illages are specially notorious for their gift of the gab: when Bailie
M'Scales or Provost Cleaver gets up to speak, no one has any inclination
to fall asleep.

A HIGHLAND LAIRD ON LITERATURE.

Max O'Rell has told us that his chairmen sometimes took advantage of
their position to push their claims for the Town Council. I have not had
the time at my disposal curtailed by any such municipal oratory, though,
occasionally, my remarks on literature have seemed to the chairmen to
stand in need of supplementing. One gentleman, in proposing a vote of
thanks, pulled a copy of Bacon out of his pocket and read the whole of
the famous essay on _Studies_. Another managed to bring in a lengthy
dissertation on radium! The following speech, delivered by a Highland
laird of a poetical turn, is noteworthy: "I am very fond of poetry," he
said, "and yet I turn with a very languid interest to the writings of
modern poets like Watson and Davidson. The verses of these gifted
singers are for others, not for me. The truth is, I don't want any more
lyrics and such like sugar pellets. My brain is already stocked with a
plenteous supply on which I browse in weal and woe, which I almost think
I personally composed, and to which I have attached a great many
emotions and extraneous incidents known to nobody but myself. My old
poetic favourites have been lying in various corners of my brain for
forty or fifty years; I know every turn, rhyme and rhythm of them; and
as they have served my need and alleviated my sorrow so long, I do not
intend to give them many fellow-lodgers more. I do not know at what
particular time literary nausea sets in, but Solomon had it when he said
that of the making of books there was no end. No doubt his father David
had primed him well in boyhood in the Psalms, and Solomon, feeling (like
many others since) that the paternal psaltery met all his need of
literary stimulus, would turn wearily from the heaps of presentation
copies of new verse sent by the rising poets of Judaea for their
sovereign's inspection. When a new book came out, Charles Lamb re-read
an old one,--an excellent practice and one which has the additional
recommendation of economy. It is not an unpleasant thing to find
yourself falling back on old favourites and losing interest in the
current hour. I knew a happy old gentleman whose reading was confined to
Walter Scott. Every evening the lamp was lighted in the trim snuggery,
and the appropriate _Waverley_