ST. ANDREWS AND ELSEWHERE.* THIS is an entertaining book, like

everything from the pen of "A. K. H. B." But it comes rather hard upon the heels of his two volumes of St. Andrews reminis- cences. With that curious, pretty pathos—or pathetic prettiness—which becomes him so well, he says, in the last

sentence of his last chapter: "If I am permitted to complete thirty years in this charge—which I shall do if I see

September of next year—I may yet be able to tell the story, a simple but pathetic story, of the years since the Twenty- five." It is a pity that Dr. Boyd had not waited for two years or so. He would then have been in a position to pro- dace a book which might not perhaps have been so large as

his new volume, but which would have been more coherent, and therefore more easily intelligible. The first two hundred pages or so are quite in the line of Twenty-five Years of St. Andrews, and may fairly be regarded as a continuation of

them. But the two other parts, bearing the titles, "That Peaceful Time" and "Things that are Left," constitute a

relapse into Recreations of a Country Parson and The Graver Thoughts of a Country Parson. They are not absolutely devoid of anecdote and personal recollection, but both are subordinated to superficial, and here and there positively

Tupperian, reflection. And yet, taken as a whole, this is a very readable book, and eminently characteristic of

the author, who has come to be quite as mu,th of a clerical personage in Scotland as Tulloch or Norman

Macleod, although of a very different type from either.

"The world," he says in his curious way, "is beautiful yet, although one is some months older than Luther, Knox, and Chalmers lived to be." "A. K. H. B." is ageing ;

at all events, he professes very gracefully to think so, and to philosophise over the fact. Nearly all his old friends in St. Andrews are gone. He had to lament in his former volumes the loss of Tulloch and Shairp ; in their successor he has to tell of the departure of Bishop Wordsworth and Cunningham. As a consequence, he appears here in the

character rather of the accomplished raconteur, than of the writer of chapters of autobiography.

It must be allowed, however, that Dr. Boyd plays very well, and for him almost with gusto, the part of the retailer of good stories,—of stories, that is to say, that are good in themselves and not simply good in virtue of their being illustrative of points of character. Several, indeed, of those contained in this volume would appear to have "gone round" long before it appeared; one, at all events, the point of which lies in the incorrect pronunciation of the first of the Prince of Wales's names, we are morally certain has done duty before. Others, however, are curiously demonstrative of very different sides of Scotch character, and in particular of its matter-of- factness. Take this :—

" Tulloch was the Kirk's first Croall lecturer, getting four hundred pounds for six lectures which did not cost him a great deal of trouble. His subject was 'Sin.' The volume was pub- lished by an eminent firm in George Street, the Blackwoods. It sold well. But a chief authority told me one day, as I sat in 'The Old Saloon,' that it sounded sad when a message-boy came in from a retail bookseller, exclaiming, Gie us six Tulloch's Sins.' " Take, again :— "A good man, the Head of a Roman Catholic college, was walking home in the failing light when he beheld in the middle of the road a dark object in the snow. Drawing near he found a little cobbler from the neighbouring hamlet lying unconsciously drunk. The Jesuit could not leave him to perish, so with diffi- culty he raised him from the ground, and with great difficulty he managed to steer the helpless fellow-mortal to his house, half a mile off. Though unconscious at starting, he had partly regained his senses when he reached his own door ; and he uttered some words of thanks. The good-natured priest said, 'Maybe ye wad not be soo ceevil, if ye kenned who I am.' But the answer was ready. Not without dignity, the half-articulate cobbler replied, 'On ay, I ken ye fine. Ye're a Cawthlic priest. But I'm a man aboon a' prejudice."

Dr. Boyd says such a speech could have been made by none

• Et. Andrews and Eisen here Glimrses of Some Gone and of Things Left. By the author of "Twenty-tve Years ot St. Andrews." ,London; Longinans and Co. 1695,

other than a Scotchman. This is probably true. No less peculiarly Scotch is the ghostly seriousness of this :—

"An old man in Ayrshire, after a burial, said to the minister, Div ye ken what I aye think at a funeral ? ' The minister ex- pected some devout reflection, and made inquiry what it was the old man thought so regularly. 'I aye think '—he paused awe stricken= I aye think, rm desperate glad it's no' me.'"

