Towards the end of May, 1812, the Sheriff finally removed from Ashestiel to Abbotsford. The day when this occurred was a sad one for many a poor neighbour—for they lost, both in him and his wife, very generous protectors. In such a place, among the few evils which counterbalance so many good things in the condition of the peasantry, the most afflicting is the want of access to medical advice. As far as their means and skill would go, they had both done their utmost to supply this want; and Mrs Scott, in particular, had made it so much her business to visit the sick in their scattered cottages, and bestowed on them the contents of her medicine-chest as

2

LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.

well as of the larder and cellar, with such unwearied kindness, that her name is never mentioned there to this day without some expression of tenderness. Scott’s children remember the parting scene as one of unmixed affliction—but it had had, as we shall see, its lighter features.

Among the many amiable English friends whom he owed to his frequent visits at Rokeby Park, there was, I believe, none that had a higher place in his regard than the late Anne Lady Alvanley, the widow of the celebrated Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas. He was fond of female society in general; but her ladyship was a woman after his heart; well born, and highly bred, but without the slightest tinge of the frivolities of modern fashion; soundly informed, and a warm lover of literature and the arts, but holding in as great horror as himself the imbecile chatter and affected ecstasies of the bluestocking generation. Her ladyship had written to him early in May, by Miss Sarah Smith (now Mrs Bartley), whom I have already mentioned as one of his theatrical favourites; and his answer contains, among other matters, a sketch of the “Forest Flitting.”

“Ashestiel, 25th May, 1812.

“I was honoured, my dear Lady Alvanley, by the kind letter which you sent me with our friend Miss Smith, whose talents are, I hope, receiving at Edinburgh the full meed of honourable applause which they so highly merit. It is very much against my will that I am forced to speak of them by report alone, for this being the term of removing, I am under the necessity of being at this farm to superintend the transference of my goods and chattels, a most miscellaneous collection, to a

“FLITTING” TO ABBOTSFORD.

3

small property, about five miles down the Tweed, which I purchased last year. The neighbours have been much delighted with the procession of my furniture, in which old swords, bows, targets, and lances, made a very conspicuous show. A family of turkeys was accommodated within the helmet of some preux chevalier of ancient Border fame; and the very cows, for aught I know, were bearing banners and muskets. I assure your ladyship that this caravan, attended by a dozen of ragged rosy peasant children, carrying fishing-rods and spears, and leading poneys, greyhounds, and spaniels, would, as it crossed the Tweed, have furnished no bad subject for the pencil, and really reminded me of one of the gypsey groupes of Callot upon their march.

“Edinburgh, 28th May.

“I have got here at length, and had the pleasure to hear Miss Smith speak the Ode on the Passions charmingly last night. It was her benefit, and the house was tolerable, though not so good as she deserves, being a very good girl, as well as an excellent performer.

“I have read Lord Byron with great pleasure, though pleasure is not quite the appropriate word. I should say admiration—mixed with regret, that the author should have adopted such an unamiable misanthropical tone.—The reconciliation with Holland-house is extremely edifying, and may teach young authors to be in no hurry to exercise their satirical vein. I remember an honest old Presbyterian, who thought it right to speak with respect even of the devil himself, since no one knew in what corner he might one day want a friend. But Lord Byron is young, and certainly has great genius, and has both time and capacity to make amends for his errors. I wonder if he will pardon the Edinburgh reviewers, who have read their recantation of their former strictures.

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LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.

“Mrs Scott begs to offer her kindest and most respectful compliments to your ladyship and the young ladies. I hope we shall get into Yorkshire this season to see Morritt: he and his lady are really delightful persons. Believe me, with great respect, dear Lady Alvanley, your much honoured and obliged

Walter Scott.”

A week later, in answer to a letter, mentioning the approach of the celebrated sale of books in which the Roxburghe Club originated, Scott says to his trusty ally, Daniel Terry:—

This was one of the busiest summers of Scott’s busy life. Till the 12th of July he was at his post in the Court of Session five days every week; but every Saturday evening found him at Abbotsford, to observe the progress his labourers had made within doors and without in his absence; and on Monday night he returned to Edinburgh. Even before the Summer Session commenced he appears to have made some advance in his Rokeby, for he writes to Mr Morritt, from Abbotsford, on the 4th of May—“As for the house and the poem, there are twelve masons hammering at the one and one poor noddle at the other—so they are both in progress;” and his literary labours throughout the long vacation were continued under the same sort of disadvantage. That autumn he had, in fact, no room at all for himself. The only parlour which had been hammered into any thing like habitable condition, served at once for dining-room, drawing-room, school-room, and study. A window looking to the river was kept sacred to his desk; an old bed-curtain was nailed up across the room close behind his chair, and there, whenever the spade, the dibble, or the chisel (for he took his full share in all the work on hand) was laid aside, he pursued his poetical tasks,

* The epitaph of this favourite greyhound may be seen on the edge of the bank, a little way below the house of Abbotsford.

