A Dictionary of Lowland Scotch, by Charles Mackay, LL.D. (Whittaker),
is a volume which we regret, for the sake both of its contents and of its author as an authority on all things Scotch, not to be able to notice at some length. It has grown out of Dr. Mackay's original intention to provide a good glossary of Burns, Scott, and the old Northern ballad-writers for the use of English readers. As it now stands, the book is a very full dictionary of Lowland Scotch, which is very much the same as old English, and contains, besides, a number of Celtic words with which even the leading Scotch lexicographer, Dr. Ja.mieson, seems to have been im- perfectly acquainted. With this book by his side, an English reader of the most important works written in Scotch ought to have no diffi- culty in understanding them, for Dr. Mackay is very painstaking and lucid; and it would be difficult to say whether his explanations of the meanings of words, or his illustrations of them by quotation and reference to kindred words in other languages, are the ampler. Dr. Mackay is a man of views—which is, however, not the same thing as a viewy man—but these find expression less in the body of the work, or dictionary proper, than in an elaborate introductory essay on "The Scottish Language and its Literary History." This volume also contains a collection of lost English and Scotch preterites, Allan Ramsay's Scotch proverbs, and a list of the principal writers in the Scotch language, "compiled by G. May." This last is not quite satisfactory. We notice, among other things, that it does not contain the name either of William Tennant, the author of " Anster Fair," or of William Thom, the Inverury poet. One would gather, too, from the sketch of Thomas Aird, that he is still alive.
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