and scenery, and of life in the great industrial centres as well, from the dales of Yorkshire to the deans of the Southdowns. The Brontes in the bleak seclusion of Haworth; Mrs. Gaskell in Manchester; George Eliot in Stafford and the eastern shires; the Kingsleys with their Devonshire worthies; Blackmore in Devon, Somerset, and Sussex; Hardy, who has made Dorsetshire his own; Mr. Baring Gould and Mrs. Humphry Wardthese are but a few of the names which suggest themselves in a host of others. Nor should we forget such old evergreens as Harrison Ainsworth, whose fertility was fatal to lasting fame, and whose inartistic abruptness is always irritating, but who, nevertheless, was as genuine an Englishman at heart, as passionate an admirer of English scenery, as the Romany Rye or William Howitt. It seems strange that when novel writers were everywhere on the search, like hungry trout in some highland tarn on the feed after a thunderstorm, that the Scotland of Scott was comparatively neglected. We have no such belief in the modesty of the modern littérateur as to believe that the lustre of Scott's fame scared imitators away. He had shown what a rich field lay open to those familiar with it, apart from the thrilling historical romance of a country whose history was tragedy written in blood. Take the single scene of the funeral of Steenie Mucklebackit as an example of what may be made of unpromising materials. With the magic of a Shakespeare, with that instinctive gift of appreciating the innermost feelings of all ranks and conditions of men, Scott gives the bereavement of those prosaic Forfarshire fishing folk the pathetic sublimity of a drama by Aeschylus. The speechless grief of the rugged fisherman, the softening of the termagant house-mother, the stupefaction of the children at the splendid festivities when the black ox had set his hoof on the humble threshold, are all presented with simple though exquisite skill which should have incited to imitation, for literary ambition makes light of difficulties. Yet since the wizard's wand was buried with him in Dryburgh, the Scottish novels of any mark might almost be counted on the fingers. Wilson, oddly enough for the versatile and rollicking author of the "Noctes" and the "Recreations," sinned on the side of excessive sentimentalism in the "Shadows of Scottish Life" and the "Trials of Margaret Lyndsay." His collaborator Lockhart audaciously ran counter to the prejudices of his countrymen when he gravely compromised a worthy Presbyterian minister in the brilliant "Adam Blair." Even Hogg, who had been brought up in the cottage ingle neuk, and nursed his poetic fancies when watching the sheep on the fells, though of course there are passages of tenderness and pathos, made a signal failure in his pastoral tales of the Borders. As for Miss Ferrier's novels, they are rather pseudo-fashionable than tales of lowly life. Does any one now read the "Cottagers of Glenburnie," though in its day it had no little popularity? We fear we might ask the same question as to "Mrs. Margaret Maitland" and "Adam Graeme," with which Mrs. Oliphant first gave the world assurance of her genius. They well deserve the honors of a reprint, which they will assuredly have sooner or later, but, like her "Katie Stewart" and the admirable "Minister's Wife," they are studies less of the lowest orders than of well-to-do manse folk or the country aristocracy. For the genuine paternity of the present-day novelists we must go back to Galt, the contemporary of Scott, who was criticised and discriminatingly commended by him. So it is but fair that Galt should have the tardy honor which is his due, in the form of new editions of his works, issued simultaneously by rival publishers. Galt was essentially the memorialist of the cottager, the small farmer, and the struggling shopkeeper in the rural burgh who rises to local eminence and sometimes to wider notoriety and wealth. He is prolix and trivial, he is very frequently vulgar, and not unfrequently coarse. But, like Mr. Barrie and some of Barrie's ablest imitators, Galt has described and analyzed with intimate knowledge and intense personal sympathy the joys, the troubles, and the aspirations of the poor. For intimate knowledge, born in no small degree of similarity in rank and lot, is essential to giving vivid effect to the pictures, unless, indeed, the novelist have the genius of a Shakespeare or a Scott. Equipped with the indispensable qualifications, the opportunities for microscopic observation are considerable, even within a necessarily limited horizon. The austere race of intelligent farmers have pronounced national virtues, with individual foibles or vices. To the casual observer they may resemble each other like so many sheep in a flock, but the shepherd in the habit of reading the faces can tell each from the others by significant signs. The mechanics of the towns differ as much from the men of the country as from the neighboring fisherpeople, with whom they have never intermarried. Are those stolid and seemingly quiet-going souls insensible to the noble infirmity of ambition? Very far from it. There are few who do not struggle and save that they may win a step upwards on the social ladder. Hardly a farmsteading, as all those writers peatedly remark, that does not hope to send a son to the college, with the expectation that he may wag his head in a pulpit or, at the worst, fall back upon a parish school. And, except for pride of kinship, it is an unselfish ambition, for as in Brittany a Scottish re household will cheerfully stint its expenses that the kloarec may have the chance of taking holy orders. The very boy from the turf-roofed hovel, herding the cow or scaring crows from the potatoes, may be dreaming of winning favor in the eyes of the schoolmaster and being passed on from the master to the notice of the minister, and from the minister to the generous patronage of the laird. So all save the hopeless dullards make a certain progress in letters, and rub up the intellectual faculties in a rude kind of intellectual controversy. A cheap press circulates a hundred journals, where a single paper a generation back served the