One November afternoon in 1810--the year in which 'Waverley' was resumed
and laid aside again, to be finished off, its last two volumes in three
weeks, and made immortal in 1814; and when its author, by the death of
Lord Melville, narrowly escaped getting a civil appointment in
India--three men, evidently lawyers, might have been seen escaping like
schoolboys from the Parliament House, and speeding arm-in-arm down Bank
Street and the Mound in the teeth of a surly blast of sleet.
The three friends sought the _bield_ of the low wall old Edinburgh boys
remember well, and sometimes miss now, as they struggle with the stout
west wind....
The third we all know. What has he not done for every one of us? Who
else ever, except Shakespeare, so diverted mankind, entertained and
entertains a world so liberally, so wholesomely? We are fain to say not
even Shakespeare, for his is something deeper than diversion, something
higher than pleasure; and yet who would care to split this hair?
Had any one watched him closely before and after the parting, what a
change he would see! The bright, broad laugh, the shrewd, jovial word,
the man of the Parliament House and of the world; and next step, moody,
the light of his eye withdrawn, as if seeing things that were invisible;
his shut mouth like a child's, so impressionable, so innocent, so sad;
he was now all within, as before he was all without; hence his brooding
look. As the snow blattered in his face, he muttered, "How it raves and
drifts! On-ding o' snaw,--ay, that's the word,--on-ding--" He was now at
his own door, "Castle Street, No. 39." He opened the door and went
straight to his den; that wondrous workshop, where in one year, 1823,
when he was fifty-two, he wrote 'Peveril of the Peak,' 'Quentin
Durward,' and 'St. Ronan's Well,' besides much else. We once took the
foremost of our novelists--the greatest, we would say, since Scott--into
this room, and could not but mark the solemnizing effect of sitting
where the great magician sat so often and so long, and looking out upon
that little shabby bit of sky, and that back green where faithful dog
Camp lies.
He sat down in his large green morocco elbow-chair, drew himself close
to his table, and glowered and gloomed at his writing apparatus, "a very
handsome old box, richly carved, lined with crimson velvet, and
containing ink-bottles, taper-stand, etc., in silver, the whole in such
order that it might have come from the silversmith's window half an hour
before." He took out his paper, then starting up angrily, said, "'Go
spin, you jade, go spin.' No, d---- it, it won't do,--
"'My spinnin' wheel is auld and stiff,
The rock o't wunna stand, sir;
To keep the temper-pin in tiff
Employs ower aft my hand, sir.'
I am off the fang. I can make nothing of 'Waverley' to-day; I'll awa'
to Marjorie. Come wi' me, Maida, you thief." The great creature rose
slowly, and the pair were off, Scott taking a _maud_ (a plaid) with him.
"White as a frosted plum-cake, by jingo!" said he, when he got to the
street. Maida gamboled and whisked among the snow, and his master strode
across to Young Street, and through it to 1 North Charlotte Street, to
the house of his dear friend, Mrs. William Keith, of Corstorphine Hill;
niece of Mrs. Keith of Ravelston, of whom he said at her death, eight
years after, "Much tradition, and that of the best, has died with this
excellent old lady, one of the few persons whose spirits, and
_cleanliness_ and freshness of mind and body, made old age lovely and
desirable."
Sir Walter was in that house almost every day, and had a key, so in he
and the hound went, shaking themselves in the lobby. "Marjorie!
Marjorie!" shouted her friend, "where are ye, my bonnie wee croodlin'
doo?" In a moment a bright, eager child of seven was in his arms, and he
was kissing her all over. Out came Mrs. Keith. "Come your ways in,
Wattie." "No, not now. I am going to take Marjorie wi' me, and you may
come to your tea in Duncan Roy's sedan, and bring the bairn home in your
lap." "Tak' Marjorie, and it _on-ding o' snaw_!" said Mrs. Keith. He
said to himself, "On-ding,'--that's odd,--that is the very word. Hoot,
awa'! look here," and he displayed the corner of his plaid, made to hold
lambs [the true shepherd's plaid, consisting of two breadths sewed
together, and uncut at one end, making a poke or _cul-de-sac_]. "Tak'
your lamb," said she, laughing at the contrivance, and so the Pet was
first well happit up, and then put, laughing silently, into the plaid
neuk, and the shepherd strode off with his lamb,--Maida gamboling
through the snow, and running races in her mirth.
