In its power of evoking the past, Mrs. Rachel Annand Taylor's "Aspects of the Italian Renaissance," just published, is a wonderful achievement. Professor Gilbert Murray, who writes a preface to the book, does not exaggerate when he says, "However seriously one may disagree with it, or even at times resent it, it has worth because it is based on real knowledge, conceived with real feeling, and expressed with rich and often exquisite power of language."' One of its sections deals with the connexion of France with Scotland during the period of the Renaissance. Ié may seem strange, writes the authoress, yet it is natural enough, for Flodden can contemplate 30 ' field was only one of the red love tokens that Scotland wore for France. The French Renaissance crossed the sea most definitely with Mary; and if the bitterness of political strife rent and spoiled the gift, it was French building, French personality, that affected Scotland, "as the French University and the French royalty had already dyed her mood: and it was a French reaction that ruined.the burthen of beauty, for Scottish Protestantism came from the lucid and terribly definite Calvin, not from the compromising Luther. There were always Scots Guards for the French Kings, French Queens for the Scottish Courts, and Scots Princesses for the French. The Scottish villages are still like French towns, a close huddle of roofs round Abbey or Town Hall. Castles had been built high where waters met, with gardens of red flowers enclosed, and the lily-lea below. With the Renaissance came French musicians, masons, poets.
For personality, this land of clear, pale gold atmosphere, green sunsets, great rain-washed skies, where the black thorn suddenly breaks into dazzling white like a miracle, has always had its complete value, writes Mrs. Taylor in another passage. These harled. houses on the "L"' plan, doorway safe in the angle, all aflower at the top, flaunting, many of them, their French or Italian gardens, have their lingering legends, strange as the wandering songs of love and death. The dreaming half-heavenly Celtic strain marries happily with the irenic and impassioned Latin spirit, whether French or Italian. A marriage which gave to history one of the most famous of Renaissance ladies, a Queen renowned through Europe for her enchantment, even in those days, as if she were a Guenivere or Morgan la Faye—CUarie Stuart, lover of Jove and verse and personal liberty, wonder fully red and white, flowerlike and flame-like, whose name still creates an impression as of clashing steel,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.