ify, without apparent trouble, any whim of his royal friends.

The most striking portraits in this book are those of the Empress Elizabeth of Austria and the late King of the Belgians. The first is a perfect human study of a very charming and tragic figure one of the few really human contemporary studies of a sovereign that I have ever read. The study of the King of the Belgians makes us long for more. We want an even fuller account of that highly intelligent, sardonic, selfish, and vicious old man, with his icy chaff and his simple bourgeois habits, "wearing a pair of goloshes over his enormous boots and a black bowler on his head, carrying in his hand an umbrella that had seen better days, and under his arm a bundle of yellow-backed books or a knickknack of some sort packed up anyhow in a newspaper . . . haggling over a musty old tome at the corner of the Pont des Saints-Pères, and counting the money twice over before paying it." He was worthy of a full-length portrait; but I daresay that it is not for nothing that M. Paoli has won his reputation for discretion. King Leopold was the vagabond among kings, the only one of our time who really succeeded in kicking over all the traces and doing what he liked. It is only a pity that what he liked doing was not more interesting. For the official amusements of kings are not really very amusing; everything is presented to them officially; if they want to meet a certain type of man, an official representative of that kind is produced for them. This apparently even applies to beggars, as the following story of M. Paoli's shows:

When they heard of King Edward's presence at Biarritz, numbers of needy people imagined that Heaven had sent them an unexpected windfall; and a regular swarm of beggars came down upon the town. Fearing lest the sov

ereign should be importuned, I had them all sent away, with the exception of two old blind beggars, whose character was known to me and who were worthy of all pity. Regularly, whatever the weather, they posted themselves daily, at the time of the King's walk, on the road that led to the beach. As soon as they heard Cæsar barking-the dog could never bring himself to tolerate them!--they held out their bowls; and each of them, with the sleeve of his coat, dusted the placard on his chest, inscribed, in big clumsy letters, with the time-honored formula, "Pity the poor blind." The King walked up to them, dropped a handsome alms in their respective trays, and said as he passed: "Till to-morrow!"

Now it happened that one morning he saw only one of the blind men at the usual spot. Startled and fearing lest some accident had befallen the other for he had gradually become accustomed to the sight of those faithful sentries he made inquiries about the absentee. No one had seen him. The next day the second blind man was at his post again.

"Were you ill yesterday?" asked the King.

"No, monsieur le Roi."

"Then you were late?"

"Excuse me, monsieur le Roi, I beg your pardon," the old man answered, not knowing what to say. "You were early!"

The whole metaphysic of kings and beggars is contained in this story.

Judging from this book one would say that kings were a sober and orderly class of men, punctual, obliging, and good-tempered; fond of early rising, and of "transacting business at their desks"; given to curiosity and the asking of questions, "close students of human nature," but suffering from very limited material for their studies, with remarkable memories for the most unimportant details, and highly developed powers of summoning a smile to their faces on any and every occasion, and with a very touching and

whole-hearted affection for any kind and sympathetic independent human being, such as M. Paoli, whom they have the good fortune to come across. Their amusements, even when on a holiday, are singularly limited, and perhaps the most exciting of them is the amusement of buying things. When Muzaffr-ed-Din, Shah of Persia, was in Paris under the care of M. Paoli, his chief amusement consisted in buying masses of rubbish. The King of Kings, wearing more than a million pounds' worth of gems, would regularly every day, go down to the Rue de The Saturday Review.

The

books called "drawing-room books" are generally fashionable fakes; sometimes they are valued for their binding, sometimes even for their illustrations. Sometimes they are not opened at all; sometimes they are opened and are found to contain chessmen or draughts or packs of cards. But a real drawing-room book is provided in the elaborately illustrated reissue of Gilbert's plays. For Gilbert's plays are really discussed in drawingrooms; in desperate cases they might even be read in drawing-rooms: which is by no means the case with the ornamental edition of Thomas à Kempis or Francis Thompson, which probably lies in the same place. And this edition of Gilbert's great Operas answers a domestic need. It is printed in that plain and open way which is proper to things that have to be sung rather than spoken; and spoken rather than read. It is helped with illustrations which, while they give glimpses of landscape of longer reach than the stage permits, still permit a certain stage magnificence.

1 The Mikado: Iolanthe : Patience: The Pirates of Penzance. By W. S. Gilbert. Bell. 3s. 6d. net each.

Gilbert has triumphed as a humorist. It is not so certain that he has triumphed as a satirist. The man who says that the English are "a stupid people" either has no connection with England or too much connection with stupidity. Through all the ordinary channels by which a native fertility and inventiveness can be shown the English have shown themselves as a clever people; their legends and ballad literature (when they were allowed to have any) were spirited and lusty; their average of poets is high; their scientific discoveries have been numerous; and their wit is almost as wide as the whole people. But it is true that some special mental weakness paralyzes them, especially in their sense of the end and upshot of social satire. It is a strictly special weakness: it is not like the consistent darkness in the brain of a barbarian. It is rather like one of those blind spots on brilliant brains, like Swift's occasional attraction to anything that was nauseous, or Bernard Shaw's recoil from anything that is romantic. It is a curious power of enjoying the laughter without seeing what is being laughed at. They

like to hear a gun go off, as part of a festival. They do not even ask whether the gun was aimed at anything.

