to transfer their consequences to the political domain. If the correct attitude of the German Government, and the cordial relations existing between the German Emperor and the ruler of Austro-Hungary, have hitherto blunted the point of the agitation of the "alldeutschen" party organs in favor of the German opposition in Austria, this does not exclude the possibility that from other directions, for instance, not only from French, but also from internal Austrian sources, the alleged desires of Germany-in case of the opening of a question of succession in Austria-may be drawn into the circle of discussion and made the cause of suspicion. That this is possible, in spite of the absence of any real foundation for it, Germany owes to the foolish course of some of her press organs, which, though they are in the habit of assailing their own government just as vehemently as they attack foreign countries, are represented by English and French publications as official or semi-official government organs.

The seventh great Power, for as such we must probably estimate the press since Italy has taken the sixth place, has this one thing in common with the ruler of a constitutional government, that both, in theory, can do no wrong. But in one respect it is more fortunate than such a ruler by the grace of God; its ministers and councillors, the editors and publishers, are not responsible before the judgment seat of history, though they may often fall into the hands of other and lower courts of justice. Charles X, Louis Philippe, Napoleon III, to say nothing of others, were obliged to atone, by dethronement and exile, for the stupidity of the press of their times and countries, while the journalists who worked diligently at the causes of the various downfalls, died quietly in their beds, and works of history make no

The Deutsche Revue.

mention of their articles and their names. We, too, shall soon forget the names and articles of the men who were and are now in the act of causing us serious international difficulties, and in a short time the grass will have grown over their printers' ink; but who knows whether the son of many a mother will not have to suffer for the mischief they have wrought, and which, perhaps, might have been prevented if the more sensible portion of the press had exerted its influence more energetically and permanently? this requires that it shall clearly understand the consequences of the policy it advocates, and take the trouble to reflect upon the thoughts which daily events inspire, instead of merely letting them effervesce. That the latter occurs far too often, the events of the last year or two have furnished striking proof.

True,

The press, too, has a right to demand something, and that is, that competent authority shall give it the necessary suggestions for what appears to be requisite in the interests of the foreign relations of the empire, and this is not restricted to political questions. That this is done to a certain extent is probably undeniable, but we need only turn the pages of one of the larger political papers for the last year, to convince ourselves how contradictory is the information received at different times from one or another official source. Baron Louis, the French Minister of Finance, used to say: "Give good politics and I will give you good finances," and an impertinent journalist-there are such fellows-might parody the phrase by the statement that a plainly understood system of politics was the first condition of a good political press. But even this beautiful world of ours is said to have arisen from chaos.

M. von Brandt.

Ever since I can remember anything old people-very old people—their ways and their talk, have exercised a strong fascination over me. Of late years I find that children-if they are goodhave begun to master my heart as they never did in my younger time. But this is partly because children are so much better and sweeter than they used to be, and partly because there are so many fewer old people nowadays than when I was in my prime. For when men and women are only ten or twenty years older than you are they are not nearly as interesting as they must needs be when they are twice or thrice or four times your own age.

I used to be a good deal laughed at and teased in my childhood and my boyhood for this taste for old people, and a wicked young uncle, who never lived to grow old himself, prophesied that I should end by marrying my great-grandmother. "You know, boy," he used to say, "there's nothing against it; for a great-grandmother is not among the prohibited degrees!" That uncle was a bad man, and when I gravely replied that it did not follow because you were very fond of a dear old lady that therefore you should marry her, that bad uncle only laughed the more at me, and made other people laugh, too.

Never spend your cheap derision upon a child, my masters! You never can tell how much bitter pain you give by ridiculing a little boy or a little girl.

As I grew older myself I provoked my friends-especially those of them who were in the spooning stage-by frequently insisting that, as a rule, a woman of forty was a great deal more beautiful and wiser, and generally a great deal more worth marrying, than any chit of a girl; and I held to that

opinion firmly and obstinately until, until-until in fact I gave it up-under compulsion.

The most remarkable instance I ever knew of what I may call cumulative longevity was that of a friend of mine in Norwich, who died, I think, at seventy-five, and who used to tell me that his grandfather, when a child, had been held up to look at Charles the Second at the King's restoration in 1660. My friend was a highly respected and influential solicitor in Norwich, Freestone by name, and at his death in, I think, 1865 or thereabouts, he left an estate in Norfolk to his nephew, Mr. Justice Lindley, now Master of the Rolls.

John Freestone, the grandfather, lived as a bachelor till his seventy-second year, and then he married and had a son, John the Second. This gentleman did as his father did; he lived a jovial life till he was seventy-two, and then he married and had a son, John the Third, my friend, who, living till seventy-five, died 218 years after his grandfather was born, and some 205 after that grandfather was held up to stare at Charles the Second: That is, the grandfather must then have been a boy of eleven or twelve!

