In these poets the perceptive faculties roamed at will over a wide field of human activities, and voiced their impressions with a witchery of language which has hardly a parallel. The work of both men was revolutionizing in its effects. Burns found his countrymen in bondage to the fear of wraiths, hobgoblins and kindred spirits, and he was a mighty power in their deliverance. Taine estimates that he was as great a force in Scotland as the Revolution in France. Byron is believed largely to have influenced the revolutionary movement in Germany. He gave a direct stimulus to the liberators of Italy, and ended his life in a heroic struggle for the liberties of Greece. If Byron’s literary work is more resplendent and daring, Burns’s seems fresher from the varied living forces about us. If Byron’s is a circlet of sapphires, Burns’s is that same circlet transmuted by the alchemy of human sympathy to a wreath of never-fading violets. When we remember that these colossal figures passed off the stage of life after thirty-seven short years, when we get a suggestion of the difficult circumstances and terrible temptations that encompassed their stormy young lives, we may well leave their failings to God, who alone is their moral Judge. It may be His compassion for them is commensurate with the powers with which He endowed them. _The Man With White Nails_ BY CAPTAIN W. E. P. FRENCH, U.S.A. My wife brought me the case and the client, and, strict candor compels me to say, I was not particularly grateful for either. The case was a curiously involved combination of an over-indulgent, invalid mother; a shrewd, selfish and unscrupulous son; a trained nurse, rather worse than she should have been; a cleverly drawn but very unjust will; an exceedingly large estate mostly in investment securities; a husband-deserted daughter with two small children and “an annual income of nothing to keep ’em on”; a witness who would undoubtedly be “agin the government,” and one other person whose testimony might, or might not, be favorable to the prosecution, but who had apparently vanished bodily from the face of the earth. The client was a pretty, gentle little creature, crushed under a load of trouble much too big for her, quite pathetic in her helplessness, and shrinking and rather indifferent about her own claims, but with an almost fierce mother-instinct over the rights of her babies. How the partner of my joys and sorrows discovered these wronged mites of humanity is immaterial—she has a keen scent for injustice or oppression of any kind—but she rounded them up, brought them to my office, and said I was to take the case. I never appeal from the decision of my supreme court, so I said, “Certainly.”