Books and Bookmen | Page 9

his young kinswoman had he been more masterful and self- confident. Thackeray takes us to a larger and gayer scene than Scott's Edinburgh of narrow streets and gloomy jails and working people and old-world theology, but yet it may be after all Scott is stronger. No bit of history, for instance, in Esmond takes such a grip of the imagination as the story of the Porteous mob. After a single reading one carries that night scene etched for ever in his memory. The sullen, ruthless crowd of dour Scots, the grey rugged houses lit up by the glare of the torches, the irresistible storming of the Tolbooth, the abject helplessness of Porteous in the hands of his enemies, the austere and judicial self-restraint of the people, who did their work as those who were serving justice, their care to provide a minister for the criminal's last devotions, and their quiet dispersal after the execution--all this remains unto to-day the most powerful description of lynch law in fiction. The very strength of old Edinburgh and of the Scots-folk is in the Heart of Midlothian. The rivalry, however, between these two books must be decided by the heroine, and it seems dangerous to the lover of Scott to let Thackeray's fine lady stand side by side with our plain peasant girl, yet soul for soul which was greater, Rachel of Castlewood or Jeanie Deans? Lady Castlewood must be taken at the chief moment in Esmond, when she says to Esmond: "To-day, Henry, in the anthem when they sang, 'When the Lord turned the captivity of Zion we were like them that dream'--I thought, yes, like them that dream, and then it went, 'They that sow in tears shall reap in joy; and he that goeth forth and weepeth, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.' I looked up from the book and saw you; I was not surprised when I saw you, I knew you would come, my dear, and I saw the gold sunshine round your head."
That she said as she laughed and sobbed, crying out wildly, "Bringing your sheaves with you, your sheaves with you." And this again, as Esmond thinks of her, is surely beaten gold. "Gracious God, who was he, weak and friendless creature, that such a love should be poured out upon him; not in vain, not in vain has he lived that such a treasure be given him? What is ambition compared to that but selfish vanity? To be rich, to be famous: what do these profit a year hence when other names sound louder than yours, when you lie hidden away under the ground along with the idle titles engraven on your coffin? Only true love lives after you, follows your memory with secret blessing or precedes you and intercedes for you. 'Non omnis moriar'- -if dying I yet live in a tender heart or two, nor am lost and hopeless living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays for me." This seems to me the second finest passage in English fiction, and the finest is when Jeanie Deans went to London and pleaded with the Queen for the life of her condemned sister, for is there any plea in all literature so eloquent in pathos and so true to human nature as this, when the Scottish peasant girl poured forth her heart: "When the hour of trouble comes to the mind or to the body--and seldom may it visit your ladyship--and when the hour of death that comes to high and low--lang and late may it be yours--oh, my lady, then it is na' what we hae dune for oursels but what we hae dune for ithers that we think on maist pleasantly. And the thought that ye hae intervened to spare the puir thing's life will be sweeter in that hour, come when it may, than if a word of your mouth could hang the haill Porteous mob at the tail of ae tow." Jeanie Deans is the strongest woman in the gallery of Scott, and an embodiment of all that is sober, and strong, and conscientious, and passionate in Scotch nature.
The bookman has indeed no trouble arranging his gossips in his mind, where they hold good fellowship, but he is careful to keep them apart upon his bookshelves, and when he comes home after an absence and finds his study has been tidied, which in the feminine mind means putting things in order, and to the bookman general anarchy (it was the real reason Eve was put out of Eden), when he comes home, I say, and finds that happy but indecorous rascal Boccaccio, holding his very sides for laughter, between Lecky's History of European Morals and Law's Serious Call, both admirable books, then the bookman