line 37.  Blackhouse, a farm ’situated on the Douglas-burn, then tenanted by a remarkable family, to which I have already made allusion—­that of William Laidlaw.’—­’Life,’ i. 328.  Ettrick Pen is a hill in the south of Selkirkshire.

line 46.  ’Various illustrations of the Poetry and Novels of Sir Walter Scott, from designs by Mr. Skene, have since been published.’—­Lockhart.

line 48.  Probably the first reference in poetry to the Scottish heather is, says Prof.  Veitch (’Feeling for Nature,’ ii. 52), in Thomson’s ‘Spring,’ where the bees are represented as daring

     ‘The purple heath, or where the wild thyme grows.’

lines 55-97.  With this striking typical winter piece, cp. in Thomson’s ‘Winter,’ the vivid and pathetic picture beginning:—­

     ’In his own loose-revolving fields, the swain
      Disastered stands.’

See also Burns’s ‘Winter Night,’ which by these lines may have suggested Scott’s ’beamless sun’:—­

     ’When Phoebus gies a short-liv’d glow’r
                        Far south the lift;
      Dim-dark’ning thro’ the flaky show’r,
                        Or whirling drift.’

The ‘tired ploughman,’ too, may owe something to this farther line of Burns:—­

‘Poor labour sweet in sleep was lock’d’;

while the animals seeking shelter may well follow this inimitable and touching description:—­

‘List’ning the doors an’ winnocks rattle,
I thought me on the ourie cattle,
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle
O’ winter war,
And thro’ the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle
Beneath a scaur.’

line 91.  ’I cannot help here mentioning that, on the night on which these lines were written, suggested as they were by a sudden fall of snow, beginning after sunset, an unfortunate man perished exactly in the manner here described, and his body was next morning found close to his own house.  The accident happened within five miles of the farm of Ashestiel.’—­Scott.

line 101.  ’The Scottish Harvest-home.’—­Scott.  Perhaps the name ‘kirn’ is due to the fact that a churnful of cream is a feature of the night’s entertainment.  In Chambers’s Burns, iii. 151, Robert Ainslie gives an account of a kirn at Ellisland in 1790.

line 102.  Cp. the ‘wood-notes wild’ with which Milton credits Shakespeare, ‘L’Allegro,’ 131.

lines 104-5.  The ideal pastoral life of the Golden Age.

line 132.  ’Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo, Baronet; unequalled, perhaps, in the degree of individual affection entertained for him by his friends, as well as in the general respect and esteem of Scotland at large.  His “Life of Beattie,” whom he befriended and patronised in life, as well as celebrated after his decease, was not long published, before the benevolent and affectionate biographer was called to follow the subject of his narrative.  This melancholy event very shortly succeeded the marriage of the friend, to whom this introduction is addressed, with one of Sir William’s daughters.’—­Scott.