Mr. Ian Maclaren, though he is distinctly an imitator, and may be said to owe his literary existence to Mr. J. M. Barrie, is both artistic and sympathetic. His work conveys to the reader the impression of an encounter with Barrie in a dream. The keen edges of the original are blurred and partly lost, but the author of ‘Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush’ has many excellent qualities, and if he had had the good fortune or the initiative to be first in the field, his work would have been almost wholly charming. As it is, he still shows much faculty of intuition and of heart, and his work is all sympathetically honest His emotions are genuine, and this in the creation of emotional fiction is the first essential to success. Here is another case where the hysteric overpraise of the critics has done a capable workman a serious injustice, and but for it a candid reviewer could have no temptation towards blame. His inspiration is from the outside, but that is the harshest word that can honestly be spoken, and in days when literature has become a trade such a judgment is not severe. IX.--DR. MACDONALD AND MR. J. M. BARRIE When one calls to mind the rapid and extensive popularity achieved by the latest school of Scottish dialect writers, one is tempted to wonder a little at the comparative neglect which has befallen a real master of that _genre_, who is still living and writing, and who began his work within the memory of the middle-aged. With the single exception of ‘A Window in Thrums,’ none of the new books of this school are worthy to be compared with ‘David Elginbrod,’ or ‘Alec Forbes of Howglen,’ or ‘Robert Falconer.’ Yet not one of them has failed to find a greater vogue or to bring to its author a more swelling reputation than Dr. Mac-donald achieved. Perhaps the reasons for these facts are not far to seek. To begin at the beginning, Sir Walter, who created the Scottish character novel, had made, in other fields, a reputation quite unparalleled in the history of fiction before he took broadly to the use of Scottish rural idiom, and the depiction of Scottish character in its peculiarly local aspects. The magic of his name compelled attention, and his genius gave a classic flavour to dialects until then regarded as barbarous and ugly. The flame of Burns had already eaten all grossness out of the rudest rusticities, and in the space of twenty years at most the Auld Braid Scots wore the dignity of a language and was decorated with all the honours of a literature. But this, in spite of the transcendent genius of the two men to whom northern literature owes its greatest debt, brought about very little more than a local interest and a local pride. Scott was accepted in spite of the idiom which he sometimes employed, and not because of it, and one can only laugh at the fancy presented to the mind by the picture of an English or a foreign reader who for the first time found himself confronted by Mrs. Bartlemy Saddletree’s query