FOOTNOTES:

"The humble boon was soon obtain'd;The aged minstrel audience gain'd.But, when he reach'd the room of state,Where she with all her ladies sate,Perchance he wish'd his boon denied;For, when to tune the harp he tried,His trembling hand had lost the easeWhich marks security to please;And scenes long past, of joy and pain,Came wildering o'er his aged brain,—He tried to tune his harp in vain!The pitying Duchess praised its chime,And gave him heart, and gave him time,Till every string's according gleeWas blended into harmony.And then, he said, he would full fainHe could recall an ancient strainHe never thought to sing again.It was not framed for village churls,But for high dames and mighty earls;He'd play'd it to King Charles the Good,When he kept Court at Holyrood;And much he wish'd, yet fear'd, to tryThe long-forgotten melody.Amid the strings his fingers stray'd,And an uncertain warbling made,And oft he shook his hoary head.But when he caught the measure wildThe old man raised his face, and smiled;And lighten'd up his faded eye,With all a poet's ecstasy!In varying cadence, soft or strong,He swept the sounding chords along;The present scene, the future lot,His toils, his wants, were all forgot;Cold diffidence and age's frostIn the full tide of song were lost;Each blank in faithless memory voidThe poet's glowing thought supplied;And, while his harp responsive rung,'Twas thus the latest minstrel sung.

Here paused the harp; and with its swellThe master's fire and courage fell;Dejectedly and low he bow'd,And, gazing timid on the crowd,He seem'd to seek in every eyeIf they approved his minstrelsy;And, diffident of present praise,Somewhat he spoke of former days,And how old age, and wandering long,Had done his hand and harp some wrong."

These lines hardly illustrate, I think, the particular form of Mr. Pitt's criticism, for a quick succession of fine shades of feeling of this kind could never have been delineated in a painting, or indeed in a series of paintings, at all, while theyareso given in the poem. But the praise itself, if not its exact form, is amply deserved. The singular depth of the romantic glow in this passage, and its equally singular simplicity,—a simplicity which makes it intelligible to every one,—are conspicuous to every reader. It is not what is called classical poetry, for there is no severe outline,—no sculptured completeness and repose,—no satisfying wholeness of effect to the eye of the mind,—no embodiment of a great action. The poet gives us a breath, a ripple of alternating fear and hope in the heart of an old man, and that is all. He catches an emotion that had its roots deep in the past, and that is striving onward towards something in the future;—he traces the wistfulness and self-distrust with which age seeks to recover the feelings of youth,—the delight with which it greets them when they come,—the hesitation and diffidence with which it recalls them as they pass away, and questions the triumph it has just won,—and he paints all this without subtlety, without complexity, but with a swiftness such as few poets ever surpassed. Generally, however, Scott prefers action itself for his subject, to any feeling, however active in its bent. The cases in which he makes a study of any mood of feeling, as he does of this harper's feeling, are comparatively rare. Deloraine's night-ride to Melrose is a good deal more in Scott's ordinary way, than this study of the old harper's wistful mood. But whatever his subject, his treatment of it is the same. His lines are always strongly drawn; his handling is always simple; and his subject alwaysromantic. But though romantic, it is simple almost to bareness,—one of the great causes both of his popularity, and of that deficiency in his poetry of which so many of his admirers become conscious when they compare him with other and richer poets. Scott used to say that in poetry Byron "bet" him; and no doubt that in which chiefly as a poet he "bet" him, was in the variety, the richness, the lustre of his effects. A certain ruggedness and bareness was of the essence of Scott's idealism and romance. It was so in relation to scenery. He told Washington Irving that he loved the very nakedness of the Border country. "It has something," he said, "bold and stern and solitary about it. When I have been for some time in the rich scenery about Edinburgh, which is like ornamented garden-land, I begin to wish myself back again among my honest grey hills, and if I did not see the heather at least once a year,I think I should die."[14]Now, the bareness which Scott so loved in his native scenery, there is in all his romantic elements of feeling. It is while he is bold and stern, that he is at his highest ideal point. Directly he begins to attempt rich or pretty subjects, as in parts ofThe Lady of the Lake, and a good deal ofThe Lord of the Isles, and still more inThe Bridal of Triermain, his charm disappears. It is in painting those moods and exploits, in relation to which Scott shares most completely the feelings of ordinary men, but experiences them with far greater strength and purity than ordinary men, that he triumphs as a poet. Mr. Lockhart tells us that some of Scott's senses were decidedly "blunt," and one seems to recognize this in the simplicity of his romantic effects. "It is a fact," he says,"which some philosophers may think worth setting down, that Scott's organization, as to more than one of the senses, was the reverse of exquisite. He had very little of what musicians call an ear; his smell was hardly more delicate. I have seen him stare about, quite unconscious of the cause, when his whole company betrayed their uneasiness at the approach of an overkept haunch of venison; and neither by the nose nor the palate could he distinguish corked wine from sound. He could never tell Madeira from sherry,—nay, an Oriental friend having sent him a butt ofsheeraz, when he remembered the circumstance some time afterwards and called for a bottle to have Sir John Malcolm's opinion of its quality, it turned out that his butler, mistaking the label, had already served up half the bin assherry. Port he considered as physic ... in truth he liked no wines except sparkling champagne and claret; but even as to the last he was no connoisseur, and sincerely preferred a tumbler of whisky-toddy to the most precious 'liquid-ruby' that ever flowed in the cup of a prince."[15]

