was over at Abbotsford talking to Terry the actor, whose advice about the new buildings was at the time in great request. Their chat was suddenly broken in upon by Sir Walter, who, holding out a bundle of manuscript, exclaimed, "Well, lads, I've laid the keel of a new lugger this morning-here it is-be off to the waterside, and let me hear how you like it." The keel of the new lugger was the first chapter of The Fortunes of Nigel; and the new boat was launched within less than half a year after the piratical craft had left the docks. In the Introductory Epistle-well worth reading by anyone interested in Scott's literary methods and opinions, though perhaps rather too long-the author (still anonymous, it is to be remembered) justifies this haste. He confesses to the imaginary Captain Clutterbuck (representing those of his friends who had urged that he should give the public a rest and himself time to prepare carefully the next novel) that the books and parts of books which he had succeeded best in had always been written with the greatest rapidity; and he declares to him that a man should strike while the iron is hot, and hoist sail while the wind is fair. As to the supposed danger of "writing himself out," the best authors had, he maintained, been the most voluminous; and he did not think so ill of the present generation of readers as to suppose that its present favour necessarily inferred future condemnation.

That Sir Walter was right on the last point, his abiding popularity with all healthy-minded persons is

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the permanent evidence; and we know from Constable himself how little his client's popularity was yet diminished. The publisher wrote to the author on the day after Nigel was issued, that he had seen people reading it in the streets as they passed along, and that the smack Ocean, by which the new work was shipped from Edinburgh, arriving in London on the Sunday, had been relieved of seven thousand copies before half-past ten on the Monday morning. The world owes it to Ballantyne, Erskine, and Lockhart that this fine historical romance was not suffered to take the form of a mere jeu d'esprit. Scott had begun to print a series of imaginary letters, presumed to be written in the days of James I., accompanied with a caustic commentary by a Radical chaplain, who was supposed to edit them, when he was persuaded by them that he would thus be throwing away valuable material for the delectation at best of a few musty antiquaries. Some of these Letters appear to have been contributed by Lady Louisa Stuart, Morritt, and perhaps other friends.

The most striking point about The Fortunes of Nigel is that, though all the action takes place in and around London, every leading character in it, from the King to the hero's servant, is a Scot. The Scottish atmosphere is varied only by some whiffs of Cockney rascality having their source in the author's familiarity with Ben Jonson's plays. There is no trace here of "cram" of imperfect topography, though by a slip of the pen

Hyde Park is once spoken of half a century before its existence. The author is thoroughly at home both with the people and the places of his third English romance. "Scotland in London" might, in fact, have been the sub-title of the book, which relates the fortunes and misfortunes of a young Scottish peer and his servant in the metropolis in the days of the first Stewart King of England. Nigel's object is to save his estate, threatened with the foreclosure of a mortgage, by obtaining the repayment from the Crown of a sum advanced by his father; and his servant has also his own "sifflication" in the form of a petition for the settlement of a debt arising from goods supplied to royalty by his father, erstwhile an Edinburgh butcher.

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Court influence, represented by the overbearing arrogance of Buckingham, with Prince Charles in the background, is all against the chief suppliant, who is moreover betrayed by his false friend Lord Dalgarno; but he has on his side the beneficent influence of George Heriot, 'Jingling Geordie," as the King pleasantly named his goldsmith and banker, and Dalgarno's father, who has saved James's life in the days of the Ruthven Raid. Richie Moniplies, Nigel's servant, has for his own part a useful ally in the person of Laurie Linklater, an official of the royal kitchen, who has such a tenderness for his northern countryman that he allows him to insert his petition between the basin and the platter in which the favourite royal mess, the well-known Scottish pottage, called cockie-leekie, is being sent up.

Linklater's recipe for the favour of the wisest fool in Christendom (as a French statesman aptly dubbed James I. and VI.) was a direct appeal to his Sovereign's sapience spiced high with Latin-the cook had himself studied at Edinburgh-with a curn (grain) or two of Greek, and, if possible, a reference to the wisdom of Solomon in the original Hebrew, seasoned with a merry jest or so.

Every scene in which the British Solomon figures shows Scott at the height of his art. It is difficult to say whether one prefers that in which Jingling Geordie obtains from him the royal sign-manual, or the interview in the presence chamber of the same new palace of Whitehall, culminating in James's hurried retirement and perusal in private, ere Steenie and Babie Charles arrive, of Glenvarloch's petition; or again one may perhaps doubt whether either of these be not surpassed by the picture of the hero's rencontre with the royal huntsman in Greenwich Park, with its masterly representation of the royal timidity struggling with the sense of offended dignity; or by the later scenes in Elizabeth's old palace in which James hides Richie behind the arras to enjoy a joke at his goldsmith's expense, and once more sinks the king in the man in his emotion on beholding old Huntinglen's distress at his son's disgrace. Second only to the royal James in skilfulness of portraiture is the awkward, conceited, and wordy, but staunch Scottish servitor, Richie Moniplies, who leaves his master in his prosperity after reproving him for his

petty gambling and other delinquencies, but returns to help him out of his adversity with the wealth which he has acquired with the hand of the murdered miser's daughter. Richie has a touch of Andrew Fairservice in Rob Roy, but he has sterling qualities which were unknown to Frank Osbaldistone's follower. Not the least remarkable in the gallery of London Scots is Sir Mungo Malagrowther, described by the Greenwich barber as a handsome person, "bating the loss of his fingers and the lameness of his leg and the length of his chin"-that sharp-tongued misanthrope, once his royal master's whipping-boy, to whom the failings and misadventures of his kind were as the breath of life, but with enough of humanity still left in his nature to prompt him to stand by Nigel when he braved the frown of Prince Charles and the arrogance of Buckingham in St. James's Park.

Nigel's fortunes take him from his lowly lodgings in Paul's Wharf to the Court at Whitehall, to dine with the King's goldsmith in Lombard Street and with a noble countryman in his mansion along the river bank; he is inveigled into Beaujeu's ordinary in Blackfriars (where he sees a prentice put to shame a swaggering bully) by his false friend Dalgarno, in whose company also he sees Burbage play Richard III., and visits other haunts of fashion and pleasure, till Malagrowther's hints turn love into hate and lead to the assault within the sacred precincts of St. James's. He has then to take refuge from a Star Chamber prosecution, involving the loss of