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(March, 1817.)

Tales of My Landlord, collected and arranged by Jedediah Cleishbotham, Schoolmaster and Parish Clerk of the Parish of Gandercleugh. 4 vols. 12mo. Edinburgh: 1816.

ing dull and uninteresting to the votaries of these more seductive studies. Among the most popular of these popular productions that have appeared in our times, we must rank the works to which we just alluded; and we do not hesitate to say, that they are well entitled to that distinction. They are indeed, in many respects, very extraordinary performances though in nothing more extraordinary than in having remained so long unclaimed. There is no name, we think, in our literature, to which they would not add lustre

THIS, we think, is beyond all question a new coinage from the mint which produced Waverley, Guy Mannering, and the Antiquary: -For though it does not bear the legend and superscription of the Master on the face of the pieces, there is no mistaking either the quality of the metal or the execution of the die and even the private mark, we doubt not, may be seen plain enough, by those who know how to look for it. It is quite impossible to read ten pages of this work, in short, without feeling that it belongs to the same school with those very remarkable produc--and lustre, too, of a very enviable kind; tions; and no one who has any knowledge of nature, or of art, will ever doubt that it is an original. The very identity of the leading characters in the whole set of stories, is a stronger proof, perhaps, that those of the last series are not copied from the former, than even the freshness and freedom of the draperies with which they are now invested-or the ease and spirit of the new groups into which they are here combined. No imitator would have ventured so near his originals, and yet come off so entirely clear of them And we are only the more assured that the old acquaintances we continually recognise in these volumes, are really the persons they pretend to be, and no false mimics, that we recollect so perfectly to have seen them before, or at least to have been familiar with some of their near relations!

for they not only show great talent, but infinite good sense and good nature,—a more vigorous and wide-reaching intellect than is often displayed in novels, and a more powerful fancy, and a deeper sympathy with va rious passion, than is often combined with such strength of understanding.

The author, whoever he is, has a truly graphic and creative power in the invention and delineation of characters- which he sketches with an ease, and colours with a brilliancy, and scatters about with a profusion, which reminds us of Shakespeare himself: Yet with all this force and felicity in the representation of living agents, he has the eye of a poet for all the striking aspects external of nature; and usually contrives, both in his scenery and in the groups with which it is enlivened, to combine the pictur We have often been astonished at the esque with the natural, with a grace that has quantity of talent-of invention, observation, rarely been attained by artists so copious and and knowledge of character, as well as of rapid. His narrative, in this way, is kept conspirited and graceful composition, that may stantly full of life, variety, and colour; and be found in those works of fiction in our lan-is so interspersed with glowing descriptions, guage, which are generally regarded as and lively allusions, and flying traits of saamong the lower productions of our litera-gacity and pathos, as not only to keep our ture,-upon which no great pains is under-attention continually awake, but to afford a stood to be bestowed, and which are seldom pleasing exercise to most of our other faculregarded as titles to a permanent reputation. ties. The prevailing tone is very gay and If Novels, however, are not fated to last as pleasant; but the author's most remarkable, long as Epic poems, they are at least a great and, perhaps, his most delightful talent, is deal more popular in their season; and, slight that of representing kindness of heart in union as their structure, and imperfect as their fin- with lightness of spirits and great simplicity ishing may often be thought in comparison, of character, and of bending the expression we have no hesitation in saying, that the better of warm and generous and exalted affections specimens of the art are incomparably more with scenes and persons that are in themselves entertaining, and considerably more instruc- both lowly and ludicrous. This gift he shares tive. The great objection to them, indeed, is, with his illustrious countryman Burns—as he that they are too entertaining-and are so does many of the other qualities we have pleasant in the reading, as to be apt to pro- mentioned with another living poet,—who is duce a disrelish for other kinds of reading, only inferior perhaps in that to which we have which may be more necessary, and can in last alluded. It is very honourable indeed, no way be made so agreeable. Neither sci- we think, both to the author, and to the readers ence, nor authentic history, nor political nor among whom he is so extremely popular, that professional instruction, can be rightly con- the great interest of his pieces is for the most veyed, we fear, in a pleasant tale; and, there-part a Moral interest-that the concern we fore, all those things are in danger of appear-take in his favourite characters is less on ac

