preliminary direction. It is usually the latest to be discerned. by the novel consumer, and it is often never discerned by him or her at all. Every intelligent reader with a little experience of life can perceive truth to nature in some degree; but a great reduction must be made for those who can trace in narrative the quality which makes the Apollo and the Aphrodite a charm in marble. Thoughtful readers are continually met with who have no intuition that such an attribute can be claimed by fiction, except in so far as it is included in style.

The indefinite word style may be made to express almost any characteristic of story-telling other than subject and plot, and it is too commonly viewed as being some independent, extraneous virtue or varnish with which the substance of a narrative is artificially overlaid. Style, as far as the word is meant to express something more than literary finish, can only be treatment, and treatment depends upon the mental attitude of the novelist; thus entering into the very substance of a narrative, as into that of any other kind of literature. A writer who is not a mere imitator looks upon the world with his personal eyes, and in his peculiar moods; thence grows up his style, in the full sense of

the term.

"Cui lecta potenter erit res,

Nec facundia deseret hunc, nec lucidus ordo." *

Those who would profit from the study of style should formulate an opinion of what it consists in by the aid of their own educated understanding, their perception of natural fitness, true and high feeling, sincerity, unhampered by considerations of nice collocation and balance of sentences, still less by conventionally accepted examples. They will make the discovery that certain names have, by some accident or other, grown to be regarded as of high, if not of supreme merit in the catalogue of exemplars, which have no essential claims, in this respect, to be rated higher than hundreds of the rank and file of literature who are never mentioned by critic or considered by reader in that connection. An author who has once acquired a reputation for style may write English down to the depths of slovenliness if he choose, without losing his character as a master; and this probably be

* Hor." De Arte Poetica," 40.

cause, as before observed, the quality of style is so vague and inapprehensible as a distinct ingredient that it may always be supposed to be something else than what the reader perceives to be indifferent.

Considerations as to the rank or station in life from which characters are drawn can have but little value in regulating the choice of novels for literary reasons, and the reader may leave thus much to the mood of the moment. I remember reading a lecture on novels by a young and ingenious, though not very profound, critic, some years ago, in which the theory was propounded that novels which depict life in the upper walks of society must, in the nature of things, be better reading than those which exhibit the life of any lower class, for the reason that the subjects of the former represent a higher stage of development than their less fortunate brethren. At the first blush this was a plausible theory; but when practically tested it is found to be based on such a totally erroneous conception of what a novel is, and where it comes from, as not to be worth a moment's consideration. It proceeds from the assumption that a novel is the thing, and not a view of the thing. It forgets that the char acters, however they may differ, express mainly the author, his largeness of heart or otherwise, his culture, his insight, and very little of any other living person, except in such an inferior kind of procedure as might occasionally be applied to dialogue, and would take the narrative out of the category of fiction; ie., verbatim reporting without selective judgment.

But there is another reason, disconnected entirely from methods of construction, why the physical condition of the characters rules nothing of itself one way or the other. All persons who have thoughtfully compared class with class-and the wider their experience the more pronounced their opinion-are convinced that education has as yet but little broken or modified the waves of human impulse on which deeds and words depend. So that in the portraiture of scenes in any way emotional or dramatic the highest province of fiction-the peer and the peasant stand on much the same level; the woman who makes the satin train and the woman who wears it. In the lapse of countless ages, no doubt, improved systems of moral education

will considerably and appreciably elevate even the involuntary instincts of human nature; but at present culture has only affected the surface of those lives with which it has come in contact, binding down the passions of those predisposed to turmoil as by a silken thread only, which the first ebullition suffices to break. With regard to what may be termed the minor key of action and speech-the unemotional, every-day doings of mensocial refinement operates upon character in a way which is oftener than not prejudicial to vigorous portraiture, by making the exteriors of men their screen rather than their index, as with untutored mankind. Contrasts are disguised by the crust of conventionality, picturesqueness obliterated, and a subjective system of description necessitated for the differentiation of character. In the one case the author's word has to be taken as to the nerves and muscles of his figures; in the other they can be seen as in an écorché.

