to the Beauty Room (now a bedroom) that a late Chancellor of Ireland, his thoughts reverting to the natural enemies of his youth, exclaimed: What a capital place if a man was pursued by bailiffs!' Walpole was constantly haunted by the fear that his creations and collections would not be respected by his successors, whatever indulgent friends might think or say of them : 'I wish' (he writes to Montague in 1755) 'you would visit it (Strawberry Hill) when it is in its beauty, and while it is mine. You will not, I flatter myself like it so well when it belongs to the Intendant of Twickenham, when a cockle shell walk is made across the lawn, and everything without doors is made regular, and everything within modern and riant; for this must be its fate. May, 1772. 'In short this old, old, very old castle, as his prints called Old Parr, is so near being perfect, that it will certainly be ready by the time I die to be improved with Indian paper, or to have the windows let down to the ground by some travelled lady.' May 4, 1774. (To Cole.) 'Consider, Strawberry is almost the last monastery left, at least, in England. Poor Mr. Bateman's is despoiled. Lord Bateman has stripped and plundered it, has advertised the site, and is dirtily selling by auction what he neither would keep nor sell for a sum that is worth while. Surely it is very indecent for a favourite relation, who is rich, to show so little remembrance and affection. I suppose Strawberry will share the same fate. It has already happened to two of my friends.' His melancholy forebodings have been partly realised :— 'Jove heard and granted half the suppliants' prayer, His collection has been dispersed through both hemispheres. But the fixed (we can hardly say, solid) fabric of his creation, his monastic castle or castellated monastery, the historic Strawberry Hill, has risen with renovated splendour from its temporary prostration; and thanks to the taste, spirit, munificence, and cordial graceful abounding hospitality of an accomplished highly-gifted woman-has regained and surpassed all the interest, attraction, and celebrity which it possessed in his lifetime, and which he sorrowfully foretold would die with him. ART. ART. II.-Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo, with a Sketch of their Habits, Religion, Language, and other Peculiarities. By Dr. Henry Rink, Director of the Royal Greenland Board of Trade. Translated from the Danish by the Author, and Edited by Dr. Robert Brown; with numerous illustrations, drawn and engraved by Eskimo. London, 1875. AS Well, S is well known, this is a sceptical, fault-finding age, and so our readers must not be surprised if they find old forms and names overthrown in the very heading of our article. Our grandfathers talked of the Esquimaux' and were content; just as our grandmothers when they sucked eggs extracted the yolk by an old and time-honoured process. So far as regards these venerable women, a new generation has sprung up which will not allow them to pursue such a hand-to-mouth means of alimentation, but insists on a more scientific treatment of barn-door deposits. In the same way we are not suffered to write Esquimaux' after the good old spelling, but are quite behind the age unless we adopt the form Eskimo.' where no principle is involved, we are quite ready to comply with any change which will ensure us a quiet life, and so we are willing to follow the learned Dr. Rink in the orthography of the name of the tribes for which he has done so much, and to call these interesting members of the great human race no longer 'Esquimaux,' but Eskimo.' If there is any joking on so serious a subject as the nomenclature of a family so widely spread over the Arctic regions, we may add that the best of the joke is that the Eskimo do not speak of themselves by the name so commonly given them by foreigners, but simply and proudly as Innuit, that is, the people,' as though they were the only people on the face of the earth; a confidence all the more remarkable if we consider that isolated tribes have been met with, numbering not a hundred individuals, who were convinced, until discovered by Arctic explorers, that they were the only members of their race that existed; so completely, while they kept the language spoken by the whole race, had the memory and tradition of a common origin with other Eskimo tribes died out among them. And yet the Eskimo straggle over, if they do occupy and fill, vast regions, which, fortunately for them, are never likely to excite the cupidity of the Alexanders, Napoleons, and Frederick Williams, of this civilised and wicked world. Some years ago our attention was attracted by the heading of an article in a periodical too much given to supply its readers with chaff rather than grain. It was entitled, 'An Enquiry into the the History of the Ancient Picts,' a most interesting subject, to which we eagerly turned. What was our surprise, however, to find that the whole Essay consisted of these words: 'Who were the ancient Picts?' a literary production which might vie for brevity with that famous chapter in Pontoppidan's History,' 'There are no snakes in Iceland.' As with the Picts and as with the snakes, so with the Eskimo; all that was known of their early history and origin might have been compressed into the narrow compass of an interrogative sentence. Fifty years ago, and, indeed, down to a much later period, the ethnological inquirer might have shouted, "Who are the Eskimo?' till he was hoarse, and yet received no answer. The little, in fact, that was known of them was derived from persons either too ignorant or too pre-occupied to be able to ascertain the truth. Whaling captains and Arctic voyagers when they came in contact with the Innuit in their snow-houses, cared the one only for blubber, which they envied the Eskimo for consuming, the other only for open water and the North-West Passage. Whales,' and 'the way to Behring's Strait?' were the only questions which these simple people were required to answer by their visitors, and if they sometimes afforded the whalers welcome information as to whales, the intelligence they could give to the Arctic explorers as to open water towards the North-West was meagre and unsatisfactory in the extreme. The result of the contact between the civilised and uncivilised races was in nowise useful to science. All we knew of the Eskimo from these sources was that they were most accomplished seal- and whale-hunters; that they delighted in blubber, and that when they had plenty of it they lay down on their