"The conduct of the Queen's Own Guides does not form part of the inquiry intrusted to the commission. But they have, in the course of these inquiries, had the extreme gallantry of the bearing of these men so forcibly brought to their notice that they cannot refrain from placing on record their humble tribute of admiration.

They do not give their opinion hastily, but they believe that the annals of no army and no regiment can show a brighter record of devoted bravery than has been achieved by this small band of Guides. By their deeds they have conferred undying honour, not only on the regiment to which they belong, but on the whole British army."

In the second campaign in Afghanistan, which followed the Kabul massacre, the Corps of Guides was even more distinguished for its conduct than in the previous year. Arriving at Kabul just in time to take part in the severe fighting of December 1879, the corps was an invaluable addition to Sir Frederick Roberts's force, and both cavalry and infantry behaved with the greatest gallantry in those as well as in subsequent fights. Having been on service almost continuously for nearly two years, during which time they had suffered severe losses, the Guides were not included in the force which marched with Sir Frederick Roberts to relieve Kandahar, and they returned to their headquarters at Hoti Mardan in September 1880. During the two campaigns the corps had lost 2 British and 6 native officers and 96 non-commissioned officers

In 1886 and 1891 parts of the Guide Corps were again employed in frontier expeditions; but passing over these, the long record of brilliant services terminates in the campaign of 1895, which, as will be fresh in the reader's recollec

tion, was undertaken for the relief

of Chitral.

The little station of Hoti Mardan, where the Guides are located, stands about sixteen miles from the line of rail, and on the direct road from the nearest railway station to the foot of the Mala

kand Pass, over which the relieving column was to advance. The corps was therefore on the spot when the concentration took place, and it crossed the frontier with the rest of the troops on the morning of the 3d April. The infantry formed part of the 2d Brigade, and the cavalry were included in the divisional troops. The former were conspicuous in the assault on the precipitous slopes of the Malakand, while the cavalry, under Captain Adams, equally distinguished themselves on the following day against the hostile tribesmen in the Swat valley. But it was in the action on the 13th April on the banks of the Panjkora river that the conduct of the Guides was most noticeable, reminding those who witnessed it that this was the very same corps which had confronted the overwhelming number of mutineers at Delhi, which had stormed the heights round Kabul, and of which the name was foremost in the history of a hundred fights on the frontier.

The advance troops of the Chitral Relief Force reached the bank of the Panjkora on the 10th April, and on the arrival soon afterwards of Sir Robert Low, commanding

the force, orders were at once given for the construction of a bridge, without which it was found impossible to cross the stream. On the evening of the 12th April the bridge was sufficiently completed to allow of the Guides infantry passing over to cover the work. The next morning the corps, under Colonel F. D. Battye (the third brother of this distinguished family who served in the Guides), made a reconnaissance into Bajaur territory; but, by a combination of misfortunes, not only did Colonel Battye advance farther than had been intended from the river, but in addition to this the stream suddenly rose, and in the early morning of the 13th the frail bridge was swept away, thus cutting off all possibility of reinforcing the Guides. Meanwhile, at noon, Colonel Battye found himself confronted by two large bodies of the enemy, who advanced rapidly against him down the sides of the surrounding hills. He was immediately ordered by heliogram to fall back on the bridge-head, where he would be covered by the fire of the guns on the opposite bank; and it was in this retirement that the steadiness and discipline of the Guides were so brilliantly displayed. The battalion retired in perfect order, inflicting a loss of some 500 on the enemy, "probably one for every sepoy of the Guides engaged."

"His Excellency," wrote the adjutant-general in a despatch to Government, "considers this a very remarkable instance of the results that may be obtained under very trying circumstances by absolute steadiness, combined with high training and

perfect fire control, and believes that the Guides must have felt themselves conquerors though retiring before eight times their number of brave but undisciplined tribesmen." To all who know how bold are Afghan tribesmen in pursuit, and how trying is a retirement to all Asiatic soldiery, the brilliancy of this action will be specially apparent. The losses of the Guides were small numerically, amounting to but three killed and nine wounded; but they were rendered more deplorable by the fall of the gallant Colonel Battye, who was shot just at the close of the action. "By his death, at the moment when he had with great gallantry and skill brought the battalion under his command out of a position of peculiar difficulty, the Indian service has lost one of its most admirable officers." 1

