cannot be regarded as barbarous, or even harsh, according to the standard of that age. We may regret the necessity for the death sentences, but we may fairly doubt whether the Government lost a golden opportunity of conciliating the disaffected. On turning to Dr. Theal's 'Compendium' for further information on this point we find there no extenuation of these 'treasonable practices.' In Dr. Theal's earlier judgment, on a question which has not been further elucidated by his later researches, there was no room for mercy : The Government felt that it was necessary to show these people, so long accustomed to anarchy, that they must be obedient to the law, and that mercy in such cases as this could not be granted.' (p. 181.) Mr. Cloete, who makes some very temperate reflections on this subject, merely vouches for the fact that these executions left an indelible impression' upon the Boers; he observed with regret that the Boers were henceforth impervious to all the efforts of the Government to give them the enjoyment of the utmost share of rational liberty in all their political institutions.' They could, they assured him thirty years after the event, never forget Slachters Nek.' Even so late as 1883 the late Sir Bartle Frere, in a paper read before the Royal Historical Society, informed his hearers that the sentence is to this day regarded by many Dutch farmers as a judicial murder, and the men executed are spoken of as martyred patriots.' What can conciliation avail with such a spirit! * We have emphasised the importance of this native question because we believe that it will be found to cover nearly every cause that has been assigned for the movement known as the Great Trek. We dare even venture to assert that at the date of the Trek itself no other cause was generally recognised. The modern tendency to obscure this plain issue has, we think, received its chief support from the later writings of Dr. Theal, blindly followed by those little authors who are well pleased to use the historian's reputation as an ægis to cover their own shortcomings both in knowledge and judgment. one aspect, then, the Great Trek marks a crisis in South African history that was long deferred and is not even yet passed, whilst in another aspect it opens up a new period of liberty and progress. As a justification of the more hopeful view we may once more cite the invigorating arguments of Dr. Theal's 'Compendium': In This period marks a great turning point in South African history. The abolition of the commando-reprisal system and the emancipation * R. Hist. Soc. Trans.,' N.S., iv, 240. of the slaves were measures of incalculable benefit to the community. As long as those systems endured, moral progress was impossible. When they were destroyed, men acquired clearer and juster views of their duties and responsibilities' (p. 232). Another reflection will perhaps occur to the student of these times, and that is a somewhat serious one. Whilst the colonists of other nations were fighting for the security of their persons and property or the free exercise of their religion, and whilst those of other territories of the British Crown were engaged in an arduous constitutional struggle for a representative government or some other privilege which was associated in their minds with the idea of political liberty, the Boers were mainly intent on claiming the right to keep their weaker fellow-subjects in a state of bondage. Their Governors in fact were tyrants' because they put an end to a tyranny which was revolting to civilised humanity and the sense of justice. Yet these retrograde Dutchmen were the descendants of the men who had fought against the Spaniards, whose treatment of the native races was in no way worse than their own. We have already pointed out the fallacy of supposing that the Dutch settlers of the frontiers could plead the spirit of patriotism as a motive for their resistance to British rule. This excuse indeed is plainly hinted at in many passages of Dr. Theal's work, but it is quite clear from their own statements and actions that the Dutch colonists cared nothing for their mother country and aimed at independence chiefly as a means of obtaining freedom of action on the native question. It was for this that the Great Trek was made, and in this mind the children of those Voor-trekkers have continued down to our own times. ART. II.-LORD BYRON. 1. The Works of Lord Byron. London: John Murray, 1837. 2. The Works of Lord Byron. A new, revised, and enlarged edition. (1) Poetry; Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, M.A. Vols. I, II. (2) Letters and Journals; Edited by Rowland E. Prothero, M.A. Vols. I-III. London: John Murray, 1898-9. 3. Byron. By John Nichol. (English Men of Letters.) London: Macmillan and Co., 1880. HE life of Byron, a masque in action, to which his poetry This but the moralising accompaniment of words, is better known than the life of perhaps any other poet; but it is not yet known completely. Perhaps if the Memoirs' which he wrote had not been destroyed, we should know all that need be known of the period which they covered; perhaps not. 'If,' he wrote in his Journal,' 'I am sincere with myself (but I fear one lies more to one's self than to anyone else) every page should confute, refute, and utterly abjure its predecessor.' The 'Memoirs' are lost; but there remain large quantities of letters, among the best letters in the language, certain fragmentary journals, notes, and jottings of various kinds, many of which are only now being published, in the edition of Byron's Letters and Journals' edited by Mr. R. E. Prothero, in a companion series of volumes to the edition of Byron's 'Poetry edited by Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge. Every additional letter of Byron is worth having, for its own sake and for his; a final edition of the poems, with all their variants, has long been needed; and it would be difficult to over-praise the diligence, research, and thoroughness of both editors, in their copious notes to almost every page. The labour of this minute annotation, which seems to leave no gaps for future commentators, must have been enormous; it is certainly the most serious contribution which has yet been made to our knowledge of Byron as a man and as a poet. 