bard had kept up his enthusiasm for
poetry at pitch of youth, and all his admiration of genius, free, pure,
and unstained by the least drop of literary jealousy" (v. 341).

77. With such necessary and easily imaginable varieties as chanced in
having Dandie Dinmont or Captain Brown for guests at Abbotsford, or
Colonel Mannering, Counselor Pleydell, and Dr. Robertson in Castle
Street, such was Scott's habitual Sabbath: a day, we perceive, of eating
the fat, (_dinner_, presumably not cold, being a work of necessity and
mercy--thou also, even thou, Saint Thomas of Turnbull, 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 coronatioens 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.

78. Nathless, firm, though deeply courteous, rebuke, for his sometimes
overmuch lightmindedness, 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 traveling 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,--