I do not know how far I shall be able in this letter to carry you forward in the story of Scott’s life; let me first, therefore, map its divisions clearly; for then, wherever we have to stop, we can return to our point in fit time.

First, note these three great divisions—essentially those of all men’s lives, but singularly separate in his,—the days of youth, of labour, and of death.

Youth is properly the forming time—that in which a man makes himself, or is made, what he is for ever to be. Then comes the time of labour, when, having become the best he can be, he does the best he can do. Then the time of death, which, in happy lives, is very short: but always a time. The ceasing to breathe is only the end of death.

Scott records the beginning of his own in the following entry in his diary, which reviews the life then virtually ended:—

“December 18th, 1825.1—What a life mine has been!—half educated, almost wholly neglected, or left to myself; stuffing my head with most nonsensical trash, and undervalued by most of my companions for a time; getting forward, and held a bold, clever fellow, contrary to the opinion of all who thought me a mere dreamer; broken-hearted for two years; my heart handsomely pieced again, but the crack will remain till my dying day. Rich and poor four or five times: once on the verge of ruin, yet opened a new source of wealth almost overflowing. Now to be broken in my pitch of pride.2…

“Nobody in the end can lose a penny by me; that is one comfort. Men will think pride has had a fall. Let them indulge in their own pride in thinking that my fall will make them higher, or seem so at least. I have the satisfaction to recollect that my prosperity has been of advantage to many, and to hope that some at least will forgive my transient wealth on account of the innocence of my intentions, and my real wish to do good to the poor. Sad hearts, too, at Darnick, and in the cottages of Abbotsford. I have half resolved never to see the place again. How could I tread my hall with such a diminished crest?—how live a poor, indebted man, where I was once the wealthy, the honoured? I was to have gone there on Saturday, in joy and prosperity, to receive my friends. My dogs will wait for me in vain. It is foolish, but the thoughts of parting from these dumb creatures have moved me more than any of the painful reflections I have put down. Poor things, I must get them kind masters! There may be yet those who, loving me, may love my dog because it has been mine. I must end these gloomy forebodings, or I shall lose the tone of mind with which men should meet distress. I feel my dogs’ feet on my knees; I hear them whining, and seeking me everywhere.”

He was fifty-four on the 15th August of that year, and spoke his last words—“God bless you all,”—on the 21st September, 1832: so ending seven years of death.

His youth, like the youth of all the greatest men, had been long, and rich in peace, and altogether accumulative and crescent. I count it to end with that pain which you see he remembers to his dying day, given him by—Lilias Redgauntlet, in October, 1796. Whereon he sets himself to his work, which goes on nobly for thirty years, lapping over a little into the death-time3 (‘Woodstock’ showing scarcely a trace of diminution of power).

Count, therefore, thus:—

The great period of mid-life is again divided exactly in the midst by the change of temper which made him accurate instead of fantastic in delineation, and therefore habitually write in prose rather than verse. The ‘Lady of the Lake’ is his last poem, (1810). ‘Rokeby,’ (1812) is a versified novel; the ‘Lord of the Isles’ is not so much. The steady legal and historical work of 1810–1814, issuing in the ‘Essay on Scottish Judicature,’ and the ‘Life of Swift,’ with preparation for his long-cherished purpose of an edition and ‘Life of Pope,’4 (“the true deacon of the craft,” as Scott often called him,) confirmed, while they restrained and chastised, his imaginative power; and ‘Waverley,’ (begun in 1805) was completed in 1814. The apparently unproductive year of accurate study, 1811, divides the thirty years of mid-life in the precise centre, giving fifteen to song, and fifteen to history.

You may be surprised at my speaking of the novels as history. But Scott’s final estimate of his own work, given in 1830, is a perfectly sincere and perfectly just one; (received, of course, with the allowance I have warned you always to make for his manner of reserve in expressing deep feelings). “He replied5 that in what he had done for Scotland as a writer, he was no more entitled to the merit which had been ascribed to him than the servant who scours the brasses to the credit of having made them; that he had perhaps been a good housemaid to Scotland, and given the country a ‘rubbing up;’ and in so doing might have deserved some praise for assiduity, and that was all.” Distinguish, however, yourselves, and remember that Scott always tacitly distinguishes, between the industry which deserves praise, and the love which disdains it. You do not praise Old Mortality for his love to his people; you praise him for his patience over a bit of moss in a troublesome corner. Scott is the Old Mortality, not of tables of stone, but of the fleshly tables of the heart.

We address ourselves to-day, then, to begin the analysis of the influences upon him during the first period of twenty-five years, during which he built and filled the treasure-house of his own heart. But this time of youth I must again map out in minor detail, that we may grasp it clearly.

