SCOTT, John, an eminent English divine, was born in 1638, and became minister of St Thomas’s in Southwark. In the year 1684 he was collated to a prebend in the cathedral of St Paul’s. Dr Hickes tells us, that, after the revolution, “he first refused the bishopric of Chester, because he would not take the oath of homage; and afterwards another bishopric, the deanery of Worcester, and a prebend of the church of Windsor, because they were all places of deprived men.” He published several excellent works, particularly the Christian Life, and died in the year 1695. He was eminent for his humanity, affability, sincerity, and readiness to do good; and his talent for preaching was extraordinary.

Scott , Thomas, an eminent divine of the Church of England, was born on the 16th of February 1747. His father was a grazier in Lincolnshire, in humble circumstances, with thirteen children, of whom Thomas was the tenth. The father was ambitious that one of his sons should belong to a learned profession, and with this view sent the subject of this memoir, when about fifteen years of age, to be apprentice to an apothecary and surgeon at Alford. In this situation he conducted himself so improperly, that after a short time he was dismissed by his master, and sent home in disgrace. His father, mortified and vexed by the conduct of his son, treated him with great harshness, and employed him only in the lowest and most laborious drudgery about the farm. For nine years after his return home in disgrace, he was exposed to great hardships, associated with persons in the lowest stations of society, and often joined in their riotous and abandoned pursuits. Conceiving himself used with unjust severity by his father, his temper was soured, and he became exceedingly irritable and discontented.

His employment of tending the sheep left him often in solitude. At these seasons his mind was filled with bitter reflections on the past, and gloomy anticipations of the future; and although his education had been very superficial, yet he had acquired so much as awakened in him an insatiable longing after the pleasures and distinctions of literature; and every thing conspired to disgust him with his present employment.

When about twenty-five years of age, to the astonishment of every one, he declared his resolution of entering into the church. This scheme was strongly opposed by his father, treated as chimerical by his friends, and ridiculed by his neighbours. At length, however, his unconquerable fortitude and patient perseverance overcame every obstacle, and he was admitted to priest’s orders in the year 1773, and shortly thereafter was appointed curate of Weston Underwood, with a salary of L.50 a year. While here, he applied with indefatigable zeal and industry to the study of sacred and profane literature. His sentiments at first were decidedly Socinian; but a candid and diligent study of the Scriptures gradually opened his eyes to the fallacy and the dangers of the doctrines which he had espoused; and being in the neighbourhood of John Newton, the friend of Cowper, who was strongly evangelical and Calvinistic in his views, his acquaintance with that eminent individual may have contributed to this change in his religious sentiments. In the year 1779 he published a small autobiography, entitled the Force of Truth, in which he gave a candid statement of the change in his opinions, and the steps by which he was gradually led to adopt the orthodox and evangelical creed. This publication made a great sensation at the time, and has gone through many editions since. He married, in 1774, Jane Kell, who proved a valuable helpmate to him in his future struggles. In 1780 he succeeded John Newton at Olney, and in 1785 he accepted the situation of lecturer at the Lock Hospital, with a salary of L.80 a year. This, with small sums for occasional lectureships, furnished but a scanty allowance for the support of an increasing family; and when, a few years afterwards, a proposal was made to him by a London bookseller to write a Commentary on the Bible, to be published in numbers, the offer of a guinea a week, as remuneration for his writings, decided him to engage in the undertaking.

This valuable work was well received by the public, and, under proper management, ought to have been a very profitable speculation; but, owing to the bankruptcy of the bookseller, Mr Scott not only received no remuneration for his labour, but lost all his little savings, and was involved in considerable debt. The first edition, of two thousand copies, commenced in 1802, and was finished in 1809; a second of two thousand copies, in 1807-11; the third, of three thousand copies, in six volumes 4to, 1812—14. The fourth was stereotyped, and sold to a great extent. He published a volume of Essays in 1793-94. He also published, in two volumes 8vo, Remarks on the Bishop of Lincoln’s Refutation of Calvinism; and Sermons on various subjects, from time to time. His Theological Works were collected and edited by his son, the Reverend John Scott, and published in ten volumes 8vo, in 1823.

In 1803 he left London for the rectory of Aston, Sandford, where he died on the 16th of April 1821. He was a man of eminent piety, somewhat eager and impetuous, but of great sincerity, and sterling honesty of character; of a vigorous intellect, indefatigably diligent in his studies, and a useful and practical preacher.

Scott, Sir Walter, was born at Edinburgh on the 15th of August 1771. “My birth,” says he, “was neither distinguished nor sordid. According to the prejudices of my country, it was esteemed gentle, as I was connected, though remotely, with ancient families, both by my father’s and mother’s side.” His paternal great-grandfather was a cadet of the border family of Harden, which has been ennobled within the last few years, and sprung in the fourteenth century from the great house of Buccleuch; his grandfather became a farmer in Roxburghshire, and married a lady who was a relation of his own; and his father, Walter Scott, was a writer to the signet in the Scottish capital. The poet’s mother, Anne Rutherford, who was likewise of honourable descent, was the daughter of one of the medical professors in the university of Edinburgh.

Neither Scott’s poetical turn nor his extraordinary powers of memory seem to have been inherited from either of his parents. His early years displayed as little precocity of talent as did the steady development of his mind in riper days; and the uneventful tenor of his childhood and youth, although their impressions can now be traced vividly in his works, must have seemed, but for these, as little calculated as possible to awaken in his mind a love of the imaginative or romantic.

