cumstances of payment have to be related again, as accounting for the absence of proof. And behold, they are completely transformed! The narrator thus dramatises the dialogue:

"STEPHEN: "Please your honour, Sir John, I paid it to your father."

'SIR JOHN: "Ye took a receipt, then, doubtless, Stephen ; and can produce it?"

"STEPHEN: "Indeed, I hadna time, an it like your honour, for nae sooner had I set doun the siller, and just as his honour, Sir Robert, that's gaen, drew it till him to count it, and write out the receipt, he was ta'en wi' the pains that removed him.”

9

If this were the truth, or near the truth, evidently the receipt could not be written, and the debtor knew, by the witness of his own eyes, that it never was. But here, on every material fact, the latter version is contradicted by the first, though both are given, as this very discrepancy proves, in good faith. That Scott perceived the flaw, and deliberately planned it, is proved (if proof be wanted) by his providing the narrator with a plausible pretext for giving, or rather purporting to give, the second version, the erroneous and misleading, in the form of a dramatic dialogue, reported ipsissimis verbis:

'I have heard their communings so often tauld ower, that I almost think I was there mysell.'

Accordingly he describes the interview exactly as if he had been there, and, at the very point where he becomes essentially false, becomes also (as we see in the quotation) most precise and positive in form, dropping narration altogether, and acting each speaker in turn. To this change of form Scott emphatically directs attention, actually arresting the story at this point and inserting a comment, by the supposed auditor, upon the narrator's dramatic talent. At a first reading, or a second, this may appear needless or cumbrous, but presently we perceive the humour of it. The supposed precision is of course altogether illusory, and merely serves to disguise from our informant the fact that, as can be proved out of his own mouth, he is not here reporting the incident as it was originally told. Scott's own view of the facts, the rationalistic view, is implied clearly enough in the final paragraph of the story, and indeed throughout.

We may see here in fact, exhibited from within, an example of that skill in recalling, applying, and accenting the observed traits of character and speech, for which, in the case of Scott, we have external testimony more abundant than in any other. One cannot easily doubt that the unconscious misrepresentation of Wandering Willie, and the equally unconscious comment of Darsie Latimer, reflect, without exactly imitating, some actual experience, in which the acuteness of Scott, both in noting and recording, was as much above that of his company as we know it to have been from the common report of his intimates. The case would resemble that of the sailor at Leith, as it is detailed by his friend James Skene in the 'Memories,' recently edited and published by Mr Basil Thomson. It is often not difficult, and it is an amusing as well as profitable exercise, to discover, by looking close enough, touches of this sort, which Scott, because they would be spoiled by a bald statement, has properly left to the reader's penetration. To collect them, and to use them aright, was the work of that large, easy, and genial survey which embraced and united all kinds of society, from the range of peers, statesmen, scholars, poets, and the like—such as pass before us as 'Sir Walter Scott's Friends' in the pages of Mrs MacCunn-to the humbler but not less necessary sort, whose 'Memories' will not be edited, nor their lives otherwise portrayed than as they contributed to the store of Sir Walter.

6

We have not space to compare in detail Stevenson's rival tale of the Bass Rock (in Catriona '), though the comparison would be full of interest. In the tone of the two there is this important difference, that the allegations in Stevenson's tale cannot possibly be resolved into common incidents plus involuntary error. When we are told that, at one and the same moment, several persons saw A.B. dancing (in spirit) at one place, and a crowd of other persons saw him lying motionless (in body) many miles away, we are driven to suppose that either the facts or the lies are abnormal. Our choice will depend on our opinion of the witnesses and our general theory of the universe. To Frederic Myers the facts in the 'Bass Rock' story, so far as I have yet given them, seemed abnormal

* p. 8. See also pp. 29, 51, 60, 184, 231.

indeed, but quite natural. Never shall I forget the grave and reproachful tone in which, talking of 'Catriona' soon after its appearance, he complained of Stevenson for disfiguring an otherwise legitimate and persuasive piece of imagination by the 'ridiculous' addition, that, when the dancing spirit is shot, the silver coin, with which the gun was loaded, is found in the man's body, which dies at the same moment but-several miles away. The precise boundary between the natural and the ridiculous is sometimes not easy to fix.

However, to return to Scott, such, in the bare outline and in general style, is the famous tale of Wandering Willie. But if there were no more to say of it, if it rose nowhere above the level which we have described, it would be good indeed, even so perhaps best in its kind, but it would not have the sublimity which Scott has contrived to impart. This depends on the moral source of the legend, the assurance of future punishment reserved for a persecutor of the saints. The Sir Robert Redgauntlet of the story was, as we have said, an oppressor, a cruel oppressor, of nonconformists and recusants; and his tenant, the originator of the legend, though no saint, was a religious man, and had no doubt whatever of his master's destiny post mortem. Accordingly, in his dream beside the grave, it is to Hell that he goes for the receipt, a Hell which is also and at the same time Sir Robert's own house. There still, there again, as in this world often, he and his wicked friends are holding such feast as yet they may. The vision is profoundly moving and solemn, and from it is diffused over the whole narrative a strong religious enchantment, which raises what otherwise were a trifle to the level of Dante and Homer.