count of their adventures than of their amia- | helplessness and humility of our common bleness--and that the great charm of his works nature. Unless we misconstrue very grossly is derived from the kindness of heart, the the indications in these volumes, the author capacity of generous emotions, and the lights thinks no times so happy as those in which an of native taste which he ascribes, so lavishly, indulgent monarch awards a reasonable porand at the same time with such an air of truth tron of liberty to grateful subjects, who do and familiarity, even to the humblest of these not call in question his right either to give or favourites. With all his relish for the ridicu- to withhold it-in which a dignified and delous, accordingly, there is no tone of misan- cent hierarchy receives the homage of their thropy, or even of sarcasm, in his representa- submissive and uninquiring flocks-and a tions; but, on the contrary, a great indulgence gallant nobility redeems the venial immoand relenting even towards those who are to ralities of their gayer hours, by brave and be the objects of our disapprobation. There honourable conduct towards each other, and is no keen or cold-blooded satire-no bitter- spontaneous kindness to vassals, in whom ness of heart, or fierceness of resentment, in they recognise no independent rights, and not any part of his writings. His love of ridicule many features of a common nature. is little else than a love of mirth; and savours throughout of the joyous temperament in which it appears to have its origin; while the buoyancy of a raised and poetical imagination lifts him continually above the region of mere jollity and good humour, to which a taste, by no means nice or fastidious, might otherwise be in danger of sinking him. He is evidently a person of a very sociable and liberal spirit -with great habits of observation-who has ranged pretty extensively through the varieties of human life and character, and mingled with them all, not only with intelligent familiarity, but with a free and natural sympathy for all the diversities of their tastes, pleasures, and pursuits-one who has kept his heart as well as his eyes open to all that has offered itself to engage them; and learned indulgence for human faults and follies, not only from finding kindred faults in their most intolerant censors, but also for the sake of the virtues by which they are often redeemed, and the sufferings by which they have still oftener been chastised. The temper of his writings, in short, is precisely the reverse of those of our Laureates and Lakers, who, being themselves the most whimsical of mortals, make it a conscience to loathe and abhor all with whom they happen to disagree; and labour to pro-delight and amuse us, without trespassing at mote mutual animosity and all manner of uncharitableness among mankind, by refer ring every supposed error of taste, or peculiarity of opinion, to some hateful corruption of the heart and understanding.

It is very remarkable, however, that, with propensities thus decidedly aristocratical, the ingenious author has succeeded by far the best in the representation of rustic and homely characters; and not in the ludicrous or contemptuous representation of them-but by making them at once more natural and more interesting than they had ever been made before in any work of fiction; by showing them, not as clowns to be laughed at-or wretches, to be pitied and despised-but as human creatures, with as many pleasures and fewer cares than their superiors-with affections not only as strong, but often as delicate as those whose language is smoother and with a vein of humour, a force of sagacity, and very frequently an elevation of fancy, as high and as natural as can be met with among more cultivated beings. The great merit of all these delineations, is their admirable truth and fidelity-the whole manner and cast of the characters being accurately moulded on their condition-and the finer attributes that are ascribed to them so blended and harmonised with the native rudeness and simplicity of their life and occupations, that they are made interesting and even noble beings, without the least particle of foppery or exaggeration, and

all on the province of pastoral or romance.