However, Scott's eye was very keen:—"It was commonly him," as his little son once said, "that saw the hare sitting." And his perception of colour was very delicate as well as his mere sight. As Mr. Ruskin has pointed out, his landscape painting is almost all done by the lucid use of colour. Nevertheless this bluntness of organization in relation to the less important senses, no doubt contributed something to the singleness and simplicity of the deeper and more vital of Scott's romantic impressions; at least there is good reason to suppose that delicate and complicated susceptibilities do at leastdiminish the chance of living a strong and concentrated life—do risk the frittering away of feeling on the mere backwaters of sensations, even if they do not directly tend towards artificial and indirect forms of character. Scott's romance is like his native scenery,—bold, bare and rugged, with a swift deep stream of strong pure feeling running through it. There is plenty of colour in his pictures, as there is on the Scotch hills when the heather is out. And so too there is plenty of intensity in his romantic situations; but it is the intensity of simple, natural, unsophisticated, hardy, and manly characters. But as for subtleties and fine shades of feeling in his poems, or anything like the manifold harmonies of the richer arts, they are not to be found, or, if such complicated shading is to be found—and it is perhaps attempted in some faint measure inThe Bridal of Triermain,the poem in which Scott tried to pass himself off for Erskine,—it is only at the expense of the higher qualities of his romantic poetry, that even in this small measure it is supplied. Again, there is no rich music in his verse. It is its rapid onset, its hurrying strength, which so fixes it in the mind.

