J. G. Lockhart: Life of Walter Scott

Before the Court of Session rose in July, Sir Walter had made considerable progress in his Sketch of the French Revolution; but it was agreed that he should make his promised excursion to Ireland before any MS. went to the printers. He had seen no more of the sister island than Dunluce and the Giant’s Causeway, of which we have his impressions in the Lighthouse Diary of 1814; his curiosity about the scenery and the people was lively; and besides the great object of seeing his son and daughter-in-law under their own roof, and the scarcely inferior pleasure of another meeting with Miss Edgeworth, he looked forward to renewing his acquaintance with several accomplished persons, who had been serviceable to him in his labours upon Swift. But, illustriously as Ireland has contributed to the English Library, he had always been accustomed to hear that almost no books were now published there, and fewer sold than in any other country calling itself civilized; and he had naturally concluded that apathy and indifference prevailed as to literature itself, and of course as to literary men. He had not, therefore, formed the remotest anticipation of the kind of reception which awaited him in

LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.

Dublin, and indeed throughout the island wherever he traversed it.

When we halted at Drogheda, a retired officer of dragoons, discovering that the party was Sir Walter’s, sent in his card, with a polite offer to attend him over the field of the battle of the Boyne, about two miles off, which of course was accepted;—Sir Walter rejoicing the veteran’s heart by his vigorous recitation of the famous ballad (The Crossing of the Water), as we proceeded to the ground, and the eager and intelligent curiosity with which he received his explanations of it.

On Thursday the 14th we reached Dublin in time for dinner, and found young Walter and his bride established in one of those large and noble houses in St Stephen’s Green (the most extensive square in Europe), the founders of which little dreamt that they should ever be let at an easy rate as garrison lodgings. Never can I forget the fond joy and pride with which Sir Walter looked round him, as he sat for the first time at his son’s table. I could not but recall Pindar’s lines, in which, wishing to paint the gentlest rapture of felicity, he describes an old man with a foaming wine-cup in his hand at his child’s wedding-feast.

That very evening arrived a deputation from the Royal Society of Dublin, inviting Sir Walter to a public dinner; and next morning he found on his breakfast-table a letter from the Provost of Trinity College (Dr Kyle, now Bishop of Cork), announcing that the University desired to pay him the very high compliment of a degree of Doctor of Laws by diploma. The Archbishop of Dublin (the celebrated Dr Magee), though surrounded with severe domestic afflictions at the time, was among the earliest of his visitors; another was the Attorney-General (now Lord Chancellor Plunkett); a

LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.

third was the Commander of the Forces, Sir George Murray; and a fourth the Chief Remembrancer of Exchequer (the Right Honourable Anthony Blake), who was the bearer of a message from the Marquis Wellesley, then Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, offering all sorts of facilities, and inviting him to dine next day at his Excellency’s country residence, Malahide Castle. It would be endless to enumerate the distinguished persons who, morning after morning, crowded his levee in St Stephen’s Green. The courts of law were not then sitting, and most of the judges were out of town; but all the other great functionaries, and the leading noblemen and gentlemen of the city and its neighbourhood, of whatever sect or party, hastened to tender every conceivable homage and hospitality. But all this was less surprising to the companions of his journey (though, to say truth, we had, no more than himself, counted on such eager enthusiasm among any class of Irish society), than the demonstrations of respect which, after the first day or two, awaited him, wherever he moved, at the hands of the less elevated orders of the Dublin population. If his carriage was recognised at the door of any public establishment, the street was sure to be crowded before he came out again, so as to make his departure as slow as a procession. When he entered a street, the watchword was passed down both sides like lightning, and the shopkeepers and their wives stood bowing and curtseying all the way down; while the mob and boys huzza’d as at the chariot-wheels of a conqueror. I had certainly been most thoroughly unprepared for finding the common people of Dublin so alive to the claims of any non-military greatness. Sir Robert Peel says, that Sir Walter’s reception on the High Street of Edinburgh, in August, 1822, was the first thing that gave him a notion of “the electric shock of

DUBLIN—ST PATRICK.

a nation’s gratitude.” I doubt if even that scene surpassed what I myself witnessed when he returned down Dame Street, after inspecting the Castle of Dublin. Bailie Tennent, who had been in the crowd on that occasion, called afterwards in Stephen’s Green to show Sir Walter some promised Return about his Glasgow Police, and observed to me, as he withdrew, that “yon was owre like worshipping the creature.”

