‘A mightier monument command
The mountains of his native land.’[13]
After the death of his chief, Mr Laidlaw removed to the county of Ross, and was successively factor on the estates of Seaforth and Balnagown. His health failing, he went to reside with his brother, Mr James Laidlaw, sheep-farmer at Contin, also in Ross-shire, and there he died May 18, 1845. His remains were interred in the churchyard of Contin, a retired spot under the shade of Tor Achilty, one of the loftiest and most picturesque of the Ross-shire mountains, and amidst the most enchanting Highland scenery. The lord of the manor, Sir George S. Mackenzie of Coul, Bart., erected a tomb, with a marble tablet, to his memory.
Mr Laidlaw cherished with religious care all his memorials of Abbotsford, where, indeed, his heart may be said to have remained till its last pulsation. The desk in which the first manuscript of Waverley was deposited stood in his room; the works inscribed and presented by the author were carefully ranged on his shelves; the letters he had received from him were treasured up; the pens with which Ivanhoe was written were laid past, and kept as a sacred thing; but above all he valued the brooch which was round the neck of Scott when he died. That most interesting ornament Mr Laidlaw wore while a trace of sensibility remained, and it has descended to another generation—one of the most precious of the personal reliquiæ of a splendid but melancholy friendship.
* * * * *
The biographer of Scott, John Gibson Lockhart, was not a social or clubable man. He was fastidious and reserved, silent in mixed company (he heard with only one ear, and was too proud to acknowledge it), and was inveterately prone to satire, so that he earned for himself the appellation of ‘The Scorpion,’ and he was a victim to dyspepsia, which, perhaps, like charity, ought to cover a multitude of sins. His fine acute intellect and classic taste were often obscured and his better sympathies chilled by pain and languor. To a few friends, however, Lockhart at times unbosomed himself. With them his cold, sarcastic, haughty manner melted away—at least for a season—and in those genial hours he was the most confiding and delightful of companions. As shewing the better nature and higher feelings of the man, we are tempted to subjoin one of his letters to William Laidlaw, in which he speaks of the sense of duty and responsibility under which he wrote the Memoirs of Scott—a work which, with all its faults, is unquestionably the best biography since Boswell’s Life of Johnson. There is great tenderness in the following letter; and the picture which the writer draws of his happy fireside contrasts painfully with his latter years, when broken health, a desolate hearth, and feelings lacerated by paternal troubles and anxieties, might have made him join in that lamentation of the ancient British bard which he applied to the old age of Thomas Campbell:
‘God hath provided unpleasant things for me;
Dead is Morgeneu, dead is Mordav,
Dead is Morien, dead are those I love.’[14]
Few letters of Lockhart’s are so generally interesting or so valuable, biographically, as the following: