THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 SCOTTISH LITERATURE
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 
 LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO 
 DALLAS SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. 
 
 TORONTO
 
 SCOTTISH 
 LITERATURE 
 
 CHARACTER & INFLUENCE 
 
 BY 
 
 G. GREGORY SMITH 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 
 ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 
 
 1919
 
 COPYRIGHT 
 
 GLASGOW J PRINTED AT THB UNIVKRSITY PKRSS 
 BY ROBERT MACI.F.HOSK AND CO. LTD.
 
 College 
 Library 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THESE ten connected Essays deal with two sub- 
 jects, the character or habit of Scottish Literature 
 (Chapters I.-V.) and the influence which that 
 literature has exerted on others (Chapters VI.-X.). 
 The book is not offered as a history, though in 
 places, where details are handled in support of the 
 argument, it may assume the manner of narrative. 
 It claims to be mainly critical, and it carries with 
 it the author's confession that he knows how diffi- 
 cult it is to set forth a corporate literary character 
 or to indicate the direction of a literary influence ; 
 as it is to win assent to a general judgement, when 
 the survey is so wide, when the proofs are not at all 
 points complete, and when there are prepossessions, 
 not always literary, which decline to be adjusted. 
 Yet the venture seemed worth making, partly 
 because of these risks, but chiefly because the way 
 was untrodden. The author consoles himself that, 
 if his interpretation prove inadequate, he may have 
 served some purpose in reconstituting the evidence. 
 
 1222166
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 Much of the material is already familiar to readers 
 of Scottish Literature, but some of it may be 
 allowed to be new, or set in another light and in 
 fresh relationships. 
 
 February, 1919.
 
 CONTENTS 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Two MOODS i 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 LETS AND HINDRANCES ..... 41 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 THE FOREIGN ELEMENTS 71 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 DRAMA AND PROSE 102 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 THE PROBLEM OF DIALECT . . . .130 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 THE NEW POETIC FORCES . . . .155 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE NORTHERN AUGUSTANS . 186
 
 viii CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 PAGE 
 
 BURNS 225 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 SCOTT 248 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 A MODERN EPILOGUE 276 
 
 INDEX 289
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 TWO MOODS 
 
 IT is never easy to describe national idiosyncrasy, 
 but Englishmen think they know their Scot, He 
 has long been a very near neighbour, and every 
 habit of his has become familiar. In his literature, 
 as in his other activities, he stands so self-confessed 
 that any man of intelligence can as they phrase it 
 in the high places of Jargon "discern the true 
 Scottish note." Yet one sometimes wonders what 
 these words are intended to mean, and whether 
 they are not used, in an offhand impressionist way, 
 to turn the reader from stricter enquiry. For 
 Criticism has learnt as much from that sacred bird 
 the lapwing as from the sacred ostrich. 
 
 Many in the South have a ready touchstone for 
 the detection of Scottish quality. By an easy 
 metaphor they transfer to Scottish literature the 
 eccentricities which have vexed their five senses in 
 their dealings with the aggressive North. They 
 think of the freakish colour-schemes of the tartans, 
 of the skirl of the pipes, of the reek of haggis, of
 
 2 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 the flavour of John Barleycorn, in one or more of 
 his three disguises, of the rudeness of the thistle. 
 They seem to see, hear, and gust these glaring, 
 noisy, redolent things at every turn in Northern 
 art. They allow that there are occasions when 
 these qualities are proper and even pleasing, but on 
 the whole these are not comfortable virtues and 
 they are sadly lacking in the finesse required of 
 the superior artist. Others, declining this crude 
 analogy, discover their Scot in quaint words 
 and accent, in a certain whinstone jocularity, in a 
 patriotism rampant as his lion and prickly as his 
 motto, in an idealism tempered with kirk-politics 
 and a love of small change. To these, as to the 
 tartan-and-haggis critics, it appears to be of little 
 moment that they should show that the Scot thus 
 gives himself away when he takes pen in hand, or 
 that they should testify, on oath, that they have 
 ever met such a guy in real life or reputable 
 romance. The fiction is too useful when they are 
 at a loss or have a crow to pluck with the North ; 
 and it at once assumes an air of truth when the 
 Perfervids rush in with vulgar clamour against 
 southern prejudice. 
 
 Generalities on the Scot himself or on national 
 genius are here irrelevant. We are reminded how 
 Sainte-Beuve l dealt with Nisard's attempt to 
 answer the question c What is French genius ? * 
 
 1 Causeries du Lundi, xv. 211.
 
 TWO MOODS 3 
 
 He showed that the setting-up of a standard and 
 the measuring of books and periods by it are always 
 inadequate, even in classicist France ; that the 
 method does not allow for the variety of Nature's 
 moulds ; and that there is no Genius which pre- 
 sides over a nation's literature with the authority 
 of a Platonic archetype. The warning is not 
 unnecessary here, for critics, Scottish as well as 
 English, have approached northern work with 
 strong prepossessions on what they choose to call 
 the essential and abnormal in Scotticism, and have 
 explained and judged both the whole literature and 
 its parts in terms of a pattern which is imaginary, 
 or, if it be framed, as it so often is, on their know- 
 ledge of Burns and Burns alone, is illusory. In 
 the second place, it is well to be on guard against 
 concerning ourselves overmuch with externals, as 
 if we must judge a man by his clothes. Though 
 this counts for something in the pictorial or plastic 
 medium for when Rodin's Victor Hugo declines 
 the tailor there is no telling whether he is a 
 great poet or a marooned philosopher it fails in 
 the interpretation of literature. It should not 
 confirm even the hastiest of critics in the heresy 
 that Scotticism is only a matter of filibeg and 
 muslin-kail. 
 
 Two considerations of contrary bearing present 
 themselves at the outset. One is of encourage- 
 ment ; that the literature is the literature of a
 
 4 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 small country, that it runs a shorter course than 
 others, and that there is no linguistic divorce 
 between its earlier and later stages, as in southern 
 English. 1 In this shortness and cohesion the most 
 favourable conditions seem to be offered for the 
 making of a general estimate. But, on the other 
 hand, we find at closer scanning that this cohesion, 
 at least in formal expression and in choice of 
 material, is only apparent, that the literature is 
 remarkably varied, and that it becomes, under 
 the stress of foreign influence and native division 
 and reaction, almost a zigzag of contradictions. 
 The antithesis need not, however, disconcert us. 
 Perhaps in the very combination of opposites 
 what either of the two Sir Thomases, of Norwich 
 and Cromarty, might have been willing to call { the 
 Caledonian antisyzygy' we have a reflection of 
 the contrasts which the Scot shows at every turn, 
 in his political and ecclesiastical history, in his 
 polemical restlessness, in his adaptability, which is 
 another way of saying that he has made allowance 
 for new conditions, in his practical judgement, 
 which is the admission that two sides of the matter 
 have been considered. If therefore Scottish 
 history and life are, as an old northern writer said 
 of something else, "varied with a clean contrair 
 spirit," we need not be surprised to find that in his 
 
 1 Whatever claims, still unknown, Northumbrian Old English 
 may have on Lowland literature ; or whatever whims the 
 Middle Scots poets chose to indulge.
 
 TWO MOODS 5 
 
 literature the Scot presents two aspects which 
 appear contradictory. Oxymoron was ever the 
 bravest figure, and we must not forget that 
 disorderly order is order after all. We can be 
 indifferent to the disciples of De Quincey who will 
 suspect us of making "ambitious paradoxes" and 
 " false distinctions." We may dwell on these 
 incongruities, the better to explain their remark- 
 able synthesis in Scottish literature ; as we may, 
 in a later chapter, on the breaks and thwarts, 
 the better to show the continuity of a literary 
 tradition. 
 
 One characteristic or mood stands out clearly, 
 though it is not easily described in a word. We 
 stumble over * actuality,' 'grip of fact,' * sense of 
 detail,' ' realism,' yet with the conviction that we 
 are proceeding in the right direction. We desire to 
 express not merely the talent of close observation, 
 but the power of producing, by a cumulation of 
 touches, a quick and perfect image to the reader. 
 What we are really thinking of is * intimacy ' of 
 style. Scottish literature has no monopoly of this, 
 which is to be found in the best work everywhere, 
 and is indeed a first axiom of artistic method, no 
 matter what processes of selection and recollection 
 may follow ; but in Scots the zest for handling a 
 multitude of details rather than for seeking broad 
 effects by suggestion is very persistent. When 
 Allan Ramsay commended two of the authors
 
 6 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 represented in his Ever Green because they 
 " painted to the life," he might have said this of 
 nearly all the writers in his collection. Every- 
 where it is the Dutch style interiors, country folk 
 and town ' bodies,' farmyard and alehouse ; every- 
 where a direct and convincing familiarity ; little or 
 nothing left out, and much almost pedantically 
 accurate. < Matter-of-fact ' shall we say, befitting 
 the practical genius of the Scot, and the seriousness 
 which provoked Sydney Smith's taunt? Some 
 would see in this gluttony of the particular the 
 nemesis of the national earnestness, and conclude 
 that in a literature so enmeshed there is no play 
 for lighter qualities, that the writers must ' joke wi* 
 difficulty ' and be in no mood for fun or faery. 
 Half truths make good theories. 
 
 In Scott, for example, we find that much of his 
 success in description, whether of scene, or move- 
 ment, or conversation, is achieved by the piling up 
 of detail, and that in those passages which our 
 impatient generation calls the duller, the failure, 
 such as it is, is often due to extravagance in the use 
 of material. There are many places, especially in 
 the Waverley Novels, where the description leaves 
 nothing to the imagination ; which, if made the 
 task of half a dozen artists, would painfully dis- 
 abuse them of belief in their own originality. The 
 reader will recall such passages as the account of 
 the Green Room at the entry of Oldbuck and
 
 TWO MOODS 7 
 
 Lovel ; l or, in the same novel, of the cave to 
 which Lovel is taken by Edie ; 2 or the parallel, 
 yet fuller, sketch in Ivanhoe of the Black Knight's 
 approach to the hermitage ; 3 or the picture of Old 
 Mortality on his white pony, drawn to a ' hair 
 tether,' as no other nag, not even the palfrey of 
 Chaucer's monk, or Rocinante, has been portrayed. 
 There is nothing omitted for the illustrator who 
 would venture. Perhaps it is because the * instruc- 
 tions ' are so absolute that Scott has escaped so well 
 from foolish commentary in black and white. 4 
 But it remains a question whether this revel in 
 minutiae does not strain the art of descriptive prose 
 which is something more than inventory: as we 
 seem to see in an earlier novelist, also a Scot, whose 
 persistency in piling up details does not always 
 achieve the success of the opening scene of Sir 
 Launcelot Greaves. Defoe, our master realist, 
 does not so distrust his reader ; and Fielding, 
 who was realist enough, knew when to hold his 
 hand. 
 
 In his verse, however, Scott's keen sense of 
 movement, his greatest f romantic ' gift to his age, 
 produces happier results. There it may be 
 because he is working with a different medium 
 the close succession of minute touches neither 
 
 1 The Antiquary, ch. x. * ib., ch. xxi. 8 ch. xvi. 
 
 4 Even the ' aids ' in the Author's Edition have only a vignette 
 or decorative interest ; as Turner's too in the Poems.
 
 8 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 oppresses us nor distracts us in our enjoyment of 
 the complete effect. 
 
 " Day set on Norham's castled steep, 
 And Tweed's fair river, broad and deep, 
 
 And Cheviot's mountains lone : 
 The battled towers, the donjon keep, 
 The loop-hole grates where captives weep, 
 The flanking walls that round it sweep, 
 
 In yellow lustre shone. 
 The warriors on the turrets high, 
 Moving athwart the evening sky, 
 
 Seem'd forms of giant height ; 
 Their armour, as it caught the rays, 
 Flash'd back again the western blaze, 
 
 In lines of dazzling light. 
 
 St. George's banner, broad and gay, 
 Now faded, as the fading ray 
 
 Less bright, and less, was flung ; 
 The evening gale had scarce the power 
 To wave it on the donjon tower, 
 
 So heavily it hung. ..." 
 
 Full as these lines from Marmion are, there is 
 no overcrowding of detail. By the climax of 
 individual touches, notwithstanding the aid of word 
 and vowel (" So heavily it hung ") and the canter 
 of the rhyme, the pictorial success is achieved. 
 But * pictorial success ' is, pace Pitt's compliment, 1 
 a poor phrase for the poet's triumph in the trenches 
 at Torres Vedras, when soldiers under fire took 
 
 1 " This is a sort of thing which I might have expected in 
 painting, but could never have fancied capable of being given in 
 poetry " in reference to the perplexity of the harper in the 
 Lay of the Last Minstrel when requested to play. See Lockhart, 
 Life, ii. 226. And see Chapter IX., infra.
 
 TWO MOODS 9 
 
 courage from their captain's reading of the battle- 
 passage in the sixth canto of The Lady of the 
 Lake. 1 
 
 In Burns the evidence is not less convincing ; 
 in the opening lines of Tarn o' Shanter and in the 
 central episode at Alloway Kirk, in the satire on 
 Captain Grose and in the climax of Hornbook's 
 delinquencies, and in the rush of Hallowe'en. As 
 it is in Fergusson, 2 and in Ramsay before him, and 
 in yet earlier specimens of the intimate style, 
 such as Christis Kirk on the Green ; or in the 
 anglicized Thomson, 3 where this same evidence is 
 the main excuse for certain hackneyed sayings about 
 4 Scottish quality ' and * Scottish sense of colour.' 
 As it is, too, in many passages in the older prose, 
 such as Pitscottie's description of the royal banquet 
 in Athole, or the pastoral monologue in the Corn- 
 play nt of Scotlande each a crude endeavour after 
 realism by a conglomerate of details. 
 
 ^ockhart's Life, iii. 327; and see infra, p. 251. 
 2 Cf. Auld Reekie: 
 
 " Now morn, wi' bonny purple smiles, 
 
 Kisses the air-cock o' St. Giles ; 
 
 Rakin their een, the servant lasses 
 
 Early begin their lies and clashes," etc. 
 
 8 e.g. Summer : 
 
 " Swarming they pour, green, speckled, yellow, grey, 
 
 Black, azure, brown, more than the assisted eye 
 
 Of poring virtuoso can discern." 
 
 Changed in the 1744 edition to 
 
 " Swarming they pour, of all the varied hues 
 Their beauty-beaming parent can disclose." 
 
 Summer, 247-248.
 
 io SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 Even the artificial verse of the Middle Scots 
 Makars may be called to witness, however remote 
 real life appears to be from the conventions of 
 the Rose, the medieval litanies of love, or the 
 formalities of fifteenth century court poets. We 
 do not look for Nature's colours in the gold and 
 enamel of their rhetorical verse, in rivers 
 
 " Of balmy liquour, cristallyne of hew," 1 
 
 or in nightingales, with * angel feathers' shining 
 as the peacock's, singing their l sugared notes,' or 
 in sunrise described as the * upspringing ' of 
 
 " the goldyn candill matutyne, 
 With clere depurit bemes cristallyne." * 
 
 Closer acquaintance, however, will correct this 
 estimate. 
 
 It may seem strange that in Sir David Lyndsay, 
 the last and most modern of the * Middle ' Scots, 
 this quality of intimacy is less marked than in 
 his predecessors. He is so conscious of the 
 formalism of the Chaucerian tradition that he 
 cannot avoid being formal ; and so zealous in 
 polemic and so ready to preach to a foolish genera- 
 tion that he gives himself few opportunities of 
 free enjoyment, and, when he finds them, never 
 uses them to the full. His best work The Satyre 
 of the Thrie Estaitis supplies some hints of this 
 intimate power ; yet it is hard to recall in that long 
 
 1 Dunbar, S.T.S., ii. 174. * ib., The Golden Targe,
 
 TWO MOODS ii 
 
 play, or in any of his poems, a single character or 
 episode which is self-explained and real. The 
 rough folk of the interludes are mere vulgar 
 voices ; and the description of " Pedder Coffeis " 
 (if it be his), which would have given Henryson 
 or Dunbar his opportunity, is but a tattered 
 sketch. 
 
 The medievalist Douglas is more generous. 
 Such things as the tedious geography in the 
 * voyage ' in the Police of Honour are no more than 
 the ' catalogue ' pictures of earlier days, but there 
 are suggestions of a crisper and more direct art, 
 as in the passage describing the halt in the pleasant 
 plain amid cedar trees at the foot of a green moun- 
 tain, or in the Prologues to his Virgil, where he 
 breaks away from his task in almost desperate 
 contrariness to give a picture of a Lothian country- 
 side in Spring or a winter day in old Edinburgh. 
 Take, for example, these lines 
 
 41 The dowy dichis war all donk and wait, 
 The law vaille flodderit all wyth spait, 
 The plane stretis and every hie way 
 Full of fluschis, doubbis, myre, and clay. . . . 
 The wynd maid wayfe the reid weyd on the dyk, 
 Bedovin in donkis deyp was every syk ; 
 Our craggis, and the front of rochis seyre, 
 Hang gret isch schoklis lang as ony spere ; 
 The grund stude barrand, widderit, dosk, and gray . . . 
 Smal byrdis, flokand throw thik ronnis thrang, 
 In chyrmyng and with cheping changit thair sang, 
 Sekand hidlis and hirnys thaira to hyde
 
 12 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 Fra feirful thudis of the tempestuus tyde. 
 The wattir lynnis routtis, and every lynde 
 Quhyslyt and brayt of the swouchand wynde " l 
 
 vivid in detail, even to the red weed swaying in 
 the wind, and strong in their cumulative effect. 
 As we read on, we see that this realism is neither 
 woven in nor embroidered, but is the very warp 
 of the literary fabric. 
 
 " Repaterit weill, and by the chymnay beykyt, 
 At evin be tyme dovne a bed I me streikit, 
 Warpit my held, kest on claythis thrinfauld, 
 For till expell the perrellus peirsand cauld. 
 I crocit me, syne bownit for to sleip" 2 
 
 but fitfully, with the moonlight streaming in, the 
 screeching of an owl nearby, and the * clacking ' of 
 wildgeese as they fly over the city. Later, he 
 tells us 
 
 " Fast by my chalmir, in heych wysnit treis, 
 The soir gled quhislis loud wyth mony ane pew, 
 Quhairby the day was dawin weil I knew ; 
 Bad beit the fyire, and the candill alycht, 
 Syne blissit me, and, in my wedis dycht 
 Ane schot wyndo vnschet a lytill on char, 
 Persawit the morning bla, wan, and har, 
 Wyth cloudy gum and rak ourquhelmyt the air, 
 The soulse stythlie, hasart, rowch, and hair, 
 Branchis brattlyng, and blayknit schew the brays, 
 With hyrstis harsk of waggand wyndilstrays ; 
 The dew droppis congelyt on stibyll and rynd, 
 And scharp hailstanis, mortfundit of kynd, 
 Hoppand on the thak and on the causay by. 
 The schot I clossit and drew inwart in hy, 
 Chiverand for cauld, the sessoun was so snell." 8 
 
 1 Prologue vii. (Small, iii. 75-76). 2 t'6. 77. ' ib. 78.
 
 TWO MOODS 13 
 
 Thus confined indoors, and taking thought of his 
 unfinished translation, he sets to work on the 
 seventh book ; and the reader, ' repaterit weill ' 
 with this domestic realism, passes on to the high 
 matters of Turnus and Aeneas. The interest of 
 this Prologue lies not so much in the literary 
 ingenuity l as in the revelation of the intimate and 
 simple in the solemn places of scholarship. The 
 poet turns to a real world to refresh and steady his 
 eye for his next flight. That c indisputable air of 
 truth ' of which Carlyle speaks is so easily lost in 
 the ceremonious tale of gods and heroes. If some 
 of the other Prologues are critical or * artificial,' 
 they too have a tonic purpose of contrast like those 
 which are directly pictorial. We feel that we are 
 as far from Troy when he gossips of Caxton or 
 makes heavy * sport ' in his eighth Prologue, and 
 that we are always within cry of the lodging of the 
 garrulous Provost of St. Giles. 
 
 Dunbar gives like testimony. Critics in calling 
 him the * Scottish Chaucer ' and the ' Scottish 
 Skelton' hint at his formal discipleship, in his 
 Chaucerian allegory and language and his Skeltonic 
 variety of verse, to the neglect of certain stronger 
 likenesses in the directness or realistic fulness of 
 their art. There are, of course, differences, always 
 in favour of the " maister dere," but the intimacy 
 
 1 And in the echo of Henryson's opening lines of the Ttstament 
 
 of Cresseid.
 
 i 4 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 is there, and it is the Scot's own. There is the 
 tale of " gay ladies in a grene arbeir," l where the 
 persons and conversation are as real to us as to 
 Dunbar's first readers, though in their truthfulness 
 a little more scabrous to us than to that age. 
 There is the Fly ting with Kennedy, where by the 
 sheer heaping up of personalities he achieves 
 a portrait ; and there are The Tidings from the 
 Session, The Dance of the Sevin Deidlie Synnis, 
 The Turnament, and others all showing the same 
 direct manner, and all working up the picture by 
 a climax of detail. So persistent is this habit of 
 imposing word upon word and epithet on epithet, 
 that it appears even in the most artificial verse of 
 Dunbar and his fellow poets. In such a piece as 
 the following the recurrences and rhymes, though 
 individually vague or even frivolous, win for the 
 poem, by their united rush, some measure of 
 respect. 
 
 " Haile, sterne superne ! Haile in eterne, 
 
 In Goddis sicht to schyne ! 
 Lucerne in derne, for to discerne 
 
 Be glory and grace devyne ; 
 Hodiern, modern, sempitern, 
 
 Angelicall regyne ! 
 Our tern inferne for to dispern, 
 
 Helpe rialest rosyne." 2 
 
 Should research discover that these lines, and 
 others of similar structure, like Henryson's Prayer 
 
 1 The Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo. 
 
 2 An Ballat of Our Lady. 1-8.
 
 TWO MOODS 15 
 
 for the Pest, are a Scottish borrowing from some 
 medieval Ave^ we shall not be deprived of the 
 interesting fact that in this form the Scot found 
 something that suited his idiosyncrasy. 
 
 Still earlier, there is Henryson, the greatest of 
 the Makars, and most truly the ' Scottish Chaucer/ 
 if the catch-title be worth the keeping ; and 
 before him, at the beginnings of Scottish litera- 
 ture, the Archdeacon of Aberdeen ; and, between 
 and after these, minors willing to add to the 
 evidence. We must leave the Fables, with their 
 vie intime of the Town Mouse and Chanticleer, 
 and Sprutok and Pertok, and their picaresque tales 
 of Reynard and Wolf Waitskaith, and the Testa- 
 ment's picture of the leper Cresseid, and the story 
 of Orpheus's sad journey ; and we must pass by 
 the BruSy bringing with us the conviction that in 
 the crowded movement of the poem its proces- 
 sional of shining shields and basnets, "browdyn 
 baneris," "pennons upon spears" we have more 
 than a hint of the art of the later poet of Scottish 
 chivalry. 
 
 An exhaustive survey of all this material would 
 show that the completed effect of the piling up of 
 details is one of movement, suggesting the action 
 of a concerted dance or the canter of a squadron. 
 We have gone astray if we call this art merely 
 meticulous, a pedant's or cataloguer's vanity in 
 words, as some foolish persons have inclined to
 
 1 6 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 make charge against the 'antiquary 5 Scott. The 
 whole is not always lost in the parts : it is not a 
 compilation impressive only because it is greater 
 than any of its contributing elements, but often 
 single in result, and above all things lively. For 
 which reason our earlier epithet of * Dutch J must 
 be understood 4 with a difference,' if we incline to 
 think only of the careful brushwork of every tile 
 and pot-lid in an interior. The verse-forms of 
 both popular and artificial Scots poetry aid this 
 purpose of movement in the stanzas of the 
 Cherrie and the Slae, in Philotus, in some of 
 Douglas's Prologues, in Christis Kirk and Peblis 
 to the Play, in much of Burns. In the older 
 popular verse, partly cast in the mould of the 
 alliterative romance, as well as in the seventeenth 
 and eighteenth century copies, the details catch 
 each other up like dancers in a morris. 
 
 " Than thai come to the tounis end 
 
 Withouttin moir delai, 
 He befoir, and scho befoir, 
 
 To see quha wes maist gay. 
 All that lukit thame upon 
 
 Leuche fast at thair array ; 
 Sum said that thay were mercat folk, 
 Sum said the Quene of May 
 
 Wes cumit 
 To Peblis to the play." 
 
 Thus in Peblis to the Play ; so too in Christis Kirk 
 
 " To dans thir damysellis thame dicht, 
 Thir lassis licht of laitis,
 
 TWO MOODS 17 
 
 Thair gluvis wes of the raffel rycht, 
 
 Thair schone wes of the straitis ; 
 
 Thair kirtillis wes of lynkome licht, 
 
 Weill prest with mony plaitis. 
 Thay wer so nys quhen men thame nicht, 
 Thay squeilit lyk ony gaitis 
 
 So lowd 
 At Chrystis Kirk of the Grene that day." 
 
 There, surely, the swish of the skirt, the fling and 
 bob of rustic festivity! Just as in one of the 
 stanzas of the Buke of the Howlat the author 
 suggests in his elaborate account of the four 
 and twenty musical instruments an orchestral 
 effect, dying away in the short lines of the finale. 1 
 So, too, in the lively tale of Sym and his Brudir 
 and in Colkelbie's Sow the appeal to the reader is 
 in like terms the familiar crescendo of frolic, rush, 
 and noise. In the former, when the hubbub is 
 over, the poet naively makes confession of his 
 restless mood 
 
 " He endis the story with harme forlorne ; 
 The nolt begowth till skatter, 
 The ky ran startling to the corne." 
 
 There is the same motive in the recital of the 
 'tocher-gud' in the Wowing of Jok and Jynny, 
 and in the husbandman's long tale of woe in the 
 Wyf of Auchtirmuchty , where the climax is aided, 
 
 1 We may compare this with the less effective musical passage 
 in Douglas's Police of Honour, or even with Henryson's happier 
 erudition in his Orpheus, and explain the failure, in Douglas's 
 case at least, as a result of the allegorical setting. 
 
 S.L. B
 
 1 8 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 as more familiarly in the Ballads, by an ingenious 
 repetition of phrase. 1 
 
 It is this sense of movement which has done 
 something to save the Scot's zeal in observation 
 from becoming merely antiquarian and tiresome. 
 It achieves in some of the best examples that higher 
 realism in which R. L. Stevenson found " the senti- 
 ment assimilating the facts of natural congruity," 2 
 not what is suggested only by the sheer force of 
 numbers. The old saw comes to mind, "An artist 
 should learn his anatomy and forget it " ; or as 
 one has said, "Anatomy, indispensable to the 
 artist, becomes a source of all error if we forget 
 that it is inertia." 3 Criticism has concerned itself 
 too exclusively with these inert elements in Scottish 
 poetry. It has talked much of the * sense of 
 colour' and the 'feeling for nature,' but has gone 
 no further than to make an inventory of the refer- 
 ences, or to theorize very airily on the Celtic origin 
 of these likings, or, with Sydney Smith and Russell 
 Lowell, to discover in this uncouth verse the early 
 
 1 As in the ninth stanza 
 
 " Than to the kyrn that he did stoure 
 
 And jwmlit at it quhill he swatt : 
 
 Quhen he had jwmlit a full lang houre. 
 
 The sorrow crap of butter he gatt. 
 
 Albeit na butter he could gett 
 
 Yit he was cummerit with the kyrne 
 
 And syne he het the milk our hett. 
 
 And sorrow spark of it wald jyrne." 
 
 * From an unpublished letter, described and reproduced in 
 part in Maggs Bros.' Catalogue, No. 298 (Oct. 1912). 
 *A propos of the Rodin-Gsell causeries on Art.
 
 TWO MOODS 19 
 
 hints of what they might have agreed to call the 
 tedious arithmetic of the Scottish mind. 
 
 The Scottish Muse has, however, another mood. 
 Though she has loved reality, sometimes to 
 maudlin affection for the commonplace, she has 
 loved not less the airier pleasure to be found in the 
 confusion of the senses, in the fun of things thrown 
 topsyturvy, in the horns of elfland and the voices 
 of the mountains. It is a strange union of 
 opposites, alien as Hotspur and Glendower ; not 
 to be explained as if this liking for " skimble- 
 skamble stuff " l were derived from the very 
 exuberance of the poets' realism by an inevitable 
 reaction, or were a defect of its quality, or a sort 
 of saturnalian indulgence to the slaves of observa- 
 tion. The opinion, so popular with Kenan's and 
 Matthew Arnold's generation, that this whimsical 
 delight is a Celtic heritage may or may not be true, 
 but the attempt to find a source is useful as a 
 reminder that this characteristic is not a mere 
 accident, or wantoning, no matter how much of its 
 extravagance may be a direct protest against the 
 prose of experience. It goes better with our 
 knowledge of Scottish character and history to 
 accept the antagonism as real and necessary. The 
 Scot is not a quarrelsome man, but he has a fine 
 sense of the value of provocation, and in the clash 
 of things and words has often found a spiritual 
 
 1 / Hen. IV. in. i. 154 ; taken in the fullest sense.
 
 20 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 tonic. Does any other man combine so strangely 
 the severe and tender in his character, or forgo the 
 victory of the most relentless logic at the sudden 
 bidding of sentiment or superstition? Does 
 literature anywhere, of this small compass, show 
 such a mixture of contraries as his in outlook, 
 subject, and method ; real life and romance, every- 
 day fact and the supernatural, things holy and 
 things profane, gentle and simple, convention and 
 " cantrip," thistles and thistledown ? We see this 
 constitutional liking for contrasts in the old fun of 
 the fly ting, so popular in the North, in which the 
 pitting of East against West, Angle against Gael, 
 commended itself less for the roughness and 
 obscenity which an obscene taste fostered than for 
 the sheer exhilaration of conflict. We are least 
 concerned here with the plainest of all devices in 
 contrariety, that of simply reversing experience, as 
 when Swift and Voltaire make great things small 
 and small things great ; for once the convention is 
 stated and understood, everything that follows is 
 matter-of-fact. There is more in the Scottish anti- 
 thesis of the real and fantastic than is to be 
 explained by the familiar rules of rhetoric. The 
 sudden jostling of contraries seems to preclude any 
 relationship by literary suggestion. The one 
 invades the other without warning. They are the 
 4 polar twins ' l of the Scottish Muse. 
 
 1 Stevensoniana, p. 21.
 
 TWO MOODS 21 
 
 We have a modern and familiar illustration of 
 this bizarrerie in Byron's Don Juan. Everybody 
 knows the hymn to Greek liberty, but not every- 
 body, perhaps, nowadays, its setting in the poem. 
 In the description of the poet in Juan's suite, we 
 are told 
 
 " In France, for instance, he could write a chanson ; 
 
 In England a six canto quarto tale ; 
 In Spain, he'd make a ballad or romance on 
 
 The last war much the same in Portugal ; 
 In Germany, the Pegasus he'd prance on 
 
 Would be old Goethe's (see what says De Stae'l) ; 
 In Italy he'd ape the ' Trecentisti ' ; 
 In Greece he'd sing some sort of hymn like this t'ye." l 
 
 On the heels of these gibes and the flippant " this 
 t'ye" follow the familiar lines on the Isles of 
 Greece, till, at the height of patriotic fervour and 
 lyrical beauty, which still count for something to 
 Byron's faded reputation, the other Byron breaks 
 in, in contrary mood 
 
 " Thus sung, or would, or could, or should have sung 
 The modern Greek, in tolerable verse," etc. 
 
 Let us avoid the irrelevance that Byron is here 
 finding a place for a copy of verses, as Pope did 
 for his * Character of Addison ' ; or, as Jeffrey 
 appears to have thought, that he is merely throwing 
 his " cold-blooded ribaldry " into stronger relief by 
 his smooth heroics ; or, with some solemn persons, 
 that he is only showing us his poet's weakness 
 
 1 Don Juan, canto iii.
 
 22 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 and the degenerate taste he served. It is frivolous 
 to look for a deep purpose in this conjunction 
 of opposite moods, especially in a poet whom the 
 critics have singled out as ' daemonic.' These 
 moods are individual and alien, " dremis or dotage 
 in the monis cruik," x which interrupt the prose of 
 life as dreams will, in Puck's own way, and at his 
 own time. 
 
 Historians and critics of Scottish literature have 
 made scant allowance, if any, for these interruptions 
 in the plain tale of experience, even though the 
 poets themselves have given not a few hints of 
 surprise at their own change of mood and have at 
 times attempted an explanation. The author of 
 Lichtounis Dreme ends his whimsical story by 
 saying 
 
 " As wiffis commandis, this dreme I will conclude ; 
 God and the rude mot turn it all to gud 1 
 Gar fill the cop, for thir auld carlingis clames 
 That gentill aill is oft the caus of dremes ; " 
 
 just as Burns delicately ascribes Tarn's adventure 
 "wi 5 warlocks in the mirk," or the picturesque 
 harangue to Auld Cloots, to the machinations of 
 the bourgeois fairy, John Barleycorn ; 2 or as Sir 
 John Redgauntlet tells Steenie it were better to 
 lay the " haill dirdum " on * Major Weir ' and say 
 
 1 G. Douglas, A en. vi. Prol. 
 
 2 Cf . Burns's account of the Alloway Kirk stories (Letter to 
 F. Grose, in Chambers, iii. 220), especially of the shepherd boy 
 whisked off to Bordeaux. Cf. also Hogg's Witch of Fife.
 
 TWO MOODS 23 
 
 nothing about the dream in the wood of Pitmurkie, 
 as he "had taken ower muckle brandy to be very 
 certain about onything." * We are dull indeed if 
 we do not see in this reference to the contrast and 
 in its explanation a quizzing of those prosaic and 
 precise persons who must have that realism which 
 presents everything as sober fact, within an ell of 
 their noses. The poets seem to say : * Here is 
 fantasy strange enough ; if you, drunkard of facts, 
 must explain it, do so in the only way open to 
 you, or to any "auld carlin." Be satisfied, if 
 you think it is we who are drunk. As for us, 
 let the contrast be unexplained, and let us make 
 merry in this clash of strange worlds and moods.' 
 It is beside the point to hint at or deny John 
 Barleycorn's aid to the poetic imagination, and 
 unnecessary to consider the ingenious view of a 
 recent writer on Celtic literature, that bardic 
 intemperance is not the satisfying of a sordid 
 appetite but proof of the " cravings for the illusion 
 of an unreal world." 2 
 
 We have probably lost much of the evidence of 
 this delight in the grotesque and uncanny, for these 
 things are not the decorous tasks of copyists or of 
 poets printing for posterity. Yet enough remains. 
 It is interesting, for example, to note that when 
 
 1 Redgauntlet, Letter xi. 
 
 * The Literature of the Scottish Gael, by the Rev. Donald Mac- 
 lean, 1912, p. 50.
 
 24 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 each of the greater Middle Scots Makars doffs the 
 ceremonial robes required by the courtly Muse 
 and takes his ease in his own inn, he turns to 
 alliterative burlesque and the wonderland of Gog 
 Magog and the fairies. Lyndsay reminds us that 
 he cheered his young master the prince, when he 
 was ' sorye,' with the prophecies of Thomas the 
 Rhymer and Merlin and such < pleasant stories ' as 
 the Red Etin and the Gyre Carling x the last 
 sheer skimble-skamble, telling of Blasour's love 
 for a witch who defied his army of moles and beat 
 him badly, and, when the King of Faery with his 
 elves and all the dogs from Dunbar to Dunblane 
 and all the tykes of Tervey laid siege to her tower, 
 changed herself into a sow and went " gruntling 
 our the Greik Sie " ; of her marriage to Mahoun, 
 and of Scotland's distress, so that the cocks of 
 Cramond ceased to crow and the hens of Hadding- 
 ton to lay. The tale of King Berdok is better 
 nonsense. This " great King of Babylon," who in 
 summer dwelt on a " bowkaill stock " (cabbage 
 runt) and in winter retired for warmth to a cockle- 
 shell, had wooed for seven years Mayok, " the golk 
 of Maryland," who was "but yeiris thre." He 
 set out to ravish this " bony bird," who, though she 
 had but one eye, was loved by him, " for hir foirfute 
 was langer than hir heill." He found her milking 
 her mother's cows, and cast her into a creel on his 
 
 1 The Dreme, ed. Laing, i., p. 2.
 
 TWO MOODS 25 
 
 back. When he returned, his burden was but a 
 " howlat nest, full of skait birdis : " so he wept, and 
 ran back for his love. But in vain, for the King 
 of Faery was out with his many, and Berdok hid 
 himself within a kiln. On this refuge the King, 
 with the aid of the Kings of the Picts and of 
 Portugal, Naples, and Strathnaver, trained his guns 
 and showered bullets of dough. Jupiter invoked 
 father Saturn to save the amorous Berdok by 
 transforming him to a toad, but Mercury gave him 
 the shape of a bracken bush. 
 
 " And quhen thay saw the buss waig to and fra, 
 Thay trowd it wes ane gaist, and thay to ga." 
 
 Lichtoun, at one stage of his dream- journey, sails 
 in a barge of draff to Paradise, " the place where 
 Adam was," and, as he enters the port, sees Enoch 
 and Eli 
 
 " Sittand, on Yule euin, in ane fresch grene schaw, 
 Rostand straberries at ane fyre of snaw ; " 
 
 and later, at the blowing of an 'elrich home,* 
 beholds, besides other * ferlies,' three white whales, 
 tied by grasshoppers' hairs in a meadow. Of the 
 ghost of Lord Fergus, which another anonymous 
 writer seeks to lay with extravagant ritual, it is 
 said that 
 
 " It stall Goddis quhittill ; 
 It stall fra peteous Abrahame 
 Ane quhorle and ane quhum quhame ;
 
 26 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 It stall fra the carle of the mone 
 Ane pair of awld yrn schone ; 
 It ran to Pencaitlane 
 And wirreit ane awld chaplane." 
 
 In the Littill Interlud, ascribed to Dunbar, the 
 dwarf sketches his giant grandsire Gog Magog, 
 who, when he danced, made the world * schog,' and 
 
 " wald upoun his tais up stand 
 And tak the starnis doun with his hand, 
 And set thame in a gold garland 
 
 Aboif his wyvis hair." * 
 
 And in Dunbar's short fantasy of Kynd Kittok we 
 have the story of a gay wife who, having died of 
 thirst and taken the highway to heaven, wandered 
 by an * elriche well,' where she met a newt riding 
 on a snail, 
 
 " And cryit, ' Ourtane, fallow, haill ! ' 
 And raid ane inche behind the taill, 
 Till it wes neir evin ; " 
 
 of the tedium of her heavenly task as Our Lady's 
 henwife ; and of her escape to enjoy once more the 
 lower delights of inn-keeping. When the poet 
 concludes, wantonly 
 
 " Frendis, I pray you hertfully, 
 Git ye be thirsty or dry, 
 Drink with my guddame, as ye ga by, 
 Anys for my saik," 
 
 we seem to catch the sentiment, even the turn of 
 phrase, of Burns's Addtess to the Deil. Of 
 
 1 Cf . Byron's Vision of Judgment, st. 2, for another astronomical 
 hyperbole.
 
 TWO MOODS 27 
 
 ' ugsum horribilities ' and of the doings of sprites 
 like Inflar Tasyand Belly Bassy in Sir John Rowll's 
 Cursing, there are examples enough ; so too of 
 that gentler topsyturvy humour, with its nursery- 
 note, as in the * Dreg-song' and 'When I was a 
 wee thing' preserved for us in Herd's MS. 1 
 With these and many other passages in mind, we 
 see that the Scottish Muse, expert as she is in life's 
 realities, has, like Burns's ' douce honest woman,' 
 her moments when she hears the rustling of strange 
 things " thro' the bourtrees comin'." " The Lord 
 guide us," we may say with Mistress Baby in the 
 Pirate, 2 " what kind of a country of guisards and 
 gyre-carlines is this! " 
 
 The consideration of this second element and 
 of its contrasted character has generally been 
 narrowed down to argument about its Celtic origin. 
 The problem does not press on us as it did upon 
 Renan and Matthew Arnold, and the latter' s plea 
 for the Celt is, in spite of its abiding elegance of 
 exposition, not so convincing as it was, even to the 
 most partisan. While we are willing to' make 
 some allowance for the influence of locality and the 
 mixing of races, and to find Scottish instance for 
 the Irish commonplace about Norman settlers ipsis 
 Hibernis hiberniores, we must take account of 
 certain stubborn facts. In the first place, it is hard 
 
 1 ed. 1904, pp. 190 and 188. 
 * Chapter vi.
 
 28 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 to find traces of this whimsical quality in the extant 
 literature of the Scottish Gael, in the book of the 
 Dean of Lismore, in the Ossianic corpus, or in 
 the oral traditions collected by Campbell of Islay. 
 There we have persistent evidence of a lively talent 
 for observation and of some cunning in obtaining 
 general effects by the device of massing details ; 
 and in many passages which cannot be so described 
 where the mists of Morven often descend most 
 provokingly upon the poet the characteristic 
 Celtic touch is merely impressionist, not shirking 
 the use of detail, either directly or fantastically, but 
 omitting what is of lesser importance and leaving 
 the reader to complete the picture. Here is a 
 short Finn poem, for illustration 
 
 "A tale here for you: oxen lowing, winter's 
 snowing, summer's passing ; wind from the 
 North, high and cold, low the sun and short his 
 course, wildly tossing the wave of the sea. The 
 fern burns deep red. Men wrap themselves 
 closely. The wild goose raises her wonted cry; 
 cold seizes the wing of the bird ; 'tis the season 
 of ice ; sad my tale ! " l 
 
 In the second place, we must not forget that Old 
 English literature, especially of the * Riddle } kind, 
 is streaked with this vein ; and thirdly, that the 
 long-continuing antagonism of racial elements and 
 areas down to a late period makes against a theory 
 of ready absorption, and more clearly in the North 
 
 1 Nutt, Ossian and the Ossianic Literature, 1899, p. 9.
 
 TWO MOODS 29 
 
 than in Wales. Even in the case of the latter we 
 have grown suspicious of Arnold's conclusions. 
 His argument means little more than this : given 
 one quality which is to all appearance unlike 
 another admittedly characteristic of a people, it 
 may, must, and does come from an outside source ; 
 given a spiritual lightness and vivacity in the dull, 
 heavy, practical genius of Teutonic England, it 
 must have come from the Celts. We ask for 
 proof ; indeed, we decline to think it capable of 
 proof, when we are told that the richest gifts are a 
 sense of colour, an appreciation of natural effects, 
 and other aptitudes, all of which are the ordinary 
 talents and tools in the realist's workshop. 
 
 Were any distinctions in this general denial of 
 Celtic indebtedness worth making in this connexion, 
 we might be tempted to say that the Welsh 
 evidence, on which current opinion mainly rests, is 
 less convincing than that of the Scottish Gaelic, and 
 that the latter only commends itself when it shows 
 some direct touch with Irish Gaelic. The plausible 
 affiliation with Cymric fancy, as illustrated in the 
 tale of Kilhwch and Olwen in the Mabinogion, 
 discloses nothing more than the familiar device of 
 hyperbole. Drem can see the gnat rising with the 
 sun in far-off Cornwall l and Clust hears the ant 
 fifty miles off rustling from her nest. 2 When the 
 bard tells us that Gwevyl in his sad moods "let 
 1 ed. Nutt, p. no. a ib., p. 113.
 
 30 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 one of his lips drop below his waist, while he 
 turned up the other like a cap upon his head," 
 and that Hornyhead was wont " to go upon his 
 head to save his feet," like "a rolling stone upon 
 the floor of the court," 2 we smoke an old jest 
 which involves no bardic mystery. In such 
 passages there is little, if any, parodic intention. 
 In Irish, on the other hand, the evidence is not so 
 negative, even if we have to confine ourselves to 
 the rather exceptional Vision of MacConglinne. 3 
 Description like that in the Feast of Bricriu of 
 Cuchulainn's straining to heave the feast-house to 
 its upright position is only hyperbolic. " He tried 
 to lift the house at a tug and failed. A distortion 
 thereupon got hold of him, whilst a drop of blood 
 was at the root of each single hair, and he absorbed 
 his hair into his head, so that, looked on from 
 above, his dark-yellow curls seemed as if they had 
 been shorn by scissors : and, taking upon him the 
 motion of a mill-stone, he strained himself till a 
 warrior's foot could find room between each pair 
 of ribs." 4 The fun of Guzzledom of Fluxy, 
 son of Elcab the Fearless, from the Fairy-knoll of 
 Eating, 5 and of Bacon-lad, son of Butter-lad, son 
 of Lard, with his leggings of pot-meat and tunic 
 of corned beef, and his steed of bacon with its 
 1 ed. Nutt, p. 112. ib. t p. 104. ed. Meyer, 1892. 
 
 * T * F'"*t of Bricriu, transl. by George Henderson, Irish 
 Terti Society, ii. p. 33. 
 
 Vision of MacConglinne, p. 74.
 
 TWO MOODS 31 
 
 four legs of custard l is nothing but a straight- 
 forward tale of Cockayne. Once the premisses are 
 admitted, we know what to expect. There is little 
 or nothing of the wantonness of grotesque, the 
 curious turns and contradictions and general chaos 
 of sense, all expressed within narrow limits. It has 
 been pointed out, in reference to the Irish influence 
 on Welsh story-telling, that the peculiar Celtic 
 * note ' consists in the " vivid contrast between the 
 realism of the introductory framework " of certain 
 pieces and the " fantastic gorgeousness " of dream- 
 passages interpolated. 2 When we turn to the tale 
 which suggested this comment we find that it has 
 no bearing on our present purpose. Rhonabwy 
 falls asleep and dreams that " he journeyed and 
 heard a mighty noise, the like whereof heard he 
 never before ; and looking behind him, he beheld 
 a youth with yellow curling hair, and with his beard 
 newly trimmed, mounted on a chestnut horse, 
 whereof the legs were grey from the top of the 
 forelegs, and from the bend of the hind legs down- 
 wards. And the rider wore a coat of yellow satin 
 sewn with green silk, and on his thigh was a gold- 
 hiked sword, with a scabbard of new leather of 
 Cordova, belted with the skin of the deer, and 
 clasped with gold. And over this was a scarf of 
 yellow satin wrought with green silk,, the borders 
 whereof were likewise green. And the green of 
 
 1 ib., p. 88. 2 Mabinogion, ed. Nutt, pp. 346-7.
 
 32 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 the caparison of the horse, and of his rider, was as 
 green as the leaves of the fir-tree, and the yellow 
 was as yellow as the blossom of the broom " 
 and so on, in sober recital of a thousand details. 
 It is a very methodical knight this Rhonabwy, 
 dreaming and waking ; and we miss the promised 
 contrasts, such as come to us in the Vision of a 
 poet of a less golden age, when, sitting by the 
 ingle-cheek, "fill'd wi' hoast-provoking smeek," 
 
 and hearing 
 
 " the restless rattons squeak 
 About the riggin," 
 
 he saw the cottage door open to the " outlandish 
 hizzie" from dreamland. 2 
 
 It may be that the lowland Muse has learnt 
 something from the Muse of Erscherie in her 
 Galloway and Ayrshire haunts, as neighbours will ; 
 but, as neighbourhood often provokes criticism, it 
 might not be too fantastic on our part, were the 
 borrowing to be taken for granted, to see in the 
 more complicated grotesques of the borrower an 
 element of conscious parody rather than a family 
 tradition. If it be hard to admit borrowing in 
 the more patent habit of language, 3 it becomes a 
 
 1 Mabinogion, U.S., p. 149. * Burns, The Vision. 
 
 As, with Sir James Murray, that the Scot's roundabout way 
 of stating a question is a Gaelic fashion ; or, with others, that the 
 Ulsterman's emphasis of reply (" Dud you do it ? " " I dud ") 
 discloses association with a people who have no " Yes " in their 
 language. And if, on the other hand, it be beyond doubt that 
 the initial ' f ' f or ' hw ' or ' wh ' in the dialects of Aberdeen and
 
 TWO MOODS 33 
 
 hopeless task in the analysis of literary faculty. 
 Even if any evidence were available to those on 
 whom the onus of proof at present rests, we should 
 be loath to surrender the opinion that opposites and 
 contrasts in an individual or literature are, more 
 often than not, original and constitutional in that 
 individual or literature, and that neither of the 
 contraries may be imposed from without. To 
 separate the contrasts in character, as Scott, with 
 the licence of the novelist and of his age, has done 
 in his chapters on Saxon and Norman, or Arnold 
 in his Essay, is to place the obverse of a coin in one 
 bag and the reverse in another. 
 
 It may not appear unreasonable to lay this 
 emphasis on the contrariety in northern literary 
 mood, especially as certain conditions, or accidents, 
 in the later national development, to be glanced at 
 later, 1 too readily obscure the second element and 
 leave the Muse the narrower reputation of being 
 painfully concerned with the Annals of the Five 
 Senses. Even if it be said that much of this 
 skimble-skamble is but the stuff of dreams which 
 engages the irresponsible hours of the slowest 
 minds, or if the humorous excuses of Lichtoun, 
 and Burns himself, be taken literally, it would 
 be worth noting that the Scot, the methodical, level- 
 
 of a portion of County Wexford, comes from contact with the 
 Gael, we do not forget the special ' borderland ' circumstances 
 of the Highland Line and the English Pale. 
 1 See Chapter ii. 
 S.L. c
 
 34 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 headed, self-conscious creature of popular tradition, 
 has so far forgotten his conventional manner as to 
 make confession of these disordered moments. 
 For the * douce ' travesty which stands for the Scot 
 with the general never says as much as he thinks : 
 he is a mute philosopher on warlocks, and as calm 
 as a country Sabbath-morn on the cantrips of his 
 mind. 1 But he is not the Scot who steps forth self- 
 confessed in the Makars old and new, despite the 
 accidents or * thwarts ' of history which stayed, or 
 appear to stay, the freer play of his fancy. 
 
 This mixing of contraries c intermingledons,' 
 to recall Burns's word 2 helps to explain the pre- 
 sence of certain qualities which have come to be 
 considered as characteristic of Scottish literature. 
 In the first place, it throws some light on that talent 
 for the picturesque so generally allowed to northern 
 writers. And what is the picturesque, in spite 
 of the cheapening of the term in the market- 
 place, but the quality which, as Hazlitt tells us, 3 
 " depends chiefly on the principle of discrimination 
 and contrast" and "runs imperceptibly into the 
 fantastical and grotesque " ? In other words, in its 
 exercise and effect it does not show mere sensitive- 
 ness to fact, with or without the art of intensifying 
 
 He was even a Scot (the poet Campbell) who thought that 
 Burns was -the most un-Scotch-like of Scotchmen," because he 
 was so free m confession to the world. 
 
 1 See his letter to Mrs. Dunlop, 22nd August, 1792. 
 
 Table Talk. 1819, pp. 448-449.
 
 TWO MOODS 35 
 
 and completing the impression by the heaping-up 
 of details. Scottish literature is not so placid. 
 If we neglect its more striking or astonishing 
 extravagances, we have to account for that pre- 
 vailing sense of movement, that energy and variety, 
 call it what we like, that stirs even its most narra- 
 tive mood. If a formula is to be found it must 
 explain this strange combination of things unlike, 
 of things seen in an everyday world and things 
 which, like the elf-queen herself, neither earth 
 nor heaven will claim. This mingling, even of 
 the most eccentric kind, is an indication to us 
 that the Scot, in that medieval fashion which takes 
 all things as granted, is at his ease in both * rooms 
 of life,' and turns to fun, and even profanity, with 
 no misgivings. For Scottish literature is more 
 medieval in habit than criticism has suspected, 
 and owes some part of its picturesque strength to 
 this freedom in passing from one mood to another. 
 It takes some people more time than they can spare 
 to see the absolute propriety of a gargoyle's 
 grinning at the elbow of a kneeling saint. 1 
 
 In the second place, the recognition of these 
 
 1 In an article in the Times, of loth Dec., 1912, on the first 
 exhibition of the Society of Humorous Art in London, the writer 
 finds evidence of the weakness of contemporary pictorial fun 
 in the work of Charles Keene, who " will often place an incon- 
 gruously beautiful and serious landscape behind two low-comedy 
 figures." And he had no Scottish blood to excuse the folly ! 
 ' Scientific ' criticism may have something to say about his having 
 learned to play the bagpipes so well.
 
