eclipse. It is interesting to learn that the ex-Sultan Abdul Hamid and King Theebaw, the deposed King of Burmah, have both been graciously pleased to accept a presentation advance copy of Mr. Pougher's romance, which rejoices in the engaging title of The Swanking Times.

A new poet is about to swim into our ken in the person of Boaz Bobb, a son of the Arkansas soil, who has long been resident in London studying Icelandic literature for the purpose of a new saga of the Wild West. Those persons who have been privileged to see Mr. Bobb's lyrics in MS. say that

Punch.

they can remember nothing like them for their simplicity and candor. Mr. Bobb, with the delightful lack of restraint and false shame that is so marked a characteristic of the age. takes the reader into his confidence with complete unreserve, even when he runs the risk of suffering in reputation from so doing. The title of the little volume is Naked and Unashamed. It will be printed on hand-made paper, with the widest margins of recent times.

Lord Hugh Cecil has accepted the dedication of the new edition of The Slang Dictionary.

To its enormous population and infinite agricultural resources and mineral wealth and military zones of retirement and recuperation and its choice of capitals and bases, from Riga to Odessa, and from the Vistula to the Amur, Russia is daily adding improved means of utilizing and mobilizing men and material on sound strategic principles.

The

The nation, from Tsars to peasants, thinks Imperially. They are never unduly elated by victory, and the worst defeat, even the burning of a capital to the last stick, cannot debase or even depress their energy. very furnace of disaster only serves to revive and intensify their patriotism and courage, their skill and enterprise. The true foundations of all national greatness are the breed and disposition of the people, who should be stout and warlike. These qualifications for immortality are frequent in Muscovy. Hence the stolid resistance of an infantry which amazed the marshals of Napoleon and held out for days in every point of vantage against the more dreadful, because more scientific,

assaults of Kuroki and Oku and Nogi. Every one of the eulogies of Russian troops by Napoleon and Jomini and Clausewitz holds good to-day, nor are their strategic operations merely military. This is proved by the movements in Central Asia and Siberia. Their great trunk railways, like those of Canada, subserve economic, agricultural and commercial, as well as strategic, purposes, and the former objects are even more facilitated in 1911 than in 1904.

The actions in 1904-5, from the Yalu to the Sha-Ho, and from Port Arthur to Mukden and Tsu-shima, were a series of defeats, and so were their 1805, 1807, and 1812 campaigns against Napoleon; but at no period of history have the Muscovites, however şeverely handled from the West or East, bated one jot of heart or hope. We were disgusted with the stupid sneers at Kuropatkin in 1904. His retreat resembled rather the retirements of Moore in 1808 and of Wellington in 1810 and 1812 and of MacClellan in Virginia than that of Napoleon from Moscow or those of Bazaine, Chanzy.

and Bourbaki.

Mukden was no Sédan -not even a Vittoria. Kuropatkin's battles almost rivalled those of Lee in 1864. The colossus of the North has often been rudely handled but never exhausted, even when it was the bulwark of Europe during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and bore the brunt of the fell attacks of Zenghis and Tamerlane. It soon renewed its mighty youth. Napoleon's terrible victory at Borodino, 1812, did not induce the Tsar to make peace; on the contrary we find his myriads at Leipsic the next year, and the Cossacks of Platoff and Davidoff avenged, by the banks of the Marne, 1814, the repulse of Attila at Chalons in the fifth century.

In Manchuria the despised Japanese drove the Russians from Korea and out of Manchuria in a year, and defeat abroad was followed by civil struggle at home. But the Duma had as much foresight and military insight as any Tsar-Peter or Alexander, or the Tsarina Catherine herself-and by a lavish and wise policy of militarism the northern Parliament gave a lesson in true wisdom to the progressive votecatchers of Westminster. All the prophecies of Napoleon before and of Alison after 1812, that no temporary check by sea or land could ruin Russia, such is the character, such the faith of the inhabitants, have been realized. A race of military men and devout women is equal to either extremity of fortune. Every enthusiastic eulogy of Russians, as apart from their bureaucracy, from 1719 to 1877, might be rewritten now without any exaggeration, and to-day the alliance of the Tsar would be welcomed as eagerly by any great State as it was by Pitt in 1805 and by Napoleon in 1807.

Russia is now more powerful than ever from the Caspian to the Pamirs, and is consolidating her influence in Central Asia; she is stronger in Per

sia and not weaker by the Oxus, while she is looking again to lost Manchuria and to free ports, no longer sealed by ice, with longing eyes. Russia's ambitions for sea power have been checked by every variety of adverse conditions since the days of the Varangian kings; but assuredly they will revive, and the voyage of the Baltic Fleet eastward, which rivalled in romance Jason's trip to the Euxine, will be repeated in some other direction and with greater success.

