of common day. For many people, the splendor rather increases, and only with the years the vision is born and grows. It grows more brilliant, more spiritual, more intense. Shadows of the prison-house do not begin to close around, but rather the light of freedom indefinitely expands, with every year opening out new vistas of glory, new wonder and delight. Such people lament, not that the visionary gleam is fled, nor that they are forgetting the imperial palace whence they came, but that life is too short for the ecstasy continually revealed with greater brightness, and that into all the many mansions of the noble house of existence they cannot enter to abide.

The unrealized thought, the action unfulfilled, the deep draughts of passionate enterprise and endeavor that there is not time to drink-those are the things that make calamity of so short life. The poet found consolation in the years that bring the philosophic mind. But to many there is no need of philosophy or of such consolation. Their trouble is not that the sense sublime of something whose dwelling is the light of setting suns diminishes with the years, but that it increases till it fills the soul almost beyond endurance. For, as the Cleon of another poet wrote to Protus, "life's inadequate to joy, as the soul sees joy." Nor is it only the sense of joy impossible and unfulfilled that increases. The divine halo of intellectual and spiritual grandeur which gleams around the universe increases too-the halo that is like the sun, of which the Archangel sings in the Prologue to "Faust":"Ihr Anblick gibt den Engeln Stärke, Wenn keiner sie ergründen mag." Now, the angels are not babies, but very old-older even than the middleaged.

The other point in which that noble and distinctive poet seems to us to

have misjudged the usual course of the soul is the converse of this. He thought that the souls of children came trailing clouds of glory, and that heaven lies about us in our infancy. Grown-up people are often inclined to think so. They cherish the idea, partly because memory has a happy way of obliterating sorrow and pain, and of idealizing the past with a light that never was; but also because there is an irresistible appeal in childhood, as in animals. It is so naïve, so helpless, so ignorantly trustful, SO innocently unashamed. The pretty wide-open eyes look so frank. There is something attractive even in the first yawns, coughs, and sneezes-so human already, though quite uninstructed. And then come the smiles and attempts at speech. But a great part of this charm is given by ourselves. It arises from memory, from pity, from the sense of protection. The child itself remains, as the Catechism teaches us, a child of wrath. Its innocence is partly due to powerlessness. The chief weapons of war which it possesses-its vehement and distracting outcries-it employs to attain its immediate purposes. And as to the clouds of glory, and the heaven that lies about it-may heaven itself help us if they are not of a peculiar kind!

Take, for instance, the glory and the heaven revealed to us in the mind of Miss Joan Maude, aged three. Her mother, known to the stage as Miss Nancy Price, has published an accurate account of them under the title "Behind the Nightlight" (Murray). There is nothing unusual, or morbid, or precocious here-nothing of what has been called "the infant prodigy." Nearly all alert and healthy children are attended by figures and images like Miss Joan Maude's; but the mothers have not the patience or the enterprise to chronicle them exactly. But we ask: Have these figures and images the

smallest resemblance to clouds of glory, or to emblems of the heavens to which the poet supposes the child to have come? They have no such resemblance. They are a series of uncouth and ghastly monsters, such as a medieval painter might have imagined as inhabiting another place than heaven. Only one of them makes any pretence to the moral rectitude we should expect among clouds of glory, and the child evidently likes him least. "You soon get tired of him," she remarks.

For the rest, she is accompanied from her pre-existent state by the Kiddikee, who has nineteen legs, and one ear on one of his legs, and one at the end of his long tail, and who lives underneath a flower-pot, with a caterpillar and two snails; by the Fritchet, who kicks and wriggles all day long, and is always clawing and snatching things, and biting people, and whose nose is always tumbling off, so that he has to tie it on with string; by the Caragal, who has one side hot and one side cold, and who lends his tail to other animals, but never gives anybody anything; by the Joe-Jag, who has no legs or arms, but a face in the middle of his body, and a ring in his head to hang him up by; by the Gott family, who have hands like spades, and no ears, and always bite; by the Bomblemass, who has no teeth, and ties on his legs with black ribbon; by the HitchyPenny, who has claws that pull out, so that he can scratch anywhere he wants; by the Lowdge, who runs very fast, and has no heels, and kisses cats; by the Stickle-Jag, whose teeth are acid drops, and who has bull's-eyes, and can take his legs off and on; by Fat-Tack, who has a green nose that shines in the dark, and is dreadfully greedy; by the Jaat family, who are the oldest of the animals, and have the habits of the old; by the Mounjee, who have different faces by night and day, both hideous;

and by a few other misshapen, grotesque, and usually unpleasing creatures.

