Page:Female Portrait Gallery.pdf/29

Rh self-love. Secluded, pursuing studies of a dry and abstract sort; kind-hearted, yet needing some strong impulse to draw such kindness forth; and, excepting in the cases of Roman pavements, plain, shrewd and practical; yet he is the rallying point for the romance of the story. Scott well understood the force of contrast. Attached, as the shy and silent are apt to be, to one whose frank gaiety is perhaps a relief to their sombre temperament, the Antiquary has undergone the common fate of seeing a more gifted rival win the young beauty, who thought little of the awkward student. Her fate is a melancholy one—suicide, or a dark suspicion of violence, and a dishonoured name; these are the remains of the lovely Eveline Neville. Every bitterness that could aggravate the misery of an unhappy attachment is here. The thought must have been for ever recurring that the heart was broken which would have reposed in safety beside his own—broken for another who proved less worthy of such trust than himself. Disappointment and regret close all the avenues of warmer affections: he has suffered too much to risk such suffering again; still the kindness peeps out in spite of indulged humours, oddities, and a system of callousness—and this is a true picture. How often, among our acquaintance, have we met some individual whose crabbed temper has provoked our irritability, or whose