Abbotsford

'O bear me back to all to Memory dear, 'Twill to my faded brow be health restored To feel the breeze that waves the woods of Abbotsford.'

[Illustration: ABBOTSFORD FROM THE RIVER TWEED]

'Within that pile _he_ dwelt whose ardent soul Filled with bright dreams, and aspirations high, And boundless knowledge, wonder-chained the whole Of human kind, but turned its glorious eye Of love on Caledon's bleak hills and cloudy sky.'

Abbotsford

Painted By William Smith, Jr.

DESCRIBED BY W. S. CROCKETT MINISTER OF TWEEDSMUIR; AUTHOR OF 'THE SCOTT COUNTRY,' ETC.

With

Twenty Full-Page Illustrations In Colour

[Illustration]

London Adam And Charles Black 1905

TO SIR WALTER'S SUCCESSORS AT ABBOTSFORD, THE HON. MRS. MAXWELL SCOTT, HIS GREAT-GRANDDAUGHTER, AND WALTER MAXWELL SCOTT, GREAT-GREAT-GRANDSON, THESE CHAPTERS ARE DEDICATED.

Preface

Abbotsford merits a volume in the present series will be readily conceded. In preparing the letterpress I have found myself, not unnaturally, playing to some extent the part of a biographer, and in this I have generally followed Lockhart, always the ultimate authority on Sir Walter. A number of fresh facts, however, will be found here and there throughout the work. Mrs. Maxwell Scott has kindly read the proof of 'The Later Abbotsford,' and for the 'Treasures' chapter I am indebted somewhat to her admirable little 'Catalogue,' which no visitor to Scott's home should miss.

W. S. Crockett.

THE MANSE, TWEEDSMUIR, _June 15, 1905_.

Contents

Chapter I Page Introductory 1

Chapter II From Cartleyhole To Abbotsford 9

Chapter III The Creation Of Abbotsford 27

Chapter IV Scott At Abbotsford 47

Chapter V An Abbotsford Bead-Roll 75

Chapter VI The Wizard'S Farewell To Abbotsford 103

Chapter VII Lockhart And Abbotsford 123

Chapter VIII The Later Abbotsford 149

Chapter IX The Treasures Of Abbotsford 165

Chapter X Around Abbotsford 207

Index 220

List of Illustrations

1. Abbotsford from the River Tweed _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE 2. The Cross, Melrose 8

3. The Abbey, Melrose 24

4. The Gateway, Abbotsford 38

5. Darnick Tower 42

6. Sandyknowe Tower 80

7. Cauldshiels Loch 92

8. The Rhymer's Glen 98

9. Melrose Abbey from the Meadows 106

10. Jedburgh Abbey 112

11. Leaderfoot Bridge 122

12. The Eildon Hills and River Tweed 134

13. Chiefswood 140

14. The Garden, Abbotsford 160

15. Sir Walter's Dial, Abbotsford 172

16. Sir Walter Scott's Desk and 'Elbow-chair' in the Study, Abbotsford 178

17. The Entrance Hall, Abbotsford 200

18. The Dining-room, Abbotsford 204

19. Dryburgh Abbey 216

20. Kelso Abbey and Bridge 218

Introductory

Chapter I

Introductory

Last year (1904) no fewer than seven thousand persons from all parts of the world visited Abbotsford.[1] There is no diminution in the annual pilgrimage to this chief shrine of the Border Country, nor is there likely to be. Scott's name, and that of Abbotsford, are secure enough in the affections of men everywhere. Whilst many would rejoice to see Sir Walter's home on a different footing from a patriotic point of view--less of a shilling show-house for one thing--there is no reason to quarrel with the present arrangements, which, likely enough, are the best under existing conditions. The order of viewing the various rooms, however, might well be improved, the public permitted to linger over them a little more leisurely, and also to see something of the exterior of the building. That many ardent Scott worshippers who flock yearly to Abbotsford would welcome a more ample opportunity for study and reflection within its charmed enclosure goes without saying. Of course, as being still a private residence, there are obvious difficulties in the way of such easier access. But probably that may come by-and-by.

The best preparation for a visit to Abbotsford is a course of Lockhart. There is no more faithful account of the place, from its purchase to the high-water mark of Scott's happiness there and the troubled years preceding the end. From at least 1820, and irrespective of his London life, Lockhart was Scott's companion and confidant at Abbotsford. Seldom has the fellowship of letters shown a friendship so strong and true. It was sympathy other than that of a son-in-law which Lockhart brought to the writing of his great Biography, and which has made it one of the masterpieces of literature. Never, surely, was a great man more fortunate in his life-story than Scott at the hands of Lockhart, one of the most maligned and misunderstood men of his day, indeed, but a kindly, lovable soul withal. To understand Abbotsford, it is a necessity that one should study the life of its originator and owner, with whose name, notwithstanding any subsequent occupation, the 'romance in stone and lime' is indissolubly connected.

In Scott's earliest association with Abbotsford, or, rather, with the site on which Abbotsford stands, is there not theme alike for painter and poet? Lockhart tells how Scott used to relate that, travelling in boyhood with his father from Selkirk to Melrose, the old man 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[2] on the edge of an acclivity about half a mile from the Tweed, at which spot the last great clan-battle of the Borders was fought between Scotts and Kers for the possession of King James V., the young Prince himself being a spectator of the contest. From a child Scott had exhibited a marked precocity for Border history and Border lore in general, and even then, as a boy, there were few to excel him as a story-teller. The printed page was in the dim distance, but already he could command an audience no less wonder-struck with that fair silver tongue of his, which in the budding Edinburgh days won him the heart of Mrs. Alison Cockburn and her coterie. We may be sure that the elder Walter had a more than average pride in the boy's tastes and promise for the future, nor would the opportunity be lacking by which these were encouraged and enriched. The road between Selkirk and Melrose has other memories, recalled, doubtless, that day as they drove along, but to a boy whose mind seemed ever bent on

'Old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago,'

the near neighbourhood of a Border battle-field was quite an event. Hence the picture of Scott and his father surveying the spot where, in the year 1526,

'gallant Cessford's heart-blood dear Reeked on dark Elliot's Border spear,'

might well lend inspiration for some artist's canvas. For there is more in the subject than the mere suggestion of a future great author touching for the first time the land to be immortalized by his genius. Were it that only, we should have an endless succession of canvases; but it is the suggestiveness of strongest personal association rather. Comparatively few recollect the incident which appealed so to Scott, both in his boyhood and later life. But everybody knows that practically all the arena of that fateful struggle--most of the landscape on which his youthful vision long and rapturously rested--by-and-by became his own possession. We may suppose that at least a quarter of a century lay between that day and the purchase of his first hundred acres as Laird of Abbotsford, and the gradual growth, almost year by year, of the lands of Abbotsford, still holds a big place in the popular imagination. As a battle scene, it was significant of his own career. What conquests were these fields not again to witness--and what defeats! What heroism of the pen, no less noble than that of the sword! What determination in the face of fearful odds to do his best at Duty's call, no less honoured and no less magnificent in achievement than the doughtiest deed of arms in ancient or modern days! That Abbotsford should attract its tens of thousands from all ends of the earth was to be expected after such a strenuous life as Scott's. Human nature must always pay homage at the shrine of the truly great, and if it be true that no writer has given pleasure to vaster multitudes, and that never has the life of his country been so well limned as by this master-hand, it will be equally true of Abbotsford that it will never want those to whom everything about it and its very dust is dear.

[Illustration: THE CROSS, MELROSE]

'And thou hast stood--how strange the story!-- In Melrose Square seven hundred years or more: Saw the gray Abbey in its pomp and glory-- Looked round on hill and valley long before Men gave up being mosstroopers and reivers, And settled down as shopkeepers and weavers!

From Cartleyhole To Abbotsford

Chapter II

From Cartleyhole To Abbotsford

It is scarcely necessary to recall that Scott on both sides of his house was connected with the Border Country--the 'bold bad Border' of a day happily long dead. He would have been a reiver himself, more than likely, and one of its nameless bards to boot, had he lived before the Border felt the subdued spirit of modern times. In the many-sided story of the Border, however, with its rare wealth of romanticism, Scott found his life-work. So that it was the Border which made him the force he is in the world of letters. No Borderer--no Scotsman, indeed, has taken truer and firmer hold of his countrymen. A descendant of Wat of Harden, linked to the best blood of the Border, and with every phase of his life redolent of the Border feeling, history has had no difficulty in claiming Sir Walter Scott as the most representative Border man the world has seen. He was not born in the Border Country, but practically all his life was spent there. His environment throughout was that of a Borderer. He belongs, to be sure, to every country. Like Shakespeare and Burns, Scott is one of the cosmopolitan heroes of literature, whose works are as widely cherished abroad as at home. Not a summer in the Border Country--the true 'Scott Country'--but is evidence of his universality. Scott gloried in the heritage that came to him from generations of Border ancestors, their cattle-lifting propensities notwithstanding. To belong to the Border--to Tweedside, to use his pet phrase--was never a superficial boast. It was because his most personal interests were bound up therein, and because he clung with a whole-hearted passion to the Border and to the Tweed, that these are to-day the most familiar of Scottish names. 'It is part of my creed,' he writes in an early letter to Patrick Murray, 'that the Tweed and Teviot yield to none in the world; nor do I fear that even in your eyes, which have been feasted on classic ground, they will greatly sink in comparison with the Tiber or Po!' Calais was not more indelible on Mary's heart than the Tweed was on Scott's. All the joyful strength of his life, says Ruskin, was spent in the Tweed valley. He came to the Border a sickly, delicate child, between his third and fourth year, and for threescore years and one he seldom left it for any lengthened interval. Edinburgh was his school, and his office, and the arena of much of his professional career. At a later period it was crowded with many painful memories. But he was happiest, even amid the most crushing sorrows of his life, when within earshot of the Tweed. There was not a blither or sunnier boyhood than Scott's at Rosebank, where even then he was 'making' himself, and dreaming of the days that were to be. At Ashestiel, the birthplace of the most popular poetry of the century before Byron blazed upon the literary horizon, his life was singularly untrammelled. Ashestiel, from being off the beaten track perhaps, seems to have lost favour somewhat with the Scott student. At any rate, it is not the shrine it should be, although in several respects it is more interesting to lovers of Scott than even Abbotsford itself. As for Abbotsford, may we not say that it is at once the proudest, and the most stimulating, and the saddest memorial ever associated with a man of letters? All these, comprising the three periods of Scott's life--Rosebank, Ashestiel, Abbotsford--lie as close to the Tweed as can be--none of them more than a few hundred paces from it at the outset. And when the great Borderer's task was accomplished, where more fitly could he have rested than with the river of his love and of his dreams singing ceaseless requiem around his last low bed?

It will be interesting to have a glimpse of Tweedside just as Scott appeared upon the scene. Since his day the valley in many of its aspects has not been without change. Even the remote uplands, long untouched by outside influences, have not escaped the modern spirit. The river must needs remain _in statu quo_, but the contrast between Sir Walter's Tweedside and ours is considerable. A century of commerce and agriculture has wrought marvels on the once bare and featureless and uncultivated banks of the Tweed. And none would have rejoiced at its present picturesque and prosperous condition more than Scott himself. Of the valley as it was a hundred years since, some early travellers give their impressions. There is the following from a Londoner's point of view, for instance--a somewhat sombre picture, true enough, however, of _the upper reaches_ at the time: 'About four in the afternoon we were obliged to proceed on our journey to Moffat, a market town, where we were informed we should meet with good lodging, which made us ride on the more briskly, but notwithstanding all our speed, we had such terrible stony ways and tedious miles, that when we thought we had been near the place, we met a Scotchman, who told us we were not got half way; this put us almost into the spleen, for we could see nothing about us but barren mountains on the right and the River Tweed on the left, which, running thro' the stones and rocks with a terrible noise, seemed to us like the croaking of a Raven, or the tone of a Screitch Owle to a dying man, so we were forced to ride on by guesse, knowing not a step of the way, and meeting none to direct us, till at last, coming up a hill, we spyed some waggons going over another mountain before us, and resolving to press somebody into our service, we rode on as fast as we could to overtake them, and then we were told we had still twelve long miles to Moffat.'

Dorothy Wordsworth's diary (1803) of a day by the Tweed below Peebles--_the middle portion_ of the stream--is a pleasanter memory: 'We had a day's journey before us along the banks of the Tweed, a name which has been sweet to my ears almost as far back as I can remember. After the first mile or two our road was seldom far from the river, which flowed in gentleness, though perhaps never silent; the hills on either side high, and sometimes stony, but excellent pasture for sheep.... In one very sweet part of the vale a gate crossed the road, which was opened by an old woman who lived in a cottage close to it. I said to her, "You live in a very pretty place!" "Yes," she replied, "the water of Tweed is a bonny water." The lines of the hills are flowing and beautiful, the reaches of the vale long; in some places appear the remains of a forest, in others you will see as lovely a combination of forms as any traveller who goes in search of the picturesque need desire, and yet perhaps without a single tree; or, at least, if trees there are, they shall be very few.' And writing about the same time the Rev. Richard Warner--afterwards the author of a work on the Waverley Novels--describes _the lower half_ of the river between Berwick and Kelso: 'The country around Berwick, though swelling into hills and sinking into vales, has neither beauty nor variety, the one being uniform and lumpish, the other wide and unwooded. A naked surface everywhere presents itself, unadorned with those indispensable features in agreeable landscape, lofty trees and spreading shrubs. The river Tweed, also, disappointed our expectations of picturesque beauty. Associated as the name of this river had hitherto been in our minds with poetical and pastoral ideas, we were prepared to admire its fringed banks and sacred shades, the haunt of many a water-nymph and sylvan deity; but alas! no solemn woods lifted their lofty heads over these celebrated waters. All was original nakedness.... The scenery is more animated and cheerful in the neighbourhood of Kelso, where wood is more frequent. Tweed's velvet banks were here and there spotted with little clumps of trees, presenting a fairer subject for tender and elegiac poetry than it had before done.'

At Scott's day the Tweed valley, in what are now its most luxuriant reaches, exhibited a markedly naked and treeless character. From Abbotsford to Norham Castle the scenery was of the openest. Here and there 'ancestral oaks' still clumped themselves about the great houses, with perhaps some further attempt at decorating the landscape. But that was rare enough. Landlords had not learned the art, not to speak of the wisdom, of tree-planting. It is only within the past hundred years that planting has become frequent, and the modern beauty of Tweedside emerged into being. It is said that Scott was one of the first to popularize the planting spirit. His operations at Abbotsford certainly induced the neighbouring proprietors to follow suit. Scott of Gala, and the lairds of Ravenswood, Drygrange, Cowdenknowes, Gladswood, Bemersyde, Mertoun, Eildon Hall, and Floors, all took their lead, more or less, from Abbotsford. Arboriculture was Scott's most passionate hobby. At least two long articles were penned by him on the subject, and he practised the art with extraordinary diligence and foresight. Of botany he knew little, but of trees everything. As we shall see, not the least important part of Abbotsford's creation was planning and perfecting that wondrous wealth of woodland--a very network about the place, on whose full growth his eyes, alas! were not destined to feast. 'Somebody,' he said, 'will look at them, however, though I question that they will have the same pleasure in gazing on the full-grown oaks that I have had in nursing the saplings.'

A fourth impression of Tweedside comes to us from the pages of Lockhart. We are dealing now with _the site of Abbotsford_ as it was about the year 1811. Scott was tenant of Ashestiel. Here he had spent eight of the pleasantest years of his life. But his lease was out, and the laird himself--his cousin, General Russell--was returning from India.

