The pity is that this imaginative writer, who knew all characters better than his own, should have fancied himself a shrewd man of business, a part for which he was too generous and trustful. Of his personal merits, the most marked is that in a class of sedentary craftsmen notoriously apt to be irritable, bilious, jealous, and vainglorious, Walter Scott stands out by hearty, wholesome, human qualities which present him as the type of a Scottish gentleman. Whatever record leap to light, He never shall be shamed! To have done with the “Scott Country,” we should hold on westward up the Tweed to where its sources almost mingle with those of the Clyde, below the bold mass of Tinto and other hills that might claim a less modest title. This route would bring us by the renowned inn of Clovenfords, “howff” of Christopher North and many another choice spirit, by Ashestiel, then by Innerleithen, set up as a spa through its claim to represent St. Ronan’s; and so to Peebles, a haunt of pleasure since the days when James I. wrote of “Peeblis to the play.” For some reason or other, Peebles and Paisley have become butts of Gotham banter, their very names attracting the sly jests by which Scotsmen love to make fun of themselves. But neither of them is a town to be sneezed at. Peebles, for its part, after falling into a rather sleepy state, has been wakened up in our time through the Tontine “hottle,” that so much excited Meg Dods’ scorn; the huge Hydropathic that has introduced German bath practice into Scotland; and the Institution bestowed on the town by William Chambers, who hence set out to turn the proverbial half-crown into a goodly fortune. Was it not at this Institution that the local Mutual Improvement Society gravely debated the question, “_Shall_ the material Universe be destroyed?” and decided, by a majority of one, in the negative! When Sir Cresswell Cresswell, from his peculiar bench, laid down the dictum that marriages between May and December often turned out ill, it must have been a Paisley statistician who wrote to him for the data on which he founded his assertion that “marriages contracted in the latter part of the year, etc.” But Paisley has its manufacturing prosperity to fling in the teeth of calumny; and Peebles has romantic as well as comic associations, notably its Neidpath Castle and its Manor Water Glen, haunted by memories of the Black Dwarf. The leisurely tourist might gain Edinburgh by a [Illustration: SCOTT’S FAVOURITE VIEW FROM BEMERSIDE HILL, ROXBURGHSHIRE]