d broadly Scotch, though, unless in the
_burr_, which no doubt smacked of the country bordering on
Northumberland, there was no _provincial_ peculiarity about his
utterance. He had strong powers of mimicry--could talk with a peasant
quite in his own style, and frequently in general society introduced
rustic _patois_, northern, southern, or midland, with great truth and
effect; but these things were inlaid dramatically, or playfully, upon
his narrative. His exquisite taste in this matter was not less
remarkable in his conversation than in the prose of his Scotch novels.

Another lady, nearly connected with the Keiths of Ravelston, has a
lively recollection of young Walter, when paying a visit much about
the same period to his kind relation,[49] the mistress of that
picturesque old mansion, which furnished him in after-days with many
of the features of his Tully-Veolan, and whose venerable gardens, with
their massive hedges of yew and holly, he always considered as the
ideal of the art. The lady, whose letter I have now before me, says
she distinctly remembers the sickly boy sitting at the gate of the
house with his attendant, when a poor mendicant approached, old and
woe-begone, to claim the charity which none asked for in vain at
Ravelston. When the man was retiring, the servant remarked to Walter
that he ought to be thankful to Providence for having placed him above
the want and misery he had been contemplating. The child looked up
with a half-wistful, half-incredulous expression, {p.077} and said,
"_Homer was a beggar_!" "How do you know that?" said the other. "Why,
don't you remember," answered the little virtuoso, "that

'Seven _Roman_ cities strove for Homer dead,
Through which the living Homer begged his bread?'"

The lady smiled at the "_Roman_ cities,"--but already

"Each blank in faithless memory void
The poet's glowing thought supplied."

[Footnote 49: Mrs. Keith of Ravelston was born a Swinton of
Swinton, and sister to Sir Walter's maternal grandmother.]

It was in this same year, 1777, that he spent some time at
Prestonpans; made his first acquaintance with George Constable, the
original of his Monkbarns; explored the field where Colonel Gardiner
received his death-wound, under the learned guidance of Dalgetty; and
marked the spot "where the grass long grew rank and green,
distinguishing it from the rest of the field,"[50] above the grave of
poor Balmawhapple.

[Fo