| 354 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
Throughout 1811, Scott’s serious labour continued to be bestowed on the advancing
edition of Swift; but this and all other
literary tasks were frequently interrupted in consequence of an important step which he
took early in the year; namely, the purchase of the first portion of what became in the
sequel an extensive landed property in Roxburghshire. He had now the near prospect of
coming into the beneficial use of the office he had so long filled without emolument in the
Court of Session. For, connected with the other reforms in the Scotch judicature, was a
plan for allowing the retirement of functionaries, who had served to an advanced period of
life, upon pensions; should this meet the approbation of parliament, there was little doubt
that Mr George Home would avail himself of the
opportunity to resign the place of which he had now for five years executed none of the
duties; and the second Lord Melville, who had now
succeeded his father as the virtual Minister for Scotland, had so much at heart a measure
in itself obviously just and prudent, that little doubt could be entertained of the result
of his efforts in its behalf. The Clerks of Session, it had been already settled, were
| ABBOTSFORD—1811. | 355 |
And the place itself, though not to the general observer a very attractive one, had long been one of peculiar interest for him. I have often heard him tell, that when travelling in his boyhood with his father, from Selkirk to Melrose, the old man suddenly desired the carriage to halt at the foot of an eminence, and said, “we must get out here, Walter, and see a thing quite in your line.” His father then conducted him to a rude stone on the edge of an acclivity about half a mile above the Tweed at Abbotsford, which marks the spot—
“Where gallant Cessford’s
life-blood dear Reeked on dark Elliott’s border
spear.” |
| 356 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
On the 12th of May, 1811, he writes to James
Ballantyne, apologizing for some delay about proof-sheets. “My
attention,” he adds, “has been a little dissipated by considering a
plan for my own future comfort, which I hasten to mention to you. My lease of Ashestiel
is out—I now sit a tenant at will under a heavy rent, and at all the inconvenience of
one when in the house of another. I have, therefore, resolved to purchase a piece of
ground sufficient for a cottage and a few fields. There are two pieces, either of which
would suit me, but both would make a very desirable property indeed. They stretch along
the Tweed near half-way between Melrose and Selkirk, on the opposite side from
Lord Somerville, and could be had for between
L.7000 and L.8000—or either separate for about half the sum. I have serious thoughts of
one or both, and must have recourse to my pen to make the matter easy. The worst is the
difficulty which John might find in advancing so
large a sum as the copyright of a new poem; supposing it to be made payable within a
year at farthest from the work going to press,—which would be essential to my purpose.
Yet the Lady of the Lake came soon home. I
have a letter this morning giving me good hope of my Treasury business being carried
through: if this takes place, I will buy both the little farms, which will give me a
mile of the beautiful turn of Tweed, above Gala-foot—if not, I will confine myself to
one. As my income, in the event supposed, will be very considerable, it will afford a
sinking
| ABBOTSFORD—1811. | 357 |
He alludes in the same letter to a change in the firm of Messrs Constable, which John Ballantyne had just announced to him; and, although some of his prognostications on this business were not exactly fulfilled, I must quote his expressions for the light they throw on his opinion of Constable’s temper and character. “No association,” he says, “of the kind Mr C. proposes, will stand two years with him for its head. His temper is too haughty to bear with the complaints, and to answer all the minute enquiries, which partners of that sort will think themselves entitled to make, and expect to have answered. Their first onset, however, will be terrible, and John must be prepared to lie by . . . . . The new poem would help the presses.” The new partners to which he refers were Mr Robert Cathcart, Writer to the Signet, a man of high worth and integrity, who continued to be connected with Constable’s business until his death in November, 1812; and Mr Robert Cadell, who afterwards married Mr Constable’s eldest daughter.*
|
* This union was dissolved by the death of the lady within a year |
| 358 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
