On their side the heads of society in Edinburgh were much interested in this young man. There had been an article in the Lounger, fondly deemed a Scotch Spectator, an elegant literary paper widely read not only in Scotland but even beyond the Border, upon him and his works. "The Ayrshire Ploughman" was the title of the article, and it set forth all the imperfections of his breeding, his want of education, his ignorance both of books and of the world, and yet the amazing verses he had produced, which, though disguised in a dialect supposed to be unknown to the elegant reader, and for which Henry Mackenzie, the Man of Feeling, supplied a glossary—living, he himself, in an old-fashioned house in the South Back of the Canongate and within the easiest reach of those wonderful old ladies who spoke broad Scotch, and left no one in any doubt as to the strong opinions expressed therein—were certified to be worthy the perusal of the most fastidious critic. Lord Monboddo, who was the author of speculations which forestalled Darwin and who considered a tail to be an appendage of which men had not long got rid, on the one side, and the metaphysicians and philosophers on the other, would no doubt prick up their ears to hear of this absolutely new being in whom there might be seen some traces of primeval man. We forget which of the early Jameses it was who is said to have shut up two infants with a dumb nurse in one of the islands of the Firth to ascertain what kind of language they would speak when thus left to the teaching of nature. The experiment was triumphantly successful, for the heaven-taught babies babbled, the chroniclers tell us, a kind of Hebrew, thus proving beyond doubt that the language of the Old Testament was the original tongue of man. The Edinburgh savants must have received Burns with something of the same feeling: for here was a new soul which had been shut up amid the primeval elements, and the language it spoke was Poetry! yet poetry disguised in imperfect dialect which might yet be trained and educated into elegance. They asked him to dinner as a first step, and gathered round him to hear what he would have to say; to observe the effect produced by the sight of learning, criticism, knowledge; to enjoy his awe, and note the improvement that could not but ensue. This curiosity was full of kindness; their hearts were a little touched by the ploughman, by his glowing eyes, and by the strange sight of him there among them in the midst of their high civilisation, a rustic clown who knew nothing better than a thatched cottage and a clay floor. No doubt they had the sincerest desire that he should be made to understand how much he was deficient, what a great deal he had to learn, and be taught to use fine language, and turn his attention to higher subjects, and be altogether elevated and brought on in the world. The situation is very curious and full of human interest, even had the stranger been less in importance than he was. It is wonderfully enlightening in any circumstances to see such an encounter from both sides, to perceive the light in which it appears to them, and the very different light in which it is seen by him. There was the usual great divergence between the views of the visitor and the highly-cultured community to which he came. For he indeed did not come there at all to be enlightened and trained and put in the way he should go. He came full of delightful hope that he was coming among his own kind, that he was for the first time to meet his own species, and recognise in other human faces the light that shone about his own path, but in none of the other muddy ways of the country-side; to make friends with his natural brethren, and be understood of them as no one yet had been found to understand him. In his high anticipations, in his warm enthusiasm of hope, he himself figured dimly as a sort of noble exile coming back to his father's house. So does every child of fancy regard the world of which he knows nothing, the world of the great and famous, where to dazzled fancy all the beautiful things, words, and thoughts for which he has been sighing all his life are to be found.

They met, and they were, if not mutually disappointed, yet strangely astonished and perplexed. Burns would seem to have been always on his guard, too much on his guard we should be disposed to say, suspicious of the intention to guide, to chasten, to educate and refine, which was indeed in the kindest way at the bottom of everybody's thoughts. He was determined to be astonished by nothing, to keep his head so that no one should ever be able to say that it was turned by his new experiences—an attitude which altogether bewildered the good people, who were willing to give him every kind of education, to excuse any rudeness or roughness or imperfection, but not to see a man at his ease, appearing among them as if he were of them, requiring no allowance to be made for him, holding his head high as any man he met. All the accounts we have of his appearance in Edinburgh agree in this. He was neither abashed nor embarrassed; no rustic presumption or vulgarity, but quite as little any timidity or awkwardness, was in the Ayrshire ploughman. His shoulders a little bent with the work to which he had been accustomed, his dress like a countryman, a rougher cloth perhaps, a pair of good woollen stockings rig and fur, his mother's knitting, instead of the silk which covered limbs probably not half so robust—but so far as manners went, nothing to apologise for or smile at. The accounts all agree in this. If he never put himself forward too much, he never withdrew with any unworthy shyness from his modest share in the conversation. Sometimes he would be roused to eloquent speech, and then the admiring ladies said he carried them "off their feet" in the contagion of his enthusiasm and emotion. But this was a very strange phenomenon for the Edinburgh professors and men of letters to deal with: a novice who had not come humbly to be taught, but one who had come to take up his share of the inheritance, to sit down among the great, as in his natural place. He was not perhaps altogether unmoved by their insane advices to him, one of the greatest of lyrical poets, a singer above all—to write a tragedy, to give up the language he knew and write his poetry in the high English which, alas! he uses in his letters. Not unmoved, and seriously inclining to a more lofty measure, he compounded addresses to Edinburgh:

"Edina, Scotia's darling seat!"

and other such intolerable effusions. One can imagine him roaming through the fields between the old town and the new, and looking up to the "rude rough fortress," and on the other side to the brand-new regular lines of building, where

"Architecture's noble pride Bids elegance and splendour rise,"

and musing in his mind how to celebrate them in polished verse so that even the critics may be satisfied—

"Thy sons, Edina! social, kind, With open arms the stranger hail; Their views enlarged, their liberal mind, Above the narrow, rural vale; Attentive still to sorrow's wail, Or modest merit's silent claim; And never may their sources fail! And never envy blot their name!"

One wonders what the gentlemen said to this in the old town and the new—whether it did not confuse them still further, as well intended perhaps, but not after all like the "Epistle to Davie," though they had all advised him to amend that rustic style. A very confusing business altogether—difficult for the kind advisers as well as for the poet, and with no outlet that any one could see.



We have, however, a more agreeable picture of the visitor on another occasion when he walked out into the country with Dugald Stewart in a spring morning to the hills of Braid and talked that gentle philosopher's heart away, not now about Edina's palaces and towers. "He told me ... that the sight of so many smoking cottages gave a pleasure to his mind which none could understand who had not witnessed like himself the happiness and worth which they contained." It is more pleasant to think of the poet's dark eyes lighting up as he said this than to watch him proud and self-possessed in the drawing-rooms holding his own, taking such good care that nobody should divine how his heart was beating and his nerves athrill.

