Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

446 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
had to say or of the consequences of saying it. Gait,
with his curious, limited, but very remarkable talent,
had always a serious purpose before him, and worked
soberly for such modest fame as might be procurable,
and the more substantial reward which helped him
forward through the mingled course of his career—
little reputation which often helped him, and money
which was of still greater use. His works were the
first of their kind, and have been the model of all
those successive works—always curiously popular in
England as well as in Scotland, for it is difficult to
tell what reason— which have expounded so often,
and notably in our own day, the life from within of
the Scottish peasant, with its humours and sagacities
and roughnesses. We do not compare any of the
recent exponents of the native farmer, clodhopper, or
shepherd, from his own point of view, with Scott
but we do compare them with Gait, although with
reservations, seeing that he is their originator and
the chief of their tribe. It was not, however, the
Scottish peasant with whom he was chiefly concerned.
It was with the middle class, the smaller order of
lairds, the rural clergy, the country writers and civic
dignitaries, most of them with certain pretensions to
gentility, but all with those views—original by force
of their extreme limitation, and the quaint incomprehension
which mingled with their native judgment
—with which an intelligence trained in a village looks
out upon the bigger world. The * Annals of the
Parish,' the ' Ayrshire Legatees,' and the others, were
so true to fact as well as — perhaps more than—to
nature, that even readers least acquainted with the
class were attracted by the evident truth of the
a: