have now to propose, all those excuses have vanished. (Cheers.) I have no longer any reason for saying that Burns is not with me. Nine-tenths of his poems are amatory-ninetenths of his poems are devoted to the adoration of that sex who have come here in such numbers to do honour to the memory of that poet who wooed not one of them but their whole sex in the most bewitching tones. Now, gentlemen, Burns has got me into a scrape, and Burns shall be made to get me out of it. It is impossible to describe the attraction of women better than Burns has described them. It would be the highest presumption on my part, particularly on this night and at this moment, to endeavour to describe the better part of the creation in terms which can by any possibility come to be equal to the smallest of Burns'; I shall therefore take refuge under his ægis, and propose that we should drink to the Scotch lasses as Burns describes them. (Cheers.) We can pay them no higher compliment. I wish we could. If you want his description, open his book. You cannot turn over a page without finding some remarkable stanzas expressive of his admiration of them. If you are not satisfied with that descriptioncircumspice! (Loud cheers.) Turn if you please from the black letter of the book to the book of Nature, and you will find you cannot show your respect for that sex which has honoured us with their presence here to-night, in any way more than by drinking their healths as Burns' own lasses. (Loud applause.) writer; and with all this strong tincture of nationality, he was at the same time so widely human, and so generously catholic, that he has made Scottish character and Scottish scenery known and beloved wherever the common British language is understood, from the Ganges to the St. Lawrence. There is no doubt a certain class of shallow witlings besouth the Tweed who would gladly have the whole British world refashioned after their own Anglican image; to whom, of course, anything like the assertion of an independent type and characteristic feature in Scottish men is an abomination. And yet these very pert and priggish persons are delighted with nothing so much, when they perform their autumnal visit to Scotland, as to find our Grampians not exactly like their own Malvern Hills, and our Highland lochs not simply a mere northern repetition of their Westmoreland meres. (Cheers and laughter.) But if it is right and pleasant that there should be various types of landscape in the various districts of our island, it is no less right and pleasant that there should be various types of men inhabiting those districts; and therefore it is right that the style of human being called Scotsman should glory in his national peculiarities, as a lion glories in his maue, and not submit his strong shaggy exterior to be clipped smooth according to any London or Oxonian model of pithless proprieties and conventional gentilities. Therefore, let us rejoice in Walter Scott, not merely as a great painter of men and nature, but as pre-eminent in the truthful The toast was drunk with great enthusiasin. portraiture of Scottish men and Scottish manProfessor BLACKIE, after some introductory ners. No doubt he has not done justice to one remarks, said—It is with the greatest pleasure class of Scottish men-to our Guthries and our that I rise to propose "The Memory of Sir Renwicks, and our whole glorious army of Walter Scott." There are six great names in martyrs, who are, with good reason, more to us Scottish history round which all true Scotsmen than St. Jerome or St. Augustine, or all the must gather as the proudest symbols of their saints in the calendar put together; but that nationality-two in the political world, Robert was his misfortune no doubt, not his fault; beBruce and William Wallace; two in the world sides, religion is always a somewhat delicate of Christian heroism and devotedness, Patrick matter, with which, in a divided country, a Hamilton, the first Protestant martyr, and John poet is often wise not to intermeddle. With Knox, the founder of our National Church; two this single exception, however, there is no in the literary world, Robert Burns and Walter Scottish writer more thoroughly Scottish, in his Scott. To which of these truly representative whole tone, temper, and habits, than Sir Walter men we are most indebted for the inheritance Scott; none to whom a Scotsman, by whom of our great birthright of national feeling it his nationality is prized, lies under greater obwere foolish to inquire; enough that they have ligations; none who has more just claim to be all contributed to make us what, by the grace specially remembered in this national recogniof God, we are-a free, an independent, a tion of the great lyric poet of the Scottish thoughtful, a sober-minded, and a conscientious people-Robert Burns. There is scarce a not-an earnest, determined, and persevering-able hill or crag in the country on which he and, so long as we cherish these virtues, a has not stamped his name; not a birch-fringed prosperous and an invincible people. I value Walter Scott for many things; but for nothing, certainly, more than this, that he was a thoroughly national, and an eminently Scottish amber-flooded stream which does not