CHAPTER VIII

THE EDINBURGH OF SIR WALTER SCOTT AND HIS CIRCLE

Benevolence, charitableness, tolerance, sympathy with those about him in their joys and their sorrows, kindly readiness to serve others when he could, utter absence of envy or real ill-will,--these are qualities that shine out everywhere in his life and in the succession of his writings.... Positively, when I contemplate this richness of heart in Scott, and remember also how free he was from those moral weaknesses which sometimes accompany and disfigure an unusually rich endowment in this species of excellence ... positively, I say, with all this in my mind, I can express my feeling about Scott no otherwise than by declaring him to have been one of the very best men that ever breathed.

PROFESSOR MASSON’S _Edinburgh Sketches and Memories_.

It is easy to trace Sir Walter Scott’s Edinburgh life from door to door. The house in the College Wynd, in which, on August 15, 1771, he was born, was pulled down in his lifetime. Sir Walter once pointed out its site to Mr. Robert Chambers during one of their walks together, and told him that his father had “received a fair price for his portion of it”; and, when Mr. Chambers naturally suggested that more money might have been made and the public much more gratified had Scott’s birthplace been retained to be shown,--“Ay, ay,” said Sir Walter, “that is very well; but I am afraid I should have required to be dead first, and that would not have been so comfortable, you know.”

The home of his boyhood and youth, 25 George Square, still stands, looking exactly the same to-day as it did then. Here the little lame boy lived, and regretted the country life at Sandyknowe among dogs and sheep and legends; and the troubles of life began for him as he limped backwards and forwards to the High School, or sensitively shrank from the rough tyranny of his elder brother; and the triumphs of life fired him as he took his share in the street “bickers” between the High School boys and the rough lads of Potterrow, or as he gained fame in the High School yard as a story-teller. It was under his parents’ roof in George Square that Scott lived all the years from those schoolboy days till he was a young man of many friendships, and slovenly dress and deep feelings and enthusiasms, studying law in deference to his father’s wishes, but thinking his own long thoughts during his rambles over Blackford Hill and the country round Edinburgh; and at home, in his father’s house, giving full play to his fancies in the safety of his own small den in the sunk basement, where he was surrounded by “more books than shelves,” where he hoarded collections of Scottish and Roman coins, and where he had proudly crossed a claymore and a Lochaber axe over a little print of Prince Charlie. But perhaps the fondest

treasure in that den was a certain china saucer which,--possibly unknown to the father upstairs,--the young Cavalier kept hung on the wall, and whose tale he no doubt often unfolded to his friends. Once upon a time Mrs. Scott’s curiosity had been roused by the visits, night after night, of a mysterious stranger, who came in a sedan-chair and a cloak, and remained closeted with her husband in his business-room till long after the household had retired. Mr. Scott preserved a stern reticence; but woman’s wit found out a way. One night, very late, when the house was silent in sleep, Mrs. Scott entered the business-room with a smile and two cups of tea, and the hospitable suggestion that, as they had sat so long, they might be glad of some refreshment. The stranger proved to be a richly dressed man, who bowed, took one of the cups, and drank it. But Mr. Scott, turning aside, neither drank his tea nor introduced his guest. Presently, returning from showing the stranger out, he took the empty cup, and, throwing up the window-sash, flung it out into the night, with the now famous words, “Neither lip of me nor mine comes after Murray of Broughton’s.”[58]

It was here, in this small den on the sunk floor of 25 George Square, that Jeffrey found Scott when he called on him the evening after he had asked to be introduced to him at the Speculative Society, where young Scott had read a paper on “Ballads”: and Jeffrey evidently did not extend his approval of Scott and of the paper on Ballads to this sunk den,--or was it that Scott had no command of hospitalities in his father’s house?--for they sallied forth together and supped at a tavern. No doubt, before they went, Jeffrey had looked round curiously at the treasures of his new acquaintance, and had been told how the “Broughton saucer” had come by its widowed condition.

It was decided that Scott should become an advocate, and he and his friend Clerk--a friendship made in the High School days, to last through life--read for the Bar together. Poor Scott, with his open-air nature and his dreamy enthusiasms, how he hated the drudgery! But he buckled to it; and every summer morning for two summers he used to walk from George Square to the house of his friend Clerk, “at the extremity of Princes Street, New Town,” arriving at seven o’clock, to rouse his sleepy fellow-student to an examination of Heineccius’s _Analysis of the Institutes and Pandects_ and Erskine’s _Institutes of the Law of Scotland_. It speaks well for Clerk that their friendship did last.

