The Maker to Posterity, Ille Terrarum, A Blast, A Counterblast, and The Counterblast Ironical, are all excellent; and one can point to no prettier picture of a Scottish Sunday than A Lowden Sabbath Morn, which has recently been published alone in book form very nicely illustrated, while he pokes some, not undeserved, fun at our Scottish good opinion of ourselves and our religious privileges in Embro, her Kirk, and The Scotsman's Return from Abroad. Surely nowhere is there Scots more musical or lines more true to the sad experience which life brings to us all than these with which the book ends:
'It's an owercome sooth for age and youth,
And it brooks wi' nae denial,
That the dearest friends are the auldest friends
And the young are just on trial.
'There's a rival bauld wi' young an' auld,
And it's him that has bereft me,
For the surest friends are the auldest friends
And the maist o' mine hae left me.'...
The last volume of verses, Songs of Travel, has a pathos all its own, for, like St Ives and Weir of Hermiston, the author never saw it in print. The verses were sent home shortly before his death, and in the note appended to them Mr Sydney Colvin says they were to be finally printed as Book III. of Underwoods, but meantime were given to the world in their present form in 1896.