The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford by Sir Walter Scott
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page 34 of 1157 (02%)
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[8] Sir Robert Dundas of Beechwood, one of Scott's colleagues at the "Clerks' Table,"--son of the parish minister of Humbie, and kinsman of Lord and Lady Melville; he died in 1835. Some of the other gentlemen with whom the duties of his office brought Scott into close daily connection were David Hume, Hector Macdonald Buchanan, and Colin Mackenzie of Portmore. With these families, says Mr. Lockhart, "he and his lived in such constant familiarity of kindness, that the children all called their father's colleagues _uncles_, and the mothers of their little friends _aunts_; and in truth the establishment was a brotherhood." [9] Mrs. Thomas Scott's brother. [10] George L. Sanders, born at Kinghorn, 1774; died in London, 1846. [11] Sir Walter told Moore that Lewis was the person who first set him upon trying his talent at poetry, adding that "he had passed the early part of his life with a set of clever, rattling, drinking fellows, whose thoughts and talents lay wholly out of the region of poetry." Thirty years after having met Lewis in Edinburgh for the first time in 1798, he said to Allan Cunningham, "that he thought he had never felt such elation as when 'the monk' invited him to dine with him at his hotel." Lewis died in 1818, and Scott says of him, "He did much good by stealth, and was a most generous creature--fonder of great people than he ought to have been, either as a man of talent or as a man of fashion. He had always ladies and duchesses in his mouth, and was pathetically fond of any one that had a title. Mat had queerish eyes--they projected like those of some insects, and were flattish on the orbit." |
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