MOST Scotchmen are serious, but by some miracle Andrew Lang escaped the North British sense of responsibility which would have made him great instead of entertaining. No one who knows him, however, will wish him to be other than he is. He is, perhaps, at his best in his verse of the Old French school, though he is an attractive prose writer on many themes. He writes old English with great purity and clearness, as he has illustrated in his translations from Homer. His “Ballads and Verses Vain” and other poems have been widely read in America, as well as in England, and “The World’s Desire,” a novel he published as joint author with Haggard, in 1890, is one of the most entertaining of all the stories of the Argive Helen. As an essayist and reviewer, Lang has long occupied a prominent place in the best English periodicals. He was born at Selkirk, Scotland, March 31st, 1844. After graduating at Oxford, he was made a Fellow of one of its colleges, and in 1888 Gifford lecturer at St. Andrew’s University.