Later that evening, the ex-matron found the new-comer sitting on the edge of a tiny white bed in the boys' ward, and bending in rapture over two bowed heads.

"Hush!" she said imperatively, while little Paul lisped

"Effishidy before I wake."

"I'm so glad they can say 'em in English," she whispered, when they had finished and stood before her in their white night-gowns. "It never seemed to me as if God really could understand French."

As Mrs. Faunce went on to the other room to say good-night to Enchen and little English Mary and the others, she heard Jeannot's oft-repeated question as to whether God had side curls. "Sh, sh, oh no!" came the shocked The Cornhill Magazine.

answer from the new grandmother's lips.

"Then he's got side whiskers," triumphantly asserted little Paul.

"Yes, I guess maybe he's got side whiskers," was the answer. "You see, God isn't a lady, God is a man."

Jeannot drew a deep sigh of relief, as if theological spectres were laid for

ever.

"I asked Grandma Faunce the other day, and she didn't know," he said reproachfully.

Mrs. Faunce clasped her hands together with delight; she had found the right person at last! She went hastily upstairs, and sat down at her desk, carefully examining certain documents that gave information about steamers leaving Marseilles for Egypt.

"I'll start for the Sphinx to-morrow," she announced with a gleam in her eye. Then she wrote a letter to America, ordering a Boston rocker to be shipped to No. 41, Rue de Vannes, Paris.

Margaret Sherwood.

There are tragedies of success as well as of failure, and although tragedy does not enter into the career of George Wyndham there is a tinge of pathos which might in some lights seem tragic in the brilliant life and sudden death of this spoiled child of fortune. Under our grey skies and in our sombre intellectual world, with his romance and his beauty, his florid and magnificent rhetoric, his fine writing, his brilliant and daring wit, he appeared almost as an exotic from some warmer intellectual clime, where a sense of ornament in thought and language is more naïve and unashamed than it is with us. He was born to be successful, to do things easily, to experience the best and achieve the high

est as a matter of course. The top of the tree was his natural home; and there, like some gaily-plumaged bird in a tropical forest, he swung easily to the breeze among sunshine and color. But let some accident happen to such a one so that he fall from his natural seat, and must, if he would regain it, toil painfully upward again, all the heart and the life seem to go out of him, and he lacks the wings to soar. To change the simile, Wyndham was like a highly-geared motor-car that would flash and fly along the levels, but could not with grinding and laboring pinions climb a steep hill. The genius of his energy was for being rather than for striving.

He was descended from Lord Ed

ward Fitzgerald and the famous lady who is said to have been the daughter of Madame de Genlis and Philippe Egalité. The racial admixture of French and Irish is almost always productive of fine qualities of brain; and these, steadied and solidified through two generations of English aristocracy, blossomed in George Wyndham into that combination of grace and ability, poetry, imagination, and scholarship in life which is always irresistible when it is allied with wealth and position. He ran rapidly through the gamut of Eton and Sandhurst and active service in Suakim in the Coldstream Guards, and emerged, at the age of twentyfour, into the world of politics which was still in 1887 the great world, the great opportunity for a man of his capacity. He worked under Arthur Balfour in Ireland, and thus served his apprenticeship in the best school-the school of which he was one of the last representatives and to which he remained consistently loyal. Few men would now dare to use the kind of florid and magnificent rhetoric which was characteristic of George Wyndham's highest flights. Read in cold print such rhetoric appears so exaggerated as to border on the absurd; the eye and the ear must also surrender themselves to the charm of personality if it is to make its full effect. But he was more than an orator. He was a creative and inspiring influence in the inner councils of his party. He was destined, had his character been as solid as his abilities were brilliant, to be the true successor, and lineal continuation of Arthur Balfour in our public life. As Under-Secretary for War in the difficult time of the Boer war he showed that he could not only represent a great department in Parliament, but also administer it with as much success as the exigencies of the situation and the condition in which he took it over permitted; and his

speech in the Debate on the Address in 1900, when things were going wrong in South Africa, will long be remembered for its brilliancy and firmness, and the strength and courage of its defence. In Ireland, when he went there as Chief Secretary in 1900, he did even better. The difficulty of his post was an inspiration to him, and in the years of his administration he rose to fulfilment of the best that was in him. A kind of fundamental generosity and benevolence, which was not very obvious to those who only knew him superficially, set him to work on the scheme which he believed would most practically benefit the people of Ireland; and the result was the Land Purchase Act, which was not only the finest achievement of his political life, but one of the most statesmanlike measures passed by any political party since Mr. Chamberlain's Compensation Act. It was impossible to be in Ireiand in those days and not to feel that there was a delightful "go" about public life there. Sir Horace Plunkett's work in the Department of Agriculture had come to its fruition, the Gaelic League was at the height of its vogue, and there was throughout the country an intellectual activity, a feeling of optimism, the fruits of which remain to this day. On all this Wyndham shone like a sun; through all this time he worked with an almost feverish activity, like one who feels that the time is short; yet it is certain that the idea of failure was the thing most remote from his mind. He spoke quite confidently to his intimates of the time when he should be Prime Minister; and it seemed as though nothing could stand in his way. But little as he knew it, on the day that he brought Sir Antony MacDonnell to Dublin Castle he had sealed his own political fate. It was regarded as a daring and brilliant stroke, and so it was; but it was fatal. The history of his conferences

