and valuable geographical discoveries, he had worthily earned the resting-place in Westminster Abbey to which he was borne nearly a year after his death in Central Africa. His own Last Journals, published in 1874, bring the record of his great third journey down to within a few days of its tragic close. The indomitable and powerful but simple and noble character of the man is reflected in his literary work, which is artless and straightforward, without any attempt at securing literary effect. His books are but an accident of his work. His most exciting adventures and his most brilliant discoveries are told in the main with the same unaffected simplicity as the most ordinary daily experiences; though episodes like his first great adventure with the lion and his first view of the Victoria Falls stand out from the background of painfully plotted marchings and delays, daily recurring successes and failures, and frankly recorded hopes and aspirations. Robert Nicoll (1814-37) was the son of a ruined farmer at Auchtergaven in Perthshire. After being an apprenticed grocer at Perth, he managed a circulating library at Dundee; and having steadily cultivated his mind by reading and writing, he became editor of the Leeds Times, a weekly paper representing extreme Liberal opinions. He overworked himself in an election contest; at twenty-three died of consumption at Trinity near Edinburgh; and was buried in Leith. He wrote songs and occasional poems marked by simplicity, tenderness, and some humour. Some of the Scotch poems of this lad of twenty-three are still remembered by his countrymen; among the bestknown are We are Brethren a',' 'Thoughts of Heaven,' 'The Dew is on the Summer's greenest Grass.' See the Memoir by Mrs Johnstone in the edition of 1844, and the biography by P. R. Drummond (1884). Charles Mackay (1814-89), author of 'Cheer, Boys! Cheer!' and a hundred other songs vastly popular in their day, was born, the son of a half-pay naval lieutenant, at Perth. His mother being dead, he spent his first eight years with a nurse in a lonely house on the Firth of Forth. He was educated at the Caledonian Asylum in Hatton Garden, and later at Brussels acquired a knowledge of French, German, Italian, and Spanish. While acting as private secretary to an ironmaster near Liége he began contributing French articles and English poems to Belgian newspapers. In 1834, having returned to London, he published his first volume, Songs and Poems, and began his career as a journalist. From the office of the Sun he passed to that of the Morning Chronicle, and in 1844 became editor of the Glasgow Argus. Meanwhile he had written a History of London; a romance, Longbeard, Lord of London; and books on The Thames and its Tributaries and on Popular Delusions, as well as two further volumes of poetry. It was while he was in Glasgow in 1846 that some of his songs were set to music by Henry Russell, and suddenly attained a world-wide popularity, selling in editions of hundreds of thousands. Glasgow University conferred on him the degree of LL.D. in 1846; and in 1852 he became editor of the Illustrated London News. In the previous year this paper had begun to issue musical supplements, each containing an original song by Mackay set to an old English air by Sir Henry Bishop. These also proved immensely popular, and were afterwards collected and published as Songs by Charles Mackay. He was entertained to a banquet at the Reform Club to celebrate his starting of the London Review in 1860; but neither this nor Robin Goodfellow, another periodical he took in hand, proved successful. As Times correspondent during the American Civil War he discovered and revealed the Fenian conspiracy in America. During his later years many volumes, both of prose and poetry, came from his pen. Among others were a History of the Mormons, a fantastic book on Gaelic etymology, and two interesting volumes of reminiscences. By his first wife he had three sons (one of them Eric-1851-98-author of half-a-dozen volumes of verse) and a daughter; and Miss Marie Corelli was his adopted child. Cheer, Boys! Cheer!-The Departing Emigrants. So farewell, England! Much as we may love thee, Cheer, boys! cheer! for England, mother England! Cheer, boys! cheer !—in the new and happy land! The star of empire glitters in the West. Here we had toil, and little to reward it, But there shall plenty smile upon our pain, And ours shall be the mountain and the forest, And boundless prairies ripe with golden grain. Cheer, boys! cheer! for England, mother England! Cheer, boys! cheer! united heart and hand!