"This was the unhappy man who, after attending Prince Charles Stuart
as his secretary throughout the greater part of his expedition,
condescended to redeem his own life and fortune by bearing evidence
against the noblest of his late master's adherents, when--

"Pitied by gentle hearts, Kilmarnock died,
The brave, Balmerino were on thy side."[3]

"Broughton's saucer"--i. e. the saucer belonging to the cup thus
sacrificed by Mr. Scott to his indignation against one who had
redeemed his own life and fortune by turning king's evidence against
one of Prince Charles Stuart's adherents,--was carefully preserved by
his son, and hung up in his first study, or "den," under a little
print of Prince Charlie. This anecdote brings before the mind very
vividly the character of Sir Walter's parents. The eager curiosity of
the active-minded woman, whom "the honourable Mrs. Ogilvie" had been
able to keep upright in her chair for life, but not to cure of the
desire to unravel the little mysteries of which she had a passing
glimpse; the grave formality of the husband, fretting under his wife's
personal attention to a dishonoured man, and making her pay the
penalty by dashing to pieces the cup which the king's evidence had
used,--again, the visitor himself, perfectly conscious no doubt that
the Hanoverian lawyer held him in utter scorn for his faithlessness
and cowardice, and reluctant, nevertheless, to reject the courtesy of
the wife, though he could not get anything but cold legal advice from
the husband:--all these are figures which must have acted on the
youthful imagination of the poet with singular vivacity, and shaped
themselves in a hundred changing turns of the historical kaleidoscope
which was always before his mind's eye, as he mused upon that past
which he was to restore for us with almost more than its original