untouched by the new spirit. They sit on the side-lines of our busy life and have no part in the game except to criticize or condemn. Young men there are, still further, who slink through their years among us with harm and shame to themselves and to the college, though even these young men would not shift the burden of their shame from their own shoulders to the natural influences of college life. When we turn, however, from these lookers-on to the actual sharers of our life, then the sense of reality is seen to sober and lift the standard of college morals. Young men study now, as they did not study in earlier generations, with a sense of the nearness of life and its demands; they train their bodies for serviceableness, utility and symmetry; and they say their prayers, not as a part of college compulsion, but as a final step in the elective system, an essential part of the athletics of the soul. An unmistakable witness of this sense of reality is to be found in the present renaissance in the college of social responsibility. No graduate of twentyfive years ago could observe without amazement the great development of philanthropic service among all classes and types of Harvard students. Boys' clubs, men's clubs, charity-work and religious activity provide natural outlets for the new sense of human relationships. It has been estimated that one student in every eight or ten is probably engaged this year in some such form of self-effacing and unostentatious service. On the whole, therefore, this is no time to be despondent about college morals. Like every moving stream the current of college life carries some scum upon its surface; and there are each year some pitiful lives which can hardly be kept from sinking to the bottom under the weight of their own or their inherited passions, follies, or wealth. Yet, in spite of our social scum, and our social sediment, the main current of the stream, as it hurries past one who watches it from year to year, seems to gain in cleanness as it gains in volume. The very swiftness of its movement sweeps away some of the obstructions which used tɔ clog its course, and it feels beyond itself the increasing pull of the reality of life, as a river feels the persuasion of the waiting sea.

Francis G. Peabody.

BATTLE HYMN.

(Translated from the Greek of Tyrtæus.)

Blest is the brave; how glorious is his prize,
When at his country's call he dares and dies.
And sad the sight when, envious of the dead,
The man without a country begs his bread.
His poor old parents feebly toil along,
And little children who have done no wrong.
Spurned by the glance he meets at every turn,
He learns how hot the beggar's brand can burn.
His name is shame: the human form divine
Shows in its fall the soul's dishonored shrine.
Deeds in the dust of ages swiftly root,
And children's children reap the bitter fruit.
Strike for our country, comrades: on, ye brave!
Where is the man that dreads a patriot grave?
And ye, my younger brethren, side by side,
Shoulder to shoulder stand, whate'er betide.
The surging thrill ye feel before your foe
Swept o'er your fathers' heart-strings long ago.
To those whose days are longer in the land
Lend in the pride of youth the helping hand.
For shame to see an old man fall in front

When young men leave him there to bear the brunt :
Low in the dust the hoary hair is trailed:

At last is quenched a soul that never quailed.

Youth in its bloom should pluck the glowing bough
Whose leaves in glory wreathe a hero's brow.
Welcome to man, and fair in woman's eye,

The manly form that living dares to die.

Fate hangs apoise, with gloom and triumph fraught:

Up, hearts! and in the balance count we our lives as naught.

Charles Wellington Stone.

THE PREACHING SCOT.

"And something of the Shorter-Catechist." So Mr. Henley closes his sonnet on Stevenson. So, too, he might have summed up his chapter of insinuation and disapproval in his recent lamentable exposure of himself over the biography of his quandam friend. He meant to pass an individual criticism. After all, what he said was merely that Stevenson was a Scot.

Generalizations on whole peoples are notoriously dangerous, and are apt to rebound. Yet few national characteristics seem more easily proved than this, that the Scot by race and breeding is an inveterate preacher. The commonplace about the metaphysical and theological tendencies of the North Briton applies only to Protestant Scotland; but this didactic bent had displayed itself long before the Reformation had Calvinized the national temperament.

During the Middle Ages, Englishmen wrote abundant riming chronicles, full of uninspired concrete detail. A Scot took up the form, and, under the guise of history, preached a sermon in twelve books on an abstract idea:

"A! Fredome is a noble thing!