 36 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 opposites must modify some popular views, even 
 among Scotsmen, about the element of humour in 
 Scottish literature humour in its most inclusive 
 sense, not mere " wut " (of the " jocose " kind) or 
 rough fun. We may assent to Lamb's tale of 
 " imperfect sympathy " with the Caledonian whose 
 " Minerva is born in panoply," whose ideas " do 
 not grow," who " never hints or suggests anything, 
 but unlades his stock of ideas in perfect order and 
 completeness." We know that Scot as well as they 
 did at the India House, though even he has been 
 misjudged a little. We have met him in railway 
 carriages and at foreign Universities, but rarely in 
 northern writing, except in the polemical tracts of 
 the seventeenth century or other documents as 
 unliterary in pretence. In that Scot there is, in 
 Lamb's phrase, "no borderland within." He 
 dwells far from Huntlie Bank, where we shall find 
 our poet, if he be not on seven years' leave in the 
 land of mystery. If logic keeps this solemn person 
 from being caught in the druid's mist, it denies 
 him the secrets of humour and pathos, and an 
 understanding companionship with the poets he is 
 always ready to praise. 
 
 In the third place, we seem to find some con- 
 nexion between this double mood and the easy 
 passing in Scottish literature between the natural 
 and supernatural, as if in challenge to the tradi- 
 tional exclusiveness of certain subjects, each within
 
 TWO MOODS 37 
 
 its own caste. Here, again, we call to mind the 
 preaching and arguing Scot of the seventeenth 
 century, who placed impossible barriers to the 
 poet's free passage from the one to the other ; and 
 the neo-classical Scot of the eighteenth century, 
 who, while admitting that on occasion the super- 
 natural and natural might have, as it were, a 
 drawing-room introduction, had no desire to pro- 
 mote their closer acquaintance. Neither of these 
 attitudes represents the true feeling of Scottish 
 literature, which at all periods has shown a readi- 
 ness not only to accept the contrary moods more or 
 less on equal terms, but to make the one blend 
 imperceptibly into the other. Coleridge has shown 
 this as convincingly as any English writer, not so 
 much by direct critical argument as by the inter- 
 woven magic and reality of his verse. His gentle 
 association of the two elements, so unlike the 
 cumbrous coupling by many of his * romantic ' 
 contemporaries, was one of his great aids to the 
 poetic enlightenment of the nineteenth century. 
 We find a like quality in a northern poet of 
 his time, the Ettrick Shepherd ; but in him its 
 interest is less individual. We strike, as it were, 
 upon a vein, which had been worked before and 
 would be later. Hogg, with pardonable egotism, 
 when comparing himself with Scott, claimed that 
 he was " king of the mountain and fairy school," 
 and we cannot, with the elfin music of Kilmeny in
 
 38 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 our ears, dispute the self-appreciation, even though 
 compelled to admit that in the Shepherd's work 
 there is so much of the local and of the earth 
 earthy. That the Hogg of this verse, sticky with 
 the mud of Mitchelslacks, the writer of veterinary 
 prose on Diseases of Sheep, should be a Pilgrim to 
 the Sun and hold fairyland in fee has almost turned 
 some critics to a belief in miracles, to the forgetting 
 of all the inspired moments which have come to 
 simple folk from Caedmon's days to ours. The 
 true miracle, if so must be the word, of the 
 Shepherd's art is the way in which we pass without 
 a hint of change from the land of real men and 
 women to that other, as we might do from one 
 parish to another on an afternoon's walk. His lost 
 Kilmeny returns as unexpectedly, but as gently, as 
 she went. Like his lark, she is of earth and sky. 
 There is no wrench, no lumbering change of 
 scenery when the stage harlequin has waved his wand. 
 
 " When many a day had come and fled, 
 When grief grew calm and hope was dead, 
 When mass for Kilmeny's soul had been sung, 
 When the beadsmen had prayed and the dead-bell 
 
 rung, 
 
 Late, late in a gloamin, when all was still, 
 When the fringe was red on the westlin' hill, 
 The wood was sere, the moon i* the wane, 
 The reek o* the cot hung over the plain 
 Like a little wee cloud in the world its lane ; 
 When the ingle lowed with an eiry leme, 
 Late, late in the gloamin Kilmeny came hame."
 
 TWO MOODS 39 
 
 The cottage calm is unbroken ; there are no strange 
 lights in the west at this home-coming. Kilmeny 
 floats into her mother's ken; returns to her a real 
 child, to be asked in natural and kindly curiosity 
 about her truant doings and the gift of her skirt 
 of lily sheen and her bonny snood. Again in the 
 poem, after the tale of her fairy-life is told, and 
 she has * raiked J the lonely glen and tamed beast 
 and bird by her beauty and innocence, 
 
 " There laid her down on the leaves so green, 
 And Kilmeny on earth was never mair seen ! " 
 
 Hogg guides us back to Tamlane, once popular 
 in his Ettrick Forest, and Thomas Rymer, and 
 others, both Border ballad and Makars' verse. It 
 is of no moment what any one of these may owe 
 to predecessors, for the most deliberate pastiche is 
 testimony to this sensitiveness * to the twilight of 
 earth and fairyland. Down to "our own day there 
 has been continuous witness, in all types of the 
 literary Scot. We see the elements combined in 
 the work of the greatest of the moderns, as hum- 
 drum Edinburgh lawyers saw it in their neighbour 
 * Sprite ' and Samoans in their loved Tusitala. 
 We see it in one who, though scholar, researcher, 
 bibliographer as pleased to be Gifford lecturer 
 as Stevenson would have been to be Professor of 
 Constitutional History is remembered as our chief 
 Fairy-book maker. Of him the creator of Peter 
 1 On the dulling of this, see Chapter ii.
 
 40 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 Pan has said : " Mr. Lang was as Scotch as peat. . . . 
 He thought Mr. Lang always puzzled the Sassenach 
 a little. That was one of the duties of the Scot. 
 He was so prodigal of his showers of gold and so 
 wayward. There was a touch of the elf about 
 him. A * touch' hardly seemed quite right, 
 because one could never touch him he was too 
 elusive for that. The same could be said of 
 Stevenson. No doubt if Scotland were searched 
 long enough it would be found that there were 
 others. It was perhaps a Scottish quality." 1 And 
 what say the Auld Lichts to the capers of this 
 Peter and his whimsical friends within hearing of 
 the kirk-session of Thrums ? 
 
 So it has fallen out with Scottish literature, as 
 Burns tells us it fell out with his art, that it has 
 been cared for by fairies, and brownies, and witches, 
 and warlocks, and spunkies, and kelpies " and 
 other trumpery," he adds, 2 with a Scot's privilege 
 and a Scottish meaning. So, too, this literature 
 has satisfied that " first condition of the poetic way 
 of seeing and presenting things " which is, in 
 Pater's phrase, " particularisation " and " the 
 delight in concrete definition." 3 Contraries 
 indeed, but as warp and woof. 
 
 1 The Times, zgth Nov., 1912. 
 
 1 Letter to Dr. Moore, 2nd Aug., 1787. 
 
 3 Appreciations, p. 231.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 LETS AND HINDRANCES 
 
 A LITERATURE so attracted by the intimacies of 
 life and so fancy-free runs some risk of exaggerating 
 its enthusiasms. As the range is narrowed in 
 times of lesser account, art becomes more emphatic 
 and retrospective, and what was once spontaneous 
 or even occasional in interest is made a badge of 
 * nationality.' Somehow we feel, as our acquain- 
 tance with Scottish literature grows, that the 
 promise of its combined moods is not generously 
 fulfilled, except in a few instances ; that by lets and 
 hindrances, partly of its own making, partly the 
 tyranny of circumstance, it has been thrown back 
 upon itself and has become too domestic or 
 irresponsible. It is not difficult to see that, though 
 strong external forces interrupted the development, 
 not a little of the loss was, as it were, the effect of 
 inbreeding. We are not likely to obscure the 
 investigation by discussing these internal condi- 
 tions before the ' foreign ' influences, which may be 
 said to be the first cause of the throwing back. The 
 
 41
 
 42 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 effect of the attacks from without was, in general, 
 not so much the intrusion of alien ideas, as the 
 curtailment of opportunities- the cutting off of 
 territory rather than the planting of strange 
 standards on the citadel. The later native habit 
 is directly related to the older. It would have 
 been found in freer conditions, had there been no 
 interference by the * foreigner > ; in its narrower 
 setting it appears to be intensified, or, from another 
 point of view, degenerate. 
 
 The Scottish Muse has been charged with three 
 breaches of * decorum,' each serious enough to 
 damn her higher hopes of Parnassus. She has 
 been called provincial, by which is meant no mere 
 contrast with English or other standards, but a 
 certain frumpishness or village-habit that goes 
 badly with her national pretence. It has been said 
 of her that often in taste and language she shows an 
 unblushing defiance of the gender graces and the 
 proprieties. She has been blamed for being 
 tediously reminiscent of family matters and neigh- 
 bour-folk, of living too much in the past and in 
 her own past. Briefly, the indictment is that she 
 is provincial (even parochial), rough-mannered, and 
 antiquarian. 
 
 The charge of provincialism recalls a quarrel now 
 a generation old. When Matthew Arnold in his 
 Introduction to a popular anthology of the English 
 Poets made survey from his trigonometric base of
 
 LETS AND HINDRANCES 43 
 
 * criticism of life,' he took particular care to check 
 some Scottish miscalculations of Burns's genius. 
 He found much that was reasonable in the general 
 estimate, but he thought the verse has too often 
 the taint of the provincial and local. It "deals 
 perpetually with Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and 
 Scotch manners " so we are told, four times in 
 one paragraph. If it have " truth of matter and 
 truth of manner," it lacks the " high seriousness," 
 the "accent or the poetic virtue of the highest 
 masters." Ruskin, in the same year, 1 when refer- 
 ring to the fourth stanza of Death and Dr. Horn- 
 book, concluded that "for Burns the moon must 
 rise over Cumnock hills " ; and Henley, in the 
 calm of a footnote to a famous effort in frankness 
 (1896), held that most of the poems are local, 
 "parochial even," that in Holy Willie and the 
 Holy Fair, for example, " the circumstances, the 
 manners, the characters, the experience, all are 
 local." 2 Such agreement by three English critics 
 must command respectful consideration, for on all 
 questions as to how the universal appeal of an 
 artist is affected by the parochial and petty, the 
 alien has perhaps the better right to speak. Yet 
 it is strange that they should have found this dis- 
 turbing element in Burns, who, of all poets, has 
 
 1 Fiction, Fair and Foul, iii., in Nineteenth Century, Sept., 1880 ; 
 Works, ed. Cook and Wedderburn, xxxiv. 331. 
 
 2 Edition of Burns, iv. 274.
 
 44 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 laid hold of the universal, and, in winning the 
 world's favour, has overcome the barrier of dialect. 
 Arnold's position was soon attacked and turned, 
 and it is not necessary to add much to what the late 
 Professor Nichol said in his Life of the poet 1 
 about the critic's confounding of " provincialism in 
 themes and provincialism in thought." If " pro- 
 vincialism" means anything, it is, as our Oxford 
 authority has it, " narrowness of view, thought, or 
 interests, roughness of speech or manners, as 
 distinct from the polish of court or capital." The 
 roughness of speech, that is the dialect, has been 
 condoned, even allowed to be an aid where the 
 curial speech must fail. Of narrowness of view, 
 even Matthew Arnold would have made no com- 
 plaint. What he appears to hint at is the studied 
 and unflagging realism of Burns's work, the ab- 
 sence of the abstract and of the mist of romance. 
 This is an unexpected misliking on the part of 
 one to whom, both as poet and critic, classicism 
 meant so much. For, as one has laid it down, 
 " Romance . . . there was none in Burns 'tis the 
 sole point, perhaps, at which he was out of touch 
 with the unrenowned generations whose flower and 
 crown he was." 2 His is that classical quality, the 
 perfection of the acquisitive power which misses 
 nothing, feels directly and fully, and, as in the 
 greater of the ancients, attains the absolute by its 
 
 1 1882. Henley's Essay. Burns, iv. 332.
 
 LETS AND HINDRANCES 45 
 
 very precision in the real. The moon may rise 
 over Cumnock and cast familiar shadows of Ayr- 
 shire lairds and weavers. What of that? If 
 Afton Water were to meander by Parnassus and 
 Alloway Kirk were a temple of the Great God 
 Pan, we should not be one whit less distracted 
 we might be more than we are by the trans- 
 cendent realism of this modern. 
 
 But if this be true of Burns, what shall we say 
 of others, and of Scottish literature generally? 
 There, and especially in the later period, in the 
 ingle-pathos and tavern-fun, even amid the most 
 artificial sentimentalism, the free appeal is certainly 
 hampered by * parochial ' claims. There is no 
 denying the fact that the Scot seldom strays far 
 from the village-pump and the familiar gable-ends. 
 Nor is this surprising, when we find the habit of 
 intimacy so engrained in the literary character ; nor 
 strange that it should be exaggerated in the special 
 conditions of modern Scotland. A small country, 
 made guardian of its own destinies, runs the risk, 
 by the sheer energy and success of its self-reliance, 
 of finding an ever-growing satisfaction in the 
 things that lie at hand and are familiar. The Scot 
 may be a great wanderer, may accommodate him- 
 self readily to new ways, may even be completely 
 endenized in a foreign civilization ; but the Scot 
 at home, accepting circumstance with like readiness, 
 busies himself, happily enough, with the tasks of
 
 46 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 neighbourhood and gossipry imposed by a rigorous 
 tradition. There is another consideration, savour- 
 ing a little of paradox, that the exceptional and 
 envied advantages which Scotland has enjoyed 
 from her educational system have been obstacles to 
 her artistic enlargement. It has often been pointed 
 out, in reference to the Scot's unique method of 
 honouring Burns's genius, that the training of the 
 national intellect, even in the humblest classes, has 
 given him a wider public than has fallen to the lot 
 of poets of other peoples. Though it may be said 
 that this would not have availed much had Burns 
 not shown the talent of giving his countrymen just 
 what they liked best, it must not be forgotten 
 that his audience was unusually receptive. This 
 appreciation enhanced the reputation of individual 
 poets and created a currency of song and jest, but 
 it did not extend the range of literary interest. 
 That there were so many practitioners ready for 
 the work brought conviction that the old matters 
 and the old method were still unexhausted ; and 
 emulation and neighbourly pride encouraged self- 
 satisfaction. The narrow discipline of this culture 
 hardly allowed even the most daring spirits to 
 venture afield in search of that * long perspective ' 
 which Keats claimed as by right for the poet's 
 exercise. Had Burns's genius not been so 
 great, he too might have been no more than a 
 pleasant annalist of village sentiment. Yet the
 
 LETS AND HINDRANCES 47 
 
 completeness of his own triumph has probably done 
 more than we can estimate in confirming his suc- 
 cessors, great and small, in their liking for the 
 intimate genre, and, in the changed circumstance 
 of later Scotland, has given the excuse for a literary 
 affectation in verse-making. 
 
 If we are asked to point to the more obvious 
 effects of this habit in Scottish literature, we do 
 not hesitate to fix on its patriotic cast and its 
 domesticity. Of the former it is always difficult, 
 if not dangerous to speak. An alien, if he is wise, 
 will not meddle in this matter, however reasonably 
 he may protest that an unprejudiced eye sees better 
 how overstrained enthusiasm stands in the way 
 of a poet's recognition in the commonwealth of 
 great literature. Even the Scot, unsuspected of 
 treason, may feel that academic refinement is here 
 unwelcome ; yet he may go in safety, if he restricts 
 himself to the historical observation, that in the 
 earlier stages of the literature the appeal to national 
 sentiment is always in general terms, and that in 
 the period of high achievement which has been 
 called the "Golden Age of Scottish Poetry" this 
 appeal is almost entirely absent. Though history 
 shows that there was no lack of nationalism of the 
 more generous kind as far back as Scottish litera- 
 ture can go, and no lack of verse-chronicle of the 
 deeds of Roy Robert and other champions, we 
 must remember that in the Scotland of James IV.
 
 48 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 national confidence never expressed itself as in 
 Henry V.'s or Elizabeth's England. We do not 
 find such utterance till we come to the time of 
 the Complaynt of Scotlande, and then rather pro- 
 testingly, and sadly than defiantly. Not till nearly 
 two centuries later is it clear that the perfervid 
 genius has grown superlative, praefervidissimum, 
 in praise of all things native. This could not well 
 be avoided, especially after the chaos of the seven- 
 teenth century, and during the revival in the 
 eighteenth. It is a curious speculation that in the 
 great times the Muse was so shy, and that only in 
 more comfortable modern days, and then partly by 
 way of protest against ennui and the formal pipings 
 of the Strephons, did Scotland discover that 
 patriotic fervour which we know. Since which 
 time the Royal Lion has ramped very bravely 
 within his tressure, as the royal beast should ; and, 
 let us add, long may he do so. Nevertheless, later 
 Scots have done some wrong to his dignity and to 
 their own, by trundling him round for the enter- 
 tainment of the vulgar. In this literary cara- 
 vaning, and by pistolling and pokering, it would 
 not be strange if he lost something of his old spirit. 
 Scots may consent more willingly to the charge 
 of domesticity. It is characteristic of northern 
 poetry at all times. The older poets, when not 
 busily narrative, or allegorical, or playing the 
 courtier for an unpaid pension, are homely persons.
 
 LETS AND HINDRANCES 49 
 
 They seldom take us out of earshot of Rauf's 
 rumbling cart, or Colkelbie's sow, or the * flyting ' 
 tongues of country dames, or the fun of the farm, 
 more or less savoury than in the * midden-fight ' 
 ascribed to the elegant author of Cypress Grove. 
 Clear as this is in the earlier literature, it is certainly 
 a 'dominant humour' since Allan Ramsay's day. 
 His nymphs are Maggy Johnstoun and Lucky 
 Wood ; and Parnassus lies very near Bruntsfield 
 Links. His Gentle Shepherd and his shorter 
 pastoral efforts like Richy and Sandy show how 
 ill he carries his artifice : as in this opening 
 dialogue : 
 
 " RICHY. 
 
 What gars thee look sae dowf, dear Sandy, say ? 
 Cheer up, dull fellow, take thy reed and play 
 1 My apron deary,' or some wanton tune. 
 Be merry lad, and keep thy heart aboon. 
 
 SANDY. 
 
 Na, na, it winna do ; leave me to mane. 
 
 This aught days twice o'er tell'd I'll whistle nane. 
 
 RICHY. 
 
 Wow, man, that's unco' sad 1 Is't that ye'r jo 
 Hes ta'en the strunt ? Or has some bogle-bo, 
 Glowerin' frae 'mang auld waws, gi'en ye a fleg ? 
 Or has some dauted wedder broke his leg ? 
 
 SANDY. 
 
 Naithing like that, sic troubles eith were borne : 
 What's bogles, wedders, or what Mausy's scorn ? 
 Our loss is meikle mair, and past remeid : 
 Adie, that play'd and sang sae sweet, is dead." 
 S.L. D
 
 50 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 As we read verses like these, and gather that here 
 Richy is Dick Steele, that Sandy is Pope, and that 
 Adie is not a threepenny piper, but, of all people, 
 Addison, we turn for relief to the Shepherd's 
 Calendar and think of Spenser's * decorum * in 
 his disguisings of contemporaries. It is not 
 difficult to see that it is Ramsay's domestic style 
 which denies him the secret of the pastoral. He 
 set a bad example, at a critical time, but he had no 
 strong following. We might wish that he had had 
 more disciples, for a surfeit of this stuff might 
 have helped Scotland to some change in poetic fare. 
 Dialect was, of course, a determining factor. 1 It 
 has probably done more than any other in pre- 
 serving the cast of intimacy in Scottish verse down 
 to our own day ; and, encouraged by the excuse that 
 it is often more expressive and suggestive than 
 standard English, it retains its place and upholds 
 the honour of the ancient house of Whistle 
 Binkie. There is no blasphemy against Burns's 
 immortal Doric or against rustic life in praying 
 that other motives may find favour with the Muse, 
 that there may be escape at times from the buts and 
 bens and far-bens of this overworked subject, that 
 Scottish Horace shall not always 'stravague' in 
 Ochil homespun. This is perhaps the fate of all 
 dialect literatures, or of those parts of literatures 
 which are written in dialect. The present-day 
 1 See Chapter v.
 
 LETS AND HINDRANCES 51 
 
 attempts to create a national drama in Ireland 
 are illustrative. In both the * Abbey Theatre ' and 
 4 Ulster ' plays everybody seems to be satisfied 
 with a one- or two-roomed cottage, with c perti- 
 nents,' as the lawyers say. * Scene, a Kitchen ' is 
 standing type at their bill-printers : always the same 
 setting for the comedy which amuses County Down 
 or makes fun for County Antrim, for Gregorian 
 farce as for Riders to the Sea. There may be, 
 by way of * local ' compliment and as warrant of 
 the playwrights' intimate knowledge, northern 
 or southern differences of thatch and door, or of 
 cottage ways and accent ; still it is all and always 
 a matter of kitchen and small farm gossip. The 
 Irish writers have the beginners' excuse ; and, 
 intent on raising a home-industry, have no option 
 but to take material that lies at hand. Scotland has 
 a hoarier tradition of kail and potatoes and 
 mutches and tappit hens, and, if she dream of a 
 renaissance, may protest that these things poorly 
 answer her longing and smack too much of out- 
 worn convention. But she has been slow in 
 suspecting this habit of cottage musing over the 
 unending * matter ' of Habbie Simpson, which has 
 attracted the poets from Allan Ramsay to those 
 with us. Even the dignified essayist on Truth, in 
 his dignified surroundings, could not escape. 
 
 From this it is an easy step to the second char- 
 acteristic, rudeness. We might say that they are
 
 52 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 not unconnected, but by placing them apart we 
 avoid the suspicion of holding that this uglier 
 habit is of necessity, or exclusively, the affair of 
 the homely Muse. Further, it may be well to say 
 at once, to prevent misunderstanding, that we are 
 not concerned with honest frankness, with the 
 blunt psychology of sex, with the vigour of Panta- 
 gruel. The most fastidious must allow for these, 
 if the ' criticism of life' formula is to stand the 
 simplest test ; and Goethe's warning against a 
 schoolgirl criterion in literature is still good plati- 
 tude. But the exclusion of these universal 
 elements leaves a northern residuum. The 
 problem is one of art, not of morals, which may 
 be discussed without any confusion of view about 
 change in social convention. It may be treated as 
 a matter of general impression rather than by 
 censure of single poets, for the Abbess dictum still 
 holds, that whereas one century may judge another, 
 only his own century may judge the individual. 
 There is no doubt that this roughness was 
 intensified by the enlistment of the burgess and 
 bucolic classes as a reading public ; just as that 
 coarsening of taste which gave Addison his spec- 
 tatorial opportunity and confirmed Horace Walpole 
 in his cynicism was the effect of the awakening of 
 the pot-house intelligence of England. In both 
 cases popular demand created a market for every 
 kind of coarse cheap goods. But Scotland had
 
 LETS AND HINDRANCES 53 
 
 trafficked in these things before she made her 
 literature a plain tale of country humours ; as 
 witness her most courtly and artificial poets, her 
 scholars, and her theologians. Though it is easy to 
 trace in this the direct influence of the realistic 
 habit, we must admit that it is not unconnected 
 with the fantastic strain in Scots. It is generally 
 associated with the humorous and satirical, and, 
 when it depends most upon the lower device of 
 hyperbole, has something of the shock and sugges- 
 tive contrariness with which the literature so often 
 varies its serious mood. Though there are not a 
 few passages where indulgence in nauseous detail is 
 mere sow-nosing, yet the explanation, if not the 
 defence, is often literary, analogous to that of 
 the extravagance in " aureate terms," rhyme-jingle, 
 and other exercising of the muscle of language, and 
 sometimes of that of Swift's mood, when he revels 
 in what he himself abhors, that the humiliation of 
 his victim may be complete. Nearly always, how- 
 ever deliberate the passage may be, the critic seems 
 to see an under-purpose of contrast. If, for the 
 moment, we think of the skimble-skamble habit 1 
 of the Scot as a protest against, or, better per- 
 haps, a relief from the prosaic orderliness of real 
 life, we might call this a protest against or relief 
 from the conventions of literary respectability. 
 The analogy between the two reactions must not be 
 
 1 See Chapter i.
 
 54 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 pressed, for whereas the one comes only when the 
 elves will, and knows no rule but theirs, the other, 
 even when least deliberate, is never more than a 
 simple problem in rhetoric. Sometimes indeed the 
 amazing craftsmanship of the latter almost drives 
 us to seek a more inspired origin, as if it were in 
 such language that the King of Faery indulged 
 when he fell on King Berdqk or * flyted * with his 
 cowslip-neighbours out of hearing, let us hope, 
 of Bonnie Kilmeny and other gentle hostages. It 
 would be easy to illustrate this characteristic, for 
 there are few of the greater poets who do not offer 
 examples, and the lesser are by no means un- 
 generous. The earnest student must not be 
 squeamish in this matter. His perspective will be 
 far out, if he does not take with his King's Quair 
 and Golden Targe and Gentle Shepherd the 
 Flytings, the John Cowpers, and the newer Christis 
 Kirk. The worst are the best for a beginning. 
 The very extravagance of the genre makes pieces 
 like The Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo 
 less provoking than the companion southern 
 gossip of John Davies or Sam Rowlands. Dunbar 
 and Montgomerie pour such torrents that we 
 can stand under their Niagaras and wonder at 
 the din. All this rush and hubbub in the confined 
 literary landscape may well amaze those who look 
 only for the dowie dens of sentimental verse and 
 the high castles of romance.
 
 LETS AND HINDRANCES 55 
 
 This rudeness is not far to seek in later Scottish 
 writers whom English literature claims as her 
 own. It has been well said of Smollett, in explana- 
 tion of the contrast with his contemporaries in the 
 fashioning forth of the novel, that he shows " such 
 a bustle of coarse life, such swearing and rioting 
 and squalor, and, above all, such incessant thump- 
 ing and fighting and breaking each other's heads 
 and kicking each other's shins as could never have 
 taken place in any conceivable community, or under 
 any system of police, unless the human skeleton 
 had been of much harder construction than it is at 
 present." l And though James Thomson's rhetoric 
 and seriousness have given him an escape from the 
 grosser things which his age enjoyed better than 
 we do, he has more than once, and with the 
 strangest incongruity, even in diction, let the 
 roughness of the bothie invade his work. 2 
 
 There is, in the third place, the effect of reminis- 
 cence. In no other country, with perhaps one 
 exception, does the past grip the present as it does 
 in Scotland. But the Italian peasant's homage to 
 antiquity is a gentler service than the Scot's ; there 
 
 1 Quarterly Review, No. 205. One may accept this view without 
 feeling that injustice is done to Smollett, and without risking the 
 charge of ignorance of eighteenth century manners or of the fact 
 that in the hands of a superior artist like Fielding conversation 
 and narrative are so often interrupted by " a mighty noise " 
 and scufflings. 
 
 2 As in the picture in Winter of the " leap, the slap, the haul " 
 of rustic frolic.
 
 56 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 is just a hint of pride of ancestry, perhaps a touch 
 of cynicism, in his shrug and laconic ' Gli antichi, 
 Signer,' which answer all the stranger's questions 
 and his own curiosity about the famous things he 
 lives beside and cares to honour. He does not 
 take his * Pechts ' and Cullodens quite so seriously 
 and persistently. In saying this we do not meddle 
 with the sentiment of patriotism or make any 
 dangerous distinctions between popular enthusi- 
 asms. There is no warrant for holding that 
 there is a necessary association of love of country 
 with love of its past. Indeed, the contrary might 
 be argued, and Frenchmen called to witness how in 
 the words La Patrie, untranslatable and envied of 
 all, the appeal to the past is incidental and counts 
 for little. The Scot, on the other hand at all 
 events before the topsyturvydom of the twentieth 
 century never forgets the past. It is a matter of 
 instinct with him. He fights for his ancestors as 
 well as for his children. He must explain himself 
 historically. 
 
 In Scottish literature this attitude to tradition 
 is, however, something more than instinct or 
 natural piety. Like Captain Grose, the Scot has 
 "ta'en the antiquarian trade." It is another of 
 those striking contrasts in character, that with the 
 keenest appreciation of what is called, in blessed 
 epithet, the 'practical' value of things there is 
 found such zeal for the things that are merely old.
 
 LETS AND HINDRANCES 57 
 
 It is like finding a Yale lock on a thirteenth century 
 ambry. There is no relic-hunter and relic- 
 worshipper like your Scot. There must be few 
 parishes of which the families, kirk, and. tradi- 
 tions are not on record, specially and handsomely 
 honoured outside the omnibus gossip of the 
 Origines and Statistical Accounts, or few episodes, 
 even beyond the magic circles of Queen Mary and 
 the ' Forty-Five,' which have escaped this untiring 
 scrutiny. Scotland is a land of monuments, and 
 in none of these is national sentiment commemo- 
 rated so bravely as in this literary cairn, to which 
 so many hands have contributed. Is there a 
 parallel to be found in any other small country, or, 
 in like proportion, in any of the greater? The 
 good folk of Edinburgh could finish their Valhalla 
 on the Calton Hill with the shelf-loads of quarto 
 and octavo gatherings from every nook of Scottish 
 history and literature, which the printing-clubs and 
 learned societies of the east, west, and north have 
 added to the labours of single-handed venturers. 
 We say 'history and literature,' for though the 
 Scot has been partial to political and personal history 
 and has an unsatisfied craving for the mysteries of 
 the " tribe of Macfungus," he has not forgotten 
 the poets. The early issues of the Edinburgh 
 Bannatyne Club and the Glasgow Maitland Club 
 bear testimony to an interest already aroused by 
 collectors and commentators like Ramsay, Hailes,
 
 58 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 and Pinkerton. From that time down to the 
 Scottish Text Society there has been no lack of 
 exploration. As the work proceeded, there arose 
 the desire to join up these disjecta membra in 
 a connected account, but the response since the 
 feeble beginnings of Alexander Campbell and 
 others inspired by Warton counts for little 
 till we come to Mr. Hepburn Millar's Literary 
 History in our own day. We may wonder why the 
 interest in this story was so late in coming, when 
 scholars and half-scholars had shown such zeal in 
 the collecting and editing of all sorts of material, 
 and when the Scottish commons had found pleasure 
 in hearing the old gests and songs at festival and 
 cottage hearth, long before Alexander Pennecuik 
 tells us, in halting verse, 
 
 " My lucky dade, an honest Whig, 
 Was telling tales of Bothwell Brig ; 
 He could not miss to mind th* attempt, 
 For he was sitting peeling hemp ; . . . 
 The meikle tasker, Davie Dallas, 
 Was telling blads of William Wallace ; 
 My mother bad her second son say 
 What he'd by heart of Davie Lindsay." l 
 
 But it was not likely that the historians would 
 turn to a survey of poetry as long as they had 
 chronicles and cartularies to 'expiscate,' and it is 
 easy for us to misinterpret the peasant devotion. 
 
 1 Streams from Helicon, 1720 (' Merry Tales for the Lang 
 Nights of Winter').
 
 LETS AND HINDRANCES 59 
 
 The shepherds of the Complaynt loved the old tales 
 of the Red Etin and Tamlane in the way simple 
 folk should love them, or as the very formal author 
 intended they should ; and the songs brought them 
 tunes for the dance. Quotations like that just 
 given from Pennecuik's muddied Streams from 
 Helicon are significant as showing that the poets 
 were admired mainly as aids to patriotic reflection. 
 We cannot think of the Dallases or Dougal 
 "MacCallums l being attracted to the "Bruce or the 
 Wallace or *Davie Lindsay' for any other reason 
 than the comfortable history of stalwart doings 
 against Englishmen and priests. So, after all, it is 
 history rather than literature, or the history that is 
 in literature or goes with it, that gives popular 
 credit to the Muse. 
 
 But there is more. What has been said leads on 
 to the statement that the historical habit rules in 
 Scottish literature, in all its higher and more 
 imaginative work ; that, quite apart from the 
 influence of popular affection in establishing the 
 reputation of Blind Harry and Lyndsay and others 
 by some sort of historical sympathy, the literature, 
 in its matter and certainly in its form, is deliberately 
 and exceptionally conservative. It may smack of 
 text-book commonplace to say that Burns is the 
 final expression of what the national spirit had so 
 
 1 Who " would hear naething but a blaud of Da vie Lindsay," 
 (Redgauntlet, Letter, xi.).
 
 60 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 long dwelt upon and had made its peculiar purpose, 
 and that his successors have been content to be 
 little more than copyists ; and it may be easy to 
 find flaws in this, as in all generalizations. Yet 
 it deserves attention ; for though it is natural, 
 if not also wholesome, to be sceptical of the 
 genealogists who know Burns as a sort of Robert 
 MacFergusson (or MacHerd) VicRamsay, it would 
 appear that the wider and deeper we go, the more 
 reason do we find for the application of what we 
 may call the 'editorial ' theory. This is not sug- 
 gested in the narrower sense in which we speak of 
 Ramsay's recasting of Christis Kirk, for the worse, 
 or of Burns's rehandling of the songs, to their 
 bettering, but with the meaning that from as far 
 back as Henryson, and notwithstanding all checks 
 from without, the indebtedness of each poet to his 
 predecessors, individually and corporately, is un- 
 mistakable, and in none more so than in Burns 
 himself. Through him the tradition passed on ; 
 and his successors, minors in power, harped on the 
 old strings, the more complacently because he had 
 played so well. He fixed securely in both profes- 
 sional and popular regard the subjects and manner, 
 which, though time-honoured, might without him 
 have lost some of their vitality and credit with 
 those who could never be other than imitators. 
 For this reason, not less than by his personality, he 
 won the heart of a nation as poet has seldom, if
 
 LETS AND HINDRANCES 61 
 
 ever, done ; and the gist of so much of the January 
 praise, stripped of extravagance, is the acknow- 
 ledgement of his expressive power. This is not, 
 in any reputable critical court, the full recognition 
 which is his due for the gifts he offered. That 
 recognition, which, as Stevenson has well said, is 
 given for his style, not his matter, for his remark- 
 able talent of " writing well," l is to be found in the 
 admiration of alien poets of the great world 
 beyond the Lowlands. To them the traditional 
 elements make no appeal ; to his compatriots that 
 appeal, however piously and rightly heard, has 
 denied the appreciation of some things which 
 they can ill miss. No one desires Scottish litera- 
 ture to grow indifferent to historical sentiment ; no 
 Scot would offer the suggestion, and no Scot could 
 accept it ; but it may be worthy of consideration 
 by the North whether it has not indulged one 
 pleasure to the loss of others. This ivy is a goodly 
 plant, but let it not clasp the gray walls too securely. 
 When the " battlements are overtopt with ivy- 
 tods," the stranger knows that the sentinels are at 
 rest. Then there may be risk that a national litera- 
 ture will be scheduled as an ancient monument, and 
 be no more than a pleasure-spot for tourist readers 
 in search of the picturesque. 
 
 The growth of this 'ivy' in the later period of 
 Scottish literature was favoured by two conditions : 
 
 1 Men and Books, 1889, p. 86.
 
 62 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 first, in the eighteenth century, in the deliberate 
 return to the past, afterwards, in the interpretation 
 of the work and influence of Sir Walter Scott. 
 The historical novel gave opportunities for fresh 
 expression of an old mood and reacted on every 
 department of literature. Though Scott did not 
 impose, as some have thought, an antiquarian 
 tyranny or make his own work a mere " business 
 of bufF-jerkins," 1 he gave heart to the Oldbucks. 
 There are serious risks when the care of litera- 
 ture is thus made over to our good friends the 
 antiquaries. It is not suggested that matters of 
 history are not subjects for the poet, as personal 
 emotions or the moods of Nature are, or that in 
 periods not necessarily the dullest the historian may 
 not provide very useful commentary. But a little 
 experience discovers for us that there are dangers 
 when the historical habit, pious or curious, invades 
 the liberties of art, to the * strublance ' of all good 
 fairies ; that, being more disciplined, it inclines 
 to overassert itself most provokingly. Somehow 
 the Scot is never shy of showing what hold the 
 pageants of history have upon him. Even in his 
 studies of the national literature, from the earliest 
 efforts in the nineteenth century to the very latest, 
 with perhaps only two exceptions, a goodly part of 
 each might better find place in histories of the 
 Tytler or Hill Burton pattern. And if this be true 
 
 1 See Chapter ix, infra.
 
 LETS AND HINDRANCES 63 
 
 of these outer courts of literature, it is not less 
 true of the inner, among the poets themselves, 
 who so often and so persistently since the 
 seventeenth century indulge their " mistempered 
 humour" of retrospect. "Vain antiquarianism," 
 Pater has said, " is a waste of the poet's power " ; 1 
 and in another place he reminds us how the 
 museum mood of literature " induces the feeling 
 that nothing could ever have been young." 2 
 
 It is, unfortunately, only too clear that this 
 antiquarian zeal has overstimulated the Scottish 
 love of fact, and of the explanation of fact, and 
 weakened that sensitiveness to the borderland 
 effects of which we have spoken. Scott's treat- 
 ment of the supernatural is a case in point. That 
 other world of the strange and whimsical has no 
 place in his art as it has in his predecessors'. 
 What intrudes in its name, but rarely, and rather 
 ceremoniously, is only * mystification,' to be un- 
 riddled by its author or by its own absurdity, 
 never justifying itself as proper entertainment for 
 an age of Terror and Wonder plain waxwork 
 from the first, without any hint of Udolphine 
 might-have-beens. 3 We should try to prove this 
 not by that rather theatrical lady of Avenel, but by 
 what is generally allowed to be Scott's master- 
 
 1 Appreciations, p. 223. **&., p. 138. 
 
 The reader may be reminded of the long thrill in The 
 Mysteries of Udolpho before the unveiling of the' picture 
 which " was no picture."
 
 1 
 
 64 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 stroke, that " wildest and most rueful of dreams, 
 Wandering Willie's Tale, in Redgauntlet. Yet 
 its wildness and ruefulness hardly compensate us 
 for Scott's disappointing surrender to the bourgeois 
 sentiment which tolerates * mystery' only as 
 material to be explained by the literary detective. 
 We begin to think better of the tale, and less of 
 problems of brandy potations and a * wanchancy ' 
 jackanapes, when we are told that Steenie " would 
 have thought the whole was a dream, but he had 
 the receipt in his hand, fairly written and signed by 
 the auld Laird." But before long we are put out 
 of humour by the flight of the unburnt paper up 
 the chimney, in good stage fashion, "wi 5 a lang 
 train of sparks at its tail, and a hissing noise like a 
 squib." 2 Even Kilmeny's magic journey must be 
 explained in the Noctes 3 by twaddle about "in- 
 spired dwawms" and by a theory of the "social 
 affections." Fortunately, there is no confession of 
 this in Hogg's poem, and the Ambrosian commen- 
 tary is now quite forgotten. 
 
 There is another matter which is not inappro- 
 priate to these reflections on the emphasis, or, from 
 another point of view, the limitations of Scottish 
 
 1 Lockhart's Life, vii. 214. 
 
 * Redgauntlet, Letter xi. So too the Goblin in the Lay of the 
 Last Minstrel has been persistently condemned as theatrical, 
 crude, and entirely unnecessary to the story, though defended 
 by Minto, in his Literature of the Georgian Era, pp. 212 et seq. 
 
 3 iii. pp. 121-122.
 
 LETS AND HINDRANCES 65 
 
 literature. The Scot's sensitiveness to natural 
 effects has always been allowed, but his choice of 
 theme, far from being general, has been confined 
 to the sterner aspects ; or, let us put it thus, the 
 better to meet an obvious objection, his best and 
 most intimate work has concerned itself with the 
 frowns of the Dame, and his more conventional 
 with her smiles. 
 
 Medieval literature declined acquaintance with 
 these angry moods. There the attitude through- 
 out is one of protest, either directly against the 
 unfriendliness of winter and storm, or, by implica- 
 tion, in a perpetual chant of May. The familiar 
 overture of " merrie fowles " and jewelled meadows 
 in the poems and romances of the Middle Ages is 
 not so conventional as would appear. It means 
 that the Muse has found herself again ; that 
 months of draughty lattices, crowded firesides, 
 ankle-mud, and other miseries of the 'good old 
 days ' are over for a time. 1 The poets sing of May 
 to spite December. Later the expression of 
 this summer-mood becomes more and more con- 
 ventional, as the giving of thanks is apt to grow 
 formal, though one's feeling of gratitude may 
 remain lively. Indeed, it might be worth while 
 investigating how much of what is merely 
 
 1 How unmedieval is the Laureate who sings complaisantly 
 of Wintry Delights 
 
 " when broken roads barricade me 
 Mudbound." 
 
 S.L.
 
 66 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 artificial or traditional lingers unsuspected in 
 modern naturalism. 
 
 The Scot, certainly when moved to write of 
 these gentler themes, is as artificial and ' ennamelit ' 
 in his style as any. Witness Henryson, and 
 Dunbar, and Lyndsay ; even Douglas, when he 
 makes effort to be original, as in the Twelfth 
 Prologue, in honour of ' our hailsum May.* Such 
 couplets as 
 
 " Soft gresy verdour eftir balmy schowris 
 
 On curland stalkis smyling to thair flowris " 
 and 
 
 " The roys knoppis, tetand furth thar heyd, 
 Gan chyp, and kyth thar vermel lippis red " 
 
 are pleasant surprises on a canvas where 
 " maist amyabill walxis the amerant medis." 
 
 Yet he, too, rarely forgets to be formal ; and only 
 when he attempts the winter passage from which 
 we quoted in the first chapter does he show a 
 freshness of touch which for that age is exceptional. 
 The appearance of that passage is significant in the 
 work of an * aureate * school which had no decora- 
 tive need of the cold, the dismal, and the cruel, 
 except as a setting for satire or for homily on the 
 deadly sins. The predilection is clearly shown in 
 the popular verse outside the courtly circles of 
 the Makars and of Drummond and his contem- 
 poraries, and especially in the Ballads, as, for 
 example, in Sir Patrick Spens and Tamlane. In
 
 LETS AND HINDRANCES 67 
 
 the first the fear of " deidly storm " and the grim 
 circumstance, 
 
 14 When wind and weet and snaw and sleit 
 Came blawing them behind," 
 
 discover the tragic motive and supply an effective 
 setting. 1 In the second, when Janet has " kilted her 
 green kirtle" and is off to Carterhaugh, and the 
 well is found and the roses pulled, the singer is 
 not tempted to c paint the scene ' ; but when she 
 goes to Miles Cross, we are told that 
 
 44 Gloomy, gloomy was the night 
 And eerie was the way." 
 
 To know that these lines are a later addition, and 
 by Burns, only strengthens the argument, for they 
 disclose at what point and how the modern poet 
 found his opportunity. This is confirmed in the 
 subsequent editing by the * gentleman residing near 
 Langholm,' who, when he interpolated some verses 
 for the benefit of the readers of The Minstrelsy of 
 the Scottish Border, touched up the same part of 
 the picture thus 
 
 14 The heavens were black, the night was dark, 
 And dreary was the place " 
 
 and 
 
 44 Betwixt the hours of twelve and one, 
 A north wind tore the bent." 
 
 1 The difference between the version here quoted from and the 
 shorter one, first printed by Percy, lies chiefly in the working-up 
 of the storm picture.
 
 68 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 If it be asked why we should expect any setting 
 but this in pieces such as these, since pathos and 
 tragedy do not invite the pictorial calm of summer- 
 tide, the answer is best made, more Caledonia, by 
 a further question, why should this drab of life and 
 nature prove so attractive to the Scot ? And why 
 was it, we are tempted to ask, that the expatriated 
 Scot, whose Seasons guided the changing taste 
 in English poetry, chose Winter for his first 
 subject ? 
 
 " See, Winter comes to rule the varied year, 
 Sullen and sad, with all his rising train 
 Vapours, and clouds, and storms. Be these my 
 
 theme ; 
 
 These, that exalt the soul to solemn thought 
 And heavenly musing. Welcome, kindred glooms ! 
 Cogenial horrors, hail ! " 
 
 If Dryasdust find here some reminiscence of boyish 
 admiration of Robert Riccaltoun, who had wooed 
 the Muse in her angrier mood, 1 we proceed to ask 
 why the farmer of Earlshaugh so made his choice ? 
 Further, it might be recommended to the curious 
 to consider why Thomson in his early verses Of a 
 Country Life, the foreshadowing of the Seasons, 
 gives to Winter four times as much space as to 
 Summer or Spring, and eight times as much as to 
 Autumn a proportion completely changed in his 
 extended southern version. 
 
 1 Winter: printed in Savage's Miscellany, 1726, and revised 
 by Mallet in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1740.
 
 LETS AND HINDRANCES 69 
 
 At the coming of the Revival, with its * native ' l 
 images and 4 domestic ' l landscapes, it was still in 
 the greys and colder sepias that the poets worked to 
 best purpose. Burns's praise of * Honest Allan,' 
 that he painted 'Auld Nature to the nines,' was a 
 pretty compliment by one who could be generous, 
 and it was not intended for serious analysis. It 
 would require small critical cunning to see that in 
 Ramsay the idyllic is not his happiest vein, that the 
 4 burnie ' never * trots ' as briskly between his 
 'birks' as it does by the 'hazelly shaws' of the 
 younger poet. The oft-quoted passage on the 
 pool at Habbie's Howe, to which Burns also refers, 
 hardly owes its repute to the perfection of ' natural ' 
 sentiment. Even in Burns himself, as in that 
 delight of the anthologies, the description of the 
 streamlet in Hallowe'en, the appeal is chiefly as a 
 tour de force in wordcraft. Less frequently than 
 we might imagine is his eye on Nature for her own 
 sake. Although he holds that no poet ever found 
 his Muse 
 
 " Till by himsel he learn'd to wander 
 Adown some trottin burn's meander," 2 
 
 he lets us see that she is at most but an aid to 
 reflection on other realities. Yet when he does 
 claim in the same poem, and rather ceremoni- 
 ously, that all Nature's * shows J appeal to him, he 
 
 1 See the Preface to the Ever Green, and infra, p. 89. 
 1 Efistte to William Simpson.
 
 70 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 cannot disguise his deeper sympathy with her mood 
 
 when 
 
 " Winter howls, in gusty storms, 
 The lang, dark night." 
 
 When her countenance, like that of Fergus in 
 Waverley, "resembles a smiling summer's day," 
 we are always "made sensible . . . that it may 
 thunder and lighten before the close of the 
 evening." l 
 
 The long dark night and the storm have, how- 
 ever, done more for Scottish poetry than answer 
 to its pathos or its gloom. They have bidden her 
 to Poosie-Nansie's and merriment, 
 
 " When hailstanes drive wi' bitter skyte, 
 And infant frosts begin to bite, 
 In hoary cranreuch drest," 
 
 as in an earlier age the shivering Muse sought 
 cheer in tavern-song. If pathos and frolic be the 
 sum or nearly all the sum of Scotland's literary 
 endeavour, small wonder then that her art has 
 so rarely shown the summer mood of Nature, and 
 that when she has done so, she has hung her 
 ' pearls ' rather formally on the * dewy fields ' of 
 Ballochmyle. 2 Like her poet, the bravest and yet 
 the gentlest of all her singers, she had her hansel 
 from a "blast o j Janwar' win'." 
 
 1 Waverley, ch. xviii. * The Lass of Ballochmyle.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE FOREIGN ELEMENTS 
 
 SUCH then if we may borrow a metaphor from 
 old-time leechcraft is the 'complexion' or 
 < temperament ' of Scottish literature, with the 
 Intimate and Whimsical as its * dominant 
 humours ' ; such too, as in the best ordered bodies, 
 the c distemperature y which comes by excess or loss 
 in these ' proper qualities. 1 There remains, unless 
 we seem to overwork our metaphor, the astro- 
 logical part of our diagnosis, to seek what 
 influences flowed in upon the literature and deter- 
 mined or controlled its ' life.' This is a more 
 straightforward task, for history, philology, and 
 other aids supply us with an astrolabe which leaves 
 little in doubt. 
 
 Scottish literature has been affected by foreign 
 influences both in the working habits of the crafts- 
 man and in its artistic direction. The problem of 
 the first is more immediately racial and political, 
 though the moulding of the national character 
 could not be without effect on general taste. That 
 of the second is, on the other hand, mainly 
 
 71
 
 72 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 'literary,' involving questions of style and of 
 ' school ' ; strong enough at times to transform a 
 single poet and to make disciples, to arrest or dis- 
 guise national characteristics, but never to destroy 
 them. Consideration of the first involves the 
 study of matters of social and political concern and 
 of ethnology, of which the literary historian may 
 disclaim all right to speak. Even were our scien- 
 tific friends to agree as to the strains which have 
 produced what is airily called the Scottish type, 
 they would find a world of difficulty in connecting 
 the national character with their conclusions on 
 blood and skull and colour. Who or what is the 
 'real Mackay' in this pedigree can never be an 
 easy problem, nor a whit simpler than the search 
 for that real Hibernian who is the least common 
 multiple of Kerry and North Down. Nor does all 
 that we think we know of Tacitus's Teuton, or 
 Renan's Celt, or Skene's Pict help us much. 
 
 In starting this survey it is necessary to clear 
 our minds of some prepossession. The terms 
 'Scot,' 'Scottish,' 'Scotland,' taken in their full 
 modern significance, may lead the reader astray, 
 unless he is careful to make certain adjustments. 
 The name ' Scots ' was first applied, and applied 
 exclusively, to the language of the area outside 
 what we may name, loosely, the Lothians and 
 Borders. It described the speech of the settlers in 
 Alban, the Celts of the Goidelic branch ; and, after
 
 FOREIGN ELEMENTS 73 
 
 their kings had brought the eastern territory of 
 the Picts under their rule, the vernacular of the 
 region north of the Forth. 1 So it remained, alike 
 to the Anglian colonists south of the Forth and to 
 the Bretts or * Welsh' of Strathclyde ; and it 
 continued to be applied even beyond the time when 
 the dominion of these * Scots ' had been extended 
 southward, and had become, by the thirteenth 
 century, identical, at least in nominal jurisdiction, 
 with the later kingdom. From the * Scottish ' or 
 'Gaelic' point of view this extension was, both 
 politically and linguistically, an anglicizing ; for 
 the rulers who gave their racial name to the larger 
 ' Scotland ' acquired the manners and speech of the 
 stronger Anglian civilization, and by influence and 
 policy intruded the Teutonic element along the 
 eastern fringe of the older ' Scotland,' and there 
 probably the more easily because that region was 
 the last to come under the Celtic power. The 
 Scottish Kings and their Anglian subjects of the 
 Lothians and Fife spoke * Inglis ' (English) and 
 called the speech of their northern people and 
 western neighbours 'Scots.' This alienation 
 between the anglicized Scot and the Gaelic Scot, 
 made concrete for us in the story of Duncan and 
 Macbeth, was strengthened by the Wars of Inde- 
 pendence. Examination of that conflict should 
 
 1 This section goes over some of the ground of the writer's 
 Specimens of Middle Scots, Introd., pp. xiii. et seq.
 
 74 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 bring before us two important facts, which have not 
 always been noted. The first is, that the struggle 
 was primarily the resistance of the last remnant 
 of the Anglian settlement to the encroaching 
 Norman authority ; the second, that this * national ' 
 and * Scottish defence (to use each of the epithets 
 in its modern sense), or, to state the issue in its 
 more historical, if almost paradoxical, form, the 
 resistance of the English of Scotland to the Anglo- 
 French of England, was hampered by the active 
 enmity of the northern and western * Scots.' 
 When modern Scotland emerged from these 
 troubles, not untouched by that Anglo-French 
 civilization which she had defied in the open, the 
 division between her southern and northern peoples 
 had become absolute. For more than a century 
 later * Scots ' means in Lothian writers and in the 
 dispatches of ambassadors at the Scottish Court 
 the Gaelic speech of the Highlands and Islands: 
 to them it is the speech of * savages ' and * bribour 
 bardis,' and generally the badge of social disrepute. 
 It is the highest honour to be a Scot of Scotland, 
 but the tongue must speak * Inglis.' When the 
 author of the Wallace describes Thomas de 
 Longueville, he is careful to draw a distinction 
 
 " Lykly he was, manlik of contenance, 
 Lik to the Scottis be mekill gouernance, 
 Saiff off his tong, for Inglis had he nane ; " l 
 
 1 Bk. ix. 295-297.
 
 FOREIGN ELEMENTS 75 
 
 and in his frequent use of * Southroun ' for * Inglis- 
 man ' he shows how loath he is to identify the term 
 ' Inglis ' with the enemy of England. As the 
 recognition of this confusion, or the risk of con- 
 fusion, in applying- the term became more general 
 and the usage proved more and more distasteful to 
 northern patriotism, some change was necessary, 
 if only for political reasons. Besides, though the 
 speech was still 'English,' it was now standard 
 and * national,' with differences unknown in earlier 
 periods. So by the sixteenth century the once- 
 discredited * Scots ' became by the force majeure of 
 politics the proud title of the northern tongue, 
 and Gaelic, Macgregor-like, had to surrender its 
 name. By the will of the Sassenach it passed, with 
 the Galloway and Carrick speech, as 'Ersch' or 
 * Yrische.' 
 
