keep away from his village skylarking for days at a time—in fact, for as long as he thinks he can satisfactorily account for by means of lies when he does return-whereas gentlemen cannot sit for protracted periods with children under their garments, either in Africa or out of it, without grave risk of some one noticing they are not normal. This freedom of the African witch also acted here in allowing the uncle to remain. He had an interview with his niece, our lady traveller, the outcome of which voluminous affair was that he would take her to her mother's village if she would not reveal his secret and the threat that if she ever did do so he would kill her. She promised, and he carried out his promise; but some time afterwards one of those wretched children told their grandmother of their adventure, and then she forced her daughter to tell her all.

This grandmother, reeking with family pride, threw herself into a tremendous temper on hearing that any one of her family, let alone her own brother, should be supposed to be a witch; the outcome of all this was that the uncle (who had his good points, or he would have spiflicated those children in the witch town instead of putting himself to grave inconvenience to save their lives) was compelled to take casca (ordeal poison), and, as he was a witch, of course he died of it and his body was thrown to the dogs, for one cannot bury witches-you might just as well bury wireworms, for they play the mischief with the crops, you know. The spirit of the uncle killed his niece, and what happened when those two spirits met the other side I do not know, but the leakytongued children did not have anything happen to them, as far as I can find. I always feel they ought to have had; but there is no evidence of poetic justice overtaking them, and they showed a certain decency of feeling in making for themselves and their descendants a keecheela—an orunda as my Mpongwe friends would call it, a thing that is forbidden-of parrots' flesh, for if it had not been for those parrots answering their mother when the professional murderer was going for her with intent, &c., their mother would for sure have been killed in the bush.

M. H. KINGSLEY.

CHARLES BULLER.

WHO was Charles Buller? To those to whom sentiment in such things is not altogether worthless, there may seem a fitness that one who knew the man should bring some account of him out of the pigeonholes of memory into the pages of the Magazine created by Buller's friend, Thackeray-a friend who recorded his loss in words which will never be forgotten :

Why should your mother, Charles, not mine,

Be weeping o'er her darling's grave?

George III. was proud of his English subjects when they did not thwart his narrow and wrong-headed doctrines of government; and it may have been with such a pride that he said that he knew all the English pedigrees except two-those of the Bullers of Cornwall and the Careys of Devonshire. And yet it is perhaps unlikely that he should have thought these untitled families equals of the barons and counts of Germany. Perhaps he would have said of those houses, as he did of Shakespeare's plays, 'Poor stuff, but we must not say so.' Be this as it may, the Bullers were an old family, with branches spreading from Cornwall into Devonshire. The name is represented in the Long Parliament, and I believe long before and after the Restoration Buller of Morval returned the four members for East and West Looe, up to the time of the disenfranchisement of those boroughs.' East Looe had a small, and West Looe a large, constituency; but both returned without question the nominees of Buller of Morval. There was a story that one morning, after breakfast, Mr. Buller said to the visitors staying in the house, 'I had nearly forgotten that there is an election for the borough to-day; shall we go and see it?' He was not much of a political philosopher, but if his young Radical nephew (our Charles Buller) was there, he could no doubt have explained to his own satisfaction, if not to that of Charles, that this was a clear instance of that virtual representation by which these four members of the Looe villages took effectual care of the interests of Birmingham and Manchester, The learned Dryasdust will detect a small inaccuracy, but I will not trouble my readers with it,

and so made it quite unnecessary that these great cities should have any members of their own.

But to return to Charles Buller, the subject of these notes. He was the eldest son of Charles, younger brother of John Buller of Morval, and a Bengal Civil servant of the East India Company. His mother was a daughter of Colonel William Kirkpatrick, also in the East India Company's service, and, like so many of their military servants, distinguished as a man of letters and a statesman. Their eldest son, Charles (my first cousin), was born in Calcutta in the year 1806, and in 1811 the child was brought to England by my father and mother. I have heard him say that he remembered his fall on the stone or marble floor of the hotel at St. Helena, where the home-bound ships usually touched. In those days, the surgical skill which can now restore the form of a broken nose was unknown. That most terrible of disfigurements was hopeless. There was no remedy, unless it were that which Thackeray found in making fun of it in himself and his friend Charles. Either, or both, might have stood for the drawing in 'Punch,' in which the street boy asks wonderingly of the figure before him : 'Did it grow so, or was it druv in?' And How like Buller is to Thackeray or Thackeray to Buller' was the thought which occurred to any one who, knowing the one, saw the other for the first time. But for this disfigurement, his features would no doubt have reproduced the refined beauty and dignity which characterised his father and mother; and though I do not recollect any signs of other feeling than that of satisfied pride in their son as he was, I cannot but think of what the shock of grief must have been to them when, on their return to England, their boy came back to them, some ten years later, so changed from what he was when they parted with him.