Delicacy of constitution, accompanied by a lameness which proved permanent, exhibited itself before he had completed his second year, and caused soon afterwards his removal to the country. There, at his grandfather’s farmhouse of Sandyknowe, situated beneath the crags of a ruined baronial tower, and overlooking a tract of many miles studded with spots famous in border-history, the poet passed his childhood till about his eighth year, with scarcely any interruption but that of a year spent at Bath. From this early period there are related some interesting anecdotes of his sympathy with the grandeur and beauty of nature. The tenacity of his infantine recollections gave promise of what was afterwards so remarkable a faculty in his mind; and the ballads and legends, which were recited to him amidst the scenes in which their events were laid, co-operated in after-days with family and national pride to decide the bent of the border-minstrel’s fancy.

His health being partially confirmed, he was recalled home; and from the end of 1779 until 1783 his education was conducted in the High School of Edinburgh, with the assistance of a tutor resident in his father’s house. In the years immediately preceding this change, he had shewn[7:19:772] decided activity of intellect, and strong symptoms of its diversion towards literary pursuits; but now, introduced with imperfect preparation into a large and thoroughly trained class, and thrown, for the first time in his life, among a crowd of boisterous boys, his childish zeal for learning seems to have been quenched by ambition of another kind. His memory, it is true, was still remarkable, and procured for him from his master the title of historian of the class; while he produced some school-verses, both translated and original, which were at least creditable for a boy of twelve. Even his intellectual powers, however, were less active in the proper business of the school than in enticing his companions from their tasks by merry jests and little stories; and his place as a scholar scarcely ever rose above mediocrity. But his reputation stood high in the play-ground, where, possessed of unconquerable courage, and painfully eager to defeat the scorn which his physical defects excited, he is described as performing hazardous feats of agility, and as gaining pugilistic trophies over comrades who, that they might have no unfair advantage over the lame boy, fought, like him, lashed face to face on a plank. At home, his tutor, a zealous Presbyterian, initiated him, chiefly by means of conversation, in the facts of Scottish history, political as well as ecclesiastical, though without being able to shake those opinions which the boy had already taken up as an inheritance descending from his Jacobite ancestors; and he pursued with eagerness, at every interval which could be stolen from the watchfulness of his elders, a course of reading utterly miscellaneous and undigested, and embracing much that to most minds would have been either useless or positively injurious. “I left the High School,” says he, “with a great quantity of general information, ill arranged, indeed, and collected without system, yet deeply impressed upon my mind, readily assorted by my power of connexion and memory, and gilded, if I may be permitted to say so. by a vivid and active imagination.”

His perusal of histories, voyages, and travels, fairy tales, romances, and English poetry, was continued with increasing avidity during a long visit which, in his twelfth year, he paid to his father’s sister at the village of Kelso, where, lying beneath a noble plane-tree in an antique garden, and beholding around him one of the most beautiful landscapes in Scotland, the young student read for the first time, with entranced enthusiasm, Percy’s Reliques of Ancient Poetry. This work, besides the delight which was imparted by the poems it contained, influenced his mind by giving new dignity, in his eyes, to his favourite Scottish ballads, which he had already begun to collect from recitation, and to copy in little volumes, several of which are still preserved at Abbotsford. “To this period, also,” he tells us, “I can trace distinctly the awaking of that delightful feeling for the beauties of natural objects, which has never since deserted me. The romantic feelings which I have described as predominating in my mind, naturally rested upon and associated themselves with the grand features of the landscape around me; and the historical incidents or traditional legends connected with many of them gave to my admiration a sort of intense impression of reverence, which at times made my heart feel too big for its bosom. From this time the love of natural beauty, more especially when combined with ancient ruins, or remains of our fathers’ piety or splendour, became with me an insatiable passion, which, if circumstances had permitted, I would willingly have gratified by travelling over half the globe.”

In November 1783, Scott became a student in the university of Edinburgh, in which, however, he seems to have attended no classes but those of Greek, Latin, and logic, during one session, with those of ethics and universal history at a later period, while preparing for the bar. At college the scholastic part of his education proceeded even more unpros-perously than it had previously done. For science, mental, physical, or mathematical, he displayed no inclination; and in the acquisition of languages, for which he possessed considerable aptitude, he was but partially industrious or successful. Of Greek, as his son-in-law and biographer admits, he had in later life forgotten the very alphabet. He had indeed entered on the study with disadvantages similar to those which had formerly impeded his progress in Latin; he had, as he informs us, petulantly resolved on despising a study in which he found himself inferior to his competitors; and Professor Dalziel, irritated not only by his carelessness, but by an essay in which he maintained that Ariosto was a better poet than Homer, solemnly pronounced of him, “that dunce he was, and dunce would remain.” His knowledge of Latin does not appear to have ever extended farther than enabling him to catch loosely the meaning of his author; although we are informed that for some writers in that tongue, especially Lucan, Claudian, and Buchanan, he had in after life a decided predilection. About the time now under review, he also acquired French, Italian, and Spanish, all of which he afterwards read with sufficient ease; and the German language was learned a few years later, but never critically understood.

It was some time between his twelfth and his sixteenth year that his stores of romantic and poetical reading received a vast increase, during a severe illness which long confined him to bed; and one of his schoolfellows has given an interesting account of excursions in the neighbourhood of the city, during this period, when the two youths read poems and romances of knight-errantry, and exercised their invention in composing and relating to each other interminable tales modelled on their favourite books. The vocation of the romance-writer and poet of chivalry was thus already fixed. His health likewise became permanently robust. The sickly boy grew up into a muscular and handsome youth; and the lameness in one leg, which was the sole remnant of his carly complaints, was through life no obstacle to his habits of active bodily exertion, or to his love for out-of-door sports and exercise.