They were called to the Bar together; and together, when the ceremony was over, they stood about in their wigs and gowns in the great hall, till at last Scott whispered to Clerk, imitating a farm servant-lass waiting at the Cross to be hired, “We’ve stood here an hour by the Tron, hinny, and de’il an ane has speered our price.” Before the Court rose, however, Scott had earned his first guinea,--and he spent it on a silver taper-stand for his mother.

It was all in Edinburgh--all his “supreme moments.” Was it not in a shower of rain in Greyfriars’ Churchyard that he met his first love? Greyfriars’ Churchyard in a shower of rain, after a sermon; and Scott offered her his umbrella, and together they walked home under it. Probably it was a very shabby umbrella, for Scott was slovenly in his dress in those days. What did it matter? There were more walks--more talks. Presently Scott’s father thought it right to warn the other father, for Scott was but a dependent youth; and, moreover, his love had been given to the daughter and heiress of Sir John and Lady Jane Stuart Belches of Invermay, and in those days in Scotland every shade of rank was considered. Did Scott ever know what his father had done? Still the romance went on, till the day when Scott rode home from Invermay back to Edinburgh, and “the iron entered into his soul.” A long ride through the beloved Scottish Highlands--

Never the time and the place and the loved one all together.

She married Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo. Of course she did. Had it not been ordained since the beginning of time that she who had won the first love of Walter Scott was to marry another? Who knows her story? Who, for the matter of that, knows his? Who has measured the influence on his life?

It was in Edinburgh that Scott’s youth passed, and that most of the happenings took place that went to the making of him. In Edinburgh was clustered his group of friends: Clerk (afterwards the original of “Darsie Latimer”); Thomas Thomson, the legal antiquary; John Irving; Adam Ferguson; George Cranstoun (afterwards Lord Corehouse); George Abercromby (Lord Abercromby); Patrick Murray of Simprim; Patrick Murray of Auchtertyre; and, most congenial of all to Scott’s own nature, Erskine, the son of a Scottish Episcopalian clergyman of good family, and the only Tory, save Scott himself, among the set of young Whigs then predominant at Parliament House.

In those days Scott indulged in many rambles to the Borders or the Highlands, to interesting neighbourhoods and historic houses and worthy hosts; but it was from one of these excursions that he returned to Edinburgh to see the execution of Watt the republican; and it was in the Edinburgh theatre that he assisted to break the heads of a band of young Irish rowdies who howled and hooted during the National Anthem; and it was in Edinburgh that he haunted the vaults below Parliament House among hoards of MSS. and deeds, and came up again steeped in dust and lore to be made a curator of the Advocates’ Library, with Professor David Hume and Malcolm Laing the historian as his colleagues.

Scott’s first serious attempt at verse was a rhymed translation of Bürger’s _Lenore_. It was written when he was four-and-twenty, and was done under the inspiration of hearing that Mrs. Barbauld, then on her first visit to Edinburgh, had read aloud Taylor’s then unpublished version of it at a party at Dugald Stewart’s. Scott, already deeply interested in German literature, was fired; and one morning before breakfast he brought his translation to show to his friend Miss Cranstoun.

Walter Scott was not without women friends. Miss Cranstoun, to whom he brought his poem before breakfast, had already been his confidante in his love-story. Of his young kinswoman, the wife of the head of his family, Hugh Scott of Harden,--who was a daughter of Count Brühl Martkirchen, Saxon Ambassador at the Court of St. James’s, and Almeria, Dowager Countess of Egremont--he says that she “was the first woman of real fashion that took him up.”

It was about this time also that Scott’s martial ardour and patriotism found vent in helping to organise the Scottish Light-horse Volunteers, in preparation for the expected French Invasion. When, therefore, in his twenty-sixth year, he brought home to Edinburgh the little half-French bride to whose dark prettiness and novel vivacity he had fallen a victim whilst a fellow-visitor at a watering-place, she found a warm welcome awaiting her from a large and various circle of friends, all devoted to her young husband, and sharing with him one or other of his enthusiasms,--military or literary, antiquarian or sporting. Among these must not be forgotten Skene of Rubislaw, whose friendship with Scott began in a mutual love for German literature, and ended only with death.

