man declared he was the only honest man in a Cabinet of rogues. He seems to have lived two different lives. At the Treasury or in Parliament he was the heavy, sagacious, wary man of business, immersed in finance, and seemingly wedded to his duties. But admirably as he discharged them, his heart was not really in his work. His heart was on the race-course, or at the gaming-table, or else with the Cynthia of the minute. We wonder that Mr. Elliot forgot to quote the lines of Pope, familiar as they are to every student of the period : 'Who would not praise Patritio's high desert, This tribute to Godolphin's political honesty from Pope, who was the friend of Harley, is especially valuable, and decidedly outweighs 'Sid Hamet's Rod,' perhaps the poorest satire which Swift ever wrote. The Minister was at Newmarket when he heard of the Queen's dismissal of Lord Kent, and the appointment of the Duke of Shrewsbury. But he only wrote to her from the spot; he did not think it necessary to come to town. Swift says that love and play were his two master passions, and that in them alone he was ambitious of distinction. He was often in earlier days to be found in the Duchess of Mazarin's Drawing-room; and he had some pretension to the character of a man of wit and pleasure. 'He could scratch out a song,' says Swift, in praise of his mistress with a pencil and a card.' He is said to have formed a romantic attachment for Mary of Modena, whose Chamberlain he had been in early days; and when the opportunity occurred, he used to send her little presents to Paris, such things as ladies like,' says the same Diarist-whatever that may mean. We have to thank Mr. Elliot for a very interesting book, though there are many questions in which we cannot entirely agree with him; more particularly the question of Party government in the reign of Anne, and the scheme of Godolphin and Marlborough for superseding it. It appeared to some of the ablest heads of that day, that parties ought to have expired at the Revolution, and were kept alive by artificial means afterwards. This was Lord Bolingbroke's view; and a view, which had practically in its favour two such heads as Bolingbroke's and Marlborough's, can hardly have been the absurdity which Mr. Elliot represents it. ART. ART. VIII.—1. The Story of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa. By Rev. H. Rowley. London, 1866. 2. The Zambesi and its Tributaries. Livingstone. London, 1865. By David and Charles 3. Memoir of Bishop Mackenzie. By Harvey Goodwin, D.D., Dean of Ely. London, 1864. 4. Livingstone's Last Journals. London, 1874. 5. Memoir of Edward Steere, third Missionary Bishop in Central Africa. By Rev. R. M. Heanley. London, 1888. 6. Tropical Africa. By Henry Drummond. London, 1888. 7. Reports on Slave Trade on the East Coast of Africa, 1887-8. Presented to both Houses of Parliament, Nov. 1888. 8. Mission to Nyassa. By E. D. Young, R.N. London, 1877. 9. Central Africa, a Monthly Record of the Universities Mission. London, 1888. O walk in front of the strange implements gathered together at our Colonial and Industrial Exhibitions is in itself a valuable lesson. A whiff of the prairie here, the stifling fusty smell of the sugar plantation there, the dust of the Diamond Fields, all bring back vividly to the memory of the traveller scenes never to be forgotten. But the lesson is also useful to him who stays at home. He sees the apparatus for 'heaving down' the gigantic trees of the primeval forest, hitherto undisturbed throughout their generations by the hand of man. There too is the stump-extractor' in its place, ready for the sinewy wrist of the colonist'out West'; and gazed at with awe by many a 'cold-land' farmer of the Shires stands the massive prairie plough, built to tear and rend, to jump what it can't get over, and go round what it can't get under in the hitherto untouched waste. Here at all events men can realize for themselves what the beginning of things means. Reverence is begotten for the enterprise and determination which have called these things into existence, and for the firm hope which has planned and forged, and welded and tempered tools, for the tremendous task. Some such awe and reverence was accorded to David Livingstone, as the men of Oxford and Cambridge scanned him in 1857. Fresh from his marvellous travels in Central Africa, pale with fever-poison, struggling with nervousness, Livingstone, nevertheless, won all hearts with his simple addresses. The face of the plough-share might be seamed and cut into, the frame might be wrung and twisted, but he stood there, the hard unflinching instrument, who had gone through lands and tribes and tough problems, and had cut furrows in a wilderness a wilderness of human life which no one had heard of or dreamed of. The appeal was not in vain; 'I have opened the door, I leave it to you to see that it does not close after me.' The Universities' Mission to Central Africa, the direct result of Livingstone's appeal to the Universities, was a new departure, and a very bold one; it was launched against a special evil, rather than dedicated to the heathendom of a geographical tract. Livingstone in more than one direction had come face to face with the avant-courriers of the East Coast slave-trade, which was fomented by the Arabs and the Portuguese. He met Zanzibar Moslim at Linyanti buying boys in exchange for muskets in 1853, and the Portuguese along the Zambesi were actively at work sending slaves to markets which no cruiser ever heard of or suspected. His idea was to develop the capabilities of those lands he had travelled through, simultaneously introducing Christianity. His practical eye quickly took in the fertility of the Shiré highlands. The current price of boys and girls, around the Lake Nyassa of his discovering, was from two to three yards of American calico apiece (for your slave-dealer fights shy of stuff which is bedaubed with size), whilst a few strings of beads would fill any slave-stick: why then should the wretched people not be taught that coffee, cotton, sugar, and wool might take the place of their own flesh and blood? To Bishop Mackenzie, 'second wrangler' of his year, and already known for missionary work in the young colony of Natal, he commended the problem. So in 1860 we plunge into the day of small things. With one fellow-Cambridge man, the Rev. H. Scudamore, a