It would be hard to beat that record.

And yet, when one comes to think about it, John the Third could never have known much about his father. None of the race, I believe, lived to eighty, and one generation had no reminiscences of the previous generation to hand down to the succeeding one. It has been very different with me. The first man that called on me here twenty years ago was an old gentleman of ninety-two, who had lived within three miles of this door all his life, and was born in the parish. There never was

a more gifted master of delightful gossip, as distinguished from scandal, than Mr. Barry Girling. No, never! He distinctly remembered the poet Cowper's burial at Dereham, on the 2nd of May, 1800, and had a story to tell of every house in the town of Dereham, and of every family, high or low, within ten miles of his own birth-place. Moreover, he was a born antiquary and collector, and he began to write a minute history of the Scarning School as far back as 1819, and continued to make additions to it from time to time till his death in 1881. Scarning School has a history. For well-nigh 200 years it was a flourishing and famous County Grammar School, at which the sons of the Norfolk gentry received their education, and that a very good education, too, under a succession of Masters of some eminence in their day. Mr. Girling fished up a register of the scholars admitted betwen the years 1733 and 1750, and a very curious register it is. In those seventeen years no fewer than six boys were admitted to the school who afterwards became High Sheriffs of Norfolk, and on the 11th of April, 1743, Edward Thurlow, afterwards Lord High Chancellor of England, was entered at the school, he being then eleven years of age.

Lord Thurlow's biographers agree in saying that he was a violent and ungovernable boy, and that he had a lifelong hatred of Brett, his Scarning schoolmaster; for Brett was, by all accounts, a very fierce and cruel pedagogue. Among Thurlow's schoolfellows, though two years his junior, was Thomas Elwin, of Booton Hall-grandfather of the Rev. Whitwell Elwin, for seven years editor of the Quarterly Review, who died a few months ago at the ripe age of eighty-seven. Mr. Elwin told me that his grandfather was present one day when Brett threw a ruler at a small boy named Buck, with such force that it knocked him down

senseless. There was a great alarm, and Brett called for water and rushed out to fetch some himself. Another boy named North came in first, bringing a cup of water, and Thurlow bawled out to North, "Let him alone! let him alone! you young fool. Let him die, and then old Brett will be hanged. Let him die!" This Charles North was the eldest grandson of Roger North of Rougham; he was born in 1735, and was alive in 1760; but what became of him I cannot tell, but tradition says that he twice deliberately set fire to Scarning School. But Mr. Elwin's story, which he heard from his grandfather, exactly corroborates the other story of Thurlow's life-long hatred of his first schoolmaster.

A few weeks after I became acquainted with Mr. Girling, I was honored by a call from the Rev. Bartle Edwards, who died nine days short of 100 in 1889. Elsewhere I have called him Nestor. He held the living of Ashill for seventy-seven years, and he told me once that not a man, woman or child had been buried in the parish during the whole of his incumbency by any one but himself. "I have buried three generations of them," he said. He actually continued to write fresh sermons till within a year of his death, and I believe he preached in a black gown till the end. I had the honor of wearing that gown at his funeral; it must have been quite fifty years old, and I shall never cease regretting that I did not steal that gown and run away with it, as I might have done so easily. Nestor was, in his whole cast of mind, as different a man as could well be imagined from Mr. Barry Girling. I never knew any one who was less of a gossip or who lived less in the past. He was not only a faithful parish priest first and foremost; it might almost be said of him that he was a parish priest first and last. I went to see him once by appointment,

to get, if it were possible, some information from him as to the way in which his tithes were collected in the days when they were paid in kind. He had nothing, absolutely nothing, to tell me. "I have been trying to remember something for you,” he said, "but it's so long ago that I can't recollect." He never thought of anything so far back. His memory began at a point where the reminiscences of men of fifty begin. All before that was a blank; but of the last fifty years of his life he could talk as simply and as accurately as I could, so much and no .more. There seemed to have been only two incidents in his boyhood that he habitually recurred to. The first was when he was about fourteen years old. He had somehow played truant, and he found himself at Epsom on the Derby day [?]. There was a great crowd and the lad was very nearly ridden over by the Prince Regent. "I got somehow between the horse's front legs, and I looked up and saw his Royal Highness towering over me." This must have been in 1804, for Mr. Edwards was born in 1789.

