WE have seen how various were Linton's tastes and sympathies. Drawing and engraving, poetry, Nature-study to some small extent, biography, magazine editing, and extreme politics—extreme for the age—relating not only to England, but to most of Europe: all these occupied his attention, not in turn, but continuously.

Dealing with his published volumes, we must give first place to his autobiographical 'Memories.' They are of ever-increasing value to the student of the evolution of the nineteenth century, for they are crammed with recollections and estimations of its makers, and with illustrations of the old 'condition of England' question. One of the earliest things that impressed him was the tolling of George III.'s 'passing bell.' Another was the trial of Queen Caroline and the popular excitement consequent thereon, and somewhat later the sordid funeral permitted her, 'the shabbiest notable funeral I ever saw,' he says. 'The demoralizing craze for State lotteries,' the wild debauchery of the Court, press-gangs and fights between these and butchers armed with long knives, Government terrorism over the Press and the right of public speech, riots in Wales for the purpose of demolishing turnpikes, and many more such things are recorded; and they unquestionably impelled him to take the side of the people against their despotic rulers. Concurrently with these, however, he records the progressive movements and struggles of the working-classes for social and political emancipation, and for education and for such equality of opportunity as wise laws can secure. In the course of his narrative we meet, in addition to the continental agitators and ultra-Radicals and Chartists of England, and the Duffys, Mitchells, O'Connells, O'Connors, and O'Briens of Ireland, galaxies of literary celebrities, and men in the foremost ranks of Art and Science.

He shows himself to have had strong prejudices for or against people, and he never scruples to record his opinions quite frankly. Of Thornton Hunt and his relations to the pretty wife of G. H. Lewes and to Lewes himself, he remarks that the legal husband 'asserted his belief in Communistic principles,' the two men only quarrelling over the expense of the double family! This Lewes is that historian of philosophy, be it remembered, with whom 'George Eliot' lived, though he was undivorced. For some reason or other, Samuel Carter Hall, author and editor of the Art Journal, was Linton's pet aversion. He asserts—I know not with what truth—that Charles Dickens made him sit for the portrait of 'Pecksniff.' Robert Owen, the founder of 'New Harmony' and of other socialistic and co-operative enterprises, he stigmatizes as impracticable, and 'a dry and unimaginative creature.' On the other hand, he has many pleasant and generous things to say about Ruskin, 'the poet beyond all verse-makers of his time,' and 'a man of the noblest nature'; Derwent Coleridge, with whom he rambled around Keswick, and who appeared to him to be 'a sensible, well-informed, genial and liberal clergyman'; Harriet Martineau, who lived near enough to be on visiting terms, 'a good-looking, comely, interesting old lady, very deaf, but cheerful and eager for news which she did not always catch correctly'; and many another, including the Americans, Whittier (of whom he wrote a life), Longfellow, and Emerson.

Linton's biographies of 'European Republicans'—mostly reprints of magazine articles—are graphic and sympathetic. His sketch of Mazzini's career I cannot say is the best extant, but it is good, and is the result of a warm and life-long personal friendship. His great work—for such it truly is—'The Masters of Wood-Engraving,' is not only the best of a series of publications he issued on the history and technique of his own art, but is, and always will be, the text-book of the subject. Wood-engraving is now almost entirely superseded by the various photographic 'processes.'

His other purely literary productions ranged from a volume of children's stories, 'The Flower and the Star,' to 'Poems and Translations.' The children of days of long ago, when really good books for them were scarce, must have hung delighted over the apparently impromptu fairy-tales about the flowers of the sky and the stars of the earth commingling; and how the dear little boy Dreamy Eyes, and his sisters Softcheek and Brightface, sought and found them 'under the golden oak-buds of the great oak,' and under the bushes clothed with delicate young leaves of the honeysuckle, or in the evening glow, where the great red sun went down, like a ball of fire, behind the sea. Linton was a true poet. His muse was a lyric rather than an epic or dramatic one.

'Youth came: I lay at beauty's feet; She smiled, and said my song was sweet.'

His first volume of poetry was entitled 'The Plaint of Freedom,' and one of its themes evoked a tribute in verse from W. S. Landor. 'Claribel,' seldom quoted now, was his second venture. 'Grenville's Last Fight,' published in this collection, is a spirited ballad of a sea-fight in the Western Main, when the Spanish fleet attacked the solitary English man-of-war, 'drove on us like so many hornets' nests, thinking their multitudes would bear us down,' and yet failed to conquer her, because her captain sank her rather than surrender.

