 Section 6 of Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson. A Gossip on Romance. In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous. We should gloat over a book, be wrapped clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thence forward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye. It was for this last pleasure that we read so closely, and loved our books so dearly, in the bright, troubled period of boyhood. Elegance and thought, character and conversation, were but obstacles to brush aside as we dug blithely after a certain sort of incident, like a pig for truffles. For my part, I liked a story to begin with an old wayside inn, where, towards the close of the year seventeen, several gentlemen in three cocked hats were playing bowls. A friend of mine preferred the Malabar coast in a storm, with a ship beating to windward, and a scowling fellow of Herculean proportions striding along the beach. He, to be sure, was a pirate. This was further afield than my home-keeping fancy loved to travel, and designed altogether for a larger canvas than the tales that I affected. Give me a highwayman, and I was full to the brim. A Jacobite would do, but the highwayman was my favourite dish. I can still hear that merry clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit lane. Night and the coming of day are still related in my mind, with the doings of John Ran, or Jerry Abashore, and the words Post Shares, the Great North Road, Ostler and Nag, still sound in my ears like poetry. One and all, at least, and each with his particular fancy, we read storybooks in childhood, not for eloquence or character or thought, but for some quality of the brute incident. That quality was not mere bloodshed or wonder. Although each of these was welcome in its place, the charm for the sake of which we read depended on something different from either. My elders used to read novels aloud, and I can still remember four different passages which I heard before I was ten, with the same keen and lasting pleasure. One I discovered long afterwards, to be the admirable opening of what will he do with it. It was no wonder I was pleased with that. The other three still remain unidentified. One is a little vague. It was about a dark, tall house at night, and people groping on the stairs by the light that escaped from the open door of a sickrum. In another a lover left a ball, and went walking in a cool, dewy park, whence he could watch the lighted windows and the figures of the dancers as they moved. This was the most sentimental impression I think I had yet received, for a child is somewhat deaf to the sentimental. In the last a poet who had been tragically wrangling with his wife, walked forth on the sea-beach on a tempestuous night, and witnessed the horrors of a wreck. Different as they are, all these early favourites have a common note. They have all a touch of the romantic. Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance. The pleasure that we take in life is of two sorts, the active and the passive. Now we are conscious of a great command over our destiny, and on we are lifted up by circumstance as by a breaking wave, and dashed we know not how into the future. Now we are pleased by our conduct, and on merely pleased by our surroundings. It would be hard to say which of these modes of satisfaction is the more effective, but the latter is surely the more constant. It is three parts of life, they say, but I think they put it high. There is a vast deal in life, and letters both, which is not immoral, but simply amoral, which either does not regard the human will at all, or deals with it in obvious and healthy relations, where the interest turns not upon what a man shall choose to do, but on how he manages to do it, not on the passionate slips and hesitations of the conscience, but on the problems of the body, and of the practical intelligence, in clean, open air adventure, the shock of arms, or the diplomacy of life. With such material as this, it is impossible to build a play, for the serious theatre exists solely on moral grounds, and is a standing proof of the dissemination of the human conscience. But it is possible to build upon this ground the most joyous of verses, and the most lively, beautiful, and buoyant tales. One thing in life calls for another. There is a fitness in events and places. The sight of a pleasant arbor puts it in our minds to sit there. One place suggests work. Another idleness, a third early rising and long rambles in the dew. The effect of night, of any flowing water, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships of the open ocean, calls up in the mind an army of anonymous desires and pleasures. Something we feel should happen. We know not what, yet we proceed in quest of it. And many of the happiest hours of life fleet by us in this vain attendance on the genius of the place and moment. It is thus that tracts of young fur, and low rocks that reach into deep soundings, particularly torture and delight me. Something must have happened in such places, and perhaps age is back to members of my race. When I was a child I tried in vain to invent appropriate games for them, as I still try, just as vainly, to fit them with the proper story. Some places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder. Certain old houses demand to be haunted. Certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other spots again seem to abide their destiny, suggestive and impenetrable, mitching malecho. The inn at Berford Bridge, with its arbours and green garden, and silent eddying river, though it is known already as the place where Keats wrote some of his endymion, and Nelson parted from his emma, still seems to wait the coming of the appropriate legend. Within these ivied walls, behind these old green shutters, some further business smolders waiting for its hour. The old whores inn at the Queen's Ferry makes a similar call upon my fancy. Where it stands, apart from the town, beside the pier, in a climate of its own, half inland, half marine, in front the ferry bubbling with the tide, and the guardianship swinging to her anchor. Behind the old garden with the trees, Americans seek it already for the sake of Lovell and Old Buck, who dined there at the beginning of the antiquary. But you need not tell me, that is not all. There is some story, unrecorded, or not yet complete, which must express the meaning of that inn more fully. So it is with names and faces. So it is with incidents that are idle and inconclusive in themselves, and yet seem like the beginning of some quaint romance, which the all careless author leaves untold. How many of these romances have we not seen determine at their birth? How many people have met us with a look of meaning in their eye, and sunk at once into trivial acquaintances? To how many places have we not drawn near with express intimations? Here my destiny awaits me, and we have but dined there and passed on. I have lived both at the Hawes and Burford in a perpetual flutter, on the heels, as it seemed, of some adventure that should justify the place. But though the feeling had me to bed at night, and called me again at morning in one unbroken round of pleasure and suspense, nothing befell me in either worth remark. The man or the hour had not yet come. But some day I think a boat shall put off from the Queen's ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night, a horseman on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the green shutters of the inn at Burford. Now, this is one of the natural appetites with which any lively literature has to count. The desire for knowledge, I had almost added, the desire for meat, is not more deeply seated than this demand for fit and striking incident. The dullest of clowns tells or tries to tell himself a story, as the feeblest of children uses invention in his play, and even as the imaginative grown person joining in the game at once enriches it with many delightful circumstances, the great creative writer shows us the realisation and the apotheosis of the daydreams of common men. Histories may be nourished with the realities of life, but their true mark is to satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and to obey the ideal laws of the daydream. The right kind