not change her appearance or perceptibly alter her trim. A French critic believes that there was some defect in the Japanese shells, since, as he says, "they did not open enormous holes or destroy the decks, as do melinite shells." Certainly, if the Japanese projectiles were a fair specimen of the shells used by European artilleristsand it is probable, notwithstanding the French criticism, that they were-the destructive power of modern ordnance has been greatly exaggerated.

One cause of the Japanese successes in the earlier period of the war was the excellence of the telescopic sights provided. The Russian fleet at Port Arthur is stated, rightly or wrongly, to have been equipped with very inferior sights; indeed, some authorities have declared that there were no telescopic sights at all. Remembering certain incidents which have occurred in the British navy, this is not incredible. Our own sights in many of our ships are inaccurate or fitted with telescopes of too low power to be thoroughly satisfactory, and it is not very pleasant to read in a Service journal that within the past few weeks the gun-sights of most of the Home Fleet battleships have been found to be defective. In the battle of August the Port Arthur fleet made better shooting, hitting the Mikasa repeatedly, and this is probably to be ascribed to the fact that the guns had then been fitted with the latest and best sights, which had been thoroughly The Monthly Review.

tested in actions with the Japanese siege artillery before Port Arthur.

Generally speaking, the lessons of the war confirm predictions, except with regard to the deadliness of the torpedo and mine and the efficacy of modern artillery. The immense value of the large battleship and armored cruiser has been again and again demonstrated. Small craft can effect nothing without their support, and are further liable to lose their speed in continuous service. The wear and tear of warships has been proved to be very serious, and to increase as the size of the vessel decreases. A large margin must be allowed in any fleet which means to take the offensive for mishaps due to mines and collisions. The effect of the war on the navies of the world will inevitably be to stimulate the construction of battleships and large armored cruisers, and to increase the attention already given to organization. Success has been proved to depend on three things: being ready first, the possession of a personnel trained for war and not merely prac tised in inane peace evolutions, and a good material. Pushing the analysis a point further, it is clear that the personnel, or the quality of the general staff, is the final determinant of victory. A good general staff will provide good ships and be ready in time; the best ships will be useless weapons if the men who have to work and fight them are unready or ill-trained when the day of battle comes.

H. W. Wilson.

"What's become of Waring?" asked Browning, over sixty years ago; and in a different sense the question may be repeated to-day, for assuredly Alfred Domett, "a good man and true," as

Tennyson called him, was far too able, loving and interesting a man for the world to be justly allowed to forget him. For nearly fifty years he was Browning's friend. In the spring of

1842 he sailed for New Zealand, to the eighteen-months-old settlement of Nelson; and three years later his old friend, Joseph Arnould-afterwards Sir Joseph, and a judge at Bombaywrote, "I never knew an absent person so uniformly and universally well and kindly spoken of, so gladly remembered, so sadly regretted." But within three weeks of the departure of the "very fast sailing-vessel," Sir Charles Forbes, which bore Domett to the Antipodes, Browning sat down to write by the next vessel with almost womanly tenderness of his sincere love for Domett, stronger love than he had deemed himself capable of. He was then aged thirty, and Domett was one year his senior. Surely a man so winning and so loved by a great poet is not lightly to be forgotten. Browning certainly did not forget him. Until his marriage in 1846 he was a regular correspondent; letter followed letter every three or six months, and a continuous little group of fourteen remains which Domett treasured as carefully as he treasured the first editions of his friend's works. These letters abound in expressions of affection; and with them, from time to time, went various books. The letter of May, 1842, was accompanied by Domett's copy of Sordello which he had lent Browning before he sailed. In midsummer the two volumes of Tennyson's new poems, strongly bound in Russia leather "to stand wear and tear," were sent, and with them a letter containing some interesting criticism; in autumn, there was a Review with the latest article on Tennyson's new volumes, by Leigh Hunt, and another on Browning himself, by "Orion" Horne. The December letter had as companion a smaller but more interesting volume; it was the thin paper-covered booklet, closely printed in double columns, Bells and Pomegranates, Part III. This Domett read amid surroundings such as he

himself described in his letters homethe fern hills, the goose-besprinkled green, the lounging shooting-jacket existence; Mrs. Reay's æsthetic tea; Miss Essex's piano [possibly the only one then in Nelson!]; the droppers-in from the country; the brandy-andwhistcum-sugar evenings, and that almost inevitable "general tinge of genteel blackguardism" which might be expected in a settlement not yet three

years old. Amid such surroundings Domett first read the "Pied Piper," "My Last Duchess," the splendid "Count Gismond," and the fragmentary "Artemis Prologuizes," which Matthew Arnold so much admired. In the middle of the booklet he came upon "Waring," and read in verse what was expressed with equal emphasis in the letter which accompanied the poem :

Meantime, how much I loved him.
I find out now I've lost him:
I, who cared not if I moved him,
Who could so carelessly accost him,
Henceforth never shall get free
Of his ghostly company,

Oh, could I have him back once more, This Waring, but one half-day more!

