like the intervention of this element. Great men, they must admit, have introduced it,-Scott and Hawthorne, for instance. Nevertheless, they generally feel that it is a device recourse to which is lawful but not expedient,-a license which should be kept for the very great. We do not altogether agree with this verdict. The element of the supernatural enters a good deal into life. It is impossible to map out correctly the human heart and mind, leaving out that half-lit region which lies outside the realm of fancy and beyond the bounds of actual belief where those theories take shape whose propositions most men will not affirm and yet dare not deny. "Half-beliefs," as Mr. Bagehot calls them, have a great influence upon life; consequently their discussion has a place in fiction. Very often they are nothing but the ghosts of that passed-away host of certainties which kept up the light heart of our youth, belief in some of which we would perhaps have died to retain, but almost all of which we have probably lived to doubt. In our opinion, no author has ever known his way about the spiritualistic side of the commonplace mind better than Mrs. Oliphant. She was a past-mistress of what we may call the domestic supernatural. She never trespassed upon the vulgar precincts of mere horror, nor lost her way in the celestial country of pure poetry; neither, though her stories of the unseen are certainly religious, did she invade the various folds of the orthodox faith. She dealt exclusively with those improbable possibilities so dear to the heart, so foreign to the intelligence, of

"half-beliefs" play in life, and how bare and cold would be the appearance of the world if they were suddenly swept away.

Few of us, we suppose, would be prepared to say we believe that one mind can influence another from a distance without the help of speech, writing, or action. We are all ready to condemn the unscrupulous impostors who accept 30s. a week in remuneration for "absent treatment" of some poor credulous invalid. We are sure that we cannot project the number of a five-pound note into another man's mind, and that if we asked our friends to dinner by a process of willing, we could not tell the butler even approximately how many to lay for. All the same, when we write to a friend and our letter crosses his, it gives us pleasure to notice that the two were written upon the same day, and if, as not infrequently happens, the letters turn upon the same subjects, we think, even if we do not believe, that some means for communication other than that of the post exists between us. Friendship would be a much poorer thing, and the world a much more lonely place, if we were sure that memory alone keeps up the fire of love in the minds of the absent.

None but Roman Catholics dare to dogmatize upon the vicarious efficacy of works of supererogation. We agree with David and with Matthew Arnold that "no man can save his brother's soul nor pay his brother's debt," and we regard those who shut themselves up in convents and give their lives to vain repetitions of "Aves" and "Paternosters" to deliver the world from the Devil as so many pious wasters of time. All the same, how much pathos would be taken out of life, and how much bitterness would take its place, if we had not some hazy idea that the sufferings of good people do benefit the worthless individuals for whom they are often undertaken. The idea of

imputed righteousness lies at the root of love, but it is a sentiment which turns to ashes at the least touch of logic. We all have a vague notion that we can by mere willing do each other good or harm. If we hear a person wishing another bad wishes, we are shocked, not because we think he is doing harm to his own mind and soul -this may very well be the case-but probably we despise him too much at the moment to care a pin. Our instinctive feeling is that we have witnessed an injury and are sorry. The feeling is not, of course, so poignant as if the injury had been actual, but the one sensation is the shadow of the other. If we happen to say that we hate some one, and then immédiately hear that he is ill, we instinctively take back our words. We do not definitely think that our expression of opinion could stand in the way of his recovery, but we anxiously avoid the possibility of its doing So. The dislike to speak ill of those lately dead has been proverbial for ages. The feeling no doubt springs largely from a chivalrous fear of slandering those who can no longer speak in their own defence; but have we not also a secret feeling that our thought may injure a soul which has cast off all material protection? True, we do not feel this of the dead we have never known; the dead in history are as the dead in fiction. Impersonal hates are not very pointed, and can probably injure no one. That a sense of well-being arises in the minds of those who feel that many people actively wish them well, we all vaguely know. To look for an opportunity to do a man a good turn is, we suspect, to benefit him in some manner, even though the actual opportunity should never arise. Το hate some one to the extent of desiring to do him a mischief is to sin, we are certain, and that not only against our own souls. Many of us have experienced, or have imagined we experi

enced, in moments of doubt, perplexity, or suffering, a sense of suggestion, as if some friend prompted us to a course of action, or offered us an argument, a consolation, or a conviction. If we had asked that friend whether or no he was aware of our mental distress on that particular day, he would probably have told us that he was absorbed in his work or his amusement, and never thought of us at all. Perhaps this might prove to our mind that the whole thing was imagination; on the other hand, it might prove nothing of the sort, and we might consider that we had still a right to associate our friend with our moment of mental relief. We know next to nothing about the spiritual laws of the unseen world. The person we thought of is sure to be some one who has actually desired our happiness, and expended his mental and moral force for our good or our pleasure, perhaps when we were in no immediate need. That force, for anything we know, may stand to our credit, and uphold us when we want it most.