of thing should fall out in the right kind of place, the right kind of thing should follow, and not only the characters talk aptly and think naturally, but all the circumstances in a tale answer to one another like notes in music. The threads of a story come from time to time together and make a picture in the web. The characters fall from time to time into some attitude to each other or to nature, which stamps the story home like an illustration. True so, recoiling from the footprint, Achilles shouting over against the Trojans, Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian running with his fingers in his ears, these are each culminating moments in the legend, and each has been printed on the mind's eye forever. Other things we may forget. We may forget the words, although they are beautiful. We may forget the author's comment, although perhaps it was ingenious and true. But these epoch-making scenes, which put the last mark of truth upon a story, and fill up at one blow our capacity for sympathetic pleasure, we so adopt in each one of them into the very bosom of our mind that neither time nor tide can efface or weaken the impression. This then is the plastic part of literature, to embody character, thought or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the mind's eye. This is the highest and hardest thing to do in words. The thing which, once accomplished, equally delights the schoolboy and the sage, and makes, in its own right, the quality of epics. Compared with this all other purposes in literature, except the purely lyrical, or the purely philosophic, are bastard in nature, facile of execution, and feeble in result. It is one thing to write about the inn at Burford, or to describe the scenery with the word-painters. It is quite another to seize on the heart of the suggestion, and make a country famous with a legend. It is one thing to remark, and to dissect, with the most cutting logic, the complications of life, and of the human spirit. It is quite another to give them body and blood in the story of Ajax, or of Hamlet. The first is literature, but the second is something besides, for it is likewise art. English people of the present day are apt, I know not why, to look somewhat down on the incident, and reserve their admiration for the clink of teaspoons and the accents of the curate. It is thought clever to write a novel with no story at all, or at least with a very dull one. Reduced even to the lowest terms, a certain interest can be communicated by the art of narrative. A sense of human kinship stirred, and a kind of monotonous fitness, comparable to the words and air of Sandy's Mull, preserved among the infinitesimal occurrences recorded. Some people work in this manner with even a strong touch. Mr. Trollop's inimitable clergyman naturally arised a mind in this connection. But even Mr. Trollop does not confine himself to chronicling small beer. Mr. Crawley's collision with the bishop's wife, Mr. Melnette, dallying in the deserted banquet room are typical incidents, epically conceived, fitly embodying a crisis. Or again look at Thackeray. If Rodin Crawley's blow were not delivered, vanity fair would cease to be a work of art. That scene is the chief ganglion of the tale, and the discharge of energy from Rodin's fist is the reward and consolation of the reader. The end of Esmond is a yet wider excursion from the author's customary fields. The scene at Castle Wood is pure du-mah. The great and wily English borrower has here borrowed from the great unblushing French thief. As usual he has borrowed admirably well, and the breaking of the sword rounds off the best of all his books with a manly, martial note. But perhaps nothing can more strongly illustrate the necessity for marking incident than to compare the living fame of Robinson Crusoe with the discredit of Clarissa Harlow. Clarissa is a book of a far more startling import, worked out on a great canvas with inimitable courage and unflagging art. It contains wit, character, passion, plot, conversations full of spirit and insight, letters sparkling with unstrained humanity. And if the death of the heroine be somewhat frigid and artificial, the last days of the hero strike the only note of what we now call Byronism between the Elizabethans and Byron himself. And yet a little story of a shipwreck sailor, with not a tenth part of the style nor a thousandth part of the wisdom, exploring none of the arcana of humanity, and deprived of the perennial interest of love, goes on from addition to addition ever young, while Clarissa lies upon the shelves unread. A friend of mine, a Welsh blacksmith, was twenty-five years old and could neither read nor write, when he heard a chapter of Robinson read aloud in a farm kitchen. Up to that moment he had sat content, huddled in his ignorance. But he left that farm another man. There were daydreams it appeared, divine daydreams, written and printed and bound, and to be bought for money and enjoyed at pleasure. Down he sat that day, painfully learned to read Welsh, and returned to borrow the book. It had been lost, nor could he find another copy, but one that was in English. Down he sat once more, learned English, and at length and with entire delight read Robinson. It is like the story of a love-chase. If he had heard a letter from Clarissa, would he have been fired with the same chivalrous ardour? I wonder. Yet Clarissa has every quality that could be shown in prose, one alone accepted, pictorial or picture-making romance. While Robinson depends, for the most part, and with the overwhelming majority of its readers, on the charm of circumstance. In the highest achievements of the art of words, the dramatic and the pictorial, the moral and romantic interest rise and fall together by a common and organic law. Passion is animated with passion, passion clothed upon with situation. Neither exists for itself, but each inheres indissolubly with the other. This is high art, and not only the highest art possible in words, but the highest art of all, since it combines the greatest mass and diversity of the elements of truth and pleasure. Such are epics, and the few prose tales that have the epic weight. But as from a school of works aping the creative, incident and romance are ruthlessly discarded, so may character and drama be omitted or subordinated to romance. There is one book, for example, more generally loved than Shakespeare, that captivates in childhood and still delights in age. I mean the Arabian Nights, where you shall look in vain for moral or for intellectual interest. No human face or voice greets us among that wooden crowd of kings and genies, sorcerers and beggarmen. Adventure, on the most naked terms, furnishes forth the entertainment, and is found enough. Dumas approaches perhaps nearest of any modern to these Arabian authors in the purely material charm of some of his romances. The early part of Monte Cristo, down to the finding of the treasure, is a piece of perfect storytelling. The man never breathed, who shared these moving incidents without a tremor, and yet Faria is a thing of pack thread and Dante's little more than a name. The sequel is one long-drawn era, gloomy, bloody, unnatural and dull. But as for these early chapters, I do not believe there is another volume extant where you can breathe the same unmingled atmosphere of romance. It is very thin and light, to be sure, as on a high mountain, but it is brisk and clear and sunny in proportion. I saw the other day, with Envy, an old and a very clever lady, setting forth on a second or third voyage into Monte Cristo. Here are stories which powerfully affect the reader, which can be re-perused at any age, and where the characters are no more than puppets. The bony fist of the showman visibly propels them. Their springs are an open secret. Their faces are of wood, their bellies filled with bran, and yet we thrillingly partake of their adventures. And the point may be illustrated still further. The last interview between Lucy and Richard Feverell is pure drama. More than that, it is the strongest scene since Shakespeare in the English tongue. Their first meeting by the river, on the other hand, is pure romance. It has nothing to do with character. It might happen to any other boy and maiden, and be nonetheless delightful