day studying in chambers or in court, where I had some devilling practice, carried on my usual correspondence and attended to the affairs of a man with a young family and a certain landed estate." It almost gives one a headache to read of it. Yet I do not know that it affected Haggard unduly. To his quick fancy" the ideas came very readily and he had a naturally fluent, easy style. He could command success now on whatever stage he pleased to make his romantic figures move. The mystery of Egypt had always attracted him: indeed, any mystery held his thought much more strongly than the obvious. "I seem to myself," he writes, " to understand the Norse folk of anywhere about 800 A.D., the Egyptians from Menes down to the Ptolemaic period, much better than I understand the people of the age in which I live. They are more familiar to me. They interest me much more.” So to Egypt he went and wrote his "Cleopatra." To Iceland he went, not long after, and wrote his "Eric Bright-Eyes." To Mexico he went then and wrote "Montezuma's Daughter." He paid another visit to South Africa, but he had scarcely any fresh crop to glean there. Those other strange lands he visited with the definite purpose of staging a drama there: and he succeeded greatly in each and all. Romance followed romance, and all were good, if not all equally good. And then it seems that he suddenly wearied of it. He writes plaintively of a fate which seems to condemn him to write romance to the end of his life's last chapter. This man who only a month or two before could note that he understood the Scandinavians of 800 A.D., and the Egyptians from Menes to Ptolemy, far better than his neighbour of the next street in London, or the next property in Norfolk, settled down in the country and began to study his native turnips. It is true that fate had dealt hardly with him in the midst of all his literary glory. While he was on his visit to Mexico he had the bitter pain to learn by cable of the death of his only son, that eldest child who had been born to them at Newcastle in Natal, in the midst of troubles and the threat of deadly danger. Haggard felt the loss very deeply. Nevertheless it does not seem that it had anything to do with that change of mood which led him from the wildest places of the earth to the peace of agriculture. I would not under-rate the value of the work which Haggard did for agriculture. Rather, I would rate it at his own value, as we find that value indicated in this most interesting and instructive autobiography. He saw it in its right perspective; and that is not an easy breadth of vision for a man writing at a moment when one detail of the picture is particularly occupying his thought. Haggard, rather apologetically, tells us in an early page that it is impossible for any man to be wholly self-revealing to the public eye. He excepts Pepys from the rule as proving it, because Pepys so obviously intended his revelations to be secret. Rousseau, we may note, by the bye, can hardly be thought to have left much still to be confessed. Be that as it may, Haggard, though very delicately respecting the essential reticences, shows us sufficiently the man of whom he writes. We can reconstruct him-sensitive, dreamy, brilliantly imaginative, simple, honest, a good father and husband, a good neighbour, a useful country gentleman, working hard at what we call the "practical,” and on the whole not making a more than ordinary success of it. And what is "practical?" Is it not of practical service to write these vivid stories to cheer gay hearts, and to solace sad hearts, by taking them to a world far removed from their sadnesses? This is surely practical and good practice! If Haggard had lived only to inspire Rudyard Kipling to write his " Jungle Books" it would not have been a vain life. For this he incidentally did. Kipling writes to him: "It was a chance sentence of yours in 'Nada the Lily' that ended in my writing a lot of wolf stories. You remember in your tale where the wolves leaped up at the feet of a dead man sitting on a rock? Somewhere on that page I got the notion.” It is not until we have gone with Haggard more than a hundred pages through his second volume that we quit romance and take up county affairs, standing for parliament (" mercifully the thing miscarried" he writes of his failure to win the seat) and studying rural business. And the whole of it, inclusive of the account of his father, who died about this time, fills scarcely more than a hundred pages. Haggard's own account of his change of interest from things fanciful to things tangible is as follows : The desire haunted me to do something in my day more practical than the mere invention of romance upon romance. By degrees it came home to me that a great subject lay to my hand, that of the state of VOL. 244. NO. 498. W English agriculture and of our rural population.... Therefore with a bold heart I gave all my spare time and energy to a study of the matter. The first result was the publication of his " A Farmer's Year" -a record of the circumstances and lives of those who were struggling in the difficult conditions of agriculture in 1898. Whether we shall concede to him that this book, excellent in its kind, really was more "practical" and of more service to man, than his romances, is a question of which the answer must depend on what " practical " means to us. After the "Farmer's Year" the spirit moved him to go in the steps (or in the steps of the horse) of Arthur Young, making a peregrination through some twenty-six counties and drawing up a report destined in part for the information of the Board of Agriculture. It was ably done, but the difference between the rural rides of Haggard, and those of Young and Cobbett, is that the latter were made through an