I may as well, perhaps, extract from a letter of the 16th, the contemporary note of one day’s operations. “Sir Humphry Davy is here on his way to fish in Connemara—he breakfasted at Walter’s this morning; also Hartstonge, who was to show us the lions of St Patrick’s. Peveril was surprised to find the exterior of the cathedral so rudely worked, coarse, and almost shapeless—but the interior is imposing, and even grand. There are some curious old monuments of the Cork family, &c., but one thinks of nothing but Swift there—the whole cathedral is merely his tomb. Your papa hung long over the famous inscription,* which is in gilt letters upon black marble; and seemed vexed there was not a ladder at hand that he might have got nearer the bust (apparently a very fine one), by Roubilliac, which is placed over it. This was given by the piety of his printer, Faulkener. According to this, Swift had a prodigious double chin; and Peveril remarked that the severity of the whole countenance is much increased by the absence of the wig, which, in the prints, conceals the height and gloom of the brow, the uncommon massiveness and breadth of the temple-bones, and the Herculean style in which the head fits in to the neck

* The terrible inscription is “Hic depositum est corpus Jonathan Swift, S.T.P. &c., ubi sæva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit.”

LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.

behind. Stella’s epitaph is on the adjoining pillar—close by. Sir Walter seemed not to have thought of it before (or to have forgotten, if he had), but to judge merely from the wording that Swift himself wrote it. She is described as ‘Mrs Hester Johnson, better known to the world by the name of Stella, under which she is celebrated in the writings of Dr Jonathan Swift, Dean of this cathedral.’ ‘This,’ said Sir Walter, ‘the Dean might say—any one else would have said more.’ She died in 1727, Swift in 1745. Just by the entrance to the transept, is his tablet in honour of the servant who behaved so well about the secret of the Drapier’s letters. We then saw St Sepulchre’s Library, a monastic looking place, very like one of the smaller college libraries in Oxford. Here they have the folio Clarendon, with Swift’s marginal remarks, mostly in pencil, but still quite legible. ‘Very savage as usual upon us poor Scots every where,’ quoth the Unknown. We then went into the Deanery (the one Swift inhabited has been pulled down), and had a most courteous and elegant reception from the Dean, the Honourable Dr Ponsonby. He gave us a capital luncheon—the original full-length picture of the Dean over the sideboard. The print in the Edinburgh edition is very good—but the complexion is in the picture—black, robust, sanguine—a heavy-lidded, stern blue eye. It was interesting to see how completely the genius loci has kept his ground. Various little relics reverently hoarded as they should be. They said his memory was as fresh as ever among the common people about—they still sing his ballads, and had heard with great delight that Sir Walter wrote a grand book all about the great Dane. The

‘Jolly lads of St Patrick’s, St Kevin’s, Donore,’

mustered strong and Stentorian at our exit. They

DUBLIN—JULY 1825.

would, like their great-grandfathers and mothers, have torn the Unknown to pieces, had he taken the other tack, and

‘Insulted us all by insulting the Dean.’

