to her maid: ‘What gart ye busk your cockernony that gait?’ To this hour, indeed, there are thousands of Scott’s admirers for whom the question might just as well be framed in Sanscrit. In Sir Walters own day and generation he had one considerable imitator in Galt, whose ‘Andrew Wylie of that Ilk’ and ‘The Entail’ can still afford pleasure to the reader. Then for a time the fiction of Scottish character went moribund. The prose Muse of the North was silent, or spoke in ineffectual accents. After a long interregnum came George Macdonald, unconsciously paving the way for the mob of northern gentlemen who now write with ease. He brought to his task an unusual fervour, a more than common scholarship, a more than common richness, purity, and flexibility in style, a truly poetic endowment of imagination, and a truly human endowment of sympathy, intuition, and insight. It would be absurd to say that he failed, but it is certain that he scarcely received a tithe either of the praise or the pudding which have fallen to the share of Mr. S. R. Crockett, for example, who is no more to be compared with him than I to Hercules. Such readers as were competent to judge of him ranked him high, but, south of the Tweed, such readers were few and far between, for he employed the idiomatic Scotch in which he chose to work with a remorseless accuracy, and in this way set up for himself a barrier against the average Englishman. His genius, charming as it was, was not of that tremendous and compulsive sort which lays a hand on every man, and makes the breaking down of such a barrier an essential to intellectual happiness. There was a tacit admission that he was, in his measure, a great man, but that the average reader could afford to let him alone. And then, things were very different with the press. The northern part of this island, though active in press life, had nothing like its influence of to-day. To-day the press of Great Britain swarms with Scotchmen, and the ‘boom’ which has lately filled heaven and earth with respect to the achievements of the new Scotch school has given ample and even curious evidence of that fact. The spoils to the victor, by all means. We folk from over the border are a warlike and a self-approving race, with a strong family instinct, and a passionate love for the things which pertain to our own part of the world. If Scotchmen had been as numerous amongst pressmen as they are to-day, and as certain of their power, they would have boomed Dr. Macdonald beyond a doubt. Such recognition as he received came mainly from them. But if only the present critical conditions had existed in his early day, with what garlands would he have been wreathed, what sacrifices would have been made before him!