Alexander Leighton

“ Throughout the High Street and Canongate, and down through the squalid wynds and closes, where, though crime and misery shake hands over the bottle of whisky, the death-bed still retains some claims over the affections, and where religion is sometimes able to extort from the demons of passion the unwilling tribute of compunction, these strange men prowled in the hope of finding or making a monster. ”

“ True, indeed, the white element of the population was at a discount at Peach Grove. But in addition to the above source of reconciliation, Halket became day by day more captivated by the beauty of the country, with its undulating surface, its wooded clumps, its magnolias, tulip-trees, camellias, laurels, passion-flowers, and palms, its bright-coloured birds, and all the rest of the beauties for which it is famous all over the world. But nature might charm as it might—Mary Brown was three thousand miles away. ”

“ They had only to look a few yards to the west, up Portsburgh, or to the east, up the Grassmarket and Cowgate, to be certain that “a ten pounds,” all prepared, was walking or staggering as if every roll to a side offered to be one into their arms. They had thus reason, if they had been of a philosophical habit,—and one had the poetry of sentiment—to thank the great genius Society for his injustice to his own members. And what an extraordinary injustice it appears, when we consider that the high head of Wealth is upheld by the tax of respect imposed upon the poor and the humble! ”

“ We can fancy the godly man, we believe all unconscious of the intentions of his brother, pouring the holy unction of his prayers over the struggling spirit of the dying Christian, and the doctor counting the pulses as they died away into that stillness which was to be the prelude to the payment—five pounds—for the deserted temple. One recording angel would fly to heaven with a name to be inscribed in the roll of eternal salvation, and the other to Edinburgh to announce that another body was to be inserted in the black list of Surgeon’s Square. ”

“ If Mysie Craig had appeared shortly before to Miss Gilroy paler than any snow her ladyship had ever seen, she must now have been as pale as some other kind of snow that nobody ever saw. The dreadful words had, indeed, produced the adequate effect—but not in the most common way, for we are to keep in view that it is not the most shrinking and sensitive natures that are always the readiest to faint; and there was, besides, the aforesaid conviction of impossibility which, grasping the mind by a certain force, deadened the ear to words implying the contrary. ”

“ We smile at the extravagance, while we acknowledge some kind of truth, which we cannot understand. These small traces of the little world of crime within the back room “with the window looking out on the dead wall,” long since destroyed and erased from the bigger world of which it formed a part and the shame, may be brought together and filled up by the imagination, with a certainty so far removed from the feeling of fiction, that we might scarcely regret the want of particulars. ”

“ A charm was working among the old half-dead nerves that for years had quivered with the passions of the devil. The revived feelings of that olden time, when that mild loving mother was the centre of their affections and bond of love between themselves, were in a tumult below the hard crust of mutual hatred, that was breaking under the touch of the finger of God ”

“ It is, we think, laid down in that strange book of Robert Forsyth’s on morals, that the gratification of the desire of knowledge is, at least on this earth of ours, the true end of man; and, no doubt, were we to judge of the strength of this desire in forcing man down into the bowels of the earth, and up into the heavens, across unknown seas, and over equally unknown continents, we would not be slow to confess its great power. And yet how many there are who assign the same place to the power of mammon, while others stand up for love and the social affections! ”

“ That same day George Lindsay was lodged also in the Tolbooth, satisfied that he had made a sacrifice of his life for one whom he had loved for years, and who yet had never shown him even a symptom of hope that his love would be returned.
All which proceedings soon came on the wings of rumour to the ears of Robert Stormonth, who was not formed to be a martyr even for a love [200] which was to him as true as his nature would permit. He saw his danger, because he did not see the character of a faithful girl who would die rather than compromise her lover. ”

“ Turn the question in any way you please, your final cause is nowhere, unless it be that the experience of agonised death-beds is the opportunity of virtue—a poor back-handed way of making people better, and certainly bought at a terrible expense. But even taking the advantage in this limited form, it does not exhaust the conditions of the question; for while the dying sinner is altogether unconscious that his agonies will go forth to the world and be an example, his mind is in another direction. He looks forward, and the more keenly, that he cannot look backwards. ”

“ We think it a strange thing that mortals should laugh and weep by turns, yet we think sunshine and showers a very natural alternation; and surely [268] it is far more wonderful that we often weep when we should laugh, and laugh when we should weep—of which hypocrisy, notwithstanding, there is a hundred times more in the world than man or woman wots of. And we are sorry to be obliged to doubt the extent of the new-made lady’s grief when she saw the laird’s cough increasing as his love waxed stronger and his lungs grew less. ”

“ Lodgers began to be less cared for, as mere lodgers, though the most squalid of them had recommendations of another kind, of which they themselves were not aware; and as for the men, the producers of this wonderful change, they were now gentlemen at large—the huckster’s cart, the hurley, the old horse, the stool, and the awl-box, having been discharged and despised as unworthy of those who held in their hands a charm invested with even greater power than the ring of Giges or Mongogul, even that of turning, by a touch, the mortal part of human nature into gold. ”

“ People who merely meet may be supposed to seek for objects of disagreement. In the room in Burnet’s Close the occasions were the very actions of natural life; the movements of the body, the words of the mouth, the glances of the eye, the thoughts of the mind, the misconstrued feelings of the heart. ”

“ Science became the Nemesis of the dearest and most sacred affections; and what may appear strange enough, the students themselves engaged in the work with a feeling, as we have hinted, approaching to chivalry. They were sworn knights of the fair damsel Science, though the rites were those of Melpomene, with the grotesque shapes of those of Thalia. The midnight enterprises had charms for them, but they were death to those feelings of a Christian people, which require to be viewed as a natural and necessary part of a social fabric, to be tampered with only to the ruin of virtue. ”