CHAPTER II.

In our last chapter we took a breezy morning walk amid the Lake scenery of England--more particularly that portion of it which lies between the old homes of Wordsworth and of Southey; we found it a thirteen-mile stretch of road, coiling along narrow meadows and over gray heights--beside mountains and mountain tarns--with Helvellyn lifting mid-way and Skiddaw towering at the end. We had our talk of Dr. Southey--so brave at his work--so generous in his home charities--so stiff in his Churchism and latter-day Toryism--with a very keen eye for beauty; yet writing poems--stately and masterful--which long ago went to the top-shelves, and stay there.

We had our rough and ready interviews with that first of “War Correspondents”--Henry Crabb Robinson--who knew all the prominent men of this epoch, and has given us such entertaining chit-chat about them, as we all listen to, and straightway forget. Afterwards we had a look at that strange, intellectual, disorderly creature De Quincey--he living a long while in the Lake Country--and in his more inspired moments seeming to carry us by his swift words, into that mystical region lying beyond the borders of what we know and see. He swayed men; but he rarely taught them, or fed them.

_Christopher North._

We still linger about those charmingest of country places; and by a wooden gateway--adjoining the approach to Windermere Hotel--upon the “Elleray woods,” amid which lived--eighty years ago--that stalwart friend of De Quincey’s, whose acquaintance he made among the Lakes, and who, like himself, was a devoted admirer of Wordsworth. Indeed, I think it was at the home of the latter that De Quincey first encountered the tall, lusty John Wilson--brimful of enthusiasm and all country ardors; brimful, too, of gush, and all poetic undulations of speech. He[12] was a native of Paisley--his father having been a rich manufacturer there--and had come to spend his abundant enthusiasms and his equally abundant moneys between Wordsworth and the mountains and Windermere. He has his fleet of yachts and barges upon the lake; he knows every pool where any trout lurk--every height that gives far-off views. He is a pugilist, a swimmer, an oarsman--making the hills echo with his jollity, and dashing off through the springy heather with that slight, seemingly frail De Quincey in his wake--who only reaches to his shoulder, but who is all compact of nerve and muscle. For Greek they are fairly mated, both by love and learning; and they can and do chant together the choral songs of heathen tragedies.

This yellow-haired, blue-eyed giant, John Wilson--not so well-known now as he was sixty years ago--we collegians greatly admired in that far-off day. He had written the _Isle of Palms_, and was responsible for much of the wit and dash and merriment which sparkled over the early pages of _Blackwood’s Magazine_--in the chapters of the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_ and in many a paper besides:--he had his first university training at Glasgow; had a brief love-episode there also, which makes a prettily coy appearance on the pleasant pages of the biography of Wilson which a daughter (Mrs. Gordon) has compiled. After Glasgow came Oxford; and a characteristic bit of his later writing, which I cite, will show you how Oxford impressed him:--

“Having bidden farewell to our sweet native Scotland, and kissed ere we parted, the grass and the flowers with a show of filial tears--having bidden farewell to all her glens, now a-glimmer in the blended light of imagination and memory, with their cairns and kirks, their low-chimneyed huts, and their high-turreted halls, their free-flowing rivers, and lochs dashing like seas--we were all at once buried not in the Cimmerian gloom, but the Cerulean glitter of Oxford’s Ancient Academic groves. The genius of the place fell upon us. Yes! we hear now, in the renewed delight of the awe of our youthful spirit, the pealing organ in that Chapel called the Beautiful; we see the Saints on the stained windows; at the Altar the picture of One up Calvary meekly ascending. It seemed then that our hearts had no need even of the kindness of kindred--of the country where we were born, and that had received the continued blessings of our enlarging love! Yet away went, even then, sometimes, our thoughts to Scotland, like carrier-pigeons wafting love messages beneath their unwearied wings.”[13]

We should count this, and justly, rather over-fine writing nowadays. Yet it is throughout stamped with the peculiarities of Christopher North; he cannot help his delightfully wanton play with language and sentiment; and into whatever sea of topics he plunged--early or late in life--he always came up glittering with the beads and sparkles of a highly charged rhetoric. Close after Oxford comes that idyllic life[14] in Windermere to which I have referred. Four or more years pass there; his trees grow there; his new roads--hewn through the forests--wind there; he plots a new house there; he climbs the mountains; he is busy with his boats. Somewhat later he marries; he does not lose his old love for the poets of the Greek anthology; he has children born to him; he breeds game fowls, and looks after them as closely as a New England farmer’s wife after her poultry; but with him poetry and poultry go together. There are old diaries of his--into which his daughter gives us a peep--that show such entries as this:--“The small Paisley hen set herself 6th of July, with no fewer than nine eggs;” and again--“Red pullet in Josie’s barn was set with eight eggs on Thursday;” and square against such memoranda, and in script as careful, will appear some bit of verse like this:--

“Oh, fairy child! what can I wish for thee? Like a perennial flowret may’st thou be, That spends its life in beauty and in bliss; Soft on thee fall the breath of time, And still retain in heavenly clime The bloom that charms in this.”

