ssie McLure, are all immortal, deathless as Shakspeare's men and
women. Indeed here, even more than elsewhere, we admire the life which
Scott breathes into his minor characters, Halliday and Inglis, the
troopers, the child who leads Morton to Burley's retreat in the cave,
that auld Laird Nippy, old Milnwood (a real "Laird Nippy" was a neighbour
of Scott's at Ashiestiel), Ailie Wilson, the kind, crabbed old
housekeeper, generous in great things, though habitually niggardly in
things small. Most of these are persons whom we might still meet in
Scotland, as we might meet Cuddie Headrigg--the shrewd, the blithe, the
faithful and humorous Cuddie. As to Miss Jenny Dennison, we can hardly
forgive Scott for making that gayest of soubrettes hard and selfish in
married life. He is too severe on the harmless and even beneficent race
of coquettes, who brighten life so much, who so rapidly "draw up with the
new pleugh lad," and who do so very little harm when all is said. Jenny
plays the part of a leal and brave lass in the siege of Tillietudlem,
hunger and terror do not subdue her spirit; she is true, in spite of many
temptations, to her Cuddie, and we decline to believe that she was untrue
to his master and friend. Ikuse, no doubt, is a caricature, though Wodrow
makes us acquainted with at least one Mause, Jean Biggart, who "all the
winter over was exceedingly straitened in wrestling and prayer as to the
Parliament, and said that still that place was brought before her, Our
hedges are broken down!" ("Analecta," ii. 173.) Surely even Dr. McCrie
must have laughed out loud, like Lady Louisa Stuart, when Mause exclaims:
"Neither will I peace for the bidding of no earthly potsherd, though it
be painted as red as a brick from the tower o' Babel, and ca' itsel' a
corporal." Manse, as we have said, is not more comic than heroic, a
mother in that Sparta of the Covenant. The figure of Morton, as usual, is
not very attractive. In his review, Scott explains the weakness of his
heroes as usually strangers in the land (Waverley, Lovel, Mannering,
Osbaldistone), who need to have everything explained to them, and who are
less required to move than to be the pivots of the general movement. But
Morton is no stranger in the land. His political position in the juste
milieu is unexciting. A schoolboy wrote to Scott at this time, "Oh, Sir
Walter, how could you take the lady from the gallant Cavalier, and give
her to the crop-eared Covenanter?" Probably Sc