who let his beard grow after the execution of Charles the First. There is also a portrait of Lucy Walters, mother to the Duke of Monmouth; and another of Anne Duchess of Buccleugh, the same who,

'In pride of youth, in beauty's bloom,

Had wept o'er Monmouth's bloody tomb.'

Beyond and alongside are narrowish passages, which make one fancy one's self in the penetralia of some dim old monastery; for roofs and walls and windows (square, round, and oval alike) are sculptured in stone, after the richest relics of Melrose and Roslin Chapel. One of these leads to a charming breakfast-room, which looks to the Tweed on one side, and towards Yarrow and Ettrick, famed in song, on the other: a cheerful room, fitted up with novels, romances, and poetry, at one end; and the other walls covered with a valuable and beautiful collection of water-colour drawings, chiefly by Turner, and Thomson of Duddingstone the designs, in short, for the magnificent work entitled "Provincial Antiquities of Scotland." There is one good oil painting over the chimneypiece Fast Castle by Thomson, alias the Wolf's Crag of the Bride of Lammermoor- and some large black and white drawings of the Vision of Don Roderick, by Sir James Steuart of Allanbank (whose illustrations of Marmion and Mazeppa you have seen or heard of), are at one end of the parlour. The room is crammed with queer cabinets and boxes, and in a niche there is a bust of old Henry Mackenzie, by Joseph of Edinburgh. Returning towards the armoury, you have, on one side of a most religious-looking corridor, a small greenhouse, with a fountain playing before it the very fountain that in days of yore graced the cross of Edinburgh, and used to flow with claret at the coronation of the Stuarts - a pretty design, and a standing monument of the barbarity of modern innovation. From the small armoury you pass into the drawing-room, another handsome and spacious apartment, with antique ebony furniture and crimson silk hangings, cabinets, china, and mirrors quantum suff., and some portraits; among

a very

the rest, Dryden, by Lely, with his grey hairs floating about in a most picturesque style, eyes full of wildness, presenting the old bard, I take it, in one of those "tremulous moods" in which we have it on record he appeared when interrupted in the midst of his Alexander's Feast. From this you pass into the largest of all these rooms, the library. It is an oblong of some fifty feet by thirty, with a projection in the centre, opposite the fire-place, terminating in a grand bow-window, fitted up with books also, and, in fact, constituting a sort of chapel to the church. The roof is of carved oak again rich pattern-chiefly à la Roslin; and the book-cases, which are also of richly carved oak, reach high up the walls all round. The collection amounts, in this room, to some fifteen or twenty thousand volumes, arranged according to their subjects: British history and antiquities filling the whole of the chief wall; English poetry and drama, classics and miscellanies, one end; foreign literature, chiefly French and German, the other. The cases on the side opposite the fire are wired, and locked, as containing articles very precious and very portable. One consists entirely of books and MSS. relating to the insurrections of 1715 and 1745; and another (within the recesses of the bow-window) of treatises de re magica, both of these being (I am told, and can well believe) in their several ways, collections of the rarest curiosity. My cicerone pointed out in one corner a magnificent set of Mountfaucon, fifteen volumes folio, bound in the richest manner in scarlet, and stamped with the royal arms, the gift of King George IV. There are few living authors of whose works presentation copies are not to be found here. My friend showed me inscriptions of that sort, in, I believe, every European dialect extant. The books are all in prime condition, and bindings that would satisfy Dr. Dibdin. The only picture is Sir Walter's eldest son, in hussar uniform, and holding his horse - by Allan of Edinburgh -a noble portrait, over the fire-place ; and the only bust is that of Shakspeare, from the Avon monument, in a small niche in the centre of the east side. On a rich stand of porphyry, in one corner, reposes a tall silver urn,

filled with bones from the Piræus, and bearing the inscription, "Given by George Gordon, Lord Byron, to Sir Walter Scott, Bart."