He wrote, too, while living there above Windermere, his poem of the _Isle of Palms_; having a fair success in the early quarter of this century, but which was quickly put out of sight and hearing by the brisker, martial music of Scott, and by the later and more vigorous and resonant verse of Byron.

Indeed, Wilson’s poetry was not such as we would have looked for from one who was a “varra bad un to lick” at a wrestling bout, and who made the splinters fly when his bludgeon went thwacking into a page of controversial prose. His verse is tender; it is graceful; it is delicate; it is full of languors too; and it is tiresome--a gentle girlish treble of sound it has, that you can hardly associate with this brawny mass of manhood.

_Wilson in Scotland._

But all that delightful life amidst the woods of Elleray--with its game-cocks, and boats, and mountain rambles, and shouted chorus of Prometheus--comes to a sharp end. The inherited fortune of the poet, by some criminal carelessness or knavery of a relative, goes in a day; and our fine stalwart wrestler must go to Edinboro’ to wrestle with the fates. There he coquets for a time with law; but presently falls into pleasant affiliation with old Mr. Blackwood (who was a remarkable man in his way) in the conduct of his magazine. And then came the trumpet blasts of mingled wit, bravado, and tenderness, which broke into those pages, and which made young college men in England or Scotland or America, fling up their hats for Christopher North. Not altogether a safe guide, I think, as a rhetorician; too much bounce in him; too little self-restraint; too much of glitter and iridescence; but, on the other hand--bating some blackguardism--he is brimful of life and heartiness and merriment--lighted up with scholarly hues of color.

There was associated with Wilson in those days, in work upon _Blackwood_, a young man--whom we may possibly not have occasion to speak of again, and yet who is worthy of mention. I mean J. G. Lockhart,[15] who afterwards became son-in-law and the biographer of Walter Scott--a slight young fellow in that day, very erect and prim; wearing his hat well forward on his heavy brows, and so shading a face that was thin, clean cut, handsome, and which had almost the darkness of a Spaniard’s. He put his rapier-like thrusts into a good many papers which the two wrought at together. All his life he loved literary digs with his stiletto--which was very sharp--and when he left Edinboro’ to edit the _Quarterly Review_ in London (as he did in after days) he took his stiletto with him. There are scenes in that unevenly written Lockhart story of _Adam Blair_--hardly known now--which for thrilling passion, blazing out of clear sufficiencies of occasion, would compare well with kindred scenes of Scott’s own, and which score deeper colorings of human woe and loves and remorse than belong to most modern stories; not lighted, indeed, with humor; not entertaining with anecdote; not embroidered with archæologic knowledge; not rattling with coruscating social fireworks, but--subtle, psychologic, touching the very marrow of our common manhood with a pen both sharp and fine. We remember him, however, most gratefully as the charming biographer of Scott, and as the accomplished translator of certain Spanish ballads into which he has put--under flowing English verse--all the clashing of Cordovan castanets, and all the jingle of the war stirrups of the Moors.

We return now to Professor Wilson and propose to tell you how he came by that title. It was after only a few years of work in connection with _Blackwood_ that the Chair of Moral Philosophy in Edinboro’ University--which had been held by Dugald Stewart, and later by Dr. Thomas Brown--fell vacant; and at once the name of Wilson was pressed by his friends for the position. It was not a little odd that a man best known by two delicate poems, and by a bold swashbuckler sort of magazine writing should be put forward--in such a staid city as Edinboro’, and against such a candidate as Sir William Hamilton--for a Chair which had been held by Dugald Stewart! But he _was_ so put forward, and successfully; Walter Scott and the Government coming to his aid. Upon this, he went resolutely to study in the new line marked out for him; his rods and guns were, for the time, hung upon the wall; his wrestling frolics and bouts at quarter-staff, and suppers at the Ambrose tavern, were laid under limitations. He put a conscience and a pertinacity into his labor that he had never put to any intellectual work before.[16] But there were very many people in Edinboro’ who had been aggrieved by the appointment--largely, too, among those from whom his pupils would come. There was, naturally, great anxiety among his friends respecting the opening of the first session. An eye-witness says:--

