Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 392, June, 1848

But the French Revolution came, sent to try the infirmities of all thrones. It found Victor Amadeus the Third sitting calmly in the seat of his forefathers, and wholly unsuspicious of the barbarian storm which was to sweep through his valleys. The French burst on Nice in 1792, then on Oniglia, and stripped Savoy of all its outworks to the Alps.

But Napoleon came, another shape of evil. While the king was preparing to defend the passes of the mountains, the young French general turned the line of defence by the sea, and poured his army into Piedmont. A succession of rapid battles carried him to the walls of Turin; and the astonished king, in 1796, signed a treaty which left his dominions at the mercy of Republicanism.

On the death of the king in this year of troubles, his son, Charles Emanuel IV., succeeded him. But he was now a vassal of France; he saw his country dismembered, his armies ruined, and his people groaning under the cruel insults and intolerable exactions which have always characterised French conquest. Unable to endure this torture, he retired to Sardinia, and from Sardinia finally went to Rome, and there abdicated in favour of his brother, Victor Emanuel.

The new monarch, whose states were undergoing from year to year all the capricious and agonising vicissitudes of Italian revolution, at length shared in the general European triumph over Napoleon, and at the peace of 1814 returned to his dominions, augmented, by the treaty of Vienna, by the important addition of Genoa.

But his return was scarcely hailed with triumph by his subjects, when the example of Spain was followed in an insurrection demanding a new constitution. The king, wearied of political disturbance, and being without offspring, now determined to follow the example of his predecessor, and gave up the crown to his brother, Charles Felix, appointing, as provisional regent, Prince Charles Albert of Savoy Carignano, a descendant of Victor Amadeus I.

After a reign of ten years, undistinguished by either vices or virtues, but employed in the harmless occupations of making roads and building schools, the king died in 1831, and was succeeded by the Prince of Carignano.

Charles Albert has now been seventeen years upon the throne; yet, to this hour, his character, his policy, and his purposes, are the problems of Italy. His whole course strongly resembles those biographies of studied mystery and sleepless ambition – those serpent obliquities and serpent trails – which marked the career of the mediæval princes of Italy; but which demanded not only a keen head, but a bold resolve, – Castruccio, with a Machiavel, for the twin image of the perfection of an Italian king.

The object of universal outcry for his original abandonment of "Young Italy," – an abandonment which may find its natural excuse in the discovery that Young Italy was digging up the foundations of the throne, on whose first step his foot was already placed, and to which within a few years he actually ascended; – from that period he has fixed the eyes of all Italy upon his movements, as those of the only possible antagonist who can shake the power of Austria. He has at least the externals of a power to which Italy can show no rival: 50,000 of the best troops south of the Alps, which a blast of the trumpet from Turin can raise to 100,000; a country which is almost a continued fortress, and a position which, being in the command of the passes of Italy, can meet invasion with the singular probability of making his mountains the grave of the invader, or open Italy to the march of an auxiliary force, which would at once turn the scale. His government has exhibited that cool calculation of popular impulse and royal rights, by which, without a total prohibition of change, he has contrived to keep the whole power of government in his hands. Long watched by Austria, he had never given it an opportunity of direct offence; and if he has at length declared war, his whole past conduct justifies the belief, that he has either been driven to the conflict by some imperious necessity, or that he has assured himself, on deliberate grounds, of the triumph of his enterprise.

He has now taken the first step, and he has taken it with a daring which must either make him the master of Italy, or make him a beggar and an exile. By rushing into war with Austria, he has begun the game in which he must gain all or lose all. Yet we doubt that, for final success, far as he has gone, he has gone far enough. On the day when he unfurled the standard against Austria, he should have proclaimed Italian independence. We look upon the aggression on Austria as a violation of alliance which must bring evil. But that violation being once resolved on, the scabbard should have been thrown away, and the determination published to the world, that the foreign soldier should no longer tread the Italian soil. This declaration would have had the boldness which adds enthusiasm to interest. It would have had the clearness which suffers no equivocation; and it would have had the comprehensiveness which would include every man of Italian birth, and not a few in other countries, to whom unlicensed boldness is the first of virtues.

