y, and his son
George's eldest girl, Caroline, as she approached her fourth birthday,
began to receive from him the tenderest of letters.

The most important incident in Crabbe's life during this period was his
visit to Walter Scott in Edinburgh in the early autumn of 1822. In the
spring of that year, Crabbe had for the first time met Scott in London,
and Scott had obtained from him a promise that he would visit him in
Scotland in the autumn. It so fell out that George the Fourth, who had
been crowned in the previous year, and was paying a series of Coronation
progresses through his dominions, had arranged to visit Edinburgh in the
August of this year. Whether Crabbe deliberately chose the same period
for his own visit, or stumbled on it accidentally, and Scott did not
care to disappoint his proposed guest, is not made quite clear by
Crabbe's biographer. Scott had to move with all his family to his house
in Edinburgh for the great occasion, and he would no doubt have much
preferred to receive Crabbe at Abbotsford. Moreover, it fell to Scott,
as the most distinguished man of letters and archaeologist in Edinburgh,
to organise all the ceremonies and the festivities necessary for the
King's reception. In Lockhart's phrase, Scott stage-managed the whole
business. And it was on Scott's return from receiving the King on board
the Royal yacht on the 14th of August that he found awaiting him in
Castle Street one who must have been an inconvenient guest. The
incidents of this first meeting are so charmingly related by Lockhart
that I cannot resist repeating them in his words, well known though they
may be:--

"On receiving the poet on the quarter-deck, his Majesty
called for a bottle of Highland whisky, and having drunk his
health in this national liquor, desired a glass to be filled for
him. Sir Walter, after draining his own bumper, made a
request that the king would condescend to bestow on him the
glass out of which his Majesty had just drunk his health: and
this being granted, the precious vessel was immediately
wrapped up and carefully deposited in what he conceived to
be the safest part of his dress. So he returned with it to
Castle Street; but--to say nothing at this moment of graver
distractions--on reading his house he found a guest established
there of a sort rather different from the usual visitors
of the time. The Poet Crabbe, to whom he had been introduced
when last in London by Mr. Mu