And laughs again, in lines beginning :

'When, his thighs with sweetness laden,

From the meadow comes the bee';

but some friend should have told him that drones gather no honey. Ruskin, in 'Stones of Venice,' is sound but heavy.

'The ornamental value of the minute chasing obtained by the delicate plumage of the birds and the clustered bees on the honey comb in the bear's mouth, opposed to the strong simplicity of its general form cannot be too much admired.'

Charles Dickens used the bee for laughter-making in 'Nicholas Nickleby' and 'Our Mutual Friend'; there is a further reference in Bleak House.'

Swinburne is in raptures.

'But I who leave my queen of panthers,

As a tired honey-heavy bee

Gilt with sweet dust from gold-grained anthers
Leaves the rose-chalice, what for me?

'From the ardours of the chaliced centre,
From the amorous anther's golden grime

That scorch and smirch all wings that enter,
I fly forth hot from honey time.'

Tennyson affords many quotations. Here are lines from Eleanore':

'The yellow-banded bees

Thro' half-opened lattices

Coming in the scented breeze

Fed thee, a child, lying alone

With whitest honey in fairy gardens cull'd.'

In 'The Princess' we read:

'Every sound is sweet,

Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro' the lawn,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,

The murmuring of innumerable bees.'

There are, in his work, too many references for quotation, and one more must suffice-from 'In Memoriam':

'And, brushing ankle deep in flowers,
We heard behind the woodbine veil
The milk that bubbled in the pail
And buzzing of the honied hours.'

Robert Louis Stevenson in Memories and Portraits,' Kipling in The Second Jungle Book' and several poems, Tolstoi in War and Peace,' Lewis Morris in his Garden of Regret,' and Francis Thompson in his magnificent sonnet, 'To my Friend,' have referred to the bee; but it is impossible to quote at length.

Maeterlinck in his Life of the Bee' provides passages innumerable for quotation. Here is one that pictures in exquisite prose the tragic nuptials :

'Prodigious nuptials these, the most fairy-like that can be conceived, azure and tragic, raised high above life by the impetus of desire: imperishable and terrible, unique and bewildering, solitary and infinite. An admirable ecstasy wherein death, supervening in all that our sphere has of most limpid and loveliest, in virginal limitless space, stamps the instant of happiness on the sublime transparence of the great sky, purifying in that immaculate light the something of wretchedness that always hovers round love.'

In her Corrymeela,' Moira O'Neill sings:

"This livin' air is moithered wi' the hummin' o' the bees,'

and in that line suggests a picture.

Lovers of Thomas Hardy will remember how his early novel Under the Greenwood Tree' is full of the scent of honey and the sounds of swarming time. Towards the end when Dick the Tranter's son is coming to wed Fancy Day he is late and there is some misgiving, but only the bees have delayed him.

"Well, who-ever would have thought such a thing?" said Dick ... “'tis a fine swarm too. I haven't seen such a fine swarm these ten years."

"Well, bees can't be put off," said Grandfather James, “marrying a woman is a thing you can do at any moment, but a swarm o' bees won't come for the asking.”’

There are other references to the bee in some of the poems. Mr W. B. Yeats writes of

The leafy bower where one smells the wild bee's honey';

and here is a charming verse:

'I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made,

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.'

The following lines are from 'The Stare's Nest by my Window':

'The bees build in the crevices

Of loosening masonry, and there

The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening, honey bees

Come build in the empty house of the Stare.'

But Dean Inge, in his 'Outspoken Essays,' tells us, 'The bee-hive is an appalling object lesson in state Socialism carried to its logical consequences.'

Eighty years ago an Essay on the Honey Bee was printed in this Review and republished in book form by the John Murray of that generation. The anonymous author-the Rev. T. James-was clearly a scholar and a bee-keeper, and if his discourse, pleasant and rambling, is not altogether free from error, he did correct some of the mistakes that passed current in his season and gave evidence of much shrewd observation. For example, he knew why the bees prefer white clover to red, he could recognise the varying qualities of honey and account for them, he had learned how to make metheglin and to enumerate the natural enemies of the honey bee. His paper is adorned with all manner of apposite quotations. I think there must have been a place for this Essay in a corner of the library in every country parsonage of his day. When it was written the revolting practice of destroying all but the strongest stocks was engaging attention, and it is interesting to read of the measures then under consideration to enable the bee-master to take a surplus and yet leave the workers alive. Our author clings to the old-time skep, he would rather have less honey than make a change; he is a stern critic of hives that know nothing of straw.

