BOOKS.
SIR MOUNTSTUART GRANT DUFF'S DIARY.* Tax four volumes that have already appeared of Sir Mount- stuart Grant Duff's Diary have set the example which the further instalment now before us, dealing with the five years of his Governorship of Madras, follows very closely. Politics in their bluer aspect are, as before, altogether excluded ; and the writer assures us that he has cut away vigorously at the botany ; but the vegetation of the tropics is naturally luxuriant and difficult to keep within bounds, and, notwithstanding the Governor's energy, it still flourishes in many places where, in our judgment, it ought not, even thrusting itself into book- plates, and correspondence capable of better things, notably letters from Matthew Arnold and Lord de Tabley. The table- talk, however, which is the distinction of this Diary, as it should be of all diaries kept for the sake of other people, is as well-informed and diverting as ever ; the people who come and go are not only persons of importance in India, but in- teresting people, with something to say drawn from their own reading or professional experience ; and we can appreciate the feelings of satisfaction with which those at home who sent across the water their anecdotes, epigrams, character-sketches, riddles, to cheer a magnificent exile, must now welcome them back to their bosoms after many days, with the cachet of so distinguished an approval. Naturally, there is less in this volume than in those that have gone before about political people in England, fewer humours of the House of Commons, though there are one or two good stories of Gladstone, and fewer sketches of places in Europe, which, having ourselves seen, we take pleasure in seeing again through such critical eyes as those of Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff. But as it is the mind that makes the man, whether at Naishapur or Babylon, at Ulubree or Madras, it is not surprising that this instalment of the Diary, even with these necessary limitations, should exhibit a no less wide range of moral and intellectual interests than its predecessors.
When the Diary has reached its term, it will inevitably become the wit's vade mecum; not impossibly it may become the text-book for a course of lectures, at one of our Univer- sities which possesses a Chair of Rhetoric, upon the origin and functions of the jest. It contains, for example, a singularly pure example of the purest type of jest, that which presents a situation in itself humorous independently of all details of time and place :— " Scene : an erening party in London.
Lord — Are you going on to — House ?'
Lady — 'No I am going to my bed.' Lord — (lgu; is very deaf). 'Then we shall meet again very
soon.' " The "joke on occasion," the impromptu, which depends for all its excellence upon its subject and object and circumstances, is, of course, by far the most brilliant type of jest, while it lasts; it is among jests what champagne is among wines, so sparkling and effervescent at the moment, afterwards so flat ; and it is unfortunately of this species that most jest-books are chiefly composed. Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff chronicles a few of these : Sir F. Doyle's hard saying about Lord Houghton, His exit is the result of too many entrées " ; the quiz upon Mr. Gladstone, "I am not surprised at your being in favour of a bare majority," when he stood fascinated at the spectacle of all the beauty of London in (so-called) "full " evening dress ; the "used-up craturs" proposed as the explanation of the phrase " exhausted volcanoes " applied by Disraeli to the Notes from a Diary Kept Chiefly in Southern India, 18814888. By the Right Hon. Sir 3iountatuart E. Grant Buff, G.C.S.I. 2 rola London : J. Murray. [18s.] Ministry. The best example, if authentic, is the following :— " Sir F. Pollock tells me that Gladstone, being recently at Seacox Heath with Goschen, said he should much like to know what General Gordon thought of the book of Genesis. Just at pre- sent,' remarked some one. it would be more interesting to know his views on Exodus ! " Are we to understand that this re- mark was made to Mr. Gladstone I But who would have had the courage to make it? The "remarked some one" is ominous of the ben trovato story ; the champagne that may be excel- lent, but lacks the brand. Most reported impromptus, of course, are liable to suspicion, if they do not come with unim- peachable credentials. Who, for instance, is childlike enough to believe that the question, "Whether is the Dauphin or the Prince of Wales the greater man ? " was over proposed except by the person who had the answer ready: "Juvenal has settled that ; does he not say :
Quante delphinis balaena Britannica major' " ?
Of other forms of jest, such as the chestnut of friendly com- merce, the conundrum, and the examination blunder, Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff has recorded several interesting specimens. Some of the former supply variations from the ordinary type, such as the "Lord Smith who spelled his name Johnson" (I. 207) ; the play on the words " hung " and " sus- pended " (I. 71) ; and the tale of the first balloon seen in a backward village (I. 164),—which are not for the better. How much more amusing, for instance, than the incredible supposi- tion that the occupant of the balloon was a divine person, is the Suffolk form of the tale, given in Mr. Hindes Groome's Two Svirolk Friends : "As it floated over Monk Soham, the aeronaut shouted, Where am I ?' to some harvesters, who, standing in a row, their forefingers pointing at him, shouted back, You're in a ballune, bor."' Jests, then, abound in these volumes, but there is much beside jests. There are one or two anecdotes of individuals that add to our knowledge of their characters, and there are not a few capital epigrams. One of the best anecdotes and one of the best epigrams relate to Jowett :—" Mr. Eliot told me that just after getting the Ireland, he dined alone with Jowett. It was the day on which Henry Smith died, and his host did not utter one word till near the end of the evening, when he said, 'It is very nice to be young, and to gain University Scholarships." The epigram, attributed to Mr. Dutton, elder brother of Lord Sherborne, is that Jowett in a lecture " maintained that St. Paul used the word yOFo; in seven senses ; in the first it meant God, and in the last the Devil " ! Another good English epigram (there are too many French ones to quote) is the remark of Rogers that "it matters little whom one marries, for one finds next day that one has married somebody else." A third is the retort of Russell to Burdett, who spoke against the " cant of patriotism " as the worst thing possible, that the " recant of patriotism was worse still." A homely phrase, attributed to an Irish nurse, is worth remembering : "Paper never refuses ink ; don't believe all you hear."
This last quotation leads us to notice one great merit of Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff as a narrator, that he is unusually careful to record his authorities, and occasionally is successful in tracking a story back to its original form or its true author. Thus he gives us the following as the warranted genuine shape of an oft-told tale:—" The authorities of the Madras Railway received one day the following telegram from a remote station, Walliar, which is some three hundred miles from the capital : Tiger jumping about on the platform. Staff much alarmed. Please arrange !'" He traces to Baron Hiibner the epigram on Napoleon III.: " Il ne parle jamais mais it ment toujours," and to the late Sir Frederick Pollock he gives the Sydneian image about patting the dome of St. Paul's to please the Dean and Chapter. But in this last case Sydney Smith's representatives seem not to concur. He even disputes with Renan the form of words in which the Capuchin expressed his pious confidence in him : "Il a pazle tres bien de St. Francois et St. Francois arrangera tout cola," not as Renan himself quoted it: "St. Francois Is sauvera." As a part of the same fairness of mind we note a disposition to see the best side of everybody, and give the most antipathetic his due. Perhaps the disposition is least successful in the case of leading High Churchmen, Bishop Wilberforce, who is slightingly spoken of, was at any rate the creator of the modern type of bard-working Bishop ; and the connection of Dean Hook with Theodore Hook was
far from being ludicrous, as that excellent dignitary was a person of great wit and humour.
On another more trifling matter we can correct the diarist. The gentleman whose poem on Lies de Castro is referred to (I. 362) is not Mr. Nichol, but Mr. Bowyer Nichols (a name with a long family record in literary history), and we happen to know that the story about the omission of the coronation episode from the first form of the poem has no foundation in fact, and therefore can have no typical significance.
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