favorable opportunities. Mr. Barrie was a townsman of weaving Thrums, somewhat remotely connected with the Highlands and their romance by the glens that lead upwards to the Lower Grampians. It, was the good fortune of Mr. Crockett to have been born in Galloway, the very home of wild legend, of fierce warfare and daring adventure, and of the pious traditions kept sacred in many a memory. The Galwegians still made a stand against the legions when Agricola had carried the eagles into the far north. Galloway with its trackless morasses and its broken seaboard was a second fatherland to the roving Egyptians and the favorite resort of the smugglers from France and Holland, who ran their cargoes in the moonlight in its creeks and bays. Galloway was a sanctuary for the persecuted West-country Whigs; the wanderers held their conventicles in the solitudes of the moorlands, where the moan of the lapwing and the scream of the curlew chimed in with the bursts of prayer and praise; and in its caves the apostles of the Covenant found safe retreat when Clavers and Lagg were beating the hills for them.

But, above all,

The sufferings and escapes of God's persecuted folk must have appealed most strongly to Mr. Crockett's Cameronian sympathies. Yet we place "The Raiders" as by far the first of his works. There is no approach to rhapsody, cant, or rant in it, though we only use those strong expressions as indicating the snares which more or less beset any Presbyterian writer on the times of the Trouble. Moreover, construction is not Mr. Crockett's forte, and in "The Raiders" he is kept straight by stress of circumstances. The story follows the fortunes of two lives that are closely intertwined. It abounds in exciting episodes which arise naturally out of the situations; it is compact and logically sensational, for the setting is so picturesque that thrilling incidents evolve themselves

spontaneously. The people in the fertile Gallwegian lowlands are literally living between the devil and the deep sea. On the one hand they are subjected to the descents of the black or the white smugglers—that is, of men who shoot and slash only in self-defence, or of ruffians who, having forfeited their lives, are ready for any atrocity. These descents of the contrabandists are spasmodic or casual; besides most of the white smugglers are kenned folk who have kin all over the country. Even austere Cameronians look leniently on breaches of the excise laws, and if they find an anker of brandy at the back of a dyke, they thank the Almighty for his mercies, and convey it into a sure place of hiding. But, on the other hand, and in the hills, are the gypsy outlaws who neither fear God nor regard men, and have their fastnesses whither the sheriff dare not follow them. They are the Raiders who drive their creaghs like barbarous Highland caterans, who levy blackmail on all and sundry, and when the laird is at feud with them, or the tenant refuses their "cess," set the red cock crowing of a night in the stackyard and peaceful homestead. A lad of spirit, left to his own guardianship and devices, could hardly help being drawn into these broils, and Patrick Heron commits himself doubly by falling in love with the daughter of a fighting family to whom gypsies and black smugglers bear a deadly enmity. So the story,

as we said, travels forward of itself. Like the amphibious hero of the siege of Acre, Mr. Crockett displays his warlike versatility

Alike to him the sea, the shore, The brand, the bridle, or the oar. We have a succession of highly illustrative pictures. There are surprises of slumbering farmers, and attacks in force on half-fortified feudal mansions. There are brawls and fierce single combats with rough and ready

weapons; there are games of hide and seek in the moors where the penalty of discovery is death; and horrors come to a climax in the robbers' den above "the murder hole" in the dark loch, where the reluctant guest shudders at bed-clothes clotted with gore, and finds a corpse in the oaken chest which is the sole furniture of the chamber. It is superfluous to add that the hero's lady-love is ravished from him, and that, following her to what was literally the back of his world, he saves her by heroic audacity and superhuman endurance. But the most impressive of these brilliantly effective scenes is the raiding and driving of a great herd of Lowland cattle when the country has been roused and the passes occupied. The subject has been often treated by Scottish painters, but never, perhaps, with so much spirit. We see the cattle stampeded in the night, with the wild horsemen and footmen goading them forward. We see the overdriven beasts falling out before "the hurrying pikeman's goad," as the weaker become footsore, hungry and athirst. Finally, there is the demoniacal scene when the raiders with their droves are repeatedly repulsed from the narrow bridgeway that has been secured by their pursuers. The cries of jubilation are raised prematurely, for the Egyptians have an infernal device in reserve. The bellowing herd is besprinkled with tar, then matches are set to their shaggy hides; they are bestridden by the baffled demons who are herding them, and the defenders are swept away in the headlong rush. The catastrophe which metes out the long-deferred vengeance, now that the cup of iniquity has been filled to overflowing, is wrought out in the memorable storm of the fifteen days which buried these uplands in impenetrable snowdrift. And the elect are saved, as in the ill days of the Trouble, by sheltering in a commodious cave only known to the mysterious "Silver Sand.”

Silver Sand is ingeniously introduced. We had read a full half of the volume before recollecting that we had heard nothing of John Faa, although it professes to relate certain passages in his life. Then of course we caught the clue to the mystery which it would have been morally impossible to maintain to the end. John Faa, a belted earl and hereditary prince and seer of the Faa clan, had from circumstances, adequately explained, a foot in either camp. As Baillie Jarvie's worthy father the deacon might have said, he had a conscience of a sort and drew the line at cold-blooded murder. But blood being thicker than water, and as, after all, he was a monarch by divine right, he continued relations with his kin and their more villainous allies, whose misdeeds he condemned and solemnly cursed.

Nor is Mr. Crockett anyways inferior to Mr. Barrie in dry and subtle humor. We take at random a remark of the hero's father, when giving his son the mature fruit of his wisdom:

Mind ye, Patrick (he used to say), that the Good Book says, "a soft answer turneth away wrath." Now keep your temper, laddie. Never quarrel wi' an angry person, specially a woman. Mind ye, a soft answer's aye best. It's commanded, and forbye, it makes them far madder than anything else ye could say.

