POLITICAL OPINIONS—SOLDIERING.
From his earliest years, Sir Walter’s political leanings were towards Conservatism, or that principle which disposes men to wish for the preservation of existing institutions, and the continuance of power in the hands which have heretofore possessed it. ‘As for politics,’ says Shenstone in his Letters, ‘I think poets are Tories by nature, supposing them to be by nature poets. The love of an individual person or family that has worn a crown for many successions, is an inclination greatly adapted to the fanciful tribe. On the other hand, mathematicians, abstract reasoners, of no manner of attachment to persons, at least to the visible part of them, but prodigiously devoted to the ideas of virtue, liberty, and so forth, are generally Whigs.’ There is much in this passage that hits the particular case of Sir Walter Scott. But moods of political feeling are not confined to individuals—they sometimes become nearly general over entire nations. At the time when Sir Walter entered public life, almost all the respectable part of the community were replete with a Tory species of feeling in behalf of the British constitution, as threatened by France; and numerous bodies of volunteer militia were consequently formed, for the purpose of local defence against invasion from that country. In the beginning of the year 1797, it was judged necessary by the gentlemen of Mid-Lothian to imitate the example already set by several counties, by embodying themselves in a cavalry corps. Thisassociation assumed the name of the Royal Mid-Lothian Regiment of Cavalry; and Mr Walter Scott had the honour to be appointed its adjutant, for which office his lameness was considered no bar, especially as he happened to be a remarkably graceful equestrian. He was a signally zealous officer, and very popular in the regiment, on account of his extreme good-humour and powers of social entertainment. His appointment partly resulted from, and partly led to, an intimacy with the most considerable man of his name, Henry, Duke of Buccleuch, who had taken a great interest in the embodying of the corps. It was also perhaps the means, to a certain extent, of making him known to Mr Henry Dundas, who was now one of His Majesty’s Secretaries of State, and a lively promoter of the scheme of national defence in Scotland. Adjutant Scott composed a war-song, as he called it, for the Mid-Lothian Cavalry, which he afterwards published in theBorder Minstrelsy. It is an animated poem, and might, as a person isnowapt to suppose, have commanded attention, by whomsoever written, or wherever presented to notice. Yet, to shew how apt men are to judge of literary compositions upon general principles, and not with a direct reference to the particular merits of the article, it may be mentioned that the war-song was only a subject of ridicule to many individuals of the troop. The individual, in particular, who communicated this information, remembered a large party of the officers dining together at Musselburgh, where the chief amusement, at a certain period of the night, was to repeat the initial line, ‘To horse, to horse!’ with burlesque expression, and laugh at ‘this attempt of Scott’s’ as a piece of supreme absurdity.