When Thomas Campbell published his “Pleasures of Hope,” Walter Scott was an enthusiastic admirer of his fellow-poet. “I have repeated these lines so often on the North Bridge that the whole fraternity of coachmen know me by tongue as I pass. To be sure, to a mind in sober, serious, street-walking humour, it must bear an appearance of lunacy when one stamps with the hurried pace and fervent shake of the head, which strong, pithy poetry excites.” Oh days of enthusiasms and strong feelings! Nowadays, we are all jaded with travel, and washed over with the neutral tint of cosmopolitanism, and as insipid as bread and water. No Scott stamps and rolls his head to the rhythm of his thoughts on the North Bridge; no Scott protests out of his full heart against the innovations of Whiggery, and leans his brow against the wall of the Mound, unashamed if his tears be seen by a jesting Jeffrey, and tells him, “No, no--’tis no laughing matter; little by little, whatever your wishes may be, you will destroy and undermine, until nothing of what makes Scotland Scotland shall remain!”[59] When Scott’s worldly prospects were very prosperous, when he was Sheriff of Selkirk, and the author of the successful _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, and a contributor to the _Edinburgh Review_, under the editorship first of Sydney Smith and then of Jeffrey, he was an established citizen of Edinburgh, in his second house in Castle Street--“poor 39”--as he lived to call it. Here were his most brilliant days spent,--here, and at Ashestiel, the picturesque farm on the banks of the Tweed which superseded the Lasswade cottage, and then at Abbotsford, the proudest home of all. But 39 Castle Street remained his town home through all the brilliant and wonderful years, till the financial crash came in 1826. It was here that Joanna Baillie paid a visit of a week or so,--here that Crabbe stayed,--here that every one of worth or want found a ready welcome. The dining-room in 39 Castle Street!--what scenes and what voices have its walls seen and heard! Here all Scott’s famous dinners took place, including those Sunday ones “without silver dishes” to his intimates--Mrs. Maclean of Torloisk and her daughters; his school friend Clerk; Kirkpatrick Sharpe of caustic humour and scandalous memory; Sir Alexander Boswell of Auchinleck, “Bozzie’s” son, and author of “Jenny dang the weaver”; Sir Alexander Don of Newton; William Allan, the artist; and many others. It was here he had his orderly “den” behind the dining-room, with its many books, its big writing-table, its two armchairs, the staghound on the floor, and the cat safely atop the book-ladder, and one picture--the beautiful, sad face of Graham of Claverhouse, who, as Scott said, “foully traduced” by Covenanting historians, “still passed among the Scottish vulgar for a ruffian desperado.”