“Nothing would be so valuable to me as the mark of kindness which you offer, and yet my kennel is so much changed since I had the pleasure of seeing you, that I must not accept of what I wished so sincerely to possess. I am the happy owner of two of the noble breed, each of gigantic size, and the gift of that sort of Highlander whom we call a High Chief, so I would hardly be justified in parting with them even to make room for your kind present, and I should have great doubts whether the mountaineers would receive the Irish stranger with due hospitality. One of them I had from poor Glengarry, who, with all wild and fierce points of his character, had a kind, honest, and warm heart. The other from a young friend, whom Highlanders call MacVourigh, and Lowlanders MacPherson of Cluny. He is a fine spirited boy, fond of his people and kind to them, and the best dancer of a Highland reel now living. I fear I must not add a third to Nimrod and Bran, having little use for them except being pleasant companions. As to labouring in their vocation, we have only one wolf which I know of, kept in a friend’s menagerie near me, and no wild deer. Walter has some roebucks indeed, but Lochore is far off, and I begin to feel myself distressed at running down these innocent and beautiful creatures, perhaps because I cannot gallop so fast after them as to drown sense of the pain we are inflicting. And yet I suspect I am like the sick fox; and if my strength and twenty years could come back, I would become again a copy of my namesake, remembered by the sobriquet of Walter ill to hauld (to hold, that is). ‘But age has clawed me in its clutch,’ and there is no remedy for increasing disability except dying, which is an awkward score.
| LETTER TO MISS EDGEWORTH. | 211 |
“There is some chance of my retiring from my official situation upon the changes in the Court of Session. They cannot reduce my office, though they do not wish to fill it up with a new occupant. I shall be therefore de trop; and in these days of economy they will be better pleased to let me retire on three parts of my salary than to keep me a Clerk of Session on the whole; and small grief at our parting, as the old horse said to the broken cart. And yet, though I thought such a proposal when first made was like a Pisgah peep of Paradise, I cannot help being a little afraid of changing the habits of a long life all of a sudden and for ever. You ladies have always your work-basket and stocking-knitting to wreak an hour of tediousness upon. The routine of business serves, I suspect, for the same purpose to us male wretches; it is seldom a burden to the mind, but a something which must be done, and is done almost mechanically; and though dull judges and duller clerks, the routine of law proceedings, and law forms, are very unlike the plumed troops and the tug of war, yet the result is the same. The occupation’s gone.* The morning, that the day’s news must all be gathered from other sources that the jokes which the principal Clerks of Session have laughed at weekly for a century, and which would not move a muscle of any other person’s face, must be laid up to perish like those of Sancho in the Sierra Morena—I don’t above half like forgetting all these moderate habits, and yet
‘Ah, freedom is a noble thing!’ |
| 212 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
“Let me enquire about all my friends, Mrs Fox, Mr and Mrs Butler, Mrs Edgeworth, the hospitable squire, and plan of education, and all and sundry of the household of Edgeworthstown. I shall long remember our delightful days—especially those under the roof of Protestant Frank.*
“Have you forsworn merry England, to say nothing of our northern regions? This meditated retreat will make me more certain of being at Abbotsford the whole year; and I am now watching the ripening of those plans which I schemed five years, ten years, twenty years ago. Anne is still the Beatrix you saw her; Walter, now major, predominating with his hussars at Nottingham and Sheffield; but happily there has been no call to try Sir Toby’s experiment of drawing three souls out of the body of one weaver. Ireland seems to be thriving. A friend of mine laid out L.40,000 or L.50,000 on an estate there, for which he gets 7 per cent; so you are looking up. Old England is distressed enough—we are well enough here—but we never feel the storm till it has passed over our neighbours. I ought to get a frank for this, but our members are all up mending the stops of the great fiddle. The termination of the King’s illness is considered as inevitable, and expected with great apprehension and anxiety. Believe me always with the greatest regard, yours,
