Footnote 50: [This is probably the "expression of kindness" which encouraged Murray to beg Scott to review in the Quarterly Byron's recently published volumes, Childe Harold, Canto III., and The Prisoner of Chillon, a Dream, and Other Poems. The request was promptly complied with, and the article appeared in the next number issued (dated October, 1816),—a review full of generous, and also judicious, appreciation. For some reason, hard now to discover, unless it were the kindliness of the writer's tone towards the younger poet, some of Lady Byron's friends, among whom was Joanna Baillie, seem to have taken strong exception to the paper, and Miss Baillie wrote to Scott at some length on the matter, even animadverting upon the purely literary criticism of the reviewer. Much of the correspondence which ensued, including a characteristic letter from Lady Byron, can be found in the Familiar Letters (vol. i. pp. 413-422).
Of the review, Byron writes to Murray (March 3, 1817):—
... "It seems to me (as far as the subject of it may be permitted to judge) to be very well written as a composition, and ... even those who may condemn its partiality, must praise its generosity. The temptations to take another and less favorable view of the question have been so great and numerous, that, what with public opinion, politics, etc., he must be a gallant as well as a good man, who has ventured in that place and at this time to write such an article even anonymously. Such things, however, are their own reward; and I even flatter myself that the writer, whoever he may be (and I have no guess), will not regret that the perusal of this has given me as much gratification as any composition of that nature could give, and more than any other has ever given,—and I have had a good many in my time of one kind or the other. It is not the mere praise, but there is a tact and a delicacy throughout, not only with regard to me, but to others, which, as it has not been observed elsewhere, I had till now doubted, whether it could be observed anywhere." He writes a few weeks later, on learning that Scott wrote the article: ... "It cannot add to my good opinion of him, but it adds to that of myself."—Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1900), vol. iv. pp. 63, 85.][Back to Main Text]
Footnote 51: Since I have mentioned this reviewal, I may as well, to avoid recurrence to it, express here my conviction, that Erskine, not Scott, was the author of the critical estimate of the Waverley Novels which it embraces—although, for the purpose of mystification, Scott had taken the trouble to transcribe the paragraphs in which that estimate is contained. At the same time I cannot but add that, had Scott really been the sole author of this reviewal, he need not have incurred the severe censure which has been applied to his supposed conduct in the matter. After all, his judgment of his own works must have been allowed to be not above, but very far under the mark; and the whole affair would, I think, have been considered by every candid person exactly as the letter about Solomon and the rival mothers was by Murray, Gifford, and the "four o'clock visitors" of Albemarle Street—as a good joke. A better joke, certainly, than the allusion to the report of Thomas Scott being the real author of Waverley, at the close of the article, was never penned; and I think it includes a confession over which a misanthrope might have chuckled: "We intended here to conclude this long article, when a strong report reached us of certain Transatlantic confessions, which, if genuine (though of this we know nothing), assign a different author to these volumes than the party suspected by our Scottish correspondents. Yet a critic may be excused seizing upon the nearest suspicious person, on the principle happily expressed by Claverhouse, in a letter to the Earl of Linlithgow. He had been, it seems, in search of a gifted weaver, who used to hold forth at conventicles: 'I sent for the webster (weaver), they brought in his brother for him: though he, maybe, cannot preach like his brother, I doubt not but he is as well-principled as he, wherefore I thought it would be no great fault to give him the trouble to go to jail with the rest!'"—Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol. xix. pp. 85, 86.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 52: [On reading The Black Dwarf, Mrs. Leigh believed her brother to be the author, and wrote to him to that effect. Byron had not yet seen the book, and says in his reply: "I am not P. P. [Peter Pattieson], I assure you on my honor, and do not understand to what book you allude, so that all your compliments are quite thrown away."—Byron's Letters and Journals (1900), vol. iv. p. 56.][Back to Main Text]
