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and lonesome, and yet at times not without a strange beauty of their own. Though in winter little grows on them but long pale reeds and a little herbage with long patches of bright yellowishgreen moss, and here and there a purplish spurge, later on wild pansies help to clothe their nakedness, and there are hollows that are the home of innumerable white violets; and in summer they are bright with the purplish blue of the viper's bugloss, and the gray-green leaves of the yellow poppy, and the lovely burnet roses. Eastward they rise higher, like South African kopjes, and there is a wilderness of sand, to cross which on a hot summer's day is to gain some idea of the heat of the tropics. And ever near are the waters of the Bristol Channel, beyond which stand forth the bright hills of Somerset and Devon. It would have been strange indeed if so striking a scene had not impressed a man so sensitive to Nature's various aspects as was Blackmore; nor is it wonderful that he should have given the first place in his esteem to a work portraying so skilfully the rare scenes and characters of a neighborhood that otherwise, from different causes, must have held a high place in his affections.

It cannot be said that "The Maid of Sker" is popular in the parish of Newton Nottage. There are two small circulating libraries at Porthcawl, but neither of them contains it, though "Lorna Doone" and "Alice Lorraine" are there, and we boast our acquaintance with the novels of popular authors, which it is fashionable to read. Occasionally, indeed, a copy of "The Maid of Sker" may be seen in a shopwindow, but this is rather a concession to the needs of visitors than the response to a demand from Porthcawl itself, and it is a rare event. Visitors learn nothing of the book from the guide to Porthcawl, although this is a creditable production of its class, writ

ten by a professional man who knows the district well, and records other literary matters connected therewith; but of Blackmore and his novel he utters never a syllable. An article on Porthcawl, written by one of ourselves, was recently published in a magazine much esteemed in Wales; it mentioned all other points that tend to our glory and honor, but was silent about "The Maid of Sker." I used once to marvel at this policy of silence, but I do so now no longer; it must be acknowledged that as a rule we mildly resent the book. "Yes, I have read Blackmore," said one of us, the other day, "but I don't think much of him. There is a lot of bosh in "The Maid of Sker,' making out as if we were all a set of poachers here. 'Lorna Doone' is better; but for characters give me Dickens." I am afraid that the general verdict of such portion of the parish as has read the book would endorse this statement that it contains a "lot of bosh;" but it is probably considered more patriotic not to read it at all; I have certainly never seen it in any other house than my own and I should be inclined to estimate the total number of copies in the whole parish, which contains some eighteen hundred inhabitants, as less than a dozen. For we do not consider Davy Llewellyn a credit to so ancient and historic a parish as ours; his poaching and his weakness for selling gamesome fish stick in our throats, and there are also remarks in the novel, such as that respecting a Welsh hurrah ("as good as the screech of a wild-cat trapped"), which are held to be dishonoring to Wales. Some over-curious persons, too, have asked whether one or two characters, even less respectable than Davy Llewellyn, had their originals in our parish, a question which we deem grossly impertinent. We acknowledge Davy Llewellyn and Sandy Macraw, but we confess to no more. When rash intruding folk question us closely on

various points, we say that the incidents of the book are so familiar to us that we have never troubled to read it through, and we change the conversation.

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Our attitude in Newton Nottage is reflected in Wales generally. It is an axiom with some Welshmen that no Englishman really understand Welsh life and character, and Davy Llewellyn, lovable as he is despite all his trickiness, is not a type which such readily admit to be accurate. Daniel Owen's realistic sketches of Calvinistic life in North Wales, clear, true and unpoetical as photographs, and Allen Raine's tender and graceful idylls of Cardiganshire villages are read and appreciated; but "The Maid of Sker" is ignored by Welsh opinion. Yet, as a Welsh lady has told me that she has failed to read the book through because it contains too much of Davy Llewellyn and she knows too many Davy Llewellyns already and heartily dislikes them, the reason for the low esteem of "The Maid of Sker" in Wales may be not necessarily lack of appreciation, but an appreciation that is too vivid. It is a kindly picture, after all, that Blackmore has drawn; Daniel Owen has drawn a much harsher one of a tricky Welshman. But Wales yet awaits her novelist; for she has nobler types than any novelist has yet attempted. Shakespeare alone has been able to give us not merely Sir Hugh Evans, who is common "Welsh flannel," but Fluellen, the valorous gentleman, and Glendower, the mystic seer, who could call spirits from the vasty deep. Blackmore knew the Welsh gentleman, and the hand that sketched good Colonel Lougher might have done more than it did; amid heroic circumstances Colonel Lougher would have been heroic; but Blackmore would have stopped short of investing a Welsh hero with Celtic glamor and mystery, for his genius had its limitations. It is, perhaps,

only in the Mabinogion, and some lyrics of the Welsh poets, that one can find literary expression of the beauty of the ideal Welshman of perfect stature. Giraldus Cambrensis knew Wales well, and he never uttered any. thing truer than his judgment that when a Welshman was good he was of better than the good men other races, and when he was bad he was worst of all. Even in the drab existence of the present day there are spots of brilliant color in Welsh life, though perhaps the background of the historic novel would suit best the pictures of the ideal hero of Wales.

In Nottage

Of Blackmore himself I can say but little. Newton Nottage never knew him; it thinks nothing of him now, and knows not and recks not what the world outside thinks. Court, however, his memory is beloved. It is quite true that he ranked high his later work, "Springhaven." He told one of his cousins that he considered it the best of his books, a judgment which is not necessarily opposed to the general report that "The Maid of Sker" was his favorite. But he rarely talked of his writings, even to his relations. He had a keen sense of the ludicrous and incongruous, and he detested fussy pretentious people, and if forced to see them, was glum, taciturn, and miserable in their company, though afterwards he would laugh over his experi

ence.

At Nottage Court there is a photograph taken of him in his later years, that appears to me very characteristic. He is seated under a canopy of vines laden with magnificent grapes, and as he is but a small figure in the corner of the photograph, while the greater space is occupied by the vinery and the vines, it is a little difficult at first to decide to which it is designed to direct the attention, to the cultivator or to his crops. But it is the figure on which one settles at last, with its expression

of quietude and satisfaction, sitting in solitude in the great vinery. It is the husbandman rejoicing in the labor of his hands, sitting much as the old Hebrew sat under his own vine and under his own fig-tree. The picture is symbolic of the shy and reserved Blackmore, who lived apart from men and cities, who would direct attention to his works rather than to himself, but who must yet be recognized in his aloofness to be even greater than his works. As it is, the picture is harmonious; but few other literary men of Macmillan's Magazine.

our age could be substituted for that tranquil figure without grotesqueness. Even its pose is not that which we are accustomed to see in illustrated interviews. His was the hidden life, still and dignified in the midst of a vulgar, self-advertising generation. But the goodness that pervaded and animated it cannot be hid; it lives forever in his writings, and makes them as bracing and wholesome as the breezes that blow, even now as I write, straight from the Atlantic Ocean around the lonely grange of Sker.

E. J. Newell.

IN PRAISE OF BOOKS.

Speaking to me once of the catalogue of books of a departed friend which were about to be sold by auction, the late Dr. Percy, the famous author of "Metallurgy," himself an indefatigable collector of books and prints, expressed surprise, not unmingled with disapprobation, at the number of editions of the same work with which the deceased had burdened his shelves. The utterance of one whom I regarded as a sage gave me pause. His remarks had a personal application of which he was unaware. I was myself, and am still, an offender, if offence there be, in the same direction. I like several editions of the same book, if it is a good one, and I venture to ask the book-lov. ers among my readers-and for their own sakes I hope they are all booklovers-whether I am wrong. To those who, having read or skimmed a book, throw it away, as I have somewhere read was the custom of the first Napoleon, I have nothing to say. I cannot even get near the mind of the man who, except through poverty, obtains from a circulating library any books except novels or works too costly or extensive

for private shelves. I am for once addressing those to whom books are friends, who would have a library if they could afford space and money, and who would no sooner think of returning to the circulating library Lamb's Letters or Keats's Poems than they would of boarding out their children or of sending their best friend, when he visited their village or town, to stay at the public-house, while they had a room vacant.

If some of the observations I make seem extravagant or futile to a portion of my readers, I am sorry. To me the gossip of certain men concerning books is the quintessence of delight; and though I cannot claim to edify or to charm like a Russell Lowell or an Austin Dobson, I hope that there are readers who, when they have not the pick of companionship, will not despise a chat concerning matters of interest with a man of average intelligence. To me books in every shape and of almost every kind appeal. With Charles in "The Elder Brother" of Fletcher I would say:

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I wish I dare quote more from this fine play. An eloquent and a profoundly interesting book might indeed be made from the praises of books that have been said or sung by our great ones. I am not sure that something of the kind has not been done and that I have not the work somewhere, if I could lay hands upon it, on my own overburdened shelves. My theory concerning books is that every work worth reading and studying-mind, I don't say Did skimming is worth possessing. any real student of literature, except one so poor as to be compelled, like Erasmus, to read by moonlight in order to save the expense of a candle, ever read Shakespeare in a borrowed volume? How many people have perused "Atalanta in Calydon" or "Poems and Ballads" in a library copy? I accept, of course, the poor; and my sympathies go out to one compelled to read a work of the class in the British Museum, or even it may be such things have been known-to peruse it by instalments, surreptitiously and affrightedly, at a book-stall.

