From a state of high civilisation, it is curious to look back upon the manners and modes of life of our ancestors of barbarous times; and the contrast never can be presented in stronger hues than in the picture of the lives of the old Borderers, who so completely realised Hobbes' theory of the beginning of society (fighting and stealing for their daily bread), and that of the quiet, sedate men of industry and peace of these days, whose blood never rises beyond the degree of the heat of a money-making ambition. A shiver comes over us, when we read of the son killed in a feud, carried in to his mother a corpse; of the father of a family, and the laird of many broad acres, laid before his weeping wife and children, the dead victim of a strife with his next neighbour; of families rendered houseless and homeless, often by a marauding kinsman; of the never-ceasing turmoil, strife, cruelty, and revenge, of the whole inhabitants of that distracted part of our country. We read, pause, tremble, and hug ourselves in the happy thought that we have been born in more auspicious times, when the sword is turned into the ploughshare, the castle into the granary, and the fire of enmity softened and changed into the fervour of love and friendship. Yet, alas! if we carry our thoughts farther, how little may we have to felicitate ourselves on in the pictured contrast? Rudeness has its evils; but is civilisation without them? If the household of the Border chief was begirt with dangers of rieving and spoliation, the domestic lares kept it free from the inebriated and demoralised son, whom the genius of civilisation sends from the city haunts of pollution, to lift his hand against his parent. If the ingenium perfervidum, of a roving life carried the husband from the arms of the wife, perhaps to be brought home a corpse, she seldom witnessed in him the victim of any of the thousand civilised crimes which render the common thief, the fraudulent bankrupt, the swindler, the gambler, the disloyal-spouse, the drunkard, worse than dead to her. If a well-directed revenge might deprive the inmates of the turret of a rude home, the strength was, at least, free from the inroads of the messenger or poinder, whose warrant has a crueller edge than the falchion of an enemy. We advocate not the cause of robbery, though dignified by the name of war or revenge, or coloured by the hues of a chivalric spirit of daring; but, when we look around us, and see how much civilisation has accomplished for our bodies and our intellects, and how little for our hearts or our morals, we hesitate to condemn our ancestors for crimes which they were taught to believe as virtues, to attribute to them an unhappiness which they viewed as the mere chance of war, and to laud the civilised doings of our own times, when the criminal has not the excuse of a want of proper education to palliate his offences against the laws of his country. We are led into these remarks by some rising reminiscences of the doings of old Wat Scott of Harden, the most gnarled, most crooked, and sturdiest stem of the tree of that old family. He lived in the fifteenth century, the hottest period of Border warfare, and occupied the old seat of the family, Harden Castle—a place of considerable strength, situated on the beetling brink of a dark and precipitous dell, not far from the river Borthwick, and facing a small rivulet which brawled past to meet the larger stream. The place was suitable to the castle and its possessor; for the stronghold contained in security the sturdy riever, and the glen was a species of massy more for the cattle which he made his own upon the good old legitimate principle of might, so much despised in these days of statutory legislation, when the acts of Parliament extend to twenty times the size of the Bible.
Many anecdotes and stories have been recorded of Walter Scott of Harden; and we ourselves, we believe, have, in prior parts of our work, noticed him favourably. There can be little doubt, indeed, that he was a perfect man—that is, according to the estimate of qualities in the times in which he lived, as gallant in love as he was bold in war; and surely, letting the latter rest on his undisputed fame, the former could not be better proved than by his having, when still a fine bold riever, wooed and won the "Flower of Yarrow," Mary Scott, the daughter of Philip Scott of Dryhope—a young maiden, whose poetical appellation, expressive as it is, would go small way in carrying to the minds of those curious in beauties the perfections she enjoyed from nature. Of the manner in which Harden conducted his operations on the heart of this famous beauty, it may be difficult now to speak with that certainty which is applicable to his seizure and appropriations of his neighbours' live stock generally; but, judging from the analogy of the boldness of his other exploits, and from the circumstance that his father-in-law stipulated in the marriage-contract that he was "to find Harden in horse meat and man's meat, at his tower of Dryhope, for a year and a day, but that (as five barons pledge), at the expiry of that period, his son-in-law should remove without attempting to continue in possession by force,"[13] it may be presumed that the riever was not, in this instance, lost or forgotten in the lover. Old Dryhope knew him from the early fame he had acquired; and, while he had no objection to give him the Flower of Yarrow for his wife, he saw the necessity of providing against the occurrence which would, in all likelihood, have taken place, of Walter taking up his residence at Dryhope Tower, and becoming laird, at the same time that he kept a firm hold of Harden and his other lands. The spirit of appropriation, in short, was so strong and overpowering in the heart of the bold chief, that, as was frequently alleged of him, it was dangerous to let him sit down on a creepy stool belonging, to a bona fide proprietor; for three minutes' occupancy seemed to produce in him all the effects of the long positive prescription; and he never looked at an article of man's making, or nature's production, without considering whether it were a moveable or a fixture.
