have been the case, as having been commenced and laid aside several years before, but I well recollect that he consulted me with his usual openness and candour respecting his probability of succeeding as a novelist, and I confess my expectations were not very sanguine.  He saw this and said, ’Well, I don’t see why I should not succeed as well as other people.  Come, faint heart never won fair lady—­let us try.’  I remember when the work was put into my hands, I could not get myself to think much, of the Waverley Honour scenes, but to my shame be it spoken, when he had reached the exquisite scenes of Scottish manners at Tully-Veolan, I thought them, and pronounced them, vulgar!  When the success of the book so utterly knocked me down as a man of taste, all that the good-natured Author observed was, ’Well, I really thought you might be wrong about the Scotch.  Why, Burns had already attracted universal attention to all about Scotland, and I confess I could not see why I should not be able to keep the flame alive, merely because I wrote in prose in place of rhyme.’”—­Memorandum.

[179] This was a club-house on the London plan, in Princes Street [No. 54], a little eastward from the Mound.  On its dissolution soon afterwards, Sir W. was elected by acclamation into the elder Society, called the New Club, who had then their house in St. Andrew Square [No. 3], and since 1837 in Princes Street [No. 85].

[180] Mr. Skene’s house was No. 126 Princes Street.  Scott’s written answer has been preserved:—­

“MY DEAR SKENE,—­A thousand thanks for your kind proposal.  But I am a solitary monster by temper, and must necessarily couch in a den of my own.  I should not, I assure you, have made any ceremony in accepting your offer had it at all been like to suit me.

“But I must make an arrangement which is to last for years, and perhaps for my lifetime; therefore the sooner I place myself on my footing it will be so much the better.—­Always, dear Skene, your obliged and faithful, W. SCOTT.”

[181] Pope’s Imitation of Horace, Bk. ii Sat. 6.—­J.G.L.

[182] These Letters appeared in the Edinburgh Weekly Journal in February and March 1826.  “They were then collected into a pamphlet, and ran through numerous editions; in the subsequent discussions in Parliament, they were frequently referred to; and although an elaborate answer by the then Secretary of the Admiralty, Mr. Croker, attracted much notice, and was, by the Government of the time, expected to neutralise the effect of the northern lucubrations—­the proposed measure, as regarded Scotland, was ultimately abandoned, and that result was universally ascribed to Malachi Malagrowther.”—­Scott’s Misc.  Works, vol. xxi.

[183] Winter’s Tale, Act iv.  Sc. 2, slightly altered.

[184] The late Mr. Williamson of Cardrona in Peeblesshire, was a strange humorist, of whom Sir Walter told many stories.  The allusion here is to the anecdote of the Leetle Anderson in the first of Malachi’s Epistles.:—­See Scott’s Prose Miscellanies, vol. xxi. p. 289.—­J.G.L.