NIMROD'S NORTHERN TOUR. 45 



The sound of Cressey none shall own, 

 And Agiucourt shall be unknown ; 

 And Blenheim be a nameless spot, 

 Long ere thy glories are forgot/' 



These are the words of his countryman Scott, and proud must he 

 have been of the honourable association. Yet, though Lord Saltoun is a 

 hero fit for the pages of Plutarch, it is not as a hero that I have now to 

 speak of him, but in the milder sphere of private life,— as a gentleman, 

 a companion, a sportsman, and a friend. And here he needs neither a 

 Plutarch nor a Scott. Whoever knows him, has but one opinion of him, 

 — that he is, in homely language, " one of the best fellows in the 

 world;" and gives the lie to the assertion, that what raises the hero ge- 

 nerally sinks the man. Although he was obliged to give up hunting 

 for many years on account of a badly fractured thigh, there is no 

 man fonder of the sport, and no man rode harder than he did over 

 Leicestershire, particularly on his famous horse Spot, which I now 

 have in my mind's eye. But it is not in the field alone he shines ; 

 who can beat Lord Saltoun over the mahogany ? I would go in the Di- 

 ligence from hence to Paris— and God knows that would be a high 

 price for me to pay— who have an abhorrence of all such conveyances — 

 to hear him sing " The Man with the Wooden leg." Independently of 

 the humour with which he sings it, the song itself is most irresistibly 

 ludicrous; and talk of the unities of a poem, I never met with any in 

 which they are better preserved than they are in this. As I received a 

 kind invitation from his lordship to visit him in the summer and enjoy 

 with him the sports of flood and field, I hope once more to hear the ad- 

 ventures of the one-legged man ; and were I not assured that no praise 

 of mine could add a feather to a plume so full as his, I should think 1 

 had already said too much of this illustrious Scotchman. 



