emotions as the bagpipes can? The voice of the violin can carry us to high planes of thought. It can make us want to weep, but can it make us want to fight? Can it stir our blood and quicken our pulses? Can it bring to the eye the picture of any one country? Can it make us hold our heads high and be very proud? But perhaps the questions are unfair. The violin is cosmopolitan, but the bagpipes are our own. How many men, I wonder, have, on finding themselves facing death on a red-tinged battlefield, been saved from cowardice by the buoyant notes that brought to them the memory of grim brave hills at home, and stirred in them the spirits of those earlier patriots who had built up the nation's pride? If when a Scotsman in battle thinks of anything but the fighting to be done, then he thinks of Scotland and what Scotland would expect.

The pipes are the finest recruiting sergeant that a Highland regiment could have. The booming of a drum or the blaring of a bugle will bring men and women hurrying out to see the gay-uniformed soldiers, and these same gay uniforms may attract the lads and the desire to be similarly bedecked urge them to enlist, but the pipes do not recruit after this fashion. It is not to a man's eyes that they appeal; they do not set a lure for his vanity. They strike deeper than that. They send strange messages quivering to his heart; they set his blood a-tingling madly, and all unconsciously he stretches out an eager hand for the sword-hilt that he knows should be there. Oh, it is a strange thing, this music of ours! It turns brave men into heroes, and cowards into brave men. The world does not need to be told the manner of soldier that a Highlander makes; how fierce his fighting is; how, even though he lie dying at the feet of his enemy, he will mutter out defiance and deny that he is con

quered; but it may be that the world gives too little credit to the music that helped to make the man's heart hot, and to put the strength of reckless enthusiasm into his arms.

And to us who know the pipes inspire this tumultuous lust for fighting, it is a little wonderful to think that the same instrument can dim the battle-light in a man's eyes; can chase it quite away and bring in its place a mist of tenderest sadness. There is something of sadness in all music soberly played, but the plaintive lilting and droning of the bagpipes can shake a Scotsman's nature to its very core. He may not weep, perhaps, for tears come seldom to him, but his fingers will twist about each other, his face will be set in a sort of whimsical sternness, and his eyes will be full of a mystical knowledge. For him the mists have momentarily swept away and he sees things that for the most part are hidden from all but those who, having lived long full lives, are granted an insight and understanding that is not of the earth. While the weird music throbs on and while half-unconsciously he continues to listen, all that is sweetest and best in the man's soul awakens. He may not know it-it is better that he should not-but while the music held sway over him he came near, very near, to greatness.

There is a noble dignity about a lament played upon the bagpipes; a plaintive sorrow untouched by any sense of whimpering or cowardly complaint. One may watch a kilted company, with arms reversed, following a comrade to his resting-place; one may watch the glinting of the sporn-mountings and the twinkling of the white spats, and one may listen to the pipers as they play "Lochaber No More," but one does not feel that there is any note of puling or useless moaning here. In the music there is just the mingling of many voices mourning the loss of a friend.

A mourning that is very simple and very honest, and that is unaccompanied by any wringing of hands or stricken crying of "give him back!" Ah well! the Highland music accords with the Highland heart. The bleak sky may sob over the mountains and wrap their great shoulders in folds of gray, but it can never hide their bravery nor subdue their austere strength. Perhaps to no one does the magic of this music appeal so strongly as to the Scotsman abroad. No matter how long he may have dwelt in some sun. blistered land; no matter how happy he may have been there; no matter how honestly he may dread the climate of the "old country," he will ache with an unutterable home-sickness when he hears the long-forgotten skirling of the pipes. His throat will grow a bit dry, and the hands that he claps together will be a trifle unsteady. But of course the proper place to listen to the pipes, the place where one can best appreciate their subtle charm, is among the mountains and glens of the Highlands themselves.