— Cheer, boys! cheer! there's wealth for honest labour Cheer, boys! cheer!—in the new and happy land! Who shall be Fairest? Who shall be fairest? Who shall be rarest? Who shall be first in the songs that we sing? When Fortune is blindest, Bearing through winter the blooms of the spring; Charm of our gladness, Friend of our sadness, Angel of life when its pleasures take wing! She shall be fairest, She shall be rarest, She shall be first in the songs that we sing! Who shall be nearest, Noblest, and dearest, Named but with honour and pride evermore? He, the undaunted, Whose banner is planted On Glory's high ramparts and battlements hoar; Fearless of danger, To falsehood a stranger, Looking not back while there's Duty before! He shall be nearest, He shall be dearest, He shall be first in our hearts evermore. Frederick William Faber (1814-63) was born at Calverley in Yorkshire, passed from Shrewsbury School to Harrow, and thence to Balliol College, Oxford, where in 1834 he was elected a scholar of University College, in 1837 a Fellow. Already he had come under the influence of Newman, and in 1845, after three years' tenure of the rectory of Elton in Huntingdonshire, he followed him into the Roman fold, and at Birmingham founded a community of converts, 'the Wilfridians,' he himself being Brother Wilfrid, from his Life of St Wilfrid (1844). With his companions he joined in 1848 the Oratory of St Philip Neri, of which a branch was then established in England by Newman; next year a branch under Faber's care was established in London, and finally located at Brompton in 1854. Faber wrote many theological works; but his fame rests upon his hymns-The Pilgrims of the Night,' 'The Land beyond the Sea,' 'My God, how wonderful Thou art,' 'Souls of men, why will ye scatter?' are amongst those in use by Christians of all denominations; for though they were designed for the use of English Roman Catholic fellow-believers, many of them have been heartily adopted as a fervent expression of their faith alike by English Churchmen and by evangelical Nonconformists. A collection of a hundred and fifty of them was published in 1862. See the Lives by J. E. Bowden (1869; new ed. 1892) and his brother, F. A. Faber (1869). Sir John William Kaye (1814-70), son of a London solicitor, was educated at Eton and Addiscombe, served in the Bengal Artillery for ten years, and was ultimately John Stuart Mill's successor as secretary of a department in the East India Company's office in London. He wrote a memorable series of works, begun by a novel in 1845, and including the famous history of The War in Afghanistan (2 vols. 1851) and The Sepoy War in India (3 vols. 1857-58; completed by Malleson as The History of the Indian Mutiny, 6 vols. 1890), besides histories of the East India Company and of Christianity in India, and Lives of Sir John Malcolm and other Indian soldiers and statesmen. His works showed not only conscientious research but much of the true historical spirit, and were written with a dignity suited to his subjects. His name was a household word in India, both amongst AngloIndians and natives. He was K.C.S.I. and F.R.S. William Henry Giles Kingston (1814-80), though born in London, was the son of a merchant in Oporto, and there spent much of his youth. He had already published two stories and a book of Portuguese travel, when he found his life-work in the immediate success of Peter the Whaler (1851), the first of over a hundred and fifty similar books for boys, simple, vigorous, healthy in tone, and full of daring adventures and hair-breadth escapes. Among the most popular were The Three Midshipmen (1862), The Three Lieutenants (1874), The Three Commanders (1875), and The Three Admirals (1877). Kingston took an active interest in many philanthropic schemes, such as seamen's missions and assisted emigration. A Portuguese knighthood was conferred on him in 1842 for helping to bring about a commercial treaty with England. Samuel Phillips (1814-54), son of a Hebrew shopkeeper in Regent Street, tried the stage, studied at London and Göttingen, and at Cambridge was qualifying for orders in the Church of England when his father died. After a vain struggle with the family business, he took to writing for a livelihood, his best-known novel, Caleb Stukely (sent to Blackwood in 1842) just serving to save him and his wife from starvation. In 1845 he became a