and clattering escort come and go before the gate; at night the windows are lighted up, and its near neighbours, the workmen, may dance in their own houses to the palace music. And in this the palace is typical. There is a spark among the embers; from time to time the old volcano smokes. Edinburgh has but partly abdicated, and still wears, in parody, her metropolitan trappings. Half a capital and half a country town, the whole city leads a double existence; it has long trances of the one and flashes of the other; like the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive and half a monumental marble. There are armed men and cannon in the citadel overhead; you may see the troops marshalled on the high parade; and at night after the early winter evenfall, and in the morning before the laggard winter dawn, the wind carries abroad over Edinburgh the sound of drums and bugles. Grave judges sit bewigged in what was once the scene of imperial deliberations. Close by in the High Street perhaps the trumpets may sound about the stroke of noon; and you see a troop of citizens in tawdry masquerade; tabard above, heathermixture trowser below, and the men themselves trudg ing in the mud among unsympathetic bystanders. The grooms of a well-appointed circus tread the streets with a better presence. And yet these are the Heralds and Pursuivants of Scotland, who are about to proclaim a new law of the United Kingdom before two score boys, and thieves, and hackney-coachmen. Meanwhile every hour the bell of the University rings out over the hum of the streets, and every hour a double tide of students, coming and going, fills the deep archways. And lastly, one night in the springtime-or say one morning rather, at the peep of day-late folk may hear the voices of many men singing a psalm in unison from a church on one side of the old High Street; and a little after, or perhaps a little before, the sound of many men singing a psalm in unison from another church on the opposite side of the way. There will be something in the words about the dew of Hermon, and how goodly it is to see brethren dwelling together in unity. And the late folk will tell themselves that all this singing denotes the conclusion of two yearly ecclesiastical parliaments-the parliaments of Churches which are brothers in many admirable virtues, but not specially like brothers in this particular of a tolerant and peaceful life.

From 'Kidnapped.'

The next day Mr Henderland found for me a man who had a boat of his own and was to cross the Linnhe Loch that afternoon into Appin, fishing. Him he prevailed on to take me, for he was one of his flock; and in this way I saved a long day's travel and the price of two public ferries I must otherwise have passed.

It was near noon before we set out; a dark day with clouds, and the sun shining upon little patches. The sea was here very deep and still, and had scarce a wave upon it; so that I must put the water to my lips before I could believe it to be truly salt. The mountains on either side were high, rough and barren, very black and gloomy in the shadow of the clouds, but all silver-laced with little watercourses where the sun shone upon them. It seemed a hard country, this of Appin, for people to care as much about as Alan did.

There was but one thing to mention. A little after we had started, the sun shone upon a little moving clump of scarlet close in along the waterside to the

north. It was much of the same red as soldiers' coats; every now and then, too, there came little sparks and lightnings, as though the sun had struck upon bright steel.

I asked my boatman what it should be; and he answered he supposed it was some of the red soldiers coming from Fort William into Appin, against the poor tenantry of the country. Well, it was a sad sight to me; and whether it was because of my thoughts of Alan, or from something prophetic in my bosom, although this was but the second time I had seen King George's troops, I had no good-will to them.

At last we came so near the point of land at the entering in of Loch Leven that I begged to be set on shore. My boatman (who was an honest fellow and mindful of his promise to the catechist) would fain have carried me on to Balachulish; but as this was to take me farther from my secret destination, I insisted, and was set on shore at last under the wood of Lettermore (or Lettervore, for I have heard it both ways) in Alan's country of Appin.

This was a wood of birches, growing on a steep, craggy side of a mountain that overhung the loch. It had many openings and ferny howes; and a road or bridle track ran north and south through the midst of it, by the edge of which, where was a spring, I sat down to eat some oat-bread of Mr Henderland's, and think upon my situation.

Here I was not only troubled by a cloud of stinging midges, but far more by the doubts of my mind. What I ought to do, why I was going to join myself with an outlaw and a would-be murderer like Alan, whether I should not be acting more like a man of sense to tramp back to the south country direct, by my own guidance and at my own charges, and what Mr Campbell or even Mr Henderland would think of me if they should ever learn my folly and presumption: these were the doubts that now began to come in on me stronger than ever.

reins.

