led "Mystifications," a narrative of the pranks of Miss Stirling
Graham, is a brief, vivid record of the clever and quaint society of
Scotland sixty years ago. Scotland, or at least Scottish society, is now
only English society--a little narrower, a little prouder, sometimes even
a little duller. But old people of position spoke the old Scotch tongue
sixty years ago, and were full of wonderful genealogies, full of
reminiscences of the "'45," and the adventures of the Jacobites. The
very last echoes of that ancient world are dying now from memory, like
the wide reverberations of that gun which Miss Nelly MacWilliam heard on
the day when Prince Charles landed, and which resounded strangely all
through Scotland.

The children of this generation, one fears, will hardly hear of these old
raids and duels, risings and rebellions, by oral tradition handed down,
unbroken, through aunts and grandmothers. Scott reaped a full, late
harvest of the memories of clannish and feudal Scotland; Dr. Brown came
as a later gleaner, and gathered these stirring tales of "A Jacobite
Family" which are published in the last volume of his essays. When he
was an observer, not a hearer only, Dr. Brown chiefly studied and best
wrote of the following topics: passages and characters of humour and
pathos which he encountered in his life and profession; children, dogs,
Border scenery, and fellow-workers in life and science. Under one or
other of these categories all his best compositions might be arranged.
The most famous and most exquisite of all his works 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 na