to the sensibility of his own nature, which could not endure even the shadow of reproach,—­like the ermine, which is said to pine if its fur is soiled,” was not the man to father a puff, even by his dearest friend, on that friend’s own creations.  Erskine was indeed almost feminine in his love of Scott; but he was feminine with all the irritable and scrupulous delicacy of a man who could not derogate from his own ideal of right, even to serve a friend.

Another friend of Scott’s earlier days was John Leyden, Scott’s most efficient coadjutor in the collection of the Border Minstrelsy,—­that eccentric genius, marvellous linguist, and good-natured bear, who, bred a shepherd in one of the wildest valleys of Roxburghshire, had accumulated before the age of nineteen an amount of learning which confounded the Edinburgh Professors, and who, without any previous knowledge of medicine, prepared himself to pass an examination for the medical profession, at six months’ notice of the offer of an assistant-surgeoncy in the East India Company.  It was Leyden who once walked between forty and fifty miles and back, for the sole purpose of visiting an old person who possessed a copy of a border ballad that was wanting for the Minstrelsy.  Scott was sitting at dinner one day with company, when he heard a sound at a distance, “like that of the whistling of a tempest through the torn rigging of a vessel which scuds before it.  The sounds increased as they approached more near; and Leyden (to the great astonishment of such of the guests as did not know him) burst into the room chanting the desiderated ballad with the most enthusiastic gesture, and all the energy of what he used to call the saw-tones of his voice."[22] Leyden’s great antipathy was Ritson, an ill-conditioned antiquarian, of vegetarian principles, whom Scott alone of all the antiquarians of that day could manage to tame and tolerate.  In Scott’s absence one day, during his early married life at Lasswade, Mrs. Scott inadvertently offered Ritson a slice of beef, when that strange man burst out in such outrageous tones at what he chose to suppose an insult, that Leyden threatened to “thraw his neck” if he were not silent, a threat which frightened Ritson out of the cottage.  On another occasion, simply in order to tease Ritson, Leyden complained that the meat was overdone, and sent to the kitchen for a plate of literally raw beef, and ate it up solely for the purpose of shocking his crazy rival in antiquarian research.  Poor Leyden did not long survive his experience of the Indian climate.  And with him died a passion for knowledge of a very high order, combined with no inconsiderable poetical gifts.  It was in the study of such eccentric beings as Leyden that Scott doubtless acquired his taste for painting the humours of Scotch character.