'"--p. 9.
Throughout this scene, as through the whole book, no opportunity is
overlooked for giving individuality to the persons introduced: Sir
Hector, of whom we lose sight henceforward, the attache, the
Guards-man, are not mere names, but characters: it is not enough to
say that two tables were set apart "for keeper and gillie and
peasant:" there is something to be added yet; and with others
assembled around them were "Pipers five or six; _among them the young
one, the drunkard_."
The morrow's conversation of the reading party turns on "noble ladies
and rustic girls, their partners." And here speaks out Hewson the
chartist:
"'Never (of course you will laugh, but of course all the
same I shall say it,)
Never, believe me, revealed itself to me the sexual glory,
Till, in some village fields, in holidays now getting stupid,
One day sauntering long and listless, as Tennyson has it,
Long and listless strolling, ungainly in hobbydihoyhood,
Chanced it my eye fell aside on a capless bonnetless maiden,
Bending with three-pronged fork in a garden uprooting potatoes.
Was it the air? who can say? or herself? or the charm of the labor?
But a new thing was in me, and longing delicious possessed me,
Longing to take her and lift her, and put her away from her slaving.
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