 If, at the shaping of an independent Scotland, 
 the speech of its people, south and east of the 
 Highland Line, was ' English,' so too was the 
 literature. Philology tells us that the verses 
 on the cross at Ruthwell could be proved to 
 have been carved at Edinburgh or at York, had 
 the stone been found at either of these places, 
 and that there are few differences, even slight, 
 between the language of Barbour written at Aber- 
 deen and that of the hermit of Hampole in the 
 south of Yorkshire. This linguistic unity within 
 and beyond the confines of old Northumbria has
 
 76 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 its parallel in the literature ; in which there is no 
 evidence of variation, unless perhaps in the stronger 
 Norman flavour of the work of the more northern 
 area. There are no remains to show, as in 
 England, the distinctions between the curial Muse 
 and her vulgar sister which might be helpful in 
 explaining later differences. It is doubtful 
 whether they ever existed ; and, if they did, 
 whether they could tell us anything of the literary 
 development. They might be an aid to the study 
 of the language, especially on the Gaelic border- 
 lands, and to the unriddling of forms which per- 
 plex the student of Middle Scots. All this is, 
 however, irrelevant to the statement that the litera- 
 ture of Scotland was in its beginnings English in 
 sentiment, as it was in its language. Later, after 
 the Wars of Independence, a series of assaults, of 
 varying vigour, were made upon this isolated 
 * Scottish' literature, in close parallel with the 
 foreign pressure brought to bear upon the 
 language, and, in certain notable respects, upon 
 the general polity. 
 
 It might be expected that the separation from 
 the South would throw the nation into closer 
 contact with the alien elements within its own 
 jurisdiction, and that, in especial, there would be 
 some reaction by the Gaelic upon the general 
 habit. History, however, supplies an emphatic 
 negative, and shows that, for some time after, the
 
 FOREIGN ELEMENTS 77 
 
 alienation remained so complete that neither of the 
 elements paid the other even the compliment of 
 combat. That the inroads came from the South 
 is, after all, not surprising in the circumstances, 
 for good quarrellers are good borrowers, and 
 literature roves and reaves at will, knowing no 
 Debatable Land and no Statutes for Border Peace. 
 Kinship enforced acquaintance ; and it was not un- 
 fitting that the South should try to wrest some 
 compensation from the poets for what it had lost to 
 soldiers and statesmen. With a fine courtesy, and 
 with no suspicion of disloyalty, the poets received 
 the stranger, and bade him come again. Indeed, 
 the guest never lost touch with his amiable hosts ; 
 but there were three occasions, each of special 
 interest for their elaborate show of welcome. 
 
 On the first of these occasions, early in the 
 fifteenth century, Scottish literature yielded whole- 
 heartedly to the genius of Chaucer. There is 
 perhaps no parallel to the suddenness of the change 
 in the national manner, and to the completeness of 
 that change ; or anything so remarkable as the 
 immediate and continuing vigour of the trans- 
 formed verse. It is traditional with us to speak of 
 this Anglicized century as the Golden Age of 
 Scottish Poetry, and to measure its power with that 
 of the discipleship of Chaucer in his own country, 
 to the shaming of the latter. Why a fashion so 
 artificial and alien won its way so soon, and lasted
 
 78 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 well into the sixteenth century, why it became the 
 inspiration of all the poets whom we still call great, 
 and not only united the most diverse minds 
 in a common purpose but imposed upon them a 
 new craft of verse, and upon poetry even a new 
 language, are problems which will not be solved in 
 haste. For with literatures, as with peoples, the 
 delight in novelty of this exotic kind is generally 
 shortlived, and as generally confined to individuals 
 or small coteries. But in Scotland this affair of 
 the Court became an affair of the public in a more 
 complete way than happened in England ; and so 
 held for a time, though older methods lingered 
 in the alliterative verse, the chronicle-poem, the 
 legendary, and other medieval stock-in-trade, for 
 there must always be stray corners and old- 
 fashioned folk left after the wildest revolution. 
 
 Yet, if this was a revolution, it was so in a 
 restricted sense ; and ' wild ' it certainly was not, 
 however hard may appear the task of adjusting the 
 mood of the Palice of Honour to that of works 
 like The Holy Fair. The careful student, if he is 
 to satisfy himself that there is any truth in the 
 plea of continuity, must take a narrower measure 
 of these spectacular differences. He will see that 
 the movement was inevitable, that it was the 
 belated coming of a wave sweeping round the 
 whole European shore, that its course would be by 
 England, and that it could not come by any other
 
 FOREIGN ELEMENTS 79 
 
 way. By a pretty fancy we enshrine the story of 
 the change in the * Romance of a King's Life,' or, 
 in pictorial allegory, draw the spirit of Dan Chaucer 
 appearing to the first James in his English prison 
 and bidding him go preach a new gospel to the 
 North. That the young king learned in his exile 
 to love the * maister dere,' that he carried his poems 
 to Scotland as truly as he took Joan Beaufort, that 
 his own Quair (whether we have his text, matters 
 not), so full of reminiscence of the author of the 
 Legend of Good Women> made, and made quickly, 
 a courtly fashion of that poet, need not be disputed, 
 nor the wide effect of the royal enterprise under- 
 rated. Nor need the effect of this personal in- 
 fluence appear smaller, were it true, as some would 
 assert, that the awakening of this new interest 
 came much later in the century. Chaucer or no 
 Chaucer, James or no James, the coming was in 
 Scotland's destiny. The isolated northern Muse, 
 finding new opportunities at a Court so amiable to 
 letters, had a mind to other strains than suited 
 venerable Archdeacons devoted to history and 
 saintly legend. National self-consciousness de- 
 manded a more expressive medium. It was a 
 question of manner, of form, not of new ideals ; 
 the craving for what contemporary England 
 received from Chaucer and thanked him for, and 
 for nought else ; the desire for relief from the old 
 plain style, for the making of verse more royally.
 
 8o SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 There were no guides ; and when Scotland chanced 
 on Chaucer, it was as one chances on what one 
 seeks. Superficially studied, the transformation 
 appears as a set-back to the development of a 
 national ideal. We seem to understand why the 
 perfervid modern turns from it as barren of the 
 qualities which characterize later work. Yet even 
 with all its exaggeration it played a part in the 
 discipline of the Muse, which did not serve her ill 
 when she made later protest against the alien and 
 artificial. If it be one paradox that this intensified 
 Anglicism gave Scotland her * Golden Age,' it is 
 another that when the popular revival took head in 
 the eighteenth century it was to this transformed 
 fifteenth century that the poets turned with affec- 
 tion. Stranger still, when this courtly fashion had 
 spent itself, Scotland at once welcomed another, 
 and yet another, as gifts from the ' auld enemy. 5 
 As politics strained the bonds more and more, art's 
 necessity forbade the breaking. 
 
 The second English influence was of a different 
 sort. Literature, grown tired of the *termis 
 celicall ' of verse, turned to political and theological 
 controversy. Though this was not the whole 
 business of letters, it certainly was an absorbing 
 interest, and the atmosphere in which it thrived 
 proved unwholesome to poetry. England had 
 recovered herself, but Scotland had completely lost 
 the lead which the Makars had given. It is there-
 
 FOREIGN ELEMENTS 81 
 
 fore not surprising that so far as poetry was 
 concerned the recovered vigour of the South should 
 act on the North even more strongly than it had 
 done in the fifteenth century. The literary annals 
 show how little self-reliance had been left and that 
 all that was best in an age of very minor poets was 
 foreign-bred and mainly English. The flickerings 
 of the Sempills and the protest of Bysset in favour 
 of the quaintest of travesties of the " maternall " 
 manner and of Alexander Hume (the grammarian) 
 against the " conceat of fineness " are poor evidence 
 of native vitality. Patriotic dulness like Simion 
 Grahame's or Lithgow's, the whole art of peregri- 
 nation, what there is of drama, the lucubrations 
 of Patrick Hannay all this mixed stuff sends us 
 at once to Overbury or Rich or Brathwaite or any 
 other of the minors of the South. Not language 
 alone betrays that other Alexander Hume, of the 
 Day Estivall, or the covenanting laird of Rowallan. 
 And what more deliberate wooing of the southern 
 Muse than by that coterie of writers, called, rather 
 pedantically, the 'Anglo-Scottish Poets of James's 
 English Court,' among whom we name Lord 
 Ancram ("The Muses' Sanctuary"), Murray of 
 Gorthy, Alexander of the Monarchicke Tragedies, 
 Aytoun, Drummond, and the soldier Montrose? 
 Never a thought of Pipers of Kilbarchan comes to 
 these courtly singers ; not even of their courtier 
 predecessors the Makars. Ben Jonson might take 
 
 S.L. F
 
 82 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 his ease for weeks at Hawthornden and hear of 
 none of these, whatever the native Muse might 
 whisper in his ear as he tramped to ' Lomond Lake ' 
 or made merry at Master John Stuart's lodging in 
 Leith. Subject, treatment, tricks of style, are pure 
 Elizabethan echoes of Spenser, even of his 
 archaism, of Drayton, Daniel, and the rest ; 
 everything, pace Ben's judgement of poetry as 
 writ at Hawthornden, very much " after the fancy 
 of the time " as they understood the business of 
 writing in the England of James and Charles ; all 
 very English, or sometimes Italianate in the English 
 way, as these 
 
 " Slide soft, fair Forth, and make a crystal plain, 
 Cut your white locks, and on your foamy face 
 Let not a wrinkle be, when you embrace 
 The boat that Earth's perfections doth contain." * 
 
 " Those golden palaces, those gorgeous halls, 
 With furniture, superfluously fair, 
 Those stately courts, those sky-encountring walls, 
 Do vanish all like vapours in the air." 2 
 
 " He either fears his fate too much, 
 
 Or his deserts are small, 
 That dares not put it to the touch, 
 To gain or lose it all." 8 
 
 It would be no shame to any reader who, not know- 
 ing where these lines are to be found, began his 
 
 1 Drummond, Poems, First Part, Sonnet xxxix. 
 
 1 Alexander, Tragedy of Darius, Act iv. Sc. iii. 
 
 1 Marquis of Montrose, ' My dear and only love, I pray.'
 
 FOREIGN ELEMENTS 83 
 
 quest in some Jacobean Miscellany or in Mr. 
 Saintsbury's repository of the Caroline Muse. 
 
 When we turn from the verse to the plainer tale 
 of the historians and homilists of Spottiswoode, or 
 Calderwood, or Knox, or Baillie, or of Rutherford 
 and Leighton we find like evidence, and more 
 persistent than the occasion of this prose might 
 lead us to expect. Knox's Anglicism is the most re- 
 markable of all, not merely in the language, which 
 must have appeared strange to his countrymen, 
 but in the style. Nor is this to be wondered at, 
 for the galleys on the Loire, life at Geneva, preach- 
 ings at Newcastle, and sojourns in London, whatever 
 they contributed in different ways to the unsettling 
 of native habit, were nothing in their effect to the 
 polemical literature with which England flooded 
 the North. Contemporary record takes note of 
 the fact in the charge made by exiles, such as Ninian 
 Winzet and John Hamilton, that the national style 
 was dishonoured by their Reforming adversaries. 
 Though there is a touch of the ludicrous in the 
 latter's calling these opponents "triple traitoris, 
 quha not onlie knappis suddrone in your negatiue 
 confession, bot also hes causit it be imprentit at 
 London in contempt of our natiue language," * and 
 though much of these foreign-printed protests are 
 as perverse Scots as Knox's is, the recognition of 
 differences and of the ill-treatment of the native 
 
 1 Catholik Traictise, 1581.
 
 84 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 style is of some historical significance. To this 
 may be added the strange fact that the vernacular 
 Bible, which played such an important part in these 
 controversial times, and later, was always English. 
 The discovery some years ago of a Scots version 
 of the New Testament does not modify this state- 
 ment, for Nisbet's text (c. 1520), as it may be 
 called, was not printed till the beginning of this 
 century, 1 and there is no reason to believe that 
 the manuscript was known outside the little circle 
 of the Ayrshire Lollards. Till the issue of the 
 Bassandyne edition by authority of the General 
 Assembly, in 1576-79, Scotland had imported 
 every copy of her Bible from England ; and the 
 Bassandyne itself was nothing but a straightforward 
 reproduction of the Genevan version. When 
 Lyndsay in his Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis makes 
 Good Counsel quote the Vulgate " Fidelis sermo, 
 si quis Episcopatum desiderat," etc., he adds, in 
 unblushing * suddroun,' " That is : This is a true 
 saying, if any man desire the office of a bishop, he 
 desireth a worthie worke," etc. 2 It is therefore not 
 hard to see what effect this English Book, and 
 the English books about it, had on the whole trend 
 of Scottish literature, even outside the strictly 
 
 1 By the Scottish Text Society, ed. T. G. Law, 3 vols., 1900-1904. 
 
 1 11. 2912* et seq. Such passages as in the Complaynt (E.E.T.S. 
 p. 24), from Dent, xxviii., in Lyndsay's Satyre (1. 2602), from 
 2 Thess. iii. 10, and in the preliminary pages of the Gude and 
 Godlie Ballatis (S.T.S. pp. 5-7) have a more individual interest.
 
 FOREIGN ELEMENTS 85 
 
 religious and Puritanical verse. What was left of 
 Scottish self-reliance was rudely shaken when the 
 Englishman Francis Rous ousted not only Zachary 
 Boyd but the ' Anglo-Scottish > Mure of Rowallan 
 as Psalm-maker-in-ordinary for the Kingdom. 
 
 The third phase of English influence appears in 
 the eighteenth century. This phase follows almost 
 automatically on the second. There is no differ- 
 ence in character or direction, as between the first 
 and the second. It expresses itself in more literary 
 terms, as an effect of the wide social and political 
 preparation in the preceding period of English 
 influence. Scottish writers had a larger oppor- 
 tunity, and in the circumstances were more likely 
 to be attracted than coerced by southern culture. 
 Scores of biographies tell of the magnetism of the 
 English capital, how the Thomsons and Homes 
 and Mallochs turned to London most of them to 
 stay, a few to return and come again. When 
 Englishmen like Gay wandered northwards, they 
 made holiday as curious persons bent on knowing 
 more of the new province in which Jacob Tonson's 
 writ now ran ; and, however varied were their 
 reports of what they saw, none had reason to doubt 
 the goodwill of their northern hosts. The pro- 
 blems of language and accent pressed hard, and 
 throughout the century the more ambitious Scots 
 were painfully exercised in undoing the national 
 differences in these respects. These searchings of
 
 86 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 heart, the untiring efforts in prose and verse to 
 compete with the Englishman in his own medium, 
 the writing of formal pamphlets on northern im- 
 perfection by men of such standing as David Hume 
 and his opponent James Beattie, not to speak of 
 lesser fry like Elphinston, Sinclair, and Mitchell, 
 show how fast events were moving. What they 
 chose to call ' Scotticism ' was a fault. The word, 
 which is no older than Defoe, was to the English- 
 men who first used it merely a kbel for the 
 characteristics of the new-settled London-Scot, but 
 it soon became more familiar in Scottish mouths as 
 a confession and self-criticism. It had come to 
 this, that it was no longer a question how much 
 Anglicism could or should be incorporated, as 
 reasonable or advantageous or unavoidable, but 
 how much of the native element remained as a 
 barrier to the desired perfection in writing and 
 speaking. 
 
 On the literary side the process is not less clear. 
 Scotland gave her days and nights to Addison and 
 all the Queen Anne writers the more readily 
 because a literature so troubled about its formal 
 shortcomings was best served by another which 
 professed to offer models in Wit, Good Taste, and 
 the exercise of the Rules. Verse and prose, in 
 each and all of their kinds, had guidance for the 
 asking. Yet there were difficulties in the way of 
 thorough discipleship. Scottish literature could
 
 FOREIGN ELEMENTS 87 
 
 not assume the lightness of the Spectator or The 
 Rape of the Lock. These were altogether too 
 foreign to northern habit, even the most frolic- 
 some. A general restraint or oppression lay too 
 heavily on the art of the eighteenth century to 
 admit of successful defiance witness the draggings 
 and brakings in Hume and especially in Robert- 
 son ; and the northern literature, by approaching, of 
 set purpose, so closely to its neighbour, had grown 
 only more sensitive to the differences which 
 remained, and more nervous that it could not sur- 
 mount them. Galled that at the very time when 
 it would be at one with its object of admiration it 
 should be most keenly alive to the difficulties which 
 stood in the way, it sought to make good in 
 rhetoric. Posterity has dealt severely with this 
 choice, which played havoc with prose, Hume's 
 excepted, and turned so much of the verse to mere 
 sound and vanity, nowhere more flagrantly than in 
 Thomson, in his home apprenticeship and, later, in 
 his work in England. So it fell out, by way of 
 Nemesis for these many prayers for relief from its 
 shibboleths, that Scottish literature was stricken 
 with a new impediment. 
 
 For a time, however, but not for long, Scottish 
 literature was hardly conscious of its plight. 
 After confidence and self-gratulation came dis- 
 illusion. The forces of reaction, encouraged by 
 this failure, were given their head towards the
 
 88 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 revival of everything that was felt to be originally 
 and essentially Scottish. Though the conditions 
 which caused revolt were in the main identical with 
 those in England, the terms of protest differed. 
 If Scotland, like England to some extent inde- 
 pendently of England, and to some extent through 
 her example appealed from neo-classical conven- 
 tions to a freer Past, to Nature, and to Sensibility, 
 she appealed also to Nationality. In the south, the 
 readjustment was, if the phrase be not misunder- 
 stood, more an academic matter : poetry had grown 
 dull in the schools, and new methods had to be 
 devised. The critical outpourings of the great 
 leaders of the movement the militant Prose 
 Prefaces and Essays on Poetry make confession 
 of this. In Scotland this critical incitement was 
 hidden, if it did exist. She felt that, however 
 much she had lost to artifice in the general process 
 which had undone others, she had lost more by her 
 ready surrender to alien sentiment. To recover 
 primary feelings she must in the first place recover 
 her own individuality. So, whereas the English- 
 man said amiably, * Let us go to the Middle Ages, 
 for we are tired of our own, and to Olney and 
 Rydal Mount, for Gough Square is stifling,' the 
 Scot said he would turn to olden times and country- 
 side and village fun, and burgh taverns and noise 
 too, because they were his, not only because their 
 appeal was direct and exhilarating. When it was
 
 FOREIGN ELEMENTS 89 
 
 given to Allan Ramsay to speak the first word of 
 defiance to "affected delicacies and studied refine- 
 ments," l he appealed to the " natural strength of 
 thought and simplicity of style our forefathers 
 practised." He contended that " when these good 
 old bards wrote, we had not yet made use of 
 imported trimming upon our deaths, nor of foreign 
 embroidery in our writings. Their poetry is the 
 product of their own country, not pilfered and 
 spoiled in the transportation from abroad : their 
 images are native, and their landskips domestick, 
 copied from those fields and meadows we every day 
 behold. The morning rises ... as she does in 
 the Scottish horizon. . . . There is nothing can 
 be heard more silly than one's expressing his 
 ignorance of his native language. . . . Shew 
 them the most elegant thoughts in a Scots dress, 
 they as disdainfully as stupidly condemn it as 
 barbarous." Though he points directly at the 
 literatures of Greece and Rome and at modern 
 Italian and French affectations, he does not leave us 
 in doubt that his protest is against obsequiousness 
 to patterns less remote. 
 
 We may wonder that this restlessness was so 
 late in coming, but we wonder more at some of 
 Ramsay's methods of carrying out his reform. 
 Neither he nor any other in his age could make a 
 clear retrospect. He certainly did not see we 
 
 1 Preface to Tht Ever Green.
 
 9 o SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 may say, in extenuation, could not see that in 
 turning his back on one Anglicism he welcomed 
 another. We rub our eyes when we scan the con- 
 tents of his Ever Green and measure his debt to 
 the Makars and to later poets who wrote under 
 English influence. When we read The Thistle 
 and the Rose y The Golden Targe, Stewart's Luvers 
 Mane 
 
 " Quhen Flora had owrfrett the firth, 
 In May of ilka moneth Quene," etc., 
 
 and other aureate delights, mixed with versions of 
 Christis Kirk, and Flytings, and modern fakes like 
 Hardy knutey-we begin to understand what he really 
 means by " imported trimmings " and " foreign 
 embroideries." In their ardour of protest against 
 the degenerate taste of their day, the antiquarian 
 reformers took no thought of the character 
 and origin of the material which they offered as 
 a corrective ; 1 but they prepared the way for 
 work more truly Scottish, by restoring the national 
 self-confidence, and they had their reward in the 
 sympathy of a wider public, both cultured and 
 bucolic, and in the triumph of Burns. Thereafter 
 Scottish literature pursued a double course. 
 English influence remained vigorous, and grew, 
 
 1 It is but fair to Ramsay to remember that he admitted that 
 the ' greatest value ' of ' two or three ' of the pieces in his 
 collection lay in their ' antiquity.' This allowance does not 
 affect his thesis, or ours.
 
 FOREIGN ELEMENTS 91 
 
 and grows, to the confounding of the experts who 
 must find a northern or southern label for every 
 modern writer and book. The vernacular Muse 
 piped on lustily for a time, till with the scattering 
 of the village crowd and through the fussing of the 
 Perfervids, her notes began to falter. Her self- 
 confidence had been won on terms too narrow. 
 Her neighbour, with larger purpose, sensitive, and 
 willing in discipline, snatched away her reward, to 
 the greater honour of their common country. 
 
 The second foreign influence was Latin. This 
 was more than a scholar's matter, even in the 
 sixteenth century, when in every country of Europe 
 the vernacular had won its way. In Scotland, 
 later than in many places, Latin held its own, as a 
 living language as well as the medium of literature. 
 There is no lack of evidence to show that, even 
 in quarters where we should least expect to find it, 
 the Scot thought in it, and that he often found 
 difficulty in expressing himself in his * maternall 
 tong.' In vocabulary especially the effect was 
 great, and an instance or two may serve to show 
 the attitude of Scots writers and the difficulties 
 which stood in their way. When John of Ireland 
 describes the purpose of his book, he apologizes 
 for his style by saying that, being "nurist" in 
 France in the Latin tongue, he " knew nocht the 
 gret eloquens of Chauceir, na colouris that men
 
 92 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 vsis in this Inglis metir." * Douglas, when giving 
 us our first verse translation of the Aeneid, is 
 concerned with the weakness of Scots in making 
 a " ganand translation " of Virgil, and often solves 
 the difficulty by carrying over the words and idiom 
 and presenting them in a native disguise, so thin 
 that no Scot ignorant of Latin could have profited 
 anything. Even Bellenden in his translation of 
 Livy makes a point of * exceeding ' his author. 
 The writer of the Complaynt of Scotlande, who is 
 all for simplicity, plunges into this strange defence : 
 " ther is mony wordis of antiquite that i hef rehersit 
 in this tracteit, the quhilkis culd nocht be translatit 
 in oure scottis langage . . . ther for gyf sic wordis 
 suld be disusit or detekkit, than the phrasis of the 
 antiquite wald be confundit and adnullit ; ther for 
 it is necessair at sum tyme til myxt oure langage 
 witht part of termis dreuyn fra lateen, be rason 
 that oure scottis tong is nocht sa copeus as is the 
 lateen tong." 2 And, strangest thing of all, this 
 author who gives us a mosaic of translation from 
 the French is more Latinized in his original 
 passages than in those which he conveys. 
 
 The influence of this borrowing could not but 
 be great on the literary side. It helps to explain 
 how easily Middle Scots poetry took to the task of 
 
 1 Specimens of Middle Scots, p. 97. 
 
 Ed. E.E.T.S. pp. 16-17. 'V,' as in 'vordis' has been replaced 
 by ' w,' which the French printer's case did not contain.
 
 FOREIGN ELEMENTS 93 
 
 naturalizing the methods of the Rh6toriqueurs and 
 their followers, and why there is less suspicion of 
 fake and pedantry in their * aureate terms ' than in 
 the work of Lydgate and Occleve in the south. 
 Even Lyndsay, who was sheering off from this 
 affectation, and cannot be charged with finesse in 
 scholarship, gilds his style with an ease which few 
 southern poets can rival. So when the author of 
 the Complaynt of Scotlande takes farewell of his 
 reader, thus : 
 
 " Now for conclusione of this prolog, i exhort 
 the, gude redar, to correct me familiarly, ande 
 be charite, ande til interpreit my intentione 
 fauorablye, for doutles the motione of the com- 
 pilatione of this tracteit procedis mair of the 
 compassione that i hef of the public necessite 
 nor it dois of presumptione or vane gloir. Thy 
 cheretabil correctione maye be ane prouocatione 
 to gar me studye mair attentiuelye in the nyxt 
 werkis that i intend to set furtht, the quhilk i be- 
 leif in gode sal be verray necessair tyl al them 
 that desiris to lyue verteouslye indurand the 
 schort tyme of this oure fragil peregrinatione, and 
 sa fayr weil." 
 
 we think of Lexiphanes's burlesque of Dr. Johnson, 
 or the mock of Chrononhotonthologos, and seem 
 to have lighted on a humourist who would have 
 drawn an apology from Sydney Smith, if he had 
 heard the plea that this writer had "vsit domestic 
 scottis langage, maist intelligibil for the vulgare 
 pepil," and had not thought it necessary to have his
 
 94 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 tractate " fardit ande lardit " with " exquisite termis, 
 quhilkis ar nocht daly vsit." But the more fun we 
 see in all this, the more clearly do we confess our 
 modern prejudice. Nor is there any allowance 
 possible, as might be made in the case of a trans- 
 lator of Virgil, or of a writer on law, or theology, or 
 political philosophy, that the author was constrained 
 to pedantries, and was conscious of them. 
 
 Just at the time when the vernacular verse had 
 achieved some success at the hands of the Makars, 
 and prose had begun to try its fortune beyond the 
 paternal home which had reared Fordun, and Boece, 
 and Major, the promise of fuller activity was 
 rudely stayed : just at the beginning of that long 
 sterile stretch from the middle of the sixteenth 
 century to the close of the seventeenth, when guid- 
 ing genius was most needed. The weakness of 
 Scots was the opportunity of Latin, and many a 
 poet of respectable talent, scornful or shy of the 
 vulgar noise of the one, devoted himself to the 
 service of the other, in every kind and grade of 
 verse-making, from the Jephthes of Buchanan, 
 praised of Ascham, to the poemata and poematia of 
 the tribe of Pitcairne at the opening of the 
 eighteenth century. Scholarly vanity, not timidity, 
 turned Buchanan aside, to the loss of Scottish 
 letters. Yet we seem to know enough of him to 
 see beneath the transformation some qualities which 
 might have brought great strength to the verna-
 
 FOREIGN ELEMENTS 95 
 
 cular ; and a like regret catches at the reputation 
 of Florence Volusene, and of others enshrined in 
 the dainty volumes which Arthur Johnston pro- 
 duced at Amsterdam in 1637 at the expense of Scot 
 of Scotstarvet. Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum hujus 
 aevi illustrium runs the title of this corpus of 
 thirty-seven poets, including the famous John 
 Barclay of the Argents, the 'admirable' Crichton 
 himself, Thomas Dempster, there more excusably 
 imaginative than in his History, Arthur Johnston 
 of the Psalms, Andrew Melville, Alexander Ross, 
 Andrew Ramsay, in whose work the egregious 
 William Lauder discovered the quarry of Paradise 
 Lost, authors of Lusus Poetici, Parerga, Epigram- 
 mata, Musae Aulicae, Sylvae, Lachrymae, and what 
 not. Serious and dignified Latin all of it : with 
 much before it and later in * Muses' Welcomes,' 
 versions of the Psalms, and occasional verse ; in 
 Ludi Apollinares of a hundred years ago, "con- 
 taining," as the undertakers thought, "some 
 choice morsels, particularly translations into 
 modern Latin of some truly laughable poems in 
 the ancient Scotish language, a language now 
 hardly understood even in the metropolis of 
 Caledonia," a strange second burial of Christis 
 Kirk, The Monk and the Miller's Wife, and the 
 Wyf of Auchtermuchty ; and, for frolic and 
 contrast, in some rather muddy macaronic, con- 
 necting the Burschen Muse of the Middle Ages, in
 
 96 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 unbroken descent through Dunbar and Drum- 
 mond, with our grandfathers' days. 
 
 Scottish literature never lost touch with Latin, 
 whether for exercise or in more inspired moments, 
 right down to our complacent age of * Greek- 
 less areas ' and * Modern Humanities.' The full 
 meaning of this association may some day be 
 thought worthy of research. It was both gain and 
 loss. When we think of the latter, let us not 
 forget how well this use of Latin served Scots, if 
 only by keeping before it at all times, and in the 
 darkest hours, a literary ideal and the discipline of 
 art. 
 
 Popular opinion has so exaggerated the influence 
 of French, especially on the language, and has 
 had such generous backing in certain philological 
 quarters, that Scots would appear to be a sort of 
 French dialect. There were few Scotsmen in the 
 'eighties of last century who were not convinced 
 this was so, when M. Francisque-Michel had 
 marshalled the evidences in a bulky quarto of 
 over four hundred and fifty pages. 1 His modest 
 plea was that " to thoroughly understand Scottish 
 civilization, we must seek for most of its more im- 
 portant germs in French sources." 2 The opinion 
 was perhaps not unreasonable then, if we think of 
 
 1 A Critical Inquiry into the Scottish Language, Edin., 1882. 
 2 6., p. viii.
 
 97 
 
 the science at his command, but its general accept- 
 ance must have appeared strange to the Englishman 
 who sees in the Scot an incorrigible sentimentalist 
 in home matters. And yet, after all, it was senti- 
 ment historical sentiment as much as anything 
 else that reconciled, and still reconciles, the Scot 
 to the Frenchman's conclusions. It is so easy to 
 find Scotland a borrower, in the tale of the Alliance, 
 in the resort of generations of Scottish youth to the 
 lecture-rooms at Paris and Bordeaux, in the model- 
 ling of the College of Justice on the Parlement and 
 of the Universities on those of France, in the oppor- 
 tunities which came to merchants and soldiers-of- 
 fortune, in the influence of Calvinistic theology in 
 the framing of a Reformed Church, in the sojourn 
 of Jacobite Catholic exiles, in the frequent holiday- 
 ing in the French capital long before the days of 
 Hume or Sir Walter. And all so clear, because 
 Scottish gigots are served on Scottish ashetsl 
 
 In leaving this question of the exaggeration of 
 French influence on the language to the philologers, 
 it may not be impertinent to remind the reader of 
 two things. The first is, that the French element 
 in the literary speech was incorporated in three 
 ways from the Anglo-French naturalized in the 
 earlier period, from the Anglo-French and French 
 received in the middle period through the 
 Chaucerian poems, and from the later " French of 
 Paris " which passed over during the League. Of 
 
 S.L.
 
 98 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 these the first, the baronial French of the Lowlands 
 and of the Romances, is the most important, and 
 the last certainly the least. Philology has no 
 doubts on any of these matters ; and History is 
 ready to offer a cooling card to the good people who 
 delight in fanciful views of international and social 
 conditions created by the pacts of kings and poli- 
 ticians. The second point is, that of the claims of 
 the different Romance elements in Scots that of 
 Latin is not only great, but the strongest. " We 
 have already hinted why this pre-eminence should 
 be expected ; and it is not our present purpose to 
 offer the proofs. No great philological experience 
 is required to help one to the best of sport in the 
 Francisque-Michel preserves. 
 
 French literary influence was never strong, and 
 is hardly found outside the poets whose work is 
 of an artificial and experimental kind. Very little 
 Gallicism came in through the translations, even 
 in books like the Complaynt of Scotlande. The 
 Romances, as might be expected, confess their 
 origin, but their influence declined quickly, and 
 what remained is only a matter of language. 
 Henryson's non-Chaucerian Robene and Makyne 
 may link itself with the pastourelles, but this means 
 little, even if it could be proved to be less original 
 than we take it to be. If Charles d'Orle'ans per- 
 suaded his fellow-prisoner to leave his Chaucer for 
 a time, literary history tells us nothing ; and the
 
 FOREIGN ELEMENTS 99 
 
 yields no hint of French tradition. Dunbar 
 may have met Villon, but he learned little, even if 
 we choose to find something of the form and 
 timbre of the Grand Testament in the verse frolic 
 of the Scottish friar. It is not till we come to the 
 courtly poets of the reign of the sixth James that 
 Scottish verse, indulging the eclectic taste of 
 Shakespeare's contemporaries, took thought of 
 borrowing from France. Till recently the opinion 
 was generally held that the greater part of the 
 foreign matter embedded in the verse of Drum- 
 mond and his circle had come into Scots through 
 English channels, and chiefly through Spenser and 
 Sidney, or, at most, that some Italians, especially 
 later writers; such as Guarini and Marino, had 
 been studied at first hand. There was, of course, 
 Du Bartas, who, with or without his Sylvester, 
 was everybody's familiar. But, now, we have 
 learned that the Pleiade exerted a strong and direct 
 influence on the poets of that age, and claims as 
 much as the English and Italian models. Drum- 
 mond transfers gaily not only from Ronsard and 
 Du Bellay, but from Desportes, in the Diane, and 
 from minors such as Pontus de Tyard, in the 
 Erreurs Amoureuses> and Jean Passerat ; and Sir 
 William Alexander is part Ronsard and part Du 
 Bellay. 1 Still, with all their borrowing from the 
 
 1 See the S.T.S. edition of Drummond, 1913, and Mod, Lang. 
 Review, in. i., iv. iii., v. i.
 
 ioo SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 Pl&ade these poets added little or no Gallic flavour 
 to Scottish literature. The vocabulary was eked 
 out, as will always happen in copying and transla- 
 tion (we think of Douglas's immediate debt to 
 Virgilian Latin), yet even there it is easy for us 
 to be misled. 1 Thereafter hardly a suspicion of 
 French influence is to be found. The " affected 
 class of fops " chidden by Ramsay for drawing from 
 French and Italian at the expense of Scots did not 
 vex literature overmuch, and they soon passed away. 
 Visits to Paris did as little for the native Muse as 
 did good French claret at home ; and when we sum 
 up the later account we look in vain for any literary 
 imports to set against the debt of the foreigner to 
 the Waverley Novels. 
 
 Lastly, there is the question of the influence of 
 the Gael upon his Lowland neighbour. We might 
 be tempted to think that two partners in one polity 
 would, even if they were not on the best of terms, 
 affect each other in some way, and that literary art 
 would follow its own will, as we have seen it did in 
 another case. 2 Belief in the effect of good neigh- 
 bourhood has encouraged the pleasant theory that 
 the sense of colour and the love of external nature 
 which are characteristic of the literature were the 
 gift of the Gael to the Mull ' Anglian. We have 
 
 1 Cf. Mod. Lang. Review, v. i., where ' decore ' and ' ramage * 
 are cited as examples. * Supra, pp. 76-77.
 
 FOREIGN ELEMENTS 101 
 
 already hinted 1 at the difficulties in the way of 
 accepting this view, and we are still without the 
 evidence which it is the first duty of the holders 
 of this view to supply. To us it seems clear that 
 the Highlander or Islesman, whatever he did for 
 his own aesthetic culture through sennachies now 
 forgotten, had no mission to the South, and no 
 opportunity for it. There was harder business on 
 hand ; and each side took the other in terms of 
 that business. The Lowlander on his part showed 
 by his unfriendly attitude to everything Gaelic that 
 he was in no mood to be a debtor. Indeed the 
 unbroken expression of racial antipathy from the 
 very beginnings of Scots literature down through 
 every one of the poets of the Golden Age and past 
 the closing years of the seventeenth century, when 
 William Cleland's gibes were welcome, is one of 
 the most remarkable facts in northern literary 
 history. Not till the dark days of the 'Fifteen 
 and 'Forty-five were over, and, in the general re- 
 action against classical complacency, England and 
 Scotland had welcomed the novelty and mystery 
 of the Ossianic legends, were happier relations 
 established. These the spectacular art of Scott 
 confirmed, and the Sassenach yielded himself, as 
 he had never done before, to the glamour of the 
 farther North and West. 
 
 1 Supra, Chapter i.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 DRAMA AND PROSE 
 
 IT would not be unreasonable to expect that the 
 intrusion of these foreign elements would give a 
 wider range to the literature, or to hold that associa- 
 tion with a neighbour, so rich in every kind, could 
 not fail to influence general taste. On the other 
 hand, it would not be too foolish to assume that 
 the studied following of foreign models, through- 
 out a period of marked restlessness, political and 
 social, involved, if not the staying, at least the 
 degeneracy of national growth. Such problems in 
 the life-history of a literature, as in the career of 
 an individual, are not to be solved by ingenious 
 speculation on the probable or possible. Our only 
 recourse is to the facts. So let us turn for a 
 moment to the old classification of Poetry into its 
 three main kinds, Lyric, Epic, and Drama, even 
 though we recognize that this pigeon-holing is not 
 free from pedantry and may be an indifferent aid. 
 For " literary compositions," as Lord Kames has 
 said, " run into each other precisely like colours :
 
 DRAMA AND PROSE 103 
 
 in their strong tints they are easily distinguished ; 
 but are susceptible to so much variety and of so 
 many different forms that we can never say where 
 one species ends and another begins." What then 
 is the Scottish range of " strong tints " ? 
 
 Of Lyric, old and new, there is surely no doubt ; 
 of love-song, even had Burns been silent ; of 
 passion for the simple delights of Nature ; of 
 bacchanal and religious fervour ; and, in later days, 
 of patriotic enthusiasm. The battle-song, the more 
 formal ode, and the elegy are offered too, though 
 more rarely than might be expected. Certainly, 
 there is in all the kinds of lyrical expression sufficient 
 evidence to discredit the narrowest view of northern 
 * dourness ' and reticence. In Epic the case is 
 hardly so clear, at least in the more comprehen- 
 sive type. There is no Scottish Odyssey, or 
 Aeneid, or Divine Comedy, or Jerusalem, or 
 Lusiad y or Paradise Lost. The Brus is not of the 
 stuff of which these are made ; its historical habit 
 does not help it, for that is too actual and the facts 
 are too near. Henry the Minstrel's effort is of 
 less account. And what is there to show of 
 Scottish endeavour in high epic till we come to the 
 Course of Time, which our great-grandfathers were 
 polite enough to say they " heard, entranced " ? 
 
 " As some vast river of unfailing source, 
 Rapid, exhaustless, deep, his numbers flowed." * 
 
 1 Book iv.
 
 io 4 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 Time, in his wisdom, has rounded on his chronicler, 
 and Scotland, fortunately, has had no second 
 Pollok. Of the less sustained varieties there is 
 not much outside the Ballad, for the verse-tales 
 are nearly all in the burlesque vein, stories of Friars 
 of Berwick and Priests of Peebles and Ayrshire 
 souters ; and there is little in the pastoral form 
 besides Ramsay's formalities at Habbie's Howe, 
 and little of the idyllic note to be heard before or 
 after the Cotter's Saturday Night. The Ballad, 
 with its mingled * tints ' of epic and romance, is 
 honest compensation for the lack of many things. 
 Yet the whole sum is strangely modest, and we are 
 tempted to find a contributing cause of the epical 
 penury in that unrestrained ' intimacy * which has 
 done much for Scottish literature in other ways. 
 We do not require Lord Kames's reminder that 
 " familiarity " is the curse of epic, " the peculiar 
 character of which is dignity and elevation." As 
 the Scot must have his cottage-interiors and tavern 
 4 clash,' he must do without his Archangels and 
 Godfreys, and not take it amiss if the Miltonic 
 Satan declines acquaintance with his kinsman of 
 Alloway. In this undoing of the hope of epic, 
 the national love of burlesque and topsyturvydom 
 has been a ready ally. We cannot give the fairies 
 the stature of heroes ; and the laughter of Puck 
 is the confusion of dignity. The Scot has laughed 
 with him often ; but when he would be serious he
 
 DRAMA AND PROSE 105 
 
 has fallen to satire, to plaint, to apologue, to 
 homily, to plain narrative. He has had apparently 
 no liking for the ' grand style,' and has passed his 
 time comfortably without it. 
 
 It is remarkable that Scottish literature not only 
 shows this restricted range, but confines itself 
 rather stubbornly to certain paths within it. 
 We might expect that in the zigzag of circum- 
 stance in which it developed there would be less 
 persistency or uniformity. The transition from 
 one dominant form to another, as appears in the 
 passing fashions of English literature, say, from the 
 drama of the sixteenth century to the novel of the 
 eighteenth, has no counterpart in Scotland, except 
 in a very subsidiary way. That insoluble problem 
 of other literatures, why one age so loved the play- 
 house and another the drawing-room, is never 
 pressing. The absence of marked change may be 
 in great part due to the * historical ' habit, which at 
 all times, but especially in the later period of 
 revival, asserted itself in the directing of northern 
 taste. 
 
 There is the third literary kind, Drama ; but of 
 this there is as little (or as much) to be said as 
 Niels Horrobow was able to say of the owls and 
 snakes of Iceland. Scientific duty compelled that 
 worthy to set apart a chapter 1 to tell us "There 
 are no owls in the whole island," and another 2 
 1 xlii., ' Concerning Owls.' * Ixxii., ' Concerning Snakes.'
 
 106 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 to intimate with like brevity that "No snakes 
 of any kind are to be met with throughout the 
 whole island." But Horrobow, being an honest 
 man and, as we have hinted, scientifically inclined, 
 remarks in a foot-note to the first that a Mr. 
 Andersen, burgomaster of Hamburg, " says there 
 are various species of owls in Iceland, as the cat- 
 owl, the horn-owl, and the stone-owl," and that 
 there is "a print of one catched in the farther 
 part of Iceland on a ship homeward bound from 
 Greenland ; " and in a foot-note to the second 
 chapter he reports that this Mr. Andersen is of 
 opinion that " it is owing to the excessive cold that 
 no snakes are found." An excellent pattern for an 
 account of the Scottish drama! For is it not true 
 that c there is no drama in the whole literature,' 
 even if we play the Andersen by referring to some 
 * cat ' or * horn J varieties, only to prove the rarity 
 of the whole genus? And we can have our one 
 strange bird * catched ' in the * farther part ' of the 
 country, in a certain William Livingston, 1 the only 
 Gael in all Scottish record who is known to have 
 produced what friendly Celtic scholars are content 
 to describe as a " dramatic poem, so-called." 
 
 The record is, at its fullest and with most 
 generous allowance, indeed one of the quaintest 
 chapters in historical nonplus. The antiquaries 
 
 1 See Magnus Maclean, Lit. of the Highlands, 1904, p. 182 ; 
 Donald Maclean, Lit. of the Scottish Gael, 1912, p. 72. Living- 
 ston is late (1808-1870).
 
 DRAMA AND PROSE 107 
 
 have searched in vain for material, and, lacking the 
 Dane's frankness, have fallen to padding out their 
 little chapters on the national drama with careful 
 analyses of Lyndsay's Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis. 
 David Irving (1861) begins with Maximus Tyrius 
 and Gregory Nazianzen ; James Maidment con- 
 fines his energies regretfully, in his Fragmenta 
 Scoto-Dramatica (1835), to f r ty years after the 
 'Fifteen (1715-1758) ; and Ralston Inglis in his 
 Dramatic Writers of Scotland, a meagre duodecimo 
 of 1868, shows the flimsiest result of "some 
 years " labour in snippets of biography of minor 
 poets and moderns of a dramatic turn. Mr. 
 Henderson (1898) and Mr. Hepburn Millar 
 (1903) present the whole matter as a frilling of a 
 few paragraphs to their descriptions of Lyndsay's 
 Morality. Were our purpose merely to record, we 
 could not add a single fact to what these books 
 have told and retold. All the owls to be had have 
 been * catched,' and reasonably well stuffed too ; 
 and all that remains to the makers of text-books 
 is to see that they are occasionally dusted. It is 
 not a long task to run through the fragment of the 
 Dwarf's Part of the Play, ascribed to Dunbar, and 
 the Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis of the middle 
 period ; Philotus, for comedy of a kind, and the 
 English Monarchicke Tragedies, dull for chamber- 
 study, and not for the stage ; and the exotic 
 Douglases and Sophonisbas of the eighteenth cen-
 
 io8 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 tury. There is nothing else but stray references 
 in Knox and Calderwood to lost Moralities by 
 Kyllour and others unknown, or, in unliterary 
 corners, to entertainments of a dramatic character, 
 miracles and pageants ; nothing else for us to read 
 but the academic Latin plays of Buchanan. 
 
 It may well be asked, in that easy way we put 
 hard questions to ourselves, why Scotland failed to 
 produce a dramatist worthy of the name. We 
 seem to see in the prevailing * intimacy ' of Scottish 
 literature the promise of dramatic development, 
 and especially of comedy, which came early in 
 English and other vernaculars and had for nurse a 
 realism no whit more helpful. Yet, a little investi- 
 gation will show that it is not a problem of might- 
 have-been or should-have-been ; that we are to ask 
 ourselves, not why drama did not develop, but why 
 it could not develop. 
 
 There is the ever-ready argument of Puritanical 
 opposition. " It is owing to the excessive cold that 
 no snakes are found there." Historians have told 
 us when and why the temperature fell so low, and 
 we are asked to believe that literature, even more 
 reputable than drama, could not escape the 'peril- 
 lous cauld,' and to look at the benumbed and empty 
 years of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 
 We see the coming again of the old winter which 
 the early leaders of the Church, from Tertullian to 
 Salvian, had invoked on a play-loving world, and
 
 DRAMA AND PROSE 109 
 
 in which the English Precisians would fain have 
 involved their generation ; but with this difference, 
 that in Scotland alone it gripped with a strange 
 relentless rigour. Nor do we fail to see the master- 
 touch of irony in this chilling of northern art, 
 and of northern drama in particular, by the very 
 forces which the dramatic genius of Lyndsay, more 
 than any other agency, had roused to activity. 
 Yet however true this snowing and freezing may 
 be of the past, or, for that matter, of the present, 
 on some of the slopes of the Scottish Parnassus, 
 we must not assume that Puritanical inclemency 
 was the sole cause of disaster. No zealotry could 
 suppress lyric freedom, and the Muse, whether 
 true-love, or light-o'-love, or frankly ribald, 
 inspired the Scot when she willed, and by feebler 
 pens than Burns's, even when the laws of the 
 Righteous were most severe. In Scotland, as else- 
 where, drama would have defied all interference, 
 had it outgrown its infant weakness. Though an 
 epidemic Puritanism carried it off, it was from 
 the first, and was destined to remain, even if 
 fate had been kinder, a * puir shilpet cratur.' The 
 problem is one of family history, rather than of 
 rough handling by the Assembly of the Kirk. 
 
 That it is a problem of individual vitality is 
 made clear by comparison with English dramatic 
 literature. The South had no lack of Gossons and 
 Prynnes and Colliers to rail at playwrights and
 
 no SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 other * caterpillars of the Commonwealth,' of 
 pulpit exhortation, and of 'discipline' by scan- 
 dalized authority. Had the opposition there been 
 twice as strong, it could not have killed the craving 
 for dramatic expression. We cannot imagine any 
 system of control depriving the Wife of Bath of 
 her pleasure in Miracles, or making the play-loving 
 folk of York lose their interest in seeing Noah 
 mocked by his wife and Judas at the mercy of 
 the Porter, or throttling the drama of the Great 
 Age half as successfully as the infant Shakespeare 
 chokes the serpents in the well-known picture. 
 The Cromwellian dispensation could not banish the 
 drama for good ; and though, on its return, it 
 showed loss in literary vigour, and perhaps in 
 popular esteem, it failed as one fails in old age and 
 yields to younger talents. If the Puritan would 
 not be of the audience, he had now and then to take 
 his part on the stage. We get the measure of the 
 difference between southern and northern condi- 
 tions when we ask what would have happened had 
 some courageous Scottish Jonson dealt thus freely 
 with the Saints as an unforgotten poet dared to 
 do later with the Holy Willies and the Aulds. 
 
 It is clear that when the tyranny was least strong, 
 or when, during that tyranny, rebellion was most 
 active, Scottish drama did riot find its opportunity. 
 If Lyndsay's Morality appears to be an exception, 
 and the only one, let us remember how much of its
 
 DRAMA AND PROSE in 
 
 * 
 
 credit came from its display of qualities which 
 were in no sense dramatic its allegorical purpose, 
 and, above all, its satire ; and that it failed of 
 successors because as drama it discovered no motive 
 which could be an incentive to later talent or 
 offered no model which could be followed even 
 mechanically, and because as satire it drew upon 
 its kind the opposition which overwhelmed the 
 controversial Morality elsewhere, whether Catholic 
 or Reformed. We are led irresistibly to the con- 
 clusion that though Puritan sentiment thwarted 
 dramatic development, its task was not difficult, 
 and that if its repressing influence had been stayed, 
 or even if it had never been vigorous in the North, 
 development would have remained uncertain. If, 
 therefore, the effect of this superimposed Puri- 
 tanism may be disregarded, what arguments can be 
 brought forward that the conditions for the growth 
 of a national drama were unfavourable? There 
 is, in the first place, the general consideration which 
 is connected with what has been already said of the 
 familiar and retrospective habits of Scottish litera- 
 ture. These are even less of an aid to the 
 dramatist than to the epic poet, if they are not 
 accompanied by what is after all the dominant 
 characteristics of drama, the sense of movement 
 and the presentation of that movement in a 
 coherent and, it may be, single action. The realistic 
 and historical details can never be more than the
 
 ii2 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 setting ; they supply the literary scenery and pro- 
 perties. Epic has the power of self-recovery from 
 the crowded fact, partly in its slower action, partly 
 in its greater freedom of arrangement and even of 
 creation, partly because its dealing with things old 
 or far removed, though real enough, relieves it from 
 the oppression of the immediate and familiar. If, 
 therefore, the Scot has done so little in the epic 
 because he has not allowed himself this relief, it is 
 not surprising that he has done so little in drama, 
 in which an unrestrained interest in the familiar 
 must always be a barrier to its purpose. Tragedy, 
 if we apply to it any test approaching the Aris- 
 totelian, may be at once ruled out ; and comedy 
 is choked by its own aids, as Jonson's would have 
 been in his best plays, had not his zest for realism 
 been guided by his dramatic instinct. When later 
 Scottish drama, of the eighteenth century, en- 
 deavoured to avoid this risk, it encountered, as we 
 shall see, another not less dangerous. 
 
 So it would appear that in what should have 
 been the formative period the inventorial and anti- 
 quarian habits destroyed the hope of drama. If 
 that hope ever came, it came late, and then too it 
 was thwarted, by the pressure of other forces. 
 One thinks of the author of the forgotten Doom 
 of Devorgoil and Auchindrane. If Scott possessed 
 one great quality more than another it was that 
 sensitiveness to movement, which helps him so
 
 DRAMA AND PROSE 113 
 
 well to overcome the natural inertia of his descrip- 
 tive style. It might have brought him some suc- 
 cess as a dramatist, though he protested that his 
 " turn was not dramatic." 1 He was well aware of 
 what was essential to the genre, how " the plot, or 
 business of the piece, should advance with every 
 line," how many plays "superior in point of 
 poetical merit fail merely because the author is not 
 sufficiently possessed of the trick of the scene, or 
 enough aware of the importance of a maxim pro- 
 nounced by no less a performer than Punch himself, 
 * Push on, keep moving.' " 2 He tells us that it 
 is a great defect in drama to be " ill-combined," 3 
 and that though the . unities of time and place 
 always appeared to him to be * fopperies,' the unity 
 of action was the one indispensable rule. 4 Yet he 
 made his attempt in this kind rather half-heartedly, 
 and posterity will not revise his self-criticism. The 
 spirit of the age was against him, and what might 
 have been given to drama in other circumstance 
 went to verse-tale and the creation of the historical 
 novel. There he had opportunity of displaying 
 his mastery in uniting what may be called the 
 dynamic force of great narrative with the static 
 force of description. If there he has given us 
 movement, he has not less truly provided what 
 has been described as "a gallery of landscape 
 
 1 Lockhart, Life, x. 195. * &., vi. 278-279. Cf. ix. 78. 
 3 &., vi. 282. * ib., 308-309. 
 
 S.L. H
 
 n 4 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 and * interior ' such as had never been known 
 before " which, we may add, is not the business 
 of the dramatist, or helpful to him. 
 
