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EARLY MANHOOD

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(1792-1799)

1792-95

A Scots advocate in his first years at the Bar has commonly a superfluity of leisure. He walks the floor of the Parliament House waiting to be hired, and shares in what used to be one of the most friendly and jovial of societies. That floor, looked down upon by the grave periwigged judges of the past, has always been a breeding-ground of good stories, and in this gentle art Walter Scott shone among his contemporaries. He was a famous mimic, especially of such farcical judicial figures as Lord Eskgrove, with his low muttering voice and projected chin, who would in sentencing a prisoner to death console him thus: "Whatever your relig-ious persua-shon may be, there are plenty of rever-end gentle-men who will be most happy for to show you the way to yeternal life." Scott was noted for taking the tales of other men and sharpening their point—putting, as he said, "a cocked hat on their heads and a cane into their hands."

On Circuit

But his legal career was not wholly occupied with the pleasantries of the Outer House. In 1795 he was appointed one of the curators of the Advocates' Library, an office reserved for the more literary members of the faculty. A certain amount of work reached him from his father's office, chiefly the endless legal paperasserie known as "informations," with which the administration of law was cumbered. He defended poor prisoners without a fee, and on circuit at Jedburgh had as clients local poachers and sheepstealers. One case took him for the first time into Galloway, and gave him the landscape for Guy Mannering. The minister of Girthon was accused of "toying with a sweetie-wife" at a penny-wedding and of singing doubtful songs, and Scott defended him before the General Assembly, drawing a nice distinction between ebrius and ebriosus, between being occasionally drunk and being a habitual drunkard. He lost his case, but his argument greatly edified his brethren of the Covenant Close.

1792-99

It was a life which enlarged his knowledge of the human comedy and took him into odd by-paths. If he won few guineas by it he was paid often in a better coin, as in the case of a housebreaker at Jedburgh who remunerated him with two pieces of advice—never to keep a watch-dog out of doors but to tie up a noisy terrier within, and to trust not to clever new locks but to the old heavy kind with the rude keys. As he once told Lord Meadowbank,

Yelping terrier, rusty key,

Was Walter Scott's best Jeddart fee.

Cockburn has a tale of a dinner given by an old drunken Selkirk attorney to Scott, Cranstoun and Will Erskine, when Scott as a toper nearly triumphed over the host. "As they were mounting their horses to ride home, the entertainer let the other two go without speaking to them, but he embraced Scott, assuring him that he would rise high. 'And I'll tell ye what, Maister Walter—that lad Cranstoun may get to the tap of the bar if he can; but tak' ma word for't—it's no' be by drinking.'"[1]

He learned more from his practice than the humours of humanity, for Scots law was one of the main educative influences in his life. Its complexity and exactness formed a valuable corrective to a riotous imagination. It was the one form of science which he ever cultivated. Moreover, when he became a novelist, it was to give immense point and gusto to his Scots conversations. In an older Scotland the language of the law, like the language of the Bible, interpenetrated the speech of every class. A smattering of it was considered proof of gravity and practical good sense. Consequently it was often misused, and this farcical side adds perpetual salt to his dialogues. His years at the Bar not only enabled him to draw characters like Pleydell and the elder Fairford, but also to give to some of his minor figures their most idiomatic humours—as witness the speech of Bailie Macwheeble, and mine host Mackitchinson, and Andrew Fairservice, and Bartoline Saddletree.

For the rest, as he wrote of Alan Fairford, he "laughed and made others laugh; drank claret at Bayle's, Fortune's and Walker's, and ate oysters in the Covenant Close," while on his desk "the new novel most in repute lay snugly intrenched beneath Stair's Institutes or an open volume of Decisions," and his table was littered with every kind of document "but briefs and banknotes." He was fortunate in his friends, some of whom we have already met. Will Clerk, his boyhood ally, remained an intimate, though he was a Whig in politics, and had no share in Scott's literary and sporting interests. As the years of his youth passed an inner circle grew up for him in his immense acquaintanceship. Chief of that circle was William Erskine, the son of an Episcopalian clergyman in Perthshire, who became to Scott both an exacting literary censor and a second conscience. Erskine was a small, frail man, no lover of sport, awkward on horseback, a being of quick sensibilities and delicate nerves—a strange contrast to his big-boned, bluff, adventurous friend. The two men were complementary: Erskine rested upon Scott's sanity and vigour, and Scott looked to Erskine's finer perceptions to correct his own ebullience in letters and life. No two friends were ever closer together, or more complete partakers of each other's intimate thoughts.