Thirty years later Domett wrote in his diary:

Who first gave currency to the idea of identifying the imaginary Waring with myself, I have not the slightest notion. True, the idea of inventing adventures for a youth who had left his companions rather suddenly to go abroad may have been suggested to Browning by my having done so; and some or most of the slight particulars in the earlier part of the poem are descriptive of the circumstances under which I left England. Browning in composing his imaginary picture just availed himself of such real incidents as came his way and suited his purpose, as, I suppose, every artist does.

That the Waring of the poem should no more be identified with Domett than

the "Lost Leader" should be identified with Wordsworth, is of course evident; but neither Domett nor his friends had any difficulty in tracing the original of the imaginary being, nor in seeing how heart-felt were Browning's words, since Arnould at once wrote to New Zealand that the poem "delighted us all very much, for we recognized in it a fancy portrait of a very dear friend." Fact and fancy, indeed, are freely mingled. The secrecy of Waring's departure, for instance, had no counterpart in reality, and though a parting supper was held, it took place not in the "snowiest of all December,” but in the last week of April, 1842. Browning was present, so was Arnould and the Dowsons, and almost certainly the Youngs, the Oldfields and others of what the friends termed "the set." That Peckham curiosity, Thos. Powell, was also there, it would appear-the man to whose home Wordsworth came as godfather to one of the boys, the man on whose plano Browning used to play, whose scalloped oysters he used to enjoy, whose poor verses he used to correct, and to whom, six months after the supper, he sent a copy of the Waring number of the Bells and Pomegranates, inscribed, "T. Powell, from his affectionate friend, Robert Browning." Two years later they had parted company; and in 1846 Browning is found writing of the "unimaginable, impudent, vulgar stupidity" of "poor gross stupid Powell," who somewhat later had to quit the country precipitately," after being "repudiated for ever," as Horne expressed it, by those in whose society he had for a time mingled. In

1 When Domett saw Browning's early friend, Richard Hengist Horne, in 1877, the latter remarked that while he was in Australia "they called me Browning's Waring, but I told them it was Domett." Domett replied, "It was a fancy character, and he was welcome to the honor, if it were such, of being the original, but that Browning, I was sure, would not have alluded to his poetical productions as mere hedge-side chance-blades,' for he

America he issued that utterly unscrupulous volume, The Living Authors of England (1849), in which he made all the capital he possibly could out of such intercourse as he had enjoyed with literary society in London. He claimed to be, and perhaps we can believe him in this,

the new prose-poet,

That wrote the book there, on the shelf

for whose arm Browning describes himself as leaving that of Domett.

Domett of course resembled Waring in that he was a poet. Tennyson, to whom in 1884 Sir Henry Parkes introduced him, and with whom he stayed at Blackdown, remarked concerning Domett's longest poem, "your friend only wants limitations to be a very considerable poet." Besides the Poems of 1833, and the Venice of 1839, he had, before leaving for New Zealand, published in Blackwood sundry "hedge-side chance-blades," as Browning terms them. Of the first of these, "A Glee for Winter," Christopher North wrote most cordially, and spoke of the author as fine-hearted "Alfred Domett . . . a new name to our old ears; but he has the prime virtue of a song-writer-a heart," and the "Christmas Hymn" he did not hesitate to compare favorably with that of Milton. Longfellow noticed this hymn in Blackwood, and admired it so much that he reprinted it in 1845 in a little volume called The Waif. More than thirty years later he wrote to Domett, "I have lost none of my old admiration; I have just read it over again and think it equally had written 'Cosmo' and the Death of Marlowe,' etc., etc., before that." Part II. of the poem is, of course, purely imaginative.

2 In 1883 Prowning, who had "found him out earlier than most of his dupes," described Powell as a "forger who only escaped transportation through the ill-deserved kindness of his employers." Browning's Pisa edition of the "Adonais," borrowed by Powell, was sold by him, it is said, for fifty guineas.

beautiful in conception and execution." Year after year the Hymn was regularly printed each Christmas in a score of the leading American papers; and in 1883 Domett was both surprised and pleased to hear that over thirteen hundred competitors had sent in designs for a prize of 3,000 dollars offered by Messrs. Harper for the best illustrations by an American artist of his poem.

These details are amply sufficient to indicate that "Waring" is, in several essential respects, true to fact. The interest of the poem, however, is by no means limited to the light it casts upon the life and character of Domett; it is equally a revelation of the heart and character of Browning. The words he soon afterwards wrote to Miss Barrett cannot, of course, . be accepted quite literally: "What I have printed gives no knowledge of me-it evidences abilities of various kinds, if you willand a dramatic sympathy with certain modifications of passion . . . that, I think. But I never have begun even what I hope I was born to begin and end,-'R. B., a poem.'" The love which finds dramatic expression in "Waring" was as sincere as that which afterwards found lyrical utterance in "One Word More," and the reflections upon the life of the day contained in “Waring" must be accepted with equal literalness; they came deep from the heart of the poet, exactly as did the utter scorn which breathes in the concluding lines of "The Englishman in Italy":

Fortù, in my England at home,
Men meet gravely to-day
And debate, if abolishing Corn-laws
Is righteous and wise
-If 'tis proper, Scirocco should vanish
In black from the skies?

