Mr.and Miss Wordsworth had just completed that tour in the Highlands of which so many incidents have since been immortalised, both in the poet's sense and in the hardly less poetical prose of his sister's Diary.

On the morning of the 17th of September, having left their carriage at Rosslyn, they walked down the valley to Lasswade, and arrived there before Mr.and Mrs.Scott had risen.

"We were received," Mr.Wordsworth has told me, "with that frank cordiality which, under whatever circumstances I afterwards met him, always marked his manners; and, indeed, I found him then in every respect--except perhaps that his animal spirits were somewhat higher--precisely the same man that you knew him in later life; the same lively, entertaining conversation, full of anecdote, and averse from disquisition; the same unaffected modesty about himself; the same cheerful and benevolent and hopeful views of man and the world.

He partly read and partly recited, sometimes in an enthusiastic style of chant, the first four cantos of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel;" and the novelty of the manners, the clear picturesque descriptions, and the easy glowing energy of much of the verse, greatly delighted me."' (pp.

160-1).
27.