of finish or varnish that is desired. The same remark applies to musical reviewing; but Johnstone's distrust of himself was needless. The result was more in accordance with the expectation of his friends than with his own. Many of his articles were written at great speed, and as one of his colleagues said, if it had been possible for him to wait till he felt he could do justice to the subject, most of them would never have been written at all. Before passing to his main labours as a journalist, we may here quote, in illustration, part of the notice that he wrote on the _Johannisfeuer_ of Sudermann. Our reprints in this book deal almost wholly with music, and, as we have said, he thought of music as a comment, at several removes and after strange distillations, on life and experience. But the drama, which is a copy of life, not indeed a direct one, but subject to the laws of theatrical art, also engrossed him, especially when it was at once modern in form and homely and passionate in theme. The Bavarian peasants and their girls still jump through the dying embers of their bonfires on the eve of St. John:-- _"For the truth is Mr. Parson, a remnant of heathenism stirs in the blood of us all. It has persisted through all the centuries since ancient Germanic times, and, once a year, it blazes up with the fire of St. John's Eve. For that night the spooks of ancient heathenism are unchained. Witches ride on broomsticks, instead of being beaten with them, and pass through the air, with mocking laughter, on their way to the Blocksberg. The Wild Hunt scours over the forest and wilder desires over our hearts--all that is most frenzied and most utterly doomed to nonfulfilment. No matter what the order may be that for the time being reigns in the world, for one single heart's desire to be realised, and to give us something to live on, a thousand others must go to ruin, not only for the ever unattainable, but others, allowed to escape from a hand that held them too carelessly. Yes, those bonfires which blaze up--do you know what they are? They are the spectres of our heart's desires, the red-winged birds of paradise that we might have kept by us for life but allowed to escape, the spooks of the old order, of the heathenism that is in us. However satisfied we may be in the light of day and beneath the reign of law and order, this is St. John's Eve in the night sacred to Midsummer Madness. I drink to your ancient heathen fires. Let them blaze high! Will no one clink glasses with me?"--(Act. iii., sc. 3.)_