AN AMERICAN COACHING PARTY.*

THIS volume, which does not contain a single dull or unreadable page, is the record of a delightful coaching journey from Brighton to Inverness, undertaken by the writer and a party of

American friends. Of course, we are at once reminded of the captivating Strange Adventures of a Phaeton, which some of us still think the pleasantest of Mr. William Black's pleasant books, but Mr. Carnegie seems to have been beforehand with his fellow-Scot in the inception of the happy thought of a drive through Britain, though the popular novelist was the first to put it into a concrete form. As a work of art simply, this volume does not profess to enter into competition with its dis- tinguished predecessor ; though, if artistic worth is to be gauged, not by conformity to formal and artificial canons, but by the measure of success with which an intended purpose is achieved, -and a desired impression conveyed, it is not easy to see how Mr. Carnegie's book could have been better than it is.

The railway has not, perhaps, proved the irredeemably prosaic thing it seemed to those who grieved over its early aggressions half a century ago; the great appropriator, Nature, has adopted it kindly, and many a landscape has gained a new charm from the white, curling cloud, floating above the meadows, or losing itself among the stems of the far-off plantation; but, after all, stage-coach travel, with its sense of freedom and exhilaration, its nearness to nature, its fascinating music of rolling wheels and clattering hoofs, and shrill, jubilant horn, remains still what De Quincey called it, the poetry of motion. When, therefore, Mr. Carnegie determined to show his old British home to his American friends, he arranged that the exhibition should be given under the most favourable conditions, -so far as he could control them ; and happily the elements became his allies, so that even in our uncertain climate the voyagers knew no abatement of the joys of travel. The party, indeed, deserved the best ; for they were prepared, even if they met the worst, to make the best of it. As Mr. Carnegie sagely remarks :—

"There is everything in the way one takes things. Whatever is, is right,' is a good maxim for travellers to adopt, but the charioteers improved on that. The first resolution they passed was, Whatever is, is lovely ; all that does happen and all that doesn't happen shall be altogether lovely.' We shall quarrel with nothing, admire everything and everybody. A surly beggar shall afford us sport, if -anybody can be surly under our smiles ; and stale bread and poor fare shall only serve to remind us that we have banquetted at the Windsor. Even no dinner at all shall pass for a good joke. Rain shall be hailed as good for the growing corn, a cold day pass as in. vigoratiug, a warm one be welcomed as suggestive of summer at home, -and even a Scotch mist serve to remind us of the mysterious ways of Providence. In this mood the start was made. Could any one suggest a better for our purpose ?"

To such a question an unhesitating negative is the only reason- able reply, and it is pleasant to learn that this best of all pos- sible moods was more abiding than good moods are wont to be. Mr. Matthew Arnold says that,—

" Tasks in hours of insight willed,

May be through hours of gloom fulfilled ;"

but the task willed by the charioteers in their hour of insight was no less than the total suppression of all hours of gloom, and it was fulfilled in a way that did equal credit to heart, head, temper, and digestion. A day's rain was a pleasant change, the anticipation, which came to nothing, of going without a night's lodging was positively exhilarating, and even the bitter dis- appointment of finding that the world-renowned Banbury Cross, instead of being a worshipful antiquity, was as modern as Chicago, seems to have been borne not with mere stoical resig- nation, but with an approach to genuine cheerfulness.

One of the many things for which ordinary readers will feel, or ought to feel, profoundly grateful to Mr. Carnegie is that he has stoutly resisted the temptation—if, indeed, he ever felt it— to give long-winded descriptions of scenery. Mr. Ruskin com-

• An American Four-in-Hand in Britain. By Andrew Carnegie. London : Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Raington.

plains that people only read his descriptions, and skip his theology, political economy, and the like; but then, Mr. Ruskin stands by himself, and even Mr. Black is inimitable. Mr. Carnegie, therefore, wisely contents himself with those impres- sions of travel which do not make impossible demands upon the pen, and what he gives us is so welcome that we would not have it anything else. He has evidently not got beyond a vigorous middle-age, and at least some years of childhood were spent in his Scottish birthplace ; but in spite of his patriotic enthusiasm for Caledonia stern and wild, he seems to have left the old.

days behind, and writes more like a Yankee with a Knicker- bocker pedigree than like a full born Briton returning to the old home. His delight in the roadside inns of England is the sort of emotion aroused by things which are not only pleasant, bat strange as well ; their very names, especially such rural ones as "The Lamb and Lark," "The Wheat Sheaf," and "The Barley Mow," are full of fascination for him ; and not only he, but the whole party seems to have been profoundly impressed by the many virtues of the English "landlord" and " land- lady :"—

" The scrupulous care bestowed upon us and our belongings by the innkeepers excited remark. Not one article was lost of the fifty packages, great and small, required by fifteen persona. It was not even practicable to get rid of any trifling article which had served its purpose ; old gloves or discarded brushes, quietly stowed away in some drawer or other, would be handed to us at the next stage, having been sent by express by these careful, honest people. It was a great and interesting occasion, as the reporters say, when the stowed-away pair of old slippers, which had been purposely left, were delivered to one of our ladies with a set speech after dinner one evening. Little did she suspect what was contained in the nice package which had been forwarded. Oar cast-off things were verit- able Devil's ducats, which would return to plague us. To the grandest feature of the Briton's character, the love of truth, let one more cardinal virtue be added,—his downright honesty."

