pologise for my enthusiasm--you who claim the proud
distinction of being a country woman, need I ask--an acquaintance?"

All that poor Grizzy could comprehend of this harangue was that it was
reckoned a great honour to be acquainted with a Campbell; and chuckling
with delight at the idea of her own consequence, she briskly replied--

"Oh, I know plenty of Campbells; there's the Campbells of Mireside,
relations of ours; and there's the Campbells of Blackbrae, married into
our family; and there's the Campbells of Windlestrae Glen, are not very
distant by my mother's side."

Mary felt as if perforated by bullets in all directions, as she
encountered the eyes of the company, turned alternately upon her aunt
and her; but they were on opposite sides of the room; therefore to
interpose betwixt Grizzy and her assailants was impossible.

"Possibly," suggested Mrs. Dalton, "Miss Douglas prefers the loftier
strains of the mighty Minstrel of the Mountains to the more polished
periods of the Poet of the Transatlantic Plain."

"Without either a possibility or a perhaps," said Mrs. Apsley, "the
probability is, Miss Douglas prefers the author of the 'Giaour' to all
the rest of her poetical countrymen. Where, in either Walter Scott or
Thomas Campbell, will you find such lines as these;--

'Wet with their own best blood, shall drip
Thy gnashing tooth and haggard lip!'"

"Pardon me, madam," said Miss Parkin; "but I am of opinion you have
scarcely given a fair specimen of the powers of the Noble Bard in
question. The image here presented is a familiar one; 'the gnashing
tooth' and 'haggard lip' we have all witnessed, perhaps some of us may
even have experienced. There is consequently little merit in presenting
it to the mind's eye. It is easy, comparatively speaking, to portray the
feelings and passions of our own kind. We have only, as Dryden expresses
it, to descend into ourselves to find the secret imperfections of our
mind. It is therefore in his portraiture of the canine race that the
illustrious author has so far excelled all his contemporaries--in fact,
he has given quite a dramatic cast to his dogs," and she repeated, with
an air of triumph--

"And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall,
Hold o'er the dead their carnival;
Gorging and growling o'er carcase and limb,
They were too busy to bark at him!
From a Tartar's skull they had stripped the flesh,
As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fre