rafters which support the flat roof; and as the windows are always open, they are constantly flying to and fro. There is a fountain in one saloon, and thither they come to drink. After breakfast, which is a very social and substantial meal, we pass a short time in the garden, and then part-Petherick to his duties, and I to mine. We seldom see each other until dinnerhour, at three o'clock. Sometimes visitors may happen to call, but there are few Europeans here, and the Turks I do not see. After dinner, a walk in the garden on the shady side, where the palm and the fig trees are numerous, or beneath the shelter of the vines, when the grapes are forming. This indulgence is but brief, for there is still more work to be done; and again we separate, to meet when the sun is getting low, and then we visit the animals and pets. The antelopes, gazelles, and goats try to put their noses into our pockets; the horses also, as they know well we carry with us nuts and bread for them. We have a multitude of donkeys, bought for our use in the interior; and generally, when our sunset stroll begins, we see the Doctor and Foxcroft, mounted on two of the best, starting for their short evening ride.

When the sun is fairly down and the lamps lighted, coffee is served. We read a little, have plenty of music, and play backgammon. Then comes a grateful thanksgiving, and the day is ended.

The difficulties to be encountered in the getting up the expedition from this place to succour Captains Speke and Grant cannot be exaggerated. The negroes have been cruelly used, and the razzias upon them numerous, and thousands have been carried into slavery. They now mistrust all, and in turn attack strangers-no longer able to distinguish friend from foe. As those who are employed in the slave-trade find it a lucrative one, they prefer it; and it is with much

trouble soldiers or sailors can be engaged here to undertake a legitimate trade. Petherick's agent had, previous to our arrival, secured an efficient body of men for three boats, to proceed to Gondokoro, there to await the advent of Speke. All require five months' pay in advance; and when that is, as a matter of course, paid to them, several run away.

It took but a few days of Petherick's time to arm and equip these men well; but the wind was against the sailing of the boats. The extraordinary high Nile was the cause of this; and not until the 15th of this month (November) did the north wind blow. They then set sail, but the treacherous breeze died away for many hours; and, some three miles from Khartoum, the boats were made fast to the shore, and four of the hired soldiers went off with their guns. This is of frequent occurrence, and a very troublesome thing it is to hunt up these deserters generally without success. We follow with four boats as soon as possible, and with upwards of one hundred and twenty men, well armed. Fortythree soldiers went with the first boats, and they, with a principal agent of Petherick's, were, on their arrival at Gondokoro, to proceed at once towards the south, in the direction of the Lake Nyanza, to meet Captains Speke and Grant. We take up with us some thirty donkeys and three horses: these are intended to carry the beads and baggage as we march in the interior. Negroes, we hear, will not carry loads at this time, so disaffected are they. The feuds amongst the various tribes are furious and many.

We have health, we have hope and energy to bear us up; and we humbly trust that we may, in due time, be enabled to send to our friends at home a faithful account of our journey to the equator, and of a meeting with the brave travellers we go in search of.

IN every good prose writer there will be found a certain harmony of sentence, which cannot be displaced without injury to his meaning. His own ear has accustomed itself to regular measurements of time, to which his thoughts learn mechanically to regulate their march. And in prose, as in verse, it is the pause, be it long or short, which the mind is compelled to make, in order to accommodate its utterance to the ear, that serves to the completer formation of the ideas conveyed; for words, like waters, would run off to their own waste were it not for the checks that compress them. Water-pipes can only convey their stream so long as they resist its pressure, and every skilled workman knows that he cannot expect them to last unless he smooth, with care, the material of which they are composed. For reasons of its own, prose has therefore a rhythm of its

own.

But by rhythm I do not necessarily mean the monotonous rise and fall of balanced periods, nor the amplification of needless epithets, in order to close the cadence with a Johnsonian chime. Every style has its appropriate music; but without a music of some kind it is not style it is scribbling. And even when we take those writers of the last century in whom the taste of the present condemns an overelaborate care for sound, we shall find that the sense which they desire to express, so far from being sacrificed to sound, is rendered with singular distinctness; a merit which

may be reasonably ascribed, in great part, to the increased attention with which the mind revolves its ideas, in its effort to harmonise their utterance. For all harmony necessitates method; and the first principle of method is precision.

In some exquisite critical hints on "Eurythmy," Goethe remarks, "that the best composition in pictures is that which, observing the most delicate laws of harmony, so arranges the objects that they by their position tell their own story." And the rule thus applied to composition in painting, applies no less to compoşition in literature.

