We regret exceedingly to record the death of Principal Shairp
of St. Andrews, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and one of the best critics Scotland has produced. He had a most sensitively delicate appreciation of poetry, and many of his judgments are remarkable, not only for insight, but originality. His merit as a critic, which was both real and great, was partly obscured from his countrymen and the world by an accident. He had the moral antipathy to Burns not unfrequent with those Scotch- men who know that Barns injured as well as interpreted the Scotch character ; and his life of the poet betrayed a dislike so deep as to blind its author on points to the genius of his subject. The Principal was a man, nevertheless, of keen, and sometimes even tender, perception, and his criticisms will, with those who are competent to follow them, hold a place among the first. He was an ardent Wordsworthian, but retained independence suffi- cient to know that the most poetic among poets was also the one who had most inequalities in his genius.
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