 A second consideration is that the literature had 
 small opportunity of indulging a dramatic taste 
 by reason of its distraction to other interests. 
 There was Humanism, which drew off Buchanan 
 and deprived Scots of advantages which could not 
 have failed to flow from a talent so truly native, 
 even to faults. In his four tragedies, the Jephthes 
 and Baptistes and the versions of the Medea and 
 AlcestiSy northern quality has but small opportunity 
 of making itself felt. Yet, with full allowance 
 for their weakness as drama, for the dulling 
 effect of academic exercises, written for pupils and 
 to scholarly ends, and for their satirical bent, these 
 plays encourage us to think that, had other circum- 
 stances been given, Scotland might have had, if 
 not a Jonson, at Ben's best, as reputable a play- 
 wright as the * Tribe ' produced. Scotland never 
 wrested her own from Humanism, and though for 
 many years after Buchanan her college youth played 
 in Latin, she was content that they should confine 
 themselves to the rendering of ckssical masterpieces, 
 without even a * Westminster J prologue to relieve 
 the strict discipleship. 
 
 There is this further fact, even more strange, 
 that at the beginning of the seventeenth century, 
 when Scotland was most receptive of English
 
 DRAMA AND PROSE 115 
 
 culture, she was untouched by the dramatic energies 
 of the South. There is no reflection of the taste 
 of Shakespeare's age in the North or in the work 
 of the London-haunting Scots ; nothing but the 
 tedious dialogue of Alexandrian tragedy or the 
 poor borrowed fun of that "delectabill treatise" 
 Philotus. Jonson's visit to Hawthornden stirred 
 no ambitions ; there they talked of Sidney and the 
 Latin poets, of Poly-Olbion and the Ars Poetica, 
 of masques and Inigo Jones, of Shakespeare's * want 
 of art,' and of the quarrels of rival dramatists. 
 Drummond held on his course of sonneting and 
 making of madrigals and epigrams, devoted to his 
 ' French and Italians,' venturing once on some 
 speeches by Caledonia, Endymion, Saturn, Jove, 
 and other solemn personages for a spectacular 
 Entertainment of King Charles at his coming to 
 his northern kingdom. 
 
 The truth is that drama requires a longer period 
 of preparation than other forms before it can use 
 outside models to advantage. It is still a text- 
 book conundrum why Elizabethan literature was 
 so strongly dramatic. We used to be told, in 
 diluted or travestied Symonds, that the secret is 
 to be found in the active spirit abroad in politics, 
 religion, and society. There was a good deal about 
 merchant-adventurers, and about the new worlds 
 of Columbus and his friends ; and the siege of 
 Constantinople played a contributory part in the
 
 n6 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 literary exposition. Whereas, in the main, and with 
 due respect to debts of plot to the Italians and others, 
 the problem has always been of home concern. 
 The explanation at each stage is the history of the 
 previous stage ; everything tells of experience, and 
 of wide experience. The adoption of the Senecan 
 elements would have been futile without this pre- 
 paration ; Marlowe, Kyd, and Lyly built their 
 fabrics on it, each in his own way ; Shakespeare 
 his or theirs. When in England fashion suddenly 
 became exotic, it as quickly forgot its whim, and 
 literature showed no lasting effect from the indul- 
 gence. The Heroic Play is witness of this, even 
 in face of the fact that its appeal to the ceremonious 
 utterance of sultans and princesses was a protest 
 against the plain-tale of everyday life, which was 
 already voiced freely in the non-dramatic literature. 
 Scotland lacked all this experience and experiment. 
 The Hawthornden coterie could not have made, 
 had they so willed, the reputation of a Scottish 
 Globe or Blackfriars. When, in the eighteenth 
 century, under the pressure of a new ambition, the 
 North studiously imitated the southern theatre, we 
 see only too clearly how feeble that following 
 was, and why it failed of even moderate success 
 with contemporaries. What it lacked by way of 
 tradition it tried to furnish forth from the armoury 
 of rhetoric ; it showed no * action,' and it had no 
 self-confidence. Artificial, grandiose, stilted, in
 
 DRAMA AND PROSE 117 
 
 the worst sense applied to eighteenth-century 
 apprentice work all these it was. It clutched at 
 history, thinking there to find the strength and the 
 local appeal which might save its name. But 
 Douglas could not save it, and all the 41 f reds and 
 Britannias and Sophonisbas of the London Scot 
 brought no honour or aid to the drama at home. 
 Thereafter only two courses lay open to Scottish 
 drama ; either to continue this making of pompous 
 lifeless tragedies, or to turn to the humours of the 
 kitchen. It tried both, and, latterly, showed a 
 stronger liking for the ways of simple folk, both 
 * burghal ' and * landward ' a good beginning per- 
 haps, but as it should have begun three hundred 
 years before ; and hopeful perhaps, if something 
 more than a protest against the ennui of the middle- 
 class day, or a restless craving for contrasts. 
 
 In conclusion, it may be pointed out that during 
 the later period, that is from the eighteenth century, 
 there was yet another barrier to the progress of 
 drama in Scotland. This is more directly a question 
 of the literary medium and is associated with 
 another which will be considered later in this 
 chapter in connexion with vernacular prose. 
 Pinkerton hints at it in the Preface to his Scotish 
 Poems (1792), where, in his remarks on the drama, 
 he says : 1 "It is singular that our theatre should so 
 little resemble the English, or any other. Sir 
 
 1 Vol. i, p. xxi.
 
 n8 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 Thomas Saintserf's and Mrs. Cockburn's plays, of 
 the last century, form a mean introduction to the 
 fame of Thomson and Home. 1 In comedy we are 
 still deficient ; and it is a general opinion that we 
 are strangers to the English humour and wit : but 
 these qualities depend so much on * thinking in a 
 language,' and a perfect use of all its delicate lights 
 and shades, that it may be reasonably inferred that, 
 when the nations are blended into the same speech 
 and pronunciation, we may aspire to comic fame, 
 especially as in our own dialect, written and spoken, 
 much humour at times appears." We have already 
 said that Scots, despite its zeal in imitation, was 
 unable to carry over the lightness of the Spectator 
 or the crispness of the Rape of the Lock, and that, 
 as it came closer, or appeared to come closer, to 
 these models, it became more sensitive to the 
 differences and to the difficulty of overcoming 
 them. In comedy, certainly, the literature was 
 "deficient," though not, as Pinkerton put it, 
 because it was impervious to English humour. 
 The act of * thinking,' if not exactly in a 
 * foreign ' language, at least in a half-familiar 
 medium, denied the mobility in expression, the 
 flow and point, the repartee, which native English 
 art had acquired after long labour. The Scot had 
 not mastered the art of these, with all his assiduous 
 copying, and he found the task increasingly dis- 
 
 1 We can now adjust this perspective.
 
 DRAMA AND PROSE 119 
 
 heartening. So, in the end, he sought relief in 
 the fustian and rhetoric of the Norvals and Ormi- 
 sindas. There is no Scottish quality in these 
 things ; and of English little else than what the 
 genius of Garrick, or Mrs. Siddons, or Mrs. Barry 
 may have imparted. 
 
 Even more surprising than this lack of Drama 
 is the failure to achieve a vernacular Prose. Not 
 only was a national prose late in appearing, but it 
 never throve well ; and it succumbed for reasons 
 which may be worth the seeking. 
 
 We need not go farther back than the fifteenth 
 century, for the snatches of legal and official prose 
 found in the late fourteenth are of no literary con- 
 cern. It would not have been strange if even the 
 fifteenth century had produced nothing. With our 
 knowledge of the poverty of effort in England 
 among Chaucer's contemporaries, we should not 
 expect any development within the northern 
 literature of that time. Nor might we look for 
 evidence later, when the literary energies of Scot- 
 land were absorbed in carrying on, in successful 
 rivalry, the work of the English Chaucerians. 
 But, later still, when the North, in its turn, lost 
 its poetic cunning, we might hope for signs of an 
 awakening interest in prose, as we find them 
 appearing in the South, after the verse had fallen so
 
 120 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 low. Research, however, tells us that no prose- 
 talent passed northward or disclosed itself there. 
 Prose hardly appears before the middle of the 
 sixteenth century, and then apologetically or half- 
 heartedly, as if it were forced upon literature by 
 the stress of politics and controversy ; unconscious 
 of any artistic purpose as hinted at by the first 
 southern writers from Pecocke to Fisher, and 
 without a single touch of the craftsmanship of 
 Malory, or even of Caxton. There is nothing in 
 Scots then, or indeed later, like that passage 
 of the throwing of Excalibur into the lake, or a 
 hundred others, as good or less good, in the 
 Morte d? Arthur ; no confession like that of our 
 first printer's delight in French prose, because 
 it was "so well and compendiously set and 
 written," and of his ambition to make his English 
 as fair. When the Scot pleads for the ' maternal 
 tongue,' it is as Lyndsay does in his Exclama- 
 tion to the Reader* (and that is in verse), for 
 every reason but a literary one ; or as John of 
 Ireland, or the author of the Complaynt of Scot- 
 lande, or Bellenden does, with shyness or with 
 priggish condescension. He recognizes it as a 
 necessary instrument for theological and political 
 propaganda ; rarely, if ever, does he try to get 
 out of it the formal values which he seeks in line 
 and stanza and poetic diction. 
 
 This difference of attitude is clear. Scottish
 
 DRAMA AND PROSE 121 
 
 prose, like English, begins with translation, the 
 best and only means of self-improvement open to 
 a young vernacular. It is very serious in the 
 business of transferring the " sentence " (as the 
 slang of the Chaucerians has it) from Latin and 
 French to plain Scots, but it takes no thought of 
 the form, of anything corresponding to what the 
 weakest disciple in verse understood by the 
 discipline of "rhyme." Something of the old 
 shame clings to vernacular prose as the vehicle for 
 the unconsidered scraps and pedantries which could 
 not be put comfortably into verse. Such pieces as 
 the Craft of Deyng, the Wisdom of Solomon, and 
 The Vertewis of the Mess, for homily, and Sir 
 Gilbert Haye's translations, for the instruction of 
 soldiers and gentlemen, are perhaps no whit more 
 serious or dull than Reginald Pecocke on Faith or 
 overmuch blaming of clergy, or Sir John Fortescue 
 on the governance of England. But the mood 
 never changes in the North. There follow in halt- 
 ing Scots the theological disquisitions of John of 
 Ireland, Cadiou's translation from the French, 
 called the Portuus of Nobilnes, worthy of remem- 
 brance only as one of the first tasks of the first 
 Scottish printing-press, Myll's Spectakle of Luf, 
 and a snippet of mere annals entitled The Schort 
 Memoriale of the Scottis Corniklis. Then, in the 
 sixteenth century, we have Nisbet's translation of 
 the New Testament, Gau's Richt Vay to the King-
 
 122 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 dome of Hevine, from the Danish, Bellenden's 
 version of Livy and his Scottish History, the 
 quaint olio called the Complaynt of Scotlande, 
 Ninian Winzet's Tractates and his translation of 
 Vincentius Lerinensis, the political discourses of 
 Bishop Leslie and the Scots version of his History, 
 Buchanan's satire on Lethington, Knox's Histo*y y 
 the Catholic arguments of Nicol Burne and other 
 exiles, Memoirs and Diaries, King James the VI. 's 
 Schort Treatise, of small literary pretence all 
 concerned in teaching, stating, refuting, or cursing, 
 with hardly a thought, except perhaps in the 
 Complaynt and, later, in the Rolment of Courtis 
 of that most affected scribe Abacuck Bysset, of the 
 mere pleasure of writing, if not well, at least with 
 care. There is no Scottish Caxton who, "having 
 no great charge of occupation, . . took a French 
 book and read therein many strange and marvel- 
 lous histories, wherein [he] had great pleasure and 
 delight, as well for the novelty of the same as for 
 the fair language of French " : * no hint of a 
 northern writer struggling like Pecocke with the 
 vernacular difficulties of divinity and moral philo- 
 sophy, and seeking an aid to interpretation in the 
 sheer exercise of word and phrase. 2 
 
 If there are any exceptions throughout this 
 
 1 The Recuyell, Preface. 
 
 1 See the passage beginning " Even as grammar and divinity 
 be two diverse faculties and cunnings, "in the Rcpressour, Pt. i.
 
 DRAMA AND PROSE 123 
 
 period and we might extend it down to the 
 eighteenth century or later they are to be found 
 in papers of a more private character, in the diaries 
 or in odd corners of historical accounts, in reported 
 conversations of picturesque episodes, that is, only 
 in those places where the professional sense of the 
 writer is least active. We are thinking of, for 
 example, Knox's tale of the first defeat of the 
 Congregation, when he describes the Queen sitting 
 on the rampart welcoming her " victorious sud- 
 darts" with their loot of kirtles and household 
 gear ; or the well-known passage in the Diary of 
 Mr. James Melville about Knox's preaching at St. 
 Andrews. There are many passages like these 
 imbedded in the work of those whom we may call 
 the controversial historians, and of the best in 
 Kirkton's Secret and True History, but most 
 strikingly, because least expected, in the Acts and 
 Decreets of the Privy Council. It will be hard to 
 find in any other country the solemn record of the 
 law so relieved by human interest and easy frank- 
 ness. Each ' minute ' may start fair in style-book 
 fashion, with its 'anent,' its Albeit,' and the rest, 
 but before long we come upon other matter, in no 
 place better than in the story of Gordon of Gight's 
 disorderly doings in 1618. 
 
 " And the said Mr. William haveing opponit 
 aganis his furie his awne innocence and im- 
 possibilitie to gif him contentment in that
 
 I2 4 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 mater quhairwith he burdynit him, and then 
 the respect quhilk he aucht to carey to his 
 Maiestie and his lawis, and the havie wraith and 
 judgement of God that wold still persew him 
 gif he medlit with the said Mr. Williame his 
 innocent blood, yit nothing could content him, 
 bot with horrible aitheis he avowed that nane 
 sould releve him out of his handis, and that he 
 sould ding a sword throughe thame that durst 
 presome to releve him, uttering in this meantyme 
 mony disdanefull speetcheis aganis his Maiestie 
 and his lawis, saying that he knew the Wynd of 
 the Tolbuith and how to gyde his turne, and that 
 he hes had to do with the gritest of Scotland, and 
 had outit his turnis aganis thame. . . . And so, 
 they being sinderit, he past in to the place, and 
 with grite intreaty wes moved to take some 
 refreschement, and then to ly down and tak 
 rest ; bot he wes so fer distemperit and careyed 
 with a cruell purpois of revenge as he could tak 
 no rest, bot rease immediatlie, saying to his 
 wyff, 'Jeane, I can tak no rest. I knaw I 
 will die upoun a scaffald. Thair is ane evill 
 turne in my hand, quhilk I avow to God pre- 
 sentlie to performe.' " 
 
 In this very human document, the more interesting 
 to us because it deals with a maternal ancestor of 
 the poet Byron, nothing is missed, and there is no 
 artifice. The good secretaries of the Privy Council 
 were, doubtless, as innocent as other secretaries of 
 literary finesse. Yet here a crisp natural style out- 
 wits the discipline of the clerk's table and the 
 
 1 The rest of the graphic story of the laird's disorderliness 
 (" he sould go mad, lyke Richie the foole. gif he wer not revengeit 
 upoun thame") will be found in the Register of the Privy Council, 
 vol. ri. pp. 397-399-
 
 DRAMA AND PROSE 125 
 
 pomposity of the historian. The Scot's liking of 
 realism, of details for themselves and in their 
 accumulated effect, breaks in even in his most cere- 
 monious moments. It is pleasing ; it is on the 
 way to good art ; but it is only in the narrowest 
 sense literary. When Scots prose becomes con- 
 scious, this disappears, and turgid rhetoric and 
 foreign-made syntax take its place. 
 
 The failure of Scottish prose to develop in the 
 earlier period, on lines parallel to what we find in 
 other vernaculars, may be ascribed to the distracting 
 power of Latin. This acted in a double way, by 
 curtailing the range of subjects and by imposing a 
 strong classical habit of idiom and syntax. It is 
 not extravagant to say that the Scot often wrote 
 his prose, thinking in Latin as he proceeded. 1 Of 
 this there is ample proof, both from confession by 
 the writers and from the internal evidence of style. 
 Later, the enthusiasm for English models played 
 havoc with what was left of native pretence ; so 
 that in an author like Knox the Scottish character- 
 istics are but occasional shows of northern idiom 
 and vocabulary, touching up the text like trim- 
 mings on honest south-country cloth. The decora- 
 tion is agreeable to our modern taste for contrasts, 
 strong effects, and fresh suggestion, and we forget 
 the fabric on which it rests. But the most liberal 
 scattering of Scots words and phrases, however 
 
 1 See Chapter iii., supra p. 91.
 
 126 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 expressive these may be where ordinary English 
 fails, could never give, even in the loosest sense of 
 the term, a Scottish prose. 1 
 
 As time goes on, the vernacular becomes more 
 and more the concern of verse, till it is completely 
 so in the Revival in the eighteenth century. That 
 would not have made the creation of a national 
 prose impossible, had not the tradition grown up 
 that the vernacular should be the medium for the 
 humorous and burlesque. To be comic one must 
 write in verse the better in vernacular verse. It 
 is hard to recall offhand a single example of 
 humorous prose in the middle or early modern 
 periods. The dedication of vernacular effort 
 almost exclusively to subjects of an occasional, 
 humorous, or burlesque kind implied the denial of 
 experience in the more serious mood of prose, 
 perhaps even the power of indulging that mood. 
 When an attempt was made, and on rare occasions, 
 to escape from the mere pedestrianism of annals, 
 and memoir, and homily, Scots felt its unfitness, 
 and turned at once and whole-heartedly, as the 
 author of Cypresse Grove did, to the guidance of 
 the stranger ; and when in the eighteenth century 
 the literary range was so extended that prose 
 needed no longer to be the vehicle only of history 
 or polemic, it refused the opportunity, and even 
 
 1 On the use of Scots words and forms in English see later in 
 this chapter and in the next.
 
 DRAMA AND PROSE 127 
 
 resigned such rights as it had enjoyed. Then 
 logically enough, but in strange contrast with the 
 earlier mood, it studiously removed all that re- 
 mained of the old trimmings brushed the * Scotti- 
 cisms J off, as if they were mud-spots on its 
 southern broad-cloth. In this mood it has 
 remained. For what appears in later writers like 
 Scott and Gait to be a recovery of lost Scotticism 
 is not really a literary recovery. It is very occa- 
 sional in these novelists and others, and is rather 
 a matter of accent than of vocabulary. It is 
 employed for a special spectacular purpose, to strike 
 a note or differentiate a character, in the stage 
 fashion of Shakespeare's French doctor or Welsh 
 man. It is, in the theatrical sense, a mere * pro- 
 perty,' and most in use in what may be called the 
 * costume y kind of narrative. There is no better 
 instance of this than * Wandering Willie's Tale' 
 in Redgauntlet, to which reference has been already 
 made for another purpose. An extract will suffice. 
 " He had no sooner uttered the word than all was 
 dark around him ; and he sank on the earth with 
 such a sudden shock, that he lost both breath and 
 sense. How lang Steenie lay there, he could not 
 tell ; but when he came to himsell, he was lying in 
 the auld kirkyard of Redgauntlet parochine. . . . 
 There was a deep morning fog on grass and grave- 
 stane around him, and his horse was feeding quietly 
 beside the minister's twa cows." It is not hard to
 
 128 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 see the purpose of this gentle sprinkling of Scottish 
 accent over the straightforward English, and to 
 note the distributive effect of the few Scots-spelt 
 words on their neighbours and on the whole 
 passage. How poorly beside Sir Walter's art in 
 this matter show certain modern attempts to trans- 
 late folk-tale, and Tennyson, and the Bible into 
 what some people choose to call " Braid Scots." 1 
 These foolish persons have found it convenient to 
 forget, if they ever knew, the testimony of Burns 
 on this heresy. In a letter by him, perhaps the 
 only one of his written in this "Braid Scots," 
 addressed to William Nicol of the Edinburgh High 
 School, 2 this Scot of Scots, who could use the Doric 
 as no other could, shows what a fake such 
 prose must be. The letter is good evidence, 
 even if it be a deliberate travesty. " Kind honest- 
 hearted Willie," it begins, " Pm sitten doun here 
 after seven-and-forty miles ridin', e'en as forjesket 
 and forniaw'd as a forfoughten cock, to gie ye some 
 notion o' my land-lowper-like stravaiguin sin the 
 sorrowfu' hour that I sheuk hands and parted wi* 
 auld Reekie. My auld ga'd gleyde o' a meere has 
 huchyall'd up hill and doun brae, in Scotland and 
 England, as teugh and birnie as a vera deil wi' 
 
 1 See further on this in the next chapter. The passage from 
 Redgauntlet may some day run ' For whatna time Steenie lay 
 in a dwawm he daurna jalouse/ etc. 
 
 'Carlisle, ist June. 1787. Burns calls it a "Scots fragment." 
 See Chambers, Life and Works of Robert Burns, ed. Wallace, ii. 1 19.
 
 DRAMA AND PROSE 129 
 
 me." And so it proceeds, with each sentence 
 freely sprinkled with 'poutherie,' 'smeddum,' 
 * rumblegumtion,' and the like from the glossarial 
 pepper-pot. 
 
 When old Henry Scrimger excused himself in 
 1572 that "the Scotts Tung is now forgett with 
 me, speciallie in writting," 1 he was not speaking 
 only for himself and those who had been long out 
 of Scotland and had become "acquantit with 
 strainge fassiouns of leving," but for many good 
 people at home. As time passed .and these lost 
 their Latin, no compensation came to Scots against 
 the ever-invading English, except in verse, and 
 there only when it dealt with domestic pathos and 
 humour or with satire. Even now the northern 
 singers must be shepherds of the Ochils and their 
 songs must remind us of Burns and his stanza or 
 of the fioriture of Whistle Binkie. It is a modest 
 ambition at best. This narrowing and hardening 
 in verse is perhaps the fate of all vernacular litera- 
 tures as they become more dialectal, especially in 
 conditions such as grew up in Scotland ; but the' 
 refusal of all experience worth the name in drama 
 and prose is surely exceptional. 
 
 1 In a letter to the Regent Mar, printed in Buchanan, Opera, II 
 (Epist. viii.) 
 
 S.L.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF DIALECT 
 
 IN concluding this sketch of the forces which inter- 
 rupted the development of the vernacular, we 
 are tempted to ask whether Scottish literature, 
 in the more complex conditions of modern life, 
 can recover, or should try to recover, what it has 
 declined or forgotten. The question involves us 
 sooner or later in the problem of dialect, of which 
 we had a hint at the close of the preceding chapter, 
 but we may find it useful, by way of preliminary, 
 to combine and summarize what has been said of 
 the lets and hindrances to its literary expansion. 
 It would appear that the strongly negative result 
 which we have described is the effect of three habits, 
 or, it may be, intentions, which, though of varying 
 power, have generally coexisted. 
 
 The first expresses itself in the desire to 
 eliminate the literary differentiae, to accept new 
 ways, and to throw out, steadily, what remains of 
 native quality. This, as has been pointed out, is 
 in marked contrast with the Scot's general atti- 
 
 130
 
 THE PROBLEM OF DIALECT 131 
 
 tude to other intellectual and social problems. It 
 begins with the Chaucerian idolatry of the fifteenth 
 century, and hardly ends with the war against 
 Scotticism in the late eighteenth. It is seldom a 
 reasonable, or reasoned, receptiveness. It is a 
 hankering after new models, not because they are 
 good models for Scotland has not always followed 
 the best but because they are strange. How- 
 ever strong may be the national self-reliance, and, in 
 the modern period, the self-satisfaction, these cer- 
 tainly have never been prevailing virtues of the 
 literature. 
 
 The second, apparently but not really contra- 
 dictory to the first, is the retrospective habit. 
 This affects the matter and sentiment of the litera- 
 ture more than the form. We have seen how 
 the historical interest rather than the literary the 
 history that is in the literature won a hearing for 
 the Muse, how the antiquarianism of the poets 
 persisted from first to last, and, in spite of a strong 
 bias to the immediate and real, and notwithstanding 
 the individual vigour of certain writers, shackled 
 northern verse to certain well-defined conventions. 
 Literature is always looking back, shaking out 
 the old garments, rummaging the old stores of sub- 
 jects and forms. Its work is for the most part tasks 
 of editorship ; even Burns is a sublime example 
 of the art of continuation. When, in the late 
 eighteenth century, England turned to the new, for
 
 i 3 2 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 the enjoyment of what had not been felt before, or 
 had been long forgotten, Scotland turned to the 
 past, because it was the past and her past. Then in 
 the passion of recovery she seemed to find a national 
 quality in everything that belonged to that past 
 and to claim for her literature a formal tradition of 
 its own, unconcerned how often it had borrowed 
 and exchanged one artifice for another, or how at 
 that very time it was never busier in imitating 
 the South. A literature which thus recoils upon 
 itself, not so much under stress of sentiment as 
 under that of mistaken literary authority, is in 
 difficulties. These some present-day enthusiasts 
 too willingly overlook. 
 
 There is, in the third place, the curtailment of 
 literary experience. At no stage of its career has 
 the Scots vernacular enjoyed the freedom in range 
 which every literature claims as necessary to pro- 
 gress and security. Whatever reputation may be 
 achieved in certain kinds or through the brilliance 
 of individual poets will not compensate for weak- 
 ness or silence in others. To have given the 
 world its best ballads, a great body of song, and 
 Burns, may be honour enough ; but a literature 
 does not live on old repute or by imitative 
 ingenuity, and one which has declined the dis- 
 cipline of drama and prose, and has prescribed a 
 narrow area to its verse, must reckon with itself 
 if it fail to meet others on equal terms. This, too,
 
 THE PROBLEM OF DIALECT 133 
 
 our modern regenerators appear to be unwilling to 
 consider. 
 
 The effect of these habits upon Scottish litera- 
 ture is clear. Only two writers, Burns and Scott, 
 have done anything to loosen this triple grip 
 both unconsciously, and the former with no per- 
 manent aid to the victim. For our admiration 
 of Burns's genius, whether in its appeal, or, in 
 Stevenson's phrase, in its * art of writing well,' is 
 the admiration of individual power ; and popular 
 opinion may be excused its persistent concern in 
 him as a great personality. But when this homage 
 goes further and proclaims, as it has the right to 
 proclaim, that he is also great because he is so 
 expressive, not merely of the world's heart, but of 
 national sentiment, the historian of literature is 
 given his opportunity of explaining why he did 
 so little to enlarge the range of the vernacular. 
 Though it is to his honour that he gathered together 
 so much of the old that was good, or potentially 
 good, and gave new life to it, he did little to 
 stimulate a wider literary ambition. He edited 
 supremely well and aroused his countrymen to a 
 consciousness of things they had but poorly under- 
 stood. If he gave them some confidence in their 
 literary ambitions, he directed them, or they chose 
 to be directed, to a narrow round of subject and 
 form, to be worked and reworked, by a sort of law 
 of permutations and combinations. He is the end
 
 i 3 4 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 of a process : genius is expressing itself in terms of 
 what has gone before. As a literary force and 
 apart from all question of his place in the humani- 
 tarian reaction of the closing century he is retro- 
 spective, as the Makars were, and the Jacobeans, 
 and Ramsay of the Revival, and all before him. 
 How truly this strength, this expressive power, so 
 justly acclaimed, was the denial of incentive rather 
 than the promise of new life is sorrowfully told in 
 the later record of verse. Before him, even though 
 the literature suffered from the dulling habits to 
 which attention has been drawn, some change 
 might have come as a reward for the discipline 
 endured, some fresh outlook, at the bidding of 
 writers not so richly endowed as he was ; and he 
 himself, in other circumstances, might have used 
 his powers to such an end. He made the best, 
 the very best, of what had been, and there the 
 matter ended. He completed the edifice, and men 
 admired, and have gone on admiring and declining 
 the hope of admiring anything else. All efforts 
 since his are but his in little or in part. There is 
 one model, and he is that model. Posterity is too 
 pleased or too awed; she has made a sacred book 
 of him, and all that she dare allow herself is to 
 assume the solemn duty of commentator. So it has 
 fallen out that an inspired mind, instead of moving 
 later generations of poets to more vigorous and 
 varied endeavour, has by reason of its own strength
 
 THE PROBLEM OF DIALECT 135 
 
 become the strictest barrier to emanci'pation. It 
 is a nice speculation that had Burns not been so 
 great, later Scots verse might not have been quite 
 so poor ; and another, that but for him it might 
 have, by some good chance, shaken itself free from 
 the historical and formal incubus. Like his own 
 Captain Grose he took "the antiquarian trade," 
 and by his influence on literature perhaps, as has 
 already been said, by the very force of his indivi- 
 duality diverted the remaining energies to the 
 collecting of the " auld nick-nackets " of the form 
 and subject and custom of verse. Orpheus Cale- 
 donius by looking back has been denied his 
 Eurydice. 
 
 With Scott the case is different, and we may 
 complete the paradox begun in speaking of the 
 antiquary Burns, by saying that he who has been so 
 often chidden ^ for the sorry business of buff- 
 jerkins is the only great Scottish writer who has 
 given to literature the courage of adventure. 
 There is no need to repeat that his great gift to 
 his age and to ours is the sense of movement, 
 offered not merely in the romantic stir which 
 touches the most blase reader, but in the general 
 provocative quality of his work. The most * anti- 
 quarian ' places in his verse and prose do not smell 
 so mustily of the museum as we think. We are 
 too ready to take his men in armour as mere suits of 
 steel, decorating his story as if it were a corridor
 
 136 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 at Abbotsford ; or to be bored by his erudition in 
 architectural * whigmaleeries.' Knights encased 
 cap-a-pie walk slowly and ride heavily, too slowly 
 for the six-cylinder fancy of the present day ; and 
 our literary slumming in * by-streets ' and the 
 Potteries has scheduled all this mouldering 
 feudalism for removal under the Improvement 
 Acts. Taste may change, but criticism must not 
 be blind. Though Scott in his creation of a new 
 genre takes history for his motive, he does not 
 treat it as mere reminiscence, or lack vivacity in 
 the telling of his story. He is not the slave of a 
 literary tradition. If we allow that he is Janus- 
 faced, let us remember the face that is next us, and 
 that the light is upon it. He has had better 
 reward than Burns has had in his following. He 
 has not had the personal homage which wise men 
 and not a few fools have rendered to the other ; 
 he has not been so * expressive* of the things 
 of which the common man, indifferent to Burns's 
 greater claims as a writer, delights to be reminded, 
 as his forefathers so delighted. Time and an 
 intoxicate vocabulary have not given him Scottites, 
 as they have given Burnsites to vex the memory of 
 the Bard. He is not Scottish in any parochial 
 sense, though no one knew Scotland better. We 
 measure his greatness by that influence of literary 
 enlightenment, which, both for his own country- 
 men and for a greater public on the Continent,
 
 THE PROBLEM OF DIALECT 137 
 
 not only established the Novel securely, but in 
 the practice of his craft suggested so many fresh 
 forms for later hands. If the editorial epitaph on 
 Robert Fergusson, "with him Scots Poetry now 
 sleeps," may, with critical accuracy, be postdated 
 for praise of a more famous successor, we must find 
 other words for Scott. He died as the seed dies 
 when the burgeon springs. 
 
 These reflections help our approach to the 
 question of the present-day position and hopes of 
 the vernacular. Discussion has led to some con- 
 fusion of thought and bad temper. It is not 
 easy to adjust the claims of historical evidence and 
 sentiment, especially when the latter is stimulated 
 by influences which are in no sense literary. As 
 public opinion has fallen more and more out of 
 touch with the facts of the past, it has grown more 
 sensitive to national affronts, and it would probably 
 be less surprised to see a statue to Mr. Henley in 
 the market-place of Dumfries than to be told how 
 strangely it has misunderstood the literary tradi- 
 tions. Our modern sentimentalists would do well 
 to remember that Scottish literature, perhaps more 
 than any other, has made a virtue of disputing the 
 tyranny of sentiment ; that, almost with a show 
 of personal feeling, it has resented the separation 
 which politics and ' social habit have worked to 
 establish between its artistic life and that of its
 
 138 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 southern neighbour. Why the vernacular has 
 faded, and why it is hard for it to recover some of 
 the colour and character to be found in older poets, 
 are not questions for persons who are only out for 
 the scalps of centralizing Englishmen or partisan 
 historians. The discussion has grown a little 
 raucous on platforms, and it is time to impose some 
 academic calm. It should be unnecessary to say 
 that there cannot be any quarrel with the patriots 
 about the richness of the Scottish vocabulary, its 
 frequent superiority to English in both the spiritual 
 and technical matters of poetic diction, its musical 
 movement and suggestion, and generally, what 
 have been called the "grand accommodations" in 
 the craft of writing well. 
 
 It may be asked not merely whether it is within 
 the competence of anyone to write or even speak 
 a Scots which in all particulars, in the nuances of 
 vocabulary and idiom, will be accepted as a stan- 
 dard from Kilmarnock to Aberdeen, but whether 
 there is any modern writer, even Burns himself, who 
 has worked in a uniform medium. The question 
 forces itself upon us at once when we encounter 
 the surprising travesty called * Braid Scots,' to which 
 passing reference was made at the close of the last 
 chapter. It may be taken as seriously by us as 
 most of the Latin prose of our classrooms must be 
 by the shade of the long-suffering Cicero. We 
 know how it is made, how our poeticule waddles
 
 THE PROBLEM OF DIALECT 139 
 
 in good duck fashion through his Jamieson, snap- 
 ping up fat expressive words with nice little bits of 
 green idiom for flavouring. It is never literature, 
 and it is certainly not Scots, unless we are so to call 
 that menu-ingenuity which is shown at St. Andrew 
 festivals in Massachusetts, or was written two hun- 
 dred years ago in Watson's Choice Collection 
 
 " There will be Tartan, Dragen, and Brachen, 
 
 And fouth of guid gappocks of Skate ; 
 Pow-sowdie and Drammock and Crowdie, 
 
 And callour Nowt-feet in a plate ; 
 And there will be Partans and Buckies, 
 
 Speldens and Haddocks anew ; 
 And singed Sheepheads and a Haggis, 
 
 And Scadlips to sup till ye're fow." 
 
 Even when we turn from this prentice foolery to 
 Hogg himself, in good verse like The Witch of 
 Fife, we seem to see more artifice than a true-born 
 Fifer can digest ; and when we find Burns sing- 
 ing of a " tapetless ramfeesl'd hizzie " or of an 
 old mare's caperings, 
 
 " Till sprittie knowes wad rair't, an 1 riskit, 
 An' slypet owre," 
 
 we ask whether everybody in the poet's parish, and 
 in every other parish outside the Edinburgh of 
 Henry Mackenzie, was in better plight than some 
 of our most learned to-day. 
 
 It is not difficult to put one's finger on some of 
 the main causes of this mistaken or exaggerated 
 attitude to dialect. There is, in the first place, the
 
 i 4 o SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 confusion of the literary language with the col- 
 loquial. This, when once stated, does not require 
 much argument. Pinkerton was apparently the 
 first to touch on it, in one of his characteristically 
 perverse * prefaces.* "Some may say," he wrote 
 in 1786, the year of the Kilmarnock edition of 
 Burns, " the Scots themselves wish to abolish their 
 dialect totally, and substitute the English ; why 
 then attempt to preserve the Scotish language? 
 Let me answer that none can more sincerely wish 
 a total extinction of the Scotish colloquial dialect 
 than I do, for there are few modern Scoticisms 
 which are not barbarisms. . . . Yet, I believe, no 
 man of either kingdom would wish an extinction 
 of the Scotish dialect in poetry. ... It were to 
 be wished that it should be regarded in both king- 
 doms equally only as an ancient and a poetical 
 language, and nothing can take it so much out of 
 the hands of the vulgar as a rigid preservation of 
 the old spelling. Were there no Scotish books 
 that the common people in Scotland could read, 
 their knowledge of the English would increase 
 very rapidly. But while they are enraptured with 
 Barbour's History of Bruce, Blind Hary's Life of 
 Wallace, and the works of Sir David Lindsay, 
 books to be found in modern spelling at this day 
 in almost every cottage of Scotland, their old 
 dialect will maintain its ground. Were these 
 books to be published only in their original ortho-
 
 THE PROBLEM OF DIALECT 141 
 
 graphy, not one in a hundred of the peasantry 
 could read them ; and of course they would be 
 forced to read English. In short, the old Scotish 
 poets ought to be regarded in the same light as 
 Chaucer and the old English ones ; and who 
 suspects that the perusal of the latter can injure 
 the purity of English conversation or writing? 
 The contrary is so far true, that I will venture to 
 say that a man who writes a language, without 
 acquaintance with its early state, may compose well 
 from chance, but never from intelligence. For 
 knowledge of the primitive and progressive powers 
 of words is the only solid foundation of that rich 
 and terse style which posterity pronounces classic." l 
 There is some wisdom in this very provocative 
 passage, if only in pointing to the indefeasible 
 rights of the literary dialect. In the period from 
 the Revival to Burns the indifference to the mixing 
 of the literary and colloquial had not been serious 
 in its effects, for, as has been shown, the protest of 
 the verse of that age was based upon an extremely 
 rigid literary tradition. Burns, in spite of his 
 addition of fresh colloquial elements, to which he 
 gave infinite credit, was, as we have already seen, 
 strongly rooted in that tradition. Though he 
 borrowed from the unliterary speech, he somehow 
 or other escaped the difficulties with which his 
 contemporary Wordsworth encumbered himself, 
 
 1 Ancient Scotish Poems, i. pp. xvii.-xviii.
 
 142 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 when, in his protest against conventionality, he 
 to.ok over the untried and unpedigreed language 
 of his dalesmen. But since Burns's time, the minors, 
 careless of history and oblivious of the risks which 
 his genius could take, have swept the vocabulary 
 of each and every countryside into the granaries 
 of the literary speech. The test of spelling reveals 
 an interesting fact, that, whereas, with all allowance 
 for the free habit of the early scribes, there is philo- 
 logical as well as ocular authority for the words 
 which the poets of the Revival rehandled, the 
 modern practitioner, within and without the canon 
 of Whistle Binkie, is the most shameless amateur 
 in such matters. He treats his text as if it were a 
 lesson in accent, marked as a guide to a venture- 
 some alien preparing a { Scotch piece.' When a 
 vernacular of national pretence is driven to these 
 shifts, it makes sad confession of its literary hopes. 
 In the second place, the modern plea neglects 
 consideration of the relationship of true dialect to 
 changing conditions, intellectual and social. By 
 these changes we mean more than the differences 
 which grow up naturally and healthily in a progres- 
 sive culture, when what is true of or good for 
 one set of circumstances is not likely to be true of 
 or good for a later age of different mood. This 
 problem is more pathological, and it may be best 
 explained by a passage from Ruskin, where, in re- 
 ference to the verbal characteristics of Scott's style,
 
 THE PROBLEM OF DIALECT 143 
 
 we read " It has not generally been observed, 
 either by their imitators [of the Waverleys] or 
 the authors of different taste who have written for 
 a later public, that there is a difference between the 
 dialect of a language and its corruption. A dialect 
 is formed in any district where there are persons 
 of intelligence enough to use the language itself 
 in all its fineness and force, but under the particular 
 conditions of life, climate, and temper, which intro- 
 duce words peculiar to the scenery, forms of word 
 and idioms of sentence peculiar to the race, and 
 pronunciations indicative of their character and 
 disposition. Thus 'burn' (of a streamlet) is a 
 word possible only in a country where there are 
 brightly running waters, * lassie,' a word possible 
 only where girls are as free as the rivulets, and 
 * auld,' a form of the southern * old,' adopted by a 
 race of finer musical ear than the English. On the 
 contrary, mere deteriorations, or coarse, stridulent, 
 and, in the ordinary sense of the phrase, 'broad' 
 forms of utterance, are not dialects at all, hav- 
 ing nothing dialectic in them ; and all phrases 
 developed in states of rude employment, and 
 restricted intercourse, are injurious to the tone and 
 narrowing to the power of the language they affect. 
 Mere breadth of accent does not spoil a dialect as 
 long as the speakers are men of varied idea and 
 good intelligence ; but the moment the life is con- 
 tracted by mining, millwork, or any oppressive and
 
 i 4 4 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 monotonous labour, the accents and phrases become 
 debased. It is part of the popular folly of the day 
 to find pleasure in trying to write and spell these 
 abortive, crippled, and more or less brutal forms 
 of human speech." 1 This elaboration by Ruskin 
 of his protest against the sins of modern life 
 is directly applicable to the matter before us, for 
 modern Scots has certainly reduced the literary 
 values of the vernacular by the free intrusion of 
 untested colloquialism. The conditions are denied 
 under which, in an earlier culture, the springs of 
 popular utterance trickled into the cisterns of 
 national literature. It was easy to resist or regu- 
 late the inflow in a Scotland, when, as in the 
 sixteenth century, the Scots-speaking population, 
 all told, was barely one quarter of that of the 
 modern city of Glasgow, and when only a very 
 small fraction, and that well-knit and confirmed 
 in tradition, professed or encouraged the craft 
 of letters. Scots has lost this power of resist- 
 ance, and, affecting the humanitarianism of Burns, 
 its only pattern, has been generous to every ' randie 
 gangrel' bit of shelta and clachan-slang. Some 
 literatures have clamoured at times for an Aliens 
 Act, and have felt themselves in need of protection 
 against * over-sea* fashion. Scotland, even when 
 Ramsay thought she had a grievance, has, as we 
 have observed, never shut her ports ; and her free 
 
 1 ' On the Old Road ' ; Works, ed. Cook, xxxiv. p. 293.
 
 THE PROBLEM OF DIALECT 145 
 
 habit may have brought her good as well as 
 harm. It is the wastrels of dialect and her own 
 bad housewifery, which threaten to destroy her 
 vernacular credit. 
 
 This leads to a third point, that there is no 
 vernacular standard for literary purposes. No 
 Scots ever printed or spoken can claim general 
 authority. Burns presents not a few difficulties to 
 his Aberdonian admirers, and they in turn perplex 
 the good folk of the Lothians. The subdivision 
 of dialect has persisted, in spite of the processes of 
 natural decay and the pressure of English, by 
 reason of frequent exercise in each variety to 
 literary ends ; and the limitation of this exercise 
 to the casting and recasting of matters of the 
 narrowest local interest has accentuated rather than 
 blurred the differences. We can admire this 
 dialectal pride in Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk, in 
 Poems in the Buchan Dialect (1787), in others in 
 that of Kyle, or Mearns, or Merse, though we 
 extend our sympathy to the connoisseurs in epic 
 when they see Ajax's Speech and Ulysses' Answer 
 in homely * fa's ' and * fat's.' These ingenuities 
 are good material for the philologers, whom we 
 commiserate too when they wrestle with the 
 phonetic conundrums of bucolics and *sma' toun' 
 printers. It is, however, another matter when we 
 have to deal with modern enthusiasts, who draw 
 freely from all quarters, and, making pretence of a 
 
 S.L. K
 
 146 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 standard, jumble Ayrshire and East Neuk and 
 Galloway and ' Stanehive ' together, and translate 
 the whole into * fonetik,' for * scientific ' use on 
 Teutonic gramophones. This make-believe can- 
 not reduce the anarchy of dialect or give literary 
 confidence to the vernacular. The day is long past 
 for the realization of that ambition, if Scotland 
 ever cherished it, and we may rest content with 
 what we have, and pray that when the Muse is in 
 no mood to try English she will not disturb the 
 ancient peace of Balmaquhapple with the vanities 
 of Kennaquhair. 
 
 Where, then, lies the hope of the Scottish 
 vernacular, if it is not to succumb to English, 
 and if it is to recover any of its credit against the 
 travesties which pass with Cockneys and not a 
 few misguided Northerners? Can it, at the best, 
 have any other claim than as a pastiche, a rehand- 
 ling of themes such as Burns took, in language 
 such as he used and made literary? If not, then 
 it is spent, and will go a-begging in the Poet's 
 Corners of the country press ; and its traditions 
 will be left to the care of the scholarly and pious. 
 Yet it may make compromise with its strong neigh- 
 bour, as we shall see it has done now and then in the 
 past. 
 
 We are reminded, at the outset, of a device, of 
 the nature of a compromise, which Burns used not 
 rarely, and which no one has managed better than
 
 THE PROBLEM OF DIALECT 147 
 
 he. The readiest illustration is Tarn o' Shanter, 
 in which we have alternate layers, or a mosaic, of 
 two styles. The most notable instance is near the 
 beginning of the poem, when, after the ' familiar ' 
 picture of the "blethering, blustering, drunken 
 blellum " and his c< drouthy cronie," the poet 
 suddenly falls to general reflection, and as suddenly 
 falls into pure Southern. 
 
 " But pleasures are like poppies spread : 
 You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed ; 
 Or like the snow falls in the river, 
 A moment white then melts for ever ; 
 Or like the borealis race, 
 That flit ere you can point their place ; 
 Or like the rainbow's lovely form 
 Evanishing amid the storm." 
 
 And then at the mention of Tarn as if the very 
 sound * T-a-m ' could not fail to play havoc with 
 eighteenth century decorum he recovers at once 
 the accent and phrase of Alloway parish ; and so 
 continues, with little breaks here and there, till, 
 after the din and rush, and the breathless moment 
 when the " hellish legion " sallies forth 
 
 " As bees bizz out wi' angry fyke, 
 When plundering herds assail their byke," 
 
 he goes on 
 
 " As open pussie's mortal foes, 
 When, pop ! she starts before their nose ; 
 As eager runs the market-crowd, 
 When ' Catch the Thief ! ' resounds aloud : 
 So Maggie runs, the witches follow,"
 
 i 4 8 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 and concludes the episode, and the couplet, thus 
 " Wi' monie an eldritch skreich and hollo." 
 
 That this is by no means exceptional parquetry, the 
 poem To a Mountain Daisy , with its wedge of 
 English 
 
 " Such is the fate of artless maid, 
 Sweet flow' ret of the rural shade," etc., 
 
 or, even more strikingly, the Cotter's Saturday 
 Night y shows very clearly. We are not here 
 directly concerned with the literary propriety of 
 this tartan-Scots, over which some critics have 
 shaken their heads, or with the measure of Burns's 
 success or failure. The immediate interest lies in 
 the historical necessity of the compromise, showing 
 either that Scots had so lost its hold that it could 
 only be pressed into service, even during the 
 Revival, in the very * familiar ' and realistic 
 moments of the Muse, or, more truly, that it was, 
 by reason of its domestic habit, ill at ease or quite 
 at a nonplus in more ceremonial and reflective 
 efforts. 
 
 We are, however, more immediately attracted by 
 another kind of compromise, of subtler device, 
 which has been tested and found good, and which 
 appears to offer a way for the freer expression of 
 nationality in style. It may be described as the 
 delicate colouring of standard English with 
 northern tints. And here it is well to remember
 
 THE PROBLEM OF DIALECT 149 
 
 that the wisest patriotism does not seek to force 
 on new and changed generations, and certainly not 
 in literary matters, the rule of* a tradition already 
 outworn ; that the hope of continuing and increas- 
 ing the vitality of a language or literature is 
 undone by an affected antiquarianism ; that there 
 is no working with tools which are blunt in the 
 hands of Englishmen and foreigners, and of Scots 
 themselves. When Scotland puts a premium upon 
 antiquity or parochialism she confesses that she has 
 lost so much, perhaps everything. Matters of 
 scholarship may be left to scholarship, which will 
 give them their due honour and point the historical 
 lesson at appropriate times. Scotland wants no 
 4 compulsory Scots' for her poets, as in Dublin 
 they pretend to think they want compulsory Achill ; 
 but she wants, and may earnestly pray for, a fuller 
 realization of national sentiment in a regenerated 
 art. Let Scots, in their literature, express the Scot 
 that is in them, and believe that their artistic oppor- 
 tunity lies in something more than an occasional 
 strut or frolic in the masquing-gear of * Braid 
 Scots.' 
 
 If this appear extravagant or be as gall to the 
 Perfervids, they may be reminded of the testimony 
 of certain Scottish writers who have some right to 
 speak on this matter. We find a hint of it in 
 Burns, when he tells George Thomson 1 that " there 
 
 1 Letter to Thomson, a6th Jan., 1793.
 
 150 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 is a naivete", a pastoral simplicity, in a slight inter- 
 mixture of Scots words and phraseology, which is 
 more in unison at least to my taste, and, I will add, 
 to every genuine Caledonian taste with the simple 
 pathos or rustic sprightliness of our native music, 
 than any English verses whatever." Scott offers 
 corroboration in his correspondence in 1817 with 
 his friend Daniel Terry about the writing of a play 
 The Baron of Plenton. In discussing the details, 
 he says : " I think Scotland is entitled to have 
 something on the stage to balance Macklin's two 
 worthies. 1 You understand the dialect will be 
 only tinged with the national dialect not that the 
 Baron is to speak broad Scotch, while all the others 
 talk English." 2 This is a hint of a purpose which 
 Scott keeps in mind throughout all his work ; and 
 it is interesting to find him thinking of it in con- 
 nection with drama, where direct dialogue and 
 stage realism demand a fuller allowance. Even in 
 the novel, and especially in the conversational 
 passages, some of this extra allowance might be 
 claimed ; yet there he takes it rather sparingly, and 
 holds by his conviction that a dialect tincture is the 
 best. Each one of his novels supplies its hundred 
 instances. If the reader require an illustration, 
 let him turn again to the passage from * Wandering 
 Willie's Tale,' in Redgauntlet, quoted near 
 
 1 Sir Archy MacSarcasm and Sir Pertinax MacSycophant. 
 3 Lockhart, Life of Scott, v. 202.
 
 THE PROBLEM OF DIALECT 151 
 
 the end of last chapter. No one can miss the 
 extensive effect of the sprinkling of Scots-spelt 
 words, securing through the gently-suggested and 
 rising accent of the passage a complete impres- 
 sion of northern quality and setting. A more 
 generous indulgence, especially if accompanied 
 with polite hints of phonetic values, as in our 
 modern * Braid Scots,' would have been a distrac- 
 tion, if not the undoing of the whole. The 
 parochial antiquaries are welcome to their view that 
 Scott's art is but the bastardy of language. We 
 prefer to think that by this handling of words he 
 promised youth and adventure to a literature, for 
 which some people could hope for no happier 
 fate than decent burial. The excellence of his 
 method stands out clearly when it is contrasted 
 with Hogg's, even in the least extravagant passages 
 in the Nodes. There is frank recognition of the 
 device in R. L. Stevenson, though at times he 
 swings away in a clatter of dialect, distressful to 
 southerners and foreigners. The author of The 
 Little Minister perhaps relies less upon it in his 
 task of putting the stranger at his ease with the 
 gossips of Thrums. We see it, with the new 
 interest of a Gaelic setting, in the craftsmanship of 
 the author of John Splendid. 
 
