And Quetta graveyards give again Their victims to the air, I shouldn't like to be the man Who sent Jack Barrett there. But the man from India does not keep all his poetry for verse. The sense of the sea's shuddering possibilities which darkens his plesiosaurus tale, makes first-class poetry of it. In an entirely different line, it is equalled by the incisive, lurid tragedy of the "one weak man." "The Finest Story in the World "—a romance for sheer photographic realisation bad to beat-contains in its superb gruesomeness a great deal of poetry extra to the awful song with the burden, "Will you never let us go?" The now famous "Ballad of East and West" is distanced by that glorious masterpiece, "The Man who Was," whose sixteen pages make up one of the bonnes bouches of our literature. It is a solidified echo of the clashing clank and the swinging thunder of cavalry. It warms the blood like an inspection of Dick's "beautiful men." No finer situation was ever devised than the gradual discovery of Lieutenant Austin Limmason in the dazed abject scarecrow, standing in ghastly contrast to the brilliant life of his own old mess, and grovelling before a man whom it was his business to defy. The feline Dirkovitch cuts a most telling figure in his naturally trying position of a cat watching an escaped mouse. He makes exactly the same impression as a cat, with his suave sweetness and his onyx eyes, dilating at the sight of the knout scars, visible signs as he was visible representative of his nation in the stronghold of the hereditary foe. The fierce smothered antagonism between Russian and English fills the reader with angry joy. One shares the White Hussars' delight, that after all Limmason did not apologise. The verse Mildred hummed tastes good in the mouth. So say all of us. We're sorry for Mr. Bluebeard, We're sorry to cause him pain; But a terrible spree there's sure to be Rudyard Kipling can pass a highly creditable examination on children and dogs, who collectively form an excellent test of an author's insight. His Majesty and poor Black Sheep (I will bet ten to one on the identity of Black Sheep with the man who has described his troubles) accomplish the well-nigh impossible feat of being really pathetic children. Tietjens and Mr. Wardle are even better creations. Mr. Wardle's fixed belief that his master was incapable of existing without his countenance and protection, hits 'Barrack Room Ballads, &c. London: Methuen & Co off the average canine to the life. Mian Mittu and Amomma are respectively a bird and beast, whose acquaintance one should be most happy to make. This is an illegal stoppage. But the finish must arrive some time, even if no peroration comes handy. May the Presence, having read me without skipping, live a thousand years! GORING COPE. 147 BROTHER, PALADIN, AND LOVER. Saluons, c'est Marceau! L'honorer m'est permis, Lui, son cœur était pur! . . . Voilà d'où vient sa gloire ! . . Eugène Quiettant's translation of Byron. OLDIER at sixteen, General at twenty-three, killed at twenty SOLDIER at sixteen, at twenty-three, seven." Thus is summed up the life of François-Severin Marceau, on the pedestal of the statue erected to him in his native town of Chartres; and English subalterns, living in dread of being superseded for failing to obtain promotion, have sighed for glory so quickly won and so soon secured past losing. Byron's poem and Barbier's picture have kept before us the image of the dying hero, lamented by friend and foe, " that bright spot in the dark annals of grim-visaged war" (Major Griffiths); and while military historians marvel at the brilliant operations directed by so young a head, the civilian turns with satisfaction to the testimony of the Coblentz magistrates that the victor was as generous as the assailant was intrepid. Closer examination into the life of the young warrior discloses new subjects for admiration, but it discloses also, as a com pensation for folk who are less outwardly favoured by Fortune, that a glorious public career can be chequered by bitter disappointments in private life, and that even a general of twenty-three may have occasion for tears as well as for smiles. François-Severin Marceau-Desgraviers was born at Chartres, March 1, 1769, son of the local procureur au bailliage Desgraviers, who had already four children by a former wife. The new-comer was not particularly welcomed, even by the mother of whom he was the first-born; and he was not only put out to nurse in the country at once, but was left there for full ten years, receiving, happily, maternal affection from his foster-mother, a vine-dresser's wife, the bonne femme Francœur of the General's subsequent recollections. When it became absolutely necessary to think about him, he was sent to the local college, where he learned nothing. "When he was offered a book, he asked for a sword," says his panegyrist, in language more or less figurative. He distinguished himself principally by one day inciting some eight or ten of his schoolfellows to jump on the backs of a flock of horses grazing in a meadow and gallop away across country as far as Maintenon. The