SOURCE: A review of The Book of Orm, in The Nation, New York, Vol. 11, No. 266, August 4, 1870, pp. 76-7.

The following review offers an unfavorable assessment of The Book of Orm.

In previous volumes, Mr. Buchanan has published verses which were not precisely good poetry, and which were not very agreeable reading, but which, nevertheless, showed that he had in him something of poetic power. The imagination in them was of the purely sympathetic order, and was unaccompanied by any but a weak and futile way of thinking, and was unaccompanied, too, so far as appeared, by any perception of the beautiful or sense of the humorous. The impression given was of a thoroughly Scotch mind and nature, flushed with a good deal of that hectic which has consigned a great many young Scotchmen to poetry and an early grave. But for all that—though he was conceited and...