He writes of books that have passed beyond our ken, books we cannot think of without regret. Who would not wish to read Cotton's Letters to Cottagers from a Conservative Bee-keeper,' described as 'one of the most elegant volumes that ever graced a library table'? The author's system was apparently faulty, his style calls for pungent criticism, but 24,000 copies of the 'elegant

volume' were sold, so there was balm in Gilead and the fashion of the day favoured plain speaking. Remarks the reviewer, 'the sale of such books is no test of their real popularity, as a hundred are given to where one is bought by the poor.' And he goes on to complain with some asperity, 'we do not think him happy in his jokes nor at home in his familiarity... His Aristotle has taught him the use of proverbs to the vulgar, which he has everywhere taken advantage of. . . .' I like to think of the Quarterly Reviewer and Mr Cotton in some Elysian field to which the bees of Hymettus go when they leave this plane, settling their differences over a jug of metheglin and contemplating a model of one of the latest bar-frame hives. Given the surroundings, agreement is quite possible; for though our reviewer chastises Mr Cotton he has a certain regard for him that leads to long quotations. He throws gay light on some of the methods by which bee-keeping was encouraged. For example, a Mr Thorley asked what profit could be derived in fourteen years by a man who started with a single swarm and allowed it to multiply? It is interesting to learn that at the end of the term he would have 8,192 hives and 4,300l. 16s. profit!

The pursuit of the bee-master has a mellowing influence. He envies no man his wealth or his leisure, neither golf clubs, hunters, shotguns, rifles, nor fishing rods avail to stir the deep content with which he tends the hives; golf-links, moors, and salmon-pool must fail to lure him from the garden ways in which his hives are set. In the summer he must work for his subjects while they work for him; through the winter hive and bee-master share the golden tribute of the fields and gardens. No insect is better beloved even though love be tinctured with fear. Nothing that runs or flies has attracted in larger measure the attention of philosophers and poets, nor do the foregoing pages tithe the tribute that has been rendered to the hive and its workers. Yet while the lover of books and bees ponders the pleasant relations between the two, he may find difficulty in forgetting that the hive is the goal of materialism.

S. L. BENSUSAN.

Art. 4.-THE FIUME-ADRIATIC SOLUTION.

By a curious irony of fate the solution in a conciliatory spirit of the thorny Fiume-Adriatic controversy and the re-establishment of friendly relations between Italy and Yugoslavia have been the work of Benito Mussolini, the Italian statesman who is generally regarded abroad as the exponent of extreme Imperialism.

To understand the problem and its effects on Italian public opinion, we must glance back at some of its antecedents. For many decades it had been the policy of Austria-Hungary to promote dissensions among her various subject races in order to rule them more easily. On the Adriatic coast the Austrian Government supported the Croats and Slovenes against the Italians, because the Italians hankered after union with Italy, whereas the Slavs had no Irredentist aspirations. Hungary, on the other hand, persecuted the Slav population, and tended to support the Italians of Fiume, the one Italian community under the Hungarian Crown. The population of Fiume, through many vicissitudes, had always been a prevalently Italian community, and in 1779 Maria Theresa erected the town into a corpus separatum under the Hungarian Crown, and although Croatia was around it, Fiume had no political or administrative connexion with that province. Hungary appointed the governor, and Fiume sent a deputy to the Hungarian Diet. As it was Hungary's only port, the Hungarian Government did everything to promote its welfare and increase its trade. Before the War, in fact, the great bulk of its trade was with Hungary, and only a small proportion - about 10 per cent.-with Croatia.* Owing to Hungary's treatment of Fiume, the inhabitants, although ever attached to their Italian nationality and language, were not as keen Irredentists as were the Italians under Austria; though shortly

The total trade of Fiume in 1912 was 1,975,000 tons. The imports were chiefly from Britain and British India (coal and jute), Italy, and the United States, of which 80 per cent. went to Hungary (including CroatiaSlavonia), 15 per cent. to Austria, and 5 per cent. to other countries. Of the exports, mostly beet sugar and timber, 77 per cent. came from Hungary, 18 per cent. from Austria, and the rest from Bosnia; 25 per cent. went to Britain, 25 per cent. to Italy, and the rest to India and the U.S.A.