THE one "THE ATTACK." HE secret of M. Bernstein's success is out. It is given away in the title of his new play at the St. James's Theatre. Any or every one of this dramatist's plays might have been called “l'Assaut." M. Bernstein does do, in the exact sense, assault and battery upon us. He uses menacing words; we go in fear of our lives. In the dramatic method of M. Bernstein the arts of persuasion are unknown, unless they are the arts of the persuasion ironically known as peaceful. When an effect comes off the term "premeditation" would meet the case of the ancillary processes more nearly than the term "preparation." For the arts of suggestion this dramatist has no use at all. His are the arts of asseveration rather. Why, even his people cannot hope to be believed by one another unless they asseverate, so that the St. James's stage is filled just now with persons with arms and voices raised, saying to another (in the English translation of George Egerton), "I swear to you. . . The penalty for all this excited externalism of the Bernstein drama is that its people have no longer any life the moment they drop their voices. You remember the Dying Pig, guaranteed to cause great fun and amusement by the vendors on the kerbstone?-well, the Bernstein drama is like that. A successful Bernstein drama is one in which the wind lasts. . . I think the opinion will be general that the wind does not quite last the length of the latest example of the Bernstein drama to be exhibited in London (although not the latest to be written). I rather fancied that I heard M. Bernstein's pig die in the middle of Act Three, and I do not think that the long-drawn sigh of emitted life can have been inaudible to others. As a matter of fact M. Bernstein's pig had a risky moment of inflation when, in the first act, the actress who played the principal young woman came within an ace of making the play appear ridiculous merely because, instead of raising her arms and her voice above her head, she remained a natural young woman. But I see that I shall have to tell the story. leader of the Social Party finds himself about to be ruined, but it is a simple matter for the leader of the Social Party to ruin his friend (whom he never really liked) instead. It is a simple matter, in the Bernstein theatre, of sitting up late of nights for a week or two until one finds the incriminating documents that will do the trick. Of course Mérital finds them, and of course he turns the tables upon the miserable Frépeau. And then the surprise!-Mérital did steal in his youth from his kind employer. But Renée does not mind, since the attack has been beaten off, and her politician is in the running for the Presidency again, or at least the Premiership. No, that is unfair. She loves him for himself alone, for Mérital will retire from politics. That is merely our due, that Mérital should retire from politics. But, lest we should be slower than Renée in taking him to our hearts, Mérital shall make a speech about that lapse of his youth-how sorely he was tempted, how promptly he paid the money back... It was here, in spite of the persuasive arts of Sir George Alexander-(lent to his dramatist, as it were, "to eke his living out")—that the pig of M. Bernstein breathed its last. Miss But I see that I have said nothing about Renée. Renée is what M. Bernstein, one feels sure, would call the Love Interest-a constituent part in every really well-premeditated attack. When Renée, in the first act, declares her love for our politician-prompted, apparently, by the overwhelming effect of that party name, which prompted the others to their "By George!"-the leader of the Social Party tells her that her fresh young love is just like a breath of beautiful incense, but he will remain a father to her. A moment later she is in his arms, and the revulsion in his feelings is not made very clear, but one supposed it, in the full light of the play's complete illumination, te have had something to do with that money he stole. For the rest of the play Renée has really nothing to do except to come out of a door at lulls in the play's excitement and say, “Well?": until, as I have said, she receives that too-long-postponed confession. But for an actress as good as Miss Martha Hedman, that is quite enough to do to be dangerous to a play by M. Bernstein. Hedman is an actress with a voice most pleasing low, and a rare faculty of looking the truth of a suggested emotion. In a word, Miss Hedman is a most unlikely choice for a play by M. Bernstein, and, to speak the truth, in the first act she nearly killed it. How is one to blame an audience for misplaced laughter when the cause is not, to be sure, the actress, but the accidental comicality thrust upon the play when the actress insists upon