Ladies, life is a changing measure,Youth is a lilt that endeth soon;
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Pluck ye never so fast at pleasure,Twilight follows the longest noon.Nay, but here is a lasting boon,Life for hearts that are old and chill,Youth undying for hearts that treasureImogen dancing, dancing still.
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Nel Mezzo Del Cammin
Whisper it not that late in yearsSorrow shall fade and the world be brighter,Life be freed of tremor and tears,Heads be wiser and hearts be lighter.Ah! but the dream that all endears,The dream we sell for your pottage of truth—Give us again the passion of youth,Sorrow shall fade and the world be brighter.
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The Invasion
Spring, they say, with his greeneryNorthward marches at last,Mustering thorn and elm;Breezes rumour him conquering,Tell how Victory sitsHigh on his glancing helm.
Smit with sting of his archery,Hardest ashes and oaksBurn at the root below:Primrose, violet, daffodil,Start like blood where the shaftsLight from his golden bow.
Here where winter oppresses usStill we listen and doubt,Dreading a hope betrayed:Sore we long to be greeting him,Still we linger and doubt"What if his march be stayed?"
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Folk in thrall to the enemy,Vanquished, tilling a soilHateful and hostile grown;Always wearily, warily,Feeding deep in the heartPassion they dare not own—
So we wait the deliverer;Surely soon shall he come,Soon shall his hour be due:Spring shall come with his greenery,Life be lovely again,Earth be the home we knew.
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Rilloby-Rill
Grasshoppers four a-fiddling went,Heigh-ho! never be still!They earned but little towards their rentBut all day long with their elbows bentThey fiddled a tune called Rilloby-rilloby,Fiddled a tune called Rilloby-rill.
Grasshoppers soon on Fairies came,Heigh-ho! never be still!Fairies asked with a manner of blame,"Where do you come from, what is your name?What do you want with your Rilloby-rilloby,What do you want with your Rilloby-rill?"
"Madam, you see before you stand,Heigh-ho! never be still!The Old Original Favourite GrandGrasshopper's Green Herbarian Band,And the tune we play is Rilloby-rilloby,Madam, the tune is Rilloby-rill."
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Fairies hadn't a word to say,Heigh-ho! never be still!Fairies seldom are sweet by day,But the Grasshoppers merrily fiddled away,O but they played with a willoby-rilloby,O but they played with a willoby-will!
Fairies slumber and sulk at noon,Heigh-ho! never be still!But at last the kind old motherly moonBrought them dew in a silver spoon,And they turned to ask for Rilloby-rilloby,One more round of Rilloby-rill.
Ah! but nobody now replied,Heigh-ho! never be still!When day went down the music died,Grasshoppers four lay side by side,And there was an end of their Rilloby-rilloby,There was an end of their Rilloby-rill.
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Pereunt Et Imputantur
Bernard, if to you and meFortune all at once should giveYears to spend secure and free,With the choice of how to live,Tell me, what should we proclaimLife deserving of the name?
Winning some one else's case?Saving some one else's seat?Hearing with a solemn facePeople of importance bleat?No, I think we should not stillWaste our time at others' will.
Summer noons beneath the limes,Summer rides at evening cool,Winter's tales and home-made rhymes,Figures on the frozen pool—These would we for labours take,And of these our business make.
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Ah! but neither you nor IDare in earnest venture so;Still we let the good days dieAnd to swell the reckoning go.What are those that know the way,Yet to walk therein delay?
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Felix Antonius
To-day, my friend is seventy-five;He tells his tale with no regret,His brave old eyes are steadfast yet,His heart the lightest heart alive.
He sees behind him green and wideThe pathway of his pilgrim years;He sees the shore, and dreadless hearsThe whisper of the creeping tide.
For out of all his days, not oneHas passed and left its unlaid ghostTo seek a light for ever lost,Or wail a deed for ever done.
So for reward of life-long truthHe lives again, as good men can,Redoubling his allotted spanWith memories of a stainless youth.
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Ireland, Ireland
Down thy valleys, Ireland, Ireland,Down thy valleys green and sad,Still thy spirit wanders wailing,Wanders wailing, wanders mad.
Long ago that anguish took thee,Ireland, Ireland, green and fair,Spoilers strong in darkness took thee,Broke thy heart and left thee there.
Down thy valleys, Ireland, Ireland,Still thy spirit wanders mad;All too late they love that wronged thee,Ireland, Ireland, green and sad.
