THE melancholy death of Mr Andrew Lang has been the occasion of a multitude of tributes in the press which bear unequivocal testimony to his remarkable position in the world of journalism and letters. That he was at the head of his profession, that he was the deacon of his craft, was tacitly conceded or assumed by all. There were differences of opinion as to the intrinsic value of his work. Among so many voices some must have been raised by persons unfitted, from constitution or training, to do justice to his peculiar merits. But of malicious detraction or premeditated disparagement scarce a sound has reached our ears.

In attempting to commit to paper for remembrance some notes on the salient characteristics of his temperament and genius, it is natural that the first thought should be of his unique versatility. Nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit, to quote once more an epitaph which has been in great requisition; and the remainder of the sentence may also be applied to him without any qualification. For the best part of quarter of a century he had been a regular contributor to 'Maga. During that period he wrote, inter alia, of ghosts, of Homer, of 'Edwin Drood,' of Queen Mary, of games, of certain favourite byways of history. These are but a few of the subjects on

which he discoursed to the world with a felicity and a charm all his own. He could not "bring it twangingly off" save on themes which interested him. Fortunately the range of his interests was unusually extensive. Yet he would never have been able to display his characteristic ease and mastery but for the habit of unremitting industry. True, he wrote with an enviable facility. His, too, was the precious faculty of utilising odd minutes, of filling up spare moments whenever and wherever they occurred. Ingenuous youth with a turn for writing is apt to picture the successful journalist "dashing off" his epoch-making articles in less than no time for a princely fee. If any one ever seemed to lend countenance by his example to the "dashing off" fallacy it was Mr Lang. But beneath all his brilliance and rapidity and grace was a foundation of sound learning, laid by sheer hard work, as genuine and exacting in its kind as that which is essential to the barrister or the man of business. Since the death of Southey there has been no more conscientious, no better equipped labourer in the vineyard of letters. To the very end he was working "up to the collar"; and, if he sometimes felt the strain and scrupled not to say so, there was never for one moment the slightest relaxation of effort.

It were idle in the meantime

to weigh his multifarious productions in the scales, and by balancing his grave against his gay, his poetry against his criticism, his criticism against his history, to conjecture what portions will be best remembered by future generations. Doubtless his choicer gifts reached their high-water mark in some of his sonnets. Possibly some of his very best stuff lies buried in the files of 'The Saturday Review.' Curiously enough, the most disappointing of his works is the 'Life of Sir George Mackenzie.' We suspect that in the course of composition he discovered a promising subject to be for some reason or other less congenial than he had anticipated. The book bears unmistakable traces of fatigue, if not of disgust: traces from which his magnum opus is surprisingly free. The History of Scotland' was conceived upon a modest scale. It expanded, however, from a text-book for the use of the upper forms of schools into the four solid volumes which occupied the chief of his waking hours for some of the best years of his life, and upon which he bestowed more pains and trouble than upon any other single work. There the final structure far outran the original design. It was not so with his History of English Literature from Beowulf to Swinburne.' He must have been well aware of the magnitude of such an enterprise. To prepare

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a hand-book of that subject is a task which no man competent to undertake it could contemplate at any time of life without a sinking of the heart. He did not flinch, notwithstanding the burden of wellnigh threescore years and ten, and the book appeared in the very week in which he diedhis last testament and confession, as it were, to the educated public.

Everybody is more or less familiar with the style in which such compilations for scholastic purposes are usually executed. We must all have noted how the hackneyed statements and the hackneyed judgments get passed on from hand to hand. We must all have become conscious how the necessary process of compression squeezes out the vital juices which firsthand study and appreciation alone can be trusted to supply. Mr Lang's 'History of English Literature' is one of the few performances of its class instinct with real life. In tone and method it is the very antithesis of Brunetière's wellknown manual of French literature. It is a delightful causerie, in which, from the first page to the last, we seem to be listening to the author's living utterance. Like others of his works, it discloses a fair proportion of those mysterious slips of the pen which the critical novice delights to castigate, but which, as older hands know too well, successfully pursue the fallentis semita vitæ in proof, and leap into the

blaze of day only when the sheets have issued from the press beyond recall. The presence of such patent corrigenda, however, in no wise diminishes the attractiveness of the book. The author's opinions invariably spring from the direct application to the matter in hand of a sensitive, vigilant, and trained intelligence, so that, even when they seem wayward -88 in the vilipending of 'Jonathan Wild'they are neither petulant nor "thrawn." It is refreshing, though not unexpected, to find a really adequate estimate of Miss Austen, in which her matchless genius is neither patronised nor poohpooh'd. Equally refreshing is

it to come across an account of such Restoration dramatists as Otway and Lee which conveys an intelligible impression of their place in our literature, and imparts a correct understanding of how and what they wrote. Wherever the reader pleases to dip into the volume, he is certain to light upon something at once true and pregnant. For not the least of its excellences is that Mr Lang has "let himself go," and indulged in a thousand of those happy strokes of which he alone possessed the secret; strokes which never decline upon the mechanical artifice of epigram, but which serve to elucidate all that is to be told with unrivalled humour, delicacy, and precision. Thus, of Smollett's heroines he remarks that they are regarded by his heroes "rather as luxuries than as ladies." Of Southey he notes that, "on

entering Balliol College, Oxford, he declared himself a rebel, wearing his hair long, as becomes men of genius, while women of genius commonly wear their hair short." Browning, he tells us, won the applause of readers who value "thought" in poetry. "Of these many preferred the passages most difficult of comprehension, and found joy in mysteries where the difficulties were really caused by the manner of the poet." FitzGerald's 'Omar,' "though idolised by the ised by the worst judges," remains a very pretty piece of paganism. "Before his fortieth year,' Mr Gosse informs us, there had set in a curious ossification of Swinburne's intellect.' But this appears only

