Page images
PDF
EPUB

whole population from entreating British intervention. They know it is their only resource, and what they must come to sooner or later; for though they might ultimately conquer their native antagonists, provided the Zulus did not step in, yet they would be so utterly crippled financially, that there would not be the slightest chance of their recovering themselves unaided. Yet, knowing this, they prefer to stand aloof in sulky apathy rather than meet the inevitable end with a good grace. The Dutch have nothing to complain of; they have had their chance, they have been allowed to play at governing themselves and they have failed, and failed miserably. But if their failure affected themselves only perhaps we should have no right to a voice in the matter, but it does not. It affects us in our position with the natives, and endangers our peace and security; and it also affects us in our feelings as Christians and Englishmen. We can hardly be expected to stand by and see our highest principles as regards the treatment of subject races set utterly at nought. We cannot give the reins to a people who rejoice in slavery and brutality of every kind, and who consider the enlightenment of a "black creature as something little short of a crime..

[ocr errors]

It is true that we granted independence to this state, but then one of the principal conditions on which we did so the condition of the abolition of slavery has been totally disregarded. Besides, we Englishmen came to this land, as Sir H. Bulwer said in opening the Legislative Council of Natal in 1875, with "a high mission of truth and civilization," and surely that mission should take precedence of any scruples as to the original cession. mistake has admittedly been committed, but that is no reason why it should not be rectified. Our obligations to the native whom we have ousted are great, and we must fulfil them it is a duty that we owe to them, to ourselves, and to the misguided Boers. It is not leasant to be obliged to a certain

A

extent to recede from our word, but it must be done. In some ways it will be far from an advantage to us to take over this country, since with it must be taken many disputes, a troublesome population, and heavy liabilities. Still there will be abundant advantages resulting from the annexation to both parties concerned. Her Majesty will add a jewel to her crown which, though it be unpolished, is still a jewel of price. The Transvaal is a magnificent corn-producing country, with great mineral resources which only require development. Left in the hands of the Boers these resources will never be developed, but once in the hands of the English they may repay the enterprise of thousands. Nor will the advantages be on our side only. The Transvaal will have, what it never has had or would have, a strong government, peace, justice, and security, without which things the fairest land is of little account. To the unfortunate natives also our rule would be an inestimable boon. It is useless to deny that the Boers, partly from causes touched on in the beginning of this paper and partly for the sake of convenience, treat these conquered races in a most cruel and savage manner. If left to continue this course of action, the result would probably be that as the tribes became better armed and better informed they would combine to crush the Boers, and then make a grand attempt to sweep the white men back into the black water out of which, according to their legend, he rises. We alone of all the nations in the world appear to be able to control coloured races without the exercise of cruelty, a statement which the success of our rule in South Africa, whatever some may say to the contrary, goes far to prove. Secocoeni has openly declared his intention, in the event of his being worsted, of giving up all his land to the English rather than, as he puts it, "let those cowardly Boers have an inch of it." It is our mission to conquer and hold in subjection, not from thirst of conquest,

[blocks in formation]

SIR,-After you had kindly sent to press my paper on "The Oera Linda Book," I saw that, from later tidings from Holland, it had been found to be a sheer forgery. I had known, as I wrote, that many men had so thought it, and I showed tokens, or rather proofs, that, as to Greece and India, and some other matters, its history could not be true in kind, or could not be so for the very early times to which it reached back, but I thought that it might have been compiled from some legendary lore (as I still think it was), in which I felt there were many points of interesting truth, and did not readily believe that the writer penned it with the guile of low-cunning.

But now postulating that it is a foremeant forgery, I soon come to a reductio-I will not say ad absurdum, but it is to me-ad valdè mirandum. The forger, Gerrit Over de Linde, was a Dutch workman in a dockyard, and was unlearned, and understood no Frisian, old or new, and so being, he forged a book in Frisian, and in such Frisian as a learned Frisian, Dr.

Otteman, read and held as his own old mother tongue.

This-to bring such a case nearer home is as if an unlearned English workman of a dockyard, knowing no Welsh, new or old, should forge a book in such Welsh that the learned Canon Williams of St. Asaph, who has lately brought through the press the old Welsh Greal, should take it for fair old Cymraeg-Miror!

