f
laughter, and every now and then seizing them, and stopping, that they
might take their fill of the fun; there they stood shaking with laughter,
"not an inch of their body free" from its grip. At George Street they
parted, one to Rose Court, behind St. Andrew's Church, one to Albany
Street, the other, our big and limping friend, to Castle Street.

We need hardly give their names. The first was William Erskine,
afterwards Lord Kinnedder, chased out of the world by a calumny, killed
by its foul breath,--

"And at the touch of wrong, without a strife,
Slipped in a moment out of life."

There is nothing in literature more beautiful or more pathetic than
Scott's love and sorrow for this friend of his youth.

The second was William Clerk,--the _Darsie Latimer_ of "Redgauntlet"; "a
man," as Scott says, "of the most acute intellects and powerful
apprehension," but of more powerful indolence, so as to leave the world
with little more than the report of what he might have been,--a humorist
as genuine, though not quite so savagely Swiftian as his brother Lord
Eldon, neither of whom had much of that commonest and best of all the
humors, called good.

The third we all know. What has he not done for every one of us? Who else
ever, except Shakespeare, so diverted mankind, entertained and
entertains a world so liberally, so wholesomely? We are fain to say, not
even Shakespeare, for his is something deeper than diversion, something
higher than pleasure, and yet who would care to split this hair?

Had any one watched him closely before and after the parting, what a
change he would see! The bright, broad laugh, the shrewd, jovial word,
the man of the Parliament House and of the world, and, next step, moody,
the light of his eye withdrawn, as if seeing things that were invisible;
his shut mouth, like a child's, so impressionable, so innocent, so sad:
he was now all within, as before he was all without; hence his brooding
look. As the snow blattered in his face, he muttered, "How it raves and
drifts! On-ding o' snaw,--ay, that's the word,--on-ding--" He was now at
his own door, "Castle Street, No.39." He opened the door, and went
straight to his den; that wondrous workshop, where, in one year, 1823,
when he was fifty-two, he wrote "Peveril of the Peak," "Quentin
Durward," and "St. Ronan's Well," besides much else. We once took the
foremost of our novelists, the greatest, we would say, since Scott, into
this room, and could n