Sir Walter Scott E-Book

John Buchan

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 341

Beschreibung

To know Sir Walter Scott as a man is as delightful and fruitful an experience as to appreciate the greatness of his books. In the bicentenary year of the publication of Sir Walter Scott's first novel Waverley, this is a timely republication of John Buchan's biography of Scott - one great storyteller exploring the life of another. Buchan's sympathetic treatment of Scott is perceptive, and his enthusiasm for Scott's work is infectious. Interspersed with superb extracts exhibiting Scott's storytelling skills, John Buchan's short introduction to Scott has never been bettered. To this day, he remains the ideal advocate and guide to the great Sir Walter Scott. John Buchan is the very person to get us reading Scott again, abandoning the superficial media distractions for a grand rumbling rollercoaster of a read - ideal for a stage coach journey, an airport wait, or a holiday lived out of time. FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY DONALD SMITH The almost inspired literary criticism of Sir Walter Scott shows Buchan at his best. DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY

Leseprobe

JOHN BUCHAN, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir (1875–1940), studied Classics at the University of Glasgow and Law at the University of Oxford. He pursued successful literary, military and political careers and published a steady flow of fiction, poetry and non-fiction works, notably historical biographies. His gift for storytelling was remarkable and the works of Sir Walter Scott were an undoubted influence. In The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle Buchan created the prototype for the modern spy thriller. He left a legacy of over a hundred books.

First published as The Man and the Book: Sir Walter Scott by

Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd., 1925

This edition 2014

Reprinted 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-910324-46-2

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

Typeset in 10.5 point Sabon

Introduction © Donald Smith

Contents

Introduction by Donald Smith

CHAPTER 1 Youth and Early Manhood

CHAPTER 2 The Poems

CHAPTER 3 The First Waverley Novels

CHAPTER 4 The Waverley Novels Rob Roy, The Bride of Lammermoor, The Heart of Midlothian

CHAPTER 5 The Sunshine of Success

CHAPTER 6 Redgauntelet

CHAPTER 7 The Dark Days

CHAPTER 8 The End

Introduction

WALTER SCOTT WAS entitled ‘The Great Unknown’ by Edgar Johnson, one of his modern biographers. He is also in danger of becoming ‘The Great Unread’. This is a tragic mistake, since Scott remains one of the world’s great storytellers, and an intriguing example of the rich relationship between life and art.

Scott’s early illness and disability took him out of Edinburgh middle-class society to the Scottish Borders, where he imbibed centuries of family tradition. On returning, he compensated by becoming the playground storyteller. Growing into adulthood at a time when Scotland was experiencing unprecedented change, Scott soaked up the literature and history of world cultures, developing an understanding of these processes which was both reflective and instinctive, and led to his fashioning of the historical novel as a newly developing genre. He became a potent influence on European and American literature.

Scott wrote most of his fiction anonymously. He was intensely conscious of his public position as a legal official and as a scion of gentlemanly landowners. He also kept secret his shrewd involvement in the commercial aspects of mass printing and publishing. These multiple roles were to tragically bankrupt the successful laird and writer in a credit crunch, leading to a heroic and ultimately successful effort to clear his debts without surrendering Abbotsford, his own precious Borders home and gothic artwork.

Scott is also in the front rank of biographers, letter writers and diarists. His influence on Scottish and British culture has been hailed and denounced but never denied. He shapes our current self-presentation and understanding in ways of which most people are oblivious.

The conflicts between realism and romance found in his work arose from inner contradiction, and became part of Scotland’s psychological fabric. Above all Scott is a master of character, description and dramatic speech – he is Scotland’s Shakespeare in range and variety.

This year is the bicentenary of the publication of Waverley, Scott’s first novel and begetter of countless succeeding Jacobite fictions. It also sees the appearance of the first scholarly edition of The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, his first major published work, whose importance in Scott’s artistic growth is only now being fully recognised.

In the Minstrelsy, historic and legendary ballads of ridings and affrays are brought together with supernatural ballads and poems written in imitation of the old style. Concerned with issues of source and authenticity, Scott used a range of informants across the region. For me, the real interest in these volumes is seeing Scott’s mind at work: as avid collector and antiquary, commenting on locations, written records and local legend; as artist, the Battle of Otterburn and Thomas the Rhymer’s intimate encounter with the Fairy Queen grist to his narrative mill.

