Yet almost his last record of a really delightful evening, refers to a bachelor's dinner given by Mr.Clerk, who remained unmarried, as late as 1827, after all Sir Walter's worst troubles had come upon him.

"In short," says the diary, "we really laughed, and real laughter is as rare as real tears.

I must say, too, there was a _heart_, a kindly feeling prevailed over the party.

Can London give such a dinner ?"[21] It is clear, then, that Clerk's charm for his friend survived to the last, and that it was not the mere inexperience of boyhood, which made Scott esteem him so highly in his early days.
If Clerk pricked, stimulated, and sometimes badgered Scott, another of his friends who became more and more intimate with him, as life went on, and who died before him, always soothed him, partly by his gentleness, partly by his almost feminine dependence.

This was William Erskine, also a barrister, and son of an Episcopalian clergyman in Perthshire,--to whose influence it is probably due that Scott himself always read the English Church service in his own country house, and does not appear to have retained the Presbyterianism into which he was born.