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

the completion of the Minstrelsy publication, Scott first appears as a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, which Jeffrey was editing. He reviewed Southey’s Amadis of Gaul, for which he was particularly well qualified. His subsequent articles cover a wide range of subjects, but have the common quality of being those with which he was specially conversant. He never cultivated the journalistic habit of being promiscuously omniscient.

      The summer passed without any climax of incident, in work on the Lay and Sir Tristrem, and in the usual routine of visits, and legal and military duties. The last had become of more than perfunctory character. While the Scotts were on their way back from London, the war in Europe, after a short pause of exhaustion had broken out with a renewed and increasing fury. The fear of invasion was far more real and reasonable than when, a century later, an English government lacked either the courage or the military insight which would have used its full strength on its foemen’s ground. Now, people were told that the army was for use abroad. If they did not join it, they must be prepared for the defense of their own homes. The camp at Musselburgh had become an active military centre. A letter to Miss Seward, written at that time, and quoted by Lockhart, deserves reproduction, but, in reading it, it is well to remember that the regiment that owed its first inception to Scott’s imagination and practical energy was not a peacetime plaything of the pageantry of war. It met and trained with the knowledge that, at any moment, it might have to oppose its inexperienced valour to the war-hardened legions of France, that would have landed upon the British coast with the prestige of having strewn the map of a ruined Europe with the sites of a hundred victories. It was the year when Collingwood, after the few months of home-life that the brief peace gave, put to sea once more, never to see his wife and infant children again. He died at sea seven years later. England fought for life with an extremity of effort for which there is no parallel in the war of a later century. Her fleets, watching the French ports, must beat backwards and forwards, in all seasons and any weather, as the winds allowed. The partial relief of Trafalgar was still two years ahead.

      Scott wrote:

      “We are assuming a very military appearance. Three regiments of militia, with a formidable park of artillery, are encamped just by us. The Edinburgh Troop, to which I have the honour to be quartermaster, consists entirely of young gentlemen of family, and is, of course, admirably well mounted and armed. There are other dour troops in the regiment, consisting of yeomanry, whose iron faces and muscular forms announce the hardness of the climate against which they wrestle, and the powers which nature has given them to contend with and subdue it. These corps have been easily raised in Scotland, the farmers being in general a high-spirited race of men, fond of active exercises, and patient in hardship and fatigue. For myself, I must own that to one who has, like myself, la tête un peu exaltée ‘the pomp and circumstance of war’ gives, for a time, a very poignant and pleasing sensation. The imposing appearance of cavalry, in particular, and the rush which marks their onset, appear to me to partake highly of the sublime. Perhaps I am the more attached to this sort of sport of swords because my health requires much active exercise, and a lameness contracted in childhood renders it inconvenient for me to take it otherwise than on horseback. I have, too, a hereditary attachment to the animal—not, I flatter myself, of the common jockey cast, but because I regard him as the kindest and most generous of the subordinate tribes. I hardly even except the dogs; at least they are usually so much better treated, that compassion for the steed should be thrown into the scale when we weigh their comparative merits. My wife (a foreigner) never sees a horse ill-used without asking what the poor horse has done in his state of pre-existence? I would fain hope that they have been carters or hackney-coachmen, and are only experiencing a retort of the ill-usage they have formerly inflicted. What think you?”

      The joyous courage which could be optimistic enough, but which did not allow any optimism to take the place of the hard work by which safety is gained, or success comes: the universal sympathy with all around him, extending as he wrote to the cavalry horses for the welfare of which it is a quartermaster’s duty to provide—do they not make easy explanation of the fact that Wordsworth noticed when he and Dorothy visited the Scotts during this autumn, that “I believe that, in the character of the sheriff’s friends, we might have counted on a hearty welcome under any roof in the Border country”?

      William and Dorothy, walking from Roslin, where they had left the carriage in which they were touring Scotland, called at Lasswade so early that Mr. and Mrs. Scott were still in bed, but they got no worse reception for that.

      “We were received,” Wordsworth said to Lockhart long afterwards, “with that frank cordiality which, under whatever circumstances I afterwards met him, always marked his manners; and, indeed, I found him then in every respect—except, perhaps, that his animal spirits were somewhat higher—precisely the same man that you knew him in later life; the same lively, entertaining conversation, full of anecdote, and averse from disquisition; the same unaffected modesty about himself; the same cheerful and benevolent and hopeful views of man and the world. He partly read and partly recited, sometimes in an enthusiastic style of chant, the first four cantos of the Lay of the Last Minstrel; and the novelty of the manners, the clear picturesque descriptions, and the easy glowing energy of much of the verse, greatly delighted me.”

      We notice that the Lay was advancing. There were four cantos now. And Wordsworth listened with an intelligent appreciation. It was not his kind of poetry, but, of its kind, it was quite good. And, so far as he praises, it is intelligent praise. He may have noticed—he may have remarked—a very curious similarity between the opening lines and those of an unfinished poem called Christabel, that his friend Coleridge had written, and which had already had some manuscript circulation; but, if he did, there is no record that he spoke aloud.

      Later in the day, Scott walked back with the Wordsworths to their carriage at Roslin. He recommended the little inn at Clovenford, where they stayed the night. He was starting to ride to Jedburgh in the course of the next day, and if they cared to pause at Melrose he would catch them up, and show them the ruins there.

      So he did, and they went on to Jedburgh together. He introduced William Laidlaw, who was very anxious to meet a poet whose verses he already knew. He rode with them to Hawick on the next day, and would have taken them into the wilder Liddesdale country, “where,” he said, “I have a home in every farmhouse”. But he had his sheriff’s duties in Jedburgh, and it was time that they should be back in their Westmorland home.

      He gave Wordsworth the impression that he did not take literature or literary success very seriously, and yet that it was in his easy reach. He said casually that he did not make much money at the law, and added that “he was sure he could, if he chose, get more money than he should ever wish to have from the book-sellers”.

      Wordsworth, having less reason for a similar confidence, was puzzled, but not alienated by this remark. They parted with cordiality, and he doubtless regained his usual intellectual altitude, making a disquisition to Dorothy, as they rumbled onwards to Westmorland.

      Wordsworth was about eighteen months older than Scott. He was physically and intellectually about at his best at this time. He had recently married, having left a wife and a new-born baby when he set out with his sister on this Highland tour. He had lost something of the neurotic temperament of earlier years, and the pontifical was not yet at its worst. They met with the common consciousness that Wordsworth was the greater man, about which both were content. They had a common love of poetry, but little else to draw them together. Wordsworth was a powerful young man, well-made, with no lameness to hold him back, but there was no thought of a saddle in his mind, no sword in his hand. He went on a Highland tour.

      That Scott’s multitude of activities shamed him in any way is an unlikely thing. They are the occupations of the herd, from which genius stands apart. When we remember that Wordsworth had neither sense of humour, nor spark of romance, that he actually attributed the failure of Lyrical Ballads to the fact that he had reluctantly agreed to the inclusion of the Ancient Mariner, we may consider him to have been one of the most difficult friendships that Scott ever made.

      As to Scott’s measure of legal success at this time, his fee-book shows a steady advance from year to year, and its total for 1802-3 had reached £228 18. 0. This could not have been the case had he failed to give good service to those