‘Dorians may talk Doric,’ according to Praxinoë and Gorgo, but, according to a certain kind of reviewer, Scotch novelists should not write Scotch. The remarks of the critic of Mr. Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston in the Athenaeum are typical. Long ago the Quarterly Review discovered that Guy Mannering was couched in ‘a darkened dialect of Anglified Erse’ – ‘the language of Ossian,’ as a recent newspaper philologist has it. ‘We can scarcely have half the book before us,’ says the Athenaeum about Weir, ‘yet already the glossary, which is eminently necessary, deals with over a couple of hundred words. Lord Hermiston objects to “palmering about in bauchles”. He talks a little “sculduddery” after dinner. We have “ettercaps” and “carlines,” scraps of Scot's “ballants,” and, in short, the book is not for the Southron.’

This is either gross ignorance or puerile affectation. The Scotch Ballads, the Waverley Novels, and Burns's poems are familiar to every Englishman with the slightest pretensions to literature. The words – the two hundred Scotch words used by Mr. Stevenson – are of constant occurrence in Burns, Scott, and the Ballads. If this reviewer really does not understand them, he cannot read, without a glossary, books with which every educated man is supposed to be familiar. The words themselves, as a rule, are old English surviving north of the Tweed. A critic ought to be enough of a philologist to comprehend them, especially by aid of the context. When we are told that a coarse, sensual humorist talks ‘sculduddery’ after dinner, we must be idiots if we fail to understand the nature of his conversation. It was ‘bold bawdry,’ as Ascham calls it. There are scarcely any Celtic words in Scotch; the terms are old English, with a few corruptions of French. A person who does not understand most of the peculiar terms is more dull and ignorant than a critic should like to write himself down, or to write his reading fellow- countrymen down. It is ridiculous to pretend, in the face of facts, that educated ‘Southrons’ do not read and appreciate Scott, Burns, and the Ballads.