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Cardigan when he was Inspector-General of Cavalry. If any man ever asserted the dignity and importance of his position, he did, and one unfortunate sergeant, to whom he somewhat brusquely addressed a question, was so dumfounded that he could hardly articulate. The Colonel tried to shield him, and hoped that his Lordship would excuse the man, as he was rather nervous. 'Good God!' replied Cardigan, who ever heard of a nervous hussar? Curiously enough, it was often the case that men, who had shown over and over again that they were full of pluck, quite lost their heads when they suddenly found themselves confronted with a live general, particularly if he was a little peremptory. They did not perhaps generally carry their deference for high rank quite so far as the sternly drilled Russians in the Crimean war, who, when one of the Allied Generals blundered into their lines, were so taken aback by the apparition that, instead of securing him as a prisoner, they at once presented arms. It may possibly be well in some ways, if it is the case that the non-commissioned officers and privates of to-day have not the same blind reverence for the heads of the military hierarchy as had their predecessors, but there is no doubt that, on occasions without number in our history, the most marvellous deeds have been accomplished by the command and leading of a general, simply because in the eyes of the rank-and-file he was so tremendous an individual that he must be implicitly and unhesitatingly obeyed.

I dare say I have been garrulous enough for the present.

SALOMON GESSNER AND THE ALPS.

BY J. H. YOXALL, M.P.

I HAD not forgotten the book; we forget nothing we knew in boyhood, when we were 'whacks to receive and marbles to retain ' as Byron said (à peu pres), cribbing-like a boy-from Cervantes himself. No, I had not forgotten the wretched book; that tidy housewife the brain had merely packed a particularly useless memory away in one of the lumber garrets which line one's cranial roof. And there on a dusty shelf, like the bones of some preposterous ignorant protomartyr in a cellule of the Catacombs, the remembrance had long lain perdu, for five-and-thirty years had intervened. Until at Luxembourg on a day of kermesse I got the recollection; in quite the strangest place and hour for such a nexus and tie of thought. A wet Whit-sun was setting, naphtha lamps would soon begin their gusty blazing, a sordid riot of tam-tams, 'phones, and merry-go-rounds was about to break into roar, when, through an open market of marine-stores passing, I spied a pair of blue and white medallions, lying forlorn amidst a spread of wastrel oddments behind a lager-beer barrel, flat on the sopping ground. Dignified yet forlorn they lay, those exquisite ovals, patient amidst the strange bed-fellows of adversity; but was it not a flash of piteous appeal that came from them to one's eye? I verily believe that neglected treasures know a rescuer when they see him much sooner than we always recognise a treasure which ought to be retrieved. 'Look! those are Wedgwood jasper, man!' Hobbinol whispered to me quickly. 'Old Wedgwood-Josiah Wedgwood-1790 Wedgwood, bedad!' For this Hobbinol of mine is an Irish imp, I fancy, related by Royal blood to the familiar that accompanied Barry Lyndon, who had, as you will remember, the finest natural taste for lace and china of any man alive.' And Hobbinol always prompts one skilfully, for he has that ineffable something called flair. If, walking down from Bloomsbury to Westminster, I get an impulse to go round by Caramel Street or Sallow Alley, it is Hobbinol who suggests it, and there will be something treasurable to be found in Caramel Street or Sallow Alley, I well know; it

was Hobbinol who hoicked me, lazy, out of the Hôtel Brasseur, and sent me trapesing through the kermesse. 'Asy, now!' said he, when for nine francs I had rescued the blue and white pair of patricians from their coarse surroundings and carried them off— in a fragment of the Etoile Belge-to a calm old Square. Easy, indeed, in my mind I was as there, in that tree-hung Place all dappled with shadow-leaves clear-cut and bluish, I, sitting at an outside café-table, by electric light and a lens examined my find. Josiah Wedgwood medallions indeed they were, not a doubt of it, and rare ones at that; exquisite in touch and hue, egg-shell smooth, the rich blue shimmering through the ivory-white. Under-cut the high reliefs had been, and polished by the lapidary-the mark was evenly impressed and legible, the oes in it were orange-shapedin short, there were all the signs of aristocracy which real old Wedgwood jasper shows. Votive medallions they were, Muses of Poetry and Painting weeping classic tears upon the profile of a young Apollo; and when around the cranium of the young Apollo I read the name Gessner, instantly off the shelf in my own cranial garret came the old 'Death of Abel' book to mind.