But after all there is no such account given of this wonderful visitor to Edinburgh as that we have from the after-recollections of a certain "lameter" boy who was once present in a house where Burns was a guest. The Scott boys from George Square had been admitted to the party which they were too young to join in an ordinary way, in order that they might see this wonder of the world, the ploughman-poet who was not afraid, but behaved as well as any of the gentlemen. And it befell by the happiest chance that Burns inquired who was the author of certain verses inscribed upon a print which he had been looking at. No one knew but young Walter, who we may be sure had not lost a look or a word of the stranger, and who had read everything in his invalid childhood. The boy was not bold enough to answer the question loud out, but he whispered it to some older friend, who told the poet, no doubt with an indication of the blushing and eager lad from whom it came, which procured him a word and a look never forgotten. But there passed at the same time a thought through young Walter's mind, the swift reflection of that never-failing criticism of youth which pierces unaware through all wrappings and veils of the soul. "I remember I thought Burns's acquaintance with English poetry was rather limited; and also that having twenty times the ability of Allan Ramsay and of Fergusson, he talked of them with too much humility as his models." The much-read boy was a little shocked, no doubt disturbed in his secret soul that the poet—so far above any other poet that was to be seen about the world in those days—should not have known that verse: though indeed men better read than Burns might have been excused for their want of acquaintance with a minor poet like Langhorne; but how true was the indignant observation, half angry, that with "twenty times the ability" it was Allan Ramsay and the still less important unfortunate young Fergusson to whom Burns looked up! Did the boy wonder perhaps, though too loyal to say it—for criticism at his age is always keen—whether there might be a something not quite real in that devotion, and ask in the recesses of his mind whether it was possible for such a man to be so self-deceived?

There were no doubt various affectations about Burns, as when he talks big in his diary of observing character and finding this pursuit the greatest entertainment of his life in Edinburgh, with a pretension very general among half-educated persons: but there is no reason to believe that he was not quite genuine about his predecessors. A poet is not necessarily a critic; and Allan Ramsay's fame had been exactly of the popular kind which would attract a son of the soil, whereas Fergusson was the object of Burns's especial tenderness, pity, and regard. And it is touching to recollect that the only sign he left of himself in Edinburgh, where for the first time he learned what it was to mix in fine company and to feel the freedom of money in his pocket, from which he could afford a luxury, was to place a stone over the grave of Fergusson in the Canongate Churchyard, where he lay unknown. His application to the Kirk-Session for leave to do this is still kept upon the books—a curious interruption amid the minutes of church discipline and economics. One wonders if that homely memorial is kept as it ought to be. It is a memorial not only of the admiration of one poet for another, but of Burns's poignant pity—a wellnigh intolerable pang—for a young soul who preceded himself in the way of poetry and despair, one whose life, destined to better and brighter things, had been flung away like a weed on the dismal strand. Only twenty-three years of poetry and folly had sufficed that other reckless boy to destroy himself and shatter his little lamp of light. Burns was only a few years older, and perhaps, though on the heights of triumph, felt something of that horrible tide already catching his own feet to sweep him too into the abyss. There are few things in the world more pathetic than this tribute of his to the victim who had gone before him.

I may perhaps venture to say, with an apology for recurring to a subject dealt with in another book, that this poetic visit to Edinburgh reminds me of the visit of another poet in every way very different from Burns to another city which cannot be supposed to resemble Edinburgh except in the wonderful charm and attraction for devotees which she possesses. There is indeed no just comparison between Petrarch at Venice and Burns at Edinburgh, nothing but the fantastic link, often too subtle to be traced, which makes the mind glide or leap over innumerable distances and diversities from one thing to another. The Italian poet came conferring glory, great as a prince, and attended by much the same honours and privileges, though he was but a half priest, the son of an exile, in an age and place where birth and family were of infinitely more importance than they are now. He was the perfection and flower of learning and high culture, and a fame which had reached the point which is high-fantastical, and can mount no farther—and he came to a palace allotted to him by the Government, and every distinction which it was in their power to bestow, and demeaned himself en bon prince, adorning with skilful eloquent touches of description the glorious scene beneath his windows, the pageants at which he was an honoured spectator. Nothing could be more unlike the young, shy, proud, yet genial-hearted rustic, holding firmly by that magic wand of poetry which was his sole right to consideration, and facing the curious, puzzled, patronising world with a certain suspicion, a certain defiance, as of one whom no craft or wile could betray or pretension daunt—yet ready to melt into an enthusiasm almost extravagant when a lovely young woman or a noble youth pushed open with a touch the door always ajar, or at least unfastened, of his heart.

"The mother may forget the child That smiles sae sweetly on her knee; But I'll remember thee, Glencairn, And a' that thou hast done for me!"

What Glencairn had done was nothing but kindness, a warm reception which not even the poet's susceptibility could think condescending: but he is repaid with an exuberant, extravagant gratitude. Such was the man; ever afraid to compromise his dignity, but with no measure for the overflowings of his heart. Petrarch, so much more assured in his eminence and superiority to all living poets, was driven from his palace on the Riva and all his delights by the impertinent gibes of some foolish young men. But Burns was flattered and caressed to the top of his bent, and—forgotten, or at least dropped, and no more thought of. He returned to Edinburgh only to find that, the gloss of novelty having worn off, his friends were no longer ready to move heaven and earth in order to bring him to their parties, though probably had he chosen he might have worked himself back "into society" in a slower but more permanent fashion. This, however, he did not choose, but fell back among the convivial middle class, the undistinguished and over merry, where nobody thought it too great humility to refer to Allan Ramsay and Fergusson as his models. It must be recollected, however, that his second visit to Edinburgh, and what seems in the telling a foolish and almost vulgar flirtation, produced one of the most impassioned and exquisite songs of love and despair which has ever been written in any language.

"Ae fond kiss, and then we sever; Ae farewell, alas! for ever!"

There is a stillness of exhausted feeling in this wonderful utterance which is the very soul of despair.

