ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)

BOOK REVIEWS - Miscellaneous (3)

Poems of the Hon. Roden Noel. A selection (1892)

The Piper of Hamelin (1893)

Red and White Heather (1894)

The Truth about the Game Laws (1898)

Poems of the Hon. Roden Noel. A selection.
With an introduction by Robert Buchanan (1892)

Pall Mall Gazette (29 October, 1892 - p.3)

     From the circumstance that the Hon. Roden Noel is included amongst the friends of the late Laureate whose tributes appear in the Nineteenth Century for November, a good deal of attention is likely to be directed to the volume of selections made by the poet himself from his works and published this week by Mr. Walter Scott. Mr. Robert Buchanan, who writes the “prefatory notice” to the selection, avers that “no living poet whatsoever equals Roden Noel in wealth and variety, power and profundity of natural description. That Roden Noel is a poet,” continues Mr. Buchanan, “no reader of these selections will doubt. That he is a very remarkable and original poet, I personally believe.”

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The Glasgow Herald (3 November, 1892 - p.10)

POETRY AND VERSE.
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     The latest volume of the Canterbury Poets (Walter Scott) contains a selection of the Poems of the Hon. Roden Noel, made by himself, with an introduction by Robert Buchanan. Mr Roden Noel is a poet of fine quality, as the contents of this book amply prove. But some readers may think that Mr Buchanan’s applause of his friend and his verse is occasionally a little overdone. A few of the critic’s phrases may be interesting. “Out of the portals of a temple of white marble, glimmering through the fogs and clouds of contemporary literature, Roden Noel stept like a young god, with a message from the old Greek world which is ever new. The joy of earth was with him, the sunlight of a lost divinity clung around him, and so light was his footstep that he seemed to walk on air.” Such was the impression made upon Mr Buchanan when first he became acquainted with the wonderful young poet, who is distinguished, he says, by three qualities from most, if not from all, of his contemporaries. These qualities are—(1) A subtlety of sensuousness and of sensuous perception only to be found among pre-Christian singers; (2) an ever-present mood of moral exaltation; and (3) a phenomenal power of sympathising with and interpreting the most secret moods of nature. That is praise indeed. Mr Buchanan further says that “no singer in our time is so eager to perceive, so quick to apprehend, the problems of evil;” “nowhere in our language is personal sorrow more supremely expressed than in the noble series of poems called with touching tenderness ‘A Child’s Monument;’” “I have no hesitation in saying that no living poet whatsoever equals Roden Noel in wealth and variety, power and profundity, of natural description;” “no poet of our time surpasses him in extent of reasoning power on abstract subjects;” “he is, in a word, as every real poet must be, a Thinker, a man whose business it is to help us to fathom the problems of life and thought;” “he is the poet of Christian Thought;” “he is a Christian thinker, a Christian singer, or nothing;” “if poetry is ever to resume again its old prophetic function, and to regain its influence over the lives and thoughts of men, it will be through the help of such writers as Mr Noel;” “his sympathy with humanity is wide and far-reaching;” and lastly, “in these poems we are offered no mild Tennysonian infusion, no decoction of Browning and commonplace, no dilution of Byron’s strong tipple, or of Shelley’s etherealised dillwater.” This is something in the manner of an auctioneer, but the words seem final, and no more need be said.

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The Academy (1 April, 1893 - No. 1091, p.280-281)

“CANTERBURY POETS.”—Poems of the Hon. Roden Noel: a Selection, with an Introduction by Robert Buchanan. (Walter Scott.)