Taken as a whole, including introductions, collected ballads, improved or imitated ballads, and voluminous notes, the Minstrelsy contains the seeds of all Scott’s later endeavour. Throughout his life he returned frequently to this work, adding and amending, reconnecting with the original springs of his own inspiration. Lurking in Scott’s make up, through all his commonsense humanity and pragmatism, was a poet in search of the land of faerie.

In 2014 we have the perfect opportunity to look again at Scott, and who better to take for our guide than John Buchan?

Buchan was a Borderer with that same intimate feeling for the landscape and culture of those debatable grounds which provided Scott’s imaginative springboard. A novelist, poet, and biographer who had a role in public life alongside his literary career, like Scott he balanced a conservative public stance with intense human sympathy and wide cultural understanding. Like Scott, he lived through a destructive world conflict which fuelled the historical impulse. Both men had an inner spiritual side, while refusing to wear religion on their sleeves.

Buchan wrote his brief biography of Scott in 1925 as part of publisher Thomas Nelson’s projected series ‘The Man and the Book’. His sympathetic, perceptive treatment is at points critical and does acknowledge Scott’s weaknesses. Buchan’s selection of extracts is superb, exhibiting Scott’s narrative arts and tempting us into reading more. As a short introduction to, and sampling of Scott, Buchan has never been bettered. I am honoured and delighted as a storyteller, novelist and cultural historian to be commending this perfectly judged little book as a plank of the 2014 Scott celebrations. Buchan is the very person to get us reading Scott again, abandoning the superficial media distractions for a grand rumbling rollercoaster of a read – ideal for a stage coach journey, an airport wait, or a holiday lived out of time. Ignore the prejudices about Scott’s novels and soak up the diverse narrative worlds of a magical storyteller – ‘Wizard of the North’. If you don’t believe me, or you have had some negative experience in the past, just begin with Buchan – right now.

Donald Smith,

Edinburgh 2014

CHAPTER I

Youth and Early Manhood

IF WE WERE given the power of recalling to the present and beholding in the flesh a great writer of the past, what would our choice be? With many it would be Dr Johnson; with many it would be Sir Walter Scott; but I think that these two would command most of the suffrages, because they are still personalities as real to us as our own contemporaries. We think of them as we think of famous men of action – as living and breathing human beings, and not dim shades from a library. We know them both so well that we can picture for ourselves every detail of their figure and dress; we are almost familiar with the tones of their voice; we are aware of their foibles and imperfections as we are aware of their transcendent qualities, and we feel for them the affection of personal friendship.

Most men of letters live only in their books. Their lives are apt to be unfeatured and their characters can only be deduced indirectly from their writings. But Sir Walter Scott’s character is as notable and engaging as that of any of the figures which his fancy created. He lived great drama and romance as well as wrote it. We are fortunate in having ample material for his rife, quite apart from its reflex in his writings. His biography by his son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart, is one of the two greatest biographies in the English tongue. His private Journal reveals his innermost thoughts during the last stages of his life. For thirty years he was one of the most distinguished figures in Britain, and a hundred contemporaries have recorded the impression he made upon them. He would have been a great man even if he had not been a great writer. To know Sir Walter Scott as a man is as delightful and fruitful an experience as to appreciate the greatness of his books.

There is a pleasant fancy that the good and just return to earth now and then to revisit the scenes which they have loved. If such a shadow is found on some green drove-road in Ettrick Forest we know what shape it will take. It will be a tall, broadish man, with a ruddy face, mounted on a Highland pony, with a tangle of dogs at his heels. His head will be uncovered, and the wind will be blowing his silvery hair, while his keen eyes are roving the hills. He will hail us in soft Border Scots, and bid us mark the light on Ettrick Pen, and warn us to go carefully, for the shepherd at the Cross Shiels is gathering in his sheep. We might puzzle for a moment at such a figure, and then something in the face, and the green shooting-coat, and the deerhound by his side would suddenly be familiar, and we would know that we were looking at the Last of the Minstrels. We would not be afraid, I think, to meet that kindly ghost.

Walter Scott was born on the 15th of August, 1771, in an old house at the head of the College Wynd in Edinburgh, the son of Walter Scott, a Writer to the Signet. On both his father’s and his mother’s side he came of a long line of Border lairds and yeomen, many of them notable in Scottish history. ‘There are few in Scotland,’ Lockhart wrote, ‘under the titled nobility, who can trace their blood to so many stocks of distinction.’ He had Celtic blood in his veins, too, through the ancient house of Macdougal. He was thus born to a great background of tradition and legend. The Edinburgh of his day was a good nurse for a romantic child. The Scottish Law and the Scottish Church found in it their headquarters; it was the capital to which all Scottish families of substance migrated for the winter season; and the stem little city on its backbone of rock had tradition enough of its own. The age was one of transition between old and new. At his birth the British Empire was in the making, and the French Revolution less than a score of years distant. Scotland was winning her way from the bitter poverty of the early eighteenth century to some degree of prosperity, and had already made a high place for herself in British literature and thought. The last Jacobite war was less than thirty years removed, and figures from that old world still haunted the Edinburgh streets. We find this story in Lockhart:

Mrs Scott’s curiosity was strongly excited one autumn by the regular appearance, at a certain hour every evening, of a sedan chair, to deposit a person carefully muffled up in a mantle, who was immediately ushered into her husband’s private room, and commonly remained with him there until long after the usual bedtime of this orderly family. Mr Scott answered her repeated inquiries with a vagueness which irritated the lady’s feelings more and more; until, at last, she could bear the thing no longer; but one evening, just as she heard the bell ring as for the stranger’s chair to carry him off, she made her appearance within the forbidden parlour with a salver in her hand, observing, that she thought the gentlemen had sat so long, they would be the better of a dish of tea, and had ventured accordingly to bring some for their acceptance. The stranger, a person of distinguished appearance, and richly dressed, bowed to the lady, and accepted a cup; but her husband knit his brows, and refused very coldly to partake the refreshment. A moment afterwards the visitor withdrew – and Mr Scott, lifting up the window-sash, took the cup, which he had left empty on the table, and tossed it out upon the pavement. The lady exclaimed for her china, but was put to silence by her husband’s saying, ‘I can forgive your little curiosity, madam, but you must pay the penalty. I may admit into my house, on a piece of business, persons wholly unworthy to be treated as guests by my wife. Neither lip of me nor of mine comes after Mr Murray of Broughton’s.’ This was the unhappy man who, after attending Prince Charles Stuart as his secretary throughout the greater part of his expedition, condescended to redeem his own life and fortune by bearing evidence against the noblest of his late master’s adherents when

Pitied by gentle hearts Kilmarnock died –

The brave, Bahnerino, were on thy side.

When confronted with Sir John Douglas of Kelhead (ancestor of the Marquess of Queensberry), before the Privy Council in St. James’s, the prisoner was asked, ‘Do you know this witness?’ ‘Not I,’ answered Douglas; ‘I once knew a person who bore the designation of Murray of Broughton – but that was a gentleman and a man of honour, and one that could hold up his head!’ The saucer belonging to Broughton’s teacup chanced to be preserved; and Walter had made prize of it.

Walter was one of a large family, six of whom died in infancy, for the house in the College Wynd was unhealthy. After his birth the Scotts moved to a more wholesome habitation in George Square, near the Meadows. An illness at the age of eighteen months produced permanent lameness in his right leg, which prevented him from becoming a soldier, as was always his desire. It sent him also to his grandfather’s farm of Sandy Knowe, near the castle of Smailholm, where he imbibed his lifelong passion for the Borderland. There are stories of him lying, on the kitchen floor in the skin of a newly killed sheep for his health’s sake, and crawling out alone among the hills in a thunderstorm, clapping his hands at the lightning and crying ‘Bonnie!’ Even in these early days he showed a prodigious memory, learning ballads and poetry of all kinds with the utmost ease.

