so much indebted; Burns himself, Leyden, Sir Walter Scott, James Hogg and (longo intervallo) Christopher North and the late Professor Shairp.  On nearly all these poets Professor Veitch writes with fine judgment and delicate feeling, and even his admiration for Burns has nothing absolutely aggressive about it.  He shows, however, a certain lack of the true sense of literary proportion in the amount of space he devotes to the two last writers on our list.  Christopher North was undoubtedly an interesting personality to the Edinburgh of his day, but he has not left behind him anything of real permanent value.  There was too much noise in his criticism, too little music in his poetry.  As for Professor Shairp, looked on as a critic he was a tragic example of the unfortunate influence of Wordsworth, for he was always confusing ethical with aesthetical questions, and never had the slightest idea how to approach such poets as Shelley and Rossetti whom it was his mission to interpret to young Oxford in his later years; {189} while, considered as a poet, he deserves hardly more than a passing reference.  Professor Veitch gravely tells us that one of the descriptions of Kilmahoe is ’not surpassed in the language for real presence, felicity of epithet, and purity of reproduction,’ and statements of this kind serve to remind us of the fact that a criticism which is based on patriotism is always provincial in its result.  But it is only fair to add that it is very rarely that Professor Veitch is so extravagant and so grotesque.  His judgment and taste are, as a rule, excellent, and his book is, on the whole, a very fascinating and delightful contribution to the history of literature.

The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry.  By John Veitch, Professor of Logic and Rhetoric in the University of Glasgow. (Blackwood and Son.)

LITERARY AND OTHER NOTES—­I

(Woman’s World, November 1887.)

The Princess Christian’s translation of the Memoirs of Wilhelmine, Margravine of Baireuth, is a most fascinating and delightful book.  The Margravine and her brother, Frederick the Great, were, as the Princess herself points out in an admirably written introduction, ’among the first of those questioning minds that strove after spiritual freedom’ in the last century.  ‘They had studied,’ says the Princess, ’the English philosophers, Newton, Locke, and Shaftesbury, and were roused to enthusiasm by the writings of Voltaire and Rousseau.  Their whole lives bore the impress of the influence of French thought on the burning questions of the day.  In the eighteenth century began that great struggle of philosophy against tyranny and worn-out abuses which culminated in the French Revolution.  The noblest minds were engaged in the struggle, and, like most reformers, they pushed their conclusions to extremes, and too often lost sight of the need of a due proportion in things.  The Margravine’s influence on the intellectual development of her country is untold.  She formed at Baireuth a centre of culture and learning which had before been undreamt of in Germany.’