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FROM ADDRESS TO THE EDINBURGH BURNS' CLUB.

THE value of Greek literature cannot be too highly rated in the case of those who really drink its blood, and not, as is so often the case in Scotland, only amuse, or, it may be, vex themselves with paring its nails; but learning, like charity, should begin at home. God made us Scotsmen, and we cannot make ourselves Greeks; and no Scotsman ought to be considered well educated who, next to the gospel history, is not intimately and warmly familiar with the lyric poetry of Robert Burns. It looks almost too much like a formal lecture to say anything in the way of critical estimate about our great national poet on this occasion; but, as every man has his own way of looking at books as well as things, perhaps you will pardon me if I allude shortly to what appear to me the grand and most characteristic excellences of the poetry of Robert Burns. First, of course, there is, what I have already brought forward, his essentially Scotch character and burning Scottish patriotism. The men who now-a-days delight to hear some small Cockney retailer of German scepticism declare that Wallace is a myth, can have no comprehension of the noble fire of patriotism which flamed in the breast of our Scottish singer, when he trod the field of Bannockburn, and felt that the single name of Bruce was of more value to a human being born in this quarter of the globe than all the sounding magnificence of London, the classic pomp of Oxford, and even the proud glories of Westminster Abbey. Had it not been for that Wallace and that Bruce, and, in after ages, for that stout John Knox, who fought for us manfully on another field, we Scotsmen should have grown up as the degraded bondmen of that mighty Eng

land of whom we are now the stout ally and friend. But Burns was not a one-sided Scot. He gloried also, as we all do, in being a Briton; he had no mean jealousy of the English. He could not have understood, indeed, the assumption implied in that recent abuse of historical phraseology which talks of the ancient and independent kingdom of Scotland, as if it were a northern province of England; but at the most distant report of foreign invasion, his keenest feelings as a Scot were sunk in the stern determination that no stranger should set foot on the seagirt shore of this tight little island. Not only the great difference of England and Scotland, but the more bitter, if not more important, divisions of Whig and Tory, High Church and Low Church, are annihilated the moment the patriotic bard hears an echo of the French invasion—

"The kettle o' the Kirk and State,
Perhaps a clout may fail in't,

But deil a foreign tinker loon
Shall ever ca' a nail in't.

Our faithers' bluid the kettle bought,
And wha would dare to spoil it,

By Heaven, the sacrilegious dog
Shall fuel be to boil it!"

The next characteristic of the poetry of our great lyrist, which occurs to me as the most important, is what I may term its reality. By this I mean that there is no mighty gulf in the case- -as we see in not a few others-betwixt the ideal and the real, the poet and the man, the fancy and the fact-but with him, as with Homer, the ideal and the real are one, or the ideal is only the natural crown and blossom of the real. There is a class of versemakers whose productions always put me in mind of those long, slenderstalked, pale, pithless potatoes which are sometimes seen

growing in dark cellars; they have a sort of refinement about them, but it is rooted in feebleness-they have none of that strong healthy fibre which only a stiff browning in the sun and a battle with the mountain breeze can bestow. They are in the domain of poetry what monks and nuns are in the history of medieval poetry-devotees of the cloister and shade. Of this dainty sickliness our ploughman bard presented in his poetry, as in his life, exactly the reverse. His poetry, in fact, was his life; and both were full of bold, free, stoutly-swimming, and widelyplashing manhood. Goethe, whom I esteem among the wisest men of the latter days, said that his own poems were at bottom Gelegen heits gedichte—that is, what we call occasional poems-poems which grew out of living adventure, which were part of the rich drama of the existence, in which every man lives who knows what it is to live beyond his own shell. Exactly in the same way Burns stood in the most vital and electric connexion with his social environment; and therefore his poems are real -and in the broadest sense, because they express the reality, not only of the man's private meditations, but of the real life which he led among his fellow-men.

PROFESSOR BLACKIE.

POSITION OF THE GREEK WOMEN IN THE HEROIC AGE.

WHEN we are seeking to ascertain the measure of that conception which any given race has formed of our nature, there is perhaps no single test so effective as the position which it assigns to women. For as the law of force is the

law of the brute creation, so in proportion as he is under the yoke of that law, does man approximate to the brute; and in proportion, on the other hand, as he has escaped from its dominion, is he ascending into the higher sphere of being, and claiming relationship with deity. But the emancipation and due ascendancy of woman are not a mere fact they are the emphatic assertion of a principle; and that principle is the dethronement of the law of force, and the dethronement of other and higher laws in its place, and in its despite. Outside the pale of Christianity it would be difficult to find a parallel, in point of elevation, to the Greek woman of the heroic age. Mr Buckle candidly acknowledges that her position was then much higher than it had come to be in the most civilised historic period of Greece; and yet he was a writer whose bias, and the general cast of whose opinions, would have disposed him to an opposite conclusion. Again, if the pictures presented by the historical books of the Old Testament and by Homer respectively be compared, candour will claim from us a verdict in favour of the position of the Greek as compared with that of the Hebrew woman. Among the Jews polygamy was permitted; to the Greeks, as has been said, it was unknown. Tales like that of Ammon and Tamar, or like that of the Levite and his concubine, are not found even among the deeds of the dissolute Suitors of the Odyssey. Among the Jews the testimony of our Lord is that, because of the hardness of their hearts, Moses suffered them to put away their wives; but that "from the beginning it was not so." Apart from the violent contingencies of war, manners seem to have been, in the momentous point of divorce, not very different among the Greeks of the heroic age from what they had been in "the beginning." The picture of Penelope wait

ing for her husband through the creeping course of twenty years, and of Odysseus yearning in like manner for his wife, is one of the most remarkable in the whole history of human manners; and it would lose little, if anything, of its deeper significance and force, even if we believed that the persons, whom the poet names Odysseus and Penelope, have never lived. It must be observed, too, what, in the mind of Homer, constitutes the extraordinary virtue of the royal matron. It is not the refusal to marry another while her husband is alive, but her stubborn determination not to accept the apparently certain conclusion that he must have ceased to live. Not even the Suitors suggest that, if he be indeed alive, any power can set her free. Scarcely less noteworthy, for the purposes of the present argument, are the immunities which she enjoys even in her painful position. She is importuned, but she is not insulted. She feels horror and aversion, but she has no cause for fear. Such, in the morning of Greek life, was the reverence that hedged a woman, as she sat alone and undefended in the midst of a body of powerful and abandoned men. WILLIAM E. GLADSTONE.

FEMALE EDUCATION.

Ir cannot, I think, be denied that the more highly the minds of women are cultivated, the better fitted they become for the discharge even of their domestic duties. The fact that women are not educated with a view to any particular profession, makes perhaps the broadest distinction between the training given to the two sexes in early life; and it seems an irresistible inference from this fact, that

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