behaving as a natural woman would? That was what happened at the first performance; and one could not sufficiently admire the firmness of mastery with which Sir George Alexander brought back the play to its own level again, and shamed the misplaced laughter. Mérital is the kind of part Sir George Alexander goes through in a studied négligé, and the quietness of his method did much to soften his dramatist's insistence. The same may be said for the Frépeau of Mr. Holman Clark, who is experienced enough an actor not to find himself surprised in any company, even in the company of English-speaking persons who spend the day with their arms and voices raised. As for M. Bernstein, perhaps it is his destiny on the English stage to render the drama of excited externalism finally impossible. He pushes the thing so far. . . When there are three loud blasts on a horn without his people say, "There is the motor." Excitement at a window about observed action without— Maeterlinck's trick, and Synge's—is no longer exciting with M. Bernstein: it is pandemonium, that is all. When Sir George Alexander, at his dramatist's behest, has shown in his countenance all that can possibly be shown, it is M. Bernstein's cue to come along and say, "Your face is strange. ." lest we may miss it. There is a vulgar phrase for M. Bernstein's method, and we may as well apply it: he rubs it in. Certainly the moment at the St. James's Theatre which most successfully combined The instruction with amusement was the moment in which all Alexandre Mérital is a very splendid politician, with two sons, a daughter, a daughter's friend, and some hangers-on. When the curtain rises the politician is discovered in the act of arriving at a name for his new party, and this name is the Social Party, a name which causes the politician's sons and hangers-on to exclaim "By George! With a name like that for his party one gathers the success of Mérital is certain; no one can keep the leader of a party with a name like that out of the Presidency, or the Premiership at least. But stay, there is one-Frépeau. Frépeau is chief of the hangers-on, and when a man feels himself to be stabbed in the back, says M. Bernstein, he will always do well to look first among his dearest friends for the assassin. And so it is in this case. At the fall of the curtain on M. Bernstein's first act Frépeau is the bearer of the ill news of the dastardly attack upon our politician; but we had only to keep our eyes upon Sir George Alexander's face to know two things-first, that the attack wasn't so unfounded as it appeared to be; and second, that nice Uncle Frépeau would probably prove to have a tiger's heart within the hide of the editor of the Social Party's newspaper. And so it was; and since it was so, what, in a play by M. Bernstein, does one do? One turns the tables-that is expected of one. The great scene of The Attack is the tableturning in the second act. The crowds are ravening without for the blood of the leader of the Social Party, who stole in his youth from his kind employer. Within, the leader of the Social Party is playing cat-and-mouse with his miserable second-in-command. "I never really liked you," cries the leader of the Social Party. In another dramatist one would call that cynical; in M. Bernstein's drama friend turns upon friend, and intimate upon intimate, and it is no more than we expect, for what are "friend" and "intimate" but convenient pawns in the game of the dramatist? might see what happened to a play by M. Bernstein when Miss Martha Hedman declined to do her part in the rubbing in. T P. P. H. THE HEART OF ROME, (FROM A CLASSICAL CORRESPONDENT.) HE archæological find made on the Palatine Hill at Rome by Commendatore Boni, on New Year's Day just passed, is the more interesting to scholars Day just passed, is the more interesting to scholars inasmuch as it represents a legendary site which the Emperor Augustus himself sought in vain to discover. There is a peculiar interest in the fact that what the ancient antiquary failed to locate a modern scholar has been able to antiquary failed to locate a modern scholar has been able to bring to light. Sinking a shaft for some feet under the well-known ruins of the Palace of Domitian on the Palatine, Commendatore Boni came upon a hollow in the earth which he has no hesitation in identifying with the recess or cavity known to the Romans of primitive times as the "Mundus." The cave or cellar, if such it was, has long been a puzzle to littérateurs, to antiquaries, and to students of the scanty remains of ancient folklore. References to it are constant in the classical authors, such writers as Varro, Ovid, Pliny, and Plutarch all mentioning it. The most comprehensive account of the site, its purpose and history, is given