was not prominent or exhaustive in its claims upon his time and energy. The appointment came about at the period of Mr. Gladstone's dilemma, when called upon to form a government after the general election of 1892. He must get Ministers somewhere outside the ranks of seceded Liberals. So inter alia he made Seale-Hayne Paymaster-General. The secret of what duties pertained to the office, the new incumbent preserved with a quiet dignity that paralysed curiosity. No one was quite certain whom the Paymaster paid. But it was clear from the estimates that no one paid the Paymaster. Seale-Hayne was a wealthy man, owning a castle in Devonshire and a town house whose walls were decorated with rare copies of the Old Masters, its cellars stocked with fine vintage port. In lieu of salary Mr. Gladstone made the Paymaster-General a Privy Councillor. Moreover, ministerial office carried with it the privilege of an assured seat on one or other of the front benches, according as his party was in power or in opposition. Seale-Hayne was a regular attendant at the Parliamentary sittings, but rarely troubled the House with a speech. Indeed I do not remember ever hearing him in debate. If demand had been for a song it would be different. Passionately fond of music, gifted with a fine baritone voice, he maintained, collaterally with Ministerial office, membership of the Royal Choir, Albert Hall.

When at the end of the Session of 1892 Mr. Gladstone's muchharassed Ministry went down to Greenwich to the fish dinner, the Paymaster-General was called upon for a song. He promptly responded by chanting 'Down among the Dead Men.' Had the songster been anyone but Seale-Hayne satire would have been suspected. The Paymaster-General was above suspicion on that

score.

The tune suited his voice to half a note; so he rendered it.

Blundell Maple came into the House of Commons too late in life, was too busy elsewhere, at Tottenham Court Road and Newmarket, to make his mark. He happened to touch it in his last active session, when the great scandal of the army horse remounts stirred the nation to depths of angry indignation. There were two diverse things of which Blundell Maple was supreme, unerring judge. One was an Eastern carpet, the other a horse. Had the duty of supplying remounts during the war been committed to him, many a lamentable episode in the long campaign would have turned out differently. Unasked, he devoted much of his valuable time to saving the country from loss and the army

from peril in the matter of remounts. For guerdon he was snubbed by the sapient War Office authorities, and scolded by the committee appointed to enquire into their laches. In almost the last speech he made in the House he, in broken voice, described his treatment when summoned before the Remount Committee to give evidence. He fought long, quietly, but obstinately with prejudice against a tradesman, a prejudice most openly displayed by peers whose grandfathers had been mercers or their fathers brewers. He was lying on what proved to be his deathbed when news reached him of his election to the Jockey Club, an honour for years withheld from a man who spent unlimited sums on the Turf, and always ran straight.

I made the acquaintance of Lord Rowton in the lobby of the House of Commons which he frequented for more than thirty years. Even when Lord Beaconsfield was dead, and he himself was a peer, the old instincts of the Whip brought him back to his former hunting ground. Ostensibly he looked in for a pinch of snuff, drawn from the box kept by the principal doorkeeper pro bono publico. Being there his quick eye took in the scene, he noted the persons present, and found opportunity to fill up half an hour by picking up opinions and little bits of information. They were of no official use to him in later days. But it had been his business, whilst his chief was alive, and in his retirement he pursued it.

Twenty-five years ago there was nothing more pleasant in public life than the relations of Disraeli and Monty Corry. In a fashion, differing from that sung in immortal verse, the companionship was the realisation of Coleridge's dream that 'Youth and Age are housemates still.' Lord Rowton's reverent affection for his old master remained warm to the last. In intimate conversation he rarely omitted to make some personal reference to him.

The last time I was in Lord Rowton's company was at Harrogate in the August of last year. Hearing we were staying with a friend on The Stray, he called to leave a card. I had not met him since the spring, and was shocked at the change in his appearance. After an unbroken period of perennial youth, prolonged over his sixtieth year, he had suddenly finally broken down. He was suffering so acutely from lumbago that he regretfully protested it would be impossible for him to get out of his cab and walk up the steps. Prevailed upon by our host, he managed, with assistance, to enter the house and stay to luncheon. Quickly his spirits

rose.

He made light of recurrent twinges of pain, and talked with all his ancient vivacity. Inevitably his memory ran back to his old chief, about whom he freely spoke. Among other things, he related how Disraeli told him that the first communication he had with the lady who subsequently became his wife was dated from an inn bearing the extraordinary name The Cow and Snuffers.' Going down on electioneering business to the neighbourhood in which her husband lived, he had put up at this inn.

