expansive, chattering, good-natured madness, so utterly unlike the cold-blooded, wicked, deliberate lying of the North." These notes were gathered everywhere. First of all, he drew from his inner self, as one must do who hopes to write true. All the memories of his early years that life which he painted so vividly when telling the stories of Little What's-HisName and Elysée Méraut of the Kings in Exile-were pencilled there. It was full of the local ballads, the proverbs and homely sayings of the South, the cries of its hawkers, its epithets and its extravagances of speech.

From that book I drew Tartarin de Tarascon, Numa Roumestan, and, more recently, Tartarin sur les Alpes. Other books dealing with the South are vaguely outlined there, fanciful sketches, novels, physiological studies-Mirabeau, Marquis de Sade, RaoussetBoulbon, and the Malade Imaginaire, whom Molière surely imported from the South. Yes, and even serious history, too, if I may believe this ambition lying in a corner of the little book: Napoleon, a Southerner-the whole race embodied in him.

Mon Dieu, yes. In anticipation of the day when the Novel of Manners should weary me by the confined and conventional limits of its frame, when I should feel the need of enlarging my field and of soaring higher, I had dreamed of that—of striking the dominant note in Napoleon's supernatural existence, of interpreting that extraordinary man by this simple phrase, The South, of which Taine, with all his learning, never thought. The South, pompous, classical, theatrical, fond of parade and gorgeous costumes-with a spot or two in the creases-platforms, plumes, banners and trumpets flaring in the wind. The family-loving, tradition-ridden South, inheriting from the Orient loyalty to the clan of the tribe, with the fondness for sweet dishes and that incurable content for woman which does not prevent its being passionate and lustful to the point of madness. The cajoling, cunning South, with its reckless eloquence, luminous but colourless-for colour is a Northern quality-with its short but terrible outbreaks of wrath, accompanied by much pawing of the ground and grimacing, always more or less simulated, even when they are sincere now tragic, now comic-typical Mediterranean hurricanes, ten feet of foam on top of calm water. The superstitious, idleworshipping South, readily forgetful of the

gods in the excitement of its salamander-like life, but remembering the prayers of its childhood as soon as disease or misfortune threatens. (Napoleon on his knees praying, at sunset, on the deck of the Northumberland, and hearing mass twice a day in the diningroom at St. Helena.) Lastly, and above all, the most prominent characteristic of the race —imagination—which was never so vast, so frenzied in any man as in him. (Egypt, Russia, the dream on conquering the Indies.) Such was the Napoleon whom I would have liked to describe in the principal acts of his public life and the trivial details of his private life, coupling with him as a foil, for a Bompard, imitating and exaggerating his gestures and his display another Southerner, Murat of Cahors, the poor and intrepid Murat, who was captured and driven to the wall, having attempted to effect a little return from Elba on his own account.

When Numa Roumestan appeared and for a long time afterward all Paris insisted, despite what Daudet said to the contrary, that the character of its hero was in a measure drawn from Gambetta. Numa, in reality, was made up of scraps and fragments, as was the case with every one of the people in the book, with the exception of the most ridiculous and improbable of them all-the chimerical and delirious Bompard. The character of the tambourinaire, Valmajour, was suggested by a musician named Buisson, who came to Paris with a letter to the novelist from the poet Mistral. It was from Buisson's lips that Daudet heard the little tale beginning: "It came to me at night." The house in Nîmes in which Numa was born was one in which Daudet lived as a child; the Brothers' school of the book was one of his earliest memories. There were others besides Gambetta who were recognised or who recognised themselves in Numa Roumestan. Numa Baragnon, a Southerner and an minister, misled by the similarity of Christian names, was the first to protest. The legend about Gambetta was started by an article in a Dresden newspaper. Gambetta himself never believed it, and he and Daudet laughed over the story together.

As we were dining one evening side by side at our publishers' table, he asked me if Roumestan's "When I don't talk, I don't think,"

was a manufactured sentence or one that I had heard somewhere.

"Pure invention, my dear Gambetta." "Well," he said, "at the council of ministers this morning one of my colleagues, a Southerner from Montpellier, informed us that he never thought except while he was speaking. Evidently the idea is indigenous to your country."

V.