by the last named in his Life of Romulus. In his pages we find the tradition that, on the foundation of Rome, Romulus chose a spot to serve as the exact centre of his city-to-be, and there dug a pit into which offerings of the first-fruits of food and other articles of use were thrown, while the nondescript assortment of colonists, who joined in the founding of the new city, cast in each man a clod of earth from his native district. Plutarch makes the mistake of referring the site of the Mundus to the Comitium in the Forum. It is obvious that it must have been, if anywhere, on the Palatine Hill, where still are to be seen the ruins of the "Roma Quadrata" of the earliest foundation. From other sources we learn that the Mundus was made the centre of the "Sulcus Primigenius," or the furrow, wherewith Romulus marked out the limits of his city, and that the cavity was kept covered by a stone, popularly known as the "Lapis Manalis," which was itself in all probability covered with earth. Now comes the extraordinary feature connected with the popular cult-for it was nothing less of the Mundus. On three days of the year-August 24, October 5, and November 8-the Lapis Manalis was taken up and the subterranean cavity laid bare. "Mundus patet,' "Mundus patet," say the ancient writers-" the Mundus is open." The popular belief was that this raising of the stone was for the purpose of allowing egress to the spirits of the dead, who were thus enabled to revisit the upper air. This darksome superstition-undoubtedly of Etruscan origin, as the Romans derived all their gloomier views of the underworld from Etruscan sources-is preserved in a passage of Varro, quoted by Macrobius: "When the Mundus is opened it is as though a gate were opened for the sad deities and the denizens of the underworld." The superstition was of course entirely popular. It obtained no credit among the educated classes. Indeed as time went on the actual site of the cavity was forgotten-though it appears to have been known as late as the time of Cato-and Commendatore Boni has found traces of shaftings which he is eager to identify with Augustan searches for the lost Mundus. The Emperor Augustus was of course a keen restorer of all appertaining to the old religion of Rome. refined grain known as Triticum, which Virgil counselled his farmer to sow "after the setting of the Pleiades." It is noteworthy that the cosmical setting of the Pleiades has been fixed as November 9. The goddess Ceres and her daughter Proserpina, besides being the protectresses of the fruits of the earth, are also deities of the underworld-and indeed the transference of thought is obvious. While the growth of Rome therefore religious taboo, which in primitive times would naturally soon outdated the use of the Mundus as a storehouse, the Protect such an essential spot, preserved an echo in the gloomy superstitions of the lower-class people. The Lapis Manalis, which originally was probably a species of charmstone, supposed to have efficacy in ensuring rain-(mano= with the Manes, or departed spirits. The site now disto flow)-easily became connected in the popular imagination It is significant that it is situated on the Palatine Hill, and covered probably reveals the exact centre of ancient Rome. close to those ruins which have been consistently regarded Quadrata of Romulus. as the city's earliest architectural remains the Roma N° WHAT LONDON WANTS. OTWITHSTANDING what has been done for London, particularly during the past few years, and in spite of what is being to-day carried out for the betterment and embellishment of the city, there yet remains much to do, and one of the problems of local government is how to effect the necessary improvements in view of the almost daily dwindling area available for such reforms. We have created When our streets cry aloud for a widening process we can only afford to enlarge them by inches; when an open space becomes almost a necessity of sanitary existence we fulfil the want by a sort of incantation of the necessary funds from the pockets of a much-taxed ratepaying community, or we invoke the aid of that new race which has sprung up in our midst—the millionaires. By hook or by crook we have thus succeeded in doing what I really think may be termed, without exaggeration, wonders, during the last few years. Kingsway, and flung the Aldwych semi-lune through a once squalid neighbourhood. We have traced a great boulevard from Buckingham Palace to Charing Cross, and have made Whitehall the finest street in London. We have linked up Oxford Street with Piccadilly, and, above all, we are gradually creating a city of stone where splendid and dignified buildings are the rule rather than the exception, and where something of classic grace enters into the scheme