he never found the one woman who could obtain and retain his entire constancy; he was too full of gifts, of grace, of genius for that; but he gave in love more than he received-though he received much. Those who judge him by the standard of to-day, mistake him grossly. Lili, who was not fully worthy of his love, was yet ennobled by it. Christiane played contentedly the part of Bayadere to Goethe's Gott. Frederike was happier in having loved and lost than she would have been had she never loved him at all. Frau von Stein was grande dame-elegant, aristocratic, coquettish, capricious, heartless. He deceived himself in her. At the beginning of their amour she may not have fully recognised the greatness of her immortal lover; but she was yet proud of his homage, and exacting in her demands upon it. She tortured and ultimately repelled him. She was not genuine, not unselfishly devoted enough to hold him. But for her coquetry and desire to retain her empire, she might have married him. The naïve Christiane suited him better, as a wife, than the fantastic great lady would have done. A poet, and such a poetcould he help loving women? Women are born hero-worshippers; and a poet must needs love the loveliness of women.

Our race is created infirm and erring; not one is perfect; no, not one; but after making all allowances, Goethe impresses us as having been one of the greatest, wisest, best of men. We regard him, if we have really attained to knowledge of him--and we regard him especially in his calm and kingly age-with a loving awe and with a reverent wonder. In so short an essay, I can only hope to reach to imperfect suggestion on such an infinite subject. The greater part of his long life was spent in the city of his adoption; and this is why I have here tried to picture Weimar-as a background to Goethe.

H. SCHÜTZ WILSON.

HISTORICAL MONUMENTS OF

OF

CALCUTTA.

F all the many visitors who in yearly increasing numbers spend a few bright weeks in Calcutta, the brilliant capital of British India, it is only now and again that one leaving the beaten track turns aside from the round of gaieties, and stands for awhile in the old cemeteries among the tombs where lie the illustrious dead of the early years of English occupation. And yet in these quiet cities of the dead lie the men who were makers of the Empire that to-day rises firm and strong, a finished work; and passing on from tomb to tomb the thoughtful visitor may read in the long roll of names an epitome, as it were, of England's history in the East. Here they lie, a great company of men who toiled and died for England's sake, and with them lie their wives and little ones.

Man, or woman, or suckling;

Mother, or bride, or maid,

Because on the bones of the English

The English flag is stayed.

The oldest English tombs in Calcutta are those to be found in St. John's Churchyard. The church was built under the auspices of Warren Hastings, when Governor-General, by public subscription, aided by a grant from the Court of Directors of the Hon. East India Company. It was completed in 1787, and remained the Cathedral Church of Calcutta till St. Paul's Cathedral was built in 1847. The ground which now forms St. John's Churchyard was used as a burial-ground by the English from the time of their first settlement in Calcutta in 1690, and it has been surmised that it was in use from an even earlier period, and that several persons who died while voyaging up or down the river Hooghly were interred on this spot. However this may be, the first interment of which we have record is that of Job Charnock, the founder of Calcutta, who died on January 10, 1692, less than a year and a half after he had

established the little settlement which was destined to become the chief city of India.

This remarkable man spent thirty-six years in Bengal in the service of the East India Company, and was held in the highest regard by the Directors, his employers. His marriage was the romance of his life: his wife was a Hindu widow, and the story goes that she was about to be burnt on her Hindu husband's funeral pyre, when Charnock, moved by her youth and beauty, led his own body-guard of soldiers to her rescue, and, dispersing the Brahmin priests and her relatives, carried her away to be for twenty-five years his companion and the sharer of his many trials.

The old records show that many of the English in the early years of their settlement in Bengal were married by the rites of the Roman Catholic Church to native women who became converts to that faith, and the probabilities are that Charnock was really married to the Hindu lady who was the mother of his children, two daughters, who both married Englishmen.

It is not certain when and where Charnock's wife died, but it has always been popularly believed that she died at Chuttanutty, the name by which Calcutta was first known; that Charnock buried her in the burial-ground of the settlement, and was himself laid in the same grave, over which a monument was erected by his elder daughter Mary and her husband Charles Eyre, who succeeded his father-in-law in the agency. The Charnock mausoleum still stands in excellent preservation, and is the oldest piece of masonry in Calcutta. It was one of the earliest masonry buildings erected by the English, as they lived in houses built in the native style with clay walls and thatched roofs till they obtained a grant of land on which to build, and the monument was probably erected at the same time and with the same materials as the fortifications of the original Fort William, begun in 1696, four years after Charnock's death.

