Although only thirty-seven, Mr. David son has already written ten books. Besides his Plays, I may mention Perfervid, which had a curious history. It was written at Crieff, and under the title Like Father, like Son, went the round of the publishers. It was returned with the remark that the title was already copyrighted. Mr. Davidson next called it Bred in the Bone, and sent it on a second wandering, only to be reminded that Mr. James Payn had written a novel of that name. In despair," he remarked, "I fixed on the utterly impossible title of Perfervid, and one consequence is that the book has never had a large sale."

To return to the list of Mr. Davidson's writings, his first real success was achieved in 1893, when he published Fleet-street Eclogues. He told me how He told me how this volume originated.

"When I was a teacher in Scotland, I had the idea of writing a kind of teacher's calendar on the plan of the old Shepherd's Calendar, but this idea was never carried out. When my father died, however, among the books that came into my possession was a copy of Gibbon's Decline and Fall. As I read it the old idea revived, but I was in London now, and the journalists of Fleet-street seemed closer friends than the teachers of my younger days. So I wrote a journalist's calendar, under the title of Fleet-street Eclogues, and every morning, before sitting down to my desk, I read a chapter of Gibbon.

A Random Itinerary is another wellknown work. It gives a series of travel sketches. Mr. Davidson travels round London as Xavier de Maistre travelled round his room, noting everything with the discriminating eye of the poet. As far as mere distance goes, his travels are all before him. When I asked him about the scenery which has entered most deeply into his poetry, he named the district of the Ochills, where as a boy he used to spend his summer holidays, and the scenery of the Firth of Clyde. When I am alone and not preoccupied, the sweep of the coast between Helensburgh and the entrance to Loch Long comes before me, and however far I may travel in the future, no other coast can be so deeply graven on my memory.

Mr. Davidson knows parts of England very intimately, such as the Chilterns and the old Cinque Ports. Readers will remember his beautiful poem, A Cinque

Port, which expresses so well that spirit of melancholy which broods over towns like Rye and Winchelsea, which now, with the salt wind murmuring through their streets, remember long-departed glories, and “Await the end that shall betide. The most careless traveller, as he climbs the streets of Rye on an autumn evening, must have felt this burden of the past; but no one has expressed the feeling so well as Mr. David

son.

In reading Ballads and Songs, nothing impressed me more than the evident influence of Goethe, an influence, however, which nowhere obscures the strong individuality of the poems. I was much interested to learn from Mr. Davidson that Goethe has long been one of his favourite writers. He does not read German, but in translations he made himself familiar years ago with the work of the greatest of modern poets. Carlyle, who with Scott and Shakespeare was the author he studied most deeply in boyhood, showed him the way into the world of German poetry.

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The later writers," said Mr. Davidson, whom I have read most are Tennyson, and, recently, Ibsen. I don't mean that you could trace Ibsen in my work, but he has certainly had a considerable influence on my thought. It would be well worth while to study Norwegian in order to read him in the original. Swedish, too, I should much like to learn, for the writings of Strindberg and Ola Hansson can hardly be appreciated in English. By the way, I may mention that Ola Hansson's wonderful book, Young Ofeg's Ditties, has been translated by George Egerton, and will shortly be published by Mr. Lane."

I asked Mr. Davidson whether he considered London a good home for a poet.

Better than any town in Britain," he replied. "I at least can work quite as well in London as in the country. If I can get a quiet room, no matter how near the city's roar, I can work steadily for two or three hours every morning.'

We spoke next of the poetry which is not only written in London, but has London for its subject. There are poems in Mr. Davidson's new book, as well as many passages in the Itinerary, which show how he has been caught by the fascination of the city. There is no one whom Londoners would welcome more

gladly than a poet who could transfigure the scenes and incidents of their common life, and such a poet they have in Mr. Davidson. Whether he stands on Primrose Hill, showing how, far off in the sunlit distance,

"Dissolving, dimly reappearing,
Afloat upon ethereal tides,

St. Paul's above the city rides,"

or strolls down the noisy main street of Aldgate, crowded with waggons and choked with passengers, he is always able to see how above dim London,

"Close as a roof and like a jasper stone,
Lit by the Lamp of God,"

there hangs a new and more wonderful city, the creation of a poet's fancy.

