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men have ever succeeded. But there was not one of his enterprises which had a sordid aim. He made money because he knew that he could turn to a wise use the power that money brings, and he deserves all the respect and admiration which can be lavished upon the single man of our day who knew how to use money imaginatively.

It is a long journey from the Vicarage of Bishops Stortford to the Matoppo Hills, and as we look back upon Rhodes's career there is scarcely a single step in that journey that was not purposed and and foreseen. Though he has been dead but a few years, the singular unity of his ambition is already apparent. The young student who read for his pass degree at Oxford while he controlled a diamond mine, was the same man who presently amalgamated the De Beers Company and opened the way for the federation of South Africa. From the very first he understood the problems which he, as a South African statesman, would be asked to solve, and never for a day did he waver in his his purpose. Thirty years ago he had already divined that his essential policy must always be "to keep open the road to the North, to secure for British South Africa room for expansion, and to leave time and circumstances to bring about an inevitable federation." He put this central truth in many shapes, and looked at it in many lights, but so long as he lived it never weakened in him. "I have my own views," he said

in 1883, "as to the future of South Africa, and I believe in a United States of South Africa, but as a portion of the British Empire."

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No man ever took a wider view of politics than Rhodes. His far-seeing eye ranged beyond the limits of a parish, a county, or a continent. He admired the Boers with an open sincerity. There was not one of them that he would not admit into the great country which his imagination pictured. "My motto," said he, "is equal rights for every civilised man south of the Zambesi. What is a civilised man? A man, whether white or black, who has sufficient education to write his name, has some property, or works-in fact, is not a loafer." Both motto and definition are liberal enough. But their liberality did not diminish the intensity of Rhodes's patriotism. "I desire," said he on another occasion, "to act for the benefit of those who, I think, are the greatest people the world has ever seen, but whose fault is that they do not know their strength and their greatness and their destiny." This is noble praise indeed, and if ever England becomes again fully conscious of her destiny and of her grandeur, it is from Cecil Rhodes that she will have learned the lesson.

The long struggle which Rhodes waged with Kruger was the inevitable result of the two men's temperament and policy. The aim and end of Kruger's ambition was to serve the Transvaal at

the expense of South Africa. upon a large scale and without Rhodes was determined to any thought of self. So at the keep open the Northern age of twenty-four this youth, route, and to set no bounds who was yet scarcely on the his railway, the liv- threshold of opulence, solemnly ing thread of commerce and bequeathed everything of which civilisation, until it reached he died possessed to the SecCairo. Kruger, whose austere retary of State for the Colonies, and narrow mind could not and to his friend Sidney Godfathom Rhodes's process of olphin Shippard, in trust. reasoning, saw only that a Never was so fantastic a trust limit was being set upon his devised by mortal brain. Its power. "Rhodes is putting a purpose was to establish a ring fence round me," said he, secret society, "the true aim "and that is why I must fight and object of which shall him." The fight had been in- be the extension of British evitable long before it came, rule throughout the world, the and its result, a federated South perfecting of a system of emiAfrica, is the result which gration from the United KingRhodes had kept in sight for dom, and the colonisation by thirty years, and which is due British subjects of all lands wholly to his courage and where the means of livelihood prescience. are attainable by energy, labour, and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the islands of the Pacific, the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States as an integral part of the British Empire," and, finally, the establishment of an Imperial Parliament. There is a boyish impetuosity in this first will which compels our admiration. The wills drafted by Rhodes in later years were more modest and more sternly practical. But they all, even the last masterpiece, exhibit the same suppression of self, the same determination to make a wise use of money,

As we have said, Rhodes is separated from all commonplace millionaires by the imaginative use to which he put his great wealth. To become rich in these days is not beyond the reach of those whom nature has endowed with the gift of acquisitiveness. To use riches aright is the rarest of talents. Yet Rhodes, even in the days of his poverty, dreamed of the wonders which wealth might work. He was all his life long an artist in the making of wills. It was in 1877 that he devised his first testamentary bequest-long before he had money to bequeath. But the ambition and the imagination which marked his other wills were already there. It was not for him merely to benefit his friends and relatives, even with his ungotten gains. Whatever he did must be done

as were evident in the amazing document drawn up by Cecil Rhodes in his generous youth.

And, like many another great man, Rhodes thought nothing which touched life too trivial for his attention. His curiosity was boundless. He had a passion for growing things and for the breeding of cattle. He was determined to make the most of all his resources. He travelled nowhere without thinking of his African soil. He visited Spain and Italy to study the culture of olivetrees. When he was in Turkey he saw the Sultan for the express purpose of obtaining from

him some Angora goats wherewith to improve the African breed. The things of the mind had an equal hold upon him. The ruins of Zimbabwe turned his thoughts to archæology, and he was once eager to visit Mycenae to compare the Cyclopean masonry with the masonry of his temple. To his ardent mind nothing came amiss. His warm imagination glorified the plain details of existence. And if it were not his talent to play with words, to invent noble phrases, he carved his whole life into a Romance as splendid and as strangely coloured as any the poets have fashioned in verse or prose.

TALES OF THE MERMAID TAVERN.

BY ALFRED NOYES.

I. BLACK BILL'S HONEY-MOON.

UNDER that foggy sunset London glowed
Like one huge cob-webbed flagon of old wine.
And, as I walked down Fleet Street, the soft sky
Flowed thro' the roaring thoroughfares, transfused
Their hard sharp outlines, blurred the throngs of black
On either pavement, blurred the rolling stream
Of red and yellow busses, till the town
Turned to a golden suburb of the clouds.
And, round that mighty bubble of St Paul's,
Over the up-turned faces of the street,

An air-ship slowly sailed, with whirring fans,
A voyager in the new-found realms of gold,
A shadowy silken chrysalis whence should break
What radiant wings in centuries to be.

So, wandering on, while all the shores of Time
Softened into Eternity, it seemed

A dead man touched me with his living hand,
A flaming legend passed me in the streets

Of London-laugh who will-that City of Clouds,
Where what a dreamer yet, in spite of all,
Is man, that splendid visionary child

Who sent his fairy beacon through the dusk,
On a blue bus before the moon was risen,-
This Night, at eight, The Tempest !

Dreaming thus, (Small wonder that my footsteps went astray!)

I found myself within a narrow street,
Alone. There was no rumour, near or far,
Of the long tides of traffic. In my doubt
I turned and knocked upon an old inn-door,
Hard by, an ancient inn of mullioned panes,
And crazy beams and over-hanging eaves:
And, as I knocked, the slowly changing west
Seemed to change all the world with it and leave
Only that old inn steadfast and unchanged,
A rock in the rich-coloured tides of time.

And, suddenly, as a song that wholly escapes
Remembrance, at one note, wholly returns,
There, as I knocked, memory returned to me.
I knew it all-the little twisted street,
The rough wet cobbles gleaming, far away,

Like opals, where it ended on the sky;
And, overhead, the darkly smiling face
Of that old wizard inn; I knew by rote

The smooth sun-bubbles in the worn green paint
Upon the doors and shutters.

There was one

Myself had idly scratched away one dawn,

One mad May-dawn, three hundred years ago,

When out of the woods we came with hawthorn boughs
And found the doors locked, as they seemed to-night.
Three hundred years ago-nay, Time was dead!

No need to scan the sign-board any more
Where that white-breasted siren of the sea
Curled her moon-silvered tail among such rocks
As never in the merriest seaman's tale
Broke the blue-bliss of fabulous lagoons

Beyond the Spanish Main.

And, through the dream,

Even as I stood and listened, came a sound
Of clashing wine-cups: then a deep-voiced song
Made the old timbers of the Mermaid Inn

Shake as a galleon shakes in a gale of wind
When she rolls glorying through the Ocean-sea.

SONG.
I.

Marchaunt Adventurers, chaunting at the windlass,
Early in the morning, we slipped from Plymouth Sound,
All for Adventure in the great New Regions,

All for Eldorado and to sail the world around!

Sing the red of sun-rise ripples round the bows again!
Marchaunt Adventurers, O sing, we're outward bound,
All to stuff the sunset in our old black galleon,

All to seek the merchandize that no man ever found.
Chorus:
Marchaunt Adventurers,

Marchaunt Adventurers,

Marchaunt Adventurers, O, whither are ye bound?— All for Eldorado and the great new Sky-line,

All to seek the merchandize that no man ever found!

II.

Marchaunt Adventurers, O, what'ull ye bring home again?—Hearts o' British oak and the glory of the sea!

Whom will ye traffic with ?-The King of the Sunset!

What shall be your pilot then?-A star from old Judee'!

Nay, but ye be marchaunts, will ye come back empty-handed?—
Ay, we be marchaunts, though our gain we ne'er shall see!
Cast we now our bread upon the waste wild waters!
After many days, it shall return with usury!

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What shall be your profit in the mighty days to be?— England-England !-England !-England!

God's free kingdom and the glory of the sea!

VOL. CLXXXVIII.—NO. MCXLII,

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