By architecture we mean building considered as a fine art—that is to say, an art which subserves mental and not merely physical necessities. Art is primarily simply skill—thus we rightly speak of the art of the dentist and the art of the pickpocket, and there is great art in washing up. Upon this lowly base is built up the grand erection of human accomplishment. To do or make something well is the root of the business.

But as it commonly happens that human works are used by human beings as well as done by human beings, it follows that the idea of suitability as well as that of utility occupies the mind of the workman. Hence even in the simplest articles of use the two ideas combine, coalesce or conflict, and the chair-maker who sets out to make simply a thing which will fit the sitting human body finds himself involved in all the complexity of the problems aroused by the question, what human body, or whose human body—am I making a child’s chair or an office stool, a chair for the dining room or one for the bishop in his cathedral?

Thus has grown up the distinction between art and fine art. By art is meant simply the skill to do what needs doing or the skill to make what serves a physical use simply. By fine art is meant skill to do or to make that which is simply delightful to the mind. At the one extreme are such things as dentistry and pure engineering (though even dentists play about with gold stoppings for no real utilitarian reason), such things as working a London tube lift or mixing concrete for foundations.

This is certainly the very type of biography Scott would most have desired. For him history was the clash of personalities, was a sustained human drama; he could only think of it as dynamic, moving, alive. While he was moved by ancient things, he had wit enough to know that ancient things were but relics of a living age; yet because of the living age they were descended from, he was content with relics. His imagination supplied all the life that had departed from them. Yet, curiously, his imagination seems to have needed a centre on which to focus. Clairvoyant as he was, he needed some personal belonging of the dead to be put in front of him before he could see him as once he was in his habit as a man. Hence he developed an overwhelming passion for collecting the flotsam of heroic ages; to Lady Scott it was a tiresome interference with the orderliness of house-keeping, to Sir Walter it was the central need for his creative power to set itself working. Out of it his memory, working under the spell of the contact, was roused to see and describe the man and his age. The long sword of Montrose was the most sacred object of the shrine of Abbotsford; it not only pleased Sir Walter to see it, but it actually moved him to understand Montrose. There was a curious earthliness about Sir Walter; he might weave romances in the air, but he wove them out of the solid materials of the earth.

Owen Glyn DWR has been neglected to a remarkable extent by English historians. The reason is perhaps not far to seek. He belonged to the great army of unsuccessful men; and history has never been kind to failures. He survived in the memory of Englishmen as a character in a Shakesperian play. In so far as he entered at all into serious history, they were content to put him down as an irascible but unpractical Celt, a picturesque bandit, the main object of whose existence was to kill Saxons.

His fate at the hands of his countrymen was little better. Paradoxically enough the battle of Bosworth, which enabled a Welsh king to ride into London at the head of a largely Welsh army, did Wales little but harm. The gentry came to court and became Anglicised : the Reformation which destroyed the monasteries—the cultural centres of the country—completed the process. The patriots were usually papists, and either fled abroad or perished on the gallows. The Act of 1535 avowedly aimed at the extirpation of the Welsh language : and the unpleasant figure of the anglicised Welshman began to appear. In 1567 Dr. Griffith Roberts, the Chaplain of St. Charles Borromeo, and a prominent exile, satirized the type in the preface to his Grammar : ‘their Welsh is Englishfied, and their English, God knows, is too Welshy.’ Morus Kyffin, a fervent defender of the Reformation, wrote in 1595 of a ‘clerical person’ who ‘said that it was not right to allow any Welsh books to be printed.

Some fourteen years after Boswell’s Life of Johnson was given to the world there appeared a small collection of Letters addressed to Dr. Johnson which had found no place in the great Biography. These were contained in a slim volume published in London in 1805 and bearing the title Original Letters to Dr. Johnson by Miss Hill Boothby. The little work has never once been re-printed, although some few extracts from it are to be met with in the notes to Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s edition of Johnson's Letters, and it has occasionally been referred to by other commentators. A copy of this now exceedingly rare book lies before us as we write, and suggests to us to set down something about one of the most singular of Dr. Johnson’s many friendships.

When Johnson was a very young man, poverty-stricken and unknown, he paid the first of many visits to his friend, the Rev. Dr. Taylor, of Ashbourne, in Derbyshire. There, we are told, ‘the daughters of some of the Derbyshire squires showed their good taste and good sense by desiring the company of the young genius, poor and unpolished as he was.’ Or, as Miss Seward, the ‘Swan of Lichfield,’ most appalling of poetesses, and a life-long enemy of Johnson, preferred in her acid and waspish way to put it, ‘They probably amused themselves with the uncouth adorations of the learned though dirty stripling, whose mean appearance was overlooked, because of the genius and knowledge that blazed through him, albeit with umbered flames owing to his spleen and melancholy.’

The Service was in no way in excess of the meal: bird broth; candied and pickled fruit and vegetables; and the expected goslings, tasting of lemon; There was great variety of biscuits; the wines were sweet and not strong; and there were delicate morsels of cheese looking like wooden matches, taken at any time during the meal. At the end there were fine peaches; and sweets which no one took.

When, as has been said in certain times and places, the cloth was withdrawn, for there was never any sign of any cloth, Koti said :

There are several reasons why we cannot address questions to the most honoured present, and doubtless his wisdom has divined what they are. But nothing prevents his asking questions of us. Talk at table is sacred talk.

So Park began:

There is the surface population of this island. Is it denser in other parts than in this part?

Its density varies exactly with the productivity of the soil.

The soil feeds the whole population?

Yes, and it is the greatest thing done in la.

The moors and hills are uninhabited, said another speaker; except by wild creatures.

What?

Different kinds with antlers, including the great kinds.

Wild swine and bears.

Hunting forests?

Yes.

Who use them?

The nobles.

How are they hunted?

Mostly with dogs.

What’s the name of that long-legged feline?

Svillig looked pleased and said : N’ti. Have you seen it?

Yes, in captivity.

In captivity?

Yes, and often in pictures. I saw it in a picture the first day I was here, on the eve of the Assumption. Did you though?

December 23rd, 1588.

To us, who look back on it after three hundred and fifty years, the murder at Blois seems an inevitable climax to the continued provocation suffered by Henry III at the hands of his most powerful follower ; but to the Duke of Guise, save in the last few minutes of all, it was a thing undreamed of and unfeared. ‘So blind was that high mind of his to things as clear as daylight,’ says Pierre de l’Estoile, that ‘he could not bring himself to believe that the King intended to do him an ill-turn; for God had blinded his eyes, as he generally does to those whom he designs to chasten.’

In July of the year 1588, five months before the day of his death, the Duke, fresh from a victory in Alsace, rode triumphantly into Paris—and the King trembled at his subject’s approach.

Henry de Guise was thirty-eight years of age. He was tall and well built. His hair was fair and curly, and he wore a close-trimmed beard. Across his left cheek still showed the scar which had been inflicted on him at the Battle of Dormans, thirteen years before, but he was none the less handsome for that. His was the perfect figure of a soldier. All were devoted to him, for his generosity, for his tireless energy, for his prompt actions and decisions. ‘Franee went mad over this man,’ said Balzac, ‘to say they loved him is too weak an expression.’

At once, on the day of the Barricades, he won a personal triumph.