A claymore and Lochaber axe, given him by old Invernahyle, mounted guard on a little print of Prince Charlie; and Broughton's Saucer was hooked up on the wall below it." He had entered literature through the ruined gateway of archleology, in the "Border Minstrelsy," and his last project was an edition of Perrault's "Contes de Ma Mere l'Oie." As pleasant to him as the purchase of new lands like Turn Again, bought dearly, as in Monkbarns's case, from "bonnet lauds," was a fresh acquisition of an old book or of old armour.
Yet, with all his enthusiasm, he did not please the antiquaries of his own day.

George Chalmers, in Constable's "Life and Correspondence" (i.

431), sneers at his want of learning.

"His notes are loose and unlearned, as they generally are." Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, his friend in life, disported himself in jealous and ribald mockery of Scott's archaeological knowledge, when Scott was dead.

In a letter of the enigmatic Thomas Allen, or James Stuart Hay, father of John Sobieski and Charles Edward Stuart, this mysterious person avers that he never knew Scott's opinion to be held as of any value by antiquaries (1829).
They probably missed in him "a sort of pettifogging intimacy with dates, names, and trifling matters of fact,--a tiresome and frivolous accuracy of memory" which Sir Arthur Wardour reproves in Monkbarns.