The

mine-master in the world. Man of Destiny moved steadily onward; but he had his fluctuations and his anxieties like Sharon. Yet most of his little ventures had succeeded, and each gain was shrewdly invested in mines, as a stepping-stone to something further. Sharon had secured all that was supposed best; but these outsiders could pick and choose among abandoned properties, and Fair had the scent of a sleuth-hound in puzzling out signs of metal. The partners, who had already accumulated a moderate fortune, decided to break ground on a tract of the hill comparatively neglected. Fair pronounced that it had a likely look, and the purchase-money was a trifle. Performance seemed to belie the promise. When they had sunk to a depth of 1200 feet, they had nearly touched their bottom dollar, and the big Californians were chuckling over their discomfiture. Then came one of the most wonderful turns on record of the capricious wheel of Fortune. For weeks Fair had been growing more gloomy and more anxious. One day when Mackay met him at the mouth of the shaft there was a smile on his worn face. At last they had broken through the barren quartz to rock that showed distinctly metalliferous. Next morning they had picked up the thread of a tiny silver vein. They followed it: they lost it when Fair had broken down under the strain: they harked back, and they found it again. Tunnelling along it Tunnelling along it for 250 feet from the bottom of the shaft, it brought them

out upon the upper floor of the Comstock bonanza par excellence. Foot by foot, as the new shaft went down, the bonanza steadily increased in richness. They tested its width by cutting transverse drifts, and nowhere did they strike indications of poverty. In fact, with the silver sparkling from the sides in the lamplight, they might have fancied themselves in some fabled treasure-cave of the gnomes. Almost as surprising as the rare richness of the find was the comparative secrecy in which it was shrouded. Sharon and his Californians obstinately refused to give credence to the reports till the yields of the ore made unbelief impossible. In truth, the little syndicate was literally a close corporation. Mackay and his partners kept the mine in their own hands: there were no shares to be rigged on fluttering markets. He always held to the principle he avowed, of sticking to mining and never speculating in stocks. In the course of some seven years their bonanzas had paid the partners nearly fourteen millions sterling in dividends. They had made their piles and should have been well satisfied, when, after a sudden and swift decline, all the bonanzas had simultaneously given out.

They sold the reversions for what they would fetch: they retired from business, and when Mackay the millionaire was being fêted in the Old World as the bonanza king, many of the adventurers who had taken over his property were filing their schedules of bankruptcy.

"THERE is not in existence a compendious history of Scotland which at once supplies a consecutive narrative of events and seeks to trace the gradual consolidation of the various elements that have gone to the making of the Scottish people. It is as an attempt to meet this want that this book was conceived and written." So says Mr Hume Brown in the preface to his 'History of Scotland,' of which the first volume, ending with the last sigh of James V.,"He exclaimed that the Crown had come to his house by a woman, and would pass from it by a woman," is now published. There are, indeed, verbal differences in the reports of the king's last words; but no report is quite so bald as Mr Hume Brown's statement. This baldness of manner is the chief fault in a book which has many merits (perhaps all the merits at which it aims), and is destined to be very useful. The book is one of the Cambridge Press Series, edited by Mr Prothero, who says that "it is intended for the use of all persons anxious to understand the nature of existing political conditions."

Now a book should be judged by the author's aim and scope. But even to understand "existing political conditions," it is, we think, above all things necessary to understand what sort of men

1 History of Scotland. Hume Brown, M.A., LL.D.

made them. As far as we have a complaint against Mr Hume Brown, it is that, in the relentless effort to keep romance (the romance of fact) out of history, he neglects the personal element, which gives history its charm. He never stirs the blood in telling the most stirring of all tales of the human past— nay, he seems to scorn the action. Thus, in our opinion, a reader of even the uncritical Tales of a Grandfather' knows more of.our fathers who made us than a reader of the critical Mr Hume Brown is likely to know. Our meaning is not that he should repeat the legends of Pitscottie, Boece, Buchanan, and Knox, where facts disprove their fancies. But facts resting on good authority are themselves, in all conscience, romantic and characteristic enough. These are the flesh and blood, the colour and life, of history. The modern school prefer to give us the excessively dry bones, the osteology of national existence.