It was not till 1808, three years after the publication ofThe Lay, thatMarmion, Scott's greatest poem, was published. But I may as well say what seems necessary of that and his other poems, while I am on the subject of his poetry.Marmionhas all the advantage overThe Lay of the Last Minstrelthat a coherent story told with force and fulness, and concerned with the same class of subjects asThe Lay, must have over a confused and ill-managed legend, the only original purpose of which was to serve as the opportunity for a picture of Border life and strife. Scott's poems have sometimes been depreciated as merenovelettesin verse, and I think that some of them may be more or less liable to this criticism. For instance,The Lady of the Lake, with the exception of two or three brilliant passages, has always seemed to me more of a versifiednovelette,—without the higher and broader characteristics of Scott's prose novels—than of a poem. I suppose what one expects from a poem as distinguished from a romance—even though the poem incorporates a story—is that it should not rest for its chief interest on the mere development of the story; but rather that the narrative should be quite subordinate to that insight into the deeper side of life and manners, in expressing which poetry has so great an advantage over prose. OfThe LayandMarmionthis is true; less true ofThe Lady of the Lake, and still less ofRokeby, orThe Lord of the Isles, and this is whyThe LayandMarmionseem so much superior as poems to the others. They lean less on the interest of mere incident, more on that of romantic feeling and the great social and historic features of the day.Marmionwas composed in great part in the saddle, and the stir of a charge of cavalry seems to be at the very core of it. "For myself," said Scott, writing to a lady correspondent at a time when he was in active service as a volunteer, "I must own that to one who has, like myself,la tête un peu exaltée, the pomp and circumstance of war gives, for a time, a very poignant and pleasing sensation."[16]And you feel this all throughMarmioneven more than inThe Lay. Mr. Darwin would probably say that Auld Wat of Harden had about as much responsibility forMarmionas Sir Walter himself. "You will expect," he wrote to the same lady, who was personally unknown to him at that time,"to see a person who had dedicated himself to literary pursuits, and you will find me a rattle-skulled, half-lawyer, half-sportsman, through whose head a regiment of horse has been exercising since he was five years old."[17]And what Scott himself felt in relation to the martial elements of his poetry, soldiers in the field felt with equal force. "In the course of the day whenThe Lady of the Lakefirst reached Sir Adam Fergusson, he was posted with his company on a point of ground exposed to the enemy's artillery, somewhere no doubt on the lines of Torres Vedras. The men were ordered to lie prostrate on the ground; while they kept that attitude, the captain, kneeling at the head, read aloud the description of the battle in Canto VI., and the listening soldiers only interrupted him by a joyous huzza when the French shot struck the bank close above them."[18]It is not often that martial poetry has been put to such a test; but we can well understand with what rapture a Scotch force lying on the ground to shelter from the French fire, would enter into such passages as the following:—

"Their light-arm'd archers far and nearSurvey'd the tangled ground,Their centre ranks, with pike and spear,A twilight forest frown'd,Their barbèd horsemen, in the rear,The stern battalia crown'd.No cymbal clash'd, no clarion rang,Still were the pipe and drum;Save heavy tread, and armour's clang,The sullen march was dumb.There breathed no wind their crests to shake,Or wave their flags abroad;Scarce the frail aspen seem'd to quake,That shadow'd o'er their road.Their vanward scouts no tidings bring,Can rouse no lurking foe,Nor spy a trace of living thingSave when they stirr'd the roe;The host moves like a deep-sea wave,Where rise no rocks its power to brave,High-swelling, dark, and slow.The lake is pass'd, and now they gainA narrow and a broken plain,Before the Trosach's rugged jaws,And here the horse and spearmen pause,While, to explore the dangerous glen,Dive through the pass the archer-men."At once there rose so wild a yellWithin that dark and narrow dell,As all the fiends from heaven that fellHad peal'd the banner-cry of Hell!Forth from the pass, in tumult driven,Like chaff before the wind of heaven,The archery appear;For life! for life! their plight they ply,And shriek, and shout, and battle-cry,And plaids and bonnets waving high,And broadswords flashing to the sky,Are maddening in the rear.Onward they drive, in dreadful race,Pursuers and pursued;Before that tide of flight and chase,How shall it keep its rooted place,The spearmen's twilight wood?Down, down, cried Mar, 'your lances downBear back both friend and foe!'Like reeds before the tempest's frown,That serried grove of lances brownAt once lay levell'd low;And, closely shouldering side to side,The bristling ranks the onset bide,—'We'll quell the savage mountaineer,As their Tinchel cows the game!They came as fleet as forest deer,We'll drive them back as tame.'"

"At once there rose so wild a yellWithin that dark and narrow dell,As all the fiends from heaven that fellHad peal'd the banner-cry of Hell!Forth from the pass, in tumult driven,Like chaff before the wind of heaven,The archery appear;For life! for life! their plight they ply,And shriek, and shout, and battle-cry,And plaids and bonnets waving high,And broadswords flashing to the sky,Are maddening in the rear.Onward they drive, in dreadful race,Pursuers and pursued;Before that tide of flight and chase,How shall it keep its rooted place,The spearmen's twilight wood?Down, down, cried Mar, 'your lances downBear back both friend and foe!'Like reeds before the tempest's frown,That serried grove of lances brownAt once lay levell'd low;And, closely shouldering side to side,The bristling ranks the onset bide,—'We'll quell the savage mountaineer,As their Tinchel cows the game!They came as fleet as forest deer,We'll drive them back as tame.'"

