IV. JOANNA’S CARE 543

of the most living interest to me; and although, from my father’s unerring tutorship, I had learned Scott’s own Edinburgh accent with a precision which made the turn of every sentence precious to me, (and, I believe, my own rendering of it thoroughly interesting, even to a Scottish listener,¹)-yet every now and then Joanie could tell me something of old, classic, Galloway Scotch, which was no less valuable to me than a sudden light thrown on a chorus in Æschylus would be to a Greek scholar;-nay, only the other day I was entirely crushed by her interpreting to me, for the first time, the meaning of the name of the village of Captain Clutterbuck’s residence,-Kennaquhair.*

69. And it has chiefly been owing to Joan’s help,-and even so, only within the last five or six years,-that I have fully understood the power, not on Sir Walter’s mind merely, but on the character of all good Scotchmen, (much more, good Scotchwomen,) of the two lines of coast from Holy Island to Edinburgh, and from Annan to the Mull of Galloway. Between them, if the reader will glance at any old map which gives rivers and mountains, instead

* “Ken na’ where”! Note the cunning with which Scott himself throws his reader off the scent, in the first sentence of The Monastery, by quoting the learned Chalmers “for the derivation of the word ‘Quhair,’ from the winding course of the stream; a definition which coincides in a remarkable degree with the serpentine turns of the Tweed”! (“It’s a serpentine turn of his own, I think!” says Joanie, as I show her the sentence,) while in the next paragraph he gives an apparently historical existence to “the village of which we speak,” by associating it with Melrose, Jedburgh, and Kelso, in the “splendour of foundation by David I.,” and concludes, respecting the lands with which the king endowed these wealthy fraternities, with a grave sentence, perhaps the most candid ever written by a Scotsman, of the centuries preceding the Reformation: “In fact, for several ages the possessions of these Abbeys were each a sort of Goshen, enjoying the calm light of peace and immunity, while the rest of the country, occupied by wild clans and marauding barons, was one dark scene of confusion, blood, and unremitted outrage.”

¹ [“On more than one visit to Brantwood,” says Mr. Wedderburn, “Ruskin read Scott aloud after dinner-quite admirably. The first novel I heard him read was The Fortunes of Nigel, then Quentin Durward, and later The Monastery. He thoroughly enjoyed the reading himself, and delighted in seeing his audience held by the book, and in yielding to (or refusing) their appeal for ‘just one more chapter.’”]

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