“On receiving the poet on the quarter-deck, his Majesty called for a bottle of Highland whisky, and having drunk his health in this national liquor, desired a glass to be filled for him.  Sir Walter, after draining his own bumper, made a request that the king would condescend to bestow on him the glass out of which his Majesty had just drunk his health:  and this being granted, the precious vessel was immediately wrapped up and carefully deposited in what he conceived to be the safest part of his dress.  So he returned with it to Castle Street; but—­to say nothing at this moment of graver distractions—­on reading his house he found a guest established there of a sort rather different from the usual visitors of the time.  The Poet Crabbe, to whom he had been introduced when last in London by Mr. Murray of Albemarle Street, after repeatedly promising to follow up the acquaintance by an excursion to the North, had at last arrived in the midst of these tumultuous preparations for the royal advent.  Notwithstanding all such impediments, he found his quarters ready for him, and Scott entering, wet and hurried, embraced the venerable man with brotherly affection.  The royal gift was forgotten—­the ample skirt of the coat within which it had been packed, and which he had hitherto held cautiously in front of his person, slipped back to its more usual position—­he sat down beside Crabbe, and the glass was crushed to atoms.  His scream and gesture made his wife conclude that he had sat down on a pair of scissors, or the like:  but very little harm had been done except the breaking of the glass, of which alone he had been thinking.  This was a damage not to be repaired:  as for the scratch that accompanied it, its scar was of no great consequence, as even when mounting the ‘cat-dath, or battle-garment’ of the Celtic Club, he adhered, like his hero, Waverley, to the trews.”

What follows in Lockhart’s pages is also too interesting, as regards Scott’s visitor himself, to be omitted.  The Highland clans, or what remained of them, were represented on the occasion, and added greatly to the picturesqueness of the procession and other pageantry.  And this is what occurred on the morning after the meeting of Scott and his guest:—­

“By six o’clock next morning Sir Walter, arrayed in the ‘Garb of old Gaul,’ (which he had of the Campbell tartan, in memory of one of his great-grandmothers) was attending a muster of these gallant Celts in the Queen Street Gardens, where he had the honour of presenting them with it set of colours, and delivered a suitable exhortation, crowned with their rapturous applause.  Some members of the Club, all of course in their full costume, were invited to breakfast with him.  He had previously retired for a little to his library, and when he entered the parlour, Mr. Crabbe, dressed in the highest style of professional neatness and decorum, with buckles in his shoes, and whatever was then befitting an English clergyman of his years