WHEN a poet leaves a ballad here and a lyric there in comparative hiding, and only brings for our ears the choicest outpourings of his pipe, it is fair to expect beautiful music in beautiful forms. A selection, though not always a final acknowledgment of the Muse’s most excellent bounty, is nevertheless an arrangement for the reader by the author of the songs which he thinks have the sweetest appeal; and here we have Mr. Roden Noel’s estimate of himself—the concert of his own melodies, to which he can hopefully invite his literary guests. He has not been niggardly in drawing up the programme, for it consists of nearly four hundred pages; he has not failed in the matters of variety and blend, for we are called to the dramatic, the philosophical, the elegiac; he has not forgotten a certain feudal and heraldic pomp, for Mr. Buchanan gallops up with the invitation.
     If we did nothing now but blame the entertainment, we should behave but churlishly to our host. Many items are discordant, it is true; but not seldom there falls upon our ears the ravishing snatch that can regain our content. Often the barbaric comes in the very middle of the beautiful; and, to desert the figure of the concert, it is on the ground of want of craftsmanship that we find ourselves most at war with the book in question. Here we have loveliness going on crutches again and again: the idea is crippled by the expression. While reading this volume, it frequently occurred that, on perusing the first three lines of a verse of four, the desire to quote flashed into the mind. Not always, but far too often, the last line ruined the wish. Sometimes it was a matter of accent (and as to the proper placing of his accents the author we are considering is either wilful or ignorant), sometimes mere mechanism following inspiration, sometimes very prose of very prose limping behind a fine thought uttered in a manner that would not disgrace such a vagrant Orpheus as a thrush. Words and ideas escape from this poet as liberally as lava does from Vesuvius; but even as the volcano does not stay to direct its molten rivers, to suggest a picturesque loop here, or a graceful winding there, so Mr. Roden Noel seems powerless to control the mass from within. Why, schoolboy faults abound! On one page it is possible to find impotent verses; turn over, and your senses are sucked into a whirlpool of fairy fancy and glowing words.
     On the whole, judging coolly and thoughtfully, we are persuaded that this author’s Muse is deaf in one ear. This is so serious a charge that proof or apology must be forthcoming. As a short lyric suffers most from a fault, we quote from the early pages where the lyrics are. An ear like an instrument true would not have passed this line, with its painful recurrence of a similar sound in the first four words:

“Like a shy light over bole and root.”

Nor would this couplet have been accounted satisfactory:

“Leap, heart! be aflame with them! loud, not dumb,
Give a voice to their epithalamium!”

We quote next a quatrain in defence of our previous condemnation in the matter of faulty accents:

“They are waiting on the shore
For the bark to take them home;
They will toil and grieve no more,
The hour for release hath come.”

In the first three lines there is a faint stress on the third syllable. It is not heavy, and so clumsy; but the voice of a reader naturally runs to it, and dwells there for the fraction of an instant. The effect is both pleasant and harmonious; it is even demanded in the second and third lines by the fashion of the first. The fourth line should be a flawless mate to the others. But is it? Certainly not. It is lame. It lumbers along, looking for its legitimate pause, but cannot find it till it reaches the fifth syllable.
     We have spent some space over this defect, because it is of far greater importance than the casual may imagine. A noble verse is swung along by its accents, and the less they are dwelt upon of necessity by the voice or by the ear, which is a kind of speechless voice, the finer example of music is the verse; add a glorious thought or image, and the masterpiece is made. Mr. Roden Noel is greatly gifted: few men can reap from themselves so abundant an intellectual harvest; but not once, nor twice, he offends in his metrical contrivances, thus spoiling the speed of his poetry, and inflicting shock after shock upon the ardent reader. However, there are calls to forgiveness from very many pages. Who can resist music such as follows?

“You who lay in Love’s white bosom
Shall find more fair our cool sea-blossom;
Leander turning to his love,
And lipping the fond seas he clove,
We lured to our still coral grove.”

A reader has to take heed, even in this instance, lest he fall; but the lines are lovely indeed. The poem entitled “The Swimmer” is a sufficing example of Mr. Roden Noel’s thoughtfulness and power of winning utterance. It contains these four lines:

“But a wet sand is a glass
Where the plumy cloudlets pass,
Floating islands of the blue,
Tender, shining, fair and true.”

Consider for one moment what an insult that last line is to its three sisters!
     We like this author most when he is out under the blue, the sea in front of him, dreaming of the days of mermaidens. Then there is in his verse the wing of the gull, the speech of the ocean, and the under-sea song of Neptune’s daughters. When he would rhyme about an old piano, he falls plump from the excellent, and delivers himself of stuff as little as this:

“Oh, how thinly, Oh, how feebly
     Rings the ancient instrument!
When it opened, slowly yielding,
     What a weird, unwonted scent!

Plaining wildered all forlornly,
     As it were surprised from death:
On a plate of faded ivory
     Some lost name faint wavereth.”