leader-writer to the Times, a post he held all the rest of his life; he was also 'literary director' to the Crystal Palace from 1853. Charles Reade was born at Ipsden House in Oxfordshire, on the 8th of June 1814. The youngest of eleven, he came on both sides of good lineage, his father a squire; from his mother, a clever woman of strong Evangelical convictions, he 'inherited his dramatic instinct.' After five years (largely flogging) at Iffley, and six under two other and milder private tutors, in 1831 he gained a demyship at Magdalen College, Oxford, and in 1835, having taken a third-class in honours, was duly elected to a lay fellowship. Next year he entered at Lincoln's Inn, and in 1843 was called to the Bar, having meanwhile made the first of many tours abroad and at home, and developed a craze for trading in violins. I studied the great art of Fiction for fifteen years before I presumed to write a line of it,' is his own report; and it was not till 1850 that he put pen seriously to paper, 'writing first for the stage-about thirteen dramas, which nobody would play.' Through one of these dramas, however, he formed his platonic friendship with Mrs Seymour, a warm-hearted actress, who from 1854 till her death in 1879 kept house for him. She animated, counselled, guided him; and, apart from his quarrels and lawsuits-which were many -his life after 1852 is little except a record of the production of plays and novels, by the former of which he generally lost money, though by the latter he won profit and fame. The plays include Masks and Faces (1852), written in conjunction with Tom Taylor, and having Peg Woffington for its leading character; Gold (1853), the germ, and Sera Nunquam (1865), the dramatised form, of Never too Late; and Drink (1879), an adaptation of Zola's L'Assommoir. Of his eighteen novels may be mentioned Peg Woffington (1853); Christie Johnstone (1853), with a Newhaven fisher-lass for its central figure; It is Never too Late to Mend (1856), a tale of prison abuses and life in Australia; The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), its hero the father of the great Erasmus; Hard Cash (1863), levelled against private lunatic asylums; Griffith Gaunt, or Jealousy (1866); Foul Play (1869), in conjunction with Dion Boucicault, against ship-knackers; Put Yourself in his Place (1870), against trades-unions; A Terrible Temptation (1871); and A Womanhater (1877), on behalf of woman's rights. His last years clouded by sorrow and ill-health, he died at Shepherd's Bush on Good Friday, 11th April 1884, and was buried in Willesden churchyard beside his 'beloved friend.' Charles Reade has not been usually accounted one of the greatest novelists of the nineteenth century, though Sir Walter Besant unhesitatingly ranked him with Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray; but few would hesitate to place him foremost, or amongst the very foremost, of the second order. He is sometimes coarse, theatrical sometimes rather than dramatic, and sometimes even dull, weighed down with his authorities-the blue-books, the books of travel, the all too copious scrap-books and note-books with which he fettered his imagination. With the greatest novelists the reader is conscious only of the story, with him one is always conscious of the story-teller; some tone or mannerism from time to time jars upon us. And yet what a story-teller he is-how he carries us with him, stirs us, saddens, gladdens, terrifies, delights! By critics, however, he has been very variously judged. Thus humour and pathos have been denied him by some, and by others recognised as peculiarly his gifts; it has been affirmed that 'Reade invented the True Woman,' and contrariwise declared that 'of the woman who is essentially of our time he has never had even the faintest conception;' one enthusiastic admirer has discovered 'in the short Wandering Heir at least half-a-dozen situations all new and all strong,' and to a not unfriendly censor it appeared 'very decidedly the worst of Reade's shorter stories.' These things need not perplex the admirers of Griffith Gaunt, of the fight with the pirates, of the bursting of the reservoir, and of the scenes at the golddiggings. But it may be broadly asserted that critics pass a unanimously favourable verdict on The Cloister and the Hearth, which Mr Swinburne-from whom praise is praise indeed-places dead leaves. He turned round with some little curiosity. A colossal creature was coming down the road at about sixty paces distant. He looked at it in a sort of calm stupor at first, but the next moment he turned ashy pale. 