I have in my memory the picture of a certain summer afternoon when I lay amongst the heather and bracken on one of the Perthshire hills overlooking a famous pass. I had been sleeping, I think-drowsing in the sunshine, at any rate-when gradually some sounds, faint and very far away but quite unmistakable, came drifting up to where I lay. I sat up and waited, listening. Slowly the sounds drew nearer and became more clear; the spirited rattling of the drums and the glowing clamorous gaiety of the bagpipes. Greedily I hearkened to it all, storing up almost with the eagerness of a miser a memory that in after years I could fall back upon and muse over gladly. The players came in sight at last, they and the men they led homewards from the mimic warfare in which they had been engaged. And as I watched them,

kilts swaying, side arms glittering, go swinging up the glen and out of sight; as I listened while the music became fainter and fainter and finally faded away, I leapt to my feet, filled with a sudden yearning to have a sword in my hand and be one of that gallant company. The mood passed quickly, but I cannot forget that for a few minutes at least I looked enthusiastically upon a very different sphere of life from mine and felt with the feelings of a soldier. I make mention of the incident because I have often wondered how many thousands of my fellowScotsmen, who are not maybe even in the ranks of the Territorial Army, have shared such a joyous moment with me and now are glad to cherish its remembrance.

When I have spoken here of bagpipe music, I have of course meant bagpipe music played upon the bagpipes; not bagpipe music played upon the piano or the violin. But such rendering of the famous marches and dances and laments is by no means to be despised when the performer is talented and his or her nimble fingers controlled by an understanding brain. If you take a Scotsman with a cultivated taste for music and play to him from the works of the masters, he will reward you with a very attentive hearing and with honest words of thanks. But give him half an hour of Highland airs, of the music that was born when the wind moaned along the hill valleys and rustled and laughed through the fir-trees, and he will probably forget to thank you at all-with his voice. It is to his eyes you must look, and there you will see that which should make you very glad. Then take the music that the piper plays to the Scottish dances. Were there ever such rollicking, jaunty, captivating strains as these, which set fingers a-snapping and bring a subdued "Hooch!" to the lips of even the most decorous?

There is a world of sympathy in this dear music of ours. I wonder if there is any chord in our natures that the pipes cannot touch! They can make

us warlike and strong to kill; they can make us gladsome with a gaiety that has no slightest tinge of affectation; and, perhaps best of all, they can set

The Outlook.

throbbing in our hearts a pity and a manly sadness that carries us into realms where we had not thought to enter. And there we may wander for a while; sorrow-touched perhaps, but with eyes full of amazement at the tenderness of our passing wonderland. W. Harold Thomson.

Perhaps it is from a kind of racial conceit, because the power to associate is the first and most distinctive of human faculties; perhaps it is from the physical delight that every man has in exercising a well-developed organ; but, whatever the motive, man has always derived an exquisite pleasure from the simple act of perceiving a likeness, from the process of storing impressions and still more from the process of bringing them again to light when experience presents some new one which seems to need a match. It was just this pleasure that made it so much more profitable for the ancient rhapsodists to tell their tales in iambic or hexameter verse than in the storyteller's easier prose, for as each line came beating out and its last smooth cadence rounded it cleanly, every man in the listening group could see its resemblance to the last and to the last before, and look for the next to match it. In one of its earliest and simplest forms the love of repeated sound and the joy in its recognition have produced that strangely beautiful growth, the poetry of the Hebrews. The ordered or splendidly disordered correspondences, the sounding repetitions and haunting echoes which are the music of the Hebrew poets are not all lost in the transference to other tongues, and in our English version we still feel the power of Isaiah's twobladed curses and wonder at his tra

ceries of interwoven sound. But these things are the products of a past age and a lost art, and while the world lasts there will be no second Isaiah. Yet from the clash of answering phrases it is no far cry to the clash of single words, and of this same love of echo the art of rhyme came into the light. Its birthplace, so far as touches the Western world, was lowly and obscure; but from the forgotten songs of a Latin dying and debased, rhyme has risen to take hold on the literatures of the world, filling the gaps which the passing of the old prosody had left and giving a new instrument of beauty to the singers that have come after. It opened new mines of musical wealth which have been worked by every poet in our tongue; it created Spenser and Pope, the lyrists, and the sonneteers; it created the songs of Shakespeare. The very existence of its poetry, perhaps, the French language owes to rhyme, for rhyme has supplemented and replaced the rigid mould of a clear-cut metre into which a substance so delicate and unstable could never have been compressed. To all the literatures of the later world it has given powers of color and melody such as Pindar and the tragedian lyrists of Athens wielded through firm, hard forms too intricate for another tongue than Greek to take.

