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same tendency is rapidly developing itself in England; and it is evidently fatal to the genuine existence of Parliamentary institutions.

So far as England is concerned, the institution of an executive regularly elected by the legislature at large in place of a cabinet formed of the leaders of a party majority would be substantially a return to the old form of government the Privy Council. Parliament is now the sovereign power, and election by it would be equivalent to the ancient nomination by the crown. The mode of electing, and confirming a Speaker shows how the forms of monarchy may be reconciled

with the action of an elective institution.

However, be the proper substitute

for party what it may, the thing here insisted on is that party is evidently in a state of decadence; that the causes of its decadence are not accidental or temporary, but inherent in its nature, which is that of an instrument of change, not that of a permanent principle of government; and that, consequently, sooner or later, some other basis for government must be found. "You are sanguine," say objectors, "if you think you can carry on constitutional government without party." We trust not; for, if it is so, the end of constitutional government is at hand. The decline of party may fairly be said to present an urgent question: for the political observer to-day-tomorrow for the statesman.

GOLDWIN SMITH.

A poem has not the same political value as a diplomatic document. But it may possess a deeper significance; and the following lines by A. Maikoff, printed in the May number of Katkoff's monthly review, the Russian Messenger, are worth considering, if only from the fact that they are the work of a popular Russian poet, and are published in a popular Russian periodical.

TO THE EMPRESS OF INDIA.

SAY that in thee again the Prophet doth arise,
Say, an thou wilt, thou'rt of the gods elect;
But, Empress of the East! in native eyes
No sway imperial shall thy claim reflect.
There in the Orient, rooted in the soil,

Live prophecies and very old traditions,
Which round the hearts of men like serpents coil
And nestle in the strangest superstitions.
The Eastern mind has strange prognostic drawn
Of dark dominion chased by northern star,
Which, as the herald of a promised dawn,
Shall signalise the reign of the White Tsar !' ¦

A SCOTTISH "ELIA."

AN obscure Scottish novelist, whose luck or whose merit obtained him favourable notice in certain journals south of the Tweed, recently, it is said, received the congratulations of an Irish friend to whom the thing was no mystery-the fact is, he remarked, everything Scotch takes there just now. If this candid friend was not mistaken, there is a chance that The Life of a Scottish Probationer may prove to be an attractive title in England, notwithstanding the circumstance that probably not one person in a hundred will have any notion of what it means. A little work with this title has just been published, which deserves its share of whatever popularity "everything Scotch" enjoys, and which might even have the effect of contributing to that popularity in the way in which Scott's novels and Burns's poems have enhanced the reputation of Kilmarnock bonnets and Glenlivet whisky. It is seven years since Thomas Davidson, the subject of the brief memoir which appears under this title, after pining through several dreary winters, the victim of a hopeless malady, "fell on the threshhold of the summer," and was carried to his grave in Teviotdale, leaving behind him a few poems and a quantity of letters, which to his friends and fellow-students were precious memorials of genius, and which now tell to the world the tale of a poet and a humourist numbering his days and applying his heart unto wisdom. What came from his pen after his illness assumed a fatal aspect occupies about a half of the space to which his biographer has limited himself, and is the text to which the rest of the book is introduction and commentary. Even when illness and death therefore are not in the writer's thoughts they are in the reader's;

where they are not the central figures of the picture they are shadows in the background, more conspicuous for being there. The Life of a Scottish Probationer ought thus to be a book for readers whose tastes are what Davidson called "necropolitan." The charm of the volume lies in the fact, that, in spite of fate, it is bright and festal with a poet's joy in all that is sweet and fair in nature, and with a humourist's delight in all that is queer and not too deformed in man. It contains verses which bear the undoubted stamp of poetic genius, and it largely consists of letters which only a consummate humourist could have written. But to the thoughtful reader its interest in this point of view is immeasurably inferior to that which it possesses in respect of being a monument of as knightly an encounter "with that old Ishmael whose hand is against us all," as any that has been recorded.

