Up then, children! We will go
Where the blooming roses grow;
In a joyful company,

We the bursting flowers will see.
Up! your festal dress prepare !
Where gay hearts are meeting, there
May has pleasures more inviting,
Heart and sight and ear delighting.
Listen to the birds' sweet song;
Hark, how soft it floats along!
Country dames, our pleasures share ;
Never saw I sky so fair;
Therefore dancing forth we go.
Youths, rejoice! the flowerets blow!
Sing we! join the chorus gay,
Hail this merry, merry May!

-Translation of E. TAYLOR.

MINTO, WILLIAM, a Scottish literary critic and journalist, born in Alford Parish, Aberdeenshire, October 10, 1845; died at Aberdeen, March 1, 1893. At Aberdeen he won high honors in the classics, philosophy, and mathematics. He then studied for a year at Oxford, after which he was for several years the assistant of Professor Bain at Aberdeen. In 1872 he published a Manual of English Prose Literature; and in 1874 Characteristics of English Poets from Chaucer to Shirley. In the latter year he became editor of the Examiner, and held the position for four years, afterward being on the editorial staff of the Daily News and the Pall Mall Gazette. In 1880 he was appointed Professor of Logic in Aberdeen University. Besides his previously mentioned works he published Daniel Defoe, in the series of English Men of Letters (1879); The Crack of Doom, a novel (1885); Logic, Inductive and Deductive (1893); Literature of the Georgian Era, posthumously (1895), and contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica biographical sketches of Chaucer, Spenser, Dryden, Pope, Dickens, and other literary men.

ROBINSON CRUSOE.

It would be a mistake to suppose that the vitality of Robinson Crusoe is a happy accident, and that others of Defoe's tales have as much claim in point of merit to permanence. Robinson Crusoe has lived longest because

it lives most, because it was detached, as it were, from its own time and organized for separate existence. It is the only one of Defoe's tales that shows what he could do as an artist.

We might have seen from the others that he had the genius of a great artist; here we have the possibility realized, the convincing proof of accomplished work. Moll Flanders is in some respects superior as a novel. Moll is a much more complicated character than the simple, open-minded, manly mariner of York; a strangely mixed compound of craft and impulse, selfishness and generosity; in short, a thoroughly bad woman, made bad by circumstances. In tracing the vigilant resolution with which she plays upon human weakness, the spasms of compunction which shoot across her wily designs, the selfish after-thoughts which paralyze her generous impulses, her fits of dare-devil courage and uncontrollable panic, and the steady current of good-humored satisfaction with herself which makes her chuckle equally over mishaps and successes, Defoe has gone much more deeply into the springs of action, and sketched a much richer page in the natural history of his species than in Robinson Crusoe. True, it is a more repulsive page, but that is not the only reason why it has fallen into comparative oblivion, and exists as a parasite upon the more popular work.

It is not equally well constructed for the struggle of existence among books. No book can live forever which is not firmly organized round some central principle of life, and that principle in itself imperishable. It must have a heart and members; the members must be soundly compacted and the heart superior to decay. In Robinson Crusoe we have real growth from a vigorous germ. The central idea round which the tale is organized, the position of a man cast ashore on a desert island, abandoned to his own resources, suddenly shot beyond help or counsel from his fellow-creatures, is one that must live as long as the uncertainty of human life.

The germ of Robinson Crusoe, the actual experience of Alexander Selkirk, went floating about for several years, and more than one artist dallied with it, till it finally settled and took root in the mind of the one man of his

generation most capable of giving it a home and working out its artistic possibilities. Defoe was the only man of letters in his time who might have been thrown on a desert island without finding himself at a loss what to do. The art required for developing the position in imagination was not of a complicated kind, and yet it was one of the rarest of gifts. Something more was wanted than simply conceiving what a man in such a situation would probably feel and probably do. Above all, it was necessary that his perplexities should be unexpected; and his expedients for meeting them unexpected, yet both perplexities and expedients so real and life-like that, when we were told them, we should wonder we had not thought of them before. One gift was indispensable for this, however many might be accessory, the genius of circumstantial invention-not a very exalted order of genius, perhaps, but quite as rare as any other intellectual prodigy.

Looking at Defoe's private life, it is not difficult to understand the peculiar fascination which such a problem as he solved in Robinson Crusoe must have had for him. It was not merely that he had passed a life of uncertainty, often on the verge of precipices, and often saved from ruin by a buoyant energy which seems almost miraculous; not merely that, as he said of himself in one of his diplomatic appeals for commiseration,

"No man hath tasted differing fortunes more,
For thirteen times have I been rich and poor."

But when he wrote Robinson Crusoe, it was one of the actual chances of his life, and by no means a remote one, that he might be cast all alone on an uninhabited island. We see from his letters to De la Faye how fearful he was of having "mistakes" laid to his charge by the Government in the course of his secret services. His former changes of party had exposed him, as he well knew, to suspicion. A false step, a misunderstood paragraph, might have had ruinous consequences for him. If the Government had prosecuted him for writing anything offensive to them, refusing to believe that it was put in to amuse the Tories, transportation might

very easily have been the penalty. He had made so many enemies in the press that he might have been transported without a voice being raised in his favor, and the mob would not have interfered to save a Government spy from the plantations.

But whatever it was that made the germ idea of Robinson Crusoe take root in Defoe's mind, he worked it out as an artist.

Artists of a more emotional type might have drawn much more elaborate and affecting word-pictures of the mariner's feelings in various trying situations, gone much deeper into his changing moods, and shaken our souls with pity and terror over the solitary castaway's alarms and fits of despair. Defoe's aims lay another way. This Crusoe is not a man given to the luxury of grieving. If he had begun to pity himself, he would have been undone. Perhaps Defoe's imaginative force was not of a kind that could have done justice to the agonies of a shipwrecked sentimentalist; he has left no proof that it was; but if he had represented Crusoe bemoaning his misfortunes, brooding over his fears, or sighing with Ossianic sorrow over his lost companions and friends, he would have spoiled the consistency of the character. The lonely man had his moments of panic and his days of dejection, but they did not dwell in his memory. Defoe no doubt followed his own natural bent, but he also showed true art in confining Crusoe's recollections as closely as he does to his efforts to extricate himself from difficulties that would have overwhelmed a man of softer temperament. The subject had fascinated him, and he found enough in it to engross his powers without travelling beyond its limits for diverting episodes, as he does more or less in all the rest of his tales. The diverting episodes in Robinson Crusoe all help the verisimilitude of the story.—Daniel Defoe.