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THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

No. 435.-APRIL, 1913.

Art. 1.-ANDREW LANG.

ANDREW LANG's first historical work was a sketch of the history of St Andrews (1893). It made no pretence to original research, and it differs from all of its author's subsequent writings in being based on printed books and not on MS. sources. In a characteristically frank preface, he explained that he understood that a much more elaborate history of the town was in preparation, and that he gladly left the department of manuscript to a far better qualified student.' His modest attempt to present some pictures of the half-obliterated past' remains the only modern history of St Andrews, and it offers a sympathetic sketch of his 'dear city of youth and dream.' Lang, in its pages, took an obvious and, at times, a mischievous pleasure in indicating his own views on questions much controverted in Scotland. His remark— 'Here, among the fruits of the Reformation, we have, thank God, a Christian at last, and one who, we may say, would not have been consenting to any deed of murder'though a fair description of James Melville, was a challenge to the admirers of other sixteenth-century heroes; and his comment on the executions at St Andrews in 1646 -Others might have forgiven; these flowers of the kirk never forgave-could not fail to rouse the defenders of 'a theocracy modelled on the wildest passions of ancient Israel.' His critics had their revenge, for the book contained both slips of the pen and more serious errors. Its author used to speak of it as his apprenticeship to the historian's task; it showed me that I did not know the rules of the game.' While he was at work on his first historical essay, his friend R. L. Stevenson applied to him for information about the Jacobites. Lang had been Vol. 218.-No. 435.

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a Jacobite from childhood; on his copy of the 'Lays of Ancient Rome,' where Titus stabbed Valerius a span deep in the breast,' the boy had scribbled, 'Well done, the Jacobites'; his sympathies were always with dethroned kings. Among the books he sent to Stevenson was James Browne's History of the Highlands and of the Highland Clans,' which contains extracts from the Stuart Papers in Windsor Castle. Lang's curiosity was aroused by the problem of identifying the spy referred to by Scott in the introduction to Redgauntlet' as 'the channel of communication which, it is now well known, they [the ministers of George II] possessed to all the plots of Charles Edward.' He undertook an examination of the Pelham Papers in the Additional мss of the British Museum, and sent the transcripts to his friend in Samoa. On December 3, 1894, Stevenson died; and the return of the transcripts made Lang an historian.

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'Resisting the temptation to use Pickle as the villain of fiction, I have tried to tell his story with fidelity,' he says in the preface to Pickle the Spy' (1897). It can have required but a small effort to overcome that temptation, for he was already fascinated by the spirit of the chase, the desire to satisfy the passion of curiosity. 'However unimportant a secret may be, it is pleasant to know what all Europe was once vainly anxious to discover.' The discovery of the secret brought its pangs of regret ; he thought that Sir Walter may have known this woful history,' but it was no story for Scott to tell.' This aspect was more than sufficiently emphasised by Scottish critics; if St Andrews' had annoyed the Covenanters, 'Pickle the Spy' was not less offensive to the Cavaliers. But the task itself, and the unjust and ungenerous criticism which its completion evoked, proved a singularly good method of learning the rules of the game.' The identification of Pickle with 'Young Glengarry' was placed beyond reasonable doubt; but, in answer to unreasonable doubts, Lang was led to make an examination of fresh material, and in a chapter of his later work, 'The Companions of Pickle' (1898), he summed up his whole case, laying stress on the discovery of fresh evidence. Highland critics described his industry as an attempt to avoid 'leaving unraked a dunghill in search for a cudgel wherewith to maltreat the Highlanders.' This particular

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dunghill produced a charming sketch of the last Earl Marischal and a defence of Cluny and of Dr Archibald Cameron; but the book owed its existence to an intellectual curiosity which discovered new problems and could not rest content until they were solved.

If Lang had written nothing except the two 'Pickle volumes, he would have left behind him a valuable contribution to an obscure, though not unimportant, discussion; but the appearance of so distinguished a recruit to the thin ranks of Scottish historians could not be permitted to result merely in the solution of some Jacobite problems. He was asked to contribute a biography of Prince Charles to the Goupil Series and to write a short History of Scotland. He accepted both invitations, and, with the help of Miss Violet Simpson, for whose services he never failed to express as well as to feel his gratitude, he set to work systematically on fresh Ms. sources and on the vast quantity of printed material bearing on the history of the exiled Stuarts. 'Prince Charles Edward' (1900) is, from the literary standpoint, his best historical work. He had learned his method and had not yet begun to exaggerate it, as he sometimes did in his later books. If it contains comparatively little that was startling either in the results of his investigations or in his point of view, it is written throughout with the imaginative power which was one of his greatest gifts, and its style shows no trace of the weariness that sometimes beset him in the twelve years of continuous labour that followed its publication. About the Prince himself he was never under any illusion. illusion. In Pickle the Spy' he had already told the worst; and it was in a spirit of 'pardoning pity' that he accomplished his task.

