19 OCTOBER 1861, Page 20

BOOKS.

THE HISTORY OF SCOTTISH POETRY.*

TifE author of this volume was an excellent specimen of the genuine and unpretending man of letters. He was born at Langholm, in the county of Dumfries, in 1778, of a family which had for several gene- rations been engaged in agriculture. His father, however, acquired some property in trade, and David, the youngest son, who was in- tended for the Church, after a preliminary education in his native town came to Edinburgh at the age of eighteen, where he studied the classics, logic, and philosophy. It would appear, however, that he early relinquished his original design of taking orders, and that, for a time at least, he contemplated entering the.Law. This idea, too, was in turn abandoned, and by the time his college course was completed he had adopted literature as a profession. His earliest performances were the lives of Robert Ferguson, illiam Falconer, and Dr. William Russell, author of `"The kistory of Modern Europe ;" these were published together in one volume and dedi- cated to Dr. Robert Anderson, at that time the literary dictator of Edinburgh. From this time forward Irving's life was one of eon. tinuous literary work, varied by the instruction of pupils in Juris- prudence and the Civil Law, in which branches of learning, though not a lawyer, he was considered to be highly accomplished. Law and literary biography were indeed the two subjects in which he seems to have excelled ; so much so that when the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" passed into the hands of Adam Black, all the Scottish biographies, and all the articles ou Jurisprudence, Canon Law, Civil Law, and Feudal Law, were entrusted to his hands. In 1818 he was appointed librarian to the Faculty of Advocates, and owing perhaps to this improvement in his circumstances, he married two years afterwards his cousin, Miss Janet Laing. His career was diversified by no ex- traordinary incidents, but glided quietly on among his favourite pursuits, till he had attained the great age of eighty-two with all his faculties unimpaired. He died literally in the midst of his books, as every room in the house, his own bedroom included, was lined with them. And it is recorded of him that his last earthly action was to direct his daughter to place a volume of Whiston's " Josephus," which was standing too far hack upon the shelf, level with the others. He died on the 10th of May, 1860, and with him expired one of the few remaining links between the new and the old regime both in literature and manners. His style possesses all the formality and precision of the eighteenth century. His taste seems rather more in harmony wit 11 the taste of that age than of this ; and his manners and dress, which was always full black, corresponded with the rest of his character. To have entered literature when the Edinburgh Review was not, and to have lived on into the age. of penny news- papers, is in itself no ordinary distinction, and is, indeed, the source of the chief interest with which, in our eyes, lie is invested. His works, chiefly antiquarian, of which a list is here appended, though learned and curious, are not remarkably prepossessing. He is a dry and plodding writer, and in the present volume the only success which he has attained is analogous to that of the winner in a donkey race, that, namely, of having shown how interesting it was possible for a history of Scotch poetry to be. We cast no slur upon the extent of Dr. lrving's learning, or on the sterling merits of the work which lie has bequeathed to the public. The first is visible in every page and foot-note of the volume ; and the second may almost be inferred from the first. Such a book was demanded to supply a gap in Scottish literature, and being executed with adequate knowledge of the subject, must be recognized as a standard work. But Dr. Irving has handled his subject too much in the spirit of a black-letter antiquary, and too little in that of a man of taste and feeling, to render his performance acceptable to the general public. All uncommon knowledge is sure to be prized above its merits ; and the owner of a rare book, or a precious edition, in- variably sees beauties in it which are invisible to the vulgar eye. Dr. Irving, accordingly, appears to have estimated the poetry of which the knowledge was confined to himself and a select few, at a rate which the world at large will probably be disposed to challenge. Its antiquity and its archaisms, rather than its depth of feeling or its beauty of imagery, are the qualities by which he appraises it ; as Mr. Oldbuck, when he overheard a new verse of the Harlau ballad, caught at ,the particular word "chafron," which occurred in it, re- gardless of the force or spirit of the whole. The consequence of this is, that Dr. Irving has given us a volume containing no less than 590 pages, of which we make bold to say there are barely a hundred which any Englishman will care to read, nor, we should think, more than a moiety which can be interesting even to a Scotchman. He begins with Thomas the Rhymer, and ends with Lady Wardlaw, the reputed author of Hardykanute, who died in 1727. Of the poets who flourished during this interval which Dr. Irving has included m his history, almost all are of exclusively Scotch reputation. Some three or four, such as James I., Drummond, Sir David Lindsay, &c., are known rather more widely. But the vast majority are men whose names have been preserved to us rather by their literature than their poetry, and who are entitled to our respect rather because they culti- vated learning in a rude age, than because they produced anything calculated to please a polished one. This, of course, is no reason why they should have been excluded from a history of Scotch poetry. It is, perhaps, no reason why they should not be treated of at great length in a history of Scotch poetry, which allotted a proportionate

• The Ilietory of Scottish Poetry. By David Irving, LL.D., Author of "The Life of Buchanan." Edited by John Aitken Carlyle. With a Memoir and Glossary. Edin- burgh: Edmondstone and Douglas.

space to other and better known poets. But it is a reason why they should have been dismissed more briefly in the pages of a work from which the ballad poetry of Scotland is entirely excluded.

We do not think our readers would profit very much by an elaborate epitome of the actual contents of this volume. The first chapter is perhaps the specimen of his powers, which contains a well written essay upon the Celtic language, the origin of the romances

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of chivalry, and the use of rhyme in poetry, which was not, in Dr. Irving's opinion, unknown either to the Greeks or Romans. The recurrence of similar sounds in the middle and end of the penta- meter verse is quoted, as it often has been by other writers, in sup- port of this view; and many other instances of the same practice might be adduced, both from Greek and Latin versification, if they added anything to the probability of the hypothesis. In our opinion, however, they do not ; these similarities of sound being introduced, as we think, rather to mark the rhythm than to answer the same end as rhyme. The chapter on Thomas of Ercildoun, or Thomas the Rhymer, sometimes called True Thomas, though whether on account of the truth of his prophecies or of his fidelity to his friends we have been unable to ascertain, is, we think, the -next best in the volume. But after that we plunge into a maze of " quhilks" and " quhairs," and "gullets," winch, as schoolboys say, fairly "stodge" us, We have toiled through a good many of the pieces here quoted as specimens of Scottish genius in the middle ages, and the only conclusion to which we could arrive was, that the destiny which con- fined the reputation of those poets within the limits of Scotland was not to be lamented. How we longed for a blast of that stirring minstrelsy which is the true ancient poetry of Scotland as we wearily masticated the long pedantic outpourings of Bellenden, Fowler, and Dunbar !

Another remark brings us to the main question we have to ask of Dr. Irving's editor : why, namely, it is that the ballads are not included in this work ? There is, doubtless, some excellent reason for it ; but it does not lie upon the surface. The ballads are as purely Scotch as anything contained in this volume, both in their origin, their lan- guage, and their sentiments, while in the point of poetical merit there can of course be but one opinion of their superiority. The mingled roughness and tenderness of the Scotch character, the ceaseless turbulence of the period which gave them birth, and the native force of the Scotch dialect, unspoiled by its accommodation to the language of hooks, are reflected in these compositions with a fidelity which makes them even more natural than the elaborate pro- ductions of scholars. It may be that the absence of this branch of poetry from the present work is in harmony with some more scientific design than we are able to discover ; or it may be that the author originally intended to complete his history by another volume, and wisely took the heavier one first. But whatever the explanation, the fact will for ever prevent this history of Scottish poetry from becom- ing a popular book, however much we may have underrated its merits as a critical and learned composition.