he possessed, in an uncommon measure, the historical mind. "Instructive" is a dreadful word; and yet one must say that Hypatia is a work intensely instructive, just as Westward Ho! a brighter effort, tells us next to nothing, and is valuable only as a great romance.

Much of Henry Kingsley's work was trivial; Charles was never trivial. Much of Charles Kingsley's work was tiresome; Henry was never tiresome. Charles Kingsley took everything seriously, himself included. Henry is eternally smiling, even though the jest is not always apparent. Charles had no sense of humor; Henry overflows with humor. Lord Saltire is Henry Kingsley's masterpiece; but so many of the characters of Ravenshoe live and delight us that it would be no more than fair to say that Lord Saltire is only the finest expression of a type that Henry could not draw, in different poses, too often. Few social studies are of greater interest than Ravenshoe. It is a picture of English town and country life at the epoch of the Crimean war. In the middle of the nineteenth century England was enjoying the double advantage of a prosperous country life and a vigorous and flourishing manufacturing interest. In these sumptuous and settled conditions a fine plot is developed. The dialogue is felicitous; and though Mr. Norris is past grand master in nimble dialogue, Henry Kingsley takes high rank after him. Charles's dialogue is somewhat lumbering, and his fine ladies and gentlemen lack inspiration. Now Lord and Lady Ascot, Lord Hainault (a very different personage form Lord Beaconsfield's Lord Hainault), Lord Welter, Lord Saltire, Denzil Ravenshoe, even the slightly sketched General Manwaring all these are faithful, distinguished portraits. I suppose that one must admit the plot to be commonplace. It is the old story

of the concealed marriage and the substituted heir. There is a wicked confessor, and there is also a jolly priest who is a very good fellow by way of contrast. The incidents are many and exciting, and they play their proper part in the book as illustrations, so to speak, to the story. We have none of the panoramic effect of Charles Reade's work. Above all we have none of the pagan fury of expression which Charles Kingsley loved. It is not trivial work, but a tone of smiling earnestness pervades and lightens the narrative, which moves easily to an agreeable if somewhat obvious end.

As a picture of manners and social history it could hardly be improved upon. If any student of history were to ask in the future of what elements the social world of England was composed at the date of the Crimean War, the answer is that they are all to be found in Ravenshoe. There is not a touch of exaggeration, not a false note, not a caricature in the book from beginning to end. Ravenshoe contains, moreover, some of the best portraits of children in literature. Passionately though Charles Kingsley loved children, the recording of child life and child language was beyond him. The portrayal of child life is a difficult thing. It may or may not be important, but undoubtedly it is one of those things that are revealed to some and denied to others. Even to Titian, who could paint the Venus of the Uffizi, the Charles the Fifth on the Field of Mühlberg, the Bacchus and Ariadne of the National Gallery, and the queer little swaddled Archduke of the Pitti, even to Titian himself the secret was not revealed as it was to Sir Joshua Reynolds, and as it has been to Mr. Shannon. In literature the number of artists who have appreciated and translated child life is wonderfully small. After all, the Garth children are common little brats.

Until Mr. Kenneth Grahame wrote the Golden Age we should have had to admit that Mr. Henry Kingsley's pictures of child life were unsurpassable; and to say that Gus and Archie Herries are only a shade less interesting than Edward and Harold and Charlotte and Selina, is to give to the creator of Gus and Archie Herries the highest praise available at the moment.

One test that is often applied to authors of all kinds is to inquire, What phrases has he added to the language? or Which of his characters live? Those who decry Dickens would be astonished to realize how much of their memory of fiction, how many figures, how many incidents, how many phrases, are traceable to the armchair at Gad's Hill. The test is fair. If Coleridge had written nothing but the first stanza of Kubla Khan he would still be immortal. Two lines earned for a duke a crown less perishable than the strawberry leaves. We remember the M.P. who wrote, two hundred years ago:

Annihilating all that's made

To a green thought in a green shade,

and are not at all concerned with what he deemed important at the time-his pay as a member of the House of Commons.

Therefore, if in honest desire to appreciate the great brothers we ask which of their characters live, we are applying a reasonable test, and we find some odd results. If we come to phrases, one phrase is always remembered with glee and malice against Charles Kingsley-"and then began a murder grim and great," but it is rather remembered against him than in his favor; while Henry Kingsley was not a phrase-maker. Then follows the weightier inquiry, Which of their characters have lived, say, for a genera

tion? Wonderfully few. Let us take Charles Kingsley first. Alton Locke undoubtedly lives-as a name: probably few remember the significance of the story which was woven round his career. Hereward the Wake has a slightly less shadowy existence. As regards Westward Ho! the curious fact remains that the name of the story is all that abides. We remember that it is a tale of "the spacious times of great Elizabeth," but Amyas Leigh does not exist as a personage; Sir Richard Grenvill is quite unconvincing. On the other hand, Hypatia lives, and lives more as a great figure than as the type of the wonderful work of interpretation to which she has given her name. The powerful study of Raphael Aben-Ezra is forgotten, except perhaps by some High Church functionaries who may condescend to say -referring to his theological reflections -"Ah! Kingsley."

