-which comes to much the same thing. At all events, in these two volumes, and in Sylvestre Bonnard,' we see M. France at his best as a gentle humorist.

Now the gentle humorist is one who, depicting the simple and humble in their intellectual and moral limitations, makes us love them for their very limitations. M. France, as the meditative and tender moralist, loves the humble and simple; but his keen perception of the odd and picturesque, his ability to rival Heine in fantastic portraiture and Dickens in swiftly sketched caricature, is somewhat disconcerting. The alternation of grotesque portraits and tender subjective reveriesis that the humour of M. France? Rather, perhaps, he is a humorist by reason that he assumes the guise of a Pierre Nozière or a Sylvestre Bonnard in order that he may, with the greater detachment, regard the world as a spectacle and a problem, and contemplate the humanity within and without him in its mysteries and contradictions.

Pierre Nozière, then, midway in life, will look back upon his past. Recollection is, as it were, the perfume of the soul; to assemble memories and evoke phantoms is to be a poet. Does not each of us renew Adam's adventure and awake to life in the fresh Eden of our childhood? We know not that the enchantment is within ourselves, and know not what is life. "And, after having thought over the question_many_times since, I confess that I am not greatly advanced." Little Pierre, however, pored over the pictures of his seventeenth-century Bible, and shaped the world in accord with them. The happy and simple world! But I was already troubled by that great curiosity which was destined to prove the torture and joy of my life, and to devote me to the quest of that which one never finds.' Already he preferred illusion to scientific truth. He could not endure to think that the Seine which washed the Quai Voltaire, and the dear bookstalls and curiosity shops upon which he looked from his window, flowed ceaselessly to the ocean. He would have it ever the same water, since he loved it; the eternal flux of things was all too sad. But how be sad with his hand in that of his mother, who had the divine patience and merry simplicity of souls whose single business in this world is to love"? Perhaps he could have wished to be bold and free, like the dirty little boy who used to look up at him as though he were a bird in a cage. But he hears from his mother that Alphonse has been badly brought up. It is not his fault, but his misfortune'-whereby he early realised the innocence of the wretched. But alas! one day he would fain give Alphonse a sign of his pity, and lowered a Vol. 192.-No. 384.

2 II

bunch of stolen grapes by a string down to the courtyard. Alphonse takes them and runs away with naughty gestures. Pierre is glad at least that he did not send him a flower or a kiss, as he had first intended. He begins to learn that one must give that which is one's own, and know how to give-a secret of happiness of which few are aware.

Presently ambition seizes upon him. His tin soldiers cause him to dream of military glory. But so many things, including enemies, are needed if one is to be a soldier, and so few if one is to resemble those saints whose lives his mother reads out to him. On the other hand, it is difficult to practise asceticism in the bosom of one's family. He must withdraw to the desert, like St. Anthony, and hide himself in the labyrinth of the Jardin des Plantes, which resembles the Garden of Eden in his pictureBible. And was he wrong in renouncing those dreams?

'He who can reason upon his actions soon discovers that few of them are innocent. One must be a priest or a soldier to escape the anguish of doubt. And as for the dream of being an anchoret, I have renewed it just so often as I have felt that life was wholly evilthat is to say, daily. But, daily, nature has plucked me by the ear and brought me back to the amusements which wile away the life of the humble.'

What figures, graceful and fantastic, pass before his childish and happily limited vision! M. Le Beau, collector of antiquities and devotee of catalogues, who determined his vocation by inspiring a love for the things of the mind and the folly of writing'; M. Hamoche, who did not sufficiently resemble a person who sells spectacles, nor his spectacles the spectacles which people buy,' and whose suicide caused Pierre to lose his first confidence in the kindness of nature; grandmama Nozière, abounding in anecdotes of that other century in which she was young-that frivolous and charming grandmama, who would nowadays approve nothing in me save an easiness in living and a happy tolerance for which I have not paid too dear by the loss of certain moral and political beliefs'; his young godmother Marcelle of the golden eyes, born to love and suffer, who first revealed to him the delightful torments which beauty gives to souls that are eager to understand it.'

Follow Pierre to school; learn how the charm of poetry was revealed to him by his schoolmistress, in an impayable scene; smile at the tribulations he must endure at the hands of his schoolfellows, because his mother, economical and charitable, would fain encourage tailor Rabiou, whose skill was nowise equal to his poverty and piety; join in his merry laughter at the manner in which M. Chotard, eloquent and reproachful

alternately, dictated his themes for Latin composition. Two

arts he acquired at school. blows he received :

It is a useful art.

He learnt to return with usury the

I confess to my shame that I have not exercised it at all in the sequel of my life. But several comrades whom I had well trounced showed me a lively sympathy in return for my endeavours.'

6

From these schooldays dated a taste for elegant Latin and elegant French, which I have not lost, in spite of the counsels and examples of my most fortunate contemporaries.' Furthermore, nature had bestowed upon the young humanist her fairest gift of reverie. His head buried in the dictionary, he followed Ulysses upon the violet sea, beheld the white tunic and ivory arms of Alcestis, and heard the voice of Antigone in dulcet lamentations. M. Pierre Nozière, you are busy with things that are not class-work '-and he fears that, however old, he will be liable to the same reproach.

