what can be more pathetic than her lament over the Cairn of Dernclough.
"Do you see that blackit and broken end of a sheeling? there my kettle boiled for forty years—there I bore twelve buirdly sons and daughters—where are they now?—where are the leaves that were on that auld ash tree at Martinmas? the west wind has laid it bare, and I am stripped too. . . . It will ne'er be green again, and Meg Merrilies will never sing sangs mair, be they blithe or sad. But ye'll no forget her, and ye'll gar build up the old wa's for her sake!!". . . Mixed with the romantic and the pathetic, how much too there is in "Guy Mannering" of the amusing and the humorous. Pleydell is a comedy in himself, and now a relic of the olden time. Strange how manners change, and how to-morrow alters all it can of yesterday; but an acute and kind-hearted lawyer with peculiarities which, like a touch of sharp sauce, give flavour to the viand, might and will be longer found than the sturdy and honest farmer of Charlie's Hope. When civilization comes to a certain point, the changes in the higher classes are little more than those of fancies and of fashions; but those operating on the classes below are changes of character.
Never did book end more satisfactorily than "Guy Mannering." We are glad of Julia's marriage, but we have even a kindlier interest in that
