torches, the irresistible storming of the Tolbooth, the abject helplessness of Porteous in the hands of his enemies, the austere and judicial self-restraint of the people, who did their work as those who were serving justice, their care to provide a minister for the criminal’s last devotions, and their quiet dispersal after the execution—all this remains unto to-day the most powerful description of lynch law in fiction.  The very strength of old Edinburgh and of the Scots-folk is in the Heart of Midlothian.  The rivalry, however, between these two books must be decided by the heroine, and it seems dangerous to the lover of Scott to let Thackeray’s fine lady stand side by side with our plain peasant girl, yet soul for soul which was greater, Rachel of Castlewood or Jeanie Deans?  Lady Castlewood must be taken at the chief moment in Esmond, when she says to Esmond: “To-day, Henry, in the anthem when they sang, ‘When the Lord turned the captivity of Zion we were like them that dream’—I thought, yes, like them that dream, and then it went, ‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy; and he that goeth forth and weepeth, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.’  I looked up from the book and saw you; I was not surprised when I saw you, I knew you would come, my dear, and I saw the gold sunshine round your head.”

That she said as she laughed and sobbed, crying out wildly, “Bringing your sheaves with you, your sheaves with you.”  And this again, as Esmond thinks of her, is surely beaten gold.  “Gracious God, who was he, weak and friendless creature, that such a love should be poured out upon him; not in vain, not in vain has he lived that such a treasure be given him?  What is ambition compared to that but selfish vanity?  To be rich, to be famous: what do these profit a year hence when other names sound louder than yours, when you lie hidden away under the ground along with the idle titles engraven on your coffin?  Only true love lives after you, follows your memory with secret blessing or precedes you and intercedes for you.  ‘Non omnis moriar’—if dying I yet live in a tender heart or two, nor am lost and hopeless living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays for me.”  This seems to me the second finest passage in English fiction, and the finest is when Jeanie Deans went to London and pleaded with the Queen for the life of her condemned sister, for is there any plea in all literature so eloquent in pathos and so true to human nature as this, when the Scottish peasant girl poured forth her heart: “When the hour of trouble comes to the mind or to the body—and seldom may it visit your ladyship—and when the hour of death that comes to high and low—lang and late may it be yours—oh, my lady, then it is na’ what we hae dune for oursels but what we hae dune for ithers that we think on maist pleasantly.  And the thought that ye hae intervened to spare the puir thing’s life will be sweeter in that hour, come when it may, than if a word of your mouth could hang the haill Porteous mob at the tail of ae tow.”  Jeanie Deans is the strongest woman in the gallery of Scott, and an embodiment of all that is sober, and strong, and conscientious, and passionate in Scotch nature.

The bookman has indeed no trouble arranging his gossips in his mind, where they hold good fellowship, but he is careful to keep them apart upon his bookshelves, and when he comes home after an absence and finds his study has been tidied, which in the feminine mind means putting things in order, and to the bookman general anarchy (it was the real reason Eve was put out of Eden), when he comes home, I say, and finds that happy but indecorous rascal Boccaccio, holding his very sides for laughter, between Lecky’s History of European Morals and Law’s Serious Call, both admirable books, then the bookman is much exhilarated.  Because of the mischief that is in him he will not relieve those two excellent men of that disgraceful Italian’s company for a little space, but if he finds that the domestic sprite has thrust a Puritan between two Anglican theologians he effects a separation without delay, for a religious controversy with its din and clatter is more than he can bear.

The bookman is indeed perpetually engaged in his form of spring cleaning, which is rearranging his books, and is always hoping to square the circle, in both collecting the books of one department together, and also having his books in equal sizes.  After a brief glance at a folio and an octavo side by side he gives up that attempt, but although he may have to be content to see his large Augustine, Benedictine edition, in the same row with Bayle’s Dictionary, he does not like it and comforts himself by thrusting in between, as a kind of mediator, Spotswood’s History of the Church of Scotland with Burnett’s Memoirs of the Dukes of Hamilton, that edition which has the rare portrait of Charles I. by Faithorne.  He will be all his life rearranging, and so comes to understand how it is that women spend forenoons of delight in box rooms or store closets, and are happiest when everything is turned upside down.  It is a slow business, rearrangement, for one cannot flit a book bound after the taste of Grolier, with graceful interlacement and wealth of small ornaments, without going to the window and lingering for a moment over the glorious art, and one cannot handle a Compleat Angler without tasting again some favourite passage.  It is days before five shelves are reconstructed, days of unmixed delight, a perpetual whirl of gaiety, as if one had been at a conversazione, where all kinds of famous people whom you had known afar had been gathered together and you had spoken to each as if he had been the friend of your boyhood.  It is in fact a time of reminiscences, when the two of you, the other being Sir Thomas Browne, or Goldsmith, or Scott, or Thackeray, go over passages together which contain the sweetest recollections of the past.  When the bookman reads the various suggestions for a holiday which are encouraged in the daily newspapers for commercial purposes about the month of July, he is vastly amused by their futility, and often thinks of pointing out the only holiday which is perfectly satisfying.  It is to have a week without letters and without visitors, with no work to do, and no hours, either for rising up or lying down, and to spend the week in a library, his own, of course, by preference, opening out by a level window into an old-fashioned garden where the roses are in full bloom, and to wander as he pleases from flower to flower where the spirit of the books and the fragrance of the roses mingle in one delight.

Times there are when he would like to hold a meeting of bookmen, each of whom should be a mighty hunter, and he would dare to invite Cosmo Medici, who was as keen about books as he was about commerce, and according to Gibbon used to import Indian spices and Greek books by the same vessel, and that admirable Bishop of Durham who was as joyful on reaching Paris as the Jewish pilgrim was when he went to Sion, because of the books that were there.  “O Blessed God of Gods, what a rush of the glow of Pleasure rejoiced our hearts, as often as we visited Paris, the Paradise of the World!  There we long to remain, where on account of the greatness of our love the days ever appear to us to be few.  There are delightful libraries in cells redolent with aromatics, there flourishing greenhouses of all sorts of volumes, there academic meads, trembling with the earthquake of Athenian Peripatetics pacing up and down, there the promontory of Parnassus and the Porticoes of the Stoics.”  The Duke of Roxburghe and Earl Spencer, two gallant sportsmen whose spoils have enriched the land; Monkbarns also, though we will not let him bring any antiquities with him, jagged or otherwise; and Charles Lamb, whom we shall coax into telling over again how he started out at ten o’clock on Saturday night and roused up old Barker in Covent