'Denys!' he cried. 'Oh, God! Denys!' Denys whirled round. It was a bear as big as a cart-horse. It was tearing along with its huge head down, running on a hot scent. The very moment he saw it Denys said in a sickening whisper 'THE CUB!' Oh! the concentrated horror of that one word, whispered hoarsely, with dilating eyes! For in that syllable it all flashed upon them both like a sudden stroke of lightning in the dark-the bloody trail, the murdered cub, the mother upon them, and it. DEATH. All this in a moment of time. The next, she saw them. Huge as she was, she seemed to double herself (it was her long hair bristling with rage): she raised her head big as a bull's, her swine shaped jaws opened wide at them, her eyes turned to blood and flame, and she rushed upon them, scattering the leaves about her like a whirlwind as she came. 'Shoot!' screamed Denys; but Gerard stood shaking from head to foot, useless. 'Shoot, man! ten thousand devils, shoot! Too late! Tree! tree!' and he dropped the cub, pushed Gerard across the road, and flew to the first tree and climbed it, Gerard the same on his side; and as they fled, both men uttered inhuman howls like savage creatures grazed by death. With all their speed one or other would have been torn to fragments at the foot of his tree; but the bear stopped a moment at the cub. Without taking her bloodshot eyes off those she was hunting, she smelt it all round, and found, how, her Creator only knows, that it was dead, quite dead. She gave a yell such as neither of the hunted ones had ever heard, nor dreamed to be in nature, and flew after Denys. She reared and struck at him as he climbed. He was just out of reach. Instantly she seized the tree, and with her huge teeth tore a great piece out of it with a crash. Then she reared again, dug her claws deep into the bark, and began to mount it slowly, but as surely as a monkey. Denys's evil star had led him to a dead tree, a mere shaft, and of no very great height. He climbed faster than his pursuer, and was soon at the top. He looked this way and that for some bough of another tree to spring to. There was none; and if he jumped down, he knew the bear would be upon him ere he could recover the fall, and make short work of him. Moreover, Denys was little used to turning his back on danger, and his blood was rising at being hunted. He turned to bay. My hour is come,' thought he. 'Let me meet death like a man.' He kneeled down and grasped a small shoot to steady himself, drew his long knife, and clenching his teeth, prepared to job the huge brute as soon as it should mount within reach. Of this combat the result was not doubtful. The monster's head and neck were scarce vulnerable for bone and masses of hair. The man was going to sting the bear, and the bear to crack the man like a nut. Gerard's heart was better than his nerves. He saw his friend's mortal danger, and passed at once from fear to blindish rage. He slipped down his tree in a moment, caught up the crossbow, which he had dropped in the road, and running furiously up, sent a bolt into the bear's body with a loud shout. The bear gave a snarl of rage and pain, and turned its head irresolutely. 'Keep aloof!' cried Denys, 'or you are a dead man.' 'I care not; and in a moment he had another bolt ready and shot it fiercely into the bear, screaming, ‘Take that! take that!' Denys poured a volley of oaths down at him. 'Get away, idiot!' : He was right the bear, finding so formidable and noisy a foe behind him, slipped growling down the tree, rending deep furrows in it as she slipped. Gerard ran back to his tree and climbed it swiftly. But while his legs were dangling some eight feet from the ground, the bear came rearing and struck with her fore-paw, and out flew a piece of bloody cloth from Gerard's hose. He climbed, and climbed; and presently he heard as it were in the air a voice say, 'Go out on the bough!' He looked, and there was a long massive branch before him shooting upwards at a slight angle: he threw his body across it, and by a series of convulsive efforts worked up it to the end. Then he looked round panting. The bear was mounting the tree on the other side. He heard her claws scrape, and saw her bulge on both sides of the massive tree. Her eye not being very quick, she reached the fork and passed it, mounting the main stem. Gerard drew breath more freely. The bear either