The Scottish border country - the abbeys, the peel towers, the ballad ground - walked and described by two brothers who had grown up in it. Andrew Lang, who spent a lifetime on the ballads and wrote on everything from Homer to totemism, died when the book was barely begun, and his brother John finished it; it is the book where the Langs are simply at home. Sixty plates of border landscape and light by painters from Turner to Henshaw, spanning 1778 to 1898, keep the country the Langs walked before the reader's eye.