Next to these, we think, he has found his happiest subjects, or at least displayed his greatest powers, in the delineation of the grand and gloomy aspects of nature, and of the dark With all the indulgence, however, which and fierce passions of the heart. The natural we so justly ascribe to him, we are far from gaiety of his temper does not indeed allow complaining of the writer before us for being him to dwell long on such themes;-but the too neutral and undecided on the great sub- sketches he occasionally introduces, are exejects which are most apt to engender exces- cuted with admirable force and spirit-and sive zeal and intolerance-and we are almost give a strong impression both of the vigour of as far from agreeing with him as to most of his imagination, and the variety of his talent. those subjects. In politics it is sufficiently It is only in the third rank that we would place manifest, that he is a decided Tory-and, we his pictures of chivalry and chivalrous charare afraid, something of a latitudinarian both acter-his traits of gallantry, nobleness, and in morals and religion. He is very apt at least honour-and that bewitching combination of to make a mock of all enthusiasm for liberty gay and gentle manners, with generosity, canor faith-and not only gives a decided prefer- dour, and courage, which has long been faence to the social over the austerer virtues-miliar enough to readers and writers of novels, but seldom expresses any warm or hearty ad- but has never before been represented with miration, except for those graceful and gentle- such an air of truth, and so much ease and man-like principles, which can generally be happiness of execution. acted upon with a gay countenance-and do not imply any great effort of self-denial, or any deep sense of the rights of others, or the

Among his faults and failures, we must give the first place to his descriptions of virtuous young ladies-and his representations of the

effect; and, at all events, impossible to affect, by any observations of ours, the judgment which has been passed upon them, with very little assistance, we must say, from professed critics, by the mass of their intelligent readers,

ordinary business of courtship and conversa- | the place of a more detailed examination of tion in polished life. We admit that those those which he has given to the public since things, as they are commonly conducted in we first announced him as the author of real life, are apt to be a little insipid to a mere Waverley. The time for noticing his two critical spectator; and that while they conse-intermediate works, has been permitted to go quently require more heightening than strange by so far, that it would probably be difficult adventures or grotesque persons, they admit to recal the public attention to them with any less of exaggeration or ambitious ornament: -Yet we cannot think it necessary that they should be altogether so tame and mawkish as we generally find them in the hands of this spirited writer,-whose powers really seem to require some stronger stimulus to bring-by whom, indeed, we have no doubt that them into action, than can be supplied by the Aat realities of a peaceful and ordinary existence. His love of the ludicrous, it must also be observed, often betrays him into forced and vulgar exaggerations, and into the repetition of common and paltry stories,-though it is but fair to add, that he does not detain us long with them, and makes amends by the copiousness of his assortment for the indifferent quality of some of the specimens. It is another consequence of this extreme abundance in which he revels and riots, and of the fertility of the imagination from which it is supplied, that he is at all times a little apt to overdo even those things which he does best. His most striking and highly coloured characters appear rather too often, and go on rather too long. It is astonishing, indeed, with what spirit they are supported, and how fresh and animated they are to the very last ;-but still there is something too much of them-and they would be more waited for and welcomed, if they were not quite so lavish of their presence. It was reserved for Shakespeare alone, to leave all his characters as new and unworn as he found them, and to carry Falstaff through the business of three several plays, and leave us as greedy of his sayings as at the moment of his first introduction. It is no light praise to the author before us, that he has sometimes reminded us of this, as well as other inimitable excellences in that most gifted of all inventors.

they are, by this time, as well known, and as correctly estimated, as if they had been indebted to us for their first impressions on the subject. For our own parts we must confess, that Waverley still has to us all the fascination of a first love! and that we cannot help thinking, that the greatness of the public transactions in which that story was involved, as well as the wildness and picturesque graces of its Highland scenery and characters, have invested it with a charm, to which the more familiar attractions of the other pieces have not quite come up. In this, perhaps, our opinion differs from that of better judges;but we cannot help suspecting, that the latter publications are most admired by many, at least in the southern part of the island, only because they are more easily and perfectly understood, in consequence of the training which had been_gone through in the perusal of the former. But, however that be, we are far enough from denying that the two succeeding works are performances of extraordinary merit,-and are willing even to admit, that they show quite as much power and genius in the author-though, to our taste at least, the subjects are less happily selected.