After this can there be any doubt that this Muse is deaf in one ear?
     That Mr. Roden Noel is a man governed by right emotions, no one reading his poetry could fail to detect. His range of subject is vast; and when he leaves the coral and the sand to take his part in great questions he pours out his protest or praise in long, living lines that rush impetuously from his heart. A curious fact about him is that, however stately the measure he chooses, he can never make it march; it never tramps along, it always rushes. It lacks sobriety and stability from the moment that the poet annexes it for use. Though he has a remarkable volubility, he is not satisfied with the legitimate resources of the English language. He knows all words, and he asks for more. He makes some compound adjectives that do not charm, for instance, “mellow-ripe-of-autumn”; and he twists the unusual out of the usual in many bewildering ways. Scattered among his writings are to be found many expressions and, as it were, catchwords that are much in vogue in our younger school of poetry. From this it is fair to assume that he has not failed of his effect upon literature. He is not such a master of the long word as Mr. Watson is; but he knows how to make it his very helpful slave, and, what is better still, he knows when to work without it. Here is a wise instance:

“Love was playing hide and seek,
     And we deemed that he was gone;
Tears were on my withered cheek,
     For the setting of our sun;
Dark it was around, above,
But he came again, my love!

Chill and drear in wan November,
     We recall the happy spring,
While bewildered we remember
     When the woods began to sing,
     All alive with leaf and wing;
Leafless lay the silent grove;
But he came again, my love!”

     In the longer poems we find much that is splendid. The author has a certain thunder, and it compels, as is the wont of thunder, attention. Pathos is not absent from his gifts; and through many of the more serious verses one can trace the fervent heart that feels the aches of the multitude, and yearns to see the poor possessed of that oil and wine, the double gift, which, wisely tendered, can bring to pass the necessary healing of the wound.
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The Piper of Hamelin (1893)

The Pall Mall Gazette (30 December, 1893)

TO AMUSE THE CHILDREN. †

WE “would do anything for the dear children,” as somebody said in the “Pantomime Rehearsal,” and, since the book of Mr. Buchanan’s “fantastic opera” is likely to amuse them, we submit it was worth publishing. But putting the dear children aside, we confess we think it rather slovenly done. Some of it is bright, some of it pretty, but most of it might have been a deal prettier and brighter. If a thing is worth doing, &c. Mr. Buchanan was capable of doing this thing far better than he has done it. Simple it had to be and is, but the simplicity should have been artful and is a little crude. Of the songs the Piper’s in Act I., Scene I., is very good, is robust, and has a pleasant lilt about it. Mr. Buchanan’s sequel to the legend, making the Piper restore the children on condition that the mayor’s daughter is given to him, and then releasing her, is tame perhaps, but sufficient. The comic relief embodied in the mayor is rather weak; it may be humorous to be fat, but is not the whole of humour. Still the thing is pretty and will serve. Mr. Hugh Thomson’s illustrations are not of his very best, but are quaint and with some character.

     † “The Piper of Hamelin: a Fantastic Opera in Two Acts.” By Robert Buchanan. (London: Heinemann.)

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Red and White Heather: North Country tales and ballads (1894)

The Leeds Mercury (28 March, 1894 - p.5)

MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN AND HIS WORK.

     The “Daily Chronicle” says—Mr. Robert Buchanan is to issue, through Messrs. Chatto, a volume of “North Country Tales and Ballads.” Some have appeared in magazines, some are new. Mr. Buchanan originally christened the volume “A Highland Princess,” after the first story. He changed his mind, however, in favour of “Red and White Heather.” Besides “A Highland Princess,” the tales, and ballads, are the ballad of Lord Langshaw, “The Legend of the Piper,” “The Broken Tryst,” “Miss Jean’s Love Story,” “The Dumb Bairn,” and “Sandie Macpherson.” The new novel by Mr. Buchanan, which has been announced, will not be out for some little time.

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The Dundee Evening Telegraph (30 May, 1894 - p.3)

ROBERT BUCHANAN’S NEW WORK.

     The Daily Chronicle says:—Mr Robert Buchanan’s new book, “Red and white Heather,” will be ready on June 7. The cover has a charming design in the two sorts of heather, and Mr Buchanan addresses an epilogue to his native country. There are four stories and three verse pieces in the volume, and the note of them all is that of the north. The poems are entitled “The Ballad of Lord Langshaw,” “The Broken Tryste,” and “The Dumb Bairn.” In one of the stories, “Sandie Macpherson,” there probably figures a Scotsman whose name is now historic.

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Aberdeen Weekly Journal (6 June, 1894)

     Mr Robert Buchanan’s new book, “Red and White Heather,” will be ready on June 7. The cover has a charming design in the two sorts of heather, and Mr Buchanan addresses an epilogue to his native country. There are four stories and three verse pieces in the volume, and the note of them all is that of the North. The poems are entitled “The Ballad of Lord Langshaw,” “The Broken Tryst,” and “The Dumb Bairn.”

