tensity, be accounted as incomplete and artistically unsymmetrical. The word 'description' is almost certain in this connection to bring the name of Mr. William Black to the tip of the tongue. In these days when boom' succeeds boom' in literature with breathless and headachy activity, the critics of Scottish fiction have by common consent given Mr. Black a back seat. This is not very surprising. Mr. Black has himself given the critics cause to blaspheme. His latest work is not at all up to the level of his earliest. His strange (and commonplace) adventures in houseboats and elsewhere are a weariness of the flesh. But A Daughter of Heth is one, not only of the sweetest, but of the most artistic stories that have ever been written. The Whaup is as assured of immortality as any of the creations of Mr. Stevenson or Mr. Barrie. But Mr. Black's day-let us hope it has not quite ceased to bewas emphatically the day of 'descriptions.' He was notoriously in demand with the constituencies of the circulating libraries, because of the purple heather and other 'patches' which he deliberately made an important feature of his stories. He represented the art of Glasgow and the West of Scotland-at all events of the pre-impressionism days-projected into fiction. May it not be hoped that even if deliberate 'patch' work be a thing of the past, our novelists of the future will not quite ignore the influence of Nature upon human life and mood? Here, for instance, in the latest of Mrs. Oliphant's works, Sir Robert's Fortune, now running in one of the magazines, is a piece of description,' which is something very different from a 'patch':

'The lingering sunset died over the moss with every shade of colour that the imagination could conceive. The heather flamed now pink, now rose, now crimson, now purple; little clouds of light detached themselves from the pageant of the sunset, and floated all over the blue, like rose leaves scattered and floating on a heavenly breeze; the air over the hills thrilled with a vibration more delicate than that of the heat, but in a similar confusion like water, above the blue edges of the mountains. Then the evening slowly dimmed, the colours going out upon the moor, tint by tint, though they still lingered in the sky; then in the east, which had grown gray and wistful, came up all at once the white glory of the moon. It was such an evening as only belongs to the North. An enchanted

hour, neither night nor day, bound by no vulgar conditions, lasting for ever, like Lily's mood, no limits or boundaries to it, floating in infinite vastness and stillness, between heaven and earth.'

Here we have a far higher and, indeed, heavenlier 'graphic' than can be found in the pages of Mr. Hardy. This passage is the accent, nay the ecstacy of Wordsworthianism-an ecstacy which it may be hoped will never desert Scottish life or Scottish fiction.

Finally, it may be claimed for the Scottish fiction of to-day that it has no fellowship with the unfruitful works of fin de siècle Decadence. There may be degrees of merit among our novelists, but it may be claimed for all of them-for Mrs. Oliphant as well as for Mrs. Burnett-Smith, for Mr. Stevenson no less than for Mr. Barrie-that they keep ever flying the standard of purity and simplicity. The latter-day gospels of sensuality and suicide have found no exponents on this side of the Tweed. The vehement moral sensationalism which Mr. Hardy has enunciated in his Tess of D'Urbervilles has made no headway with us. Mr. Stevenson is as familiar with French as with British literature. He probably knows Baudelaire and Verlaine as intimately as he knows Meredith. But he has directly protested against the 'erotic mania,' the black cloud of which would appear to be at last passing from the powerful mind of M. Zola. He places the heroine of his latest story, as has already been noted, in a position of almost Shandean difficulty; but he extricates her from it with the chivalry of a Harry Esmond or a Thomas Newcome. It would be hardly possible to exaggerate the influence for good which Mr. Black and Mr. Barrie have had upon two generations of Scotsmen and Scotswomen through their teaching by example. Scott placed the stamp of purity upon Scottish fiction, as before him Burns had placed the stamp of purity upon Scottish song. The tradition of Scott will he handed down unsullied to the latest generations.

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ART. IV. MARSHAL MACMAHON.

1. The Times, October 18-20, 1893.

2. The Journal Des Debats, October 18-22, 1893.

IN

N the last days of October 1893, the gay capital of France, suddenly put on mourning in the midst of a brief season of joyous excitement. The most distinguished chief of her old Imperial army had passed away in his peaceful home, not far from the ancient town of Montargis, which had been the abode of his later years; and the death of Macmahon was followed by national mourning. France, always generous to chivalrous valour, forgot the frightful disasters in war, of which the Marshal was largely the canse, and the political intrigues of his short day of power; she thought only of the dash at the Malakoff, of the march to Magenta, of the heroism of Wörth, and of a character, noble, with all its faults; and she grieved for the brilliant soldier she had lost, as she had grieved for some of her most illustrious worthies. The remains of Macmahon, borne in military state, in the presence of silent and reverent crowds, were laid for a moment in the Madeleine-designed as a Temple for the Grand Army—and they were thence carried through the stateliest ways of Paris, accompanied by the grandeur of war, in sorand amidst a scene that told of deep national feeling, and were placed under the dome of the Invalides, not far from those of Turenne and Napoleon. Nothing was wanting to give effect to the solemn spectacle; the new Army of France, the bodies of the State, the centres of Letters, Science, and Art, sent chosen representatives to the funeral rites; the bier of the warrior was decked with wreaths, emblems of the regret of many a foreign sovereign; and even the monarchs of the Triple Alliance combined against France gave tokens of sympathy. Yet the most striking sign, perhaps, of the general sentiment, was exhibited in another way. Paris had been overflowing with passionate delight as she had received the envoys from the fleet of the Czar, in whom she saw the pledges of the League with Russia, in which France has placed her hopes for the future; yet, at the

