‘Really,’ resumed the traveller, ’I am sorry to see a gentleman of your learning and gravity labouring under such strange blindness and delusion.  Will you place the brief, the modern, and, as I may say, the vernacular name of Isaac Newton in opposition to the grave and sonorous authorities of Dariot, Bonatus, Ptolemy, Haly, Eztler, Dieterick, Naibob, Harfurt, Zael, Taustettor, Agrippa, Duretus, Maginus, Origen, and Argol?  Do not Christians and Heathens, and Jews and Gentiles, and poets and philosophers, unite in allowing the starry influences?’

‘Communis error—­it is a general mistake,’ answered the inflexible Dominie Sampson.

‘Not so,’ replied the young Englishman; ’it is a general and well-grounded belief.’

‘It is the resource of cheaters, knaves, and cozeners,’ said Sampson.

’Abusus non tollit usum.—­The abuse of anything doth not abrogate the lawful use thereof.’

During this discussion Ellangowan was somewhat like a woodcock caught in his own springe.  He turned his face alternately from the one spokesman to the other, and began, from the gravity with which Mannering plied his adversary, and the learning which he displayed in the controversy, to give him credit for being half serious.  As for Meg, she fixed her bewildered eyes upon the astrologer, overpowered by a jargon more mysterious than her own.

Mannering pressed his advantage, and ran over all the hard terms of art which a tenacious memory supplied, and which, from circumstances hereafter to be noticed, had been familiar to him in early youth.

Signs and planets, in aspects sextile, quartile, trine, conjoined, or opposite; houses of heaven, with their cusps, hours, and minutes; almuten, almochoden, anabibazon, catabibazon; a thousand terms of equal sound and significance, poured thick and threefold upon the unshrinking Dominie, whose stubborn incredulity bore him out against the pelting of this pitiless storm.

At length the joyful annunciation that the lady had presented her husband with a fine boy, and was (of course) as well as could be expected, broke off this intercourse.  Mr. Bertram hastened to the lady’s apartment, Meg Merrilies descended to the kitchen to secure her share of the groaning malt and the ‘ken-no,’ [Footnote:  See Note i.] and Mannering, after looking at his watch, and noting with great exactness the hour and minute of the birth, requested, with becoming gravity, that the Dominie would conduct him to some place where he might have a view of the heavenly bodies.

The schoolmaster, without further answer, rose and threw open a door half sashed with glass, which led to an old-fashioned terrace-walk behind the modern house, communicating with the platform on which the ruins of the ancient castle were situated.  The wind had arisen, and swept before it the clouds which had formerly obscured the sky.  The moon was high, and at the full, and all the lesser satellites of heaven shone forth in cloudless effulgence.  The scene which their light presented to Mannering was in the highest degree unexpected and striking.