Dandie Dinmont is, beyond all question, we think, the best rustic portrait that has ever yet been exhibited to the public-the most honourable to rustics, and the most creditable to the heart, as well as the genius of the artist -the truest to nature-the most interesting To complete this hasty and unpremeditated and the most complete in all its lineaments. sketch of his general characteristics, we must-Meg Merrilees belongs more to the departadd, that he is above all things national and Scottish, and never seems to feel the powers of a Giant, except when he touches his native soil. His countrymen alone, therefore, can have a full sense of his merits, or a perfect relish of his excellences;-and those only, indeed, of them, who have mingled, as he has done, pretty freely with the lower orders, and made themselves familiar not only with their language, but with the habits and traits of character, of which it then only becomes expressive. It is one thing to understand the meaning of words, as they are explained by other words in a glossary, and another to know their value, as expressive of certain feelings and humours in the speakers to whom they are native, and as signs both of temper and condition among those who are familiar with their import.

We must content ourselves, we fear, with this hasty and superficial sketch of the general character of this author's performances, in

ment of poetry. She is most akin to the witches of Macbeth, with some traits of the ancient Sybil engrafted on the coarser stock of a Gipsy of the last century. Though not absolutely in nature, however, she must be allowed to be a very imposing and emphatic personage; and to be mingled, both with the business and the scenery of the piece, with the greatest possible skill and effect.-Pleydell is a harsh caricature; and Dirk Hatteric a vulgar bandit of the German school. The lovers, too, are rather more faultless and more insipid than usual,-and all the genteel persons, indeed, not a little fatiguing. Yet there are many passages of great merit, of a gentler and less obtrusive character. The grief of old Ellengowan for the loss of his child, and the picture of his own dotage and death, are very touching and natural; while the many descriptions of the coast scenery, and of the various localities of the story, are given with a freedom, force, and effect, that bring every

feature before our eyes, and impress us with an irresistible conviction of their reality.

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little too much like the hero of a fairy tale, and the structure and contrivance of the story, in general, would bear no small affinity to that meritorious and edifying class of compositions, was it not for the nature of the details, and the quality of the other persons to whom they relate who are as real, intelligible, and tangible beings as those with whom we are made familiar in the course of the author's former productions. Indeed they are very apparently the same sort of people, and come here before us again with all the recommendations of old acquaintance. The outline of the story is soon told. The scene is laid among the Elliots and Johnstons of the Scottish border, and in the latter part of Queen Anne's reign; when the union then newly effected between the two kingdoms, had revived the old feel

The Antiquary is, perhaps, on the whole, less interesting, though there are touches in it equal, if not superior, to any thing that occurs in either of the other works. The adventure of the tide and night storm under the cliffs, we do not hesitate to pronounce the very best description we ever met with,-in verse or in prose, in ancient or in modern writing. Old Edie is of the family of Meg Merrilees, a younger brother, we confess, with less terror and energy, and more taste and gaiety, but equally a poetical embellishment of a familiar character; and yet resting enough on the great points of nature, to be blended without extravagance in the transactions of beings so perfectly natural and thoroughly alive that no suspicion can be en-ings of rivalry, and held out, in the general tertained of their reality. The Antiquary himself is the great blemish of the work,-at least in so far as he is an Antiquary ;-though we must say for him, that, unlike most oddities, he wearies us most at first; and is so managed, as to turn out both more interesting and more amusing than we had any reason to expect. The low characters in this book are not always worth drawing; but they are exquisitely finished; and prove the extent and accuracy of the author's acquaintance with human life and human nature.-The family of the fisherman is an exquisite group throughout; and, at the scene of the funeral, in the highest degree striking and pathetic. Dousterswivel is as wearisome as the genuine Spurzheim himself: And the tragic story of the Lord is, on the whole, a miscarriage; though interspersed with passages of great force and energy. The denouement which connects it with the active hero of the piece, is altogether forced and unnatural.--We come now, at once, to the work immediately before us.

The Tales of My Landlord, though they fill four volumes, are, as yet, but two in number; the one being three times as long, and ten times as interesting as the other. The introduction, from which the general title is derived, is as foolish and clumsy as may be; and is another instance of that occasional imbecility, or self-willed caprice, which every now and then leads this author, before he gets afloat on the full stream of his narration, into absurdities which excite the astonishment of the least gifted of his readers. This whole prologue of My Landlord, which is vulgar in the conception, trite and lame in the execution, and utterly out of harmony with the stories to which it is prefixed, should be entirely retrenched in the future editions; and the two novels, which have as little connection with each other as with this ill-fancied prelude, given separately to the world, each under its own denomination.

