tory
interested the hearer, offered to inquire farther about that
enthusiast on his return to Galloway. "Do so by all means," said
Scott; "I assure you I shall look with anxiety for your
communication." He said nothing at this time of his own meeting with
Old Mortality in the churchyard of Dunnottar--and I think there can be
no doubt that that meeting was thus recalled to his recollection; or
that to this intercourse with Mr. Train we owe the whole machinery of
the Tales of my Landlord, as well as the adoption of Claverhouse's
period for the scene of one of its first fictions. I think it highly
probable that we owe a further obligation to the worthy Supervisor's
presentation of Rob Roy's _spleuchan_.

[Footnote 54: [Scott's old friend, John Richardson, who
was from the first in the secret of the Waverley Novels,
was a stanch Whig, as beseemed the descendant of an old
Covenanting family. Some of his ancestral traditions
suggested certain passages in _Old Mortality_, and he
has recorded that during a visit to Abbotsford Scott
gave him the proof sheets of the first volume to read,
and how he lost a night's sleep in doing it. Twelve
years later, in writing to Scott regarding _The Tales of
a Grandfather_, he says that in this work,--"You have
paid a debt which you owed to the manes of the
Covenanters for the flattering picture which you drew of
Claverhouse in _Old Mortality_."

Scott says in his reply (December, 1828): "As to
Covenanters and Malignants, they were both a set of
cruel and bloody bigots, and had, notwithstanding, those
virtues with which bigotry is sometimes allied. Their
characters were of a kind much more picturesque than
beautiful; neither had the least idea either of
toleration or humanity, so that it happens that, so far
as they can be distinguished from each other, one is
tempted to hate most the party which chances to be
uppermost for the time."--See _Journal_, note, vol. ii.
p. 404.]]

The original design for the First Series of Jedediah Cleishbotham was,
as Scott told me, to include four separate tales illustrative of four
districts of the country, in the like number o