The death-song of the Sword has been sung, and we are told that ‘Steel has ceased to be a gentleman.’[1] Not so! and by no means so. These are mere insular and insulated views, and England, though a grand figure, the mother of nations, the modern Rome, is yet but a fraction of the world. The Englishman and, for that matter, the German and the Scandinavian, adopted with a protest, and right unwillingly, swordsmanship proper—that is, rapier and point, the peculiar and especial weapon, offensive and defensive, of Southern Europe, Spain, Italy, and France. During the most flourishing age of the Sword it is rare to find a blade bearing the name of an English maker, and English inscriptions seldom date earlier than the eighteenth century. The reason is evident. The Northerners hacked with hangers, they hewed with hatchets, and they cut with cutlasses because the arm suited their bulk and stature, weight and strength. But such weapons are the brutality of the Sword. In England swordsmanship is, and ever was, an exotic; like the sentiment, as opposed to the knowledge, of Art, it is the property of the few, not of the many; and, being rare, it is somewhat ‘un-English.’ But the case is different on the continent of Europe. Probably at no period during the last four centuries has the Sword been so ardently studied as it is now by the Latin race in France and Italy. At no time have the schools been so distinguished for intellectual as well as for moral proficiency. The use of the foil ‘bated’ and ‘unbated’ has once more become quasi-universal. A duello, in the most approved fashion of our ancestors, was lately proposed (September 1882) by ten journalists of a Parisian paper, to as many on the staff of a rival publication. Even the softer sex in France and Italy has become cunning of fence; and women are among the most prosperous pupils of the _salles d’armes_. Witness, for instance, the ill-fated Mdlle. Feyghine of the Théâtre Français, so celebrated for her skill in ‘the carte and the tierce and the reason demonstrative.’ Nor is the cause of this wider diffusion far to seek. In the presence of arms of precision, the Sword, as a means of offence and defence, may practically fall for a time into disuse. It may no longer be the arm paramount or represent an idea. It may have come down from its high estate as tutor to the noble and the great. Yet not the less it has, and will ever have, its work to do. The Ex-Queen now appears as instructress-general in the art of arms. As the mathematic is the basis of all exact science, so Sword-play teaches the soldier to handle every other weapon. This is well known to Continental armies, in which each regiment has its own fencing establishment and its _salle d’armes_.