position, and pretty sure to spoil any but a boy of generous nature. Nor is the parish schoolmaster the man to keep him straight. Mr. Malison is one of the best studies in the book. He is one of a class that is less common now than formerly. Like many another parochial teacher, after studying divinity and taking orders, he falls back in the meantime on the schoolmaster's desk, looking forward later to presentation to a parish. By the way, the story of how he became a stickit minister—that is, how he broke down ignominiously in the pulpit, while trying to dispense with the use of manuscript-is told with admirable drollery. Meantime Malison is the petty tyrant of the schoolhouse, and his unlucky scholars lead miserable lives within doors, though the habit of being maltreated has become second nature with them, and they forget their sorrows when they break loose for the day. It is characteristic of the stern notions of discipline of their really affectionate parents, that the fathers do not interfere, though the mothers may be resentful. An old man brings his grandchildren to place them under Mr. Malison's charge:

'There had come to the school about a fortnight before two unhappylooking twin orphans, with white thin faces and bones in their clothes instead of legs and arms, committed to the mercies of Mr. Malison by their grandfather. Bent into all the angles of a grasshopper, and lean with ancient poverty, the old man tottered away with his stick in one hand, stretched far out to support his stooping frame, and carried in the other the caps of the two forsaken urchins, saying as he went in a quavering, croaking voice, "I'll just tak' them wi' me, or they'll no be fit for Sawbath within a fortnicht. They're terrible laddies to blaud (spoil) their claes." Turning with difficulty when he had reached the door, he added, "Noo, ye just give them their whaps weel, Maister Mailison, for ye ken that he that spareth the rod blaudeth the bairn."

Thus authorised, Malison certainly did "gie them their whaps weel."

Brutal severity of this kind would have gone far towards spoiling Alec Forbes, by exciting angry passions and a sense of injustice, had not his spirit been too high to be easily broken. As it is, it develops his manly qualities by making him the generous protector of the feeble, especially of a certain charming little Annie Anderson, who ends by marrying the champion who was the object of her childish adoration. What helps to save Alec also, besides the influence of his excellent mother, is familiar intercourse with some of the godly working men. Their excellent hearts and their narrow opinions are always dragging them in opposite directions. There is one Thomas Crann, a stonemason, and a pillar of the local dissenting chapel. He cannot deny that Alec Forbes is a vessel of wrath at

present, but he sees promise and almost assurance of a blessed future for him. Thomas never neglects the opportunity of speaking a word in season to any of his neighbours, and even the more thoughtless of them being unconsciously inoculated with the serious atmosphere they have been brought up in, have no disrelish for abstract speculation in solemn subjects. They reply to Thomas's warnings with mingled seriousness and badinage, being always pleased to make him trip in an argument or to catch him out in a contradiction. We quote the following conversation at some length as a good specimen of the talk with which they lighten their labours. It came off in the churchyard after a funeral, between Crann the mason and Macwha the wright (carpenter)

"Hech! it's a weary warl," said George.

"for ye

""Ye hae no richt to say sae, George," answered Thomas; hae never met it an' foughten wi' it. Ye hae never draan the soord o' the Lord and o' Gideon. Ye hae never broken the pitcher to let the light shine owt, an' I doubt ye hae smo'red it by this time. And sae when the bridegroom comes ye'll be ill aff for a licht."

""Hoot, man! dinna speak sic awfu' things in the verra kirkyard." "Better hear them in the kirkyard than at the closed door, George." "Weel, but," rejoined Macwha, anxious to turn the current of the conversation, which he found unpleasantly personal; "jist tell me honestly, Thamas Crann, do ye believe wi' a' your heart an' sowl that the deid man-Gude be wi' him!"

"No prayin' for the deid i' my hearing, George! as the tree falleth, so it shall lie."

"Weel, weel, I didna mean anything."

"That I verily believe. Ye seldom do."

"Wad it be a glorified timmer leg he rase wi', gin he had been buried wi' a timmer leg?" asked he.

"His ain leg wad be buried same gate."

"Ow, ah, nae doubt. An' it wad come happin' ower the Paceefic or the Atlantic to fine its oreeginal stump-wad it no? But supposin' the man had been wantin' a leg-eh Thamas?"

6.66

George, George," said Thomas, with great solemnity, "luik ye efter your sowl, an' the Lord 'll luik efter your body, legs an' a'. Man, ye're no convertit, an' how can ye unnerstan' the things o' the speerit ? Aye jeerin' an' jeerin'.

"Weel, weel, Thamas,

I was only takin' the leeberty o' thinkin' that when he was about it, the Almighty might as weel mak' a new body a'thegither as patch up the auld ane. Sae I'se awa hame." "Mind ye your immortal pairt, George."

"Gin the Lord tak's sic guid care o' the body, Thamas," retorted Macwha, with less of irreverence than appeared in his words, "maybe he winna objec' to gie a look to my puir sowl as weel, for they say it's

worth a hantle mair. I wish he wad, for he kens better nor me how to set about the job."'

Removed from such unsophisticated companionship to the university, Alec casts his village slough, though slowly. Mr. Mac Donald goes back heart and soul to his college days with their delightful memories for the hopeful and studious. His description of the primitive life in a Scotch university, with all its drawbacks and advantages, is given with equal truth and spirit. But the newly-arrived student has a fit of romantic musing on the threshold of the world which is just opening before him :

'Alec stood at the window and peered down into the narrow street, through which, as in a channel between rocks burrowed into dwellings, ran the ceaseless torrent of traffic. He felt at first as if life had really opened its gates, and he had been transported into the midst of its drama. But in a moment the show changed, turning first into a meaningless procession; then into a chaos of conflicting atoms; reforming itself at last into an endlessly unfolding coil, no break in the continuity of which would ever reveal its hidden mechanism. For to no mere onlooker will Life any more than Fairyland open its secret. A man must become an actor before he becomes a true spectator.'

Mr. Mac Donald conjures up before us the old universitytown-Old Aberdeen evidently-with the picturesque features brought out in strange contrast by the generally bleak scenery and baldly uninteresting buildings. There is the grey old college with its granite crown, its buttressed quadrangle, its colonnades, and its chapel, owing its foundation to the munificence of times when episcopal dignitaries were the liberal patrons of art. There is the venerable Brig of Balgounie,' spanning, as Byron says, its deep black salmon pool, below a reach of the river whose precipitous banks are densely timbered down to the water's edge. Above all, there is the dreary stretch of bents' and links lying along the shore of the melancholy Northern Ocean, and yet with a wild beauty of their own. There Alec, although no dreamer constitutionally, naturally delights to wander when he has fallen in love, which he does quickly enough, with a cousin of his own. But, as we have remarked already, the tender passion in Mr. Mac Donald's Scotch works is generally etherealised beyond reasonable prospect of fruition. We knew beforehand that nothing can come of this impulsive boyish attachment, and therefore, though the pangs in the boy's heart may be terrible, our own does not throb sympathetically; and we feel that the practical considerations, which Mr. Mac Donald's lovers ignore, must be paramount after all. For his lovers either set their affections on women

hopelessly above them, while they are themselves penniless and without prospects, or they begin sighing after maidens who are relatively women, before they have even got out of their jackets. Here is Alec hanging on the lips and waiting on the looks of his cousin Kate, while he is beginning his course of college studies, and leading from necessity a life of privation, that reminds one of the Breton Cloarcks of St. Pol de Léon. Clearly the pair can't marry, and they don't. Kate, for all the exaltation of her fanciful and sentimental character, is too womanly to plight herself to him, even had she no other attachment. At the same time, when we see how gracefully Mr. Mac Donald makes the girl half ardently breathe out her undefined yearnings, while honest Alec makes creditable efforts to understand her and answers prosaically wide of the mark, we feel a regret that we are not indulged with love scenes that might possibly end in happy marriages. So in Robert Falconer,' Robert, when a mere village boy, plunges ecstatically into a hopeless adoration of a beautiful and accomplished Miss St. John, a mature woman brought up in the ways of English refinement. Of course she only likes him; her unsuspicious praises and caresses draw him on; and what we must call his 'calf-love' becomes the absorbing sorrow of his life. It makes him consecrate himself to benevolent works and become the Providence of the helpless.

