98.  Broke.  Quartered.  Cf. the quotation from Jonson below.  Scott says here:  “Everything belonging to the chase was matter of solemnity among our ancestors; but nothing was more so than the mode of cutting up, or, as it was technically called, breaking, the slaughtered stag.  The forester had his allotted portion; the hounds had a certain allowance; and, to make the division as general as possible, the very birds had their share also.  ’There is a little gristle,’ says Tubervile, ’which is upon the spoone of the brisket, which we call the raven’s bone; and I have seen in some places a raven so wont and accustomed to it, that she would never fail to croak and cry for it all the time you were in breaking up of the deer, and would not depart till she had it.’  In the very ancient metrical romance of Sir Tristrem, that peerless knight, who is said to have been the very deviser of all rules of chase, did not omit the ceremony: 

    ’The rauen he yaue his yiftes
     Sat on the fourched tre.’ [FN#9]

“The raven might also challenge his rights by the Book of St. Albans; for thus says Dame Juliana Berners: 

         &nb
sp;                                      ’slitteth anon
    The bely to the side, from the corbyn bone;
    That is corbyns fee, at the death he will be.’

Jonson, in The Sad Shepherd, gives a more poetical account of the same ceremony: 

     ’Marian.  He that undoes him,
    Doth cleave the brisket bone, upon the spoon
    Of which a little gristle grows—­you call it
      Robin Hood.  The raven’s bone. 
      Marian.  Now o’er head sat a raven
    On a sere bough, a grown, great bird, and hoarse,
    Who, all the while the deer was breaking up,
    So croaked and cried for ’t, as all the huntsmen,
    Especially old Scathlock, thought it ominous.’”

115.  Rouse.  Rise, stand erect.  Cf.  Macbeth, v. 5. 12: 

    “The time has been, my senses would have cool’d
     To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair
     Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
     As life were in ’t.”

119.  Mine.  Many eds. have “my.”

128.  Fateful.  The reading of the 1st ed. and that of 1821; “fatal” in some recent eds.

132.  Which spills, etc.  The Ms. has “Which foremost spills a foeman’s life.”

“Though this be in the text described as a response of the Taghairm, or Oracle of the Hide, it was of itself an augury frequently attended to.  The fate of the battle was often anticipated, in the imagination of the combatants, by observing which party first shed blood.  It is said that the Highlanders under Montrose were so deeply imbued with this notion, that on the morning of the battle of Tippermoor, they murdered a defenceless herdsman, whom they found in the fields, merely to secure an advantage of so much consequence to their party” (Scott).