In metaphysical works, the writers most conspicuous for harmony of style are those in whom the meaning is most clear from misconception, Thus Hume, the subtlest of all our metaphysicians, is the one whose theories have been the least obscure to his commentators or disciples; for his theories themselves led him to consult, in "every combination of syllables or letters," that euphony which, by pleasing the ear (or, through sympathy, the eye that runs over the book"), allures the attention of the mind, and, while it increases the lucidity of the author by the deliberation with which he selects his expressions, quickens the intelligence of the reader by the charm that lightens the fatigue of its tension; whereas the meaning of Locke is often made needlessly difficult by the ruggedness of his style, and many of the erroneous deductions which his followers have drawn from his system may be

traced to the want of that verbal precision which a due culture of euphony seldom fails to bestow.

Much has been said, with justice, against the peculiar modes of euphony elaborated by Johnson and Gibbon; too pompous and grandiose; too remote from our homely vernacular: granted. But that does not prove the care for euphony to be a fault; it only proves that the modes of euphony favoured by those illustrious writers were too perceptibly artificial to be purely artistic. Yet no critic can say that Johnson and Gibbon are obscure; their meaning is much plainer than that of many a writer who prefers a colloquial diction. Not only in spite of the fault, but because of the fault, we impute to their styles, Johnson and Gibbon are-Johnson and Gibbon. And if you re-formed their rhythm to. simpler modulations, accordant to your own critical canons, they would no more be Johnson and Gibbon, than Pope and Gray would be Pope and Gray

if you reconstructed the 'Essay on Man,' on the theories of Wordsworth; or, by the ruthless excision of redundant epithets, sought, with Goldsmith, to improve the dirge of the 'Elegy' into the jig of a ballad.

It is not, then, that rhythm should be cultivated only for the sake of embellishment, but also for the sake of perspicuity; the culture of rhythm in prose defeats its own object, and results in obscurity, if it seek to conceal poverty of thought by verbal decorations. Its uses, on the contrary, are designed for severe thinkers, though its charm may be insensibly felt by the most ordinary reader,-its uses are based on the common-sense principle, that the more the mind is compelled to linger on the thought, the more the thought itself is likely to emerge, clear and distinct, in the words which it ultimately selects : so metals, opaque in the mass, are made translucent by the process of solution.

There is a great distinction between the art of style and what the phrenologists call "the organ of language." In Jeremy Taylor, for instance, we are dazzled by the opulent splendour of diction with which the preacher comes in state to our souls. High priest of eloquence, to his sacred tiara the many royalties of genius contribute the richest gems of their crowns. But no teacher of style would recommend as a safe model to his pupil the style of Jeremy Taylor. Still more noticeable are the absolute command, and the exquisite selection, of words in Sir Thomas Browne. Milton himself, in the Lycidas' or 'Comus,' has scarcely a more curious felicity of phrase, a more dulcet arrangement of sound, than the 'Essay upon Urn Burial' displays in its musical prose. Yet who would contend that the style of Sir Thomas Browne was that of pure classical

English? Attempt to imitate the Urn Burial,' and you fall into quaint affectation.

I know not if any of his contemporaries, mighty prose-writers though they were, had, on the whole, so subtle and fine a perception of the various capacities of our language as the author of 'Tristram Shandy.' With what finger-how light and how strong-he flies over the keys of the instrument! What delicate elegance he can extract from words the most colloquial and vulgate; and again, with some word unfamiliar and strange, how abruptly he strikes on the universal chords of laughter. He can play with the massive weights of our language as a juggler plays with his airy balls. In an age when other grand writers were squaring their periods by rule and compass, he flings forth his jocund sentences loose and at random; now up to

wards the stars, now down into puddles; yet how they shine where they soar, and how lightly rebound when they fall! But I should have small respect for the critic who advised the youthful author to emulate the style of Sterne. Only writers the most practised could safely venture an occasional, restrained, imitation of his frolicsome zoneless graces.

On the other hand, no praise of Addison's style can exaggerate its merits. Its art is perfectly marvellous. No change of time can render the workmanship obsolete. His style has that nameless urbanity in which we recognise the perfection of manner-courteous, but not courtierlike; so dignified, yet so kindly; so easy, yet so highbred. Its form of English is fixed-a safe and eternal model, of which all imitation pleases - to which all approach is scholarship-like the Latin of the Augustan age. Yet I know not whether we could justly say that Addison possessed a very extensive command of language; certainly not a command equal to that of the writers I have just named. His jewels are admirably set, but they are not of the largest size, nor of the most precious water. Of Goldsmith we may say much the same. His idea of the beauties compatible with chastity of style was limited, but he realised his own idea with exquisite finish of execution. And there is no English writer, Addison alone excepted, to whose lucid periods, always elegant and never effeminate, a young man of genius, desiring to form a style attractive alike to scholars and the populace, should more sedulously devote his days and nights.

