At the conclusion of his speech fon the occasion of his receiving the freedom of Edinburgh, Sir Harry Lauder told his hearers the origin of his new song. He wax with a friend in a bookseller's shop Blackpool when the title of a book attracted his attention, It was "Flower 0' the Heather," by Mackonna, and he bought the volume and enjoyed reading it immensely. But he could not get the title out of his mind. He thought "Flower o' the Heather" was too beautiful an expression to be buried between the covers of a Book and finally he said "I will ite a little song so that every-chorus of, protest against a picture so true to life as this is, and so at variance with their comfortable doctrine of make-believe, and the chorus rose to an uproar on the appearance in 1895 of "Jude the Obscure." The ungentle creator of Jude and Tess thereupon retired from a field already invaded by precious young men who confound. ed literary wsthetics with moral anastheties, and were ready to soothe the dying century with those stories psychological whence was presently to come the psycho-anal tical novel with its puppets endlessly talking and seldom or never doing anything. Their work was, in fact, far lees their own product than that of the mass mind of their day, and it follows that each generation of readers gots the novelists and the novels it deserves, Sir Harry Lauder then proceeded to sing the new song which was received with great applause.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.