description worthy of either Sterne or Goldsmith. I mean where the young
man [2] supposed to have been lost at sea, revisits, after a lapse of
time, the precincts of his own home, watching unseen in the twilight the
occupations and bearings of the different members of the family, and
resolving, under the influence of a most generous feeling, to keep the
secret of his preservation.'

[1] This is not true, as there are many pathetic passages in _Destiny_,
particularly between Edith, the heroine, and her faithless lover, Sir
Reginald.

[2] Ronald Malcolm.

"_North.-' _I remember it well, and you might bestow the same kind of
praise on the whole character of Molly Macaulay. It is a picture of
humble, kind-hearted, thorough-going devotion and long-suffering,
indefatigable gentleness, of which, perhaps, no sinner of our gender
could have adequately filled up the outline. Miss Ferrier appears
habitually in the light of a hard satirist, but there is always a fund
of romance at the bottom of every true woman's heart who has tried to
stifle and suppress that element more carefully and pertinaciously, and
yet who has drawn, in spite of herself, more genuine tears than the
authoress of _Simple Susan.' "_

The story of _Destiny,_ like its predecessors, is laid in Miss Ferrier's
favourite Highlands, and it contains several picturesque and vivid
descriptions of scenery there, --Inveraray, and its surroundings
generally, forming the model for her graphic pen. Much of this novel was
written at Stirling Castle, when she was there on a visit to her sister,
Mrs. Graham, [1] whose husband, General Graham, was governor of that