cation of Evelina. She does not pretend that it was composed much before that time; though a sort of preliminary novel containing the adventures of Evelina's mother was composed very early in her girlhood and destroyed. But Croker in reviewing the Memoir chose to assume that from literary vanity she had suppressed dates, in order to favour the notion of the composition of Evelina being that of a wonderful girl. He accordingly took the trouble to search the registers at Lynn, and made the notable discovery that Madame D'Arblay was born in 1752, and was therefore twenty-five when the novel was published.

Even thus this book, which took so many famous men and women by storm, which has delighted thousands of readers for a hundred years, is allowed to be the work of a young lady between twenty-three and twentyfour, who had seen little of the world, and enjoyed very small advantages of education. Croker's discovery then detracts little from the credit of the book; and can be considered to have brought him but small advantage, unless his object was to cause pain to the venerable writer. In this at least he succeeded; the attack on her truthfulness being especially distressing to her. However, if Madame D'Arblay was not a hard hitter herself, she was the cause of hard hitting in others; and we may feel a malicious pleasure in remembering that this brought upon Croker one of Macaulay's most savage blows: "It did not occur to them [Kenrick, &c.] to search the parish

register, in order that they might be able to twit a lady with having concealed her age. That truly chivalrous exploit was reserved for a bad writer of our own time, whose spite she had provoked by not furnishing him with materials for a worthless edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson, some sheets of which our readers may have doubtless seen round parcels of better books". Croker we know did not produce a wholly worthless edition of Boswell's book, nor is he sufficiently described by the expression "a bad writer of our time"; still for once we feel inclined to applaud a blow which, if somewhat harder than the case deserved, fell on the head of a bully. Now that the dust of these controversies has been long laid, how small they seem compared with the abiding pleasure which the object of them has bequeathed to us! It is perhaps a questionable act to drag them into light again, or to speak of a work like Edwy and Elgiva which the world has been content to let lie buried. But its author long retained a belief in its worth, and the manuscript, carefully bound, is pencilled with alterations and improvements in English and French, showing a parent's partiality and a fond belief in its possible revival. Madame D'Arblay's fame happily rests on better grounds; but even the failures of the author of Evelina and Cecilia may have some interest to a generous reader.

E. S. SHUCKBURGH.

WITH the exception of the Bible there is no more popular book in the rural districts of the south and southwest of Scotland than the Scots Worthies of John Howie. On the cottage-shelf of the Ayrshire peasant and of the Border shepherd alike a copy of it is almost invariably to be found bound in substantial. boards of calf, and rivalling in size the family's holy volume itself. Within these districts it fills the place occupied in England by the Pilgrim's Progress. With solemn satisfaction not a few owners of the book, quiet farmers and cottagers among the hills, can point out in its pages the recorded sufferings of some Covenanting ancestor of their own; and in thousands of simple, God-fearing homes John Howie's work has come to be looked upon with something of the awe and reverence belonging to the Sacred Scriptures.

Notwithstanding the popularity of the Scots Worthies however comparatively few of its readers are personally acquainted with the abode of its author, or with the scenes among which it was written. People may be familiar with the circumstances of John Howie's life from the introduction to his book; but few indeed have found their way to the place itself where the good man's years were spent and where his work was done. Only of late some increased attention has been attracted to the spot by the display, among the antiquities of the International Exhibition at Glasgow, of some of the relics of Covenanting times cherished at Lochgoin by the Howie family.

There are difficulties, it is true, in the way of reaching the home of the Howies; but a visit to the lonely moorland farm helps to a proper

understanding of the work which had its birth there, and affords, besides, a clue now all but unique to many characteristics of the general Covenanting spirit. John Howie's writings indeed possess nothing of the classic polish and the impartial analysis of character conspicuous in the work of so illustrious a biographer as Plutarch, to whom Howie has been likened; but the reader learns to account for the difference when he beholds the upland solitudes amid which the Scottish writer passed his life. The friend of Trajan had all the culture of Greece as well as a cosmopolitan experience of life to aid him in his work. The Scottish farmer on the other hand, inheriting all the bitter traditions of an oppressed sect, and with none of that wider commerce with men so necessary to a just appreciation of the actions of others, had his early instincts narrowed and intensified by the unbroken monotony of his surroundings. somewhat similar circumstances of a life upon the Yorkshire wolds, acting upon a more romantic type of character, produced the sombre, half-morbid work of the Bronte family. The reader of John Howie's book therefore ceases to blame the hard view of life, the strong partiality, and the too frequent bitterness of the writer, when he has become familiar with the lonely wastes which isolate Lochgoin.

