3 o MORE POT-POURRI 



garden must help the gardener, as it is absolutely 

 impossible, with the number of things requiring his con- 

 stant attention, that he should remember them all himself. 



September llth. What a week of excitement this has 

 been, even for those without near relations in that far- 

 away Nile Valley ! Never in all my life do I, remember 

 what might be called the aggressive, grasping, ruling 

 spirit of the typical John Bull to have been so united 

 and so universal. War and the pity of it, and the ques- 

 tion why it has to be, which was so strong a feeling and 

 which had such large numbers of supporters in the old 

 Crimean day and even in the Indian Mutiny time, 

 seems now simply non-existent. Is this gain or is it 

 loss? Is it progress or is it retrogression? A most 

 curious and, to me, poetic description, showing the con- 

 servativeness of the East, and how certain effects suggest- 

 ing certain word-paintings were the same in the time of 

 David as to-day, struck me very forcibly when I read it 

 in yesterday's ' Spectator,' and I record it here. That a 

 figure of speech which has long puzzled somewhat 

 ignorant Bible commentators should be explained, as with 

 a limelight flash, by the unconscious wording of a war- 

 correspondent of to-day seems indeed a drawing together 

 of all historic times : 



' The telegraphic despatch conveying the news of the 

 battle of Omdurman contained an interesting illustration 

 of a verse of the sixty-eighth Psalm which has caused 

 some difficulty to commentators. The Prayer Book ver- 

 sion reads (verse 14) : " W T hen the Almighty scattered 

 kings for their sake : then were they as white as snow in 

 Salmon" i.e., as generally explained, the flashing of the 

 armour of the slain warriors resembled the snow shining 

 on the dark boughs of the forest. Unconsciously perhaps 

 the writer of the telegraphic despatch has used the same 

 simile. His words are : " After the dense mass of the 