England relatively very little known. It was impossible, now that knowledge of the country was so much more general, that Haggard should have nearly so much of novelty to say as had Young and Cobbett. In these years, for all his devotion to the "practical," the romantic re-asserted, now and then, its ancient attraction. In 1904 he wrote "The Way of the Spirit," a book of the English in Egypt with a strong current through it of that psychical influence which had always occupied a large place in his mind. He gives us in his autobiography a whole chapter headed "psychical" and treating of experiences in what appear like manifestations which none of the causes that we call natural can account for. In 1905 his home-life was broken by an invitation to go to America to report on the Salvation Army Labour Colonies in the United States. The mission was on behalf of our own Colonial Office, which desired to know how these Salvation Army settlements were faring. When Haggard returned and had submitted his report to Mr. Alfred Lyttelton, then Colonial Secretary, and asked Lyttelton whether he was satisfied, the reply was: "Satisfied? I think it splendid," adding, "I wish the Prime Minister could take it up. But Arthur won't read it—you know Arthur won't read it." Nothing came of the report or its suggestions. Haggard (the italics in the above extract are his, not mine) was rather sore about its reception. "I confess," he says, "I did wish Mr. Lyttelton could have spared me an hour or two to talk over its leading points with him, as for instance President Roosevelt found himself able to do." The following year Haggard was put on a Royal Commission to enquire into the causes and remedies of coast erosion; and again, as a result of the enquiry, a scheme was suggested, but no action taken. With that, and the chairmanship of the Unemployed Labour and Reclamation Committee, his time must have been well filled. For these and the like services he was made knight. There is little more that he has to tell us for spoken' as the Zulus say." now' I have So (he winds up his clew) ends the chronicle of Henry Rider Haggard a lover of the kindly race of men, a lover of children, a lover of his friends (and no hater of his enemies), a lover of flowers, a lover of the land and of all creatures that dwell thereon; but, most of all, perhaps, a lover of his country, which, with heart and soul and strength, he has tried to serve to the best of his small powers and opportunities... One boon, from infancy to age, has been showered upon me in a strange abundance, pressed down and running over-the uncountable, peculiar treasure of every degree and form of human love, which love alone, present or departed, has made my life worth living. The chronicle of Henry Rider Haggard! It is not as deep as a Rousseau nor as wide as a Samuel Pepys, but it will serve— serve to reveal to us a human being of singularly lovable qualities, especially lovable because of his own possession of a very loving heart, and of qualities of mind and imagination for which the whole English reading world owes gratitude. To the general reader the book is to be commended as the work of one who was past-master of that seeming simple, yet so difficult, art—the telling of a tale so that it shall grip the auditor's ear. There is an interest on every page. It has illustrations of Haggard himself at different ages, of his father and of his mother, of his friend Umslopogaas the Zulu, of some of the houses which were his homes at one time or other, and so forth. The whole is contained in two volumes of large clear print, wide margins and a good paper. Both as literary editor and as publisher, Mr. Longman has done his utmost in this labour of love for his lost friend. HORACE G. HUTCHINSON THE TEMPLE The History of the Temple, London, from the Institution of the Order of John Murray, 1926 OST Londoners and other Englishmen, if asked to state MOST what they knew about the Temple, would probably reply that it was a round church, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Temple Bar, where a man might on a Sunday hear good music, with judges and lawyers in the congregation; and that there were not very many round churches in England. Of the fascinating history enshrined in its stones, connoted by the shape of that building, and intimately bound up with the painful growth of our realm and constitution, during a space of 700 years, most of us have been content to be disgracefully ignorant. In our own defence, it can at least be pleaded that until Mr. Bruce Williamson produced his admirable and erudite volume, which is as readable as it is trustworthy, the English public had few such able books from which they could inform themselves on this particular subject. No longer can this excuse stand if, as may be hoped, every reputable library of our folk, here and beyond the seas, will be furnished with a copy of "The Temple, London." 66 The Bible of the Hebrews might not inaptly have been entitled The Temple, Jerusalem." And there is a sense in which the history of the doings connected with the Temple on the Thames is as much the pith and core of English Imperialism as the building of Solomon's temple and of its successors was-until the Emperor Titus defiled it-the inspiration of Judaism. In its earliest foundation on our island in 1118, and for 300 succeeding years, the Temple was a noble monument of Christian chivalry, when, throughout civilized Europe, men materialised the unseen, and revelled in enterprises which to later ages are an enigma and marvel. The Knights Templars were a product of the Crusades; of that bewitched stirring of the European spirit which, passing like a flame, time and again, across Christendom, urged our ancestors, by the hundred thousand, with |