Memories and Portraits ......................................................................................................................................1

THIS volume of papers, unconnected as they are, it will be better to read through from the beginning, rather

than dip into at random. A certain thread of meaning binds them. Memories of childhood and youth, portraits

of those who have gone before us in the battle taken together, they build up a face that "I have loved long

since and lost awhile," the face of what was once myself. This has come by accident; I had no design at first

to be autobiographical; I was but led away by the charm of beloved memories and by regret for the

irrevocable dead; and when my own young face (which is a face of the dead also) began to appear in the well

My grandfather the pious child, my father the idle eager sentimental youth, I have thus unconsciously

exposed. Of their descendant, the person of today, I wish to keep the secret: not because I love him better,

but because, with him, I am still in a business partnership, and cannot divide interests.

Of the papers which make up the volume, some have appeared already in THE CORNHILL, LONGMAN'S,

REVIEW; three are here in print for the first time; and two others have enjoyed only what may he regarded as

Two recent books (1) one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on France by the diabolically clever Mr.

Hillebrand, may well have set people thinking on the divisions of races and nations. Such thoughts should

arise with particular congruity and force to inhabitants of that United Kingdom, peopled from so many

different stocks, babbling so many different dialects, and offering in its extent such singular contrasts, from

the busiest overpopulation to the unkindliest desert, from the Black Country to the Moor of Rannoch. It is

not only when we cross the seas that we go abroad; there are foreign parts of England; and the race that has

conquered so wide an empire has not yet managed to assimilate the islands whence she sprang. Ireland,

Wales, and the Scottish mountains still cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech. It was but the other day that

English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still show in Mousehole, on St. Michael's Bay, the house of the last

Cornish speaking woman. English itself, which will now frank the traveller through the most of North

America, through the greater South Sea Islands, in India, along much of the coast of Africa, and in the ports

of China and Japan, is still to be heard, in its home country, in half a hundred varying stages of transition.

You may go all over the States, and setting aside the actual intrusion and influence of foreigners, negro,

French, or Chinese you shall scarce meet with so marked a difference of accent as in the forty miles

between Edinburgh and Glasgow, or of dialect as in the hundred miles between Edinburgh and Aberdeen.

Book English has gone round the world, but at home we still preserve the racy idioms of our fathers, and

every county, in some parts every dale, has its own quality of speech, vocal or verbal. In like manner, local

custom and prejudice, even local religion and local law, linger on into the latter end of the nineteenth century

In spite of these promptings to reflection, ignorance of his neighbours is the character of the typical John

Bull. His is a domineering nature, steady in fight, imperious to command, but neither curious nor quick about

the life of others. In French colonies, and still more in the Dutch, I have read that there is an immediate and

lively contact between the dominant and the dominated race, that a certain sympathy is begotten, or at the

least a transfusion of prejudices, making life easier for both. But the Englishman sits apart, bursting with

pride and ignorance. He figures among his vassal in the hour of peace with the same disdainful air that led

him on to victory. A passing enthusiasm for some foreign art or fashion may deceive the world, it cannot

impose upon his intimates. He may be amused by a foreigner as by a monkey, but he will never condescend

to study him with any patience. Miss Bird, an authoress with whom I profess myself in love, declares all the

viands of Japan to be uneatable a staggering pretension. So, when the Prince of Wales's marriage was

celebrated at Mentone by a dinner to the Mentonese, it was proposed to give them solid English fare roast

beef and plum pudding, and no tomfoolery. Here we have either pole of the Britannic folly. We will not eat

the food of any foreigner; nor, when we have the chance, will we eager him to eat of it himself. The same

spirit inspired Miss Bird's American missionaries, who had come thousands of miles to change the faith of

Japan, and openly professed their ignorance of the religions they were trying to supplant.

I quote an American in this connection without scruple. Uncle Sam is better than John Bull, but he is tarred

with the English stick. For Mr. Grant White the States are the New England States and nothing more. He

wonders at the amount of drinking in London; let him try San Francisco. He wittily reproves English

ignorance as to the status of women in America; but has he not himself forgotten Wyoming? The name

Yankee, of which he is so tenacious, is used over the most of the great Union as a term of reproach. The

Yankee States, of which he is so staunch a subject, are but a drop in the bucket. And we find in his book a

vast virgin ignorance of the life and prospects of America; every view partial, parochial, not raised to the

horizon; the moral feeling proper, at the largest, to a clique of states; and the whole scope and atmosphere not

American, but merely Yankee. I will go far beyond him in reprobating the assumption and the incivility of

my countryfolk to their cousins from beyond the sea; I grill in my blood over the silly rudeness of our

newspaper articles; and I do not know where to look when I find myself in company with an American and

see my countrymen unbending to him as to a performing dog. But in the case of Mr. Grant White example

were better than precept. Wyoming is, after all, more readily accessible to Mr. White than Boston to the

English, and the New England selfsufficiency no better justified than the Britannic.

It is so, perhaps, in all countries; perhaps in all, men are most ignorant of the foreigners at home. John Bull is

ignorant of the States; he is probably ignorant of India; but considering his opportunities, he is far more

ignorant of countries nearer his own door. There is one country, for instance its frontier not so far from

London, its people closely akin, its language the same in all essentials with the English of which I will go

bail he knows nothing. His ignorance of the sister kingdom cannot be described; it can only be illustrated by

anecdote. I once travelled with a man of plausible manners and good intelligence a University man, as the

phrase goes a man, besides, who had taken his degree in life and knew a thing or two about the age we live

in. We were deep in talk, whirling between Peterborough and London; among other things, he began to

describe some piece of legal injustice he had recently encountered, and I observed in my innocence that

things were not so in Scotland. "I beg your pardon," said he, "this is a matter of law." He had never heard of

the Scots law; nor did he choose to be informed. The law was the same for the whole country, he told me

roundly; every child knew that. At last, to settle matters, I explained to him that I was a member of a Scottish

legal body, and had stood the brunt of an examination in the very law in question. Thereupon he looked me

for a moment full in the face and dropped the conversation. This is a monstrous instance, if you like, but it

England and Scotland differ, indeed, in law, in history, in religion, in education, and in the very look of

nature and men's faces, not always widely, but always trenchantly. Many particulars that struck Mr. Grant

White, a Yankee, struck me, a Scot, no less forcibly; he and I felt ourselves foreigners on many common

provocations. A Scotchman may tramp the better part of Europe and the United States, and never again

receive so vivid an impression of foreign travel and strange lands and manners as on his first excursion into

England. The change from a hilly to a level country strikes him with delighted wonder. Along the flat horizon

there arise the frequent venerable towers of churches. He sees at the end of airy vistas the revolution of the

windmill sails. He may go where he pleases in the future; he may see Alps, and Pyramids, and lions; but it

will be hard to beat the pleasure of that moment. There are, indeed, few merrier spectacles than that of many

windmills bickering together in a fresh breeze over a woody country; their halting alacrity of movement, their

pleasant business, making bread all day with uncouth gesticulations, their air, gigantically human, as of a

creature half alive, put a spirit of romance into the tamest landscape. When the Scotch child sees them first he

falls immediately in love; and from that time forward windmills keep turning in his dreams. And so, in their

degree, with every feature of the life and landscape. The warm, habitable age of towns and hamlets, the

green, settled, ancient look of the country; the lush hedgerows, stiles, and privy pathways in the fields; the

sluggish, brimming rivers; chalk and smockfrocks; chimes of bells and the rapid, pertlysounding English

speech they are all new to the curiosity; they are all set to English airs in the child's story that he tells

himself at night. The sharp edge of novelty wears off; the feeling is scotched, but I doubt whether it is ever

killed. Rather it keeps returning, ever the more rarely and strangely, and even in scenes to which you have

been long accustomed suddenly awakes and gives a relish to enjoyment or heightens the sense of isolation.

One thing especially continues unfamiliar to the Scotchman's eye the domestic architecture, the look of

streets and buildings; the quaint, venerable age of many, and the thin walls and warm colouring of all. We

have, in Scotland, far fewer ancient buildings, above all in country places; and those that we have are all of

hewn or harled masonry. Wood has been sparingly used in their construction; the windowframes are sunken

in the wall, not flat to the front, as in England; the roofs are steeperpitched; even a hill farm will have a

massy, square, cold and permanent appearance. English houses, in comparison, have the look of cardboard

toys, such as a puff might shatter. And to this the Scotchman never becomes used. His eye can never rest

consciously on one of these brick houses rickles of brick, as he might call them or on one of these

flatchested streets, but he is instantly reminded where he is, and instantly travels back in fancy to his home.

"This is no my ain house; I ken by the biggin' o't." And yet perhaps it is his own, bought with his own money,

the key of it long polished in his pocket; but it has not yet, and never will be, thoroughly adopted by his

imagination; nor does he cease to remember that, in the whole length and breadth of his native country, there

But it is not alone in scenery and architecture that we count England foreign. The constitution of society, the

very pillars of the empire, surprise and even pain us. The dull, neglected peasant, sunk in matter, insolent,

gross and servile, makes a startling contrast with our own longlegged, longheaded, thoughtful,

Biblequoting ploughman. A week or two in such a place as Suffolk leaves the Scotchman gasping. It seems

incredible that within the boundaries of his own island a class should have been thus forgotten. Even the

educated and intelligent, who hold our own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold them with

a difference or, from another reason, and to speak on all things with less interest and conviction. The first

shock of English society is like a cold plunge. It is possible that the Scot comes looking for too much, and to

be sure his first experiment will be in the wrong direction. Yet surely his complaint is grounded; surely the

speech of Englishmen is too often lacking in generous ardour, the better part of the man too often withheld

from the social commerce, and the contact of mind with mind evaded as with terror. A Scotch peasant will

talk more liberally out of his own experience. He will not put you by with conversational counters and small

jests; he will give you the best of himself, like one interested in life and man's chief end. A Scotchman is

vain, interested in himself and others, eager for sympathy, setting forth his thoughts and experience in the

best light. The egoism of the Englishman is selfcontained. He does not seek to proselytise. He takes no

interest in Scotland or the Scotch, and, what is the unkindest cut of all, he does not care to justify his

indifference. Give him the wages of going on and being an Englishman, that is all he asks; and in the

meantime, while you continue to associate, he would rather not be reminded of your baser origin. Compared

with the grand, treelike selfsufficiency of his demeanour, the vanity and curiosity of the Scot seem uneasy,

vulgar, and immodest. That you should continually try to establish human and serious relations, that you

should actually feel an interest in John Bull, and desire and invite a return of interest from him, may argue

something more awake and lively in your mind, but it still puts you in the attitude of a suitor and a poor

relation. Thus even the lowest class of the educated English towers over a Scotchman by the head and

Different indeed is the atmosphere in which Scotch and English youth begin to look about them, come to

themselves in life, and gather up those first apprehensions which are the material of future thought and, to a

great extent, the rule of future conduct. I have been to school in both countries, and I found, in the boys of the

North, something at once rougher and more tender, at once more reserve and more expansion, a greater

habitual distance chequered by glimpses of a nearer intimacy, and on the whole wider extremes of

temperament and sensibility. The boy of the South seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he gives

himself to games as to a business, striving to excel, but is not readily transported by imagination; the type

remains with me as cleaner in mind and body, more active, fonder of eating, endowed with a lesser and a less

romantic sense of life and of the future, and more immersed in present circumstances. And certainly, for one

thing, English boys are younger for their age. Sabbath observance makes a series of grim, and perhaps

serviceable, pauses in the tenor of Scotch boyhood days of great stillness and solitude for the rebellious

mind, when in the dearth of books and play, and in the intervals of studying the Shorter Catechism, the

intellect and senses prey upon and test each other. The typical English Sunday, with the huge midday dinner

and the plethoric afternoon, leads perhaps to different results. About the very cradle of the Scot there goes a

hum of metaphysical divinity; and the whole of two divergent systems is summed up, not merely speciously,

in the two first questions of the rival catechisms, the English tritely inquiring, "What is your name?" the

Scottish striking at the very roots of life with, "What is the chief end of man?" and answering nobly, if

obscurely, "To glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever." I do not wish to make an idol of the Shorter

Catechism; but the fact of such a question being asked opens to us Scotch a great field of speculation; and the

fact that it is asked of all of us, from the peer to the ploughboy, binds us more nearly together. No

Englishman of Byron's age, character, and history would have had patience for long theological discussions

on the way to fight for Greece; but the daft Gordon blood and the Aberdonian schooldays kept their

influence to the end. We have spoken of the material conditions; nor need much more be said of these: of the

land lying everywhere more exposed, of the wind always louder and bleaker, of the black, roaring winters, of

the gloom of highlying, old stone cities, imminent on the windy seaboard; compared with the level streets,

the warm colouring of the brick, the domestic quaintness of the architecture, among which English children

begin to grow up and come to themselves in life. As the stage of the University approaches, the contrast

becomes more express. The English lad goes to Oxford or Cambridge; there, in an ideal world of gardens, to

lead a semiscenic life, costumed, disciplined and drilled by proctors. Nor is this to be regarded merely as a

stage of education; it is a piece of privilege besides, and a step that separates him further from the bulk of his

compatriots. At an earlier age the Scottish lad begins his greatly different experience of crowded

classrooms, of a gaunt quadrangle, of a bell hourly booming over the traffic of the city to recall him from

the publichouse where he has been lunching, or the streets where he has been wandering fancyfree. His

college life has little of restraint, and nothing of necessary gentility. He will find no quiet clique of the

exclusive, studious and cultured; no rotten borough of the arts. All classes rub shoulders on the greasy

benches. The raffish young gentleman in gloves must measure his scholarship with the plain, clownish laddie

from the parish school. They separate, at the session's end, one to smoke cigars about a wateringplace, the

other to resume the labours of the field beside his peasant family. The first muster of a college class in

Scotland is a scene of curious and painful interest; so many lads, fresh from the heather, hang round the stove

in cloddish embarrassment, ruffled by the presence of their smarter comrades, and afraid of the sound of their

own rustic voices. It was in these early days, I think, that Professor Blackie won the affection of his pupils,

putting these uncouth, umbrageous students at their ease with ready human geniality. Thus, at least, we have

a healthy democratic atmosphere to breathe in while at work; even when there is no cordiality there is always

a juxtaposition of the different classes, and in the competition of study the intellectual power of each is

plainly demonstrated to the other. Our tasks ended, we of the North go forth as freemen into the humming,

lamplit city. At five o'clock you may see the last of us hiving from the college gates, in the glare of the shop

windows, under the green glimmer of the winter sunset. The frost tingles in our blood; no proctor lies in wait

to intercept us; till the bell sounds again, we are the masters of the world; and some portion of our lives is

Nor must we omit the sense of the nature of his country and his country's history gradually growing in the

child's mind from story and from observation. A Scottish child hears much of shipwreck, outlying iron

skerries, pitiless breakers, and great sealights; much of heathery mountains, wild clans, and hunted

Covenanters. Breaths come to him in song of the distant Cheviots and the ring of foraying hoofs. He glories

in his hardfisted forefathers, of the iron girdle and the handful of oatmeal, who rode so swiftly and lived so

sparely on their raids. Poverty, illluck, enterprise, and constant resolution are the fibres of the legend of his

country's history. The heroes and kings of Scotland have been tragically fated; the most marking incidents in

Scottish history Flodden, Darien, or the Fortyfive were still either failures or defeats; and the fall of

Wallace and the repeated reverses of the Bruce combine with the very smallness of the country to teach rather

a moral than a material criterion for life. Britain is altogether small, the mere taproot of her extended empire:

Scotland, again, which alone the Scottish boy adopts in his imagination, is but a little part of that, and

avowedly cold, sterile and unpopulous. It is not so for nothing. I once seemed to have perceived in an

American boy a greater readiness of sympathy for lands that are great, and rich, and growing, like his own. It

proved to be quite otherwise: a mere dumb piece of boyish romance, that I had lacked penetration to divine.

But the error serves the purpose of my argument; for I am sure, at least, that the heart of young Scotland will

So we may argue, and yet the difference is not explained. That Shorter Catechism which I took as being so

typical of Scotland, was yet composed in the city of Westminster. The division of races is more sharply

marked within the borders of Scotland itself than between the countries. Galloway and Buchan, Lothian and

Lochaber, are like foreign parts; yet you may choose a man from any of them, and, ten to one, he shall prove

to have the headmark of a Scot. A century and a half ago the Highlander wore a different costume, spoke a

different language, worshipped in another church, held different morals, and obeyed a different social

constitution from his fellowcountrymen either of the south or north. Even the English, it is recorded, did not

loathe the Highlander and the Highland costume as they were loathed by the remainder of the Scotch. Yet the

Highlander felt himself a Scot. He would willingly raid into the Scotch lowlands; but his courage failed him

at the border, and he regarded England as a perilous, unhomely land. When the Black Watch, after years of

foreign service, returned to Scotland, veterans leaped out and kissed the earth at Port Patrick. They had been

in Ireland, stationed among men of their own race and language, where they were well liked and treated with

affection; but it was the soil of Galloway that they kissed at the extreme end of the hostile lowlands, among a

people who did not understand their speech, and who had hated, harried, and hanged them since the dawn of

history. Last, and perhaps most curious, the sons of chieftains were often educated on the continent of

Europe. They went abroad speaking Gaelic; they returned speaking, not English, but the broad dialect of

Scotland. Now, what idea had they in their minds when they thus, in thought, identified themselves with their

ancestral enemies? What was the sense in which they were Scotch and not English, or Scotch and not Irish?

Can a bare name be thus influential on the minds and affections of men, and a political aggregation blind

them to the nature of facts? The story of the Austrian Empire would seem to answer, NO; the far more galling

business of Ireland clenches the negative from nearer home. Is it common education, common morals, a

common language or a common faith, that join men into nations? There were practically none of these in the

The fact remains: in spite of the difference of blood and language, the Lowlander feels himself the

sentimental countryman of the Highlander. When they meet abroad, they fall upon each other's necks in

spirit; even at home there is a kind of clannish intimacy in their talk. But from his compatriot in the south the

Lowlander stands consciously apart. He has had a different training; he obeys different laws; he makes his

will in other terms, is otherwise divorced and married; his eyes are not at home in an English landscape or

with English houses; his ear continues to remark the English speech; and even though his tongue acquire the

I AM asked to write something (it is not specifically stated what) to the profit and glory of my ALMA

MATER; and the fact is I seem to be in very nearly the same case with those who addressed me, for while I

am willing enough to write something, I know not what to write. Only one point I see, that if I am to write at

all, it should be of the University itself and my own days under its shadow; of the things that are still the

same and of those that are already changed: such talk, in short, as would pass naturally between a student of

The generations pass away swiftly enough on the high seas of life; more swiftly still in the little bubbling

backwater of the quadrangle; so that we see there, on a scale startlingly diminished, the flight of time and

the succession of men. I looked for my name the other day in last year's casebook of the Speculative.

Naturally enough I looked for it near the end; it was not there, nor yet in the next column, so that I began to

think it had been dropped at press; and when at last I found it, mounted on the shoulders of so many

successors, and looking in that posture like the name of a man of ninety, I was conscious of some of the

dignity of years. This kind of dignity of temporal precession is likely, with prolonged life, to become more

familiar, possibly less welcome; but I felt it strongly then, it is strongly on me now, and I am the more

emboldened to speak with my successors in the tone of a parent and a praiser of things past.

For, indeed, that which they attend is but a fallen University; it has doubtless some remains of good, for

human institutions decline by gradual stages; but decline, in spite of all seeming embellishments, it does; and

what is perhaps more singular, began to do so when I ceased to be a student. Thus, by an odd chance, I had

the very last of the very best of ALMA MATER; the same thing, I hear (which makes it the more strange),

had previously happened to my father; and if they are good and do not die, something not at all unsimilar will

be found in time to have befallen my successors of today. Of the specific points of change, of advantage in

the past, of shortcoming in the present, I must own that, on a near examination, they look wondrous cloudy.

The chief and far the most lamentable change is the absence of a certain lean, ugly, idle, unpopular student,

whose presence was for me the gist and heart of the whole matter; whose changing humours, fine occasional

purposes of good, flinching acceptance of evil, shiverings on wet, east windy, morning journeys up to class,

infinite yawnings during lecture and unquenchable gusto in the delights of truantry, made up the sunshine and

shadow of my college life. You cannot fancy what you missed in missing him; his virtues, I make sure, are

inconceivable to his successors, just as they were apparently concealed from his contemporaries, for I was

practically alone in the pleasure I had in his society. Poor soul, I remember how much he was cast down at

times, and how life (which had not yet begun) seemed to be already at an end, and hope quite dead, and

misfortune and dishonour, like physical presences, dogging him as he went. And it may be worth while to

add that these clouds rolled away in their season, and that all clouds roll away at last, and the troubles of

youth in particular are things but of a moment. So this student, whom I have in my eye, took his full share of

these concerns, and that very largely by his own fault; but he still clung to his fortune, and in the midst of

much misconduct, kept on in his own way learning how to work; and at last, to his wonder, escaped out of the

stage of studentship not openly shamed; leaving behind him the University of Edinburgh shorn of a good deal

But while he is (in more senses than one) the first person, he is by no means the only one whom I regret, or

whom the students of to day, if they knew what they had lost, would regret also. They have still Tait, to be

sure long may they have him! and they have still Tait's classroom, cupola and all; but think of what a

different place it was when this youth of mine (at least on roll days) would be present on the benches, and, at

the near end of the platform, Lindsay senior (3) was airing his robust old age. It is possible my successors

may have never even heard of Old Lindsay; but when he went, a link snapped with the last century. He had

something of a rustic air, sturdy and fresh and plain; he spoke with a ripe eastcountry accent, which I used

to admire; his reminiscences were all of journeys on foot or highways busy with postchaises a Scotland

before steam; he had seen the coal fire on the Isle of May, and he regaled me with tales of my own

grandfather. Thus he was for me a mirror of things perished; it was only in his memory that I could see the

huge shock of flames of the May beacon stream to leeward, and the watchers, as they fed the fire, lay hold

unscorched of the windward bars of the furnace; it was only thus that I could see my grandfather driving

swiftly in a gig along the seaboard road from Pittenweem to Crail, and for all his business hurry, drawing up

to speak goodhumouredly with those he met. And now, in his turn, Lindsay is gone also; inhabits only the

memories of other men, till these shall follow him; and figures in my reminiscences as my grandfather

Today, again, they have Professor Butcher, and I hear he has a prodigious deal of Greek; and they have

Professor Chrystal, who is a man filled with the mathematics. And doubtless these are set offs. But they

cannot change the fact that Professor Blackie has retired, and that Professor Kelland is dead. No man's

education is complete or truly liberal who knew not Kelland. There were unutterable lessons in the mere sight

of that frail old clerical gentleman, lively as a boy, kind like a fairy godfather, and keeping perfect order in

his class by the spell of that very kindness. I have heard him drift into reminiscences in class time, though not

for long, and give us glimpses of oldworld life in out oftheway English parishes when he was young;

thus playing the same part as Lindsay the part of the surviving memory, signalling out of the dark backward

and abysm of time the images of perished things. But it was a part that scarce became him; he somehow

lacked the means: for all his silver hair and worn face, he was not truly old; and he had too much of the unrest

and petulant fire of youth, and too much invincible innocence of mind, to play the veteran well. The time to

measure him best, to taste (in the old phrase) his gracious nature, was when he received his class at home.

What a pretty simplicity would he then show, trying to amuse us like children with toys; and what an

engaging nervousness of manner, as fearing that his efforts might not succeed! Truly he made us all feel like

children, and like children embarrassed, but at the same time filled with sympathy for the conscientious,

troubled elderboy who was working so hard to entertain us. A theorist has held the view that there is no

feature in man so tell tale as his spectacles; that the mouth may be compressed and the brow smoothed

artificially, but the sheen of the barnacles is diagnostic. And truly it must have been thus with Kelland; for as

I still fancy I behold him frisking actively about the platform, pointer in hand, that which I seem to see most

clearly is the way his glasses glittered with affection. I never knew but one other man who had (if you will

permit the phrase) so kind a spectacle; and that was Dr. Appleton. But the light in his case was tempered and

passive; in Kelland's it danced, and changed, and flashed vivaciously among the students, like a perpetual

I cannot say so much about Professor Blackie, for a good reason. Kelland's class I attended, once even gained

there a certificate of merit, the only distinction of my University career. But although I am the holder of a

certificate of attendance in the professor's own hand, I cannot remember to have been present in the Greek

class above a dozen times. Professor Blackie was even kind enough to remark (more than once) while in the

very act of writing the document above referred to, that he did not know my face. Indeed, I denied myself

many opportunities; acting upon an extensive and highly rational system of truantry, which cost me a great

deal of trouble to put in exercise perhaps as much as would have taught me Greek and sent me forth into

the world and the profession of letters with the merest shadow of an education. But they say it is always a

good thing to have taken pains, and that success is its own reward, whatever be its nature; so that, perhaps,

even upon this I should plume myself, that no one ever played the truant with more deliberate care, and none

ever had more certificates for less education. One consequence, however, of my system is that I have much

less to say of Professor Blackie than I had of Professor Kelland; and as he is still alive, and will long, I hope,

continue to be so, it will not surprise you very much that I have no intention of saying it.

Meanwhile, how many others have gone Jenkin, Hodgson, and I know not who besides; and of that tide of

students that used to throng the arch and blacken the quadrangle, how many are scattered into the remotest

parts of the earth, and how many more have lain down beside their fathers in their "restinggraves"! And

again, how many of these last have not found their way there, all too early, through the stress of education!

That was one thing, at least, from which my truantry protected me. I am sorry indeed that I have no Greek,

but I should be sorrier still if I were dead; nor do I know the name of that branch of knowledge which is

worth acquiring at the price of a brain fever. There are many sordid tragedies in the life of the student, above

all if he be poor, or drunken, or both; but nothing more moves a wise man's pity than the case of the lad who

is in too much hurry to be learned. And so, for the sake of a moral at the end, I will call up one more figure,

and have done. A student, ambitious of success by that hot, intemperate manner of study that now grows so

common, read night and day for an examination. As he went on, the task became more easy to him, sleep was

more easily banished, his brain grew hot and clear and more capacious, the necessary knowledge daily fuller

and more orderly. It came to the eve of the trial and he watched all night in his high chamber, reviewing what

he knew, and already secure of success. His window looked eastward, and being (as I said) high up, and the

house itself standing on a hill, commanded a view over dwindling suburbs to a country horizon. At last my

student drew up his blind, and still in quite a jocund humour, looked abroad. Day was breaking, the cast was

tinging with strange fires, the clouds breaking up for the coming of the sun; and at the sight, nameless terror

seized upon his mind. He was sane, his senses were undisturbed; he saw clearly, and knew what he was

seeing, and knew that it was normal; but he could neither bear to see it nor find the strength to look away, and

fled in panic from his chamber into the enclosure of the street. In the cool air and silence, and among the

sleeping houses, his strength was renewed. Nothing troubled him but the memory of what had passed, and an

as they sang of old in Portugal in the Morning Office. But to him that good hour of cockcrow, and the

changes of the dawn, had brought panic, and lasting doubt, and such terror as he still shook to think of. He

dared not return to his lodging; he could not eat; he sat down, he rose up, he wandered; the city woke about

him with its cheerful bustle, the sun climbed overhead; and still he grew but the more absorbed in the distress

of his recollection and the fear of his past fear. At the appointed hour, he came to the door of the place of

examination; but when he was asked, he had forgotten his name. Seeing him so disordered, they had not the

heart to send him away, but gave him a paper and admitted him, still nameless, to the Hall. Vain kindness,

vain efforts. He could only sit in a still growing horror, writing nothing, ignorant of all, his mind filled with a

single memory of the breaking day and his own intolerable fear. And that same night he was tossing in a

People are afraid of war and wounds and dentists, all with excellent reason; but these are not to be compared

with such chaotic terrors of the mind as fell on this young man, and made him cover his eyes from the

innocent morning. We all have by our bedsides the box of the Merchant Abudah, thank God, securely enough

shut; but when a young man sacrifices sleep to labour, let him have a care, for he is playing with the lock.