murmur more sweetly, or rush more fiercely to the stirring notes of his lyre. Scotland lies painted in his pages as truly and as significantly as the woody Zacynthus or the rocky Ithaca in Homer. [of those young ladies, to whom the "horrible There is everywhere in Scott's poetry to me a murder" and the "shocking accident" is the breath as of the bracing mountain air, and a dis- most delightful paragraph in the newspapers. tinct smell of heather-qualities which are As little will he please those to whom neither not only essentially Scotch, but pre-eminently poetry nor sermons, nor even novels, in the healthy. And this brings me to the second present age, are palatable without a certain point which I should wish to bring forward in amount of misty metaphysics and super-subtle connexion with the bard of "Marmion" and theology. This metaphysico-theological tend"The Lady of the Lake." Scott is character-ency also is one of the sublime diseases of the istically, both in his prose and in his verse, a present time; to which, as a necessary transition healthy poet; and this is a quality which, both stage, in its proper place, a reasonable man can in prose and verse, but especially in verse, have no objection; but poetry is not that place ought to be ranked a great deal higher than at all, certainly not the most fitting place. It now-a-days seems in certain quarters to be is the misfortune, perhaps, of metaphysicians fashionable. I could name poets of consider- and theologians to be ever tormenting themable note within the present century whose selves and others with fruitless attempts to solve works can be accurately defined no otherwise the insoluble. But be this as it may; it never than as the musical utterance of a sublime dis- can be the business of any sane poet to be conease; with which one may be pleased after a fash-stantly striving to jump out of his skin, and ion, as with the piteous cries of the Sophoclean Philoctetes left on the desert isle; but after all it was an ugly sore; and one has permanent delight in the warblings of a happy bird, not in the screamings of a wounded Titan, into whatever curious harmonies they may be worked up. It is not at all an indifferent matter whether a great poet be a healthy and therefore a happy man. The business of poetry-the special rogative of genius-is not merely to stimulate and to excite, but to harmonise and to reconcile; and no one who does not know the blessing of a reconciling and harmonising temper in his own mind can communicate that greatest of all blessings to the souls of his fellow-men. My notion unquestionably is, that if a man can give nothing to the public but musical wails, and lamentations, and denunciations, he had better hold his tongue. (Laughter.) We have enough of misery in the world without applauding persons as great poets for whisking up into sparkling foam the bitter waters of their own diseased emotions. And yet it is precisely because he does not do this that certain persons are constantly repeating that Walter Scott is great only as a novelist, but very poor as a poet. Certainly a volcanic poet, in the style which the French Revolution was quick to raise up, he was not; and those people who prefer the turbid sublime of a volcano to the clear beneficent glory of the sun, or the cheerful blaze of the domestic hearth, may laud Byron and write down Scott with perfect consistency. But for my part I prefer the steady splendour of the familiar luminaries of the sky, and the fireside, to Titanic convolutions of eruptive smoke, and the fitful glare of distempered lightnings. (Cheers.) Walter Scott was not a poet of this troubled class, and may be compared fitly not to a seething ocean of passion, but to a cup of mellow wine. He will not be the chosen poet vainly struggling to give a body to that which is essentially bodiless. (Applause.) It is the business of the true poet directly in a rich life, various with concrete reality, and indirectly in musical expression, to enjoy all that is enjoyable, and to help other men to do the like. Had Walter Scott been infected with the modern rage for mixing up metaphysics with poetry, he pre-never could have set forth with such graceful luxuriance those vivid and sunny pictures of Scottish nature which only the morbidly fretful and the inanely ambitious will despise. I have only another word to say in conclusion, and it is this. A great deal of critical fencing has taken place among notable men abroad, and in this country also, about the two great schools of art, the classical and the romantic. I have no wish to tax your patience at present with any curious definitions on this subject; but this I will say, that in the best and deepest sense of the word, Walter Scott is the most classical of modern poets, and that precisely by virtue of the thorough nationality and broad healthyminded popularity which was so eminently characteristic of his genius. If there is one distinction between ancient Greek poetry as a whole, and modern British poetry, and specially the poetry of the last fifty years, it is this, that while the ancient poet was essentially the spokesman of the people, the modern poet is too apt to use his verse as a vehicle to vent his personal