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.

_Christianlike._ 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.

34. 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 37: _Nineteenth Century_, June, 1880.]

[Footnote 38: See _Time and Tide_, Sec. 72.--ED.]

[Footnote 39: Nell, in the "Old Curiosity Shop," was simply killed for
the market, as a butcher kills a lamb (see Forster's "Life,") and Paul
was written under the same conditions of illness which affected Scott--a
part of the ominous palsies, grasping alike author and subject both in
"Dombey" and "Little Dorrit."]

[Footnote 40: "Chourineur" not striking with dagger-point, but ripping
with knife-edge. Yet I do him, and La Louve, injustice in classing them
with the two others; they are put together only as parts in the same
phantasm. Compare with La Louve, the strength of wild virtue in the
"Louvecienne" (Luci