They were called to the Bar together; and together, when the ceremony was over, they stood about in their wigs and gowns in the great hall, till at last Scott whispered to Clerk, imitating a farm servant-lass waiting at the Cross to be hired, “We’ve stood here an hour by the Tron, hinny, and de’il an ane has speered our price.” Before the Court rose, however, Scott had earned his first guinea,—and he spent it on a silver taper-stand for his mother.
It was all in Edinburgh—all his “supreme moments.” Was it not in a shower of rain in Greyfriars’ Churchyard that he met his first love? Greyfriars’ Churchyard in a shower of rain, after a sermon; and Scott offered her his umbrella, and together they walked home under it. Probably it was a very shabby umbrella, for Scott was slovenly in his dress in those days. What did it matter? There were more walks—more talks. Presently Scott’s father thought it right to warn the other father, for Scott was but a dependent youth; and, moreover, his love had been given to the daughter and heiress of Sir John and Lady Jane Stuart Belches of Invermay, and in those days in Scotland every shade of rank was considered. Did Scott ever know what his father had done? Still the romance went on, till the day when Scott rode home from Invermay back to Edinburgh, and “the iron entered into his soul.” A long ride through the beloved Scottish Highlands—
Never the time and the place and the loved one all together.
She married Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo. Of course she did. Had it not been ordained since the beginning of time that she who had won the first love of Walter Scott was to marry another? Who knows her story? Who, for the matter of that, knows his? Who has measured the influence on his life?
It was in Edinburgh that Scott’s youth passed, and that most of the happenings took place that went to the making of him. In Edinburgh was clustered his group of friends: Clerk (afterwards the original of “Darsie Latimer”); Thomas Thomson, the legal antiquary; John Irving; Adam Ferguson; George Cranstoun (afterwards Lord Corehouse); George Abercromby (Lord Abercromby); Patrick Murray of Simprim; Patrick Murray of Auchtertyre; and, most congenial of all to Scott’s own nature, Erskine, the son of a Scottish Episcopalian clergyman of good family, and the only Tory, save Scott himself, among the set of young Whigs then predominant at Parliament House.
In those days Scott indulged in many rambles to the Borders or the Highlands, to interesting neighbourhoods and historic houses and worthy hosts; but it was from one of these excursions that he returned to Edinburgh to see the execution of Watt the republican; and it was in the Edinburgh theatre that he assisted to break the heads of a band of young Irish rowdies who howled and hooted during the National Anthem; and it was in Edinburgh that he haunted the vaults below Parliament House among hoards of MSS. and deeds, and came up again steeped in dust and lore to be made a curator of the Advocates’ Library, with Professor David Hume and Malcolm Laing the historian as his colleagues.
Scott’s first serious attempt at verse was a rhymed translation of Bürger’s Lenore. It was written when he was four-and-twenty, and was done under the inspiration of hearing that Mrs. Barbauld, then on her first visit to Edinburgh, had read aloud Taylor’s then unpublished version of it at a party at Dugald Stewart’s. Scott, already deeply interested in German literature, was fired; and one morning before breakfast he brought his translation to show to his friend Miss Cranstoun.
Walter Scott was not without women friends. Miss Cranstoun, to whom he brought his poem before breakfast, had already been his confidante in his love-story. Of his young kinswoman, the wife of the head of his family, Hugh Scott of Harden,—who was a daughter of Count Brühl Martkirchen, Saxon Ambassador at the Court of St. James’s, and Almeria, Dowager Countess of Egremont—he says that she “was the first woman of real fashion that took him up.”
It was about this time also that Scott’s martial ardour and patriotism found vent in helping to organise the Scottish Light-horse Volunteers, in preparation for the expected French Invasion. When, therefore, in his twenty-sixth year, he brought home to Edinburgh the little half-French bride to whose dark prettiness and novel vivacity he had fallen a victim whilst a fellow-visitor at a watering-place, she found a warm welcome awaiting her from a large and various circle of friends, all devoted to her young husband, and sharing with him one or other of his enthusiasms,—military or literary, antiquarian or sporting. Among these must not be forgotten Skene of Rubislaw, whose friendship with Scott began in a mutual love for German literature, and ended only with death.
Scott took his young wife first to lodgings in George Street, his house at 10 South Castle Street not being quite ready; and the following summer he hired that first and humblest of those three country homes near Edinburgh where his happiest days were spent, a pretty cottage, with a garden and a paddock, at Lasswade. It is still standing and unchanged. Here and at Castle Street the young people lived comfortably on their combined incomes for many years, and made themselves and their friends happy with much simple and inexpensive hospitality. At Lasswade it was that they formed friendships with the neighbouring great houses of Melville and Buccleuch; that they were near—as the country counts near—to Scott’s old friends the Clerks of Penicuik and Tytlers of Woodhouselee, and Henry Mackenzie, the “Man of Feeling,” who lived at Auchendinny. And it was at the Lasswade cottage that Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy arrived before breakfast on the morning of September 17, 1803. Scott was then writing the Lay of the Last Minstrel, and read the first four cantos to Wordsworth. He walked with his guests to Roslin, and afterwards met them for the famous days in the Border country, where he was Sheriff. Hogg’s first celebrated visit was paid at Castle Street. It was in the drawing-room there that the Ettrick Shepherd, feeling sure he “could never do wrong to copy the lady of the house,” lay down at full length on the sofa opposite hers. It was here that he “dined heartily and drank freely and, by jest, anecdote, and song, afforded plentiful merriment.” It was here that, as the hour grew later, his enthusiasm showed itself in a descending warmth of appellations for his host, who, first “Mr. Scott,” became “Shirra,” and then “Scott,” “Walter,” and, finally, “Wattie”; and the “plentiful merriment” must have reached its culmination when Mrs. Scott was addressed as “Charlotte.”