I will admit the reasonableness of those and they include some of the greatest minds-who, so long as they have a book at all, don't care for the edition. Such are readers, but scarcely book-lovers. There are, moreover, book-lovers who are not readers; collectors who, with Sir Benjamin Backbite, love "a beautiful quarto page, where a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of margin." Coxcomb though he be, Sir Benjamin is justified in his preferences. In

Still

fact the argument is reasonable enough that, so long as you have in a fairly convenient shape, and with clear and legible print, all that a man has written, you may well be content. beauty goes for much, and sentiment for something. The sense of possession even is in its way respectable. Who would not feel some enjoyment in reading, say, Herrick's "Hesperides" in an original edition which the poet's own eyes may have contemplated? At any rate I may own my strength or my weakness; I have all the first Miltons on which I have been able to lay my hands, and I would not willingly part with one of them. There they are, the first, second and third "Paradise Lost;" the 1673 "Poems, Etc."-the second edition-I have not the first, which is beyond my reach; the first "Paradise Regained" and "Samson Agonistes." Of course, I do not habitually read in these precious volumes; for that I have Mr. Beeching's delightful reprint;1 just as if I had a fine First Folio Shakespeare-which I have not-I should turn as now I do on my "whirligig" book-shelves to Booth's facsimile reprint, which is ever at my hand, and every whit as trustworthy as the original.

While prizing, for various reasons, a first edition of any work of extreme interest, beauty or value-and few of such are without some important readings excluded from subsequent texts; while admitting the claims of the best and most richly annotated edition; and while not being without a sort of tenderness for the superbly-illustrated editions-I come back to the cheap onevolume edition, and am willing to concede that it is, for some purposes, the best. Chief of all it is such for purpose of immediate reference, and next, for convenience of carriage. I have just, for instance,

1 Oxford, Clarendon Press.

or

come into possession of a onevolume edition of Molière, issued from the Clarendon Press. It is a most legibly printed work, with the best and most authoritative of texts. Look at the advantage of such a book when, as Sir Peter Teazle says, “you want to find anything in a hurry." A long time is taken in going through a dozen volumes of Molière in search of, say, “Don Juan ou le Festin de Pierre," when to find it in the one-volume edition is the work of an instant. As regards the advantage of portability, let me suppose a man going on a journey and unable to burden himself with more than one book. The work in question can be slipped into handbag, knapsack, even a tolerably large coat-pocket, and carried with very slight addition to weight, and the bearer is provided, if he knows French-as who now does not?-with a month's perpetual amusement or solace. Whether his holiday consists of a walking tour through Welsh hills, a trip by steamer and cariole to Norwegian fiords, or an exploration of the cataracts of the Nile, dull hours will certainly arrive-hours when the rain renders the earth sodden and the crag inaccessible, and when the best company, if such be accessible, palls when the tobacco-pouch is haply empty and delight itself is scarcely delightsome. For such an occasion the one-volume edition is a preservative-a stream in the desert which will not soon run dry.

I have spoken of Molière's works as an ideal companion for a journey. In so doing I am not awarding them an unjust preference over other works. A volume of Shakespeare contains naturally many times the amount of nutriment. But whereas we, all of us, are more or less familiar with the plots, characters and even the very language of Shakespeare, there are few of us who are equally well-read in Molière. I read recently that not more than a

score passages in Molière had become proverbially accepted, and of these one at least belongs to Cyrano de Bergerac. I wonder, however, how many of my readers could, without reference, tell me at once who was Chrysale, who Béralde and who Eriphile. To ninetynine Englishmen out of a hundred, accordingly, most of Molière's plays would come with a freshness such as is not to be expected in the case of Shakespeare. All of them, moreover, bristle with observation, with wit and with satire, and there are some of them which are permeated by "the still sad music of humanity." Anything but a mere jester is Molière. Few of us have had a keener experience of sorrow and suffering; and when the great actor and dramatist died all but on the stage, there is little doubt that rest came to a sufficiently "perturbed spirit." Great man as he is, however, Molière, like his prototype Rabelais, was more inclined to laugh and sneer at human infirmities than to feel the divine pity which is the attribute of the greatest

men.

It repays the reader who is fond of such enjoyments to contrast the female characters of Shakespeare, with those of Molière. The task is at once pleasant and edifying, and I am sorry that I have not space to attempt it. I can only indicate where I should wish to prove. The charge that has been occasionally brought against Shakespeare is that some of his sweetest characters are less beings of flesh and blood than abstractions, types of all the virtues. Mind, I am myself bringing no such arraignment. It would, however, be difficult, I suppose, in the real world to find innocence such as is depicted in Miranda, meekness and long-suffering such as we find in Desdemona, or filial love such as is illustrated in Cordelia. Beatrice, on the other hand, and Juliet are essentially human, and Shakespeare has given us besides Lady Macbeth,

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