am quoting from Mr. Hume Brown's The poor French nation! One naadmirable “Early Scotland,” 1521) : – tive polypod from "mine own Gleghornie "" Sabellicus, who was no mean historian, equal to thirty misbegotten charges the Scots with being of a jealous polypods of the Seine ! And how temper, and it must be admitted that there much nobler 'tis to the polypodic mind is some color for this charge to be gathered to be dragged out with hooks, and elsewhere. . . . A man that is puffed up stuffed in a bag at the summer and strives for some pre-eminence among his winter solstice, than to cling to the fellows, and when he sees that other men ropes of wretched pile-driving engines are equal to him, or but little inferior, he in the insignificant city of Paris. is filled with rage and breaks out into Paris for pile-driving, Gleghornie for jealousy. I do not deny [says most honest Major] that some of the Scots may be pleasure," is the motto for all true polypods!

boastful and puffed up, but whether they suffer more than their neighbors from such

mind.

like faults, I have not quite made up my Sabellicus also asserts that the Scots delight in lying; but to me it is not clear that lies like these flourish with more vigor among the Scots than among other people.

It is pleasant to see Major, nearly four hundred years ago, as the Americans would say, “spreading himself " in praise of his own particular part of broad Scotland, after having made out that, in spite of all faults and all temptations, the Scots are yet the noblest people in the world. He is a worthy predecessor of all such as celebrate their Thrums, their Swanston by the Pentland edge, their Yarrow and Tweedside, their Lang Toun, their Barncraig and Gushetneuk and Drumtochty, their St. Serf's and Carricktown.

Major has been celebrating the fish. of the rivers of Scotland:

And so was it ever, and so, please the pigs, shall it be so long as this sturdy knuckle-end of Britain sticks into the Arctic wash of the northern sea.

To the Scot his own gate-end, his own ingle-nook is always the best, the most interesting, the only thing indeed worth singing about and talking about.

So, deep in the Scottish nature, began the humor of about-the-doors. It is little wonder that the romancers have generally begun with descriptions of their own kail-yairds - which are the best kail-yairds the only true kailyairds, growing the best curly greens, the most entrancing leeks and syboes, lying fairest to the noontide heat, and blinked upon, as John Major says, by the kindliest sun, the sun of "mine own Gleghornie."

It appears to me that John Galt, with all his most absolute limitations, is yet the most excellent, as he was the first, of all these students of "

Besides these there are the Clyde, the Tweed, and many other rivers, all abounding in salmon, turbot, and trout. [How hoose," and "my ain folk."

The

my ain names, the characters, the descriptions of the places, delight me like a bonny Scots song sung by a bonny Scots lass

Mr. Andrew Lang would admire to catch a turbot in the pool beneath the Kelso cemetery, where lies Stoddart, that mighty angler.] And near the sea is plenty of and that is the best kind of singing oysters, as well as crabs, and polypods of there is. I care not so greatly for plot. marvellous size. One crab or polypod is I can make my own as I go. I am not larger than thirty crabs such as are found greatly interested in what happens to in the Seine. The shells of the jointed the characters; but the humor of polypods that you see in Paris clinging to about-the-doors interests me past tellthe ropes of the pile-driving engines, are a ing; and I read Galt arching my sufficient proof of this. In Lent and in

summer, at the winter and summer solstice,

people go in the early morning from mine own Gleghornie and the neighboring parts to the shore, drag out the polypods and crabs with hooks, and return at noon with well-filled sacks.

back by the fireside, like a pussy bawdrons when she is stroked the right way. I should like to see an edition of Galt reprinted it would not need to be edited, for learned comment would spoil it. I am persuaded that an edi

would sell to-day better than they ever did in his own time.1 Yet I should be sorry too, for he is a fine, tangled, unexplored garden wild for the wandering Autolycus, and for that I should

tion of all the Scottish books of Galt | Mr. Barrie in all his books, have chronicled how the world grew for them when they were growing, aud how the young thoughts moved briskly in them. Mr. Stevenson, being more subjective, was interested mainly in these things as an extension and explanation of his How admirable, for instance, to pull personality. He saw the child he was, down the first volume of Galt that the lad he grew to be, move among comes to hand, is the following descrip- these surroundings, and they took subtion of the office-houses of an old Scot-stance and color from the very keentish mansion: ness and zest of his reminiscence.

miss him.