What a set! What an awful intimation of immortality! If that is the best that a charming and intelligent child can do in the way of trailing clouds of glory, would it not be better to leave all of it behind and start fresh? If this is the heaven that lies about us in our infancy, we personally prefer the less celestial condition of maturer age. But before we emerge from the haunted atmosphere of these goblins and abortions into the welcome light of common day, let us notice one further point about them. Nearly all children "collect" something. And these ghostly attendants on the mind of Miss Joan Maude collect also. One might suppose that, with the lovesome innocence of a childhood so close to the imperial palace whence it came, they would collect sunbeams, dewdrops, or, at the lowest, diamonds and pearls. Not a bit of it. The creatures collect coughs, dust, footballs with sugar inside, sausages, and candles. That peculiarly unpleasant family, the Gotts (who all bite), collect relations-how shrewd a thrust at the tiresome aunts who come to tea, and never will let you eat enough, and are always wiping the jam off your mouth and fingers, as though that mattered!

Perhaps enough has now been said to prove that if these are the inhabitants of the heaven from which the poet supposed our infancy conveyed some faint remembrances, we must change our conceptions of Paradise. Such apparitions as these would have shocked and terrified Adam and Eve. Unlike Miss Joan Maude, they would have been at a loss to find names for them. Ever since the Fall, earth has contained nothing quite so hideous, except in the mind of a little child, "whose exterior semblance doth belie its soul's immensity":

"Mighty prophet! Seer blest!

On whom those truths do rest, Which we are toiling all our lives to find!"

On the whole, perhaps, it is just as well we find something different. It is true that the shapes in her menagerie of monsters do not appear to frighten Miss Joan Maude. She tells us she is sorry she ever invented that disagreeable Gott family. The jolliest of her familiar spirits told her it was a mistake, and we quite agree with him. But her imaginings fill her with no haunting terrors. She takes even the creature with nineteen legs and an ear at the end of his tail as he comes, and being a nice, cheerful child, she makes the best of him. Other children are not so fortunate. How many have we known tortured to extreme misery by the terror of those ghostly images that arise unbidden in the mind, and are so much more real and horrible than soap in the eyes, the plague of brothers and sisters, and all the other changes and chances of this mortal life! Just as the fetish that the savage makes of a bit of rag becomes to him so much more terrible than a host of cannibals.

The Nation.

For ourselves, we rejoice to be shut of all such goblins and monsters as we are shut of fetishism. Like the Man in the Ode, we have perceived them die away, and we are heartily glad they have faded. We feel for the child who tells us of them, for it reminds us of the nightmare existence from which we have escaped. We sympathize with it for its imaginings just as we do for the helplessness and simplicity that give it a naïve attraction. But would even the poet rejoice if the Youth, who is Nature's priest, or the Man in his maturity, went on babbling all his life about Lowdges and Stickle-Jags? Thank you, we have other things to do, and far nobler visions to contemplate. "When I was a child, I thought But no as a child," said St. Paul. earthly soul would have cared what he thought, if he had not put away childish things. And in the same way, however alluring the nursery prattle may

In Andrew Lang the world has lost a great man of letters in the old full sense of the word. Nowadays our writers are specialists, cultivating diligently their little gardens. In other times an Erasmus or a Dr. Johnson, having mastered his medium, took all letters for his province, and reached distinction in half-a-dozen very different fields. Andrew Lang thought he loved life better than literature, a delusion which Stevenson shared; but in reality both to their innermost hearts were devotees of the printed word. His versatility would be perplexing if we

He loved

did not remember its cause. the things of the mind, the exercise of an accomplished intellect; and there were few domains of human interest in which he could not find this pleasure. Politics he detested; his prejudices were too fundamental to be embodied in any one of our opportunist parties. Nor did he greatly care for metaphysics or physical science, his mind being too concrete for the one and too picturesque for the other. But almost everything else, from salmon to totems, came within the circle of his interests.

He was an exact and

learned classical scholar, and probably the best translator of our day; a wellequipped anthropologist; a lover of odd corners in psychology; a painstaking and at times a brilliant historian; a student of origins and religions; an unraveller of puzzles, with an unfailing scent for a mystery; an acute, though occasionally a petulant, critic of literature. He was also poet, novelist, parodist, essayist, and weaver of fairy-tales. For more than forty years he pursued the most laborious of callings, that of "occasional" journalist, and found leisure to prepare at the same time many works of profound research. And with it all he never lost his freshness. He never wrote a paragraph into which he did not put something of himself, some touch of his curious grace and wit. It would be hard to find a parallel to such an amazing versatility.

