this unexpected condescension; and my face, not accustomed to find a Prince's countenance in such close quarters, flushed up exceedingly. Are you an Englishman?' 'No, I am from Scotland. We are both Scotchmen. Although it is the same nation, there is still a difference between the two people.' 'You travel only for your pleasure?' 'Yes, Sire, only.' Your name?' 'My name is Tytler.' And that of your friend?' Anderson.' How long do you remain? Till after the Coronation?' 'Yes, Sire, we expect great things in seeing the Coronation.' Then followed a question, Whether we had been pleased with our stay in Drontheim; for I remember I replied that we had met with great civilities there. Ah yes, they are a good kind of people,' was his answer; upon which he bowed and passed on to another part of the room. The King remained for a long time in conversation with the Bishop of Drontheim; after which, without entering into conversation with any of the other nobility or dignitaries, he bowed to the company and retired, Prince Oscar following him."

CHAPTER VII.

(1818-1824.)

Tytler's growing passion for letters-His lyrics-The Bannatyne Club-Yeomanry songs-The Deserter-Great fire in Edinburgh-Campbell-Basil Hall.

66

THE travellers finally took their passage to Scotland from Gottenberg. Whether because detained by contrary winds, or for whatever other reason, I suspect that Tytler did not reach Edinburgh till Saturday, 17th October. He seems to have repaired to his beloved Woodhouselee even before rejoining his family at Mount Esk. When I return, after months of absence, to this scene of all my former happiness," (he writes in his pocket book,) "it is no wonder that my mind is full of sorrowful recollections; and although Religion has poured balm upon this sorrow, and Time has softened down the bitterness of those remembrances, still, the sight of all the well known walks and shades is apt to bring all that is now past, too freshly before the memory." A further extract from what he wrote on this occasion has been already offered at page 79.

One short month was spent at Mount Esk, during which he will have recounted his adventures, and braced up his mind for those arduous professional duties which were already becoming so distasteful to him. On the 12th of November, I find that he was- 'Again returned to town: to the Parliament House, and all its business and turmoil. The stir and buzz, the crowd and heat and hum of the legal Babel felt more intolerable to me than ever. But it is idle," he adds, "to give way to this love of seclusion when I know it

is impossible for me at present to attain it." Such were his feelings concerning the Law. The fashionable gaieties of the winter season at Edinburgh, which immediately followed, though not in the same sense uncongenial to him, became also a constant source of self-reproach. In truth, when the day has been spent in labour, if the night be spent in dissipation, every one knows what is the inevitable result; what must be the effect produced on the moral, the spiritual, the intellectual life. I forbear to enlarge further on the little hint supplied by a mournful entry in my friend's Diary. Could he have followed the bent of his taste consistent with the dictates of prudence and with his sense of duty, I apprehend that he would have already withdrawn from the Scotch metropolis into the retirement of the country, and devoted himself to Literature.

And yet, I shall be conveying an utterly incorrect impression of the kind of man Tytler was throughout this period of his life, (I mean from about 1815 to 1825, that is, speaking generally, from the time he was about four-andtwenty to the time he was about four-and-thirty years of age, a period which embraces the whole of his career as a barrister, as well as the first few years of his literary celebrity,) if I leave it to be inferred from anything that has gone before that there was aught in his manner which at all savoured of methodism or strictness, much less of discontent or unsociability. We all of us lead two lives,-one outward, the other inward; and the extracts from Tytler's Diary, from his letters to his family, and from the little volumes in which he occasionally wrote down the most secret aspirations of his soul, have let the reader to a great extent into the inmost life of my friend. How blameless this was needs not to be told; nor am I about to insinuate that his manners and conversation were in the slightest

degree at variance with the convictions of his conscience. But gaiety is constitutional; and a good conscience is perhaps the very best source from which gaiety can proceed. My friend's manners were always most winning, his address most engaging. He had moreover the keenest sense of what is humorous or ridiculous; a large fund of entertaining stories; and was the pleasantest company in the world. Will it excite surprise that, as a young man especially, he should have been painfully conscious that these are perilous gifts? Hence, proceeded his severe self-scrutiny when he was alone. There was thus no real inconsistency between his inner and his outer self; and yet the one was very sober, sometimes very sad, while the other was for ever diffusing its own habitual cheerfulness on all around him. It must have been evident to others, by all that he said and did, that he was a religious man, although he was not one to bring forward the topic of religion, or even to say serious things at inopportune moments. Nay, he resigned himself willingly to the current of the society in which he found himself, and would at all periods of his life have been noticed as an uncommonly lively person, and desired as a most agreeable guest.

6

Many an amusing indication of the truth of what I have been saying is supplied by the memorials of his professional and social life which have fallen into my hands; some of which evidently belong to the present period. Thus, I find a manuscript song called 'The birth of the Robin,' (air, A frog it would a-wooing go,') which must have been written in 1815 or 1816, and which exhibits anything but the picture of a morose young barrister. Three stanzas shall suffice. It need only be explained that 'Craigie,'' Pringle,' and he were fellow-students, and had been friends from boyhood; the former, a nephew of Lord Craigie, one of the Senators of the College of Justice, since dead: the latter, of

Yair, one of the Lords of the Treasury in Sir Robert Peel's government.*

1.

'Some legal gentry met one day,
Heigh ho, says Craigie;

It's a wearisome thing at the bar to stay,
To study by night and to starve by day,
With never a fee for your wig to pay:

This life is wondrous plaguy.

2.

'As oft in my chamber I sit alone,

Heigh ho, says Pringle,

O'er Dirleton's Doubts I toil and groan

With the zeal of the ant but the speed of the drone,

Whilst many a weary wail and moan

With all my fancies mingle.

3.

"Tis the very same thing with me, says Pat,

I never a stiver win, sir.

But hark ye, I've thought of a cure for that,
Will make a man frisky tho' ever so flat,

Turn a lawyer thin to a lawyer fat

Tho' his bones had cut his skin, sir.'

The proposed cure was nothing more recondite than that he friends should form themselves into a 'Round Robin 'lub, and proceed to drink punch at Oman's hotel.

I find among his papers the rough draft of another amorous song, called 'The Legal Vow,' describing an

See the letter which concludes the present Memoir.