of improvement. We have at last realised the utility, and we have come to recognise the picturesqueness, of Bazalgette's great embankment. One thing however has been left undone, even unattempted. I mean a sister embankment on the Surrey shore, which should link up the Albert Embankment with Blackfriars. At present, as we most of us know, the area embraced (it is under a mile of river frontage) is in the undisputed possession of low (architecturally speaking) and disreputable-looking warehouses, from which spring, here and there, those huge towers which have become the prey of the insistent advertiser. As you look, say, from the Adelphi Terrace, the sight, considering it is almost in the centre of the greatest city in the world, is little short of a disgrace. I don't mean for a moment to indicate that there is anything disgraceful about wharves or warehouses. Far A plausible origin for the superstition has been well out- from that. They represent some of the wealth and comlined by Dr. Warde Fowler. Dr. Fowler is inclined to mercial activity which have made London what it is. But identify the early pit of Romulus with a species of civic we must move with the times, and the times cry aloud for granary or storehouse for the seed-corn, which a primitive the transference of such activity as still exists in these people would have great interest in preserving for the next ancient timbers to spots more removed from the centre of season's sowing. The three dates on which the underground a great city. What at present one gazes upon is a collocacavity was opened represent primæval openings of the store- tion of apparently squalid erections, standing in what looks room for the purposes (1) of storing the grain saved from for all the world like an architectural rubbish-heap. The the harvest, and of taking out (2) the seed of the rough wheat unsightly backs of the houses in the Waterloo Bridge Road or Far, which was usually sown in October, and (3) the more gaze forlornly on to a "London Waste Paper" store here, You must or a "Wharf to Let" there. The mists and fogs of Disestablishment in order that Anglicanism of the Low London may give a factitious picturesqueness to these relics variety may eventually triumph throughout this realm of on occasion, but nothing else can. They are essentially a England. You must rejoice in the triumphs of Fabianism, disfigurement, just as the hideous Charing Cross railway Labour, Syndicalism, Anarchism, Forcible Feeding, bridge is a disfigurement and an eyesore such as, I dare Feminism, and Strong Government by turns. swear, no other European capital would tolerate for a talk for ever of the imbecility of Toryism, and you must moment. Use has reconciled us to this state of things, just never hit Mr. Balfour very hard. For one thing, you as use reconciled us, or deadened us, to the conditions once think the country will not stand hearing very much against obtaining in the Seven Dials, until measures of reform were Mr. Balfour; for another, you think that every word uttered initiated, and reconstruction was carried out with energy; in praise of the former leader is a kick delivered to the when we realised what an area for improvement had been address of Mr. Bonar Law. If you write the serials for the lying awaiting attention for so many a long year. Much Daily News you must never let your hero and heroine (ah, the same state of things exists to-day on that little-known you wonder what is coming! Je vous le donne en mille! Surrey shore, where a frontage of dingy, tumble-down It is this:) meet at a ball; it must be at a sale of work. buildings (in some cases, it is true, galvanised into energy) Nevertheless, you must, if you are a reporter from Bouverie masks so much that is old and insanitary in the way of Street, from time to time visit the tea-shops of Piccadilly, dwellings. It is sufficient to look from the carriage-windows and glimpse in at the doors of the Carlton. There you will of the trains as they travel from Charing Cross to Cannon make astonishing discoveries, such as that some women of Street to realise what a field for amelioration is here. If, fashion smoke, or that there is a new dance being danced then, a building reform such as is wanted can be made at tea-time! to go hand in hand with the architectural embellishment of the City and the linking into its scheme of the river, which should be, but is only now partially, an integral portion of it, what an opportunity presents itself for the town-planner and the civic reformer! It will be reasonably asked: “(1) What do you suggest as a solution? (2) How would you indemnify the loss which might accrue to the wage-earning classes still employed in the area under discussion? To the first question I reply that from Westminster