the fawning Claverhouse, beautiful as a panther, smooth-looking, blood-spotted; and the fanatics, Macbriar and Mucklewrath, crazed with zeal and sufferings; and the inflexible Morton, and the faithful Edith, who refused to “give her hand to another while her heart was with her lover in the deep and dead sea.”  And in The Heart of Mid-Lothian we have Effie Deans (that sweet, faded flower) and Jeanie, her more than sister, and old David Deans, the patriarch of St. Leonard’s Crags, and Butler, and Dumbiedikes, eloquent in his silence, and Mr. Bartoline Saddle-tree and his prudent helpmate, and Porteous swinging in the wind, and Madge Wildfire, full of finery and madness, and her ghastly mother.—­Again, there is Meg Merrilies, standing on her rock, stretched on her bier with “her head to the east,” and Dirk Hatterick (equal to Shakespear’s Master Barnardine), and Glossin, the soul of an attorney, and Dandy Dinmont, with his terrier-pack and his pony Dumple, and the fiery Colonel Mannering, and the modish old counsellor Pleydell, and Dominie Sampson,[D] and Rob Roy (like the eagle in his eyry), and Baillie Nicol Jarvie, and the inimitable Major Galbraith, and Rashleigh Osbaldistone, and Die Vernon, the best of secret-keepers; and in the Antiquary, the ingenious and abstruse Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck, and the old beadsman Edie Ochiltree, and that preternatural figure of old Edith Elspeith, a living shadow, in whom the lamp of life had been long extinguished, had it not been fed by remorse and “thick-coming” recollections; and that striking picture of the effects of feudal tyranny and fiendish pride, the unhappy Earl of Glenallan; and the Black Dwarf, and his friend Habbie of the Heughfoot (the cheerful hunter), and his cousin Grace Armstrong, fresh and laughing like the morning; and the Children of the Mint, and the baying of the blood-hound that tracks their steps at a distance (the hollow echoes are in our ears now), and Amy and her hapless love, and the villain Varney, and the deep voice of George of Douglas—­and the immoveable Balafre, and Master Oliver the Barber in Quentin Durward—­and the quaint humour of the Fortunes of Nigel, and the comic spirit of Peveril of the Peak—­and the fine old English romance of Ivanhoe.  What a list of names!  What a host of associations!  What a thing is human life!  What a power is that of genius!  What a world of thought and feeling is thus rescued from oblivion!  How many hours of heartfelt satisfaction has our author given to the gay and thoughtless!  How many sad hearts has he soothed in pain and solitude!  It is no wonder that the public repay with lengthened applause and gratitude the pleasure they receive.  He writes as fast as they can read, and he does not write himself down.  He is always in the public eye, and we do not tire of him.  His worst is better than any other person’s best.  His backgrounds (and his later works are little else but back-grounds capitally made out) are more attractive than the principal figures and most complicated actions of other writers.  His works (taken together) are almost like a new edition of human nature.  This is indeed to be an author!