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LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.

apparently undisturbed and unannoyed by the surrounding confusion of masons and carpenters, to say nothing of the lady’s small talk, the children’s babble among themselves, or their repetition of their lessons. The truth no doubt was, that when at his desk he did little more, as far as regarded poetry, than write down the lines which he had fashioned in his mind while pursuing his vocation as a planter, upon that bank which received originally, by way of joke, the title of the thicket. “I am now,” he says to Ellis (Oct. 17), “adorning a patch of naked land with trees, facturis nepotibus umbram, for I shall never live to enjoy their shade myself otherwise than in the recumbent posture of Tityrus or Menalcas.” But he did live to see the thicket deserve not only that name, but a nobler one; and to fell with his own hand many a well-grown tree that he had planted there.

Another plantation of the same date, by his eastern boundary, was less successful. For this he had asked and received from his early friend, the Marchioness of Stafford, a supply of acorns from Trentham, and it was named in consequence Sutherland bower; but the field-mice, in the course of the ensuing winter, contrived to root up and devour the whole of her ladyship’s goodly benefaction. A third space had been set apart, and duly enclosed, for the reception of some Spanish chestnuts offered to him by an admirer established in merchandise at Seville; but that gentleman had not been a very knowing ally as to such matters, for when the chestnuts arrived, it turned out that they had been boiled.

Scott writes thus to Terry, in September, while the Roxburghe sale was still going on:—

The tutor alluded to at the close of this letter was Mr George Thomson, son of the minister of Melrose, who, when the house afforded better accommodation, was and continued for many years to be domesticated at Abbotsford. Scott had always a particular tenderness towards persons afflicted with any bodily misfortune; and Thomson, whose leg had been amputated in consequence of a rough casualty of his boyhood, had a special share in his favour from the high spirit with which he refused at the time to betray the name of the companion that had occasioned his mishap, and continued ever afterwards to struggle against its disadvantages. Tall, vigorous, athletic, a dauntless horseman, and expert at the singlestick, George formed a valuable as well as picturesque addition to the tail of the new laird, who often said, “In the Dominie, like myself, accident has spoiled a capital lifeguardsman.” His many oddities and eccentricities in no degree interfered with the respect due to his amiable feelings, upright principles, and sound learning; nor did Dominie Thamson at all quarrel in after times with the universal credence of the neighbourhood that he had furnished many features for the inimitable personage whose designation so nearly

* An edition of the British Dramatists had, I believe, been projected by Mr Terry.

ROKEBY AND TRIERMAIN.

9

resembled his own; and if he has not yet “wagged his head” in a “pulpit o’ his ain,” he well knows it has not been so for want of earnest and long-continued intercession on the part of the author of Guy Mannering.

For many years Scott had accustomed himself to proceed in the composition of poetry along with that of prose essays of various descriptions; but it is a remarkable fact that he chose this period of perpetual noise and bustle, when he had not even a summer-house to himself, for the new experiment of carrying on two poems at the same time—and this too without suspending the heavy labour of his edition of Swift, to say nothing of the various lesser matters in which the Ballantynes were, from day to day, calling for the assistance of his judgment and his pen. In the same letter in which William Erskine acknowledges the receipt of the first four pages of Rokeby, he adverts also to the Bridal of Triermain as being already in rapid progress. The fragments of this second poem, inserted in the Register of the preceding year, had attracted considerable notice; the secret of their authorship had been well kept; and by some means, even in the shrewdest circles of Edinburgh, the belief had become prevalent that they proceeded not from Scott but from Erskine. Scott had no sooner completed his bargain as to the copyright of the unwritten Rokeby, than he resolved to pause from time to time in its composition, and weave those fragments into a shorter and lighter romance, executed in a different metre, and to be published anonymously, in a small pocket volume, as nearly as possible on the same day with the avowed quarto. He expected great amusement from the comparisons which the critics would no doubt indulge themselves in drawing between himself and this humble candidate; and Erskine good-humouredly entered into the scheme, undertaking to do

10

LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.

nothing which should effectually suppress the notion of his having set himself up as a modest rival to his friend. Nay, he suggested a further refinement, which in the sequel had no small share in the success of this little plot upon the sagacity of the reviewers. Having said that he much admired the opening of the first canto of Rokeby, Erskine adds, “I shall request your accoucheur to send me your little Dugald too as he gradually makes his progress. What I have seen is delightful. You are aware how difficult it is to form any opinion of a work, the general plan of which is unknown, transmitted merely in legs and wings as they are formed and feathered. Any remarks must be of the most minute and superficial kind, confined chiefly to the language, and other such subordinate matters. I shall be very much amused if the secret is kept and the knowing ones taken in. To prevent any discovery from your prose, what think you of putting down your ideas of what the preface ought to contain, and allowing me to write it over? And perhaps a quizzing review might be concocted.”

This last hint was welcome; and among other parts of the preface to Triermain which threw out “the knowing ones,” certain Greek quotations interspersed in it are now accounted for. Scott, on his part, appears to have studiously interwoven into the piece allusions to personal feelings and experiences more akin to his friend’s history and character than to his own; and he did so still more largely, when repeating this experiment, in the introductory parts of Harold the Dauntless.

