212 FURTHER NOTES CONCERNING SIR WALTER SCOTT 



circumstance that a lion who was being exhibited in Edinburgh 

 took no notice of the spectators till a youth in Highland dress came 

 in, when he got up and roared, as if recognising a worthy 

 antagonist ! 



Mr Martin Hardy's clever picture of the meeting of Burns 

 and Scott represents the youth as very like both the childish 

 miniature, and Kay's profile of him as a young advocate. This 

 was necessary in the circumstances, but I am not sure, con- 

 sidering the long illness he had about the time in question, that 

 it may not give a better idea of what he was really like then, 

 than his actual portrait (if it is one) of a year or two earlier. 



When writing on the circumstances which probably led to 

 Alexander II. being buried at Melrose, I had not seen Win- 

 chester Cathedral; which I did just about the same time that 

 the life of John Lockhart was published ; from which it appears 

 that the three ladies with Cornish names who were at Melrose 

 in 1817, were told by Sophia Scott, who took them to see the 

 Abbey, that her father had had the ground examined under the 

 marble tombstone, and that there was no interment there ! She 

 begged them not to mention this to the showman, who would 

 have been much mortified by any allusion to it. 



And this seems to show that the marble stone has been, 

 like the similar ones at Winchester, the top of a sarcophagus of 

 common stone ; which probably, from analogy, stood under the 

 tower, in the centre of the church. The one so placed at Win- 

 chester, sometimes attributed to Eufus, must be that of an 

 ecclesiastic, if a chalice was really found in it when it was first 

 opened ; but there is nothing beyond probability to connect it 

 with Bishop Henry de Blois, nephew of Rufus, and brother of 

 King Stephen — who, with all his incapacity, was a grandson of 

 the Conqueror. 



It may be added, that St. William of York, whose name may 

 probably have been given to William Law in Wedale, on his 

 being canonized (by Honorius III., I think, but I am not sure 

 of the date) was a nephew of Stephen and of Henry de Blois. 

 He was an eminently good man, as great churchmen went then ; 

 when he was dispossessed of the archbishopric, under the 

 no- government of the day, instead of raising a civil war, which 

 would have been the natural mode of procedure, he went to 

 France to see King Stephen about it ; and I think, after various 

 ups and downs, he died in possession, about the middle of the 