In casting about for a new abode, Scott seems at first to have thought of Broadmeadows, on the Yarrow, then in the market, a compact little domain which would have suited him well. Lockhart's one regret was that Scott did not purchase Broadmeadows. Here, surrounded by large landed proprietors, instead of a few bonnet-lairds, he would certainly have escaped the Abbotsford 'yerd-hunger,' and changed, possibly, the whole of his career. But the Broadmeadows Scott might have been very different from _our Sir Walter_. Of Newark, also, close by, the scene of the 'Lay,' he had some fancy, and would fain have fitted it up as a residence. The ancestral home of Harden itself was proposed to him, and indeed offered, and he would have removed thither but for its inconvenience for shrieval duties. After all, however, there was uppermost in Scott's mind the wish to have a house and land of his own--to be 'laird of the cairn and the scaur,' as in the case of Broadmeadows, or 'a Tweedside laird' at best, and later on, perhaps, to 'play the grand old feudal lord again.' Lockhart assures us that Scott was really aiming at higher game. His ambition was to found a new Border family, and to become head of a new branch of the Scotts, already so dominant. And did he not succeed? It is not strictly true to say that he failed. He realized his ambition, and he died in that belief. He built his 'castle,' as he playfully calls it, with more grandeur about it than he had, mayhap, dreamed of. Honours of the highest were heaped upon him. And at his death, at any rate, there was a prospect of his line being continued. Only one ugly shadow stood between--his monetary troubles. It is easy to say at this time of day that Scott was defeated in his most cherished hopes. He was defeated, as hundreds are, through the accidents of history. But in himself he was surely a noble success, and at his passing most of his plans had prospered. Scott towered so much above his fellows in intellectual strength, and he had such perfect faith in himself and the power of his own transcendent capabilities, that it is scarcely fair to pass censure on the ambitions and ideals which governed him, and the steady purpose that made him one of the truest and best of men--one of the world's greatest men. There is no occasion to bemoan Scott's career, no need to reflect on its 'might-have-beens.' His course he had mapped out for himself, and it was the only course destined to give us Scott as he wished to be, and as the generations should best remember him.

About to quit Ashestiel, therefore, his attention was directed to a small farm-holding not far distant, on the south bank of the Tweed, some two miles from Galashiels, and about three from Melrose. Scott knew the spot well. It had 'long been one of peculiar interest for him,' from the incident mentioned in the foregoing chapter. By name Newarthaugh--a name almost forgotten in the story of Abbotsford--it was also known as Cartleyhole, or Cartlawhole, and Cartlihole, according to the Melrose Session Records, in which parish it was situated. The place was tenanted for a time by Taits and Dicksons. Then it seems to have passed into the family of Walter Turnbull, schoolmaster of Melrose, who disposed of it, in the year 1797, to Dr. Robert Douglas, the enterprising and philanthropic minister of Galashiels. Why Dr. Douglas purchased this property nobody has been able to understand. It lay outside his parish, and was never regarded as a desirable or dignified possession. A shrewd man of business, however, he may, like Scott, have judged it capable of results, speculating accordingly. He had never lived at Cartleyhole. The place was laid out in parks, and the house, of which, curiously, Scott speaks in a recently recovered letter as 'new and substantial,' was in occupation. The surroundings were certainly in a deplorably neglected condition. The sole attempt at embellishment had been limited to a strip of firs so long and so narrow that Scott likened it to a black hair-comb. 'The farm,' according to Lockhart, '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 kailyard on one flank and a staring barn 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.'[3] A local reminiscence emphasizes Lockhart's description: 'The first time I saw Cartley Hole, or, as it is more appropriately called, Clarty Hole, which you are probably aware is the Scotch term for dirty, was in 1807 or 1808. I was on my first holiday visit to an uncle in Darnick. It was a low-built, one-story house, standing in what was literally a _hole_, and it had anything but a prepossessing appearance. It may have had attics, but of this I am not quite sure. It had nothing to recommend it as a site for a stately mansion, save its proximity to the Tweed. The scenery around was bare, and did not boast of a single natural beauty.' But to Scott's far-seeing eye matters were not so hopeless. There were, he felt, possibilities in the place. Moreover, it was his wish to _create_, as far as he could, the home that was to be his own. Cartleyhole offered in many respects an ideal site for the purpose he had in prospect. It lay at almost the centre of the Border district. All around were the grand historic and romantic associations of the Border, the subjects in which Scott revelled. Melrose Abbey, the most graceful and picturesque ruin in Scotland, already so celebrated in his verse, was visible from many points in the neighbourhood. Dryburgh was not far distant. Yonder Eildon's triple height, sacred to so much of the supernatural in Border lore, reared his grey crown to the skies. There, the Tweed, 'a beautiful river even here,' flowed in front, broad and bright over a bed of milk-white pebbles. Selkirk, his Sheriff's headquarters, was within easy reach. He was interested in the Catrail, or Picts' Work Ditch, on the opposite hillside, so often alluded to in his letters to Ellis; and on his own ground were fields, and mounds, and standing-stones, whose placenames recalled the struggle of 1526. A Roman road running down from the Eildons to a ford on the Tweed, long used by the Abbots, the erstwhile lords of the locality, furnished a new designation for the acres of hungry haugh-land--'as poor and bare as Sir John Falstaff's regiment'--upon which was destined to be reared the most venerated, and probably the most visited shrine in the kingdom.

[Illustration: THE ABBEY, MELROSE]

'If thou would'st view fair Melrose aright, Go visit it by the pale moonlight; For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild, but to flout, the ruins gray. When the broken arches are black in night, And each shafted oriel glimmers white; When the cold light's uncertain shower Streams on the ruined central tower; When buttress and buttress alternately Seem framed of ebon and ivory; When silver edges the imagery And the scrolls that teach thee to live and die; When distant Tweed is heard to rave, And the owlet to hoot o'er the dead man's grave, Then go--but go alone the while-- Then view St. David's ruined pile; And, home returning, soothly swear Was never scene so sad and fair!'

On May 12, 1811, we find Scott writing to James Ballantyne: 'I have 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, and could be had for between £7,000 and £8,000--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.' By the end of June one of the pieces passed into his hands for the sum mentioned--£4,000, half of which, according to Scott's bad and sanguine habit, he borrowed from his brother John, raising the remainder on the security of 'Rokeby,' as yet unwritten. The letter to Dr. Douglas acknowledging his receipt for the last instalment of the purchase-money has been preserved: 'I received the discharged bill safe, which puts an end to our relation of debtor and creditor:

'Now the gowd's thine, And the land's mine.

I am glad you have been satisfied with my manner of transacting business, and have equal reason at least to thank you for your kindly accommodation as to time and manner of payment. In short, I hope our temporary connection forms a happy contradiction to the proverb, "I lent my money to my friend; I lost my money and my friend." A figure of note in his day, Dr. Douglas was born at the manse of Kenmore, in 1747, and in his twenty-third year was presented to the parish of Galashiels, where he laboured till his death in 1820. He has been styled the Father of Galashiels. Much of his money--he inherited a fortune from his brother, a Captain in the Indian Army--was lent without stint to the manufacturers of that period, who were struggling out of their old-time condition as country weavers, and endeavouring to establish the woollen trade as a staple industry in the town. Galashiels, when Abbotsford came into being, was a mere thatched hamlet. Then it could boast of not more than a dozen slated houses. To-day there is a population of over 13,000. Dr. Douglas's friendship with Scott continued for many years. He was the 'reverend and unbigoted' clergyman to whom Scott addressed 'Paul's Letter' on Religion in France, and was himself the author of a carefully compiled essay on 'Agriculture in the Counties of Roxburgh and Selkirk.' Perhaps most interesting to recall, it was to Dr. Douglas that Mrs. Cockburn of Fairnalee penned her epistle wherein mention is made of Scott in his seventh year as 'the most extraordinary genius of a boy I ever saw.' Four-and-thirty years lay between that evening and the purchase of Cartleyhole--'a poor thing, but mine own.' Scott had taken a further, and as yet the most important, step up the ladder of his ambition. Things were going well with him, and it was a joy to send such welcome news to his brother-in-law on the other side of the world:[4] 'This is the greatest incident which has lately taken place in our domestic concerns, and I assure you we are not a little proud of being greeted as Laird and Lady of Abbotsford.'

The Creation Of Abbotsford

Chapter III

The Creation Of Abbotsford

The first purchase of land was close on a hundred and ten acres, half of which were to be planted, and the remainder kept in pasture and tillage. An ornamental cottage with a pillared porch--a print of which is still preserved--after the style of an English vicarage, was agreed upon, and it was here that Scott passed the first years of his Abbotsford life. He had many correspondents during this period. Daniel Terry, an architect turned actor, was probably his chief adviser as to Abbotsford and its furnishings, no end of letters passing between them. Morritt of Rokeby was much in his confidence, and Joanna Baillie, 'our immortal Joanna,' whose 'Family Legend,' had been produced at Edinburgh the previous year under Scott's auspices. The plans for his house were at first of the simplest. He thus describes them to Miss Baillie: 'My dreams about my cottage go on. My present intention is to have only two spare bedrooms, with dressing-rooms, each of which on a pinch will have a couch-bed; but I cannot relinquish my Border principle of accommodating all the cousins and _duniwastles_, who will rather sleep on chairs, and on the floor, and in the hayloft, than be absent when folks are gathered together.'

To Morritt we find him writing: 'I have fixed only two points respecting my intended cottage--one is that it shall be _in_ my garden, or rather kailyard; the other, that the little drawing-room shall open into a little conservatory, in which conservatory there shall be a fountain. These are articles of taste which I have long since determined upon; but I hope before a stone of my paradise is begun we shall meet and collogue upon it'; but soon after, as an excuse for beginning 'Rokeby,' his fourth verse romance, he says: 'I want to build my cottage a little better than my limited finances will permit out of my ordinary income.' Later on he tells Lord Byron that 'he is labouring to contradict an old proverb, and make a silk purse out of a sow's ear--namely, to convert a bare haugh and brae into a comfortable farm'; and to Sarah Smith, a London tragic actress, he writes: 'Everybody, after abusing me for buying the ugliest place on Tweedside, begins now to come over to my side. I think it will be pretty six or seven years hence, whoever may come to see and enjoy, for the sweep of the river is a very fine one of almost a mile in length, and the ground is very unequal, and therefore well adapted for showing off trees.' Scott, as was said, took a profound interest in tree-planting. Had he not been able to add by purchase the neighbouring hills to his original lands, it was said that he would have requested permission of the owners to plant the grounds, for the mere pleasure of the occupation, and to beautify the landscape. 'I saunter about,' he said to Lady Abercorn, 'from nine in the morning till five at night with a plaid about my shoulders and an immense bloodhound at my heels, and stick in sprigs which are to become trees when I shall have no eyes to look at them! He had a painter's as well as a poet's eye for scenery: 'You can have no idea of the exquisite delight of a planter,' he said; 'he is like a painter laying on his colours--at every moment he sees his effects coming out. There is no art or occupation comparable to this; it is full of past, present, and future enjoyment. I look back to the time when there was not a tree here, only bare heath; I look round and see thousands of trees growing up, all of which--I may say almost each of which--have received my personal attention. I remember five years ago looking forward, with the most delighted expectation, to this very hour, and as each year has passed the expectation has gone on increasing. I do the same now; I anticipate what this plantation and that one will presently be, if only taken care of, and there is not a spot of which I do not watch the progress. Unlike building, or even painting, or indeed any other kind of pursuit, this has no end, and is never interrupted, but goes on from day to day and from year to year with a perpetually augmenting interest. Farming I hate; what have I to do with fattening and killing beasts, or raising corn only to cut it down, and to wrangle with farmers about prices, and to be constantly at the mercy of the seasons? There can be no such disappointments or annoyances in planting trees.'

Scott left Ashestiel at Whitsunday, 1812--a rather comical 'flitting,' according to his own account of it. 'The neighbours,' he writes to Lady Alvanley, 'have been much delighted with the procession of my furniture, in which old swords, bows, targets, and lances made a very conspicuous show. A family of turkeys was accommodated within the helmet of some _preux_ chevalier of ancient Border fame; and the very cows, for aught I know, were bearing banners and muskets. I assure your ladyship that this caravan, attended by a dozen of ragged, rosy peasant children, carrying fishing-rods and spears, and leading ponies, greyhounds, and spaniels, would, as it crossed the Tweed, have furnished no bad subject for the pencil, and really reminded me of one of the gypsy groups of Callot upon their march.' The year 1812 was one of his busiest. Five days every week until the middle of July he did Court duty at Edinburgh. Saturday evening saw him at Abbotsford. On Monday he superintended the licking into shape of his new domicile, and at night he was coaching it to the city. During the Court recess he pegged away at 'Rokeby' and other work under circumstances that must have been trying enough. 'As for the house and the poem,' he writes to Morritt, 'there are twelve masons hammering at the one and one poor noddle at the other.' He did not then know the luxury of a private 'den' as at Castle Street. A window corner, curtained off in the one habitable room which served for dining-room, drawing-room, and school-room, constituted his earliest Abbotsford study. There, amid the hammer's incessant fall, and the hum of many voices, and constant interruptions, he plodded on, and got through a fair amount. The letters to Terry commence in September, 1812, and show that some little progress had been made: 'We have got up a good garden-wall, complete stables in the haugh, and the old farm-yard enclosed with a wall, with some little picturesque additions in front. The new plantations have thriven amazingly well, the acorns are coming up fast, and Tom Purdie is the happiest and most consequential person in the world.' To Joanna Baillie he sends this characteristic note, in the beginning of 1813: 'No sooner had I corrected the last sheet of 'Rokeby' than I escaped to this Patmos as blithe as bird on tree, and have been ever since most decidedly idle--that is to say with busy idleness. I have been banking, and securing, and dyking against the river, and planting willows, and aspens, and weeping birches. I have now laid the foundations of a famous background of copse, with pendent trees in front; and I have only to beg a few years to see how my colours will come out of the canvas. Alas! who can promise that? But somebody will take my place--and enjoy them, whether I do or no'; and in March he adds: 'What I shall finally make of this villa work I don't know, but in the meantime it is very entertaining'; and again: 'This little place comes on as fast as can be reasonably hoped.' To Lady Louisa Stuart he writes: 'We are realizing the nursery tale of the man and his wife who lived in a vinegar bottle, for our only sitting-room is just 12 feet square, and my Eve alleges that I am too big for our paradise.' In October, 1813, Terry is told that 'these are no times for building,' but in the following spring, pressing the Morritts to visit him, he says: 'I am arranging this cottage a little more conveniently, to put off the plague and expense of building another year, and I assure you I expect to spare you and Mrs. Morritt a chamber in the wall, with a dressing-room and everything handsome about you. You will not stipulate, of course, for many square feet.' In a letter to Terry, dated November 10, 1814--the year of 'Waverley'--further progress is reported: 'I wish you saw Abbotsford, which begins this season to look the whimsical, gay, odd cabin that we had chalked out. I have been obliged to relinquish Stark's (the Edinburgh architect, who died before the building was well begun) plan, which was greatly too expensive. So I have made the old farm-house my _corps de logis_ with some outlying places for kitchen, laundry, and two spare bedrooms, which run along the east wall of the farmcourt, not without some picturesque effect. A perforated cross, the spoils of the old kirk of Galashiels, decorates an advanced door, and looks very well.' Not much was done during the next two years, but in November, 1816, a new set of improvements was under consideration. Abbotsford was rapidly losing its cottage character. The 'romance' period was begun. A notable addition--connecting the farm-house with the line of buildings on the right--was then agreed upon, on which Scott communicates with Terry: 'Bullock[5] will show you the plan, which I think is very ingenious, and Blore has drawn me a very handsome elevation, both to the road and to the river. This addition will give me a handsome boudoir opening into the little drawing-room, and on the other side to a handsome dining-parlour of 27 feet by 18, with three windows to the north and one to the south, the last to be Gothic and filled with stained glass. Besides these commodities there is a small conservatory, and a study for myself, which we design to fit up with ornaments from Melrose Abbey.' In the same letter he says: 'I expect to get some decorations from the old Tolbooth of Edinburgh, particularly the copestones of the doorway, and a niche or two. Better get a niche _from_ the Tolbooth than a niche _in_ it to which such building operations are apt to bring the projectors.'

