to the extensive patronage exercise of Indian patronage which it fell to him to dis- in 1784. Out of a long list of pense. Brougham has given promotions England and Irean entertaining picture of the land between them had capconsternation and bewilder- tured only three. But what ment which prevailed when the Home Secretary attributed he followed Mr Pitt Pitt into to "a combination of the most Opposition. "No man could insatiable ambition and the tell whom he might trust: most sordid avarice and vilnay, worse still, no man could lany," the Scot will be charittell of whom he might ask ably disposed to ascribe to "I have seen,' anything." somewhat nobler motives. wrote Sir Walter Scott to George Ellis, "when the streets of Edinburgh were thought by the inhabitants almost too vulgar for Lord Melville to walk upon." With all his power, he was singularly free from the taint of jobbery. He may have sometimes bestowed places with a view to strengthening the position of his party, but he did not bestow places upon notoriously unsuitable men. He refused to appoint a Sheriff for the county of Sutherland on the strength of local and political connections; and Lord Minto testifies to his belief that "there was scarce a gentleman's family in Scotland, of whatever politics, which had not at some time and in some one of its members received some Indian appointment or other act of, in many cases, quite disinterested kindness from Henry Dundas." To him we owe that long succession of civil and military officers who have reflected so much glory both upon our East Indian possessions and upon their native land. It is impossible to refrain from smiling at the indignant remonstrance addressed addressed by Lord Sydney to Mr Pitt upon the VOL. CLXXXIX.—NO. MCXLVII. It was this indefatigable solicitude for their interests which secured for Dundas the affection and regard of the great body of his countrymen. He has had no successor. Since 1832, if not for longer, Scotland has been the corpus vile upon which Treasury officials, in conjunction with successive Chancellors of the Exchequer, have conducted their curious experiments in economy. A tardy perception of this fact may account in some measure for the spasmodic demand which is sometimes heard for "Home Rule" for Scotland. But the true remedy for the evil lies in no such mischievous and insane project. It lies rather in bringing the Scotch Radical members to a due sense of their responsibilities. From the date of the first Reform Bill the Scotch Whig or Liberal or Radical representatives in the House of Commons have enjoyed a marked numerical preponderance. They could have exercised an irresistible pressure upon any Government which they habitually supported had they been minded so to do. "Instead of which," they have done the bidding of the Liberal whips with an unquestioning 2 T fidelity which the devotion of the Scotch members to Dundas never surpassed. Nowhere has the party system, with its blind adherence to "the machine," operated so balefully as in Scotland. It is, of course, responsible for our numberless "carpetbaggers"-men who knew rather less about the country they condescended to misrepresent than they did about the South Sea Islands. Most of these, it is perhaps unnecessary to mention, have been perceptibly inferior in ability and eminence to their great forerunner, Mr Fox. But in point of cheerful readiness to postpone Scottish interests to the exigencies of faetion, we doubt if any distinction can be taken between the indigenous and the exotic element in the party. A characteristic illustration of our contention has quite recently been given. The Treasury has taken it into its head wantonly to withhold an addition to the salaries of the Principals of the four Scottish Universities which had been voted for the financial year just expired. The existing salaries are ludicrously inadequate; the anticipated increase could hardly be described as munificent; and the augmented stipends would not have equalled the remuneration granted out of public funds to the heads of certain educational institutions which have been established of late years in the English provinces. Yet not a single Scots Radioal member, to the best of our recollection, has raised his voice to protest against this highhanded and pettifogging action on the part of a Government department. Can any one imagine Mr Asquith's or anybody's ministry treating Ireland in a similar manner? The thing is inconceivable. Well may we exclaim with Sir Walter, "Ah! Hal Dundas, there was no such truckling in thy day!" All systems of government and administration have their drawbacks. The system of one United Parliament for Great Britain and Ireland is not perfect. But its superiority over any other possible scheme is so manifest that it is well worth while to attempt to reduce its disadvantages to a minimum. At no period since the Union, as we have endeavoured to indicate, has that attempt been attended with more conspicuous success than during the years of Dundas's dictatorship. Sound common-sense, a knowledge of the world, a wholesome freedom from fanaticism and cant, and a fixed determination to promote the interests of their particular corner of the vineyard, are the qualifications which Scotsmen have a right to expect in their representatives. If the occurrence of this anniversary should induce a little meditation upon his political career, should breathe into them a portion of his spirit, and should stimulate them to follow, however feebly, in his footsteps, their constituents will have good cause once more to bless the name and extol the example of Henry Dundas. THE TWYMANS. BY HENRY NEWBOLT. CHAPTER XXXIV. FOR Percy, as for other dwellers in the Enchanted City, the sense of Time, as we know it in the outer world, practically did not exist. The Seasons, it is true, flitted round him in their accustomed circle, and a very gay dance they made of it, with the help of the nine Muses, the seven-and-seventy Spirits of Delight, Pan and the River Nymphs, Thyrsis and the Dryads: among them too the iridescent wings of Cupid flashed continually in and out. The whirl was unresting, but it never seemed to move: it changed without advancing. As it was last year, so was life to-day, so it would be the next year and the next, as full of mad pursuit and wild ecstasy as the men and maidens on the Grecian Urn, as fixed too in its unfading beauty, the audible and visible beauty of the little town by the river, the forest branches, the songs for ever new, the loves that are always winning near the goal, but always unfulfilled, the beauty of the marble that has no thought for the day when it will wake and pass beyond into the world of attainment and mortality. Percy, then, and his friends saw nothing of Father Time; but with his daughters they