Then there was Thomas Thomson, the son of an Ayrshire minister; he became one of the most learned of Scottish antiquaries and was to Scott at once a boon-companion and an esteemed fellow-worker in the quarries of the past. Of all his friends, perhaps, Thomson was the one whom Scott most esteemed as a table companion. "I pray you of all loves," so ran his usual invitation form, "to dine with me to-morrow at half-past five." There was George Cranstoun, afterwards Lord Corehouse, who belonged to a family which Lord Dudley told Mrs Dugald Stewart—herself a member of it—was reputed to consist of "the cleverest but the oddest people in the world." Cranstoun was shy, proud, notably able, an excellent critic and a storehouse of good sense. There was James Skene of Rubislaw, who was especially a brother sportsman. There were young women, too, in the circle, who played a part in Scott's education—Erskine's sister, Mary Anne; Cranstoun's sister, Jane Anne, who became Countess Purgstall; the young Lady Harden, the wife of the head of his sept, who lent him German books and corrected his Scotticisms, the "first woman of real fashion," he used to say, "that took me up."

The Revolution in France

These were the years of the Revolution in France, but to Scott it was no blissful dawn, as it appeared to the young Wordsworth, but a carnival of disorder distasteful to the lawyer, and a menace to his country hateful to the patriot. He was always wholly insensitive to the appeal of abstract ideas. As we shall see, he developed a strong interest in the technique of government and the practical workings of society, and few novelists have had such a masculine grasp of its economic framework. But the political ideas which were beginning to work like yeast in many of the younger minds in Scotland, problems like the ultimate purpose of human society, and the relation between the power of the state and the rights of the individual, left him cold. His mind was in a high degree concrete and practical; he might take arms against a proven abuse but not against a dubious theory, and his devotion to the past made him abhor all that was speculative and rootless. He had none of his countrymen's love of metaphysics, which was generally linked to the Calvinism of their training. Scott had early put behind him Calvinism and all that it implied, whether exemplified in his father or his tutor. He had escaped that fate which befell so many Scottish children and which was to befall Stevenson, a "Covenanting childhood." Though he was the great-grandson of the minister of Yarrow, the traditional Scottish theology did not affect him; he neither fell under its burden nor reacted against it; he simply gave it the go-by. The new seeds of thought sown by the French Revolution found a prepared soil in minds accustomed to the toils of religious speculation, minds which were compelled to work out for themselves a reasoned philosophy of life. Scott never felt the compulsion. In practice he regarded all men as his brothers, but he would have nothing to do with whimsies about the Brotherhood of Man. He was a Tory, not on the philosophical grounds of Burke and Bolingbroke, but because as a poet he loved the old ways, and as a practical man would conserve them, however logically indefensible, so long as they seemed to serve their purpose. So he joined heartily in breaking the heads of Irish students who sang rebel songs in the theatre, and, when the volunteering movement began, wrote to Kelso for "a strong gelding such as would suit a stalwart dragoon," to purchase which he was prepared to sell his collection of Scottish coins.

1797

Scott's experience as a volunteer was of value, for it gave him a means of working off his high spirits, and enabled one who was man of action as well as man of letters to satisfy at a critical stage both demands of his nature. In 1794 his brother Thomas was enrolled as a grenadier in an Edinburgh regiment, but Scott's own lameness prevented him joining the infantry. In 1797, however, he had his chance when a cavalry corps, the Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons, was embodied and he became its quartermaster. Stevenson has told us that his dream was always to be "the leader of a great horde of irregular cavalry," and that on his sick bed he saw himself "turning in the saddle to look back at my whole command (some five thousand strong) following me at a hand gallop up the road out of the burning valley by moonlight." Such fancies were at the back of Scott's head as he manoeuvred on Portobello sands, or took part in the policing of an occasional meal riot. Once in Paris the Tsar of Russia, observing his uniform, asked in what battles he had been engaged, and was told "in some slight actions, such as the battle of the Cross Causeway and the affair of Moredoun Mill." He was an exemplary volunteer, playing the game according to its extreme rigour, his heart making martial music within him, and thereby preparing himself for the galloping speed of his verses; and his humour and ardour were the inspiration of his corps. Lord Cockburn, the Whig, has a pleasant note on a performance with which he did not wholly sympathize:—