The same post which conveyed William Erskine’s letter above quoted, brought him an equally wise and kind one from Mr Morritt, in answer to a fresh application for some minute details about the scenery and local traditions of the Valley of the Tees. Scott had promised to spend part of this autumn at Rokeby Park

LETTER FROM MR MORRITT.

11

himself; but now, busied as he was with his planting operations at home, and continually urged by Ballantyne to have the poem ready for publication by Christmas, he would willingly have trusted his friend’s knowledge in place of his own observation and research. Mr Morritt gave him in reply various particulars, which I need not here repeat, but added,—“I am really sorry, my dear Scott, at your abandonment of your kind intention of visiting Rokeby—and my sorrow is not quite selfish—for seriously, I wish you could have come, if but for a few days, in order, on the spot, to settle accurately in your mind the localities of the new poem, and all their petty circumstances, of which there are many that would give interest and ornament to your descriptions. I am too much flattered by your proposal of inscribing the poem to me, not to accept it with gratitude and pleasure. I shall always feel your friendship as an honour—we all wish our honours to be permanent—and yours promises mine at least a fair chance of immortality. I hope, however, you will not be obliged to write in a hurry on account of the impatience of your booksellers. They are, I think, ill advised in their proceeding, for surely the book will be the more likely to succeed from not being forced prematurely into this critical world. Do not be persuaded to risk your established fame on this hazardous experiment. If you want a few hundreds independent of these booksellers, your credit is so very good, now that you have got rid of your Old Man of the Sea, that it is no great merit to trust you, and I happen at this moment to have five or six for which I have no sort of demand—so rather than be obliged to spur Pegasus beyond the power of pulling him up when he is going too fast, do consult your own judgment and set the midwives of the trade at defiance. Don’t be scrupulous to the disadvantage of your muse, and above all be not

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offended at me for a proposition which is meant in the true spirit of friendship. I am more than ever anxious for your success—the Lady of the Lake more than succeeded—I think Don Roderick is less popular—I want this work to be another Lady at the least. Surely it would be worth your while for such an object to spend a week of your time, and a portion of your Old Man’s salary, in a mail-coach flight hither, were it merely to renew your acquaintance with the country, and to rectify the little misconceptions of a cursory view. Ever affectionately yours—J. B. S. M.”

This appeal was not to be resisted. Scott, I believe, accepted Mr Morritt’s friendly offer so far as to ask his assistance in having some of Ballantyne’s bills discounted: and he proceeded the week after to Rokeby, by the way of Flodden and Hexham, travelling on horseback, his eldest boy and girl on their poneys, while Mrs Scott followed them in the carriage. Two little incidents that diversified this ride through Northumberland have found their way into print already; but, as he was fond of telling them both down to the end of his days, I must give them a place here also. Halting at Flodden to expound the field of battle to his young folks, he found that Marmion had, as might have been expected, benefitted the keeper of the public-house there very largely; and the village Boniface, overflowing with gratitude, expressed his anxiety to have a Scott’s Head for his sign-post. The poet demurred to this proposal, and assured mine host that nothing could be more appropriate than the portraiture of a foaming tankard, which already surmounted his doorway. “Why, the painter-man has not made an ill job,” said the landlord, “but I would fain have something more connected with the book that has brought me so much good cus-

FLODDEN, 1812.

13

tom.” He produced a well-thumbed copy, and handing it to the author, begged he would at least suggest a motto from the Tale of Flodden Field. Scott opened the book at the death-scene of the hero, and his eye was immediately caught by the “inscription” in black letter

“Drink, weary pilgrim, drink, and pray For the kind soul of Sibyl Grey,” &c.

“Well, my friend,” said he, “what more would you have? You need but strike out one letter in the first of these lines, and make your painter-man, the next time he comes this way, print between the jolly tankard and your own name

“Drink, weary pilgrim, drink, and pay.”

Scott was delighted to find, on his return, that this suggestion had been adopted, and for aught I know the romantic legend may still be visible.

The other story I shall give in the words of Mr. Gillies. “It happened at a small country town that Scott suddenly required medical advice for one of his servants, and, on enquiring if there was any doctor at the place, was told that there were two—one long established, and the other a new comer. The latter gentleman, being luckily found at home, soon made his appearance;—a grave, sagacious-looking personage, attired in black, with a shovel hat, in whom, to his utter astonishment, Sir Walter recognised a Scotch blacksmith, who had formerly practised, with tolerable success, as a veterinary operator in the neighbourhood of Ashestiel ‘How, in all the world!’ exclaimed he, ‘can it be possible that this is John Lundie?’ ‘In troth is it, your honour just a’ that’s for him.’—‘Well, but let us hear; you were a horse-doctor before;

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LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.

now, it seems, you are a man-doctor; how do you get on?’—‘Ou, just extraordinar’ weel; for your honour maun ken my practice is vera sure and orthodox. I depend entirely upon twa simples.’—‘And what may their names be? Perhaps it is a secret?’—‘I’ll tell your honour,’ in a low tone; ‘my twa simples are just laudamy and calamy!’—‘Simples with a vengeance!’ replied Scott. ‘But John, do you never happen to kill any of your patients?’—‘Kill? Ou ay, may be sae! Whiles they die, and whiles no; but it’s the will o’ Providence. Ony how, your honour, it wad be lang before it makes up for Flodden!’”*

