Many and wonderful as are the romances which Sir Walter Scott wrote,
there are none of them so wonderful as the romance of his own life. It
is not that from a simple son of a Writer to the Signet, he raised
himself to wealth and title;--that many have done before him, and far
more than that. That many a man of most ordinary brain can achieve;
can, as it were, almost stumble into, he knows not how. That many a
scrivener, a paviour, or a pawnbroker, has accomplished, and been
still deemed no miracle. The city of London, from the days of Dick
Whittington to those of Sir Peter Laurie, can show a legion of such
culminations. But Sir Walter Scott won _his_ wealth and title in
fields more renowned for starvation and "Calamities," than for making
of fortunes--those of literature. It was from the barren hills of
Parnassus that he drew down wealth in quantities that struck the whole
world with astonishment, and made those famous mountains, trodden bare
with the feet of glorious paupers, rivals of the teeming heights of
Mexico and Peru. At a period when the sources of literature appeared
to have exhausted themselves; when it was declared that nothing
original could be again expected in poetry, that all its secret places
were rifled, all its fashions outworn, all its imagery beaten into
triteness; when romance was grown mawkish and even childish; when Mrs.
Radcliffe and Horace Walpole had exhausted its terrors, and the
novelist's path through common life, it was thought, had been gleaned
of all possible discovery by Fielding, Richardson and Smollett,
Goldsmith and Sterne,--when this was confirmed in public opinion by
the sentimentalities of Henry Mackenzie, forth started Scott as a
giant of the first magnitude, and demolished all the fond ideas of
such dusty-brained dreamers. He opened up on every side new scenes of
invention. In poetry and romance, he showed that there was not a
corner of these islands which was not, so far from being exhausted,
standing thick with the richest materials for the most wonderful and
beautiful creations. The reign of the schoolmen and the copyists was
at an end. Nature, history, tradition, life, every thing and every
place, were shown by this new and vigorous spirit to be full to
overflowing with what had been, in the dim eyes of former
_soi-disant_ geniuses, only dry bones; but which, at the touch of
this bold necromancer, sprung up living forms of the most fascinating
grace. The whole public opened eyes of wonder, and in breathless
amazement and delight saw this active and unweariable agent call round
him, from the brooks and mountains of his native land, troop after
troop of kings, queens, warriors, women of regal forms and more regal
spirits; visions of purity and loveliness; and lowly creations of no
less glorious virtues. The whole land seemed astir with armies,
insurrections, pageantries of love, and passages of sorrow, that for
twenty years kept the enraptured public in a trance, as it were, of
one accumulating marvel and joy. There seemed no bounds to his powers,
or the field of his operations. From Scotland he descended into
England, stepped over into France, Germany, Switzerland, nay, even
into Palestine and India; and people asked, as volumes, any one of
which would have established a first-rate reputation, were poured out,
year after year, with the rapid prodigality of a mountain stream,--is
there no limit to the wondrous powers of this man's imagination and
creative faculty? There really seemed none. Fresh stories, of totally
novel construction, fresh characters, of the most startling
originality, were continually coming forward, as from an inexhaustible
world of soul. Not only did the loftiest and most marked characters of
our history, either the Scotch or English, again move before us in all
their vitality of passions and of crimes, of virtue and of heroism
as--Bruce, James V. and VI., Richard Coeur de Lion, Elizabeth, Mary
of Scots, Leicester, James I. of England, Montrose, Claverhouse,
Cumberland the butcher; not only did the covenanters preach and fight
anew, and the highland clans rise in aid of the Stuart, but new
personages, of the rarest beauty, the haughtiest command, or the most
curious humor, swarmed out upon the stage of life, thick, as if their
creation had cost no effort. Flora M'Ivor, Rose Bradwardine, Rebecca,
the high-souled Jewess, the unhappy Lucy Ashton and Amy Robsart, the
lowly Effie Deans, and her homely yet glorious sister Jenny, the
bewitching Di Vernon, and Brenda Troil of the northern isles, stand
radiant amid a host of lesser beauties; while Rob Roy, the Robin Hood
of the hills, treads in manly dignity his native heather; Balfour of
Burley issues a stalwart apparition from his hiding-places; and for
infinitude of humor, and strangeness of aspect and mood, where are the
pages that can present a troop like these: the Baron of Bradwardine,
Dominie Sampson, Meg Merrilies, Monkbarns, Edie Ochiltree, Dugald
Dalgetty, Old Mortality, Bailie Nicol Jarvie, Andrew Fairservice,
Caleb Balderstone, Flibbertigibbet, Norna of the Fitful Head, and that
fine fellow, the farmer of Liddesdale, with whom every one feels a
desire to shake hands, honest Dandie Dinmont, with all his Peppers and
Mustards yaffling at his heels?
It may be safely said that, in twenty years, one man enriched the
literature of his country with more story of intense beauty, and more
original character, than all its literati together for two hundred
years before. And this is only part of the wonder with Sir Walter
Scott; he was all this time a man of business, of grave and various
business--a Clerk of Session, sitting in the Parliament-house of
Edinburgh daily, during term, from ten to four o'clock--the Sheriff of
Selkirk, with its calls--an active cavalry volunteer--a sitter on gas
and other committees--a zealous politician and reviewer--mixed up in a
world of printing and publishing concerns, and ready to run off and
traverse as diligently sea and land, in all directions, at every
possible interval. Beside all this, he was a buyer of lands, a planter
of extensive woods, a raiser of a fairy castle, a keen sportsman with
grayhound and fish-spear. Amid all these avocations and amusements,
his writing appeared the produce of his odd hours; and this mass of
romance, on which his fame chiefly rests, after all, but a fragment of
his literary labor. In the enormous list of his works, to be found at
the end of his Life by Lockhart, his novels and poems appear but a
slight sprinkling amid his heavier toils: reviews, translations,
essays, six volumes; Tales of a Grandfather, twelve volumes; sermons,
memoirs, a multitude; editions of Swift and Dryden, in nineteen
volumes and eighteen volumes; Somers's Tracts, in thirteen volumes;
antiquities, lives, etc., etc. The array of works, written and edited,
is astounding: and when we recollect that little of this was done
before forty, and that he died at the age of sixty-one, our
astonishment becomes boundless. It is in vain to look for another such
life of gigantic literary labor, performed by a man of the world, and
no exclusive, unmitigated bookworm; much less of such an affluent
produce of originality. In these particulars, Scott stands alone.
