Max O'Rell on the Scotch.

Te Aroha News, Volume V, Issue 243, 25 February 1888, Page 3

Max O'Rell on the Scotch.

That shrewd observer of our national characteriscics.MrMax O'Rell,hasbeen discoursing to the people of Nottingham on the habits and manners of the Scotch, and as usual has been affording to his audiences abundant entertainment. If a proverb very familiar to his countrymen has anj^force, the absent, when their conduct or principles are under discussion, have a strong tendency to be in the wrong ; but though no doubt it would have been easier to " rail upon the Scofca " on the banks of the Trent' than in many places further north, tho author of '•John Bull and his Isle" went no further in this way than those pleasantries about hard - headedness and thrift which Scotchmen have long been accustomed to hear with tolerable equanimity. Tho Scot who was wont to accompany his daily prayer that he might neither take in any one nor be himself taken in, with an expression of particular repugnance to the fatter alternative, may have been a purely apocryphal personage. * There was more of the touch of reality in the stories^ illustrating the absence of anything like a'bjectness inScottish beggars. In Prince s-street,Edin-burgh, Mr O'Rell once met a man who appealed to him for alms with which to purchase food. Being near a pie-shop, Mr O'Rell proposed to buy* him a pork pie, on which the beggar observed, " I will have veal, please." The observation of the lecturer that he never knew any Christian so confident of going to heaven as a Scotchman, or less eager than a Scotchman " to set out," has a Johnsonian flavour. But it ought to redeem many sallies of this sort that Mr O'Rell has the sense and the honesty to lend no countenance to foolish old calumnies about Scottish " wut." How it came to be noised abroad that the countrymon of Burns and Scotb have no sense of humour, it is not easy fco say. Mr Max O'Rell is of opinion that, although in the eyes of his countrymen, the French, a Scot is simply a Briton, there never were two nations so near on the map who were so far removed in their ways and character as Scotch and English. Unlike most of his predecessors, howevw, what difference he discerns,, in the vrayof sense of humour appears to hjn* rather jft' favour, of our nprtherfc brethren. The further north we go in Great Britain, according to bhU authority, the more quickwittedness and humour we find ; and for quicknees of seeing the significance of gesture, glance, or tono, Mr O'Rell " does not hesitate to give the palm to the Scotch." For a fuller andoratanding of his views on this subject, however, the reader must go to hia nevr book, entitled " L'Ann Macdonald," of which it was announced that an English edition 1b shortly to be issued.