THERE is a certain graveyard, looked upon on the one side by a prison, on the other by the windows of a

quiet hotel; below, under a steep cliff, it beholds the traffic of many lines of rail, and the scream of the engine

and the shock of meeting buffers mount to it all day long. The aisles are lined with the inclosed sepulchres of

families, door beyond door, like houses in a street; and in the morning the shadow of the prison turrets, and of

many tall memorials, fall upon the graves. There, in the hot fits of youth, I came to be unhappy. Pleasant

incidents are woven with my memory of the place. I here made friends with a plain old gentleman, a visitor

on sunny mornings, gravely cheerful, who, with one eye upon the place that awaited him, chirped about his

youth like winter sparrows; a beautiful housemaid of the hotel once, for some days together, dumbly flirted

with me from a window and kept my wild heart flying; and once she possibly remembers the wise

Eugenia followed me to that austere inclosure. Her hair came down, and in the shelter of the tomb my

trembling fingers helped her to repair the braid. But for the most part I went there solitary and, with

irrevocable emotion, pored on the names of the forgotten. Name after name, and to each the conventional

attributions and the idle dates: a regiment of the unknown that had been the joy of mothers, and had thrilled

with the illusions of youth, and at last, in the dim sickroom, wrestled with the pangs of old mortality. In that

whole crew of the silenced there was but one of whom my fancy had received a picture; and he, with his

comely, florid countenance, bewigged and habited in scarlet, and in his day combining fame and popularity,

stood forth, like a taunt, among that company of phantom appellations. It was then possible to leave behind

us something more explicit than these severe, monotonous and lying epitaphs; and the thing left, the memory

of a painted picture and what we call the immortality of a name, was hardly more desirable than mere

oblivion. Even David Hume, as he lay composed beneath that "circular idea," was fainter than a dream; and

when the housemaid, broom in hand, smiled and beckoned from the open window, the fame of that bewigged

And yet in soberness I cared as little for the housemaid as for David Hume. The interests of youth are rarely

frank; his passions, like Noah's dove, come home to roost. The fire, sensibility, and volume of his own nature,

that is all that he has learned to recognise. The tumultuary and gray tide of life, the empire of routine, the

unrejoicing faces of his elders, fill him with contemptuous surprise; there also he seems to walk among the

tombs of spirits; and it is only in the course of years, and after much rubbing with his fellowmen, that he

begins by glimpses to see himself from without and his fellows from within: to know his own for one among

the thousand undenoted countenances of the city street, and to divine in others the throb of human agony and

hope. In the meantime he will avoid the hospital doors, the pale faces, the cripple, the sweet whiff of

chloroform for there, on the most thoughtless, the pains of others are burned home; but he will continue to

walk, in a divine selfpity, the aisles of the forgotten graveyard. The length of man's life, which is endless to

the brave and busy, is scorned by his ambitious thought. He cannot bear to have come for so little, and to go

again so wholly. He cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be still idle, and by way of cure, neglects

the little that he has to do. The parable of the talent is the brief epitome of youth. To believe in immortality is

one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life. Denunciatory preachers seem not to suspect that they may

be taken gravely and in evil part; that young men may come to think of time as of a moment, and with the

pride of Satan wave back the inadequate gift. Yet here is a true peril; this it is that sets them to pace the

graveyard alleys and to read, with strange extremes of pity and derision, the memorials of the dead.

Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing upon their minds the issues, pleasures,

busyness, importance and immediacy of that life in which they stand; books of smiling or heroic temper, to

excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity of that game of consequences to

which we all sit down, the hangerback not least. But the average sermon flees the point, disporting itself in

that eternity of which we know, and need to know, so little; avoiding the bright, crowded, and momentous

fields of life where destiny awaits us. Upon the average book a writer may be silent; he may set it down to his

ill hap that when his own youth was in the acrid fermentation, he should have fallen and fed upon the

cheerless fields of Obermann. Yet to Mr. Arnold, who led him to these pastures, he still bears a grudge. The

day is perhaps not far oft when people will begin to count MOLL FLANDERS, ay, or THE COUNTRY

WIFE, more wholesome and more pious diet than these guidebooks to consistent egoism.

But the most inhuman of boys soon wearies of the inhumanity of Obermann. And even while I still continued

to be a haunter of the graveyard, I began insensibly to turn my attention to the grave diggers, and was

weaned out of myself to observe the conduct of visitors. This was dayspring, indeed, to a lad in such great

darkness. Not that I began to see men, or to try to see them, from within, nor to learn charity and modesty and

justice from the sight; but still stared at them externally from the prison windows of my affectation. Once I

remember to have observed two working women with a baby halting by a grave; there was something

monumental in the grouping, one upright carrying the child, the other with bowed face crouching by her side.

A wreath of immortelles under a glass dome had thus attracted them; and, drawing near, I overheard their

To a youth afflicted with the callosity of sentiment, this quaint and pregnant saying appeared merely base.

My acquaintance with gravediggers, considering its length, was unremarkable. One, indeed, whom I found

plying his spade in the red evening, high above Allan Water and in the shadow of Dunblane Cathedral, told

me of his acquaintance with the birds that still attended on his labours; how some would even perch about

him, waiting for their prey; and in a true Sexton's Calendar, how the species varied with the season of the

year. But this was the very poetry of the profession. The others whom I knew were somewhat dry. A faint

flavour of the gardener hung about them, but sophisticated and disbloomed. They had engagements to keep,

not alone with the deliberate series of the seasons, but with man kind's clocks and hourlong measurement

of time. And thus there was no leisure for the relishing pinch, or the hourlong gossip, foot on spade. They

were men wrapped up in their grim business; they liked well to open longclosed family vaults, blowing in

the key and throwing wide the grating; and they carried in their minds a calendar of names and dates. It

would be "in fiftytwa" that such a tomb was last opened for "Miss Jemimy." It was thus they spoke of their

past patients familiarly but not without respect, like old family servants. Here is indeed a servant, whom we

forget that we possess; who does not wait at the bright table, or run at the bell's summons, but patiently

smokes his pipe beside the mortuary fire, and in his faithful memory notches the burials of our race. To

suspect Shakespeare in his maturity of a superficial touch savours of paradox; yet he was surely in error when

he attributed insensibility to the digger of the grave. But perhaps it is on Hamlet that the charge should lie; or

perhaps the English sexton differs from the Scotch. The "goodman delver," reckoning up his years of office,

might have at least suggested other thoughts. It is a pride common among sextons. A cabinetmaker does not

count his cabinets, nor even an author his volumes, save when they stare upon him from the shelves; but the

gravedigger numbers his graves. He would indeed be something different from human if his solitary

openair and tragic labours left not a broad mark upon his mind. There, in his tranquil aisle, apart from city

clamour, among the cats and robins and the ancient effigies and legends of the tomb, he waits the continual

passage of his contemporaries, falling like minute drops into eternity. As they fall, he counts them; and this

enumeration, which was at first perhaps appalling to his soul, in the process of years and by the kindly

influence of habit grows to be his pride and pleasure. There are many common stories telling how he piques

himself on crowded cemeteries. But I will rather tell of the old gravedigger of Monkton, to whose

unsuffering bedside the minister was summoned. He dwelt in a cottage built into the wall of the churchyard;

and through a bull'seye pane above his bed he could see, as he lay dying, the rank grasses and the upright

and recumbent stones. Dr. Laurie was, I think, a Moderate: 'tis certain, at least, that he took a very Roman

view of deathbed dispositions; for he told the old man that he had lived beyond man's natural years, that his

life had been easy and reputable, that his family had all grown up and been a credit to his care, and that it now

behoved him unregretfully to gird his loins and follow the majority. The gravedigger heard him out; then he

raised himself upon one elbow, and with the other hand pointed through the window to the scene of his

lifelong labours. "Doctor," he said, "I ha'e laid three hunner and fowerscore in that kirkyaird; an it had

been His wull," indicating Heaven, "I would ha'e likit weel to ha'e made out the fower hunner." But it was not

to be; this tragedian of the fifth act had now another part to play; and the time had come when others were to

I would fain strike a note that should be more heroical; but the ground of all youth's suffering, solitude,

hysteria, and haunting of the grave, is nothing else than naked, ignorant selfishness. It is himself that he sees

dead; those are his virtues that are forgotten; his is the vague epitaph. Pity him but the more, if pity be your

cue; for where a man is all pride, vanity, and personal aspiration, he goes through fire unshielded. In every

part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy; and this poor,

laughable and tragic fool has not yet learned the rudiments; himself, giant Prometheus, is still ironed on the

peaks of Caucasus. But byandby his truant interests will leave that tortured body, slip abroad and gather

flowers. Then shall death appear before him in an altered guise; no longer as a doom peculiar to himself,

whether fate's crowning injustice or his own last vengeance upon those who fail to value him; but now as a

power that wounds him far more tenderly, not without solemn compensations, taking and giving, bereaving

The first step for all is to learn to the dregs our own ignoble fallibility. When we have fallen through storey

after storey of our vanity and aspiration, and sit rueful among the ruins, then it is that we begin to measure the

stature of our friends: how they stand between us and our own contempt, believing in our best; how, linking

us with others, and still spreading wide the influential circle, they weave us in and in with the fabric of

contemporary life; and to what petty size they dwarf the virtues and the vices that appeared gigantic in our

youth. So that at the last, when such a pin falls out when there vanishes in the least breath of time one of

those rich magazines of life on which we drew for our supply when he who had first dawned upon us as a

face among the faces of the city, and, still growing, came to bulk on our regard with those clear features of

the loved and living man, falls in a breath to memory and shadow, there falls along with him a whole wing of

One such face I now remember; one such blank some halfadozen of us labour to dissemble. In his youth he

was most beautiful in person, most serene and genial by disposition; full of racy words and quaint thoughts.

Laughter attended on his coming. He had the air of a great gentleman, jovial and royal with his equals, and to

the poorest student gentle and attentive. Power seemed to reside in him exhaustless; we saw him stoop to play

with us, but held him marked for higher destinies; we loved his notice; and I have rarely had my pride more

gratified than when he sat at my father's table, my acknowledged friend. So he walked among us, both hands

The powers and the ground of friendship is a mystery; but, looking back, I can discern that, in part, we loved

the thing he was, for some shadow of what he was to be. For with all his beauty, power, breeding, urbanity

and mirth, there was in those days something soulless in our friend. He would astonish us by sallies, witty,

innocent and inhumane; and by a misapplied Johnsonian pleasantry, demolish honest sentiment. I can still see

and hear him, as he went his way along the lamplit streets, LA CI DAREM LA MANO on his lips, a noble

figure of a youth, but following vanity and incredulous of good; and sure enough, somewhere on the high

seas of life, with his health, his hopes, his patrimony and his self respect, miserably went down.

From this disaster, like a spent swimmer, he came desperately ashore, bankrupt of money and consideration;

creeping to the family he had deserted; with broken wing, never more to rise. But in his face there was a light

of knowledge that was new to it. Of the wounds of his body he was never healed; died of them gradually,

with cleareyed resignation; of his wounded pride, we knew only from his silence. He returned to that city

where he had lorded it in his ambitious youth; lived there alone, seeing few; striving to retrieve the

irretrievable; at times still grappling with that mortal frailty that had brought him down; still joying in his

friend's successes; his laugh still ready but with kindlier music; and over all his thoughts the shadow of that

unalterable law which he had disavowed and which had brought him low. Lastly, when his bodily evils had

quite disabled him, he lay a great while dying, still without complaint, still finding interests; to his last step

The tale of this great failure is, to those who remained true to him, the tale of a success. In his youth he took

thought for no one but himself; when he came ashore again, his whole armada lost, he seemed to think of

none but others. Such was his tenderness for others, such his instinct of fine courtesy and pride, that of that

impure passion of remorse he never breathed a syllable; even regret was rare with him, and pointed with a

jest. You would not have dreamed, if you had known him then, that this was that great failure, that beacon to

young men, over whose fall a whole society had hissed and pointed fingers. Often have we gone to him,

redhot with our own hopeful sorrows, railing on the roseleaves in our princely bed of life, and he would

patiently give ear and wisely counsel; and it was only upon some return of our own thoughts that we were

reminded what manner of man this was to whom we disembosomed: a man, by his own fault, ruined; shut out

of the garden of his gifts; his whole city of hope both ploughed and salted; silently awaiting the deliverer.

Then something took us by the throat; and to see him there, so gentle, patient, brave and pious, oppressed but

not cast down, sorrow was so swallowed up in admiration that we could not dare to pity him. Even if the old

fault flashed out again, it but awoke our wonder that, in that lost battle, he should have still the energy to

fight. He had gone to ruin with a kind of kingly ABANDON, like one who condescended; but once ruined,

with the lights all out, he fought as for a kingdom. Most men, finding themselves the authors of their own

disgrace, rail the louder against God or destiny. Most men, when they repent, oblige their friends to share the

bitterness of that repentance. But he had held an inquest and passed sentence: MENE, MENE; and

condemned himself to smiling silence. He had given trouble enough; had earned misfortune amply, and

Thus was our old comrade, like Samson, careless in his days of strength; but on the coming of adversity, and

when that strength was gone that had betrayed him "for our strength is weakness" he began to blossom

and bring forth. Well, now, he is out of the fight: the burden that he bore thrown down before the great

If we go now and look on these innumerable epitaphs, the pathos and the irony are strangely fled. They do

not stand merely to the dead, these foolish monuments; they are pillars and legends set up to glorify the

difficult but not desperate life of man. This ground is hallowed by the heroes of defeat.

I see the indifferent pass before my friend's last restingplace; pause, with a shrug of pity, marvelling that so

rich an argosy had sunk. A pity, now that he is done with suffering, a pity most uncalled for, and an ignorant

wonder. Before those who loved him, his memory shines like a reproach; they honour him for silent lessons;

they cherish his example; and in what remains before them of their toil, fear to be unworthy of the dead. For

this proud man was one of those who prospered in the valley of humiliation; of whom Bunyan wrote that,

"Though Christian had the hard hap to meet in the valley with Apollyon, yet I must tell you, that in former

times men have met with angels here; have found pearls here; and have in this place found the words of life."

ALL through my boyhood and youth, I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was

always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one

to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat

by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a penny version book would be in my hand, to note

down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words. And what I

thus wrote was for no ulterior use, it was written consciously for practice. It was not so much that I wished to

be an author (though I wished that too) as that I had vowed that I would learn to write. That was a proficiency

that tempted me; and I practised to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with myself. Description

was the principal field of my exercise; for to any one with senses there is always something worth describing,

and town and country are but one continuous subject. But I worked in other ways also; often accompanied my

walks with dramatic dialogues, in which I played many parts; and often exercised myself in writing down

This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries I sometimes tried to keep, but always and very speedily

discarded, finding them a school of posturing and melancholy selfdeception. And yet this was not the most

efficient part of my training. Good though it was, it only taught me (so far as I have learned them at all) the

lower and less intellectual elements of the art, the choice of the essential note and the right word: things that

to a happier constitution had perhaps come by nature. And regarded as training, it had one grave defect; for it

set me no standard of achievement. So that there was perhaps more profit, as there was certainly more effort,

in my secret labours at home. Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a

thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or

some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was

unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least

in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the coordination of parts.

I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to

Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann. I remember one of these monkey tricks, which

was called THE VANITY OF MORALS: it was to have had a second part, THE VANITY OF

KNOWLEDGE; and as I had neither morality nor scholarship, the names were apt; but the second part was

never attempted, and the first part was written (which is my reason for recalling it, ghostlike, from its ashes)

no less than three times: first in the manner of Hazlitt, second in the manner of Ruskin, who had cast on me a

passing spell, and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas Browne. So with my other works: CAIN, an

epic, was (save the mark!) an imitation of SORDELLO: ROBIN HOOD, a tale in verse, took an eclectic

middle course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer and Morris: in MONMOUTH, a tragedy, I reclined on the

bosom of Mr. Swinburne; in my innumerable goutyfooted lyrics, I followed many masters; in the first draft

of THE KING'S PARDON, a tragedy, I was on the trail of no lesser man than John Webster; in the second

draft of the same piece, with staggering versatility, I had shifted my allegiance to Congreve, and of course

conceived my fable in a less serious vein for it was not Congreve's verse, it was his exquisite prose, that I

admired and sought to copy. Even at the age of thirteen I had tried to do justice to the inhabitants of the

famous city of Peebles in the style of the BOOK OF SNOBS. So I might go on for ever, through all my

abortive novels, and down to my later plays, of which I think more tenderly, for they were not only conceived

at first under the bracing influence of old Dumas, but have met with resurrection: one, strangely bettered by

another hand, came on the stage itself and was played by bodily actors; the other, originally known as

SEMIRAMIS: A TRAGEDY, I have observed on bookstalls under the ALIAS of Prince Otto. But enough

has been said to show by what arts of impersonation, and in what purely ventriloquial efforts I first saw my

That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write whether I have profited or not, that is the way. It was so Keats

learned, and there was never a finer temperament for literature than Keats's; it was so, if we could trace it out,

that all men have learned; and that is why a revival of letters is always accompanied or heralded by a cast

back to earlier and fresher models. Perhaps I hear some one cry out: But this is not the way to be original! It

is not; nor is there any way but to be born so. Nor yet, if you are born original, is there anything in this

training that shall clip the wings of your originality. There can be none more original than Montaigne, neither

could any be more unlike Cicero; yet no craftsman can fail to see how much the one must have tried in his

time to imitate the other. Burns is the very type of a prime force in letters: he was of all men the most

imitative. Shakespeare himself, the imperial, proceeds directly from a school. It is only from a school that we

can expect to have good writers; it is almost invariably from a school that great writers, these lawless

exceptions, issue. Nor is there anything here that should astonish the considerate. Before he can tell what

cadences he truly prefers, the student should have tried all that are possible; before he can choose and

preserve a fitting key of words, he should long have practised the literary scales; and it is only after years of

such gymnastic that he can sit down at last, legions of words swarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrase

simultaneously bidding for his choice, and he himself knowing what he wants to do and (within the narrow

And it is the great point of these imitations that there still shines beyond the student's reach his inimitable

model. Let him try as he please, he is still sure of failure; and it is a very old and a very true saying that

failure is the only highroad to success. I must have had some disposition to learn; for I clear sightedly

condemned my own performances. I liked doing them indeed; but when they were done, I could see they

were rubbish. In consequence, I very rarely showed them even to my friends; and such friends as I chose to

be my confidants I must have chosen well, for they had the friendliness to be quite plain with me, "Padding,"

said one. Another wrote: "I cannot understand why you do lyrics so badly." No more could I! Thrice I put

myself in the way of a more authoritative rebuff, by sending a paper to a magazine. These were returned; and

I was not surprised nor even pained. If they had not been looked at, as (like all amateurs) I suspected was the

case, there was no good in repeating the experiment; if they had been looked at well, then I had not yet

learned to write, and I must keep on learning and living. Lastly, I had a piece of good fortune which is the

occasion of this paper, and by which I was able to see my literature in print, and to measure experimentally

The Speculative Society is a body of some antiquity, and has counted among its members Scott, Brougham,

Jeffrey, Horner, Benjamin Constant, Robert Emmet, and many a legal and local celebrity besides. By an

accident, variously explained, it has its rooms in the very buildings of the University of Edinburgh: a hall,

Turkeycarpeted, hung with pictures, looking, when lighted up at night with fire and candle, like some

goodly diningroom; a passagelike library, walled with books in their wire cages; and a corridor with a

fireplace, benches, a table, many prints of famous members, and a mural tablet to the virtues of a former

secretary. Here a member can warm himself and loaf and read; here, in defiance of Senatusconsults, he can

smoke. The Senatus looks askance at these privileges; looks even with a somewhat vinegar aspect on the

whole society; which argues a lack of proportion in the learned mind, for the world, we may be sure, will

prize far higher this haunt of dead lions than all the living dogs of the professorate.

I sat one December morning in the library of the Speculative; a very humbleminded youth, though it was a

virtue I never had much credit for; yet proud of my privileges as a member of the Spec.; proud of the pipe I

was smoking in the teeth of the Senatus; and in particular, proud of being in the next room to three very

distinguished students, who were then conversing beside the corridor fire. One of these has now his name on

the back of several volumes, and his voice, I learn, is influential in the law courts. Of the death of the second,

And the third also has escaped out of that battle of in which he fought so hard, it may be so unwisely. They

were all three, as I have said, notable students; but this was the most conspicuous. Wealthy, handsome,

ambitious, adventurous, diplomatic, a reader of Balzac, and of all men that I have known, the most like to one

of Balzac's characters, he led a life, and was attended by an ill fortune, that could be properly set forth only in

the COMEDIE HUMAINE. He had then his eye on Parliament; and soon after the time of which I write, he

made a showy speech at a political dinner, was cried up to heaven next day in the COURANT, and the day

after was dashed lower than earth with a charge of plagiarism in the SCOTSMAN. Report would have it (I

daresay, very wrongly) that he was betrayed by one in whom he particularly trusted, and that the author of the

charge had learned its truth from his own lips. Thus, at least, he was up one day on a pinnacle, admired and

envied by all; and the next, though still but a boy, he was publicly disgraced. The blow would have broken a

less finely tempered spirit; and even him I suppose it rendered reckless; for he took flight to London, and

there, in a fast club, disposed of the bulk of his considerable patrimony in the space of one winter. For years

thereafter he lived I know not how; always well dressed, always in good hotels and good society, always with

empty pockets. The charm of his manner may have stood him in good stead; but though my own manners are

very agreeable, I have never found in them a source of livelihood; and to explain the miracle of his continued

existence, I must fall back upon the theory of the philosopher, that in his case, as in all of the same kind,

"there was a suffering relative in the background." From this genteel eclipse he reappeared upon the scene,

and presently sought me out in the character of a generous editor. It is in this part that I best remember him;

tall, slender, with a not ungraceful stoop; looking quite like a refined gentleman, and quite like an urbane

adventurer; smiling with an engaging ambiguity; cocking at you one peaked eyebrow with a great appearance

of finesse; speaking low and sweet and thick, with a touch of burr; telling strange tales with singular

deliberation and, to a patient listener, excellent effect. After all these ups and downs, he seemed still, like the

rich student that he was of yore, to breathe of money; seemed still perfectly sure of himself and certain of his

end. Yet he was then upon the brink of his last overthrow. He had set himself to found the strangest thing in

our society: one of those periodical sheets from which men suppose themselves to learn opinions; in which

young gentlemen from the universities are encouraged, at so much a line, to garble facts, insult foreign

nations and calumniate private individuals; and which are now the source of glory, so that if a man's name be

often enough printed there, he becomes a kind of demigod; and people will pardon him when he talks back

and forth, as they do for Mr. Gladstone; and crowd him to suffocation on railway platforms, as they did the

other day to General Boulanger; and buy his literary works, as I hope you have just done for me. Our fathers,

when they were upon some great enterprise, would sacrifice a life; building, it may be, a favourite slave into

the foundations of their palace. It was with his own life that my companion disarmed the envy of the gods. He

fought his paper singlehanded; trusting no one, for he was something of a cynic; up early and down late, for

he was nothing of a sluggard; daily ear wigging influential men, for he was a master of ingratiation. In that

slender and silken fellow there must have been a rare vein of courage, that he should thus have died at his

employment; and doubtless ambition spoke loudly in his ear, and doubtless love also, for it seems there was a

marriage in his view had he succeeded. But he died, and his paper died after him; and of all this grace, and

tact, and courage, it must seem to our blind eyes as if there had come literally nothing.

These three students sat, as I was saying, in the corridor, under the mural tablet that records the virtues of

Macbean, the former secretary. We would often smile at that ineloquent memorial and thought it a poor thing

to come into the world at all and have no more behind one than Macbean. And yet of these three, two are

gone and have left less; and this book, perhaps, when it is old and foxy, and some one picks it up in a corner

of a bookshop, and glances through it, smiling at the old, graceless turns of speech, and perhaps for the love

of ALMA MATER (which may be still extant and flourishing) buys it, not without haggling, for some pence

this book may alone preserve a memory of James Walter Ferrier and Robert Glasgow Brown.

Their thoughts ran very differently on that December morning; they were all on fire with ambition; and when

they had called me in to them, and made me a sharer in their design, I too became drunken with pride and

hope. We were to found a University magazine. A pair of little, active brothers Livingstone by name, great

skippers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a book shop over against the University building

had been debauched to play the part of publishers. We four were to be conjunct editors and, what was the

main point of the concern, to print our own works; while, by every rule of arithmetic that flatterer of

credulity the adventure must succeed and bring great profit. Well, well: it was a bright vision. I went home

that morning walking upon air. To have been chosen by these three distinguished students was to me the most

unspeakable advance; it was my first draught of consideration; it reconciled me to myself and to my

fellowmen; and as I steered round the railings at the Tron, I could not withhold my lips from smiling

publicly. Yet, in the bottom of my heart, I knew that magazine would be a grim fiasco; I knew it would not be

worth reading; I knew, even if it were, that nobody would read it; and I kept wondering how I should be able,

upon my compact income of twelve pounds per annum, payable monthly, to meet my share in the expense. It

The magazine appeared, in a yellow cover, which was the best part of it, for at least it was unassuming; it ran

four months in undisturbed obscurity, and died without a gasp. The first number was edited by all four of us

with prodigious bustle; the second fell principally into the hands of Ferrier and me; the third I edited alone;

and it has long been a solemn question who it was that edited the fourth. It would perhaps be still more

difficult to say who read it. Poor yellow sheet, that looked so hopefully Livingtones' window! Poor, harmless

paper, that might have gone to print a SHAKESPEARE on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with

nonsense; And, shall I say, Poor Editors? I cannot pity myself, to whom it was all pure gain. It was no news

to me, but only the wholesome confirmation of my judgment, when the magazine struggled into halfbirth,

and instantly sickened and subsided into night. I had sent a copy to the lady with whom my heart was at that

time somewhat engaged, and who did all that in her lay to break it; and she, with some tact, passed over the

gift and my cherished contributions in silence. I will not say that I was pleased at this; but I will tell her now,

if by any chance she takes up the work of her former servant, that I thought the better of her taste. I cleared

the decks after this lost engagement; had the necessary interview with my father, which passed off not amiss;

paid over my share of the expense to the two little, active brothers, who rubbed their hands as much, but

methought skipped rather less than formerly, having perhaps, these two also, embarked upon the enterprise

with some graceful illusions; and then, reviewing the whole episode, I told myself that the time was not yet

ripe, nor the man ready; and to work I went again with my penny version books, having fallen back in one

From this defunct periodical I am going to reprint one of my own papers. The poor little piece is all

tailforemost. I have done my best to straighten its array, I have pruned it fearlessly, and it remains

invertebrate and wordy. No selfrespecting magazine would print the thing; and here you behold it in a

bound volume, not for any worth of its own, but for the sake of the man whom it purports dimly to represent

and some of whose sayings it preserves; so that in this volume of Memories and Portraits, Robert Young, the

Swanston gardener, may stand alongside of John Todd, the Swanston shepherd. Not that John and Robert

drew very close together in their lives; for John was rough, he smelt of the windy brae; and Robert was

gentle, and smacked of the garden in the hollow. Perhaps it is to my shame that I liked John the better of the

two; he had grit and dash, and that salt of the Old Adam that pleases men with any savage inheritance of

blood; and he was a wayfarer besides, and took my gipsy fancy. But however that may be, and however

Robert's profile may be blurred in the boyish sketch that follows, he was a man of a most quaint and beautiful

nature, whom, if it were possible to recast a piece of work so old, I should like well to draw again with a

maturer touch. And as I think of him and of John, I wonder in what other country two such men would be

found dwelling together, in a hamlet of some twenty cottages, in the woody fold of a green hill.

