Here is a glimpse of Grote, the historian of Greece: “A man with straight upper lip, large chin, and open mouth (spout mouth); for the rest, a tall man, with dull, thoughtful brows and lank, disheveled hair, greatly the look of a prosperous Dissenting minister.” In telling Emerson whom he shall see in London, he says: “Southey’s complexion is still healthy mahogany brown, with a fleece of white hair, and eyes that seem running at full gallop; old Rogers, with his pale head, white, bare, and cold as snow, with those large blue eyes, cruel, sorrowful, and that sardonic shelf chin.” In another letter he draws this portrait of Webster: “As a logic-fencer, advocate, or parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him, at first sight, against all the extant world. The tanned complexion; that amorphous, crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to be _blown_; the mastiff mouth, accurately closed; I have not traced as much of silent _Berserkir rage_, that I remember of, in any other man.”—_From John Burroughs’s “Fresh Fields.”_ * * * * * SCOTT AT WORK.—I never can forget the description Sir Adam Fergusson gave me of a morning he had passed with Scott at Abbottsford, which at that time was still unfinished, and swarming with carpenters, painters, masons, and bricklayers, was surrounded with all the dirt and disorderly discomfort inseparable from the process of house-building. The room they sat in was in the roughest condition which admitted of their occupying it at all; the raw, new chimney smoked intolerably. Out-of-doors the whole place was one chaos of bricks, mortar, scaffolding, tiles, and slates. A heavy mist shrouded the whole landscape of lovely Tweed side, and distilled in a cold, persistent and dumb drizzle. Maida, the well beloved stag-hound, kept fidgeting in and out of the room. Walter Scott every five minutes exclaiming, “Eh, Adam! the puir beast’s just wearying to get out;” or, “Eh, Adam! the puir creature’s just crying to come in;” when Sir Adam would open the door to the raw, chilly air for the wet, muddy hound’s exit or entrance, while Scott with his face swollen with a grievous toothache, and one hand pressed hard to his cheek, with the other was writing the inimitably humorous opening chapters of “The Antiquary,” which he passed across the table, sheet by sheet, to his friend, saying, “Now, Adam, d’ye think that will do?” Such a picture of mental triumph over outward circumstances has surely seldom been surpassed. House-builders, smoky chimney, damp draughts, restless, dripping dog, and toothache form what our friend Miss Masson called a “concatenation of exteriorities,” little favorable to literary composition of any sort; but considered as accompaniments or inspiration of that delightfully comical beginning of “The Antiquary,” they are all but incredible.—_From Mason’s “Traits of British Authors.”_