Now those of Henry Kingsley's creations who survive do not attract the attention of such important people as High Church functionaries; but then, on the other hand, they are not spoken of so slightingly. It is with the affection that becomes our reminiscence of old friends that we speak of Lord Saltire, Charley Ravenshoe, and Lord Welter:-in effect most of the characters (including the children) of Ravenshoe live yet. But that is as much as we have a right to admit of Henry Kingsley's work. It may be doubted whether any readers who are not Kingsley lovers remember much about The Grange Garden, or Geoffrey Hamlyn, or Austin Elliot.

So, if we are called upon to place the brothers Kingsley in the world of nineteenth-century letters we shall have to recall, in reflecting on their lives and intentions, much that is elevating and something that is distinguished. As regards the work of Charles Kingsley, we shall have to

say that over emphasis destroyed the artistic effect that he would fain have produced. A not dissimilar lack of finish is perceptible in the work of Henry Kingsley, owing to his eagerness to produce. A little more mental concentration in the case of both, a Nineteenth Century and After

little more deliberation in the case of Charles and a little more earnestness in the case of Henry, and the world of letters would have been enriched by two great artists. As it is-proxime accesserunt.

Walter Frewen Lord.

The map of Africa is a monument to Stanley aere perennius. There lie before me various atlases, published during the past sixty years, which is less than the span of Stanley's lifetime. I turn to a magnificently proportioned volume, bearing the date of 1849, when Henry Rowlands was a boy at school at Denbigh. In this atlas the African continent is exhibited, for about a third of its area, as a mighty blank. The coast is well defined, and the northern part, as far as ten degrees from the Equator, is pretty freely sprinkled with familiar names. We have Lake Tchad, Bornu, Darfur, Wadi-el-Bagharmi, Sennaar, Kordofan, and Khartum, and so on. But at the southern line of "the Soudan or Nigritia" knowledge suddenly ceases, and we enter upon the void that extends right through and across Africa down to the tropic of Capricorn. "Unexplored" is printed, in bold letters, that stride over fifteen hundred miles of country, from the tropical circle to well beyond the Equator. The great lakes are marked only by a vague blob, somewhere in the interior, west of the Zanzibar territory. The estuary of the "Congo or Zaire" is shown, and a few miles of the river inland. After that we are directed, by uncertain dots, along the supposed course of the stream northward, to where it is imagined to take its rise in the Montes Lunae, for

which the map-maker can do not better for us than to refer, in brackets, to ("Ptolemy") and (“Abulfeda Edrisi”).

I pass to another atlas, dated 1871. Here there is considerable progress, especially as regards the eastern side of the continent. The White Nile and the Bahr-el-Gasal have been traced almost to their sources. The Zambesi is known, and the Victoria Falls are marked. Lakes Victoria Nyanza and Nyassa appear with solid boundaries. Tanganyika, however, is still uncertain, the Albert Nyanza with its broken lines testifies to the doubts of the geographer, and the Albert Edward does not appear at all; and beyond the line of the lakes, and north of the tenth degree of south latitude, the blank of the interior is still as conspicuous, and almost as unrelieved, as it was twoand-twenty years earlier.

By 1882 there is a great change. The name of Stanley has begun to be written indelibly upon the surface of the Continent. The vague truncated "Congo or Zaire" is the "Livingstone River," flowing in its bold horseshoe through the heart of the former unex plored region, with "Stanley Falls" just before the river takes its first great spring westward, and "Stanley Pool" a thousand miles lower down, where, after a long southerly course, the mighty stream makes its final plunge to the sea. Tributary rivers, hills, lakes,

villages, tribal appellations, dot the waste. Uganda is marked, and Urua,

and Unyanyembe.

All

If we pass on to the present day, and look at any good recent map, the desert seems to have become-as, indeed, it is-quite populous. There is no stretch of unknown and apparently unoccupied land, except in the Sahara, and between Somaliland and the White Nile. the rest is neatly divided off, and most of it tinted with appropriate national colors, the British red, the French purple, the German brown, the Portuguese green. In the map I am looking at there is, right in the middle, a big irregular square or polygon, which is painted yellow. It is twelve hundred miles from north to south, a thousand from east to west. It is scored by the winding black lines of rivers, not the Congo only, but the Aruwimi, the Lualaba, the Sankalla, the Ubangi. It is the Congo Free State, one of the recognized political units of the world, with its area of 800,000 square miles, and its population computed at fifteen millions. The great hollow spaces have been filled in. The Dark Continent is, geographically at any rate, dark no longer. The secret of the centuries has been solved.

