filled with as great a terror as had scattered his captors. His hair rose on end as the laugh died away, and he gazed spellbound for several seconds at the light which rose and fell inside Dun Brolchain. He remained as if rooted where he stood by fear and a weird sort of fascination, until a second unnerving outburst of mirth sent him running like the rest. He did not run many yards. His foot caught in some tangled heather, and, as his arms were close bound to his sides, he lost his balance and fell heavily forward on his face, where he lay half dazed, while, as in a dream, his ears caught the sound of a body of men marching through the night. A strange apathy and carelessness as to his fate overcame him; and all thought of struggling to his feet to escape deserted him. The steady tramp approached him, passed him by, but he could discern nothing. But it seemed to him, stretched as one dead upon the heather, that the phantom army, if of phantoms it was composed, took hours in the march past. Subdued sounds of revelry came from the fort, and Malcolm shivered with dread ; but his recent exertions acted as an opiate strong enough to drown his fear. He closed his eyes reluctantly in sleep. Ian's young legs carried him rapidly away from Dun Brolchain, and he arrived breathless at old Janet's door, and burst into the hut with a confused tale in which the fort and Malcolm and ghosts were hopelessly mixed, thoroughly rousing MacLean from his gloomy meditations concerning what the future held in store. "I must away, Janet," said Sir Lauchlan standing up, "the night is wearing on." He had been silently admiring Tibbie's puppies before Ian's hasty coming. Now he stooped and picked up the larger of them; the little animal snuggled in his arms, knowing by instinct his friendliness. "MacDonald promised me a dog," said he, "in place of Barra, that he killed. Will he object if I help myself to one of these? What think you, Janet ? " The woman made no difficulty. She had agreed to keep the dogs for Sir Angus at the special pleading of her foster-son. Tibbie was almost tired of her romping offspring and regarded the pup in MacLean's arms with sleepy complaisance. She was not unwilling to part with one. But an objector arose in a quarter unexpected by Sir Lauchlan. Ian had recovered from his terror, and saw with dismay one of his pets about to be carried off by the man whom he and the wild band in whose company he had recently been expressly hated. At first he begged that the puppy might be left to him, but finding that his prayer was unheeded, he exclaimed in tones that proved him fearless at least of man, The dogs are MacDonald's, and it's not for her," pointing to Janet, "to bestow one on his enemy!" The woman turned upon him angrily, but Sir Lauchlan, as Janet had told him Ian loved the dogs, drew out a broad gold piece from his sporran and pressed it upon the boy. "Bold blood will speak out, Janet," said he. Ian flung the coin violently from him. I want not your gold," he shouted in anger; I hate you! I hate you!" and to hide the sobs of rage that struggled for expression, he threw himself down upon the floor beside Tibbie and pressed his face close to her side. He was enough of a child to cry, but proud withal. He would not let MacLean see his tears. Perhaps if he had done so the puppy would have been left him. Sir Lauchlan was not hard-hearted. As it was, MacLean and the little dog went out into the night, to begin a companionship that would end only with Sir Lauchlan's death. And Sir Lauchlan's death? If the puppy had remained, that, perhaps, would have been different. AUBREY DE VERE AND HIS "LEGENDS OF THE SAXON SAINTS WE E have celebrated many centenaries within the past decade―Tennyson, Browning, Dickens, and Thackeray, to select only four names from what Carlyle would call the roll of the beatified. With varied emotions we listened to their life-story once again, following them onwards and upwards through tedious ways of trial and of striving till their kingdom was won and they spoke to us as kings whose words brought strength, and peace, and healing. And this is another year of centenary. The centenary, too, of a king among poets, though a king whose name is not emblazoned on the world's escutcheons, for his kingdom was lowly and his creed despised. There could be no tomb for the troubadour of Heaven's Queen in the great abbey where so many of his compeers are laid, not even a monument to recall his name, but he is honoured none the less for that, and they who honour him love him the more. It is not eulogy in verse or prose that Aubrey de Vere would have wished from us now, not wreaths of flowers to adorn his tomb-though he loved the lily, the rose, and the tiny white snowdrops above all-no, a greater boon he would have sought, the remembrance of the Requiem Mass and of Mary's Rosary in solemnisation of his life's centenary. He esteemed the Sage of Chelsea mightily, but he cared not a whit for his canon of beatification. What to him was "the unguided instinct of the world, working across all perverse impediments and arriving at such result"? De Vere's ambitions soared higher : " In vain, O God, our wings we spread, Several laudable attempts have indeed been made to direct the unguided instinct of the world" towards our poet. Alas! [This tribue to the poet, from an English admirer, reached us while the article of Father George O'Neill, S. J., on the Centenary of Aubrey de Vere, which appeared in our May number, was going through the press.