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Hymn
O Lord Almighty, Thou whose handsDespair and victory give;In whom, though tyrants tread their lands,The souls of nations live;
Thou wilt not turn Thy face awayFrom those who work Thy will,But send Thy peace on hearts that pray,And guard Thy people still.
Remember not the days of shame,The hands with rapine dyed,The wavering will, the baser aim,The brute material pride:
Remember, Lord, the years of faith,The spirits humbly brave,The strength that died defying death,The love that loved the slave;
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The race that strove to rule Thine earthWith equal laws unbought:Who bore for Truth the pangs of birth,And brake the bonds of Thought.
Remember how, since time began,Thy dark eternal mindThrough lives of men that fear not manIs light for all mankind.
Thou wilt not turn Thy face awayFrom those who work Thy will,But send Thy strength on hearts that prayFor strength to serve Thee still.
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The Building of the Temple
The Organ.
O Lord our God, we are strangers before Thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.
O Lord God of our fathers, keep this for ever in the imagination of the thoughts of Thy people, and prepare their heart unto Thee.
And give unto Solomon my son a perfect heart to keep Thy commandments, and to build the palace for the which I have made provision.
Boys' voices.
O come to the Palace of Life,Let us build it again.It was founded on terror and strife,It was laid in the curse of the womb,And pillared on toil and pain,And hung with veils of doom,And vaulted with the darkness of the tomb.
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Men's voices.
O Lord our God, we are sojourners here for a day,Strangers and sojourners, as all our fathers were:Our years on the earth are a shadow that fadeth away;Grant us light for our labour, and a time for prayer.
Boys.
But now with endless song,And joy fulfilling the Law;Of passion as pure as strongAnd pleasure undimmed of awe;With garners of wine and grainLaid up for the ages long,Let us build the Palace againAnd enter with endless song,Enter and dwell secure, forgetting the years of wrong.
Men.
O Lord our God, we are strangers and sojourners here,Our beginning was night, and our end is hid in Thee:Our labour on the earth is hope redeeming fear,In sorrow we build for the days we shall not see.
Boys.
Great is the nameOf the strong and skilled,Lasting the fameOf them that build:
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The tongues of many nationsShall speak of our praise,And far generationsBe glad for our days.
Men.
We are sojourners here as all our fathers were,As all our children shall be, forgetting and forgot:The fame of man is a murmur that passeth on the air,We perish indeed if Thou remember not.
We are sojourners here as all our fathers were,Strangers travelling down to the land of death:There is neither work nor device nor knowledge there,O grant us might for our labour, and to rest in faith.
Boys.
In joy, in the joy of the light to be,
Men.
O Father of Lights, unvarying and true,
Boys.
Let us build the Palace of Life anew.
Men.
Let us build for the years we shall not see.
Boys.
Lofty of line and glorious of hue,With gold and pearl and with the cedar tree,
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Men.
With silence dueAnd with service free,
Boys.
Let us build it for ever in splendour new.
Men.
Let us build in hope and in sorrow, and rest in Thee.
{216}
Epistle
Across the Western World, the Arabian Sea,The Hundred Kingdoms and the Rivers Three,Beyond the rampart of Himalayan snows,And up the road that only Rumour knows,Unchecked, old friend, from Devon to Thibet,Friendship and Memory dog your footsteps yet.
Let not the scornful ask me what availsSo small a pack to follow mighty trails:Long since I saw what difference must beBetween a stream like you, a ditch like me.This drains a garden and a homely fieldWhich scarce at times a living current yield;The other from the high lands of his birthPlunges through rocks and spurns the pastoral earth,Then settling silent to his deeper courseDraws in his fellows to augment his force,Becomes a name, and broadening as he goes,Gives power and purity where'er he flows,Till, great enough for any commerce grown,He links all nations while he serves his own.
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Soldier, explorer, statesman, what in truthHave you in common with homekeeping youth?"Youth" comes your answer like an echo faint;And youth it was that made us first acquaint.Do you remember when the Downs were whiteWith the March dust from highways glaring bright,How you and I, like yachts that toss the foam,From Penpole Fields came stride and stride for home?One grimly leading, one intent to pass,Mile after mile we measured road and grass,Twin silent shadows, till the hour was done,The shadows parted and the stouter won.Since then I know one thing beyond appeal—How runs from stem to stern a trimbuilt keel.Another day—but that's not mine to tell,The man in front does not observe so well;Though, spite of all these five-and-twenty years,As clear as life our schoolday scene appears.The guarded course, the barriers and the rope;The runners, stripped of all but shivering hope;The starter's good grey head; the sudden hush;The stern white line; the half-unconscious rush;The deadly bend, the pivot of our fate;The rope again; the long green level straight;The lane of heads, the cheering half unheard;The dying spurt, the tape, the judge's word.
