[124]: 1st King Henry IV. Act III. Scene 1.
[125]: The Rev. John Graham is known as the author of a History of the Siege of Londonderry, Annals of Ireland, and various political tracts. Sir Walter Scott published Gwynne's Memoirs, with a Preface, etc., in 1822.
[126]: No specimen of John's inaccuracy as to business-statements could be pointed out more extraordinary than his assertion in the above sketch of his career, that the bookselling concern, of which he had had the management, was finally wound up with a balance of £1000 in favor of the first partner. At the time he refers to (1817), John's name was on floating bills to the extent of at least £10,000, representing part of the debt which had been accumulated on the bookselling house, and which, on its dissolution, was assumed by the printing company in the Canongate.—(1839.)
[127]: Ballad of the Marchioness of Douglas, "O waly, waly, up yon bank!" etc.
[128]: The great engineer, James Watt, of Birmingham—in whose talk Scott took much delight—told him, that though hundreds probably of his northern countrymen had sought employment at his establishment, he never could get one of them to become a first-rate artisan. "Many of them," said he, "were too good for that, and rose to be valuable clerks and book-keepers; but those incapable of this sort of advancement had always the same insuperable aversion to toiling so long at any one point of mechanism as to gain the highest wages among the workmen." I have no doubt Sir Walter was thinking of Mr. Watt's remark when he wrote the sentence in the text.
[129]: Kent is the shepherd's staff—Colley his dog. Scott alludes to the old song of the Lea Rig,—
"Nae herds wi' kent and colley there," etc.
[130]: Scott's schoolfellow, the Right Hon. D. Boyle.
[131]: [John Leycester Adolphus, son of John Adolphus, eminent as a barrister and the author of various historical works, was born in 1795, and was educated at Merchant Taylors', and St. John's College, Oxford, where in 1814 he gained the Newdigate prize for English verse. He held a reputable position in his father's profession, and, beside the work described in the text, published Letters from Spain in 1856 and 1857. He also wrote a number of clever metrical jeux d'esprit. He was engaged in completing his father's History of England under George III. at the time of his death in 1862.]
[132]: King Lear, Act III. Scene 4.