A ROMANCE OF GLASGOW.*
THIS is an excellent novel. There are characters in it which the creator of Baillie Nicol Jarvie might have " fathered " with- out feeling them any discredit to their kin, and scenes that are as good as Galt's delineations of Scotch life and. peculiarities. Mrs. Tytler's three maiden ladies, the Misses Mackinnon, deserve the honour of comparison with the immortal Jacky, Nicky, and Grizzy, of Miss Ferrier's best novel, Marriage, although they are portrayed with a graver kind of humour. Tam Drysdale, the successful manufacturer whose social rise is 'rather too much for him to manage, is so cleverly drawn and so full of truth as to be convincing, even though the reader should have no typical experience with which to compare him.
The reading of a novel not in the English tongue, but in a dialect, is an exercise which one generally approaches with dis- taste. Even Mrs. Gaskell's Mary Barton was felt to be a tough though toothsome morsel, on account of the Lancastrianism of the lads and lasses. The Highland dialect with which Mr. Black doses his readers is excessively tiresome ; and the imita- tors of Mr. Black, with their " iss," "was," and " rairever,"—as like the real thing as a stage-Irishman's brogue is like the language of Liffey-side—are more tiresome than himself. The broad Scotch of the Lowlands is, however, an exception, perhaps because even in this generation, so perverse in its novel-reading, there lingers a leaven of gratitude to Sir Walter, and the tongue which he made familiar to the " Southron" ears of our fathers has not yet become strange to our own.
Mrs. Ty tler's Lowland Scotch is delightful. It is so thoroughly characteristic of the people in her book ; it is, in every sense, so racy of the soil, that we feel only these people could have said these things, and only in this way. The picture of " Glasgie " society, of the "maiden ladies in their honourable poverty and their respectable pride, with their un- conquerable prejudices, their narrow but upright minds, and their stolid resistance to the giving place of the old order to the new, is remarkably clever. The family pride of the poverty- stricken old women would be simply ridiculous in less skilful hands ; but, while Mrs. Tytler makes it humorous, she never per- mits the reader to feel inclined to laugh at it or them. The father of the Miss Mackinnons had been a man in a better posi- tion than the one they filled. Their grandfather had been far before their father. As for their great-grandfather, "a' Glasgy," as Miss Janet was wont to say,." trim'led at the wag of his finger." Unfortunately, his descendants had little more than his memory to plume themselves upon. The three are ad- mirably sketched, and the picture is framed in this passage :—
"One of the peculiarities of the female Mackinnon mind was that it scorned any attempt in Scotch people to speak high English.' As the ladies' voices were naturally load, and they had accustomed
• Saint Mungo'd City. A Novel. By B..rah Tytler. LoLdon : Chatty, and Windus.
themselves to speak still more loudly to snit Miss Mackinnon's in- firmity, the effect of their homely Scotch shouted to each other or to any visitor was decidedly startling to a new-comer. Another thing the sisters could not abide was a silly pretence at polished, instead of plain, manners. Such weak copying of their neighbours, or yielding to changes which were no improvements, were for the cotton and iron dirt.' Such trifles were far beneath the attention of the Mackinnons. These favoured mortals needed no artificial props. The family's claims to precedence were so unanswerable that a Mackinnon might do exactly as he or she liked, within the bounds of the moral law, for the maiden representatives of the house were. respectable Christians and staunch Presbyterians, assured that the name would grace any speech or action, and confer, not derive, lustre from it."
The sinking of the queer old ladies into deeper and deeper poverty, while they strive to keep their grand-nephew, Lieu- tenant Eneas Mackinnon, who is also very poor, in ignorance of
their straits, the honourable devices to which they resort, their staunch attachment to each other, their oddities, prejudices, and "ways," make up a genre picture which is drawn with a
masterly hand, and finely contrasted with that of the Drysdales.
The plot of this story is not a complicated one ; but it is singularly ingenious, and its simplicity is of a very artistic kind. .
The contrivance by which the fortunes of the lonely and poverty- stricken old ladies, and those of the prosperous, happy, and deserving Tom Drysdale, are made to hang upon each other, is very skilfully devised, and kept up to the end. The two young men of the story, Eneas Mackinnon and "Young Tam," the " viewy " son of the eminently practical proprietor of the great dye-works and bleaching-mills which had their small beginnings in a Mackinnon failure, are, perhaps, a little too indistinct- They do not appear often, and they do not do much ; but this, although strictly speaking a fault in the construction of the novel, does not annoy the reader at all. He has ample com- pensation in the real hero of the story, Tam Drysdale, in his delightful wife, and in his equally charming, but widely different, daughters, Claribel and Eppie. The talk of the homely pair, the vague discontent of the son with a fortune made to his hand, the readiness with which the one daughter accommodates herself to the great world, and the other remains the bonnie Scotch lassie, while all the time Fate is preparing to reverse these self-made plans ; the complications of business, the episodical occurrences in the way of the smooth stream of the story, the dependence of it all upon its one simple motive, form a remarkably interesting combination. Clever sayings, things which one would like to -remember, are plentifully sprinkled all over the book ; and while it is of the quiet order of fiction, it is essentially impressive—a novel which no one who reads it with appreciation will forget.
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