by Richard H. Hutton

London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1888

The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved.

PREFATORY NOTE

It will be observed that the greater part of this little
book has been taken in one form or other from Lockhart's
Life of Sir Walter Scott, in ten volumes. No introduction
to Scott would be worth much in which that course was
not followed. Indeed, excepting Sir Walter's own writings,
there is hardly any other great source of information
about him; and that is so full, that hardly anything needful
to illustrate the subject of Scott's life remains untouched.
As regards the only matters of controversy,---
Scott's relations to the Ballantynes, I have taken care to
check Mr. Lockhart's statements by reading those of the
representatives of the Ballantyne brothers; but with this
exception, Sir Walter's own works and Lockhart's life
of him are the great authorities concerning his character
and his story.

Just ten years ago Mr. Gladstone, in expressing to
the late Mr. Hope Scott the great delight which the
perusal of Lockhart's life of Sir Walter bad given him,
wrote, "I may be wrong, but I am vaguely under the
impression that it has never had a really wide circulation.
If so, it is the saddest pity, and I should greatly like
(without any censure on its present length) to see published
an abbreviation of it." Mr. Gladstone did not
then know that as long ago as 1848 Mr. Lockhart did
himself prepare such an abbreviation, in which the original
eighty-four chapters were compressed into eighteen,
---though the abbreviation contained additions as well as
compressions. But even this abridgment is itself a
bulky volume of 800 pages, containing, I should think,
considerably more than a third of the reading in the original
ten volumes, and is not, therefore, very likely to be
preferred to the completer work. In some respects I hope
that this introduction may supply, better than that bulky
abbreviation, what Mr. Gladstone probably meant to
suggest,---some slight miniature taken from the great picture
with care enough to tempt on those who look on it
to the study of the fuller life, as well as of that image of
Sir Walter which is impressed by his own hand upon
his works.

CHAPTER I: ANCESTRY, PARENTAGE, AND CHILDHOOD

Sir Walter Scott was the first literary man of a great
riding, sporting, and fighting clan. Indeed, his father---
a Writer to the Signet, or Edinburgh solicitor---was the
first of his race to adopt a town life and a sedentary profession.
Sir Walter was the lineal descendant---six
generations removed---of that Walter Scott commemorated
in The Lay of the Last Minstrel, who is known
in Border history and legend as Auld Wat of Harden.
Auld Wat's son William, captured by Sir Gideon Murray,
of Elibank, during a raid of the Scotts on Sir Gideon's
lands, was, as tradition says, given his choice between being
hanged on Sir Gideon's private gallows, and marrying the
ugliest of Sir Gideon's three ugly daughters, Meiklemouthed
Meg, reputed as carrying off the prize of ugliness
among the women of four counties. Sir William was a handsome
man. He took three days to consider the alternative
proposed to him, but chose life with the large-mouthed
lady in the end; and found her, according to the tradition
which the poet, her descendant, has transmitted, an excellent
wife, with a fine talent for pickling the beef which
her husband stole from the herds of his foes. Meiklemouthed
Meg transmitted a distinct trace of her large
mouth to all her descendants, and not least to him
who was to use his "meikle" mouth to best advantage
as the spokesman of his race. Rather more than
half-way between Auld Wat of Harden's times---i. e.,
the middle of the sixteenth century---and those of Sir
Walter Scott, poet and novelist, lived Sir Walter's
great-grandfather, Walter Scott generally known in
Teviotdale by the surname of Beardie, because he would
never cut his beard after the banishment of the Stuarts,
and who took arms in their cause and lost by his intrigues
on their behalf almost all that he had, besides running
the greatest risk of being hanged as a traitor. This was
the ancestor of whom Sir Walter speaks in the introduction
to the last canto of Marmion:---

"And thus my Christmas still I hold,
Where my great grandsire came of old,
With amber beard and flaxen hair,
And reverend apostolic air,---
The feast and holy tide to share,
And mix sobriety with wine,
And honest mirth with thoughts divine;
Small thought was his in after time
E'er to be hitch'd into a rhyme,
The simple sire could only boast
That he was loyal to his cost;
The banish'd race of kings revered,
And lost his land---but kept his beard."

Sir Walter inherited from Beardie that sentimental
Stuart bias which his better judgment condemned, but
which seemed to be rather part of his blood than of his
mind. And most useful to him this sentiment undoubtedly
was in helping him to restore the mould and
fashion of the past. Beardie's second son was Sir
Walter's grandfather, and to him he owed not only his
first childish experience of the delights of country life,
but also,---in his own estimation at least,---that risky,
speculative, and sanguine spirit which had so much influence
over his fortunes. The good man of Sandy-Knowe,
wishing to breed sheep, and being destitute of
capital, borrowed 30_l._ from a shepherd who was willing
to invest that sum for him in sheep; and the two set off
to purchase a flock near Wooler, in Northumberland;
but when the shepherd had found what he thought
would suit their purpose, he returned to find his master
galloping about a fine hunter, on which he had spent
the whole capital in hand. This speculation, however,
prospered. A few days later Robert Scott displayed
the qualities of the hunter to such admirable effect
with John Scott of Harden's hounds, that he sold the
horse for double the money he had given, and, unlike his
grandson, abandoned speculative purchases there and
then. In the latter days of his clouded fortunes, after
Ballantyne's and Constable's failure, Sir Walter was accustomed
to point to the picture of his grandfather and
say, "Blood will out: my building and planting was
but his buying the hunter before he stocked his sheep-walk,
over again." But Sir Walter added, says Mr.
Lockhart, as he glanced at the likeness of his own staid
and prudent father, "Yet it was a wonder, too, for I have
a thread of the attorney in me," which was doubtless the
case; nor was that thread the least of his inheritances,
for from his father certainly Sir Walter derived that
disposition towards conscientious, plodding industry,
legalism of mind, methodical habits of work, and a
generous, equitable interpretation of the scope of all his
obligations to others, which, prized and cultivated by
him as they were, turned a great genius, which, especially
considering the harebrained element in him, might
easily have been frittered away or devoted to worthless
ends, to such fruitful account, and stamped it with
so grand an impress of personal magnanimity and fortitude.
Sir Walter's father reminds one in not a few
of the formal and rather martinetish traits which are
related of him, of the father of Goethe, "a formal man,
with strong ideas of strait-laced education, passionately
orderly (he thought a good book nothing without a good
binding), and never so much excited as by a necessary
deviation from the `preestablished harmony' of household
rules." That description would apply almost wholly
to the sketch of old Mr. Scott which the novelist has
given us under the thin disguise of Alexander Fairford,
Writer to the Signet, in Redgauntlet, a figure confessedly
meant, in its chief features, to represent his father. To
this Sir Walter adds, in one of his later journals, the
trait that his father was a man of fine presence, who conducted
all conventional arrangements with a certain grandeur
and dignity of air, and "absolutely loved a funeral."
"He seemed to preserve the list of a whole bead-roll of
cousins merely for the pleasure of being at their
funerals, which he was often asked to superintend, and
I suspect had sometimes to pay for. He carried me with
him as often as he could to these mortuary ceremonies;
but feeling I was not, like him, either useful or ornamental,
I escaped as often as I could." This strong dash of the
conventional in Scott's father, this satisfaction in seeing
people fairly to the door of life, and taking his final leave
of them there, with something of a ceremonious flourish
of observance, was, however, combined with a much
nobler and deeper kind of orderliness. Sir Walter used
to say that his father had lost no small part of a very
flourishing business, by insisting that his clients should do
their duty to their own people better than they were
themselves at all inclined to do it. And of this generous
strictness in sacrificing his own interests to his sympathy
for others, the son had as much as the father.

Sir Walter's mother, who was a Miss Rutherford, the
daughter of a physician, had been better educated than
most Scotchwomen of her day, in spite of having been
sent "to be finished off" by "the honourable Mrs.
Ogilvie," whose training was so effective, in one direction
at least, that even in her eightieth year Mrs. Scott could
not enjoy a comfortable rest in her chair, but "took as
much care to avoid touching her chair with her back, as if
she had still been under the stern eyes of Mrs. Ogilvie."
None the less Mrs. Scott was a motherly, comfortable
woman, with much tenderness of heart, and a well-stored,
vivid memory. Sir Walter, writing of her, after his
mother's death, to Lady Louisa Stewart, says, "She had
a mind peculiarly well stored with much acquired information
and natural talent, and as she was very old, and
had an excellent memory, she could draw, without the
least exaggeration or affectation, the most striking pictures
of the past age. If I have been able to do anything
in the way of painting the past times, it is very much
from the studies with which she presented me. She
connected a long period of time with the present generation,
for she remembered, and had often spoken with, a person
who perfectly recollected the battle of Dunbar and Oliver
Cromwell's subsequent entry into Edinburgh." On the
day before the stroke of paralysis which carried her off, she
had told Mr. and Mrs. Scott of Harden, "with great
accuracy, the real story of the Bride of Lammermuir, and
pointed out wherein it differed from the novel. She had
all the names of the parties, and pointed out (for she
was a great genealogist) their connexion with existing
families."<*> Sir Walter records many evidences of the

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, vi. 172--3. The edition referred to is
* throughout the edition of 1839 in ten volumes.

tenderness of his mother's nature, and he returned
warmly her affection for himself. His executors, in lifting
up his desk, the evening after his burial, found "arranged
in careful order a series of little objects, which had
obviously been so placed there that his eye might rest on
them every morning before he began his tasks. These
were the old-fashioned boxes that had garnished his
mother's toilette, when he, a sickly child, slept in her
dressing-room,---the silver taper-stand, which the young
advocate had bought for her with his first five-guinea fee,
---a row of small packets inscribed with her hand, and
containing the hair of those of her offspring that had died
before her,---his father's snuff-box, and etui-case,---and
more things of the like sort."<*> A story, characteristic

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, x. 241.

of both Sir Walter's parents, is told by Mr. Lockhart which
will serve better than anything I can remember to bring
the father and mother of Scott vividly before the imagination.
His father, like Mr. Alexander Fairford, in
Redgauntlet, though himself a strong Hanoverian, inherited
enough feeling for the Stuarts from his grandfather
Beardie, and sympathized enough with those who were, as
he neutrally expressed it, "out in '45," to ignore as much
as possible any phrases offensive to the Jacobites. For
instance, he always called Charles Edward not the Pretender
but the Chevalier,-and he did business for many
Jacobites:---

"Mrs. Scott's curiosity was strongly excited one autumn
by the regular appearance at a certain hour every evening
of a sedan chair, to deposit a person carefully muffled up in
a mantle, who was immediately ushered into her husband's
private room, and commonly remained with him there until
long after the usual bed-time of this orderly family. Mr.
Scott answered her repeated inquiries with a vagueness that
irritated the lady's feelings more and more; until at last
she could bear the thing no longer; but one evening, just as
she heard the bell ring as for the stranger's chair to carry
him off, she made her appearance within the forbidden
parlour with a salver in her hand, observing that she
thought the gentlemen had sat so long they would be
better of a dish of tea, and had ventured accordingly to
bring some for their acceptance. The stranger, a person of
distinguished appearance, and richly dressed, bowed to the
lady and accepted a cup; but her husband knit his brows,
and refused very coldly to partake the refreshment. A
moment afterwards the visitor withdrew, and Mr. Scott,
lifting up the window-sash, took the cup, which he had left
empty on the table, and tossed it out upon the pavement.
The lady exclaimed for her china, but was put to silence by
her husband's saying, `I can forgive your little curiosity,
madam, but you must pay the penalty. I may admit into
my house, on a piece of business, persons wholly unworthy
to be treated as guests by my wife. Neither lip of me nor
of mine comes after Mr. Murray of Broughton's.'

