and Borroughcliffe, Mr. Marble of Marble-Head, Captain Tuck of the packet-ship Montauk, or Daggett, the tenacious commander of the Sea Lion of Martha’s Vineyard, must pass away some day and be utterly forgotten.  His sympathy is large, and his humour is as genuine—­and as perfectly unaffected—­as is his art.  In certain passages he reaches, very simply, the heights of inspired vision.

He wrote before the great American language was born, and he wrote as well as any novelist of his time.  If he pitches upon episodes redounding to the glory of the young republic, surely England has glory enough to forgive him, for the sake of his excellence, the patriotic bias at her expense.  The interest of his tales is convincing and unflagging; and there runs through his work a steady vein of friendliness for the old country which the succeeding generations of his compatriots have replaced by a less definite sentiment.

Perhaps no two authors of fiction influenced so many lives and gave to so many the initial impulse towards a glorious or a useful career.  Through the distances of space and time those two men of another race have shaped also the life of the writer of this appreciation.  Life is life, and art is art—­and truth is hard to find in either.  Yet in testimony to the achievement of both these authors it may be said that, in the case of the writer at least, the youthful glamour, the headlong vitality of the one and the profound sympathy, the artistic insight of the other—­to which he had surrendered—­have withstood the brutal shock of facts and the wear of laborious years.  He has never regretted his surrender.

AN OBSERVER IN MALAYA {3}—­1898

In his new volume, Mr. Hugh Clifford, at the beginning of the sketch entitled “At the Heels of the White Man,” expresses his anxiety as to the state of England’s account in the Day-Book of the Recording Angel “for the good and the bad we have done—­both with the most excellent intentions.”  The intentions will, no doubt, count for something, though, of course, every nation’s conquests are paved with good intentions; or it may be that the Recording Angel, looking compassionately at the strife of hearts, may disdain to enter into the Eternal Book the facts of a struggle which has the reward of its righteousness even on this earth—­in victory and lasting greatness, or in defeat and humiliation.

And, also, love will count for much.  If the opinion of a looker-on from afar is worth anything, Mr. Hugh Clifford’s anxiety about his country’s record is needless.  To the Malays whom he governs, instructs, and guides he is the embodiment of the intentions, of the conscience and might of his race.  And of all the nations conquering distant territories in the name of the most excellent intentions, England alone sends out men who, with such a transparent sincerity of feeling, can speak, as Mr. Hugh Clifford does, of the place of toil and exile as “the land which is very dear to me, where the best years of my life have been spent”—­and where (I would stake my right hand on it) his name is pronounced with respect and affection by those brown men about whom he writes.