LADY WARDLAW AND THE BARONESS NAIRNE[[6]]
In 1719 there was published in Edinburgh, in a tract of twelve folio pages, a small poem, 27 stanzas or 216 lines long, entitled Hardyknute, a Fragment. It was printed in old spelling, to look like a piece of old Scottish poetry that had somehow been recovered; and it seems to have been accepted as such by those into whose hands the copy had come, and who were concerned in having it published. Among these were Duncan Forbes of Culloden, afterwards Lord President of the Court of Session, and Sir Gilbert Elliott of Minto, afterwards Lord Justice-Clerk; but there is something like proof that it had come into their hands indirectly from Sir John Hope Bruce of Kinross, baronet, who died as late as 1766 at a great age, in the rank of lieutenant-general, and who, some time before 1719, had sent a manuscript copy of it to Lord Binning, with a fantastic story to the effect that the original, in a much defaced vellum, had been found, a few weeks before, in a vault at Dunfermline.
The little thing, having become popular in its first published form, was reproduced in 1724 by Allan Ramsay in his Evergreen, which professed to be “a collection of Scots Poems wrote by the ingenious before 1600”; but it there appeared with corrections and some additional stanzas. In 1740 it had the honour of a new appearance in London, under anonymous editorship, and with the title “Hardyknute, a Fragment; being the first Canto of an Epick Poem: with general remarks and notes.” The anonymous editor, still treating it as a genuine old poem, of not later than the sixteenth century, praises it very highly. “There is a grandeur, a majesty of sentiment,” he says, “diffused through the whole: a true sublime, which nothing can surpass.” It was but natural that a piece of which this could be said should be included by Percy in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, published in 1765. It appeared, accordingly, in the first edition of that famous book, still as an old poem and in antique spelling; and it was reprinted in the subsequent editions issued by Percy himself in 1767, 1775, and 1794, though then with some added explanations and queries.
It was through Percy’s collection that the poem first became generally known and popular. Even there, though in very rich company, it was singled out by competent critics for special admiration. But, indeed, good judges, who had known it in its earlier forms, had already made it a favourite. The poet Gray admired it much; and Thomas Warton spoke of it as “a noble poem,” and introduced an enthusiastic reference to it into one of his odes. Above all, it is celebrated now as having fired the boyish genius of Sir Walter Scott. “I was taught Hardyknute by heart before I could read the ballad myself,” he tells us, informing us further that the book out of which he was taught the ballad was Allan Ramsay’s Evergreen of 1724, and adding, “It was the first poem I ever learnt, the last I shall ever forget.” In another place he tells us more particularly that it was taught him out of the book by one of his aunts during that visit to his grandfather’s farmhouse of Sandyknowe in Roxburghshire on which he had been sent when only in his third year for country air and exercise on account of his delicate health and lameness, and which he remembered always as the source of his earliest impressions and the time of his first consciousness of existence. He was accustomed to go about the farmhouse shouting out the verses of the ballad incessantly, so that the Rev. Dr. Duncan, the minister of the parish, in his calls for a sober chat with the elder inmates, would complain of the interruption and say, “One may as well speak in the mouth of a cannon as where that child is.” Hardyknute, we may then say, was the first thing in literature that took hold of the soul and imagination of Scott; and who knows how far it may have helped to determine the cast and direction of his own genius through all the future? Afterwards, through his life in Edinburgh, Ashestiel, and Abbotsford, he was never tired of repeating snatches of the strong old thing he had learnt at Sandyknowe; and the very year before his death (1831) we find him, when abroad at Malta in the vain hope of recruiting his shattered frame, lamenting greatly, in a conversation about ballad-poetry, that he had not been able to persuade his friend Mr. John Hookham Frere to think so highly of the merits of Hardyknute as he did himself.
What is the piece of verse so celebrated? It must be familiar to many; but we may look at it again. We shall take it in its later or more complete form, as consisting of 42 stanzas or 336 lines; in which form, though it is still only a fragment, the conception or story is somewhat more complex, more filled out, than in the first published form of 1719. The fragment opens thus:—
“Stately stept he east the wa’,
And stately stept he west;
Full seventy years he now had seen,
With scarce seven years of rest.
He lived when Britons’ breach of faith