Fortunately for himself, Alec Forbes forms friendships as well as attachments. He finds a sage mentor in Mr. Cosmo Cupples, perhaps the very best character of the novel, who first makes Forbes' acquaintance by running up against him in the darkness:

""Whustlin'?" said the man interrogatively.

""Ay, what for no?" answered Alec cheerily.

"Haud yer een aff o' rainbows, or ye'll brak yer shins upo' gravestanes," replied the man.'

Poor Cupples himself had broken his shins on a gravestone, whilst fixing his rapt gaze on a rainbow. A lady of noble family had stirred all the depths in a tender and emotional nature, and then turned her back on the peor tutor when he was hopelessly bewitched. With a fine fancy and versatile intellect, he lives the life of a recluse with some chosen books magnificently bound, a pipe, and a jar of spirits for the companions of his solitude. He seems settled into a confirmed drunkard, although his dismal little den is illuminated with fitful flashes of genius. The disreputable, brilliant little man is his own worst enemy. He indulges his pet vice without restraint, but takes special care that his protégé Alec Forbes

shall not fall into it; and when at last his example has more power than his precepts, he braces himself up for a sublime effort, and as the reward of his virtue, he saves himself in saving Alec. Mr. Cupples' literary criticisms are pointed and original. On Sterne :

'The clever deevil had his entrails in his breest an' his hert in his belly, an' regairdet neither God nor his ain mither. His lauchter's no like the cracklin' o' thorns under a pot, but like the nicherin' o' a deil ahint the wainscot.'

Of Shelley he says:

'A bonny cratur' wi' mair thoihts than there was room for i' the bit heid o' him. Consequently he gaed staggerin' aboot as gin he had been tied to the tail o' an invisible balloon. Unco' licht heidet, but no muckle hairm in him by natur'.'

When in uncontrollable anxiety he makes his way on foot to Alec's house in the country, and there helps to nurse the love-stricken prodigal through a critical illness, Cupples is gradually drawn into free interchange of thought with Thomas Crann and Annie Anderson, although the austere elder and the innocent girl at first regard the elderly scapegrace with

some natural

repugnance :

""I was glad to see you at oor kirk, sir," said Thomas. ""What for that?" returned the librarian.

""A stranger wad aye be welcomed to anybody's hoose." "I didna ken it was your hoose."

It's no my hoose; it's the Lord's hoose.

"Ow na. But a smile frae the servin'-lass that opens the door's something till a man that gangs to ony hoose the first time," replied Thomas, who, like many men of rough address, was instantly put upon his good behaviour by the exhibition of like roughness in another. This answer disarmed Cupples.'

The whole book is full of quaint dialogues of the kind, constantly breaking out in sparkles of rustic humour, which must inevitably be spoiled to English people by the language in which they are wrapped up. Everybody must be impressed, however, by Mr. Mac Donald's own descriptions of scenery, and by the passages often pregnant with precious moral lessons, in which he moralises on the character and sources of action of his own creations. And these general criticisms on 'Alec Forbes' adapt themselves almost equally to Robert Falconer,' for the works resemble each other very closely, in purpose as well as in plot. It is true that Falconer is represented as a being of much rarer mould than Alec Forbes, who merely shows noble traits in a far more ordinary nature. Falconer's history is carried farther and higher. He is chastened prematurely by that dis