SIR WALTER SCOTT'S PET.

DR. JOHN BROWN, of Edinburgh, has one of the keenest eyes now open on our social world for a quality for which it is a great discredit to the English language that we have no individual name—naiveté. In all his writings, from his charming narrative of " Rab and his Friends," to his thoughtful essay on Arthur Hallam's fresh and single-minded theology, he has always shown the same eager love of those bright and new and always instructive glimpses of the universe which are caught through sympathy with the swift, honest glances of inexperienced and, therefore, utterly disen- gaged simplicity. No other man has given us such a delightful insight into the moral naiveté of the lower animal world,—that ' world where moral qualities are first discernible in the germ,—and taught us to enjoy so keenly the quaint undress in which the dog, ty instance, shows desires and emotions that in a more arti- Lcial form play a very large part in human society. The

"genius for unexpectedness" which he admired so just1/ in "Peter," the Skye puppy, is, indeed, one of the great charms of his own intellect. He makes us feel the world fresh again by discovering the first anticipations of our dull and con- ventional humanities in fresh minds and fresh species. The unaffected importance with which dogs regard their meals, the quaint pride with which they congratulate themselves on their acuteness in understanding an order and executing it successfully, the mischievous side-glances with which they watch the impression

made by a forbidden trick, the frank jealousy and disgust with which they treat a rival, their pathetic loyalty unto death to their masters, are all made charming in his pages as naïf anticipations of human nature. And he has the same genius for discovering the far higher nuivehis of the same general kind amongst children, and has never done us a greater service than by turning the attention of the world, in the last number of the North British Review (in an article which has been just republished*) to the exquisite humour and originality of Sir Walter Scott's fascinating little friend, Mar-

jorie Fleming.

Marjorie Fleming was a little girl who died at seven years of age in the winter of 1811, and who, in the last year of her life, kept childish journals and wrote letters that ought to be, for their wonderful picture of a genuine child's fun and fire and fore- casts of matured sweetness, as immortal as the works of her great admirer Sir Walter Scott. In all genuine children, where the bud gives any discernible forecast of the flower, and not merely reason to expect it, there is a primitiveness of thought and feeling which is, to the matured qualities even of the finest mind, what the wild rose is to the garden rose,--something far more exquisitely fascinating by the singleness of impression produced,—by the very absence of those richer forms and colours which culture brings. But, usually, there is also a want of fire, though not of vividness, in such early anticipations of character, a want which robs the picture of its interest to all except thorough-going children-worshippers. There was not this in little Marjorie, who, besides having all the fun, the delight in mischief, the caprice, the love of influence, which such brilliant little women have often possessed, had an indescribable fire of her own which, in combination with her humour and her sweet- ness, was quite enough to rivet the chains on Scott's impressible genius and tender heart. No such striking picture has ever been drawn of the great novelist as that of Scott carrying off the little woman through the snow from her aunt's house in Edinburgh, wrapped, like a little lamb, in the corner of his shepherd's plaid, to his own house, and then saying his nonsense-lesson dutifully to her as he stood before her like a sheepish schoolboy, with his hands behind him :—

' Wonery, twoery, tickery, seven?

Alibi, crackaby, ten, and eleven ; Pin, pan, musky dan ; Tweedle-um, twoddlo-um, Twenty-wan; eerie, orbs, ourie, You, are, out.'

He pretended to great difficulty, and she rebuked him with most comical gravity, treating him as a child. Ho used to say that when he came to Alibi, Crackaby, he broke down, and Pin-Pan, Musky-Dan, Tweedle-um, Twoddlc-um made him roar with laughter. Ho said Musky-Dan especially was beyond endurance, bringing up an Irishman and his hat fresh from the Spice Islands and odoriferous Ind ; she getting quite bitter in her displeasure at his ill-behaviour and stupid- ness. Then he would read ballads to her in his own glorious way, the two getting wild with excitement over Gil Morrice or the Baron of Sniailhobn ; and he would take her on his knee, and make her repeat Constance's speeches in King John, till ho swayed to and fro, sobbing his fill Scott used to say that he was amazed at her power over him, saying to Mrs. Keith, ' She's the most extraordinary creature I ever met with, and her repeating of Shakespeare overpowers me as nothing else does."

• By Minna Edmonaton and Douglas, Edinburgh.

What was the secret of this great fascination ? Principally, we think,—though in a very much higher and richer region, of course, —exactly that which also constituted the secret of Scott's passion for the noblest amongst the lower anitnals,—the charm of that ex- cessive naturalness, that naked simplicity, with which the highest feelings, and deepest intuitions, and richest humour of intellectual life, dawn on us in the crystal surface of a mind only just emerging from unconsciousness, utterly incapable therefore of any of the complexities of experience, and yet with fire enough to anticipate in strength and intensity of apprehension the feelings and per- ceptions of maturity. What an exquisite childish anticipation of all womanly delights is there in that bit of diary written at six years of age at Braehead !—

" The day of my existence here has been delightful and enchanting. On Saturday I expected no less than three well-made Bucks the names of whom is here advertised. Mr. George Crakey [Craigie] and William Keeth and Jn Keith—the first is the funniest of every one of them. Mr. Crakey and I walked to Crakeyball hand in hand in Innocence and matitation [meditation] sweet thinking on the kind love which flows in our tender hearted mind which is overflowing with majestic pleasure no one was ever so polite to me in the hole state of my existence. Mr. Crakey you must know is a great Buck and pretty good-looking. I am at Ravelston enjoying nature's fresh air. The birds are singing sweetly

—the calf doth frisk and nature shows her glorious face walked to that delightful place Crakeyhall with a delightful young man beloved by all his friends especially by me his loveress, but I must not talk any more about him for Isa said it is not proper for to speak of gentahnen but I will never forget him."

Of course, part of the enjoyment we take in this is derived from the humorous contrast, of which Marjorie was entirely unconscious, between the little "loveress's " frankly confessed delight in her fancied conquest, and the form in which she would have confided to herself the same sentiments at a somewhat riper age. But that is only a part of the charn;t. The piquancy of the passage lies chiefly in the clear dawn of that feminine love for the luxury of tranquil emotion and gratified dignity which speaks in the confession of walking "hand in hand in innocence and matitation, sweet thinking on the kind love which flows in our tender-hearted mind, which is overflowing with majestic pleasure," and in the tender complacency with which the child admits its principal source, "no one was ever so polite to me in the hole state of my existence." Yet no woman could have expressed the brimming serenity of sweet sensations so happily ; for any woman who had tried to express it at all would have allowed a shyness or a consciousness to mingle with it that would have destroyed all the exquisite singleness of this loveress's "majestic pleasure."

The naiveté of Marjorie's humour is at least second amongst her fascinations. There is the charm in it of a child's fresh thought boldly placed in juxtaposition with the dusty old world's used-up ideas, and quite conscious of the contrast. She had been taught to believe in the " divil," and writes pretty freely about him, but he has only three positive attributes to her playful imagination ; he invented medicine, especially "sine tea," and the multiplication- table, with both of which happy conceptions he did not cease to torment even her; while he held in reserve the greatest terror of all, with which in old times he had nearly worn out the piety of Job—" boils." "I am very glad,' she says, "that Satan has not given me boils and many other misfortunes. In the holy bible these words are written that the Devil goes like a roaring lyon in search of his pray but the lord lets us escape from him but we do

not strive with this awfull Spirit to-day I pronounced a word which should never come out of a lady's lips it was that I called John a Impudent Bitch. I will tell you what I think made me in so bad a humour was, I got 1 or 2 cups of that bad, bad sina tea to day:" She is evidently not quite sure whether Job would have succeeded in resisting Satan if his boils had been com- plicated by multiplication-table and " sina tea," for she says, in confessing how ill she had behaved, "It was the very same devil that tempted Job that tempted me I am sure but he resisted Satan though he had boils and many many other misfortunes which I have escaped I am now going to tell you the horible and wretched plaege that my multiplication gives me you can't con- ceive it, the most devilsh thing is 8 times 8 and 7 times 7 it is what nature itself can't endure." Marjorie probably held that Satan had interposed a preternatural intellectual difficulty in the 8 and the 7 lines of the multiplication-table for the special trial of children's tempers, and with parfectly correct intellectual instinct, as well as true humour, she did pitch on the most difficult efforts of memory which the decimal system requires of children. For our- selves, we always h?ld 7 times 9 the peculiarly " devilish " point which "nature itself can't endure," though at Marjorie's age we coin certainly never have expressed the feeling so eloquently. Indeed, the child had, no doubt, a keen sense of humour in attributing 7 times 7 to the agency of the same devil who invented boils. She thought the multiplication-table, as a whole, a sort of intellectual eruption of demoniacal origin, even though, like the boils, "it might be turned to some good purpose to be revealed hereafter." But Marjorie's highest feat of humour is the epitaph on the three turkeys destroyed by rats, and the feelings of their bereaved parent. The tenderness and solici- tude with which she first delineates the desolate parent's feelings, and then the extraordinary evidence which she suddenly gives of the bird's patience and resignation, forms an exquisite combination of childish nonsense with social irony. Only a child who had a clear sense of the fun in supposing that oaths are a sign of pro- found grief could, even when solicited by a promising rhyme, have ventured to praise the turkey-hen for not swearing at her loss :— "Three turkeys fair their last have breathed,

And now this world for ever leaved, Their father and their mothers too, Will sigh and weep as well as you, Mourning for their offspring fair, Whom they did nurse with tender care, Indeed the rats their bones have crazteh'd.

