..%Gentlem en Errant : being the Journeys and Adventures of Four

Noblemen in worn

of special dogmas, not of that sum of thoughts and emotions

" Marryat as a man must not be judged by Marryat as an consciously in the minds of very few people. The average author, in the pages of The Naval 'Officer.; or, Scenes and man might run up against them, but he did not realise what Adventures in the Life of Prank Mildmay.' He had witnessed they meant. He thought of them only as a whimsy in Church mutiny and was aware of its forms ; he knew there were tyrannical captains and weak captains, and he held them up as government or a vagary in taste to which he might or might examples in his dark pictures of cruelty and failure. He forgot not have leanings. Mrs. Cost's four narratiVes show us the that he might misinterpret to the uninstructed reader the Navy heart of the gentlemen of the later Middle Ages as few that bad among its captains many gallant and honourable gentle- historical novels we ever read have done. Her achievement men, like Cochrane himself, and the men who were Nelson's ' band of brothers.' In his later books he was in a happier is in its essentials brilliant fiction. She has expounded and mood, and on his behalf it must be remembered that he had annotated her originals with remarkable learning, but the himself suffered in his younger days. It was unfortunate, never- result is not history, but romance. She is in the position theless, that he made fiction a vehicle for his revenge upon those of a novelist who, after careful study of every authority, who had persecuted him. As a narrative, 'Frank Mildmay ' is

selects certain real personages as his characters and carries

because, protest as he might that he was not the rather un- them on the quest of adventure. It is quite immaterial that Pleasant person whom he had made his hero, it was impossible every adventure really took place ; that concerns the historian, for his contemporaries to distinguish him from that character. not the reader. The point is that the narratives are art. He had chosen deliberately to perpetuate the darker side of naval The author takes the documents and tells their story in her he did later on, its honest gaiety and cleanly virtue." own way, and her way is that of good fiction. That is to say, Where so much writing about the sea has been at one, or she shows us with full realism the hearts and deeds of her more than one, remove from reality we might expect that it people, but in the showing gives us a modern. staudpoink—a had gone particularly astray in such familiar stories as those view-ground from which we can see the medley of adventures about women who joined the Navy disguised as men. But under the conditions of artistic presentation. We are inclined there we should be wrong. Captain Robinson says :— to call the book the best historical novel Which has appeared. "There are many instances in naval history which are well for many years. authenticated of females who went, to sea as sailors, and some of The four gentlemen were knights, but not knights-errant them not only made excellent .seamen—if the expression may be There was nothing of a crusade in their enterprises. The Permitted—but exhibited courage and gallantry in battle with Bohemian Lev was in quest of useful alliances for his brother- their country's enemies. Two well-known instances are those of Hannah Snell, who enlisted as a marine and saw active service, in-law, the King, and of amusement for his own lusty self; and Mary Ann Talbot, otherwise John Taylor, who was wounded Wilwolt of Schaumburg was a soldier of fortune who sought in the nation of the Glorious First of June. Both these women a good price for his sword; the Palsgrave Frederick was in received pensions from the Government when they •were no search Per a wife worthy of his degree; while the luckleas longer able to follow a sea life. How these and other women (two of whom turned pirates, Anne Bonney and Mary Read) were Hans von Schweinichen was dragged at the tail of nfeckless able to remain on board ship, doing the sailor's work and to live master who raked Europe for loans. Hans is the most With the men without being discovered, is amazing, but that such amusing, Wilwolt the most admirable, Lev the most ingenuous was the case, and that there have been similar cases in quite as well as the most truculent, and the Palsgrave the most engaging of the goodly company. Lev of Rozmital had a We must not forget to mention the admirable piece of pretty notion of a traveller's comforts, journeying with his nautical exposition in which Captain Robinson sets forth the own cook, steward, and comptroller, and a great staff of meaning of the shipwreck scene in Shakespeare's Tempest. servants dressed in red, "with much gold and velvet showing, The apparently confused and discordant cries take on meaning, and sleeves of pearl." At Cologne he visited the famous

the master of the ship tried to do, and why, having failed, he nunnery of Neuss, and had a merry time with the nuns, was necessarily wrecked. supping and dancing with them. At Brussels he was enter- tained by Philip the Good of Burgundy, and the Bohemians held the ring at wrestling against all corners. After a very

GENTLEMEN ERRANT.* seasick voyage he reached England, and paid a visit to St. IT is no easy matter to get at the heart of an earlier age. Thomas's shrine at Canterbury, the description, of which The common historian cannot do it, for his business is more makes one sigh for the noble jewel-work which has long 'With the forms than with the spirit which imposed them. He perished from the earth. Lev was well received in London by has knowledge, but he looks at an era with an alien perspec- Edward IV., but the Bohemians were not in love with England tive, and is not concerned to get inside the skins of the or Englishmen. They thought our countrymen "so crafty Puppets who made the wars and sat on the Councils.which he and treacherous that a stranger may not be sure of his life chronicles. He judges their work, but not, strictly speaking, amongst them." Thereafter they departed for France, and themselves. The common romancer has little knowledge, and journeying southwards met Louis XI. at Meung, and came in What he has is only of the surface,—the things in which the for a miracle at Amboise. It was Whit-Monday, and folk were being dipped in the Loire for their souls' health. One fts pe during the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. By Mrs. Heury Cost, an fell into the water and should have been drowned, but aaniaon: Joul Murray, [lac mtj she swam "under the waves" for two miles with her infant in