The

Even at the present day the spot is by no means easy of access. Until a year or two ago, indeed, it was only to be reached by a long and doubtful cart-track across the moors. No railway invades that desolate upland, and for this reason probably, though it is no more than fifteen miles from the great hive of commerce in the West of

Scotland, the place remains primitive and remote as in the days of John Howie himself. The situation can perhaps best be appreciated by the traveller who makes his way thither on foot from Glasgow or from the little outlying village of Clarkston. The details of the road prepare him for the primitive remoteness of his destination.

On a morning in late autumn there may be mist filling the lower parts of the Clyde valley and hiding the city with its suburbs; but as the road rises among the softly swelling pasture lands, the sun breaks warmly through to dry the dews of night from the wayside grasses, and to make the diamond drops in the hedges glitter and disappear. Trees that a little earlier appeared ghostly on far-off misty hills, resolve themselves into pines on the higher edges of the rising country, spreading their branches in black flakes against the deepening blue of the sky. And presently even the stray wreaths of vapour which had entangled themselves among the scattered copses, are melted and disappear. The sun glints on the backs of the rooks in the park beside the road busily digging up worms in the old green sward; while noisy starlings, the jackals of the larger bird, disturbed by the approaching footstep, fly up with sudden whirr into the trees; and once and again a blackbird, with its soft low note, drifts across from hedge to hedge. There is the sweet smell of the high-piled hay-carts passing on their way to town, to be enjoyed a fragrance full of many pleasant memories and suggestions; and from the group of young cattle resting on the sunny side of a knoll close by comes a breath reminiscent of comfortable homesteads and country life. Milk-carts, too, are overtaken returning lightened of their load. Long before sunrise the ruddy drivers left their far-off farms to carry the warm wealth of their dairies to the town; their day's work is over before the rest of the world is astir, and they

will be in bed again before twilight has deepened into night.

After ascending the long street of Eaglesham village, with its wide green, the wind may be felt coming fresh off the open moor. Far below and behind, the pall of brown fog can be seen still lying over the city; but on the upland the sunshine falls clear and warm, and the dry unfrequented road can be seen far in front running unfenced through yellow hills of bent. Grouse rise in twos and threes to whirr off across these hills; nothing breaks the stillness of the waste but the lonely bleat of sheep; and for miles not even a solitary farm is passed.

Some three miles beyond Ballegeich, that is, just so far beyond the ridge of the watershed, lies Lochgoin. The long, low dwelling of a single story rests in a hollow, and as it is of the same sombre colour as the surrounding moor it might easily be passed unnoticed. Indeed it is not until one is close upon it that the place can be seen at all, with the few wind-blown trees about it, and its one or two hayricks. Looking on it one ceases to marvel that the same family has managed to retain the holding for so many hundreds of years. No one, probably, ever found it worth while to deprive them of it. In the perilous times, indeed, its bleak surroundings and its loneliness were the security of its occupants. A wild place it must be in winter when the tempests are holding their revels on the moor, and the snowdrifts are gathering deep around. Not another dwelling is in sight,-nothing but a waste of heath and scaur; and even on an autumn day no sound is to be heard but the far faint bleat of sheep, the curlew's call, and the wild cry of the peesweep.

Once inside however it becomes easy to understand something of the home feeling which has rooted the owners of Lochgoin for so many generations to the spot. Hospitable people they have always been, even when they suffered for it; and they make a kindly welcome for the pilgrim. And a seat

by the ingle in the clean, low-raftered, stone floored kitchen, with a great peat fire glowing and flaming up the wide chimney, is worth coming far to enjoy. However lonely life may be in such a spot, it has substantial comforts ; and, just for the reason that the rest of the world is shut out, a man in these circumstances must come to have the stronger love for his home.

Here the Howies have lived for more than seven hundred years. The tradition of the family says they emigrated from the French Waldenses in the year 1178 on account of religious persecution. Firmness, therefore, in the matter of religious tenets would appear to be a hereditary trait of their character. For sheltering refugees in Covenanting times their property was twelve times confiscated: there is a record of their cattle having been exposed at the cross of Kilmarnock for sale; and more than once they themselves, far as their remoteness might seem to have removed them from political importance, were compelled to take to the mountains and moors for safety. Here John Howie, the author of the Scots Worthies, was born, November 14th, 1735, and though he was not bred on the spot his father dying when he was but a year old, he was brought up by his maternal grandparents at Blackhill farm-it is easy to perceive how the surroundings of his home must have wrought upon his imagination. Only five miles distant to the south lay the battlefield of Drumclog, with, close by on Loudon Hill, the cairn of stones at which the Covenanters worshipped on the day of the conflict; while a few miles further off lay Airdsmoss, the scene of another Covenanting struggle, with Cameron's monumental stone rising on its dark waste; and no more than a mile away was Priesthill, where Brown the carrier had been shot by the orders of Claverhouse. Add to this the fact that Howie was himself a descendant of the persecuted people and an inheritor of their spirit, and it becomes easy to trace the influence

which induced him to write his Lives, as well as to account for the uncompromising tone in which they and his later works are written.

Upon his entry to Lochgoin in 1763 his natural bent towards books had liberty to declare itself. He had never been robust, and was at best, it seems, no great farmer; besides which the particular kind of produce for which his holding was adapted-stock and sheep-raising allowed him an ample leisure which soon found a natural employment at his desk. As with many of his character however his piety did not prevent his making a good bargain at fair or market; rather the reverse, as his customers were made aware that they had to do with a man of sterling if somewhat assertive integrity. It is reported that the erect, neatly-dressed little man, though humility was ever on his lip, appeared upon these occasions to have a mental consciousness of superiority over less literary acquaintances. Men like him, no doubt, have their foibles, some of them innocent enough, others entailing sometimes serious faults of character. John Howie was apt to be morbidly introspective, as the strict religious disciplinarians of his day frequently were. In his diary, for instance, he accuses himself of carrying parental anxiety to the length of criminality, when his state of feeling was evidently no more than mere natural solicitude after the welfare of his family. And in the last scene of his life it is hardly possible to avoid the impression that the good man had a self-conscious eye to effect. Summoned from his own deathbed to the death-bed of his son, when he had prayed and questioned the lad of his soul's state, he turned to a bystander to remark that it was an event

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of rare occurrence, a dying father addressing the language of consolation to an expiring son About such a remark there appears an absence of the self-forgetfulness characteristic of strong and absorbing grief.

A man however may do useful work

despite such failings; and John Howie has left a portrait, crisp and accurate, if not of the Covenanting times, at least of the spirit of the Covenanters -a more useful contribution to history, perhaps, than a less biassed narrative might have been. The shortcomings of Howie's book are to a great extent the shortcomings of the Covenanters themselves, and between the lines of the Scots Worthies one can read the natural character of the persecuted people. The thorough understanding of both, however, is greatly helped by a knowledge of their environment, circumstances and ante

cedents; and this is supplied at the fountain-head by a visit to Lochgoin.

The family there are still pleased to show visitors a drum and flag, the Fenwick banner, which were used at Drumclog; the sword of Captain Paton, and the Bible he handed from the scaffold to his wife; John Howie's stick and Bible-a "Breeches Bible", by the way; a box of old silver coins hidden in troublous times, and several other relics; and these, together with the associations, literary and historical, of the spot, well repay the trouble of a walk across the breezy uplands of the Ayrshire moors.