We should be sorry to aver that Mr. Crockett is a man of one book, or of two, and moreover, it would be unjust. But, comparing him with himself, the "Stickit Minister," and the "Raiders," in their respective manners, stand far above his other productions. Scott's critics were in the habit of objecting that a Meg Merrilees was always cropping up in his novels. With more reason we may say that in Mr. Crockett's mossland romances we are forever renewing acquaintance with almost identical types, although in "The Men of the Moss Hags" and "The Grey Men

of Auchindrane," he may change the secular for the religious garb, and assimilate his ministers and lay saints to the tone of the Puritanism of the times. There is the outspoken Scotch lady of the olden school, who brings blushes to the cheeks of maidens by calling a spade a spade; there is the narrow-minded minister with a fanatical misconception of his mission, but a very warm human heart; there is the youth drawn by circumstances and godly education to the side of persecuted religion, though the blood of warm summer is flowing hotly in his veins and the old Adam is roused on slight provocation; there is the henpecked husband who is a man of action nevertheless, and, above all, there is the shrill-voiced motherly woman, whose bark is far worse than her bite, and whose heart and home are ever open as the day to melting charity. Sundry Scotch romancers have painted Claverhouse. The Clavers of "Old Mortality," though censured by McCrie, was limned with the vigorous realism of a Raeburn and can never be

surpassed. The Ettrick Shepherd, from the point of view of the Cameronian hill-shepherd, gave a ludicrously burlesqued caricature in "The Brownie of Bodbeck." But it seems to us that Mr. Crockett, between Presbyterian sympathies and romantic admiration of chivalrous courage, has hit off a singularly happy mean and sketched a very probable personality. His Claverhouse is a gentleman, fanatical in his loyalty, as his victims were in their religious faith, but a soldier with a heart as hard as the temper of his sword, and with a constitutional indifference to suffering, fostered by an exaggerated sense of duty. If the genial Scott could speak lightly in the beginning of this century of "the beastly Covenanters," who were only superior to the brutes inasmuch as they walked on two legs, we can, perhaps, appreciate the feelings with which Graham regarded the Calvinists

who were the irreconcilable enemies of the throne and the administration in an age when the affairs of state were directed by a Queensberry or a Lauderdale.

We can only allude to the "Lilac Sun Bonnet" and "Cleg Kelly." Yet "The Sun Bonnet" is a pretty and delicate fancy, none the less piquant that it was written by a Scottish clergyman in orders. It is a romance of very charming love-making, and the delicate and insidious courtship of winsome Charteris is cleverly contrasted with the vulgar loves of the maids of the farm, with their business-like suitors and the rustic Lovelaces. There is the amorous poetic vein of a Moore and the gay verve of a De Grammont blending with the broadest farce. There have been few more startling conversions in the annals of Scottish churches than the sudden transformation of the priggish probationer who has been a professed misogynist into a passionate admirer of the fairest of her sex. As for "Cleg Kelly," it sadly disappoints us. There is no sort of sequence in it, yet Mr. Crockett challenges criticism on that score by heading his sixty chapters as Cleg's sixty successive adventures. In many of them the young street Samaritan is dropped out of the story, though we follow with no little interest and sympathy the fortunes of his family of small protégés. In that children's pilgrimage, as is his wont, Mr. Crockett brings out the kindly side of feminine nature, and among the children the patronizing little Miss Briggs is charming as his sweetheart daughter in his "Sweetheart Travellers." As for the mad doings and strange housekeeping of General Theophilus Raff, they are more idiotically extravagant than those of Miss Havisham, which are the most fatal blot in "Great Expectations." The general, like the melodramatic gypsy, in Mr. Barrie's "Little Minister," is forcibly dragged in by the head and shoulders, much to

as

the injury of a far-fetched and disjointed story.

"Ian Maclaren" is, we believe, a clergyman like Mr. Crockett, and so we should judge from internal evidence. "The Bonnie Briar Bush" blooms in the parish of Drumtochty, swept by breezes from the Moray Firth blowing over the Moor of Rannoch. Drumtochty is said to stand for Logiealmond, but we may locate it on the borders of the Western Highlands, where the mystic Celt meets the dour Covenanting Calvinist in the services of the Free Kirk. The author has all the intelligent sympathies of Mr. Barrie, and he is more searching in subtle mental analysis, as perhaps he excels Mr. Crockett in striking and sensational, yet lifelike, portraiture. "The Bonnie Briar Bush" is a sparkling book, though the weeping climate and the sombre scenery throw heavy shadows on the personalities of the struggling community. The hearts are sound and the affections warm, but it is de rigueur to restrain all signs of feeling, and to measure out language carefully after slow consideration. There is infinite humor underlying the solemn gravity, but there is no cleverer chapter than that on "the cunning speech of Drumtochty." No parishioner commits himself rashly to an assertion of the most self-evident truth; and even gratitude for a good harvest or any other temporal blessing is strictly guarded, apparently lest it should seem a wanton provoking of Providence to change the blessing for a curse. There is an admirably droll scene where the parish beadle, cited as a reluctant witness in a clerical court, baffles the counsel for the impeachment, over a frank definition of drunkenness. The Drumtochty folk only speak their minds like men—or women-when the surging of inexpressible mental anguish bursts the barriers of conventional restraint. So far as good neighborship and friendly hearts go, Drumtochty, notwithstand