rds life seasoned and tempered the whole, giving it
vitality and force. This was neither a "drum-and-trumpet history"
designed to tickle the vulgar ear, nor a blank four-wall depository of
dry facts, names, dates, statistics, such as pedants mustily adore; but a
living thing, seen and felt. Not his subconscious, but that much finer
and--as one trusts--more permanent element in our human constitution, his
super-conscious self found expression in its pages and travelled freely,
fruitfully, through them amid luminous and masterful ideas. At times the
intellectual sweep threatened to be overdaring and overwide; so that, in
the interests of symmetry and balance of construction, he had been forced
to clip the wings of thought, lest they should bear him to regions too
remotely high and rare. Race, religion, customs and the modifications of
these, both by climate and physical conformation of the land on the face
of which they operate, went to swell the interest and suggestion of his
theme. In handling such varied and coloured material the intellectual
exercise had been to him delicious, as he fashioned and put a fine edge
to passages of admirable prose, coined the just yet startling epithet,
perfected the flow of some graceful period, and ransacked the English
language for fearless words in which to portray the mingled splendour and
vileness of a barbaric oriental Court, the naked terrors of tribal feuds
and internecine war.

The occupation had, indeed, proved at once so refreshing and so absorbing
that he went leisurely, lengthening out the process of production until
it came nearer covering the thirty months of elephantine gestation than
the normal human nine.

With but two brief sojourns to England, for the consultation of certain
authorities and of his publishers, the said near on thirty months were
passed in wandering through Southern France, Central Italy, and, taking
ship from Naples to Malaga, finally through Eastern and Northern Spain.
Charles Verity was too practised a campaigner for his power of
concentration to depend on the stability or familiarity of his
surroundings. He could detach himself, go out into and be alone with his
work, at will. But the last chapter, like the first, he elected to write
in the study at The Hard. A pious offering of incense, this, to the
pleasant memory of that excellent scholar and devoted amateur of letters,
his great-uncle, Thomas Clarkson Verity, whose society and conversation
awake