outh, remarkable for personal attractions; as it was, she dwells on
my memory as the perfect picture of an old Scotch lady, with a great
deal of simple dignity in her bearing, but with the softest eye, and
the sweetest voice, and a charm of meekness and gentleness about every
look and expression; all which contrasted strikingly enough with the
stern dry aspect and manners of her husband, a right descendant of the
moss-troopers of Harden, who never seemed at his ease but on
horseback, and continued to be the boldest fox-hunter of the district,
even to the verge of eighty. The poet's aunt spoke her native language
pure and undiluted, but without the slightest tincture of that
vulgarity which now seems almost unavoidable in the oral use of a
dialect so long banished from courts, and which has not been avoided
by any modern writer who has ventured to introduce it, with the
exception of Scott, and I may add, speaking generally, of Burns. Lady
Raeburn, as she was universally styled, may be numbered with those
friends of early days whom her nephew has alluded to in one of his
prefaces, as preserving what we may fancy to have been the old Scotch
of Holyrood.

The particulars which I have been setting down may help English
readers to form some notion of the structure of society in those
southern districts of Scotland. When Satchells wrote, he boasted that
Buccleuch could summon to his banner one hundred lairds, all of his
own name, with ten thousand more--landless men, but still of the same
blood. The younger sons of these various lairds were, through many
successive generations, portioned off with fragments of the
inheritance, until such subdivision could be carried no farther, and
then the cadet, of necessity, either adopted the profession of arms,
in some foreign service very frequently, or became a cultivator on the
estate of his own elder brother, of the chieftain of his branch, or of
the great chief and patriarchal protector of the whole clan. Until the
commerce of England and, {p.065} above all, the military and civil
services of the English colonies were thrown open to the enterprise of
the Scotch, this system of things continued entire. It still remained
in force to a considerable extent at the time when the Goodman of
Sandy-Knowe was establishing his children in the world--and I am happy
to say, that it is far from being abolished even at the present day.
It was a system which bound together the various classes of the