Mr Haverfield-who disagree. Mr Hume Brown does not say who the authorities are; but he includes Dr Christison's 'Early Fortifications in Scotland' and the Celtic Britain' of the Principal of Jesus in his Bibliography. He also thanks Dr James Macdonald, Rhind Lecturer for 1897, "for his invaluable assistance in connection with the chapter on the Roman occupation of Northern Britain."

The invaluable results of Dr Macdonald's reflections, if they are represented here, seem to be chiefly negative. Nobody knows where "Mons Graupius" was, nor where Agricola's camps were, nor what was his line of march. But we do know how and with what weapons, claymore and target, the natives fought. We do know that, as in 1240, they lived in wattled houses. Of all this Mr Hume Brown says nothing: nothing about "certain customs" of a possible pre - Celtic northern people, which “ seem to have affected their Pictish conquerors." Was it not the Picts themselves who were "preCeltic," if pre-Celtic any body was? Without discussing that question, which needs discussion, Mr Hume Brown thinks that "the main body of the Picts" were "Goidelic Celts."

We incline to agree with him, but we consider that a page of discussion (though the problem is unsettled) would not have been wasted. Did Severus reach Burghead in his energetic northern march?1 (210). Mr Hume Brown does not inquire. Of St Ninian's labours "all traces disappear," yet we doubt if Professor Rhys would thus dismiss the Latin and Christian inscriptions of Galloway, not quite rejected even by the scepticism of Mr Hill Burton.2 Mr Hume Brown, however, does admit "what seem to be Roman temporary camps" as far north as Aberdeenshire."

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What seems to us regrettable is the total lack of spirit and sympathy in the blank negative conclusions of "the latest critical opinion." The picturesque method, where it rests on fancy, is detestable. But in Tacitus's account of the immortally glorious stand of Calgacus it is the facts that are picturesque. And the event is historical in this sense, that the fame of it has often uplifted the hearts the hearts of Scots, whether Highlanders or Lowlanders. Mr Hume Brown's account of the Roman occupation is too negative and colourless. On the other hand, his description of the chaotic affairs between 449 and 844-the war

Mr

rings of Brython (practically Welshman), Dalriad Scot (Irish settler in Argyll, circ. 500), English from Forth to Humber, and Pict "defæcates to a pure translucency," and may be praised as a remarkably excellent account of a most con

fusing period. On the other hand, the account of the Columban introduction of Christianity is not accompanied by any statement as to the native religion on which it was engrafted. Columba "is, in fact, half Druid magician, half Christian missionary." This is true; but its truth implies the survival of "Druidic " or Shamanistic ideas into the age of Adamnan, the historian of Columba. Mr Hume Brown draws a valuable contrast between the book of the Celtic Adamnan and the works of the English Bede, half a century later. "It is a difference of mental and moral atmosphere. In his keener sense of truth and the relations of things, Bede represents a general movement of mind of which Adamnan, with his childlike taste for the wonderful and the miraculous, had no conception." He had not; but we think that " a general movement of mind" was not the cause of the intellectual advance. We would rather suggest that the difference is an affair of race. umba and Adamnan were Celts; Bede was English. In every page of Adamnan you meet second-sight, clairvoyance, telepathy, just as you meet them to-day in Lochaber and Appin. Bede also, of course, believes in miracles; but his St Cuthbert

Col

has but very few examples of the powers so notable in Columba, and in the Western Celt to this day. Once Christianised and educated, the Englishman reaches Bede's remarkable level of criticism; but Christianity and education leave the Celt still a poet, still a seer. This in itself is a fact of history.

Again, from Adamnan's legends, however we may estimate them, we gleam a hundred details of Celtic daily life, as it was till "Drumossie's day," nay, as in the lonelier isles (for instance Eriskay) it continues to be. But Mr Hume Brown is either indifferent to this colour of human existence (a thing as "historical" as Magna Charta) or cannot afford space for what is so charming and so real. He tells us, admirably, how the fortunes of Celt and Englishman veered; how each race in turn had the upper hand: but he does not tell us what manner of men were these English and Celts; how they lived their lives, what they believed, what were their ideals. Yet nobody can put more tersely and lucidly the political differentiæ of the rival Churches, English and Celtic. "While Roman Christianity" (which England adopted in 664) "had fitted itself into the mould of the municipal institutions of the empire, Celtic Christianity had grown out of the tribal system of the peoples who had embraced it." There is a chapter in a sentence! But a reader needs to know more of what "the tribal system really was. The difficulties about St Patrick and Palladius are not discussed;