"This was the unhappy man who, after attending Prince
Charles Stuart as his secretary throughout the greater part
of his expedition, condescended to redeem his own life and
fortune by bearing evidence against the noblest of his late
master's adherents, when---

"Pitied by gentle hearts, Kilmarnock died,
The brave, Balmerino were on thy side."<*>

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, i. 243--4.

"Broughton's saucer"---i. e. the saucer belonging to the
cup thus sacrificed by Mr. Scott to his indignation against
one who had redeemed his own life and fortune by turning
king's evidence against one of Prince Charles Stuart's
adherents,---was carefully preserved by his son, and hung
up in his first study, or "den," under a little print of
Prince Charlie. This anecdote brings before the mind
very vividly the character of Sir Walter's parents. The
eager curiosity of the active-minded woman, whom "the
honourable Mrs. Ogilvie" had been able to keep upright
in her chair for life, but not to cure of the desire to
unravel the little mysteries of which she had a passing
glimpse; the grave formality of the husband, fretting
under his wife's personal attention to a dishonoured man,
and making her pay the penalty by dashing to pieces the
cup which the king's evidence had used,---again, the
visitor himself, perfectly conscious no doubt that the
Hanoverian lawyer held him in utter scorn for his faithlessness
and cowardice, and reluctant, nevertheless, to
reject the courtesy of the wife, though he could not get
anything but cold legal advice from the husband:---all
these are figures which must have acted on the youthful
imagination of the poet with singular vivacity, and shaped
themselves in a hundred changing turns of the historical
kaleidoscope which was always before his mind's eye, as
he mused upon that past which he was to restore for us
with almost more than its original freshness of life. With
such scenes touching even his own home, Scott must
have been constantly taught to balance in his own mind,
the more romantic, against the more sober and rational
considerations, which had so recently divided house
against house, even in the same family and clan. That the
stern Calvinistic lawyer should have retained so much of
his grandfather Beardie's respect for the adherents of the
exiled house of Stuart, must in itself have struck the boy
as even more remarkable than the passionate loyalty of the
Stuarts' professed partisans, and have lent a new sanction
to the romantic drift of his mother's old traditions, and
one to which they must have been indebted for a great
part of their fascination.

Walter Scott, the ninth of twelve children, of whom
the first six died in early childhood, was born in Edinburgh,
on the 15th of August, 1771. Of the six later-born
children, all but one were boys, and the one sister
was a somewhat querulous invalid, whom he seems to have
pitied almost more than he loved. At the age of eighteen
months the boy had a teething-fever, ending in a life-long
lameness; and this was the reason why the child was sent
to reside with his grandfather---the speculative grandfather,
who had doubled his capital by buying a racehorse
instead of sheep---at Sandy-Knowe, near the ruined tower
of Smailholm, celebrated afterwards in his ballad of The
Eve of St. John, in the neighbourhood of some fine crags.
To these crags the housemaid sent from Edinburgh to
look after him, used to carry him up, with a design
(which she confessed to the housekeeper)---due, of
course, to incipient insanity---of murdering the child
there, and burying him in the moss. Of course the maid
was dismissed. After this the child used to be sent out,
when the weather was fine, in the safer charge of the
shepherd, who would often lay him beside the sheep.
Long afterwards Scott told Mr. Skene, during an excursion
with Turner, the great painter, who was drawing his illustration
of Smailholm tower for one of Scott's works, that
"the habit of lying on the turf there among the sheep and
the lambs had given his mind a peculiar tenderness for
these animals, which it had ever since retained." Being
forgotten one day upon the knolls when a thunderstorm
came on, his aunt ran out to bring him in, and found him
shouting, "Bonny! bonny!" at every flash of lightning.
One of the old servants at Sandy-Knowe spoke of the
child long afterwards as "a sweet-tempered bairn, a
darling with all about the house," and certainly the
miniature taken of him in his seventh year confirms the
impression thus given. It is sweet-tempered above everything,
and only the long upper lip and large mouth,
derived from his ancestress, Meg Murray, convey the promise
of the power which was in him. Of course the high,
almost conical forehead, which gained him in his later
days from his comrades at the bar the name of "Old
Peveril," in allusion to "the peak" which they saw towering
high above the heads of other men as he approached, is not
so much marked beneath the childish locks of this miniature
as it was in later life; and the massive, and, in
repose, certainly heavy face of his maturity, which conveyed
the impression of the great bulk of his character, is
still quite invisible under the sunny ripple of childish
earnestness and gaiety. Scott's hair in childhood was
light chestnut, which turned to nut brown in youth. His
eyebrows were bushy, for we find mention made of them as
a "pent-house." His eyes were always light blue. They
had in them a capacity, on the one hand, for enthusiasm,
sunny brightness, and even harebrained humour,
and on the other for expressing determined resolve and
kindly irony, which gave great range of expression to
the face. There are plenty of materials for judging what
sort of a boy Scott was. In spite of his lameness, he early
taught himself to clamber about with an agility that few
children could have surpassed, and to sit his first pony---a
little Shetland, not bigger than a large Newfoundland
dog, which used to come into the house to be fed by him---
even in gallops on very rough ground. He became very
early a declaimer. Having learned the ballad of Hardy
Knute, he shouted it forth with such pertinacious enthusiasm
that the clergyman of his grandfather's parish
complained that he "might as well speak in a cannon's
mouth as where that child was." At six years of age Mrs.
Cockburn described him as the most astounding genius
of a boy, she ever saw. "He was reading a poem to his
mother when I went in. I made him read on: it was
the description of a shipwreck. His passion rose with the
storm. `There's the mast gone,' says he; `crash it goes;
they will all perish.' After his agitation he turns to me,
`That is too melancholy,' says he; `I had better read
you something more amusing.' " And after the call, he
told his aunt he liked Mrs. Cockburn, for "she was a
virtuoso like himself." "Dear Walter," says Aunt Jenny,
"what is a virtuoso?" "Don't ye know? Why, it's one
who wishes and will know everything." This last scene
took place in his father's house in Edinburgh; but Scott's
life at Sandy-Knowe, including even the old minister, Dr.
Duncan, who so bitterly complained of the boy's ballad-spouting,
is painted for us, as everybody knows, in the
picture of his infancy given in the introduction to the
third canto of Marmion:---

"It was a barren scene and wild,
Where naked cliffs were rudely piled:
But ever and anon between
Lay velvet tufts of loveliest green;
And well the lonely infant knew
Recesses where the wall-flower grew,
And honeysuckle loved to crawl
Up the low crag and ruin'd wall.
I deem'd such nooks the sweetest shade
The sun in all its round survey'd;
And still I thought that shatter'd tower
The mightiest work of human power,
And marvell'd as the aged hind
With some strange tale bewitch'd my mind,
Of forayers, who, with headlong force,
Down from that strength had spurr'd their horse,
Their southern rapine to renew,
Far in the distant Cheviots blue,
And, home returning, fill'd the hall
With revel, wassail-rout, and brawl.
Methought that still with trump and clang
The gateway's broken arches rang;
Methought grim features, seam'd with scars,
Glared through the window's rusty bars;
And ever, by the winter hearth,
Old tales I heard of woe or mirth,
Of lovers' slights, of ladies' charms,
Of witches' spells, of warriors' arms,
Of patriot battles, won of old
By Wallace wight and Bruce the bold;
Of later fields of feud and fight,
When, pouring from their Highland height,
The Scottish clans, in headlong sway,
Had swept the scarlet ranks away.
While, stretch'd at length upon the floor,
Again I fought each combat o'er,
Pebbles and shells in order laid,
The mimic ranks of war display'd;
And onward still the Scottish lion bore,
And still the scattered Southron fled before.
Still, with vain fondness, could I trace
Anew each kind familiar face
That brighten'd at our evening fire!
From the thatch'd mansion's grey-haird sire,
Wise without learning, plain and good,
And sprung of Scotland's gentler blood;
Whose eye in age, quick, clear, and keen,
Show'd what in youth its glance had been;
Whose doom discarding neighbours sought,
Content with equity unbought;
To him the venerable priest,
Our frequent and familiar guest,
Whose life and manners well could paint
Alike the student and the saint;
Alas! whose speech too oft I broke
With gambol rude and timeless joke;
For I was wayward, bold, and wild,
A self-will'd imp, a grandame's child;
But, half a plague and half a jest,
Was still endured, beloved, caress'd."

A picture this of a child of great spirit, though with
that spirit was combined an active and subduing sweetness
which could often conquer, as by a sudden spell,
those whom the boy loved. Towards those, however, whom
he did not love he could be vindictive. His relative,
the laird of Raeburn, on one occasion wrung the neck of
a pet starling, which the child had partly tamed. "I
flew at his throat like a wild-cat," he said, in recalling
the circumstance, fifty years later, in his journal on
occasion of the old laird's death; "and was torn from
him with no little difficulty." And, judging from this
journal, I doubt whether he had ever really forgiven the
laird of Raeburn. Towards those whom he loved but
had offended, his manner was very different. "I seldom,"
said one of his tutors, Mr. Mitchell, "had occasion all the
time I was in the family to find fault with him, even for
trifles, and only once to threaten serious castigation, of
which he was no sooner aware, than he suddenly sprang
up, threw his arms about my neck and kissed me." And
the quaint old gentleman adds this commentary:---"By
such generous and noble conduct my displeasure was in a
moment converted into esteem and admiration; my soul
melted into tenderness, and I was ready to mingle my
tears with his." This spontaneous and fascinating sweetness
of his childhood was naturally overshadowed to some
extent in later life by Scott's masculine and proud character,
but it was always in him. And there was
much of true character in the child behind this sweetness.
He had wonderful self-command, and a peremptory
kind of good sense, even in his infancy. While yet
a child under six years of age, hearing one of the servants
beginning to tell a ghost-story to another, and well knowing
that if he listened, it would scare away his night's
rest, he acted for himself with all the promptness of an
elder person acting for him, and, in spite of the fascination
of the subject, resolutely muffled his head in the
bedclothes and refused to hear the tale. His sagacity
in judging of the character of others was shown, too, even
as a school-boy; and once it led him to take an advantage
which caused him many compunctions in after-life,
whenever he recalled his skilful puerile tactics. On one
occasion---I tell the story as he himself rehearsed it to
Samuel Rogers, almost at the end of his life, after his
attack of apoplexy, and just before leaving England
for Italy in the hopeless quest of health---he had long
desired to get above a school-fellow in his class, who
defied all his efforts, till Scott noticed that whenever a
question was asked of his rival, the lad's fingers grasped
a particular button on his waistcoat, while his mind went
in search of the answer. Scott accordingly anticipated
that if he could remove this button, the boy would be
thrown out, and so it proved. The button was cut off,
and the next time the lad was questioned, his fingers
being unable to find the button, and his eyes going in
perplexed search after his fingers, he stood confounded,
and Scott mastered by strategy the place which he could
not gain by mere industry. "Often in after-life," said
Scott, in narrating the man<oe>uvre to Rogers, "has the sight
of him smote me as I passed by him; and often have I
resolved to make him some reparation, but it ended in
good resolutions. Though I never renewed my acquaintance
with him, I often saw him, for he filled some inferior
office in one of the courts of law at Edinburgh. Poor
fellow! I believe he is dead; he took early to drinking."<*>

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, i. 128.