Bridge to Blackfriars Bridge an embankment similar to the existing one oppofriars Bridge an embankment similar to the existing one opposite should run. Some portion of this is already in process of formation in front of the new County Council Hall now being erected. I would then suggest again, as the editor of THE OUTLOOK suggested in August 1910, that a certain portion of the area should be utilised for the site of the University of London. I was discussing the matter with the President of the Local Government Board, and he pointed out that use might be made (it would, as he suggested, have formed a fine home for the London Museumappropriately adjacent to the County Council Hall) of the large Indian store, owned by the Government, which, with an added frontage, might well be worked into the scheme. The erection of business quarters, of flats, etc., on the same principle as is in force in Kingsway, would produce much towards ways and means. In fact, this side of the river might be converted, in time, into a quarter similar to what exists in Paris, where commercial activity might join hand in hand with architectural beauty. To the second supposititious question I answer that what business undertakings are still flourishing in this quarter might have their activity transferred elsewhere on the river, where they would be more appropriate, and not so unsightly, and the wage-earning classes connected with them would not suffer. I E. BERESFORD CHANCELLOR. LITERARY PORTRAITS-XVIII, HAVE always thought that of the queer things in this queer world the queerest of all must be to write political or social articles for the Daily News. I do not mean to say that it must be disagreeable, for it must be so funny-the odd obstacle race of a thing that such writing must be. For just imagine what, exactly, must be prescribed for you. You have to be extremely antiRomanist, for your supporters are Nonconformist; at the same time you must be pretty fairly Papist, or you will displease the followers of Mr. Redmond, Mr. Belloc, and the tolerant. You must generally slam the Church of England; at the same time every now and then you must assure that Church, for the sake of the Bishop of Hereford, the Dean of Durham, and Archdeacon Lilley, that you only desire Of course, if you are a writer on things of the intellect you may be as impartial as you please. You might uphold the sanctity of marriage, or praise a book extolling Free Love à la P. B. Shelley; for in the Daily News public there are many mansions. Except for Mr. Kipling, at whose head, I think, you must whack whenever he bobs it up, you may praise any writer, musician, or painter, and your readers will like it the more if he is one of les jeunes. That is quite jolly. So the Daily News walked delicately, its. writers tiptoeing amidst the eggshells, holding their breaths beneath avalanches. I dare say it and they still do so, but I never see it now. I gave it up because of its treatment of Suffragette news. But its delicate treading; its bright niceness; its feeling of unreality-all these things were due to Mr. A. G. Gardiner. Mr. Gardiner is, of course, the worst type of nasty Radical; but the feeling of unreality that his workings convey gild, for me, his personality. It may be obtuseness, it may be the blindness of the ostrich; but I never can believe that any of these chaps are really in earnest. How can a man, classes or any man who can read at all-hold the vast an educated man, a man ex-officio a member of the ruling number of contradictory opinions that are necessary to a a would think that any proper man would, after a time, get them, and perusing Mr. Gardiner's anecdotes of them, there rise to my lips the words, "It's the lot of stout fellows they are!"-words which I heard an Irish lady use in describing the members of a vegetarian league. Mind, I am not cavilling at Mr. Gardiner's selection. He includes Mr. Belloc, Mr. Wells, Mrs. Despard, Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, Prince Kropotkin, and the Jam Sahib of Nawanagar, as the live figures amongst his rows of waxwork First Bench nonentities--amongst the Asquiths and the Simons, and the Levers and the Carnegies and the Ures. And, of course, it is quite delicately done, the threading of the eggshell-besprent pathway, the laudation of Mr. Chamberlain in order to give the aspect of fairness, and to get a better kick at Mr. Austen Chamberlain. Twice Mr. Gardiner states that Mr. Balfour captured the soul of his party-more fairness, and a better kick at Mr. Bonar Law! Of course I am not grumbling at that; it is perfectly good partisan writing. But what is most striking is the want of enthusiasm in our author. If some one of the same type had been writing of the Victorian dead in the dead