“I went prepared to join in a cabal which was formed to put him down. The lecture-room was crowded to the ceiling. Such a collection of hard-browed, scowling Scotsmen, muttering over their knob-sticks, I never saw. The Professor entered with a bold step, amid profound silence. Every one expected some deprecatory, or propitiatory introduction of himself and his subject, upon which the mass was to decide against him, reason or no reason; but he began with a voice of thunder right into the matter of his lecture, kept up--unflinchingly and unhesitatingly, without a pause--a flow of rhetoric such as Dugald Stewart or Dr. Brown, his predecessors, never delivered in the same place. Not a word--not a murmur escaped his captivated audience; and at the end they gave him a right-down unanimous burst of applause.”[17]

From that time forth, for thirty years or more, John Wilson held the place, and won a popularity with his annual relays of pupils that was unexampled and unshaken. Better lectures in his province may very possibly have been written by others elsewhere--more close, more compact, more thoroughly thought out, more methodic. His were not patterned after Reid and Stewart; indeed, not patterned at all; not wrought into a burnished system, with the pivots and cranks of the old school-men all in their places. But they made up a series--continuous, and lapping each into each, by easy confluence of topic--of discourses on moral duties and on moral relations, with full and brilliant illustrative talk--sometimes in his heated moments taking on the gush and exuberance of a poem; other times bristling with reminiscences; yet full of suggestiveness, and telling as much, I think, on the minds of his eager and receptive students as if the rhetorical brilliancies had all been plucked away, and some master of a duller craft had reduced his words to a stiff, logical paradigm.

From this time forward Professor Wilson lived a quiet, domestic, yet fully occupied life. He wrote enormously for the magazine with which his name had become identified; there is scarce a break in his thirty years’ teachings in the university; there are sometimes brief interludes of travel; journeys to London; flights to the Highlands; there are breaks in his domestic circle, breaks in the larger circle of his friends; there are twinges of the gout and there come wrinkles of age; but he is braver to resist than most; and for years on years everybody knew that great gaunt figure, with blue eyes and hair flying wild, striding along Edinboro’ streets.

His poems have indeed almost gone down under the literary horizon of to-day; but one who has known _Blackwood_ of old, can hardly wander anywhere amongst the Highlands of Scotland without pleasant recollections of Christopher North and of the musical bravuras of his speech.

_Thomas Campbell._

Another Scotsman, who is worthy of our attention for a little time, is one of a different order; he is stiff, he is prim, he is almost priggish; he is so in his young days and he keeps so to the very last.

A verse or two from one of the little poems he wrote will bring him to your memory:

“On Linden when the sun was low, All bloodless lay the untrodden snow, And dark as winter was the flow, Of Iser, rolling rapidly.”

And again:

“Then shook the hills with thunder riven, Then rushed the steed to battle driven, And louder than the bolts of heaven, Far flashed the red artillery.”

If Thomas Campbell[18] had never written anything more than that page-long story of the “Battle of Hohenlinden,” his name would have gone into all the anthologies, and his verse into all those school-books where boys for seventy years now have pounded at his martial metre in furies of declamation. And yet this bit of martial verse, so full of the breath of battle, was, at the date of its writing, rejected by the editor of a small provincial journal in Scotland--as not coming up to the true poetic standard![19]

I have spoken of Campbell as a Scotsman; though after only a short stay in Scotland--following his university career at Glasgow--and a starveling tour upon the Continent (out of which flashed “Hohenlinden”)--he went to London; and there or thereabout spent the greater part of the residue of a long life. He had affiliations of a certain sort with America, out of which may possibly have grown his _Gertrude of Wyoming_; his father was for much time a merchant in Falmouth, Virginia, about 1770; being however a strong loyalist, he returned in 1776. A brother and an uncle of the poet became established in this country, and an American Campbell of this stock was connected by marriage with the family of Patrick Henry.

The first _coup_ by which Campbell won his literary spurs, was a bright, polished poem--with its couplets all in martinet-like order--called the _Pleasures of Hope_. We all know it, if for nothing more, by reason of the sympathetic allusion to the woes of Poland:

“Ah, bloodiest picture in the book of time! Sarmatia fell, unwept, without a crime; Found not a generous friend, a pitying foe, Strength in her arms nor mercy in her woe! Dropped from her nerveless grasp the shattered spear, Closed her bright eye and curbed her high career, Hope for a season bade the world farewell, And freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell!”

