TWO LETTERS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 219, 16 September 1935, Page 5

TWO LETTERS.

OF VICTORIAN ERA.

JOHN BRIGHT AND GORDON.

IN NAPIER SALE ROOM.

r (By Telegraph.—Own Correspondent.) " NAPIER, this day. ' Originals of letters written by two 1 noted men of the nineteenth century— two "eminent Victorians," as Lytton 1 Strachey would have called them —are 3 included in a collection of curios and 3 antiques which are at present in a Napier saleroom. There are only two " of them—one by John Bright to Glad--3 stone and the other by General Gordon 3 to a friend named Colonel West. 3 Bright'a letter was written, appar--1 ently, in refusal of an appointment to 5 a railway commission. It is penned ir k a neat hand, on House of Commons notepaper, dated March 2, 18C5. It la as } follows: — . "Dear Mr. Gladstone, "I should have written to you sooner, ' but I have taken a day or two to conI sider your proposition with respeot to '■ the railway commission. ! :< J am not htU'd-w now, but 1 ■ have worked haul in tuoes past and I ■ think I have given and do now give as . much time and labor (the spelling is ; noteworthy) to the public as I ought : to give and can afl'ord. ! "I feel therefore that I cannoc un.ler- : *ake the work that you ofTi- to uip It i is not in the direction ot my thoughts i and studies and i could en- be of any real service in it, and must therefore decline it. "I thank you for your letter, and feel quite sure that you will not misunderstand this reply to it." General Gordon's letter is interesting chiefly for its expression of his known piety. It is written from Jaffa, in Palestine, where Gordon spent about a year following his visit to South Africa in connection with the Baisutoland administration problems, and imiaedi-

ately before his return to Egypt on his final mission in the Sudan. Writ-

ing on August 13, 1883, he says:— "My Dear Colonel West, "Thank you for your kind letter, received to-<lay. I did not know that the application had failed. Unless one felt Wilson was only a secondary cause one would feel vexed, for truly, in a secondary sense, I got him his appt. in India. Not destiny, but the kind loving hand of our Saviour rules your life, and I trust He will give you. as I believe He will, more than you apparently wish. Perhaps Roberts may do something. I am glad Mrs. West ard the children are well and that you have good news of your lambs in England. Cholera threatens us here, but has not yet come. You are never forgotten. I feel somehow now that my function Is to pray for others, and then to work with Him. It may appear idle work,

but it is not, for our Lord works out our prayers in us. We, as it were, touch the Rudder of Life. No, no more appts. in this life. lam quite unfitted for them. This 1 feel sure."

Gordon's references to what he apparently conceived at that time to be his in life coincide with what is known of his extraordinary character — the character of a military genius who devoted so much of his time to Biblical study and research, the Royal Engineers officer so studiously occupied with Biblical speculations on the site of the Garden of Eden and the rate of drift of the Ark. But the final impression with which one is left, after reading the original, is that Gordon may have possessed the qualities , of military leadership, capacity as a strategist and tactician, and the profound religious sense, but he was, too, the practitioner of a very poor stamp of hand-writing.