the unpardonable being the worst absurdity of all Scotch
wickedness to this hour--everything being forgiven to people who go to
church on Sunday, and curse the Pope. Scott never loses sight of this
marvelous plague-spot of Presbyterian religion, and the last words of
Andrew Fairservice are:--

"The villain Laurie! to betray an auld friend that sang aff the
same psalm-book wi' him _every Sabbath_ for twenty years,"

and the tragedy of these last words of his, and of his expulsion from
his former happy home--"a jargonelle pear-tree at one end of the
cottage, a rivulet and flower plot of a rood in extent in front, a
kitchen garden behind, and a paddock for a cow" (viii. 6, of the 1830
edition) can only be understood by the reading of the chapter he quotes
on that last Sabbath evening he passes in it--the 5th of Nehemiah.

122. For--and I must again and again point out this to the modern
reader, who, living in a world of affectation, suspects "hypocrisy" in
every creature he sees--the very plague of this lower evangelical piety
is that it is _not_ hypocrisy; that Andrew and Laurie _do_ both expect
to get the grace of God by singing psalms on Sunday, whatever rascality
they practice during the week. In the modern popular drama of
"School,"[108] the only religious figure is a dirty and malicious usher
who appears first reading Hervey's "Meditations," and throws away the
book as soon as he is out of sight of the company. But when Andrew is
found by Frank "perched up like a statue by a range of beehives in an
attitude of devout contemplation, with one eye watching the motions of
the little irritable citizens, and the other fixed on a book of
devotion," you will please observe, suspicious reader, that the devout
gardener has no expectation whatever of Frank's approach, nor has he any
design upon him, nor is he reading or attitudinizing for effect of any
kind on any person. He is following his own ordinary customs, and his
book of devotion has been already so well used that "much attrition had
deprived it of its corners, and worn it into an oval shape"; its
attractiveness to Andrew being twofold--the first, that it contains
doctrine to his mind; the second, that such sound doctrine is set forth
under figures properly belonging to his craft. "I was e'en taking a
spell o' worthy Mess John Quackleben's 'Flower of a Sweet Savour sown on
the Middenstead of this World'" (note in passing Scott's easy, instant,
exquisite inve