The next step in his life did not seem directed towards the goal to which all his favourite studies pointed. His father, a formal though high-spirited and high-principled man, whose manners are accurately described in his son’s novel of Redgauntlet, designed him for the legal profession; and, although he always looked wishftuly forward to his son’s embracing the highest department of it, considered it advisable, according to a practice not uncommon in Scotland, that he should be prepared for the bar by an education as an attorney. Accordingly, in May 1786, Scott, then nearly fifteen years old, was articled for five years as an apprentice to his father, in whose chambers he thenceforth continued, for the greater part of every day, to discharge the humble duties of a clerk, until., about the year 1790, he had, with his father’s approbation, finally resolved on coming to the bar. Of the amount of the young poet’s professional industry during those years of servitude we possess conflicting representations; but many circumstances in his habits, many peculiarities in the knowledge he exhibits incidentally in his works, and perhaps even much of his resolute literary industry, may be safely referred to the period of his apprenticeship, and show satisfactorily that at all events he was not systematically negligent of his duties. Historical and imaginative reading, however, continued to be prosecuted with undiminished ardour; summer excursions into the Highlands introduced him to the scenes, and to more than one of the characters, which afterwards figured in his most successful works; while in the law-classes of the university, as well as in the juvenile debating societies, he formed, or renewed from his school-days, acquaintance with several who became in manhood his cherished friends and his literary advisers. In 1791 the Speculative Society made him acquainted with Mr Jeffrey and those other young[7:19:773] men whose subsequent celebrity has been to a small extent reflected on the arena of their early training.

Scott’s attempts in poetry had now become more ambitious; for, it is said, about the completion of his fifteenth year, he had composed a poem in four books on the Conquest of Granada, which, however, he almost immediately burned, and no trace of it has been preserved. During some years after this time, we hear of no other literary compositions than essays for the debating societies.

In July 1792, being almost twenty-one years of age, he was called to the bar. Immediately after his first circuit, he commenced that series of “raids,” as he playfully called them, or excursions into the secluded border-districts, which in a few years enabled him to amass the materials for his first considerable work. His walks on the boards of the Parliament House, the Westminster Hall of Scotland, if they gained him for a time few professional fees, speedily procured him renown among his fellow-lawyers as a storyteller of high excellence; his father’s connections and his own friendships opened for him a ready admission into the best society of the city, in which his cheerful temper and his rich store of anecdotes made him universally popular; and his German studies produced, in 1796, his earliest poetical efforts that were published, namely, the translations of Burger’s ballads, Lenora and the Wild Huntsman. The same year witnessed the disappointment of a long and fondly-cherished hope, by the marriage of a young lady, whose image, notwithstanding, clung to his memory through life, and inspired some of the tenderest strains of his poetry.

In the summer of 1797, however, on a visit to the watering-place of Gilsland, in Cumberland, he became acquainted with Charlotte Margaret Carpenter, a young lady of French birth and parentage, whose mother, the widow of a royalist of Lyons, had escaped to England, and there died, leaving her children to the guardianship of their father’s friend the Marquis of Downshire. A mutual attachment ensued; and, after the removal of prudential doubts, which had arisen among the connections on both sides, Scott and Miss Carpenter were married at Carlisle in December of the same year.

The German ballads, which, though they met with very little sale, had been justly praised by a few competent critics, served as the translator’s introduction to the then celebrated Matthew Gregory Lewis, who enlisted him as a contributor to his poetical Tales of Wonder; and one cannot now but smile to hear of the elation with which the author of Waverley at that time contemplated the patronising kindness extended to him by the author of The Monk. Early in 1788 was published Scott’s translation of Goethe’s Goetz von Berlichingen, which, through Lewis’s assistance, was sold to a London bookseller for twenty-five guineas; but, though favourably criticised, it was received by the public as coldly as the preceding volume. In the summer of 1799, the poet wrote those ballads which he has himself called his “first serious attempts in verse the Glenfinlas, the Eve of St John, and the Grey Brother.

After Scott’s marriage, several of his summers were spent in a pretty cottage at Lasswade near Edinburgh, where he formed, besides other acquaintances, those of the noble houses of Melville and Buccleuch. The influence of these powerful friends, willingly exerted for one whose society was agreeable, whose birth connected him, though very remotely, with the latter of those titled families, and who in politics was decidedly and actively devoted to the ruling party, procured for him, in the end of the year 1799, his appointment as sheriff-depute of Selkirkshire, an office which imposed very little duty, while it gave him a permanent salary of L.300 per annum. His father’s death had recently bestowed on him a small patrimony; his wife had an income which was considerable enough to aid him greatly; his practice as a lawyer yielded, though not much, yet more than barristers of his standing can usually boast of; and, altogether, his situation in life, if not eminent, was at least strikingly favourable when compared with that which has fallen to the lot of most literary men. Scott, however, now twenty-eight years of age, had done nothing to found a reputation tor him as a man of letters; and there appeared as yet to be but little probability that he should attach himself to literature as a profession, or consider it as any thing more than a relaxation for those leisure hours which were left unoccupied by business and the enjoyments of polite society.

