his friend's MS., in order to increase the
mystification which he so much enjoyed as to the authorship of his
variously named series of tales. Possibly enough, too, he may have
drawn Erskine's attention to the evidence which justified his sketch
of the Puritans in _Old Mortality_, evidence which he certainly
intended at one time to embody in a reply of his own to the adverse
criticism on that book. But though Erskine was Scott's _alter ego_ for
literary purposes, it is certain that Erskine, with his fastidious,
not to say finical, sense of honour, would never have lent his name to
cover a puff written by Scott of his own works. A man who, in Scott's
own words, died "a victim to a hellishly false story, or rather, I
should say, to the sensibility of his own nature, which could not
endure even the shadow of reproach,--like the ermine, which is said to
pine if its fur is soiled," was not the man to father a puff, even by
his dearest friend, on that friend's own creations. Erskine was indeed
almost feminine in his love of Scott; but he was feminine with all the
irritable and scrupulous delicacy of a man who could not derogate from
his own ideal of right, even to serve a friend.

Another friend of Scott's earlier days was John Leyden, Scott's most
efficient coadjutor in the collection of the _Border Minstrelsy_,--that
eccentric genius, marvellous linguist, and good-natured bear, who, bred a
shepherd in one of the wildest valleys of Roxburghshire, had accumulated
before the age of nineteen an amount of learning which confounded the
Edinburgh Professors, and who, without any previous knowledge of medicine,
prepared himself to pass an examination for the medical profession, at six
months' notice of the offer of an assistant-surgeoncy in the East India
Company. It was Leyden who once walked between forty and fifty miles and
back, for the sole purpose of visiting an old person who possessed a copy
of a border ballad that was wanting for the _Minstrelsy_. Scott was sitting
at dinner one day with company, when he heard a sound at a distance, "like
that of the whistling of a tempest through the torn rigging of a vessel
which scuds before it. The sounds increased as they approached more near;
and Leyden (to the great astonishment of such of the guests as did not know
him) burst into the room chanting the desiderated ballad with the most
enthusiastic gesture, and all the energy of what he used to call the
_saw-tones_ of his voice."[22