which are a dear possession to each of us, there are anecdotes enough. [Illustration: JOHN LEYDEN, From a Pen Drawing] We know the speed and ease, in truth Shakespearean, with which he threw off the best of them, yet to the outsider he seemed hard at work. In June 1814 a party of young bloods were dining in a house in George Street, at right angles with North Castle Street. A shade overspread the face of the host. “Why?” said the narrator. “There is a confounded hand in sight of me here which has often bothered me before, and now it won’t let me fill my glass with a good will. Since we sat down I have been watching it—it fascinates my eye—it never stops; page after page is finished and thrown on that heap of MS., and still it goes on unwearied, and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that; it is the same every night.” It was the hand of Walter Scott, and in the evenings of three weeks in summer it wrote the last two volumes of Waverley (there were three in all). Whatever impression the novels make upon us has been discounted before we have read them, but when they were appearing, when to the attraction of the volumes themselves was added the romance of mystery, when the Wizard of the North was still “The Great Unknown,” _then_ was the time to enjoy a Waverley. James Ballantyne lived in St. John Street, then a good class place off the Canongate. He was wont to give a gorgeous feast whenever a new Waverley was about to appear. Scott was there, but he and the staider members of the company left in good time, and then there were broiled bones and a mighty bowl of punch, and James Ballantyne was persuaded to produce the proof-sheets, and, with a word of preface, give the company the liver wing of the forthcoming literary banquet. Long before the end the secret was an open secret, but it was only formally divulged, as we all know, at the Theatrical Fund dinner, on Friday the 23rd February 1827. Among the company was jovial Patrick Robertson, “a mighty incarnate joke.” When _Peveril of the Peak_ appeared he applied the name to Scott from the shape of his head as he stood chatting in the Parliament House, “better that than Peter o’ the Painch,” was the not particularly elegant but very palpable retort at Peter’s rotundity. At the banquet Scott sent him a note urging him to confess something too. “Why not the murder of Begbie?” (the porter of the British Linen Company Bank, murdered under mysterious circumstances in November 1806, in Tweeddale Close, in the High Street). Immediately after, the farce of _High Life Below Stairs_ was played in the theatre. A lady’s lady asked who wrote Shakespeare? One says Ben Jonson, another Finis. “No,” said an actor, with a most ingenious “gag,” “it is Sir Walter Scott; he confessed it at a public meeting the other day.”