He was met with the answer (which seemed highly satisfactory to the rest), "Ah, Nelson only said '_expects_' of the English; he said naething of Scotland, for he _kent_ the _Scotch_ would do theirs." I am assured the following manifestation of national feeling against the memory of a Scottish character actually took place within a few years:--Williamson (the Duke of Buccleuch's huntsman) was one afternoon riding home from hunting through Haddington; and as he passed the old Abbey, he saw an ancient woman looking through the iron grating in front of the burial-place of the Lauderdale family, holding by the bars, and grinning and dancing with rage.

"Eh, gudewife," said Williamson, "what ails ye ?" "It's the Duke o' Lauderdale," cried she.

"Eh, if I could win at him, I wud rax the banes o' him." To this class belongs the following complacent Scottish remark upon Bannockburn.

A splenetic Englishman said to a Scottish countryman, something of a wag, that no man of taste would think of remaining any time in such a country as Scotland.

To which the canny Scot replied, "Tastes differ; I'se tak ye to a place no far frae Stirling, whaur thretty thousand o' your countrymen ha' been for five hunder years, and they've nae thocht o' leavin' yet." In a similar spirit, an honest Scotch farmer, who had sent some sheep to compete at a great English agricultural cattle-show, and was much disgusted at not getting a prize, consoled himself for the disappointment, by insinuating that the judges could hardly act quite impartially by a Scottish competitor, complacently remarking, "It's aye been the same since Bannockburn." Then, again, take the story told in Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter Scott, of the blacksmith whom Sir Walter had formerly known as a horse-doctor, and whom he found at a small country town south of the Border, practising medicine with a reckless use of "laudamy and calomy[169]," apologising at the same time for the mischief he might do, by the assurance that it "_would be lang before it made up for Flodden_." How graphically it describes the interest felt by Scotchmen of his rank in the incidents of their national history.