I THINK I might almost have said the last: somewhere, indeed, in the uttermost glens of the Lammermuir or

among the southwestern hills there may yet linger a decrepid representative of this bygone good fellowship;

but as far as actual experience goes, I have only met one man in my life who might fitly be quoted in the

same breath with Andrew Fairservice, though without his vices. He was a man whose very presence could

impart a savour of quaint antiquity to the baldest and most modern flowerplots. There was a dignity about

his tall stooping form, and an earnestness in his wrinkled face that recalled Don Quixote; but a Don Quixote

who had come through the training of the Covenant, and been nourished in his youth on WALKER'S LIVES

Now, as I could not bear to let such a man pass away with no sketch preserved of his oldfashioned virtues, I

hope the reader will take this as an excuse for the present paper, and judge as kindly as he can the infirmities

of my description. To me, who find it so difficult to tell the little that I know, he stands essentially as a

GENIUS LOCI. It is impossible to separate his spare form and old straw hat from the garden in the lap of the

hill, with its rocks overgrown with clematis, its shadowy walks, and the splendid breadth of champaign that

one saw from the northwest corner. The garden and gardener seem part and parcel of each other. When I

take him from his right surroundings and try to make him appear for me on paper, he looks unreal and

phantasmal: the best that I can say may convey some notion to those that never saw him, but to me it will be

The first time that I saw him, I fancy Robert was pretty old already: he had certainly begun to use his years as

a stalking horse. Latterly he was beyond all the impudencies of logic, considering a reference to the parish

to say; and I never found any one bold enough to answer the argument. Apart from this vantage that he kept

over all who were not yet octogenarian, he had some other drawbacks as a gardener. He shrank the very place

he cultivated. The dignity and reduced gentility of his appearance made the small garden cut a sorry figure.

He was full of tales of greater situations in his younger days. He spoke of castles and parks with a humbling

familiarity. He told of places where undergardeners had trembled at his looks, where there were meres and

swanneries, labyrinths of walk and wildernesses of sad shrubbery in his control, till you could not help

feeling that it was condescension on his part to dress your humbler garden plots. You were thrown at once

into an invidious position. You felt that you were profiting by the needs of dignity, and that his poverty and

not his will consented to your vulgar rule. Involuntarily you compared yourself with the swineherd that made

Alfred watch his cakes, or some bloated citizen who may have given his sons and his condescension to the

fallen Dionysius. Nor were the disagreeables purely fanciful and metaphysical, for the sway that he exercised

over your feelings he extended to your garden, and, through the garden, to your diet. He would trim a hedge,

throw away a favourite plant, or fill the most favoured and fertile section of the garden with a vegetable that

none of us could eat, in supreme contempt for our opinion. If you asked him to send you in one of your own

artichokes, "THAT I WULL, MEM," he would say, "WITH PLEASURE, FOR IT IS MAIR BLESSED TO

GIVE THAN TO RECEIVE." Ay, and even when, by extra twisting of the screw, we prevailed on him to

prefer our commands to his own inclination, and he went away, stately and sad, professing that "OUR WULL

WAS HIS PLEASURE," but yet reminding us that he would do it "WITH FEELIN'S," even then, I say, the

triumphant master felt humbled in his triumph, felt that he ruled on sufferance only, that he was taking a

mean advantage of the other's low estate, and that the whole scene had been one of those "slights that patient

In flowers his taste was oldfashioned and catholic; affecting sunflowers and dahlias, wallflowers and roses

and holding in supreme aversion whatsoever was fantastic, newfashioned or wild. There was one exception

to this sweeping ban. Foxgloves, though undoubtedly guilty on the last count, he not only spared, but loved;

and when the shrubbery was being thinned, he stayed his hand and dexterously manipulated his bill in order

to save every stately stem. In boyhood, as he told me once, speaking in that tone that only actors and the

oldfashioned common folk can use nowadays, his heart grew "PROUD" within him when he came on a

burncourse among the braes of Manor that shone purple with their graceful trophies; and not all his

apprenticeship and practice for so many years of precise gardening had banished these boyish recollections

from his heart. Indeed, he was a man keenly alive to the beauty of all that was bygone. He abounded in old

stories of his boyhood, and kept pious account of all his former pleasures; and when he went (on a holiday) to

visit one of the fabled great places of the earth where he had served before, he came back full of little

preRaphaelite reminiscences that showed real passion for the past, such as might have shaken hands with

But however his sympathy with his old feelings might affect his liking for the foxgloves, the very truth was

that he scorned all flowers together. They were but garnishings, childish toys, trifling ornaments for ladies'

chimneyshelves. It was towards his cauliflowers and peas and cabbage that his heart grew warm. His

preference for the more useful growths was such that cabbages were found invading the flowerpots, and an

outpost of savoys was once discovered in the centre of the lawn. He would prelect over some thriving plant

with wonderful enthusiasm, piling reminiscence on reminiscence of former and perhaps yet finer specimens.

Yet even then he did not let the credit leave himself. He had, indeed, raised "FINER O' THEM;" but it

seemed that no one else had been favoured with a like success. All other gardeners, in fact, were mere foils to

his own superior attainments; and he would recount, with perfect soberness of voice and visage, how so and

so had wondered, and such another could scarcely give credit to his eyes. Nor was it with his rivals only that

he parted praise and blame. If you remarked how well a plant was looking, he would gravely touch his hat

and thank you with solemn unction; all credit in the matter falling to him. If, on the other hand, you called his

attention to some backgoing vegetable, he would quote Scripture: "PAUL MAY PLANT AND APOLLOS

MAY WATER;" all blame being left to Providence, on the score of deficient rain or untimely frosts.

There was one thing in the garden that shared his preference with his favourite cabbages and rhubarb, and

that other was the beehive. Their sound, their industry, perhaps their sweet product also, had taken hold of his

imagination and heart, whether by way of memory or no I cannot say, although perhaps the bees too were

linked to him by some recollection of Manor braes and his country childhood. Nevertheless, he was too chary

of his personal safety or (let me rather say) his personal dignity to mingle in any active office towards them.

But he could stand by while one of the contemned rivals did the work for him, and protest that it was quite

safe in spite of his own considerate distance and the cries of the distressed assistant. In regard to bees, he was

rather a man of word than deed, and some of his most striking sentences had the bees for text. "THEY ARE

As far as the Bible goes, he was deeply read. Like the old Covenanters, of whom he was the worthy

representative, his mouth was full of sacred quotations; it was the book that he had studied most and thought

upon most deeply. To many people in his station the Bible, and perhaps Burns, are the only books of any vital

literary merit that they read, feeding themselves, for the rest, on the draff of country newspapers, and the very

instructive but not very palatable pabulum of some cheap educational series. This was Robert's position. All

day long he had dreamed of the Hebrew stories, and his head had been full of Hebrew poetry and Gospel

ethics; until they had struck deep root into his heart, and the very expressions had become a part of him; so

that he rarely spoke without some antique idiom or Scripture mannerism that gave a raciness to the merest

trivialities of talk. But the influence of the Bible did not stop here. There was more in Robert than quaint

phrase and ready store of reference. He was imbued with a spirit of peace and love: he interposed between

man and wife: he threw himself between the angry, touching his hat the while with all the ceremony of an

usher: he protected the birds from everybody but himself, seeing, I suppose, a great difference between

official execution and wanton sport. His mistress telling him one day to put some ferns into his master's

particular corner, and adding, "Though, indeed, Robert, he doesn't deserve them, for he wouldn't help me to

gather them," "EH, MEM," replies Robert, "BUT I WOULDNAE SAY THAT, FOR I THINK HE'S JUST A

MOST DESERVIN' GENTLEMAN." Again, two of our friends, who were on intimate terms, and

accustomed to use language to each other, somewhat without the bounds of the parliamentary, happened to

differ about the position of a seat in the garden. The discussion, as was usual when these two were at it, soon

waxed tolerably insulting on both sides. Every one accustomed to such controversies several times a day was

quietly enjoying this prizefight of somewhat abusive wit every one but Robert, to whom the perfect good

faith of the whole quarrel seemed unquestionable, and who, after having waited till his conscience would

suffer him to wait no more, and till he expected every moment that the disputants would fall to blows, cut

suddenly in with tones of almost tearful entreaty: "EH, BUT, GENTLEMEN, I WAD HAE NAE MAIR

WORDS ABOUT IT!" One thing was noticeable about Robert's religion: it was neither dogmatic nor

sectarian. He never expatiated (at least, in my hearing) on the doctrines of his creed, and he never condemned

anybody else. I have no doubt that he held all Roman Catholics, Atheists, and Mahometans as considerably

out of it; I don't believe he had any sympathy for Prelacy; and the natural feelings of man must have made

him a little sore about FreeChurchism; but at least, he never talked about these views, never grew

controversially noisy, and never openly aspersed the belief or practice of anybody. Now all this is not

generally characteristic of Scotch piety; Scotch sects being churches militant with a vengeance, and Scotch

believers perpetual crusaders the one against the other, and missionaries the one to the other. Perhaps Robert's

originally tender heart was what made the difference; or, perhaps, his solitary and pleasant labour among

fruits and flowers had taught him a more sunshiny creed than those whose work is among the tares of fallen

humanity; and the soft influences of the garden had entered deep into his spirit,

But I could go on for ever chronicling his golden sayings or telling of his innocent and living piety. I had

meant to tell of his cottage, with the German pipe hung reverently above the fire, and the shell box that he

had made for his son, and of which he would say pathetically: "HE WAS REAL PLEASED WI' IT AT

FIRST, BUT I THINK HE'S GOT A KIND O' TIRED O' IT NOW" the son being then a man of about

forty. But I will let all these pass. "'Tis more significant: he's dead." The earth, that he had digged so much in

his life, was dug out by another for himself; and the flowers that he had tended drew their life still from him,

but in a new and nearer way. A bird flew about the open grave, as if it too wished to honour the obsequies of

one who had so often quoted Scripture in favour of its kind. "Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing, and

Yes, he is dead. But the kings did not rise in the place of death to greet him "with taunting proverbs" as they

rose to greet the haughty Babylonian; for in his life he was lowly, and a peacemaker and a servant of God.

TO leave home in early life is to be stunned and quickened with novelties; but when years have come, it only

casts a more endearing light upon the past. As in those composite photographs of Mr. Galton's, the image of

each new sitter brings out but the more clearly the central features of the race; when once youth has flown,

each new impression only deepens the sense of nationality and the desire of native places. So may some cadet

of Royal Ecossais or the Albany Regiment, as he mounted guard about French citadels, so may some officer

marching his company of the Scots Dutch among the polders, have felt the soft rains of the Hebrides upon

his brow, or started in the ranks at the remembered aroma of peatsmoke. And the rivers of home are dear in

particular to all men. This is as old as Naaman, who was jealous for Abana and Pharpar; it is confined to no

race nor country, for I know one of Scottish blood but a child of Suffolk, whose fancy still lingers about the

lilied lowland waters of that shire. But the streams of Scotland are incomparable in themselves or I am only

the more Scottish to suppose so and their sound and colour dwell for ever in the memory. How often and

willingly do I not look again in fancy on Tummel, or Manor, or the talking Airdle, or Dee swirling in its

Lynn; on the bright burn of Kinnaird, or the golden burn that pours and sulks in the den behind Kingussie! I

think shame to leave out one of these enchantresses, but the list would grow too long if I remembered all;

only I may not forget Allan Water, nor birchwetting Rogie, nor yet Almond; nor, for all its pollutions, that

Water of Leith of the many and wellnamed mills Bell's Mills, and Canon Mills, and Silver Mills; nor

Redford Burn of pleasant memories; nor yet, for all its smallness, that nameless trickle that springs in the

green bosom of Allermuir, and is fed from Halkerside with a perennial teacupful, and threads the moss under

the Shearer's Knowe, and makes one pool there, overhung by a rock, where I loved to sit and make bad

verses, and is then kidnapped in its infancy by subterranean pipes for the service of the seabeholding city in

the plain. From many points in the moss you may see at one glance its whole course and that of all its

tributaries; the geographer of this Lilliput may visit all its corners without sitting down, and not yet begin to

be breathed; Shearer's Knowe and Halkerside are but names of adjacent cantons on a single shoulder of a hill,

as names are squandered (it would seem to the inexpert, in superfluity) upon these upland sheepwalks; a

bucket would receive the whole discharge of the toy river; it would take it an appreciable time to fill your

morning bath; for the most part, besides, it soaks unseen through the moss; and yet for the sake of auld lang

syne, and the figure of a certain GENIUS LOCI, I am condemned to linger awhile in fancy by its shores; and

if the nymph (who cannot be above a span in stature) will but inspire my pen, I would gladly carry the reader

John Todd, when I knew him, was already "the oldest herd on the Pentlands," and had been all his days

faithful to that curlew scattering, sheepcollecting life. He remembered the droving days, when the drove

roads, that now lie green and solitary through the heather, were thronged thoroughfares. He had himself often

marched flocks into England, sleeping on the hillsides with his caravan; and by his account it was a rough

business not without danger. The drove roads lay apart from habitation; the drovers met in the wilderness, as

today the deepsea fishers meet off the banks in the solitude of the Atlantic; and in the one as in the other

case rough habits and fistlaw were the rule. Crimes were committed, sheep filched, and drovers robbed and

beaten; most of which offences had a moorland burial and were never heard of in the courts of justice. John,

in those days, was at least once attacked, by two men after his watch, and at least once, betrayed by his

habitual anger, fell under the danger of the law and was clapped into some rustic prisonhouse, the doors of

which he burst in the night and was no more heard of in that quarter. When I knew him, his life had fallen in

quieter places, and he had no cares beyond the dulness of his dogs and the inroads of pedestrians from town.

But for a man of his propensity to wrath these were enough; he knew neither rest nor peace, except by

snatches; in the gray of the summer morning, and already from far up the hill, he would wake the "toun" with

the sound of his shoutings; and in the lambing time, his cries were not yet silenced late at night. This wrathful

voice of a man unseen might be said to haunt that quarter of the Pentlands, an audible bogie; and no doubt it

added to the fear in which men stood of John a touch of something legendary. For my own part, he was at

first my enemy, and I, in my character of a rambling boy, his natural abhorrence. It was long before I saw him

near at hand, knowing him only by some sudden blast of bellowing from far above, bidding me "c'way oot

amang the sheep." The quietest recesses of the hill harboured this ogre; I skulked in my favourite wilderness

like a Cameronian of the Killing Time, and John Todd was my Claverhouse, and his dogs my questing

dragoons. Little by little we dropped into civilities; his hail at sight of me began to have less of the ring of a

war slogan; soon, we never met but he produced his snuffbox, which was with him, like the calumet with

the Red Indian, a part of the heraldry of peace; and at length, in the ripeness of time, we grew to be a pair of

friends, and when I lived alone in these parts in the winter, it was a settled thing for John to "give me a cry"

over the garden wall as he set forth upon his evening round, and for me to overtake and bear him company.

That dread voice of his that shook the hills when he was angry, fell in ordinary talk very pleasantly upon the

ear, with a kind of honied, friendly whine, not far off singing, that was eminently Scottish. He laughed not

very often, and when he did, with a sudden, loud hawhaw, hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a

rock. His face was permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like a picture than a

face; yet with a certain strain and a threat of latent anger in the expression, like that of a man trained too fine

and harassed with perpetual vigilance. He spoke in the richest dialect of Scotch I ever heard; the words in

themselves were a pleasure and often a surprise to me, so that I often came back from one of our patrols with

new acquisitions; and this vocabulary he would handle like a master, stalking a little before me, "beard on

shoulder," the plaid hanging loosely about him, the yellow staff clapped under his arm, and guiding me uphill

by that devious, tactical ascent which seems peculiar to men of his trade. I might count him with the best

talkers; only that talking Scotch and talking English seem incomparable acts. He touched on nothing at least,

but he adorned it; when he narrated, the scene was before you; when he spoke (as he did mostly) of his own

antique business, the thing took on a colour of romance and curiosity that was surprising. The clans of sheep

with their particular territories on the hill, and how, in the yearly killings and purchases, each must be

proportionally thinned and strengthened; the midnight busyness of animals, the signs of the weather, the cares

of the snowy season, the exquisite stupidity of sheep, the exquisite cunning of dogs: all these he could present

so humanly, and with so much old experience and living gusto, that weariness was excluded. And in the

midst he would suddenly straighten his bowed back, the stick would fly abroad in demonstration, and the

sharp thunder of his voice roll out a long itinerary for the dogs, so that you saw at last the use of that great

wealth of names for every knowe and howe upon the hillside; and the dogs, having hearkened with lowered

tails and raised faces, would run up their flags again to the masthead and spread themselves upon the

indicated circuit. It used to fill me with wonder how they could follow and retain so long a story. But John

denied these creatures all intelligence; they were the constant butt of his passion and contempt; it was just

possible to work with the like of them, he said, not more than possible. And then he would expand upon the

subject of the really good dogs that he had known, and the one really good dog that he had himself possessed.

He had been offered forty pounds for it; but a good collie was worth more than that, more than anything, to a

"herd;" he did the herd's work for him. "As for the like of them!" he would cry, and scornfully indicate the

Once I translate John's Lallan, for I cannot do it justice, being born BRITANNIS IN MONTIBUS, indeed,

but alas! INERUDITO SAECULO once, in the days of his good dog, he had bought some sheep in

Edinburgh, and on the way out, the road being crowded, two were lost. This was a reproach to John, and a

slur upon the dog; and both were alive to their misfortune. Word came, after some days, that a farmer about

Braid had found a pair of sheep; and thither went John and the dog to ask for restitution. But the farmer was a

hard man and stood upon his rights. "How were they marked?" he asked; and since John had bought right and

left from many sellers and had no notion of the marks "Very well," said the farmer, "then it's only right that

I should keep them." "Well," said John, "it's a fact that I cannae tell the sheep; but if my dog can, will ye let

me have them?" The farmer was honest as well as hard, and besides I daresay he had little fear of the ordeal;

so he had all the sheep upon his farm into one large park, and turned John's dog into their midst. That hairy

man of business knew his errand well; he knew that John and he had bought two sheep and (to their shame)

lost them about Boroughmuirhead; he knew besides (the lord knows how, unless by listening) that they were

come to Braid for their recovery; and without pause or blunder singled out, first one and then another, the two

waifs. It was that afternoon the forty pounds were offered and refused. And the shepherd and his dog what

do I say? the true shepherd and his man set off together by Fairmilehead in jocund humour, and "smiled to

ither" all the way home, with the two recovered ones before them. So far, so good; but intelligence may be

abused. The dog, as he is by little man's inferior in mind, is only by little his superior in virtue; and John had

another collie tale of quite a different complexion. At the foot of the moss behind Kirk Yetton (Caer Ketton,

wise men say) there is a scrog of low wood and a pool with a dam for washing sheep. John was one day lying

under a bush in the scrog, when he was aware of a collie on the far hillside skulking down through the

deepest of the heather with obtrusive stealth. He knew the dog; knew him for a clever, rising practitioner

from quite a distant farm; one whom perhaps he had coveted as he saw him masterfully steering flocks to

market. But what did the practitioner so far from home? and why this guilty and secret manoeuvring towards

the pool? for it was towards the pool that he was heading. John lay the closer under his bush, and presently

saw the dog come forth upon the margin, look all about him to see if he were anywhere observed, plunge in

and repeatedly wash himself over head and ears, and then (but now openly and with tail in air) strike

homeward over the hills. That same night word was sent his master, and the rising practitioner, shaken up

from where he lay, all innocence, before the fire, was had out to a dykeside and promptly shot; for alas! he

was that foulest of criminals under trust, a sheepeater; and it was from the maculation of sheep's blood that

A trade that touches nature, one that lies at the foundations of life, in which we have all had ancestors

employed, so that on a hint of it ancestral memories revive, lends itself to literary use, vocal or written. The

fortune of a tale lies not alone in the skill of him that writes, but as much, perhaps, in the inherited experience

of him who reads; and when I hear with a particular thrill of things that I have never done or seen, it is one of

that innumerable army of my ancestors rejoicing in past deeds. Thus novels begin to touch not the fine

DILETTANTI but the gross mass of mankind, when they leave off to speak of parlours and shades of manner

and stillborn niceties of motive, and begin to deal with fighting, sailoring, adventure, death or childbirth;

and thus ancient outdoor crafts and occupations, whether Mr. Hardy wields the shepherd's crook or Count

Tolstoi swings the scythe, lift romance into a near neighbourhood with epic. These aged things have on them

the dew of man's morning; they lie near, not so much to us, the semiartificial flowerets, as to the trunk and

aboriginal taproot of the race. A thousand interests spring up in the process of the ages, and a thousand

perish; that is now an eccentricity or a lost art which was once the fashion of an empire; and those only are

perennial matters that rouse us today, and that roused men in all epochs of the past. There is a certain critic,

not indeed of execution but of matter, whom I dare be known to set before the best: a certain lowbrowed,

hairy gentleman, at first a percher in the fork of trees, next (as they relate) a dweller in caves, and whom I

think I see squatting in cavemouths, of a pleasant afternoon, to munch his berries his wife, that

accomplished lady, squatting by his side: his name I never heard, but he is often described as Probably

Arboreal, which may serve for recognition. Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits

Probably Arboreal; in all our veins there run some minims of his old, wild, treetop blood; our civilised

nerves still tingle with his rude terrors and pleasures; and to that which would have moved our common

We have not so far to climb to come to shepherds; and it may be I had one for an ascendant who has largely

moulded me. But yet I think I owe my taste for that hillside business rather to the art and interest of John

Todd. He it was that made it live for me, as the artist can make all things live. It was through him the simple

strategy of massing sheep upon a snowy evening, with its attendant scampering of earnest, shaggy

aidesdechamp, was an affair that I never wearied of seeing, and that I never weary of recalling to mind: the

shadow of the night darkening on the hills, inscrutable black blots of snow shower moving here and there like

night already come, huddles of yellow sheep and dartings of black dogs upon the snow, a bitter air that took

you by the throat, unearthly harpings of the wind along the moors; and for centre piece to all these features

and influences, John winding up the brae, keeping his captain's eye upon all sides, and breaking, ever and

again, into a spasm of bellowing that seemed to make the evening bleaker. It is thus that I still see him in my

mind's eye, perched on a hump of the declivity not far from Halkerside, his staff in airy flourish, his great

voice taking hold upon the hills and echoing terror to the lowlands; I, meanwhile, standing somewhat back,

until the fit should be over, and, with a pinch of snuff, my friend relapse into his easy, even conversation.

I HAVE named, among many rivers that make music in my memory, that dirty Water of Leith. Often and

often I desire to look upon it again; and the choice of a point of view is easy to me. It should be at a certain

waterdoor, embowered in shrubbery. The river is there dammed back for the service of the flourmill just

below, so that it lies deep and darkling, and the sand slopes into brown obscurity with a glint of gold; and it

has but newly been recruited by the borrowings of the snuffmill just above, and these, tumbling merrily in,

shake the pool to its black heart, fill it with drowsy eddies, and set the curded froth of many other mills

solemnly steering to and fro upon the surface. Or so it was when I was young; for change, and the masons,

and the pruningknife, have been busy; and if I could hope to repeat a cherished experience, it must be on

many and impossible conditions. I must choose, as well as the point of view, a certain moment in my growth,

so that the scale may be exaggerated, and the trees on the steep opposite side may seem to climb to heaven,

and the sand by the waterdoor, where I am standing, seem as low as Styx. And I must choose the season

also, so that the valley may be brimmed like a cup with sunshine and the songs of birds; and the year of

grace, so that when I turn to leave the riverside I may find the old manse and its inhabitants unchanged.

It was a place in that time like no other: the garden cut into provinces by a great hedge of beech, and

overlooked by the church and the terrace of the churchyard, where the tombstones were thick, and after

nightfall "spunkies" might be seen to dance at least by children; flowerplots lying warm in sunshine; laurels

and the great yew making elsewhere a pleasing horror of shade; the smell of water rising from all round, with

an added tang of papermills; the sound of water everywhere, and the sound of mills the wheel and the dam

singing their alternate strain; the birds on every bush and from every corner of the overhanging woods

pealing out their notes until the air throbbed with them; and in the midst of this, the manse. I see it, by the

standard of my childish stature, as a great and roomy house. In truth, it was not so large as I supposed, nor yet

so convenient, and, standing where it did, it is difficult to suppose that it was healthful. Yet a large family of

stalwart sons and tall daughters were housed and reared, and came to man and womanhood in that nest of

little chambers; so that the face of the earth was peppered with the children of the manse, and letters with

outlandish stamps became familiar to the local postman, and the walls of the little chambers brightened with

the wonders of the East. The dullest could see this was a house that had a pair of hands in divers foreign

Here lived an ancestor of mine, who was a herd of men. I read him, judging with older criticism the report of

childish observation, as a man of singular simplicity of nature; unemotional, and hating the display of what

he felt; standing contented on the old ways; a lover of his life and innocent habits to the end. We children

admired him: partly for his beautiful face and silver hair, for none more than children are concerned for

beauty and, above all, for beauty in the old; partly for the solemn light in which we beheld him once a week,

the observed of all observers, in the pulpit. But his strictness and distance, the effect, I now fancy, of old age,

slow blood, and settled habit, oppressed us with a kind of terror. When not abroad, he sat much alone, writing

sermons or letters to his scattered family in a dark and cold room with a library of bloodless books or so

they seemed in those days, although I have some of them now on my own shelves and like well enough to

read them; and these lonely hours wrapped him in the greater gloom for our imaginations. But the study had a

redeeming grace in many Indian pictures, gaudily coloured and dear to young eyes. I cannot depict (for I have

no such passions now) the greed with which I beheld them; and when I was once sent in to say a psalm to my

grandfather, I went, quaking indeed with fear, but at the same time glowing with hope that, if I said it well, he

it ran: a strange conglomerate of the unpronounceable, a sad model to set in childhood before one who was

himself to be a versifier, and a task in recitation that really merited reward. And I must suppose the old man

thought so too, and was either touched or amused by the performance; for he took me in his arms with most

unwonted tenderness, and kissed me, and gave me a little kindly sermon for my psalm; so that, for that day,

we were clerk and parson. I was struck by this reception into so tender a surprise that I forgot my

disappointment. And indeed the hope was one of those that childhood forges for a pastime, and with no

design upon reality. Nothing was more unlikely than that my grandfather should strip himself of one of those

pictures, lovegifts and reminders of his absent sons; nothing more unlikely than that he should bestow it

upon me. He had no idea of spoiling children, leaving all that to my aunt; he had fared hard himself, and

blubbered under the rod in the last century; and his ways were still Spartan for the young. The last word I

heard upon his lips was in this Spartan key. He had overwalked in the teeth of an east wind, and was now

near the end of his many days. He sat by the diningroom fire, with his white hair, pale face and bloodshot

eyes, a somewhat awful figure; and my aunt had given him a dose of our good old Scotch medicine, Dr.

