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."

11. Yet to be despised--either for men or flowers--may {124} be no
ill-fortune; the real ill-fortune is only to be despicable. These faults of
human character, wherever found, observe, belong to it as
ill-trained--incomplete; confirm themselves only in the vulgar. There is no
base pertinacity, no overweening conceit, in the Black Douglas, or
Claverhouse, or Montrose; in these we find the pure Scottish temper, of
heroic endurance and royal pride; but, when, in the pay, and not deceived,
but purchased, idolatry of Mammon, the Scottish persistence and pride
become knit and vested in the spleuchan, and your stiff Covenanter makes
his covenant with Death, and your Old Mortality deciphers only the
senseless legends of the eternal gravestone,--you get your weed,
earth-grown, in bitter verity, and earth-devastating, in bitter strength.

12. I have told you, elsewhere, we are always first to study national
character in the highest and purest examples. But if our knowledge is to be
complete, we have to study also the special diseases of national character.
And in exact opposition to the most solemn virtue of Scotland, the domestic
truth and tenderness breathed in all Scottish song, you have this special
disease and mortal cancer, this woody-fibriness, literally, of temper and
thought: the consummation of which into pure lignite, or rather black
Devil's charcoal--the sap of the birks of Aberfeldy become cinder, and the
blessed juices of them, deadly gas,--you may know in its pure blackness
best in the work of the greatest of these ground-growing Scotchmen, Adam
Smith. {125}

13. No man of like capacity, I believe, born of any other nation, could