At the age of seven he went to the famous High School in Edinburgh, of which the head master was then Dr Adam, an admirable Latin scholar, whose last words in his final illness are still remembered: ‘It grows dark; the boys may dismiss.’ The school days of Walter Scott were not distinguished. He sat near the bottom of the class, and shone only when it was a question of translating the classics into vigorous English. But he was a leader among the boys in every escapade, such as climbing Edinburgh Castle Rock, and commanding in snowball battles against the street urchins. He always maintained that there was a deep vein of laziness in his family, and that the ordinary tasks of life were only performed by them with an effort. But while he was an idle scholar, he was very intent upon his own private business. He read every kind of literature he could lay his hands on – often, as he tells us, beginning a book in the middle, or wherever he found something to interest him. The education which he describes in the first chapter of Waverley was his – ‘driven through the sea of books like a vessel without pilot or rudder.’ When he went to Edinburgh College in his thirteenth year, his habits were the same. He had a facile but inaccurate knowledge of Latin; Greek he never acquired at all; but he picked up sufficient Italian, German, Spanish, and French to read the books that interested him. For history and every form of antiquarian lore he had a deep passion, and it was natural that in his fifteenth year he should enter upon the profession of the law, like his father before him.

Scots law was, along with the masterpieces of English literature and the ballads and traditions of the Borders, the chief educative force, I think, in Walter Scott’s life. He never became a great lawyer, but the humours and pedantries of the legal profession were to have an abiding effect upon his work. As a lawyer’s apprentice he visited the Highlands, and made the acquaintance of Mr Stewart of Invernahyle, who had fought a duel with Rob Roy and who was ‘out’ with Prince Charlie. In his office work he acquired the gift of steady and laborious writing, and it is recorded that he once covered without a halt one hundred and twenty pages of folio, thereby earning thirty shillings for pocket money. In spite of his lameness he grew into a strong and active young man – the strongest man, said the Ettrick Shepherd, whom he had ever met. A walk of thirty miles in a day was nothing to him, and on foot or on horseback he roamed over the Lowlands. He had decided to follow the higher branch of the legal profession, and on July 1792 he was admitted a member of the Faculty of Advocates, just before he attained his majority.

The big, fair-haired, fresh-complexioned boy now began to appear in Edinburgh society, and made everywhere a host of friends. A lady who saw him at the time describes him thus:

His eyes were clear, open, and well set, with a changeful radiance, to which teeth of the most perfect regularity and whiteness lent their assistance, while the noble expanse and elevation of the brow gave to the whole aspect a dignity far above the charm of mere features. His smile was always delightful, and I can easily fancy the peculiar intermixture of tenderness and gravity, with playful innocent hilarity and humour in the expression, as being well calculated to fix a fair lady’s eye. His figure, excepting the blemish in one limb, must in those days have been eminently handsome – tall, much above the usual stature, cast in the very mould of a youthful Hercules; the head set on with singular grace, the throat and chest after the truest model of the antique, the hands delicately finished, the whole outline that of extraordinary vigour, without as yet a touch of clumsiness.

He was a famous story-teller in the lobby of the Parliament House, and whenever he could escape from Court he was off to Liddesdale, or Galloway, meeting every type from bonnet-laird to salmon poacher, and laying up the treasures of experience which were later to be the groundwork of the Waverley novels. At nineteen he had fallen in love with a lady whom he called Green Mantle, and who, under different names, flits through all his writings. She married Sir William Forbes, the banker, but till the end of his life Walter Scott cherished her memory. ‘There is nothing in Scott,’ says Mr Andrew Lang ‘like the melancholy or peevish repining of the lovers in Locksley Hall and in Maud’. Only in the fugitive farewell caress of Diana Vernon, stooping from her saddle on the darkling moor before she rides into the night, do we feel the heart-throb of Walter Scott. Of love, as of human life, he knew too much to speak. For five years he lived with his hopes, till, in 1796, Green Mantle married. The next year Scott’s heart, as he says, was ‘handsomely pieced,’ for he fell in love with and married Miss Charpentier, whose portrait we find in the dark liveliness of Julia Mannering. In the summer of 1798 the Scotts began their married life in a little cottage at Lasswade, on the Esk, about six miles from Edinburgh.

