son's death. Moving forward to the 20th century, Andrew Lang found the character of Mucklebackit to be an example of Scott's art at its very best. Virginia Woolf presented the same opinion through her character Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, and in her own voice said that in the funeral scene the various elements "come together…drawn, one knows not how, to make a whole, a complete presentation of life". The boat-repairing speech put Catherine Macdonald Maclean in mind of David's lament for Absalom in the Second Book of Samuel. John Buchan wrote that Mucklebackit and Edie Ochiltree were the true heroes of The Antiquary, and that through strong emotion the fisherman rose to an epic dignity with the austere quality of the sagas. Scott's biographer Edgar Johnson praised the "racy and picturesque Scots" of Mucklebackit's dialogue, and found his rhetoric "beautiful and effective", but wondered whether its poetry and eloquence were true to life. David D. Brown thought the interchange between Mucklebackit and Oldbuck the most poignant in all Scott's work, Mucklebackit being Scott's "only spokesman for the incipient working classes". Likewise Harry E. Shaw found the boat-repairing scene unforgettable, and saw Mucklebackit as the voice of social protest by the Scottish peasant class against the gentry. Jane Millgate considered the tragedy of Mucklebackit's bereavement an essential strand of the novel's plot, in that it shows us the empathetic and humane side of Oldbuck's character and prepares both Oldbuck and the reader for his generous response to Lord Glenallan's plea for help in recovering his lost son. The scholar Robin Mayhead, noting that Mucklebackit is, with Edie Ochiltree, the character furthest from sham and pretension, was reminded of the stoical Scott who endured the troubled years that followed the death of his wife Charlotte. Footnotes Literary characters introduced in 1816 Fictional fishers Fictional Scottish people Fictional smugglers Sir Walter Scott characters