subjects of his pencil to
the reader's recollection; for nothing we could add, by way of note or
commendation, could make the impression more vivid.

There is (first and foremost, because the earliest of our acquaintance)
the Baron of Bradwardine, stately, kind-hearted, whimsical, pedantic; and
Flora MacIvor (whom even _we_ forgive for her Jacobitism), the fierce Vich
Ian Vohr, and Evan Dhu, constant in death, and Davie Gellatly roasting his
eggs or turning his rhymes with restless volubility, and the two
stag-hounds that met Waverley, as fine as ever Titian painted, or Paul
Veronese:--then there is old Balfour of Burley, brandishing his sword and
his Bible with fire-eyed fury, trying a fall with the insolent, gigantic
Bothwell at the 'Change-house, and vanquishing him at the noble battle of
Loudon-hill; there is Bothwell himself, drawn to the life, proud, cruel,
selfish, profligate, but with the love-letters of the gentle Alice
(written thirty years before), and his verses to her memory found in his
pocket after his death: in the same volume of _Old Mortality_ is that lone
figure, like a figure in Scripture, of the woman sitting on the stone at
the turning to the mountain, to warn Burley that there is a lion in his
path; and the fawning Claverhouse, beautiful as a panther, smooth-looking,
blood-spotted; and the fanatics, Macbriar and Mucklewrath, crazed with
zeal and sufferings; and the inflexible Morton, and the faithful Edith,
who refused to "give her hand to another while her heart was with her
lover in the deep and dead sea." And in the _Heart of Mid Lothian_ we have
Effie Deans (that sweet, faded flower) and Jeanie, her more than sister,
and old David Deans, the patriarch of St. Leonard's Crags, and Butler, and
Dumbiedikes, eloquent in his silence, and Mr. Bartoline Saddle-tree and
his prudent helpmate, and Porteous swinging in the wind, and Madge
Wildfire, full of finery and madness, and her ghastly mother.--Again,
there is Meg Merrilies, standing on her rock, stretched on her bier with
"her head to the east," and Dirk Hatterick (equal to Shakspeare's Master
Barnardine), and Glossin, the soul of an attorney, and Dandy Dinmont, with
his terrier-pack and his pony Dumple, and the fiery Colonel Mannering, and
the modish old counsellor Pleydell, and Dominie Sampson,[138] and Rob Roy
(like the eagle in his eyry), and Baillie Nicol Jarvie, and the inimitable
Major Galbraith, and Rashleigh Osbaldistone, and Die Vernon, the