DOMINIE SAMPSON'S PRO-DI-GI-OUS.

37

solitary and somewhat surly sort of business, whereas in the former you have the chance of pleasant and agreeable companionship, in addition to its other attractions.

For one to make a discovery, and to think that oneself has made a discovery, are two widely different things. We readily acknowledge the distinction. That we have made a discovery we shall not venture to affirm, but we think we have. Our discovery, if discovery it be, is this, that Sir Walter Scott is indebted for Dominie Sampson's "prodigious !" to Boswell's Life of Johnson. Who can think of the worthy, kind-hearted, most unsophisticated, and withal most learned, albeit life-long kirkless parson, without instantly recalling his favourite exclamation of "Pro-di-gi-ous?" We stumbled on our discovery in this wise :-A few evenings ago we were reading the third volume of a very fine edition of Boswell's "Johnson," kindly placed at our disposal by Lady Riddell of Strontian-and a good edition of a good book is no small matter to one so far removed from libraries as we are-when we came to a page that described Johnson's meeting with a gentleman who had been his companion at Pembroke College, Oxford, some fifty years previously. Mr. Edwards, for that was the gentleman's name, and Boswell accompanied Johnson home, where, in course of conversation, Mr. Edwards said, addressing Johnson, "Sir, I remember you would not let us say prodigious at college. For even then, sir (turning to Boswell), he was delicate in language, and we all feared him." Now, can any one doubt that it was having his attention particularly called to the word in this passage that made Scott first ponder the absurdity of using a word of such volume and import on every trifling occasion, and caused him, possibly at a long subsequent date (for Scott's memory, as we know, was prodigiously retentive there the word, you will observe, is pat and appropriate enough-prodigiously retentive, we say, of words, phrases, and odd turns of expression)-to put it so frequently as an exclamation of

unspeakable, indescribable import into the mouth of honest Sampson, whom you can no more help laughing at, at times, than you can loving him with all your heart always? The matter, after all, may seem a trifle, and it is a trifle, but such trifles are dear to the lovers of literature. Were Boswell in the flesh subsequent to the publication of Guy Mannering, and had his attention drawn to such a matter, slight as it seems, what a delightful chapter of gossip he could write about it, with fresh reminiscences of his long and intimate intercourse with his "illustrious friend," for whom till his dying day he cherished so much veneration and awe, evermore mingled with most pardonable pride that he knew him as no one else knew him, and loved him as no one else loved him, or perhaps could love him.

We have just been reading our friend Professor Blackie's poem on "Glencoe." The manner in which he " goes at " his subject, to use a sporting phrase, the life, and vigour, and swing, and fervour of the whole, is most refreshing in these days of poetical (save the mark) namby-pambyisms, and eminently characteristic of the learned Professor when at his best. Here you have him, like a knight of the Middle Ages, high in his stirrups, with' lance in rest, "Dh'aindeoin co theireadh e!" blazing on his shield, and who shall dare to stop his fierce career against the perpetrators of the foulest deed on record? Less polished and less artistic than Aytoun's "Widow of Glencoe," it is, nevertheless, the better poem, on such a subject, of the two. Its very ruggedness and stern headlong force are its chief charm, they best befit the theme. Blackie is terribly in earnest; with Aytoun you cannot help feeling it was a mere matter of sentiment and no more.

CHAPTER VII.

O the Barren, Barren Shore-Brilliant Auroral Display-Intense Cold-Birds-Glanders Scribblings on the Back of One Pound Notes,

