how far chiller climate and sourer soil, centuries of unequal yet not inglorious conflict, a separate race of kings, a body of separate traditions, and a peculiar crisis of reformation issuing in peculiar forms of religious worship, confirmed and strengthened the national idiosyncrasy.  If a difference between the races be allowed, it is sufficient for the present purpose. That allowed, and Scot and Southern being fecund in literary genius, it becomes an interesting inquiry to what extent the great literary men of the one race have influenced the great literary men of the other.  On the whole, perhaps, the two races may fairly cry quits.  Not unfrequently, indeed, have literary influences arisen in the north and travelled southwards.  There were the Scottish ballads, for instance, there was Burns, there was Sir Walter Scott, there is Mr. Carlyle.  The literary influence represented by each of these arose in Scotland, and has either passed or is passing “in music out of sight” in England.  The energy of the northern wave has rolled into the southern waters.  On the other hand, we can mark the literary influences travelling from the south northward.  The English Chaucer rises, and the current of his influence is long afterwards visible in the Scottish King James, and the Scottish poet Dunbar.  That which was Prior and Gay in London, became Allan Ramsay when it reached Edinburgh.  Inspiration, not unfrequently, has travelled, like summer, from the south northwards; just as, when the day is over, and the lamps are lighted in London, the radiance of the setting sun is lingering on the splintered peaks and rosy friths of the Hebrides.  All this, however, is a matter of the past; literary influence can no longer be expected to travel leisurely from south to north, or from north to south.  In times of literary activity, as at the beginning of the present century, the atmosphere of passion or speculation envelop the entire island, and Scottish and English writers simultaneously draw from it what their peculiar natures prompt—­just as in the same garden the rose drinks crimson and the convolvulus azure from the superincumbent air.

Chaucer must always remain a name in British literary history.  He appeared at a time when the Saxon and Norman races had become fused, and when ancient bitternesses were lost in the proud title of Englishman.  He was the first great poet the island produced; and he wrote for the most part in the language of the people, with just the slightest infusion of the courtlier Norman element, which gives to his writings something of the high-bred air that the short upper-lip gives to the human countenance.  In his earlier poems he was under the influence of the Provencal Troubadours, and in his “Flower and the Leaf,” and other works of a similar class, he riots in allegory; he represents the cardinal virtues walking about in human shape; his forests are full of beautiful ladies with coronals on their heads; courts of love are held