Finally, it would be difficult for even Scotch self-conceit to go further than in the following, which relates to one of the greatest preachers not only of the North, but of Great Britain :—

"In that inconceivably remote age, when the writer was a lad at Glasgow College, he sojourned for a space in the vicinity of a little Scotch town, in a lonely region. The inhabitants were incredibly pragmatical and self-sufficient. Our biggest Scotch preacher ministered one Sunday in the parish kirk. I said to an aged inhabitant, 'Well, what did you all think of Mr. Caird ? ' The answer was prompt. It was likewise idiotic. Not much ; we thought his sermons no' very weel conneckit.' "

As has been hinted, Dr. Boyd has not very much that is fresh to tell of St. Andrews or of himself. In fact, he is forced to chronicle such small-beer about the one as that it has got new lamps, and of the other :—

"I once found that a decent man was putting about a long story touching an intimation made from the pulpit in the same place, the point of which was that I called my church-officer the Sacristan. I had never once done so in my life. I cannot count the occasions on which I have read, in newspapers which favour Nonconformity, that I preach in lavender kid gloves. Never once, in my lengthened pilgrimage, have I preached in gloves of any material or colour known among men.'

We have not here so often as usual with "A. K. H. B.," when he has his pen in his hand, touches of that egotism which, on the whole, sits very pleasantly on him. Here, however, we have

it in a quotation from a letter of Hugh Pearson's recalling a Sunday in Edinburgh at the time Dr. Boyd was a minister there :—

" How well I remember hearing you preach in St. Bernard's ; going with A. P. S. and Kingsley ! An admirable sermon, which we all contrasted greatly to your advantage with one we heard from Guthrie in the afternoon."

As a rule, however, Dr. Boyd is in this book remarkably im- personal, and more especially in the chapters in which he reviews the lives of Archbishop Tait, Dean Stanley, and Hugh Pearson. The last is the best—at least, in the "A. K. H. B." sense of being most anecdotal:—

" Pearson and Stanley had a private interview with Pius IX., during which the infallible man (as Stanley said) made more blunders than he had ever known any mortal make in twenty minutes before. One question was, 'Is not Vealberfoss a Pro- fessor at Oxford ? Oh no ; Bishop,' was Stanley's reply.—' Oh, Vealberfoss is Bishop ; I did not know that.' Another curious detail of that historic talk, which appears to have been carried on in a singular mixture of French and English. 'How is the Pro- fessor Pouse ? ' said the Pope. Stanley took up the question wrong, fancying the Pope was asking if Stanley, then an Oxford Professor, was epouse, married. Stanley was just going to be married, so in a somewhat confused way he stated that Oxford Professors might marry, but that he had not done so ; whereupon the Pope impatiently,—' That is not what I mean ; I want to know how is the Professor Pouse.' The friends replied that he was very well. Then the Pope summed up, Oh, the Professor Pouse is like une cloche, a church bell. He induces others to enter the Church, but he stays outside himself.'"

What of this volume is not given up directly either to recollections of St. Andrews, or of "A. K. H. B.'s " friends and acquaintances, can only be described as a melange of chat and superficial, but generally hopeful, reflection upon all sorts of subjects, from Scotch liturgies to "Growing Old,"" Saying Goodbye," and "The Periodicity of Sensations." It is thus, for example, that he talks of the advent of old age :—

" The evening rest is wonderfully grateful, when there is no worrying interruption ; and to the ageing it must be as a law of the Medes,—no work after the last meal of the day. Thus kindly sleep comes on most. And as the great preacher of my youth, Henry Melva (who never got his due and is forgotten), once said in his eager way, What can He give them better ? ' Though I fear now that is not the meaning of the famous text."

And thus he prattles on through the two parts of his volume to which he gives the titles of "Things Left" and "That Peaceful Time." Occasionally the reader stumbles upon a passage the beauty of which recalls the two lines of genuine poetry in Hobbes's Homer. Thus in an inspiriting if not quite inspiring chapter entitled "Helped by Nature," we have

a strain of a more poetical mood than that ordinarily affected

by "A. K. H. B." :— "It is but the twenty-sixth day of July ; yet already the golden hue of harvest is widely spread forth below ; where the fine river

winds down the broad valley, and the great black hills rise above the yellow gleam. The scenery is Highland; vitally and unmis- takeably Highland ; yet it is not like Perthshire or Argyllshire. It has a character of its own ; there is an indefinable but strongly felt difference. Stop and gaze ; and take things in. The ripening rustle is at one's feet ; there is a fresh, warm breeze which makes waves over the cornfields, which makes an teolian harp of the wires overhead. The landscape, vast in extent, is black towards the west, where the way tends, at the base of these great rounded hills, towards Loch Maree and Skye. Eastward, where a few miles would bring you to the sea, the valley widens into a considerable plain. The plain is now in shadow ; save that, far away, there is an oasis of sunshine, a round expanse of blazing green and gold amid the gloom ; like the bright days of one's life, which have passed away."

The Country Parson has never written a truer or more natural sentence than the final one in this passage. It con- tains none of that provoking affectation of style which is, after all, perhaps only a form of stoicism. The author seems more of himself in it than in almost anything he has written. It is typical of this book. "A. K. H. B." has written many a better work,—many a work, certainly, that is more compact and fuller of readable anecdote or re- miniscence. But he has published nothing so full of himself at his best.