1898] NOTES AND COMMENTS iW 
SCENERY AND THE POETS 
THE Romanes Lecture for 1898 was delivered in the Sheldonian 
Theatre at Oxford on June 1, by Sir Archibald Geikie, who took for 
his subject “Types of Scenery and their influence on Literature.” 
This has now been published, at the price of two shillings, by 
Messrs Macmillan & Co. The subject of the lecture is less than its 
title. Scenery is limited to Great Britain; its types are defined as 
Lowlands, Uplands, and Highlands; and by ‘literature’ we are for 
the nonce to understand ‘poetry.’ Even within these somewhat 
narrow bounds, we are not sure that Sir Archibald has made the 
most of his theme. It was a delightful lecture, full of pretty word- 
painting and apt quotation, with a geological flavour deftly introduced 
so as to make the listener think that there was a foundation of 
abstruse science, and that this particular branch of science was 
perfectly charming. But as an essay, as a contribution to. serious 
thought on the subject, its tenuity approaches transparency. <A 
poet, we gather from the lecture, describes what he sees, and draws 
his images from his surroundings. Cowper depicts the valley of the 
Ouse; Thomson turns from “the living stream, the airy mountain, 
and the hanging rock” of his native Border to Hagley Park and the 
“ sleep-soothing groves” of the south of England; Burns sings the 
“banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon” and “the bonnie banks of Ayr”; 
Wordsworth, fortunately for English literature, lived in the high- 
lands of the Lake District, and introduced to us mountains and 
lakes and sounding cataracts, “clouds, mists, streams, watery rocks 
and emerald turf.” But all this, though we may not have heard it 
expressed in such felicitous language, we knew before. 
The most striking and original passage in the essay is that 
which applies the scenic method of criticism to Macpherson’s 
“Ossian.” “The landscape,’ we are told, “belongs unmistakably 
to Western Argyleshire. Its union of mountain, glen, and sea 
removes it at once from the interior to the coast. Even if it had 
been more or less inaccurately drawn, its prominence and consist- 
ency all through the poems would have been remarkable in the 
productions of a lad of four-and-twenty, who had spent his youth 
in the inland region of Badenoch, where the scenery is of another 
kind.” “It is not that in Ossian, highland landscape was deliberately 
described, but it formed a continually visible and changing back- 
ground. The prevalent character of the whole range of scenery in 
the region, and the general impression made by it on the eye and 
mind, were so vividly conveyed that no one familiar with the 
country can fail to recognise how faithfully the innermost spirit of 
the West Highlands is rendered.” This is strong as well as new 
evidence in favour of the authenticity of at least a large proportion 