You, too, I doubt not, from your Lama's hallCan see the Stand above the worn old wall,
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Where then they clamoured as our race we sped,Where now they number our heroic dead.*As clear as life you, too, can hear the soundOf voices once for all by "lock-up" bound,And see the flash of eyes still nobly brightBut in the "Bigside scrimmage" lost to sight.
Old loves, old rivalries, old happy times,These well may move your memory and my rhymes;These are the Past; but there is that, my friend,Between us two, that has nor time nor end.Though wide apart the lines our fate has tracedSince those far shadows of our boyhood raced,In the dim region all men must explore—The mind's Thibet, where none has gone before—Rounding some shoulder of the lonely trailWe met once more, and raised a lusty hail.
"Forward!" cried one, "for us no beaten track,No city continuing, no turning back:The past we love not for its being past,But for its hope and ardour forward cast:The victories of our youth we count for gainOnly because they steeled our hearts to pain,And hold no longer even Clifton greatSave as she schooled our wills to serve the State.
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Nay, England's self, whose thousand-year-old nameBurns in our blood like ever-smouldering flame,Whose Titan shoulders as the world are wideAnd her great pulses like the Ocean tide,Lives but to bear the hopes we shall not see—Dear mortal Mother of the race to be."
Thereto you answered, "Forward! in God's name;I own no lesser law, no narrower claim.A freeman's Reason well might think it scornTo toil for those who may be never born,But for some Cause not wholly out of ken,Some all-directing Will that works with men,Some Universal under which may fallThe minor premiss of our effort small;In Whose unending purpose, though we cease,We find our impulse and our only peace."
So passed our greeting, till we turned once more,I to my desk and you to rule Indore.To meet again—ah! when? Yet once we met,And to one dawn our faces still are set.
EXETER,September10, 1904.
* In the school quadrangle at Clifton, the site from which, upon occasion, the grand stand used to overlook the Close, is now occupied by the Memorial to those Cliftonians who fell in the South African War.
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An Essay on Criticism
'Tis hard to say if greater waste of timeIs seen in writing or in reading rhyme;But, of the two, less dangerous it appearsTo tire our own than poison others' ears.Time was, the owner of a peevish tongue,The pebble of his wrath unheeding flung,Saw the faint ripples touch the shore and cease,And in the duckpond all again was peace.But since that Science on our eyes hath laidThe wondrous clay from her own spittle made,We see the widening ripples pass beyond,The pond becomes the world, the world a pond,All ether trembles when the pebble falls,And a light word may ring in starry halls.When first on earth the swift iambic ranMen here and there were found but nowhere Man.From whencesoe'er their origin they drew,Each on its separate soil the species grew,And by selection, natural or not,Evolved a fond belief in one small spot.The Greek himself, with all his wisdom, tookFor the wide world his bright Aegean nook,{221}
For fatherland, a town, for public, allWho at one time could hear the herald bawl:For him barbarians beyond his gateWere lower beings, of a different date;He never thought on such to spend his rhymes,And if he did, they never read theTimes.Now all is changed, on this side and on that,The Herald's learned to print and pass the hat;His tone is so much raised that, far or near,All with a sou to spend his news may hear,—And who but, far or near, the sou affordsTo learn the worst of foreigners and lords!So comes the Pressman's heaven on earth, whereinOne touch of hatred proves the whole world kin—"Our rulers are the best, and theirs the worst,Our cause is always just and theirs accurst,Our troops are heroes, hirelings theirs or slaves,Our diplomats but children, theirs but knaves,Our Press for independence justly prized,Theirs bought or blind, inspired or subsidized.For the world's progress what was ever madeLike to our tongue, our Empire and our trade?"So chant the nations, till at last you'd thinkMen could no nearer howl to folly's brink;Yet some in England lately won renownBy howling word for word, but upside down.
