to have a Portrait of the Poet whom I
am afraid I read more than any other of late and with whose Family (as
you know) I am kindly connected. The other Portrait, which you wanted to
see, and I hope have not seen, is by Phillips; and just represents what I
least wanted, Crabbe's company look; whereas Pickersgill represents the
Thinker. So I fancy, at least.

LITTLE GRANGE, WOODBRIDGE.
[_July_ 4/74.]

MY DEAR LAURENCE,

. . . I am (for a wonder) going out on a few days' visit. . . . And,
once out, I meditate a run to Edinburgh, only to see where Sir Walter
Scott lived and wrote about. But as I have meditated this great
Enterprize for these thirty years, it may perhaps now end again in
meditation only. . . .

I am just finishing Forster's Dickens: very good, I think: only, he has
no very nice perception of Character, I think, or chooses not to let his
readers into it. But there is enough to show that Dickens was a very
noble fellow as well as a very wonderful one. . . . I, for one, worship
Dickens, in spite of Carlyle and the Critics: and wish to see his
Gadshill as I wished to see Shakespeare's Stratford and Scott's
Abbotsford. One must love the Man for that.

_To W. F. Pollock_.

LITTLE GRANGE, WOODBRIDGE.
_July_ 23, [1874].

But I did get to Abbotsford, and was rejoiced to find it was not at all
Cockney, not a Castle, but only in the half-castellated style of heaps of
other houses in Scotland; the Grounds simply and broadly laid out before
the windows, down to a field, down to the Tweed, with the woods which he
left so little, now well aloft and flourishing, and I was glad. I could
not find my way to Maida's Grave in the Garden, with its false Quantity,

Ad januam Domini, etc.

which the Whigs and Critics taunted Scott with, and Lockhart had done it.
'You know I don't care a curse about what I write'; nor about what was
imputed to him. In this, surely like Shakespeare: as also in other
respects. I will worship him, in spite of Gurlyle, who sent me an ugly
Autotype of Knox whom I was to worship instead.

Then I went to see Jedburgh {172} Abbey, in a half ruined corner of which
he lies entombed--Lockhart beside him--a beautiful place, with his own
Tweed still running close by, and his Eildon Hills looking on. The man
who drove me about showed me a hill which Sir Walter was very fond of
visiting, from which he could see over the Border, etc. This hill is
between Abbotsford and Jedburgh: {173} a