9. It is strange that, after much hunting, I cannot find authentic note of the day when Scotland took the thistle for her emblem; and I have no space (in this chapter at least) for tradition; but, with whatever lightness of construing we may receive the symbol, it is actually the truest that could have been found, for some conditions of the Scottish mind. There is no flower which the Proserpina of our Northern Sicily cherishes more dearly: and scarcely any of us recognize enough the beautiful power of its close-set stars, and rooted radiance of ground leaves; yet the stubbornness and ungraceful rectitude of its stem, and the besetting of its wholesome substance with that fringe of offence, and the forwardness of it, and dominance,--I fear to lacess some of my dearest friends if I went on:--let them rather, with Bailie Jarvie's true conscience,[33] take their Scott from the inner shelf in their heart's library which all true Scotsmen give him, and trace, with the swift reading of memory, the characters of Fergus M'Ivor, Hector M'Intyre, Mause Headrigg, Alison Wilson, Richie {123} Moniplies, and Andrew Fairservice; and then say, if the faults of all these, drawn as they are with a precision of touch like a Corinthian sculptor's of the acanthus leaf, can be found in anything like the same strength in other races, or if so stubbornly folded and starched moni-plies of irritating kindliness, selfish friendliness, lowly conceit, and intolerable fidelity, are native to any other spot of the wild earth of the habitable globe. 10. Will you note also--for this is of extreme interest--that these essential faults are all mean faults;--what we may call ground-growing faults; conditions of semi-education, of hardly-treated homelife, or of coarsely-minded and wandering prosperity. How literally may we go back from the living soul symbolized, to the strangely accurate earthly symbol, in the prickly weed. For if, with its bravery of endurance, and carelessness in choice of home, we find also definite faculty and habit of migration, volant mechanism for choiceless journey, not divinely directed in pilgrimage to known shrines; but carried at the wind's will by a Spirit which listeth _not_--it will go hard but that the plant shall become, if not dreaded, at least despised; and, in its wandering and reckless splendour, disgrace the garden of the sluggard, and possess the inheritance of the prodigal: until even its own nature seems contrary to good, and the invocation of the just man be made to it as the executor of Judgment, "Let thistles grow instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley."