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There is something heroic about the spaciousness of its streets, the loftiness of the buildings, and the omnipresence of granite a Tyrtaean spirit, which finds its supreme embodiment in the noble statue of Wallace poised on rough craglets of unpolished granite, and of General Gordon with his martial cloak around him. If Edinburgh be the Athens of Scotland, Aberdeen is its Sparta.
Twenty years ago we were in the crisis of the great Jingo fever, and Lord Beaconsfield's antics in the East were frightening all sober citizens out of their senses. It was at that period that the music-halls rang with the "Great MacDermott's" Tyrtaean strain "We don't want to fight; but, by Jingo, if we do, We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too;"
But whether or not Mr. Smith shall purify himself and he can do so, if he will, right nobly the world must be purified of his style of poetry, if men are ever, as he hopes, to "set his age to music;" much more if they are once more to stir the hearts of the many by Tyrtaean strains, such as may be needed before our hairs are gray.
He learnt it as he listened to the shrieks of the San Bartholomew; he learnt it as he watched the dragonnades, the tortures, the massacres of the Netherlands, and fought manfully under Norris in behalf of those victims of 'the Pope and Spain. He preached it in far stronger and wiser words than I can express it for him, in that noble tract of 1591, on Sir Richard Grenville's death at the Azores a Tyrtaean trumpet-blast such as has seldom rung in human ears; he discussed it like a cool statesman in his pamphlet of 1596, on 'A War with Spain. He sacrificed for it the last hopes of his old age, the wreck of his fortunes, his just recovered liberty; and he died with the old God's battle-cry upon his lips, when it awoke no response from the hearts of a coward, profligate, and unbelieving generation.
From the affectation of cosmopolitan indifference not AEschylus, not Pindar, not Dante's very self was more alien or more free than Shakespeare; but there was nothing of the dry Tyrtaean twang, the dull mechanic resonance as of wooden echoes from a platform, in the great historic chord of his lyre.
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