This is strangely exemplified in the two greatest humorists of the Victorian time, in Dickens, and in Gilbert. That the mistake did not arise out of the mere stupidity of the nation is easily shown. It is shown by the simple fact that Dickens and Gilbert were appreciated, adequately, often even exquisitely appreciated, in their function as artists. Thousands of Englishmen really relished like epicures that unalterable choice of words which made Dickens allow the nervous Mr. Magnus "a spectral attempt at drollery," when nine hundred and ninety-nine authors out of a thousand would have written "a ghostly attempt at drollery." Thousands of English readers did applaud like connoisseurs that verbal victory by which Gilbert was enabled to write "I'm awfully fond of that heavenly boud," when most of the mere children of men might have written "I thoroughly love that link with above," or anything else of the sort. The modern English gentleman did appreciate Gilbert's fun. He even appreciated it delicately. What he did not appreciate was the thing that Gilbert was making fun of; for the thing was himself.

Take, for the sake of a symbol, the case of The Mikado. In that play Gilbert pursued and persecuted the evils of modern England till they had literally not a leg to stand on; exactly as Swift did under the allegory of "Gulliver's Travels." Yet it is the solid and comic fact that The Mikado was actually forbidden in England for the first time, because it was a satire on Japan. The cannon had been fired point blank at us. The cannon ball simply rebounded. And we were earnestly concerned about whether the cannon would cannon and hit our Gallant Al

lies. I doubt if there is a single joke in the whole play that fits the Japanese. But all the jokes in the play fit the English, if they would put on the cap. The great creation of the play is Pooh-Bah. I have never heard, I do not believe, that the combination of inconsistent functions is specially a vice of the extreme East. I should guess the contrary; I should guess that the East tends to split into steady and inherited trades or castes; so that the torturer is always a torturer and the priest a priest. But about England Pooh-Bah is something more than a satire; he is the truth. It is true of British politics (probably not of Japanese) that we meet the same man twenty times as twenty different officials. There is a quarrel between a landlord, Lord Jones, and a railway company presided over by Lord Smith. Strong comments are made on the case by a newspaper (owned by Lord Brown), and after infinite litigation, it is sent up to the House of Lords, that is, Lords Jones, Smith and Brown. Generally the characters are more mixed. The landlord cannot live by land, but does live as director of the railway. The railway lord is so rich that he buys up the newspaper. The general result can be expressed only in two syllables (to be uttered with the utmost energy of the lungs): Pooh-Bah.

It was, of course, precisely the same with Dickens. It is quite a mistake to suppose that Englishmen have only lately derided or dismissed the Party System. Dickens derided it in his early book "Pickwick"; refusing to make any distinction between Buffs and Blues. Dickens dismissed it in his late book "Little Dorrit," refusing to make any distinction between "Barnacle née Stiltstalking" and "Stiltstalking née Barnacle." All these plunging dagger-points seem to have remained pointless. Two towns in Suffolk still compete for the honor of be

candle and hand it to anybody who wants to go to bed.

I was ready to give way to the ladies here, but even while I was bowing and saying, "Not at all," I found myself on one of the jam pots with Bob next to me on another. To balance with the arms outstretched was not so difficult; but as the matches were then about six feet from the candle and there seemed no way of getting them nearer together the solution of the problem was as remote as ever. Three times I brought my hands together, and three times the jam-pot left me.

"Well played, Bob," said somebody. The bounder had done it.

I looked at his jam pot.

"There you are," I said, "Raspberry -1909.' Mine's 'Gooseberry-1911,' a rotten vintage. And look at my book,

Alone on the Prairie; and you've got The Mormon's Wedding. No wonder I couldn't do it."

I refused to try it again as I didn't think I was being treated fairly; and after Bob and Miss Power had had a race at it, which Bob won, we got on to something else.

"Of course you can pick a pin out of a chair with your teeth?" said Miss Power.

"Not properly," I said. 'I always swallow the pin."

"I suppose it doesn't count if you swallow the pin," said Miss Power thoughtfully.

"I don't know. I've never really thought about that side of it much. Anyhow, unless you've got a whole lot of pins you don't want, don't ask me to do it to-night."

Accordingly we passed on to the water-trick. I refused at this, but Miss Power went full length on the floor with a glass of water balanced on her forehead and came up again without spilling a single drop. Personally I shouldn't have minded spill

ing a single drop; it was the thought of spilling the whole glass that kept me back. Anyway it is a useless trick, the need for which never arises in an ordinary career. Picking up The Times with the teeth, while clasping the left ankle with the right hand, is another matter. That might come in useful on occasions: as, for instance, if having lost your left arm on the field and having to staunch with the right hand the flow of blood from a bullet wound in the opposite ankle, you desired to glance through the paper while waiting for the ambulance.

"Here's a nice little trick," broke in Bob, as I was preparing myself in this way for the German invasion.

He had put two chairs together, front to front, and was standing over them-a foot on the floor on each side of them, if that conveys it to you. Then he jumped up, turned round in the air, and came down facing the other way.

"Can you do it?" I said to Miss Power.

"Come and try," said Bob to me. "It's not really difficult."

I went and stood over the chairs. Then I moved them apart and walked over to my hostess.

"Good-bye," I said; "I'm afraid I must go now."

"Coward!" said somebody, who knew me rather better than the others. "It's much easier than you think," said Bob.

"I don't think it's easy at all," I protested. "I think it's impossible."

I went back and stood over the chairs again. For some time I waited there in deep thought. Then I bent my knees preparatory to the spring, straightened them up, and said,

"What happens if you just miss it?" "I suppose you bark your shins a bit."

"Yes, that's what I thought."

I bent my knees again, worked my