'Non-seulement il se battait pour son compte, mais encore il se battait à sa manière.

'Il était debout, sans perdre un pouce de sa grande taille, sans garantir un coin de son grand corps.

'Il ne s'inquiétait pas plus des balles et des boulets que si c'étaient des moustiques ou des abeilles.

'Il visait aussi tranquillement que s'il eût été à l'affût, lâchait son coup de fusil, posait sa carabine contre son pied, prenait son binocle mis au point, regardait pour voir l'effet de son coup, faisait un mouvement de tête négatif ou approbatif, selon qu'il était mécontent ou satisfait, rechargeait son fusil, visait de nouveau, faisait feu, reprenait son binocle, et témoignait de nouveau son mécontentement ou sa satisfaction.

'L'ennemi en fuite, Garibaldi, maître comme toujours du champ de bataille, sir John ne s'occupa plus que de chercher ses morts et ses blessés, qu'ils connaissait parfaitement, comme, en battue, le chasseur reconnaît les lièvres qu'il a tués roide ou blessés seulement.

'Ses morts et ses blessés reconnus, les uns et les autres portés sur son calepin, l'Anglais se mit à poursuivre les Autrichiens, et avec ses longues jambes eut bientôt rejoint les meilleurs marcheurs.

'Garibaldi le laissa tirailler ainsi deux ou trois fois à sa guise et sans avoir l'air de faire attention à lui. Mais, comme, avant tout, Garibaldi aime les braves, il s'arrêta, il alla droit à l'Anglais, et, au beau milieu du feu :

'Sir John, lui dit-il, je vous fais mon compliment, vous êtes un brave.

- Je le sais bien, dit l'Anglais.

Et, de plus, vous êtes mon ami.

Ah, ceci, dit sir John, je ne le savais pas, et je vous suis bien reconnaissant. Mais pardon, il y a là un diable

d'Autrichien qui me tire l'œil.

Sir John porta sa carabine à son épaule, et l'Autrichien qui lui tirait l'œil, atteint en pleine poitrine, fit trois pas en avant et tomba sur le nez.

'Sir John prit son binocle, examina son Autrichien, fit un signe de satisfaction, et, se tournant vers le général :

'

Bonjour, général, dit-il en lui tendant la main; votre santé est bonne aujourd'hui ?

Depuis ce jour-là, on n'appelle plus sir John Williams (sic) Peard que l'Anglais de Garibaldi.'-DUMAS. Causeries, ii. 279–281.

But in fact Peard was not only humane towards the enemy, but modest with regard to his own achievements, as his journals amply show.

G. M. TREVElyan.

111

AT LARGE.

BY ARTHUR C. BENSON.

VII.

KELMSCOTT AND WILLIAM MORRIS.

I HAD been at Fairford that still, fresh, April morning, and had enjoyed the sunny little piazza, with its pretty characteristic varieties of pleasant stone-built houses, solid Georgian fronts interspersed with mullioned gables. But the church! That is a marvellous place; its massive lantern-tower, with solid, softly moulded outlines for the sandy oolite admits little fineness of detail—all weathered to a beautiful orange-grey tint, has a mild dignity of its own. Inside it is a treasure of mediævalism. The screens, the woodwork, the monuments, all rich, dignified, and spacious. And the glass! Next to King's College Chapel, I suppose, it is the noblest series of windows in England, and the colour of it is incomparable. Azure and crimson, green and damask, yet all with a firm economy of effect, the robes of the saints set and imbedded in a fine intricacy of white tabernacle-work. As to the design, I hardly knew whether to smile or weep. The splendid, ugly faces of the saints, depicted, whether designedly or artlessly I cannot guess, as men of simple passions and homely experience, moved me greatly, so unlike the mild, polite, porcelain visages of even the best modern glass. But the windows are as thick with demons as a hive with bees; and oh! the irresponsible levity displayed in these merry, grotesque, long-nosed creatures, some flame-coloured and long-tailed, some green and scaly, some plated like the armadillo, all going about their merciless work with infinite gusto and glee! Here one picked at the white breast of a languid, tortured woman who lay bathed in flame; one with a glowing hook thrust a lamentable big-paunched wretch down into a bath of molten liquor; one with pleased intentness turned the handle of a churn, from the top of which protruded the head of a fair-haired boy, all distorted with pain and terror. What could have been in the mind of the designer of these hateful scenes? It is impossible to acquit him • Copyright, 1907, by Arthur C. Benson, in the United States of America.

of a strong sense of the humorous. Did he believe that such things were actually in progress in some infernal cavern, seven times heated? I fear it may have been so. And what of the effect upon the minds of the village folk who saw them day by day? It would have depressed, one would think, an imaginative girl or boy into madness, to dream of such things as being countenanced by God for the heathen and the unbaptized, as well as for the cruel and sinful. If the vile work had been represented as being done. by cloudy, sombre, relentless creatures, it would have been more tolerable. But these fantastic imps, as lively as grigs and full to the brim of wicked laughter, are certainly enjoying themselves with an extremity of delight of which no trace is to be seen in the mournful and heavily lined faces of the faithful. Autre temps, autres mœurs! Perhaps the simple, coarse mental palates of the village folk were none the worse for this realistic treatment of sin. One wonders what the saintly and refined Keble, who spent many years of his life as his father's curate here, thought of it all. Probably his submissive and deferential mind accepted it as in some ecclesiastical sense symbolical of the merciless hatred of God for the desperate corruption of humanity. It gave me little pleasure to connect the personality of Keble with the place, patient, sweet-natured, mystical, serviceable as he was. It seems hard to breathe in the austere air of a mind like Keble's, where the wind of the spirit blows chill down the narrow path, fenced in by the high, uncompromising walls of ecclesiastical tradition on the one hand and stern Puritanism on the other. An artificial type, one is tempted to say!-and yet one ought never, I suppose, so to describe any flower that has blossomed fragrantly upon the human stock; any system that seems to extend a natural and instinctive appeal to certain definite classes of human temperament.

