"I'll take one," quoth I, "if you '11 tell me whose statue that is."
"'Tis Rabbie Burns" replied he, on the nail.
"Thank you," said I, taking the paper. "And what did he do, to deserve the statue?"
My newsboy scratched his head. Perceiving his embarrassment, a party of his friends down the street called out in stentorian chorus: "Ay, 'tis Babbie Burns."
"But what did he do to deserve the statue?" I thundered back. They hung their heads. At last my newsboy recovered himself; his face brightened. "Well?" said I again, "what did he do to deserve this statue?"
"He deed!" answered the intelligent little man.
Another newsboy, whom I asked if he had ever read Sir Walter Scott, replied, "No, he is ower dreich (over dry)."
Talking of statues, I see that Paisley is going to erect a full-sized figure of the late Thomas Coats, with a bronze high hat under his bronze arm. The history of the Corporation Art Galleries is curious. The nucleus of the collection is the bequest of a coach-builder, who seems to have had a Glaswegian Renaissance all to himself, for it was years after his death before his legacy was routed out from the lumber-rooms to which it had been consigned, and ere its many genuine treasures were catalogued by Mr. James Paton, the learned curator, whose magic-lantern exhibit the other day of the coach-building connoisseur's face was the first display of his lineaments to an ungrateful posterity. The Galleries now claim to contain so many Old Masters that no connoisseur is complete without a knowledge of them. Except Velasquez, there is scarcely one of the great painters who is not represented here, even including Giorgione, of whom, parodying Hegel's remark about the one disciple who understood him ("and he doesn't understand me!"), it may be said that there are only two genuine specimens of him in the world, and that both of these are by his pupils. What Mary Logan would say to these Rembrandts and Rubenses I know not; but there is much of indisputable value in this collection, to say nothing of Flaxman's masterpiece-the statue of Pitt,-or the recent accessions, such as the Whistler, or David Murray's "Fir Faggots," or the bust of Victor Hugo by Rodin.
Pictorially the hill of the dead was the most interesting part of Glasgow I saw-a scene which, especially in its simple severe Protestant draping of snow, might well tempt the artist. At its summit John Knox looks down upon the Cathedral, whose altars and images were broken during the Reformation, and whose new stained windows (made in Germany) testify by their preference for Old Testament subjects to the latent Puritanism of Caledonia. Especially interesting is the crypt, with its sepulchral church, whose subterranean service is recorded in "Bob Roy." One of the pillars of the crypt proper is called the Rob Roy pillar, for behind it the great outlaw is supposed to have hidden. Near it is the shrine of St. Mungo, patron saint of Glasgow, who has presumably risen in the hierarchy now that Glasgow has been made a county. Facing the shrine is a window decorated with a portrait of Edward Irving, clothed as St. John the Baptist. The cicerone said it was greatly admired because the eyes followed you about wherever you walked. This is not the first tune I have been asked to admire as supreme art what is really one of the commonest of optical delusions. After the Cathedral had closed, it had to be reopened because I had lost a glove within. After a careful search the glove was found in the gloomy crypt, pointing its finger at this miraculous picture, unable to tear itself away. But perhaps the most characteristic thing I came across in Glasgow was an inscription at the end of the bridge leading to the picturesque cemetery. "The adjoining bridge was erected by the Merchants' House of Glasgow to afford a proper entrance to their new cemetery, combining convenient access to the grounds with suitable decoration to the venerable Cathedral and surrounding scenery, to unite the tombs of many generations who have gone before with the resting-places destined for generations yet unborn, where the ashes of all shall repose until the rising of the just, when that which is born a natural body shall be raised a spiritual body, when this corruptible must put on incorruption, when this mortal must put on immortality, when death is swallowed up in victory." There you have Glasgow! An auctioneer's advertisement blent with an edifying sermon, a happy combination of commerce and Christianity, making the best of this world and the next.
I left Glasgow in a choking yellow fog. Five minutes from the city the train steamed into bright sunshine, which continued till five minutes from London, where a sisterly yellow fog was waiting. As Tennyson sings, I had gone "from the night to the night."
HASLEMERE
I am up a "Bo tree." Every schoolboy knows (that is, of course, every Buddhistic schoolboy) that when the Buddha made "the great renunciation," he attained Nirvana by sitting under a "Bo tree." My "Bo tree" is a great oak in the heart of the woods, mounted by a dizzy spiral staircase, at the summit of which you enter Nirvana by means of the "House on the Garden," a glass-house floored with boards and furnished with rustic chairs, a lounge and a writing-table; and here, amid the tree-tops, I write to the music of thrush and blackbird, with restful glances at the sailing clouds or at the sunny weald, that circles for miles around and ends to the south in the "downs" that hide the English Channel. Perhaps it is because my landscape takes in Tennyson's happy Haslemere home that my thought runs so much on him to-day, and then runs back to a cold stone staircase up which I toiled in pitchy blackness to see a great French poet. Taine, who preferred Alfred de Musset to Tennyson, made of a contrast between the two men the most telling pages in his history of our literature, setting in graphic antithesis the dust and flare and fever of the Boulevards against the
English home, gray twilight poured On dewy pastures, dewy trees, Softer than sleep,-all things in order stored, A haunt of ancient peace,
where the English Laureate brooded over his chiselled verses. How much more piquant a contrast might be drawn between the jealously-guarded castle in which Tennyson entrenched himself and the accessible garret in the Rue St. Jacques where Verlaine held his court in absolute bonhomie and deshabille.
But, alas! there is no Nirvana on my "Bo Tree"-at least, not to-day. The blatancy of a brass band bursts forth on the breeze. A popular waltz silences the cuckoos. I climb down my spiral staircase and hasten across the wood to discover what these strange sounds portend. In front of the creeper-clad house I come upon a scene of comic opera. This is the village fete day, and here are the festive villagers come to pay allegiance to the lord of the manor. The majority are Foresters, and wear green sashes, and carry banners like to the pictorial pocket-handkerchiefs of Brobdingnag. The music gives over, and my host addresses them from between the roses of his porch, and they laugh at his genial jokes with the unanimity of the footlights. There are tiny tots and old women in the background, and yonder is the Village Beauty-a ripe maid, i' faith, and a comely. There are other girls in her train; but, oddsbobs! what have they done with their tights? and why do they delay to announce her approaching marriage in merry melodic chorus? But I conceal my surprise and, as the cynical Man from Town (gadzooks!), ogle the Pride of the Village, to the disgust of her rural swain, who has started blowing the trombone and dare not desist, though his cheeks get redder and more explosive each instant. In the next Act we all go down to the annual dinner, in a long rose-wreathed tent, and the Parson says grace and the Parson's Clerk "Amen," and the Squire (in corduroy knickerbockers and leggings) bestows his benediction on all the village, while without, the happy peasants project sticks at cocoanuts or try their strength with mallets, and all is virtuous and feudal. In the third Act we are in the Vicarage Garden-a beautiful set, with real rhododendrons. Sir Roger de Coverley takes tea i'fackins with the Parson, and the Stalwart Farmer passes the sugar to the Man from Town, who is gazing out wistfully towards the Village Green, where the Village Beauty foots it featly with the Village Idiot. The last Act passes in the Drawing-Boom of "Bo tree" House, where the Archdeacon's Daughter touches her tinkling guitar and warbles a plaintive ballad:-