He is past eighty [he was seventy-three]. Mr. Walpole coming
in just afterwards, I told him how highly I had been pleased. He begged
me to entreat for a repetition of it. It was the satire conveyed in this
little ballad upon the conduct of Sir Robert Walpole's ministry which is
thought to have been a remote cause of his resignation. It was a very
curious circumstance to see his son listening to the recital of it with
so much complacency.'
[364] See ante, i. 125.
[365] See _ante_, i. 456, and _post_, Sept. 22.
[366] See _ante_, ii. 82, and _post_, Oct. 27.
[367] 'Nairne is the boundary in this direction between the highlands
and lowlands; and until within a few years both English and Gaelic were
spoken here. One of James VI.'s witticisms was to boast that in Scotland
he had a town "sae lang that the folk at the tae end couldna understand
the tongue spoken at the tother."' Murray's _Handbook for Scotland_, ed.
1867, p. 308. 'Here,' writes Johnson (_Works_, ix. 21), 'I first saw
peat fires, and first heard the Erse language.' As he heard the girl
singing Erse, so Wordsworth thirty years later heard The
Solitary Reaper:--
'Yon solitary Highland Lass
Reaping and singing by herself.'
[368]
'Verse softens toil, however rude the sound;
She feels no biting pang the while she sings;
Nor, as she turns the giddy wheel around,
Revolves the sad vicissitude of things.
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