Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 9.djvu/71

H& DC. JULY ia,io2i.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 53 from Disraeli an Englishman with a mastery of the English language.

Now hear Mr. Buckle in the 6th vol., p. 560, of his 'Life of Disraeli.' After showing how Disraeli was sometimes guilty of literary kidnapping and had borrowed the above witticism and put it into the mouth of Waldershare, in his novel 'Endymion,' he adds in a footnote:—"Lord Fitzmaurice, in his Life of Lord Granville,' points out that this passage is a reproduction of Speaker Onslow's reply to Burnet's character of Shaftesbury in his; 'History of His Own Time,' vol. i.,p. 164."

Who is right? It is a pity that so fine a child should bear the brand of bastardy.

—I remember reading, more than 60 years ago, some verses which described how a woman applied to a savant to tell her how to restore peace in her house. He gave her a bottle of medicine with a direction that she was to hold a small dose in her mouth whenever she met her husband. She was thus unable to scold in answer to his complaints; and he then ceased complaining, and peace was restored. Can anyone tell me where these verses can be found?

, that evolved a brilliant civilization when England and much of the Continent were in disorder, sank into a condition of barbarism that had lasted for one hundred and fifty years when Henry II. invaded the island. The Tatar obliterated the civilization of Kiev, which at one time threatened to outrival that of Byzantium. The modern Annamite has made no attempt to continue or reproduce the magnificent civilization that seems to have existed centuries ago in Cambodia, and the Indian of Latin America has never risen to the heights of his ancestors who made Mexico and Peru what they were before the Spanish conquest. In Hayti, since the elimination of the whites who controlled and Christianized the slave population, the superstitions of Africa have reappeared. The serpent is worshipped, as it once was on the coast of Guinea; sorcerers are held in honour; children have been sacrificed, and people who are supposed to be invested with supernatural powers utter mysterious incantations to put themselves into communication with the invisible world.

A large tract of South-Western Africa was Christianized by the Portuguese, but when Portuguese influence declined, the natives reverted to their former beliefs and practices. In Asia Minor the barren Turk supplanted the supple Greek with his glorious past, pagan and Christian. The Greek, perhaps, was sometimes absorbed rather than destroyed, and there are many curious instances of Christian communities that embraced the Moslem creed. In our own days a number of Jews of a low type have annihilated the civilization of the Tsars and have substituted chaos in its place. But of course much depends, in a matter of this kind, on the exact meanings that we attach to the word "civilization" and its opposite, and if a contempt for simplicity, proportion, tradition, harmony, combined with a strong preference for discordant noises, senseless speed and monstrous machines is a characteristic of barbarism, then I think that we shall be constrained to admit that more than one of the so-called leading nations of the world to-day ought perhaps to be classed with those that were once civilized and are now reverting to a savage state.

Sir Henry M. Stanley relates such an incident in his voyage up the Congo in his expedition for the relief of Emin Pasha ('In Darkest Africa,' London, 1890, i. 106-8). A Basoko named Baruti ("Gunpowder") had been captured on the Aruwimi river when a child, in 1883, and had been taken to England by Sir Francis de Winton. He afterwards entered into Stanley's service and accompanied the Emin relief expedition in 1887. When they reached his native village and tribe, "from which he had been absent six (sic) years," he was welcomed by his brother, and Stanley offered him the choice of rejoining his tribe or continuing with the expedition. The lad at first declined to be restored to his native land and tribe; but (writes Stanley) a day or two after reaching Yambuya he altered his mind, came into my tent in the dead of night, armed himself with my Winchester rifle and a brace of Smith and Wesson revolvers, a supply of rifle and revolver cartridges, took possession of a silver road-watch, a silver pedometer, a handsome belt with fitted pouches, a small sum of