Of all Daudet's books, the one with which he had most difficulty, the one which he carried longest in his head in the stage of title and vague outline, was Kings in Exile. The chief trouble in the building of the story was in the search for models and for accurate information. He was obliged to press into service all his acquaintances from the top to the bottom of the social ladder. He interviewed the upholsterers who furnished the mansions of exiled kings and the great nobleman who visited these homes socially and diplomatically. He pored over the records of the police court and the bills of tradesmen, going in this way to the bottom of those royal existences, discovering instances of proud destitution, of heroic devotion side by side with manias, infirmities, tarnished honour and seared consciences. It was for a long while believed that the King and Queen of Naples were the originals of Christian and Frederika of Illyria. Here, again, Daudet contradicted the popular idea. Elysée Méraut, however, was taken from life. The original of the character was a young man named Constant Thérion, whom Daudet used to meet soon after he arrived in Paris in company with his brother Ernest-a young man who was forever coming out of book-stalls or burying his nose in old volumes in front of the shops that surround the Odéon; "a long, dishevelled devil, with a peculiar trick, constantly repeated, like the spasms of the St. Vitus dance, of adjusting his spectacles on a flat, open, sensual nose instinct with love of life." To the figure of this strange Bohemian, who used to stalk about the Quartier, shouting his monarchical opinions, Daudet brought the impression of his own Southern childhood. "It occurred to me to make him a countryman of mine own, from Nimes, from that hard-working bourgade from

which all my father's workmen came; to place in his bedroom that red seal, Fides, Spes, which I had seen in the house of my own parents, in the room where we used to sing Vive Henri V" Méraut having been invented, Daudet began to study out the problem of how he could be introduced into the royal household. The idea came of making him the tutor of a prince; hence, Zara. And while at work on this part of the book an accident took place in the family of a friend, a child struck in the eye by a bullet from a parlour rifle, suggested the idea of the poor king-maker destroying his own work. Daudet had originally intended to describe in the book the funeral of an exiled king from the impressions which he had derived from watching the funeral procession of the old King of Hanover pass the Librairie Nouvelle, the Prince of Wales at its head. Unfortunately, he was embarrassed by parallel episodes in some of his former works.

VI.

Fromont and Risler was pieced together and finished in Daudet's house in the Marais, the quarter which is the very life and essence of the book; Kings in Exile was written in the Place des Vosges, the old Place Royale of the eighteenth and preceding centuries, rich with the traditions of France under the Bourbon kings; Tartarin of Tarascon during a trip to Algeria, which Daudet took in the winter of 1861-62, when he went over the ground immortalised by the formidable Lion-Hunter. The book, however, was not written until some years later. It was first published as a serial in the Petit Moniteur Universal. and fell absolutely flat. The Petit Moniteur was a popular newspaper, appealing to a class of people utterly without comprehension of printed sarcasm. To those readers who had been accustomed to the blood-curdling romances of Ponson du Terrail the first chapters of the life of Tartarin were a disappointment that caused many to threaten to stop their subscriptions. After some ten or twelve instalments Daudet took Tartarin to the Figaro. There it was better understood by the readers, but came in collision with other animosities. The secretary of the newspaper, who had at one time lived in

Algeria, retained a feeling of great affection for the colony, and was deeply exasperated by Daudet's apparent flippancy. He could not prevent the publication of the story, but he managed to divide it into intermittent fragments, so that the tale dragged on so slowly as to cause interest to flag. Nor was that all. The hero of the book was originally called Barbarin of Tarascon. It happened that there was at Tarascon an old family of Barbarins, who threatened the author with a lawsuit in case he did not instantly remove the name from his "insulting buffoonery." In time, however, all these difficulties were cleared away; people began to appreciate the "baobab villa," the "cap-hunters" and the Prince of Montenegro, and Tartarin emerged as one of the glories of French satire. It was not so many years afterward that the public which at first had received him so lukewarmly were clamouring impatiently for new adventures and incarnations. The Lion of Tarascon seems destined to take a place among the great comic heroes of all literature. In the Valhalla of fiction he will be found at

table with Falstaff and Uncle Toby and Sam Weller and Squire Western and Wamba and Jos Sedley and Panurge and the Knight de la Mancha and Monsieur Jourdain. And yet, despite the thousands upon thousands who have laughed over his buffooneries and wept over him in the dark days of his downfall, he seems even now to be generally misunderstood. He talked of slaughtering herds-he whose only trophy after the Algerian expedition was the purchased skin of one blind lion

and yet at heart he was not a braggart. He uttered at every turn a thousand gasconnades, and yet at heart he was never a liar. Get underneath his great coarse skin, and you will find something of the gentleman. Like the Don Quixote of Cervantes, one of the best knights and noblest hearts that ever passed through fiction's pages, Tartarin was simply an anachronism. Quixote, seeking adventures in the days of Amadis of Gaul; Tartarin shouting his battle-cry in the Crusades-these men would not have been ridiculous, but sublime.