But though the wonder of his life is seen in this, the romance of it
yet remains. He arose to fill a great and remarkable point of time. A
new era was commencing, which was to be enriched out of the neglected
matter of the old. The suppression of the rebellion of 1745 was the
really vitalizing act of the union of Scotland and England. By it the
old clan life and spirit were extinguished. The spirit which
maintained a multitude of old forms, costumes, and modes of life, was
by that event annihilated; and the rapid amalgamation of the two
nations in a time of internal peace, would soon have obliterated much
that was extremely picturesque and full of character, were it not
seized and made permanent by some mighty and comprehensive mind. That
mind was Scott's! He stood on the threshold of a new world, with the
falling fabric of the past close beneath his view. Every circumstance
which was necessary to make him the preserver of the memory and life
of this past world met in him, as by a marked decree of the Almighty.
He had all the sensibility and imagination of the past, with the
keenest relish of every thing that was prominent in living character
among his fellow-men. He was inspired with the love of nature, as an
undying passion, by having been, in his earliest years, suffered to
run wild amid the rocks of Smailholm, and the beautiful scenery of
Kelso. The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry--that herald of nature
to all that were capable of loving her at that period, and which,
without saying a word about the false taste of the age, at once awoke
in it the true one, was to him but the revelation of still further
relics of the like kind in his own country. He had heard similar
strains from his nurses--from the country people among whom he had
been cast, from the ladies of his family; and Percy's volume was but
as a trumpet note, awakening him to a consciousness of poetic wealth,
that lay all around him thick as the dews of a spring morning. In
highland and in lowland, but especially along that wild border-land
which had become the delight of his boyhood, the lays and the
traditions of the past were in every mouth, and awaited some fortunate
hand to gather them. His was the hand destined to do that and more.
Every step that he made in the pursuit of the old ballad literature of
his country, only showed him more and more of the immense mass of the
materials of poetry and romance which the past ages had neglected as
vulgar. The so-called poets of two or three generations had gone about
on the stilts of classical pride; and had overlooked, nay, had scorned
to touch even with their shoe-toes, the golden ore of romantic
character and deed, that lay in actual heaps on every mountain, and
along every mountain stream. Young Scott, transported at the sight,
flew east and west; traversed mountain and heath, with all the
buoyancy of youth and the throbbing pulse of poetry. He went among the
common people; and amid shepherds, and with housewives at their
wheels, and milk-maids over their pails, he heard the songs and
ballads which had been flashed forth amid the clash of swords, or
hymned mournfully over the fallen, in wild days of wrong and strife,
and still stirred the blood of their descendants when they were become
but the solace of the long watch on the brae with the flock, or the
excitement of the winter fireside. Nay, he found not only poetry and
romance, but poets and romancers. Hogg and Leyden, Laidlaw and
Shortreed, all men of genius, all glowing with love of their native
land, became his friends, companions, and fellow-gatherers. The
romance of his life had now begun. Full of youth and the delicious
buoyancy of its enjoyment, full of expanding hopes and aspirations,
dreams of power came upon him. He put forth his volumes of The
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and found them realized. His
horizon was at once wonderfully widened. The brightest spirits of
England, as well as of his own country, hailed him as a true brother.
The dawn of this new era was kindling apace. The hearts which had
caught the same impulse from the same source as himself, and owned the
native charms of nature, were now becoming vocal with the burden of
this new music. Campbell, Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, and others,
were sending forth new strains of poetry, such as had not been heard
since Shakspeare, and Spenser, and Milton had lived. But Walter Scott
was to become something more than a poet. His destiny was to become
the great romance writer of his age; to gather up and mold into a new
form the life and spirit of the past many-colored ages of his country,
and to leave them as a legacy of delight to the world forever. For
this purpose he was qualified, by sundry accomplishments and
experiences. He studied the literature of Germany, and drew thence a
love of the wild and wonderful; he became a lawyer, and thus was
brought into closer contact with the inner workings of society, its
forms and formalities. He was brought to a close gaze upon family
history, upon the passions that agitate men in the transitions of
property, and in the committal of crime, or the process of its arrest
and punishment. He was made to study men, both as they were and had
been, and was enriched with a knowledge of the technicalities which
are so essential to him who will describe, with accuracy, trials and
transactions in which both life and property are at stake, and the
crooked arts of villains, especially the villains of the law. To these
most auspicious preparations for his great task--a task not yet
revealed to him--he added a keen relish for antiquities; and a memory
as gigantic as his frame was robust. Did there yet want any thing? It
was a genial humor, which rejoiced in the social pleasures of life,
and that, while it lived amid the open hearts of his fellow-men, in
the hours of domestic freedom and convivial gayety, saw deep into
their hearts, and hoarded up without knowing it theories of the
actuality of existence, and of original character. This too was
eminently his.
His Border Minstrelsy published, he turned his views northward, and a
still more stirring scene presented itself. The Highlands, with their
beautiful mountains and lakes, their clan life, their thrilling
traditions and stories of but recently past conflicts, bloodshed, and
sorrow;--their striking costume, their pipers blowing strains that,
amid the rocks, and forests, and dark heather of that romantic region,
kindled even in the heart of the stranger a strange enthusiasm,--all
was to him full of the fire of poetry, and of a romance too large,
with all its quick and passionate characters, and its vivid details,
for poetry itself. First came forth his Metrical Romances--themselves
a new and inspiriting species of poetry, founded, indeed, on an old
basis, but quickened with the soul of modern knowledge, and handled
with the harmonious freedom of a modern master. These, however, now we
may regard them as somewhat overstepped by the more impassioned lays
of Byron, and by the more expansive wonders of the author's own prose
romances, were, at the time, an actual infusion of new life-blood into
the public. They were the opening up of a totally new world, fresh and
beautiful as the imagination could conceive. They actually seemed to
smell of the heather. Every rock, hung with its dark pines, or
graceful birches; every romantic lake, bosomed in its lonely
mountains; the hunt careering along its richly colored glens; the
warrior, full of a martial and chivalrous spirit; the lithe
Highlander, with dirk and philibeg, crouching in the heath, like the
Indian in his forest, or speeding from clan to clan with the fiery
cross of war,--every one of these vivid images was as new to the
English public as if they had been brought from the farthest regions
of Japan. Then the whole of these newly discovered regions, the
Highlands, for such they were, was covered with traditions of
strangest exploits; the people were a wild, irritable, vengeful, but
still high-minded people, exhibiting the equally prominent virtues and
crimes of a demi-civilized race. How refreshing was the contemplation
of such scenes and people to the jaded minds of the English, so long
doomed to mediocre monotony! I well remember, then a youth, with what
avidity a new poem of Walter Scott's was awaited for and devoured. It
was a poetry welcome to all, because it had not merely the qualities
of good poetry, which would have been lost on the majority of readers,
but it had all this novelty of scenery and character, and the
excitement of brilliant story, to recommend it. Then it was
perpetually shifting its ground. It was now amid the lonely regions of
the south of Scotland; now high up amid heaths, and lochs, and
pine-hung mountains, the shepherd's sheiling, the roar of the
cataract, and the cry of the eagle, mixing with the wild sound of the
distant pibroch; and now amid the green, naked mountains and islands
of the west, and savage rocks, and thundering seas, and the cries of
sea-birds, as they were roused by the wandering Bruce and his
followers, on their way to win back the crown of Scotland from the
English invader.
