_QUARTERLY REVIEW_, _LADY OF THE LAKE_, _ROKEBY_, BALLANTYNE AFFAIRS
As Scott had now become a professional man of letters, while remaining a
well paid official, it may be convenient to glance at the state of the
literary calling in 1808. Britain was not yet a wildly excitable and
hysterical country. Rapidity of communication of news had not irritated
the nerves of the community. We won or lost a battle, but as men knew
nothing about it till long after the event, as they did not sit with
their eyes on a tape, as there were not fresh editions of the evening
newspaper every quarter of an hour, they could be engaged in war without
wholly abandoning the study and purchase of books. A few years after
Scott’s death, a Parliamentary Commission inquired into the financial
conditions of publishers and authors. The Commission learned, from one
of Messrs. Longmans’ firm, that it was not unusual for gentlemen to
“form libraries” (the expression “every gentleman’s library” survives as
a jest), but that the practice began to decline in 1814, and had now
ceased to be.
The man who killed the formation of private libraries was Walter Scott.
His _Waverley_ appeared in 1814, and henceforth few people purchased any
books except novels. Poetry soon became a “drug in the market,” and the
taste for “the classics,” whether ancient or modern, died away: the
novel was everything, and presently novels were procured from the
circulating library.
[Sidenote: “QUARTERLY REVIEW”]
It was the fortune of Scott to take full advantage of the traditional
usage of “forming libraries” in the years between the appearance of the
_Lay_ and of _Waverley_. He edited Dryden in many volumes, and was
fairly well paid. By doubling the price, Constable induced him to edit
Swift’s works, and to write the best extant _Life of Swift_. He also
edited the important Sadleir Papers, the diplomatic correspondence of
the agent of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, a most valuable book to the
historian, and he was concerned in many antiquarian publications. These
were undertaken partly from love of the past, partly for the purpose of
gaining employment for needy men of letters like Henry Weber, a German
who later became insane and challenged Scott to a pistol duel across a
table! Constable was usually the publisher of the ventures, but
Constable had a partner, a Mr. Hunter, a laird, no less, who bullied
Weber, and behaved to Scott in a manner which he deemed insufferable.
Again, politics came between Constable and Scott. Constable was the
publisher of the _Edinburgh Review_, which had filled up the measure of
its iniquities. No man likes to be called an unpatriotic pedant, and
Jeffrey, in the _Edinburgh Review_, had called Scott both pedantic and
unpatriotic. Again, the year 1808 saw the Spanish national rising
against Napoleon. Backed by Britain and Wellington, and by the
infatuation of Bonaparte himself,[4] by the fatuous Moscow expedition,
and the revenge of Germany, the rising of the Peninsula overthrew the
French Emperor. But the _Edinburgh Review_ and the Whigs had no taste
for a national rising in the name of freedom. The Spanish, they
observed, were a Catholic and intolerant people, not like the liberal
French. The Spanish insurrections began in massacres of unpopular
officials, and, at Valencia (June 6, 7, 1808), in the murder of the
whole colony of French merchants in the town. That French Republican
mobs should massacre uncounted victims was very well: it was
intolerable to the Whigs that Spanish Catholic mobs should imitate them.
The Spanish cause was both disreputable and desperate, said the Whigs.
England, if she aided Spain, must perish in the same ruin. Such was the
song of the _Edinburgh Review_, at that time the only critical journal
conducted by educated men. Meanwhile Scott recognized the genius of
Wellesley--“I would to God he were now at the head of the English in
Spain!”
[Sidenote: “QUARTERLY REVIEW”]
For personal and political reasons then, as a patriot and a poet
outraged, Scott determined not only to counteract the _Edinburgh
Review_, but to set up a rival to Constable, its publisher. It is
difficult to trace each step in his scheme of resistance to Constable
and Whiggery. But John Murray, then a young publisher in London, saw his
opportunity of winning Scott away from Constable; he determined to back,
financially, the Ballantynes in London, and he visited Ashestiel in
October 1808. He had heard of the nascent _Lady of the Lake_, he had
heard of _Waverley_ as “on the stocks,” and he wished to have his share.
From a letter of Scott to his brother Thomas, we learn that the old
staff of _The Antijacobin_, including Canning, now Prime Minister, and
Frere, had been “hatching a plot” for a Tory rival to the _Edinburgh
Review_. Scott had been offered the Editorship, with “great prospects
of emolument,” and the new serial was to have private information from
Government. But for many obvious reasons, Scott could not take the
Editorship, which fell to Gifford, a man of bad health, bad temper, and
procrastinating habits, feared and unpopular as a satirist. Heber and
Ellis, however, were ready to aid contributors, and Scott’s letters
reveal his opinion of the state of literary criticism.
