sit for hours on the sunny Battery Green-children at play all about him, a noisy, unkept crew-or walk the pier, absent-minded, absorbed in the music of the then excellent band. Or he would appear in the twilight at the lodgings of some favourite nieces, with a little offeringa few fine pears, a bunch of grapes; he had a genius for making pretty presents-always interested in their interests. When my brother went to Cambridge, Fitz-Gerald had him to breakfast with him in his rooms at Lowestoft, spoke to him of his own days at Trinity, and bade the new undergraduate go and taste the celebrated ale at some little house of call on the banks of the Cam-the one mentioned in Euphranor, I believe it to have been.

Fitz-Gerald had a great affection for the old ' Ivy House' in North Lowestoft ; his brother John had several times rented it, latterly one of his nephews. Of its then owner, old Mr. Fisher, a bowed, pathetic, white-haired figure, wrapped in a cloak, he said one day to me, 'How exactly like dear old Carlyle!'

These visits to Lowestoft continued at intervals until the end came so peacefully, so absolutely as he would have wished that it should-and were, I think, the chief source of his pleasure during the last few years of his life. Just before his death he revisited Geldeston Hall, the home of his sister Mrs. Kerrich's married life; her presence gone, he had not had till then the heart to see it again and she not there. The house was empty, but he lunched there, waited on by the lodge-keeper's wife, who had been housemaid when Mr. Edward' was a constant visitor, and who had not-to-be-defied orders never to disturb the books and papers which heaped his room.

Amy' was fond of telling how he gave her an eight-day grandfather's clock as a wedding present, and had for him and his untidy ways a courteous toleration mixed with the affection he could always inspire in servants; he was so very ready to save them all trouble that he could comprehend.

Fitz-Gerald went on from Geldeston to Gillingham Hall, of which house the Miss Schutz aforementioned had been the talented chatelaine. She was his great friend and his sister's friend. Older than either, she was also the first to go. Many must have been the walks he took along the half-mile of oak-shaded country road which lies between the two houses, with her and to see her, the walk ending at the gates of Gillingham Hall, unusually set between two churches; one, 'the ivory steeple,' as we Norfolkians call its ivy-embraced stones; the other a many-pillared, dark Norman building-of William Rufus' time-so runs the tale. Gillingham Hall garden was known to and loved by Browne, he of Religio Medici fame; here he walked and gathered its herbs and simples.

The world was much poorer when Fitz-Gerald left it. For some time it took no cognisance of its loss, and nothing can be more extraordinary in the history of posthumous reputations than the slow but

steady and persistent growth of his, which now, in this year of the centenary of his birth, has almost reached the perilous dignity of a cult. Quotations from Omar are in the mouth of every cultured miss' in real life and in fiction. Half-crown and penny magazines alike drag in his name. No novelist of pretension is happy unless one chapter boast a quotation as headline or some heroine goes through the psychological moment of her existence with the Rubáiyát at hand on her dressing-table to point out to her the nothingness of all things. In every conceivable binding and at all variety of price it lies on bookshop counters and railway stalls.

Fitz-Gerald certainly never foresaw this fruit of his leisurely labours. I take leave to doubt, ungracious though that may seem to an appreciative public, whether he would have wished for or liked it. Cheap indiscriminate admiration he gave to neither person nor thing: it was his abhorrence. Would he have welcomed it lavished on himself, so little understood when living; on his work, possibly so little understood now?

The solemn music of his quatrain is as the ground swell of the ocean in some echoing cavern; as the burden of the west wind over a grove of sad cypress; as the perfume of roses in the warm darkness of a summer's night before the dawn breaks; as the depths of wine cooled in the snow; as the garnered melancholy of man's heart in all ages; and, being these things, it is also much that this century knows not yet its need of, prate as it may of Omar.

A year or two ago it was my happy lot to be staying at Thornby Rectory, near Naseby, part of the Fitz-Gerald country, and where there were yet a few who remembered him. These kind people entertained me in the sweetest old-fashioned drawing-room. Little mirrors, priceless from the collector's point of view, hung high up on the walls— little oval gilt-framed mirrors, and so high up that they seemed only intended to see the white clouds on the blue sky of that hot afternoon. China, too-such as would have caught Fitz-Gerald's eye-stood on tables whose date was of the mirrors; bowls of roses, delphiniums, geraniums, and wonderful bouquets of worked flowers vied with them in colour. Also there was provided a delightful tea of the comfortable all-round-the-table order which would have cheered Cowper's heart, if not Fitz-Gerald's.

The memory of my courteous hostess was not what it had once been; but on hearing his name she said cheerfully, Edward FitzGerald? Of course I recollect Edward Fitz-Gerald: what of him?' and then, with a spark of roguery and the prettiest pink flush, is he married?'

