of printer's ink,
no vision of publicity or fame, no solicitude to propitiate critics or
win the sympathy of the "gentle reader." Or one might say it was a book
of the primitive kind, written on the bark of trees by some shy dryad,
unconcious translator into speech of the rustlings and whisperings of
the woodland. It is, as the editor observes, an "effortless narrative,"
with "no attempt at fine or sensational writing, ... at that modern
artifice which they call word-painting," but recording with "vivid
exactness" what was seen and felt by the writer and her companions on a
journey through regions then little frequented by tourists and
unsmirched by the eloquence of guide-books. That the travelers were
William and Dorothy Wordsworth and (for a part of the way) S.T.
Coleridge, that scenes and incidents here first sketched in the sister's
sober prose were afterward memorialized and moralized in the brother's
verse, and that many of the spots described were about to become famous
with and through Scott--a meeting with whom formed the fitting close to
the tour,--these are circumstances that of course invest the journal
with a deeper interest and have called wider attention to its
unobtrusive beauty. But its chief attractiveness lies in the Doric
simplicity not only of the style but of the matter. An outlandish Irish
car was the conveyance; the appearance of the party was not such as to
attract notice unless by the quaintness of their garb or their awkward
management of the horse, "now gibbing and backing over a bank, now
reduced to a walk, with one of the poets leading him by the head;" and
they themselves were in search of nothing more notable than such wayside
objects as might serve to feed contemplation. On one occasion, having
turned aside to visit the duke of Hamilton's picture-gallery, they were
told by the porter, after he had scanned them over, that they ought not
to have come to the front door, and were directed to an obscure entrance
at the corner of the house, where they seated themselves humbly on a
bench while waiting for admittance, which was finally refused. They were
mortified, but had a deeper pang in the grounds around Bothwell Castle,
for here they were "_hurt_ to see that flower-borders had taken place of
the natural overgrowings of the ruins, the scattered stones and wild
plants." Sometimes at an inn they were made to perceive how little
consideration they were entitled to by being lodged in inferior roo