ing baxters, excellent
cooks, and pottingars, with confections and drugs for the desserts.'
Besides the particulars which may be thence gleaned for this Highland
feast (the splendour of which induced the Pope's legate to dissent from
an opinion which he had hitherto held, that Scotland, namely, was
the--the--the latter end of the world)--besides these, might I not
illuminate my pages with Taylor the Water Poet's hunting in the Braes of
Mar, where,--

Through heather, mosse,'mong frogs, and bogs, and fogs,
'Mongst craggy cliffs and thunder-batter'd hills,
Hares, hinds, bucks, roes, are chased by men and dogs,
Where two hours' hunting fourscore fat deer kills.
Lowland, your sports are low as is your seat;
The Highland games and minds are high and great?

But without further tyranny over my readers, or display of the extent of
my own reading, I shall content myself with borrowing a single incident
from the memorable hunting at Lude, commemorated in the ingenious Mr.
Gunn's essay on the Caledonian Harp, and so proceed in my story with all
the brevity that my natural style of composition, partaking of what
scholars call the periphrastic and ambagitory, and the vulgar the
circumbendibus, will permit me.

The solemn hunting was delayed, from various causes, for about three
weeks. The interval was spent by Waverley with great satisfaction at
Glennaquoich; for the impression which Flora had made on his mind at
their first meeting grew daily stronger. She was precisely the character
to fascinate a youth of romantic imagination. Her manners, her language,
her talents for poetry and music, gave additional and varied influence to
her eminent personal charms. Even in her hours of gaiety she was in his
fancy exalted above the ordinary daughters of Eve, and seemed only to
stoop for an instant to those topics of amusement and gallantry which
others appear to live for. In the neighbourhood of this enchantress,
while sport consumed the morning and music and the dance led on the hours
of evening, Waverley became daily more delighted with his hospitable
landlord, and more enamoured of his bewitching sister.

At length the period fixed for the grand hunting arrived, and Waverley
and the Chieftain departed for the place of rendezvous, which was a day's
journey to the northward of Glennaquoich. Fergus was attended on this
occasion by about three hundred of his clan, well armed and accoutred in
their best fashio