As is usual, periodical criticism revelled in “a facetious and rejoicing
ignorance.” Specialists could not write what the public would read;
editors like Jeffrey added flippancy to their dull lucubrations.
Reviewing had long been indolently good natured: the _Edinburgh Review_
had set the fashion of being tart and bitter; the fashion pleased, and
“the minor reviews give us all abuse and no talent.” The age of
“slashing” criticism had begun, and Scott held that “decent, lively, and
reflecting criticism” would be welcome. He knew Gifford’s temper, and
hoped to abate it. “We must keep our swords clear as well as sharp, and
not forget the gentlemen in the critics.” Had Scott accepted the
Editorship, with Heber, Ellis, Southey, and other gentlemen for his
_aides_, the _Quarterly_ would have been what he desired it to be. But a
satirist was the Editor, and for long the tone was “savage and
tartarly,” in cases well remembered. Many of Scott’s best essays,
however, appeared in the _Quarterly_.
His indignation, and we may say his infatuation, found vent in another
project. Lockhart may be too severe in his account of James Ballantyne’s
brother John, who, after failing in various undignified lines, was
started as a publisher by Scott, in 1809. Scott supplied most of the
capital; John was expected to manage the accounts, and so the fatal
business began. Nobody could call the Ballantynes “gentlemen,” whether
in a heraldic or any other sense of the word. But both, in several ways,
consciously or unconsciously amused Scott; he was deeply attached to
them, and they to him. That he had such henchmen was his own fault: they
were, so to speak, his Cochranes and Oliver Sinclairs, the unworthy
favourites who were the ruin of the old Stuart Kings. Lockhart says that
“a more reckless, thoughtless, improvident adventurer” than the festive
John “never rushed into the serious responsibilities of business,” while
James “never understood book-keeping or could bring himself to attend to
it with regularity.” Scott, on the other hand, thoroughly understood
business, and kept systematic accounts of his private expenditure.
[Sidenote: THE BALLANTYNE COMPANY]
But his success carried him, as it carried the great Emperor his
contemporary, beyond himself. He felt adequate to all labours, however
diverse; he was as confident as Napoleon in his own star; he entered on
this publishing business as Napoleon invaded Russia, without organized
supplies (for Mr. Murray soon withdrew from the Ballantyne alliance),
and disaster was always at his doors. Between 1805 and 1810 he invested
at least £9,000 in the Ballantyne companies, and night by night the
fairy gold won by his imagination changed into worthless paper. We
cannot here attempt to distribute exactly the shares of blame which fall
to Scott and to the Ballantynes. Mr. Cadell uses the word
“hallucination” to qualify Scott’s part in the business. I have examined
these complicated matters carefully,[5] and the gist of the explanation
lies in a remark of James Ballantyne. “The large sums received never
formed an addition to stock. In fact they were all expended by the
partners, who, being then young and sanguine men, not unwillingly
adopted my brother John’s sanguine results.” They accepted John’s
book-keeping at a venture, and, to use a slang phrase, they “blued” the
apparent profits. That is the secret.
To leave a repulsive theme, in 1809 Scott visited the Highlands, he
began _The Lady of the Lake_, which had long “simmered” in his mind, and
he rode Fitz James’s ride from Loch Vennachar to Stirling, finding it
practicable, though the ground, to be sure, must have been very
different in the days of James V, when lochs occupied what is now arable
land. At Buchanan House, on this tour, he read _English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers_, and briefly spoke of the author as “a whelp of a young Lord
Byron ... abusing me for endeavouring to scratch out a living with my
pen. God help the bear if, having little else to eat, he must not even
suck his own paws.” But, like the Moslems in Thackeray’s White Squall,
he “thought but little of it,” and did not dream of repaying Byron in
kind.
[Sidenote: NO SATIRIST]
As he wrote to Lady Abercorn, “If I did not rather dislike satire from
principle than feel myself altogether disqualified from it by nature, I
have the means of very severe retaliation in my power,” particularly
with respect to the Whigs of Holland House. Scott never used his powers
as a satirist. He was remarkably skilled in the playful imitation of the
styles of other poets, a faculty scarcely to have been expected from one
so careless of finish in his own productions. He could easily have
retaliated on Byron and others in the manner of Pope; but, as he
thought, satire is the lowest, because the least sincere, of all forms
of composition. Mankind is weary of the points and the feigned
indignation of the satirist, and as “damns have had their day,”
according to Bob Acres, versified satire too is fortunately in the limbo
of things obsolete.