Gregory's powder. Now that remedy, as the work of a near kinsman of Rob Roy himself, may have a savour

of romance for the imagination; but it comes uncouthly to the palate. The old gentleman had taken it with a

wry face; and that being accomplished, sat with perfect simplicity, like a child's, munching a "barleysugar

kiss." But when my aunt, having the canister open in her hands, proposed to let me share in the sweets, he

interfered at once. I had had no Gregory; then I should have no barleysugar kiss: so he decided with a touch

of irritation. And just then the phaeton coming opportunely to the kitchen door for such was our unlordly

Now I often wonder what I have inherited from this old minister. I must suppose, indeed, that he was fond of

preaching sermons, and so am I, though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to hear them. He

sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight, and I have sought it in both hemispheres; but whereas he

found and kept it, I am still on the quest. He was a great lover of Shakespeare, whom he read aloud, I have

been told, with taste; well, I love my Shakespeare also, and am persuaded I can read him well, though I own I

never have been told so. He made embroidery, designing his own patterns; and in that kind of work I never

made anything but a kettleholder in Berlin wool, and an odd garter of knitting, which was as black as the

chimney before I had done with it. He loved port, and nuts, and porter; and so do I, but they agreed better

with my grandfather, which seems to me a breach of contract. He had chalkstones in his fingers; and these,

in good time, I may possibly inherit, but I would much rather have inherited his noble presence. Try as I

please, I cannot join myself on with the reverend doctor; and all the while, no doubt, and even as I write the

phrase, he moves in my blood, and whispers words to me, and sits efficient in the very knot and centre of my

being. In his garden, as I played there, I learned the love of mills or had I an ancestor a miller? and a

kindness for the neighbourhood of graves, as homely things not without their poetry or had I an ancestor a

sexton? But what of the garden where he played himself? for that, too, was a scene of my education. Some

part of me played there in the eighteenth century, and ran races under the green avenue at Pilrig; some part of

me trudged up Leith Walk, which was still a country place, and sat on the High School benches, and was

thrashed, perhaps, by Dr. Adam. The house where I spent my youth was not yet thought upon; but we made

holiday parties among the cornfields on its site, and ate strawberries and cream near by at a gardener's. All

this I had forgotten; only my grandfather remembered and once reminded me. I have forgotten, too, how we

grew up, and took orders, and went to our first Ayrshire parish, and fell in love with and married a daughter

of Burns's Dr. Smith "Smith opens out his cauld harangues." I have forgotten, but I was there all the same,

And there is a thing stranger than all that; for this HOMUNCULUS or partman of mine that walked about

the eighteenth century with Dr. Balfour in his youth, was in the way of meeting other HOMUNCULOS or

partmen, in the persons of my other ancestors. These were of a lower order, and doubtless we looked down

upon them duly. But as I went to college with Dr. Balfour, I may have seen the lamp and oil man taking

down the shutters from his shop beside the Tron; we may have had a rabbithutch or a bookshelf made for

us by a certain carpenter in I know not what wynd of the old, smoky city; or, upon some holiday excursion,

we may have looked into the windows of a cottage in a flowergarden and seen a certain weaver plying his

shuttle. And these were all kinsmen of mine upon the other side; and from the eyes of the lamp and oil man

onehalf of my unborn father, and onequarter of myself, looked out upon us as we went by to college.

Nothing of all this would cross the mind of the young student, as he posted up the Bridges with trim,

stockinged legs, in that city of cocked hats and good Scotch still unadulterated. It would not cross his mind

that he should have a daughter; and the lamp and oil man, just then beginning, by a not unnatural metastasis,

to bloom into a lighthouseengineer, should have a grandson; and that these two, in the fulness of time,

should wed; and some portion of that student himself should survive yet a year or two longer in the person of

But our ancestral adventures are beyond even the arithmetic of fancy; and it is the chief recommendation of

long pedigrees, that we can follow backward the careers of our HOMUNCULOS and be reminded of our

antenatal lives. Our conscious years are but a moment in the history of the elements that build us. Are you a

bankclerk, and do you live at Peckham? It was not always so. And though today I am only a man of letters,

either tradition errs or I was present when there landed at St. Andrews a French barber surgeon, to tend the

health and the beard of the great Cardinal Beaton; I have shaken a spear in the Debateable Land and shouted

the slogan of the Elliots; I was present when a skipper, plying from Dundee, smuggled Jacobites to France

after the '15; I was in a West India merchant's office, perhaps next door to Bailie Nicol Jarvie's, and managed

the business of a plantation in St. Kitt's; I was with my engineergrandfather (the soninlaw of the lamp and

oil man) when he sailed north about Scotland on the famous cruise that gave us the PIRATE and the LORD

OF THE ISLES; I was with him, too, on the Bell Rock, in the fog, when the SMEATON had drifted from her

moorings, and the Aberdeen men, pick in hand, had seized upon the only boats, and he must stoop and lap

seawater before his tongue could utter audible words; and once more with him when the Bell Rock beacon

took a "thrawe," and his workmen fled into the tower, then nearly finished, and he sat unmoved reading in his

Bible or affecting to read till one after another slunk back with confusion of countenance to their

engineer. Yes, parts of me have seen life, and met adventures, and sometimes met them well. And away in

the still cloudier past, the threads that make me up can be traced by fancy into the bosoms of thousands and

millions of ascendants: Picts who rallied round Macbeth and the old (and highly preferable) system of

descent by females, fleers from before the legions of Agricola, marchers in Pannonian morasses, stargazers

on Chaldaean plateaus; and, furthest of all, what face is this that fancy can see peering through the disparted

branches? What sleeper in green treetops, what muncher of nuts, concludes my pedigree? Probably arboreal

And I know not which is the more strange, that I should carry about with me some fibres of my

ministergrandfather; or that in him, as he sat in his cool study, grave, reverend, contented gentleman, there

was an aboriginal frisking of the blood that was not his; treetop memories, like undeveloped negatives, lay

dormant in his mind; treetop instincts awoke and were trod down; and Probably Arboreal (scarce to be

distinguished from a monkey) gambolled and chattered in the brain of the old divine.

THOSE who try to be artists use, time after time, the matter of their recollections, setting and resetting little

coloured memories of men and scenes, rigging up (it may be) some especial friend in the attire of a

buccaneer, and decreeing armies to manoeuvre, or murder to be done, on the playground of their youth. But

the memories are a fairy gift which cannot be worn out in using. After a dozen services in various tales, the

little sunbright pictures of the past still shine in the mind's eye with not a lineament defaced, not a tint

impaired. GLUCK UND UNGLUCK WIRD GESANG, if Goethe pleases; yet only by endless avatars, the

original re embodying after each. So that a writer, in time, begins to wonder at the perdurable life of these

impressions; begins, perhaps, to fancy that he wrongs them when he weaves them in with fiction; and looking

back on them with evergrowing kindness, puts them at last, substantive jewels, in a setting of their own.

One or two of these pleasant spectres I think I have laid. I used one but the other day: a little eyot of dense,

freshwater sand, where I once waded deep in butterburrs, delighting to hear the song of the river on both

sides, and to tell myself that I was indeed and at last upon an island. Two of my puppets lay there a summer's

day, hearkening to the shearers at work in riverside fields and to the drums of the gray old garrison upon the

neighbouring hill. And this was, I think, done rightly: the place was rightly peopled and now belongs not to

me but to my puppets for a time at least. In time, perhaps, the puppets will grow faint; the original memory

swim up instant as ever; and I shall once more lie in bed, and see the little sandy isle in Allan Water as it is in

nature, and the child (that once was me) wading there in butterburrs; and wonder at the instancy and virgin

freshness of that memory; and be pricked again, in season and out of season, by the desire to weave it into art.

There is another isle in my collection, the memory of which besieges me. I put a whole family there, in one of

my tales; and later on, threw upon its shores, and condemned to several days of rain and shellfish on its

tumbled boulders, the hero of another. The ink is not yet faded; the sound of the sentences is still in my

The little isle of Earraid lies close in to the southwest corner of the Ross of Mull: the sound of Iona on one

side, across which you may see the isle and church of Columba; the open sea to the other, where you shall be

able to mark, on a clear, surfy day, the breakers running white on many sunken rocks. I first saw it, or first

remembered seeing it, framed in the round bull'seye of a cabin port, the sea lying smooth along its shores

like the waters of a lake, the colourless clear light of the early morning making plain its heathery and rocky

hummocks. There stood upon it, in these days, a single rude house of uncemented stones, approached by a

pier of wreckwood. It must have been very early, for it was then summer, and in summer, in that latitude, day

scarcely withdraws; but even at that hour the house was making a sweet smoke of peats which came to me

over the bay, and the barelegged daughters of the cotter were wading by the pier. The same day we visited

the shores of the isle in the ship's boats; rowed deep into Fiddler's Hole, sounding as we went; and having

taken stock of all possible accommodation, pitched on the northern inlet as the scene of operations. For it was

no accident that had brought the lighthouse steamer to anchor in the Bay of Earraid. Fifteen miles away to

seaward, a certain black rock stood environed by the Atlantic rollers, the outpost of the Torran reefs. Here

was a tower to be built, and a star lighted, for the conduct of seamen. But as the rock was small, and hard of

access, and far from land, the work would be one of years; and my father was now looking for a shore station,

where the stones might be quarried and dressed, the men live, and the tender, with some degree of safety, lie

I saw Earraid next from the stern thwart of an Iona lugger, Sam Bough and I sitting there cheek by jowl, with

our feet upon our baggage, in a beautiful, clear, northern summer eve. And behold! there was now a pier of

stone, there were rows of sheds, railways, travellingcranes, a street of cottages, an iron house for the

resident engineer, wooden bothies for the men, a stage where the courses of the tower were put together

experimentally, and behind the settlement a great gash in the hillside where granite was quarried. In the bay,

the steamer lay at her moorings. All day long there hung about the place the music of chinking tools; and

even in the dead of night, the watchman carried his lantern to and fro in the dark settlement and could light

the pipe of any midnight muser. It was, above all, strange to see Earraid on the Sunday, when the sound of the

tools ceased and there fell a crystal quiet. All about the green compound men would be sauntering in their

Sunday's best, walking with those lax joints of the reposing toiler, thoughtfully smoking, talking small, as if

in honour of the stillness, or hearkening to the wailing of the gulls. And it was strange to see our Sabbath

services, held, as they were, in one of the bothies, with Mr. Brebner reading at a table, and the congregation

perched about in the double tier of sleeping bunks; and to hear the singing of the psalms, "the chapters," the

In fine weather, when by the spyglass on the hill the sea was observed to run low upon the reef, there would

be a sound of preparation in the very early morning; and before the sun had risen from behind Ben More, the

tender would steam out of the bay. Over fifteen seamiles of the great blue Atlantic rollers she ploughed her

way, trailing at her tail a brace of wallowing stonelighters. The open ocean widened upon either board, and

the hills of the mainland began to go down on the horizon, before she came to her unhomely destination, and

layto at last where the rock clapped its black head above the swell, with the tall iron barrack on its spider

legs, and the truncated tower, and the cranes waving their arms, and the smoke of the enginefire rising in the

midsea. An ugly reef is this of the Dhu Heartach; no pleasant assemblage of shelves, and pools, and creeks,

about which a child might play for a whole summer without weariness, like the Bell Rock or the Skerryvore,

but one oval nodule of blacktrap, sparsely bedabbled with an inconspicuous fucus, and alive in every

crevice with a dingy insect between a slater and a bug. No other life was there but that of seabirds, and of

the sea itself, that here ran like a millrace, and growled about the outer reef for ever, and ever and again, in

the calmest weather, roared and spouted on the rock itself. Times were different upon DhuHeartach when it

blew, and the night fell dark, and the neighbour lights of Skerryvore and Rhuval were quenched in fog, and

the men sat prisoned high up in their iron drum, that then resounded with the lashing of the sprays. Fear sat

with them in their seabeleaguered dwelling; and the colour changed in anxious faces when some greater

billow struck the barrack, and its pillars quivered and sprang under the blow. It was then that the foreman

builder, Mr. Goodwillie, whom I see before me still in his rockhabit of undecipherable rags, would get his

fiddle down and strike up human minstrelsy amid the music of the storm. But it was in sunshine only that I

saw DhuHeartach; and it was in sunshine, or the yet lovelier summer afterglow, that the steamer would

return to Earraid, ploughing an enchanted sea; the obedient lighters, relieved of their deck cargo, riding in her

wake more quietly; and the steersman upon each, as she rose on the long swell, standing tall and dark against

But it was in Earraid itself that I delighted chiefly. The lighthouse settlement scarce encroached beyond its

fences; over the top of the first brae the ground was all virgin, the world all shut out, the face of things

unchanged by any of man's doings. Here was no living presence, save for the limpets on the rocks, for some

old, gray, rainbeaten ram that I might rouse out of a ferny den betwixt two boulders, or for the haunting and

the piping of the gulls. It was older than man; it was found so by incoming Celts, and seafaring Norsemen,

and Columba's priests. The earthy savour of the bogplants, the rude disorder of the boulders, the inimitable

seaside brightness of the air, the brine and the iodine, the lap of the billows among the weedy reefs, the

sudden springing up of a great run of dashing surf along the seafront of the isle, all that I saw and felt my

predecessors must have seen and felt with scarce a difference. I steeped myself in open air and in past ages.

"Delightful would it be to me to be in UCHD AILIUN On the pinnacle of a rock, That I might often see The

face of the ocean; That I might hear the song of the wonderful birds, Source of happiness; That I might hear

the thunder of the crowding waves Upon the rocks: At times at work without compulsion This would be

So, about the next island of Iona, sang Columba himself twelve hundred years before. And so might I have

And all the while I was aware that this life of seabathing and sunburning was for me but a holiday. In that

year cannon were roaring for days together on French battlefields; and I would sit in my isle (I call it mine,

after the use of lovers) and think upon the war, and the loudness of these faraway battles, and the pain of the

men's wounds, and the weariness of their marching. And I would think too of that other war which is as old

as mankind, and is indeed the life of man: the unsparing war, the grinding slavery of competition; the toil of

seventy years, dearbought bread, precarious honour, the perils and pitfalls, and the poor rewards. It was a

long look forward; the future summoned me as with trumpet calls, it warned me back as with a voice of

weeping and beseeching; and I thrilled and trembled on the brink of life, like a childish bather on the beach.

There was another young man on Earraid in these days, and we were much together, bathing, clambering on

the boulders, trying to sail a boat and spinning round instead in the oily whirlpools of the roost. But the most

part of the time we spoke of the great uncharted desert of our futures; wondering together what should there

befall us; hearing with surprise the sound of our own voices in the empty vestibule of youth. As far, and as

hard, as it seemed then to look forward to the grave, so far it seems now to look backward upon these

emotions; so hard to recall justly that loath submission, as of the sacrificial bull, with which we stooped our

necks under the yoke of destiny. I met my old companion but the other day; I cannot tell of course what he

was thinking; but, upon my part, I was wondering to see us both so much at home, and so composed and

sedentary in the world; and how much we had gained, and how much we had lost, to attain to that composure;

and which had been upon the whole our best estate: when we sat there prating sensibly like men of some

experience, or when we shared our timorous and hopeful counsels in a western islet.

THE death of Thomas Stevenson will mean not very much to the general reader. His service to mankind took

on forms of which the public knows little and understands less. He came seldom to London, and then only as

a task, remaining always a stranger and a convinced provincial; putting up for years at the same hotel where

his father had gone before him; faithful for long to the same restaurant, the same church, and the same

theatre, chosen simply for propinquity; steadfastly refusing to dine out. He had a circle of his own, indeed, at

home; few men were more beloved in Edinburgh, where he breathed an air that pleased him; and wherever he

went, in railway carriages or hotel smokingrooms, his strange, humorous vein of talk, and his transparent

honesty, raised him up friends and admirers. But to the general public and the world of London, except about

the parliamentary committeerooms, he remained unknown. All the time, his lights were in every part of the

world, guiding the mariner; his firm were consulting engineers to the Indian, the New Zealand, and the

Japanese Lighthouse Boards, so that Edinburgh was a world centre for that branch of applied science; in

Germany, he had been called "the Nestor of lighthouse illumination"; even in France, where his claims were

long denied, he was at last, on the occasion of the late Exposition, recognised and medalled. And to show by

one instance the inverted nature of his reputation, comparatively small at home, yet filling the world, a friend

of mine was this winter on a visit to the Spanish main, and was asked by a Peruvian if he "knew Mr.

Stevenson the author, because his works were much esteemed in Peru?" My friend supposed the reference

was to the writer of tales; but the Peruvian had never heard of DR. JEKYLL; what he had in his eye, what

Thomas Stevenson was born at Edinburgh in the year 1818, the grandson of Thomas Smith, first engineer to

the Board of Northern Lights, son of Robert Stevenson, brother of Alan and David; so that his nephew, David

Alan Stevenson, joined with him at the time of his death in the engineership, is the sixth of the family who

has held, successively or conjointly, that office. The Bell Rock, his father's great triumph, was finished before

he was born; but he served under his brother Alan in the building of Skerryvore, the noblest of all extant

deepsea lights; and, in conjunction with his brother David, he added two the Chickens and Dhu Heartach

to that small number of man's extreme outposts in the ocean. Of shore lights, the two brothers last named

erected no fewer than twenty seven; of beacons, (4) about twentyfive. Many harbours were successfully

carried out: one, the harbour of Wick, the chief disaster of my father's life, was a failure; the sea proved too

strong for man's arts; and after expedients hitherto unthought of, and on a scale hypercyclopean, the work

must be deserted, and now stands a ruin in that bleak, Godforsaken bay, ten miles from John o'Groat's. In

the improvement of rivers the brothers were likewise in a large way of practice over both England and

It was about this nucleus of his professional labours that all my father's scientific inquiries and inventions

centred; these proceeded from, and acted back upon, his daily business. Thus it was as a harbour engineer that

he became interested in the propagation and reduction of waves; a difficult subject in regard to which he has

left behind him much suggestive matter and some valuable approximate results. Storms were his sworn

adversaries, and it was through the study of storms that he approached that of meteorology at large. Many

who knew him not otherwise, knew perhaps have in their gardens his louvreboarded screen for

instruments. But the great achievement of his life was, of course, in optics as applied to lighthouse

illumination. Fresnel had done much; Fresnel had settled the fixed light apparatus on a principle that still

seems unimprovable; and when Thomas Stevenson stepped in and brought to a comparable perfection the

revolving light, a not unnatural jealousy and much painful controversy rose in France. It had its hour; and, as

I have told already, even in France it has blown by. Had it not, it would have mattered the less, since all

through his life my father continued to justify his claim by fresh advances. New apparatus for lights in new

situations was continually being designed with the same unwearied search after perfection, the same nice

ingenuity of means; and though the holophotal revolving light perhaps still remains his most elegant

contrivance, it is difficult to give it the palm over the much later condensing system, with its thousand

possible modifications. The number and the value of these improvements entitle their author to the name of

one of mankind's benefactors. In all parts of the world a safer landfall awaits the mariner. Two things must be

said: and, first, that Thomas Stevenson was no mathematician. Natural shrewdness, a sentiment of optical

laws, and a great intensity of consideration led him to just conclusions; but to calculate the necessary

formulae for the instruments he had conceived was often beyond him, and he must fall back on the help of

others, notably on that of his cousin and lifelong intimate friend, EMERITUS Professor Swan, of St.

Andrews, and his later friend, Professor P. G. Tait. It is a curious enough circumstance, and a great

encouragement to others, that a man so ill equipped should have succeeded in one of the most abstract and

arduous walks of applied science. The second remark is one that applies to the whole family, and only

particularly to Thomas Stevenson from the great number and importance of his inventions: holding as the

Stevensons did a Government appointment they regarded their original work as something due already to the

nation, and none of them has ever taken out a patent. It is another cause of the comparative obscurity of the

name: for a patent not only brings in money, it infallibly spreads reputation; and my father's instruments enter

anonymously into a hundred lightrooms, and are passed anonymously over in a hundred reports, where the

But the lifework of Thomas Stevenson remains; what we have lost, what we now rather try to recall, is the

friend and companion. He was a man of a somewhat antique strain: with a blended sternness and softness that

was wholly Scottish and at first somewhat bewildering; with a profound essential melancholy of disposition

and (what often accompanies it) the most humorous geniality in company; shrewd and childish; passionately

attached, passionately prejudiced; a man of many extremes, many faults of temper, and no very stable

foothold for himself among life's troubles. Yet he was a wise adviser; many men, and these not

inconsiderable, took counsel with him habitually. "I sat at his feet," writes one of these, "when I asked his

advice, and when the broad brow was set in thought and the firm mouth said his say, I always knew that no

man could add to the worth of the conclusion." He had excellent taste, though whimsical and partial;

collected old furniture and delighted specially in sunflowers long before the days of Mr. Wilde; took a lasting

pleasure in prints and pictures; was a devout admirer of Thomson of Duddingston at a time when few shared

the taste; and though he read little, was constant to his favourite books. He had never any Greek; Latin he

happily retaught himself after he had left school, where he was a mere consistent idler: happily, I say, for

Lactantius, Vossius, and Cardinal Bona were his chief authors. The first he must have read for twenty years

uninterruptedly, keeping it near him in his study, and carrying it in his bag on journeys. Another old

theologian, Brown of Wamphray, was often in his hands. When he was indisposed, he had two books, GUY

MANNERING and THE PARENT'S ASSISTANT, of which he never wearied. He was a strong

Conservative, or, as he preferred to call himself, a Tory; except in so far as his views were modified by a

hotheaded chivalrous sentiment for women. He was actually in favour of a marriage law under which any

woman might have a divorce for the asking, and no man on any ground whatever; and the same sentiment

found another expression in a Magdalen Mission in Edinburgh, founded and largely supported by himself.

This was but one of the many channels of his public generosity; his private was equally unstrained. The

Church of Scotland, of which he held the doctrines (though in a sense of his own) and to which he bore a

clansman's loyalty, profited often by his time and money; and though, from a morbid sense of his own

unworthiness, he would never consent to be an officebearer, his advice was often sought, and he served the

Church on many committees. What he perhaps valued highest in his work were his contributions to the

defence of Christianity; one of which, in particular, was praised by Hutchinson Stirling and reprinted at the

His sense of his own unworthiness I have called morbid; morbid, too, were his sense of the fleetingness of

life and his concern for death. He had never accepted the conditions of man's life or his own character; and

his inmost thoughts were ever tinged with the Celtic melancholy. Cases of conscience were sometimes

grievous to him, and that delicate employment of a scientific witness cost him many qualms. But he found

respite from these troublesome humours in his work, in his lifelong study of natural science, in the society of

those he loved, and in his daily walks, which now would carry him far into the country with some congenial

friend, and now keep him dangling about the town from one old bookshop to another, and scraping romantic

acquaintance with every dog that passed. His talk, compounded of so much sterling sense and so much

freakish humour, and clothed in language so apt, droll, and emphatic, was a perpetual delight to all who knew

him before the clouds began to settle on his mind. His use of language was both just and picturesque; and

when at the beginning of his illness he began to feel the ebbing of this power, it was strange and painful to

hear him reject one word after another as inadequate, and at length desist from the search and leave his phrase

unfinished rather than finish it without propriety. It was perhaps another Celtic trait that his affections and

emotions, passionate as these were, and liable to passionate ups and downs, found the most eloquent

expression both in words and gestures. Love, anger, and indignation shone through him and broke forth in

imagery, like what we read of Southern races. For all these emotional extremes, and in spite of the

melancholy ground of his character, he had upon the whole a happy life; nor was he less fortunate in his

THERE can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be affable, gay, ready, clear and welcome; to have a

fact, a thought, or an illustration, pat to every subject; and not only to cheer the flight of time among our

intimates, but bear our part in that great international congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are first

declared, public errors first corrected, and the course of public opinion shaped, day by day, a little nearer to

the right. No measure comes before Parliament but it has been long ago prepared by the grand jury of the

talkers; no book is written that has not been largely composed by their assistance. Literature in many of its

branches is no other than the shadow of good talk; but the imitation falls far short of the original in life,

freedom and effect. There are always two to a talk, giving and taking, comparing experience and according

conclusions. Talk is fluid, tentative, continually "in further search and progress"; while written words remain

fixed, become idols even to the writer, found wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the

amber of the truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged with linseywoolsey, can only deal with a fraction

of the life of man, talk goes fancy free and may call a spade a spade. Talk has none of the freezing

immunities of the pulpit. It cannot, even if it would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical like

literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dissolved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the

contemporary groove into the open fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like schoolboys out of school. And

it is in talk alone that we can learn our period and ourselves. In short, the first duty of a man is to speak; that

is his chief business in this world; and talk, which is the harmonious speech of two or more, is by far the most

accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money; it is all profit; it completes our education, founds and

fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health.

The spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are still a kind of contest; and if we would not forego all

that is valuable in our lot, we must continually face some other person, eye to eye, and wrestle a fall whether

in love or enmity. It is still by force of body, or power of character or intellect, that we attain to worthy

pleasures. Men and women contend for each other in the lists of love, like rival mesmerists; the active and

adroit decide their challenges in the sports of the body; and the sedentary sit down to chess or conversation.

All sluggish and pacific pleasures are, to the same degree, solitary and selfish; and every durable band

between human beings is founded in or heightened by some element of competition. Now, the relation that

has the least root in matter is undoubtedly that airy one of friendship; and hence, I suppose, it is that good talk

most commonly arises among friends. Talk is, indeed, both the scene and instrument of friendship. It is in

talk alone that the friends can measure strength, and enjoy that amicable counterassertion of personality

A good talk is not to be had for the asking. Humours must first be accorded in a kind of overture or prologue;

hour, company and circumstance be suited; and then, at a fit juncture, the subject, the quarry of two heated

minds, spring up like a deer out of the wood. Not that the talker has any of the hunter's pride, though he has

all and more than all his ardour. The genuine artist follows the stream of conversation as an angler follows

the windings of a brook, not dallying where he fails to "kill." He trusts implicitly to hazard; and he is

rewarded by continual variety, continual pleasure, and those changing prospects of the truth that are the best

of education. There is nothing in a subject, so called, that we should regard it as an idol, or follow it beyond

the promptings of desire. Indeed, there are few subjects; and so far as they are truly talkable, more than the

half of them may be reduced to three: that I am I, that you are you, and that there are other people dimly

understood to be not quite the same as either. Wherever talk may range, it still runs half the time on these

eternal lines. The theme being set, each plays on himself as on an instrument; asserts and justifies himself;

ransacks his brain for instances and opinions, and brings them forth newminted, to his own surprise and the

admiration of his adversary. All natural talk is a festival of ostentation; and by the laws of the game each

accepts and fans the vanity of the other. It is from that reason that we venture to lay ourselves so open, that

we dare to be so warmly eloquent, and that we swell in each other's eyes to such a vast proportion. For

talkers, once launched, begin to overflow the limits of their ordinary selves, tower up to the height of their

secret pretensions, and give themselves out for the heroes, brave, pious, musical and wise, that in their most

shining moments they aspire to be. So they weave for themselves with words and for a while inhabit a palace

of delights, temple at once and theatre, where they fill the round of the world's dignities, and feast with the

gods, exulting in Kudos. And when the talk is over, each goes his way, still flushed with vanity and

admiration, still trailing clouds of glory; each declines from the height of his ideal orgie, not in a moment, but

by slow declension. I remember, in the ENTR'ACTE of an afternoon performance, coming forth into the

sunshine, in a beautiful green, gardened corner of a romantic city; and as I sat and smoked, the music moving

in my blood, I seemed to sit there and evaporate THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (for it was that I had been

hearing) with a wonderful sense of life, warmth, wellbeing and pride; and the noises of the city, voices, bells

and marching feet, fell together in my ears like a symphonious orchestra. In the same way, the excitement of

a good talk lives for a long while after in the blood, the heart still hot within you, the brain still simmering,

Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up a large surface of life, rather than dig mines into geological strata.

Masses of experience, anecdote, incident, crosslights, quotation, historical instances, the whole flotsam and

jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the matter in hand from every point of the compass, and from

every degree of mental elevation and abasement these are the material with which talk is fortified, the food

on which the talkers thrive. Such argument as is proper to the exercise should still be brief and seizing. Talk

should proceed by instances; by the apposite, not the expository. It should keep close along the lines of

humanity, near the bosoms and businesses of men, at the level where history, fiction and experience intersect

and illuminate each other. I am I, and You are You, with all my heart; but conceive how these lean

propositions change and brighten when, instead of words, the actual you and I sit cheek by jowl, the spirit

housed in the live body, and the very clothes uttering voices to corroborate the story in the face. Not less

surprising is the change when we leave off to speak of generalities the bad, the good, the miser, and all the

characters of Theophrastus and call up other men, by anecdote or instance, in their very trick and feature; or

trading on a common knowledge, toss each other famous names, still glowing with the hues of life.

