criticism. He
find his words, he says, in all localities; he spells them, he allows,
sometimes with a compromise.

'I have stuck for the most part to the proper spelling,' he writes; and
again--

'To some the situation is exhilarating; as for me I give one bubbling
cry and sink. The compromise at which I have arrived is indefensible,
and I have no thought of trying to defend it.'

And indeed he has no need of it; it is good, forcible 'Scots' after all,
and the thoughts he clothes in it are as 'hame-ower' and as pithy as the
words.

_The Maker to Posterity_, _Ille Terrarum, A Blast_, _A Counterblast_,
and _The Counterblast Ironical_, are all excellent; and one can point to
no prettier picture of a Scottish Sunday than _A Lowden Sabbath Morn_,
which has recently been published alone in book form very nicely
illustrated, while he pokes some, not undeserved, fun at our Scottish
good opinion of ourselves and our religious privileges in _Embro, her
Kirk_, and _The Scotsman's Return from Abroad_. Surely nowhere is there
Scots more musical or lines more true to the sad experience which life
brings to us all than these with which the book ends:

'It's an owercome sooth for age and youth,
And it brooks wi' nae denial,
That the dearest friends are the auldest friends
And the young are just on trial.

'There's a rival bauld wi' young an' auld,
And it's him that has bereft me,
For the surest friends are the auldest friends
And the maist o' mine hae left me.'...

The last volume of verses, _Songs of Travel_, has a pathos all its own,
for, like _St Ives_ and _Weir of Hermiston_, the author never saw it in
print. The verses were sent home shortly before his death, and in the
note appended to them Mr Sydney Colvin says they were to be finally
printed as Book III. of _Underwoods_, but meantime were given to the
world in their present form in 1896.

They were written at different periods, and they show their author in
varying moods; but they incline rather to the sadder spirit of the last
two years of his life, and have left something if not of the courage for
the fight, at least of the gaiety of living behind them. Two of them are
written to his wife, many of them to friends; some of them have the lilt
and the brightness of songs, others, like _If this were Faith_ and _The
Woodman_, are filled with the gravity of life and the bitterness of the
whole world's struggle for exi