[1] One thinks of Oliver Proudfute and his sternpost of a dromond, fixed up in his yard for practice. 'That must make you familiar with the use of your weapon,' said the Smith. 'Ay, marry does it.'—Fair Maid of Perth, chap. viii.
Looking at the patriotic movement in the cold light of reason, one can see that its real use was a much humbler one than those enthusiastic and gallant fellows intended. Young artisans and ploughmen who had once joined the volunteers, falling in love with the liveliness and display of the military career, and becoming unsettled in mind for the dull routine of their daily work, drifted readily into the paid militia. Thus the volunteer system was indirectly a splendid means of recruiting for the army. But there can be no doubt that for immediate service in the field—and it was for this that they were preparing—the volunteers would not have been found qualified. Their existence, however, gave the nation confidence, and prevented all danger of panic. It is marvellous to find, on the best evidence of those who lived and acted important parts in those critical years, that the general feeling about invasion was one of complete indifference. Most people went about their own business, and trusted to the country's luck. Although justified by events, it was an ill-founded security. Men of speculative minds, the Cockburns and the Horners, were in a great and genuine fright. Romantic and active spirits, like Scott, anticipated the turning of their sport into earnest at any moment. And how easily it might have happened so. 'Questions are mooted' (said Horner), 'and possibilities supposed, that make one shudder for the fate of the world.' Certainly there were reasons enough for constant fear and dread: the brilliant and unbroken success of Napoleon's arms: Ireland, a ready and willing basis for his first attack: and then the fearful loss and suffering to a country so thickly peopled and utterly unprepared for internal defence, should the war actually be brought within our bounds.
'If ever breath of British gale
Shall fan the tri-color,
Or footstep of invader rude,
With rapine foul, and red with blood,
Pollute our happy shore—
Then, farewell home, and farewell friends!
Adieu each tender tie!
Resolved we mingle in the tide,
Where charging squadrons furious ride,
To conquer or to die.'—
From 'War-Song of Royal Edinburgh
Light Dragoons,' 1802.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
Ashestiel—39 Castle Street—'Honest Tom Purdie'—Associations of Scott's Work with Edinburgh Home—First Lines of the Lay—Abandons the Bar for Literature—Story of Gilpin Horner—Progress of the Poem.
In the summer of 1803, when Scott was engaged in the military functions in which his heart delighted, he received a gentle hint from the Lord-Lieutenant of Selkirkshire with regard to the less exciting claims of his sheriffship. He had not yet complied strictly with the law which required that every sheriff should reside at least four months in the year within his own jurisdiction. In order to comply with the law, the Lasswade cottage was now given up, and in the summer of 1804 the family took up their residence for that season at Ashestiel, a farmhouse very romantically situated on the banks of the Tweed, a few miles from Selkirk. Their town residence, since 1802, was 39 Castle Street, and continued so to be till the black days of 1826. By the death of his uncle Robert in June 1804, Scott inherited Rosebank, 'a beautiful little villa on the banks of the Tweed, and about thirty acres of the finest land in Scotland.' The estate was sold in the course of the year for £5000. Scott's fixed income, from all sources, at this time seems to have been about £1000 a year. During the first week at Ashestiel the Sheriff acquired his famous retainer 'honest Tom Purdie'; the ideal companion that the Sheriff got so much good of, 'Tom Purdie, kneaded up between the friend and servant, as well as Uncle Toby's bowling-green between sand and clay.' This is Lockhart's account of their meeting: 'Tom was first brought before him, in his capacity of Sheriff, on a charge of poaching, when the poor fellow gave such a touching account of his circumstances—a wife, and I know not how many children, depending on his exertions—work scarce and grouse abundant—and all this with a mixture of odd sly humour,—that the Sheriff's heart was moved. Tom escaped the penalty of the law—was taken into employment as shepherd, and showed such zeal, activity, and shrewdness in that capacity, that Scott never had any occasion to repent of the step he soon afterwards took, in promoting him to the position' (of farm grieve) 'which had been originally offered to James Hogg.'
To return to Edinburgh, and 39 Castle Street. 'Poor No. 39' was from 1802 Scott's home and headquarters, his workshop, where he had all his books and manuscripts stored, the tools he delighted to employ in planning and perfecting the wondrous works of his tireless pen and teeming fancy. The house had its connection therefore with the far greater part of Scott's literary work, a connection starting from the Lay of the Last Minstrel, which Scott himself regarded as 'the first work in which he laid his claim to be considered as an original author,' and continuing as far as Woodstock, on which he was engaged in the fatal January of 1826. Even more than Abbotsford, No. 39 Castle Street deserves to be called the shrine of Scott's memory, having been the scene of his labours, the home of his children's infancy, the place where his friends and professional colleagues were feasted at his genial board, and the scene where the dauntless old hero took up his lance for his last romantic encounter, the fight with the fiery dragon of debt which Ballantyne had raised to torture his latest years. The Lay was not actually commenced here, but at the Lasswade cottage. Here, in the autumn of 1802, he read the opening stanzas to his friends William Erskine and George Cranstoun.[1] They were naturally so much impressed as hardly to venture a remark, and the ardent poet concluded that 'their disgust had been greater than their good-nature chose to express.' He threw the MS. in the fire, but on finding that he had so strangely mistaken their feelings, he decided to begin again. The first canto was completed during a few days' confinement to his room in Musselburgh during the 'autumn manoeuvres,' and he thereafter proceeded with it at the rate of a canto a week. In his letter to George Ellis introducing Leyden, he mentions his intention of including in the third volume of the Minstrelsy 'a long poem, a kind of romance of Border chivalry, in a light-horseman sort of stanza.'
[1] Cranstoun, a great favourite of Scott's, was one of his legal advisers in his troubles. He became a lord of session in 1826, as Lord Corehouse.
As we know from the Introduction to the Lay, it was now, while the first draft of the poem was finished on his desk, that Scott finally resolved to abandon the Bar for literature. His last year's earnings, 1802-3, were £228, 18s. It is probable that his professional friends expected this, which would be sure to decrease their patronage. 'Certain it is,' he says, 'that the Scottish Themis was at this time peculiarly jealous of any flirtation with the Muses.' It showed, all the same, great confidence in his literary resources, for he was well aware that anything like a firm reputation with the public was a thing he had still to acquire.
Every one now knows that the story of the goblin page, Gilpin Horner, was really the occasion which started the poem. The beautiful young Countess of Dalkeith, having heard the old legend, suggested half in jest that Scott should make a ballad of it. 'A single scene of feudal festivity in the hall of Branksome, disturbed by some pranks of a nondescript goblin, was probably all that he contemplated; but suddenly, as he meditates his theme to the sound of the bugle, there flashes on him the idea of extending his simple outline so as to embrace a vivid panorama of that old Border life of war and tumult. Erskine, or Cranstoun, suggests that he would do well to divide the poem into cantos, and prefix to each of them a motto explanatory of the action, after the fashion of Spenser in the Faery Queen. He pauses for a moment—and the happiest conception of the framework of a picturesque narrative that ever occurred to any poet—one that Homer might have envied—the creation of the ancient harper, starts to life. By such steps did the Lay of the Last Minstrel grow out of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.'