community. All are profoundly versed in secular politics, and burning questions come up for fiery discussion. But it is religion that really underlies everything that addresses itself to the best and the worst of their passions. The ways of the Almighty are mysterious, leading either to acquiescence or revolt. The sullen, smouldering fires are ever ready to burst out. The Scotland of the persecution times and the covenanting martyrsthe Scotland of Knox and Henderson, of Peden and Cameron, of Lauderdale and Claverhouse-is still the battleground of creeds and conflicting sects. At this day, in Thrums, if Sydney Smith were to preach one of his sermons on toleration as a primary article of the Christian faith, he would probably be stoned like St. Stephen by a mob of honest-minded bigots. But to do the fanaticism justice we should in fairness remark that it is still the Scotland where, in the memorable disruption year, four hundred and sixty-four clergymen resigned their livings, to be followed by their flocks into the wilderness, and where two hundred probationers cast in their lot with the seceders, instead of making a rush for the vacant pulpits. Profound conviction of any kind is infinitely preferable to scepticism or indifference. Yet it must be admitted that Scottish conviction takes singularly unpleasing shapes. No wonder that the truthful irreverence of Burns's "Holy Fair" excited a storm of indignation which has scarcely yet subsided. It touched the Calvinist in the most sensitive places-perhaps it awakened uneasy searchings of conscience; it outraged his principles and his cherished prejudices. For the thorough-paced Calvinist goes back for choice from the prayers of Gethsemane to the thunders of Sinai; he would rather listen to the curses from Ebal than to the blessings from Gerizim. Celtic or Lowland, what he revels in above all is an "awaking" preacher, who deals boisterously in the terrors of the Mosaic dispensation with predestination and condemnation carried to extremes. Yet sect after sect has split away from the main body, on the ground that the most advanced of the evangelists were Erastians and timeserving Gallios. The inevitable tendency of such teaching, in theory, is to make each father of a household a Brutus or a Judge Jeffreys, to shut the door against the son who has heretical opinions on free will, and to make the mother cast off the child whom she has caught kissing in the gloaming. But, as Artemus Ward remarked when paying attentions to a fair southern in the heat of the struggle between North and South, there is always considerable human nature in a man; and Scotland with its fond family life is the favorite seat of the strongest domestic affection. The stern sense of principle or duty will be swayed by the deep-seated, passionate love which seeks excuses for its own human tenderness. There these new novelists have rare opportunities of which the best have made admirable use, in scenes that are pathetically true to nature. The monotony of the cottage tragedy or the humble melodrama may be overdone, and ecclesiastical plots reared on the shattered foundations of the Jewish temple may have too much of gravity for the ordinary reader. But there is another and a brighter side to these novels. Not a few of them, and notably Mr. Barrie's books, are exquisitely humorous. When Sydney Smith assumed that only a surgical operation could get a joke into a Scotchman, he did the nation serious injustice, though there was something of truth in the saying. As to the Scot being destitute of humor we are content to call the author of the Waverley Novels, Christopher North, and Dean Ramsay as witnesses for the refutation. But, on the other hand, we must own that, with Mr. Barrie and others, the charm of the best drollery is in its being absolutely unconscious. The honest villagers commit themselves in the most delightful way, without an idea that they are making themselves ridiculous. In manse or in cot, on a solemn sacramental occasion, or in some gathering of the elect in a parlor of the village public, they are never, for example, more charmingly inconsistent than when the element of conviviality comes in. All creeds hold firmly in practice to the tenet that man does not live by bread alone; that the whiskey is a necessity of existence and the climate. The preaching in the new minister and the victory at the curling pond are celebrated alike by libations of toddy. All classes are ready to imitate the examples of their betters in the measure of their means. So the whiskey is a perennial source of sensation in the Scottish novel, which the artist does not neglect. In England the loaded ale stupefies the muddled drinker. In Scotland the swift flow of the fiery alcohol stirs the sluggish blood, gives life to longsmouldering resentment, and leads to the hasty blow which makes a murderer of some devout elder. Then we have the anguish of the despairing wife and the suffering of the deserted children; the broken-hearted daughter of the disgraced man taking back her plighted troth; the gaol; the trial; the evidence to character and the death sentence, to be followed by the gallows or the reprieve. Or over-indulgence, which may perhaps be extenuated on the score of the weather, leads to smothering in the snowdrift, to a miscarriage in the mist, or to being swept off the unsteady legs in the familiar ford when the stream has come down in sudden spate. So the Scottish) novelist can command every variety of dramatic situation in which the foibles of his countrymen may be used to advantage. Nor need we add a word as to the scenery from which he frames the setting of his pictures. There can be none of the pale uniformity of fens and flat farms and trim hedgerows. The mountains are mirrored in the lonely Highland loch; the surge of the cold North Sea is breaking on the red sandstone cliffs of Forfarshire; or you are among the trackless morasses and caverned glens of Galloway, where Sir Robert Redgauntlet hunted Whigs before the Revolution reduced him to hunting foxes. Even the comparatively tame inland parish has a character of its own, with its barn-like kirks, its "purpose-like" steadings, sheltered