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to mean that he saw no merit in Ibsen, Stevenson, Dostoieffsky." The truth the same poet's criticisms, he remarks, "would not be less apparent if the critic did not speak in the tones of a demoniac, and write sentences longer and less easily to be construed than those of Clarendon." On the appearance of "The Newcomes, every one wept with the good Colonel, loathed the Campaigner, sighed with Clive, was more or less in love with Ethel, and was anxious, vainly anxious, to see no more of Laura Pendennis: an angel, perhaps, but a recording angel." Finally, Richard Richard Edgeworth is described as "an energetic and intelligent man, reckoned one of the leading bores of his age." It is in such passages. and the anthology might have been

indefinitely enlarged-that we seem to hear the very voice of our friend yet speaking.

Our last quotation brings to mind a strongly marked trait in Mr Lang: his dislike of all ill-founded pretension. He heartily detested bores and pedants, both in print and in the flesh. He detested even more heartily the "movements," the crazes, the societies for the promotion of this crotchet or of that, with which bores and pedants are invariably associated. It was not merely that his keen sense of the ludicrous made him alive to their countless absurdities: their whole mental attitude, their claims to "intellectual" and moral superiority, were utterly abhorrent to his candid and well-balanced mind. Not since the period of the 'AntiJacobin' has the noisy race of busy bodies, system - mongers, regenerators of society, and wiseacres, had so deadly a critic. In every generation there is apt to spring up a body of men who, adding to natural abilities and an uncommon stock of assurance a certain amount of specialised knowledge, terrorise the rest of the world under the guise of "experts." Thinking that they find something rotten in the state of Denmark, incapable of calm reflection, and eager for notoriety, they hit upon a specific for what is amiss, compared with which all others are spurious imitations. Their field of interest may range from solar mythology to "eugenics," but the threefold badge of the

tribe is an overweening belief in their Own infallibility, coupled with a proportionate contempt for ordinary human beings; the command of a barbarous jargon; and an irrepressible desire to badger and bully their unfortunate fellowcreatures. For a pardonable reluctance to swallow the nostrum without some proof of its quality the latter are labelled "obscurantists," "reactionaries," and (most horrible of all) "medieval." The regenerators, on the other hand, are leaders of "thought," to differ from whom is to write one's self down a criminal. This singularly offensive class of person was very prominent in the age of Voltaire and the Encyclopædia; was not unknown in the early days of 'The Edinburgh Review'; and was well to the fore in the reign of Queen Victoria. But never has it flourished with so rank a luxuriance as in our own time, when no theory is too fantastic, no project too insane, to escape a Bishop's blessing. A halfeducated proletariate, which has been taught to throw the old beliefs overboard, wildly clutches at the last doctor or professor whose name has been "starred" in the newspapers, in its blind groping for the guidance of "authority." It was the intellectual arrogance inseparable from this type of mind which found in Mr Lang a relentless foe. He was strong where the "thinkers" weak. He had a sense of humour, a working knowledge of the laws of evidence, and a familiarity with the rules of

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logic. He was also skilled in the method vulgarly described as "knocking his opponents' heads together." His attacks gave them no little uneasiness, for, their stock-in-trade being chiefly a mass of a priori assumptions, they knew not with what weapons they should meet him. But at one point Mr Lang was at a serious disadvantage. He could not help being readable and entertaining. And they had their revenge in being able to point triumphantly to those infallible indicia of the hopeless "amateur.”

He reserved his most deadly shafts for the founders of new religions and the apostles of new moral codes. New-fangled religions and newfangled

moralities he knew must be false, for any apparently novel truth which they contained turned out upon closer examination to be as old as human society itself. As he says of Captain Marryat's novels, he was full of "sound honest views of life and duty." In all business dealings he was the soul of integrity and honour, abhorring the sophistries which make good faith and loyalty melt into thin air. It is consequently not surprising that he had no taste for party politics. A system under which men keep two sets of opinions, one for public, the other for private, use presented no attraction to a nature constituted as his was. But by whatever name he may formerly have chosen to describe himself, his whole instincts were fundamentally and strongly conservative. He asked noth

ing better than to be allowed stare super antiquas vias: "progress," and the vociferous cant of progress, he knew for a delusion and a snare. The civilisation and culture in which he was steeped were those of ancient Europe: a civilisation and a culture which, firmly rooted in the humanities, it is the honourable boast of our older Universities still to maintain, despite assaults from without and treason from within. A true son of Oxford, he must have viewed with serious misgiving the growth of a frame of mind which regards it as the chief business of those who are supported by her noble foundations, to intrigue with wirepulling politicians and to act as "bonnet" to the most impudent anarchists. Of his fellow - countrymen north of the Tweed he had a thorough understanding. He was well acquainted with their foibles, and knew their vulnerable points. It was amusing to watch the effect he produced upon a certain class of Scot,— the class of Scot who punctually called him "Dr" Lang on the strength of his honorary degrees, and thought he liked it. The 'doctoring" class do not much understand raillery, though they sometimes guess that they are being laughed at. They can take their turn at a a "flyting," but they are baffled by controversy in which dexterous badinage takes the place of solemn repartee. Mr Lang began by mystifying and ended by irritating them. In their perplexity and annoyance they were reduced to the last