When Sir Walter left us, it was settled that I was to breakfast with him the following day but one. I was punctual, of course, and found him in a new silk _douillette_ that he had just purchased, trying "as hard as he could," as he pleasantly observed, to make a Frenchman of himself--an undertaking as little likely to be successful, I should think, in the case of his Scottish exterior, and Scottish interior too, as any experiment well could be. There were two or three visitors, besides Miss Ann Scott, his daughter, who was his companion in the journey. He was just answering an invitation from the Princesse ----, to an evening party, as I entered. "Here," said he, "you are a friend of the lady, and _parlez-vous_ so much better than I; can you tell me whether this is for _Jeudi_, or _Lundi_, or _Mardi_, or whether it means no day at all?" I told him the day of the week intended. "You get notes occasionally from the lady, or you could not read her scrawl so readily?" "She is very kind to us, and we often have occasion to read her writing." "Well, it is worth a very good dinner to get through a page of it." "I take my revenge in kind, and I fancy she has the worst of it." "I don't know, after all that she will get much the better of me with this _plume d'auberge._" He was quite right, for, although Sir Walter writes a smooth even hand, and one that appears rather well than otherwise on a page, it is one of the most difficult to decipher I have ever met with; the i's, u's, m's, n's, a's, e's, t's, etc., etc., for want of dots, crossings, and being fully rounded, looking all alike, and rendering the reading slow and difficult, without great familiarity with his mode of handling the pen: at least, I have found it so.
He had sealed the note, and was about writing the direction, when he seemed at a loss. "How do you address this lady--as Her Highness?" I was much surprised at this question from him, for it denoted a want of familiarity with the world, that one would not have expected in a man who had been so very much and so long courted by the great. But, after all, his life has been provincial, though, as his daughter remarked in the course of the morning, they had no occasion to quit Scotland to see the world, all the world coming to see Scotland.