)
'Ailie, take ye care and haud the gear weel thegither; for
the name of Morton of Milnwood's gane out like the last
sough of an auld sang.' And sae he fell out o' ae dwam into
another, and ne'er spak a word mair, unless it were
something we cou'dna mak out, about a dipped candle being
gude eneugh to see to dee wi'. He cou'd ne'er bide to see a
moulded ane, and there was ane, by ill luck, on the table.

In _Guy Mannering_, the murder, though unpremeditated, of a single
person, (himself not entirely innocent, but at least by heartlessness in
a cruel function earning his fate,) is avenged to the uttermost on all
the men conscious of the crime; Mr. Bertram's death, like that of his
wife, brief in pain, and each told in the space of half-a-dozen lines;
and that of the heroine of the tale, self-devoted, heroic in the
highest, and happy.

Nor is it ever to be forgotten, in the comparison of Scott's with
inferior work, that his own splendid powers were, even in early life,
tainted, and in his latter years destroyed, by modern conditions of
commercial excitement, then first, but rapidly, developing themselves.
There are parts even in his best novels coloured to meet tastes which he
despised; and many pages written in his later ones to lengthen his
article for the indiscriminate market.

But there was one weakness of which his healthy mind remained incapable
to the last. In modern stories prepared for more refined or fastidious
audiences than those of Dickens, the funereal excitement is obtained,
for the most part, not by the infliction of violent or disgusting death;
but in the suspense, the pathos, and the more or less by all felt, and
recognised, mortal phenomena of the sick-room. The temptation, to weak
writers, of this order of subject is especially great, because the study
of it from the living--or dying--model is so easy, and to many has been
the most impressive part of their own personal experience; while, if the
description be given even with mediocre accuracy, a very large section
of readers will admire its truth, and cherish its melancholy: Few
authors of second or third rate genius can either record or invent a
probable conversation in ordinary life; but few, on the other hand, are
so destitute of observant faculty as to be unable to chronicle the
broken syllables and languid movements of an invalid. The easily
rendered, and too surely recognised, image of familiar suffering is f