Italy as vigorously as his predecessor and showed a particular predilection for the Scots, who served him, volunteers as well as Guards, with more devotion than success, and in the person of Marshal Stuart d'Aubigny earned grateful recognition in the chronicles of Brantôme. The Guard was more fortunate than its chivalrous countrymen. It helped to crush the power of Venice at Agnadel in 1509, and did most notable service against the Spanish at Ravenna in 1512. At the latter action the French infantry, landsknechts for the most part, had been pretty well beaten by the artillery and musketry of the Spaniards, when two hundred of the Scottish archers came up, armed with axes, and fell on with such fury that they beat the Spaniards back and captured their most brilliant soldier, the Marquis Pescayra himself. So excellent indeed was the service done by the Scottish auxiliaries that Louis in 1513 granted letters of denizenation to the Scottish people at large, and drew the bond that united the two nations closer than ever.

Shortly after the Guard was engaged in the terrible two days' battle of the French against the revolted Swiss at Marignano, where they be haved so gallantly that a French historian, Joachim du Bellay, vowed he would make the world ring with their fame. Then, ten years later, they learned at Pavia the meaning of a great defeat, and for the first time failed, in spite of all possible bravery, to save their sovereign in the time of need. Pescayra, the same man who had surrendered to them at Ravenna, had been carefully studying the tactics of musketry in the interval, and had taught the Spanish arquebusiers how to maintain a continuous fire which could not only annihilate columns of pikemen, but overthrow the chivalry of France as efficiently as the archers

of Crecy had overthrown it. So Francis, his armour dinted in a score of places by bullets, was taken prisoner in spite of the body-guard, after the heaviest defeat suffered by the French since Agincourt. The Scotch enjoy the credit of having been cut to pieces around him; but the muster-rolls show that, how many soever may have been wounded, but few were killed, so the legend must unfortunately be abandoned.

We come next to the strangest tragedy in the history of the Scottish Guards, the death of a king of France by the hand of one of them. The long wars of France and the Empire had for the moment ceased with the peace of Chateau Cambrésis, and the King, Henry the Second, was celebrating the weddings of his sister and daughter with the usual amusement of jousts. He ran two courses against the Duke of Savoy and the Duke of Guise with much skill, for he was one of the best horsemen in his kingdom; and then in an unlucky moment he called on Gabriel Montgomery, son of the Captain of the Scottish Guard, and himself second in command, to break yet another lance with him. Montgomery, a big, powerful young fellow, was not very eager; but he obeyed, and struck the King so roughly with his lance as almost to thrust him out of the saddle. Irritated by his failure, Henry challenged him to run again. Montgomery refused pointblank, and when pressed offered every excuse that he could find; the Queen also twice endeavoured to dissuade the King, but in vain. He bade Montgomery on his allegiance to mount, and the course was run. Both lances were shivered, but the broken shaft in Montgomery's hand flew up, and forcing open the visor of his helmet drove a splinter deep into the King's head above the right eye. Henry dropped his reins and reeled over his

horse's neck, but, on being lifted from the saddle, said that it was nothing, and that Montgomery was not to blame. The wound was, however, fatal, and in a fortnight he was dead. Quem Mars non rapuit, Martis imago rapit, wrote the French court-poet of the day, without noticing the really tragic point in the incident. Gabriel, poor man, also came to a bad end, for he embraced Protestantism, became a leader of the Huguenots, and after inflicting a severe defeat on the Catholics at Orthez, was finally captured, after a gallant defence of a besieged town, and beheaded in Paris.

His career was emblematic of much that went forward in the sixteenth century. Religious differences, with two such persons as Mary Stuart and John Knox to represent opposing parties, were fast undermining the old friendship of France and Scotland. Scotch Catholics fled to France, and French Huguenots took refuge in England, and England had considerably the best of the exchange. Henry the Third even refused to take a Scotch company of men-at-arms, which had volunteered to serve him, into his pay. England, in fact, was growing too strong to be lightly offended, and the Scotch alliance, since it did not bind the whole nation, was no longer of value. Henry the Fourth was a man far more to the taste of Scotland at large; the old allies helped him to gain his throne, and the Guard, honoured by him as by every sovereign, escorted him to his coronation.

