English duke is not the creator of his own wealth, although in his keeping it makes the earth around him a garden, and the walls of his house bright with pictures.  But our inability to conceive satisfactorily of Dunbar does not arise from this alone.  We have his works, but then they are not supplemented by personal anecdote and letters, and the reminiscences of contemporaries.  Burns, for instance,—­if limited to his works for our knowledge of him,—­would be a puzzling phenomenon.  He was in his poems quite as spoken as Dunbar, but then they describe so wide an area, they appear so contradictory, they seem often to lead in opposite directions.  It is, to a large extent, through his letters that Burns is known, through his short, careless, pithy sayings, which imbedded themselves in the memories of his hearers, from the recollections of his contemporaries and their expressed judgments, and the multiform reverberations of fame lingering around such a man—­these fill up interstices between works, bring apparent opposition into intimate relationship, and make wholeness out of confusion.  Not on the stage alone, in the world also, a man’s real character comes out best in his asides.  With Dunbar there is nothing of this.  He is a name, and little more.  He exists in a region to which rumour and conjecture have never penetrated.  He was long neglected by his countrymen, and was brought to light as if by accident.  He is the Pompeii of British poetry.  We have his works, but they are like the circumvallations of a Roman camp on the Scottish hillside.  We see lines stretching hither and thither, but we cannot make out the plan, or divine what purposes were served.  We only know that every crumpled rampart was once a defence; that every half-obliterated fosse once swarmed with men; that it was once a station and abiding-place of human life, although for centuries now remitted to silence and blank summer sunshine.

A LARK’S FLIGHT

Rightly or wrongly, during the last twenty or thirty years a strong feeling has grown up in the public mind against the principle, and a still stronger feeling against the practice, of capital punishments.  Many people who will admit that the execution of the murderer may be, abstractly considered, just enough, sincerely doubt whether such execution be expedient, and are in their own minds perfectly certain that it cannot fail to demoralise the spectators.  In consequence of this, executions have become rare; and it is quite clear that many scoundrels, well worthy of the noose, contrive to escape it.  When, on the occasion of a wretch being turned off, the spectators are few, it is remarked by the newspapers that the mob is beginning to lose its proverbial cruelty, and to be stirred by humane pulses; when they are numerous, and especially when girls and women form a majority, the circumstance is noticed and deplored.  It is plain enough that, if the newspaper considered