"Her eldest daughter then she sped
To fetch Child Dyring out of bed";

instead of Jamieson's--

"Till her eldest dochter syne [then] said she,
'Ye bid Child Dyring come here to me.'"

And, still worse,--

"Out from their chest she stretch'd her bones
And rent her way through earth and stones";

where Jamieson is not only more literal, but more forcible,--

"Wi' her banes sae stark a bowt she gae
Hath riven both wall and marble gray."

The original is better than either,--

"She upward heaved her mighty bones
And rived both wall and gray marble-stones."

Jamieson had the true instinct of a translator, though his own verses
defy the stanchest reader; and, reasoning by analogy, Dr. Prior's
translations are so bad that he ought to be capable of very good
original poetry.

However, with all its defects, Dr. Prior's book is of value for the
information it gives. Under the dead ribs of his translations the reader
familiar with old ballads can create a life for himself, and can form
some conception of the spirit and strength of the originals.

Mr. Chambers's pamphlet is one that we should hardly have expected from
the editor of the best collection of ballads in the language before
that of Professor Child. Directly in the teeth of all probability, he
attributes the bulk of the _romantic_ Scottish ballads to Lady Wardlaw,
who wrote "Hardyknute." This is one of those theories (like that of Lord
Bacon being the author of Shakspeare's plays) which cannot be argued,
but which every one familiar with the subject challenges peremptorily.
Without going very deeply into the matter, Mr. Norval Clyne has put in
a clever plea in arrest of judgment. The truth is, that, in the present
state of our knowledge, "Hardyknute" could not pass muster as an antique
better than "Vortigern," or the poems of "Master Rowley"; and the notion
that Lady Wardlaw could have written "Sir Patrick Spens" will not hold
water better than a sieve, when we consider how hopelessly inferior are
the imitations of old ballads written by Scott, with fifty times her
familiarity with the originals, and a man of genius besides.

* * * * *

_Miss Gilbert's Career_. An American Story. By J.G. HOLLAND. New York:
Charles Scribner.

There is scarcely a more hazardous experiment for any novelist than "a
novel with a purpose." If the moral does not run away with the story, it
is in most cases only because the aut