THE PARABLE OF JOTHAM. 87 



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

 thentic 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 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 ungrace- 

 ful 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, 

 Kichie Moniplies, and Andrew Fail-service ; and then say, if 

 the faults of all these, drawn as they are with a precision of 

 touch like a Corinthian sculptor's of the acanthus leaf, can be 

 found in anything like the same strength in other races, or if 

 so stubbornly folded and starched moni-plies of irritating 

 kindliness, selfish friendliness, lowly conceit, and intolerable 

 fidelity, are native to any other spot of the wild earth of the 

 habitable globe. 



10. Will you note also for this is of extreme interest 

 that these essential faults are all mean faults ; what we may 

 call ground-growing faults; conditions of semi-education, 



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

 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- 

 diaeval k 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 uucanonized ' by George ' in 

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

 individual opinion. 



