 and advanced age, had bestowed on the original. The
Baron joined in the laugh. »Truly,« he said, »that picture was a woman's fantasy
of my good mother's (a daughter of the Laird of Tulliellum, Captain Waverley; I
indicated the house to you when we were on the top of the Shinnyheuch; it was
burnt by the Dutch auxiliaries brought in by the Government in 1715); I never
sate for my pourtraicture but once since that was painted, and it was at the
special and reiterated request of the Marechal Duke of Berwick.«
    The good old gentleman did not mention what Mr. Rubrick afterwards told
Edward, that the Duke had done him this honour on account of his being the first
to mount the breach of a fort in Savoy during the memorable campaign of 1709,
and his having there defended himself with his half-pike for nearly ten minutes
before any support reached him. To do the Baron justice, although sufficiently
prone to dwell upon, and even to exaggerate, his family dignity and consequence,
he was too much a man of real courage ever to allude to such personal acts of
merit as he had himself manifested.
    Miss Rose now appeared from the interior room of her apartment, to welcome
her father and his friends. The little labours in which she had been employed
obviously showed a natural taste, which required only cultivation. Her father
had taught her French and Italian, and a few of the ordinary authors in those
languages ornamented her shelves. He had endeavoured also to be her preceptor in
music; but as he began with the more abstruse doctrines of the science, and was
not perhaps master of them himself, she had made no proficiency farther than to
be able to accompany her voice with the harpsichord; but even this was not very
common in Scotland at that period. To make amends, she sung with great taste and
feeling, and with a respect to the sense of what she uttered that might be
proposed in example to ladies of much superior musical talent. Her natural good
sense taught her, that if, as we are assured by high authority, music be
»married to immortal verse,« they are very often divorced by the performer in a
most shameful manner. It was perhaps owing to this sensibility to poetry, and
power of combining its expression with those of the musical notes, that her
singing gave more pleasure to all the unlearned in music, and even to many of
the learned, than could have been communicated by a much finer voice and more
brilliant execution, unguided by the same delicacy of feeling.
