their works, and the rational and right-minded view which they take of the moral and external condition of mankind. The train of thought and feeling which their writings inspire is equally remote from fat-headed, contented optimism, and from the atrabilarious sensibilities of those writers whom, for want of a better term, we may define as the Manichean school. In the hands of the latter gentlemen, "this goodly frame the earth seems a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, this brave o'er-hanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, appears no other thing than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours," and man is handled with little more mercy than the poor cock whose feathers Diogenes plucked off to represent a lord of the creation. The heroes of their tales are either ill-starred Pilgarlics, the devoted butts for all the persecution which the Leisure of their neighbours can afford, or sulky querulous egotists, yelling and dashing themselves against their fleshly cage at the slightest untoward accident, and full of Utopian aspirations and practical selfishness.

Instead of the Fleetwoods and Caleb Williams's, of this school, and other such fungous excrescences of a perverted imagination, the Scots writers present us with men and women; and in lieu of libelling mankind, do their best to cheer and improve it.

The present tale, as will appear from the abstract, and from its very title, is of a more melancholy nature than is usually the case with the Scots novels; but second to none of them in the sound tone of feeling to which we have alluded, as well as in elegance and pathos, and superior to them all in its moral and religious tendency.

The plot of the story is simple and unincumbered with involved incident, as is, perhaps, more consistent with its nature and intention. It opens with a beautiful description of the happiness of an humble family at Braehead, a village near Edinburgh. Walter Lyndsay, the father of it, is represented as a man exemplary in the discharge of his social and domestic duties, and in birth and acquirements far superior to his employment as a printer's foreman; and maintaining by his industry an aged mother, as well as a wife and family of four children. Of these, Laurence the only son, escapes to sea at an early age, and Esther and Marion, the two younger daughters, are afflicted, the former with blindness, and the latter with idiotcy. These dispensations of Providence are, however, borne with resignation and cheerfulness by Mrs. Lyndsay and her elder daughter Margaret, the heroine

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of our story; but a more bitter and hopeless misery awaits them. In an evil hour, Walter Lyndsay becomes a disciple of infidelity and sedition, and their effects become soon manifest in his altered and morose manners, and his neglect of his business. Suspicion being excited against him from other causes, he is thrown into prison on a charge of treason, and being released from want of evidence, abandons his family for the cast off mistress of one of his reforming friends, while Margaret, the firmness and tenderness of whose character have already been developed by these trying circumstances, narrowly escapes the brutal violence of another of the same tribe. The aged grandmother, already on the brink of the grave, does not survive the shock occasioned by the discovery of her son's conduct; and Mrs. Lyndsay and her daughters are forced by his desertion to remove to a narrow lane in Edinburgh, where by dint of industry, frugality, and the resource of a small school, they support themselves respectably, reconciling their minds to unavoidable privations and irksome employment, with a religious patience, which the author has described in his happiest manner.

"But all within their house and their hearts was unchanged and unchangeable. Herein lie the great and eternal sources of joy and sorrow, alike to the lofty and to the low; and when at night the little room was made snug, and clean, and comfortable-the fire beeted the shutters closed-work in hand-with tale or songand the rain driving, or the snow falling without-blessed in that widow's dwelling was the lot of humble and unrepining virtue,— and had some wandering sage been on a pilgrimage to search out Happiness, he might have found her even there sitting with her sister Sorrow, by the fire-side in that obscurest tenement.

"The winter had set suddenly in with extreme and unusual severity, and deep long-lying snow blocked up the lane, till it was dug through, and heaped up against the wall higher than the ground windows. Provisions and fuel were dear; and it was a

severe season even for those families who were not the very poorest, and who had enough to do to procure the bare necessaries of life. It was a bad time for attempting to open the smallest school even with the very lowest children's fees; but the attempt had been made, and about a dozen scholars came to the house with their Bibles, seams, and samplers. That number, if their parents could pay the merest trifle a quarter, was sufficient to keep the family of their teacher alive, along with what they could otherwise earn. And there is a pride among the very poorest of the poor to pay such debts; for parents, who think of educating their children at all, are not likely to wish to do so at the expence of their own honesty, and at another's loss. ૨૧ 2

"Before Christmas the Lyndsays were known and respected, not only in their own lane, but throughout several adjacent streets. The parents of the children soon saw that they learned there nothing but what was right and good. When at school, they were kept warm at a fire-side, and out of the way of all harm; and even those parents, who were themselves too careless of human duties, or of their duties to their Creator, could not but be pleased to see their children more quiet and decent in their manners, less fractious and disobedient, and disposed during the long winter nights to find amusement in what was instruction, and pleasure in reading over their lessons in that Catechism and that Bible which they themselves perhaps had too much neglected. Even the idle, the base, and the dissolute respected the inmates of the floor of that house, and gradually abstained from offering them any of those insuits which thoughtless and unfeeling brutality so often takes a satisfaction in heaping upon those whom they suppose pure enough to feel, and too helpless to repel them. Much meanness, duplicity, coarseness, and vice were daily before their eyes, and often carried into the hearts of this harmless and industrious family; but the minds even of the young, as long as they feel the happiness and the sanctity of innocence, remain pure amidst pollution-to them contact is not contagion-much is seen and heard which they do not understand; and from the sins that Nature in her greatest purity must know, there is found a preservative in the simple joy of that virtue which is strong in the consciousness of being pleasant in the eyes of God.