Of the two adjoining farms, both of which he had at this time thought of purchasing, he shortly afterwards made up his mind that one would be sufficient to begin with; and he selected that nearest to Ashestiel, and comprising the scene of Cessford’s slaughter. The person from whom he bought it was an old friend of his own, whose sterling worth he venerated, and whose humorous conversation rendered him an universal favourite among the gentry of the Forest—the late Rev. Dr Robert Douglas, minister of Galashiels—the same man to whom Mrs Cockburn described the juvenile prodigy of George’s Square, in November 1777. Dr Douglas had never resided on the property, and his efforts to embellish it had been limited to one stripe of firs, so long and so narrow that Scott likened it to a black hair-comb. It ran from the precincts of the homestead towards Turn-again, and has bequeathed the name of the Doctor’s redding-kame to the mass of nobler trees amidst which its dark straight line can now hardly be traced. The farm consisted of a rich meadow or haugh along the banks of the river, and about a hundred acres of undulated ground behind, all in a neglected state, undrained, wretchedly enclosed, much of it covered with nothing better than the native heath. The farm-house itself was small and poor, with a common kail-yard on one flank, and a staring barn of the doctor’s erection on the other; while in front appeared a filthy pond covered with ducks and duckweed, from which the whole tenement had derived the unharmonious designation of Clarty Hole. But the Tweed was every thing to him—a beautiful river, flowing broad and bright over a bed of milk-white pebbles, unless here and there where it darkened into a deep pool, overhung as yet only by the birches and alders which had survived the statelier growth
of the marriage. Mr Cadell, not long after the catastrophe of 1826, became sole publisher of Scott’s later works. |
| ABBOTSFORD—1811. | 359 |
Such was the territory on which Scott’s prophetic eye already beheld rich pastures, embosomed among flourishing groves, where his children’s children should thank the founder. But the state of his feelings, when he first called these fields his own, will be best illustrated by a few extracts from his letters. To his brother-in-law, Mr Carpenter, he thus writes, from Ashestiel, on the 5th of August—
“As my lease of this place is out, I have bought, for about
£4000, a property in the neighbourhood, extending along the banks of the river
Tweed for about half a-mile. It is very bleak at present, having little to
| 360 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
The same week he says to Joanna Baillie—
“My dreams about my cottage go on; of about a
hundred acres I have manfully resolved to plant from
| LETTER TO MISS BAILLIE—AUG. 1811. | 361 |
| 362 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
“I never heard of a stranger that utterly baffled all efforts to engage him in conversation, excepting one whom an acquaintance of mine met in a stage coach. My friend,* who piqued himself on his talents for conversation, assailed this tortoise on all hands, but in vain, and at length descended to expostulation. ‘I have talked to you, my friend, on all the ordinary subjects—literature, farming, merchandise—gaming, game-laws, horse-races—suits at law politics, and swindling, and blasphemy, and philosophy—is there any one subject that you will favour me by opening upon?’ The wight writhed his countenance into a grin ‘Sir,’ said he, ‘can you say any thing clever about bend leather?’ There, I own, I should have been as much non-plussed as my acquaintance; but upon any less abstruse subject, I think, in general, something may be made of a stranger, worthy of his clean sheets, and beef-steak, and glass of port. You, indeed, my dear friend, may suffer a little for me, as I should for you, when such a fortuitous acquaintance talks of the intercourse arising from our meeting as any thing beyond the effect of chance and civility: but these braggings break no bones, and are always a compliment to the person of whom the discourse is held, though the narrator means it to himself; for no one can suppose the affectation of intimacy can be assumed unless from an idea that it exalts the person who brags of it. My little folks are well, and I am performing the painful duty of hearing my little boy his Latin lesson every morning; painful, because my knowledge of the language is more familiar than grammatical, and because little Walter has a disconsolate yawn at intervals which is quite irresistible, and has nearly cost me a dislocation of my jaws.”
|
* This friend was Mr William Clerk. |
| LETTER TO MISS BAILLIE—AUG. 1811. | 363 |
In answering the letter which announced the acquisition of Abbotsford, Joanna Baillie says, very prettily:—“Yourself, and Mrs Scott, and the children, will feel sorry at leaving Ashestiel, which will long have a consequence, and be the object of kind feelings with many, from having once been the place of your residence. If I should ever be happy enough to be at Abbotsford, you must take me to see Ashestiel too. I have a kind of tenderness for it, as one has for a man’s first wife, when you hear he has married a second.” The same natural sentiment is expressed in a manner characteristically different, in a letter from the Ettrick Shepherd, of about the same date:—“Are you not sorry at leaving auld Ashestiel for gude an’ a’, after having been at so much trouble and expense in making it a complete thing? Upon my word I was, on seeing it in the papers.”
