EIGHT CENTURIES WITH WALTER SCOTT.
By WALLACE BRUCE.
Queen Elizabeth died March 24, 1602. James the Sixth, of Scotland, became James the First of the United Kingdoms. According to ancient prophecy the Scottish kings were to follow the Stone of Scone, which, it will be remembered, was removed to London by Edward the First. The prophecy was three hundred years in being fulfilled. The same strange Nemesis of fate, which, in the last generation, placed the grandson of Josephine upon the throne of France, handed the scepter of the haughty Elizabeth to the son of her unfortunate rival, Mary, Queen of Scots. But the good fortune of James only emphasizes the general misfortune of the Stuart family. His ancestral record was not a cheerful retrospect. James the First of Scotland was murdered. James the Second was killed by the bursting of a cannon. James the Third was privately slain. James the Fourth fell on the disastrous field of Flodden. James the Fifth died of a broken heart. Mary was beheaded. His father Darnley was murdered.
Could he have foreseen the history of the next three generations—the execution of his son, Charles the First; the debauched reign of his grandson, Charles the Third, after his return from exile; and the banishment of James the Second, he would have found the outlook even more sad than the retrospect. The lines of the Stuart family did not fall in pleasant places. Some writer has observed that they suffered for the crimes of the Tudors. It may be that England had piled up a century of wrong which demanded atonement, but, without prejudice, the proverb was emphatically true, “Sufficient unto each reign was the evil thereof.” It must also be remembered that all Europe was in a ferment. The celebrated Thirty Years’ War was raging in Germany. Religious enthusiasm was asserting its power in Britain. The English and Scotch people were jealous of their political rights. The reign of a Scottish-born king, after so many centuries of bitter hate, could not be entirely acceptable to the English race. Both sides accused the king of partiality. Needy lords and nobles poured down from the north, and London resembled our own National Capital at the inauguration of a new president. The king was supplicated in Court, in the street, on horseback, at every doorway; ay, the very plate that contained his food was adorned with urgent request from some impatient relative of fifteenth or twentieth cousinship. As the Court had removed from Edinburgh and Scotland it seemed that Edinburgh and Scotland had removed to the Court. The ancient prejudice between Scot and English broke out in street, palace and inn. These are the historic events which preface the “Fortunes of Nigel,” and the fray between the Scottish servant and the ’prentice boys of London, at the opening of the volume, strikes the keynote of universal discord.
It was a constitutional defect of James the First to be without money. As Nigel, the Scottish lord, happened to need the loan which his father had made to the king, he presented himself with the old fashioned assurance of a man justly demanding his rights, although at the hands of a monarch. The king was incensed, but the young lord fortunately falls in with George Heriot, the wealthy Scotch jeweler “to His Majesty,” whose princely bequests still adorn the city of Edinburgh; but, unmindful of good counsel, he gradually lapses from duty, becomes a murderer in what he considers a matter of honor, is compelled to find refuge in Alsatia or Whitefriars, a sort of privileged den of iniquity. The portrayal of his experience in this nest of outlaws is true to the London of 1620.
It is this blending of Scott’s dramatic and descriptive power which gives even to his minor works an enduring value. We have, as it were, a photograph of the great city as it appeared two hundred and sixty years ago. We see the Strand, a quiet street, unlike the noisy thoroughfare of to-day, lined on the river-side with palaces and pleasure grounds reaching to the Thames. We see Whitehall, with its rich gates designed by Holbein, and stately court planned by Inigo Jones. We walk in the park with the courtly Duke of Buckingham, talk face to face with the king in the palace, on the chase, in the parlor of the wealthy Londoner; and at the close of the volume we feel that Scott has justly summed up his character in this striking paragraph of the fifth chapter: “He was deeply learned, without possessing useful knowledge; sagacious in many individual cases, without having real wisdom; fond of his power, yet willing to resign the direction of that, and himself, to the most unworthy favorites; a big and bold asserter of his rights and words, yet one who tamely saw them trampled on in deeds; a lover of negotiations, in which he was always outwitted; and one who feared war, where conquest might have been easy. He was fond of his dignity, while he was perpetually degrading it by undue familiarity; capable of much public labor, yet often neglecting it for the meanest amusement; a wit, though a pedant; and a scholar, though fond of the conversation of the ignorant and uneducated. Even his timidity of temper was not uniform; and there were moments of his life, and those critical, in which he showed the spirit of his ancestors. He was laborious in trifles, and a trifler where serious labor was required; devout in his sentiments, and yet too often profane in his language; just and beneficent by nature, he yet gave way to the iniquities and oppressions of others.”
“Rokeby,” a poem, comes next in historic order. The scene is laid at Rokeby, near Greta Bridge in Yorkshire, and the date is immediately subsequent to the great battle of Marston Moor, July 3, 1644. It was here that the bold cavaliers learned a lesson never to be forgotten, at the hand of Puritan and Roundhead. The poem abounds with notable and vigorous passages. It throws light on the stormy years of the great Civil War; but so many of Scott’s novels are related to this period that we must dismiss the poem with a single quotation—a tribute to the genius of Chaucer:
“O for that pencil, erst profuse