But admirable in its stern and deep excitement as that is, the battle of Flodden inMarmionpasses it in vigour, and constitutes perhaps the most perfect description of war by one who was—almost—both poet and warrior, which the English language contains.

AndMarmionregisters the high-water mark of Scott's poetical power, not only in relation to the painting of war, but in relation to the painting of nature. Critics from the beginning onwards have complained of the six introductory epistles, as breaking the unity of the story. But I cannot see that the remark has weight. No poem is written for those who read it as they do a novel—merely to follow the interest of the story; or if any poem be written for such readers, it deserves to die. On such a principle—which treats a poem as a mere novel and nothing else,—you might object to Homer that he interrupts the battle so often to dwell on the origin of the heroes who are waging it; or to Byron that he deserts Childe Harold to meditate on the rapture of solitude. To my mind the ease and frankness of these confessions of the author's recollections give a picture of his life and character while writingMarmion, which adds greatly to its attraction as a poem. You have a picture at once not only of the scenery, but of the mind in which that scenery is mirrored, and are brought back frankly, at fit intervals, from the one to the other, in the mode best adapted to help you to appreciate the relation of the poet to the poem. At least if Milton's various interruptions of a much more ambitious theme, to muse upon his own qualifications or disqualifications for the task he had attempted, be not artistic mistakes—and I never heard of any one who thought them so—I cannot see any reason why Scott's periodicrecurrence to his own personal history should be artistic mistakes either. If Scott's reverie was less lofty than Milton's, so also was his story. It seems to me as fitting to describe the relation between the poet and his theme in the one case as in the other. What can be more truly a part ofMarmion, as a poem, though not as a story, than that introduction to the first canto in which Scott expresses his passionate sympathy with the high national feeling of the moment, in his tribute to Pitt and Fox, and then reproaches himself for attempting so great a subject and returns to what he calls his "rude legend," the very essence of which was, however, a passionate appeal to the spirit of national independence? What can be more germane to the poem than the delineation of the strength the poet had derived from musing in the bare and rugged solitudes of St. Mary's Lake, in the introduction to the second canto? Or than the striking autobiographical study of his own infancy which I have before extracted from the introduction to the third? It seems to me thatMarmionwithout these introductions would be like the hills which border Yarrow, without the stream and lake in which they are reflected.

Never at all events in any later poem was Scott's touch as a mere painter so terse and strong. What a picture of a Scotch winter is given in these few lines:—

"The sheep before the pinching heavenTo shelter'd dale and down are driven,Where yet some faded herbage pines,And yet a watery sunbeam shines:In meek despondency they eyeThe wither'd sward and wintry sky,And from beneath their summer hillStray sadly by Glenkinnon's rill."

Again, if Scott is ever Homeric (which I cannot thinkhe often is), in spite of Sir Francis Doyle's able criticism,—(he is too short, too sharp, and too eagerly bent on his rugged way, for a poet who is always delighting to find loopholes, even in battle, from which to look out upon the great story of human nature), he is certainly nearest to it in such a passage as this:—

"The Isles-men carried at their backsThe ancient Danish battle-axe.They raised a wild and wondering cryAs with his guide rode Marmion by.Loud were their clamouring tongues, as whenThe clanging sea-fowl leave the fen,And, with their cries discordant mix'd,Grumbled and yell'd the pipes betwixt."

In hardly any of Scott's poetry do we find much of what is called thecuriosa felicitasof expression,—the magic use ofwords, as distinguished from the mere general effect of vigour, purity, and concentration of purpose. But inMarmionoccasionally we do find such a use. Take this description, for instance, of the Scotch tents near Edinburgh:—

"A thousand did I say? I weenThousands on thousands there were seen,That chequer'd all the heath betweenThe streamlet and the town;In crossing ranks extending far,Forming a camp irregular;Oft giving way where still there stoodSome relics of the old oak wood,That darkly huge did intervene,And tamed the glaring white with green;In these extended lines there layA martial kingdom's vast array."

