[32] And I have too harshly called our English vines, 'wicked weeds of Kent,' in Fors Clavigera, xxvii. 11. Much may be said for Ale, when we brew it for our people honestly.
[33] Has my reader ever thought,—I never did till this moment,—how it perfects the exquisite character which Scott himself loved, as he invented, till he changed the form of the novel, that his habitual interjection should be this word;—not but that the oath, by conscience, was happily still remaining then in Scotland, taking the place of the mediæval 'by St. Andrew,' we in England, long before the Scot, having lost all sense of the Puritanical appeal to private conscience, as of the Catholic oath, 'by St. George;' and our uncanonized 'by George' in sonorous rudeness, ratifying, not now our common conscience, but our individual opinion.
[34] 'Jotham,' 'Sum perfectio eorum,' or 'Consummatio eorum.' (Interpretation of name in Vulgate index.)
[35] If you will look at the engraving, in the England and Wales series, of Turner's Oakhampton, you will see its use.
[36] General assertions of this kind must always be accepted under indulgence,—exceptions being made afterwards.
[37] I use 'round' rather than 'cylindrical,' for simplicity's sake.
[38] Carduus Arvensis. 'Creeping Thistle,' in Sowerby; why, I cannot conceive, for there is no more creeping in it than in a furzebush. But it especially haunts foul and neglected ground; so I keep the Latin name, translating 'Waste-Thistle.' I could not show the variety of the curves of the involucre without enlarging; and if, on this much increased scale, I had tried to draw the flower, it would have taken Mr. Allen and me a good month's more work. And I had no more a month than a life, to spare: so the action only of the spreading flower is indicated, but the involucre drawn with precision.
[39] The florets gathered in the daisy are cinquefoils, examined closely. No system founded on colour can be very general or unexceptionable: but the splendid purples of the pansy, and thistle, which will be made one of the lower composite groups under Margarita, may justify the general assertion of this order's being purple.
[40] See Miss Yonge's exhaustive account of the name, 'History of Christian Names,' vol. i., p. 265.
[41] (Du Cange.) The word 'Margarete' is given as heraldic English for pearl, by Lady Juliana Berners, in the book of St. Albans.