Scott seems usually to have had in his mind the theme for his next poem
but one before he had finished its predecessor. In an excursion to
Stirling, during the autumn of 1808, he told Mrs. Scott that he hoped
one day “to make the earth yawn” at Bannockburn, “and devour the English
archery and knighthood, as it did on that celebrated day of Scottish
glory.” The design was long deferred, and when it was fulfilled, the
Earth is not the only person who yawns in the course of _The Lord of the
Isles._
In a life that was now very happy, whether spent in London, in
Edinburgh, or in coursing and spearing salmon with the Ettrick Shepherd
at Ashestiel, Scott occupied his morning hours with his edition of
Swift, with the editing of the Somers Tracts, and with _The Lady of the
Lake_, which appeared in May 1810.
The feud with Constable was now dying of natural decline, and Scott and
Jeffrey were quite forgetting their differences. Scott had never
concealed from Jeffrey his opinion that the critic knew nothing of the
heart and glow of poetry, and Jeffrey, before publishing his review of
_The Lady of the Lake_ sent his proof sheets to Scott, expressing his
regret for the “heedless asperities” in the criticism of _Marmion_.
“Believe me when I say that I am sincerely proud both of your genius and
your glory, and that I value your friendship more highly than most of
either my literary or political opinions.” Jeffrey was a good fellow at
heart, though, in criticising contemporary poetry, he spoke most highly
of a certain Professor Brown! He found _The Lady of the Lake_ “more
polished in its diction” than its predecessors, and certainly its
rhyming octosyllabic couplets are more monotonous than the varied
cadences of the _Lay_. “It never expresses a sentiment which it can cost
the most ordinary reader any exertion to comprehend,” which is true
enough, but is no less true of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. The
general chorus of praise, and the rush of tourists to Loch Katrine and
Ellen’s Isle, did not turn Scott’s head, or persuade him that he was a
poet of the first order. Miss Scott told James Ballantyne that she had
not read _The Lady of the Lake_. “Papa says there is nothing so bad for
young people as reading bad poetry.” Yet he confessedly wrote for “young
people of spirit.” He says, “I can, with honest truth, exculpate myself
from having been at any time a partisan of my own poetry, even when it
was in the highest fashion with the million.”
[Sidenote: “LADY OF THE LAKE”]
Meanwhile, whosoever, in youth, has read the magical lines--
The stag at eve had drunk his fill
Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill,
and has followed the chase across the Brig of Turk, to
The lone lake’s western boundary
has to thank Scott for leading him into the paradise of romance, and
cares not how low the literary critics may rate the Minstrel. Such a
reader has been with
mountains that like giants stand
To sentinel enchanted land.
Other enchanted lands there are, but to one Scott has given him the key,
to a land where the second-sighted man foretells the coming of the
stranger, and the prophet sleeps swathed in the black bull’s hide in the
spray of the haunted linn.
Never can we forget the hurrying succession of pictures that pass by the
bearer of the fiery cross, or the song of the distraught Blanche that
gives warning to Fitz James.
The toils are pitch’d, and the stakes are set,
Ever sing merrily, merrily;
The bows they bend, and the knives they whet,
Hunters live so cheerily.
It was a stag, a stag of ten,
Bearing his branches sturdily;
He came stately down the glen,
Ever sing hardily, hardily.
It was there he met with a wounded doe,
She was bleeding deathfully;
She warned him of the toils below,
Oh, so faithfully, faithfully!
He had an eye and he could heed,
Ever sing warily, warily;
He had a foot, and he could speed,
Hunters watch so narrowly.
On this passage the egregious Jeffrey wrote--
“No machinery can be conceived more clumsy for effecting the deliverance
of a distressed hero, than the introduction of a mad woman, who, without
knowing or caring about the wanderer, warns him, _by a song_, to take
care of the ambush that was set for him. The maniacs of poetry have
indeed had a prescriptive right to be musical, since the days of Ophelia
downwards; but it is rather a rash extension of this privilege to make
them sing good sense, and to make sensible people be guided by them.”
