land whiskey, and
with a proper show of devoted loyalty entreated to be allowed to
retain the glass out of which his Majesty had just drunk his health.
The request was graciously acceded to, but let it be pleaded on
Scott's behalf, that on reaching home and finding there his friend
Crabbe the poet, he sat down on the royal gift, and crushed it to
atoms. One would hope that he was really thinking more even of Crabbe,
and much more of Erskine, than of the royal favour for which he had
appeared, and doubtless had really believed himself, so grateful. Sir
Walter retained his regard for the king, such as it was, to the last,
and even persuaded himself that George's death would be a great
political calamity for the nation. And really I cannot help thinking
that Scott believed more in the king, than he did in his friend George
Canning. Assuredly, greatly as he admired Canning, he condemned him
more and more as Canning grew more liberal, and sometimes speaks of
his veerings in that direction with positive asperity. George, on the
other hand, who believed more in number one than in any other number,
however large, became much more conservative after he became Regent
than he was before, and as he grew more conservative Scott grew more
conservative likewise, till he came to think this particular king
almost a pillar of the Constitution. I suppose we ought to explain
this little bit of fetish-worship in Scott much as we should the
quaint practical adhesion to duelling which he gave as an old man, who
had had all his life much more to do with the pen than the sword--that
is, as an evidence of the tendency of an improved type to recur to
that of the old wild stock on which it had been grafted. But certainly
no feudal devotion of his ancestors to their chief was ever less
justified by moral qualities than Scott's loyal devotion to the
fountain of honour as embodied in "our fat friend." The whole relation
to George was a grotesque thread in Scott's life; and I cannot quite
forgive him for the utterly conventional severity with which he threw
over his first patron, the Queen, for sins which were certainly not
grosser, if they were not much less gross, than those of his second
patron, the husband who had set her the example which she faithfully,
though at a distance, followed.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 45: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, vi. 229-30.]

[Footnote 46: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, vi. 13, 14.]

CHAPTER XIV.

SCOTT AS A