It is pleasant to turn again to Mr. Colvin, who criticises always with modesty and often with acumen.  We do not agree with him when he accepts Mrs. Owens’s theory of a symbolic and allegoric meaning underlying Endymion, his final judgment on Keats as ’the most Shaksperean spirit that has lived since Shakspere’ is not very fortunate, and we are surprised to find him suggesting, on the evidence of a rather silly story of Severn’s, that Sir Walter Scott was privy to the Blackwood article.  There is nothing, however, about his estimate of the poet’s work that is harsh, irritating or uncouth.  The true Marcellus of English song has not yet found his Virgil, but Mr. Colvin makes a tolerable Statius.

(1) Keats.  By Sidney Colvin.  ‘English Men of Letters’ Series.  (Macmillan and Co.)

(2) Life of John Keats.  By William Michael Rossetti.  ‘Great Writers’ Series. (Walter Scott.)

A SCOTCHMAN ON SCOTTISH POETRY

(Pall Mall Gazette, October 24, 1887.)

A distinguished living critic, born south of the Tweed, once whispered in confidence to a friend that he believed that the Scotch knew really very little about their own national literature.  He quite admitted that they love their ‘Robbie Burns’ and their ‘Sir Walter’ with a patriotic enthusiasm that makes them extremely severe upon any unfortunate southron who ventures to praise either in their presence, but he claimed that the works of such great national poets as Dunbar, Henryson and Sir David Lyndsay are sealed books to the majority of the reading public in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow, and that few Scotch people have any idea of the wonderful outburst of poetry that took place in their country during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, at a time when there was little corresponding development in England.  Whether this terrible accusation be absolutely true, or not, it is needless to discuss at present.  It is probable that the archaism of language alone will always prevent a poet like Dunbar from being popular in the ordinary acceptation of the word.  Professor Veitch’s book, however, shows that there are some, at any rate, in the ‘land o’ cakes’ who can admire and appreciate their marvellous early singers, and whose admiration for The Lord of the Isles and the verses To a Mountain Daisy does not blind them to the exquisite beauties of The Testament of Cresseid, The Thistle and the Rose, and the Dialog betwix Experience and ane Courteour.

Taking as the subject of his two interesting volumes the feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry, Professor Veitch starts with a historical disquisition on the growth of the sentiment in humanity.  The primitive state he regards as being simply a sort of ‘open-air feeling.’  The chief sources of pleasure are the warmth of the sunshine, the cool of the breeze and the general fresh aspect of the earth and sky, connecting itself with a consciousness of life and