heard him, or found by scent she was wrong: she paused; presently she caught sight of him. She eyed him steadily, then quietly descended to the fork. Slowly and cautiously she stretched out a paw and tried the bough. It was a stiff oak branch, sound as iron. Instinct taught the creature this. It crawled carefully out on the bough, growling savagely as it came. Gerard looked wildly down. He was forty feet from the ground. Death below. Death moving slow but sure on him in a still more horrible form. His hair bristled. The sweat poured from him. He sat helpless, fascinated, tongue-tied. As the fearful monster crawled growling towards him, incongruous thoughts coursed through his mind. Margaret the Vulgate, where it speaks of the rage of a shebear robbed of her whelps-Rome-Eternity. The bear crawled on. And now the stupor of death fell on the doomed man; he saw the open jaws and bloodshot eyes coming, but in a mist. As in a mist he heard a twang; he glanced down; Denys, white and silent as death, was shooting up at the bear. The bear snarled at the twang, but crawled on. Again the crossbow twanged, and the bear snarled, and came nearer. Again the crossbow twanged; and the next moment the bear was close upon Gerard, where he sat, with hair standing stiff on end, and eyes starting from their sockets, palsied. The bear opened her jaws like a grave, and hot blood spouted from them upon Gerard as from a pump. The bough rocked. The wounded monster was reeling; it clung, it stuck its sickles of claws deep into the wood; it toppled, its claws held firm, but its body rolled off, and the sudden shock to the branch shook Gerard forward on his stomach with his face upon one of the bear's straining paws. At this, by a convulsive effort, she raised her head up, up, till he felt her hot fetid breath. Then huge teeth snapped together loudly close below him in the air, with a last effort of baffled hate. The ponderous carcass rent the claws out of the bough, then pounded the earth with a tremendous thump. There was a shout of triumph below, and the very next instant a cry of dismay, for Gerard had swooned, and without an attempt to save himself, rolled headlong from the perilous height. (From The Cloister and the Hearth.) Captain Dodd's Battle with the Pirates. The pirate, bold as he was, got sick of fair fighting first; he hoisted his mainsail and drew rapidly ahead, with a slight bearing to windward, and dismounted a carronade and stove in the ship's quarter-boat, by way of a parting kick. The men hurled a contemptuous cheer after him; they thought they had beaten him off. Dut Dodd knew better. He was but retiring a little way to make a more deadly attack than ever: he would soon wear, and cross the Agra's defenceless bows, to rake her fore and aft at pistol-shot distance: or grapple, and board the enfeebled ship two hundred strong. Dodd flew to the helm, and with his own hands put it hard a-weather, to give the deck guns one more chance, the last, of sinking or disabling the Destroyer. As the ship obeyed, and a deck gun bellowed below him, he saw a vessel running out from Long Island, and coming swiftly up on his lee quarter. It was a schooner. Was she coming to his aid? Horror! A black flag floated from her foremast head. While Dodd's eyes were staring almost out of his head at this death-blow to hope, Monk fired again; and just then a pale face came close to Dodd's, and a solemn voice whispered in his ear: ‘Our ammunition is nearly done!' Dodd seized Sharpe's hand convulsively, and pointed to the pirate's consort coming up to finish them; and said, with the calm of a brave man's despair, 'Cutlasses! and die hard !' At that moment the master gunner fired his last gun. It sent a chain-shot on board the retiring pirate, took off a Portuguese head and spun it clean into the sea ever so far to windward, and cut the schooner's foremast so nearly through that it trembled and nodded, and presently snapped with a loud crack, and came down like a broken tree, with the yard and sail; the latter overlapping the deck and burying itself, black flag and all, in the sea; and there, in one moment, lay the Destroyer buffeting and wriggling-like a heron on the water with his long wing broken-an utter cripple. The victorious crew raised a stunning cheer. 'Silence!' roared Dodd, with his trumpet. hands make sail!' 