“Blow, blow, thou northern wind."[248]

Nothing more than about two or three pages.  I went to the Parliament House to-day, but had little to do.  I sat to Mr. Graham the last time, Heaven be praised!  If I be not known in another age, it will not be for want of pictures.  We dined with Mr. Wardlaw Ramsay and Lady Anne—­a fine family.  There was little done in the way of work except correcting proofs.  The bile affects me, and makes me vilely drowsy when I should be most awake.  Met at Mr. Wardlaw’s several people I did not know.  Looked over Cumnor Hall by Mr. Usher Tighe of Oxford.  I see from the inscription on Tony Foster’s tomb that he was a skilful planter, amongst other fashionable accomplishments.

FOOTNOTES: 

[232] Milton’s Paradise Lost, Bk. i.

[233] See Cases in Court of Session, vol. vii.  S. p. 527.

[234] John Graham, who afterwards assumed the name of Gilbert; born 1794, died 1866.

He was at this time painting Sir Walter for the Royal Society of Edinburgh.  When the portrait was finished it was placed in the rooms of the Society, where it still hangs.  The artist retained in his own collection a duplicate, with some slight variations, which his widow presented to the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 1867.

[235] Sir Walter, in common with the majority of his contemporaries, evidently believed that Dr. Robert Knox was partly responsible for the West Port atrocities, but it is only just to the memory of the talented anatomist to say that an independent and influential committee, after a careful examination, reported on March 13th, 1829, that there was no evidence showing that he or his assistants knew that murder had been committed, but the committee thought that more care should have been exercised in the reception of the bodies at the Anatomical Class-room.

Lord Cockburn, who was one of the counsel at the trial of Burke, in writing of these events, remarks:  “All our anatomists incurred a most unjust and very alarming, though not an unnatural, odium; Dr. Knox in particular, against whom not only the anger of the populace, but the condemnation of more intelligent persons, was specially directed.  But, tried in reference to the invariable and the necessary practice of the profession, our anatomists were spotlessly correct, and Knox the most correct of them all.”

At this date Dr. Knox was the most popular teacher in the Medical School at Edinburgh, and as his class-room could not contain more than a third of his students, he had to deliver his lectures twice or thrice daily.  The odium attached to his name might have been removed in time had his personal character stood as high as his professional ability, but though he remained in Edinburgh until 1841 he never recovered his position there, and for the last twenty years of his life this once brilliant teacher subsisted as best he could in London by his pen, and as an itinerant lecturer.  He died in 1862.