us
Of ancient heritage--
Of manners, speech, of humours, polity,
The limited horizon of our stage--
Old love, hope, fear,
All this I fain would fix upon the page;
That so the coming age,
Lost in the empire's mass,
Yet haply longing for their fathers, here
May see, as in a glass,
What they held dear--
May say, ''Twas thus and thus
They lived'; and as the time-flood onward rolls
Secure an anchor for their Keltic souls."

This was his task, and the public of course set him down for a rustic.
"What ought I to do?" he demands. "Shall I put on my next title-page,
'Late Fellow of Oriel, etc.'? or am I always to abide under this ironic
cloak of rusticity?" To be sure, on consideration (if the public ever
found time to consider), the language and feeling of the poems were
penetrated with scholarship. He entered his countrymen's hearts; but he
also could, and did, stand outside and observe them with affectionate,
comprehending humour. Scholarship saved him, too--not always, but as a
rule--from that emotional excess to which he knew himself most dangerously
prone. He assigns it confidently to his Manx blood; but his mother was
Scottish by descent, and from my experience of what the Lowland Scot can
do in the way of pathos when he lets himself go, I take leave to doubt
that the Manxman was wholly to blame. There can, however, be no doubt
that the author of "The Doctor," of "Catherine Kinrade," of "Mater
Dolorosa," described himself accurately as a "born sobber," or that an
acquired self-restraint saved him from a form of intemperance by which of
late our literature has been somewhat too copiously afflicted.

To scholarship, too, imposed upon and penetrating a taste naturally
catholic, we owe the rare flavour of the many literary judgments scattered
about his letters. They have a taste of native earth, beautifully
rarefied: to change the metaphor, they illuminate the page with a kind of
lambent common sense. For a few examples:--

"I have also read a causerie on Virgil and one on Theocritus. So many
French _litterateurs_ give me the idea that they don't go nearer the
Greek authors than the Latin translations. . . . Sainte Beuve
[_Nouveaux Lundis_, vii. 1--52, on 'The Greek Anthology'] is an
enthusiastic champion for our side, but, oddly enough, he never
strikes me as knowing much about