Again, after the death of the forger, men went into a room of his house which he had kept carefully shut against any feet but his own, and in it they found a store of books in sundry tongues, and some of them of deep lore, from which he drew the matter of his forgery, and as they were kept from all other men's eyes, he could not have had any scholar to help him in the reading of them, as he could not have had the help of any Frisian in the writing of his hidden Frisian book, which he seems, therefore, as an unlearned workman, to have written in a speech which he did not understand, from the matter of books which it is

hard to believe that he could read. Then this man, who was himself in the dark, blundered, as I feel, into some most clear shinings of light, though it may not be to say very much for them to tell you that I had long groped for them, and been very glad to find them.

I have, however, read some Friesic of sundry oldnesses, being so lucky as to have one of the 250 copies of the Gospel of St. Matthew in New LandFriesic, printed for H.H. Prince Lucien Buonaparte, for whom it was written by the learned J. H. Halbertsma, and the first share (all yet printed) of his great work, the Lexicon Frisicum, kindly given to me by his son, Mr. Tialling Halbertsma, and I have some Friesic laws and poetry, and wordbooks of Friesic old and new, but I could not write a book in Friesic and cheat Mr. Tialling Halbertsma to take it for a fair shape of his mother tál. As to the jol (yól), our yule, Outzen, in his Glossarium der Friesischen Sprache, gives four pages, large square size, to the word in its sundry Teutonic forms, and gives sundry foregiven opinions that it was the sun, or a year-sweep of the earth round the sun, or the so-seeming yearcourse of the sun or other revolution, or ring of time, and says that in Saterland Friesic the word is used for a wheel, and if Saterland was so called from the god Sater, Seater (Time), as the land where he was honoured, as Frea was honoured in Freastland, it is markworthy, since the Saxon figure of Seater holds the yol as a wheel in his hand. The forger, if he could read German, might have read Outzen, but he gives the yol as a wheel without any wavering. The older form of yól was however geol.

Did the forger invent or find in a book the yule alphabet in which he writes his book? He seems to have written it so long that it had become to him a ready handwriting, but no pen, cut in the shape of the Eastern or European pens, would give its strokes. The paper of his books has been said to be of cotton, and then to have been

made by a now - standing firm in Maestricht, and latterly to have been no such thing, but Chinese paper. Did he write with a Chinese writingpencil? As to Therp, Thorp, most of us know that Nelson was born at Burnham Thorp, but far fewer may know what a thorp at first was. In Dutch and German the word, as Dorp or Dorf, means simply a village, and yet the unlearned forger clearly understood its first meaning, and how it differed from a knoll.

The English version is from a Dutch one, and shunts the word Therp. The Friesic makes Trâst to say to a man, as to his house,

"Did it not stand then on a Knoll or Therp?" "Uppen, Nol jeftha Therp." The English is, "Did it not stand on a knoll?"

Then the man says afterwards, “I could not alone make there a Therp" (not a Nol); but the English says a Hillock, by which it must mean a Knoll-a natural Hillock-the only thing it had named.

As to Frea, the lamps are most fitting for her worship if she is Light, but while he gives marks that befit her as Light, he does not know, or does not say that she is Light, and so far seems to be uncrafty. He also falls in with our Saxon Chronicle, in the taking of Woden, forefather of the Saxon kings, as a hero other than the god Woden. He seems to me to give us the true first meaning of a gossip, in "Thju, gå-moder." The gâ-mother, the village mother, by whom he means the village midwife. The Gâ, or Gau, or Gae, being the Friesic and Saxon community, answering more or less to our parish, and thence we see that a gossip was a gásib, a parish kinswoman or acquaint

ance.

I have seen some things from other such little sparks of light, and should wish that it could be shown from the forger's old books what legends or histories afforded him his matter, and what other grains of gold might be found in their heaps of sand.

W. BARNES.

MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.

JUNE, 1877.

PART VI.

CHAPTER XVI.

YOUNG MUSGRAVE.

THE Squire had made use of that discretion which is the better part of valour. When Randolph for the second time insisted upon coming to an understanding on family affairs, which meant deciding what was to be done on the Squire's death, Mr. Musgrave, not knowing how else to foil his son, got up and came away. "You can settle these matters with Mary," he said, quietly enough. It would not have been dignified to treat the suggestion in any other way. But he went out with a slight acceleration of his pulses, caused half by anger and half by the natural human thrill of feeling with which a man has his own death brought home to him. The Squire knew that there was nothing unnatural in this anticipation of his own end. He was aware that it required to be done and the emergency prepared for; but yet it was not agreeable to him. He thought they might have awaited the event, although in another point of view it would have been imprudent to await the event. He felt that there was something undesirable, unlovely in the idea of your children consulting over you for their own comfort afterwards. But then his children were no longer children, whose doings affected his affections much-they were middle-aged people, No. 212.-VOL. XXXVI.

