tter of the bargain.

Certain gentlemen who have preceded me in this series have spoken of
letters as of any ordinary characteristic pursuit. Naturally, therefore,
they report unfavourably; but they seem to me to prove the obvious.
Literature has her own pains, her own rewards; and it scarcely needs
demonstration that one who can only bring to these a bagman's estimate
had very much better be a bagman than an author.

_'UNDERTONES' AND 'IDYLS AND LEGENDS OF INVERBURN'_

BY ROBERT BUCHANAN

My first serious effort in literature was what I may call a
double-barrelled one; in other words, I was seriously engaged upon two
books at the same time, and it was by the merest accident that they did
not appear simultaneously. As it was, only a few months divided one from
the other, and they are always, in my own mind, inseparable, or Siamese,
twins. The book of poems called 'Undertones' was the one; the book of
poems called 'Idyls and Legends of Inverburn' was the other. They were
published nearly thirty years ago, when I was still a boy, and as they
happened to bring me into connection, more or less intimately, with some
of the leading spirits of the age, a few notes concerning them may be of
interest.

A word, first, as to my literary beginnings. I can scarcely remember the
time when the idea of winning fame as an author had not occurred to me,
and so I determined very early to adopt the literary profession, a
determination which I unfortunately carried out, to my own life-long
discomfort, and the annoyance of a large portion of the reading public.
When a boy in Glasgow, I made the acquaintance of David Gray, who was
fired with a similar ambition to fly incontinently to London--

The terrible City whose neglect is Death,
Whose smile is Fame!

and to take it by storm. It seemed so easy! 'Westminster Abbey,' wrote
my friend to a correspondent; 'if I live, I shall be buried there--so
help me God!' 'I mean, after Tennyson's death,' I myself wrote to Philip
Hamerton, 'to be Poet Laureate!' From these samples of our callow
speech, the modesty of our ambition may be inferred. Well, it all
happened just as we planned, only otherwise! Through some blunder of
arrangement we two started for London on the same day, but from
different railway stations, and, until some weeks afterwards, one knew
nothing of the other's exodus. I arrived at King's Cross Railway Station
with the conventional half-crown in my pocket; liter