Sensible people if they are asked whether they believe in ghosts generally reply, with a mixture of irritation and sincerity, that they certainly do not. If, however, it is not impossible that we may be in some sort of touch with those at a distance, why is it impossible that we should be in touch with those at the greatest distance of all, with those, we mean, who have passed beyond the horizon of death? It would greatly add to the sadness of life if every man were absolutely certain that no one he had ever loved, no one whom any one had ever loved, could ever again show him, by any manner of means, the slightest sympathy or the slightest approval, that nothing he ever did while he remained in the world could ever again be of the least consequence to the person to whom, maybe, for many years his affairs were the most important thing in

life. Many men's influence lasts beyond their death; sometimes it seems to become stronger. Perhaps it may be all accounted for by the germination of the seed they sowed. Perhaps, being dead, they still speak, and speak with more authority. If it would be absurd to affirm this latter suggestion, why is it not equally absurd to affirm the former? Life is garnished by possibili

The Spectator.

ties, and made beautiful by half-beliefs. To depict it without them is to draw a picture without atmosphere, to define the facts and miss the truth:

Can science bear us
To the hid springs
Of human things?
Why may not dream
Or thought's day-gleam
Startle yet cheer us?

The influence of ballads, both English and Scottish, upon our literature is clear enough to need no demonstration. Percy's "Reliques" did as much as the poetry of Gray to herald the triumph of romance, which cast a glamour over the last years of the eighteenth century. After these examples of a bolder style, the couplet of Pope began to lose its supremacy, and not even the stout Toryism of Dr. Johnson could make good its claim to be the only poetry worth making. But the Romanticism of Bishop Percy and Thomas Gray was the mere beginning of a movement. It did no more than foretell what it could not achieve. It killed the old convention without putting another in its place. It aspired to drive poetry from the study into the open air; it aimed to replace the imitation of Ovid by a study of nature; but the old prison walls were high, the old prison doors were stout, and the way of escape, though indicated, was not always easy. The achievement of Scott, on the other hand, was not tentative. He resumed in himself the Romantic Movement. His work, which gave the world a new literature, was uniform and consistent. Both by precept and example he went back to the age of courage and adventure, which

flourished before the eighteenth century, and he showed himself in his earliest work as in his last the prophet of romance. "The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," in truth, the first great work to bear upon its title-page the name of Walter Scott, might be taken as a handbook of the new gospel, the new style. In other words, it was the first wave of that Romantic Movement which presently overwhelmed Europe, and whose echo was heard not only upon the shores of Britain, but from end to end of cultured France and sentimental Germany.

The ballad, however, had known centuries of popularity before the revival of Romance. It had already appealed both to the highest and the lowest in the court of taste. The poets had joined with the people in acclaiming the large style and the direct simplicity of our popular poetry. If it had not gained the formal recognition of scholars and critics, that is because the taste of scholars and critics is not always equal to their knowledge. But while the poet detected the essence of his art in the best of the ballads, the rough broadsheet satisfied those untutored readers who sought their literature at the street-corner. The song of "Chevy Chase," for instance, was in

the brave old days "the favorite Ballad of the common People of England," yet Ben Johnson declared that he would rather have written it than all his works. Nor does Sir Philip Sidney temper his enthusiasm in his "Defence of Poesy." "Certainly," says he, "I must confess my own barbarousness. I never heard the old song of 'Piercy and Douglas,' that I found not my heart more moved than with a Trumpet; and yet it is sung by some blind Crowder with no rougher voice than rude Stile; which being so evil apparelled in the Dust and Cobweb of that uncivil Age, what would it work trimmed with the gorgeous Eloquence of Pindar?" In yet more evil apparel did Addison encounter it, for he knew but a poor modern version of the poem which moved Sidney's heart more than with a trumpet. Nevertheless he found in this poor modern version "the majestick simplicity" of the ancient poets, and to prove his wise appreciation he compared it passage by passage with the golden lines of the "Eneid." other words, he recognized that the ballad was a reasoned work of art, not the accidental outpouring of the natural man. Meanwhile, Samuel Pepys, to whom nothing human came amiss, had made that priceless collection of ballads which is still the glory of Magdalene College. Thus through the eighteenth century the popular interest in popular poetry grew until Percy published his "Reliques," and Ritson with more justice than good manners exposed the Bishop's literary method. So that Scott's "Minstrelsy" did not create, it rather revived, an enthusiasm for the ancient ballads. But he gave them so bright a setting of romance, he enlivened them with a learning so sympathetic, that he created for the world of letters, and for himself especially, a new impulse, a new influence.

