he fancied it would be a fine thing to be emperor of the united realms of Great Britain and Abyssinia, and afterwards took such liberties with our consulars and the clerical gentlemen, when affairs did not go as the fiery heart expected. Yet I am sorry for Theodore, as I stand gazing at this case full of tinsel and royal rubbish, and I wish we had not been obliged to buy them and the missionaries of the Fates for seven millions sterling. A bargain is a bargain, and I do not forget the necessity of the expedition, nor the prestige it has recovered for England, nor the noble and knightly conduct of the chief of our Anabasis, which makes it a land-mark in the chivalry of war. I salute that gallant and resolute soldier, Lord Napier of Magdala, and thank him that he executed pure justice in Ethiopia, and did his function with the precision and completeness of a minister of Destiny. But I have been also looking at another trophy from Abyssinia,-Mr. Holmes' little sketch of Theodore's head as he lay defunct and bloody on the hilltop at Magdala. Anybody that has studied physiognomy cannot mistake that sardonic visage for a vulgar countenance. It is writhed and twisted with the death-pang; but the last of the king's thoughts must have been a stern and princely thought of savage kingliness to leave that air of unsubdued pride upon his jaws and lips. What does it matter whether or no, as he gave out, his line descended straight through all the dusky generations from Solomon's baby-son, who had Makada, the Queen of Sheba, for nursing-mother? The story is likelier that he was the bastard of Aitetegeb, who swept the tent of Waldo Gurgis; but there are spirits born in the purple as bodies are, and an eagle may be hatched in a crow's nest. This was no vulgar Negro whom we have effaced, and left rotting, like an Abyssinian eagle killed in its own eyrie. He had ideas. He was "Porphyrogenitus" from the very breast of Aitetegeb the sweeper, and the one born patriot and reformer that Eastern Africa has produced since her majesty Queen Makada's day. His programme was magnificently impossible; he meant to root El Islam out from the face of the earth, to be king of Jerusalem-if not of London-by right of his ancestor David, and the Gospel according to Abunas. When he used to sit with his face buried in his hands, while the Hubshis fired futile mortars at his orders, and blazed away unlimited experimental powder, with the effect of gently lulling him to thought, he was meditating this mad but splendid dream. Strange and even palpable visions, it is said, fostered his ambition. They pretend that as he rode one day on the borders of the Lake Tsana, when he was only "Kassa, the free lance," a thick cloud rose from the water on his approach, which developed into a throne with a seated figure upon it, whose voice hailed the young Ethiopian as "king that shall be." And if valour could prove him royal, young Kassa assuredly did not belie the pedigree that he claimed. He fought in fifty raids like a black Paladin, with no armour but his cotton shirt. At the river Rahhad the Egyptians wounded him, and the Hubshi doctor who cured the wound asked a bullock, instead of a guinea, for his fee. Theodore was as short of bullocks as of guineas, and therefore applied to the mother of Ras Ali at Gondar for the animal. She sent him no more than a quarter of beef and an unlady-like message with it; in return for which he captured Gondar. At Tchengar he killed a great chief, Biriu, in single combat, and tearing the tobe of gold and green from the body, he stuck it on his spear-head, and made a standard of victory out of the bloody vestment. Let us not spurn this carcase— it was a brave man once! He was as eloquent as he was sanguine and brave, making fiery speeches to his warriors before fighting-one especially on the eve of the battle of the Deraskie, when he finished with the prophetic words, "Follow me, and, by the power of God, to-morrow my name shall be Tedros of Ethiopia the king, not the man Kassa-the Kosso-seller's son." At this time, with the lion's courage he had also the lion's magnanimity. He was gentle to his enemies so soon as they were once defeated, clement in victory, and when a knot of chiefs conspired against his life, and were detected, this hard bitter face, which grins so fierce in death, in Mr. Holmes' sketch, melted with gentle ruth towards them, and spared their lives-a thing as strange in Africa as Lord Napier of Magdala and his Christian soldiership. The first edict he issued at this time from his new throne, ran thus: "Let every man return to his labour, the ploughman to his plough, the trader to his shop, the blacksmith to his anvil. I am come to give peace to Abyssinia." He swore he would by-and-by forge all the swords into field-hooks; and "make a yoke-ox sell dearer than two war-horses." He opened caravan-routes, cut off the hands or heads of robbers, laid out roads, exploited for minerals, sent to Europe for Western artificers, and like an Abyssinian Henry VIII., sequestrated the church property for the benefit of the poor. He forbade the slavetrade, set his face firm against polygamy; and towards his first wife he was ever true and tender, affording an almost unknown example in the land, of chastity and noble love. It seems as though he buried in her grave the high and the beautiful hopes of his strange life. She died, and the savage peoples among whom he lived failed to understand Theodore's radical reforms. Rebel after rebel lifted the spear against him, till the king's heart caught at length the fire of that anger and disappointment which altered all his nature. The good and evil in him were seen contending at the date when Plowden and Bell died for his cause. He was so sorry for Plowden's death that his passionate hands sought to take away his own existence; and when Bell fell murdered in Woggera, he not only with his own spear killed the assassin, but like another maddened Ajax, plunged and re-plunged the weapon into the dead murderer, and dreadful to add, cut off the hands and feet of 1700 prisoners, and piled their bodies into a pyramid, as a ghastly monument of his white friend. At that time this red-handed king loved us English well. Next to the psalms of his "great father" David, he delighted to get his Briton to translate to him passages of Shakspeare, which he called " Bell's Bible." Did he ever, we wonder, come thus across the wooing of the Prince of Morocco in the "Merchant of Venice," and did Portia's black lover put into his head a certain unlucky letter, which might well have run "Mislike me not for my complexion, The shadow'd livery of the burnished sun, To prove whose blood is reddest, hers or mine. I tell thee, lady! this aspect of mine The best regarded virgins of our clime Have loved it too. I would not change my hue Except to steal your thoughts, my gentle queen!" Pity, in that case, not to have read a little further forward with friend Bell, and so have come, to those other lines "the greater throw May turn by fortune from the weaker hand, Perish with grieving." From the time of Bell's loss the heart of Theodore grew hot and evil. He cut upon his cannon the legend "Tedros, the scourge of God;" he mingled his daily draught of "tej" with human blood and tears; he was like one of his own Hubshi people when they are ill of bouda, and the soul of a hyena, as it is thought has entered into them. The grief he felt at the "badness" of his subjects, was exemplified, more Africano, by leaving his hair unplaited, and without the pat of salted butter which finishes the Abyssinian toilette. He lived in a simple soldier's dress-the white cotton tobe with the red border; and spent his days in the field, with a moving city of black and grey tents, in the centre of which were three coloured silk marquees of the king and his women. For by this time he had, along with other casual loves, taken a new empress to share his restless and furious fortunes-that same "darke ladye" whom we buried on the road down to the sea-Woizero Tournish by name, mother of the little prince "Allamayou," whose name, "I have seen the world," is another specimen of the satirical presence of Destiny at christenings and elsewhere. He saw Woizero Tournish kneeling at her prayers in a church, and won her by releasing her father, the Prince of Tigrè, from chains;-her, but not her heart, for she was proud and cold. Two stories about her paint for us a remarkable woman, an Ethiopic Sophonisba. Once, when Theodore in his cups threatened to strike her, she stopped him with a flash of brilliant scorn and wit mingled. "What!" she cried, "will you so affront the Queen of the King of Kings?" And another time, when she was reading, and did not rise as his majesty entered the scarlet tent, he was piqued, and inquired why she took such scant notice of him :— "I am conversing with a better king than you, David of Israel," was the reply. Yet she was true to him in his great danger, in spite of his infidelities; and, on the day before his death, Woizero Tournish (very near to her own demise) was reconciled, it is said, to her dusky lord. What changes to be sure a vote of the House of Commons has made in the domestic and political affairs of this Ethiopian royal family! His Majesty is in his grave at Magdala, the Queen is in hers at Sooroo, the Prince is in knickerbockers at Plymouth. Non hæc pollicitus tuæ-you never discussed the probability of all this with handsome Woizero Tournish, King Theodore !-not to mention the naked warriors slain by the Beloochees and Fusiliers, and the fair land of Abyssinia handed back to Kassai of Tigrè, and the Wagshum. A fair land it is described to be, even by unenthusiastic military persons and correspondents, principally anxious about the subject of their stomachs. This African Switzerland is the land whither Homer's Jove used to go down from Olympus to dine with the "blameless Ethiopians." It seems beautiful enough for a god's outing-a lovely wilderness of hills and valleys, torrents and lakes and passes-where there are rich groves and marvellous flowers, butterflies and humming-birds of wonderful colour, and that “ Kolquoltree," above all, like a vast green candelabrum, with fiery-coloured blossoms at the end of each branch for the lights. As I stand before these souvenirs of Theodore, I think of him in scenes of his singular life, which make me sorry he is "expended." He used to come forth at daybreak and sit all alone on a stone, with his head buried in his hands. Sunrise from Magdala reveals a glorious land-too rich to lose without a bolder and better struggle than Tedros made. Why did he wait for us? Why did he never send a message of defiance or curiosity as the avenging British army engineered its way up? We don't understand Theodore yet, and it is too late now to try to understand him; but, considering that none but enemies have described him, a just mind finds itself looking at these relics with a misgiving that the late owner might have left us something in the way of vindication, had he been given to the weakness of autobiography. How wonderfully well, on the whole, he behaved to those trying persons, the missionaries! His toleration of Mr. Stern appears saintly and inexplicable; and then his liberality in the way of tej to his captives! and his amazing patience as Lord Napier approached. Which was it—the patience of a wild beast, crouched to spring upon his hunters, and careless of his prey for the time being; or the patience of a king, with great schemes yet working in his head, and only his power grown little, as he sat on the stone thinking in the grey of the Magdala mornings? That ghastly sight below the cliff, where his butchered victims lay, inclines us to the "wild beast" view. Theodore's evil genius-his infernal spirit of anger-makes these garments appear, indeed, like the hide stripped from a tiger, as one reflects on the frightful day when he rushed upon his captives, sword in hand, and hacked and hewed till VOL. I., N. S. 1868. C C |