The sun upon the Weirdlaw hill,
In Ettrick’s vale is sinking sweet.
Scott was still adding acre to acre, but Rob Roy and the gallant price offered by Constable, enabled him to redeem the bond for £4,000 of which the Duke of Buccleuch was guarantor. At this time Lockhart and Blackwood’s Magazine came into his life. In Lockhart he was to find a son rather
“The Abbotsford Family.”
After the painting by Sir David Wilkie, R.A.
LOCKHART
than a son-in-law, though he could not wean him from that perilous enchantress, Maga, which was then in the wild heyday of its stormy youth. He declared that Rob Roy (December 1817), “smells of the cramp”; he had to wind it up more rapidly than he intended, but his fatally buoyant spirits led him to hope that in four or five years he might add the considerable estate of Faldonside to his acres, a dream which haunted his enfeebled mind in his ultimate decrepitude. Meanwhile expense on the estate of Abbotsford, and on the acquisition of curios for the collection, went on briskly, Scott paying prices probably too high, and conducting his affairs with the people on his land with a profuse but judicious generosity. He discovered, as others have done, real taste and artistic power amongst the craftsmen in wood and stone in the district, and encouraged it to the best of his power. His gold was not spent in vain, but the need for money grew with every year, and he did not measure his own labour by his failing strength.
Rob Roy, whether it “smelled of the cramp” or not, was as popular as its hero has ever been in Scotland, where he has the same sort of reputation as Robin Hood. The novel is unusually defective in composition, the mystery of Rashleigh’s compound of commercial malfeasance with bills, and of treacherous Jacobitism has always baffled the reader. The melodrama of Helen Macgregor is, in Mr. Stevenson’s phrase, “too steep,” and the whole plot is not more lucid than some plots of Dickens. While Diana Vernon[1] is, by popular acclaim, peerless among the heroines of Scott, while her love story is a real love story, her wooer is not more interesting than the general run of Scott’s heroes. The book is saved by Diana, by the reiver himself, by the delightful Baillie, and by that flower of serving Men, the canny Scottish gardener Andrew Fairservice. In this novel the secret of authorship was let out, but passed unobserved. The long lecture by the Baillie on the state of the Highlands is taken straight from a manuscript of Graham of Gartmore, from whom Scott purchased his most authentic relic, the sword of the great Montrose. Scott lent the manuscript to Jamieson, who published it in his edition of Burt’s Letters from the North, acknowledging his debt to Scott. Now as Scott used his manuscript in Rob Roy, here was a plain pièce de conviction, but no hunter after proof of authorship of the Waverley novels ever detected the facts, in fact I believe that I was the first person who observed them!