LITERARY NOTES.
While these pages are passing into the hands of our readers, the Pope Commenroration ceremonies will be in progress at Twicken- ham. They begin with a water pageant on the Thames ; and on the 31st of July Professor Henry Morley opens a Loan Museum of relics of the poet, which will close on Saturday the 4th of August. The catalogue is under the supervision, among others, of Mr. Austin Dobson. One of the most conspicuous and characteristic of the relics exhibited will be four volumes of libels upon Pope, collected, bound, and annotated by the poet himself — perhaps a superfluous reminder of the weakest and most unlovable side of his character. For all time Pope is likely to remain the standing exemplar of the foibles of the literary temperament — of its jealousy, its vanity, and its preternatural thinness of skin. But by us he is more profitably to be studied as the outcome of certain social con- ditions, and the representative of an answering cast of culture. He is the poet of the age of courts in Western Europe, as dis- tinguished from that of kings on the one hand, and of the people on the other, —an age when aristocracy grafted on royalty had issued in the strange florescence of manners. It is scarcely too much to say of Pope that he is the petit-mat tre of our literature, or that the equipment of his poetry is summed up in ' talon-rouge, falbala, queue.' But of course these also are poetic, and one could have no reasonable grudge against Pope, if it were not for his translation of Homer. By that he made his fortuue and perilled his fame. In opening the pages of his Review to the Celt and Teuton controversy, Mr. Harry Quilter is doing good service to the cause of a rational ethnology. There is no delusion more baseless or more pernicious than that which assumes the English to be an essentially Teutonic people. We laugh at the Greeks and their three eponymous patriarchs, while at the same time we hold to our preposterous legend of the three ancestral keels. Perhaps in all questions of national parentage the most pious and decent course is a discreet suspension of the judgment, for, ethnically as well as individually, it is a wise child that knows its own father. Besides, in most current race-theories, there is the radical defect that they assume coincidence of likeness in language with kinship in blood — a coincidence which we have no right to look for, and which we often find awanting. Viewed in this light even the Celt and Teuton question is made ultimately futile by the initial error of its terminology. Nevertheless we are grateful to Mr. Grant Allen for his brilliant sally of iconoclasm, and not less to Mr. G. A. Smith for the support he unconsciously gives his opponent. One of the most readable, and by far the most good-humoured article in the new number of the Universal Seviao is the ' Qiiis desiihrio. . , . ? ' of Mr. Samuel Butler. The author of Ereivhon and the champion of Lamarck as against Darwin, is a man of exceeding versatility. He confesses that he is by a good deal a creditor of the public, for he has published many books, and all of them at his own expense. Less worthy authors have succeeded in running a big balance on the other side. ^ Qtds desiderio. . . . ?' is a comic narration of how Mr. Butler for a dozen years or so used, in the British Museum, Frost's Lives of Eminent Cliristians as a sloping desk to write upon. Here it may be presumed he wrote Ltick or Cunning, and the delightful bits of description in the Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino, Here also, doubtless, he wrote Ex Voto, which the Glasgoio Herald, in reviewing the other day, repeatedly attributes to a mythical Mr. Samuel Hunter. Butler's quaint essay is indeed a bit of * satire and imagination,' with a literary aroma of peculiar delicacy. OssiAN, the July volume of the Canterbury Poets, is edited by a young Glasgow litterateur, Mr. George Eyre-Todd. The selec- tion is ajudicious and fairly representative one, and is preceded by an introduction in which the editor contends vehemently for the authenticity of the poems. To the dsvellers at ease in Zion any attempt to upset the orthodox decision of Dr. Johnson will, of course, appear flat blasphemy. And, doubtless, it is rather late in the day to expect any one to believe in the personality of Ossian or the actual existence of his car-borne heroes. Wolfe's Prolegomena was not written precisely for nothing. Nevertheless, we know something more about the Celt now than they knew in 1760 ; and one can hardly deny that somewhere in the heart of Macpherson's rhapsodies there lurks, undistinguishable, a nucleus of genuine Gaelic song. But certainly Mr. Todd would have been treading on firmer and more fruitful ground if he had confined himself to tracing the undoubted influence of the Ossianic fragments on English and Continental literature. As it is, there is just a little too much flaunting of the tartan in his treatise. But that seems a fault inevitable to the editors of Celtic poetry. Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson's love of the adventurous does not exhaust itself in mere praise of roving sea-dogs and errant princes. If he voyages to the South Seas as a valetudinarian, it can be only in the spirit of enterprise that he is for ever in literature going further afield. His last departure was the marvellous Child's Garden of Verses, and now it is announced that he has written a romantic drama, in conjunction with another author who possesses a prac- tical knowledge of the stage. Further, the Messrs. Cassell are soon to publish his Black Arrow, a tale of the Wars of the Roses. As a rule the historical novel may be defined as a work display- ing an utter lack of historical imagination ; but Mr. Stevenson's former efforts have not been of the ordinary anachronistic kind. We can only hope that his new venture will keep the same high level which was attained in Kidnapped. The new number of the Scottish Review contains a series of hitherto unpublished letters of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. They were intended apparently for the eye of Sir Walter Scott, and describe a tour made in the Highlands in 1803. Messrs. Murray announce the correspondence, in two volumes, of Mr. Motley, the historian of the Dutch Republic ; three volumes of the Battle Abbey Roll, by the Duchess of Cleveland ; and the late Sir Henry Maine's Whrwell Lectures on Lnternational Law. They are also going to publish an account of excursions in Apulia, by Mrs. Ross (nee Duft' Gordon) under the fascinating title of The Land of Manfred. As its name indicates, the book will treat largely of the associations with Norman and Hohenstaufen times which yet linger around Southern Italy. The forthcoming volume of Messrs. Blackwood's Philosophical Classics is Professor Nichol's Bacon. We believe that the Pro- fessor's long promised text-book of English Literature is likely to appear before long. Mr. Goldwin Smith is said to be engaged on what he intends to be his magnum opus.
The obituary of letters for July includes the Rev. George Robert Gleig, author of The Subaltern, and other military tales ; and also Herr Theodore Sturm, the Nestor of German novelists. Besides his more honourable distinctions Mr. Gleig has a claim to remembrance, along with Croker and the Rev. Robert Montgomery, as one of the victims of Macaulay's critical tomahawk. We have also to note the death of Mr. Robert Carruthers of the Inverness Courier, a son of the well-known editor of Pope.
Edinburgh : T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty.
