Footnote 87: A stage-coach, so called, which ran betwixt Edinburgh and Jedburgh.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 88: Slightly altered from Dr. Johnson's Prologue to the comedy of A Word to the Wise.
Footnote 89: Mr. Nicol Milne of Faldonside. This gentleman's property is a valuable and extensive one, situated immediately to the westward of Abbotsford; and Scott continued, year after year, to dream of adding it also to his own.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 90: A sawmill had just been erected at Toftfield.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 91: A cocklaird adjoining Abbotsford at the eastern side. His farm is properly Lochbreist; but in the neighborhood he was generally known as Laird Lauchie—or Lauchie Langlegs. Washington Irving describes him in his Abbotsford, with high gusto. He was a most absurd original.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 92: An article in one of the early numbers of Blackwood's Magazine, entitled The Chaldee MS., in which the literati and booksellers of Edinburgh were quizzed en masse—Scott himself among the rest. It was in this lampoon that Constable first saw himself designated in print by the sobriquet of "The Crafty," long before bestowed on him by one of his own most eminent Whig supporters; but nothing nettled him so much as the passages in which he and Blackwood are represented entreating the support of Scott for their respective Magazines, and waved off by "the Great Magician" in the same identical phrases of contemptuous indifference. The description of Constable's visit to Abbotsford may be worth transcribing—for Sir David Wilkie, who was present when Scott read it, says he was almost choked with laughter, and he afterwards confessed that the Chaldean author had given a sufficiently accurate version of what really passed on the occasion:—
"26. But when the Spirits were gone, he (The Crafty) said unto himself, I will arise and go unto a magician, which is of my friends: of a surety he will devise some remedy, and free me out of all my distresses.
"27. So he arose and came unto that great magician which hath his dwelling in the old fastness, hard by the River Jordan, which is by the Border.
"28. And the magician opened his mouth and said, Lo! my heart wisheth thy good, and let the thing prosper which is in thy hands to do it.
"29. But thou seest that my hands are full of working, and my labor is great. For, lo, I have to feed all the people of my land, and none knoweth whence his food cometh; but each man openeth his mouth, and my hand filleth it with pleasant things.