“My dear Miss
Edgeworth,—I said I would tell you the upshot of my
endeavours to arrange the worldly business I had to grapple with in Scotland.
It comes to this. I found that the Colonel had entailed not the house, library, and immediate
grounds alone (as I had supposed), but the whole lands at Abbotsford, on his
brother, and then on my son, &c., but that there remained a debt of
£8500, secured on these lands in his father’s time of trouble, and
£24,000 more of old bookselling debt—besides an odd £1000 of
claims against the founder—with all which I must deal as my
father-in-law’s sole surviving executor. The only funds were the
remaining copyrights of his works—now much diminished, and every three
months diminishing in number. Cadell
offered, as he had done some time ago to the Colonel, to obliterate the
£8500 and the £24,000, on receiving the remaining share of the
copyrights in Scott’s works, and in my
Life of him, and to take
an abridged edition of the Life in payment of the other £1000; and being
wholly at a loss how to meet demands for interest (at this Whitsuntide even),
and really believing that no one else could or would offer so much for what I
had to dis-
| 298 | LIFE OF J. G. LOCKHART. |
“The entail requires my son to add the name and arms of Scott to his own, and this will be done at the convenience of the Heralds’ College, of course.
“Lady Scott will have a tolerable income now, and a much larger one if she outlives her mother. Her plans are as yet quite unfixed, but I much doubt if she will live at Abbotsford (which would be the most desirable thing for my son), or even in Scotland. Her mother, in anticipation of their return, had taken Huntly Burn, to be near them—you remember the house above Chiefswood, where the Fergusons used to be. Both it and my little glen are just what they were, only the woods on the skirts of the Eildons so grown that I could hardly see the summits from my garden. Lady Scott continued wonderfully tranquil, and Sir Adam is quite paternal in his treatment of her—in short, she is as well, and as well placed, as one could wish her to be for the present. My youth has rejoined his corps at Canterbury, and Missy and I have resumed our usual quiet habits here.—Ever yours affectionately,