-ED., I. M.] " for the brave attempts. Frankly, we are not hopeful of his future fame or popularity. He will always be an elect poet, if not a renowned poet. It is far easier to beat down criticism of the type that assailed Thompson's Mistress of Vision as nonsense verse or barbarous jargon," that described his glorious Anthem of Earth as "a terrible poem . . . without form and void, rhymeless and the work of a medieval and pedantic Walt Whitman," than to kindle even into resemblance of a flame the criticism that deals out cold platitudes. Yet such chill indifference has been the treatment meted out to De Vere, save from the few unto whose souls his message will ever be music. Finally, for our greater consolation in this his year of centenary, be it remembered that our lesser king of song, if he is neglected by our own age, merited the praise and the affection alike of the greater kings of song amongst whom he moved. Wordsworth and Coleridge welcomed him as a friend; Tennyson and Browning loved him as a brother-poet; Patmore and Thompson revered him as we revere him, for a true son of the Mother of all the arts, the Church of Christ founded on Blessed Peter. THE LEGENDS OF THE SAXON SAINTS. To undertake a review of the verse and prose of De Vere from his first published work in 1842 to his last in 1893, nine, years before his death at the venerable age of eighty-eight, is obviously impossible and unnecessary in the small compass of an article. We propose, therefore, to consider the Legends of the Saxon Saints, partly because they have met with such scant notice hitherto and also owing to the recent movement, if so we may dignify it, towards the study of the early Saints of the Church. The latest of volumes on this subject, and the first of a projected series, has already been reviewed in these pages.* It has been observed, moreover, that these authors who plead so eloquently for a return to the " love and reverence for national saints are, for the most part, non-Catholic-though generous and sympathetic minds, be it said—and so it seems more than fitting to summon such a stalwart Catholic champion as De Vere into the lists. The purpose of the Legends of the Saxon Saints, as, indeed, of the Legends of St. Patrick, is made clear by the poet's own * The Lives and Legends of English Saints, by L. M. Shortt. preface. "Many years ago," he writes, "my friend, Miss Fenwick, remarked to me on the strange circumstance that the chief event in a nation's history, its conversion to Christianity, largely as it is often recorded in national legends, has never been selected as a theme for poetry." And as the significance of that “chief event" developed with the fervent convictions of his new-found Catholicity, so the set task became a task of love, inspired by something akin to the missionary spirit of the race to which his English blood had been wedded centuries before. The lives and legends of the old heroes of the Church, that had instilled generosity and high ideals into the men of former ages, were ignored, and so he would become their minstrel, as he had become the "lutanist" of their Queen, trustful that song would arrest where chronicle might only oppress. This is no exaggerated view. Chivalry, the gentle chivalry of a Sir Galahad, rather than the daring of a Lancelot or a Sir Bors, lay deep in the soul of Aubrey de Vere and ministered to his muse. To grasp this is to grasp a principle whereby to judge and the spirit wherein to read his legends. He chivalrously follows the footsteps of Venerable Bede, striving to see with his eyes, to interpret his seventh-century “legend-roll” as faithfully as it was first recorded. “With all its violences and inconsistencies, the seventh century was a noble age-an age of strong hearts which were gentle as well as strong, of a childhood that survived in manhood, of natures that had not lost their moral unity, of holy lives and of happy deaths. Bede's picture of it is a true one: and for that reason it comes home to us." Hence, De Vere is whole-hearted in his acceptance of these legends. He felt it was not for him to make selection for fear of offending, to suit bis treatment to a more fastidious age than was the age of Bede, or to explain away what the Venerable had written in his priceless history. One point of difference there is-over the poetic Legends the shadow of Odin, god or hero, or both, falls continually. Kings struggle to break asunder the ancient bonds that bind themselves and their people to the godlike hero. Sigebert of Essex in the tower of Heida the Prophetess, Oswald raising his standard in pagan Mercia, Oswy sorrowing over the nurdered Oswin, are all types of the combat between the old and the new. On the other hand, the legends of "St. Cuthbert's Pentecost," of St. Frideswida, Oxford's glorious patroness, of Cadmon, the Father of English song, and of "Bede's Last |