[1114] Perhaps the same woman showed the chapel who was there 29 years later, when Scott visited it.  One of his friends ’hoped that they might, as habitual visitors, escape hearing the usual endless story of the silly old woman that showed the ruins’; but Scott answered, ’There is a pleasure in the song which none but the songstress knows, and by telling her we know it all ready we should make the poor devil unhappy.’  Lockharts Scott, ed. 1839, ii. 106.

[1115] _ O rare Ben Jonson_ is on Jonson’s tomb in Westminster Abbey.

[1116] See ante, ii. 365.

[1117] ’Essex was at that time confined to the same chamber of the Tower from which his father Lord Capel had been led to death, and in which his wife’s grandfather had inflicted a voluntary death upon himself.  When he saw his friend carried to what he reckoned certain fate, their common enemies enjoying the spectacle, and reflected that it was he who had forced Lord Howard upon the confidence of Russel, he retired, and, by a Roman death, put an end to his misery.’  Dalrymple’s Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. i. p. 36.  BOSWELL.  In the original after ’his wife’s grandfather,’ is added ‘Lord Northumberland.’  It was his wife’s great-grandfather, the eighth Earl of Northumberland.  He killed himself in 1585.  Burke’s Peerage.

[1118] Dr. A. Carlyle (Auto. p. 293) says of Robertson and Blair:—­’Having been bred at a time when the common people thought to play with cards or dice was a sin, and everybody thought it an indecorum in clergymen, they could neither of them play at golf or bowls, and far less at cards or backgammon, and on that account were very unhappy when from home in friends’ houses in the country in rainy weather.  As I had set the first example of playing at cards at home with unlocked door [Carlyle was a minister], and so relieved the clergy from ridicule on that side, they both learned to play at whist after they were sixty.’  See ante, iii. 23.

[1119] See ante, i. 149, and v. 350.

[1120] See ante, iv. 54.

[1121] He wrote to Boswell on Nov. 16, 1776 (ante, iii. 93):—­’The expedition to the Hebrides was the most pleasant journey that I ever made.’  In his Diary he recorded on Jan. 9, 1774:—­’In the autumn I took a journey to the Hebrides, but my mind was not free from perturbation.’ Pr. and Med. p. 136.  The following letter to Dr. Taylor I have copied from the original in the possession of my friend Mr. M. M. Holloway:—­

’DEAR SIR,

’When I was at Edinburgh I had a letter from you, telling me that in answer to some enquiry you were informed that I was in the Sky.  I was then I suppose in the western islands of Scotland; I set out on the northern expedition August 6, and came back to Fleet-street, November 26.  I have seen a new region.

’I have been upon seven of the islands, and probably should have visited many more, had we not begun our journey so late in the year, that the stormy weather came upon us, and the storms have I believe for about five months hardly any intermission.