It was not a duty with him, or a necessity, or a pastime, but an absolute passion, indulgence in which gratified his feudal taste for war, and his jovial sociableness. He drilled, and drank, and made songs, with a hearty conscientious earnestness which inspired or shamed everybody within the attraction. I do not know if it is usual, but his troop used to practise, individually, with the sabre at a turnip, which was stuck on the top of a staff, to represent a Frenchman, in front of the line. Every other trooper, when he set forward in his turn, was far less concerned about the success of his aim at the turnip, than about how he was to tumble. But Walter pricked forward gallantly, saying to himself: "Cut them down, the villains, cut them down!" and made his blow, which from his lameness was often an awkward one, cordially, muttering curses all the while at the detested enemy.[2]

Liddesdale

He spent his holidays in exploring Scotland, not a common occupation in those days of comfortless travelling. He visited a dozen country houses from Angus to Lennox—Glamis, Meigle, Craighall, Newton, Tullibody, Cambusmore, Keir, Blairdrummond—which, being situated near the half-moon of the Highland Line, gave him some knowledge of the northern borderland. But it was to his own Border that he devoted most of his leisure. He had already explored the main valleys of Tweed and Teviot, and both sides of the central Cheviots, and now he began to push farther into the wild hill country that bounded the Debatable Land. In the autumn of 1792, along with Robert Shortreed, the Sheriff-substitute of Roxburghshire, he made his first incursion into Liddesdale, and thereafter for seven successive years the raid was annually repeated. In those days there were no roads for a wheeled carriage in Liddesdale, and therefore no tolls, and on the first journey the only expense which the travellers incurred was the feed of corn for their horses at Riccarton Mill. They slept in cot-houses or farms or manses as their road led them, and enjoyed an Homeric hospitality. Scott, as a young advocate, at first inspired some awe, till the herds and store-farmers discovered that "he was just a chield like ourselves." A chield he was, for he could drink and jest, hunt and fish, walk and ride with any Dandie Dinmont. "Drunk or sober," Shortreed reported, "he was aye the gentleman." Family worship would suddenly be broken up by the arrival of a keg of smuggled brandy from the Solway shore, whisky punch was drunk out of milk-pails, and breakfast would consist of porter and devilled ducks. Those days in sun and rain on the Liddesdale bent and nights by the peat-fire were filled with more than roystering. Scott was getting deeper into the ancient Border life and enlarging his knowledge of mankind and himself: "makin' himsell a' the time," said his companion. He was collecting 'gabions' too, like Border war horns and steel bonnets, and—more important—the songs and tunes and tales of a vanishing world.

His literary education followed the fashionable groove. Henry Mackenzie, the author of The Man of Feeling, read a paper to the Edinburgh Royal Society in April 1788 which started in the capital a craze for German literature. Scott in 1792 joined a class to study the subject, and a few years later was stirred to enthusiasm by hearing Mrs Barbauld read a translation of Bürger's "Lenore." Miss Jane Anne Cranstoun, his friend's sister, and the young Lady Harden encouraged his interest and corrected his German. It was the peak moment of Gothick extravagance, for in 1794 Mrs Radcliffe published her Mysteries of Udolpho, and a certain odd, undersized youth of twenty-one, Matthew Lewis by name, next year issued a tale, Ambrosia or The Monk, which took the town by storm. Scott fell deeply under the glamour of this pasteboard romance. "I wish to Heaven," he declared to a friend, "I could get a skull and two cross-bones." In October 1796 he published in a slim quarto his own verse translations of "Lenore" and "Der Wilde Jäger," which were perhaps not much worse than the originals, and revealed some talent for fluent verse. Three months before a poet worth a thousand Bürgers had died in Dumfries, but Scott had forgotten all about Burns, of whom he had been thrilled to get a casual glimpse as a boy. He was passing through the inevitable stage in a literary education, when the foreign seems marvellous because it is strange, and the domestic humdrum because it is familiar. He was soon to return by way of Liddesdale and the ballads to his own kindly earth.

