and station, was standing in the midst of half-a-dozen stalwart Highlanders, exchanging elaborate civilities with them in what was at least meant to be French.  He had come into the room shortly before, without having been warned about such company, and hearing the party conversing together in an unknown tongue, the polite old man had adopted, in his first salutation, what he considered as the universal language.  Some of the Celts, on their part, took him for some foreign Abbe or Bishop, and were doing their best to explain to him that they were not the wild savages for which, from the startled glance he had thrown on their hirsute proportions, there seemed but too much reason to suspect he had taken them; others, more perspicacious, gave in to the thing for the joke’s sake; and there was high fun when Scott dissolved the charm of their stammering, by grasping Crabbe with one hand, and the nearest of these figures with the other, and greeted the whole group with the same hearty good-morning.”

In spite, however, of banquets (at one of which Crabbe was present) and other constant calls upon his host’s time and labour, the southern poet contrived to enjoy himself.  He wandered into the oldest parts of Edinburgh, and Scott obtained for him the services of a friendly caddie to accompany him on some of these occasions lest the old parson should come to any harm.  Lockhart, who was of the party in Castle Street, was very attentive to Scott’s visitor, Crabbe had but few opportunities of seeing Scott alone.  “They had,” writes Lockhart, “but one quiet walk together, and it was to the ruins of St. Anthony’s Chapel and Mushat’s Cairn, which the deep impression made on Crabbe by The Heart of Midlothian had given him an earnest wish to see.  I accompanied them; and the hour so spent—­in the course of which the fine old man gave us some most touching anecdotes of his early struggles—­was a truly delightful contrast to the bustle and worry of miscellaneous society which consumed so many of his few hours in Scotland.  Scott’s family were more fortunate than himself in this respect.  They had from infancy been taught to reverence Crabbe’s genius, and they now saw enough of him to make them think of him ever afterwards with tender affection.”

Yet one more trait of Scott’s interest in his guest should not be omitted.  The strain upon Scott’s strength of the King’s visit was made more severe by the death during that fortnight of Scott’s old and dear friend, William Erskine, only a few months before elevated to the bench, with the title of Lord Kinedder.  Erskine had been irrecoverably wounded by the circulation of a cruel and unfounded slander upon his moral character.  It so preyed on his mind that its effect was, in Scott’s words, to “torture to death one of the most soft-hearted and sensitive of God’s creatures.”  On the very day of the King’s arrival he died, after high fever and delirium had set in, and his funeral, which Scott attended, followed in due course.