These things are the greater children of the love of likeness-metre itself

of Hebrew poetry. There is another; one that has made history too in the world of literature, though little of its creative work remains. The poetry which "alliteration" (most barbarously named) has made in Europe has barely survived. The early Teutonic lays which found in the echoes of initial letters the needed system of repeated sounds to which it was the poet's task to mould his songs, save such as antiquaries have found among the flotsam of old Europe, have passed altogether from the consciousness of later days. Of Saxon and our own first English there is something left. "Beowulf" is

not forgotten, with its limping couplets, two letters clashing and a single third

Here the alliteration is pure ornament, it is no integral part of the scheme or structure of the measure; and it is in this function of ornament that alliteration has been most useful and most beautiful. By a very ancient tradition of speech which survives perhaps from the days when all learning was carried in the memory and conveyed by spoken word, we still cast our gnomic and proverbial sayings into alliterative form. "Kith and kin," "Bread and board," we say, and "Born in the blood is bred in the bone," and the result has been that manufactured epigrams in every language have been thought the better of an alliterative swing.

Puffs, powders, patches, bibles, billetdoux,

said Pope, pouring scorn by mere enumeration. Even Cæsar condescended to "Veni, Vidi, Vici." and if the vigor of those "V's" be robbed from him by the reformed pronunciation of his language, we see how great the condescension must have been. But since Cæsar sinned there have been worse things done, and if Shakespeare found the Elizabethan "alliteratist" fair game for satire, he would have had his fill of such sport to-day. When Holofernes "somewhat affects

the letter" and begins his epitaph with seven "p's"

The preyful princess pierced

and pricked a pretty pleasing pricket

he scarcely sinks as low as the headline artists of to-day and the puffers of pale-pink pills. Truly to-day the ragged and rake-helly rout boasts a membership both large and clamorous.

But these things are the degradation of what has been an instrument of high art. They have blunted it, ruined it, for this age, and till they are gone it cannot be employed again; but it has a past that need not be forgotten, and what Vergil has used, and Tennyson, Ælfric, and Ruskin, can never be permanently disgraced. No man was ever so completely master of the medium in which he worked as Vergil was master of his language and his measure, and it is in the Georgics and the Eneid that the most perfect examples of assonance perhaps in all literature are to be found. But it is the very soul of assonance rightly used that it be subtle, elusive, touched in with the lightest hand, combining with all the melodies that follow and precede to make perfect some whole chapter of harmonious sound. The work of Vergil's highest art cannot be cut from its place and shown apart, and where the effect is briefest there it must be most crude. Yet there are famous single lines in Vergil where alliteration is amply and yet worthily employed to produce some refinement of cadence or to suggest some special image to the mind. When he speaks of the Ganges, it is of

The silent sweeping of its seven streams;

Ε

There is, too, a famous passage in the Georgics in which are described the warnings that precede a gale. By some magic which no analysis can fathom, the music of the lines alone, by rhythm and the play of answering sounds, recalls with weird effect the strained, unrestful silence that comes before a storm. The passage ends with a picture that all verse-writers have since sought to reproduce:

Tum cornix plena pluviam vocat improba voce,

Et sola in sicca secum spatiatur harena.

There is no mistaking in those lines the raucous importunity of the raven and the stately stepping of his solitary march. There are passages no less in English in which alliteration is used briefly but with effect. When Gray wrote

Weave the warp and weave the woof, The winding-sheet of Edward's race,

there was no question of a delicate, subtle harmony sustained through a long elaborate passage, but there is no mistaking the wail of those two lines. The art is not concealed, but it is high art none the less.

Of all prose writers since Elfric none has used alliteration so freely and with such rich effect as Ruskin. Those long impassioned sentences, those splendid mosaics of language in which the gloom and the glory of the mountains have been painted as no brush can paint, these owe half their color and half their music to the studied interplay of echoing sounds, to the weaving of like beginnings and the subtle striking once and again of answering notes. In a passage such as that which describes a view of distant

line how

the singing spear Severs the wind, sure aimed.

Trient, the infinite variety of effects makes real analysis impossible, and yet certain of the echoes ring out quite