Scott was now settled apparently in the career of a rising lawyer. He was beginning to acquire a practice, and he seemed to have found the life which satisfied him. He had many companions of like tastes, such as William Erskine and William Clerk of Penicuik, and he had powerful friends, such as the Duke of Buccleuch, the head of his family, who might be expected to assist him in his career. His conservative habit of mind already appeared in the vigorous part he took in volunteer training and in his hostility to the revolutionary spirit with which France was affecting certain classes. His love of literature made it inevitable that he should try his hand at writing, and in 1796 he published a little volume containing translations of some of Burger’s ballads, and three years later a version of Goethe’s Goetz von Berlickingen. He was also trying his ’prentice hand at ballads of his own. In 1799 he was made Sheriff Depute of Selkirkshire, which gave him a connection with his well-beloved Borderland. At this time he looked to make his career at the Bar, and regarded writing as only an amusement for his scanty leisure. Literature, as he once said, was ‘a good staff, but a bad crutch.’ But no man with such stores of romance and poetry in his head could long refrain from giving something of it to the world, and in conjunction with a school friend, James Ballantyne, a printer in Kelso, he set about making a collection of Border ballads. It was the natural avenue into literature for a mind like his, so deeply under the spell of the past. He had first to lay bare to the world the poetic treasures of his own countryside before he added to them riches of his own.

CHAPTER II

The Poems

IN 1802, WHEN Walter Scott was thirty-one, the two first volumes of The Border Minstrelsy were published. He was very modest about the performance. ‘I have contrived,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘to turn a very slender portion of literary talent to some account by a poetical record of the antiquities of the Border.’ The Minstrelsy sprang at once into fame. It put on record old ballads which were fast being forgotten; moreover, it provided a version of these ballads prepared by one who was himself a poet, and these versions remain today the classic text. One result was to bring Scott into acquaintance with notable English men of letters, such as Wordsworth, and to put a spur to his own literary ambitions. The practice of profession left him ample leisure, and the stirring days in which he lived, and his association with the Edinburgh Volunteer Horse kept his imagination at fever heat.

Some years before, the young Lady Dalkeith had asked him to write a ballad on the subject of a mysterious goblin, called Gilpin Homer, whose doings were a legend in the Borders. About the same time Scott heard part of Coleridge’s Christabel, then in manuscript, recited by a friend. The metre took his fancy, and he set to work to obey Lady Dalkeith’s wishes. The result was The Lay of the Last Minstrel, published in 1805, which established his poetical reputation. There had been little done in English poetry since Cowper, for Wordsworth and Coleridge were still almost unknown. The Lay was a story in rhyme which the simplest could understand, and the magic of the galloping verse and the strange atmosphere of romance were new things to a public a little wearied of the decorous strains of the Augustans. It was the ballad manner enlarged and adapted for a modern audience; small wonder that it delighted the whole contemporary world. In some ways it is the most perfect of all Scott’s poems, for it is the first and the freshest, and the one sprung most directly from the memories of his youth. The main plot is indeed faulty, and there are many defects in the workmanship, but there are incidental passages which few romantic poets have equalled. Take this on how the Scotts won Eskdale:

Hearken, Ladye, to the tale,

How thy sons won fair Eskdale…

Earl Morton was lord of that valley fair,

The Beattisons were his vassals there.

The Earl was gentle, and mild of mood,

The vassals were warlike, and fierce, and rude;

High of heart and haughty of word,

Little they reck’d of a tame liege lord.

The Earl into fair Eskdale came.

Homage and seignory to claim:

Of Gilbert the Galliard a heriot he sought,

Saying, ‘Give thy best steed, as a vassal ought.’

… ‘Dear to me is my bonny white steed,

Oft has he help’d me at pinch of need;

Lord and Earl though thou be, I trow,

I can rein Bucksfoot better than thou,’…

Word on word gave fuel to fire,

Till so highly blazed the Beattisons’ ire,

But that the Earl the flight had ta’en.

The vassals there their lord had slain.

Sore he plied both whip and spur,

As he urged his steed through Eskdale muir;

And it fell down a weary weight,

Just on the threshold of Branksome gate.

The Earl was a wrathful man to see,

Full fain avenged would he be.

In haste to Branksome’s lord he spoke,

Saying – ‘Take these traitors to thy yoke:

For a cast of hawks and a purse of gold

All Eskdale I’ll sell thee, to have and hold:

Beshrew thy heart, of the Beattisons’ clan

If thou leavest on Eske a landed man;

But spare Woodkerrick’s lands alone.

For he lent me his horse to escape upon.’

A glad man then was Branksome bold,

Down he flung him the purse of gold;

To Eskdale soon he spurred amain,

And with him five hundred riders has ta’en.

He left bis merry men in the mist of the hill,

And bade them hold them close and still;

And alone he wended to the plain,

To meet with the Galliard and all his train.

