rselves. I pardon the lad having done some
discredit to my gray hairs, when I see him take care of that helpless
creature, which ye would have trampled upon as if ye had been littered
of bitch-wolves, not born of women."

The infant thus saved is the heir of Avenel, and the intricacy and
fateful bearing of every incident and word in the scene, knitting into
one central moment all the clews to the plot of two romances, as the
rich boss of a Gothic vault gathers the shaft moldings of it, can only
be felt by an entirely attentive reader; just as (to follow out the
likeness on Scott's own ground) the willow-wreaths changed to stone of
Melrose tracery can only be caught in their plighting by the keenest
eyes. The meshes are again gathered by the master's own hand when the
child now in Halbert's arms, twenty years hence, stoops over him to
unlace his helmet, as the fallen knight lies senseless on the field of
Carberry Hill.[103]

112. But there is another, and a still more hidden method in Scott's
designing of story, in which, taking extreme pains, he counts on much
sympathy from the reader, and can assuredly find none in a modern
student. The moral purpose of the whole, which he asserted in the
preface to the first edition of Waverley, was involved always with the
minutest study of the effects of true and false religion on the
conduct;--which subject being always touched with his utmost lightness
of hand and stealthiness of art, and founded on a knowledge of the
Scotch character and the human heart, such as no other living man
possessed, his purpose often escapes first observation as completely as
the inner feelings of living people do; and I am myself amazed, as I
take any single piece of his work up for examination, to find how many
of its points I had before missed or disregarded.

113. The groups of personages whose conduct in the Scott romance is
definitely affected by religious conviction, may be arranged broadly, as
those of the actual world, under these following heads:

1. The lowest group consists of persons who, believing in the general
truths of Evangelical religion, accommodate them to their passions, and
are capable, by gradual increase in depravity, of any crime or violence.
I am not going to include these in our present study. Trumbull ("Red
Gauntlet"), Trusty Tomkyns ("Woodstock"), Burley ("Old Mortality"), are
three of the principal types.

2. The next rank above these consists of men who believe firml