Before this time, Mr Ballantyne had set up a printing-office in Edinburgh, partly by the assistance of a loan from his old friend. Getting rapidly into a considerable business, which his skill and taste amply justified, he came to require additional capital, and Scott at length agreed to advance the needful sum, on condition of his being made a partner, but a secret one, in the concern. His dread of dependence on literary gains seems to have blinded him to the fact, that mercantile gains are also precarious, and usually attended by risks.
By the interest of his titled friends, he soon after obtained an appointment to the duties of a clerkship in the Court of Session; the salary, however, which afterwards was fixed at £1300 a year, was not to be realised till the death of a superannuated predecessor in office, and, in fact, Scott touched nothing of it till 1812. With such an addition to his solid prospects, one cannot but wonder at the eagerness and assiduity with which he commenced and pursued literary labours of a severely tasking kind; such as an edition of the works of Dryden, a publication of Sadler’s State Papers, and a reprint of Somers’s collection of Tracts. It seems as if a naturally ambitious and ardent spirit had at length found a vent for its energies, and felt a self-rewarding pleasure in their exercise. At the same time, he gave much of his time to volunteer soldiering, to politics, and to the affairs of literary men less fortunate than himself. The recollections of his friends present a charming picture of his ordinary life at his summer retreat of Ashestiel on the Tweed, where he had found it necessary to establish himself on account of his duties as sheriff of Selkirkshire. His household, enlivened by four healthy children, and superintended by Mrs Scott, was marked by simple elegance. On Sundays, being far from church, he read prayers and a sermon to his family; then, if the weather was good, he would walk with them, servants and all, to some favourite spot at a convenient distance, and dine with them in the open air. Frequent excursions on horseback, and coursing-matches, varied the tenor of common domestic life. Friends coming to pay visits found him in constant good-humour, and at all times willing to introduce them to the fine scenery and interesting antiquities of the district. In the evenings, his conversation, in which stories and anecdotes formed a large part, was a sure resource against ennui. As a husband and father, he was most kind and indulgent. His children had access to his room at all times; and when they came—unconscious of the nature of his studies—and asked for a story, he would take them on his knee, repeat a tale or a ballad, kiss them, and then set them down again to their sports, never apparently feeling the least annoyance at the interruption. His dogs, of which he always had two or three, were even more privileged, for he kept his window open in nearly all weathers, that they might leap out and in as they pleased.
These were the happiest days of Scott’s life, when as yet in the enjoyment of full vigour of body and mind, rather acquiring than reposing upon fame, and unembarrassed by possessions and dignities which afterwards made his position false and dangerous. He occasionally visited London, and allowed himself to go through that kind of exhibition called lionising, to which everything famous, or even notorious, is liable to be subjected in the metropolis; but he never was in the slightest degree spoiled by such idolatry. He fully shewed that he estimated it at its real worth, and, after good-naturedly submitting to it, could laugh at its absurdity. It is less pleasant to record a change in his arrangements for study which took place about this time. Finding the day apt to be broken in upon by little duties and by visitors, he adopted the habit of rising and commencing his literary toils at six in the morning, usually finishing them at twelve, after the interruption of breakfast at ten. His biographer, Mr Lockhart, tells us how careful he was to dress neatly before sitting down, but he says nothing of his preparing for the duty before him by taking food. We have come to understand such things better now, and can easily see what fatal effects might arise in a few years from a habit of performing the principal duties of life with an exhausted system.
The year 1808 saw his poetical reputation brought to its zenith by the publication of the admirable romantic tale of Marmion, for which, to the astonishment of the public, Mr Constable undertook beforehand to pay a thousand guineas. Not long after, his zeal in Tory politics, or, as he thought it, solicitude for the honour and safety of his country, then harassed by the Bonaparte wars, led to his quarrelling with this eminent publisher, and to his taking an interest in the establishment of the Quarterly, as an opposition to the Edinburgh Review. It would have been well if he had stopped here; but the same feelings, helped, perhaps, by that trafficking spirit which had entered into him since he lost hopes at the bar, induced the false step of his setting up a publishing-house in Edinburgh, under the firm of John Ballantyne and Company, the ostensible manager being a younger brother of the printer, a clever comical being, not overstocked with worldly prudence, and possessed of few qualifications for business beyond a knowledge of accounts.
From this house issued, in May 1810, his most pleasing poem, the Lady of the Lake, which experienced even greater popularity than either of its two predecessors, and might, if anything could, have made its author a vain man. In this and his two preceding poems, the chief charm lay in the vividness with which the author brought the past before the minds of his readers. He gave the grace, the dignity, the gallantry of old times, free from all their rudeness and grossness. All was done, too, in such an easy and fluent style, that the reader was never wearied. The singular fascination of these writings shewed itself in numberless ways; for one thing, there was a rush of tourists to the scene of the Lady of the Lake, so great, as to produce a marked rise of the amount of post-horse duty raised in Scotland. Scott’s own firm, in connection with another, undertook to pay two thousand guineas for the Lady of the Lake, a fact in authorship at that time without anything approaching to a parallel. Meanwhile, he was urging into print, as a publisher, an Annual Register (to commence with the year 1808); an edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, under the care of a drudging German of the name of Weber; a huge quarto, under the title of Tixall Poetry; an edition of Defoe’s novels; the Secret Memoirs of the Court of James I.; and some other books agreeable to his own taste, but hardly to that of the public.