But there are standards of heroic achievement which are seldom attained without many bold errors in the trial-errors not incurred by those who are contented with standards of less lofty elevation. We may guess at once where Goldsmith would fail in the rarer beauties of

language, when we find him rebuking the muse of Gray for that luxuriance of epithet which made its characteristic embellishment. From a treasury of poetic expression, enriched by a learning as copious as Johnson's, and selected by a taste more comprehensive than Goldsmith's, Gray extracted those jewels of phrase which render his verse original by the inimitable arrangement of its spoils. He is among poets what Cellini is among artists; ornament is less the accessory grace than the essential merit of his designs.

Lord Bolingbroke's Political Essays, and many of his letters in familiar correspondence, are often admirable alike for arrangement of style and richness of language. And his mode of composition is in singular accordance with the nature of his subjects and the dignity of his station. He was a patrician statesman, and in treating of state affairs he speaks with authority, and not as the scribes-"Quodam modo, præ se ferens in dicendo nobilitatem suam. His irony is majestic, his lamentations are reserved and masculine. His graces of language are those which become an accomplished statesman. He is not a poet, and he takes from poets no ornaments obsolete or far-fetched. He assumes to be a man who has brought into active life the love of letters; like the English friend of Rousseau's St Preux, "he has been conducted to philosophy through the path of the passions." His quotations and his images harmonise with the character he assumes. His similes and illustrations are no wanton enrichments of fancy; they support the argument they adorn-like buttresses which, however relieved with tracery, add an air of solidity to the building against which they lean, and, in leaning, prop. Withal, he has been a man of the world's hard business-a leader of party, a chief among the agencies by which opinion is moulded and action is con

trolled. And therefore, amidst his natural stateliness, there is an absence of pedantry-a popular and genial elegance. His sentences flow loose as if disdainful of verbal care. Yet throughout all there reigns the senatorial decorum. The folds of the toga are not arranged to show off the breadth of the purple hem; the wearer knows too well that, however the folds may fall, the hem cannot fail to be

seen.

Perhaps the charm of Bolingbroke's writings. is in some degree caused by the interest which it is impossible to refuse to the peculiarities of his character and the vicissitudes of his life-an interest to which his very errors contribute, as they do to that which the human heart so mournfully yields to the infirmities of genius in Byron or Burns.

In this English Alcibiades, what restless, but what rich vitality! We first behold him, like his Athenian prototype, bounding into life, a beautiful ambitious youth, seizing on notoriety as a substitute for fame; audacious in profligate excess-less, perhaps, from the riot of the senses, than from a wild joy in the scandal which singles him out for talk. Still but a stripling, he soon wrenches himself from so ignoble a corruption of the desire for renown. He disappears from the haunts that had rung with the turbulent follies of a boy-he expends his redundant activity in travel-and learns the current language of Europe to so nice a perfection, that, in later life, Voltaire himself acknowledges obligations to his critical knowledge of French.

He returns to England, enters Parliament at the age of twentytwo, and wins, as it were with a bound, the fame which a free state accords to the citizen in whom it hails the sovereign orator of his time. Nor of his own time alone. So far as we can judge by concurrent testimonies of great weight, Henry St John was, perhaps, in point of effect upon his audience,

the most brilliant and fascinating orator the English Parliament ever knew; Chesterfield, himself amongst the most accomplished of public speakers, and doing full justice to Chatham, to whom he ascribes "eloquence of every kind," still commends Bolingbroke as the ideal model of the perfect orator. And Chatham must have accepted as truthful the traditions of his precursor's eloquence, when he said he would rather win back from oblivion Lord Bolingbroke's unreported speeches than Livy's lost books-an opinion endorsed by the severer taste of a yet higher authority, Chatham's son.

And how soon all this splendour is obscured! Queen Anne dies; and the councillor of Queen Anne is denounced as a traitor to King George. What a scene, for some highbred novelist, might be laid in the theatre itself, the night in which Bolingbroke vanished from the town he had dazzled and the country he had swayed! The playhouse is crowded; -all eyes turn to one box;-there sits serene the handsome young statesman whom, says Swift, with rare felicity of compliment, men respect, and women love"

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Curious tongues whisper-" But what is really the truth? Is there any proof against him? It is said the articles of impeachment are already drawn up; the Whigs are resolved to have his head. "Tut, impossible ! See how gaily he smiles at this moment! Who has just entered his box-an express? Tut, only the manager. My lord has bespoken the play for to-morrow night."

The curtain falls-falls darkly on an actor greater than any Burbage or Betterton that ever fretted his hour on the mimic stage. Where behind the scenes has my lord disappeared? He is a fugitive on the sea. Axe and headsman are baffled. Where next does my lord reappear? At the playhouse in Paris. All eyes there, as in London, are fixed on the handsome young statesman.