By July, 1817, the foundation of the existing house, which extends from the hall westwards to the original courtyard, had been laid, and Scott found a new source of constant occupation in watching the proceedings of his masons. In consequence of a blunder or two during his absence, 'I perceive the necessity,' he said, 'of remaining at the helm.' To Joanna Baillie he writes in September: 'I get on with my labours here; my house is about to be roofed in, and a comical concern it is.' There is some correspondence in October between Scott and Terry relative to the tower, a leading feature of the building. Scott mentions that (Sir) David Wilkie, who had just been his guest, 'admires the whole as a composition, and that is high authority.' 'I agree with you that the tower will look rather rich for the rest of the building, yet you may be assured that, with diagonal chimneys and notched gables, it will have a very fine effect, and is in Scotch architecture by no means incompatible.' In the beginning of 1818, he again writes to Terry: 'I am now anxious to complete Abbotsford. I have reason to be proud of the finishing of my castle, for even of the tower, for which I trembled, not a stone has been shaken by the late terrific gale which blew a roof clean off in the neighbourhood.' Lockhart, who saw Abbotsford for the first time in 1818, confesses that the building presented a somewhat 'fantastic appearance,' the new and old by no means harmonizing (see the chapter on Lockhart for a further account of his visit). In the spring of 1820 Scott writes to his wife from London, whither he had gone to receive his baronetcy: 'I have got a delightful plan for the addition at Abbotsford, which, I think, will make it quite complete, and furnish me with a handsome library, and you with a drawing-room and better bedroom. It will cost me a little hard work to meet the expense, but I have been a good while idle.' The plans for these new buildings, including the wall and gateway of the courtyard and the graceful stone screen which divides it from the garden, were made by Blore, although the screen--with its carvings taken from details of stone-work at Melrose Abbey--was originally devised by Sir Walter himself. During the winter of 1821 the new operations were commenced. By the spring of 1822 they were in full swing. 'It is worth while to come,' he writes to Lord Montagu, 'were it but to see what a romance of a house I am making'; and to Terry later on: 'The new castle is now roofing, and looks superb--in fact, a little too good for the estate; but we must work the harder to make the land suitable.' That same summer the place was besieged by visitors from the South, who, after witnessing the King's reception at Edinburgh, hastened out to see Abbotsford. In October, 1822, he writes to his son Walter: 'My new house is quite finished as to masonry, and we are now getting on the roof just in time to face the bad weather.' In November, 1822, and January, 1823, there are long letters to Terry: 'The house is completely roofed. I never saw anything handsomer than the grouping of towers, chimneys, etc., when seen at a proper distance.' With Terry all sorts of subjects were discussed--bells, and a projected gas installation, along with a constant enumeration of curios and relics, on which he is urged to spare no expense. 'About July,' Scott writes at the beginning of 1824, 'Abbotsford will, I think, be finished, when I shall, like the old Duke of Queensberry who built Drumlanrig, fold up the accounts in a sealed parcel, with a label bidding "the deil pike out the een" of any of my successors that shall open it.' By Christmas, it was completed, and with the New Year's festivities a large and gay party celebrated the 'house-warming,' of which Basil Hall's sprightly 'Journal,' incorporated in the 'Life,' supplies a singularly agreeable account. But there is no room to quote. It was a doubly joyous occasion, marking not only the realization of Scott's long-cherished scheme as to his 'castle,' but the engagement of his eldest son, with whom, as he must have felt at the time, were the fortunes of the future Abbotsford. Of the year entered so auspiciously, none dreamt what the end was to be.

[Illustration: THE GATEWAY, ABBOTSFORD]

'Master of Abbotsford! Magician strange and strong, Whose voice of power is heard By an admiring throng, From court to peasant's cot We come, but thou art gone; We speak, thou answerest not-- Thy work is done.'

In the creation of Abbotsford not only was the cottage of 1812 transformed to the castle of 1824, but the estate itself was continually enlarging. Possession of land was a crowning passion with Scott. He was always driving bargains, as he declared--on the wrong side of his purse, however--with the needy, greedy cock-lairds of the locality. 'It rounds off the property so handsomely,' he says in one of his letters. Once, on his friend Ferguson remarking that he had paid what appeared to be one of his usual fabulous prices for a particular stretch, Scott answered quite good-humouredly, 'Well, well, it is only to me the scribbling of another volume more of nonsense.' The first purchase was, as we have seen, the hundred odd acres of Clarty Hole. In 1813 he made his second purchase, which consisted of the hilly tract stretching from the Roman road near Turn-Again towards Cauldshiels Loch, then a desolate and naked mountain mere. To have this at one end of his property as a contrast to the Tweed at the other 'was a prospect for which hardly any sacrifice would have appeared too much.' It cost him about £4,000. In 1815, Kaeside--Laidlaw's home--on the heights between Abbotsford and Melrose, passed into his hands for another £4,000, and more than doubled the domain. The house has changed considerably since Laidlaw's halcyon days. By 1816 the estate had grown to about 1,000 acres. In 1816 and 1817 he paid £16,000 for the two Toftfields, altering the name of the new and unfinished mansion to Huntlyburn, from a supposed but absolutely erroneous association with the 'Huntlee Bankis'[6] of the Thomas the Rhymer romance. In 1820, Burnfoot, afterwards Chiefswood, and Harleyburn fell to his hands for £2,300, and there were many minor purchases of which Lockhart takes no notice. Scott was very anxious to acquire the estate of Faldonside,[7] adjoining Abbotsford to the west, and actually offered £30,000 for it, but without success. He was similarly unsuccessful with Darnick Tower, which lay into his lands on the east, and which he was extremely desirous of including in Abbotsford. Scott's suggestion rather spurred the owner, John Heiton, to restore the ancient peel-house as a retreat for his own declining days, and it is still in excellent preservation--one of the best-preserved peels on the Border--and a veritable museum, crammed from floor to ceiling with curios, relics, and mementos both of the past and present.

[Illustration: DARNICK TOWER]

'Oft have I traced within thy fort, Of mouldering shields the mystic sense, Scutcheons of honour, or pretence, Quarter'd in old armorial sort, Remains of rude magnificence.'

But even 'yerd-hunger' must be satisfied, and in Scott's case there was nothing for it save to steel the flesh against further desire. In November, 1825, there is the following entry in his diary: 'Abbotsford is all I can make it, so I resolve on no more building and no purchases of land till times are quite safe.' But times were never safe again. Abbotsford was all but within sound of the 'muffled drum.' Very soon--December 18, 1825--Scott was to write these words: 'Sad hearts at Darnick and in the cottages of Abbotsford. I have half resolved never to see the place again. How could I tread my hall with such a diminished crest! How live a poor, indebted man where I was once the wealthy, the honoured!' And again on January 26, 1826: 'I have walked my last on the domains I have planted, sat the last time in the halls I have built'--reflections happily unrealized, though, as a matter of fact, Scott was then the laird of Abbotsford in name only, and nothing more.

The building and furnishing of Abbotsford are estimated to have cost over £25,000. The contract for the 1824 edifice was in the capable hands of the Smiths of Darnick, with whom Scott was on the most cordial terms. John Smith (the sculptor of the Wallace statue at Bemersyde) was a singularly able craftsman, and his staff of workmen, with Adam Paterson for foreman, were known all over the Border. For the interior decorations--painting, papering, etc., and even for some of the carvings and casts--Scott generally gave employment to local labour. Much of the costlier furniture was shipped from London, but the great bulk of the work was carried through by tradesmen in the district, selected by Scott himself, and in whom he placed implicit confidence. The estate, all told, must have cost at least £60,000. It extended to 1,500 acres, and the annual rental in Scott's day was only about £350.

Such was the creation of Scott's Abbotsford, a real 'romance in stone and lime,' to use the Frenchman's hackneyed phrase. Never had Sir Walter deeper delight than when its walls were rising skywards, and the dream of his youth taking steady shape by the silvery side of the Tweed. But for Abbotsford he would not have been _our_ Scott--our man among men--our Immortal. If Abbotsford was his dream, it was also his Delilah. It is at once a reminder of his success, and of the most gigantic literary collapse of the century. So far as monuments to Scott go, there is none to equal it, not even the most splendid and costly pile which is one of Edinburgh's proudest adornments. Yet of all his creations, Abbotsford will be the soonest to perish, for 'Waverley' and its fellows are imperishable. Still, so long as it lasts, it will be the memorial of a pride, unjustifiable in many respects, but chivalrous withal, and of a fall to depths seldom touched, but., best of all, of a restoration than which there has been none more illustrious--none more heroic in literary craftsmanship. 'I have seen much, but nothing like my ain house,' he cried--a broken, dying man returned to Abbotsford, only to be borne forth again. Nor has history been slow to add its Amen.

Scott At Abbotsford

Chapter IV

Scott At Abbotsford

Of the Abbotsford life in the seven or eight brilliant seasons preceding the disaster of 1826 Lockhart's exquisite word-pictures are far the finest things in the Biography. Scott's dream was now fairly realized. He was not only a lord of acres, but a kind of mediæval chieftain as well. His cottage was transformed to a superb mansion, like some creation of the 'Arabian Nights,' and the whole estate, acquired at a cost far exceeding its real value, had grown to one of the trimmest and snuggest on Tweedside. A comparative failure at the Bar, Scott succeeded well otherwise in his professional career. His income from the Court Clerkship and Sheriffdom totalled £1,600, and from other sources he had an additional £400 a year. As the most prosperous book-producer of the period, he was netting an annual profit of no less than £10,000. His family was grown up, and his home life, notwithstanding some harsh things said about Lady Scott, was of the happiest. Unliterary, and Frenchified to a degree, Charlotte Carpenter was not the ideal helpmeet, perhaps, for a man of Scott's calibre and temperament. But that they lived comfortably together, that she made him an excellent wife, and that Scott was much attached to her, must be taken for granted, else Lockhart and the others are equivocating. There is at least one glimpse into Scott's heart which cannot savour of hypocrisy--the occasion of her death. Some of the most touching passages in the Diary belong to that event. As lover, husband, father, there is no question of the acuteness with which he felt her loss who had been his 'thirty years' companion.' Within less than six months the two biggest blows of his life fell upon Scott. Ruined, then widowed, his cup of grief was drained to the utmost. But before the fatal '26 Scott's life was an eminently ideal one. Abbotsford was all he could make it. He had reached the loftiest rung of the ladder. Long had he been the celebrity of the hour, not in Britain only, but throughout Europe itself. Probably no British author of his time was more widely known, and none, it is certain, was surrounded with so many of the material comforts. It was truly a summer fulness for Scott at Abbotsford ere the autumn winds or the biting breath of winter had begun to chill his cheek.

A glance at the Abbotsford life will bring us nearer Scott as a man--and as the most lovable of men. Treading, as one does to-day, in his very footsteps, we shall want to know how he lived there, and in what manner the pleasant days were spent. Scott's habits at Abbotsford, as at Ashestiel, were delightfully simple. In the country he was a rustic of the rustics. Formality vanished to a considerable extent when he changed his town-house for the bracing atmosphere of the Tweed. But always methodical in his literary operations, he never allowed the freer life of Abbotsford to interfere with whatever tasks he had on hand. He did not sit late into the night. As a rule, the Abbotsford day ended for Scott by ten o'clock. He rose at five, lit his own fire in the season, shaving and dressing with precision. Attired generally in his green shooting-jacket, he was at his desk by six, and hard at work till nine. About half-past nine, when the family met for breakfast, he would enter the room 'rubbing his hands for glee,' for by that time he had done enough, as he said, 'to break the neck of the day's work.' After breakfast, he allowed his guests to fill in the next couple of hours or so for themselves--fishing, shooting, driving, or riding, with a retinue of keepers and grooms at command. Meantime he was busy with his correspondence, or a chapter for Ballantyne to be dispatched by the 'Blucher,' the Edinburgh and Melrose coach, by which he himself frequently travelled to and from Abbotsford. At noon he was 'his own man,' and among his visitors, or felling trees with the workmen on the estate, laying wagers, and competing with the best of them. When the weather was wet and stormy he kept to his study for several hours during the day, that he might have a reserve fund to draw from on good days. To his visitors he appeared more the man of leisure than the indefatigable author conferring pleasure on thousands. Only a careful husbanding of the moments could have enabled him to give the greater part of afternoon and evening to his guests. 'I know,' said Cadell, the publisher, once to him, 'that you contrive to get a few hours in your own room, and that may do for the mere pen-work, but when is it that you think?' 'Oh,' said Scott, 'I lie simmering over things for an hour or so before I get up, and there's the time I am dressing to overhaul my half-sleeping, half-waking _projet de chapitre_, and when I get the paper before me it commonly runs off pretty easily. Besides, I often take a dose in the plantations, and while Tom marks out a dyke or a drain as I have directed, one's fancy may be running its ain riggs in some other world.' His maxim was never to be doing nothing, and in making the most of the opportunities, he served both himself and his friends. Several of Lockhart's reminiscences of the Abbotsford life are so delightfully vivid, conveying probably better than anything else something of the ideal charm of Scott and his circle, that the following may well be printed in full:

'I remember saying to (Sir) William Allan one morning, as the whole party mustered before the porch after breakfast, "A faithful sketch of what you at this moment see would be more interesting a hundred years hence than the grandest so-called historical picture that you will ever exhibit in Somerset House"; and my friend agreed with me so cordially that I often wondered afterwards he had not attempted to realize the suggestion.[8]

The subject ought, however, to have been treated conjointly by him (or Wilkie) and Edwin Landseer.

