[101] I am ashamed to exemplify the miserable work of "review" by mangling and mumbling this noble closing chapter of the "Monastery," but I cannot show the web of work without unweaving it.
[102] With ludicrously fatal retouch in the later edition "was deprived of" his sword.
[103] Again I am obliged, by review necessity, to omit half the points of the scene.
[104] I must deeply and earnestly express my thanks to my friend Mr. Hale White for his vindication of Goethe's real opinion of Byron from the mangled representation of it by Mr. Matthew Arnold (Contemporary Review, August, 1881).
[105] "Reirde, rerde, Anglo-Saxon reord, lingua, sermo, clamor, shouting" (Douglas glossary). No Scottish sentence in the Scott novels should be passed without examining every word in it, his dialect, as already noticed, being always pure and classic in the highest degree, and his meaning always the fuller, the further it is traced.
[106] The reader must observe that in quoting Scott for illustration of particular points I am obliged sometimes to alter the succession and omit much of the context of the pieces I want, for Scott never lets you see his hand, nor get at his points without remembering and comparing far-away pieces carefully. To collect the evidence of any one phase of character, is like pulling up the detached roots of a creeper.
[107] Note the "wee business of my ain," i. 213.
[108] Its "hero" is a tall youth with handsome calves to his legs, who shoots a bull with a fowling-piece, eats a large lunch, thinks it witty to call Othello a "nigger," and, having nothing to live on, and being capable of doing nothing for his living, establishes himself in lunches and cigars forever, by marrying a girl with a fortune. The heroine is an amiable governess, who, for the general encouragement of virtue in governesses, is rewarded by marrying a lord.
[109] The present paper was, however, the last.—Ed.