Although Mr. Davidson published four books last year—A Random Itinerary, his collected Plays, Baptist Lake, a novel issued by Ward and Downey, and the Ballads and Songs-he has no idea of taking a rest from work. On the contrary, the appreciation of the public, which is making up in cordiality for a tardiness of which Mr. Davidson does not complain, has encouraged him to new and more important efforts. This year he hopes to give us further ballads and eclogues.

"Do you think," I asked, "that 'booming' does an author much good?"

May I ask if any one has a right to claim that he discovered you?"

"Well, no," said Mr. Davidson, with a smile, "I discovered myself; but I may say that I have never met a more sympathetic and appreciative man than Mr. Grant Allen. He has an open mind for everything new, and does not, like some critics, keep back his kind words till an author no longer requires them."

Mr. Davidson did not conceal from me that he had found his four years in London something of a battle. "When I first came to town," he said, "I tried every kind of pot-boiling, without being able to

realise a sufficient income. My mainstay was reviewing, and my chief source of income the Speaker. Sir Wemyss Reid gave me my first chance in London."

The reception of Ballads and Songs is proof sufficient that brighter days are in store for Mr. Davidson. Until lately, he was the idolised poet of a small and select coterie; now, by one of the sudden turns of fortune's wheel, he has become one of the most popular and most fashionable of our younger poets.

Jane T. Stoddart.

The great amount of criticism of all kinds called forth by that unique publication, The Yellow Book, has led many residents of New York to brush up their recollections of its editor, Mr. Henry Harland, who now for some years has expatriated himself and become a confirmed Londoner.

Henry Harland, the literary editor of The Yellow Book, was born in this city just thirty-four years ago. He was graduated from the College of the City of New York, and subsequently went to Harvard, where, however, he did not remain to take a degree. He afterward set out on a pleasure trip through Southern Europe, and spent a winter in Rome. From 1883 to 1886 he was in the office of

the Surrogate, where his literary career was really begun. He was then living at his father's house in Beekman Place. During this time he had formed a definite literary plan, which his hours at the office did not allow him the necessary leisure to carry out. It was, accordingly, his daily habit, pursued through all one winter with the utmost conscientiousness, to go to bed and to sleep immediately after dinner; at two o'clock in the morning he rose, and, fortified with black coffee, he then wrote undisturbed until it was time for breakfast, preceding his start down-town to his labours in the Surrogate's office. The fruit of his winter's work, in which there is not even a remote suspicion either of pre-prandial

coffee or of midnight oil, was his first novel, As It Was Written, a story of Jewish life in New York, published in 1885. This and others of his first books appeared under the pseudonym of "Sidney Luska," a name that he only gradually sloughed off for his own legitimate appellation, which, in point of fact, is apparently of the two the real nom de guerre.

The subjects of his subsequent stories, Mrs. Peixada (1886)-in which year he left the Surrogate's office to devote himself wholly to literature-The Yoke of the Thorah (1887), My Uncle Florimond, and Mr. Sonnenschein's Inher

NOTE. This portrait is reproduced from a plate made for the new edition of the Library of American Literature, by courtesy of William Evarts Benjamin.

itance, both in 1888, were, like his first novel, taken from Jewish life, and, like it, they were all characterised by a refreshing newness of material and novelty of treatment. Harland well recognised at this time that he had opened up a new vein, and he consciously worked it. He was led, however, to the choice of subject by his own personal predilections. He had many friends among the Jews, and he had a sincere admiration-or asserted that he had-for the Jewish character. At any rate, Jewish life in all this early work has never been more sympathetically treated. This is even the case in The Yoke of the Thorah, which evoked some protest on the part of the Jews themselves, who called upon Harland to vindicate his position, as he did in a public address in one of the city synagogues.

This first subject, however, was never more than a passing phase that has not since been recurred to. Grandison Mather, published in 1889, in which year he went to Europe, is largely autobiographical. This was followed, the same year, by A Latin Quarter Courtship; the succeeding year by Two Women or One? and Two Voices; in 1891 by Mea Culpa ; in 1893 by Mademoiselle Miss, a collection of short stories. Since 1889 he has not been in America, but has oscillated between Paris and London, where his real residence is, in Cromwell Road.

Henry Harland's own work on The Yellow Book has been altogether on a higher plane than that of his contributors, whose selection in many cases is entirely inscrutable. When all is said, whether to its advantage or disadvantage be here apart, The Yellow Book has undoubtedly attracted attention. Whatever Aubrey Beardsley may or may not be considered to have done for it in an artistic way, Harland has undeniably given it by his editorship a by no means insignificant literary place.

William H. Carpenter.