6

She was a pretty girl, and always had two strings to her bow,' said the perfect host with an answering smile, and then told me that Fitz-Gerald spent his days at Naseby in the same quiet as at Boulge or Woodbridge. His mother hated the house, Naseby Woolleys,

and the neighbourhood, and only visited them twice, and then drove about and was very haughty and distant.' Such was the verdict on what was most likely acute boredom at being so far from town and her own coterie. Fitz-Gerald was regarded as a harmless, solitudeloving, taciturn young man.

At another village in these parts-well known to him-I made inquiry as to remembrances of him of the most likely inhabitant, to be answered, Fitz-Gerald, Fitz-Gerald? Do you mean the commercial traveller?' 'Oh, no,' I replied; I only wanted to hear about the Fitz-Gerald who wrote some verses.' His fame had not travelled so far, which I daresay was as he would have had it be.

It was a fiercely hot day when I drove along the straight white road which leads from Thornby to Naseby, and I was glad to get into the cool of the ugly church, whose entrance seemed like that of Mrs. Harris's house 'round the corner,' and over whose threshold FitzGerald walked quite the king' in a blue frock-coat, as he tells us. In the front pew, just under the pulpit, dedicated to the occupants of the great house, one may be sure he did not sit.

The Fitz-Gerald Arms' still stands, a substantial, imposing memento of their reign. The Woolleys itself I could not see, but it doubtless bears no traces of their ownership. The daughter of Linnet, one of the old servants-old herself now, and with but confused and rambling memories of her girlhood—had been interviewed by a gentleman from London,' and had heard 'he meant to print' what she had told him. She received me, therefore, with some suspicion, but on hearing my name said, 'Oh, you must be Eleanor's grandchild : she married John Kerrich, out of Norfolk.' She told me of an attempt to break into the house when her father was left in charge of it, and how 'he whipt old Oliver's sword out of his hand and made after them down the front staircase and into the scullery, but he never caught no one'; ' Oliver' being the Cromwell of that name, who is still a byword in those parts, and whose armour was moved with other Fitz-Gerald belongings to Ireland when Naseby was sold. Such details were clear in the old woman's mind; the coats of arms- monkeys there were on them; they unscrewed off the park gates; Mr. Fitz-Gerald he had them sent by water to Little Island-they were heavy.'

The school, the ground for which was a joint gift from Fitz-Gerald and all his brothers and sisters, as the deed shows, was built by and endowed by his father and mother with, so I understand, this stipulation attached, that the Church Catechism should amongst other things be taught in it every day.'

The monument erected to perpetuate the memory of the battlefield is now linked with Fitz-Gerald's own, as being the occasion of his friendship with Carlyle. Hideous in itself and the rendezvous of trippers, whose sandwich-papers and other lunch débris covered its base on the day when I visited it, it commands, as it was intended to do,

a fine view of the rolling Northamptonshire country oddly like the delicate, clear-atmosphered water-colour drawing of a hundred years ago; its pastures and hedges, its oaks, its far-stretching roads so oldworld that one might expect to meet Rupert's rallied horse at any turn, or irresolute Charles Dalzell at his bridle rein urging haste. The magpie, that bird of unerring wisdom and cunning, haunts the lonely wide fields; dog roses bloom in endless profusion, no man saying them nay. They are lighter in colour than their Persian sisters; but I think Fitz-Gerald loved them, and the space and peacefulness of all this Midland scenery.

Here, where your lyric The Meadows in Spring'
Rose like the lark's, enraptured, piercing, sweet—
Here will I lay this little Word-this Thing,
Nosegay of memories only, humbly at your feet.

MARY ELEANOR FITZ-GERALD-KERRICH.

1909

A LESSON FROM AUSTRALIA

If the truth as to the relative progress of the two principal Australian States, Victoria and New South Wales, under the rival policies of restriction and free trade, be once grasped, it is safe to say that it must be admitted that restriction was hopelessly beaten. The two States lie side by side, separated by the River Murray, and for thirtyfive years, that is from 1866 to 1901, Victoria resolutely followed the policy of restriction, whilst New South Wales as resolutely followed the policy of free trade. During all these years, whenever the tariff question came before the electors, Victoria never failed to vote for restriction, and New South Wales never failed to vote for free trade.

Victoria adopted the policy of restriction in 1866. In that year she stood head and shoulders above New South Wales in both population and wealth; and, if restriction were indeed that creative force which its adherents claim it to be, she should not only have remained ahead, but increased her lead. It is true that Victoria is much smaller than New South Wales, but when it is pointed out that Victoria is bigger by some thousands of square miles than Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, and Greece, all five, put together, it can scarcely be argued that she was short of room for development, especially as her average rainfall is not only equal to, but is superior to that of New South Wales.

Now for the great test, population, the flesh and blood of a country. The following are the totals at the beginning and at the end of the thirty-five years: