Molendinar. From 'molendinum,' the grinding-place. I do not know if actually the local name,[173] or Scott's invention. Compare Sir Piercie's 'Molinaras.' But at all events used here with bye-sense of degradation of the formerly idle saints to grind at the mill.
Crouse. Courageous, softened with a sense of comfort.
Ilka. Again a word with azure distance, including the whole sense of 'each' and 'every.' The reader must carefully and reverently distinguish these comprehensive words, which gather two or more perfectly understood meanings into one chord of meaning, and are harmonies more than words, from the above-noted blunders between two half-hit meanings, struck as a bad piano-player strikes the edge of another note. In English we have fewer of these combined thoughts; so that Shakespeare rather plays with the distinct lights of his words, than melts them into one. So again Bishop Douglas spells, and doubtless spoke, the word 'rose,' differently, according to his purpose; if as the chief or governing ruler of flowers, 'rois,' but if only in her own beauty, rose.
Christian-like. The sense of the decency and order proper to Christianity is stronger in Scotland than in any other country, and the word 'Christian' more distinctly opposed to 'beast.' Hence the back-handed cut at the English for their over-pious care of dogs.
I am a little surprised myself at the length to which this examination of one small piece of Sir Walter's first-rate work has carried us, but here I must end for this time, trusting, if the Editor of the Nineteenth Century permit me, yet to trespass, perhaps more than once, on his readers' patience; but, at all events, to examine in a following paper the technical characteristics of Scott's own style, both in prose and verse, together with Byron's, as opposed to our fashionably recent dialects and rhythms; the essential virtues of language, in both the masters of the old school, hinging ultimately, little as it might be thought, on certain unalterable views of theirs concerning the code called 'of the Ten Commandments,' wholly at variance with the dogmas of automatic morality which, summed again by the witches' line, 'Fair is foul, and foul is fair,' hover through the fog and filthy air of our prosperous England.
John Ruskin.
'He hated greetings in the market-place, and there were generally loiterers in the streets to persecute him either about the events of the day, or about some petty pieces of business.'
These lines, which the reader will find near the beginning of the sixteenth chapter of the first volume of the Antiquary, contain two indications of the old man's character, which, receiving the ideal of him as a portrait of Scott himself, are of extreme interest to me. They mean essentially that neither Monkbarns nor Scott had any mind to be called of men, Rabbi, in mere hearing of the mob; and especially that they hated to be drawn back out of their far-away thoughts, or forward out of their long-ago thoughts, by any manner of 'daily' news, whether printed or gabbled. Of which two vital characteristics, deeper in both the men, (for I must always speak of Scott's creations as if they were as real as himself,) than any of their superficial vanities, or passing enthusiasms, I have to speak more at another time. I quote the passage just now, because there was one piece of the daily news of the year 1815 which did extremely interest Scott, and materially direct the labour of the latter part of his life; nor is there any piece of history in this whole nineteenth century quite so pregnant with various instruction as the study of the reasons which influenced Scott and Byron in their opposite views of the glories of the battle of Waterloo.
But I quote it for another reason also. The principal greeting which Mr. Oldbuck on this occasion receives in the market-place, being compared with the speech of Andrew Fairservice, examined in my first paper, will furnish me with the text of what I have mainly to say in the present one.