for the change. And yet I think he would be a bold man who should choose between these passages. Thus in the same book we may have two scenes, each capital in its order. In the one human passion, deep calling unto deep, shall utter its genuine voice. In the second, according circumstances, like instruments in tune, shall build up a trivial but desirable incident, such as we love to prefigure for ourselves. And in the end, in spite of the critics, we may hesitate to give the preference to either. The one may ask more genius. I do not say it does, but at least the other dwells as clearly in the memory. True romantic art, again, makes a romance of all things. It reaches into the highest abstraction of the ideal. It does not refuse the most pedestrian realism. Robinson Crusoe is as realistic as it is romantic. Both qualities are pushed to an extreme, and neither suffers. The writer's romance depend upon the material importance of the incidents. To deal with strong and deadly elements, banditi, pirates, war, and murder, is to conjure with great names, and in the event of failure, to double the disgrace. The arrival of Haydn and Consuelo at the cannon's villa is a very trifling incident. Yet we may read a dozen boisterous stories from beginning to end, and not receive so fresh and stirring an impression of adventure. It was the scene of Crusoe at the wreck, if I remember rightly, that so bewitched my blacksmith. Or is the fact surprising? Every single article the castaway recovers from the hulk is a joy forever to the man who reads of them. They are the things that should be found, and the bear enumeration stirs the blood. I found a glimmer of the same interest the other day in a new book, The Sailor's Sweetheart, by Mr. Clark Russell. The whole business of the brig morning star is very rightly felt and spiritedly written, but the clothes, the books, and the money satisfy the reader's mind like things to eat. We are dealing here with the old, cut and dry, legitimate interest of treasure trove. But even treasure trove can be made dull. There are few people who have not groaned under the plethora of goods that fell to the lot of the Swiss family Robinson. That dreary family. They found article after article, creature after creature, from milk-kind to pieces of ordinance, a whole consignment. But no informing taste had presided over the selection. There was no smack or relish in the invoice, and these riches left the fancy cold. The box of goods in Verne's mysterious island is another case in point. There was no gusto and no glamour about that. It might have come from a shop, but the two hundred and seventy-eight Australian sovereigns on board the morning star fell upon me like a surprise that I had expected. Whole vistas of secondary stories, besides the one in hand, radiated forth from that discovery, as they radiate from a striking particular in life, and I was made for the moment as happy as a reader has the right to be. To come at all at the nature of this quality of romance, we must bear in mind the peculiarity of our attitude to any art. No art produces illusion. In the theatre we never forget that we are in the theatre. And while we read a story, we sit wavering between two minds, now merely clapping our hands at the merit of the performance, now condescending to take an active part in fancy with the characters. This last is the triumph of romantic storytelling. When the reader consciously plays at being the hero, the scene is a good scene. Now in character studies the pleasure that we take is critical. We watch, we approve, we smile at incongruities. We are moved to sudden heats of sympathy with courage, suffering or virtue. But the characters are still themselves, they are not us. The more clearly they are depicted, the more widely do they stand away from us. The more imperiously do they thrust us back into our place as a spectator. I cannot identify myself with Rauden Crawley or with Eugène de Hastignac, for I have scarce a hope or fear in common with them. It is not character but incident that woos us out of our reserve. Something happens as we desire to have it happen to ourselves. One situation that we have long dallied with in fancy is realised in the story with enticing and appropriate details. Then we forget the characters, then we push the hero aside, then we plunge into the tale in our own person, and bathe in fresh experience. And then, and then only, do we say we have been reading a romance. It is not only pleasurable things that we imagine in our daydreams. There are lights in which we are willing to contemplate even the idea of our own death. Ways in which it seems as if it would amuse us to be cheated, wounded or culminated. It is thus possible to construct a story even of tragic import in which every incident, detail and trick of circumstance shall be welcome to the reader's thoughts. Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child. It is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life. And when the game so chimes with his fancy that he can join in it with all his heart, when it pleases him with every turn, when he loves to recall it, and dwells upon its recollection with entire delight, fiction is called romance. Walter Scott is out and away the king of the romantics. The Lady of the Lake has no indisputable claim to be a poem beyond the inherent fitness and desirability of the tale. It is just such a story as a man would make up for himself, walking in the best health and temper through just such scenes as it is laid in. Since it is that a charm dwells undefinable among these slovenly verses as the unseen cuckoo fills the mountains with his note. Hence, even after we have flung the book aside, the scenery and adventures remain present to the mind, a new and green possession, not unworthy of that beautiful name, the Lady of the Lake, or that direct romantic opening, one of the most spirited and poetical in literature. The stag at eve had drunk his fill. The same strength and the same weaknesses adorn and disfigure the novels. In that ill-written, ragged book, the pirate, the figure of Cleveland, cast up by the sea on the resounding foreland of Don Ross Ness, moving with the blood on his hands and the Spanish words on his tongue among the simple islanders, singing a serenade under the window of his Shetland mistress, is conceived in the very highest manner of romantic invention. The words of his song, through groves of palm, sung in such a scene, and by such a lover, clench as in a nutshell, the emphatic contrast upon which the tale is built. In guy-mannering again, every incident is delightful to the imagination, and the scene when Harry Bertram lands at Ellen Gowan is a model instance of romantic method. I remember the tune well, he says, though I cannot guess what should it present so strongly recall it to my memory. She took his flageolet from his pocket and played a simple melody. Apparently the tune awoke the corresponding associations of a damsel. She immediately took up the song. Are these the links of fourth, she said, or are they the crooks of D, or the borny woods of Warrahead that I so fain would see? By heaven, said Bertram, it is the very ballad. On this quotation two remarks fall to be made. First, as an instance of modern feeling for romance, this famous touch of the flageolet and the old song is selected by Miss Braddon for omission. Miss Braddon's idea of a story, like Mistress Todgers's idea of a wooden leg, where something strange to have expounded. As a matter of personal experience, Meg's appearance to old Mr. Bertram on the road, the ruins of Dern Kluch, the scene of the flageolet, and the domini's recognition of Harry, are the four strong notes that continue to ring in the mind after the book is laid aside. The second point is still more curious. The reader will observe a mark of excision in the passage as quoted by me. Well, here is how it runs in the original. A damsel who, close behind a fine spring about half way down the descent, and which had once supplied the castle with water, was engaged in bleaching linen. A man who gave in such copy would be discharged from the staff of a daily paper. But has forgotten to prepare the reader for the presence of the damsel. He has forgotten to mention the spring and its relation to the ruin, and now face to face with his omission, instead of trying back and starting fair, crams all this matter tailforemost into a single shambling sentence. It is not merely bad English or bad style. It is abominably bad narrative, besides. Certainly the contrast is remarkable, and it is one that throws a strong light upon the subject of this paper. For here we have a man of the finest creative instinct, touching with perfect certainty and charm the romantic junctures of his story. And we find him utterly careless. Almost it would seem incapable in the technical matter of style, and not only frequently weak, but frequently wrong in points of drama. In character parts, indeed, and particularly in the scotch, he was delicate, strong, and truthful. But the trite obliterated features of too many of his heroes have already wearied two generations of readers. At times his characters will speak with something far beyond propriety, with a true heroic note. But on the next page they will be wading wearily forward with an ungrammatical and undramatic rigmarole of words. The man who could conceive and write the character of Elspeth of the Craig Bernfurt, as Scott has conceived and written it, had not only splendid romantic, but splendid tragic gifts. How comes it, then, that he could so often fob us off with languid, inarticulate twaddle? It seems to me that the explanation is to be found in the very quality of his surprising merits. As his books are play to the reader, so were they play to him. He conjured up the romantic with delight, but he had hardly patience to describe it. He was a great daydreamer, a seer of fit and beautiful and humorous visions, but hardly a great artist, hardly in the manful sense an artist at all. He pleased himself, and so he pleases us. Of the pleasures of his art he tasted fully, but of its toils and vigils and distresses never man knew less. A great romantic, an idle child. End of Section 6. The Character of Dogs The civilisation, the manners, and the morals of dog-kind are to a great extent subordinated to those of his ancestral master, man. This animal, in many ways so superior, has accepted a position of inferiority, shares the domestic life, and humours the caprices of the tyrant. But the potentate, like the British in India, pays small regard to the character of his willing client, judges him with listless glances, and condemns him in a byword. Dogs have been the looks of his admirers, who have exhausted idle terms of praise, and buried the poor soul below exaggerations. And yet more idle, and if possible more unintelligent, has been the attitude of his express detractors, those who are very fond of dogs, but in their proper place. Who say, poor fellow, poor fellow, and are themselves far poorer, who wet the knife of the vivisectionist, or heat his oven, who are not ashamed to admire the creature's instinct, and flying far beyond folly, have dared to resuscitate the theory of animal machines. The dog's instinct, and the automaton dog, in this age of psychology and science, sound like strange anachronisms. An automaton he certainly is, a machine working independently of his control, the heart like the millwheel, keeping all in motion, and the consciousness like a person shut in the mill garret, enjoying the view out of the window, and shaken by the thunder of the stones, an automaton in one corner of which a living spirit is confined, an automaton like man. It again he certainly possesses. Inherited aptitudes are his, inherited frailties. Some things he at once views and understands, as though he were awakened from asleep, as though he came trailing clouds of glory. But with him, as with man, the field of instinct is limited. Its utterances are obscure and occasional, and about the far larger part of life, both the dog and his master, must conduct their steps by deduction and observation. The leading distinction between dog and man, after, and perhaps before, the different duration of their lives, is that the one can speak, and that the other cannot. The absence of the power of speech confines the dog in the development of his intellect. It hinders him from many speculations, for words are the beginning of metaphysics. At the same blow it saves him from many superstitions, and his silence has won for him a higher name for virtue than his conduct justifies. The faults of the dog are many. He is veiner than man, singularly greedy of notice, singularly intolerant of ridicule, suspicious like the deaf, jealous to the degree of frenzy, and radically devoid of truth. The day of an intelligent small dog is passed in the manufacture and the laborious communication of falsehood. He lies with his tail, he lies with his eye, he lies with his protesting paw, and when he rattles his dish or scratches at the door, his purpose is other than appears. But he has some apology to offer for the vice. Many of the signs which form his dialect have come to bear an arbitrary meaning, clearly understood both by his master and himself. Yet when a new want arises, he must either invent a new vehicle of meaning or rest an old one to a different purpose, and this necessity frequently recurring must tend to lessen his idea of the sanctity of symbols. Meanwhile, the dog is clear in his own conscience, and draws with a human nicity the distinction between formal and essential truth. Of his punning perversions, his legitimate dexterity with symbols, he is even vain. But when he has told and been detected in a lie, there is not a hair upon his body but confesses guilt. To a dog of gentlemanly feeling, theft and falsehood are disgraceful vices. The canine, like the human gentleman, demands in his misdemeanours, montaigne, je ne sais quoi de générer, bit of generosity. He is never more than half ashamed of having barked or bitten, and for those faults into which he has been led by the desire to shine before a lady of his race, he retains even under physical correction a share of pride. But to be caught lying, if he understands it, instantly uncurls his fleece. Just as among dull observers he preserves a name for truth, the dog has been credited with modesty. It is amazing how the use of language blunts the faculties of man, that because vain glory finds no vent in words, creatures supplied with eyes have been unable to detect a fault so gross and obvious. If a small spoiled dog were suddenly to be endowed with speech, he would pray interminably, and still about himself. When we had friends, we should be forced to lock him in a garret, and what with his whining jealousies, and his foible for falsehood, in a year's time he would have gone far to weary out our love. I was about to compare him to Sir Willoughby pattern, but the patterns have a manlier sense of their own merits, and the parallel besides is ready. Hans Christian Andersen, as we behold him in his startling memoirs, thrilling from top to toe with an excruciating vanity, and scouting even along the street for shadows of offence, here was the talking dog. It is just this rage for consideration that has betrayed the dog into his satellite position as the friend of man. The cat, an animal of franker appetites, preserves his independence, but the dog, with one eye ever on the audience, has been whetled into slavery, and praised and patted into the renunciation of his nature. Once he ceased hunting, and became man's plate liquor, the Rubicon was crossed. Thenceforth he was a gentleman of leisure, and except the few whom we keep working, the whole race grew more and more self-conscious, mannered, and affected. The number of things that a small dog does naturally is strangely small. Enjoying better spirit, and not crushed under material cares, he is far more theatrical than average man. His whole life, if he be a dog of any pretension to gallantry, is spent in a vain show, and in the hot pursuit of admiration. Take out your puppy for a walk, and you will find the little ball of fur clumsy, stupid, bewildered, but natural. Let but a few months pass, and when you repeat the process you will find nature buried in convention. They will do nothing plainly, but the simplest processes of our material life will all be bent into the forms of an elaborate and mysterious etiquette. Instinct says the fool has awakened, but it is not so. Some