prospect of its being extirpated. It is true that the unprotected colonies have been broken up, where they used to congregate in certain favoured localities in rushy pastures almost as thickly as the black-headed gulls; but they have been dispersed over the length and breadth of the land, and there is scarcely a fallow or a bit of waste without at least a pair of these querulous denizens of solitude. But the borders of well protected streams like Test and Itchen are invaluable as breeding places for the kingfisher, which Mr. Gibbs describes as

'clothed in priceless jewellery, sparkling in the sun; sapphire and amethyst in his bright blue back, rubies on his ruddy breast, and diamonds round his princely neck';

and on these Hampshire rivers the kingfisher has still free right of fishing, while his mate can hatch her brood in tranquillity in the badger-like burrow beneath the bank.

Mr. Dewar is skilled in the subtleties of fine fishing in limpid chalk streams. He says 'the Test trout are very difficult to deceive,' and no one who has tried the stream will dispute it.

'Whitchurch, Longparish, Bransbury, Wherwell, Chilboltonwhat enticing sounds these names have for the trout fisherman about the time when the yellow of palm and primrose begins to appear in the hazel coppices, and the note of the chiff-chaff is heard from oak and elm.'

But the mention of Longparish and its water-meadows reminds us of the changes that have come about in the course of the century. The Test trout were not always so wary. For Longparish House was the residence of the sporting Colonel Hawker, who in his 'Diary' makes constant mention of the river and the water-meadows. Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey remarks, in the introduction to the last edition, 'In the Test he caught literally thousands of trout, when trout could be caught without first crawling for them like stalking a stag and then throwing a floating fly.'

Mr. Gibbs's Cotswold Village' is a fertile oasis in a bleaker district. But Shakespeare has thrown his charm over the Cotswolds: Justice Shallow had his hospitable hall in Gloucestershire, and Will Squele was 'a Cotswold man.' Mr. Gibbs was a devout admirer of the poet, and cherished the memory of the Justice; but it was not Shakespeare or Shallow who tempted him to rent his old Manor House. It was a case of love at first sight, and affection soon warmed into passion. We know how much there is in piquancy of expression; it can

give charm to features that are plain or even positively ugly. Mr. Gibbs admits that to a superficial observer his surroundings might seem almost forbidding. On the wolds all is bleak, dull, and uninteresting; the air is ever chill; walls of loose stone divide field from field, and few houses are to be seen.' At first he was inclined to say with Shallow that all was barren. But when he caught sight of the little hamlet, sheltering under its stately trees, on the copse-fringed banks of the pellucid Colne, a change came over his spirit. The sharpness of the contrasts had an irresistible fascination, and the vision of beauty decided his fate. The first view of his village impressed itself indelibly on his memory and affections:

'Suddenly, as I was wondering how among these never-ending hills there could be such a place as I had been told existed, I beheld it at my feet, surpassing beautiful! Below me was the small village, nestling amid a wealth of stately trees. The hand of man seemed in some by-gone time to have done all that was necessary to render the place habitable, but no more. There were cottages, bridges, and farm-buildings, but all were ivy-clad and time-worn. The very trees themselves appeared to be laden with a mantle of ivy that was more than they could bear. Many a tall fir, from base to topmost bough, was completely robed with the smooth five-pointed leaves of this rapacious evergreen. Though the thick foliage of elm and ash and beech I could just see an old manor-house; and round about it, as if for protection, were clustered some thirty cottages. A running of waters filled my ears, and on descending the hill I came upon a silvery trout stream.'

In the five-pointed' leaves of the ivy we note the exactness of knowledge which gives vraisemblance to the work of great poets and artists-vraisemblance gave their cachet to the landscapes of Millais, for Millais passed half the year in the country. So old Mr. Holbrook in Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford' appreciates the poetry of Tennyson, because the young poet had written of the black ash-buds in March; and so Scott explained from the artistic point of view the value of the minuteness of truth, when he was gathering the wild flowers that grew on the banks of the Greta.

Mr. Gibbs's decision to settle in his Cotswold village was a fortunate one for the natives. He took up his abode in the Manor House and became the Providence of the parish. In his book there is nothing of egoism, but it is full of personal experiences and fond reminiscences, and it brings us into the closest touch with the writer. In the overflow of irrepressible feeling it is the frank revelation of a beautiful life, and yet the shadow of a premature death seems to darken the brightest pages. Gibbs

might have taken the night cometh' for his motto, and he set himself, in the highest sense, to make the best of the passing world. He was not righteous over-much, and there was nothing in him of the Puritan or the sentimentalist; rather was he the lay counterpart of Charles Kingsley. Devoted to all manner of sport, he was as patient an angler as Mr. Dewar, and as pleased with a wild bag picked up by hard walking. No man went straighter when hounds were carrying a scent breasthigh; he complains that the stone walls on the wolds were not stiff enough; and his recollections of good days remind us of runs by Whyte-Melville in Market Harborough' or 'Kate Coventry.' But there is a serious undercurrent in his lighter vein, though it may sink out of sight in an occasional chapter, as the Colne disappears for a space beneath its chalk bed, the fact being that he took his responsibilities seriously, spending means and talents for the good of his neighbours. His system may be summed up in his relations with his head-keeper, the son of a venerable tenant, and one of a family long settled on the land. As Scott had his Tom Purdie, so Gibbs had his Tom Peregrine, and he made the most of him. Tom may have been embellished by an indulgent fancy, but in essentials he is evidently true to the life. An incarnation of sylvan knowledge and rural lore, he was exploited by his friend and master to their mutual advantage. Tom was the Leather-Stocking of Gibbs's old English scenes:

