His Border Minstrelsy came out; his fame spread. His Metrical Romances followed; and he was the most popular man of the day. In matters of business he rapidly advanced. He was made Clerk of Session and Sheriff of Selkirk. He quitted his cottage at Lasswade, for the still more beautiful, but more solitary farm of Ashestiel, on the banks of the Tweed. Lord Byron's poetry blazed out; but Scott took another flight, in the Historical Novel, and was still, if not the greatest poet, the most popular man of his age. Never had there been any evidence of such pecuniary success in the literary world. He made about £15,000 by his poetry; but by his prose he made, by a single work, his £5,000, his £10,000, his £12,000. His facility was equal to his success; it was no long and laborious task to complete one of these truly golden volumes; they were thrown off as fast as he could write; and, in three months, a novel, worth eight or ten thousand pounds in the market, was finished! Well might his hopes and views tower to an unprecedented height. The spirit of poetry and romance reveled in his brain, and began to show itself not only in the construction of volumes, but in the building of a castle, an estate, a family to stand amid the aristocratic families forever. The name of Walter Scott should not only descend with his children as that of an illustrious writer, but should clothe them with the world-honored mantle of titular rank. And every thing was auspicious. The tide and the wind of fortune, and public favor, blew wondrously. Work after work was thrown off; enormous sums often were netted. Publishers and printers struggled for his patronage; but Constable and the Ballantynes, acquaintances of his youth, were selected for his favor; and great became their standing and business. There seemed not one fortune, but three secure of accomplishment. The poet, in the romantic solitude of Ashestiel, or galloping over the heathy hills in the neighborhood, as he mused on new and ever succeeding visions of romances among them, conceived the most fascinating scheme of all. It was to purchase lands, to raise himself a fairy castle, to become, not the minstrel of a lord, as were many of those of old, but a minstrel-lord himself. The practical romance grew. On the banks of the Tweed, then, began to rise the fairy castle. Quaint and beautiful as one of his descriptions, it arose; lands were added to lands; over hill and dale spread the dark embossment of future woods; and Abbotsford began to be spoken of far and wide. The poet had chosen his seat in the midst of the very land of ancient poetry itself. At three miles' distance stood the fair pile of Melrose, which he had made so attractive, by his Lay of the Last Minstrel, to the whole world. Near that showed themselves the Eildon hills, the haunt of True Thomas; at their feet ran the classic stream of Huntly burn. The Cowdenknows lifted its black summit farther down the Tweed; and upward was a whole fairy land—Carterhaugh, Newark Tower, Ettrick forest, St. Mary's Lake, and the Dowie Dens of Yarrow. There was scarcely an object in the whole country round—neither hill, nor wood, nor stream, nor single rock—which was not full of the associations of ballad fame. Here, then, he lived, like an old feudal lord, with his hounds and his trusty vassals; some of the latter, as Laidlaw and Tom Purdie, occupying the station of those humble, faithful friends, who tend so much to complete the happiness of life. In truth, never did the poet himself dream a fairer dream beneath a summer oak than he had now realized around him. His lovely wife, the lady of the domain; his children shooting fast up into beautiful manhood and womanhood; his castle and domain built, and won, as they were, from the regions of enchantment; and friends and worshipers flocking from every country, to behold the far famed minstrel. Princes, and nobles, and men of high name in every walk of life, were his guests.
Every man of any note called him friend. The most splendid equipages crowded the way toward his house; the feast was spread continually as it were the feast of a king; while on the balcony, ranging along the whole front, stalked to and fro, in his tartans, the wild piper, and made the air quiver with the tempestuous music of the hills. Arms and armor were ranged along the walls and galleries of his hall. There were portraits of some of the most noted persons who had figured in his lays and stories—as of Claverhouse, Monmouth, the Pretender, the severed head of the Queen of Scots; with those of brother poets, Dryden, Thomson, Prior, and Gay. There were the escutcheons of all the great clan chieftains blazoned round the ceiling of his hall; and swords, daggers, pistols, and instruments of torture, from the times and the scenes he had celebrated.