Didn't he face "the angry airt," and make her bield his bosom, and into
his own room with her, and lock the door, and out with the warm rosy
little wifie, who took it all with great composure! There the two
remained for three or more hours, making the house ring with their
laughter; you can fancy the big man's and Maidie's laugh. Having made
the fire cheery, he set her down in his ample chair, and standing
sheepishly before her, began to say his lesson, which happened to
be,--"Ziccotty, diccotty, dock, the mouse ran up the clock; the clock
struck one, down the mouse ran, ziccotty, diccotty, dock." This done
repeatedly till she was pleased, she gave him his new lesson, gravely
and slowly, timing it upon her small fingers,--he saying it after her,--
"Wonery, twoery, tickery, seven;
Alibi, crackaby, ten and eleven;
Pin, pan, musky dan;
Tweedle-um, twoddle-um, twenty-wan;
Eerie, orie, ourie,
You, are, out."
He pretended to great difficulty, and she rebuked him with most comical
gravity, treating him as a child. He used to say that when he came to
Alibi Crackaby he broke down, and Pin-Pan, Musky-Dan, Tweedle-um
Twoddle-um made him roar with laughter. He said Musky-Dan especially was
beyond endurance, bringing up an Irishman and his hat fresh from the
Spice Islands and odoriferous Ind; she getting quite bitter in her
displeasure at his ill behavior and stupidness.
Then he would read ballads to her in his own glorious way, the two
getting wild with excitement over 'Gil Morrice' or the 'Baron of
Smailholm'; and he would take her on his knee, and make her repeat
Constance's speech in 'King John,' till he swayed to and fro, sobbing
his fill....
Scott used to say that he was amazed at her power over him, saying to
Mrs. Keith, "She's the most extraordinary creature I ever met with, and
her repeating of Shakespeare overpowers me as nothing else does."
Thanks to the unforgetting sister of this dear child, who has much of
the sensibility and fun of her who has been in her small grave these
fifty and more years, we have now before us the letters and journals of
Pet Marjorie,--before us lies and gleams her rich brown hair, bright and
sunny as if yesterday's, with the words on the paper, "Cut out in her
last illness," and two pictures of her by her beloved Isabella, whom she
worshiped; there are the faded old scraps of paper, hoarded still, over
which her warm breath and her warm little heart had poured themselves;
there is the old water-mark, "Lingard, 1808." The two portraits are very
like each other, but plainly done at different times; it is a chubby,
healthy face, deep-set, brooding eyes, as eager to tell what is going on
within as to gather in all the glories from without; quick with the
wonder and the pride of life; they are eyes that would not be soon
satisfied with seeing; eyes that would devour their object, and yet
childlike and fearless. And that is a mouth that will not be soon
satisfied with love; it has a curious likeness to Scott's own, which has
always appeared to us his sweetest, most mobile and speaking feature.
There she is, looking straight at us as she did at him,--fearless and
full of love, passionate, wild, willful, fancy's child.
* * * * *
There was an old servant, Jeanie Robertson, who was forty years in her
grandfather's family. Marjorie Fleming--or as she is called in the
letters and by Sir Walter, Maidie--was the last child she kept. Jeanie's
wages never exceeded £3 a year, and when she left service she had saved
£40. She was devotedly attached to Maidie, rather despising and
ill-using her sister Isabella, a beautiful and gentle child. This
partiality made Maidie apt at times to domineer over Isabella. "I
mention this," writes her surviving sister, "for the purpose of telling
you an instance of Maidie's generous justice. When only five years old,
when walking in Raith grounds, the two children had run on before, and
old Jeanie remembered they might come too near a dangerous mill-lade.
