often miss an illustration, or at least a metaphor,
from the hunting-field. Undoubtedly he had the distinction of his
class; but its narrowness was his as surely. Also the partisanship of
the eight volumes grows into a weariness. The longevity of the English
Bench is notorious; but it comes of hearing both sides of every
question.

After all, he was a splendid artist. He tamed that beautiful and
dangerous beast, the English sentence, with difficulty indeed, but
having tamed, worked it to high achievements. The great occasion
always found him capable, and his treatment of it is not of the sort
to be forgotten: witness the picture of the Prince President cowering
in an inner chamber during the bloodshed of the _Coup d'Etat_, the
short speech of Sir Colin Campbell to his Highlanders before the Great
Redoubt (given in the exact manner of Thucydides), or the narrative of
the Heavy Brigade's charge at Balaclava, culminating thus--

"The difference that there was in the temperaments of the two
comrade regiments showed itself in the last moments of the onset.
The Scots Greys gave no utterance except to a low, eager, fierce
moan of rapture--the moan of outbursting desire. The
Inniskillings went in with a cheer. With a rolling prolongation
of clangour which resulted from the bends of a line now deformed
by its speed, the 'three hundred' crashed in upon the front of
the column."

C.S.C. and J.K.S.

Dec. 5, 1891. Cambridge Baras.

What I am about to say will, no doubt, be set down to tribal
malevolence; but I confess that if Cambridge men appeal to me less at
one time than another it is when they begin to talk about their poets.
The grievance is an old one, of course--at least as old as Mr.
Birrell's "_Obiter Dicta_": but it has been revived by the little book
of verse ("_Quo Musa Tendis_?") that I have just been reading. I laid
it down and thought of Mr. Birrell's essay on Cambridge Poets, as he
calls them: and then of another zealous gentleman, hailing from the
same University, who arranged all the British bards in a tripos and
brought out the Cambridge men at the top. This was a very
characteristic performance: but Mr. Birrell's is hardly less so in
these days when (to quote the epistolary parent) so much prominence is
given to athleticism in our seats of learning. For he picks out a team
of lightblue singers as though he meant to play an inter-University
match, and challenge