NEXT morning I got up pretty early, and walked for at least two hours before breakfast through the extensive young woods with which Mr Scott has already clothed the banks of the Tweed, in every direction about his mansion. Nothing can be more soft and beautiful than the whole of the surrounding scenery; there is scarcely a single house to be seen, and excepting on the rich low lands, close by the river, the country seems to be almost entirely in the hands of the shepherds. The green hills, however, all around the horizon, begin to be skirted with sweeping plantations of larch, pine, and oak; and the shelter which these will soon afford, must no doubt ere long give a more agricultural aspect to the face of Tweeddale. To say the truth, I do not think with much pleasure of the prospect of any such changes—I love to see tracts of countries, as well as races of men, preserving as much as possible of their old characteristics. There hovers at present over the most of this district a certain delicious atmosphere of pastoral loneliness, and I think there would be something like sacrilege in disturbing it, even by things that elsewhere would confer interest as well as ornament.

After a breakfast à la fourchette, served up in the true style of old Scottish luxury, which a certain celebrated Novelist seems to take a particular pleasure in describing—a breakfast, namely, in which tea, coffee, chocolate, toast, and sweetmeats, officiated as little better than ornamental out-works to more solid and imposing fortifications of mutton-ham, hung-beef, and salmon killed over-night in the same spear and torch-light method, of which Dandie Dinmont was so accomplished a master—after doing all manner of justice to this interesting meal, I spent an hour with Mr Scott in his library, or rather in his closet; for, though its walls are quite covered with books, I believe the far more valuable part of his library is in Edinburgh. One end seemed to be devoted to books of Scots Law—which are necessary to him no doubt even here; for he is Chief Magistrate of the county—and, indeed, is known among the country people, who passionately love him, by no other name than that of “the Sherra.”