The account of this defeat of the soldiers was given me in our logia, and the narrator wound up by remarking

"I wonder if the Vali can do anything! They say that Tchakegie carries a talisman with him which prevents his being shot."

"That is so," remarked Hadja, who sat on the floor before the brazier engaged in her favorite occupation of making coffee-"that is so, for we know that if a bullet strikes his flesh it falls to the ground."

Whether this be true or not the reader must decide for himself. At all events the greater part of the stories told me of Tchakegie were, I believe, Longman's Magazine.

substantially so, and no doubt he is in many respects a remarkable character. A better government would provide a career for such a man. Instead of living in his mountain stronghold breathing defiance and executing vengeance upon corrupt and venial officials, he might be fighting his country's battles, or helping to carry out some greatly needed scheme of roads or irrigation.

At all events his character and life as sketched to me suggested the fact that Turkey can produce men of mettle, with rude ideals of justice, by no means devoid of heroism.

Frances MacNab.

At his death Professor Mommsen occupied a unique position in contemporary Europe. By common consent he was the foremost scholar, both by virtue of the extent and variety of his attainments, and the extraordinary literary value of one or two of his works. He was also the accepted savant of the German people, the tutelary intellectual genius of his country. For many years it had been his business to expound German ideals and to give voice to racial ambitions. His verdict on any question, whether of the day or of all time, was accepted by the large proportion of his countrymen. He may rank with Savigny as one of the greatest of academic lawyers, who have brought into the sphere of legal maxims a constructive historical spirit, and shown us the great edifice rising out of the swamps of primitive society.

The Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum for which he was chiefly responsible laid the foundation of a scientific study of the most important of original authorities, and classical epigraphy

owes more to him than to any modern scholar. But his great achievement is to be found in the work which he wrote less for the student than for the ordinary reader. He wrote the history of Rome, not as a mosaic of painfully deciphered facts, but as a story of living men, a drama of the rise of one of the greatest of human peoples. Only a laborious scholar can know what a deep foundation of scholarship underlies the vivid narrative; but the most prosaic of men can feel in the tale something of an epic magnificence. Mommsen carried the same vitality into his politics. An enthusiastic Liberal from the first, and a strenuous opponent of Bismarck, he remained to the end a keen critic of policies and politicians. Whatever our verdict on hiswork, all must feel that a great figure has departed from the world.

Being a man before he was a scholar, he carried into scholarship a profound sense of the importance of the man of action. Like Freeman, he always insisted upon the unity of history, and

refused to change his attitude towards

the protagonists merely because they had been two thousand years in their graves. He was as keenly interested, and, let it be said, as violent a partisan, in the quarrels of Sullans and Marians as he was in the debates of the Reichstag. For him there was no distinction in nature between 1805 and B.C. 90. Hence we never find in him the severely balanced judgments and the scrupulous impartiality of calmer historians. He wrote his history with certain fixed presuppositions in his mind, but happily they are 80 very clear on every page that the student can detect them and allow for them. In the first place, he was a democrat, rejoicing in the strength of the people, and when he found a man capable of leading the masses, ready to fall down and worship him. But the democracy must be a militant one. The ineffective philanthropist gets from him nothing but contempt. It is the strong man, the Cæsar or Napoleon, who can discern the power of the "body-guard from the pavement," and use it to shatter effete institutions, who commands his admiration. That Teutonic characteristic, which is found in different degrees in such very opposite people as Bismarck and Nietzsche, is very strong in this historian's mind. He believes in and preaches the gospel of strength, and the strong unjust man seems to him more worth having than a century of the ineffectual good. Hence his democracy is a fighting force, and only one step removed from a tyranny. For constitutional fictions and beliefs which have outlived their usefulness he has a complete scorn, and the upholders of an old régime rarely get justice at his hands. cannot be said that he has stated the Senatorial case fairly, or done that justice to the old Republicans which he has done so amply to the iconoclasts. Liberal though he calls him

