"ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE, 1880-4."* (Pall Mall Gazette.)

Waikato Times, Volume XXIII, Issue 1889, 14 August 1884, Page 4

"ENGLAND UNDER GLADSTONE, 1880-4."* (Pall Mall Gazette.)

Ma jDSTfN Huntly McOarthv wields a facile pen. , His style is limpid, and his history ok* .Mr Gladstone's Administration from 1880-1884, will have a wide cJJcK "of interested readers. It is a striking stoVy to'tell, and, on the whole, he tells it well. Front an artistic poiut of view its chief fan it, is its want of proportion. The work is almost as hurried as a newspaper article. Pages are dovoted to incidents of ephemeral interest, while events of the first importance are slurred over in a sentence. A dozen lines are devoted to the death of of Mr Darwin, a single sentence tells, the change m the editorship of The Times on the death of Mr Chenery, while a whole jageiß devoted to Mr Henry S. Leigh. The death of Mdme Taghoui occupies nearly the whole of a page, while two lines record the demise of Prince Gortschakoff. Nor is that its only defect. The attempt to cover too much ground, to embrace things small and great in a universal survey, makes the book seem to be not) so much a history as a roughly condensed digest of several " Annual Registers." It is, no doubt, interesting to know that " Captain Hans Busk, the inventor of the volunteer movoment, Sir Henry Cole, inventor of the South Kensington Museum ; and Joseph Aloysius Hansom, who invented the Hansom cab, died in this year " (1882) ; but when miscelaneous information such as this is interspersed between philosophic eurveyi of great revolutions and historical retrospects going back at least a century, the efiect is somewhat incongruous. When the second edition is issued, which will no doubt be speedily called for, Mr McCarthy will do well to recast all his obituaries ; or, better still, cast them out into a compendious necrological table in a appeudix. It is only when Mr McCarthy can shake himself free ot these details and take a wider sweep than is possible to one who has to indulge in the snippety observations of the newspaper writer of the Deaths of the Year on the 31st of December, that he does full justice to himself or to his theme. The sei ies of portraits in the chapter on " The New Men " are very cleverly drawn, nor is their general effect marred by such slight inaccuracies as that, for instance, by which he includes Mr Courtney in the Ministry on its formation. The sketch of Mr Chamberlain is, perhaps, a little too eulogistic— it would certainly be more accurate to say that he was the exponent of Birmingham than of Northcountry opinion — but it is very well done nevertheless. " Ambitious, masterful, profoundly polite, occasionally impulsive, he is at the present moment one of the most interesting as well as one of the most pitted of English representatives." Mr McCarthy makes a great mistake when he represents Sir Charles Dilke as being " master of the situation " when Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Had he been so he might have hesitated before exchanging the most important post in the gift of the Crown for the Presidency of the Local Government Board. It is an open secret that Sir Charles Dilke chafed so much at his own impotence at the Foreign Office that he was glad to welcome any chauge that admitted him to the Cabinet. Of Sir W. Harcourt, Mr McCarthy well says : — He gave hii services to the Liberal party as a De Bracy or a John Hawkwood lent his. lance to King or Kaiser. There was something of the Copper Captain of the Alsatian Trojan about his eloquence which would have made Sheridan smile and Burke shiver ; but it was none the less exceedingly effective Nobody could smash an antagonist more effectively, nobody could be more noisily indignant, more obstreperously virtuous, more loudly humourous. Mr McCarthy is not savage except when he speaks of Mr Forster, but there is a spice of cruelty in him, as, for instance, when he says, "Mr Dodson is an estimable and painstaking man, with a certain capacity for figures such as is in all probability enjoyed by nine out of every ten clerks in the kingdom," and again, when speaking of Lord Kimbeiley, he says : — The patient ov which by the borders of the Nile walks its unceasing ciicle in the sakkieh that draws water from the river for the irrigation of the fields has as much ambition for the changeful life of the desert camel as Lord Kimbeiley has to make himself in any way conspicuous among states men. Mr McCarthy panegyrises Mr Labouchere and Truth, praises Lord Randolph Churchill, sneers at the "comprehensive amiability " of Sir Stafford Noi thcote, and obeys the maxim de mortuis so literally in ' the case of Lord Beaconsfield as to leave j the render at a loss to understand how the dead statesman came to be regarded as a political Ahnmanes by the Liberal party. There is a certain want of grit about Mr McCaithy's wiiting. It is pleasant and smooth, but the mannerism although pretty is monotonous. It is a kind of wall paper style. It attracts, but it does not impress. His pictures of battlo scenes aie vivid enough in their way, but the lurid glare of war is mellowed down to a ruddy glow, and in his account of the Land League a judicious use of chiaro oscuro leaves the reader in happy ignorance of the carnival of crime which drove England into a temporary forgetfulness ot the most cherished maxims of popular government. His account of the Eastern policy of the Government is very unsympathetic and somewhat misleading ; his narrative of the Bradlaugh embroglio is almost as involved as the embroglio itself. There is lesa exception to be taken to his account of even)* in the Transvaal and in Afghanistan, and his narrative of the trouble in the Soudan is deserving of all praise. Here is his description of Geneial Gordon. :— If one imagines a combination of a fifteen-century condottiere with a fourthcentury father of the Church, one gets, perhaps, the nearest approach to a description of Chinese Goidon. He is Sir John Hawkwood, but he is also Jerome ; he is, in the noblest sense of the woid adventurer, but his pure soul has alw&ys served beneath the colours " of his captain Chiist," like Shakespeare's Norfolk. On the whole, Mr McCarthy has done a very useful piece of work indifferently well. If he could take a little more time in recasting what he has written, he could convert it into a history worthy the name. As it is, it is too much of an omnium-gatherum of all kinds of miscelaneons facts, grouped chronologically around some well written chapters ; and to crown all, the index is execrably inadequate. But as almost all the faults of the book are due to haste, they will, -we trust, be remedied in the next edition.

" England under Gladstone, 1880-1884." By Justin Huntly McCarthy. (London : Chatto and

A resolution of the Council of the Bussiau Empire, sanctioned by the Emperor, is promulgated, directing from January Ist next, the collection of the poll-tax among the poorer classes of the peosantry shall be entirely discontinued, the rates for the other peasant classes and the remainder of population subject , to this tax being reduced by one-half and one-tenth respectively. The Minister of the Interior is at the same time instructed to submit the draft of a law for giviog the classes of population affected by the above order greater liberty as regards change of domicile in Russia. A bold Mollah at Cabul has declared the use of tobacco to be contrary to the law of the Prophet. The Ameer of , Affghanistan has ordered a council of Mollahs to assemble and vote on the moinentom question. If the decision of ' the Council should be against the prohibition, the anti-tobacco theologian will he sent to prison. If the council agree with his views, tobacco smoking will be declared unlawful in the Ameer's dopinions*