The sensation which these poems produced is now forgotten, and can
only be conceived by those who can remember their coming out; but
these were soon to be eclipsed by the prose romances of the same
author. The ground, the spirit, and the machinery were the same; but
these were now allowed to work in broad, unfettered prose, and a
thousand traits and personages were introduced, which could by no
possibility have found a place in verse. The variety of grotesque
characters, the full country dialect and dialogues of all sorts of
actors in the scenes, thus gave an infinite superiority to the prose
over the poetry. The first reading of Waverley was an era in the
existence of every man of taste. There was a life, a color, a feeling
given to his mind, which he had never before experienced. To have
lived at that period when, ever and anon, it was announced that a new
novel by the Author of Waverley was coming out; to have sat down the
moment it could be laid hold of, and have entered through it into
another world, full of new objects of admiration, new friends, and new
subjects of delight and discussion,--was, in truth, a real privilege.
The fame of Scott, before great, now became unbounded. It flew over
sea and land. His novels were translated into every language which
could boast of a printing-press; and the glory of two such men as
himself and Byron made still more proud the renown of that invincible
island, which stood against all the assaults of Napoleon, and had now
even chained that terrible conqueror, as its captive, on a far
sea-rock.
I say the fame of Scott was thus augmented by the Waverley Novels.
Yes, they were, long before they were owned to be his, felt by the
public to be nobody else's. The question might be, and was agitated,
but still there was a tacit feeling that Scott was their author, far
and wide diffused. Dense, indeed, must they have been who could doubt
it. What were they but prose amplifications of his Lady of the Lake,
his Marmion, and his Lord of the Isles? So early as 1820, rambling on
foot with Mrs. Howitt in the Highlands, we came to Aberfoil, where the
minister, Mr. Graham, who had written Sketches of the Scenery of
Perthshire, accompanied us to spots in that neighborhood which are
marked ones in the novel of Rob Roy. It was he who had first turned
the attention of Scott to the scenery of Lock Katrine and the
Trosachs. "Can there be any doubt," we asked, "that Scott is the
author of Waverley?" "Could it possibly be any body else?" he replied.
"If the whole spirit and essence of those stories did not show it, his
visits here during the writing of Rob Roy would have been decisive
enough. He came here, and inquired out all the traditionary haunts of
Rob. I accompanied him upon Loch Ard, and at a particular spot I saw
his attention fixed; he observed my notice, but desired his daughter
to sing something, to divert it; but I felt assured that before long I
should see that spot described--and there, indeed, was Helen Macgregor
made to give her celebrated breakfast." Long before the formal
acknowledgment was made, few, in fact, were they who were not as fully
satisfied of the identity of Walter Scott and the author of Waverley,
as was the shrewd Ettrick Shepherd, who, from the first, had had the
Waverley Novels bound and labeled, "Scott's Novels." No one could have
seen Abbotsford itself without being at once convinced of it, if he
had never been so before. Without, the very stones of the old gateway
of the Tolbooth of Edinburgh stared the fact in his face; within, it
was a perfect collection of testimonies to the fact. The gun of Rob
Roy; the pistols of Claverhouse; the thumbikins which had tortured the
Covenanters; nay, a whole host of things cried out--"We belong to the
author of Waverley."
And never did fame so richly follow the accomplishment of deeds of
immortality as in the case of Sir Walter. From the monarch to the
meanest reader; from Edinburgh to the farthest wilds of Russia and
America, the enthusiastic admiration of "The Great Northern Magician,"
as he was called, was one universal sentiment. Wherever he went he was
made to feel it; and from every quarter streamed crowds on crowds to
Abbotsford to see him. He was on the kindliest terms of friendship
with almost every known writer; to his most distinguished
cotemporaries, especially Byron, Miss Edgeworth, and Miss Joanna
Baillie, he seemed as though he could not testify sufficient honor;
and, on the other hand, the highest nobility, nay, royalty itself,
felt the pride of his presence and acquaintance. Never had the glory
of any literary man, not even of those who, like Petrarch, had been
crowned publicly as the poetic monarchs of the age, reached such a
pitch of intense and universal splendor. The field of this glory was
not one country,--it was that of the vast civilized world, in which
almost every man was a reader. No evidences more striking of this were
ever given than on his tour in Ireland, where the play was not allowed
to go on in Dublin till he showed himself to the eager people; and on
his return from whence, he declared that his whole journey had been an
ovation. It was the same on his last going on the Continent. But the
fact mentioned by Lockhart as occurring during his attendance in
London at the coronation of George IV., in 1821, is worth a thousand
others, as it shows how truly he was held in honor by the common
people. He was returning from the coronation banquet in Westminster
Hall. He had missed his carriage, and "had to return on foot, between
two and three in the morning, when he and a young gentleman, his
companion, found themselves locked in the crowd, somewhere near
Whitehall; and the bustle and tumult were such, that his friend was
afraid some accident might happen to the lame limb. A space for the
dignitaries was kept clear, at that point, by the Scots Grays. Sir
Walter addressed a sergeant of this celebrated regiment, begging to be
allowed to pass by him into the open ground in the middle of the
street. The man answered shortly, that his orders were strict--that
the thing was impossible. While he was endeavoring to persuade the
sergeant to relent, some new wave of turbulence approached from
behind, and his young companion exclaimed, in a loud voice--'Take
care, Sir Walter Scott, take care!' The stalwart dragoon hearing the
name, said--'What! Sir Walter Scott? He shall get through, anyhow.' He
then addressed the soldiers near him--'Make room, men, for Sir Walter
Scott, our illustrious countryman!' The men answered--'Sir Walter
Scott! God bless him!' and he was in a moment within the guarded line
of safety."
This is beautiful. Sir Walter had won a proud immortality, and lived
now in the very noon of its living radiance. But the romance is still
behind. When about six-and-twenty, at the pleasant little
watering-place of Gilsland, in Cumberland, he fell in love with a
young French lady, Charlotte Margaret Charpentier. The meeting was
like one of those in his own novels. He was riding with his friend,
Adam Fergusson--the joyous, genial friend of his whole life--one day
in that neighborhood, when they met a young lady taking an airing on
horseback, whom neither of them had before seen. They were so much
struck with her appearance, as to keep her in view till they were sure
that she was a visitor at the wells. The same evening they met her at
a ball, and so much was Scott charmed with her that he soon made her a
proposal, and she became his wife. All who knew her in her youth speak
of her as a very charming person; though I confess that her portrait
at Abbotsford does not give me much idea of her personal charms. But,
says Mr. Lockhart, who had the best opportunity of knowing, "Without
the features of a regular beauty, she was rich in personal
attractions; 'a form that was fashioned as light as a fairy's;' a
complexion of the clearest and the brightest olive; eyes large,
deep-set and dazzling, of the finest Italian brown; and a profusion of
silken tresses, black as the raven's wing: her address hovering
between the reserve of a pretty Englishwoman who has not mingled
largely in general society, and a certain natural archness and gayety
that suited well with the accompaniment of a French accent. A lovelier
vision, as all who remember her in the bloom of her days have assured
me, could hardly have been imagined."
