dangerous; a man to care nothing for at first glance, but, somehow, to
give a second and not-forgetting look at. The third was the biggest of
the three, and though lame, nimble, and all rough and alive with power;
had you met him anywhere else, you would say he was a Liddesdale
store-farmer, come of gentle blood; "a stout, blunt carle," as he says
of himself, with the swing and stride and the eye of a man of the
hills,--a large, sunny, out-of-door air all about him. On his broad and
somewhat stooping shoulders was set that head which, with Shakespeare's
and Bonaparte's, is the best known in all the world.

He was in high spirits, keeping his companions and himself in roars of
laughter, and every now and then seizing them, and stopping, that they
might take their fill of the fun; there they stood shaking with laughter,
"not an inch of their body free" from its grip. At George Street they
parted, one to Rose Court, behind St. Andrew's Church, one to Albany
Street, the other, our big and limping friend, to Castle Street.

We need hardly give their names. The first was William Erskine,
afterwards Lord Kinnedder, chased out of the world by a calumny, killed
by its foul breath,--

"And at the touch of wrong, without a strife,
Slipped in a moment out of life."

There is nothing in literature more beautiful or more pathetic than
Scott's love and sorrow for this friend of his youth.

The second was William Clerk,--the _Darsie Latimer_ of "Redgauntlet"; "a
man," as Scott says, "of the most acute intellects and powerful
apprehension," but of more powerful indolence, so as to leave the world