The private habits of this prince are said to be singularly adapted to the leader of a national war. His frame is hardy, his manner of living is abstemious, and his few recreations are manly and active. He has already seen war, and commanded a column of the French army in the campaign of 1823, which broke up the Spanish liberals, and reinstated the king upon the throne. But, with all those daring qualities, he never forgets that the Italian is by nature a superstitious being; that he is, at best, a compound of the mime and the monk – with the monk three-fourths predominating; and that no man can hope to be master of the national mind who does not take his share in the priestly slavery of the people. This accounts for the extraordinary reverence which from time to time he displays in the ceremonials of the church, for his sufferance of the monkish thousands which blacken the soil of his dominions, and for his tolerance of the Jesuits, whom he, as well as probably every other sovereign of Europe, dreads, and whom every other sovereign of Europe seems, by common consent, to be fixed on expelling from his dominions.

What the ulterior views of the King may be, of course, it would require a prophet to tell. Whether the crown of Lombardy is among the dreams of his ambition, whether the Italian hatred of Austria stimulates his councils, or whether the mere Italian passion for freedom urges him to stake his own diadem on the chances of the field for the liberation of the peninsula, are questions which can be answered only by the event; but he has at last advanced, – has menaced the Austrian possession of Italy; has pressed upon the Austrian army in its retreat; has reduced it to the defensive; and has brought the great question of Austrian dominion to the simple arbitration of the sword.

The history of the Sardinian campaign has been hitherto a history of skirmishes. The Piedmontese troops have advanced, and Radetski has retired. The Austrian position is memorable for its strength, and has been successively adopted by every defender of the Austro-Italian provinces. Peschiera, Verona, and Mantua form the three angles of an irregular triangle, of which the line of the Mincio forms the base. Charles Albert, by crossing the Mincio at Goito, is now within the triangle. The three fortresses are strong, and he has already made some attempts on Peschiera, which commands the head of the Lake of Garda. Those attempts have failed, and Verona is now his object; and there too he appears to have already undergone some failures. The true wonder is, that he has been suffered to remain a moment making these experiments, and that Austria, with 300,000 men under arms, should allow an Italian army, of 50,000 men at the most, to shut up her general, and lord it over half of her Italian territory. All this is an enigma. It is equally an enigma, that the Austrian commander-in-chief should have allowed himself to be driven out of the capital of Lombardy by the rabble of the streets, and have marched out with a garrison of 15,000 men, before a mob of half their number. He ought to have fought in Milan to his last battalion. If he had been embarrassed by orders from home, he ought to have resigned at once. A heavy blow at the insurrection in Milan would have extinguished Italian rebellion.

He has now a position in which he might fight with perfect security for his flanks and rear; with the strongest fortress in Italy, Mantua, for his place of refuge, if defeated; and, if successful, with the certainty of ruin to his adversary; – yet he stands still. It was by a brilliant movement in this position that the Austrian Kray gave the French that tremendous defeat which ultimately drove them over the Alps.

The surrounding country is of the most intricate kind – a perpetual intersection of large rivers, guarded at every passage by têtes de pont, and all the means known to military science. A war of this order may be carried on for years; and, unless the Italian population shall rise en masse, it must be a mere waste of blood and time.

The true tactique of an Italian invasion is a succession of rapid, daring, and hazardous attacks. This is the dictate of experience in every example of Italian conquest. A bold rush into the interior, leaving all fortresses behind, despising the obstacles of rivers, lakes, and mountains, and only hurrying on to meet the enemy in line, has been the principle of success from the first days of the French assaults on Italy to the last. Their war was an incursion, their marches were a headlong charge, their battles were outbursts of furious force; and, if their triumphs were transient, they failed merely from the national caprice which tires of every thing, and from the exhaustion of an ill-regulated finance. The French, even under the old Bourbons, never descended the Alps without sweeping all resistance before them. The campaigns of Napoleon in 1796, and the following year, were on the same principle. He plunged into Italy at the head of 50,000 troops, ragged, hungry, and in beggary, but the first robbers in Europe. He told them that, by beating the Italians, they should get clothes, food, and money. As a strategist, he probably committed a thousand faults, but he did not commit the grand fault of all, that of giving the enemy time to recover his senses. He fought every day, – he fought by night as well as by day. At Montenotte, he fought for twelve hours, and was beaten; he again mounted his horse at midnight, attacked the victor in his first sleep, and, before morning, was master of the mountains, with the Austrian army in full flight, and the gates of Turin open before him. The Russian campaign in Italy was on the same principle. "When you are not fighting, march; when you are not marching, fight." When the Austrian generals advised Suwarrow to manœuvre, he laughed, and told them that tactics were only trifling. "Make reconnoissances," said the greybeard pupils of the Aulic Council. "My reconnoissances," said the great Russian, "are of 10,000 men. Form column, charge bayonet, plunge into the enemy's centre. These are my only reconnoissances." In three months he drove the French, under their two best officers, Macdonald and Moreau, across the Alps, and cleared Italy. A lingering Italian campaign is always a campaign thrown away, or a country lost. It is the work of a military gambler. Napoleon's invasion of Italy, in his consulate, was one of the most desperate hazards ever ventured in war. He might have been defeated, and, if defeated, he must have been utterly ruined. But he attacked the Austrians, was repulsed, renewed the attack in desperation, repulsed the enemy in turn, and next day saw all Italy capitulate to him.

