the name of Jedediah Cleishbotham, are clearly
laborious at times. And even his own letters to his daughter-in-law,
which Mr. Lockhart seems to regard as models of tender playfulness and
pleasantry, seem to me decidedly elephantine. Not unfrequently, too,
his stereotyped jokes weary. Dalgetty bores you almost as much as he
would do in real life,--which is a great fault in art. Bradwardine
becomes a nuisance, and as for Sir Piercie Shafton, he is beyond
endurance. Like some other Scotchmen of genius, Scott twanged away at
any effective chord till it more than lost its expressiveness. But in
dry humour, and in that higher humour which skilfully blends the
ludicrous and the pathetic, so that it is hardly possible to separate
between smiles and tears, Scott is a master. His canny innkeeper, who,
having sent away all the peasemeal to the camp of the Covenanters, and
all the oatmeal (with deep professions of duty) to the castle and its
cavaliers, in compliance with the requisitions sent to him on each
side, admits with a sigh to his daughter that "they maun gar wheat
flour serve themsels for a blink,"--his firm of solicitors, Greenhorn
and Grinderson, whose senior partner writes respectfully to clients in
prosperity, and whose junior partner writes familiarly to those in
adversity,--his arbitrary nabob who asks how the devil any one should
be able to mix spices so well "as one who has been where they
grow;"--his little ragamuffin who indignantly denies that he has
broken his promise not to gamble away his sixpences at pitch-and-toss
because he has gambled them away at "neevie-neevie-nick-nack,"--and
similar figures abound in his tales,--are all creations which make one
laugh inwardly as we read. But he has a much higher humour still, that
inimitable power of shading off ignorance into knowledge and
simplicity into wisdom, which makes his picture of Jeanie Deans, for
instance, so humorous as well as so affecting. When Jeanie reunites
her father to her husband by reminding the former how it would
sometimes happen that "twa precious saints might pu' sundrywise like
twa cows riving at the same hayband," she gives us an admirable
instance of Scott's higher humour. Or take Jeanie Deans's letter to
her father communicating to him the pardon of his daughter and her own
interview with the Queen:--

"DEAREST AND TRULY HONOURED FATHER.--This comes
with my duty to inform you, that it has pleased God to
redeem that captivi