The line I have italicized seems to me to have more of the poet's special magic of expression than is at all usualwith Scott. The conception of the peaceful green oak woodtamingthe glaring white of the tented field, is as fine in idea as it is in relation to the effect of the mere colour on the eye. Judge Scott's poetry by whatever test you will—whether it be a test of that which is peculiar to it, its glow of national feeling, its martial ardour, its swift and rugged simplicity, or whether it be a test of that which is common to it with most other poetry, its attraction for all romantic excitements, its special feeling for the pomp and circumstance of war, its love of light and colour—and tested either way,Marmionwill remain his finest poem. The battle of Flodden Field touches his highest point in its expression of stern patriotic feeling, in its passionate love of daring, and in the force and swiftness of its movement, no less than in the brilliancy of its romantic interests, the charm of its picturesque detail, and the glow of its scenic colouring. No poet ever equalled Scott in the description of wild and simple scenes and the expression of wild and simple feelings. But I have said enough now of his poetry, in which, good as it is, Scott's genius did not reach its highest point. The hurried tramp of his somewhat monotonous metre, is apt to weary the ears of men who do not find their sufficient happiness, as he did, in dreaming of the wild and daring enterprises of his loved Border-land. The very quality in his verse which makes it seize so powerfully on the imaginations of plain, bold, adventurous men, often makes it hammer fatiguingly against the brain of those who need the relief of a wider horizon and a richer world.

FOOTNOTES:[12]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, ii. 217.[13]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, ii. 226.[14]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, v. 248.[15]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, v. 338.[16]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, ii. 137.[17]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, ii. 259.[18]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, iii. 327.

[12]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, ii. 217.

[13]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, ii. 226.

[14]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, v. 248.

[15]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, v. 338.

[16]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, ii. 137.

[17]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, ii. 259.

[18]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, iii. 327.

I have anticipated in some degree, in speaking of Scott's later poetical works, what, in point of time at least, should follow some slight sketch of his chosen companions, and of his occupations in the first period of his married life. Scott's most intimate friend for some time after he went to college, probably the one who most stimulated his imagination in his youth, and certainly one of his most intimate friends to the very last, was William Clerk, who was called to the bar on the same day as Scott. He was the son of John Clerk of Eldin, the author of a book of some celebrity in its time onNaval Tactics. Even in the earliest days of this intimacy, the lads who had been Scott's fellow-apprentices in his father's office, saw with some jealousy his growing friendship with William Clerk, and remonstrated with Scott on the decline of his regard for them, but only succeeded in eliciting from him one of those outbursts of peremptory frankness which anything that he regarded as an attempt to encroach on his own interior liberty of choice always provoked. "I will never cut any man," he said, "unless I detect him in scoundrelism, but I know not what right any of you have to interfere with my choice of my company. As it is, I fairly own that though I like many of you very much, andhave long done so, I think William Clerk well worth you all put together."[19]Scott never lost the friendship which began with this eager enthusiasm, but his chief intimacy with Clerk was during his younger days.

In 1808 Scott describes Clerk as "a man of the most acute intellects and powerful apprehension, who, if he should ever shake loose the fetters of indolence by which he has been hitherto trammelled, cannot fail to be distinguished in the highest degree." Whether for the reason suggested, or for some other, Clerk never actually gained any other distinction so great as his friendship with Scott conferred upon him. Probably Scott had discerned the true secret of his friend's comparative obscurity. Even while preparing for the bar, when they had agreed to go on alternate mornings to each other's lodgings to read together, Scott found it necessary to modify the arrangement by always visiting his friend, whom he usually found in bed. It was William Clerk who sat for the picture of Darsie Latimer, the hero ofRedgauntlet,—whence we should suppose him to have been a lively, generous, susceptible, contentious, and rather helter-skelter young man, much alive to the ludicrous in all situations, very eager to see life in all its phases, and somewhat vain of his power of adapting himself equally to all these phases. Scott tells a story of Clerk's being once baffled—almost for the first time—by a stranger in a stage coach, who would not, or could not, talk to him on any subject, until at last Clerk addressed to him this stately remonstrance, "I have talked to you, my friend, on all the ordinary subjects—literature, farming, merchandise, gaming, game-laws, horse-races, suits-at-law, politics, swindling, blasphemy,and philosophy,—is there any one subject that you will favour me by opening upon?" "Sir," replied the inscrutable stranger, "can you say anything clever about 'bend-leather'?"[20]No doubt this superficial familiarity with a vast number of subjects was a great fascination to Scott, and a great stimulus to his own imagination. To the last he held the same opinion of his friend's latent powers. "To my thinking," he wrote in his diary in 1825, "I never met a man of greater powers, of more complete information on all desirable subjects." But in youth at least Clerk seems to have had what Sir Walter calls a characteristic Edinburgh complaint, the "itch for disputation," and though he softened this down in later life, he had always that slight contentiousness of bias which enthusiastic men do not often heartily like, and which may have prevented Scott from continuing to the full the close intimacy of those earlier years. Yet almost his last record of a really delightful evening, refers to a bachelor's dinner given by Mr. Clerk, who remained unmarried, as late as 1827, after all Sir Walter's worst troubles had come upon him. "In short," says the diary, "we really laughed, and real laughter is as rare as real tears. I must say, too, there was aheart, a kindly feeling prevailed over the party. Can London give such a dinner?"[21]It is clear, then, that Clerk's charm for his friend survived to the last, and that it was not the mere inexperience of boyhood, which made Scott esteem him so highly in his early days.

