his time. There had already been formed a Gas-light
Company in 1818, for the manufacture of gas from coal, but the
projectors of this new venture believed they could produce a purer and
more powerful light by the use of oil. It was not successful
commercially, and, as is told in the Journal, the rival company acquired
the stock and plant a few years after the formation of this "Oil Gas
Co.," of which Sir Walter had been Chairman from 1823.

See _Life_, vol. vii. pp. 141, 144, 197, 251, 374; and viii. p. 113;
Cockburn's _Memorials_ (for 1825).

[8] Sir Robert Dundas of Beechwood, one of Scott's colleagues at the
"Clerks' Table,"--son of the parish minister of Humbie, and kinsman of
Lord and Lady Melville; he died in 1835. Some of the other gentlemen
with whom the duties of his office brought Scott into close daily
connection were David Hume, Hector Macdonald Buchanan, and Colin
Mackenzie of Portmore. With these families, says Mr. Lockhart, "he and
his lived in such constant familiarity of kindness, that the children
all called their father's colleagues _uncles_, and the mothers of their
little friends _aunts_; and in truth the establishment was a
brotherhood."

[9] Mrs. Thomas Scott's brother.

[10] George L. Sanders, born at Kinghorn, 1774; died in London, 1846.

[11] Sir Walter told Moore that Lewis was the person who first set him
upon trying his talent at poetry, adding that "he had passed the early
part of his life with a set of clever, rattling, drinking fellows, whose
thoughts and talents lay wholly out of the region of poetry." Thirty
years after having met Lewis in Edinburgh for the first time in 1798, he
said to Allan Cunningham, "that he thought he had never felt such
elation as when 'the monk' invited him to dine with him at his hotel."
Lewis died in 1818, and Scott says of him, "He did much good by stealth,
and was a most generous creature--fonder of great people than he ought
to have been, either as a man of talent or as a man of fashion. He had
always ladies and duchesses in his mouth, and was pathetically fond of
any one that had a title. Mat had queerish eyes--they projected like
those of some insects, and were flattish on the orbit."

[12] Moore's friends seem to have recognised his thorough manliness and
independence of character. Lord John Russell testifies: "Never did he
make wife or family a pretext for political shabbiness--never did he
imagine that to leave a disgraced name as an inheritance