422 PRÆTERITA-II

I thought no one else likely to do it better, and had another motive to the business,-of an irresistible nature.

The little high-foreheaded Charlotte¹ had by this time become a Scottish fairy, White Lady, and witch of the fatallest sort, looking as if she had just risen out of the stream in Rhymer’s Glen, and could only be seen by favouring glance of moonlight over the Eildons. I used to see her, however, sometimes, by the dim lamplight of this world, at Lady Davy’s,-Sir Humphry’s widow,-whose receptions in Park Street gathered usually, with others, the literary and scientific men who had once known Abbotsford. But I never could contrive to come to any serious speech with her; and at last, with my usual wisdom in such matters, went away into Cumberland to recommend myself to her by writing a Quarterly review.

193. I went in the early spring* to the Salutation at Ambleside, then yet a country village, and its inn a country inn. But there, whether it was the grilled salmon for breakfast, or too prolonged reflections on the Celestial Hierarchies,² I fell into a state of despondency till then unknown to me, and of which I knew not the like again till fourteen years afterwards.³ The whole morning was painfully spent in balancing phrases; and from my boat, in the afternoons on Windermere, it appeared to me that the water was leaden, and the hills were low. Lockhart, on the first reception of the laboured MS., asked me to cut out all my best bits, (just as Keble had done before with my prize poem⁴). In both cases I submitted patiently to the loss of my feathers; but was seriously angry and disgusted when Lockhart also intimated to me that a sentence in which

* 1847.

¹ [See above, p. 249; and below, p. 428. Miss Charlotte Lockhart presently became Mrs. Hope Scott.]

² [The principal subject of the first volume of Lord Lindsay’s book.]

³ [For his despondency in 1861, see Vol. XVII. p. xxxviii. For an account of his movements in 1847, with extracts from letters, see Vol. VIII. pp. xxiv.-xxvii.]

⁴ [Keble discharged this office in his capacity of Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1831-1841).]

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