As I was so sitting and thinking, a sound of men and horses came to me through the wood; and presently after, at a turning of the road, I saw four travellers come into view. The way was in this part so rough and narrow that they came single and led their horses by the The first was a great, red-headed gentleman, of an imperious and flushed face, who carried his hat in his hand and fanned himself, for he was in a breathing heat. The second, by his decent black garb and white wig, I correctly took to be a lawyer. The third was a servant, and wore some part of his clothes in tartan, which showed that his master was of a Highland family, and either an outlaw or else in singular good odour with the Government, since the wearing of tartan was against the Act. If I had been better versed in these things, I would have known the tartan to be of the Argyle (or Campbell) colours. This servant had a good-sized portmanteau strapped on his horse, and a net of lemons (to brew punch with) hanging at the saddle-bow; as was often enough the custom with luxurious travellers in that part of the country.

As for the fourth, who brought up the tail, I had seen his like before, and knew him at once to be a sheriff's officer.

I had no sooner seen these people coming than I made up my mind (for no reason that I can tell) to go through with my adventure; and when the first came alongside

of me, I rose up from the bracken and asked him the way to Aucharn.

He stopped and looked at me, as I thought, a little oddly; and then, turning to the lawyer, 'Mungo,' said he, there's many a man would think this more of a warning than two pyats. Here am I on my road to Duror on the job ye ken; and here is a young lad starts up out of the bracken, and speers if I am on the way to Aucharn.'

'Glenure,' said the other, this is an ill subject for jesting.'

These two had now drawn close up and were gazing at me, while the two followers had halted about a stonecast in the rear.

And what seek ye in Aucharn?' said Colin Roy Campbell of Glenure; him they called the Red Fox; for he it was that I had stopped.

'The man that lives there,' said I.

'James of the Glens,' says Glenure, musingly; and then to the lawyer: 'Is he gathering his people, think ye?'

6

'Anyway,' says the lawyer, we shall do better to bide where we are, and let the soldiers rally us.'

'If you are concerned for me,' said I, 'I am neither of his people nor yours, but an honest subject of King George, owing no man and fearing no man.'

'Why, very well said,' replies the Factor. 'But if I may make so bold as ask, what does this honest man so far from his country? and why does he come seeking the brother of Ardshiel? I have power here, I must tell you. I am King's Factor upon several of these estates, and have twelve files of soldiers at my back.'

'I have heard a waif word in the country,' said I, a little nettled, that you were a hard man to drive.'

He still kept looking at me, as if in doubt.

'Well,' said he, at last, 'your tongue is bold; but I am no unfriend to plainness. If ye had asked me the way to the door of James Stewart on any other day but this, I would have set ye right and bidden ye God speed. But to-day-eh, Mungo?' And he turned again to look at the lawyer.

But just as he turned there came the shot of a firelock from higher up the hill; and with the very sound of it Glenure fell upon the road.

'O, I am dead!' he cried, several times over.

The lawyer had caught him up and held him in his arms, the servant standing over and clasping his hands. And now the wounded man looked from one to another with scared eyes, and there was a change in his voice that went to the heart.

'Take care of yourselves,' says he. 'I am dead.' He tried to open his clothes as if to look for the wound, but his fingers slipped on the buttons. With that he gave a great sigh, his head rolled on his shoulder, and he passed away.

From 'Pulvis et Umbra.'

Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports many doubtful things and all of them appalling. There seems no substance to this solid globe on which we stamp: nothing but symbols and ratios. Symbols and ratios carry us and bring us forth and beat us down; gravity that swings the incommensurable suns and worlds through space, is but a figment varying inversely as the squares of distances; and the suns and worlds themselves, imponderable figures of abstraction, NH, and H,O. Con

sideration dares not dwell upon this view; that way madness lies; science carries us into zones of speculation, where there is no habitable city for the mind of man.

But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our senses give it us. We behold space sown with rotatory islands, suns and worlds and the shards and wrecks of systems some, like the sun, still blazing; some rotting, like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in desolation. All of these we take to be made of something we call matter: a thing which no analysis can help us to conceive; to whose incredible properties no familiarity can reconcile our minds. This stuff, when not purified by the lustration of fire, rots uncleanly into something we call life; seized through all its atoms with a pediculous malady; swelling in tumours that become independent, sometimes even (by an abhorrent prodigy) locomotory; one splitting into millions, millions cohering into one, as the malady proceeds through varying stages. This vital putrescence of the dust, used as we are to it, yet strikes us with occasional disgust, and the profusion of worms in a piece of ancient turf, or the air of a marsh darkened with insects, will sometimes check our breathing so that we aspire for cleaner places. But none is clean the moving sand is infected with lice; the pure spring, where it bursts out of the mountain, is a mere issue of worms; even in the hard rock the crystal is forming.