These huge indigestible masses of paper and print had brought his outlay in the printing and publishing concerns up to £9000 before the end of this year. Scarcely ever did the most thoughtless of the tuneful tribe make a more unfortunate adventure than this publishing affair was destined to prove itself. If Scott had instituted some safe and modest copartnery, to give himself the publishing profits of his own writings, diminished only by expenses and the small profits due to his acting associates, he would have been doing what perhaps it will yet be seen all authors of decided popularity may rightly do. But he had an antiquarian taste, and a disposition to over-estimate all literary productions save his own—he indulged these tendencies in his firm of John Ballantyne and Company, and unavoidably became a great loser. Before it was fully seen that such was to be his fate as a man of business—namely, in the summer of 1811—he had thought so well of his means and prospects—the clerkship salary being now on the eve of realisation—as to resolve on purchasing a hundred acres of land on Tweedside, in order to build a cottage residence for himself, and this notwithstanding that the £4000 requisite in the very first place had to be borrowed, the one half as a permanent burden on the property. Such was the origin of his estate of Abbotsford, where ultimately he reared a castle. The purchase would have been perfectly a right one, if he had not involved his superfluous fortune in business: as things actually stood, it was only preparing for himself needless embarrassments.
His removal to the little estate which he had purchased took place in May 1812, and he soon became involved in the pleasant but costly labours attendant on building, planting, and what is called making a place. At the same time, besides attending to other literary avocations, he was composing a fourth romance in verse, which appeared just before the close of the year under the title of Rokeby, but in point of popularity proved a comparative failure. Ere this time, the concerns of John Ballantyne and Company were seriously embarrassed, insomuch that Scott was glad to accept of a little credit from his friend Mr Morritt of Rokeby Park. The difficulties had only increased during the early months of 1813, and it then became necessary for those who had begun in rivalry to Mr Constable, to resort to that publisher for his friendly aid. To give an idea of the fatality of the whole adventure, it appears that the single publication of Tixall Poetry, which proved a dead failure, involved an outlay of £2500, while the Edinburgh Annual Register was attended by an annual loss of £1000. At the same time, all the parties concerned were living in a style rather suited to their hopes than to their realised profits. To sustain so severe a drainage, the private fortune of Scott, and even his unprecedented literary gains, were inadequate. Fortunately, the hope of regaining the author of Marmion as an adherent of his house, induced Mr Constable to grant relief to some extent by the purchase of stock, trusting that the rival house would as soon as possible be extinguished. The Duke of Buccleuch also extended the favour of his credit for the sum of £4000, by means of which, and of further sales of stock to other publishers, the principal difficulties were passed, though not without the most serious vexation to Scott for the greater part of a year. In the midst of his worst perplexities, he resigned an offer of the laureateship to Mr Southey, and was liberal as usual to unfortunate men of letters, sending, for one thing, fifty pounds to Mr Maturin, the Irish novelist.
WAVERLEY NOVELS.
Scott had, so early as 1805, commenced a prose fiction on the manners of the Highlanders, which he designated Waverley, or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since. Discouraged by the unfavourable opinion of his friends regarding the first few chapters, he threw aside the manuscript, which lay accordingly unthought of in an old desk for nine years. Happening to find it while rummaging for fishing-tackle, he bethought him of completing the story, and seriously trying his fortune in a new walk of literature. Three weeks of June 1814 enabled him to add the second and third volumes, and the tale appeared anonymously in the ensuing month. The public almost immediately appreciated its merits, and the first edition of a thousand copies meeting with a quick sale, was speedily followed by a second and a third. The lifelike representation here given of times not too remote for sympathy, and yet sufficiently so in character to tell as eminently romantic, joined to the wonderful ease, spirit, and mingled humour and pathos of the narrative, gave Waverley at once a place far above all contemporary novels, and awakened great curiosity regarding the unknown author.
Always unconcerned about the fate of his works, Scott immediately set out on a six weeks’ yachting excursion round the north of Scotland, with hardly a chance of hearing news from the world of letters during that time. The excursion was performed in company with the Commissioners of Northern Light-houses, of whom he was the guest. As yet, the Commissioners had no steam-vessel for their annual trips, but used a sailing yacht, provided with arms for defence, in case of attack, against French privateers or other marauders. Sailing from Leith on the 29th July 1814, the party first visited the Isle of May, and thence proceeded northward. In passing, they landed on the Bell Rock, and inspected the recently erected light-house on that dangerous reef. In the album of the keepers, it is customary for visitors to inscribe their name, along with any passing remark. Sir Walter inscribed the following impromptu lines: