d
have long done so, I think William Clerk well worth you all put
together."[19] Scott never lost the friendship which began with this
eager enthusiasm, but his chief intimacy with Clerk was during his
younger days.

In 1808 Scott describes Clerk as "a man of the most acute intellects and
powerful apprehension, who, if he should ever shake loose the fetters of
indolence by which he has been hitherto trammelled, cannot fail to be
distinguished in the highest degree." Whether for the reason suggested, or
for some other, Clerk never actually gained any other distinction so great
as his friendship with Scott conferred upon him. Probably Scott had
discerned the true secret of his friend's comparative obscurity. Even
while preparing for the bar, when they had agreed to go on alternate
mornings to each other's lodgings to read together, Scott found it
necessary to modify the arrangement by always visiting his friend, whom he
usually found in bed. It was William Clerk who sat for the picture of
Darsie Latimer, the hero of _Redgauntlet_,--whence we should suppose him
to have been a lively, generous, susceptible, contentious, and rather
helter-skelter young man, much alive to the ludicrous in all situations,
very eager to see life in all its phases, and somewhat vain of his power
of adapting himself equally to all these phases. Scott tells a story of
Clerk's being once baffled--almost for the first time--by a stranger in a
stage coach, who would not, or could not, talk to him on any subject,
until at last Clerk addressed to him this stately remonstrance, "I have
talked to you, my friend, on all the ordinary subjects--literature,
farming, merchandise, gaming, game-laws, horse-races, suits-at-law,
politics, swindling, blasphemy, and philosophy,--is there any one subject
that you will favour me by opening upon?" "Sir," replied the inscrutable
stranger, "can you say anything clever about '_bend-leather_'?"[20] No
doubt this superficial familiarity with a vast number of subjects was a
great fascination to Scott, and a great stimulus to his own imagination.
To the last he held the same opinion of his friend's latent powers. "To my
thinking," he wrote in his diary in 1825, "I never met a man of greater
powers, of more complete information on all desirable subjects." But in
youth at least Clerk seems to have had what Sir Walter calls a
characteristic Edinburgh complaint, the "itch for disputation," and though
he softened this down in lat