FIRST COUNTRY HOMES.
So completely was Scott by nature an out-of-doors man that he cannot
be adequately known either through his poems or through his friends,
without also knowing his external surroundings and occupations. His
first country home was the cottage at Lasswade, on the Esk, about six
miles from Edinburgh, which he took in 1798, a few months after his
marriage, and retained till 1804. It was a pretty little cottage, in
the beautification of which Scott felt great pride, and where he
exercised himself in the small beginnings of those tastes for altering
and planting which grew so rapidly upon him, and at last enticed him
into castle-building and tree-culture on a dangerous, not to say,
ruinous scale. One of Scott's intimate friends, the master of Rokeby,
by whose house and neighbourhood the poem of that name was suggested,
Mr. Morritt, walked along the Esk in 1808 with Scott four years after
he had left it, and was taken out of his way to see it. "I have been
bringing you," he said, "where there is little enough to be seen, only
that Scotch cottage, but though not worth looking at, I could not pass
it. It was our first country house when newly married, and many a
contrivance it had to make it comfortable. I made a dining-table for
it with my own hands. Look at these two miserable willow-trees on
either side the gate into the enclosure; they are tied together at the
top to be an arch, and a cross made of two sticks over them is not yet
decayed. To be sure it is not much of a lion to show a stranger; but I
wanted to see it again myself, for I assure you that after I had
constructed it, _mamma_ (Mrs. Scott) and I both of us thought it so
fine, we turned out to see it by moonlight, and walked backwards from
it to the cottage-door, in admiration of our own magnificence and its
picturesque effect." It was here at Lasswade that he bought the
phaeton, which was the first wheeled carriage that ever penetrated to
Liddesdale, a feat which it accomplished in the first August of this
century.
When Scott left the cottage at Lasswade in 1804, it was to take up his
country residence in Selkirkshire, of which he had now been made
sheriff, in a beautiful little house belonging to his cousin,
Major-General Sir James Russell, and known to all the readers of
Scott's poetry as the Ashestiel of the _Marmion_ introductions. The
Glenkinnon brook dashes in a deep ravine through the grounds to join
the Tweed; behind the house rise the hills which divide the Tweed from
the Yarrow; and an easy ride took Scott into the scenery of the
Yarrow. The description of Ashestiel, and the brook which runs through
it, in the introduction to the first canto of _Marmion_ is indeed one
of the finest specimens of Scott's descriptive poetry:--
"November's sky is chill and drear,
November's leaf is red and sear;
Late, gazing down the steepy linn,
That hems our little garden in,
Low in its dark and narrow glen,
You scarce the rivulet might ken,
So thick the tangled greenwood grew,
So feeble trill'd the streamlet through;
Now, murmuring hoarse, and frequent seen,
Through bush and briar no longer green,
An angry brook, it sweeps the glade,
Brawls over rock and wild cascade,
And, foaming brown with doubled speed,
Hurries its waters to the Tweed."
Selkirk was his nearest town, and that was seven miles from Ashestiel;
and even his nearest neighbour was at Yair, a few miles off lower down
the Tweed,--Yair of which he wrote in another of the introductions to
_Marmion_:--
"From Yair, which hills so closely bind
Scarce can the Tweed his passage find,
Though much he fret, and chafe, and toil,
Till all his eddying currents boil."
At Ashestiel it was one of his greatest delights to look after his
relative's woods, and to dream of planting and thinning woods of his
own, a dream only too amply realized. It was here that a new
kitchen-range was sunk for some time in the ford, which was so swollen
by a storm in 1805 that the horse and cart that brought it were
themselves with difficulty rescued from the waters. And it was here
that Scott first entered on that active life of literary labour in
close conjunction with an equally active life of rural sport, which
gained him a well-justified reputation as the hardest worker and the
heartiest player in the kingdom. At Lasswade Scott's work had been
done at night; but serious headaches made him change his habit at
Ashestiel, and rise steadily at five, lighting his own fire in winter.
