FOOTNOTES
[1] This print, glazed in a black frame, was presented by Sir Adam Ferguson to my brother Robert, and it is now in my possession.—W. C.
[2] [For a number of years after the decease of Sir Walter, there were many small floating anecdotes and memorabilia of his habits, and the happy way in which he would make some pleasantry out of very ordinary occurrences. Two or three instances occur to recollection.—One day, when walking along Princes Street, Edinburgh, my brother, who accompanied him, made the remark that he was evidently well known, for many persons looked back at him on passing. ‘Oh, ay, ay,’ replied Scott jocosely; ‘more know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows!’—The late Mr Thomas Tegg, publisher, Cheapside, having, on the occasion of visiting Scotland, ventured with a friend to call on Sir Walter at Abbotsford, was somewhat doubtful of his reception, for he had published a small book in doggerel verse, designed to bring Scott’s muse into ridicule. He was speedily relieved of his apprehensions. ‘I am sorry to say,’ said Tegg apologetically, ‘that I happen to be the publisher of Jokeby, a Burlesque on Rokeby.’ ‘Glad to see you, Mr Tegg,’ replied Sir Walter; ‘the more jokes the better!’—Mrs John Ballantyne, in her reminiscences of Scott, states that, besides his story-telling manner, he had another quite distinct, in which he was accustomed to utter any snatch of poetry, such as a verse of a Border ballad, or a simple but touching popular rhyme. ‘I can never forget,’ she says, ‘the awe-striking solemnity with which he pronounced an elegiac stanza inscribed on a tombstone in Melrose Abbey:
“Earth walketh on the earth
Glistering like gold;
Earth goeth to the earth
Sooner than it wold.
Earth buildeth on the earth
Palaces and towers;
Earth sayeth to the earth,
All shall be ours.”’
—On the occasion of an excursion with a friend to Dumfriesshire and Galloway, Scott’s money happened to run out; and he borrowed from his companion a pound-note at Tinwald Manse, and two pounds at the inn of Beattock Bridge. The payment of the loan became the subject of a bit of pleasantry. Returning home, he enclosed three pounds to his friend, with the following lines:
‘One at Tinwald Manse, and two at Beattock Brig,
That makes three, if Cocker’s worth a fig;
Borrow while you may, pay when you can,
And at the last you’ll die an honest man!’]
‘From Soldan Turk I this Forest wan
When the king and his men was not to see.’
In the copy printed in the Border Minstrelsy, this is Soudron—i. e., Southron or English, which I have no doubt is the proper reading.—Aytoun.
[4] The Shepherd’s conjecture proved correct. Mr Aytoun procured his copy of the ballad from the charter-chest at Philiphaugh. The copy in the Border Minstrelsy was printed from one found among the papers of Mrs Cockburn, authoress of The Flowers of the Forest.
[5] MS. notes by W. Laidlaw. Professor Aytoun says that one cause of his doubts as to the antiquity of Auld Maitland was that it wanted a clear intelligible story and main plot, so that it could not be retained in memory for a couple of months. If the Professor (alas, now no more!) had chanced, in any of his angling excursions on the Tweed, to have fallen in with a brother of the rod, Mr Stirling, Depute Sheriff-clerk of Peebles (also now gone), he would have found at least one gentleman who could repeat the whole ballad without a break, though he had not read a line of it for more than twenty years. Hogg states explicitly that when the sheriff visited his cottage at Ettrick, his mother recited or chanted the ballad; and in a poetical address to Scott congratulating him on his elevation to the baronetcy, the Shepherd says:
‘When Maitland’s song first met your ear,
How the furled visage up did clear,
Beaming delight! though now a shade
Of doubt would darken into dread,
That some unskilled presumptuous arm
Had marred tradition’s mighty charm.
Scarce drew thy lurking dread the less
Till she, the ancient Minstreless,
With fervid voice and kindling eye,
And withered arms waving on high,
Sung forth these words in eldritch shriek,
While tears stood on thy nut-brown cheek:
“Na, we are nane o’ the lads o’ France,
Nor e’er pretend to be;
We be three lads of fair Scotland,
Auld Maitland’s sons a’ three!”
Thy fist made all the table ring—
“By ——, sir, but that is the thing!”’
[6] Marmion—Introduction to Canto II.
[7] He rarely made corrections on his published works, but there is one alteration worth noting in the opening of this Introduction. In the first edition he says: ‘From the remote period when the Roman deity Terminus retired behind the ramparts of Severus,’ &c. This seemed a little inflated, and also inappropriate, for it represents Terminus as if capable of motion, though the Romans represented the god as wanting legs and arms, to shew that he was immovable; and Scott reduced the illustration to sober historical limits: ‘From the remote period when the Roman province was contracted by the ramparts of Severus,’ &c.
[8] Marmion: Introd. to Canto II. When the poem was published, its author wrote to his friend at Blackhouse: ‘This accompanies a copy of Marmion, which I will see put up with my own eyes. Constable is greatly too busy to be uniformly accurate.’
[9] Letter to Hon. Mrs Stewart Mackenzie.
[10] Seaforth Papers at Brahan Castle, Ross-shire.
[11] The Burghers were a religious sect, now merged in the United Presbyterian body.
[12] Letter to Hon. Mrs Stewart Mackenzie.
[13] Lockhart also was in favour of a cairn: ‘As to monuments, if I could choose—passing Abbotsford—I should say, put a plain sitting statue of Sir W. S. on Princes Street, Edinburgh, at the south end of Castle Street, backed by the rock; and put a cairn on the Eildon Hill, that every lad might carry his stone to. As for temples and pillars, they have been vulgarised in Edinburgh. A friend said to me: ‘Good God, what a grand thing it will be to have Sir Walter put on a level with the late Lord Melville! Let us have another pillar at the west end of George Street, by all means.’ This man is a sensible one, and was dead serious. On a level with Lord Melville, whose name will appear only in the fag-end of a note to the future history of this country, and really will be kept in memory chiefly by the pillar! Dugald Stewart and Playfair, admirable dominies both, have their temples; so I fancy will now Sir John Leslie. The Calton Hill had better be left to the schoolmasters; in a hundred years they will have covered it; but, if they please, they may keep a place in the midst for Sir John Sinclair.’—Letter to Hon. Mrs Stewart Mackenzie.
[14] Vide Quarterly Review, June 1849.
[15] Mr Cadell. In the autumn of the same year, the enterprising bookseller writes to Laidlaw: ‘Strange that all the Ballantynes and Constable are gone, and I am left alone of those behind the curtain during so many critical years! Born at Cockenzie, in East Lothian, educated for business above five years in Glasgow, I came here’ [to Edinburgh] ‘a raw young man of twenty-one in the winter of 1809–10, and have cuckooed all these men out of their nests, firmly seated in which they all were at that time. And here is Lockhart telling about all of us to posterity. We will all be handed down as appendages to the great man!’ Mr Cadell died January 20, 1849, having, it is said, made about £100,000 in business, chiefly by Scott’s works. ‘Our late illustrious friend used to joke me about a Waverley Cottage or Waverley Hall: I am now rated for a palace!’ (Cadell to Laidlaw, July 1834.) Latterly, he was proprietor of the estate of Ratho, near Edinburgh.
[16] The Glen is a small mountain valley on the banks of the Quair, about four and a half miles from Innerleithen. A magnificent residence has been built on the estate by the proprietor, Charles Tennant, Esq. Vide description and engraving in Chambers’s History of Peeblesshire.
[17] Hogg altered this line as follows:
‘She cam there afore the flower bloom’d on the pea.’