On Monday the 18th, to give another extract: “Young Mr Maturin breakfasted, and Sir Walter asked a great deal about his late father and the present situation of the family, and promised to go and see the widow. When the young gentleman was gone, Hartstonge told us that Maturin used to compose with a wafer pasted on his forehead, which was the signal that if any of his family entered the sanctum they must not speak to him. ‘He was never bred in a writer’s chaumer,’ quoth Peveril. Sir Walter observed that it seemed to be a piece of Protestantism in Dublin to drop the saintly titles of the Catholic Church: they call St Patrick’s, Patrick’s; and St Stephen’s Green has been Orangeized into Stephen’s. He said you might trace the Puritans in the plain Powles (for St Paul’s) of the old English comedians. We then went to the Bank, where the Governor and Directors had begged him to let themselves show him every thing in proper style; and he was forced to say, as he came out, ‘These people treated me as if I was a Prince of the Blood.’ I do believe that, just at this time, the Duke of York might be treated as well—better he could not be. From this to the College hard by. The Provost received Sir W. in a splendid drawing-room, and then carried him through the libraries, halls, &c. amidst a crowd of eager students. He received his diploma in due form, and there followed a superb dejeuner in the Provostry. Neither Oxford nor Cambridge could have done the whole thing in better style. Made acquaintance with Dr Brinkley, Astronomer Royal, and Dr Macdonnell, Professor of Greek, and all the rest of the leading Professors, who vied with each other in respect

DUBLIN—WICKLOW.

and devotion to the Unknown.—19th. I forgot to say that there is one true paragraph in the papers. One of the College librarians yesterday told Sir W., fishingly, ‘I have been so busy that I have not yet read your Redgauntlet.’ He answered, very meekly, ‘I have not happened to fall in with such a work, Doctor.’”

It may well be imagined with what lively interest Sir Walter surveyed the scenery with which so many of the proudest recollections of Ireland must ever be associated, and how curiously he studied the rural manners it presented to him, in the hope (not disappointed) of being able to trace some of his friend’s bright creations to their first hints and germs. On the delight with which he contemplated her position in the midst of her own large and happy domestic circle I need say still less. The reader is aware by this time how deeply he condemned and pitied the conduct and fate of those who, gifted with pre-eminent talents for the instruction and entertainment of their species at large, fancy themselves entitled to neglect those every-day duties and charities of life, from

LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.

the mere shadowing of which in imaginary pictures the genius of poetry and romance has always reaped its highest and purest, perhaps its only true and immortal honours. In Maria he hailed a sister spirit; one who, at the summit of literary fame, took the same modest, just, and, let me add, Christian view of the relative importance of the feelings, the obligations, and the hopes in which we are all equally partakers, and those talents and accomplishments which may seem, to vain and shortsighted eyes, sufficient to constitute their possessors into an order and species apart from the rest of their kind. Such fantastic conceits found no shelter with either of these powerful minds. I was then a young man, and I cannot forget how much I was struck at the time by some words that fell from one of them, when, in the course of a walk in the park at Edgeworthstown, I happened to use some phrase which conveyed (though not perhaps meant to do so) the impression that I suspected Poets and Novelists of being a good deal accustomed to look at life and the world only as materials for art. A soft and pensive shade came over Scott’s face as he said—“I fear you have some very young ideas in your head: are you not too apt to measure things by some reference to literature—to disbelieve that any body can be worth much care who has no knowledge of that sort of thing, or taste for it? God help us! what a poor world this would be if that were the true doctrine! I have read books enough, and observed and conversed with enough of eminent and splendidly cultivated minds, too, in my time; but, I assure you, I have heard higher sentiments from the lips of poor uneducated men and women, when exerting the spirit of severe yet gentle heroism under difficulties and afflictions, or speaking their simple thoughts as to circumstances in the lot of friends and neighbours, than I

EDGEWORTHSTOWN, AUG. 1825.

ever yet met with out of the pages of the Bible. We shall never learn to feel and respect our real calling and destiny, unless we have taught ourselves to consider every thing as moonshine, compared with the education of the heart.” Maria did not listen to this without some water in her eyes—her tears are always ready when any generous string is touched (for, as Pope says, “the finest minds, like the finest metals, dissolve the easiest”); but she brushed them gaily aside, and said, “You see how it is—Dean Swift said he had written his books, in order that people might learn to treat him like a great lord. Sir Walter writes his, in order that he may be able to treat his people as a great lord ought to do.”