To Gilbert the Galliard thus he said:…

‘Know thou me for thy liege-lord and head;

Deal not with me as with Morton tame,

For Scotts play best at the roughest game.

Give me in peace my heriot due,

Thy bonny white steed, or thou shalt rue.

If my horn I three times wind,

Eskdale shall long have the sound in mind.’…

Loudly the Beattison laugh’d in scorn;

‘Little care we for thy winded horn.

Ne’er shall it be the Galliard’s lot

To yield his steed to a haughty Scott,

Wend thou to Branksome back on foot.

With rusty spur and miry boot.’…

He blew his bugle so loud and hoarse,

That the dun deer started at fair Craikcross;

He blew again so loud and clear,

Through the grey mountain-mist there did lances appear;

And the third blast rang with such a din

That the echoes answered from Pentoun linn,

And all his riders came lightly in.

Then had you seen a gallant shock,

When saddles were emptied, and lances broke!

For each scornful word the Galliard had said,

A Beattison on the field was laid.

His own good sword the chieftain drew,

And he bore the Galliard through and through;

Where the Beattisons’ blood mix’d with the rill.

The Galliard’s Haughmen call it still.

The Scotts have scatter’d the Beattison clan,

In Eskdale they left but one landed man.

The valley of Eske, from the mouth to the source,

Was lost and won for that bonny white horse.

Meantime the Scotts had left Lasswade and made their home at Ashestiel, an old house on the steep southern bank of the Tweed between Yair and Thomilee. It is in the most haunted part, of the Borderland, for over the hills to the south lie Yarrow and Ettrick, and every glen is famous in ballad or story. Scott had still little practice at the Bar, but between his private resources and his Sheriffdom he had more than a thousand a year, and he had the reversion of a Clerkship in the Court of Session. Had he been content with Ashestiel, and never dreamed of Abbotsford, his life might have been the fortunate one of the country gentleman who has both law and literature to keep his mind active. Certainly those years at Ashestiel were among the happiest in his life. He had the family of Buccleuch near him at Bowhill, English men of letters constantly visited him, and Edinburgh was less than thirty miles away. With Tom Purdie, a reclaimed salmon poacher, as his factotum, he entered joyfully into every country sport. He was noted as a bold rider in a country of bold riders. ‘The de’il’s in ye, Shirra,’ said Mungo Park’s brother: ‘ye’ll never halt till they bring you hame with your feet foremost.’ Scott himself has written of the delights of that simple life:

On Ettrick Forest’s mountains dun,

’Tis blithe to hear the sportsman’s gun,

And seek the heath-frequenting brood

Far through the noonday solitude;

By many a cairn and trenched mound.

Where chiefs of yore sleep lone and sound.

And springs, where grey-hair’d shepherds tell,

That still the fairies love to dwell.

Along the silver streams of Tweed,

Tis blithe the mimic fly to lead,

When to the hook the salmon springs,

And the line whistles through the rings;

The boiling eddy see him try,

Then dashing from the current high,

Till watchful eye and cautious hand

Have led his wasted strength to land.

’Tis blithe along the midnight tide,

With stalwart arm the boat to guide;

On high the dazzling blaze to rear,

And heedful plunge the barbed spear;

Rock, wood, and scaur, emerging bright,

Tiling on the stream their ruddy light,

And from the bank our band appears

Like Genii, arm’d with fiery spears.

’Tis blithe at eve to tell the tale,

How we succeed, and how we fail,

Whether at Alwyn’s lordly meal,

Or lowlier board of Ashestiel;

While the gay tapers cheerly shine,

Bickers the fire, and flows the wine –

Days free from thought, and nights from care,

My blessing on the Forest fair!

It was a full life, for apart from his poetry he was busy with contributions to the reviews, and with an edition of Dryden. The fact was that, owing to his friendship with James Ballantyne, he was slowly being drawn into publishing ventures, for he had already entered into a secret partnership and invested a considerable sum of money in Ballantyne’s printing business. A lawyer and a man of letters has no business to engage in commerce and take upon himself indefinite responsibilities unless he can give his mind honestly to the subject. Scott trusted everything to Ballantyne, and was content to provide the literary material for the partners’ press.