by the groups of wind-blown ashes and the thickets of lush bourtree bushes, which come in the more effectively for the scarcity of timber. The advent of Mr. Barrie may be compared to one of the "Revivals" which stir souls from time to time alike in Highlands and Lowlands. He struck down to a deeper vein than any of his predecessors in "Auld Licht Idylls." The Auld Lichts were a section of godly professors who seceded from a secession. They prided themselves on the purity of their gospel faith, on the consistency of their walk and conversation, and above all on the stringency of their ceremonial observ ances. That they could keep a minister for themselves in the paltry townlet of Thrums was the crowning proof of their zeal and earnestness. They wrought, they pinched, they saved for the stipend; but when they had got the man, he was their common property. His was a very peculiar position. He had reverence and his high privileges, as an anointed doge of Venice, but like the doge he had his Secret Council of ten or more, who kept him up to the mark and were faithful in reproving and correcting. He was their spiritual master, but their paid pensioner, to whom at any time they might give summary warning to quit. That was doubtless an aggravation of the snares which beset him; for though he might lay down the law in the pulpit authoritatively, he dare not decline an invitation to tea. Moreover, he lived and moved under pious and observant eyes, and if he jumped a bush in his garden-which one minister did-in exuberance of boyish spirits, or if he broke out in an unseemly laugh on the Sabbath, sooner rather than later, he was sure to hear of it. But if grave elders drove him on the curb, the victim of the oligarchy had his revenge on the females of the flock, who, indeed, were encouraged to worship him by husbands and fathers. It was the prerogative of the father of the household to go behind the veil in the vestry and venture on blunt criticism or paternal remonstrance. For within certain well-understood limits, the right of private judgment was freely exercised, and book-learning-as to which the clergy gave small cause of complaint-was regarded as suspiciously unorthodox, if not positively sacrilegious. The mothers in Israel had their say, as we may be sure, and there were Deborahs who would often take the lead when Barak was inclined to hang back. We regard the "Auld Licht Idylls" as having paved the way for Mr. Bar rie's subsequent books. If it has passed through many editions, it is because, after being attracted and deeply interested in some work, we naturally turn back with curiosity to the preface we had neglected. It is extremely clever, and admirably descriptive, especially where the author has already impressed us. The old schoolmaster of Glen Quharity makes us "weel acquent" with the weavers of Kirriemuir and the rustics of the glen. But, after all, it is the mere setting and framework of "The Window," through which he has flashed a series of innermost photographs by a searching process of the Roentgen rays. The advance from one book to the other is marvellous, although, indeed, it is rather the swift progress of inevitable evolution. The genius is evident, in the germ as in the bloom, but we can see that the untried author gained confidence as he felt his feet and tested his strength. In "The Window" there is the Shakespearian subtlety of humor, which, as it seeks its subjects in eternal types of humanity, is bound to survive. The Scotch is perhaps unnecessarily broad: possibly there is too much of it for purposes of effective art, although the extraordinary popularity of the book in the South appears to dispose of that criticism as captious. All the greater is the tribute to the analytical genius which has triumphed over obstacles of its own creating. But to the Scotchman born, and especially to the northeastern Scot, the realism is strangely striking and impressive. It is a story we should be sorry to read were we inclined to home-sickness, on the sun-baked plains of Australia or the waterless Karoo of South Africa. We should yearn to exchange the cloudless skies for the dripping heavens and driving mists of Glen Quharity. To the peasant-born emigrant the Dutch-like painting of cottage interiors would come with an powering rush of fond associations; over a and the homely talk and ejaculations, with the local names for the familiar domestic objects, would bring breath of the pungent peat-reek or a flavor of the sun-smoked haddocks. The crippled Jess who sits in her window is eminently natural. Though ever ready for the flitting to a better world where she will soar on wings instead of hirpling on a staff, she is far from superior to mortal vanities. That she should make an idol of her only boy is a weakness for which the recording angel will make generous allowance; but none save the loving husband could surmise that she had set her heart so ardently on a cloak with beads. Moreover Jess, although her heart is set generally upon higher things, is a past mistress in gossip; and, as we remarked, Thrums is a town where the minister, like everybody else, lives under a microscope. The practice of gossip has trained Jess and her daughter Leeby to habits of the most ingenious deduction. There may sometimes be a false start, for science is no infallible safeguard against error; but the reasoning is characterized by Scottish reserve. There is no hasty jumping at conclusions; however erroneous they may prove, they have always been plausibly argued. There is no better example of that than the chapter in which it is a question who is to fill the pulpit of the absent minister. Leeby, always the most attentive of daughters, is never more dutiful than when she obeys her mother's behests and goes scouting for indications. And though Jess is somewhat apt to hurry off on a false scent, she is a candid and even cautious inquirer; for at a check she is always ready to try back. To show her methods we should quote the chapter, but we give a couple of sentences taken at random. Leeby has gone up to the watch-tower of the attic to take another look at the manse. "Weel, I assure ye, it'll no be Mr. Skin |