lier arms and came ashore unhurt. "This thing we saw," says the chronicler. On the way they heard au odd version of the story of Joan of Arc, who was only thirty-five years dead. This version told how she was carried to London, placed on a brazen horse, and then burned,—a curious

commentary on the value of contemporary evidence. In 'Spain, where 11 nobleman may be recognised by wearing only One shoe, the Bohemians had 'a bard time. They were happier

in Portugal, and then went north to Galicia, where they were

shown the kingdom of Scotland lying out in the sea to the right! With great difficulty, owing to local wars, they were

admitted to the brine of St. James of Compostella, and

-continuing to Cape Finieterre, looked upon a limitless ocean. "The end of it no one knoweth save God alone," says the chronicler. They returned by Milan and Venice, and at 'Gratz fell in with the Emperor Frederick III., who gave them -nothing but fine words and two kegs of wine. Lord Lev and his friends had high notions about the duty of entertaining

wandering gentlemen.

Wilwolt of Schaumburg was a fighter from his youth, and his story gives up a picture of the difficulties in the way of a leader of Landshnechts. He began in the service of Charles

the Bold, a good beginning for a free captain. His adventures were endless both in love and war, and later, as the henchman of Duke Albrecht of Saxony, he tried his hand at the game of diplomacy as well, visiting London as Ambassador. His hardest fighting was done in the Low Countries, and his greatest dangers came from his own greedy and treacherous followers. The tale of how he outwitted them at Arras is delightful romance. After some desperate fighting in Fries- land, the curtain falls upon Wilwolt at home in his decayed ancestral towers, married, and busy with the improvement of his estates. The story of the Palsgrave Frederick leads us into higher circles of war and intrigue. That cheerful Prince set off at the age of eighteen with the Archduke Philip to see the world. With his feather-headed comrade be courted adventure in France and 'Spain, and finally joined the Emperor Maximilian at Innsbruck. Here in the train of that mighty hunter they pursued the chamois by curious .devices. "Sometimes," says the chronicle, "the hunters were tempted to such terrible heights that they could by no means come down again. And when this is made known a priest is fetched, who showeth them, so near as he may, the body of Christ, that they may remember their salvation, and die in the true Catholic faith: for there is no other remedy." It is impossible to summarise the Pals,grave's doings, for he flashes like a will-o'-the-wisp over Europe,—now harassing the Turks, now campaigning in Holland, now kicking his heels in Spain, now wearily waiting elsewhere on Imperial favour. His constant purpose was his desire for a wife, At first it was the Princess Eleonore, sister of Charles V.; then it was the Queen of Hungary; then one of the young Princesses of Montferrat; then a Princess of France; until at long last he led Dorothea of Denmark to the altar. Never did man more -earnestly follow the star of suitable matrimony. The last of the tales, which is called appositely "An Epic, of Debts," is the chronicle of that Silesian Pepys, Hans von Soh weinichen, who with his master, the Duke of Liegnitz, was a finished expert in the art of riding away, whether from debts or sweethearts. It is the most whimsical and human of the four, for the devices of this Caleb Balderston° are endless, and his courage invincible. He protests always against the

ignominy of his position, but it is clear that he loved it, and when evil days fell on his master, and the life of the road was closed, it is with many a sigh that he turns to marriage and comparative solvency and decorum.

A word must be added in conclusion on the manner in which these stories are told. Quotation and comment are skilfully blended, and, as we have said, the rude garrulous chronicles are shaped into the forms of art. Mrs. Cost's style is admirably suited for such a task. It is an ornate style, with many conceits and mannerisms, and a passion for quaint and beautiful phrases. It has something of a Renaissance luxuriance, and often it is hard to tell what is translation and what her own narrative. Now and

then it errs on the side of euphuism, but on the whole it is 'onderfully effective, both as something fine' in itself, and as exactly fitted for these picaresque chronicles. In style as in matter there is the exuberanee, of adventure. We .4tiote -tine passage, taken- at randoth, -kis a illustration': "Something, indeed, of the baseless fabric of dreams these diaries portray; something of their indistinctness, something of their incompleteness, something of their improbability ; but something, too, of their tantalising and ever-changing charm. They are the issue, it is true, not of shaping fantasies, but of the plain and often painful ways of daily life ; and they are not chiselled by cunning or delicate hands. Yet they are the true stuff that dreams are made of, and along with them we move in a pleasant region of sumptuous kings and proud princesses ; of knights and saints and dwarfs and pirates; of jewelled swords and jocund singers ; of perilous seas and imperishable sanctities ; of skiey towers and solemn temples; of secret forests, sudden dragons, and scouted mountain paths ; of high hills citied to the tops and rich sea-palaces shining with silver and alabaster and pearl. Their earth, though curiously mingled with the roaring, ruffling, rushing earth of Villon and of Commynes, is still the gracious earth of the Golden Legend and the Roman de la Rose, an earth gay with poetry and pageantry, with 'antique fables and fairy toys,' with the love of God and the passions of men. It is an earth that but yesterday sheltered St. Francis and his little sisters the birds ; St. Elizabeth and her cap full of roses ; St. Brandan and the trees thick with fallen angels making a delectable noise ; St. Joan with her holy feet and her burning sword. The devious Louis XI. may be hypnotising France, and every country may be tangled and mangled by civil war ; but the lovely Melusine still cries from her enchanted towers, and Theodoric and his knights still haunt the falling castle of Verona."