ith what is
recorded of his historic prototype, Lord Braxfield, is certain. The
_locus classicus_ in regard to this personage is in Lord Cockburn's
"Memorials of his Time." "Strong built and dark, with rough eyebrows,
powerful eyes, threatening lips, and a low growling voice, he was like a
formidable blacksmith. His accent and dialect were exaggerated Scotch;
his language, like his thoughts, short, strong, and conclusive.
Illiterate and without any taste for any refined enjoyment, strength of
understanding, which gave him power without cultivation, only encouraged
him to a more contemptuous disdain of all natures less coarse than his
own. It may be doubted if he was ever so much in his element as when
tauntingly repelling the last despairing claim of a wretched culprit,
and sending him to Botany Bay or the gallows with an insulting jest. Yet
this was not from cruelty, for which he was too strong and too jovial,
but from cherished coarseness." Readers, nevertheless, who are at all
acquainted with the social history of Scotland will hardly have failed
to make the observation that Braxfield's is an extreme case of
eighteenth-century manners, as he himself was an eighteenth-century
personage (he died in 1799, in his seventy-eighth year); and that for
the date in which the story is cast (1814) such manners are somewhat of
an anachronism. During the generation contemporary with the French
Revolution and the Napoleonic wars--or, to put it another way, the
generation that elapsed between the days when Scott roamed the country
as a High School and University student and those when he settled in the
fulness of fame and prosperity at Abbotsford,--or again (the allusions
will appeal to readers of the admirable Galt) during the interval
between the first and the last provostry of Bailie Pawkie in the borough
of Gudetown, or between the earlier and final ministrations of Mr.
Balwhidder in the parish of Dalmailing,--during this period a great
softening had taken place in Scottish manners generally, and in those of
the Bar and Bench not least. "Since the death of Lord Justice-Clerk
Macqueen of Braxfield," says Lockhart, writing about 1817, "the whole
exterior of judicial deportment has been quite altered." A similar
criticism may probably hold good on the picture of border life contained
in the chapter concerning the Four Black Brothers of Cauldstaneslap,
namely, that it rather suggests the ways of an earlier generation; nor
have I any