Whether Scott ever personally encountered the old king, George III., may be doubtful; but I recall in some of his easy, family letters (perhaps to his eldest boy Walter), most respectful and kindly allusions to the august master of the royal Windsor household--who ordered his home affairs so wisely--keeping “good hours;” while, amid the turbulences and unrest which belonged to the American and French Revolutions--succeeding each other in portentous sequence--he was waning toward that period of woful mental imbecility which beset him at last, and which clouded an earlier chapter[24] of our record. The Prince Regent--afterward George IV.--was always well disposed toward Scott; had read the _Minstrel_, and _Marmion_, with the greatest gratification (he did sometimes read), and told Lord Byron as much; even comparing the Scot with Homer--which was as near to classicism as the Prince often ran. But Byron, in his _English Bards_, etc., published in his earlier days, had made his little satiric dab at the _Minstrel_--finding a lively hope in its being _the Last_! Murray, however, in the good Christian spirit which sometimes overtakes publishers, stanched these wounds, and brought the poets to bask together in the smiles of royalty. The first Baronetcy the Prince bestowed--after coming to Kingship--was that which made the author of Waverley Sir Walter; the poet had witnessed and reported the scenes at the Coronation of 1820 in London; and on the King’s gala visit to Edinboro’--when all the heights about the gray old city boomed with welcoming cannon, and all the streets and all the water-ways were a-flutter with tartans and noisy with bagpipes--it was Sir Walter who virtually marshalled the hosts, and gave chieftain-like greeting to the Prince. Scott’s management of the whole stupendous paraphernalia--the banquets, the processions, the receptions, the decorations (of all which the charming water-colors of Turner are in evidence)--gave wonderful impressions of the masterful resources and dominating tact of the man; now clinking glasses (of Glenlivet) with the mellow King (counting sixty years in that day); now humoring into quietude the jealousies of Highland chieftains; again threading Canongate at nightfall and afoot--from end to end--to observe if all welcoming bannerols and legends are in place; again welcoming to his home, in the heat of ceremonial occupation, the white-haired and trembling poet Crabbe; anon, stealing away to his Castle Street chamber for a new chapter in the _Peveril of the Peak_ (then upon the anvil), and in the heat, and fury, and absorption of the whole gala business breaking out of line with a bowed head and aching heart, to follow his best friend, William Erskine (Lord Kinnedder),[25] out by Queensferry to his burial.