Last month all the Scottish lion in a peaceful nature was aroused by reviewers who did not understand, or pretended not to understand, common Scots words. Since then another critic, Mr. Purcell, devotes three columns and a half of the Academy (June 27) to what I fear I must call incoherences about Scotland and Scotch authors and critics, all à propos of Mr. Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston. As Mr. Purcell has never crossed the Tweed (he says), his opinion of Caledonia is like that about ‘rich Cyrene,’ which the Delphic oracle treated with contempt.

Mr. Purcell says: ‘Caledonia … has ever been to each poetic child of her own, not only a fit nurse, but a most partial, indulgent, and boastful one.’ If Mr. Purcell knows anything at all about literary history, he knows, on reflection, that his remark is incorrect. He must have heard of Jeffrey's reviews of ‘a poetic child’ named Scott.3Was Jeffrey – then the first of British critics – ‘partial, indulgent, and boastful’ as regards Sir Walter? Nonsense! In fact no man is a prophet in his own country, a Scot least of all. San Francisco, not Edinburgh, has a memorial of Mr. Stevenson. Mr. Crockett has told a tale which I may therefore repeat. It is ben trovato, if not vero. When Mr. Barrie's amusing Professor's Love Story was played in Kirriemuir (Thrums), one of the audience was heard to remark, ‘Man, this is waur nor (worse than) Walker London!’ This is the common line of Scotch criticism of ‘a brither Scot.’ ‘Brither’ is Scots for ‘brother,’ by the way. Yet Mr. Purcell, with fine humour, avers that the critical Caledonian ‘feels that he has discovered another masterpiece “if he sees in print” but one cherished topographical name – the Brig o'Guddlepaddock, or the Kirk o'Cuddyclavers.’ Alas! I have not found the Northern reviewer so complacent, and it was a Scot who trampled so noisily on what he called ‘The Kailyard School.’ Five or six Scotch novels have long lain unopened on the shelves of one Caledonian critic, who owns that he cannot draw paper-knife on them, for good or bad, we have, at present, too much of the genre.