With his charming young wife, Scott settled at Lasswade, about seven
miles from Edinburgh. Here he had a lonely and retired cottage, in a
most beautiful neighborhood; and was within an easy distance of
Edinburgh and his practice there as an advocate. Here he busied
himself in his literary pursuits, and made those excursions into
Liddesdale, and Ettrick forest, and other parts of the border country,
in quest of materials for his Border Minstrelsy, in which he found
such exquisite delight. Here he found Shortreed, Hogg, Laidlaw, men
all enthusiastic in the same pursuits and tastes. At this time, too,
he became acquainted, in Edinburgh, with Leyden, also a border man,
full of ballad and poetry, and with powers as gigantic as Scott
himself, though uncouth as a colt from the moors. There is nothing in
any biography which strikes me so full of the enjoyment of life as
Scott's _raids_, as he called them, into Liddesdale, and other
border wildernesses, at that period. He found everywhere a new
country, untrodden by tourists, unknown to fame, but richly deserving
of it. There was a new land discovered, full, from end to end, of wild
scenery, and strange, rude, but original character, rich in native
wit, humor, and fun. Down Liddesdale there was no road; in it there
was no inn. Scott's gig, on the last of seven years' _raids_, was
the first wheel-carriage that ever entered it. "The travelers passed
from the shepherd's hut to the minister's manse; and again from the
cheerful hospitality of the manse, to the rough and jolly welcome of
the homestead." "To these rambles," says Lockhart, "Scott owed much of
the material of his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and not less of
that intimate acquaintance with the living manners of those
unsophisticated regions, which constitutes the chief charm of one of
the most charming of his prose works." "He was _makin' himsel'_
a' the time," said Mr. Shortreed; "but he did na ken, may be, what he
was about till years had passed. At first he thought o' little, I dare
say, but the queerness and the fun." That overflowing enjoyment of
life which so much distinguished Scott at all periods, except the
short melancholy one of his decline, now exhibited itself in all its
exuberance. "Eh me!" says Mr. Shortreed, "sic an endless fund o' humor
and drollery as he then had wi' him! Never ten yards but we were
either laughing, or roaring, and singing. Wherever we stopped, how
brawlie he suited himsel' to every body! He aye did as the lave did;
never made himsel' the great man, or took ony airs in the company." It
was in one of these _raids_ that they fell in with the original
Dandie Dinmont.
His Border Minstrelsy came out; his fame spread. His Metrical Romances
followed; and he was the most popular man of the day. In matters of
business he rapidly advanced. He was made Clerk of Session and Sheriff
of Selkirk. He quitted his cottage at Lasswade, for the still more
beautiful, but more solitary farm of Ashestiel, on the banks of the
Tweed. Lord Byron's poetry blazed out; but Scott took another flight,
in the Historical Novel, and was still, if not the greatest poet, the
most popular man of his age. Never had there been any evidence of such
pecuniary success in the literary world. He made about £15,000 by his
poetry; but by his prose he made, by a single work, his £5,000, his
£10,000, his £12,000. His facility was equal to his success; it was no
long and laborious task to complete one of these truly golden volumes;
they were thrown off as fast as he could write; and, in three months,
a novel, worth eight or ten thousand pounds in the market, was
finished! Well might his hopes and views tower to an unprecedented
height. The spirit of poetry and romance reveled in his brain, and
began to show itself not only in the construction of volumes, but in
the building of a castle, an estate, a family to stand amid the
aristocratic families forever. The name of Walter Scott should not
only descend with his children as that of an illustrious writer, but
should clothe them with the world-honored mantle of titular rank. And
every thing was auspicious. The tide and the wind of fortune, and
public favor, blew wondrously. Work after work was thrown off;
enormous sums often were netted. Publishers and printers struggled for
his patronage; but Constable and the Ballantynes, acquaintances of his
youth, were selected for his favor; and great became their standing
and business. There seemed not one fortune, but three secure of
accomplishment. The poet, in the romantic solitude of Ashestiel, or
galloping over the heathy hills in the neighborhood, as he mused on
new and ever succeeding visions of romances among them, conceived the
most fascinating scheme of all. It was to purchase lands, to raise
himself a fairy castle, to become, not the minstrel of a lord, as were
many of those of old, but a minstrel-lord himself. The practical
romance grew. On the banks of the Tweed, then, began to rise the fairy
castle. Quaint and beautiful as one of his descriptions, it arose;
lands were added to lands; over hill and dale spread the dark
embossment of future woods; and Abbotsford began to be spoken of far
and wide. The poet had chosen his seat in the midst of the very land
of ancient poetry itself. At three miles' distance stood the fair pile
of Melrose, which he had made so attractive, by his Lay of the Last
Minstrel, to the whole world. Near that showed themselves the Eildon
hills, the haunt of True Thomas; at their feet ran the classic stream
of Huntly burn. The Cowdenknows lifted its black summit farther down
the Tweed; and upward was a whole fairy land--Carterhaugh, Newark
Tower, Ettrick forest, St. Mary's Lake, and the Dowie Dens of Yarrow.
There was scarcely an object in the whole country round--neither hill,
nor wood, nor stream, nor single rock--which was not full of the
associations of ballad fame. Here, then, he lived, like an old feudal
lord, with his hounds and his trusty vassals; some of the latter, as
Laidlaw and Tom Purdie, occupying the station of those humble,
faithful friends, who tend so much to complete the happiness of life.
In truth, never did the poet himself dream a fairer dream beneath a
summer oak than he had now realized around him. His lovely wife, the
lady of the domain; his children shooting fast up into beautiful
manhood and womanhood; his castle and domain built, and won, as they
were, from the regions of enchantment; and friends and worshipers
flocking from every country, to behold the far famed minstrel.
Princes, and nobles, and men of high name in every walk of life, were
his guests.
