umbull, hast thine!) and
drinking the sweet, abundant in the manner of Mr. Southey's cataract of
Lodore,--'Here it comes, sparkling.' A day bestrewn with coronations and
sops in wine; deep in libations to good hope and fond memory; a day of
rest to beast, and mirth to man, (as also to sympathetic beasts that can
be merry,) and concluding itself in an Orphic hour of delight,
signifying peace on Tweedside, and goodwill to men, there or far
away;--always excepting the French, and Boney.

'Yes, and see what it all came to in the end.'

Not so, dark-virulent Minos-Mucklewrath; the end came of quite other
things: of _these_, came such length of days and peace as Scott had in
his Fatherland, and such immortality as he has in all lands.

Nathless, firm, though deeply courteous, rebuke, for his sometimes
overmuch light-mindedness, was administered to him by the more grave and
thoughtful Byron. For the Lord Abbot of Newstead knew his Bible by heart
as well as Scott, though it had never been given him by his mother as
her dearest possession. Knew it, and, what was more, had thought of it,
and sought in it what Scott had never cared to think, nor been fain to
seek.

And loving Scott well, and always doing him every possible pleasure in
the way he sees to be most agreeable to him--as, for instance,
remembering with precision, and writing down the very next morning,
every blessed word that the Prince Regent had been pleased to say of him
before courtly audience,--he yet conceived that such cheap ryming as his
own _Bride of Abydos_, for instance, which he had written from beginning
to end in four days, or even the travelling reflections of Harold and
Juan on men and women, were scarcely steady enough Sunday afternoon's
reading for a patriarch-Merlin like Scott. So he dedicates to him a work
of a truly religious tendency, on which for his own part he has done his
best,--the drama of _Cain_. Of which dedication the virtual significance
to Sir Walter might be translated thus. Dearest and last of Border
soothsayers, thou hast indeed told us of Black Dwarfs, and of White
Maidens, also of Grey Friars, and Green Fairies; also of sacred hollies
by the well, and haunted crooks in the glen. But of the bushes that the
black dogs rend in the woods of Phlegethon; and of the crooks in the
glen, and the bickerings of the burnie where ghosts meet the mightiest
of us; and of the black misanthrope, who is by no means yet a dwarfed
one, and concerni