 One word may be added, by way of epilogue to 
 this discussion, that the final test of the method 
 must always be literary. Every form derives its
 
 152 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 value from its artistic necessity and appropriate- 
 ness. Art is free to select, not always free to use ; 
 and no one may assume that he serves her ends 
 rightly by a mere collector's fury for things that are 
 old or for things that are 'vulgar,' in order that 
 new thrills may be given to our jaded English. 
 Why should the Scot want to preserve an outworn 
 vocabulary more than the English or French have 
 preserved theirs, or make the speech of the good 
 folk of Balmaquhapple, Easter or Wester, the 
 criterion of diction? It is no disrespect to 
 Chaucer or William Barnes that poet X writes 
 as his public likes him to write ; and no slight to 
 tradition to be strenuous in making the best of 
 what lies to hand. But, while so much may be 
 said for general argument, no lover of literature, 
 even if he brings small historical knowledge to the 
 matter, dare overlook the aid of both kinds, the 
 old and the dialectal, in the enrichment of the 
 modern medium. What Spenser gained by 
 archaism, lesser poets and later ages may emulate 
 to advantage. Scottish literature, if rightly guided, 
 is not likely to be indifferent to this opportunity. 
 As it has ever been a great borrower from neigh- 
 bours, it may well, in later conditions, take freely 
 from its own forgotten riches, especially from that 
 "almost unrivalled provision of poetical cliches," 
 the " stock phrases which Heaven knows who first 
 minted and which will pass till they are worn out
 
 THE PROBLEM OF DIALECT 153 
 
 of all knowledge." 1 But it must borrow, as 
 southern English has borrowed and will continue 
 to borrow, with the authority of the Muse, by 
 literary methods, and to literary ends. 
 
 There might be little harm in the view that 
 dialect is the symbol and test of all that counts for 
 nationality, and that the more assiduous is the 
 recovery of the past or the cherishing of colloquial 
 forms the more secure will that nationality be, if it 
 were certain that we get behind externals and come 
 into touch with essential Scotticism. Unfor- 
 tunately, the Perfervid coteries are wholly absorbed 
 in a ritual of protest, and that ritual not altogether 
 of the best, or reasonably explanatory of itself. 
 Some day they may understand the attitude of 
 Scott, whose patriotism they dare not dispute, and 
 give his method its due. Perhaps we trouble over- 
 much about the future. Should it be the destiny 
 of Scottish literature to lose its individual place 
 and at last forget the full Doric and the traditional 
 themes, there need be no wringing of hands, as if 
 nationality were lost and the generous spring of 
 Scotticism had run dry. The passing will not be 
 as the last flicker of a spent force, but the com- 
 pletion of an Act of Union which has been long in 
 the making, and under which northern genius, 
 trained in a school too narrow for its powers, may, 
 in the fuller enjoyment of an old comradeship, find 
 1 Saintsbury, Essays in English Literature, i., p. 48.
 
 154 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 play for these powers and indulge a growing con- 
 fidence. There is small risk, the Muse helping, 
 of this being vexatious to those, southern or 
 northern, who dislike the aroma of the Kailyard 
 and resent the artifice of * Braid Scots,' or to the 
 purists who must protest, with better reason than 
 Tom Moore did, against 
 " Scotch, English, and slang in promiscuous alliance." * 
 
 1 So Moore, of Gait's 'rabble of words ' (Poems, Oxford edition, 
 p. 621). De Quincey, while allowing to the Scots dialect pic- 
 turesqueness and value in " characteristic expression," especially 
 in Scott's novels, asks " what man in his senses would employ it 
 in a grave work, and speaking in his own person ? " (On Style, 
 Part II., Works, 1897, vol. x. p. 188.)
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE NEW POETIC FORCES 
 
 PERSISTENT and varied as were the influences which 
 acted on Scottish literature throughout its history, 
 they never succeeded in obliterating the family 
 traits, even at times when the affectation of foreign 
 taste was at its height. This may not surprise the 
 stranger who has not made particular study of its 
 history. Englishmen will say that this is as it 
 should be, for they are aware that, though exile and 
 travel and cosmopolitan culture may produce a 
 remarkable conformity with the manner of others, 
 the bases of national character remain unshaken ; 
 and they have learned that, fight as Scots will over 
 theology and politics, the sense of brotherhood is 
 never lost, and that the bickerings about Kirk and 
 State are but tonic or exercise. The South has 
 long made merry over this tenacity and 'clannish- 
 ness,' and no one need be so wanting in humour 
 as to quarrel with the ancient hyperbolical jests 
 about * brither ' Scotticism. The literature shows 
 a like contrariness at once the most acquisitive 
 and the most self-possessed ; running after alien
 
 156 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 fashions, in apparent discontent with what national 
 pride should find at home, and yet holding to its 
 own ; strong enough to offer to the very neigh- 
 bour from which it borrows so much, and even to 
 Europe at large, new interests and new methods. 
 
 It was, of course, only in modern times, certainly 
 not before the eighteenth century, that Scottish 
 literature found itself in a position to act upon 
 English literature, and through it upon others. 
 We speak only of the vernacular, not of that 
 medieval and humanist Latin in which many in 
 and beyond Scotland won great reputation, and 
 in which they were so often more at home than in 
 their native speech. Nor shall we consider 
 whether hints are to be found of spiritual and 
 artistic differences between the Majors and 
 Buchanans and the other provincials of the great 
 empire of Latinity. Verse, even in its most tradi- 
 tional forms in the eclogue, psalm, and other 
 exercises practised in the Delitiae might disclose 
 not a little of that national quality which juts out 
 here and there, rather jaggedly, in the pedantries 
 and rancours of historical or theological prose ; 
 but of influence, in any strict sense, there could be 
 none. All that the world knew of the Scottish 
 origin of these citizens of a common empire was 
 probably no more than the title-page confession 
 Scotus ; and this, in earlier days at least, was poor 
 security against Hibernian claims.
 
 NEW POETIC FORCES 157 
 
 Just at the stage when Scottish literature 
 seemed to yield up its individuality to its southern 
 neighbour, it began for the first time to exert a 
 direct influence on the teachers from whom it had 
 learnt so much. When in the eighteenth century 
 the Scot had become almost morbidly conscious of 
 his provincialism, he found, by a strange turn of 
 fortune, that these teachers were now his pupils. 
 The situation is not so paradoxical as it would 
 appear. The period of receptivity had been one 
 of preparation, a time of discipline rather than 
 of barter or surrender. No literature has ever 
 found its place without such experience. The 
 plodding translators gave England her prose ; the 
 endless practice in the un-English intricacies of 
 the Italian sonnet gave the Elizabethans their 
 free enjoyment of English verse. As in that 
 English training there was no sacrifice of English 
 quality, so even in the most extravagantly Angli- 
 cized Scots the northern character was not lost. 
 When towards the close of the century the full- 
 toned Doric had won repute beyond Scotland, 
 there was no question, on either side of the Border, 
 of debauched Scotticism. It has always appeared 
 strange that a modern and rather wrong-headed 
 patriotism, as voiced by literary historians, greater 
 and lesser, should be so depressed by this Anglo- 
 mania, this trudging to London of the Thomsons 
 and Macphersons, this inordinate deference to
 
 1 58 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 things Addisonian and Johnsonian, and should 
 feel it a duty to make apology for the Humes and 
 Robertsons of a degenerate Edinburgh. It is 
 forgotten by these sad people, and by many un- 
 biassed persons too who should know better, that 
 England's welcome to the new-comers was not 
 offered in the old schoolmasterly manner. Her 
 literature was sensitive to this Scottish compli- 
 ment, and by it, as well as by the less effective and 
 less novel devoirs of Ireland and Wales, was 
 encouraged to exchange English self-content for 
 British responsibilities and aspirations. It was 
 Sawney the Scot who brought this awakening to 
 England, and to Europe the knowledge of another 
 England, such as Shakespeare's age or Dryden's 
 could not have foreseen or understood. In this 
 transaction, far more than in the vaunt of having 
 placed a Scottish dynasty on the English throne, 
 or of having avenged the loss of some independ- 
 ence by capturing high places and honours in the 
 South, should lamenting Scots find consolation 
 and even pride. We must discard the heresy 
 that calls the eighteenth century in Scotland the 
 Age of Apostasy, and smile at the contemporary 
 French distress at the literary disgrace of the old 
 ally. "L'Ecosse," says the Encyclopedie, "a t6 
 redoutable tant qu'elle n'a pas 6t6 incorpore"e avec 
 PAngleterre ; mais, comme dit M. de Voltaire, un 
 6tat pauvre, voisin d'un riche, devient v6nal a la
 
 NEW POETIC FORCES 159 
 
 longue ; et c'est aussi le malheur que 1'ficosse 
 e"prouve." l The truer reading now is that it was 
 only after incorporation that Scotland felt her 
 literary strength. Even contemporaries might 
 have seen that whatever English satirists and 
 angry place-hunters said of the beggarly Scots who 
 poured into Lord Bute's London, there was an 
 honest welcome to the northern Muse. 
 
 So it fell out that it was only during this 
 period of * Shame y that Scotland and her literature 
 became known beyond the Borders and across the 
 seas. She had, it is true, great reputation abroad 
 as the nursery of many famous in learning, soldier- 
 ing, and commerce. In some places, as in the Low 
 Countries and Poland, the burgher-folk must have 
 had a sneaking respect for the country which pro- 
 duced the astute merchants and chapmen, who, like 
 foraging ants, passed through their markets year in 
 year out. There was something mysterious about 
 the little kingdom away in the North-East, some- 
 thing which invited a condescending interest in 
 the foreigner, something provocative of gossip 
 which the picturesque fancy of these wandering 
 patriots and scholar-exiles could not let slip. We 
 know how successfully the arch-romancer Boece, 
 and others in a more stolid way, improved upon the 
 national history, to the great delectation of the 
 Continent, and to the deluding of men of the 
 
 1 Art. Ecosse, by the Chevalier de Jaucourt (ed. 1 755, vol. v.) .
 
 160 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 world like Erasmus and Paulus Jovius ; how, by 
 lucky accident as well as by careful handling of 
 editors and printers, Scotland was honoured so 
 nobly in Blaeu's folios, the universal Bayle, Moreri 
 and Hoffman, the Elzevir Respublicae and the 
 French Delices. There was never any lack of 
 material of the * terror and wonder > kind, or of 
 embroiderers and retailers, both home and foreign, 
 to supply all demands. So it mattered little when 
 in later days the historical bag-wigs set them- 
 selves to throw out all the stories of phantom 
 kings and regicides from before the Flood or spoil 
 the romance of what could not be proved mythical. 
 The praefervidum ingenium Scotorum, of which 
 the Poitevin Andr Rivet was the first to speak, 1 
 had so heralded itself in Europe that, in whatever 
 way and at whatever time it might express itself 
 with confidence in literature, it was not likely to 
 pass unnoticed. Its greatest opportunity came in 
 the later eighteenth century. Then literature both 
 in England and abroad shows unmistakably in its 
 record an awakened interest in ideas Scottish in 
 origin or Scottish in nurture. 
 
 Scotland had her chance when the neo-classical 
 regime in England began to totter. Although she 
 maintained in the critical atmosphere of her angli- 
 cized Edinburgh 2 the authority of that regime, 
 
 1 See J. Hill Burton, The Scot Abroad, p. 198. 
 1 See next chapter.
 
 NEW POETIC FORCES 161 
 
 especially in her prose, she showed in many ways 
 in her verse, both in the work of the home-poets 
 of the Revival from Ramsay to Burns and in that 
 of the poets who established themselves in England 
 or sought an English audience, that she had thrown 
 in her lot with the rebels. So valiantly did she 
 proclaim the new gospel of nature and romantic 
 freedom, that it is not extravagant to allow her the 
 main share in directing the change, though England 
 was already restless and had broken silence. Her 
 three gifts were the Seasons and Fingal and the 
 Ballads, and through these the Revival discovered 
 its full purpose. 
 
 James Thomson is now forgotten, except in the 
 text-books, those graveyards of letters which tell 
 the passer-by little more than that here lies one 
 poet and there another, each of some account in his 
 own generation. Few, even of the professional 
 brethren in England, read the Seasons, and abroad 
 there is now no Madame Roland who would choose 
 the book for solace, no Ch6nier or Rousseau to 
 praise, no Prevost or Voltaire or Grimm to honour 
 it as a classic. Thomson is gone with the ineffable 
 Gessner, and we seem to be content to leave his 
 memory to the school-anthologists and the Schmed- 
 ings. 1 This may be the way of all poets except 
 
 1 Jacob Thomson, ein vergessener Dichter des achtzehnten Jahr- 
 hunderts (1889).
 
 1 62 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 the greatest, and it is nobody's concern to try to 
 galvanize what time has palsied. But no reputa- 
 tion of this kind, however soon and willingly it 
 is forgotten, passes away without exerting some 
 influence, and it is the business of the historical 
 student to extort from the self-possessed modern 
 some acknowledgement of the debt. 
 
 Thomson's share in the coming change, or his 
 consciousness of the part he played, must not be 
 exaggerated. His mind was as lazy as his body, 
 too comfortably slow to allow him to play the 
 reformer. With all his worries, he was not dis- 
 satisfied with his world, as Wordsworth was some- 
 times with his. We may say that it was his 
 indifference, or habit of compromise, which was 
 one of the causes, if not the main cause, of his 
 successful insinuation into the affections of his age, 
 as, on the other hand, it was one of the reasons for 
 his neglect by the next. How strongly he is on 
 the side of the older order is shown in the arti- 
 ficiality of his verse, even in the Seasons and Castle 
 of Indolence ; certainly at every turn in his minor 
 pieces, deservedly forgotten ; but chiefly in his 
 choice of trivial subjects, by which he vexed not a 
 few foreign admirers, in his didactic vein, his 
 historical interludes, his overdone and lifeless 
 epithets, his dull Miltonic echoes and studio-made 
 phrasing and vocabulary, his apostrophes, his 
 reminiscences of Virgil and Lucretius. The love
 
 NEW POETIC FORCES 163 
 
 of his age for him was the love of these things, 
 and it may be doubted whether there were many 
 who had eyes to see any difference between him 
 and the poet of Windsor Forest. We know that 
 the Seasons was admired for its 'philosophical 
 reflections,' and for its panel subjects of the 
 Musidora type, and for these alone, by many of 
 the best. 
 
 Yet in essentials, in the poems by which he 
 would choose to be remembered, he is alien to 
 the prevailing taste. He is too careless in con- 
 struction, and, in the marshalling of his ideas, not 
 seldom too unrestrained, to be counted a loyal son 
 of Twickenham. Johnson noted these things and 
 found his diction " in the highest degree florid and 
 luxuriant," l just as, in the poet's student days, the 
 academic authorities at Edinburgh had found his 
 theological exercises. There is risk of our making 
 too much of these as hints of the romantic en- 
 thusiasm which was about to undo the precisians 
 of English letters, for there is little passion in 
 Thomson, and, when he is either unkempt or over- 
 dressed, the frolic is merely intellectual. If this 
 were the only measure of contrast with his con- 
 temporaries, it would prove no more than that he 
 was an indifferent artist. There was no novelty 
 in this, and Johnson's London was not likely to be 
 misled. But there was something new nothing 
 
 1 Lives, ' Thomson.'
 
 1 64 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 less, as Time would prove, than a fresh gospel in 
 his choice of subject ; and, even in his artificial 
 verse, the discovery of a new instrument. These 
 things, the turning to Nature for more than decora- 
 tive purposes and the achievement of his blank 
 verse, are commonplaces with which those who 
 know least of Thomson are not unfamiliar. 
 
 It is not necessary, even were it historically just, 
 to claim for Thomson a surpassing share in this 
 appreciation of Nature among his contemporaries. 
 We may allow to the most confirmed formalist of 
 that age and every age intimate moments with the 
 simple harmonies and colours of the countryside, 
 and it would not be hard to collect evidence of this 
 in the early eighteenth century. But a rather 
 cheap criticism, based partly on a misconception of 
 Wordsworth's misconception of that century, has 
 cried down Thomson's credit by declining to see 
 in his work any genuine enthusiasm for Nature, or 
 any novelty in his open-air studies. This view 
 neglects certain considerations, that Thomson's 
 choice of a new subject, as a relief from the trivial 
 and artificial delights of his time, was deliberate, 
 and even enforced by critical argument ; that early 
 personal devotion, not mere nausea of town- 
 elegances or the promise of fresh rhetorical oppor- 
 tunity, dictated that choice ; and that no one is to be 
 denied the honour of having given us something, 
 because we know that thing so well and have for-
 
 NEW POETIC FORCES 165 
 
 gotten the source of our knowledge. On this last 
 point, Johnson, with characteristic nobility of 
 judgement, has said the last word. "The reader 
 of the Seasons wonders that he never saw before 
 what Thomson shows him, and that he never yet 
 has felt what Thomson impresses." L We are 
 ungrateful to him as we are to his century, which 
 is so * dull ' and < prosaic ' because it had the talent 
 of making things so clear. As to deliberate pur- 
 pose, the Preface to the second edition of Winter 
 may stand for evidence. "Let poetry," says 
 Thomson, "once more be restored to her ancient 
 truth and purity ; ... let her exchange her low, 
 venal, trifling subjects for such as are fair, useful, 
 and magnificent." What he calls, in characteristic 
 figure, the " wintry world of letters " must be 
 lightened and warmed by " the choosing of great 
 and serious subjects." And he proceeds, " I 
 know no subject more elevating, more amusing, 
 more ready to awake the poetical enthusiasm, the 
 philosophical reflection, and the moral sentiment, 
 than the works of Nature. . . . How gay looks 
 the Spring! how glorious the Summer! how 
 pleasing the Autumn! and how venerable the 
 Winter ! But there is no thinking of these things 
 without breaking out into Poetry ; which is, by- 
 the-by, a plain and undeniable argument of their 
 superior excellence. . . . The best . . . Poets 
 
 * Lives. 'Thomson.'
 
 1 66 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 have been passionately fond of retirement and 
 solitude. The wild romantic country was their 
 delight." The third point, his personal devotion 
 to Nature, is made clear in the story of his boyhood 
 and undergraduate days, from the time when, as a 
 stripling, and the pet of Robert Riccaltoun, a 
 Border farmer, he was stirred by that worthy's 
 verses on Winter to his student efforts in the 
 Edinburgh Miscellany. 
 
 " I hate the clamours of the smoky towns, 
 But much admire the bliss of rural clowns." * 
 
 And again, 
 
 " But grant, ye Powers, that it may be my lot 
 To live in peace, from noisy towns remote," 2 
 
 a very proper prayer for a young poet dedicated 
 to the service of Nature and fretting to escape from 
 his academic prison in Auld Reekie. If this prayer 
 was strangely answered by his being plunged into 
 the literary life of the southern capital and by his 
 remaining too happy or too indolent to gird at 
 Fate, he never had any misgivings about these early 
 fervours. Even though the compliment of popu- 
 larity tempted him to revise his first Winter, to the 
 loss, as Johnson rightly thought, of some of its 
 'race,' he never fell to be a mere singer of 
 " pendant gardens in Cheapside." 3 By a triumph 
 of insinuation (for thus may we excuse the 
 
 1 Of a Country Life (1720). 6. 
 
 * See the Preface to the 2nd edition of Winter.
 
 NEW POETIC FORCES 167 
 
 rhetoric and diction which the romantic poets 
 could not or would not understand, and of the 
 usefulness of which Thomson himself was not fully 
 aware) the Seasons disclosed a new motive, just as 
 the Castle of Indolence, notwithstanding its serio- 
 comic vein, showed the accent and touch of 
 Spenser's romanticism which scores of 'Imita- 
 tions' had missed. Though Thomson failed to 
 give the soul of the scene as later Nature poets have 
 done, he at least painted the scene with the sensi- 
 tiveness of one who had lived in it and learnt its 
 charms, past forgetting. We can forgive his 
 Scottish 'pawkiness' in conforming to his hosts' 
 humour for moral bombast and ceremonious 
 epithet, and may doubt whether any one of his 
 poet-critics, had he been born before his time and 
 had he proclaimed an earlier gospel of Olney or of 
 Rydal Mount, would have fared half so well in his 
 mission to the * ingenious ' of Fleet Street. Eng- 
 land had to have her Ciders and Winter Solstices 
 before her Tasks. What she would have had, 
 and when, and how, if Thomson had not let in the 
 northern breezes and shown the northern colours, 
 would be matter for a chapter in literary history 
 strangely different from the existing record. 
 
 Thomson brought to English literature not 
 merely a new interest in the details of country-life, 
 but a new atmosphere. The novelty of the second 
 lay in discovering for English letters some liking
 
 1 68 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 for the sterner and gloomier aspects, which runs 
 through all Scottish literature from Douglas on- 
 wards. 1 Winter rules Thomson's year. Of 
 Winter his first teacher, Riccaltoun, sang ; of 
 Winter Thomson first sang, and sang best. When 
 there is a touch of home-sickness in later years, it 
 is for the shadows and storm of his Teviotdale. 
 The minute realism of his Spring and Summer 
 the " sweet-briar hedges " and " smell of dairy," 
 the glow of the garden, the " sound of sharpening 
 scythe," the mower in the "humid hay," the 
 summer pool might have passed unnoticed, but 
 for his bolder studies in the greys of Nature. 
 The trail of the tempest is over all. The pleasures 
 of Spring are the relief from the " kindred glooms " 
 and " cogenial horrors " ; the harvest-time is con- 
 solation against coming stress. His first picture is 
 the breaking of a rain-storm 
 
 " First, joyless rains obscure 
 Drive through the mingling skies with vapour foul, 
 Dash on the mountain's brow, and shake the woods 
 That grumbling wave below. The unsightly plain 
 Lies a brown deluge ; as the low bent clouds 
 Pour flood on flood, yet unexhausted still 
 Combine, and, deepening into night, shut up 
 The day's fair face." a 
 
 Here lay his tonic value. When he indulges this 
 mood he is most opposed to the classical calm of 
 his age, whether in England or abroad, and in his 
 
 1 See Chapter ii, supra. 2 Winter. 73-80.
 
 NEW POETIC FORCES 169 
 
 manner least aureate and conventional. The late 
 M. Texte, when quoting the passage from Spring 
 on sunshine after rain, asked, " What French author 
 wrote in this style in 1730? " ; or, what German 
 poet before Uz in 1742, or before Kleist, whose 
 Friihling (1749) was a compliment to Thomson? 
 It may be doubted whether English and European 
 literature would have taken so early and so fully 
 to the new subject of Nature, in the spring and 
 summer settings which more genial lands could 
 understand, had it not been stirred by the sterner 
 sketches of the northern poet. But, apart from 
 this provocative aid to naturalism, the Seasons 
 directed European taste to the ' matter' of the 
 North, and stimulated what M. Jules Lemaitre has 
 described as the acces de septentriomanie of the 
 eighteenth century. 1 Scotland, thus introduced to 
 the Continent, was not slow in making a stronger 
 appeal. 
 
 Ossian has long ago retired to his misty hill-tops, 
 and James Macpherson, who conjured him forth to 
 vex the world of letters as no ghost has done, before 
 or since, has ' tholed his assize.' It is hard for us 
 to understand what a pother the son of Fingal 
 caused in the critical coteries, or to measure the 
 effects, in some ways for good, of this fiction, so 
 impudently conceived, upon the literature of 
 
 1 Revue des Deux Mondes, 126 (Dec. 1894), p. 847.
 
 170 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 Europe. When we turn over the minutes of the 
 literary and philosophical societies of the period, 1 
 we find no subjects so persistent as this Ossianic 
 poetry and the problem of its authenticity. In 
 England the question involved men like Gray and 
 Johnson ; abroad, the publication of the book was 
 hailed as the birthday of a new era. Latin and 
 Teutonic art welcomed it in identical terms, echo- 
 ing or corroborating Blair, who proclaimed it the 
 equal of Homer. Ossian is the modern Homer, 
 said Madame de Stael. To Klopstock he is the 
 rival of Homer ; to Voss " Ossian of Scotland is 
 greater than Homer of Ionia" 2 : and Herder, 
 having at last found his soul's desire, had thoughts 
 of going to Scotland that he might be touched 
 more closely by this inspired writing. All this 
 and more, especially of the enthusiasm in Ger- 
 many, is familiar, 8 and need not be repeated ; but 
 one or two reflections suggest themselves not 
 impertinently. 
 
 In the first place, the Scotticism, as found by 
 Herder in Macpherson's pages, was illusory. If, 
 
 1 For example the Speculative Society of Edinburgh Uni- 
 versity, of which Scott and so many of the northern youth who 
 became famous were members. 
 
 2 As he was to the sorrowful Werther : " Ossian hat in meinem 
 Herz den Homer verdrangt." 
 
 3 See Texte, /.-/ Rousseau, passim. It would appear that in 
 our own day ' Ossian ' (in translation) is, or was, accepted in 
 Italian schools as the " standard ' English ' classic " a peda- 
 gogical enormity very distressing to a correspondent in The 
 Spectator of 26th Oct. 1918.
 
 NEW POETIC FORCES 171 
 
 as their author claimed, the Ossianic poems are far 
 removed from the fantastic work of the Irish bards, 
 they are not any nearer, in trait and sentiment, to 
 what must pass for Scottish, even if by that we 
 mean only Gaelic. No literary critic nowadays 
 could, even were all clues of provenance and 
 language to fail, mistake this Ossian and his 
 brethren as representative. The Dean of Lismore 
 would have had no doubts ; and there would have 
 been fewer in the classical Edinburgh of Blair's day 
 willing to be convinced of the ancient and abiding 
 Scottish timbre of the epics, had not the contempt 
 shown by Johnson and other Englishmen made 
 defence of Macpherson and his work a plain matter 
 of national honour. Had these good people been 
 as wise as posterity, they would have seen that 
 Scotland's credit in the matter was based not on 
 the local or representative character of Macpher- 
 son's work, but on the larger issue, that it voiced 
 the new mood of Romanticism, and in terms which 
 immediately won the attention of every literature 
 ready to break with the ennui of Rule. If, as 
 Percy said of the Fragments, there is "not one 
 local or appropriated image in the whole," there is 
 at least genius, and genius which promised a new 
 dispensation. 
 
 This suggests a second observation, that Mac- 
 pherson, even more than Thomson, was uncon- 
 scious of the trend of his effort toward Roman-
 
 172 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 ticism. Like the lowlander he was attracted by 
 the homiletic and rhetorical fashions, which not a 
 few in England were already of opinion " had been 
 carried too far." 1 Isaac Taylor's dainty vignette 
 on the title-page of Temora, with its Greekish 
 hero, helmeted, and reclining as the gods do on 
 Olympus, tells us how author and artist interpreted 
 their mission. 2 The quaint protest in the t Disser- 
 tation' which Macpherson prefixed to the piece 
 shows, notwithstanding its hint of his sensitiveness 
 to the situation, how thoroughly he failed to under- 
 stand the true direction of his work. In answer- 
 ing, with a complacency so astounding that Johnson 
 must have smiled, the "absurd opinion" which 
 " appropriated " the " compositions of Ossian " to 
 " the Irish nation," he describes the Irish poems as 
 " entirely writ in that romantic taste, which pre- 
 vailed two ages ago." He proceeds : " Giants, 
 enchanted castles, dwarfs, palfreys, witches, and 
 magicians form the whole circle of the poet's 
 invention. The celebrated Fion could scarcely 
 move from one hillock to another, without encoun- 
 tering a giant or being entangled in the circles of 
 a magician. Witches, on broomsticks, were con- 
 tinually hovering round him, like crows ; and he 
 had freed enchanted virgins in every valley in 
 
 1 Joseph Warton, Preface to Odes, 1746. 
 
 'And Wale's vignette (engraved by Taylor) in the earlier 
 volume Fingal may have encouraged the ' Homeric ' common- 
 places about the ancient bard.
 
 NEW POETIC FORCES 173 
 
 Ireland. In short, Fion, great as he was, had but 
 a bad sort of life of it." l He appears to have this 
 in mind when in a note to Cath-Loda, in the same 
 volume, he disparages the traditional tales of the 
 Highlands, where he holds there "are more 
 stories of giants, enchanted castles, dwarfs, and 
 palfreys than in any country in Europe." 2 
 Clearly, he had convinced himself that the poems 
 the * original ' documents of his affection were 
 immune from all romantic disease. Ten years later 
 he actually threatened to impose the * classical ' 
 couplet on his spasmodic prose. Europe, indif- 
 ferent alike to his deceit and his wrong-headed 
 criticism, thanked him, past the dreams of more 
 ambitious bards, for his gift of Romance. If the 
 mystery of his popularity becomes a little less 
 mysterious when we know how well prepared the 
 public was, even in England, and as far back as the 
 time of Temple's Essay of Heroic Virtue, how 
 greedy that public had grown, and that the things 
 which it coveted were not those which he offered 
 with most ceremony, we may still be allowed to 
 wonder, when we think of what Romanticism has 
 
 1 Temora, 1763, p. xxiii. In every way, in the interests of his 
 peculiar patriotism, and the originality of his work, he resisted 
 Irish pretensions even to the renaming of Finn MacCoul (so 
 known to Dunbar and every Scottish writer) as Fingal. Irish 
 scholarship showed temper, and a triangular duel ensued between 
 Scot, Englishman, and Irishman, to the increasing of Mac- 
 pherson's credit not a little. 
 
 'ib.,p. 184 n.
 
 174 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 meant since his day, how this impudent anti- 
 quarian fraud fared so well, and how men, by no 
 means fools, came to believe that thus " Imagi- 
 nation dwelt many hundred years ago in all her 
 pomp on the cold and barren mountains of 
 Scotland." 1 
 
 So, in the third place, we may ask ourselves, 
 are these poems Scottish in any other way than may 
 be assumed by us from our knowledge of the nation- 
 ality of their author and of their setting ? Could 
 we dispute their Hibernian origin had Macpherson 
 called himself O'Flaherty and hailed from Dublin ? 
 We are almost tempted to ask, could we have 
 tracked him back to Caledonia had he disguised the 
 names of his heroes and hills in Choctaw and had 
 his poems been published posthumously at the 
 charges of the Smithsonian Institute? What are 
 the native qualities in such representative passages 
 as the following? 
 
 " And fallest thou, son of my fame ! And shall I 
 never see thee, Oscar ! When others hear of their 
 sons, I shall not hear of thee. The moss is on thy 
 four grey stones ; the mournful wind is there. The 
 battle shall be fought without him : he shall not 
 pursue the dark-brown hinds. When the warrior 
 returns from battles, and tells of other lands ; I have 
 seen a tomb, he will say, by the roaring stream, 
 the dark dwelling of a chief. He fell by car-borne 
 Oscar, the first of mortal men. I, perhaps, shall 
 
 1 Gray, Works, ed. Gosse, iii. 148.
 
 NEW POETIC FORCES 175 
 
 hear his voice ; and a beam of joy will rise in ray 
 soul." * 
 
 " Stranger of tales, said Toscar, hast thou marked 
 the warrior's course ? He must fall, give thou 
 that bossy shield ! In wrath he took the shield. 
 Fair behind it rose the breasts of a maid, white as 
 the bosom of a swan, trembling on swift-rolling waves. 
 It was Colna-dona of harps, the daughter of the king. 
 Her blue eyes had rolled on Toscar, and her love 
 arose." 2 
 
 It is easy to see why Europe found this unreality 
 so real. The infinite melancholy of the Ossianic 
 books, their sentiment and lyrical appeal, their 
 Biblical sublimity of expression, 3 were welcomed by 
 writers, not so much as a revelation, as the first 
 adequate satisfaction of a general yearning. The 
 stranger Macpherson, bent on a Chattertonian 
 frolic, had stumbled in their way. He seemed to 
 give them what their passion for mystery and gloom 
 and their eighteenth century ennui demanded, an 
 excuse, a place, a setting, for the freer exercise of 
 imagination. Who, in these days, had written, as 
 in these contrasted passages noted by Blair? 
 " Thus they passed the night in song, and brought 
 
 1 Temora, u.s. p. 16. 
 
 * Colna-dona, in the same volume, p. 223. 
 
 * On this, as well as on the ousting of Homer, the reader may 
 be reminded of Voltaire's quizzical fiction, in the article on the 
 Ancients and Moderns in the Encyclopedic, of a lively meeting 
 at Lord Chesterfield's house of a Florentine, an Oxford Professor, 
 and a Scot, where the opening lines of Fitrgal, beugUs by the 
 last, are the challenge to encounter.
 
 176 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 back the morning with joy. Fingal arose on the 
 heath, and shook his glittering spear in his hand. 
 He moved first towards the plains of Lena, and 
 we followed like a ridge of fire. Spread the 
 sail, said the King of Morven, and catch the winds 
 that pour from Lena. We rose on the wave with 
 songs, and rushed with joy through the foam of the 
 ocean." 1 And this : " Thou art fairer than the 
 ghost of the hills ; when it moves in a sunbeam at 
 noon over the silence of Morven." 2 And this: 
 " The hunter shall hear from his booth. He shall 
 fear, but love my voice. For sweet shall my voice 
 be for my friends ; for pleasant were they both to 
 me." 3 Macpherson gave them, as Goethe has 
 pointed out, " ein vollkommen passendes Local " 4 
 for this exercise, by taking them to far-away Thule 
 with its mise-en-scene of heath, moss-grown grave- 
 stones, wind-tossed grass, and lowering sky. 
 Young France and Germany had been dreaming 
 of adventure in the cloudscapes of a spiritual 
 twilight. In Fingal and Temora came the answer 
 to the longing. Amid the imaginary mists of an 
 imaginary Caledonia Macpherson's heroes fought 
 and loved and lamented as a Chateaubriand, a 
 
 1 Fingal, p. 84. Blair, Dissert., p. 28. 
 * Fingal, p. 14. Blair, ib., p. 38. 
 
 3 The Songs of Selma, ib. p. 212. Blair, ib., p. 38. 
 
 4 The phrase was respectable in Goethe's day, without any 
 beerhouse suggestion, as in modern Germany. 
 
 See Wahrheit und Dichtung, iii. (xiii.).
 
 NEW 4 POETIC FORCES 177 
 
 Goethe, or a Lamartine craved. To each, as to 
 the last, 
 
 " La harpe de Morven de mon ame est I'embteme ; 
 Elle entend de Cromla les pas de morts venir ; 
 Sa corde a mon chevet re"sonne d'elle-mfime 
 Quand passe sur ses nerfs 1'ombre de 1'avenir." 1 
 
 Here was Macpherson's triumph, and with it 
 the beginning of Scotland's literary reputation 
 throughout Europe. It mattered not that the 
 general impression was confused, or the gratitude 
 extravagant, or the universality of appeal over- 
 stated, when a French poet could identify his own 
 mountains by the details of the Northern picture, 
 and his own passion on the lips of Ossianic lovers. 2 
 This welcome made the way easier to others whose 
 task was to show the realities. Indeed, it may be 
 doubted whether the truer Scottish temper of the 
 Border Minstrelsy and Waverley would have been 
 so readily accepted had not Macpherson's pretty 
 fiction put the world in such good humour with its 
 * Caledonians.' 
 
 To these two influences of Nature and the 
 Heroic Scotland added a third in the Romantic 
 Ballad. Not only has she contributed far in excess 
 of what might be expected of her literary oppor- 
 tunity, as her share of the ten-quarto corpus 3 
 
 1 Les Confidences, vi. xi. (vol. xxix. ed. 1863). 
 1 ib., vi. vi. Ed. Child. 
 
 S.L. M
 
 178 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 showsj but she has taken a critical and editorial 
 interest in the genre, which is unrivalled. 
 
 Here the Scot's antiquarian habit served him to 
 better purpose. There is nothing in the South to 
 stand beside the general treasuries which John 
 Asloan, George Bannatyne, and Sir Richard Mait- 
 knd gathered in the sixteenth century, though 
 there had always been many in England, as else- 
 where, who from Tottel's day indulged the 
 * Miscellany ' habit, or who, like Pepys and Lord 
 Dorset, were merely curious and acquisitive. 
 When Addison, in 1711, invited the readers of the 
 Spectator to turn to Chevy Chase for fresh enjoy- 
 ment, Scotland had already shown her interest in 
 a practical way. For though the three volumes of 
 Watson's Choice Collection 1 were concerned with 
 " comic and serious Scots poems, both Ancient and 
 Modern," rather than with romantic pieces of the 
 ballad type, and with their appeal to the general 
 reader rather than to literary persons, they were not 
 without indications of revolt against the classical 
 taste of the age, and they were immediately pro- 
 vocative of more vigorous protests. Imitation 
 showed the sincerity of the liking for the older 
 romantic stuff, when, in 1719, Hardy knute 
 appeared as an original, recovered by a Scottish 
 dame, Lady Wardlaw the beginning of a long 
 tale of delicate faking and mystification which does 
 
 1 Vol. i., 1706 j ii., 1709 j iii., 1711.
 
 NEW POETIC FORCES 179 
 
 not end with the forgivable fun of Sir Walter. 
 It perhaps helps us to think less of Macpherson's 
 impudence and more generously of the tragedy of 
 his literary close, 1 when we see how youthful 
 Romanticism in all its kinds was so shy or so 
 tricksy in confession. In 1719, the year after the 
 authorized appearance of Prior's rendering of the 
 Nut Brown Maid in his Henry and Emma, and 
 the year of the first instalment of D'Urfey's 
 cathartic collection (with some Scottish contribu- 
 tions) perhaps England's only work in this kind 
 Ramsay produced his Scots Songs, and, between 
 1724 and 1727, the three volumes of his Tea- 
 Table Miscellany, containing a number of ballads, 
 and the two volumes of his Ever Green. Scotland 
 owes much to her poetical wigmaker ; partly for 
 his Gentle Shepherd, which, if we would be 
 generous, anticipated the Seasons in its love of 
 Nature, and which, for patriotic and local reasons, 
 enjoyed greater popularity, in spite of its arti- 
 ficiality ; but chiefly for his editorial labours in the 
 Miscellany and Ever Green. In these he accom- 
 plished a double purpose. He linked the truer 
 Scottish sentiment of his day with the past, 
 explained, though with poor scholarly equipment, 
 the literary continuity, and made it possible, or at 
 
 1 In the impossible task of reconstituting the original texts, 
 in courtesy to his supporters, which he persistently shirked and 
 left to be attempted after his death.
 
 i8o SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 least easier, for his "greater successors, Fergusson 
 and Burns, to do what they did. In the second 
 place, he entered a general plea for a break with 
 contemporary fashion, not because the older stuff 
 was old but because it was simple. In the Preface 
 to the Miscellany he quotes some doggerel com- 
 mendation by his friend Bannerman in America 
 
 " Nor only do your lays o'er Britain flow, 
 Round all the globe your happy sonnets go ; 
 Here thy soft verse, made to a Scottish air, 
 Are often sung by our Virginian fair. 
 Camilla's warbling notes are heard no more, 
 But yield to ' Last time I came o'er the moor ' ; 
 Hydaspes and Rinaldo both give way 
 To Mary Scott, Tweedside, and Mary Gray." 
 
 Ramsay's taste was poor, but he proved himself 
 better able than more scholarly or dandified versi- 
 fiers to lead the public to fresh enjoyment of the 
 simple motives of song and ballad. In his homely 
 way he did as much as Percy in discrediting the 
 * imported ' and ' embroidered ' style. He was 
 seconded by William Thomson, 1 in his Orpheus 
 Caledonius (1725), which gave musical aid in popu- 
 larizing the new-old matter, and helped Burns and 
 his successors in their task of reconstruction. 
 
 Though nothing of importance appeared in 
 England or Scotland till after the mid-century, 
 
 1 In the Romantic Revival, Scotland owes something to three 
 of the name of Thomson : to James, of the Seasons, William, 
 here alluded to, and George, who set so much of Burns. And 
 Thomas, the antiquary, may be kept in mind.
 
 NEW POETIC FORCES 181 
 
 Cantilenus, as Johnson unsympathetically reminds 
 us, still " turned all his thoughts upon old ballads, for 
 he considered them as the genuine records of the 
 national taste." l The lull was broken by Thomas 
 Percy, when, after preliminary meddlings with the 
 verse of mandarins and skalds, he " turned his 
 thoughts " to the famous Folio, and, encouraged 
 by Shenstone, produced the Reliques of Ancient 
 English Poetry. What this great book did for 
 struggling Romanticism in England is a common- 
 place. On that it is enough to say at this point, 
 that its effect was as immediate as that of the 
 Ossianic poems, and more lasting. Its influence 
 on Scotland was remarkable. It was a spark to 
 the old tinder. And yet this metaphor is not 
 altogether happy, for the public has forgotten one 
 fact, which we might as truly figure forth as the 
 firing of some good English tinder by a Scottish 
 spark. It is supplied by Percy himself in his pre- 
 face, where in the forefront of his acknowledge- 
 ments to literary friends he says : " To Sir David 
 Dalrymple, Bart., of Hailes, near Edinburgh, the 
 editor is indebted for most of the beautiful Scottish 
 poems with which this little miscellany is enriched, 
 and for many curious and elegant remarks with 
 which they are illustrated. Some obliging com- 
 munications of the same kind were received from 
 John MacGowan, Esq., of Edinburgh ; and many 
 
 1 The Rambler, No. 177
 
 1 82 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 curious explanations of Scottish words in the glos- 
 saries from John Davidson, Esq., of Edinburgh, 
 and from the Rev. Mr. Hutchinson, of Kim- 
 bolton." This was not mere English courtesy, 
 and Scotland was not slow in taking the hint that 
 she had much material, rich and unexplored. The 
 success of the Reliqiies was an immediate en- 
 couragement, and Scottish collections by Scottish 
 editors poured from the press. Indeed, few of 
 Percy's many followers dealt with anything but 
 Scottish ballads. When the bishop died in 1811, 
 a goodly library of these books had already 
 appeared. The mere names and titles are cumu- 
 lative evidence of some importance : David Herd's 
 Ancient and Modern Scots Songs, Heroic Ballads, 
 etc. (1769), Pinkerton's Scottish Tragic Ballads 
 (1781) and Select Scotish Ballads (1783), James 
 Johnson's Scots Musical Museum (1787), with 
 which Burns associated himself, Dalyell's Scotish 
 Poems of the Sixteenth Century, with its selection 
 from the Gude and Godlie Ballatis (1801), Sir 
 Walter Scott's great book The Minstrelsy of the 
 Scottish Border (1802-1803), Robert Jamieson's 
 Popular Ballads and Songs (1806), John Finlay's 
 Historical and Romantic Ballads (1808), together 
 with the English contributions of Thomas Evans 
 (1777) and the indefatigable Ritson. And what of 
 the later series even if we do not go beyond 
 1840, when posthumous honours were paid to the
 
 NEW POETIC FORCES 183 
 
 editor of the Reliques by the foundation of the 
 Percy Society piled up by the labour of the 
 antiquary Laing, Buchan, Allan Cunningham, 
 Kinloch, Motherwell, Maidment, Chambers, Peter 
 Cunningham, and others? This bibliography is 
 too full and continuous to be explained as a mere 
 access of energy on the part of Dr. Dryasdust, 
 too symptomatic of a powerful change in literary 
 taste. With Burns and Scott involved, it could 
 not be a mere fashion, amusing itself at the expense 
 of the town exquisites. We, at the remove of 
 a century, do not mistake its meaning what its 
 passion, and movement, and simplicity, and free- 
 dom brought to the making of the second Great 
 Age of English Literature, and bequeathed to us 
 to-day. 
 
 In direction and effect this ballad activity of 
 Percy and his Scottish abettors differed from the 
 Ossianic fervour ; but each helped the other in 
 the process towards Romanticism. The accepted 
 authenticity of the Ballad gave it greater in- 
 fluence. It was less at the mercy of individual 
 whim. It disclosed the wonder-house of the 
 Middle Ages, which the heroic style of Fingal, 
 with all its claims of ancientry, could not accom- 
 plish. It carried to the modern heart and eye the 
 passion and colour of a living past. It possessed 
 an infinite variety which no editorial overdoing 
 could stale : to counter which Macpherson could
 
 1 84 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 offer nothing but the solemnity of one mood. 
 The harp of Morven had only one string ; and 
 Literature, tiring ere long of these monotones, as 
 she tired of all the single-stringed melodies of the 
 sentimentalists, turned to the Middle Ages, which 
 she had miscalled ascetic and dull, and to the 
 Ballads to satisfy her longing. Though both the 
 Ballad hero and the Ossianic hero endured grievous 
 insult at the hands of painful copyists, all the 
 foolish * Imitations ' and all the cynicism of 
 Fleet Street could not kill the Ballad motive, 
 as the discrediting of Macpherson shattered the 
 Fingalian l : for the one was an incentive, the other 
 a mere easement ; the one continued as an active 
 influence, the other, as all things sentimental in 
 origin and mode, was a victim of its self-destructive 
 habit. Of the process of that influence nothing 
 need be said now, and no one requires to be 
 reminded of what Wordsworth told his generation 
 about its effect on Burger and others, and about 
 its redemptive power in English poetry. 2 Every- 
 body knows, too, that the foreign compliment was 
 returned, when Scott began his career with homage 
 to Burger. 8 The repayment was all the more 
 handsome, coming from the homeland of Ballad, 
 
 1 "Ossian semblait l'gal d'Homfere," says M. Anatole France, 
 "quand on le croyait ancien. On le mprise depuis qu'on salt 
 que c'est MacPherson " (Le Jardin d'picure, p. 224). 
 
 * Essay Supplementary to the Preface. 
 
 * The Chase and William and Helen, 1796.
 
 NEW POETIC FORCES 185 
 
 where the material was so rich and appreciation so 
 strong. When the historian reflects on what the 
 knowledge and sympathetic use of this material did 
 for the world's literature, he is not likely to forget 
 what aid Scotland gave, in different ways, in 
 leading that literature back to the fountains of 
 Romance.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 THE NORTHERN AUGUSTANS 
 
 THE old capital of Scotland attracts the stranger as 
 few cities do, even those of greater historic pre- 
 tence. Curiosity or piety may bring him to the 
 places which Mary Stuart knew or where the ghosts 
 of the good folk of the Waverley Novels still walk, 
 but the first joy of acquaintance is something more 
 than what comes from the direct touch of a great 
 past. It is the pleasure of surprise the revelation 
 of a scene, striking because of its happy under- 
 standing between Man and Nature, but more 
 striking because it is unexpected. "How was 
 this done by a country so poor ? " once remarked a 
 New Englander, on beholding the panorama of the 
 Old Town from the gardens by the Scott Monu- 
 ment. He had come, as so many do, with 
 prejudices about the land of the Thistle, and with 
 Scriptural memories of what man may not expect 
 to gather from that unfriendly plant. Even the 
 Scot is tempted to ask himself, how, with all his 
 * penury,' he has been able to plan and rear this 
 
 1 86
 
 THE NORTHERN AUGUSTANS 187 
 
 metropolis, and why, with all his * penuriousness,' as 
 averred by southern wits, and all his utilitarianism, 
 as asserted by other * authorities,* he has so engaged 
 himself, when, if he had known his proper busi- 
 ness, he should have been growing oats and curing 
 haddocks. It was no narrow patriotism which 
 stirred Scott to praise of this c darling seat,' or 
 made the critical Lockhart forget himself in the 
 honest compliments of his Peter Morris. There 
 is something in its atmosphere, blow as the east 
 wind will, something in its tumbled sky-line 
 from the old Castle to St. Giles, something in the 
 dignity of its institutions and the ease of its 
 people which gives Edinburgh an individual and 
 arresting interest to all comers, which at the same 
 time proclaims it neither a show-city nor a com- 
 mercial Philistia, but a place that would offer 
 welcome to the Muses, in whatever mood these 
 wandering ladies chose to come. Nowadays the 
 Scot has almost forgotten that there was once a 
 northern capital of letters, rivalling and even excel- 
 ling London. He takes it for granted that talent 
 must find its way to the South, and, willing that 
 others should write the books, is satisfied with the 
 task of seeing that he has the printing of them. 
 He may console himself with the pktitudes about 
 opportunity and convenience, and convince himself 
 of the uselessness of protest when all northern 
 literary purpose and manners have grown so
 
 1 88 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 English. Yet, when he tests this view in the light 
 of history, he will find that it was just when the 
 affectation of southern modes was strongest that 
 the Scottish capital most indulged its self-con- 
 fidence and enjoyed its power. Before the 
 eighteenth century there was never a literary 
 Edinburgh in any reasonable sense of the term ; 
 but in that century, when so many went south, and 
 those that remained seemed to dream that they 
 were there too, Scotland became conscious of her 
 particular literary place and of a capacity to 
 influence others. England did not grudge to 
 acknowledge this, and she made amends for her 
 complaint against a Scot-haunted London by 
 sending her sons to the Scots' own city. 
 
 Few places have been better served than Edin- 
 burgh by the gossip and literary annalist. The 
 fulness of the record of its period of power is a 
 confession of self-consciousness. There is the 
 series of Memoirs and Letters of all the eminent 
 and * ingenious ' persons, of Hume and Scott and 
 Jeffrey, of Reid and Robertson and Dugald 
 Stewart, of their patrons and printers, so confi- 
 dential and particular that we seem to know these 
 worthies as well as they knew each other. There 
 is the entertaining prattle of visitors like that of 
 the Englishman Edward Topham, who, " in re- 
 membrance of many civilities received," presented 
 the inhabitants with friendly reflections on their
 
 THE NORTHERN AUGUSTANS 189 
 
 character ; l and of the inconsequent, but ever- 
 amusing De Latocnaye, a French emigre", 2 and his 
 more ponderous countryman Simond. 3 There are 
 the reminiscences of ' Jupiter ' Carlyle, the cor- 
 respondence of Kirkpatrick Sharpe (the * Scottish 
 Horace Walpole'), the Tytlers, Anna Seward, and 
 their friends, and the appreciations of such as 
 William Smellie 4 and Ramsay of Ochtertyre. But 
 above all, there are Lockhart, for descriptive 
 criticism in his Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk, and 
 John Kay, for pictorial aid in his Original Portraits 
 and Caricature Etchings. In 1816 Scott had pub- 
 lished his Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk, an account 
 of his journey to Paris after a visit to Waterloo. 
 His young friend, later his son-in-law and bio- 
 grapher, was happily inspired when he played 
 Peter to his senior's Paul, and chose their * romantic 
 town ' for his subject. The imaginary Peter 
 Morris, M.D., of Pensharpe Hall, made good use 
 of his time from the moment he drove into the 
 city in his shandrydan. " I arrived," he says, 
 "without prejudices against that which I should 
 see and was ready to open myself to such impres- 
 sions as might come." He began well by taking 
 
 1 Letters from Edinburgh, 1776. 
 
 2 Promenade autour de la Grande Bretagne, Edinburgh, 1 795, 
 and Promenade d'un Franfais dans I'Irlande, Dublin, 1797 (con- 
 taining some Scottish matter). 
 
 3 Journal of a Tour, 1810-1811. Edin. 1815. 
 
 1 Literary and Characteristical Lives of J. Gregory, M.D., Lord 
 Kames, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Edin. 1800 (posthum.).
 
 1 90 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 a general view of the city from the Calton Hill, 
 from which he "descended again into her streets 
 in a sort of stupor of admiration." He went 
 everywhere and saw everybody, and, blessed with 
 his creator's keen eye and critical talent, has drawn 
 a remarkable picture of Edinburgh society and 
 its literary lions, of Wilson, Jeffrey, Scott, Henry 
 Mackenzie, Hogg, Dr. Chalmers, Raeburn ("his 
 works would do honour to any capital of 
 Europe," * he says prophetically) and many others. 
 He has given memories of Hume, Burns, and Brax- 
 field (Stevenson's 'Weir of Hermiston'), gossip 
 of the Edinburgh Reviewers and of the begin- 
 nings of Blackwood everything in fact that the 
 historian, critic, impressionist, even the producer 
 of ' costume ' plays could desire. 2 For pictorial 
 supplement there is the collection of over seven 
 hundred plates by the miniaturist Kay, a series 
 unrivalled by any other city, and, despite the crude- 
 ness which may be permitted to caricature, a fair 
 presentment of everybody then interesting to his 
 neighbours ; 3 and, a generation later, Benjamin 
 Crombie's portraits of Modern Athenians* lacking 
 
 1 ii. 293. 
 
 2 Some day we may be able to supplement this entertainment 
 from the pages of an Account of Contemporaries (" not to be 
 published while any of them are alive "), by John Leyden, the 
 poet. (See the Scotsman, 26th April, 1890.) 
 
 * Offering in several cases the only portraits we possess. 
 Burns is not included. 
 
 * 1839 to 1847.
 
 THE NORTHERN AUGUSTANS 191 
 
 the gusto of his predecessor's work, as well as its 
 range of interest, though the artist had for sub- 
 jects * Christopher North, 1 Jeffrey, Edmondstoune 
 Aytoun, and * The Author of Waverley.' 
 