Mr. Carnegie is, however, fully alive to what he considers the weak points in the English character and institutions. His residence in the United States has made him a republican of the republicans, and he is wont to indulge in rather " withering" remarks upon our social arrangements. After noting the facts that the Marquis of Stafford is a hard-working Director of the London and North-Western Railway, that the Duke of Devon- shire is Chairman of the Barrow Steel Company, and that Lord. Granville and Earl Dudley have a large pecuniary interest in the iron trade, he exclaims :—

"It is all right, you see, my friends, to be a steel-rail manufacturer or an iron-master. How fortunate ! But the line must be drawn somewhere, and we draw it at trade. The A. T. Stewarts and the Morrisons have no standing in society in England. They are in vulgar trade. Now, if they brewed beer' for instance, they would be somebodies, and might confidently look forward to a baronetcy at least ; for a great deal of beer, a peerage is not beyond reach."

This rhetorical assault, which is quite in Sir Wilfrid Lawson's manner, might, perhaps, be mildly parried by a suggestion that even in the paradise of Republicanism, arbitrary caste dis- tinctions are not unknown ; but, at any rate, they have no princes in the United States, so we are left entirely unprotected. from the good-natured, but still tremendous satire of the following passage concerning Mr. Gladstone and the Prince of Wales :—

" We attended church at Windsor, and saw the great man and the Prince come to the door together. There the former stopped, and the other walked up the aisle, causing a flatter in the congregation. Mr. Gladstone followed at a respectful distance, and took his seat several pews behind. How absurd you are, my young-lady Republi- can! Can you not understand ? One is only the leading man in the Empire—a man who, in a fifty years' tussle with the foremost states- men of the age, has won the crown both for attainments and char- acter; but the other, bless your ignorant little head !—he is a Prince."

St. George's Chapel seems to have stimulated all Mr. Carnegie's powers of sarcasm, and after saying his say about Mr. Gladstone and the Prince of Wales, he turns to another distinguished person—the Earl of Beaconsfield—of whose char- acter and aims he gives the following brief, but uncompromising estimate :—

" When I was not gazing at Gladstone's face, I was moralising upon the last Knight of the Garter, whose flag still floats above the stall. Disraeli won the blue ribbon about as worthily as most men, and by much the same means,—he flattered the monarch. But there is this to be said of him,—he had brains, and made himself. What a commentary upon pride of birth, the flag of the poor literary adventurer floating beside that of my lord duke's ! It pleased me much to see it. How that man must have chuckled as he bowed his way among his dupes, from her Majesty to Salisbury, and passed the Radical extension of the franchise that doomed hereditary privilege to speedy extinction !"

In this amusing, plain-spoken way does Mr. Carnegie comment upon things and persons English; but where he is, so far as words go, most uncompromisingly severe, there is no mistaking the underlying amiability. He is simply anxious to show that the resolution to find everything "altogether lovely" has not dimmed his Republican vision or impaired his logical impartiality, and, considering that he is an Americanised Scotchman, and, therefore, a critic both by nature and training, we are, on the whole, let down very easily.

There are several good stories in the book, as, indeed, there could hardly fail to be, and we select the following, not as the best—though the conclusion is a fine stroke of humour—but as one of the shortest. The party had reached Sanquhar, where the Cameronians abjured their allegiance to "the ungodly king," and Mr. Carnegie tells how some of them— "Stopped into a stationer's shop there, and met a character. One side of the shop was filled with the publications of the Bible Society, the other with drugs. 'A strange combination, this,' I remarked.—' Wee!, man, no sae bad. Pheseek for the body, an' pheseek for the soul,—castor oil and Bibles no sae bad.' Harry and I laughed. 'Have you the Revised Version here yet?' I inquired.— ' Na, na, the auld thing here Kane of yer new-fangled editions of the Scripture for us. But I hear they've shortened the Lord's Prayer. Noo, that's nee a bad thing for them as hae to get up early in the mornin's.' "

We must have read many hundreds of Scottish stories, but we cannot recall one with a stronger flavour of national character than this. The general denunciation of theological novelties, with the cautious exception in favour of a convenient shortening of a prayer, is deliciously Caledonian.

Should Mr. Carnegie's book reach a second edition, as it well deserves, a few unimportant errors may as well be corrected.

Mr. Robert Lowe's title is "Sherbrooke," not " Sherborne ;" Milton wrote "fresh woods and pastures new," not " fresh fields," (h. ; the popular juvenile sweetmeat is "toffee," not " taffee ;" and " Balliol," not " Baliol," is the correct spelling of the name of the well-known Oxford College. As for the following sentence,

it is so hopelessly muddled that correction is impossible :—" I wish," writes Mr. Carnegie, "I could quote something, from Adam Bede, I think it is—where Garth, the stonemason, thinks good work in his masonry the best prayer he has to stand

upon ;" but unfortunately, Mr. Garth is not a character in Adam Bede, he is not a stonemason, and he never made the remark here attributed to him, so the quotation very fairly matches the celebrated definition of a crab as "a red fish that walks back- wards." Double the number of errors would not, however, seriously diminish our enjoyment of a most delightful volume, and we thank the writer most heartily for some very pleasant hours.