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The Dundee Evening Telegraph (13 June, 1894 - p.2)

ROBERT BUCHANAN AND ALEXANDER SMITH.
A BURLESQUE BIOGRAPHY.

     Mr Robert Buchanan’s many friends in Glasgow who continue to watch his chequered literary career, always with kindly sympathy for his in his failures and unstinted admiration in his successes, will, says the N.B. Mail, unfeignedly regret that he should have lent himself to that burlesque sketch of Alexander Smith’s life history which, under the title of “A Highland Princess,” is the principal story in “Red and White Heather,” a collection of north country tales and ballads just published by Messrs Chatto & Windus. The references are so thinly disguised and the main incidents of the poet’s life so closely followed that few will fail at once to identify. The poet figures as “Walter Syme,” pattern designer, Paisley; George Gilfillan, through whose influence selections from his poetry were first published in the Critic, appears as “Professor Glenfinlas”; Smith’s appointment as Registrar of the University at Edinburgh is changed to Aberdeen; the Critic becomes the Orb, and the Athenæum, with its crushing critique, the Megatherium; the famous lyric, “City, I am true son of thine,” is referred to as describing “the feelings of a poor child shut up between the brick walls of a town,” and as fine as anything in Burns or Tennyson; in fact, throughout the so-called story the source of inspiration is so palpable that there are few in Edinburgh or Glasgow who will need to puzzle themselves over it. The references to Smith’s wife and her relations in the Highlands are without excuse, and so is a footnote to a particular failing of “Professor Glenfinlas.” The whole sketch is in wretched taste. Smith was a true poet, and, better still, a personal foe he never had, an unkind act he never did. Robert Buchanan would perhaps not have penned such ill-natured and wretched trash had he timely recollected the noble part played by his own father in giving Alexander Smith his first great lift to a congenial literary career. He relieved him from the drudgery of pattern designing, and made him editor of the weekly paper in Glasgow of which he was proprietor.

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Aberdeen Weekly Journal (16 June, 1894)

     FOR the recent extraordinary asperities of Mr Robert Buchanan’s tongue and pen there is now sufficient explanation by his appearance in the Bankruptcy Court. The Bohemian Bob has always been distinguished for his eccentricities — perhaps of late years more for these than for products of genius — but within the last few months he has out-Buchananed Buchanan. He has transformed himself into a literary Ishmael, whose hand is against every man, with the inevitable consequence that every man’s hand is against him. The quarrel with Clement Scott is not a solitary instance. One of the latest and worst acts of his Philistinism is burlesquing the revered dead. This is done in “A Highland Pass,” the principal story in a collection of north country tales and ballads from his pen. In this story he stoops to write a satirical sketch of Alexander Smith. The deceased poet figures as “Walter Syme,” pattern designer, Paisley, but the references are so thinly disguised, and the leading incidents of the poet’s life so closely followed, that identification is all too easy. Making “Walter Syme” Registrar of the University of Aberdeen instead of Alexander Smith actually occupying a similar post in Edinburgh is pretty transparent transplanting. References in the very worst taste to Smith’s wife and her relatives in the Highlands are perfectly inexcusable. It ill becomes Robert Buchanan to do this sort of thing. No one denies his claim to talent. His “God and the Man” and “The Shadow of the Sword” are vastly superior to the ordinary run of novel. But he is not in the same boat with Alexander Smith. He is scarcely worthy of the honour of being allowed to place a flower on the poet’s grave; and therefore he should never have attempted to plant upon it stinging thistles and undergrowth. For purity of diction and sublimity of thought alone the author of “Dreamthorp” and “City Poems” far outstrips his critic. Let the latter remember, and be humble, what Byron said of the Edinburgh reviewers—

A man must serve his time to every trade
Save censure—critics all are ready-made.

In the same work Buchanan satirises the late George Gilfillan as Professor Glenfinlas, mentioning some failings and foibles of that worthy old man. As if not satisfied, he also tilts at Carlyle as “Thomas Ercildoune.” Only two things could account for such wretched conduct—either colic or creditors. It turns out to be the latter.

