To the last he held the same opinion of his friend's latent powers. "To my
thinking," he wrote in his diary in 1825, "I never met a man of greater
powers, of more complete information on all desirable subjects." But in
youth at least Clerk seems to have had what Sir Walter calls a
characteristic Edinburgh complaint, the "itch for disputation," and though
he softened this down in later life, he had always that slight
contentiousness of bias which enthusiastic men do not often heartily like,
and which may have prevented Scott from continuing to the full the close
intimacy of those earlier years. Yet almost his last record of a really
delightful evening, refers to a bachelor's dinner given by Mr. Clerk, who
remained unmarried, as late as 1827, after all Sir Walter's worst troubles
had come upon him. "In short," says the diary, "we really laughed, and
real laughter is as rare as real tears. I must say, too, there was a
_heart_, a kindly feeling prevailed over the party. Can London give such a
dinner?"[21] It is clear, then, that Clerk's charm for his friend survived
to the last, and that it was not the mere inexperience of boyhood, which
made Scott esteem him so highly in his early days.
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