64 PRÆTERITA-I

my grandfather’s servant in Edinburgh,-who might well have been the prototype of the Mause of Old Mortality,* but had even a more solemn, fearless, and patient faith, fastened in her by extreme suffering; for she had been nearly starved to death when she was a girl, and had literally picked the bones out of cast-out dust-heaps to gnaw; and ever afterwards, to see the waste of an atom of food was as shocking to her as blasphemy. “Oh, Miss Margaret!” she said once to my mother, who had shaken some crumbs off a dirty plate out of the window, “I had rather you had knocked me down.” She would make her dinner upon anything in the house that the other servants wouldn’t eat;-often upon potato skins, giving her own dinner away to any poor person she saw; and would always stand during the whole church service, (though at least seventy years old when I knew her, and very feeble,) if she could persuade any wild Amorite¹ out of the streets to take her seat. Her wrinkled and worn face, moveless in resolution and patience, incapable of smile, and knit sometimes perhaps too severely against Jessie and me, if we wanted more creamy milk to our porridge, or jumped off our favourite

* Vulgar modern Puritanism has shown its degeneracy in nothing more than in its incapability of understanding Scott’s exquisitely finished portraits of the Covenanter. In Old Mortality alone, there are four which cannot be surpassed; the typical one, Elizabeth, faultlessly sublime and pure; the second, Ephraim Macbriar, giving the too common phase of the character, which is touched with ascetic insanity; the third, Mause, coloured and made sometimes ludicrous by Scottish conceit, but utterly strong and pure at heart; the last, Balfour, a study of supreme interest, showing the effect of the Puritan faith, sincerely held, on a naturally and incurably cruel and base spirit. Add to these four studies, from this single novel, those in the Heart of Midlothian, and Nicol Jarvie and Andrew Fairservice from Rob Roy, and you have a series of theological analyses far beyond those of any other philosophical work that I know, of any period.²

¹ [“Amorite,” because in Letter 65 of Fors, where this passage first appeared, Ruskin was discussing the Amorites, and likening them to the “Highlander”: see Vol. XXVIII. p. 596.]

² [For other references to Elizabeth MacClure, see Fiction, Fair and Foul, § 113 (Vol. XXXIV. p. 383); to Ephraim, ibid., p. 382; to Mause Headrigg, ibid.; to Balfour of Burley, ibid.; to Nicol Jarvie, Vol. XXV. p. 296; and to Andrew Fairservice, Vol. XXXIV. pp. 383 seq.]

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