anomalous complexity — has reigned as pro- | purpose when we believe ourselves to be in foundly and potently in England, as a stern the right; and we should be so sympathetic and naked simplicity in the northern part as to be able to enter with a huge leap and of the island. As a rule, every question for an eager luxury into all human joys and all an Englishman is complex, every question human sorrows, and even into the convicfor a Scotchman simple. This is the radical tions and ideas the most opposed to our difference between the two nations; this is own. But away with mere phrases and why the English and the Scotch are unable sentimentalities! Words are vapour and to arrive at a mutual understanding. The wind, unless there is a brave and stalwart Englishman thinks the Scotchman hard, soul behind them: and if we eat honey, it narrow, and pedantic: the Scotchman thinks must be as Jonathan the son of Saul ate it, the Englishman cumbrous and slow. Fer- when weary and hungry, after a victory tile breadth is the attribute of the English- won by our valour. The maxim, or provman, athletic force that of the Scotchman. erb, that speech is silver, but that silence is While, except in his business, the English-gold, is meaningless or misleading. If I man does things by halves, and would rather am a true and brave man every one of my on the whole not do them at all, the Scotch- words has the value of a deed, is a deed; man approaches and accomplishes every- and if I am not a true and brave man my thing with an uncompromising thoroughness. words and deeds have both the same value A lover of extremes the Scotchman is not; - that is to say, they have no value at all. a lover of change for change's sake he cer- Were not the words breathed by St. Bertainly is not; but in his vehemence and nard of Clairvaux, by Savonarola of Florearnestness he resolves that what is done ence, by George Fox, by Martin Luther, once shall never need to be done again. The creation of the Free Church five and twenty years ago is an illustrious example.

and by John Wesley, deeds, and very puissant deeds? On the other hand, if there are charlatans in England or elsewhere, are not their deeds and words alike detestable? If the quack is not to be hanged till his deeds convict him, his life will be long in the land.

Striving to speak the truth in love, striving to combine individuality and catholicity, striving to make every one of my words a deed, I would gladly teach the Scotchman to see what is best in the Englishman, and the Englishman what is best in the Scotchman. Englishmen, Scotchmen, are we not all natives of the same island, nothing geographically dividing us but an imaginary line? And before the end of the century, how many other dividing lines, real or imaginary, are destined to disappear!

I would speak the truth in love. I am here to flatter, to decry no one; and slander and adulation are equally odious to my heart. Slander and adulation are companions and rivals. Where there is undeserved eulogy, there is always calumny to balance it. This is an age when there is much crawling on the ground both to bite and to lick, and he who has licked one moment is ready to bite the next. Let us neither lick nor bite, but stand up like men, and speak the truth like men, and bear the truth like men. Now, apart from all sectarianisms and animosities and conflicts, there is a large region where it would be better for us if the truth were more spoken and more heeded. It is the region of highest duty and broadest culture and deepest insight the region of which the German author, Richter, is perhaps the grandest and most beautiful representative. In this region, I, poor, unworthy Scotchman, am neither lawgiver nor king; I can only stand at the gate as a proclaimer of the delights, and an interpreter of the mysteries. What we The Irish have a fervent and fascinating should evermore endeavour to combine is manner, and are, spite of their conspicuous individuality and catholicity. We should infirmities, leniently dealt with accordingly; be so intense as never to be moved from our they win friends speedily, whom they do

Most men and women judge other men and women by manner, not taking the trouble to pierce with discriminating glance into the character. Oh! the charming man, and oh! the charming woman! Doubtless, but the charming man may be a scoundrel or a sneak, and the charming woman may not be exactly a paragon of purity.

