After his agitation, he turned to Mrs. Cockburn, and said—
“That is too melancholy. I had better read you something more amusing.”
Mrs. Cockburn preferred a little chat, and asked his opinion of Milton and other books which he had been reading, which he gave wonderfully. One of his observations was—“How strange that Adam, just new come into the world, should know everything. That must be the poet’s fancy,” said he. But when told he was created perfectly by God Himself, he instantly yielded.
When he was taken to bed the same evening, he told his aunt that he liked Mrs. Cockburn, “for I think,” said he, “she is a virtuoso like myself.”
“Dear Walter, what is a virtuoso?” inquired his aunt.
“Don’t you know?” said he. “Why, it’s one that will know everything.”
He was still a boy, when a lady friend remarked in company on the almost perpetual drizzle which prevails in the West of Scotland, and declared herself at a loss to account for it.
Popping his head up from below the table, “It is,” said he, “only Nature weeping for the barrenness of her soil.”
It was Sir Walter Scott who said that “his friends werna great book-readers, but they were maistly a’ grand book-keepers”—a common accomplishment of the friends and acquaintances of all men, alas!
Tom Purdie, Sir Walter’s favourite servant, appeared before the Sheriff first as a poacher; when Scott became so interested in his story, which he told with a mixture of pathos, simplicity, and pawky humour, that he granted him forgiveness, and ultimately engaged him as a sort of factotum at Abbotsford. Tom served him long and faithfully. Only “leeward whiles he took a bicker” towards the dram. Scott is said to have proposed for Tom’s epitaph the words—“Here lies one who might have been trusted with a purse of untold gold, but not with a barrel of unmeasured whisky.” But more pungent than this even was his remark at the funeral ceremony of the eccentric Earl of Buchan. In accordance with the Christian mode of burial, the body should have been carried into the chapel, where it was to be interred, feet first. Sir David Brewster was one of the mourners, and was the first to observe that the head of the coffin was first in. He said—“We have brought the Earl’s head in the wrong way.”