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The preparation of any Anthology is bound to be disappointing to somebody; and, therefore, to that extent, ungratefully received. Mr J. C. Squire, no novice in this minor department of literature, was, as they say, asking for trouble in gathering and issuing The Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets' (Cambridge University Press). Lesser Poets! He has safeguarded himself by limiting his choice to those who are dead and in their minority secure. It is amusing to notice that he has left Andrew Lang alone; for once upon a time Lang was made cheerfully indignant by discovering himself listed in a monthly article as one of the minor poets of his day. In any case, he deserves to have been mentioned in this work; but it is ungrateful to look for omissions in a volume of this compass. It has good things and not so good things. Obviously verse is included here which might well have been omitted, and poets are left out which might well have been chosen; but it is needless to complain. Mr Squire has done his work with liberality and industry; and has produced a book for browsing in comfortably and generously skipping.

Not for the first time the stale conventions of the West have been relieved and reinforced by the imaginative stimulations of the East; and the advent of Mrs Vennette Herron from Java to the ranks of our fictionists is welcome. She has the gifts of the born story-teller. Her work has imagination, passion, energy, rhythm and colour; and her volume of stories, 'Peacocks' (Murray), promises to be the forerunner of a highly successful literary output. The best of her seven tales is 'The Chinese Bed'; for in this, with vivid suggestions and ample play of colour, she leaves most to the imagination; but every one of the tales is excellent in itself and an admirable foil to the others. Already she has made her mark distinctively and ensured a ready interest in hor future work.

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1. A Great Man's Friendship. By Lady Burghclere. Murray, 1927.

2. Napoleon. By Emil Ludwig. George Allen & Unwin, 1927.

3. Napoleon. The Last Phase. By Lord Rosebery. A. L. Humphreys, 1900.

4. The Life of Wellington. By Sir Herbert Maxwell. Two vols. Sampson Low, 1899.

5. Jadis: 1 et 2 Série. By Frédéric Masson. Paris: Ollendorff, 1906.

'You should make your portrait,' says Leonardo in one of his note-books, 'at the hour of the fall of the evening when it is cloudy or misty, for the light is then perfect'; and the great painter's advice embodies an aesthetic as well as a technical truth. 'Had I died on the throne, surrounded by all the emblems of power,' observed Napoleon to Las Cases, 'I should have remained a riddle to many. To-day the wrappings have been stripped from me; thanks to my misfortunes, every one can judge me in my nakedness.' In this latter opinion Lord Rosebery cautiously concurs: We have more chance of seeing the man Napoleon at St Helena than at any other period of his career.'

Two books that have lately appeared provoke one to look again at the two most arresting figures cast up by the greatest European War before our own and to contemplate and contrast them in their last phases, as the sea-mists gather around Walmer and Longwood and Vol. 249.-No. 494.

the light gains that subtle charm which gives both to the figures and the background their surest values. Herr Ludwig's contribution to the study of Napoleon is, indeed, of a very different character to that of Lady Burghclere in respect of Wellington. The former is a piece of psychology which assembles, with unerring skill and a far-flung net, a mass of more or less familiar material bearing upon the Emperor's personality; the latter no more than a collection of letters, for the most part* hitherto unpublished, to a young lady but lately married. Yet, for all that, this ill-assorted pair of books may serve in harness to draw the effigies of these two great captains across the stage. For there are enough of those slight things like a phrase or jest' which, as Plutarch urges, often make a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands fall,' discoverable in a miscellany, esteemed by the late Lord Curzon to be of as much interest as any private collection of Wellington's correspondence, even if not so many as in Herr Ludwig's star-spangled pages.

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These last letters of the Great Duke were written to one who only passed off the stage at the close of the last century. Lady Salisbury as she was at the time she received them, Lady Derby as she ultimately became, was entirely worthy of the good fortune that gave her Wellington as a correspondent. As a girl she had worshipped the hero of Waterloo with marks of unusual devotion, even at a date when it was the right and proper thing for young ladies to do. She made relics of the very gloves that his hands had touched, to say nothing of the handkerchiefs that from time to time he freely bestowed upon her; these latter articles always accompanying him, as the letters show, in such abundance that he was in a position to thrust into the Queen's hands, during the simultaneous progress of a royal concert and a royal cold, no less than three, and even to afford Her Majesty the option of a fourth. Lady Salisbury's extravagance of admiration found, after she became a mother, a new outlet. Each of her elder children, no matter what its sex, received the name of Arthur in memory of him whom to her dying day she

The important and interesting letter of Sept. 8, 1852, was freely quoted from by Gleig.

