four times as much as the cost, good hospitality having been the rule.”  “I read publicly (private readings additional, as often asked after dinners, &c.) twenty-nine proverbial essays and thirty-eight poems; repeated according to popularity by request to two hundred.”  I only do not name some of my generous Scotch and English hosts for fear of seeming to have forgotten others by omission; and the list is too lengthy for full insertion; as also is the long story of my adventures and experiences in the hospitable North.

Miscellaneous Poems.

Before dismissing thus curtly, my great Scottish exploit (which, by the way, anticipated by three years my second American visit, but I would not disjoin that from my first) I ought to give some account of the publication of my Miscellaneous Poems by Gall & Inglis at Edinburgh, and of some few of the hospitalities connected therewith, though not revealing domesticities, as against my wholesome rule.

An odd thing happened to me at Mr. Inglis’s dinner-table, where I met several literary celebrities.  I had just read, and was loud in my praises of a then anonymous work, “Primeval Man Unveiled,” and I asked my neighbour, an aged man, if he knew that extraordinary book?  Whereupon the whole table saluted the questioner with a loud guffaw; for I was speaking to its author, whom I had innocently so bepraised.  However, my mistake was easily forgiven, as may be imagined.  I found that the said author was Mr. Inglis’s near relative, Mr. Gall,—­so my new publisher and I were immediately en rapport.

There are two simultaneous editions of this book of my poetry—­one called the Redlined and the other the Landscape; the first on thick paper, and with eight steel engravings, the latter having every page decorated in colours with beautiful borderings of scenery.  The volume contains about one-half or less of all the mass of lyrics I have written, some of the pieces having been in earlier books of my poetry, as Ballads and Poems, Cithara, Lyrics of the Heart and Mind, Hactenus, A Thousand Lines, &c. &c.; and they date, though not printed in systematic order, from my fifteenth year to beyond my sixtieth.  Fly-leaf lyrics have been continually growing ever since now to my seventy-sixth.

Here are a few further random, extracts from my Scotch diary:—­“Arbroath, Sunday, Nov. 2, 1873.—­What a comfort it is for once to feel utterly unknown; for even my luggage has only a monogram, and here at the White Hart I am No. 15, and a commercial gent to all appearance:  really, it is quite a relief to be some one else than Martin Tupper.”