'I liked the man: he was so delightfully mysterious. And the place would never have been the same without him; for he became part and parcel with the trees and the fields and every living thing. Nor would the woods and the path by the brook and the breezy wolds ever have been quite the same if his quaint figure had not appeared suddenly there. Many a time was I startled by the sudden appearance of Tom Peregine, when out shooting on the hill: he seemed to spring up from the ground like Herne the Hunter. . . . The dog was almost as mysterious as the man himself. When in the woods, Tom's attitude and gait would at times resemble the movements of a cock-pheasant: now stealing along for a few yards, listening for the slightest sound of any animal stirring in the underwood: now standing for a time with bated breath. Did a blackbird -that dusky sentinel of the woods-utter her characteristic note of warning, he would whisper, "Hark!" Then after due deliberation, he would add, ""Tis a fox!" or, "There's a fox in the grove"; and then he would steal gently up to try to get a glimpse of Reynard.'

Mr. Gibbs was happy in the God-given gift of mingling with the under-educated or ignorant without a suspicion of condescension. His was the familiarity of a patriarchal chief—

with vassals who were bound to him by a thousand kind offices. It need hardly be said that with such a man no day was ever too long, and no month was ever dreary. When not actively amusing himself he was doing something for others, and he could possess himself in patience with his pen among his books till rain-bursts or snow-storms had blown over. Not that he shrank from facing the elements. Some of his sharpest cameos are cut from the desolation of the downs in winter, when crows, magpies, and green plover had been driven to shelter on the Colne banks, and when the hares had buried themselves beneath the snow, only leaving scarcely perceptible breathing holes. Naturally he enjoyed the country most when woods and fields were most luxuriant. His angling rambles down his river, from its sources to his own village, will be another revelation, for the district has no great notoriety, and is beyond the range of the tourist. He is never more sympathetically poetical than when dilating on the beauties of his own special oasis, when the sun is sloping to the west in the flush of a September evening, or when the moonbeams fall glimmering through the lattice-work of the ash boughs. In his sympathy with animal nature, he is the rival of Jefferies, the disciple of White. He identifies himself with the shrewd strategy of the crafty old dog-fox who laughed all the packs in the neighbourhood to scorn; and he makes himself at home with the houseparties on his lawn in the autumn, when swans and ducks waddled up to the banquet to meet hand-bred pheasants and the songsters of the bushes. We said that the shadow of the future falls on the pages, and, strangely enough, on the last of them with speculation on the future of the soul-is a solemn word of affectionate warning to the reader :

'When the sun goes down, if you will turn for a little while from the noise and clamour of the busy world, you shall list to those voices ringing, ringing in your ears. Words of comfort shall you hear at eventide, and "sorrow and sadness shall be no more."'

ART. VI.-GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO.

1. Il Piacere. Di G. d'Annunzio. Milano: Fratelli Treves, 1889.

2. L'Innocente. By the Same.

1891.

3. Trionfo della Morte. By the Same. 1894.

4. Le Vergini delle Rocche. By the Same. 1898. 5. La Gloria. By the Same.

6. Il Fuoco. By the Same.

MANY are

1899. 1900.

the kinds of story-telling, from Homer's 'Odyssey' to yesterday's feuilleton in the French daily paper. But may there not be among them, enquires Signor d'Annunzio, as he offers his Triumph of Death to a sympathising friend, 'some ideal book of modern prose'-call it a novel if you will-that in its variety of cadence and by virtue of its style shall compare with the finest poetry? a book, he goes on to argue, almost with passion, that might be exact as any science yet visionary as any dream'; not bound in the fetters of fable, not merely or chiefly an adventure, but showing through all his moods one single dramatis persona, whose thought creates the world outside him, and who realises himself at last in victory or perhaps even in ruin? Yes, we answer, such a book, at least in the author's mind, was 'Obermann'; such the episode of René,' which made Chateaubriand famous; such, too, for readers of a certain daintiness in their studies, was 'Marius the Epicurean.' Not all these figures attained to popularity or could endure it. The school from which they came boasted of its indifference to the mob; it was never democratic; and it breathed an air of disquieting romance, of antinomian audacity, mingled with some strange attraction for what was pathetic or mysterious in the Christian usages. To that school Gabriele d'Annunzio belongs, nor is he the least significant among its disciples.

·

In what way significant, then? it will be asked. As a grand expounder of moralities and the laws of life? Certainly not, if we attend only to the letter, the ample rhetoric in which he speaks; for this, again and again, shocks all the proprieties, rides roughshod over good breeding, and is an offence which makes it impossible ever to circulate his stories in English without excision. Yet, when we pass beyond the letter we may find him prophesying, as in sackcloth and ashes, the downfall of evildoers. He will, therefore, at any rate serve to point a moral if he does not adorn one; he may be that highly desirable object, a sign of the times, symbolic to us, and to his