Note 8 — LETTER XXXI.

Well, I’m sorry for you:—but if you don’t care for St. Mary, the wife of Joseph, do you care at all for St. Mary-Anne, the wife of Joe? Have you any faith in the holiness of your own wives, who are here, in flesh and blood? or do you verily wish them, as Mr. Mill8 would have it—sacrifice all pretence to saintship, as to holy days—to follow “some more lucrative occupation than that of nursing the baby”? And you don’t care for the young Buccleugh? Cut away the cleugh, then, and read the Buc backwards. Do you care for your own cub as much as Sir Walter would have cared for his own beast? (see, farther on, how he takes care of his wire-haired terrier, Spice,) or as any beast cares for its cub? Or do you send your poor little brat to make money for you, like your wife; as though a cock should send his hen and chickens to pick up what they could for him; and it were the usual law of nature that nestlings should feed the parent birds? If that be your way of liberal modern life, believe me, the Border faith in its Mary and its master, however servile, was not benighted in comparison.