'It was a clear, bright September morning, with a sharpness in the air that doubled the animating influence of the sunshine, and all was in readiness for a grand coursing match on Newark Hill. The only guest who had chalked out other sport for himself was the staunchest of anglers, Mr. Rose; but he, too, was there on his _shelty_, armed with his salmon-rod and landing-net, and attended by his humorous squire, Hinves, and Charlie Purdie, a brother of Tom, in those days the most celebrated fisherman of the district. This little group of Waltonians, bound for Lord Somerville's preserve, remained lounging about to witness the start of the main cavalcade. Sir Walter, mounted on Sybil, was marshalling the order of procession with a huge hunting-whip; and among a dozen frolicsome youths and maidens, who seemed disposed to laugh at all discipline, appeared, each on horseback, each as eager as the youngest sportsman in the troop, Sir Humphry Davy, Dr. Wollaston, and the patriarch of Scottish belles-lettres, Henry Mackenzie. The Man of Feeling, however, was persuaded with some difficulty to resign his steed for the present to his faithful negro follower, and to join Lady Scott in the sociable, until we should reach the ground of our battue. Laidlaw, on a long-tailed, wiry Highlander, yclept Hoddin Grey, which carried him nimbly and stoutly, although his feet almost touched the ground as he sat, was the adjutant. But the most picturesque figure was the illustrious inventor of the safety-lamp. He had come for his favourite sport of angling, and had been practising it successfully with Rose, his travelling companion, for two or three days preceding this, but he had not prepared for coursing fields, and had left Charlie Purdie's troop for Sir Walter's on a sudden thought; and his fisherman's costume--a brown hat with flexible brim, surrounded with line upon line, and innumerable fly-hooks, jack-boots worthy of a Dutch smuggler, and a fustian surtout dabbled with the blood of salmon--made a fine contrast with the smart jackets, white-cord breeches, and well-polished jockey-boots of the less distinguished cavaliers about him. Dr. Wollaston was in black, and, with his noble, serene dignity of countenance, might have passed for a sporting archbishop. Mr. Mackenzie, at this time in the seventy-sixth year of his age, with a white hat turned up with green, green spectacles, green jacket, and long brown leathern gaiters buttoned upon his nether anatomy, wore a dog-whistle round his neck, and had all over the air of as resolute a devotee as the gay Captain of Huntlyburn. Tom Purdie and his subalterns had preceded us by a few hours with all the greyhounds that could be collected at Abbotsford, Darnick, and Melrose; but the giant Maida had remained as his master's orderly, and now gambolled about Sybil Grey, barking for mere joy, like a spaniel puppy.

'The order of march had been all settled, and the sociable was just getting under weigh, when _the Lady Anne_ broke from the line, screaming with laughter, and exclaimed, "Papa! papa! I knew you could never think of going without your pet." Scott looked round, and I rather think there was a blush as well as a smile upon his face, when he perceived a little black pig frisking about his pony, and evidently a self-elected addition to the party of the day. He tried to look stern, and cracked his whip at the creature, but was in a moment obliged to join in the general cheers. Poor piggy soon found a strap round his neck, and was dragged into the background. Scott, watching the retreat, repeated with mock pathos the first verse of an old pastoral song:

'What will I do gin my hoggie die? My joy, my pride, my hoggie! My only beast, I had nae mae, And wow! but I was vogie!'

The cheers were redoubled, and the squadron moved on. This pig had taken, nobody could tell how, a most sentimental attachment to Scott, and was constantly urging its pretension to be admitted a regular member of his _tail_, along with the greyhounds and terriers; but, indeed, I remember him suffering another summer under the same sort of pertinacity on the part of an affectionate hen. I leave the explanation for philosophers; but such were the facts. I have too much respect for the vulgarly calumniated donkey to name him in the same category of pets with the pig and the hen; but, a year or two after this time, my wife used to drive a couple of these animals in a little garden chair, and whenever her father appeared at the door of our cottage, we were sure to see Hannah More and Lady Morgan (as Anne Scott had wickedly christened them) trotting from their pasture to lay their noses over the paling, and, as Washington Irving says of the old white-haired hedger with the Parisian snuff-box, "to have a pleasant crack with the laird."'

* * * * *

The Abbotsford Hunt, another of the great annual outings--a coursing match on an extensive scale--affords material for Lockhart's best vein, especially the Hunt dinner, which for many of the neighbouring yeomen and farmers was _the_ event of the year. 'The company were seldom under thirty in number, and sometimes they exceeded forty. The feast was such as suited the occasion--a baron of beef, roasted, at the foot of the table, a salted round at the head, while tureens of hare-soup, hotchpotch, and cockieleekie extended down the centre, and such light articles as geese, turkeys, an entire sucking-pig, a singed sheep's head, and the unfailing haggis were set forth by way of side-dishes. Black-cock and moor-fowl, snipe, black and white puddings, and pyramids of pancakes, formed the second course. Ale was the favourite beverage during dinner, but there was plenty of port and sherry for those whose stomachs they suited. The quaighs of Glenlivet were filled brimful, and tossed off as if they held water. The wine decanters made a few rounds of the table, but the hints for hot punch and toddy soon became clamorous. Two or three bowls were introduced and placed under the supervision of experienced manufacturers--one of these being usually the Ettrick Shepherd--and then the business of the evening commenced in good earnest. The faces shone and glowed like those at Camacho's wedding; the chairman told his richest stories of old rural life, Lowland or Highland; Ferguson and humbler heroes fought their Peninsular battles o'er again; the stalwart Dandie Dinmonts lugged out their last winter's snow-storm, the parish scandal, perhaps, or the dexterous bargain of the Northumberland tryst. Every man was knocked down for the song that he sung best, or took most pleasure in singing. Shortreed gave "Dick o' the Cow," or "Now Liddesdale has ridden a raid"; his son Thomas shone without a rival in the "Douglas Tragedy" and the "Twa Corbies"; a weather-beaten, stiff-bearded veteran, "Captain" Ormiston, had the primitive pastoral of "Cowdenknowes" in sweet perfection. Hogg produced the "Women Folk," or "The Kye comes Hame," and, in spite of many grinding notes, contrived to make everybody delighted, whether with the fun or the pathos of his ballad. The Melrose doctor sang in spirited style some of Moore's masterpieces. A couple of retired sailors joined in "Bold Admiral Duncan," and the gallant croupier crowned the last bowl with "Ale, good ale, thou art my darling." And so it proceeded until some worthy, who had fifteen or twenty miles to ride, began to insinuate that his wife and bairns would be getting sorely anxious about the fords, and the Dumples and Hoddins were at last heard neighing at the gate, and it was voted that the hour had come for _doch an dorrach_, the stirrup-cup, a bumper all round of the unmitigated mountain dew. How they all contrived to get home in safety Heaven only knows, but I never heard of any serious accident except upon one occasion, when James Hogg made a bet at starting that he would leap over his wall-eyed pony as she stood, and broke his nose in this experiment of o'ervaulting ambition. One comely good-wife, far off among the hills, amused Sir Walter by telling him the next time he passed her homestead after one of these jolly doings, what her husband's first words were when he alighted at his own door--"Ailie, my woman, I'm ready for my bed; and oh, lass, I wish I could sleep for a towmont, for there's only ae thing in this warld worth living for, and that's the Abbotsford Hunt."'

Nor was the good old custom of the Kirn omitted at Abbotsford. Every autumn, before proceeding to Edinburgh, Scott gave a 'Harvest Home,' to which all the tenantry and their friends--as many as the barn could hold--were invited. Sir Walter and his family were present during the first part of the evening, to dispense the good things and say a few words of farewell. Old and young danced from sunset to sunrise, to the skirling of John o' Skye's pipes, or the strains of some 'Wandering Willie's' fiddle, the laird having his private joke for every old wife or 'gausie carle,' his arch compliment for the ear of every bonnie lass, and his hand and his blessing for the head of every little Eppie Daidle from Abbotstown or Broomielees. Hogmanay, and the immemorial customs of the New Year, as celebrated in Scotland--now fast dying out--obtained full respect at Abbotsford. Scott said it was uncanny, and would certainly have felt it very uncomfortable not to welcome the New Year in the midst of his family and a few cronies in the orthodox fashion. But nothing gave him such delight as the visit which he received as laird from all the children on his estate on the last morning of the year, when, as he was fond of quoting:

'The cottage bairns sing blythe and gay At the ha' door for hogmanay.'

'Yesterday (December 31, 1825) being Hogmanay,' says Basil Hall's 'Journal'--the clearest, cleverest, most picturesque sketch of the Abbotsford life from an outsider's point of view--'there was a constant succession of guizards--boys dressed up in fantastic caps, with their shirts over their jackets, and with wooden swords in their hands. These players acted a sort of scene before us, of which the hero was one Goloshin, who gets killed in a battle for love, but is presently brought to life again by a doctor of the party. As may be imagined, the taste of our host is to keep up these old ceremonies. Thus, in the morning, I observed crowds of boys and girls coming to the back-door, where each got a penny and an oaten-cake. No less than seventy pennies were thus distributed--and very happy the little bodies looked with their well-stored bags.' Guizarding--that is, masquerading, guising--has lost practically all the scope and popularity it once had in the South of Scotland. The present writer well remembers how, as a boy, he took part scores of times during Christmas and New Year weeks in the grotesque but picturesque play referred to. The words and form of the drama exist in various versions in every part of the Border Country, almost every parish possessing its own rendering. The _dramatis personæ_, three or four in number, sometimes five, arrayed in the fashion described above, proceeded from house to house, generally contenting themselves with the kitchen for an arena, where the performance was carried through in presence of the entire household. Galations (not Goloshin) is the title of the play. Some account of it will be found in Chambers' 'Popular Rhymes of Scotland' and in Maidment's scarce pamphlet on the subject (1835).

From what has been said, it is not difficult to imagine the ideal relationship existing between Scott and his dependents at Abbotsford. They were surely the happiest retainers and domestics in the world. How considerate he was in the matter of dwellings, for instance! He realized that he owed them a distinct duty in diffusing as much comfort and security into their lives as possible. They were not mere goods and chattels, but beings of flesh and blood, with human sympathies like himself. And he treated them as such. Amid the severities of winter, some of his Edinburgh notes to Laidlaw are perfect little gems of their kind: 'This dreadful weather will probably stop Mercer (the weekly carrier). It makes me shiver in the midst of superfluous comforts to think of the distress of others. I wish you to distribute £10 amongst our poorer neighbours so as may best aid them. I mean not only the actually indigent, but those who are, in our phrase, _ill off_. I am sure Dr. Scott (of Darnlee) will assist you with his advice in this labour of love. I think part of the wood-money, too, should be given among the Abbotstown folks if the storm keeps them off work, as is like.' And again: 'If you can devise any means by which hands can be beneficially employed at Abbotsford, I could turn £50 or £100 extra into service. If it made the poor and industrious people a little easier, I should have more pleasure in it than any money I ever spent in my life.' 'I think of my rooks amongst this snow-storm, also of the birds, and not a little of the poor. For benefit of the former, I hope Peggy throws out the crumbs, and a cornsheaf or two for the game, if placed where poachers could not come at them. For the poor people I wish you to distribute £5 or so among the neighbouring poor who may be in distress, and see that our own folks are tolerably well off.' 'Do not let the poor bodies want for a £5, or even a £10, more or less'--

'We'll get a blessing wi' the lave, And never miss 't.'

Socially, the bond between Scott and his servants was a characteristic object-lesson. 'He speaks to us,' said one, 'as if we were blood relations.' Like Swift, he maintained that an affectionate and faithful servant should always be considered in the character of a humble friend. Even the household domestics 'stayed on' year after year. Some of them grew grey in his service. One or two died. He had always several pensioners beside him. Abbotsford was like a little happy world of its own--the most emphatic exception to the cynic's rule. Scott was 'a hero and a gentleman' to those who knew him most intimately in the common and disillusionizing routine of domestic life.

In reading Lockhart, one feels that, aristocrat as Scott was, familiar with the nobility and literary lions of the time, he was most at home, and happiest, perhaps, in the fellowship of commoner men, such as Laidlaw, and Purdie, and John Usher, and James Hogg, who were knit to him as soul to soul. Of some of these he declared that they had become almost an integral part of his existence. We know how life was inexpressibly changed for Scott minus Tom Purdie, and to dispense with Laidlaw, when that had become absolutely necessary, was as the iron entering his soul. The most perfect pen-portraits in Lockhart are those of Purdie (the Cristal Nixon of 'Redgauntlet'), that faithful factotum and friend for whom he mourned as a brother; and 'dear Willie' Laidlaw, betwixt whom and Scott the most charming of all master and servant correspondence passed; and 'auld Pepe'--Peter Mathieson, his coachman, a wondrously devoted soul, content to set himself in the plough-stilts, and do the most menial duties, rather than quit Abbotsford at its darkest. John Swanston, too, Purdie's successor, and Dalgleish, the butler, occupy exalted niches in the temple of humble and honest worth and sweet sacrificing service for a dear master's sake who was much more than master to them all. Purdie's grave, close to Melrose Abbey, with a modest stone erected by Scott (see closing chapter), is probably the most visited of the 'graves of the common people' almost anywhere. It is seventy-six years, since, apparently in the fullest enjoyment of health and vigour, he bowed his head one evening on the table, and dropped asleep--for ever. Laidlaw lies at Contin amid the Highland solitudes. But few from Tweedside have beheld the green turf beneath which his loyal heart has been long resting, or read the simple inscription on the white marble that marks a spot so sacred to all lovers of Abbotsford and Sir Walter.

'Here lie the remains of William Laidlaw, Born at Blackhouse in Yarrow, November, 1780. Died at Contin, May 18, 1845.'

No account of the Abbotsford life can fail to take notice of the extraordinary number of visitors, who, even at that early date, flocked to the shrine of Sir Walter. The year 1825, as has been said, must be regarded as the high-water mark in the splendours of Abbotsford. From the dawn of 'Waverley,' but particularly the period immediately preceding the crash, Abbotsford was the most sought-after house in the kingdom. It was seldom without its quota of guests. 'Like a cried fair,' Scott described it on one occasion. 'A hotel widout de pay,' was Lady Scott's more matter-of-fact comparison. What a profoundly interesting and curious record a register of visitors to Abbotsford would have been! We may regret, like Lockhart, that none was ever attempted. His pages, however, supply to some extent the lack of such a list. One is amazed at its vastness and cosmopolitanism. Scott's visitors came from all parts of the compass. Even then the ubiquitous American led the way, much less reticent and more irrepressible than his modern representative. Of Continental visitors to Britain in the early part of last century, not a few, Lockhart says, crossed the Channel, chiefly as a consequence of their interest in Scott's writings, and in the hope of seeing the man himself under his own roof. As for the more intellectual of his own countrymen, Lockhart will be surprised if it can be shown that any of them crossed the Tweed without spending a day at Abbotsford.

It was Scott's ambition to assemble at his board some of the best blood of the country, and at the height of his prosperity he is said to have entertained as many persons of distinction in rank, politics, art, literature, and science, as the foremost nobleman of his age ever did in the like space of time. Lockhart computes that one out of every six of the British Peerage had dined at Scott's table. Prince Leopold, afterwards Leopold I. of the Belgians, husband of the Princess Charlotte, and the exiled Crown Prince Gustavus of Sweden, were guests at Abbotsford in 1819 and 1820 respectively. With the leading Border families Scott was on the best of terms, and the neighbouring gentry were all, more or less, included within the Abbotsford circle. Of his literary friendships some account will be found in the next chapter.

Nor was Scott above introducing his poorer relations to Abbotsford. No old acquaintance or family connections, however remote their station or style of manners, were forgotten or lost sight of. These were welcome guests, whoever might be under his roof; and it was the same with many an old classmate, or the fellow-apprentice who had faced him at the desk when he was proud to earn threepence a page in drudging pen-work. 'To dwell on nothing else,' says Lockhart, 'it was surely a beautiful perfection of real universal humanity and politeness that could enable this great and good man to blend guests so multifarious in one group, or contrive to make them all equally happy with him, with themselves, and with each other.'