Appearance

Meanwhile, in addition to his advocate's work and ballad-hunting and soldiering, he was living the life of an ordinary young man, and met other women besides lettered ladies. He had become a personable being, and appeared thus to one female observer. "His eyes were clear, open and well set, with a changeful radiance, to which teeth of the most perfect regularity and whiteness lent their assistance, while the noble expanse and elevation of his brow gave to the whole aspect a dignity far above the charm of mere features. His smile was always delightful, and I can easily fancy the peculiar intermixture of tenderness and gravity, with playful innocent hilarity and humour in the expression, as being well calculated to fix a fair lady's eye. His figure, excepting the blemish in one limb, must in those days have been eminently handsome—tall, much above the usual stature, cast in the very mould of a youthful Hercules; the head set on with singular grace, the throat and chest after the truest model of the antique, the hands delicately finished, the whole outline that of extraordinary vigour without as yet a touch of clumsiness."[3] The portrait is perhaps too highly coloured; Scott himself always declared that he had the largest pair of hands north of Tweed, and he was not for nothing a descendant of Muckle Mou'd Meg. His figure was what is called in Scotland "buirdly"; he had a noble peaked head thatched with light brown hair, grey-blue eyes, a deep voice, and a pleasant Border burr. The lower part of his face, with its long upper lip and heavy jowl, gave him a slightly lumpish air—till he smiled, when the whole countenance became whimsical and kindly. There was obvious power in him, but of the ruder kind, and it needed a discerning eye to penetrate to the poetry below the bluffness. What was not in doubt was the friendliness. "I said to myself," Joanna Baillie wrote after her first sight of him, "if I had been in a crowd and at a loss to do, I should have fixed upon his face among a thousand, as the sure index of benevolence and the shrewdness that would and could help me in any strait."

1793-97

Williamina

Such a young man could not escape the common fate. Scott belonged to the familiar northern type to which sex is not the sole mainspring of being. He preferred the society of men to that of women; he had no disposition to casual amours; in this domain of life he had an almost virginal fastidiousness.[4] The love affairs of such a man are apt to begin with a fairy tale and to conclude with a marriage of convenience. Happily he did not miss the first, for he had a taste of the old Romeo and Juliet romance, that ecstatic, child-like idealization of one woman which belongs especially to a poetic youth. Before he was quite out of his teens he offered the shelter of his umbrella to a girl one wet Sunday in Greyfriars churchyard, and had a glimpse of a face which was to be a profile de rêve to him for many a day. She was only fifteen, the daughter of Sir John Stuart-Belsches of Fettercairn, and his wife, Lady Jane, who was a daughter of the Earl of Leven and Melville. She was not only well-born but a considerable heiress, and her portrait shows composed features, large blue eyes, dark brown ringlets and a complexion of cream and roses. The two had probably met before, for their parents were acquaintances. The elder Scott, in an excess of conscientiousness, thought it his duty to inform Sir John of the young people's growing friendship, but no bar was put in its way, and the Lady of the Green Mantle became a toast among Scott's friends. He tells us that he had three years of dreaming, and two of wakening; some time during the year 1795 he declared himself, and by the end of that year he began to doubt whether he had won the lady's hand. The story is like the baseless fabric of a dream, but it would appear that his hopes revived again in 1796, and that, during a tour in the north in April and May of that year, he visited Fettercairn and returned south in better spirits. But some time in the early autumn he got his dismissal. Miss Williamina, though Scott suspected her mother's influence, had given her heart elsewhere, and in January 1797 she married the banker, Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo, who had been a college friend of Scott and a fellow-volunteer.[5]

Scott had perhaps been a timid and hesitating lover, for he was shy of women, and had marvellously idealized this woman. Some of his friends dreaded the consequences for one whom they knew to be full of banked fires. "I now shudder at the violence of his most irritable and ungovernable mind." But Scott was no sigher in the shades. In Lockhart's phrase he "digested" his agony. His philosophy was that of Quentin Durward: "Melancholy, even love-melancholy, is not so deeply seated, at least in minds of a manly and elastic character, as the soft enthusiasts who suffer under it are fond of believing. It yields to unexpected and striking impressions, to changes of plans ... and to the busy hum of mankind." Nevertheless the shaft went deep, and though the sting passed away the memory remained till his dying day. The first lines he wrote with any of the freshness of reality owed their inspiration to the lost lady, those beginning, "The violet is her greenwood bower"; and in the last decade of his life he either composed or copied other verses on the same topic.[6] The wraith of Green Mantle glimmers in Margaret of Branksome in The Lay of the Last Minstrel, in her namesake in Redgauntlet, in Matilda in Rokeby, maybe, too, in Diana Vernon, when she stoops from her saddle on the midnight moor with a kiss as light as the touch of a bird's wing. He had cut Williamina's name on the turf at the castle gate of St Andrews as a young lover, and thirty-four years after sat on an adjacent gravestone and wondered why the name "should still agitate my heart." Three months later he met Lady Jane in Edinburgh; she was then well over seventy, and her daughter had been dead for seventeen years. The meeting was like opening a sepulchre.

