LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. | 309 |
Walter Scott was at this epoch in the highest spirits, and having strong reasons of various kinds for his resolution to avail himself of the gale of favour, only hesitated in which quarter to explore the materials of some new romance. His first and most earnest desire was to spend a few months with the British army in the Peninsula, but this he soon resigned, from an amiable motive, which a letter presently to be quoted will explain. He then thought of revisiting Rokeby for he had, from the first day that he spent on that magnificent domain, contemplated it as the scenery of a future poem. But the burst of enthusiasm which followed the appearance of the Lady of the Lake finally swayed him to undertake a journey, deeper than he had as yet gone, into the Highlands, and a warm invitation from the Laird of Staffa,* a brother of his friend and colleague Mr Macdonald Buchanan, easily induced him to add a voyage to the Hebrides. He was accompanied by part of his
* The reader will find a warm tribute to Staffa’s character as a Highland landlord, in Scott’s article on Sir John Carr’s Caledonian Sketches, Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol. xix.; and some spirited verses, written at his mansion of Ulva, in Scott’s Poetical Works, edition 1834, vol. x., p. 356. |
310 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
He seems to have kept no journal during this expedition; but I shall string together some letters which, with the notes that he contributed many years afterwards to Mr Croker’s Edition of Boswell, may furnish a tolerable sketch of the insular part of his progress, and of the feelings with which he first inspected the localities of his last great poem—The Lord of the Isles. The first of these letters is dated from the Hebridean residence of the young Laird of Staffa, now Sir Reginald Macdonald Steuart Seton of Staffa, Allanton, and Touch, Baronet.
“I cannot, my dear Miss
Baillie, resist the temptation of writing to you from scenes
which you have rendered classical as well as immortal. We, which in
THE HEBRIDES—1810. | 311 |
312 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
“Yesterday we visited Staffa and Iona: The former is one of the most extraordinary places I ever beheld. It exceeded, in my mind, every description I had heard of it; or rather, the appearance of the cavern, composed entirely of basaltic pillars as high as the roof of a cathedral,† and running deep into the rock, eternally swept by
* William Alexander Mackinnon, Esq., now member of Parliament for Lymington, Hants.
|
STAFFA—1810. | 313 |
“When this fun was over (in which, strange as it
A minster to her Maker’s praise! Not for a meaner use ascend Her columns, or her arches bend; Nor of a theme less solemn tells That mighty surge that ebbs and swells, And still, between each awful pause From the high vault an answer draws, In varied tone prolonged and high, That mocks the organ’s melody. Nor doth its entrance front in vain To old Iona’s holy fane, That Nature’s voice might seem to say, ‘Well hast thou done, frail Child of clay! Thy humble powers that stately shrine Task’d high and hard—but witness mine!’” Lord of the
Isles, Canto IV., St.
10. |
314 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
“Our friend Staffa is himself an excellent specimen of Highland
chieftainship; he is a cadet of Clanronald, and lord of a
cluster of isles on the western side of Mull, and a large estate (in extent at
least) on that island. By dint of minute attention to this property, and
particularly to the management of his kelp, he has at once trebled his income
and doubled his population, while emigration is going on all around him. But he
is very attentive to his people, who are distractedly fond of him, and has them
under such regulations as conduce both to his own benefit and their profit; and
keeps a certain sort of rude state and hospitality, in which they take much
pride. I am quite satisfied that nothing under the personal attention of the
landlord himself will satisfy a Highland tenantry, and that the substitution of
factors, which is now becoming general, is one great cause of emigration: This
mode of life has, however, its evils; and I can see them in this excellent man.
THE HEBRIDES—1810. | 315 |
“P.S. I am told by the learned, the pebble will wear its way out of the letter, so I will keep it till I get to Edinburgh. I must not omit to mention that all through these islands I have found every person familiarly acquainted with the Family Legend, and great admirers.”
It would be idle to extract many of Scott’s notes on Boswell’s Hebridean Journal; but the following specimens appear too characteristic to be omitted. Of the island Inchkenneth, where Johnson was received by the head of the clan M’Lean, he says:—
“Inchkenneth is a most beautiful little islet of
the most verdant green, while all the neighbouring shore of Greban, as well as the
large islands of Colonsay and Ulva, are as black as heath and moss can make them. But
Ulva has a good anchorage, and Inchkenneth is surrounded by shoals. It is now
uninhabited. The ruins of the huts, in which Dr
Johnson was received by Sir Allan
M’Lean, were still to be seen, and some tatters of the paper
hangings were to be seen on the walls. Sir George
Onesiphorus Paul was at Inchkenneth with the same party of which I was a
member. He seemed to me to suspect many of the Highland tales which he heard,
316 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
“Sir Allan M’Lean, like many Highland chiefs, was embarrassed in his private affairs, and exposed to unpleasant solicitations from attorneys, called, in Scotland, Writers (which, indeed, was the chief motive of his retiring to Inchkenneth). Upon one occasion he made a visit to a friend, then residing at Carron Lodge, on the banks of the Carron, where the banks of that river are studded with pretty villas. Sir Allan, admiring the landscape, asked his friend whom that handsome seat belonged to. ‘M——, the Writer to the Signet,’ was the reply. ‘Umph!’ said Sir Allan, but not with an accent of assent, ‘I mean that other house.’ ‘Oh! that belongs to a very honest fellow, Jamie ——, also a Writer to the Signet.’—‘Umph!’ said the Highland chief of M’Lean, with more emphasis than before—‘And yon smaller house?’—‘That belongs to a Stirling man; I forget his name, but I am sure he is a writer too; for’—— Sir Allan, who had recoiled a quarter of a circle backward at every response, now wheeled the circle entire, and turned his back on the landscape, saying, ‘My good friend, I must own you have a pretty situation here, but d—n your neighbourhood.’”
