Among those who have passed away may be mentioned John Fairbairn, the contemporary and friend of Pringle, whom the latter invited to join him at the Cape. Pringle thought well of his poetry, quoting in his autobiography more than one of Fairbairn's pieces and ranking them above his own; and expressed a regret that one who had written so well had written so little.

A poet of some merit, with an eye and voice for the characteristics of South African nature, was E. B. Watermeyer. Some lines of his, happily prefixed to the Dutch collection mentioned above, are well worth remembering:

"English are you? or Dutch?

Both; neither;" How?

The land I dwell in Dutch and English plough.
Together they have been in weal and woe;
Together they have stood to breast the foe;
A name of future days, in Time's far scope

May tell perhaps the nation of "Good Hope"!

A sea piece by the same writer, entitled After a Storm, is a sincere and appealing study of nature.

Another poet of more variety and range is A. Haynes Bell. His Knight of Avelon is a romantic story in the manner of Tennyson, and a skilful and pleasing poem in that style. The poem, To a Sea Conch, is also early, or middle, Victorian, with perhaps some echo of Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes. A martial piece, The Last Stand, is interesting as being one of the earlier South African poems of empire:

Comrades, wake! 'tis morn!

See, the foe draws near!
Britons we were born,

Britons then appear!

Death we laugh to scorn;

Shame alone we fear.

There are many, true;

We are but a score,
But, though we are few,

Honour makes us more;

So we'll count anew

When the fight is o'er.

Now for all we love

King, and Empire, friends; Now for God above,

Who the right defends. Strike, nor recreant prove To our Country's ends.

Freedom, justice, peace,
These we bring to all.
'Tis our faith too; these
Are our Empire's wall.
Grow with its increase,
Perish with its fall.

'Tis a sacred cause Summons to the fray; Not for vain applause

Or the fame we pray. For our Country's laws Stand we here to-day.

Stern will be the strife;
Let us do or die.
Honour's more than life,

More than victory.

More than children, wife;

Let us do or die.

Each, then, do his part;
Fight, lads, with a will.
Many a gallant heart

Will the tidings thrill;
Many a tear will start
To our memory still.

And should we prevail,
As by grace we may,
What a shout will hail

This triumphant day!
How the foe will quail!

What will England say?

Steady, lads! lie low!

See, the foe appears.
Let us treat him now

To three British cheers;

Then the victor's brow

Or a nation's tears.

The influence of Tennyson, as was only natural, may be traced in much of the poetry of South Africa at this period. He had a great vogue there. A friend of the writer of this chapter, who knew South Africa well and who lost his life in the South African war, told of an old Boer farmer who, when his last days came, wandered down to a stream on his farm, and was heard repeating the well-known verses of The Rivulet:

No more by thee my steps shall be,

For ever and for ever.

When Cecil Rhodes himself lay dying he quoted, as many will remember, the words of In Memoriam:

So little done, so much to do.

But perhaps still more striking testimony was that rendered by a divine of the Dutch church, H. S. Bosman, who shortly after the war, preached a remarkable sermon at Johannesburg, in July, 1902, advocating the keeping alive of the Dutch ideals, and who, when called in question, justified himself by quoting a passage from Tennyson's Cup, beginning:

Sir, if a State submit

At once, she may be blotted out at once,
And swallow'd in the conqueror's chronicle.
Whereas in wars of freedom and defence

The glory and grief of battle won and lost
Solders a race together.

To the influence of Tennyson succeeded naturally that of another poet, who has spent much time in the country, knows it, and is known by it, well. But of Rudyard Kipling and his influence on many, if not most, of the living poets of this part of the empire it is not permissible to take this occasion of speaking.

Suffice it, therefore, to say that in letters as in action, in poetry as in politics and war, South Africa shows to-day the promise and the potency of achievement worthy of its own growing greatness and of the still vaster empire, and the noble aspirations, for which it has given, and is giving, at this hour, its best blood, and the travail alike of its sword and its soul.

T

CHAPTER XIV

Education

HE latter half of the eighteenth century was marked by an

hitherto unprecedented development of science. Mathematics, physics and astronomy made notable advances, the foundations of modern chemistry were laid, the idea of biological evolution was being carefully studied a century before the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859); the speculations of the early French economists were focused in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776). But the most striking results of scientific research and experiment were to be found in the applied sciences and in mechanical inventions. From the later years of George II onwards, there was an extraordinary growth in the number of labour-saving machines, more especially of those employed in the cotton and woollen industries, inventions which multiplied almost incalculably the resources of the manufacturing districts of the north and middle of England. On the heels of these inventions came the work of great engineers, Watt, Boulton, Rennie, Stephenson. The enormous economy of labour, the much greater mechanical precision of the output and the increased facility of transport, all combined to bring about an industrial expansion, which, assisted by the commercial activity of the earlier part of the century, was deep enough and broad enough to merit the name "revolution." Amidst such circumstances, it was inevitable that the critics of contemporary education should condemn its almost absolute disregard of useful knowledge and of modern studies.

A new people and a new order of civilised society appeared. Population increased, great urban communities arose in the midlands and in northern England, there was a general move