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tempt which is the proverbial result of familiarity. A man who has been often in danger has learnt to distinguish its real, from its apparent, symptoms-to fear the lightning, not the thunder. has learnt to balance the hazards of different modes of escape-to wait the opportunity for putting in practice that which appears most promising, and to snatch that opportunity when, on the whole, it appears probable that a better will not offer. All this supposes great calmness and presence of mind-but is compatible with a thorough detestation of all unnecessary risk. It not only is compatible with such a detestation, but its natural tendency, if uncounteracted by other causes, must be to produce it. The constant association, in such a man's mind, with danger has been, that it is a thing to be as much as possible avoided. His constant meditation has been, how shall I attain my object with the least hazard, and, having attained it, how shall I best provide for my safety? Such habits fit him admirably for avoiding danger-aud for encountering it when it it cannot be avoided; but very ill for thrusting himself into it when it can-or for continuing in it when any mode of escape is open. No man can show more calmness in danger, than a North American Indian, or try more frightful modes of escape, if they are the best that offer,-or fight more desperately if he is absolutely forced to fight. But he will not fight unless he is forced. He will rather endure any fatigue, cold, sleeplessness, and famine, to surprize his deadliest enemy, than meet him on fair, or nearly fair, terms.

Military courage is founded on the glory attached to the endurance of danger, and to the infamy attached to undue fear. And, as no natural bounds can be assigned to qualities, which are themselves unnatural, the necessary endurance was first raised to insensibility, and, at last, to delight, in danger. In that most artificial period which followed both the English and the French civil wars, when the minds of men, deprived of the violent sources of excitement to which they had been accustomed, ran into every sort of affectation and absurdity, a gentleman seems to have been bound to hold any opportunity of encountering danger a source of unalloyed enjoyment. Any ulterior purpose, however frivolous, was not to be required. A man who was so fortunate as to receive, or to have a fair opportunity of giving, a challenge, had the patronage of inviting three or four friends to partake in the amusement; and while the principals, who might be supposed to have some object in it, were fighting, the seconds, instead of minding their duty as umpires, fought too, to show how much they enjoyed a chance of being wounded or killed. The story is well known of the man who offered to Lord Stair such an opportunity, provided he would exercise this patronage in his favour; and who refused to interfere further

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ther when he found he could derive no advantage from the transaction, as his lordship's list was full for his next three affairs. The story is probably coloured, but it shows what were the feelings, at least the cant, of the times in which it could be circulated. A man so trained would have shone on those occasions, on which we have described Rob Roy as failing-but it may be questioned whether he would have heard, with the same presence of mind, the Baillie's step on the Tolbooth's stairs; and whether, if strapped, like him, to Evan Bigg, he would have had sufficient boldness to plan his escape, sufficient composure to execute it, or sufficient patience to delay it to the most favourable instant.

We

But what of Die Vernon, the heath-bell of Cheviot, the blossom of the Border? To say the truth we had rather say nothing, for we fear we may not be impartial judges. We are now old and grey-headed, and, even when young, we do not recollect that we ever were in love; a passion, of which Bacon remarks that great and worthy persons are unsusceptible. But if we could suspect ourselves of admitting a feeling so inconsistent with our age and situation, we should believe ourselves in love with Die Vernon. have what has always been considered as the first and most fatal symptom- We like her faults as much as if they were our own.' We acknowledge that her debut is coarse and unnatural-that her telling Osbaldistone, in the first five minutes of their acquaintance, that she thinks him handsome, is shocking-that her selecting their first meeting at dinner, when all eyes and ears would naturally be open upon the stranger, to abuse the whole family seriatim, by name, is absolutely impossible. And yet we dwell upon all these passages with pleasure. But certainly the damage was not done on the first day. The next we were very much amused. We were delighted with her during her ride to Justice Inglewood's, and still more during her return-laughed most heartily at her meeting with Jobson, sympathised with her three subjects of pity, envied Osbaldistone his situation as her confidant and counsellor, tho' he was to know nothing of her affairs;' admired her collection of treasures, and were pleased even with her blue-ism, so different was it from any to which we had been accustomed. By this time we probably were in some danger, but we are not sure whether she completed our conquest in the masterly scene, in which she drew from Osbaldistone the account of Rashleigh's falsehoods, or in that, perhaps still finer, in which, after her unsuccessful defence of the mysterious glove, she baffled her cousin's curiosity, and defied his jealousy, without diminishing one shade of his esteem or his love. We have heard the character called unnatural throughout. She ought, perhaps, to be somewhat older, twenty-two would have been better than eighteen ; but grant the author what he has always a right to claim for his heroine, if

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he is bold enough to think he can support them, great talents and excellence of disposition, and add, what certainly is possible, an education perfectly unfemale, under the superintendance of two men of talent and learning, and add the pride of high birth, and the enthusiasm of an adherent to a persecuted religion and an exiled king -exclude her from the ordinary wishes and schemes of young girls by predestining her to a hateful object or a cloister, and give her, instead of their ordinary amusements and employments, political intrigues, Greek and Latin, and field-sports, and you have the rough outlines of the portrait, to which our author has given such relief and colouring.

But we must hasten to the HEART OF MID LOTHIAN, with the exception perhaps of Waverley, the most perfect of the whole set. And we are not sure that even Waverley may not owe the superiority in our eyes, which, on reconsideration, we still feel that it possesses, to the circumstances under which we first read it. We shall never forget the disappointment and listlessness with which, in the middle of a watering-place long vacation, we tumbled a new, untalked of, anonymous novel out of the box, which came to us from our faithless librarian, filled with substitutes for every thing we had ordered. Any where else we might have returned it uncut; but a wateringplace makes a man acquainted with strange companions for his reading, as well as his talking, hours. So we opened it, at hazard, in the second volume, and instantly found ourselves, with as much surprise as Waverley himself, and with about the same effect, in the centre of the Chevalier's court. Little did we suspect, while we wondered who this literary giant might be, that seven years after, we should be reviewing so many more of his volumes in one article, and that the mystery would be, except by internal evidence, as dark as ever.