feelings, and spin his own peculiar speculations. Hence the perfect freedom of classical poetry generally from all those favourite characteristics of much of our modern poetry, which are only various phases of emotional self-indulgence, and pampered individualism. Pindar, Æschylus, and Sophocles spoke to the people; performed, in fact, in their works part of the regular public life of the nation to which they belonged; and therefore they are never overstrained or transcendental in their style. Therefore, they are always clear and true, sober and sensible, moderate and judicious. For an appeal to the normal standard of healthy human feeling, as it exists in the great mass of what is called the public, is always the great God-ordained corrective of the private crotchets of the individual thinker, poet, philosopher, or theologian. This appeal the Greeks always had without seeking it. This Walter Scott, with the wise instinct of a thoroughly healthy nature, always sought, and never failed to find. Therefore, while ignorant of the Greek language, he everywhere manifested a soul in healthy freshness, in breadth of popular sympathy, and in frank hilarity, containing the best elements of what we most admire in the great classic writers of antiquity. He is in fact more like Homer both in style and manner than any writer that I know, ancient or modern. In Homer there is no dim-groping theology, no self-torturing metaphysics, no unreal supersensualism; but only and everywhere Greek nature and Greek life, Greek men and Greek women, Greek grace, Greek cheerfulness, and Greek eloquence. So in Walter Scott, while we are everywhere kept far from the dim region of intangible speculations and laboured subtleties, we are nowhere divorced from the invigorating influences of Scottish nature and Scottish life, Scotch sobriety and Scotch humour, Scottish hills, Scottish heather, and Scottish mountain air. (Loud cheers.) Part song "Scots wha hae." Professor CAMPBELL SWINTON then briefly proposed "Scottish Art and the Royal Scottish Academy," which was acknowledged by Mr. D. O. Hill. Song "My Nannie's Awa"-Mr. Smith. The CHAIRMAN then proposed the Secretary, Treasurer, and Committee, alluding particularly to the exertions of Mr. A. T. Boyle and Mr. Ballantine in connexion with the arrangements for the banquet. The whole company, standing, and hand in hand, then sung "Auld Langsyne." After Miss Cole, Mr. Howard, Mr. Hunter, and others who led the singing, had concluded, Lord Neaves sang an additional stanza, in capital style and amidst warm applause, the company renewing the chorus with increased enthusiasm. LETTER FROM LORD BROUGHAM TO LORD ARDMILLAN, MY LORD, It is altogether unnecessary to say how very deeply I lament the disappointment of my hopes that I should have been able to attend this interesting festival. Such celebrations are the discharge of a duty, the payment, as it were, of a debt to departed genius; they afford occasion for ing honest national pride. But also they should indulging in mutual congratulations, and displayby all means be turned to good account, in the opportunity which they give of drawing practical inferences from the subject-matter of our contemplations. To two of these inferences I take the great liberty of directing your attention, in order that this celebration may be productive of some useful result. After his great poetical genius, there is nothing so remarkable in Burns' history as the extraordinary refinement of his sentiments, and even of his taste, from his earliest years, the effect certainly of his education having been greater than falls to the lot of the peasantry, even in Scotland. But it is impossible to read the accounts of his family, his friends of the same age, and the same humble and his description of, and correspondence with, station, and not be struck with the manner in which they were all raised above their condition by the ordinary education of the parish schools, and the taste for reading and for contemplation to which it gives rise, beside its effects in forming industrious and temperate habits. It led in him further to the greater cultivation of his faculties, and the nursing and unfolding of his genius; and we have an unquestionable right to affirm that but for this education he in all likelihood would have passed through the life of an humble and unknown peasant, and that his genius would never have been known either to himself or the world. The existence of genius must ever be an accident; but as it cannot be confined to any class of the community, the chances of its appearing, that is, of its existence being known, must needs be in proportion to the numbers placed in circumstances that shall nurse and unfold it. Thus beside the ordinary and everyday effects of this education, we have its necessary tendency to mature and to disclose rare capacity of the highest order-all that is called genius; a Watt to alter the whole face of the world by the changes which his profound science and matchless skill produced, each change an improvement, and adding to the happiness of mankind; a Burns whose immortal verse makes the solace and the delight of his countrymen in every age and every country where their lot may be cast. These are