dogs, some at the very least, if they be kept separate from others, remain quite natural, and these, when at length they meet with a companion of experience, and have the game explained to them, distinguish themselves by the severity of their devotion to its rules. I wish I were allowed to tell a story which would radiantly illuminate the point, but men like dogs have an elaborate and mysterious etiquette. It is their bond of sympathy that both are the children of convention. The person, man or dog, who has a conscience, is eternally condemned to some degree of humbug. The sense of the law in their members fatally precipitates either towards a frozen and affected bearing, and the converse is true, and in the elaborate and conscious manners of the dog, moral opinions and the love of the ideal stand confessed. To follow for ten minutes in the street some swaggering canine cavalier is to receive a lesson in dramatic art and the cultured conduct of the body. In every act and gesture you see him true to a refined conception, and the dullest curve beholding him pricks up his ear and proceeds to imitate and parody that charming ease. For to be a high-mannered and high-minded gentleman, careless, affable, and gay, is the inborn pretension of the dog, the large dog, so much lazier, so much more weighed upon with matter, so majestic in repose, so beautiful in effort, is born with the dramatic means to wholly represent the part, and it is more pathetic and perhaps more instructive to consider the small dog in his conscientious and imperfect efforts to outdo Sir Philip Sidney. For the ideal of the dog is feudal and religious. The ever-present polytheism, the whip-bearing Olympus of mankind, rules them on the one hand. On the other, their singular difference of size and strength among themselves effectively prevents the appearance of the democratic notion. Or we might more exactly compare their society to the curious spectacle presented by a school. Usher's monitors and big and little boys, qualified by one circumstance the introduction of the other sex. In each we should observe a somewhat similar tension of manner, and somewhat similar points of honour. In each the larger animal keeps a contemptuous good humour. In each the smaller annoys him with wasp-like impudence, certain of practical immunity. In each we shall find a double life producing double characters, and an excursive and noisy heroism, combined with a fair amount of practical timidity. I have known dogs, and I have known school heroes that set aside the fur could hardly have been told apart. And if we desire to understand the chivalry of old, we must turn to the school play-fields or the dung-heap where the dogs are trooping. Woman with the dog has been long enfranchised. Incessant massacre of female innocence has changed the proportions of the sexes and perverted their relations. Thus, when we regard the manners of the dog, we see a romantic and monogamous animal, once perhaps as delicate as the cat, at war with impossible conditions. Man has much to answer for, and the part he plays is yet more damnable and parlous than corins in the eyes of touchstone. But his intervention has at least created an imperial situation for the rare surviving ladies. In that society they reign without a rival, conscious queens, and in the only instance of a canine wife-beater that has ever fallen under my notice, the criminal was somewhat excused by the circumstances of his story. He is a little, very alert, well-bred, intelligent sky, as black as a hat, with a wet bramble for a nose, and two cairn-gorns for eyes. To the human observer he is decidedly well-looking, but to the ladies of his race he seems abhorrent. A thorough, elaborate gentleman of the plume and sword-knot order, he was born with the nice sense of gallantry to women. He took at their hands the most outrageous treatment. I have heard him bleeding like a sheep. I have seen him streaming blood, and his ear tattered like a regimental banner. And yet he would scorn to make reprisals. Nay more, when a human lady upraised the contumelius whip against the very dame who had been so cruelly misusing him, my little great heart gave but one horse cry, and fell upon the tyrant, tooth and nail. This is the tale of a soul's tragedy. After three years of unavailing chivalry he suddenly, in one hour, threw off the yoke of obligation. Had he been Shakespeare he would then have written Troilus and Cressida to brand the offending sex. But being only a little dog he began to bite them. The surprise of the ladies whom he attacked indicated the monstrosity of his offence. But he had fairly beaten off his better angel, fairly committed moral suicide, for almost in the same hour, throwing aside the last rags of decency. He proceeded to attack the aged also. The fact is worth remark, showing as it does that ethical laws are common both to dogs and men, and that with both a single deliberate violation of the conscience loosens all. And while the lamp holds on to burn, says the paraphrase, the greatest sinner may return. I have been cheered to see symptoms of effectual penitence in my sweet ruffian, and by the handling that he accepted uncomplainingly the other day from an indignant fair one, I begin to hope the period of storm and dung is closed. All these little gentlemen are subtle casuists. The duty to the female dog is plain, but where competing duties rise, down they will sit and study them out like Jesuit confessors. I knew another little sky, somewhat plain in manner and appearance, but a creature compact of amiability and solid wisdom. His family going abroad for a winter, he was received for that period by an uncle in the same city. The winter over, his own family home again, and his own house, of which he was very proud, reopened. He found himself in a dilemma between two conflicting duties of loyalty and gratitude. His old friends were not to be neglected, but it seemed hardly decent to desert the new. This was how he solved the problem. Every morning, as soon as the door was opened, off posted Coolyn to his uncles, visited the children in the nursery, saluted the whole family, and was back at home in time for breakfast and his bit of fish. Nor was this done without a sacrifice on his part, sharply felt, for he had to forego the particular honour and jewel of his day. His mornings walk with my father. And perhaps from this cause he gradually wearied of and relaxed the practice, and at length returned entirely to his ancient habits. But the same decision served him in another and more distressing case of divided duty, which happened not long after. He was not at all a kitchen dog, but the cook had nursed him with unusual kindness during the distemper, and though he did not adore her as he adored my father, although born snob, he was critically conscious of her position as only a servant. He still cherished for her a special gratitude. Well, the cook left and retired some streets away to lodgings of her own, and there was Coolyn in precisely the same situation with any young gentleman who has had the inestimable benefit of a faithful nurse. The canine conscience did not solve the problem with a pound of tea at Christmas. No longer content to pay a flying visit, it was the whole forenoon that he dedicated to his solitary friend. And so, day by day, he continued to comfort her solitude, until, for some reason which I could never understand and cannot approve, he was kept locked up to break him of the graceful habit. Here it is not the similarity, it is the difference that is worthy of remark, the clearly marked degrees of gratitude, and the proportional duration of his visits. Being further removed from instinct, it was hard to fancy, and one is even stirred to a certain impatience with a character so destitute of spontaneity, so passionless in justice, and so priggishly obedient to the voice of reason. There are not many dogs like this good Coolyn, and not many people, but the type is one well marked both in the human and the canine family. Gallantry was not his aim, but a solid and somewhat oppressive respectability. He was a sworn foe to the unusual and the conspicuous, a praiser of the golden mean, a kind of city uncle modified by cheerable. And as he was precise and conscientious in all the steps of his