pitying eye which the benevolent assume when viewing the insane. Addressing him with, "How ever did these shells come into these rocks?" "When God made the rocks, he made the shells in them" was the damping reply.'

Yet, mainly from his enthusiastic interest in all creation, Livingstone became early in life a man of deeply religious feeling and mode of life, though disinclined to give definite allegiance to any specific branch of the Christian Church, unless it were-in later years-the Church of England. There was much in the work and the missionary efforts of the Church of Rome which appealed to him strongly, though to many of her doctrines he could not subscribe.

As a youth he desired to go out as a medical missionary '— the phrase was a new one then, though it describes so many among the best types of missioners at the present day-and to accomplish this purpose he walked into and out of Glasgow (sixteen miles there and back) several times a week to attend the classes of Glasgow University in Greek, Medicine and Divinity, paying his fees out of his increased wages as an expert cotton-spinner ( I never received a farthing of aid from anyone'). Originally he had intended, after getting his degree as a Licentiate of Physicians and Surgeons, to go to China on his own account, having ideas far beyond those of his time as to the future awakening of China, and the need for the civilization of the world that that awakening should be on Christian lines. But friends at Glasgow suggested a career under the London Missionary Society (already famous for its successful propaganda through men like Robert Moffat). He adopted this suggestion because of the 'perfectly unsectarian character of this society. It sends neither episcopacy, nor presbyterianism, nor independency, but the gospel of Christ to the heathen.'

In after-life Livingstone came to see that bishops have their uses the mission he himself instituted by his personal effortsthat of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge to Central Africa -was an episcopal one. But at that stage and age (1835-40) it is quite certain that there was only one missionary society existing which could have long retained his services and those of other noteworthy pioneers of keen intelligence who desired to preach nothing but the essence of Christianity and not become involved in disastrous apologia for the truths' of the Old Testament which led poor honest Colenso into his martyrdom for the cause of true religion-the seeking after truth.

The war which broke out between Britain and China through the insistence on free access to specified Chinese trade-markets (a war

with a bad name, because it was waged to enable Indian opium manufacturers to send this drug to China; but really a struggle which was to begin the awakening of China from the paralysing despotism of the Manchu Tartars) diverted Livingstone's thoughts from China to South Africa, and he embarked for Capetown in December, 1840, at the age of nearly twenty-seven years. So that he was no raw enthusiast, but had devoted some six and a half years (slaving nearly all this time at the cotton mill) to the study of Greek, Hebrew, Medicine and Surgery, History and Theology. He was probably supported for about a year by the London Missionary Society after being accepted on probation, and while he pursued his studies in England.

His appearance, when at this period of his life, had little that was remarkable or even prepossessing about it. He was about five feet seven in height certainly not taller-so many times is he referred to by his sportsmen-friends in Africa as the plucky little missionary,' the 'determined little man'; slim, rather loose-jointed, but with well-shaped, clever hands. His recurved chin and full, 'obstinate' under-lip gave him a rather sullen look; his complexion was sallow, the face rather lined, eyes brown, hair, moustache and eyebrows, black. The eyes were probably hazel, and this with his dull white skin and dark hair gave him a distinctly Spanish look. He was in fact of that Iberian type so often to be seen among Highlanders, and in the Pictish regions of Scotland.

One who saw and knew both-great as the interval of time was between them-has told me that there was about Livingstone's face an expression which he saw again long afterwards in the features of Robert Louis Stevenson, and in some directions a spiritual affinity also.

Livingstone went out to Africa determined to explore. To that end, and after his fashion of never losing an opportunity to acquire knowledge, he studied on board the ship which took him to South Africa, via Brazil, the difficult art of taking astronomical observations for the fixing of latitude and longitude-twice as difficult on land because of the absence of a natural horizon. The orders of his Society sent him immediately to southern Bechuanaland whence, at Moffat's advice or instruction, he went farther north to the Molopo River. From the French Evangelical missionaries en

1 Livingstone in course of time lost the somewhat Spanish look of his earlier manhood. Before he was fifty, the moustache and whiskers were grey-white, and the abundant head-hair was turning to iron grey. He was only sixty when he died, and by that time was a white-haired man.

route he heard the stories that had been taking shape for ten years or more, of a great lake, a land of running waters and big trees to the north-west, beyond the Kalahari Desert; and at once the wish came to him (recorded for us in one of his letters) that he might be the first explorer to reach that lake, at any rate to get there before the Frenchmen.

Livingstone's was not a perfect character, or he would have been as cloying to study and to read about as one or two of his contemporaries in Africa, lay and clerical, whose biographies ought to edify, but somehow exasperate where they do not bore. Were these great pioneers, these splendid, fearless gentlemen, compact of other clay (one asks oneself, remembering, as a marginal commentary, how there is no one of our intimate acquaintance who can be pronounced faultless)? Did they never lose their tempers, never behave unjustly, never refuse monetary help to an aunt, a brother, or a castaway? Did they never fail to read the lessons in the village church except when obliged to absent themselves from home on business or errands of mercy? Did they never display envy, malice, or uncharitableness? Apparently not. The minutest scrutiny can detect no flaw in three or four personages who have played great parts in the history of South and Central Africa and of India as well. They were not even to be pitied on the physical side, but were of goodly stature, of handsome appearance, and of a bravery which knew no qualm.

