you would refuse to lead it any longer. Stop and think! Ay, but 'tis difficult thinking today. It will be all over and done with so long -by the time you read this-that the Triple Alliance may be in three pieces; but for the moment the complications of European politics alternately startle and depress my day with furious cannonades of honour from an Italian gunboat and brazen dronings of national anthems from a German band. For the young man whom Tolstoi has described as the most comic figure in Europe, coming to meet Umberto I. in Venice, inconsiderately stationed his yacht just outside my window; and though he is gone at last, Gott sei gedankt, the echoes of him still linger in irrelevant cannon-shots that send the pigeons scurrying in mad swoops, while, as if removed from the oppression of his presence, the band of the Hohenzollern plays London music-hall tunes all day long, commencing, significantly enough, with "Oh,

Mr. Porter, what a funny man you are!" I never realised how international is our music-hall till I heard Italians staggering home at midnight, singing "Two lovely black eyes" in choice Venetian. A beautiful yacht this Hohenzollern, as large as an Atlantic liner: I suppose an Imperial yacht is like an Imperial pint. 'Twas a great moment when it sailed in round a bend, slow and serene-a glorious white vessel, radiant with flags, stately and majestic in its movement as a sonnet of Milton, and about it a black swarm of gondolas, those of the noble families equipped with half a dozen gondoliers in green, yellow or blue liveries, and at the stern of each boat a trail of silk. And the dense crowds huzzahed, and the band played "God Save the Queen," only in German, so that it meant,

Heil dir im Siegeskranz.

And after that came the Italian national air, which isn't an anthem but a quick march, and so lacks dignity. The Wacht am Rhein made a half-hearted effort to be present, but in the night we had the Emperor's own Sang an Aegir, stuck in the middle of a Wagner programme. Beyond this, compliment could scarcely go. This brazen air was the one jar on the poetry of a spectacle possible only in Venice. Imagine it! Wagner played on a floating fairy-pagoda, built as of gold flame,

and shot with green and red, on the broad bosom of St. Mark's basin, in the divine night, the stars seen hanging diversely in free space, not stuck like gold-headed nails in a dark ceiling; and in the mystery of the darkness, the domes and spires and palaces of Venice, and the dim creeping boats, and the quivering reflections of the illuminated Imperial vessel, and across the narrow track of luminous water made by the Pagodathat glittered with a fantastic splendour as

of Aladdin and Arabian nights-sudden gondolas gliding from darkness to darkness, the beautiful curve of the prow sharply revealed, the gondolier growing semi-transparent and quivering with light, a strange half-demoniac figure bestriding his black bark. And, mingled with the music, the hum of multitudes and the tramp of feet and the silence of the vast night. All as Nietzsche's poem on Venice hath itGondeln, Lichter, Musik. Yes, they play politics prettily on the Grand Canal. Does it matter much what is the game? Cannons and colour, bands and decorations, bread and circuses, emperors uncovering to us, beautiful queens waving dainty handkerchiefs - this is what lies behind the dry Treaties of the history books. A few short weeks back we had been very angry with our King, and had talked of Republics and what not. But the dead men in Abyssinia are dead, and we are alive, and the Bengal fire on the palaces is really very picturesque. If we would only stop and think-just for one moment! But there's the rub. It's no use stopping and thinking, unless everybody else. will stop and think at the same time. For you cannot refuse to lead a life that everybody is leading, unless you are willing to be crushed by the revolutions of the social machinery. Socialists, for instance, are often twitted with not "behaving as sich." But socialists say that socialism should be the law of the land, they do not say that it is practicable for an odd man here and there to be a socialist in a world of individualists. Tolstoi, to be of effect, would have to move all mankind at once to renounce its ways, to abjure the lust of the eye and the pride of life. And he would have to keep on moving it, or back it would roll. Mazzini and the unification of Italy-what words to conjure with But Mazzini is dead, and how much of Italy is alive! 'Tis more like a great show-place, supported by its visitors, than a real live country. Stop and think! 'Tis perhaps better not to think, for fear we should stop. William II., at any rate-he is not likely to stop and think. This young man-from all I have observed since he became my neighbour-lives a highly coloured dramatic existence, in which there are sixty minutes to every hour and sixty seconds to every minute, the sort of life that should have pleased Walter Pater. He must be a disciple of Nietzsche, a lover of the

strong and the splendid, this German gentleman who is just off to Vienna to prance at the head of fifteen hundred horsemen. While he lived opposite me, it was all excursions and alarums. As a neighbour an emperor is distinctly noisy. The local comic paper suggested that, as a universal genius, Guglielmo II. would at once set about rowing a two-oared sandolo. But this difficult feat Guglielmo did not essay, being convoyed more comfortably in a long-boat by a brawny crew. Curious, by the way, that transformation of William !

CUGLIELMO SHAKESPEARE

They announce plays here by
G. Shakespeare, the divine
Guglielmo.