Even at so late a date as the death of Campbell (1844), when they buried him in Westminster Abbey, close upon the tomb of Sheridan, some grateful Pole secured a handful of earth from the grave of Kosciusko to throw upon the coffin of the poet.

But in addition to its glow of liberalism, this first poem of Campbell was, measured by all the old canons of verse, thoroughly artistic. Its pauses, its rhymes, its longs and shorts were of the best prize order; even its errors in matters of fact have an academic tinge--as, for instance,--

“On Erie’s banks, where tigers steal along!”

The truth is, Mr. Campbell was never strong in his natural history; he does not scruple to put flamingoes and palm trees into the valley of Wyoming. Another reason why the first poem of Campbell’s, written when he was only twenty-one, came to such success, was the comparatively clear field it had. The date of publication was at the end of the century. Byron was in his boyhood; Scott had not published his _Lay of the Last Minstrel_ (1805); Southey had printed only his _Joan of Arc_ (1796), which few people read; the same may be said of Landor’s _Gebir_, (1797); Cowper was an old story; Rogers’s _Pleasures of Memory_ (1792), and Moore’s translation of _Anacreon_ (1799-1800), were the more current things with which people who loved fresh poetry could regale themselves. The _Lyrical Ballads_ of Wordsworth and Coleridge had indeed been printed, perhaps a year or two before, down in Bristol; but scarce any one read _these_; few bought them;[20] and yet--in that copy of the _Lyrical Ballads_ was lying _perdu_--almost unknown and uncared for--the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

_Gertrude of Wyoming_, a poem, written at Sydenham, near London, about 1807, and which, sixty years ago, every good American who was collecting books thought it necessary to place upon his shelves, I rarely find there now. It has not the rhetorical elaboration of Campbell’s first poem; never won its success; there are bits of war in it, and of massacre, that are gorgeously encrimsoned, and which are laced through and through with sounds of fife and warwhoop; but the landscape is a disorderly exaggeration (I have already hinted at its palm trees) and its love-tale has only the ardors of a stage scene in it; we know where the tragedy is coming in, and gather up our wraps so as to be ready when the curtain falls.

He was a born actor--in need (for his best work) of the foot-lights, the on-lookers, the trombone, the bass-drum. He never glided into victories of the pen by natural inevitable movement of brain or heart; he stopped always and everywhere to consider his _pose_.

There is little of interest in Campbell’s personal history; he married a cousin; lived, as I said, mostly in London, or its immediate neighborhood. He had two sons--one dying young, and the other of weak mind--lingering many years--a great grief and source of anxiety to his father, who had the reputation of being exacting and stern in his family. He edited for a long time the _New Monthly Magazine_, and wrote much for it, but is represented to have been, in its conduct, careless, hypercritical, and dilatory. He lectured, too, before the Royal Institute on poetry; read oratorically and showily--his subject matter being semi-philosophical, with a great air of learning and academically dry; there was excellent system in his discourses, and careful thinking on themes remote from most people’s thought. He wrote some historical works which are not printed nowadays; his life of Mrs. Siddons is bad; his life of Petrarch is but little better; some poems he published late in life are quite unworthy of him and are never read. Nevertheless, this prim, captious gentleman wrote many things which have the ring of truest poetry and which will be dear to the heart of England as long as English ships sail forth to battle.

_A Minstrel of the Border._

Yet another Scotsman whose name will not be forgotten--whether British ships go to battle, or idle at the docks--is Walter Scott.[21] I scarce know how to begin to speak of him. We all know him so well--thanks to the biography of his son-in-law, Lockhart, which is almost Boswellian in its minuteness, and has dignity besides. We know--as we know about a neighbor’s child--of his first struggles with illness, wrapped in a fresh sheepskin, upon the heathery hills by Smailholme Tower; we know of the strong, alert boyhood that succeeded; he following, with a firm seat and free rein--amongst other game--the old wives’ tales and border ballads which, thrumming in his receptive ears, put the Edinboro law studies into large confusion. Swift after this comes the hurry-scurry of a boyish love-chase--beginning in Grey Friar’s church-yard; she, however, who sprung the race--presently doubles upon him, and is seen no more; and he goes lumbering forward to another fate. It was close upon these experiences that some friends of his printed privately his ballad of _William and Helen_, founded on the German Lenore:--

“Tramp, tramp! along the land they rode! Splash, splash! along the sea! The scourge is red, the spur drops blood, The flashing pebbles flee!”