member of the Durham University, a lay superintendent, and some mechanics, Charles Frederick Mackenzie sailed for Africa in October 1860, hoping to meet Livingstone, who had previously returned to the rivers at the head of the Zambesi Expedition.' It was now Livingstone's desire to see the Mission settled in healthy quarters, and to give it a fair start by personally making the new-comers acquainted with the natives, who had already received him well. The Expedition' and the Mission' met at the Kongoné mouth of the Zambesi in May 1861, for the ascent of the rivers. Unluckily the Pioneer' steamer, which the Admiralty had sent, out was ill-fitted for the shallow waters she had to navigate. The next three months were spent in fighting all the difficulties of sandbanks, snags, and rocks. However, all reached the upper waters of the Shiré in due time, and anchored where the navigation is interrupted by rapids, in August 1861, at Chibisa's village. Within twenty-four hours of their first start towards some table land which their leader knew of and believed to to be healthy and fertile, they were confronted by a difficulty which was as unwelcome as it was unlooked for. Livingstone had left the country in peace and prosperity but a short time previously. African travellers have, through a succession of years, enlarged upon the horrors of the slave-trade, but they have kept their descriptions within bounds: they bury much of what they have witnessed too deep down to be exhumed for the gratification of sensational literature. We know that Gordon held fast to this resolve; his notes from the Soudan were carefully penned, and perhaps poor humanity has to thank him for it! But if ignorance is bliss to the stay-at-home, the revelation is all the more horrible to the new-comer as he meets his first slave-gang. We repeat that Livingstone had left this district in peace, but he now found to his chagrin that fire and musket were rampant. Partly to exchange them for ivory, thousands of captives were being taken by Portuguese agents from the town of Tette, to the Banyai and other tribes in the very centre of the continent. The Portuguese Governor was more deeply implicated in this traffic than any one else. Almost at the same moment that our travellers arrived at M'bami's village, a gang of eighty-four captives was marched in. Emaciated, wounded by the sticks of their drivers, burnt by the falling wood of their flaming villages, and torn about by the rapid march through forest tangle, it was impossible to look on unconcerned.* This was a 'no man's land' in particular, and quite outside and behind Portuguese territory. In a few moments they were set free; and when once the slaves had been assured, a very difficult task, that the white men were not going to eat them, a bonfire was made of their thongs, bonds, and slave-sticks. By the embers of this fire the two leaders took counsel together. But the released slaves settled the question. 'You are free to go to your homes,' they were told their reply was that they had none, for they were destroyed when they themselves were taken prisoners. So after their tale was heard and carefully considered, it was agreed to lead them to a place of safety, in order to begin life afresh under the white man's auspices. Every few miles confirmed the history. Slavers were surprised here and there: their diabolical cruelty fairly exasperated Livingstone; and his anger was contagious enough. It was no good dealing with these men in twos and threes; every one reported head-quarters to be under Mount Zomba, and the country must be rid of them. Livingstone has been rather * For further information on the slave-trade in Central Africa, see Drummond's Tropical Africa,' chap. iv. reticent reticent on what ensued. A 'special reporter' would have told a story of slave-dealers being put into their own yokes and marched about the country, and of a hard-fought tussle as a wind up, which led to the complete discomfiture of a horde of some 800 men. Such doings very naturally astounded folks at home, and also very naturally divided public opinion. On the one hand, Bishop Mackenzie was condemned in strong terms. Other men, who could safely testify that he was in every way the very personification of all that was kind, tender-hearted, and gentle, felt that there must have been a good cause indeed before he took up arms to side with it. never The Mission had been launched against the slave-trade, but those who fitted it out with the sinews of war hardly knew what was implied in the work. It was reckoning without one's host when an Englishman was brought into a scene like this, where the war cry, and the wail and sob of widow and child, sounded in the ear day and night. It certainly was Livingstone's intention to lead the Mission into this state of things, but being face to face with it, what was to be done? They passed five burning villages one morning. They saw women and children swept off in scores. Chiefs and people besieged their resting-places for help. The question was, could the missionaries stand between two tribes and save the Manganja people, amongst whom circumstances had brought them, and who gave them a welcome, though of course an interested one. 'If you stop here,' said Livingstone, as he quitted Magomero to attend to his explorations on Lake Nyassa, 'you will save the tribe; if you fall back, they will be annihilated.' And so months passed on at Magomero. The stress upon all was terrible. Beyond being a defensible position, it had nothing to recommend it. At times the advance of the Ajawas was repelled; for the offensive is inseparable from a plan of defence. The liberated people could not grow a crop till the rains came; the neighbouring villages were drawn upon to feed some three hundred mouths, and it would not do to allow these to be burned. Fever and dysentery were never absent. Those who were down had to ask the others to take double watches at night. Mackenzie was in the worst possible condition for undertaking a long journey in the drenching storms of the 'rainy season,' and he was a doomed man when he set out from Magomero in January 1862, for the river Shiré, just as, years after, Livingstone struggled into the swamps of Bangweolo to die. He reached the Ruo, a tributary of the Shiré, with the Rev. H. de W. Burrup, to wait an indefinite |