t what I write;" and Wordsworth, whose chief
reading in later days was his own poetry. Whenever the two are brought
into actual juxtaposition, Wordsworth is all pose and self-absorption;
Scott all simplicity and disregard of fame. Wordsworth staying at
Abbotsford declines to join an expedition of pleasure, and stays at
home with his daughter. When the party return, they find Wordsworth
sitting and being read to by his daughter, the book his own Excursion.
A party of travellers arrive, and Wordsworth steals down to the chaise,
to see if there are any of his own volumes among the books they have
with them. When the two are together, Scott is all courteous deference;
he quotes Wordsworth's poems, he pays him stately compliments, which
the bard receives as a matter of course, with stiff, complacent bows.
But, during the whole of the time, Wordsworth never lets fall a single
syllable from which one could gather that he was aware that his host
had ever put pen to paper.

Yet, while one desires to shake Wordsworth to get some of his pomposity
out of him, one half desires that Scott had felt a little more deeply
the dignity of his vocation. One would wish to have infused Wordsworth
with a little of Scott's unselfish simplicity, and to have put just a
little stiffening into Scott. He ought to have felt--and he did
not--that to be a great writer was a more dignified thing than to be a
sham seigneur.

But through the darkening scene, when the woods whisper together, and
Tweed runs hoarsely below, the simple spirit holds uncomplaining and
undaunted on his way: "I did not like them to think that I could ever
be beaten by anything," he says. But at length the hand, tired with the
pen, falls, and twilight creeps upon the darkening mind.

I paid a pious pilgrimage last summer, as you perhaps remember, to
Abbotsford. I don't think I ever described it to you. My first feeling
was one of astonishment at the size and stateliness of the place,
testifying to a certain imprudent prosperity. But the sight of the
rooms themselves; the desk, the chair, the book-lined library, the
little staircase by which, early or late, Scott could steal back to his
hard and solitary work; the death-mask, with its pathetic smile; the
clothes, with hat and shoes, giving, as it were, a sense of the very
shape and stature of the man--these brought the whole thing up with a
strange reality.

Of course, there is much that is pompous, affected, unreal about the