And the spirit and dash of those four lines were quickly recognized as marking a new power in Scotch letters; and an echo of them, or of their spirit, in some shape or other, may be found, I think, in all his succeeding poems and in all the tumults and struggles of his life. The elder Scott does not like this philandering with rhyme; it will spoil the law, and a solid profession, he thinks; and true enough it does. For the _Border Minstrelsy_ comes spinning its delightfully musical and tender stories shortly after Lenore; and a little later appears his first long poem--the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_--which waked all Scotland and England to the melody of the new master. He was thirty-four then; ripening later than Campbell, who at twenty-one had published his _Pleasures of Hope_. There was no kinship in the methods of the two poets; Campbell all precision, and nice balance, delicate adjustment of language--stepping from point to point in his progress with all grammatic precautions and with well-poised poetic steps and demi-volts, as studied as a dancing master’s; while Scott dashed to his purpose with a seeming abandonment of care, and a swift pace that made the “pebbles fly.” Just as unlike, too, was this racing freedom of Scott’s--which dragged the mists away from the Highlands, and splashed his colors of gray, and of the purple of blooming heather over the moors--from that other strain of verse, with its introspections and deeper folded charms, which in the hands of Wordsworth was beginning to declare itself humbly and coyly, but as yet with only the rarest applause. I cannot make this distinction clearer than by quoting a little landscape picture--let us say from _Marmion_--and contrasting with it another from Wordsworth, which was composed six years or more before _Marmion_ was published. First, then, from Scott--and nothing prettier and quieter of rural sort belongs to him,--

“November’s sky is chill and drear, November’s leaf is red and sear; Late gazing down the steepy linn That hems our little garden in.”

(I may remark, in passing, that this is an actual description of Scott’s home surroundings at Ashestiel.)

“Low in its dark and narrow glen You scarce the rivulet might ken, So thick the tangled greenwood grew, So feeble trilled the streamlet through; Now, murmuring hoarse, and frequent seen Through brush and briar, no longer green, An angry brook it sweeps the glade, Breaks over rock and wild cascade, And foaming brown with double speed Marries its waters to the Tweed.”

There it is--a completed picture; do what you will with it! Reading it, is like a swift, glad stepping along the borders of the brook.

Now listen for a little to Wordsworth; it is a scrap from Tintern Abbey:--

“Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms, Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke Sent up in silence, from among the trees! With some uncertain notice, as might seem Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some hermit’s cave, where by his fire The hermit sits alone.”

(Here is more than the tangible picture; the smoke wreaths have put unseen dwellers there); and again:--

“O Sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee!

I have learned To look on Nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity! Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns And the round ocean and the living air And the blue sky, and in the mind of men A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods And mountains.”

This will emphasize the distinction, to which I would call attention, in the treatment of landscape by the two poets: Wordsworth putting _his_ all on a simmer with humanities and far-reaching meditative hopes and languors; and Scott throwing windows wide open to the sky, and saying only--look--and be glad!

In those days Wordsworth had one reader where Scott had a hundred; and the one reader was apologetic and shy, and the hundred were loud and gushing. I think the number of their respective readers is more evenly balanced nowadays; and it is the readers of Scott who are beginning to be apologetic. Indeed I have a half consciousness of putting myself on this page in that category:--As if the Homeric toss and life and play, and large sweep of rivers, and of battalions and winnowed love-notes, and clang of trumpets, and moaning of the sea, which rise and fall in the pages of the _Minstrel_ and of _Marmion_--needed apology! Apology or no, I think Scott’s poems will be read for a good many years to come. The guide books and Highland travellers--and high-thoughted travellers--will keep them alive--if the critics do not; and I think you will find no better fore-reading for a trip along the Tweed or through the Trosachs than _Marmion_, and the _Lady of the Lake_.

_The Waverley Dispensation._

Meantime, our author has married--a marriage, Goldwin Smith says, of “intellectual disparagement”; which I suppose means that Mrs. Scott was not learned and bookish--as she certainly was not; but she was honest, true-hearted, and domestic. Mr. Redding profanely says that she was used to plead, “Walter, my dear, you must write a new book, for I want another silk dress.” I think this is apocryphal; and there is good reason to believe that she gave a little hearty home huzza at each one of Mr. Scott’s quick succeeding triumphs.

Our author has also changed his home; first from the pretty little village of Lasswade, which is down by Dalkeith, to Ashestiel by the Yarrow; and thence again to a farm-house, near to that unfortunate pile of Abbotsford, which stands on the Tweed bank, shadowed by the trees he planted, and shadowed yet more heavily by the story of his misfortunes. I notice a disposition in some recent writers to disparage this notable country home as pseudo-Gothic and flimsy. This gives a false impression of a structure which, though it lack that singleness of expression and subordination of details which satisfy a professional critic, does yet embody in a singularly interesting way, and with solid construction, all the aspirations, tastes, clannish vanities and archæologic whims of the great novelist. The castellated tower is there to carry the Scottish standard, and the cloister to keep alive reverent memory of old religious houses; and the miniature Court gate, with its warder’s horn; and the Oriole windows, whose details are, maybe, snatched from Kenilworth; the mass, too, is impressive and smacks all over of Scott’s personality and of the traditions he cherished.

