scribe the sanctimonious air which the
murderer maintained during his trial--preserving throughout the aspect
of a devout person, who believed himself to have been hurried into his
accumulation of crime by an uncontrollable exertion of diabolical
influence; and on his copy of the "Life of James Mackean, executed
25th January, 1797," I find the following marginal note:--

"I went to see this wretched man when under sentence of death, along
with my friend, Mr. William Clerk, advocate. His great anxiety was to
convince us that his diabolical murder was committed from a sudden
impulse of revengeful and violent passion, not from deliberate design
of plunder. But the contrary was manifest from the accurate
preparation of the deadly instrument--a razor strongly lashed to an
iron bolt--and also from the evidence on the trial, from which it
seems he had invited his victim to drink tea with him on the day he
perpetrated the murder, and that this was a reiterated invitation.
Mackean was a good-looking elderly man, having a thin face and clear
gray eye; such a man as may be ordinarily seen beside a
collection-plate at a seceding meeting-house, a post which the said
Mackean had occupied in his day. All Mackean's account of the murder
is {p.238} apocryphal. Buchanan was a powerful man, and Mackean
slender. It appeared that the latter had engaged Buchanan in writing,
then suddenly clapped one hand on his eyes, and struck the fatal blow
with the other. The throat of the deceased was cut through his
handkerchief to the back bone of the neck, against which the razor was
hacked in several places."

In his pursuit of his German studies, Scott acquired, about this time,
a very important assistant in Mr. Skene of Rubislaw, in
Aberdeenshire--a gentleman considerably his junior,[132] who had just
returned to Scotland from a residence of several years in Saxony,
where he had obtained a thorough knowledge of the language, and
accumulated a better collection of German books than any to which
Scott had, as yet, found access. Shortly after Mr. Skene's arrival in
Edinburgh, Scott requested to be introduced to him by a mutual friend,
Mr. Edmonstone of Newton; and their fondness for the same literature,
with Scott's eagerness to profit by his new acquaintance's superior
attainment in it, thus opened an intercourse which general similarity
of tastes, and I venture to add, in many of the most important
features of character, soon ripened into the fami