Whilst, however, Abbotsford was a kind of ever open door to an unparalleled variety of guests, there was another and a much larger company constantly invading its precincts--the great army of the uninvited. Such interruptions were a constant source of worry to Scott. Lockhart counted in one day no fewer than sixteen parties begging admittance. It was impossible at that time, it was said, to pass between Melrose and Abbotsford 'without encountering some odd figure, armed with a sketch-book, evidently bent on a peep at the Great Unknown.' Some came furnished with letters of introduction from friends for whose sake Scott received them cordially, and treated them kindly. Others had no introduction at all, but, pencil and note-book in hand, took the most impertinent liberties with the place and its occupants. On returning to Abbotsford upon one occasion, Lockhart recalls how Scott and he found Mrs. Scott and her daughters doing penance under the merciless curiosity of a couple of tourists who had been with her for some hours. They were rich specimens--tall, lanky young men, both of them rigged out in new jackets and trousers of the Macgregor tartan, the one a lawyer, the other a Unitarian preacher from New England. These gentlemen, when told on their arrival that Scott was not at home, had shown such signs of impatience that the servant took it for granted they must have serious business, and asked if they would wish to speak a word with his lady. They grasped at this, and so conducted themselves in the interview that Mrs. Scott never doubted they had brought letters of introduction to her husband, and invited them accordingly to partake of her luncheon. They had been walking about the house and grounds with her and her daughters ever since that time, and appeared at the porch, when the Sheriff and his party returned to dinner, as if they had been already fairly enrolled on his visiting-list. For the moment he too was taken in; he fancied that his wife must have received and opened their credentials, and shook hands with them with courteous cordiality. But Mrs. Scott, with all her overflowing good nature, was a sharp observer; and she, before a minute had elapsed, interrupted the ecstatic compliments of the strangers by reminding them that her husband would be glad to have the letters of the friends who had been so good as to write by them. It then turned out that there were no letters to be produced, and Scott, signifying that his hour for dinner approached, added that, as he supposed they meant to walk to Melrose, he could not trespass further on their time. The two lion-hunters seemed quite unprepared for this abrupt escape. But there was about Scott, in perfection, when he chose to exert it, the power of civil repulsion. He bowed the overwhelmed originals to the door, and on reentering the parlour, found Mrs. Scott complaining very indignantly that they had gone so far as to pull out their note-book and beg an exact account, not only of his age, but of her own. Scott, already half relenting, laughed heartily at this misery, afterwards saying, 'Hang the Yahoos, Charlotte, but we should have bid them stay dinner.' 'Devil a bit,' quoth Captain Ferguson, who had come over from Huntlyburn, 'they were quite in a mistake, I could see. The one asked Madame whether she deigned to call her new house Tully Veolan or Tillietudlem, and the other, when Maida happened to lay his head against the window, exclaimed, "_Pro-di-gi-ous!_"' 'Well, well, Skipper,' was the reply, 'for a' that, the loons would hae been nane the waur o' their kail.'

Much has been written of Scott and his dogs--not the least important part of the establishment. All true poets, from Homer downwards, have loved dogs. Scott was seldom without a 'tail' at his heels. His special favourites, Camp and Maida (the Bevis of 'Woodstock'), are as well-known as himself. Both were frequently painted by Raeburn and others. When Camp died at Castle Street, Scott excused himself from a dinner-party on account of 'the death of a dear old friend'--a fine compliment to the canine tribe--a finer index to the heart of the man. Scott looked upon his dogs as companions, 'not as the brute, but the mute creation.' He loved them for their marvellously human traits, and we know how they reciprocated his affection. He was always caring for them. When the financial cloud burst, there is this touching record in the Diary: 'I was to have gone there (Abbotsford) on Saturday in joy and prosperity to receive my friends. My dogs will wait for me in vain. It is foolish, but the thought of parting with these dumb creatures has moved me more than any of the painful reflections I have put down. Poor things! I must get them kind masters! There may be yet those who, loving me, may love my dog, because it has been mine.... I feel my dogs' feet on my knees; I hear them whining and seeking me everywhere. This is nonsense, but it is what they would do could they know how things may be.' 'Be very careful of the dogs,' was his last request to Laidlaw on the eve of setting out for Italy. And when, close on a year afterwards, he returned so deadly stricken, it was his dogs fondling about him which for the most part resuscitated the sense of 'home, sweet home.'

An Abbotsford Bead-Roll

Chapter V

An Abbotsford Bead-Roll

Of Scott's friendships in the world of letters, Lockhart's account runs like a silver thread through the Life. Many of his strongest ties were on the literary side. His attitude to literature was a curious one, however. Notwithstanding the unique place which he held, and his unrivalled popularity, his successes, from an author's point of view, were accepted with singular sang-froid. Nor was he ever heard to profess a love of literature for its own sake. Carlyle's statement that, with Scott, literature was mainly a means to an end--and a material enough one at that--it is to be feared, is only too true. His fictional work was made entirely subsidiary to the other and more tangible creations of his imagination and ambition--Abbotsford, and the race of Abbotsford Scotts. Literary reputation, he was fond of saying, while a bright enough feather in one's cap, is never a substantial covering for the head. 'He never considered,' says Lockhart, 'any amount of literary distinction as entitled to be spoken of in the same breath with mastery in the higher departments of practical life--least of all, with the glory of a first-rate captain. To have done things worthy to be written was a dignity to which no man made any approach who had only written things worthy to be read.' Of his own work he seldom spoke, except to his intimates. The making of a book he held to be no great matter, and to the glory which might be won thereby 'one is apt,' he said, 'to ascribe an undue degree of consequence.' Recounting his introduction to the Iron Duke, he told Ballantyne that he had felt awed and abashed as never before in the presence of the man whom he regarded not only as the greatest soldier, but also as the greatest statesman of the age. Ballantyne suggested that, on his part, the Duke had seen before him a great poet, and the greatest novelist of the age. Scott smiled. 'What,' said he, 'would the Duke of Wellington think of a few _bits of novels_, which perhaps he had never read, and for which the strong probability is that he would not care a sixpence if he had?' 'I have more than once,' said Laidlaw, 'heard Sir Walter assert that, had his father left him an estate of £500 or £600 a year, he would have spent his time in miscellaneous reading, not writing.' This, to a certain extent, might have been the case. It is hardly likely, however. Had he not tasted blood in the success of the 'Minstrelsy,' and the magnificent reception given to the verse romances, matters might have been different. But, so singularly successful at the first venture, it was not possible for Scott to restrain himself from further achievements. Writing was as natural to him as breathing. From boyhood he had a penchant for letters. And had he not been 'making himself' right on from Sandyknowe and Kelso to Lasswade and Ashestiel? The fruit came late, but what a crop! Still, it was nothing for him, in one aspect of it, to be the uncrowned king of his country's literature. So far as it made him Scott of Abbotsford, that was a much more real matter.

We have seen how Abbotsford, in its palmy days, was the most popular guest-house in the kingdom. To the intellectual lions of the time its doors offered a specially gracious welcome. Never did gatherings glisten with a more resplendent genius or such genuine good-fellowship. An Abbotsford 'noctes' was worth dozens at Ambrose's, as Lockhart and the contemporary biographies evidence.

To the present bead-roll, which is based almost entirely on the Biography, Thomas Faed's picture, 'Scott and his Literary Friends,'[9] offers a good index. The piece is purely imaginary, for the persons represented were never all at Abbotsford at the same time, two of them, indeed--Crabbe and Campbell--never having seen it. Scott is represented as reading the manuscript of a new novel; on his right, Henry Mackenzie, his oldest literary friend, occupies the place of honour. Hogg, the intentest figure in the group, sits at Scott's feet to the left. Kit North's leonine head and shoulders lean across the back of a chair. Next come Crabbe and Lockhart--at the centre of the table--together with Wordsworth and Francis (afterwards Lord) Jeffrey. Sir Adam Ferguson, a bosom cronie, cross-legged, his military boots recalling Peninsular days and the reading of the 'Lady of the Lake' to his comrades in the lines of Torres Vedras, immediately faces Scott. Behind him, Moore and Campbell sit opposite each other. At the end of the table are the printers Constable and Ballantyne, and at theirback, standing, the painters Allan and Wilkie. Thomas Thomson, Deputy Clerk Register, is on the extreme left, and Sir Humphry Davy is examining a sword-hilt. A second and smaller copy of Faed's picture (in the Woodlands Park collection, Bradford) substitutes Lord Byron and Washington Irving for Constable and Ballantyne. Allan, Davy, and Thomson are also omitted. The artist might well have introduced Scott's lady literary friends, Joanna Baillie and Maria Edgeworth, and it is a pity that Laidlaw has been left out.

[Illustration: SANDYKNOWE TOWER]

'Then rise those crags, that mountain tower Which charm'd my fancy's wakening hour; It was a barren scene and wild, Where naked cliffs were rudely piled; But ever and anon between Lay velvet tufts of loveliest green; And well the lonely infant knew Recesses where the wall-flower grew, And honeysuckle loved to crawl Up the low crag and ruin'd wall. And still I thought that shatter'd tower The mightiest work of human power; And marvell'd as the aged bind With some strange tale bewitch'd my mind, Of forayers who, with headlong force, Down from that strength had spurr'd their horse, Their southern rapine to renew Far in the distant Cheviots blue. Methought grim features seam'd with scars Glared through the window's rusty bars.'

Such a picture suggests instinctively the table-talk of Abbotsford. One cannot help regretting the absence of a volume on the subject, apart from Lockhart. What would 'Bozzy' not have given for the opportunity! Lockhart, naturally, scorned to 'Boswellize' his hero. Notwithstanding the sterling excellence of the Biography, with its reproductions of many rare conversations and chronicling of scores of delightful little incidents, some of the finest things that fell from Scott's lips and from his guests must have perished irretrievably. Laidlaw, it is said, was urged to play the rôle of Boswell, but declined, yet few could have done it better. He was part of the establishment, and hardly any company was considered complete without his quiet and sagacious presence. Scott once remarked when they were alone, after a specially brilliant night, that many a one, meeting such people and hearing such talk, might make excellent 'copy' out of it in a very lively and entertaining book, which would be sure to be read with interest. Hence the value of the 'Abbotsford Notanda'--Laidlaw's correspondence and other papers, collected and edited by Robert Carruthers--with no thought, possibly, on Laidlaw's part, of their ever being printed. It is a perfect little gem of its kind--one of the sweetest pictures of the Abbotsford life and of that winsomely ideal relationship which existed between Sir Walter and his steward. No student of Scott can overlook it. As the writer, be it noted also, of one of the most touching and characteristic Scottish ballads, 'Lucy's Flittin',' and an enthusiastic collaborateur with Scott in the 'Minstrelsy,' Laidlaw will always merit the most honourable remembrance.

It is interesting to recall that Scott's first really distinguished visitor from the arena of letters was from the other side of the Atlantic--Washington Irving, an American of the Americans. Irving's visit, doubtless, helped to modify Scott's estimate of his countrymen. He did not at first care for many of his Yankee admirers, but by-and-by not a few of them became friends for life. Campbell introduced Irving to Scott. 'When you see Tom Campbell,' wrote Scott to Richardson of Kirklands, 'tell him, with my best love, that I have to thank him for making me known to Mr. Washington Irving, who is one of the best and pleasantest acquaintances I have made this many a day.' Irving was the guest--if we except Basil Hall at a later period--who made the most of his brief stay at Abbotsford. He was there in August, 1817, whilst the building operations were in progress. Some parts of his famous and classical essay are too good and too graphic not to be quoted at length.

'While the postilion was on his errand, I had time to survey the mansion. It stood some short distance below the road, on the side of a hill sweeping down to the Tweed; and was as yet but a snug gentleman's cottage, with something rural and picturesque in its appearance. The whole front was overrun with evergreens, and immediately above the portal was a great pair of elk horns, branching out from beneath the foliage, and giving the cottage the look of a hunting-lodge. The huge baronial pile, to which this modest mansion in a manner gave birth, was just emerging into existence; part of the walls, surrounded by scaffolding, already had risen to the height of the cottage, and the courtyard in front was encumbered by masses of hewn stone.

'The noise of the chaise had disturbed the quiet of the establishment. Out sallied the warder of the castle, a black greyhound, and, leaping on one of the blocks of stone, began a furious barking. His alarm brought out the whole garrison of dogs, all open-mouthed and vociferous. In a little while the "lord of the castle" himself made his appearance. I knew him at once by the descriptions I had read and heard, and the likenesses that had been published of him. He was tall, and of a large and powerful frame. His dress was simple, and almost rustic. An old green shooting-coat, with a dog-whistle at the buttonhole, brown linen pantaloons, stout shoes that tied at the ankles, and a white hat that had evidently seen service. He came limping up the gravel walk, aiding himself by a stout walking-staff, but moving rapidly and with vigour. By his side jogged along a large iron-grey staghound of most grave demeanour, who took no part in the clamour of the canine rabble, but seemed to consider himself bound, for the dignity of the house, to give me a courteous reception.

'Before Scott had reached the gate he called out in a hearty tone, welcoming me to Abbotsford, and asking news of Campbell. Arrived at the door of the chaise, he grasped me warmly by the hand: "Come, drive down, drive down to the house," said he; "you're just in time for breakfast, and afterwards ye shall see all the wonders of the Abbey."

'I would have excused myself, on the plea of having already made my breakfast. "Hout, man," cried he, "a ride in the morning in the keen air of the Scotch hills is warrant enough for a second breakfast."

'I was accordingly whirled to the portal of the cottage, and in a few moments found myself seated at the breakfast-table. There was no one present but the family, which consisted of Mrs. Scott, her eldest daughter Sophia, then a fine girl about seventeen, Miss Anne Scott, two or three years younger, Walter, a well-grown stripling, and Charles, a lively boy, eleven or twelve years of age. I soon felt myself quite at home, and my heart in a glow with the cordial welcome I experienced. I had thought to make a mere morning visit, but found I was not to be let off so lightly. "You must not think our neighbourhood is to be read in a morning, like a newspaper," said Scott. "It takes several days of study for an observant traveller that has a relish for auld-world trumpery. After breakfast you shall make your visit to Melrose Abbey. When you come back, I'll take you out on a ramble about the neighbourhood. To-morrow we will take a look at the Yarrow, and the next day we will drive over to Dryburgh Abbey, which is a fine old ruin well worth your seeing." In a word, before Scott had got through with his plan, I found myself committed for a visit of several days, and it seemed as if a little realm of romance was suddenly opened before me....

'After my return from Melrose Abbey, Scott proposed a ramble to show me something of the surrounding country. As we sallied forth, every dog in the establishment turned out to attend us. There was the old staghound Maida, a noble animal, and a great favourite of Scott's; and Hamlet, the black greyhound, a wild, thoughtless youngster, not yet arrived to years of discretion; and Finette, a beautiful setter, with soft silken hair, long pendent ears, and a mild eye--the parlour favourite. When in front of the house, we were joined by a superannuated greyhound, who came from the kitchen wagging his tail, and was cheered by Scott as an old friend and comrade.

'In our walks, Scott would frequently pause in conversation to notice his dogs and speak to them, as if rational companions; and, indeed, there appears to be a vast deal of rationality in these faithful attendants on man, derived from their close intimacy with him. Maida deported himself with a gravity becoming his age and size, and seemed to consider himself called upon to preserve a great degree of dignity and decorum in our society. As he jogged along a little distance ahead of us, the young dogs would gambol about him, leap on his neck, worry at his ears, and endeavour to tease him into a frolic. The old dog would keep on for a long time with imperturbable solemnity, now and then seeming to rebuke the wantonness of his young companions. At length he would make a sudden turn, seize one of them, and tumble him in the dust; then, giving a glance at us, as much as to say, "You see, gentlemen, I can't help giving way to this nonsense," would resume his gravity and jog on as before.

'Scott amused himself with these peculiarities. "I make no doubt," said he, "when Maida is alone with these young dogs he throws gravity aside, and plays the boy as much as any of them; but he is ashamed to do so in our company, and seems to say, 'Ha' done with your nonsense, youngsters; what will the laird and that other gentleman think of me if I give way to such foolery?'" ...

