November 1, 1887.] 



♦ KNO^A^LEDGE ♦ 



19 



theory as Mr. Donnelly has wandered into. But the theory, 

 could it lie established, would not hand the fame of " gentle 

 Will Shakespeare" to Bicon, the keen logician and potent 

 reasoner ; it would bring discredit to tiie n imes of both, as 

 also to others esteemed for varied attainments and qualities, 

 whom the Baconian theory associates with Shakespeare and 

 Bacon in a cowardly and shameful plot. 



By Eichard A. Proctor. 



Ix this number are begun several of the subjects promised in 

 the announcements made respecting the eleventh volume of 

 Knowledge. How much more might be done if the public 

 would give one tithe of the support to a magazine relating 

 to science which they will give to a magazine incorpo- 

 rating sensation stories by tenth-rate novelists, few, save the 

 proprietoi's and publishers of scientific magazines, can guess. 

 Every month's issue of a magazine like this involves a sacri- 

 iiee of time, labour, and money, entirely inconsistent with 

 the sound old saying that " the labourer is worthv of his 

 hire." 



* * * 

 By an odd coincidence, just after reading through, in 

 Knowledge for September, an article in which true loyalty 

 and false loyalty were contrasted, I opened the October issue 

 of " The Forum " at the stupendously silly — unless it is to 

 be considered the bitterly sarcastic — article by General Lord 

 Wolseley on " Queen Victoria's Eeign." 



General Wolseley found in the Jubilee clatter evidence of 

 love for a family representing " all that we most delight to 

 dwell on in our history," " the heirs of our lion-heai-ted 

 Eichard " (recognised Ijy history as one of the coarsest, and 

 at heart most cowardly of ruffians), " of our Henries of 

 York and Lancaster" (the Henries of York are unknown to 

 history, and onh' one Henry of Lancaster was even respect- 

 able in character and conduct, the fourth Henry being a 

 treacherous murderer, and the sixth a nonentity), and "of 

 our own great Tudor Elizabeth." Queeu Victoria's kinship 

 to Elizabeth is remote — to say the least — considei'ing that 

 we have to go back to Henry VII. befoi-e we can advance 

 down the line of descent to the one Stuart King of England, 

 through whom the Hanoverian line claims kinship with the 

 earlier mouarchs of this country. But when we consider 

 that less than a thousandth part of the Queen's blood came 

 from that Stuart monarch, it is rather absurd to grow en- 

 thusiastic about the attributes of the present royal family. 

 Ask Mr. Francis Galton how much of the old fighting and 

 ruling qualities of the Xorman kings could have been handed 

 down by direct hereditary descent even to the later Plan- 

 tagenets, and his answer will hardly favour the idea that, 

 for example, George III., whom WolseJey openly ridicules 

 as a blundering old ass, or George IV., whom solier history 

 recognises as a brainless and heartless humbug, could have 

 inherited any exceptionally kingly attributes from those ad- 

 mirable ancestral plunderers. Loyalty like Wolseley's, which 

 depends solely on the asserted amiability and good sense of 

 the actual monarch, and openly despises her nearer ancestry, 

 is not loyalty at all, even of the poor kind considered — and 

 assuredly cannot be tinselled into better semblance by refer- 

 ences t ) far-back ruffians palmed off in children's histories 

 as gallant knights and able rulers. 

 * * * 



It is not here and thus, however, that General Wolseley 

 chiefly blundeis in his easily explained enthusiasm. He 



deliberately quotes, as the most characteristic samples of 

 true loyalty, conduct which in the selfsame breath he calls 

 superstitious or silly or ignorant (or all three). He was 

 " much struck " by " a newspaper descrijition of the unveil- 

 ing of the Queen's statue in India," telling how the ignor.ant 

 natives, regarding it as a kind of idol, " rushed forward and 

 kissed the feet " of it ! " The simpler the nature of the 

 peeple," he justly says (he mzist mean his whole article 

 ironically), " the more unquestioning is their religious faith 

 and that loyalty which is akin to it." Then he tells how a 

 little girl, after the Hyde Fni-k fete, went home and told her 

 mother she had seen a balloon go up which had taken "the 

 Queen to heaven." " The idea may " (sic) have been '' silly 

 in itself, but it signified a train of reasoning in which loyalty 

 was evidently a prominent element." Could anything more 

 sarcastic have possiblj' been said by the keenest advocate of 

 true versus false lojalty ? 



* * * 



Nest, the gallant opponent of the superstitious but most 

 loyal followers of the Mahdi tells us how " a ])oorly-clad 

 nursemaid, pushing a perambulator before her through the 

 crowds in the ' East End,' " expounded //cr ideas about the 

 Queen — and he grows enthusiastic over her utterances : 

 " This simple nursemaid," he says, '• like millions of other 

 people, was imbued with the species of hero-worship which 

 in monarchies is known as loyalty." 



* * * 



Then he somewhat liberates the feline from its encom- 

 passment by dwelling on the fact that " personal devotion 

 to the sovereign is more apt to be" (or to seam) lively, 

 " when all favours, rewards, and punishments emanate 

 directly from the throne : the less this is the case, the feebler 

 we should expect to find those feelings of which loyalty is 

 compounded." Pos.sibly General Viscount Wol.seley has had 

 occasion to appreciate both that kind of gratitude which has 

 been described as " a lively sense of favours to come," and 

 that anxiety as to punishment which naturally, as he says, 

 suggests the sense of personal — aye, intensely personal — 

 loyalty. If so, he may well ask, consciously and anxiously, 

 whether the spirit which teaches men to despise adulation of 

 the powerful and to advocate true self-respecting loyalty, 

 "confers a boon upon mankind " (as represented by number 

 one) in " seeking to eradicate loyalty " (of the false kind) 

 " from the human heart." 



But if this is the way in which such friends of loyalty, 

 falsely so called, defend it, such loyalty, could it but speak 

 for itself, miglit exclaim " Save me from my friends," — with 

 almost as much reason as Gordon at Khartoum. 



MYTH, RITUAL, AND RELIGION.* 



HE science of comparative mythology is for- 

 tunate in having had the methods of its 

 expositors subjected to severe tests at 

 what is still an early stage of its history. 

 We owe no small debt to the scholars 

 who rescued materials which imbed men's 

 thoughts while at low levels of culture 

 from the hands of dictionary-makers .and allegorists, and 

 who made plain its deep and long hidden significance. But 

 this must not blind us to the defects of their method, which, 

 as our readers scarcely need to be reminded, explains the 

 repulsive and ludicrous features in the myths of higher 

 races as due to what Professor Max Miiller calls a " disease 



* " Myth, Ritual, and Religion.' 

 a; Co. 



By Andrew Lang. Longmans 



