offerings to the dread unknown power that holds the land in thrall. From the market-square the bugles sound once more to recall the soldiers, now scattered far and wide in vain pursuit, and on their return a woman, the only prisoner, who was found cowering in the bush, is brought up to the commandant. She is but a girl and fear has made her dumb. For such as she African warfare has had but little mercy, and in this land of blood, where human life is held so cheap, death has ever been the usual fate of captives, men and women, old and young alike. The wild staring eyes proclaim her terror, and vain are all attempts to reassure her, so when presently appears a Yao soldier tenderly carrying a tiny child, it is placed in her arms with a bundle of food and she is escorted out of the town and sent to join her own people. When the troops have re assembled we are able to reckon our losses. One young English life has paid the price of empire and one soldier will return no more to his fardistant home on Lake Nyassa, whilst the wounded number little over a score; losses light enough considering the closeness of the fighting and the determined stand made by the enemy. They must have been far heavier had the stockade been attacked from the front as the enemy had anticipated, but that its flanks could be turned had not been thought of, and in the dense bush the movements of the soldiers had been screened from view until too late. LADY LOUISA STUART. IN the correspondence of Madame de Villars, a contemporary of Madame de Sévigné, a sentence describes the stupendous ennui of the Royal Palace of Madrid: "L'ennui est affreux; il me semble qu'on le sent, qu'on le voit, qu'on le touche tant il est répandu, épais." "Apply this where you please," writes Lady Louisa Stuart-"half in the vapours"-to her sister Lady Caroline Dawson, in the year of our Lord 1781, and of her age twenty-three, dating from the family seat of Luton, in the fat, loamy county of Northamptonshire. "Our magnificent barns," she writes again, with a sort of shiver, of the classical mansion which the brothers Adam had built for Lord Bute-a patron of Scottish architects, as he was of Scottish poets and painters. The details of the life at Luton make the eighteenth century distaste for a country life not wholly incomprehensible. In summer,-the dusty summer of the flat midlands, "we spend the day," writes Lady Louisa, "trailing to the farm and dawdling to the flower-garden." When winter and the early hour of dinner made the evenings interminable, Lady Bute would retire with my lord to the library, and Lady Louisa prepared tea in her room for two brothers, who yawned in her face, and spoke perhaps six sentences during the evening. Such was the poisoned at mosphere that Lord Bute carried with him into retirement after his brief and unmerited day of power. His moods, his hypochondria, his suppressed rage where politics were concerned, his sensitiveness to attack, made variable weather in the stately home. At the same time, Lady Bute's shyness and ill-health and Lord Bute's pride of birth prevented free intercourse with neighbours or easy hospitality to guests. In her old age Lady Louisa declared that "pride of birth makes dull people duller." She certainly did not formulate such a thought in her silent youth, but she could not remember the time when she did not reflect, and the Bute household invited such criticism. On the few guests who were invited the place had the same chilling effect as on Lord Bute's family, but the host himself could affect a could affect a more cheerful demeanour, while his genuine interest in his library and garden supplied him with conversation. Miss Eleanor Elliot-herself a delightful member of the affectionate, quickwitted family of Minto-writes in 1775 of a visit to Luton: "This is the finest and most expensive palace I have ever seen; it has a melancholy grandeur that is inexpressible. Lord Bute's fall from power had given him a horror of society and, at this date, the Elliots were the only people, except his own family, who had seen the costly fabric. He himself had a touch of melancholy romance, much to Miss Elliot's taste, but she admits that "disgust with the ingratitude of the world has made him savage, and the family when with him in the country take the colour of their minds from his." Naturally the object of all the family was to escape from home as quickly as they might. Lady Mary, marrying in the heyday of her father's power, had her soul satiated with wealth and selfimportance as the wife of the notorious Sir James Lowther, later Lord Londsdale; Lady Jane married Sir James (afterwards Lord) Macartney; the dull, self-important brothers were out in the world in the fashionable services, diplomacy and the army. the sister island to win Irish hearts and to struggle with Irish poverty. In long intimate letters to Lady Caroline,1 Lady Louisa poured out her discontent with home, her weariness of the conventional gaieties of London, her heartache, and the mismanagement that wrecked her young years. But even from this sympathetic sister she kept secret one large part of her experience, her eager, thwarted intellectual life, the books she read, the poetry she wrote, the dreams of a vivid imagination, the judgments of an acute critical mind. romantic 66 One enthusiasm indeed Lady Louisa shared with this artistic sister, the love of wild and beautiful scenery. Writing from Buxton, at the age of eighty, of her The happiest friendship any delight in mountain scenery, woman can enjoy is one with she says: Though I was "the sister next to to herself certainly a grown woman in age." Fortunately Lady before I ever saw rock or moor, Louisa's "next sister" was a yet they seem native to me, gifted and beautiful creature. and I felt at home as soon as I Mrs Delany's Letters give a got to Buxton." It was when pleasant picture of Lady Bute she was twenty-two that she bringing her two youngest and her mother escaped for a daughters to wait upon her old week or two from Luton to friend. It is natural that shy Lady Bute's own inheritance Lady Louisa passed unnoticed, at Wharncliffe, and lived but Lady Caroline's "genius" blissfully in the plain little for painting and music are lodge among rocks and trees. praised, and her sweet voice, Perhaps Rousseau's influence only spoilt by her little trick told for something in Lady of unnecessary laughter. In Louisa's delight in the small bare rooms and the freedom of taking long walks in a short skirt, she read 'La Nouvelle Héloïse' that winter with eager 1779 she had made a lovematch with Mr Dawson, the eldest son of an Irish peer, Lord Carlow, and had gone to 1 Mr Dawson succeeded to his father as Lord Carlow in 1779. In 1785 he was created Earl of Portarlington. VOL. CLXXXV.