itself a valuable substance, usually includes flies, straws, and other
trifles; whereas these studies, being themselves very insignificant and
trifling, do nevertheless serve to perpetuate a great deal of what is
rare and valuable in ancient manners, and to record many curious and
minute facts, which could have been preserved and conveyed through no
other medium. If, therefore, Edward Waverley yawned at times over
the dry deduction of his line of ancestors, with their various
intermarriages, and inwardly deprecated the remorseless and protracted
accuracy with which the worthy Sir Everard rehearsed the various degrees
of propinquity between the house of Waverley-Honour and the
doughty barons, knights, and squires, to whom they stood allied; if
(notwithstanding his obligations to the three ermines passant) he
sometimes cursed in his heart the jargon of heraldry, its griffins,
its moldwarps, its wyverns, and its dragons with all the bitterness of
Hotspur himself, there were moments when these communications interested
his fancy and rewarded his attention.

The deeds of Wilibert of Waverley in the Holy Land, his long absence and
perilous adventures, his supposed death, and his return in the evening
when the betrothed of his heart had wedded the hero who had protected
her from insult and oppression during his absence; the generosity with
which the Crusader relinquished his claims, and sought in a neighbouring
cloister that peace which passeth not away; [1]--to these
and similar tales he would hearken till his heart glowed and his
eye glistened. Nor was he less affected, when his aunt, Mrs. Rachel,
narrated the sufferings and fortitude of Lady Alice Waverley during
the Great Civil War. The benevolent features of the venerable spinster
kindled into more majestic expression, as she told how Charles had,
after the field of Worcester, found a day's refuge at Waverley-Honour;
and how, when a troop of cavalry were approaching to search the mansion,