The foregoing are a few imperfect indications how, to the best of my judgment, to discriminate fiction which will be the most desirable reading for the average man or woman of leisure, who does not wish the occupation to be wholly barren of results except in so far as it may administer to the pleasure of the hour. But, as with the horse and the stream in the proverb, no outside power can compel or even help a reader to gain good from such reading unless he has some natural eye for the finer qualities in the best productions of this class. It is unfortunately quite possible to read the most elevating works of imagination in our own or any language, and, by fixing the regard on the wrong sides of the subject, to gather not a grain of wisdom from them, nay, sometimes positive harm. What author has not had his experience of such readers?—the mentally and morally warped ones of both sexes, who will, where practicable, so twist plain and obvious meanings as to see in an honest picture of human nature an attack on religion, morals, or institutions. Truly has it been observed that "the eye sees that which it brings with it the means of seeing."

THOMAS HARDY.

SCOTLAND TO-DAY.

THE character and position of the Scotland of to-day as a constituent member of the complex body called the British Empire have been determined by three forces: by climate and geographical position, by political history, and by successful struggles for religious independence. To the soil, not rich and loamy like that of England, but in great part rough and intractable, and to the sky oftener cloudy than bright, and seldom admitting the possibility of a sun-stroke, the Scot owes that capacity for hard work and patient endurance, that wiry texture and weather-fronting aspect, which from the earliest times has distinguished him from what Shakespeare three hundred years ago called the "English Epicures be-south the Tweed." And if his climate rendered him more hardy than his southern neighbors, his geographical situation and his double cincture of the South and the North Highlands made his mountain home more difficult of access, and less open to violence from the ambitious. Plantagenets of the south. It may be laid down as a general deduction from history that all great nations have been cradled in war. What a man fights for he puts a special value on; and the virtues of co-operation and subordination, obedience, discipline, self-denial, self-devotion, and persistent endeavor, which are developed in a struggle for independence, form at once the strong root and the breezy atmosphere which make a nationality possible. We may therefore certainly say, that had it not been for the Grampians, and for Bruce and Wallace, the type of the political animal called Scot would centuries ago have been as extinct as the mastodon or the dodo; and the field of Bannockburn, the proudest of his historical memories, is even at the present day, in far East and far West, a word of power to call up the spirit of patriotism, for which, as Macaulay remarks, the Scot in his multifarious wanderings is everywhere noted. But,

if a struggle for political independence, such as that at Marathon and Salamis for the Greeks, is a powerful element to stamp a strong nationality on a people, the fight for liberty of conscience does the same thing, with a greater force and a more lasting impression in proportion as religious convictions strike deeper roots into the inner soul of a people than political arrangements. Like the ancient Athenians whose piety Sophocles praises, the Scotch have long been known as a religious, seriousthinking, Bible-reading, and church-going people; and there cannot be the slightest doubt, that the great Scottish religious movements of the present hour, free-church and others, are the direct inheritance of the fifty years' struggle of the Covenanters against the organized conspiracy of the Stuarts and their priestly coadjutors, to overturn the national church and strangle in its birth. the soul of personal religious conviction in the people.

Let us now see how the Scotland of to-day bears on its front the most distinctive marks of its past history. Taking religion first as the most powerful factor, it is as true now as it was in the year 1637, that the typical Scot is a Presbyterian, that he is republican or democratic in his church organization, as contrasted with the monarchical priesthood of Rome and the sacerdotal aristocracy of the English church. Episcopacy always asserted itself stoutly in some districts of the country and in some of the oldest historical families; but, taken overhead, the Scot is eminently and characteristically a Presbyterian, as typically as the normal Englishman is an Episcopalian; and though the mitered hierarchy in Edinburgh, with the prestige of a grand new cathedral, has been recently lifting its head high-so high, indeed, as even to make a public boast in the diocese of John Knox, that a church without the three orders of bishop, priest, and deacon is a bastard church, without any lawful commission to dispense the sacraments, the fact still remains that the great body of the people are with heart and head Presbyterians; and so the Episcopalian, however broad he may here and there flaunt his phylacteries, must ever feel himself as much a stranger to the religious life of Scotland as a Presbyterian minister in London is to the Episcopal organization of the land in which he is only a settler or a sojourner. Notwithstanding a tendency vis