any support reached him. To do
the Baron justice, although sufficiently prone to dwell upon, and even
to exaggerate, his family dignity and consequence, he was too much a man
of real courage ever to allude to such personal acts of merit as he had
himself manifested.

Miss Rose now appeared from the interior room of her apartment, to
welcome her father and his friends. The little labours in which she
had been employed obviously showed a natural taste, which required only
cultivation. Her father had taught her French and Italian, and a few of
the ordinary authors in those languages ornamented her shelves. He had
endeavoured also to be her preceptor in music; but as he began with the
more abstruse doctrines of the science, and was not perhaps master of
them himself, she had made no proficiency further than to be able to
accompany her voice with the harpsichord; but even this was not very
common in Scotland at that period. To make amends, she sang with great
taste and feeling, and with a respect to the sense of what she uttered
that might be proposed in example to ladies of much superior musical
talent. Her natural good sense taught her, that if, as we are assured
by high authority, music be 'married to immortal verse,' they are
very often divorced by the performer in a most shameful manner. It was
perhaps owing to this sensibility to poetry, and power of combining its
expression with those of the musical notes, that her singing gave more
pleasure to all the unlearned in music, and even to many of the learned,
than could have been communicated by a much finer voice and more
brilliant execution, unguided by the same delicacy of feeling.

A bartizan, or projecting gallery, before the windows of her parlour,
served to illustrate another of Rose's pursuits; for it was crowded
with flowers of different kinds, which she had taken under her special
protection. A projecting turret gave access to this Gothic balcony,
which commanded a most beautiful prospect. The formal garden, with its
high bounding walls, lay below, contracted, as it seemed, to a mere
parterre; while the view extended beyond them down a wooded glen, where
the small river was sometimes visible, sometimes hidden in copse. The
eye might be delayed by a desire to rest on the rocks, which here and
there rose from the dell with massive or spiry fronts, or it might dwell
on the noble, though ruined tower, which was here beheld in all its
dignity, frowning from a promon