in the dress and character of an eccentric old Scottish gentlewoman; and who but Dr. John immortalised the tradition by telling her story over again, and re-imagining for us the whole of that Edinburgh society of 1820–21 in which Miss Stirling Graham had moved so bewitchingly? Ten years before that, or in December 1811, there had died in Edinburgh a little girl of a family with whom Scott was particularly intimate, and who lived near him. She was but in her ninth year; but for several years she had been the pet and wonder of her friends, for her childish humours and abilities, her knowledge of books and poetry, the signs of a quaint genius in her behaviour, and in her own little exercises in prose and in verse. Many a heart was sore, Scott’s for one, we are told, when poor little “Pet Marjorie” died; and no one that knew her ever forgot her. One sister of hers, who survived her for seventy years, cherished her memory to the last like a religion, and had preserved all her childish and queerly spelt letters and journals, with other scraps of writing, tied up with a lock of her light-brown hair. To these faded letters and papers Dr. John Brown had access; and the result was his exquisitely tender _Pet Marjorie_ or _Marjorie Fleming_,—the gem in its kind among all his papers, and perhaps the most touching illustration in our language of Shakespeare’s text, “How quick bright things come to confusion!” Here, as in some other cases, it may be said that Dr. John Brown only edited material that came ready to his hand. Even in that view of the matter, one could at least wish that there were more such editing; but it is an insufficient view. He had recovered the long-dead little Marjorie Fleming for himself; and the paper, though consisting largely of quotations and extracts, is as properly his own as any of the rest. But, should there be a disposition still with some to distinguish between editing and invention, and to regard _Mystifications_ and _Marjorie Fleming_ as merely well-edited curiosities of a fascinating kind, no such distinction will trouble one who passes to _Jeems the Doorkeeper_. A real person, as the writer tells us, sat for that sketch too, and we have a portrait of the actual Jeems who officiated as his father’s beadle in Broughton Place Church; but with what originality and friskiness of humour is the portrait drawn, and how fantastically the paper breaks in the end into streaks of a skyward sermon! There is the same quaint originality, or Lamb-like oddity of conglomerate, in the little fragment called “_Oh, I’m wat, wat_,” and in one or two other trifles, with similarly fantastic titles, which I have not named.