In

It was Percy's "Reliques" which first satisfied his curiosity. From his

early childhood he had been an adept in legendary lore, and such rough rhymes as he could collect were still in secret "the Delilahs of his imagination," when suddenly he came upon the Bishop of Dromore's collection of ancient poetry, printed and annotated with all the solemnity of scholarship. But the story must be told in his own words. "I remember well the spot where I read these volumes for the first time," so he writes in his "Autobiography." "It was beneath a huge platanus-tree, in the ruins of what had been intended for an old-fashioned arbor... The summer day sped onward so fast, that, notwithstanding the sharp appetite of thirteen, I forgot the hour of dinner, was sought for with anxiety, and was still found entranced in my intellectual banquet." The spell thus cast upon him endured until the end of his life. Henceforth the meanest fragment of popular poetry enchanted him. He began to collect whatever legends and verses came to his ears; he wandered far afield to find such peasants as kept green the memories of their youth; and when he undertook to edit the "Minstrelsy of the Border," he had not a little material ready to his hand. Moreover, he had stimulated his love of romance by translating Bürger's "Lenore," and when he promised to find work for Ballantyne's newly established press, it was not strange that he should sug gest an edition of ancient ballads. The work, which received much aid from Richard Heber, John Leyden, and others, was published in 1802-3, and contained, as a by no means extravagant critic declared, "the elements of a hundred historical romances."

For many years this admirable collection-Scott's first essay in literaturehas not been reprinted. And it is a pleasure to welcome Mr. Henderson's complete and scholarly edition.' While 1 Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scot

he has preserved intact Scott's eloquent introductions and wise commentaries, the new editor has not scrupled to illustrate both text and commentary from the stores of his own erudition; and such illustration is the more valuable, not only because recent research has increased our knowledge of ancient peotry, but because Scott's ingenuous enthusiasm sometimes persuaded him to accept modern imitations as old ballads. Moreover, Scott could not refrain his hand from the ancient text, and he treated his material with no more respect, if with far happier results, than Percy himself. His aim was to combine in his text the best of all the versions known to him. But this aim could not be achieved without new words, phrases, lines, and even stanzas. In Mr. Henderson's words, Scott "often found it impossible to resist the impulse to improve the phraseology, and he hardly ever resisted the impulse to improve the rhythm or the rhyme. He rarely scrupled to substitute an archaic word or phrase-if one was to be had inside or outside ballad literature-for one merely modern, especially if the modern one was jejune, or commonplace, or vulgar." Thus Mr. Henderson, and the practice of Scott, which was also the practice of Burns, needs no extenuation. A ballad is not sacred. By the very method of its transmission it is exposed to the chances of time and ignorance. No doubt it came from its maker as well finished as a bard's skill could make it. Then by a process of attrition it became commonplace, or even trivial. The difficult or rare words, which gave a color to its diction, were rejected by an ill-educated ear, and the editor in restoring archaic words or phrases was merely attempting to give the ballad the style and shape which it had lost. But Scott's ingenuity makes

tish Border. Edited by T. F. Henderson. 4 vols. Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

the work of textual criticism puzzling and intricate, and it is no small praise to say that Mr. Henderson has performed this portion of his task with consummate skill. Indeed, he is no novice in tracking changes and interpolations; he has already shown his ingenuity in the Centenary Edition of Burns; and he collects and compares varias lectiones with a care in all respects worthy of an editor of the classics. Scott, as Mr. Henderson tells us, was not so fine a restorer as Burns; he lacked his countryman's "rare intuition and genius for style"; but he yielded neither to Burns nor to any man in intrepidity; and much that is excellent in his "Minstrelsy" is due to the taste and learning of its editor. To consult Mr. Henderson's footnotes is to discover with how bold a hand Walter Scott managed his text. Look at "Sir Patrick Spens," for instance, and you will note that the fourth stanza is all Scott's own, written "to complete the story." In the fourteenth stanza, again, is a couplet which shines out among its fellows,

When the lift grew dark, and the wind blew loud,

And gurly grew the sea;

and you are not surprised that Scott has been at work again. But while there are few ballads which do not reveal in a word or a line the touch of the master, Scott, as Mr. Henderson points out, could not refrain his hand from a ballad which aroused his enthusiasm for clan or country. If ever a Scott were engaged, if ever a Buccleuch drew sword from scabbard, then their loyal kinsman did his best to embellish the ballad which sang their praise. So it is that Scott, as he himself admitted, rewrote that masterpiece "Kinmont Willie"; so it is that he did his utmost to improve "Otterbourne," and added more than one characteristic stanza to "Jamie Tel