[12] It is fair to him to say that he made no public complaints, and that when some gutter-scribbler in 1810 made charges of plagiarism from him against Scott, he furnished Southey with the means of clearing him from all share in the matter (Lockhart, iii. 293; Southey's Life and Correspondence, iii. 291). But there is a suspicion of fretfulness even in the Preface to Christabel; and the references to Scott's poetry (not to himself) in the Table Talk, etc., are almost uniformly disparaging. It is true that these last are not strictly evidence.
[13] The objection taken to this word by precisians seems to ignore a useful distinction. The antiquary is a collector; the antiquarian a student or writer. The same person may be both; but he may not.
[14] Waverley, chap. vi. It owes a little to Smollett's Introduction to Humphry Clinker, but as usual improves the loan greatly.
[15] Inasmuch as he himself was secretary to the Commission which did away with it.
[16] Taken from the name of his friend Morritt's place on the Greta.
[17] Lockhart, iv. chaps. xxviii.-xxxiii.
[18] The name, which, as many people now know since Aldershot Camp was established, is a real one, had been already used with the double meaning by Charlotte Smith, a now much-forgotten novelist, whom Scott admired.
[19] The once celebrated 'Polish dwarf.'
[20] I may be permitted to refer—as to a pièce justificatif which there is no room here to give or even abstract in full—to a set of three essays on this subject in my Essays in English Literature. Second Series. London, 1895.
[21] This part, however, has a curious adventitious interest, owing to the idea—fairly vouched for—that Scott intended to delineate in the Colonel some points of his own character. His pride, his generosity, and his patronage of the Dominie, are not unrecognisable, certainly. And a man's idea of himself is often, even while strange to others, perfectly true to his real nature.