Scott's school reputation was one of irregular ability; he
"glanced like a meteor from one end of the class to the
other," and received more praise for his interpretation of
the spirit of his authors than for his knowledge of their
language. Out of school his fame stood higher. He
extemporized innumerable stories to which his school-fellows
delighted to listen; and, in spite of his lameness,
he was always in the thick of the "bickers," or street
fights with the boys of the town, and renowned for his
boldness in climbing the "kittle nine stanes" which are
"projected high in air from the precipitous black granite
of the Castle-rock." At home he was much bullied by his
elder brother Robert, a lively lad, not without some powers
of verse-making, who went into the navy, then in an
unlucky moment passed into the merchant service of the
East India Company, and so lost the chance of distinguishing
himself in the great naval campaigns of Nelson.
Perhaps Scott would have been all the better for a sister
a little closer to him than Anne---sickly and fanciful---
appears ever to have been. The masculine side of life
appears to predominate a little too much in his school
and college days, and he had such vast energy, vitality,
and pride, that his life at this time would have borne a
little taming under the influence of a sister thoroughly
congenial to him. In relation to his studies he was
wilful, though not perhaps perverse. He steadily declined,
for instance, to learn Greek, though he mastered
Latin pretty fairly. After a time spent at the High
School, Edinburgh, Scott was sent to a school at Kelso,
where his master made a friend and companion of him,
and so poured into him a certain amount of Latin scholarship
which he would never otherwise have obtained. I
need hardly add that as a boy Scott was, so far as a boy
could be, a Tory---a worshipper of the past, and a great
Conservative of any remnant of the past which reformers
wished to get rid of. In the autobiographical fragment
of 1808, he says, in relation to these school-days, "I,
with my head on fire for chivalry, was a Cavalier; my
friend was a Roundhead; I was a Tory, and he was a
Whig; I hated Presbyterians, and admired Montrose
with his victorious Highlanders; he liked the Presbyterian
Ulysses, the deep and politic Argyle; so that we
never wanted subjects of dispute, but our disputes were
always amicable." And he adds candidly enough: "In
all these tenets there was no real conviction on my part,
arising out of acquaintance with the views or principles
of either party. . . . . I took up politics at that
period, as King Charles II. did his religion, from an idea
that the Cavalier creed was the more gentlemanlike persuasion
of the two." And the uniformly amicable character
of these controversies between the young people, itself
shows how much more they were controversies of the
imagination than of faith. I doubt whether Scott's convictions
on the issues of the Past were ever very much
more decided than they were during his boyhood; though
undoubtedly he learned to understand much more profoundly
what was really, held by the ablest men on both
sides of these disputed issues. The result, however, was,
I think, that while he entered better and better into both
sides as life went on, he never adopted either with any
earnestness of conviction, being content to admit, even
to himself, that while his feelings leaned in one direction,
his reason pointed decidedly in the other; and holding
that it was hardly needful to identify himself positively
with either. As regarded the present, however, feeling
always carried the day, Scott was a Tory all his life.

CHAPTER II.

YOUTH---CHOICE OF A PROFESSION.

As Scott grew up, entered the classes of the college, and
began his legal studies, first as apprentice to his father,
and then in the law classes of the University, he became
noticeable to all his friends for his gigantic memory,---the
rich stores of romantic material with which it was loaded,
---his giant feats of industry for any cherished purpose,---
his delight in adventure and in all athletic enterprises,---
his great enjoyment of youthful "rows," so long as they
did not divide the knot of friends to which he belonged,
and his skill in peacemaking amongst his own set. During
his apprenticeship his only means of increasing his slender
allowance with funds which he could devote to his
favourite studies, was to earn money by copying, and he
tells us himself that he remembered writing "120 folio
pages with no interval either for food or rest," fourteen
or fifteen hours' very hard work at the very least,---
expressly for this purpose.

In the second year of Scott's apprenticeship, at about
the age of sixteen, he had an attack of h<ae>morrhage,
no recurrence of which took place for some forty
years, but which was then the beginning of the end.
During this illness silence was absolutely imposed
upon him,---two old ladies putting their fingers on
their lips whenever he offered to speak. It was at this
time that the lad began his study of the scenic side of
history, and especially of campaigns, which he illustrated
for himself by the arrangement of shells, seeds, and
pebbles, so as to represent encountering armies, in the
manner referred to (and referred to apparently in anticipation
of a later stage of his life than that he was then speaking
of) in the passage from the introduction to the third
canto of Marmion which I have already given. He also
managed so to arrange the looking-glasses in his room as
to see the troops march out to exercise in the meadows,
as he lay in bed. His reading was almost all in the
direction of military exploit, or romance and medi<ae>val
legend and the later border songs of his own
country. He learned Italian and read Ariosto. Later
he learned Spanish and devoured Cervantes, whose
"novelas," he said, "first inspired him with the ambition
to excel in fiction;" and all that he read and admired
he remembered. Scott used to illustrate the capricious
affinity of his own memory for what suited it, and its
complete rejection of what did not, by old Beattie of
Meikledale's answer to a Scotch divine, who complimented
him on the strength of his memory. "No, sir," said the
old Borderer, "I have no command of my memory. It
only retains what hits my fancy; and probably, Sir,
if you were to preach to me for two hours, I would not
be able, when you finished, to remember a word you had
been saying." Such a memory, when it belongs to a man
of genius, is really a sieve of the most valuable kind.
It sifts away what is foreign and alien to his genius, and
assimilates what is suited to it. In his very last days,
when he was visiting Italy for the first time, Scott delighted
in Malta, for it recalled to him Vertot's Knights of Malta,
and much other mediaeval story which he had pored over
in his youth. But when his friends descanted to him at
Pozzuoli on the Therm<ae>---commonly called the Temple
of Serapis---among the ruins of which he stood, he only
remarked that he would believe whatever he was told,
"for many of his friends, and particularly Mr. Morritt,
had frequently tried to drive classical antiquities, as they
are called, into his head, but they had always found his
skull too thick." Was it not perhaps some deep literary
instinct, like that here indicated, which made him, as a
lad, refuse so steadily to learn Greek, and try to prove to
his indignant professor that Ariosto was superior to
Homer? Scott afterwards deeply regretted this neglect
of Greek; but I cannot help thinking that his regret was
misplaced. Greek literature would have brought before
his mind standards of poetry and art which could not
but have both deeply impressed and greatly daunted an
intellect of so much power; I say both impressed and
daunted, because I believe that Scott himself would never
have succeeded in studies of a classical kind, while he
might---like Goethe perhaps---have been either misled, by
admiration for that school, into attempting what was not
adopted to his genius, or else disheartened in the work
for which his character and ancestry really fitted him.
It has been said that there is a real affinity between Scott
and Homer. But the long and refluent music of Homer,
once naturalized in his mind, would have discontented
him with that quick, sharp, metrical tramp of his own moss-troopers,
to which alone his genius as a poet was perfectly
suited.

It might be supposed that with these romantic tastes,
Scott could scarcely have made much of a lawyer, though
the inference would, I believe, be quite mistaken. His
father, however, reproached him with being better fitted for
a pedlar than a lawyer,---so persistently did he trudge over
all the neighbouring counties in search of the beauties
of nature and the historic associations of battle, siege, or
legend. On one occasion when, with their last penny spent,
Scott and one of his companions had returned to Edinburgh,
living during their last day on drinks of milk
offered by generous peasant-women, and the hips and haws
on the hedges, he remarked to his father how much he
had wished for George Primrose's power of playing on the
flute in order to earn a meal by the way, old Mr. Scott,
catching grumpily at the idea, replied, "I greatly doubt, sir,
you were born for nae better then a gangrel scrape-gut,"---
a speech which very probably suggested his son's conception
of Darsie Latimer's adventures with the blind fiddler,
"Wandering Willie," in Redgauntlet. And, it is true that
these were the days of mental and moral fermentation,
what was called in Germany the Sturm-und-Drang, the
"fret-and-fury" period of Scott's life, so far as one so
mellow and genial in temper ever passed through a period
of fret and fury at all. In other words these were the days
of rapid motion, of walks of thirty miles a day which
the lame lad yet found no fatigue to him; of mad enterprises,
scrapes and drinking-bouts, in one of which Scott
was half persuaded by his friends that he actually sang
a song for the only time in his life. But even in these
days of youthful sociability, with companions of his
own age, Scott was always himself, and his imperious will
often asserted itself. Writing of this time, some thirty-five
years or so later, he said, "When I was a boy, and
on foot expeditions, as we had many, no creature could be
so indifferent which way our course was directed, and I
acquiesced in what any one proposed; but if I was once
driven to make a choice, and felt piqued in honour to
maintain my proposition, I have broken off from the
whole party, rather than yield to any one." No doubt,
too, in that day of what be himself described as "the
silly smart fancies that ran in my brain like the bubbles
in a glass of champagne, as brilliant to my thinking, as
intoxicating, as evanescent," solitude was no real deprivation
to him; and one can easily imagine him marching off
on his solitary way after a dispute with his companions,
reciting to himself old songs or ballads, with that
noticeable but altogether indescribable play of the upper
lip, which Mr. Lockhart thinks suggested to one of
Scott's most intimate friends, on his first acquaintance
with him, the grotesque notion that he had been "a
hautboy-player." This was the first impression formed
of Scott by William Clerk, one of his earliest and life-long
friends. It greatly amused Scott, who not only had
never played on any instrument in his life, but could
hardly make shift to join in the chorus of a popular song
without marring its effect; but perhaps the impression
suggested was not so very far astray after all. Looking
to the poetic side of his character, the trumpet certainly
would have been the instrument that would have best
symbolized the spirit both of Scott's thought and of his
verses. Mr. Lockhart himself, in summing up his impressions
of Sir Walter, quotes as the most expressive of his
lines:---

"Sound, sound the clarion! fill the fife!
To all the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth a world without a name."