I fairly softened myself, like an old fool, with recalling stories, till I was fit for nothing but shedding tears and repeating verses for the whole night. This is sad work. The very grave gives up its dead, and time rolls back thirty years to add to my perplexities.[7]

The emotion must have been deep which could leave such traces. He put it behind him, as he put all things of whose futility he was convinced, but it survived in the secret places of his soul. It is wrong, I think, to argue that Scott was never seriously in love with Williamina, that it was a mere boyish fancy, and that what attracted him was her birth and the long-descended world in which she moved. These things no doubt played a part in his idealization of the girl, but the enduring power of the idealization lay in the fact that she came to represent for him the first ardour of his youth and all youth's dear and unsubstantial visions. No one can read his letters at the time without concluding that this was that rare thing, a deep and enduring love. Rare, I mean, among the fleeting, volcanic passions of the poets, who wear their hearts on their sleeves and protest to the world that the pang of an hour is an eternal sorrow. Scott's passion was a profounder emotion than any which the lives of Burns or Shelley or Byron can show. He never saw Williamina again, and he did not wish to; there was no bitterness in his memory of her, but there was regret—regret perhaps less for a thing of flesh and blood than for the "glory and the freshness of a dream." Somewhere at the back of his mind the thought of her dwelt, and on the eve of any great misfortune she came to him in sleep. It is a strange tale, but one which carries the key to most of his life, for we shall not understand Scott unless we realize how much he lived in a secret world of his own, an inner world of dream and memory, from which he brought great treasures, but which now and then to his undoing invaded the world of facts.

Charlotte Carpenter

His heart, he has told us, was soon "handsomely pieced" and this time the wooer had his feet on solid earth. In July 1797 he set out with his brother John and Adam Ferguson on a visit to the English lakes, and at the little Cumberland watering-place of Gilsland met a young lady in her early twenties, with a slight graceful figure, a suspicion of a foreign accent, a clear olive complexion, jet black hair, and large brown eyes. He was afterwards to draw her portrait in Julia Mannering. She was witty, sprightly, and full of hard Latin good sense. Her name was Charlotte Margaret Carpenter; her father had been Jean Charpentier, a refugee from Lyons and a Royalist; her guardian (some have without reason suspected a closer relationship) was Lord Downshire: and her only brother, thanks to the Downshire interest, was doing well in the East India service. Scott went to a ball in his Light Horse regimentals, fell in love, promptly offered marriage, and was accepted subject to Lord Downshire's consent, which arrived early in October. The elder Scott, now paralysed and dying, made no objection, and on Christmas Eve 1797, the young couple were married in St Mary's Church, Carlisle.

Scott was in wild spirits during his engagement, and raved about the lady to his friends, but it seems certain that his heart was not greatly affected. He liked the idea of marriage as a step in that progress in life to which one side of him (his father's side) was vowed. He wanted a cheerful companion for the road, and he believed that he had found one. Twelve years afterwards he wrote to Lady Abercorn:

Mrs Scott's match and mine was of our own making, and proceeded from the most sincere affection on both sides, which has rather increased than diminished during twelve years' marriage. But it was something short of love in all its forms, which I suspect people only feel once in all their lives; folk who have been nearly drowned in bathing rarely venturing a second time out of their depth.[8]

1797-99

The brisk Julia Mannering was not Diana Vernon, and never entered into his secret world. But she made him an admirable wife, and no quarrel clouded their thirty years of matrimony. She loved show—"I am glad you don't give up the cavalry, as I love anything that is stylish"; gaiety—in Edinburgh they went to the play nearly every night, and consistently entertained up to and beyond their means; money, perhaps, for what it brought. She had no interest in the things of the mind, and doubted whether thoughtful people could ever be happy. She was not a good manager, in spite of her French blood. But she was loyal, wholly free from jealousy, courageous, and her son once wrote to her "I admire above all things your laughing philosophy." When the fierce light of popularity blazed on him, she was not shrivelled, as Mrs Grant of Laggan feared she might be. She had no part in her husband's inner world of dreams, but she helped him abundantly to enjoy the externals of life.

The young people took up house in the New Town of Edinburgh, first in rooms in George Street, then in South Castle Street, and finally in the house, No 39 North Castle Street, which was to be their home till 1826. Scott was making about £150 a year at the Bar, his wife had a few hundreds, and he had an allowance from his father, so he was able in 1798 to take a country cottage at Lasswade on the Esk, half a dozen miles from Edinburgh. There he was close to his friends, the Clerks at Pennycuik, the Fraser Tytlers at Woodhouselee, Henry Mackenzie at Auchendinny, not to speak of grandees like the Duke of Buccleuch and Lord Melville, whose acquaintance his Light Horse service had brought him. The Lasswade cottage was a little place by the roadside, with a view, a garden, and one big living-room. It was to be for Scott the Sabine farm where he first held serious converse with the Muses.

1799

Will Erskine had been in London, where he had met Matt Lewis, who in that day of small things passed for a literary arbiter. Lewis was projecting a miscellany, and, when Erskine showed him Scott's Bürger translations, welcomed him as a contributor. Presently Lewis came to Edinburgh and summoned Scott to dine with him at his hotel. The young advocate approached the presence with awe, and was kindly received, and the upshot was that his translation of Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen, through Lewis's offices, was issued by a London bookseller, one Bell, in February 1799—the first publication to which Scott put his name. It is a performance of much the same merit, or lack of merit, as the earlier "Lenore." But meantime the poet, with Lewis's miscellany in mind, was busy on better tasks. He wrote the ballads of "Glenfinlas," "The Gray Brother," and "The Eve of St John"—prentice work, full of dubious echoes and conventional artifice, yet with, as a foundation, the stuff of folk legend from which he was soon to draw richer ore.

Sheriff of the Forest

The year 1799 was eventful. In the spring the Scotts went to London, where, under the guidance of Lewis, they had their first taste of literary society. In April death mercifully delivered his father from his afflictions. In the winter he met again James Ballantyne, now publishing a newspaper in Kelso, and gave him some of his verses to print: the result so pleased him that he proposed to Ballantyne a small volume of old Border ballads. Then came the death of the Sheriff-deputy of Selkirkshire, Andrew Plummer of Middlestead, and through the Melville and Buccleuch influence Scott was appointed to succeed him.

So at twenty-eight we may regard him as being settled in life. From his Bar earnings, his wife's allowance, his father's estate, and his sheriffship, he had now nearly £1000 a year—which in the Scotland of that age may be regarded as the equivalent of £3000 to-day.[9] He was happily married, with the beginnings of a family, and possessed a large circle of attached friends. He had found in literature an engrossing hobby, though he had no intention of making it his chief calling. That must remain the law, but, having made little success of advocacy, he was now a little weary of its drudgery, and looked rather to legal appointments. "My profession and I," he wrote, "came to stand nearly upon the footing which honest Slender consoled himself on having established with Mistress Anne Page: 'There was not great love between us at the beginning, and it pleased heaven to decrease it on further acquaintance.'"[10] He held his father's view that the making of books was not enough to fill the life of an active man; that, as he put it, literature was a good staff but a bad crutch. The drums and trumpets of life still sounded for him, and he had one ear always at their service, though the other might be rapt by the flutes of his secret world. His ambitions at this stage can be summed up in the letter of his friend Charles Kerr of Abbotrule.

With your strong sense and hourly ripening knowledge, that you must rise to the top of the tree in the Parliament House in due season I hold as certain as that Murray died Lord Mansfield. But don't let many an Ovid, or rather many a Burns (which is hotter) be lost in you. I rather think men of business have produced as good poetry in their by-hours as the professed regulars; and I don't see any sufficient reason why a Lord President Scott should not be a famous poet (in the vacation time), when we have seen a President Montesquieu step so nobly beyond the trammels in the Esprit dea Loix.[11]


[1] Mem., 456.

[2] Mem., 195-6.

[3] Lockhart, I. 162.

[4] Lockhart, I. 161-2.

[5] Lord Sands in Sir Walter Scott's Congê (3rd edition, 1931) has collected many details of the affair, and corrected some of Lockhart's mistakes.

[6] Lockhart, I. 244: but see Adam Scott's Sir Walter Scott's First Love, 157.

[7] Journal, II. 62.

[8] Fam. Letters, I. 167

[9] Jeffrey at the same age, after nine anxious years at the Bar, was only earning £240.

[10] Introd. to Lay of the Last Minstrel, 1830.

[11] Lockhart, I. 315.


Sir Walter Scott

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