Perhaps the most famous Probationer on record was one whose connection with the order would have made it at least as famous as himself, if his first public appearance in that character had not also been his last. Readers

of Guy Mannering will remember the passage recording the event :-"In process of time Abel Sampson, Probationer of Divinity, was admitted to the privileges of a preacher. But alas! partly from his own bashfulness, partly owing to a strong and obvious disposition to risibility which pervaded the congregation, upon his first attempt he became totally incapable of proceeding in his intended discourse; gasped, grinned, hideously rolled his eyes till the congregation thought them flying out of his head, shut the Bible, tumbled down the pulpit stairs, trampling upon the old women who generally take

their station there, and was ever after designated a 'stickit minister.' To Meg Merrilies and all his acquaintance it was in the latter character that the Dominie was known. His connection with the order of probationer was too slight to be of any advantage to it in the way of making it as illustrious as himself. Yet any one who is curious as to the meaning of the term may learn something from the passage in the Dominie's history in which his first appearance as a preacher is recorded. He will gather from it that after Abel had completed at the university his studies in arts and in divinity, and was duly licensed to preach the Gospel, he was, technically speaking, a probationer. If his nervousness had been less overpowering, or if the risibility of his audience had been better restrained so as to allow of his proceeding with his first discourse, his occupation for the next few years might have been to go about the country exercising his gifts as a preacher, when invited to do so, in vacant charges, or by ministers wanting his help for a Sunday or two, and in that case his proper style and title would have been Mr. Probationer Sampson. Had his probation not been cut short as it was, his lanthorn jaws and gaunt figure would have become familiar to grinning schoolboys in numerous parishes, perhaps in several counties. Having to provide himself with a horse as the first equipment for his work, "he would have been seen riding from church to church, with his sermons and changes of raiment packed in his saddle-bags," his reward for his apostolic labours and travels being "bed and board" for a week at the place at which his saddle-bags were opened for the delivery of a specimen of his slender stock of sermons. Since the Dominie's day the world has changed for the preacher of the Gospel as well as for other mortals. But in some respects the probationer of today is as nearly as possible what he was then. His life is still one which has its own share of romance, from

which indeed rather an uncommon share of romance is excluded only by the fiction that those who preach the Gospel care little whether or not they can manage to live by the Gospel. His Lehrjahre is followed by a Wanderjahre which cannot last for ever, and in the course of which he gains or loses a fortune as often as he appears in his proper character, that is to say, as often as he has to exhibit his gifts in a vacant charge. If his discourse pleases by its piety or its bombast, by its logical force or by the force with which its logical weakness is delivered, it is manse and stipend to him; if it makes no impression, or a bad one, he has lost a living by preaching it. The event too, whatever it may be, is known to the public and to all his friends and acquaintance, including perhaps (as in Davidson's case) an aged father and mother, whose supreme desire is to see their son settled in life, and possibly "a nearer and dearer one yet than all other," who has a still deeper interest in the question of his settlement in life than his father or his mother. It is not every probationer whose Wanderjahre is concluded within one twelvemonth, and when it extends to three or four years, the hopes which cheered and brightened its commencement are apt to be chequered with dismal apprehensions as to its end. Apart therefore from the circumstance that the probationer sees cities and men and congregations in the course of his travels, his life is not destitute of variety and adventure, nor without opportunities for the cultivation of gifts like those with which Thomas Davidson was destined to preach to a larger and more appreciative audience than ever listened to his sermons.

It is only, it must be remarked, in one of the Scottish Churches that this description of the probationer is now strictly applicable. But to that Church Davidson belonged. In the Established and Free Churches licentiates are as a rule employed at mission stations, and as assistants to ministers,

that name.

a

much as deacons are in the Church of England, and earn in that way a modest stipend, on which they are able to nourish the hope of being promoted some day or other to parochial or, at any rate, a ministerial charge. In these Churches the probationer accordingly is hardly known by It is only in the United Presbyterian body, whose Committee of Supply distributes preachers over the country according to a regular plan, that the legitimate representative of the old probationer is now to be found. Davidson was on the "list" of probationers in that Church for five years, and for the first half of that period, until fairly disabled by illness, travelled wherever he was sent by the Committee of Supply. He had gifts as a preacher, but they were not popular gifts. In truth, they were unpopular gifts-modesty amounting almost to Abel Sampson's nervousness, disdain of clap-trap, sense, sincerity, culture, being among the number. As a preacher, therefore, his probation not encouraging, and possibly never would have been brilliant. In spite of his talents, or rather in virtue of them, he seemed as likely as any of his contemporaries far more likely than the dullest dullard of them allto lapse finally along with Abel Sampson and many other good and some able men into the condition of "a stickit minister." His biographer, with a natural desire to screen the Church to which Davidson belonged from the imputation of indifference to genius, labours to make it appear that the poet and humourist was not unsuccessful as a probationer. Davidson himself took another and, it would seem, a juster view. He knew the worth as well as the worthlessness of popularity. He was strenuous in advising his probationer friends to cultivate it with all their might, especially in the way of an energetic delivery. He was resolved, "if the great Healer should bid him preach again," to follow the advice which he gave his friends. But this resolution,

was

announced by him in a letter written a few weeks before his death, was very much of a recollection, and very little of an anticipation, and pointed to the fact that the most gifted probationer of his time had been weighed in the balance of popular judgment and found wanting-a hint perhaps to Church reformers that even when the sheep are free to choose their shepherd, mistakes may possibly occur.