'All He set his courses, bent a new jib, and stood out to windward close hauled, in hopes to make a good offing, and then put his ship dead before the wind, which was now rising to a stiff breeze. In doing this he crossed the crippled pirate's bows, within eighty yards; and sore was the temptation to rake him; but his ammunition being short, and his danger being imminent from the other pirate, he had the self-command to resist the great temptation. He hailed the mizen-top: 'Can you two hinder them from firing that gun?' 'I rather think we can,' said Fullalove, 'eh, colonel?' and tapped his long rifle. The ship no sooner crossed the schooner's bows than a Malay ran forward with a linstock. Pop went the colonel's ready carbine, and the Malay fell over dead, and the linstock flew out of his hand. A tall Portuguese, with a movement of rage, snatched it up, and darted to the gun: the Yankee rifle cracked, but a moment too late. Bang! went the pirate's bow-chaser, and crashed into the Agra's side, and passed nearly through her. 'Ye missed him! Ye missed him!' cried the rival theorist, joyfully. He was mistaken the smoke cleared, and there was the pirate captain leaning wounded against the mainmast with a Yankee bullet in his shoulder, and his crew uttering yells of dismay and vengeance. They jumped, and raged, and brandished their knives, and made horrid gesticulations of revenge; and the white eyeballs of the Malays and Papuans glittered fiendishly; and the wounded captain raised his sound arm and had a signal hoisted to his consort, and she bore up in chase, and jamming her fore latine as flat as a board, lay far nearer the wind than the Agra could, and sailed three feet to her two besides. On this superiority being made clear, the situation of the merchant-vessel, though not so utterly desperate as before Monk fired his lucky shot, became pitiable enough. If she ran before the wind, the fresh pirate would cut her off: if she lay to windward, she might postpone the inevitable and fatal collision with a foe as strong as that she had only escaped by a rare piece of luck; but this would give the crippled pirate time to refit and unite to destroy her. Add to this the failing ammunition and the thinned crew! Dodd cast his eyes all round the horizon for help. The bright sun was hidden now; drops of rain fell, and the wind was beginning to sing, and the sea to rise a little. 'Gentlemen,' said he, 'let us kneel down and pray for wisdom, in this sore strait.' He and his officers kneeled on the quarter-deck. When they rose, Dodd stood rapt about a minute; his great thoughtful eye saw no more the enemy, the sea, nor anything external; it was turned inward. His officers looked at him in silence. 'Sharpe,' said he at last, 'there must be a way out of them both with such a breeze as this is now; if we could but see it.' 'Ay, if,' groaned Sharpe. Dodd mused again. 'About ship!' said he, softly, like an absent man. 'Ay, ay, sir!' 'Steer due north!' said he, still like one whose mind was elsewhere. While the ship was coming about, he gave minute orders to the mates and the gunner, to ensure co-operation in the delicate and dangerous manoeuvres that were sure to be at hand. The wind was W.N.W.: he was standing north: one pirate lay on his lee beam stopping a leak between wind and water, and hacking the deck clear of his broken mast and yards. The other fresh, and thirsting for the easy prey, came up to weather on him and hang on his quarter, pirate fashion. When they were distant about a cable's length, the fresh pirate, to meet the ship's change of tactics, changed his own, luffed up, and gave the ship a broadside, well aimed but not destructive, the guns being loaded with ball. Dodd, instead of replying immediately, put his helm hard up and ran under the pirate's stern while he was jammed up in the wind, and with his five eighteen pounders raked him fore and aft, then paying off, gave him three carronades crammed with grape and canister; the rapid discharge of eight guns made the ship tremble, and enveloped her in thick smoke; loud shrieks and groans were heard from the schooner: the smoke cleared; the pirate's mainsail hung on deck, his jibboom was cut off like a carrot and the sail struggling; his foresail looked lace, lanes of dead and wounded lay still or writhing on his deck, and his lee scuppers ran blood into the sea. Dodd squared his yards and bore away. The ship rushed down the wind, leaving the schooner staggered and all abroad. But not for long; the pirate wore and fired his bow-chasers at the now flying Agra, split one of the carronades in two, and killed a Lascar, |