Next read Sir Walter Scott’s entry made in his copy of the Haliburton Memorials:—
“The said Thomas Scott died at Monklaw, near Jedburgh, at two of the clock, 27th January, 1823, in the 90th year of his life, and fully possessed of all his faculties. He read till nearly the year before his death; and being a great musician on the Scotch pipes, had, when on his deathbed, a favourite tune played over to him by his son James, that he might be sure he left him in full possession of it. After hearing it, he hummed it over himself, and corrected it in several of the notes. The air was that called ‘Sour Plums in Galashiels.’ When barks and other tonics were given him during his last illness, he privately spat them into his handkerchief, saying, as he had lived all his life without taking doctors’ drugs, he wished to die without doing so.”
No occasion whatever for deathbed repentances, you perceive, on the part of this old gentleman; no particular care even for the disposition of his handsome independence; but here is a bequest of which one must see one’s son in full possession—here is a thing to be well looked after, before setting out for heaven, that the tune of “Sour Plums in Galashiels” may still be played on earth in an incorrupt manner, and no damnable French or English variations intruded upon the solemn and authentic melody thereof. His views on the subject of Materia Medica are also greatly to be respected.
“I saw more than once,” Lockhart goes on, “this respectable man’s sister (Scott’s aunt Janet), who had married her cousin Walter, Laird of Raeburn, thus adding a new link to the closeness of the family connection. She also must have been, in her youth, remarkable for personal attractions; as it was, she dwells on my memory as the perfect picture of an old Scotch lady, with a great deal of simple dignity in her bearing, but with the softest eye and the sweetest voice, and a charm of meekness and gentleness about every look and expression. She spoke her native language pure and undiluted, but without the slightest tincture of that vulgarity which now seems almost unavoidable in the oral use of a dialect so long banished from courts, and which has not been avoided by any modern writer who has ventured to introduce it, with the exception of Scott, and I may add, speaking generally, of Burns. Lady Raeburn, as she was universally styled, may be numbered with those friends of early days whom her nephew has alluded to in one of his prefaces as preserving what we may fancy to have been the old Scotch of Holyrood.”
To this aunt, to his grandmother, his mother, and to the noble and most wise Rector of the High School of Edinburgh, Dr. Adam, Scott owed the essential part of his “education,” which began in this manner. At eighteen months old his lameness came on, from sudden cold, bad air, and other such causes. His mother’s father, Dr. Rutherford, advised sending him to the country; he is sent to his grandfather’s at Sandy-Knowe, where he first becomes conscious of life, and where his grandmother and aunt Janet beautifully instruct, but partly spoil him. When he is eight years old, he returns to, and remains in, his father’s house at George’s Square. And now note the following sentence:—
“I felt the change from being a single indulged brat, to becoming a member of a large family, very severely; for under the gentle government of my kind grandmother, who was meekness itself, and of my aunt, who, though of a higher temper, was exceedingly attached to me, I had acquired a degree of license which could not be permitted in a large family. I had sense enough, however, to bend my temper to my new circumstances; but such was the agony which I internally experienced, that I have guarded against nothing more, in the education of my own family, than against their acquiring habits of self-willed caprice and domination.”
The indulgence, however, no less than the subsequent discipline, had been indeed altogether wholesome for the boy, he being of the noble temper which is the better for having its way. The essential virtue of the training he had in his grandfather’s and father’s house, and his aunt Jessie’s at Kelso, I will trace further in next letter.
[1] Colonel Talbot, in ‘Waverley;’ I need not, surely, name the other:—note only that, in speaking of heroism, I never admit into the field of comparison the merely stage-ideals of impossible virtue and fortune—(Ivanhoe, Sir Kenneth, and the like)—but only persons whom Scott meant to be real. Observe also that with Scott, as with Titian, you must often expect the most tender pieces of completion in subordinate characters. [↑]
[2] I beg my readers to observe that I never flinch from stating a fact that tells against me. This George’s Square is in that New Town of Edinburgh which I said, in the first of these letters, I should like to destroy to the ground. [↑]