If Clerk pricked, stimulated, and sometimes badgered Scott, another of his friends who became more and more intimate with him, as life went on, and who died before him, alwayssoothed him, partly by his gentleness, partly by his almost feminine dependence. This was William Erskine, also a barrister, and son of an Episcopalian clergyman in Perthshire,—to whose influence it is probably due that Scott himself always read the English Church service in his own country house, and does not appear to have retained the Presbyterianism into which he was born. Erskine, who was afterwards raised to the Bench as Lord Kinnedder—a distinction which he did not survive for many months—was a good classic, a man of fine, or, as some of his companions thought, of almost superfine taste. The style apparently for which he had credit must have been a somewhat mimini-pimini style, if we may judge by Scott's attempt inThe Bridal of Triermain, to write in a manner which he intended to be attributed to his friend. Erskine was left a widower in middle life, and Scott used to accuse him of philandering with pretty women,—- a mode of love-making which Scott certainly contrived to render into verse, in painting Arthur's love-making to Lucy in that poem. It seems that some absolutely false accusation brought against Lord Kinnedder, of an intrigue with a lady with whom he had been thus philandering, broke poor Erskine's heart, during his first year as a Judge. "The Counsellor (as Scott always called him) was," says Mr. Lockhart, "a little man of feeble make, who seemed unhappy when his pony got beyond a footpace, and had never, I should suppose, addicted himself to any out of door's sports whatever. He would, I fancy, as soon have thought of slaying his own mutton as of handling a fowling-piece; he used to shudder when he saw a party equipped for coursing, as if murder was in the wind; but the cool, meditative angler was in his eyes the abomination of abominations. His small elegant features, hectic cheekand soft hazel eyes, were the index of the quick, sensitive, gentle spirit within." "He would dismount to lead his horse down what his friend hardly perceived to be a descent at all; grew pale at a precipice; and, unlike the white lady of Avenel, would go a long way round for a bridge." He shrank from general society, and lived in closer intimacies, and his intimacy with Scott was of the closest. He was Scott's confidant in all literary matters, and his advice was oftener followed on questions of style and form, and of literary enterprise, than that of any other of Scott's friends. It is into Erskine's mouth that Scott puts the supposed exhortation to himself to choose more classical subjects for his poems:—

"'Approach those masters o'er whose tombImmortal laurels ever bloom;Instructive of the feebler bard,Still from the grave their voice is heard;From them, and from the paths they show'd,Choose honour'd guide and practised road;Nor ramble on through brake and maze,With harpers rude of barbarous days."

And it is to Erskine that Scott replies,—

"For me, thus nurtured, dost thou askThe classic poet's well-conn'd task?Nay, Erskine, nay,—on the wild hillLet the wild heath-bell flourish still;Cherish the tulip, prune the vine,But freely let the woodbine twine,And leave untrimm'd the eglantine:Nay, my friend, nay,—since oft thy praiseHath given fresh vigour to my lays;Since oft thy judgment could refineMy flatten'd thought or cumbrous line,Still kind, as is thy wont, attend,And in the minstrel spare the friend!"

