Is it impertinent to say a word in praise of a writer, too soon forgotten at circulating libraries, where she was but too voluminously in evidence for the best part of her lifetime? Had she been content with a flat in Grub Street, Mrs. Oliphant might now be better remembered than by the mass of often hasty work for which her way of life gave hostages to fortune and to publishers. Her novels often smell too much of an Aladdin’s lamp that had to be rubbed hard for copy; there is awful example to money-making authorship in a middle period of them that scared off readers for whom again she would rise to her early charm. Defects she had, notably a curious warp of sympathy that led her to do less than poetic justice to prodigal ne’er-do-weels; but her chief fault was in writing too much, when at her best she was very good. Her best known stories are those which deal with English life; yet she was not less happy in describing her native Scotland, having an extraordinary insight that set her at home in very varied scenes and classes of society. Few writers are found in touch with so many phases of life. Even George Eliot, sure as she is in portraying her Midland middle-class life, seems a little _depaysé_ when she strays among fine folk; and many a skilful novelist might be mentioned who falls into convention or caricature as soon as he gets out of his own familiar environment. But, after Sir Walter, I doubt if there be any author who has given us such a varied gallery of Scottish characters, high and low, divined with Scott’s sympathy and often drawn with Jane Austen’s minute skill. Her servants and farmers seem as natural as her baronets and ministers, all of them indeed ordinary human beings, not the freaks and monsters of the overcharged art that for the moment has thrown such work as hers into the shade. Of her tales dealing with Fife, perhaps the best, at least the longest, is “The Primrose Path,” a beautiful idyll of this East Neuk, its scene laid within a few miles of St. Andrews, evidently at Leuchars, where such a noble Norman chancel is disgraced by the modern meeting-house built on to it, and the old shell of Earl’s Hall offered itself as a fit setting for the drama of an innocent girl’s heart, that at the end shifts its stage to England. The hero, he that is to be made happy after all, plays a somewhat colourless part in the background; but heroes have license to be lay figures. The real protagonist, the imperfectly villainous Rob Glen, seems to walk out of the canvas; and all the other characters, from the high-bred, scholarly father to the love-sick servant lass, are alive with humour and kindliness. As for the scenery, it is thus that Mrs. Oliphant puts the East Neuk in its best point of view:-- [Illustration: ON THE DOCHART, KILLIN, PERTHSHIRE]