frey, Wilson, and
others. Distinguished by the friendship and confidence of Sir Walter
Scott, the name of Susan Edmonstone Ferrier is one that has become
famous from her three clever, satirical, and most amusing novels _of
Marriage, The_ _Inheritance,_ and _Destiny. _They exhibit, besides, a
keen sense of the ludicrous almost unequalled. She may be said to have
done for Scotland what Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth have respectively
done for England and Ireland--left portraits, painted in undying
colours, of men and women that will live for ever in the hearts and
minds of her readers. In the present redundant age of novel writers and
novel-readers, and when one would suppose the supply must far exceed the
demand from the amount of puerile and often at the same time prurient
literature in the department of fiction that daily flows from the press,
it is refreshing to turn to the vigorous and, above all, healthy moral
tone of this lady's works. To the present generation they are as if they
had never been, and to the question, "Did you ever read _Marriage?"_ it
is not uncommon in these times to get such an answer as, "No, never. Who
wrote it?" "Miss Ferrier." "I never heard of her or her novels." It is
with the view, therefore, of enlightening such benighted ones that I pen
the following pages.

[1] Reprinted from the _Temple Bar_ Magazine for November 1878, Vol I.

Miss Ferrier was the fourth and youngest daughter of James Ferrier,
Writer to the Signet, and was born at Edinburgh, 7th of September 1782.
Her father was bred to that profession in the office of a distant
relative, Mr. Archibald Campbell of Succoth (great grandfather of
the present Archbishop of Canterbury).To his valuable and extensive
business, which included the management of all the Argyll estates, he
ultimately succeeded. He was admitted as a member of the Society of
Writers to the Signet in the year 1770. He was also appointed a
Principal Clerk of Session through the influence (most strenuously
exerted) of his friend and, patron, John, fifth Duke of Argyll, [1] and
was a colleague in that office with Scott. He also numbered among his
friends Henry Mackenzie, the "Man of Feeling," Dr. Hugh Blair, and last,
though not least, Burns the poet. His father, John Ferrier, had been in
the same office till his marriage with Grizzel, only daughter and
heiress of Sir Walter Sandilands Hamilton, Bart., of Westport, county
Linlithgow. [2] John Ferrier was the last L