Every man of any note called him friend. The most splendid equipages
crowded the way toward his house; the feast was spread continually as
it were the feast of a king; while on the balcony, ranging along the
whole front, stalked to and fro, in his tartans, the wild piper, and
made the air quiver with the tempestuous music of the hills. Arms and
armor were ranged along the walls and galleries of his hall. There
were portraits of some of the most noted persons who had figured in
his lays and stories--as of Claverhouse, Monmouth, the Pretender, the
severed head of the Queen of Scots; with those of brother poets,
Dryden, Thomson, Prior, and Gay. There were the escutcheons of all the
great clan chieftains blazoned round the ceiling of his hall; and
swords, daggers, pistols, and instruments of torture, from the times
and the scenes he had celebrated.
Such was the scene of splendor which had sprung from the pen of one
man. If it were wonderful, the streams of wealth which continued to
pour from the same enchanted goose-quill were still more astounding.
From Lockhart's Life we see that, independent of what these works have
made since, he had pretty early netted above £13,000 by his poems,
though he had sold some of them in their first edition.
£ _s._ _d._
Border Minstrel, 1st and 2d vol. 1st edit. 78 10 0
Copyright of the same work 500 0 0
Lay of the Last Minstrel, copyright sold 769 6 0
Marmion, copyright sold 1,000 0 0
Lady of the Lake, copyright sold 2,100 0 0
Rokeby, copyright sold 5,000 0 0
Lord of the Isles 3,000 0 0
Halidan Hill 1,000 0 0
------------------
£13,447 16 0
------------------
But this was nothing to the produce of his romances. Of Waverley,
fifty-one thousand copies had been sold when that Life was published,
and Scott tells us that he cleared £400 by each one thousand copies,
that is £20,400.
Guy Mannering, 60,000, or £24,000 0 0
Rob Roy, 53,000, or 21,200 0 0
Of the rest we have no total amount given; but, at a similar rate, his
twenty-one novels would make an amount of £460,000! Beside this, he
received for the Life of Napoleon above £18,000. In three months he
wrote Woodstock, for which he tells us that he received £8,400 at
once. Then there are his Tales of a Grandfather, twelve volumes, a
most popular work, but of which no proceeds are given. For his History
of Scotland for Lardner's Cyclopædia, £1,500; for editing Dryden,
£756; for seven Essays for the Encyclopædia Britannica, £300; Paul's
Letters to his Kinsfolk, £1,350; for a contribution to the Keepsake,
£400, which he says he considered poor pay. Then he wrote thirty-five
Reviews for the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, for which such a
writer could not, on an average, receive less than £50 each, probably
£100; but say £50, that is £1,750. And these items are exclusive of
the vast mass of edited editions of Swift, of Memoirs, Antiquities,
etc., etc. They do not either, except in the three novels specified,
include the proceeds of the collective editions of either his prose or
his poetry. It appears certain that his works must have produced to
the author or his trustees, at the very least, _half-a-million of
money_!
Truly this was the revenue of a monarch in the realm of letters!
Popular as Lord Byron was, I suppose the whole which he received for
his writings did not realize £30,000. Scott cleared that by any two of
his novels. He could clear a third of it in three months. Well might
he think to lay field to field, and house to house, and plant his
children in the land as lords of the soil, and titled magnates
forever!
But, as the fabric of this glorious estate had risen as by the spell
of a necromancer, so it fell. It was like one of those palaces, with
its fairy gardens, and lawns scattered with diamonds instead of dews,
in the Arabian Nights, which, with the destruction of the spell,
passed away in a crash of thunder. A house of cards is proverbial, and
this house of books fell at one shock, and struck the world with a
terrible astonishment. It was found that the great minstrel was not
carefully receiving his profits, and investing them; but was engaged
as partner in the printing and publishing of his works. His publisher
and his printers, drained on the one hand by the vast outlay for
castle-building, land-buying, and the maintenance of all comers; and,
on the other, infected with the monstrous scene of acquisition which
was revealed to their eyes--were moving on a slippery course, and at
the shock of the great panic in 1826 went to the ground; leaving Scott
debtor to the amount of £120,000, beside a mortgage of £10,000 on his
estate!
In some instances the darkness and the difficulty come in the early
stages, and wind up in light and happiness; in others, the light comes
first, and the darkness at the end. These latter are tragedies, and
the romance of Scott's life was a tragedy. How sad and piteous is the
winding up here to contemplate! The thunderbolt of fate had fallen on
the "Great Magician." The glory of his outward estate was over, but
never did that of his inner soul show so brilliantly. Gentle, and
genial, and kindly to all men, had he shown himself in his most
prosperous days; but now the giant strength of his fortitude, and the
nobility of his moral principle, came into magnificent play. He was
smitten, sorely smitten, but he was not subdued. Not a hero which he
had described could match him in his contest with the rudeness of
adversity. He could have paid his dividend, as is usual in such cases,
and his prolific pen would have raised him a second fortune. But,
then, his honor! no, he would pay to the uttermost farthing! And so,
with a sorrowful but not murmuring or desponding heart, he went to
work again on his giant's work, and, in six years, with his own hand,
with his single pen, paid off £16,000 a-year! This is an achievement
which has no parallel. With failing health, with all his brilliant
hopes of establishing a great family dashed to the ground, with the
dearest objects of his heart and health dropping and perishing before
him, he went on and won £60,000, resolved to pay all or perish. And he
did perish! His wife, shattered by the shock, died; he was left with a
widowed heart still to labor on. Awful pangs and full of presage
seized his own frame; a son and a daughter failed too in health; his
old man, Tom Purdie, died suddenly; his great publisher, and one of
his printers, died, too, of the fatal malady of ruined hopes. All
these old connections, formed in the bright morning of life, and which
had made his ascent so cheering and his toil so easy, seemed now to be
giving way; and how dark was become that life which had exceeded all
others in its joyous luster!
Yet, in the darkness, how the invincible soul of the heroic old man
went on rousing himself to fight against the most violent shocks of
fortune and of his own constitution. "I have walked the last on the
domains I have planted; sat the last in the halls I have built; but
death would have taken them from me if misfortune had spared them. My
poor people whom I loved so well! There is just another die to turn
against me in this run of ill luck; _i.e._, if I should break my
magic wand in the fall from this elephant, and lose my popularity with
my fortune!... But I find my eyes moistening, and that will not do; I
will not yield without a fight for it." "Well, exertion, exertion. O
invention, rouse thyself! May man be kind! may God be propitious! The
worst is, I never quite know when I am right or wrong." "Slept ill,
not having been abroad these eight days; now a dead sleep in the
morning, and, when the awakening comes, a strong feeling how well I
could dispense with it for once and forever. This passes away,
however, as better and more dutiful thoughts arise in my mind." Poor
man! and that worst which he feared came. His publisher told him,
though reluctantly, that his power had departed, and that he had
better lay by his pen! To a man like Scott, who had done such wonders,
and still doggedly labored on to do others as great, that was the last
and the bitterest feeling that could remain with life.
