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.