There is evidence that the Prince really did pursue his fleeting vision of a crown into England, in 1763, and was actually seen by Murray, the actor, a friend of Scott’s, then a boy. When the Prince was in England, in disguise, there is always a complete break in his correspondence, and I find such a gap at this period. He still had a few adherents, and would stray across the Channel to see and frighten them, and slip back again to his hermit life at Bouillon. Miss Walkinshaw, the original of the lady who accompanies him in the tale, had forsaken him at the date of the romance, and she was not a fair but a dark beauty. There is a mournful grace in Charles’ last good-bye to the few Jacobite gentry who surround him in the novel when “there was an end of an auld song.” The romance “contains perhaps more of the author’s personal experiences than any other, or even than all of them put together.” As for “Wandering Willie’s Tale,” the corrections and admirable additions in the proof sheets show p. 118 that this chef d’oeuvre, unlike “the rest of them,” was written with all the care that it deserved. If it has anything to be called a rival, that rival is Mr. Stevenson’s story of about the same period, in the latest dusk of the day of the Covenant, Thrawn Janet. But there is no rivalry—Scott’s legend is unapproachable.

There was but this one novel in 1824; if Scott’s advisers concealed from him the relative slackness of his sales, they did not hesitate to warn him against “over-cropping.” He wrote his tribute to Byron, on the news of the poet’s death, and he worked at a new edition of his Swift. As a Director of the Edinburgh Academy, founded in this year, Scott remarked that he did not love his country better than truth, and that Dr. Johnson was not wholly wrong when he said that, in learning, “every Scot had a mouthful and none had a bellyful.” Boys were now to learn Greek earlier, and to learn more Greek than in his own days at the High School. In fact the new school has produced some Grecians of merit and distinction in its eighty years of existence. Scott did not tell the boys that of Greek he had less than Shakespeare, and he despised the contemptible clamour over his own famous brace of false quantities in the two elegiac lines for the epitaph of his deerhound Maida. One of the false quantities, after all, was the fault of a transcriber who wrote “jaces” in place of “dormis”; that transcriber was James Ballantyne. “We could have written as good longs and shorts as the English, if it had not been for the—Covenant,” an old gentleman used to say, but Porson opened Buchanan on a false quantity, and surely Dr. Pitcairn erred when he began his famous epitaph on Dundee (admirably Englished into poetry by Dryden)—“Ultime Scotorum.” Yet he could hardly write Ultime Pictorum, and so save his prosody at the expense of his ethnology.

THE FIRST AND LAST BALL

“Surely if Sir Walter Scott be not a happy man, which he seems truly to be, he deserves to be so,” wrote Basil Hall at Abbotsford in the Christmas of 1824. January 7, 1825, saw “the first regular ball given at Abbotsford—and the last.” As in Marmion,

It was his blithest and his last.

The occasion of the festivity was the wedding of Scott’s eldest son, a young cavalry officer “of strict and even severe principles,” to a Miss Jobson, of Lochore, “with a fortune of £50,000 in land.” The name of Jobson is neither suggestive of wealth nor of heraldic additions to the quarterings of the Scotts. Sir Walter speaks of his daughter-in-law with unconcealed affection; she was a pretty, shy, candid, innocent girl, in the manner of Rose Bradwardine. The lovers lately wed crossed to Ireland, where the Regiment was quartered, and whither Scott himself went for a holiday later in 1825. Scott now backed the credit of his friend, the actor manager Terry, for £1,250, plus £500 guaranteed by James Ballantyne. Whoever lends a friend money for the purposes of his business is absolutely certain to see no more of the coins, and to lend Terry money, Terry being a manager and lessee of a theatre, was laying the longest possible odds on a hopeless horse. Like Steenie denouncing incontinence, and Baby Charles reproving dissimulation, Scott read Terry a lecture against raising money by bills and discounts, a ruinous system, he declared, very wisely, which was assiduously practised by Constable, and Ballantyne & Co.

“NAPOLEON”

Constable now had a new project, which Lockhart describes with infinite humour. We have mentioned evidence given before a Parliamentary Commission, to the effect that libraries ceased to be formed about the time when Waverley appeared (1814). The same evidence showed that real books had never prospered since cheap little volumes of boiled down information, the tinned meats of the intellectual life, were introduced. It was Constable who now introduced them. He came out to Abbotsford enormously big with a project. He unloaded himself of a packet, the annual schedule of assessed taxes. From the items of taxes paid on many things which profit not, such as hair powder, he inferred, justly, that the British public spent money on every thing conceivable, except books. Hundreds of thousands of people had obviously plenty of money, and in the article of books alone did they economize. Scott remarked that all down Tweed were the houses of lairds of whom none spent £10 yearly on literature. Of course they did not, and of course they do not, and never will. One extravagance our countrymen and country-women avoid, as they would the devil, and that is buying a book. They are like the Highland crofter who was implored to give at least five shillings to the “Sustentation Fund,” and for the salvation of his immortal part. “Me give five shillings to save my soul! I haena five shillings to buy mysel’ tobacco!”

Constable admitted that the gentry were content with a magazine, and, at most, a subscription to a circulating library. But he would produce books so cheap and good that even the gentry would buy them. To the sanguine soul of the projector this seemed a splendid speculation, though even he did not think of sinking to a sixpenny price. Monthly volumes at half-a-crown or three-and-sixpence were in his eye, as if the public could afford to give nearly forty shillings annually for books. The public “has not time,” setting the pecuniary extravagance aside, to read twelve volumes yearly. However Scott accepted the golden dream, and proposed a short Life of Napoleon. It grew into ten tomes of Constable’s Miscellany, and was mainly written after Sir Walter’s ruin, in eighteen months. A critic mentions a dozen people then alive in England, including Carlyle, who could have done a better Life of Napoleon. Perhaps they could have done it, “if they had the mind,” but certainly they could not have done it better than Scott, in eighteen months. Constable provided about a hundred volumes of Le Moniteur, and quantities of printed works, as materials, while MSS. were collected. But no Life written at that time could be satisfactory; most documents were inaccessible, and Scott made great use of second-hand authorities. Though the book won £18,000 for Sir Walter’s creditors, and though it is very readable, the task work (and few forms of drudgery are so tedious as history writing in a hurry) did not suit Scott, and adds nothing to his reputation.

RUIN