In 1800 and 1801 those hours were employed in the preparation of the Border Minstrelsy, the fruit of his childish recollections, and of his youthful rambles and studies. The first two volumes appeared in the beginning of the next year, and the edition, consisting of eight hundred copies, was sold off before its close. This work, however, the earliest of his which can be said to have given him any general fame, yielded him about eighty pounds of clear profit; being very far less than he must have expended in the investigations out of which it sprang. In 1803 it was completed by the publication of the third volume. Besides the value which the Minstrelsy possesses in itself, in the noble antique ballads, so industriously, tastefully, and yet conscientiously edited, in the curious and spiritedly-used information which overflows through all the prose annotations, and in those few original poems which gave the earliest warning of that genius which as yet had lurked unseen, the work has now a separate value and interest, as forming the most curious of all illustrations for the history of its editor’s mind and of his subsequent works. “One of the critics of that day,” remarks Mr Lockhart, “said that the book contained 'the elements of a hundred historical romances ;’ and this critic was a prophetic one. No person who has not gone through its volumes for the express purpose of comparing their contents with his great original works, can have formed a conception of the endless variety of incidents and images, now expanded and emblazoned by his mature art, of which the first hints may be found either in the text of those primitive ballads, or in the notes which the happy rambles of his youth had gathered together for their illustration.”

But before the publication of the Border Minstrelsy, the poet had begun to attempt a higher flight. “In the third volume,” says he, writing to his friend George Ellis in 1803, “I intend to publish a long poem of my own. It will be a kind of romance of border chivalry, in a light-horseman sort of stanza.” This border romance was the Lay of the Last Minstrel, which, however, soon extended in plan and dimensions, and, originating as a ballad on a goblin story, became at length a long and varied poem. The first draught of it, in its present shape, was written in the autumn of 1802, and the whole history of its progress has been delightfully told by the author himself, and is well illustrated by his biographer.

In 1803, during a visit to London, Scott, already familiarly acquainted with Ellis, Heber, and other literary men, and now possessing high reputation himself in virtue of the Minstrelsy, was introduced to several of the first men of the time; and thenceforth, bland as he was in manner, and kind in heart, indefatigable and successful in his study of human character, and always willing to receive with cordiality the strangers whom his waxing fame brought about him, it is not surprising to find, that not to know personally Walter Scott, argued one’s self unknown. The toleration and kindliness of his character are illustrated by the fact, that firm as his own political opinions were, and violently as excitement sometimes led him to express them, not only did he always continue on friendly terms with the chief men of the opposite party in Edinburgh, but several of them were his intimate friends and associates; and he even was for some years an occasional contributor to the Edinburgh Review.

In 1804 was published his edition of the ancient poem[7:19:774] of Sir Tristrem, so valuable for its learned dissertations, and for that admirable imitation of the antique which appears as a continuation of the early minstrel’s work.

During that year and the preceding, the Lay was freely communicated to all the author’s friends, Wordsworth and Jeffrey among the rest; and after undergoing various changes, and receiving enthusiastic approval in several quarters from which commendation was wont to issue but sparingly, it was at length published, in the first week of 1805. The poet, now thirty-three years of age, took his place at once as a classic in English literature. Its circulation immediately became immense, and has since exceeded that of any other English poem.

But exactly at this culminating point of the poet’s life, we must turn aside from the narrative of his literary triumphs, to notice a step of another kind, which proved the most important he ever took. In one of those interesting communications of 1830, which throw so much light on his personal history, he has told us, that from the moment when it became certain that literature was to form the principal employment of his days, he determined that it should at least not constitute a necessary source of his income. Few literary men, perhaps, have not nourished a wish of this sort; but very few indeed have possessed, like Scott, the means of converting the desire into an effectual resolution. In 1805, as his biographer tells us, he was, “independently of practice at the bar and of literary profits, in possession of a fixed revenue of nearly, if not quite, L.1000 a year.” To most men of letters this income would have appeared affluence; but Scott has frankly avowed, that he did not think it such. The truth is, that his mind was already filled with the feeling which speedily became its master-passion, namely, the ambition, not of founding a new family (for that was too mean an aim for his pride of birth to stoop to), but of adding to his own ancestral pretensions that claim to respect which ancient pedigree does not always possess when it stands alone, but which belongs to it beyond challenge when it is united with territorial possessions. The fame of a great poet, now within his reach, if not already grasped, seemed to him a little thing, compared with the dignity of a well-descended and wealthy Scottish landholder; and, while neither he nor his friends could yet have foreseen the immensity of those resources which his genius was afterwards to place at his disposal for the attainment of his favourite wish, two plans occurred and were executed, which promised to conduct him far at least towards the goal.

The first of these was the obtaining of one of the principal clerkships in the Scottish Court of Session, offices of high respectability, executed at a moderate cost of time and trouble, and remunerated at that time by an income of about L.800 a year, which was afterwards increased to L.1300. This object was attained early in 1806, through his ministerial influence, aided by the consideration paid to his talents; although, owing to a private arrangement with his predecessor, he did not receive any part of the emoluments till six years later.

The second plan was of a different sort, being in fact a commercial speculation. James Ballantyne, a schoolfellow of Scott, a man possessing a good education, and considerable literary talent of a practical kind, having become the editor and printer of a newspaper in Kelso, had been employed to print the Minstrelsy, and acquired great reputation by the elegance with which that work was produced. Soon afterwards, in pursuance of Scott’s advice, he removed to Edinburgh, where, under the patronage of the poet and his friends, and assisted by his own character and skill, his printing business accumulated to an extent which his capital, even with pecuniary aid from Scott, proved inadequate to sustain. An application for a new loan was met by a refusai, accompanied, however, by a proposal, that Scott should make a large advance, on condition of being admitted as a partner in the firm, to the amount of a third share. Accordingly, in May 1805, 'Walter Scott became regularly a partner of the printing-house of James Ballantyne and Company, though the fact remained for the public, and for all his friends but one, a profound secret. “The forming of this commercial connexion was,” says his son-in-law, “one of the most important steps in Scott’s life. He continued bound by it during twenty years, and its influence on his literary' exertions and his worldly fortunes was productive of much good and not a little evil. Its effects were in truth so mixed and balanced during the vicissitudes of a long and vigorous career, that I at this moment doubt whether it ought, on the whole, to be considered with more of satisfaction or of regret.”

