When Thomas Campbell published his “Pleasures of Hope,” Walter Scott was an enthusiastic admirer of his fellow-poet. “I have repeated these lines so often on the North Bridge that the whole fraternity of coachmen know me by tongue as I pass. To be sure, to a mind in sober, serious, street-walking humour, it must bear an appearance of lunacy when one stamps with the hurried pace and fervent shake of the head, which strong, pithy poetry excites.”
Oh days of enthusiasms and strong feelings! Nowadays, we are all jaded with travel, and washed over with the neutral tint of cosmopolitanism, and as insipid as bread and water. No Scott stamps and rolls his head to the rhythm of his thoughts on the North Bridge; no Scott protests out of his full heart against the innovations of Whiggery, and leans his brow against the wall of the Mound, unashamed if his tears be seen by a jesting Jeffrey, and tells him, “No, no—’tis no laughing matter; little by little, whatever your wishes may be, you will destroy and undermine, until nothing of what makes Scotland Scotland shall remain!”[59]
When Scott’s worldly prospects were very prosperous, when he was Sheriff of Selkirk, and the author of the successful Lay of the Last Minstrel, and a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, under the editorship first of Sydney Smith and then of Jeffrey, he was an established citizen of Edinburgh, in his second house in Castle Street—“poor 39”—as he lived to call it. Here were his most brilliant days spent,—here, and at Ashestiel, the picturesque farm on the banks of the Tweed which superseded the Lasswade cottage, and then at Abbotsford, the proudest home of all. But 39 Castle Street remained his town home through all the brilliant and wonderful years, till the financial crash came in 1826. It was here that Joanna Baillie paid a visit of a week or so,—here that Crabbe stayed,—here that every one of worth or want found a ready welcome. The dining-room in 39 Castle Street!—what scenes and what voices have its walls seen and heard! Here all Scott’s famous dinners took place, including those Sunday ones “without silver dishes” to his intimates—Mrs. Maclean of Torloisk and her daughters; his school friend Clerk; Kirkpatrick Sharpe of caustic humour and scandalous memory; Sir Alexander Boswell of Auchinleck, “Bozzie’s” son, and author of “Jenny dang the weaver”; Sir Alexander Don of Newton; William Allan, the artist; and many others. It was here he had his orderly “den” behind the dining-room, with its many books, its big writing-table, its two armchairs, the staghound on the floor, and the cat safely atop the book-ladder, and one picture—the beautiful, sad face of Graham of Claverhouse, who, as Scott said, “foully traduced” by Covenanting historians, “still passed among the Scottish vulgar for a ruffian desperado.”
It must have been in the window of this study that Scott sat writing night after night, when the son of William Menzies, living at his father’s house in George Street, looked across from the back windows of their house to the back of Scott’s, when, at a gathering of “gay and thoughtless” young men, mostly advocates, he asked one to change places with him that he might not see a hand that fascinated his eye. “It never stops—page after page is finished and thrown on that heap of MS., and still it goes on unwearied—and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that.... I well know what hand it is—’tis Walter Scott’s.”
It was in this self-same study that an attempt was made on Scott’s life by a man named Webber, whose literary efforts Scott had befriended. Webber had taken to drinking, and a sudden mad resentment against Scott filled his unhinged mind. In this study Scott suddenly found himself confronted by a madman with firearms, insisting on a duel then and there; and it was only because of Scott’s absolute self-control and courage that the great man’s life did not end in the year 1818. He suggested that a duel in the house might disturb the ladies of the family and had better be postponed till after dinner; and then, locking up the pistols, he calmly brought Webber into the dining-room, and, whilst they dined with an unconscious hostess, Scott sent for the young man’s friends.
It was to Castle Street that Scott walked home across the Mound leaning on his daughter’s arm, his own trembling, speaking not a word all the way, on the day after the Scottish Regalia had been discovered. It was owing to Scott’s representations to his friend the Prince Regent that the Commission had been appointed to examine the Crown Room in the Castle, and the long-lost Regalia had been brought to light. The next day he and his fellow-commissioners had brought the ladies of their families to view it, and Sophia Scott had been so wrought upon by the sight that she had turned faint, and was drawing back from the group when she heard her father’s voice, “something between anger and despair,” exclaim, “By God, no!” and turned to see that one of the Commissioners had been, in play, about to put the Scottish crown on the head of a young girl present. The father and daughter walked home together in silence, with a new sympathy between them.
It was of this very year, 1818, that Lockhart said: “At this moment, his position, take it for all in all, was, I am inclined to believe, what no other man had ever won for himself by the pen alone. His works were the daily food, not only of his countrymen, but of all educated Europe. His society was courted by whatever England could show of eminence. Station, power, wealth, beauty, and genius, strove with each other in every demonstration of respect and worship, and—a few political fanatics and envious poetasters apart—wherever he appeared, in town or country, whoever had Scotch blood in him, ‘gentle or simple,’ felt it move more rapidly through his veins when he was in the presence of Scott.”[60]
Lockhart goes on to say that, “descending to what many looked on as higher things,” the annual profits of Scott’s novels alone had been for several years not less than £10,000, and his Castle of Abbotsford was being built, and “few doubted that ere long he might receive from the just favour of his Prince some distinction in the way of external rank, such as had seldom before been dreamt of as the possible consequences of mere literary celebrity.”
On February 2, 1820, Scott took Prince Gustavus Vasa, and his attendant, Baron Polier, who were spending some months in Edinburgh, to the window over Constable’s shop in the High Street, to hear George IV. proclaimed King at the site of the Cross. Here Scott lamented to the Prince the “barbarity of the Auld Reekie Bailies,” who had removed the historic Cross; and when the exiled Prince broke down on hearing the National Anthem sung by the crowd, Scott drew Lockhart away into another window, whispering: “Poor lad! poor lad! God help him!”