IN MEMORIAM: ANDREW LANG (1844-1912).
BY EDWARD CLODD.
In a letter which lies before me, George Meredith says: "Horribly will I haunt the man who writes memoir of me." If Andrew Lang did not utter a like threat, he expressed a like repugnance when he wished "for some short way with the Life and Letters plague." But the author of monographs on Lockhart, Tennyson, and others, and of the Life, Letters., and Diaries of Sir Stafford Northcote, would not, were it possible, resent the payment of a brief tribute to his genius and worth in the organ of a Society the furtherance of whose aims had no small place in his manifold interests.
"It has been a tradition in the Lang family that they originally came from Bohemia," says Sir Lauder Brunton in a letter to The Times,[1] and there is recognition of gipsy ancestry in the stanzas:
"Ye wanderers that were my sires,
Who read men's fortunes in the hand,
Who voyaged with your smithy fires
From waste to waste across the land,
Why did you leave for garth and town
Your life by heath and river's brink,
Why lay your gipsy freedom down
And doom your child to Pen and Ink? "[2]
His father was John Lang, of Selkirk; his mother's maiden name was Jane Plenderleath Sellar (the name recalls his memoir of his uncle, Professor Sellar, prefaced to the posthumous volume on Horace and the Elegiac Poets); he was educated at Edinburgh and St. Andrews Universities and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he
- ↑ July 30. 1912.
- ↑ Grass of Parnassus (1892), p. 28.