 This generous contemporary evidence is eked 
 out by the records of a long series of Edin- 
 burgh clubs and societies. Though convivial 
 opportunity was their frank purpose, they were the 
 means of provoking considerable literary activity. 
 The Scot's liking for this corporate pleasure was 
 older than the eighteenth century, but it was then 
 that he really discovered how clubbable he was. 
 Many of these clubs, it must be confessed, -were 
 entirely bacchanalian, and not seldom disreputable 
 or foolish, in grades of extravagance from the 
 Pious, the Dirty, the Ugly, the Cape, or the 
 Crochallan Fencibles (where in a rough wit-combat 
 Burns admitted "that he had never been so 
 abominably thrashed in his life ") l to the wilder 
 Boar and Hell-Fire ; others claimed to be of a 
 more pedantic and * improving ' kind, like the 
 Rankenian, 2 where the young Colin Maclaurin and 
 his friends cultivated, rather priggishly, " liberality 
 of sentiment, accuracy of reasoning, correctness of 
 taste, and attention to composition," 3 or like the 
 Speculative of Edinburgh University ; others, 
 
 1 Traditions of Edinburgh, p. 182. 
 
 1 From 1717. 
 
 Ramsay of Ochtertyre, i. 8 .
 
 192 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 again, where good talk and punch met on 
 honourable terms, are represented by the Poker at 
 Fortune's Tavern, the Select Society, the Friday 
 Club ; and there were the parties at Dugald 
 Stewart's house, the gatherings of the ' Brother- 
 hood of the Mountain ' in the Cranstoun drawing- 
 room, 1 and, later, the gossiping in Ebony's Saloon. 
 If the rollicking * Nights' at Ambrose's are after 
 all but a fiction devised in the country calm of 
 Chiefswood, 2 the fiction is good commentary on 
 the compelling habit of the period. 
 
 There is therefore no lack of material of the 
 personal and spectacular kind at the will of the 
 historian who would reconstitute this literary 
 society. The crowding of detail does not embar- 
 rass us ; the area is clearly defined and compact, 
 and everything falls easily into its place. "Here 
 stand I," said a London visitor to printer Smellie, 
 " at what is called the Cross of Edinburgh, and can 
 in a few minutes take fifty men of genius by the 
 hand." 3 "Edinburgh," says Matthew Bramble 
 in Humphrey Clinker, "is a hotbed of genius." 
 Let us hope that some day we shall have a com- 
 prehensive account of this crowded talent. We 
 have had studies of individuals and coteries, not 
 of the whole, with perhaps a little too much of 
 
 1 Of Lord Corehouse and his sister. 
 
 * Oliphant, William Blackwood and his Sons, i. 261. 
 
 * Kerr, Memoirs of William Smellie, 1811, ii. 252.
 
 THE NORTHERN AUGUSTANS 193 
 
 that antiquarian fussiness which afflicts the Scot in 
 tasks of this kind. 
 
 In writing of the literary purpose of this time, 
 it is convenient to treat the latter half of the 
 eighteenth century and the first decades of the 
 nineteenth as a whole, though it is more accurate 
 to sort out two periods of particular brilliance and 
 influence, the first between the years 1760 and 
 1770, when the* turmoil of the 'Forty-Five had 
 been almost forgotten, and the second between the 
 French Revolution and the years immediately suc- 
 ceeding Waterloo. In the first it is the Edinburgh 
 of David Hume ; in the second of Walter Scott. 
 In these two short stretches and round these two 
 famous names is gathered all that is best and most 
 enduring in later Scotticism. 
 
 The historian of these literary activities finds an 
 easy approach through the membership of the more 
 representative clubs, say, for the first period, the 
 Select Society as it was in 1759, and as recorded by 
 Alexander Carlyle, one of the company, 1 or the 
 Poker, from its foundation in I762, 2 and, for the 
 second, the Friday Club of 1803, or some of the 
 coteries of which we hear in Peter's Letters. 
 
 The fifteen members of the Select Society, whom 
 
 1 Dugald Stewart, Life and Writings of William Robertson, 2nd 
 edition, 1802, p. 214. 
 
 * Many of the Select Society were members. See the list in 
 the Supplement to Tytler's Life of Kames ; also A. Carlyle, 
 Autobiography, new ed., pp. 439-444. 
 s.L. N
 
 i 9 4 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 Allan Ramsay, the son of the poet, 1 drew together 
 in 1754 for purposes of " philosophical inquiry and 
 the improvement of members in the art of speak- 
 ing," had, by 1759, increased their number to over 
 one hundred and thirty, without serious offence to 
 the claim of their titular epithet. For though the 
 extension of membership brought with it a finer 
 subdivision into grades of literary ability, and 
 allowed the fellowship of sundry sympathetic 
 nobles and gentry who were * select' in another 
 sense, the Society remained representative of all 
 that was best in Scottish culture. There was 
 perhaps a lack of poets, for London at that very 
 time had peculiar attractions for the lovers of the 
 lighter Muses ; but literature had her sponsors in 
 John Home, who had made a stir with his tragedy 
 of Douglas, not so much by its merits as by his 
 outrage of clerical propriety, in * Jupiter' Carlyle 
 (* the grandest demi-god I ever saw,' said Scott), 
 and in Hugh Blair, the academic exponent of 
 Augustan taste and the encourager of James 
 Macpherson. For history there were William 
 Robertson, by Gibbon's allowance a * master artist,' 
 Tytler, the defender of Mary, Queen of Scots, 
 and Adam Ferguson, philosopher. There were 
 representatives of that long line of Scottish lawyers 
 who have made important contributions to litera- 
 
 1 Who was the guiding spirit of the earlier, and less ' select, 
 Easy Club.
 
 THE NORTHERN AUGUSTANS 195 
 
 ture and science : James Burnett, later Lord Mon- 
 boddo, who perplexed society with his Darwinian 
 and Neo-Kantian anticipations ; Sir David Dal- 
 rymple, afterwards Lord Hailes, Percy's coadjutor 
 in the Reliques and the pious recoverer of older 
 Scottish poetry ; Henry Home, alias Lord Kames, 
 author of the * pretty essay' l on the Elements of 
 Criticism ; and Alexander Boswell (Lord Auchin- 
 leck), father of Bozzy and entertainer of the Great 
 Cham, whom he dared to call an " auld dominie " 
 who kept a school " and cau'd it an acaadamy." 2 
 For medicine, there were Monro, the first of the 
 famous family of anatomists, and William Cullen ; 
 and for art, Allan Ramsay himself, and John and 
 James Adam, two of those renowned Adelphians 
 who brought a new dispensation to English archi- 
 tecture. Lastly, there were two, whom it is 
 sufficient to name in * Jupiter's* bald style, 
 Adam Smith, "Professor of Ethics at Glasgow," 
 and David Hume unless we add the significant 
 statement of Dugald Stewart that, though there 
 was much excellent speaking in the Society, these 
 select personages "never opened their lips." 3 
 
 In the second period, which is longer and more 
 brilliant, it is not so easy to find all the talent 
 gathered at one board, as in the case of the Select 
 Society ; but all are clubmen, and in touch with 
 
 Boswell, Life of Johnson, i. 394- * <* v - 382. 
 
 Dugald Stewart, u.s., 1802, p. 213.
 
 196 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 each other in one way or another. If philosophy 
 and history were the chief concern of the older 
 literati, though by no means in the pedantic way 
 in which we might expect the thinkers and re- 
 searchers of our day to regulate their symposia, if 
 they took delight in such things, it was in literature 
 and art that the later generation found its convivial 
 excuse. Yet, philosophy was again the means, 
 though indirectly, of "creating the atmosphere and 
 making the northern city a sort of intellectual spa. 
 ForDugald Stewart, the last of the ' Scottish School,' 
 a man of the most enticing personality and so 
 attractive as a speaker that " there was eloquence 
 in his very spitting," * was then in his power. He 
 drew to his University class-room not only the 
 best of the Edinburgh youth, but many English- 
 men who were frustrated by the Great War of their 
 regulation continental tour. When Sydney Smith 
 was denied Weimar, he came with his pupil to hear 
 Stewart. The young Henry John Temple, the 
 future Pam of European politics, spent some early 
 years in Stewart's house, and laid (as in his own 
 words) " the foundation of whatever useful know- 
 ledge and habits of mind I possess " ; and Lord 
 John Russell, destined, too, to be Prime Minister 
 of Great Britain, attended his lectures. Older 
 men less willing to renew the discipline of hard 
 benches, or Tories chary of Stewart's sympathetic 
 
 Cockburn, Memorials, pp. 22 et seq.
 
 THE NORTHERN AUGUSTANS 197 
 
 Liberalism, preferred his evening parties. Scott, 
 who had no common ground in politics, liked to 
 recall College days under one " whose striking and 
 impressive eloquence riveted the attention of even 
 the most volatile student," 1 and he maintained " an 
 affectionate intercourse" with him to the end. 2 
 Some decades earlier, when philosophy was, to 
 quote Cockburn, 3 more " indigenous in the place," 
 and " all classes, even in their gayest hours, were 
 proud of the presence of its cultivators," Stewart 
 might have diverted these budding statesmen and 
 litterateurs to professional discipleship of Thomas 
 Reid. But the times were changing. Stewart's 
 personality brought the crowd, but the crowd 
 brought its own likings. And these likings, 
 whetted by the fellowship for which the elegant 
 philosopher had given the opportunity, were 
 developed in their own natural way. Nor was it 
 ever in doubt that it was the personality of the man 
 and not the academic rechauffe by the suspected 
 philosopher that gave Stewart his hold on this 
 society, nor matter of surprise that when his direct 
 influence came to an end the vogue of philosophy 
 abated. 
 
 Some of the wits of this later Edinburgh may 
 be named in rough parallel with those of the 
 earlier, and in illustration of the difference between 
 
 1 Lockhart, Life, i. 59. * *&-. i- 235-236. 
 
 of Jeffrey, i. 159.
 
 198 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 the two periods. Philosophy gives Thomas Brown 
 with Stewart, the last stalwarts of the * Scottish 
 School.' Science, mathematical and physical, has 
 not a few respectable persons ; and the Faculty of 
 Medicine, then, and for a long time, the honour of 
 the city, is well represented by, among others, 
 James Gregory, whose reputation is, in the most 
 literal sense, still in the mouths of the great public. 
 For Art there are at least four whose names remain 
 with us : David Wilkie, * Circassian ' Allan, 
 Alexander Nasmyth, and Henry Raeburn, who, 
 having been called <a Scottish Reynolds' and 
 praised and priced as a mere northern celebrity, 
 has now a place among the masters in the 
 galleries of Europe. The hegemony, however, 
 was with literature. And what doubt could there 
 be of this, with Burns and Scott of the company, 
 and even if there had been no others ? Though it 
 will be admitted by many a modern reader that 
 it is in the fame of these two, and in it alone, that 
 he has found the excuse for acquaintance with 
 Scottish literature, or by some that honour done 
 to them is honour enough for Scottish genius, or 
 any other, it must be kept in mind that Burns and 
 Scott are by no means the sum of their age, or the 
 whole measure of the influence of that age. Here 
 some of the minors may be named, less out of 
 civility to Scottish pride than because they deserve 
 well of later generations for the part they played
 
 THE NORTHERN AUGUSTANS 199 
 
 in the establishment of new literary methods. The 
 two chief centres of activity were the Edinburgh 
 Review and Blackwood's Magazine y the one the 
 critical reserve of Jeffrey and Sydney Smith and 
 their Whig familiars, the other the exercise-ground 
 for the more literary wit of Lockhart, Wilson, and 
 Hogg. There is Henry Mackenzie, the last high 
 priest of sensibility, hugging the memories of his 
 Mirror and Lounger in these times of change. 1 
 There are John Leyden, poet, physician, and anti- 
 quary, who contributed the " Elf-King " to 
 Gregory Lewis's Tales of Wonder and helped 
 Scott with his Border Minstrelsy ; Thomas Camp- 
 bell, of The Pleasures of Hope, whom we prefer 
 to remember for his war-lyrics ; and, if Aberdeen 
 and London will allow Edinburgh some claim, 
 James Beattie, who busied himself so with Edin- 
 burgh's heretical David, and was one of the writers 
 of the Mirror. For criticism in its philosophical 
 mood, and in contrast with the workaday manner 
 of the Reviewers, there is Alison, the academic 
 exponent of the laws of Taste ; and with him, if 
 Aberdeen will again allow, George Campbell, sur- 
 passing Blair in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, and 
 Alexander Gerard, the inspirer of Alison in his 
 Essay on Taste (1759) and author of an Essay on 
 Genius (1774). We cannot name the rankers in 
 
 " Old Mackenzie ... I must say his day has gone by." 
 Lockhart, in Oliphant, Blackwood and his Sons, i. 187.
 
 200 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 this array of talent, beyond selecting Francis 
 Horner and Hector MacNeill, the antiquaries 
 George Chalmers, J. Graham Dalyell, and John 
 Pinkerton, and, among other * respectable persons,' 
 Macvey Napier, Kirkpatrick Sharpe, Sir J. Mac- 
 kintosh, and Sir Thomas Dick Lauder ; or speak 
 of the sutlers, the ever necessary * booksellers, 7 
 hodie publishers, beyond making passing mention 
 of Archibald Constable, William Blackwood, and 
 Robert Chambers, whose insight and enterprise 
 transformed the whole business of authorship and 
 established that Scottish tradition which John 
 Murray and the Macmillans continued in England. 
 We have spoken of the part which Scotland 
 played, unconsciously rather than of set purpose, 
 in the movement towards Romanticism. The 
 guest-city of Burns and the home of Scott could 
 not forget that it had given welcome to the pro- 
 phets. 1 Yet, notwithstanding a certain sympathy 
 with the New Spirit, it could not abandon its 
 past, because of the close-knit tradition of a small 
 metropolis, and because that tradition concerned 
 itself with things which demand a cast of mind 
 more classical than romantic. The preoccupation 
 with philosophy in all its familiar branches, meta- 
 physics, ethics, logic, or in the newer kind formu- 
 lated by Adam Smith ; with history, either in its 
 antiquarian guise (ever the most popular in Scot- 
 
 1 Supra, chapter vi.
 
 THE NORTHERN AUGUSTANS 201 
 
 land) or in the more literary but very ceremonious 
 manner of Hume or Smollett, and especially of* 
 Robertson ; with science as Monboddo and 
 college professors interpreted it ; with criticism 
 and the theory of style as expounded by Blair and 
 Alison, or used as a practical engine by the 
 Reviewers for the reduction of Lake Schools and 
 Cockney Poets to the terms of Common Sense ; 
 with verse-making for an intellectual public which 
 liked morality and argument in couplets and its 
 fun in epigram all this seems to be poles apart 
 from the spirit of the ballads which these elegant 
 persons were now collecting, from Englishmen's 
 Rimes of Ancient Mariners and Scots' Tarn o' 
 Shanters and Lords of the Isles. Even the Wizard 
 was bound by a tradition from which his art freed 
 others. " He had often said to me," says Ballan- 
 tyne, " that neither his own nor any modern 
 popular style of composition was that from which 
 he derived most pleasure. . . . He had more 
 pleasure in reading London and The Vanity of 
 Human Wishes than any other poetical composi- 
 tion he could mention ; and I think I never saw 
 his countenance more indicative of high admiration 
 than while reciting aloud from those productions." l 
 This is significant, much more significant than 
 Byron's liking of Pope, for Byron was merely 
 telling himself, what everybody knew, that to be 
 
 1 Lockhart, Life, iii. 269.
 
 202 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 even with dunces and * Scotch Reviewers ' one must 
 use the master's unsurpassed weapon. It was 
 the acknowledgement of the perfection of a certain 
 instrument for a certain task. Scott's admission, 
 however, means more. There is no compulsion, 
 no question of special use ; nor is he complimen- 
 tary out of private regard for the author of 
 Vanity of Human Wishes. His work has that 
 background of eighteenth century decorum which 
 makes us sometimes wonder whether he too, like 
 Thomson and Macpherson, was conscious of the 
 new trend in literature and of the direction of his 
 own pioneer work. When we picture to our- 
 selves the meeting of Burns and the fifteen-year- 
 old Scott in 1786-7 in the house of the * venerable* 
 Adam Ferguson, 1 where, as Scott tells us, " there 
 were several gentlemen of literary reputation, 
 among whom I remember the celebrated Mr. 
 Dugald Stewart," we feel that the setting, even for 
 the chance encounter of this man and this boy, 
 disappoints our critical expectations. A severely 
 handsome drawing-room, the courtesies of a crowd 
 of philosophes and their ladies, Burns, robust and 
 simple, "the douce gudeman who held his own 
 plough," Langhorne's poor lines and Bunbury's 
 poorer print these do not * compose ' well in any 
 painting or narrative, however free and unhistorical 
 the treatment may be ; and a canvas which, 
 1 Lockhart, i. 185.
 
 THE NORTHERN AUGUSTANS 203 
 
 some thirty years ago, tried to convey the scene, 
 only showed how inappropriate and unsatisfying 
 historical * accuracy ' may be. Nor is a lesson of 
 contrast to be drawn, as if this meeting of the 
 Ayrshire bard and the ballad-loving youth were to 
 be taken as symbolic of the New thrown into relief 
 against the Old. Yet no one is ill at ease, unless it 
 be ourselves, who are so strangely uninformed 
 about this dignified comfortable society. 1 
 
 The academic spirit ruled in all things ; and its 
 power was never shaken so rudely and suddenly as 
 elsewhere. The reserve, the sense of form (mis- 
 taken for formality), the feeling for order, the sheer 
 discipline of intellect, all stand out clearly, no 
 matter in what * cantrips ' a very sober Muse might 
 at times indulge. For these 'cantrips,' like the 
 topsyturvydom of the older literature, whether the 
 whimsical invasion of the real, or a countering of 
 the pressure from that quarter, are but confession 
 of the strength of the classical habit of mind. 
 At this time, when other literatures were in a con- 
 dition of flux, Scots clung to classical ideals. By 
 its devotion to them it won much of its credit with 
 posterity, and by their aid exerted no uncertain 
 influence upon its neighbours. In appreciating 
 what this later Scottish literature did for Roman- 
 ticism, we forget how closely Romanticism was 
 interwoven with classical tradition, and how much 
 
 1 See Chapter viii.
 
 204 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 of the texture and pattern of that tradition 
 remained. We seem to be involved in a paradox, 
 that a period of full passion and imaginative free- 
 dom is also a period responsive to the claims of 
 classicism. Yet it is no paradox, for the greater 
 ages, like the greater artists, always combine both 
 qualities ; and the danger to the critic, in juggling 
 with the pretty contrast of * romantic' and 
 'classical,' is that he exalts the one and forgets 
 the other. 
 
 If Scott and his friends were not fully in sym- 
 pathy with the change afoot or indeed conscious of 
 it, the public certainly had no delusions as to 
 where its liking and faculty lay. Its mood was 
 persistently critical. It was all for enquiry, for the 
 testing of literary practice, and it took some pride 
 in readjusting and interpreting the principles by 
 which it judged the individual craftsman. In 
 other words, these good people set themselves the 
 task of erecting criticism to the dignity of a 
 separate literary genre, and of winning for it 
 respect and popularity. Down to this time Scot- 
 land had given but poor and scattered indications 
 of any critical interest in the art of letters ; and 
 England, on her part, notwithstanding the guiding 
 talent of Dryden and Johnson to name only the 
 greatest had not snatched the matter from the 
 hands of the inexperienced, or supplied a code 
 which was more than a jejune rehandling of Aris-
 
 THE NORTHERN AUGUStANS 205 
 
 to tie, Horace, and the Renaissance Italians. Nor 
 had anything been done in a serious way to collect 
 the materials required for the finding of a critical 
 perspective, beyond what Capell had attempted in 
 England within the narrow limits of his Prolusions, 
 or Ramsay in Scotland, with no scholarly care, in 
 his Ever Green : nor to arrange these materials in 
 connected narrative, beyond what Warton, follow- 
 ing the suggestion of Pope and Gray, but taking 
 another method than theirs, had done in his History 
 of English Poetry. 1 Nor had there been more 
 than a hint of what we may call the mechanism or 
 machinery of the critical workshop, the * Review' 
 and * Magazine,' for the Tatler and Spectator and 
 the crowd of imitators had gossiped too freely 
 of "pictures, taste, and the musical glasses" to 
 induce the public to take kindly to the systematic 
 dulness of disquisitions like Addison's on Paradise 
 Lost. Our familiarity with these things we 
 speak only of the change of outlook and the differ- 
 ence in the equipment offered, not of the merit or 
 demerit in the use of opportunities make us 
 wonder that there had ever been a world so devoid 
 of these necessaries of intellectual life. What 
 share, we ask, had Scotland, and Edinburgh in 
 particular, in the transformation? 
 
 There was, as has been said, something in the 
 
 1 ist vol. 1774 ; but not in complete form till 1824 (pos- 
 thumously).
 
 206 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 atmosphere which favoured the indulgence of this 
 new mood. Philosophy, not always the best friend 
 to the literary artist, exercised an influence ; or 
 rather, it was the training in philosophic method, 
 the precision of the school of Common Sense, and 
 the stimulus of David Hume which were provoca- 
 tive of enquiry outside the stricter matters of The 
 Grove. This influence was not exerted in a magis- 
 terial way. The elegances and humanities of a 
 society led by men like Ferguson and Stewart 
 would have been wasted in professional task-work 
 on Causation and Free- Will. Metaphysics did 
 not move comfortably in silk knee-breeches, in 
 handsome saloons, among vivacious women, and 
 painters, and poetical lions from the wilds of Ayr- 
 shire. Disguised as Aesthetics, it was less of a 
 bore to its neighbours and more at its ease. But 
 only when, with something of the wisdom of Mr. 
 Spectator, it adapted itself to the etiquette of 
 * assemblies * and { tea-tables,* did it discover how 
 popular it could be and what fresh opportunities 
 were to be found. In some respects this conde- 
 scension of the philosophers was their undoing. 
 It served Thomas Brown badly, when he super- 
 saturated his lectures with Akenside's blank verse. 
 Yet the sacrifice was not without some reward. 
 The disavowal, even in the class-room, of an 
 exclusive concern in the Profundities did much to 
 help the growth of taste in the crowd, already
 
 THE NORTHERN AUGUSTANS 207 
 
 attracted by the social charm and personal merit of 
 its teachers. For these reasons the best of Scottish 
 youth found college-life at Edinburgh entertain- 
 ing ; and for these reasons too, so many English- 
 men and Irishmen were attracted. When they 
 scattered, it was not as missioners of the cult of 
 Thomas Reid or as trained partisans or opponents 
 of the sceptical David. Some of the more serious 
 sort, with the echoes of college-exercises in their 
 ears, grew old in controversy about the ' Imitative 
 Nature of Poetry ' and vexed the booksellers with 
 'Letters' on the Standard of Taste ; but others, 
 and these perhaps the best, concluded that higher 
 philanthropy (and the happiest moments for them- 
 selves) lay in settling and resettling the Ossianic 
 question, in discovering Chaldee Manuscripts, and 
 in making the public think about the Lake School 
 and Cockney Poets. So that if it is true that the 
 philosophical atmosphere favoured this literary 
 development, it is also true that the product in 
 time created an atmosphere of its own. Scotland, 
 and Edinburgh in particular, won a place in the 
 annals of literature with something of the credit of 
 an inventor. What the novelty was and what 
 influence it exerted both within Scotland and beyond 
 are best explained by turning to the early years of 
 the Edinburgh Review and BlackwootTs Magazine. 
 
 The beginnings of the Edinburgh Review -, 
 founded in 1802, have a double historical interest,
 
 2o8 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 t>n the one hand, in relation to earlier periodical 
 enterprise and to Scotland's share in that, and, on 
 the other, on account of certain characteristics of 
 considerable prospective importance. The history 
 of the * Review,' as a distinct literary form in the 
 sense familiar to us, opens in England with the 
 establishment of the Monthly Review in 1749 and 
 its rival the Critical Review in 1756. Before these 
 we have nothing but a miscellany of * Mercuries,' 
 * Newsletters,' * Journals,' and the like, recording 
 events for the curious. Boswell tells us that in 
 1767 Dr. Johnson, having been asked by King 
 George whether "there were any other literary 
 journals published in this kingdom except the 
 Monthly and Critical Reviews," answered "there 
 were no other " ; and, in reply to a further question 
 on their respective merits, said " that the Monthly 
 Review was done with most care, the Critical on the 
 best principles." * Johnson could then look back 
 with mixed pleasure to his own experience in the 
 Rambler, 2 Hawkesworth's Adventurer* and the 
 Idler,* all short-lived, for the most part one-man 
 undertakings, and in type more akin to the Spec- 
 tator than to the * Reviews' which he was 
 describing. His compliment to the Critical 5 stirs 
 
 1 Life of Johnson, ed. Hill, ii. 39. 
 
 2 1750-1752. 3 1752-1754. 1758-1760. 
 
 6 Which we need not narrow down to admiration of political 
 and church ' principles,' though these are referred to later in 
 the anecdote, and were doubtless important in Johnson's eyes.
 
 THE NORTHERN AUGUSTANS 209 
 
 northern pride, for that Review was the London 
 venture of one Archibald Hamilton, an exile from 
 Edinburgh on account of some connexion with 
 the troubles which came to a head in the Porteous 
 Riots, and the * Society of Gentlemen ' which sup- 
 plied the literary material was controlled by 
 another Scot, the novelist Smollett. The title 
 * Critical ' is significant ; so, too, the greater 
 number of literary articles on such subjects 
 as Gray's Odes and Home's Douglas. The 
 general purpose, as disclosed in the editors' defen- 
 sive preface to the first volume (1756), is in many 
 ways a forecast of that of the Edinburgh. There 
 is * fight ' in it (for the redoubtable Griffiths and his 
 wife had to be dealt with) protests that the under- 
 takers will speak " without prejudice, fear, or affec- 
 tion," and promises that "neither prayers nor 
 threats shall induce them to part with their integrity 
 and independence." 
 
 After this Scottish proclamation on English soil, 
 the scene changes to Scotland, and there, with the 
 exception of some critical skirmishings of minor 
 interest, the whole history of the * Review ' is 
 enacted. As yet the Scots Magazine and General 
 Intelligencer, founded in 1739 on the model of the 
 Gentleman's Magazine (1731) and known from 
 1749 as the Scots Magazine, was a purely political 
 and newsmongering journal. So it remained when 
 a group of young men, Alexander Wedderburn, 
 
 S.L.
 
 210 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 afterwards Lord Chancellor of England, William 
 Robertson, Blair, and Adam Smith launched their 
 Edinburgh Review, with patriotic purpose and an 
 amusing profession of critical sobriety, 1 to stir 
 North Britain to greater literary confidence and 
 more informed judgement of outside learning. But 
 the new periodical burnt itself out in its second 
 number, and it is remembered now only as a 
 curious anticipation of the name and manner of 
 the later Edinburgh, and as the encourager of the 
 first efforts of Robertson and Adam Smith. 2 When 
 Walter Ruddiman, probably inspired by Smollett's 
 venture in the South, started his Edinburgh Maga- 
 zine in July 1757, he politely excused the appear- 
 ance of a new journal, "when this part of the 
 kingdom was in possession of one 3 which had so 
 long and deservedly enjoyed the public favour," by 
 saying that " it will be allowed that the bounds of 
 a monthly magazine, besides what it must neces- 
 sarily contain, cannot comprehend every occasional 
 essay, poem, etc. which deserves notice." Later in 
 the century the rival Scots, after long enjoyment of 
 public favour, became alive to the growing literary 
 demands of the public which the astute Ruddiman 
 
 1 As in the first number : " We are almost ashamed to say we 
 have read this pamphlet. Tis such a low scurrilous libel, that 
 even the most necessitous printer or publisher must be at a loss 
 for finding a decent excuse for publishing it." 
 
 * Adam Smith wrote an article on Johnson's Dictionary. 
 9 The Scots Magaeine.
 
 THE NORTHERN AUGUSTANS 211 
 
 had recognized. In its 'new series,' begun in 
 J 794> political gossip and argument yielded space 
 to literary criticism ; and in 1 802, the year of 
 Jeffrey's first thunderbolt, it became, in a further 
 series, edited by the poet-physician Ley den, still 
 more literary in character. 1 
 
 Ruddiman's banding expired in 1762 in a 
 splutter of three columns of verse, describing the 
 ' pregnant prospect ' of the * literary field ' when it 
 started, and lamenting its inability to cope with 
 rivals, doubtless the vigorous Monthly and Critical 
 which circulated with the Scots in Edinburgh 
 circles. 
 
 " To these we stooped not, till they bore along 
 Our noblest friends of genius, taste, and song, 
 Who, smit with love of novelty, withdrew, 
 And joined the standards of an alien crew. 
 'Tis vain to struggle when our Friends rebell : 
 When Brutus drew the poniard, Caesar fell." 
 
 But Caesar was yet to have his Mark Antony ; till 
 which time, there were not a few efforts made in 
 support of a more literary journalism. Among 
 these were the Edinburgh Magazine and Review, 
 produced between 1773 and 1776 by a * Society of 
 Gentlemen,' directed by Dr. Gilbert Stuart and 
 printer Smellie, and with Burns's Dr. Blacklock 
 and Hume among the contributors. Stuart stated 
 
 1 When it stopped in 1826, on the Constable failure, its copy- 
 right passed to its literary rival Blackwood's Magatine.
 
 212 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 in his Preface that " there has not hitherto appeared 
 in Scotland a periodical publication which has been 
 conducted with liberal views and on extensive 
 plan." The first number promised well, with a pot- 
 pourri of anecdotes on Scottish literature, ' literary 
 news ' from England, a ' character y of Tacitus, an 
 epitaph on Smollett, six columns of verse, a longer 
 section of reviews of recent books, and a short 
 concluding summary of news from the chief 
 European centres ; but Stuart showed such 
 ferocity, especially in his onslaughts on Mon- 
 boddo's magnum opus, Of the Origin and Pro- 
 gress of Language, 1 that the publishers were com- 
 pelled to intimate a cessation of hostilities 'for 
 some months.' 2 In 1779-80, the 'Man of 
 Feeling' made venture with his Mirror, A 
 Periodical Paper, which ran to one hundred and 
 ten numbers. It was literary in the older sense 
 in which we think of the Spectator, and its avowed 
 object " to hold the Mirror up to Nature " was so 
 truly spectatorial that the c Scottish Addison,' as 
 Scott has styled Mackenzie, had the charge pre- 
 ferred against him that he was too literal a copyist 
 
 1 See vol. v. pp. 88 et seq. The opening sentence of the first 
 article on this book has the vitriol of a later generation of cen- 
 surers : " The unsuccessful attempts of this author to acquire 
 the estimation of the public seem to have affected both his 
 temper and reasoning ; and it is with pain we remark that, in 
 the volume before us, his characteristic weaknesses are pro- 
 minent and striking to a degree that must excite surprise and 
 compassion." 
 
 8 ib., p. 392.
 
 THE NORTHERN AUGUSTANS 213 
 
 of the English model. It pursued its course with 
 an old-fashioned amiability and elegance, and 
 revenged itself on its critics by quizzing them in 
 the approved Addisonian manner. 1 The North 
 British Magazine of 1782, a rival of the Scots, 
 was not a success, and James Sibbald's Edinburgh 
 Magazine and Literary Miscellany (1785), also a 
 rival of the Scots, was undistinguished, though it 
 may be remembered as the first to draw attention 
 to Burns, in a sympathetic review as early as 
 October, I786. 2 Thereafter literary journalism 
 abated its ambition for a time, and fell to the level 
 of Anderson's Bee, the dull Edinburgh Herald, 
 which had the luck to secure Tarn o j Shanter,* 
 and gossipy repositories of public events like the 
 Historical Register or the Edinburgh Gazetteer 
 (1792). England was in no better plight, though 
 the Monthly rumbled on, and Richard Cumber- 
 land revived Mackenzie's role for a time (1786- 
 1791) in the Observer, the last of the Spectatorial 
 journals. There was perhaps a symptom of 
 coming change in the Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly 
 Examiner, as in the first efforts of its contributors 
 in the Etonian Microcosm, but the brilliant literary 
 
 1 Mirror, No. 79. 
 
 * Mackenzie seconded this praise in December, in the ninety- 
 seventh number of a new venture, The Lounger, in which he 
 followed on the lines of the Mirror, but with inferior power and 
 with less applause. 
 
 'This honour was shared with the Edinburgh Maganne in 
 March 1791.
 
 2i 4 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 fun was shaped to political ends, and lost, till 
 separate publication later, in the plain prose of 
 party argument. 
 
 This " dotage of all the existing journals " l 
 gave an opportunity to a band of young Edinburgh 
 friends to found the Edinburgh Review secundus 
 el major. The effect, as Jeffrey's biographer has 
 said, was " electrical." 2 " The old periodical 
 opiates were extinguished at once. The learning 
 of the new Journal, its talent, its spirit, its writing, 
 its independence, were all new ; and the surprise 
 was increased by a work so full of public life 
 springing up, suddenly, in a remote part of the 
 kingdom." Neither the undertakers nor their 
 public "could then discern its consequences." 3 
 The combination of politics and literature, or 
 rather the pronounced political purpose of the 
 Review, is not surprising. In these Napoleonic 
 days it would have been hard to find even a limited 
 number of readers entirely devoted to the Muses. 
 From the first the Whig editor recognized that it 
 was well to have what he called " two legs," but 
 he had to learn that one must be the stronger, and 
 experience had to tell him which. The young 
 Review was, if not violent, at least energetic in the 
 use of both limbs ; but energy in politics, as then 
 understood, soon threatened its stability, in a way 
 
 1 Cockburn. Life of Jeffrey, i. 126. 
 9 ib. i. 131. *ib., p. 132.
 
 THE NORTHERN AUGUSTANS 215 
 
 which all the scolding of bards in hours of idleness 
 was unable to do. Whiggism roused Toryism, 
 and Jeffrey's Cevallos article called the Quarterly 
 into being and alienated good literary friends like 
 Scott. Jeffrey, while confessing that his "natural 
 indolence would have been better pleased not to be 
 always in sight of an alert and keen antagonist," 
 rejoiced at " the prospect of this kind of literature, 
 which seems to be more and more attended to than 
 any other, being generally improved in quality," 
 and was " proud to have set an example." 1 By 
 this countering of each other in politics, the two 
 journals and their increasing public were drawn 
 more and more to interest themselves in other 
 problems and to find new opportunity and fresh 
 pleasure in the party feuds of Letters. 
 
 If we go to the Edinburgh and its rival in 
 search of literary originality and brilliance, we shall 
 be disappointed. Such plums are rare in its solid 
 pudding. Contemporaries were not deluded in 
 this ; they felt that it was by the novelty, the 
 shock of new methods, that the rivals won their 
 way so easily. Later, when experience had fixed 
 the habit, a higher literary competence might be 
 expected to disclose itself in critical journalism. 
 As philosophy had been the foster-mother at an 
 earlier stage, so were politics then ; and just as in 
 that earlier stage literary talent disentangled itself 
 
 1 ib. i. 193.
 
 216 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 slowly from the mannerisms of the schools, so in 
 the later it seemed unwilling or unable to forget its 
 training in party debate. At both stages the 
 quality of the literary critiques is generally poor 
 and the misunderstanding often surprising, if not 
 wanton ; yet in the united effort there was promise 
 of better things. 
 
 This Edinburgh coterie had convinced itself 
 from the first that the safety of letters lay in the 
 frankness and boldness of the critic's handling. 
 Neither respect for person or place nor tradition 
 was to block him in his course and prevent his 
 dealing faithfully with all persons whom he chose 
 to think disorderly. The North had already some 
 experience of the severity and effrontery of 
 journalistic critics, and had seen more than one 
 Review wear itself out quickly with its own hard 
 hitting. It may be true, with some necessary quali- 
 fications, 1 that "the older rivals of the Edinburgh 
 maintained for the most part a decent and amiable 
 impartiality," 2 but of Jeffrey and his friends there is 
 never a doubt of their competence with the sturdiest 
 of their predecessors in the business of dragoon- 
 ing. They appear to exercise themselves in it 
 more persistently and more systematically, to be 
 conscious of their aggressiveness, and to find 
 no little sport in performing their self-imposed 
 
 1 As shown supra. 
 
 * Saintsbury, Essays in Eng. Lit,, 1780-1800. 1890, p. 108.
 
 THE NORTHERN AUGUSTANS 217 
 
 tasks. Their elders, on the other hand, convey 
 the impression, even when they are in their 
 ugliest moods, that they think they are only 
 candid or paternal. 
 
 This boldness, though remarkable in the Edin- 
 burgh Reviewers and more remarkable in their 
 more literary successors, is a minor contribution to 
 the history of critical method compared with what 
 they did towards defining the critic's function and 
 elevating Criticism per se to a place among the 
 literary genres. Here again, it would appear, their 
 political training served them not so badly in the 
 end ; for if party encourages a man to explain 
 politics in the terms of a working theory, the 
 literary critic trained first in this school cannot well 
 avoid bringing certain prepossessions to his new 
 task, or, at least, being tempted to find some easy 
 analogies in method. When imagination is active, 
 and rather strangely and variously expressed, as 
 happened among the poets at this very time, he is 
 driven to discover, or rather recover, some work- 
 ing formula, if only to excuse his bludgeoning. 
 It was easy in Pope's day to be amiable in com- 
 mentary of Popian verse ; if a rather indolent 
 criticism disliked Mr. Dennis's writing, it was 
 generally because the critics disliked Mr. Dennis. 
 But it was different when Lake Schools and 
 Cockney Poets, when Wordsworth and Shelley 
 and Keats and other eccentrics crowded the scene.
 
 2i 8 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 The Constitution of Letters was in danger. 
 Political Whiggery disguised as literary Toryism 
 felt it its duty to fight for order, and in upholding 
 that Constitution to explain it and to show how it 
 was endangered. This militancy could not fail to 
 provoke reprisals. The comedy of the situation 
 was that the Reviewers, and Jeffrey in particular, had 
 no claim to take up the line of defence which they 
 did. They were moderns in spirit, if any were, 
 disapproving of Scott's antiquarianism ; of Byron's 
 sentimentality and Wdlschmerz^ because these 
 things jarred upon men who were praying hard to 
 be, above all things, happy ; of Wordsworth's 
 nature-mysticism, because it dumfounded practical 
 minds, and of his * real language of real men,' the 
 object of so much exaggerated and mistaken fun, 
 because it was vulgar ; of De Quincey's flamboyant 
 prose because it was flamboyant ; generally, of 
 the New Poetry, because of its extravagance and 
 bustle. Thus, while moderns in spirit, though 
 scarcely knowing it themselves, they were forced 
 by the exigencies of the situation to revert, as 
 critics often do or must, to a more classical creed 
 than they might accept in calmer moments. These 
 inconsistencies may be overlooked; in any case, they 
 need not distract us in our historical perspective. 
 All was for good, for as the * new ' poets had stirred 
 the imagination of a public grown sleepy or dull, 
 the reviewers were to stir its critical powers,
 
 THE NORTHERN AUGUSTANS 219 
 
 and, even by their mistakes, to lead themselves 
 and that public to a livelier appreciation of 
 literature and give a new dignity to their calling 
 as guides. 
 
 In a third and more practical way they may 
 claim the honour of being originators, in what 
 may be called the economics of editing and author- 
 ship. They purged periodical literature of many 
 of its Grub Street infamies, by instituting, with 
 the aid of a princely-minded publisher, an honour- 
 able relationship between him and themselves, 
 and, as a consequence, by relieving their craft from 
 the incubus of the unpaid elegants. General com- 
 petence rose when work was not extorted for a 
 pittance or accepted without fee from ambitious 
 fools. Further, there grew up, quite naturally, in 
 these earlier warlike conditions, an editorial right 
 of discipline and a call for uniformity in the work 
 contributed. The Reviewers give us the first 
 clear hint of what in more modern phrase we 
 call the * policy of a paper,' which, for good or 
 ill, has remained the rule of journalistic enter- 
 prise. Here, yet again, we seem to find an effect 
 of the old political association and the old party 
 habit. 
 
 It is easy to see the risks of the critical method 
 inaugurated by the Edinburgh Review and de- 
 veloped during the early rivalry of the Quarterly. 
 Gifford shows us, rather provokingly, the defect of
 
 220 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 Jeffrey's quality, and, more than any other con- 
 temporary, confuses the issue for us. He too 
 well deserves his reputation for the indulgence 
 of the canine pleasures of snarling and biting. He 
 took the motto of the Edinburgh l for his rule, in 
 a way which Jeffrey and his friends in the North 
 never did, and he remains responsible for that mis- 
 conception, still popular, which makes the critic a 
 sort of Herod. Had it not been for Southey 
 and Scott the latter especially, who has there 
 given us what is still his best prose and sanest 
 opinion the Quarterly might have succumbed 
 to the fury of its first editor, 'so savage and 
 tartarly.' 
 
 The lesson of the Edinburgh was not lost on a 
 later band of Edinburgh adventurers, who, while 
 fully recognizing the right to be sharp-tongued in 
 censure, had too much of the true literary stuff in 
 them to make journalism a mere ' scorpion '- 
 business. Blackwood's Magazine survived the 
 tempests of its first years the actions-at-law, chal- 
 lenges to duels, and lampoons and the coldness of 
 superior friends. For much of this trouble Maga 
 was itself to blame ; but there was confidence, and 
 good spirits, and enough of the Humanities' to 
 outlast 'the animosities.' 2 A right literary gust 
 will save a situation when other graces fail. 
 
 1 Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur (Publius Syrus). 
 * John Wilson's own word.
 
 THE NORTHERN AUGUSTANS 221 
 
 Blackwood, with Lockhart, 'Christopher North/ 
 Hogg, and the Irishman Maginn, and the rival 
 London Magazine, a birth of the same year (1817), 
 with Hazlitt, Lamb, Hood, and De Quincey, 
 offered entertainment which the generation of 
 Jeffrey's and Gifford's prime had never enjoyed. 
 If Maga cannot claim to have originated or im- 
 posed the new habit, or to be a very decorous 
 Prospero, it may have the credit of giving the 
 tormented Ariel of letters its freedom. 
 
 " It was mine art, 
 
 When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape 
 The pine, and let thee out." 
 
 Yet it was a strange setting free at least the 
 manner of it. There had been nothing like 
 Maga's first number : nothing since, quite like this 
 olio of fun, wicked personalities, sober criticism, 
 and good literary relish. The strangest thing of 
 all to us, who are too far removed to appreciate 
 how our great-grandfathers were convulsed, is that 
 the nucleus of the excitement the fiction of the 
 Chaldee MS. was a purely local matter, a riddle 
 of Edinburgh allusion, a quizzing in Biblical 
 English of two obscure persons Pringle and Cleg- 
 horn (the ' Two Beasts '), of Constable, the pub- 
 lisher ( Crafty '), of Scott (' The Magician '), who 
 "almost choked with laughter" at his portrait, 
 and of Lockhart himself, "the scorpion which
 
 222 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 delighteth to sting the faces of men." There were 
 other articles, one abusing Coleridge, and another, 
 the first of a series by ' Z J on the * Cockney School 
 of Poets,' duly noted in London as a clever feat of 
 gun-running in a long-drawn conflict ; but these 
 did not stir even the South as the * Manuscript ' 
 did. The tradition of the older review was 
 broken ; henceforth the magazine would allow a 
 wider reach to writers place for original essays, 
 
 * occasional ' pieces, fiction and verse, parody, what 
 not, with, perhaps, as in the Edinburgh, the 
 Quarterly, and Blackwood of to-day, a tailpiece on 
 politics, as a sop to old Cerberus. The shock of 
 this anarchism on the part of the Tory journal, 
 considered apart from the shock which its effrontery 
 and mercilessness caused to respectabilities like the 
 
 * Man of Feeling,' Fraser Tytler, and Dr. McCrie, 
 may be measured by the protest of John Murray, 
 then, though not for much longer, its London 
 publisher. "The prominent features of the 
 Magazine," he said, "should be literary and 
 scientific news, and most of all the latter, for which 
 your editors appear to have little estimation, and 
 they seem not to be the least aware that this is ten 
 times more interesting to the public than any other 
 class of literature at present. . . . You have 
 unfortunately too much of the Lake School, for 
 which no interest is felt here. Give us foreign 
 literature, particularly German, and let them create
 
 THE NORTHERN AUGUSTANS 223 
 
 news in all departments." l The incorrigible 
 Lockhart lulled Murray's fears by presenting the 
 observations of the Baron von Lauerwinkel and 
 Professor Sauerteig first sketches of Teufels- 
 drockh and the literary fantastics of the mid- 
 century. Thus did one thing produce another ; 
 each difficulty brought fresh opportunity. If the 
 sowing was at random, the harvest was good ; how 
 good, the London Fraser would soon show, 2 with 
 Lockhart, Maginn, and Hogg, and with these (as 
 if to make all editors envious) Coleridge, Southey, 
 Carlyle, Gait, Theodore Hook, Harrison Ains- 
 worth, and Thackeray. Fraser has gone, but 
 others have come ; and though Edinburgh still has 
 its Blackwood, vigorous as ever, but less * local' 
 in interest than in the days of the Old Saloon, 
 the true product of the pioneer work lies outside. 
 Edinburgh cannot now, if it would, oust London. 
 In these matters literature cannot defy economics. 
 Leigh Hunt's taunt that the Scot of his day " swears 
 (of course) by the Edinburgh Review, and thinks 
 Blackwood not easily put down " * has lost its point 
 in our more cosmopolitan generation. History, 
 however, is a kindly interpreter of northern 
 pride ; and somehow there lingers still in these 
 
 1 Murray to Blackwood, William Blackwood and his Sons, 
 i. 159- 
 
 1 From 1830. 
 
 3 The Liberal, 1822 (No. 2), vol. i. p. 371.
 
 224 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 old friends, despite London manners and modern 
 taste, more than a booksellers' tradition of the 
 Edinburgh of Jeffrey and Lockhart. 1 
 
 1 The reader's attention has been requested in this chapter 
 exclusively to the contributions of the Northern Augustans in 
 criticism and belles lettres. He may feel that there is more to 
 be said of the general indebtedness, as, for example, in the rise 
 of the new school of historical writers in the eighteenth century, 
 led by the three Scots, Hume, Smollett, and Robertson, and 
 in the synchronous development of the historical study of 
 literature, in the work of the great Printing-Clubs and the great 
 Encyclopaedias. This more learned activity, though an ex- 
 pression of the engrained antiquarian habit of the Scot, was no 
 mere matter of research and ingathering. If it owed some- 
 thing to the awakened critical spirit and imaginative energies 
 of the period, it in turn served both well, and interested a wider 
 public than the good folk of Edinburgh.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 BURNS 
 
 A WRITER nowadays may well confess to some 
 diffidence in approaching the subject of Burns. 
 Such a " pitchy cloud " of opinion has enveloped 
 his story, that even in the twentieth century there 
 is some risk of losing the poet in the darkness of 
 commentary on the perversities of earlier critics. 
 It is so easy to be turned aside to questions of 
 Burns's private life, or his merits as a reformer 
 of old bawdry, or any other of the Ethical' 
 matters which are the proper business of literary 
 prigs and all unliterary persons. 
 
 We must select our Burns ; for there are at 
 least three. There is the popular idol, the Burns 
 of January festival, honoured in Scotland and 
 wherever Scots gather together as no poet has 
 been honoured in human history, and, if to alien 
 eyes excessively, yet honoured not without cause. 
 To have given a nation its songs, and expressed 
 so unerringly the passion, and patriotism, and 
 pathos and humour which stir its life and tradition, 
 
 S.L. 225 p
 
 226 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 were excuse for the wildest popular affection. The 
 maudlin praise of the c common Burnsite' has its 
 value, not because of its intensity, but for, what is 
 so rare in the history of ideas, its testimony to an 
 undivided and continuing opinion throughout an 
 entire community. For this reason the purely 
 c Scottish ' Burns interests the coldest outsider as a 
 remarkable, perhaps unique, instance of social and 
 literary forces expressing themselves in terms of 
 ,each other. There is, in the second place, the 
 Burns of wider appeal, the ' friend of humanity * 
 (in no Anti-Jacobin gibe), the poet of the generous 
 instincts of the Common Race ; born in the time 
 of revolution, yet no revolutionary ; peasant, yet 
 no girder at great place ; honest with Nature and 
 her creatures, too honest with himself ; speaking 
 the lingua franca of the Universal Brotherhood, 
 not of 'brither Scots.* The third Burns is the 
 artist, the lyrist of unsurpassed vigour and sweet- 
 ness, the guardian of a literary tradition and its 
 renewer. After all is said, this is the true Burns. 
 If we understand him thus, the Burns of Scottish 
 idolatry is better understood and the Burns of 
 European affection better explained. This Burns 
 is perhaps the least known to our generation. The 
 wide appreciation of his lyrics is, it is true, an 
 acknowledgement of literary quality, but their 
 appeal is that of the universal Burns ; just as their 
 Scottish timbre and colour constitute the appeal of
 
 BURNS 227 
 
 the national Burns. Pretty talk about an 'Ayr- 
 shire ploughman' and a 'peasant bard' tends to 
 make us indifferent to his art for its own sake, or 
 to its place in the process of literature, for one does 
 not ask oneself to look for technical triumphs in 
 verses thrown off by countrymen and gaugers. 
 There is dialect too, to distress the foreigner and, 
 not rarely, the modern Scot. So it falls out that 
 we incline to take Burns either on very general 
 terms and without much literary consideration, or 
 on very particular 'kailyard' terms, as only the 
 exponent, though the best, of the intimacies of 
 Scottish life. It is a duty to discredit this 
 emphasis, and to interpret him as a poet, and as 
 a Scottish poet, in the light of his own literary 
 accomplishment. 
 
 * There is, in the judgements of contemporaries, 
 some acknowledgement of this literary quality, 
 though it is often but darkly hinted ; a tinge of 
 condescension in the congratulations by men to 
 whom the origin and circumstance of work so 
 excellent is matter of astonishment. We see it in 
 Mackenzie's article in the Lounger, 1 perhaps less 
 affectedly in Jeffrey's in the Edinburgh* and in 
 Scott's in the Quarterly. 3 Jeffrey showed only 
 imperfect sympathy. It is, in fact, his sense of 
 
 1 Dec. 9, 1786, No. xcvii. 
 
 * Jan. 1809. xiii., pp. 249 < seq. 
 
 3 Feb. 1809, i., pp. 19 el seq.
 
 228 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 fairness, or rather his judicial habit of stating a 
 case 'for the other side,' for tradition in the face 
 of novelty, that exposed him to wrath of the 
 patriots. One sometimes wonders how Burns 
 fared so well in the classical atmosphere of the 
 Edinburgh of that day. Had he been overlooked, 
 or been at most an evening exhibit in the Duchess 
 of Gordon's saloon, we should not have been sur- 
 prised. But we know from many sources, from 
 that great lady herself, and from Sir Walter too, 
 that there was something more than simple amaze- 
 ment at the rustic phenomenon. "No man's 
 conversation," says the Duchess, " ever carried me 
 so completely off my feet." Scott, in the account 
 of the meeting in Adam Ferguson's house, 1 con- 
 veys an unmistakable sense of ease and good 
 humour on the part of all concerned. There is 
 nothing histrionic ; no shock to these intellectuals 
 and elegants ; no hint of the rhetoric of Humanity 
 or the rollick of Poosie Nansie's, without which 
 the Burnsites cannot think of their poet. Perhaps 
 he disturbs our enthusiastic moderns when they 
 find him a sentimentalist dropping tears over a 
 poor print, and the confessed reader of Sterne, 
 * The Man of Feeling,' and Macpherson. 2 There 
 is something in this mutual recognition, which 
 neither the patriotic Burns nor the cosmopolitan 
 
 1 See p. 202, supra. 
 
 1 Letter to John Murdoch, 15 Jan. 1783.
 
 BURNS 229 
 
 Burns can explain. Was it all a triumph of per- 
 sonality, the effect, as Lockhart hints, 1 of over- 
 powering vigour and unguessed reserve upon " an 
 isolated set of scholars " ? Was it the victory of 
 those flashing black eyes, the "fascinating con- 
 versation, the spontaneous eloquence of social 
 argument, or the unstudied poignancy of brilliant 
 repartee " ? 2 For we are asked to believe, on 
 the authority of a contemporary, that "Poetry 
 (I appeal to all who had the advantage of being 
 personally acquainted with him) was actually not 
 his /orte."* 
 
 Here we seem to see the genesis of that critical 
 obsession of Burns the man. So strong has this 
 interest in his personality been that when the 
 glamour of his drawing-room fame had faded, there 
 succeeded immediately the spell of the closing 
 tragedy, in which miserable business posterity, 
 with many shakings of the head, has busied itself 
 to distraction. Wordsworth tangles his praise 
 with condescending regret at the "admixture of 
 useless, irksome, and painful details," 8 and he is 
 vexingly homiletic in his verses on the poet. 
 When he would defend Burns against the "per- 
 severing Aristarch " of the Edinburgh, it is, as 
 
 1 Life of Burns. 
 
 2 The writer was a woman. See Lord Rosebery's Glasgow 
 speech, ai July, 1896 (Stirling, 1912, p. 28). 
 
 8 Letter to James Gray, Jan. 1816.
 
 230 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 Hazlitt well says, " only to bring him before a 
 graver and higher tribunal, which is his own " 1 
 before which tribunal there is much disorderly 
 evidence on certain kinds of temperance. Even 
 Carlyle, in his Essay, of deeper sympathy and 
 sanity than most, tells us that " true and genial as 
 his poetry must appear, it is not chiefly as a poet, 
 but as a man, that he interests and affects us." 8 
 And again : " All that remains of Burns, the writ- 
 ings he has left, seem to us ... no more than a 
 poor mutilated fraction of what was in him. . . . 
 His poems are, with scarcely any exception, mere 
 occasional effusions ; poured forth with little pre- 
 meditation. . . . To try by the strict rules of 
 Art such imperfect fragments would be at once 
 unprofitable and unfair." 8 After which preamble 
 of half-truth, Carlyle immediately proceeds to show 
 that " there is something " in this defective record, 
 "some sort of enduring quality" which must 
 explain the continuing popularity, some claim to 
 high art established. Then, having talked con- 
 vincingly of Burns's literary character and art, he 
 reverts to contemplation of the " sad end " and the 
 sadder discourses thereon. And so the comment 
 on intrigue and whisky rolls on, involving us all in 
 irrelevance. 
 
