in the first class is the unrivalled “Rab and
his Friends”—a study of the stoicism
and tenderness of the Lowland character worthy of
Scott. In a minor way the little paper on “Jeems,”
the door-keeper in a Dissenting house of the Lord,
is interesting to Scotch people, though it must seem
a rather curious revelation to all others. “Her
last Half-crown” is another study of the honesty
that survived in a starving and outcast Scotch girl,
when all other virtues, as we commonly reckon virtue,
had gone before her character to some place where,
let us hope, they may rejoin her; for if we are to
suffer for the vices which have abandoned us, may we
not get some credit for the virtues that we have abandoned,
but that once were ours, in some heaven paved with
bad resolutions unfulfilled? “The Black
Dwarf’s Bones” is a sketch of the misshapen
creature from whom Scott borrowed the character that
gives a name to one of his minor Border stories.
The real Black Dwarf (David Ritchie he was called
among men) was fond of poetry, but hated Burns.
He was polite to the fair, but classed mankind at
large with his favourite aversions: ghosts, fairies,
and robbers. There was this of human about the
Black Dwarf, that “he hated folk that are aye
gaun to dee, and never do’t.” The
village beauties were wont to come to him for a Judgment
of Paris on their charms, and he presented each with
a flower, which was of a fixed value in his standard
of things beautiful. One kind of rose, the prize
of the most fair, he only gave thrice. Paris
could not have done his dooms more courteously, and,
if he had but made judicious use of rose, lily, and
lotus, as prizes, he might have pleased all the three
Goddesses; Troy still might be standing, and the lofty
house of King Priam.
Among Dr. Brown’s papers on children, that called
“Pet Marjorie” holds the highest place.
Perhaps certain passages are “wrote too sentimentally,”
as Marjorie Fleming herself remarked about the practice
of many authors. But it was difficult to be perfectly
composed when speaking of this wonderful fairy-like
little girl, whose affection was as warm as her humour
and genius were precocious. “Infant phenomena”
are seldom agreeable, but Marjorie was so humorous,
so quick-tempered, so kind, that we cease to regard
her as an intellectual “phenomenon.”
Her memory remains sweet and blossoming in its dust,
like that of little Penelope Boothby, the child in
the mob cap whom Sir Joshua painted, and who died
very soon after she was thus made Immortal.
It is superfluous to quote from the essay on Marjorie
Fleming; every one knows about her and her studies:
“Isabella is teaching me to make simme colings,
nots of interrigations, peorids, commoes, &c.”
Here is a Shakespearian criticism, of which few will
deny the correctness: “‘Macbeth’
is a pretty composition, but awful one.”
Again, “I never read sermons of any kind, but
I read novelettes and my Bible.” “‘Tom
Jones’ and Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country