Its universities have vanished, its library is almost
empty. Freedom of thought has been killed by the Koran, freedom of
living by bad government. But Mr. Stutfield is not without hopes for the
future. So far from agreeing with Lord Salisbury that 'Morocco may go
her own way,' he strongly supports Captain Warren's proposition that we
should give up Gibraltar to Spain in exchange for Ceuta, and thereby
prevent the Mediterranean from becoming a French lake, and give England a
new granary for corn. The Moorish Empire, he warns us, is rapidly
breaking up, and if in the 'general scramble for Africa' that has already
begun, the French gain possession of Morocco, he points out that our
supremacy over the Straits will be lost. Whatever may be thought of Mr.
Stutfield's political views, and his suggestions for 'multiple control'
and 'collective European action,' there is no doubt that in Morocco
England has interests to defend and a mission to pursue, and this part of
the book should be carefully studied. As for the general reader who, we
fear, is not as a rule interested in the question of 'multiple control,'
if he is a sportsman, he will find in El Magreb a capital account of pig-
sticking; if he is artistic, he will be delighted to know that the
importation of magenta into Morocco is strictly prohibited; if criminal
jurisprudence has any charms for him, he can examine a code that punishes
slander by rubbing cayenne pepper into the lips of the offender; and if
he is merely lazy, he can take a pleasant ride of twelve hundred miles in
Mr. Stutfield's company without stirring out of his armchair.

El Magreb: Twelve Hundred Miles' Ride through Morocco. By Hugh
Stutfield. (Sampson Low, Marston and Co.)

THE CHILDREN OF THE POETS

(Pall Mall Gazette, October 14, 1886.)

The idea of this book is exceedingly charming. As children themselves
are the perfect flowers of life, so a collection of the best poems
written on children should be the most perfect of all anthologies. Yet,
the book itself is not by any means a success. Many of the loveliest
child-poems in our literature are excluded and not a few feeble and
trivial poems are inserted. The editor's work is characterised by sins
of omission and of commission, and the collection, consequently, is very
incomplete and very unsatisfactory. Andrew Marvell's exquisite poem The
Picture of Little T. C., for instance, does not appear in Mr. Robertson's
volume, nor the Young Love of the same author, nor the beautiful elegy
Ben Jonson wrote on the death of Salathiel Pavy, the little boy-actor of
his plays. Waller's verses also, To My Young Lady Lucy Sidney, deserve a
place in an anthology of this kind, and so do Mr. Matthew Arnold's lines
To a Gipsy Child, and Edgar Allan Poe's Annabel Lee, a little lyric full
of strange music and strange romance.