I sped pleasantly enough along the low, rich pastures, thick with hedgerow elms, to Lechlade, another pretty town with an infinite variety of habitations. Here again is a fine ancient church with a comely spire, a pretty pyramis of stone,' as the old Itinerary says, overlooking a charming gabled house, among walled and terraced gardens, with stone balls on the corner-posts and a quaint pavilion, the river running below; and so on to a bridge over the yet slender Thames, where the river water spouted clear and fragrant into a wide pool; and across the flat meadows, bright with kingcups, the spire of Lechlade towered over the clustered house-roofs to the west.

Then further still by a lonely ill-laid road. And thus, with a mind pleasantly attuned to beauty and a quickening pulse, I drew near to Kelmscott. The great alluvial flat, broadening on either hand, with low wooded heights, 'not ill-designed,' as Morris said, to the south. Then came a winding cross-track, and presently I drew near to a straggling village, every house of which had some charm and quality of style, with here and there a high gabled dovecot, and its wooden cupola, standing up among solid barns and stacks. Here was a tiny and inconspicuous church, with a small stone belfry; and then the road pushed on, to die away among the fields. But there, at the very end of the village, stood the house of which we were in search; and it was with a touch of awe, with a quickening heart, that I drew near to a place of such sweet and gracious memories, a place so dear to more than one of the heroes of art.

One comes to the goal of an artistic pilgrimage with a certain sacred terror; either the place is disappointing, or it is utterly unlike what one anticipates. I knew Kelmscott so well from Rossetti's letters, from Morris's own splendid and loving description, from pictures, from the tales of other pilgrims, that I felt I could not be disappointed; and I was not. It was not only just like what I had pictured it to be, but it had a delicate and natural grace of its own as well. The house was larger and more beautiful, the garden smaller and not less beautiful, than I had imagined. I had not thought it was so shy, so rustic a place. It is very difficult to get any clear view of the house. By the road are cottages, and a big building, half storehouse, half wheelwright's shop, to serve the homely needs of the farm. Through the open door one could see a bench with tools; and planks, staves, spokes, waggontilts, faggots, were all stacked in a pleasant confusion. Then came a walled kitchen-garden, with some big shrubs, bay and laurustinus, rising plumply within; beyond which the grey house, spread thin with plaster, held up its gables and chimneys over a stonetiled roof. To the left, big barns and byres-a farm-man leading in a young bull with a pole at the nose-ring; beyond that, open fields, with a dyke and a flood-wall of earth, grown over with nettles, withered sedges in the watercourse, and elms in which the rooks were clamorously building. We met with the ready, simple Berkshire courtesy; we were referred to a gardener who was in charge. To speak with him, we walked round to the other side of the house, to an open space of grass, where the fowls picked merrily

VOL. XXIV.-NO. 139, N.S.

and the old farm-lumber, broken coops, disused ploughs, lay comfortably about. How I love tidiness!' wrote Morris once. Yet I did not feel that he would have done other than love all this natural and simple litter of the busy farmstead.

Here the venerable house appeared more stately still. Through an open door in a wall we caught a sight of the old standards of an orchard, and borders with the spikes of spring-flowers pushing through the mould. The gardener was digging in the gravelly soil. He received us with a grave and kindly air; but when we asked if we could look into the house, he said, with a sturdy faithfulness, that his orders were that no one should see it, and continued his digging without heeding us further.

Somewhat abashed we retraced our steps; we got one glimpse of the fine indented front, with its shapely wings and projections. I should like to have seen the great parlour, and the tapestryroom with the story of Samson that bothered Rossetti so over his work. I should like to have seen the big oak bed, with its hangings embroidered with one of Morris's sweetest lyrics:

The wind's on the wold,

And the night is a-cold.

I should like to have seen the tapestry-room, and the room where Morris, who so frankly relished the healthy savour of meat and drink, ate his joyful meals, and the peacock yew-tree that he found in his days of failing strength too hard a task to clip. I should like to have seen all this, I say; and yet I am not sure that tables and chairs, upholsteries and pictures, would not have come in between me and the sacred spirit of the place.

So I turned to the church. Plain and homely as its exterior is, inside it is touched with the true mediæval spirit, like the old febel chapel' of the Mort d'Arthur.' Its bare walls, its halfobliterated frescoes, its sturdy pillars, gave it an ancient, simple air. But I did not, to my grief, see the grave of Morris, though I saw in fancy the coffin brought from Lechlade in the bright farmwaggon, on that day of pitiless rain. For there was going on in the churchyard the only thing I saw that day that seemed to me to strike a false note: a silly posing of village girls, self-conscious and overdressed, before the camera of a photographer-a playing at æsthetics, bringing into the village life a touch of unwholesome vanity and the vulgar affectation of the world. That is the ugly shadow of fame; it makes conventional people curious