own blameless course, he looked for the same precision and an even greater gravity in the bearing of his deity, my father. It was no sinecure to be Coolyn's idol. He was exacting like a rigid parent, and at every sign of levity in the man whom he respected, he announced loudly the death of virtue and the proximate fall of the pillars of the earth. I have called him a snob, but all dogs are so, though in varying degrees. It is hard to follow their snobbery among themselves, for though I think we can perceive distinctions of rank, we cannot grasp what is the criterion. Thus in Edinburgh, in a good part of the town, there were several distinct societies or clubs that met in the morning to, the phrase is technical, to rake the buckets in a troupe. A friend of mine, the master of three dogs, was one day surprised to observe that they had left one club and joined another. But whether it was a rise or a fall, and the result of an invitation or an expulsion, was more than he could guess. And this illustrates, pointedly, our ignorance of the real life of dogs, their social ambitions and their social hierarchies. At least in their dealings with men, they are not only conscious of sex, but of the difference of station, and that in the most snobbish manner. For the poor man's dog is not offended by the notice of the rich, and keeps all his ugly feeling for those poorer or more ragged than his master, and again for every station they have an ideal of behaviour, to which the master and a pain of derogation will do wisely to conform. How often has not a cold glance of an eye informed me that my dog was disappointed, and how much more gladly would he not have taken a beating than to be thus wounded in the seat of piety? I knew one disrespectful dog. He was far like her a cat, cared little or nothing for men, with whom he merely co-existed, as we do with cattle, and was entirely devoted to the art of poaching. A house would not hold him, and to live in a town was what he refused. He led, I believe, a life of troubled but genuine pleasure, and perished beyond all question in a trap. But this was an exception, a marked reversion to the ancestral type, like the hairy human infant. The true dog of the nineteenth century, to judge by the remainder of my fairly large acquaintance, is in love with respectability. A street dog was once adopted by a lady. While still an Arab, he had done as Arabs do, gambling in the mud, charging into butcher's stalls, a cat-hunter, a sturdy beggar, a common rogue and vagabond. But with his rise into society, he laid aside these inconsistent pleasures. He stole no more, he hunted no more cats, and, conscious of his collar, he ignored his old companions. Yet the canine upper class was never brought to recognise the upstart, and from that hour, except for human countenance, he was alone, friendless, shorn of his sports and the habits of a lifetime, he still lived in a glory of happiness, content with his acquired respectability, and with no care but to support it solemnly. Are we to condemn or praise this self-made dog? We praise his human brother, and thus to conquer vicious habits is as rare with dogs as with men. With the more part, for all their scruple-mongering and moral thought, the vices that are born with them remain invincible throughout, and they live all their years glorying in their virtues, but still the slaves of their defects. Thus the sage Coolin was a thief to the last. Among a thousand peccadillos a whole goose and a whole cold leg of mutton lay upon his conscience. But Wawkes, whose soul's shipwreck in the matter of gallantry I have recounted above, has only twice been known to steal, and has often nobly conquered the temptation. The eighth is his favourite commandment. There is something painfully human in these unequal virtues and mortal frailties of the best. Still more painful is the bearing of those stammering professors in the house of sickness and under the terror of death. It is beyond a doubt to me that somehow or other the dog connects together or confounds the uneasiness of sickness and the consciousness of guilt. To the pains of the body he often adds the torches of the conscience, and at these times his haggard protestations form in regard to the human deathbed a dreadful parody or parallel. I once supposed that I had found an inverse relation between the double etiquette which dogs obey, and that those who were most addicted to the showy street life among other dogs were less careful in the practice of home virtues for the tyrant man. But the female dog, that mass of carneying affectations, shines equally in either sphere. Perhaps her rough posse of attendant swains with unwearying tact and gusto, and with her master and mistress pushes the arts of insinuation to their crowning point. The attention of man and the regard of other dogs flatter it would thus appear the same sensibility. But perhaps if we could read the canine heart they would be found to flatter it in very marked degrees. Dogs live with man as courteous round a monarch, steeped in the flattery of his notice, and enriched with sinecures. To push their favour in this world of pickings and caresses is perhaps the business of their lives, and their joys may lie outside. I am in despair at our persistent ignorance. I read in the lives of our companions the same processes of reason, the same antique and fatal conflicts of the right against the wrong, and of unbitted nature with too rigid custom. I see them with our weaknesses, vain, false, inconstant against appetite, and with our one stork of virtue devoted to the dream of an ideal. And yet as they hurry by me on the street with tail in air, or come singly to solicit my regard, I must own the secret purport of their lives is still inscrutable to man. Is man the friend, or is he the patron only? Have they indeed forgotten nature's voice? Or are those moments snatched from courteous ship when they touch noses with the tinker's mongrel, the brief reward and pleasure of their artificial lives? Doubtless, when man shares with his dog the toils of a profession and the pleasures of an art, as with the shepherd or the poacher, the affection warms and strengthens till it fills the soul. But doubtless also the masters are in many cases the object of a merely interested cultus, sitting aloft like Louis-Catares, giving and receiving flattery and favour, and the dogs, like the majority of men, have but forgotten their true existence, and become the dupes of their ambition. A college magazine 1. All through my boyhood and youth I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler, and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words. When I sat by the roadside I would either read, or a pencil and a penny version book would be in my hand to note down the features of the scene, or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words, and what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use. It was written consciously for practice. It was not so much that I wished to be an author, though I wished that too, as that I had vowed that I would learn to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me, and I practised to acquire it, as men learned to whittle in a wager with myself. Description was the principal field of my exercise. For to any one with senses there is always something worth describing, and town and country, are but one continuous subject. But I worked in other ways also, often accompanied my walks with dramatic dialogues, in which I played many parts, and often exercised myself in writing down conversations from memory. This was all excellent, no doubt. So where the diaries I sometimes tried to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them a school of posturing and melancholy self-deception. And yet this was not the most efficient part of my training. God, though it was, it only taught me, so far as I have learned them at all, the lower and less intellectual elements of the art, the choice of the essential note and the right word, things that to a happier constitution had perhaps come by nature. And regarded as training, it had one grave defect, for it set me no standard of achievement, so that there was perhaps more profit, as there was certainly more effort, in my secret labours at home. Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it, and tried again, and was again unsuccessful, and always unsuccessful. But at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction, and the coordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape, to Hazlet, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Brown, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire, and to Obermann. I remember one of these monkey tricks, which was called the Vanity of Models. It was to have had a second part, the Vanity of Knowledge. And as I had neither morality nor scholarship, the names were apt. But the second part was never attempted, and the first part was written, which is my reason for recalling it ghost-like from its ashes, no less than three times, first in the manner of Hazlet, second in the manner of Ruskin, who had cast on me a passing spell, and third in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas Brown. So with my other works, Cain, an epic, was, save the mark, an imitation of Sordello. Robin Hood, a tale-inverse, took an eclectic middle course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer, and Morris. In Monmouth, a tragedy, I reclined on the bosom of Mr. Swinburne. In my innumerable gouty-footed lyrics I followed many masters. In the first draft of The King's Pardon, a tragedy, I was on the trail of no lesser man than John Webster. In the second draft of the same piece, with staggering versatility, I had shifted my allegiance to Congrive, and of course conceived my fable in a less serious vein, for it was not Congrive's verse, it was his exquisite prose that I admired and sought to copy. Even at the age of thirteen, I had tried to do justice to the inhabitants of the famous city of Peebles in the style of the Book of Snobbs. So I might go on forever through all my abortive novels, and down to my later plays, of which I think more tenderly, for they were not only conceived at first under the bracing influence of old Dumas, but have met with resurrections. One strangely bettered by another hand came on the stage itself, and was played by bodily actors. The other, originally known as Semiramis, a tragedy, I have observed on bookstalls under the alias of Prince Otto. But enough has been said to show by what arts of impersonation, and in what purely ventriloquial efforts I first saw my words on paper. That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write, whether I have profited or not, that is the way. It was so Keats learned, and there was never a finer temperament for literature than Keats's. It was so, if we could trace it out, that all men have learned, and that is why a revival of letters is always accompanied or heralded by a castback to earlier and fresher models. Perhaps I hear someone cry out, but this is not the way to be original. It is not, nor is there any way but to be born so. Nor yet, if you are born original, is there anything in this training that shall clip the wings of your originality. There can be none more original than Montaigne. There could any be more unlike Cicero. Yet no craftsman can fail to see how much the one must have tried in his time to imitate the other. Burns is the very type of a prime force in letters. He was of all men the most imitative. Shakespeare himself, the Imperial, proceeds directly from a school. It is only from a school that we can expect to have good writers. It is almost invariably from a school that great writers these lawless exceptions issue. Nor is there anything here that should astonish the considerate. Before he can tell what cadence is he truly prefers, the students should have tried all that are possible. Before he can choose and preserve a fitting key of words, he should long have practiced the literary scales. And it is only after years of such gymnastic that he can sit down at last, legions of words swarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrase simultaneously bidding for his choice, and he himself knowing what he wants to do, and within the narrow limit of a man's ability able to do it. And it is the great point of these imitations that there still shines beyond the students reach, his inimitable model. Let him try as he please, he is still sure of failure. And it is a very old and a very true saying that failure is only the high road to success. I must have had some disposition to learn, for I clear-sightedly condemned my own performances. I liked doing them indeed, but when they were done I could see they were rubbish. In consequence I very rarely showed them even to my friends. And such friends as I chose to be my coffee-dance. I must have chosen well, for they had the friendliness to be quite plain with me. Padding, said one, another wrote, I cannot understand why you do lyrics so badly. No more could I. Thrice I put myself in the way of a more authoritative rebuff by sending a paper to a magazine. These were returned, and I was not surprised, nor even pained. If they had not been looked at, as like all amateurs I suspected was the case, there was no good in repeating the experiment. If they had been looked at, well, then I had not yet learned to write, and I must keep on learning and living. Lastly, I had a piece of good fortune, which is the occasion of this paper, and by which I was able to see my literature in print, and to measure experimentally how far I stood from the favour of the public. Two The speculative society is a body of some antiquity, and has counted among its members Scott, Brum, Geoffrey, Horner, Bonjamins-Constant, Robert Emmett, and many a legal and local celebrity besides. By an accident, variously explained, it has its rooms in the very buildings of the University of Edinburgh. A hall, turkey carpeted, hung with pictures, looking when lighted up at night with fire and candle, like some goodly dining-room. A passage-like library, walled with books in their wire cages, and a corridor with a fireplace, benches, a table, many prints of famous members, and a mural tablet to the virtues of a former secretary. Here a member can warm himself, and loaf and read. Here in defiance of Sinatus' consults, he can smoke. The Sinatus looks ascance at these privileges, looks even with a somewhat vinegar aspect on the whole society. Which argues a lack of proportion in the learned mind, for the world we may be sure will prize far higher this haunt of dead lions than all the living dogs of the professorate. I sat one December morning in the library of the speculative, a very humble-minded youth, though it was a virtue I never had much credit for, yet proud of my privileges as a member of the speck, proud of the pipe I was smoking in the teeth of the Sinatus, and in particular proud of being in the next room to three very distinguished students, who were then conversing beside the corridor fire. One of these has now his name on the back of several volumes, and his voice I learn is influential in the law courts. Of the death of the second you have just been reading what I had to say. And the third also has escaped out of that battle of life in which he fought so hard. It may be so unwisely. They were all three, as I have said, notable students, but this was the most conspicuous. Wealthy, handsome, ambitious, adventurous, diplomatic, a reader of Balzac, and of all men that I have known the most like to one of Balzac's characters. He led a life, and was attended by an ill fortune that could be properly set forth only in the Comédie humaine. He had then his eye on Parliament, and soon after the time of which I write, he made a showy speech at a political dinner, was cried up to heaven the next day in the current, and the day after he was dashed lower than earth with a charge of plagiarism in the Scotsman. Report would have it, I dare say very wrongly, that he was betrayed by one in whom he particularly trusted, and that the author of the charge had learned its truth from his own lips. Thus at least he was up one day on a pinnacle admired and envied by all, and the next, though still but a boy, he was publicly disgraced. The blow would have broken a less finely tempered spirit, and even him, I suppose it rendered reckless, for he took flight to London, and there in a fast club disposed of the bulk of his considerable patrimony in the space of one winter. For years