 Let us decline to be drawn into this vortex. The 
 
 1 English Poets, 1818, p. 256. * Essays, ii., p. 6. 
 ib., p. 8.
 
 BURNS 231 
 
 censure may be right, or it may be wrong ; we 
 may like personal gossip, or we may not. What 
 does it matter? If the question be asked, what 
 would be our attitude to this body of verse if we 
 knew less about Burns than we know about Shake- 
 speare, if, indeed, the whole story had been blotted 
 out, what must be the answer ? Is there no voice 
 in the works themselves ? If they speak, on what 
 grounds shall we conclude that the utterance is but 
 a broken whisper of might-have-beens, *a muti- 
 lated fragment ' of what we should have had ? In 
 one respect we may agree with Carlyle, that what we 
 have may be but a partial expression of the poet's 
 power, that the man who wrote these poems might 
 have written more, perhaps better still, had life's 
 conditions been easier. But this assumption is 
 only another way of congratulating ourselves on 
 what we have. 
 
 It is a comfortable habit of criticism, when faced 
 with the problem of explaining why Burns suc- 
 ceeded as he did in such unlikely conditions, to 
 take refuge in the platitude that genius explains 
 itself, that, when simple folk surpass the trained 
 pupils of Apollo, it is by an act of the god and 
 "there's the end on't." When, as with Burns, 
 there is great inequality in craftsmanship, even 
 evidence of what would be called amateurishness 
 in others, then we are told that Apollo was asleep 
 or forgetful, and the peasant strummed as an
 
 232 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 untaught peasant should. Genius of this sort, 
 define it as we may, counts for much ; so does 
 happy circumstance. But they count only when 
 they are aided or guided by the artist's conscience. 
 The prophet has his noviciate before the message 
 is given to him, and the measure of the world's 
 applause is, after all is said, the measure of his 
 right to convey it and of the manner of his con- 
 veying. Such a phrase as "an inspired plough- 
 man " is mere froth of words, to cover our surprise 
 and excuse our condescension. Burns was no 
 untutored creature. His success among the select 
 intelligences of Edinburgh would be testimony 
 enough had we lost every line he wrote. That 
 adjustment of his faculties to every situation which 
 so astonished Dugald Stewart, his charm alike in 
 drawing-room and tavern, his power of repartee, 
 imply both the artist's sensitiveness and the artist's 
 experience. It is not necessary to show how the 
 facts of his schooling and family-life discredit the 
 clodhopper theory. 1 We may perhaps exaggerate 
 their importance, just as we may underrate them. 
 There is better guidance for us in the poet's confi- 
 dences. When writing to Mrs. Dunlop, in January 
 
 1 " By the time I was ten or eleven years of age," he says, 
 " I was a critic in substantives, verbs, and particles." (Letter 
 to Dr. Moore, and Aug., 1787.) He had reached to " sines and 
 cosines," when a charming fillette " overset " his " trigonometry " 
 (ib.) ; and he kept up a " literary correspondence " with his 
 schoolfellows. " This," he adds, " improved me in composi- 
 tion," (ib.).
 
 BURNS 233 
 
 1787, on his Edinburgh welcome, intimating in 
 grim prophecy that the "novelty of a poet in my 
 obscure situation" cannot be sustained, he says, 
 " I have studied myself, and know what ground I 
 occupy." In the same month, he tells his literary 
 confessor, Dr. Moore, that, apart from the in- 
 security of his social success with the 'polite and 
 learned,' there are literary reasons why he cannot 
 hope to retain his fame. Two years later, he un- 
 burdens himself thus to the same friend. "The 
 character and employment of a poet were formerly 
 my pleasure, but are now my pride. I know that 
 a very great deal of my late clat was owing to the 
 singularity of my situation, and the honest pre- 
 judice of Scotsmen ; but still, as I said in the 
 preface to my first edition, I do look upon myself 
 as having some pretensions from nature to the 
 poetic character. I have not a doubt but the 
 knack, the aptitude, to learn the Muses' trade, is 
 a gift bestowed by Him * who forms the secret bias 
 of the soul ' ; but I as firmly believe that excellence 
 in the profession is the fruit of industry, labour, 
 attention, and pains. At least I am resolved to 
 try my doctrine by the test of experience." l This 
 resolve he had already put into practice, in the days 
 on his father's farm, when he, " the most ungainly 
 awkward boy in the parish," had for his familiars 
 Shakespeare, the Spectator, Locke, Allan Ramsay, 
 
 4th Jan. 1789.
 
 234 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 Boyle, Hervey, and, with others, A Select Col- 
 lection of English Songs. "The Collection," he 
 tells us, " was my vade mecum. I pored over 
 them, driving my cart, or walking to labour, song 
 by song, verse by verse ; carefully noting the true, 
 tender, or sublime, from affectation and fustian. I 
 am convinced I owe to this practice much of my 
 critic-craft, such as it is." * If believers in the 
 figment of an 'unliterary* Burns had sufficient 
 antiquarian enterprise to look at this Collection, 
 The Lark y z an English-made miscellany of 
 southern and northern song, with bits of Dryden, 
 Congreve, Prior, Cibber, and others, they might 
 begin to wonder what relish their plain peasant had 
 for these things. In another place Burns says : 
 " It is an excellent method in a poet, and what I 
 believe every poet does, to place some favourite 
 classic author, in his walks of study and composi- 
 tion, before him as a model." His letters to 
 Dr. Moore about Zeluco* and to Alison about his 
 essays on the principles of Taste * show how con- 
 firmed his interest in literary expression had be- 
 come ; and Cromek records a reply to a question 
 about his habits of composition, that "all my 
 poetry is the effect of easy composition, but of 
 laborious correction." 5 
 
 1 Letter to Dr. Moore, and August, 1787. 
 
 1 London, 1740. There were later issues. 
 
 8 I4th July, 1790 j 28th Jan. 1791. * i^th Feb. 1791. 
 
 6 Reliqws of Robert Burns, 1808.
 
 BURNS 235 
 
 There is another heresy or half-heresy which 
 must be thrown over, that Burns's greatness, as a 
 song-writer, is mainly derived from the fact that 
 he was fortunate in having a rich tradition for the 
 stimulation of his power, circumstances unusually 
 helpful, and an age and country peculiarly respon- 
 sive. In other words, had Scotland not been 
 already a land of song and the Scottish peasantry 
 and bourgeoisie in the mood they were, we should 
 not have had this Burns. Goethe gave currency 
 to this view. "How is he great," he said to 
 Eckermann, " except through the circumstance that 
 the whole songs of his predecessors lived in the 
 mouth of the people that they were, so to speak, 
 sung at his cradle ; that, as a boy, he grew up 
 amongst them, and the high excellence of these 
 models so pervaded him that he had therein a living 
 basis on which he could proceed further? Again, 
 why is he great, but from this, that his own songs 
 at once found susceptible ears amongst his com- 
 patriots ; that, sung by reapers and sheaf-binders, 
 they at once greeted him in the field ; and that his 
 boon-companions sang them to welcome him at 
 the ale-house ? " l Let us, by all means, admit 
 this happy circumstance, but do not let us allow 
 too little to the artist's individuality, or forget that 
 in his reworking of the traditional stuff the approach 
 and touch are always literary. Editing may be a 
 1 Conversations, tr. Oxenford, 1883. p. 254.
 
 236 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 great art, and Burns's, at its best or worst, may be 
 something more than merely clever. 
 
 It is not necessary to go closely into the details 
 of the historical evidence. There are very few of 
 the poems which are entirely kinless or which cannot 
 claim some sort of Scottish cousinship. If, for 
 example, we open the Kilmarnock edition and take 
 the first ten pieces in order, we find the first, The 
 Two, Dogs, and the sixth, The Death and Dying 
 Words of Poor Mailie, in the octosyllabic couplet, 
 an old favourite in Scots from the days of the 
 Makars but most familiar as the metre of the 
 people's great book, Barbour's Bruce ; the second 
 on Scotch Drink, the third, The Author's Earnest 
 Cry and Prayer, the fifth, Address to the Deil, 
 the seventh, Poor Mailie's Elegy, the eighth, the 
 Epistle to James Smith, and the tenth, The 
 Vision, in the so-called * Burns stanza,' an old 
 Troubadour form often used in Middle English, 
 and a favourite in Scotland from the fifteenth 
 century, and notably in the work of the poet's 
 immediate predecessors, from * standard Habbie ' l 
 to Ramsay, Hamilton of Gilbertfield, and Fergus- 
 son ; the fourth, The Holy Fair, and the ninth, 
 A Dream, in the bob-wheel stanza, traceable in 
 genealogical ascent, from Fergusson and Alexander 
 Scott, back to Christ's Kirk on the Green and 
 Peblis to the Play and the earlier Sir Tristrem. In 
 
 1 Piper of Ktibarchan.
 
 BURNS 237 
 
 choice of subject, too, there are many ties with the 
 past. In these ten poems the evidence is amply 
 illustrative. It is enough to state that The Twa 
 Dogs recalls Fergusson's Planestanes and Causey, 
 Scotch Drink the same poet's Cauler Water, and 
 The Holy Fair his Leith Races and Hallow Fair, 
 and that Poor Mailie*s Elegy is, like Tarn Samson, 
 directly reminiscent of the elegiac efforts of 
 Ramsay on Maggie Johnston and others, as 
 Ramsay's verses are of the ever-famous Piper. 
 Then there is the not less clear, if less conscious, 
 relationship in sentiment and manner, as shown, 
 say, between the Address to the Deil and Dunbar's 
 Kynd Kittok. 1 All these things, however, are 
 of less moment to the critics who have set their 
 hearts on an * editorial ' Burns than his deliberate 
 recasting of old texts, even of some which remained 
 familiar to his generation. There is the stock 
 illustration of the classic verses of Auld Lang Syne. 
 Watson in his Collection of 1711 printed a poem 
 of Old Long Syne, which is now ascribed to 
 Francis Sempill, though there is some evidence for 
 believing that it is a recension of still older 
 matter. 2 The first stanza runs: 
 
 " Should old acquaintance be forgot 
 And never thought upon, 
 
 i J See supra, p. 26. 
 
 * On the evidence of the popularity of the poem before Burns's 
 time, see Henley and Henderson's edition, vol. iii.. pp. 408-410.
 
 238 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 The Flames of Love extinguished 
 
 And freely past and gone ? 
 Is thy kind Heart now grown so cold 
 
 In that Loving Breast of thine, 
 That thou can'st never once reflect 
 
 On Old-long-syne ? " 
 
 This is transformed by Ramsay 1 : 
 
 " Should auld acquaintance be forgot, 
 
 Tho' they return with scars ? 
 These are the noble hero's lot, 
 
 Obtain'd in glorious wars : 
 Welcome, my Varo, to my breast, 
 
 Thy arms about me twine, 
 And make me once again as blest, 
 
 As I was lang syne." 
 
 On this Burns builds his first stanzas 2 : 
 
 " Should auld acquaintance be forgot, 
 
 And never brought to mind ? 
 Should auld acquaintance be forgot 
 And auld lang syne ? 
 
 We twa ha'e run about the braes 
 
 And pu'd the gowans fine ; 
 But we've wander'd mony a weary foot, 
 
 Sin' auld lang syne." 
 
 When we continue through the familiar lines, we 
 feel how far we have wandered from the 'Flames 
 of Love' and the noble Varo, and how beside 
 Burns's four-lined chorus Watson's sounds but a 
 
 1 Tea Table Miscellany, i. 51. 
 
 2 As in George Thomson's Select Melodies, ii. 19, "from a MS. 
 in the editor's possession," given by the poet.
 
 BURNS 239 
 
 jingle. 1 Here, if anywhere, we are bidden to 
 test the critic's dictum that Burns's " function was 
 not origination but treatment, and that in treat- 
 ment it is that the finer qualities of his endowment 
 are best expressed and displayed." 2 What appeals 
 to us in the Auld Lang Syne which we know is 
 Burns's own ; what he preserves of the old material 
 is preserved because it has passed the tests of his 
 art. This is the * peasant-poet's ' unoriginality, his 
 cobbling of other men's stuff! We prefer to 
 think that by discarding what is least worthy and 
 by substituting his own excellences, he has done 
 something more. The trail of the mere editor is 
 not upon this work. 
 
 Burns's indebtedness,' especially in song 
 his following of old themes, his returning of old 
 rhythms, his carrying over of phrase and line and 
 verse has an interest for us over and above its 
 testimony to his literary insight and craftsmanship. 
 Popular criticism has sometimes asked the ques- 
 tion, Why did Burns so concern himself with other 
 men's work, if he shows such power of discrimi- 
 nating between successes and failures and of 
 recovering the failures to honour? Why did he 
 
 1 " On old long syne. 
 
 On old long syne, my jo. 
 On old long syne : 
 That thou canst never once reflect 
 On old long syne." 
 
 Henley, Essay on Burns, u.s. iv. p. 325.
 
 2 4 o SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 not give his imagination a freer course? It is 
 foolish to ask why a poet did not do certain things, 
 or why, having done good work * of his own,' he 
 did not do more. It might be replied, under com- 
 pulsion, that, for one reason or another, there is 
 ground for suspecting that the Burns we know 
 might not have been able, with his short life-oppor- 
 tunity, to produce more * original ' verse or any- 
 thing better than these inspired recensions ; but 
 the question may well be declined. If a more 
 professional ambition had driven him only to 
 * novelties,' the gain to his reputation and to us 
 might not have balanced the loss. When his 
 dealings with the earlier vernacular are considered, 
 two things are borne in upon us. In the first 
 place, we see that he re-expressed the old motives 
 of Scottish poetry so convincingly that his state- 
 ment is accepted as completely representative and 
 saved them from neglect, perhaps from oblivion. 
 This is the reason why Scottish gratitude has gone 
 forth to him so freely ; and why outside criticism 
 has so readily, and without much risk, made him 
 the sole medium for helping it to its knowledge of 
 Scottish genius. In the second place, the character 
 of this dealing supplies the strongest proof of what 
 may be called the literary intelligence of the poet. 
 His use of this strewn material, lingering in oral 
 tradition, blown about in broadsheets, or disguised 
 by * polite ' plagiarists, is too careful and persistent
 
 BURNS 241 
 
 to show nothing more than the poet's necessity. 
 We seem to see a deliberate choice, even if the poet 
 had not told us of his patriotic resolve ; and we 
 recognize the literary insight which suggested or 
 compelled that choice. We cannot think of his 
 use of these old channels, which won him a free 
 passage to the heart of the nation, as merely 
 accidental or the lazy observance of tradition. 
 After all, do we not juggle with the blessed words 
 'recension' and 'treatment' overmuch? We are 
 better served by Channel* or * mould,' for in 
 fifty cases, as striking as that of Auld Lang Syne, 
 what he has poured in words sparkling like the 
 mountain stream, or molten from the crucible of 
 passion is his own. 
 
 In passing from this 'editorial' heresy we en- 
 counter another, subtler perhaps, because it appears 
 to allow more to the poet's artistic originality. 
 We are reminded of Burns's ' homeliness,' and told 
 that he is above all things great because he sang of 
 simple life as no one had done before him. On 
 this little more need be said than to recall Steven- 
 son's dictum that Burns succeeds less by his choice 
 of themes than by his power of " writing well " 
 the only criterion by which posterity can separate 
 the literary sheep from the literary goats. " It 
 was by his style, and not by his matter, that he 
 affected Wordsworth and the world." And 
 again : " If Burns helped to change the course of 
 
 S.L.
 
 242 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 literary history, it was by his frank, direct, and 
 masterly utterance, and not by his homely choice 
 of subjects. . . . He wrote from his own experi- 
 ence because it was his nature so to do, and the 
 tradition of the school from which he proceeded 
 was fortunately not opposed to homely subjects. 
 But to these homely subjects he communicated the 
 rich commentary of his nature ; they were all 
 steeped in Burns ; and they interest us not in 
 themselves, but because they have been passed 
 through the spirit of so genuine and vigorous a 
 man. Such is the stamp of living literature ; and 
 there was never any more alive than that of 
 Burns." 1 It is his literary alertness which saves 
 the movement of his ideas, his descriptions, his 
 phrasing, from the failure which dogs the mere 
 limner in words ; and not a little of the credit 
 which we give to his Doric speech is reflected from 
 himself. 3 We see the full meaning of this when 
 we look on the gulf between his work and that of 
 any of the crowd of writers whom he inspired. 
 He showed a way, and so many have tried to 
 follow, as the Lydgates and Occleves, minor and 
 more minor, tried to follow Dan Chaucer. He is 
 their Springing well,' and <A per se,' and 'lan- 
 tern ' ; they and their critical friends, like the older 
 poet's admirers, are but feeble tricklings and glint- 
 ings. These tarry at the " sources from which the 
 
 1 Men and Books, pp. 86-87. * c f- <6 - P- 84.
 
 BURNS 243 
 
 materials for the imagery" of Poetry are drawn, 
 and win the experience which does not " constitute 
 men Poets, but only prepares them to be the audi- 
 tors of those who are." l Burns, like Shelley, was 
 "familiar with mountains and lakes," had seen 
 "populous cities," had "conversed with living 
 men of genius " ; but posterity, in its critical 
 moods, bears him some grudge that he narrowed 
 his range. It chides him for cribbing his talents, 
 and forgets the transforming power, the alertness 
 in adjustment, the gift of the poet's self, which so 
 few, even the greatest, have offered so freely. 
 
 The poetry of Burns was a further contribution 
 by Scotland to the Romantic stir in which the 
 verse of Thomson and Macpherson had done so 
 much, but it was, in its vigour and direction, so 
 unlike these earlier forces that many who were the 
 first to admire felt only the attraction of its novelty. 
 Its strangeness and strength secured for it a 
 welcome by a jaded literature already partly 
 refreshed by the * new poetry.' Later, when reflec- 
 tion followed their first enthusiasm, Englishmen 
 had to explain to themselves why they so frankly 
 allowed Burns his place, and why they met the 
 difficulties of a strange dialect and an alien setting 
 so amiably. 
 
 The exhilaration produced by the revel of the 
 Romantics in Nature and the Past gave Burns his 
 
 1 Shelley, Preface to Revolt of Islam.
 
 244 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 opportunity. For in literature, as in life, reaction 
 is itself the begetter of reaction ; and though it 
 was a new pleasure to moralize in terms of the 
 Seasons or indulge the misty sentiments of Mor- 
 ven, such pleasure soon palled. It is difficult for 
 us to realize the fascination of the change offered 
 by Burns from apostrophes to the Powers 
 
 " That o'er the garden and the rural seat 
 Preside," 
 
 to Addresses to the Deil ; from the haughty stride 
 of the Chief of Moma, * like a cloud, the robe of 
 ghosts,' 2 to the * randie, gangrel bodies,' who 
 
 " In Poosie-Nansie's held the splore, 
 To drink their orra duddies " ; 3 
 
 from Musidora's swain to the lover of Mary 
 Morison. Indeed, so violent is the contrast that 
 we may wonder how it pleased English ears except 
 as a discord. But Burns's style, his art of * writing 
 well, 1 his literary genius, and nothing else, found 
 the harmonies. These found, the strangeness 
 became not only more attractive but reasonable. 
 
 What were the elements of novelty? There 
 was first a new scenery village-street, hillside, 
 corn-rigs, wimplin' burns, auld clay biggins a 
 score of settings unknown to the Crabbes and 
 Cowpers and other * innovators ' ; and, with these, 
 unusual situations, surprises of character and senti- 
 
 1 Seasons, ' Autumn,' 11. 1037 et seq. 
 
 Temora, p. 54. " Jolly Beggars, i.
 
 BURNS 245 
 
 ment. In the second place, Burns offered a sheaf 
 of new-old metres ; old to England, but a dis- 
 covery to the good folk of the eighteenth century, 
 and lively enough entertainment to them after their 
 Pindaric gambolling. Thirdly, there was the 
 Doric, in many places puzzling (perhaps therefore 
 not unattractive), but more often, by its sprink- 
 lings of quaint or vigorous words, giving nuances 
 and graces which the statelier southern speech had 
 overslipped. This early and continuing commen- 
 dation of Burns in spite of difficulties of language is 
 testimony to the power of the poet rather than of 
 the tongue which he used. For though the 
 elements of his medium are not, except on rare 
 occasions, of his making, their ordering is his ; 
 and in that ordering they acquire values which 
 dictionary and peasant-usage and the literary prac- 
 tice of Ramsay and Fergusson and other pre- 
 decessors fail to disclose. There was in this 
 English admiration the acknowledgement that 
 Burns had found for the world latent powers in the 
 language, which, without him, might have been 
 lost, even to Scots. If the medium was an aid to 
 Burns, he more than repaid his debt to it. No one 
 but he could have sent the great public to wrestle 
 with dialect as he has done. If lines like 
 
 11 A daimen icker in a thrave 
 'S a sma' request " l 
 
 1 To a Mouse, iii.
 
 246 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 fail to remove from English and foreign minds the 
 suspicion that such a vocabulary is unnecessarily 
 thorny or obscure, there are hundreds where the 
 value of pure dialect is frankly admitted to be 
 worth all the trouble of unravelling. For example, 
 in the Brigs of Ayr the description of the torrent is 
 carried through so vigorously that the Englishman 
 feels that the line at the close, 
 
 " And dash the gumlie jaups up to the pouring skies," 
 
 must be as good as the rest. Burns established 
 the credit of dialect. What Scott was to do for 
 northern countryside and character, he did for 
 northern speech. By his art strange things were 
 made familiar and the South became sensitive for 
 the first time, and perhaps as fully as it can ever be, 
 to the timbre of modern Scotticism. 
 
 The influence exerted by Burns upon contem- 
 porary literature gave vogue to Scotticism which 
 the other Northern pioneers failed to secure 
 Thomson, Macpherson, the Critics, even the name- 
 less and named writers of the Ballads. Thomson 
 loses his identity in the general English and Conti- 
 nental revel in Nature ; the curiosity of a few 
 foreign tourists to see the country of the Ossianic 
 bards soon dies out and Fingal returns to its literary 
 mists ; the Edinburgh of Jeffrey and Lockhart, 
 having inspired London, yields not unamiably. 
 But Burns remains the Scot. "The appellation
 
 BURNS 247 
 
 of a Scottish bard is by far my highest pride ; to 
 continue to deserve it is my most exalted ambi- 
 tion." * He achieved his wish, and more. For his 
 greatness is not only a Scottish matter, that he 
 recovered the true 'race' of northern literature 
 and discovered the Scots to themselves, but the 
 affair of the wide world of letters, that he found 
 for it the enjoyment of a fresh purpose, and from 
 the springs of experience, so national or even local, 
 replenished the common cisterns of Poetry. 
 
 1 Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, 22nd March, 1787.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 SCOTT 
 
 SCOTLAND had something more to offer to the 
 Romantic Movement, and to literatures greater 
 and older than hers. This fresh incentive she and 
 her neighbours received from Sir Walter Scott. 
 He was but dimly conscious of the significance of 
 the part which he played in the literary change. 1 
 Training, social circumstance, taste, all inclined 
 him to the * constitutional party ' in letters, and he 
 was more than once prompted to open confession 
 of sympathy with the Northern Augustans. 
 Though he was a lover of Nature and was attracted 
 by the heroic past as few have been, he had no 
 kinship with Thomson and Macpherson. His 
 interest in the ballads was, with all its anti- 
 quarianism, no mere tradition of Percy and the 
 editors, and it worked to a different end. He 
 seems to stand apart from all the protagonists of 
 the new Romanticism by his measured passion. 
 He discloses no compelling force behind him, no 
 
 1 See supra, chapter vii., pp. 201 et stq. 
 248
 
 SCOTT 249 
 
 missionary zeal to an unregenerate art, no con- 
 noisseurship in sensation or emotion. He contri- 
 butes no new ideas, as more excited contemporaries 
 understood their duty: unlike these contem- 
 poraries, he seems to be strangely indifferent to 
 such things, at least for their own sake. Yet, 
 though all this be admitted, we count him one of 
 the primary forces in transforming the literary habit 
 of the early nineteenth century. 
 
 Much of Scott's influence flowed from his per- 
 sonality. He is rarely judged on purely literary 
 grounds. His age gave but passing thought to 
 these, though, as its taste changed and it turned from 
 the verse it had at first hailed as of the best, it felt 
 compelled with fatuous regret to profess that it did 
 so in the name of art. Ours, too, when it thinks of 
 him, thinks rather of the man, and, when it would 
 excuse its inexcusable indifference, makes pretence 
 of critical dislike of the whims and faults of c buff- 
 jerkined ' romance. 
 
 " Why take the style of those heroic times ? 
 For nature brings not back the Mastodon, 
 Nor we those times ; and why should any man 
 Remodel models ? " 
 
 Scott holds his own, as it were by the sheer 
 momentum of character which won for him the 
 triumphs of his lifetime. He does not tempt the 
 biographers to homily, as Burns by an ill fete so 
 often does. The tragic decline, not less tragic than
 
 250 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 the other, only discloses further proof of his 
 spiritual vigour. Outbursts like Hazlitt's, 1 or even 
 the gender Hunt's, are mere dog-day frenzy, which 
 their authors would forget and we are ready to 
 forgive. We admire Scott's energy and reserve, 
 his amiability and honesty above all, his sanity ; 
 and we have no difficulty, with or without Lock- 
 hart's canvas, in understanding why a personality 
 which so stirred the enthusiasm of its generation 
 has had effects so wide and abiding. 
 
 It is not inconsistent with what has been hinted 
 about Scott's reserve or lack of high passion to 
 find the source of his influence in his attractive 
 vigour, in his frank delight in action ; but some 
 explanation may be required. Although, unlike 
 so many of his contemporaries, he refrained from 
 critical exposition of his purpose, either by 
 analysing his sympathies with eighteenth century 
 tradition, or by explaining his indifference to so 
 much in the new movement, he did perhaps more 
 than any preface-writing poet or exuberant essayist 
 to give that movement confidence in itself. His 
 effect was tonic. He has described himself, to his 
 friend Miss Seward, as "a rattle-sculled half- 
 lawyer, half-sportsman, through whose head a 
 regiment of horse has been exercising since he was 
 five years old." 2 All his work, both verse and 
 prose, shows this spirited, yet orderly, bearing. 
 
 1 We do not forget his praise. * Lockhart, Life, ii. 259.
 
 SCOTT 251 
 
 His is an atmosphere which is neither sultry with 
 convention, nor cyclonic, but clear and bracing, 
 stirring the reader as hill-air quickens the steps and 
 attunes the nerves. He is sustained by an electric 
 force which gives him untiring energy in his crafts- 
 manship and abounding happiness in the perform- 
 ance, and which conveys to others a wholesome 
 sense of exhilaration. In this respect he appeals 
 not only to the armchair reader, as Lockhart shows 
 us in his Torres Vedras anecdote. When the 
 Lady of the Lake reached Sir Adam Ferguson that 
 officer was posted with his company on a point of 
 ground so exposed to the enemy's artillery that the 
 men had been ordered to take a lying position. 
 "While they kept that attitude, the Captain, 
 kneeling at their head, read aloud the description 
 of the battle in Canto VI., 1 and the listening 
 soldiers only interrupted him by a joyous huzza, 
 whenever the French shot struck the bank close 
 above them." 2 What Scott could do for the 
 individual, or for soldiers in action, he has done 
 for literature. He confirmed and gave wider 
 vogue to the romantic mood, and supplied to the 
 general what more purposeful verse or the exhorta- 
 tions of critics could not secure. If his art had not 
 the mettle of Pegasus, it served better the Bellero- 
 
 1 Canto vi. xvi., beginning 
 
 ' Their light-arm'd archers far and near. 
 
 1 Life, Ui. 327.
 
 252 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 phons of Romance ; and we should have lost 
 exceedingly, had it careered heavenwards through 
 the wrack of the Sturm und Drang. He cantered 
 an indolent age comfortably into enjoyment of the 
 new fervours of literature, taught it the pleasures 
 of the morning-saddle and spring air, gave it the 
 zest of doing and moving, as no Pegasus-antics of 
 higher-bred art could have done. 
 
 We have already referred to Scott's work in 
 illustration of the two dominant moods of Scottish 
 literature, and hinted that though it is effective in 
 its treatment of detail 1 and in its descriptive 
 method, it is less successful in expressing its fan- 
 tastic humours. 2 He has been called the" Wizard 
 of the North," happily enough, if we have a care in 
 determining how his spells were laid. We give 
 to the term * wizardry,' as applied to writers of 
 Scott's time, a Radcliffian sense of Terror and 
 Wonder, an association with "browneis and 
 bogillis" and other things of their kind. This, 
 in spite of occasional dealings with Goblins and 
 White Ladies, has small claim upon his art. He 
 is a wizard because he called up the past, found a 
 
 1 See chapter i., supra, pp. 6 el seq. R. L. Stevenson has noted 
 this. " In literature the great change of the past century has 
 been effected by the admission of detail. It was inaugurated 
 by the romantic Scott ; and at length, by the semi-romantic 
 Balzac and his more or less wholly unromantic followers, bound 
 like a duty on the novelist." The Art of Writing, ' A Note on 
 Realism,' 1910 ed., p. 98. 
 
 1 See chapter ii., supra, p. 63.
 
 SCOTT 253 
 
 fresh purpose for the dross of common fact, dis- 
 covered to the world and to the Scots themselves 
 a new vision of northern scenery and history and 
 character. "We owe to him, as a people," said 
 Lord Meadowbank on the memorable occasion 
 when the * Great Unknown' was compelled to 
 make public confession of his authorship of the 
 Waverley Novels, 1 " a large and heavy debt of 
 gratitude. He it is who has opened to foreigners 
 the grand and characteristic beauties of our 
 country. It is to him that we owe that our gallant 
 ancestors and illustrious patriots . . . have ob- 
 tained a fame no longer confined to the boundaries 
 of a remote and comparatively obscure country. 
 It is he who has called down upon their 
 struggles for glory and freedom the admiration of 
 foreign lands. He it is who has conferred a new 
 reputation on our national character, and bestowed 
 on Scotland an imperishable name, were it only by 
 her having given birth to himself." There is the 
 historical and social side of Scott's wizardry. 
 Byron's compliment to him as the " Ariosto of the 
 North" gives the more literary aspect of his 
 "magic line" and "new creation." 2 
 
 We can realize, at least as well as a later genera- 
 tion can, the pleasure of contrast which Scott's 
 
 *At the Theatrical Dinner, on 23rd Feb. 1827. See Intro- 
 duction to Chronicles of the Canongatt. Author's edit., vol. xli.. 
 pp. l-li. ( and Lockhart, Life, ix. 81. The texts vary slightly. 
 
 2 Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, iv. xl.
 
 254 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 verse and novels gave to his contemporaries a 
 contrast not merely with the lingering mood 
 against which Romanticism was striving, but with 
 so much of the matter and manner of that Roman- 
 ticism itself. It has been a custom with us to 
 dismiss the subject by saying that it was by his 
 appeal to antiquity, or, as some uncomfortable 
 people prefer to call it, his antiquarianism, that 
 Scott arrested the attention of his age ; as if the 
 choice of old stories or a mania for fancy-dress or 
 rusty iron could expkin his reception by it and by 
 ours. The " business of buff-jerkins " was no new 
 thing, even as a fashionable craze in literature. It 
 had helped the New School in its first efforts. Every- 
 body but the stragglers of the Cult of Twickenham 
 thought in terms of basnets and flying buttresses. 
 Scott only offered to his age what it was already 
 familiar with ; he had no protest to make, in the 
 valiant way of some of his contemporaries. Yet we 
 cannot, if we show any precision in our estimate, 
 consider him as a mere laudaior temporis acti, 
 deliberately turning to the past to spite the present 
 for its restlessness and emotional shoddy ; or, with 
 Hazlitt in one of his critical lapses, as a political 
 plotter, working against the holy * spirit of the 
 age,' self-dedicated to reform. 1 Nor may we con- 
 sider him as a mere antiquary offering to his con- 
 temporaries a sort of museum-refuge from the 
 
 1 The Spirit of the Age, ' Scott.'
 
 SCOTT 255 
 
 clamour and traffic of letters, or, at worst, indulg- 
 ing his own taste in curios or advertising his 
 cabinets at Abbotsford. None of these Scotts 
 could have lived long in the affection of his fellows, 
 or live still with us. 
 
 We are tempted to counter these views by saying 
 that we can read Scott not only without being 
 attracted or repelled by his antiquarian learning, 
 but without recognizing it. Both those who con- 
 demn and those who excuse make an extraordinary 
 fuss about nothing. It is all a question of style, or 
 a matter of * vocabulary.' Sir Walter thought and 
 wrote in a language of his own. He found his 
 medium for a time in the traditions of the Middle 
 Ages, and he worked in it easily. Others, ignorant 
 of it, or carried away by zeal for things modern 
 and prone to consider that all other things are 
 inferior, find themselves unsympathetic. It is a 
 problem of taste or of instinct ; perhaps as much 
 of training. Critics who gird at Scott's medieval 
 setting remind one of the censors of hard words 
 pilloried by Dr. Johnson. "Words are hard," 
 he retorted, "only to those who do not under- 
 stand them ; and the critic ought always to inquire, 
 whether he is incommoded by the fault of the 
 writer, or by his own." 1 Scott's censurers dislike 
 the paraphernalia of chivalry because they do not 
 understand them, and, disliking them, suggest that 
 
 i The Idler, No. 70.
 
 256 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 he has created difficulties for himself. If they go 
 further and say, what Johnson, in the same place, 
 says of one sort of author, that he "involves his 
 thoughts in voluntary obscurity" and merely 
 " boasts his learning," we must at once measure 
 swords with them. Scott may, at odd moments, 
 give the impression of being over-curious in anti- 
 quarian detail, just as the Great Cham sometimes 
 distresses his friends by an overstrained delight in a 
 rotund vocabulary; but this is no reason for think- 
 ing of the author of the Waverley Novels as little 
 better than a Captain Grose, any more than for our 
 joining in the foolish libel of Johnsonese. Just 
 as Johnson's learning can never destroy his reputa- 
 tion as the clearest and most direct of writers, so 
 Scott's armorial style never obscures the simple 
 purpose of his art. If he shows the 'rust' of 
 antiquity, he also conveys its * freshness.' 1 In 
 ballad, in his more ambitious verse, in novel, he 
 speaks with the voice of the past, not because it is 
 an ancient and strange voice, but because it is 
 living and pleasing ; not because it is quaint, but 
 because it is simple and clear. This, and this only, 
 explains why he enchanted his generation, and 
 offered relief, alike from the conventional cadences 
 and the fashionable experiments in discord. Lock- 
 hart, in the guise of Peter Morris, tells us what this 
 revel in the Past did for his age. "By enquiring 
 
 1 Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, ' Byron.'
 
 SCOTT 257 
 
 into and representing the modes of life in earlier 
 times, [Scott] employs the imagination of his 
 countrymen, as a means of making them go 
 through the personal experience of their ancestry, 
 and of making them acquainted with the various 
 courses of thought and emotion by which their 
 forefathers had their genius and characters drawn 
 out things to which, by the mechanical arrange- 
 ments of modern life and society, we have been 
 rendered too much strangers." 1 Scott's contem- 
 poraries probably did not see, as well as we can, 
 how, incidentally to this new enjoyment, their 
 historical sense was refreshed. If his presentation 
 of olden days is sometimes imaginary, or extra- 
 vagant, and if he takes more than Shakespeare's 
 allowance of freedom, to the vexing of the 
 precisians in history, his perspective is rarely dis- 
 torted to indulge a craving for the picturesque, 
 or thrown out of scale to humour a tedious 
 antiquarianism. He never pretended to historical 
 accuracy. As the literary son of the Minstrels he 
 had no mind to forgo his heritage for a quest of 
 pedantries. His right to the name of Wizard rests 
 not more on the new visions and fervours which he 
 created for posterity, than on the method by which 
 he drew the curtain of antiquity between his age 
 and its intellectual prepossessions. For great as 
 was his recovery of the simpler life and ideals of a 
 
 1 Peter's Letters, ii. 350. 
 
 S.L
 
 258 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 forgotten past, not less great was the immediate 
 effect of the manner of that recovery, in making 
 modern life and art more sensitive to the simpler 
 feelings. No antiquary or vainly bookish person 
 ever achieved this. 
 
 It is in this simplicity that we find Scott's posi- 
 tion of contrast with so many around him, his 
 strength, and his appeal to his time. It is the 
 criterion of his romanticism. It is a protest 
 against artificiality on the one hand and extrava- 
 gance on the other, and in its association with 
 4 movement ' for Scott finds his descriptive oppor- 
 tunity in the stirring business of life rather than 
 in the psychology of feeling a protest against 
 both the stagnation which ensued after a spell of 
 artifice and the bewilderment into which the search 
 for novelty had thrown men's minds. Washing- 
 ton Irving tells us that when he commented on the 
 bareness of the Border scenery, Scott replied : " I 
 like the very nakedness of the land ; it has some- 
 thing bold, and stern, and solitary about it. When 
 I have been for some time in the rich scenery about 
 Edinburgh, which is like ornamented garden land, 
 I begin to wish myself back again among my own 
 honest grey hills ; and if I did not see the heather, 
 at least once a year, / think I should die." l In 
 further conversation, about the Laidlaws and a 
 woman friend who had been invited to meet the 
 
 1 Lockhart. Life, v., pp. 248-249.
 
 SCOTT 259 
 
 American, Scott remarked : " I wished to show you 
 some of our really excellent, plain Scotch people ; 
 not fine gentlemen and ladies, for such you can 
 meet everywhere, and they are everywhere the 
 same " ; and, of the last, " she's a fine old Scotch 
 girl, and I delight in her more than in many a fine 
 lady I have known, and I have known many of the 
 finest." l Anecdotes like these, corroborated by 
 other gossip in Lockhart, help to explain how Scott 
 was even more successful in the novels of Scottish 
 life nearer his own time. They perhaps throw 
 some further light on his much discussed 'anti- 
 quarianism,' by making it, too, appear as a desire for 
 intimacy, and an effort to put the barons bold as 
 much at their ease with himself and his readers as 
 the Bailie and Dominie are, or as barons bold may 
 care to be. The simple taste of the Grand 
 Seigneur, then building and planting his Abbots- 
 ford, is reflected in his literary mood, even in his 
 pictures of these barons and their dames and 
 tourneys. There is nothing exotic, or * oriental,' 
 or sensuous in these processional panels ; nothing 
 of the cheap mystery of Castles of Otranto or the 
 fantastic splendour of pleasure-domes in Xanadu. 
 One sometimes wonders how such simple hearts 
 beat under these magnificent accoutrements ; but 
 one wonders less when one notes how the whole 
 scene moves. There is no time to be introspec- 
 
 i Lockhart. Life, v., pp. 251-252.
 
 260 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 live, or morbid, or affected. In this breezy mood 
 there can be no cobwebs. It is the " vitality " of 
 his art which "preserves it from putrefaction." 
 This is true, also, in those rarer passages when 
 Scott turns psychologist ; as in the lines in the Lay 
 describing the hesitation of the Aged Minstrel to 
 play before the Duchess and her ladies. 1 Pitt's 
 well-known comment 2 on this passage helps us to 
 understand how the colour and realism of the New 
 Poetry revealed themselves to an age used to 
 decorative and symbolic method, but it misses the 
 element which makes these qualities so vivid. For 
 it is Scott's rapid progression from one gentle touch 
 to another, his refusal, or inability, to rest and 
 analyse, which gives the lines their character. He 
 takes the ups and downs of the old man's feeling at 
 a canter. Now this is just what pictorial art does 
 not do, and cannot do, even in our cinematographic 
 days ; and we have here, from another point of 
 view, further proof of the difference between 
 Scott's art and the painter's between the panoramic 
 effect and the " caught movement." 
 
 So far then, Scott has the credit of disclosing to 
 his age the more essential and abiding qualities of 
 Romanticism, or, at the very least, of confirming 
 and encouraging it in its appreciation of them. 
 Though, from the historical point of view, his atti- 
 
 1 Introduction, Poetical Works, vi. 46-48. 
 1 Quoted supra, p. 8, n.
 
 SCOTT 26 , 
 
 tude may be considered as a protest ' against both 
 the conventional and anarchic moods which were 
 struggling with each other, and though this term 
 has been used in this chapter for critical conveni- 
 ence, it is better to interpret his influence in a 
 more disengaged sense. Let it be repeated that he 
 was for the most part unconscious of the part which 
 he played. For this reason it may be that 'he 
 played so well. He supplied an atmosphere, a 
 tonic, a fresh motive call it what we like which 
 genius of a higher order has so often failed to do 
 by more provocative methods. 
 
 Scott however did more than this ; he gave not 
 only to English but to the world's literature the 
 Historical Novel. Prose fiction has always claimed 
 the right to reconstruct the past, and has exercised 
 it more freely than either satire or drama has done ; 
 but in all that had been written during the double 
 millennium before the nineteenth century there is 
 nothing to be found which can be called a historical 
 novel in the sense understood by that century and 
 by ours. There are, of course, different types, 
 and perhaps a hint or two of approach towards the 
 modern genre. The reader has access to a con- 
 cise account 1 of the stages from the * philosophic 
 novel ' of the Greeks through the * epical novel * of 
 
 1 Saintsbury, Essays in English Literature. /78o-tS6o, Second 
 Series. 1895. pp. 303 et seq.
 
 262 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 Rome to the medieval romance, when the confusion 
 of the differences between what could be accepted 
 as history and what should be taken as romance 
 becomes so remarkable. The Arcadian efforts of 
 the sixteenth century are almost a deliberate rever- 
 sion to classical types ; and the painful folios of the 
 seventeenth, with their Gallic Cyruses and Cassan- 
 dras and their English copies, make no show, 
 notwithstanding their affectation of history, of 
 spiriting readers away from the familiar interests 
 of the age of the Grand Monarch. Nor in the 
 more allegorical, and satirical, delights of books 
 like the New Atlantis is any advance to be looked 
 for. We are still leagues from the Waverley con- 
 ception of how the novel should be Historical* ; 
 and, what is not the least remarkable fact, hardly 
 an ell nearer in Scott's immediate predecessors. 
 For the antique setting in Walpole and Clara 
 Reeve, and in Mrs. Radcliffe and Godwin not less, 
 is a more ludicrous jumble than when medieval 
 writers placed Melchizedek, Aristotle, and Godfrey 
 cheek by jowl, or stage-managers put Hector in 
 trunks and Cleopatra in a commode ; and of 
 historical 'sentiment' these writers show not a 
 scrap. For the rest of the story of the prepara- 
 tion for the Waverley Novels, Scott is himself the 
 best chronicler, in the apologia of 1829, offered as 
 a General Preface to the 'Author's Edition.' 
 There, in a fragment of a tale of chivalry " in the
 
 SCOTT 263 
 
 style of the Castle of Otranto," written by him at 
 an early date and incorporated in 1808 in the 
 chapters continuing Strutt's Queen-hoo Hall, and 
 in his observations on these first ventures, 1 the 
 interest to us is not so much in what he had tried to 
 do, as in what he was saved from doing, both by 
 his own talent and by accident, when he seriously 
 began his career as novelist. " Queen-hoo Hall" 
 he tells us, " was not very successful. I thought I 
 was aware of the reason, and supposed that, by 
 rendering his language too ancient, and displaying 
 his antiquarian knowledge too liberally, the 
 ingenious author had raised up an obstacle to his 
 own success. Every work designed for mere 
 amusement must be expressed in language easily 
 comprehended ; and when, as is sometimes the 
 case in Queen-hoo Hall, the author addresses him- 
 self exclusively to the Antiquary, he must be 
 content to be dismissed by the general reader with 
 the criticism of Mungo, in The Padlock,* on 
 Mauritanian music, *What signifies me here, if 
 me no understand?' I conceived it possible to 
 avoid this error ; and by rendering a similar work 
 more light and obvious to general comprehension, 
 to escape the rock on which my predecessor was 
 
 1 Both the fragment and the continuation are printed in the 
 Appendix in the ' Author's Edition.' 
 
 2 A Comic Opera by Isaac Bickerstaffe (Drury Lane. 1768), 
 based on Cervantes's ' Tealous Husband.' in the Exemplary 
 
 Novels.
 
 264 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 shipwrecked." 1 Scott deals with the matter too 
 modestly, for he confines himself to the Mungo plea 
 of intelligibility, all-important no doubt, and inci- 
 dentally very interesting to us in respect of later 
 opinion on his own * antiquarian ' obscurity. We 
 are in a better position to estimate the general char- 
 acter of his experiment and its permanent effects. 
 
 The most essential difference between his art of 
 romance and that of each and all of his predecessors 
 lies in what may be called, for lack of a better 
 description, its fuller co-ordination. He succeeds 
 where others had failed in the reconstruction of 
 history in an imaginative medium, first, by reason 
 of the more extended range of his historical 
 sympathies, his ampler equipment, and his more 
 catholic taste as a virtuoso , and, secondly, as an 
 effect in part of that fuller acquaintance, by reason 
 of his power of co-ordinating his material. How 
 much richer is his picture in its colouring and how 
 much better composed, how much truer and more 
 complete than anything that came from the crowd of 
 second- and fifth-rate novelists of the opening of 
 the nineteenth century I If the reader has no 
 opportunity of tasting these books for himself (for 
 an effort to feast upon them would produce the 
 worst results), he may turn to Mr. Saintsbury's 
 lively chapters in his history of the English Novel, 2 
 
 1 General Preface, Waverley Novels, I. pp. xvi.-xvii. 
 1 The English Novel. London. 1913
 
 SCOTT 265 
 
 where enough is quoted to show that " the failure 
 in verisimilitude is practically universal," in 
 volumes less funnily stupid than Henrietta Mosse's 
 Peep at Our Ancestors (1807). We do not laugh 
 at them for their errors in description, even though 
 these be many, because we are unwilling to admit 
 fussy pedants in this business, and because Bohemia 
 has long had an undisputed right to its seaboard. 
 They do not give us a Bohemia of any kind, either 
 landward or littoral. They have some knowledge 
 of it ; they are very learned in certain things ; but 
 their knowledge is partial, and so concerned with 
 externals that the reader cannot surrender himself 
 to the illusion. They may be, with certain allow- 
 ances, very informing persons in the forgotten lore 
 of heraldry, or falconry, or architecture, or village 
 customs, or troopers' oaths, but they are seldom 
 cunning in all these ; and of the more spiritual 
 matters which constitute society old or new 
 literature and art and religion they know little 
 or nothing and have no use for them on their 
 canvas. They are the " mere antiquaries " ; they 
 lack the "vitality" which preserves art from 
 " putrefaction." l It is they who help us to under- 
 stand his greatness as the creator of the historical 
 novel. For it is by the multiplicity of his interests in 
 the past, his range of sympathy, and the intimacy of 
 
 1 On their " dragging-in " of historical details " by head and 
 shoulders," see Scott's Journal, under i8th Oct. 1826.
 
 266 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 his style that we separate him from all the chif- 
 fonniers of romance. This intimacy is not, as some 
 have thought, merely an effect of his extensive 
 erudition. Without his natural vivacity and 
 simplicity, learning would not have served him 
 half so well as it did. Without these we should 
 not have had, for example, that expressive dialogue 
 which more than anything else convinces the reader 
 of the historical reasonableness of the narrative. 
 Is there anything before these Novels which realizes 
 so fully to the modern the sentiment and character 
 of earlier society ; or anything which makes 
 characters, especially the villains, express them- 
 selves so directly, without giving us the crude 
 ipsissima verba, the oaths and obscenities in which 
 we know they must have indulged ? * Scott's per- 
 sonages speak to each other and to us as good 
 acting speaks to us. We forget the 'properties' 
 in the directness of the appeal. The setting, with 
 all its detail, is often as immaterial to the enjoyment 
 of the book, as the spectacular whims of our 
 theatre-managers are to the enjoyment of the acted 
 Shakespeare. Let us go further, and say, once 
 
 1 Some contemporaries found, with Heber's correspondent 
 Adolphus, that Scott failed in his rare attempts at " scenes of 
 bold and unmitigated vulgarity," and, thinking of his ill-success 
 in portraying " the reckless and ribald audacity of the ' lewd 
 rabble '," were reminded of the " economical humorist in Miss 
 Burney's Cecilia, who appears at a masquerade with the borrowed 
 suit of a real chimney-sweeper " (Letters to Richard Heber, Esq., 
 1821, pp. 91-92). This qualification, if accepted, only throws 
 all that they, and we, find so successful into stronger relief.
 
 SCOTT 267 
 
 again for the benefit of the critics who think only 
 of a buff-jerkined Scott, that the antique setting 
 is, in no paradoxical sense, an accident of Scott's 
 mood. Early circumstances guided his choice, 
 but he was never wedded to it, as the collector is 
 to his hobby. He soon became "satisfied that 
 the manners of the Middle Ages did not possess 
 the interest which [he] had conceived ; " l and he 
 turned to Highland story and the Edinburgh of 
 his own day. His success in each and all, and 
 especially in the last, shows not only how well he 
 could " make up " for each part, but that he could 
 play so many to the life. He showed the world 
 of letters what could be done in these antique 
 disguisings, but also that historical and romantic 
 tale-telling is more than a mummer's business. If, 
 for a time, he had poor imitators, and, later, few, 
 if any, rivals in his own craft, his example proved 
 good to the whole fraternity of authorship not 
 least perhaps in giving the Historical Novel a place 
 of dignity among the other genres of the modern 
 workshop, and the stimulus of an almost unlimited 
 variety of subject. The classical tradition of 
 fiction was shattered. In Scott's art the narrow 
 medievalism of the earlier stages of the new 
 romanticism yielded to the intimacies of the 
 generations that had just passed, then to those of 
 the writer's time ; but that was only a beginning, 
 
 ' General Preface, Waverley Novels. I., p. xvii.
 
 268 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 for the Historical Novel learned to know no 
 bounds this side of Peru. It may be doubted 
 whether without Scott's lesson we should have had 
 those 'historical' tales of imaginary lands which 
 have no history and, unlike the old-fashioned 
 Utopias, are not the mere toy of the satirist. 
 Further, we may ask ourselves whether the modern 
 novel, which has no c historical ' setting and objects 
 to be suspected of having it, is not, more than it 
 knows, a debtor to Scott, in its exposition of 
 manners and character, 1 or has not learnt, in its 
 happier moods, something from the simplicity and 
 vigour of his appeal. 
 