'One whose dust was once all fire' (words which Byron used of Rousseau, and which may still more truthfully be used of himself), Byron still lives for us with such incomparable vividness because he was a man first and a poet afterwards. He became a poet for that reason, and that reason explains the imperfection of his poetry. Most of his life he was a personality looking out for its own formula, and his experiments upon that search were of precisely the kind to thrill the world. What poet ever had so splendid a legend in his lifetime? His whole life was lived in the eyes of men, and Byron had enough of the actor in him to delight in that version of all the world's a stage.' His beauty and his deformity, his tenderness, roughness, delicacy, coarseness, sentiment, sensuality, soaring and grovelling, dirt and deity, all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay' (it is his own summary of Burns), worked together with circumstances to move every heart to admiration and pity. He was a poet, and he did what others only wrote; he seemed to write what others dared not think. It was a romantic time, 'gigantic and exaggerated,' as he said, the age of the French Revolution, the age of Napoleon; Trafalgar and Waterloo were contemporary moments. The East was the new playground of the imagination: Byron, and Byron alone of the Orientalising poets, had been there. He was a peer and a republican, at twenty-four the most famous poet of the day, the idol of one London season and cast out with horror by the next, an exile from his country, equally condemned and admired, credited with abnormal genius and abnormal wickedness, confessing himself defiantly to the world, making a public show of a very genuine misery, living with ostentatious wildness in Venice, reclaimed to a kind of irregular domesticity, giving up everything, life itself, in the cause of liberty and for a nation with a tradition of heroes, a hero in death; and he was one whom Scott could sum up, as if speaking for England, at the news of that death, as 'that mighty genius, which walked amongst us as something superior to ordinary mortality, and whose powers were beheld with wonder, and something approaching to terror, as if we knew not whether they were of good or evil.' Circumstances made Byron a poet; he became the poet of circumstance. But with Byron, remember, a circumstance was an emotion; the idealist of real things, and an imperfect idealist, never without a certain suspicion of his ideal, he turned life, as it came to him, into an impossible kind of romance, invented by one who was romantic somewhat in the sense that a man becomes romantic when he loves. Such an experience does not change his nature; it does not give him sincerity in romance. Byron's sincerity underlies his romance, does not transmute it. This is partly because the style is the man; and Byron had not style, through which alone emotion can prove its own sincerity. 'All convulsions end with me in rhyme,' he writes; and all through his letters we see the fit working itself out. I wish I could settle to reading again,' he notes in his journal; my life is monotonous, and yet desultory. I take up my books and fling them down again. I began a verse, we comedy, and burnt it because the scene ran into reality: a novel for the same reason. In rhyme I can keep more away from facts; but the thought always runs through . . . . . yes, yes, through.' Convinced that the great object of life is sensation -to feel that we exist, even though in pain,' Byron was constantly satisfying himself of the latter part of his conviction. Rhyme was at once the relief and the expression; and, in his see the confusion of that double motive. To withdraw myself from myself-oh, that cursed selfishness-has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.' Now this conflict between the fact which insists on coming with the emotion, and the alien kind of fact which presents itself as an escape from the emotion, does much to render Byron's earlier poetry formless, apparently insincere. Byron wrote with a contempt for writing; managing his pen,' in Scott's phrase which has become famous, 'with the careless and negligent ease of a man of quality.' God help him!' he writes of a gentleman who has published a book of verses; 'no one should be a rhymer who could be anything better.' And again, more deliberately: I by no means rank poetry or poets high in the scale of intellect. This may look like affectation, but it is my real opinion. It is the lava of the imagination, whose eruption prevents an earthquake . . . I prefer the talents of action.' 'The lava of the imagination, whose eruption prevents an earthquake,' is indeed precisely what poetry was to Byron; and it is characteristic of him that he cannot look beyond himself even for the sake of a generalisation. If we would define yet more precisely his ideal we must turn to a certain stanza in Childe Harold' : 'Could I embody and unbosom now That which is most within me,-could I wreak and so, indeed, at his best, he did speak, condensing the indignation of his soul or the wrath of Europe into one word, and that word lightning. But the word flashes out intermittently from among the dreariest clouds, and he is not even sure whether his lightning has flashed or not, waiting to know whether it has been seen before he has any positive opinion of his own. Sending the manuscript of 'Manfred' to |