Indeed, I have such a reverence for this episode, the Hades of the oppressors, that I have some scruple in touching it with a philological finger. But since I do not myself find in such remarks any bar to emotion, but feel the poetic achievement only the more when I seem to perceive the means, others, I suppose, may feel the same; the truth is, that the effect is partly, and even principally, a matter of vocabulary. The strolling fiddler, Wandering Willie, who tells the tale, is by birth a peasant, and his ordinary language is not very far, though it differs, from Vol. 213.-No. 424.

E

and

that of Meg Merrilies. But he is no gipsy. He has had the regular Presbyterian training and, from special circumstances, much irregular education besides. He has notions of history, theology, literature; and specially, like all good Scots, he knows and reverences the language of the preacher. The influence of it may be traced often, and grows when he begins to describe his grandfather's dream. And when for a while he is fully possessed by the moral and religious purport of the vision, shade by shade his speech takes the learned colours of the pulpit, French and Latin, even Greek, points from the Pentateuch, and rhythms modelled upon the Psalms. You will hardly find anywhere a finer example of what can be done by economy of art than the simple effects of this passage, the unexpected and therefore thrilling note of such words as fierce, savage, dissolute, beautiful, contorted, melancholy. And finally, this far-away spell dies out as it came in, and we sink back into the plainness of the vernacular. Here is the passage, with so much of the context as will suffice to show these contrasts. Coming in his dream to Redgauntlet Castle, the debtor is received there, as usual, by Dougal MacCallum, Sir Robert's old servant, whose death, be it remarked, has followed close on that of his master:

"Never fash yoursell wi' me," said Dougal, "but look to yoursell; and see ye tak naething frae ony body here, neither meat, drink, or siller, except just the receipt that is your ain."

'So saying, he led the way out through halls and trances that were weel kend to my gudesire, and into the auld oak parlour; and there was as much singing of profane sangs, and birling of red wine, and speaking blasphemy and sculduddry, as had ever been in Redgauntlet Castle when it was at the blithest.

But, Lord take us in keeping, what a set of ghastly revellers they were that sat around that table!-My gudesire kend mony that had long before gane to their place, for often had he piped to the most part in the hall of Redgauntlet. There was the fierce Middleton, and the dissolute Rothes, and the crafty Lauderdale; and Dalyell, with his bald head and a beard to his girdle; and Earlshall, with Cameron's blude on his hand; and wild Bonshaw, that tied blessed Mr Cargill's limbs till the blude sprung; and Dunbarton Douglas, the twice-turned traitor baith to country and king. There was the Bluidy Advocate MacKenyie, who, for his worldly wit

And there was

and wisdom, had been to the rest as a god.* Claverhouse, as beautiful as when he lived, with his long, dark, curled locks, streaming down over his laced buff-coat, and his left hand always on his right spule-blade, to hide the wound that the silver bullet had made. He sat apart from them all, and looked at them with a melancholy, haughty countenance; while the rest hallooed, and sung, and laughed, that the room rang. But their smiles were fearfully contorted from time to time; and their laugh passed into such wild sounds as made my gudesire's very nails grow blue, and chilled the marrow in his banes.*

"They that waited at the table were just the wicked serving-men and troopers that had done their work and cruel bidding on earth. There was the Lang Lad of the Nethertown, that helped to take Argyle; and the Bishop's summoner, that they called the Deil's Rattle-bag; and the wicked guardsmen in their laced coats; and the savage Highland Amorites, that shed blood like water; and mony a proud serving-man, haughty of heart and bloody of hand, cringing to the rich, and making them wickeder than they would be; grinding the poor to powder, when the rich had broken them to fragments. And mony, mony mair were coming and ganging, a' as busy in their vocation as if they had been alive.'

It will of course be understood that Scott, as a manipulator of language, is not to be praised without discrimination. Not only is he often careless, sometimes in place and sometimes very much out of place, but a certain class of his romances, the so-called 'historic,' are all debased, more or less, by a deplorable amalgam, which he compounded from cuttings of every kind of English between Chaucer and Gray, and vended as, in some sort, the style of chivalry. 'Ivanhoe' and 'The Talisman,' 'Quentin Durward,' 'Nigel' even, 'Woodstock,' 'Peveril ' and others, are sown more or less liberally with this pernicious flower. It pleased the day, but it was a bad thing, and, like all weeds, was fertile. It has helped to make some of the worst literature that we possess. But let us say no more of it. It has little or no part in these 'Guy Mannering,' 'The Antiquary,' 'The Heart of Midlothian,' 'Old Mortality,' 'Rob Roy,' 'Redgauntlet,' 'The Bride of Lammermoor,' 'St. Ronan's Well,' and within this round one may comfortably circulate without end.

Between these points the dialectic forms almost totally disappear. In the next paragraph they gradually reappear.

: