FURTHER NOTES CONCERNING SIR WALTER SCOTT 207 



the most intimate of his younger friends ; and after all there 

 were really only three years between them ; while Mr Mackenzie 

 of Portmore was a brother clerk of Session, and a very con- 

 genial associate. 



And as mentioned in the paper of 1896, Mrs Mackenzie's 

 daughter, Mrs Dundas, had heard that the ladies of the Forbes 

 family had never known what was the matter with their 

 sister-in-law till Lockhart's Life was published. For one 

 thing, this bears on the probability of the couples occasionally 

 meeting, of which there seems no actual record. Though Sir 

 Walter's remark on Sir William Forbes, as a banker, taking 

 the chair at the meeting of his creditors in 1826, is that they had 

 not met much of late years, neither stirring much beyond his 

 own family. This is borne out more fully than one would have 

 expected, by what that very graphic writer, the 'Highland Lady' 

 says — Mrs Smith, born Grant : — 



" She never met him in society in Edinburgh, and believed 

 that he did not go out much, and when he did was rather 

 silent. That in his own house he was a different person, 

 especially if he liked his company. That one of her sisters had 

 stayed at Abbotsford, on a tour with Sir Thomas and Lady 

 Dick Lauder, and taken greatly to him ; he related all his 

 Border legends, and she corrected his mistakes about the 

 Highlands. Of course it would be chiefly to dinner parties 

 that he was invited in Edinburgh. That he did not at all 

 decline youthful society is shown by his joining a party which 

 met at his own house, to go to see a caravan of wild beasts 

 which was being exhibited in Edinburgh. It was a very wet 

 day, but they assembled notwithstanding, and filled two 

 carriages. Anne Scott and a sister of Captain Basil Hall's 

 were in the second carriage, and after Sir Walter had put them 

 into it and turned away to the other, Anne said " Papa's joke all 

 this morning has been, ' Here's a beastly day for our beastly 

 party ! ' " 



Politics then divided society a good deal. The late Miss 

 Aytoun, the elder of the two sisters of the poet and professor, 

 who long outlived him (and was, to an advanced age, a 

 very fine looking woman) said not long before her death 

 that she had just once been spoken to by Sir Walter, which 

 had been when she was about twelve. He met her with 

 her mother, and said "I knew your mother when she was 



