he was the object of popular insult and on one of popular
violence. Both were at Jedburgh; but the blame is put upon intrusive
weavers from Hawick. The first, a meeting of Roxburghshire freeholders,
saw nothing worse than unmannerly interruption of a speech made
partially unintelligible by the speaker's failing articulation. He felt
it bitterly, and when hissing was repeated as he bowed farewell, is said
to have replied, low, but now quite distinctly, '_Moriturus vos
saluto!_' On the second, the election after the throwing out of the
first Bill, he was stoned, spat upon, and greeted with cries of 'Burke
Sir Walter.'[42] Natural indignation has often been expressed at this
behaviour towards the best neighbour and the greatest man in
Scotland--behaviour which, as we know, haunted him on his deathbed; but
it is to be presumed that the persons who thus proclaimed their cause
knew the line of conduct most worthy of it.

It does not appear with absolute certainty who first suggested the
Italian journey. It could not have been expected to produce any radical
cure; but it seems to have been hoped that change of scene would prevent
the patient from indulging in that attempt to write from which at
Abbotsford it was impossible to keep him, though it was simply slow, and
not so very slow, suicide. The wishes of his family were most kindly and
generously met by the Government of the day, among whose members he had
many personal friends, though political opponents; and the frigate
_Barham_, a cut-down seventy-four, which had the credit of being one of
the smartest vessels in the navy, was assigned to take him to Malta. He
had, before he left Abbotsford itself, an affecting interview with
Wordsworth, which occasioned _Yarrow Revisited_ and the beautiful
sonnet, 'A trouble, not of clouds or weeping rain,' and had no doubt
part in the initiation of the last really great thing that Wordsworth
ever wrote--the _Effusion_ on the deaths of Hogg, Coleridge, Crabbe,
Lamb, and Scott himself, in 1835. Some stay was made with the Lockharts
in London, and a little at Portsmouth, waiting for a wind; but the final
departure took place on October 29, 1831.

Scott was abroad for the best part of a year, the time being chiefly
made out in visits of some length to Malta, Naples, and Rome. We have a
good deal of diary for this period, and it, even more than the
subsidiary documents and Lockhart's summary of no doubt much that is
unpublished, betrays th