that the writer effects the separation of the doctrine of Protagoras from that of his followers by showing conclusively that Plato has himself indicated the separation by a difference of phraseology (pp. 22-23). In his account of the final form of Plato's Idealism Dr. Dyde indirectly exhibits the inadequacy of the conventional view; indeed his short statement is so admirable that one cannot restrain the wish that he may in some future work give us a thorough discussion of the whole philosophy of Plato, a task which he has shown himself to be eminently fitted to perform. It is to be hoped that this edition of the Theatetus will come into general use, as it well deserves to do, in all English-speaking colleges.

A NEW NOVEL.

JOHN WATSON.

(Gilian the Dreamer. By Neil Munro. Isbister & Co., London.)

THE day of high romance and the grand historical novel

seems to be almost done, in the English-speaking world at least. We still have work on those lines from not a not a few practised hands, Marion Crawford, Pakrer and others, work too, which finds a large circle of readers, but we have nothing which can be set for a moment beside the work of the older masters, Scott, or Thackeray, or Sand But in another field, we seem still to have masters, though they may be only The Little Masters.' The best of our contemporary novels, have largely the character of local history, a strong flavour of the soil, almost of the parish, very different from the more cosmopolitan art of the older school. The novelist of this type takes his stand on ground which is in the strictest sense native to him, where he is the sole and unique interpreter of local sentiment and character, where his knowledge is of that deep kind which is entwined with the memories of his boyhood and his whole family history. In such a case there is a real work of interpretation and the book which reveals to us some stratum of the national life, stratum not generally known and perhaps fast disappearing under the huge new alluvial deposits of our modern democracy, has something of the value of a historical document in addition to any charm of romance which it possesses. Who

knows how much America owes to Bret Harte for having taught it and the English speaking world generally to see something human and heroically capable in the rough exterior and camp dialect of the Californian miner? Barrie too, who has drawn the village life of the east coast of Scotland with such rare skill and fidelity has deserved well of his country. Thrums is no longer what it was. For years it has been undergoing an insidious change at the hands of school-boards, new young ministers, and summer-visitors. But Barrie's books will always remain to illuminate much in the history, secular and religious, of the Lowland Scot which was dark to the Gentiles. Even Kipling, wide as his range seems to be, is really a sketcher of local character and traditions; only that his parish happens to be the Empire, especially that part of it which is Indian and represented by the bazaar, the bungalow and the barracks, all of which the world now knows as it never could have done but for him who has been their sacer vates.

Something of this solid merit belongs to Mr. Munro's book amongst the other merits which it possesses. It is a quite original picture of West Highland life in a small county town, perhaps Inverary (the author's birthplace), as it might be fifty or sixty years ago. That life, we can see, is drawn with the perfect knowledge of one who knows not only its present state and phenomena, but how these grew out of its past states and phenomena. There is a copiousness and ease in his delineations, a novelty and yet a universal truth in his representation of character which show that the writer draws from an inexhaustible first hand stock of impressions. Clearly the author has seen the men and things he paints with the all-seeing eye of boyhood, and there are headstones in "the burial ground of Kilmalieu" carved with the names of his forbears. It is a new world which he pictures for us, one not of much intrinsic importance perhaps, Highland gentility of the small burgh sort, Peninsular veterans, lairds and sheep-farmers with a commonalty in sympathetic relations with them; but he has succeeded in making it intelligible and interesting to us, a very homogeneous little world, essentially modern, yet just at that stage when its roots are still visible reaching away into the feudal or patriarchal past. That is new ground which we hope the author will continue to cultivate with at least not less success than he has done in Gilian the Dreamer.

But the main current of the story is psychological, even intensely psychological, being the inward history of Gilian, the dreamer, the artist or poet, a plastic, ultra-sensitive, imaginative nature in whom action is, as in Prince Hamlet, sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. For practical affairs in any form he has the abnormal incapacity found in certain types (not the greater types) of the artist and poet. The sketch of the dreamer's boyhood is very skilful, full of fine insight into the opening sensitivities, the budding poetic and artistic instincts of such a nature. In this part Mr. Munro's work has often a strong flavour of Barrie's manner. The actors, the scenery, the draperies are all new and excellent of their kind, but the play is the same old play. Even the peculiar fondness which Mr. Barrie has for painting the excessive self-consciousness of the young artist nature and its first almost false instinct to study effect rather than truth has left a clear mark on the history of Gilian. The following, for example, might almost be a page out of the history of Sentimental Tommy, if that sublime artist in language (I mean Tommy) had known anything of Gaelic. It is the story of how Gilian brought the news of his foster-mother's death.