"Arrayed in his shooting-jacket, or whatever dress he meant to use
till dinner-time, he was seated at his desk by six o'clock, all his
papers arranged before him in the most accurate order, and his books
of reference marshalled around him on the floor, while at least one
favourite dog lay watching his eye, just beyond the line of
circumvallation. Thus, by the time the family assembled for breakfast,
between nine and ten, he had done enough, in his own language, 'to
break the neck of the day's work.' After breakfast a couple of hours
more were given to his solitary tasks, and by noon he was, as he used
to say, his 'own man.' When the weather was bad, he would labour
incessantly all the morning; but the general rule was to be out and on
horseback by one o'clock at the latest; while, if any more distant
excursion had been proposed overnight, he was ready to start on it by
ten; his occasional rainy days of unintermitted study, forming, as he
said, a fund in his favour, out of which he was entitled to draw for
accommodation whenever the sun shone with special brightness." In his
earlier days none of his horses liked to be fed except by their
master. When Brown Adam was saddled, and the stable-door opened, the
horse would trot round to the leaping-on stone of his own accord, to
be mounted, and was quite intractable under any one but Scott. Scott's
life might well be fairly divided--just as history is divided into
reigns--by the succession of his horses and dogs. The reigns of
Captain, Lieutenant, Brown Adam, Daisy, divide at least the period up
to Waterloo; while the reigns of Sybil Grey, and the Covenanter, or
Douce Davie, divide the period of Scott's declining years. During the
brilliant period of the earlier novels we hear less of Scott's horses;
but of his deerhounds there is an unbroken succession. Camp, Maida
(the "Bevis" of _Woodstock_), and Nimrod, reigned successively between
Sir Walter's marriage and his death. It was Camp on whose death he
relinquished a dinner invitation previously accepted, on the ground
that the death of "an old friend" rendered him unwilling to dine out;
Maida to whom he erected a marble monument, and Nimrod of whom he
spoke so affectingly as too good a dog for his diminished fortunes
during his absence in Italy on the last hopeless journey.
Scott's amusements at Ashestiel, besides riding, in which he was
fearless to rashness, and coursing, which was the chief form of
sporting in the neighbourhood, comprehended "burning the water," as
salmon-spearing by torchlight was called, in the course of which he
got many a ducking. Mr. Skene gives an amusing picture of their
excursions together from Ashestiel among the hills, he himself
followed by a lanky Savoyard, and Scott by a portly Scotch
butler--both servants alike highly sensitive as to their personal
dignity--on horses which neither of the attendants could sit well.
"Scott's heavy lumbering buffetier had provided himself against the
mountain storms with a huge cloak, which, when the cavalcade was at
gallop, streamed at full stretch from his shoulders, and kept flapping
in the other's face, who, having more than enough to do in preserving
his own equilibrium, could not think of attempting at any time to
control the pace of his steed, and had no relief but fuming and
_pesting_ at the _sacré manteau_, in language happily unintelligible
to its wearer. Now and then some ditch or turf-fence rendered it
indispensable to adventure on a leap, and no farce could have been
more amusing than the display of politeness which then occurred
between these worthy equestrians, each courteously declining in favour
of his friend the honour of the first experiment, the horses fretting
impatient beneath them, and the dogs clamouring encouragement."[24]
Such was Scott's order of life at Ashestiel, where he remained from
1804 to 1812. As to his literary work here, it was enormous.
Besides finishing _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, writing _Marmion_,
_The Lady of the Lake_, part of _The Bridal of Triermain_, and part of
_Rokeby_, and writing reviews, he wrote a _Life of Dryden_, and edited
his works anew with some care, in eighteen volumes, edited _Somers's
Collection of Tracts_, in thirteen volumes, quarto, _Sir Ralph
Sadler's Life, Letters, and State Papers_, in three volumes, quarto,
_Miss Seward's Life and Poetical Works_, _The Secret History of the
Court of James I_., in two volumes, _Strutt's Queenhoo Hall_, in four
volumes, 12mo., and various other single volumes, and began his heavy
work on the edition of Swift. This was the literary work of eight
years, during which he had the duties of his Sheriffship, and, after
he gave up his practice as a barrister, the duties of his Deputy
Clerkship of Session to discharge regularly. The editing of Dryden
alone would have seemed to most men of leisure a pretty full
occupation for these eight years, and though I do not know that Scott
edited with the anxious care with which that sort of work is often now
prepared, that he went into all the arguments for a doubtful reading
with the pains that Mr. Dyce spent on the various readings of
Shakespeare, or that Mr. Spedding spent on a various reading of Bacon,
yet Scott did his work in a steady, workmanlike manner, which
satisfied the most fastidious critics of that day, and he was never, I
believe, charged with hurrying or scamping it. His biographies of
Swift and Dryden are plain solid pieces of work--not exactly the works
of art which biographies have been made in our day--not comparable to
Carlyle's studies of Cromwell or Frederick, or, in point of art, even
to the life of John Sterling, but still sensible and interesting,
sound in judgment, and animated in style.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 24: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 268-9.]