PATER. He told me a thing I can scarcely credit.

FILIUS. Lord Northwick ?

PATER. He said the last time he ever saw Nelson he was lying asleep in Frascati's gambling house in Paris, with his head on Lady Hamilton's shoulder.

FILIUS. I don't think Nelson ever was in Paris. He must have meant Palermo. Frascati was a common name for a gambling house, you know, and there's a story something like it told with reference to Palermo in the Minto Life and Letters.

PATER. That's what he most distinctly told me.

FILIUS. The Old English Merry-making' never had a rail round it, had it?

PATER. Dear me, no. Why should it? There was no sort of popular crush to see it. Not so very long ago, by the way, I'd a letter from somewhere in America, out West, I think, from a man who told me he'd recently been very ill and had a long convalescence. Hanging in his room was a print of the picture and he thought I'd like to know how much it had cheered and helped him to get well. Of course, I did like to know it.

FILIUS. What was the first picture that ever had a rail round it in the Exhibition?

PATER. Wilkie's 'Reading the Gazette after Waterloo,' in 1821. Then came the 'Derby-Day,' in 1858, and we shouldn't have had that if Jacob Bell, who'd bought the picture, hadn't made a fuss about it.

FILIUS. Jacob Bell was the chemist, wasn't he, in Oxford Street?

PATER. Yes; he'd been a fellow-student of mine at Sass's. But he was always incorrigibly idle. One day, after a row with Sass, when he was doing that infernal ball we all had to draw, he made an elaborate drawing in the middle of it of a man hanging. I shall never forget Sass's face when he came in and saw it. was an end of Jacob Bell's career as an artist.

That

FILIUS. I suppose the general average of the Academy Exhibition has immensely improved in your time?

PATER. Oh, enormously. When I first remember it in Somerset House

FILIUS. By the way, whereabouts in Somerset House was it? PATER. Why, just through the arch, as you go in on the left up the steps. They left there to go to Trafalgar Square in '37. Well, when I remember the Exhibition first there were always a

few fine things-Wilkie, Turner, Constable, Landseer, Mulready and so on-but the rest was comparative rubbish. Now, I am astonished, amazed, at the general high level of excellence of the work done by outsiders. I have no hesitation in saying that the large majority of pictures hung in the Exhibition of my early time would be turned out nowadays.

FILIUS. There's generally been what one may call a picture of the year, hasn't there?

PATER. Lord! how many of them I can remember, and how good they've mostly been. Wilkie's Columbus,' and Landseer's 'Departure of Highland Drovers,' and 'There's Life in the Old Dog Yet'; Mulready's 'Whistonian Controversy,' and Eastlake's 'Christ Weeping over Jerusalem,' and Maclise's 'The Baron's Hall.' Then came Millais's 'Carpenter's Shop,' and Leighton's 'Cimabue and Holman Hunt's 'Scapegoat,' and Poynter's 'Hear, O Israel!'-wasn't it called?-down to Herkomer's 'Chelsea Pensioners,' and Lady Butler's 'Roll Call,' and Frank Dicksee's Harmony,' and Bramley's Sleepless Dawn,' and Fildes's 'Doctor.' And lots more. First-rate, nearly all of them. But the amazing thing is the increase of average excellence. Why, look what a wonderful drawing a student has to do now to get into the Academy schools at all. I saw some the other day, and I'm sure I couldn't have done them. Never, at any time.

FILIUS. By the way, whatever made Dickens attack the 'Carpenter's Shop' so savagely in 'Household Words'?

PATER. Ignorance. Millais was very angry about it. I met him a night or two after it was published, at a party at Loudon's in Porchester Terrace. He came up to me and said, 'I say, you know that fellow Dickens, don't you? Is he coming here to-night?' 'I'm sure I don't know,' I said. 'Why?' 'I'm going to give him a piece of my mind,' said Millais. 'Writing against my picture like that.' Whether he ever did or not, I'm sure I don't know. But, most certainly, they never were friends.

FILIUS. I suppose that was Loudon, the landscape gardener, who laid out the grounds of Strathfieldsaye? Didn't he have some ridiculous correspondence with the old Duke about the Waterloo beeches there?

PATER. Yes. He wrote a vile hand, and as the Duke read the letter he thought it was the Bishop of London writing to him about the breeches he wore at the battle. They went on for a long time at cross purposes, I believe; until one day Loudon met

the Duke in Piccadilly and asked why he hadn't answered his letter. Then the Duke hurried off in a cab to explain to the Bishop.