Communication is no longer by words, but by the instancing of whole biographies, epics, systems of

philosophy, and epochs of history, in bulk. That which is understood excels that which is spoken in quantity

and quality alike; ideas thus figured and personified, change hands, as we may say, like coin; and the

speakers imply without effort the most obscure and intricate thoughts. Strangers who have a large common

ground of reading will, for this reason, come the sooner to the grapple of genuine converse. If they know

Othello and Napoleon, Consuelo and Clarissa Harlowe, Vautrin and Steenie Steenson, they can leave

Conduct and art are the two subjects that arise most frequently and that embrace the widest range of facts. A

few pleasures bear discussion for their own sake, but only those which are most social or most radically

human; and even these can only be discussed among their devotees. A technicality is always welcome to the

expert, whether in athletics, art or law; I have heard the best kind of talk on technicalities from such rare and

happy persons as both know and love their business. No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two

minutes at a time, which makes me suspect we hear too much of it in literature. The weather is regarded as

the very nadir and scoff of conversational topics. And yet the weather, the dramatic element in scenery, is far

more tractable in language, and far more human both in import and suggestion than the stable features of the

landscape. Sailors and shepherds, and the people generally of coast and mountain, talk well of it; and it is

often excitingly presented in literature. But the tendency of all living talk draws it back and back into the

common focus of humanity. Talk is a creature of the street and marketplace, feeding on gossip; and its last

resort is still in a discussion on morals. That is the heroic form of gossip; heroic in virtue of its high

pretensions; but still gossip, because it turns on personalities. You can keep no men long, nor Scotchmen at

all, off moral or theological discussion. These are to all the world what law is to lawyers; they are

everybody's technicalities; the medium through which all consider life, and the dialect in which they express

their judgments. I knew three young men who walked together daily for some two months in a solemn and

beautiful forest and in cloudless summer weather; daily they talked with unabated zest, and yet scarce

wandered that whole time beyond two subjects theology and love. And perhaps neither a court of love nor

an assembly of divines would have granted their premisses or welcomed their conclusions.

Conclusions, indeed, are not often reached by talk any more than by private thinking. That is not the profit.

The profit is in the exercise, and above all in the experience; for when we reason at large on any subject, we

review our state and history in life. From time to time, however, and specially, I think, in talking art, talk

becomes elective, conquering like war, widening the boundaries of knowledge like an exploration. A point

arises; the question takes a problematical, a baffling, yet a likely air; the talkers begin to feel lively

presentiments of some conclusion near at hand; towards this they strive with emulous ardour, each by his

own path, and struggling for first utterance; and then one leaps upon the summit of that matter with a shout,

and almost at the same moment the other is beside him; and behold they are agreed. Like enough, the

progress is illusory, a mere cat's cradle having been wound and unwound out of words. But the sense of joint

discovery is none the less giddy and inspiriting. And in the life of the talker such triumphs, though imaginary,

are neither few nor far apart; they are attained with speed and pleasure, in the hour of mirth; and by the nature

There is a certain attitude, combative at once and deferential, eager to fight yet most averse to quarrel, which

marks out at once the talkable man. It is not eloquence, not fairness, not obstinacy, but a certain proportion of

all of these that I love to encounter in my amicable adversaries. They must not be pontiffs holding doctrine,

but huntsmen questing after elements of truth. Neither must they be boys to be instructed, but fellowteachers

with whom I may wrangle and agree on equal terms. We must reach some solution, some shadow of consent;

for without that, eager talk becomes a torture. But we do not wish to reach it cheaply, or quickly, or without

The very best talker, with me, is one whom I shall call Spring Heel'd Jack. I say so, because I never knew

any one who mingled so largely the possible ingredients of converse. In the Spanish proverb, the fourth man

necessary to compound a salad, is a madman to mix it: Jack is that madman. I know not which is more

remarkable; the insane lucidity of his conclusions the humorous eloquence of his language, or his power of

method, bringing the whole of life into the focus of the subject treated, mixing the conversational salad like a

drunken god. He doubles like the serpent, changes and flashes like the shaken kaleidoscope, transmigrates

bodily into the views of others, and so, in the twinkling of an eye and with a heady rapture, turns questions

inside out and flings them empty before you on the ground, like a triumphant conjuror. It is my common

practice when a piece of conduct puzzles me, to attack it in the presence of Jack with such grossness, such

partiality and such wearing iteration, as at length shall spur him up in its defence. In a moment he

transmigrates, dons the required character, and with moonstruck philosophy justifies the act in question. I can

fancy nothing to compare with the VIM of these impersonations, the strange scale of language, flying from

the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the absurd irrelevant particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour,

eloquence and bathos, each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the admired disorder of their

combination. A talker of a different calibre, though belonging to the same school, is Burly. Burly is a man of

a great presence; he commands a larger atmosphere, gives the impression of a grosser mass of character than

most men. It has been said of him that his presence could be felt in a room you entered blindfold; and the

same, I think, has been said of other powerful constitutions condemned to much physical inaction. There is

something boisterous and piratic in Burly's manner of talk which suits well enough with this impression. He

will roar you down, he will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of revolt and agony; and

meanwhile his attitude of mind is really both conciliatory and receptive; and after Pistol has been out Pistol'd,

and the welkin rung for hours, you begin to perceive a certain subsidence in these spring torrents, points of

agreement issue, and you end arminarm, and in a glow of mutual admiration. The outcry only serves to

make your final union the more unexpected and precious. Throughout there has been perfect sincerity, perfect

intelligence, a desire to hear although not always to listen, and an unaffected eagerness to meet concessions.

You have, with Burly, none of the dangers that attend debate with SpringHeel'd Jack; who may at any

moment turn his powers of transmigration on yourself, create for you a view you never held, and then

furiously fall on you for holding it. These, at least, are my two favourites, and both are loud, copious,

intolerant talkers. This argues that I myself am in the same category; for if we love talking at all, we love a

bright, fierce adversary, who will hold his ground, foot by foot, in much our own manner, sell his attention

dearly, and give us our full measure of the dust and exertion of battle. Both these men can be beat from a

position, but it takes six hours to do it; a high and hard adventure, worth attempting. With both you can pass

days in an enchanted country of the mind, with people, scenery and manners of its own; live a life apart, more

arduous, active and glowing than any real existence; and come forth again when the talk is over, as out of a

theatre or a dream, to find the east wind still blowing and the chimneypots of the old battered city still

around you. Jack has the far finer mind, Burly the far more honest; Jack gives us the animated poetry, Burly

the romantic prose, of similar themes; the one glances high like a meteor and makes a light in darkness; the

other, with many changing hues of fire, burns at the sealevel, like a conflagration; but both have the same

humour and artistic interests, the same unquenched ardour in pursuit, the same gusts of talk and thunderclaps

Cockshot (5) is a different article, but vastly entertaining, and has been meat and drink to me for many a long

evening. His manner is dry, brisk and pertinacious, and the choice of words not much. The point about him is

his extraordinary readiness and spirit. You can propound nothing but he has either a theory about it ready

made, or will have one instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay its timbers and launch it in your presence.

"Let me see," he will say. "Give me a moment. I SHOULD have some theory for that." A blither spectacle

than the vigour with which he sets about the task, it were hard to fancy. He is possessed by a demoniac

energy, welding the elements for his life, and bending ideas, as an athlete bends a horseshoe, with a visible

and lively effort. He has, in theorising, a compass, an art; what I would call the synthetic gusto; something of

a Herbert Spencer, who should see the fun of the thing. You are not bound, and no more is he, to place your

faith in these brandnew opinions. But some of them are right enough, durable even for life; and the poorest

serve for a cock shy as when idle people, after picnics, float a bottle on a pond and have an hour's diversion

ere it sinks. Whichever they are, serious opinions or humours of the moment, he still defends his ventures

with indefatigable wit and spirit, hitting savagely himself, but taking punishment like a man. He knows and

never forgets that people talk, first of all, for the sake of talking; conducts himself in the ring, to use the old

slang, like a thorough "glutton," and honestly enjoys a telling facer from his adversary. Cockshot is bottled

effervescency, the sworn foe of sleep. Three inthemorning Cockshot, says a victim. His talk is like the

driest of all imaginable dry champagnes. Sleight of hand and inimitable quickness are the qualities by which

he lives. Athelred, on the other hand, presents you with the spectacle of a sincere and somewhat slow nature

thinking aloud. He is the most unready man I ever knew to shine in conversation. You may see him

sometimes wrestle with a refractory jest for a minute or two together, and perhaps fail to throw it in the end.

And there is something singularly engaging, often instructive, in the simplicity with which he thus exposes

the process as well as the result, the works as well as the dial of the clock. Withal he has his hours of

inspiration. Apt words come to him as if by accident, and, coming from deeper down, they smack the more

personally, they have the more of fine old crusted humanity, rich in sediment and humour. There are sayings

of his in which he has stamped himself into the very grain of the language; you would think he must have

worn the words next his skin and slept with them. Yet it is not as a sayer of particular good things that

Athelred is most to he regarded, rather as the stalwart woodman of thought. I have pulled on a light cord

often enough, while he has been wielding the broadaxe; and between us, on this unequal division, many a

specious fallacy has fallen. I have known him to battle the same question night after night for years, keeping

it in the reign of talk, constantly applying it and reapplying it to life with humorous or grave intention, and

all the while, never hurrying, nor flagging, nor taking an unfair advantage of the facts. Jack at a given

moment, when arising, as it were, from the tripod, can be more radiantly just to those from whom he differs;

but then the tenor of his thoughts is even calumnious; while Athelred, slower to forge excuses, is yet slower

to condemn, and sits over the welter of the world, vacillating but still judicial, and still faithfully contending

Both the last talkers deal much in points of conduct and religion studied in the "dry light" of prose. Indirectly

and as if against his will the same elements from time to time appear in the troubled and poetic talk of

Opalstein. His various and exotic knowledge, complete although unready sympathies, and fine, full,

discriminative flow of language, fit him out to be the best of talkers; so perhaps he is with some, not quite

with me PROXIME ACCESSIT, I should say. He sings the praises of the earth and the arts, flowers and

jewels, wine and music, in a moonlight, serenading manner, as to the light guitar; even wisdom comes from

his tongue like singing; no one is, indeed, more tuneful in the upper notes. But even while he sings the song

of the Sirens, he still hearkens to the barking of the Sphinx. Jarring Byronic notes interrupt the flow of his

Horatian humours. His mirth has something of the tragedy of the world for its perpetual background; and he

feasts like Don Giovanni to a double orchestra, one lightly sounding for the dance, one pealing Beethoven in

the distance. He is not truly reconciled either with life or with himself; and this instant war in his members

sometimes divides the man's attention. He does not always, perhaps not often, frankly surrender himself in

conversation. He brings into the talk other thoughts than those which he expresses; you are conscious that he

keeps an eye on something else, that he does not shake off the world, nor quite forget himself. Hence arise

occasional disappointments; even an occasional unfairness for his companions, who find themselves one day

giving too much, and the next, when they are wary out of season, giving perhaps too little. Purcel is in

another class from any I have mentioned. He is no debater, but appears in conversation, as occasion rises, in

two distinct characters, one of which I admire and fear, and the other love. In the first, he is radiantly civil

and rather silent, sits on a high, courtly hilltop, and from that vantageground drops you his remarks like

favours. He seems not to share in our sublunary contentions; he wears no sign of interest; when on a sudden

there falls in a crystal of wit, so polished that the dull do not perceive it, but so right that the sensitive are

silenced. True talk should have more body and blood, should be louder, vainer and more declaratory of the

man; the true talker should not hold so steady an advantage over whom he speaks with; and that is one reason

out of a score why I prefer my Purcel in his second character, when he unbends into a strain of graceful

gossip, singing like the fireside kettle. In these moods he has an elegant homeliness that rings of the true

Queen Anne. I know another person who attains, in his moments, to the insolence of a Restoration comedy,

speaking, I declare, as Congreve wrote; but that is a sport of nature, and scarce falls under the rubric, for there

One last remark occurs: It is the mark of genuine conversation that the sayings can scarce be quoted with

their full effect beyond the circle of common friends. To have their proper weight they should appear in a

biography, and with the portrait of the speaker. Good talk is dramatic; it is like an impromptu piece of acting

where each should represent himself to the greatest advantage; and that is the best kind of talk where each

speaker is most fully and candidly himself, and where, if you were to shift the speeches round from one to

another, there would be the greatest loss in significance and perspicuity. It is for this reason that talk depends

so wholly on our company. We should like to introduce Falstaff and Mercutio, or Falstaff and Sir Toby; but

Falstaff in talk with Cordelia seems even painful. Most of us, by the Protean quality of man, can talk to some

degree with all; but the true talk, that strikes out all the slumbering best of us, comes only with the peculiar

brethren of our spirits, is founded as deep as love in the constitution of our being, and is a thing to relish with

IN the last paper there was perhaps too much about mere debate; and there was nothing said at all about that

kind of talk which is merely luminous and restful, a higher power of silence, the quiet of the evening shared

by ruminating friends. There is something, aside from personal preference, to be alleged in support of this

omission. Those who are no chimneycornerers, who rejoice in the social thunderstorm, have a ground in

reason for their choice. They get little rest indeed; but restfulness is a quality for cattle; the virtues are all

active, life is alert, and it is in repose that men prepare themselves for evil. On the other hand, they are

bruised into a knowledge of themselves and others; they have in a high degree the fencer's pleasure in

dexterity displayed and proved; what they get they get upon life's terms, paying for it as they go; and once the

talk is launched, they are assured of honest dealing from an adversary eager like themselves. The aboriginal

man within us, the cavedweller, still lusty as when he fought tooth and nail for roots and berries, scents this

kind of equal battle from afar; it is like his old primaeval days upon the crags, a return to the sincerity of

savage life from the comfortable fictions of the civilised. And if it be delightful to the Old Man, it is none the

less profitable to his younger brother, the conscientious gentleman I feel never quite sure of your urbane and

smiling coteries; I fear they indulge a man's vanities in silence, suffer him to encroach, encourage him on to

be an ass, and send him forth again, not merely contemned for the moment, but radically more contemptible

than when he entered. But if I have a flushed, blustering fellow for my opposite, bent on carrying a point, my

vanity is sure to have its ears rubbed, once at least, in the course of the debate. He will not spare me when we

For many natures there is not much charm in the still, chambered society, the circle of bland countenances,

the digestive silence, the admired remark, the flutter of affectionate approval. They demand more atmosphere

and exercise; "a gale upon their spirits," as our pious ancestors would phrase it; to have their wits well

breathed in an uproarious Valhalla. And I suspect that the choice, given their character and faults, is one to be

defended. The purely wise are silenced by facts; they talk in a clear atmosphere, problems lying around them

like a view in nature; if they can be shown to be somewhat in the wrong, they digest the reproof like a

thrashing, and make better intellectual blood. They stand corrected by a whisper; a word or a glance reminds

them of the great eternal law. But it is not so with all. Others in conversation seek rather contact with their

fellowmen than increase of knowledge or clarity of thought. The drama, not the philosophy, of life is the

sphere of their intellectual activity. Even when they pursue truth, they desire as much as possible of what we

may call human scenery along the road they follow. They dwell in the heart of life; the blood sounding in

their ears, their eyes laying hold of what delights them with a brutal avidity that makes them blind to all

besides, their interest riveted on people, living, loving, talking, tangible people. To a man of this description,

the sphere of argument seems very pale and ghostly. By a strong expression, a perturbed countenance, floods

of tears, an insult which his conscience obliges him to swallow, he is brought round to knowledge which no

syllogism would have conveyed to him. His own experience is so vivid, he is so superlatively conscious of

himself, that if, day after day, he is allowed to hector and hear nothing but approving echoes, he will lose his

hold on the soberness of things and take himself in earnest for a god. Talk might be to such an one the very

way of moral ruin; the school where he might learn to be at once intolerable and ridiculous.

This character is perhaps commoner than philosophers suppose. And for persons of that stamp to learn much

by conversation, they must speak with their superiors, not in intellect, for that is a superiority that must be

proved, but in station. If they cannot find a friend to bully them for their good, they must find either an old

man, a woman, or some one so far below them in the artificial order of society, that courtesy may he

The best teachers are the aged. To the old our mouths are always partly closed; we must swallow our obvious

retorts and listen. They sit above our heads, on life's raised dais, and appeal at once to our respect and pity. A

flavour of the old school, a touch of something different in their manner which is freer and rounder, if they

come of what is called a good family, and often more timid and precise if they are of the middle class

serves, in these days, to accentuate the difference of age and add a distinction to gray hairs. But their

superiority is founded more deeply than by outward marks or gestures. They are before us in the march of

man; they have more or less solved the irking problem; they have battled through the equinox of life; in good

and evil they have held their course; and now, without open shame, they near the crown and harbour. It may

be we have been struck with one of fortune's darts; we can scarce be civil, so cruelly is our spirit tossed. Yet

long before we were so much as thought upon, the like calamity befell the old man or woman that now, with

pleasant humour, rallies us upon our inattention, sitting composed in the holy evening of man's life, in the

clear shining after rain. We grow ashamed of our distresses, new and hot and coarse, like villainous roadside

brandy; we see life in aerial perspective, under the heavens of faith; and out of the worst, in the mere

presence of contented elders, look forward and take patience. Fear shrinks before them "like a thing

reproved," not the flitting and ineffectual fear of death, but the instant, dwelling terror of the responsibilities

and revenges of life. Their speech, indeed, is timid; they report lions in the path; they counsel a meticulous

footing; but their serene, marred faces are more eloquent and tell another story. Where they have gone, we

will go also, not very greatly fearing; what they have endured unbroken, we also, God helping us, will make a

Not only is the presence of the aged in itself remedial, but their minds are stored with antidotes, wisdom's

simples, plain considerations overlooked by youth. They have matter to communicate, be they never so

stupid. Their talk is not merely literature, it is great literature; classic in virtue of the speaker's detachment,

studded, like a book of travel, with things we should not otherwise have learnt. In virtue, I have said, of the

speaker's detachment, and this is why, of two old men, the one who is not your father speaks to you with

the more sensible authority; for in the paternal relation the oldest have lively interests and remain still young.

Thus I have known two young men great friends; each swore by the other's father; the father of each swore by

the other lad; and yet each pair of parent and child were perpetually by the ears. This is typical: it reads like

The old appear in conversation in two characters: the critically silent and the garrulous anecdotic. The last is

perhaps what we look for; it is perhaps the more instructive. An old gentleman, well on in years, sits

handsomely and naturally in the bowwindow of his age, scanning experience with reverted eye; and

chirping and smiling, communicates the accidents and reads the lesson of his long career. Opinions are

strengthened, indeed, but they are also weeded out in the course of years. What remains steadily present to

the eye of the retired veteran in his hermitage, what still ministers to his content, what still quickens his old

honest heart these are "the real longlived things" that Whitman tells us to prefer. Where youth agrees with

age, not where they differ, wisdom lies; and it is when the young disciple finds his heart to beat in tune with

his graybearded teacher's that a lesson may be learned. I have known one old gentleman, whom I may name,

for he in now gathered to his stock Robert Hunter, Sheriff of Dumbarton, and author of an excellent

lawbook still reedited and republished. Whether he was originally big or little is more than I can guess.

When I knew him he was all fallen away and fallen in; crooked and shrunken; buckled into a stiff waistcoat

for support; troubled by ailments, which kept him hobbling in and out of the room; one foot gouty; a wig for

decency, not for deception, on his head; close shaved, except under his chin and for that he never failed to

apologise, for it went sore against the traditions of his life. You can imagine how he would fare in a novel by

Miss Mather; yet this rag of a Chelsea veteran lived to his last year in the plenitude of all that is best in man,

brimming with human kindness, and staunch as a Roman soldier under his manifold infirmities. You could

not say that he had lost his memory, for he would repeat Shakespeare and Webster and Jeremy Taylor and

Burke by the page together; but the parchment was filled up, there was no room for fresh inscriptions, and he

was capable of repeating the same anecdote on many successive visits. His voice survived in its full power,

and he took a pride in using it. On his last voyage as Commissioner of lighthouses, he hailed a ship at sea and

made himself clearly audible without a speaking trumpet, ruffling the while with a proper vanity in his

achievement. He had a habit of eking out his words with interrogative hems, which was puzzling and a little

wearisome, suited ill with his appearance, and seemed a survival from some former stage of bodily portliness.

Of yore, when he was a great pedestrian and no enemy to good claret, he may have pointed with these minute

guns his allocutions to the bench. His humour was perfectly equable, set beyond the reach of fate; gout,

rheumatism, stone and gravel might have combined their forces against that frail tabernacle, but when I came

round on Sunday evening, he would lay aside Jeremy Taylor's LIFE OF CHRIST and greet me with the same

open brow, the same kind formality of manner. His opinions and sympathies dated the man almost to a

decade. He had begun life, under his mother's influence, as an admirer of Junius, but on maturer knowledge

had transferred his admiration to Burke. He cautioned me, with entire gravity, to be punctilious in writing

English; never to forget that I was a Scotchman, that English was a foreign tongue, and that if I attempted the

colloquial, I should certainly, be shamed: the remark was apposite, I suppose, in the days of David Hume.

Scott was too new for him; he had known the author known him, too, for a Tory; and to the genuine classic

a contemporary is always something of a trouble. He had the old, serious love of the play; had even, as he

was proud to tell, played a certain part in the history of Shakespearian revivals, for he had successfully

pressed on Murray, of the old Edinburgh Theatre, the idea of producing Shakespeare's fairy pieces with great

scenic display. A moderate in religion, he was much struck in the last years of his life by a conversation with

two young lads, revivalists "H'm," he would say "new to me. I have had h'm no such experience." It

struck him, not with pain, rather with a solemn philosophic interest, that he, a Christian as he hoped, and a

Christian of so old a standing, should hear these young fellows talking of his own subject, his own weapons

that he had fought the battle of life with, "and h'm not understand." In this wise and graceful attitude he

did justice to himself and others, reposed unshaken in his old beliefs, and recognised their limits without

anger or alarm. His last recorded remark, on the last night of his life, was after he had been arguing against

Calvinism with his minister and was interrupted by an intolerable pang. "After all," he said, "of all the 'isms, I

know none so bad as rheumatism." My own last sight of him was some time before, when we dined together

at an inn; he had been on circuit, for he stuck to his duties like a chief part of his existence; and I remember it

as the only occasion on which he ever soiled his lips with slang a thing he loathed. We were both Roberts;

and as we took our places at table, he addressed me with a twinkle: "We are just what you would call two

bob." He offered me port, I remember, as the proper milk of youth; spoke of "twenty shilling notes"; and

throughout the meal was full of oldworld pleasantry and quaintness, like an ancient boy on a holiday. But

what I recall chiefly was his confession that he had never read OTHELLO to an end. Shakespeare was his

continual study. He loved nothing better than to display his knowledge and memory by adducing parallel

passages from Shakespeare, passages where the same word was employed, or the same idea differently

treated. But OTHELLO had beaten him. "That noble gentleman and that noble lady h'm too painful for

me." The same night the hoardings were covered with posters, "Burlesque of OTHELLO," and the contrast

blazed up in my mind like a bonfire. An unforgettable look it gave me into that kind man's soul. His

acquaintance was indeed a liberal and pious education. All the humanities were taught in that bare

diningroom beside his gouty footstool. He was a piece of good advice; he was himself the instance that

pointed and adorned his various talk. Nor could a young man have found elsewhere a place so set apart from

envy, fear, discontent, or any of the passions that debase; a life so honest and composed; a soul like an

ancient violin, so subdued to harmony, responding to a touch in music as in that diningroom, with Mr.

Hunter chatting at the eleventh hour, under the shadow of eternity, fearless and gentle.

The second class of old people are not anecdotic; they are rather hearers than talkers, listening to the young

with an amused and critical attention. To have this sort of intercourse to perfection, I think we must go to old

ladies. Women are better hearers than men, to begin with; they learn, I fear in anguish, to bear with the

tedious and infantile vanity of the other sex; and we will take more from a woman than even from the oldest

man in the way of biting comment. Biting comment is the chief part, whether for profit or amusement, in this

business. The old lady that I have in my eye is a very caustic speaker, her tongue, after years of practice, in

absolute command, whether for silence or attack. If she chance to dislike you, you will be tempted to curse

the malignity of age. But if you chance to please even slightly, you will be listened to with a particular

laughing grace of sympathy, and from time to time chastised, as if in play, with a parasol as heavy as a

poleaxe. It requires a singular art, as well as the vantageground of age, to deal these stunning corrections

among the coxcombs of the young. The pill is disguised in sugar of wit; it is administered as a compliment

if you had not pleased, you would not have been censured; it is a personal affair a hyphen, A TRAIT

D'UNION, between you and your censor; age's philandering, for her pleasure and your good. Incontestably

the young man feels very much of a fool; but he must be a perfect Malvolio, sick with self love, if he cannot

take an open buffet and still smile. The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have

transgressed, and your friend says nothing and avoids your eye. If a man were made of guttapercha, his

heart would quail at such a moment. But when the word is out, the worst is over; and a fellow with any

goodhumour at all may pass through a perfect hail of witty criticism, every bare place on his soul hit to the

quick with a shrewd missile, and reappear, as if after a dive, tingling with a fine moral reaction, and ready,

with a shrinking readiness, one third loath, for a repetition of the discipline.

There are few women, not well sunned and ripened, and perhaps toughened, who can thus stand apart from a

man and say the true thing with a kind of genial cruelty. Still there are some and I doubt if there be any man

who can return the compliment. The class of man represented by Vernon Whitford in THE EGOIST says,

indeed, the true thing, but he says it stockishly. Vernon is a noble fellow, and makes, by the way, a noble and

instructive contrast to Daniel Deronda; his conduct is the conduct of a man of honour; but we agree with him,

against our consciences, when he remorsefully considers "its astonishing dryness." He is the best of men, but

the best of women manage to combine all that and something more. Their very faults assist them; they are

helped even by the falseness of their position in life. They can retire into the fortified camp of the proprieties.

They can touch a subject and suppress it. The most adroit employ a somewhat elaborate reserve as a means to

be frank, much as they wear gloves when they shake hands. But a man has the full responsibility of his

freedom, cannot evade a question, can scarce be silent without rudeness, must answer for his words upon the

moment, and is not seldom left face to face with a damning choice, between the more or less dishonourable

But the superiority of women is perpetually menaced; they do not sit throned on infirmities like the old; they

are suitors as well as sovereigns; their vanity is engaged, their affections are too apt to follow; and hence

much of the talk between the sexes degenerates into something unworthy of the name. The desire to please, to

shine with a certain softness of lustre and to draw a fascinating picture of oneself, banishes from conversation

all that is sterling and most of what is humorous. As soon as a strong current of mutual admiration begins to

flow, the human interest triumphs entirely over the intellectual, and the commerce of words, consciously or

not, becomes secondary to the commencing of eyes. But even where this ridiculous danger is avoided, and a

man and woman converse equally and honestly, something in their nature or their education falsifies the

strain. An instinct prompts them to agree; and where that is impossible, to agree to differ. Should they neglect

the warning, at the first suspicion of an argument, they find themselves in different hemispheres. About any

point of business or conduct, any actual affair demanding settlement, a woman will speak and listen, hear and

answer arguments, not only with natural wisdom, but with candour and logical honesty. But if the subject of

debate be something in the air, an abstraction, an excuse for talk, a logical Aunt Sally, then may the male

debater instantly abandon hope; he may employ reason, adduce facts, be supple, be smiling, be angry, all

shall avail him nothing; what the woman said first, that (unless she has forgotten it) she will repeat at the end.

Hence, at the very junctures when a talk between men grows brighter and quicker and begins to promise to

bear fruit, talk between the sexes is menaced with dissolution. The point of difference, the point of interest, is

evaded by the brilliant woman, under a shower of irrelevant conversational rockets; it is bridged by the

discreet woman with a rustle of silk, as she passes smoothly forward to the nearest point of safety. And this

sort of prestidigitation, juggling the dangerous topic out of sight until it can be reintroduced with safety in an

The drawingroom is, indeed, an artificial place; it is so by our choice and for our sins. The subjection of

women; the ideal imposed upon them from the cradle, and worn, like a hairshirt, with so much constancy;

their motherly, superior tenderness to man's vanity and selfimportance; their managing arts the arts of a

civilised slave among goodnatured barbarians are all painful ingredients and all help to falsify relations. It

is not till we get clear of that amusing artificial scene that genuine relations are founded, or ideas honestly

compared. In the garden, on the road or the hillside, or TETEATETE and apart from interruptions,

occasions arise when we may learn much from any single woman; and nowhere more often than in married

life. Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes. The disputes are valueless; they but ingrain

the difference; the heroic heart of woman prompting her at once to nail her colours to the mast. But in the

intervals, almost unconsciously and with no desire to shine, the whole material of life is turned over and over,

ideas are struck out and shared, the two persons more and more adapt their notions one to suit the other, and

in process of time, without sound of trumpet, they conduct each other into new worlds of thought.

