ad made, in other fields, a reputation quite unparalleled in the
history of fiction before he took broadly to the use of Scottish rural
idiom, and the depiction of Scottish character in its peculiarly local
aspects. The magic of his name compelled attention, and his genius gave
a classic flavour to dialects until then regarded as barbarous and ugly.
The flame of Burns had already eaten all grossness out of the rudest
rusticities, and in the space of twenty years at most the Auld Braid
Scots wore the dignity of a language and was decorated with all the
honours of a literature. But this, in spite of the transcendent genius
of the two men to whom northern literature owes its greatest debt,
brought about very little more than a local interest and a local pride.
Scott was accepted in spite of the idiom which he sometimes employed,
and not because of it, and one can only laugh at the fancy presented to
the mind by the picture of an English or a foreign reader who for the
first time found himself confronted by Mrs. Bartlemy Saddletree's query
to her maid: 'What gart ye busk your cockernony that gait?' To this
hour, indeed, there are thousands of Scott's admirers for whom the
question might just as well be framed in Sanscrit.

In Sir Walters own day and generation he had one considerable imitator
in Galt, whose 'Andrew Wylie of that Ilk' and 'The Entail' can still
afford pleasure to the reader. Then for a time the fiction of Scottish
character went moribund. The prose Muse of the North was silent, or
spoke in ineffectual accents. After a long interregnum came George
Macdonald, unconsciously paving the way for the mob of northern
gentlemen who now write with ease. He brought to his task an unusual
fervour, a more than common scholarship, a more than common richness,
purity, and flexibility in style, a truly poetic endowment of
imagination, and a truly human endowment of sympathy, intuition, and
insight. It would be absurd to say that he failed, but it is certain
that he scarcely received a tithe either of the praise or the pudding
which have fallen to the share of Mr. S. R. Crockett, for example, who
is no more to be compared with him than I to Hercules. Such readers as
were competent to judge of him ranked him high, but, south of the Tweed,
such readers were few and far between, for he employed the idiomatic
Scotch in which he chose to work with a remorseless accuracy, and in
this way set up for himself a barrier against the ave