and consolatory variety, doubly welcome because it comes after a prolonged dose of somewhat grimy pessimism. Their work is almost always light-hearted, though it can scarcely be said to be characterised by wit, in the sense of epigram, or by the point and archness which distinguish Molière and other French writers for the stage. Their characters say few 'good things'; their page seldom flowers, as Benavente's does, with a thing said once for all. But in default of epigram, they have abundant humour, which is always kindly, always refined. For example, though since the 'Satyricon' the parvenu has been counted fair game, their treatment of the nouveaux riches in 'Los Leales' is entirely free from gall.

Nor need it be pointed out that, in the delineation of stage character, humour is to wit as Shakespeare is to Congreve. Thus the Quintero comedies have something of the true Quijote quality, with its unfailing geniality. These authors love the sunlight, love life and the natural goodness of mankind. Indeed, in all their works that I have read, I do not recall a single death, scarcely a fault that is unforgivable, or a sorrow that is not to be consoled. Then, their plays are singularly pure, and generally free, not merely from questionable subject, but from the jest which depends on innuendo or on risqué situation. Yet the authors are avowed followers of the Naturalistic School! Only, in their case, naturalism is refined by temperament. Their individual organisation, the prime factor in all art, leads them instinctively to reject all that that other naturalist,' Zola, instinctively sought after and dwelt upon. And, naturalism for naturalism, give me that of joy and beauty, rather than that of ugliness and foulness!

Yet here inevitably comes in the question of the Quinteros' limitations. Perhaps I have said enough to show that they 'see life steadily,' but they by no means see it whole. For, though in art to be sincerely optimistic is good and produces pleasing results, yet the higher art is neither optimistic nor pessimistic. Let either of these leanings become warped into a system or a mannerism, and art is bound to suffer and to shrink in proportion. Hitherto the Señores Quintero have written as young men; and youth has privileges. It is

an ungracious part to tell a youth that life is not all he thinks it: let him discover that for himself. But are the gifted brothers making this discovery for themSelves? Readers of 'Malvaloca' may answer yes. But in 'Así se escribe la historia,' their latest play that I have seen, they are back once more in their own Cranford, to give us a village 'School for Scandal.' That they do this sort of thing inimitably has been gratefully acknowledged. But it may be done too often; and already there are signs that their chosen material is being beaten out thin. Supposing-which the powers avert!-that they stop writing now, they have already accomplished much for Spain and for dramatic literature. My plea is for development, my argument that there is within them a principle of growth as yet unexhausted. And I believe that those who have applauded 'Malvaloca,' or Che tragic monologue of El Hombre que hace reir,' will Dear me out in this. No doubt the wider public is ever eady to welcome repetitions of the old effects by which uccess was first attained. But in this respect the public not the artist's truest friend. Briefly, then, I ask, are nese Heavenly Twins' of modern Spanish Comedy to est content with laurels won, or will they yet strike nt into more arduous paths, adding to the successes of ne sock those higher ones pertaining to

'Tragoedia cothurnata, fitting kings'?

GEORGE DOUGLAS.

Art. 10.-THE HOUSE OF ROTHSCHILD.

1. The Romance of the Rothschilds. By Ignatius Balla Eveleigh Nash, 1913.

2. A History of the Jews in England. By A. M. Hyamson Chatto & Windus, 1908.

And other sources.

MORE fortunate than the heroes who lived before Agamemnon, the aboriginal financiers of the East have found, if not their commemorating bard, yet an imperishable monument of their dealings, as well as their names, in a series of clay tablets, rescued from the dustheaps of the region watered by the lower streams of the Euphrates and Tigris. The writing on these earthenware fragments shows them to have been the ledgers of a firm which, under the style of Egibi and Sons, from 600 to 500 B.C., carried on a business, entitling them to be con sidered the predecessors of the famous family which for nearly two centuries has swayed the money markets of the world. Not that the Egibis had any ideas of international finance. Their advances were mostly made to princes or communities in their own neighbourhood on the security of taxes or public works. In that, they resemble the patrician capitalists of medieval Italy, who enriched originally by some papal relative, inherited the wealth enabling them, for a sufficiently handsome con sideration, to supply neighbouring princes or states with funds for the conduct of war or the domestic undertakings of peace. Hence arose the Dorias, the Torlonias in Lombardy or Rome, and the Aguados in Spain. The families, like the palaces, of the Italian plutocratic nobility still survive. In England the Lopeses, the Rodrigues, the Goldsmids, had reached positions of national usefulness as well as social distinction. The German capitalists were a later growth; even at Frankfort, the cradle of the race, its founder, Mayer Amschel (1743-1812), only took the Rothschild name in 1780. More than a century earlier the Berliners, the Frankfurters, the Pragers, the Weiners, the Fuggers and

