y be ever so beautiful, the air ever so clear, the
shadows give back a sensitive, luminous darkness that reveals tragedies
within itself.

Not that the sentient background, as he has painted it, is to be
confounded with the "sympathy of nature with character" of the older
school, in which hysterical emotion is accentuated by wild wind storms,
and the happiness of lovers by a sunshiny day. But character, as
depicted by him in these early novels, is so far subordinate to nature
that nature assumes moral responsibility. When Macleod of Dare commits
murder and then suicide, we accept it as the result of climatic
influences; and the tranquil-conscienced Hamish, the would-be homicide,
but obeys the call of the winds. Especially in the delightful romances
of Skye, Mr. Black reproduces the actual speech and manners of
the people.

And as romance of motive clothes barren rocks in rich hues and waste
bogland in golden gorse, it does like loving service for homely
characters. The dialect these people talk, without editorial comment,
delights and amuses from its strangeness, and also from the conviction
that it is as real as the landscape. They tell wonderful tales of moor
and fen as they tramp the woods or sail on moonlit waters, and sitting
by a peat fire of a stormy night, discuss, between deep pulls of Scotch
whisky, the Erastianism that vitiates modern theology. We must look in
the pages of Scott for a more charming picture of the relation of
clansman to chief.

But Mr. Black is his own most formidable rival. He who painted the
sympathetic landscapes of northern Scotland has taught the reader the
subtle distinction between these delicate scenes and those in which
nature's moods are obtrusively chronicled. There are novels by Mr. Black
in reading which we exclaim, with the exhausted young lady at the end of
her week's sight-seeing, "What! another sunset!" And he set himself a
difficult task when he attempted to draw another character so human and
so lovable as the Princess of Thule, although the reader were ungracious
indeed did he not welcome the beautiful young lady with the kind heart
and the proud, hurt smile, whom he became familiar with through frequent
encounters in the author's other novels. And if Earlscope, who has a dim
sort of kinship with the more vigorous hero of 'Jane Eyre,' has been
succeeded by well-bred young gentlemen who never smoke in the presence
of their female relatives, though they are master hands a