Lest I should forget to mention it, I put down here a rebuke which, later in his life, Sir Walter once gave in my hearing to his daughter Anne. She happened to say of something, I forget what, that she could not abide it—it was vulgar. “My love,” said her father, “you speak like a very young lady; do you know, after all, the meaning of this word vulgar? ’Tis only common; nothing that is common, except wickedness, can deserve to be spoken of in a tone of contempt; and when you have lived to my years, you will be disposed to agree with me in thanking God that nothing really worth having or caring about in this world is uncommon.”

Miss Edgeworth, her sister Harriet, and her brother William, were easily persuaded to join our party for the rest of our Irish travels. We had lingered a week at Edgeworthstown, and were now anxious to make the best of our way towards the Lakes of Killarney; but posting was not to be very rapidly accomplished in those regions by so large a company as had now collected—and we were more agreeably delayed by the

LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.

hospitalities of Miss Edgeworth’s old friends, and several of Sir Walter’s new ones, at various mansions on our line of route—of which I must note especially Judge Moore’s, at Lamberton, near Maryborough, because Sir Walter pronounced its beneficence to be even beyond the usual Irish scale; for, on reaching our next halting place, which was an indifferent country inn, we discovered that we need be in no alarm as to our dinner at all events, the judge’s people having privately packed up in one of the carriages, ere we started in the morning, a pickled salmon, a most lordly venison pasty, and half-a-dozen bottles of Champagne. But most of these houses seemed, like the judge’s, to have been constructed on the principle of the Peri Banou’s tent. They seemed all to have room not only for the lion and lionesses, and their respective tails, but for all in the neighbourhood who could be held worthy to inspect them at feeding-time.

Sir Walter said it reminded him of a woman in Fife, who, summing up the misfortunes of a black year in her history, said—“Let me see, sirs; first, we lost our wee callant—and then Jenny—and then the gudeman himsel died—and then the coo died too, poor hizzey; but, to be sure, her hide brought me fifteen shillings.”

On at last quitting the festive circle of Storrs, we visited the family of the late Bishop Watson at Calgarth, and Mr Wordsworth at his charming retreat of Mount Rydal. He accompanied us to Keswick, where we saw Mr Southey re-established in his unrivalled library. Mr Wordsworth and his daughter then turned with us, and passing over Kirkstone to Ulswater, conducted us first to his friend Mr Marshall’s elegant villa, near Lyulph’s Tower, and on the next day to the noble castle of his lifelong friend and patron Lord Lonsdale. The Earl and Countess had their halls filled with another splendid circle of distinguished persons, who, like them, lavished all possible attentions and demonstrations of respect upon Sir Walter. He remained a couple of days, and perambulated, under Wordsworth’s guidance, the superb terraces and groves of the “fair domain,” which that poet has connected with the noblest monument of his genius. But the temptations of Storrs and Lowther had cost more time than had been calculated upon, and the promised visit to Rokeby

LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.

was unwillingly abandoned. Sir Walter reached Abbotsford again on the first of September, and said truly that “his tour had been one ovation.”

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Maria Stanhope, countess of Harrington [née Foote] (1797-1867) English actress; in 1814 made her debut at Covent Garden as Amanthis in The Child of Nature; she retired in 1825 following a successful and notorious breech of promise suit. In 1831 she married Charles Stanhope, fourth earl of Harrington (1780-1851).

Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729) English playwright and essayist, who conducted The Tatler, and (with Joseph Addison) The Spectator and The Guardian.

Lady Louisa Stuart (1757-1851) The youngest child of John Stuart, third earl of Bute; she corresponded with Sir Walter Scott. Several volumes of her writings and memoirs were published after her death.

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) Dean of St Patrick's, Scriblerian satirist, and author of Battle of the Books with Tale of a Tub (1704), Drapier Letters (1724), Gulliver's Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729).

Thomas of Erceldoune (1220 c.-1297 c.) Scottish poet and prophet; author (or supposed author) of the romance, Sir Tristrem.

Richard Watson, bishop of Llandaff (1737-1816) Regius Professor of Divinity, Trinity College, Cambridge and bishop of Llandaff (1782); he published Apology for Christianity (1776) in response to Gibbon, and Apology for the Bible (1796) in response to Paine.

