ng whom wiser creatures than Hobbie Elliot may
tremblingly ask 'Gude guide us, what's yon?' hast thou yet known, seeing
that thou hast yet told, _nothing_.

Scott may perhaps have his answer. We shall in good time hear.

JOHN RUSKIN

FOOTNOTES:

[154] Nell, in the _Old Curiosity Shop_, was simply killed for the
market, as a butcher kills a lamb (see Forster's _Life_), and Paul was
written under the same conditions of illness which affected Scott--a
part of the ominous palsies, grasping alike author and subject, both in
_Dombey_ and _Little Dorrit_.

[155] Chourineur' not striking with dagger-point, but ripping with
knife-edge. Yet I do him, and La Louve, injustice in classing them with
the two others; they are put together only as parts in the same
phantasm. Compare with La Louve, the strength of wild virtue in the
'Louvecienne' (Lucienne) of Gaboriau--she, province-born and bred; and
opposed to Parisian civilisation in the character of her sempstress
friend. 'De ce Paris, ou elle etait nee, elle savait tout--elle
connaissait tout. Rien ne l'etonnait, nul ne l'intimidait. Sa science
des details materiels de l'existence etait inconcevable. Impossible de
la duper!--Eh bien! cette fille si laborieuse et si econome n'avait meme
pas la plus vague notion des sentiments qui sont l'honneur de la femme.
Je n'avais pas idee d'une si complete absence de sens moral; d'une si
inconsciente depravation, d'une impudence si effrontement
naive.'--_L'Argent des autres_, vol. i. p. 358.

[156] The reader who cares to seek it may easily find medical evidence
of the physical effects of certain states of brain disease in producing
especially images of truncated and Hermes-like deformity, complicated
with grossness. Horace, in the _Epodes_, scoffs at it, but not without
horror. Luca Signorelli and Raphael in their arabesques are deeply
struck by it: Durer, defying and playing with it alternately, is almost
beaten down again and again in the distorted faces, hewing halberts, and
suspended satyrs of his arabesques round the polyglot Lord's Prayer; it
takes entire possession of Balzac in the _Contes Drolatiques_; it struck
Scott in the earliest days of his childish 'visions' intensified by the
axe-stroke murder of his grand aunt; L. i. 142, and see close of this
note. It chose for him the subject of the _Heart of Midlothian_, and
produced afterwards all the recurrent ideas of executions, tainting
_Nigel_, almost spoiling _Quentin Durwa