Arthur Bartlett Maurice.

Of King Edward's abilities as a sovereign, of his fitness for his position as King of England, it is, of course, impossible now to do more than make a good guess. He may be upon the English throne for years without our knowing very definitely what his real mental characteristics are or even what his opinions are. The late Queen ruled in England for sixty years and more, and yet we know her mental qualities only very vaguely. She managed to keep these in the background. Nor have any of the men admitted to her counsels ever thought it right or proper to give the world any light upon her real mind. Lord Salisbury, indeed, said the other day in the House of Lords that the Queen had a very accurate and just idea of the mind of the English people, of what they would and would not approve of course, a very great quality in a politician. We can scarcely think of anything said about her by an English minister so authoritative and so intimate as this remark of Lord

Salisbury; and it is safe to say that he would not have said even so much if the Queen were living. She herself has rarely said anything by which we could know what she was really like. All we know is that the result has been good, and that after sixty years we can pronounce her reign a beneficent and a successful one and may hold that she has been a good, perhaps a great, queen.

In the same way, we must wait to see the result in the case of the present king; but we may get some notion of the sort of king he is likely to be from what we already know of the man and by regarding the character of the education he has been receiving throughout these many years. During these years his function has been chiefly that of representation. Of education in practical politics he can hardly be said to have had any whatever. For instance, he has not received an education in the least like that by which an English prime minister is prepared for the duties of his office. An English

prime minister begins as a young member of Parliament, serves first as a junior secretary in some department, later becomes a small member of the Cabinet, afterward a more important one, say foreign secretary, and finally prime minister, and the kind of work he has had to perform in these successive positions is much of the same general character. But the Prince received no education in the business of governing. Any attempt on his part to exercise an influence upon the course of politics would have been resented by the Queen and would have been disapproved by public senti

ment.

He has been obliged, therefore, to confine himself to the office of representation. Here his duties have been especially important, owing to the fact that the sovereign was a woman, and, more than that, a woman retired from the world. These duties have been extremely well performed. They may not seem to have been difficult, but I am not sure even of that. They certainly necessitated a great deal of hard work and self-sacrifice. At every court, drawing-room and levee he has had to stand upon his legs for two hours and nod to or shake hands with an endless string of people, very few of whom could have had any possible interest for him. He deserves praise for doing this so thoroughly, and very high praise for never giving any sign of the weariness he must have felt. And it cannot be altogether easy to know just how to treat every one-whom to nod to only, whom to shake hands with, whom to shake hands with smiling, etc. Besides these court entertainments there are an infinite number of cornerstones to lay, hospitals and other public institutions to open, celebrations to attend; and at all of these he has had to be on time and throughout the whole performance to look as if he liked it, when, of course, he must have had many pleasanter things to do. At many of these ceremonies he has had to make addresses. This he has the art of doing very well. He is a good after-dinner speaker. Lord Houghton once said to him: "The two best afterdinner speakers in England are your Royal Highness and myself." I once heard him make an address at a memorial meeting upon Dean Stanley. Nothing could have been better than his manner of

delivery. It is true he read it, but he did it with so much dignity, good taste and emphasis, that he seemed to feel what he said. Stanley had been one of the friends of his youthful days. He had been his companion on a visit to Palestine, when the Prince was little more than a boy. It is evidence, by the way, of the wonderful opportunities which the Prince has had of seeing the world and all that it contains that he was, I believe, the first person not a Mohammedan to enter the cave of Macpelah and see the tombs of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. There was fear that harm might be done the Prince by some fanatic; so he approached the mouth of the cave through long files of soldiers on either side. I may here be pardoned for mentioning a very pretty story of that adventure which Stanley relates and which amused the young man. When the Prince and Stanley approached the tomb of Abraham, the Mohammedan attendants made some outcry at the sacrilege, but not a great deal. But when the Prince came to the tomb of Isaac, they were loud in their lamentations. The English visitors thought this odd, Isaac being so much less distinguished than his father, and asked an explanation. The answer was that Abraham was of a kind and forbearing nature, but that Isaac was a severe saint, and likely to cut up rough if offended.

