394 Mr. Frederick Polloch [June 1, 



the gentlemen, botli seholiirs and soldiers, like Bassanio, who wore 

 and handled it. The long rapier, with its quillons and cunningly 

 wrought metal-work, and somewhat rigid hand-hold, is a kind of 

 visible image of the stately and involved periods of Elizabethan prose. 

 I can persuade myself that it was not in the nature of things for 

 k^idney or Ealeigh to be otherwise armed. When we come to the 

 great forerunners of modern English, Hobbes (who has in nowise for- 

 gotten to i3ut a sword in the right hand of the mystical figure 

 representing the might of the State in the frontispiece to his 

 ' Leviathan ') seems to wield an Andrea Ferara, such a blade and so 

 mounted as Cromwell's, dealing nimbly and shrewdly with both edge 

 and point. And in the exquisite dialectic of Berkeley and Hume, as 

 clear and graceful as it is subtle, and without a su2)erfluous word, we 

 surely have the true counterpart of the tiiiishcd play of the small- 

 sword, the perfection of single combat. Warfare is on a grander 

 scale now, the controversies of philosophers as well as the campaigns 

 of generals. There are modern philosojihical arguments which 

 profess to be more weighty, as they are certainly more voluminous, 

 than Hume's or Berkeley's, and which remind one not of an assault 

 between two strong and supple fencers in which every movement can 

 be followed, but of a modern field-day, where there is much hurrying 

 to and fro, much din. dust, and smoke, and extreme difficulty in 

 discovering what is really going on. 



But our story is not fully done. At the same time, or almost tlie 

 same time, with the small-sword there came in an ofi"shoot of this 

 class of weapons which has a curious little history of its own, namely 

 the bayonet, a modified dagger in its immediate origin, but influenced 

 in its settled ordinary form by the small-sword, and by the sabre 

 and yataghan in various experimental foiTQS which have ended in the 

 sword-bavonet largely used in Continental services, and to some 

 extent in our own. There is a new French pattern of this weapon in 

 which the yataghan curve is abandoned ; though quite straight, it 

 still has only one edge. It seems a considerable improvement on the 

 shape which we have copied from an older French model. There 

 have been some rather pretentious writings in France and elsewhere 

 about the reduction of bayonet practice to a system ; I am inclined to 

 think that a man who knows how to use the point of a sword (the 

 necessary foundation of all skill in hand-weapons) will very soon 

 learn what the bayonet is and is not capable of. 



A word is also due to the modern military sabre. This, broadly 

 speaking, is a continuation of the straight European military sword 

 of the sixteenth century, lengthened and lightened after the example 

 of the rapier, but one-edged instead of two-edged (which, according 

 to the French authorities, is the decisive mark of sahre as distinguished 

 f ri m epee), and in many cases more or less curved after the fashion of 

 the Eastern swords. Meanwhile, the long straight sword has thrown 

 out a most eccentric development, or even " sport," in the shape of 

 the German Schlager with which students' duels are fought. This 



