ill
flicker away like the smoke of the guns on the windswept hill. He
meanwhile sits 'musing and fasting and hoping to die.' Fitzjames is the
precise antithesis: his heart was with the trampling legions, and for
the ascetic he might feel pity, but certainly neither sympathy nor
respect. He goes out of his way more than once to declare that he sees
nothing sublime in Buddhism. 'Nirvana,' he says in a letter, 'always
appeared to me to be at bottom a cowardly ideal. For my part I like far
better the Carlyle or Calvinist notion of the world as a mysterious hall
of doom, in which one must do one's fated part to the uttermost, acting
and hoping for the best and trusting' that somehow or other our
admiration of the 'noblest human qualities' will be justified. He had
thus an instinctive dislike not only for Buddhism, but for the strain of
similar sentiment in ascetic versions of Christianity. He had a great
respect for Mohammedanism, and remarks that of all religious ceremonies
at which he had been present, those which had most impressed him had
been a great Mohammedan feast in India and the service in a simple
Scottish kirk. There, as I interpret him, worshippers seem to be in the
immediate presence of the awful and invisible Power which rules the
universe; and without condescending to blind themselves by delusive
symbols and images and incense and priestly magic, stand face to face
with the inscrutable mystery. The old Puritanism comes out in a new
form. The Calvinist creed, he says in 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,'
was the 'grain on which the bravest, hardiest, and most vigorous race of
men that ever trod the earth were nourished.' That creed, stripped of
its scholastic formulas, was sufficient nourishment for him. He
sympathises with it wherever he meets it. He is fond of quoting even a
rough blackguard, one Azy Smith, who, on being summoned to surrender to
a policeman, replied by sentencing 'Give up' to a fate which may be left
to the imagination. Fitzjames applied the sentiment to the British
Empire in India. He was curiously impressed, too, by some verses which
he found in an Australian newspaper and was afterwards given to quoting.
They turned out to be written by Adam Lindsay Gordon (the 'Sick
Stockrider').

I have had my share of pastime, and I've done my share of toil,
And life is short--the longest life a span.
I care not now to tarry for the corn or for the oil,
Or for the wine that maketh glad t