not always keep. Though the Englishman caused by a midge when flying. Thirdly, is inclined to be stiff, and formal, and pom- we have the crotchet-monger, who pesters pous, and self-important — yea, even at us till we grow furious with his nostrums times absolutely repulsive yet he is the and noodledoms. Fourthly, we have the frankest of men. This frankness - brutal captious disputant, who will not allow us to enough on occasions - does not hinder the call black black and white white, and to say Englishman from being sometimes a hum- that Peter is not Paul without arraying bug; but it effectually prevents him from proofs and reasonings to show that there is being a hypocrite. When, followed by his a good deal to be said on the other side. footman carrying the Bible and the prayer- From the story-teller, the lecturing-machine, book, an Englishman marches to church in the crotchet-monger, the captious disputant, all the majesty of self-consequence and self- let us pray to be delivered. Now, as storyidolatry as if he were not about to worship tellers, as lecturing-machines, as crotchetGod but God was about to worship him, it mongers, the English may display a genius would be wrong to call him a hypocrite; as consummate for boring as the Scotch; but to call him a humbug is not uncharita- but the Scotch go infinitely beyond the Engble. The humbug begins by imposing on lish as captious disputants, or argle-barglers. himself before imposing on the rest of the I have often fled in terror from my argleworld, and he half believes that he is a man bargling countryman. The odd part of the of honour and integrity. If England is the affair is, that it is principally the young paradise of humbugs it is the purgatory of among the Scotch who, as argle-barglers, hypocrites, while Scotland is the paradise are the most pertinacious, obstinate, and of hypocrites and the purgatory of humbugs. wearisome. There is scarcely a juvenile To be a hypocrite would cost the Englishman Scotchman who travels southwards that more trouble than he likes to expend, and does not think himself born to be an illumiwould be incompatible with his frankness. nator and missionary to mankind, thereby becoming the most intolerable animal in the universe. How he lays down the law! How authoritative he is! How he reproduces with an air of original discovery, the platitudes and paltrinesses he has gathered in the course of his omnivorous reading! How he contests every point and every step! How he converts you and himself into interminable disjunctive conjunctions! How he feeds you on ready reckoners, chopped up small, as if he were nourishing you with lumps of haggis! Years and experience may soften or efface many of his obnoxious peculiarities; but an argle-bargler he has been born and an argle-bargler he dies.

The Scotch have neither the Irishman's fervour and fascination of manner nor the Englishman's frankness and bluntness. They are not at the outset attractive mortals, though they improve upon acquaintance. There is, both in their manner and character, a painful harshness, accompanied by abruptness and angularity.

Then, how disposed the Scotch are to be pedantic, and dogmatic, and oracular, and to dispute every statement, the most trifling and offensive! The tendency to what in Scotland is named argle-bargling makes the very best Scotchmen tiresome companions. In conversation, there should never be any acrimonious debate, nor, indeed, debate of any kind. Conversation should be a sort of shuttlecock, and every one present should be permitted to take part in the game.

There are four classes of bores that should be ejected by the most summary process from good society. We have first Joe Miller's grandson, the story-teller, who never stops till he has exhausted his stock of trash. Secondly, we have the lecturing machine, who discourses for an hour and three quarters on the occult virtues of a toad, or on the exact amount of disturbance to the air

There is, however, a serious and by no means ridiculous side to the matter, and this we must not overlook. The Scotch have caught and appropriated, in an incomparable degree, the spirit of the ancient Hebrews. They are Hebrews more than Presbyterians, Presbyterians more than Calvinists, though it is generally first as Calvinists that they are considered by those who have not studied the subject. To the Scotch, the Mosaic legislation, the Judaical institutions, have become bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh. Prophecy, both in its

