ars in the auld
troublesome time byepast. And Mrs. Glass has been kind like
my very mother. She has a braw house here, and lives bien
and warm, wi' twa servant lasses, and a man and a callant in
the shop. And she is to send you doun a pound of her
hie-dried, and some other tobaka, and we maun think of some
propine for her, since her kindness hath been great. And the
Duk is to send the pardon doun by an express messenger, in
respect that I canna travel sae fast; and I am to come doun
wi' twa of his Honour's servants--that is, John Archibald, a
decent elderly gentleman, that says he has seen you lang
syne, when ye were buying beasts in the west frae the Laird
of Aughtermuggitie--but maybe ye winna mind him--ony way,
he's a civil man--and Mrs. Dolly Dutton, that is to be
dairy-maid at Inverara: and they bring me on as far as
Glasgo', whilk will make it nae pinch to win hame, whilk I
desire of all things. May the Giver of all good things keep
ye in your outgauns and incomings, whereof devoutly prayeth
your loving dauter,

"JEAN DEANS."

This contains an example of Scott's rather heavy jocularity as well as
giving us a fine illustration of his highest and deepest and sunniest
humour. Coming where it does, the joke inserted about the Board of
Agriculture is rather like the gambol of a rhinoceros trying to
imitate the curvettings of a thoroughbred horse.

Some of the finest touches of his humour are no doubt much heightened
by his perfect command of the genius as well as the dialect of a
peasantry, in whom a true culture of mind and sometimes also of heart
is found in the closest possible contact with the humblest pursuits
and the quaintest enthusiasm for them. But Scott, with all his turn
for irony--and Mr. Lockhart says that even on his death-bed he used
towards his children the same sort of good-humoured irony to which he
had always accustomed them in his life--certainly never gives us any
example of that highest irony which is found so frequently in
Shakespeare, which touches the paradoxes of the spiritual life of the
children of earth, and which reached its highest point in Isaiah. Now
and then in his latest diaries--the diaries written in his deep
affliction--he comes near the edge of it. Once, for instance, he says,
"What a strange scene if the surge of conversation could suddenly ebb
like the tide, and show us the state