BOOKS.
ONE OF THE KINGSLEYS.*
IT is worth noticing that the records of intellectual eminence in this century show a peculiar number of cases where the distinction has not concentrated itself upon an individual, but diffused itself over a generation or even two generations of one family. The Brontes, the Napiers, the Arnoids, the Wordsworths, the Coleridgee, the Rossettis, the Lyttons, are without parallel, so far as our knowledge serves us, in previous centuries ; and in the group of distinguished family names the Kingsleys furnish an instance quite as remarkable as any of these we have cited,—indeed, perhaps more remarkable in the equality and the likeness of the gift. Of the four best known among them, Charles and Henry Kingsley, Lucas Malet, and Miss Mary Kingsley herself, who in this book sketches a sort of family chronicle, all were endowed by Nature with the gift of story-telling; and three of the four, at any rate, were visited with that strange drawing in the blood, that nostalgia, for the lands they had never known, and specially for the tropics. This, as Miss Kingsley notes with justice, makes itself felt, not only in the work of Henry Kingsley, whose nature was for ever straining back to the blazing suns of Australia, whither this instinct had carried him in youth, but also in the ballads where Charles Kingsley put into words the desire of the "last buccaneer" for the "pleasant Isle of Aves,"—and, moreover, in his West Indian book, At Last. These two characteristics, the desire to see strange lands, and the skill to tell what he had seen, were present not less strongly in the third of the brothers,—so strongly, indeed, that they overpowered in him the will to give a per- manent shape to his thoughts and his experiences. Miss Kingsley makes it very plain that except in this industry, this ability to settle down to the work in hand, George • Notes on Sport and Travel. By George Henry Kingsley, M.D., P1.3.. &e. With a Memoir by his Daughter, Mary H. Kingsley: London Mnn:an and Co. Ss. 65. net.) Kingsley was in no way the inferior of his brothers. One is bound to say that from the world's point of view this makes all the difference. To the chance of fame that he might win as a writer, and to the certainty of money that he might earn by settling down to a London practice, he preferred the free and unhampered enjoyment of the adventurous life which circumstances offered him ; and it would be a rash man who would pronounce him unwise. He had his life, and he lived it; perpetuating both by example and precept that willing-
ness to wander and take hazards, that devotion to "the bright eyes of danger," which is not the least part of our common endowment ; and his medical skill gave him the power to sow his path with kindnesses. The chapters in
Two Years Ago which record the work done by Tom Thttrnall in a cholera-stricken village are a brother's tribute to the
humanity and courage of a brother shown among the Flint. shire people in 1849. Moreover, the sportsman and man of adventure was also a man, of science and the main work of his lifetime is not negligible because it is uncompleted :-
"He has left enough in manuscript," says Miss Kingsley, "to fill volumes on all manner of branches of obscure learning, mainly on early English literature and Semitic tradition. The most complete among these manuscripts is a work on the idea involved in sacrificial rites; but I, who for many years was his underworker on that subject, collecting for him accounts given by travellers of sacrificial rites and views taken on the question by German authors, know that he did not consider it sufficiently complete for publication. I do not like, therefore, to make him responsible for it now that he is dead and unable to give to it all the care and further research his death stayed him in."
And it is only just to attribute to his inspiration much of the valuable research into strange religions among dangerous peoples that has been carried out by his daughter and helper ; all of which, we take it, goes toward the completion of the inquiry that he was content to push, after the manner of scientists, ever so little forward in a man's lifetime.
There is nothing of abstract science in this volume, which consists, first, of a prefatory memoir about two hundred pages long, written by Miss Kingsley, but made up mainly of extracts from letters and unpublished or uncompleted sketches of her father's; and, secondly, of ten papers by him, reprinted from various magazines, which describe sport in
every variety of climate and in pursuit of every kind of fin, fur, and feather,—of trout under Canadian ice, sharks off a harbour in New Zealand, stags on a Sutherland hillside, chamois on the Wildgrad Kogle, and, for a climax, the fox, hunted—prok pudor 1—with shot-guns by chorus-singing Germans in the valley of the Rhine. You may pick and choose ; and the title of an essay need never prejudice you, for the contents are sure to be miscellaneous. On the Sutherland hillside you shall bear the story of the last wolf slain in Scotland—and a moving tale it is—a tale of a tails since the slayer was just in time to seize the mother wolf as she plunged into the hole where the slayer's son was dealing with the mother wolf's cubs. In "The Log on H.M.S. St. George" you shall find a vivid description of a Dervish
dance in Algiers ; and in almost any one of them you shall meet intercalated remarks upon the wickedness of convents
and monasteries, and the beauties of snipe-shooting. George Kingsley, so far as we can judge, held every passionate prejudice of his brother Charles. and held it with a re- doubled fervour ; whether it related to he iniquities of Rome or the virtues of a Scandinavian stock. They are very useful prejudices to go through life with, but one woak sooner talk about his views on snipe-shooting The diffusioz of this admirable bird—whose " skape 1 skape Georg( Kingsley preferred (and said so) to the music of nightingalei —is a manifest sign of the kindness to the Anglo-Saxon race. Wherever Englishmen go they find snipe to shoot, among a population not worthy of their advantages. Dr. Kingsley plainly thought meanly of the people of Lisbon, because they left the snipe undisturbed in the adjoining pumpkin-fields. But the crown and cream of his experiences was at the Fountain of Cyane in Sicily, where he wandered- " Shooting snipe amidst magnificent tufts of papyrus and beds of the most exquisite wild narcissus—infinitely sweeter than the cultivated ones—and acres and acres of lovely sweet. scented purple iris, with the vultures soaring above us and the swallows skimming over our heads—and all this at Christmas- time."
This took place during a cruise on the Duke of St. Al bun' yacht. His travel had then confined itself to Europe, first in independent roaming as a student, then as private physician to various noblemen whose Scotch demesnes afforded him at home the chance to gratify his love of sport. It was in 1867 that be went with the Earl of Pembroke to the South Seas on the cruise recorded in that once popular book "South Sea Bubbles, by the Earl and the Doctor." His later experiences in the Rocky Mountains were made in company with Lord Danraven ; and Miss Kingsley is able to demonstrate that he was equally willing to rough it under the tropics or in the frozen snows. In the North-West he foregathered with Colonel Cody (" Buffalo Bill "), of whose picturesque appear- ance and romantic personality he left a glowing description. But there is no use in enumerating the subjects treated of in this fascinating book. Still, we cannot but mention a paper on "Certain Delusions of the North Britons," which declares that the kilt, so far from being a national institution of the Highlander, is merely a garment invented for con- venience and decency by an Englishman named Rawlinson who had to employ Highlanders in or about the year 1728; and the remark, arising out of certain observations among the Maoris, that the only sure way to kill cannibalism among a people is to implant a healthy taste for alcohol. Will Miss Kingsley say how far this latter view is borne out by recent history in the Congo Free State?
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