functions. The Liberals say that this would be a step toward home rule, and that admission is eagerly seized upon by the Tories and other anti-home rulers as a basis for a strenuous campaign against the proposed measure. Already an organization has been formed to fight "devolution" and "home rule by installments." The Lords are counted upon to "kill" any such bill as is contemplated, and perhaps the expected conflict between the two chambers will follow the action upon the Irish bill.

There are other important questions before Parliamentthe establishment of an Irish Catholic university, progressive taxation of incomes, land reform, etc. "Radical" budgets are talked of, and no feature of the government's program can possibly commend itself to the Lords.

News Notes From Abroad

The arrangements for the opening of Parliament by King Edward were made, as usual, by the Lord Great Chamberlain, the Marquis of Cholmondeley. This interesting hereditary office which carries with it a salary of £4,500 per annum, is held jointly by the Marquess, the Earl of Carrington, and the Earl of Ancaster, the former having been appointed to fill the duties during the present reign. The Lord Great Chamberlain must not be confused with the Lord Chamberlain of the Household, who is such an important personage at Levees and Drawing Rooms. His duties are political in character, not social. The Marquis of Cholmondeley, by reason of his office, enjoys many quaint privileges.

He is entitled to have forty ells (fifty yards) of crimson velvet from the Crown for his Coronation robes. On the Coronation day he has to carry to the King his wearing apparel, and when His Majesty leaves his bedchamber, he is entitled to take the bed and all the furniture, with the nightgown, and any clothes there may be, as his fee. He also claims to serve the King with water before and after dinner, and to have the basin and towels as his perquisites. The velvet and the gilt basin have been given at the last four coronations, but the right_to_the_bedroom furniture is compounded for about £200.-From M. A. P. (Mainly About People.)

* * * *

Whenever the King opens Parliament, the excellent elocution he displays in the delivery of the King's Speech is invariably remarked upon. His Majesty has a strong, compelling voice, which is almost unrivalled in the two Houses for clearness and penetration. There is nothing "preachy" about his intonation, although he was first taught the art of voice production by a clergyman. His accent, too, is thoroughly and unaffectedly British. Queen Victoria had His Majesty taught elocution when

he was very young. One day she inquired how he was progressing. "I regret to say," said the tutor, "that I cannot get rid of the Prince's German accent; and when he is older, and has to speak in public, the people will not be pleased with it." The Queen, therefore, ordered that in future the future King should give a daily reading before her in pure English.

Not only is the manner of the King's speeches good, but their matter is irreproachable. Many of his impromptu speeches-utterances which it is obvious from the circumstances cannot have been prepared are characterized by striking aptness of expression. Moreover, he can speak in several languages with equal felicity. When one hundred delegates of the International Association of Academies visited Windsor in 1904, His Majesty shook each delegate by the hand and spoke to him cordially in his own language. On the same occasion he exhibited an intimate knowledge of chemistry and scientific matters. French he speaks "like a native." This was curiously illustrated at a private dinner in Paris, when M. Loubet read a carefully prepared little speech, whereas King Edward got up and rattled off a breezy little address, also in French, absolutely impromptu.

At the age of sixty-one King Edward began to study that difficult language Hindustani, and with such effect that at a review of Indian troops at Buckingham Palace he addressed the soldiers fluently in their native tongue. The possession of a really wonderful memory has no doubt largely contributed to the King's success as a linguist. He never forgets anything. He recalls faces and names with unerring accuracy. Whoever is presented to him, no matter how great or how humble a personage, or under what crowded, changing surroundings, he is able to recall the exact circumstances of the presentation years afterwards. The implanting of this facility was a hobby of Queen Victoria's. In his boyhood on her instructions, the King was made to repeat to his tutor every night before going to bed the names of the people he had met during the day and the circumstances under which he had met them. -From M. A. P. (Mainly About People).

* * * *

ONE ENGLISHMAN'S VIEW.

As far as one can judge from the available facts, Sir Alexander Swettenham seems to have acted with the greatest propriety. It must have been a singularly galling fact to witness the arrival of American warships in view of the inexplicable absence of any English man-of-war. When the American admiral proceeded to behave in an altogether officious and presuming manner, the English Governor was, in loyalty to his Sovereign, bound to assert himself as being competent to manage his own affairs. There is a point at which the Colonies of this country will, I believe, though it may appear strange, rebel. That point is reached when the Mother Country, whilst callously evading her own responsibilities, submits its representative to the well-meant but utterly tactless interference of a foreign subject.

The Americans are not to blame; they possess a very rightly grounded contempt for the self-reliance of this country. Alabama. Behring Sea, Venezuela, Alaska, Newfoundland, ambassadorial incidents in which British susceptibilities have been trampled upon; what a record! Little wonder that Americans have a very

low opinion of us. Such incidents as the Kingston affair are the natural outcome.-A Letter in the London Times.

