Government and disturb the peace of the colony, he says that that regiment had been very efficient.

Colonel McRea, who was quartered in St. John's in 1865, is a better authority, and a book which he published, entitled "Lost Amid the Fogs," is very interesting. According to him, many of the men of the Newfoundland Companies were very indifferent characters, and they were nearly all married, and had their families in the town. Incorrigible offenders from the forces in Canada were drafted to the Newfoundland Regiment.

In 1860, some six years after complete Responsible Government had been accorded to Newfoundland, very unhappy political difficulties arose, due chiefly to the bitter feeling existing between conflicting religious parties, and to the lack of rectitude and ability on the part of the popular representatives. In the House of Assembly the Attorney-General grossly insulted the Governor, Sir Alexander Bannerman, and the Government was dismissed. The consequent elections were contested with a violence and license which might be expected in a community divided in race and religion, and of a people of very little education and entirely unaccustomed to the franchise. At the meeting of the House of Assembly a furious riot took place. The populace, enraged and excited, attempted to force an entry to the House, but being resisted at the point of the bayonet, they rushed down to Water Street, where they broke into the shops, and looted the stores, and made free use of the public-houses. The Royal Newfoundland Companies were ordered out, and Colonel Grant, with the greatest moderation, endeavoured to disperse the mob. He was an officer of ability and experience, having served through the Crimean Campaign, and was present at Balaklava, Inkerman, and the siege and fall of Sebastopol, receiving the brevet rank of major in 1854.

For hours he and his men, unable without recourse to firearms to make any way against the overwhelming numbers, endured insult and rough treatment, being pelted with stones. At length someone in the crowd fired on the soldiers. Then the order to fire was given, and several of the insurgents were killed. Almost simultaneously the bells of the Roman Catholic Cathedral rang out, calling the angry Irishmen to the presence of their bishop; they obeyed-probably the discharge of musketry did not make them less ready to respond to the episcopal summons-and the streets were quickly cleared.

This was the first time the Royal Newfoundland Companies ever fired a shot, and the last-the last because the event discovered a

most unsatisfactory state of discipline. It was found that when the order to load was given many of the men had dropped their cartridges on the ground. Whether or not they sympathised with the rioters, at all events they were unwilling to fire on their friends, many of whom were doubtless their relatives, for, as has been said, most of them, even those who were not natives, were connected by marriage with the townspeople. The regiment was relieved by another from Canada, and the inquiry which took place led to the disbanding of the Royal Newfoundland Companies. After 1862 they disappear from the Army List.

The Newfoundlanders are physically a very fine race, and having for generations occupied their business in great waters they are second to none as seamen. There can also be little doubt that they would make good soldiers, but the experience of the Newfoundland Regiments goes to show what indeed hardly needs emphasising, that it is not good to keep a regiment continually in the place where it is raised, for the intimate relations which naturally exist with the people of the place are apt to interfere with the proper discharge of their duty in case of civil commotion.

A few years later the troops were withdrawn from nearly all of the self-governing colonies, and for the last quarter of a century Newfoundland has been without any armed force with the exception of the constabulary, which, though a very efficient body of men, is not 150 strong, and is distributed all over the island, the force in St. John's numbering only about forty men.

There is not a single gun in St. John's, though the entrance to the harbour might easily at no great cost be made as impregnable as the Rock of Gibraltar.

It is only necessary to glance at the map of North America to see the immense importance of Newfoundland. Whoever holds St. John's in time of war commands the trade of Canada, and it should be remembered that all our cables land there, so that should the island be seized by a foreign power we should lose telegraphic communication with North America. The two last Governors, Sir Henry Blake and Colonel Sir Terence O'Brien, endeavoured to raise a volunteer force, but unsuccessfully, and the latter wished to have St. John's fortified. The Imperial Government offered to supply guns and to send half a battery of the Royal Artillery if the colony would pay the men, but the Colonial Government refused.

The theory of the Home Government seems to be that those colonies which enjoy responsible government should provide for their own defence. This seems to be perfectly reasonable, but it

does not follow that because the expense is to be borne by a Colonial Government that it should be permitted to leave undefended that portion of the Empire over which it rules, more particularly if, as in the case of Newfoundland, the safety of another and greater colony greatly depends upon its secure possession.

It is possible to suppose that the long peace which England has enjoyed may some day be broken, and it is also possible that in the event of a conflict with a great European power or powers, the Navy might not be sufficient to defend the whole of our vast and scattered Empire, so that the maintenance of land forces and the erection of fortifications in the colonies would not seem to be an unnecessary precaution.