Meanwhile I have the authority of Colonel MacDonnell's latest text-book on Strategic Geography that Russia's power in Siberia is even to-day being relaid by the best possible system of colonization, which will found new provinces in arms and under universal military service new generations of disciplined Cossacks will threaten the capital of their ancient conqueror at Karakorum, in Mongolia. Engineering Yermaks are emulating and surpassing the explorers of Ivan the Terrible. In 1904 the Trans-Siberian Railway was only a single line, with a break at Lake Baikal, and very imperfect in other respects. The distance from Moscow to Harbin is about five thousand miles, and at first only about four trains a day could be despatched. But a genius in the way of transport and railway management arose in Prince Khilkoff. He despatched ultimately thirteen trains a day, and the result was the enormous transit not only of 1,200,000 men, but also 230,000 horses, 1,600 guns, and 700,000 tons of supplies. Hence Mukden was no Sédan. There was no capitulation. Japan got no indemnity in money, and while Russia was compelled to withdraw from the Pacific and Manchuria and give up the cherished Korea, Dalny, and Port Arthur, Siberia remained intact. True, the Russian policy in Europe was obliged to mark time for a few years, with disastrous

results for Balkan States like Bosnia and Herzegovina; but British diplomacy was even more severely rebuffed, and treaties were torn up by Austria, backed by Germany.

In none of their international blunders have our party wiseacres been more persistent than in their hopes and fears concerning Russia. I could give columns of examples, the latest being the headlines of the daily Press in 1904-05. One would imagine that Kuropatkin's operations in the winter and spring of 1904-05 were similar to those forced on MacMahon in August 1870, or to the disjointed and fatal strategy forced on the Federal generals in 1862 or to our South African strategy in 1899, but as Sir Sydenham Clarke (the military member of the Esherite trio, and Governor of Bombay) says, the simplicity of diplomatists like Granville and Grey and other fashionable party bureaucrats is as popular as it is recurrent and enervating and absurd. After the Crimean War it was taken for granted that Russia was defeated and kept from naval power in the Black Sea by the Treaty of Paris, 1856; but during the FrancoGerman war, when France and Germany were busy fighting and Paris was beseiged and starved, worse than was Sevastopol, Prince Gortschakoff tore up the treaty, in spite of Lord Granville's protests. The same simple folk who put up with this rebuff quietly prophesied that Russia was checked in its progress across the Caucasus by the Crimean incidents, but the brave followers of Schamyl were all subdued and the new province of Turkestan created by 1865. So the late Duke of Argyll, another Whig chief, set forth in an enormous tome in 1879-a year after the apparent collapse of the Russians in the Balkan Peninsula-that they would not reach Merv for generations. The Duke had reprobated "Mervousness." But the Mery oasis

was annexed in 1884, and Russians were near Penjdeh in 1893, and within five years the Russian corps were so distributed on the German and Austrian frontiers as to handicap both these States, and Russian naval power revived both in the Baltic and the Euxine.

Even as the German Press to-day ridicules the idea that Sir E. Grey and Lloyd George can by rhetoric limit the extent or direction of Prussian expansion, so in 1898 Sir E. Clarke, writing on Russian naval power, held up our diplomatists to contempt for supposing that treaties are of as much weight as ironclads and battalions. Russia was not conquered in 1856 any more than in 1878 or than in 1905, and "was justified in reasserting her freedom as soon as she felt ready." was absurd to suppose that a great nation could be expected indefinitely to acquiesce in the artificial restrictions imposed by the treaty of Paris. It may be taken for granted that Russia will look after her own interests again once the present tension about Morocco becomes more acute. The apparent contraction of the claws of the Russian bear really means only a collected concentration of strength for future blows.

It

The Outlook has already referred to the reorganization and redistribution of the Russian corps, backed by liberal supplies from the popular representatives and by the genuine enthusiasm of all classes of the Duma. Their patriotism does not depend on office, like that of our progressives. The improvement in transport facilities more than compensates for having fewer men on the frontier. It is good strategy to keep a great central force of seven corps and two cavalry divisions between Moscow and Kazan, just as wise as was the great German mass between the Elbe and Oder when German inner lines were desirable between Russia and France. Russia can pour rapidly

by rail troops to Poland or to Warsaw, Wilna, and Kiev, as required, in one vast line or to either flank. Or they can be hurried to the Amur and Manchuria or Samarkand as need be. What Prince Khilkoff could effect in The Outlook.

time of war can be repeated with twice the energy in time of peaceful preparation for war, and the results will be pregnant with fateful consequences for both the white and the yellow T. Miller Maguire.

races.

