being greatly encouraged by the progress of those I formerly
laid out. Read the veracious Gulliver's account of the
Windsor Forest of Lilliput, and you will {p.172} have some
idea of the solemn gloom of my Druid shades. Your Lordship's
truly faithful

Walter SCOTT.

This is the 8th of June, and not an ash-tree in leaf yet.
The country cruelly backward, and whole fields destroyed by
the grub. I dread this next season.

{p.173} CHAPTER XXXIX.

Excursion to the Lennox, Glasgow, and Drumlanrig. --
Purchase of Toftfield. -- Establishment of the Ferguson
Family at Huntly Burn. -- Lines Written in Illness. --
Visits of Washington Irving, Lady Byron, and Sir David
Wilkie. -- Progress of the Building at Abbotsford. --
Letters to Morritt, Terry, etc. -- Conclusion of Rob Roy.

1817.

During the summer term of 1817, Scott seems to have labored chiefly on
his History of 1815 for the Register, which was published in August;
but he also found time to draw up the Introduction for a richly
embellished quarto, entitled Border Antiquities, which came out a
month later. This valuable essay, containing large additions to the
information previously embodied in the Minstrelsy, has been included
in the late collection of his Miscellaneous Prose, and has thus
obtained a circulation not to be expected for it in the original
costly form.

Upon the rising of the Court in July, he made an excursion to the
Lennox, chiefly that he might visit a cave at the head of Loch Lomond,
said to have been a favorite retreat of his hero, Rob Roy. He was
accompanied to the seat of his friend, Mr. Macdonald Buchanan, by
Captain Adam Ferguson--the _long Linton_ of the days of his
apprenticeship; and thence to Glasgow, where, under the auspices of a
kind and intelligent acquaintance, Mr. John Smith, bookseller, he
refreshed his recollection of the noble cathedral, and other
localities of the birthplace of Bailie Jarvie. Mr. Smith took care
also {p.174} to show the tourists the most remarkable novelties in
the great manufacturing establishments of his flourishing city; and he
remembers particularly the delight which Scott expressed on seeing the
process of _singeing_ muslin--that is, of divesting the finished web
of all superficial knots and irregularities, by passing it, with the
rapidity of lightning, over a bar of red-hot iron. "The man that