"Connected with this fine room, and fronting — which none of the other sitting-rooms do — to the south, is a smaller library, the sanctum of the Author. This room, which seems to be a crib of about twenty feet, contains, of what is properly called furniture, nothing but a small writing-table in the centre, a plain arm-chair covered with black leather and a single chair besides; plain symptoms that this is no place for company. On either side of the fire-place there are shelves filled with books of reference, chiefly, of course, folios; but except these, there are no books save the contents of a light gallery which runs round three sides of the room, and is reached by a hanging stair of carved oak in one corner. There are only two portraits — an original of the beautiful and melancholy head of Claverhouse (Bonny Dundee), and a small full-length of Rob Roy. Various little antique cabinets stand round about, each having a bust on it. Stothard's Canterbury Pilgrims are over the mantle-piece; above them is a Highland target, with a star of claymores; and in one corner I saw a collection of really useful weapons — those of the forest-craft, to wit axes and bills, and so forth, of every calibre.

"In one corner of the sanctum there is a little holy of holies, in the shape of a closet, which looks like the oratory of some dame of old romance, and opens into the gardens; and the tower which furnishes this below, forms above a private staircase accessible from the gallery, and leading to the upper regions.

"The view to the Tweed from all the principal apartments is beautiful. You look out from among bowers over a lawn of sweet turf, upon the clearest of all streams, fringed with the wildest of birch woods, and backed with the green hills of Ettrick Forest."

CHAPTER LXIII.

Reception in Dublin

Excursion to Ireland Wicklow Edgeworthstown - Killarney - Cork Castle Blarney, &c. - Letters from Moore and Canning — Llangollen — Elleray Storrs - Lowther.

-

1825.

BEFORE the Court of Session rose in July, Sir Walter had made considerable progress in his Sketch of the French Revolution; but it was agreed that he should make his promised excursion to Ireland before any MS. went to the printers. He had seen no more of the sister island than Dunluce and the Giant's Causeway, of which we have his impressions in the Lighthouse Diary of 1814; his curiosity about the scenery and the people was lively; and besides the great object of seeing his son and daughter-in-law under their own roof, and the scarcely inferior pleasure of another meeting with Miss Edgeworth, he looked forward to renewing his acquaintance with several accomplished persons, who had been serviceable to him in his labours upon Swift. But, illustriously as Ireland has contributed to the English Library, he had always been accustomed to hear that almost no books were now published there, and fewer sold than in any other country calling itself civilized; and he had naturally concluded that apathy and indifference prevailed as to literature itself, and of course as

to literary men. He had not, therefore, formed the remotest anticipation of the kind of reception which awaited him in Dublin, and indeed throughout the island wherever he traversed it.

On the day after he dispatched the following letter, he had the satisfaction of seeing his son gazetted as Captain.

"To Walter Scott, Esq., 15th Hussars, 10 Stephen's Green, Dublin.

"Edinburgh, 16th June, 1825. "My Dear Walter, I shall wait with some impatience for this night's Gazette. I have written to Coutts to pay the money so soon as you are in possession.

“On Saturday 11th, I went to Blair-Adam, and had a delicious stroll among the woods. The roe-deer are lying as thick there as in the Highlands, and I dare say they must be equally so at Lochore: so you will have some of the high game. They are endeavouring to destroy them, which they find very difficult. It is a pity they do so much mischief to the woods, for otherwise they are the most beautiful objects in nature; and were they at Abbotsford, I could not, I think, have the heart to make war on them. Two little fawns came into the room at tea-time and drank cream. They had the most beautiful dark eyes and little dark muzzles, and were scarce so big as Miss Fergusson's Italian greyhound. The Chief-Commissioner offered them to me; but, to keep them tame would have been impossible, on account of the dogs, and to turn them loose would have been wilfully entailing risk on the plantations which have cost me so much money and trouble. There was then a talk of fattening them for the kitchen, a proposal which would have driven mamma distracted.

"We spent Monday on a visit to Lochore, and in planning the road which is so much wanted. The Chief-Commissioner undertaken to treat with

is an excellent manager, and has