136 PROSERPINA. 



whatever lightness of construing 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 sub- 

 stance with that fringe of offence, and the forward- 

 ness 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 Moniplies, and Andrew Fairservice ; and then 

 say, if the faults of all these, drawn as they are with 



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

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

 invented, 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 

 mediaeval '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, 'by St. George;' and our uncanonized 'by 

 George' in sonorous rudeness, ratifying, not now our common con- 

 science, but our individual opinion. 