Is there any thing in language more pathetic than the words of Sir
Walter, when, at Abbotsford, he looked round him after his wife's
death and wrote thus in his journal:--"When I contrast what this place
now is, with what it has been not long since, I think my heart will
break. Lonely, aged, deprived of my family--all but poor Anne; an
impoverished, an embarrassed man, deprived of the sharer of my
thoughts and counsels, who could always talk down my sense of the
calamitous apprehensions which break the heart that must bear them
alone."
Sir Walter was the Job of modern times. His wealth and prosperity had
been like his, and the fabric of his fortune was smitten at the four
corners at once by the tempest of calamity; but his patience and
resignation rivaled even those of the ancient patriarch. In no period
of his life, though he was admirable in all, did he display so lofty a
nobility of nature as in that of his adversity. Let us, who have
derived such boundless enjoyment from his labors, praise with a
fitting honor his memory. How descriptive are the words of Prior,
which in his last days he applied to himself:--
"Whate'er thy countrymen have done,
By law and wit, by sword and gun,
In thee is faithfully recited;
And all the living world that view
Thy works, give thee the praises due--
At once instructed and delighted."
That tragic reverse which bowed down himself and so many of those who
had shared with him in his happiness, did not stop with his death. His
daughters and one of his sons soon followed him. His eldest and only
surviving child, the present Sir Walter, has no family; there is no
heir of his name, though, I believe, there are two of his blood, the
son and daughter of Mr. Lockhart, of the third generation. As in the
greatest geniuses in general, in Milton, Shakspeare, Byron, the direct
male line has failed in Sir Walter Scott. "The hope of founding a
family," says Lockhart, "died with him."
Such is the wonderful and touching romance of the life of Sir Walter
Scott. We might pause and point to many a high teaching in it--but
enough; in the beautiful words of Sir Egerton Bridges, quoted by
Lockhart--"The glory dies not, and the grief is past."
We will now visit seriatim the homes and haunts of this extraordinary
man.
Sir Walter has pointed out himself in his autobiography the place of
his birth. He says, "I was born, I believe, on the 15th of August,
1771, in a house belonging to my father at the head of the College
Wynd. It was pulled down with others to make room for the northern
part of the new college." In ascending the Wynd, it occupied the
left-hand corner at the top, and it projected into what is now North
College-street. According to the account of my friend, Mr. Robert
Chambers, in his Reekiana, it has been pulled down upward of sixty
years. "The site," he says, "is now partly occupied as a wood-yard,
and partly used in the line of North College-street. Mr. Walter Scott,
W. S., father of the poet, here lived _au troisième_, according
to the simple fashion of our fathers, the _flat_ which he
occupied being accessible by a stair leading up from the little court
behind. It was a house of what would now be considered humble aspect,
but at that time neither humble from its individual appearance, nor
from its vicinage. When required to be destroyed for the public
convenience, Mr. Scott received a good price for it; he had some time
before removed to a house on the west side of George's-square, where
Sir Walter spent all his school-boy and college days. At the same time
that Mr. Scott lived in the third flat, the two lower floors were
occupied as one house by Mr. Keith, W.S., grandfather to the late Sir
Alexander Keith, knight-marischal of Scotland.
"In the course of a walk through this part of the town in 1825, Sir
Walter did the present writer the honor to point out the site of the
house in which he had been born. On Sir Walter mentioning that his
father had got a good price for his share of it, in order that it
might be taken down for the public convenience, the individual who
accompanied him took the liberty of expressing his belief that more
money might have been made of it, and the public _much more_
gratified, if it had remained to be shown as the birthplace of a man
who had written so many popular books. 'Ay, ay,' said Sir Walter,
'that is very well; but I am afraid it would have been necessary for
me to die first, and that, you know, would not have been so
comfortable.'"
Thus, the birthplace of Scott remains to this hour exactly in the
condition described above, being used for a wood-yard, and separated
from North College-street merely by a wooden fence.
The other spots in Edinburgh connected with Scott, are, his father's
house in George's square; his own house, 39, North Castle-street; 19,
South Castle-street, the second flat, which he occupied immediately
after his marriage; the High-school and the Parliament-house. We may
as well notice these at once, as it will then leave us at liberty to
take his country residences in consecutive order.
George's-square is a quiet and respectable square, lying not far from
Heriot's hospital, and opposite to Watson's hospital, on the left hand
of the Meadows-walk. Mr. Robert Chambers--my great informant in these
matters in Edinburgh, and who is an actual walking history of the
place--every house, and almost every stone, appearing to suggest to
him some memorable fact connected with it--stated that this was the
first square built, when Edinburgh began to extend itself, and the
nobility and wealthy merchants to think of coming down from their
lofty stations in flats of the old town ten-storied houses, and
seeking quieter and still more airy residences in the suburbs. It was
the first sign of the new life and growth before the new town was
thought of. No doubt, when Scott's father removed to it, it was the
very center of fashion, and still it bears traces of the old
gentility. Ancient families still linger about it, and you see
door-plates bearing some aristocratic title. At the top, or north side
of the square, lived Lord Duncan, at the time that he set out to take
command of the fleet, and fight the battle of Camperdown. Before his
setting out, he walked to and fro on the pavement here before his
house, and, with a friend, talked of his plans; so that the victory of
Camperdown may be said to have been planned in this square. The house
still belongs to the family. Many other remarkable people have lived
just about here. Blacklock, the blind poet, lived near; and Anderson,
the publisher of the series of the The Poets, under his name, lived
near also, in Windmill-street. A quieter square now could not,
perhaps, be found; the grass was growing greenly among the stones when
I visited it. The houses are capacious and good, and from the upper
windows, many of them look out over the green fields, and have a full
view of the Pentland hills. The new town, however, has now taken
precedence in public favor, and this square is thought to be on the
wrong side of the city. The house which Scott's father occupied, is
No. 25.
On the window of a small backroom, on the ground-floor, the name of
Walter Scott still remains written on a pane of glass, with a diamond,
in a school-boy's hand. The present occupiers of the house told us,
that not only the name, but verses had been found on several of the
windows, undoubtedly by Walter Scott, and that they had had the panes
taken out and sent to London, to admirers of the great author.
The room in which this name is written on the glass, used to be his
own apartment. To this he himself, in his autobiography, particularly
refers; and Lord Jeffrey relates, that, on his first call on young
Walter Scott, "he found him in a small den, on the sunk floor of his
father's house, in George's-square, surrounded with dingy books." Mr.
