[7] One of the numerous joint-stock adventures which were so common in Edinburgh at this time.  There had already been formed a Gas-light Company in 1818, for the manufacture of gas from coal, but the projectors of this new venture believed they could produce a purer and more powerful light by the use of oil.  It was not successful commercially, and, as is told in the Journal, the rival company acquired the stock and plant a few years after the formation of this “Oil Gas Co.,” of which Sir Walter had been Chairman from 1823.

See Life, vol. vii. pp. 141, 144, 197, 251, 374; and viii. p. 113; Cockburn’s Memorials (for 1825).

[8] Sir Robert Dundas of Beechwood, one of Scott’s colleagues at the “Clerks’ Table,”—­son of the parish minister of Humbie, and kinsman of Lord and Lady Melville; he died in 1835.  Some of the other gentlemen with whom the duties of his office brought Scott into close daily connection were David Hume, Hector Macdonald Buchanan, and Colin Mackenzie of Portmore.  With these families, says Mr. Lockhart, “he and his lived in such constant familiarity of kindness, that the children all called their father’s colleagues uncles, and the mothers of their little friends aunts; and in truth the establishment was a brotherhood.”

[9] Mrs. Thomas Scott’s brother.

[10] George L. Sanders, born at Kinghorn, 1774; died in London, 1846.

[11] Sir Walter told Moore that Lewis was the person who first set him upon trying his talent at poetry, adding that “he had passed the early part of his life with a set of clever, rattling, drinking fellows, whose thoughts and talents lay wholly out of the region of poetry.”  Thirty years after having met Lewis in Edinburgh for the first time in 1798, he said to Allan Cunningham, “that he thought he had never felt such elation as when ‘the monk’ invited him to dine with him at his hotel.”  Lewis died in 1818, and Scott says of him, “He did much good by stealth, and was a most generous creature—­fonder of great people than he ought to have been, either as a man of talent or as a man of fashion.  He had always ladies and duchesses in his mouth, and was pathetically fond of any one that had a title.  Mat had queerish eyes—­they projected like those of some insects, and were flattish on the orbit.”

[12] Moore’s friends seem to have recognised his thorough manliness and independence of character.  Lord John Russell testifies:  “Never did he make wife or family a pretext for political shabbiness—­never did he imagine that to leave a disgraced name as an inheritance to his children was a duty as a father” (Memoirs, vol. i. pp. xiii and xiv), and when Rogers urged this plea of family as a reason why he should accept the money, Moore said, “More mean things have been done in this world under the shelter of ‘wife and children’ than under any pretext worldly-mindedness can resort to.”  To which S.R. only said, “Well, your life may be a good poem, but it is a ——­ bad matter of fact.”—­Clayden, Rogers and his Contemporaries, vol. i. p. 378.