So for a short time the ancient friendship was revived and refreshed by tactful compliments from Henry, who gave to all Scots resident in France greater advantages than they had ever enjoyed, and to the Guards in particular his own special protection. But the play was by this time played out. England and Scotland

were now united under one crown, and the French began to complain that the recruits for the Guard were not Scotch, but English; and though there had been in the past English companies in the French service, and were yet to be regiments, RoyalAnglais and others, yet the true Englishman preferred as a rule to fight against rather than for France, while Frenchmen, on their part, liked the English better as enemies than as friends. The Scotch Guard rapidly ceased to be Scotch in anything but name. As early as 1612 the corps presented a petition of complaint that two-thirds of its numbers were French, and that its old privileges were disappearing. James the First took up their cause in England, and endeavoured to reinstate them, not without a certain measure of success; but the heart of the matter, the old alliance of France and Scotland, was gone, and nothing but the empty husk remained. There was still the old division of twenty-five Archers of the Body, and seventy-five Archers of the Guard; but French names became ever more frequent, and Scotch names rarer on the muster-rolls.

The outward change came more swiftly in the senior corps of archers than in that of the men-at-arms. The last Scotch captain of the former was appropriately enough the Gabriel Montgomery who had been the death of Henry the Second; and his reign ceased in 1557, the very year, singular to say, when the first Scotch covenant was signed in Edinburgh, and but one year before the final expulsion of the English from Calais. The coincidence is notable, for from the moment that the Scotch ceased to be a united nation the old alliance began to wane. The men-at-arms enjoyed a Scotch chief for some time longer. To all intent the corps was an appanage of the Stuarts of Aubigny,

James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, furnishing in 1515 the one break during a century and a half of the eternal recurrence of the same name. But the list of the last five captains is curious. In 1567 James the Sixth of Scotland was appointed at the request of his mother Mary: in 1601 Henry, afterwards Prince of Wales, succeeded him; and in 1620 Charles, Prince of Wales, followed his brother. Then came a captain who brought in a new name, George Gordon, Earl of Enzie, afterwards second Marquis of Huntly. He actually took command of them, and served with great distinction against the Austrians in Lorraine and Alsace; fighting indeed for the French king more resolutely than he ever fought for his sovereign, though he ended his career on the scaffold through the tender mercies of his brother-in-law Argyll. Finally, in 1645, the year of Naseby, came James, Duke of York, who fit tingly closed the reign of the Stuarts alike over the Scotch men-at-arms and the kingdom of Great Britain. Thus of the five captains three were heirs-apparent to the crown of England, three actually ascended the throne, and two, as if to make a parallel with Gabriel Montgomery of the archers, fell by the headsman's

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In 1667 Louis the Fourteenth took the command to himself; and in this very same year there was added to the French service a new corps of English men-at-arms, which took rank after their brethren of Scotland. It was composed of a medley of English, Scotch, and Irish Catholics brought over by a Hamilton of the House of Abercorn. Louis drafted the Scotchmen into the corps of their compatriots, and erected the remainder into the English Company already named, with himself for captain and Hamilton for lieutenant. The new

men-at-arms wore, like so many of the French regiments, a uniform of scarlet, which had been adopted twenty years before by the English, while heir Scottish comrades wore blue. Both bodies saw plenty of active service, the Scotch meeting the English at Dunkirk Dunes, and the English at Namur, Steinkirk, and Malplaquet. But, as with the archers, both soon became French in everything but name, and in 1788 they were disbanded. Minden was the last battlefield of the Scotch men-at-arms, so that they were unlucky in their final exit from active service.

The senior corps, the original archers, likewise perished in the Revolution, though it was galvanised into a false resurrection after Waterloo, and actually endured until 1830. Though it had long lost its natural character, it jealously retained until the crash of 1789 all its curious old privileges, which, though they led to constant wrangles with other regiments, had been duly allowed by Louis the Fourteenth. He was actually obliged to intervene at his own wedding to compose a dispute as to the precedence of the Scots Guards and the Cent Gentilshommes. "Proud as a Scotchman" was an old proverb in France, and their successors in the Body-guard did their best to justify it. But the most curious survival, long after a word of Scotch had been heard in the corps, was the practice of answering hamir (a corruption for I am here) when the roll was called, which was religiously maintained, at all events, down to the Revolution.

In truth one has only to look at an old French Army List to appreciate the extreme conservatism of that nation, at any rate in military matters, before 1789. One such list, included in a collection of the forces of Europe, which was prepared by Captain Lloyd in 1761, is now lying

come the Household troops, led of course by the Scotch, then the Gendarmerie, again led by the Scotch, and immediately followed by the English. In the Horse are the Royal Strangers, and Dauphin's Strangers, Royal Croatia, Royal Piedmont, Royal Germany, Royal Poland; in the Guards, the Swiss; in the Line nine regiments called Swiss, five called, and probably rightly, Irish, two German, a Royal Italian, a Royal Bavarian, and a Royal Corsican; and all this at the close of the Seven Years' War. Further, it is particularly noted that certain Royal Scots, "then in the French service," took precedence by Ordinance of 1670 as the twelfth regiment of the French line. If it be asked where they are now, we have only to turn back a few pages to the list of the British army, and there we shall find them as we know them still, at the head of the English line. It does not fall to the lot of every regiment to have been called Royal in two distinct and bitterly hostile armies; but here there is, in the heart of us, a living record of the transition from Scotland and France against England, to England and Scotland against France.