There has been no more remarkable moment in the experience of the town which has known so many strange and striking scenes, though its interest has little to do with history or even with national feeling. It is pure humanity in an unusual development, an episode in the life of the poet such as has many less important parallels, but scarcely any so fully representative and typical. It discloses to us suddenly, as by a flash of light striking into the darkness, the persons, the entertainments, the sentiments of a hundred years ago. We make improvements daily in external matters, but society—we had almost said humanity—rarely learns. There is not the smallest hope that in Edinburgh or elsewhere a young man of genius in Burns's position would now be either more wisely noticed or more truly benefited by such a period of close contact with people who ought by experience and knowledge to know better than he. The only thing that is probable is a falling-off, not an advance. I think it highly doubtful whether a ploughman from Ayrshire, however superlative his genius, would now be received at all in "the best houses" and by the first men and women in Edinburgh; and if not in Edinburgh, surely nowhere else would such a reception as that given to Burns await the untutored poet. The world has seldom another chance permitted to it, and in this case I cannot but think it would be worse and not better used.



CHAPTER III

THE SHAKSPEARE OF SCOTLAND

There are many variations in degree of the greatest human gifts, but they are few in kind. The name we have ventured to place at the head of this chapter is one not so great as that of Shakspeare, not so all-embracing—though widely-embracing beyond any other second—not so ideal, not so profound. Walter Scott penetrated with a luminous revelation all that was within his scope, the most different kinds and classes of men, those whom he loved (and he loved all whom it was possible to love) and the few whom he hated, with the same comprehension and power of disclosure. But Shakspeare was not restrained by the limits of any personal scope or knowledge. He knew Lear and Macbeth, and Hamlet and Prospero, though they were beings only of his own creation. He could embody the loftiest passion in true flesh and blood, and show us how a man can be moved by jealousy or ambition in the highest superlative degree and yet be a man with all the claims upon our understanding and pity that are possessed by any brother of our own. Nothing like Lear ever came in our Scott's way: that extraordinary embodiment of human passion and weakness, the forlorn and awful strength of the aged and miserable, did not present itself to his large and genial gaze. It would not have occurred to him perhaps had he lived to the age of Methuselah. He knew not those horrors and dreadful depths of humanity that could make such tragic passion possible. But he had his revenge in one way even upon Shakspeare. Dogberry and Verges, as types of the muddle-headed old watch—pompous, confused, and self-important—are always diverting; but they would have been men not all ridiculous had Scott taken them in hand—real creatures of flesh and blood, not watchmen in the abstract. Our greater poet did not take trouble enough to make them individual, his fancy carrying him otherwhere, and leaving him scarce the time to put his jotting down. To Shakspeare the great ideals whom he almost alone has been able to make into flesh and blood; to Scott all the surrounding world, the men as we meet them about the common thoroughfares of life. He knows no Rosalind nor Imogen, but on the other hand Jeanie Deans and Jenny Headrigg would have been impossible to his great predecessor. Both, we may remark, are incapable of a young hero—the Claudios and the Bertrams being if anything a trifle worse than Henry Morton and Young Lovel. But whereas Shakspeare is greatest above that line of the conventional ideal, it is below that Sir Walter is famous. The one has no restriction, however high he may soar; the other finds nothing so common that he cannot make it immortal.



It is, however, especially in the breadth and largeness of a humanity which has scarcely any limit to its sympathy and understanding that the great romancist of Scotland resembles the greatest of English poets. They are both so great, so broad, so little restrained by any individual limitations, that a perverse criticism has made this catholic and all-comprehending nature a kind of reproach to both, as though that great and limpid mirror of their minds, in which all nature was reflected, was less noble than the sharp face of a stone which can catch but one ray. They were both subject to political prejudices and prepossessions. Shakspeare has made of many a youth of the nineteenth century an ardent Lancastrian, ready to pluck a red rose with Somerset and die for Margaret and her prince; and Scott in like manner has made many a Jacobite, though in the latter case our novelist is too full of sense even in the midst of his own inclinations to become ever an out-and-out partisan. But, except these prepossessions, they have no parti pris. Every faction renders up its soul of meaning, the most diverse figures unclose themselves side by side. The wit, the scholar, the true soldier, the braggart and thief, the Jew and the Christian, the Hamlet, hero of all time, and Shallow and Slender from the fat pastures of English rural life, come all together, each as true as if on him alone the poet's eye had fixed. And Scott is like him, setting before us with unerring pencil the old superstitious despot of mediaeval France, the bustling pedant of St. James's, the ploughmen and shepherds, the churchmen, the Border reivers and Highland caterans, the broad country lying under a natural illumination, without strain or effort, large and temperate as the day. Neither in the greatest poet nor the great romancer is there any force put upon the natural fulness of life to twist its record into a narrow circle with one motive only. It is the round world and all that it inhabits, the grandeur and divinity of a universe, that delights them. Their view is large as the vision of God, or as nearly so as is given to mortal eyes. It is in this, above all, that they resemble each other. In degree Shakspeare, it need not be said, is all-transcendent, reaching heights such as no other man has reached in delineation and creation: but Scott is of his splendid species, one of his kind, the only one among all the many sons of genius with whom this island has been blessed, for whom the boldest could make such a claim.

Walter Scott belongs to all Scotland. He was, no man more, a lover of the woods and fields, of mountain-sides and pastoral braes, of the river and forest, Ettrick and Tweed and Yarrow, and Perthshire—that princely district, half Highland, half Lowland—and the chain of silvery lochs that pierce the mountain shadows through Stirling and Argyle: every league of the fair country he loved. From the Western Isles and the Orkneys to the very fringe of debatable land which parts the northern and the southern half of Great Britain—is his, and has tokens to show of his presence. When he came home to die at the end of almost the most tragic yet most noble chapter of individual history which our century has known, it was the longing of his sick heart above all other that he should not be so unblest as to lay his bones far from the Tweed.