It

self, his sympathies are far more with Sulla than with the Gracchi, who discovered a truth which they had not the courage to develop logically; with Catiline and "those terrible energies, the wicked," than with Cicero and academic virtue. No one can forget that portrait of Cicero, which, bitten in with vitriolic energy, has so biassed the world that there seems small chance of that excellent man of letters getting justice for many a day. But it is in his account of Cæsar that Mommsen's imagination carries him to the plane of creative literature. In the main it is no doubt correct, though for some of his more sensational theories, such as the motive with which Cæsar undertook the Gallic Wars, there seems scanty warrant from the authorities. The great epic of the career of the aristocrat, who passes from a negative iconoclasm to a profoundly constructive policy, and at last lays down his life as the seal on the task he has finished, has never been surpassed by any historian. Mommsen had always a good deal of the dramatist's art, and the way in which the narrative leads up to the climax, the crossing of the Rubicon, is moving drama as well as great history.

But if he so carried his politics into his history that he seems to give his narrativé a contemporary interest, there was a reflex action, and he imported from his history certain principles which determined his attitude to questions of his own day. His conception of civic freedom was rather Roman than modern. For the cast-off rags of feudalism and clericalism he had nothing but contempt, but in discarding one set of bonds he imposed another. He was at all times a thorough-going Individualist. He detested slavery, and the war between North and South in America seemed to him a holy crusade. But his conception of freedom, like that of most Individualists, was nar

row and abstract; and he was prepared to submit to other bonds. He was nominally opposed to the doctrine of Imperialism, but in practice he was an enthusiast for the domination of his ●wn Teutonic race. His nationalism was strong enough to make him a violent critic of the policy of other peoples, as in his ill-judged comments on the Boer War, but it was a nationalism quite inconsistent with itself. The old democratic cult of the "strong man" is always somewhere in the back of his mind. The people are the only source of power and of political wisdom, so ran his creed; but they must be led, and their leader should tolerate no malcontents. He was so like Bismarck that we need not wonder that he quarrelled with him. The truth is that no Conservativism is so unshakeable as a certain kind of Liberalism which professes a small number of Liberal dog

The poetster.

mas, but is by temperament bureaucratic and absolutist. To Mommsen the Hague Convention was merely a misprint in history, Socialism a dangerous heresy, and popular liberties an uncertain growth which should be blessed but also jealously curtailed. His honesty and political courage were always remarkable, and were so recognized by his countrymen that towards the end of his life he was granted a kind of indulgence for free speech, and held a position of whimsical independence. But the net result of his teaching seems to us to have been the riveting of militarist and bureaucratic shackles upon his compatriots, and the encouragement of every grandiose racial ambition. Like the Republican Whigs of the eighteenth century, he showed how reaction can masquerade in the cap of liberty.

Black and White.

Nora Chesson.

If in Charles of Orleans the first note of the French Renaissance is heard, if in Villon you find first its energy appearing above ground, yet both are forerunners only.

With Marot one is in the full tide of the movement. The discovery of America had preceded his birth by three or perhaps four years. His early manhood was filled with all that ferment, all that enormous branching out of human life, which was connected with the expansion of Spain; he was in the midst of the scarlet and the gold. A man just of age when Luther was first condemned, living his active manhood through the experience of the great battlefields in Italy, wounded (a valet rather than a soldier) at Pavia, the perpetual chorus of Francis I., privileged to witness the first stroke of the pickaxe against the mediæval Louvre, and to see the first Italian dignity of the great stone houses on the Loire-being all this the Renaissance was the stuff on which his life was worked.

His blood and descent were typical enough of the work he had to do. His own father was one of the last set rhymers of the dying Middle Ages. All his boyhood was passed among that multitude of little dry "writersdown of verse" with which, in Paris, the Middle Ages died; they were not a swarm, for they were not living; they were a heap of dust. All his early work is touched with the learned, tedious, unbeautiful industry which was all that the elder men round Louis

CLEMENT MAROT.

