into the sere and yellow. In that house, as a boy, he saw some of the most distinguished men of the age. In after years, when his fortunes were ripe and his fame as a poet had been established, he drew around himself a kindred class of associates. The record of his life blazes with splendid names. As a lad of fifteen, in 1786, he saw Burns, then twenty-seven, and in the heyday of fame; and he also saw Dugald Stewart, seventeen years his senior. Lord Jeffrey was his contemporary and friend, only two years younger than himself. With Henry Mackenzie, "the Addison of Scotland,"--born in the first year of the last Jacobite rebellion, and therefore twenty-six years his senior,--he lived on terms of cordial friendship. David Hume, who died when Scott was but five years old, was one of the great celebrities of his early days; and doubtless Scott saw the Calton Hill when it was, as Jane Porter remembered it, "a vast green slope, with no other buildings breaking the line of its smooth and magnificent brow but Hume's monument on one part and the astronomical observatory on the other." He knew John Home, the author of _Douglas_, who was his senior by forty-seven years; and among his miscellaneous prose writings there is an effective review of Home's works, which was written for the _Quarterly_, in March 1827. Among the actors his especial friends were John Philip Kemble, Mrs. Siddons, the elder Charles Mathews, John Bannister, and Daniel Terry. He knew Yates also, and he saw Miss Foote, Fanny Kemble, and the Mathews of our day as "a clever, rather forward lad." Goethe was his correspondent. Byron was his friend and fervent admirer. Wordsworth and Moore were among his visitors and especial favourites. The aged Dr. Adam Ferguson was one of his intimates. Hogg, when in trouble, always sought him, and always was helped and comforted. He was the literary sponsor for Thomas Campbell. He met Madame D'Arblay, who was nineteen years his senior, when she was seventy-eight years old; and the author of _Evelina_ talked with him, in the presence of old Samuel Rogers, then sixty-three, about her father, Dr. Burney, and the days of Dr. Johnson. He was honoured with the cordial regard of the great Duke of Wellington, a contemporary, being only two years his senior. He knew Croker, Haydon, Chantrey, Landseer, Sydney Smith, and Theodore Hook. He read _Vivian Grey_ as a new publication and saw Disraeli as a beginner. Coleridge he met and marvelled at. Mrs. Coutts, who had been Harriet Mellon, the singer, and who became the Duchess of St. Albans, was a favourite with him. He knew and liked that caustic critic William Gifford. His relations with Sir Humphry Davy, seven years his senior, were those of kindness. He had a great regard for Lord Castlereagh and Lord Melville. He liked Robert Southey, and he cherished a deep affection for the poet Crabbe, who was twenty-three years older than himself, and who died in the same year. Of Sir George Beaumont, the