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esteemed her first and foremost friend' and to whose paternal counsels she turned for guidance in the conduct of a first marriage none too wisely made.

Mistress of Hatfield, and then of Knowsley, at a date when the great country-houses counted for so much more in politics than they do at present, Mary, Lady Derby, as she became in her own last phase, remains an intriguing figure of the period in which she reigned. She had her critics and, as Lady Burghclere's charming memoir shows, she had-and deserved to have-her devoted and grateful friends. But to neither class, I think, was the secret of her power of attracting and interesting remarkable men immediately obvious. Without conspicuous beauty of feature, if we except her eyes, or conspicuous brilliancy of conversation, she enjoyed an intimacy with some of the eminent men of the time not wholly to be explained away by the possession of the solid, social assets lately alluded to. It was not merely that Gladstone and Disraeli might be met together in her drawing-room, but that she satisfied to the full correspondents as different as Wellington and Froude. Such another budget of the latter's letters to her as Lady Burghclere has published of the former's was at one time in my possession; and, if the great soldier was the first and foremost of her friends, the great historian gave her perhaps the longest-lived and most intellectual of her friendships. Strange things, not fully recorded among published Carlyleiana, and now all but forgotten, came of an intimacy formed when Froude was working over the Elizabethan manuscripts at Hatfield and she was still its mistress. It was through him that the exterior of the little house in Cheyne Row, where Carlyle dwelt, was sometimes graced by the presence of the Derby carriage, with a live flunkey attached to it as if to mock in his full canonicals of plush and powder the philosopher's theories and threshold; and it was through her, acting upon his suggestion, that Disraeli was induced to make Carlyle that offer of a G.C.B. which did 'the Hebrew conjurer' as much honour in the proffering as 'the Sage of Chelsea' in the refusing.

Times changed; Derby shifted his allegiance from the Conservative to the Liberal Party; and Lady Derby lost caste with Lord Beaconsfield. I cannot but suspect

that in that last unfinished novel of his, which certainly contains a portrait of Gladstone and possibly also shadow-studies of Jowett, Froude, and the then reigning head of the House of Russell, we have in the person of Lady Bertram a reminiscence, in some features perhaps deliberately obscured, of her as he had seen her first some thirty years before.

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'Claribel, Countess Bertram,' we read, 'was a very young widow when she consented to become the second wife of her present husband. . . . Tall, pale, and somewhat fragile, but of a distinguished mien, her large dark eyes full of inscrutable meaning, while a profusion of rich brown hair all her own veiled in a straight line her well-moulded brow and shaded with rich masses her oval cheeks, Claribel received her guests, her voice low but musical and quite distinct, though she scarcely condescended to raise it beyond a whisper. She listened rather than conversed, but could seem deeply or what is styled intensely interested with her companion, and generally herself summed up with an epigram or what sounded as such.'

Be the accuracy of this identification as it may, Mary, Lady Salisbury, was the last of that line of attractive women who had supplied-in her case at least, as in that of her first husband's first wife, without the slightest suspicion of anything being otherwise than it should be-the feminine element which Wellington's nature demanded and which his own all-too-chivalrous marriage had dismally failed to supply. She takes in the last phase of his life the place which had once been held by her immediate predecessor as mistress of Hatfield, by Lady Shelley and by Mrs Arbuthnot. Into her attentive ear he poured day by day fragments of the endless trifles into which all living-even the greatest-ultimately dissolves.

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'The letters which I write to you,' he told her-and he never humbugged, are altogether apart from all others. They amuse me as they do you, and I laugh while writing them, thinking of the amusement they will afford you. . . . To her he speaks of the growing pains and penalties of his deafness; of his conviction that these had their source in his inability to protect his ears from cold at night; of his boredom with guests who put him to the necessity of making a 'fruitless

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