the _Balmawhapples_ of the Braes of Angus. From
Meigle they made a trip to Dunnottar Castle, the ruins of the huge old
fortress of the Earls Marischall, and it was in the churchyard of that
place that Scott then saw for the first and last time Robert Paterson,
the living _Old Mortality_. He and Mr. Walker, the minister of the
parish, found the poor man refreshing the epitaphs on {p.196} the
tombs of certain Cameronians who had fallen under the oppressions of
James the Second's brief insanity. Being invited into the manse after
dinner to take a glass of whiskey-punch, "to which he was supposed to
have no objections," he joined the minister's party accordingly; but
"he was in bad humor," says Scott, "and, to use his own phrase, had no
freedom for conversation. His spirit had been sorely vexed by hearing,
in a certain Aberdonian kirk, the psalmody directed by a pitch-pipe or
some similar instrument, which was to Old Mortality the abomination of
abominations."

It was also while he had his headquarters at Meigle at this time that
Scott visited for the first time _Glammis_, the residence of the Earls
of Strathmore, by far the noblest specimen of the real feudal castle,
entire and perfect, that had as yet come under his inspection. What
its aspect was when he first saw it, and how grievously he lamented
the change it had undergone when he revisited it some years
afterwards, he has recorded in one of the most striking passages that
I think ever came from his pen. Commenting, in his Essay on Landscape
Gardening (1828), on the proper domestic ornaments of the Castle
_Pleasaunce_, he has this beautiful burst of lamentation over the
barbarous innovations of _the Capability men_:--"Down went many a
trophy of old magnificence, courtyard, ornamented enclosure, fosse,
avenue, barbican, and every external muniment of battled wall and
flanking tower, out of the midst of which the ancient dome, rising
high above all its characteristic accompaniments, and seemingly girt
round by its appropriate defences, which again circled each other in
their different gradations, looked, as it should, the queen and
mistress of the surrounding country. It was thus that the huge old
tower of Glammis, 'whose birth tradition notes not,' once showed its
lordly head above seven circles (if I remember aright) of defensive
boundaries, through which the friendly guest was admitted, and at each
of which a suspicious {p.197} person was unquestionably put to his