This was the last occasion on which the Guides were seriously engaged, and here this brief sketch of their services during the last half century may be fittingly closed. As lately as last year individual officers of the corps have been selected for important service with the contingent sent from India to Suakin, but the last service of the Guides as a whole was in the Chitral expedition. As has been shown, the courage and discipline of both officers and men have not deteriorated since the days when they were led by Lumsden, Hodson, and Daly; and whenever or wherever in the future they may be called on to defend the interests of the empire, the Queen's Own Guides may be trusted to show themselves second to no regiment or corps in the British army.

IT has often been remarked that the novel is to the Victorian era what the drama was to the age of Elizabeth, or the narrative poem to the epoch of the Great Revolution at once the favourite form of literary expression and the most characteristic embodiment of the spirit of the time. The Elizabethan literary world demanded action, vigorous language, and no intrusive comments or explanations; the child of the Revolution preferred a medium in which he could intersperse his narrative with his views on nature or the Rights of Man; and the later nineteenthcentury writer, following out the same idea, chooses the means by which, while pandering to the unaccountable liking of the public for a story, he may most freely inculcate the tenets of the newest form of irreligion or the merits of his own particular nostrum for saving society. Since, therefore, the novel now occupies the place of the pulpit and the platform as well as that of the vehicle of "innocent amusement " (to use a term much reprobated by the novelists of the earlier part of the century), we feel that it is unnecessary to apologise for undertaking a survey of a part of the development of this new social force during the years 1837-97.

The sixty years of the Victorian era lend themselves readily to a rough division into three partsand, in point of fact, we do distinguish three separate periods in the growth of the novel during the reign, but the divisions are by no means equal in length, nor do they follow consecutively on one another. The characteristics of the second period make their

appearance while those of the first are still predominant, and one writer at any rate has brought the tone and manner of the Early Victorian era almost into our own time. The style of 'Kenelm Chillingly,' published in the seventies, betrays its author as the last survivor of the romanticists of the older day. Roughly speaking, we may say that the period of which we propose now to treat ended with the Crimean War, although waifs and strays which properly belong to it continue to make their appearance for some years thereafter, and its lofty solemnity had long been threatened by the encroachments of the rising generation of authors. It was the era of the belated pseudo-romantic, of the imitators of the imitators of Scott, of tales of magic and mystery, and of the novel of high life. Dickens, Thackeray, Charles Kingsley, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Reade, and Mrs Oliphant rose, or even flourished, during its course; but their principal works belong more properly to the succeeding period, although the writers themselves have not all escaped the influence of the romantic era. To take but two instances, the Parisian experiences of Rochester and his courtship of his first wife might have come straight from the pages of Lady Blessington, while the melodramatic portions of Nicholas Nickleby' and other early works of Dickens reflect the methods both of the fashionable and of the purely romantic among his predecessors.

In thus restricting our field of view to the more old-fashioned writers of our period, it might be

6

imagined that we should find ourselves confined to a very narrow range of interests, but this is not the case. The Early Victorian era had much more affinity with our own as regards subjects and their treatment than has the succeeding period, and it even anticipated not a few of the crazes of to-day. It had its Celtic Renascence, to which, after the too famous Macpherson, Scott had given the first impulse by his studies of Highland character, and which was continued impartially by the Irish stories of Carleton and Lover, and gained new life from the publication (or should it be the republication?) of the Mabinogion.' It had its Kailyard School, which descended through Scott to Galt and to Wilson, whose 'Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life' portrays the Scottish peasant of the period as considerably more sentimental and less humorous than his modern representative. It had its realists, who are now our romanticists, and even, highly favoured age! its lady exponent of popular mysticism, its Marie Corelli, so to speak, of whom more hereafter. It possessed, moreover, its competing American literature (mostly pirated, it is to be feared), although the American novelist had as yet scarcely attained to the elaborate unconsciousness of the existence of any country but the United States, and any city but his own Orford or Hamilcar, let us say, which distinguishes him so pleasantly at this later day. It had even its lady journalists-not merely Harriet Martineau fulminating against Toryism and Protection in the columns of the 'Daily News,' but, as Mrs Gore tells us, misses in their teens, who had been inoculated with the virus of journalism by some mad editor, and

were allowed to contribute to the great dailies ferocious leading articles denouncing the Government of the day. In this respect the world fifty years ago seems to have been more advanced than it is now, or was the speedy promotion of these young ladies due to the fact that they worked without remuneration? And the age possessed also its New Woman in fiction, for the heroine of Mrs Trollope's 'Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman,' with her diary carefully written with a view to its being read by other eyes, and her insistence on being taken seriously, might be the prototype of Marie Baschkirtseff herself, while her calm calculation on

