to help to get the beggar Ochiltree, who has been accused of an assault on Dousterswivel, freed from prison, and to advise the hapless Wardour on how to handle his impending bankruptcy. The novel ends with a rumour of impending French invasion, which rouses Oldbuck and the whole town of Fairport to take up arms and if necessary fight for their country together. This false alarm is suppressed by the arrival of a famous cavalry officer, Major Neville, who proves to be not only Oldbuck's friend Lovel but also Glenallan's son. So the Antiquary can return to his life of contented historical research. His character Oldbuck functions in the novel as a comic foil to the down-to-earth realist Ochiltree, the gothically tragic Glenallan, and the absurdly self-important Wardour. The most obvious aspect of his character is an obsessive devotion to the pursuit of antiquarianism. He writes on castrametation, the science of ancient fortification, and contributes papers on learned subjects to journals; he argues heatedly with his friends over the nature of the Pictish language; he buys overpriced land purely for the pleasure of owning the site of a Roman camp and of the battle of Mons Graupius. His devotion to his scholarship, and his celibacy, make him a modern equivalent of the monks of St. Ruth’s Priory, as he recognises himself. But this enthusiasm can lead him into self-delusion, as with his supposed Roman camp which was in fact built as a shelter by local peasants only twenty years before, partly because his approach to the past is not that of a scientific historian, deducing hypotheses from solid evidence, but that of an antiquary, forming opinions first and justifying them with whatever evidence comes to hand afterwards. He also has a legal training, and believes strongly in its usefulness in all matters of business, but in the early stages of the novel both his antiquarian and his legal skills tend to be in practice of little use to him. He is, like his author, a Stoic, but this philosophy is compromised by his Scottish materialism. His rejection by Eveline Neville has left him with an marked lack of regard for “womankind”, but has not embittered him to the extent of drying up all capacity for human sympathy. His futility as an agent in human affairs is only ended when he begins to feel for the troubles of others, and to