drew forth his slumbering genius. It was his pride to save the verse, or half-verse, or poetical phrase, or lilting chorus. But to tell us that Burns's position among the poets is changed by this fact is a solemn piece of absurdity. Burns's greatest songs are not even affected at all. The editors are obliged to imagine that, in the case of "Mary Morison," he took his measure from a poem published by Allan Ramsay in the Evergreen,' though it is the commonest and most universal of stanzas. "Ye Banks and Braes" has not even so much as this to weigh it down, nor "O' a' the airts the wind can blaw," nor "She's fair and fause," nor many of the finest productions in this volume. And, by the way, where is "My Nannie, O"? We have hunted through the book without being able to find anywhere that delightful song.

"A country lad is my degree,

And few there be that ken me, 0; But what care I how few they be,

I'm welcome aye to Nannie, O."

Has this been proved to be not Burns's?-though he stands there looking at us through the cheerful honest verse

"Our auld guidman delights to view

His sheep and kye thrive bonnie, O; But I'm as blythe that hauds his pleugh,

And has nae care but Nannie, O."

We beg Mr Henley's pardon, we have mistaken. The third volume is confined to the 'Thomson's Museum' and Johnson's 'Scottish Songs' series. "My Nannie, O" is in vol. i. of the Centenary Burns, but printed in exactly the same spirit as the other, showing that the editor's convictions were already formed.

"Perhaps suggested by a poor thing of Ramsay's," says the note:

"While some for pleasure pawn their health "Twixt Lais and the bagnio, I'll save myself and without stealth Kiss and caress my Nanny, O." If there is but one man with a candid mind left in the world we would ask him, "Wherein lies the most distant possibility that this rubbish suggested the fine and free strains of Burns's song?" And he would answer "Fudge!"

like Mr Burchell.

No; it is no doubt Mr Henderson who is guilty. We have not the faintest objection to sacrifice Mr Henderson to the manes of our poet. A poet like Mr Henley never could have believed for a moment that Dodsley's "One Fond Kiss" diminished the originality of Burns's fine song. We would not

believe him did he swear it. The words are not SO uncommon. Many people have uttered and many listened to them, without reference to any ballad. Burns himself must have said them oftener than was good for him, at moments when he was thinking of anything but Dodsley. If he had thought of Dodsley on many occasions instead of occupying himself with more melodious names, it might have been a good thing for him. These references are taken at hazard as the book opened: there are many more just as unconvincing. Where any real instance is given of what it would be absurd to call plagiarism, it is distinctly stated at first hand by Burns himself. Thus, in the song called "The Silver Tassie," "The first half-stanza," says Burns,

"Go fetch to me a pint o' wine,

And fill it in a silver tassie,
That I may drink before I go
A service to my bonnie lassie,'

is old; the rest is mine."

"Nevertheless," adds Mr Henley,

"on 17th December 1788 he wrote to Mrs Dunlop thus: 'Now I am on my hobby-horse, I cannot help inserting two other old stanzas which please me mightily.'

What does Mr Henley mean by that "nevertheless"? We confess that we are absolutely incapable of divining. And we are much surprised, though with the comfortable conviction that it is Mr Henderson again, to find how vehemently the pretty episode of Highland Mary is assailed in this book. To show the very worst side of these commentaries, we quote the passage on this subject, which really is a subject concerning nobody but Burns, who himself has given a circumstantial account of certain passages in her career, to which our present editors give the lie direct as nearly as words allow :

"The Highland Lassie was Mary Campbell, daughter of one Archibald Campbell, a Clyde sailor. The year of her birth is uncertain, its place is not beyond dispute; the date of her death is matter of debate; there is room for conjecture as to the place of her burial; little or no independent testimony exists as to her person and character, unless she be identified with a certain Mary Campbell of indifferent repute; there is scarcely material for the barest outline of her biography. But on the strength of sporadic allusions by Burns, meant, as it seems, to dissemble more than they reveal, and especially of certain ecstatic expressions in the song, Thou ling ring Star, and in a letter to Mrs Dunlop, Mary Campbell has come to be regarded less as an average Scots peasant, to whom a merry-begot was then, if not a necessary of life, at all events the commonest effect of luck, than as a bare-legged Beatrice, a Spiritualised Ideal of Peasant Womanhood."