:

:

In two main shapes this eruption covers the countenance of the earth: the animal and the vegetable: one in some degree the inversion of the other: the second rooted to the spot; the first coming detached out of its natal mud, and scurrying abroad with the myriad feet of insects or towering into the heavens on the wings of birds a thing so inconceivable that, if it be well considered, the heart stops. To what passes with the anchored vermin, we have little clue: doubtless they have their joys and sorrows, their delights and killing agonies: it appears not how. But of the locomotory, to which we ourselves belong, we can tell more. These share with us a thousand miracles: the miracles of sight, of hearing, of the projection of sound, things that bridge space; the miracles of memory and reason, by which the present is conceived, and when it is gone, its image kept living in the brains of man and brute; the miracle of reproduction, with its imperious desires and staggering consequences. And to put the last touch upon this mountain mass of the revolting and the inconceivable, all these prey upon each other, lives tearing other lives in pieces, cramming them inside themselves, and by that summary process, growing fat: the vegetarian, the whale, perhaps the tree, not less than the lion of the desert; for the vegetarian is only the eater of the dumb.

Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded with predatory life, and more drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship, scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and turns alternate cheeks to the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety million miles

away.

What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming ;—and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes! Poor soul, here for so little,

cast among so many hardships, filled with desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives: who should have blamed him had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous? And we look and behold him instead filled with imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the heart of his mystery, we find in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God: an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not stoop. (From Across the Plains.)

From 'Underwoods.'

It is the season now to go
About the country high and low,
Among the lilacs hand in hand,
And two by two in fairy land.

The brooding boy, the sighing maid,
Wholly fain and half afraid,
Now meet along the hazel'd brook
To pass and linger, pause and look.

A year ago, and blithely paired,

Their rough-and-tumble play they shared ; They kissed and quarrelled, laughed and cried, A year ago at Eastertide.

With bursting heart, with fiery face,

She strove against him in the race;
He unabashed her garter saw,

That now would touch her skirts with awe.

Now by the stile ablaze she stops,
And his demurer eyes he drops;
Now they exchange averted sighs
Or stand and marry silent eyes.

And he to her a hero is,

And sweeter she than primroses,
Their common silence dearer far
Than nightingale and mavis are.

Be it granted me to behold you again in dying,

Hills of home! and to hear again the call; Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying, And hear no more at all.

(No. xliii.; To S. R. Crockett, on receiving a dedication.) The only complete collection of Stevenson's works is the Edinburgh edition in twenty-eight volumes (1894-98); but most of his romances, essays, and miscellaneous writings are in general circulation. His Life, by Mr Graham Balfour (2 vols. 1901), does little more than supplement the two volumes of Letters to his Family and Friends, edited by Mr Sidney Colvin (1899). Some further biographical details are given in R. L. Stevenson's Edinburgh Days, by Miss E. B. Simpson (1898). Out of the hundreds of critical articles on the man and his work which have appeared during the later years of his life and since his death, few are of any substantial value. Among those which are, two only are of sufficient importance to demand mention: Mr Colvin's prefacereally an informal biography-to the two volumes of letters just mentioned, and Professor W. Raleigh's able, if somewhat academic, appreciation, R. L. Stevenson (1895).

J. W. MACKAIL.

John Churton Collins, born in 1848 in Gloucestershire, studied at Balliol, has written much for the reviews and magazines, edited works of Tourneur, Herbert of Cherbury, Greene, Dryden, Tennyson, and written books on Sir Joshua Reynolds, on Bolingbroke and on Voltaire in England, and on Swift, besides A Study of English Literature, Illustrations of Tennyson, Essays and Criticisms, and Ephemera Critica.

William Hurrell Mallock, born in 1849 at Cockington Court, Devon, won the Newdigate in 1871 whilst at Balliol, Oxford. He made a hit with The New Republic (1877) and The New Paul and Virginia (1878); has written A Romance of the Nineteenth Century, and other novels; has published a poem on Lucretius and other volumes of verse; and in Aristocracy and Evolution, Religion as a Credible Doctrine, and other works has sought to make serious contributions to the solution of religious, political, and sociological problems.