What a month may bring forth is beyond our calculation; but while we were writing those pages, there had been a general movement of the Piedmontese troops on Verona, probably with the intention of aiding some insurrectionary movement in the city. The Piedmontese artillery speedily demolished the field-works in the approaches to the city. A general advance was ordered, and the Austrian troops continued to retreat, still turning on the advancing line, and fighting, through a country the greater part of which is a low shrubby forest. At length, however, a Piedmontese division was vigorously attacked, taken by surprise, and broken with a loss so heavy, as to determine the retreat of the army to its position of the morning. Still, this was but an affair of posts; and, in the mean time, General Nugent, with an army of 30,000 men, is putting down the insurgents in the Venetian provinces, and is marching towards the flank of the Piedmontese.

One fact is evident, that Italy has not risen in a body, and that, with all the harangues of her revolutionary orators, and all the promises of what those orators call "her heroic youth, burning to extinguish the abomination of the Teutons," very few of them have stirred from their coffee-houses. Italy, with her twenty millions of men, has probably not furnished to the field twenty thousand volunteers. Yet this is the time for which they have been all panting in all kinds of sonnets; when the "new spirit of political regeneration" has full range for its flight, when the Austrian police are a dead letter, and when Spielberg and its bastions are a bugbear no more.

But the movements of the Roman populace are matters of more rapid execution. What the Pope was a month since, every one knows; – Pius the powerful, Pius the popular, Pius the restorer of liberty to all the aggrieved nations of Italy, with a slight appendix, including the aggrieved nations of Europe. But the populace, which gave him his titles, have now changed them, and he is "Pius the Monk."

In a year whose every week produces a revolution, who can predict the events of a month? In the middle of this month of May, Pope Pius is virtually a prisoner in his palace; within a week he may be transferred to the castle of St Angelo; within a fortnight he may be an exile, an outlaw, or a refugee in England.

The intelligence from Rome at the commencement of the month was simply, that he was a cipher. The people, in their eagerness for Austrian overthrow, demanded a declaration of war. But the German bishops are said to have informed the Court of Cardinals, that a measure of that order would instantly produce a renouncement of their allegiance to the Roman See. A council of cardinals was now summoned, before whom the Pope laid a recapitulation of his policy, which may be considered in the light of a penitential speech. In the mean time, all his ministers tendered their resignations, probably hoping to lay the onus of things on the shoulders of Pius himself, and glad to escape from being massacred by the mob, or hanged by the Austrians.

But the Pope wisely determined, that whatever happened to one, should happen to all, and refused to let them resign. The general staff then held a "sitting," and the municipality marched in procession, to give their opinion at the Vatican on matters of government, and recommend "abdication!" Such are the benefits of telling the rabble that they are the true depositaries of the national wisdom. In other and better days, the Pope would have sent those volunteer privy-councillors to the galleys, as their impudence richly deserved. But he may now thank his own political visions.

The affair was not yet over. The civic guard, that darling creation of regenerate freedom, took up its muskets, planted themselves at the gates, and declared that no one, priest, bishop, or pope, should stir from Rome. A kind of rabble proclamation was next made, that "no ecclesiastic should hold any civil office." If this be persisted in, there is an end of "Our Sovereign Lord the Pope." He may possibly be allowed to say mass, hear confessions, and work miracles in the old monkish fashion. But his tiara must pass away, his sceptre will be a staff, and his toe will be kissed no more. The mob say that as they do not wish to take him by surprise, they have allowed him some days to settle the question of private life with himself. But the declaration of war is the sine quâ non, and if he refuses, there is to be a "provisional government."