And undoubtedly this gives us the key-note of Scott's
personal life as well as of his poetic power. Above everything
he was high-spirited, a man of noble, and, at the same
time, of martial feelings. Sir Francis Doyle speaks very
justly of Sir Walter as "among English singers the
undoubted inheritor of that trumpet-note, which, under
the breath of Homer, has made the wrath of Achilles
immortal;" and I do not doubt that there was something
in Scott's face, and especially in the expression of his
mouth, to suggest this even to his early college companions.
Unfortunately, however, even "one crowded
hour of glorious life" may sometimes have a "sensual"
inspiration, and in these days of youthful adventure, too
many such hours seem to have owed their inspiration
to the Scottish peasant's chief bane, the Highland whisky.
In his eager search after the old ballads of the Border,
Scott had many a blithe adventure, which ended only too
often in a carouse. It was soon after this time that he first
began those raids into Liddesdale, of which all the world
has enjoyed the records in the sketches---embodied subsequently
in Guy Mannering---of Dandie Dinmont, his pony
Dumple, and the various Peppers and Mustards from
whose breed there were afterwards introduced into Scott's
own family, generations of terriers, always named, as Sir
Walter expressed it, after "the cruet." I must quote the
now classic record of those youthful escapades:---

"Eh me," said Mr. Shortreed, his companion in all these
Liddesdale raids, "sic an endless fund of humour and drollery
as he had then wi' him. Never ten yards but we were either
laughing or roaring and singing. Wherever we stopped, how
brawlie he suited himsel' to everybody! He aye did as the
lave did; never made him sel' the great man or took ony airs
in the company. I've seen him in a' moods in these jaunts,
grave and gay, daft and serious, sober and drunk---(this, however,
even in our wildest rambles, was but rare)---but drunk
or sober he was aye the gentleman. He looked excessively
heavy and stupid when he was fou, but he was never out o'
gude humour."

One of the stories of that time will illustrate better
the wilder days of Scott's youth than any comment:---

"On reaching one evening," says Mr. Lockhart, some
Charlieshope or other (I forget the name) among those wildernesses,
they found a kindly reception as usual: but to
their agreeable surprise, after some days of hard living, a
measured and orderly hospitality as respected liquor. Soon
after supper, at which a bottle of elderberry wine alone had
been produced, a young student of divinity who happened to
be in the house was called upon to take the `big ha' Bible,' in
the good old fashion of Burns' Saturday Night: and some
progress had been already made in the service, when the good
man of the farm, whose `tendency,' as Mr. Mitchell says,
`was soporific,' scandalized his wife and the dominie by starting
suddenly from his knees, and rubbing his eyes, with a
stentorian exclamation of `By ------! here's the keg at last!'
and in tumbled, as be spake the word, a couple of sturdy
herdsmen, whom, on hearing, a day before, of the advocates
approaching visit, he had despatched to a certain smuggler's
haunt at some considerable distance in quest of a supply of
run brandy from the Solway frith. The pious `exercise' of
the household was hopelessly interrupted. With a thousand
apologies for his hitherto shabby entertainment, this jolly
Elliot or Armstrong had the welcome keg mounted on the
table without a moment's delay, and gentle and simple, not
forgetting the dominie, continued carousing about it until
daylight streamed in upon the party. Sir Walter Scott
seldom failed, when I saw him in company with his Liddesdale
companions, to mimic with infinite humour the sudden
outburst of his old host on hearing the clatter of horses' feet,
which he knew to indicate the arrival of the keg, the consternation
of the dame, and the rueful despair with which
the young clergyman closed the book."<*>

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, i. 269--71.

No wonder old Mr. Scott felt some doubt of his son's
success at the bar, and thought him more fitted in many
respects for a "gangrel scrape-gut."<*>

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, i. 206.

In spite of all this love of excitement, Scott became a
sound lawyer, and might have been a great lawyer, had not
his pride of character, the impatience of his genius, and
the stir of his imagination rendered him indisposed to
wait and slave in the precise manner which the prepossessions
of solicitors appoint.

For Scott's passion for romantic literature was not at
all the sort of thing which we ordinarily mean by boys'
or girls' love of romance. No amount of drudgery or
labour deterred Scott from any undertaking on the prosecution
of which he was bent. He was quite the reverse,
indeed, of what is usually meant by sentimental, either in
his manners or his literary interests. As regards the
history of his own country he was no mean antiquarian.
Indeed he cared for the mustiest antiquarian researches---
of the medi<ae>val kind---so much, that in the depth of his
troubles he speaks of a talk with a Scotch antiquary and
herald as one of the things which soothed him most.
"I do not know anything which relieves the mind so
much from the sullens as trifling discussions about antiquarian
old womanries. It is like knitting a stocking,
diverting the mind without occupying it."<*> Thus his

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, ix. 221.

love of romantic literature was as far as possible from that of
a mind which only feeds on romantic excitements; rather
was it that of one who was so moulded by the transmitted
and acquired love of feudal institutions with all their incidents,
that he could not take any deep interest in any other
fashion of human society. Now the Scotch law was full
of vestiges and records of that period,---was indeed a great
standing monument of it; and in numbers of his writings
Scott shows with how deep an interest he had studied
the Scotch law from this point of view. He remarks somewhere
that it was natural for a Scotchman to feel a strong
attachment to the principle of rank, if only on the ground
that almost any Scotchman might, under the Scotch law,
turn out to be heir-in-tail to some great Scotch title or
estate by the death of intervening relations. And the law
which sometimes caused such sudden transformations, had
subsequently a true interest for him of course as a novel
writer, to say nothing of his interest in it as an antiquarian
and historian who loved to repeople the earth, not
merely with the picturesque groups of the soldiers and
courts of the past, but with the actors in all the various
quaint and homely transactions and puzzlements which
the feudal ages had brought forth. Hence though, as a
matter of fact, Scott never made much figure as an advocate,
he became a very respectable, and might unquestionably
have become a very great, lawyer. When he started
at the bar, however, he had not acquired the tact to
impress an ordinary assembly. In one case which he
conducted before the General Assembly of the Kirk of
Scotland, when defending a parish minister threatened
with deposition for drunkenness and unseemly behaviour,
he certainly missed the proper tone,---first receiving a
censure for the freedom of his manner in treating the allegations
against his client, and then so far collapsing under
the rebuke of the Moderator, as to lose the force and urgency
necessary to produce an effect on his audience. But
these were merely a boy's mishaps. He was certainly by
no means a Heaven-born orator, and therefore could not
expect to spring into exceptionally early distinction, and
the only true reason for his relative failure was that he
was so full of literary power, and so proudly impatient of
the fetters which prudence seemed to impose on his extra-professional
proceedings, that he never gained the credit
he deserved for the general common sense, the unwearied
industry, and the keen appreciation of the ins and outs of
legal method, which might have raised him to the highest
reputation even as a judge.

All readers of his novels know how Scott delights in
the humours of the law. By way of illustration take the
following passage, which is both short and amusing, in
which Saunders Fairford---the old solicitor painted from
Scott's father in Redgauntlet---descants on the law of
the stirrup-cup. "It was decided in a case before the
town bailies of Cupar Angus, when Luckie Simpson's cow
had drunk up Luckie Jamieson's browst of ale, while it
stood in the door to cool, that there was no damage to
pay, because the crummie drank without sitting down;
such being the circumstance constituting a Doch an
Dorroch, which is a standing drink for which no reckoning
is paid." I do not believe that any one of Scott's contemporaries
had greater legal abilities than he, though, as
it happened, they were never fairly tried. But he had
both the pride and impatience of genius. It fretted him
to feel that he was dependent on the good opinions of
solicitors, and that they who were incapable of understanding
his genius, thought the less instead of the better
of him as an advocate, for every indication which he gave
of that genius. Even on the day of his call to the bar he
gave expression to a sort of humorous foretaste of this
impatience, saying to William Clerk, who had been called
with him, as he mimicked the air and tone of a Highland
lass waiting at the Cross of Edinburgh to be hired for the
harvest, "We've stood here an hour by the Tron, hinny,
and deil a ane has speered our price." Scott continued to
practise at the bar---nominally at least---for fourteen
years, but the most which he ever seems to have made in
any one year was short of 230_l._, and latterly his practice
was much diminishing instead of increasing. His own
impatience of solicitors' patronage was against him; his
well-known dabblings in poetry were still more against
him; and his general repute for wild and unprofessional adventurousness---
which was much greater than he deserved
---was probably most of all against him. Before he had
been six years at the bar he joined the organization of the
Edinburgh Volunteer Cavalry, took a very active part in
the drill, and was made their Quartermaster. Then he
visited London, and became largely known for his
ballads, and his love of ballads. In his eighth year
at the bar he accepted a small permanent appointment,
with 300_l._ a year, as sheriff of Selkirkshire; and this
occurring soon after his marriage to a lady of some
means, no doubt diminished still further his professional
zeal. For one third of the time during which
Scott practised as an advocate he made no pretence of
taking interest in that part of his work, though he was
always deeply interested in the law itself. In 1806 he
undertook gratuitously the duties of a Clerk of Session---
a permanent officer of the Court at Edinburgh---and discharged
them without remuneration for five years, from
1806 to 1811, in order to secure his ultimate succession to
the office in the place of an invalid, who for that
period received all the emoluments and did none of the
work. Nevertheless Scott's legal abilities were so well
known, that it was certainly at one time intended to offer
him a Barony of the Exchequer, and it was his own doing,
apparently, that it was not offered. The life of literature
and the life of the Bar hardly ever suit, and in Scott's
case they suited the less, that he felt himself likely to be
a dictator in the one field, and only a postulant in the
other. Literature was a far greater gainer by his choice,
than Law could have been a loser. For his capacity for
the law he shared with thousands of able men, his
capacity for literature with few or none.


CHAPTER III.<! p30>

LOVE AND MARRIAGE.