backs to be crammed by their wives with the precious dainty, of which they were capable of devouring twelve or fourteen pounds in a day. It must be owned that the example thus set them by their elders was well followed by the rising generation. An Eskimo boy-we forget whether it is Parry or Richardson who tells the story-ate in twenty-four hours eight and a half pounds of seal-meat, half frozen and half cooked, one pound and two ounces of bread, and one pint and a half of thick soup; washing all this down with three wineglasses of Schnapps, a tumbler of grog, and five pints of water. As they seldom or never washed, except when the warm summer sun melted the ice and snow of their huts, they were so dirty that it was hard to tell what the complexion of the race really was under the mask of soot and clotted train-oil which besmeared their faces. It will readily be conceived that a warm bath to such people was more than a luxury. It was, in fact, as dangerous an experiment as a Turkish bath to many Englishmen. In the great great interest of tubbing we are happy to say that Parry, who was the first to introduce warm baths among the Eskimo, found that they were attended with the happiest results in the cure of rheumatism and kindred diseases. Besides affording the Eskimo this medical treatment, the various expeditions collected lists of words, but as for these vocabularies of the language, they rivalled that famous one compiled by the veracious Daly in Gilbert Gurney' at Boulogne, as the dialect of Timbuctoo, in which 'Phiz' meant lightning, 'Bang,' thunder, and though last, not least, Tooroluro,' a wheel-barrow. Under these circumstances it is fortunate for the Eskimo that they have fallen on a far more critical age, which, in spite of all its absurdities about egg-sucking, can do for them what they would never have been able to do for themselves, that is, tell them who they are and whence they came, and, in fact, expand the question, 'Who were the Eskimo?' into a very satisfactory Ethnological Essay. But let not our readers be alarmed, we are not going to break their heads in this fine autumn weather with a dry philological discussion. We will not drag them from the fresh woods and green fields to ponder over roots and conjugations. All that we shall assume is the right to be rather doctrinaire, and to beg them to believe us when we state results. The Eskimo, then, are the most considerable remnant in northern regions of that nameless pre-historic race of fishers and hunters, who once clung to the coasts and shores of Europe, until they were pushed away into the holes and corners, and to the very verge and edge of the great continents of the earth by the successive bands of the Aryan migrations. They once existed in England, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Spain, in all of which they have left their traces in interments and implements, and laystalls and 'kitchenmixens.' They were of Turanian race; and even at the present day they exist as Basks in the rugged mountains of Spain. In Sweden we find them as Lapps and Finns; and so on along the Russian coast there is a fringe of them that clings to the edge of the land on the shore of the frozen ocean. How the great division of this pre-historic family found their way to the vast and inhospitable regions in which they are now known to foreigners as Eskimo, is open to doubt. The received theory now is that they were forced thither from the coasts both of Asia and America, across Behring's Strait, by the migrations of Indian and Mongolian tribes; but it is at least as likely that these hardy savages, who are nowhere so happy as in their native tents, if they only have plenty of seal-meat and blubber, have existed from time immemorial in the Arctic regions, and in this sense may claim to be be as really autochthon and indigenous children of the soil, or rather of ice and snow, as any race on the surface of the globe. But whether indigenous or not, there they are, a branch of the great Turanian family, and carrying with them in their speech the best evidence of their origin, in the affinity which their language bears to the Lapp, Bask, Hungarian, and Turkish dialects of their common race. The reader therefore sees at once that these Eskimo, whose existence-huddled up in snow and ice, and condemned for half the year to a perpetual night (which we may assure them from experience is not nearly so dark as London in a really good winter fog), and with few or no wants beyond blubber-seems so wretched and miserable to civilised man, have attained to the dignity of being members of the great body politic of nations, and are by kinship cousins to some of the proudest and haughtiest peoples in the world. There is a Turkish proverb, we believe, which speaks of the pride of the Magyar as exceeding that of the peacock, and no doubt the Magyar repertory of wise saws, which embody the wisdom of many in the wit of one,' contains a saying as apposite to the Turks; but here we find that the Eskimo are of the same race as both these peacocks, and we dare say have quite as much right to pride themselves on their national characteristics. And now, having thus settled the position of the Eskimo among the races of the world, let us look a little more closely at them by the aid of the light which the researches of Dr. Rink have shed upon them. If, as we think can be shown, Dr. Rink was fortunate in finding so fresh a subject as the Eskimo and their customs, tales, and traditions, the Eskimo in their turn were lucky in having a spokesman so well qualified to become their advocate. The learned Doctor has, for the last sixteen winters, either been a resident or a traveller on the shores of Davis' Strait, from the southernmost point of Greenland, Cape Farewell, up to the 73rd degree of north latitude. If we reckon his residence by summers, it was still longer, for he was in Greenland for twenty-two summers. He went out to that somewhat unpromising region from Denmark, his native country, in Government employ, first as a scientific explorer, until, rising in the service, he became Royal Inspector or Governor of the Southern Danish Establishment in Greenland. In one respect he set a good example to all governors who have to deal with the natives of a foreign land: he was not above learning the language and acquiring the speech of the people he was to inspect and govern. In this way he came to know and to love the simple race among whom he lived. He soon saw that there was more in the Greenland Eskimo than mere seal-meat and |