Boston's 'Crook in the Lot,' while her ideas were engaged in summing up the reckoning"--Waverley, i. 112)--do indeed modify in Scotland the national character for the better or the worse; or, not materially altering, do at least solemnize and confirm it in what good it may be capable of. My own Scottish nurse described in "Fors Clavigera" for April, 1873, would, I doubt not, have been as faithful and affectionate without her little library of Puritan theology; nor were her minor faults, so far as I could see, abated by its exhortations; but I cannot but believe that her uncomplaining endurance of most painful disease, and steadiness of temper under not unfrequent misapprehension by those whom she best loved and served, were in great degree aided by so much of Christian faith and hope as she had succeeded in obtaining, with little talk about it. 123. I knew however in my earlier days a right old Covenanter in my Scottish aunt's house, of whom, with Mause Hedrigg and David Deans, I may be able perhaps to speak further in my next paper.[109] But I can only now write carefully of what bears on my immediate work: and must ask the reader's indulgence for the hasty throwing together of materials intended, before my illness last spring, to have been far more thoroughly handled. The friends who are fearful for my reputation as an "ecrivain" will perhaps kindly recollect that a sentence of "Modern Painters" was often written four or five times over in my own hand, and tried in every word for perhaps an hour--perhaps a forenoon--before it was passed for the printer. I rarely now fix my mind on a sentence, or a thought, for five minutes in the quiet of morning, but a telegram comes announcing that somebody or other will do themselves the pleasure of calling at eleven o'clock, and that there's two shillings to pay. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 98: October 1881.] [Footnote 99: "Jean Francois Millet." Twenty Etching's and Woodcuts reproduced in Facsimile, and Biographical Notice by William Ernest Henley. London, 1881.] [Footnote 100: I am sorry to find that my former allusion to the boating expedition in this novel has been misconstrued by a young authoress of promise into disparagement of her own work; not supposing it possible that I could only have been forced to look at George Eliot's by a friend's imperfect account of it.] [Footnote 101: I am ashamed to exemplify the miserable work of "review" by mangling and mumbling this noble closing chapter of the "Monastery," but I cannot show the web of work without unweaving it.] [Footnote 102: With ludicrously fatal retouch in the later edition "was deprived of" his sword.] [Footnote 103: Again I am obliged, by review necessity, to omit half the points of the scene.] [Footnote 104: I must deeply and earnestly express my thanks to my friend Mr. Hale White for his vindication of Goethe's real opinion of Byron from the mangled representation of it by Mr. Matthew Arnold (_Contemporary Review_, August, 1881).]