The luncheon was prolonged over two hours, Lord Rowton contributing most of the conversation. As he left to return to his hotel he, by way of showing how completely he was recovered, did a step of the hornpipe in the hall. Then, linked arm in arm with unseen, unfelt Death, he got into his cab and passed away out of my life, and, within a few months, out of his own. The next I heard of him was by another of those cable messages announcing the death of old and treasured friends.

MACEDONIA-AND AFTER?

FOR the second time in his troubled reign Abdul Hamid II. has been forced to place his administration of a great province, whose frontier lies but a few hours from his capital, under the tutelage of Christian Powers. He has tried principiis obstare and failed; and the parallel between the first steps taken to 'reform' Macedonia and those by which Eastern Roumelia was detached from his sovereignty twenty years ago is too close to escape him. There are circumstances which add complication to the Macedonian case, and doubtless neither do these escape him. Adroitly manipulated, the latent jealousies of the two intervening Powers, too long rivals in Balkan diplomacy to go far hand in hand, as well as the heterogeneity of the Macedonian population (which is more evenly and variously divided than the East Roumelian), and the existence of a warlike and still faithful Albania in its rear, may yet clog the wheels of fate. But he knows that the Concert of the Powers has never yet allowed a province of his Empire, taken under its official protection in any sense or degree, to return to its former state; and that all such provinces as lie in Europe have developed from a protected towards an autonomous condition. These considerations must give seriously to think' in Yildiz at this moment; for the Sultan's stake in Macedonia is far more serious than that which was involved in the other lost Balkan provinces. Sooner or later it will be found that, in playing for the basins of the Mesta, Struma, Vardar, and Vistritza, the Ottoman Power has been staking its continued existence in Europe.

Looking back over the nineteenth century, few students of Balkan politics would now dispute that the successive losses of Servia, of Roumania, and of Bulgaria with Eastern Roumelia, hardly relinquished after terrible sacrifices as was each of these provinces, have amounted, by a paradox, to an eventual gain to the Porte. In each case, as in those also of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a considerable revenue, the political allegiance of numerous Moslems, and the impaired prestige of the Caliph, had to be put to debit. But that was all the loss. No further province was directly involved; no bulwark of Ottoman power was found to have been VOL. XVI.-NO. 92, N.S.

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abandoned, for these provinces had long been an embarrassment and a menace; but, on the contrary, a new bulwark had been raised in their autonomy. When all was over, and Russia had withdrawn, it was seen that the emancipated provinces were fortifying themselves rather against Moscow than against Constantinople; and the Sultan was left to enjoy a new security behind a screen of buffer states. It is due more to the existence of free Roumania and Bulgaria and Servia than to any other fact, that Abdul Hamid has been on his throne for above a quarter of a century without meeting a European Power in arms. Of which among his predecessors can the like be said?

The one reservation which, however, must be made brings us to the present point. The emancipation of the other Balkan provinces was sure sooner or later to entail a Macedonian question, and that question, if solved in the same way, would change the whole face of the account. In, and by itself, Macedonia is not worth more than Bulgaria or Bosnia. The revenue, which will be lost with it, when fully emancipated, is not greater than vanished with the former of these provinces; its peasantry is worth less to the Ottoman military system than the militia of the latter used to be. True, there is a Moslem population in the Macedonian valleys, somewhat more numerous than that in any one of the other lost provinces (not excepting Bosnia) at the time of their detachment, and in part it is of older settlement, for there were colonies of Seljuk Turks planted on the Struma, the Vardar, and the Vistritza before Othman; and the future conquerors of Constantinople had added others, as far north as the Kossovo plain, before they marched to make an end of the Byzantine Empire. As the sentiment of the Moslem world in favour of these communities may be greater, so may the Caliph's loss of prestige, if he must now abandon them to Giaur rule, or transport them exiles to Asia. But these losses are trifles compared with another and supplementary one, which that of Macedonia seems inevitably to entail-the loss of Albania.

This momentous consequence, which the Powers, foreseeing, hastened to avert in 1878 by tearing up the Treaty of San Stefano and annulling Macedonian Bulgaria, and the Sultan so dreaded that his consent to the cession even of the southern pashalik of Yanina was not to be obtained, will follow Macedonian emancipation as surely as night follows day. A glance at the map, and a moment's reflection on the maritime impotence of