grass grows, I enclose a cheque upon Messrs Coutts for £50, to accompt of your first year's allowance. Your paymaster will give you the money for it I dare say. You have to indorse the bill, i. e. write your name on the back of it.

"All concerned are pleased with your kind tokens of remembrance from London. Mamma and I like

the caricatures very much. I think, however, scarce any of them shows the fancy and talent of old Gilray: he became insane, I suppose by racking his brain in search of extravagant ideas, and was supported in his helplesss condition by the woman who keeps the great print shop in St James' Street, who had the generosity to remember that she had made thousands by his labour.

Everything here goes on in the old fashion, and we are all as well as possible, saving that Charles rode to Lawrence fair yesterday in a private excursion, and made himself sick with eating gingerbread, whereby he came to disgrace.

whatever is necessary. I

Sophia has your letter of the 4th, which she received yesterday. The enclosed will help you to set up shop and to get and pay wish we had a touch of your hand to make the parties rise in the morning, at which they show as little alertness as usual.

"I beg you will keep an account of money received and paid. Buy a little book ruled for the purpose, for pounds, shillings, and pence, and keep an account

of cash received and expended. The balance ought to be cash in purse, if the book is regularly kept. But any very small expenses you can enter as 'Sundries, £0:3:6,' which saves trouble.

"You will find this most satisfactory and useful. But, indeed, arithmetic is indispensable to a soldier who means to rise in his profession. All military movements depend upon calculation of time, numbers, and distance.

"Dogs all well-cat sick-supposed with eating birds in their feathers. Sisters, brother, and mamma join in love to the poor wounded hussa-a-r'. .I dare say you have heard the song, if not, we shall send it for the benefit of the mess. Yours affectionately, WALTER SCOTT.

"P. S. Yesterday, the 12th, would, I suppose, produce some longings after the Peel heights."

In the following letter to Mr Richardson, we see Scott busied about certain little matters of heraldic importance which had to be settled before his patent of baronetcy could be properly made out. He also alludes to two little volumes, which he edited during this autumn--the Memorials of the Haliburtons, a thin quarto (never published) and the poems of Patrick Carey, of which he had given specimens some years before in the Annual Register.

"To John Richardson, Esq., Fludyer Street,

Westminster.

"My Dear Richardson,

"Abbotsford, 22d August 1819.

"I am sorry Walter did not get to your kind domicile. But he staid but about five or six days in London, and great was his haste, as you may well suppose. He had a world of trinkums to get, for you know there goes as much to the man-millinery of a young officer of hussars as to that of an heiress on her bridal day. His complete equipage, horses not included, cost about £360, and if you add a couple of blood horses, it will be £200 more, besides the price of his commission, for the privilege of getting the hardness of his skull tried by a brickbat at the next meeting of Radical Reformers. I am not much afraid of these folks, however, because I remember 1793 and 1794, when the same ideas possessed a much more formidable class of the people, being received by a large proportion of farmers, shopkeepers, and others, possessed of substance. A mere mob will always be a fire of loose straw; but it is melancholy to think of the individual mischief that may be done. I did not find it quite advisable to take so long a journey as London this summer. am quite recovered; but my last attack was of so dreadful a nature, that I wish to be quite insured

I

against another.

i. e. as much as one can be insured

against such a circumstance-before leaving home for any length of time.

"To return to the vanities of this world, from what threatened to hurry me to the next: I enclose a drawing of my arms, with the supporters which the heralds here assign me. Our friend Harden seems to wish I would adopt one of his Mer-maidens, otherwise they should be both Moors, as on the left side. I have also added an impression of my seal. You can furnish Sir George Naylor with as much of my genealogy as will serve the present purpose. I shall lose no time in connecting myself by a general service with my granduncle, the last Haliburton of Dryburgh Abbey, or Newmains, as they call it. I spoke to the Lyon-office people in Edinburgh. I find my entry there will be an easy matter, the proofs being very pregnant and accessible. I would not stop for a trifling expense to register my pedigree in England, as far as you think may be necessary, to show that it is a decent one. My ancestors were brave and honest men, and I have no reason to be ashamed of them, though they were neither wealthy nor great.

"As something of an antiquary and genealogist, I should not like there were any mistakes in this matter, so I send you a small note of my descent by my father and my paternal grandmother, with a memorandum of the proofs by which they may be supported, to which I might add a whole cloud of oral

witnesses. I hate the being suspected of fishing for a pedigree, or bolstering one up with false statements. How people can bring themselves to this, I cannot conceive. I send you a copy of the Haliburton MS., of which I have printed twenty for the satisfaction of a few friends. You can have any part of them copied in London which ought to be registered. I should like if Sir George Naylor would take the trouble of looking at the proofs, which are chiefly extracts from the public records. I take this opportunity to send you also a copy of a little amateur-book-Carey's Poem's a thoroughbred Cavalier, and, I think, no bad versifier. Kind compliments to Mrs Richardson, Yours, my dear Richardson, most truly,

WALTER SCOTT."

"To Cornet W. Scott, 18th Hussars, Cork.

"Dear Walter,

"Abbotsford, 4th Sept. 1819.

"Your very acceptable letter of the 26th reached me to-day. I had begun to be apprehensive that the draft had fallen into the hands of the Philistines, but the very long calm must have made the packets slow in their progress, which I suppose was the occasion of the delay. Respecting the allowance, Colonel Murray informs me that from £200 to £250, in addition to the pay of a Cornet, ought to make a young man very comfortable. He adds, which I am