relics of, Charles Edward Stuart.  “And this,” said the old gentleman, “was his sword.”  It was a light dress rapier, with a very highly cut and ornamented steel hilt.  I half drew the blade, thinking how it had flashed from its scabbard, startling England and dazzling Scotland at its first unsheathing, and in what inglorious gloom of prostrate fortunes it had rusted away at last, the scorn of those who had opposed, and the despair of those who had embraced, its cause.  “And so that was the Pretender’s sword!” said I, hardly aware that I had spoken until the little, withered, snuff-colored gentleman snatched rather than took it from me, exclaiming, “Wha’ did ye say, madam? it was the prince’s sword!” and laid it tenderly back in the receptacle from which he had taken it.

As we drove away, Dr. Combe told me, what indeed I had perceived, that this old man, who looked like a shriveled, russet-colored leaf for age and feebleness, was a passionate partisan of Charles Edward, by whom my mention of him as the Pretender, if coming from a man, would have been held a personal insult.  It was evident that I, though a mere chit of the irresponsible sex, had both hurt and offended him by it.  His sole remaining interest in life was hunting out and collecting the smallest records or memorials of this shadow of a hero; surely the merest “royal apparition” that ever assumed kingship.  “What a set those Stuarts must have been!” exclaimed an American friend of mine once, after listening to “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” “to have had all those glorious Jacobite songs made and sung for them, and not to have been more of men than they were!” And so I think, and thought even then, for though I had a passion for the Jacobite ballads, I had very little enthusiasm for their thoroughly inefficient hero, who, for the claimant of a throne, was undoubtedly un tres pauvre sire.  Talking over this with me, as we drove from Mr. M——­’s, Dr. Combe said he was persuaded that at that time there were men to be found in Scotland ready to fight a duel about the good fame of Mary Stuart.

Sir Walter Scott told me that when the Scottish regalia was discovered, in its obscure place of security, in Edinburgh Castle, pending the decision of government as to its ultimate destination, a committee of gentlemen were appointed its guardians, among whom he was one; and that he received a most urgent entreaty from an old lady of the Maxwell family to be permitted to see it.  She was nearly ninety years old, and feared she might not live till the crown jewels of Scotland were permitted to become objects of public exhibition, and pressed Sir Walter with importunate prayers to allow her to see them before she died.  Sir Walter’s good sense and good nature alike induced him to take upon himself to grant the poor old lady’s petition, and he himself conducted her into the presence of these relics of her country’s independent sovereignty; when, he said, tottering hastily forward from his support, she fell on her knees before the crown, and, clasping and wringing her wrinkled hands, wailed over it as a mother over her dead child.  His description of the scene was infinitely pathetic, and it must have appealed to all his own poetical and imaginative sympathy with the former glories of his native land.