is usually styled in English. Of Sir Arthur's debt to Poe there is no more to say than he has said. Perhaps he has not himself observed that his tale of The Man with the Twisted Lip' is a variant of the adventure of Mr Altamont in the Memoirs of James Fitzjames de la Pluche. The 'mistry' of that hero's 'buth,' by the way, seems to be revealed in his Christian names, which, like the motto of Clan Alpine, murmur, 'My race is royal.' Readers who remember the case of Mr Altamont are not puzzled by the disappearance of Mr Neville St Clair.

Possibly the homicidal ape in 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' suggested the homicidal Andaman islander in 'The Sign of Four.' This purely fictitious little monster enables us to detect the great detective and expose the superficial character of his knowledge and methods. The Andamanese are cruelly libelled, and have neither the malignant qualities, nor the heads like mops, nor the weapons, nor the customs, with which they are credited by Sherlock. He has detected the wrong savage, and injured the character of an amiable people. The bō: jigngijji is really a religious, kindly creature, has a Deluge and a Creation myth, and shaves his head, not possessing scissors. Sherlock confessedly took his knowledge of the bōjig-ngijji from 'a gazetteer,' which is full of nonsense. The average height is below four feet'! The average

height is four feet ten inches and a half. The gazetteer says that' massacres are invariably concluded by a cannibal feast.' Mr E. H. Man, who knows the people thoroughly, says 'no lengthened investigation was needed to disprove this long-credited fiction, for not a trace could be discovered of the existence of such a practice in their midst, even in far-off times.'

In short, if Mr Sherlock Holmes, instead of turning up a common work of reference, had merely glanced at the photographs of Andamanese, trim, elegant, closely-shaven men, and at a few pages in Mr Man's account of them in 'The Journal of the Anthropological Institute' for 1881, he would have sought elsewhere for his little savage villain with the blow-pipe. A Fuegian who had lived a good deal on the Amazon might have served his turn.

A man like Sherlock, who wrote a monograph on over a hundred varieties of tobacco-ash, ought not to have been gulled by a gazetteer. Sherlock's Andamanese

fights with a blow-pipe and poisoned arrows. Neither poisoned arrows nor blow-pipes are used by the islanders, according to Mr Man. These melancholy facts demonstrate that Mr Holmes was not the paragon of Dr Watson's fond imagination, but a very superficial fellow, who knew no more of the Mincopies (a mere nickname derived from their words for 'come here') than did Mr Herbert Spencer.

Sherlock is also as ignorant as Dickens was of a very simple matter, the ordinary British system of titles. He has a client, and he looks for that client in another book of reference,' not the light-hearted gazetteer which he consults with the pious confidence that Mrs Gallup bestows on the Encyclopædia Britannica.' He discovers that the client's name is 'Lord Robert Walsingham de Vere St Simon, second son of the Duke of Balmoral'-not a plausible title at best. Yet, knowing this, and finding, in the 'Morning Post,' the client's real name, both Sherlock and the egregious Watson speak of Lord Robert St Simon throughout as 'Lord St Simon'! The unhappy 'nobleman,' with equal ignorance of his place in life, signs himself, ‘Yours faithfully, St Simon.'

Of course we expect that so clumsy a pretender to be the second son of a duke will be instantly exposed by the astute Sherlock. Not so; Sherlock thinks it all wery capital.' Now would Sherlock have called the late Lord Randolph Churchill Lord Churchill,' or would he have been surprised to hear that Lord Randolph did not sign himself 'Churchill'? Anthropology we do not expect from Sherlock, but he really ought to have known matters of everyday usage. The very 'page boy' announces 'Lord Robert St Simon'; but Sherlock salutes the visitor as Lord St. Simon,' and the pretended nobleman calls his wife 'Lady St Simon.' But do not let us be severe on the great detective for knowing no more of anthropology than of other things! Rather let us wish him 'good hunting,' and prepare to accompany Dr Watson and him, when next they load their revolvers, and go forth to the achieving of great adventures.

Art. IX.-THE TSAR.*

THE Emperor Nicholas II has already reigned for nearly ten years, and ruled for fully eight; yet the concrete man, his individual character, and the order of motives to which it is sensible, are nearly all as legendary as those of Numa Pompilius. Clouds of journalistic myths, mainly of German origin, enwrap his figure, hiding it from the vulgar gaze as thoroughly as though he were the Dalai Lama; and the fanciful portrait which we are asked to accept is as abstract and as colourless as that of our legendary Russian princes. Beyond the precincts of the palace his person is transfigured, his most trivial deeds are glorified, and his least disinterested motives are twisted and pulled into line with the fundamental principles of ethics. The result is a caricature closely bordering on the grotesque. Nikolai Alexandrovitch is depicted as a prince of peace, a Slav Messiah sent for the salvation, not of his own people only, but of all the world. The most precious porcelain of human clay was lavished in the making of this unique ruler, who stands upon a much higher level than that of the common run of mortals or of kings, in virtue, not only of the dread responsibilities laid upon him by the Most High, but also by reason of his own passionate love of humanity and his selfless devotion to the true and the good. In short, he is an Übermensch' whose innate goodness of heart exceeds even his irresponsible power.

But no newspaper hero is a prophet in his own country for long; and Nicholas II did not play the part in Russia for more than a twelvemonth. His father's reign had ended in utter moral exhaustion, in the blasting of hopes, the killing of enthusiasm, the blackness of despair. Better things were confidently expected of the son, because worse were rashly held to be impossible. But the credulous masses were again mistaken, and soon became conscious of their error. All Europe will know it soon.

Nicholas II began his reign in 1894 as a highly sensitive, retiring young man, who shrank instinctively from the fierce light that beats upon the throne. In spite of his camp experience he was still his mother's child,

*This article is from the pen of a Russian official of high rank

passivity his predominant trait, and diffidence one of its temporary symptoms. But that phase of his existence was short, and the change from the chrysalis to the butterfly very rapid.

Men still call vividly to mind the Emperor's first meeting with one of the historic institutions of the Empire. It was a raw November day in 1894. The members of the State Council, many of them veteran officials, who had served the Tsar's great-grandfather, were convened to do homage to the new monarch, and long before the time fixed were gathered together at the appointed place, their bodies covered with gorgeous costumes and their faces hidden with courtly masks expressive of awe and admiration. But he came and went like a whiff of wind in a sandy waste, leaving them rubbing their eyes. They had expected imperial majesty, but were confronted with childish constraint, a shambling gait, a furtive glance, and spasmodic movements. An undersized, pithless lad sidled into the apartment in which these hoary dignitaries were respectfully awaiting him. With downcast eyes, and in a shrill falsetto voice, he hastily spoke a single sentence: Gentlemen, in the name of my late father, I thank you for your services,' hesitated for a second, and then, turning on his heels, he was gone. They looked at each other, some in amazement, others in pain, many uttering a mental prayer for the weal of the nation; and after an awkward pause they dispersed to their homes.

6

The nation's next meeting with his Majesty took place a few days later, upon an occasion as solemn as the first; but in the interval he had been hypnotised by M. Pobedonostseff, the lay-bishop of autocracy, who has the secret of spiritually anointing and intellectually equipping the chosen of the Lord. The key-note of the Emperor's second appearance was dignity-inaccessible, almost superhuman dignity. All Russia had then gathered together in the persons of the representatives of the Zemstvos or local boards-we may call them embryonic county councilsto do homage to his Majesty on his accession to the throne. Loyal addresses without number, drawn up in the flowery language of oriental servility, had been presented from all those institutions. One of these documents-and only one-had seemed to M. Pobedonostseff

to smack of Liberalism. No less loyal in form or spirit than those of the other boards, the address drawn up by the council of Tver vaguely expressed the modest hope that his Majesty's confidence might not be wholly restricted to the bureaucracy, but would likewise be shared by the Russian people and by the Zemstvos, whose devotion to the throne was proverbial. This was a reasonable wish; it could not seriously be dubbed a crime; and, even if it bespoke a certain spirit of mild independence, it was after all the act of a single Zemstvo, whereas the men who had come to do homage to the Emperor were the spokesmen, not of one Zemstvo, but of all Russia. Yet the autocrat strode majestically into the brilliantly lighted hall, and with knitted brows and tightly drawn lips turned wrathfully upon the chosen men of the nation and, stamping his little foot, ordered them to put away such chimerical notions, which he would never entertain. Such was the Tsar's first imperious assertion of his divine viceroyalty; and even staunch partisans of the autocracy blamed it as harsh and ill-advised.

Between those two public appearances of Nicholas II lay that short period of suggestion during which the impressionable youth had been made not so much to believe as to feel that he was God's lieutenant, the earthly counterpart of his divine Master. From that time forward his Majesty has been filled with a spirit of self-exaltation which has gone on gaining strength, in accordance with the psychological law that pride usurps as much space as servility is ready to yield. Nikolai Alexandrovitch soon began to look upon himself as the centre of the world, the peacemaker of mankind, the torch-bearer of civilisation among the 'yellow' and other barbarous' races, and the dispenser of almost every blessing to his own happy people. Taking seriously this his imaginary mission, he has meddled continuously and directly in every affair of State, domestic and foreign, thwarting the course of justice, undermining legality, impoverishing his subjects, boasting his fervent love of peace, and yet plunging his tax-burdened people into the horrors of a sanguinary and needless war.

Before setting forth a few of the many facts known personally to most of those who live in the shadow of the