That Scott had many a pang in
quitting a spot which had been the scene of so many innocent and noble pleasures, no one
can doubt; but the desire of having a permanent abiding-place of his own, in his
ancestorial district, had long been growing upon his mind; and, moreover, he had laboured
in adorning Ashestiel, not only to gratify his own taste as a landscape gardener, but
because he had for years been looking forward to the day when Colonel (now General) Russell would return from India to claim possession
of his romantic inheritance. And he was overpaid for all his exertions, when the gallant
soldier sat down at length among the trees which an affectionate kinsman had pruned and
planted in his absence. He retained, however, to the end of his life, a certain
“tenderness of feeling” towards Ashestiel, which could not perhaps be better
shadowed than in Joanna Baillie’s similitude.
It was not his first country residence—nor could its immediate landscape be said to equal
the Vale
| 364 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
Miss Baillie had then in the press a new volume of Tragedies, but had told her
friend that the publication, for booksellers’ reasons, would not take place until
winter. He answers (August 24th),—“Were it possible for me to hasten the treat I
expect by such a composition with you, I would promise to read the volume at the silence of
noonday, upon the top of Minchmuir, or Windlestrawlaw. The hour is allowed, by those
skilful in demonology, to be as full of witching as midnight itself; and I assure you, I
have felt really oppressed with a sort of fearful loneliness, when looking around the naked
and towering ridges of desolate barrenness, which is all the eye takes in from the top of
such a mountain—the patches of cultivation being all hidden in the little glens and
valleys—or only appearing to make one sensible how feeble and inefficient the efforts of
art have been to contend with the genius of the soil. It is in such a scene that the
unknown author of a fine, but unequal poem, called Albania, places the remarkable superstition which consists in hearing the noise
of a chase, with the baying of the hounds, the throttling sobs of the deer, the hollos of a
numerous band of huntsmen, and the ‘hoofs thick beating on the hollow
hill.’ I have often repeated his verses with some sen-
| JOANNA BAILLIE’S ORRA. | 365 |
Miss Baillie sent him, as soon as it was printed, the book to which this communication refers; she told him it was to be her last publication, and that she was getting her knitting needles in order—meaning to begin her new course of industry with a purse, by way of return for his Iona brooch. The poetess mentioned, at the same time, that she had met the evening before with a Scotch lady, who boasted that “she had once been Walter Scott’s bedfellow.”—“Don’t start,” adds Joanna, “it is thirty years since the irregularity took place, and she describes her old bedfellow as the drollest looking, entertaining little urchin that ever was seen. I told her that you are a great strong man, six feet high, but she does not believe me.” In point of fact, the assigned date was a lady’s one; for the irregularity in question occurred on board the Leith smack which conveyed Walter Scott to London on his way to Bath, when he was only four years of age, A. D. 1775.
Miss Baillie’s welcome volume contained, among others, her tragedy on the Passion of Fear; and Scott gives so much of himself in the letter acknowledging this present that I must insert it at length.
“ . . . . It is too little to say I am enchanted with the said third volume, especially with the two first plays, which in every point not only sustain, but even exalt your reputation as a dramatist. The whole character of
* The reader will find these lines from Albania (which Scott was very fond of repeating) quoted in a Note to his ballad of “The Wild Huntsman.”—Poetical Works, vol. vi. p. 308. |
| 366 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
‘’Tis mirk midnight with peaceful men, With us ’tis dawn of day ’ |
‘Then boot and saddle, comrades boon, Nor wait the dawn of day.’* |
|
* These lines were accordingly struck out of the outlaw’s song in Rokeby. The verses of Orra, to which Scott alludes, are no doubt the following:—
|
| ORRA—FEAR. | 367 |
“I think the Dream extremely powerful indeed, but I am rather glad we did not hazard the representation. It rests so entirely on Osterloo, that I am almost sure we must have made a bad piece of work of it. By-the-by a story is told of an Italian buffoon, who had contrived to give his master, a petty prince of Italy, a good hearty ducking, and a fright to boot, to cure him of an ague; the treatment succeeded, but the potentate, by way of retaliation, had his audacious physician tried for treason, and condemned to lose his head; the criminal was brought forth, the priest heard his confession, and the poor jester knelt down to the block. Instead of wielding his axe, the executioner, as he had been instructed, threw a pitcher of water on the bare neck of the criminal; here the jest was to have terminated, but poor Gonella was found dead on the spot. I believe the catastrophe is very possible.* The latter half of the volume I have not perused with the same attention, though I have devoured both the Comedy and the Beacon in a hasty manner. I think the approbation of the public will make you alter your intention of taking up the knitting-needle—and that I shall be as much to seek for my purse as for the bank-notes which you say are to stuff it—though I have no idea where they are to come from. But I shall think more of the purse than the notes, come when or how they may.
