Demeter,--Mother, and Judge,--brings forth, as the herb yielding seed, so
also the thorn and the thistle, not to herself, but _to thee_.

8. You have read the words of the great Law often enough;--have you ever
thought enough of them to know the difference between these two appointed
means of Distress? The first, the Thorn, is the type of distress _caused by
crime_, changing the soft and breathing leaf into inflexible and wounding
stubbornness. The second is the distress appointed to be the means and
herald of good,--Thou shalt see the stubborn thistle bursting, into glossy
purple, which outredden, all voluptuous garden roses. {122}

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