whom Edinburgh produced in their time. I may add here
the description of that early _den_, with which I am favored by a lady
of Scott's family:--"Walter had soon begun to collect out-of-the-way
things of all sorts. He had more books than shelves; a small painted
cabinet, with Scotch and Roman coins in it, and so forth. A claymore
and Lochaber axe, given him by old Invernahyle, mounted guard on a
little print of Prince Charlie; and _Broughton's Saucer_ was hooked up
against the wall below it." Such was the germ of the magnificent
library and museum of Abbotsford; and such were the "new realms" in
which he, on taking possession, had {p.161} arranged his little
paraphernalia about him "with all the feelings of novelty and
liberty." Since those days, the habits of life in Edinburgh, as
elsewhere, have undergone many changes: and the "convenient parlor,"
in which Scott first showed Jeffrey his collections of minstrelsy, is
now, in all probability, thought hardly good enough for a menial's
sleeping-room.

But I have forgotten to explain _Broughton's Saucer_. We read of Mr.
Saunders Fairford, that though "an elder of the kirk, and of course
zealous for King George and the Government," yet, having "many clients
and connections of business among families of opposite political
tenets, he was particularly cautious to use all the conventional
phrases which the civility of the time had devised as an admissible
mode of language betwixt the two parties: Thus he spoke sometimes of
the Chevalier, but never either of the _Prince_, which would have been
sacrificing his own principles, or of _the Pretender_, which would
have been offensive to those of others: Again, he usually designated
the Rebellion as the _affair_ of 1745, and spoke of any one engaged in
it as a person who had been _out_ at a certain period--so that, on the
whole, he was much liked and respected on all sides."[85] All this was
true of Mr. Walter Scott, W. S.; but I have often heard his son tell
an anecdote of him, which he dwelt on with particular satisfaction, as
illustrative of the man, and of the difficult time through which he
had lived.

[Footnote 85: _Redgauntlet_, chap. i.]

Mrs. Scott's curiosity was strongly excited one autumn by the regular
appearance, at a certain hour every evening, of a sedan chair, to
deposit a person carefully muffled up in a mantle, who was immediately
ushered into her husband's private room, and commonly remained with
him t