The other incident which had made an indelible impression upon him was when he was a pupil with Forby, the author of the valuable "Vocabulary of East Anglia," at Fincham, of which place Forby became rector in 1801. Here, again, he had nothing to tell me of Forby, except that "he was a rare flogger and gave Pillans a cruel flogging the very day he was going to leave him." Who "Pillans" was I did not ask and I do not know. "Do you remember William Girling, sir, who was at Forby's with you?" "Was he? No, I don't remember that-it's so long ago. Of course I knew Mr. Girling very well when he lived at Scarning." That is after Mr. Edwards had become rector of Ashill. Everything before that had passed from his memory.

As I have said, Mr. Edwards died

nine days before completing his 100th year. But I number among my friends who are still alive an old worthy who is some months over 100. I first became acquainted with him about three years ago, when he used to be up to a five miles walk without fatigue; he was then in possession of all his faculties, except that he was a little deaf, and he more than once asured me that if he survived until 1900 he should be able to boast that he had lived in three centuries. Recently, however, they had found that he was baptized on the 12th of February, 1800, and he now calls that his birthday, though the probability is that he was right at first when he assumed or asserted that he was born in 1799. Mr. Lewis Barton, for that is the old man's name, was a shoemaker at Dereham for sixty or seventy years, and saved a modest competency by his own industry and thrift. In early life he used to travel on his own account for orders, and he had journeymen working for him in the villages round. When the railroad came he saw that this peripatetic looking about for customers would not pay, and he stayed at home and his old customers came to him instead of his going to them, and he was the gainer. All through life he has been a most pronounced and loyal Churchman, and, when both eyesight and hearing failed him, he worried himself a good deal because, as he said to me, "I find it hard, sir, that I can't make my early Communion now, as I used to do!" The worthy Vicar of Dereham met that difficulty easily, and on his birthday (or it may be only his baptismal day) he administered the Blessed Sacrament to the old gentleman and a small congregation of his friends in the room where now almost all his time is passed. Old Barton is wonderfully vigorous in mind even now; he used to be a great reader, and as long as he could he read the Psalms daily. The loss of his sight, which

came on quite suddenly, was a terrible blow to him. It was pitiful to see him wave his hand to the bookshelves behind his chair, saying, "Ah, I shall never read them any more. They're all dumb or asleep to me now, sir. But yet, you see, they're not all dead and forgotten. There's old Shakespeare still comes back upon me. I used to read old Shakespeare almost every week seventy or eighty years ago. Don't you think he was a wonder, sir?" One day, not so very long ago, he began abruptly to recite the famous soliloquy of Hamlet:

To be, or not to be: that is the question;

He got as far as

There's the respect That makes calamity of so long life.

Then he paused with a curious fixed set in the blind eyes, turned my way. "Ah! sir, I do pray God to deliver me from that that temptation of getting tired of this life now. . . ." What more he added I may not and I will not repeat. I am persuaded that if I had known old Barton a year or two before his deafness had become a bar to any continuous conversation, I should have gathered a volume of curious and interesting reminiscences, which now have passed away and can never be recovered. Thus it is that we miss our chances, and once missed, they never return.

I cannot, however, reproach myself for neglecting any opportunities of picking up those fragmentary records of the past which the elders of Arcady have handed down to me from their sometimes well-stored memories. The older I grow the more do I believe in traditions. Old people never invent, they do not much exaggerate, and the more ignorant they are, the more accurately do they tell their old stories.

This is my experience of life among the elders of Arcady.

To the honor of the guardians of this Poor Law Union be it written that they have more than once been censured by the officials in high places for not too rigidly forcing the aged poor among us into "the house." The result is that in this parish there have been for some time past an extraordinary number of aged folk who have been allowed to live on undisturbed in their birthplace for eighty or ninety years, some of them subsisting for ten or fifteen years on the niggardly pittance allowed them as "out-door relief." Of course, when a lonely old man has no one to look after him and begins to mumble querulously and to get into dirty habits, such a one is best sent to the workhouse, where he gets fairly well attended to, and he usually ends by growing silly. He is friendless and has nothing to live for, and forgets all that is worth remembering. It is, however, very different with the old people who have never been uprooted from the old belongings. On a single page of our parish register, which covers a period of less than thirteen months, i.e., from the 25th of March, 1877, to the 20th of April, 1878, I find that five persons were buried whose united ages amounted to 425 years. The youngest of them died at eighty-two, the eldest at ninety-two. Now, I have never but twice in my Arcadian experience known of an aged man or woman who "lost their memory," as the phrase is. They can always tell you something about the long past. They can do more than that; they love nothing better than to talk of what their fathers and grandfathers did and said. This is to me the most precious kind of folklore. But how few people have ever considered how far back the "living memory" of a man can carry us. Let me illustrate this by an example. Joseph Barker died in April, 1883, în