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The Glasgow Herald (21 June, 1894 - p.9)

NOVELS AND STORIES.
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     Red and White Heather. By Robert Buchanan. (London: Chatto & Windus.)—Coming as it does from a man who has done some really good work in his time, this book will strike a heavier blow at his literary fame than a score of critical diatribes could do. There is scarcely a line in the 272 pages of prose and verse grouped under Mr Buchanan’s highly inappropriate title that rises above the level of the merest amateur triviality. Regarded as literary workmanship, the “Mysterious Piper” and “Miss Jean’s Love Story” would compare unfavourably with the average temperance tract. If that were all, one might dismiss the book with a brief regret that the author of “Shon Maclean” should have written it. But this volume is unfortunately disfigured by a couple of these errors in good taste and good feeling of which Mr Buchanan alone among living writers seems to possess the secret. Mr Buchanan has chosen to make one of the sketches in this book out of a sneering attack on Carlyle, put with the worst possible taste in the form of a confession made by “Thomas Ercildoune—True Thomas, as he was affectionately called by the generation to whom he told so many grim truths”—to a young literary friend. In this precious production we are told how “Ercildoune’s” criticism of “John Still, the Philosopher” arose purely from personal pique, how his attack on “the sordid, self-conceited, money-grabbing, secularity of the trading classes” grew entirely out of a grudge at one of their number, and so forth. It is just possible that Mr Buchanan, whose sense of humour is notoriously weak, may think that this is amusing. But, however willing one may be to believe that here he is only “full of his fun,” it is difficult to extend that charitable construction to the references to that “Professor of Moral Philosophy in Aberdeen, one Glenfinlas, who wrote a good deal in the magazines about poets and poetry, and was said to have the trick of discovering unknown merit and announcing it to the world.” The whole of this description, with the insinuations that accompany it, is a little beyond most people’s appreciation of humour. Mr Buchanan must be strangely innocent if her did not intend the average reader to attach the name of a real person to this caricature.

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The Bookman (London) (July, 1894 - p.121)

RED AND WHITE HEATHER. By Robert Buchanan. (Chatto and Windus.)

     This is a wonderful book. Some of the stories in it we had seen before and they had produced a certain impression, but taken together their effect is overpowering. To find cause for their peculiarities set one racking one’s brains, but the only reasonable hypothesis we can suggest is, that Mr. Buchanan, much concerned at the great conceit his countrymen have of themselves, resolved, for their good, to lessen it. With so excellent a motive, perhaps his performance should be dealt with charitably. But in the interests of his purpose one might remind him that when caricature oversteps certain limits the laughter is sometimes at the caricaturist, and that his intended victims are wont to join in. Mr. Buchanan has great qualities, but a fine wit has never been of them. Yet he never rollicked with quite such noisy foolishness as in “The Legend of the Mysterious Piper.” Beside the piper Mactavish a certain McCrankie of Savoy fame, was realistic. Had his authorship been anonymous, we should have believed that Mactavish was born, not beyond the Grampian line, but in the brain of a Cockney before even the tourist era began. Still, if this is Mr. Buchanan’s idea of being funny, no Highlander will care to put a dirk into him because of the quality of his jokes. There is another story, however, in which the jokes are less tolerable, “A Highland Princess.” Here the hero is a young poet, a genius, a good man, and, of course, a Lowlander. Many readers will guess who sat for his portrait. The story of his career is pathetic, how he abandons his trade, takes to literature, grinds like a galley slave at his pen, writing what he despises, in order to feed and finance a horde of his wife’s greedy Highland relatives. It is, in truth, a heart-rending picture, and for Walter Syme we have the sincerest sympathy. But he and his brother are treated as human beings. That is why we believe in them. The Highland relatives are about as human as Dancing-dogs. They are farcical clowns brought on to do service as the villains in a tragedy, and neither their speech nor their manners, nor their whisky do we believe in, because taking the comic stage even as representing the level of real life, they go beyond the requirements or probabilities of that. The skit on Carlyle is a trifle funnier, but not quite finely enough drawn to be in good taste. At the end, having poured out this rude mockery, he waxes sentimental over his God-mother Caledonia’s “brave old tartan plaid’!

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The Morning Post (6 July, 1894 - p.6)

     Mr. Robert Buchanan’s volume of tales and ballads, called “Red and White Heather” (Chatto and Windus) offers considerable variety. In “A Highland Princess” he cleverly depicts an aspiring poet’s hopes and disillusions, the latter much intensified by the want of sympathy of his bride, the descendant of the haughty MacInners, whose clanish spirit contributes to the poor man’s ruin. The “Legend of the Mysterious Piper” is fantastic and humorous, while the ballad of “The Dumb Bairn” is singularly pathetic.