The very cares and troubles, and anxieties of her little school, were all of a kind to lead away the thoughts of the widow from her own misfortunes. The teazing ways of the careless and obstinate imps forced her to exert herself, and even called out at times exercises of patience, and occasioned slight irritations of temper, that made her wonder with a sigh how she who had suffered such great evils could be affected by trifles like these. By degrees she felt an interest-a pride-even a selfishness in her humble and useful trade; and the very airs of the schoolmistress, so necessary to uphold her authority among these urchins, fortified her heart against the intrusion of formidable recollections. So powerful over misery are the occupations of utility or innocence Margaret, too, delighted in her little school room. She saw, with deep satisfaction, that it was restoring her mother to peace of mind; and as for herself, she, in whose heart love did by nature overflow, soon bestowed it on one and all, even the least winning of her childish pupils. Above all, not an hour in the day was left unoccupied; and thus, after a bustling morning and busy afternoon, came on a joyful evening and a tranquil night." P. 72.

Their spirits are cheered by the return of the lost son from sea, in favour with his officers, and unchanged, in

affection and good principles. He is accompanied by his friend and mess-mate Harry Needham, a joyous and generous youth like himself, between whom and Margaret an attachment arises, almost unsuspected by themselves. Poor Harry however is drowned in a party of pleasure on the sea, from which Margaret narrowly escapes with her life; and scarcely has her young mind recovered the shock, when her father, of whose abode and circumstances his family have been long unapprized, summons them in penitence to his death-bed, where he is lying in the utmost destitution and penury and his wife and daughter, having soothed his last moments by their tenderness, extend their good offices to the partner of his guilt, who is also in a dying state. But a new trial soon awaits poor Margaret, in the death of her two sisters, who are carried off in succession by the typhus fever, and of her mother, who wasted by sorrow and a rapid decline, soon follows them to the grave. The desolate condition of the orphan is alleviated by the kindness of Miss Wedderburn, an accomplished and benevolent girl, at whose instance her mother receives Margaret into the house as a governess to her younger daughters. Here her beauty and merit attract the affections of Richard Wedderburn, the son of her patroness, whose honourable proposals she rejects from motives of gratitude and delicacy to his mother, and accompanied by the friendship and attachment of the family, leaves the house to reside with an old maternal uncle in Clyderdale. Here follows the most unmixedly happy part of poor Margaret's life; her relative Daniel Craig, a man of naturally kind feelings, but soured by disappointed affection into a morose and solitary miser, is softened by the influence of his adopted daughter into a social old man, and closes his life respected and loved by the neighbours who had shunned him before. By his death Margaret is left in possession of the small patrimony on which he resided, which together with her hand, she bestows after a very short acquaintance, on Ludovic Oswald, a young soldier of fortune, son of the minister of her parish. By this solitary act of folly she prepares for herself the severest trial which has yet fallen upon her. Hannah Blantyre, a young woman whom Ludovic had seduced in earlier life, and married without the knowledge of his friends, returns unexpectedly with her child to assert her marriage, and claim her husband. The latter, who had deserted her during his last campaign, and believed her dead, abandons his home in a paroxysm of despair and shame; and Margaret, on whose mercy the unwelcome intruder is thrown, exerts herself to bestow every care which

the dying state of Hannah requires. After a. considerable interval subsequent to the death of the latter, the repentant Ludovic is discovered in the hospital of Edinburgh, enfeebled by wounds and hardships suffered in a campaign against the Maroons, and in a state of extreme danger. Restored to life, though not to health, by the care of the woman whom he had always loved with sincerity, he is re-married to her, and lives for a few years afterwards, a happier and better man than in his days of youth and health.

"He could not, wished not, to forget that he had been a man of many sins; and he held the uncertain tenure of his life from God with a sacred fear. He did not deliver himself up to a wild enthusiasm―he did not fling himself helplessly upon Divine mercy, without humbly striving to feel and act as religion required-he did not trust in the promises held forth to sinners, without knowing that better thoughts had gained an ascendancy over those that had so long been too familiar-he did not vainly conceive that all alliance had been broken off between himself of other years, and himself of the present season-he still knew that hauntings from the past were with him still, to tempt and try and he humbly suspected even his penitence, lest it might be only remorse for guilt, or regret of pleasure. But deeply convinced that his frailties clung to him still, and that the seeds of sin were smothered, not utterly crushed, in his nature, he made small pretences before man to superior piety, and so much the more humbly did he prostrate himself before God." P. 398.

After his death, Margaret, long weaned from the world and its vanities, devotes herself to benevolence and the education of her children. Her brother Laurence, almost the only person in the story whose lot has been invariably happy, marries Lucy Oswald, the sister of Ludovic, and obtains promotion by his merit; and Richard Wedderburn, long reconciled to his disappointment, and on the strictest terms of friendship with Margaret and her family, also marries a woman worthy of him.

It must be owned that the first impression conveyed by this tale is but a cheerless and gloomy one. Distresses and deaths seem multiplied in almost an unnecessary manner, particularly in the "fell swoop," of lover, father, mother, and sisters, which takes place within as short a time as the death of the three sisters in "Lights and Shadows of Scottish life" and it may be said of both books, that their lights are but of a cold autumnal nature, just sufficient to deepen their shadows by contrast. We are however forewarned by the very title of the story before us, that it is to be a detail of sorrow and suffering; and it is our own fault if we peruse