I am tempted to introduce here some notes of a visit made to this locality very many years ago. I had set off on a foot-pilgrimage from the old border town of Berwick-on-Tweed; had kept close along the banks of the river, seeing men drawing nets for salmon, whose silvery scales flashed in the morning sun. All around swept those charming fields of Tweed-side, green with the richest June growth; here and there were shepherds at their sheep washing; old Norham Castle presently lifted its gray buttresses into view; then came the long Coldstream bridge, with its arches shimmering in the flood below; and after this the palace of the Duke of Roxburgh. In thus following up leisurely the Tweed banks from Berwick, I had slept the first night at Kelso; had studied the great fine bit of ruin which is there, and had caught glimpses of Teviot-dale and of the Eildon Hills; had wandered out of my way for a sight of Smailholme tower, and of Sandy Knowe--both associated with Scott’s childhood; I passed Dryburgh, where he lies buried, and at last on an evening of early June, 1845, a stout oarsman ferried me across the Tweed and landed me in Melrose.

I slept at the George Inn--dreaming (as many a young wayfarer in those lands has since done), of Ivanhoe and Rebecca, and border wars and _Old Mortality_. Next morning, after a breakfast upon trout taken from some near stream (very likely the Yarrow or the Gala-water), I strolled two miles or so along the road which followed the Tweed bank upon the southern side, and by a green foot-gate entered the Abbotsford grounds. The forest trees--not over high at that time--were those which the master had planted. From his favorite outdoor seat, sheltered by a thicket of arbor-vitæ, could be caught a glimpse of the rippled surface of the Tweed and of the turrets of the house.

It was all very quiet--quiet in the wood-walks; quiet as you approached the court-yard; the master dead; the family gone; I think there was a yelp from some young hound in an out-building, and a twitter from some birds I did not know; there was the unceasing murmur of the river. Besides these sounds, the silence was unbroken; and when I rang the bell at the entrance door, the jangle of it was very startling; startling a little terrier, too, whose quick, sharp bark rang noisily through the outer court.

Only an old house-keeper was in charge, who had fallen into that dreadful parrot-like way of telling visitors what things were best worth seeing--which frets one terribly. What should you or I care (fresh from _Guy Mannering_ or _Kenilworth_) whether a bit of carving came from Jedburgh or Kelso? or about the jets in the chandelier, or the way in which a Russian Grand Duke wrote his name in the visitors’ book?

But when we catch sight of the desk at which the master wrote, or of the chair in which he sat, and of his shoes and coat and cane--looking as if they might have been worn yesterday--these seem to bring us nearer to the man who has written so much to cheer and to charm the world. There was, too, a little box in the corridor, simple and iron-bound, with the line written below it, “Post will close at two.” It was as if we had heard the master of the house say it. Perhaps the notice was in his handwriting (he had been active there in 1831-2--just thirteen years before)--perhaps not; but--somehow--more than the library, or the portrait bust, or the chatter of the well-meaning house-keeper, it brought back the halting old gentleman in his shooting-coat, and with ivory-headed cane--hobbling with a vigorous step along the corridor, to post in that iron-bound box a packet--maybe a chapter of _Woodstock_.

I have spoken of the vacant house--family gone: The young Sir Walter Scott, of the British army, and heir to the estate--was at that date (1845) absent in the Indies; and only two years thereafter died at sea on his voyage home. Charles Scott, the only brother of the younger Sir Walter, died in 1841.[22] Miss Anne Scott, the only unmarried daughter of the author of _Waverley_, died--worn-out with tenderest care of mother and father, and broken-hearted--in 1833. Her only sister, Mrs. (Sophia Scott) Lockhart, died in 1837. Her oldest son--John Hugh, familiarly known as “Hugh Little John”--the crippled boy, for whom had been written the _Tales of a Grandfather_, and the darling of the two households upon Tweed-side--died in 1831. I cannot forbear quoting here a charming little memorial of him, which, within the present year, has appeared in Mr. Lang’s _Life of Lockhart_.

