romantic and chivalrous spirit of Scotland, will ensure its immortality. Scott was the Homer of his people.

That he was less than Homer was rather the fault of time, and race, and language, than of the man. The Greek, a star of the dawn, burns calmly above Olympus. He was the creator of deities. He gave nations their ancestry. He used a verse whose music was like the innumerable laughter of the sea--a verse which remains unrivalled for sonorous strength and divine variety, after the lapse of all the ages, and the labour of all the languages of men. To the modern critic Homer is a myth; a collector of ballads and weaver of purpurei panni; no one man, indeed, but rather a guild of minstrels, whose ballads became an epic by "fortuitous concurrence of atoms." Walter Scott held this critical hypothesis not incredible only, but irreligious. Whether man, or myth, or multitude, Homer is to the world an idea, simple and single; shining ever clearer as laborious study brings men better to understand his age, his people, his religion.

The world can scarce again have work for a Homer, unless, indeed, there comes the ecdysis which certain philosophers predict, and fresh tribes of mightier mould sweep from its surface mankind and all which men have wrought. Scott had a lower

Ethnic

destiny, yet his, also, was unique. He had to embody and express that inimitable spirit which dwells in the ballads and legends of his race. students may inquire from what far fountain sprang the strange, subtle, imperishable beauty of Scottish minstrelsy. Lovers of poetry enjoy without such investigation. Some, at least, of the minstrels are known to them. The royal Stuart who, four centuries ago, looked down upon his lady-love as she loitered in the "little garden" at Windsor, caught no faint echoes of Chaucer's clear and manly voice. His songs are lost: doubtless their melody was sad enough, as he pined for freedom, and for the land of his birth. Another King James, the gayest and least unfortunate of his doomed race, was also among the minstrels we see him, disguised as a beggar, wooing barefooted lasses in their silken snoods, and fighting his way gallantly through the angry louts who try to punish his amorous daring. His own words have lived upon the lips of the people: and still may be heard the half-gay, half-melancholy burden of his choicest song:

And we'll gang nae mair a roving,

A roving in the nicht;

We'll gang nae mair a roving,

Let the moon shine e'er so bricht.

That dauntless cavalier, in whom De Retz beheld an antique hero, the Marquis of Montrose, tells in one stanza of his song the secret of his life :- :

He either fears his fate too much,

Or his deserts are small,

Who dares not put it to the touch,
To gain or lose it all.

Besides the gay adventure and lofty love of troubadours like these, there is in Scottish ballad a wealth of almost heart-breaking pathos, springing from the depths of woman's nature.

Werena my heart licht I wad dee!

exclaims Lady Grissell Baillie.

The flowers of the forest

Are a' wede awae,

sings Jane Elliot, of Minto. Simple strains, but rising fresh from the divine depths of sorrow. Camparatively modern days have produced some of the most delightful of these songs, yet they breathe the Even in this æra of very spirit of the olden time.

science and of prose, the magic of their music is not lost utterly and if Scott had lived to hear the last sweet song from the lonely banks of Quair Water, he

:

might well believe that it was the voice of a rare old minstrel, not of a learned professor.

And what saw ye there at the bush aboon Traquair?

Or what did ye hear that was worth your heed?

I heard the cushies croon through the gowden afternoon,
And the Quair burn singing doun to the vale o' Tweed.

And birks saw I three or four, wi' grey moss bearded owre,
The last that are left o' the birken shaw,

Whar mony a simmer e'en fond lovers did convene
Thae bonny bonny gloamins that are lang awa'.

By reason of their wanderings from land to land, the song of the Scots is full of tender reference to their "ain countree:" their literature gives greater individuality to city and river, village and burn, than any other, except the Greek, which also belonged to a restless race. As his island-realm of Ithaca haunted Odysseus throughout all his wanderings, se the Scot looks wistfully, even across a thousand leagues of foam, to the burn in which he paddled barefoot, and the shieling where dwelt the lassie who was his first love. Love of home dwells doubtless in the hearts of Englishmen, and we know what effect it had on the Daylesford charity-boy who rose to govern the Empire of the East: but the local feeling enters into Scottish poetry as it never enters into that of

England.

We English are too cosmopolitan to understand this. We are a world-ruling race, and our island is the foundress of empires and republics.

Ubicunque pontus est ibi Britannia est.

Dwellers across the waters of Atlas, or those who listen to "the long wash of Australasian seas," may, perchance, have poetic ideas of Cheapside and Piccadilly; but they have never yet crystallized into poetry, though the Old Town of Edinburgh-ay, even "St. Rollox' stalk" at Glasgow-has found a sacred bard.

Sir Walter Scott embodies this poetry of place, in common with all other poetic tendencies of his nation. He catches the wild voices of Scotland's hills and streams. His verse is cheery and strong, like the hunter's horn upon the mountain-side. He has no false statement, no discontent with things as they are, no pitiful quarrel with Omnipotence, no desire to "shatter himself against the huge, black, cloud-topped, interminable precipice of British Philistinism." Possibly Mr. Matthew Arnold would class him even among Philistines. For he was not ill-pleased to become a country gentleman and a baronet, and did not perceive that the war of liberation of humanity required such hard fighting. And the healthier and