Scott took his young wife first to lodgings in George Street, his house at 10 South Castle Street not being quite ready; and the following summer he hired that first and humblest of those three country homes near Edinburgh where his happiest days were spent, a pretty cottage, with a garden and a paddock, at Lasswade. It is still standing and unchanged. Here and at Castle Street the young people lived comfortably on their combined incomes for many years, and made themselves and their friends happy with much simple and inexpensive hospitality. At Lasswade it was that they formed friendships with the neighbouring great houses of Melville and Buccleuch; that they were near--as the country counts near--to Scott’s old friends the Clerks of Penicuik and Tytlers of Woodhouselee, and Henry Mackenzie, the “Man of Feeling,” who lived at Auchendinny. And it was at the Lasswade cottage that Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy arrived before breakfast on the morning of September 17, 1803. Scott was then writing the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, and read the first four cantos to Wordsworth. He walked with his guests to Roslin, and afterwards met them for the famous days in the Border country, where he was Sheriff. Hogg’s first celebrated visit was paid at Castle Street. It was in the drawing-room there that the Ettrick Shepherd, feeling sure he “could never do wrong to copy the lady of the house,” lay down at full length on the sofa opposite hers. It was here that he “dined heartily and drank freely and, by jest, anecdote, and song, afforded plentiful merriment.” It was here that, as the hour grew later, his enthusiasm showed itself in a descending warmth of appellations for his host, who, first “Mr. Scott,” became “Shirra,” and then “Scott,” “Walter,” and, finally, “Wattie”; and the “plentiful merriment” must have reached its culmination when Mrs. Scott was addressed as “Charlotte.”

When Thomas Campbell published his “Pleasures of Hope,” Walter Scott was an enthusiastic admirer of his fellow-poet. “I have repeated these lines so often on the North Bridge that the whole fraternity of coachmen know me by tongue as I pass. To be sure, to a mind in sober, serious, street-walking humour, it must bear an appearance of lunacy when one stamps with the hurried pace and fervent shake of the head, which strong, pithy poetry excites.”

Oh days of enthusiasms and strong feelings! Nowadays, we are all jaded with travel, and washed over with the neutral tint of cosmopolitanism, and as insipid as bread and water. No Scott stamps and rolls his head to the rhythm of his thoughts on the North Bridge; no Scott protests out of his full heart against the innovations of Whiggery, and leans his brow against the wall of the Mound, unashamed if his tears be seen by a jesting Jeffrey, and tells him, “No, no--’tis no laughing matter; little by little, whatever your wishes may be, you will destroy and undermine, until nothing of what makes Scotland Scotland shall remain!”[59]

When Scott’s worldly prospects were very prosperous, when he was Sheriff of Selkirk, and the author of the successful _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, and a contributor to the _Edinburgh Review_, under the editorship first of Sydney Smith and then of Jeffrey, he was an established citizen of Edinburgh, in his second house in Castle Street--“poor 39”--as he lived to call it. Here were his most brilliant days spent,--here, and at Ashestiel, the picturesque farm on the banks of the Tweed which superseded the Lasswade cottage, and then at Abbotsford, the proudest home of all. But 39 Castle Street remained his town home through all the brilliant and wonderful years, till the financial crash came in 1826. It was here that Joanna Baillie paid a visit of a week or so,--here that Crabbe stayed,--here that every one of worth or want found a ready welcome. The dining-room in 39 Castle Street!--what scenes and what voices have its walls seen and heard! Here all Scott’s famous dinners took place, including those Sunday ones “without silver dishes” to his intimates--Mrs. Maclean of Torloisk and her daughters; his school friend Clerk; Kirkpatrick Sharpe of caustic humour and scandalous memory; Sir Alexander Boswell of Auchinleck, “Bozzie’s” son, and author of “Jenny dang the weaver”; Sir Alexander Don of Newton; William Allan, the artist; and many others. It was here he had his orderly “den” behind the dining-room, with its many books, its big writing-table, its two armchairs, the staghound on the floor, and the cat safely atop the book-ladder, and one picture--the beautiful, sad face of Graham of Claverhouse, who, as Scott said, “foully traduced” by Covenanting historians, “still passed among the Scottish vulgar for a ruffian desperado.”

It must have been in the window of this study that Scott sat writing night after night, when the son of William Menzies, living at his father’s house in George Street, looked across from the back windows of their house to the back of Scott’s, when, at a gathering of “gay and thoughtless” young men, mostly advocates, he asked one to change places with him that he might not see a hand that fascinated his eye. “It never stops--page after page is finished and thrown on that heap of MS., and still it goes on unwearied--and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that.... I well know what hand it is--’tis Walter Scott’s.”

