Dour, dour, and eident was he,
Dour and eident, but and ben,
Dour against their barley water,
And eident on the Bramah pen.[9]
In July Scott began Castle Dangerous, and paid his last visit to the tombs of the Douglases. The country people received him gladly, following him in a procession. I must quote what Lockhart says about the close of this day, spent beside the graves of that stern and haughty race who had been, now the savers, now the betrayers, of their country.
Sir Walter Scott.
From the painting by Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A.
AT THE DOUGLAS GRAVES
“It was again a darkish, cloudy day, with some occasional mutterings of distant thunder, and perhaps the state of the atmosphere told upon Sir Walter’s nerves; but I had never before seen him so sensitive as he was all the morning after this inspection of Douglas. As we drove over the high tableland of Lesmahago he repeated I know not how many verses from Winton, Barbour, and Blind Harry, with, I believe, almost every stanza of Dunbar’s elegy on the deaths of the Makers (poets). It was now that I saw him, such as he paints himself in one or two passages of his Diary, but such as his companions in the meridian vigour of his life never saw him—‘the rushing of a brook, or the sighing of the summer breeze, bringing the tears into his eyes not unpleasantly.’ Bodily weakness laid the delicacy of the organization bare, over which he had prided himself in wearing a sort of half-stoical mask. High and exalted feelings, indeed, he had never been able to keep concealed, but he had shrunk from exhibiting to human eye the softer and gentler emotions which now trembled to the surface. He strove against it even now, and presently came back from the Lament of the Makers to his Douglases, and chanted, rather than repeated, in a sort of deep and glowing, though not distinct recitative, his first favourite among all the ballads—
“It was about the Lammas tide,
When husbandmen do win their hay,
That the doughty Douglas bownde him to ride
To England to drive a prey,