It was in the Tirolese mines of this family that Browning's Paracelsus discovered the subterranean passages.

the Oppenheimers had been controlling figures in German finance.

The last of these families gave Mayer Amschel those peeps into a realm of gold where he knew that his powers, his ambition, and the courage and industry supporting it, would place him beyond all rivals in the struggle for wealth. His father's death and the poverty of his kin had brought his education to an end at the age of twelve. Thus was a boy, trained originally for a teacher in the synagogue, destined to establish a monarchy of the mart, outlasting that of the emperors and kings whom his childhood knew. From the Talmud school at Fürth he brought away a knowledge of himself and his peculiar aptitudes that was to be of infinitely greater value than any portion of its curriculum. The old coins used by the professors to illustrate their lectures may not have taught him much history, but they flashed upon him an inspiring revelation of the one element in which he had been formed to live and work. While hawking his goods at the great fairs in the town of his birth, he showed an expertness in all matters concerned with gold and silver that reached the ears of the Landgrave of Hesse, a prince who swelled his revenues by raising and letting out, at a heavy charge, mercenary troops to the British Government. Those transactions secured Mayer Amschel the chance of becoming the Landgrave's right-hand man and, eventually, his chief adviser.

In and after 1785 the Landgrave's purchases of British stock, always conducted by his agent, brought the first Rothschild into relations with the London money market. His position resembled that in a modern stock-broking firm occupied by an Authorised Clerk,' strictly responsible to his employers but so trusted by them as to have something of a free hand in laying out their capital. The Landgrave combined the title of a prince with the spirit of a pawnbroker, trusted no one even so far as he could see him, seasoned alike his few open-air recreations and the functions of his petty state with a mixture of buying, selling, and bargaining; always on the lookout for a little better percentage, and fearful only lest his neighbour should have a chance which he himself had missed. His court had been turned into a counting-house; the chief duty of his gentlemen-in-waiting

was to calculate rates of exchange and to advance their royal master's interests by keeping a sharp outlook for the main chance. The Gentile principal could not but be the teacher as well; the pupil bettered the instruction, and so impressed on his sons the lessons that had been taught him that he lived to see all the five prosperously established at the different places assigned them for the display of the family gift.

The eldest, Anselm Mayer, continued to manage the parent business at Frankfort; the second son, Solomon, opened his offices at Vienna; the fourth, James, achieved a purely intellectual distinction, scarcely second to his financial fame, at Paris; the youngest, Charles, conducted the short-lived department of his house at Naples. The third son, Nathan, with whom we are now concerned, concentrated in himself, in their highest form, all the family faculties. Migrating to the British Isles in 1798, he first initiated himself into the mysteries of the cotton trade at Manchester. With the dawn of the 19th century, he went to London and started the great business still flourishing in New Court. Once satisfied as to his son's capacity and prospects, the Frankfort patriarch induced the Landgrave to appoint him his sole agent in London. Shortly afterwards (1806) Nathan Rothschild carried through the first great international transaction, bringing forward the family name as that of the principals, and securing for New Court, as well as for its kindred establishments abroad, the cosmopolitan distinction and influence indicated by the name ever since.

During the first decade of the 19th century Denmark had been compelled by her domestic necessities to be a frequent borrower. In 1801 Mayer Amschel had secured her an advance from the Landgrave. Five years later Nathan Rothschild had prospered to such an extent in London that he had no difficulty in obtaining his father's co-operation for supplying the Copenhagen government with a million or so immediately required. This operation is memorable for two reasons: first, as has been said, it brought forward the first of the English Rothschilds as a power in world-finance; secondly, London, already the largest of European money centres, now began to take the place of 18th-century Amsterdam, and to become the emporium of the markets of the world. So began