The incident of the cave is one of many illustrations, easily to be cited, of the fact that the Prince has had all his life the open sesame of the world. No man has been able to say with more truth, "Creation's heir, the world, the world is mine." Owing to the vast relations and possessions of England, his opportunities have been coextensive with the planet. But he has usually preferred those quarters of the earth where the most fun was to be had. In all the capitals of Europe everything worth seeing was, of course, open to him. But the world of London and England seemed to exist for his amusement, and he brought to the entertainment a lively capacity for its enjoy

These instances, showing the width and variety of his opportunities, occur to me. I remember once going to see Toole as Sergeant Buzfuz in Bardell v. Pickwick, at that time being given in one of the theatres off the Strand. Between the acts Toole asked me back

into his dressing-room. As he was putting on his paint before the looking-glass, I asked him who had been the model from whom he had taken his Sergeant Buzfuz, for I was sure it must have been a copy of some individual. He said it was Sergeant Ballantine, and that the night before the Prince of Wales had been sitting in the chair I then occupied and had said, "Come, Toole, let's go in and have some more Ballantine." This struck me as a little like a prince in the Arabian Nights. Another incident comes to mind, which Laurence Oliphant used to relate. It was of the Prince's introduction to John Bright. The meeting took place in the days when Bright was still unpopular with English society. Not a great while before, Palmerston had referred to him in the House of Commons as "the honourable and reverend gentleman," from which contemptuous treatment one may get a notion of what was then thought of Bright by London society. It was about the same time, perhaps, that Tennyson said to Gladstone that he had heard that John Bright dropped his "h's." The answer was: "Knock him down that says it." One day the Prince said to Oliphant: "What, Oliphant, you know John Bright! How does that happen?" "Yes; I know him," said Oliphant, "and will you allow me to say that the acquaintance of John Bright would be more worth while to you than that of many of the men you now know and are intimate with?" Accordingly, a meeting between Bright and the Prince was arranged in Oliphant's rooms, which were some dingy lodgings up two flights of stairs. As Oliphant was taking the Prince up, they met on the little, narrow stairs the landlord, who nearly fainted at the apparition. At this meeting the young man succeeded thoroughly in pleasing Bright. No very difficult thing, you may say. But the will to please was something, and some tact was needed in the case of a diffident, unworldly Quaker like Bright. There is no doubt the Prince has as the basis of his character a great deal of good nature. A few minutes' conversation with him will show this. People who saw him during his visit to this country were struck by this quality. Men show their real dispositions early in life. Mr. Maunsell B. Field, who saw a great deal of him here, says: "He was at that time as amiable and good-natured

a youth as I ever met." He speaks of the Prince's walking with him from his drawing-room to the carriage, "holding my hand boy-fashion all the way."

If it must be admitted that his early manhood and middle age were not altogether blameless, it may be said in extenuation of his lapses from the strictest standards of good behaviour that the temptations of his position were peculiar. He was in the novel situation of one to whom the world had assigned splendour and pleasure as an occupation; indeed, in effect as his whole occupation. For these pursuits he seems to have had a natural suitability. He had a gift for splendour. Aristotle made magnificence one of the virtues, distinguishing it from vulgar ostentation. That virtue the Prince had. He had a gift for pleasure also. In that he was not peculiar. Most men like a pretty woman. But his position was exceptional in the fact that the pretty women were all throwing themselves at him. It was not that they wanted him so much as that each desired that victory over the others so dear to the female heart. Like Paris, he had an apple to give to the most beautiful, or rather I should say that, unlike Paris, he had a bushel of them for distribution; so that any good-looking woman might hope to walk off with one. No doubt, these various affairs did him some injury in the public eye, and he was himself conscious of this. I had the following anecdote from a very authentic source. It will be remembered that some twenty years ago the Prince of Wales was very popular in Paris. He was talking on the subject of this popularity with his friend, Alfred Montgomery, a very charming man, much his senior-a man universally liked. and respected. They were saying how pleasant and how nice this popularity was. The Prince said that he knew that he did not have the same popularity among his own people. He regretted this, and wondered why it was, saying, "There was my great-grandfather, George III.: he made a great many mistakes, and yet he was very much beloved by the English people." "Shall I tell you why?" said Montgomery. "It was this; he ruled for sixty years over the English people, and during the whole of that time he never looked at anybody but his ugly old wife." I fancy the impropriety of most of these