DURING a week's pleasant and gentle thaw [February 1870], we had hoped that the worst of winter was come and gone; but to our no small disappointment the genial interregnum has been followed by another heavy fall of snow, and a wonderfully keen and biting frost, which, borne on the wings of a surly nor'easter, has again bound up the earth as if with fetters of iron. Under such circumstances the sea-coast, we take it, presents the most dreary and desolate-looking winter picture imaginable; far more so, to our thinking, than either moss, or moorland, or mountain range. There is a something inexpressibly dismal and dowie in the black crape-like belt of sea beach which divides a landscape deeply clad with snow and frostbound, from the dull and leaden coloured deep beyond; the dashing of the waves of said deep upon the shore, uttering the while a sadly funereal and dirge-like moan. If our inland friends, in view of the wintry waste around them, take up the cry of "O the dreary, dreary moorland "-we, dwellers by the sea coast, have the best possible right to finish the Tennysonian line by exclaiming "O the barren, barren shore." It must, by the way, have been on some fair summer eve that the Crown officials first thought of depriving landowners of the sea-shore privileges hitherto enjoyed by them; had it been in winter, the idea, it strikes us, would have withered in the bud; they would have fled the very sight of the dark and dreary "foreshore," and wisely confined themselves to the shelter. of their Woods and Forests!

It is worthy of record that the present severe snow-storm was ushered in by a very splendid and in many respects peculiar auroral display. Shortly after dark on Friday evening, a faint auroral film, over which an occasional streamer flashed impetuously, overspread the northern heavens. All this, however, soon died away, and the north assumed a cold, clear, frosty aspect. Between seven and eight o'clock many meteors, some of them of great brilliancy and beauty, were observed to cross and recross the zenith and its neighbourhood in all directions. Towards the latter hour, however, these ceased, and all of a sudden, in a very few seconds at most, the whole celestial hemisphere from E.N.E. to W.S.W.—from horizon to horizon-appeared completely spanned by a magnificent auroral arch, eight degrees in breadth; like a glorious bridge of a single semicircular span, with its edges or parapets of a deep blood-red colour, and its centre part or roadway of frosted silver; the rest of the heavens, in all directions, being the while of an inky blue, and cold and cloudless, without the slightest appearance of anything like streamers to be seen anywhere. Some idea of the brilliancy of this auroral arch may be formed from the fact that such bright stars as Arcturus, Castor and Pollux, Aldebaran, Mars, and others, which lay along its path, became quite dim, and when located near the centre and brightest part of the stream, almost invisible. Even Venus, which once or twice was overlapped for a few minutes by the arch's margin only, lost all its lustre and sheen, and had a burdened anxious aspect, as if the forehead and "face divine" of a mighty intelligence laboured under the shade of deep and profound thought. For upwards of an hour did this splendid auroral arch continue to span the heavens from horizon to horizon, and undergoing little or no change, until its final disappearance, by what seemed a process of gradual contraction into itself and towards its terminus in the east-north-east, whence it started. Such was the very singular meteoric phenomena by which a severe snow-storm and an amount

of cold almost unparalleled in its intensity was ushered in on the western sea-board of Scotland in February of the year of grace 1870.

And how fares it with our feathered favourites, the wild birds, in these hard times? Fertile as they are in resources, and indefatigable in providing for the wants of the passing hour, all their little shifts must frequently prove inadequate to the supply of their daily wants in such trying times as these. St. Valentine's day has come and gone, but neither in copse, nor hedgerow, nor ivy-mantled wall, find we as yet any traces of nidification, nor has the loveprompted warble, in past years so loud and incessant at this season, been yet heard around us. The robin only cheeps; the sparrow simply chirps; the linnet merely twitters; and even the "gay chaffinch" can only give us a disconsolate " fink, fink," in place of his well-known glad burst of choicest and cheeriest song. The mellow chaunt of the merle and song-thrush delights not yet the ear from copse or brake at early morn or evening-tide. The intense and piercing cold, which, on the wings of the northern blast, sweeps over the land as we write, and as it moans, and sighs, and wildly shrieks by starts in its progress over the deep, causes the lone sea-bird to utter its eeriest and wildest cry, has succeeded in freezing, not only the rivulet and the pool, but has actually bound up the voice of gladness and every source of joyful utterance in all our feathered friends as well. But "nil desperandum," better times are coming. Fields will yet be green, trees will yet be leafy, rivers unbound from icy fetters will yet dance merrily in the sun, and laugh with all their ripples, as they hasten seawards; and then "again shall flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds shall have come, and the voice of the turtle be heard in our land."

Are glanders incurable? is a very ugly, but doubtless a very important question, which is being at present keenly discussed in the columns of several metropolitan journals. By glanders is