t; but the thing certainly happened,
somehow. That he made pregnant utterances as a legislator may be taken
as proved by the keen philosophy of the travels and tales he has since
tossed to us; but the House, strong in stupidity, did not understand
him until in an inspired moment he voiced a universal impulse by bluntly
damning its hypocrisy. Of all the eloquence of that silly parliament,
there remains only one single damn. It has survived the front bench
speeches of the eighties as the word of Cervantes survives the
oraculations of the Dons and Deys who put him, too, in prison. The
shocked House demanded that he should withdraw his cruel word. "I never
withdraw," said he; and I promptly stole the potent phrase for the sake
of its perfect style, and used it as a cockade for the Bulgarian hero
of Arms and the Man. The theft prospered; and I naturally take the first
opportunity of repeating it. In what other Lepantos besides Trafalgar
Square Cunninghame Graham has fought, I cannot tell. He is a fascinating
mystery to a sedentary person like myself. The horse, a dangerous
animal whom, when I cannot avoid, I propitiate with apples and sugar, he
bestrides and dominates fearlessly, yet with a true republican sense of
the rights of the fourlegged fellowcreature whose martyrdom, and man's
shame therein, he has told most powerfully in his Calvary, a tale with
an edge that will cut the soft cruel hearts and strike fire from the
hard kind ones. He handles the other lethal weapons as familiarly as the
pen: medieval sword and modern Mauser are to him as umbrellas and kodaks
are to me. His tales of adventure have the true Cervantes touch of
the man who has been there--so refreshingly different from the scenes
imagined by bloody-minded clerks who escape from their servitude into
literature to tell us how men and cities are conceived in the counting
house and the volunteer corps. He is, I understand, a Spanish hidalgo:
hence the superbity of his portrait by Lavery (Velasquez being no
longer available). He is, I know, a Scotch laird. How he contrives to be
authentically the two things at the same time is no more intelligible to
me than the fact that everything that has ever happened to him seems to
have happened in Paraguay or Texas instead of in Spain or Scotland. He
is, I regret to add, an impenitent and unashamed dandy: such boots, such
a hat, would have dazzled D'Orsay himself. With that hat he once saluted
me in Regent St. when I was