But in truth, as he went sobbing in his loneliness, down the river-side, a regard for the manner of his message busied him more than the matter of it. It was not every Friday a boy had a task so momentous, had the chance to come upon households with intelligence so unsettling. They would be sitting about the table, perpaps, or spinning by the fire, the good wife of Ladyfield still for them a living breathing body, home among her herds, and he would come in among them and in a word bring her to their notice in all death's great monopoly. It was a duty to be done with care if he would avail himself of the whole value of so rare a chance. A mere clod would be for entering with a weeping face, to blurt his secret in shaking sentences, or would let it slip out in an indifferent tone, as one might speak of some common occurance. But Gilian, as he went, busied himself on how he should convey most tellingly the story he brought down the glen. Should he lead up to his news by gradual steps or give it forth like an alarum? It would be a fine and rare experience to watch them for a little, as they looked and spoke with common cheerfulness, never guessing why he was there, then shock them with the intelligence, but he dare not let them think he felt so little the weightiness of his message that his mind was ready to dwell on trivialities. Should it be in Gaelic or

in English he should tell them? Their first salutations would be in the speech of the glens; it would be, "Oh Gilian, little hero! fair fellow! there you are! sit down and have town bread, and sugar on its butter," and if he followed the usual custom he would answer in the same tongue. But between "Tha bean Lecknamban air falbh" and "The wife of Ladyfield is gone," there must be some careful choice. The Gaelic of it was closer on the feelings of the event, the words some way seemed to make plain the emptiness of the farmhouse. When he said them, the people would think all at once of the little brown wrinkled dame, no more to be bustling about the kitchen, of her wheel silent, of her boot no more upon the blue flagstones of the milk-house, of her voice no more in the chamber where they had so often known her hospitality. The English, indeed, when he thought of it with its phrase a mere borrowing from the Gaelic, seemed an affectation. No, it must be in the natural tongue his tidings should be told. He would rap at the door hurriedly, lift the sneck before any response came, go in with his bonnet in his hand, and say "Tha bean Lecknamban air falbh" with a great simplicity.

Unfortunately this imaginative literary Gilian, who under happier stars might have been a kind of lion in æsthetic circles, has to grow up in a very incongruous society, where he generally manages to cut an extremely poor figure. His very gifts and graces are misconstrued as faults and weaknesses, and indeed do become so from the total want of compatibility between him and his surroundings. A small Highland town living in the isolation of fifty or sixty years ago, where arts and letters barely exist, where at any rate they do not count as real elements in life, but only as remote, quasi-sacred traditions, represented say by Shakespeare and Macknight's Harmony of the Gospels, traditions to which no sound-minded person has any thought of adding; a home circle made up of veteran officers, old Peninsular heroes, whose one measure of man is that of the soldier; that is a sphere where the shy literary graces of Gilian's spirit, accompanied as they are by a certain external awkwardness, a nervous sensitivity of speech and action, meet with a very poor welcome. What the veterans hoped for in their adopted son was a brisk, prompt, decided young man who would do them credit as a 'soger;' what they have got is, to their scornful amazement, a sublime kind of simpleton, uncannily clever in his mental opera

tions, but in their stern old eyes that saw the storming of Badajos and the squares at Waterloo, only half a man-and hardly that. The author has treated this situation with the quiet kind of humour which is characteristic of his work, a humour much leavened by pathos and a vein of sentiment which inclines, though not obtrusively, to melancholy. The veterans themselves with their triple distilled pride as Gaels, as Campbells, and as soldiers, are delightful portraits, decidedly fine types of national life which Mr. Munro has rescued from oblivion. They represent the old duine-wasail in his first transformation into a "soldier of the queen," or as it then was, of the king. They are not precisely heroic figures, one of them indeed, the Paymaster, is decidedly unheroic, but about the other two there is a simple, old-fashioned valour, a passionate devotion to the vocation of the sword, which warms their old hearts and gilds with a ray of glory their old, faded, bachelor pensioner lives now wearing to the socket.

Some of the subordinate figures, too, are well worth noting, quite remarkable creations and done, as is often the case in Scott also, with a freer and bolder hand even than the principal characters; Black Duncan, for example, the sailor from Skye ; externally, a dark, gloomy-eyed seaman with a mahogany visage and the rude appearance of a coasting skipper; internally, sensitive as a woman and quite as subtle and delicate in his wonderful converse with friends; with a mind, too, as full of fancy and fable as Shakespeare's. "The world," he says to Gilian, in his grave queer Highland-English, "is a very grand place to such as understand and allow." Such it certainly is to Duncan, who has the feeling of a poet for its roaring sea-winds and soft dawns, for its Highland traditions and songs, the Rover and Lochaber No More. A very Celtic world, my masters! in which the note of ideal reverie and sadness is as persistent as the wail of a bagpipe. That national instrument, I believe, is capable of producing merry music; men are said to dance to it; but to my affectionate memory it suggests always two notes only in which I think it perfect and unsurpassable, its note of wailing lament and its note of warlike clangour. That is why I always ask any wandering Highland piper I meet to play Cha til mi tulidh (We return no more), but he never understands me. Perhaps in his wanderings he has forgotten his Gaelic.