The Seven Sagas of Prehistoric Man. By James H. Stoddart.
(Chatto and Windus.)—This is a very unpretentious attempt to pre- sent tindogmatic evolution in verso. The author had already obtained a leading place in the small band of living Scotch poets by his volume entitled "The Village Life," in which, with a careful, kindly, and reverent hand, he sketched the characteristics of country life, and like that worthy Wordsworthian, Thomas Aird, whom in many respects he resembles, reproduced,—
" Onr picturesque simplicities of life,
Old points of character, old points of faith."
It may seem a far cry, if not an ambitious vault, from the life of a village to that of prehistoric man. Yet it is not difficult to see how Mr. Stoddart should have been attracted to his second and larger subject. Obviously, he is one of those men who find a special pleasure in occa- sionally retiring from the strain of present-day labour to contemplate humanity freed from the complexities of modern civilisation. He ound such in the blacksmith and the doctor and the old professor of the village ; and from them to the "cave" man and the " neolithic farmer" whom the enthusiastic study of evolution and archaeology is making known to us, is, after all, a natural though a considerable remove. Mr. Stoddart is evidently saturated with the spirit of the prehistoric "periods," of which he writes under titles that tell their own story, such as "The Earliest Man," "The Cave Man," "The Neolithic Farmer," "The Early Man of Africa," "The Aryan Migration," "The Burning of the Crannog," and "The Last Sacri. fine." Reverence and gentle pathos are the notes of Mr. Stoddart's verse, dealing, though it does, with a life essentially of half-brutish struggle, and not capable of high poetic treatment. It is simple and unrhetorical, but is well calculated to depict scenes of primitive joy and sorrow. The stories of "The Burning of the Crannog " and "The Last Sacrifice" are told with spirit, but we prefer, chiefly on account of their variety and reflectiveness, the " sagas" which bear the titles, " The Neolithio Farmer," "The Early Man of Africa," and "The Aryan Migration." We notice some dubious rhymes in this volume, and errors in scansion, which Mr. Stoddart will do well to rectify.
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