and where he bears
such testimony to my exertions as I do not care to transcribe, for
fear my cheeks should reflect a lasting blush on my paper, but
which I keep as a treasure and shall certainly show you with pride
and pleasure when we meet.

Among the delightful occurrences of last week, I must record our
breakfasting with Walter Scott. I was wonderfully happy. To whom,
since Shakespeare, does the reading world owe so many hours of
perfect, peaceful pleasure, of blessed forgetfulness of all things
miserable and mean in its daily life? The party was a small but
interesting one: Sir Walter and his daughter Anne, his old friend
Sir Adam Ferguson and Lady Ferguson, and Miss Ferrier, the
authoress of "Marriage" and "Inheritance," with both which capital
books I hope, for your own sake, you are acquainted. Sir Walter was
most delightful, and I even forgot all awful sense of his celebrity
in his kind, cordial, and almost affectionate manner toward me. He
is exceedingly like all the engravings, pictures, and busts of him
with which one is familiar, and it seems strange that so varied and
noble an intellect should be expressed in the features of a shrewd,
kindly, but not otherwise striking countenance. He told me several
things that interested me very much; among others, his being
present at the time when, after much searching, the regalia of
Scotland was found locked up in a room in Edinburgh Castle, where,
as he said, the dust of centuries had accumulated upon it, and
where the ashes of fires lit more than two hundred years before
were still lying in the grate. He told me a story that made me cry,
of a poor old lady upward of eighty years of age, who belonged to
one of the great Jacobite families,--she was a Maxwell,--sending to
him at the time the Scottish crown was found, to implore permission
to see it but for one instant; which (although in every other case
the same petition had been refused) was granted to her in
consideration of her great age and the vital importance she seemed
to attach to it. I never shall forget his describing her when first
she saw it, appearing for a moment petrified at sight of it, and
then tottering forward and falling down on her knees, and weeping
and wailing over these poor remains of the royalty of her country
as