To as late as the winter of 1850–51 there was to be seen occasionally in the streets of Edinburgh an old gentleman, very peculiarly attired in a faded surtout of utterly antique fashion, with a large and bulging cravat round his throat, the lower curls of a light-brown wig visible between his hat and his smooth and still ruddy cheeks, pumps on his thread-stockinged feet instead of shoes or boots, and in his hand a green silk umbrella. This, you were told, if you did not know it already, was Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. The mere name probably conveyed some information to you; and on a little inquiry you could learn more. For nearly forty years, you could learn, he had been one of the notabilities of Edinburgh: resident since about 1843 in his present house, No. 28 Drummond Place, where he lived in a recluse manner, with a wonderful museum of antiquities and artistic curiosities about him; but remembered for his more active connection with Edinburgh society in that prior period, between 1813 and 1840, when his house had been in No. 93 Princes Street. It was mainly in this Princes Street portion of Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s Edinburgh life, bringing him from the thirty-third year of his age to the sixtieth, that he had made his reputation. A strange and mixed reputation it was. A zealot in Scottish antiquities and editor of some Scottish historical books, an occasional scribbler also in other and semi-private ways on his own account, a dilettante in art and collector of pictures and engravings, a facile master of the pencil in portrait and whimsical caricature, a Tory of the most pronounced old type and hater of everything Whiggish in the past or the present, he was notorious above all as a Sir Mungo Malagrowther _redivivus_, delighting in scandalous anecdote and reminiscence, and in a habit of cynical sarcasm on all sorts of persons, living or dead. A special distinction of a large segment of this portion of his life, you could not fail to be told, had been his intimacy with Sir Walter Scott. The death of Scott in 1832, removing as it did the one man whose companionship he had always prized most, and whose influence on him had been strongest, had, in fact, turned the rest of his life in Edinburgh into a comparative blank. Still in friendly enough relations, however, with some of the best-known of Scott’s survivors in the literary society of Edinburgh, especially Thomas Thomson, David Laing, and Robert Chambers, and admitting to his acquaintance now and then a junior of kindred antiquarian tastes, such as Hill Burton, he had continued to prefer “New Athens,” as he liked to call it satirically, to any other home. And so, quitting No. 93 Princes Street in 1840, he had, after a brief intervening habitation somewhere in the Old Town, taken up his final abode, in 1843, as has been said, in No. 28 Drummond Place, becoming more and more of an invalid and a recluse there, till at last he had shrunk into that “lean and slippered