of course very rare examples; but it is fit to dwell upon the common and universal effects of the system in raising the character of our people, distinguishing them wherever they go for intelligence and usefulness; for thoughtful and therefore prudent habits. The testimony is general and it is striking, which is borne to them in these respects, not only by calm observers free from all national prejudice, like M. Biot, father of the National Institute (whose work on our Scotch system I am publishing with notes), but by the employers of labour in all parts of the world, both old and new. It is truly gratifying to reflect that wher ever a native of Scotland goes he bears this character along with him, and finds his claims to respect acknowledged as soon as he declares his country, not like the old Roman appealing to the fears awakened by the sound of the barbarous tyrant's name, and silencing the voice of justice or preventing its course, but representing the humane and enlightened nation which has faithfully discharged its highest duty of diffusing knowledge and promoting virtue. The inference to be drawn is, that what cannot in any way be treated as the ground of empty boast, should not be made the ground of exultation, foolish and unprofitable. Our duty is to maintain and to amend the system by all well-considered | measures, so that it may not only be perpetuated but improved. There, as everywhere else, time has produced some defects and disclosed others. By our experience in both these respects we are bound to profit-securing the independence of teachers; placing them under the inspection which the law originally intended to be effectual; providing for their removal when incompetent, and for their support when disabled by age or infirmity; apportioning their advancement to their merits; and raising to their just place in society such as are distinguished by their useful labours; nor ever forgetting that to this body of men there once belonged one of the most powerful preachers and eminent leaders of the National Church. That a firm resolution to work for the attainment of these objects may arise out of this celebration, to which it is so peculiarly appropriate, would not seem to be entertaining too sanguine a view. But it is also fit that we should, on this occasion, consider in what language Burns' poems, at least by far the most celebrated, and the most justly celebrated, are written. It is the language, the pure and classical language of Scotland, which must on no account be regarded as a provincial dialect, any more than the French was so regarded in the reign of Henry V., or Italian in that of the first Napoleon, or Greek under the Roman Empire. Nor is it to be in any manner of way considered as a corruption of the Saxon; on the contrary, it contains much of the old and genuine Saxon, with an intermixture from the northern nations, as Danes, and Norse, and some, though a small adoption, from the Celtic. But in whatever way composed, or from whatever source arising, it is a national language, used by the whole people in their early years, by many learned and gifted persons throughout life, and in which are written the laws of the Scotch, their judicial proceedings, their ancient history, above all their poetry. Its Saxon origin may be at once proved by the admitted fact, that Barbour, Chaucer's contemporary, is more easily understood by an English reader at this day than the Saxon of the father of English poetry. The merits of the Scotch language are attested, as regards conciseness, by the brevity of the Scotch statutes compared with the English, and as regards clearness, by the fact that there has been much more frequent occasion for judicial interpretation of the latter than of the former. But the peculiar value of the language arises from the great body of national poetry entirely composed in it, both in very remote times, and in those nearer our own day; and there can be no doubt that the English language, especially its poetical diction, would greatly gain by being enriched with a number, both of words and of phrases, or turns of expression, now peculiar to the Scotch. It was by such a process that the Greek became the first of tongues, as well written as spoken. Nor can it be for a moment admitted that the Scotch has less claim to this partial adoption, than the Doric had to mingle with the Ionian; or the Eolic with the Attic. Indeed of Eolic works there are none, while there is a whole body of Scottish classics. Had Theocritus lived before any poet like Pindar made frequent use of the new Doric, his exquisite poems, so much tinged with Sicilian, must have given that dialect admission into the pure Greek. Indeed Pindar, himself Boeotian, and naturally disposed to use the old Doric, has recourse to the new, for its force of expression, probably as much as he would have done, had he like Theocritus been a Sicilian; as Moschus did, who belonged to those colonies of Asia Minor, the origin of the language and literature of Greece. It must be allowed that when we refer to the free admission of various dialects into the classical language of Greece, we should bear in mind the peculiar fastidiousness of the Attic taste, and its scrupulous rejection