alas! like the song of the nightingale, they were only heard for two months out of twelve.

It is true that the words of the cries were often pronounced so indistinctly that it was not possible to distinguish them, nor could a stranger guess the nature of the wares which the songsters vended; insomuch that a country boy has been seen to run out to buy apples from a bellows-mender and ginger-bread from a grinder of knives and scissors. And even when the words of a cry could be clearly heard, they sometimes furnished no clue to the profession of the crier. Who, for example, could know that Work if I had it' was the signification of a corn-cutter? However, in the reign of Queen Anne, as in our own time, there were many people who had no soul for the melody of street cries; who refused to listen to the plaintive strains of the sow-gelder's horn; who turned a deaf ear to the voice of the corn-cutter; and in whose savage breast the musical request for chairs to mend awakened no response. We hear of such an one who paid a card-match-maker never to come into his street again. But what was the consequence? Why, the whole tribe of card-match-makers passed by his door the very next morning, in hopes of being bought off after the same manner.

More pleasing to many ears than the street cries was the chime of the church bells, which might be heard ringing to prayers from morning to night in some part of the city or another. When Addison's friend, the Tory fox-hunter, came to town, obsessed with a fear of stumbling on meeting-houses and dissenters at every street corner, he was much reassured in his mind by listening to the music of the bells from many steeples; and his satisfaction was increased when he looked in at St Paul's in the middle of sermon-time and saw the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and City Sword all sitting in the congregation, and not more than two of them fast asleep.

In Addison's time the gay world drove in Hyde Park, sometimes with six horses to a carriage. Military reviews were also held there; we hear of a lady who fell in love with the Duke of Monmouth, when she saw him, in all the splendour of scarlet and gold, at the head of his troop of Guards in the park. Kensington Palace had been built and Kensington Gardens laid out by William

the Third. Addison speaks with admiration of the upper gardens at Kensington, which, from being merely a gravel-pit, had been wrought by the gardener's art into a beautiful hollow, planted with shrubs and trees that rose into the semblance of a circular mount.

Among Addison's favourite haunts we may perhaps reckon Gray's Inn walks and the garden of Lincoln's Inn. For he lays the scene of one of the Spectator's talks with Sir Roger de Coverley in the verdure and seclusion of Gray's Inn walks, which to this day remain a sort of green oasis in the bricky wilderness of London. There on the terrace, waiting for the Spectator, the old knight hemmed with great vigour to clear his pipes, as he said, in the good air of the place; and there he discoursed with his friend on country matters, on the last sermon of his domestic chaplain, on the tobacco-stoppers which Will Wimble had been busy turning all the winter, on the death of the witch, Moll White, on the open house he had kept for his tenants in the hall last Christmas, and other topics of equal interest and importance. In another paper Addison tells us that by the favour of the benchers he was allowed to walk by himself in the garden of Lincoln's Inn; and he describes how, pacing there alone on a winter evening, he was overtaken by the dusk and drawn into an agreeable contemplation by the sight of the starry heaven, where in the clear air of a freezing night every constellation shone with a brilliance such as he had never witnessed before.

But there was no place in the town which Addison so much loved to frequent as the Royal Exchange. It gave him a secret satisfaction and in some measure gratified his vanity, as he was an Englishman, to see so rich an assembly of fellow-countrymen and foreigners consulting together upon the private business of mankind and making London a kind of emporium for the whole earth. Here he was pleased to hear disputes adjusted between an alderman and a native of Japan, or to see a subject of the Great Mogul bargaining with a subject of the Czar of Muscovy. He was infinitely delighted to mix among these motley groups, to observe their different costumes, and to listen to their different tongues. Sometimes he made one of a group of Dutchmen; sometimes he was lost in a crowd of Jews; and sometimes he was

jostled by a body of Armenians. Now he fancied himself a Dane, now a Swede, and now a Frenchman; or rather, like the old philosopher, he felt himself to be a citizen of the world. Moving there, a silent spectator in the busy throng, he often imagined one of the old kings, whose effigies adorned the edifice, standing in person and looking down on the wealthy concourse of people with which the place was every day filled; and he said to himself how the monarch, come to life again, would wonder to hear all the languages of Europe spoken in this little spot of his former dominions, and to see so many private men negotiating like princes for greater sums than were formerly paid into the royal treasury.