But yet, above all other places, it was to Edinburgh that Scott belonged. His birth, his growth, the familiar scenes of his youth, his education and training, the business and work of his life, were all associated with the ancient capital. George Square—with its homely and comfortable old-fashion, which has nothing to do with antiquity, the first breaking out of the Edinburgh citizens into large space and air outside the strait boundaries of the city, with the Meadows and their trees beyond, and all the sunshine of the south side to warm the deep corps de logis, the substantial and solid mansions which are so grey without yet so full of warmth and comfort within—was the first home he knew, and his residence up to manhood. No boy could be more an Edinburgh boy. Lame though he was, he climbed every dangerous point upon the hills, and knew the recesses of Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags by heart before he knew his Latin grammar. His schoolboy fights, his snowballing, the little armies of urchins set in battle array, the friendly feuds of gentle and simple (sometimes attended by hard knocks, as among his own Liddesdale farmers), fill the streets with amusing recollections. And when he was promoted in due time to the Parliament House and to all the frolics of the youthful Bar, and his proud father steps forth in the snuff-coloured suit which Mr. Saunders Fairford wore after him, to tell his friends that "my son Walter passed his private Scots law examination with good approbation," and on Friday "puts on the gown and gives a bit chack of dinner to his friends and acquaintances, as is the custom," how familiar and kindly is the scene, how the sober house lights up, and the good wine about which we have known all our lives comes out of the cellar and the jokes fly round—Parliament House pleasantries and recollections of the witticisms of the Bench gradually giving place to the sallies of the wild young wits, the shaft from the new-bent bow of the young advocate himself. Nothing can be more true and simple than he is through all the tale, or more real than the Edinburgh atmosphere; the fun that is mostly in the foreground; the work that is pushed into corners yet always gets done, though it has not the air of being important except to the excellent father whose steps on the stair are the signal for the disappearance of a chess-board into a drawer or a romance under the papers,—well-known tricks of youth which we have all been guilty of. There is a curious evidence, however, in Lockhart's Life, less known than the usual tales of frolic and apparent idleness, of the professional trick of Scott's handwriting, which showed how steadily he must have laboured even in his delightful, easy, innocently irregular youth. "I allude particularly to a sort of flourish at the bottom of the page, originally, I presume, adopted in engrossing as a safeguard against the intrusion of a forged line between the legitimate text and the attesting signature. He was quite sensible," adds his biographer, "that this ornament might as well be dispensed with; and his family often heard him mutter after involuntarily performing it, 'There goes the old shop again!'" Which of us now could see that flourish without the water coming into our eyes?



It is impossible to eradicate, from the minds of youthful students at least, the admiration which always attends the performances of the young man who gains his successes without apparently working for them. As a matter of fact, it is the work which we ought to respect rather than that apparently fortuitous accidental result: but nothing will ever cure us of our native delight in an effect which appears to have no vulgar cause, and great has been the misery produced by this prejudice to many a youth who has begun with the tradition of easy triumph and presumed upon it to the loss of all his after-life. But when there shows in the apparent idler a sign like this of many a long hour's labour ignored and lightly thought of, covered over with a pleasant veil of fun and ease and happy leisure, the combination is one that no heart can resist.

Scott had read everything he could lay his hands on while he was still a child, and boasted himself a virtuoso, that is, according to his explanation, at six years old, "one who wishes and will know everything;" but his boyish tastes and triumphs became more and more athletic as he gained a firmer use of his bodily powers. No diseased consciousness of disability in respect to his lameness, like that which embittered Byron, could find a place in the rough wholesome atmosphere of the Edinburgh High School and playgrounds, where nobody was too delicate about reminding him of his infirmity, and the stout-hearted little hero took it like a man, offering "to fight mounted," and being tied upon a board accordingly for his first combat. "You may take him for a poor lameter," said one of the Eldin Clerks, a sailor, with equal friendly frankness to a party of strangers, "but he is the first to begin a row, and the last to end it." To such a youth the imperfection was a virtue the more. When the jovial band strolled forth upon long walks the cheerful "lameter" bargained for three miles an hour, and kept up with the best. They would start at five in the morning, beguiling the way with endless pranks, on one occasion at least without a single sixpence in all their youthful pockets with which to refresh themselves during a thirty miles' round. "We asked every now and then at a cottage door for a drink of water; and one or two of the goodwives, observing our worn-out looks, brought forth milk instead of water, so with that and hips and haws we came in little the worse." Little they cared for fatigue and inconvenience; they were things to laugh over when the lads got back. Scott only wished he had been a player on the flute, like George Primrose in the Vicar of Wakefield, and his father shook his head and doubted the boy was born "for nae better than a gangrel scrapegut"—reproach of little gravity, as the expedition so poorly provisioned was of little harm. Thus the young gentlemen bore cheerfully what would have been hardship to a ploughman, and gibed even at each other's weaknesses without a spark of unkindness, which made the weakness itself into a robust matter of fact not to be brooded over. High susceptibility might have suffered from the treatment, but high susceptibility generally means egotism and inordinate self-esteem, qualities which it is the very best use of public school and college to conjure away.

Nothing indeed more cheerful, more full of endless frolic and enjoyment, fresh air and fun and feeling, ever existed than the young manhood of Walter Scott. Talk of Scotch gravity and seriousness! The houses in which they were received as they roamed about—farmers' or lairds', it was all the same to the merry lads—were only too uproarious in their mirth; with songs and laughter they made the welkin ring. At home in Edinburgh the fun might be less noisy, but it was not less sincere. In the very Parliament House itself the young men clustered in their corner, telling each other the last good things, and with much ado to keep their young laughter within the bounds of decorum. The judge on the Bench, the Lord President himself, greatest potentate of all, was not more safe from the audacious wits than poor Peter Peebles. There was nothing they did not laugh at, themselves and each other as much as Lord Braxfield, and all the humours of a town more full of anecdote and jest, laughable eccentricity and keen satire and amusing comment, than any town in literature. The best joke of all perhaps was Sydney Smith's famous bon mot about the surgical operation, which no doubt he meant as an excellent joke in the midst of that laughing community, where the fun was only too fast and furious. Nowadays, when life is more temperate and the world in general has mended its manners, the habits of that period fill us with dismay; but perhaps after all there was less harm done than appears, and not more of the fearful tribute of young life which our fated race is always paying than is still exacted amid a population much less generally addicted to excess. But that of course increased rather than diminished the jovial aspect of Edinburgh life when Walter Scott was young, and when the few cares he had in hand, the occasional bit of work, interfered very little with the warm and lively social life in the midst of which he had been born. He dwelt, in every sense of the word, among his own people, his friends, the sons of his father's friends, his associates all belonging to families like his own, of good if modest rank and lineage, the "kent folk" of whom Scotland loves to keep up the record. This, which is perhaps one of the greatest advantages with which a young man can enter on life, was his from his infancy. He and his companions had been at school together, together in the college classes, in frequent social meetings, on the floor of the Parliament House. Familiar faces and kind greetings were round him wherever he went. No doubt these circumstances, so genial, so friendly and favourable, helped to perfect the most kind, the most generous and sunshiny of natures. And thus no man could be more completely at once the best product and most complete representative of his native soil.

