Leading Articles in the Reviews. 



563 



him this from me." Jowett was deeply touched, 

 " It is like M. to say that; it was kind of him; 

 not but what it is quite true." There wa.. 

 another case, a famous man of letters, whom 

 with unwearied patience he nursed, restrained, 

 encouraged, and finally saved. 



CONVERSATIONS WITH GEORGE 



MEREDITH. 



In the November Pall Mall J. P. Collins 

 gives a faithful transcript of two conversations 

 with George Meredith. Most of the talk, Mr. 

 Collins says, was monologue, partly through the 

 great man's deafness, partly the scattered on- 

 rush of his sentences, partly the utter content 

 of the visitor to listen. To reproduce the rapid 

 s\^irl of his ideas would tax any pen save his ; 

 certainly no words from anyone else convey its 

 flow, and breadth, and vigour. Retrospect and 

 comment on matters of the day came tumbling 

 from him headlong, and it is hard to say which 

 was the sharper and clearer of the two. He 

 leant well forward to put a question, and before 

 he had caught half the answer he was away 

 again, perhaps across the gulf of half a century. 

 Speaking of the books he read when a boy, 

 Meredith said : — 



" There was one book I was fond of when I was quite 

 a small fellow, and that was a story called 'The Boy 

 Crusoe.' I forget who wrote it, and can't imagine why; 

 I believe it was a woman. It was a strange and be- 

 wildering affair. At last someone gave me ' The Arabian 

 Nights,' and I lived and lived in them, until I said 

 to myself, 'Why, I can write a story in that vein,' and 

 I wrote a book called 'The Shaving of Shagpat.' That 

 was years ago, and there are people who read it still." 



Of Carlyle he related the following : — 



" No one knows the extraordinary pains he took, or 

 how he toiled so that every word of a sentence should 

 fall on the ear with the emphasis it carried in his 

 mind. Mrs. Carlyle once said to me : ' Thomas is hard 

 to bear with now he has finished the first volume ; 

 what he will be when he gets into the third I can 

 hardly bring myself to think.' But he was soon 

 restored, and, after an hour's talk with him, he could 

 recall something or other he had said, and end it all 

 with a great peal of laughter." 



Tennyson, he remarked, was sensitive to 

 criticism : — 



" I remember him saying to me once, as we were 

 walking from Orleans House down to the river, 

 'Apollodorus says I'm not a great poet.' I wondered 

 to myself who Apollodorus could be, till I remembered 

 there was a certain man of the name of GilfiUan, who 

 wrote under the name in an insignificant paper of those 

 days, and I said, ' Why trouble your head with what 

 Apollodorus says?' He answered me very gloomily, 

 'He shouldn't have said I'm not a great poet.' And I 

 remembered, too, that another attack in a third-rate 

 weekly paper, great as he was, caused Tennyson three 

 nights of insomnia. No, sensitiveness like that is too 

 dear a price to pay. I need not tell you that the rogues 

 never kept me awake." 



BYRON AND CHILLON. 



Nearly a century ago, June, 1816, Byron 

 wrote "The Prisoner of Chillon. " The Rev. 

 Thomas Hannan, anticipating the centenary of 

 the poem, has an interesting article on Byron and 

 the Chateau de Chillon in the October number of 

 the English Illustrated Magazine. 



A SUDDEN INSPIRATION. 



In the month of April, 1816, Byron left Eng- 

 land, passing through Brussels, whence he 

 visited the field of Waterloo, and it is said that it 

 was during this visit to Brussels that he wrote 

 the stanzas in " Childe Harold's Pilgrimage " 

 dealing with the great battle. From Brussels he 

 proceeded up the Rhine to Bale, and thence to 

 Berne, Lausanne, and Geneva. At Geneva he 

 met Shelley, and the two poets spent most of 

 their time together on the lake. Below Lau- 

 sanne, by the side of the lake, lies Ouchy. Here 

 Byron was detained two days by bad weather, 

 and here it was he wrote " The Prisoner of 

 Chillon." Probably he had just visited the castle, 

 with its pillared vaults and ancient halls, and 

 apparently he wrote at once while the inspiration 

 was still upon him. There is, explains the writer, 

 a lack of correspondence between the story as 

 told in the poem and the story as told by history, 

 and this proclaims the suddenness and complete- 

 ness of the inspiration. 



THE TRUE STORY. 



Byron's story is full of pathos, but it is not the 

 historical account of Bonnivard. The Duke of 

 Savoy put Bonnivard in prison at Grolee and 

 kept him in captivity for two years, not as a pri- 

 soner for religion, but entirely for affairs of 

 State. In 1530, when on a journey, Bonnivard 

 was seized by robbers, who handed him over to 

 the Duke. On this occasion he was confined in 

 the Castle of Chillon and he remained there with- 

 out trial till 1536. In that year the Castle was 

 captured by the Inhabitants of Berne, at war with 

 the Duke, and Bonnivard was released. Return- 

 ing to Geneva, he found the city was now free 

 and that it had embraced the principles of the 

 Reformation. He was made a citizen and in 

 1537 became a member of the Council of the Two 

 Hundred. History says nothing of his father 

 having been persecuted and there is no record of 

 any brothers. It does not even say that Bonni- 

 vard was chained to a pillar in a dungeon of the 

 Castle. All this, however, does not detract from 

 the beauty of the poem, the story of which will 

 continue to appeal to every lover of liberty, and 

 the Castle will remain to attract multitudes to the 

 scene of the heart-rending tragedy. 