From them one turns almost with relief to Livingstone, who, without the keen intelligence animating his face, might with truth have been called-especially in early middle age-an ugly little man, who, though, brave and resolute, was intelligent enough to know fear and anxiety, and to avoid needless perils. Oswell, his friend, admirer, and companion, insists on the obstinacy of his disposition-from the good side, of course. In no account of him I have ever come across is half enough made of the curious, persistent sticking to his line of action. If he hadn't been a Scotchman one might have called it obstinacy, but with this man it was more : a very quiet, dogged persistency, unwilling to render any explanation of how and why, but still quite clearly defined in his inner man.' This persistency was coupled with a kind of conviction-never precisely put into words-of his predestination as an opener-up of Africa, a missionary of knowledge, one fore-ordained, whether in Eastern Asia or Southern Africa, to show the way to the inquiring white man and induct the backward peoples into the way of lifethis last in a sense so broad and comprehensive as to unite the

suffrages of mid-nineteenth-century divines and early twentiethcentury philosophers. But his great obstinacy prevented him on several occasions from taking the right course, either in the direction of laying a basis for a British-protected Zambezia (a thing he had set his heart on), or in solving the true secret of the Lualaba. Obstinacy and the fear that he might be forestalled in this great discovery by someone else sent him to his death on the swamps of Bangweulu; whereas it is just possible that, had he returned to Europe under Stanley's protecting care, he might have lived another ten years and have greatly hastened by his influence the evolution of Central Africa towards freedom and happiness.

His sense of predestination made him slightly arrogant as a young man, too summary and crisp in his judgments of others, condemning indeed (in his private letters) as inept, petty-minded, or scandal-loving, colleagues (like Edwards) whom, on other evidence and on their subsequent achievements, one must pronounce to have been worthy men, of grit and intelligence. His treatment of Thomas Baines on the second Zambezi expedition was not quite fair; and, indeed, on this forlorn hope-the expedition to survey the Zambezi, Shiré, and Lake Nyasa, and open them up to British commerce and Mission work, without either the co-operation or the submission of the Portuguese-his temper, formerly restrained and placable under the severest trials and disappointments, gave way to an irritability and moodiness which produced a coolness from time to time between the leader and the rest of the staff of the expedition. The book which describes this Zambezi enterprise of 1858-64-a good deal of it written by his brother and secretary, Charles Livingstone, a man of somewhat disagreeable disposition— is not fair towards the Portuguese officials on the Zambezi. However much these last may have disliked the advent of the British in what they had regarded for three hundred and fifty years as their private preserves, they behaved towards Livingstone, his officers and men with singular forbearance, and even remarkable generosity. But for the Portuguese the expedition might once or twice have met with a complete disaster, perhaps even the death of nearly all the staff-owing to the extreme difficulties attending the negotiation of the bars at the Zambezi mouths, and the shoals, rocks and rapids of that uncertain water-highway. On his first contact with this nation in Angola, Livingstone wrote of them in glowing terms and did them full justice: May God remember

1 A pioneer of the first rank, but rather a conceited and superficially educated person.

them in their day of need!' He it was who recorded what might otherwise have passed unnoticed, that a Portuguese official, Senhor Candido de Costa Cardoso, had in 1846 forestalled him in the discovery of Lake Nyasa.

But in compiling the records of the second Zambezi expedition, he attempts to throw too much blame on the Portuguese for his failure in that part of his scheme which meant the foundation of British trading posts and mission stations in Nyasaland, and the opening up of the Zambezi generally. He failed in reality, because neither he nor anyone else appreciated the enormous difficulties of the vague and vast enterprise on which he had been somewhat recklessly sent out by the British Government in 1857: the unhealthy climate, the germ-diseases conveyed by mosquitoes, flies and ticks, the frightful difficulties of navigation in the Zambezi and Shiré, the devastation of Nyasaland which was going on by the Muhammadan Yao slave-traders (for which the Portuguese were no more to blame than the British, the slaves being obtained for the Zanzibar market), the absolute impossibility of conducting either missionary, planting, or trading work without some small force of armed men to keep order. The Portuguese were barely able to retain the lands they claimed and occupied, and even if they had enlarged their forces so as to protect British colonists and teachers in Nyasaland, the last thing Livingstone desired was to admit their right to do so or their governing rights over any part of Zambezia. It was an utterly false position, one too often characteristic of the British Government in the early stages of colonial enterprise, when the great idea of Downing Street was to avoid responsibility, to maintain a fluid, non-committal policy, and to get some one else to pull the chestnuts out of the fire; to be commended if they succeeded, and if they merely burnt their fingers, then to be denounced with unctuous rectitude. Livingstone and Kirk and their companions -not forgetting the two excellent bluejackets, Rowe and Hutchinsworked like heroes from 1858 to 1863-4 (Livingstone, when the British Government abruptly cancelled the commission for the expedition, stayed on alone for nearly a year to finish his surveys and inquiries), and what they achieved for geography and the physical study of Africa was most noteworthy. They had practically discovered and had surveyed the coasts of a great lake-Nyasa-had

'It is practically certain that in his first great journey to Angola and across the continent Livingstone would have perished from disease, poverty, or the hostility of natives had it not been for the active, warm-hearted assistance of the Portuguese,