XII. could bring to letters. By a happy accident there were mixed in him, however, two vigorous springs of inspiration, each ready to receive the new forces that were working in Europe, each destined to take the fullest advantage of the new time. These springs were first, learned Normandy, quiet, legal, well-founded, deep in grass, wealthy; and secondly, the arid brilliancy of the South: Quercy and the country round Cahors. His father was a Norman pure bred, who had come down and married into that sharp land where the summer is the note of the whole year, and where the travel ler chiefly remembers vineyards, lizards on the walls, short shadows, sleep at noon, and blinding roads of dust. The first years of his childhood were spent in the Southern town, so that the south entered into him thoroughly. The language that he never wrote, the Languedoc, was that, perhaps, in which he thought during all his life. It was his mother's.

It has been noticed by all his modern readers, it will be noticed probably with peculiar force by English readers, that the fame of Marot during his lifetime and his historical position as the leader of the Renaissance has in it something exaggerated and false. One cannot help a perpetual doubt as to whether the religious quarrel, the influence of the Court, the strong personal friendships and enmities which surrounded him had not had more to do with his reputation than his facility, or even his genius, for rhyme.

Whenever he wanted £100 he asked it of the King, with the grave promise that he would bestow upon him immortality.

From Ronsard, or from Du Bellay, we, here in the north, could understand that phrase; from Marot it carries a flavor of the grotesque. Good song indeed and a great power over the material one uses in singing last indefinitely; they last as long as the sublime or the terrible in literature, but we forbear to associate with them-perhaps unjustly-the conception of greatness.

If indeed anyone were to maintain that Marot was not an excellent and admirable poet he would prove himself ignorant of the language in which Marot wrote, but let the most sympathetic turn to what is best in his verse, let them turn for instance to that charming lyric: "A sa Dame Malade" or to "The Ballad of Old Time," and they will see that it is the kind of thing which is amplified by music, and which sometimes demands the aid of music to appear at all. They will see quite plainly that Marot took pleasure in playing with words and arranged them well, felt keenly and happily, had even some fecundity, but they will doubt whether poetry was necessarily for him the most serious business of life.

Why, then, has he taken the place claimed for him, and why is he firmly secure in the place of master of the ceremonies, as it were, to that glorious century whose dawn he enjoyed and helped to beautify?

I will explain it.

It is because he is national. He represents not what is most this, or most that "highest," "noblest," "truest," "best," and all the rest of it-in his countrymen, but rather what is most common.

Did you meet him to-day in the Strand you would know at once that

you had to do with a Frenchman, and, probably, with a kind of poet.

He was short, square in the shoulders, tending in middle age to fatness. A dark hair and beard; large brown eyes of the south, a great, rounded, wrinkled forehead like Verlaine's; a happy mouth, a nose a trifle insignificant, completed him. Who knows but we may meet somewhere, under cypress trees at last, these great poets of a better age, and find Ronsard a very happy man, Du Bellay, a gentleman, Malherbe, for all that he was a northerner, we may mistake if we find him ever, for a Catalonian. Villon a Bohemian that many cities have produced; Charles of Orleans one of that very high nobility remnants of which are still to be discovered in Europe. But when we see Marot (if we ever see him), our first thought will certainly be, as I have said, that we have come across a Frenchman; and the more French for a touch of the commonplace.

See how French was the whole career!

The

Whatever is new attracts him. reform attracts him. It was chic to have to do with these new things. He had the French ignorance of what was foreign and alien; the French curiosity to meddle with it because it had come from abroad; the French passion for opposing, for struggling;— and beneath it all the large French indifference to the problem of evil (or whatever you like to call it), the changeless French content in certitude, upon which ease, indeed, as upon a rock, the Church of Gaul has permanently stood and will continuously repose.

He has been a sore puzzle to the men who have never heard of these things. Calvin (that astounding exception who had nothing in him of France except lucidity) could make neither head nor tail of him. Geneva was glad enough