ADDITIONAL PASSAGES FROM THE MS. OF “PRÆTERITA,” ETC.

GALLOWAY ANCESTRY

[This piece is printed from sheets of MS. found among Ruskin’s papers for Fors Clavigera. It is preceded by a passage which was used in Letter 63, § 11 (Vol. XXVIII. pp. 546-547), and repeated in Præterita, i. § 69 (above, p. 62, down to “... its gifts and promises”). The MS. then continues:-]

MY grandmother was a Miss Tweddale, and brought with her what dim gleam of ancestral honour I may claim for myself; her people being right Earth-born and ghgeneiV of Galloway, and, as far as I learn or have noticed, honest, religious, and delicately-hearted persons: some of them not without strength of character, and more or less inly gifted with spiritual faculty, manifested in the wayward manner of which many old Scottish families are still and certainly conscious among themselves.¹

For instance,-I am not sure whether it was my great-grandmother or her sister who was a beautiful and self-willed girl in Wigton, where election was to be made of a new pastor; the Wigton electors sitting, on successive Sabbaths, in their congregational Court of Judicature to judge of the qualities of candidates by probational sermons. My great-grandmother, hearing one day some gossip of the probability of a certain pastor’s success, calmly negatived the rumour. “He will never be the minister. The man who is to be your minister I shall marry; and that man I shall not marry.” On the next, or some speedily following, Sabbath a Mr. Maitland preached in Wigton church. Whereupon, my great-grandmother, though she had never seen, nor heard of him, before, coming forth of church, announced, serenely Sibylline: “Now, that man will be your minister, and I shall marry him.”

Which accordingly came to pass: to the great benefit of the town, for Mr. Maitland did his pastor’s duty with stern Presbyterian conscience and pure heart; rebuking and exhorting with all authority, and fearlessly exercising the needful excommunicative power of all living churches, Puritan or Papal. For when Lady-, who had openly quarrelled with her son, desired still to receive the sacrament, Mr. Maitland resolutely interdicted her; and when, thinking so to shame him into concession, she came forward and knelt at the altar to receive it, the undaunted pastor lifted her up bodily and conveyed her, with as much force as her presumably helpless astonishment might render needful, back to her seat.²

¹ [See Fors Clavigera, Letter 63 (Vol. XXVIII. p. 546).]

² [This anecdote is told more briefly in The Lord’s Prayer and the Church, Vol. XXXIV. p. 227.]

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[Version 0.04: March 2008]