327.]
CHAPTER VI.
COMPANIONS AND FRIENDS.
I have anticipated in some degree, in speaking of Scott's later
poetical works, what, in point of time at least, should follow some
slight sketch of his chosen companions, and of his occupations in the
first period of his married life. Scott's most intimate friend for
some time after he went to college, probably the one who most
stimulated his imagination in his youth, and certainly one of his most
intimate friends to the very last, was William Clerk, who was called
to the bar on the same day as Scott. He was the son of John Clerk of
Eldin, the author of a book of some celebrity in its time on _Naval
Tactics_. Even in the earliest days of this intimacy, the lads who had
been Scott's fellow-apprentices in his father's office, saw with some
jealousy his growing friendship with William Clerk, and remonstrated
with Scott on the decline of his regard for them, but only succeeded
in eliciting from him one of those outbursts of peremptory frankness
which anything that he regarded as an attempt to encroach on his own
interior liberty of choice always provoked.
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