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Sir Walter then points out his departures from this rude sketch, and mentions the prototypes of several of his principal characters; such as Jean (and her granddaughter Madge) Gordon, of Kirk Yetholm, for Meg Merrilies; and a nameless individual for Dominie Sampson.  “Such a preceptor as Mr. Sampson,” says he, “is supposed to have been, was actually tutor in the family of a gentleman of considerable property.  The young lads, his pupils, grew up and went out in the world, but the tutor continued to reside in the family, no uncommon circumstance in Scotland (in former days), where food and shelter were readily afforded to humble friends and dependents.  The laird’s predecessors had been imprudent, he himself was passive and unfortunate.  Death swept away his sons, whose success in life might have balanced his own bad luck and incapacity.  Debts increased and funds diminished, until ruin came.  The estate was sold; and the old man was about to remove from the house of his fathers, to go he knew not whither, when, like an old piece of furniture, which, left alone in its wonted corner, may hold together for a long while, but breaks to pieces on an attempt to move it, he fell down on his own threshold under a paralytic affection.  The tutor awakened as from a dream.  He saw his patron dead, and that his patron’s only remaining child, an elderly woman, now neither graceful nor beautiful, if she had ever been either the one or the other, had by this calamity become a homeless and penniless orphan.  He addressed her nearly in the words which Dominie Sampson uses to Miss Bertram, and professed his determination not to leave her.  Accordingly, roused to the exercise of talents which had long slumbered, he opened a little school, and supported his patron’s child for the rest of her life, treating her with the same humble observance and devoted attention which he had used towards her in the days of her prosperity.”

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NOTES OF A READER

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JOHN KEMBLE AND MISS OWENSON.

There is more of the patter and fun of fashion in Lady Morgan’s books than in any other chronicles of the ton.  Her last work, the Book of the Boudoir, to use an Hibernicism, is not yet published; but from one of its scenes shifted into the Court Journal, we pick the following anecdote of John Kemble and her ladyship, (then Miss Owenson), about twenty years since.  All the town were then running mad after her “wild Irish girl,” and Miss O. was invited to a blue-stocking party, at the mansion of the Dowager Countess of Cork, in New Burlington Street.