horoughly in the work.

It has been remarked more than once, that Gordon's military career
reminds one of the great soldier Cromwell, who did so much to rescue
England from the degenerate condition into which it had fallen under
the miserable rule of the Stuarts. In the same way the six years spent
by Gordon at Gravesend, very forcibly remind us of the great religious
philanthropist, Lord Shaftesbury, who did perhaps more than any other
man of this nineteenth century, or any other century, to relieve human
suffering, and to solve some of those difficult problems that are
associated with the condition of the poor. Lord Shaftesbury had little
in common with Cromwell, except that both loved God and hated tyranny
and injustice. Their ways of going to work were very different, but one
cannot help seeing that Gordon combined much of both characters; and
had his lot fallen in different times or different circumstances, he
might have undertaken the work of either. He had all the martial
instinct of a Cromwell, and, with it, the love of relieving suffering
which so characterised Lord Shaftesbury. His one object seems to have
been to--

"Rescue the perishing, care for the dying,
Snatch them in pity from sin and the grave;
Weep o'er the erring ones, lift up the fallen,
Tell them of Jesus, the Mighty to save."

Gordon was never allowed to carry on any work for any great length of
time, and the six years at Gravesend passed very quickly. In 1871 he
was appointed British representative on the European Commission to
superintend the improvement of the mouth of the Danube, so that it
might be made more navigable for ships. He was engaged in this work for
two years, with his headquarters at Galatz; and the eminent war
correspondent, Archibald Forbes, says that he "found his memory still
green there in the early years of the Russo-Turkish war, fourteen years
after he had exchanged the mosquitoes of the Lower Danube for the not
less venomous insects of the Upper Nile."

Apart from the testimony of Archibald Forbes, we may be quite sure that
he did some good work at Galatz, for it would be difficult to imagine
him doing nothing but the ordinary routine of official duties. He
always discovered an opening of some sort by which he could help his
fellow-creatures, and his active mind and sympathetic nature were, in
the words of Jean Ingelow, always asking the question of those with
whom he came in contact--

"Are