DAVID LIVINGSTONE, 1813-1873. African Missionary and Explorer. Born at Blantyre, near Glasgow, and in his youth worked in cotton-mills in that town. Sent to Africa by the London Missionary Society in 1838, he thenceforth spent his life in exploring and evangelizing that continent. In 1865 and 1870 expeditions were sent in search of him. He died at Ilala. His body was brought to England, and buried in Westminster Abbey.] [Illustration: _J. Ballantyne, R.S.A._} {_In the National Portrait Gallery._ SIR EDWIN LANDSEER, R.A., 1802-1873. This distinguished animal painter was born in London. He was knighted in 1850, and in 1865 was offered and declined the office of President of the Royal Academy. The picture represents him in the studio of Baron Marochetti, at work on one of the lions for the Nelson column. These were cast in bronze, and placed in position in January 1867.] [Sidenote: Irish Land Legislation.] The Irish people at first showed few signs of gratitude for the disestablishment of their State Church. The Fenians were giving fresh signs of activity, agrarian crime was of frightful frequency during the winter of 1869-70, and the virulence of the anti-British press became day by day more intense. Troops were poured into the country to repress disturbance, and Mr. Gladstone set about preparing fresh measures of conciliation. The Irish land system, theoretically almost identical in general principles to that of Great Britain, not only differed from it in important details, but had come to be worked on wholly different lines from those pursued by English and Scottish landlords. In Great Britain the tendency had been to throw small unprofitable holdings into substantial farms which should be worth the efforts of energetic men of means to cultivate. The landlord, as a rule, equipped the farm with suitable buildings and fences, and frequently lived on his estates during most of the year. In Ireland, with few exceptions, buildings and improvements of every sort were executed by the tenant, who was allowed to subdivide his holding into mere patches of land, with a hovel run up at the expense of the occupant. The peasantry were bound to their holdings by the capital they had sunk in them; they could not in every season wring the rent out of the land; huge masses of arrears accumulated, often ending in eviction, which meant practical confiscation of such permanent improvements as had been effected. All the evil effects and bitter feelings arising out of this decrepid mode of tenure were intensified by the ever-increasing tendency of landowners to absenteeism, and by the prevailing difference in the religion of proprietors and peasantry. [Illustration: _W. H. Mason._} {_From a Print at the Oval._ CRICKET IN THE EARLY YEARS OF THE REIGN. Sussex _v._ Kent, at Brighton, 1842.]