'We rambled on among scenes which had been familiar in Scottish song, and rendered classic by the pastoral muse, long before Scott had thrown the rich mantle of his poetry over them. What a thrill of pleasure did I feel when first I saw the broom-covered tops of the Cowdenknowes peeping above the grey hills of the Tweed! and what touching associations were called up by the sight of Ettrick Vale, Gala Water, and the Braes of Yarrow! Every turn brought to mind some household air--some almost forgotten song of the nursery, by which I had been lulled to sleep in my childhood; and with them the looks and voices of those who had sung them, and who were now no more. It is these melodies, chanted in our ears in the days of infancy, and connected with the memory of those we have loved, and who have passed away, that clothe Scottish landscape with such tender associations....

'Our ramble took us on the hills, commanding an extensive prospect. "Now," said Scott, "I have brought you, like the pilgrim in the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' to the top of the Delectable Mountains, that I may show you all the goodly regions hereabouts. Yonder is Lammermoor and Smailholm; and there you have Galashiels, and Torwoodlee, and Gala Water; and in that direction you see Teviotdale, and the Braes of Yarrow, and Ettrick stream, winding along, like a silver thread, to throw itself into the Tweed."

'He went on thus to call over names celebrated in Scottish song, and most of which had recently received a romantic interest from his own pen. In fact, I saw a great part of the Border Country spread out before me, and could trace the scenes of those poems and romances which had, in a manner, bewitched the world. I gazed about me for a time with mute surprise, I may almost say with disappointment. I beheld a mere succession of grey waving hills, line beyond line, as far as my eye could reach, monotonous in their aspect, and so destitute of trees that one could almost see a stout fly walking along their profile; and the farfamed Tweed appeared a naked stream, flowing between bare hills, without a tree or thicket on its banks; and yet, such had been the magic web of poetry and romance thrown over the whole, that it had a greater charm for me than the richest scenery I beheld in England.

'I could not help giving utterance to my thoughts. Scott hummed for a moment to himself, and looked grave; he had no idea of having his muse complimented at the expense of his native hills. "It may be partiality," said he, at length; "but to my eye, these grey hills and all this wild Border Country have beauties peculiar to themselves. I like the very nakedness of the land; it has something 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_!" The last words were said with an honest warmth, accompanied with a thump on the ground with his staff, by way of emphasis, that showed his heart was in his speech.'

Following Irving's visit came Lady Byron--for a day only--spent on the banks of the Yarrow. Lord Byron never was at Abbotsford. Scott and he met at John Murray's London house and elsewhere, and they frequently corresponded. Like the old heroes in Homer, they exchanged gifts. Scott gave Byron a beautiful dagger mounted with gold, which had been the property of the redoubted Elfi Bey, and some time after, Byron sent to Abbotsford a large sepulchral vase of silver, filled with dead men's bones from the Piræus, and suitably inscribed. A letter from the noble poet accompanying the gift was filched from the vase, much to Scott's annoyance.

That same year, 1817, Sir David Wilkie painted his incongruous 'Abbotsford Family' (in the Scottish National Gallery), wherein Scott figures as a miller and the rest of the group as peasants. Sir Adam Ferguson, who commissioned the picture, was depicted as a poacher. Wilkie's impressions of Abbotsford, in a letter to his sister, reveal the pleasant nature of his visit. 'I have never been in any place,' he says, 'where there is so much real good humour and merriment. There is nothing but amusement from morning till night, and if Scott is really writing "Rob Roy," it must be while we are sleeping.' (That was practically so.) 'He is either out planting trees, superintending the masons, or erecting fences, the whole of the day. He goes frequently out hunting, and this morning there was a whole cavalcade of us out hunting hard.'

Lockhart at Abbotsford, which he first saw in 1818, merits a chapter to himself. Sir Humphry Davy and Dr. Wollaston, natural philosophers both, Henry Mackenzie, and William Stewart Rose, translator of Ariosto, to whom Scott dedicated the first canto of 'Marmion,' were at Abbotsford in 1820. Of their doings (unliterary) some account will be found in the preceding pages. The year 1823, when Miss Edgeworth visited Abbotsford, Lockhart believes to be the happiest in Scott's life. Probably no more welcome guest crossed his threshold. Scott and she corresponded occasionally. As a matter of fact, it was Maria's delightful delineations of Irish life and character which inspired him to try his own hand at fiction. Long had he hoped to meet her. At last the novelist of 'Castle Rackrent' and 'The Absentee' was in Scotland, with Abbotsford as her objective. Barely had she and her sister reached Edinburgh before a note came from Scott begging them to venture to his house that very night, late as it was, and just as they were, to hear the Laird of Staffa and some of his clansmen singing Highland boat-songs. 'Ten o'clock struck,' writes Miss Edgeworth, 'as I read this note. We were tired; we were not fit to be seen; but I sent for a hackney, and just as we were, without dressing, we went. As the coach stopped, we saw the hall lighted, and the moment the door opened, heard the joyous sounds of loud singing. Three servants: 'The Miss Edgeworths!' sounded from hall to landing-place; and as I paused for a moment in the ante-room, I heard the first sound of Walter Scott's voice--'The Miss Edgeworths?--come!' Thus the eventful meeting took place, and the friendship of two lives long intimate, so far as correspondence can be said to create intimacy, seems to have grown to its full height, literally at their first hand-clasp. Here is Scott's opinion of the 'little Irish lioness,' as he called her: 'It is scarcely possible to say more of this remarkable person than that she not only completely answered, but exceeded the expectations which I had formed. I am particularly pleased with the naïveté and good-humoured ardour of mind which she unites with such formidable powers of acute observation.' 'Never did I see a brighter day at Abbotsford,' says Lockhart, 'than that on which Miss Edgeworth first arrived there; never can I forget her look and accent when she was received by Scott at his archway, and exclaimed: 'Everything about you is exactly what one ought to have had wit enough to dream!' The visit was a series of fêtes. The weather, on its good behaviour, allowed of an out-of-doors life to the full. One day they picnicked at Cauldshiels. Another, the whole party feasted by the Rhymer's Waterfall in the Glen, and the stone on which Maria sat was ever afterwards called 'Edgeworth's stone.' A third day they drove to the Upper Yarrow, and about sunset the baskets were unpacked beside St. Mary's Chapel of the Lowes, or all that remains of it, high up on the hillside, overlooking the shining waters of the Loch. The young ladies trimmed their hair with heather and blue-bells, and some of the party sang, and Scott recited, until it was time to go home beneath the softest of harvest moons. So passed that halcyon fortnight, and Miss Edgeworth never saw Abbotsford again. But exactly two years later, Mr. Lovell Edgeworth threw open the doors of his classical mansion at Edgeworthstown to the Wizard of the North, and Maria, with her brother and sister, accompanied him to Killarney amid a succession of festive gaiety wherever they halted.

[Illustration: CAULDSHIELS LOCH]

'The westland wind is hush and still, The lake lies sleeping at my feet.'

John Leycester Adolphus, author of the 'Letters to Heber,' unmasking the 'Great Unknown' in proof that 'Marmion' and 'Waverley' were from the same pen, was a frequent guest from 1823 onwards. His 'Memoranda, like Irving's and Hall's, discloses interesting little sidelights of Scott as seen by an outsider. There is nothing better than his exquisite description of Scott's laugh: '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 on telling or descanting, while his lungs did 'crow like chanticleer,' his syllables, in the struggle, growing more emphatic, his accent more strongly Scotch, and his voice plaintive with excess of merriment.'

Tom Moore came in 1825--the culminating year. Scott and he had only once met, in public, some twenty years earlier. Abbotsford, curiously, but luckily for Moore, was absolutely guestless during his visit. Scott enjoyed having the author of 'Lalla Rookh' all to himself, and sacrificed his mornings, usually sacred to work, in honour of the occasion. The liking between the two men was immediate, but none the less profound. To Moore--and tired, doubtless, of the long mask-wearing--Scott confessed the Novels' authorship, the first avowal outside his own circle. On the third day Moore's Diary notes that Scott, 'laying his hand cordially on my breast, said: "Now, my dear Moore, we are friends for life."' Together they called on Laidlaw at Kaeside, the Fergusons at Huntlyburn, saw Melrose, and in the evening Scott 'collected his neighbours to enjoy his guest, with the wit and humour of Sir Adam Ferguson, his picturesque stories of the Peninsula, and his inimitable singing of the old Jacobite ditties.' 'I parted from Scott,' says Moore, 'with the feeling that all the world might admire him in his works, but that those only could learn to love him as he deserved who had seen him at Abbotsford.' And there is no passage in Moore's memoirs more evidently sincere than that in which he expresses (only a few months later) his 'deep and painful sympathy' in the news of Scott's financial misfortune: 'For poor devils like me (who have never known better) to fag and to be pinched for means, becomes, as it were, a second nature; but for Scott, whom I saw living in such luxurious comfort, and dispensing such cordial hospitality, to be thus suddenly reduced to the necessity of working his way is too bad, and I grieve for him from my heart.'

Arthur Henry Hallam, of 'In Memoriam,' cut off in the very bloom of life and genius, accompanied by his father, the historian, was at Abbotsford in 1829. His beautiful verses, 'written after visiting Melrose Abbey in company of Scott,' have been often reprinted:

'I lived an hour in fair Melrose; It was not when the "pale moonlight" Its magnifying charm bestows; Yet deem I that I "viewed it right." The wind-swept shadows fast careered, Like living things that joyed or feared, Adown the sunny Eildon Hill, And the sweet winding Tweed the distance crownèd well.

'I inly laughed to see that scene Wear such a countenance of youth, Though many an age those hills were green, And yonder river glided smooth, Ere in these now disjointed walls The Mother Church held festivals, And full-voiced anthemings the while Swelled from the choir, and lingered down the echoing aisle.

'I coveted that Abbey's doom; For if, I thought, the early flowers Of our affection may not bloom, Like those green hills, through countless hours, Grant me at least a tardy waning, Some pleasure still in age's paining; Though lines and forms must fade away, Still may old Beauty share the empire of Decay!

'But looking toward the grassy mound Where calm the Douglas chieftains lie Who, living, quiet never found, I straightway learnt a lesson high: For there an old man sat serene, And well I knew that thoughtful mien Of him whose early lyre had thrown Over these mouldering walls the magic of its tone.

'Then ceased I from my envying state, And knew that aweless intellect Hath power upon the ways of fate, And works through time and space uncheck'd. That minstrel of old chivalry In the cold grave must come to be, But his transmitted thoughts have part In the collective mind, and never shall depart.

'It was a comfort, too, to see Those dogs that from him ne'er would rove, And always eyed him reverently, With glances of depending love. They know not of that eminence Which marks him to my reasoning sense; They know but that he is a man, And still to them is kind, and glads them all he can.'

That same summer Mrs. Hemans, visiting the Hamiltons at Chiefswood, was daily at Abbotsford. Lockhart has no mention of the occasion. See, however, the references in the 'Journal.' As with Miss Edgeworth, Scott piloted the 'poet of womanhood' to Yarrow, and over into Ettrick, and in the Rhymer's Glen he related the incident which gave origin to her inspiring 'Rhine Song.'[10] At parting with her, he said, 'There are some whom we meet and should like ever after to claim as kith and kin; and you are one of these.' Susan Ferrier, authoress of 'Marriage,' 'Inheritance,' etc., novels of the older school (in need of modern revival), visited Scott in 1829, and again in 1831. 'This gifted personage,' says the 'Journal,'' besides having great talents, has conversation the least _exigeante_ of any author--female, at least--whom I have ever seen among the long list I have encountered--simple, full of humour, and exceedingly ready at repartee; and all this without the least affectation of the blue-stocking.'[11]

[Illustration: THE RHYMER'S GLEN]

'Come now, O Queen of Faery, With the first love-steps of spring; The larch holds out its tassels, The birks their splendour fling.

* * * * *

Thy Rhymer's Glen is yearning, Methinks thou tarriest long, While breeze, and bird, and burnie Sing one expectant song.'

Wordsworth was the last of the giants to visit Scott at Abbotsford. They met for the first time at Lasswade Cottage as far back as 1803, and at least on four other occasions, both in Scotland and England. But how altered the circumstances of their present meeting! Scott, a confirmed invalid, was on the eve of saying farewell to Abbotsford practically for ever. Wordsworth arrived on September 21, 1831, and Scott was to leave on the 23rd. On the 22nd--the last day at home, and the last one of real enjoyment--the two friends spent the morning together in a visit to Newark. 'It was a day to deepen both in Scott and Wordsworth whatever of sympathy either of them had with the very different genius of the other'; and that it had this result in Wordsworth's case we know from the very beautiful poem 'Yarrow Revisited,' and the Sonnet ('A trouble, not of clouds, or weeping rain'), which the occasion also produced. As long as English poetry lives, so will the memory of that last day of the Last Minstrel at Newark:

'Grave thoughts ruled wide on that sweet day, Their dignity installing In gentle bosoms, while sere leaves Were on the bough, or falling;

But breezes played, and sunshine gleamed-- The Forest to embolden; Redden'd the fiery hues, and shot Transparence through the golden.

* * * * *

'For thee, O Scott! compelled to change Green Eildon Hill and Cheviot For warm Vesuvio's vine-clad slopes; And leave thy Tweed and Teviot For mild Sorrento's breezy waves; May classic Fancy, linking With native Fancy her fresh aid, Preserve thy heart from sinking!

'O! while they minister to thee, Each vying with the other, May Health return to mellow Age With Strength, her venturous brother; And Tiber, and each brook and rill Renowned in song and story, With unimagined beauty shine, Nor lose one ray of glory!

'For Thou, upon a hundred streams, By tales of love and sorrow, Of faithful love, undaunted truth, Hast shed the power of Yarrow! And streams unknown, hills yet unseen, Wherever they invite Thee, At parent Nature's grateful call, With gladness must requite Thee.'

Sitting in the Library that same night, the talk turned on Smollett and Fielding, both driven abroad, as Scott recalled, like himself, through declining health, and we hardly wonder if there was the feeling present to his mind that, like them, he, too, might not return.

Mention of Yarrow instinctively calls up the name of James Hogg, a true friend of Scott, notwithstanding Lockhart's farrago. Hogg and Lockhart were constantly misunderstanding one another. In one sense, they were wide as the poles asunder--Lockhart aristocratic to the finger-tips, Hogg excessively plebeian. But that should have made no difference. It made no difference with Scott. Lockhart undoubtedly tried to help Hogg a good deal, which Hogg resented more than once; hence Lockhart's strictures. But for all that, the Shepherd is a picturesque and lovable figure, even in the pages of Lockhart. Hogg's alleged 'insult' to the dust of Scott--the 'Scorpion's' most stinging charge against him--amounts, after all, to very little. That Hogg was never further from insult in the writing of his little brochure[12] seems perfectly clear. There are, to be sure, some things that had been better left unsaid. But the book is, nevertheless, one of the brightest and most natural pen-portraits of Scott that we have. Hogg was a regular visitor at Abbotsford. Laidlaw denies that he ever, even in his cups, descended to 'Wattie' and 'Charlotte.' Scott smiled at Hogg's inordinate vanity, and Hogg had one or two stupid estrangements with him. But Sir Walter's attachment to his more humble compeer was never lessened in the least until the day when the two friends parted for ever at the Gordon Arms in Yarrow--the dearest vale on earth to them both.[13]

The Wizard'S Farewell To Abbotsford

Chapter VI

The Wizard'S Farewell To Abbotsford

On March 5, 1817, at Castle Street, in the midst of a merry dinner-party, Scott was seized with a sudden illness--the first since his childhood. The disorder was cramp in the stomach of an unusually severe type. From Gillies's 'Recollections' we learn that, although disabled and compelled to retire to his room, he was unwilling that the festivity of the evening should be broken up, and actually sent a message to Mrs. Siddons that nothing would do him so much good as to hear her sing. He would, he said, be all right in the morning. But the illness lasted a week, and was more serious than had been anticipated. It was, indeed, the first of a series of such paroxysms, which for years visited him periodically, and from which he never absolutely recovered. Probably the best index to his feelings at this period is found in what may be described as the most pathetically poetic verses he ever penned. He was at Abbotsford, battling with depression and melancholy, and seldom without a sense of pain. On the bare height above Cauldshiels, with its then magnificent prospect of Melrose and the open valley of the Tweed, hemmed in on the west by the Selkirkshire uplands, he wrote, on one lovely autumn evening, these exquisite lines--exquisite because expressing the deepest passion of his soul at the moment:

'The sun upon the Weirdlaw Hill, In Ettrick's vale, is sinking sweet; The westland wind is hush and still-- The lake lies sleeping at my feet. Yet not the landscape to mine eye Bears those bright hues that once it bore, Though evening with her richest dye Flames o'er the hills of Ettrick's shore.