It was also in the course of this expedition that Scott first made acquaintance with the late excellent and venerable Shute Barrington, Bishop of Durham. The travellers having reached Auckland over night, were seeing the public rooms of the Castle at an early hour next morning, when the Bishop happened, in passing through one of them, to catch a glimpse of Scott’s person, and immediately recognising him, from the likeness of the engravings by this time multiplied, introduced himself to the party, and insisted upon acting as cicerone. After showing them the picture-gallery and so forth, his Lordship invited them to join the morning service of the chapel, and when that was over insisted on their remaining to breakfast. But Scott and his lordship were by this time so much pleased with each other that they could not part so easily. The good Bishop ordered his horse, nor did Scott observe without admiration the proud curvetting of the animal on which his lordship proposed to accompany him during the next stage of his progress. “Why, yes, Mr Scott,” said the gentle but high-spirited old man, “I still like to feel my horse under me.” He

* Reminiscences of Sir Walter Scott, p. 56.

BISHOP-AUCKLAND—ROKEBY.

15

was then in his 79th year, and survived to the age of ninety-two, the model in all things of a real prince of the Church. They parted, after a ride of ten miles, with mutual regret; and on all subsequent rides in that direction, Bishop-Auckland was one of the poet’s regular halting places.

At Rokeby, on this occasion, Scott remained about a week; and I transcribe the following brief account of his proceedings while there from Mr Morritt’s Memorandum:—“I had of course,” he says, “had many previous opportunities of testing the almost conscientious fidelity of his local descriptions; but I could not help being singularly struck with the lights which this visit threw on that characteristic of his compositions. The morning after he arrived he said, ‘You have often given me materials for romance—now I want a good robber’s cave and an old church of the right sort.’ We rode out, and he found what he wanted in the ancient slate quarries of Brignal and the ruined Abbey of Egglestone. I observed him noting down even the peculiar little wild flowers and herbs that accidentally grew round and on the side of a bold crag near his intended cave of Guy Denzil; and could not help saying, that as he was not to be upon oath in his work, daisies, violets, and primroses would be as poetical as any of the humble plants he was examining. I laughed, in short, at his scrupulousness; but I understood him when he replied, ‘that in nature herself no two scenes are exactly alike, and that whoever copied truly what was before his eyes, would possess the same variety in his descriptions, and exhibit apparently an imagination as boundless as the range of nature in the scenes he recorded; whereas—whoever trusted to imagination, would soon find his own mind circumscribed, and contracted to a few favourite images, and the repetition of these would sooner or later

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LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.

produce that very monotony and barrenness which had always haunted descriptive poetry in the hands of any but the patient worshippers of truth. Besides which,’ he said, ‘local names and peculiarities make a fictitious story look so much better in the face.’ In fact, from his boyish habits, he was but half satisfied with the most beautiful scenery when he could not connect with it some local legend, and when I was forced sometimes to confess, with the Knife-grinder, ‘Story! God bless you! I have none to tell, sir’ he would laugh, and say, ‘then let us make one—nothing so easy as to make a tradition.’” Mr Morritt adds, that he had brought with him about half the Bridal of Triermain—told him that he meant to bring it out the same week with Rokeby—and promised himself particular satisfaction in laying a trap for Jeffrey; who, however, as we shall see, escaped the snare.

We are now close upon the end of this busy twelvemonth; but I must not turn the leaf to 1813, without noticing one of its miscellaneous incidents—his first

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LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.

intercourse by letter with the poet Crabbe. Mr Hatchard, the publisher of his “Tales,” forwarded a copy of the book to Scott as soon as it was ready; and, the bookseller having communicated to his author some flattering expressions in Scott’s letter of acknowledgment, Mr Crabbe addressed him as follows:—

I cannot produce Scott’s reply to this communication. Mr Crabbe appears to have, in the course of the year, sent him a copy of all his works, “ex dono auctoris,” and there passed between them several letters, one or two of which I must quote.

Scott’s answer to this letter expresses the opinions he always held in conversation on the important subject to

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LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.

which it refers; and acting upon which, he himself at various times declined taking any part in the business advocated by Dr Brunton.

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LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.

To Walter Scott, Esq., Edinburgh.

The contrast of the two poets’ epistolary styles is highly amusing; but I have introduced these specimens less on that account, than as marking the cordial confidence which a very little intercourse was sufficient to establish between men so different from each other in most of the habits of life. It will always be considered as one of the most pleasing peculiarities in Scott’s history that he was the friend of every great contemporary poet: Crabbe, as we shall see more largely in the sequel, was no exception to the rule: yet I could hardly name one of them who, manly principles and the cultivation of literature apart, had many points of resemblance to him; and surely not one who had fewer than Crabbe.

