[7] To please the king, Canning appointed the Duke of Clarence as first Lord of the Admiralty, but Greville says it was a most judicious stroke of policy, and nothing served so much to disconcert his opponents.  Lord Melville had held the office from March 25, 1812, to April 13, 1827.  The Duke resigned in the following year.—­See Croker’s Correspondence, vol. i. pp. 264 (letter to Blomfield), 427, 429; also ante, vol. i. p. 262.  Lord Melville was President of the India Board in the Duke of Wellington’s administration in 1828, and again First Lord from Sept. 17 of the same year until Nov. 22, 1830.

[8] The Rev. William Stephen Gilly, D.D., Vicar of Norham, author of Narrative of an Excursion to the Mountains of Piemont, 1823; Researches among the Vaudois or Waldenses, 1827-31.

[9] See Raine’s St. Cuthbert, 4to, Durham, 1828.

[10] See Danvers in First Series of Sayings and Doings.

[11] The Merry Devil of Edmonton, a play by “T.B.,” which has also been attributed to Anthony Brewer.

[12] Right Hon. Thomas Francis Kennedy, M.P. for Ayr Burghs, 1818-34.  Died at the age of ninety at Dalquharran in 1879.

[13] This powerful drama, entitled Witchcraft:  a Tragedy in Prose, was suggested, as the author says in her preface, by reading a scene in The Bride of Lammermoor.

[14] Did Constable ruin Scott, as has been generally supposed?  It is right to say that such a charge was not made during the lifetime of either.  Immediately after Scott’s death Miss Edgeworth wrote to Sir James Gibson-Craig and asked him for authentic information as to Sir Walter’s connection with Constable.  Sir James in reply stated that to his personal knowledge Mr. Constable had, in his anxiety to save Scott, about 1814 [1813], commenced a system of accommodation bills which could not fail to produce, and actually did produce, the ruin of both parties.  To another correspondent, some years later, he wrote still more strongly (Memoirs, vol. iii. p. 457).

Scott appears to have been aware of the facts so far, as he says to Laidlaw, in a letter of December 16, 1825, “The confusion of 1814 is a joke to this ... but it arises out of the nature of the same connection which gives, and has given, me a fortune;” and Mr. Lockhart says that the firm of J.B. & Co. “had more than once owed its escape from utter ruin and dishonour” through Constable’s exertions.—­Life, vol. v. p. 150.

On reading the third volume of Constable’s Memoirs (3 vols. 8vo, 1873), one cannot fail to see that all the three parties—­printer, publisher, and author—­were equal sharers in the imprudences that led to the disaster in 1826.  Whether Mr. Constable was right in recommending further advances to the London house is doubtful; but if it was an error of judgment, it was one which appears to have been shared by Mr. Cadell and Mr. James Ballantyne.  It must be admitted that the three firms were equally culpable in maintaining for so many years a system of fictitious credit.  Constable, at least, from a letter to Scott, printed in vol. iii. p. 274, had become seriously alarmed as early as August 8, 1823.