The new Khedive of Egypt, Abbas II., has marked his
accession by lowering the price of salt by 40 per cent., and by abolishing altogether the professional licence duty. Sir Evelyn Baring knows his business ; but if it is true that the Egyptian Budget will this year show a surplus of a million sterling, we hope that some remission will be announced still more directly benefiting the cultivator. If he could only be allowed to accumulate a little, it would be a better security for Egyptian finance than even the British Minister's sound management. The professional tax fell chiefly on the poorer Europeans, whose presence, though unavoidable, is not an unmixed benefit to Egypt ; and the salt-tax is not the oppression in Oriental climates which it is believed to be in Europe. The people do not eat salted food, and as long as the consumption per head does not diminish, we may be pretty sure that they obtain as much as is indispensable to health. It is the land-tax, and the oppression to which its collection gives rise, which bow down the people, and it is still very heavy throughout the Valley. It is not easy to understand why it crushes prosperity so, but every Indian Commissioner knows that one turn of the screw will destroy all happiness in a province.
Mr. Andrew Lang, in his humorous and brilliant speech proposing the toast of Burns at the dinner of the Edinburgh Burns Club on Monday, asserted that " if the Last Man, described by Campbell, were a Scotsman (which was likely, owing to the survival of the fittest), he would-
. Yon darkening Universe defy To quench Burns' immortality, Or shake his faith in Burns.'" His estimate of Burns as a poet was, in the main, judicious, and he does Burns no more than justice when he says that he was at least as often at his best as any other great poet. Mr. Lang admits, however, that "in English verse he was never at his best." This is, of course, always said ; but is it true P No doubt the poems which have no Scotticisms are, as a rule, bad. This, however, is due far more to their subjects and treatment than to Burns's inability to write English. Many of the best
lines in the Scotch poems are purely English in word and
idiom. Take, for example, the exquisite Anacreontic line :- " Her cheeks like lilies drenched in wine."
Burns had a complete mastery of English, and failed when he wrote pure English only because he could not escape the infection of the eighteenth-century mannerisms. Unless he at least began a poem with a burst of Scots, he dropped into verbal conventionalities.
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