Other things also prove it. It is always a good brick to throw at a literary pessimist, to tell him the number of editions of Scott that have appeared during the last half-dozen years. I do not know how many there are - I have no idea - but I always say fifty-three and four more coming, for that sounds tistics up one's sleeve. exact, and as if one had all the stathese little things with a confident air, If you say you are never contradicted. No one knows any different. It is a habit worth acquiring. I am not proud of the accomplishment, and I don't mind saying that I learned the trick from listening to the evidence of skilled witnesses in the courts of law. There is no special loveliness in that grey of Scottish humor south of the Tweed, country with its rainy, sea-beat archi- England is "creeping up." The numpelago; its fields of dark mountains; its bers of editions of Scott, edited and unsightly places, black with coal; its tree- inedited, illustrated and annotated, less, sour, unfriendly looking corn-lands; plain and colored, prove it. its quaint, grey, castled city, where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat. I do not know if I desire to live there; but let me hear, in some far land, a kindred voice sing out, "Oh, why left I my hame?" and it seems at once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the good and wise, can repay me for my absence from my country. And though I would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be buried among good Scots clods. I will say it fairly, it grows on me with every year; there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street-lamps. The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotsman. You must pay for dit in many ways, as for all other advantages on earth. You have to learn the Paraphrases and the Shorter Catechism; you generally take to drink; your youth, so far as I can make out, is a time of louder war against society, of more outcry, and tears, and turmoil, thån if you were born, for instance, in England. But, somehow, life is warmer and closer, the hearth burns more redly; the lights of home shine softer on the rainy street, the very names, endeared in verse and music, cling nearer round our hearts. An Englishman may meet an Englishman tomorrow, upon Chimborazo, and neither of them care; but when the Scotch winegrower told me of Mons Meg, it was like magic. From the dim shieling on the misty island, Mountains divide us and a world of seas; Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are land, And we in dreams behold the Hebrides. Humor in Fiction." at the national humor of fact. Therefore let us look for a moment The Scots were, for instance, a people intensely loyal to their kings and queens. Yet, so long as they were with us, we dissembled our affection. Alas, we never told our love! In fact, we always rebelled against them, so that they might have a good time hanging us in the Grassmarket and ornamenting the Netherbow with our heads. But as soon as we had driven these kings and queens into exile, we became treHigh-mendously loyal, and kept up constant Our humor lies so near our feeling for our country that I would almost say, if we do not feel this quotation · ay, and feel it in our bones -we may take it for granted that both the humor and the pathos of Scotland are to be during the term of our trokings with the exiled at Carisbrook, in Holland, or with "the king over the water." Our very Cameronians became Jacobites and split on the subject, as the Scottish kirks always did-being apparently of the variety of animalculæ which multiply by fissure. So we went on, till we got them back, and again seated on the throne with a firm seat and a tight rein. Then we reHowever, as Mr. Whistler said, when belled once more, just to keep them a friend pointed out to him a certain aware of themselves. Thus was our suggestion of the landscape Whistle-national humor expressed in history. rian in an actual sunset: "Ah, yes, hid from us natural lives. nature is creeping up!" Or we had our family feuds. It matso we may tered not whether we were kilted Macs say, with reference to the appreciation of the north or steel-capped, leathern jacked Kennedys of the south, we humorsome apprentice of Stirling to loved our name and clan, and stood for Bridewell, where, as he says, and as them against king and country. But, we should expect, he was never mernevertheless, we arose early in the rier in his life, albeit within iron gates morning and had family worship, like and waiting on the mercy of the Mr. John Mure of Auchendraine."sweet provost " whom he surprised Then we rode forth, with spear and "putting on his breeks.” pistolet, to convince some erring brother of the clan that he must not do So. I received a delightful entry from an old family register of facts the other day. It was mixed up with religious reflections, and had this trifling memorandum interpolated to break the placid flow of the spiritual meditation. "This day and date oor Jock stickit to deid Wat Maxwell o' Traquair! Glory be to the Father and to