His life too was as prosperous and full of good fortune and happiness as a man could desire. He married at twenty-six, and a few years later received the appointment of Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire, which rendered him independent of the precarious incomings of his profession, and made the pleasure he always took in roaming the country into a necessary part of his life's work. He had begun a playful and pleasurable authorship some time before with some translations from the German, Buerger's Lenore and Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen—the first of which was hastily made into a little book, daintily printed and bound, in order to help his suit with an early love, so easy, so little premeditated, was this beginning. With equal simplicity and absence of intention he slid into the Border Minstrelsy, which he intended not for the beginning of a long literary career, but in the first place for "a job" to Ballantyne the printer, whom he had persuaded to establish himself in Edinburgh—the best of printers and the most attached of faithful and humble friends—and for fun and the pleasure of scouring the country in pursuit of ballads, which was a search he had already entered upon to his great enjoyment. From this nothing was so easy as to float into original poetry, inspired by the same impulse and inspiration as his ballads. One of the ladies of the house of Buccleuch told him the story of the elfin page, and begged him to make a ballad of it; and from this suggestion the Lay of the Last Minstrel arose. The time was ripe for giving forth all that had been unconsciously stirring in his teeming fertile imagination. It came at once like a sudden bursting into flower, with a splendid eclosion, out-bursting, involuntary, unlaborious, delightful to himself as to mankind. From henceforward his name stood in one of the highest places of literature and his fame was assured.



Nothing could be more unintentional, more spontaneous, almost careless; a thing done for his pleasure far more than with any serious purpose; nothing—except the later beginning, equally unintentional, of a still more important stream of production. The poems of Scott will always be open to much criticism; even those who love them most—and there are many whose love for this fresh, free, spontaneous, delightful fountain of song is strong enough to repress every impulse of criticism and transport it beyond the reach of comment to a romantic enchanted land of its own, where it flows in native sunshine and delight for ever—declining to pronounce any definite judgment as to their greatness. But to Scott in his after-work we are inclined to say no man worthy of expressing an opinion can give any but the highest place. It is true, and the fact has to be admitted with astonishment and regret, that one great writer, his countryman, speaking the same language and in every way capable of pronouncing judgment, has failed to appreciate Sir Walter. We cannot tell why, nor pretend to solve that amazing question. Perhaps it was the universal acclaim, the consent of every voice, that awoke the germ of perversity that was in Thomas Carlyle: an impulse of contradiction, especially in face of an opinion too unanimous, which is one of our national characteristics: perhaps one of those prejudices pertinacious as the rugged peasant nature itself, which sometimes warps the clearest judgment; perhaps, but this we find it difficult to believe, a narrower intensity and passion of meaning in himself which found little reflection in the great limpid mirror which Scott held up to nature. The beginning of Scott's chief and greatest work was as fortuitous, as accidental (if we may use the word), as the poetry. He took up by some passing impulse the idea of a prose story on the events of the 'forty-five, which perhaps he considered too recent to be treated in poetry; wrote (everybody knows the story) half a volume, read it to a trusted critic, who probably considered it foolish for a man who had risen to the heights of fame by one kind of composition to risk himself now with another. It is very likely that Scott himself was easily moved to the same opinion. He tossed the MS. into a drawer, and gave it up. There had been no special motive in the effort, and it cost him nothing to put it aside, to whistle for his dogs, and go out for a long round by wood and hill, or to take his gun or rod, or to entertain his visitors—all of which were more rational, more entertaining, and altogether important things to do than the writing of a dull story, which after all was not his line. For years the beginning chapters of Waverley lay there unknown. They lay very quietly, we may well believe, not bursting the dull enclosure as they might have done had the Baron of Bradwardine been yet born; but that good young Waverley was always a little dull, and might have slept till doomsday had nothing occurred to disturb his rest. One day, however, some fishing tackle was wanted for the use of one of Scott's perpetual visitors at Ashiestiel—not even for himself, for some chance man taking advantage of the Shirra's open house. Visitor arriving in a good hour! fortunate sorner, to be thereafter blessed of all men! Let us hope he got just the lines he wanted and had a good day's sport. For in his search Scott's eyes lighted upon the bundle of written pages. "Hallo!" he must have said to himself, "there they are! Let's see if they're as bad as Willie Erskine thought." In his candid soul he did not think they were very good, unless it was perhaps the description of Waverley Honour, a great mild English mansion which he would admire all the more that it was so unlike Tully Veolan. Perhaps it was the contrast which brought into his teeming brain a sudden vision of that "Scottish manor-house sixty years since," which he went off straightway and built in his eighth chapter with the baron and all his surroundings, which must have been awaiting impatient that happy moment to burst into life.

And thus by spontaneous accident, by delightful, careless chance, so to speak, the thing was done. One wonders by what equally, nay more fortunate unthought-of haphazard it was, that the country rogue Shakspeare, his bright eyes shining with mock penitence for the wildness of his woodland career, and the air and the accent of the fields still on his honeyed lips, first found out that he could string a story together for the theatre and make the old knights and the fair ladies live again. Of this there is no record, but only enough presumption, we think, to make it sufficiently clear that the discovery which has ever since been one of the chief glories of the English name, and added the most wonderful immortal inhabitants to the population, was made, like Scott's, by what seems a divine chance, without apparent preparation or likelihood. In our day much more importance is given to a development which the scientific thinker would fondly hope to be traceable by all the leadings of race and inheritance into an evolution purely natural and to be expected; while, on the other hand, there is nothing which appears more splendid and dignified to others than the aspect of a life devoted to poetry, in which the man becomes but a kind of solemn incubator of his own thoughts. It will always be, however, an additional delight to the greater part of the human race to see how here and there the greatest of all heavenly tools is found unawares by the happy hand that can wield it, no one knowing who has put it there ready for his triumphant grasp when the fated moment comes.

