeral service in the Abbey, I could not but think sadly of what he many a time said humorously: 'Mr. Gladstone will long outlive me; and I often tell my wife what a beautiful letter he will write on my death, proposing my burial in Westminster Abbey.' I cannot better conclude this inadequate sketch than by quoting the words used by Mr. Gladstone in writing to his poor mother:

You followed your son at every step with, if possible, more than a mother's love; and on the other hand, in addition to his conspicuous talents, he had gifts which greatly tended to attach to him those with whom he was brought into contact. For my own share, I received many marks of his courtesy and kindness, and I have only agreeable recollections of him to cherish.

ALGERNON WEST.

ON THE DERVISH FRONTIER

PARTS of Africa have to be discovered and other parts rediscovered, and each little war and each little journey contributes to the accomplishment of both these ends with alarming rapidity, and the geographical millennium is looming in the distance when the traveller will no longer require his sextant and his theodolite, but will take his spade and his pruning-hook to cultivate the land this generation is so busy in mapping out.

This last winter we have added a few square miles to a blank corner of the map where rediscovery was necessary, and where rediscovery will go on apace and produce most interesting results when we have conquered the barbarous followers of the Khalifa, and restored law and order to that wide portion of Africa known as the Eastern Soudan; for the Soudan, meaning in Arabic 'the country of the blacks,' really extends from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. Little did we think when we started to explore the western shores of the Red Sea that the explosion with the Dervishes was so near, otherwise I think we should have turned our steps in another direction.

To effect our ends we hired an 80-ton Arab dhow at Suez, and after placing it in the hands of a carpenter, who boarded off two cabins for us four whites in the big open stern cabin of the antiquated craft, leaving a sort of verandah in front of them where we lived by day, we embarked with a consumed plum pudding inside us and another in our hands for future consumption, last Christmas Day.

Our captain, Rais Himaya, turned out an excellent fellow, as also did the seventeen sailors he had under him, and though at times they would quarrel loudly enough amongst themselves, the only points of discord which arose between us always had reference to the length of time they wished to stop in harbour and the length of distance they wished to go in a day. Ill-fed, dirty, unkempt men as our sailors were, we got to like them all, from the elderly, dignified Mohammed, who thought he knew more about navigation than the captain, to the buffoon who played the tomtom and made everybody laugh; this worthy individual was the recognised leader of all the festivities with which they regaled us from time to time, consisting of very ugly songs and a yet uglier dance, the chief art in which

consisted in wagging their elastic tails with an energy which mortals further removed from monkey origin could never hope to approach.

Four days' sailing with an excellent north wind behind us brought us to Kosseir, our last comparatively civilised point, where we stayed for two nights to do our final victualling arrangements. Kosseir is a wretched place now, though twice in its existence it has been of importance, owing to its road connection with Keneh on the Nile. The ruins of the old Ptolemaic town Myos Hormos are five miles to the north of the present one, where the Red Sea fleets in ancient days assembled to start for India, and twenty years ago it was a favourite point for the departure of pilgrims for Mecca, and the P. & O. had offices there, which are now turned into camel stables. Kosseir is waiting for a railway before it can again recoup its fortunes.

Along the whole coast-line from Kosseir to Sawakin we may say that there are no permanent places of residence, if we except the tiny Egyptian military stations with their fort and huts for the soldiers at Halaib, Mohammed Gol, and Darour; it is practically desert all the way, and is only visited by the nomad Ababdeh and Bisharin tribes, when after the rains they can obtain there a scanty pasturage for their flocks. During the Ptolemaic and early Arab periods the condition of affairs was very different; several considerable towns stood on this coast, now marked only by heaps of sand and a few fallen walls. In spite of its aridity this coast-line has a wonderful charm of its own, its lofty, deeply serrated mountains are a perpetual joy to look upon, and the sunset effects were unspeakably glorious, rich in every conceivable colour and throwing out the sharp outline of the pointed peaks against the crimson sky.

The nature of this coast-line, too, is singularly uniform, and offers tremendous obstacles to navigation, owing to the great belt of coral reefs along it, through which the passage was often barely wide enough for our dhow to pass, and against which on more than one occasion we came in unpleasant contact. The bay of Berenice, for example, was for this reason known in ancient times as ȧκáðaрTоs KóλжOs, and is now known as 'Foul Bay;' it can only be navigated with the greatest care by native pilots accustomed to the various aspects of the water, which in many places only just covers the treacherous reefs. All boats are obliged to anchor during the night either just inside the reefs, or in the numerous coves along the coast, which are caused by the percolations of fresh water through the sandbeds of rivers into the sea, and these preventing the coral insect from erecting its continuous wall.

Sometimes when the coral reef rises above the surface low islets have been formed with sandy surface and a scant marine vegetation. By one of these named Siyal we were anchored for a night, and on landing we found it about three miles in length, some fifty feet in width, and never more than four feet above the surface of the sea. On its