eternal facts. Before the immense possibilities of man, all mere experience, all past biography, however spotless and sainted, shrinks away." (The Over-Soul.)

In another place Emerson says:

If a man claims to know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country in another world, believe him not. Whence this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. . . . History is an impertinence and an injury if it be anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming. As men's prayers are a disease of the will so are their creeds a disease of the intellect. (On Self-Reliance.)

You cannot, I repeat, however dogmatically inclined, construct a theology out of Emerson.

How really Emerson stands in America to-day I do not know. Unitarianism, so at least Dr. Holmes says, is no longer dominant in Boston. A mild Episcopalianism reigns in its stead. Anything less like Emerson than a mild Episcopalianism it would be hard to fancy. But it may well be there has been another change since Dr. Holmes wrote his life of Emerson.

The America of to-day is certainly not the America of Emerson's Boston hymns and songs. Old Europe groans with palaces, Has lords enough and moreWe plant and build by foaming seas A city of the poor.

God said "I'm tired of kings,
I suffer them no more;

Up to my ear the morning brings
The outrage of the poor.

"I will divide my goods;

Call in the wretch and slave:
None shall rule but the humble,

And none but Toil shall have."

It would be cruel to quote any more of what I am sure the Press, its new-born admiration for Emerson notwithstanding, would call "rant " or "fustian."

Social unrest haunts both worlds. Fear sits at

the bottom of men's hearts. "Society," said Emerson, "is devoured by a secret melancholy which breaks through all its smiles and all its gaiety and games.' Society is still devoured by this same melancholy. The nations dwell behind barricades forging fresh weapons of offence. Great guns and hostile tariffs have lost none of their vogue. If ever Freedom shrieked aloud she might be expected to do so to-day. It is hard to be an optimist on the 2nd of June, 1903.

At no time did the luckless race of man stand more in need of Emerson's spirit than to-day. His splendid courage, his undying hope, his cheerfulness, his fixed determination to quake at nothing, his spiritual independence, his serenity, his peace, are all possessions we would were ours.

O air-born voice, long since, serenely clear,
A cry like thine in mine own heart I hear-
Resolve to be thyself, and know that he
Who finds himself, loses his misery.

M

GEORGE BORROW

1892

R. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, in his delightful Memories and Portraits, takes occasion to tell us, amongst a good many other things of the sort, that he has a great fancy for The Bible in Spain, by Mr. George Borrow. He has not, indeed, read it quite so often as he has Mr. George Meredith's Egoist, but still he is very fond of it. It is interesting to know this, interesting, that is, to the great Clan Stevenson who owe suit and service to their liege-lord; but so far as Borrow is concerned, it does not matter, to speak frankly, two straws. The author of Lavengro, The Romany Rye, The Bible in Spain, and Wild Wales is one of those kings of literature who never need to number their tribe. His personality will always secure him an attendant company, who, when he pipes, must dance. A queer company it is too, even as was the company he kept himself, composed as it is of saints and sinners, gentle and simple, master and man, mistresses and maids; of those who, learned in the tongues, have read everything else, and of those who have read nothing else and do not want to. People there are for whom Borrow's books play the same part as did horses and dogs for the gentleman in the tall white hat whom David Copperfield met on the top of the Canterbury coach. "'Orses and dorgs," said that

gentleman," is some men's fancy. They are wittles and drink to me, lodging, wife and children, reading, writing, and 'rithmetic, snuff, tobacker, and sleep."

Nothing, indeed, is more disagreeable, even offensive, than to have anybody else's favourite author thrust down your throat. "Love me, love my dog," is a maxim of behaviour which deserves all the odium Charles Lamb has heaped upon it. Still, it would be hard to go through life arm-in-arm with anyone who had stuck in the middle of Guy Mannering, or had bidden a final farewell to Jeannie Deans in the barn with the robbers near Gunnerly Hill in Lincolnshire. But, oddly enough, Borrow excites no such feelings. It is quite possible to live amicably in the same house with a person who has stuck hopelessly in the middle of Wild Wales, and who braves it out (what impudence!) by the assertion that the book is full of things like this: "Nothing worthy of commemoration took place during the two following days, save that myself and family took an evening walk on the Wednesday up the side of the Berwyn, for the purpose of botanising, in which we were attended by John Jones. There, amongst other plants, we found a curious moss which our good friend said was called in Welsh 'corn carw, or deer's horn, and which he said the deer were very fond of. On the Thursday he and I started on an expedition on foot to Ruthyn, distant about fourteen miles, proposing to return in the evening."

The book is full of things like this, and must be pronounced as arrant a bit of book-making as ever was. But judgment is not always followed

by execution, and a more mirth-provoking error can hardly be imagined than for anyone to suppose that the admission of the fact-sometimes doubtless a damaging fact-namely, book-making, will for one moment shake the faithful in their certitude that Wild Wales is a delightful book; not so delightful, indeed, as Lavengro, The Romany Rye, or The Bible in Spain, but still delightful because issuing from the same mint as they, stamped with the same physiognomy, and bearing the same bewitching inscription.

It is a mercy the people we love do not know how much we must forgive them. Oh the liberties they would take, the things they would do, were it to be revealed to them that their roots have gone far too deep into our soil for us to disturb them under any provocation whatsoever!

George Borrow has to be forgiven a great deal. The Appendix to The Romany Rye contains an assault upon the memory of Sir Walter Scott, of which every word is a blow. It is savage, cruel, unjustifiable. There is just enough of what base men call truth in it, to make it one of the most powerful bits of devil's advocacy ever penned. Had another than Borrow written thus of the good Sir Walter, some men would travel far to spit upon his tomb. Quick and easy would have been his descent to the Avernus of oblivion. His books, torn from the shelf, should have long stood neglected in the shop of the second-hand, till the hour came for them to seek the stall, where, exposed to wind and weather, they should dolefully await the sack of the paper-merchant, whose holy office it should be to mash them into eternal pulp. But