“With great pleasure and curiosity, but with something like awe, I first saw this celebrated house emerge from below the plantation which screened it from the Selkirk and Melrose road. Antique as it was in design, it had not yet had time to take any tint from the weather, and its whole complication of towers, turrets, galleries, cornices, and quaintly ornamented mouldings looked fresh from the chisel, except where the walls were enriched with some really ancient carving or inscription. As I approached the house, there was a busy sound of masons’ tools; the shrubbery before the windows was strewed with the works of the carpenter and stonecutter, and with grotesque antiquities, for which a place was yet to be found; on one side were the beginnings of a fruit and flower garden; on another, but more distant, a slope bristling with young firs and larches; near the door murmured an unfinished fountain.
“I had seen Sir Walter
Scott, but never met him in society, before this visit. He
received me with all his well-known cordiality and simplicity of manner. The
circumstances under which I presented myself were peculiar, as the only cause
of my being under his roof was one which could not without awkwardness be
alluded
| 294 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
“A point of hospitality in which Sir Walter Scott never failed, whatever might be
the pretensions of the guest, was to do the honours of conversation. When a
stranger arrived, he seemed to consider it as much a duty to offer him the
resources of his mind as those of his table; taking care, however, by his
choice of subjects, to give the visiter an opportunity of making his own
stores, if he had them, available. I have frequently observed this—with
admiration both of his powers and of his discriminating kindness. To me, at the
time of my first visit, he addressed himself often as to a member of his own
profession; and indeed he seemed always to have a real pleasure in citing from
his own experience as an advocate and a law officer. The first book he
recommended to me for an hour’s occupation
| MR ADOLPHUS’S MEMORANDA. | 295 |
“It would, I think, be extremely difficult to give a just idea of his general conversation to any one who had not known him. Considering his great personal and literary popularity, and the wide circle of society in which he had lived, it is perhaps remarkable that so few of his sayings, real or imputed, are in circulation. But he did not affect sayings; the points and sententious turns, which are so easily caught up and transmitted, were not natural to him: ‘though he occasionally expressed a thought very pithily and neatly. For example, he once described the Duke of Wellington’s style of debating as ‘slicing the argument into two or three parts, and helping himself to the best.’ But the great charm of his ‘table-talk’ was in the sweetness and abandon with which it flowed,—always, however, guided by good sense and taste; the warm and unstudied eloquence with which he expressed rather sentiments than opinions; and the liveliness and force with which he narrated and described: and all that he spoke derived so much of its effect from indefinable felicities of manner, look, and tone—and sometimes from the choice of apparently insignificant words—that a moderately faithful transcript of his sentences would be but a faint image of his conversation.
“At the time of my first and second visits to Abbots-
* See the case of Philip Stanfield’s alleged parricide, and Sir Walter Scott’s remarks thereupon, in his edition of “Lord Fountainhall’s Chronological Notes on Scottish Affairs,” pp. 233-36; and compare an extract from one of his early note-books, given ante, vol. i. p. 261. |
| 296 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
* Mr Rose was at this time meditating his entertaining little jeu d’esprit, entitled “Anecdotes of Monkeys.” |
| MR ADOLPHUS’S MEMORANDA. | 297 |
“He read a play admirably well, distinguishing the speeches by change of tone and manner, without naming the characters. I had the pleasure of hearing him recite, shortly before it was published, his own spirited ballad of ‘Bonny Dundee;’ and never did I listen to more ‘eloquent music.’ This was in one of the last years of his life, but the lines
Away, to the hills, to the caves, to the rocks! Ere I own a usurper, I’ll couch with the fox!’ |
“In conversation he sometimes added very strikingly to the ludicrous or pathetic effect of an expression by dwelling on a syllable; holding the note, as it would have been called in music. Thus I recollect his telling, with an extremely droll emphasis, that once, when a boy, he was ‘cuffed’ by his aunt for singing,
‘There’s nae repentance in my heart, The fiddle’s in my arms!’* |
|
* These lines are from the old ballad, “Macpherson’s Lament,”—the groundwork of Burns’s glorious “Macpherson’s Farewell.”—See Scott’s Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol. xvii., p. 259. |
| 298 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
“No one who has seen him can forget the surprising
power of change which his countenance showed when awakened from a state of
composure. In 1823, when I first knew him, the hair upon his forehead was quite
grey, but his face, which was healthy and sanguine, and the hair about it,
which had still a strong reddish tinge, contrasted rather than harmonized with
the sleek, silvery locks above; a contrast which might seem rather suited to a
jovial and humorous, than to a pathetic expression. But his features were
equally capable of both. The form and hue of his eyes (for the benefit of
minute physiognomists it should be noted, that the pupils contained some small
specks of brown) were wonderfully calculated for showing great varieties of
emotion. Their mournful aspect was extremely earnest and affecting; and, when
he told some dismal and mysterious story, they had a doubtful, melancholy,
exploring look, which appealed irresistibly to the hearer’s imagination.