The sight suggests curious reflections, when one thinks of the cost paid to make Royal Ecossais into Royal Scots. To go no further back than the thirteenth century, the list of battles is terribly long: Dunbar in 1296, Cambuskenneth, Falkirk (after which Edward tried to accomplish the union four hundred years before his time), Bannockburn, Halidon Hill, Nevill's Cross, Homildon Hill, then passing across the Channel, Beaugé,

Crevant, Verneuil, Patay, all of them Scotch actions, and a hundred minor engagements equally Scotch,Flodden, Solway Moss, Pinkie, Leith, Haddington, Newburn, Preston, Dunbar, to say nothing of border-raids beyond name or number. And all this, and a great deal more, was needed to unite under one government a country of one race and one language, divided by an arbitrary boundary, and kept apart mainly by their opposing relations with France. England wasted incalculable strength in her mad endeavour to annex the territory of her powerful neighbour to the South, and just when she seemed to have gained her end the Scotch stepped in and spoiled all. The incident was unpleasant at the time, but it was the best service that they could have done to us, and equally to France. It encouraged them, however, on a wrong path, for their true way lay with England; and it is significant that though Scotchmen were happy enough in France, Frenchmen were much the reverse of happy in Scotland. But for the unlucky chance that set such a race as the Stuarts on the throne of England it is possible that Scotch influence might have done something in promoting friendship between United Britain and France; and even as things are, it may perhaps be pleasant for Frenchmen to remember that the most sturdy of those colonists who have fretted her sensitive soul by eternally hoisting the Union Jack in new places are generally of the same race as those who delivered France from the English, and gave to her army the first of all its regiments and to her kings the most faithful guard that ever saved a crown.

GREAT is the activity of those who go about doing good, and much has been done by them. In one small district in East London, and during one man's experience, institutes have been established and all sorts of classes drawn together; schools have been built and improved, clubs have been fostered, entertainments and excursions have been promoted, and much done to make pleasure more common and more healthy. Crazy and unwholesome houses have been replaced by sound and well-planned structures; open spaces have been secured; a free library and public baths have been opened; and the Poor Law infirmary has been raised to the level of a hospital with skilled nursing and every medical luxury. Many men and women, members of charitable societies or of public bodies, devote their time to planning schemes for the improvement of the condition of the people, and in some cases themselves see to the execution of their schemes. The standard of health and of comfort has in consequence been raised; children are better nourished and better clad; rooms are better furnished and common pleasures are of a higher character.

Philanthropy is active, but the prevailing feeling is one of anxiety. The richer people are nervous. They ask, "What can be done for the Unemployed?" They are shy of their possessions; they give, and distrust. The poor are more restless at tales of starvation, more indignant at the contrast between the shirt-maker's wage of ten shillings a week and the shirtwearer's wage of £100 a week. They receive, and are dissatisfied. The rich

are asking, "To what purpose do we do good?" The poor are asking, “Why do the rich do good? Does Job serve God for naught?" With all its manifold activity philanthropy still fails to create peace and goodwill. What, then, is the cause of this failure?

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The cause of the failure may perhaps be found in the motive which lies behind much good-doing. Motives are more important than methods. The reason from which a will in the long run tell his neighbours than the which he acts. A friend with love in his heart may blunder in the sort of gift which he bestows, and yet evoke in the recipient an energy which comes of gratitude; while a stranger may give according to the best-known principles of charity, and nevertheless create a resentment destructive of the best qualities of human nature. good motive may make mistakes, but at least it will fit acts to needs; a good method may for a time serve its purpose, but in the end it becomes lifeless and deadening. Motive is the soil on which the roots of action feed. If the soil be poor and shallow the tree of action may flourish for a season, and people will rejoice in its fruit or its shade; but in the time of trial it will fail, and they who sought its shelter will curse it for its false promise. If the soil be pure and deep the tree may be of slow growth, but it will abide and its fruits will be good.

In considering, then, the failure of philanthropy the question to be asked is, "What are its motives?"

The first is, probably, pity. Men cannot endure the sight of suffering; they cannot bear to see the starving