boys returned a little before midnight, very weary, and very apprehensive of chastisement, which however was declared by the masters and by Desgraviers père to be duc only to that turbulent little Desgraviers, who was fit for nothing but to be made food for powder as soon as he should be big enough. However, his family had what seemed to them more ambitious designs; and the lad, at fourteen, was placed as a clerk in the office of the procureur Champion, who had married his eldest half-sister. This office, which he straightway nicknamed Enfer, was made endurable to him only by the company of his half-sister Emira. She had sought consolation for a loveless marriage in books, in gardening, and in drawing; and the advent of the neglected younger brother, affectionate, and craving for affection, was a godsend to her. "She, though but of the half-blood, bestowed on me those cares which nearer kindred denied," wrote Marceau in after years to his betrothed. But conjugal dissensions ended in Emira's retirement to a Parisian convent; " and then," to quote Marceau again, "everything palled upon me." "I am a stranger to the Desgraviers," he wrote to Emira, after a renewed experience of coldness. "Not one of their hearts has opened to me. Henceforth I drop their name, and will be known only by that of Marceau. Promise me to do the same, my good sister, you to whom I owe all as to a tender mother. There are only we two who love each other." At fifteen he offered himself to a recruiting-sergeant, but was told to go home for a year and grow bigger. The next year (1785) he succeeded in entering the regiment of Savoy-Carignan, without a farthing beyond the two hundred livres he received as bounty-money. Cast off by his family, but sustained by the recollection of Emira, and, moreover, of a young girl of his own age, Marie-Anne Maugar s he applied himself to the study of his profession, reading every military book from Xenophon to Marshal Saxe, and composing, it is said, a treatise on infantry manoeuvres, which he presented to the War Minister in 1791. The work, however, has been searched for in vain, and is believed to exist only in the imagination of biographers. At twenty years old he was sergeant, and obtained his first leave of A decree of the Revolutionary Commune of Chartres authorised her thus to transpose her too clerical name of Marie. absence, which he employed in a visit to Paris and to his beloved Emira, arriving opportunely to take part in the storming of the Bastille, and to lead a detachment out of Paris in readiness for the expected "Austrian hordes," which never appeared. But the youth confesses that he was not wholly proof against the seductions of the capital. "I should have gone to ruin," he wrote, "if my good sister, who never took her eye off me, had not used all her power to get me away from Paris and from my evil habits." Accordingly, in October, 1789, he used the right of a Bastille conqueror to choose his regiment, and demanded his transfer to Chartres as drill instructor of the National Guard. During the next two years we find him captain of Chasseurs, and, finally, quartered at Rheims as commandant of the Eure and Loire volunteers, but only waiting for his election as colonel to follow Emira's advice and solicit from the War Minister his transfer to the line troops. Marceau's portrait has been made familiar by Sergent's engraving, reproduced on every French child's coloured picture sheet of Les Grands Hommes de France. A figure of the type of the youthful Buonaparte, not tall, but active and strongly made, the face oval, with large brown eyes, high forehead and straight nose, shaded by long chestnut hair, and moustache of a redder hue. A quick temper, well kept under control, a warm heart, knowing no bounds in its friendship, readiness to laugh or weep-such were the prominent characteristics of Marceau, who was as much beloved for his social qualities by his equals, as he was respected by his superiors for his steady conduct and for the skill with which he brought his raw volunteers under discipline. Up to the age of twenty-two he had never touched wine, and to the end of his life he could go straight from a supper-table to his cabinet, and plan the next day's battle. His letters, almost schoolgirlish in their reiterated "I embrace thee," "Let me hear from thee soon," breathe a spirit equally ready to give or take friendship, and as forgiving as it is trusting and hopeful for the future. "Why does he not write to me?" he asks of some common friend in his letter to Constantin Maugars. "Though I have lent him money which I never expect to see back, that ought to make no difference." Maugars was Marceau's old schoolfellow, and the brother of Marie-Anne, his first love, who, alas ! fell a prey to consumption at twenty-one, "a fatal event," writes her lover, "which will long draw tears from me." Marceau's affairs of the heart seem to have been many, and as he adopted all his expected brothers-inlaw as brothers, his circle of intimates quickly enlarged itself. We transcribe the following letter, in all its innocence of punctuation, as |