Now we must not here behold principal

sense of forthtelling and of foretelling, has the Scotch have ever produced a single gone far down into the Scottish soul. If properly devotional book. They go on. you read the Scots Worthies, The Cloud of singing Sunday after Sunday the Psalms of Witnesses, and similar books, you see that David in metre, and fiercely resist the inthe Scottish Covenanters believed in their troduction of hymns and of instrumental own possession of the power to work mira-music, thus excluding themselves from the cles and to foretell the future. He who is sweetest and sublimest devotional food. not familiar with the history of the Cove- Everything in Scotch worship is so meagre nanters cannot know all the grandeur and and mechanical that, after the most solemn all the tenderness of which the Scottish na-service in a Scottish church, I have often, ture is capable. The Scotch are, in modern in my childhood and youth, rushed to the times, the prophetic people by excellence, seashore or to the hillside, to commune with and what, more than thirty years ago, pro- the Almighty Father. The prevalence of duced such prodigious excitement under the the legal and the logical in the Scottish rename of the Row Heresy, and Irvingism, ligion, the excess of faith, as compared with which sprang from that heresy, sufficiently the poverty of the emotional and the devodemonstrate the proclivity of the Scottish tional, the absence of beautiful rites and mind towards the belief in a perennial su- divine symbols, have a horrible effect on pernaturalism of the Hebraic type. Now, young hearts yearning for God, driving this Hebraism, by which every Scotchman them either into outrageous superstitions or is, consciously or unconsciously, influenced, audacious and blasphemous negations. spontaneously runs into propagandism; and one form of the propagandism is that argle-ly a religious defect. The Scotch have a bargling of which I have spoken, and which more vivid and muscular imagination than I have so strongly condemned. their English brethren, and their being is The Scotch are the most intolerant of na- more steeped in poetry and romance. Liketions; but it does not follow therefrom that wise the Scotch language, in which Burns they are the most bigoted of nations. In- wrote some of his best poems is more fit.tolerance is the hatred of what is believed ted than the English language, to express to be intrinsically evil, and, in a certain both humour and pathos, while it has many sense, we should all be intolerant. Even of those admirable and touching diminutives in its ugliest shapes, intolerance is better in which the English language is so lamenthan indifference and latitudinarianism. tably deficient. What then do the English The man who is earnest about nothing, who possess of which the Scotch are totally deshas no fixed and definite principles, no titute ? Phantasy, which is creative-as strong convictions, must be useless, when distinguished from reproductive — imaginahe is not, as he is almost sure to be, per- tion, and of which Shakespeare had a milnicious. Bigotry, however, is merely a lion times more than any other poet. Next form of selfishness. It is the disposition to to Shakespeare, Shelley was gifted with thrust on others our dogmas and practices, phantasy in a marvellous measure. Spensimply because they are our dogmas and ser had it, and few of the Elizabethan writpractices. When not indifferentists and lat-ers were quite without it. Some English itudinarians, the English are more prone to prose writers, such as Bacon and Jeremy bigotry than the Scotch. Taylor, have been gifted with it as opulentDo not, however, imagine that I regardly as the great English poets. The Gerthe Scotch as a more religious people than mans have phantasy in its most living, and the English. I do not. Faith is by no many-colored, and many-shaped plentitude; means identical with the religious faculty but, spite.of Goethe and his peers, the Gerand feeling. If it were, then the Scotch mans have never been able to give phantasy would be the most religious people that adequate and perfect artistic expression. ever existed, because their whole being is Now phantasy is such a stranger to Scotinwoven with certain dogmas, especially land and the Scotch, that only one Scottish the dogma of predestination. Little emo-writer,- James Hogg, the Ettrick sheption, however, enters into their religion, herd, has manifested a genius enriched little imagination, and no sentiment or pre- and enlivened by phantasy. This man,sentiment of the mysterious in its most aw-a dweller on the lonely hills, would, but for ful aspects. They are God-fearing rather educational and other disadvantages, have than devout. A Scotch sermon is a long come very near to Shakespeare and to Shelargument, often a very able argument, sel- ley. dom a passionate appeal. I am not aware Every Scotchman believes in ghosts, just that, though they have written controver- as every Scotchman believes, and ought, as sial and theological works in abundance, a gallant and patriotic Scotchman, to be

its career must be brief and inglorious. Already are preceptible the angry and stormy stirrings of reaction against our contemporary poetry. What our contemporary poetry lacks is, that which Byron and Scott scattered abroad with a generous hand,— life. Scott put life into the past as no one had ever done before him as no one can ever do after him. And this powerful revival of the past did not lead merely to a transfigurement of fiction, but to an enlargement, an enrichment and ennoblement of all literature, and especially of historical literature.