THE civilisation, the manners, and the morals of dogkind are to a great extent subordinated to those of his

ancestral master, man. This animal, in many ways so superior, has accepted a position of inferiority, shares

the domestic life, and humours the caprices of the tyrant. But the potentate, like the British in India, pays

small regard to the character of his willing client, judges him with listless glances, and condemns him in a

byword. Listless have been the looks of his admirers, who have exhausted idle terms of praise, and buried the

poor soul below exaggerations. And yet more idle and, if possible, more unintelligent has been the attitude of

his express detractors; those who are very fond of dogs "but in their proper place"; who say "poo' fellow, poo'

fellow," and are themselves far poorer; who whet the knife of the vivisectionist or heat his oven; who are not

ashamed to admire "the creature's instinct"; and flying far beyond folly, have dared to resuscitate the theory

of animal machines. The "dog's instinct" and the "automatondog," in this age of psychology and science,

sound like strange anachronisms. An automaton he certainly is; a machine working independently of his

control, the heart, like the mill wheel, keeping all in motion, and the consciousness, like a person shut in the

mill garret, enjoying the view out of the window and shaken by the thunder of the stones; an automaton in

one corner of which a living spirit is confined: an automaton like man. Instinct again he certainly possesses.

Inherited aptitudes are his, inherited frailties. Some things he at once views and understands, as though he

were awakened from a sleep, as though he came "trailing clouds of glory." But with him, as with man, the

field of instinct is limited; its utterances are obscure and occasional; and about the far larger part of life both

The leading distinction between dog and man, after and perhaps before the different duration of their lives, is

that the one can speak and that the other cannot. The absence of the power of speech confines the dog in the

development of his intellect. It hinders him from many speculations, for words are the beginning of

metaphysic. At the same blow it saves him from many superstitions, and his silence has won for him a

higher name for virtue than his conduct justifies. The faults of the dog are many. He is vainer than man,

singularly greedy of notice, singularly intolerant of ridicule, suspicious like the deaf, jealous to the degree of

frenzy, and radically devoid of truth. The day of an intelligent small dog is passed in the manufacture and the

laborious communication of falsehood; he lies with his tail, he lies with his eye, he lies with his protesting

paw; and when he rattles his dish or scratches at the door his purpose is other than appears. But he has some

apology to offer for the vice. Many of the signs which form his dialect have come to bear an arbitrary

meaning, clearly understood both by his master and himself; yet when a new want arises he must either

invent a new vehicle of meaning or wrest an old one to a different purpose; and this necessity frequently

recurring must tend to lessen his idea of the sanctity of symbols. Meanwhile the dog is clear in his own

conscience, and draws, with a human nicety, the distinction between formal and essential truth. Of his

punning perversions, his legitimate dexterity with symbols, he is even vain; but when he has told and been

detected in a lie, there is not a hair upon his body but confesses guilt. To a dog of gentlemanly feeling theft

and falsehood are disgraceful vices. The canine, like the human, gentleman demands in his misdemeanours

Montaigne's "JE NE SAIS QUOI DE GENEREUX." He is never more than half ashamed of having barked or

bitten; and for those faults into which he has been led by the desire to shine before a lady of his race, he

retains, even under physical correction, a share of pride. But to be caught lying, if he understands it, instantly

Just as among dull observers he preserves a name for truth, the dog has been credited with modesty. It is

amazing how the use of language blunts the faculties of man that because vain glory finds no vent in words,

creatures supplied with eyes have been unable to detect a fault so gross and obvious. If a small spoiled dog

were suddenly to be endowed with speech, he would prate interminably, and still about himself; when we had

friends, we should be forced to lock him in a garret; and what with his whining jealousies and his foible for

falsehood, in a year's time he would have gone far to weary out our love. I was about to compare him to Sir

Willoughby Patterne, but the Patternes have a manlier sense of their own merits; and the parallel, besides, is

ready. Hans Christian Andersen, as we behold him in his startling memoirs, thrilling from top to toe with an

excruciating vanity, and scouting even along the street for shadows of offence here was the talking dog.

It is just this rage for consideration that has betrayed the dog into his satellite position as the friend of man.

The cat, an animal of franker appetites, preserves his independence. But the dog, with one eye ever on the

audience, has been wheedled into slavery, and praised and patted into the renunciation of his nature. Once he

ceased hunting and became man's platelicker, the Rubicon was crossed. Thenceforth he was a gentleman of

leisure; and except the few whom we keep working, the whole race grew more and more selfconscious,

mannered and affected. The number of things that a small dog does naturally is strangely small. Enjoying

better spirits and not crushed under material cares, he is far more theatrical than average man. His whole life,

if he be a dog of any pretension to gallantry, is spent in a vain show, and in the hot pursuit of admiration.

Take out your puppy for a walk, and you will find the little ball of fur clumsy, stupid, bewildered, but natural.

Let but a few months pass, and when you repeat the process you will find nature buried in convention. He

will do nothing plainly; but the simplest processes of our material life will all be bent into the forms of an

elaborate and mysterious etiquette. Instinct, says the fool, has awakened. But it is not so. Some dogs some,

at the very least if they be kept separate from others, remain quite natural; and these, when at length they

meet with a companion of experience, and have the game explained to them, distinguish themselves by the

severity of their devotion to its rules. I wish I were allowed to tell a story which would radiantly illuminate

the point; but men, like dogs, have an elaborate and mysterious etiquette. It is their bond of sympathy that

The person, man or dog, who has a conscience is eternally condemned to some degree of humbug; the sense

of the law in their members fatally precipitates either towards a frozen and affected bearing. And the

converse is true; and in the elaborate and conscious manners of the dog, moral opinions and the love of the

ideal stand confessed. To follow for ten minutes in the street some swaggering, canine cavalier, is to receive a

lesson in dramatic art and the cultured conduct of the body; in every act and gesture you see him true to a

refined conception; and the dullest cur, beholding him, pricks up his ear and proceeds to imitate and parody

that charming ease. For to be a highmannered and highminded gentleman, careless, affable, and gay, is the

inborn pretension of the dog. The large dog, so much lazier, so much more weighed upon with matter, so

majestic in repose, so beautiful in effort, is born with the dramatic means to wholly represent the part. And it

is more pathetic and perhaps more instructive to consider the small dog in his conscientious and imperfect

efforts to outdo Sir Philip Sidney. For the ideal of the dog is feudal and religious; the everpresent

polytheism, the whipbearing Olympus of mankind, rules them on the one hand; on the other, their singular

difference of size and strength among themselves effectually prevents the appearance of the democratic

notion. Or we might more exactly compare their society to the curious spectacle presented by a school

ushers, monitors, and big and little boys qualified by one circumstance, the introduction of the other sex. In

each, we should observe a somewhat similar tension of manner, and somewhat similar points of honour. In

each the larger animal keeps a contemptuous good humour; in each the smaller annoys him with wasp like

impudence, certain of practical immunity; in each we shall find a double life producing double characters,

and an excursive and noisy heroism combined with a fair amount of practical timidity. I have known dogs,

and I have known school heroes that, set aside the fur, could hardly have been told apart; and if we desire to

understand the chivalry of old, we must turn to the school playfields or the dungheap where the dogs are

Woman, with the dog, has been long enfranchised. Incessant massacre of female innocents has changed the

proportions of the sexes and perverted their relations. Thus, when we regard the manners of the dog, we see a

romantic and monogamous animal, once perhaps as delicate as the cat, at war with impossible conditions.

Man has much to answer for; and the part he plays is yet more damnable and parlous than Corin's in the eyes

of Touchstone. But his intervention has at least created an imperial situation for the rare surviving ladies. In

that society they reign without a rival: conscious queens; and in the only instance of a canine wifebeater that

has ever fallen under my notice, the criminal was somewhat excused by the circumstances of his story. He is

a little, very alert, wellbred, intelligent Skye, as black as a hat, with a wet bramble for a nose and two

cairngorms for eyes. To the human observer, he is decidedly welllooking; but to the ladies of his race he

seems abhorrent. A thorough elaborate gentleman, of the plume and swordknot order, he was born with a

nice sense of gallantry to women. He took at their hands the most outrageous treatment; I have heard him

bleating like a sheep, I have seen him streaming blood, and his ear tattered like a regimental banner; and yet

he would scorn to make reprisals. Nay more, when a human lady upraised the contumelious whip against the

very dame who had been so cruelly misusing him, my little greatheart gave but one hoarse cry and fell upon

the tyrant tooth and nail. This is the tale of a soul's tragedy. After three years of unavailing chivalry, he

suddenly, in one hour, threw off the yoke of obligation; had he been Shakespeare he would then have written

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA to brand the offending sex; but being only a little dog, he began to bite them.

The surprise of the ladies whom he attacked indicated the monstrosity of his offence; but he had fairly beaten

off his better angel, fairly committed moral suicide; for almost in the same hour, throwing aside the last rags

of decency, he proceeded to attack the aged also. The fact is worth remark, showing, as it does, that ethical

laws are common both to dogs and men; and that with both a single deliberate violation of the conscience

loosens all. "But while the lamp holds on to burn," says the paraphrase, "the greatest sinner may return." I

have been cheered to see symptoms of effectual penitence in my sweet ruffian; and by the handling that he

accepted uncomplainingly the other day from an indignant fair one, I begin to hope the period of STURM

All these little gentlemen are subtle casuists. The duty to the female dog is plain; but where competing duties

rise, down they will sit and study them out, like Jesuit confessors. I knew another little Skye, somewhat plain

in manner and appearance, but a creature compact of amiability and solid wisdom. His family going abroad

for a winter, he was received for that period by an uncle in the same city. The winter over, his own family

home again, and his own house (of which he was very proud) reopened, he found himself in a dilemma

between two conflicting duties of loyalty and gratitude. His old friends were not to be neglected, but it

seemed hardly decent to desert the new. This was how he solved the problem. Every morning, as soon as the

door was opened, of posted Coolin to his uncle's, visited the children in the nursery, saluted the whole family,

and was back at home in time for breakfast and his bit of fish. Nor was this done without a sacrifice on his

part, sharply felt; for he had to forego the particular honour and jewel of his day his morning's walk with

my father. And, perhaps from this cause, he gradually wearied of and relaxed the practice, and at length

returned entirely to his ancient habits. But the same decision served him in another and more distressing case

of divided duty, which happened not long after. He was not at all a kitchen dog, but the cook had nursed him

with unusual kindness during the distemper; and though he did not adore her as he adored my father

although (born snob) he was critically conscious of her position as "only a servant" he still cherished for her

a special gratitude. Well, the cook left, and retired some streets away to lodgings of her own; and there was

Coolin in precisely the same situation with any young gentleman who has had the inestimable benefit of a

faithful nurse. The canine conscience did not solve the problem with a pound of tea at Christmas. No longer

content to pay a flying visit, it was the whole forenoon that he dedicated to his solitary friend. And so, day by

day, he continued to comfort her solitude until (for some reason which I could never understand and cannot

approve) he was kept locked up to break him of the graceful habit. Here, it is not the similarity, it is the

difference, that is worthy of remark; the clearly marked degrees of gratitude and the proportional duration of

his visits. Anything further removed from instinct it were hard to fancy; and one is even stirred to a certain

impatience with a character so destitute of spontaneity, so passionless in justice, and so priggishly obedient to

There are not many dogs like this good Coolin, and not many people. But the type is one well marked, both in

the human and the canine family. Gallantry was not his aim, but a solid and somewhat oppressive

respectability. He was a sworn foe to the unusual and the conspicuous, a praiser of the golden mean, a kind of

city uncle modified by Cheeryble. And as he was precise and conscientious in all the steps of his own

blameless course, he looked for the same precision and an even greater gravity in the bearing of his deity, my

father. It was no sinecure to be Coolin's idol: he was exacting like a rigid parent; and at every sign of levity in

the man whom he respected, he announced loudly the death of virtue and the proximate fall of the pillars of

I have called him a snob; but all dogs are so, though in varying degrees. It is hard to follow their snobbery

among themselves; for though I think we can perceive distinctions of rank, we cannot grasp what is the

criterion. Thus in Edinburgh, in a good part of the town, there were several distinct societies or clubs that met

in the morning to the phrase is technical to "rake the backets" in a troop. A friend of mine, the master of

three dogs, was one day surprised to observe that they had left one club and joined another; but whether it

was a rise or a fall, and the result of an invitation or an expulsion, was more than he could guess. And this

illustrates pointedly our ignorance of the real life of dogs, their social ambitions and their social hierarchies.

At least, in their dealings with men they are not only conscious of sex, but of the difference of station. And

that in the most snobbish manner; for the poor man's dog is not offended by the notice of the rich, and keeps

all his ugly feeling for those poorer or more ragged than his master. And again, for every station they have an

ideal of behaviour, to which the master, under pain of derogation, will do wisely to conform. How often has

not a cold glance of an eye informed me that my dog was disappointed; and how much more gladly would he

I knew one disrespectable dog. He was far liker a cat; cared little or nothing for men, with whom he merely

coexisted as we do with cattle, and was entirely devoted to the art of poaching. A house would not hold him,

He led, I believe, a life of troubled but genuine pleasure, and perished beyond all question in a trap. But this

was an exception, a marked reversion to the ancestral type; like the hairy human infant. The true dog of the

nineteenth century, to judge by the remainder of my fairly large acquaintance, is in love with respectability. A

streetdog was once adopted by a lady. While still an Arab, he had done as Arabs do, gambolling in the mud,

charging into butchers' stalls, a cathunter, a sturdy beggar, a common rogue and vagabond; but with his rise

into society he laid aside these inconsistent pleasures. He stole no more, he hunted no more cats; and

conscious of his collar, he ignored his old companions. Yet the canine upper class was never brought to

recognise the upstart, and from that hour, except for human countenance, he was alone. Friendless, shorn of

his sports and the habits of a lifetime, he still lived in a glory of happiness, content with his acquired

respectability, and with no care but to support it solemnly. Are we to condemn or praise this selfmade dog?

We praise his human brother. And thus to conquer vicious habits is as rare with dogs as with men. With the

more part, for all their scruplemongering and moral thought, the vices that are born with them remain

invincible throughout; and they live all their years, glorying in their virtues, but still the slaves of their

defects. Thus the sage Coolin was a thief to the last; among a thousand peccadilloes, a whole goose and a

whole cold leg of mutton lay upon his conscience; but Woggs, (7) whose soul's shipwreck in the matter of

gallantry I have recounted above, has only twice been known to steal, and has often nobly conquered the

temptation. The eighth is his favourite commandment. There is something painfully human in these unequal

virtues and mortal frailties of the best. Still more painful is the bearing of those "stammering professors" in

the house of sickness and under the terror of death. It is beyond a doubt to me that, somehow or other, the dog

connects together, or confounds, the uneasiness of sickness and the consciousness of guilt. To the pains of the

body he often adds the tortures of the conscience; and at these times his haggard protestations form, in regard

I once supposed that I had found an inverse relation between the double etiquette which dogs obey; and that

those who were most addicted to the showy street life among other dogs were less careful in the practice of

home virtues for the tyrant man. But the female dog, that mass of carneying affectations, shines equally in

either sphere; rules her rough posse of attendant swains with unwearying tact and gusto; and with her master

and mistress pushes the arts of insinuation to their crowning point. The attention of man and the regard of

other dogs flatter (it would thus appear) the same sensibility; but perhaps, if we could read the canine heart,

they would be found to flatter it in very different degrees. Dogs live with man as courtiers round a monarch,

steeped in the flattery of his notice and enriched with sinecures. To push their favour in this world of pickings

and caresses is, perhaps, the business of their lives; and their joys may lie outside. I am in despair at our

persistent ignorance. I read in the lives of our companions the same processes of reason, the same antique and

fatal conflicts of the right against the wrong, and of unbitted nature with too rigid custom; I see them with our

weaknesses, vain, false, inconstant against appetite, and with our one stalk of virtue, devoted to the dream of

an ideal; and yet, as they hurry by me on the street with tail in air, or come singly to solicit my regard, I must

own the secret purport of their lives is still inscrutable to man. Is man the friend, or is he the patron only?

Have they indeed forgotten nature's voice? or are those moments snatched from courtiership when they touch

noses with the tinker's mongrel, the brief reward and pleasure of their artificial lives? Doubtless, when man

shares with his dog the toils of a profession and the pleasures of an art, as with the shepherd or the poacher,

the affection warms and strengthens till it fills the soul. But doubtless, also, the masters are, in many cases,

the object of a merely interested cultus, sitting aloft like Louis Quatorze, giving and receiving flattery and

favour; and the dogs, like the majority of men, have but foregone their true existence and become the dupes

THESE words will be familiar to all students of Skelt's Juvenile Drama. That national monument, after

having changed its name to Park's, to Webb's, to Redington's, and last of all to Pollock's, has now become, for

the most part, a memory. Some of its pillars, like Stonehenge, are still afoot, the rest clean vanished. It may

be the Museum numbers a full set; and Mr. Ionides perhaps, or else her gracious Majesty, may boast their

great collections; but to the plain private person they are become, like Raphaels, unattainable. I have, at

different times, possessed ALADDIN, THE RED ROVER, THE BLIND BOY, THE OLD OAK CHEST,

TERROR OF JAMAICA; and I have assisted others in the illumination of MAID OF THE INN and THE

BATTLE OF WATERLOO. In this rollcall of stirring names you read the evidences of a happy childhood;

and though not half of them are still to be procured of any living stationer, in the mind of their once happy

There stands, I fancy, to this day (but now how fallen!) a certain stationer's shop at a corner of the wide

thoroughfare that joins the city of my childhood with the sea. When, upon any Saturday, we made a party to

behold the ships, we passed that corner; and since in those days I loved a ship as a man loves Burgundy or

daybreak, this of itself had been enough to hallow it. But there was more than that. In the Leith Walk

window, all the year round, there stood displayed a theatre in working order, with a "forest set," a "combat,"

and a few "robbers carousing" in the slides; and below and about, dearer tenfold to me! the plays themselves,

those budgets of romance, lay tumbled one upon another. Long and often have I lingered there with empty

pockets. One figure, we shall say, was visible in the first plate of characters, bearded, pistol in hand, or

drawing to his ear the clothyard arrow; I would spell the name: was it Macaire, or Long Tom Coffin, or

Grindoff, 2d dress? O, how I would long to see the rest! how if the name by chance were hidden I would

wonder in what play he figured, and what immortal legend justified his attitude and strange apparel! And then

to go within, to announce yourself as an intending purchaser, and, closely watched, be suffered to undo those

bundles and breathlessly devour those pages of gesticulating villains, epileptic combats, bosky forests,

palaces and warships, frowning fortresses and prison vaults it was a giddy joy. That shop, which was dark

and smelt of Bibles, was a loadstone rock for all that bore the name of boy. They could not pass it by, nor,

having entered, leave it. It was a place besieged; the shopmen, like the Jews rebuilding Salem, had a double

task. They kept us at the stick's end, frowned us down, snatched each play out of our hand ere we were

trusted with another, and, increditable as it may sound, used to demand of us upon our entrance, like banditti,

if we came with money or with empty hand. Old Mr. Smith himself, worn out with my eternal vacillation,

once swept the treasures from before me, with the cry: "I do not believe, child, that you are an intending

purchaser at all!" These were the dragons of the garden; but for such joys of paradise we could have faced the

Terror of Jamaica himself. Every sheet we fingered was another lightning glance into obscure, delicious

story; it was like wallowing in the raw stuff of storybooks. I know nothing to compare with it save now and

then in dreams, when I am privileged to read in certain unwrit stories of adventure, from which I awake to

find the world all vanity. The CRUX of Buridan's donkey was as nothing to the uncertainty of the boy as he

handled and lingered and doated on these bundles of delight; there was a physical pleasure in the sight and

touch of them which he would jealously prolong; and when at length the deed was done, the play selected,

and the impatient shopman had brushed the rest into the gray portfolio, and the boy was forth again, a little

late for dinner, the lamps springing into light in the blue winter's even, and THE MILLER, or THE ROVER,

or some kindred drama clutched against his side on what gay feet he ran, and how he laughed aloud in

exultation! I can hear that laughter still. Out of all the years of my life, I can recall but one homecoming to

compare with these, and that was on the night when I brought back with me the ARABIAN

ENTERTAINMENTS in the fat, old, doublecolumned volume with the prints. I was just well into the story

of the Hunchback, I remember, when my clergyman grandfather (a man we counted pretty stiff) came in

behind me. I grew blind with terror. But instead of ordering the book away, he said he envied me. Ah, well he

The purchase and the first halfhour at home, that was the summit. Thenceforth the interest declined by little

and little. The fable, as set forth in the playbook, proved to be not worthy of the scenes and characters: what

fable would not? Such passages as: "Scene 6. The Hermitage. Night set scene. Place back of scene 1, No. 2,

at back of stage and hermitage, Fig. 2, out of set piece, R. H. in a slanting direction" such passages, I say,

though very practical, are hardly to be called good reading. Indeed, as literature, these dramas did not much

appeal to me. I forget the very outline of the plots. Of THE BLIND BOY, beyond the fact that he was a most

injured prince and once, I think, abducted, I know nothing. And THE OLD OAK CHEST, what was it all

about? that proscript (1st dress), that prodigious number of banditti, that old woman with the broom, and the

magnificent kitchen in the third act (was it in the third?) they are all fallen in a deliquium, swim faintly in

I cannot deny that joy attended the illumination; nor can I quite forget that child who, wilfully foregoing

pleasure, stoops to "twopence coloured." With crimson lake (hark to the sound of it crimson lake! the

horns of elfland are not richer on the ear) with crimson lake and Prussian blue a certain purple is to be

The latter colour with gamboge, a hated name although an exquisite pigment, supplied a green of such a

savoury greenness that today my heart regrets it. Nor can I recall without a tender weakness the very aspect

of the water where I dipped my brush. Yes, there was pleasure in the painting. But when all was painted, it is

needless to deny it, all was spoiled. You might, indeed, set up a scene or two to look at; but to cut the figures

out was simply sacrilege; nor could any child twice court the tedium, the worry, and the longdrawn

disenchantment of an actual performance. Two days after the purchase the honey had been sucked. Parents

used to complain; they thought I wearied of my play. It was not so: no more than a person can be said to have

wearied of his dinner when he leaves the bones and dishes; I had got the marrow of it and said grace.

Then was the time to turn to the back of the playbook and to study that enticing double file of names, where

poetry, for the true child of Skelt, reigned happy and glorious like her Majesty the Queen. Much as I have

travelled in these realms of gold, I have yet seen, upon that map or abstract, names of El Dorados that still

haunt the ear of memory, and are still but names. THE FLOATING BEACON why was that denied me? or

THE WRECK ASHORE? SIXTEEN STRING JACK whom I did not even guess to be a highwayman,

troubled me awake and haunted my slumbers; and there is one sequence of three from that enchanted

calender that I still at times recall, like a loved verse of poetry: LODOISKA, SILVER PALACE, ECHO OF

WESTMINSTER BRIDGE. Names, bare names, are surely more to children than we poor, grownup,

The name of Skelt itself has always seemed a part and parcel of the charm of his productions. It may be

different with the rose, but the attraction of this paper drama sensibly declined when Webb had crept into the

rubric: a poor cuckoo, flaunting in Skelt's nest. And now we have reached Pollock, sounding deeper gulfs.

Indeed, this name of Skelt appears so stagey and piratic, that I will adopt it boldly to design these qualities.

Skeltery, then, is a quality of much art. It is even to be found, with reverence be it said, among the works of

nature. The stagey is its generic name; but it is an old, insular, homebred staginess; not French, domestically

British; not of today, but smacking of O. Smith, Fitzball, and the great age of melodrama: a peculiar

fragrance haunting it; uttering its unimportant message in a tone of voice that has the charm of fresh

antiquity. I will not insist upon the art of Skelt's purveyors. These wonderful characters that once so thrilled

our soul with their bold attitude, array of deadly engines and incomparable costume, today look somewhat

pallidly; the extreme hard favour of the heroine strikes me, I had almost said with pain; the villain's scowl no

longer thrills me like a trumpet; and the scenes themselves, those once unparalleled landscapes, seem the

efforts of a prentice hand. So much of fault we find; but on the other side the impartial critic rejoices to

remark the presence of a great unity of gusto; of those direct claptrap appeals, which a man is dead and

buriable when he fails to answer; of the footlight glamour, the readymade, barefaced, transpontine

picturesque, a thing not one with cold reality, but how much dearer to the mind!

The scenery of Skeltdom or, shall we say, the kingdom of Transpontus? had a prevailing character.

Whether it set forth Poland as in THE BLIND BOY, or Bohemia with THE MILLER AND HIS MEN, or

Italy with THE OLD OAK CHEST, still it was Transpontus. A botanist could tell it by the plants. The

hollyhock was all pervasive, running wild in deserts; the dock was common, and the bending reed; and

overshadowing these were poplar, palm, potato tree, and QUERCUS SKELTICA brave growths. The caves

were all embowelled in the Surreyside formation; the soil was all betrodden by the light pump of T. P. Cooke.

