1865 to Balliol College, Oxford. In 1868, having taken a first class both in moderations and in literae humaniores, he was elected to an open fellowship at Merton College.
A career of academic distinction now lay before him. But although he occasionally resided (a carved door-top and oak mantelpiece still testify to his interest in his college rooms), he was by temperament unsuited to collegiate routine, and his literary talents pointed clearly elsewhere. In 1873 the doctors passed sentence on his lungs, and he went abroad for a time; but the trouble was averted. In 1875 he married Miss Leonora Blanche Alleyne, the youngest daughter of Mr. C. T. Alleyne, of Clifton and Barbados. He vacated his Merton fellowship, and settled down in London to a life of journalism and letters.
For journalism, which he practised with unremitting diligence for nearly forty years, Lang was unusually well qualified, combining with a lively scholarship and wit a remarkable range of miscellaneous and immediately applicable knowledge, a facility in writing which astonished even Fleet Street, and a complete indifference to time or place or interruptions. ‘He would turn into the pavilion during the intervals of a cricket match’, says a friend, ‘and begin, finish, or write some middle page of an article, on the corner of a table or the top of a locker, quite as comfortably as he would in his own study.’ His essays and articles found their public at once, and kept it grateful to the end. His sparkling verses proclaimed a new and happy talent. His characteristic studies, also, were already taking shape. By 1875 he was making his name as a folk-lorist, he was hard at work on Homer, and had been selected by Spencer Baynes to write for the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1875–1889). The articles in that work on Apparitions, Ballads, The Casket Letters, Crystal-gazing, Fairy, Family, Edmund Gurney, Hauntings, La Cloche, Molière, Mythology, Name, Poltergeist, Prometheus, Psychical Research, Scotland, Second Sight, Tale, and Totemism are all from his pen.
Lang's first book was of verse, his Ballads and Lyrics of Old France (1872). It was followed in 1880 by xxii Ballades in Blue China, which became xxxii the next year. These two books helped to inaugurate a revival, which Théodore de Banville had already established in France and with which Swinburne had toyed, of the old French modes of ballade, triolet, and rondeau. It was a notable contribution to English prosodical resources. His Helen of Troy (1882) was more ambitious. It is a narrative poem in six books, in stanzas—a beautiful exercise, but in rather still life, for ‘who can write at length of Helen?’ This was Lang's one deliberate bid for the laurel, and it brought him more compliments than praise. He accepted the sentence perhaps too hastily; spoke of ‘the unpermitted bay’; and though he continued to write and publish poetry, as one to whom verse-making was a function of being, never again attempted a poem that might not be written at a sitting. Rhymes à la Mode (1884), Grass of Parnassus (1888), Ban and Arrière Ban (1894), and the rest, are rallies of fugitive verse, as his Letters to Dead Authors (1886), his Books and Bookmen (1886), and their numerous successors are rallies of fugitive prose. They are all journalism, but they are the willing journalism of a man of genius. In the lighter play of the essay as in some of the daintier forms of verse, in the short causerie falling just between literature and gossip, Lang had no rival. The prose pieces which he valued most were collected in his lifetime; a collected edition of his poetical works was published posthumously in 1923; the latter contains many waifs from the files of periodicals, and leaves many uncollected. Lang's prose was always relished, but he wrote so much of it that his verse has been underrated. He was in the habit of belittling his poetical achievement, and was too readily believed. On his favourite places and heroes, on St. Andrews and the Ettrick country, on Gordon, Burnaby, and the world of ancient Greece, he has written poems not easily forgotten. His Ballade of his Choice of a Sepulchre and some of his sonnets are among the best of their kind; his poems in Scots stand high in a now impoverished tradition; and he boasted with justice that no man of his day could better fake a ballad. He might have been a much more considerable poet had he made the necessary sacrifice, and been a poet only; but this he could not do.
Lang valued himself most as an anthropologist. He was forty when his first book on folk-lore appeared, Custom and Myth (1884), but it embodied papers written and printed much earlier. He had been brought up as a boy among ballads and folk-tales, and the reading of Dasent's Popular Tales from the Norse and similar collections had made him a comparative mythologist while still a youth. He observed, like others, that many of these tales existed, in analogous
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