"Nay, never start about it, man; you see you are known. Alack-a-day! that an honest man's son should live to start at hearing himself called by his own name." "I pray you in good fashion to let me go," said Jenkin. "I am in the humor to be dangerous to myself, or to anyone." "I will abide the risk," said the Scot, "if you will but come with me. You are the very lad in the world whom I most wish to meet."[106] "And you," answered Vincent, "or any of your beggarly countrymen, are the last sight I should ever wish to see. You Scots are ever fair and false." "As to our poverty, friend," replied Richie, "that is as Heaven pleases; but touching our falsity, I'll prove to you that a Scotsman bears as leal and true a heart to his friend as ever beat in an English doublet." 119. In these, and other such passages, it will be felt that I have done Richie some injustice in classing him among the religionists who have little sympathy! For all real distress, his compassion is instant; but his doctrinal religion becomes immediately to him a cause of failure in charity. "Yon divine has another air from powerful Master Rollock, and Mess David Black of North Leith, and sic like. Alack-a-day, wha can ken, if it please your lordship, whether sic prayers as the Southrons read out of their auld blethering black mess-book there, may not be as powerful to invite fiends, as a right red-het prayer warm from the heart may be powerful to drive them away; even as the evil spirit was driven by the smell of the fish's liver from the bridal chamber of Sara, the daughter of Raguel!" The scene in which this speech occurs is one of Scott's most finished pieces, showing with supreme art how far the weakness of Richie's superstitious formality is increased by his being at the time partially drunk! It is on the other hand to be noted to his credit, for an earnest and searching Bible-reader, that he quotes the Apocrypha. Not so gifted Gilfillan,-- "But if your honor wad consider the case of Tobit--!" "Tobit!" exclaimed Gilfillan with great heat; "Tobit and his dog baith are altogether heathenish and apocryphal, and none but a prelatist or a papist would draw them into question. I doubt I hae been mista'en in you, friend." Gilfillan and Fairservice are exactly alike, and both are distinguished from Moniplies in their scornfully exclusive dogmatism, which is indeed the distinctive plague-spot of the lower evangelical sect everywhere, and the worst blight of the narrow natures, capable of its zealous profession. In Blattergowl, on the contrary, as his name implies, the _doctrinal_ teaching has become mere Blather, Blatter, or patter--a string of commonplaces spoken habitually in performance of his clerical function, but with no personal or sectarian interest in them on his part.