approved friends to that of the gallant Obadiah in a similar critical moment.  “The noble Captain Ferguson was married on Monday last.  I was present at the bridal, and I assure you the like hath not been seen since the days of Lismahago.  Like his prototype, the Captain advanced in a jaunty military step, with a kind of leer on his face that seemed to quiz the whole matter.”  That the sketch was a portrait, though doubtless disguised to such an extent as rendered its introduction permissible, is very probable; and as it is beyond question one of the masterpieces of English fiction, a few lines may well be given to the point.  With great justice the Quarterly Reviewer pronounces the character of Lismahago in no whit inferior to that of Scott’s Dugald Dalgetty; and who would not go out of his way to trace any circumstance in the history of such a conception as that of the valiant Laird of Drumthwacket, the service-seeking Rittmaster of Swedish Black Dragoons?

Scott himself tells us that he recollected “a good and gallant officer” who was said to have been the prototype of Lismahago, though probably the opinion had its origin in “the striking resemblance which he bore in externals to the doughty Captain.”  Sir Walter names no name; but there is a tradition that a certain Major Robert Stobo was the real original from which the picture was drawn.  Stobo may fairly be said to fulfil the necessary requisites for this theory.  That he was as great an oddity as ever lived is abundantly testified by his own “Memorial,” written about 1760, and printed at Pittsburg in 1854, from a copy of the MS. in the British Museum.  At the breaking out of the Seven-Years’ War, he was in Virginia, seeking his fortune under the patronage of his countryman, Dinwiddie, and thus obtained a captaincy in the expedition which Washington, in 1754, led to the Great Meadows.  On the fall of Fort Necessity, he was one of the hostages surrendered by Washington to the enemy; and thus, and by his subsequent doings at Fort Du Quesne and in Canada, he has linked his name with some interesting passages of our national history.[A] That he was known to Smollett in after life appears by a letter from David Hume to the latter, in which his “strange adventures” are alluded to; and there is considerable resemblance between these, as narrated by Stobo himself, and those assigned by the novelist to Lismahago.  And, bearing in mind the ineffable self-complacency with which Stobo always dwells on himself and his belongings, the description of his person given in the “Memorial” coincides very well with that of the figure which the novelist makes to descend in the yard of the Durham inn.  One circumstance further may be noted.  We are told of “the noble and sonorous names” which Miss Tabitha Bramble so much admired:  “that Obadiah was an adventitious appellation, derived from his great-grandfather, who had been one of the original Covenanters; but Lismahago was the family surname, taken from a place in Scotland, so called.”