The following notices of Boswell himself, and his father, Lord Auchinleck, may be taken as literal transcripts from Scott’s Table-Talk:—
BOSWELL. | 317 |
“Boswell himself was callous to the contacts of Dr Johnson, and when telling them, always reminds one of a jockey receiving a kick from the horse which he is showing off to a customer, and is grinning with pain while he is trying to cry out, ‘Pretty rogue—no vice all fun.’ To him Johnson’s rudeness was only ‘pretty Fanny’s way.’ Dr Robertson had a sense of good breeding, which inclined him rather to forego the benefit of Johnson’s conversation than awaken his rudeness. . . . . . .
“Old Lord
Auchinleck was an able lawyer, a good scholar, after the manner of
Scotland, and highly valued his own advantages as a man of good estate and ancient
family; and, moreover, he was a strict Presbyterian and Whig of the old Scottish cast.
This did not prevent his being a terribly proud aristocrat; and great was the contempt
he entertained and expressed for his son James,
for the nature of his friendship, and the character of the personages of whom he was
engoué one after another.
‘There’s nae hope for Jamie, mon,’ he
said to a friend. ‘Jamie is gane clean gyte. What do you
think, mon? He’s done wi’ Paoli—he’s off wi’ the land louping scoundrel of a
Corsican; and whose tail do you think he has pinned himself to now, mon?’
Here the old judge summoned up a sneer of most sovereign contempt. ‘A dominie, mon—an auld dominie! he keeped a schule, and caud
it an acaadamy.’ Probably if this had been reported to Johnson, he would have felt it most galling, for he
never much liked to think of that period of his life; it would have aggravated his
dislike of Lord Auchinleck’s Whiggery and Presbyterianism.
These the old Lord carried to such an unusual height, that once, when a country man
came in to state some justice business, and being required to make his oath, declined
to do so before his Lordship, because he was not a covenanted magistrate. ‘Is
that a’ your objection, mon?’ said the judge; ‘come your
ways in here, and we’ll baith of us tak the solemn league and covenant
together.’ The oath was accordingly agreed and sworn to by both, and I
dare say it was the last time it ever received such homage. It may be surmised how far
Lord Auchinleck, such as he is here described, was likely to
suit a high Tory and Episcopalian like Johnson. As they approached
Auchinleck, Boswell conjured Johnson by all
the ties of regard, and in requital of the services he had rendered him upon his tour,
that he would spare two subjects in tenderness to his father’s prejudices; the
first related to Sir John Pringle, President of
the Royal Society, about whom there was then some dispute current; the second concerned
the general question of Whig and Tory. Sir John Pringle, as
Boswell says, esca-
318 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
The following letter, dated Ashestiel, August 9, appears to have been written immediately on Scott’s return from this expedition.
“Your letter reached me in the very centre of the Isle of Mull, from which circumstance you will perceive how vain it was for me even to attempt availing myself of your kind invitation to Rokeby, which would otherwise have given us so much pleasure. We deeply regretted the absence of our kind and accomplished friends, the Clephanes, yet, entre nous, as we were upon a visit to a family of the Capulets, I do not know but we may pay our respects to them more pleasantly at another time. There subsist some aching scars of the old wounds which were in former times inflicted upon each other by the rival tribes of M’Lean and Macdonald, and my very good friends the Laird of Staffa and Mrs M’Lean Clephane are both too true Highlanders to be without the characteristic prejudices of their clans, which, in their case, divide two highly accomplished and most estimable families, living almost within sight of each other, and on an island where polished conversation cannot be supposed to abound.
“I was delighted, on the whole, with my excursion.
THE HEBRIDES—1810. | 319 |
—Sir George Paul, for
prison-house renowned, A wandering knight, on high adventures bound. |
320 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
The Iona pebble, mentioned in Scott’s letter from Ulva, being set in a brooch of the form of a harp, was sent to Joanna Baillie some months later; but it may be as well to insert here the letter which accompanied it. The young friend, to whose return from a trip to the seat of war in the Peninsula it alludes, was John Miller, Esq., then practising at the Scotch bar, but now an eminent King’s counsel of Lincoln’s Inn.