Lockhart has described the orderly busyness of Scott’s habits at Ashestiel, habits which continued to the end of his days:

He rose by five o’clock, lit his own fire when the season required one, and shaved and dressed with great deliberation – for he was a martinet as to all but the mere coxcombries of the toilet, not abhorring effeminate dandyism itself so cordially as the slightest approach to personal slovenliness, or even those ‘bed-gown and slipper tricks,’ as he called them, in which literary men are so apt to indulge. Clad in his shooting-jacket, or whatever dress he meant to use till dinner time, he was seated at his desk by six o’clock, all his papers arranged before him in the most accurate order, and his books of reference marshalled around him on the floor, while at least one favourite dog lay watching his eye, just beyond the line of circumvallation. Thus, by the time the family assembled for breakfast between nine and ten, he had done enough (in his own language) ‘to break the neck of the day’s work.’ After breakfast, a couple of hours more were given to his solitary tasks, and by noon he was, as he used to say, ‘his own man.’ When the weather was bad, he would labour incessantly all the morning; but the general rule was to he out and on horseback by one o’clock at the latest; while, if any more distant excursion had been proposed over night, he was ready to start on it by ten; his occasional rainy days of unintermitted study forming, as he said, a fund in his favour, out of which he was entitled to draw for accommodation whenever the sun shone with special brightness.

In 1806 Scott’s appointment as a Clerk of the Court of Session was gazetted, but the attainment of this office was really his farewell to the legal profession, for his thoughts were now mainly on literature. The general admiration of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, in which Fox and Pitt shared, induced him to continue his metrical romances, and he took as the subject for the second the most melancholy page in Scottish history – the battle of Flodden. Marmion was begun in the autumn of that year, and published early in 1808. Its success more than equalled that of its predecessor, though Lord Jeffrey criticised it unfavourably in the Edinburgh Review. It ranks in general estimation as the best of the poems, for though the plot is constructed with extreme carelessness, it abounds in noble passages. His story of Flodden is one of the finest battle-pieces in literature, and Scott never excelled the picture of the steel circle which died around the king:

By this, though deep the evening fell,

Still rose the battle’s deadly swell,

For still the Scots, around their King,

Unbroken, fought in desperate ring.

Where’s now their victor vaward wing,

Where Huntly, and where Home? –

O for a blast of that dread horn,

On Fontarabian echoes borne,

That to King Charles did come,

When Rowland brave, and Olivier,

And every paladin and peer,

On Roncesvalles died!

Such blast might warn them, not in vain,

To quit the plunder of the slain,

And turn the doubtful day again,

While yet on Flodden side,

Afar, the Royal Standard flies,

And round it toils, and bleeds and dies,

Our Caledonian pride!

But as they left the dark’ning heath,

More desperate grew the strife of death.

The English shafts in volleys hail’d.

In headlong charge their horse assail’d;

Front, flank, and rear, the squadrons sweep

To break the Scottish circle deep.

That fought around their King.

But yet, though thick the shafts as snow,

Though charging knights like whirlwinds go,

Though bill-men ply the ghastly blow.

Unbroken was the ring;

The stubborn spear-men still made good

Their dark impenetrable wood,

Each stepping where his comrade stood,

The instant that he fell.

No thought was there of dastard flight;

Link’d in the serried phalanx tight,

Groom fought like noble, squire like knight,

As fearlessly and well;

Till utter darkness closed her wing

O’er their thin host and wounded King.

Then skilful Surrey’s sage commands

Led back from strife his shatter’d bands;

And from the charge they drew,

As mountain-waves, from wasted lands,

Sweep back to ocean blue.

But Marmion was only one of many literary enterprises. The Life of Dryden was published in the same year, and Scott became a voluminous contributor to Mr Murray’s new Quarterly Review. The confusion into which his brother’s affairs had fallen made it necessary that he should increase his income, and he was full of literary schemes with his partner Ballantyne and Mr Constable, the Edinburgh book publisher – schemes which involved him in almost unceasing labour. Part of this was undertaken with the design of helping struggling authors. ‘It was enough to tear me to pieces,’ he told Lockhart, ‘but there was a wonderful exhilaration about it all; my blood was kept at fever pitch; I felt as if I could have grappled with anything and everything; then there was hardly one of all my schemes that did not afford me the means of serving some poor devil of a brother author. There were always huge piles of materials to be arranged, sifted, and indexed – volumes of extracts to be transcribed – journeys to be made hither and thither for ascertaining little facts and dates – in short, I could commonly keep half a dozen of the ragged army of Parnassus in tolerable case.’