Everybody will remember as a pendant—but one so much more grave that we hesitate to cite it, though the coincidence is curious—the pause made by Dante in the beginning of the Inferno, which resembles so exactly the pause in Scott's career. The great Florentine had written seven cantos of his wonderful poem when the rush of his affairs carried him away from all such tranquil work and left the Latin fragment, among other more vulgar papers, shovelled hastily into some big cassone in the house in Florence from which he was a banished man. It was found there after five years by a nephew who would fain have tried his prentice hand upon the poem, yet finally took the better part of sending it to its author—who immediately resumed Io dico sequitando, in a burst of satisfaction to have recovered what he must have begun with far more zeal and intention than Scott. The resemblance, however, which is so curiously exact, the seven cantos and the seven chapters, the five years' interval, the satisfaction of the work resumed, is, different as are the men and their work, one of those fantastic parallels which are delightful to the fantastic soul. Nothing could be more unlike than that dark and splendid poem to Scott's sunshiny and kindly art; nothing less resembling than the proud embittered exile with his hand against every man, and the genial romancer whose heart overflowed with the milk of human kindness. Yet this strange occurrence in both lives takes an enhanced interest from the curious dissimilarity which makes the repetition of the fact more curious still.

The sudden burst into light and publicity of a gift which had been growing through all the changes of private life, of the wonderful stream of knowledge, recollection, divination, boundless acquaintance with and affection for human nature, which had gladdened the Edinburgh streets, the Musselburgh sands, the Southland moors and river-sides, since ever Walter Scott had begun to roam among them, with his cheerful band of friends, his good stories, his kind and gentle thoughts—was received by the world with a burst of delighted recognition to which we know no parallel. We do not know, alas! what happened when the audience in the Globe Theatre made a similar discovery. Perhaps the greater gift, by its very splendour, would be less easily perceived in the dazzling of a glory hitherto unknown, and obscured it may be by jealousies of actors and their inaptitude to do justice to the wonderful poetry put into their hands. But of that we know nothing. We know, however, that there were no two opinions about Waverley. It took the world by storm, which had had no such new sensation and no such delightful amusement for many a day. It was not only the beginning of a new and wonderful school in romance, a fresh chapter in literature, but the revelation of a region and a race unknown. Scotland had begun to glow in the sunshine of poetry, in glimpses of Burns's westland hills and fields, of Scott's moss-troopers and romantic landscapes, visions of battle and old tradition: but the wider horizon of a life more familiar, of a broad country full of nature, full of character, running over with fun and pawky humour, thrilling with high enthusiasm and devotion, where men were still ready to risk everything in life for a falling cause, and other men not unwilling to pick up the spoils, was a discovery and surprise more delightful than anything that had happened to the generation. The books flew through the island like magic, penetrating to corners unthought of, uniting gentle and simple in an enthusiasm beyond parallel. How the multitude got at them at all it is difficult to understand, for these were the days of really high prices, before the actual cost of a book got modified by one-half as now, and when there were as yet no cheap editions. Waverley was printed in three small volumes at the cost of a guinea. We believe that to buy books was more usual then than now, and there were circulating libraries everywhere, conveying perhaps the stream of literature more evenly over the country than can be attained by one gigantic Mudie. At all events; by whatever means it was procured, Waverley and its successors were read everywhere, not only in great houses but in small, wherever there was intelligence and a taste for books; and the interest, the curiosity, the eagerness, were everywhere overwhelming. I have heard of girls in a dressmaker's workroom who kept the last volume in a drawer, from whence it was read aloud by one to the rest, the drawer being closed hurriedly whenever the mistress came that way. From this humble scene to the highest in the land, where the Prince Regent sat—

"His table spread with tea and toast, Death-warrants, and the Morning Post,"

these volumes went everywhere. One of them lies before me now in rough boards of paper, with the "blue back" of which one of Scott's correspondents talks, not a prepossessing volume, but independent of externals and all things else except its own native excellence and power.

For fifteen years after, this stream of living literature poured forth in the largest generous volume like a great river, through every region where English was spoken or known. His work was as the march of a battalion, always increasing, new detachments appearing suddenly, now an individual, now a group, to join the line. The Baron of Bradwardine with his attendant bailie; Vich Ian Vohr and noble Evan Dhu, and all the clan; the family at Ellangowan and that at Charlieshope, good Dandie and all his delightful belongings; Jock Jabos and the rest; Monkbarns and Edie Ochiltree, and all the pathos of the Mucklebackits; Bailie Nicol Jarvie and the Dougal Cratur; humours of the clachan and the hillside; Jeanie Deans in her perfect humbleness and truth. It would be vain to attempt to name the new inhabitants of Scotland who appeared out of the unseen wherever Scott moved. Neither to himself nor to his audience could it seem that these friends of all were new created, invented by any man. Scott, who alone could do it, withdrew the veil that had concealed them. He opened up an entire country, a full world of men and women, so living, so various, with their natural garb of fitting language, and their heart of natural sentiment, and the thoughts which they must have been thinking, by inalienable right of their humanity. There might have been better plots or more carefully constructed stories; as indeed in life, heaven knows, all our stories might be much better constructed; but could we conceive it possible that these, our country-folk and friends, could be dismissed again off the face of the earth, how impoverished, how diminished, would Scotland be! The want of them is more than we could contemplate, and we can well understand how our country must have appeared to the world a poor little turbulent country, without warmth or wealth, before these representatives of a robust and manifold race were born.

