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THESE “Bits from Blinkbonny” were grouped together by the Author to beguile the tedium of a protracted period of domestic quarantine. They are not only his first attempt at sustained literary work, but they were commenced without any concerted plan.
Blinkbonny was selected as a pretty name for a Scottish village, but the Author himself cannot fix the precise locality; and all the names he has used are supposititious, excepting those of such public characters as Dr. Duff, Dr. Guthrie, etc.
Owing to his having adopted the autobiographical form, the Author has experienced more difficulty in writing the preface than any other part of the book, as, although most of the incidents are founded on fact, a good deal of imported matter has been required to form a connected narrative. He also knows that inbringing together the varieties of character and incident that an ordinary Scotch village affords, he has passed “from grave to gay, from lively to severe,” in some instances with injudicious abruptness, and that there are other defects for which he needs to apologize; but as even his readers will probably differ as to where these occur, it is not desirable for him to dwell on them.
The Author is not in any way connected with the Free Church of Scotland, and at the outset he had no intention of treating so largely as he has done of the “Disruption” of 1843; if, however, he induces the rising generation to study the past and the present of that great movement, neither they nor he will regret the prominence given to it in this volume.
The illustrations with which the book is embellished are “composition” sketches; but the Author confidently leaves these to introduce themselves.
The idiom of the Scottish language—the dear old Doric—has been to the Author a difficult matter to render, so as to be at once intelligible to ordinary readers and fairly representative of the everyday mother tongue of the common people of Scotland. He hopes that he has succeeded in doing this, as wellas in preserving a few of the floating traditions of the passing generation which are so rapidly being swept away by the absorbing whirlpool of these bustling times, and that his readers will follow with kindly interest these homely records of the various subjects he has tried to portray in these “Bits from Blinkbonny.”