whether the arrangements were completed. I said to him, "You are trying a dangerous experiment; you will never get through in privacy." He said, "They are entirely absorbed in loyalty." But I was the better prophet. He was recognised from the one extremity of the street to the other; and never did I see such an instance of national devotion expressed.'

Yet some ludicrous misadventures, along with one serious calamity and one signal mortification, befell Scott during these gala days. When the King received him in his yacht, he ordered a bottle of Highland whisky to be produced, took a glass himself, and made Scott drink another. Scott requested that the King would present him with the glass out of which he had just drunk his health, and proceeded to deposit it in the safest portion of his dress. When he returned to Castle Street, he found Crabbe newly arrived. He saluted him with warmth, and, forgetting all about the King's present, sat down beside him; the glass perished, and he screamed aloud under the advent of a considerable wound. This was only a scratch. But a day or two after this, his friend Lord Kinneder (William Erskine) died, stung to death by a base calumny, and Scott, on one of the busiest days of the royal visit, attended his funeral, and

returning in a most melancholy plight, had to plunge into gaieties, or, as Crabbe has it,' said he,

'To hide in rant the heartache of the night.'

There were other circumstances which annoyed him. There was a general rumour that His Majesty did not fully appreciate Scott's services in the visit matters, and that he spoke of him and his everlasting clans and tartans as a bore. Lockhart, indeed, denies this, but some believe it notwithstanding. Mrs. Johnstone, the well-known author of Clan Albin and editor of Tait, then on the spot, asserted it often in print, and specially insisted on the fact that cards were issued for a royal entertainment at Castle Street, but withdrawn in disgust. If so, the King's conduct was very ungrateful to one who had done so much to gild his stained reputation, and to uphold his tottering throne both by his private and public efforts.

Another dark event blackened still more this August. Lord Castlereagh died by his own hands, it being understood that one cause at least of the sad event was his counsel, like that of Achitophel, having been rejected. He had opposed the royal visit, but opposed it in vain. It seemed the Man's Hand writing prophetic characters of lamen

tation, mourning, and woe on the wall of a Belshazzar banqueting-room, and

'Made men tremble who never wept.'

In fine, Scott's exertions on this occasion nearly cost him his life, and, but for the safety-valve of a prickly eruption on the skin, he would have fallen a victim to the effects of his sincere but shortsighted loyalty. When recovered, he instantly resumed his gigantic labours.

CHAPTER XVII.

SCOTT IN IRELAND.

PN the close of 1822 Scott commenced
Quentin Durward, but was considerably

retarded by his environment with the various clubs,-Bannatyne, Roxburgh, Blair Adam, etc., of which he was a member, as well as by his connection with some of those joint-stock companies, such as the Edinburgh Oil Company, which were beginning to spring up like mushrooms around him. The subject was probably suggested to him by the return of his friend Mr. Skene from France, bringing along with him drawings and landscapes of that beautiful land, besides an accurately kept and well-written journal. It was, however, a drawback to the novelist that he had never visited the country himself, and he got at times perplexed and bewildered amidst the localities he was compelled to describe.

In June 1823 the novel appeared, fitly coming out amidst the blaze and splendour of summer, for it is one of the gayest and most buoyant of all his tales. At home it was, strange to tell, not well received at first, but was welcomed on the Continent with a burst of applause so loud and unanimous, that its spent echo returned on this country was fame. The power was seen to lie, first of all, in the youthful freshness breathing out of Quentin himself, one of the most life-like of all Scott's heroes; again, in the unmitigated interest of the story, and the elastic, easy force of the style; but especially in the contrast, drawn out with a line so long and bold, between the bull-headed Burgundy and the crafty, cunning, unscrupulous, cruel, and superstitious Louis XI. Shakspeare in many of his plays adds a fool to his dramatis personæ as a foil, a wild ornament, and a running commentary. Scott often uses, for a similar purpose, a villain with a dash of romance in him, and never with more effect than in Hayraddin Maugrabin the Bohemian, who is no commonplace town blackguard, but a poetical ragamuffin, his eye flashing with a mystic fire, with strange Oriental blasphemies mingling with unmeasured leasings as they flow out of his supple yet burning lips, and his swarthy countenance, seeming to shine, not in the light of