with the consciousness of God and truth, open to him by the simple and irrefutably clear norms of reason. I further pointed to the contradictions in Spir's philosophy. Tolstoï listened to me attentively, and when I had done said:

You are right! That's exactly how I had pictured to myself Spir's importance. To my mind he has, better than any other philosophers, defined the main point of human moral life, and has proved the uselessness of all attempts at explaining the origin of evil in this world, attempts which had plunged his predecessors into such a distress of hopelessness. Why, even Kant and Schopenhauer were unable to solve that problem. There's one point, however, in which I cannot possibly agree with him, and that is in his conception of Christianity. Spir was wrong to reject it, though, on the other hand, he could not have done otherwise, as he had completely misunderstood its essential meaning. Now listen! [Tolstoi went on excitedly, stopping in the middle of the hall]. How often has it been repeated, and probably will further be repeated, that I have created a religious teaching of my own! I have only striven in all my works, for the last twenty years, to explain the true meaning of Christ's teaching, such as I understand it. The only merit I consider to be mine is to have succeeded in untying the knot which human thought has tied itself into, acknowledging the final deductions of the pessimistic teaching, and especially that of Schopenhauer, and yet, at the same time, unable to deny that tendency which is prevalent in us towards everlasting moral perfection. It's not Nirvana, that absence of desire, that we need, but a desire to attain good, truth and ideal moral order of the world, and it's only by following Christ's teaching, by fulfilling the will of the Father, that we can attain that end, that is, by living not according to our own evil human will, but by the will of God, which stands before us as the supreme moral law of love. In that volume in which Spir treats of the question of morality, you will probably have noticed the passages marked by me on the margins as I read that volume. To my mind Spir has unconsciously in many cases repeated the teaching of Christ. I hope, if such be God's will, to make some day an extract from his moral philosophy of those ideas which I consider correct and which coincide with my understanding of true moral life.

With these words our conversation on Spir came to an end. Boutourlin came into the hall and proceeded to take leave of Tolstoï. As it was already late, I followed his example. Tolstoï, holding my hand affectionately, said:

I hope that we shall meet again before I leave for Iasnaïa Poliana; we shall then talk about what we had not time to speak of to-night.

Unfortunately, this hope was not realised, owing to my time being very much occupied.

It is true that one morning in May, when, I am ashamed to say, I awoke after ten, I was very much confused when the servant whilst giving me a number of the periodical Questions of Philosophy and Psychology, which I had lent to Tolstoï, said: "This morning, between nine and ten, an old grey-haired gentleman with a long beard asked for you. I told him that you were still in bed, whereupon he asked me not to disturb you. "Give him this

book," he said, "with my best thanks; remember me to him, and tell him that Tolstoï had come to bid him farewell before leaving for the country.'

The next day I heard from some friends that he had left for Iasnaïa Poliana.

In addition to these reminiscences of my acquaintance with Tolstoï, I consider that my readers would be interested by reading those thoughts of Spir on moral philosophy which Tolstoï mentioned in our conversation. He made pencil notes in his wide characteristic handwriting on the margins of those pages which had specially struck him, marking many of them with an N.B.

As the translation of these passages marked in his handwriting would take up much room, I have decided to put them before my readers one day in a special sketch.

S. N. EVERLING.

ROBERT BURNS, POET:

CAN ENGLISH PEOPLE UNDERSTAND HIM?

THE Editor of The Nineteenth Century has invited me, as a Lowland Scot (with also some Highland, or Celtic, blood in my veins) of the Angus and Mearns (or Forfar and Kincardine) variety-which was also that of the father of the Ayrshire bard from whom he imbibed his vernacular Doric-has invited me, I say, to reply to the question-' Robert Burns, Poet: Can English people understand him?' To which I at once hasten to answer: Certainly they could, since there is practically nothing the English people cannot do when seriously put to it.' But as for their comprehension of the poetry of Burns, which is mainly a question of language, this effort on their part has hitherto been seriously handicapped by certain misconceptions of the racial kind which it may be well for me to deal with first, so as thus to clear the ground for a further advance. What I complain of is that dwellers south of the Tweed, and especially on the Thames, still continue to hold most confused and erroneous ideas as to the ethnology of Scotland, which is generally referred to as a 'Celtic fringe' to England, like Wales.

No greater mistake was ever made. Far from being a ' Celtic fringe' to England, Scotland, of which the population is overwhelmingly of Saxo-Scandinavian origin, has a 'Celtic fringe,' or marginal embroidery, of its own. But the 'man in the street' no less than the professor in his study, and the able editor' at his desk, may well be excused for harbouring an illusion which was shared by one of our monarchs on the throne. This was George IV., whose heroic portrait by Wilkie, in full Highland costume, now embellishes the throne-room of Holyrood Palace. George IV., the first of his sceptred line to cross the Tweed, paid a memorable visit to Edinburgh in 1822, the year after his coronation; and the royal procession from Leith to Holyrood, as stage-managed by Scott, was one of the finest things the latter ever did, and looked like a scenic page out of Waverley or Rob Roy, taking the credulous King completely in, and leading him to think, what, i deed, many of George V.'s subjects in the South still also

seem to believe, that 'Caledonia stern and wild' was mainly a country of 'kilts, caterans, kail-yairds, and Gaelic-speaking Kelts.'