James Watt (1736-1819) Scottish inventor of the steam engine patented in 1769.

Arthur Wellesley, first duke of Wellington (1769-1852) Soldier and statesman; commander in the Peninsular Campaign (1809-1813), he defeated Napoleon at Waterloo and was prime minister (1828-1830).

Richard Wellesley, first marquess Wellesley (1760-1842) The son of Garret Wesley (1735-1781) and elder brother of the Duke of Wellington; he was Whig MP, Governor-general of Bengal (1797-1805), Foreign Secretary (1809-12), and Lord-lieutenant of Ireland (1821-28); he was created Marquess Wellesley in 1799.

William III, king of England (1650-1702) King of England (1689-1702); succeeded James II in the Glorious Revolution.

Jane Wilson [née Penny] (d. 1837) The daughter of a wealthy Liverpool merchant; in 1811 she married the poet John Wilson. Charles Macfarlane described her as “kind-hearted, sonsie, thoroughly Scottish.”

John Wilson [Christopher North] (1785-1854) Scottish poet and Tory essayist, the chief writer for the “Noctes Ambrosianae” in Blackwood's Magazine and professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University (1820).

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) With Coleridge, author of Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth survived his early unpopularity to succeed Robert Southey as poet laureate in 1843.

John Wilson Croker (1780-1857) Familiar Epistles to Frederick J[one]s, Esq. On the Present State of the Irish Stage. (Dublin: John Barlow, 1804). Verse epistles addressed to Frederick Jones, manager of the Theatre Royal.

Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) Harry and Lucy concluded: being the last part of Early Lessons. 4 vols (London: R. Hunter; Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1825).

Oliver Goldsmith (1728 c.-1774) The Vicar of Wakefield: a Tale. (London: F. Newbery, 1766). Parson Primrose is the hero of this partly-autobiographical sentimental romance.

Sir Walter Scott, baronet (1771-1832) The Lay of the Last Minstrel: a Poem. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1805). The first of Scott's metrical romances, the Lay recounts the love of Margaret of Branksome for Henry of Cranstoun during a sixteenth-century border raid.

Sir Walter Scott, baronet (1771-1832) Marmion; a Tale of Flodden Field. (Edinburgh: Constable, 1808). A narrative poem set in the sixteenth century; the six cantos are introduced by epistles addressed to William Stewart Rose, James Marriot, William Erskine, James Skene, George Ellis, and Richard Heber.

Sir Walter Scott, baronet (1771-1832) The Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D.: containing additional Letters, Tracts, and Poems, not hitherto published; with Notes, and a Life of the Author. 19 vols (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1814). Edited by Walter Scott; a revised edition was issued in 1823.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) Henry IV Part II. (London: 1600). Written in 1597 and first published in quarto in 1600.

Sir John Sinclair, first baronet (1754-1835) The Code of Health and Longevity; or, a concise View, of the Principles calculated for the Preservation of Health, and the Attainment of Long Life. 4 vols (Edinburgh: A. Constable & Co., 1807).

Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729) The Tender Husband, or, the Accomplish'd Fools: a Comedy. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1705).

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) A Letter to the Shop-keepers, Tradesmen, Farmers, and Common People of Ireland: concerning the Brass Half-pence coined by Mr. Woods, with a Design to have them pass in this Kingdom. (Dublin: J. Harding, [1724]). Signed “Mr. M.B. Drapier”—the first of the pamphlets known as the Drapier's Letters.

INFORMATION FROM TEI HEADER

Source Description:

Author: Lockhart, J. G. (John Gibson), 1794-1854

Title: Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. 7 vols (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1837).

Electronic Edition:

Series: Lord Byron and his Times: http://lordbyron.org

Encoding Description: Any dashes occurring in line breaks have been removed. Obvious and unambiguous compositors’ errors have been silently corrected.

Markup and editing by: David Hill Radcliffe

Completed January 2011

Publication Statement:

Publisher: Center for Applied Technologies in the Humanities, Virginia Tech

Availability: Published under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License