Geographical science has still its unfulfilled tasks to finish; but there can never again be another Stanley. He is the last of the discoverers, unless, indeed, we shall have to reserve the title for his friend and younger disciple, Sven Hedin. No other man, until the records of our civilization perish, can lay bare a vast unknown tract of the earth's surface, for none such is left. The North Pole and the South Pole, it is true, are still inviolate; but we know enough to be aware how little those regions can offer to the brave adventurers, who strive to pierce their mysteries. There is no Polar continent nor open Antarctic Sea; only a dreary waste of lifeless ice and un

changing snow. But the habitable and inhabited globe is mapped and charted; and none of the explorers, who labored at the work during the past fifty years, did so much towards the consummation as Stanley. Many others helped to fill in the blank in the atlas of 1849, which has become the network of names in the atlas of 1904.

A famous company of strong men gave the best of their energies to the opening of Africa during the nineteenth century. They were missionaries like Moffat and Livingstone; scientific inquirers like Barth, Rohlfs, Du Chaillu, Teleki, and Thomson; adventurous explorers like Speke, Grant, Burton, Cameron, and Selous; and soldiers, statesmen, and organizers such as Gordon, Rhodes, Samuel Baker, Emin Pasha, Johnston, Lugard, and Taubman Goldie-but there is no need to go through the list. The hardships they endured were not less than those of Stanley; their discoveries were made often with a more slender equipment and scantier resources; as geographers and scientific observers, some of them were his superiors; as administrators, one or two at least could be counted his equals. But those of the distinguished band, who still survive, would freely acknowledge that it was Stanley who put the crown and coping-stone on the edifice of African exploration, and so completed the task begun twenty-four centuries ago with the voyage of King Necho's Phoenician captains and the Periplus of Hanno. It was Stanley who gathered up the threads, brought together the loose ends, and united the discoveries of his predecessors into one coherent and connected whole. He linked the results of Livingstone's explorations with those of Speke and Grant and Burton, and so, enabled the great lacustrine and riverine system of Equatorial Africa to become intelligible; and he it was, also, who saved from loss the fruits of Emin's years of

study and investigation on the Upper Nile. Without him the work of his most illustrious predecessors might still have remained only a collection of splendid fragments. Stanley exhibited their true relation to one another, and showed what they meant. He is the great-we may say the final-systematizer of African geography, and his achievements in this respect can neither be superseded nor surpassed, if only because the opportunity exists no longer.

The

As a fact, Stanley not only completed, but he also corrected, the chief of all Livingstone's discoveries. missionary traveller was steadily convinced that the Nile took its rise in Lake Tanganyika, or, rather, that it passed right through that inland sea. Stanley, when he had "found" the Doctor, and restored the weary old man's spirit and confidence, induced him to join in an exploration trip round the north end of Tanganyika, which proved that there was no river flowing out of the lake, and therefore that no connection was possible with the Nile system. But Livingstone still believed that he was on the track of the great Egyptian stream. He persisted in regarding his Lualaba as one of the feeders of the Nile, and he was in search of the three fountains of Herodotus, in the neighborhood of Lake Bangweolo, when he made his last journey. It was reserved for Stanley to clear up the mystery of the Lualaba, and to identify it with the mighty watercourse which, after crossing the Equator, empties itself, not into the Mediterranean, but into the South Atlantic.

Stanley regarded himself, and rightly, as the geographical legatee and executor of Livingstone. From the Scottish missionary, during those four months spent in his company in the autumn of 1871, the young adventurer acquired the passion for exploration and the deter

mination to clear up the unsolved enigmas of the Dark Continent. Before that he does not seem to have been especially captivated by the geographical and scientific side of travel. He liked visiting strange countries, because he was a shrewd observer, with a lively journalistic style, which could be profitably employed in describing people and places. But the finding of Livingstone made Stanley an explorer; and his own nature made him, in a sense, a missionary, though not quite of the Livingstone kind. He was a man who was happiest when he had a mission to accomplish, some great work entrusted to him which had to be got through, despite of difficulties and dangers; and when the famous traveller laid down his tired bones in the wilderness, Stanley felt that it was decreed for him to carry on the work. So he has said himself in the opening passage of the book in which he described the voyage down the Congo. When he returned to England in 1874, after the Ashanti War, it was to learn that Livingstone was dead:

The effect which this news had upon me, after the first shock had passed away, was to fire me with a resolution to complete his work, to be, if God willed it, the next martyr to geographical science, or, if my life was to be spared, to clear up not only the secrets of the great river throughout its course, but, also all that remained still problematic and incomplete of the discoveries of Burton and Speke, and Speke and Grant.

The solemn day of the burial of the body of my great friend arrived. I was one of the pall-bearers in Westminster Abbey, and when I had seen the coffin lowered into the grave, and had heard the first handful of earth thrown over it, I walked away sorrowing over the fall of David Livingstone.1

There must have been some among 1 "Through the Dark Continent" ad init.