It was in this self-same study that an attempt was made on Scott’s life by a man named Webber, whose literary efforts Scott had befriended. Webber had taken to drinking, and a sudden mad resentment against Scott filled his unhinged mind. In this study Scott suddenly found himself confronted by a madman with firearms, insisting on a duel then and there; and it was only because of Scott’s absolute self-control and courage that the great man’s life did not end in the year 1818. He suggested that a duel in the house might disturb the ladies of the family and had better be postponed till after dinner; and then, locking up the pistols, he calmly brought Webber into the dining-room, and, whilst they dined with an unconscious hostess, Scott sent for the young man’s friends.

It was to Castle Street that Scott walked home across the Mound leaning on his daughter’s arm, his own trembling, speaking not a word all the way, on the day after the Scottish Regalia had been discovered. It was owing to Scott’s representations to his friend the Prince Regent that the Commission had been appointed to examine the Crown Room in the Castle, and the long-lost Regalia had been brought to light. The next day he and his fellow-commissioners had brought the ladies of their families to view it, and Sophia Scott had been so wrought upon by the sight that she had turned faint, and was drawing back from the group when she heard her father’s voice, “something between anger and despair,” exclaim, “By God, no!” and turned to see that one of the Commissioners had been, in play, about to put the Scottish crown on the head of a young girl present. The father and daughter walked home together in silence, with a new sympathy between them.

It was of this very year, 1818, that Lockhart said: “At this moment, his position, take it for all in all, was, I am inclined to believe, what no other man had ever won for himself by the pen alone. His works were the daily food, not only of his countrymen, but of all educated Europe. His society was courted by whatever England could show of eminence. Station, power, wealth, beauty, and genius, strove with each other in every demonstration of respect and worship, and--a few political fanatics and envious poetasters apart--wherever he appeared, in town or country, whoever had Scotch blood in him, ‘gentle or simple,’ felt it move more rapidly through his veins when he was in the presence of Scott.”[60]

Lockhart goes on to say that, “descending to what many looked on as higher things,” the annual profits of Scott’s novels alone had been for several years not less than £10,000, and his Castle of Abbotsford was being built, and “few doubted that ere long he might receive from the just favour of his Prince some distinction in the way of external rank, such as had seldom before been dreamt of as the possible consequences of mere literary celebrity.”

On February 2, 1820, Scott took Prince Gustavus Vasa, and his attendant, Baron Polier, who were spending some months in Edinburgh, to the window over Constable’s shop in the High Street, to hear George IV. proclaimed King at the site of the Cross. Here Scott lamented to the Prince the “barbarity of the Auld Reekie Bailies,” who had removed the historic Cross; and when the exiled Prince broke down on hearing the National Anthem sung by the crowd, Scott drew Lockhart away into another window, whispering: “Poor lad! poor lad! God help him!”

Scott’s friend and admirer the Prince Regent once King, the distinctions came. In 1820 Scott went to London to receive the baronetcy which, as Lord Sidmouth had told him, it had been the Prince Regent’s desire to confer on him. Whilst in London he sat to Sir Thomas Lawrence for his portrait for the King, and to Chantrey for his bust, and the degree of D.C.L. was offered him by both the English Universities. Three Edinburgh distinctions were conferred on him. He was elected President of the Royal Scottish Society; he was first President of the Bannatyne Club, which he had founded; and he was appointed Professor of Ancient History to the Royal Scottish Academy. Those years were his most active time as a citizen as well as an author, for he was chairman of nearly every public meeting, or charity, or educational scheme in the town. Every day must have seen him limping along Princes Street, recognised by all, coming from Parliament House, or his meetings, or his printer’s; perhaps one of a group talking eagerly, pausing to disperse at the door of some bookshop or on the steps of a club, or at the corner of Castle Street. Many a head must have turned to gaze after the rugged familiar figure; many a whisper to child or stranger must have followed him, “There, look! That is Sir Walter Scott!”