Yet, amid the delightful enrichment of these productions to the nation and the world, the man himself who produced them was perhaps the finest revelation of all. And here he transcends for once the larger kindred genius of whom we do not know, yet believe, that he was such a man as Scott, though better off in one way and less well in others. Shakspeare must have been somewhat oppressed with noble patrons, which Scott never was—patrons to whom his own splendid courtesy and the magnifying glamour in his poetic eyes must sometimes have made him more flattering than was needful, overwhelming them with magnificent words; but on the other hand he had not those modern drawbacks under which Scott's great career was so bitterly burdened, the strain for money, the constant combat with debt and liability. To bear the first yoke must have taken much of a man's strength and tired him exceedingly: but to bear the second is perhaps the severest test to which any buoyant spirit can be put. And from the very beginning of his career as a novelist Scott had this burden upon his shoulders. He bore the chains very lightly at first with a hundred hairbreadth 'scapes which made the struggle—as even that struggle can be made while the sufferer is strong and young—almost exhilarating, with a glee in the relief and the power to surmount every difficulty, and a faith strengthened by numberless examples of the certainty—however dark things might seem up to the very last moment—of bursting through, with an exquisite sensation of success, the hardest coil of circumstance. But as Scott grew older these obstacles grew stronger; he could not put sense or prudence into the heads of his colleagues, and it was hard to teach himself, the most liberal, the most hospitable and princely of entertainers, those habits of frugality which are never harder to learn than by a Scots gentleman of the ancient strain accustomed to keep open house. I do not think it has ever been acknowledged that there is in this desperate struggle to keep afloat a certain intoxication of its own. To foil your pursuers, your enemies, whether they take the form of armed assailants or of pressing creditors, by ever another and another daring combination, by sudden reliefs unthought of, by a bold coup executed at the very moment when the crisis seems inevitable, by all the happy yet desperate chances of warfare, has a fascination in it which no one could conceive as attending a sordid struggle for money. The pursuit becomes exciting, breathless, in proportion as it becomes desperate. Sometimes, when all the stars in their courses have seemed to be fighting against the combatant, a sudden aid like the very interposition of heaven will bring him safety; and a confidence in this interposition takes possession of him. He does not see how deliverance can come, but it will come. His labouring breast strains, his brain whirls, he is at his last gasp: when all at once the heart leaps up in his bosom, the wheels in his head stand still, a flash of satisfaction comes over him. Once more and once more, again and again, at the last gasp of the struggle he is saved.

No doubt something of this was in the long and desperate fight which Scott waged with the creditors of the Ballantynes, who were also his own. The worst of the struggle is that it almost legalises a prodigality which to men always fixed on solid ground would be impossible. The conviction that the money will come somehow, added to the still more intoxicating conviction that this somehow depends oftenest upon your own unrivalled power of work, and the confidence which all men have in you, permits, almost sanctions, a yielding to personal temptations, and the indulgence of a little taste and inclination of your own in the midst of so many burdens for others. Thus Abbotsford grew, of which all the critics have talked as if its, alas! somewhat sham antiquity and its few acres had been the cause of all the trouble. One could have wished that Scott's taste had been more true, that he had so dearly bought and so fondly collected curiosities more worthy, that he should have had a genuine old house, a direct and happy lineage, son and son's son, to bear his name—not to posterity, with whom it was safe, but on Tweedside among the other Scotts,—a kindly and not ignoble ambition. But he has himself forestalled the criticisms of the antiquarians by that delightful record of good Monkbarns's mistakes and deceptions which would make us forgive him for any "lang ladle" or fictitious relic; and it would be a hard heart that would be otherwise than thankful that he had so much as Abbotsford to indemnify him for his labours and trials. As the time approached when he was no longer able to maintain that gallant struggle, and the power of labour failed and confidence was lost, the position of the man becomes more tragical than the spectator can well bear to look upon. Who can read unmoved the story of the time when his faithful friends (though it was their necessities that had pulled him down to the ground of this bitter failure) had to come and tell him that his last romance was scarcely worth paper and print? who could refrain from going down on his knees to kiss that failing hand which could now only bring forth Count Robert of Paris where once it had set out in glorious array of battle Sir Kenneth of Scotland, and the stout old Constable of Chester, and Front de Boeuf, and the Scottish archers—and which still could not be inactive, but would struggle on, on—to pay that miserable money and leave behind a spotless name!

There is one melancholy and almost terrible consolation in such a heartbreaking record, terrible from the light it throws upon the constitution of human nature and the conditions of that supreme sympathy which is the noblest kind of fame. Had Sir Walter been able to throw his burdens from him, had he loosed the millstone from his neck and retired in full credit and comfort to his Abbotsford to pass the conclusion of peaceful and glorious days on the banks of the Tweed—had we known him only as the greatest romancist of the world, the next to Shakspeare in large creation and revelation of mankind, proud had every Scotsman been of his name, and fondly had the nation cherished his memory. But when his brilliant and wonderful life fell under the shadow of all these tragical clouds, when its course was arrested by obstacles which are usually unsurmountable, before which any other man must have broken down, when he stood in the face of fate, in the face of every misfortune, broken in health, in hope, in power, a lonely man where he had been the centre of every joy in life, an enchanter with his magic wand broken and his witchery gone—then, and then only, does Scott attain his highest greatness and give the world most noble assurance of a man. His diary as his life dwindles away, that life once so splendid and so full, is like the noblest poem—its broken and falling sentences go direct to the heart. Fuimus was never written more grandly, with more noble patience and valour. Without this downfall his triumph might have been but as the other triumph—the tragedy of the conclusion is a sight for men and angels. Lockhart, who preserves the record for us, becomes for the time the greatest, with a subject more moving, more noble, than any that his hero had selected from the records of the ages. The pity and anguish grow too much for the spectator. We are spectators no longer, but mournful and devoted retainers standing about, all hushed and silent, scarcely able either to shed or to restrain the choking tears.

One asks one's self, Is this the cost of supreme human power? is it to be bought by nothing but the agony in which failure, real or apparent, is a part, and in which all the exquisite tenement of reputation, happiness, and delightsome life seems to crumble down like a house of cards before our eyes? Dread question for the genius of the future, sad yet sublime problem of the past! At all events it was so in the life of Scott, which in all its greatness was never so great, so touching, so secure of love and honour, as in the moment when his weapons fell from his hands and his genius and being alike failed, breaking down in a last supreme struggle for justice and honour and fair dealing, to avoid what he thought disgrace and the intolerable stigma of having done any man wrong.

It is a penalty of such greatness, especially in the midst of an enthusiastic and unanimous country, that it becomes more or less a thing to trade upon, the subject of vague patriotic vapourings, and much froth of foolish talk from uninstructed lips in the following generations. As Stratford-on-Avon is in respect to Shakspeare all Scotland is in respect to Burns and Scott. It has even become a mark of culture and superiority among certain fine spirits in consequence to pretend to despise the former of these names—perhaps really to despise it, for there is no fathom that can sound the depths of human foolishness even in the learned and wise. The vulgarity of fame when it becomes the cry of the most prosaic is, however, calculated justly to alarm the literary soul, and in the excess of Scott monuments, and wooden quaighs, and tartan paper-knives, there is a damping and depressing quality which we must all acknowledge.