One Sunday, about two years before his call to the bar,
Scott offered his umbrella to a young lady of much
beauty who was coming out of the Greyfriars Church
during a shower; the umbrella was graciously accepted;
and it was not an unprecedented consequence that Scott
fell in love with the borrower, who turned out to be
Margaret, daughter of Sir John and Lady Jane Stuart
Belches, of Invernay. For near six years after this,
Scott indulged the hope of marrying this lady, and it
does not seem doubtful that the lady herself was in
part responsible for this impression. Scott's father, who
thought his son's prospects very inferior to those of Miss
Stuart Belches, felt it his duty to warn the baronet of
his son's views, a warning which the old gentleman
appears to have received with that grand unconcern
characteristic of elderly persons in high position, as a
hint intrinsically incredible, or at least unworthy of
notice. But he took no alarm, and Scott's attentions to
Margaret Stuart Belches continued till close on the eve
of her marriage, in 1796, to William Forbes (afterwards
Sir William Forbes), of Pitsligo, a banker, who proved
to be one of Sir Walter's most generous and most
delicate-minded friends, when his time of troubles came
towards the end of both their lives. Whether Scott was
in part mistaken as to the impression he had made on
the young lady, or she was mistaken as to the impression
he had made on herself, or whether other circumstances
intervened to cause misunderstanding, or the grand indifference
of Sir John gave way to active intervention
when the question became a practical one, the world will
now never know, but it does not seem very likely that
a man of so much force as Scott, who certainly had at
one time assured himself at least of the young lady's
strong regard, should have been easily displaced even by
a rival of ability and of most generous and amiable
character. An entry in the diary which Scott kept in
1827, after Constable's and Ballantyne's failure, and his
wife's death, seems to me to suggest that there may have
been some misunderstanding between the young people,
though I am not sure that the inference is justified.
The passage completes the story of this passion---Scott's
first and only deep passion---so far as it can ever be
known to us; and as it is a very pathetic and characteristic
entry, and the attachment to which it refers had
a great influence on Scott's life, both in keeping him free
from some of the most dangerous temptations of the
young, during his youth, and in creating within him
an interior world of dreams and recollections throughout
his whole life, on which his imaginative nature was continually
fed---I may as well give it. "He had taken,"
says Mr. Lockhart, "for that winter [1827], the house
No. 6, Shandwick Place, which he occupied by the
month during the remainder of his servitude as a clerk
of session. Very near this house, he was told a few
days after he took possession, dwelt the aged mother of
his first love; and he expressed to his friend Mrs.
Skene, a wish that she should carry him to renew an
acquaintance which seems to have been interrupted from
the period of his youthful romance. Mrs. Skene complied
with his desire, and she tells me that a very
painful scene ensued." His diary says,---"November
7th. Began to settle myself this morning after the hurry
of mind and even of body which I have lately undergone.
I went to make a visit and fairly softened
myself, like an old fool, with recalling old stories till
I was fit for nothing but shedding tears and repeating
verses for the whole night. This is sad work. The very
grave gives up its dead, and time rolls back thirty years
to add to my perplexities. I don't care. I begin to
grow case-hardened, and like a stag turning at bay,
my naturally good temper grows fierce and dangerous.
Yet what a romance to tell---and told I fear it will one
day be. And then my three years of dreaming and my
two years of wakening will be chronicled, doubtless. But
the dead will feel no pain.---November 10th. At twelve
o'clock I went again to poor Lady Jane to talk over old
stories. I am not clear that it is a right or healthful
indulgence to be ripping up old sores, but it seems to
give her deep-rooted sorrow words, and that is a mental
blood-letting. To me these things are now matter of calm
and solemn recollection, never to be forgotten, yet scarce
to be remembered with pain."<*> It was in 1797, after

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, ix. 183--4.

the break-up of his hopes in relation to this attachment,
that Scott wrote the lines To a Violet, which Mr. F. T. Palgrave,
in his thoughtful and striking introduction to Scott's
poems, rightly characterizes as one of the most beautiful
of those poems. It is, however, far from one characteristic
of Scott, indeed, so different in style from the best
of his other poems, that Mr. Browning might well have
said of Scott, as he once affirmed of himself, that for
the purpose of one particular poem, he "who blows
through bronze," had "breathed through silver,"---had
"curbed the liberal hand subservient proudly,"---and
tamed his spirit to a key elsewhere unknown.

"The violet in her greenwood bower,
Where birchen boughs with hazels mingle,
May boast itself the fairest flower
In glen, or copse, or forest dingle.

Though fair her gems of azure hue,
Beneath the dewdrop's weight reclining,
I've seen an eye of lovelier blue,
More sweet through watery lustre shining.

The summer sun that dew shall dry,
Ere yet the day be past its morrow;
Nor longer in my false love's eye
Remain'd the tear of parting sorrow."

These lines obviously betray a feeling of resentment,
which may or may not have been justified; but they are
perhaps the most delicate produced by his pen. The
pride which was always so notable a feature in Scott, probably
sustained him through the keen, inward pain which
it is very certain from a great many of his own words that
he must have suffered in this uprooting of his most passionate
hopes. And it was in part probably the same
pride which led him to form, within the year, a new tie---
his engagement to Mademoiselle Charpentier, or Miss
Carpenter as she was usually called,---the daughter of a
French royalist of Lyons who had died early in the revolution.
She had come after her father's death to England,
chiefly, it seems, because in the Marquis of Downshire,
who was an old friend of the family, her mother knew
that she should find a protector for her children. Miss
Carpenter was a lively beauty, probably of no great depth
of character. The few letters given of hers in Mr. Lockhart's
life of Scott, give the impression of an amiable,
petted girl, of somewhat thin and espi<e`>gle character,
who was rather charmed at the depth and intensity of
Scott's nature, and at the expectations which he seemed
to form of what love should mean, than capable of realizing
them. Evidently she had no inconsiderable pleasure in
display; but she made on the whole a very good wife, only
one to be protected by him from every care, and not one
to share Scott's deeper anxieties, or to participate in his
dreams. Yet Mrs. Scott was not devoid of spirit and self-control.
For instance, when Mr. Jeffrey, having reviewed
Marmion in the Edinburgh in that depreciating and omniscient
tone which was then considered the evidence of
critical acumen, dined with Scott on the very day on
which the review had appeared, Mrs. Scott behaved to
him through the whole evening with the greatest politeness,
but fired this parting shot in her broken English,
as he took his leave,---"Well, good night, Mr. Jeffrey,---
dey tell me you have abused Scott in de Review, and I
hope Mr. Constable has paid you very well for writing
it." It is hinted that Mrs. Scott was, at the time of
Scott's greatest fame, far more exhilarated by it than her
husband with his strong sense and sure self-measurement
ever was. Mr. Lockhart records that Mrs. Grant of Laggan
once said of them, "Mr. Scott always seems to me like a
glass, through which the rays of admiration pass without
sensibly affecting it; but the bit of paper that lies beside
it will presently be in a blaze, and no wonder." The bit
of paper, however, never was in a blaze that I know of;
and, possibly Mrs. Grant's remark may have had a little
feminine spite in it. At all events, it was not till the rays
of misfortune, instead of admiration, fell upon Scott's life,
that the delicate tissue paper shrivelled up; nor does it
seem that, even then, it was the trouble, so much as a
serious malady that had fixed on Lady Scott before Sir
Walter's troubles began, which really scorched up her
life. That she did not feel with the depth and intensity
of her husband, or in the same key of feeling, is clear.
After the failure, and during the preparations for abandoning
the house in Edinburgh, Scott records in his diary:---
"It is with a sense of pain that I leave behind a parcel
of trumpery prints and little ornaments, once the pride
of Lady Scott's heart, but which she saw consigned with
indifference to the chance of an auction. Things that have
had their day of importance with me, I cannot forget,
though the merest trifles; but I am glad that she, with
bad health, and enough to vex her, has not the same useless
mode of associating recollections with this unpleasant
business."<*>

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, viii. 273.

Poor Lady Scott! It was rather like a bird of paradise
mating with an eagle. Yet the result was happy on the
whole; for she had a thoroughly kindly nature, and a true
heart. Within ten days before her death, Scott enters in
his diary:---"Still welcoming me with a smile, and asserting
she is better." She was not the ideal wife for Scott;
but she loved him, sunned herself in his prosperity, and
tried to bear his adversity cheerfully. In her last illness
she would always reproach her husband and children for
their melancholy faces, even when that melancholy was, as
she well knew, due to the approaching shadow of her own
death.



CHAPTER IV.<! p36>

EARLIEST POETRY AND BORDER MINSTRELSY.

Scott's first serious attempt in poetry was a version of
B<u:>rger's Lenore, a spectre-ballad of the violent kind,
much in favour in Germany at a somewhat earlier period,
but certainly not a specimen of the higher order of imaginative
genius. However, it stirred Scott's youthful
blood, and made him "wish to heaven he could get a
skull and two cross-bones!" a modest desire, to be expressed
with so much fervour, and one almost immediately
gratified. Probably no one ever gave a more spirited
version of B<u:>rger's ballad than Scott has given; but the
use to which Miss Cranstoun, a friend and confidante of
his love for Miss Stuart Belches, strove to turn it, by
getting it printed, blazoned, and richly bound, and presenting
it to the young lady as a proof of her admirer's
abilities, was perhaps hardly very sagacious. It is quite
possible, at least, that Miss Stuart Belches may have
regarded this vehement admirer of spectral wedding
journeys and skeleton bridals, as unlikely to prepare for
her that comfortable, trim, and decorous future which
young ladies usually desire. At any rate, the bold stroke
failed. The young lady admired the verses, but, as we
have seen, declined the translator. Perhaps she regarded
banking as safer, if less brilliant work than the most
effective description of skeleton riders. Indeed, Scott at
this time---to those who did not know what was in him,
which no one, not even excepting himself, did---had no
very sure prospects of comfort, to say nothing of wealth.
It is curious, too, that his first adventure in literature was
thus connected with his interest in the preternatural, for
no man ever lived whose genius was sounder and healthier
and less disposed to dwell on the half-and-half lights of a
dim and eerie world; yet ghostly subjects always interested
him deeply, and he often touched them in his stories, more,
I think, from the strong artistic contrast they afforded to
his favourite conceptions of life, than from any other
motive. There never was, I fancy, an organization less
susceptible of this order of fears and superstitions than his
own. When a friend jokingly urged him, within a few
months of his death, not to leave Rome on a Friday, as it
was a day of bad omen for a journey, he replied, laughing,
"Superstition is very picturesque, and I make it, at times,
stand me in great stead, but I never allow it to interfere
with interest or convenience." Basil Hall reports Scott's
having told him on the last evening of the year 1824,
when they were talking over this subject, that "having
once arrived at a country inn, he was told there was no
bed for him. `No place to lie down at all?' said he.
`No,' said the people of the house; `none, except a room
in which there is a corpse lying.' `Well,' said he, `did
the person die of any contagious disorder?' `Oh, no;
not at all,' said they. `Well, then,' continued he, `let
me have the other bed. So,' said Sir Walter, `I laid me
down, and never had a better night's sleep in my life.' "
He was, indeed, a man of iron nerve, whose truest artistic
enjoyment was in noting the forms of character seen in
full daylight by the light of the most ordinary experience.
Perhaps for that reason he can on occasion relate a
preternatural incident, such as the appearance of old Alice
at the fountain, at the very moment of her death, to the
Master of Ravenswood, in _The Bride of Lammermoor,_
with great effect. It was probably the vivacity with
which he realized the violence which such incidents do to
the terrestrial common sense of our ordinary nature, and
at the same time the sedulous accuracy of detail with
which he narrated them, rather than any, even the
smallest, special susceptibility of his own brain to thrills
of the preternatural kind, which gave him rather a unique
pleasure in dealing with such preternatural elements.
Sometimes, however, his ghosts are a little too muscular
to produce their due effect as ghosts. In translating
B<u:>rger's ballad his great success lay in the vividness of the
spectre's horsemanship. For instance,---

"Tramp! tramp! along the land they rode,
Splash! splash! along the sea;
The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,
The flashing pebbles flee,"

is far better than any ghostly touch in it; so, too, every
one will remember how spirited a rider is the white Lady
of Avenel, in The Monastery, and how vigorously she
takes fords,---as vigorously as the sheriff himself, who was
very fond of fords. On the whole, Scott was too sunny
and healthy-minded for a ghost-seer; and the skull and
cross-bones with which he ornamented his "den" in his
father's house, did not succeed in tempting him into the
world of twilight and cobwebs wherein he made his first
literary excursion. His William and Helen, the name he
gave to his translation of B<u:>rgers Lenore, made in 1795,
was effective, after all, more for its rapid movement, than
for the weirdness of its effects.