Victorian day and way, with what awe would he not have penned his breathless periods. Of course Mr. Gardiner writes with a sort of professional and almost lachrymose unction about Mr. Asquith, Mr. George, and Mr. Ure. That is his job, But he presents us with two "greatest men in the world' at once. One is Prince Kropotkin, and the other—again je vous le donne en mille-Mr. Bryce, of all imaginable people. And even for these two greatest he cannot get up an approach to the adoration that, let us say, the late Tom Taylor, if he had had the job, would have bestowed on Carlyle, Tennyson, Ruskin, Gladstone, Newman, or, for the matter of that, on Sir Edwin Arnold. "Well, what do you think of Kropotkin," I said afterwards to my friend. I had introduced him to the Prince, who was still stirring his tea [my italics]. But I am not saying that Mr. Gardiner's book is not full of entertainment. He has had the most amazing opportunities. He has conversed with the Truly Great in gardens, at tables, on the borders of seas. (He dared even to roar with laughter at Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb on the shores of Harlech Bay. For that, much may be forgiven him. I am not sure that everything may not be forgiven to one who will laugh at the monstrous and horrible doctrines of the Fabian leaders.) He has been present at more thrilling, awful, or momentous scenes in the House of Commons than any man I have ever come across. Witness this: There was one such moment early in the session of 1912. It was in the midst of the coal crisis and the House, grave and perplexed, was in a sombre mood. Suddenly there rolled over the packed benches a thunder of delightful cheering. It swept the Liberal ranks; it swept the Tories. Labour and Irish were caught in the wave. And do you not expect the sentinel at Whitehall Gate to come in too? But he does not! No. The note was new and perplexing. It was not merely its unanimity. It was as though the House had suddenly seen a Mr. vision. For a moment I was at fault... I looked down. passing along the Front Opposition Bench to a seat beside-Mr. Balfour was emerging from behind the Speaker's chair and Bonar Law. . . It was a merciless, a scornful comment on the one side; a comment of humiliation and apology on the other. Mr. Bonar Law has placed Parliamentary leadership on a level of the Glasgow Debating Society. Mr. Gardiner who is responsible for it. He could not be, since he has a sense of humour. It is the Chancellor of the On the day of the memorial service to the late Marquis of "Well, I'm not sure whether he's a giant; but I think he's a Ripon as he (the Chancellor) left the Westminster Cathedral saint," was the reply. with a colleague he talked of the splendour of the ceremony. And his companion remarked, laughingly, "When you die we'll give you a funeral like that." "No, you won't," came the swift, almost passionate reply. "When I die, you will lay me in the shadow of the mountains." The tea touch, you will observe, reduces the Prince to the level of you, me, and Mr. Gardiner. The Victorians would have shown him doing something god-like; this is a democratic age. But as for adoration of the greatest man in the world.. Why I could have done it better myself, all reactionary that I am. For hang it all, the author of Fields, Factories, and Workshops is something-an overwhelming personality, an immense influence... Is that not really amazing! When I read it I began to laugh. And I laughed; and I lost my breath. And I laughed. And I went out on to the links; and, as I was addressing my ball, the driver dropped from my hands, and As for Mr. Bryce, I don't know anything about him. II fell into contortions of laughter. think he got a title the other day, and I do not for a moment doubt that that was in the fitness of things. Mr. Gardiner tells us : His appointment as ambassador was one of the supreme services which that great and wise man [Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman] performed as Prime Minister, -which is rather funny if you read it dispassionately. Also: He has the joy of the journey, the unquenchable spirit of old Ulysses the grey spirit yearning with desire to seek a newer world: His Of course the moral of the whole sad affair is that it is uncommonly rough on poor Mr. Gardiner to have such a sentimental, such a wildly uninspiring, lot of stout fellows to describe as are his leaders and, heaven help us, some of his opponents. It is not that he lacks the gift of hitting people off neatly enough, and, particularly, of knocking them down, as long as they are not politicians. demolition of Mrs. Humphry Ward is as neat a demolition as one may read; his demolition of the Webbs is a masterpiece; his chipping at Mr. Belloc is a pretty display of