Henry Rider Haggard, born at Bradenham Hall in Norfolk, 22nd June 1856, and educated at Ipswich Grammar School, held several official positions in South Africa in 1875-79, and on his return was called to the Bar. His first book, Cetewayo and his White Neighbours (1882), attracted little notice; and two novels, Dawn (1884) and The Witch's Head (1885), were only successful after King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1887) had by their novelty and imaginative ingenuity won great and immediate popularity. Among his other novels are Jess (1887), Allan Quatermain (1887), Maiwa's Revenge (1888), Cleopatra (1889), Allan's Wife (1890), Nada the Lily (1892), Montezuma's Daughter (1893), Joan Haste (1895), and Swallow, a Story of the Great Trek (1897). The World's Desire (1891) was written in collaboration with Mr Andrew Lang. Mr Haggard is keenly interested in agricultural conditions and problems, and has published A Farmer's Year (1899) and Rural England (1903), a somewhat pessimistic survey of the present agricultural position, based on elaborate personal inquiries.

Mrs Humphry Ward was born in 1851 at Hobart in Tasmania, eldest daughter of Thomas Arnold, second son of Dr Arnold of Rugby, who, having resigned his Tasmanian inspectorship of schools on becoming a Roman Catholic, was by Dr Newman appointed Professor of English Literature in a Catholic college at Dublin. Mary Augusta Arnold was already known as a scholarly and accomplished writer when in 1872 she married Thomas Humphry Ward, editor of The English Poets. She began early to contribute to Macmillan's Magazine, and gave the fruits of her Spanish studies to Smith and Wace's Dictionary of Christian Biography. A child's story,

MRS HUMPHRY WARD. From a Photograph by Russell & Sons.

Milly and Olly (1881), Miss Bretherton (1884), a slight novel, and the translation of Amiel's Journal Intime (1885) prepared the way for the spiritual romance of Robert Elsmere (1888), which became the novel of the season. It embodied an attempt to describe the struggle of a soul in its voyage towards newer theistic aspirations after losing the landmarks of the old faith. Profound spiritual insight, broad human sympathy, and strong thinking are manifest throughout; but as a work of art it is marred by diffuseness, didactic persistency of purpose, and a fatal want of mastery over the fundamental secret of the novelist-the power to make her puppets live rather than preach. Its successor, David Grieve (1892), showed all its faults and fewer merits.

Marcella (1894) and Sir George Tressady (1895) are novels of English politics and society with much that is truly felt and movingly represented, yet too didactic withal. Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898) and Eleanor (1900) deal with aspects of modern Catholicism; and Lady Rose's Daughter (1903) is another novel of society, depicting a situation that recalls the relations of Mdlle. de l'Espinasse and Madame du Deffand.

Madame Duclaux, a bilingual authoress, was born at Leamington in 1857, was educated at Brussels, in Italy, and at University College, London, and under her maiden name of Agnes Mary Frances Robinson was well known as an English poetess ere, in 1888, she married Professor James Darmesteter, a learned Parisian, who was professor at the Collége de France (died 1894). In 1901 she married Professor Duclaux, Directorin-Chief of the Pasteur Institute. Her Handful of Honeysuckles showed her a poetess of rare gifts, and the impression was confirmed by her Crowned Hippolytus, a translation from Euripides; The New Arcadia and other Poems; An Italian Garden, a book of songs; Songs, Ballads, and a Garden Play; and Retrospect and other Poems. She has published a novel, Arden, and books on the End of the Middle Ages and on Emily Brontë; in French and English, Lives of Margaret Queen of Navarre and of M. Renan, and a mediæval anthology; and in French, a book on Froissart (in the 'Grands Ecrivains' series), and Grands Ecrivains d'Outremanche (1901).

Michael Field is the pseudonym adopted by two ladies who write poetry in collaboration, and whose names are understood to be Miss Bradley and Miss Cooper. They have produced about a dozen plays in verse, and also three or four volumes of lyrics. Some of the plays, like Callirrhöe (1884) and Brutus Ultor (1887), have classical themes, but the majority are based on passages of English and Scottish history. Such are Fair Rosamund (1884); The Father's Tragedy (1885), dealing with the fate of David, Earl of Rothesay; William Rufus (1886); Canute the Great (1887); and The Tragic Mary (1890), who of course is Mary Queen of Scots. These latter are written after the Elizabethan manner, and by some critics have even been called Shakespearian. Callirrhöe is pretty and ingenious, but not at all Hellenic in tone or quality. The lyrical poems published under the pseudonym as Long Ago (1889), Sight and Song (1892), and Under the Bough (1893) are less ambitious and have more decided charm.