Could anything be more absolutely uncalled for, more vindictive (though what had poor Mary

done to those English gentlemen ?), petty, and malignant, than this assault? If Burns chose to make a pretty story of his parting from his Highland lass, is that a reason for saying it was all a fable, and that there was no Mary at all, "unless she be identified with a certain Mary Campbell of indifferent repute"? Perhaps Burns told a lie; but Messrs Henley and Henderson have no knowledge that he did so, no proof against him, not the faintest indication of evidence one way or other. Mr Henley is no doubt aware that Beatrice is believed by superior persons in Italy to be no actual woman at all, but a mere abstraction, to whom Dante gave the name of a certain noble lady, his relations to whom were entirely imaginary, though related with much pathetic circumstance by the poet himself. But we conceive that no man, not even a poet, has a right to be accused of telling a circumstantial lie without evidence, and something to found the accusation upon. We know no cult, "for cult it is," these gentlemen say, of Mary Campbell. There is a cult of another Mary which has led Scotland into a good deal of absurdity. Could there be a confusion in the mind of the writer on this point?

We must also protest against the use of words which have had no place hitherto in English literature of a decent, not to say of the highest, kind. "Merry-begot" is not a pretty word, still less is another which is used on several occasions in this book, but never that we remember in any such book before. It is to be found in Shakespeare, no doubt, but many things are to be found in Shakespeare which do not suit the habits of this day. A master of vigorous English has less need

than most to seek to add to the strength of his phrases by foul words. The interposition of that which we have quoted in a simile which ends with Beatrice, is a downright offence both to the language and us, and nothing but the bitterest insinuated scorn for the subject could excuse it.

We are quite willing to allow that there is something in the uproarious "cult" of Burns carried on by the lower classes of Scots, to account for at least the often suppressed and sourd but always existent distaste for him in the minds of his latter - day critics. Mr Robert Louis Stevenson was not free from it, nor yet is Mr Andrew Lang, both Scotsmen, so that it cannot be entirely a point of national prejudice. It is curiously evident, however, through the most of the works which count, in a matter which has of late been so often handled. But the shouts of a hundred noisy parties of rough Scotsmen in town and vil lage, though they may irritate delicate nerves, have really nothing to do with the question; and it is very illogical, as well as undignified, to allow that roar to affect the mind of a man of letters. There is something like spite in the bitterness with which the poet is discussed a feeling which we cannot but, though much against our will, suspect in the awed and expectant position held by the editors of the Centenary Burns, in the fear (is it perhaps the hope?) that their revelations will change his place in the estimation of the world. If they fear it, we entreat these gentlemen to take courage. They will not attain that object, nor is there any reason why they should, seeing that everything worth consideration which they have said has been familiar to the world

precisely since the moment when Burns himself said it over and over again. The Centenary Burns is a fine edition of the poet. It has, we have no doubt, been most carefully collated, and every means taken, as is said, to secure the purity of the text, though there are some occasional departures from tradition which are not agreeable to our own ears. But the editors in some cases, at least, have been led away by the impulse of opposition, and that rage to deduce everything they can from something that went before, no matter how faint the connection, which is the soul of the New Criticism. It has seldom, we think, been less successful than in this attempt to alter the position of a great lyric poet.

But

We are not sure that we are in a general way very fond of the literature produced by newspaper correspondents. To be sure, there have been admirable writers among them-Laurence Oliphant, for example, one of our own band. the last new figure stepping out into the world from that busy crowd has many qualities to prepossess the critic. He has the delightful spontaneity and absence of any parti pris or deliberate intention, which give animation and sparkle to the style, and often the charm of the unexpected to the most hackneyed subject. America is not the freshest of themes, and no doubt the fortunate, and in this case very lucky, editor who sent out Mr George Steevens to report upon the Presidential election, probably expected, as did most people, a number of clever political let

ters to make that contest comprehensible. But nobody knew that we were to receive one of the most vivid, nay, brilliant, sketches of America that have been made in

recent times,1 all warm from the heart of the country, living, moving, full of colour, an almost dazzling reproduction of life. The 'Daily Mail,' we understand, unlike other efforts which seemed just as likely to succeed, was doing well before; but these letters gave it a literary position to which it previously had no pretensions: and here we have in a volume the collected result. 'The Land of the Dollar' is a book which we almost feel ought to march by itself, like Donatello's statue. It is so crisp with young energy and force that it is curious to see it rest quiet on an ordinary table. When one opens it, which is it that runs, that strides with a wind of going which blows us all about, we the reader, or the book? We are there, we are not here, hurrying along with a delight in the pace, in the sense of movement, in the rapid succession of scenes, which is almost like that of a performer in them. Was it you and we or Mr Steevens who saw that blazing procession in Chicagowho looked down upon that amazing town with the sea air in our nostrils yet the smoke in our throat? We protest we are not sure. We think it must have been ourselves, in the body or out of the body, who was there.

