May the Giver of all good things keep
ye in your outgauns and incomings, whereof devoutly prayeth
your loving dauter,
"JEAN DEANS."
This contains an example of Scott's rather heavy jocularity as well as
giving us a fine illustration of his highest and deepest and sunniest
humour. Coming where it does, the joke inserted about the Board of
Agriculture is rather like the gambol of a rhinoceros trying to
imitate the curvettings of a thoroughbred horse.
Some of the finest touches of his humour are no doubt much heightened
by his perfect command of the genius as well as the dialect of a
peasantry, in whom a true culture of mind and sometimes also of heart
is found in the closest possible contact with the humblest pursuits
and the quaintest enthusiasm for them. But Scott, with all his turn
for irony--and Mr. Lockhart says that even on his death-bed he used
towards his children the same sort of good-humoured irony to which he
had always accustomed them in his life--certainly never gives us any
example of that highest irony which is found so frequently in
Shakespeare, which touches the paradoxes of the spiritual life of the
children of earth, and which reached its highest point in Isaiah.
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