of course the Ministry carried their way, and Tom Scott got his unearned pension.  Nevertheless, Scott was furious with Lord Holland.  Writing soon after to the happy recipient of this little pension, he says, “Lord Holland has been in Edinburgh, and we met accidentally at a public party.  He made up to me, but I remembered his part in your affair, and cut him with as little remorse as an old pen.”  Mr. Lockhart says, on Lord Jeffrey’s authority, that the scene was a very painful one.  Lord Jeffrey himself declared that it was the only rudeness of which he ever saw Scott guilty in the course of a life-long familiarity.  And it is pleasant to know that he renewed his cordiality with Lord Holland in later years, though there is no evidence that he ever admitted that he had been in the wrong.  But the incident shows how very doubtful Sir Walter ought to have felt as to the purity of his Conservatism.  It is quite certain that the proposal to abolish Tom Scott’s office without compensation was not a reckless experiment of a fundamental kind.  It was a mere attempt at diminishing the heavy burdens laid on the people for the advantage of a small portion of the middle class, and yet Scott resented it with as much display of selfish passion—­considering his genuine nobility of breeding—­as that with which the rude working men of Jedburgh afterwards resented his gallant protest against the Reform Bill, and, later again, saluted the dauntless old man with the dastardly cry of “Burk Sir Walter!” Judged truly, I think Sir Walter’s conduct in cutting Lord Holland “with as little remorse as an old pen,” for simply doing his duty in the House of Lords, was quite as ignoble in him as the bullying and insolence of the democratic party in 1831, when the dying lion made his last dash at what he regarded as the foes of the Constitution.  Doubtless he held that the mob, or, as we more decorously say, the residuum, were in some sense the enemies of true freedom.  “I cannot read in history,” he writes once to Mr. Laidlaw, “of any free State which has been brought to slavery till the rascal and uninstructed populace had had their short hour of anarchical government, which naturally leads to the stern repose of military despotism.”  But he does not seem ever to have perceived that educated men identify themselves with “the rascal and uninstructed populace,” whenever they indulge on behalf of the selfish interests of their own class, passions such as he had indulged in fighting for his brother’s pension.  It is not the want of instruction, it is the rascaldom, i. e. the violent esprit de corps of a selfish class, which “naturally leads” to violent remedies.  Such rascaldom exists in all classes, and not least in the class of the cultivated and refined.  Generous and magnanimous as Scott was, he was evidently by no means free from the germs of it.