Alice Meynell, daughter of Mr T. J. Thompson, and younger sister of Lady Butler (Miss Elizabeth Thompson) the battle-painter, was educated entirely by her father, with whom she lived in England and Italy until her marriage in 1877 with Mr Wilfrid Meynell, who has written much for the reviews, and in 1903 published a Life of

Beaconsfield. Preludes (1875), her first volume of verse, was illustrated by her sister, and was republished with some changes and additions in 1893.

It was praised by Ruskin and Rossetti, and contains verse of high quality and finish for so young a poetess as she was when most of its contents were written. For many years afterwards her literary activity was mainly employed in essay-writing in the newspapers and reviews, but in 1897 she edited an Anthology of English Poetry, showing delicate literary discernment. The list of her published works includes The Rhythm of Life (1893), The Colour of Life and The Children (1896), The Spirit of Place (1898), a sympathetic criticism of Ruskin, and a volume of Later Poems (1902).

Mary St Leger Harrison, at the beginning of the twentieth century one of the most conspicuous and powerful of women novelists, is the younger daughter of Charles Kingsley, and as Mary St Leger Kingsley spent her girlhood at Eversley Rectory. She married the rector of Clovelly in that North Devon which was so dear to her father, but became a widow in 1897. Under the penname of Lucas Malet' she made her mark in 1882 with Mrs Lorimer, a sketch in black and white, and had a great success in Colonel Enderby's Wife (1885)-both of them, like most of her novels, dealing frankly with the ethical aspects of human life and society. Little Peter and A Counsel of Perfection were succeeded by The Wages of Sin (1891), The Carissima (1896), The Gateless Barrier (1900), and The History of Sir Richard Calmady, a 'strong' rather than pleasant study of an unamiable dwarf and his noble mother (1901). In 1899 Mrs Harrison had become a member of the Roman Catholic communion.

Fiona Macleod is the name borne by the authoress of a remarkable series of Celtic tales, romances, and poems which began to appear in 1894 with Pharais, a Romance of the Isles. Then followed in quick succession The Mountain Lovers and The Sin-Eater (1895), The Washer of the Ford and Green Fire (1896), and The Laughter of Peterkin (1897), most of which were collected in 1897 in a three-volume reprint. Later books are The Dominion of Dreams (1899), The Divine Adventure (1900), and Drostan and Iseult (1902). Fiona Macleod finds her themes in the Celtic myths of early Ireland and Scotland, which in her pages are so effectively treated as to make her one of the chief representatives of that 'Celtic Revival' of which Mr W. B. Yeats is the protagonist. From the Hills of Dream is a collection of lyrics; Through the Ivory Gates, poems; The Immortal Hour, a drama based on a Celtic legend. In the dedication to Mr Meredith of The Sin-Eater she says: 'The beauty of the world, the pathos of life, the gloom, the fatalism, the spiritual glamour-it is out of these, the spiritual inheritance of the Gael, that I have fashioned these tales.'

James Matthew Barrie was born in 1860 at Kirriemuir, a Forfarshire village to which he has given a popularity it never formerly enjoyed. Educated at first at the village school, he passed to Dumfries Academy and Edinburgh University, taking his M.A. in 1882. After eighteen months' work on the staff of a Nottingham newspaper, he settled in London as a contributor to such weekly journals as the Speaker and the National Observer. His first book, Better Dead (1887), was largely a satire on London life; his second, The Auld Licht Idylls (1888), and its successor and sequel, A Window in Thrums (1889), made him one of the most popular writers of the day. Few recent

JAMES MATTHEW BARRIE.

From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry.

sketches of Scottish village life show as much keen observation and quaint humour as are to be found in these vignettes of an extinct generation of country weavers. Less successful was Mr Barrie's next venture, The Little Minister, a full-length novel published in Good Words in 1891, which, though clever in description, dialogue, and character-drawing, showed a lack of constructive power on a large design and of skill in the handling of a theme involving serious passion. Other works of fiction from his pen are When a Man's Single (1888); My Lady Nicotine (1899); Sentimental Tommy (1896), with its sequel, Tommy and Grizel (1900); and The Little White Bird (1902). Margaret Ogilvie (1896) is a pathetic picture of the life and death of his mother. His dramatic ventures, including Walker, London (1892), a slight but agreeable farce, in the title-rôle of which Mr J. L. Toole made one of his last successes; The