deal fragmentarily with rural lives and never with
the collective life of our larger towns; though it also readily takes the paths of English fiction. All round, in short, our 'provincial centres' suffer from the centripetal habit which makes London the centre.
If it be asked, then, in what way the desired improvement is likely to arise, the answer would seem to be that it will be from a general culture movement which shall yield a soil for productive intellectual life. The development which has gone on in Scotland in the past fifty years is essentially commercial, the ' theological thaw ' being thus far in the main superficial. A period of plain living and high thinking has been succeeded by one of plain (in a sense) thinking and (comparatively) high liv- ing, in Scotland as in the English provincial cities ; and salvation all round must be sought in a readjust- ment of activities, bottomed on a general bettering of education. We want on all hands a higher con- ception of life, which can only come of a manifold intellectual fertilisation. It will not come from the Cliurch, which has, curiously enough, always flour- ished inversely to the prosjierity of literature among us. Our two brilliant periods since the Reformation have been the latter half of last century, which our ecclesiastics now pronounce to have been religiously torpid ; and the first generation of this century, before the Disruption opened a new ecclesiastical era. And to-day our attention to our preachers is the measure of our neglect of our literary men. Let us ask ourselves what amount of honour, compared with that given to the pulpit, has been given to Burton and Skene ; how our consumption of sermons compares with our reception of Masson's Dnimmond qf' Hmathornden ; nay, what degree of interest we show in our new writers, as Mr. Lang, or even Mr. Stevenson, compared with the talk over the last new preacher. Mr. Lang's reputation rests on English suffrages ; and Scotland waited till Mr. Stevenson was widely famous in America, after being compara- tively famous in England, before she showed any overt satisfaction in his performance. Some of his earlier effbrts, one remembers, were stupidly snubbed in the Edinburgh press. It is satisfying to be able to think that the swift turning of the tables in his case is prophetic of a general metamorphosis. John M. Robertson
BOOK COVERS.
SHOULD books as they come from the press have ^O a cloth cover or a paper one 't This is a ques- tion which, if fairly asked, would, no doubt, result in an answer favouring a change from the prevalent fashion of binding in cloth, covers and stiff" boards. Looked at from an artistic pomt, cloth covers are unsatisfactory. Bookbinder's cloth seldom has any of that beauty of grain or texture admired so much in leather, silk, and wool ; and when attempts are made to rib or grain it in order to make the surfaces catch the light and let the shadows fall, the result is a mean and unsuccessful imitation. Besides, as a piece of decorative furniture, a cloth-bound book is seldom chosen with success ; often too strong in colour for anything to come near it, there is always a cold shine that prevents the eye from resting on it with satisfaction. It is difficult, too, to understand why those who want to have their best books bound in leather of their own liking have to pay for cloth binding which has to be destroyed. Surely if a book is worth keeping it ought to be bound in leather ; and if it is only one of fashion's fancy, and passing interest, paper covers are expensive enough for it. And what designs and illustrations could be printed on these paper covers ! Some would, of course, be as impudently advertising as an importunate poster, but others, and the most of them, would be so charmingly beautiful, so subtly artistic and refined, that we could afford to despise the existence of the few vulgar prints. And when these covers became dirty and torn with suc- cessive liand-graspings of the interested reader, the book loved and thought worthy to be treasured would be bound in leather of a colour and ffrain chosen by the owner, and if possible an original and beautiful design tooled in gold upon it. Tlius would the almost forgotten but ever beautiful Art of Bookbinding be encouraged. They manage these things better on the Continent. In Paris the artist- designer and the printer are engaged upon the first — the paper — cover of the book, and produce what, if not a good piece of colour, is at least a fine piece of draughtsmanship, and often both ; and then the binder, in sumptuous leather and fine gold, eventually binds it for the library. Here we manu- facture, first and last, cloth cases.