'Tis all very well for Guglielmo, the gondola of Avon, to invite us to sit on the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings, and in a city of departed Doges and lost glories 'tis casy to moralise over earthly greatness; but kings are not always dead, and I daresay as William II. in his cocked hat gazed from the quarter-deck of the Hohenzollern at the marvellous but untenanted Palace of the ancient Bridegrooms of the Sea, he felt that a living lion is better than a dead Doge. And yet 'tis a strange life, a king's. What an unreal universe of flags and cannons and phrases must monarchs inhabit! Do they think that the streets are always gay with streamers and bunting and triumphal arches, always thundrous with throats of men or guns, always impassable? Do they imagine their subjects. pass all their lives in packed black masses, waving hats? Poor kings! I always class them with novelists for ignorance of real life. And to think that they can only get to know life from novels! If they would only stop and think! But even when they do stop, they never seem to think. There is Don Carlos, now, whom I miss in my afternoon stroll. The poor mock king had to leave Venice because his brother-sovereigns would not have called upon him. For Don Carlos still keeps up the form and style of a crowned head, and remains the last of the Bourbons, a picturesque ruin, reproach to a blasphemous generation, heedless. of the divine right of kings. And the 'divinity that doth hedge a king" can be kept up nowhere so cheaply as in Venice

Venice is the dress-coat of cities, making all men equal. Well might Wordsworth dub her "the eldest child of liberty"! For in the streets of Venice you cannot drive or ride walk you must. No gleaming broughams, no spanking steeds: nothing-be you monarch or mendicantbut your two legs. 'Tis strange, in a land of no horses, to find Venetians styled 'Cavalier' for title of honour. They should surely be called 'Gondoliers.' For the gondola is your only chance of display. Rich Americans may flaunt it with four gondoliers, and print Palazzo on their visiting-cards. But doctors and lawyers live in Palaces, and even a moderate purse can keep a horseless carriage. And your St. Mark's Square, which is the largest drawing-room. in the world, is also the most democratic. Ladies of quality jostle shawled street-walkers, a German sailor galls the kibe of a beautiful Browning duchess, officers with showy epaulettes glitter among respectable shop

keepers; helmeted cuirassiers, Austrian admirals, policemen with coloured tufts like lamp-cleaners, German baronesses, bouncing bonnes with babies, garlic-scented workingmen, American schoolgirls, and kings in exile, are mixed pell-mell, all in perfect freedom and equality, and, though in the shadow of St. Mark's Church, quite Christian. And an Italian crowd is also Christian in its freedom from crush. It does not turn a fête into a fight and a concourse into a competition. Thus, as the Prince Consort was amused to find we English said of our pleasure-parties, all " passes off well.” Except when there is rain. And the heavens threw unmistakable cold water on the Triple Alliance. The day of the Emperor's stay was the one wet day Venice had known for months-so dank and chill, with so sooty a sky, that my friend the artist, who had just been reading in the London paper that his work had not caught the glamour and the colour of Venice, that the South had not yet revealed its passionate secrets to him, chuckled grimly. What is all this nonsense about an Italian hothouse? At Florence I was afraid of being snow-bound in the sunny South. For, long and heavily,

474

though the London meteorologists registered sunshine,

"Cadeva del cielo la neve

Con tutta la sua quiete."
(Down from heaven fell the snow
With all its quietness.)

This perfect description of snowfall-which
I found rudely chalked on the wall of
a Venetian alley-could never have been
conceived in the Italy of popular imagination.
The superstition about Italian sunshine is
like that about Italian beauty. If the
country about Florence is the loveliest in
Europe, surely the plain of Lombardy around
Padua is the ugliest-a land of symmetrical
tree-stumps and stony villas flaunting them-
selves on the roadway in pompous publicity.
In Venice the Emperor seemed specially to
irritate the elements. The illuminations
were extinguished by a terrific torrent that
sent the people pattering away into the
black starless night, gleaming with rain and
fire; and to-night, when the imperial band
attempted to play Sang an Aegir again, the
heavens fell, and audience and orchestra
vanished in the twinkling of a gas-lamp,
while the pavement of the piazza glittered
golden as the façade of St. Mark's with
dancing reflections, and the lights burnt
blue in the wind. Yes, though the papers
next day said the Emperor's Song was
applauded enthusiastically, Jupiter Pluvius
at least never plays the courtier, and Boreas
must be a rude reminder to monarchs of

their essential humanity. Come, let us sit on the ground and tell sad stories of the colds of kings. In the daylight I chanced upon a rough wooden platform, bordered with plush and surrounded by tawdry terraces of coloured glass cups. This was the fairy, Aladdin-like Pagoda. And such, methinks, are kings, on closer acquaintance. How majestic seemed William II. and Humbert, the Kaiserin and Queen Margherita, when, massed in our thousands on the piazza, we clamoured for a glimpse of

'Tis comic this,

And comic that,

And clown on royal pay,

But 'tis Long live unser Kaiser!
When the band begins to play.

And humanity has need of leaders, heroes -'tis a primal instinct. The Jews had Jehovah Himself for sovereign, but nothing would content them but a real man king, who should rule them and judge them and go out before them in war. Kings were leaders once, but in modern days they are only symbols, just as flags are the whole force of the nation is behind them, and they stand for home and country. This it is that gives them majesty and divinity. 'Tis a case of transformation of function, an old institution adapted to new uses, and valuable partly as giving colour to life, partly for preventing the evils which Gibbon so pregnantly showed to be inseparable from any system of primacy not based on an immutable heredity. The trouble is when the flag wishes to order the march.

We

An unbroken tradition has kept up the old phrases of loyalty, and so what wonder if a king sometimes takes them seriously! Le roi le veult not unnaturally leads sometimes to a king willing. And also we are not quite conscious of the transformation; it has come about so gradually that no one knows when kings ceased to be leaders and when they became Flags, and so with the new feeling blend confusedly strands of the old. English have abolished the sovereign, but we are too loyal to say so. In Germany the sovereign has refused to be a symbol, and in a country over-civilised in thought and under-civilised in action he has had a pretty good innings. I must confess I do not find this attitude of his merely ridiculous. forces clearly upon the modern world the question of kingship, whether it is to be a sham or a reality. Unpopular as William II.

It