Other pieces, too long to include here, are short enough to be set to music, and would be worth more than the sentimental or garish theatre stuff too many young ladies indulge in nowadays; such as—

'Oh, happy days of innocence and song, When Love was ever welcome, never wrong, When words were from the heart, when folk were fain To answer truth with truthfulness again; Oh, happy days of innocence and song.'

And again, 'The Silenced Singer'—silenced on account of the consummation of his hope in the winning of his mate, when the nest was built, and he had 'closed in the round of his content.'

And, once again, 'Mind Your Knitting,' after the style of Beranger, relating how the blind old mother heard the soft footfall of a lover, and noted the cessation of her daughter's clicking needles' task. 'Tis the cat that you hear moving!'

'You speak false to me; I'd like Robert better, loving You more openly. Lucy! mind your knitting.'

It is right to say a few words about Linton as an artist. He was engaged upon much better work than the illustrated weekly papers which were at first his sheet-anchor. He was, for instance, employed by Alexander Gilchrist to reproduce the quaint and exquisitely-coloured designs of William Blake. These beautiful reproductions are before me as I write, and they have not only the necessary accuracy of copied design, but also delicacy of touch sufficient to make them virtually indistinguishable from the master's own work. His own etchings adorn the fine volume on the Lake Country, written by his wife, Mrs. Lynn Linton. There are few such drawings done nowadays. Photography has, in some respects, greater accuracy, yet there is accuracy of insight illuminated by the artist-mind in Linton's wood-cuts, whether these be of some pouring torrent on the river Duddon, a view of the 'Old Man' from Brantwood, a group of castellated boulders on the 'sad seashore,' a jutting crag upon Great Gable, or only a fallen pine on the fell-side, or a banner-like mist clinging to a mountain peak. He had a pretty fashion of illustrating his own writings, which has increased their value in the eyes of collectors. 'Claribel' is thus brightened, and some may even prefer the pencilled pictures to the written drama. 'The Flower and the Star' has its landscapes, too, and its representations of Jack climbing the beanstalk in the full moonlight, of the three people who cooked an egg, and of other items that make the stories what they are. Even his 'Ferns of the English Lake Country' have his own copies of the fronds he gathered. My edition is coloured by hand, though whether by himself or not I cannot say. 'He is a wood-engraver first, and a poet afterwards,' says one friendly critic. The same critic adds, 'As a translator, Mr. Linton has few equals'; and yet, on the whole, heretical as it may seem, I prefer his own utterances to his translations, and like best to have them decorated by his own pencil, for his draughtmanship and his poetic fancies are as the two edges of one sword with which he fought his way to a place in our literary Valhalla. They both belonged to his love-service of humanity as he understood that service. His own prayer may be appropriately quoted:

'I am not worthy, Love! to claim a place In thy close sanctuary; but of thy grace Admit me to the outer courts, and so In time that inner worship I may learn, And on thy Altar burn The sacrifice of woe!'

He loved his race—too often at the cost of his own home happiness—and most of what trials and troubles he had were the fruits of his unselfishness.

CONISTON

'Coniston Lake, that long and narrow sheet of water stretching its six miles of blue between the fells, deserves a more generous appreciation than what it has met with, and a more popular acceptance. And now that it has a railroad probing its very heart, it is likely that lovers will come round it as thickly as round Windermere and Derwentwater. Take the circuit round the lake, beginning at the Waterhead on the west side, and going southwards towards Furness, past the islands and by Brantwood on the east, as one example of the sweetness and the richness of the place. There is first that grand Old Man, at the foot of which you reverently walk, overshadowed by his huge crags as you pass through the ancient village of Church Coniston—one of those quaint villages with the flavour of old times about them, and the generous beautifying of Nature around, so characteristic of our lake country. The old deer-park, where once the lord held his high days of sport and revelry, and which has still the inheritance of richer foliage and nobler growth than belong elsewhere, is one of those flavourings; so is that ivied and venerable house, Coniston Hall, where the Flemings used to live, and which was the residence for a time of the Countess of Pembroke—"Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother"—but which is now only a farmhouse famous for its sheep-clipping.'—Eliza Lynn Linton; The Lake Country.