_Bailie Nicol Jarvie._--Lockhart, in his _Life of Scott_, speaking of the
first representation of _Rob Roy_ on the Edinburgh boards, observes--
"The great and unrivalled attraction was the personification of Bailie
Jarvie by Charles Mackay, who, being himself a native of Glasgow,
entered into the minutest peculiarities of the character with high
_gusto_, and gave the west country dialect in its most racy
perfection."
But in the sweetest cup of praise, there is generally one small drop of
bitterness. The drop, in honest Mackay's case, is that by calling him a
"native of Glasgow," and, therefore, "to the manner born," he is, by
implication, deprived of the credit of speaking the "foreign tongue" like a
native. So after wearing his laurels for a quarter of a century with this
one withered leaf in them, he has plucked it off, and by a formal affidavit
sworn before an Edinburgh bailie, the Glasgow bailie has put it on record
that he is really by birth "one of the same class whom King Jamie
denominated a real Edinburgh Gutter-Bluid." If there is something droll in
the notion of such an affidavit, there is, assuredly, something to move our
respect in the earnestness and love of truth which led the bailie to make
it, and to prove him a good honest man, as we have no doubt, "his father,
the deacon, was before him."