From this time we are to view Scott as incessantly engaged in that memorable course of literary industry whose toils advancing years served only to augment, and from which neither the duties of his two professional offices of clerk of session and sheriff, nor the increasing claims made on him by society, were ever able to divert him. He now stood deservedly high in the favour of the booksellers, not merely as a poet and man of genius, but as one possessed of an extraordinary mass of information, and of such habits as qualified him eminently for turning his knowledge to account. He was therefore soon embarked in undertakings, not indeed altogether inglorious, but involving an amount of drudgery to which, perhaps, no man of equal original genius has ever condescended. The earliest of these was his edition of Dryden, which, entered upon in 1805, was completed and published in 1808.

But the list of works in which his poetical genius shone forth continued rapidly to increase amidst his multiplicity of other avocations. From the summer of 1804 till that of 1812, the spring and autumnal vacations of the court were spent by him and his family at Ashestiel, a small mansion romantically overhanging the Tweed some miles above Melrose, and rented from one of the poet’s kinsmen. In this beautiful retreat, at intervals during twelve months, was chiefly composed the magnificent poem of Marmion, which was published in the beginning of 1808. At the same place, likewise, in 1805, were composed the opening chapters of a novel which, on the disapproval of one of the author’s critical friends, was thrown aside and not resumed for years.

Scott’s commercial engagements must now again be adverted to. In the year 1808 he took a part, perhaps as sug-gester, certainly as a zealous promoter, of a scheme which terminated in the establishment of the Quarterly Review in London, as a political and literary counterpoise to the Edinburgh Review, the advocate of Whig opinions. But the poet had other than political grounds for embarking in this opposition. He had seriously quarrelled with the firm of Constable and Company, the publishers of the Edinburgh Review, and of several of his own earlier works; and his wish to check the enterprising head of that house in his attempts to obtain a monopoly of Scottish literature, is openly avowed, in Scott’s correspondence at the time, as one of his principal motives for framing another scheme. His plan, as far as it was explained either to the public or to his own friends, amounted only to this: That a new publishing house should be set up in Edinburgh, under the management of John Ballantyne, a younger brother of James; and that this firm, with the acknowledged patronage of Scott and his friends, should engage in a series of extensive literary undertakings, including, amongst others, the annual publication of a historical and literary Register, conducted on Tory principles. But, unfortunately both for Scott’s peace of mind, and ultimately also for his worldly fortunes, there was here, as in his previously-formed connection with the same family, an undivulged secret. The profits of the printing-house had been large; Scott’s territorial ambition had been[7:19:775] growing faster than his prospect of being able to feed it; and these causes, inextricably mixed up with pique towards Constable, and kindliness for his Kelso protéges, led him into an entanglement which at length ruined both himself and his associates. By the contract of the publishing house of John Ballantyne and Company, executed in May 1808, Scott became a secret partner to the extent of one third. The unhappy issue of this affair will force itself on our notice at a later stage.

In the mean time we see him prosecuting for some time his career of poetical success. The Lady of the Lake, published in 1810, was followed by the Vision of Don Roderick in 1811; by Rokeby in 1812; and by the Bridal of Triermain, which came out anonymously in 1813. His poems may be said to have closed in 1815 with the Lord of the Isles and the Field of Waterloo; since Harold the Dauntiess, in 1817, appeared without the writer’s name, and the dramatic poems of 1822 and 1830 are quite unworthy of him. In the midst of these poetical employments he made his second and last great appearance as an editor and commentator of English classics, by publishing in 1814 his edition of Swift.

But from 1815 till 1825, Scott’s name ceased almost entirely to be before the public as an avowed author; and for those who chose to believe that he was not the writer of the Waverley Novels it must have been a question not a little puzzling, if it ever occurred to them, how this man, who wrote with such ease, and seemed to take such pleasure in writing, was now occupying his hours of leisure. A few articles in the Quarterly Review, such works as Paul’s Letters, and annotations in occasional editions of ancient tracts, accounted but poorly for his time during ten years.

About 1813 and 1814 his popularity as a poet was sensibly on the decline, partly from causes inherent in his later poems themselves, and partly from extraneous causes, among which a prominent place belongs to the appearance of Byron. No man was more quicksighted than Scott in perceiving the ebb of popular favour; and no man better prepared to meet the reverse with firmness. He put in serious execution a threat which he had playfully uttered to one of his own family even before the publication of the Lady of the Lake. “If I fail now,” said he, “I will write prose for life.” And in writing prose his genius discovered, on its first attempt, a field in which it earned triumphs even more splendid than its early ones in the domain of poetry.