She called to them to turn back. Maidie heeded her not, rushed all the
faster on, and fell, and would have been lost, had her sister not pulled
her back, saving her life, but tearing her clothes. Jeanie flew on
Isabella to 'give it her' for spoiling her favorite's dress; Maidie
rushed in between, crying out, 'Pay (whip) Maidie as much as you like,
and I'll not say one word; but touch Isy, and I'll roar like a bull!'
Years after Maidie was resting in her grave, my mother used to take me
to the place, and told the story always in the exact same words." This
Jeanie must have been a character. She took great pride in exhibiting
Maidie's brother William's Calvinistic acquirements when nineteen months
old, to the officers of a militia regiment then quartered in Kirkcaldy.
This performance was so amusing that it was often repeated, and the
little theologian was presented by them with a cap and feathers.
Jeanie's glory was "putting him through the carritch" (catechism) in
broad Scotch, beginning at the beginning with "Wha made ye, ma bonnie
man?" For the correctness of this and the three next replies, Jeanie had
no anxiety; but the tone changed to menace, and the closed _nieve_
(fist) was shaken in the child's face as she demanded, "Of what are you
made?" "DIRT," was the answer uniformly given. "Wull ye never learn to
say _dust_, ye thrawn deevil?" with a cuff from the opened hand, was the
as inevitable rejoinder.
Here is Maidie's first letter, before she was six, the spelling
unaltered, and there are no "commoes."
"MY DEAR ISA--I now sit down to answer all your kind and beloved letters
which you was so good as to write to me. This is the first time I ever
wrote a letter in my Life. There are a great many Girls in the Square
and they cry just like a pig when we are under the painfull necessity of
putting it to Death. Miss Potune a Lady of my acquaintance praises me
dreadfully. I repeated something out of Dean Swift and she said I was
fit for the stage and you may think I was primmed up with majestick
Pride but upon my word I felt myselfe turn a little birsay--birsay is a
word which is a word that William composed which is as you may suppose a
little enraged. This horrid fat simpliton says that my Aunt is
beautifull which is intirely impossible for that is not her nature."
What a peppery little pen we wield! What could that have been out of the
sardonic Dean? what other child of that age would have used "beloved" as
she does? This power of affection, this faculty of _be_loving, and wild
hunger to be beloved, comes out more and more. She periled her all upon
it, and it may have been as well--we know, indeed, that it was far
better--for her that this wealth of love was so soon withdrawn to its
one only infinite Giver and Receiver. This must have been the law of her
earthly life. Love was indeed "her Lord and King"; and it was perhaps
well for her that she found so soon that her and our only Lord and King
Himself is Love. Here are bits from her Diary at Braehead:--
"The day of my existence here has been delightful and enchanting. On
Saturday I expected no less than three well-made Bucks the names of whom
is here advertised. Mr. Geo. Crakey [Craigie], and Wm. Keith and Jn.
Keith--the first is the funniest of every one of them. Mr. Crakey and I
walked to Crakyhall [Craigiehall] hand in hand in Innocence and
matitation [meditation] sweet thinking on the kind love which flows in
our tender hearted mind which is overflowing with majestic pleasure no
one was ever so polite to me in the hole state of my existence. Mr.
Craky you must-know is a great Buck and pretty good-looking."
"I am at Ravelston enjoying nature's fresh air. The birds are singing
sweetly--the calf doth frisk and nature shows her glorious face."
Here is a confession:
"I confess I have been very more like a little young divil than a
creature for when Isabella went up stairs to teach me religion and my
multiplication and to be good and all my other lessons I stamped with my
foot and threw my new hat which she had made on the ground and was sulky
and was dreadfully passionate, but she never whiped me but said Marjory
go into another room and think what a great crime you are committing
letting your temper git the better of you. But I went so sulkily that
the Devil got the better of me but she never never never whips me so
that I think I would be the better of it and the next time that I behave
ill I think she should do it for she never does it.... Isabella has
given me praise for checking my temper for I was sulky even when she was
kneeling an hole hour teaching me to write."
