'We might censure the vices of his style, the disorder and perplexity of his narrative; but we must now take leave of this impartial historian, and reproach is silenced by our regret for such an irreparable loss.' So does Gibbon wave his stately adieu to the accurate and faithful guide,' whose steps he has followed with punctuality, sarcasm and profit. The records of the Roman Empire are lamentably imperfect; and one of the most curious features in literary history is the complete disappearance of a series of autobiographies written by some of the most famous of the emperors. What would we not give for the memoirs of Augustus and Vespasian, for the autobiographies of Hadrian and Severus, or the Commentaries of Constantine? They have perished; and no fragment has been quoted sufficiently substantial to enable us to estimate our loss. For centuries, too, the work of Ammianus was lost to Europe; and it was not until Poggio's discovery of the Hersfeld manuscript that this invaluable writer was restored to European scholarship.

The 15th century was a Ciceronian age; and in the circle of Italian purists the solecisms of the Syrian veteran were felt to stand in need of apology. The editio princeps by Sabinus (Rome, 1494) is prefaced by a letter to the Bishop of Bergamo, in which the editor craves that his author may not be entirely condemned for his use of the Latin word for deacon.' We do not know whether the Bishop was able to condone so grave a departure from classical usage. But to the modern eye it is one of the chief merits of this honest writer that his Latinity is not too pure, that it bears traces of the mingling of Greek, Latin and Christian elements, and that it reflects with care and fidelity the conditions and transactions of the age in which he lived.

H. A. L. FISHER.

Art. 1.-CECIL SPRING-RICE: IN MEMORIAM.

'I vow to thee, my country-all earthly things above-
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love-
The love that asks no question; the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

'And there's another country, I've heard of long ago—
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that
know.

We may not count her armies; we may not see her King;
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
And soul by soul and silently, her shining bounds increase,
And her ways are ways of gentleness and all her paths are

Peace.'

WASHINGTON,

Jan. 12, 1918.

C. A. S. R.

THESE lines were written by Sir Cecil Arthur Spring-Rice, His Majesty's Ambassador to the United States, on the eve of his final departure from Washington. The vow recorded in them had been kept long before he put it into words, for he had served his country for a quarter of a century with the love that never falters'; and, though he knew it not, he was already a dying man. With his singular clarity of vision he had realised from the beginning of the war that its issue might well depend in the last resort on the attitude of the great American Republic; and so acute a sense as his of the awful responsibility that rested in such circumstances upon a British Ambassador during the prolonged period of American hesitation and neutrality, would have told severely on a much more robust constitution. If diplomacy may be compared to active warfare, he had fought for two years in the most dangerous and important salient of the British lines-had fought, as diplomatists must ever fight, silently and patiently but indomitably under the poisoned shell-fire of German intrigues; and when, with the entry of the great American democracy into the war, he had done his bit' and was free to quit the post he had held with unswerving tenacity through

the days of stress and storm, he was, as we now know, doomed-or should we say, privileged?-to survive but for a short time the hour of his crowning achievement. It was, at any rate, the end for which he had himself prayed not long before in some verses written on the death of a great friend who had passed away as suddenly as he was fated to do:

'Make no long tarrying,* O my God,

May the downward path be swiftly trod,
Swiftly the falling feet descend;

Short the road and soon the end.

When the doom is spoken, let it fall;
And when Thou takest, then take all.

'And as the sun sinks in the sea,
Nor dim nor pale nor overcast,
By no sad change, nor slow degree,
Radiant and royal to the last:-
So take the gift Thou gavest me.'

