abomination of abominations.  His small elegant features, hectic cheek and soft hazel eyes, were the index of the quick, sensitive, gentle spirit within.”  “He would dismount to lead his horse down what his friend hardly perceived to be a descent at all; grew pale at a precipice; and, unlike the white lady of Avenel, would go a long way round for a bridge.”  He shrank from general society, and lived in closer intimacies, and his intimacy with Scott was of the closest.  He was Scott’s confidant in all literary matters, and his advice was oftener followed on questions of style and form, and of literary enterprise, than that of any other of Scott’s friends.  It is into Erskine’s mouth that Scott puts the supposed exhortation to himself to choose more classical subjects for his poems:—­

    “’Approach those masters o’er whose tomb
    Immortal laurels ever bloom;
    Instructive of the feebler bard,
    Still from the grave their voice is heard;
    From them, and from the paths they show’d,
    Choose honour’d guide and practised road;
    Nor ramble on through brake and maze,
    With harpers rude of barbarous days.”

And it is to Erskine that Scott replies,—­

    “For me, thus nurtured, dost thou ask
    The classic poet’s well-conn’d task? 
    Nay, Erskine, nay,—­on the wild hill
    Let the wild heath-bell flourish still;
    Cherish the tulip, prune the vine,
    But freely let the woodbine twine,
    And leave untrimm’d the eglantine: 
    Nay, my friend, nay,—­since oft thy praise
    Hath given fresh vigour to my lays;
    Since oft thy judgment could refine
    My flatten’d thought or cumbrous line,
    Still kind, as is thy wont, attend,
    And in the minstrel spare the friend!”

It was Erskine, too, as Scott expressly states in his introduction to the Chronicles of the Canongate, who reviewed with far too much partiality the Tales of my Landlord, in the Quarterly Review, for January, 1817,—­a review unjustifiably included among Scott’s own critical essays, on the very insufficient ground that the MS. reached Murray in Scott’s own handwriting.  There can, however, be no doubt at all that Scott copied out his friend’s MS., in order to increase the mystification which he so much enjoyed as to the authorship of his variously named series of tales.  Possibly enough, too, he may have drawn Erskine’s attention to the evidence which justified his sketch of the Puritans in Old Mortality, evidence which he certainly intended at one time to embody in a reply of his own to the adverse criticism on that book.  But though Erskine was Scott’s alter ego for literary purposes, it is certain that Erskine, with his fastidious, not to say finical, sense of honour, would never have lent his name to cover a puff written by Scott of his own works.  A man who, in Scott’s own words, died “a victim to a hellishly false story, or rather, I should say,