Browning's friend, the Rev. W. Johnson Fox, it will be remembered, was one of the leading champions in the Corn-law repeal, and great was the

glee in which Browning wrote to New Zealand after reading in the Times of July 12th, 1842, that so staunch a Tory as another of his friends, Sir John Hanmer, M.P.-a fellow Moxonian poet-had actually risen in the House and "professed he had altered his opinions upon the Corn Question." Browning and most of his early friends were Liberals, even Radicals. Arnould was soon to be writing leaders in the Daily News on Law Reform and University Reform, and also contributing to a "weekly ultra-Radical print, the Weekly News and Chronicle," as he sent word to New Zealand. They all seem to have shared in the feeling expressed in the opening words of Carlyle's Past and Present (1843): “England is dying of inanition," and to have looked forward eagerly to stirring words from the pen of the always independent-minded Domett. To select but one passage from a letter written by Arnould in 1842 :

Society is heartless, unbelieving, half dead, paralysed by selfishness-with no one idea or noble purpose to animate it, but an aggregate of self-seeking units bound together only by a fellowship of mutual pelf. You, I am sure, as much as any one, have felt the wants and miseries of your time. You have mixed with men of all kinds, you have an open heart and a penetrating eye, you have abundant leisure and time, why not set earnestly about a great work of this kind?

The vessel which bore this prose appeal from Arnould was that which also carried the printed verse of Browning:

Contrive, contrive

To rouse us, Waring! Who's alive? Our men scarce seem in earnest now: Distinguished names!-but 'tis, some

how,

As if they played at being names
Still more distinguished, like the games
Of children. Turn our sport to earnest

With a visage of the sternest!
Bring the real times back, confessed
Still better than our very best!

Whence did Browning, it has often been asked, take the name of Waring? In the spring of 1834, during a visit to Russia, he met a King's Messenger who was called by that name, and it is not without interest to notice that the fact that he had met the original Waring in Russia afterwards led him, in writing his poem, to introduce the passage in which the imaginary Waring is supposed to wander thither :

Waring, in Moscow, to those rough Cold northern natures borne, perhaps.

He

Life in a newly-established settlement has inevitably many drawbacks, even should one be destined to be "the strong clearer of forests, the hardhanded 'Leather-stocking' of unborn races," as a letter to Domett expresses it. But there was much in addition of a purely personal nature to cast a gloom over Domett's early days at Nelson. He had gone out to join his cousin Wm. Curling Young, son of one of the directors of the New Zealand Company.' He arrived to find him dead, drowned while surveying. himself, soon after his arrival, when leaping from the high bank of a stream, jumped short into the water amid the merry laughter of his companions. A second attempt was more successful, but a crack was heard, Domett's leg was broken, and permanent lameness was feared. This accident, however, possibly saved that life, for a dispute having arisen between the settlers and the Maoris as to the possession of some lands in the Wairau Valley, near Nelson, the chief Rauparaha burned to the ground the reed

Young was well known to Browning. Alexander Nairne, another of Domett's relatives, and father of General Nairne, was also a director. William Curling Young's brother, Sir Frederick Young, K.C.M.G., has been,

of some fifty Europeans promptly set forth to arrest the daring chieftain, a conflict ensued, thirteen of the party were slain, and nine others, taken prisoners, were slaughtered by the Maoris. Among the dead was Captain Arthur Wakefield, brother of the famous Edward Gibbon Wakefield; he was the founder of Nelson, a man for whom Domett had a tender and reverent regard, and of whom he wrote, "He was by nature cut out for the founder of a colony and for a leader of men." Domett's accident alone prevented him from being present at this "massacre" of June 17th, 1843. Events such as these, and subsequent dissatisfaction with official incompetence in high places, turned the thoughts of Domett to coffee planting in Ceylon, where he had relatives. His friends in England urged him rather to return. Joseph Arnould, then a hard-working and rising barrister who had been I called to the Bar about the same time as Domett, wrote to offer him his spare room and the use of his chambers in the Temple should he desire to resume the Law. Browning, in the last words he wrote to New Zealand before his marriage in 1846, sent an invitation from his mother, his sister and himself to Domett to return and take up his abode with them at Hatcham, as Domett's old home had been broken up. In the previous year when Browning and others had been helping the dying Hood in his final brave struggle by contributing to Hood's Magazine, he had also written to Domett to encourage him in his adversity. Under the circumstances Hood's "Last Man" not unnaturally came into his mind, and he therefore adapted the tenth stanza to the occasion :

during his long and distinguished life, intimately associated with the Colonies, and has been an enthusiastic pioneer in the great cause of Imperial Federation.