—NO. MCXXII, 20 admiration, but the cult of "romantic prospects" and picturesque ruins was in full swing a generation before Wordsworth and Scott put spiritual interpretation or romantic associations into them. The children of Lord Bute had the misfortune to call Perhaps no one has such vivid experiences as a gifted child growing up in a repressive, formal home; chance kindnesses, rare amusements, are so eagerly enjoyed, and there are so many vacant hours in which to dream them over afterwards. When Lady Louisa was a little girl of nine she fell in love at first sight with an older girl who came in one evening to drink tea with her sisters, a girl of sixteen, but dressed in a womanly suit of mourning, figure and kind merry face, who said something to set her a-laughing, and flirted a black crape fan in her face. "I thought I had never seen so agreeable a person, and longed to have her come again; but I do not recollect that she did, nor that I saw her again till I too was an adolescent." This was her cousin, Lady Frances Scott, the dear intimate friend of her later years. When she was quite old, Lady Louisa could shut her eyes and see the whole scene "where she sat, how she looked, how she spoke." Such impressions were vivid in proportion to their rarity. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu grandmother. That lady's vanity, eccentricity, and selfwill had made the name of "wit" a terror and a mockery to all the young Stuarts. The male portion of the family lost a girl with a short, round no opportunity of inveighing brutally or jocosely against "blue-stockings." Louisa, a good deal the youngest of the family, was the only one with brains. When she was only eight years old her cousin Lady Mary Coke records that "Lady Bute's youngest daughter is a wonderful child, already engaged on writing a play on the Roman subject of Jugurtha." (Unfortunately Lady Mary Coke's own egotism and conceit and absurdity were beacons to scare any young woman from the pursuit of letters.) Louisa early learnt to conceal the sufferings that a sensitive, gifted child endures in the rough-and-tumble of a large, healthy, stupid family. She reconciled herself to her detested sewing-in the sorrows of later life she was, like many a simpler woman, to find comfort in her 66 seam," and managed to carry herself, her Plutarch and Clarendon, her romantic dreams of her unvisited native land, and her habit of scribbling, to a little sanctum four feet by eight. The little girl had indeed a friend in Lady Bute, as far as a child in so formal a household could reach her mother through ten brothers and sisters, not to speak of governesses and waiting - women. Lady Bute was a Wortley, with a pious dread of seeing the Montagu wits and foibles reappearing in any of her own daughters. She was an affectionate woman, with sound judgment, and though shy and rather forbidding in manner she could be excellent company with her intimates, having a quiet, observant woman's gift of telling circumstantial stories. Of all her children little Louisa alone had any taste for her mother's old tales and old friends. When accounting to Sir Walter Scott for her intimate knowledge of things and people passed away before she was born, Lady Louisa explained, "I was so much the youngest of a numerous family that I had no play - fellow, and for that reason listened with all my ears to the grown people's conversation, most especially when my mother and the friends of her youth got upon old stories." The rest of the family yawned at the stories, and found in their mother's friends-poor, witty Mrs Anne Pitt, deaf old Lady Suffolk, and Mrs Delany-only food for their dull quizzing. May we not make it a gloss on the fifth commandment that they who live with the old in their youth and with the young in their age, do indeed prolong their days in the land? By the tale of her years Lady Louisa lived from 1757 to 1851, but her memory stretched without a break from the Court of Queen Anne to the eve of the Great Exhibition! But old age, with its serene activities, lay far off in the depths of a following century, when Lady Louisa walked, in 1781, a disconsolate, slender little figure, through the great galleries and frigid rooms of Luton. As we see her in the miniature by Mrs Mee, she wears the loose powdered hair with curls on the neck and the feathered hat which made an artist's labour light in those days. The face is small and fine, without being pretty; it is a shy, sensitive face, with a smile only waiting for response to shine out from lips and eyes. Alas! there were few smiles, and a sufficient cause for "the vapours" in the years when she was writing to Lady Caroline Dawson. "My mother," she writes once, "attributes my melancholy to fancying that he is neglecting me and fretting about it, and perhaps there is some truth in this.' He was William Medows, a cousin of Lady Bute's, a brother officer of one of the Stuart brothers. A younger son and a cousin- -of course Lord Bute would not hear of such a thing. There was some fatal misunderstanding. Lady Louisa's efforts to conceal her feelings were only too successful; the lover adopted an air at once "cold and easy,' and a year or two later married another. One winter stood out painfully in Lady Louisa's memory, in which Lady Caroline received many melancholy letters from her. The cousins who should have been lovers met again at Tunbridge in 1792, Lady Louisa, a confirmed old maid of thirtyfive, living with her mother; William Medows, a general in command of a large camp, the husband of an adored wife, the father of a charming little daughter. Lady Louisa describes an afternoon spent in |