of contradictions—and he traces it down the centuries in a most interesting fashion, remarking that “There is more in this Scottish antithesis of the real and fantastic than is to be explained by the familiar rules of rhetoric. This mingling, even of the most eccentric kind, is an indication to us that the Scot, in that mediæval fashion which takes all things as granted, is at his ease in both ‘rooms of life,’ and turns to fun, and even profanity, with no misgivings. For Scottish literature is more mediæval in habit than criticism has suspected, and owes some part of its picturesque strength to this freedom in passing from one mood to another. It takes some people more time than they can spare to see the absolute propriety of a gargoyle’s grinning at the elbow of a kneeling saint.” And Professor Gregory Smith goes on to express the opinion that this incalculable Scottish spirit will continue to survive in English arts and letters pretty much as a dancing mouse may manifest itself in a family of orthodox rodents—as something disparate, an ornament, or an excrescence, but irreconciliable to any major tradition and incapable of affording a basis for any higher synthesis of the Scottish genius. That may be; on the other hand, its expansion may await a conjunction of conditions which have not yet arisen. It has affiliations to the baroque and the rococo, and evidences are not lacking of a widespread renewal of interest in these modes. But a more important fact is that this complicated wildness of imagination is, in Scots literature, associated with a peerless directness of utterance “Nae bombast swell, Nae snap conceits.” The language of the Greeks is simple and concrete, without _clichés_ or rhetoric. English is, by contrast, loose and vague. But what Greek epigram has a more magical simplicity than Burns’s Ye are na Mary Morison,