If, however, it was the raw preternaturalism of such
ballads as B<u:>rger's which first led Scott to test his own
powers, his genius soon turned to more appropriate and
natural subjects. Ever since his earliest college days he
had been collecting, in those excursions of his into Liddesdale
and elsewhere, materials for a book on The
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border; and the publication of
this work, in January, 1802 (in two volumes at first), was
his first great literary success. The whole edition of eight
hundred copies was sold within the year, while the skill
and care which Scott had devoted to the historical illustration
of the ballads, and the force and spirit of his own now
ballads, written in imitation of the old, gained him at
once a very high literary name. And the name was well
deserved. The Border Minstrelsy was more commensurate
in range, with the genius of Scott, than even the
romantic poems by which it was soon followed, and which
were received with such universal and almost unparalleled
delight. For Scott's Border Minstrelsy gives more than a
glimpse of all his many great powers---his historical in-
dustry and knowledge, his masculine humour, his delight
in restoring the vision of the "old, simple, violent world"
of rugged activity and excitement, as well as that power
to kindle men's hearts, as by a trumpet-call, which was
the chief secret of the charm of his own greatest poems.
It is much easier to discern the great novelist of subsequent
years in the Border Minstrelsy than even in The
Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, and The Lady of the
Lake taken together. From those romantic poems you
would never guess that Scott entered more eagerly and
heartily into the common incidents and common cares of
every-day human life than into the most romantic fortunes;
from them you would never know how completely
he had mastered the leading features of quite
different periods of our history; from them you would
never infer that you had before you one of the best
plodders, as well as one of the most enthusiastic dreamers,
in British literature. But all this might have been
gathered from the various introductions and notes to the
Border Minstrelsy, which are full of skilful illustrations,
of comments teeming with humour, and of historic weight.
The general introduction gives us a general survey of the
graphic pictures of Border quarrels, their simple violence
and simple cunning. It enters, for instance, with grave
humour into the strong distinction taken in the debatable
land between a "freebooter" and a "thief," and the difficulty
which the inland counties had in grasping it, and
paints for us, with great vivacity, the various Border superstitions.
Another commentary on a very amusing ballad,
commemorating the manner in which a blind harper stole
a horse and got paid for a mare he had not lost, gives
an account of the curious tenure of land, called that of
the "king's rentallers," or "kindly tenants;" and a third
describes, in language as vivid as the historical romance
of Kenilworth, written years after, the manner in which
Queen Elizabeth received the news of a check to her
policy, and vented her spleen on the King of Scotland.

So much as to the breadth of the literary area which
this first book of Scott's covered. As regards the poetic
power which his own new ballads, in imitation of the
old ones, evinced, I cannot say that those of the first
issue of the Border Minstrelsy indicated anything like the
force which might have been expected from one who was
so soon to be the author of Marmion, though many of
Scott's warmest admirers, including Sir Francis Doyle,
seem to place Glenfinlas among his finest productions. But
in the third volume of the Border Minstrelsy, which did
not appear till 1803, is contained a ballad on the assassination
of the Regent Murray, the story being told
by his assassin, which seems to me a specimen of his very
highest poetical powers. In Cadyow Castle yon have not
only that rousing trumpet-note which you hear in Marmion,
but the pomp and glitter of a grand martial scene is
painted with all Scott's peculiar terseness and vigour.
The opening is singularly happy in preparing the reader
for the description of a violent deed. The Earl of Arran,
chief of the clan of Hamiltons, is chasing among the old
oaks of Cadyow Castle,---oaks which belonged to the
ancient Caledonian forest,---the fierce, wild bulls, milk-white,
with black muzzles, which were not extirpated till
shortly before Scott's own birth:---

"Through the huge oaks of Evandale,
Whose limbs a thousand years have worn,
What sullen roar comes down the gale,
And drowns the hunter's pealing horn?

"Mightiest of all the beasts of chase
That roam in woody Caledon,
Crashing the forest in his race,
The mountain bull comes thundering on.

"Fierce on the hunter's quiver'd band
He rolls his eyes of swarthy glow,
Spurns, with black hoof and horn, the sand,
And tosses high his mane of snow.

"Aim'd well, the chieftain's lance has flown;
Struggling in blood the savage lies;
His roar is sunk in hollow groan,---
Bound, merry huntsman! sound the pryse!"

It is while the hunters are resting after this feat, that
Bothwellhaugh dashes among them headlong, spurring
his jaded steed with poniard instead of spur:---

"From gory sells and reeling steed,
Sprang the fierce horseman with a bound,
And reeking from the recent deed,
He dash'd his carbine on the ground."

And then Bothwellhaugh tells his tale of blood, describing
the procession from which he had singled out his
prey:---

" `Dark Morton, girt with many a spear,
Murder's foul minion, led the van;
And clash'd their broadswords in the rear
The wild Macfarlanes' plaided clan.

" `Glencairn and stout Parkhead were nigh,
Obsequious at their Regent's rein,
And haggard Lindsay's iron eye,
That saw fair Mary weep in vain.

" `Mid pennon'd spears, a steely grove,
Proud Murray's plumage floated high;
Scarce could his trampling charger move,
So close the minions crowded nigh.

" `From the raised vizor's shade, his eye,
Dark rolling, glanced the ranks along,
And his steel truncheon waved on high,
Seem'd marshalling the iron throng.

" `But yet his sadden'd brow confess'd
A passing shade of doubt and awe;
Some fiend was whispering in his breast,
Beware of injured Bothwellhaugh!

" `The death-shot parts,---the charger springs,---
Wild rises tumult's startling roar!
And Murray's plumy helmet rings---
Rings on the ground to rise no more.' "

This was the ballad which made so strong an impression
on Thomas Campbell, the poet. Referring to some of the
lines I have quoted, Campbell said,---"I have repeated
them so often on the North Bridge that the whole fraternity
of coachmen know me by tongue as I pass. To be
sure, to a mind in sober, serious, street-walking humour, it
must bear an appearance of lunacy when one stamps with
the hurried pace and fervent shake of the head which
strong, pithy poetry excites."<*> I suppose anecdotes of

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, ii. 79.

this kind have been oftener told of Scott than of any
other English poet. Indeed, Sir Walter, who understood
himself well, gives the explanation in one of his diaries:---
"I am sensible," he says, "that if there be anything good
about my poetry or prose either, it is a hurried frankness
of composition, which pleases soldiers, sailors, and young
people of bold and active dispositions."<*> He might have

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, viii. 370.

included old people too. I have heard of two old men---
complete strangers---passing each other on a dark London
night, when one of them happened to be repeating to himself,
just as Campbell did to the hackney coachmen of the
North Bridge of Edinburgh, the last lines of the account
of Flodden Field in Marmion, "Charge, Chester, charge,"
when suddenly a reply came out of the darkness, "On,
Stanley, on," whereupon they finished the death of Marmion
between them, took off their hats to each other, and
parted, laughing. Scott's is almost the only poetry
in the English language that not only runs thus in the
head of average men, but heats the head in which it
runs by the mere force of its hurried frankness of
style, to use Scott's own terms, or by that of its strong
and pithy eloquence, as Campbell phrased it. And in
Cadyow Castle this style is at its culminating point.


CHAPTER V.<! p44>

SCOTT'S MATURER POEMS.

Scott's genius flowered late. Cadyow Castle, the first of
his poems, I think, that has indisputable genius plainly
stamped on its terse and fiery lines, was composed in 1802,
when he was already thirty-one years of age. It was in
the same year that he wrote the first canto of his first
great romance in verse, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, a
poem which did not appear till 1805, when he was thirty-four.
The first canto (not including the framework, of
which the aged harper is the principal figure) was written
in the lodgings to which he was confined for a fortnight
in 1802, by a kick received from a horse on Portobello
sands, during a charge of the Volunteer Cavalry in which
Scott was cornet. The poem was originally intended to
be included in the Border Minstrelsy, as one of the
studies in the antique style, but soon outgrew the limits of
such a study both in length and in the freedom of its
manner. Both the poorest and the best parts of The Lay
were in a special manner due to Lady Dalkeith (afterwards
Duchess of Buccleugh), who suggested it, and in whose
honour the poem was written. It was she who requested
Scott to write a poem on the legend of the goblin
page, Gilpin Horner, and this Scott attempted,---and,
so far as the goblin himself was concerned, conspicuously
failed. He himself clearly saw that the story of this
unmanageable imp was both confused and uninteresting,
and that in fact he had to extricate himself from the
original groundwork of the tale, as from a regular literary
scrape, in the best way he could. In a letter to Miss
Seward, Scott says,---"At length the story appeared so
uncouth that I was fain to put it into the mouth of my
old minstrel, lest the nature of it should be misunderstood,
and I should be suspected of setting up a new
school of poetry, instead of a feeble attempt to imitate the
old. In the process of the romance, the page, intended
to be a principal person in the work, contrived (from
the baseness of his natural propensities, I suppose) to slink
down stairs into the kitchen, and now he must e'en abide
there."<*> And I venture to say that no reader of the poem

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, ii. 217.

ever has distinctly understood what the goblin page did or
did not do, what it was that was "lost" throughout the
poem and "found" at the conclusion, what was the object
of his personating the young heir of the house of Scott,
and whether or not that object was answered;---what use,
if any, the magic book of Michael Scott was to the Lady
of Branksome, or whether it was only harm to her; and I
doubt moreover whether any one ever cared an iota what
answer, or whether any answer, might be given to any of
these questions. All this, as Scott himself clearly perceived,
was left confused, and not simply vague. The
goblin imp had been more certainly an imp of mischief to
him than even to his boyish ancestor. But if Lady
Dalkeith suggested the poorest part of the poem, she
certainly inspired its best part. Scott says, as we have
seen, that he brought in the aged harper to save himself
from the imputation of "setting up a new school of
poetry" instead of humbly imitating an old school. But
I think that the chivalrous wish to do honour to Lady
Dalkeith, both as a personal friend and as the wife of his
"chief,"---as he always called the head of the house of
Scott,---had more to do with the introduction of the aged
harper, than the wish to guard himself against the imputation
of attempting a new poetic style. He clearly
intended the Duchess of The Lay to represent the
Countess for whom he wrote it, and the aged harper, with
his reverence and gratitude and self-distrust, was only the
disguise in which he felt that he could best pour out his loyalty,
and the romantic devotion with which both Lord and
Lady Dalkeith, but especially, the latter, had inspired him.
It was certainly this beautiful framework which assured
the immediate success and permanent charm of the poem;
and the immediate success was for that day something
marvellous. The magnificent quarto edition of 750 copies
was soon exhausted, and an octavo edition of 1500 copies
was sold out within the year. In the following year two
editions, containing together 4250 copies, were disposed
of, and before twenty-five years had elapsed, that is, before
1830, 44,000 copies of the poem had been bought by the
public in this country, taking account of the legitimate
trade alone. Scott gained in all by The Lay 769_l._, an
unprecedented sum in those times for an author to obtain
from any poem. Little more than half a century before,
Johnson received but fifteen guineas for his stately poem
on The Vanity of Human Wishes, and but ten guineas for
his London. I do not say that Scott's poem had not much
more in it of true poetic fire, though Scott himself, I
believe, preferred these poems of Johnson's to anything
that he himself ever wrote. But the disproportion in
the reward was certainly enormous, and yet what Scott
gained by his Lay was of course much less than he
gained by any of his subsequent poems of equal, or anything
like equal, length. Thus for Marmion he received
1000 guineas long before the poem was published, and
for one half of the copyright of The Lord of the Isles
Constable paid Scott 1500 guineas. If we ask ourselves to
what this vast popularity of Scott's poems, and especially
of the earlier of them (for, as often happens, he was better
remunerated for his later and much inferior poems than
for his earlier and more brilliant productions) is due, I
think the answer must be for the most part, the high
romantic glow and extraordinary romantic simplicity of the
poetical elements they contained. Take the old harper
of The Lay, a figure which arrested the attention of Pitt
during even that last most anxious year of his anxious life,
the year of Ulm and Austerlitz. The lines in which Scott
describes the old man's embarrassment when first urged
to play, produced on Pitt, according to his own account,
"an effect which I might have expected In painting, but
could never have fancied capable of being given in poetry."<*>

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, ii. 226.

