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 198 Claverhouse by Macaulay, and it sufficiently illustrates the position popularly assigned him by his foes. Rumor asserted in his behalf her triumphant immortality, and crystallized into tradition every floating charge urged by the Covenanters against his fame. So potent and far-reaching was her voice that it became in time a virtuous necessity to echo it; and we actually find Southey writing to Scott in 1807, and regretting that Wordsworth should have thought fit to introduce the Viscount of Dundee into the sonnet on Killiecrankie, without any apparent censure of his conduct. Scott, who took a somewhat easier view of poetical obligations, and who probably thought that Killiecrankie was hardly the fitting spot on which to recall Dundee's shortcomings, wrote back very plainly that he thought there had been censure enough already; and nine years later he startled the good people of Edinburgh, on his own account, by the publication of that eminently heterodox novel, Old Mortality. Lockhart tells us that the theme was suggested to Sir Walter by his friend Mr. Joseph Train, who, when visiting at Abbotsford, was much struck by the solitary picture