Mr. Moray McLaren, in his Return to Scotland (Duckworth, Ss.
6d.), enlls his trampish walking-tour through the Scottish Highlands an egoist's journey. But that is, if course, all nonsense. He is as passionately sentimental and as cheerily fond of consorting with his fellow-men as any Scot—with Highland tinklers (a race apart), shepherds, fishermen, and even with commercial travellers. And he admits that he likes bounders. In fact, a typical Scot, who believed himself radically altered by some years' residence out of Scotland, which he rediscovers in this tour only to find that he recognizes it as truly his own home-land. Scot though he be, he writes most admirable English, rendered none the less enjoyable by a spice of pleasing mordancy, revealed, for instance, by the reasons he gives for preferring the West Highlands to Perth- shire and the East. But between Monadliath and Cairngorm he might have found just as attractive—if loneliness is an attraction—walking-country as ever he met with through the Moor of Rannoch. In truth, however, Mr. McLaren likes all sorts of country, as is illustrated by his description of the smiling Braes of Balquhidder and by his pleasure at listening to the long sigh of the sea by the shores of the Western Isles that sigh which seems to colour the Islesman's speech. All through a delightfully-written and most entertaining book ; but does not the author sometimes mix up Dr. Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands with Boswell's Tour to the Hebrides, which is as lively a kettle of fish as Johnson's is rather frigidly Johnsoniart ? Miss Helen Waddell gives us pleasant glimpses of old ballad singers and traditional " characters " in her preface to Mr. W. F. Marshall's Ballads and Verses From Tyrone (Talbot Press, 2s. (id.). Mr. Marshall has written many of his ballads in the dialect of his own county, a dialect which the school- master " leenged " out of his classes with a cane. He rescues many a fine dialect word for our enjoyment, and as these words are explained in notes the reader will have no difficulty in following this delightful Ulster idiom. Mr. Marshall is best in his traditional mode, and he brings us a rich sense of country life :— When Derry was a village and Belfast a little town,
We learned the holy Latin in Dungannon.
He captures a lilt still heard at fairs and in songs of the famous " Twelfth."
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