felinity; so is his array of pleasantries against Mr. Garvin. But his poor dear enthusiasms have so precious little to go upon the appointment of an ambassador, the ten-minute speech without reporters. Indeed, in his eulogy of Mr. Perhaps that was why sending the author of the Holy Bryce our poor author piteously breaks down, and laments Roman Empire to lie in the United States was so memorable the fewness of the plums in his pudding. "We seem," he an achievement of the late Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. says, "to have temporarily lost the spark of the divine, and We read, however, whilst Mr. Gardiner is engaged in for our first man we must take one less than heroic," which jumping on Lord Milner with both feet, of at least one is a little rough on Mr. Bryce. And yet Mr. Gardiner can other supreme achievement of the late statesman-the ten-write sympathetically of Mrs. Despard, who is surely heroic minute speech in which he forced upon his Cabinet the policy enough for human nature's daily food. . . of granting constitutional government to South Africa. for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. "It was the soul of freedom that spoke. At the end there was more than one moist eye around that table... And remember! There were no reporters present." It is by that splendid act of courage and wisdom that C.-B. will live. But no, it is a poor job, with only the shadows of the mountains to relieve the gloom. That surely is monumental; that humanity will not willingly let die. Imagine Cobbett saying that—or Cobden, or Bright even. They might have said it of each other. But of themselves. That is pretty good; yet a Victorian to the manner born Perhaps, oh poor us, we are not so much better than those would not have left any dry eye at all. terrible Victorians! It is an awful thought. MR. PERCY FITZGERALD has been writing about Charles Dickens any time these fifty years. In 1863, during the lifetime of his master and hero, he published Two English Essayists-Charles Lamb and Charles Dickens-and he now celebrates the jubilee of his early excursion into Dickensland by a bold attempt to play the rôle of Boswell to Dickens's Johnson. Between 1863 and 1913 he has given the world just a dozen works on Dickens, including a Pickwickian Dictionary, an essay on Pickwickian manners and customs, and a complete biography in two volumes. In the course of his present and possibly most ambitious effort Mr. Fitzgerald occasionally gets the better of his native modesty. In one place he says: By the way [why by the way?] may I claim here to have done a rather unusual thing? To have written a Life and also edited Johnson and fashioned a bronze statue of him, to be seen in the Strand; to have written a Life of Boswell, and made a statue of him for Lichfield; [Mr. Fitzgerald has apparently forgotten his book in which Johnson's Boswell is shown to be after all only Boswell's Boswell]; to have written a Life of Sterne and fashioned a sitting bronze figure to be seen in the Cathedral Library at York; to have written a Life of Dickens, and set up busts of him in Holborn and Bath. This is at least a rather unique record. in the last year of his life, at which "Boz" displayed his habitual geniality, "doing his host duties everywhere with animation, taking ladies up and down to supper. The main interest of Mr. Fitzgerald's Memories lies in his account of the foundation and evolution of Household Words and All the Year Round, to both of which he constantly contributed. He also gives us a very amusing account of the fête at Knebworth given on the occasion of the opening of the short-lived Retreat" for aged and decayed actors. It was on this occasion that Mr. Fitzgerald first obtained a glimpse of the striking personality of the author of Pelham : 66 Pursued as he was by all, not to say hunted, Boz very thoughtfully contrived to bring me upstairs to a sort of retired chamber, where we saw an Eastern potentate sitting on luxurious cushions, with dreamy eyes and reposeful manner, smoking a chibouk, I think. "I must introduce you to Sir Edward," he had said, and he did so; to his old friend Lytton Bulwer or Bulwer Lytton at choice. This interesting man received me very cordially, and was gracious enough to recall and to praise certain things I had written. Mr. Fitzgerald falls into some curious errors when speak ing of the minor lights in the Dickens constellation. It was the bad advice given him by Dickens which entailed upon Edmund Yates the loss of his membership of the Garrick Club, for there can be little doubt that if Yates had maintained the attitude he contemplated Thackeray would have carried the matter no farther. Yates's two volumes of reminiscences cannot in any sense be described as “a collection of