Scott’s humour is, I think, of very different qualities in relation to different subjects.  Certainly he was at times capable of considerable heaviness of hand,—­of the Scotch “wut” which has been so irreverently treated by English critics.  His rather elaborate jocular introductions, under the name of Jedediah Cleishbotham, are clearly laborious at times.  And even his own letters to his daughter-in-law, which Mr. Lockhart seems to regard as models of tender playfulness and pleasantry, seem to me decidedly elephantine.  Not unfrequently, too, his stereotyped jokes weary.  Dalgetty bores you almost as much as he would do in real life,—­which is a great fault in art.  Bradwardine becomes a nuisance, and as for Sir Piercie Shafton, he is beyond endurance.  Like some other Scotchmen of genius, Scott twanged away at any effective chord till it more than lost its expressiveness.  But in dry humour, and in that higher humour which skilfully blends the ludicrous and the pathetic, so that it is hardly possible to separate between smiles and tears, Scott is a master.  His canny innkeeper, who, having sent away all the peasemeal to the camp of the Covenanters, and all the oatmeal (with deep professions of duty) to the castle and its cavaliers, in compliance with the requisitions sent to him on each side, admits with a sigh to his daughter that “they maun gar wheat flour serve themsels for a blink,”—­his firm of solicitors, Greenhorn and Grinderson, whose senior partner writes respectfully to clients in prosperity, and whose junior partner writes familiarly to those in adversity,—­his arbitrary nabob who asks how the devil any one should be able to mix spices so well “as one who has been where they grow;”—­his little ragamuffin who indignantly denies that he has broken his promise not to gamble away his sixpences at pitch-and-toss because he has gambled them away at “neevie-neevie-nick-nack,”—­and similar figures abound in his tales,—­are all creations which make one laugh inwardly as we read.  But he has a much higher humour still, that inimitable power of shading off ignorance into knowledge and simplicity into wisdom, which makes his picture of Jeanie Deans, for instance, so humorous as well as so affecting.  When Jeanie reunites her father to her husband by reminding the former how it would sometimes happen that “twa precious saints might pu’ sundrywise like twa cows riving at the same hayband,” she gives us an admirable instance of Scott’s higher humour.  Or take Jeanie Deans’s letter to her father communicating to him the pardon of his daughter and her own interview with the Queen:—­

“DEAREST AND TRULY HONOURED FATHER.—­This comes with my duty to inform you, that it has pleased God to redeem that captivitie of my poor sister, in respect the Queen’s blessed Majesty, for whom we are ever bound to pray, hath redeemed her soul from the slayer, granting the ransom of her, whilk is ane pardon or reprieve.  And I spoke with the Queen face to face, and