Into eternity are they laanch'd; Their graceful forms and pretty eyes Their fellow fowls did not despise, A direful death indeed they had, That would put any parent mad.

But she was more than usual calm She did not give a single dam !"

This stroke of humour is peculiarly happy with regard to a turkey, for certainly no enraged bird does swear so dreadfully and inarticulately, till its throat is on fire with oaths, as the turkey-cock, and Marjorie had previously experienced its deficiencies of temper, for in another part of her journal she had registered, with the same naïf humour, "it young turkie of two or three months old, would you believe it? the father broke its leg and he killed another 1 I think he ought to be transported or hanged." This is a delightful instance of the child's humour, which consists in applying gravely thoughts large enough for, and gathered from, the great human world to the little scale of her own childish interests, half knowing, and half unconscious of, the grotesqueness of effect produced. A turkey expiating its crimes on the scaffold, or transported for life for aggravated assault and turkey-slaughter, was an idea the drollery of which was probably only half visible to her. All her moral sentiments are at once applied to the animal world. She is horrified at our summary method of keeping down the canine and feline popula- tions. "I think it is shocking to think that the dog and cat should bear them, and they are drowned after all. I would rather have a man-dog than a woman-dog, because they do not bear like woman-dogs ; it is a hard case—it is shocking."

But, after all, that which gives its charm to all this childish non- sense, and humour, and tenderness, and which fascinated Sir Walter Scott, is the wonderful ardour with which the child stretched her sympathies into states of mind she could only have half un- derstood, and beautified them, even while she gave them a simpli- city that was alien to them, by making them child-like. When she repeats the part of Constance, in King John, till Scott cannot repress his sobs, and writes home such letters asthe following, there is, to us, an inexpressible pathos involved in the mere effort of A little child to enter into the heart of such fee,lings as those of which she touches the chords :—" My dear little Mama,—I was truly happy to hear that you were all well. . . . I will write to you as often as lean; but I am afraid not every week. I long for you with the longings of a child to embrace you—to fold you in my arms. I respect you with all the respect due to a mother. You don't know how I love you. So I shall remain, your loving child—X.

FLEMING."

And it is not only in personal relations that there is this touch- ing, but perfectly unaffected, sympathy with thoughts and feelings stretching away far out of her reach. When she says, "the birds are singing sweetly,—the calf doth frisk and nature shows her gloriouif face,"---and again, "I came here, as I thought, to enjoy nature's delightful breath, it is sweeter than a Bal of rose-oil, but alas! my hopes are disappointed, it is always spitt'ring, but I often get a blink, and then I am happy ;" or, "The balmy breeze comes down from heaven, And makes us like for to be living!"

or again, "I love to walk in lonely solitude and leave the bustel of the noisy town behind me, and while I look on nothing but what strike the eye with sights of bliss, I think myself transported far beyond the reach of the wicked sons of men,"—there is an effort in the fiery little soul to share the "lonely rapture of lonely minds," and a real forecast of meditative joy, which blends the white loveliness of childhood with the sweetness, and passion, and faith of maturer years. No wonder Sir Walter Scott's heart and intellect were alike fascinated by such a union of all the characteristic beauty of the bud with half the fragrance and har- mony of the flower. She was not such a mere child of nature as Wordsworth loved to delineate-

" Myself will to my darling be

Both law and impulse ; and with me The child, in rock and plain, In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, Shall feel an overseeing power To kindle or restrain."

She had as much in her of love for man as of love for na

she had the simple pleasure in admiration, a wealth of gene- rous love and sympathy which is rare even among wonien, all the tender mischief and simple trust of a little child, and yet combined these with a genuine passion for musing on the beauty of the earth and sky. It is a marvellous lesson on that nearness of God to children,—and to real, happy, mischievous children, not saintly apologies for children,—which is usually so common and so empty a phrase on our lips, because we fry to interpret it as deny- ing human foibles to children, instead of as attributing to them fresh and searching glimpses into a world far beyond and above themselves.