At six next morning, Queen Street--that sober terrace!--saw Sir Walter Scott clad in Campbell tartans at a muster of the Celtic Club; and a little later an inimitable scene took place in the dining-room of 39 Castle Street. Scott had hospitably brought some half-dozen Celts home to breakfast; and, on entering the room himself from his study, he discovered Crabbe, the dapper English clergyman, punctiliously neat and decorous in his black clothes and buckled shoes, standing surrounded by huge kilted and plaided Highlanders, like a sleek spaniel surrounded by collies. To Scott’s amazement, the tongue in which all were endeavouring to exchange ideas proved to be French; for Crabbe, as ignorant as an Englishman can be about Scotland, had heard the Gaelic; and, judging the strangely garbed men to be foreigners, and addressing them amiably in French, had been promptly taken by them for a French _abbé_. Throughout all the busy fortnight Scott was the centre of everything. Daily he dined at Dalkeith Palace,[61] and attended the King at the levées and drawing-rooms at Holyrood, at St. Giles’s Church on Sunday, at the performance by Murray’s company of _Rob Roy_, and at the banquet given by the Magistrates to the King at the Parliament House. It was Scott who organised the great procession from Holyrood to the Castle in copy of the “Riding of the Parliament.” And, as Lockhart points out in his _Life of Scott_, it was due to Scott’s Celtic ardour that in all the arrangements the kilts and pipes were made so prominent that King George became impressed with the false idea that Scotland’s glory rested on them alone, and that he showed this by giving as his one toast at the banquet: “The Chieftains and Clans of Scotland, and Prosperity to the Land of Cakes.” Perhaps it dates from this that the English to this day think the kilt the national--if not the usual--dress of the Scot, and that _Punch_ makes Highlanders talk lowland Scotch, and Scotsmen speak Gaelic. But some results of the King’s visit--also due to Sir Walter Scott’s influence--were better. The King knighted Adam Ferguson, Deputy-Keeper of the Regalia, and Raeburn, the Scottish portrait-painter; and Mons Meg was returned from the Tower, after much correspondence; and the Scottish peerages forfeited in 1715 and 1745 were restored. Four years later, Scott sent for his old friend Skene of Rubislaw. It was a cold January morning--seven o’clock--when Skene arrived, and Scott’s greeting to him was: “My friend, give me a shake of your hand: mine is that of a beggar.” The crash had come. Offers of assistance poured in--from his children, from the principal banks of Edinburgh, from friends high and low. Scott, hearing that Sir William Forbes the banker, his old rival in love, was foremost in wishing to help, wrote in his diary: “It is fated our planets should cross, though, and that at periods most interesting for me. Down--down--a hundred thoughts.”