clever sketches," nor was the World a pronounced success until the libel case with Beyfus and Beyfus gave a huge fillip to its circulation, and Henry Labouchere's financial articles established its reputation in the City. It was this lawsuit which originated the riddle "Who made The World?" the answer being " Beyfus and Beyfus." It will be news to many people that Albert Smith began life as a dentist, for his biographers generally describe him as a surgeon; nor did Grenville Murray leave England on account" of a horsewhipping and other scandals." He absconded from his bail while under a charge of perjury preferred by a nobleman, and never returned. The account given of the relations between Dickens and his publishers is full and interesting, but Mr. Fitzgerald is apparently unaware of the existence of the Dickens-Macrorie correspondence in the possession of Mr. Peter Keary. With pardonable pride Mr. Fitzgerald alludes to his perpetual activity in the always fruitful Dickens vineyard. "During forty years," he gleefully exclaims, "I have never relaxed storing up records and memorials of him. These are to be found everywhere, and in all shapes. In the Pump Room at Bath is a bust of him by myself, really a fair likeness. Another is at Rochester in the Eastgate House, which I think is worth noting, as it supplies the pained, strained look which his features wore in his last days. Here, too, is my Dickens Library, with other relics and curios presented to the city. Rochester might have had a large bronze statue of my own making placed in the open street to show all visitors the city's connection with the novelist, but for the Only the faintest allusion is made by Mr. Fitzgerald to protests of his own family. At the Prudential Offices in the loyal and valuable services rendered to Dickens by his London, which are built on the site of the old Furnival's gifted "illustrator," Hablot K. Browne, of whom his son Inn, where Boz had chambers, the directors have placed yet Edgar Browne (yet another survivor of Dickens's contemanother bust of my work under the entrance archway. poraries) now provides us with a most readable and interestThese testimonials prove that I am not deficient in grateful ing biography, illustrated by admirable reproductions of feeling to my eminent master and friend." If the illustra- water-colour sketches. In this book we get many interesting tion of the Bath bust given in this book affords any criterion glimpses not only of the long-maintained relations between of the artistic value of these works, the wise discretion shown" Boz" and "Phiz," but of Mr. Bicknell, the wealthy by the Dickens descendants in the matter of the projected statue must be warmly commended. As it is, this bust is an excellent pendant to the Jane Austen bust, which is or was one of the treasures of the historic Pump Room in the City of Fashion. picture-buyer, Harrison Ainsworth, Macready, the Keans, For 'tis the capital of the finest nation, An' hatin' each other for the love of God. There are portions of Mr. Fitzgerald's books which possess far more importance and interest than the statues, busts, and relics, although nothing very new is disclosed in the sheaf of unpublished letters addressed by Dickens to his admiring disciple. Mr. Fitzgerald's claim to almost sole survivorship Hablot Browne, who was an athlete and hard rider as well of the Dickens circle can hardly be maintained, for Miss Georgina Hogarth, concerning whose culinary accomplishments he waxes eloquent, is still with us, and so are Mr. John Tenniel, who took part in the Dickens plays, and Sir Luke Fildes, one of his many illustrators. Dickens was evidently something of an epicure, for he swore by the dainties of Fortnum and revelled in the fleshpots of Piccadilly. "His hospitality," says the Boswell of Gad's Hill, "never relaxed, and the cooking was always superior. His admirable sisterin-law saw to this for him and many were the excellent titbits we enjoyed." Dickens liked music as well as bonne chère, and Mr. Fitzgerald tells us of a concert given by him as an artist, lived and worked at Croydon, when Croydon was still a village and the intervening neighbourhoods between Croydon and London still maintained their primitive rusticity. Browne was a humorist as well as a successful illustrator of books, but he never produced "jocose pictures' except for the direct purpose of sale. His strong and agreeable personality has been long overshadowed by the greater fame of the man to the creations of whose fancy he gave enduring pictorial shape; but at length something like justice has been done to his memory through the filial piety of his son. Both these books will certainly find their way to the libraries of Dickens enthusiasts, although devout worshippers |