The only period of Harden's life in which his peculiar notions of meum and tuum were lost sight of, was during the sweet moon of his marriage with Mary Scott. For one lunation, the poor Border proprietors were safe; and, if the Harden motto, Cornua reparabit Phœbe, had any meaning in it, it was the only moon of his life that did not light him forth to commit some depredation. His marriage, with the slight exception already stated, had no such effect in modifying his appropriating spirit, as marriages now-a-days produce on reclaimed rogues or roués, for Mary Scott although the fairest of all the fair women of her time, had the same relish for cooking other people's kye, that her husband Walter felt in bringing them home. There was not a wife in all the Borders that served up "the feast of spurs" to her lord with greater regularity, and more attention to the rules of proper hussyskep, than the Flower of Yarrow. If Walter came in crying for supper—
"Haste ye, my dame—what cheer the night?
I look to see your table dight;
For I hae been up since peep o' light,
Driving the dun deer merrilie"—
Her reply was just as spirited and ready;—
"Are ye sae keen set, Wat? 'Tis weel—
I'faith, ye'll find a dainty meal;
For it's a' o' the guid Rippon steel,
And ye maun digest it manfullie."
The spirit of the riever, inborn, and strengthened by education and example, became, in the case of Harden, as it did in that of many a one else of the Border lairds, a regular household duty; and perhaps a more peaceable husband than he might have felt a difficulty in resisting the authority of so fair a governess as Mary Scott.
In the course of a long period, occupied by Harden in his daily duty and pastime of overturning the rights of moveable property—and sure he must have been a happy man whose hobby was his duty—his helpmate bore him no fewer than six sons, who inherited the spirit of their father, and the beauty of their mother. They came all to man's estate, and there was not one of them who disgraced the principles of education which their father took so much care to instil into them, as well by precept as by the example daily laid before them, of levying black mail, and keeping the dark glen well filled with the cattle of their neighbours. It was the ambition of Harden that each of his sons should be an independent proprietor, who might rieve, in after times, on his own account; and, at the time when our story properly begins, he could count four fine properties which he intended for the inheritance of four of the six youths. Two remained to be provided for, and a point soon came to be mooted at the fireside of Harden Castle—how two fitting lairdships might be acquired for them, so that it might never come to be said, by posterity, that Wat of Harden was unable to steal, or win by power or purchase, a good domain for every one of the sons of the Flower of Yarrow. The great difficulty, of course, lay in the nature of the thing to be acquired, because, unhappily, an estate could not be carried away; and there had already begun to be introduced a practice on the Borders of regulating the rights of land by pieces of parchment skins, whereby the outside of a sheep—a creature itself easily conveyable—was made to vest a right in the land on which it grazed. No doubt, the charter chest might be carried away, and Walter had courage enough to enable him to accomplish that object; but still there remained many difficulties in the way; doubles of the charters were apt to make their appearance at a future day, and the best fire that could be produced at Harden Castle was not sufficient to burn out the vestiges of proprietorship which the sword of its master could so easily overturn.
As his years increased, the anxiety of the old laird waxed stronger and stronger on the subject which lay nearest to his heart. He had often cast his eye on the property of Gilmanscleugh, not far distant; and he had even counted the broad acres, to ascertain if they would make a
suitable inheritance for one of his sons. It belonged, also, to a family of Scotts—a circumstance that increased its peculiar fitness for the purpose he had so long cherished, as his son would still be a Scott of Gilmanscleugh, and the injustice of the appropriation would be diminished, by his being chief of the clan, and having a species of superiority over its proprietor. By an unfortunate agreement of tempers, the two families had long remained on a sort of friendly footing; and Harden had never been able to bring about such a feud as might give him a pretext for denouncing Gilmanscleugh at head-quarters, when he might have got the envied property forfeited, and a grant of it to himself. No doubt, he had often taken from Gilmanscleugh his kye, but what neighbour had been fortunate enough to escape, and what victim of his cupidity dared to resent an injury where resentment would have brought upon his head an evil a thousand times greater than that attempted to be avenged? It was even a species of favour conferred on a small proprietor to have a theft committed upon him by old Harden, because he was generally sure to be protected against more unscrupulous aggressors by the old lion, who liked to preserve what he himself might come to require; and so Gilmanscleugh, like many others, had suffered meekly the contributions laid upon him—for the double object of retaining his old chief's friendship, and preserving the rest of his stock from the hands of the other marauders, who were continually roaming about to take whatever they could violently lay hands upon. The situation of Harden was, therefore, that of the wolf in the fable; but he had never yet been able to come to the resolution of asserting that the lamb had rendered the descending water muddy to him who drank further up the stream. On this important subject he did not disdain to take the advice of Mary, who could see no reason, any more than Walter himself, why the chief of the Scotts should not be able to provide a landed portion for two of his sons, when the whole of Liddesdale and the Debateable Land contained so much good ground lying ready for the taking. She, moreover, was also partial to Gilmanscleugh, and only lamented that it was not large enough to form two good properties; though that, of course, was no reason why it should not be taken, quantum et quale, for one of her sons, leaving the other to be provided for by some other estate out of the many that lay around them.