yet that is all the more reason for insisting on such canons of art as are common to all prose, and for not suffering the specialist to emancipate himself from the laws of literary form. The historian is concerned with pure literature from two points of view, if we are to be saved from the damnable heresy that a history is a book of reference, or an analysis of constitutional documents. He, in the first place, must recognise the obligation of literary art. In the second place, he must be familiar with literature so far as it forms part of the atmosphere of the atmosphere of the age into which he has to throw himself. He need not imitate the old-fashioned historian and give us a detached chapter on literature. His familiarity with the literature of his age may show itself indirectly; it may be, so to speak, latent. Take for example the latest work on English history which aims at the dignity of a classic. It is but seldom that Mr. Gardiner refers to any writer save as a historical authority. Yet there is ever present to his reader a certainty that he has a clear, solid, and intelligent knowledge of the Elizabethans and their immediate successors. If we accept

this view of the duty of a historian, it is easy to fix the place of such a work as Sir Henry Craik's in English historical literature. It is an illustrated comment on all those varied phases of thought which admit of being set forth in prose.

In literary matters, as we have already implied, the principle of the division of labour has a legitimate and an illegitimate application. There is, we think, very little to be said in favour of it, when it deals with subjects where unity of conception and of treatment is essential. The work as a whole suffers for lack of one animating conception and one constructive principle. Each individual contributor is in a measure stunted by the restrictions not necessarily of space, but rather of thought and method, imposed upon him; yet, on the other hand, the increase of material and the demand for more precise and exhaustive treatment, alike in the history of events and the history of thought, gives an ever-increasing importance to the labour of the specialist. Such a collection as the present seems to us to point towards the true solution. The specialist must be something more than a specialist, he must see his own province and relation to others that lie beyond it. His work, so far as it is special, will not be final; it will be subordinate and, in a wide sense of the word, educational. The historian of literature, the historian of man, so far as he deals with those aspects of thought which are revealed in literature, will be more and more dependent on that arrangement and digestion of materials which is being done for him by the critical specialist.

ART.

ART. VIII.-The Homes and Haunts of Sir Walter Scott. By George G. Napier. Glasgow, 1897.

MR.Ndying charm of the personality of Walter Scott. It

R. NAPIER'S delightful volume bears testimony to the

depicts in most attractive fashion scenes. which genius has made classic, and stimulates, if it does not suggest, the effort to people those scenes with some of the real figures from whom the actors were drawn. Scott's works have won him the gratitude of the world, but his countrymen owe him a more immediate and prosaic debt of gratitude. The wand of the magician precipitated the changes, inevitable in course of time, but which otherwise must have been slow and gradual. It was Scott who discovered or revealed the charms of a country, which to the earlier adventurers coming from beyond the border had seemed a sterile, repulsive, and dreary wilderness. He found highlands and borders very much as they were, when Waverley rode into the hamlet of Tully-Veolan, and when Earnscliffe went out stalking the red deer in the wastes that are now waving with golden grain. He cast the spell of his genius over the length of the land, and civilization followed fast in his track. The roads were made or mended through the wild scenery of the shaggy Trossachs and the gloomy grandeur of Glencoe. Thanks to Watt, Macadam the Colossus of Rhodes,' and others, who went hand in hand with him, the beat of paddles was heard on the lonely lochs which had only echoed hitherto to the scream of the eagle or the wail of the wild cat. It became the fashion and the rage to make summer pilgrimages to the scenes of the poems and novels. Each successive production of that facile pen brought an increasing rush, till, in the slang of the Stock Exchange, Scotland was boomed.' Mails and stage coaches accelerated their speed over renovated highways, and such machines as the Queensferry fly, or Mrs. Dod's primitive whiskey, were at once put out of date by the gifted painter of the manners he was destroying. Change houses, like those of Lucky Mac-Leary or Tib Mumps, were at once superseded by flourishing hostelries which might have borne comparison with the posting establishments of Ferrybridge and others on that great north road which Scott so often travelled. The price for horses went up at once, with the ever-growing demand for coachers and post cattle. That was only one of the innumerable ways in which he scattered money over his country. Marmion,' published in the immaturity of his fame, brought prosperity to his own romantic town.' The portraiture of the matter-of-fact Baillie Nicol Jarvie gave the brilliant colours of romance to

the

the bustling Broomielaws, and sent curious strangers to see for themselves the 'weel-jointed mason-work' of St. Mungo's Cathedral, with 'nane o' yere whigmaleeries and curlie-wurlies.' Trade, as a matter of course, followed the tourist. The Clyde was deepened and embanked, far sooner than would otherwise have been the case, to facilitate the passage of steamers to the dark Sound of Mull, and the barren desolation of Loch Corriskin. As he wrote and wrote on, each stroke of the pen set fresh fountains of prosperity flowing. The shopkeepers of the Fairports and Kippletringans did brisker business: the boatmen of the western seas, the highlanders in remote glens, which had seldom been trodden by a stranger's foot, the superabundant population of struggling villages, found new and lucrative sources of emolument. Many an aged man and woman, like Johnnie Bower of Melrose, had reason to bless him, for being installed as guardian of some ruined abbey or castle, which being identified with the historical or fanciful sketches in the novels had sprung of a sudden into world-wide celebrity, and acquired actual value in the eyes of its possessor. The influence of the magician had extended everywhere, from the Solway of 'Redgauntlet' to the Shetlands of 'The Pirate,'-through France and Switzerland to Syria, as over England.