Fredome mayss man to haiff liking,
Fredome all solace to man giffes,

He levys at eas that frely levys!"

In the next century a Scottish king, educated at the English court, with a literary taste trained by familiarity with the current French and Fnglish models, undertakes to write a love poem in the conventional allegorical manner then in vogue. But he is not to be bound with these withes. The pagan goddess Minerva herself turns from her traditional function in such poems to preach morality; and basing her remarks on a text from Ecclesiastes, delivers a substantial sermon.

"All thing has tyme, thus sais Ecclesiaste; .
And wele is him that his tyme wel abit.
Abyde thy time; for he that can bot haste
Can noght of hap, the wise man it writ."

Again, he takes up the artificial form of the ballade, then consecrated for the most part to amorous frivolities, and gives it a turn sufficiently indicated by the refrain :

"Lufe maist thy God that first thy lufe began,

And for ilk inche he will the quyte one span."

At a short interval follows Robert Henryson, schoolmaster, and his whole work is permeated with the desire to preach. He begins the writing of pastorals in Britain with a pretty idyll, and improves the opportunity by making the story teach that

"The man that will nocht quhen he may,

Sall haif nocht quhen he wald."

He finds congenial occupation in the elaboration of the time-worn plots of the moral fables of Aesop. He uses his knowledge of his lady's costume to allegorize it into a sermon on ideal conduct. He walks in the Abbey at Dunfermline, revolving the best consolation in adversity, and the burden of his reflection is, “Obey, and thank thy God of all." He strolls in the garden and over hears the chant of an old man, "The moyr of aige, the nerar beoynis bliss." He takes shelter by his own hearth one bitter night in Mid-Lent when the hail is driving from the North. Bent on shutting out the cold, he builds a great fire, takes a drink to comfort his spirits, and sits down to read the book

"Writtin be worthie Chaucer glorious,
Of fair Cresseid and worthie Troylus."

But it frets his Scots soul that at the close the faithless Cressida should be left happy with her paramour. So he composes a sequel in which, with great pity and no bitterness, but with a stern sense of moral retribution, he dooms the beautiful jilt to desertion and the horrible penance of a leper's death.

When we come of the golden age of early Scottish literature, and find the country for once in comparative peace without and within, and the waves

of the high tide of the Renaissance lapping even these far northern shores, the persistent note of didacticism is still clearly audible. William Dunbar, acknowledged chief of the poets of the time, a place hunter and a worldling, is as homiletic as his forerunners. In the midst of mundane satire and court eulogy one poem stands out through which there throbs with the melancholy of a drum beat in a funeral march the terror and the warning of death.

"He spairis na lord for his puiscence,

Na clerk for his intelligence;
His awfull strak may no man fle;

Timor mortis conturbat me."

Gavin Douglas, the fighting bishop of Dunkeld, takes up again the tradition of medieval allegory, and moralizes it into a discourse on the fleeting nature of youth and pleasure, and on the certainty of age and the grave. Sir David Lindesay, the Lyon King at Arms, commissioned to write a court entertainment, produces a tremendous satirical morality, exposing the abuses of society and the church, and holding up to the king the duties of his office.

And so we come to the Reformation. The spirit of this movement in Scotland is typified by the volume of Gude and Godlie Ballates, a collection of campaign songs, religious parodies of popular ditties, in which the devil's own tunes are snatched from him and turned to the service of Kirk and Covenant. Seldom has a nation been so completely transformed in so short a time as Scotland was by the great movement in which Knox was the master spirit. The old creed and the old worship were swept away, a new theology and a new code of morals were established, and the whole temper of the people was changed. The old fighting and openly licentious Scotland disappeared, and the very sound of joy was hushed. The minister was abroad in the land, and no man dared to fiddle save when he was drunk. For a cen tury and a half the pall hung over the land, and we have no need to quote instances of the instinct to preach, for no other instinct was allowed a voice.

But this could not last forever. The eighteenth century saw the awakening and first Ramsay, then Fergusson, then Burns, appeared, and dared to assert the right to sing. But they, too, revolutionaries and protesters though