The last place in London to which I will ask the reader to accompany me with Addison is one which has changed but little since his time, and has been of late very much in all our thoughts-I mean Westminster Abbey. He tells us that in his serious and pensive moods he very often walked there by himself, where the gloominess of the place, with the solemnity of the building, and the condition of the people who lie in it, filled his mind with a melancholy, or rather a thoughtfulness, that was not unpleasing. Pacing these hallowed precincts he observed that the great war, then still raging with France, had crowded the church with many empty tombs and uninhabited monuments erected to the memory of men whose bones were perhaps mouldering in the plains of Blenheim or weltering in the depths of the ocean. Since he wrote thus, two hundred years have passed away, years not the least memorable nor the least glorious in the long roll of English history. In these centuries how many sons of England, illustrious in arts, in letters, in eloquence, in arms, their race of glory run, have been borne, amid a nation's mourning, to their last resting-place in these solemn aisles! Addison himself sleeps there, not far from the dust of Elizabeth. There we will leave him, lying with his peers. They rest from their labours, and their works do follow them.

JAMES G. FRAZER.

Art. 3.-ABYSSINIA UNDER MENELIK AND AFTER.

1. Abyssinia. A handbook prepared under the direction of the Historical Section of the Foreign Office. No. 129. H.M.S.O., 1920.

2. Menelik. By R. de Caix. Revue des Deux Mondes, June 1, 1911.

3. Nelle Terre del Negus. By Lincoln de Castro. 2 vols. Milan: Treves, 1915.

4. Bulletins du Comité de l'Afrique Française. Paris. 5. Le Partage de l'Afrique. By G. Hanotaux. Paris: Flammarion, 1909.

6. Histoire de L'Éthiopie. By L. J. Morié. 2 vols. Paris:

Challamel, 1904.

THE death of Menelik II, the victor of Adowa and the creator of the vast Abyssinian or Ethiopian Empire, on Dec. 16, 1913, passed almost unnoticed in the public press. True, he had been smitten with paralysis in 1907; and repeated strokes in the following years had reduced him to such a moribund condition that for a long time he had ceased to play any part in public affairs. Now that time has placed us at a greater distance from the events, it is possible from such sources as the local newspapers and the statements of foreign ministers, supplemented by sundry official documents and a few French and Italian books on Ethiopia-English publications have been conspicuous only by their absence-to gain a clearer insight into the course of affairs in this backwater of the world's history, and a juster estimate of the part that Menelik himself played in shaping them.

Little is known of the Emperor's early years. Sehala Mariam-such was his original name—was born in 1844, the son of Haile Malicot, King of Shoa. His father died in 1855 on the eve of meeting in battle the newly-proclaimed Emperor Theodore, who had advanced at the head of a large army into Shoa to bring that province, which had for several decades asserted its independence, within the limits of his empire. The conquest was easily effected, and the young Sehala was carried off as a hostage. After ten years of captivity Theodore tried to win over the heir to the Shoan throne by offering him his daughter in marriage. Sehala

expressed himself pleased and flattered, but made use of the preparations for his wedding to effect his own escape to Shoa. There he soon found means (1866) to kill Theodore's governor and to proclaim himself king of Shoa under the ambitious title of Menelik II, thereby claiming descent from the legendary Menelik, son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and declaring his own pretensions to the imperial throne, which the career not only of Theodore himself but of many predecessors had shown to belong to the strongest sword.

Menelik had, however, still twenty-three years to wait before he reached the summit of his ambition. Though Theodore in 1868 committed suicide on the eve of the capture of Magdala by the British army under Napier, military strength still lay with the rulers of northern Abyssinia; and, after four years' struggle with his rivals, Goldja Kassa of Tigre successfully emerged (1872) as Emperor of all Abyssinia under the title of John IV. The troublous times of John's seventeen years' reign were astutely used by Menelik to strengthen his own position and to enlarge his territories. First the Egyptian, then the Dervish and Italian aggressions kept the Emperor fully occupied in the north; only on two occasions did he find time to deal with his disloyal dependent, the King of Shoa, in the south. In 1878 he invaded Shoa to punish Menelik for his alliance with the Egyptian Khedive; the king submitted without fighting and consented to receive his crown from the Emperor's hands. Again, in 1882, John attempted further to ensure the fidelity of his powerful vassal, whose extensive conquests in the south and west he now acknowledged, by promoting a marriage between his own son Area Selassye and Menelik's daughter Zauditu. At the same time he recognised Menelik as his immediate successor, but bargained that Area should be the future heir to the imperial throne. Meanwhile Menelik had succeeded in vastly improving the Shoan army and in more than doubling his ancestral territories.

The geographical position of Shoa was highly favourable to Menelik's ambitious plans. It formed the southern excrescence of old Abyssinia from which it was practically isolated; but, commanding the head of the valley of the Hawash, the mouth of which had since