122 PBOSERPINA. 



9. It is strange that, after much hunting, I cannot find 

 authentic note of the day when Scotland took the thistle 

 for her emblem ; and I have no space (in this chapter at 

 least) for tradition ; but, with whatever lightness of con- 

 struing we may receive the symbol, it is actually the truest 

 that could have been found, for some conditions of the 

 Scottish mind. There is no flower which the Proserpina 

 of our Northern Sicily cherishes more dearly : and scarcely 

 any of us recognize enough the beautiful power of its 

 close-set stars, and rooted radiance of ground leaves ; yet 

 the stubbornness and ungraceful rectitude of its stem, and 

 the besetting of its wholesome substance with that fringe 

 of offence, and the forwardness of it, and dominance, I 

 fear to lacess some of my dearest friends if I went on : 

 let them rather, with Bailie Jarvie's true conscience,* take 

 their Scott from the inner shelf in their heart's library 

 which all true Scotsmen give him, and trace, with the swift 

 reading of memory, the characters of Fergus M'lvor, 

 Hector M'Intyre, Mause Headrigg, Alison Wilson, Richie 



* Has my reader ever thought, I never did till this moment, how 

 it perfects the exquisite character which Scott himself loved, as he in- 

 vented, till he changed the form of the novel, that his habitual inter- 

 jection should be this word ; not but that the oath, by conscience, was 

 happily still remaining then in Scotland, taking the place of the me- 

 diasval ' by St. Andrew,' we in England, long before the Scot, having 

 lost all sense of the Puritanical appeal to private conscience, as of the 

 Catholic oath, l by St. George ; ' and our uncanonized ' by George 

 in sonorous rudeness, ratifying, not now our common conscience, but 

 our individual opinion. 



