"Shoulder your infant!" cried a harquebusier.
"Port your infant!" said a pikeman.
"Peace, ye brutes!" said Stawarth Bolton, "and respect humanity in others, if you have none yourselves. I pardon the lad having done some discredit to my gray hairs, when I see him take care of that helpless creature, which ye would have trampled upon as if ye had been littered of bitch-wolves, not born of women."
The infant thus saved is the heir of Avenel, and the intricacy and fateful bearing of every incident and word in the scene, knitting into one central moment all the clews to the plot of two romances, as the rich boss of a Gothic vault gathers the shaft moldings of it, can only be felt by an entirely attentive reader; just as (to follow out the likeness on Scott's own ground) the willow-wreaths changed to stone of Melrose tracery can only be caught in their plighting by the keenest eyes. The meshes are again gathered by the master's own hand when the child now in Halbert's arms, twenty years hence, stoops over him to unlace his helmet, as the fallen knight lies senseless on the field of Carberry Hill.[103]
112. But there is another, and a still more hidden method in Scott's designing of story, in which, taking extreme pains, he counts on much sympathy from the reader, and can assuredly find none in a modern student. The moral purpose of the whole, which he asserted in the preface to the first edition of Waverley, was involved always with the minutest study of the effects of true and false religion on the conduct;—which subject being always touched with his utmost lightness of hand and stealthiness of art, and founded on a knowledge of the Scotch character and the human heart, such as no other living man possessed, his purpose often escapes first observation as completely as the inner feelings of living people do; and I am myself amazed, as I take any single piece of his work up for examination, to find how many of its points I had before missed or disregarded.
113. The groups of personages whose conduct in the Scott romance is definitely affected by religious conviction, may be arranged broadly, as those of the actual world, under these following heads:
1. The lowest group consists of persons who, believing in the general truths of Evangelical religion, accommodate them to their passions, and are capable, by gradual increase in depravity, of any crime or violence. I am not going to include these in our present study. Trumbull ("Red Gauntlet"), Trusty Tomkyns ("Woodstock"), Burley ("Old Mortality"), are three of the principal types.
2. The next rank above these consists of men who believe firmly and truly enough to be restrained from any conduct which they clearly recognize as criminal, but whose natural selfishness renders them incapable of understanding the morality of the Bible above a certain point; and whose imperfect powers of thought leave them liable in many directions to the warping of self-interest or of small temptations.
Fairservice. Blattergowl. Kettledrummle. Gifted Gilfillan.
3. The third order consists of men naturally just and honest, but with little sympathy and much pride, in whom their religion, while in the depth of it supporting their best virtues, brings out on the surface all their worst faults, and makes them censorious, tiresome, and often fearfully mischievous.