The first, which is comprised in one volume, is called "The Black Dwarf"-and is, in every respect, the least considerable of the family-though very plainly of the legitimate race and possessing merits, which, in any other company, would have entitled it to no slight distinction. The Dwarf himself is a

discontent, fresh encouragement to the partizans of the banished family. In this turbulent period, two brave, but very peaceful and loyal persons, are represented as plodding their way homewards from deer-stalking, in the gloom of an autumn evening, when they are encountered, on a lonely moor, by a strange misshapen Dwarf, who rejects their proffered courtesy, in a tone of insane misanthropy, and leaves Hobbie Elliot, who is the successor of Dandie Dinmont in this tale, perfectly persuaded that he is not of mortal lineage, but a goblin of no amiable dispositions. He, and his friend Mr. Earnscliff, who is a gentleman of less credulity, revisit him again, however, in daylight; when they find him laying the foundations of a small cottage in that dreary spot. With some casual assistance the fabric is completed; and the Solitary, who still maintains the same repulsive demeanour, fairly settled in it. Though he shuns all society and conversation, he occasionally administers to the diseases of men and cattle; and acquires a certain awful reputation in the country, half between that of a wizard and a heaven-taught cow-doctor. In the mean time poor Hobbie's house is burned, and his cattle and his bride carried off by the band of one of the last Border foragers, instigated chiefly by Mr. Vere, the profligate Laird of Ellieslaw, who wishes to raise a party in favour of the Jacobites; and between whose daughter and young Earnscliff there is an attachment, which her father disapproves. The mysterious Dwarf gives Hobbie an oracular hint to seek for his lost bride in the fortress of this plunderer, which he and his friends, under the command of young Earnscliff, speedily invest; and when they are ready to smoke him out of his inexpugnable tower, he capitulates, and leads forth, to the astonishment of all the besiegers, not Grace Armstrong, but Miss Vere, who, by some unintelligible refinement of iniquity, had been sequestered by her worthy father in that appropriate custody. The Dwarf, who, with all his misanthropy, is the most benevolent of human beings, gives Hobbie a fur bag full of gold, and contrives to have his bride restored to him. He is likewise consulted in secret by Miss Vere, who is sadly distressed, like all other fictitious damsels, by

her father's threats to solemnise a forced upon the monument of the slaughtered Presbytemarriage between her and a detestable ba- rians; and busily employed in deepening, with his ronet, and promises to appear and deliver chisel, the letters of the inscription, which announc ing, in scriptural language, the promised blessings her, however imminent the hazard my ap of futurity to be the lot of the slain, anathematized pear. Accordingly, when they are all ranged the murderers with corresponding violence. A blue for the sacrifice before the altar in the castle bonnet of unusual dimensions covered the grey hairs chapel, his portentous figure pops out from of the pious workman. His dress was a large oldbehind a monument,-when he is instantly fashioned coat, of the coarse cloth called hoddinrecognised by the guilty Ellieslaw, for a cer- grey, usually worn by the elder peasants, with tain Sir Edward Mauley, who was the cousin waistcoat and breeches of the same; and the whole suit, though still in decent repair, had obviously and destined husband of the lady he had af-seen a train of long service. Strong clouted shoes terwards married, and who had been plunged studded with hob-nails, and gramoches or leggins into temporary insanity by the shock of that made of thick black cloth, completed his equip. ment. from Beside him, fed among the graves, a pony, fair one's inconstancy, on his recovery which he had allowed Mr. Vere to retain the the companion of his journey, whose extreme whiteness, as well as its projeecting bones and hollow greatest part of the property to which he suc-eyes, indicated its antiquity. It was harnessed in ceeded by her death; and had been supposed the most simple manner, with a pair of branks, and to be sequestered in some convent abroad, hair tether, or halter, and a sunk, or cushion of when he thus appears to protect the daughter straw, instead of bridle and saddle. A canvass of his early love. The desperate Ellieslaw at pouch hung round the neck of the animal, for the purfirst thinks of having recourse to force, and pose, probably, of containing the rider's tools, and any thing else he might have occasion to carry with calls in an armed band which he had that him. Although I had never seen the old man be. day assembled, in order to favonr a rising of fore, yet, from the singularity of his employment, the Catholics-when he is suddenly surround- and the style of his equipage, I had no difficulty in ed by Hobbie Elliot and Earnscliff, at the recognising a religious itinerant whom I had often head of a more loyal party, who have just parts of Scotland by the name of Old Mortality. heard talked of, and who was known in various overpowered the insurgents, and taken pos"Where this man was born, or what was his session of the castle. Ellieslaw and the Ba-real name, I have never been able to learn, nor are ronet of course take horse and shipping forth of the realm; while his fair daughter is given away to Earnscliff by the benevolent Dwarf; who immediately afterwards disappears, and seeks a more profound retreat, beyond the reach of their gratitude and gaiety.

