Mr.Bradwardine was the reverse of all this, and piqued himself upon stalking through life with the same upright, starched, stoical gravity which distinguished his evening promenade upon the terrace of Tully-Veolan, where for hours together--the very model old Hardyknute-- Stately stepped he east the wa', And stately stepped he west.
As for literature, he read the classic poets, to be sure, and the EPITHALAMIUM of Georgius Buchanan, and Arthur Johnston's PSALMS, of a Sunday; and the DELICIAE POETARUM SCOTORUM, and Sir David Lindsay's WORKS, and Barbour's BRUCE, and Blind Harry's WALLACE, and the GENTLE SHEPHERD, and the CHERRY AND THE SLAE.

But though he thus far sacrificed his time to the Muses, he would if the truth must be spoken, have been much better pleased had the pious or sapient apothegms, as well as the historical narratives, which these various works contained, been presented to him in the form of simple prose.

And he sometimes could not refrain from expressing contempt of the 'vain and unprofitable art of poem-making,' in which, he said, 'the only one who had excelled in his time was Allan Ramsay, the periwig-maker.' [The Baron ought to have remembered that the joyous Allan literally drew his blood from the house of the noble Earl, whom he terms-- Dalhousie of an old descent, My stoup, my pride, my ornament.] But although Edward and he differed TOTO COELO, as the Baron would have said, upon this subject, yet they met upon history as on a neutral ground, in which each claimed an interest.

The Baron, indeed, only cumbered his memory with matters of fact; the cold, dry, hard outlines which history delineates.

Edward, on the contrary, loved to fill up and round the sketch with the colouring of a warm and vivid imagination, which gives light and life to the actors and speakers in the drama of past ages.