And Harden grat for very rage

When Willie on the ground lay slane.

But he's ta'en off his gude steel cap,
And thrice he's waved it in the air-
The Dinlay snaw was ne'er mair white
Nor the lyart locks of Harden's hair.

'Revenge! revenge!' auld Wat gan cry;
'Fye, lads, lay on them cruellie;
We'll ne'er see Tiviotside again,

Or Willie's death revenged sall be.'

That Homeric touch about Wat of Harden, who could have given but our own Scottish Homer? What a subject for a painter, could one be found to render it worthily! But all these long ages of wild battle and raid, and romantic adventure, love and sorrow, might all have passed into oblivion and been utterly forgotten ere now, but for the local ballads that preserved their memory. And these ballads themselves had all vanished from the dales ere now, unless-just before the modern age with all its changes set in-Walter Scott had been born to gather them up and give them an immortality in that wonderful Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.

These raids after the ballads were what trained and made him. What college classes and erudition do for other men, Liddesdale and The Forest, with their old tales and ballads, did for him. Great and precious as are his poems and other works-his Lay, his Marmion, his Guy Mannering, and his Antiquary, his Abbot—I know not if there is one of them which we would not willingly spare, rather than lose that earliest of them all, The Border Minstrelsy, which, in his unknown days, he gathered and preserved. Lockhart has said that the minstrelsy was the great quarry out of which the materials for all his after works were dug—that there is hardly an incident or adventure or character in any of them the first hint of which may not be found in the three volumes of the Minstrelsy, either in the ballads, or in the prefaces and notes by which he so grandly illustrated them. This is the great storehouse out of which came the materials of all his subsequent creations.

The Borders received his first and best songs-The Eve of St. John' and 'The Lay.' They secured, too, his latest love, when, as all remember, he roused him from that last lethargy as he heard once more the name of Tweed. But if the Borders were the centre of his inspiration, his gift has overflowed and glorified the whole of Scotland

For thou upon a hundred streams,
By tales of love or sorrow;
Of faithful love, undaunted truth
Hast shed the power of Yarrow.

But while we hail Scott as king of Border melody, we must not forget the many other gifted spirits who sang their songs, and each added some lyric contribution to their native region. Leyden, Allan Cunningham, the Ettrick Shepherd, Laidlaw, poor Smibert, and many more; Lady Grizell Baillie, Miss Jane Elliot, Mrs. Rutherford-these flowers of the forest who have each enriched their native minstrelsy with at least one deathless song. And one poetess still lives, worthy to be named with the best of these-Lady John Scott, with her wealth of most characteristic minstrelsy. While we do all honour to Scott, let us not forget those genuine though lesser singers, whom he himself with his large generosity would have been foremost to acknowledge. If the volume of his song was as Tweed river, those other singers were the affluent streams and burns and hopes that fed its volume, without which he never could have been what he was. And just as every tributary burn and hope has an individual beauty of its own, and is worth tracing up to its remote well-head, so each of those minor Border poets has his own felicities to repay the loving student of them.

It is your

I say nothing of other forms of literature produced by the Borders-history, science, philosophy, etc. These may be produced anywhere as well as in the Borders. minstrelsy, your rich inheritance of heroic tradition, embalmed and glorified in song-this is your peculiar, your matchless possession, ye sons of the Border. Preserve it,

cherish it, love it; hand it on to posterity; be yourselves worthy of it. Once let go or be forgotten, it can never be restored. We who, in the heyday of youth, have wandered over these dales so delightedly, feel now that

Yarrow through the woods,

And down the meadow ranging,
Doth meet us with unaltered face,
While we are changed, or changing.

Preserve it, and

We pass; that romantic land remains. hand it on to the coming generations, that they may drink from as deep delight as we have done. Keep its green dales, as far as may be, by needless railways undesecrated, its pure streams by factories unpolluted, and its solitary places by staring statues unvulgarised. If you preserve it as it is, the consecration of its beauty will deepen with every new generation of human eyes that look on it; and he, its great poet, much as you have thought of him, future men will think of him still more-his reputation and his fame will grow with time-as century follows century, and no second Scott is born into the world."

Two months later we find Shairp as full of the spirit of the North as in this speech he is in sympathy with the South. Writing to his friend Clerk at Kilmalie in March, he says—

Will you point out to me two or three of the passages in your translation of Ossian, which you consider most characteristic of Highland scenery?

(1) Of the dreary monotone of mists, and moors, and ghosts, and voices of the wind.

(2) Of the more happy aspects, the breaking out of sunshine after the storm. . . . I wish some samples of Ossian's peculiar treatment for a book I am getting ready." He added, referring to Glen Desseray, "You have got the last but one of the instalments of the poem;" and mentioned his being a candidate for the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford.

CHAPTER XIV

THE OXFORD CHAIR OF POETRY

IN June 1877 Shairp was elected Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford.

During his candidature many interesting letters were received by him from friends in the south.

Mr. Matthew Arnold, the former occupant of the Chair, wrote him: "Unless either the Bishop of Derry claims me, or the angel Gabriel, or some equally unforeseen personage stands, I will vote for you. I have a conscience in these matters, so if I thought the best candidate I should vote for him, though I like you best. But I do not think him the best candidate, though he has more accomplishments (I suppose) than you. I think he would be sure some day to run amuck at somebody or something; and this is just what a Professor ought not to do. . . ."

After the election he wrote: "If you had stood an election and won, I should certainly have written to congratulate you. And still more do you deserve congratulation on the peaceable entry upon office by the flight of your competitors. I am most thoroughly glad that you are to be Poetry Professor, and I congratulate you most heartily on the warm and appreciative feelings towards you, which have appeared right and left since you were first announced as a candidate. Cicero says most truly that the benevolentia civium is one of the best instruments of usefulness that a man can have.

Mr. Palgrave, his successor in the same chair (who withdrew in Shairp's favour in 1877), wrote expressing his great

pleasure at the kind words Shairp had used in regard to his withdrawal, and stating that he had written to many friends to ask them to support him, and that he hoped he would "walk over." He said he did not know if "human nature' allowed one to rejoice quite so much at another's success as in one's own; but that if it ever did, it really did so now in his case.

The Bishop of Derry wrote wishing him success, and speaking of his criticisms at once reverent and refined."

He added, "You feel Keble, as no one else does."

His old Rugby colleague, the present Dean of Norwich, wrote: I will vote for you against any man in the world. And the late Dean of Rochester, Mr. Robert Scott, said

the same.

His election led to a pleasant renewal, in the closing years of life, of his old connection with Oxford, while retaining his position as Principal at St. Andrews. The duties of the Oxford Chair of Poetry are not laborious, although -when the post has been held by a distinguished man of letters the lectures delivered have often been brilliant, and usually an addition to literature. The result of such lectures is never to be judged by their immediate effect. Their subsequent publication, by which a far wider circle is reached— as in the parallel case of lectures by the Slade Professor of Fine Art-may be regarded as more important than their oral delivery.

Shairp's first lecture on "The Province of Poetry" was given in Michaelmas term 1877, when he was the guest of an old Rugby friend, then Master of University College, and now Dean of Westminster. The fact that his son had matriculated, and was resident at Oriel, added greatly to the pleasure of these Oxford visits, when he went up once a term to deliver a new lecture. It was also a peculiar pleasure to meet the few survivors of his old circle of Oxford friends, and occasionally to make the acquaintance of new ones. The interest he took in all Scotsmen resident in Oxford, and especially in those who had gone up from St. Andrews as Guthrie scholars, was unabated. Before giving the reminis