The chapters of fiction begun at Ashestiel in 1805, which had already been resumed and again thrown aside, were once more taken up, and the work was finished with miraculous rapidity; the second and third volumes having been written during the afternoons of three summer weeks in 1814. The novel appeared in July of that year, under the title of Waverley, and its success from the first was unequivocal and unparalleled. Although we cannot here give a catalogue of Scott’s works, yet in truth such a list of the novels and romances does in itself present the most surprising proof, both of his patient industry, and of the singularly equable command which he had at all times over his mental resources. In the midst of occupations which would have taken away all leisure from other men, the press poured forth volume after volume, in a succession so rapid as to deprive of some part of its absurdity one of the absurd suppositions of the day, namely, that more persons than one were concerned in the novels. Guy Mannering, the second of the series, in 1815, was followed in 1816 by the Antiquary and the First Series of the Tales of My Landlord. Rob Roy appeared in 1817; the Second Series of the Tales in 1818; and in 1819 the Third Series and Ivanhoe. Two romances a-year now seemed to be expected as the due of the public. The year 1820 gave them the Monastery and the Abbot; 1821, Kenilworth and the Pirate; the Fortunes of Nigel, coming out alone in 1822, was followed in 1823 by no fewer than three works of fiction, Peveril of the Peak, Quentin Durward, and St Ronan’s Well; and the comparatively scanty number of novels in 1824 and 1825, which produced respectively only Redgauntlet and the Tales of the Crusaders, is accounted for by the fact that the author was engaged in preparing a large historical work.

It is impossible even to touch on the many interesting details which Scott’s personal history presents during these brilliant years; but it is indispensable to say, that his dream of territorial acquisition was realized with a splendour which, a few years before, he himself could not have hoped for. The first step was taken in 1811, by the purchase of a small farm of a hundred acres on the banks of the Tweed, which received the name of Abbotsford, and in a few years grew, by new purchases, into a large estate. The modest dwelling first planned on this little manor, with its two spare bed-rooms and its plain appurtenances, expanded itself in like manner with its master’s waxing means of expenditure, till it had become that baronial castle which we now reverentially visit as the minstrel’s home. The hospitality of the poet increased with his seeming prosperity; his mornings were dedicated to composition, and his evenings to society; and from the date of his baronetcy in 1820 to the final catastrophe in 1826, no mansion in Europe, of poet or of nobleman, could boast such a succession of guests illustrious for rank or talent, as those who sat at Sir Walter Scott’s board, and departed proud of having been so honoured. His family meanwhile grew up around him; his eldest son and daughter married; most of his early friends continued to stand by his side; and few that saw the poet in 1825, a hale and seemingly happy man of fifty-four, could have guessed that there remained for him only a few more years (years of mortification and of sorrow), before he should sink into the grave, struck down by internal calamity, not by the gentle hand of time.

And yet not only was this the issue, but, even in the hour of his greatest seeming prosperity, Scott had again and again been secretly struggling against some of the most alarming anxieties. On details as to his unfortunate commercial engagements we cannot here enter. It is enough to say, that the printing company of which he was a partner, which seems to have had considerable liabilities even before the establishment of the publishing house, was now inextricably entangled with the concerns of the latter, many of whose largest speculations had been completely unsuccessful; that, besides this, both firms were involved to an enormous extent with the house of Constable; and that large sums, which had been drawn by Sir Walter as copyright-money for the novels, had been paid in bills which were still current, and threatening to come back on him.

In the beginning of 1826, Constable’s house stopped payment; and the failure of the firm of Ballantyne, for a very large sum, followed instantly and of course. Probably even the utter ruin which this catastrophe brought upon Scott, was not more painful to him than the exposure which it necessarily involved, of those secret connections, the existence of which even his most confidential friends could till now have at most only suspected. But if he had been imprudent, he was both courageous and honourable; and in no period of his life does he appear to such advantage, as when he stood, as now, beggared, humbled, and covered with a load of debt from which no human exertions seemed able to relieve him. He came forward without a day’s delay, and refused to be dealt with as an ordinary bankrupt, or to avail himself of those steps which would have set him free from the claims of his creditors, on surrendering his property to them. He insisted that these claims should, so far as regarded him, be still allowed to subsist; and he pledged himself that the labour of his future life should be unremittingly devoted to the discharge of them. He did[7:19:776] more than fulfil his noble promise; for the gigantic toil to which, during years after this, he submitted, was the immediate cause that shortened his life. His self-sacrifice, however, effected astonishingly much towards the purpose which it was designed to serve. Between January 1826 and January 1828, he had realized for the creditors the surprising sum of nearly L.40,000; and soon after his death the principal of the whole Ballantyne debt was paid up by his executors.

We have now briefly to describe the efforts by which this result was accomplished. After spending at Abbotsford, in 1826, a solitary summer, very unlike its former scenes of splendour, Scott, returning to town for his winter duties, and compelled to leave behind him his dying wife (who survived but till the spring), took up his residence in lodgings, and there continued that system of incessant and redoubled labour which he had already maintained for months, and maintained afterwards till it killed him. Woodstock, published in 1826, had been written during the crisis of his distresses; and the next fruit of his toil was the Life of Napoleon, which, commenced before the catastrophe, appeared in 1827, and was followed by the First Series of Chronicles of the Canongate; while to these again succeeded, in the end of the same year, the First Series of the Tales of a Grandfather. The year 1828 produced the Second Series of both of these works; 1829 gave Anne of Geierstein, the first volume of a History of Scotland for Lardner's Cyclopaedia, and the Third Series of the Tales of a Grandfather. The same year also witnessed the commencement of that annotated publication of the collected novels, which, together with the similar edition of the poetical works, was so powerful an instrument in effecting Scott’s purpose of pecuniary disentanglement. In 1830 came two Dramas, the Letters on Demonology, the Fourth Series of the Tales of a Grandfather, and the second volume of the History of Scotland. If we are disappointed when we compare most of these works with the productions of younger and happier days, our criticism will be disarmed by a recollection of the honourable end which the later works promoted; and as to the last productions of the mighty master, the volumes of 1831, containing Count Robert and Castle Dangerous, no one who is acquainted with the melancholy circumstances under which these were composed and published, will be capable of any feeling but that of compassionate respect.

