' pride--na pride had he...
A lang kail-gully hung down by his side,
And a great meikle nowt-horn to rout on had he,'

and meikle and sair we routed on 't and 'hotched and blew, wi'
micht and main.' O what pleasant days! And then a' the nonsense
we had cost us naething. We never put hand in pocket for a week
on end. Toll-bars there were none--and indeed I think our haill
charges were a feed o' corn to our horses in the gangin' and
comin' at Riccartoun mill."

It is a pity that we have no letters of Scott's describing this first
_raid_ into Liddesdale; but as he must have left Kelso for Edinburgh
very soon after its conclusion, he probably chose to be the bearer of
his own tidings. At any rate, the wonder perhaps is, not that we
should have so few letters of this period, as that any have been
recovered. "I ascribe the preservation of my little handful," says Mr.
Clerk, "to a sort of instinctive prophetic sense of his future
greatness."

I have found, however, two note-books, inscribed "Walter Scott, 1792,"
containing a variety of scraps and hints which may help us to fill up
our notion of his private studies during that year. He appears to have
used them indiscriminately. We have now an extract from the author he
happened to be reading; now a memorandum of something that had struck
him in conversation; a fragment of an essay; transcripts of favorite
poems; remarks on curious cases in the old records of the Justiciary
Court; in short, a most miscellaneous collection, in which there is
whatever might have been looked for, with perhaps the single exception
of original verse. One of the books opens with: "_Vegtam's Kvitha_, or
The Descent of Odin, with the Latin of Thomas Bartholine, and the
English poetical version of Mr. Gray; with some account of the death
of Balder, both as narrated in the Edda, and as handed down to us by
the Northern historians--_Auctore Gualtero Scott_." The Norse original
and the two versions are then transcribed; and {p.182} the
historical account appended, extending to seven closely written quarto
pages, was, I doubt not, read before one or other of his debating
societies. Next comes a page, headed "Pecuniary Distress of Charles
the First," and containing a transcript of a receipt for some plate
lent to the King in 1643. He then copies Langhorne's Owen of Carron;
the verses of Canute, on passing Ely; the lines to a cuckoo, given by
Warton as the