Dis award Torquato Tasso a high place among the immortal bards: miscent superis. He was laid to rest in the Monastery of Sant' Onofrio, where a tasteless monument has been erected over his tomb, and where his chamber, and a crucifix and other objects used by him, are pointed out to the visitor. In a corridor upon which this chamber opens there is a fresco on the wall by Lionardo da Vinci, a lovely Madonna and child, with the donor of the picture kneeling before her; and on this fine work, full of the intense serious sentiment which distinguishes Lionardo, the poet's eyes must often have rested sympathetically. Perhaps those last days, during which his tide of life was ebbing, were not among the saddest he had known. Poor, vexed spirit! "After life's fitful fever he sleeps well." FRANCES ELEANOR TROLLOPE, in Belgravia. CUPID'S WORKSHOP. A BALLAD IN THE OLD STYLE. Deep within my ladye's eyes Darts to suit the shy and bold, Derts that pierce and wound full sore, Darts that scratch and nothing more. None can pass my ladye by From those eyes of heaven's blue. Those who feel the pleasant pain Linger to be pierced again. Should the heart be cold and stern, And the baffled arrow turn, Cupid still doth persevere, And distils a pearly tear, Whose brightest gleam the heart doth melt; Then the stab is sharply dealt, And the victim feels the thrall Which my ladye casts o'er all." SOMERVILLE GIBNEY, in Tinsley's Magazine PLAIN WORDS ABOUT THE AFGHAN QUESTION Mandelay, Feb. 19. THIS strange sequestered capital, which happens at the present writing to be my temporary place of sojourn, is in the outermost ripple of the great world's pool. The news of important events comes to it like a half-dead echo, that dies altogether after a sentence or two of listless comment. Last night I was dining in the society of a little knot of Frenchmen, who have drifted for various causes into this outlandish place, and there came to us by a telegram (in Eurmese) the tidings of Marshal MacMahon's resignation and M. Grévy's election. Ah, mon Dieu!" cried, with a flash of faded radiancy, a white-haired captain of cavalry, whose regiment I saw ride out of Metz to lay down its arms before the conquering Germans; "ah, the good time reapproaches! The next President, look you, will be the Prince Imperial; and from President he will blossom into Emperor and then I will go back to France!" 'O droll visionary," responded a close-cropped engineer, who had been a communard," while Gam betta lives, how imbecile to prate of Badinguet's brat!" The subject dropped, and the interrupted conversation recommenced about the "King-woon Menghyr's" pooey and the Burmese prima donna, "Yin-doo-Malè." As for myself, a football of journalism, a shuttlecock of Bellona, who in nine years have made six campaigns and three visits to India, the links between home associations and myself have of necessity but feeble hold. But there is one link that still endures bright and strong—the link that binds me to friendships that I know are recipro cal. By devious tracks and with many delays, the World drifts out to this corner of quaint semi-barbarism, and in its columns I read how its Conductor had mapped out for himself a new enterprise. My acquaintance with him was born in a Vienna attic years ago, and my love for him and his has ever since been part of my life. The impulse was natural, then, which prompted me straightway to sit down and indite an article for the new venture, in the desire that I might testify in the spirit to hearty interest in the birth of Time, and to cordial wishes for its lusty life. When We got such a bellyful of Afghanistan in 1842, that ever since, till lately, we have been suffering under the nightmare thereof. Pollock turned his back on the ugly crags of the Khybur, we closed the page of Afghanistan, and dropped the book into the boundaryrivulet by Hurri-Singh-Ki-Bourj. It was well to banish the black memory of it, when as yet the Punjaub was under Sikh sway, and while our frontier station was Loodianah. But the condition.. radi cally altered when we annexed the Punjaub, and our border crossed the Indus and stretched up to the foot of the fore-hills. Then the Afghans became our neighbours; and even if there had been no region and no eventualities on the further side of Afghanistan, it behooved us, as a matter of the merest common sense, to renew relations with them, and to take measures for knowing and maintaining an accurate knowledge of all matters concerning them. What words could be found strong enough to describe her fatuity, if France, as a consequence of the disasters of 1870-1, had raised up a dead wall of demarcation between herself and Germany, utterly refusing to acquire any intelligence of the doings, the ideas, the designs of the latter country, prohibiting her citizens from visiting it all, in short, but ignoring its existence-while France lay freely open to German inquisition? And yet our "frontier policy," from the annexation of the Punjaub till Lord Salisbury became Secretary for India in 1874, was an almost exact parallel of such fatuity as this! The man who is chiefly responsible for this obstinate and wanton "don't know, won't know, and musn't know" caricature of a policy is Lord Lawrence. To the late Sir John Kaye we owe the erection and worship of a number of sham idols, of whom the biggest and the shammest-to coin a word-is" John Lawrence of the Punjaub." Why, if "John Lawrence" had had his way, and if it had not been for stout-hearted Sydney Cotton, steadfast Herbert Edwardes, and valiant John Nicholson, all the trans-Indus territory would have been abandoned by our troops and people when the great Mutiny broke out. The more one studies the story of that time, the more apparent does it become that Sir John Lawrence was, in the main, the mere formal sanctioner, and that often after the event of his energetic and stubbornsouled subordinates' acts. The men of the Punjaub" in India's hour of need were such doers and darers as I have named, with Robert Montgomery and Frederick Cooper added to the list. Lawrence was a signer and assenter, not a doer and darer. The special weakness of Indian officials is a blind worship of the Juggernaut of routine. Very often the man who is the creator of the routine, and who therefore ought to know that it is no god, but his own handiwork, is its most abandoned devotee. In the language of Scripture, he "worshippeth the work of his own hands; and his faith in it adheres long after it has become untimely, and may, indeed, have become pernicious. As likely as not, the creator of the routine is the creator of a school as well. The cultus of his policy is taken up by his disciples; and because it was the policy of their master, they swear by it and cling to it, walk in its ways, and count an impugner of its wisdom or of its timeliness as a rank heretic and irreverent revolutionary. Lawrence, when he came to the Punjaub, found the flag flying on which was inscribed, No intercourse with Afghanstan. It had been a good motto; but the banner had halliards; Lawrence cut them, and nailed it to the mast of his policy for all time to come. His young men ranged themselves under it when they joined the ranks, and looked upon it as a sacred thing, whose fitness and appropriateness was not to be questioned: at home the Liberal party adopted it with a whole heart. So there befell us the disgrace, which would be ridiculous were it not so utterly miserable and humiliating, that when the inevitable abandonment of the non-intercourse policy came, and we had to invade Afghanistan, nobody knew anything of the resources, roads, and characteristics of the region ten miles beyond our great cantonments of Peshawur. At the beginning of the present war a precis was printed by the Quartermaster-General's department, purporting to summarise what was known about the road through the Khybur, between Jumrood and Jellalabad. It may be said of this compilation that it told scarcely anything, and that what it did tell proved to be uniformly and flagrantly wrong. Our knowledge of Afghanistan might have been ample, had our authorities chosen to acquire it, or allow it to be acquired. The objection of the Afghan rulers to receive official residents hardly existed, even in name, until the Ameer Shere Ali became alienated by the chicane of our selfish "heads I win, tails you lose" treatment of him. Old Dost Mahomed in 1857 made no bones about allowing British officers with suitable establishments and orderlies " to be " 'deputed to Cabul, or Kandahar, or Balkh, or all three places;" and the Lumsdens, in virtue of the treaty of which this was a clause, actually went to Kandahar. But they were recalled when the special matter which brought about the od hoc departure from the Lawrentian policy was no longer urgent. The evidence is overwhelming that at Umballa, in 1869, Shere Ali would have been willing to accept British residents if Lord Mayo had been allowed to make the request. I have good authority for affirming that there is a document in the archives of the Foreign Office at Calcutta, in which is minuted the assurance on the part of Noor Mahomed Shah, the Ameer's envoy sent to Simla in 1873, that his master was willing to consent to the presence of British officers in Afghanistan. But if the Ameer had entertained an objection to their presence, surely it would have been wise to be urgent and peremptory for overruling the same, when all circumstances were favourable to the effort, our hands elsewhere unhampered, and the Ameer squeezable under pressure, not having yet become arrogant because of our long-continued pusillanimity, nor dazzled by the chimera of Russian support. Not less surely it was the very anti-climax of obstinately intentional purblindness that prohibited unofficial travellers from exploring Afghanistan at their own risk and on their own responsibility. If the enterprise was dangerous, that was their affair; but that Englishmen could travel in Afghanistan without being maltreated was proved by the journeys of Macgregor and Lockwood, of Pelly and March. But the prohibition was stern. When, in India in 1873, I conceived the de sign of returning through Afghanistan, and informally asked if there would be any objection, I was informed that leave was not to be procured. "Then I will go without leave," I said. The reply was that I should be pursued and brought back by cavalry if my departure were discovered. The history of the relations between Shere Ali and ourselves divides itself into epochs. As regards him the epochs are three: the epoch of his tolerable friendliness; the epoch of his surliness; and the epoch of his alienation. As regards our policy the epochs are four: the epoch of the Lawrence policy; the epoch of the Mayo policy, warm and genial compared with the former, but under protest from the powers at home, and frosted by the Lawrentian bias of the Duke of Argyll; the epoch of the Northbrook policy, on the old placidly negative Lawrentian lines; and the Lytton epoch, imbued with, and dictated by, the more peremptory spirit of Lord Salisbury. Shere Ali began his reign genially enough. He avowed his determination to follow the laudable example of his father in maintaining strong ties of amity and friendship with the British Government. "John Lawrence of the Punjaub "waited silently for six months, and then sardonically wished him a "strong and united government." In 1867 the same Viceroy recognised the rebel Mahomed Azim Khan. He dies, and his brother, another rebel succeeds him, whose accession the bland Viceroy calls an "auspicious event. Shere Ali regains his throne, takes no umbrage at the Viceroy's affability to the rebels, and applies for a meeting to "show his sincerity and firm attachment" to the Government which had called the accession of his enemy an 66 auspicious event. The Viceroy of course congratulates him on his success"-another "auspicious event." The other day our resident here at Mandelay was urging on the Burmese Ministers the necessity for consenting to the admission of a guard of British troops for the presidency. They were bent, more suo, on procrastination. They urged on him the necessity for preliminary settlement of four grand cardinal principles; and what do you think these were? Cordiality, brotherly love, charity, and mutual confidence!" Lord Lawrence tenders Shere Ali similar useful platitudes. He recommends to his notice "the excellent virtues, kindness, foresight, and good management." He gives him six lakhs and 4000 guns; but before the meeting could be acceded to, he writes home, We must wait and see whether Abdul Rahman or any other chief prove .victorious." In which event, of course, the man subsidised and congratulated might go to the devil. This is Lord Lawrence's notion of fulfilling his own postulate in a letter to the Ameer: "Of course it is essential that both parties should act with sincerity and truth, so that real confidence may exist between them.' If the Liberal Government had not tied Lord Mayo's hands-it bullied, indeed, that straightforward and right thinking Viceroy for 66 |