797. These are all in prose
like their originals; but he also versified at the same time some
lyrical fragments of Goethe, as, for example, the Morlachian Ballad,

"What yonder glimmers so white on the mountain,"

and the song from Claudina von Villa Bella. He consulted his friend at
Mertoun on all these essays; and I have often heard him say, that,
among those many "obligations of a distant date which remained
impressed on his memory, after a life spent in a constant interchange
of friendship and kindness," he counted not as the least, the lady's
frankness in correcting his Scotticisms, and more especially his
Scottish _rhymes_.

His obligations to this lady were indeed various; but I doubt, after
all, whether these were the most important. He used to say that she
was the first _woman of real fashion_ that _took him_ up; that she
used the privileges of her sex and station in the truest spirit of
kindness; set him right as to a thousand little trifles, which no one
else would have ventured to notice; and, in short, did for him what no
one but an elegant woman can do for a young man, whose early days have
been spent in narrow and provincial circles. "When I first saw Sir
Walter," she writes to me, "he was about four-or five-and-twenty, but
looked much younger. He seemed bashful and {p.230} awkward; but
there were from the first such gleams of superior sense and spirit in
his conversation, that I was hardly surprised when, after our
acquaintance had ripened a little, I felt myself to be talking with a
man of genius. He was most modest about himself, and showed his little
pieces apparently without any consciousness that they could possess
any claim on particular attention. Nothing so easy and good-humored as
the way in which he received any hints I might offer, when he seemed
to be tampering with the King's English. I remember particularly how
he laughed at himself, when I made him take notice that 'the little
two dogs,' in some of his lines, did not please an English ear
accustomed to 'the two little dogs.'"

Nor was this the only person at Mertoun who took a lively interest in
his pursuits. Harden entered into all the feelings of his beautiful
bride on this subject; and his mother, the Lady Diana Scott, daughter
of the last Earl of Marchmont, did so no less. She had conversed, in
her early days, with the brightest ornaments of the cycle of Queen
Anne, and preserved rich stores of anecdote, well calculated to