“To return, I really think Fear the most dramatic passion you have hitherto touched, because capable of being drawn to the most extreme paroxysm on the stage. In Orra you have all gradations, from a timidity excited by a strong and irritable imagination, to the extremity which altogether unhinges the understanding. The most dreadful fright I ever had in my life (being neither
* This story is told, among others, by Montaigne. |
| 368 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
| ORRA—FEAR. | 369 |
“Poor Grahame, gentle, and amiable, and enthusiastic, deserves all you can say of him; his was really a hallowed harp, as he was himself an Israelite without guile. How often have I teazed him, but never out of his good-humour, by praising Dundee and laughing at the Covenanters!—but I beg your pardon, you are a Westland Whig too, and will perhaps make less allowance for a descendant of the persecutors. I think his works should be collected and published for the benefit of his family. Surely the wife and orphans of such a man have a claim on the generosity of the public.*
“Pray make my remembrance to the lady who so kindly remembers our early intimacy. I do perfectly remember being an exceedingly spoiled, chattering monkey, whom indifferent health and the cares of a kind Grandmamma and Aunt, had made, I suspect, extremely abominable to every body who had not a great deal of sympathy and good-nature, which I daresay was the
* James Grahame, author of The Sabbath, had been originally a member of the Scotch Bar, and was an early friend of Scott’s. Not succeeding in the law, he—(with all his love for the Covenanters)—took orders in the Church of England, obtained a curacy in the county of Durham, and died there, on the 14th of September 1811, in the 47th year of his age. See a Memoir of his Life and Writings in the Edinburgh Annual Register for 1812, Part ii., pp. 384-415. |
| 370 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
Miss Baillie, in her next letter, mentioned the name of the “old bedfellow,” and that immediately refreshed Scott’s recollection. “I do,” he replies, “remember Miss Wright perfectly well. Oh, how I should like to talk over with her our voyage in the good ship the Duchess of Buccleuch, Captain Beatson, master; much of which, from the novelty doubtless of the scene, is strongly impressed on my memory. A long voyage it was—of twelve days, if I mistake not, with the variety of a day or two in Yarmouth Roads. I believe the passengers had a good deal of fun with me; for I remember being persuaded to shoot one of them with an air-gun, who, to my great terror, lay obstinately dead on the deck, and would not revive till I fell a-crying, which proved the remedy specific upon the occasion.”
The mention of Mr Terry, in the
letter about Orra, reminds me to observe
that Scott’s intimacy with that gentleman began to
make very rapid progress from the date of the first purchase of Abbotsford. He spent
several weeks of that autumn at Ashestiel, riding over daily to the new farm, and assisting
his friend with advice, which his acquirements as an architect and draughtsman rendered
exceedingly valuable, as to the future arrangements about both house and grounds. Early in
1812 Terry proceeded to London, and made, on the 20th May, a very
successful debut on the boards of the Haymarket as Lord
Ogleby. He continued, however, to visit Scotland almost every season, and no
ally had more to do either with the plans ultimately adopted as to
Scott’s new structure, or with the collec-
| DANIEL TERRY, ETC. | 371 |
Among the letters written immediately after Scott had completed his bargain with Dr Douglas, is one which (unlike the rest) I found in his own repositories:—
“You hardly deserve I should write to you, for I
| 372 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
* A Malay crease, now at Abbotsford. † A son of Mr Pringle of Whytbank. |
| LETTER TO LEYDEN. | 373 |
“Lady Hood’s departure being sudden, and your deserts not extraordinary (speaking as a correspondent), I have not time to write you much news. The best domestic intelligence is, that the Sheriff of Selkirkshire, his lease of Ashestiel being out, has purchased about 100 acres, extending along the banks of the Tweed just above the confluence of the Gala, and about three miles from Melrose. There, saith fame, he designs to bigg himself a bower—sibi et amicis—and happy will he be when India shall return you to a social meal at his cottage. The place looks at present very like ‘poor Scotland’s gear.’ It consists of a bank and a haugh as poor and bare as Sir John Falstaff’s regiment; though I fear, ere you come to see, the verdant screen I am about to spread over its nakedness will have in some degree removed this reproach. But it has a wild solitary air, and commands a splendid reach of the Tweed; and, to sum all in the words of Touchstone, ‘it is a poor thing, but mine own.’