"By six o'clock, on the 1st instant, no answer had been received." Such is the new punctuality of popular dealings with princes and popes; and such was the announcement of the mob leaders to all those political reformers, the loungers of Rome. But at last the old expedient of startled sovereignty has been adopted. The ministry, by intelligence on the 5th, had been suffered to retire, and their successors, more liberal than ever, were received with popular acclamation.

The senate of Rome, probably to soften this measure to the Papal feelings, presented Pius with a long address, which, however, contains a repetition of the demand for war at any price. It says, "The people do not expect you, a messenger of peace, to declare war. But they only desire that you should not prevent those to whom you have confided the direction of temporal affairs to undertake and conduct it." Thus the division is complete. The Pope is to be two distinct personages – the messenger of peace, and the maker of war; unless, in the latter instance, he is to be responsible for acts which he does not guide, and to acknowledge his ministers to be "viceroys over him." Of all the acts of sovereignty, the most inalienable is the making of peace and war. But the sovereign of Rome is to have nothing of the kind. He is to be a puppet in the hands of a Board. We may well believe the accounts which represent him as "in deep dejection" at these manifestations of popular dealings with princes and popes. If his "Holiness" is not expeditious in his decision to obey his Sansculotte statesmen, the conclusion will be as rapid as the conception.

In all this chapter of change, whatever may be the coolness of our respect for the Papacy, we feel for the Pope, as we should feel for any man intolerably insulted by a conspiracy of wretches pampered into gross arrogance by sudden power. His personal character is unimpeachable; and if his vanity has met with a sudden and bitter reproof, it is only the vanity of an Italian.

Even of the people of Italy we speak only with regret. If these pages contain contemptuous expressions, wrung from us by the truth of things, we are not the less ready to acknowledge the original merits of a people spoiled only by their institutions. We admit every instance which their panegyrists adduce of their natural ability, of their kindliness of disposition, of their ancient intrepidity in the field, and of their brilliancy in the arts. We impute all their waste of those gifts to the fiction which they call their religion. We lament over the hopelessness of Italian restoration while the nation sees the melting of St Januarius's blood as a work of heaven; expects the remission of sins from looking at the napkin of St Veronica; bows down to an image of the Virgin as the worker of miracles, and as an object of divine worship. While this lasts, the mind of Italy must remain in the darkness of that of its fathers, it may have wars, but it will have no advance in liberty; it may have revolutions, but it will have no national vigour; it may have a thousand depositions of sovereigns, but it will only be a change of masters, and every change only leaving it the more a slave. Italy can have but one charter – the Bible.

But now the world is in confusion. War in the north – war in the south – war gathering in the east of Europe. Russia, with 120,000 men, marching on Poland, to be followed by 300,000 more. France, with half a million of men in arms, waiting but the blast of the revolutionary trumpet to pour down on Italy. Can these things be by accident? Universal convulsion after a tranquillity of thirty years! And are these but the beginning of sorrows?

THE INCA AND HIS BRIDE. – A MEDLEY

CHAPTER I

ASTLEY'S

"Most votes carry the point, as a matter of course," said the Doctor, carefully distilling the last few drops of an incomparable Badmington into his glass. "I must say I am strongly in favour of the Surrey Zoo. They have got up Rome there in a style that is absolutely perfect; and the whole thing puts one remarkably in mind of Tacitus."

"Very likely," replied our friend the Spaniard; "but it so happens that my classical reminiscences are the reverse of agreeable. I don't believe there was a single oak in the whole grove of Dodona; at least my instinctive impression is towards the fact, that in the days of Agricola the world was a wilderness of birch. No; I declare for the opera. Pauline Viardot – "

"Bah!" said the Doctor. "These are no times to encourage foreigners. What say you, Fred?"

"I pronounce decidedly against the opera. In the first place, I am for the encouragement of native talent, especially in these revolutionary days; and in the second, I am remarkably hard up for cash. I agree with the Spaniard that Rome is rot. Suppose we go down to Astley's, and indulge ourselves with the death of Shaw?"

"I rather think that Shaw is used up," replied the Doctor. "Gomersal was the last of his race. However, Widdicomb survives, and there is still a chance of fun. So Astley's be it."