* * * *

Dinner to American Rhodes Scholars.-The American circle of the Lyceum Club gave a dinner recently to the American Rhodes scholars, of whom about twenty attended. Mme. Thayer, president of the circle, was in the chair, and among others present were Lady West, Mrs. Alec Tweedie, Lady Montague of Beaulieu, Professor Gollancz, Miss Elizabeth Robins, Miss Constance Smedley, and Mr. and Mrs. Walter Smith. Mme. Thayer, in proposing the toast of "The American Rhodes Scholars," said that Rhodes's vision was as wide as the veld he loved. He might have been a dreamer, but he was a very wideawake one. He was dominated by one idea, the union of the Anglo-Saxon race, and to the Rhodes scholars he had bequeathed the greatest trust that had ever been bequeathed to anyone-the fulfilment of the dream and the welding together of the Anglo-Saxon world. Mr. Frank Adylotte (IndianaHarvard-Brasenose), in responding to the toast, said that he thought they were all agreed that the Oxford system was superior to the American system in the plain matter-of-fact business of supplying instruction thoroughly-it was more efficient. There were two elements of greatness, however, in which the Universities of America could challenge those of the world-the men who composed them and the ideas and aspirations which they inspired in those who graduated at them. As Rhodes scholars, however, they learnt at Oxford the great lesson of thoroughness and efficiency. He believed the success of the Rhodes scholars would be largely determined by the seriousness with which the men devoted themselves to scholarship, and the success with which they combined scholarship with other pursuits at Oxford. They had come to Oxford to get as much efficiency and as much method as they could, and they wanted to take these qualities back to give their own American Universities the added greatness which would come from what they had learnt at Oxford.-London Times.

* * * *

FROM PUNCH.

President Roosevelt is sitting for a full-length portrait to be presented to the Peace Palace at the Hague. Some difficulty, we understand, is being experienced by the painter owing to the President's pugnacious type of face, into which it seems to be impossible to coax the appropriate lamb-like expression.

* * * *

The greatest discovery of 1906 was made just as the year was flickering out. As usual, it hails from America. A New York cable informs us that Professor McGee finds the Americans of today more cultured and more vigorous and nobler-physically and morally than any other people.

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The Suffragettes who so pluckily elected to go to prison rather than pay fines are now complaining that they found the prisons far from comfortable.

One of them was not satisfied with the accommodation in the Black Maria in which she was conveyed to gaol. But it is something, surely, that so important a vehicle should bear a woman's

name.

OF

By Katharine Lee Bates

Professor of Literature in Wellesley College

F the counties occupying the Severn basin, three form, in continuation with Cheshire, the Welsh border,Shropshire, Hereford and Monmouth. Shropshire, together with the West Midland counties of Worcester and Gloucester, is traversed by the mother stream, but Hereford and Monmouth lie in the vales of the tributary Wye and Usk and Warwickshire, already noted, in the broad basin of the Avon.

In previous summers we had explored, to some extent, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire and the picturesque Wye valley, but we were, except for glimpses from the railway, strangers to Shropshire, and so dropped off the train at Shrewsbury, in a Saturday twilight, with but moderate expectation. Had not the great and only Baedeker instructed us that "not more than half a day need be devoted to Shrewsbury?" What happened was that we lost our hearts to the beautiful old town and lingered there nearly a week without finding time, even so, to do a third of the tourist duty laid down in what a guileless Florentine has called "the

*This is the fifth of a series entitled "A Reading Journey in English Counties" which will appear in THE CHAUTAUQUAN from December to May. The journey begins with the Border and Lake Country and concludes with Cornwall at the southwestern extremity of England. The articles which have already appeared are "The Border" and "The Lake Country," December; "Lancashire, Cheshire, and Staffordshire," January; "The Heart of England: Warwickshire," February; "The Cotswolds," and "Oxford," March.

red prayer-book of the foreigners." But we would gladly have stayed longer and listened for the moonlight talk between that lofty Norman castle, "builte in such a brave plot that it could have espyed a byrd flying in every strete," and those fine old houses of the Salop black-and-white whose "curious sculptures and carvings and quirks of architecture" gave such pleasure to Hawthorne. Surely here, in this city of many memories, "a stone shall cry out of the wall, and the beam out of the timber shall answer it."

Shrewsbury is but a little city-one of the local proverbs runs: "We don't go by size, or a cow would catch a hare"-but its architectural grace and a certain joyousness of open-air life more French than English endow it with great charm. It was a fitting praise from its own Tudor poet, Thomas Churchyard:

"Now Shrewsbury shall be honoured (as it ought);

The seate deserves a righte greate honour heere;
That walled town is sure so finely wrought,

It glads itself, and beautifies the sheere.”

Fortunate in situation, Shrewsbury is enthroned upon twin hills almost surrounded by the Severn. As one of the warders of the Welsh border, it was stoutly fortified, and enough of the old wall remains to make a pleasant promenade. On the only land approach, an isthmus barely three hundred yards broad, stands the square red keep of the castle. The slender spire of St. Mary's is a landmark far and wide. St. Alkmund's, with a sister spire, has a tradition that reaches back to Ethel freda, daughter of Alfred the Great. Old St. Chad's, a noble church in the days of Henry III, has swayed and sunk into a fragment that serves as chapel for the cemetery where some of the first Salopian families take their select repose. The towered Abbey Church is of venerable dignity, with battered monuments of cross-legged knight and chaliced priest, and a meek, bruised, broken effigy supposed to represent that fiery founder of the abbey, first Earl of Shrewsbury and builder of the castle, Roger de Montgomery, second in command at Hastings to William the Conqueror.