The Life of Sir Walter Scott: A Biography. S. Fowler Wright

to support a numerous population; but in its northern valleys—that of the Tweed, the Esk and Teviot dales—the twenty miles, more or less, which separated their inhabitants from the English border had allowed time for the beacon-signals to give warning of hostile invasion, and for men to gather in formidable strength. It resulted that it had been possible to follow the pursuit of agriculture in relative security, and some urban industries, such as the weaving of ‘tweed’ cloth, had grown up to a modest extent in Hawick, Kelso and Jedburgh, with populations of some thousands at each of these centres. There were fields of barley and oats stretching beneath the wooded slopes of the valleys; and the orchards around Melrose and Kelso were justly famed.

      But further south, the moors, the high hills, green to their rounded summits, had been no better than precarious sheep-walks for the best part of a thousand years. Their spare population had depended for its security upon the rude poverty of its existence, as much as upon the strength of the walls behind which it sheltered when the beacons flared. A small force would turn back, baffled by the strong-walled towers, with their narrow windows, and single room on each storey: a large force would pass them by, seeking for richer spoils in the further valleys.

      Of all this barren desolate southern portion of the county, the wildest and most desolate was the district of Liddesdale in the extreme south, where the moors slope downwards to Cumberland, and the Liddell flows to join the Eden and the Irish Sea.

      When Walter Scott came to Jedburgh, Liddesdale—twenty to thirty miles to the south—was still as wild and little known as the remotest Highlands. Here and there, was a sheep-farmer’s isolated house. Less frequently, a little church might be found, or a lonely manse, or the ruins of a deserted tower. It had no roads—no inns. No wheeled vehicle had ever attempted the roughness of its mountain tracks. It was a country where few dwelt, and to which no one came.

      Here, it seemed to Scott, there might be treasure of old ballads and old tales to be gained by one who would take the trouble to seek them, and who could win the friendship of its lonely inhabitants. Old Border riding-songs might still be sung.

      He could have no better guide than the Sheriff-substitute, the one man of his own status who knew the country, who knew the Elliots and Armstrongs who occupied its lonely farms, and who was known and trusted by them. The new friends set out on horseback together, and by night-time they were sleeping in the same bed (as they would have to become accustomed to do) at the farm at Millburnholm, and between fatigue and Willie Elliot’s toddy, we may be sure that they slept well.

      There followed for Scott a very happy and successful week. They spent nothing, being received at manse and farm with a free and equal hospitality. Scott was introduced by Shortreed with the strange and frightening dignity of being an Advocate of the Edinburgh Court, such as had never been known to visit the dale before. They found him to be a tall, handsome, attractive boy, very active, in spite of a shrunken leg, very willing to be ‘just a cheild like ourselves’, very quick to make friends with every dog that he met, full of inexhaustible anecdotes, and with a smile that charmed the confidence of the shyest of these lonely dwellers on the moors. For he was at home here as much as ever he would be in the streets of Edinburgh. The hardy Cheviot sheep might have been those among which the baby with the dragging leg had crawled above the crags of Sandy-Knowe. It was the same moor, and the same sky.

      With his usual luck (if that be the word to use) he found a friend of the right kind in a doctor at Cleughhead—an Elliot like the rest, who had been collecting manuscript ballads for some previous years for his own satisfaction. Dr. Elliot, under the impetus of the enthusiasm of the younger man, undertook this work with a new energy. For many years after, he made an occupation of seeking out these dying traditional songs, oral or written, and sending them as a willing tribute to the young Edinburgh lawyer whose genius would put them to immortal use.

      It was only the first of many ‘raids’ which Scott was to make upon the Liddesdale country in the same company during succeeding summers, but Shortreed remembered and told long afterwards the intoxications (mental and too-nearly physical) of that first excursion. “Eh me!” he said, “sic an endless fund o’ humour and drollery as he then had wi’ him. Never ten yards hut we were either laughing or roaring and singing. Wherever we stopped, how brawlie he suited himself to everybody! He ay did as the lave did—” Scott’s mind reacted buoyantly from the hard self-imposed discipline of the two previous years, that had brought him with honours through the examinations of a month ago. He was released from that ordeal, and, for the moment, free. He had the genius of sympathetic imagination which made him all things to all men. But he took their confidences rather than gave his own. All his life he would be the willing confidant and helper of those around him. They would sometimes think him pliable. Where they would think to constrain him to a mile they would sometimes find that he would go two. But it would be of his own will.

      Only occasionally would he give emphatic rebuff to some too-impudent liberty. But his sympathies would seldom deflect his judgement. His own soul would remain apart, almost aloof,

      in a reticence only to be partially broken at last in the Journal of his closing years, when he would write ‘God help us: earth cannot’, and find the help for which he looked was there....

      The farmers of Liddlesdale had two occupations which relieved the healthy monotony of the sheep-walks, otherwise only varied as the seasons changed, or by the occasional visits to Hawick, or Jedburgh, or Hexham fair. They had the stimulus of alcohol; and the emotional exercise of their religion, with the intellectual acrobatics of the theological guise it wore. The young lawyer appears to have avoided, as far as courtesy would permit, the excesses of convivial hospitality. Shortreed remarked that he was rarely ‘fou’ and never showed any of the usual symptoms of drunkenness, but it was not always easy to be abstemious at that time, if one would mix sociably with all conditions of men. There came a day when they reached a remote hill-farm where they were relieved to find that the warmth of their reception was not immediately interpreted in terms of alcoholic refreshment. But it was a respite only. The eager host had sent at express speed to a smuggler on the Solway Firth, when he heard of his approaching visitors. A sober supper, at which the home-brewed elderberry wine was the only beverage, was followed by the customary religious ceremony, through which the light of Christianity was maintained in these scattered homes. A young ‘student of divinity’, who was of the party, was conducting the solemn service when there was a sound of horses’ feet on the stony road. Two herdsmen burst into the room with the keg of brandy for which the anxious farmer had been listening ever since his visitors had arrived too soon. Religious habit and self-control gave way at the joyful sound. He leapt up from his knees. “By God, here’s the keg at last!” Scott would always remember the look of despair on the face of the young clergyman, as he closed the book.

      He rode back to Jedburgh with a Border war-horn slung around his neck, the gift of Dr. Elliot, and found (it is said) at the ruins of Hermitage. It is not clear whether he actually visited the relics of that sombre isolated castle, the outpost of the Scottish borders, which the Douglases had held so stubbornly against the raids of Cumberland, on this occasion, or in the following year. He had resolved that he would return to Liddesdale at the first chance he had, but, for the time, he must turn his mind to the profession from which his income must be earned. In November, the Court was sitting again at Edinburgh, and Walter Scott was in regular attendance at Parliament House.

      CHAPTER XII.

      Lockhart came on two of Scott’s notebooks dated 1792, and evidently written in that year. He gives a list of the contents of one of them, which is an illuminating criticism of those who depreciate him for a lack of pedantic scholarship. There were first seven closely-written quarto pages containing “Vegtain’s Kvitha, or the Descent of Odin, with the Latin of Thomas Bartholine, and the English poetical version of Mr. Gray; with some account of the death of Balder, both as narrated in the Edda, and as handed down to us by the Northern historians—Auctore Gualtero Scott.” The Norse original, and the two versions follow. The whole is obviously an essay to be read before one of the Edinburgh literary or debating societies to which he belonged at this period. The book also contained these miscellaneous jottings:

      A transcript of a receipt for some plate lent to King Charles I.

      A copy of Langhorne’s Owen of Carron.