Charles was sent to Harrow, where he attained some distinction. This is evident from Carlyle's account of his scholarship, though I do not find his name in the lists of prizemen, nor could he be the Charles Buller who appears as Head of the School' in the list of 1815. In those days boys left school much earlier than they do now; and the interval between school and Oxford or Cambridge was filled by reading with a private tutor, or at one of the Scottish Universities, to which it was a sort of fashion to send the youth of the English upper classes about the end of the last century. The time for Charles leaving Harrow was concurrent with that of the return of his father and mother from

India, and Carlyle has told the story of how he became the tutor of Charles at Edinburgh University. Carlyle's introduction to the Bullers was on this wise: Edward Irving, a young member of the Scotch Church, had come to London, and by the zeal and eloquence of his preaching had begun that London career of which I need not here say more. He had become acquainted with my father and mother through Andrew Robertson, a Scotch miniature painter of some eminence. At my father's house in Fitzroy Square the Bullers met Irving, and from him they heard of Carlyle at the moment in which they were looking out for a tutor for their son Charles, now leaving Harrow, at the age of fifteen. I go on with the story in Carlyle's own words :—

From the first I found my Charles a most manageable, intelligent, cheery, and altogether welcome and intelligent phenomenon; quite a bit of sunshine in my dreary Edinburgh element. I was in waiting for his brother and him when they landed at Flemings. We set instantly out on a walk, round by the foot of Salisbury Crags, up from Holyrood, by the Castle and Law Courts, home again to George Square; and really I recollect few more pleasant walks in my life! So all intelligent, seizing all you said to him with such a recognition; so loyalhearted, chivalrous, guileless, so delighted (evidently) with me as I was with him. Arthur, two years younger, kept mainly silent, being slightly deaf too; but I could perceive that he also was a fine little fellow, honest, intelligent, and kind, and that apparently I had been much in luck in this didactic adventure, which proved abundantly the fact. The two youths took to me with unhesitating liking, and I to them; and we never had anything of a quarrel or even of weariness or dreariness between us; such "teaching" as I never did in any sphere before or since. Charles, by his qualities, his ingenuous curiosities, his brilliancy of faculty and character, was actually an entertainment to me rather than a labour. If we walked together, which I remember sometimes happening, he was the best company I could find in Edinburgh. I had entered him of Dunbar's in third Greek class at College. In Greek and Latin, in the former in every respect, he was far my superior; and I had to prepare my lessons by way of keeping him to his work at Dunbar's. Keeping him to work was my one difficulty, if there was one, and my essential function. I tried to guide him

into reading, into solid enquiry and reflection. He got some mathematics from me and might have had more. He got, in brief, what expansion into such wider fields of intellect and more manifest modes of thinking and working, as my poor possibilities could yield him, and was always generously grateful to me afterwards. Friends of mine in a fine frank way, beyond what I could be brought to merit, he, Arthur, and all the family continued till death parted us.''

This pleasant story, characterised alike by its goodness of heart and artistic genius, has unfortunately to be compared with the ungenerous, and as Mr. Froude shows utterly unjust, references and allusions to Carlyle's relations with the Buller family contained in others of his writings. In Carlyle Nature had very imperfectly tempered her clay, as was shown in these cynical contradictions of his better self. In my personal intercourse I never saw anything in him but what was good and kind; but in his books, and in what I have heard of him from others, I cannot deny that there was much that was harsh and chaotic.

From his private tutor's Charles Buller proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge, where Frederic Maurice and John Sterling were among his contemporaries. The elder Charles Buller, whose fatherly sympathies always kept him in genial accord with his own son and younger men, thought that his son had found in his Cambridge tutor a man who understood the worthlessness of the old-fashioned University studies, and how they should be replaced by the new knowledge and wisdom now beginning to shine upon the world. Charles became a leader-perhaps the leader-of the young enthusiasts among whom he found himself. The 'Union' was the organ through which the new life and light found utterance and expression in the University, while Trinity had its own special society in the Apostles.' But I must confess that this highsounding name did not originally mean that they were to be the teachers of a new Gospel, but only that their number was limited to twelve.

Politics, combined as they were with the profession of the bar, became the natural and proper business of Charles Buller's life. His family borough interests, and the fact that his father was now holding one of the East Looe seats until the son should be of age to take it, told him that he belonged to the class which governed England. Radical as he was, and ever con1 Reminiscences by Thomas Carlyle, vol, i. p. 196.