“A figure as of one of Charles Lamb’s dream-children haunts the little beck at Chiefswood, and on that haugh at Abbotsford, where Lockhart read the manuscript of the _Fortunes of Nigel_, fancy may see ‘Hugh Little John,’ ‘throwing stones into the burn,’ for so he called the Tweed. While children study the _Tales of a Grandfather_, he does not want friends in this world to remember and envy the boy who had Sir Walter to tell him stories.”--P. 75, vol. ii.

A younger son of Lockhart, Walter Scott by name, became, at the death of the younger Walter Scott, inheritor of all equities in the landed estate upon Tweed-side, and the proper Laird of Abbotsford. His story is a short and a sad one; he was utterly unworthy, and died almost unbefriended at Versailles in January, 1853.

His father, J. G. Lockhart, acknowledging a picture of this son, under date of 1843, in a letter addressed to his daughter Charlotte--(later Mrs. Hope-Scott,[23] and mother of the present proprietress of Abbotsford), writes with a grief he could not cover:--

“I am not sorry to have it by me, though it breaks my heart to recall the date. It is of the sweet, innocent, happy boy, home for Sunday from Cowies [his school].… Oh, God! how soon that day became clouded, and how dark its early close! Well, I suppose there is another world; if not, sure this is a blunder.”

I have not spoken--because there seemed no need to speak--of the way in which those marvellous romantic fictions of Sir Walter came pouring from the pen, under a cloud of mystery, and of how the great burden of his business embarrassments--due largely to the recklessness of his jolly, easy-going friends, the Ballantynes--overwhelmed him at last. Indeed, in all I have ventured to say of Scott, I have a feeling of its impertinence--as if I were telling you about your next-door neighbor: we all know that swift, brilliant, clouded career so well! But are those novels of his to live, and to delight coming generations, as they have the past? I do not know what the very latest critics may have to say; but, for my own part, I have strong belief that a century or two more will be sure to pass over before people of discernment, and large humanities, and of literary appreciation, will cease to read and to enjoy such stories as that of the _Talisman of Kenilworth_ and of _Old Mortality_. I know ’tis objected, and with much reason, that he wrote hastily, carelessly--that his stories are in fact (what Carlyle called them) extemporaneous stories. Yet, if they had been written under other conditions, could we have counted upon the heat and the glow which gives them illumination?

No, no--we do not go to him for word-craft; men of shorter imaginative range, and whose judgments wait on conventional rule, must guide us in such direction, and pose as our modellers of style. Goldsmith and Swift both may train in that company. But this master we are now considering wrote so swiftly and dashed so strongly into the current of what he had to say, that he was indifferent to methods and words, except what went to engage the reader and keep him always cognizant of his purpose. But do you say that this is the best aim of all writing? Most surely it is wise for a writer to hold attention by what arts he can: failing of this, he fails of the best half of his intent; but if he gains this by simple means, by directness, by limpid language, and no more of it than the thought calls for, and by such rhythmic and beguiling use of it as tempts the reader to follow, he is a safer exemplar than one who by force of genius can accomplish his aims by loose expressions and redundance of words.

Next it is objected to these old favorites of ours, that they are not clever in the exhibit and explication of mental processes, and their analysis of motives is incomplete. Well, I suppose this to be true; and that he did, to a certain extent (as Carlyle used to allege grumblingly), work from the outside-in. He did live in times when men fell straightforwardly in love, without counting the palpitations of the heart; and when heroes struck honest blows without reckoning in advance upon the probable contractile power of their biceps muscles. Again, it is said that his history often lacks precision and sureness of statement. Well, the dates are certainly sometimes twisted a few years out of their proper lines and seasons; but it is certain, also, that he does give the atmosphere and the coloring of historic periods in a completer and more satisfying way than many much carefuller chroniclers, and his portraits of great historic personages are by common consent--even of the critics--more full of the life of their subjects, and of a realistic exhibit of their controlling characteristics, than those of the historians proper. Nothing can be more sure than that Scott was not a man of great critical learning; nothing is more sure than that he was frequently at fault in minor details; but who will gainsay the fact that he was among the most charming and beneficent of story-tellers?

There may be households which will rule him out as old fashioned and stumbling, and wordy, and long; but I know of one, at least, where he will hold his place, as among the most delightful of visitors--and where on winter nights he will continue to bring with him (as he has brought so many times already) the royal figure of the Queen Elizabeth--shining in her jewels, or sulking in her coquetries; and Dandie Dinmont, with his pow-wow of Pepper and Mustard; and King Jamie, with Steenie and jingling Geordie; and the patient, prudent, excellent Jeanie Deans; and the weak, old, amiable mistress of Tillietudlem; and Rebecca, and the Lady in the Green Mantle, and Dominie Sampson, and Peter Peebles, and Di Vernon, and all the rest!