Few men have been less subject to literary vanity than Walter Scott. One of his friends wrote, ‘Mr Scott always seemed to me like a glass through which the rays of admiration passed without sensibly affecting him.’ Miss Joanna Baillie, the Scottish dramatist, visited him in 1808, and has recorded some of his talk:

Keenly enjoying literature as he did, and indulging his own love of it in perpetual composition, he always maintained the same estimate of it as subordinate and auxiliary to the purpose of life, and rather talked of men and events than of books and criticism. Literary fame, he always said, was a bright feather in the cap, hut not a substantial cover of a well-protected head. This sound and manly feeling was what I have seen described by some of his biographers as pride, and it will always be thought so by those whose own vanity can only be gratified by the admiration of others, and who mistake shows for realities. None loved the admiration and applause of others more than Scott; but it was to the love and applause of those he valued in return that he restricted the feeling – without restricting the kindness. Men who did not, or would not understand this, perpetually mistook him – and, after loading him with undesired eulogy, perhaps in his own house neglected common attention or civility to other parts of his family. It was on such an occasion that I heard him murmur in my ear, ‘Author as I am I wish these good people would recollect that I began with being a gentleman, and don’t mean to give up the character.’ Such was all along his feeling, and this, with a slight prejudice common to Scotsmen in favour of ancient and respectable family descent constituted what in Grub Street is called his pride. It was, at least, what Johnson would have justly called defensive pride. From all other, and still more from mere vanity, I never knew any man so remarkably free.

There is a portrait of Scott at this time, drawn, on one of his visits to England, by Miss Anna Seward, the ‘Swan of Lichfield,’ a correspondent of Dr Johnson.

This proudest boast of the Caledonian muse is tall, [she says], and rather robust than slender, but lame in the same manner as Mr Hayley, and in a greater measure. Neither the contour of his face nor yet his features are elegant; his complexion healthy, and somewhat fair, without bloom. We find the singularity of brown hair and eye-lashes, with flaxen eyebrows; and a countenance open, ingenuous, and benevolent. When seriously conversing or earnestly attentive, though his eyes are rather of a lightish grey deep thought is on their lids; he contracts his brow, and the rays of genius gleam aslant from the orbs beneath them. An upper lip too long prevents his mouth from being decidedly handsome; but the sweetest emanations of temper and heart play about it when he talks cheerfully or smiles – and in company he is much oftener gay than contemplative – his conversation an overflowing fountain of brilliant wit, apposite allusion, and playful archness – while on serious themes it is nervous and eloquent; the accent decidedly Scotch, yet by no means broad. Not less astonishing than was Johnson’s memory is that of Mr Scott; like Johnson, also, his recitation is too monotonous and violent to do justice either to his own writings or those of others.

With all his preoccupations, Scott never neglected the simpler duties of life. He was the friend and benefactor of every man, woman, and child in his neighbourhood, and treated everybody as if they were kinsfolk. He had in the fullest degree that simple friendliness of manner which is a notable possession of the Scottish Borders, and he was entirely without stiffness or pedantry. As he once said, he had far too great a respect for his dignity ever to stand upon it. Here is Lockhart on his way of bringing up his family:

By many external accomplishments, either in girl or boy, he set little store. He delighted to hear his daughters sing an old ditty, or one of his own framing; but, so the singer appeared to feel the spirit of her ballad, he was not at all critical of the technical execution. There was one thing, however, on which he fixed his heart hardly less than the ancient Persians of the Cyropaedia; like them, next to love of truth, he held love of horsemanship for the prime point of education. As soon as his eldest girl could sit a pony, she was made the regular attendant of his mountain rides; and they all, as they attained sufficient strength, had the like advancement. He taught them to think nothing of tumbles, and habituated them to his own reckless delight in perilous fords and flooded streams; and they all imbibed in great perfection his passion for horses – as well, I may venture to add, as his deep reverence for the more important article of that Persian training. ‘Without courage,’ he said, ‘there cannot be truth; and without truth there can be no other virtue.’

The Lady of the Lake was begun in 1809, after a visit to the Highlands, and appeared in May 1810