Footnote 116: I understand that this now celebrated soup was extemporized by M. Florence on Scott's first visit to Bowhill after the publication of Guy Mannering. Florence had served—and Scott having on some sporting party made his personal acquaintance, he used often afterwards to gratify the poet's military propensities by sending up magnificent representations in pastry, of citadels taken by the Emperor, etc.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 117: In the Introduction to The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 1830, Sir Walter says: "Were I ever to take the unbecoming freedom of censuring a man of Mr. Coleridge's extraordinary talents, it would be on account of the caprice and indolence with which he has thrown from him, as in mere wantonness, those unfinished scraps of poetry, which, like the Torso of antiquity, defy the skill of his poetical brethren to complete them. The charming fragments which the author abandons to their fate are surely too valuable to be treated like the proofs of careless engravers, the sweepings of whose studios often make the fortune of some painstaking collector." And in a note to The Abbot, alluding to Coleridge's beautiful and tantalizing fragment of Christabel, he adds: "Has not our own imaginative poet cause to fear that future ages will desire to summon him from his place of rest, as Milton longed
'To call up him who left half told
The story of Cambuscan bold'?"[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 118: Macneill's Will and Jean.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 119: When playing, in childhood, with the young ladies of the Buccleuch family, she had been overheard saying to her namesake Lady Anne Scott, "Well, I do wish I were Lady Anne too—it is so much prettier than Miss;" thenceforth she was commonly addressed in the family by the coveted title.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 120: Vide "Green-breeks" in the General Introduction to the Waverley Novels. Surely Yellow Waistcoat was his prototype.[Back to Main Text]