Skelt, to be sure, had yet another, an oriental string: he held the gorgeous east in fee; and in the new quarter

of Hyeres, say, in the garden of the Hotel des Iles d'Or, you may behold these blessed visions realised. But on

these I will not dwell; they were an outwork; it was in the accidental scenery that Skelt was all himself. It had

a strong flavour of England; it was a sort of indigestion of England and dropscenes, and I am bound to say

was charming. How the roads wander, how the castle sits upon the hill, how the sun eradiates from behind the

cloud, and how the congregated clouds themselves uproll, as stiff as bolsters! Here is the cottage interior,

the usual first flat, with the cloak upon the nail, the rosaries of onions, the gun and powderhorn and

cornercupboard; here is the inn (this drama must be nautical, I foresee Captain Luff and Bold Bob Bowsprit)

with the red curtain, pipes, spittoons, and eightday clock; and there again is that impressive dungeon with

the chains, which was so dull to colour. England, the hedgerow elms, the thin brick houses, windmills,

glimpses of the navigable Thames England, when at last I came to visit it, was only Skelt made evident: to

cross the border was, for the Scotsman, to come home to Skelt; there was the innsign and there the

horsetrough, all foreshadowed in the faithful Skelt. If, at the ripe age of fourteen years, I bought a certain

cudgel, got a friend to load it, and thenceforward walked the tame ways of the earth my own ideal, radiating

pure romance still I was but a puppet in the hand of Skelt; the original of that regretted bludgeon, and

surely the antitype of all the bludgeon kind, greatly improved from Cruikshank, had adorned the hand of

Jonathan Wild, pl. I. "This is mastering me," as Whitman cries, upon some lesser provocation. What am I?

what are life, art, letters, the world, but what my Skelt has made them? He stamped himself upon my

immaturity. The world was plain before I knew him, a poor penny world; but soon it was all coloured with

romance. If I go to the theatre to see a good old melodrama, 'tis but Skelt a little faded. If I visit a bold scene

in nature, Skelt would have been bolder; there had been certainly a castle on that mountain, and the hollow

tree that set piece I seem to miss it in the foreground. Indeed, out of this cutanddry, dull, swaggering,

obtrusive, and infantile art, I seem to have learned the very spirit of my life's enjoyment; met there the

shadows of the characters I was to read about and love in a late future; got the romance of DER

FREISCHUTZ long ere I was to hear of Weber or the mighty Formes; acquired a gallery of scenes and

characters with which, in the silent theatre of the brain, I might enact all novels and romances; and took from

A word of moral: it appears that B. Pollock, late J. Redington, No. 73 Hoxton Street, not only publishes

twentythree of these old stage favourites, but owns the necessary plates and displays a modest readiness to

issue other thirtythree. If you love art, folly, or the bright eyes of children, speed to Pollock's, or to Clarke's

of Garrick Street. In Pollock's list of publicanda I perceive a pair of my ancient aspirations: WRECK

ASHORE and SIXTEENSTRING JACK; and I cherish the belief that when these shall see once more the

light of day, B. Pollock will remember this apologist. But, indeed, I have a dream at times that is not all a

dream. I seem to myself to wander in a ghostly street E. W., I think, the postal district close below the

fool'scap of St. Paul's, and yet within easy hearing of the echo of the Abbey bridge. There in a dim shop,

low in the roof and smelling strong of glue and footlights, I find myself in quaking treaty with great Skelt

himself, the aboriginal all dusty from the tomb. I buy, with what a choking heart I buy them all, all but the

THE books that we reread the oftenest are not always those that we admire the most; we choose and we

revisit them for many and various reasons, as we choose and revisit human friends. One or two of Scott's

novels, Shakespeare, Moliere, Montaigne, THE EGOIST, and the VICOMTE DE BRAGELONNE, form the

inner circle of my intimates. Behind these comes a good troop of dear acquaintances; THE PILGRIM'S

PROGRESS in the front rank, THE BIBLE IN SPAIN not far behind. There are besides a certain number that

look at me with reproach as I pass them by on my shelves: books that I once thumbed and studied: houses

which were once like home to me, but where I now rarely visit. I am on these sad terms (and blush to confess

it) with Wordsworth, Horace, Burns and Hazlitt. Last of all, there is the class of book that has its hour of

brilliancy glows, sings, charms, and then fades again into insignificance until the fit return. Chief of those

who thus smile and frown on me by turns, I must name Virgil and Herrick, who, were they but

must have stood in the first company with the six names of my continual literary intimates. To these six,

incongruous as they seem, I have long been faithful, and hope to be faithful to the day of death. I have never

read the whole of Montaigne, but I do not like to be long without reading some of him, and my delight in

what I do read never lessens. Of Shakespeare I have read all but RICHARD III, HENRY VI., TITUS

ANDRONICAS, and ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL; and these, having already made all suitable

endeavour, I now know that I shall never read to make up for which unfaithfulness I could read much of the

rest for ever. Of Moliere surely the next greatest name of Christendom I could tell a very similar story;

but in a little corner of a little essay these princes are too much out of place, and I prefer to pay my fealty and

pass on. How often I have read GUY MANNERING, ROB ROY, OR REDGAUNTLET, I have no means of

guessing, having begun young. But it is either four or five times that I have read THE EGOIST, and either

Some, who would accept the others, may wonder that I should have spent so much of this brief life of ours

over a work so little famous as the last. And, indeed, I am surprised myself; not at my own devotion, but the

coldness of the world. My acquaintance with the VICOMTE began, somewhat indirectly, in the year of grace

1863, when I had the advantage of studying certain illustrated dessert plates in a hotel at Nice. The name of

d'Artagnan in the legends I already saluted like an old friend, for I had met it the year before in a work of

Miss Yonge's. My first perusal was in one of those pirated editions that swarmed at that time out of Brussels,

and ran to such a troop of neat and dwarfish volumes. I understood but little of the merits of the book; my

strongest memory is of the execution of d'Eymeric and Lyodot a strange testimony to the dulness of a boy,

who could enjoy the roughandtumble in the Place de Greve, and forget d'Artagnan's visits to the two

financiers. My next reading was in wintertime, when I lived alone upon the Pentlands. I would return in the

early night from one of my patrols with the shepherd; a friendly face would meet me in the door, a friendly

retriever scurry upstairs to fetch my slippers; and I would sit down with the VICOMTE for a long, silent,

solitary lamplight evening by the fire. And yet I know not why I call it silent, when it was enlivened with

such a clatter of horseshoes, and such a rattle of musketry, and such a stir of talk; or why I call those

evenings solitary in which I gained so many friends. I would rise from my book and pull the blind aside, and

see the snow and the glittering hollies chequer a Scotch garden, and the winter moonlight brighten the white

hills. Thence I would turn again to that crowded and sunny field of life in which it was so easy to forget

myself, my cares, and my surroundings: a place busy as a city, bright as a theatre, thronged with memorable

faces, and sounding with delightful speech. I carried the thread of that epic into my slumbers, I woke with it

unbroken, I rejoiced to plunge into the book again at breakfast, it was with a pang that I must lay it down and

turn to my own labours; for no part of the world has ever seemed to me so charming as these pages, and not

Since then I have been going to and fro at very brief intervals in my favourite book; and I have now just risen

from my last (let me call it my fifth) perusal, having liked it better and admired it more seriously than ever.

Perhaps I have a sense of ownership, being so well known in these six volumes. Perhaps I think that

d'Artagnan delights to have me read of him, and Louis Quatorze is gratified, and Fouquet throws me a look,

and Aramis, although he knows I do not love him, yet plays to me with his best graces, as to an old patron of

the show. Perhaps, if I am not careful, something may befall me like what befell George IV. about the battle

of Waterloo, and I may come to fancy the VICOMTE one of the first, and Heaven knows the best, of my own

works. At least, I avow myself a partisan; and when I compare the popularity of the VICOMTE with that of

MONTRO CRISTO, or its own elder brother, the TROIS MOUSQUETAIRES, I confess I am both pained

To those who have already made acquaintance with the titular hero in the pages of VINGT ANS APRES,

perhaps the name may act as a deterrent. A man might, well stand back if he supposed he were to follow, for

six volumes, so wellconducted, so finespoken, and withal so dreary a cavalier as Bragelonne. But the fear

is idle. I may be said to have passed the best years of my life in these six volumes, and my acquaintance with

Raoul has never gone beyond a bow; and when he, who has so long pretended to be alive, is at last suffered to

pretend to be dead, I am sometimes reminded of a saying in an earlier volume: "ENFIN, DIT MISS

STEWART," and it was of Bragelonne she spoke "ENFIN IL A FAIL QUELQUECHOSE: C'EST, MA

FOI! BIEN HEUREUX." I am reminded of it, as I say; and the next moment, when Athos dies of his death,

and my dear d'Artagnan bursts into his storm of sobbing, I can but deplore my flippancy.

Or perhaps it is La Valliere that the reader of VINGT ANS APRES is inclined to flee. Well, he is right there

too, though not so right. Louise is no success. Her creator has spared no pains; she is wellmeant, not

illdesigned, sometimes has a word that rings out true; sometimes, if only for a breath, she may even engage

our sympathies. But I have never envied the King his triumph. And so far from pitying Bragelonne for his

defeat, I could wish him no worse (not for lack of malice, but imagination) than to be wedded to that lady.

Madame enchants me; I can forgive that royal minx her most serious offences; I can thrill and soften with the

King on that memorable occasion when he goes to upbraid and remains to flirt; and when it comes to the

"ALLONS, AIMEZMOI DONC," it is my heart that melts in the bosom of de Guiche. Not so with Louise.

Readers cannot fail to have remarked that what an author tells us of the beauty or the charm of his creatures

goes for nought; that we know instantly better; that the heroine cannot open her mouth but what, all in a

moment, the fine phrases of preparation fall from round her like the robes from Cinderella, and she stands

before us, selfbetrayed, as a poor, ugly, sickly wench, or perhaps a strapping marketwoman. Authors, at

least, know it well; a heroine will too often start the trick of "getting ugly;" and no disease is more difficult to

cure. I said authors; but indeed I had a side eye to one author in particular, with whose works I am very well

acquainted, though I cannot read them, and who has spent many vigils in this cause, sitting beside his ailing

puppets and (like a magician) wearying his art to restore them to youth and beauty. There are others who ride

too high for these misfortunes. Who doubts the loveliness of Rosalind? Arden itself was not more lovely.

Who ever questioned the perennial charm of Rose Jocelyn, Lucy Desborough, or Clara Middleton? fair

women with fair names, the daughters of George Meredith. Elizabeth Bennet has but to speak, and I am at her

knees. Ah! these are the creators of desirable women. They would never have fallen in the mud with Dumas

and poor La Valliere. It is my only consolation that not one of all of them, except the first, could have

Or perhaps, again, a proportion of readers stumble at the threshold. In so vast a mansion there were sure to be

back stairs and kitchen offices where no one would delight to linger; but it was at least unhappy that the

vestibule should be so badly lighted; and until, in the seventeenth chapter, d'Artagnan sets off to seek his

friends, I must confess, the book goes heavily enough. But, from thenceforward, what a feast is spread! Monk

kidnapped; d'Artagnan enriched; Mazarin's death; the ever delectable adventure of Belle Isle, wherein Aramis

outwits d'Artagnan, with its epilogue (vol. v. chap. xxviii.), where d'Artagnan regains the moral superiority;

the love adventures at Fontainebleau, with St. Aignan's story of the dryad and the business of de Guiche, de

Wardes, and Manicamp; Aramis made general of the Jesuits; Aramis at the bastille; the night talk in the forest

of Senart; Belle Isle again, with the death of Porthos; and last, but not least, the taming of d'Artagnan the

untamable, under the lash of the young King. What other novel has such epic variety and nobility of incident?

often, if you will, impossible; often of the order of an Arabian story; and yet all based in human nature. For if

you come to that, what novel has more human nature? not studied with the microscope, but seen largely, in

plain daylight, with the natural eye? What novel has more good sense, and gaiety, and wit, and unflagging,

admirable literary skill? Good souls, I suppose, must sometimes read it in the blackguard travesty of a

translation. But there is no style so untranslatable; light as a whipped trifle, strong as silk; wordy like a

village tale; pat like a general's despatch; with every fault, yet never tedious; with no merit, yet inimitably

right. And, once more, to make an end of commendations, what novel is inspired with a more unstained or a

Yes; in spite of Miss Yonge, who introduced me to the name of d'Artagnan only to dissuade me from a nearer

knowledge of the man, I have to add morality. There is no quite good book without a good morality; but the

world is wide, and so are morals. Out of two people who have dipped into Sir Richard Burton's THOUSAND

AND ONE NIGHTS, one shall have been offended by the animal details; another to whom these were

harmless, perhaps even pleasing, shall yet have been shocked in his turn by the rascality and cruelty of all the

characters. Of two readers, again, one shall have been pained by the morality of a religious memoir, one by

that of the VICOMTE DE BRAGELONNE. And the point is that neither need be wrong. We shall always

shock each other both in life and art; we cannot get the sun into our pictures, nor the abstract right (if there be

such a thing) into our books; enough if, in the one, there glimmer some hint of the great light that blinds us

from heaven; enough if, in the other, there shine, even upon foul details, a spirit of magnanimity. I would

scarce send to the VICOMTE a reader who was in quest of what we may call puritan morality. The

ventripotent mulatto, the great cater, worker, earner and waster, the man of much and witty laughter, the man

of the great heart and alas! of the doubtful honesty, is a figure not yet clearly set before the world; he still

awaits a sober and yet genial portrait; but with whatever art that may be touched, and whatever indulgence, it

will not be the portrait of a precision. Dumas was certainly not thinking of himself, but of Planchet, when he

put into the mouth of d'Artagnan's old servant this excellent profession: "MONSIEUR, J'ETAIS UNE DE

SUR LA TERRE." He was thinking, as I say, of Planchet, to whom the words are aptly fitted; but they were

fitted also to Planchet's creator; and perhaps this struck him as he wrote, for observe what follows:

LUI AYANT PARU SOLIDE, IL Y REVA." In a man who finds all things good, you will scarce expect

much zeal for negative virtues: the active alone will have a charm for him; abstinence, however wise,

however kind, will always seem to such a judge entirely mean and partly impious. So with Dumas. Chastity

is not near his heart; nor yet, to his own sore cost, that virtue of frugality which is the armour of the artist.

Now, in the VICOMTE, he had much to do with the contest of Fouquet and Colbert. Historic justice should

And Dumas knew it well: three times at least he shows his knowledge; once it is but flashed upon us and

received with the laughter of Fouquet himself, in the jesting controversy in the gardens of Saint Mande; once

it is touched on by Aramis in the forest of Senart; in the end, it is set before us clearly in one dignified speech

of the triumphant Colbert. But in Fouquet, the waster, the lover of good cheer and wit and art, the swift

transactor of much business, "L'HOMME DE BRUIT, L'HOMME DE PLAISIR, L'HOMME QUI N'EST

QUE PARCEQUE LES AUTRES SONT," Dumas saw something of himself and drew the figure the more

tenderly. It is to me even touching to see how he insists on Fouquet's honour; not seeing, you might think,

that unflawed honour is impossible to spendthrifts; but rather, perhaps, in the light of his own life, seeing it

too well, and clinging the more to what was left. Honour can survive a wound; it can live and thrive without a

member. The man rebounds from his disgrace; he begins fresh foundations on the ruins of the old; and when

his sword is broken, he will do valiantly with his dagger. So it is with Fouquet in the book; so it was with

To cling to what is left of any damaged quality is virtue in the man; but perhaps to sing its praises is scarcely

to be called morality in the writer. And it is elsewhere, it is in the character of d'Artagnan, that we must look

for that spirit of morality, which is one of the chief merits of the book, makes one of the main joys of its

perusal, and sets it high above more popular rivals. Athos, with the coming of years, has declined too much

into the preacher, and the preacher of a sapless creed; but d'Artagnan has mellowed into a man so witty,

rough, kind and upright, that he takes the heart by storm. There is nothing of the copybook about his virtues,

nothing of the drawingroom in his fine, natural civility; he will sail near the wind; he is no district visitor

no Wesley or Robespierre; his conscience is void of all refinement whether for good or evil; but the whole

man rings true like a good sovereign. Readers who have approached the VICOMTE, not across country, but

by the legitimate, fivevolumed avenue of the MOUSQUETAIRES and VINGT ANS APRES, will not have

forgotten d'Artagnan's ungentlemanly and perfectly improbable trick upon Milady. What a pleasure it is, then,

what a reward, and how agreeable a lesson, to see the old captain humble himself to the son of the man whom

he had personated! Here, and throughout, if I am to choose virtues for myself or my friends, let me choose the

virtues of d'Artagnan. I do not say there is no character as well drawn in Shakespeare; I do say there is none

that I love so wholly. There are many spiritual eyes that seem to spy upon our actions eyes of the dead and

the absent, whom we imagine to behold us in our most private hours, and whom we fear and scruple to

offend: our witnesses and judges. And among these, even if you should think me childish, I must count my

d'Artagnan not d'Artagnan of the memoirs whom Thackeray pretended to prefer a preference, I take the

freedom of saying, in which he stands alone; not the d'Artagnan of flesh and blood, but him of the ink and

paper; not Nature's, but Dumas's. And this is the particular crown and triumph of the artist not to be true

There is yet another point in the VICOMTE which I find incomparable. I can recall no other work of the

imagination in which the end of life is represented with so nice a tact. I was asked the other day if Dumas

made me laugh or cry. Well in this my late fifth reading of the VICOMTE, I did laugh once at the small

Coquelin de Voliere business, and was perhaps a thought surprised at having done so: to make up for it, I

smiled continually. But for tears, I do not know. If you put a pistol to my throat, I must own the tale trips

upon a very airy foot within a measurable distance of unreality; and for those who like the big guns to be

discharged and the great passions to appear authentically, it may even seem inadequate from first to last. Not

so to me; I cannot count that a poor dinner, or a poor book, where I meet with those I love; and, above all, in

this last volume, I find a singular charm of spirit. It breathes a pleasant and a tonic sadness, always brave,

never hysterical. Upon the crowded, noisy life of this long tale, evening gradually falls; and the lights are

extinguished, and the heroes pass away one by one. One by one they go, and not a regret embitters their

departure; the young succeed them in their places, Louis Quatorze is swelling larger and shining broader,

another generation and another France dawn on the horizon; but for us and these old men whom we have

loved so long, the inevitable end draws near and is welcome. To read this well is to anticipate experience. Ah,

if only when these hours of the long shadows fall for us in reality and not in figure, we may hope to face them

But my paper is running out; the siege guns are firing on the Dutch frontier; and I must say adieu for the fifth

time to my old comrade fallen on the field of glory. ADIEU rather AU REVOIR! Yet a sixth time, dearest

IN anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we

should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the

busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book

be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story,

repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye. It was for this last pleasure that we read so closely,

and loved our books so dearly, in the bright, troubled period of boyhood. Eloquence and thought, character

and conversation, were but obstacles to brush aside as we dug blithely after a certain sort of incident, like a

pig for truffles. For my part, I liked a story to begin with an old wayside inn where, "towards the close of the

year 17," several gentlemen in threecocked hats were playing bowls. A friend of mine preferred the

Malabar coast in a storm, with a ship beating to windward, and a scowling fellow of Herculean proportions

striding along the beach; he, to be sure, was a pirate. This was further afield than my homekeeping fancy

loved to travel, and designed altogether for a larger canvas than the tales that I affected. Give me a

highwayman and I was full to the brim; a Jacobite would do, but the highwayman was my favourite dish. I

can still hear that merry clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit lane; night and the coming of day are still

related in my mind with the doings of John Rann or Jerry Abershaw; and the words "postchaise," the "great

North road," "ostler," and "nag" still sound in my ears like poetry. One and all, at least, and each with his

particular fancy, we read storybooks in childhood, not for eloquence or character or thought, but for some

quality of the brute incident. That quality was not mere bloodshed or wonder. Although each of these was

welcome in its place, the charm for the sake of which we read depended on something different from either.

My elders used to read novels aloud; and I can still remember four different passages which I heard, before I

was ten, with the same keen and lasting pleasure. One I discovered long afterwards to be the admirable

opening of WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT: it was no wonder I was pleased with that. The other three still

remain unidentified. One is a little vague; it was about a dark, tall house at night, and people groping on the

stairs by the light that escaped from the open door of a sickroom. In another, a lover left a ball, and went

walking in a cool, dewy park, whence he could watch the lighted windows and the figures of the dancers as

they moved. This was the most sentimental impression I think I had yet received, for a child is somewhat deaf

to the sentimental. In the last, a poet, who had been tragically wrangling with his wife, walked forth on the

sea beach on a tempestuous night and witnessed the horrors of a wreck. (8) Different as they are, all these

Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance. The pleasure that we take in life is of

two sorts the active and the passive. Now we are conscious of a great command over our destiny; anon we

are lifted up by circumstance, as by a breaking wave, and dashed we know not how into the future. Now we

are pleased by our conduct, anon merely pleased by our surroundings. It would be hard to say which of these

modes of satisfaction is the more effective, but the latter is surely the more constant. Conduct is three parts of

life, they say; but I think they put it high. There is a vast deal in life and letters both which is not immoral, but

simply amoral; which either does not regard the human will at all, or deals with it in obvious and healthy

relations; where the interest turns, not upon what a man shall choose to do, but on how he manages to do it;

not on the passionate slips and hesitations of the conscience, but on the problems of the body and of the

practical intelligence, in clean, openair adventure, the shock of arms or the diplomacy of life. With such

material as this it is impossible to build a play, for the serious theatre exists solely on moral grounds, and is a

standing proof of the dissemination of the human conscience. But it is possible to build, upon this ground, the

One thing in life calls for another; there is a fitness in events and places. The sight of a pleasant arbour puts it

in our mind to sit there. One place suggests work, another idleness, a third early rising and long rambles in

the dew. The effect of night, of any flowing water, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the open

ocean, calls up in the mind an army of anonymous desires and pleasures. Something, we feel, should happen;

we know not what, yet we proceed in quest of it. And many of the happiest hours of life fleet by us in this

vain attendance on the genius of the place and moment. It is thus that tracts of young fir, and low rocks that

reach into deep soundings, particularly torture and delight me. Something must have happened in such places,

and perhaps ages back, to members of my race; and when I was a child I tried in vain to invent appropriate

games for them, as I still try, just as vainly, to fit them with the proper story. Some places speak distinctly.

Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set

apart for shipwreck. Other spots again seem to abide their destiny, suggestive and impenetrable, "miching

mallecho." The inn at Burford Bridge, with its arbours and green garden and silent, eddying river though it

is known already as the place where Keats wrote some of his ENDYMION and Nelson parted from his

Emma still seems to wait the coming of the appropriate legend. Within these ivied walls, behind these old

green shutters, some further business smoulders, waiting for its hour. The old Hawes Inn at the Queen's Ferry

makes a similar call upon my fancy. There it stands, apart from the town, beside the pier, in a climate of its

the ferry bubbling with the tide and the guardship swinging to her anchor; behind, the old garden with the

trees. Americans seek it already for the sake of Lovel and Oldbuck, who dined there at the beginning of the

ANTIQUARY. But you need not tell me that is not all; there is some story, unrecorded or not yet complete,

which must express the meaning of that inn more fully. So it is with names and faces; so it is with incidents

that are idle and inconclusive in themselves, and yet seem like the beginning of some quaint romance, which

the allcareless author leaves untold. How many of these romances have we not seen determine at their birth;

how many people have met us with a look of meaning in their eye, and sunk at once into trivial

acquaintances; to how many places have we not drawn near, with express intimations "here my destiny

awaits me" and we have but dined there and passed on! I have lived both at the Hawes and Burford in a

perpetual flutter, on the heels, as it seemed, of some adventure that should justify the place; but though the

feeling had me to bed at night and called me again at morning in one unbroken round of pleasure and

suspense, nothing befell me in either worth remark. The man or the hour had not yet come; but some day, I

think, a boat shall put off from the Queen's Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night a

horseman, on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the green shutters of the inn at Burford. (9)

Now, this is one of the natural appetites with which any lively literature has to count. The desire for

knowledge, I had almost added the desire for meat, is not more deeply seated than this demand for fit and

striking incident. The dullest of clowns tells, or tries to tell, himself a story, as the feeblest of children uses

invention in his play; and even as the imaginative grown person, joining in the game, at once enriches it with

many delightful circumstances, the great creative writer shows us the realisation and the apotheosis of the

daydreams of common men. His stories may be nourished with the realities of life, but their true mark is to

satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and to obey the ideal laws of the daydream. The right kind of

thing should fall out in the right kind of place; the right kind of thing should follow; and not only the

characters talk aptly and think naturally, but all the circumstances in a tale answer one to another like notes in

music. The threads of a story come from time to time together and make a picture in the web; the characters

fall from time to time into some attitude to each other or to nature, which stamps the story home like an

illustration. Crusoe recoiling from the footprint, Achilles shouting over against the Trojans, Ulysses bending

the great bow, Christian running with his fingers in his ears, these are each culminating moments in the

legend, and each has been printed on the mind's eye for ever. Other things we may forget; we may forget the

words, although they are beautiful; we may forget the author's comment, although perhaps it was ingenious

and true; but these epochmaking scenes, which put the last mark of truth upon a story and fill up, at one

blow, our capacity for sympathetic pleasure, we so adopt into the very bosom of our mind that neither time

nor tide can efface or weaken the impression. This, then, is the plastic part of literature: to embody character,

thought, or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the mind's eye. This is the

highest and hardest thing to do in words; the thing which, once accomplished, equally delights the schoolboy

and the sage, and makes, in its own right, the quality of epics. Compared with this, all other purposes in

literature, except the purely lyrical or the purely philosophic, are bastard in nature, facile of execution, and

feeble in result. It is one thing to write about the inn at Burford, or to describe scenery with the

wordpainters; it is quite another to seize on the heart of the suggestion and make a country famous with a

legend. It is one thing to remark and to dissect, with the most cutting logic, the complications of life, and of

the human spirit; it is quite another to give them body and blood in the story of Ajax or of Hamlet. The first is

English people of the present day (10) are apt, I know not why, to look somewhat down on incident, and

reserve their admiration for the clink of teaspoons and the accents of the curate. It is thought clever to write a

novel with no story at all, or at least with a very dull one. Reduced even to the lowest terms, a certain interest

can be communicated by the art of narrative; a sense of human kinship stirred; and a kind of monotonous

fitness, comparable to the words and air of SANDY'S MULL, preserved among the infinitesimal occurrences

recorded. Some people work, in this manner, with even a strong touch. Mr. Trollope's inimitable clergymen

naturally arise to the mind in this connection. But even Mr. Trollope does not confine himself to chronicling

small beer. Mr. Crawley's collision with the Bishop's wife, Mr. Melnotte dallying in the deserted

banquetroom, are typical incidents, epically conceived, fitly embodying a crisis. Or again look at

Thackeray. If Rawdon Crawley's blow were not delivered, VANITY FAIR would cease to be a work of art.

That scene is the chief ganglion of the tale; and the discharge of energy from Rawdon's fist is the reward and

consolation of the reader. The end of ESMOND is a yet wider excursion from the author's customary fields;

the scene at Castlewood is pure Dumas; the great and wily English borrower has here borrowed from the

great, unblushing French thief; as usual, he has borrowed admirably well, and the breaking of the sword

rounds off the best of all his books with a manly, martial note. But perhaps nothing can more strongly

illustrate the necessity for marking incident than to compare the living fame of ROBINSON CRUSOE with

the discredit of CLARISSA HARLOWE. CLARISSA is a book of a far more startling import, worked out, on

a great canvas, with inimitable courage and unflagging art. It contains wit, character, passion, plot,

conversations full of spirit and insight, letters sparkling with unstrained humanity; and if the death of the

heroine be somewhat frigid and artificial, the last days of the hero strike the only note of what we now call

Byronism, between the Elizabethans and Byron himself. And yet a little story of a shipwrecked sailor, with

not a tenth part of the style nor a thousandth part of the wisdom, exploring none of the arcana of humanity

and deprived of the perennial interest of love, goes on from edition to edition, ever young, while CLARISSA

lies upon the shelves unread. A friend of mine, a Welsh blacksmith, was twenty five years old and could

neither read nor write, when he heard a chapter of ROBINSON read aloud in a farm kitchen. Up to that

moment he had sat content, huddled in his ignorance, but he left that farm another man. There were

daydreams, it appeared, divine daydreams, written and printed and bound, and to be bought for money and

enjoyed at pleasure. Down he sat that day, painfully learned to read Welsh, and returned to borrow the book.

It had been lost, nor could he find another copy but one that was in English. Down he sat once more, learned

English, and at length, and with entire delight, read ROBINSON. It is like the story of a lovechase. If he had

heard a letter from CLARISSA, would he have been fired with the same chivalrous ardour? I wonder. Yet

CLARISSA has every quality that can be shown in prose, one alone excepted pictorial or picturemaking

romance. While ROBINSON depends, for the most part and with the overwhelming majority of its readers,

In the highest achievements of the art of words, the dramatic and the pictorial, the moral and romantic

interest, rise and fall together by a common and organic law. Situation is animated with passion, passion

clothed upon with situation. Neither exists for itself, but each inheres indissolubly with the other. This is high

art; and not only the highest art possible in words, but the highest art of all, since it combines the greatest

mass and diversity of the elements of truth and pleasure. Such are epics, and the few prose tales that have the

epic weight. But as from a school of works, aping the creative, incident and romance are ruthlessly discarded,

so may character and drama be omitted or subordinated to romance. There is one book, for example, more

generally loved than Shakespeare, that captivates in childhood, and still delights in age I mean the

ARABIAN NIGHTS where you shall look in vain for moral or for intellectual interest. No human face or

voice greets us among that wooden crowd of kings and genies, sorcerers and beggarmen. Adventure, on the

most naked terms, furnishes forth the entertainment and is found enough. Dumas approaches perhaps nearest

of any modern to these Arabian authors in the purely material charm of some of his romances. The early part

of MONTE CRISTO, down to the finding of the treasure, is a piece of perfect storytelling; the man never

breathed who shared these moving incidents without a tremor; and yet Faria is a thing of packthread and

Dantes little more than a name. The sequel is one longdrawn error, gloomy, bloody, unnatural and dull; but

as for these early chapters, I do not believe there is another volume extant where you can breathe the same

unmingled atmosphere of romance. It is very thin and light to be sure, as on a high mountain; but it is brisk

and clear and sunny in proportion. I saw the other day, with envy, an old and a very clever lady setting forth

on a second or third voyage into MONTE CRISTO. Here are stories which powerfully affect the reader,

which can he reperused at any age, and where the characters are no more than puppets. The bony fist of the

showman visibly propels them; their springs are an open secret; their faces are of wood, their bellies filled

with bran; and yet we thrillingly partake of their adventures. And the point may be illustrated still further.

