through whose hand he dictated many of his novels. Mr. Laidlaw was
one of Scott's humbler friends,--a class of friends with whom he seems
always to have felt more completely at his ease than any others--who
gave at least as much as he received, one of those wise, loyal, and
thoughtful men in a comparatively modest position of life, whom Scott
delighted to trust, and never trusted without finding his trust
justified. In addition to these Scotch friends, Scott had made, even
before the publication of his _Border Minstrelsy_, not a few in London
or its neighbourhood,--of whom the most important at this time was the
grey-eyed, hatchet-faced, courteous George Ellis, as Leyden described
him, the author of various works on ancient English poetry and
romance, who combined with a shrewd, satirical vein, and a great
knowledge of the world, political as well as literary, an exquisite
taste in poetry, and a warm heart. Certainly Ellis's criticism on his
poems was the truest and best that Scott ever received; and had he
lived to read his novels,--only one of which was published before
Ellis's death,--he might have given Scott more useful help than either
Ballantyne or even Erskine.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 19: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, i. 214.]

[Footnote 20: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iii. 344.]

[Footnote 21: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ix. 75.]

[Footnote 22: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 56.]

[Footnote 23: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 168-9.]

CHAPTER VII.

FIRST COUNTRY HOMES.

So completely was Scott by nature an out-of-doors man that he cannot
be adequately known either through his poems or through his friends,
without also knowing his external surroundings and occupations. His
first country home was the cottage at Lasswade, on the Esk, about six
miles from Edinburgh, which he took in 1798, a few months after his
marriage, and retained till 1804. It was a pretty little cottage, in
the beautification of which Scott felt great pride, and where he
exercised himself in the small beginnings of those tastes for altering
and planting which grew so rapidly upon him, and at last enticed him
into castle-building and tree-culture on a dangerous, not to say,
ruinous scale. One of Scott's intimate friends, the master of Rokeby,
by whose house and neighbourhood the poem of that name was suggested,
Mr. Morritt, walked along the Esk in 1808 with Scott four years after
he had left it, and was taken out of his way t