It has been the fate of most of us, one time or another, to read a great deal about America. In a great many cases we know exactly what is going to be said upon the chief subjects. But this, the result of long suffering and experience, does not help us with Mr Steevens's book. We had not in the least divined it: it is too fresh, too real, to be anything but a kind of revelation, even though we may

have known the facts before. And I doubt whether any number of us knew the facts. This about the air, for instance-who ever told us anything before about the air?

"I am not a chameleon-I cannot live on air. Neither am I a Napoleon, to go without my rightful sleep. Yet the air of America would make a chapoleon [the pun is boyish, but never mind], as one might say, of anybody.

"Never was there such a stimulating, bracing air-meat and intoxicating drink together. You would not call it a kindly, perhaps not even a wholesome, air. I have found it drop from 94° to 47° in two days. I am told it will not uncommonly sink from 75° to zero in a night. An air like this will find out the weak spot and finish you before you have found it out yourself. Yet it is made of tone and vigour, and in the strength of it you can go for days and nights eating little and sleeping less, and feel like a lion at the end."

This should almost neutralise the effects of the ice water, of which Mr Steevens speaks so feelingly, and which he believes is working away the morals and the interiors of the most dyspeptic of nations; nor does he seem to have been impressed by the food, the "awesome squab on toast," the mutton and beef" coarse in grain, insipid in flavour, usually tough and invariably half raw";-but the sweets! these indeed seem to be the triumph of an American feast. Despising them at first, "like all male Britons over twenty," he found in the end that " briefly, they tempt a man to forget his manhood." If there remains in Great Britain, therefore, any man who has what used to be called a sweet tooth, it is clearly his best policy to go to America.

But these are trifles. New

VOL. CLXI.-NO. DCCCCLXXVIII.

2 L

York, Chicago, Washington, Leadville, Niagara, are the bigger points in the landscape-the last of these wonders, so hackneyed and worn out as it is, looking actually, for once in a way, as if some one were seeing it for the first time. Chicago, we think, is the central point of all. It seems to have impressed Mr Steevens's imagination with its mingled grandeur and foulness: its beautiful great lake like a sea, the immense buildings like the Alps, mountains of buildings, serried ranks of heaven - scaling peaks." The homes of the great

merchants line the Lake shore, built of "great blocks of roughhewn granite, red or grey. Their massive weight is relieved by wide round arches for doors and windows, by porches and porticoes, loggias and galleries, over the whole face of the building from top to bottom. The effect is almost prehistoric in its massive simplicity, something like the cyclopean ruins of Mycenae or Tiryns." But be hind backs is "a vast wilderness of shabby houses-a larger and more desolate Whitechapel that can hardly have a parallel for sordid dreariness in the world."

"This is the home of labour, and of nothing else. The evening's vacancy brings relief from toil, the morning's toil relief from vacancy. Little shops compete frantically for what poor trade there is with tawdry advertisements. Street stretches beyond street of little houses, mostly wooden, begrimed with soot, rotting, falling to pieces. The pathways are of rickety and worm-eaten planks, such as we should not tolerate for a day in London as a temporary gangway where a house is being built. Here the boarding is flush with the street; there it drops to it in a two-foot precipice, over which you might easily break your leg. The streets are quagmires of black mud, and no attempt is made to repair them. They are miserably lighted, and no

body thinks of illuminating them. The police force is so weak that men and women are held up and robbed almost nightly within the city limits; nobody thinks of strengthening it. Here and there is a pit or a dark cellar left wholly unguarded for the unwary passenger to break his neck in. All these miles of unkempt slum and wilderness betray a disregard for human life which is more than half barbarous. If you come to your death by misadventure among these pitfalls, all the consolation your friends will get from Chicago is to be told that you ought to have taken better care of yourself. You were is no more to be said about it." unfit; you did not survive. There

Within reach of these slums Mr Steevens then shows us the Field Columbian Museum, which is situated in the Art Building, now the only part remaining of the World's Fair, and which, as he says with enthusiasm almost American, is "as divinely proportioned a building as ever filled and satisfied the eye of man." It was endowed by its founder with "a cool million of dollars." It has received since from various citizens nearly twelve million dollars more. "Think of it, depressed Oxford and Cambridge -a university endowed at the rate of half a million sterling a-year!"

"Two other prominent Chicago men found themselves in Paris a while ago, when a collection of pictures was being sold promptly they bought up a hundred and eighty thousand dollars' worth for the gallery of their city. There is hardly a leading name in the business of the place but is to be found beneath a picture given or lent to this gallery."

Mr Steevens, however, does not tell us what kind of pictures these are, and we feel a little distrust of the millionaire's judgment generally, though it is to be hoped he was guided by more cultivated taste than his own. But the description of all this magnificence