lieve, that Mary Stuart is a grievously calumniated woman. I have myself seen hundreds of ghosts, and if ever I were to grow cold in my loyalty, my enthusiastic loyalty, to Mary Stuart, I should see hundreds more. But ghosts are not so much productions as reproductions. They come of their own accord, if we are credulous, and have the second sight, which is not a thing to laugh at; and which no man with a Celtic heart, or a Celtic name, would dare to deride. The English cannot get up decent ghosts, because the English, made robust by those two excellent things, beer and beef, wax fat: and a fat ghost would be an absurdity. Bold, fiery, hurrying from land to land, But the Scotchman, being gaunt and bony, and from adventure to adventure, talking hails the ghost as a man and a brother. with the wild waves of the ocean, when not Even Shakespeare's ghost in Hamlet is a fail-wrestling with his own tumultuous thoughts, ure. Compare it with his Ariel, and the kindred offspring of his exuberant phantasy, and you at once perceive that the Hamlet ghost is an impostor. What could Shakespeare, that best of good fellows and greatest of poets-what could Shakespeare, slightly obese, and with a digestion like that of a navvy, and living all his life in a flat country, and drinking potent ale at the George Tavern in Southwark, what could Shakespeare know about ghosts? The ghost steals on us from the mountain, the lake, the mist, the forest, the glen. Indeed, the ghost is the exclusive property of the Celtic race; and it is almost the only property that the race has ever been able to retain, as the Irish in Ireland, and the Scottish Highlanders can testify. How striking it is that three Celtic streamsone from Wales, one from Ireland, and one from the Scottish Highlands, should be continually pouring into England - prosaic region of prosaic men, and yet that it is England that continues to produce foremost poets!

Still, the two poets who, in modern days, reshaped and regenerated English literature, were, the one Scotch, and the other all but Scotch. Scott was a true Caledonian, out and out; and Byron said of himself that he was half a Scot by birth,- in heart, a whole one. It has become fashionable to deprecate, and almost to despise, both Scott and Byron. And this is not astonishing, for our contemporary poetry is sickly and effeminate; delights in preposterous, farfetched conceits, and in extravagant wordpainting. It is manufacture, and not creation, and is as monstrous as the fashions in dress, whereby women good souls-do their best to disfigure the beauty that God has given them. Our contemporary poetry is the outgrowth of that false and foolish and feeble school -the Lake School, and

Byron did not shut himself up in a closet, but, in swift and eager commune with whatsoever was wildest and strangest, and most perilous, studied nature as the book of books. The flame which Byron flashed through English literature burst from a torture that wore out, in early manhood, a strong body and a strong soul. In the mass, English poetry is too reflective; it indulges too much in soliloquizing and sermonizing. Epical, dramatic, or lyrical, let poetry be what it pretends to be. From a poet I seek inspirations; why, then, should he insult me with homilies, and moralize me to death? Because they did not soliloquize, sermonize, moralize, Byron and Scott were, if we are to believe our modern critics, very bad poets indeed.

Neither in literature, nor in anything else, is the Scotchman a fertilizing force, he is a vitalizing force. He is a bringer of life: - he causes life to abound. That he does not, like the Englishman, tabernacle in a composite and anomalous constitution of society, that he cannot deal with the complex, the subtle, the remote; that he has no phantasy — all this, and much else, fit him the better for being an athlete.

-

What multifarious and colossal energy Henry Brougham displayed! With what Titanic grasp he seized obstacles and flung them aside! How he crushed down opponents and opposition! Yet Brougham had no faculty, or combination of faculties, which could be justly designated genius, and his learning, though various and copious, was of the most common-place and superficial kind. Both his speeches and his books drag themselves very drearily and wearily along, and are not likely to be read in coming ages, except as curiosities. But, born and educated in Edinburgh, and made hardy and strong by a bracing breath from the Scottish heather and the Scottish lochs,

how he bounded to labour and to combat, as soldiers of the truth, the bravest of the as a lion to the spoil! Yet it is universally brave. acknowledged that it was from his Scottish mother, not from his English father, that his marvellous appetite and aptitude for action were derived.

