uckless Dominie was extracted from his position, justifying
the remark of one of his assistants, that "the laird might as weel trust
the care of his bairn to a potato-bogle." Which was the most helpless of
the two men--the Laird of Dumbiedikes, or the illustrious Dominie--it
would be difficult to say; both these most original characters took a
powerful hold on the artist's imagination, and as a natural consequence
the ideas of Scott were completely realized. A very comical design is
that in which he shows us the worthy but witless laird with his laced
cocked hat and empty tobacco pipe,[89] and his hand extended "like the
claw of a heraldic griffin," when he managed to utter something beyond
his usual morning greeting, and frightened Jeannie into the belief that
he had so far "screwed his courage to the sticking place" as to venture
on a matrimonial proposal, to which unwonted effort of imagination his
intelligence, however, proved altogether unequal.

ALLITERATIVE DESIGNS.

In the "Comic Almanack" will be found many examples of George's tendency
to graphic alliteration. _The Fall of the Leaf_ affords a capital
specimen of the kind of design to which we allude. The leaf of the
dinner-table has been so insecurely fastened that it falls, burying with
it the mistress of the house, the fish, the champagne, a sherry
decanter, a vase of flowers,--everything, in fact, to which it formed a
treacherous and unreliable support; Gibbon's "Decline and Fall" lies in
a corner of the room, and the walls are hung with appropriate subjects,
such as the Fall of Foyers, the Falls of Niagara, Falls of the Clyde,
and so on. An illustration of a similar kind will be found in _Taurus--a
Literary Bull_. The animal has rushed into a printing office and
scattered the compositors right and left; some seek shelter beneath
their frames, one clambers wildly up the shelves of a paper case, while
others scuttle over the frames, and one man, too wholly dismayed and
bewildered to run, brandishes a stool in helpless imbecility. The bull
is perhaps the most astonished of the _dramatis personae_, and evidently
wonders into what manner of place fate has brought him. The walls are
pasted with appropriate advertisements: "Some Account of the Pope's
Bull," "A Cock and Bull Story," "Theatre Royal, Haymarket--John Bull"
"To be Sold by Auction, the Bull Inn," "Abstract of the Act against
Bull-baiting," and so on. In _Libra Striking the Balance_ (same year), a