Such was the scene of splendor which had sprung from the pen of one man. If it were wonderful, the streams of wealth which continued to pour from the same enchanted goose-quill were still more astounding. From Lockhart's Life we see that, independent of what these works have made since, he had pretty early netted above £13,000 by his poems, though he had sold some of them in their first edition.
| £ | s. | d. | |
| Border Minstrel, 1st and 2d vol. 1st edit. | 78 | 10 | 0 |
| Copyright of the same work | 500 | 0 | 0 |
| Lay of the Last Minstrel, copyright sold | 769 | 6 | 0 |
| Marmion, copyright sold | 1,000 | 0 | 0 |
| Lady of the Lake, copyright sold | 2,100 | 0 | 0 |
| Rokeby, copyright sold | 5,000 | 0 | 0 |
| Lord of the Isles | 3,000 | 0 | 0 |
| Halidan Hill | 1,000 | 0 | 0 |
| £13,447 | 16 | 0 |
But this was nothing to the produce of his romances. Of Waverley, fifty-one thousand copies had been sold when that Life was published, and Scott tells us that he cleared £400 by each one thousand copies, that is £20,400.
| Guy Mannering, 60,000, or | £24,000 | 0 | 0 |
| Rob Roy, 53,000, or | 21,200 | 0 | 0 |
Of the rest we have no total amount given; but, at a similar rate, his twenty-one novels would make an amount of £460,000! Beside this, he received for the Life of Napoleon above £18,000. In three months he wrote Woodstock, for which he tells us that he received £8,400 at once. Then there are his Tales of a Grandfather, twelve volumes, a most popular work, but of which no proceeds are given. For his History of Scotland for Lardner's Cyclopædia, £1,500; for editing Dryden, £756; for seven Essays for the Encyclopædia Britannica, £300; Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk, £1,350; for a contribution to the Keepsake, £400, which he says he considered poor pay. Then he wrote thirty-five Reviews for the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, for which such a writer could not, on an average, receive less than £50 each, probably £100; but say £50, that is £1,750. And these items are exclusive of the vast mass of edited editions of Swift, of Memoirs, Antiquities, etc., etc. They do not either, except in the three novels specified, include the proceeds of the collective editions of either his prose or his poetry. It appears certain that his works must have produced to the author or his trustees, at the very least, half-a-million of money!
Truly this was the revenue of a monarch in the realm of letters! Popular as Lord Byron was, I suppose the whole which he received for his writings did not realize £30,000. Scott cleared that by any two of his novels. He could clear a third of it in three months. Well might he think to lay field to field, and house to house, and plant his children in the land as lords of the soil, and titled magnates forever!
But, as the fabric of this glorious estate had risen as by the spell of a necromancer, so it fell. It was like one of those palaces, with its fairy gardens, and lawns scattered with diamonds instead of dews, in the Arabian Nights, which, with the destruction of the spell, passed away in a crash of thunder. A house of cards is proverbial, and this house of books fell at one shock, and struck the world with a terrible astonishment. It was found that the great minstrel was not carefully receiving his profits, and investing them; but was engaged as partner in the printing and publishing of his works. His publisher and his printers, drained on the one hand by the vast outlay for castle-building, land-buying, and the maintenance of all comers; and, on the other, infected with the monstrous scene of acquisition which was revealed to their eyes—were moving on a slippery course, and at the shock of the great panic in 1826 went to the ground; leaving Scott debtor to the amount of £120,000, beside a mortgage of £10,000 on his estate!
In some instances the darkness and the difficulty come in the early stages, and wind up in light and happiness; in others, the light comes first, and the darkness at the end. These latter are tragedies, and the romance of Scott's life was a tragedy. How sad and piteous is the winding up here to contemplate! The thunderbolt of fate had fallen on the "Great Magician." The glory of his outward estate was over, but never did that of his inner soul show so brilliantly. Gentle, and genial, and kindly to all men, had he shown himself in his most prosperous days; but now the giant strength of his fortitude, and the nobility of his moral principle, came into magnificent play. He was smitten, sorely smitten, but he was not subdued. Not a hero which he had described could match him in his contest with the rudeness of adversity. He could have paid his dividend, as is usual in such cases, and his prolific pen would have raised him a second fortune. But, then, his honor! no, he would pay to the uttermost farthing! And so, with a sorrowful but not murmuring or desponding heart, he went to work again on his giant's work, and, in six years, with his own hand, with his single pen, paid off £16,000 a-year! This is an achievement which has no parallel. With failing health, with all his brilliant hopes of establishing a great family dashed to the ground, with the dearest objects of his heart and health dropping and perishing before him, he went on and won £60,000, resolved to pay all or perish. And he did perish! His wife, shattered by the shock, died; he was left with a widowed heart still to labor on. Awful pangs and full of presage seized his own frame; a son and a daughter failed too in health; his old man, Tom Purdie, died suddenly; his great publisher, and one of his printers, died, too, of the fatal malady of ruined hopes. All these old connections, formed in the bright morning of life, and which had made his ascent so cheering and his toil so easy, seemed now to be giving way; and how dark was become that life which had exceeded all others in its joyous luster!