George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[161] smooth symmetry than belonged to his head at any period, but a beautiful work of art and an admirable likeness. It will be the type of his head with posterity, because the one that will best answer to the claims of his genius and his works . . . .

Already what relates to Scott himself is more curious than all he collected relating to others, however famous and distinguished. Since 1832, from fifteen hundred to eighteen hundred persons have come yearly to visit his home, and the pilgrimage will not cease while the stones he piled up remain one upon another, and the English continues a living tongue. But it is now, and must long remain, a sad and sorrowful place. . . ‘Follies of the wise’ are inscribed on all its parts, in letters posterity will not forget, even if they learn nothing by the lesson that was so bitter to him that teaches it.

April 23.—We left Scott's peculiar country, the Tweed side, this morning for Edinburgh. But the road we travelled was up the Gala-water, and was his road, the road by which he habitually went to Edinburgh. . . . . At Fushie Bridge we had a little talk with the veritable Meg Dods, of ‘St. Ronan's Well,’ a personage well worthy of her reputation. Her real name is Mistress Wilson. . . . . We arrived at Edinburgh about noon . . . .

I was desirous to see Napier, the editor of the ‘Edinburgh Review,’ in order to do what I could to have ‘Ferdinand and Isabella’ noticed in that journal, and therefore I sent my letters to him at once . . . . I received immediately an extremely civil note in reply, saying that he wished to see me; and being unwell, and unable to go out, begged me to call on him in the evening. I went, of course.

On reaching his door, I was a little disconcerted to find that he lives in what Scott so mournfully calls ‘poor 39,’ the very house in which I had passed so many pleasant hours with Scott in 1819. . . . . I was received up stairs in Mrs. Scott's drawing-rooms, fitted up for a bachelor and man of letters, but lighted as if to receive a party,—a fancy in which, I believe, Napier indulges himself every night. He is thin and pale and nervous, and I am told, what between his Law Professorship in the University, and the labor of editing the ‘Edinburgh Review’ and the ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica,’ he is kept feeble and ill nearly the whole time. He received me kindly, with empressement, and came at once to the business, as I wanted him to do; and, before I had been with him half an hour, it was fully agreed that there should be an ‘Edinburgh Review’ of ‘Ferdinand and Isabella’; that Allen should write it, if Napier can persuade him to do so,—which I do not anticipate; that otherwise a review by a