Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/69

Rh. Among these were Scott, happy and happy-making at Abbotsford,—Jeffrey, the "wee reekit dell o' criticism" and laird of Craigcrook,—Playfair, always considered fair game by good haters of the Edinburgh,—James Hogg, the "inspired sheep's-head,"—Chalmers, with his sublimely-developed mathematical frontispiece, &c. Allan Cunningham calls the work all life and character, and admires its freshness and variety, treating as it does of courts of law and Glasgow punch, of craniology and criticism,—telling us how to woo a bride or cut up a haggis,—and giving us "the pictures, mental and bodily, of some of the leading men of Scotland, with great truth and effect." Scott himself was much interested in this last-mentioned feature of the book. "What an acquisition," he says, "it would have been to our general information to have had such a work written, I do not say fifty, but even five-and-twenty years ago; and bow much of grave and gay might then have been preserved, as it were, in amber, which have [sic] now mouldered away. When I think that at an age not much younger than yours I knew Black, Ferguson, Robertson, Erskine, Adam Smith, John Home, &c., &c., and at least saw Burns, I can appreciate better than any one the value of a work which, like this, would have handed them down to posterity in their living colours." And Sir Walter goes on to say that Dr. Morris ought, like Nourjahad, to revive every half century, to record the fleeting manners of the age, and the interesting features of those who will be only known to posterity by their works. Could Sir Walter have foreseen the host of third-rate and thirtieth-rate Doctor Morrises, who, between then and now, have infested the face of the earth, on the plea of being chields amang us takin' notes, and faith! wull prent'em—notes of our res domi (never mind how angusta) of our dressing-gowns and slippers, of our obiter allusions and by-the-way interjections, of how we clear our throats, and whether we wear straps, and so forth,—he would probably have put in a qualifying clause, to modify his panegyric of the Morrisian tactics. And this reminds us of a passage to the purpose in one of the lively letters of the author's countrywoman, Mrs. Grant of Laggan. "You ask me," she writes, "what I think of Peter's Letters? I answer in a very low whisper—not much. The broad personality is coarse, even where it is laudatory; no one very deserving of praise cares to be held up to the public eye like a picture on sale by an auctioneer: it is not the style of our country, and it is a bad style in itself. So much for its tendency. Then, if you speak of it as a composition, it has no keeping, no chastity of style, and is in a high degree florid and verbose. … Some depth of thought and acuteness appears now and then, like the weights at the tail of a paper kite, but not enough to balance the levity of the whole. With all this, the genius which the writers possess, in no common degree, is obvious through the whole book: but it is genius misapplied, and