Footnote 53: [Lady Louisa Stuart, whose approbation Scott writes he values "beyond a whole wilderness of critics," says in a letter of December 5, 1816:
"[Old Mortality] is super-excellent in all its points; it breaks up fresh ground, and has all the raciness of originality. I cannot help thinking it will bear down the world before it triumphantly. As usual it makes its personages our intimate acquaintance, and its scenes so present to the eye, that, last night, after sitting up unreasonably late over it, I got no sleep, from a kind of fever of mind it had occasioned. It seemed as if I had been an eye and ear witness of all the passages, and I could not lull the agitation into calmness. Mause and Cuddie hurried my spirits in another way; they forced me to laugh out aloud, which one seldom does alone. On a second slower reading I expect to be still better pleased, and then also I suppose I shall find out the faults. At present it has, in the Scotch phrase, 'taken me off my feet,' and I do not criticise, though I think you will believe me when I say I do not and will not flatter. One thing I regret, that like the author of The Antiquary, Jedediah did not add a glossary; because even I, a mongrel, occasionally paying long visits to Scotland, and hearing Girsy at Bothwell gate and Peggy Macgowan hold forth in the village,—even I, thus qualified, have found a great many words absolute Hebrew to me, and I fear the altogether English will find many more beyond their comprehension or conjecture. But this may be remedied in another edition. I have as yet only one great attack to make, and that upon a single word; but such a word! such an anachronism! Claverhouse says he has no time to hear sentimental speeches. My dear sir! tell Jedediah that Claverhouse never heard the sound of those four syllables in his life. We are used to them; but sentiment and sentimental were, I believe, first introduced into the language by Sterne, and are hardly as old as I am. Let alone the Covenanters' days, I am persuaded you would look in vain for them in the works of Richardson and Fielding. Nay, the French, from whom they were borrowed, did not talk of le sentiment in that sense till long after Louis XIV.'s reign. No such thing is to be found in Madame de Sévigné, la Bruyère, etc., etc., etc. At home or abroad I defy Lord Dundee ever to have met with the expression. Mr. Peter Pattieson had been reading the Man of Feeling, and it was a slip of his tongue, which I am less inclined to excuse than Mause's abstruse Scotch, which I duly reverence, as she did Kettledrummle's sermons, because I do not understand it. Once more I shall be much disappointed if this work does not quickly acquire a very great reputation. I fancy Mr. Morritt is in the secret; yet, as I am not certain, I will keep on the secure side and not mention it when I write to him, however one may long to intercommune on such subjects with those likely to hold the same faith."
At the close of his reply, Scott says: "I must not forget to thank your Ladyship for your acute and indisputable criticism on the application of the word sentimental. How it escaped my pen I know not, unless that the word owed me a grudge for the ill will I have uniformly borne it, and was resolved to slip itself in for the express purpose of disgracing me. I will certainly turn it out the first opportunity." This was done in the second edition.—Familiar Letters, vol. i. pp. 394, 400.][Back to Main Text]
Footnote 54: [Scott's old friend, John Richardson, who was from the first in the secret of the Waverley Novels, was a stanch Whig, as beseemed the descendant of an old Covenanting family. Some of his ancestral traditions suggested certain passages in Old Mortality, and he has recorded that during a visit to Abbotsford Scott gave him the proof sheets of the first volume to read, and how he lost a night's sleep in doing it. Twelve years later, in writing to Scott regarding The Tales of a Grandfather, he says that in this work,—"You have paid a debt which you owed to the manes of the Covenanters for the flattering picture which you drew of Claverhouse in Old Mortality."
Scott says in his reply (December, 1828): "As to Covenanters and Malignants, they were both a set of cruel and bloody bigots, and had, notwithstanding, those virtues with which bigotry is sometimes allied. Their characters were of a kind much more picturesque than beautiful; neither had the least idea either of toleration or humanity, so that it happens that, so far as they can be distinguished from each other, one is tempted to hate most the party which chances to be uppermost for the time."—See Journal, note, vol. ii. p. 404.][Back to Main Text]