its “pawkiness,” its “canniness,” its kailyardism and so forth—in a word, they are trying to revive Scots and yet remain within the stream of tendency responsible for its progressive decay. It would be truer to say that it is Braid Scots—not Scots—with which they are concerned. Their method is that of exact dialectical demarcation—they do not believe in mixing dialects—they contemplate no synthesis. What alienates the young creative writers, conscious of the inadequacy of their purpose alike of English and of what has still any currency as Scots, from the Vernacular Circle people is precisely that the latter have anything but a literary purpose. Not one of them is capable or desirous of envisaging the creative potentialities of Scots or sufficiently involved in questions of literary technique and tendency to appreciate that so far as the literary outcome of what they are professing to attempt goes it must depend, not only on intuitions in profound harmony with the phonetic and expressive genius of Scots, but also in effective relation with some major tendency in European literary evolution. If there is to be further writing in Scots these people want it to be as like what has gone before it from Burns’ time as possible: otherwise they will be the first to condemn it as un-Scottish. But they are not caring much about further writing in Scots at all; they want to maintain the Burns cult and the cult of such lesser lights as Tannahill, and “_Johnny Gibb o’ Gushetneuk_.” Any Scottish aspirant worth a bawbee is bound to recognize that this is hopeless. The Vernacular Circle is a “vicious circle.” No revival of Scots can be of consequence to a literary aspirant worthy of his salt unless it is so aligned with contemporary tendencies in European thought and expression that it has with it the possibility of eventually carrying Scots work once more into the mainstream of European literature. The re-discovery of Dunbar can solve the difficulty for every would-be Scots writer who stands divided between his reluctance to go over bag and baggage to English literature and his inability to rise above the Kailyaird level through the medium of Kailyaird Scots. Dunbar stands at the opposite pole of the Scottish genius from Burns. The latter has ruled the roost far longer than it is healthy for any literature to be dominated by a single influence. It is time, and more than time, for a swing of the pendulum which, if it carries us back over the centuries to Dunbar, may also regain for Scots literature some measure, at all events, of the future that was foregone at Flodden.