第21章 RAB'S FRIEND(5)

Among Dr. Brown's papers on children, that called "Pet Marjorie"holds the highest place. Perhaps certain passages are "wrote too sentimentally," as Marjorie Fleming herself remarked about the practice of many authors. But it was difficult to be perfectly composed when speaking of this wonderful fairy-like little girl, whose affection was as warm as her humour and genius were precocious. "Infant phenomena" are seldom agreeable, but Marjorie was so humorous, so quick-tempered, so kind, that we cease to regard her as an intellectual "phenomenon." Her memory remains sweet and blossoming in its dust, like that of little Penelope Boothby, the child in the mob cap whom Sir Joshua painted, and who died very soon after she was thus made Immortal.

It is superfluous to quote from the essay on Marjorie Fleming;every one knows about her and her studies: "Isabella is teaching me to make simme colings, nots of interrigations, peorids, commoes, &c." Here is a Shakespearian criticism, of which few will deny the correctness: "'Macbeth' is a pretty composition, but awful one."Again, "I never read sermons of any kind, but I read novelettes and my Bible." "'Tom Jones' and Gray's 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard'

are both excellent, and much spoke of by both sex, particularly by the men." Her Calvinistic belief in "UNQUESTIONABLE fire and brimston" is unhesitating, but the young theologian appears to have substituted "unquestionable" for "unquenchable." There is something humorous in the alteration, as if Marjorie refused to be put off with an "excellent family substitute" for fire and brimstone, and demanded the "unquestionable" article, no other being genuine, please observe trade mark.

Among Dr. Brown's contributions to the humorous study of dogs, "Rab," of course, holds the same place as Marjorie among his sketches of children. But if his "Queen Mary's Child Garden," the description of the little garden in which Mary Stuart did NOT play when a child, is second to "Marjorie," so "Our Dogs" is a good second to "Rab." Perhaps Dr. Brown never wrote anything more mirthful than his description of the sudden birth of the virtue of courage in Toby, a comic but cowardly mongrel, a cur of low degree.