But where, you cry, could poets find a place(If poets we possessed) in this disgrace?{222}
Mails will be mails, Reviews must be reviews,But why the Critic with the Bard confuse?Alas! Apollo, it must be confessedHas lately gone the way of all the rest.No more alone upon the far-off hillsWith song serene the wilderness he fills,But in the forum now his art employsAnd what he lacks in knowledge gives in noise.At first, ere he began to feel his feet,He begged a corner in the hindmost sheet,Concealed with Answers and Acrostics lay,And held aloof from Questions of the Day.But now, grown bold, he dashes to the front,Among the leaders bears the battle's brunt,Takes steel in hand, and cheaply unafraidSpurs a lame Pegasus on Jameson's Raid,Or pipes the fleet in melodrama's tonesTo ram the Damned on their Infernal Thrones.
Sure, Scriblerus himself could scarce have guessedThe Art of Sinking might be further pressed:But while these errors almost tragic loomThe Indian Drummer has but raised a boom."So well I love my country that the manWho serves her can but serve her on my plan;Be slim, be stalky, leave your Public SchoolsTo muffs like Bobs and other flannelled fools;The lordliest life (since Buller made such hay)Is killing men two thousand yards away;
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You shoot the pheasant, but it costs too muchAnd does not tend to decimate the Dutch;Your duty plainly then before you stands,Conscription is the law for seagirt lands;Prate not of freedom! Since I learned to shootI itch to use my ammunition boot."
An odd way this, we thought, to criticize—This barrackyard "Attention! d—— your eyes!"But England smiled and lightly pardoned him,For was he not her Mowgli and her Kim?But now the neighbourhood remonstrance roars,He's naughty still, and naughty out of doors.'Tis well enough that he should tell MammaHer sons are tired of being what they are,But to give friendly bears, expecting buns,A paper full of stale unwholesome Huns—One might be led to think, from all this work,That little master's growing quite a Turk.
O Rudyard, Rudyard, in our hours of ease(Before the war) you were not hard to please:You loved a regiment whether fore or aft,You loved a subaltern, however daft,You loved the very dregs of barrack life,The amorous colonel and the sergeant's wife.You sang the land where dawn across the BayComes up to waken queens in Mandalay,The land where comrades sleep by Cabul ford,And Valour, brown or white, is Borderlord,{224}
The secret Jungle-life of child and beast,And all the magic of the dreaming East.These, these we loved with you, and loved still moreThe Seven Seas that break on Britain's shore,The winds that know her labour and her pride,And the Long Trail whereon our fathers died.
In that Day's Work be sure you gained, my friend,If not the critic's name, at least his end;Your song and story might have roused a slaveTo see life bodily and see it brave.With voice so genial and so long of reachTo your Own People you the Law could preach,And even now and then without offenceTo Lesser Breeds expose their lack of sense.Return, return! and let us hear againThe ringing engines and the deep-sea rain,The roaring chanty of the shore-wind's verse,Too bluff to bicker and too strong to curse.Let us again with hearts serene beholdThe coastwise beacons that we knew of old;So shall you guide us when the stars are veiled,And stand among the Lights that never Failed.
{225}
Le Byron de Nos Jours; or, TheEnglish Bar and Cross Reviewers.
Still must I hear?—while Austin prints his verseAnd Satan's sorrows fill Corelli's purse,Must I not write lest haply some K.C.To flatter Tennyson should sneer at me?Or must the Angels of the Darker InkNo longer tell the public what to think—Must lectures and reviewing all be stayedUntil they're licensed by the Board of Trade?Prepare for rhyme—I'll risk it—bite or barkI'll stop the press for neither Gosse nor Clarke.
O sport most noble, when two cocks engageWith equal blindness and with equal rage!When each, intent to pick the other's eye,Sees not the feathers from himself that fly,And, fired to scorch his rival's every bone,Ignores the inward heat that grills his own;Until self-plucked, self-spitted and self-roast,Each to the other serves himself on toast.
But stay, but stay, you've pitched the key, my Muse,A semi-tone too low for great Reviews;
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Such penny whistling suits the cockpit's hum,But here's a scene deserves the biggest drum.
Behold where high above the clamorous townThe vast Cathedral-towers in peace look down:Hark to the entering crowd's incessant tread—They bring their homage to the mighty dead.Who in silk gown and fullest-bottomed wigApproaches yonder, with emotion big?Room for Sir Edward! now we shall be toldWhich shrines are tin, which silver and which gold.'Tis done! and now by life-long habit boundHe turns to prosecute the crowd around;Indicts and pleads, sums up theproandcon,The verdict finds and puts the black cap on.
