If Clerk pricked, stimulated, and sometimes badgered Scott, another of
his friends who became more and more intimate with him, as life went
on, and who died before him, always soothed him, partly by his
gentleness, partly by his almost feminine dependence. This was William
Erskine, also a barrister, and son of an Episcopalian clergyman in
Perthshire,--to whose influence it is probably due that Scott himself
always read the English Church service in his own country house, and
does not appear to have retained the Presbyterianism into which he was
born. Erskine, who was afterwards raised to the Bench as Lord
Kinnedder--a distinction which he did not survive for many months--was
a good classic, a man of fine, or, as some of his companions thought,
of almost superfine taste. The style apparently for which he had
credit must have been a somewhat mimini-pimini style, if we may judge
by Scott's attempt in _The Bridal of Triermain_, to write in a manner
which he intended to be attributed to his friend. Erskine was left a
widower in middle life, and Scott used to accuse him of philandering
with pretty women,--- a mode of love-making which Scott certainly
contrived to render into verse, in painting Arthur's love-making to
Lucy in that poem.
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