Whatever confidence may be felt in the volunteer forces of the Australasian colonies, in Newfoundland there is no such force on which to rely, and the history of the local regiments would not lead us to expect great things, should the Newfoundlanders in a spirit of patriotism, of which there is at present no manifestation, raise a volunteer corps.

Were Newfoundland a desolate rock incapable of supporting human life, void of the vast mineral wealth which it is said to contain, and shorn of its exhaustless fisheries, its geographical position would yet make it worth the expenditure necessary to insure its continued possession to the British Crown.

J. F. MORRIS FAWCETT,

453

AN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY SAGA.

IF

F ever there was an opportune time for magnifying the reputation of Tobias Smollett, it is surely the present. His merits, until now, have been steadily depreciated on the score of an overwhelming coarseness, but a generation which glorifies the author of "Jude the Obscure" ought not to find "Peregrine Pickle" too rank for its taste. Though Smollett's heroes have the disadvantage in point of language and bearing, in their sentiments and character they are no such ruffians as some recent popular heroes. The day of triumphant realism, perhaps, begins already to wane, and it is only fair that, before it is too late, Smollett should have some share in its brilliance. By virtue alike of energy and knowledge, he is a very king among the realists. He has, of course, none of the scientific instinct which marks the best novelists of to-day. His is the pure zest of story-telling, and he makes up in breadth of sympathy and experience what he lacks in precision. To him all kinds of human nature were familiar, not as specimens to be classified, phenomena to be explained, but with the homely and less curious familiarity of frequent contact. He knew the Marshalsea and the Fleet, Wapping and St. Giles', the gaming-houses of Covent Garden, and the bagnios of Long Acre, with a knowledge that only a turnkey, a seaman, a cully, or a pimp, each in his own sphere, could better. But his experience was not bounded by these unsavoury purlieus. His was a bold and adventurous spirit, and of adventure, one would think, he must have taken his fill. In the cock-pit of a man-of-war, under the walls of Carthagena, in English wayside inns frequented of highwaymen, in Jamaica, in the Highlands, among the banditti on the bleak hills of Piedmont, Smollett must have seen and done and suffered strange things indeed, when it was as easy to come by an adventure in any English lane as nowadays in the thick of an Indian jungle.

"Roderick Random," Smollett's first and freshest novel, may be equally well described as a piece of realism or a latter-day Saga. "What is a Saga?" asks Mr. Andrew Lang, and his answer is that

"it is neither quite a piece of history, nor wholly a romance."

It has to offer "true pictures of life and character, which are always the same at bottom, and true pictures of manners, which are always changing.... Tales of enterprise, of fighting by land and sea, fighting with men and beasts, with storms, and ghosts, and fiends." Smollett is the contemporary of Voltaire and Hume, and his ghosts and fiends are not likely to be very terrible or very real; but the fighting, and the storms, and the hair-breadth escapes are all genuinely moving. His picture of manners-the manners of an England which seems not much less strange to us than Julius Cæsar's Britain might have been-is not merely accurate and detailed, but so forcibly true that those who have once looked on it can never wholly shake off the impression. He has chosen to present us with an aspect that must always have its significance, even in the most enervate and ease-loving times. Smollett did not always pick his matter out of the kennel. "Roderick Random" is as certainly the most complete embodiment of the spirit of enterprise of the eighteenth century as the whole of Smollett's novels are the best documents for the study of the century's social life.

It is to Ben Jonson's "Bartholomew Fair," to Chapman and Marston's "Eastward Ho," to plays such as these rather than to Shakespeare, that one must go for mere "local colour." In the same way Smollett paints characters more narrowly differentiated by time and place and circumstance, than Fielding's. Fielding has sacrificed the slight perishable idiosyncrasies to bring into greater prominence the eternal fundamentals of human nature. "Roderick Random " has suffered in general estimation from having been followed so immediately by "Tom Jones." Smollett, it has long been a truism to say, was outdone both in art and wholesomeness. But that is no reason why we should take from him even that which he has. The construction of "Roderick Random" is obviously loose, to an extreme degree; by the side of "Tom Jones" the book seems to have no construction at all. There may be some compensation for this in the opportunity which Smollett gains of introducing so many more people and incidents into his book. In the pages of "Roderick Random" we are jostled by all kinds of queer folk. We might be picking our way through the surging streets of Old London, or footing it on a marketday along the most crowded of the ancient coaching-roads.

If it has been truly said of "Tom Jones" that "the winds of heaven blow along the pages," it is also true of no small part of the "Adventures of Roderick Random " that they are freshened by the sea-breezes. This is an inestimable service our author has done his