dapted to the taste of Louis XIV. We
drove over the Pont Neuf, and visited the fine quays, which was all we
could make out to-day, as I was afraid to fatigue Anne. When we returned
home I found Count Pozzo di Borgo waiting for me, a personable man,
inclined to be rather corpulent--handsome features, with all the
Corsican fire in his eye. He was quite kind and communicative. Lord
Granville had also called, and sent Mr. Jones [his secretary] to invite
us to dinner to-morrow. In the evening at the Odeon, where we saw
_Ivanhoe_. It was superbly got up, the Norman soldiers wearing pointed
helmets and what resembled much hauberks of mail, which looked very
well. The number of the attendants, and the skill with which they were
moved and grouped on the stage, were well worthy of notice. It was an
opera, and of course the story greatly mangled, and the dialogue in a
great part nonsense. Yet it was strange to hear anything like the words
which I (then in an agony of pain with spasms in my stomach) dictated to
William Laidlaw at Abbotsford, now recited in a foreign tongue, and for
the amusement of a strange people. I little thought to have survived the
completing of this novel.[384]

FOOTNOTES:

[350] Eldest daughter of the illustrious Admiral Lord Duncan, wife of
Sir Hew Hamilton Dalrymple. She died in 1852.

[351] This implacable enemy of Napoleon,--a Corsican, died in his
seventy-fourth year in 1842.

[352] E.H. Locker, Esq., then Secretary, afterwards one of the
Commissioners of Greenwich Hospital--an old and dear friend of
Scott's.--See Oct. 25.

[353] As an illustration of Constable's accuracy in gauging the value of
literary property, it may be stated that in his formal declaration,
after sequestration, he said:--"I was so sanguine as to the success of
the _Memoirs of Napoleon_ that I did not hesitate to express it as my
opinion that I had much confidence in it producing him at least L10,000,
and this I observed, as my expectation, to Sir W. Scott." This opinion
was expressed not only before the sale of the work, but before it was
all written.--_A. Constable and his Correspondents_, vol. iii. p. 313.

[354] Another of the Abbotsford labourers.

[355] See Ballad of _Edom of Gordon_.

[356] "On the 12th of October, Sir Walter left Abbotsford for London,
where he had been promised access to the papers in the Government
offices; and thence he proceeded to Paris, in the hope of gathering from
various eminent persons au