Accordingly, we soon found ourselves at that notable place of hippodramatic entertainment. In former years, Astley's was by far the most national of all the metropolitan theatres. It afforded the best practical exposition of the military history of Europe. One by one the fiery fights of the Peninsula and of Flanders were reproduced with an almost unnecessary amount of carnage. Real cannon – or at least cylinders which had every appearance of being bored – rumbled nightly across the stage. Squadrons of dragoons, mounted upon piebald, cream-coloured, and flea-bitten chargers, used to dash desperately through groves of canvass in pursuit of despairing fugitives; and terrific were the thunders of applause as the chivalry assailed a bridge, or overleaped the battlements of a fortification. No feat was too impracticable for these centaurs – no chasm too enormous for their vault; and it really was a touching thing to observe that, whenever a trooper fell, his horse invariably knelt down beside him, and seemed to beseech him to arise by pathetically nibbling at his buttons. The entertainments usually concluded with a series of single combats, a transparency of Britannia seated on a garden roller, and a most prodigal distribution of laurel. They were not only blameless, but highly praiseworthy and patriotic exhibitions; and it is deeply to be regretted that they are rapidly falling into desuetude.

There is no denying the fact that Astley's has undergone a change. There may be as much good riding as ever, and as fearless bounding on the tight-rope – the courier of St Petersburg may still pursue the uneven tenor of his way along the backs of six simultaneous geldings – and the lover may regain his bride by passing through the terrific ordeal of the blazing hoop as of yore. But the British feeling – the indomitable spirit – the strong, burly, independent patriotism of the ring has departed, and the Union Jack no longer floats triumphant over a sea of sawdust. This is matter of painful thought, for it is a marked sign of the decadence of the national drama.

We were just in time to witness the last act of an entertaining spectacle, which argued on the part of the author a particular intimacy with natural history, and with the customs of the Oriental nations. The scene was laid in some village of Hindostan; and it appeared that sundry British subjects, male and female, had by accident been caught trespassing within the confines of a grove sacred to Bramah. No Highland thane in the act of detecting a stray geologist on his territory could have exhibited more unbounded wrath than the high-priest, whose white beard and coffee-coloured arms vibrated and quivered with indignation. Regardless of the laws of nations, and insensible to the duties of hospitality, the hoary heathen summoned the captives before him, and offered them the fearful alternative of embracing the worship of Bramah, or of undergoing the sentence of Daniel, with the certainty of a worse catastrophe. It is hardly necessary to add, that the whole party, even down to a deboshed sergeant, whose religious scruples could hardly have been very strong, spurned at the idea of repudiating their faith, and unanimously demanded to be led on the instant to the menagerie. One young lieutenant of the Irregulars, indeed, was liberal in his offers to die for a certain lady, who had very unwisely followed him into the jungle without a bonnet, and in a gauze dress of singular tenuity: but as the old hierophant had made no offers whatever of a partial amnesty, it did not exactly appear that such generous devotion could in any way be carried into effect. The audience, accordingly, were led to prepare for a scene of indiscriminate bone-crushing, when a new turn was given to the posture of affairs by the appearance of a tall gentleman arrayed in flesh-coloured tights, who demanded the priority of sacrifice. The precise persuasion of this individual, and his claims to such invidious distinction, were not accurately set forward; but as he rejoiced in the appellation of Morok the Beast-tamer, it appeared evident to us that at some period of his existence he had been admitted to the privilege of an intimacy of M. Eugene Sue. After some consideration, and an appeal to an invisible oracle, the high-priest of Bramah, influenced probably by the distinguished literary position of his prisoner, consented to the request; and a solemn festival, to begin with the disparition of the European captives at the banquet of the beasts, and to end with the incremation of about twenty young native widows on the funeral pile, was decreed accordingly. This announcement seemed to fill the hearts of the aforesaid widows with unbounded rapture, for they incontinently advanced to the front of the stage, where they executed an extempore mazourka.