'With listless look along the plain I see Tweed's silver current glide, And coldly mark the holy fane Of Melrose rise in ruin'd pride. The quiet lake, the balmy air, The hill, the stream, the tower, the tree-- Are they still such as once they were, Or is the dreary change in me?

'Alas! the warp'd and broken board, How can it bear the painter's dye! The harp of strain'd and tuneless chord, How to the minstrel's skill reply!

To aching eyes each landscape lowers, To feverish pulse each gale blows chill, And Araby's or Eden's bowers Were barren as this moorland hill.'

[Illustration: MELROSE ABBEY FROM THE MEADOWS]

'Merrily swim we, the moon shines bright; There's a golden gleam on the distant height; There's a silver shower on the alders dank And the drooping willows that wave on the bank. I see the Abbey, both turret and tower-- It is all astir for the vesper hour; The monks for the chapel are leaving each cell, But where's Father Philip, should toll the bell?'

The 'change' in himself was visible enough. He was worn almost to a skeleton, and sat on his horse slanting, as if unable to hold himself upright. His dress was threadbare and disordered, his countenance meagre, haggard, and of the deadliest olive brown. Afterwards, a single season blanched his hair snow-white. The last days of the Last Minstrel seemed to have come. Lockhart parted on one occasion with 'dark prognostications' that it was for the last time. Scott, too, despaired of himself. Calling his children about his bed, he took leave of them with solemn tenderness, adding, 'For myself, my dears, I am unconscious of ever having done any man an injury, or omitted any fair opportunity of doing any man a benefit. I well know that no human life can appear otherwise than weak and filthy in the eyes of God; but I rely on the merits and intercession of our Redeemer.' 'God bless you!' he again said to each of them, laying his hand on their heads. 'Live so that you may all hope to meet each other in a better place hereafter.' Presently he fell into a profound slumber, and on awaking, the crisis was seen to be over. A gradual re-establishment of health followed. Of the 'Bride of Lammermoor,' and 'Ivanhoe,' written under the most adverse circumstances, whilst he still suffered acutely, one is surprised to find both romances in the very front rank of his creations. He was under opiates, more or less, when the 'Bride' was on the stocks, dictating nearly the whole of it to Laidlaw and John Ballantyne. It is a most curious fact psychologically, for of its characters, scenes, humour, and all that connected him with the authorship of the story, he recollected nothing. A more extraordinary incident literature has not known.[14] But work which cut him short in the end was the saving of his life in this instance. The mind was a constant conquest over the weaker physical framework. 'It is my conviction,' he declared to Gillies, 'that by a little more hearty application you might forget, and lose altogether, the irritable sensations of an invalid, and I don't, in this instance, preach what I have not endeavoured to practise. Be assured that if pain could have prevented my application to literary labour, not a page of "Ivanhoe" would have been written; for, from beginning to end of that production, which has been a good deal praised, I was never free from suffering. It might have borne a motto somewhat analogous to the inscription which Frederick the Great's predecessor used to affix to his attempts at portrait-painting when he had the gout: "Fredericus I., _in tormentis_ pinxit." Now, if I had given way to mere feelings and ceased to work, it is a question whether the disorder might not have taken deeper root, and become incurable. The best way is, if possible, to triumph over disease by setting it at defiance, somewhat on the same principle as one avoids being stung by boldly grasping a nettle.'

By 1820 he was enjoying tolerably good health, with no cramp recurrences for a time. But in 1823, when busy with 'Peveril,' an arresting hand laid itself upon Scott in the shape of a slight stroke of apoplexy. As a matter of fact, and as Lockhart suspected, this was only one of several such shocks which he had been carefully concealing. '"Peveril" will, I fear, smell of the apoplexy,' he afterwards admitted. Hence, no doubt, 'Peveril's' dulness'. He rallied, notwithstanding, and up to Christmas, 1825, his health was excellent. But from 1826--the year of his crowning sorrows--the record of Scott's life reads like a long martyrdom. Rheumatism, hallucinations, strange memory lapses, began to steal from Scott all the little joy that was left. On February 5, 1830, the blow fell which, like Damocles' sword, had been hanging over him for years. It fell with unmistakable meaning. It was his first real paralytic seizure--long dreaded, long expected. On his return from the Parliament House, in his usual health, he found an old friend waiting to consult him about a memoir of her father which he had promised to revise for the press. Whilst examining the MS. the stroke came, a slight contortion passing over his features. In a minute or two he rose, staggered to the drawing-room, where were Miss Anne Scott and Miss Lockhart, but fell to the floor speechless and insensible. A surgeon quickly at hand cupped him, after the old-fashioned treatment for such complaints. By night, speech had returned, and in a day or two he had resumed his Court duties. But he was never the same again. People in general did not remark any difference. Doctors and patient, however, knew well enough that it was the beginning of the end. Both his parents had succumbed to paralysis, and 'considering the terrible violence and agitation and exertion,' says Lockhart, 'to which he had been subjected during the four preceding years, the only wonder is that this blow was deferred so long; there can be none that it was soon followed by others.'

Still he plodded on. Even with half a brain he should not 'lag superfluous on the stage.' And heedless of innumerable warnings, he was at his desk day after day, writing and dictating by turns. He now resigned his Clerkship, on an £800 a year allowance, surrendered his Edinburgh house, and settled permanently at Abbotsford, lonely and desolate, an old man before his time, but indomitable to the core. There he commenced 'Count Robert of Paris,' the penultimate of his published tales. But the mighty machinery of his mind moved not as of yore. Like Samson, his strength had departed. He was now as other men. By November he suffered from a second stroke, and wrote in his Diary for January: 'Very indifferent, with more awkward feelings than I can well bear up against. My voice sunk, and my head strangely confused.' But a worse shock was coming. Cadell pronounced the 'Count' a complete failure. Yet he struggled to recast it. To crown all, he went to the 'hustings'--a hardened anti-Reform Billite. At Jedburgh, as Lockhart tells, the crowd saluted him with blasphemous shouts of 'Burke Sir Walter!'[15]--the unkindest cut of all, which haunted him to the end. By July he had begun 'Castle Dangerous,' and in the middle of the month, accompanied by Lockhart, he started for Lanarkshire to refresh his memory for the setting of his new story. They ascended the Tweed by Yair, Ashestiel, Elibank, Innerleithen, Peebles, Biggar, places all dear to his heart and celebrated in his writings. Crowds turned out to welcome him. Everywhere he was received with acclamation and the deepest respect. At Douglas the travellers inspected the old Castle, the ruin of St. Bride's, with the monuments and tombs of the 'most heroic and powerful family in Scottish annals.' At Milton-Lockhart, the seat of Lockhart's brother, Scott met his old friend Borthwickbrae. Both were paralytics. Each saw his own case mirrored in the other. They had a joyous--too joyous a meeting, with startling results to the older invalid. On returning to Cleghorn, another shock laid him low, and he was despaired of. When the news reached Scott, he was bent on getting home at once. 'No, William,' he said to his host, urging him to remain, 'this is a sad warning; I must home to work while it is called to-day, for the night cometh when no man can work. I put that text many years ago on my dial-stone, but it often preached in vain.'

[Illustration: JEDBURGH ABBEY]

'The sacred tapers' lights are gone, Gray moss has clad the altar stone, The holy image is o'erthrown, The bell has ceased to toll; The long ribb'd aisles are burst and shrunk, The holy shrines to ruin sunk; Departed is the pious monk-- God's blessing on his soul!'

Returned, he finished 'Count Robert' and 'Castle Dangerous.' Both novels were really the fruit of a paralytic brain. The 'Magnum Opus,'[16] too, proposed by Cadell (a huge success), engaged much of his attention. But Sir Walter's work was done. At length, doctors' treatment doing him little good, from his constant determination to be at his desk, it was decided, not without difficulty, that Scott should spend the winter of 1831 in Italy, where his son Charles was attached to the British Legation at Naples. On September 22 all was in readiness. A round of touching adieus, one or two gatherings of old friends, the final instructions to Laidlaw, and Scott quitted Abbotsford practically for ever. He returned, to be sure, but more a dead man than a living one. Of his journey to London (meeting again with Moore, Milman, Croker, Wilkie, and Washington Irving) there is no need to write, nor of the Italian tour--Malta, Naples, Rome,[17] Florence, Venice--for which, no matter the brilliance of their associations, he exhibited but a mere passive interest. His heart was in the homeland. _Its_ voices had the strongest appeal for him; an exile song rang in his ears:

'Hame! hame! hame! O hame fain wad I be! O hame! hame! hame! to my ain countrie.'

Not a little of the scenery reminded him of Scotland--Edinburgh, the Eildons, Cauldshiels, Abbotsford. A peasant's lilt recalled the melodies of the Border, and pathetically he repeated some lines from 'Jock o' Hazeldean' and his boyhood's 'Hardyknute.' When, on March 22, he heard of Goethe's death, whom he hoped to visit, he exclaimed: 'Alas for Goethe! but he at least died at home; let us to Abbotsford!' Then, by-and-by, the return journey was begun, viâ Switzerland, the Tyrol, Munich, Heidelberg, to Frankfort and the Rhine. At Nimeguen, on June 9, he had another attack of apoplexy, combined with paralysis. It was the crowning blow. By the 13th, London was reached, and in the St. James's Hotel, Jermyn Street (now demolished), he lay for three weeks in a state of supreme stupor. Allan Cunningham was in London then, and tells of the extraordinary interest and sympathy which Scott's illness evoked. Walking home late one night, he found a number of working men standing at the corner of Jermyn Street, one of whom asked him, as if there had been only one deathbed in London: 'Do you know, sir, if this is the street where _he_ is lying?' 'Abbotsford!' was his cry in the more lucid intervals that came to him. All its summer beauty seemed to be standing out before him, and to beckon him northwards. On July 7 he was carried on board the _James Watt_ steamer, accompanied by Lockhart, Cadell, a medical man--Dr. Thomas Watson--and his two daughters. The Forth was reached on the 9th, and the next two days--the last in his 'own romantic town'--were passed, as all the voyage had been, in a condition of absolute unconsciousness. On the 11th, at a very early hour of the morning, Scott was lifted into his carriage for the final journey homewards. During the first part of the drive he remained torpid, until the veil lifted somewhat at Gala Water. Strange that, after oblivion so profound and prolonged, he should open his eyes and regain a measure of consciousness just here, amid landscapes the most familiar to him in the world. Some good angel must have touched him then. A mere coincidence! Perhaps! But there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. 'Gala Water, surely--Buckholm--Torwoodlee,' he murmured. When he saw the Eildons--

'Three crests against the saffron sky, Beyond the purple plain, The kind remembered melody Of Tweed once more again'--

he became greatly excited, and in crossing Melrose Bridge, his 'nearest Rialto,' as he called it, he could hardly be kept in the carriage. Abbotsford, a mile ahead, was soon reached. Laidlaw--a big lump in his throat, we may be sure--was waiting at the door, and assisted to carry his dying master and friend to the dining-room, where his bed had been prepared. He sat bewildered for a moment or two, then, resting his eyes on Laidlaw, as if trying to recollect, said immediately, 'Ha, Willie Laidlaw! O man, how often have I thought of _you_!' By this time his dogs were around his chair, fawning on him, and licking his hands. Then, indeed, he knew where he was. Between sobs and tears he tried to speak to them, and to stroke them as of yore. But the body, no less than the brain, was exhausted, and gentle sleep closed his eyelids, like a tired child, once more in his own Abbotsford. He lingered for some weeks, alternating between cloud and sunshine--mostly cloud. One day the longing for his desk seized him, and he was wheeled studywards, but the palsied fingers refused their office, and he sank back, assured at last that the sceptre had departed. Lockhart and Laidlaw were now his constant attendants. Both read to him from the New Testament. 'There is but one Book,' Scott said, and it 'comforted' him to listen to its soothing and hope-inspiring utterances. Then the cloud became denser. At last delirium and delusion prostrated him, and he grew daily feebler. Now he thought himself administering justice as the Selkirkshire 'Shirra'; anon he was giving Tom Purdie orders anent trees. Sometimes, his fancy was in Jedburgh, and the words, 'Burke Sir Walter,' escaped him in a dolorous tone. Then he would repeat snatches from Isaiah, or the Book of Job, or some grand rugged verse torn off from the Scottish Psalms, or a strain sublimer still from the Romish Litany:

'Dies iræ, dies illa, Solvet sæclum in favilla.'

'As I was dressing on the morning of September 17,' says Lockhart, 'Nicolson came into my room and told me that his master had awoke in a state of composure and consciousness, and wished to see me immediately. I found him entirely himself, though in the last extreme of feebleness. His eye was clear and calm--every trace of the wild fire of delirium extinguished. "Lockhart," he said, "I may have but a minute to speak to you. My dear, be a good man--be virtuous--be religious--be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here." He paused, and I said: "Shall I send for Sophia and Anne?" "No," said he, "don't disturb them. Poor souls! I know they were up all night. God bless you all." With this he sunk into a very tranquil sleep, and, indeed, he scarcely afterwards gave any sign of consciousness, except for an instant on the arrival of his sons. About half-past one p.m., on September 21, Sir Walter Scott breathed his last, in the presence of all his children. It was a beautiful day--so warm that every window was wide open, and so perfectly still that the sound of all others most delicious to his ear, the gentle ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles, was distinctly audible as we knelt around the bed, and his eldest son kissed and closed his eyes.'