The dejection which it was impossible for Scott not to feel in commencing his self-imposed task, was materially lightened, and his health invigorated, by an excursion to London and Paris in the course of 1826, for the purpose of collecting materials for the Life of Napoleon. In 1829 alarming symptoms appeared, and were followed by a paralytic attack in February 1830, after which the tokens of the disease were always more or less perceptible to his family; but the severity of his tasks continued unremitted, although in that year he retired from his clerkship, and took up his permanent residence at Abbotsford. The mind was now but too evidently shaken, as well as the body; and the diary which he kept contains, about and after this time, melancholy misgivings of his own upon this subject. In April 1831 he had the most severe shock of his disease that had yet attacked him; and having been at length persuaded to abandon literary exertion, he left Abbotsford in September of that year, on his way to the Continent, no country of which he had ever yet visited, except some parts of France and Flanders. This new tour was undertaken with the faint hope that abstinence from mental labour might for a time avert the impending blow. A ship of war, furnished for the purpose by the Admiralty, conveyed Sir Walter, first to Malta, and then to Naples; and the accounts which we have, both of the voyage and of his residence in Italy, abound with circumstances of melancholy interest. After the beginning of May 1832, his mind was completely overthrown; his nervous impatience forced his companions to hurry him homeward from Rome through the Tyrol to Frankfort; in June they arrived in London, whence Sir Walter was conveyed by sea to Edinburgh; and, having reached Abbotsford on the 11th of July, he there continued to exist, with few intervals of consciousness, till the afternoon of the 21st of September, when he expired, having just completed the sixty-first year of his age. On the 26th he was buried in the beautiful ruins of Dryburgh Abbey.

In the article RoMANce, observations have been made on Scott’s prose works of fiction. It remains here to add a very few words on the character of his poetry. It would be rash for any who have lived only in the same age with a great poet, and still more rash for those whose earliest conceptions of poetical celebrity and poetical beauty are inseparably associated with his name and his writings, to pronounce peremptorily on the rank which may probably be assigned to him by posterity, among the classics of his native language. But without venturing on such ground as this, there are points of comparison with himself and others, which may warrantably be applied to the illustration of his genius.

In regard to the spirit which animates the poetry of Scott, he stands entirely alone in his age; separated indeed so far from the tendencies of the time, that his universal popularity seems at the first glance to have in it something unaccountable. The passionate intenseness and moody self-inquisition of Byron, the calm thoughtfulness and universal sympathies of Wordsworth, and the wildness of Coleridge’s lyrical dreams, are in their several kinds allied to those impulses which have widest sway in these generations of our race; while other poets, Campbell with his gentle pathos, Crabbe with his melancholy anatomy of life, and Moore with his overflow of voluptuous imagery, appeal to emotions which are not so much distinctive of particular periods in the history of mankind, as common to the mind in all its ages. But the world which Scott reproduced in the midst of us, the world of feudalism and chivalry, the transition-stage in the annals of Christian Europe, is one with which the men of modern times have very little communion or fellow-feeling; and the boldness with which he chose his themes was even exceeded by that of the tone in which he ventured to treat them; neither jesting with his own fancies, like Pulci or Ariosto, nor, like Tasso, overlaying the essential substance of the chivalrous life with a garniture of poetry and of delicate feeling which left the genuine light of elder times but few openings to glimmer through; but grappling with his materials in the believing and lofty devotion of an historical poet, and painting for us a picture in which the fierce and fiery spirit of martial adventure inspires the leading groups, and gives the outlines of the piece, while interesting local superstitions and the ascetic religion of Catholicism, the absorbing love of country and the anomalous devotedness of feudalism, form, singly or united, the colouring which is spread over different portions of the composition.

For, in essentials, this character of historical truth does belong to the poetry of Scott; not indeed that his view of the old world is one which could have presented itself to those who lived nearer to the times he depicts; but that it is almost as near to truth as consists with the united requirements made by the purposes of his art and the temper of his age, and probably nearer to the truth than any similar attempt which has been made in modern times. Doubtless there are many instances in which he does not preserve this fidelity to the claims of his subject; but it is surprisingly preserved in his best works, and the inferiority of the others is in no small degree owing to their deficiency in it. Indeed he goes even farther than this; for he not only presents to us the scenes of old, but he invests them in a dress[7:19:777] substantially the same as that in which they would have been clothed by poets contemporary, or nearly succeeding them, if these, for their metrical romances or their ballads of love and war, had possessed equal appliances, in a formed language, and in extended views as to the principles of the poetical art.