Occasionally, when he spoke of something very audacious or eccentric, they
would dilate and light up with a tragic-comic, harebrained expression, quite
peculiar to himself; one might see in it a whole chapter of Cœur-de-lion and the Clerk of Copmanhurst. Never, perhaps, did a man
go through all the gradations of laughter with such complete enjoyment, and a
countenance so radiant. The first dawn of a humorous thought would show itself
sometimes, as he sat silent, by an involuntary lengthening of the upper lip,
followed by a shy sidelong glance at his neighbours, indescribably whimsical,
and seeming to ask from their looks whether the spark of drollery should be
suppressed or allowed to blaze out. In the full tide of mirth he did indeed
‘laugh the heart’s laugh,’ like Walpole, but it was not boisterous and
overpowering, nor did it check the course of his words; he could go
| MR ADOLPHUS—AUGUST, 1823. | 299 |
“The habits of life at Abbotsford, when I first saw it, ran in the same easy, rational, and pleasant course which I believe they always afterwards took; though the family was at this time rather straitened in its arrangements, as some of the principal rooms were not finished. After breakfast Sir Walter took his short interval of study in the light and elegant little room afterwards called Miss Scott’s. That which he occupied when Abbotsford was complete, though more convenient in some material respects, seemed to me the least cheerful* and least private in the house. It had, however, a recommendation which, perhaps, he was very sensible of, that, as he sat at his writing-table, he could look out at his young trees. About one o’clock he walked or rode, generally with some of his visiters. At this period he used to be a good deal on horseback, and a pleasant sight it was to see the gallant old gentleman, in his seal-skin cap and short green jacket, lounging along a field-side on his mare, Sibyl Grey, and pausing now and then to talk, with a serio-comic look, to a labouring man or woman, and rejoice them with some quaint saying in broad Scotch. The dinner hour was early; the sitting after dinner was hospitably but not immoderately prolonged; and the whole family party (for such it always seemed, even if there were several visiters) then met again for a short evening, which was passed in conversation and music. I once heard Sir Walter say, that he believed there was a ‘pair’ of cards (such was his antiquated expression)
* It is, however, the only sitting-room in the house that looks southward. |
| 300 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
“It seemed at first a little strange, in a scene
where so many things brought to mind the Waverley novels, to hear no direct
mention of them or even allusion to their existence. But as forbearance on this
head was a rule on which a complete tacit understanding subsisted, there was no
embarrassment or appearance of mystery on the subject. Once or twice I have
heard a casual reference made, in Sir
Walter’s presence, to some topic in the novels; no
surprise or appearance of displeasure followed,
| MR ADOLPHUS—AUGUST, 1823. | 301 |
“After all, there is perhaps hardly a secret in the world which has not its safety-valve. Though Sir Walter abstained strictly from any mention of the Waverley novels, he did not scruple to talk, and that with great zest, of the plays which had been founded upon some of them, and the characters, as there represented. Soon after our first meeting, he described to me, with his usual dramatic power, the deathbed scene of ‘the original Dandie Dinmont;’* of course referring, ostensibly at least, to the opera of Guy Mannering. He dwelt with
* See Note to Guy Mannering, Waverley Novels, vol. iv., p. 242. |
| 302 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
“In one instance only did he, in my presence, say or
do any thing which seemed to have an intentional reference to the novels
themselves, while they were yet unacknowledged. On the last day of my visit in
1823, I rode out with Sir Walter and his
friend Mr Rose, who was then his guest
and frequent companion in these short rambles. Sir Walter
led us a little way down the left bank of the Tweed, and then into the moors by
a track called the Girth Road, along which, he told us, the pilgrims from that
side of the river used to come to Melrose. We traced upward, at a distance, the
course of the little stream called the Elland, Sir Walter,
as his habit was, pausing now and then to point out any thing in the prospect
that was either remarkable in itself, or associated with any interesting
recollection. I remember, in particular, his showing us, on a distant eminence,
a dreary lone house, called the Hawk’s Nest, in which a young man,
returning from a fair with money, had been murdered in the night and buried
under the floor, where his remains were found after the death or departure of
the inmates; the fact was simple enough in itself, but, related in his manner,
it was just such a story as should have been told by a poet on a lonely heath.
When we had ridden a little time on the moors, he said to me rather pointedly,
‘I am going to show you something that I think will interest
you;’ and presently, in a wild corner of the hills, he halted us
at a place where
| ALLANTON—SEPTEMBER, 1823. | 303 |