Without contradiction, great is the praise of praise. It, like Mercy, is a quality quick and keen to bless both giver and receiver. More than that, it is a proof in both giver and receiver of royalty in the blood. For it is not possible that a criminal should praise: he may applaud, but he cannot praise, seeing that the function of praise is something that the whole heart is participant in, whereas the criminal is a house divided against itself, his conscience against his purpose, and his purpose against his conscience. Yet perhaps even a criminal may praise. But he cannot praise crime. To praise, he must praise with his whole being; he must take rank with his conscience; and thereby he becomes no more a criminal, but a man of splendor. deed is his accolade of royalty.

The

You may tell the man of splendor by his capacity for praise, even as you may tell the age of splendor by its capacity for praise. It is a kind of touchstone. There are, for instance, certain men at whom History stands in perplexity; and at whom History must continue to stand perplexed until this touchstone has been brought forward to resolve the perplexity. You may admire Robespierre; you may stand in wonder of his genius; you may see him thrust his way from obscurity to an unrivalled dictatorship, and hold, frail and unlovely though he be, a whole fair France in fear of his slightest nod; and it may stir your

blood. Similarly, you may question the real greatness of Mirabeau; you may think him after all but a charlatan, a mimicker of greatness, a mock prophet tricked out in robes the like of which he had seen elsewhere, and had had carefully copied. You may think all this, and yet you will have a sneaking regard for Mirabeau, even as you turn from Robespierre as you would from a very beautifully colored toad. Then you will have it brought to your mind that Mirabeau must have been able to praise, a big, open, wholehearted, generous praise, if occasion demanded it, even though no single instance arose to your mind of his having done so; and you would dare wager with any that Robespierre could not so have praised, that his approval must needs have been a poor, watery, grudging kind of plaudit, while he pulled his spectacles down from his forehead to scan your intentions carefully: when the whole perplexity will at once stand resolved to you, and you will take your rank with the charlatan, were he charlatan never so much and against the man of the Mountain.

And tell us, will you, when was Rare Ben Jonson the better man: when he wrote "Sejanus," or when he wrote of the man who had been his great rival in drama, who had defied all rules and principles of Art, such rules and principles as he had laid down magisterially at the Mermaid, and who probably had compelled him to leave writ

ing for the "Globe" or cease his dramatic brawling, that "he loved the man, and did honor his memory on this side idolatry as much as any"?-that "he was not for an age, but for all time"?-that he was the "Soul of the Age! The applause! delight! the wonder of our Stage!"? Nay, how did Ben earn the epithet of "rare"? Was it because of his Book? Was it because he laid down the law heavily of a night, and through to many a morn, at the Mermaid? Tyrants are not wont to be dubbed rare. Or was it because he had a soul large enough to praise?

con

You will say, perhaps, that Ben could blame, and blame mightily. True; but then it takes a man who can praise to blame. Nay a man who cannot praise should never on any account be entrusted with the instrument of blame, for he will not use it properly; he will not blame; he will be merely and weakly censorious, irritably censorious: and a censor is not a blamer. A blamer is to a censor as a sycophant is to a praiser. You must have standards of differentiation for the one; you need have none for the other. Το blame is to detect blemishes. Ben once detected a blemish to such good effect that Shakespeare was strained to alter the line accordingly. And therefore blame, like praise, which is its obverse, is a critical function. There was probably never blame that did not imply praise. Once there was a young man who wrote a long poemwhich was no ill thing to do-but he wrote it in an age of censors, and in that he was unfortunate. He called his poem "Endymion," and he was told to "go back to the shop, Mr. John. Stick to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes." There has been much good ink used in discussing whether or not a certain fretfulness was induced in Keats as a result of this, weakening him for the scourges of phthisis, and leaving us a decapitated poetry. But

it must ever remain a matter of speculation as to what would have happened to him had he fallen into an age of good praisers, who would have hailed him royally, without omitting to point out those blemishes, those vulgarities and unmitigable crudities, that he himself declared he was not unaware of.

For there is a deep principle in this: a principle of life. It is possible to save a soul by praise when no other method could avail. You could raise an age of giants by praise. There is an ancient superstition-that is yet not so ancient-that we grow round our names like peas round a stick: to call a boy "Bob" from his youth up would make him quite a different man from the probable product had you ever hailed him as "Robert." There is another superstition which is no superstition, that if you see a friend pale and ill, you may send him to the grave by advising him of the fact, whereas you may save him by proclaiming his robust appearance. So it is with praise. Praise, as has been said, is a critical function; you cannot praise something that is not there; you could not have praised Keats because his poetry was robust and manly. The good praiser would have seen with native perception just what his poetry held worthy of praise, knowing that no man would have published an ambitious book without something worthy of praise in it; and he would have praised that royally. He would have known that no ill could have come of this; that, indeed, no ill can ever come of praise; but that the receiver would have burgeoned to the quality praised in him, filling out its proportions, and coming indeed actually to be the thing he was acclaimed for being, like a boy to the sound of his name. Yes, you could raise an age of giants by praise.

Instead of which, you will hear it