essed to her; and while
putting the book into her hand, in his own Study, standing by his desk,
he said to her in my presence, 'I should not have done any thing of this
kind, but for your father's sake; they are probably the last verses I
shall ever write.' They show how much his mind was impaired; not by the
strain of thought, but by the execution, some of the lines being
imperfect, and one stanza wanting corresponding rhymes. One letter, the
initial S., had been omitted in the spelling of his own name. In this
interview, also, it was that, upon my expressing a hope of his health
being benefited by the climate of the country to which he was going, and
by the interest he would take in the classic remembrances of Italy, he
made use of the quotation from 'Yarrow Revisited,' as recorded by me in
the 'Musings at Aquapendente,' six years afterwards.

Mr. Lockhart has mentioned in his life of him, what I heard from several
quarters while abroad, both at Rome and elsewhere, that little seemed to
interest him but what he could collect or heard of the fugitive Stuarts,
and their adherents who had followed them into exile. Both the 'Yarrow
Revisited' and the 'Sonnet' were sent him before his departure from
England. Some further particulars of the conversations which occurred
during this visit I should have set down, had they not been already
accurately recorded by Mr. Lockhart.

364. *_A Place of Burial in the South of Scotland_. [III.]

Similar places for burial are not unfrequent in Scotland. The one that
suggested this sonnet lies on the banks of a small stream, called the
Wauchope, that flows into the Esk near Langholme. Mickle, who, as it
appears from his poem on Sir Martin, was not without genuine poetic
feelings, was born and passed his boyhood in this neighbourhood, under
his father, who was a minister of the Scotch Kirk. The Esk, both above
and below Langholme, flows through a beautiful country; and the two
streams of the Wauchope and the Ewes, which join it near that place, are
such as a pastoral poet would delight in.

365. *_On the Sight of a Manse in the South of Scotland_. [IV.]

The manses in Scotland, and the gardens and grounds about them, have
seldom that attractive appearance which is common about our English
parsonages, even when the clergyman's income falls below the average of
the Scotch minister's. This is not merely owing to the one country being
poor in comparison with the other, but arises rather