Scott continued, this year, his care for the Edinburgh Annual Register—the historical department of which was again supplied by Mr Southey. The poetical miscellany owed its opening piece, the Ballad of Polydore, to the readiness with which Scott entered into correspondence with its author, who sent it to him anonymously, with a letter which, like the verses, might well have excited much interest in his mind, even had it not concluded with stating the writer’s age to be fifteen. Scott invited the youth to visit him in the country, was greatly pleased with the modesty of his manners and the originality of his conversation, and wrote to Joanna Baillie, that, “though not one of the crimps for the muses,” he thought he could hardly be mistaken in believing that

* Several of these letters having been enclosed in franked covers, which have perished, I am unable to affix the exact dates to them.

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LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.

in the boyish author of Polydore he had discovered a true genius. When I mention the name of my friend William Howison of Clydegrove, it will be allowed that he prognosticated wisely. He continued to correspond with this young gentleman and his father, and gave both much advice, for which both were most grateful. There was inserted in the same volume a set of beautiful stanzas, inscribed to Scott by Mr Wilson, under the title of the “Magic Mirror,” in which that enthusiastic young poet also bears a lofty and lasting testimony to the gentle kindness with which his earlier efforts had been encouraged by him whom he designates, for the first time, by what afterwards became one of his standing titles, that of “The Great Magician.”

“Onwards a figure came, with stately brow, And, as he glanced upon the ruin’d pile A look of regal pride, ‘Say, who art thou (His countenance bright’ning with a scornful smile, He sternly cried), ‘whose footsteps rash profane The wild romantic realm where I have willed to reign?’

“But ere to these proud words I could reply, How changed that scornful face to soft and mild! A witching frenzy glitter’d in his eye, Harmless, withal, as that of playful child. And when once more the gracious vision spoke, I felt the voice familiar to mine ear; While many a faded dream of earth awoke, Connected strangely with that unknown seer, Who now stretch’d forth his arm, and on the sand A circle round me traced, as with magician’s wand,” &c. &c.

Scott’s own chief contribution to this volume was a brief account of the Life and Poems (hitherto unpublished) of Patrick Carey, whom he pronounces to have been not only as stout a cavalier, but almost as good a poet as his contemporary Lovelace.

EDINBURGH ANNUAL REGISTER 1812.

31

That Essay was expanded, and prefixed to an edition of Carey’s “Trivial Poems and Triolets,” which Scott published in 1820; but its circulation in either shape has been limited: and I believe I shall be gratifying the majority of my readers by here transcribing some paragraphs of his beautiful and highly characteristic introduction of this forgotten poet of the 17th century.

“The present age has been so distinguished for research into poetical antiquities, that the discovery of an unknown bard is, in certain chosen literary circles, held as curious as an augmentation of the number of fixed stars would be esteemed by astronomers. It is true, these ‘blessed twinklers of the night’ are so far removed from us, that they afford no more light than serves barely to evince their existence to the curious investigator; and in like manner the pleasure derived from the revival of an obscure poet is rather in proportion to the rarity of his volume than to its merit; yet this pleasure is not inconsistent with reason and principle. We know by every day’s experience the peculiar interest which the lapse of ages confers upon works of human art. The clumsy strength of the ancient castles, which, when raw from the hand of the builder, inferred only the oppressive power of the barons who reared them, is now broken by partial ruin into proper subjects for the poet or the painter; and, as Mason has beautifully described the change,

——‘Time Has mouldered into beauty many a tower, Which, when it frowned with all its battlements, Was only terrible’——

‘For time has softened what was harsh when new, And now the stains are all of sober hue; The living stains which nature’s hand alone, Profuse of life, pours forth upon the stone.’—Crabbe.

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LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.

EDINBURGH ANNUAL REGISTER 1812.

33

‘The massy stones, though hewn most roughly, show The hand of man had once at least been there.’—Wordsworth.

“Similar combinations give a great part of the delight we receive from ancient poetry. In the rude song of the Scald, we regard less the strained imagery and extravagance of epithet, than the wild impressions which it conveys of the dauntless resolution, savage superstition, rude festivity, and ceaseless depredation of the ancient Scandinavians. In the metrical romance, we pardon the long, tedious, and bald enumeration of trifling particulars; the reiterated sameness of the eternal combats between knights and giants; the overpowering languor of the love speeches, and the merciless length and similarity of description when Fancy whispers to us, that such strains may have cheered the sleepless pillow of the Black Prince on the memorable eves of Cressy or Poictiers. There is a certain romance of Ferumbras, which Robert the Bruce read to his few followers to divert their thoughts from the desperate circumstances in which they were placed, after an unsuccessful attempt to rise against the English. Is there a true Scotsman who, being aware of this anecdote, would be disposed to yawn over the romance of Ferumbras? Or, on the contrary, would not the image of the dauntless hero, inflexible in defeat, beguiling the anxiety of his war-worn attendants by the lays of the minstrel, give to these rude lays themselves an interest beyond Greek and Roman fame?”

The year 1812 had the usual share of minor literary labours such as contributions to the journals; and before it closed, the Romance of Rokeby was finished. Though it had been long in hand, the MS. sent to the printer bears abundant evidence of its being the prima cura: three cantos at least reached Ballantyne through the Melrose post—written on paper of various sorts and sizes—full of blots and interlineations—the closing couplets of a despatch now and then encircling the page, and mutilated by the breaking of the seal.