It was Erskine, too, as Scott expressly states in hisintroduction to theChronicles of the Canongate, who reviewed with far too much partiality theTales of my Landlord, in theQuarterly Review, for January, 1817,—a review unjustifiably included among Scott's own critical essays, on the very insufficient ground that the MS. reached Murray in Scott's own handwriting. There can, however, be no doubt at all that Scott copied out his friend's MS., in order to increase the mystification which he so much enjoyed as to the authorship of his variously named series of tales. Possibly enough, too, he may have drawn Erskine's attention to the evidence which justified his sketch of the Puritans inOld Mortality, evidence which he certainly intended at one time to embody in a reply of his own to the adverse criticism on that book. But though Erskine was Scott'salter egofor literary purposes, it is certain that Erskine, with his fastidious, not to say finical, sense of honour, would never have lent his name to cover a puff written by Scott of his own works. A man who, in Scott's own words, died "a victim to a hellishly false story, or rather, I should say, to the sensibility of his own nature, which could not endure even the shadow of reproach,—like the ermine, which is said to pine if its fur is soiled," was not the man to father a puff, even by his dearest friend, on that friend's own creations. Erskine was indeed almost feminine in his love of Scott; but he was feminine with all the irritable and scrupulous delicacy of a man who could not derogate from his own ideal of right, even to serve a friend.

Another friend of Scott's earlier days was John Leyden, Scott's most efficient coadjutor in the collection of theBorder Minstrelsy,—that eccentric genius, marvellous linguist, and good-natured bear, who, bred a shepherd in one of the wildest valleys of Roxburghshire, had accumulatedbefore the age of nineteen an amount of learning which confounded the Edinburgh Professors, and who, without any previous knowledge of medicine, prepared himself to pass an examination for the medical profession, at six months' notice of the offer of an assistant-surgeoncy in the East India Company. It was Leyden who once walked between forty and fifty miles and back, for the sole purpose of visiting an old person who possessed a copy of a border ballad that was wanting for theMinstrelsy. Scott was sitting at dinner one day with company, when he heard a sound at a distance, "like that of the whistling of a tempest through the torn rigging of a vessel which scuds before it. The sounds increased as they approached more near; and Leyden (to the great astonishment of such of the guests as did not know him) burst into the room chanting the desiderated ballad with the most enthusiastic gesture, and all the energy of what he used to call thesaw-tonesof his voice."[22]Leyden's great antipathy was Ritson, an ill-conditioned antiquarian, of vegetarian principles, whom Scott alone of all the antiquarians of that day could manage to tame and tolerate. In Scott's absence one day, during his early married life at Lasswade, Mrs. Scott inadvertently offered Ritson a slice of beef, when that strange man burst out in such outrageous tones at what he chose to suppose an insult, that Leyden threatened to "thraw his neck" if he were not silent, a threat which frightened Ritson out of the cottage. On another occasion, simply in order to tease Ritson, Leyden complained that the meat was overdone, and sent to the kitchen for a plate of literally raw beef, and ate it up solely for the purpose of shocking his crazy rival inantiquarian research. Poor Leyden did not long survive his experience of the Indian climate. And with him died a passion for knowledge of a very high order, combined with no inconsiderable poetical gifts. It was in the study of such eccentric beings as Leyden that Scott doubtless acquired his taste for painting the humours of Scotch character.

Another wild shepherd, and wilder genius among Scott's associates, not only in those earlier days, but to the end, was that famous Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg, who was always quarrelling with his brother poet, as far as Scott permitted it, and making it up again when his better feelings returned. In a shepherd's dress, and with hands fresh from sheep-shearing, he came to dine for the first time with Scott in Castle Street, and finding Mrs. Scott lying on the sofa, immediately stretched himself at full length on another sofa; for, as he explained afterwards, "I thought I could not do better than to imitate the lady of the house." At dinner, as the wine passed, he advanced from "Mr. Scott," to "Shirra" (Sheriff), "Scott," "Walter," and finally "Wattie," till at supper he convulsed every one by addressing Mrs. Scott familiarly as "Charlotte."[23]Hogg wrote certain short poems, the beauty of which in their kind Sir Walter himself never approached; but he was a man almost without self-restraint or self-knowledge, though he had a great deal of self-importance, and hardly knew how much he owed to Scott's magnanimous and ever-forbearing kindness, or if he did, felt the weight of gratitude a burden on his heart. Very different was William Laidlaw, a farmer on the banks of the Yarrow, always Scott's friend, and afterwards his manager at Abbotsford, throughwhose hand he dictated many of his novels. Mr. Laidlaw was one of Scott's humbler friends,—a class of friends with whom he seems always to have felt more completely at his ease than any others—who gave at least as much as he received, one of those wise, loyal, and thoughtful men in a comparatively modest position of life, whom Scott delighted to trust, and never trusted without finding his trust justified. In addition to these Scotch friends, Scott had made, even before the publication of hisBorder Minstrelsy, not a few in London or its neighbourhood,—of whom the most important at this time was the grey-eyed, hatchet-faced, courteous George Ellis, as Leyden described him, the author of various works on ancient English poetry and romance, who combined with a shrewd, satirical vein, and a great knowledge of the world, political as well as literary, an exquisite taste in poetry, and a warm heart. Certainly Ellis's criticism on his poems was the truest and best that Scott ever received; and had he lived to read his novels,—only one of which was published before Ellis's death,—he might have given Scott more useful help than either Ballantyne or even Erskine.

FOOTNOTES:[19]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, i. 214.[20]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, iii. 344.[21]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, ix. 75.[22]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, ii. 56.[23]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, ii. 168-9.

[19]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, i. 214.

[20]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, iii. 344.

[21]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, ix. 75.

[22]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, ii. 56.

[23]Lockhart'sLife of Scott, ii. 168-9.

So completely was Scott by nature an out-of-doors man that he cannot be adequately known either through his poems or through his friends, without also knowing his external surroundings and occupations. His first country home was the cottage at Lasswade, on the Esk, about six miles from Edinburgh, which he took in 1798, a few months after his marriage, and retained till 1804. It was a pretty little cottage, in the beautification of which Scott felt great pride, and where he exercised himself in the small beginnings of those tastes for altering and planting which grew so rapidly upon him, and at last enticed him into castle-building and tree-culture on a dangerous, not to say, ruinous scale. One of Scott's intimate friends, the master of Rokeby, by whose house and neighbourhood the poem of that name was suggested, Mr. Morritt, walked along the Esk in 1808 with Scott four years after he had left it, and was taken out of his way to see it. "I have been bringing you," he said, "where there is little enough to be seen, only that Scotch cottage, but though not worth looking at, I could not pass it. It was our first country house when newly married, and many a contrivance it had to make it comfortable. I made a dining-table for it with my own hands. Look at these two miserable willow-treeson either side the gate into the enclosure; they are tied together at the top to be an arch, and a cross made of two sticks over them is not yet decayed. To be sure it is not much of a lion to show a stranger; but I wanted to see it again myself, for I assure you that after I had constructed it,mamma(Mrs. Scott) and I both of us thought it so fine, we turned out to see it by moonlight, and walked backwards from it to the cottage-door, in admiration of our own magnificence and its picturesque effect." It was here at Lasswade that he bought the phaeton, which was the first wheeled carriage that ever penetrated to Liddesdale, a feat which it accomplished in the first August of this century.

When Scott left the cottage at Lasswade in 1804, it was to take up his country residence in Selkirkshire, of which he had now been made sheriff, in a beautiful little house belonging to his cousin, Major-General Sir James Russell, and known to all the readers of Scott's poetry as the Ashestiel of theMarmionintroductions. The Glenkinnon brook dashes in a deep ravine through the grounds to join the Tweed; behind the house rise the hills which divide the Tweed from the Yarrow; and an easy ride took Scott into the scenery of the Yarrow. The description of Ashestiel, and the brook which runs through it, in the introduction to the first canto ofMarmionis indeed one of the finest specimens of Scott's descriptive poetry:—

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