giment." A large family of young children has been termed "a great
sma' family." It was a delicious dry rejoinder to the question--"Are you
Mr. So-and-so?" "It's a' that's o' me" (_i.e._ to be had for him.) I
have heard an old Scottish gentleman direct his servant to mend the fire
by saying, "I think, Dauvid, we wadna be the waur o' some coals."

There is a pure Scottish term, which I have always thought more
expressive than any English word of ideas connected with manners in
society--I mean the word to blether, or blethering, or blethers.
Jamieson defines it to "talk nonsense." But it expresses far more--it
expresses powerfully, to Scottish people, a person at once shallow,
chattering, conceited, tiresome, voluble.

There is a delicious servantgirlism, often expressed in an answer given
at the door to an inquirer: "Is your master at home, or mistress?" as
the case may be. The problem is to save the direct falsehood, and yet
evade the visit; so the answer is--"Ay, he or she is at hame; but
he's no _in_"

The transition from Scottish _expressions_ to Scottish Poetry is easy
and natural. In fact, the most interesting feature now belonging to
Scottish life and social habits is, to a certain extent, becoming with
many a matter of reminiscence of _Poetry in the Scottish dialect_, as
being the most permanent and the most familiar feature of Scottish
characteristics. It is becoming a matter of history, in so far as we
find that it has for some time ceased to be cultivated with much
ardour, or to attract much popularity. In fact, since the time of
Burns, it has been losing its hold on the public mind. It is a
remarkable fact that neither Scott nor Wilson, both admirers of Burns,
both copious writers of poetry themselves, both also so distinguished as
writers of Scottish _prose_, should have written any poetry strictly in
the form of pure Scottish dialect. "Jock o' Hazeldean" I hardly admit to
be an exception. It is not Scottish. If, indeed, Sir Walter wrote the
scrap of the beautiful ballad in the "Antiquary"--

"Now haud your tongue, baith wife and carle,
And listen, great and sma',
And I will sing of Glenallan's Earl,
That fought at the red Harlaw"--

one cannot but regret that he had not written more of the same.
Campbell, a poet and a Scotsman, has not attempted it. In short, we do
not find poetry in the Scottish dialect at all _kept up_ in Scotland. It
is every year becoming more a matter of r