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Scottish books; and one of the best collections in the country of John Galt's works was his treasured possession. He had many first editions.

Morison was a man of few words but of great actions. He was modest as he was kind, and the lover of good causes; the poor fellow-man ever found in him a friend. The spirit of brotherhood dominated him all the time. Innumerable visitors come to Greenock each year from every part of the world to see "Highland Mary's " grave and to study the local associations with Burns. To all these Morison was ever ready with his knowledge and his service. His loss is mourned in Greenock; but far afield, and overseas and in remote corners of the earth, his name will carry with it the air of sanctity that belongs to all greatness, no matter in what sphere it is manifested. CHAS. L. BRODIE.

THE SONG OF FRIENDSHIP.

Those who seek to make Scotland a mere province of England have a hard, I venture to hope an impossible, job before them. In the matter of railway transport we have become a mere pendant to London. But national literature and sentiment are tougher facts than locomotives. Scotland has impressed her individuality upon the world as no French province or German State could ever have done. International wireless seemed the crowning blow. It threatened the very citadel of the Scottish soul. Scottish song, which we ourselves had neglected and done so much to degrade, was to be finally submerged by a glutinous stream of drawing-room ballads, revue imbecilities, whipped Neapolitan cream, and musical spearmint from America, "considerable used up," like the quid presented for Martin Chuzzlewit's inspection by his Yankee fellow-traveller. But Wabash and Minnetonka, the cinema notwithstanding, have not yet eclipsed Doon and Yarrow. When America became audible to Europe, one of the first things heard by British listeners-in was the hilariously vocal wind-up of a dinner. And the tune was "Auld Lang Syne."

America, of course, is thick-starred with Caledonian associations, the strength and antiquity of which are illustrated by a quaint coloured print, representing a large gathering of perfervid and kilted Scots disporting themselves in a New York park on a July day nearly eighty years ago. Twice a year at least, on St. Andrew's Day and Burns's Birthday, those bands of prosperous exiles array themselves in what they suppose to be the garb of their ancestors, and assemble together to partake of cockaleekie and haggis and listen to the pipes and Scots songs and to the Doric effusions of their own bards. The calligraphy of these may suggest a waybill of the

Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé Railroad, and the vernacular may not be up to the standard of Charles Murray or Alexander Gray or Hugh M'Diarmid-the ScotoAmerican poets are inveterate aince-ers and tae-ers-but the blood is pure, the whisky is 10 per cent. Highland, and in dreams the diners behold the scenes of " Bonnie Scotland Calls You." And, of course, they wind up with "Auld Lang Syne." But the company heard by the listeners-in was not Scots. It was 100 per cent. American, at least in accent. Yet it was singing with conviction a song which before the time of Burns was exclusively Scots.

Many foreigners are under the impression that "For he's a jolly good fellow" is the British National Anthem. The author of the words of that immortal composition is unknown, and the use of the word "jolly" invalidates the theory that he was the same lord of language who wrote "God Save the King." The air is that of a French folk-song, "Malbrouk s'en va 't en guerre," which has nothing to do with the winner of Blenheim, and may be as old as the Crusades. That it should have become part of British social ritual renders less surprising the adoption of " Auld Lang Syne as a prandial recessional by the whole English-speaking world, if not by an even larger circle. Both “supplied a long-felt want." The one made up for the painful deficiencies of the British as after-dinner speakers. The other removed the menace of a concluding speech by the chairman, and provided a graceful coda and finale to the social symphony.

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Into the question of the origin of the song I decline to enter. There are two subjects in regard to which, whatever one may say, one is always bound to be wrong. One is Scottish Gaelic, the other is Burns. So I merely quote John Buchan's note, in The Northern Muse, to Burns's "Auld Lang Syne "-" There are older versions in Watson's Collection (1711) which may be by

Francis Sempill, and in the Tea Table Miscellany, and various Jacobite copies; but, except for the chorus, they have no kinship with Burns's masterpiece.

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have heard it sung in Dutch on a Boer farm on the Swaziland border." Allan Ramsay wrote a travesty,

beginning

"Should auld acquaintance be forgot?
Tho' they return with scars,

These are the noble hero's lot,

Obtained in glorious wars

and ending on that vulgarly suggestive note which ruins the effect of his beautiful "Polwart on the Green." It was the life-loving wigmaker's defiance to the churchy prudishness of Edinburgh. But Allan was less successful as a Scottish Anacreon than as a doric Guarini. He had the offensive tepidity, the leering, middle-aged epicurism, of Wieland or Tom Moore. He lacked the passion and the strong rustic savour that redeem the most daring passages of Burns. In the " glorious fragment," as Burns called it, of "Auld Lang Syne " he missed the big human note that Burns was to capture and immortalise.

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Burns is not one of " the inheritors of unfulfilled renown. He won his fame almost as instantly and decisively as Scott or Byron, and he would have reaped the full harvest of it had he attained the allotted span. A reference in Byron suggests that the use of "Auld Lang Syne" as a social anthem may have begun shortly after Waterloo. The manner in which convivial functions terminated before that date is indicated in Burns's most famous Bacchanalian song. Concerted pieces and the joining of hands were not to be expected from a company which had fallen on the stricken field. Each gentleman sang his own favourite song as he lay below the table, and by the time the servant came to loosen the neckties the unintelligible fragments of melody had blended in a universal snore. "Auld Lang Syne"

presupposes a company which is able to retain an upright posture and, in the spirit of brotherly assistance, to leave the hall of song "on the hoof."

From certain choice episodes in the career of Wilkins Micawber, we may conclude that by the time of Dickens's boyhood "Auld Lang Syne " had gained its present vogue. It was the crowning item in the little dinner that celebrated Mr. Micawber's foregathering with David Copperfield at Canterbury. "When we came to 'Here's a hand, my trusty frere' [sic], we all joined hands round the table; and when we declared we would 'take a right gude Willie Waught' [sic and likewise hic], and hadn't the least idea what it meant, we were really affected." At the reunion at Mrs. Crupp's Mr. Micawber, after a triumphant display of his culinary powers, brewed the punch and drank "to the days when my friend Copperfield and myself were younger, and fought our way in the world side by side. I may say of myself and Copperfield, in words we have sung together before now, that

"We twa hae run about the braes

And pu'd the gowans fine "

-in a figurative point of view-on several occasions. I am not exactly aware,' said Mr. Micawber, with the old roll in his voice and the old, indescribable air of saying something genteel, what gowans may be, but I have no doubt that Copperfield and myself would frequently have taken a pull at them, if it had been feasible.' In a letter to David, Mr. Micawber recalls the meeting at Canterbury, when " Mrs. Micawber and myself had once the honour of uniting our voices to yours, in the well-known strain of the immortal exciseman nurtured beyond the Tweed." In another letter he quotes, with reference to his private misfortunes, the stanza of "Scots Wha Hae" beginning "Now's the day and now's the hour." And in his tribute in the Port

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