The Lay of the Last Minstrel is really a long border-ballad; and, inspired by the poet’s early recollections and studies, and nourished not only by those copious sources of illustration of which the Border Minstrelsy furnishes abundant specimens, but by affectionate familiarity with the landscapes of his story, this work possesses, both in spirit and in details, at once a fervour and a unity superior to any of his others. Very little indeed, either of incident or character, would require to be withdrawn from it, as foreign to its essence. Marmion is pitched in another key, but is still antique, and, though less rich in characteristic details of the olden time, and rather less free from modern admixtures, is pervaded almost throughout by the chivalrous spirit, while that spirit blazes forth at several points with a splendour which the poet elsewhere never equalled. The poem is a metrical romance of history; the full development of a species of composition in which Barbour had but faintly traced the design. The Lady of the Lake cannot be so readily referred to any one class of our old national poems; in which, indeed, that moving panorama of gorgeous landscapes, amidst which the personages exist, is, as a prominent feature, quite unknown. But this very feature, and the placidly romantic air which breathes through most of the adventures, at once determine its type as a kind of pastoral romance (instanced more frequently in foreign literature than in our own), and diffuse over the work a singular charm, which hides from us much vagueness, both in the characters and in the historical details of manners and ideas. Rokeby, the next in the list, is confessedly the weakest of its author’s larger poems, as it is also that in which he has removed himself farthest from his ordinary models. Defective alike in unity of spirit and in historical fidelity, it would, but for some poetical gems which sparkle through, deserve no higher name than that of a novel in verse. In the Lord of the Isles we behold a return to the poet’s higher sources of inspiration; for we have here another metrical chronicle, a second Marmion, every way inferior to the first.

It is abundantly evident that the task which Scott has thus performed, of creating anew the scenes and characters of a fierce and chaotic stage of society, allowed him ample room for arousing some of the strongest emotions which poetry can awaken. Sometimes, indeed, he errs by applying himself to the excitement of feelings which, though strictly within his limits, are not broadly enough impressed on the minds of most men to found any lively sympathy. Such are the feelings of superstitious awe and delight in supernatural invention, feelings which are chiefly addressed in his two anonymous poems, and to whose prevalence these works, equal in some points to any thing in verse he ever wrote, mainly owe their want of general interest and popularity. But he far offener throws himself on those principles which are universally sympathized with and appreciated, not indeed arousing all of them with equal skill, but compounding, out of the use he makes of all, a representation which is at once sufficiently true and widely attractive. That which was really the master-feeling of the times he delineates, the love of warlike adventure, is the path in which he has been by far most successful. In tenderness or passion he does not stand by any means first among the poets of our day; and even in those exhibitions of chivalrous generosity and lofty feeling which are so closely consonant to his stories and their actors, he is, although often delightfully felicitous, yet by no means without his equals; but there is no poet of our times, and very few in any age or coun try, who have portrayed with such admirable force and fire the soldier’s thirst for battle, and the headlong fury of the field of slaughter. Throughout all his works there occur bursts of this sort, which would of themselves have placed him high among poets of the class, even though he had never written his noblest passages of warfare, the knightly combat of Fitzjames and Roderick, or the magnificent battle-piece which closes Marmion. His clear and cheerful, yet delicately sketched and poetically elevated descriptions of natural scenery, less strong in their outlines than some poetry of a similar kind, and less vivid in their colouring and chiaroscuro than others, but always pleasing and original, and often far more, may probably be said to be, after their warlike temper, the most distinctive feature of his poems.

If the moral tone of Scott’s poetry is not high, it must be at least admitted that it is uniformly inoffensive; and if most passages excite us less violently than those of some other poets, there is none whose works leave on the mind a more pleasing expression of content and hopefulness. Perhaps, in his views of human society, the only thing which can at all jar on the feelings of any, is that tendency to aristocratic hauteur, which, not indeed shrinking from contact with the lower orders, and willingly recognising and esteeming many of their virtues, yet considers them strictly as the dependents of higher men, and is silent on every other relation they can be supposed to hold. This feeling, so palpable both in his poetry and in his romances, is, it must be remarked, quite in keeping as a feature of the times he describes in the former class of writings; and even as an element in modern poetry, there doubtless are, after all, many who will esteem the sentiment a just one.

In skill of execution, as respects both ease of expression and melody of versification, there is in the poems an exceedingly observable progress, not at all corresponding to their respective degrees of real merit. Both in diction and in music there is a very wide distinction between the first few stanzas of the Lay and the most finished passages in Rokeby or the Lord of the Isles. Not less noticeable are the variations in point of poetical ornament, a thing very different from genuine poetical force or beauty. In the Lay, the most poetically conceived of all the works, there are wonderfully few passages of the kind that furnish showy quotations, though those of this class that do occur are of a very high order. Marmion, except in the Introduction, scarcely contains more; the Lady of the Lake possesses such far more abundantly; while Rokeby overflows with couplets poetically sententious; and the Lord of the Isles again returns towards the earlier manner.

There is one point of view in which the poems offer a very interesting subject of consideration, not for their own sake, but in their relation to those more celebrated and certainly higher works which succeeded them. They may be regarded as in some sense preparations, or, in the artist’s phrase, studies, for the novels and romances. The field of speculation which is thus presented may furnish some intelligent inquirer with extremely apt materials for illustrating the poet’s genius; but the mine is too wealthy to be here so much as opened. It may be remarked, however, that while the latter poems in their spirit approach far nearer to the prose romance than the earlier ones, thus in some degree indicating the operations which were going on in the author’s mind, yet it is from the earlier that the romances have derived by far the most plentiful hints and materials. In the slightly sketched personages of the poems we may frequently discover elements which were expanded into the finished characters of the prose works, and this not only in the dignified and poetical, but even in the comic, as one instance of which may be cited the Friar John of Norham as the first outline of Robin Hood’s Tuck. In incident, the borrowings from the poems are less direct and[7:19:778] palpable; and the most obvious are the obligations which, both in this and the other particular, the Monastery owes to the Lay, and Ivanhoe to Marmion. The Lady of the Lake, also, both in its scenery and its draughts of Highland character, may be considered as the preface to Waverley. (b. l.)