ture and the drama, sufficed one for the
perfect presentation of life; they can no longer so suffice.

As he is not a genius he, naturally, behaves admirably on every occasion.

Certainly dialect is dramatic. It is a vivid method of re-creating a
past that never existed. It is something between 'A Return to Nature'
and 'A Return to the Glossary.' It is so artificial that it is really
naive. From the point of view of mere music, much may be said for it.
Wonderful diminutives lend new notes of tenderness to the song. There
are possibilities of fresh rhymes, and in search for a fresh rhyme poets
may be excused if they wander from the broad highroad of classical
utterance into devious byways and less-trodden paths. Sometimes one is
tempted to look on dialect as expressing simply the pathos of
provincialisms, but there is more in it than mere mispronunciation. With
that revival of an antique form, often comes the revival of an antique
spirit. Through limitations that are sometimes uncouth, and always
narrow, comes Tragedy herself; and though she may stammer in her
utterance, and deck herself in cast-off weeds and trammelling raiment,
still we must hold ourselves in readiness to accept her, so rare are her
visits to us now, so rare her presence in an age that demands a happy
ending from every play, and that sees in the theatre merely a source of
amusement.

There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards.
The last page is, as a rule, the most interesting, and when one begins
with the catastrophe or the _denoument_ one feels on pleasant terms of
equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a
theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hairbreadth escapes of the
hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved.

He has every form of sincerity except the sincerity of the artist, a
defect that he shares with most of our popular writers.

On the whole _Primavera_ is a pleasant little book, and we are glad to
welcome it. It is charmingly 'got up,' and undergraduates might read it
with advantage during lecture hours.

* * * * *

Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press

Footnotes:

{2} Reverently some well-meaning persons have placed a marble slab on
the wall of the cemetery with a medallion-profile of Keats on it and some
mediocre