The other and more considerable story, which fills the three remaining volumes of this publication, is entitled, though with no great regard even to its fictitious origin, "Old Mortality;"-for, at most, it should only have been called the tale or story of Old Mortality -being supposed to be collected from the information of a singular person who is said at one time to have been known by that strange appellation. The redacteur of his interesting traditions is here supposed to be a village schoolmaster; and though his introduction brings us again in contact with My Landlord and his parish clerk, we could have almost forgiven that unlucky fiction, if it had often presented us in company with sketches, as graceful as we find in the following passage, of the haunts and habits of this singular personage. After mentioning that there was, on the steep and heathy banks of a lonely rivulet, a deserted burying ground to which he used frequently to turn his walks in the evening, the gentle pedagogue proceeds

"One summer evening as, in a stroll such as I have described, I approached this deserted mansion of the dead. I was somewhat surprised to hear sounds distinct from those which usually soothe its solitude, the gentle chiding, namely, of the brook, and the sighing of the wind in the boughs of three gigantic ash trees, which mark the cemetery. The clink of a hammer was, upon this occasion, distinctly heard; and I entertained some alarm that a march-dike, long meditated by the two proprietors whose estates were divided by my favourite brook, was about to be drawn up the glen, in order to substitute its rectilinear deformity or the graceful winding of the natural boundary. As I approached I was agreeably undeceived. A old man was seated

the motives which made him desert his home, and adopt the erratic mode of life which he pursued, have held, at one period of his life, a small moorknown to me except very generally. He is said to land farm; but, whether from pecuniary losses, or domestic misfortune, he had long renounced that and every other gainful calling. In the language of Scripture, he left his house, his home, and his kindred, and wandered about until the day of his death-a period, it is said, of nearly thirty years. ast regulated his circuit so as annually to visit the "During this long pilgrimage, the pious enthusigraves of the unfortunate Covenanters, who suffered by the sword, or by the executioner, during the reigns of the two last monarchs of the Stuart line. These tombs are often apart from all human habitwanderers had fled for concealment. But whereve: they existed, Old Mortality was sure to visit them, when his annual round brought them within his reach. In the most lonely recesses of the mountains, the moorfowl shooter has been often surprised to find him busied in cleaning the moss from defaced inscriptions, and repairing the emblems of the grey stones, renewing with his chisel the halfdeath with which these simple monuments are usually adorned.

ation, in the remote moors and wilds to which the

As the wanderer was usually to be seen bent on this pious task within the precincts of some country churchyard, or reclined on the solitary tombstone among the heath, disturbing the plover and the black cock with the clink of his chisel and mallet, with his old white pony grazing by his side, he acquired, from his converse among the dead, the popular appellation of Old Mortality."

Vol. ii. pp. 7-18.

The scene of the story thus strikingly introduced is laid-in Scotland of course-in those disastrous times which immediately preceded the Revolution of 1688; and exhibits a lively picture, both of the general state of manners at that period, and of the conduct and temper and principles of the two great parties in politics and religion that were then engaged in unequal and rancorous hostility. There are no times certainly, within the reach of authen tic history, on which it is more painful to look

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