Probably the poet was deepest in him. When he was at Balliol, Jowett foresaw in him a great poet, and though he never quite fulfilled the promise of his youth he did not lose his vision. Perhaps verse came too easily to him, and therefore tended to take light and transient forms. Certainly no modern writer of casual lyrics has excelled him in delicacy and esprit. He was very susceptible to literary influences, and in his serious work was apt to echo the masters. But he has written several of the noblest sonnets of our day, such as that on the death of Colonel Burnaby, and some of his poems on Tweed and Yarrow have a certainty of immortality. His prose is instinct with poetry, though nothing was ever less like "poetic prose." It is a curious style, very simple and staccato, often akin to good talk. But in purity and grace it must stand very high, and it has its great moments, such as the passage on Flora Macdonald in his "Prince Charles Edward" and the noble close of his "maid of France." The same poetic quality is shown in his

fairy-tales, whether he is re-telling old ones or weaving new ones. "The Gold of Fairnilee" is surely the most beautiful of modern exercises in this art. This gift, too, made him a wonderful translator of poetry. His "Homer," in which his share is clear, is a model of how prose may reproduce a good poet, and his "Theocritus," with its dainty cadences, is the last word in the rendering of the literary pastoral.

His scholarship gave him a hatred of all cant and flamboyance, and made him an excellent critic both of style and theory. He chose for his most serious work precisely those domains that are given over to wordy compilers and heavy-footed commentators. In his Homeric studies he fought for Homeric unity with the loyalty of a Jacobite to his king. Twenty years ago he was a voice crying in the wilderness; now the wheel of fashion is bringing many scholars round to his side. In his most recent and best book on the subject, "The World of Homer," he replies with much effect to the brilliant speculations of Professor Murray's "The Rise of the Greek Epic." Psychical research interested him greatly, and his humor is a welcome ally in its more dreary places. Few men felt more sincerely the spell of the unseen, but he would not build his faith on any charlatanry or false sentiment. In anthropology he was a laborious worker and a doughty controversialist, but he was always a little apt to forget the wood in the trees. His books were disproportioned, for he never looked at a science as a whole, and always preferred to cultivate intensively a corner rather than plough the field. Still these books have a permanent value, for they are never dull. He is provocative and perverse occasionally, but his freshness of style and wide range of knowledge make them curiously attractive-a "mass o' fine confused feeding." Form, which is so

omnipresent in his essays, was apt to be slighted in his more learned works.

It is this defect which mars his history-the subject which was probably nearest his heart. He was intensely conscious of the past, and had the gift not only of re-creating it imaginatively, but of understanding its motives and its long-forgotten disputes. Hence he was peculiarly successful in historical portraiture. Where shall we find a more balanced and sympathetic study of personality than his "Prince Charles Edward," or such portraits as Montrose and the Old Pretender in his "History of Scotland"? He was excellent, too, at fathoming puzzles, pursuing a clue like a sleuth-hound among acres of manuscript. Take any one of his "Historical Mysteries," or his treatment of the Gowrie Conspiracy, or his many studies in the career of Mary of Scots. He provided brilliantly the raw material of great history, but he never quite wrote it. His mind tended to be episodic and staccato. In his "History of Scotland," his chief work of erudition, this defect is clearly seen. It is probably the best history of Scotland extant, for it is a monument of industry and ingenuity, and, with certain small reservations, it is conspicuously fair. But we never get from it the sweep of narrative and the view as from a high place which we get from the greater historians. Once, again, it is a case of the trees obscuring the wood. It is a collection of diligent researches, brilliant pictures, and illuminating comments, but they are not woven together. Perhaps this lack of sustained power is the price which human nature must pay for versatility. If a man touches life on many sides he is the more liable to distraction.

Andrew Lang was never a strong man, and he performed his multifarious tasks in spite of real bodily weakness. He was too often and too gravely tired, and as a result a casual

observer was apt to discover a superciliousness which was quite alien to his real nature. No man was more simple and kindly. To his lucid and cultivated mind humbug and fustian were repellent, and fools were apt to bring on themselves his ironic wit. But it was only summer lightning. The very man who detested literary chatter and a sham Bohemianism was the first to help the unfortunate chatterer if he came to grief. As we have said, he did not rate the profession of letters very high, and reserved his admiration for the world of deeds-a pose, no doubt, but the proof of a sound philosophy. He was always ridiculously humble about his own work, and had none of the self-centred vanity of the sedentary worker. Like Stevenson, too, he preserved amid ill-health and advancing age a boyishness of mind. As Johnson said of Boswell, he was "longer a boy than other people." The rawest tale of adventure delighted him, and his interesting games, at which he rejoiced to confess himself a duffer, never waned. Of outdoor sports fishing was his oldest love, and, though he was the most luckless of anglers, the riverside always kept its spell for him. He was proud to reckon a gipsy strain in his ancestry, and the Fates did not doom him wholly to pen and ink. Few scholars have kept more free from "the abhorr'd pedantic sanhedrin." This old instinct kept his point of view always wholesome and human. He knew and loved the best in life and literature, and he was loyal to his standard of pure taste and clear thinking in all that he did.

He was a true Scot-perfervid, we had almost written-in those national concerns which attracted him; but his countrymen were always a little uneasy about him. He had no enthusiasm for the Kirk, or the Covenant, or Gladstonianism, or theological disputations, though he had been a Gifford