“I should not have been so long your debtor, my dear
Miss Baillie, for your kind and
valued letter, had not the false knave, at whose magic touch the Iona pebbles
were to assume a shape in some degree appropriate to the person to whom they
are destined, delayed finishing his task. I hope you will set some value upon
this little trumpery brooch, because it is a harp, and a Scotch harp, and set
with Iona stones. This last circumstance is more valuable, if ancient tales be
true, than can be ascertained from the reports of dull modern lapidaries. These
green stones, blessed of St Columba, have a virtue, saith old Martin, to gratify each of them a single
wish of the wearer. I believe, that which is most frequently formed by those
who gather them upon the shores of the Saint, is for a fair wind to transport
them from his domains. Now, after this, you must
LETTER TO MISS BAILLIE. | 321 |
‘So every servant takes his course, And bad at first, they all grow worse’— |
322 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
“You have now by my calculation abandoned your extensive domains and returned to your Hampstead villa, which, at this season of the year, though the lesser, will prove, from your neighbourhood to good society, the more comfortable habitation of the two. Dr Baillie’s cares are transferred (I fear for some time) to a charge still more important than the poor Princess.* I trust in God that his skill and that of his brethren may be of advantage to the poor King; for a Regency, from its unsettled and uncertain tenure, must in every country, but especially where parties run so high, be a lamentable business. I wonder that the consequences which have taken place had not occurred sooner, during the long and trying suspense in which his mind must have been held by the protracted lingering state of a beloved child.
“Your country neighbours interest me excessively. I was delighted with the man, who remembered me, though he had forgotten Sancho Panza; but I am afraid my pre-eminence in his memory will not remain much longer than the worthy squire’s government at Barataria. Mean while, the Lady of the Lake is likely to come to preferment in an unexpected manner, for two persons of no less eminence than Messrs Martin and Reynolds, play carpenters in ordinary to Covent Garden, are employed in scrubbing, careening, and cutting her down into one of those new-fashioned sloops called a melo-drama, to be launched at the theatre; and my friend, Mr H. Siddons, emulous of such a noble design, is at work on the same job here. It puts me in mind of
The Princess Amelia whose death was immediately followed by the hopeless malady of King George III. |
LETTER TO MISS BAILLIE. | 323 |
“You say nothing about the drama on Fear, for which you have chosen so
admirable a subject, and which, I think, will be in your own most powerful
manner, I hope you will have an eye to its being actually represented. Perhaps
of all passions it is the most universally interesting; for although most part
of an audience may have been in love once in their lives, and many engaged in
the pursuits of ambition, and some perhaps have fostered deadly hate; yet there
will always be many in each case who cannot judge of the operations of these
motives from personal experience: Whereas, I will bet my life there is not a
soul of them but has felt the impulse of fear, were it but, as the old tale
goes, at snuffing a candle with his fingers. I believe I should have been able
to communicate some personal anecdotes on the subject, had I been enabled to
accomplish a plan I have had much at heart this summer, namely, to take a peep
at Lord Wellington and his merry men in
Portugal; but I found the idea gave Mrs
Scott more distress than I am entitled to do for the mere
gratification of my own curiosity. Not that there would have been
324 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
LETTER TO MR SOUTHEY. | 325 |
There appeared in the London Courier of September 15, 1810, an article signed S. T. C., charging Scott with being a plagiarist, more especially from the works of the poet for whose initials this signature had no doubt been meant to pass. On reading this silly libel, Mr Southey felt satisfied that Samuel Taylor Coleridge could have no concern in its manufacture; but as Scott was not so well acquainted with Coleridge as himself, he lost no time in procuring his friend’s indignant disavowal, and forwarding it to Ashestiel. Scott acknowledges this delicate attention as follows:—
“Your letter, this morning received, released me from
the very painful feeling, that a man of Mr
Coleridge’s high talents, which I had always been among
the first to appreciate as they deserve, had thought me worthy of the sort of
public attack which appeared in the Courier of the 15th. The initials are so remarkable, and the trick
so very impudent, that I was likely to be fairly duped by it, for which I have
to request Mr Coleridge’s forgiveness. I believe
attacks of any sort sit as light upon me as they can on any one. If I have had
my share of them, it is one point, at least, in which I resemble greater
poets—but I should not like to have
326 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
“I renounced my Greta excursion in consequence of
having made instead a tour to the Highlands, particularly to the Isles. I
wished for Wordsworth and you a hundred
times. The scenery is quite different from that on the mainland, dark, savage,
and horrid, but occasionally magnificent in the highest degree. Staffa, in
particular, merits well its far-famed reputation: it is a cathedral arch,
scooped by the hand of nature, equal in dimensions and in regularity to the
most magnificent aisle of a gothic cathedral. The sea rolls up to the extremity
in most tremendous majesty, and with a voice
ASHESTIEL—1810. | 327 |
The “lines of Vida” which “Detector” had enclosed to Scott as the obvious original of the address to “Woman” in Marmion, closing with
“When pain and anguish wring the brow, A ministering angel thou!” |
“Cum dolor atque supercilio gravis imminet angor, Fungeris angelico sola ministerio!” |
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