Welshman. In his new book, _Music: Classical, Romantic, and Modern_, Dr Eaglefield Hull deals very succinctly with the position of Scottish music to-day. “Scotland,” he says, “the country with the loveliest scenery, the most thrilling history, a rich inheritance of literature, and hundreds of the finest love-songs in the world, has no national school of musical composition. Mac. after Mac. goes down into England and loses his musical soul for a mess of pottage! It is useless to ask whether Scotland stands where she did in music, for apart from folk-music she has no standing at all. It is indeed high time that she set to work to put her house in order. In Donald Tovey, David Stephen, Francis George Scott, Erik Chisholm, and others, there is fine material which must be utilized. But the cultivation of a School of Scottish composers can only be carried on within its own borders.” But he goes on to throw out a suggestion of no little significance. “Perhaps,” he says, “Scotland is waiting for some awakener from outside to make her thrill to a sense of her great mission, such as John Field in Russia, Glinka in Spain, and Jean Aubry in England. The spark is undoubtedly there, and only needs fanning.” Association of ideas leads me to think how the distinctively Scottish genius has manifested itself in alien fields, however inhibited it may have been at home. My main purpose here is not to discuss the lets and hindrances which have prevented the development of modern arts in Scotland, nor will my space permit me to analyse the complexities of Scottish character and circumstances responsible for our comparative failure to find expression on the higher levels of culture. But it is curious to find that in relation to the cultures of other countries, or in association with foreign elements in the constitution of the individuals concerned, Scotsmen, or half-Scotsmen have, with a surprising consistency, continued to manifest elements distinctively Scottish which clearly relate them to the Auld Makars, to the ballad makers, to our mediæval Scots musicians, and to that elusive but unmistakable thread of continuity which attaches the work of Norman Douglas, for example, to that of Sir Thomas Urquhart, the translator of Rabelais. Wergeland, the Norwegian poet, was conscious of the idiosyncratic power of the Scottish blood in his veins. So was a greater poet—the Russian Lermontov. So was Hermann Melville; so—to take a living example—is Walter de la Mare, whose _diablerie_, the finest element in his work, is probably attributable to his Scottish blood, as, in his case, were some of Browning’s amusing tortuosities and prepossession with dialectical excesses. This Scottish strain is tremendously idiosyncratic, full of a wild humour which blends the actual and the apocalyptic in an incalculable fashion. In his able analysis of the complexities of the Scottish genius Professor Gregory Smith has called it “the Caledonian antisyzygy”—a baffling zig-zag