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It is all a matter of taste, as Scaramouch says when he munches the soap-it is all a matter of taste, I know, but-what is it that gives a wretched book and a duffing author their tremendous vogue ? What made the fame of Martin Tupper? What causes the innumerable works of Mr. and the Misses and - to pervade the English-speaking world? I almost think I know. There are still more than half the population of these islands who do not write for the Press, and therefore regard as exceptional those who do. The ancient men that invented writing, and made the voice of man triumphant over Space and Time, were deservedly accounted next to gods' said Carlyle; and something of that feeling persists. If you write, no matter how badly you write, you shall get reputation from folk to whom writing is still a kind of hieroglyphics; as Lamb said, 'All poems are good poems to George.' 'Der Tod Abels,' by Salomon Gessner, was the most pervasive piece of modern print in the world about a century ago. And why? I have hunted up three English versions of it-the Sunday book it was, in Georgian and Victorian households, for two or three generations-and listen; listen and lament that such a book and such a penster should have gained such a vogue :

The silent hours led on the blushing morn, and sprinkled with dewy tears the shadowy earth: the sun darted his early rays

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through the shade of the black cedars on the hills, and tinted with rosy light the fleecy clouds, that swam through the twilight Heavens, when Abel, and his beloved Thyrza, forsook their mossy couch, and repaired to a neighbouring bower of jassmin and roses.' Listen again: 'My beloved parents!' exclaimed Abel, ‘I will pursue my brother to the field. I will say everything to him that fraternal love can dictate; I will embrace him, and he shall not leave my arms till he has promised to banish all resentment and love me.' The melancholy father answered: 'I will go myself to him, my beloved Abel. I will say everything that parental affection and reason can urge. Cain! Cain! With what ceaseless anxiety thou fillest my bosom !' Laudator temporis acti, growling at modern taste, put that in your pipe and smoke it! Is it degeneracy not to be able to digest such fudge and fustian as that?

'The angel of death now summoned the soul of Abel from its ensanguined dwelling. With a celestial smile he obeyed; the purest and most essential parts of his body flew off, mingling with the balmy odours wafted by gentle zephyrs from the flowers.' . . The wonderful painter, Memory! When I re-read that, the other year, the past was limned for me again, in a flash. A midVictorian parlour, a boy on a vast horsehair-seated sofa, I saw. When you lay down to read on that sofa you incontinently slipped off it; if you climbed up anew you immediately fell off again. And the smell of the horsehair, and its prickliness! The Spartan harshness of the bolster when you lay down! Yet there was a certain ethical connection and fitness between Sunday and that sofa; the horsehair was, so to speak, your cilice and penitential shirt for week-day worldliness. If you meant to shirk your penance there was nothing for it but to pull your knickerbockers well down over your bare knees and kneel; kneel on the sofa in the light of a window hung with crimson curtains, made of what used to be called 'rep,' you remember, the cumbrous book supported by the crude red mahogany back of the sofa; while all sorts of strange-coloured lights went quivering about upon the arsenicgreen walls, struck by sun-shafts out of the prism-hung 'lustres' of which the mistress of the house was so proud. Summer Sunday afternoon in Redditch, and the Death of Abel' by Gessner as a proper book for Sunday, though twice he slew the slain; to be read in turn and rota-Oh, Puritan Victorian England!-with those other irreproachable Sunday books, Daubigné's 'Reformation,' Stackhouse's History of the Bible,' and Bunyan's 'Holy War.'

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I remember some of the steel-plate pictures in that bulky 'Stackhouse '-was it not Elia himself who poured ridicule on that particular Sunday book ?-and I recall every gate and captain and quaint Bewickian woodcut in the 'Holy War.' At Spires and Worms one thought again of the 'History of the Reformation,' of course; but I had forgotten the other-oblivion had been granted, the queasy and overfudged young mind had long ago cleared itself of traces of the Gessner stuff. And therefore at first I did not detect the purpose of my lapis-lazuli medallions; I saw them darkly, deeply, beautifully blue,' blue as the under-tow of the Mediterranean, almost; with the reliefs as creamy white and curdy as Mediterranean foam. Oh, a great old fellow, Josiah Wedgwood! I saw a tablet bearing the profile of a young Apollo, bewept by one nymph and belaurelled by another, besung by a third who harpeth, while a handsome adolescent angel (Abel himself, I suppose) extinguishes a particularly long nuptial flambeau and looks down as one does into one's hat at a funeral. I fingered the surface of the jasper; it had just the smooth wet feel that a film of soap-bubble gives to the clay-pipes which soap-bubbles burst upon; I noted the rounded relief of the modelling in places, the thin, flat, blue-tinged lie of it elsewhere. And 'Genuine Josiah !' I told myself- Genuine Josiah!' sounds rather like a new-fangled oath, by the bye-A pair unique! No collection in England includes them! Eh, Hobbinol!' I am afraid I rubbed the palms of my hands together, which is a mercenary and shoplike thing to do; but the treasures were so preposterously and delightfully cheap-nine francs the pair! Then the eye detected the wordGessner' in small over one of the Apollonian profiles, and the boyish memory stirred.

'Come now,' said I to myself when, back in England, I was ranging the two medallions in a cabinet of such gems, 'Let us see whether I, with a boy's capacity for stony injustice, was unfair to the "Death of Abel" book all those years ago.' But the book was gone--you know how books get lost-it was lost, I am sure, for nobody in his senses would have stolen it. It is just the sort of book which people in moments of a mania might borrow and, in moments of equal aberration, return; and you know the kind of book which people return. Nobody can say to what excesses the collecting habit may not lead you, and I have actually acquired as many as three translations of Gessner in English dress. For the sum of three shillings I have procured three English versions of

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