Spring-Rice was an admirable product of his race and class and education, yet he had great originality. With Irish blood through his father, who was the younger son of the first Lord Monteagle, he inherited some of the qualities of his mother's North of England family, the Marshalls, and their affection for the English lakes. At Eton and at Balliol he not only achieved distinction as a scholar, but acquired a reputation for a ready and whimsical and sometimes rather mordant wit which clung to him, not always to his professional advantage, throughout life. His first efforts at poetry came out in an Eton book, 'Out of School'; and his Oxford Rhymes are not yet forgotten. But it was in his deep sense of reverence for all that was great and noble in the past, and in his love of all that is beautiful in nature and literature and art, that the influence of his early associations at school and college and at home was most strongly and permanently reflected. If his impatience of conventions sometimes startled the very conventional world

*Cf. Psalm 1xx, 5. Spring-Rice was a great reader of the Psalms. By a curious coincidence Psalm 1xx is appointed to be read at evensong on the 13th day of the month; and it was in the night of Jan. 13-14 last that he died with no long tarrying.

of diplomacy, he brought into it the qualities of sympathy and imagination which it often lacks.

Whenever the time comes for the record of his life to be written, it will show, I believe, in a very striking way, how his whole career seems to have been a preparation for the final struggle at Washington in which he stood immovably for the finest and most honourable traditions of British diplomacy against the brutal and corrupt methods of German statecraft. The old gibe-that a diplomatist is sent to lie abroad for the good of his country -was as repugnant to his own conception of a diplomatist's duties and functions as to his innate personal rectitude. He believed that the business of a diplomatist is in the first place that of a peacemaker who, without ignoring international differences or being blind to possibilities of open conflict, should labour unceasingly to mitigate and avert them within the limits compatible with national interests and national dignity; that in the second place it is the duty of a diplomatist not only to maintain friendly and close relations with the rulers and governing circles of the country to which he is accredited, but to familiarise himself as far as possible with all the great currents of public opinion and all the great movements, social, religious and political, which in the long run determine the policy of autocracies that mould them to their purpose as well as of democracies that merely reflect them; and thirdly that in his own personal attitude and mode of life the diplomatist should seek a golden mean between the reserve and reticence which may be easily misconstrued into aloofness and distrust, and the facile appeals to a popularity wider than he can properly aspire to in a foreign country without suspicion of overstepping the limits of a position necessarily circumscribed by the privileges it carries with it. For the outer trappings and the ceremonial side of his profession he had perhaps an excessive contempt. He preferred to rely on the more human qualities of simplicity, directness and transparent honesty in association with great power of work and a fine intellect.

More fortunate than most young diplomatists, who often have to serve an interminable apprenticeship of mere routine work and somewhat frivolous drudgery

Spring-Rice, after entering the Foreign Office in 1882, was soon brought into intimate contact, first as assistant private secretary to Lord Granville and then as préciswriter to Lord Rosebery, with the whole range of worldwide affairs which come within the purview of a British Foreign Secretary. His first post abroad, as well as his last, was Washington, where he spent with brief intervals all the earlier part of his career, gaining that thorough and sympathetic insight into American life and American character, and making the many enduring friendships, which were to serve him in such excellent stead when he returned there as Ambassador at the most critical period in the whole history of AngloAmerican relations.

The turning point in his career was his transfer as Second Secretary to the Embassy in Berlin in 1895. For, in the three years which he then spent in Germany, he witnessed some of the most significant manifestations of the aggressive spirit infused into the 'higher policy' of the German Empire after its youthful sovereign had thrown off the old Chancellor's tutelage. In the summer of 1895 Germany made her first bid for a place in the Far Eastern sun by turning against Japan and joining with Russia and France to despoil her of the fruits of her victories over China. In the early days of 1896 the Emperor's famous telegram to President Kruger sent through the whole British Empire the first thrill of alarm at the dangerous potentialities of Germanism. In 1897, after the Turkish armies, reorganised by a German military mission, had defeated the unfortunate Greeks in Thessaly, William II's effusive greetings to the 'ever-victorious' Sultan foreshadowed the price he was prepared to pay for the use of Turkey as his 'bridgehead to world-dominion.' In 1898 he watched, with an interest rendered keener by the intimate correspondence he kept up with many influential friends in Washington, the abortive efforts of the Wilhelmstrasse to persuade Great Britain, on the plea of European solidarity, into acting as the spearhead of at least a diplomatic offensive against the United States at the beginning of the SpanishAmerican war.

But Spring-Rice had not been content merely to study these outward manifestations of Germany's higher