A man of a lower nature, wrapt round by the vulgar prejudices of rank, could not have conceived such a character: he would have transferred to it a portion of his own vulgarity, dressed up in a few borrowed peculiarities of habit and phraseology. Even the character of Jeanie's father lies quite as much beyond the ordinary reach. Men such as Sheridan, Fielding, and Foote, would have represented him as a hypocrite--a feeble and unnatural mixture of baseness and cunning. Sir Walter, with all his prejudices and all his antipathies, not only better knew the national type, but he had a more comprehensive mind; and he drew David Deans, therefore, as a man of stern and inflexible integrity, and as thoroughly sincere in his religion. Not but that in this department he committed great and grievous mistakes. The main doctrine of revelation, with its influence on character--that doctrine of regeneration which our Saviour promulgated to Nicodemus, and enforced with the sanctity of an oath--was a doctrine of which he knew almost nothing. What has the first place in all the allegories of Bunyan, has no place in the fictions of Sir Walter. None of his characters exhibit the change displayed in the life of the ingenious allegorist of Elston, or of James Gardener, or of John Newton. He found human nature a _terra incognita_ when it came under the influence of grace; and in this _terra incognita_, the field in which he could only grope, not see, his way, well-nigh all his mistakes were committed. But had his native honesty been less, his mistakes would have been greater. He finds good even among Christians. What can be finer than the character of his Covenanter's widow, standing out as it does in the most exceptionable of all his works,--the blind and desolate woman, meek and forgiving in her utmost distress, who had seen her sons shot before her eyes, and had then ceased to see more? Our subject, however, is one which we must be content not to exhaust. THE LATE MR. KEMP.