We need not, however, in these follies forget the illuminating presence of Scott in the midst of all the picturesque scenes of what he has proudly called "mine own romantic town." From the High School Yards and "the kittle nine steps," from George Square, lying cosy but grey in the hollow amid the enlarged and beautiful openings of the Meadows, to the Parliament House, withdrawn in the square, once blocked by the Old Tolbooth, now confronted solely by an embellished and restored cathedral, and to the sober street on the other side of the hollow, where to 39 North Castle Street he took his bride and set up his independent home, there is no corner of Edinburgh where his step and voice have not been. And some of the most characteristic scenes which we can call to mind in recent history rise before us in his narrative as if we had been there. The Porteous Mob riots in our ears, the flare of the sudden fire at the gates of the Tolbooth, the blinding smoke, the tramp of the crowd, the sudden concentrated force of that many-headed multitude stilled by stern resolve into unity and action, are as visible as if they had happened yesterday. And after ransacking all the serious volumes that tell the story and picture the aspect of old Edinburgh, we turn back to that tale, and for the first time see the tortuous passage between the church and the Tolbooth, the dark old prison with its lofty turrets, the Luckenbooths linked on to its dark shadow, oppressing the now wide thoroughfare of the High Street, where these buildings have left no trace. No topographical record or painstaking print comes within a hundred miles of that picture, dashed in boldly by the way, to the entrancing tale. I cannot refrain from placing here one or two vignettes, which I have no doubt the artist himself will allow to surpass his best efforts, and which set the landscape before us with a distinct yet ideal and poetical grace which pencil and graver can very seldom equal. The first is of the exterior aspect of Edinburgh.

"Marching in this manner they speedily reached an eminence, from which they could view Edinburgh stretching along the ridgy hill which slopes eastward from the Castle. The latter, being in a state of siege, or rather of blockade, by the northern insurgents, who had already occupied the town for two or three days, fired at intervals upon such parties of Highlanders as exposed themselves, either on the main street, or elsewhere in the vicinity of the fortress. The morning being calm and fair, the effect of this dropping fire was to invest the Castle in wreaths of smoke, the edges of which dissipated slowly in the air, while the central veil was darkened ever and anon by fresh clouds poured forth from the battlements; the whole giving, by the partial concealment, an appearance of grandeur and gloom, rendered more terrific when Waverley reflected on the cause by which it was produced, and that each explosion might ring some brave man's knell."

The second introduces us to the interior of the city.

"Under the guidance of his trusty attendant, Colonel Mannering, after threading a dark lane or two, reached the High Street, then clanging with the voices of oyster-women and the bells of pie-men, for it had, as his guide assured him, just 'chappit eight upon the Tron.' It was long since Mannering had been in the street of a crowded metropolis, which, with its noise and clamour, its sounds of trade, of revelry and of license, its variety of lights, and the eternally changing bustle of its hundred groups, offers, by night especially, a spectacle which, though composed of the most vulgar materials when they are separately considered, has, when they are combined, a striking and powerful effect on the imagination. The extraordinary height of the houses was marked by lights, which, glimmering irregularly along their front, ascended so high among the attics, that they seemed at length to twinkle in the middle sky. This coup d'oeil, which still subsists in a certain degree, was then more imposing, owing to the uninterrupted range of buildings on each side, which, broken only at the space where the North Bridge joins the main street, formed a superb and uniform Place, extending from the front of the Luckenbooths to the head of the Canongate, and corresponding in breadth and length to the uncommon height of the buildings on either side."

Since then this great Place has become more majestic, as well as more open, by the clearing away of the Luckenbooths: but nothing can be finer than the touch of the graphic yet reticent pencil which sets down before us the glimmering of the irregular lights which seemed at last to twinkle in the middle sky. This was how the main street of Edinburgh still appeared when Scott himself was a boy, and no doubt he must have caught the aspect of the previous sketch on some king's birthday or other public holiday, the 4th of June perhaps, that familiar festival in other regions, when the guns of the Castle were saluting and the smoke hanging about those heights like a veil.

It was one of the privations of Scott's life as it began to fall into its last subdued and suffering stage that he had to give up his Edinburgh house and the cheerful company which had so long made his winters pleasant. He loved the country and his home there at all seasons, as the readers of the poetical chapters of friendly dedication and communing addressed to different friends between the cantos of Marmion will well remember: but yet the yearly change, the natural transfer of life in the short days to the cheerful surroundings of town, the twinkling of those very lights, the assembling of bright faces, the meeting of old friends, were always dear to him, and this sacrifice was not one of the least which he made during the tremendous struggle of his waning years.



With no other name could we so fitly close the story of our ancient capital, a story fitfully told with many breaks and omissions, yet offering some thread of connection to link together the different eras of a picturesque and characteristic national life. Had space and knowledge permitted, there is, in the records of Scottish law alone, much that is interesting, along with a still larger contribution of wit and humour and individual character, to the elucidation of the period which passed between the end of the history of Edinburgh under her native kings and the beginning of her brilliant record under the modern reign of literature and poetry. This book, however, does not pretend to set forth the Edinburgh of the Kirk or the Parliament House, each of which has an existing record of its own. Seated on the rocks which are more old than any history, though those precipices are now veiled with verdure and softness, and the iron way of triumphant modern science runs at their feet; with her crown of sacred architecture hanging over her among the mists, and the little primeval shrine mounted upon her highest ridge; with her palace, all too small for the requirements of an enlarged and splendid royalty, and the great crouched and dormant sentinel of nature watching over her through all the centuries; with her partner, sober and ample, like a comely matron, attended by all the modern arts and comforts, seated at the old mother's feet,—Edinburgh can never be less than royal, one of the crowned and queenly cities of the world. It does not need for this distinction that there should be millions of inhabitants within her walls, or all the great threads of industry and wealth gathered in her hands. The pathos of much that is past and over for ever, the awe of many tragedies, a recollection almost more true than any reality of the present, of ages and glories gone—add a charm which the wealthiest and greatest interests of to-day cannot give, to the city, always living, always stirring, where she stands amid traditionary smoke and mist, the grey metropolis of the North, the Edinburgh of a thousand fond associations,

Our Own Romantic Town.



THE END

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Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinburgh