_And Sir Walter Scott's Study_.
[The following extracts are from the private letter of a distinguished
American gentleman, and form part of one of the most striking articles
in "The Anniversary for 1829," edited by Allan Cunningham. We intended
the whole article for our Supplementary "Spirit of the Annuals;" but
as our engraving will necessarily occupy a few days longer, during
which time this description of _Abbotsford_ will be printed in
fifty different forms, we are induced to take it by the forelock, and
appropriate it for our present number. It is, perhaps, one of the
most, if not the most, graphic paper in the whole list of "Annuals,"
notwithstanding there are scores of brilliant gems left for our
Supplement. Certain arts must have their own pace; but, in our arduous
catering for novelties for the MIRROR, we often have occasion to wish
that _block-machinery_ could be applied to engraving on wood.]
"Stepping westward," as Wordsworth says, from the hall, you find
yourself in a narrow, low, arched room, which runs quite across the
house, having a blazoned window again at either extremity, and filled
all over with smaller pieces of armour and weapons, such as swords,
firelocks, spears, arrows, darts, daggers, &c. &c. &c. Here are
the pieces, esteemed most precious by reason of their histories
respectively. I saw, among the rest, Rob Roy's gun, with his initials,
R.M.C. i.e. Robert Macgregor Campbell, round the touch-hole; the
blunderbuss of Hofer, a present to Sir Walter from his friend Sir
Humphrey Davy; a most magnificent sword, as magnificently mounted, the
gift of Charles the First to the great Montrose, and having the arms
of Prince Henry worked on the hilt; the hunting bottle of bonnie
King Jamie; Bonaparte's pistols (found in his carriage at Waterloo,
I believe), _cum multis aliis_. I should have mentioned that
stag-horns and bulls' horns (the petrified relics of the old mountain
monster, I mean), and so forth, are suspended in great abundance above
all the doorways of these armories; and that, in one corner, a dark one
as it ought to be, there is a complete assortment of the old Scottish
instruments of torture, not forgetting the very thumbikins under which
Cardinal Carstairs did _not_ flinch, and the more terrific iron
crown of Wisheart the Martyr, being a sort of barred headpiece, screwed
on the victim at the stake, to prevent him from crying aloud in his
agony.
* * * * *
Beyond the smaller, or rather I should say, the narrower armoury,
lies the dining parlour proper, however; and though there is nothing
Udolphoish here, yet I can well believe that when lighted up and the
curtains drawn at night, the place may give no bad notion of the private
snuggery of some lofty lord abbot of the time of the Canterbury Tales.
The room is a very handsome one, with a low and very richly carved roof
of dark oak again; a huge projecting bow window, and the dais elevated
_more majorum_; the ornaments of the roof, niches for lamps, &c.
&c. in short, all the minor details, are, I believe, fac similes after
Melrose. The walls are hung in crimson, but almost entirely covered with
pictures, of which the most remarkable are--the parliamentary general,
Lord Essex, a full length on horseback; the Duke of Monmouth, by Lely; a
capital Hogarth, by himself; Prior and Gay, both by Jervas; and the head
of Mary Queen of Scots, in a charger, painted by Amias Canrod, the day
after the decapitation at Fotheringay, and sent some years ago as a
present to Sir Walter from a Prussian nobleman, in whose family it had
been for more than two centuries. It is a most deathlike performance,
and the countenance answers well enough to the coins of the unfortunate
beauty, though not at all to any of the portraits I have happened to
see. I believe there is no doubt as to the authenticity of this most
curious picture. Among various family pictures, I noticed particularly
Sir Walter's great grandfather, the old cavalier mentioned in one of
the epistles in Marmion, who let his beard grow after the execution of
Charles I., and who here appears, accordingly, with a most venerable
appendage of silver whiteness, reaching even unto his girdle.
* * * * *
A narrower passage leads to a charming breakfast room, which looks to
the Tweed on one side, and towards Yarrow and Ettricke, famed in song,
on the other: a cheerful room, fitted up with novels, romances, and
poetry, I could perceive, at one end; and the other walls covered thick
and thicker with a most valuable and beautiful collection of watercolour
drawings, chiefly by Turner and Thomson of Duddingstone, the designs,
in short, for the magnificent work entitled "Provincial Antiquities of
Scotland." There is one very grand oil painting over the chimney-piece,
Fastcastle, by Thomson, alias the Wolf's Crag of the Bride of
Lammermoor, one of the most majestic and melancholy sea-pieces I ever
saw; and some large black and white drawings of the Vision of Don
Roderick, by Sir James Steuart of Allanbank (whose illustrations of
Marmion and Mazeppa you have seen or heard of), are at one end of the
parlour. The room is crammed with queer cabinets and boxes, and in a
niche there is a bust of old Henry Mackenzie, by Joseph of Edinburgh.
Returning towards the armoury, you have, on one side of a most religious
looking corridor, a small greenhouse, with a fountain playing before
it--the very fountain that in days of yore graced the cross of
Edinburgh, and used to flow with claret at the coronation of the
Stuarts--a pretty design, and a standing monument of the barbarity of
modern innovation. From the small armoury you pass, as I said before,
into the drawing-room, a large, lofty, and splendid _salon_, with
antique ebony furniture and crimson silk hangings, cabinets, china, and
mirrors _quantum suff_, and some portraits; among the rest glorious
John Dryden, by Sir Peter Lely, with his gray hairs floating about in a
most picturesque style, eyes full of wildness, presenting the old Bard,
I take it, in one of those "tremulous moods," in which we have it on
record he appeared when interrupted in the midst of his Alexander's
Feast. From this you pass into the largest of all the apartments, the
library, which, I must say, is really a noble room. It is an oblong of
some fifty feet by thirty, with a projection in the centre, opposite the
fireplace, terminating in a grand bow window, fitted up with books also,
and, in fact, constituting a sort of chapel to the church. The roof is
of carved oak again--a very rich pattern--I believe chiefly _a la_
Roslin, and the bookcases, which are also of richly carved oak, reach
high up the walls all round. The collection amounts, in this room, to
some fifteen or twenty thousand volumes, arranged according to their
subjects: British history and antiquities, filling the whole of the
chief wall; English poetry and drama, classics and miscellanies, one
end: foreign literature, chiefly French and German, the other. The cases
on the side opposite the fire are wired and locked, as containing
articles very precious and very portable. One consists entirely of books
and MSS. relating to the insurrections of 1715 and 1745; and another
(within the recess of the bow window), of treatises _de re magica_,
both of these being (I am told, and can well believe), in their several
ways, collections of the rarest curiosity. My cicerone pointed out, in
one corner, a magnificent set of Mountfaucon, ten volumes folio, bound
in the richest manner in scarlet, and stamped with the royal arms, the
gift of his present majesty. There are few living authors of whose works
presentation copies are not to be found here. My friend showed me
inscriptions of that sort in, I believe, every European dialect extant.
The books are all in prime condition, and bindings that would satisfy
Mr. Dibdin. The only picture is Sir Walter's eldest son, in hussar
uniform, and holding his horse, by Allan of Edinburgh, a noble portrait,
over the fireplace; and the only bust is that of Shakspeare, from the
Avon monument, in a small niche in the centre of the east side. On a
rich stand of porphyry, in one corner, reposes a tall silver urn,
filled with bones from the Piraeus, and bearing the inscription,
"Given by George Gordon, Lord Byron, to Sir Walter Scott, Bart." It
_contained_ the letter which accompanied the gift till lately: it
has disappeared; no one guesses who took it, but whoever he was, as my
guide observed, he must have been a thief for thieving's sake truly,
as he durst no more exhibit his autograph than tip himself a bare
bodkin. Sad, infamous tourist, indeed! Although I saw abundance of
comfortable-looking desks and arm chairs, yet this room seemed rather
too large and fine for _work_, and I found accordingly, after
passing a double pair of doors, that there was a _sanctum_ within
and beyond this library. And here you may believe, was not to me the
least interesting, though by no means the most splendid, part of the
suite.
The lion's own den proper, then, is a room of about five-and-twenty
feet square by twenty feet high, containing of what is properly called
furniture nothing but a small writing-table in the centre, a plain
arm-chair covered with black leather--a very comfortable one though, for
I tried it--and a single chair besides, plain symptoms that this is no
place for company. On either side of the fireplace there are shelves
filled with duodecimos and books of reference, chiefly, of course,
folios; but except these there are no books save the contents of a light
gallery which runs round three sides of the room, and is reached by a
hanging stair of carved oak in one corner. You have been both at the
Elisée Bourbon and Malmaison, and remember the library at one or other
of those places, I forget which; this gallery is much in the same style.
There are only two portraits, an original of the beautiful and
melancholy head of Claverhouse, and a small full length of Rob Roy.
Various little antique cabinets stand round about, each having a bust
on it: Stothard's Canterbury Pilgrims are on the mantelpiece; and in
one corner I saw a collection of really useful weapons, those of the
forest-craft, to wit--axes and bills and so forth of every calibre.
There is only one window pierced in a very thick wall, so that the
place is rather sombre; the light tracery work of the gallery overhead
harmonizes with the books well. It is a very comfortable-looking room,
and very unlike any other I ever was in. I should not forget some
Highland claymores, clustered round a target over the Canterbury people,
nor a writing-box of carved wood, lined with crimson velvet, and
furnished with silver plate of right venerable aspect, which looked as
if it might have been the implement of old Chaucer himself, but which
from the arms on the lid must have belonged to some Indian prince of
the days of Leo the Magnificent at the furthest.
The view to the Tweed from all the principal apartments is beautiful.
You look out from among bowers, over a lawn of sweet turf, upon the
clearest of all streams, fringed with the wildest of birch woods, and
backed with the green hills of Ettricke Forest. The rest you must
imagine. Altogether, the place destined to receive so many pilgrimages
contains within itself beauties not unworthy of its associations. Few
poets ever inhabited such a place; none, ere now, ever created one.
It is the realization of dreams: some Frenchman called it, I hear,
"a romance in stone and lime."
* * * * *