[Sidenote: “LADY OF THE LAKE”]
Scott recked so lightly of this censure that he repeated the situation
(his novels often repeat the situations of his poems), the warning
lilts of a brainsick girl, in _The Heart of Midlothian_, in that most
romantic passage where Madge Wildfire’s snatches of song give warning to
the fugitive lover of Effie Deans. These parallelisms between the
structure of the rhymed and of the anonymous prose romances are frequent
and curious.
The whole poem of _The Lady of the Lake_ is inimitably vivacious, it has
on it the dew of morning in a mountain pass: the King is worthy of the
praise of Scott’s princes given to Byron by the Prince of Wales, who,
with all his faults, could appreciate Walter Scott and Jane Austen. “I
told the Prince,” Byron wrote to Scott, “that I thought you more
particularly the painter of Princes, as they never appeared more
fascinating than in _Marmion_ and _The Lady of the Lake_. He was pleased
to coincide, and to dwell on the description of your James’s as no less
royal than poetical. He spoke alternately of Homer and yourself, and
seemed well acquainted with both.” A British king well acquainted with
Homer is hardly the idiot of Thackeray’s satire.
Scott said in taking farewell of his work--
Yet, once again, farewell, thou Minstrel Harp!
Yet, once again, forgive my feeble sway,
And little reck I of the censure sharp
May idly cavil at an idle lay.
Much have I owed thy strains on life’s long way,
Through secret woes the world has never known,
When on the weary night dawn’d wearier day,
And bitterer was the grief devour’d alone,
That I o’erlive such woes, Enchantress! is thine own.
He had shown more of his heart than he cared to show, and passed the
confession off with a quotation from Master Stephen, who deemed
melancholy “a gentlemanly thing.”
Scott’s gains from _The Lady of the Lake_ must have been considerable,
though of course not nearly so great as the profits of a modern dealer
in fustian novels. A prudent poet would have regarded the money as
capital, and Scott, as we said, did place at least £9,000 in his
Ballantyne companies. But it appears that the money was no sooner in
than the profits were taken out again for the private expenditure of the
partners.
[Sidenote: “WAVERLEY”]
It really seems that Scott often was deceived, or at least confused, as
to the state of his commercial accounts. He used to write to John
Ballantyne, his book-keeper, in the strain of an affectionate elder
brother, imploring “dear John” to “have the courage to tell disagreeable
truths to those whom you hold in regard,” “not to shut your eyes or
blind those of your friends upon the actual state of business.” The
advice was given in vain, says Lockhart, and he explains that Scott’s
own conduct made his counsels of no avail. The Ballantynes could not
inquire strictly into Scott’s “uncommercial expenditure,” because, while
he was the only moneyed partner, they had “trespassed largely, for their
own purposes, on the funds of the companies.” The same reason, namely
that the money was not theirs, made it impossible for them to check
Scott’s commercial expenditure on the publication of huge antiquarian
volumes, exquisitely ill done by the many literary hangers-on for whom
he wished to procure a livelihood. These piles of waste paper remained
on the hands of his publishing company, which was also bearing the
weight of that Old Man of the Sea, his Annual Register, irregularly
published at a loss of £1,000 a year. Thus, although the excitements of
the Peninsular and other wars did not prevent the public from buying
Scott’s poetry largely, the Ballantyne companies went from one bank to
another in search of accommodation, while Scott lived as joyously as La
Fontaine’s grasshopper, in the summer weather of his genius.
In 1810 he showed the fragment of _Waverley_ to James Ballantyne, who
looked on it without enthusiasm. James was to Scott what the old
housekeeper was to Molière, a touchstone of public taste; his remarks on
the margins of Scott’s proof-sheets show that he was rather below the
level of general ignorance, and rather more morally sensitive than the
common prude of the period. He could throw cold water on _Waverley_, but
could not restrain Scott from publishing Dr. Jamieson’s _History of the
Culdees_, and Weber’s egregious “Beaumont and Fletcher.” Business looked
so bad that in 1810 Scott entertained the notion of seeking a judicial
office in India.
His next poem, _Don Roderick_--“this patriotic puppet show” he called
it--he gave, since silver and gold he had none, as a subscription to the
fund for ruined Portuguese. Scott, in _Don Roderick_, passed Sir John
Moore over in silence, not because Moore was a Whig, but because Scott
did not appreciate the much disputed strategy of that great soldier and
good man. Neither Moore’s glorious death, nor his stand at Corunna,
expiated, in Scott’s opinion, the disasters of his hurried retreat. It
was at this time that his friend, Captain Fergusson, read _The Lady of
the Lake_ aloud, the sixth canto, to the men of his command, under
artillery fire.