The next scene exhibited a cave, divided into two compartments, each of them stocked with a very fair supply of decrepid-looking lions and attenuated leopards. There was some slight squalling from the pit on the part of the female audience; for the interposed grating appeared to be needlessly slight, and one of the lions, though possibly from the mere ennui of existence, had a habit of yawning, which might have struck terror into the heart of Androcles. The clown, however, though not properly a protagonist in the drama, was kind enough to restore confidence to the spectators, by walking several times upon his hands before the bars, and exposing his motley person in divers tempting attitudes to the wild beasts, without apparently exciting their appetite. The yawning animal took no further notice of the invitation than to raise himself on his hind legs, and rested his four paws upon the cross-bar; after which he remained sitting like an enormous terrier supplicating for a fragment of muffin. A sickly tiger in the other compartment began to cough unpleasantly, as though the air of the circus was too pungent or too loaded for his delicate lungs.

Presently the procession entered, singing a hymn, which must have been highly gratifying to Bramah. In this ditty the widows joined with a fortitude worthy of so many Iphigenias; and we were not a little shocked to observe that some of the European captives were participators in that heathen psalmody. However, for the credit of our country, it should be stated, that neither the lieutenant of Irregulars, nor Amelia Darlingcourt, the young lady in whose affections he had a decided interest, took part in any such apostasy – indeed the mind of the latter was wholly occupied by other feelings, as she presently took occasion to assure us; for, the priest of Bramah having proclaimed silence, she advanced to the foot lamps, and warbled out an appropriate declaration that her heart was at that moment in the Highlands. This over, she threw herself into her lover's arms; and they both contemplated the menagerie with a calmness which testified the triumph of affection over death.

At a given signal, Morok the Beast-tamer stepped undauntedly into the den. We are ashamed to say that our friend the Doctor gloated upon this part of the spectacle with evident interest – it being a favourite theory of his that, on some occasion when the digestive organs of the animals were more than ordinarily active, Morok was sure to go the way of all flesh. Zumalacarregui was more indifferent, – pronounced the whole exhibition a humbug, and contrasted it disparagingly with the bull-fights in which, according to his own account, he was wont to take an active share at Salamanca. For my own part, it did not strike me that Mr Morok ran any particular danger. Either the animals were gorged, or their native ferocity had been long ago subdued by a system of judicious training. The lions submitted with perfect resignation to have their jaws wrenched open, and showed no symptoms of any desire to imitate the example of nutcrackers, even when the beast-tamer was inspecting the structure of their throats. The panthers were as pacific as though they had formed part of the body-guard of Bacchus; and the leopards ran up the shoulders of the man, and even allowed themselves to be twisted up into neckcloths, with a docility which was positively engaging.

The denoûment of the drama was, of course, simple. The high-priest of Bramah, and indeed the deity himself, were taken thoroughly aback. The oracle declared itself satisfied. The European captives were set free without the slightest stain upon their honour. Morok was discovered to be an eminent rajah – perhaps Tippoo Saib or Hyder Ali in disguise; the elderly individual with the coffee-coloured arms gave his benediction to the lovers – and the widows, sharing in the general amnesty, and relieved from the statutory duty of performing as suttee, testified their entire satisfaction with the whole proceedings by another mazy dance; after which the curtain fell upon a highly appropriate tableau.

"Well!" said the Doctor, "upon my honour, I must say that we should have been quite as well off at the Surrey. In this hot weather, the ammoniacal odour of the stables may be salubrious, but it is very far from refreshing; and I question whether it is improved by an intermixture of carnivorous exhalations."

"Were it not for that pretty face in the next box, I would have been off before now," observed he of Salamanca; "this lion and tiger stuff is enough to try the patience of Job."

"But the horsemanship, my dear fellow," said I.

"Psha! what do they know of real horsemanship here?" interrupted the Spaniard. "When I was in the Christino cavalry."

"There! I knew it!" said the Doctor. "Once set him off on that yarn, and we shall have the whole history of his campaigns, without the slightest remorse or mitigation. Do, my dear Fred, be cautious! You don't know what I endured yesterday at supper."

"You be shot!" replied the Iberian. "Was I not compelled to substitute some rational topic of conversation for your interminable harangue upon the symptoms of pulmonary complaint? It was enough to have emptied an hospital. But see! they are bringing in the horses. By Jove, how fresh Widdicomb looks! I wonder whether he was really master of the ring at Trajan's amphitheatre. Not a bad brute, that one striped like a Zebra. How on earth do they manage the colours?"

"It is a chemical process," said the Doctor. "Perhaps you are not aware that the hyper-iodate of – "

"Oh yes! we know all about it: very queer stuff too, I daresay. Hallo – look here! what kind of character is this fellow intended to personify?"