[163] Moore also felt that the morning was his happiest time for work, but he preferred “composing” in bed!  He says somewhere that he would have passed half his days in bed for the purpose of composition had he not found it too relaxing.

Macaulay, too, when engaged in his History, was in the habit of writing three hours before breakfast daily.

[164] I am assured by Professor Butcher that there is no such passage in the Odyssey, but he suggests “that what Scott had in his mind was merely the Greek idea of a waking vision being a true one.  They spoke of it as a [Greek:  upar] opposed to an [Greek:  onar], a mere dream.  These waking visions are usually said to be seen towards morning.

“In the Odyssey there are two such visions which turn out to be realities:—­that of Nausicaa, Bk. vi. 20, etc., and that of Penelope, Bk. xix. 535, etc.  In the former case we are told that the vision occurred just before dawn; I. 48-49, [Greek:  autika d’ Eos elthen], ’straightway came the Dawn,’ etc.  In the latter, there is no special mention of the hour.  The vision, however, is said to be not a dream, but a true vision which shall be accomplished (547, [Greek:  ouk onar all’ upar esthlon, o toi tetelesmenon estai]).

“Such passages as these, which are frequent in Greek literature, might easily have given rise to the notion of a ‘matutinal inspiration,’ of which Scott speaks.”

[165] General Sir James Steuart Denham of Coltness, Baronet, Colonel of the Scots Greys.  His father, the celebrated political economist, took part in the Rebellion of 1745, and was long afterwards an exile.  The reader is no doubt acquainted with “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Letters” addressed to him and his wife, Lady Frances.—­J.G.L.  See also Mrs. Calderwood’s Letters, 8vo.  Edin. 1884.  Sir James died in 1839.

[166] “Had Prince Charles slept during the whole of the expedition,” says the Chevalier Johnstone, “and allowed Lord George Murray to act for him according to his own judgment, there is every reason for supposing he would have found the crown of Great Britain on his head when he awoke.”—­Memoirs of the Rebellion of 1745, etc. 4to, p. 140.  London, 1810.—­J.G.L.

[167] The lines are given in Woodstock, with the following apology:  “We observe this couplet in Fielding’s farce of Tumbledown Dick, founded on the same classical story.  As it was current in the time of the Commonwealth, it must have reached the author of Tom Jones by tradition, for no one will suspect the present author of making the anachronism.”

[168] Colonel Ranaldson Macdonell of Glengarry.  He died in January 1828.—­J.G.L.

[169] “We have had Marechal Macdonald here.  We had a capital account of Glengarry visiting the interior of a convent in the ancient Highland garb, and the effect of such an apparition on the nuns, who fled in all directions.”—­Scott to Skene, Edinburgh, 24th June 1825.