house with trees and a rookery too much idleness and conalbeit in the precincts of Can- viviality among the well-born ongate where Dugald Stew- young men into whose circle art received distinguished guests Scott, with his liveliness, comeand his wife was mother and liness, good-humour, and variety inspiration to the scion of of knowledge was admitted. English Whig houses who Drinking bouts were still a boarded with them. The talk fashion, and that his hard was probably excellent, the head permitted him to see hospitality graceful and sin- all his companions under the cere, at those evening parties, table was a matter, not for where the guests sat in the jesting, but for the exercise firelight because the philoso- of Jane Anne's incomparable pher found that pleasant twi- talent for plain speaking. But, light restful to the brain and that excepted, she fostered his favourable to talk. But the life in all directions-opened wit, one cannot help thinking, social doors for him, divined was brighter, the laughter more and stimulated his genius, agiinfectious, the poetry older, tated herself over his fruitthe criticism newer at the less passion for Williamina little supper parties in the Stuart Belches of Fettercairn, modest flat in Frederick Street, and, above all, made him ride. where Miss Jane Anne Cran- "I was always riding,' she stoun kept house for her brother said of herself; and that is George, and entertained that an example of the universal select company of young advo- experience that people, howcates self-named the 'Brother- ever badly off, will always by hood of the Mountain.' ... The some means contrive to indulge two sisters may be said to have in a ruling passion. But it shared between them the de- was obvious that those who votion of all the distinguished wished for much of her comyoung men in Edinburgh.' panionship must share her rides; and Walter Scott had a further incentive to horsemanship, too, for the Duke of Buccleuch was raising a regiment of Volunteer Cavalry, and all the young men of ton in Edinburgh were joining it. His lameness handicapped his martial ambitions, but, thanks to Jane Anne and his own pluck, Scott had a very firm seat on a horse, and the Corps made him Paymaster, Quartermaster, Secretary and Regimental bard, and dubbed him 'Earl Walter.'

And the young man whose devotion to Miss Cranstoun was most lively, whose affection for her was lifelong, and who became the most famous of the Brotherhood, was, of course, Walter Scott.

The story of their friendship has often been told, and there is no need to repeat the detail of it-of how Miss Cranstoun interfered in his life for his good in every direction. For all their ambitions and their talents, there was a vast deal

"Is it then true, my God, of questions; but the philothat Earl Walter is a Benedick sophers, completely forgetting and I am in Styria? Well! their breeding in their absorpbless us all, prays the departed tion, threw her but impatient from her brethren-J. A. P.," and fragmentary answers as writes Countess von Purgstall, they strode on over the knolls when she hears of his marriage of the Links; so, not choosing to Sophy Carpenter. to be ignored, the lady slipped from between them, dropped behind, and paced after them in silence and the companionship of her own reflections. the twilight grew apace. Miss Cranstoun was aware that both men, singularly enough, were afflicted with an optical weakness called 'twilight blindness,' so that what followed amused her intensely but did not surprise her.

But outdoor exercise in Edinburgh did not consist only of long unfettered rides in the country lying between the Pentlands and the sea, nor were its festivities confined to hilarious gatherings of the young men as yet unknown to fame, but believing heartily in one another and more fitfully in themselves. There were also decent walks taken in the company of one's elders, and tea - parties in respectable houses; and it is impossible to omit the story of Jane Anne and her escort home on an evening when she had been drinking tea in the house of the Rev. Dr Alison on Bruntsfield Links. The sun was setting when, with her brotherin-law Dugald Stewart on one side and Sir James Hall of Dunglass, the President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, on the other, she left the doctor's doorstep, and before they had gone half a dozen paces her two companions recommenced, hammer and tongs, the metaphysical discussion which the party had been engaged in round the teacups. Miss Cranstoun, quite able to take, at the least, an intelligent interest in metaphysics, seems to have tried to assert her own existence by the interjection

But Now

"Presently Mr Stewart, slackening his pace, drew to my side and remarked that the golf-players had quite destroyed the Links for a lady's walking, and that unless I took his arm I might put my foot into one of the holes used in the aforesaid game. As I found none of the inconvenience to which he referred, I begged him not to to disturb his philosophical tête-à-tête on my account. But he continued to press me to take his arm. Sir James, who as yet saw quite well, had no idea what Mr Stewart was manœuvring about, and tried all he could, being deeply interested in the discussion, to attach the blind lecturer's attention from me to himself. About five minutes afterwards, however, I was much amused when Sir James also offered me his arm, expressed in like manner a wonderful anxiety

herself lifted and set down again breathless in the midst of the splendours and terrors of Central Europe. The laws which govern destiny are undiscoverable-or at least undiscovered, but the ruminative observer cannot deny that there seems to be some attraction between the storm - centres of the world and certain unfettered spirits; and that just as Diana Vernon could have no other setting but that of a Jacobite rising, so must Jane Anne Cranstoun be drawn no less unhesitatingly into the maëlstrom of her own era.

about my safety and comfort, out its arm, and she found and, as Mr Stewart had done before him, insisted on encumbering me with help in which I stood no sort of need. It became truly a task of some difficulty to lead these two gentlemen, for as neither of them could see an inch before him, I was obliged to act as guide to both. They, on the other hand, as soon as they had regained their confidence through the agency of my pilotage, forgot their sudden fit of gallantry, and once more recommenced their disquisitions across my very nose, and without once seeming to recollect that such an individual as their female protector was in existence."

In 1796, partly in order to relieve the Austrian pressure on the Rhine, and partly to intimidate the Pope, the French Directory assumed the offensive on on the Alpine frontier, and young General Buonaparte was appointed by Carnot to the command of the army in Italy. By the beginning of 1797 practically all Italy was either subjugated or in alliance with France, and Napoleon, who within a few months had risen from being a soldier of fortune to become the terror of empires, was sweeping through Carinthia into Styria to encamp under the walls of Vienna.

What was Jane Anne Cranstoun's secret feeling about this partly academic, partly fashionable, partly Bohemian life of hers in the northern capital She lived it whole-heartedly because of the fundamental honesty of her nature, and she would have had nothing but self-derision for any pose of spiritual aloofness from it. But beyond her beauty, her health, her intellect, and her spirit, none of the gifts of life had fallen to her share, and, as birthday succeeded birthday, it might well be that the Wenzel Johann Gottfried von paving stones of Edinburgh Purgstall, Count of the Holy grew harder and harder, and Roman Empire and Chamberperhaps her courage began to lain to the Emperor, was a flag-who knows! And then, great Styrian landowner and in her thirty-eighth year, with lord of the castles of Riegerskaleidoscopic suddenness, Fate, berg, Radkersberg, and Hainstalking her invisibly from feld. He was an only child, laughing childhood, stretched his father had died when he

was twelve years old, and since the age of seventeen he had travelled extensively in Europe, making friends with men of light and leading wherever he went; for his talents and enthusiasms were all for the Arts and the Humanities. He was in Denmark when Napoleon made his lightning march into Styria, and return to Austria being for the time impossible, he set off, with all the ardour of the young idealist and the patriot, for that island where the spiritual and political conceptions of the eighteenth century were beginning to bear practical fruit. Agriculture, popular education, and prison reform were his watchwords, and from Liverpool he made his way to Edinburgh laden with an introduction (among others) to Dugald Stewart, and also (we may be sure) to Mrs Anne Murray Keith in George Street --she whose brother, Sir Robert, had been Ambassador in Vienna for twenty years, and who had kept open house there for his countrymen.

view of relations is not conceivable. The disparity in age, the diversity of religion, the delicacy of the health of the suitor-everything that was reasonable must have been urged. But Jane Anne Cranstoun and Wenzel von Purgstall had been swept from the moorings of reason. Imaginative passion had engulfed them; for them was neither space nor time; and all words were a mere beating of the air.

Rob

These things happen. Roy paints for us the quality of the bride; and the beauty of person, the simplicity and persuasion of manner, and the intellectual gifts of the bridegroom are portrayed by his biographer, Herr von Hammer.

Most innocent creature," growled Thomas Thomson; and one realises the injured astonishment of the BrotherhoodJane Anne was deserting them to become the guardian spirit of this guileless idealist who had, so unnecessarily, been blown across her path.

It all happened more than a century ago, but the intensity of happiness which had come to Jane Anne Cranstoun, and which translated her into Nina von Purgstall, still warms the heart. She was ardently in love. as

The Austrian grandee's diary comes to an abrupt ending when he reaches Edinburgh. And every single person to whom exclamatory letters should have been written was provokingly on the spot as onlooker, and was exclamatory with the tongue only. There is no scrap of script of any sort extant to tell us the detail of all that went before the amazing marriage which took place in June 1797. That Jane Anne was denied the points of

That was everythingand then to everything was added immense riches, a very great position, and castles set in the midst of the most romantic scenery in Europe. "Surely there is no vanity in saying that earth has no mountains like ours," she writes

captivated or no, is a safe assertion. Perhaps she was not very patient with Zurich, perhaps she was impatient to reach the kingdom which lay on the farther side of the stupendous mountains. And at last there was the setting forth, and the wonderful journey to the frontiers of Hungary through the valleys and the passes of the Tyrol and of the Styrian Alps.

from Riegersberg. She was to with them, whether they were know that joy in the earth and all that pertains to it which keeps man and woman for ever new created. She was not from henceforth to be gainsaid. Both her sense of what has been called "devoted possession" and her responsiveness to adventure were to have play. The treaty of Campo Formio, signed in October, enabled the newly married pair to set out for Austria, and their first halt was at Paris, where the reaction from the Reign of Terror had just set in. It must have been arousing for the bride to discover real danger there in the fact of her husband's friendship with Barthélemy-but provoking too. For it is certain that the Countess had soon made a humorous diagnosis of an Edinburgh trousseau in relation to her new role-provoking the compelled evacuation of a city where lavish spending on the apparelling of the person could be classed legitimately as the encouragement of art! But into the saddle postilions must hurriedly get themselves, and when the cortège clattered presently into Zurich, disappointment had long evaporated in laughter.

Walter Scott kept all the letters Countess von Purgstall wrote him. There was once a great sealed package of them at Abbotsford. They exist no longer. Sir Walter was, in her own land, the soul to whom she most readily imparted emotions, and it would be enthralling to have from her flowing and emphatic pen a description of the semi-royal progress of the last miles of the journey through the Purgstall territory, and all the ritual of the arrival at the great fortress castle of Riegersberg.

The Purgstall family was one of the most ancient in Central Europe, and for seven hundred years this home had been an impregnable one. Invading Mongols and conquering Turks had always given up Zurich did not hold the its capture in despair. Partly hazards of Paris, but was it cut out of the rock, the gigantic not perhaps a little too like pile towered over the rolling Edinburgh to be very stimu- and wooded country and over lating ? What did Lavater the village, and the church make of the wife of his friend, where generations of Purgstalls and she of him! Were Pesta- were buried. Within the walls lozzi and Goëthe (who was stay- were mingled grandeurs and ing nearby) captivated by inconveniences. Banqueting That she held her own halls, withdrawing rooms, pres

her ?