Stout Conrad, cold and drenched in blood,
His bosom gored with many a wound,
Was by a woodman’s lyme-dog[5] found;
Unknown the manner of his death,
Gone was his brand, both sword and sheath;
But ever from that time, ’twas said
That Dickon wore a Cologne blade.”
Such the race,—such the school education,—of Scott’s mother. Of her home education, you may judge by what she herself said of her father to her son’s tutor (whose exquisitely grotesque letter, for the rest, vol. i., p. 108,) is alone enough to explain Scott’s inevitable future perception of the weakness of religious egotism.
“Mrs. Scott told me that, when prescribing for his patients, it was Dr. Rutherford’s custom to offer up, at the same time, a prayer for the accompanying blessing of heaven,—a laudable practice, in which, I fear, he has not been generally imitated by those of his profession.”
A very laudable practice indeed, good Mr. Mitchell; perhaps even a useful and practically efficacious one, on occasion; at all events one of the last remains of noble Puritanism, in its sincerity, among men of sound learning.