had performed, while those clerks who had
laboured for twenty years had no adequate remuneration." Lord Holland
supported this very reasonable and moderate view of the case; but of
course the Ministry carried their way, and Tom Scott got his unearned
pension. Nevertheless, Scott was furious with Lord Holland. Writing
soon after to the happy recipient of this little pension, he says,
"Lord Holland has been in Edinburgh, and we met accidentally at a
public party. He made up to me, but I remembered his part in your
affair, and _cut_ him with as little remorse as an old pen." Mr.
Lockhart says, on Lord Jeffrey's authority, that the scene was a very
painful one. Lord Jeffrey himself declared that it was the only
rudeness of which he ever saw Scott guilty in the course of a
life-long familiarity. And it is pleasant to know that he renewed his
cordiality with Lord Holland in later years, though there is no
evidence that he ever admitted that he had been in the wrong. But the
incident shows how very doubtful Sir Walter ought to have felt as to
the purity of his Conservatism. It is quite certain that the proposal
to abolish Tom Scott's office without compensation was not a reckless
experiment of a fundamental kind. It was a mere attempt at diminishing
the heavy burdens laid on the people for the advantage of a small
portion of the middle class, and yet Scott resented it with as much
display of selfish passion--considering his genuine nobility of
breeding--as that with which the rude working men of Jedburgh
afterwards resented his gallant protest against the Reform Bill, and,
later again, saluted the dauntless old man with the dastardly cry of
"Burk Sir Walter!" Judged truly, I think Sir Walter's conduct in
cutting Lord Holland "with as little remorse as an old pen," for
simply doing his duty in the House of Lords, was quite as ignoble in
him as the bullying and insolence of the democratic party in 1831,
when the dying lion made his last dash at what he regarded as the foes
of the Constitution. Doubtless he held that the mob, or, as we more
decorously say, the residuum, were in some sense the enemies of true
freedom. "I cannot read in history," he writes once to Mr. Laidlaw,
"of any free State which has been brought to slavery till the rascal
and uninstructed populace had had their short hour of anarchical
government, which naturally leads to the stern repose of military
despotism." But he does not seem ever to have perceived tha