please the king, Canning appointed the Duke of Clarence as first
Lord of the Admiralty, but Greville says it was a most judicious stroke
of policy, and nothing served so much to disconcert his opponents. Lord
Melville had held the office from March 25, 1812, to April 13, 1827. The
Duke resigned in the following year.--See Croker's _Correspondence_,
vol. i. pp. 264 (letter to Blomfield), 427, 429; also _ante_, vol. i. p.
262. Lord Melville was President of the India Board in the Duke of
Wellington's administration in 1828, and again First Lord from Sept. 17
of the same year until Nov. 22, 1830.

[8] The Rev. William Stephen Gilly, D.D., Vicar of Norham, author of
_Narrative of an Excursion to the Mountains of Piemont_, 1823;
_Researches among the Vaudois or Waldenses_, 1827-31.

[9] See Raine's _St. Cuthbert_, 4to, Durham, 1828.

[10] See _Danvers_ in First Series of _Sayings and Doings_.

[11] _The Merry Devil of Edmonton_, a play by "T.B.," which has also
been attributed to Anthony Brewer.

[12] Right Hon. Thomas Francis Kennedy, M.P. for Ayr Burghs, 1818-34.
Died at the age of ninety at Dalquharran in 1879.

[13] This powerful drama, entitled _Witchcraft: a Tragedy in Prose_, was
suggested, as the author says in her preface, by reading a scene in _The
Bride of Lammermoor_.

[14] Did Constable ruin Scott, as has been generally supposed? It is
right to say that such a charge was not made during the lifetime of
either. Immediately after Scott's death Miss Edgeworth wrote to Sir
James Gibson-Craig and asked him for authentic information as to Sir
Walter's connection with Constable. Sir James in reply stated that to
his personal knowledge Mr. Constable had, in his anxiety to save Scott,
about 1814 [1813], commenced a system of accommodation bills which could
not fail to produce, and actually did produce, the ruin of both parties.
To another correspondent, some years later, he wrote still more strongly
(_Memoirs,_ vol. iii. p. 457).

Scott appears to have been aware of the facts so far, as he says to
Laidlaw, in a letter of December 16, 1825, "The confusion of 1814 is a
joke to this ... but it arises out of the nature of the same connection
which gives, and has given, me a fortune;" and Mr. Lockhart says that
the firm of J.B. & Co. "had more than once owed its escape from utter
ruin and dishonour" through Constable's exertions.--_Life_, vol. v. p.
150.

On reading the third volume of Constable's Memoirs (3 vols.