Perhaps it is the special note of a masterpiece that it should delight alike the many and the few; and if this be so, 'Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard' is a masterpiece of amiability and delicate grace. M. France tells us when, as Pierre Nozière, the father, he discourses upon fairy tales, that a chief need of small and great children is that of beautiful tales that bring laughter or tears. The little book is, indeed, a fairy tale of the work-a-day present that may charm all readers. The subject of it is that little or nothing that suffices. Sylvestre Bonnard, archæologist and Membre de l'Institut, has his desire to possess a certain manuscript of the Golden Legend'; he is kind of heart one Christmas Eve,. and upon his forgotten deed follows the satisfaction of his long-baffled desire. In the second part, resuming his diary, he chances upon the orphan daughter of his one love, that Clémentine who long ago preferred his rival. Finding that she is ill-treated, he commits a happy crime of abduction, and provides a dowry for her at the cost of parting with his cherished library. In the place of deciphering old texts he loves Jeanne, and so reads the veritable book of life. In love he has found at last that something mysterious and sublime that had hitherto eluded his quest.

The minor characters of the little world which he chronicles are even more delightfully presented, in their sweet vagueness or sharply-defined contour, than those of 'Le Livre de mon Ami.' Signor Polizzo and M. Coccoz are amusingly or pathetically grotesque. M. Mouche and Mdlle. Préfère, the two wolves that stray into th ere most delectable

beasts of rapine. Jeanne and Mde. de Gabry are Angels of the House, loving to be loved, and, like the mother of Pierre Nozière, instructed in that Christian wisdom which rises above all misery and gives a beauty to grief itself.'

6

Chronologically, Sylvestre Bonnard is the earliest avatar of M. France, but in any ideal arrangement he comes the latest. He is a M. Coignard, fortunate in having led the tranquil life of a Benedictine; a M. Bergeret, who has finally given the victory to the heart over the head. He is a celibate Pierre Nozière, aged and mellow in tenderness. Pierre the boy saw of the world just that which, given to reverie and sensitive to charm and absurdity, he might see; and Bonnard, the aged savant, is like him, for Bonnard is a child. Despite the long years of patient toil, which allow him to meditate with a delicious pedantry, at which he is the first to smile, he is still a child, able to wonder at the fashion of this world, able to be a poet and to love. His love is even more disinterested in his new childhood than in the childhood of long ago. He can still laugh at such portions of the human comedy as come within his gaze; the mystery of life has but become the greater because of his much reflection thereupon. He has long practised renunciation, and, losing his life, has saved it. No self-sufficient sage, he has attained unto humility-that humility which is rare among the learned, and still more rare among the ignorant. He possesses the treasure of imagination, and thereby can find charm in the most trivial things of life; and he is the more rich that he is unconscious of his riches. Tenderly ironical, he can disparage himself with smiles; and ripe in scepticism, he knows the small reach of human knowledge and endeavour. But the spirit of charity dwells within him, and will not suffer the irony and scepticism that are sterile to turn his wistful meditations from harmony to discord.

ART. VIII.—EARLY SCOTTISH HISTORY.

1. History of Scotland. Vol. I. To the Accession of Mary Stewart. By P. Hume Brown. Cambridge: University Press, 1899.

2. A History of Scotland from the Roman Occupation. By Andrew Lang. Vol. I. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1900. 3. A Popular History of the Highlands and Gaelic Scotland. By Dugald Mitchell. Paisley: Gardner, 1900.

4. The Scottish Kings, 1005–1625. By Sir Archibald Dunbar. Edinburgh Douglas, 1899.

5. The History of Civilisation in Scotland. By John Mackintosh. New Edition. Paisley: Gardner, 1892.

6. The County Histories of Scotland. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1896-1900.

7. The History of Edward the Third. By James Mackinnon. London: Longmans, 1900.

8. Sir William Wallace, and King Robert the Bruce. By A. F. Murison. (Famous Scots' Series.) Edinburgh: Oliphant, 1898-1899.

9. King Robert the Bruce and the Struggle for Scottish Independence. By Sir Herbert Maxwell. London: Putnam's Sons, 1897.

10. The Scottish Parliament before the Union of the Crowns. By R. S. Rait. (Stanhope Prize Essay, 1899.) Engl. Hist. Review,' April and July 1900.

THE

HE extraordinary number of books dealing mainly, if not exclusively, with the early history of Scotland, that have been published during the past decade, bears testimony to the truth of Mark Pattison's dictum, 'Ideas change, the whole mode and manner of looking at things alters with every age; and so every generation requires facts to be recast in its own mould, demands the history of its forefathers to be written from its own point of view.' The list prefixed to this article, far from being exhaustive, can hardly claim to be even representative. Yet Mr. Andrew Lang, in his preface to the most vivacious and most critical history of his native country that has yet been written, warns us in effect that such volumes as his and Mr. Hume Brown's are but the advance guard of a great literature of scholarship and romance.

'That in the hands of a competent writer, with the space of Hill Burton or Tytler at his disposal, and with the mass of recently printed State Papers and Letters to work upon, a History of Scotland might be made extremely attractive, I am convinced. Perhaps the