It is to the morbid conscientiousness of the Scotch that we must trace their morbid reserve. The Scotch are often sneered at as a cautious or canny people; but I doubt The leading politician at this hour in whether in the mass or in the main they are England, as his friends boast, and as his cautious or canny. In the mass and in the enemies confess, is Gladstone. Let him be main they are eminently uncanny and inworse than his worst foes have denounced cautious. Break down the barrier of him for being, yet who can question the reserve and they are the wildest, most eagerness, the earnestness, the perfervid reckless of men. There are self-seeking enthusiasm, the conquering contagious Scotchmen. Are, however, self-seeking vitality, he throws into politics? Glad- Englishmen so very rare that the Scotch stone's parents were both Scotch-and, should be anathematized for being self-seekScotch in countenance, he is Scotch in mind ing? But the morbid reverse, generated and soul, Scotch even in that lack of self- by morbid conscientiousness, gives to nearly restraint with which he has been so often all Scotchmen the appearance of canninesss reproached. which, when provocation or temptation comes, their actions speedily belie.

There are few more remarkable facts in history than that the party of resistance should have at its head a man of pure Hebrew race; and that the party of progress should have at its head a man of pure Scottish race and the fact is the more remarkable from the stalwart Hebraism that holds sway in Scotland.

Whatever the cause, the Scotchman is seldom at his ease, and can seldom put others at their ease. Not being sure of his ground he, in his awkward way, takes so much trouble to please that he exceedingly displeases, and the self-poised, self-satisfied Englishman, perhaps in every respect his inferior, turns from him with disgust and scorn, as from a lout or a sycophant.

have a notion, or for which they have a desire, is that arising from excitement, an excitement not stopping short of madness; and when the madness arrives, the barbarian howls and rages that was chained at the Reformation. For civilization with us all does not go much farther than the surface, and the men that you can best trust and most love are those whom you know to be as imperfect as yourself. Beware of the prig who thinks himself an angel, and who is afraid of soiling his wings by contact with you.

Gladstone illustrates well an element of the Scottish nature which hinders quite as often as it helps rapid and vigorous moveFrom their morbid conscientiousness, ment. In every Scotchman's breast con- and their morbid reserve, the Scotch cannot science is a tyranny and a tragedy. None partake moderately, or even at all, of calm can know as a Scotchman knows the anguish enjoyment. They are naturally abstemious, of remorse. Bound in the threefold bond- bear privations much better than the Eng age of Hebraism, Presbyterianism, and Cal-lishman, make far less fuss about so-called vinism, the Scotchman feels as if to be comforts; but the only joy of which they happy were to sin. He is tormented by small, often morbid, scrupulosities, which to an Englishman would seem childish. Now conscience is a leading ingredient in virtue, but it is not the divinest ingredient. Virtue, whether of the more heroic or the more humane type, should be a spontaneous flow and glow. It should walk and run and fly with a graceful naturalness, not stopping every moment to consult conscience, the inevitable effect of which must be that moral dyspepsia which is so common in Scotland. There are things more saintly than duties, because they are instinctively performed from a saintly or sanctified spirit. But even as regards duties, it is best that we should do them without a perpetual interview with conscience and consciousness. Therefore, as the Scotch, from their lack of phantasy, are incapable of attaining what is most elevated in genius, what is most profound in religion and philosophy, so they are incapable, from their excessive often-diseased conscientiousness, of possessing and manifesting certain angelic charities and humanities, though they can be,

Hard drinkers the Scotch are; but the drunkenness of the Scotch and the Irish, or of any Celtic or half-Celtic race, is not so brutal or so bestial as the drunkenness of the English. It must, therefore, be dealt with in a far different way. The drunkenness of the Scotch and the Irish is an insane sort of poetry; the drunkenness of the English is the coarsest kind of prose, relieved however by the fact that the English, though a little gruff now and then, are good-humoured in nearly all things, and are seldom quarrelsome in their cups.