"Prisoners, attend! of Queen Victoria's dayI am the Glory, you are the Decay.You cannot think like Tennyson deceased,You do not sing like Browning in the least.Of Tennyson I sanction every word,Browning I cut to something like one-third:Though, mind you this, immoral he is not,Still quite two-thirds I hope will be forgot.He was to poetry a Tom Carlyle—And that reminds me, Thomas too was vile.He wrote a life or two, but parts, I'm sure,Compared with other parts are very poor.
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Now Dickens—most extraordinary—dealtIn fiction with what people really felt.That proves his genius. Thackeray againIs so unequal as to cause me pain.And last of all, with History to conclude,I've read Macaulay and I've heard of Froude.That list, with all deductions, Gentlemen,Will show that 'now' is not the same as 'then'.If you believe the plaintiff you'll declareThat English writers are not what they were."
Down sits Sir Edward with a glowing breast,And some applause is instantly suppressed.Now up the nave of that majestic churchA quick uncertain step is heard to lurch.Who is it? no one knows; but by his mienHe's the head verger, if he's not the Dean.
"What fellow's this that dares to treat us so?This is no place for lawyers, out you go!He is a brawler, Sir, who here presumesTo move our laurels and arrange our tombs.Suppose that Meredith or Stephen said(Or do you think those gentlemen are dead?)This age has borne no advocates of rank,Would not your face in turn be rather blank?Come now, I beg you, go without a fuss,And leave these high and heavenly things to us;You may perhaps be some one, at the Bar,But you are not in Orders, and we are."
{228}
Sir Edward turns to go, but as he wends,One swift irrelevant retort he sends."Your logic and your taste I both disdain,You've quoted wrong from Jonson and Montaigne."The shaft goes home, and somewhere in the rearBirrell in smallest print is heard to cheer.
And yet—and yet—conviction's not complete:There was a time when Milton walked the street,And Shakespeare singing in a tavern darkWould not have much impressed Sir Edward Clarke.To be alive—ay! there's the damning thing,For who will buy a bird that's on the wing?Catch, kill and stuff the creature, once for all,And he may yet adorn Sir Edward's hall;But while he's free to go his own wild wayHe's not so safe as birds of yesterday.
In fine, if I must choose—although I seeThat both are wrong—Great Gosse! I'd rather beA critic suckled in an age outwornThan a blind horse that starves knee-deep in corn.
NOTE.—The foregoing parody, which first appeared inThe Monthly Reviewsome years ago, was an attempt to sum up and commemorate a literary discussion of the day. On Saturday night, November 15, 1902, at the Working Men's College, Great Ormond Street, Sir Edward Clarke, K.C., delivered an address on "The Glory and Decay of English Literature in the Reign of Victoria." 'Sir Edward Clarke, who mentioned incidentally that he lectured at the college forty years ago, said that there was a rise from the {229} beginning of that reign to the period 1850-60, and that from the latter date there had been a very strange and lamentable decline to the end of the reign, would he thought, be amply demonstrated. A glorious galaxy of talent adorned the years 1850-60. There were two great poets, two great novelists, and two great historians. The two great poets were Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. The first named would always stand at the head of the literature of the Victorian period. There was no poet in the whole course of our history whose works were more likely to live as a complete whole than he, and there was not a line which his friends would wish to see blotted out. Robert Browning was a poet of strange inequality and of extraordinary and fantastic methods in his composition. However much one could enjoy some of his works, one could only hope that two-thirds of them would be as promptly as possible forgotten—not, however, from any moral objection to what he wrote. He was the Carlyle of poetry. By his Lives of Schiller and Sterling, Carlyle showed that hecouldwrite beautiful and pure English, but that he should descend to the style of some of his later works was a melancholy example of misdirected energy. . . . Charles Dickens was perhaps the most extraordinary genius of those who had endeavoured to deal with fiction as illustrative of the actual experiences of life. With Dickens there stood the great figure of Thackeray, who had left a great collection of books, very unequal in their quality, but containing amongst them some of the finest things ever written in the English tongue. The two great historians were Macaulay and Froude. To-day we had no great novelist. Would anyone suggest we had a poet? (Laughter.) After the year 1860 there were two great names in poetry—the two Rossettis. There had been no book produced in the last ten years which could compete with any one of the books produced from 1850 to 1860.'
