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?'

'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 H2O. 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, bring. ing 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

Professor's Love Story (1895), a charmingly fresh comedy; and a setting of his own novel The Little Minister (1897), which displayed many of the faults of the novel, were wonderfully well received on the stage, and have been followed by The Wedding Guest, a rather melodramatic piece; The Admirable Crichton, a clever fantasy; Quality Street; and the 'delightful joke' Little Mary (1903). There is a book on Barrie and his work by Hammerton (1900).

George Bernard Shaw, novelist and playwright, was born at Dublin in 1856. He had no university education, but in 1876 came to London and there embarked, at first with small success, in a career of journalism and literary work. Between 1880 and 1883 he produced four novels, the best-known of which is Cashel Byron's Profession, with a boxer for hero. In 1883 he became a Socialist agitator, and helped to form the programme of the Fabian Society, editing the essays of the League, to which he had contributed in 1889. Several tracts from his pen were also published by the same adventure, among them The Quintessence of Ibsenism in 1891. In 1892 appeared the first of his clever and eccentric plays, Widowers Houses, produced by the Independent Theatre Society, and followed by Arms and the Man (1894), Candida, The Man of Honour and The Man of Destiny in 1897, and others in the same erratic vein. A collection of them, under the title of Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, was issued in 1898; Three Plays for Puritans followed in 1900; and Man and Superman (1903) combines comedy with a paradoxical philosophy of life.

John Davidson, son of a minister of the Evangelical Union, was born at Barrhead in Renfrewshire in 1857, and educated at Greenock. After studying for one session at Edinburgh University, he spent some twelve years in desultory employment as chemist's assistant, mercantile clerk, and teacher in various schools at Greenock, Perth, Glasgow, Paisley, and Crieff. In 1890 he went to London as a journalist, and wrote for the newspapers until his verses began to attract attention. Already he had published several dramas-Bruce, a Chronicle Play (1886), after the Elizabethan manner; Smith, a Tragic Farce (1888); and Scaramouch in Naxos (1889). These were followed in 1891 by a volume of poems entitled In a Music Hall, and before the end of the century he had produced seven or eight other volumes of poetry and drama, the most notable of which are Fleet Street Eclogues (1893-95), Ballads and Songs (1894), New Ballads (1896), The Last Ballad (1898), Godfrida, a play, and The Testament of an Empire Builder (1902). His verse is forcible, graceful, and luxuriant; in his treatment of some metropolitan scenes he shows a quite poignant realism; in his dramatic works he is more successful with a theme like that of the story of Ariadne than with the heroic history of a nation's struggle for freedom.

William Watson, son of a Yorkshire farmer, was born at Burley-in-Wharfedale in that county on 2nd August 1858. His father afterwards became a merchant at Liverpool, where the son was brought up. None of our universities can claim the honour of educating him; but from an early age he showed a poetic bent and gift, and in 1880 appeared The Prince's Quest, his first published work, manifesting strongly the influence of William Morris. Neither it, however, nor the Epigrams of Art, Life, and Nature, which came out in 1884, attracted much attention; and it was not till the thoughtful and touching verses on 'Wordsworth's Grave,' in the measure of Gray's Elegy and the manner of Matthew Arnold, were issued along with some other short pieces in 1890 that Mr Watson was generally recognised as a poet. In 1892 he produced another pleasing elegy entitled 'Lachrymæ Musarum,' on the death of Tennyson, bringing it out along with several other lyrics, one of which, 'England my Mother,' bears close resemblance to Mr Henley's much more powerful verses to 'England, my England,' published earlier in the same year. The Eloping Angels (1893) is a clever caprice in Byronic ottava rima, and, like the majority of its predecessors, has something of the air of an echo of the great masters. More original and personal are the sonnets on The Year of Shame and The Purple East (1896), although they are deformed by their fierce and almost hysterical denunciation of the 'unspeakable Turk.' The most notable of Mr Watson's other poems are his Father of the Forest (1895) and The Hope of the World (1897), which were collected along with the rest of his verse in 1898; in 1902 he produced one of the many odes on the coronation of King Edward VII., and in 1903 published For England: Poems written in Estrangement. In prose he has written a volume of essays entitled Excursions in Criticism (1893). In 1895 he received a Civil List pension in recognition of his work.

Oscar O'Flahertie Wilde (1856-1900), poet and dramatist, was the younger son of Sir William Wilde, eminent both as surgeon and as antiquary, and of Jane Elgee, a lady who under the nom de guerre of 'Speranza' contributed some inspiring verse to The Spirit of the Nation. He was educated first at Trinity College, Dublin, and afterwards at Magdalen, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate prize in 1878 by a poem on Ravenna. Here he began that cult of 'æstheticism' for which he quickly became famous both in England and America. This movement, which for a few years took an astonishing hold on the British public, derived its impulse mainly from Wilde, and its influence has been much more than ephemeral. In 1881 appeared a volume of poems, marked by a singular mixture of verbal felicity and affected sentiment. In 1888 Wilde entered on a period of great activity, first as a writer of novels