danced merrily enough, one after another, round and round the magic circle. Soon May, for the second time, was calling them, with blowing of horns through sleepy streets, with singing of psalms on high towers at sunrise, with early wanderings in "the forest ground called Thessaly." One more week and the festival of the Eights was here again. At this the town filled suddenly with fresh life and unfamiliar beauties: you saw them everywhere-bright faces, bright frocks, bright parasols, glowing patches of colour, turning old grey streets to the semblance of garden borders newly blossomed; or crossing and recrossing before the set background of cloisters and quadrangles like the lightfooted groups which pass over the stage when the curtain rises and the play is just beginning, but hardly even yet begun. Among them, Percy knew, was to be Althea Donnelly, the sister of whom his friend so often spoke, the cousin of his own silent imaginings,she who had named him "the Twyman of the Future" but she was not among the earlier comers. On the first three days of the races Percy and Edward ran with their respective boats, and afterwards assisted at the tea-parties of various friends. The knowledge that something more interesting was in store for them, gave a feeling of suspense to their pleasure which heightened it, and, for Percy at any rate, added to it that touch of significance which marks the difference between great occasions and lesser ones. It may perhaps seem unnecessary to suspect youth, which has so many absurdities to answer for, of the supreme absurdity of falling in love by anticipation. But there is evidence that even well-built and lasting strongholds of affection have been founded before dawn: others, if not begun entirely in the dark, have certainly been reared very quickly upon ground strangely well prepared to receive them. If Peroy had not been busy with some such unauthorised planning, he would hardly have felt the sense of unanswered expectation which made the longlooked - for meeting, when it came, seem almost like a disillusionment. For, judged by all that could be said of it in words, that Monday was a day of days. True, it was blurred from beginning to end by the continual mist of confusion in Percy's mind, yet that mist was itself fascinating as well as dazzling, full of changing colour as an opal: and the details which it obscured at the time long afterwards reappeared in memory with minutest clearness. Percy, when he thought of it, was again back in the bright worldwithout-end twenties, again contentedly lounging upon Edward's comfortable window seat and looking out upon that massive remnant of the ancient city wall which divides the new buildings of New College from the older portion of the College. Again he saw the heavy round towers as they slumbered in sun and shadow; the smooth turf below them was pied with fresh spring daisies; rooks cawed lazily; the sky was of tender unflecked blue. Opposite to him, like a doorway from the past, was the narrow arch which pierces the old wall, and leads from the inner quadrangle to the outer court: upon this his eyes were fixed in an expectation that was dreamy rather than intense. Presently from this doorway the expected group emerged: he could always see them more clearly and solidly than one ever sees the hurrying phantoms of the moment that is with us. First came Edward with a short, stout lady-how the bugles on her black silk flashed in the sun!-then two more short ladies, very young, dark and pretty, dressed exactly alike, and sharing one proud undergraduate between them: lastly their brother, and with him beyond doubt the real Althea-not, after all, much like the image Peroy had made for himself. That image vanished for ever as he saw her, but it fled with a kind of remonstrance-an indignant protest, as it were, against the discrepancy-that remained in his mind to trouble it. How came she to look so much older and more experienced than his own sister? They were both, he knew, upon the upward slope towards eighteen, with only a few months between them: why, then, should one be the child he could command at will, and the other a woman grown, elegant and self-possessed? With what a leisurely air she stopped and turned to admire the feudal aspect of the old wall! It is true that the whole group had also turned, and lingered for exactly the same space of time; but Peroy did not observe this, for in his eyes she was already the sole cause of the party and all its actions. When at last they met, a new discrepancy faced him. He had been told that Althea was much like her brother: and certainly she had Edward's upright carriage of the head, and the soft auburn of his hair; her grey eyes were as quiet and unflinching as his, her voice in the same rich tones spoke of the same unfailing vitality. But the differences! the slender springing of the figure, so essentially unmasculine, so like a flower-stem drawn by the hand of Dürer: the delicate modelling of cheek and chin, the shell-like perfeotion of the ear and the living curve of the hair above it; beyond all, that peculiar grace of the head in listening, with brows averted and downward, grave eyes looking up from under them, and the generosity of the lips narrowed for the moment to a whimsical point of doubt-every where finish, completeness, individuality, a whole new world to be discovered at peril, instead of the half-familiar landscape he had thought to see. To the adventurous what could be more desirable? yet to Peroy it was at first like finding himself in a land of exile: he was as much lost as the hero of his favourite old romance, who comes back after three days' absence to his own home, and finds it with the changes of three centuries upon it, barely to be recognised at all. But now they must be moving towards the scene of the races, whither, as it soon appeared, the rest of the world had gone some time before them. The streets through which they passed were empty : empty too the avenues in Christ Church Meadows; but a faint confused roar came up the Long Walk to meet them, and died away with sharp pistolshots like the cracking of whips. The lower division races were over: no matter, their own boats were both in the First Division, and for that part of the contest they were exactly in the nick of time. Here was the river at last, a sheet of dancing gold wherever it could be seen; at present it was only visible between the College barges, which lay in a seemingly endless line close under the near bank. Strange amphibious structures they looked to the visitors, half ship, half pavilion, or as the more critical wits observed, something between a canal-boat and an omnibus. Each was distinguished by its own colours, its own heraldry, its own flag at the masthead: on one a band was playing, on the roof or |