It was, as has been said, after his name was placed on the list of probationers of the United Presbyterian Church, and indeed after the time when it might as well have been transferred to the catalogue of preachers whose probation was ended, that he wrote those poems and letters, the publication of which, as his biographer has well judged, is the best possible monument to his memory. Davidson might, therefore, be left to speak for himself in some of these later writings of his, and to furnish a new instance of the truth or falsehood of the Irish dictum-that everything Scotch takes in England. But it will perhaps not be without interest for the reader of these pages if we first avail ourselves of the help of his biographer to take a glance at the earlier part of his career, and to note some of the influences which regulated the growth and fashion of his genius and his character.

He was born in a shepherd's hut, near Jedburgh, in July, 1838, and, with the exception of the period of his university career and of his wanderings as a probationer, his life was spent in different places in the neighbourhood of that famous border town. All the influences of flood and fell, of song and story, which have rendered the border counties of Scotland so prolific of singers, and to which the genius of Scott owed so much of its inspiration, were influences in which

from avidson's mind was steeped

infancy, and from which he was never less insulated than when he was furthest away from the Cheviots and the Teviot. Influences no less

favourable to his character and the growth of his mind were those to which he was subjected in his father's house. His parents were born and married south of the border, but they were Scotch by devoted attachment to the Secession Church, and, as his biographer hints, by the cultivation of all the virtues upon a little oatmeal, in which the Scotch peasantry have always been considered adepts. When he was four years old he was put in training for the vocation of poet by being taken by his father on his rounds among the hills. At six years old he had devoured every scrap of child's literature he could lay his hands on, and "his mind was filled with a mass of border traditions and ballads." From his twelfth to his twenty-third year the home of the family was on a farm in the parish of Ancrum. Here Ruberslaw and Minto Crags, Tweedside and the Eildon Hills were scenes on which the eye of the youthful poet feasted on his long journeys to and from school. Among such scenes it was inevitable he should become a student of Sir Walter. He sat far into the night reading his novels and his minstrelsy, and alarmed his anxious mother lest " reading Walter Scott should turn his head." By the advice of Dr. Nicol, minister of the church of which the shepherd and his wife were members, who detected the boy's ability, he was enrolled as a pupil of the Jedburgh Academy, and after spending a few years in that institution, removed to Edinburgh to begin his studies for the ministry. His biographer gives us some glimpses of Scotch university life, for which English readers will be thankful to him. But it is enough here to say that Davidson's introduction to it served to mark distinctly his vocation as a poet and his bent as a humourist. Like a born singer as he was, he sat in his city lodgings dreaming for hours of his native borderland, and with a humour which already showed that a veritable, if lesser, Elia had been born on Scottish ground, he described to

old friends his new experience. Though he had not yet made the acquaintance of the daintiest of English humourists, it was in Elia's manner that he related in one of his letters "how he and a companion had been driven to the café in search of their dinner because a fellow-lodger in charge of the commissariat had ordered salt herring and potatoes for the midday meal;" moved thereto by the fact that in his habit of chanting in an ejaculatory manner certain random lines, generally the introductory ones of any song that suggested itself. The particular line which Davidson was most frequently crooning over at that time was

"I hae laid a herrin' in saut."

Poetry, as well as hunger, was sauce for the dinner on this occasion, and specially for the apple-tart.

Tart! it was no simple tart we were eating! It was an aggregate of all savoury substances, of all delicate essences, of all delicious dainties. There was flour in it, fine flour at the sowing whereof ploughboys had whistled, over the green expanse whereof birds had lilted and warbled, and at the reaping whereof the reapers had sung the songs of harvest. As a background to this, imagine two fellows sitting grim, assiduous, anatomical, bone-discovering, over potatoes and salt herrings."

As might almost have been anticipated from the decided bent of his mind towards literature, that starved and neglected department of university business, Davidson's career as a student imperfectly answered the expectations of some of his friends, but it gave ample promise of a brilliant future in the respect and admiration which it drew to itself from his fellowstudents. In the English literature class in which he had the opportunity of displaying his poetic gifts, he obtained only the second place. But the poem of Ariadne at Naxos, by which he gained that place, was zealously passed from hand to hand among his fellow-students, was submitted by one of them to the critical judgment of Thackeray, and to the great delight of

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