The preface to _Guy Mannering_ tells us it is built around an old story of a father putting a lad to test under guidance of an ancient astrologer, shutting him up in a barren room to be tempted by the Evil One, leaving him only one safeguard, a Bible, lying on the table in the middle of the room. In his introduction to _The Heart of Midlothian_, Scott makes one of the two men thrown into the water by the overturned coach remind the other that they "cannot complain, like Cowley, that Gideon's fleece remains dry while all around is moist; this is the reverse of the miracle." A little later a speaker describes novels as the Delilahs that seduce wise and good men from more serious reading. In the dramatic scene when Jeanie Deans faces the wretched George Staunton, who has so shamed the household, she exclaims: "O sir, did the Scripture never come into your mind, 'Vengeance is mine, and I will repay it?'" "Scripture!" he sneers, "why I had not opened a Bible for five years." "Wae's me, sir," said Jeanie--"and a minister's son, too!" Anthony Foster, in _Kenilworth_, looks down on poor Amy's body in the vault into which she has fallen, in response to what she thought was Leicester's whistle, and exclaims to Varney: "Oh, if there be judgment in heaven, thou hast deserved it, and will meet it! Thou hast destroyed her by means of her best affections--it is the seething of the kid in the mother's milk!" And when, next morning, Varney was found dead of the secret poison and with a sneering sarcasm on his ghastly face, Scott dismisses him with the phrase: "The wicked man, saith the Scripture, hath no bonds in his death." His characters use freely the familiar Bible events and phrases. In the _Fortunes of Nigel_, a story of the very period when our King James version was produced, Hildebrod declares that if he had his way Captain Peppercull should hang as high as Haman ever did. In _Kenilworth_, when Leicester gives Varney his signet-ring, he says, significantly: "What thou dost, do quickly." Of course, Isaac, the Jew in _Ivanhoe_, exclaims frequently in Old Testament terms. He wishes the wheels of the chariots of his enemies may be taken off, like those of the host of Pharoah, that they may drive heavily. He expects the Palmer's lance to be as powerful as the rod of Moses, and so on. Scott was writing of the period when men stayed themselves with Scripture, and his men are all sure of God and Satan and angels and judgment and all eternal things. His son-in-law vouches for the old story that when Sir Walter was on his death-bed he asked Lockhart to read him something from the Book, and when Lockhart asked, "What book?" Scott replied: "Why do you ask? There is but one book, the Bible." All this is scant justice to the Georgian group; but it may give a hint of what the Bible meant even at that period, the period when its grip on men was most lax in all the later English history. * * * * *