[Sidenote: ABBOTSFORD]
A trifling piece, _The Inferno of Altesidora_, contained verses in the
manner of Crabbe, Moore, and himself; these are excellent imitations,
and, with a lyric, _The Resolve_, in the manner of the Caroline poets,
justify the opinion that Scott would have been a formidable satirist had
he chosen to attack Byron and the Whigs in the manner and measure of
Pope.
As Scott had now a near prospect of a salary of £1,300 a year, for his
hitherto unpaid labours as Clerk of Session, he yielded to the fatal
temptation of purchasing a small estate on Tweedside. This purchase was
really an antiquarian extravagance; he wished to add to his collection
the field of the last great Border clan battle, fought in 1526 between
the clans of Scott and Ker, including the stone called Turn Again, where
an Elliot checked the pursuit by spearing Ker of Cessford. The two farms
which he bought were styled Cartley or Clarty Hole, and Kaeside, “a bare
haugh and a bleak bank,” said Scott, and there was an ugly little
farmhouse at Clarty Hole, rechristened Abbotsford, in memory of the
monks of Melrose. It is not a good site, lying low, close to the
existing public road, and the proprietor had not the charter for salmon
fishing in the pools beneath his house. But the property was all
“enchanted land,” rich in legends and Border memories of Thomas of
Ercildoune and of battles, while Scott often cast longing eyes on the
adjacent Faldonside, once the home of Andrew Ker, the most ruffianly of
Riccio’s murderers, and on the perfect little peel tower of Darnick.
Washington Irving says that Scott spoke to him of a project of buying
Smailholme Tower. Like almost all Scots for many centuries, the Sheriff
longed to be a landed man; his lease of Ashestiel was ended, and, above
all, the land which he now purchased was rich in antiquarian interest.
So he collected farms, began to rebuild the house of Clarty Hole, and
entered on his private Moscow expedition, the Making of Abbotsford. The
first farm purchased was dear at the £4,000 which was its price.
Meanwhile, a source which, in our day, would have proved a mine of gold
to Scott, was by him unworked. He would not dramatize his poems, or,
later, his novels, for the stage, and every adventurer made prize of
them.
[Sidenote: “ROKEBY”]
Early in 1812 Scott began _Rokeby_, a poem on the home of his friend
Morritt, and in May he “flitted” in a gipsy-like procession from
Ashestiel to Abbotsford. But _Childe Harold_ appeared before _Rokeby_;
Scott disliked the popular misanthropy of _The Childe_, but privately
declared it to be “a poem of most extraordinary power, which may rank
its author with our first poets.” Scott burned the whole of his first
draft of _Rokeby_ (canto 1), because “I had corrected the spirit out of
it.” Meanwhile Scott and Byron became correspondents, in a tone, to
quote Lockhart, “of friendly confidence equally honourable to both these
great competitors, without rivalry, for the favour of the literary
world.” Of _Rokeby_, which appeared in the last days of 1812, Scott
said that it was a “pseudo romance of pseudo chivalry,” though he liked
the beautiful lyrics interspersed through the poem, and rather piqued
himself on the character of the outlaw Bertram, who has won the applause
of Mr. Swinburne. The scene of _Rokeby_ is English, and of the
characters Lockhart says that, in a prose romance “they would have come
forth with effect hardly inferior to any of all the groups Scott ever
created.” Scott told Miss Edgeworth that Matilda was drawn from “a lady
who is now no more,” his lost love, and that most of the other
personages “are mere shadows.” The poet never left much for his critics
to say in the way of disapproval.
The poem, _enfin_, was in no way a success. Mocking birds of song had
wearied the public of Scott by endless imitation.
Most can raise the flowers now,
For all have got the seed,
And now again the people
Call it but a weed.
Scott himself was imitating himself in _The Bridal of Triermain_, to
“set a trap for Jeffrey,” who was expected to take Erskine for the
author. He was boyishly reckless of his reputation; he easily resigned
the lists when Byron “beat him,” as he says, and in the year 1813 was
harassed by “the ignoble melancholy of pecuniary embarrassment.”
A crisis had come in the affairs of Ballantyne & Co. The interest, for
us, lies in the light which the crisis throws on the character of Scott.
We have seen that a friend wrote, at the time of his disappointment in
love, about Scott’s “violent” and “ungovernable” character, while Scott
himself refers to “the family temper” as rather volcanic. The late Mr.