row,

intelligence of the death of Macmahon, her noisy acclaim was hushed in a moment, and her multitudes wore a look of no feigned sorrow. It was felt, in a word, we may say in Europe, that an interesting figure had disappeared from the scene, when the grave had closed on the departed warrior, and the occasion is a fitting one to review his career, and to endeavour to pronounce a just judgment on it.

Maurice Edmé Patrice de Macmahon was a scion of the princely stem of the O'Briens, for ages celebrated in Irish history. The Macmahons, like other chiefs of the old Celtic race, took up arms for the Stuarts in 1689-90, and were found in the ranks of the warlike exiles- the wild geese' of a pathetic legend -who emigrated to France, in the time of Sarsfield, when the cause of Ireland was lost after the fall of Limerick. More than one ancestor of the future Marshal served with honour in the famous Irish brigade, and intermarried with noble French families, and the representatives of the name, when the Revolution broke out, remained true to the falling Bourbon monarchy, with the great majority of their brother officers. Charles Laurence de Macmahon, the warrior's father, was an emigré in the camp of Condé, and a devoted follower of the Comte D'Artois; and though he returned to France under the reign of Napoleon, he took no part in the wars of the Empire, and having married a daughter of the great house of Caraman, he became a member of the higher noblesse of France, still attached at heart to their loyal traditions. Macmahon was born in 1808, at the chateau of Sully, not far from Autun; and having learned the rudiments at a seminary in the town, was sent, in 1825, to the military school of St. Cyr, to prepare himself for the profession of arms. The prospects of the cadet were good, for his father, a cordon rouge of the restored monarchy, remained intimate with Charles X., and he obtained his first commission, if we mistake not, in the corps d'élite of the Royal Guard. It is a tradition that he attracted the notice of the King by a singularly daring feat of horsemanship, an art in which he excelled through life; but, be this as it may, he, no doubt, held his own in the brilliant ranks of a martial array, which in some measure revived the memories of the Maison du Roi of Steenkirk and Landen.

The young officer, however, was attached ere long to the Staff; but its severe studies had no attraction for him, though not ill read in the history of war; and soon after the expedition of Bourmont he was placed on the roll of the army designed to extend the power of France in Algeria. By this time the throne of Charles X. had fallen; and Macmahon, full of Legitimist sympathies, was only dissuaded from quitting the service, in which he was to win a distinguished name, by the earnest entreaties of his aged father, who had known the bitterness of an emigré's lot.

During the protracted, arduous, and incessant contest, in which France gradually made her arms advance from a strip of the Mediterranean coast, to the wilds of Sahara, and the verge of Morocco, Macmahon served continually with the Algerian army. Indeed, if we except the short campaign, which terminated with the Siege of Antwerp, he saw nothing of European warfare, in the years which formed him to a soldier's calling; he became simply a French Algerian officer. He served under chiefs of the old Grand Army, Drouet D'Erlon, Clausel, and Damrémont, and under their successors of the new school, Changarnier, Cavaignac, and Lamoricière; and though his rise was by no means rapid, he made his mark for feats of astonishing daring, occasionally distinguished by judgment and skill. He amazed Arabs and Kabyles by the gallant charges he made at the head of a handful of horsemen, and by his prowess as a fearless rider; he mounted the deadly breach at Constantine, by the side of Niel, and the Duc de Nemours; he was conspicuous in many of the fierce contests in which Abdel Kader, the Jugurtha of his age, challenged the claim of France to the old realm of Numidia. He became, in a word, one of the foremost soldiers of an army famous for its headlong courage; was repeatedly named in orders of the day, and was a leader among the gallant band of officers, D'Aumale, Bosquet, D'Allonville and others, who had won their first spurs in Algerian warfare. Macmahon attracted too the attention of Bugeaud, by far the first of the French chiefs of the day, and the real conqueror of Algeria; he was made Governor of Constantine after Isly; and he distinguished himself greatly in putting down the rising of the tribes of Sidi Braham, in 1845, a holy war against the French Infidels. In his case, however, as in