AND THE VALE OF THE ESK. 13s
principal talker ; and, when Ben and Drummond walked briskly together in
the winter-weather by the paths in the glen itself, close to the house, or on the
high-way or cross-roads near, Ben would still be talking, and Drummond
chiefly listening. You must remember also that Drummond’s was a bachelois
household, and that, when he and Ben were alone together in the evenings,
and the candles were lit in the chief room, and the supper was removed, there
would still be wine on the board. Then, if you know anything of the two
men, you can see the scene as distinctly as if you had been peeping through
the window. You can see the two sitting on snugly by the ruddy fire far into
the night, hardly hearing the murmur of the Esk and the moaning of the wind
outside, but talking of all things in heaven or earth, Ben telling anecdotes of
his London acquaintances back to Shakespeare, and reciting scraps of poetry,
and pronouncing criticisms on poets, and Drummond now and then taking
out a manuscript from a desk and modestly reading as much as Ben would
stand, and Ben helping himself and going off again, and the noise and the
laughter always increasing on his part, till Drummond at length would grow
dizzy with too much of it, and light their bedroom tapers by way of signal.
And next morning you may be sure it would be a late breakfast, and Ben
would be surIy and taciturn for a while ; but gradually he would come round,
and the day’s talk would begin again. As surely, I repeat, as if you had been
a spy sent to watch, this is what went on in Hawthornden House during that
fortnight or so when the great Ben from London was the guest of the cultured
Drummond.
‘ The visit was one to be marked with a red mark in Drummond‘s calendar,
Here he had been for many years in his Scottish retirement, far from the
London world of politics and letters, and with only such information from
that world as might be blown to him among his boors by rumour, or brought
occasionally by Sir William Alexander and other friends. But now he had
under his own roof the very laureate of the London world, the man who had
known everybody of note in it since Elizabeth was queen, and whose habits of
talk made him the very paragon of gossips. It was, doubtless, a great treat.
But there is nothing perfect under the sun. There is evidence that Ilrummond,
when he had Ben all to himself, began to feel that he had caught a Tartar.
Ben’s own poetry, it is to- be remembered, the poetry of general and
miscellaneous strength rather than of the pure and soft musical vein, was not that
which would have predisposed Drummond to forgive him his personal faults
from a sense of literary allegiance. Hence, though he was scrupulously polite
to Ben all the while he was his guest, and must have thought him one of the
