Erskine was indeed
almost feminine in his love of Scott; but he was feminine with all the
irritable and scrupulous delicacy of a man who could not derogate from
his own ideal of right, even to serve a friend.
Another friend of Scott's earlier days was John Leyden, Scott's most
efficient coadjutor in the collection of the _Border Minstrelsy_,--that
eccentric genius, marvellous linguist, and good-natured bear, who, bred a
shepherd in one of the wildest valleys of Roxburghshire, had accumulated
before the age of nineteen an amount of learning which confounded the
Edinburgh Professors, and who, without any previous knowledge of medicine,
prepared himself to pass an examination for the medical profession, at six
months' notice of the offer of an assistant-surgeoncy in the East India
Company. It was Leyden who once walked between forty and fifty miles and
back, for the sole purpose of visiting an old person who possessed a copy
of a border ballad that was wanting for the _Minstrelsy_. Scott was sitting
at dinner one day with company, when he heard a sound at a distance, "like
that of the whistling of a tempest through the torn rigging of a vessel
which scuds before it.
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