It is proper to add to Mr. Ballantyne's solution of his "curious moral problem," that he was in his latter days a strenuous opponent of the Duke of Wellington's politics; {p.067} to which circumstance he ascribes, in these same _memoranda_, the only coolness that ever occurred between him and Scott. I need hardly repeat, what has been already distinctly stated more than once, that Scott never considered any amount of literary distinction as entitled to be spoken of in the same breath with mastery in the higher departments of practical life--least of all, with the glory of a first-rate captain. To have done things worthy to be written was in his eyes a dignity to which no man made any approach, who had only written things worthy to be read. He on two occasions, which I can never forget, betrayed painful uneasiness when his works were alluded to as reflecting honor on the age that had produced Watt's improvement of the steam-engine, and the safety-lamp of Sir Humphry Davy. Such was his modest creed--but from all I ever saw or heard of his intercourse with the Duke of Wellington, I am not disposed to believe that he partook it with the only man in whose presence he ever felt awe and abashment.[24] [Footnote 24: I think it very probable that Scott had his own first interview with the Duke of Wellington in his mind when he described the introduction of Roland Græme to the Regent Murray, in the novel of _The Abbot_, chap. xviii.:--"Such was the personage before whom Roland Græme now presented himself with a feeling of breathless awe, very different from the usual boldness and vivacity of his temper. In fact, he was, from education and nature, ... much more easily controlled by the moral superiority arising from the elevated talents and renown of those with whom he conversed, than by pretensions founded only on rank or external show. He might have braved with indifference the presence of an Earl merely distinguished by his belt and coronet; but he felt overawed in that of the eminent soldier and statesman, the wielder of a nation's power, and the leader of her armies."] A charming page in Mr. Washington Irving's Abbotsford and Newstead affords us another anecdote connected with this return from Paris. Two years after this time, when the amiable American visited Scott, he walked with him to a quarry, where his people were at work.