He has done as much for the antiquities and history of Scotland as for its material progress. He made himself the Old Mortality of the neglected memorials of the past. As for the antiquities, we need not dwell upon them. We may not be able actually to identify Tully-Veolan, Tillietudlem or Kennaquhair: in fact, Scott has assured us himself, when denying that Wolf's Craig was the Fast Castle he had only seen from the sea, that he never copied but always conceived. Yet where, out of his pages, shall we find such vivid pictures of the buildings 'biggit by the monks of auld syne,' when the first Alexander was a 'sair saint for the crown'; of the prehistoric relics of heathenism in the sterile northern isles; of the rude but massive baronial architecture, when each noble's hand was against his neighbour; and of the bastioned and battlemented ScottoGallic mansion, still secured in its sombre strength against the raids of caterans or old feudal enemies?

The blaze of light he threw upon Scottish history is even more important and valuable. We venture to say, that before he wrote the romances and Tales of a Grandfather,' intelligent Southrons cared as little about it as we do now about the obscure and sanguinary records of medieval Servians or Bulgarians. We doubt not that Macaulay has depicted with an unusual absence of highflying rhetoric, the indifference even of thought

ful

ful English statesmen to Scottish affairs, when ministers were accomplices in the massacre of Glencoe. The fierce yet chivalrous warfare of the Percy and the Douglas, the bloody fray of the Otterburn, and the hard-contested battle of Neville's Cross, had been commemorated in song and ballad; the memorable fields of Bannockburn and Flodden stood out and were remembered for sufficient reasons. Otherwise the records reveal a monotonously dreary tale of intestine broils and brutal outrages. So in a great measure they were. But it was for Scott to paint a gallery of grand historical portraits, with the firm band and rare intuition of a master. Like those of a Titian or a Velasquez, the portraits live and breathe. They begin with the inevitably dim, though strikingly_effective, sketches of William the Lion and his heir in 'The Talisman.' The Lord of the Isles' gave us the Bruce, with the gallant band of patriots who followed his desperate fortunes in the war of Liberation. There are few nobler pictures in dramatic poetry than that of the royal outlaw in the halls of Ardtornish, standing at bay before bared dirks and half-drawn broadswords, confessing the crime of the hasty murder of the Comyn to the monk, who rose to curse but was constrained to bless. The gentler side of the heroic character is equally realized by that vivid fancy, when Isabel recognises by the description of the unlettered lay-sister, the stranger who has come knocking at the convent door. Then there are the monarchs of the ill-fated line of Stewart, pre-ordained to bring a long train of calamities on their people, and destined to pay the penalty of grievous faults. The weak and well-meaning Robert, ' second of that name,' the Knight of Snowdon, the Scottish Quixote; the James of Flodden, who risked a kingdom for a passing fancy and a royal glove; the hapless Mary in her island prison, reaping in tears the harvest she had sown in folly and perhaps in crime; her pawky'son, the British Solomon, with his sage saws and ludicrous eccentricities, his bonny sparklers' of price, and his bowls of cockaleekie. Then, after a passing glance, in which there is a world of character-revelation, at King Charles the Martyr, we end with the inimitable sketches of Charles the Voluptuous, with his spaniels in the Mall, and of Charles Edward, the high-spirited young chevalier, enthroned for an hour in the halls of Holyrood.

There are the soldiers and the statesmen, most faithfully drawn from familiar acquaintance with the times and their chronicles. These may be said to begin with The Abbot' and 'The Monastery.' There are the Regent Murray and his crafty ally, the politic Morton, the rude Lord Lyndsay and the more polished Ruthven, 'the smoother and deeper traitor.' There

are

are 'the great Marquis' and the other Graham of Claverhouse, for whom Scott owned an unphilosophical and unreasoned partiality, as his portrait, the only one in the room, had the place of honour on the chimney-piece, in the little library in Castle Street. We see Lauderdale, lolling over the Council Board, with his sensual mouth and swollen tongue, when the Hill folk were going through the great tribulation. But indeed there is hardly a historical figure, conspicuous or picturesque, which is not dashed somewhere on to the canvas that stretches through the centuries.

Still more striking from the artistic point of view are the types of classes, for there the realistic imagination found freer scope. The Fair Maid of Perth' was written when the writer's health had utterly broken down; when Cadell and Ballantyne were continually worrying him with protests against the careless 'copy' he sent in when he was depressed with the sense of impending failure and when the delights of brilliantly spontaneous invention had changed to painful drudgery. Yet what can be more impressively dramatic than the personalities grouped round the feeble king? The prodigal Rothsay, with his natural nobility of character, spoiled in the upbringing; the cold-blooded Robin of Albany, regardless of all but criminal ambition: the terrible Black Douglas, whose ride through the streets of Perth was 'followed by men's eyes as they pursue the flight of the eagle through the clouds'; the false, fleeting, perjured, blue-eyed George of March, who held the keys of the East Marches in his strong castle of Dunbar: the boyish tiger-cub who was to rule Strathmore with the absolute power and unrelenting cruelty of a feudal tyrant'; the intriguing Ramsay, as conscienceless as Albany, who, though chronologically he comes after them in the sequence of the novels, was the prototype of Varney, Dalgarno, and Rashleigh Osbaldistone. Or we may take, as companion sketches, the scenes of a later date, when law and centralization had in some measure asserted themselves, when civilization and trade had made a certain progress, but when the feuds of the baronial houses were fierce as ever, and manners had scarcely mended or softened. In the Scotland of the wars of Kingsmen and Queensmen, the Protestant nobles, who would carry matters with a high hand as before, were only curbed by the growing power of the clergy and the influence of the reformed ministers over their fanatical flocks, for, with the liberation of consciences and the revolt against Rome, the democracy has been realizing its strength, and foreign politics must be considered by the Regent and his advisers. We see it all at a glance, in the conversations