Our poor little wifie, _she_ has no doubts of the personality of the
Devil!--"Yesterday I behave extremely ill in God's most holy church for
I would never attend myself nor let Isabella attend which was a great
crime for she often, often tells me that when to or three are geathered
together God is in the midst of them, and it was the very same Divil
that tempted Job that tempted me I am sure; but he resisted Satan though
he had boils and many many other misfortunes which I have escaped.... I
am now going to tell you the horible and wretched plaege that my
multiplication gives me you can't conceive it the most Devilish thing is
8 times 8 and 7 times 7 it is what nature itself cant endure."
This is delicious; and what harm is there in her "Devilish"? it is
strong language merely; even old Rowland Hill used to say "he grudged
the Devil those rough and ready words." "I walked to that delightful
place Crakyhall with a delightful young man beloved by all his friends
especially by me his loveress, but I must not talk any more about him
for Isa said it is not proper for to speak of gentalmen but I will never
forget him! ... I am very very glad that satan has not given me boils
and many other misfortunes--In the holy bible these words are written
that the Devil goes like a roaring lyon in search of his pray but the
lord lets us escape from him but we" (_pauvre petite_!) "do not strive
with this awfull Spirit.... To-day I pronounced a word which should
never come out of a lady's lips it was that I called John a Impudent
Bitch. I will tell you what I think made me in so bad a humor is I got
one or two of that bad sina [senna] tea to-day,"--a better excuse for
bad humor and bad language than most.
She has been reading the Book of Esther:--"It was a dreadful thing that
Haman was hanged on the very gallows which he had prepared for Mordecai
to hang him and his ten sons thereon and it was very wrong and cruel to
hang his sons for they did not commit the crime; _but then Jesus was not
then come to teach us to be merciful_." This is wise and beautiful,--has
upon it the very dew of youth and holiness. Out of the mouths of babes
and sucklings He perfects his praise.
"This is Saturday and I am very glad of it because I have play half the
Day and I get money too but alas I owe Isabella 4 pence for I am finned
2 pence whenever I bite my nails. Isabella is teaching me to make
simmecoling nots of interrigations peorids commoes, etc.... As this is
Sunday I will meditate upon Senciable and Religious subjects. First I
should be very thankful I am not a beggar."
This amount of meditation and thankfulness seems to have been all she
was able for.
"I am going to-morrow to a delightfull place, Braehead by name,
belonging to Mrs. Crraford, where there is ducks cocks hens bubblyjocks
2 dogs 2 cats and swine which is delightful. I think it is shocking to
think that the dog and cat should bear them" (this is a meditation
physiological) "and they are drowned after all. I would rather have a
man-dog than a woman-dog, because they do not bear like woman-dogs; it
is a hard case--it is shocking. I came here to enjoy natures delightful
breath it is sweeter than a fial of rose oil."
Braehead is the farm the historical Jock Howison asked and got from our
gay James the Fifth, "the gudeman o' Ballengiech," as a reward for the
services of his flail when the King had the worst of it at Cramond Brig
with the gipsies. The farm is unchanged in size from that time, and
still in the unbroken line of the ready and victorious thrasher.
Braehead is held on the condition of the possessor being ready to
present the King with a ewer and basin to wash his hands, Jock having
done this for his unknown king after the _splore_; and when George the
Fourth came to Edinburgh, this ceremony was performed in silver
at Holyrood.
It is a lovely neuk, this Braehead, preserved almost as it was two
hundred years ago. "Lot and his wife," mentioned by Maidie,--two
quaintly cropped yew-trees,--still thrive; the burn runs as it did in
her time, and sings the same quiet tune,--as much the same and as
different as _Now_ and _Then_. The house is full of old family relics
and pictures, the sun shining on them through the small deep windows
with their plate-glass; and there, blinking at the sun and chattering
contentedly, is a parrot, that might, for its looks of eld, have been in
the ark, and domineered over and _deaved_ the dove. Everything about the
place is old and fresh.