with Sir Antony and Lord Dunraven will probably never be recorded; but it is quite certain that out of them might have grown the really ideal solution of the Irish difficulty. Wyndham reckoned, however, without the political machine, and his conspiracy for perfection, being suddenly discovered, appeared, in the usual public treatment of such things, a sordid intrigue, a threatening of the integrity of his party. Like passionate letters read out in the Divorce Court, all the fine aspirations and ideals of his dream lay soiled in the dust of political controversy. He had worn himself out, and used up his energy, and had none left with which to fight injustice and misunderstanding. He made no complaint, acted like a good soldier with loyalty and submission to his leader-and disappeared forever from the forefront of the battle. So that we do not greatly exaggerate when we write of the "tragedy of success."

A good deal has been written about George Wyndham as a man of letters; and it is true that if he had made literature his career he might have brilliantly adorned it. "Might," we say, because it is seldom that anyone who lives as vividly as he did can preserve much to put into literature. A man must either write greatly or live greatly: he can seldom do both. If you live a thing you do not write it; if you write it, you do not need to live it. His actual achievements in literature are scarcely more than the charming recreations of an accomplished dilettante. He liked to show that he could do everything. In many things he was as simply and engagingly vain as a child. He knew so well how everything ought to be done, and he had such a perfect instinct for style, that he felt he could do everything; and he often used to say "If I could have given my time to poetry"-or soldiering, or forestry, or editing, or social

LIVING AGE VOL. LX. 3132

ism, as the case might be "what a poet, soldier, forester, editor, or socialist I should have been!" His talk when he was inspired or stimulated was the most remarkably rapid play of invention and fantasy, always charmingly addressed to the listener as to an intellectual or sympathetic equal, who would receive his ideas in shorthand, as it were, without having them elaborately developed. Such talk could not always be profound or even wise; but it was always dazzling. And always when one was with him there was the sense that things were happening, that one was in the very centre of what was happening, that one was at the top, so to speak, and that everything that happened was happening in the world beneath. Such persistent brilliancy is apt sometimes to be a little frothy, and is far from being an unmixed blessing to any man. In his case one could only say that it was irresistible, and fall gladly beneath his spell. But there was a deeper side to George Wyndham than those who were only dazzled by him would ever know -a generosity and kindness, a fine quality of soul, an essential benevolence, a desire to achieve that which would really benefit the poorer and more sorrowful of mankind-such qualities, in fact, as go to the making, and will remain as typical of, a great gentleman. We are reminded in taking leave of him of the character outlined in Meredith's sonnet "To а Friend Lost."

"When I remember, friend, whom lost I call

Because a man beloved is taken hence, The tender humor and the fire of

Divide, and at your feet his emblems fall.

O surely are you one with the white host,

Spirits whose memory is our vital air, Through the great love of Earth they had, lo! these,

The Saturday Review.

Like beams that throw the path on tossing seas,

Can bid us feel we keep them in the ghost,

Partakers of a strife they joyed to share."

Sir Edward Grey has the valor not of ignorance, but of an incorrigible optimism. It is the price that he and every man has to pay at times for the possession of ardent ideals. One of Sir Edward Grey's ideals he gave fine and memorable expression to it in a speech in the House of Commons in March, 1911-is the conclusion of an effective Treaty of Arbitration between Great Britain and the United States. I do not quarrel with that Ideal, though I believe it to be superfluous, and I know it to be unattainable. But I do quarrel with Sir Edward for striving after it just now in public, and with an unfortunate precipitancy.

At the banquet given in honor of the new American Ambassador recently, the Foreign Secretary said: "I should like to assure Mr. Page that if-as I suppose will be the case seeing that his Government has taken an initiative of its own in the matter-if he comes to us with proposals arising from the desire of his Government to find some way of making more remote the appeal to blind force between nations, he will find in this country, and from the British Government, a ready response."

That of course is more than an invitation; it is a direct incitement to Mr. Bryan and to every British and American sentimentalist to proceed to engineer another Anglo-American fiasco. As one who sets a value that can scarcely be exaggerated upon good

will between the British and American Governments and peoples, I should have thought we had had enough of these diplomatic breakdowns, and that even Downing Street by now had been convinced of the impossibility of concluding any Arbitration Treaty with the United States that is worth the paper it is written on.

Three attempts have been made in the past sixteen years, and every one of them has miscarried. The OlneyPauncefote Treaty of 1897 was rejected by the United States Senate outright; the Hay-Lansdowne Treaty of 1904 was gutted by amendments; and the Knox-Bryce compact of 1911 was done to death in an equally decisive fashion. Presidents Cleveland, McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft have each done what they could to overcome the permanent and, in my belief, the insuperable obstacle to any and every Treaty of Arbitration worth having between Great Britain, or any other country, and the United States; and each has hopelessly failed.

If President Wilson is now smitten with the same, or a similar, ambition, he will, I hope, be politely referred to the experience of his predecessors before we agree to countenance and assist his vain endeavor. With their record in the matter we might well, as it seems to me, rest resignedly acquiescent. Certainly no Englishman can wish to have his country and Government again occupying the ludicrous