the author of a book of some celebrity in its time on Naval Tactics.  Even in the earliest days of this intimacy, the lads who had been Scott’s fellow-apprentices in his father’s office, saw with some jealousy his growing friendship with William Clerk, and remonstrated with Scott on the decline of his regard for them, but only succeeded in eliciting from him one of those outbursts of peremptory frankness which anything that he regarded as an attempt to encroach on his own interior liberty of choice always provoked.  “I will never cut any man,” he said, “unless I detect him in scoundrelism, but I know not what right any of you have to interfere with my choice of my company.  As it is, I fairly own that though I like many of you very much, and have long done so, I think William Clerk well worth you all put together."[19] Scott never lost the friendship which began with this eager enthusiasm, but his chief intimacy with Clerk was during his younger days.

In 1808 Scott describes Clerk as “a man of the most acute intellects and powerful apprehension, who, if he should ever shake loose the fetters of indolence by which he has been hitherto trammelled, cannot fail to be distinguished in the highest degree.”  Whether for the reason suggested, or for some other, Clerk never actually gained any other distinction so great as his friendship with Scott conferred upon him.  Probably Scott had discerned the true secret of his friend’s comparative obscurity.  Even while preparing for the bar, when they had agreed to go on alternate mornings to each other’s lodgings to read together, Scott found it necessary to modify the arrangement by always visiting his friend, whom he usually found in bed.  It was William Clerk who sat for the picture of Darsie Latimer, the hero of Redgauntlet,—­whence we should suppose him to have been a lively, generous, susceptible, contentious, and rather helter-skelter young man, much alive to the ludicrous in all situations, very eager to see life in all its phases, and somewhat vain of his power of adapting himself equally to all these phases.  Scott tells a story of Clerk’s being once baffled—­almost for the first time—­by a stranger in a stage coach, who would not, or could not, talk to him on any subject, until at last Clerk addressed to him this stately remonstrance, “I have talked to you, my friend, on all the ordinary subjects—­literature, farming, merchandise, gaming, game-laws, horse-races, suits-at-law, politics, swindling, blasphemy, and philosophy,—­is there any one subject that you will favour me by opening upon?” “Sir,” replied the inscrutable stranger, “can you say anything clever about ’bend-leather’?"[20] No doubt this superficial familiarity with a vast number of subjects was a great fascination to Scott, and a great stimulus to his own imagination.  To the last he held the same opinion of his friend’s latent powers.  “To my thinking,” he wrote in his diary in 1825, “I never met a man of greater powers,