the Son!" This also is a part of our national humor of fact. Master Adam Blackadder was an apprentice boy in Stirling in the troublous times of the Covenant. The military were coming, and the whole Whiggish town took flight. But how exquisitely humorous is the whole scene - the lad, not to be "feared," and well content to get the better of the provost in the battle of words, derives an admirable satisfaction from the difficulties of his enemy, who has perforce to argue while "putting on his breeks," a time when teguments, not arguments, are most fitting. Meanwhile the provost is grimly conscious that he is getting the worst of it, aud that what the prentice loon said to him will be a sad jest when the bailies congregate round the civic punch-bowl; yet, for all that, he is not unappreciative of the lad's national right to say his say, and, not without some reluctance, silences him with the incontrovertible argument of the "iron gates." This also is Scottish and national, and could hardly be native elsewhere. "I would have been for running, too," says young Adam, the merchant's loon, "I would have been for the running, too, but my master discharged me to leave the shop. As we go on to consider these and 'For,' said he, 'they will not have the con- other similar circumstances chronicled fidence to take the like of you, a silly young in our national history, certain ill-delad.' However, a few days thereafter I fined but obvious sorts and kinds of was gripped by two messengers early in the national humor emerge. They look at morning, who, for haste would not suffer us out of all manner of unexpected me to tie up my stockings, or put about places out of the records of the my cravat, but hurried me away to Provost Russel's lodgings Great Seal, out of the minutes of the a violent persecutor and ignorant wretch! The first word he Privy Council, out of State trials, out spak to me [putting on his breeches] was, of the findings of juries. "We find 'Is not this braw wark, sirr, that we maun that the prisoner killit not the particube troubled wi' the like o' you?' I an- lar man aforesaid, yet that neverthelesse swered [brave loon, Adam !], 'Ye hae got- he is deserving of hanging." On genten a braw prize, my lord, that has claucht eral grounds, it is to be presumed, and a poor prentice !' He answered, 'We to encourage the others! So hanged canna' help it, sirr, we must obey the the acquitted man duly was. king's lawes!' 'King's lawes, my lord,' I there is the famous indictment upon says, there is no such lawes under the which (if all tales be true) one Moss sun!' For I had heard that, by the bond, heritors were bound for their tenants and masters for their servants and not servants for themselves [and so Andrew had him]. 'No such laws, sirr,' says our sweet Provost, 'ye lee'ed like a knave and traitour, as ye are. So, sirr, ye come not here to dispute the matter; away with him, away with him to the prison.'" man Then was hanged, on May 20, 1785. "1st. He was fand onabil to give an account of himsel'. 2nd. He wan'ered in his discoorse. 3rd. He said that he cam' from Carrick!" He was immediately executed. Disentangling some of these threads of humor which shoot scarlet through So accordingly they haled away the the hodden grey of our national rec ords, we can distinguish four kinds of first, the humor That is the polter humor in excelsis historical humor - the undergraduate playing with the which I propose, without any partic-headsman's axe instead of the harmular law or license, to call by analogy less necessary cudgel which costs a "Polter Humor." The best attested shilling. For of all apparitions is a certain Galloway It is a primitive kind of humor of ghost the spirit which troubled the savage origin; and how many varieties house of Collin, in the parish of Rer- of it there are among savage tribes, rick, for months, and was only finally and amongst that largest of all savage exorcised after many wrestlings with tribes, the noble outlaw Ishmaels of all the ministers of the countryside the world, boys - Mr. Andrew Lang in Presbytery assembled. It was a only knows. merry and noisy spirit of the type Of this Polter humor, perhaps the called (I am informed) the Polter finest instances are to be found in the Ghost, a perfect master of the whist- chap-books of the latter half of last ling, pinching, vexing, stone-throwing, century and the first ten years of this. spiritualistic athletic. So following So soon as Scott had made the Scottish this analogy we may call a considerable dialect into a national language, the part of our national humor of fact edge seemed completely to go off these polter humor. It is the same kind of productions. With one consent they thing which, mixed with the animal became flat, stale, and unprofitable. spirits and primitive methods of the Indeed, they can hardly be called undergraduate, leads him occasionally" profitable" reading at the best. to thump upon the floor of philosophy it is like walking down a South Italian class-rooms in a manner most unphil-lane to read them, so thickly do causes osophic. I am, it may be, thinking of of offence lie around. But for all that, the things that were in the good old in them we have the rough give-andtimes, when it was a mistake, trivial in take of life at the country weddings, the extreme, to forget one's college the holy fairs, the kirns and chrisnote-book, but capital to leave behind tenings of an older time. I never one's stick. The polter humor of realized how great and clean Robert Scotland is largely the humor of the Burns was, till I saw from what a unlicked cub, playing with such dan-state of utter depravity he rescued gerous weapons as swords and battle- such homely topics as these. Yet in axes, instead of boot-laces and blacking. "There is no discourse between a full man and a fasting. Sit ye doon, Sir Patrick Grey," said the Black Douglas to the king's messenger, sent to demand the release of Maclellan of Bombie. Sir Patrick, who might have known better, sits him down. The Black Douglas moves his hand and his eyebrow once; and even while the messenger is solacing himself with "doo-tairt" and a cup of sack, poor Maclellan is had out to the green and beheaded. Sir Patrick finishes, and wipes his five-pronged forks in the national manner underneath his doublet. He is ready to talk business, and so is the Black Douglas now. "There is your man. Tell his Majesty he is most welcome to him,' ," said the Douglas; "it is a pity that he wants the head!" these days we are uneasily conscious that even Robert Burns has need to have his feet wiped before he comes into our parlors. As a corrective to this over-refinement, I should prescribe a counter-irritant in the shape of a short but drastic course in the dialect chap-books of the final thirty years of last century. In the novels of Smollett is to be found the more (or less) literary expression of this form of humor. True, one cannot read very much of him at a time, for the effect of a score of pages acts physically on the stomach like sea-sickness. But yet we cannot deny that there is this polter humor element in Scottish fiction, though the fact has been largely and conveniently forgotten in these days. There are, however, some pearls among an inor dinate number of swine-sties. Yet we The second species of humor which can see the origin, or at least the man-I shall try to discriminate is what, for ifestation, of this peculiar humor in the lack of a better name, I shall call the old civic enactment which caused it to humor of irony. It is akin to the polbe proclaimed that any citizen walking ter humor in that it has chiefly referdown the Canongate upon the side ence to actions, but is of a quieter causeways after a certain hour of e'en, variety. Of this sort, and to me an did so at "the peril of his head." exquisite example, is the advice Donald There is to this day a type of sturdy, Cargil offered to Claverhouse as he full-blooded Scot, who cannot imagine was riding from the field of Drumclog, anything much funnier than the empty-after his defeat, as hard as his horse ing of a pail of suds out of a window could gallop, to "Bide for the after- upon some one else's head. Some-noon diet of worship!" -a jest which times this gentleman gets into the did credit to the grim old "faithful House of Commons, and laughs when contender," considering that he had another member sits down upon his been so lately a prisoner in the hands new and glossy hat, which cost him of John Graham himself. I am sure a guinea that morning. that Claverhouse appreciated the iron|ical edge of the observation, even if he did not forget the jester : - Two soldiers reported a squabble between two of their officers to Colonel Graham. "How knew ye of the matter?" said Claverhouse "We saw it," they replied. "But how saw ye it ?" he continued, pressing them. "We were on guard, and, hearing the din and turmoil, we set down our pieces and ran to see." and gave them many sore paiks, because that they had left their duty to gad about and gaze on that which concerned them Whereupon Colonel Graham did arise, Among the tales of James Hogg there are many examples of polter humor. Hogg is, in some of his many rambling stories, the greatest example in literature of the Scottish Picaresque. He delights to carry his hero-who is generally nobody in particular, only a hero from adventure to adventure without halt or plot, depending upon the swing of the incident to carry him through. And, indeed, so it mostly does. "The Bridal of Polmood," for instance, is of this class. It is not a great original work, like the "Confessions of a Justified Sinner," or a delightful medley of tales like the "Shepherd's Calendar." But it is a sufficiently readable story, though as like the actual life of the times as Tennyson's courtly knights are to the actual Round Table men of Arthur the king. In the "Adventures of Basil Lee" and in "Widow Watts's Court-ministers under his very nose, he sent ship," we find the polter humor. But, on the whole, the finest instance of Hogg's rattling give-and-take is his briskly humorous and admirable story of "The Souters of