Of somewhat lower and ruder structure was a desultory mass of shapeless buildings -the stable, sty, barn, and byre, with all the appurtenances properly thereunto belonging, such as peat-stack, dung-heap, and coal-heap, with a bivouacry of invalided utensils, such as bottomless boyns, headless barrels, and brushes maimed of their handles to say nothing of the body of the cat which the undealt-with packman's cur worried on Saturday se'enight. The garden was suitable to the offices and mansion. It was surrounded, but not en

closed, by an undressed hedge, which in more than fifty places offered tempting ad

mission to the cows.

The luxuriant grass

walks were never mowed but just before hay-time, and every stock of kale and cabbage stood in its garmentry of curled blades, like a new-made Glasgow bailie's wife on the first Sunday after Michaelmas, dressed for the kirk in the many-plies of her flounces.

Now there are people who do not care for this sort of thing, just as there are folk who prefer the latest concocted perfume to the old-fashioned southernwood that our grandmothers used doucely to take to the kirk with them folded in their napkins. For me, I could not spare the stave of a single barrel, nor the ragged remains of a single boyn. I take them with a mouth like an alms-dish; and, like the most celebrated of charity boys, I ask for

more.

I need not point the moral or enter into the history of the humor aboutthe-doors in recent fiction. Mr. Stevenson, in "Portraits and Memories,"

1 In contrast with the usual fate of such suggestions, this hint, thrown out to an Edinburgh audience, bids fair to ripen into an excellently printed edition of all the worthy works of John Galt.

Mr.

and

Barrie, stiller and less ready to be un-
derstood, waits round the corner,
grips everything as it passes him. But
Mr. Stevenson ever went out to seek
strange lands. Already, as a child on
the shores of an unknown Samoa, he
had built him a lordly pleasure-house
to the music of the five waterfalls.
For he was the eternal Argonaut, the
undying treasure-seeker. Each morn-
ing he woke and went out with the
hope that to-day he would find a new
world. To him the sun never grew
old, and the hunter hunted the hill to
the day's ending ere he came to "lay
him down with a will." Rare, very
rare, but almost heart-breaking when
they do occur, are Mr. Stevenson's ten-
dernesses about his native land:
Be it granted me to behold you again in
dying,

Hills of home! And to hear again the

call

Hear about the graves of the Martyrs the pee-wits crying —

And hear no more at all!

Mr. Barrie's feet, without ever straying so far, yet carry him on the track of many a romance, woven of tears and laughter when the world was young. The skies may be unkindly, the seasons dour, the steps steep, and the bread bitter—in Angus and in Thrums. Hard the lot and heavy the sorrow there! Up the steps the bowed woman goes to write a letter, in which the only cry of affection, "My dear son, Queery," is never uttered by her lips. The bent-backed weaver wheels his web up the brae with creaking wheelbarrow, and lo, in a moment Thrums melts away we see before us the Eden door, at which stands the angel

He must be purposeful, but conceal his
purpose and write with his heart. No
great romance was ever written with
what is known as a purpose. The
purpose must emerge, not be thrust
before the reader's nose, else he will
know that he has strayed into a drug-
gist's shop. And all the beauty of the
burnished glass, and all the brilliancy
of the drawer labels will not persuade
him that medicine is a good steady
diet. He will say, and with some rea-
son, "I asked you for bread -
least for cakes and ale-and lo! ye
have given me Gregory's Mixture! "

with the sword of flame, and Adam ceed because he sets himself to do it. bending to his mattock, earning the first bairn's bread with the sweat of his brow. There Jess sits by her window, and there Leeby lies in her grave; while never any more comes a "registrardy letter from London, when the blithe postman's knock had not time to fall before flying feet were at the door to welcome Jamie's letter. For Jess is Eve, the ancient mother, bearing her heavier burden. For Eve's secret is that woman's sorrow only begins with the bringing forth. Also there is Cain going out upon the waste - a bloodless if not guiltless Cain, who has only broken those three hearts that loved him and his own. I never want to read any more when I have read of Jamie fleeing hot-foot over the commonty, yet like a hunted thing, ever and anou looking back. I want to go up and look at some bairns that lie asleep, each in his cot. And then I learn what it is to pray.

There are other humors that are of our people - and of them alone. These I cannot deal with, for time would fail me to tell of the humor of the out-ofdoors, the humor of byre and stable -the humor of "When the Kye Comes Hame," of the lowsing-time, of Hallowe'en and Holy Fair. I know not whether there is as much of it now as there once was. They say that there is not. I only know that there was enough and to spare in my time, and that we in those days certainly did not kiss and tell. We said little about these jocund humors to our grave and reverent seniors; and now that we are growing suchlike ourselves, I think analogy will help us to believe that there are yet humors in the lives of our juniors as innocent and gladsome, as full of primeval mirth as those of the departed days which we now endeavor, generally so unsuccessfully, to recall.