The old burial-ground remained in use till a new cemetery was opened in 1766; up to that date it has been estimated that, with the terrible yearly mortality among the English in the then pestilential climate of the settlement, over twelve thousand bodies must have been buried in that small plot of ground. Under such conditions, monuments can only have been erected over a few of the number, and by 1802 most of these had fallen into such a ruinous condition that they were taken down and such inscription slabs as remained in good preservation were arranged in the form of a pavement round the Charnock mausoleum. There they remain to this day, the long and often quaint inscription in raised lettering as clear and fresh as

though newly cut, in spite of their having borne the burning sun and the torrential rainfall of Bengal for nearly two hundred years. One of these old tombstones, which occupies a place of honour within the mausoleum, is to the memory of William Hamilton, who did as much for the city as Charnock, the "Father of Calcutta," himself.

William Hamilton was surgeon in the service of the Hon. East India Company, and in 1715 he was appointed surgeon to an embassy which was sent from Calcutta to Delhi by the Company to complain to the Emperor Farrukh Syar of the exactions of the Nawab of Bengal. The embassy, which carried presents for the Emperor valued at £30,000, reached Delhi after a toilsome journey, and were graciously received by the Emperor, who accepted their presents, but refused to listen to their petition till his marriage with a Jodhpore princess, for which arrangements were proceeding, should have been celebrated.

The ambassadors were obliged to remain at Court trying vainly to match their English straightforwardness against Oriental intrigue, and they would have had ultimately to leave Delhi without gaining any concession but that the Emperor fell ill on the eve of his marriage, and the ceremony had to be postponed. The English surgeon, Hamilton, now came to the front; he undertook to restore the royal patient to health, and so successful was his treatment that in a few weeks the Emperor was completely cured, and received the congratulations of his Court in public Durbar. Mr. Hamilton was now in high favour; the Emperor loaded him with valuable presents, and desired to retain him permanently at his Court. Hamilton, however, strenuously refused the proffered honour, and after numerous delays, and when the embassy had spent nearly two years at Delhi, they were allowed to depart, and by Hamilton's influence were granted all the concessions they desired, including the Emperor's confirmation of the Company's purchase of the zemindarie rights in the three villages of Chuttanutty, Govindpore, and Calcutta, which had been permitted by a previous Nawab, but forbidden by his successor. By this purchase the English were able to establish themselves in an assured position as landholders, collecting rents and administering justice under the Mahometan laws within their own boundaries, and no longer mere adventuring traders dependent on the caprice of the reigning Nawab.

Hamilton died very shortly after his return to Calcutta, on December 4, 1717. On news of his death being sent to Delhi, the Emperor refused to believe it, imagining it to be a subterfuge that Hamilton might avoid returning to Court as he had promised to do,

and an officer of rank was sent to Calcutta to confirm the report. A tablet, bearing the following inscription, was placed on Hamilton's tomb:

Under this stone lyes interred the body of William Hamilton, surgeon, who departed this life the 4th December, 1717. His memory ought to be dear to this nation for the credit he gained the English in curing Furrukseer, the present King of Indostan, of a malignant distemper, by which he made his own name famous at the Court of that great monarch; and, without doubt, will perpetuate his memory as well in Great Britain as all other nations in Europe.

A Persian inscription was added, which has been translated as follows:

William Hamilton, physician, in the service of the English Company, who had accompanied the English ambassadors to the enlightened presence, and having made his own name famous in the four quarters of the earth by the cure of the Emperor, the Asylum of the World, Muhammed Farrukh Siyar the Victorious, and with a thousand difficulties having obtained permission from the Court, which is the refuge of the Universe, to return to his country, by the Divine decree, on the fourth of December, 1717, died in Calcutta, and is buried here.

In the crowded state of the burial-ground, Hamilton's tomb was early obliterated; but such was the high opinion of the valuable services which he had rendered to the East India Company that when-more than sixty years after his death-his tombstone was uncovered by the workmen who were digging the foundations of the church, Warren Hastings expressed a strong wish that the lettering of the inscription should be gilded, and the tablet placed in the centre niche of the east entrance of the church. By the time the church was completed Hastings had left India, and the stone was placed in the Charnock mausoleum, where it has remained ever since.

Near Charnock's tomb is that of Admiral Watson, who, with Clive, recaptured Calcutta from the Nawab's forces in January 1757, and died in August of the same year, after a brilliant career, at the early age of 44. A monument by Scheemakers, in Westminster Abbey, commemorates his services in recovering Calcutta and capturing Chandernagore.

There is one other tomb of more than passing interest in St. John's Churchyard, that of Mrs. Frances Johnson, or Begum Johnson as she was styled by her contemporaries. At a period when the lives of the English in Bengal were remarkable for their shortness rather than their length, this lady attained the great age of 87 years, having spent the greater part of her long life in India, and passed through