Selkirk." not. In like manner, and in the same excellent antique style, it is told of Duke Rothes that, finding that his lady was going just a step too far in the freedom with which she entertained proscribed her ladyship a message that it behoved her to keep her "black-coated messans" closer to her heel, or else that he would be obliged to kennel them for her. From recent Scottish literature this Perhaps the finest instance of this rough and thoroughly national species humor is the well-known story, probof humor has been almost banished; ably entirely apocryphal, but none the but there is no reason why, having less worthy on that account, of the cleaned its feet a little, the polter hu- Fifeshire laird, who, with his man mor might not be revived. There is John, was riding to market. (It is, I plenty of it, healthy and hearty, sur-think, in "Dean Ramsay," and, being viving in the nooks and corners of the far from books, I quote from memory.) hills. The laird and John are passing a hole was deposited. When Caleb saw the coast fairly clear, he took an invigorating pinch of snuff, to sharpen and confirm his resolution. "Cauld be my cast," thought he, in the moor, when the laird turns his thumb over his shoulder and says: “John, I saw a tod gang in there ! " "Did ye, indeed, laird?" cries John, all his hunting blood instantly on fire."if either Bide-the-Bent or Girder taste "Ride ye your lane to the toon; I'll that broche of wild fowl this evening." And then, addressing the eldest turnspit, a howk the craitur oot ! " boy of eleven years old, and putting a penny into his hand, he said, "Here is twal pennies, my man; carry that ower to Mistress Smatrash, and bid her fill my mill wi sneeshin' and I'll turn the broche for ye i' the meantime—an' she'll gie ye a gingerbread snap for yer pains." No sooner had the elder boy departed on his mission, than Caleb, looking the remaining turnspit gravely and steadily in the face, removed from the fire the spit undertaken the charge, clapped his hat on containing the wild fowl of which he had his head, and fairly marched off with it. So back goes John for pick and spade, having first stopped the earth. The laird rides his way, and all day he is forgathering with his cronies, and "preeing the drappie" at the market town-ploys in which his henchman would ably and willingly have seconded him. It is the hour of evening, and the laird rides home. He comes to a mighty excavation on the hillside. The trench is both long and deep. Very tired and some what short-grained, John is seated upon a mound of earth, vast as the foundation of a fortress. It will not surprise you to hear that in Scott's own time this mode of hu"There's nae fox here, laird ! ” says John, wiping the honest sweat of enmor was thought to be both rude and deavor from his brow. The laird is undignified, and many were the critinot put out. He is, indeed, exceed- cisms of bad taste and the accusations ingly pleased with himself. "Deed, "Deed, of literary borrowing that were made, John," he says, "I wad hae been both against this great scene, and muckle surprised gin there had been a against similar other chapters of his tod there. most famous books. Their very sucIt's ten year since I saw the beast gang in that hole!" cess promoted the rage of the envious. Here the nationality of the ironical We find, for instance, the magazines of humor consists in the non-committal the time full of ill-natured notices, attitude of the laird. It is none of his which, in view of the multiplied edibusiness if John thinks of spending his tions of the great Wizard, read someday in digging a fox-hole. It is, no what strangely at this day. Let me doubt, a curious method of taking exercise when one might be at a market ordinary. But there is no use trying to account for tastes, and the laird leaves John to the freedom of his own will. History does not relate what were John's remarks when the laird fared homeward. And that is, perhaps, as well. take one at random : Scott is just going on in the same blindfold way, and seems, in this as in other things, only to fulfil the destiny assigned to him by Providence-the task of employing the hundred black men of Mr. James Ballantyne's printing-office, Coul's Close, Canongate, for I suspect that this is the only real purpose of the author of "Waverley's" existence. This, the method ironical, with an additional spice of kindliness, is Sir I read this when the critics prove Walter's favorite mode of humor. It unkind, and these words are only the is, for instance, the basis of Caleb beginning of as satisfactory a "slatBalderston, especially in the famous ing" as ever fell to the lot of mortal scene in the house of Gibbie Girder, writer. the man of tubs and barrels : Up got mother and grandmother, and scoured away, jostling each other as they went, into some remote corner of the tenement, where the young hero of the evening Of course Scott was too great and many-sided a man to neglect any kind of humor, but on the whole perhaps that national humor of allowing circumstances to take their course, and |
