there will be in him still some nobility of irrepressible impulse, some leap of the spirit unawares. Macleod’s usual method, however, is to take some unregenerate character--a wild tramp, a godless seaman, an express ecclesiastic--and reform him, not by religious admonition, but by living influences that seize upon the better feelings. In his Vanity Fair the evangelists are the affections. Thus in _Billy Buttons_ the captain and crew are humanised by the accident of having upon their hands, in the middle of the Atlantic, the care of a new-born infant; the father of Wee Davie is made another being by his wife’s cry over the little coffin:--’O Willie, forgi’e me, for it’s no’ ma pairt to speak, but I canna help it enoo, and just, ma bonnie man, just agree wi’ me that we’ll gi’e oor hearts noo and for ever to oor ain Saviour, and the Saviour o’ wee Davie’; Jock Hall, the outcast in _The Starling_, thinking that he hates everybody and that everybody hates him, is made a new creature through the kindness and encouragement of an old soldier, who, when the bird cries, _A man’s a man for a’ that_, drives the lesson home, ‘And ye _are_ a man; cheer up, Jock.’ Macleod’s good people are no hymn-book pietists, but, like those of Dickens, gentle and true. And his stories are entertaining, so that the most bigoted agnostic might put up with the religion for the sake of the amusement. The most prevailing quality of Macleod’s fiction is the pathos, and though one must be a Christian to feel it all, there is much that no humane reader will be able to resist. To be sure the occasion is always simple and ordinary, never such, for instance, as the elaborate decline of a consumptive scholar in his garden-chair; and the cause of these tears may be only a remark or a gesture. Under the restrictions of _Good Words_ he could not do his best as a humorist, yet he permitted himself to be thoroughly Scottish and provoke hearty laughter. Within a modest range he displays real genius in the portrayal of character and the rendering of Scottish conversation.