of coquettes, who brighten life so much, who so rapidly "draw up with the
new pleugh lad," and who do so very little harm when all is said. Jenny
plays the part of a leal and brave lass in the siege of Tillietudlem,
hunger and terror do not subdue her spirit; she is true, in spite of many
temptations, to her Cuddie, and we decline to believe that she was untrue
to his master and friend. Ikuse, no doubt, is a caricature, though Wodrow
makes us acquainted with at least one Mause, Jean Biggart, who "all the
winter over was exceedingly straitened in wrestling and prayer as to the
Parliament, and said that still that place was brought before her, Our
hedges are broken down!" ("Analecta," ii. 173.) Surely even Dr. McCrie
must have laughed out loud, like Lady Louisa Stuart, when Mause exclaims:
"Neither will I peace for the bidding of no earthly potsherd, though it
be painted as red as a brick from the tower o' Babel, and ca' itsel' a
corporal." Manse, as we have said, is not more comic than heroic, a
mother in that Sparta of the Covenant. The figure of Morton, as usual, is
not very attractive. In his review, Scott explains the weakness of his
heroes as usually strangers in the land (Waverley, Lovel, Mannering,
Osbaldistone), who need to have everything explained to them, and who are
less required to move than to be the pivots of the general movement. But
Morton is no stranger in the land. His political position in the juste
milieu is unexciting. A schoolboy wrote to Scott at this time, "Oh, Sir
Walter, how could you take the lady from the gallant Cavalier, and give
her to the crop-eared Covenanter?" Probably Scott sympathised with his
young critic, who longed "to be a feudal chief, and to see his retainers
happy around him." But Edith Bellenden loved Morton, with that love
which, as she said, and thought, "disturbs the repose of the dead." Scott
had no choice. Besides, Dr. McCrie might have disapproved of so fortunate
an arrangement. The heroine herself does not live in the memory like Di
Vernon; she does not even live like Jenny Dennison. We remember Corporal
Raddlebanes better, the stoutest fighting man of Major Bellenden's