Every one knows the lines to which Pitt refers:---

"The humble boon was soon obtain'd;
The aged minstrel audience gain'd.
But, when he reach'd the room of state,
Where she with all her ladies sate,
Perchance he wish'd his boon denied;
For, when to tune the harp he tried,
His trembling hand had lost the ease
Which marks security to please;
And scenes long past, of joy and pain,
Came wildering o'er his aged brain,---
He tried to tune his harp in vain!
The pitying Duchess praised its chime,
And gave him heart, and gave him time,
Till every string's according glee
was blended into harmony.
And then, he said, he would full fain
He could recall an ancient strain
He never thought to sing again---
It was not framed for village churls,
But for high dames and mighty earls;
He'd play'd it to King Charles the Good,
When he kept Court at Holyrood;
And much he wish'd, yet fear'd, to try
The long-forgotten melody.
Amid the strings his fingers stray'd,
And an uncertain warbling made,
And oft he shook his hoary head.
But when he caught the measure wild
The old man raised his face, and smiled;
And lighten'd up his faded eye,
With all a poet's ecstasy!
In varying cadence, soft or strong,
He swept the sounding chords along;
The present Scene, the future lot,
His toils, his wants, were all forgot;
Cold diffidence and age's frost
In the full tide of song were lost;
Each blank in faithless memory void
The poets glowing thought supplied;
And, while his harp responsive rang,
'Twas thus the latest minstrel sung.

*****

Here paused the harp; and with its swell
The master's fire and courage fell;
Dejectedly and low he bow'd,
And, gazing timid on the Crowd,
He seem'd to seek in every eye
If they approved his minstrelsy
And, diffident of present praise,
Somewhat he spoke of former days,
And how old age, and wandering long,
Had done his hand and harp some wrong."

These lines hardly illustrate, I think, the particular form
of Mr. Pitt's criticism, for a quick succession of fine
shades of feeling of this kind could never have been
delineated in a painting, or indeed in a series of paintings,
at all, while they are so given in the poem. But the
praise itself, if not its exact form, is amply deserved.
The singular depth of the romantic glow in this passage,
and its equally singular simplicity,---a simplicity which
makes it intelligible to every one,---are conspicuous to
every reader. It is not what is called classical poetry, for
there is no severe outline,---no sculptured completeness
and repose,---no satisfying wholeness of effect to the eye
of the mind,---no embodiment of a great action. The poet
gives us a breath, a ripple of alternating fear and hope in
the heart of an old man, and that is all. He catches an
emotion that had its roots deep in the past, and that is
striving onward towards something in the future;---he
traces the wistfulness and self-distrust with which age seeks
to recover the feelings of youth,---the delight with which it
greets them when they come,---the hesitation and diffidence
with which it recalls them as they pass away, and
questions the triumph it has just won,---and he paints all
this without subtlety, without complexity, but with a
swiftness such as few poets ever surpassed. Generally,
however, Scott prefers action itself for his subject, to any
feeling, however active in its bent. The cues in which
he makes a study of any mood of feeling, as he does of
this harper's feeling, are comparatively rare. Deloraine's
night-ride to Melrose is a good deal more in Scott's
ordinary way, than this study of the old harper's wistful
mood. But whatever his subject, his treatment of it
is the same. His lines are always strongly drawn;
his handling is always simple; and his subject always
romantic. But though romantic, it is simple almost to
bareness,---one of the great causes both of his popularity,
and of that deficiency in his poetry of which so many
of his admirers become conscious when they compare him
with other and richer poets. Scott used to say that in
poetry Byron "bet" him; and no doubt that in which
chiefly as a poet he "bet" him, was in the variety, the
richness, the lustre of his effects. A certain ruggedness
and bareness was of the essence of Scott's idealism and
romance. It was so in relation to scenery. He told
Washington Irving that he loved the very nakedness of
the Border country. "It has something," he said, "bold
and stern and solitary about it. When I have been for
some time in the rich scenery about Edinburgh, which
is like ornamented garden-land, I begin to wish myself
back again among my honest grey hills, and if I did not
see the heather at least once a year, I think I should die."<*>

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, v. 248.

Now, the bareness which Scott so loved in his native
scenery, there is in all his romantic elements of feeling.
It is while he is bold and stern, that he is at his highest
ideal point. Directly he begins to attempt rich or pretty
subjects, as in parts of The Lady of the Lake, and a good
deal of The Lord of the Isles, and still more in The Bridal
of Triermain, his charm disappears. It is in painting
those moods and exploits, in relation to which Scott
shares most completely the feelings of ordinary men, but
experiences them with far greater strength and purity
than ordinary men, that he triumphs as a poet. Mr.
Lockhart tells us that some of Scott's senses were decidedly
"blunt," and one seems to recognize this in the
simplicity of his romantic effects. "It is a fact," he says,
"which some philosophers may think worth setting
down, that Scott's organization, as to more than one of
the senses, was the reverse of exquisite. He had very
little of what musicians call an ear; his smell was hardly
more delicate. I have seen him stare about, quite unconscious
of the cause, when his whole company betrayed
their uneasiness at the approach of an overkept haunch
of venison; and neither by the nose nor the palate could
he distinguish corked wine from sound. He could never
tell Madeira from sherry,---nay, an Oriental friend
having sent him a butt of sheeraz, when he remembered
the circumstance some time afterwards and called for a
bottle to have Sir John Malcolm's opinion of its quality,
it turned out that his butler, mistaking the label, had
already served up half the bin as sherry. Port he considered
as physic . . . . in truth he liked no wines
except sparkling champagne and claret; but even as to
the last he was no connoisseur, and sincerely preferred a
tumbler of whisky-toddy to the most precious `liquid-ruby'
that ever flowed in the cup of a prince."<*>

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, v. 338.

However, Scott's eye was very keen:---"It was commonly
him," as his little son once said, "that saw the
hare sitting." And his perception of colour was very
delicate as well as his mere sight. As Mr. Ruskin has
pointed out, his landscape painting is almost all done by
the lucid use of colour. Nevertheless this bluntness
of organization in relation to the less important senses,
no doubt contributed something to the singleness and simplicity
of the deeper and more vital of Scott's romantic
impressions; at least there is good reason to suppose that
delicate and complicated susceptibilities do at least
diminish the chance of living a strong and concentrated
life---do risk the frittering away of feeling on the mere
backwaters of sensations, even if they do not directly
tend towards artificial and indirect forms of character.
Scott's romance is like his native scenery,---bold, bare
and rugged, with a swift deep stream of strong pure
feeling running through it. There is plenty of colour
in his pictures, as there is on the Scotch hills when the
heather is out. And so too there is plenty of intensity
in his romantic situations; but it is the intensity of
simple, natural, unsophisticated, hardy, and manly characters.
But as for subtleties and fine shades of feeling in
his poems, or anything like the manifold harmonies of the
richer arts, they are not to be found, or, if such
complicated shading is to be found---and it is perhaps
attempted in some faint measure in The Bridal of Triermain,
the poem in which Scott tried to pass himself off
for Erskine,---it is only at the expense of the higher
qualities of his romantic poetry, that even in this small
measure it is supplied. Again, there is no rich music in
his verse. It is its rapid onset, its hurrying strength,
which so fixes it in the mind.

It was not till 1808, three years after the publication of
The Lay, that Marmion, Scott's greatest poem, was published.
But I may as well say what seems necessary of that
and his other poems, while I am on the subject of his
poetry. Marmion has all the advantage over The Lay of
the Last Minstrel that a coherent story told with force and
fulness, and concerned with the same class of subjects as
The Lay, must have over a confused and ill-managed
legend, the only original purpose of which was to serve
as the opportunity for a picture of Border life and strife.
Scott's poems have sometimes been depreciated as mere
novelettes in verse, and I think that some of them may be
more or less liable to this criticism. For instance, The
Lady of the Lake, with the exception of two or three
brilliant passages, has always seemed to me more of a versified
novelette,---without the higher and broader characteristics
of Scott's prose novels---than of a poem. I suppose
what one expects from a poem as distinguished from a
romance---even though the poem incorporates a story---is
that it should not rest for its chief interest on the mere
development of the story; but rather that the narrative
should be quite subordinate to that insight into the deeper
side of life and manners, in expressing which poetry has
so great an advantage over prose. Of The Lay and Marmion
this is true; less true of The Lady of the Lake, and
still less of Rokeby, or The Lord of the Isles, and this is
why The Lay and Marmion seem so much superior as
poems to the others. They lean less on the interest of
mere incident, more on that of romantic feeling and the
great social and historic features of the day. Marmion was
composed in great part in the saddle, and the stir of a
charge of cavalry seems to be at the very core of it.
"For myself," said Scott, writing to a lady correspondent
at a time when he was in active service as a volunteer, "I
must own that to one who has, like myself, la tete un peu
exalt<e'>e, the pomp and circumstance of war gives, for a
time, a very poignant and pleasing sensation."<*> And you

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, ii. 137.

feel this all through Marmion even more than in The Lay.
Mr. Darwin would probably say that Auld Wat of Harden
had about as much responsibility for Marmion as Sir
Walter himself. "You will expect," he wrote to the same
lady, who was personally unknown to him at that time,
"to see a person who had dedicated himself to literary pursuits,
and you will find me a rattle-skulled, half-lawyer,
half-sportsman, through whose head a regiment of horse
has been exercising since he was five years old."<*> And what

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, ii. 259.

Scott himself felt in relation to the martial elements of his
poetry, soldiers in the field felt with equal force. "In the
course of the day when The Lady of the Lake first reached
Sir Adam Fergusson, he was posted with his company
on a point of ground exposed to the enemy's artillery, somewhere
no doubt on the lines of Torres Vedras. The men
were ordered to lie prostrate on the ground; while they
kept that attitude, the captain, kneeling at the head, read
aloud the description of the battle in Canto VI., and the
listening soldiers only interrupted him by a joyous huzza
when the French shot struck the bank close above them."<*>

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, iii. 327.