of all barbarisms, and all solecisms all words in languages not purely Greek, and all terms of expression arising from a corruption of that pure tongue. It is a great mistake to suppose, as some have done, that the interest excited in all minds by the associations of early years, forms the only ground of desiring to retain in certain compositions the language familiar to us in childhood. The charm imported by such associations is unquestioned; but it is not the only merit of the language, which may have other claims to being preserved independent of that. Thus Scotchmen will beyond all doubt feel a greater interest in Burns' poetry, because it is in the language used by those who cherished them in childhood, and which themselves first spoke. But so they will feel a greater interest than foreigners in the songs which they knew at the same period of life, in whatever language composed, an interest wholly independent of the language; and yet there may be in the merits of the language itself, strong claims to being preserved and adopted. A Sicilian might feel the charm of Theocritus' verse, because it reminded him of the pastorals, the national songs of the peasantry, from whence, indeed, it was in a great part taken; and he might delight in that verse all the more for the language in which it was composed. But others, as Pindar and Moschus, who could have no feeling of local associations, could adopt that language in their lyrics and pastorals, if not preferring it, yet uniting it to their own, because of its peculiar adaptation to the subjects of their composition. The events which brought about the general disuse of the Scotch language, first, the union of the Crowns, but infinitely more, that of the kingdoms. have not extinguished the great works in which it is preserved. It stands in very different circumstances from the Italian in this important respect. The accident of the great writers, especially the poets, being Tuscans, in all probability prevented the dialect of Venice from being the classical language of Italy, and its great beauties make men B lament that it is not partially adopted into the place two years ago. Numerous flags and banmore expressive but harsher Tuscan, the preva-ners waved from every available spot on the lence of which has kept all poets of eminence from using any other. Scotland stands very differently in this important particular; for the greatest of modern lyric poets has used the Scotch alone. Assuredly, had either Dante or Petrarch been Venetians, the Tuscan would have divided its sovereignty with the dialect of Venice. The accident of all the great writers of the fourteenth century being Tuscans had the same effect in preventing the other languages from keeping its ground, which political changes had in discouraging the Scotch; yet it can hardly be doubted that, if Ariosto or Tasso, at a much later period, had used the Venetian, it would have gained an ample share of estimation; and if to this had been added the important circumstances, that all the Italian national poetry was confined to the shores of the Adriatic, as all the British has ever been to the country beyond the Tweed, the inevitable consequence would have been a great softening of the Tuscan by the sweeter Venetian, at once to improve the language, and to prevent two several tongues being used by the same people. Would it not afford means of enriching and improving the English language if full and accurate glossaries of approved Scotch words and phrases, those successfully used by the best writers, both in prose and verse, were given with distinct explanation and reference to authorities? This has been done in France and other countries, where some dictionaries accompany the English, in some cases with Scotch synonyms, in others with varieties of expression. It may be hoped that the very learned person who is preparing an important philological work of the same description, may incorporate with it the flowers at least of our northern Doric. Two of our most venerated names, those of Playfair and Stewart, may be cited; they were wont to express their desire to borrow some Scotch words as of great scientific use. In the judicial proceedings of Parliament we have, at least of late years, discountenanced all attempts at translating Scotch technical expressions into English. Let it be added, that the greatest poet after Burns whom Scotland has produced (there wants no mention of T. Campbell), was wont to lament the inability of using his mother tongue with the mastery which he had so happily gained over a foreign language. I have to apologise for this intrusion upon the meeting; but only for the length of the letter, and its inferiority to the subject.-Yours faithfully, BROUGHAM. CANNES, January 17, 1859. THE CORN EXCHANGE. The "grand citizen banquet" in the Corn Exchange, under the auspices of the Total Abstinence Society, came off with great éclat. The decorations of the Exchange were tasteful and brilliant, and the tout ensemble of the preparations was scarcely less striking than what was presented on the occasion of the celebrated Crimean banquet which was held in the same walls and ceiling, while from arch to arch of After tea had been partaken of, the |