To such an extent had this hallucination, through the thaumaturgic genius of Scott, taken hold of the kilted King, that at a banquet to which he was treated by the city in the Parliament House-the Westminster Hall of Edinburgh-His Majesty, after proposing the health of his hosts, said there was one toast more, and only one, in which he must request the assembly to join him. 'I shall simply give you,' he said, 'the chieftains and clans of Scotland, and prosperity to the Land of Cakes!' thus distinctly conveying His Majesty's impression that the crowning glory of Scotland consisted in the Highland clans and their chiefs; whereas, as Lockhart points out, the Highlanders had always constituted but a small, and almost always an unimportant, part of the Scottish population, so much so as to cause Hill Burton to remark that, even if the Highlands had never existed, the history of Scotland would not be essentially different from what it now is.

In England it is popularly believed that Gaelic is the native language of Scotsmen; but it is nothing of the kind. A Lowland Scot no more understands Gaelic than he does Russian, and there is just as much difference between English and Gaelic as between English and Russian. The vernacular of the Lowland Scot is the language of Burns, which is but a dialect of English, whereas the tongue of the Highlander proper is that of Ossian. But, if Burns and Ossian were to meet in the Valhalla of the gods, neither could understand a single word spoken by the other, unless, indeed, there be a kind of Esperanto language in those celestial palaces of fame and glory.

Scott himself committed the mistake of making Rob Roy, a Celt of Celts, use the unadulterated Doric of Bailie Nicol Jarvie, though my old fellow-student at Edinburgh, R. L. S.,' was more discriminating with the speech of Alan Breck. William Black, the real revealer of Celtic Scotland to the British people, was the first to make the Highlanders talk English of a kind in his pages as they do at their own firesides-with little or no admixture of the vocabulary of Burns.

It is frequently asserted-though in a loose, unthinking kind of way-that in Scotland the best English is spoken at Invernessthe capital of the Highlands-a soft, sibilant sort of English ; but this is only true in the sense that the English spoken there, and in most other parts of what was once, and to some extent still is, the Gaelic-speaking portion of Caledonia, has little or no admixture of Lallan,' or Lowland Scots words. The pure Highlander can assimilate English much more readily than the Doric of the Lowlands, and that is why the poems of Burns have

had comparatively so few readers north and north-west of the Grampians.

Even at the present time I doubt whether half a dozen copies of Burns, which had been read and appreciated, could be found throughout all the Gaelic-speaking districts of the Highlands and Isles, even belonging to those of the bilingual kind—i.e., possessing a knowledge of English as well as Erse. For the social world of Burns was totally different from that of the Highlands; and even the Highlands, which he had only seen in the course of a cursory tourist dash, supplied him with but few of his themes, and none at all of his outstanding characters.

It takes a Highlander of a very exceptional kind, indeed, and one who has almost become half a Lowlander in speech and sentiment, to understand Burns. Such a man, however—and there were many like him-was Dr. Norman Macleod, a son of the manse (as well as of Morven, like Ossian), who, when doing chaplain's duty at Balmoral, used to read not only the Bible to the Queen, but also Burns' most beautifully,' wrote Her Majesty in her diary, while being reminded of hundreds of English words current in Chaucer's time that now only survived in the poems of Burns.

But apart from these differences of race and speech, which have never been rightly realised south of the Tweed, English readers of Burns suffer from the additional disadvantage of not having acquired a true perception of the personality and character of the poet himself before attempting to appreciate his poems. For, by all accounts of those who knew him, the poet himself was far more wonderful and impressive than his poems.

One of the most persistent misconceptions in the South is that Burns was a mere peasant prodigy or ploughman, and perhaps he himself was to a great extent responsible for this erroneous belief. The poetic Genius of my country,' he wrote, 'found me at the plough, and threw her inspiring mantle over me.' Yes, but it was his own plough, and not that of an employer, which makes all the difference between the social origin and status of the two. Burns was never a hind who worked for hire. Like William Cobbett-that fascinating author of Rural Rides, with whose sturdy character he had so much in common-Burns always ploughed his own tenant-land, or that of his father, as all his ancestors had done before him ever since the time of Bannockburn, when, according to the late Dr. Charles Rogers—a most researchful historian-they first emerge to notice as tenantfarmers in the parish of Marykirk, Kincardineshire—a parish which was afterwards to have the distinction of producing an opposito pole of Scottish intellect in the person of John Stuart Mill.

It appears that the original form of the family name was 'Burnhouse,' which gradually got corrupted into 'Burness,'