It is not often that martial poetry has been put to such a
test; but we can well understand with what rapture a
Scotch force lying on the ground to shelter from the French
fire, would enter into such passages as the following:---

"Their light-arm'd archers far and near
Survey'd the tangled ground,
Their centre ranks, with pike and spear,
A twilight forest frown'd,
Their barb<e`>d horsemen, in the rear,
The stern battle crown'd.
No cymbal clash'd, no clarion rang,
Still were the pipe and drum;
Save heavy tread, and armour's clang,
The sullen march was dumb.
There breathed no wind their crests to shake,
Or wave their flags abroad;
Scarce the frail aspen seem'd to quake,
That shadow'd o'er their road.
Their vanward scouts no tidings bring,
Can rouse no lurking foe,
Nor spy a trace of living thing
Save when they stirr'd the roe;
The host moves like a deep-sea wave,
Where rise no rocks its power to brave,
High-swelling, dark, and slow.
The lake is pass'd, and now they gain
A narrow and a broken plain,
Before the Trosach's rugged jaws,
And here the horse and spearmen pause.
While, to explore the dangerous glen,
Dive through the pass the archer-men.

"At once there rose so wild a yell
Within that dark and narrow dell,
As all the fiends from heaven that fell
Had peal'd the banner-cry of Hell!
Forth from the pass, in tumult driven.
Like chaff before the wind of heaven,
The archery appear;
For life! for life! their plight they ply,
And shriek, and shout, and battle-cry,
And plaids and bonnets waving high,
And broadswords flashing to the sky,
Are maddening in the rear.
Onward they drive, in dreadful race,
Pursuers and pursued;
Before that tide of flight and chase,
How shall it keep its rooted place,
The spearmen's twilight wood?
Down, down, cried Mar, `your lances down
Bear back both friend and foe!'
Like reeds before the tempest's frown,
That serried grove of lances brown
At once lay levell'd low;
And, closely shouldering aide to sides
The bristling ranks the onset bide,---
`We'll quell the savage mountaineer,
As their Tinchel cows the game!
They came as fleet as forest deer,
We'll drive them back as tame.' "

But admirable in its stem and deep excitement as
that is, the battle of Flodden in Marmion passes it in
vigour, and constitutes perhaps the most perfect description
of war by one who was---almost---both poet and
warrior, which the English language contains.

And Marmion registers the high-water mark of Scott's
poetical power, not only in relation to the painting of
war, but in relation to the painting of nature. Critics
from the beginning onwards have complained of the
six introductory epistles, as breaking the unity of the
story. But I cannot see that the remark has weight. No
poem is written for those who read it as they do a novel---
merely to follow the interest of the story; or if any poem
be written for such readers, it deserves to die. On such
a principle which treats a poem as a mere novel and
nothing else,---you might object to Homer that he interrupts
the battle so often to dwell on the origin of
the heroes who are waging it; or to Byron that he
deserts Childe Harold to meditate on the rapture of
solitude. To my mind the case and frankness of these
confessions of the author's recollections give a picture
of his life and character while writing Marmion,
which adds greatly to its attraction as a poem. You
have a picture at once not only of the scenery, but of
the mind in which that scenery is mirrored, and are
brought back frankly, at fit intervals, from the one to the
other, in the mode best adapted to help you to appreciate
the relation of the poet to the poem. At least if
Milton's various interruptions of a much more ambitious
theme, to muse upon his own qualifications or disqualifications
for the task he had attempted, be not artistic
mistakes---and I never heard of any one who thought
them so---I cannot see any reason why Scott's periodic
recurrence to his own personal history should be artistic
mistakes either. If Scott's reverie was less lofty than
Milton's, so also was his story. It seems to me as
fitting to describe the relation between the poet and his
theme in the one case as in the other. What can be
more truly a part of Marmion, as a poem, though not as
a story, than that introduction to the first canto in which
Scott expresses his passionate sympathy with the high
national feeling of the moment, in his tribute to Pitt and
Fox, and then reproaches himself for attempting so great
a subject and returns to what he calls his "rude legend,"
the very essence of which was, however, a passionate
appeal to the spirit of national independence? What can
be more germane to the poem than the delineation of the
strength the poet had derived from musing in the hare
and rugged solitudes of St. Mary's Lake, in the introduction
to the second canto? Or than the striking autobiographical
study of his own infancy which I have before
extracted from the introduction to the third? It seems
to me that Marmion without these introductions would
be like the hills which border Yarrow, without the stream
and lake in which they are reflected.

Never at all events in any later poem was Scott's touch
as a mere painter so terse and strong. What a picture
of a Scotch winter is given in these few lines:---

"The sheep before the pinching heaven
To shelter'd dale and down are driven,
Where yet some faded herbage pines,
And yet a watery sunbeam shines.
In meek despondency they eye
The wither'd sward and wintry sky,
And from beneath their summer hill
Stray sadly by Glenkinnon's rill."

Again, if Scott is ever Homeric (which I cannot think
he often is, in spite of Sir Francis Doyle's able criticism,---
(he is too short, too sharp, and too eagerly bent on his
rugged way, for a poet who is always delighting to find
loopholes, even in battle, from which to look out upon the
great story of human nature), he is certainly nearest to
it in such a passage as this:---

"The Isles-men carried at their backs
The ancient Danish battle-axe.
They raised a wild and wondering cry
As with his guide rode Marmion by.
Loud were their clamouring tongues, as when
The clanging sea-fowl leave the fen,
And, with their cries discordant mix'd,
Grumbled and yell'd the pipes betwixt."

In hardly any of Scott's poetry do we find much of
what is called the curiosa felicitas of expression,---the
magic use of words, as distinguished from the mere general
effect of vigour, purity, and concentration of purpose.
But in Marmion occasionally we do find such a use.
Take this description, for instance, of the Scotch tents
near Edinburgh:---

"A thousand did I say? I ween
Thousands on thousands there were seen,
That chequer'd all the heath between
The streamlet and the town;
In crossing ranks extending far,
Forming a camp irregular;
Oft giving way where still there stood
Some relics of the old oak wood,
That darkly huge did intervene,
And tamed the glaring white with green;
In these extended lines there lay
A martial kingdoms vast array."

The line I have italicized seems to me to have more of
the poet's special magic of expression than is at all usual
with Scott. The conception of the peaceful green oak-wood
taming the glaring white of the tented field, is as
fine in idea as it is in relation to the effect of the more
colour on the eye. Judge Scott's poetry by whatever test
you will---whether it be a test of that which is peculiar
to it, its glow of national feeling, its martial ardour, its
swift and rugged simplicity, or whether it be a test of
that which is common to it with most other poetry, its
attraction for all romantic excitements, its special feeling
for the pomp and circumstance of war, its love of light
and colour---and tested either way, Marmion will remain
his finest poem. The battle of Flodden Field touches his
highest point in its expression of stern patriotic feeling,
in its passionate love of daring, and in the force and
swiftness of its movement, no less than in the brilliancy
of its romantic interests, the charm of its picturesque
detail, and the glow of its scenic colouring. No poet ever
equalled Scott in the description of wild and simple scenes
and the expression of wild and simple feelings. But I
have said enough now of his poetry, in which, good as it
is, Scott's genius did not reach its highest point. The
hurried tramp of his somewhat monotonous metre, is apt
to weary the ears of men who do not find their sufficient
happiness, as he did, in dreaming of the wild and daring
enterprises of his loved Border-land. The very quality
in his verse which makes it seize so powerfully on the
imaginations of plain, bold, adventurous men, often makes
it hammer fatiguingly against the brain of those who
need the relief of a wider horizon and a richer world.



CHAPTER VI.<! p60>

COMPANIONS AND FRIENDS.

I have anticipated in some degree, in speaking of Scott's
later poetical works, what, in point of time at least, should
follow some slight sketch of his chosen companions, and
of his occupations in the first period of his married life.
Scott's most intimate friend for some time after he went
to college, probably the one who most stimulated his imagination
in his youth, and certainly one of his most intimate
friends to the very last, was William Clerk, who was
called to the bar on the same day as Scott. He was the
son of John Clerk of Eldin, the author of a book of some
celebrity in its time on Naval Tactics. Even in the
earliest days of this intimacy, the lads who had been Scott's
fellow-apprentices in his father's office, saw with some
jealousy his growing friendship with William Clerk,
and remonstrated with Scott on the decline of his
regard for them, but only succeeded in eliciting from
him one of those outbursts of peremptory frankness which
anything that he regarded as an attempt to encroach on
his own interior liberty of choice always provoked. "I
will never cut any man," he said, "unless I detect him in
scoundrelism, but I know not what right any of you have
to interfere with my choice of my company. As it is, I
fairly own that though I like many of you very much, and
have long done so, I think William Clerk well worth you
all put together."<*> Scott never lost the friendship which

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, i. 214

began with this eager enthusiasm, but his chief intimacy
with Clerk was during his younger days.

In 1808 Scott describes Clerk as "a man of the most
acute intellects and powerful apprehension, who, if he
should ever shake loose the fetters of indolence by which
he has been hitherto trammelled, cannot fail to be distinguished
in the highest degree." Whether for the reason
suggested, or for some other, Clerk never actually gained any
other distinction so great as his friendship with Scott conferred
upon him. Probably Scott had discerned the true
secret of his friend's comparative obscurity. Even while
preparing for the bar, when they had agreed to go
on alternate mornings to each other's lodgings to read
together, Scott found it necessary to modify the arrangement
by always visiting his friend, whom he usually found
in bed. It was William Clerk who sat for the picture of
Darsie Latimer, the hero of Redgauntlet,---whence we
should suppose him to have been a lively, generous, susceptible,
contentious, and rather helter-skelter young man,
much alive to the ludicrous in all situations, very eager to
see life in all its phases, and somewhat vain of his power
of adapting himself equally to all these phases. Scott
tells a story of Clerk's being once baffled---almost for the
first time---by a stranger in a stage coach, who would not,
or could not, talk to him on any subject, until at last
Clerk addressed to him this stately remonstrance, "I
have talked to you, my friend, on all the ordinary subjects
---literature, farming, merchandise, gaming, game-laws,
horse-races, suits-at-law, politics, swindling, blasphemy,
and philosophy,---is there any one subject that you will
favour me by opening upon?" "Sir," replied the inscrutable
stranger, "can you say anything clever about `bend-leather?' "<*>

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, iii. 344.

No doubt this superficial familiarity with a
vast number of subjects was a great fascination to Scott,
and a great stimulus to his own imagination. To the
last he held the same opinion of his friend's latent powers.
"To my thinking," he wrote in his diary in 1825, "I
never met a man of greater powers, of more complete
information on all desirable subjects." But in youth at
least Clerk seems to have had what Sir Walter calls a
characteristic Edinburgh complaint, the "itch for disputation,"
and though he softened this down in later life,
he had always that slight contentiousness of bias which
enthusiastic men do not often heartily like, and which may
have prevented Scott from continuing to the full the
close intimacy of those earlier years. Yet almost his
last record of a really delightful evening, refers to a
bachelor's dinner given by Mr. Clerk, who remained
unmarried, as late as 1827, after all Sir Walter's worst
troubles had come upon him. "In short," says the diary,