the Ranter to Maggie Lauder, “My bonnie bird.”  Now, we would remark, upon this abundant nomenclature of kindly expressions in the Scottish dialect, that it assumes an interesting position as taken in connection with the Scottish Life and Character, and as a set-off against a frequent short and grumpy manner.  It indicates how often there must be a current of tenderness and affection in the Scottish heart, which is so frequently represented to be, like its climate, “stern and wild.”  There could not be such terms were the feelings they express unknown.  I believe it often happens that in the Scottish character there is a vein of deep and kindly feeling lying hid under a short, and hard and somewhat stern manner.  Hence has arisen the Scottish saying which is applicable to such cases—­“His girn’s waur than his bite:”  his disposition is of a softer nature than his words and manner would often lead you to suppose.

There are two admirable articles in Blackwood’s Magazine, in the numbers for November and December 1870, upon this subject.  The writer abundantly vindicates the point and humour of the Scottish tongue.  Who can resist, for example, the epithet applied by Meg Merrilies to an unsuccessful probationer for admission to the ministry:—­“a sticket stibbler”?  Take the sufficiency of Holy Scripture as a pledge for any one’s salvation:—­“There’s eneuch between the brods o’ the Testament to save the biggest sinner i’ the warld.”  I heard an old Scottish Episcopalian thus pithily describe the hasty and irreverent manner of a young Englishman:—­“He ribbled aff the prayers like a man at the heid o’ a regiment.”  A large family of young children has been termed “a great sma’ family.”  It was a delicious dry rejoinder to the question—­“Are you Mr. So-and-so?” “It’s a’ that’s o’ me” (i.e. to be had for him.) I have heard an old Scottish gentleman direct his servant to mend the fire by saying, “I think, Dauvid, we wadna be the waur o’ some coals.”

There is a pure Scottish term, which I have always thought more expressive than any English word of ideas connected with manners in society—­I mean the word to blether, or blethering, or blethers.  Jamieson defines it to “talk nonsense.”  But it expresses far more—­it expresses powerfully, to Scottish people, a person at once shallow, chattering, conceited, tiresome, voluble.

There is a delicious servantgirlism, often expressed in an answer given at the door to an inquirer:  “Is your master at home, or mistress?” as the case may be.  The problem is to save the direct falsehood, and yet evade the visit; so the answer is—­“Ay, he or she is at hame; but he’s no in”