critics assailed him. The Companions of Pickle (1898), which put the matter beyond doubt, was his reply. He was by this time well entered in the hardy game of Scottish historiography. In 1900 appeared his Prince Charles Edward, his best historical composition. He had been a Jacobite from boyhood, yet he had no illusions about the prince, preferring indeed the quieter Old Pretender, whom he did much to rehabilitate. He was now labouring at a more doubtful and ambitious project. ‘“A History of Scotland”, said the publisher of Dr. Robertson's work in the last century, “is no very attractive title”.’ So Lang quotes. His own History of Scotland from the Roman Occupation to the Suppression of the last Jacobite Rising (1900–1907) occupied him ten years, and its intended two volumes became four. It had an odd reception. His waiting critics were disappointed by its accuracy, and his admirers by its attention to detail and the business of history. History to Lang meant finding things out, and when he began an inquiry he could not be stopped. This occasioned disproportions, of which he was aware: ‘I wonder anybody can read my four volumes’, he wrote, ‘but the chapter on Montrose in vol. iii is pretty decent.’ It is one of many fine passages, but the principal merit of the work is that, in one of the most partisan fields of human history, he, a partisan, is never content with legend, and is never unfair. His studies for the History overflowed into detective monographs, such as The Mystery of Mary Stuart (1901) and James VI and the Gowrie Conspiracy (1902), or into biography, as in John Knox and the Reformation (1905) and the Life of Sir George Mackenzie (1909). This last had been interrupted by an enterprise in all respects characteristic of its author. In the spring of 1908 Anatole France issued his Vie de Jeanne d'Arc. Within six months Lang had answered M. France's cynicism, from the evidence, in his Maid of France (1908), vindicating the Maid from insult.
There are few forms of writing which Lang had not attempted. The last book he saw through the press was a History of English Literature (1912). For years he supplied the nurseries and schoolrooms of England with Fairy Books only less attractive than his budgets of True Stories:
Books Yellow, Red, and Green, and Blue
All true, or just as good as true.
He tried the novel, but without much effect, although his first, The Mark of Cain (1886), and his last, The Disentanglers (1902), are books of note, and such as no one else could have written. As a biographer he was more successful: his Life, Letters and Diaries of Sir Stafford Northcote, first Earl of Iddesleigh (1890) is a valuable contribution to Victorian parliamentary history, and his Life and Letters of J. G. Lockhart (1896) is one of the best biographies of the century. Lockhart—‘the Scorpion of the loyal heart’—was a subject to his mind, and he took pleasure in righting a proud and fastidious character which in many respects resembled his own. He was also provoked by the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy to write a defence of Shakespearian authorship, which was published after his death, Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown (1912).
The word commonly applied to Lang was versatile, and there was nothing he less liked to hear. He wrote too much, but the loyalty and tenacity of his mind are as striking as its variety. His characteristic tastes were formed early. His Jacobitism and ballad lore, his interest in folk-tales and his idolization of Homer, that devotion to the memory of Sir Walter Scott which may almost be regarded as the key to his life, all date, like his instructed passion for cricket, golf, and the ‘ringing reel’, from his boyhood or early youth. If he kept them all going, the reason is that he never grew old. He was not an affable person, and it was his pleasure to conceal his astonishing powers of work under the air of a dilettante. But no man ever helped more lame dogs over stiles. He had what is rarer than an instinct for friendship, something higher and drier, an instinct for fraternity. He was, before all things, a brother of the craft. Indeed, in his generation, he was the ambassador of all the sporting crafts at the court of letters, and the protector of all loyalties fallen upon misfortune. Though he had many admirers among his countrymen, Scotland never heartily relished Lang: he could not be serious, it was said, and he cut too near the bone. Yet he was the greatest bookman of his age, and after Stevenson, the last great man of letters of the old Scottish tradition. On two subjects only he refrained from expressing himself: on personal religion and on party politics. No man had more questions to ask of the next world, but he kept them to himself. His chance of politics was gone with Culloden.
Of the many honours that came his way Lang valued most, perhaps, his St. Andrews (1885) and Oxford (1904)
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