 It has come about that the very qualities which 
 are Scott's best defence against the libel of 'anti- 
 quarianism ' have suggested to some critics a second 
 disability. If width of range and energy and 
 rapidity of movement save his art from musty 
 service to Dr. Dryasdust, they lay it open to the 
 charge of being unkempt. The reader is asked to 
 choose between the old finery of historical wax- 
 works and the rough-and-tumble of the slop- 
 shop. Carlyle, strange to say, leads the main 
 attack on Scott for his "extempore style of writ- 
 ing," and girds, more suo, against his rapidity and 
 
 1 Which includes praise of Scott's " skilful adaptation cf 
 discourse to the natural varieties of age, sex, and disposition," 
 as first pointed out by J. L. Adolphus in his Letters to Richard 
 Heber, M.S. (Letter v., p. 78).
 
 SCOTT 269 
 
 lack of " soul's travail," l though he allows, rather 
 inconsistently, that the style is for the novelist's 
 purpose " the only good mode." Scott, it is true, is 
 never a perfect artist from the grammarian's point 
 of view. He often shocks the punctilious by his 
 indifference to the niceties of phrase and concord. 
 Much the same charge has been preferred against 
 Dumas and the less * historical' Balzac, and it 
 stands as a sort of general warrant against all the 
 minors of prose romance. We may wonder rather 
 that Scott's sinning is not greater than it is, when 
 we think of the extent of his work and his untiring 
 speed of production. Finesse in such circum- 
 stances was impossible. He was conscious of this, 
 as when he writes thus in his Journal: "J. G. L. 
 kindly points out some solecisms in my style, as 
 
 * amid ' for * amidst,' * scarce ' for * scarcely.' 
 
 * Whose,' he says, is the proper genitive of * which ' 
 only at such times as * which ' retains its quality of 
 impersonification. Well! I will try to remem- 
 ber all this, but after all I write grammar as I speak, 
 to make my meaning known, and a solecism in 
 point of composition, like a Scotch word in 
 speaking, is indifferent to me. I never learned 
 grammar ; and not only Sir Hugh Evans but even 
 Mrs. Quickly might puzzle me about Giney's case 
 and horum harum horum. 2 I believe the Bailiff 
 
 1 Essays, vi., p. 73. 
 
 2 Merry Wives of Windsor, TV. i. 55-56. (' Jenny's Case ').
 
 270 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 in The Good-natured Man l is not far wrong when 
 he says ' One man has one way of expressing him- 
 self, and another another, and that is all the dif- 
 ference between them V J2 Carlyle and his echoes 
 have been much concerned with Scott's lack of 
 plan and perilous fluency. Shakespeare and 
 Milton, Goethe and Schiller, Petrarch and Dante 
 are cited for homily to the " mob of gentlemen that 
 write with ease." " Cease therefore, O ready- 
 writer," says the Sage, " to brag openly of thy 
 rapidity and facility. . . . Write easily, by steam 
 if thou canst contrive it, and canst sell it ; but hide 
 it like virtue ! * Easy writing,' said Sheridan, * is 
 sometimes damned hard reading ! J Sometimes ; 
 and always it is sure to be rather useless reading, 
 which indeed (to a creature of few years and much 
 work) may be reckoned the hardest of all."* 
 After these honest platitudes, the shade of Hazlitt's 
 milliner 4 may wonder why novels so c hard ' as well 
 as *dry' survived her favourite Agnes y and still 
 survive. Scott himself gives us a hint or two 
 how to meet this criticism. " I am sensible," he 
 says, " that if there be anything good about my 
 poetry or prose either, it is a hurried frankness of 
 composition, which pleases soldiers, sailors, and 
 young people of bold and active dispositions." 
 He helps us better in the conversation between the 
 
 1 Act in. * Journal, 22nd April, 1826. 
 
 3 Essays, vi., p. 74. * Spirit of the Age, ' Scott.'
 
 SCOTT 271 
 
 Author of Waverley and Captain Clutterbuck, in 
 the Introductory Epistle to the Fortunes of Nigel. 1 
 
 Captain. Common gratitude to the public, which 
 has received you so kindly, and to the critics, who 
 have treated you so leniently, ought to induce you 
 to bestow more pains on your story. 
 
 Author. I do entreat you, my son, as Dr. Johnson 
 would have said, " free your mind from cant." For 
 the critics they have their business, and I mine. . . . 
 I am their humble jackal, too busy in providing food 
 for them, to have time for considering whether they 
 swallow or reject it. To the public I stand pretty 
 nearly in the relation of the postman who leaves a 
 packet at the door of an individual. . . . But I 
 deny there is any call for gratitude, properly so called, 
 either on one side or the other. 
 
 Captain. Respect to yourself, then, ought to teach 
 caution. 
 
 Author. . . To confess to you the truth, the works 
 and passages in which I have succeeded have uni- 
 formly been written with the greatest rapidity ; and 
 when I have seen some of them placed in opposition 
 with others, and commended as more highly finished, 
 I could appeal to pen and standish, that the parts in 
 which I have come feebly off, were by much the more 
 laboured. . . . 
 
 Captain. You should take time at least to arrange 
 your story. 
 
 Author. That is a sore point with me, my son. 
 Believe me, I have not been fool enough to neglect 
 ordinary precautions. I have repeatedly laid down 
 my future work to scale, divided it into volumes and 
 chapters, and endeavoured to construct a story 
 which I meant should evolve itself gradually and 
 strikingly. . . . But I think there is a demon who 
 seats himself on the feather of my pen when I 
 
 1 pp. xxxv. et seq.
 
 272 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 begin to write, and leads it astray from the purpose. 
 Characters expand under my hand ; incidents are 
 multiplied ; the story lingers, while the materials 
 increase ; my regular mansion turns out a Gothic 
 anomaly, and the work is closed long before I have 
 attained the point I proposed. 
 
 Captain. Resolution and determined forbearance 
 might remedy that evil. 
 
 Author. Alas ! my dear sir, you do not know the 
 force of paternal affection. When I light on such a 
 character as Bailie Jarvie, or Dalgetty, my imagina- 
 tion brightens, and my conception becomes clearer at 
 every step which I take in his company, although 
 it leads me many a weary mile away from the regular 
 road, and forces me to leap hedge and ditch to get 
 back into the route again. If I resist the temptation, 
 as you advise me, my thoughts become prosy, flat, 
 and dull; I write painfully to myself, and under a 
 consciousness of flagging which makes me flag still 
 more ; the sunshine with which fancy had invested 
 the incidents, departs from them, and leaves every 
 thing dull and gloomy. I am no more the same 
 author I was in my better mood, than the dog in a 
 wheel, condemned to go round and round for hours, 
 is like the same dog merrily chasing his own tail, and 
 gambolling in all the frolic of unrestrained freedom. 
 In short, sir, oh such occasions, I think I am be- 
 witched. 
 
 Captain. Nay sir, if you plead sorcery, there is no 
 more to be said he must needs go whom the devil 
 drives. 1 
 
 1 Cf. too, the Introduction to the Chronicles of the Canongate, 
 p. xxix. " Thus we begin to cross a strong river with our eyes 
 and our resolution fixed on that point of the opposite shore, on 
 which we purpose to land ; but, gradually giving way to the 
 torrent, are glad, by the aid perhaps of branch of bush, to ex- 
 tricate ourselves at some distant and perhaps dangerous landing- 
 place, much farther down the stream than that on which we 
 had fixed our intentions." And cf. J. M. Barrie : " There are
 
 SCOTT 273 
 
 Scott at least knew himself. What could be better 
 than * hurried frankness,' or what more suggestive 
 of his wizardry than this plea of a bewitched quill ? 
 How could he explain more fully to us that cove- 
 nant with Romanticism which he would not allow 
 himself to declare? If he distresses some good 
 people, because, in verse and in prose, he is too 
 narrow in his methods and range of form, because 
 he does not write other kinds of fiction and on 
 other subjects, and verse in other metres, it may 
 satisfy a larger public that his work is always so 
 fresh within the area of his choice. If his slipshod 
 English and his digressions vex so many, and are 
 taken for sin, because he could write with the best, 
 as in his anonymous articles in the Quarterly, there 
 may be as many who will acknowledge that he has 
 given more than compensation in the 'life' of his 
 telling, and that his vices lose their viciousness in 
 the circumstance of his art. 
 
 Scott is the most representative Scot. Perhaps 
 he is also " the greatest man whom Scotland has 
 produced." l There is no doubt that outside Scot- 
 writers who can plan out their story beforehand as clearly as 
 though it were a railway journey, and adhere throughout to their 
 original design they draw up what playwrights call a scenario 
 but I was never one of those. I spend a great deal of time 
 indeed in looking for the best road in the map and mark it 
 with red ink, but at the first bypath off my characters go." 
 (See Hammerton, /. M. Barrie and his Books, 1900. p. 177.) 
 
 1 Mr. Patrick Robertson at the Theatrical Dinner in 1827 
 (supra, p. 253), after Sir Walter had left the chair. 
 S.L. s
 
 274 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 land he has been, and remains, the best known and 
 most influential of her writers. No single author 
 of repute better expresses to the Englishman and 
 foreigner the fundamental qualities of northern 
 literature, the actual and daemonic, though in the 
 latter respect he is less typical than many. No one 
 has shown a wider knowledge and a deeper sym- 
 pathy with the national life ; no one has under- 
 stood so fully or expressed so happily the character 
 of his countrymen. It is Scotland's good fortune 
 that, by reason of his literary talent, his personality, 
 and the opportunities offered in the early nine- 
 teenth century, he became the mouthpiece of 
 Scotticism to the world of letters. His message 
 has perhaps meant more, spiritually, to Europe 
 than to his native land, where, though he is 
 honoured, he yields to Burns in the affection of 
 the general. "It may be asked, it has been 
 asked," says Hazlitt, " Have we no materials for 
 romance in England ? Must we look to Scotland 
 for a supply of whatever is original and striking in 
 this kind ? And we answer { Yes ! ' " l Scott 
 found the Scotland which Smollett failed to find ; 
 and more truly than Miss Edgeworth, his early 
 model, found her Ireland. He has made it a place 
 of pilgrimage, as no other literary man has done 
 before or since. The enterprise of railway 
 managers and business men is built upon his 
 
 1 The Spirit of the Age, ' Scott.'
 
 SCOTT 275 
 
 reputation. He discovered the Trossachs and Rob 
 Roy and Jeanie Deans for Scotsmen and Abbots- 
 ford for Americans. But, more than this, he found 
 the secret of a new art, and for literature a new 
 zest. Scotland may well be grateful to him for what 
 he showed her, and be proud that Europe eagerly 
 claimed to share in the lesson.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 A MODERN EPILOGUE 
 
 THE reader may ask whether all that has been said 
 about persisting traits in Sc9ttish Literature and 
 about its influence upon others is of more than 
 historical interest. Modern conditions seem to 
 put the thesis of a well-defined and sustained 
 Scotticism to a very severe test, if not to make it 
 preposterous for any time after the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, when the Scot encouraged himself to forget 
 his differences as best he could. The literary 
 historian finds, as he passes from Hume to Sir 
 Walter, that it is increasingly difficult to segregate 
 his " Scottish " writers, and that he has often no 
 better excuse for a label than the accident of birth 
 or residence, or the choice of subject or dialect. 
 The public to-day, whether of London or Edin- 
 burgh, does not trouble itself about the matter, 
 except when, roused by the accent of Drumtochty, 
 it convinces itself that it hears the "true Scottish 
 note." 
 
 And first, let it be declared, at the risk of 
 276
 
 A MODERN EPILOGUE 277 
 
 being tedious in repetition, that we rule out the 
 whole company of " stickit ministers " and all the 
 things done and said within reach of " bonnie brier 
 bushes." Perhaps this intimation is less necessary 
 than it would have been some years ago, even to 
 those who are unfamiliar with the ironies of The 
 House with the Green Shutters. Yet severe 
 judgement of the Kailyarders may involve others 
 who are not parties to their folly. Because that 
 1 school ' stood for Scotticism, and because its 
 claims are now peremptorily dismissed, too many 
 may conclude that there is nothing more to be 
 looked for, that, in a word, the notion of northern 
 idiosyncrasy, obvious and traditional, must be 
 wiped off the critical slate. The suggestion that 
 English literature is still touched by Scottish in- 
 fluences is taken in a " well-if-you-like " way, as 
 good-humouredly as the Highlander takes the 
 Cockney sportsman in his August kilt. Strange- 
 ness is pastime, as the tall hats of the elders of 
 Thrums, and Forfkrshire dialect in English actors' 
 mouths, are of an evening to a London pit. What 
 is accepted as northern is accidental and external, 
 even if it escapes Kailyard exaggeration, and the 
 work of reputable writers who happen to have been 
 born beyond the Tweed is allowed to follow 
 southern habit in all essential things. There is 
 laziness in this judgement, and some inconsistency 
 with what the Englishman confesses about " imper-
 
 278 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 feet (perhaps imperfectible) sympathies." He still 
 finds his Caledonian something of an enigma 
 adaptable, if he is to explain to himself the fellow's 
 proverbial success, and immutable, because the bore 
 who disturbed Charles Lamb still gets in his way ; 
 and yet he would assume that the riddle of litera- 
 ture is offered in simpler terms. This may be a 
 return compliment for the Scot's having made 
 common cause with the South ; but if it means 
 that the old ways are forgotten, that individuality 
 is surrendered and power to influence lost, then 
 this Scot is not he whom the Englishman professes 
 to know so well. Had the northern partner 
 busied herself with a "Renaissance," harped on 
 the sorrowful Deirdres and eloquent Dempseys, 
 hoed the cabbage-patch and dressed the kitchen- 
 table to better purpose, or out-tartaned Kiltartan, 
 she might have had readier recognition of * nation- 
 ality* in literature or opera-bouffe. But Scot- 
 land has given her Stevenson and Lang and Barrie 
 to the common purpose, as Ireland has given some, 
 greater than her Shaw and Wilde and Moore ; and 
 it is in these, rather than in the eccentrics who write 
 " in the manner of thatched houses," whether after 
 the Galloway or Abbey Street pattern, that serious 
 criticism dares to look for the deeper and abiding 
 differences in literary character. 
 
 Nor, having declined the testimony of the Kail- 
 yarders and Perfervids, need we take account of
 
 A MODERN EPILOGUE 279 
 
 that honester patriotism which clings to the trans- 
 lated Scot, even the most confirmed in English 
 ways his " salmonlike instinct to revisit his native 
 waters," his choice of northern settings and story, 
 his toying with memories. It is all as it should be 
 that Stevenson's art turns so often to the homeland 
 for action and colour, as his jaded body yearned in 
 its Samoan paradise for the stinging winds of an 
 Edinburgh spring ; that Lang's, in its range from 
 blue china to the ritual of Peru, is ever reminding 
 itself of a corner in the north-east, and, when there 
 is a Scottish mystery to be unravelled or tale to be 
 told, will forsake Homer and the Myths of the 
 Sun ; that Quality Street will go to Thrums for 
 week-ends. It is no more than the Frenchman or 
 Englishman does, and it is of no critical moment 
 in any comparative estimate. Such confessions do 
 not interpret that inner Scotticism which exile, 
 willing or unwilling, cannot deaden. Even when 
 none are offered and all provincial millinery is laid 
 aside, and the Scot would be taken for a good 
 Londoner, but for the tattling of Who's Who, the 
 ancestral habit of northern letters remains. 
 
 Like his literary forbears, the modern Scot is all 
 for observation or given over to dream, a realist 
 or a fantastic, busied in gathering up the little 
 intimacies of life or in teasing experience. Some- 
 times he will indulge both moods, as, in our 
 fathers' day, in Phantasies and David Elginbrod,
 
 28o SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 and, in our own, in Fleet Street Eclogues and 
 Ballads of Nuns, or in the humours of Kirriemuir 
 interiors and the eccentricities of Tinkle-bell and 
 the most admirable Crichton. An unrepentant 
 antiquary, who will destroy the glamour of the 
 Tales of a Grandfather, will be the best maker of 
 Fairy-Books for our grandchildren. Another 
 writer can " keep his eye " on the Paisley of his 
 youth and wander through an eerie Dominion of 
 Dreams, with less risk of artistic strabism than the 
 Good Man in the Night Thoughts encounters in 
 his spiritual activities. 1 Though the moderns 
 more often choose the intimate and actual, there 
 are few in whom irresponsible humour does not 
 find its opportunity. We know how Stevenson's 
 art, the most precise and self-considered, is touched 
 by a freakishness which adds a decorative charm, 
 welcome because unexpected or discordant. We 
 see it in his disciples and in others, in their escape, 
 each in his own way, from the oppression of fact ; 
 as in one in bookish affection for the mystery- 
 lady of lona ; in another not less by his brisk 
 piling up of an effect and the daring freshness of his 
 colours than by his whimsical defiance. We know 
 these traits and are perhaps less surprised at finding 
 them in contemporaries than in their literary 
 ancestors. No one will claim that these are 
 
 1 " One eye on Death and one full fixed on Heaven 
 
 Become a mortal and immortal man." (Bk. v., 11. 838-9.)
 
 A MODERN EPILOGUE 281 
 
 exclusively Scottish, either in the past or now, but 
 their persistency gives one the right to think of 
 them as characteristic of northern work. 
 
 Some of the defects, arising in part from the 
 practice of these moods or from the see-saw 
 between them, still remain, though not without 
 compensations in the changed conditions of litera- 
 ture. The love of detail never made for construc- 
 tive strength. Scott's strong sense of movement 
 did not always save him, at least from cheap 
 criticism on that score. Stevenson found it hard 
 to sustain a plot, and good judges have been will- 
 ing to agree. Sir James Barrie has confessed his 
 inability to plan a long tale. Lang, who, with all 
 his vagrancy, had the classicist's sense of propor- 
 tion, failed notoriously, and not only when he was a 
 venturer in romance. Their zest of observation 
 is indulged at the expense of the narrative momen- 
 tum or the pictorial unity. But it helps them in 
 the narrower ranges. They are masters in episode, 
 and are accepted by their least generous admirers as 
 guides in the finesse of the short tale and other 
 Tanagra-work of present liking. This too has its 
 historical interest, for we have seen how the older 
 literature eschewed the epical and all the longer 
 flights. And it would not be hard to show that 
 the voluminousness of Scott and of others in prose 
 does not controvert this critical generality. 
 
 There is, too, a narrowing-down in subject, with,
 
 282 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 again, a corresponding intensiveness within the 
 areas selected. We do not find, for example, much 
 love-making. This is an old northern reticence. 
 We are not forgetting Burns and others of good, if 
 lesser, repute. They are lyrical, and immediate. 
 But the Scot generally declines, like his " douce 
 gudeman," to give his public confidences on his 
 own wooing or on other people's. At all events, 
 he refuses to be analytical, and but rarely tries to 
 tell a love-story with any elaboration. Again, 
 perhaps for connected reasons, he is shy of drawing 
 female character. For though in Scott's gallery 
 we have the masterpieces of Rebecca of York and 
 Jeanie Deans in one kind and Meg Merrilies and 
 Madge Wildfire in another, and in Stevenson's 
 Catriona and Barbara Grant and perhaps a third, 
 we feel that Scott's women characters are, if we 
 take his efforts together, neither 'star' roles nor 
 indispensable to the setting, and that Stevenson's, 
 even outside Prince Oo, are a sort of synthetic 
 femininity, intelligently but rather bookishly con- 
 trived. If Sir James Barrie knows what every 
 woman knows, or what some men think about 
 them, he is rather unwilling to share his secrets. 
 This reserve is not peculiar to the Anglo-Scottish 
 brethren in these latter days, for there has been a 
 general reaction against the old sentimental obses- 
 sion ; but the Northerners are more emphatic and 
 united in silence. It may be that the purrings and
 
 A MODERN EPILOGUE 283 
 
 cooings at Drumtochty and Aldersyde are to be 
 explained as a protest against this coldness, just as 
 the domesticities, as practised in these Arcadian 
 spots, have been made much of, to the end that 
 modern Scottish art may be redeemed from its 
 unwholesome delight in pirates and venturesome 
 * bad men.* 
 
 When we speak of this enthusiasm for the 
 picaresque and mysterious which so disturbs the 
 Kailyard we touch on yet another matter of eld. 
 For in this too there is no discovery or rediscovery. 
 Scott encouraged it. He loved nothing so much as 
 to trace the fortunes of masterful barons, * reivers,' 
 and the lesser disreputables, in whom an ordinary 
 " shirra " would have had no more than a profes- 
 sional and passing concern. Deacon Brodie and 
 his cronies enjoy their place as by long use estab- 
 lished, and mysteries of Pavilions on the Links 
 and Suicide Clubs and problems of Thrawn Janets 
 compass, familiarly and easily, the whole range of 
 Stevenson's contemporaries. The Barrie pirates and 
 scallywags move in that new-old whimsical world 
 where the real jostles the unreal in entertaining 
 perplexity. The next generation will decide 
 whether this revel in diablerie, in all its kinds, has 
 been overdone, and may turn, though it gives no 
 sign at present, to other motives which need not 
 be tediously domestic or sentimental. But the 
 critic who knows his business will make no mistake
 
 284 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 about the traditional excuse for the excess, and he 
 may be willing to allow that the indulgence has 
 had a very definite effect on English literature, 
 even outside the novel. He is not likely to trace 
 the fashion back to Otrantine or Udolphine 
 patterns, to the forgetting of this northern 
 encouragement. 
 
 Nor will the critic be likely to neglect that other 
 apparently incongruous aspect of so much of this 
 pirate and swashbuckler romance, that it is written 
 for readers who must not be old, or at least as 
 elderly as the Cambridge dons whom Mrs. Rad- 
 eliffe "kept out of bed o> nights." She, good 
 lady, had no mission to very young people. 
 Nobody then had, except certain bores of the 
 school-marm sort who wrote dialogues on the kings 
 of England and tales of priggishly good boys and 
 girls. We do not realize and here the * we > 
 includes both the schoolboy and his middle-aged 
 parents how new were such things as Treasure 
 Island and the Child's Garden of Verses^ or Peter 
 Pan and Tommy and Grizel, or the yearly gift of 
 a Fairy Book of the honest fairy kind ; how they 
 differ from all the older stuff, not only because 
 they have atmosphere and real pirates and the heart 
 of true adventure, in which even old boys can 
 delight, but because they are written from the point 
 of view of the young reader. The writers have 
 thrown aside the senior's condescension, and are
 
 A MODERN EPILOGUE 285 
 
 young and companionable, no matter what deeper 
 philosophy they may be suspected of conveying 
 for wiser folk and some undergraduates of Balliol. 
 There need be no disrespect to older favourite*, 
 even to the weaklier descendants of the Pathfinder 
 stock ; or any compulsion to hold ihat the chil- 
 dren of those who in youth swore by the Ulster 
 Scot Mayne Reid or the Scot R. M. Ballantyne 
 are better judges or more fastidious in their choice. 
 Yet, the changed attitude since Stevenson's day, the 
 co-operation of higher literary talent l in providing 
 the first lessons in romance, could not be without 
 effect. 
 
 Indeed, it is in the consideration of this effect, not 
 merely in the entertaining of the young person with 
 better workmanship, and, perhaps, in the awaken- 
 ing of a sense that it is better, but in its bearing 
 in a more general way on the evidence of higher 
 literary quality, that we find some hint of tradi- 
 tional character in the writers of to-day. The 
 eighteenth century Scot was as willing to admit 
 as the Englishman was ready to point out that 
 he was handicapped by the disabilities of the 
 foreigner' in his efforts to achieve an English 
 style. Whether he succeeded or foiled, he never 
 lost the craftsman-conscience, and the reader, even 
 
 1 Mrs. Leicester's School is perhaps the only effort, in the days 
 when England rejoiced in the Story of the Robins and Sand ford 
 and Merton, in which higher literary talent engaged itself with 
 what success no admirer of Lamb need be asked to say.
 
 286 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 now, inclines to appraise him for his competence 
 in the methods of the workshop as much as for 
 anything else. He wrote well or badly ; and, 
 whatever his subject might be, he confessed his 
 solicitude to be judged by his manner. This has 
 not been without advantage, notwithstanding the 
 sacrifices made by insisting on an excessive and 
 tiresome self-criticism. It was all to the good 
 that both writers and readers should be reminded 
 that style had its claims with the other graces of 
 literature, though neither above them nor dis- 
 joined from them ; that even in a tale there might 
 be something more to enjoy than the mere story. 
 The Scot had never overlooked this, even in the 
 romantic turmoil of the early nineteenth century, 
 though Sir Walter at times seemed to hint to his 
 public that they might well be indifferent to literary 
 finesse, as a thing of minor importance when he 
 could give so much else of the best. Yet even he 
 could not weaken the old habit or stifle his own 
 conscience, however much he chose to protest, and 
 minors plodded on, showing, more than they 
 imagined, how their care for form emphasized their 
 lack of other literary virtues. But we draw a dis- 
 tinction when we come to Stevenson and the 
 followers who do him and themselves most credit, 
 for, whatever may be said of him by old-fashioned 
 people, it is admitted that he wins his way not 
 more by the gripping power of his narrative than
 
 A MODERN EPILOGUE 287 
 
 by the manner of his telling. It has been said, by 
 no means extravagantly, that " nobody (unless we 
 go back to Sterne) till Meredith, and after him 
 hardly anybody in modern times till Stevenson, had 
 obviously made his manner of writing an object, 
 almost apart from the tale he had to tell." It 
 may be that it is the essayist rather than the 
 romancer who declares that he played the " sedulous 
 ape " to Sir Thomas Browne and so many models, 
 who speaks so seriously of " books which have in- 
 fluenced " him, who studies vocabulary and phrase 
 and makes confession in an Art of Writing ; and 
 it may be, on the other hand, that the novelist, 
 forgetting his Prince Otto, sometimes grows tired of 
 this very discipline and prefers the stone in the 
 rough to the selected and polished brilliant. It is, 
 as it must always be, and should be, a matter of 
 degree that what is good for Familiar Studies is 
 prima fade not so good for Weir of Hermiston. 
 But the point is that even in his most romantic 
 moments the discipline is there ; and, not less 
 important, that he showed his contemporaries that 
 literary quality need not be a pedant's interruption 
 to romantic action, and that he taught a larger body 
 of readers to look for it and how to enjoy it. If 
 it savour of paradox to say that this "most 
 generous " author is also, in the words of Henley's 
 appreciation, " sternly critical " just as he has " a 
 deal of Ariel" and "something of the Shorter-
 
 288 SCOTTISH LITERATURE 
 
 Catechist," we must be content to say that Steven- 
 son was a paradox. And, further, that his is the 
 paradox of the Scot. The Northerner may still, 
 and to the end of time, show "an uncontented 
 care to write better than he can," and may con- 
 tinue, with varying success, the old struggle to 
 obliterate the narrow differences between his and 
 the Englishman's use of the common speech. Yet, 
 though the weighing of words and the careful 
 obedience to Stevensonian doctrine and practice 
 are sometimes too obvious, and the scaffolding 
 confuses the general effect, the work and the lesson 
 are good. Had the work been less good, we 
 should still have reason to thank these craftsmen 
 for reminding us of some things which are likely to 
 be forgotten in the rough-and-tumble of modern 
 art.
 
 . INDEX 
 
 Adam, John and James, 195. 
 Addison, J., 49, 50, 52, 86, 87, 
 
 118, 158, 178, 205, 212, 
 
 233- 
 
 Adolphus, J. L., 266, 268. 
 Ainsworth, Harrison, 223. 
 Akenside, Mark, 167. 
 Alexander, William, Earl of 
 
 Stirling, 81, 82, 99, 107, 1 15. 
 Alison, Archibald, 199, 201, 
 
 234- 
 
 Allan, Sir William, 198. 
 Ancram, Lord (Robert Kerr), 
 
 81. 
 
 Aristotle, ii2, 204. 
 Arnold, Matthew, 19, 27, 29, 
 
 33. 42, 44- 
 AsloanMS., 178. 
 Auld Lang Syne, 237-238, 241. 
 Aytoun, Edmondstoune, 191. 
 Robert, 81. 
 
 Baillie, Robert, 83. 
 
 Ballads, 18, 39, 66, 104, 161, 
 
 177-185. 
 
 Ballantyne, R. M., 285. 
 Balzac, H. de, 252, 269. 
 Bannatyne Club, 57. 
 
 MS., 178. 
 
 Bannerman, Dr., 180. 
 Barbour, John, 15, 59, 75, 79, 
 
 103, 140, 236. 
 Barclay, John, 95. 
 Barnes, William, 152. 
 
 Barrie, Sir James, 39-40, 151, 
 
 272, 278-282 passim. 
 Barry, Mrs., 119. 
 Bassandyne Bible, 84. 
 Bayle's Dictionary, 160. 
 Beattie, James, 86, 199. 
 Bellenden, John, 92, 120, 122. 
 Blacklock, Dr., 211. 
 Blackwood's Magazine, 190, 
 
 192, 199, 207, 220 et stq. 
 William, 200. 
 Blaeu's Atlas, 160. 
 Blair, Hugh, 171, 175, 194, 201, 
 
 210. 
 
 Boece, Hector, 94, 159. 
 Boswell, Alexander, Lord 
 
 Auchinleck, 195. 
 James, 195, 208. 
 Boyd, Zachary, 85. 
 Brathwaitc, R.,-8i. 
 Braxfield, Lord, 190. 
 Bridges, Mr. Robert, 65. 
 Brown, G. D., 277. 
 Thomas, 198, 206. 
 Browne, Sir Thomas, 4. 287. 
 Buchan, Peter, 183. 
 Buchanan, George, 94, 108, 
 
 114, 122, 129, 157. 
 Buke of the Howtat, 17. 
 Bunbury, H. W., 202. 
 BQrger, G. A., 184. 
 Burne, Nicol. 122. 
 Burnett, James. Lord Mon- 
 boddo, 195, 212. 
 
 S.L. 
 
 289
 
 290 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Burns, Robert, 3, 9, 16, 22, 26, 
 27, 32, 33. 34. 43. 44. 45, 
 46, 5, 59, 60, 67, 69, 78, 
 90, 103, 104, 109, no, 
 128-129, 131, 132, 133-135, 
 136, 140, 141, 144, 145, 
 146 et seq., 161, 180, 182, 
 183, 190, 198, 200, 201-3, 
 206, 213, 225-247, 274, 
 282. 
 
 Burton, J. Hill, 62. 
 
 Bute, Lord (1713-1792), 159. 
 
 Byron, Lord, 21-22, 201, 218, 
 
 253- 
 Bysset, Abacuck, 81, 122. 
 
 Cadiou's Portuus, 121. 
 Calderwood, David, 83, 108. 
 Campbell, Alex., 58. 
 George, 199. 
 Thomas, 34, 199. 
 Capell, Edward, 205. 
 Carlyle, Alexander (' Jupiter '), 
 
 189, 193, 194. 
 Thomas, 13, 223, 231-232, 
 
 268, 270. 
 
 Caxton, William, 13, 120, 122. 
 Celtic influence, 19, 27 et seq., 
 
 100-101. 
 Cervantes, 7. 
 Chalmers, George, 200. 
 
 Dr. Thomas, 190. 
 Chambers, Robert, 183, 200. 
 Charles d'Orleans, 98. 
 Chateaubriand, F. R. de, 176. 
 Chaucer and his influence, 7, 
 
 10, 13, 77 et seq., 91, 97, 
 
 no, 119, 121, 131, 141, 
 
 152, 242. 
 Ch6nier, A., 161. 
 Christis Kirk on the Green, g, 
 
 16, 60, 90, 95, 236 ; 54. 
 Gibber, C., 234. 
 Cleland, William, 101. 
 Clubs, Edinburgh, 191 et seq. 
 Cockburn, Henry, 196, 197. 
 Mrs., 118. 
 
 Coleridge, S. T., 37, 222, 223, 
 
 259- 
 
 Colkelbie's Sow, 17, 49. 
 Collier, Jeremy, 109. 
 Complaynt of Scotlande, 9, 48, 
 
 59, 92, 93, 98, 120, 122. 
 Congreve, W., 234. 
 Constable, Archibald, publisher, 
 
 200, 211, 219, 221. 
 Corehouse, Lord, 192. 
 Cowper, John, 54. 
 
 William, 167, 244. 
 Crabbe, G., 244. 
 Craft of Deyng, 121. 
 Crichton, the Admirable, 95. 
 Crichton, The Admirable, 280. 
 Criticism, 207 et seq., 217 et 
 
 seq., 246. 
 
 Crombie, Benjamin, 190. 
 Cromek, R. H., 234. 
 Cullen, William, 195. 
 Cumberland, Richard, 213. 
 Cunningham, Allan, 183. 
 Peter, 183. 
 
 Dairy mple, Sir David, 181. 
 Dalyell, J. Graham, 182, 200. 
 Daniel, Samuel, 82. 
 Davidson, John, 182. 
 
 John, 280. 
 Davies, John, 54. 
 Defoe, Daniel, 7, 86. 
 De Latocnaye, 189. 
 Delices, 160. 
 Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum, 95, 
 
 156. 
 
 Dempster, Thomas, 95. 
 Dennis, John, 217. 
 DeQuincey, T.,5, 154, 218, 221. 
 Desportes, P., 99. 
 De Stael, Madame, 170. 
 De Tyard, Pontus, 99. 
 Dialect, 127-129, 130-154, 242. 
 Dorset, Lord, 178. 
 Douglas, Gavin, n et seq., 16, 
 
 17, 22, 66, 78, 92, 100, 168. 
 Drama, 105-119.
 
 INDEX 
 
 291 
 
 Drayton, M., 82, 115. 
 Drummond, William, 49, 66, 
 
 81, 82, 96, 99, 115, 126. 
 Dryden, John, 158. 204, 234. 
 Du Bartas, 99. 
 Du Bellay, 99. 
 Dumas, A., 269. 
 Dunbar, William, 10, n, 13-15, 
 
 26, 54, 66, 90, 96, 99, 107, 
 
 *73. 237- 
 
 Dunlop, Mrs., 232, 247. 
 D'Urfey, T., 179. 
 
 Edgeworth, Miss, 274. 
 Edinburgh, 57, 139, 160, 166, 
 
 171, 186 et seq., 205 el seq., 
 
 228, 258, 276. 
 Edinburgh Miscellany, 166. 
 
 Review. See Reviews. 
 Elphinston, James, 86. 
 Encyclopaedias, The, 224. 
 Encyclopidie, The, 158-9. 
 English influences, 77-91 : use 
 
 of English models, 117- 
 
 119. 130-131, 212, 268-273, 
 
 285 et seq. 
 ' Inglis,' 73, 74. 
 Epic, 103-105. 
 Erasmus, 160. 
 Ersch, 75. 
 ' Erscherie," 32. 
 Evans, Thomas, 182. 
 
 Feast of Bricriu, 30. 
 Ferguson, Adam, 194, 202, 228. 
 
 Sir Adam, 251. 
 Fergusson, Robert, 9, 60, 137, 
 
 180, 236, 237, 245. 
 Fielding, H., 7. 
 Fingal. See Macpherson. 
 Finlay, John, 182. 
 Fordun, John, 94. 
 France, M. Anatole, 184. 
 Francisque-Michel. See Michel, 
 
 F.-. 
 
 French influence, 3, 56, 74, 92, 
 96-100, 115, 176, 177. 
 
 Oalt, John, 127, 154, 223. 
 Garrick, David, 119. 
 Gau's Rickt Vay, 121. 
 Gay, John, 85. 
 Gerard, Alexander, 199. 
 Germany, 170, 176, 184. aaa, 
 
 223. 
 
 Gessner, S., 161. 
 Ghost of Lord Fergus, 25. 
 Gibbon, Edward, 194. 
 Gifford, William, 219, 221. 
 Glasgow, 144. 
 Godwin. W., 262. 
 Goethe. 52, 170, 176, 177, 235, 
 
 270. 
 
 Goldsmith, O., 270. 
 Gordon, Duchess of, 228. 
 
 of Gight (Gicht), 123-124. 
 Gosson, S., 109. 
 Graham, Simion, 81. 
 Gray, James, 229. * 
 
 Thomas, 170, 205, 209. 
 Gregory, James, 198. 
 Grose. Captain, 56, 135. 256. 
 Grub Street, 219. 
 Guarini, B., 99. 
 Gude and Goalie BaUatis, 84, 
 
 182. 
 Gyre Carling, 24. 
 
 Hailes, Lord, 57, 195. 
 Hamilton, Archibald. 209. 
 John, 83. 
 
 of Gilbertneld. 236. 
 Hampole (R. Rolle of). 75. 
 Hannay, Patrick, 81. 
 Hardy knute, go, 178. 
 Haye, Gilbert, 121. 
 Hazh'tt, W., 34, 221, 230, 250, 
 
 256, 270, 274. 
 Henderson, Mr. T. F., 107. 
 Henley, W. E., 43, 137, 239. 
 
 287. 
 Henry the Minstrel, 59, 74, 
 
 103, 140. 
 Henryson, Robert, n. 13. 14. 
 
 15, 17, 60,66,98.
 
 292 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Herd, David, 27, 60, 182. 
 Herder, J. G., 170. 
 Historical habit, The, 55-64, 
 112-113, 131-132, 224, 
 
 255-257- 
 
 Novel, 261 et seq. 
 Hogg, James, 22, 37-39, 54, 64, 
 
 139, 151, 190, 199, 221, 
 
 223. 
 Home, Henry, Lord Kames, 
 
 195- 
 John, 85, 107, 117, 118, 194, 
 
 209. 
 
 Homer, 170. 
 Hood, Thomas, 221. 
 Hook, Theodore, 223. 
 Horace, 115, 205. 
 ' Horace in Homespun,' 50, 
 
 129. 
 
 Horner, Francis, 200. 
 -^Horrobow, Niels, 105, 106. 
 Hugo, Victor, 3. 
 Hume, Alexander (gramma- 
 rian), 81. 
 (author of Day Estivall), 
 
 81. 
 
 David, 86, 87, 97, 158, 188, 
 19. 195. 199. 201, 206, 
 
 207, 211, 224, 276. 
 
 Hunt, Leigh, 223, 250. 
 
 ' Inglis ', 73, 74. 
 
 Inglis, Ralston, 107. 
 
 Ireland and Irish, 27, 32, 51, 
 
 72, 149, 156, 158, 171, 173, 
 
 278. 
 
 Irving, David, 107. 
 Washington, 258. 
 Italy and Italian influence, 
 
 55-56, 99, 115, 116, 170, 
 
 205. 
 
 James I., 54, 79, 99. 
 
 VI., 99, 122. 
 
 Jamieson, John, lexicographer, 
 139. 
 
 Robert, 182. 
 
 Jeffrey, Francis, 21, 188, 190, 
 191, 211, 214 et seq., 224, 
 227, 229, 246. 
 
 Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuh, 
 
 145- 
 John of Ireland, 91, 120, 
 
 121. 
 
 Johnson, James, 182. 
 
 Samuel, 93, 158, 163, 165, 
 166, 170, 171, 172, 181, 
 195. 201, 202, 204, 208, 
 210, 255-256. 
 
 Johnston, Arthur, 95. 
 
 Jones, Inigo, 115. 
 
 Jonson, Ben, 81, no, 112, 114, 
 
 "5- 
 
 Jovius, Paulus, 160. 
 
 ' Kailyard,' The, 154, 277-278. 
 Kames. See Home, Henry. 
 Kay, John, 189, 190. 
 Keats, John, 46, 217. 
 Keene, Charles, 35. 
 Kilhwch and Olwen, 29. 
 King Berdok, 24, 54. 
 Kinloch, G. R., 183. 
 Kirkton's History, 123. 
 Kleist, E. C. v., 169. 
 Knox, John, 83, 108, 122, 123, 
 
 125- 
 Kyllour, 108. 
 
 Laing, David, 183. 
 Lamartine, A.-M.-L. de, 177. 
 Lamb, Charles. 36, 221, 278, 
 
 285. 
 Lang, Andrew, 39-40, 278-282 
 
 passim, 284. 
 Langhorne, John, 202. 
 Lark, The, 234. 
 Latin, 91-96, 114, 125, 156. 
 Lauder, Sir T. Dick, 200. 
 
 William, 95. 
 Leighton, R., 83. 
 Lemaltre, Jules, 169. 
 Leslie, Bishop John, 122. 
 Lewis. Matthew Gregory, 199.
 
 INDEX 
 
 293 
 
 Leyden, John, 190, 199, 211. 
 
 Lichtottnis Dreme, 22, 25, 33. 
 
 Lismore, Book of the Dean of, 
 28, 171. 
 
 Lithgow, W., 81. 
 
 Livingston, William, 106. 
 
 Locke, J., 233. 
 
 Lockhart, J. G., 187, 189, 199, 
 221, 223, 224, 246, 250, 
 256. 259, 269 ; Life of 
 Scott, 8, 9, 64, 113, 197, 
 201, 202, 250 et seq. ; Life 
 of Burns, 229. 
 
 London, 187, 246, 276. 
 
 Lucretius, 162. 
 
 Ludi Apollinares, 95. 
 
 Lyndsay, Sir David, 10, 24, 59, 
 66. 84, 93, 107, 109, no, 
 1 20, 140. 
 
 Lyric, 103. 
 
 Mabinogion, 29, 32. 
 
 M'Crie, Thomas, 222. 
 
 Macdonald, George, 279. 
 
 MacGowan, John, 181. 
 
 Mackenzie, Henry, 139, 190, 
 199, 212, 222, 227, 228. 
 
 Mackintosh, Sir J., 200. 
 
 Macklin, Charles, 150. 
 
 MacLaurin, Colin, 191. 
 
 Macmillans, The, publishers, 
 200. 
 
 MacNeill, Hector, 200. 
 
 Macpherson, James, 157, 161, 
 169 et seq., 179, 183, 184, 
 194, 202, 228, 243, 244, 
 246, 248. See also Ossi- 
 anic literature. 
 
 Maginn, William, 221, 223. 
 
 Maidment, James, 107, 183. 
 
 Maitland Club, 57. 
 MS., 178. 
 
 Major, John, 94, 156. 
 
 Mallet (Malloch), David, 68, 
 
 85, "7- 
 
 Malory, Sir Thomas, 120. 
 Marino, G., 99. 
 
 Mary, Queen of Scots, 186, 194. 
 Meadowbank. Lord, 253. 
 Melville, Andrew, 95. 
 
 James, 123. 
 Meredith, G., 287. 
 Michel, Francisque-. 96, 98. 
 Middle Scots, 4, 10 et seq., 24, 
 
 66. 76. 
 Millar, Mr. J. Hepburn, 58. 
 
 107. 
 Milton, John, 95, 104, 162, 205, 
 
 270. 
 
 Minto, William, 64. 
 Mitchell, Hugh, 86. 
 Monboddo. See Burnett, 
 
 James. 
 Monk and the Miller's Wife. 
 
 The, 95- 
 
 Monros, The, 195. 
 Montgomerie, Alex., 16, 54. 
 Montrose, Earl of, 81. 82. 
 Moore, Dr. John, 232, 233, 
 
 234- 
 
 Thomas, 154. 
 Motherwell, William, 183. 
 Munro, Neil, 151. 
 Murdoch, John, 228. 
 Mure, Sir William, of Rowallan, 
 
 8 1. 85. 
 Murray, Sir David, of Gorthy, 
 
 81. 
 
 Sir James. 32. 
 John, 200, 222, 223. 
 Muses' Welcome, The, 95. 
 Myll's Spectakle of Luf, 121. 
 
 Napier, Macvey, 200. 
 Nasmyth, Alexander, 198. 
 Nature, attitude to, 65-70 j 
 
 in eighteenth century, 161- 
 
 169. 
 
 Nichol, John, 44. 
 Nicol. William. 128. 
 Nisard, Desire 1 , 2. 
 Nisbet's New Testament. 84, 
 
 121. 
 
 Noctes Ambrosiana. 64, 192.
 
 294 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Occleve, 93, 242. 
 Origines Parochiales, 57. 
 Ossianic literature, 28, 101, 
 
 169-177, 207. See Mac- 
 
 pherson, James. 
 Overbury, SirT., 81. 
 
 Paris, 97, 100, 189. 
 Passerat, Jean, 99. 
 Pater, Walter, 40, 63. 
 Peblis to the Play 16, 236. 
 Pecocke, Reginald, 120, 121, 
 
 122. 
 
 Pennecuik, Alexander, 58, 59. 
 Pepys, Samuel, 178. 
 Percy, Thomas, 67, 171, 180, 
 
 181, 182, 183, 195. 
 Society, 183. 
 Perfervids, The, 91, 149, 153, 
 
 277-278. 
 Philosophy, influence of, 196 
 
 etseq., 206, 215. 
 Philotus, 16, 107, 115. 
 Pinkerton, John, 57, 117, 118, 
 
 140, 182, 200. 
 Piper of Kilbarchan, The, 236, 
 
 237- 
 
 Pitcairne, Dr. Archibald, 94. 
 Pitscottie (Robert Lindsay of), 
 
 9- 
 
 Pitt, William, 8, 260. 
 P16iade, The, 99, 100. 
 Poems in the Buchan Dialect, 
 
 MS- 
 Politics, influence of, 214- 
 
 215- 
 
 Pollok, Robert, 103, 104. 
 Pope, Alexander, 21, 50, 87, 
 
 118, 163, 201, 205, 217, 
 
 254- 
 
 Praefervidum ingenium Scot- 
 ovum, 1 60. 
 
 Prevost, A., 161. 
 
 Prior, Matthew, 179, 234. 
 
 Privy Council, Acts and 
 Decreets of the, 123- 
 125- 
 
 Prose, 119-129, 150-151, 207 
 
 et seq., 285 et seq. 
 Provincialism, 42 et seq. 
 Prynne, W., 109. 
 
 Rabelais, 52. 
 
 Radcliffe, Mrs., 63, 252, 262, 
 284. 
 
 Raeburn, Sir Henry, 190, 198. 
 
 Ramsay, Allan, 5, 9, 49, 51, 54, 
 57, 60, 69, 89, 90, loo, 104, 
 134, 144, 161, 179, 180, 
 205, 233, 236, 237, 238, 
 
 245. 
 
 painter, 194, 195. 
 
 Andrew, 95. 
 
 John, of Ochtertyre, 189. 
 
 191. 
 
 Rauf Coil $ear, 49. 
 Red Etin, '24, 59. 
 Reeve, Clara, 262. 
 Reid, Mayne, 285. 
 
 Thomas, 188, 197, 207. 
 Renan, E., 19, 27. 
 RespuUicae (Elzevir), 160. 
 Reviews and Magazines, The, 
 
 207 et seq. 
 
 Rhetor iqueurs, The, 93. 
 Riccaltoun, Robert, 68, 166, 
 
 168. 
 
 Ritson, Joseph, 182. 
 Rivet, Andre, 160. 
 Robertson, Patrick, 273. 
 
 William, 87, 158, 188, 194, 
 
 201, 210, 224. 
 Rodin, Auguste, 3, 18. 
 Roland, Madame, 161. 
 Ronsard, Pierre de, 99. 
 Ross, Alexander, 95. 
 Rous, Francis, 85. 
 Rousseau, J. J., 161. 
 Rowlands, Sam., 54. 
 Ruddiman, Walter, 210, 211. 
 Ruskin, John, 43, 142 et seq. 
 Russell, Lord John, 196. 
 Rutherford, S., 83. 
 Ruthwell Cross. The, 75.
 
 INDEX 
 
 295 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, C.-A., 2. 
 
 Saintsbury, Mr. George, 83, 
 153, 216, 261, 264. 287. 
 
 Saintserf, Thomas, 118. 
 
 Schort Memoriale of the Scottis 
 Cornikles, 121. 
 
 Scot, Scots, Scottish, the terms, 
 72-75; 'Braid Scots,' 128, 
 138, 149, 151, 154. 
 
 Scott, Alexander, 236. 
 
 Sir Walter, 6 et seq., 16, 22, 
 27. 37. 59, 62-64, 67, 70, 
 97, 100, 112, 127, 128, 
 133, 135-137. M2. M3. 
 15. i?7. 179, 182, 183, 
 186, 187, 188, 189. 190, 
 I 9i. *93, *97. 198, 200, 
 201-3, 212, 215, 218, 220, 
 221, 227, 228, 246, 248-275, 
 
 276, 280-283 passim, 286. 
 
 Scotticism, the term, 86. 
 
 ' Scottish School of Philos- 
 ophy,' 196, 198. 
 Text Society, 58. 
 
 Scrimger, Henry, 129. 
 
 Sempill, Francis, 237. 
 
 Sempills, The, 81. 
 
 Seward, Anna, 189, 250. 
 
 Shakespeare, 19, 99. ". "5. 
 116, 127, 158, 221, 233, 
 257, 266, 269, 270. 
 
 Sharp, William, 280. 
 
 Sharpe, C. Kirkpatrick, 189, 
 200. 
 
 Shelley, P. B., 217, 243. 
 
 Siddons, Mrs., 119. 
 
 Sidney, Sir Philip, 99. n 5- 
 
 Simond's Journal, 189. 
 
 Sinclair, Sir John, 86. 
 
 Sir John Rowll's Cursing, 27. 
 
 Sir Patrick Spens, 66. 
 
 Sir Tristrem, 236. 
 
 Skelton, John, 13. 
 
 Smellie, William. 189, 192, 211. 
 
 Smith, Adam, 190, 195- 2OO 
 
 210. 
 Sydney, 6, 93, 196. 
 
 Smollett, Tobias, 7, 55. 192. 
 
 201, 209,210, 212,224.274. 
 Societies, Edinburgh. 191 etuq. 
 Southey, R., 220, 223. 
 Spenser, E., 50, 82, 99, 152. 
 Spottiswoode, J., 83. 
 Statistical Accounts, 57. 
 Steele, Richard, 50, 205. 
 Sterne, L., 287. 
 Stevenson, R. L., 18, 39, 61. 
 
 133. 15*. 190, 252. 278- 
 
 288 passim. 
 
 Stewart's Luvars Mane, 90. 
 Stewart, Dugald, 188, 192. 193, 
 
 195. 196. 197, 198, 202, 
 
 232. 
 
 Stnitt's Queen-hoo Hall, 263. 
 Stuart, John (Leith), 82. 
 Dr. Gilbert, 211, 212. 
 Supernatural and Natural, 36 
 
 et seq. 
 
 Swift, J., 20, 5j. 
 Sylvester, J., 99. 
 Sym and his Brudir, 1 7. 
 Symonds, J. Addington, 115. 
 
 Tamlane, 39. 59, 66. 
 Taylor, Isaac (engraver), 172. 
 Temple, H. J. (Lord Palmers- 
 ton), 196. 
 Sir William, 173. 
 Terry, Daniel, 150. 
 Texte, Joseph, 169, 170. 
 Thackeray, W. M., 223. 
 Thomas Rymer, 39. 
 Thomas the Rhymer, 24. 
 Thomson, George, 149, 180, 
 
 238. 
 
 James, 9, 55. 68. 85, 107. 
 117, 118. 157, 161 $t seq., 
 171, 180, 202, 243, 244, 
 246, 248. 
 Thomas, 180. 
 William. 180. 
 Tonson, Jacob, 85. 
 Topham. Edward, 188. 
 Tottel's M iscellany, 178.
 
 296 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Turner, J. M., 7. 
 Tytler, A. Fraser, 193. 
 
 P. Fraser, 62, 222. 
 
 William, 194. 
 Tytlers, the, 189. 
 
 Urquhart, Sir Thomas, 4. 
 Uz, J. P., 169. 
 
 Vertewis of the Mess, 121. 
 Villon, Fran9ois, 99. 
 Virgil, 92, 94, 100, 162. 
 Vision of MacConglinne, 30. 
 Voltaire, 20, 158, 161, 175. 
 Volusene, Florence, 95. 
 
 Wale, Samuel, 172. 
 Wales, 29, 31, 158. 
 Walpole, Horace, 52, 259, 262, 
 263, 284. 
 
 Wardlaw, Lady, 178. 
 Warton, Joseph, 172. 
 
 Thomas, 58, 205. 
 Watson's Choice Collection, 139, 
 
 i?8, 237. 
 
 Wedderburn, Alexander, 209. 
 Whistle Binkie, 50, 129, 142. 
 Wilkie, David, 198. 
 Wilson, John, 190, 191, 199, 
 
 220, 221. 
 
 Winzet, Ninian, 83, 122. 
 Wisdom of Solomon, 121. 
 Wordsworth, William, 88, 141, 
 
 162, 164, 167, 184, 217, 
 
 218, 229, 241. 
 
 Wowing of Jok and Jynny, 1 7. 
 Wyf of Auchtirmuchty, 17, 95. 
 
 Young's Night Thoughts, 280. 
 
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