Lockhart says, "I may here add the description of that early
_den_, with which I am favored by a lady of Scott's
family:--'Walter had soon begun to collect out-of-the-way things of
all sorts. He had more books than shelves; a small painted cabinet,
with Scotch and Roman coins in it, and so forth. A claymore and
Lochabar ax, given him by Mr. Invernahyle, mounted guard on a little
print of Prince Charlie; and _Broughton's Saucer_ was hooked up
against the wall below it.' Such was the germ of the magnificent
library and museum at Abbotsford; and such were the 'new realms' in
which he, on taking possession, had arranged his little paraphernalia
about him, 'with all the feelings of novelty and liberty.'" "Since
those days," says Mr. Lockhart, "the habits of life in Edinburgh, as
elsewhere, have undergone many changes; and 'the convenient parlor' in
which Scott first showed Jeffrey his collection of minstrelsy, is now,
in all probability, thought hardly good enough for a menial's
sleeping-room." This is very much the fact; such a poor little damp
_den_ did this appear, on our visit, being evidently used by the
cook, as it was behind the kitchen, for a sort of little lumber-room
of her own, that my companion contended that Scott's room must have
been the one over this. The evidence here is, however, too strong as
to its identity; and, indeed, who does not know what little dingy
nooks children, and even youths, with ardent imaginations, can convert
into very palaces.
This house will always be one of the most truly interesting spots
connected with Scott's history. It was here that he lived, from a very
child to his marriage. Here passed all that happy boyhood and youth
which are described with so much beautiful detail in his Life, both
from his own autobiography and from added materials collected by
Lockhart. These show, in his case, how truly and entirely
"The child was father of the man;"
or, as Milton had it long before,
"The childhood shows the man
As morning shows the day."
_Paradise Regained_, Book iv. p. 63.
Here it was that he led his happy boyhood, in the midst of that
beautiful family life which he has so attractively described: the
grave, careful, but kind father; the sweet, sensible, ladylike, and
religious mother; the three brothers, various in their fortunes as in
their dispositions; and that one unfortunate sister, Anne Scott, whom
he terms from her cradle the butt for mischance to shoot arrows at.
She who had her hand caught by the iron gate leading into the area of
the square in a high wind, and nearly crushed to pieces; who next fell
into a pond, and narrowly escaped drowning; and was finally, at six
years of age, so burned by her cap taking fire, that she soon after
died. Here, as school-boy, college student, and law student, he made
his early friendships, often to continue for life, with John Irvine;
George Abercrombie, son of the famous general, and now Lord
Abercrombie; William Clerk, afterward of Eldin, son of Sir John Clerk,
of Pennycuick-house; Adam Fergusson, the son of the celebrated
Professor Fergusson; the present Earl of Selkirk, David Boyle, present
lord justice clerk, Lord Jeffrey, Mr. Claude Russell, Sir William Rae,
David Monypenny, afterward Lord Pitmilly; Sir Archibald Campbell of
Succoth, bart.; the Earl of Dalhousie, George Cranstoun (Lord
Corehouse), John James Edmonstone, of Newton; Patrick Murray, of
Simprim; Sir Patrick Murray, of Ochtertyre; David Douglas (Lord
Preston); Thomas Thompson, the celebrated legal antiquary; William
Erskine (Lord Kinedder); Alexander Frazer Tytler (Lord Woodhouselee),
and other celebrated men, with many of whom he was connected in a
literary club.
Here it was that, with one intimate or another, and sometimes in a
jovial troop, he set out on those country excursions which were to
render him so affluent in knowledge of life and varied character;
commencing with their almost daily strolls about Arthur's Seat and
Salisbury Crags, repeating poetry and ballads; then to Preston-Pans,
Pennycuick, and so extending their rambles to Roslyn, Lasswade, the
Pentlands, down into Roxburghshire, into Fife, to Flodden, Chevy
Chase, Otterburn, and many another scene of border renown, Liddesdale
being, as we have stated, one of the most fascinating; and finally
away into the Highlands, where, as the attorney's clerk, his business
led him among those old Highland chiefs who had been out in the '15
and '45, and where the veteran Invernahyle set him on fire with his
stories of Rob Roy, Mar, and Prince Charlie; and where the Baron of
Bradwardine and Tullyveolan, and all the scenes of Waverley, and
others of his Scotch romances, were impressed on his soul forever.
Here it was, too, that he had for tutor that good-hearted, but formal
clergyman, Mr. Mitchell, who was afterward so startled when Sir
Walter, calling on him at his manse in Montrose, told him he was
"collecting stories of fairies, witches, and ghosts:" "intelligence,"
said the pious old presbyterian minister, "which proved to me an
electric shock;" adding, that moreover, "these ideal beings, the
subjects of his inquiry," were not objects on which he had himself
wasted his time. And here, finally, it was that, in the ballads he
read,--as in that of Cumnor-hall, the germ of Kenilworth, of which he
used as a boy to be continually repeating the first verse,
"The dews of summer night did fall--
The moon, sweet regent of the sky,
Silvered the walls of Cumnor-hall,
And many an oak that grew thereby;--"
in the lays of Tasso, Ariosto, etc., he laid up so much of the food of
future romance, and where Edie Ochiltrees and Dugald Dalgettys were
crossing his everyday path.
It was here that occurred that singular scene, in which his mother
bringing in a cup of coffee to a gentleman who was transacting
business with her husband, when the stranger was gone, Mr. Scott told
his wife that this man was Murray of Broughton, who had been a traitor
to Prince Charles Stuart; and saying that his lip should never touch
the cup which a traitor had drank out of, flung it out of the window.
The saucer, however, being preserved, was secured by Scott, and became
a conspicuous object in his juvenile museum.
Such to Scott was No. 25, George's-square. Is it not the secret charm
of these old and precious associations which has recently led his old
and most intimate friend, Sir Adam Fergusson, to take a house in this
square, and within, I believe, one door of Scott's old residence?
We may dismiss in a few words No. 19, South Castle-street, the house
where he occupied a flat immediately on his marriage, and the
Parliament-house, where he sat, as a clerk of session, and the
_Outer house_, where he might, in his earlier career, be seen
often making his acquaintance merry over his stories;--these places
will always be viewed with interest by strangers: but it is his house,
39, North Castle-street, around which gather the most lively
associations connected with his mature life in Edinburgh.
Here it was that he lived when in town, from soon after his marriage
till the great break up of his affairs in 1826. Here a great portion
of the best of his life was passed. Here he lived, enjoyed, worked,
saw his friends, and felt, in the midst of his happy family, the sense
of the great name and affection that he had won among his fellow-men.
It is evident, from what he says in his journal, when it had to be
sold, that he was greatly attached to it. It was his pride very often
when he took strangers home with him, to stop at the crossing of
George-street, and point out to them the beauty and airiness of the
situation. In one direction was St. George's Church, in another the
whole length of George-street, with the monuments of Pitt and Dundas.