W. B. Scott, too, considered it worth while to tell the world in his
Memoirs, that, as a boy, he once heard Scott swear profane in a
printer’s office. The truth of the matter seems to be that Scott had a
large share of the family temper in boyhood, when he suffered from
serious illnesses, and that he was capable of relapses in his overworn
later years. But in the full health and vigour of his manhood, he
mastered his temper admirably.
[Sidenote: BALLANTYNE TROUBLES]
He was at Abbotsford, at Drumlanrig with the Duke of Buccleuch, and at
other country houses remote from Edinburgh, in the July and August of
1813. He was disturbed by frequent letters from John Ballantyne, always
at the very last moment demanding money to save the existence of the
firm, and always concealing the exact state of financial affairs. John
was like the proverbial spendthrift who never can be induced to give
his benevolent kinsfolk a full schedule of his debts. Thus harassed and
menaced with ruin, Scott wrote letters which are models of tact and
temper. He only asked to be told “in plain and distinct terms” how
affairs really stood, and to be told in good time. But John was as
unpunctual and untrustworthy as Scott was punctual and placable. He
would not write explicitly, he always sent unexpected demands, and it
was only certain that he was keeping others back. Scott had not an hour
of peace and safety, and he told Ballantyne as much, “in charity with
your dilatory worship.” “Were it not for your strange concealments, I
should anticipate no difficulty in winding up these matters.” Lockhart
says that he would as soon have hanged his favourite dog as turned John
Ballantyne adrift. The conclusion of the matter was that the Ballantyne
publishing company found a haven in the capacious bosom of Constable,
who believed in the Star of Scott, advanced some £4,000, and took off
the sinking ship the useless burden of the valueless books.
On the whole Scott could be patient, he knew that his copyrights and
library were valuable enough to secure all his creditors from ultimate
loss. But to avoid loss by the hurried sale of copyrights, he obtained
a guarantee for £4,000 from his friend and chief, the Duke of Buccleuch,
backed, it seems, by Messrs. Longman. At the same time he declined an
offer of the Poet Laureateship--vacant by the death of Pye--from the
Prince Regent. He supposed that the Laureateship was worth three or four
hundred pounds annually, a mistake. But as he held two other offices,
the Clerkship and Sheriffship, he deemed it wrong to take the money, and
secured the office for Southey, who lived solely by his pen. Another
motive, felt by Scott and urged by the Duke of Buccleuch, was the
ridicule which then was attached to the bays, and the necessity of
writing a Birthday Ode every year. The Regent removed that obsolete
necessity, and Southey, despite one famous error, redeemed the honour of
the laurels, next held by Wordsworth, and then by Tennyson. “Sir
Walter’s conduct,” Southey said, “was, as it always was,
characteristically generous, and in the highest degree friendly.”
Thus in temper, in generosity, and in determination that no man should
be a loser by him, we see Scott at his best, while in the sanguine
hopefulness which led him to go on buying land, books, and old armour,
during the crisis, we mark the cause of his final misfortunes; and, in
his ceaseless industry
[Illustration: Sir Walter Scott and His Friends.
[Sidenote: LAUREATESHIP]
From the painting by Thomas Faed, R.A.]
during these distractions, we note the courageous perseverance by which
he saved his honour at the expense of his life. Through his financial
troubles he worked doggedly at his Edition and _Life of Swift_, and
began _The Lord of the Isles_, though already he was the butt of every
bore, and the host of tedious uninvited guests, “the thieves of time.”
Simultaneously, he was assisting Maturin and other literary strugglers
with money, his constant practice. But he did cause the Income Tax
collectors to “abandon their claim upon the produce of literary labour.”
Lockhart chronicles this fact “in case such a demand should ever be
renewed hereafter!”
It is renewed, of course, and with perfect justice. What Scott resisted
was double taxation of literary earnings, first under the property tax,
next, yearly, under the Income Tax. He must not first be taxed on the
full price, say, of _Marmion_, as income, and then again yearly on the
interest of the price.[6]
In July 1814 the Edition and _Life of Swift_ appeared in nineteen
volumes, six years after this laborious work was begun. The _Life_,
which became popular, is perhaps, with that by Sir Henry Craik, the most
generous and sympathetic attempt to make intelligible one of the
greatest, most miserable, and most mysterious of mankind. Scott made
more allowance than Thackeray for what Lockhart calls “the faults and
foibles of nameless and inscrutable disease.”