_Glints of Royalty._

They tell us Scott loved kings: why not? Romanticism was his nurse, from the days when he kicked up his baby heels under the shadows of Smailholme Tower, and Feudalism was his foster-parent. Always he loved banners and pageantry, and always the glitter and pomp which give their under or over tones to his pages of balladry. And if he stood in awe of titles and of rank, and felt the cockles of his heart warming in contact with these, ’twas not by reason of a vulgar tuft-hunting spirit, nor was it due to the crass toadyism which seeks reflected benefit; but it grew, I think, out of sheer mental allegiance to feudal splendors and traditions.

Whether Scott ever personally encountered the old king, George III., may be doubtful; but I recall in some of his easy, family letters (perhaps to his eldest boy Walter), most respectful and kindly allusions to the august master of the royal Windsor household--who ordered his home affairs so wisely--keeping “good hours;” while, amid the turbulences and unrest which belonged to the American and French Revolutions--succeeding each other in portentous sequence--he was waning toward that period of woful mental imbecility which beset him at last, and which clouded an earlier chapter[24] of our record. The Prince Regent--afterward George IV.--was always well disposed toward Scott; had read the _Minstrel_, and _Marmion_, with the greatest gratification (he did sometimes read), and told Lord Byron as much; even comparing the Scot with Homer--which was as near to classicism as the Prince often ran. But Byron, in his _English Bards_, etc., published in his earlier days, had made his little satiric dab at the _Minstrel_--finding a lively hope in its being _the Last_!

Murray, however, in the good Christian spirit which sometimes overtakes publishers, stanched these wounds, and brought the poets to bask together in the smiles of royalty. The first Baronetcy the Prince bestowed--after coming to Kingship--was that which made the author of Waverley Sir Walter; the poet had witnessed and reported the scenes at the Coronation of 1820 in London; and on the King’s gala visit to Edinboro’--when all the heights about the gray old city boomed with welcoming cannon, and all the streets and all the water-ways were a-flutter with tartans and noisy with bagpipes--it was Sir Walter who virtually marshalled the hosts, and gave chieftain-like greeting to the Prince. Scott’s management of the whole stupendous paraphernalia--the banquets, the processions, the receptions, the decorations (of all which the charming water-colors of Turner are in evidence)--gave wonderful impressions of the masterful resources and dominating tact of the man; now clinking glasses (of Glenlivet) with the mellow King (counting sixty years in that day); now humoring into quietude the jealousies of Highland chieftains; again threading Canongate at nightfall and afoot--from end to end--to observe if all welcoming bannerols and legends are in place; again welcoming to his home, in the heat of ceremonial occupation, the white-haired and trembling poet Crabbe; anon, stealing away to his Castle Street chamber for a new chapter in the _Peveril of the Peak_ (then upon the anvil), and in the heat, and fury, and absorption of the whole gala business breaking out of line with a bowed head and aching heart, to follow his best friend, William Erskine (Lord Kinnedder),[25] out by Queensferry to his burial.

It was only eight years thereafter, when this poet manager of the great Scotch jubilee--who seemed good for the work of a score of years--sailed, by royal permission (an act redeeming and glorifying royalty) upon a Government ship--seeking shores and skies which would put new vigor (if it might be) into a constitution broken by toil, and into hopes that had been blighted by blow on blow of sorrow.

Never was a royal favor more worthily bespoken; never one more vainly bestowed. ’Twas too late. No human eye--once so capable of seeing--ever opened for a first look so wearily upon the blue of the Mediterranean--upon the marvellous fringed shores of lower Italy--upon Rome, Florence, and the snowy Swiss portals of the Simplon.

Royalty (in person of William IV., then on the throne) asked kindly after the sick magician--who was established presently on a sick bed in London; while the cabmen on street corners near by talked low of the “great mon” who lay there a-dying. A little show of recovery gave power to reach home--Abbotsford and Tweed-side--once more. There was no hope; but it took time for the great strength in him to waste.

Withal there was a fine glint of royalty at the end. “Be virtuous, my dear,” he said to Lockhart; “be a good man.” And that utterance--the summing up of forty years of brilliant accomplishment, and of baffled ambitions--emphasized by the trembling voice of a dying man--will dwell longer in human memories, and more worthily, than the empty baronial pile we call Abbotsford, past which the scurrying waters of the Tweed ripple and murmur--as they did on the day Sir Walter was born, and on the day he was buried at Dryburgh.