In August 1822 George IV. paid his state visit to Edinburgh, and stayed a fortnight in the capital of the ancient kingdom. This fortnight was perhaps the proudest and most brilliant of Scott’s life,--“his supreme moment”--and again it was in Edinburgh. The Tories, their dream of Jacobitism dead with the Cardinal of York, were more personally loyal than the Whigs; and Scott, most tory of Tories, was loyalest of the loyal. It was his influence that had brought about the royal visit, and on him devolved all the arrangements; and for weeks Castle Street was like a green-room, filled by all the actors in the great play. When the day came and in the rain the King’s yacht cast anchor in Leith Roads--where Mary Stuart’s galleys had in the mist cast anchor on a bygone August day--Scott rowed alongside and boarded the _Royal George_. The King toasted him in native whisky; and Scott, in his enthusiasm, asked leave to keep the glass. He put it, carefully wrapped up, in his deep coat-tail pocket, and went home holding the skirt of his coat carefully in front of him. Alas for the vanity of human wishes! At Castle Street he found that Crabbe the poet had chosen this inopportune season to arrive unexpectedly on a visit. Scott, ever hospitable, welcomed him warmly, and promptly sat down beside him; and crash!--the glass was smashed to atoms.

At six next morning, Queen Street--that sober terrace!--saw Sir Walter Scott clad in Campbell tartans at a muster of the Celtic Club; and a little later an inimitable scene took place in the dining-room of 39 Castle Street. Scott had hospitably brought some half-dozen Celts home to breakfast; and, on entering the room himself from his study, he discovered Crabbe, the dapper English clergyman, punctiliously neat and decorous in his black clothes and buckled shoes, standing surrounded by huge kilted and plaided Highlanders, like a sleek spaniel surrounded by collies. To Scott’s amazement, the tongue in which all were endeavouring to exchange ideas proved to be French; for Crabbe, as ignorant as an Englishman can be about Scotland, had heard the Gaelic; and, judging the strangely garbed men to be foreigners, and addressing them amiably in French, had been promptly taken by them for a French _abbé_.

Throughout all the busy fortnight Scott was the centre of everything. Daily he dined at Dalkeith Palace,[61] and attended the King at the levées and drawing-rooms at Holyrood, at St. Giles’s Church on Sunday, at the performance by Murray’s company of _Rob Roy_, and at the banquet given by the Magistrates to the King at the Parliament House. It was Scott who organised the great procession from Holyrood to the Castle in copy of the “Riding of the Parliament.” And, as Lockhart points out in his _Life of Scott_, it was due to Scott’s Celtic ardour that in all the arrangements the kilts and pipes were made so prominent that King George became impressed with the false idea that Scotland’s glory rested on them alone, and that he showed this by giving as his one toast at the banquet: “The Chieftains and Clans of Scotland, and Prosperity to the Land of Cakes.” Perhaps it dates from this that the English to this day think the kilt the national--if not the usual--dress of the Scot, and that _Punch_ makes Highlanders talk lowland Scotch, and Scotsmen speak Gaelic. But some results of the King’s visit--also due to Sir Walter Scott’s influence--were better. The King knighted Adam Ferguson, Deputy-Keeper of the Regalia, and Raeburn, the Scottish portrait-painter; and Mons Meg was returned from the Tower, after much correspondence; and the Scottish peerages forfeited in 1715 and 1745 were restored.

Four years later, Scott sent for his old friend Skene of Rubislaw. It was a cold January morning--seven o’clock--when Skene arrived, and Scott’s greeting to him was: “My friend, give me a shake of your hand: mine is that of a beggar.” The crash had come. Offers of assistance poured in--from his children, from the principal banks of Edinburgh, from friends high and low. Scott, hearing that Sir William Forbes the banker, his old rival in love, was foremost in wishing to help, wrote in his diary: “It is fated our planets should cross, though, and that at periods most interesting for me. Down--down--a hundred thoughts.”

No help was accepted. “This right hand shall pay it all,” he said. That eident hand!...

Two months later he left Castle Street. “So farewell, poor 39.... _Ha til mi tulidh._”[62] Two months later he went all alone to lodgings, in North St. David Street, and heard next day of Lady Scott’s death at Abbotsford. And so--first there, and then next winter alone with his youngest daughter in a furnished house in Walker Street, and finally at No. 6 Shandwick Place,--Sir Walter Scott worked himself to death in Edinburgh to pay his debts: perhaps more loved and honoured than even in the days of his prosperity.

Sir Walter Scott has often been compared to Shakespeare. Be that as it may, in what he has done for Scotland he may even better be compared to Napoleon; for, as Napoleon found France shattered and in chaos, and lifted her to the pinnacle of power, so Scott came at an epoch in Scotland’s history when her “flowers were a’ wede awa’,” and raised her again to her place among the nations. And what he did was accomplished, not by over two hundred battles, but by twenty-nine novels.