While round they gar the bicker roll

To weet their mouth.”

There you see the side of Edinburgh that most attracted him. He was no worse than his fellows perhaps, but perhaps he could not stand what they stood. It is said that he once gave as an excuse, “Oh, sirs, anything to forget my poor mother and these aching fingers.” As Mr. H. G. Graham truly says: “It was a poor enough excuse for forgetting himself.” He used to croon over that pleasing little trifle, The Birks of Invermay, in Lucky Middlemist’s or elsewhere, and dream of trim rural fields he did not trouble to visit. I have no heart to repeat the melancholy story of his lonely death in the Schelles, hard by the old Darien House at the Bristo Port in 1774, at the age of twenty-four. His interest is as a ghost from the Edinburgh underworld, you catch a glimpse of a more vicious Grub Street. There must have been a circle of broken professional men of all sorts, more or less clever, all needy, all drunken and ready to do anything for a dram. What a crop of anecdotes there was! But no one gathered, and the memory of it passed away with the actors. Local history that chronicled the oddities of Kames or Monboddo refused to chronicle the pranks of lewd fellows of the baser sort. Only when the wastrel happened to be a genius do we piece together in some sort his career. Whatever one says about Fergusson, you never doubt his genius.

It is curious how very occasional is the anecdote of this Caledonian Grub Street. Here is rather a characteristic straw which the stream of time has carried down regarding a certain drudge called Stewart. One night, homeless and houseless, he staggered into the ash pit of a primitive steam-engine, and lay down to rest. An infernal din aroused him from his drunken slumber; he saw the furnace opened, grimy black figures stoking the fire and raking the bars of the enormous grate, whilst iron rods and chains clanked around him with infernal din. A tardily awakened conscience hinted where he was. “Good God, has it come to this at last?” he growled in abject terror. Another anecdote, though of a later date, is told in Lockhart’s Life of Scott. Constable, the Napoleon of publishers, called the crafty in the Chaldean Manuscript, is reported “a most bountiful and generous patron to the ragged tenants of Grub Street.” He gave stated dinners to his “own circle of literary serfs.” At one of these David Bridges, “tailor in ordinary to this northern potentate,” acted as croupier. According to instructions he brought with him a new pair of breeches, and for these Alister Campbell and another ran a race, and yet this same Campbell was editor of Albyn’s Anthology, 1816, to which Scott contributed Jock o’ Hazeldean, Pibroch of Donald Dhu, and better than any, that brilliant piece of extravagance, Donald Caird’s come again. Perhaps the story isn’t true, but it is at least significant that Lockhart should tell it.

One glittering Bohemian figure, though he was much greater and much else, lights up for us those Edinburgh taverns, Johnnie Dowie’s and the rest, those Edinburgh clubs, the Crochallan Fencibles and the others, that figure is Robert Burns. His winter of 1786-1787 in the Scots capital is famous. To us, more than a century after, it still satisfies the imagination, a striking, dramatic, picturesque appearance. On the whole, Edinburgh, not merely her great but common men, received him fitly. One day in that winter Jeffrey was standing in the High Street staring at a man whose appearance struck him, he could scarce tell why. A person standing at a shop door tapped him on the shoulder and said: “Ay, laddie, ye may weel look at that man; that’s Robert Burns.” He never saw him again. His experience in this was like that of Scott; but you are glad at any rate that Burns and Scott did meet, else had that Edinburgh visit wanted its crowning glory. Scott was then fifteen. He saw Robin in Professor Fergusson’s house at Sciennes. It was a distinguished company, and Scott, always modest, held his tongue. There was a picture in the room of a soldier lying dead in the snow, by him his dog and his widow with his child in her arms. Burns was so affected at the idea suggested by the picture that “he actually shed tears,” like the men of the heroic age, says Andrew Lang; he asked who wrote the lines which were printed underneath, and Scott alone remembered that they were from the obscure Langhorne. “Burns rewarded me with a look and a word which, though a mere civility, I then received, and still recollect, with very great pleasure.” Scott goes on to describe Burns as like the “douce guid man who held his own plough.” Most striking was his eye: “It was large and of a dark cast and glowed (I say literally glowed) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men in my time.” Whether Scott was right in thinking that Burns talked with “too much humility,” I will not discuss. We know what Robin thought of the “writer chiel.” The most pleasing result of his Edinburgh visit, as it is to-day still the most tangible, was the monument, tasteful and sufficient, which he put over Fergusson’s grave in the Canongate Churchyard. R.L.S., by the way, from his distant home in the South Seas, was anxious that if neglected it should be put in order. I do not think it has ever been neglected. I have seen it often and it was always curiously spick and span: these vates have not lacked pious services at the hands of their followers. Scott was not so enthusiastic an admirer, but he knew his Fergusson well and quotes him with reasonable frequency. When Fergusson died Scott was only three years old. Edinburgh was then a town of little space, and the unfortunate poet may have seen the child, but he could not have noticed him, and we have no record.

Just as the last half of the eighteenth century may be said to group itself round Hume, so the first half of the nineteenth has Scott for its central figure. I have spoken of his birthplace in the College Wynd. In 1825 he pointed out its site to Robert Chambers. “It would have been more profitable to have preserved it,” said Chambers in a neat compliment to Scott’s rapidly growing fame. “Ay, ay,” said Sir Walter, “that is very well, but I am afraid that I should require to be dead first, and that would not have been so comfortable, you know.” Thus, with good sense and humour, Scott turned aside the eulogium which perhaps he thought too strong. How modest he was! He frankly, and justly, put himself as a poet below Byron and Burns, and as for Shakespeare, “he was not worthy to loose his brogues.” His sense and good-nature helped to make him popular with his fellows. Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, was a possible exception. Scott did him good, yet after Scott’s death he wrote some nasty things. In truth, he had an unhappy nature, since he was somewhat rough to others and yet abnormally sensitive. Lockhart tells a story of Hogg’s visit to Scott’s house in Castle Street, where he was asked to dinner. Mrs. Scott was not well, and was lying on a sofa. The Shepherd seized another sofa, wheeled it towards her, and stretched himself at full length on it. “I thought I could never do wrong to copy the lady of the house.” His hands, we are told, had marks of recent sheep-shearing, of which the chintz bore legible traces; but the guest noted not this; he ate freely, and drank freely, and talked freely; he became gradually more and more familiar; from “Mr. Scott” he advanced to “Shirra” and thence to “Scott,” “Walter,” “Wattie,” until at supper he fairly convulsed the whole party by addressing Mrs. Scott as “Charlotte.” I think, however, that Scott was too much of a gentleman ever to have told this story. “The Scorpion,” as the Chaldean Manuscript named Lockhart, had many good qualities, but was, after all, a bit of a “superior person.”

Scott’s connection with John Leyden was altogether pleasant, and no one mourned more sincerely over the early death in the East of that indefatigable poet and scholar. Leyden was of great assistance to Scott in collecting material for his Border Minstrelsy. Once there was a hiatus in an interesting old ballad, when Leyden heard of an ancient reported able to recite the whole thing complete. He walked between forty and fifty miles and back again, turning the recovered verses over in his mind, and as Scott was sitting after dinner with some company “a sound was heard at a distance like that of the whistling of a tempest through the torn rigging of a vessel which scuds before it.” It was Leyden who presently burst into the room, chanting the whole of the recovered ballad. Leyden and Thomas Campbell had a very pretty quarrel about something or other. When Scott repeated to Leyden the poem of Hohenlinden, the latter burst out, “Dash it, man, tell the fellow that I hate him; but, dash him, he has written the finest verses that have been published these fifty years.” Scott, thinking to patch up a peace, repeated this to Campbell. He only said, “Tell Leyden that I detest him, but I know the value of his critical approbation.” Well he might! Leyden once repeated to Alexander Murray, the philologist, the most striking lines in Campbell’s Lochiel, adding, “That fellow, after all, we may say, is King of us all, and has the genuine root of the matter in him.” Campbell’s verse still lives, but our day would not place it so high. I have spoken of Scott’s modesty, also he was quiet under hostile criticism. Jeffrey had some hard things to say of Marmion in the Edinburgh Review, and immediately after dined in Castle Street. There was no change in Scott’s demeanour, but Mrs. Scott could not altogether restrain herself. “Well, good-night, Mr. Jeffrey. They tell me you have abused Scott in the Review, and I hope Mr. Constable has paid you very well for writing it,” which was rather an odd remark. As that Highland blue-stocking, Mrs. Grant of Laggan, observed, “Mr. Scott always seems to me like a glass through which the rays of admiration pass without sensibly affecting it, but the bit of paper that lies beside it will presently be in a blaze—and no wonder.” Scott was “truest friend and noblest foe.” In June 1821, as he stood by John Ballantyne’s open grave in the Canongate Churchyard, the day, which had been dark, brightened up, and the sun shone forth, he looked up and said with deep feeling to Lockhart, “I feel as if there will be less sunshine for me from this time forth.” And yet through the Ballantynes Scott was involved in those reckless speculations which led to the catastrophe of his life. His very generosity and nobleness led him into difficulties. “I like Scott’s ain bairns, but Heaven preserve me from those of his fathering,” says Constable. As for those “ain bairns,” especially those Waverley Novels, which are a dear possession to each of us, there are anecdotes enough.

JOHN LEYDEN
From a Pen Drawing

We know the speed and ease, in truth Shakespearean, with which he threw off the best of them, yet to the outsider he seemed hard at work. In June 1814 a party of young bloods were dining in a house in George Street, at right angles with North Castle Street. A shade overspread the face of the host. “Why?” said the narrator. “There is a confounded hand in sight of me here which has often bothered me before, and now it won’t let me fill my glass with a good will. Since we sat down I have been watching it—it fascinates my eye—it never stops; page after page is finished and thrown on that heap of MS., and still it goes on unwearied, and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that; it is the same every night.” It was the hand of Walter Scott, and in the evenings of three weeks in summer it wrote the last two volumes of Waverley (there were three in all). Whatever impression the novels make upon us has been discounted before we have read them, but when they were appearing, when to the attraction of the volumes themselves was added the romance of mystery, when the Wizard of the North was still “The Great Unknown,” then was the time to enjoy a Waverley. James Ballantyne lived in St. John Street, then a good class place off the Canongate. He was wont to give a gorgeous feast whenever a new Waverley was about to appear. Scott was there, but he and the staider members of the company left in good time, and then there were broiled bones and a mighty bowl of punch, and James Ballantyne was persuaded to produce the proof-sheets, and, with a word of preface, give the company the liver wing of the forthcoming literary banquet. Long before the end the secret was an open secret, but it was only formally divulged, as we all know, at the Theatrical Fund dinner, on Friday the 23rd February 1827. Among the company was jovial Patrick Robertson, “a mighty incarnate joke.” When Peveril of the Peak appeared he applied the name to Scott from the shape of his head as he stood chatting in the Parliament House, “better that than Peter o’ the Painch,” was the not particularly elegant but very palpable retort at Peter’s rotundity. At the banquet Scott sent him a note urging him to confess something too. “Why not the murder of Begbie?” (the porter of the British Linen Company Bank, murdered under mysterious circumstances in November 1806, in Tweeddale Close, in the High Street). Immediately after, the farce of High Life Below Stairs was played in the theatre. A lady’s lady asked who wrote Shakespeare? One says Ben Jonson, another Finis. “No,” said an actor, with a most ingenious “gag,” “it is Sir Walter Scott; he confessed it at a public meeting the other day.”