SIR WALTER SCOTT AND HIS FRIENDS AT ABBOTSFORD
From the painting by Thomas Faed. Those in the picture, reading from left to right, are, sitting: Sir Walter Scott; Henry Mackenzie, the Scottish novelist; George Crabbe, the English poet; John Gibson Lockhart, the son-in-law of Scott, and his biographer; William Wordsworth, the English Poet Laureate from 1843 to 1850; Francis, Lord Jeffrey, the Scottish critic, essayist, and jurist; Adam Ferguson, the Scottish philosopher and historian; John Moore, the Scottish physician and writer; Thomas Campbell, the writer, and Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow from 1826 to 1829; Archibald Constable, Scott's publisher from 1805 to 1826; standing: John Wilson, who wrote under the pseudonym of Christopher North; John Allen, the British political and historical writer; Sir David Wilkie, the Scottish painter.]
Entrance Into Literature
Scott made the transition from law to literature gradually. He published a translation of Burger's "Lenore" in 1795. While he was at the University he began to collect the materials which made up the three volumes of "The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," a collection of ballads old and new in which the "old, simple, violent world" lived again in song and story. The making of these books was congenial work, and carried still further Scott's education in the spirit and temper of the Scotland of clans and feuds, of reckless border warfare, dashing foray, fierce revenge and superstition. The various introductions and notes which accompanied the ballads show Scott's painstaking care for fact and detail; he combined in rare degree the romantic spirit, the antiquarian's zeal for the small details of history, and the methodical habits of the literary drudge.
In 1805, in his thirty-fourth year, "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" appeared and secured a popular success of unprecedented proportions. The picturesque or pictorial quality of the poem and its unqualified romanticisms gave it a very broad appeal. It was popular in the good sense of the word. Mountains and wild landscapes generally, which had been shunned for generations, were coming into fashion, so to speak. They have been "in fashion" ever since, and today their appeal to city folk, to tired people, to men and women of imagination and active temperament, is irresistible. To Dr. Johnson Scotland was a wild and dreary waste, to Scott it was a wonderland; and a wonderland it has remained ever since. In the confusion of an age when every sort of opinion gets into print the "call of the wild" has a trumpet tone. "I am sensible," wrote Scott, "that if there be anything good about my poetry or prose either, it is a hurried frankness of composition which pleases soldiers, sailors, and young people of bold and active dispositions."
THE LADY OF THE LAKE
From the group by J. Adams Acton