I do not think that any one will succeed in setting down these things the humors of his country, his lost years, his lost loves without finding the tears as often in his eyes as the smile is on his lips. He will not suc

- or at

So he will walk out, and not deal any more at your shop, save when he wants medicine - for some other body. A lady sent me a book and she wrote upon it that she hoped it would do me good. Now, I did not want it for myself particularly, but I have a friend, a wicked lawyer, and I instantly recognized that this good book was the very thing for him. So I sent it to him; and he never even thanked me.

Man's inhumanity to man

Makes countless thousands mourn.

Scott did not write with any purpose, save with the primitive instinct to tell an entrancing story. And in spite of Gervinus and cartloads of commentators, chiefly Teutonic, I do not believe Shakespeare did, either. On this point, however, I am open to conviction; but, like a late great ecclesiast, let me add, "I wad like to see the man that could convince me ! "

For the "novel of purpose "' developed round some set thesis is not of the essence of story-telling, but of preaching and pamphleteering. These two things are, no doubt, of the world's greatest necessities, but I would not have them trench upon the place of creative imagination. Scott, our greatest, was as conspicuously free from moralizing as Homer, yet what infinities of actual good have arisen from the reading of his books. No, the goodness and the moral must be in the man himself in the writer — and there is no fear but that they will come

We are not of those who look upon Scottish dialect as merely a corrupt kind of English. It would be, indeed, much truer to say that modern English is a corrupt and much-adulterated variety of Scots.

out in his story, without spoiling one | upon the so-called Scottish dialect not, whit the artistic beauty of his concep- by any means as one who speaks ex tion. After all, art teaches and ele- cathedrâ, but only in order to express vates by making men and women my own feelings and beliefs. gladder; and though there are failures and mistakes, the sound of wedding bells is, on the whole, as wholesome and heartsome a sound in fiction as it is in reality. It will be better if, instead of posing as the religious regenerator of the future, the novelist confines himself to telling a plain tale in the best way he can, simply striving by the thrilling of his own heart to cast a spell upon the hearts of others.

For the old Scottish language has had a history both long and distinguished. In it the first of Scottish romancers, John Barbour, wrote his saga-tales of Wallace and Bruce. In it Dunbar sang songs, Robert Henrysoun, dominie and makkar, fabled; while Ramsay, Burns, Scott, Hogg, and Galt carried on its roll of noble names.

Of recent years, with the increasing localization of fiction, there has arisen a danger that this old literary language may be broken up into dialects, each one of which shall possess its inter

doubt, but out of the true, legitimate line of apostolic succession.

The romancer had best be a little more modest than he has been of late. If he tells his story with his heart and soul, all that is good in him and in his message will emerge in the course of the narrative without being obtruded. You will not permanently improve the readers of fiction by the methods of Mrs. Squeers. When we read fiction we do not want to take doses of brim-preters, accurate and intelligent, no stone and treacle, whether we will or no, "to purify our systems," as Mr. Squeers said. I think it is better to Now, what I understand to be the stand by fiction as a branch of the duty of the Scottish romancer is, that world's art, rather than as a depart- he shall not attempt to represent phoment of its pathology; and to look for netically the peculiarities of pronunciaits effect upon men's lives as an ano- tion of his chosen district, but that he dyne for sore hearts, a heartening of shall content himself with giving the sorrows, a pathway of escape from the local color, incident, character, in the dulness or contrariness of things into noble, historical, well-authenticated another and a fresher world. After Scots language, which was found suffiall, for religion we still have our Bible, cient for the needs of Knox, of Scott, and in my opinion we are not likely to and of Burns, to name no other names. better that as doctrine and reproof for Leave to the grim grammarian his the conduct of our lives. We have our "fous" and "fats" and "fars." Let daily newspaper which tells us, among the local vocabulary-maker, excellent other things, how to vote or how to act. and indispensable man, construct cunI decline to believe that the great prob-ning accents and pronunciation-marks. lems of religion can be adequately Leave even great Jamieson alone, save discussed and settled in the conversa- for amusement in your hours of ease. tions of the novel of purpose. I want to take my Bible plain and my newspaper plain; I do not want to mix them and label them "The Fiction of the Future." In fact, being a quiet and old-fashioned person, the fiction of the past is good enough for me. If I can make half as good as the present I shall be content.

Finally, I desire to say a few words

As Mr. Stevenson once said, "Jamieson is not Scots, but mere Angusawa'!" A pregnant saying, and one containing much sense.

There is another danger. It is difficult to write the Scottish dialect. It is easy to be vulgar in dialect. Shall our great literary language be brought down by the vulgarisms of the local funny man to the condition of a mere