'He failed utterly, failed before God and man and his own soul, but, if he failed greatly, he had greatly endeavoured. Charles is loved for his forlorn hope; for his desperate resolve; for the reckless daring, the winning charm that once were his; for bright hair and brown eyes; above all, as the centre and inspirer of old chivalrous loyalty, as one who would have brought back a lost age, an impossible realm of dreams.' ('Prince Charles Edward,' ed. 1900, p. 3.)

He loved the patient Old Pretender' better than the

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'Young Chevalier'; and we owe to him a new understanding of that melancholy life. Thackeray, perhaps misled by recollections of Charles II in Woodstock,' had drawn a brilliant and persuasive but an untrue and unjust portrait of the Prince of Wales. Scott never took this kind of liberty with an historical character, in fiction,' wrote Lang, reverting in his last days to this subject. The Whig historians had rioted over the misfortunes of a Stuart. 'The never robust frame shaken by dissipation, the feeble lazy eye, the sallow cheek, the imbecile smile, and the listless movements '-such is Hill Burton's exultant description of the Wanderer. In the preface to Pickle the Spy,' Lang urged some more leisured student to write the life of the Old Chevalier, who, 'I think, has everything to gain from an unprejudiced examination of his career. He has certainly nothing to lose.' In the biography of Prince Charles he took the opportunity of doing something like justice to the memory of his father; and, some years afterwards, he assisted Miss Alice Shield to write the authoritative life of 'The King over the Water' (1907), in the hope that a record of simple truth might do something to redeem the effect of Thackeray's 'splendid mis-reading' of the character of James III and VIII. Most of the research and almost all the writing' in the book are attributed by Lang to Miss Shield; but even the Highlanders, who, in the firm conviction that 'logic is a Lowland pedantry,' most strongly resented the exposure of Pickle, might forgive the author of that exposure for the sake of the concluding paragraph of The King over the Water.'

'So the last British-born Stuart was laid to rest; not to sleep with his fathers. With him was buried the ancient Stuart royalty. Nothing of it remained but the disappointed hope and angry protest of his elder son, the gentle but dignified acquiescence of the younger. All was over that was mortal. The old song was sung; the last drama of the awful Stuart cycle was played out. The cause and its glory remained a banquet-hall deserted, whose lights were fled, whose garlands dead, and all but a little few and a mournful memory departed. But that few-and that memory! Green as the unfading pines of the Highland glens that memory lives for ever. And for that few! We fools esteemed their life madness, and their end to be utter destruction, but

they are numbered among the heroes of all time. They stood with great constancy against those that afflicted them, and made no account of their sufferings; and they shone as sparks among the stubble of their sordid, self-seeking age. As gold in the furnace were they proved, and in time there has come respect to them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to perish in misery, but they who were faithful in love now rest in honour, and their names live for evermore where loyalty and faith are crowned.' ('Pickle,' p. 475.)

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The first volume of Lang's 'History of Scotland from the Roman Occupation to the suppression of the last Jacobite Rising' appeared in the same year as 'Prince Charles Edward.' Lang was no dilettante, and his methods were scientific and thorough. He spared no trouble, and no expense, in pursuing any track which seemed likely to lead to new sources of information. He never based a serious argument on Calendars, the blind Calendars,' as he called them. 'You must see the MSS,' he said. Critics, not all unfriendly, expected to find in his 'History' the kind of error which had marked, but not marred, his 'St Andrews.' They were disappointed, for the book was remarkable for its accuracy. Its author had entered the abhorred pedantic sanhedrim,' and, though he bore himself bravely, he did not entirely escape the effects of the contact. Some of his pages proved to be unexpectedly dull; and the craving for minute accuracy led occasionally to a lack of proportion in the narrative. 'One can't boil it down so tight,' he wrote of his first volume, when one's real interest is secret history-as it is, the book is a study of spies and traitors.'

The defects of the book impressed the reader, not because they were great, but because they were unexpected. Its merits were those for which admirers of Lang's genius naturally looked. In spite of an almost meticulous accuracy,

'Airs of the morn, airs of the hill,

The plovery Forest and the seas
That break about the Hebrides,'

followed him, as Stevenson had prophesied. There are
such noble and unforgettable passages as the death of
Wallace, the death of Mary, or the death of Montrose:
'Not for Montrose, felix opportunitate mortis, was to be the
spectacle of chicanery, hypocrisy, and perjury; of defeat and

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