According to the recollection of Mr Cadell, though James Ballantyne read the poem, as the sheets were advancing through the press, to his usual circle of literary dilettanti, their whispers were far from exciting in

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Edinburgh such an intensity of expectation as had been witnessed in the case of The Lady of the Lake. He adds, however, that it was looked for with undiminished anxiety in the south. “Send me Rokeby,” Byron writes to Murray, on seeing it advertised,—“Who the devil is he? No matter—he has good connexions, and will be well introduced.”* Such, I suppose, was the general feeling in London. I well remember, being in those days a young student at Oxford, how the booksellers’ shops there were beleaguered for the earliest copies, and how he that had been so fortunate as to secure one, was followed to his chambers by a tribe of friends, all as eager to hear it read as ever horse-jockeys were to see the conclusion of a match at Newmarket; and indeed not a few of those enthusiastic academics had bets depending on the issue of the struggle, which they considered the elder favourite as making, to keep his own ground against the fiery rivalry of Childe Harold.

The poem was published a day or two before Scott returned to Edinburgh from Abbotsford, between which place and Mertoun he had divided his Christmas vacation. On the 9th and 10th of January, 1813, he thus addresses his friends at Sunninghill and Hampstead:—

PUBLICATION OF ROKEBY.

37

To Miss Joanna Baillie.

The following letter lets us completely behind the scenes at the publication of Rokeby. The “horrid story” it alludes to was that of a young woman found murdered on New Year’s Day in the highway between Greta Bridge and Barnard Castle—a crime, the perpetrator of which was never discovered. The account of a parallel atrocity in Galloway, and the mode of its detection, will show the reader from what source Scott drew one of the most striking incidents in his Guy Mannering:—

It will surprise no one to hear that Mr Morritt assured his friend he considered Rokeby as the best of all his poems. The admirable, perhaps the unique fidelity of the local descriptions, might alone have swayed, for I will not say it perverted, the judgment of the lord of that beautiful and thenceforth classical domain; and, indeed, I must admit that I never understood or appreciated half the charm of this poem until I had become familiar with its scenery. But Scott himself had not

PUBLICATION OF ROKEBY.

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designed to rest his strength on these descriptions. He said to James Ballantyne while the work was in progress (September 2), “I hope the thing will do, chiefly because the world will not expect from me a poem of which the interest turns upon character;” and in another letter (October 28, 1812), “I think you will see the same sort of difference taken in all my former poems, of which I would say, if it is fair for me to say any thing, that the force in the Lay is thrown on style—in Marmion, on description—and in the Lady of the Lake, on incident.”* I suspect some of these distinctions may have been matters of after-thought; but as to Rokeby there can be no mistake. His own original conceptions of some of its principal characters have been explained in letters already cited; and I believe no one who compares the poem with his novels will doubt that, had he undertaken their portraiture in prose, they would have come forth with effect hardly inferior to any of all the groupes he ever created. As it is, I question whether even in his prose there is any thing more exquisitely wrought out, as well as fancied, than the whole contrast of the two rivals for the love of the heroine in Rokeby; and that heroine herself, too, has a very particular interest attached to her. Writing to Miss Edgeworth five years after this time (10th March, 1818), he says, “I have not read one of my poems since they were printed, excepting last year the Lady of the Lake, which I liked better than I expected, but not well

* Several letters to Ballantyne on the same subject are quoted in the notes to the last edition of Rokeby. See Scott’s Poetical Works, 1834, vol. ix., pp. 1-3; and especially the note on p. 300, from which it appears that the closing stanza was added, in deference to Ballantyne and Erskine, though the author retained his own opinion that “it spoiled one effect without producing another.”

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enough to induce me to go through the rest, so I may truly say with Macbeth—

‘I am afraid to think of what I’ve done— Look on’t again I dare not.’

“This much of Matilda I recollect—(for that is not so easily forgotten)—that she was attempted for the existing person of a lady who is now no more, so that I am particularly flattered with your distinguishing it from the others, which are in general mere shadows.” I can have no doubt that the lady he here alludes to, was the object of his own unfortunate first love; and as little, that in the romantic generosity, both of the youthful poet who fails to win her higher favour, and of his chivalrous competitor, we have before us something more than “a mere shadow.”