This is beautiful:--"I am very sorry to say that I forgot God--that is
to say I forgot to pray to-day and Isabella told me that I should be
thankful that God did not forget me--if he did, O what would become of
me if I was in danger and God not friends with me--I must go to
unquenchable fire and if I was tempted to sin--how could I resist it O
no I will never do it again--no no--if I can help it." (Canny wee
wifie!) "My religion is greatly falling off because I dont pray with so
much attention when I am saying my prayers, and my charecter is lost
among the Braehead people. I hope I will be religious again--but as for
regaining my charecter I despare for it." [Poor little "habit
and repute"!]
Her temper, her passion, and her "badness" are almost daily confessed
and deplored:--"I will never again trust to my own power, for I see that
I cannot be good without God's assistance--. I will not trust in my own
selfe, and Isa's health will be quite ruined by me--it will indeed."
"Isa has giving me advice, which is, that when I feel Satan beginning to
tempt me, that I flea him and he would flea me." "Remorse is the worst
thing to bear, and I am afraid that I will fall a marter to it."
Poor dear little sinner!--Here comes the world again:--"In my travels I
met with a handsome lad named Charles Balfour Esq., and from him I got
ofers of marage--offers of marage, did I say? Nay plenty heard me." A
fine scent for "breach of promise"!
This is abrupt and strong:--"The Divil is curced and all works. 'Tis a
fine work 'Newton on the profecies.' I wonder if there is another book
of poems comes near the Bible. The Divil always girns at the sight of
the Bible." "Miss Potune" (her "simpliton" friend) "is very fat; she
pretends to be very learned. She says she saw a stone that dropt from
the skies; but she is a good Christian."
Here come her views on church government:--"An Anni-babtist is a thing I
am not a member of--I am a Pisplekan (Episcopalian) just now, and" (O
you little Laodicean and Latitudinarian!) "a Prisbeteran at
Kirkcaldy"--_(Blandula! Vagula! coelum et animum mutas quoe trans mare_
[i.e., _trans Bodotriam] curris!_)--"my native town."
"Sentiment is not what I am acquainted with as yet, though I wish it,
and should like to practise it" (!) "I wish I had a great, great deal of
gratitude in my heart, in all my body." There is a new novel published,
named 'Self-Control' (Mrs. Brunton's)--"a very good maxim forsooth!"
This is shocking:--"Yesterday a marrade man, named Mr. John Balfour,
Esq., offered to kiss me, and offered to marry me, though the man" (a
fine directness this!) "was espused, and his wife was present and said
he must ask her permission; but he did not. I think he was ashamed and
confounded before 3 gentelman--Mr. Jobson and 2 Mr. Kings." "Mr.
Banesters" (Bannister's) "Budjet is to-night; I hope it will be a good
one. A great many authors have expressed themselves too sentimentally."
You are right, Marjorie. "A Mr. Burns writes a beautiful song on Mr.
Cunhaming, whose wife desarted him--truly it is a most beautiful one."
"I like to read the Fabulous historys, about the histerys of Robin,
Dickey, flapsay, and Peccay, and it is very amusing, for some were good
birds and others bad, but Peccay was the most dutiful and obedient to
her parients." "Thomson is a beautiful author, and Pope, but nothing to
Shakespear, of which I have a little knolege. 'Macbeth' is a pretty
composition, but awful one." "The 'Newgate Calender' is very
instructive." (!)
"A sailor called here to say farewell; it must be dreadful to leave his
native country when he might get a wife; or perhaps me, for I love him
very much. But O I forgot, Isabella forbid me to speak about love." This
antiphlogistic regimen and lesson is ill to learn by our Maidie, for
here she sins again:--"Love is a very papithatick thing" (it is almost a
pity to correct this into pathetic), "as well as troublesome and
tiresome--but O Isabella forbid me to speak of it."
Here are her reflections on a pineapple:--"I think the price of a
pineapple is very dear: it is a whole bright goulden guinea, that might
have sustained a poor family." Here is a new vernal simile:--"The hedges
are sprouting like chicks from the eggs when they are newly hatched or,
as the vulgar say, _clacked_". "Doctor Swift's works are very funny; I
got some of them by heart." "Moreheads sermons are I hear much praised,
but I never read sermons of any kind; but I read novelettes and my
Bible, and I never forget it, or my prayers." Brava, Marjorie!