the Peveril of the Peak (then upon the anvil), and in the heat, and fury, and absorption of the whole gala business breaking out of line with a bowed head and aching heart, to follow his best friend, William Erskine (Lord Kinnedder), * out by Queensferry to his burial.

It was only eight years thereafter, when this poet manager of the great Scotch jubilee-who seemed good for the work of a score of years— sailed, by royal permission (an act redeeming and glorifying royalty) upon a Government shipseeking shores and skies which would put new vigor (if it might be) into a constitution broken by toil, and into hopes that had been blighted by blow on blow of sorrow.

Never was a royal favor more worthily bespoken; never one more vainly bestowed. "Twas too late. No human eye once so capable of seeing-ever opened for a first look so wearily upon the blue of the Mediterranean upon the marvellous fringed shores of lower Italy-upon

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, chapter viii., pp. 126-27, vol. iii., Paris edition.

SCOTT'S DEATH.

81

Rome, Florence, and the snowy Swiss portals of the Simplon.

Royalty (in person of William IV., then on the throne) asked kindly after the sick magician who was established presently on a sick bed in London; while the cabmen on street corners near by talked low of the "great mon " who lay there a-dying. A little show of recovery gave power to reach home Abbotsford and Tweedside

more.

· once

There was no hope; but it took time for the great strength in him to waste.

Withal there was a fine glint of royalty at the end. "Be virtuous, my dear," he said to Lockhart; "be a good man." And that utterancethe summing up of forty years of brilliant accomplishment, and of baffled ambitions — emphasized by the trembling voice of a dying man — will dwell longer in human memories, and more worthily, than the empty baronial pile we call Abbotsford, past which the scurrying waters of the Tweed ripple and murmur as they did on the day Sir Walter was born, and on the day he was buried at Dryburgh.

Ο

CHAPTER III.

UR last chapter was opened by a rather

full sketch of Professor Wilson, and a briefer one of Thomas Campbell-who though of higher repute as a poet, was a far less interesting man. We then entered upon what may have seemed a very inadequate account of the great author of Waverley—because I presumed upon the reader's full and ready knowledge; and because the Minstrel's grand stride over all the Scottish country that is worth the seeing, and over all that domain in English Lands and Letters, which he made his own, has been noted by scores of tourists, and by scores of admiring commentators. You may believe me in saying that his story was not scrimped for lack of love; indeed, it would have been easy to riot in talk about the lively drum-beat of his poems, or the

82

AN ENGLISH CURATE.

83

livelier and more engaging charms of his prose Romance-through two chapters or through ten. But we must get on; there is a long road before us yet.

A Start in Life.

It was somewhere about the year 1798, that a sharp-faced, youngish Englishman- who had been curate of a small country parish down in Wiltshire - drove, upon a pleasant June day, on a coach-top, into the old city of Edinboro'. This clergyman had a young lad seated beside him, whom he was tutoring; and this tutoring business enabled the curate to take a respectable house in the city. And by reason of the respectable house, and his own pleasant humor and intelligence, he came after a year or two to know a great many of the better folk in Edinboro', and was invited to preach an occasional sermon at a small Episcopal chapel in his neighborhood. But all the good people he met did not prevent his being a-hungered after a young person whom he had left in the south of England. So he took a vacation presently and fetched her

back, a bride, to the Scottish capital― having (as he said) thrown all his fortune in her lap. This fortune was of maternal inheritance, and consisted of six well-worn silver teaspoons. There was excellent society in Edinboro' in that day, among the ornaments of which was Henry Mackenzie, * a stately gentleman - a sort of dean of the literary coteries, and the author of books which it is well to know by name The Man of

Feeling and Julia de Roubigné — written with

· --

great painstaking and most exalted sentiment, and-what we count now much dreariness.

Then there was a Rev. Archibald Alison he too an Episcopal clergyman, though Scotch to the backbone- and the author of an ingenious, but not very pregnant book, still to be found in old-fashioned libraries, labelled, Alison on Taste. Dugald Stewart was then active, and did on one or two occasions bring his honored presence to the little chapel to hear the preaching of the young English curate I spoke of. And this young

curate, poor as he is and with a

young wife, has

* Henry Mackenzie, b. 1745; d. 1831. Man of Feeling,

1771; The Lounger, 1785.