-or shall we say after?-marrying, that she had now a future before her, might have fitted her to appear in a novel by Mrs Andrew Dean.

But if the period has many points of likeness to our own, it is not without strong differences. It may seem almost a paradox to say that it was a far more literary age; but if we are to take as a test the effect produced by literature upon individuals and upon society, this was certainly the case, in spite of the far smaller number of readers, and the costliness of books. "In England," says Mrs Gore, in the 'Dean's Daughter,' "official men talk chiefly of Melton or Newmarket, ballet-dancers or cooks. Except on the day of publication of a new 'Edinburgh' or 'Quarterly,' or a crack pamphlet, or of the opening of the Session, or the downfall of a ministry, public measures are seldom canvassed among those who have enough to do in manufacturing them." The first and last charges may still be true (we will not venture to assert that this is so), but we doubt whether there is any public man nowadays

who could so much as name the day on which the Edinburgh' or the Quarterly' comes out, and even more whether there is any club at which the wealth of wisdom contained in their pages would be tolerated, though but for twenty. four hours, as the sole topic of conversation. And what young lady of to-day tries to model her personal appearance upon that of the heroine of the latest novel she has read, as did the Miss Rebecca Linnet of 'Scenes from Clerical Life'?

"Nothing but an acquaintance with the course of her studies," we are told, "could afford a clue to the rapid transitions in her dress, which were suggested by the style of beauty, whether sentimental, sprightly, or severe, possessed by the heroine of the three volumes actually in perusal. A piece of lace, which drooped round the edge of her white bonnet one week, had

been rejected by the next.... The black velvet, meeting with a crystal clasp, which one evening encircled her head, had on another descended to her neck, and on a third to her wrist, suggesting to an active imagination either a magical contraction of the ornament, or a fearful ratio of expansion in Miss Rebecca's person.”

In the case of certain heroines of recent fiction, flattery of this eminently sincere order would be unadvisable, if not in the English climate impossible; but it has not been our hap to meet with any young lady in the habit of practis ing it at all.

The fiction which exercised so powerful an influence over the minds of the gentler readers of the time may be divided into three groups-the Society novel, the purely Romantic, and the novel of Adventure. The scope of these may be more clearly defined by saying that the Society novelists followed Richardson and Jane Austen (at a respectful distance, be it understood); the Romantic

writers Scott and Mrs Radcliffe, according as their tastes inclined to history or mystery; and the authors of Adventure-books, with which may be grouped the few humorous novels of the period, Fielding and Defoe. Some there were, like Disraeli, impossible to class, for their works generally united the first two elements, and occasionally included the third; while others, like Lytton, tried them all in turn, and later types as well.

It may seem surprising to some of our readers, who entertain a vivid remembrance of the kind of fiction supplied to them in youth, that we have not allotted the didactic novel a class to itself. The reason is simple: all fiction, with the occasional exception of the humorous novel, was didactic — professedly and aggressively didactic. Considering the disfavour in which fiction was held by the educationists of the time, it can scarcely be said that the novelist was expected to moralise; but moralise he did, whether because it was the fashion of the day, or because he sought humbly to justify his existence to his stern censors, who shall say? We need not believe all that their detractors say against Bulwer Lytton or the Countess of Blessington, to feel surprised by the lofty moral tone expressed, if not always implied, in their works-a tone which was so prominent a feature in the books of the lady that, as we learn from her niece and biographer, "innumerable numbers of the clergy, with whom she had no personal acquaintance, addressed to her letters of compliment and approval." This must have proved extremely gratifying to the author, even if it strikes a later age as scarcely flattering to the discernment of her reverend cor