In spite of these graceful characters, the inimitable scenery on which they are presented, and the splendid vivacity and thrilling interest of several chapters in the story—such as the opening interview of Bertram and Wycliff—the flight up the cliff on the Greta—the first entrance of the cave at Brignall—the firing of Rokeby Castle—and the catastrophe in Eglistone Abbey;—in spite certainly of exquisitely happy lines profusely scattered throughout the whole composition, and of some detached images—that of the setting of the tropical sun,* for example—which were never surpassed by any

* “My noontide, India may declare; Like her fierce sun, I fired the air! Like him, to wood and cave bade fly Her natives, from mine angry eye. And now, my race of terror run, Mine be the eve of tropic sun! No pale gradations quench his ray,

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poet; in spite of all these merits, the immediate success of Rokeby was greatly inferior to that of the Lady of the Lake; nor has it ever since been so much a favourite with the public at large as any other of his poetical romances. He ascribes this failure, in his introduction of 1830, partly to the radically unpoetical character of the Roundheads; but surely their character has its poetical side also, had his prejudices allowed him to enter upon its study with impartial sympathy; and I doubt not, Mr Morritt suggested the difficulty on this score, when the outline of the story was as yet undetermined, from consideration rather of the poet’s peculiar feelings, and powers as hitherto exhibited, than of the subject absolutely. Partly he blames the satiety of the public ear, which had had so much of his rhythm, not only from himself, but from dozens of mocking birds, male and female, all more or less applauded in their day, and now all equally forgotten.* This circumstance, too, had probably no slender effect; the more that, in defiance of all the hints of his friends, he now, in his narrative, repeated (with more negligence) the uniform octosyllabic couplets of the Lady of

No twilight dews his wrath allay; With disk like battle-target red, He rushes to his burning bed, Dyes the wide wave with bloody light, Then sinks at once—and all is night.”—Canto vi. 21. * “Scott found peculiar favour and imitation among the fair sex. There was Miss Halford, and Miss Mitford, and Miss Francis; but, with the greatest respect be it spoken, none of his imitators did much honour to the original except Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, until the appearance of ‘The Bridal of Triermain’ and ‘Harold the Dauntless,’ which, in the opinion of some, equalled if not surpassed him; and, lo! after three or four years, they turned out to be the master’s own compositions.”—Byron, vol. xv., p. 96.

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the Lake, instead of recurring to the more varied cadence of the Lay or Marmion. It is fair to add that, among the London circles at least, some sarcastic flings in Mr Moore’s “Twopenny Post Bag” must have had an unfavourable influence on this occasion.* But the cause of failure which the Poet himself places last, was unquestionably the main one. The deeper and darker passion of Childe Harold, the audacity of its morbid voluptuousness, and the melancholy majesty of the numbers in which it defied the world, had taken the general imagination by storm; and Rokeby, with many beauties and some sublimities, was pitched, as a whole, on a key which seemed tame in the comparison.

I have already adverted to the fact that Scott felt it a relief, not a fatigue, to compose the Bridal of Triermain pari passu with Rokeby. In answer, for example, to one of James Ballantyne’s letters, urging accelerated speed with the weightier romance, he says, “I fully share in your anxiety to get forward the grand work; but, I assure you, I feel the more confidence from coquetting with the guerilla.”

* See, for instance, the Epistle of Lady Corke—or that of Messrs Lackington, booksellers, to one of their dandy authors— “Should you feel any touch of poetical glow We’ve a scheme to suggest—Mr Scott, you must know, (Who, we’re sorry to say it, now works for the Row), Having quitted the Borders to seek new renown, Is coming by long Quarto stages to town, And beginning with Rokeby (the job’s sure to pay), Means to do all the gentlemen’s seats on the way. Now the scheme is, though none of our hackneys can beat him, To start a new Poet through Highgate to meet him; Who by means of quick proofs—no revises—long coaches— May do a few Villas before Scott approaches; Indeed if our Pegasus be not curst shabby, He’ll reach, without foundering, at least Woburn-Abbey.” &c. &c.

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The quarto of Rokeby was followed, within two months, by the small volume which had been designed for a twin-birth;—the MS. had been transcribed by one of the Ballantynes themselves, in order to guard against any indiscretion of the press-people; and the mystification, aided and abetted by Erskine, in no small degree heightened the interest of its reception. Except Mr Morritt, Scott had, so far as I am aware, no English confidant upon this occasion. Whether any of his daily companions in the Parliament House were in the secret, I have never heard; but I can scarcely believe that any of those intimate friends, who had known him and Erskine from their youth upwards, could have for a moment believed the latter capable either of the invention or the execution of this airy and fascinating romance in little. Mr Jeffrey, for whom chiefly “the trap had been set,” was far too sagacious to be caught in it; but, as it happened, he made a voyage that year to America, and thus lost the opportunity of immediately expressing his opinion either of Rokeby or of the Bridal of Triermain. The writer in the Quarterly Review seems to have been completely deceived—“We have already spoken of it,” says the critic, “as an imitation of Mr Scott’s style of composition; and if we are compelled to make the general approbation more precise and specific, we should say, that if it be inferior in vigour to some of his productions, it equals or surpasses them in elegance and beauty; that it is more uniformly tender, and far less infected with the unnatural prodigies and coarseness of the earlier romances. In estimating its merits, however, we should forget that it is offered as an imitation. The diction undoubtedly reminds us of a rhythm and cadence we have heard before; but the sentiments, descriptions, and characters,

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have qualities that are native and unborrowed.” Quarterly Review, July, 1813.