The last interview between Lucy and Richard Feveril is pure drama; more than that, it is the strongest scene,

since Shakespeare, in the English tongue. Their first meeting by the river, on the other hand, is pure romance;

it has nothing to do with character; it might happen to any other boy or maiden, and be none the less

delightful for the change. And yet I think he would be a bold man who should choose between these

passages. Thus, in the same book, we may have two scenes, each capital in its order: in the one, human

passion, deep calling unto deep, shall utter its genuine voice; in the second, according circumstances, like

instruments in tune, shall build up a trivial but desirable incident, such as we love to prefigure for ourselves;

and in the end, in spite of the critics, we may hesitate to give the preference to either. The one may ask more

genius I do not say it does; but at least the other dwells as clearly in the memory.

True romantic art, again, makes a romance of all things. It reaches into the highest abstraction of the ideal; it

does not refuse the most pedestrian realism. ROBINSON CRUSOE is as realistic as it is romantic; both

qualities are pushed to an extreme, and neither suffers. Nor does romance depend upon the material

importance of the incidents. To deal with strong and deadly elements, banditti, pirates, war and murder, is to

conjure with great names, and, in the event of failure, to double the disgrace. The arrival of Haydn and

Consuelo at the Canon's villa is a very trifling incident; yet we may read a dozen boisterous stories from

beginning to end, and not receive so fresh and stirring an impression of adventure. It was the scene of Crusoe

at the wreck, if I remember rightly, that so bewitched my blacksmith. Nor is the fact surprising. Every single

article the castaway recovers from the hulk is "a joy for ever" to the man who reads of them. They are the

things that should be found, and the bare enumeration stirs the blood. I found a glimmer of the same interest

the other day in a new book, THE SAILOR'S SWEETHEART, by Mr. Clark Russell. The whole business of

the brig MORNING STAR is very rightly felt and spiritedly written; but the clothes, the books and the

money satisfy the reader's mind like things to eat. We are dealing here with the old cutanddry, legitimate

interest of treasure trove. But even treasure trove can be made dull. There are few people who have not

groaned under the plethora of goods that fell to the lot of the SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON, that dreary

family. They found article after article, creature after creature, from milk kine to pieces of ordnance, a whole

consignment; but no informing taste had presided over the selection, there was no smack or relish in the

invoice; and these riches left the fancy cold. The box of goods in Verne's MYSTERIOUS ISLAND is another

case in point: there was no gusto and no glamour about that; it might have come from a shop. But the two

hundred and seventyeight Australian sovereigns on board the MORNING STAR fell upon me like a

surprise that I had expected; whole vistas of secondary stories, besides the one in hand, radiated forth from

that discovery, as they radiate from a striking particular in life; and I was made for the moment as happy as a

To come at all at the nature of this quality of romance, we must bear in mind the peculiarity of our attitude to

any art. No art produces illusion; in the theatre we never forget that we are in the theatre; and while we read a

story, we sit wavering between two minds, now merely clapping our hands at the merit of the performance,

now condescending to take an active part in fancy with the characters. This last is the triumph of romantic

story telling: when the reader consciously plays at being the hero, the scene is a good scene. Now in

characterstudies the pleasure that we take is critical; we watch, we approve, we smile at incongruities, we

are moved to sudden heats of sympathy with courage, suffering or virtue. But the characters are still

themselves, they are not us; the more clearly they are depicted, the more widely do they stand away from us,

the more imperiously do they thrust us back into our place as a spectator. I cannot identify myself with

Rawdon Crawley or with Eugene de Rastignac, for I have scarce a hope or fear in common with them. It is

not character but incident that woos us out of our reserve. Something happens as we desire to have it happen

to ourselves; some situation, that we have long dallied with in fancy, is realised in the story with enticing and

appropriate details. Then we forget the characters; then we push the hero aside; then we plunge into the tale

in our own person and bathe in fresh experience; and then, and then only, do we say we have been reading a

romance. It is not only pleasurable things that we imagine in our daydreams; there are lights in which we are

willing to contemplate even the idea of our own death; ways in which it seems as if it would amuse us to be

cheated, wounded or calumniated. It is thus possible to construct a story, even of tragic import, in which

every incident, detail and trick of circumstance shall be welcome to the reader's thoughts. Fiction is to the

grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life; and when

the game so chimes with his fancy that he can join in it with all his heart, when it pleases him with every turn,

when he loves to recall it and dwells upon its recollection with entire delight, fiction is called romance.

Walter Scott is out and away the king of the romantics. THE LADY OF THE LAKE has no indisputable

claim to be a poem beyond the inherent fitness and desirability of the tale. It is just such a story as a man

would make up for himself, walking, in the best health and temper, through just such scenes as it is laid in.

Hence it is that a charm dwells undefinable among these slovenly verses, as the unseen cuckoo fills the

mountains with his note; hence, even after we have flung the book aside, the scenery and adventures remain

present to the mind, a new and green possession, not unworthy of that beautiful name, THE LADY OF THE

LAKE, or that direct, romantic opening one of the most spirited and poetical in literature "The stag at eve

had drunk his fill." The same strength and the same weaknesses adorn and disfigure the novels. In that

illwritten, ragged book, THE PIRATE, the figure of Cleveland cast up by the sea on the resounding

foreland of Dunrossness moving, with the blood on his hands and the Spanish words on his tongue, among

the simple islanders singing a serenade under the window of his Shetland mistress is conceived in the

very highest manner of romantic invention. The words of his song, "Through groves of palm," sung in such a

scene and by such a lover, clench, as in a nutshell, the emphatic contrast upon which the tale is built. IN GUY

MANNERING, again, every incident is delightful to the imagination; and the scene when Harry Bertram

"I remember the tune well," he says, "though I cannot guess what should at present so strongly recall it to my

memory." He took his flageolet from his pocket and played a simple melody. Apparently the tune awoke the

" 'Are these the links of Forth, she said; Or are they the crooks of Dee, Or the bonny woods of Warroch Head

On this quotation two remarks fall to be made. First, as an instance of modern feeling for romance, this

famous touch of the flageolet and the old song is selected by Miss Braddon for omission. Miss Braddon's idea

of a story, like Mrs. Todgers's idea of a wooden leg, were something strange to have expounded. As a matter

of personal experience, Meg's appearance to old Mr. Bertram on the road, the ruins of Derncleugh, the scene

of the flageolet, and the Dominie's recognition of Harry, are the four strong notes that continue to ring in the

mind after the book is laid aside. The second point is still more curious. The, reader will observe a mark of

excision in the passage as quoted by me. Well, here is how it runs in the original: "a damsel, who, close

behind a fine spring about halfway down the descent, and which had once supplied the castle with water,

was engaged in bleaching linen." A man who gave in such copy would be discharged from the staff of a daily

paper. Scott has forgotten to prepare the reader for the presence of the "damsel"; he has forgotten to mention

the spring and its relation to the ruin; and now, face to face with his omission, instead of trying back and

starting fair, crams all this matter, tail foremost, into a single shambling sentence. It is not merely bad

Certainly the contrast is remarkable; and it is one that throws a strong light upon the subject of this paper. For

here we have a man of the finest creative instinct touching with perfect certainty and charm the romantic

junctures of his story; and we find him utterly careless, almost, it would seem, incapable, in the technical

matter of style, and not only frequently weak, but frequently wrong in points of drama. In character parts,

indeed, and particularly in the Scotch, he was delicate, strong and truthful; but the trite, obliterated features of

too many of his heroes have already wearied two generations of readers. At times his characters will speak

with something far beyond propriety with a true heroic note; but on the next page they will he wading wearily

forward with an ungrammatical and undramatic rigmarole of words. The man who could conceive and write

the character of Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot, as Scott has conceived and written it, had not only splendid

romantic, but splendid tragic gifts. How comes it, then, that he could so often fob us off with languid,

It seems to me that the explanation is to be found in the very quality of his surprising merits. As his books are

play to the reader, so were they play to him. He conjured up the romantic with delight, but he had hardly

patience to describe it. He was a great daydreamer, a seer of fit and beautiful and humorous visions, but

hardly a great artist; hardly, in the manful sense, an artist at all. He pleased himself, and so he pleases us. Of

the pleasures of his art he tasted fully; but of its toils and vigils and distresses never man knew less. A great

WE have recently (12) enjoyed a quite peculiar pleasure: hearing, in some detail, the opinions, about the art

they practise, of Mr. Walter Besant and Mr. Henry James; two men certainly of very different calibre: Mr.

James so precise of outline, so cunning of fence, so scrupulous of finish, and Mr. Besant so genial, so

friendly, with so persuasive and humorous a vein of whim: Mr. James the very type of the deliberate artist,

Mr. Besant the impersonation of good nature. That such doctors should differ will excite no great surprise;

but one point in which they seem to agree fills me, I confess, with wonder. For they are both content to talk

about the "art of fiction"; and Mr. Besant, waxing exceedingly bold, goes on to oppose this socalled "art of

fiction" to the "art of poetry." By the art of poetry he can mean nothing but the art of verse, an art of

handicraft, and only comparable with the art of prose. For that heat and height of sane emotion which we

agree to call by the name of poetry, is but a libertine and vagrant quality; present, at times, in any art, more

often absent from them all; too seldom present in the prose novel, too frequently absent from the ode and

epic. Fiction is the same case; it is no substantive art, but an element which enters largely into all the arts but

architecture. Homer, Wordsworth, Phidias, Hogarth, and Salvini, all deal in fiction; and yet I do not suppose

that either Hogarth or Salvini, to mention but these two, entered in any degree into the scope of Mr. Besant's

interesting lecture or Mr. James's charming essay. The art of fiction, then, regarded as a definition, is both too

ample and too scanty. Let me suggest another; let me suggest that what both Mr. James and Mr. Besant had

But Mr. Besant is anxious to speak solely of "the modern English novel," the stay and breadwinner of Mr.

Mudie; and in the author of the most pleasing novel on that roll, ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF

MEN, the desire is natural enough. I can conceive, then, that he would hasten to propose two additions, and

Now the fact of the existence of the modern English novel is not to be denied; materially, with its three

volumes, leaded type, and gilded lettering, it is easily distinguishable from other forms of literature; but to

talk at all fruitfully of any branch of art, it is needful to build our definitions on some more fundamental

ground then binding. Why, then, are we to add "in prose"? THE ODYSSEY appears to me the best of

romances; THE LADY OF THE LAKE to stand high in the second order; and Chaucer's tales and prologues

to contain more of the matter and art of the modern English novel than the whole treasury of Mr. Mudie.

Whether a narrative be written in blank verse or the Spenserian stanza, in the long period of Gibbon or the

chipped phrase of Charles Reade, the principles of the art of narrative must be equally observed. The choice

of a noble and swelling style in prose affects the problem of narration in the same way, if not to the same

degree, as the choice of measured verse; for both imply a closer synthesis of events, a higher key of dialogue,

and a more picked and stately strain of words. If you are to refuse DON JUAN, it is hard to see why you

should include ZANONI or (to bracket works of very different value) THE SCARLET LETTER; and by

what discrimination are you to open your doors TO THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS and close them on THE

FAERY QUEEN? To bring things closer home, I will here propound to Mr. Besant a conundrum. A narrative

called PARADISE LOST was written in English verse by one John Milton; what was it then? It was next

translated by Chateaubriand into French prose; and what was it then? Lastly, the French translation was, by

some inspired compatriot of George Gilfillan (and of mine) turned bodily into an English novel; and, in the

But, once more, why should we add "fictitious"? The reason why is obvious. The reason why not, if

something more recondite, does not want for weight. The art of narrative, in fact, is the same, whether it is

applied to the selection and illustration of a real series of events or of an imaginary series. Boswell's LIFE OF

JOHNSON (a work of cunning and inimitable art) owes its success to the same technical manoeuvres as (let

us say) TOM JONES: the clear conception of certain characters of man, the choice and presentation of certain

incidents out of a great number that offered, and the invention (yes, invention) and preservation of a certain

key in dialogue. In which these things are done with the more art in which with the greater air of nature

readers will differently judge. Boswell's is, indeed, a very special case, and almost a generic; but it is not only

in Boswell, it is in every biography with any salt of life, it is in every history where events and men, rather

than ideas, are presented in Tacitus, in Carlyle, in Michelet, in Macaulay that the novelist will find many

of his own methods most conspicuously and adroitly handled. He will find besides that he, who is free who

has the right to invent or steal a missing incident, who has the right, more precious still, of wholesale

omission is frequently defeated, and, with all his advantages, leaves a less strong impression of reality and

passion. Mr. James utters his mind with a becoming fervour on the sanctity of truth to the novelist; on a more

careful examination truth will seem a word of very debateable propriety, not only for the labours of the

novelist, but for those of the historian. No art to use the daring phrase of Mr. James can successfully

"compete with life"; and the art that seeks to do so is condemned to perish MONTIBUS AVIIS. Life goes

before us, infinite in complication; attended by the most various and surprising meteors; appealing at once to

the eye, to the ear, to the mind the seat of wonder, to the touch so thrillingly delicate, and to the belly so

imperious when starved. It combines and employs in its manifestation the method and material, not of one art

only, but of all the arts, Music is but an arbitrary trifling with a few of life's majestic chords; painting is but a

shadow of its pageantry of light and colour; literature does but drily indicate that wealth of incident, of moral

obligation, of virtue, vice, action, rapture and agony, with which it teems. To "compete with life," whose sun

we cannot look upon, whose passions and diseases waste and slay us to compete with the flavour of wine,

the beauty of the dawn, the scorching of fire, the bitterness of death and separation here is, indeed, a

projected escalade of heaven; here are, indeed, labours for a Hercules in a dress coat, armed with a pen and a

dictionary to depict the passions, armed with a tube of superior flakewhite to paint the portrait of the

insufferable sun. No art is true in this sense: none can "compete with life": not even history, built indeed of

indisputable facts, but these facts robbed of their vivacity and sting; so that even when we read of the sack of

a city or the fall of an empire, we are surprised, and justly commend the author's talent, if our pulse be

quickened. And mark, for a last differentia, that this quickening of the pulse is, in almost every case, purely

agreeable; that these phantom reproductions of experience, even at their most acute, convey decided pleasure;

What, then, is the object, what the method, of an art, and what the source of its power? The whole secret is

that no art does "compete with life." Man's one method, whether he reasons or creates, is to halfshut his eyes

against the dazzle and confusion of reality. The arts, like arithmetic and geometry, turn away their eyes from

the gross, coloured and mobile nature at our feet, and regard instead a certain figmentary abstraction.

Geometry will tell us of a circle, a thing never seen in nature; asked about a green circle or an iron circle, it

lays its hand upon its mouth. So with the arts. Painting, ruefully comparing sunshine and flakewhite, gives

up truth of colour, as it had already given up relief and movement; and instead of vying with nature, arranges

a scheme of harmonious tints. Literature, above all in its most typical mood, the mood of narrative, similarly

flees the direct challenge and pursues instead an independent and creative aim. So far as it imitates at all, it

imitates not life but speech: not the facts of human destiny, but the emphasis and the suppressions with which

the human actor tells of them. The real art that dealt with life directly was that of the first men who told their

stories round the savage campfire. Our art is occupied, and bound to be occupied, not so much in making

stories true as in making them typical; not so much in capturing the lineaments of each fact, as in marshalling

all of them towards a common end. For the welter of impressions, all forcible but all discreet, which life

presents, it substitutes a certain artificial series of impressions, all indeed most feebly represented, but all

aiming at the same effect, all eloquent of the same idea, all chiming together like consonant notes in music or

like the graduated tints in a good picture. From all its chapters, from all its pages, from all its sentences, the

wellwritten novel echoes and reechoes its one creative and controlling thought; to this must every incident

and character contribute; the style must have been pitched in unison with this; and if there is anywhere a word

that looks another way, the book would be stronger, clearer, and (I had almost said) fuller without it. Life is

monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite,

selfcontained, rational, flowing and emasculate. Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate thunder; art

catches the ear, among the far louder noises of experience, like an air artificially made by a discreet musician.

A proposition of geometry does not compete with life; and a proposition of geometry is a fair and luminous

parallel for a work of art. Both are reasonable, both untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither

represents it. The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life, which are forced and

material, as a shoe must still consist of leather, but by its immeasurable difference from life, which is

The life of man is not the subject of novels, but the inexhaustible magazine from which subjects are to be

selected; the name of these is legion; and with each new subject for here again I must differ by the whole

width of heaven from Mr. James the true artist will vary his method and change the point of attack. That

which was in one case an excellence, will become a defect in another; what was the making of one book, will

in the next be impertinent or dull. First each novel, and then each class of novels, exists by and for itself. I

will take, for instance, three main classes, which are fairly distinct: first, the novel of adventure, which

appeals to certain almost sensual and quite illogical tendencies in man; second, the novel of character, which

appeals to our intellectual appreciation of man's foibles and mingled and inconstant motives; and third, the

dramatic novel, which deals with the same stuff as the serious theatre, and appeals to our emotional nature

And first for the novel of adventure. Mr. James refers, with singular generosity of praise, to a little book

about a quest for hidden treasure; but he lets fall, by the way, some rather startling words. In this book he

misses what he calls the "immense luxury" of being able to quarrel with his author. The luxury, to most of us,

is to lay by our judgment, to be submerged by the tale as by a billow, and only to awake, and begin to

distinguish and find fault, when the piece is over and the volume laid aside. Still more remarkable is Mr.

James's reason. He cannot criticise the author, as he goes, "because," says he, comparing it with another

TREASURE." Here is, indeed, a wilful paradox; for if he has never been on a quest for buried treasure, it can

be demonstrated that he has never been a child. There never was a child (unless Master James) but has hunted

gold, and been a pirate, and a military commander, and a bandit of the mountains; but has fought, and

suffered shipwreck and prison, and imbrued its little hands in gore, and gallantly retrieved the lost battle, and

triumphantly protected innocence and beauty. Elsewhere in his essay Mr. James has protested with excellent

reason against too narrow a conception of experience; for the born artist, he contends, the "faintest hints of

life" are converted into revelations; and it will be found true, I believe, in a majority of cases, that the artist

writes with more gusto and effect of those things which he has only wished to do, than of those which he has

done. Desire is a wonderful telescope, and Pisgah the best observatory. Now, while it is true that neither Mr.

James nor the author of the work in question has ever, in the fleshly sense, gone questing after gold, it is

probable that both have ardently desired and fondly imagined the details of such a life in youthful day

dreams; and the author, counting upon that, and well aware (cunning and lowminded man!) that this class of

interest, having been frequently treated, finds a readily accessible and beaten road to the sympathies of the

reader, addressed himself throughout to the building up and circumstantiation of this boyish dream. Character

to the boy is a sealed book; for him, a pirate is a beard, a pair of wide trousers and a liberal complement of

pistols. The author, for the sake of circumstantiation and because he was himself more or less grown up,

admitted character, within certain limits, into his design; but only within certain limits. Had the same puppets

figured in a scheme of another sort, they had been drawn to very different purpose; for in this elementary

novel of adventure, the characters need to be presented with but one class of qualities the warlike and

formidable. So as they appear insidious in deceit and fatal in the combat, they have served their end. Danger

is the matter with which this class of novel deals; fear, the passion with which it idly trifles; and the

characters are portrayed only so far as they realise the sense of danger and provoke the sympathy of fear. To

add more traits, to be too clever, to start the hare of moral or intellectual interest while we are running the fox

of material interest, is not to enrich but to stultify your tale. The stupid reader will only be offended, and the

The novel of character has this difference from all others: that it requires no coherency of plot, and for this

reason, as in the case of GIL BLAS, it is sometimes called the novel of adventure. It turns on the humours of

the persons represented; these are, to be sure, embodied in incidents, but the incidents themselves, being

tributary, need not march in a progression; and the characters may be statically shown. As they enter, so they

may go out; they must be consistent, but they need not grow. Here Mr. James will recognise the note of much

of his own work: he treats, for the most part, the statics of character, studying it at rest or only gently moved;

and, with his usual delicate and just artistic instinct, he avoids those stronger passions which would deform

the attitudes he loves to study, and change his sitters from the humorists of ordinary life to the brute forces

and bare types of more emotional moments. In his recent AUTHOR OF BELTRAFFIO, so just in

conception, so nimble and neat in workmanship, strong passion is indeed employed; but observe that it is not

displayed. Even in the heroine the working of the passion is suppressed; and the great struggle, the true

tragedy, the SCENEAFAIRE passes unseen behind the panels of a locked door. The delectable invention

of the young visitor is introduced, consciously or not, to this end: that Mr. James, true to his method, might

avoid the scene of passion. I trust no reader will suppose me guilty of undervaluing this little masterpiece. I

mean merely that it belongs to one marked class of novel, and that it would have been very differently

conceived and treated had it belonged to that other marked class, of which I now proceed to speak.

I take pleasure in calling the dramatic novel by that name, because it enables me to point out by the way a

strange and peculiarly English misconception. It is sometimes supposed that the drama consists of incident. It

consists of passion, which gives the actor his opportunity; and that passion must progressively increase, or the

actor, as the piece proceeded, would be unable to carry the audience from a lower to a higher pitch of interest

and emotion. A good serious play must therefore be founded on one of the passionate CRUCES of life, where

duty and inclination come nobly to the grapple; and the same is true of what I call, for that reason, the

dramatic novel. I will instance a few worthy specimens, all of our own day and language; Meredith's

RHODA FLEMING, that wonderful and painful book, long out of print, (13) and hunted for at bookstalls like

an Aldine; Hardy's PAIR OF BLUE EYES; and two of Charles Reade's, GRIFFITH GAUNT and the

DOUBLE MARRIAGE, originally called WHITE LIES, and founded (by an accident quaintly favourable to

my nomenclature) on a play by Maquet, the partner of the great Dumas. In this kind of novel the closed door

of THE AUTHOR OF BELTRAFFIO must be broken open; passion must appear upon the scene and utter its

last word; passion is the be all and the endall, the plot and the solution, the protagonist and the DEUS EX

MACHINA in one. The characters may come anyhow upon the stage: we do not care; the point is, that,

before they leave it, they shall become transfigured and raised out of themselves by passion. It may be part of

the design to draw them with detail; to depict a fulllength character, and then behold it melt and change in

But there is no obligation of the sort; nice portraiture is not required; and we are content to accept mere

abstract types, so they be strongly and sincerely moved. A novel of this class may be even great, and yet

contain no individual figure; it may be great, because it displays the workings of the perturbed heart and the

impersonal utterance of passion; and with an artist of the second class it is, indeed, even more likely to be

great, when the issue has thus been narrowed and the whole force of the writer's mind directed to passion

alone. Cleverness again, which has its fair field in the novel of character, is debarred all entry upon this more

solemn theatre. A farfetched motive, an ingenious evasion of the issue, a witty instead of a passionate turn,

offend us like an insincerity. All should be plain, all straightforward to the end. Hence it is that, in RHODA

FLEMING, Mrs. Lovell raises such resentment in the reader; her motives are too flimsy, her ways are too

equivocal, for the weight and strength of her surroundings. Hence the hot indignation of the reader when

Balzac, after having begun the DUCHESSE DE LANGEAIS in terms of strong if somewhat swollen passion,

cuts the knot by the derangement of the hero's clock. Such personages and incidents belong to the novel of

character; they are out of place in the high society of the passions; when the passions are introduced in art at

their full height, we look to see them, not baffled and impotently striving, as in life, but towering above

And here I can imagine Mr. James, with his lucid sense, to intervene. To much of what I have said he would

apparently demur; in much he would, somewhat impatiently, acquiesce. It may be true; but it is not what he

desired to say or to hear said. He spoke of the finished picture and its worth when done; I, of the brushes, the

palette, and the north light. He uttered his views in the tone and for the ear of good society; I, with the

emphasis and technicalities of the obtrusive student. But the point, I may reply, is not merely to amuse the

public, but to offer helpful advice to the young writer. And the young writer will not so much be helped by

genial pictures of what an art may aspire to at its highest, as by a true idea of what it must be on the lowest

terms. The best that we can say to him is this: Let him choose a motive, whether of character or passion;

carefully construct his plot so that every incident is an illustration of the motive, and every property

employed shall bear to it a near relation of congruity or contrast; avoid a subplot, unless, as sometimes in

Shakespeare, the subplot be a reversion or complement of the main intrigue; suffer not his style to flag

below the level of the argument; pitch the key of conversation, not with any thought of how men talk in

parlours, but with a single eye to the degree of passion he may be called on to express; and allow neither

himself in the narrative nor any character in the course of the dialogue, to utter one sentence that is not part

and parcel of the business of the story or the discussion of the problem involved. Let him not regret if this

shortens his book; it will be better so; for to add irrelevant matter is not to lengthen but to bury. Let him not

mind if he miss a thousand qualities, so that he keeps unflaggingly in pursuit of the one he has chosen. Let

him not care particularly if he miss the tone of conversation, the pungent material detail of the day's manners,

the reproduction of the atmosphere and the environment. These elements are not essential: a novel may be

excellent, and yet have none of them; a passion or a character is so much the better depicted as it rises clearer

from material circumstance. In this age of the particular, let him remember the ages of the abstract, the great

books of the past, the brave men that lived before Shakespeare and before Balzac. And as the root of the

whole matter, let him bear in mind that his novel is not a transcript of life, to be judged by its exactitude; but

a simplification of some side or point of life, to stand or fall by its significant simplicity. For although, in

great men, working upon great motives, what we observe and admire is often their complexity, yet

underneath appearances the truth remains unchanged: that simplification was their method, and that

Since the above was written another novelist has entered repeatedly the lists of theory: one well worthy of

mention, Mr. W. D. Howells; and none ever couched a lance with narrower convictions. His own work and

those of his pupils and masters singly occupy his mind; he is the bondslave, the zealot of his school; he

dreams of an advance in art like what there is in science; he thinks of past things as radically dead; he thinks a

form can be outlived: a strange immersion in his own history; a strange forgetfulness of the history of the

race! Meanwhile, by a glance at his own works (could he see them with the eager eyes of his readers) much

of this illusion would be dispelled. For while he holds all the poor little orthodoxies of the day no poorer

and no smaller than those of yesterday or tomorrow, poor and small, indeed, only so far as they are

exclusive the living quality of much that he has done is of a contrary, I had almost said of a heretical,

complexion. A man, as I read him, of an originally strong romantic bent a certain glow of romance still

resides in many of his books, and lends them their distinction. As by accident he runs out and revels in the

exceptional; and it is then, as often as not, that his reader rejoices justly, as I contend. For in all this

excessive eagerness to be centrally human, is there not one central human thing that Mr. Howells is too often

tempted to neglect: I mean himself? A poet, a finished artist, a man in love with the appearances of life, a

cunning reader of the mind, he has other passions and aspirations than those he loves to draw. And why

should he suppress himself and do such reverence to the Lemuel Barkers? The obvious is not of necessity the

normal; fashion rules and deforms; the majority fall tamely into the contemporary shape, and thus attain, in

the eyes of the true observer, only a higher power of insignificance; and the danger is lest, in seeking to draw

the normal, a man should draw the null, and write the novel of society instead of the romance of man.

(4) In Dr. Murray's admirable new dictionary, I have remarked a flaw SUB VOCE Beacon. In its express,

technical sense, a beacon may be defined as "a founded, artificial seamark, not lighted."

(7) Waiter, Watty, Woggy, Woggs, Wogg, and lastly Bogue; under which last name he fell in battle some

twelve months ago. Glory was his aim and he attained it; for his icon, by the hand of Caldecott, now lies

(8) Since traced by many obliging correspondents to the gallery of Charles Kingsley.

(9) Since the above was written I have tried to launch the boat with my own hands in KIDNAPPED. Some

(11) This paper, which does not otherwise fit the present volume, is reprinted here as the proper continuation