SOME EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BYWAYS.*
MR. BUCHAN needs no introduction to the readers of the Spectator, who will recognise in this collection of essays and studies not a few papers that first saw the light in our columns. The author has a wide range of interests and of reading, and his style possesses that impalpable quality of distinction which is born and not acquired. These byways of the centuries lead us through a great variety of country. Charles II. and the Young Chevalier, Murray of Broughton and the Murray who became the great Lord Mansfield, English noblemen so wide apart as Lord Castlereagh and Lord Dudley, Lord Buchan, "the comic Chesterfield,"- Lady Louisa Stuart and Lady John Scott, are among the figures which occupy the foremost place in "the field full of folk." In the background are Count Tolstoi and John Bunyan, Theodor Mommsen and Rabelais, while not the least interesting pages of the book are devoted to an acute and sympathetic disquisition on Mr. Balfour at a man of letters. Mr. Buchan is at his best when he is por- traying or dissecting his own countrymen, whether it be the case of a metaphysical Prime Minister, an Anglicised Chief Justice, or the men of the lost causes. "The Cameroniana retired to brood in the western moorlands over ecstatic visions of an approaching Armageddon; and Claverhouse, called thus late to a man's task, rode north under the star of Montrose to find a hero's death at Killiecrankie." His review of the • Some Eighteenth-Century Byways, and other Essays. By John Buchan. London: W. Blackwood and Sons. ge. M. net.] third volume of Mr. Lang's History of Scotland, the Scotland of the Covenant, is a brilliant piece of criticism and narrative, and worthy of a work which has scarcely received the recognition which it deserves. Most admirable, too, are the vignettes of "the Prince" and of the faithless secretary to whom "Mrs. Scott's beat china was sacrificed rather than that the family should drink from the same vessel as a traitor." But they find a rival in the thumbnail sketch of Charles II. And Mr. Buchan lays proper stress on a fact which has strangely escaped the notice of the ruck of historians :— " Good or bad, Charles is perennially interesting, because he is the most foreign of our Kings, a strayed Bourbon with Provençal blood and Southern traditions trying to speak the language of the North. The Stuart stock ran into two types—the devout, obstinate, and formal, as in Charles I., James II., and Henry, Cardinal of York, and the wholly irreligious, worldly, and Bohemian, as in Charles II. and the Young Chevalier. But the Stuart was only a little part of Charles's ancestry. Take away the ambition, the cool indomitable mind, and the fierce patriotism, audit is Henry of Navarre who is the lover of Nell Gwynn, and the merry, impecunious King of England."
It was Burke, if we remember right, who traced the blood of Henry in the most brilliant of all the descendants of the Merry Monarch, Charles James Fox.
Admirable, too, is Mr. Buchan's analysis of Mr. Balfour, "the representative Scotsman, but also a hard nut for Scotsmen to crack, for a reason obvious to all familiar with the psychology of peoples." And be sums up his comic Chesterfield in what he justly calls a bundle of paradoxes :— " He had the mad Erskine blood and a more than Scots thrifti- ness. He was magnificent, but with a prudent aim; a lover of letters with little real aptitude and an uncertain taste ; a Radical with the soundest Tory instinct ; a Scot, but itching always to be esteemed cosmopolitan; a parochial magnate, yet with an eye on the two hemispheres. A laughing-stock to his contemporaries and a bore to his friends, his egotism shielded him from pain, and he lived happily among his books and prints and stuccoed gardens."
Mr. Buchan has been well advised in giving permanent form to these "Diversions of a Reviewer."
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