To this Mr. Edmund Gosse replied a week later at the Dinner of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He reminded his audience that even the most perspicuous people in past times had made the grossest blunders when they judged their own age. Let them remember the insensibility of Montaigne to the merits of all his contemporaries. In the next age, and in their own country, Ben Jonson took occasion at the very moment when Shakespeare was producing his masterpieces, to lament the total decay of poetry in England. We could not see the trees for the wood behind them, but we ought to be confident they were growing all the time.
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Mr. Gosse also wrote to theTimeson behalf of "the Profession" of Letters, reminding Sir Edward of the names of Swinburne and William Morris, Hardy and Stevenson, Creighton and Gardiner, and asking what would be the feelings of the learned gentleman if Meredith or Leslie Stephen (of whose existence he was perhaps unaware) should put the question in public, "Would anyone suggest we have an Advocate?"
Sir Edward, in his rejoinder, had no difficulty in showing that Mr.Gosse's citation of Montaigne and Jonson was not verbally exact. Mr.Birrell added some comments which were distinguished by being printedin type of a markedly different size.
To the author of these lines, the controversy appears so typical and so likely to arise again, that he desires to record, in however slight a form, his recollection of it, and his own personal bias, which is in no degree lessened by reconsideration after ten years.
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Drake's Drum.—A State drum, painted with the arms of Sir Francis Drake, is preserved among other relics at Buckland Abbey, the seat of the Drake family in Devon.
The fighting Téméraire.—The last two stanzas have been misunderstood. It seems, therefore, necessary to state that they are intended to refer to Turner's picture in the National Gallery of "The FightingTémérairetugged to her Last Berth."
San Stefano.—Sir Peter Parker was the son of Admiral Christopher Parker, grandson of Admiral Sir Peter Parker (the life-long friend and chief mourner of Nelson), and great-grandson of Admiral Sir William Parker. On his mother's side he was grandson of Admiral Byron, and first cousin of Lord Byron, the poet. He was killed in action near Baltimore in 1814, and buried in St. Margaret's, Westminster, where may be seen the monument erected to his memory by the officers of theMenelaus.
The Quarter-Gunner's Yarn.—This ballad is founded on fragmentary lines communicated to the author by Admiral Sir Windham Hornby, K.C.B., who served under Sir Thomas Hardy in 1827. For an account of Cheeks the Marine see Marryat'sPeter Simple.
Vae Victis.—SeeLivy, xxx., 43;Diodorus Siculus, xix., 106.
Seringapatam.—In 1780, while attempting to relieve Arcot, a British force of three thousand men was cut to pieces by Hyder Ali. Baird, then a young captain in the 73rd, was left for dead on the field. He was afterwards, with forty-nine other officers, kept in prison at Seringapatam, and treated with Oriental barbarity and treachery by Hyder Ali and his son Tippoo Sahib, Sultans of Mysore. Twenty-three of the prisoners died by poison, torture, and fever; the rest were surrendered in 1784. In 1799, at the Siege of Seringapatam, Major-General Baird commanded the first European brigade, and volunteered to lead the storming column. {232} Tippoo Sahib, with eight thousand of his men, fell in the assault, but the victor spared the lives of his sons, and forbade a general sack of the city.
Clifton Chapel.—Thirty-five Old Cliftonian officers served in the campaign of 1897 on the Indian Frontier, of whom twenty-two were mentioned in despatches, and six recommended for the Distinguished Service Order. Of the three hundred Cliftonians who served in the war in South Africa, thirty were killed in action and fourteen died of wounds or fever.
"Clifton, remember these thy sons who fellFighting far over sea;For they in a dark hour remembered wellTheir warfare learned of thee."
The Echo.—The ballad was "The Twa Sisters of Binnorie," as set by Arthur Somervell.
Sráhmandázi.—This ballad is founded on materials given to the author by the late Miss Mary Kingsley on her return from her last visit to the Bantu peoples of West Africa. The song-net, as described by her, resembles a long piece of fishing-net folded, and is carried by the Songman over his shoulder. When opened and laid before an audience, it is seen to contain "tokens"—such as a leopard's paw, a child's hair, a necklet, or a dried fish—sewn firmly to the meshes of the net. These form a kind of symbolical index to the Songman's repertory: the audience make their choice by laying a hand upon any token which appears desirable. The last of the tokens is that which represents the Song of Dying or Song of Sráhmandázi. It is a shapeless piece of any substance, and is recognized only by its position in the net. The song, being unintelligible to the living, is never asked for until the moment of death.