fair old age," showed the visitors his household
portraits, his hollyhocks, and his fuchsias. His secluded mode of life,
Margaret learned, had so separated him from the living issues of the
time, that the needs of the popular heart touched him but remotely. She
found him, however, less intolerant than she had feared concerning the
repeal of the Corn Laws, a measure upon which public opinion was at the
time strongly divided.

In this neighborhood Margaret again saw Miss Martineau, at a new home
"presented to her by the gratitude of England for her course of
energetic and benevolent effort." Dean Milman, historian and dramatist,
was here introduced to Margaret, who describes him as "a specimen of the
polished, scholarly man of the world."

Margaret now visited various places of interest in Scotland, and in
Edinburgh saw Dr. Andrew Combe, Dr. Chalmers, and De Quincey. Dr. Combe,
an eminent authority in various departments of medicine and physiology,
was a younger brother of George Combe, the distinguished phrenologist.
He had much to say about his tribulations with the American publishers
who had pirated one of his works, but who refused to print an emended
edition of it, on the ground that the book sold well enough as it was.
Margaret describes Dr. Chalmers as "half shepherd, half orator, florid,
portly, yet of an intellectually luminous appearance."

De Quincey was of the same age as Wordsworth. Margaret finds his
"thoughts and knowledge" of a character somewhat superseded by the
progress of the age. She found him, not the less, "an admirable
narrator, not rapid, but gliding along like a rivulet through a green
meadow, giving and taking a thousand little beauties not required to
give his story due relief, but each, in itself, a separate boon." She
admires, too, "his urbanity, so opposed to the rapid, slang,
Vivian-Greyish style current in the literary conversation of the day."

Among Margaret's meditations in Scotland was one which she records as
"the bootless, best thoughts I had while looking at the dull bloodstain
and blocked-up secret stair of Holyrood, at the ruins of Loch Leven
Castle, and afterwards at Abbotsford, where the picture of Queen Mary's
head, as it lay on the pillow when severed from the block, hung opposite
to a fine caricature of Queen Elizabeth, dancing high and disposedly."
We give here a part of this meditation:--

"Surely, in all the stern pages of life's account-book there is none on
which