"None but a saint should write the life of a
saint," Mr. Cun-' ninghame Graham quotes in his preface to Doughty Deeds: (Heinemann) ; and so, he suggests, with sinners. And he counts himself well fitted to write this life of his ancestor, Robert Graham of Cartmore, who was neither saint nor sinner, but an adventurous fellow, poet and politician, who " passed his best years in the Indies." " Though the Indies that I Imew were wilder and less civilized than those in which he passed his youth—laying up gout and learning all the points of negroes,, as a horse-coper learns those of a horse—the world of Europe was, if possible, in his time, even more cruel and more brutal than it is to-day. Thus, we can cry quits, for if, as he himself declares, in the rebellion of the Coromantins he saw negroes gibbeted and left to starve and burned alive, I too have seen things that, as our country people say, ' I dinna care to mind.' "
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