larly, the Scottish Buckle of the future, who may seek to present country-life before and immediately after the Disruption, Iwill find what he needs in works not of the class of Mr. Barrie's Auld Licht Idylls and Mr. Crockett's Stickit Minister, but of the class of Glenbuckie and Kilmallie. Such characters as Mysie Shaw, the spae-wife, and Peter Shale, the betheral, and above all the worthy but simple minister himself, recording all the details of his life, from the outbreak of NonIntrusion in his parish to the eruption of measles in his manse, are obviously drawn from the life; they have, at all events, all the reality of coloured photographs. But Mr. Johnston, like his contemporaries, does not offer to reproduce the main stream of the Scottish life of to-day. His Scotland is the Scotland. of the Disruption and of the periods immediately before and immediately after that event, and, as last year's celebration of the Jubilee of the Free Church demonstrated in perhaps more ways than one, that is the Scotland of yesterday. And the same thing is true of Miss Veitch, an author who writes of Scottish clerical life in a very different spirit from Mr. Johnston. The minister of Miss Veitch's latest and most powerful story, Margaret Drummond, Millionaire, is a narrowminded fanatic, in whose case a hopeless and preposterous love rouses into baleful life a hereditary and homicidal madness, and of whom the best that can be said is that he has a sister who is a great deal worse than himself. Miss Veitch's dislike to bigotry makes her lapse occasionally into a positively Corinthian style, and one feels tempted every twentieth page or so to mutter for her benefit the Arnoldian watchword of Urbanity, Urbanity, Urbanity.' But apart from that, may it not be said with perfect safety that the miserable and hapless Mr. M'Gregor belongs to a type of clergymen that is nowhere to be found in Scotland, or at all events that lingers in some remote and inaccessible district, unmistakeably a survival of a past that was in theology a good deal more pedantic, and in religion a good deal gloomier than the present? Even the pharisaical swindler, M'Burnie, has an antiquated look, although his misdoings are tolerably modern. In other words, Miss Veitch is forced in

her latest work, as in its predecessors, to fall back for characters deserving of portraiture upon the Scotland not of to-day, but of yesterday-at the earliest. The younger

writers, such as Mr. Crockett, the author of The Stickit Minister, Mr. William Wallace, the author of Scotland Yesterday, and 'Gabriel Setoun,' the author of Barncraig, are following in the steps of their predecessors, and, in the meantime, are devoting their attention less to types of character that are with us, and likely to endure, than to types that are disappearing or have recently disappeared.

Can the reason for this declinature on the part of our novelists to deal with contemporary Scottish life be due to the fact that that life is so deficient in the elements of richness and picturesqueness as not to merit reproduction at all? If this be the truth it amounts in effect to the humiliating confession that Scotland--the Scotland of Scott and Galt and Miss Ferrier-is played out as a literary field. For the same thing cannot be said of fiction which deals with the leading phases and problems of present-day English life. Mr. George Meredith stands admittedly at the head of living authors of fiction; he is, as Mr. Conan Doyle has put it, the novelist's novelist.' Yet his best books, such as The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The Egoist, Diana of the Crossways, and One of our Conquerors deal with these phases and problems, though perhaps too much in the spirit of the man of the cloister, playing, in imagination, at being a man of the world. Next in order of merit comes Mr. Hardy. He, like Mr. Barrie, is in the habit of going to the highways and hedges, if not to the pig-sties, of life for his characters. But in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, his latest work of importance-his greatest sensation, if not his greatest success-he has set himself deliberately, and, indeed, with a too defiant audacity, to tackle one of the leading moral problems of the period. On the shoulders of Mr. W. E. Norris has fallen the mantle of Anthony Trollope,-his more fervent admirers would prefer to say of Thackeray. His style is that of Trollope, trimmed, however, to suit the present prison-crop taste in literature. And like Trollope, he sketches the men and women of his time, although he takes them

rather from the lawn-tennis ground and the sea-side promenade than, as did his predecessor, from the Bishop's study, the drawing-room of the prosperous country-town solicitor, and the parlour of the commercial traveller. Yet he receives—as indeed he deserves to receive-the steady support of the circulating libraries to an extent that is not accorded even to the high-priests of murder, mystery, and detectivism. Take again two very dissimilar works, Dodo and Robert Elsmere, which resemble each other in this, that at a bound they have reached the topmost step in the stair of popularity. The success of both is due partially—although in the case of Robert Elsmere, only partially-to the circumstance of their reproducing life as, in certain circles and under certain conditions, it is lived in England. Dodo is the most daring effort that has yet been made to reproduce realistically what used to be known as 'the world of fashion.' It teaches the same moral, or want of moral, as the plays of Mr. Oscar Wilde and Mr. Arthur Pinero. The strain of Robert Elsmere is in an infinitely higher mood than the strain of Dodo. Even when the Oxford Hegelianism which figures in it has gone the way of all other 'isms,' it will be read for its exquisite descriptions of clericalised country life in England, and more particularly in Westmoreland, and for a prose eloquence, when the higher problems of Deity and Destiny come to be treated of, which places Mrs. Humphry Ward almost, if not altogether, on the level of George Eliot. But its original success —a success almost as great as that attained by Waverley, by The Pickwick Papers, by Vanity Fair, and by Adam Bede-is due to its having given expression-passionate expression-to a number of the more remarkable aspirations of the time, and to its having reproduced, for the benefit of England at large, that Oxford which is, and seems destined ever to be, its centre of ideas. Mrs. Ward has followed up Robert Elsmere with David Grieve, in which some of the chief democratic, ethical, and artistic problems of the period are dealt with. It has unquestionably not attained the popularity secured by its predecessor. But this is the fault of Mrs. Ward, who has tried in David Grieve to realise certain aspects of life with which

she is obviously unfamiliar; the problems which move her almost to hysterics are themselves vital enough.

Must we then accept the humiliating conclusion that the reason why we have not to-day a Scottish fiction representing Scottish life in all its breadth, or even in such breadth as English life is represented in, say Middlemarch and Robert Elsmere, is that that life does not merit reproduction? Must we admit that, so far as the great stream of literary tendency is concerned, Scotland is indeed but the knuckleend of England? Are none of the men and women who do the hard work, not to speak of the hard pleasure, that still is done on this side of the Tweed-who constitute whatever may be left to us of national ingenium perfervidumworth portraying? Is Scotland to be nothing more than the happy hunting-ground of novelists in search of those dear, queer, quaint types,' at present being idolised by English pilgrims to Kirriemuir? Before an unhesitating negative can be given to these question, two concessions must be made. Scotland does not possess a social-to be strictly accurate, a 'Society,'-centre like London; nor does it possess a centre of literary, ethical, and religious influence, such as Oxford is now, and such as Edinburgh was in the generation of Scott and of Jeffrey, and still more in the generation of Hume and Robertson. Scotland has been convulsed over a Robert Lee seeking to improve public worship; it never will be convulsed over even an imaginary Robert Elsmere sitting overwhelmed beneath the ruins of his creed. It would be altogether inaccurate to say that the fashionable Dodo is extinct in Scotland -and for the all-sufficient reason that she has never existed. Beyond question, a new writer of Scottish fiction, seeking above all things to traverse the main road of the national life, would labour under no slight disadvantages. The great fortresses of literature are in possession of London cliques and Oxford coteries. Any author who does not himself belong, or who has not critical friends belonging, either to the one or to the other, must have an uphill battle to fight, unless, like that great literary Umpslopogaas, Thomas Carlyle, he can fight them with such a redoubtable Axe Groanmaker as the 'Annan

dale vernacular;' for at the present moment style in literature means to all intents and purposes good London or Oxford talk. Finally, those men and women who, if they are not the most interesting personages in the country, yet undoubtedly occupy the Front Benches in politics, Society, and literature, are to be found, and can, therefore, be sketched, in London alone. Lord Beaconsfield, as the author of Endymion, is purely a London product. Mr. Meredith may be essentially a novelist of the cloister, the chief business of whose Sir Willoughby Patternes and Lady Blandishes is, not to speak naturally, but to utter finely cut Meredithisms; but he could not have drawn them at all if he had been in touch, or at any rate in telephonic connection, with London drawing-rooms.

But while it must be confessed that novels dealing with London and with those forces-or figureheads-of Imperial life, which are to be found there alone, can be written nowhere but in London, it by no means follows that these are the only works of fiction worth reading. As a simple matter of fact, the great majority of the novels which have become classics-almost all in fact, except one or two of the masterpieces of Dickens and Thackeray that are classics-deal with country life. This is true of the best by Miss Austen, by George Eliot, and by Mrs. Oliphant, by Scott, by Hardy, and by Blackmore. Nor should it be forgotten that latter-day improvements in railway and telegraphic communication, if they have not absolutely abolished the Cheviots, have brought London nearer even to the smaller country towns of Scotland than it was to Manchester and Liverpool fifty years ago. Even assuming that existing political arrangements remain untouched, and that nothing of a serious character is attempted in the way of what is popularly, if also vaguely, known as devolution,' London is destined to become more and more to the rest of the United Kingdom what 'the city' is to the West End and the middle class suburbs-a place of business and not of life. The decline of provincialism, and still more of provinciality, must follow as a matter of course. And, to take the very lowest view, it follows that Scotland will share along with Lancashire, Yorkshire, and the English Mid

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