( 164 )
FEMALE NOVELISTS.
No. VI—The Author of "Margaret Maitland."
After a protracted reign of dulness, the fiction of Scottish life has lately given promise of renewing its youth. People had become weary of the insipidities perpetrated by countless imitators of Scott, Wilson, and Galt. It was enough for a time, to have on one’s shelves an Antiquary with his home circle, a Rob Roy with his cateran kith aud kin, a Waverley with his lowland and highland connexions, ranging with such worthies as Lockhart's Adam Blair and Matthew Wald, and Miss Ferrier's iron`-nerved spinsters, and Mrs. Johnstone's west-country vulgarians, and Wilson's Lyndsays and Foresters, and Galt’s parish annalists, and Moir's sartorial heroes. So that when Lilliputian Scotts, and fractions of Galt, reduced to their lowest terms, grew and multiplied, and covered the
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and the flood—
laying to its charge things that it knew not, and imputing to its zoology things that it grew not—a reaction set in, the "land of cakes and brither Scots" was voted a bore, and the world of circulating libraries indignantly repudiated the position that Caledonia was a theme of infinite variety, which no custom could stale, no age wither. But satiety is curable with time. And when, after a due lapse of days and years, there appeared a new pattern of the tartan, a new bloom and fragrance in the heather, a new glory in the thistle, "symbol dear" to not a few of the long-headed as well as to the long-eared—when the voice of Auld Reekie's arch-critic was heard to steal from the solitudes of Craigcrook, bearing witness to a new aspirant in fiction, as one whose delineation of Scottish character was as true and touching as the "Annals of the Parish," purer and
deeper than Galt, and even more absolutely and simply true—when Jeffrey did homage to the heroine as a conception so original, and yet so true to nature, and to Scottish nature, that it was far beyond anything that Galt could reach—when he profusely eulogised her sweet thoughtfulness, and pure, gracious, idiomatic Scotch—and when Mr. Colburn promptly advertised this dictum of approval, what marvel if the tide of popular interest set in with a spring freshness and force to the bleak shores of the north, and a general hush of expectation honoured the lady-wizard (witch is an ugly appellation) whose wand was to rule the waves. A Scottish school of fiction revived in full vigour—of purpose, if not of effect; an anonymous galaxy of female talent was to be seen in the novel-reader's heaven of mild ethereal "blue." The author of "Mrs. Margaret Maitland" is not to be dismissed with disrespect as a mere tenth-rate planet, even by those who hesitate to worship her as a fixed star. Nor are others of the same group to be lightly esteemed—the author of "Olive," for instance, and Miss Douglas—but none is at once so characteristically Scottish and so generally mark-worthy as Mrs. Margaret's biographer. She has probably less of the poetry of pathos and passion than her fair countrywoman who has given us the fortunes of the "Ogilvies," and the heart-struggles of the "Head of the Family." But there in more of subdued wisdom, of mellowed art, of equable manner, of
