Lang

Lang, ANDREW, a remarkably versatile writer, was born at Selkirk, March 31, 1844, and was educated at Edinburgh Academy, St Andrews University, and Balliol College, Oxford. He took a classical first-class, and was elected Fellow of Merton College in 1868. Ere long he plunged into the sea of literature, and soon became one of the busiest as well as the brightest writers in the world of London journalism. He treats the most varied subjects with the same light, humorous touch, and he touches nothing which he does not adorn, although on serious themes he sometimes falls short of the seriousness that his reader has a right to expect. He has taken a foremost part in the controversy with Max Müller and his school about the interpretation of mythology and folktales, and it may safely be said that to his brilliant polemic have fallen most of the honours of the field. He was made LL.D. of St Andrews in 1885, and in 1888 was elected the first Gifford lecturer at that university. His chief books are Ballads and Lyrics of Old France (1872), Ballades in Blue China (1880), Helen of Troy (1882), Rhymes à la Mode (1884), Grass of Parnassus (1888), and Ballades of Books (1888), volumes of far more than merely graceful verse; Custom and Myth (1884), and Myth, Ritual, and Religion (2 vols. 1887), a solid contribution to the study of the philosophy and religion of primitive man, written with unusual directness and vigour, and lightened up by a wealth of felicitous illustration. Admirably clever and entertaining volumes, on subjects ranging from pure literature, as well as folklore and primitive religion, down to the by-ways of bibliographers and gossip of the day, are The Library (1881), In the Wrong Paradise (1886), Books and Bookmen (1886), Letters to Dead Authors (1886), Letters on Literature (1889), Lost Leaders (1889), Old Friends: Essays in Epistolary Parody (1890). He translated with exquisite skill Aucassin and Nicolette (1887), produced the faultless edition of Perrault's Popular Tales (1888), and selected the fairytales forming the Blue Fairy Book (1889), the New Fairy Book, &c. He himself translated Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus (1880); and shared (with Butcher, Leaf, and Myers) in brilliant translations of the Odyssey and the Iliad. He was editor of the 'Abbotsford' Scott; wrote a history of St Andrews (1893), a novel, The Monk of Fife (1895), an edition of Burns's poems (1896), a Life of Lockhart (1896), Pickle the Spy (1897), and Prince Charles Edward (1900). He contributed BURNS and SCOTT to this Encyclopedia.