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June 15, 1895.  A racial disability.

Since about one-third of the number of my particular friends happen to be Scotsmen, it has always distressed and annoyed me that, with the best will in the world, I have never been able to understand on what principle that perfervid race conducts its enthusiasms.  Mine is a racial disability, of course; and the converse has been noted by no less a writer than Stevenson, in the story of his journey “Across the Plains":—­

“There were no emigrants direct from Europe—­save one German family and a knot of Cornish miners who kept grimly by themselves, one reading the New Testament all day long through steel spectacles, the rest discussing privately the secrets of their old-world mysterious race.  Lady Hester Stanhope believed she could make something great of the Cornish; for my part I can make nothing of them at all.  A division of races, older and more original than that of Babel, keeps this dose, esoteric family apart from neighbouring Englishmen.”

The loss on my side, to be sure, would be immensely the greater, were it not happily certain that I can make something of Scotsmen; can, and indeed do, make friends of them.

The Cult of Burns.

All the same, this disability weighs me down with a sense of hopeless obtuseness when I consider the deportment of the average intelligent Scot at a Burns banquet, or a Burns conversazione, or a Burns festival, or the unveiling of a Burns statue, or the putting up of a pillar on some spot made famous by Burns.  All over the world—­and all under it, too, when their time comes—­Scotsmen are preparing after-dinner speeches about Burns.  The great globe swings round out of the sun into the dark; there is always midnight somewhere; and always in this shifting region the eye of imagination sees orators gesticulating over Burns; companies of heated exiles with crossed arms shouting “Auld Lang Syne”; lesser groups—­if haply they be lesser—­reposing under tables, still in honor of Burns.  And as the vast continents sweep “eastering out of the high shadow which reaches beyond the moon,” and as new nations, with their cities and villages, their mountains and seashores, rise up on the morning-side, lo! fresh troops, and still fresh troops, and yet again fresh troops, wend or are carried out of action with the dawn.

Scott and Burns.

None but a churl would wish this enthusiasm abated.  But why is it all lavished on Burns?  That is what gravels the Southron.  Why Burns?  Why not Sir Walter?  Had I the honor to be a fellow-countryman of Scott, and had I command of the racial tom-tom, it seems to me that I would tund upon it in honor of that great man until I dropped.  To me, a Southron, Scott is the most imaginative, and at the same time the justest, writer of our language since Shakespeare died.  To say this is not to suggest that he is