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craftsman in making any beautiful one, before we despise any innocent person who looks for happiness in this world, as well as hereafter. But assuredly the strength of Scottish character has always been perfected by suffering; and the types of it given by Scott in Flora MacIvor, Edith Bellenden, Mary of Avenel, and Jeanie Deans,¹-to name only those which the reader will remember without effort,-are chiefly notable in the way they bear sorrow; as the whole tone of Scottish temper, ballad poetry, and music, which no other school has ever been able to imitate, has arisen out of the sad associations which, one by one, have gathered round every loveliest scene in the border land. Nor is there anything among other beautiful nations to approach the dignity of a true Scotswoman’s face, in the tried perfectness of her old age.

232. I have seen them beautiful in the same way earlier, when they had passed through trial; my own Joanie’s face owes the calm of its radiance to days of no ordinary sorrow-even before she came, when my father had been laid to his rest under Croydon hills, to keep her faithful watch by my mother’s side, while I was seeking selfish happiness far away in work which to-day has come to nought. What I have myself since owed to her,-life certainly, and more than life, for many and many a year,-was meant to have been told long since,² had I been able to finish this book in the time I designed it. What Dr. John Brown became to me, is partly shown in the continual references to his sympathy in the letters of Hortus Inclusus;³ but nothing could tell the loss to me in his death, nor the grief to how many greater souls than mine, that had been possessed in patience through his love.

¹ [For another list of Scott’s noble women, see Sesame and Lilies, § 59 (Vol. XVIII. p. 115); it includes Flora MacIvor (Waverley) and Jeanie Deans (Heart of Midlothian), but not Edith Bellenden (Old Mortality) or Mary of Avenel (The Monastery).]

² [Told afterwards, in the closing chapter of Præterita, “Joanna’s Care”; pp. 535 seq.]

³ [See, for instance, the letters of August 10 and 25, 1874 (Vol. XXXVII.). Dr. Brown died in 1882.]

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