Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/178

166 generous, warm, and pure-hearted Scottish gentlewoman of the old school, who sits down to write these passages in her life, because, as she expresses it, it has often come into her head that, seeing the threads of Providence have many times a semblance of ravelling, it would be for edification to trace out one here and one there, that folk might see how well woven the web was into which the Almighty's hand run them. Throughout the biographical excerpts her character is sustained with a beautiful unity. She has suffered much, but her heart knoweth and keepeth secret its own bitterness, while it expands at the tale of others' woe. With a narrow creed she has a broad humanity. The staunch pupil of "Free Kirk" theology and "old-world" conventionalism, she yet has a lurking enjoyment of humours and anomalies abhorrent to both; she can propound a tolerant philosophy on the virtues of the Novel, and can indite a rather con amore description of a dominic in drink. Blessings on her kind upright soul! Her simple piety, her shrewd insight, her moral courage, her singleness of eye, her depth of affection, her wealth of sympathy, her unobtrusive self-sacrifice, her unworldly intelligence, endear her to every feeling mind. Next to her stands Grace—whose history is all attractive, as one feels it will be from the hour that she first appears at Sunnyside, "a bit little thin genty-looking bairn, with a face no to be forgotten," not bonnie, indeed, but like a "shady corner," when her dark eyes are cast down—"and when she lifted them, it was like the rising of the stars in the sky; no that they were sharp, but like a deep stream flowing dark and full." We can quite realise the presence of Grace, "with a look upon her bit white face of that dowie and pining feeling that will come into folk’s heads upon a summer might,"— and yet with "aye something in her eye, and in her spirit, that ruled folk whether they would or no," and in whose nature it was not to show either her tribulation or her joyfulness by outward tokens, and in the deep soil of whose heart every strong emotion struck its roots far down, out of the sight of any mortal, and who, amid scenes of household sorrow, bore herself like a firm young tree among waving breckans, tossed with the wind, but not overcome. Her wicked relationg are somewhat weakly done; to thy author's honour, private if not professional, be it said, she does not excel in studies of bad people, with whom she has evidently had little to do, and nothing to sympathise. The widow Elphinstone and her son Allan are cleverly drawn and carefully discriminated; Mary Maitland is a douce lassie, worthy of her aunt and her "forbears;" Jenny, the heart-whole maid-of-all-work, is to the life; and Reuben Reid is a transcript from nature, to be found in esse throughout the lowlands of Scotland.

Those who desiderate a plot, a mystery, a dramatic evolution of events in the construction of a novel, will find "Merkland" more to their taste than the simple passages in the life of the Sunnyside spinster. A murder—the force and the results of circumstantial evidence, implicating an innocent man—the sorrows and magnanimity of the wrongly accused—the cowardice and remorse of the real homicide—the heroic devotion of both their sisters—and the moral adjustment of the seemingly chaotic elements of retributive justice,—these topics form the substratum for a fiction of considerable inventive art, clever portraiture, and natural pathos, Faults it has, but they are such as pertain to the author's novitiate. The story covers too large a surface; it introduces more characters