[ocr errors]

as old as he was-and in fact it was important that they should come to an arrangement and settle everything. Only he could not--and this being so, would not do it; and he said to himself that the cause of his refusal was no reluctance on his own part to consider the inevitable certainty of his own death, but only the intolerableness of the inquiry in other respects. He walked out in a little strain and excitement of feeling, though outwardly his calm was intense. He steadied himself mind and body by an effort, putting a smile upon his lip and walking with a deliberate slow movement. He would have scorned himself had he showed any excitement; he strolled out with a leisurely slow step and a smile. They would talk the matter out, the two whom he had left; even though Mary's heart would be more with him than with her brother, still she would be bound to follow Randolph's lead. They would talk of his health, of how he was looking feeble, his age beginning to tell upon him, and how it would be very expedient to know what the conditions of his will were, and whether he had made any provision for the peculiar circumstances, or arrangement for the holding of the estate. ought to be the first person considered," he thought he heard Randolph saying. Randolph had always thought himself the first person to be considered. At

G

"I

this penetration of his own the Squire smiled again, and walked away very steadily, very slowly, humming a bar of an old-fashioned air.

He went thus into the broken woodland towards the east, and strolled in the chase like a man taking a walk for pleasure. The birds sang overhead, little rabbits popped out from the great tree trunks, and a squirrel ran up one of them and across a long branch, where it sat peering at him. All was familiar, certain, well known; he had seen the same sights and heard the same sounds for the last seventy years; and the sunshine shone with the same calm assurance of shining as at other times, and all this rustling, breathing life went on as it had always gone on. There was scarcely a leaf, scarcely a moss-covered stone that did not hide or shelter something living. The air was full of life; sounds of all kinds, twitter and hum and rustle, his own step among other movements, his own shadow moving across the sunshine. And he felt well enough, not running over with health and vigour as he had sometimes felt long ago, not disposed to vault over walls and gates in that unlicensed exuberance which belongs to youth only, but well enough, quite well in short, steady afoot, his breathing easy, his head clear, everything about him comfortable. Notwithstanding which his children were discussing, as in reference to a quite near and probable event what was to be done when he should die! The Squire smiled at the thought, but it was a smile which got fixed and painful on his lip and was not spontaneous or agreeable. The amusement to be got from such an idea is not of a genial kind. He was over seventy, and he knew, who better? that threescore and ten has been set down as the limit of mortal life. No doubt he must die-every man must die. It was a thing before him not to be eluded; the darkness, indeed, was very near according to all ordinary law; but the Squire did not feel it, was not in his soul convinced of it. He

believed it of course; all other men of his age die, and in their case the precautions of the family were prudent and natural; in his own case it is true he did not feel the necessity; but yet no doubt it must be so. He kept smiling to himself; so living as he was, and everything round, it was an odd sort of discord to think of dying. He felt a kind of blank before him, a sense of being shut in. So one feels when one walks along a bit of road surrounded with walls, a cul de sac from which there is no outlet. A sense of imprisonment is in it, of discouragement, too little air to breathe, too little space to move in certainly a disagreeable, stifling, choking sensation. Involuntarily a sigh came from his breast; and yet he smiled persistently, feeling in himself a kind of defiance to all the world, a determination to be amused at it all, notwithstanding the sentence they were passing against him.

While the Squire continued his walk, amid the twitter of the birds and the warble and the crackle and rustle and hum in the woods, and all the sounds of living, now and then another sound struck ina sound not necessarily near, for in that still summer air sounds travel easily an echo of voice, now one soft cry or laugh, now a momentary babble. It struck the old man as if an independent soul had been put into the scene. He knew very well what it meant very well. no one better. By very dint of his opposition to them he recognised the sound of the children wherever they were. They were there now, the little things whose presence had moved Randolph to this assault upon his father. They were altogether antagonistic to Randolph, or rather he to them; this gave them a curious perverse interest in their grandfather's eyes. They offered him an outlet from his cul de sac; the pressure seemed suddenly removed which had bowed him down; in a moment he felt relieved, delivered from that sense of confinement. A new idea was like the opening of a door to the old man; he was no longer

« EelmineJätka »