Her capacity for labour was infinite—for labour of the only sort that, with the fine strain of old Scotch pride and belated letterless toryism that was in her, she regarded as respectable. She had small patience with new-fangled attitudes or with a finical conscience. What was good enough for Sir Walter was good enough for her, and I make no doubt that her shrewd unfiltered easy flow, fed after all by an immensity of reading as well as of observation and humour, would have been good enough for Sir Walter. If this had been the case with her abounding history, biography and criticism, it would have been still more the case with her uncontrolled flood of fiction. She was really a great _improvisatrice_, a night-working spinner of long, loose, vivid yarns, numberless, pauseless, admirable, repeatedly, for their full, pleasant, reckless rustle over depths and difficulties—admirable indeed, in any case of Scotch elements, for many a close engagement with these. She showed in no literary relation more acuteness than in the relation—so profitable a one as it has always been—to the inexhaustible little country which has given so much, yet has ever so much more to give, and all the romance and reality of which she had at the end of her pen. Her Scotch folk have a wealth of life, and I think no Scotch talk in fiction less of a strain to the patience of the profane. It may be less austerely veracious than some—but these are esoteric matters. Reading since her death “Kirsteen”—one of the hundred, but published in her latest period and much admired by some judges—I was, though beguiled, not too much beguiled to be struck afresh with that elusive fact on which I just touched, the mixture in the whole thing. Such a product as “Kirsteen” has life—is full of life, but the critic is infinitely baffled. It may of course be said to him that he has nothing to do with compositions of this order—with such wares altogether as Mrs. Oliphant dealt in. But he can accept that retort only with a renunciation of some of his liveliest anxieties. Let him take some early day for getting behind, as it were, the complexion of a talent that could care to handle a thing to the tune of so many pages and yet not care more to “do” it. There is a fascination in the mere spectacle of so serene an instinct for the middle way, so visible a conviction that to reflect is to be lost.