Page:Notes by the Way.djvu/363

 Waverley Novels,' twelve huge volumes in all, I began January 17, 1842 &hellip; At the same time I took in regularly each month, from Menzies in Prince's Street, Tyas's edition of Shakespeare, miscalled 'Works of Shakspere,' odious technical blunder of pretentious pedantry, illustrated by Kenny Meadows, 3 vols., 1843, et seq. Here was my fountain of enjoyment, revelled in month by month, although the pictures soon became poor after the beautiful best work on the Comedies." He afterwards gave this to Harriet Murray, the daughter of W. H. Murray, the manager of the Edinburgh and Adelphi Theatres, and a brother of Mrs. Henry Siddons. Young Ebsworth had free entrance to all parts of both theatres, including orchestra, greenroom, and flies.

Although Ebsworth was only between seven and eight years old at the time of the Reform agitation, 1831-2, he had already strong predilections. He remembered hearing a "howling London cad, a Reform Bill agitator, addressing the greasy rabble on Calton Hill, near to my father's house; and in a desire to propitiate the blatant mob whom we old Tories loathed, he called them, as a laudation, 'Men of the Heart of Mid-Lothian.' They shouted at the Cockney varlet's blunder. The ignorant fool meant to flatter them, and win their votes for Reform; but he was, rightly, stigmatizing them as 'jail-birds.' 'Young Ebsworth saw "plenty of the low Radicalism that disgraced Scotland in the latter days of Sir Walter Scott,whom with base ingratitude they personally insulted at Selkirk, where he had been 'the Shirra,' and still worse at Hawick, where they tried to drag him out from his carriage, and shouted 'Burke Sir Walter!' I remembered it when I went thither five years after his death; and I never forgave them."

Another reminiscence of his Edinburgh days was of O'Connell addressing the people from the Regent's Arch Hotel in 1835 or 1836, and he would frequently recall "the blundering prosecution" at his trial, when the counsel for the Crown quoted the Irish rebel ballad

At that date the poem was anonymous, but, as is now well known, the author was John K. Ingram. The result of its being quoted at the trial was its publication in every newspaper, without suppression or punishment; thus it attained an enormous circulation.

Ebsworth was in Edinburgh when Queen Victoria paid her first visit in March, 1842. Sir Robert Peel was in attendance, and the youth of eighteen would recall how the people yelled at him