FILIUS. Well, sir, I must be getting home. You're looking uncommonly well.

PATER (simply). I should be worse if anything ailed me.

FILIUS. And to what, Mr. Frith, do you attribute the extraordinary good health

PATER (laughs). No, but look here !-I never was in bed except with the measles, when I was four. I don't count double pneumonia, three or four years ago; that might have happened to anybody. When I had measles, I remember our old nurse, Jane, lifting the sheet to show my mother how covered with spots I was. 'Just look at his carcass, mum,' she said. Those were her very words. I can hear her now.

FILIUS. Well, good-bye! It's a horrible night. Don't you

come out.

PATER (chuckles). I wasn't going to.

PREHISTORIC MAN ON THE DOWNS.

BY ARTHUR JOHN HUBBARD, M.D., AND
GEORGE HUBBARD, F.S.A.

NOTHING can be more interesting to the traveller than to survey from some elevated spot the road, winding away to lose itself on the horizon, by which he has journeyed. It is an interest of a similar character, only immeasurably greater in degree, which we experience in looking back to the horizon of time and examining the works that remain to us of the earliest civilisation in our land.

The road behind us is dim, and the traces which our far-away fathers have left upon the hills and plains of England are so multitudinous, and yet so little understood, that it is necessary to make use of certain definitions and limitations of the subject if we are to arrive at any answer which shall be at once accurate and intelligible.

First, let us say that for the purposes of this paper we shall use the word neolithic' as a general term, applicable not only to stones bearing the imprint of a certain style of workmanship, but to all the works done by the earliest men of whose lives we can find traces, and also to the workers themselves. Palæolithic man we regard as below the horizon.

The human interest of this wider aspect of the subject far transcends the attractions of flints and sherds in a museum. It is true that the chipped or polished surface of the stones, and the outlines of the pottery, not only show manual dexterity, but bear witness to the nature of the life which was led by the workers. This evidence is, however, only subsidiary to the greater testimony of plain and hill.

Next, although the traces of the work done by neolithic man are probably to be found over the greater part of the world, we shall limit ourselves to our own doorstep-to the downs in the southern counties of England, where the interest is most immediate.

Even when thus restricted geographically, we find that we are gazing into a profundity of time which is scarcely to be measured in centuries. When we consider that to change, and to follow the

will-o'-the-wisp which we call progress, is of the essence of man's contract with things in general, we perceive that it would be unreasonable to regard this vast period as one, or to assume that considerations applicable to one of its epochs will be applicable to all. Again we must limit ourselves.

Two stages only can be defined. Of these the earlier may be called the Hill-period, and the later the Plain-period. The demarcation is fairly distinct, in spite of the fact that the diverse remains of the two periods frequently occur in the same neighbourhood.

The men of the earlier period were earthworkers, those of the later period, stoneworkers. The former were concerned only with the primitive necessities of life, and their settlements, built of earth, are of the earth, earthy, and the purpose of every part of them is purely utilitarian. The latter, as at Avebury and Stonehenge, built vast sun-temples in the open country, and showed great mechanical skill in moving and setting up the ponderous rocks which now form their monuments.

It is quite otherwise in the Hill-period-that earlier time of which we write. On the downs we find that the dominating idea of the hillmen was terror of the plains, which had become habitable in the later period. But, before we may pursue the subject further, we must justify ourselves in daring to describe, even in general terms, a life so far removed from our own.

It is necessary to bear in mind that we are dealing with works which were executed on the downland, and that there, when once the chalk has been scored, or an embankment built, the seal that has been set is imperishable, unless man himself again comes to destroy his own handiwork. In wooded lands the falling and decaying leaves will in time reduce all to the same dead-level; in cultivated land, ploughshare and worm are constantly transforming the surface; in a loose soil the drifting sand will in time fill up the hollows; on the mountain-side the storms and streams destroy, and on the lowlands the floods obliterate the records. But, on the uplands of the downs, man's work is practically everlasting. There, the ever-renewed mantle of short, dense turf spreads itself over the surface, moulds itself to every detail, and reproduces in its green outlines the forms which were graven in the white chalk below. Egyptian sand has not been more faithful to its trust; and the English turf has preserved for us the VOL. XX.-NO. 119, N.S.

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