If this writer was, as I suppose, Ellis, he probably considered it as a thing impossible that Scott should have engaged in such a scheme without giving him a hint of it; but to have admitted into the secret any one who was likely to criticise the piece, would have been to sacrifice the very object of the device. Erskine’s own suggestion, that “perhaps a quizzical review might be got up,” led, I believe, to nothing more important than a paragraph in one of the Edinburgh newspapers. He may be pardoned for having been not a little flattered to find it generally considered as not impossible that he should have written such a poem; and I have heard Ballantyne say, that nothing could be more amusing than the style of his coquetting on the subject while it was yet fresh; but when this first excitement was over, his natural feeling of what was due to himself, as well as to his friend, dictated many a remonstrance; and, though he ultimately acquiesced in permitting another minor romance to be put forth in the same manner, he did so reluctantly, and was far from acting his part so well.

Scott says, in the Introduction to the Lord of the Isles, “As Mr Erskine was more than suspected of a taste for poetry, and as I took care, in several places, to mix something that might resemble (as far as was in my power) my friend’s feeling and manner, the train easily caught, and two large editions were sold.” Among the passages to which he here alludes, are no doubt those in which the character of the minstrel Arthur is shaded with the colourings of an almost effeminate gentleness. Yet, in the midst of them, the “mighty minstrel” himself, from time to time, escapes; as, for

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instance, where the lover bids Lucy, in that exquisite picture of crossing a mountain stream, trust to his “stalwart arm”—

“Which could yon oak’s prone trunk uprear.”

Nor can I pass the compliment to Scott’s own fair patroness, where Lucy’s admirer is made to confess, with some momentary lapse of gallantry, that he

“Ne’er won—best meed to minstrel true— One favouring smile from fair Buccleuch;”

nor the burst of genuine Borderism,—

“Bewcastle now must keep the hold, Speir-Adam’s steeds must bide in stall; Of Hartleyburn the bowmen bold Must only shoot from battled wall; And Liddesdale may buckle spur, And Teviot now may belt the brand, Taras and Ewes keep nightly stir, And Eskdale foray Cumberland.”—

But, above all, the choice of the scenery, both of the Introductions and of the story itself, reveals the early and treasured predilections of the poet. For who that remembers the circumstances of his first visit to the vale of St John, but must see throughout the impress of his own real romance? I own I am not without a suspicion that, in one passage, which always seemed to me a blot upon the composition—that in which Arthur derides the military coxcombries of his rival—

“Who comes in foreign trashery Of tinkling chain and spur— A walking haberdashery Of feathers, lace, and fur;— In Rowley’s antiquated phrase, Horse-milliner of modern days;”

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there is a sly reference to the incidents of a certain ball, of August, 1797, at the Gilsland Spa.*

Among the more prominent Erskinisms, are the eulogistic mention of Glasgow, the scene of Erskine’s education; and the lines on Collins,—a supplement to whose Ode on the Highland Superstitions is, as far as I know, the only specimen that ever was published of Erskine’s verse.†

As a whole, the Bridal of Triermain appears to me as characteristic of Scott as any of his larger poems. His genius pervades and animates it beneath a thin and playful veil, which perhaps adds as much of grace as it takes away of splendour. As Wordsworth says of the eclipse on the lake of Lugano—

“’Tis sunlight sheathed and gently charmed;”

and I think there is at once a lightness and a polish of versification beyond what he has elsewhere attained. If it be a miniature, it is such a one as a Cooper might have hung fearlessly beside the masterpieces of Vandyke.

The Introductions contain some of the most exquisite passages he ever produced; but their general effect has always struck me as unfortunate. No art can reconcile us to contemptuous satire of the merest frivolities of modern life—some of them already, in twenty years, grown obsolete—interlaid between such bright visions of the old world of romance, when

“Strength was gigantic, valour high, And wisdom soared beyond the sky, And beauty had such matchless beam As lights not now a lover’s dream.”

* See ante, vol. i., p. 266. † It is included in the Border Minstrelsy. Scott’s Poetical Works, vol. i., p. 270.

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The fall is grievous, from the hoary minstrel of Newark, and his feverish tears on Killiecrankie, to a pathetic swain, who can stoop to denounce as objects of his jealousy—

“The landaulet and four blood bays— The Hessian boot and pantaloon.”

Before Triermain came out, Scott had taken wing for Abbotsford; and indeed he seems to have so contrived it in his earlier period, that he should not be in Edinburgh when any unavowed work of his was published; whereas, from the first, in the case of books that bore his name on the title-page, he walked as usual to the Parliament House, and bore all the buzz and tattle of friends and acquaintance with an air of good-humoured equanimity, or rather total apparent indifference. The following letter, which contains some curious matter of more kinds than one, was written partly in town and partly in the country:—

To this I add a letter to Lady Louisa Stuart, who had sent him a copy of these lines, found by Lady Douglas on the back of a tattered bank note—

“Farewell, my note, and wheresoe’er ye wend, Shun gaudy scenes, and be the poor man’s friend. You’ve left a poor one, go to one as poor, And drive despair and hunger from his door.”

It appears that these noble friends had adopted, or feigned to adopt, the belief that the Bridal of Triermain was a production of Mr R. P. Gillies—who had about this time published an imitation of Lord Byron’s Romaunt, under the title of “Childe Alarique.”