Part 16

His Border Minstrelsy came out; his fame spread. His Metrical Romances followed; and he was the most popular man of the day. In matters of business he rapidly advanced. He was made Clerk of Session and Sheriff of Selkirk. He quitted his cottage at Lasswade, for the still more beautiful, but more solitary farm of Ashestiel, on the banks of the Tweed. Lord Byron's poetry blazed out; but Scott took another flight, in the Historical Novel, and was still, if not the greatest poet, the most popular man of his age. Never had there been any evidence of such pecuniary success in the literary world. He made about £15,000 by his poetry; but by his prose he made, by a single work, his £5,000, his £10,000, his £12,000. His facility was equal to his success; it was no long and laborious task to complete one of these truly golden volumes; they were thrown off as fast as he could write; and, in three months, a novel, worth eight or ten thousand pounds in the market, was finished! Well might his hopes and views tower to an unprecedented height. The spirit of poetry and romance reveled in his brain, and began to show itself not only in the construction of volumes, but in the building of a castle, an estate, a family to stand amid the aristocratic families forever. The name of Walter Scott should not only descend with his children as that of an illustrious writer, but should clothe them with the world-honored mantle of titular rank. And every thing was auspicious. The tide and the wind of fortune, and public favor, blew wondrously. Work after work was thrown off; enormous sums often were netted. Publishers and printers struggled for his patronage; but Constable and the Ballantynes, acquaintances of his youth, were selected for his favor; and great became their standing and business. There seemed not one fortune, but three secure of accomplishment. The poet, in the romantic solitude of Ashestiel, or galloping over the heathy hills in the neighborhood, as he mused on new and ever succeeding visions of romances among them, conceived the most fascinating scheme of all. It was to purchase lands, to raise himself a fairy castle, to become, not the minstrel of a lord, as were many of those of old, but a minstrel-lord himself. The practical romance grew. On the banks of the Tweed, then, began to rise the fairy castle. Quaint and beautiful as one of his descriptions, it arose; lands were added to lands; over hill and dale spread the dark embossment of future woods; and Abbotsford began to be spoken of far and wide. The poet had chosen his seat in the midst of the very land of ancient poetry itself. At three miles' distance stood the fair pile of Melrose, which he had made so attractive, by his Lay of the Last Minstrel, to the whole world. Near that showed themselves the Eildon hills, the haunt of True Thomas; at their feet ran the classic stream of Huntly burn. The Cowdenknows lifted its black summit farther down the Tweed; and upward was a whole fairy land--Carterhaugh, Newark Tower, Ettrick forest, St. Mary's Lake, and the Dowie Dens of Yarrow. There was scarcely an object in the whole country round--neither hill, nor wood, nor stream, nor single rock--which was not full of the associations of ballad fame. Here, then, he lived, like an old feudal lord, with his hounds and his trusty vassals; some of the latter, as Laidlaw and Tom Purdie, occupying the station of those humble, faithful friends, who tend so much to complete the happiness of life. In truth, never did the poet himself dream a fairer dream beneath a summer oak than he had now realized around him. His lovely wife, the lady of the domain; his children shooting fast up into beautiful manhood and womanhood; his castle and domain built, and won, as they were, from the regions of enchantment; and friends and worshipers flocking from every country, to behold the far famed minstrel. Princes, and nobles, and men of high name in every walk of life, were his guests.

Every man of any note called him friend. The most splendid equipages crowded the way toward his house; the feast was spread continually as it were the feast of a king; while on the balcony, ranging along the whole front, stalked to and fro, in his tartans, the wild piper, and made the air quiver with the tempestuous music of the hills. Arms and armor were ranged along the walls and galleries of his hall. There were portraits of some of the most noted persons who had figured in his lays and stories--as of Claverhouse, Monmouth, the Pretender, the severed head of the Queen of Scots; with those of brother poets, Dryden, Thomson, Prior, and Gay. There were the escutcheons of all the great clan chieftains blazoned round the ceiling of his hall; and swords, daggers, pistols, and instruments of torture, from the times and the scenes he had celebrated.

Such was the scene of splendor which had sprung from the pen of one man. If it were wonderful, the streams of wealth which continued to pour from the same enchanted goose-quill were still more astounding. From Lockhart's Life we see that, independent of what these works have made since, he had pretty early netted above £13,000 by his poems, though he had sold some of them in their first edition.

£ _s._ _d._ Border Minstrel, 1st and 2d vol. 1st edit. 78 10 0 Copyright of the same work 500 0 0 Lay of the Last Minstrel, copyright sold 769 6 0 Marmion, copyright sold 1,000 0 0 Lady of the Lake, copyright sold 2,100 0 0 Rokeby, copyright sold 5,000 0 0 Lord of the Isles 3,000 0 0 Halidan Hill 1,000 0 0 ------------------ £13,447 16 0 ------------------

But this was nothing to the produce of his romances. Of Waverley, fifty-one thousand copies had been sold when that Life was published, and Scott tells us that he cleared £400 by each one thousand copies, that is £20,400.

Guy Mannering, 60,000, or £24,000 0 0 Rob Roy, 53,000, or 21,200 0 0

Of the rest we have no total amount given; but, at a similar rate, his twenty-one novels would make an amount of £460,000! Beside this, he received for the Life of Napoleon above £18,000. In three months he wrote Woodstock, for which he tells us that he received £8,400 at once. Then there are his Tales of a Grandfather, twelve volumes, a most popular work, but of which no proceeds are given. For his History of Scotland for Lardner's Cyclopædia, £1,500; for editing Dryden, £756; for seven Essays for the Encyclopædia Britannica, £300; Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk, £1,350; for a contribution to the Keepsake, £400, which he says he considered poor pay. Then he wrote thirty-five Reviews for the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, for which such a writer could not, on an average, receive less than £50 each, probably £100; but say £50, that is £1,750. And these items are exclusive of the vast mass of edited editions of Swift, of Memoirs, Antiquities, etc., etc. They do not either, except in the three novels specified, include the proceeds of the collective editions of either his prose or his poetry. It appears certain that his works must have produced to the author or his trustees, at the very least, _half-a-million of money_!

Truly this was the revenue of a monarch in the realm of letters! Popular as Lord Byron was, I suppose the whole which he received for his writings did not realize £30,000. Scott cleared that by any two of his novels. He could clear a third of it in three months. Well might he think to lay field to field, and house to house, and plant his children in the land as lords of the soil, and titled magnates forever!

But, as the fabric of this glorious estate had risen as by the spell of a necromancer, so it fell. It was like one of those palaces, with its fairy gardens, and lawns scattered with diamonds instead of dews, in the Arabian Nights, which, with the destruction of the spell, passed away in a crash of thunder. A house of cards is proverbial, and this house of books fell at one shock, and struck the world with a terrible astonishment. It was found that the great minstrel was not carefully receiving his profits, and investing them; but was engaged as partner in the printing and publishing of his works. His publisher and his printers, drained on the one hand by the vast outlay for castle-building, land-buying, and the maintenance of all comers; and, on the other, infected with the monstrous scene of acquisition which was revealed to their eyes--were moving on a slippery course, and at the shock of the great panic in 1826 went to the ground; leaving Scott debtor to the amount of £120,000, beside a mortgage of £10,000 on his estate!

In some instances the darkness and the difficulty come in the early stages, and wind up in light and happiness; in others, the light comes first, and the darkness at the end. These latter are tragedies, and the romance of Scott's life was a tragedy. How sad and piteous is the winding up here to contemplate! The thunderbolt of fate had fallen on the "Great Magician." The glory of his outward estate was over, but never did that of his inner soul show so brilliantly. Gentle, and genial, and kindly to all men, had he shown himself in his most prosperous days; but now the giant strength of his fortitude, and the nobility of his moral principle, came into magnificent play. He was smitten, sorely smitten, but he was not subdued. Not a hero which he had described could match him in his contest with the rudeness of adversity. He could have paid his dividend, as is usual in such cases, and his prolific pen would have raised him a second fortune. But, then, his honor! no, he would pay to the uttermost farthing! And so, with a sorrowful but not murmuring or desponding heart, he went to work again on his giant's work, and, in six years, with his own hand, with his single pen, paid off £16,000 a-year! This is an achievement which has no parallel. With failing health, with all his brilliant hopes of establishing a great family dashed to the ground, with the dearest objects of his heart and health dropping and perishing before him, he went on and won £60,000, resolved to pay all or perish. And he did perish! His wife, shattered by the shock, died; he was left with a widowed heart still to labor on. Awful pangs and full of presage seized his own frame; a son and a daughter failed too in health; his old man, Tom Purdie, died suddenly; his great publisher, and one of his printers, died, too, of the fatal malady of ruined hopes. All these old connections, formed in the bright morning of life, and which had made his ascent so cheering and his toil so easy, seemed now to be giving way; and how dark was become that life which had exceeded all others in its joyous luster!

Yet, in the darkness, how the invincible soul of the heroic old man went on rousing himself to fight against the most violent shocks of fortune and of his own constitution. "I have walked the last on the domains I have planted; sat the last in the halls I have built; but death would have taken them from me if misfortune had spared them. My poor people whom I loved so well! There is just another die to turn against me in this run of ill luck; _i.e._, if I should break my magic wand in the fall from this elephant, and lose my popularity with my fortune!... But I find my eyes moistening, and that will not do; I will not yield without a fight for it." "Well, exertion, exertion. O invention, rouse thyself! May man be kind! may God be propitious! The worst is, I never quite know when I am right or wrong." "Slept ill, not having been abroad these eight days; now a dead sleep in the morning, and, when the awakening comes, a strong feeling how well I could dispense with it for once and forever. This passes away, however, as better and more dutiful thoughts arise in my mind." Poor man! and that worst which he feared came. His publisher told him, though reluctantly, that his power had departed, and that he had better lay by his pen! To a man like Scott, who had done such wonders, and still doggedly labored on to do others as great, that was the last and the bitterest feeling that could remain with life.

Is there any thing in language more pathetic than the words of Sir Walter, when, at Abbotsford, he looked round him after his wife's death and wrote thus in his journal:--"When I contrast what this place now is, with what it has been not long since, I think my heart will break. Lonely, aged, deprived of my family--all but poor Anne; an impoverished, an embarrassed man, deprived of the sharer of my thoughts and counsels, who could always talk down my sense of the calamitous apprehensions which break the heart that must bear them alone."

Sir Walter was the Job of modern times. His wealth and prosperity had been like his, and the fabric of his fortune was smitten at the four corners at once by the tempest of calamity; but his patience and resignation rivaled even those of the ancient patriarch. In no period of his life, though he was admirable in all, did he display so lofty a nobility of nature as in that of his adversity. Let us, who have derived such boundless enjoyment from his labors, praise with a fitting honor his memory. How descriptive are the words of Prior, which in his last days he applied to himself:--

"Whate'er thy countrymen have done, By law and wit, by sword and gun, In thee is faithfully recited; And all the living world that view Thy works, give thee the praises due-- At once instructed and delighted."

That tragic reverse which bowed down himself and so many of those who had shared with him in his happiness, did not stop with his death. His daughters and one of his sons soon followed him. His eldest and only surviving child, the present Sir Walter, has no family; there is no heir of his name, though, I believe, there are two of his blood, the son and daughter of Mr. Lockhart, of the third generation. As in the greatest geniuses in general, in Milton, Shakspeare, Byron, the direct male line has failed in Sir Walter Scott. "The hope of founding a family," says Lockhart, "died with him."

Such is the wonderful and touching romance of the life of Sir Walter Scott. We might pause and point to many a high teaching in it--but enough; in the beautiful words of Sir Egerton Bridges, quoted by Lockhart--"The glory dies not, and the grief is past."

We will now visit seriatim the homes and haunts of this extraordinary man.

Sir Walter has pointed out himself in his autobiography the place of his birth. He says, "I was born, I believe, on the 15th of August, 1771, in a house belonging to my father at the head of the College Wynd. It was pulled down with others to make room for the northern part of the new college." In ascending the Wynd, it occupied the left-hand corner at the top, and it projected into what is now North College-street. According to the account of my friend, Mr. Robert Chambers, in his Reekiana, it has been pulled down upward of sixty years. "The site," he says, "is now partly occupied as a wood-yard, and partly used in the line of North College-street. Mr. Walter Scott, W. S., father of the poet, here lived _au troisième_, according to the simple fashion of our fathers, the _flat_ which he occupied being accessible by a stair leading up from the little court behind. It was a house of what would now be considered humble aspect, but at that time neither humble from its individual appearance, nor from its vicinage. When required to be destroyed for the public convenience, Mr. Scott received a good price for it; he had some time before removed to a house on the west side of George's-square, where Sir Walter spent all his school-boy and college days. At the same time that Mr. Scott lived in the third flat, the two lower floors were occupied as one house by Mr. Keith, W.S., grandfather to the late Sir Alexander Keith, knight-marischal of Scotland.

"In the course of a walk through this part of the town in 1825, Sir Walter did the present writer the honor to point out the site of the house in which he had been born. On Sir Walter mentioning that his father had got a good price for his share of it, in order that it might be taken down for the public convenience, the individual who accompanied him took the liberty of expressing his belief that more money might have been made of it, and the public _much more_ gratified, if it had remained to be shown as the birthplace of a man who had written so many popular books. 'Ay, ay,' said Sir Walter, 'that is very well; but I am afraid it would have been necessary for me to die first, and that, you know, would not have been so comfortable.'"

Thus, the birthplace of Scott remains to this hour exactly in the condition described above, being used for a wood-yard, and separated from North College-street merely by a wooden fence.

The other spots in Edinburgh connected with Scott, are, his father's house in George's square; his own house, 39, North Castle-street; 19, South Castle-street, the second flat, which he occupied immediately after his marriage; the High-school and the Parliament-house. We may as well notice these at once, as it will then leave us at liberty to take his country residences in consecutive order.

George's-square is a quiet and respectable square, lying not far from Heriot's hospital, and opposite to Watson's hospital, on the left hand of the Meadows-walk. Mr. Robert Chambers--my great informant in these matters in Edinburgh, and who is an actual walking history of the place--every house, and almost every stone, appearing to suggest to him some memorable fact connected with it--stated that this was the first square built, when Edinburgh began to extend itself, and the nobility and wealthy merchants to think of coming down from their lofty stations in flats of the old town ten-storied houses, and seeking quieter and still more airy residences in the suburbs. It was the first sign of the new life and growth before the new town was thought of. No doubt, when Scott's father removed to it, it was the very center of fashion, and still it bears traces of the old gentility. Ancient families still linger about it, and you see door-plates bearing some aristocratic title. At the top, or north side of the square, lived Lord Duncan, at the time that he set out to take command of the fleet, and fight the battle of Camperdown. Before his setting out, he walked to and fro on the pavement here before his house, and, with a friend, talked of his plans; so that the victory of Camperdown may be said to have been planned in this square. The house still belongs to the family. Many other remarkable people have lived just about here. Blacklock, the blind poet, lived near; and Anderson, the publisher of the series of the The Poets, under his name, lived near also, in Windmill-street. A quieter square now could not, perhaps, be found; the grass was growing greenly among the stones when I visited it. The houses are capacious and good, and from the upper windows, many of them look out over the green fields, and have a full view of the Pentland hills. The new town, however, has now taken precedence in public favor, and this square is thought to be on the wrong side of the city. The house which Scott's father occupied, is No. 25.

On the window of a small backroom, on the ground-floor, the name of Walter Scott still remains written on a pane of glass, with a diamond, in a school-boy's hand. The present occupiers of the house told us, that not only the name, but verses had been found on several of the windows, undoubtedly by Walter Scott, and that they had had the panes taken out and sent to London, to admirers of the great author.

The room in which this name is written on the glass, used to be his own apartment. To this he himself, in his autobiography, particularly refers; and Lord Jeffrey relates, that, on his first call on young Walter Scott, "he found him in a small den, on the sunk floor of his father's house, in George's-square, surrounded with dingy books." Mr. Lockhart says, "I may here add the description of that early _den_, with which I am favored by a lady of Scott's family:--'Walter had soon begun to collect out-of-the-way things of all sorts. He had more books than shelves; a small painted cabinet, with Scotch and Roman coins in it, and so forth. A claymore and Lochabar ax, given him by Mr. Invernahyle, mounted guard on a little print of Prince Charlie; and _Broughton's Saucer_ was hooked up against the wall below it.' Such was the germ of the magnificent library and museum at Abbotsford; and such were the 'new realms' in which he, on taking possession, had arranged his little paraphernalia about him, 'with all the feelings of novelty and liberty.'" "Since those days," says Mr. Lockhart, "the habits of life in Edinburgh, as elsewhere, have undergone many changes; and 'the convenient parlor' in which Scott first showed Jeffrey his collection of minstrelsy, is now, in all probability, thought hardly good enough for a menial's sleeping-room." This is very much the fact; such a poor little damp _den_ did this appear, on our visit, being evidently used by the cook, as it was behind the kitchen, for a sort of little lumber-room of her own, that my companion contended that Scott's room must have been the one over this. The evidence here is, however, too strong as to its identity; and, indeed, who does not know what little dingy nooks children, and even youths, with ardent imaginations, can convert into very palaces.

This house will always be one of the most truly interesting spots connected with Scott's history. It was here that he lived, from a very child to his marriage. Here passed all that happy boyhood and youth which are described with so much beautiful detail in his Life, both from his own autobiography and from added materials collected by Lockhart. These show, in his case, how truly and entirely

"The child was father of the man;"

or, as Milton had it long before,

"The childhood shows the man As morning shows the day."

_Paradise Regained_, Book iv. p. 63.