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The Academy (11 August, 1894 - No. 1162, p.100)

     Red and White Heather will certainly not add to the reputation of its author, though it is not devoid of that cleverness which it is impossible to dissociate from Mr. Robert Buchanan, even when he is writing at railway speed. One has a suspicion that he has taken advantage of story-writing to have a hit at some folk he does not like. Was not “A Highland Princess” written mainly for the purpose of satirising “a Professor of Moral Philosophy in Aberdeen, one Glenfinlas, who wrote a good deal in the magazines about poets and poetry, and was said to have the trick of discovering unknown merit and announcing it to the world,” and who is further described as “a fat, red-faced man, with big hands and feet, and a flow of language that was fairly astounding, though what the man was driving at it was hard to tell?” Undoubtedly Glenfinlas spoils “A Highland Princess,” which, but for him, might have been a more than passable tragedy of a man’s ambition and a woman’s heartlessness. There is, however, a good deal of natural, though roughish and alcoholic humour in the “Legend of the Mysterious Piper,” and “Miss Jean’s Love Story” relates with very considerable power the troubles of a young woman who falls in love with the man that her father hates. Of the verse in this volume it is enough to say that it flows smoothly, but has little of the peculiar “strength” which one is in the habit of associating with Mr. Buchanan.

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The Spectator (3 November, 1894 - p.12)

     Red and White Heather. By Robert Buchanan. (Chatto and Windus.)—This is a volume of “North Country Tales and Ballads,” four of each. The first tale, “A Highland Princess,” is published for the first time. No one can complain of its being wanting in actuality. No one can doubt who is the original of “Professor Glenfinlas,” the enthusiastic discoverer of poets, while some of the circumstances in the life of Walter Syme point not obscurely to Alexander Smith. The Professor is not quite fairly treated. Otherwise the tale is powerful, and teaches, if such things could be taught, a salutary truth. Few follies are worse than that which takes an artisan from an honest employment and turns him into a man of letters. “Jean’s Love Story” is a dismal tragedy, written many years ago, but tragical enough to suit the present taste for horrors. In “Sandie Macpherson” we have a very clever sketch. Here, again, “Thomas Ercildoune” is Carlyle, though Sandie is probably a happy invention of Mr. Buchanan’s. The humour of the “Legend of the Mysterious Piper” is too “North Country” for us to appreciate. The quality of Mr. Buchanan’s poetry is well known, and there is no occasion to appreciate the four specimens here given beyond saying that they are not unworthy of him.

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The Truth about the Game Laws: a record of cruelty, selfishness, and oppression.
By J. Connell, Poacher, with a preface by Robert Buchanan. (1898)

The Dundee Advertiser (3 February, 1898 - p.5)

     Mr J. Connell, for whose interesting work “The Truth about the Game Laws” Mr Robert Buchanan has just written a preface, was at one time a member of the Fenian organisation, with which, indeed, he was associated till its death. He was born in Meath, and began life as a farm hand; from that drifted to the docks, where he became a labourer. He was afterwards a navvy, railway servant, draper, journalist, and Socialist lecturer. Mr Connell is also something of a poet, which perhaps accounts for Mr Buchanan writing an introduction to his book.

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The Guardian (8 February, 1898 - p.4)

     The Truth about the Game Laws, by J. Connell (W. Reeves, 8vo, pp. 85, 6d.), with an introduction by Robert Buchanan, is one of the publications of the Humanitarian League. The author writes of the injury which the game laws do to farmers and of the social evils to which they give rise. He condemns the “battue” in common with many “good sportsmen,” as the phrase goes. Other points on which he insists (they are less obvious evils of the game laws) are the alleged cruelty to sporting dogs in the course of their training and “the disturbance of nature’s balance” by the artificial fostering of certain animals and the suppression of others which have their undoubted uses. Of shooting pure and simple over a dog we find no condemnation. It is a useful little pamphlet about a subject to which the majority of people have given little thought, and upon which they have, therefore, scarcely formed an opinion.

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The Sheffield and Rotherham Independent (9 February, 1898 - p.2)

SOME RECENT PUBLICATIONS.

     “The Truth about the Game Laws” is No. 2 of the new series of the Humanitarian League’s publications. The author is J. Connell and Mr. Robert Buchanan has written the preface. Mr. Buchanan says he almost feels in the position of Satan reproving sin, as he has been an ardent sportsman for many years. He describes the game laws as the tribute paid by the overworked and overtaxed people of England to the predatory classes who have appropriated the land and depopulated the hills and valleys to increase their own selfish pleasures. The spirit which created those laws is the spirit which the prophet of Nazareth sought in vain to destroy. William Reeves, 185, Fleet street, is the publisher.

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Robert Buchanan and the Magazines