In one direction, the castle on its commanding rock, in the other the
frith of Forth, and the shores of Fife beyond. It was in this house
that "the vision of the hand" was seen from a neighboring one in
George-street, which is related in Lockhart's Life. A party was met in
this house which was situated near to, and at right angles with,
George-street. "It was a party," says the relator, "of very young
persons, most of them, like Menzies and myself, destined for the bar
of Scotland. The weather being hot, we adjourned to a library, which
had one large window looking northward. After carousing here an hour
or more, I observed that a shade had come over the aspect of my
friend, who happened to be placed immediately opposite to myself, and
said something that intimated a fear of his being unwell. 'No,' said
he, 'I shall be well enough presently, if you will only let me sit
where you are, and take my chair; for there is a confounded hand in
sight of me here, which has often bothered me before, and now it won't
let me fill my glass with a goodwill.' I rose to change places with
him accordingly, and he pointed out to me this hand, which, like the
writing on Belshazzar's wall, disturbed his hour of hilarity. 'Since
we sat down,' said he, 'I have been watching it--it fascinates my
eye--it never stops--page after page is finished and thrown on that
heap of manuscript, and still it goes on unwearied, and so it will be
till candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that. It is
the same every night--I can't stand a sight of it when I am not at my
books.' 'Some stupid, dogged, engrossing clerk, probably,' exclaimed
myself, or some other giddy youth of our society. 'No, boys,' said our
host, 'I well know what hand it is--'tis Sir Walter Scott's.' This was
the hand that in the evenings of three summer weeks, wrote the two
last volumes of Waverley."
I went with Mr. Robert Chambers into this house to get a sight of this
window, but some back wall or other had been built up and shut out the
view. In the next house, occupied I think by a tailor, we, however,
obtained the desired sight of this window on the second story at the
back of Scott's house, and could very well have seen any hand at work
in the same situation. The house is now inhabited by Professor Napier,
the editor of the Edinburgh Review.
The houses and places of business of the Ballantynes and Constable are
not devoid of interest, as connected with Scott. In all these he was
frequently for business or dining. The place of business of Constable,
was at one time that which is now the Crown hotel, at the east end of
Princes-street. That which is now the commercial room, or the first
floor, was Constable's book-dépôt, and where he sat a good deal; and a
door near the window, looking out toward the Register Office, entered
a lesser room, now altered, where Scott used to go and write
occasionally. The private residence of Constable was at Palton, six or
seven miles from Edinburgh. James Ballantyne's was in St. John-street,
a row of good, old-fashioned, and spacious houses, adjoining the
Canongate and Holyrood, and at no great distance from his printing
establishment. John Ballantyne's auction-rooms were in Hanover-street,
and his country house, styled by him Harmony-hall, was near the frith
of Forth by Trinity. Of both the private and convivial entertainments
at these places we have full accounts given by Lockhart. Sometimes, he
says, Scott was there alone with only two or three intimate friends;
at others, there were great and jovial dinners, and that all guests
with whom Scott did not wish to be burdened were feasted here by John
Ballantyne, in splendid style; and many were the scenes of uproarious
merriment amid his "perfumed conversations," and over the Parisian
delicacies of the repast.
But, in fact, the buildings and sites in and around Edinburgh, with
which associations of Scott are connected, are innumerable, almost
universal. His Marmion, his Heart of Mid-Lothian, his Tales of the
Canongate, have peopled almost every part of the city and neighborhood
with the vivid characters of his creation. The Canongate, the Cowgate,
the Nether and West Bows, the Grass-market, the site of the old
Tolbooth, Holyrood, the Park, Muschat's cairn, Salisbury-craig, Davie
Dean's cottage, Liberton, the abode of Dominie Butler, Craigmillar
Castle, and a thousand other places, are all alive with them. We are
astonished, on visiting Edinburgh, to find how much more intense is
the interest cast over different spots by his genius than by ordinary
history.
A superb monument to his memory, a lofty and peculiarly beautiful
gothic cross, now stands in Princes-street, within which stands his
statue.
The first place in the country which Scott resided at, is the scene of
a sojourn at a very early age, and of subsequent visits--Sandy-knowe,
near Kelso. In his autobiography he gives a most picturesque account
of his life here. He says that it was here that he came soon after the
commencement of his lameness, which was attributed to a fever,
consequent on severe teething when he was about eighteen months old.
He dates his first consciousness of life from this place. He came here
to be strengthened by country air, and was suffered to scramble about
among the crags to his heart's content. His father, Walter Scott, was
the first of his family who entered on a town life. His grandfather,
Robert Scott, then very old, was living at this Sandy-knowe. The place
is some five or six miles from Kelso. The spot lies high, and is still
very wild, but in the time of Scott's childhood would be far wilder.
It was then surrounded, far and wide, with brown moorlands. These are
now, for the most part, reclaimed by the plough; but the country is
open, naked, and solitary. The old tower of Smailholm, which stands on
the spot, is seen afar off as a tall, square, and stern old border
keep. In his preface to the Eve of St. John, Scott says, "The circuit
of the outer court being defended on three sides by a precipice and a
morass, is accessible only from the west by a steep and rocky path.
The apartments, as usual in a border keep or fortress, are placed one
above another, and communicate by a narrow stair. On the roof are two
bartizans, or platforms, for defense or pleasure. The inner door of
the tower is wood, the outer an iron grate; the distance between them
being nine feet, the thickness, namely, of the walls. Among the crags
by which it is surrounded, one more eminent is called the
_Watchfold_; and is said to have been the station of a beacon in
the times of war with England."
Stern and steadfast as is this old tower, being, as Scott himself
says, nine feet thick in the wall, each room arched with stone, and
the roof an arch of stone, with other stones piled into a steep ridge
upon it; and being built of the iron-like whinstone of the rocks
around, it seems as if it were a solid and time-proof portion of the
crag on which it stands. The windows are small holes, and the feeling
of grim strength which it gives you is intense. Since Scott's day, the
inner door and the outer iron grate are gone. The place is open, and
the cattle and the winds make it their resort. All around the black
crags start out of the ground; it is an iron wilderness. There are a
few laborious cotters just below it, and not far off is the spot where
stood the old house of Scott's grandfather, a good modern farmhouse
and its buildings. This savage and solitary monument of the ages of
feud and bloodshed, stands no longer part of a waste where
"The bittern clamored from the moss,
The wind blew loud and shrill,"
but in the midst of a well cultivated corn farm, where the farmer
looks with a jealous eye on visitors, wondering what they can want
with the naked old keep, and complaining that they leave his gates
open. He had been thus venting his chagrin to the driver of my chaise,
and wishing the tower were down--a stiff business to accomplish--but
withdrew into his house at my approach.
Sterile and bare as is this wild scene, Scott dates from it, and no
doubt correctly, his deep love of nature and ballad romance. In the
Introduction to the third canto of Marmion, he thus refers to it:--