the
people, who did their work as those who were serving justice, their care
to provide a minister for the criminal's last devotions, and their quiet
dispersal after the execution--all this remains unto to-day the most
powerful description of lynch law in fiction. The very strength of old
Edinburgh and of the Scots-folk is in the _Heart of Midlothian_. The
rivalry, however, between these two books must be decided by the heroine,
and it seems dangerous to the lover of Scott to let Thackeray's fine lady
stand side by side with our plain peasant girl, yet soul for soul which
was greater, Rachel of Castlewood or Jeanie Deans? Lady Castlewood must
be taken at the chief moment in _Esmond_, when she says to Esmond: "To-
day, Henry, in the anthem when they sang, 'When the Lord turned the
captivity of Zion we were like them that dream'--I thought, yes, like
them that dream, and then it went, 'They that sow in tears shall reap in
joy; and he that goeth forth and weepeth, shall doubtless come again with
rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.' I looked up from the book and
saw you; I was not surprised when I saw you, I knew you would come, my
dear, and I saw the gold sunshine round your head."

That she said as she laughed and sobbed, crying out wildly, "Bringing
your sheaves with you, your sheaves with you." And this again, as Esmond
thinks of her, is surely beaten gold. "Gracious God, who was he, weak
and friendless creature, that such a love should be poured out upon him;
not in vain, not in vain has he lived that such a treasure be given him?
What is ambition compared to that but selfish vanity? To be rich, to be
famous: what do these profit a year hence when other names sound louder
than yours, when you lie hidden away under the ground along with the idle
titles engraven on your coffin? Only true love lives after you, follows
your memory with secret blessing or precedes you and intercedes for you.
'Non omnis moriar'--if dying I yet live in a tender heart or two, nor am
lost and hopeless living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and
prays for me." This seems to me the second finest passage in English
fiction, and the finest is when Jeanie Deans went to London and pleaded
with the Queen for the life of her condemned sister, for is there any
plea in all literature so eloquent in pathos and so true to human nature
as this, when the Scottish peasant girl poured forth her heart: "When the
hour of trouble comes to th