thereafter he lived, I know not how, always well-dressed, always in good hotels and good society, always with empty pockets. The charm of his manner may have stood him in good stead, but though my own manners are very agreeable, I have never found in them a source of livelihood, and to explain the miracle of his continued existence I must fall back on the theory of the philosopher, that in his case, as in all of the same kind, there was a suffering relative in the background. From this gentile eclipse he reappeared upon the scene, and presently sought me out in the character of a generous editor. It is in this part that I best remember him, tall, slender, with a not ungraceful stoop, looking quite like a refined gentleman, and quite like an urbane adventurer, smiling with an engaging ambiguity, cocking up to one peaked eyebrow with a great appearance of finesse, speaking low and sweet and thick, with a touch of burn, telling strange tales with singular deliberation, and to a patient listener excellent effect. After all these ups and downs, he seemed still like the rich student that he was of yore to breathe of money, seemed still perfectly sure of himself and certain of his end, yet he was then upon the brink of his last overthrow. He had set himself to found the strangest thing in our society, one of those periodical sheets from which men supposed themselves to learn opinions, in which young gentlemen from the universities are encouraged at so much a line to garble facts, insult foreign nations, and culminate private individuals, and which are now the source of glory, so that if a man's name be often enough printed there, he becomes a kind of demigod, and people will pardon him when he talks back and forth, as they do for Mr Gladstone, and crowd him to suffocation on railway platforms, as they did the other day to General Boulanger, and by his literary works, as I hope you have just done for me, our fathers, when they were upon some great enterprise, would sacrifice a life, building it may be a favourite slave into the foundations of their palace. It was with his own life that my companion disarmed the envy of the gods. He fought his paper single-handed, trusting no one, for he was something of a cynic. Up early and down late, for he was nothing of a sluggered, daily ear-wigging influential men, for he was a master of ingratiation. In that slender and silken fellow there must have been a rare vein of courage that he should thus have died at his employment, and doubtless ambition spoke loudly in his ear, and doubtless love also, for it seems there was a marriage in his view had he succeeded. But he died, and his paper died after him, and of all this grace and tact and courage, it must seem to our blind eyes as if there had come literally nothing. These three students sat as I was saying in the corridor under the mural tablet that records the virtues of Machane, the former secretary. We would often smile at that ineliquent memorial, and thought it a poor thing to come into the world at all, and leave no more behind one than Machane. And yet of these three two are gone and have left less. And this book, perhaps, when it is old and foxy, and someone picks it up in a corner of a bookshop, and glances through it, smiling at the old graceless turns of speech, and perhaps for the love of Alma Mater, which may be still extant and flourishing, buys it, not without haggling for some pence. This book may alone preserve a memory of James Walter Ferrier and Robert Glasgow Brown. Their thoughts ran very differently on that December morning. They were all on fire with ambition, and when they had called me into them, and made me a sharer in their design, I too became drunken with pride and hope. We were to found a university magazine. A pair of little active brothers, Livingston by name, great skippers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a bookshop over against the university building, had been debauched to play the part of publishers. We four were to be conjunct editors. And what was the main point of the concern to print our own works? While by every rule of arithmetic, that flatterer of credulity, the adventure must succeed and bring great profit. Well, well, it was a bright vision. I went home that morning walking upon air. To have been chosen by these three distinguished students was to me the most unspeakable advance. It was my first draft of consideration. It reconciled me to myself and to my fellow men. And as I steered round the railings at the Tron, I could not withhold my lips from smiling publicly. Yet in the bottom of my heart I knew that magazine would be a grim fiasco. I knew it would not be worth reading. I knew, even if it were, that nobody would read it. And I kept wondering how I should be able, upon my compact income of £12 per annum, payable monthly, to meet my share in the expense. It was a comfortable thought to me that I had a father. The magazine appeared in a yellow cover, which was the best part of it, for at least it was unassuming. It ran four months in undisturbed obscurity, and died without a gasp. The first number was edited by all four of us, with prodigious bustle. The second fell principally into the hands of Feria and me. The third I edited alone, and it has long been a solemn question who it was that edited the fourth. It would perhaps be still more difficult to say who read it. Poor yellow sheet that looked so hopefully in the Livingston's window, poor harmless paper that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with the nonsense. And shall I say, poor editors! I cannot pity myself to whom it was all pure gain. It was no news to me, but only the wholesome confirmation of my judgment, when the magazine struggled into half-birth, and instantly sickened and subsided into night. I had sent a copy to the lady with whom my heart was at that time somewhat engaged, and who did all that in her lay to break it. And she, with some tact, passed over the gift and my cherished contributions in silence. I will not say that I was pleased at this, but I will tell her now, if by any chance she takes up the work of her former servant, that I thought the better of her taste. I cleared the decks after this lost engagement, had the necessary interview with my father, which passed off not amiss, paid over my share of the expense to the two little active brothers, who rubbed their hands as much, but me thought skipped rather less than formally. Having perhaps these two also embarked upon the enterprise with some graceful illusions, and then reviewing the whole episode, I told myself that the time was not yet ripe, nor the man ready. And to work I went again with my penny version-books, having fallen back in one day from the printed author to the manuscript student. 3. From this defunct periodical I am going to reprint one of my own papers. The poor little piece is all tale foremost. I have done my best to straighten its array. I have pruned it fearlessly, and it remains invertebrate and wordy. No self-respecting magazine would print the thing, and here you behold it in a bound volume, not for any worth of its own, but for the sake of the man whom it purports dimly to represent, and some of whose sayings it preserves. So that in this volume of memories and portraits, Robert Young, the Swanson Gardner, may stand alongside of John Todd, the Swanson Shepherd. Not that John and Robert drew very close together in their lives, for John was rough, he smelt of the windy bray, and Robert was gentle and smacked of the garden in the hollow. Perhaps it is to my shame that I liked John the better of the two. He had grit and dash, and that salt of the old Adam that pleases men with any savage inheritance of blood, and he was a wafer besides, and took my gypsy fancy. But however that may be, and however Robert's profile may be blurred in the boyish sketch that follows, he was a man of a most quaint and beautiful nature, whom, if it were possible to recast a piece of work so old, I should like well to draw again with a mature attach. And as I think of him and of John, I wonder in what other country two such men would be found dwelling together in a hamlet of some twenty cottages in the woody fold of a green hill. End of Section 8 Recording by Martin Geeson in Hazelmere Surrey