“Our little folks, whom you left infants, are now shooting fast forward to youth, and show some blood, as far as aptitude to learning is concerned. Charlotte and I are wearing on as easily as this fashious world will permit. The outside of my head is waxing grizzled, but I cannot find that this snow has cooled either my brain or my heart.—Adieu, dear Leyden!—Pray, brighten the chain of friendship by a letter when occasion serves; and believe me ever yours, most affectionately,
On the 28th of August, 1811, just three days after this letter was
penned, John Leyden died. On the very day
| 374 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
‘Grata quies patriæ, sed et omnis terra
sepulchrum.’”* |
The packet in which Lady Hood, on her arrival in India, announced this event, and returned Scott’s unopened letter, contained also a very touching one from the late Sir John Malcolm, who, although he had never at that time seen the poet, assumed, as a brother Borderer lamenting a common friend, the language of old acquaintanceship; and to this Scott replied in the same style which, from their first meeting in the autumn of the next year, became that, on both sides, of warm and respectful attachment. I might almost speak in the like tenor of a third letter in the same melancholy packet, from another enthusiastic admirer of Leyden, Mr Henry Ellis,† who
* This little biography of Leyden is included in Scott’s Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol. iv. p. 137. † Now the Right Honourable Henry Ellis, appointed, in 1836, ambassador from the Court of St James’s to the Shah of Persia. |
| DEATH OF LEYDEN. | 375 |
Before passing from the autumn of 1811, I may mention, that the letter of James Hogg, from which I have quoted an expression of regret as to Ashestiel, was one of many from the Shepherd bearing about this date, which Scott esteemed worthy of preservation. Strange as the fact may appear, Hogg, on the other hand, seems to have preserved none of the answers; but the half of the correspondence is quite sufficient to show how constantly and earnestly, in the midst of his own expanding toils and interests, Scott had continued to watch over the struggling fortunes of the wayward and imprudent Shepherd. His letters to the different members of the Buccleuch family at this time are full of the same subject. I shall insert one, addressed, on the 24th of August to the Countess of Dalkeith, along with a presentation copy of Hogg’s “Forest Minstrel.” It appears to me a remarkable specimen of the simplest natural feelings on more subjects than one, couched in a dialect which, in any hands but the highest, is apt to become a cold one:—
“The Ettrick
Bard, who compiled the enclosed collection, which I observe is
inscribed to your Ladyship, has made it his request that I would transmit a
copy for your acceptance. I fear your Ladyship will find but little amusement
in it; for the poor fellow has just talent sufficient to spoil him for his own
trade, without having enough to support him by literature. But I embrace the
more readily an opportunity of intruding upon your Ladyship’s leisure,
that I might
| 376 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
* Lord Scott. See ante, p. 149. † The Countess of Rosslyn, born Lady Harriet Bouverie, a very intimate friend of Lady Dalkeith, died 8th August, 1810. She had, as has been mentioned before, written to Scott, resenting somewhat warmly his song at the Melville dinner. See ante, p. 106. |
| LETTER TO LADY DALKEITH. | 377 |
The Countess, in acknowledgment of the dedication of the Forest Minstrel, sent Hogg, through Scott’s hands, the donation of a hundred guineas—a sum which, to him, in those days, must have seemed a fortune; but which was only the pledge and harbinger of still more important benefits conferred soon after her Ladyship’s husband became the head of his house.
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