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failed, however, to follow up its military successes; and, though the new Empress was duly crowned by the Abun at Addis Abbaba, Yasu was enabled to collect a new force, which after sundry defeats took refuge at Magdala. But Yasu was no warrior; in August his courage failed him; he deserted his army and fled (August 1917) with a few followers to the Danakil country, where he remained, plotting and waiting upon events till the winter of. 1920-1. Then, relying on the support of the Ras of Tigre, Seyum Mangasha, the grandson of the Emperor John IV, he ventured to appear in that always turbulent district, but was within a few weeks arrested by the local governor of Makalle. Soon afterwards, when Ras Taffari marched northwards at the head of a formidable army meant to overawe the rebels, Yasu was handed over to the Regent, and is now in confinement.

Otherwise, since 1917, nothing startling seems to have happened. The new Government soon showed that it was no better than the old; in fact personal quarrels between the Empress, her regent, and the Council-when there was one; for it was suspended between March 1918 and July 1919-have practically rendered all government impossible. The ill-paid soldiers of the Palace Guard and of the Shoan army, kept in the neighbourhood of the capital, have been a constant menace to any orderly administration. In Menelik's time they were paid and fed first by long wars of conquest and then by heavy exactions from the newly-conquered provinces. But now, for more than twenty years, there have been no more lucrative wars; and continual misgovernment has so impoverished the subject races that the old tribute in kind and money has dwindled to small dimensions. Nevertheless a long series of disorders, outbreaks, and mutinies has not been sufficient to overthrow Menelik's great work of unification, chiefly because no prince of royal blood has shown himself a warrior, much less strong enough to assert his supremacy over his fellowprinces, Rases, and generals, or to shake off the dominance of the European Powers, whose interest it is to maintain the status quo.

What remedy is to be found for this melancholy state of affairs, it is not easy to discover. At one time, under cover of the Treaty of London (1915), Italy seemed

inclined to claim annexation of the whole country, or at least a protectorate such as she had tried to assert 1889-1896. But, when Great Britain and France made it plain that clause xiii of the Treaty only promised rectifications of her frontiers at the expense of the British and French territories bordering upon them, and

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that they meant to adhere to the terms of the Tripartite Convention of 1906, Italy abated her pretensions-so much so that on Sept. 27, 1919, Signor Tittoni, speaking in the Italian Chamber, declared not only that the integrity of the Ethiopian Empire formed the basis of the Allied policy, but that any diminution of Ethiopian territory or independence would be contrary to Italian interests.

Despairing of any radical reforms in internal administration, the three European neighbours of Abyssinia

seem now to be relying on a policy of peaceful penetra tion through trade and commerce, for which the Jibut railway gives an opportunity never before offered Hitherto trade on any large scale has been impossible the native Abyssinian still despises work and trade o every kind as much as ever, and not unnaturally is hostil to foreign interference. The old evils of Menelik's tim -bad communications, arbitrary taxation, corrupt deal ings, robbery, and general insecurity of life and property are just as rife, and have consistently ruined al commercial and industrial enterprises, whether attempted by members of the subject races or by foreigners. Such internal trade as there is has been wholly in the hand of foreign firms (mostly French), centred at Addi Abbaba for the sake of imperial protection. British trade has been chiefly represented by our Indian fellow subjects, whose interests our resident Minister has found it somewhat difficult to safeguard. Meanwhile, the conditions of trading all the world over have grown worse; violent fluctuations of the rates of exchange and of prices, difficulties both of freight and tonnage, have brought commercial enterprise everywhere to a stand still; with the result in Abyssinia, as elsewhere, that schemes started at the time of the Armistice with good prospects of success have so far yielded but little profit to their promoters.

G. E. UNDERHILL.

Art. 4.-AUSTIN DOBSON.

1. Collected Poems. By Austin Dobson. Kegan Paul, 1897. 2. Eighteenth-Century Vignettes. Three Series. Chatto & Windus, 1892-96.

3. Side-Walk Studies.

Chatto & Windus, 1902. 4. William Hogarth. Kegan Paul, 1891. 5. Horace Walpole. Macmillan, 1910.

And other works.

No writer of equal distinction can ever have exceeded Austin Dobson in the absence of any kind of saliency in the personal details of his life. There was absolutely nothing in his career of over eighty years upon which biography can seize, no glimmer of adventure or faintest tincture of romance. When it has been said that he was born, in 1840, into a professional family; that, after a brief education in England and at Strasbourg, he entered the Board of Trade at the age of sixteen; and that he remained there,

'Calme et paisible,
Comme un poteau
Inamovible,

Dans son bureau,'

till he retired from it at the age of sixty, there is nothing exterior that can be added. His married existence, which was untroubled by a single bereavement, enjoyed the same happy uniformity. He did not travel; he made no public appearances; he found no pleasure in political or social distractions. Every weekday morning he proceeded to his office, and every afternoon he returned to his suburban home; on Sundays he went to church. Ealing possessed no citizen more regular in his habits or more blameless in his conduct.

He preserved this noiseless regularity, this resignation to what seemed an excess of bourgeois conventionality, partly in obedience to temperament, partly because it enabled him to devote himself, with no disturbing element, to the workings of his imagination. We should make the gravest of mistakes if we supposed this outward quietude to respond to an inward insensibility. Austin Dobson, so hushed and unexhilarating as his exterior envelope appeared, lived a life of ceaseless mental

activity. His intellectual interests absorbed him, and he cultivated a curious power of resuming them, day after day, without any disturbance from domestic o official duties. These he accepted in their proper season and then passed out of them into what was for him th only real existence, the domain of literature and art The task of appraising him, therefore, although difficul because it demands observation of secret phenomena is so far simplified that it has to deal exclusively wit mental processes. The critic has to penetrate, as well a he can, the poet's art and the historian's method. H is not distracted by any extraneous circumstance, as i the case in the biographies of most eminent men o letters. The development of Dobson's imagination, an the course it took, are our sole solicitude in contemplatin his career.

He had no tradition of literature behind him and n acquaintance with literary people when he entered th Board of Trade, nor did it, I believe, occur to him t write until long afterwards. He was slow in menta development and without confidence in his own powers For a long time he saw no path before him. But he fel an impetus towards æsthetic expression, and havin some facility in drawing, he took to spending his evening in an art-school at South Kensington. A few of hi productions exist, and show a humoristic tendency, i the direction of Cruikshank and Charles Keane. H was, however, brought into contact with a clerk of hi own age at the Board of Trade, William Cosmo Monk house, afterwards distinguished as an art-critic. Monk house, who was much more precocious than Dobson, ha been writing verses for years past, and had already som experience of printer's ink. After Monkhouse's death in 1901, Dobson recalled that his old companion, in thos twilight days of their boyhood, 'had the happy facult of conveying a well-considered and weighty opinio without suggesting superiority or patronage.' words, very characteristic of Dobson, reveal the relatio which long existed between the friends, and whic gradually led to an attempt on the part of the elder t enter the lists where his friend seemed already s brilliant. But, for a long while, Dobson was content t read and to admire. He was in his twenty-fifth yea

Th

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