"Old Mortality" Concludes: "The scene was another and yet the same"

Walter Scott, Old Mortality: Reading Notes, Part Seven

Henry returns incognito from refuge in Europe; with ascension of William and Mary, political and religious situation has now reversed, with the Whigs in power and the Jacobites insurgent. Claverhouse has become a rebel, fighting with the Highlanders.

Dietary advice from Henry's aged maid: "I would approve o' your eating butcher-meat maybe as often as three times-a-week -- it keeps the wind out o' the stamack."

Surveying the Inn at Howff after the absence of many years -- and with many lives lost in the interim -- Henry observes melancholically how "the scene was another and yet the same . . . let the tide of the world wax or wane as it will, enough will be found to fill the places which chance renders vacant; and in the usual occupations and amusements of life, human beings will succeed each other as leaves upon the same tree, with the same individual difference and the same general resemblance."

The rural dram house keeper (significantly, she has gone blind) Mistress Maclure has extended her charity to those on both sides of the conflict -- "blaming nane and condemning nane" -- and only suffered for doing so.

Balfour, become a delusional hermit, holds some secret that allows him to control the fate of the Bellenden property, now in the hands of a usurper, Basil Olifant.

Of Olifant, Balfour confides: "These lands are a bit between his jaws and a hook in his nostrils, and the rein and the line are in my hands to guide them as I think meet."

In final confrontation, it is the amoral, apolitical, irreligious Cuddie who fires the shot that brings everything to right.

Poking fun at his own pat narrative resoultions and happy endings, Scott's stand-in in the book's conclusion opines: "every volume of a narrative turns less and less interesting as the author draws to a conclusion; just like your tea which, though excellent hyson, is necessarily weaker and more insipid in the last cup."


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