He died a month after completing his sixty-first year. On December 7, 1825, almost seven years earlier, we find him taking a survey of his own health in relation to the ages reached by his parents and other members of the family, and then setting down in his Diary the result of his calculations, 'Square the odds, and good-night, Sir Walter, about sixty. I care not, if I leave my name unstained and my family property settled. _Sat est vixisse._' His prophecy was fulfilled. He lived just a year--but a year of gradual death--beyond his anticipations. His wish, too, was fulfilled; for he died practically free of debt. The sale of his works, the insurance of his life, and a sum advanced by Cadell, completely cleared his engagements.[18]

On September 26--a Wednesday--Sir Walter was buried. Services at Abbotsford, after the simple fashion of the Scottish Kirk, were conducted by the Revs. Principal Baird, of Edinburgh University, Dr. Dickson, of St. Cuthbert's, and the minister of Melrose. The courtyard and all the precincts of Abbotsford were crowded with uncovered spectators as the procession (over a mile in length) was arranged. And as it advanced through Darnick and Melrose, and the villages on the route, the whole population appeared at their doors in like manner, almost all in black. From Darnick Tower[19] a broad crape banner waved in the wind, and the Abbey bell at Melrose rang a muffled peel. At Leaderfoot the Tweed was crossed for the last time. Thence there is a somewhat steep ascent to Gladswood and Bemersyde. On the crest of the road overlooking the 'beautiful bend' the hearse came to a curious halt, at the very spot where Scott was accustomed to rein up his horses. It was no 'accident,' as Lockhart imagines. For one of the horses was Sir Walter's own, and must have borne him many a time hither. Hence the explanation of an incident which, strangely enough, seems to have puzzled Lockhart, and was long regarded with a sort of superstitious awe. It was late in the day--about half-past five--before the memorable procession reached Dryburgh. The wide enclosure was thronged with old and young. Peter Mathieson, Laidlaw, and others of Scott's servants carried the plain black coffin to the grave within St. Mary's aisle, where it was lowered by his two sons, his son-in-law, and six of his cousins, Archdeacon Williams reading the Burial Service of the Church of England. And thus the remains of Sir Walter Scott--our Scottish Shakespeare--were laid by the side of his wife in the sepulchre of his fathers, 'in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.'

[Illustration: LEADERFOOT BRIDGE]

'Sing Ercildoune and Cowdenknowes, Where Homes had ance commanding; And Drygrange, with the milk-white yowes, 'Twixt Tweed and Leader standing.'

Lockhart And Abbotsford

Chapter VII

Lockhart And Abbotsford

John Gibson Lockhart, next to Boswell the greatest of British biographers, though Mr. Saintsbury is inclined to class him even above Boswell, was born in the manse of Cambusnethan, June 12, 1794.[20] He came of an ancestry of which he might well be proud. Some of the best blood of Scotland ran in his veins. Lockhart of Lee, in Lanarkshire, was probably the source of his family. The Lockharts had owned territory in the Upper Ward for centuries, Symington, or Symon's Town, famous now chiefly as a junction on the Caledonian Railway, being, perhaps, their earliest possession. The name is thought to be derived from Symon Locard, who founded its church and assumed lordship of the locality in the reign of Malcolm the Maiden. Lee itself may have been acquired about the close of the thirteenth century by William Locard, whose son, another Symon, was companion to 'the Good' Sir James Douglas on his hazardous mission with the heart of Bruce. Every schoolboy knows how Douglas fell on a blood-red field of Spain, how he flung the royal casket in front of him with the cry, 'Forward, brave heart, as thou wert wont; Douglas will follow thee or die,' and how Locard assumed the lead, rescued the King's heart and the body of his comrade, and, like a wise man, returned to Scotland. Bruce's heart he laid by the high altar at Melrose, the Douglas with his own dear dust in the Kirk of St. Bride, among the Lanarkshire uplands. It was this Symon who brought to Scotland the famous Lee Penny--Scott's 'Talisman,' the most celebrated charm in the country--a heart-shaped, dark-red stone now set in a groat of Edward IV., with a silver chain and ring attached, and long sought after by the superstitious as a positive cure for the worst ailments of man and beast.

Following Sir Symon Locard there comes on the scene Sir Stephen Lockhart,[21] as the name was now spelled, who held the lands of Cleghorn, in the same county. He was the direct male ancestor of John Gibson Lockhart, and almost certainly a cadet of the Lee family. His son, Allan Lockhart of Cleghorn, married for his second wife a daughter of the third Lord Somerville, by whom he had a son Stephen, Laird of Wicketshaw, also in Lanarkshire. In 1606 another Stephen, grandson of the latter, married Grizel Carmichael, a sister of the first Lord Carmichael, and by her he had three sons: William, heir to Wicketshaw; Robert of Birkhill, in the parish of Lesmahagow; and Walter of Kirkton. From the second of these, a noted Covenanter and leader of the Lanark Whigs at Bothwell, Scott's biographer had his immediate descent. William Lockhart, grandson of Robert of Birkhill, and his wife, Violet Inglis, of Corehouse, had two sons, the second of whom was the Rev. John Lockhart, D.D., minister of Cambusnethan, and for nearly half a century of the College Kirk, Glasgow. Dr. Lockhart was twice married, and it was his second wife, Elizabeth Gibson, daughter of the Rev. John Gibson, senior minister of St. Cuthbert's, Edinburgh, who became the mother of John Gibson Lockhart. Lockhart's ancestry on his mother's side connects him with James Nimmo the Covenanter, with the Erskines of Cardross, and the Pringles of Torwoodlee.

While the boy was still young his parents removed to Glasgow. There Lockhart matriculated, and blossomed into a scholar of brilliant parts, winning such academic blue ribbons as the Greek Blackstone and a Snell Exhibition, which took him to Oxford. He was at Balliol for some years, and left in 1813 with a 'first' in Classics. After a Continental visit (conversing with Goethe at Weimar), he studied law at Edinburgh, and in 1816 was called to the Scottish Bar. His Parliament House career came to a rather curious end, however. Speechifying was not in his line. He flustered and floundered upon every attempt, and was a complete failure. And he might have perambulated the boards of the Parliament Hall long enough. For, like Scott, 'deil a ane speered his price.' 'Gentlemen,' said he, in happy allusion to this infirmity on the occasion of a banquet in his honour long after he had relinquished the Bar, 'you know that if I could speak we would not be here.'[22]

It was in the realm of literature (more alluring than law) that Lockhart was fated to shine. Already he had shown talent in that direction in his 'Heraldry' article for Brewster's 'Encyclopædia,' and a translation of Schlegel's 'Lectures on the History of Literature.' And when _Blackwood's Magazine_ soared into the arena (1817), Lockhart and John Wilson divided its chief honours. It was largely under Lockhart that 'Maga' made its position as the most pronounced Tory organ of the day. In his earlier career Lockhart adopted the slash-style of criticism (the tomahawk type)--incisive, irritating, and keenly offensive, as a rule. He was a master of satire, blazing away to his heart's content, with many to fear him, but none to stay his unsparing pen. If he could not speak, he could at least write to purpose and with effect. He had now come to his kingdom when the whole torrent of thought, imagination, and genius, which the Bar may have held in check, burst forth in its full brilliance. He was then barely five-and-twenty, and a handsomer fellow never stepped on shoe-leather--tall, with dark Italian-like features inherited from his mother, close, tight lips, a mobile chin, and temples clustering with huge masses of curly jet hair. There is an admirable pen-portrait of him in the 'Noctes' when Wilson makes the Shepherd say: 'Wasna't me that first prophesied his great abeelities when he was only an Oxford Collegian wi' a pale face and a black toozy head, but an e'e like an eagle's, an' a sort o' lauch about the screwed-up mouth o' him that fules ca'd no canny?'

Though Lockhart must have seen Scott frequently in public--in the Law Courts, the book-shops, and elsewhere--he does not appear to have met him in private society till the General Assembly of May, 1818. The incident of the 'hand,' some years previously, is so interesting, however, as not to be overlooked in any notice of Lockhart and Scott. Happening to pass through Edinburgh in June, 1814, Lockhart relates how, along with a band of budding barristers, he dined at a friend's house in George Street whose windows overlooked at right angles the back of Scott's town-house and study at 39, Castle Street. As the merry evening advanced, Lockhart observed a strange dulness settling over his friend's demeanour, and fear of his being unwell bade him put the question. 'No,' said he, 'I shall be well enough presently if you will only let me sit where you are, and take my chair; for there is a confounded hand in sight of me here which has often bothered me before, and now it won't let me fill my glass with a goodwill.' 'I rose to change places with him,' says Lockhart, 'and he pointed out to me this hand, which, like the writing on Belshazzar's wall, disturbed his hour of hilarity.' 'Since we sat down,' he said, 'I have been watching it; it fascinates my eye; it never stops; page after page is finished and thrown on that heap of manuscript, and still it goes on unwearied--and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that. It is the same every night; I can't stand a sight of it when I am not at my books.' 'Some stupid, dogged, engrossing clerk, probably,' exclaimed Lockhart, 'or some other giddy youth in the company.' 'No, boys,' said their host, 'I well know what hand it is--'tis Walter Scott's.' This was the hand which in the evenings of three summer weeks wrote the two last volumes of 'Waverley.' Lockhart was introduced to Scott at a society function in the house of Home Drummond, of Blair-Drummond, grandson of Lord Kames. 'Mr. Scott,' he says, 'ever apt to consider too favourably the literary efforts of others, and more especially of very young persons, received me, when I was presented to him, with a cordiality which I had not been prepared to expect from one filling a station so exalted. When the ladies retired from the dinner-table I happened to sit next him, and he, having heard that I had lately returned from a tour in Germany, made that country and its recent literature the subject of some conversation. He appeared particularly interested when I described Goethe as I first saw him alighting from a carriage crammed with wild plants and herbs which he had picked up in the course of his morning's botanizing among the hills above Jena.' 'I am glad,' said he, 'that my old master has pursuits somewhat akin to my own. I am no botanist, properly speaking; and though a dweller on the banks of the Tweed, shall never be knowing about Flora's beauties; but how I should like to have a talk with him about trees!'

A few days afterwards, on Scott's initiative, Lockhart was given the compilation of the historical part of the 'Edinburgh Annual Register,' worth £500 a year, plus daily intimacy with Scott--a lucky asset for one so young. Apparently, Scott had taken at once to the younger writer, then only half his age, and for the next fourteen years Lockhart was Scott's right-hand man. No more fortunate and happy relationship was ever formed. It was said of Sir Walter's own sons that they left little record behind them. They fell back into the common crowd, and perished in the direct line, leaving no children to carry on his name. But Lockhart was the son of his heart, his confidant and faithfullest friend through all the troubles that followed, and his children were the only heirs of Abbotsford and their great forebear's glory.

Of the Edinburgh life, the Castle Street domesticities, with Lockhart's picture of the 'den,' we are not now concerned. In October of that same year, 1818, along with Wilson, Lockhart saw Abbotsford for the first time. Scott was in high feather. The second of his building schemes had just been completed, and the famous tower, the cynosure of the edifice, was his main topic. When his guests rose from table, he was eager to take them all to the top for a moonlight view of the valley. Some--the more youthful members--assented, and Scott led the way up the narrow, dark stairs. 'Nothing could have been more lovely,' says Lockhart, 'than the panorama, all the harsher and more naked features being lost in the delicious moonlight; the Tweed and the Gala winding and sparkling beneath our feet; and the distant ruins of Melrose appearing as if carved of alabaster, under the black mass of the Eildons.' The poet, leaning on his battlement, seemed to hang over the beautiful vision as if he had never seen it before. 'If I live,' he exclaimed, 'I will build me a higher tower, with a more spacious platform, and a staircase better fitted for an old fellow's scrambling.' Then to John of Skye (John Bruce), whose pipes were heard retuning on the lawn beneath, he called for 'Lochaber no more,' and as the music rose, softened by the distance and the murmur of the river, Scott crooned what Lockhart calls the 'melancholy words of the song of exile.' In the new dining-room, unfinished, but brilliantly illuminated for the occasion, music and dance and whisky-punch passed the remainder of the evening, Scott and Dominie Thomson (a reputed original of Dominie Sampson) looking on with gladsome faces, and now and then beating time, the one with his staff, the other with his wooden leg. Lord Melville proposed 'good luck' to the 'roof-tree,' and the whole party, standing in a circle hand-in-hand, sang joyously:

'Weel may we a' be, Ill may we never see, God bless the King and the gude companie!'

Such was the 'handselling' of the 1818 Abbotsford.

[Illustration: THE EILDON HILLS AND RIVER TWEED]

'Twilight, and Tweed, and Eildon Hill, Fair and too fair you be; You tell me that the voice is still That should have welcomed me.'

Lockhart's next visit (with John Ballantyne), on April 10, 1819, found Scott still in the grip of his cramp enemy, and changed in appearance far beyond what Lockhart was led to expect. In the night he had a recurrence of his pains, and Lockhart, naturally, intended to leave next morning. But Scott, recovered, and wishful to 'drive away the accursed vapours of the laudanum I was obliged to swallow last night,' was bent on taking him 'for a good trot in the open air'--'up Yarrow'--the home phrase, none dearer.

Past Carterhaugh they rode, where the Forest waters meet, and where Janet rescued Tamlane from the fairies; Philiphaugh, Scott describing the battle as vividly as if he had witnessed it; Newark where the 'Lay' was chanted; and Slain Men's Lea, where the Covenanters butchered prisoners taken under promise of quarter (darkest memory of Philiphaugh). They saw Minchmoor, too, and recalled Montrose and his cavaliers scurrying Tweedwards. Next day they rode across Bowden Moor, and up the Ale Water to Lilliesleaf and 'ancient Riddell's fair domain,' Scott doing election business on the way. Next day, again, from the crest of the Eildons Lockhart was shown the 'Kingdom of Border Romance'--Eildon itself a not unfitting centre. Between the Lammermoors and the Cheviots on one side, and from the Merse to Moffatdale on the other, there is perhaps no range of landscape more intensely interesting from a literary point of view, and none in which Lockhart felt a more personal sympathy. Though not a Borderer (a measure of Border blood in his veins, however), the dearest ties of his life were destined to be with the Border; nor, so long as the English language lasts, will there be lacking generous hearts to love and remember the man who had Sir Walter for friend and hero. As to Irving, Scott pointed out to Lockhart the more notable landmarks of the locality and the places connected with his own career. Sandyknowe he saw, the home of Scott's boyhood; Earlston, where the Tower of the Rhymer recalled 'Sir Tristrem,' one of his early essays in literature; song-haunted Cowdenknowes; Bemersyde of the perennial Haigs, 'a wizard-spell hanging over it'; Mertoun, where he penned the 'Eve of St. John'; and Dryburgh,

'Where with chiming Tweed The lintwhites sing in chorus';

and many another spot long famous in popular song and story. He repeated the lines (often on his lips)[23] ascribed to Burne the Violer, the last of the race of Border minstrels, and the prototype, doubtless, of his own 'Last Minstrel':

'Sing Ercildoune and Cowdenknowes, Where Homes had ance commanding; And Drygrange, wi' the milk-white yowes, Twixt Tweed and Leader standing. The bird that flees through Redpath trees And Gladswood banks each morrow May chant and sing sweet Leader Haughs, And bonnie howms of Yarrow.

'But Minstrel Burne cannot assuage His grief while life endureth, To see the changes of this age Which fleeting time procureth; For mony a place stands in hard case, Where blithe folks kent nae sorrow, With Homes that dwelt on Leader side, And Scotts that dwelt on Yarrow.'

Lockhart's 'Peter's Letters,'[24] published in 1819, contains, in some respects, an even better report of the Abbotsford pilgrimage than the Biography chapter. 'If I am very partial to the Doctor,' wrote Scott, acknowledging a gift of the book, 'remember I have been bribed by his kind and delicate account of his visit to Abbotsford.' Indeed, as Mr. Lang hints--and properly--had Lockhart never lived to write the Biography, Dr. Morris's description of Abbotsford would have remained the _locus classicus_.

Lockhart was not at Abbotsford again till the middle of February, 1820. He had not been idle, however. Of the charms of (Charlotte) Sophia, Scott's eldest daughter, and dearest, 'the flower and blossom of his house, and the likest of all his family to their father,' not much is said, of course, in the Biography. There is a pretty portrait of her at Abbotsford as a Norwegian peasant, with a great hound looking up into her face, in which it is not difficult to discern Sir Walter's lineaments. Bu