But, abstracting from Waverley the advantage of its primogeniture, the two novels, different as they appear, have many points in common; they are unequalled in the happiness of their subjects. The story of Prince Charles is a piece of the wildest romance, in the midst of the dullest flats of history, as if the cave of Staffa could rise in the middle of the Zuyder Zee. The Heart of Mid Lothian is as fortunately chosen. The escape of Robertson, the murder of Porteous, and the pardon of Effie, though the principal facts of the last are true, and even the minutest details of the two former, are as marvellous in their way as the enterprise of Prince Charles; and the characters in both novels derive the same advantage from our imperfect knowledge of the class from which they are taken. All our author's readers must have observed how much better he paints beggars, gipsies, smugglers, and peasants, the favourites of kings and queens, and kings and queens themselves,

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the very lowest and the very highest ranks of society, than that rank to which he must himself belong. How superior is Effie Deans to Lady Staunton, and Daddie Ratton to Sir George? How much bolder, and how much more accurate, appears to us the pencil that struck out Dandie Dinmont than that which drew, though with far more elaboration, Mr. Pleydell? How much more do his Mary of Scotland and Elizabeth of England appear to resemble queens, than his Julia Mannering does, a young lady? How comes he to copy more correctly what he knows imperfectly, than what he knows well?

Our first answer is, 'We doot the fact.' We suspect that his gentlemen and ladies are, in truth, more faithful portraits than his princes, his beggars, or his rustics; but that the familiarity of his readers with the originals makes their examination of his faithfulness too severe. They are more struck by the deficiencies than by the merits; by what varies from their own standard, than by what coincides with it. No jockey was ever satisfied with the horses even of Phidias. But when the author paints a peasant, a cowfeeder, or a queen, he takes from a class with which the reader is so little acquainted, that, if the figure be but spirited and consistent, and contain nothing obviously incompatible with its supposed situation, we are willing, indeed we are forced, to take its resemblance upon trust. And perhaps the author's consciousness of the reliance of his reader is even more valuable to him than that reliance itself. It leaves him at liberty to dress his characters, not in the most appropriate, but the most picturesque, habiliments. If he draws from his own sphere of life, it is from a finished model, where every detail is prescribed to him. If from any other, it is from a sketch of which only one or two leading features are marked, and his imagination may supply, as he likes best, the remainder. He has the same advantage which Dryden translating Chaucer had over Dryden translating Virgil. He is saved too from the danger of losing general resemblance in too close a copy of the individuals with whom he is intimate; and from that of introducing something of effort, something of overcolouring and caricature, into his figures, in his endeavours to render striking, the representations of a wellknown class. A painter may be tempted to put horses and cows into some studied attitude, or to group them too artificially, who would not think of any thing more than an unaffected resemblance of an hippopotamus.

Our general admiration of the story of the Heart of Mid Lothain does not, of course, extend to the management of all the details. The beginning, or rather the beginnings, for there are half a dozen of them, are singularly careless. The author, in his premature anxiety to get in medias res, introduces us at the point where the

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different interests converge; and then, instead of floating down the united stream of events, we are forced separately to ascend each of its tributary branches, like Humboldt examining the bifurcations of the Oroonoko, until we forget, in exploring their sources, the manner in which they bear on one another. We regret too, that he should have violated the simplicity of his narrative by that novel-like incident, the testimonial from Butler's grandfather through which, in some degree, Jeannie obtains the assistance of Argyle. Its introduction is, if we may be allowed to revert to a distinction which we endeavored to establish in a former article, vol. xxiv. p. 355, both improbable and unnatural. Improbable, because, that Jeannie should, the instant she wanted a great protector, have found her obscure lover possessed of the strongest claims on the man best fitted for the purpose, was, to a degree almost beyond the powers of numeration, against the chances of real life. Unnatural, because it was absolutely impossible that a family, holding a document which gave them unlimited access to the patronage of the most powerful nobleman in Scotland, should have suffered it to remain unemployed, like Aladdin's rusty lamp, while they struggled through three generations in poverty and disappointment. If our author thinks even this more natural, than that Argyle should have been induced, by Jeannie's representations, to examine into her sister's case, by his doubts as to her guilt to interfere in her favour, and by his sympathy with Jeannie's heroism to bestow his benefits on her and her family, we must say that he thinks much worse, than we do, of the characters he has drawn.

We are not sure too, that it might not have been politic in the author to suppress almost all his fourth volume. We are very glad that he did not, for it is all very amusing. Knockdunder is excellent; and so is the transformation of Gentle Geordie and Effie into Sir George and Lady Staunton, particularly the latter; and we revisited with pleasure, in Sir George's company, the Tolbooth door and Saddletree's shop. A new and most entertaining light is likewise thrown upon the character of David Deans; his feelings on Dumbiedike's marriage, his reconciliation of his speculative principles with existing circumstances, and his discussion with Butler as to his acceptance of the Duke's preferment, are delightful. But all this has the effect of a farce after a tragedy. Where the ludicrous is interwoven with the pathetic or the terrible, it heightens the effect, both by contrast and by the appearance which it gives of authenticity. Saddletree's absurdities have certainly a good effect in the trial scene; but a whole train of light amusing narrative, in which the very persons, whose previous history has harrowed the reader's mind with pity and terror, or swelled it with admiration, have nothing to do but to show foibles

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