IV. JOANNA’S CARE 547

dwelling on the Highland virtue which gives the strength of clanship, and the Lowland honour of knighthood, founded on the Catholic religion. Then came the series of novels, in which, as I have stated elsewhere,¹ those which dealt with the history of other nations, such as Ivanhoe, Kenil-worth, Woodstock, Quentin Durward, Peveril of the Peak, The Betrothed, and The Crusaders, however attractive to the general world, were continually weak in fancy, and false in prejudice; but the literally Scotch novels, Waverley, Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, Old Mortality, The Heart of Midlothian, The Abbot, Redgauntlet, and The Fortunes of Nigel, are, whatever the modern world may think of them, as faultless, throughout, as human work can be: and eternal examples of the ineffable art which is taught by the loveliest nature to her truest children.

Now of these, observe, Guy Mannering, Redgauntlet, a great part of Waverley, and the beautiful close of The Abbot, pass on the two coasts of Solway. The entire power of Old Mortality rises out of them, and their influence on Scott is curiously shown by his adoption of the name “Ochiltree” for his bedesman of Montrose, coming, not from the near hills, as one at first fancies, but from the Ochiltree Castle, which in Mercator’s old map of 1637 I find in the centre of the archbishopric, then extending from Glasgow to Wigtown, and correspondent to that of St. Andrew’s on the east,-the subordinate bishopric of Candida Casa, answering to that of Dunkeld, with the bishoprics of the isles Sura, Mura, and Isla. It is also, Mercator adds in his note, called the “bishopric of Galloway.”

73. “Even I,” says Joanie, again, “remember old people who knew the real Old Mortality. He used to come through all the Galloway district to clean and re-cut the old worn gravestones of the martyrs; sometimes, I have been told, to the long since disused kirkyard of Kirkchrist, the place where my great aunt, Mrs. Church (Carlyle’s

¹ [See Fiction, Fair and Foul; and a letter of “Whit Tuesday, 1887,” now printed in Arrows of the Chace, Vol. XXXIV. p. 607.]

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