102 PRÆTERITA-I

up the hill or down-to say it; and Mr. Gray’s house was always the same to us as our own at any time of day or night. But our house not at all so to the Grays, having its formalities inviolable; so that during the whole of childhood I had the sense that we were, in some way or other, always above our friends and relations,-more or less patronizing everybody, favouring them by our advice, instructing them by our example, and called upon, by what was due both to ourselves, and the constitution of society, to keep them at a certain distance.

117. With one exception; which I have deep pleasure in remembering. In the first chapter of the Antiquary, the landlord at Queen’s Ferry sets down to his esteemed guest a bottle of Robert Cockburn’s best port;¹ with which Robert Cockburn duly supplied Sir Walter himself, being at that time, if not the largest, the leading importer of the finest Portugal wine, as my father of Spanish. But Mr. Cockburn was primarily an old Edinburgh gentleman, and only by condescension a wine-merchant; a man of great power and pleasant sarcastic wit, moving in the first circles of Edinburgh; attached to my father by many links of association with the “auld toun,” and sincerely respecting him. He was much the stateliest and truest piece of character who ever sate at our merchant feasts.

Mrs. Cockburn was even a little higher,-as representative of the Scottish lady of the old school,-indulgent yet to the new. She had been Lord Byron’s first of first loves;² she was the Mary Duff of Lachin-y-Gair. When I first remember her, still extremely beautiful in middle age, full of sense; and, though with some mixture of proud severity, extremely kind.

118. They had two sons, Alexander and Archibald, both

¹ [This is not quite accurate. In chapter ii., when Monkbarns asks for port, the landlord gives him fine claret.]

² [She was a distant cousin; and her “brown, dark hair and hazel eyes-her very dress” were long years after “a perfect image” in his memory: see The Works of Lord Byron: Poetry, edited by E. H. Coleridge, 1898, vol. i. p. 192 n., and in the Letters, edited by R. E. Prothero, vol. ii. pp. 325 (“my first of flames”), 347.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]