1. From birth to three years old. In Edinburgh, a sickly child; permanent lameness contracted, 1771–1774.

2. Three years old to four. Recovers health at Sandy-Knowe. The dawn of conscious life, 1774–1775.

3. Four years old to five. At Bath, with his aunt, passing through London on the way to it. Learns to read, and much besides, 1775–1776.

4. Five years old to eight. At Sandy-Knowe. Pastoral life in its perfectness forming his character: (an important though short interval at Prestonpans begins his interest in sea-shore), 1776–1779.

5. Eight years old to twelve. School life, under the Rector Adams, at High School of Edinburgh, with his aunt Janet to receive him at Kelso, 1779–1783.

6. Twelve years old to fifteen. College life, broken by illness, his uncle Robert taking good care of him at Rosebank, 1783–1786.

7. Fifteen to twenty-five. Apprenticeship to his father, and law practice entered on. Study of human life, and of various literature in Edinburgh. His first fee of any importance expended on a silver taper-stand for his mother. 1786–1796.

You have thus ‘seven ages’ of his youth to examine, one by one; and this convenient number really comes out without the least forcing; for the virtual, though not formal, apprenticeship to his father—happiest of states for a good son—continues through all the time of his legal practice. I only feel a little compunction at crowding the Prestonpans time together with the second Sandy-Knowe time; but the former is too short to be made a period, though of infinite importance to Scott’s life. Hear how he writes of it,6 revisiting the place fifty years afterwards:—

“I knew the house of Mr. Warroch, where we lived,” (see where the name of the Point of Warroch in ‘Guy Mannering’ comes from!) “I recollected my juvenile ideas of dignity attendant on the large gate, a black arch which lets out upon the sea. I saw the Links where I arranged my shells upon the turf, and swam my little skiff in the pools. Many recollections of my kind aunt—of old George Constable—of Dalgetty” (you know that name also, don’t you?), “a virtuous half-pay lieutenant, who swaggered his solitary walk on the parade, as he called a little open space before the same port.” (Before the black arch, Scott means, not the harbour.) And he falls in love also there, first—“as children love.”

And now we can begin to count the rosary of his youth, bead by bead.

1st period—From birth to three years old.

I have hitherto said nothing to you of his father or mother, nor shall I yet, except to bid you observe that they had been thirteen years married when Scott was born; and that his mother was the daughter of a physician, Dr. Rutherford, who had been educated under Boerhaave. This fact might be carelessly passed by you in reading Lockhart; but if you will take the pains to look through Johnson’s life of Boerhaave, you will see how perfectly pure and beautiful and strong every influence was, which, from whatever distance, touched the early life of Scott. I quote a sentence or two from Johnson’s closing account of Dr. Rutherford’s master:—

“There was in his air and motion something rough and artless, but so majestic and great at the same time, that no man ever looked upon him without veneration, and a kind of tacit submission to the superiority of his genius. The vigour and activity of his mind sparkled visibly in his eyes, nor was it ever observed that any change of his fortune, or alteration in his affairs, whether happy or unfortunate, affected his countenance.

“His greatest pleasure was to retire to his house in the country, where he had a garden stored with all the herbs and trees which the climate would bear; here he used to enjoy his hours unmolested, and prosecute his studies without interruption.”7

The school of medicine in Edinburgh owed its rise to this man, and it was by his pupil Dr. Rutherford’s advice, as we saw, that the infant Walter’s life was saved. His mother could not nurse him, and his first nurse had consumption. To this, and the close air of the wynd, must be attributed the strength of the childish fever which took away the use of the right limb when he was eighteen months old. How many of your own children die, think you, or are wasted with sickness, from the same causes, in our increasing cities? Scott’s lameness, however, we shall find, was, in the end, like every other condition of his appointed existence, helpful to him.

A letter from my dear friend Dr. John Brown,8 corrects (to my great delight) a mistake about George’s Square I made in my last letter. It is not in the New Town, but in what was then a meadow district, sloping to the south from old Edinburgh; and the air of it would be almost as healthy for the child as that of the open country. But the change to George’s Square, though it checked the illness, did not restore the use of the limb; the boy wanted exercise as well as air, and Dr. Rutherford sent him to his other grandfather’s farm.

II. 1774—1775. The first year at Sandy-Knowe. In this year, note first his new nurse. The child had a maid sent with him to prevent his being an inconvenience to the family. This maid had left her heart behind her in Edinburgh (ill trusted),9 and went mad in the solitude;—“tempted by the devil,” she told Alison Wilson, the housekeeper, “to kill the child and bury it in the moss.”

“Alison instantly took possession of my person,” says Scott. And there is no more said of Alison in the autobiography.

But what the old farm-housekeeper must have been to the child, is told in the most finished piece of all the beautiful story of ‘Old Mortality.’ Among his many beautifully invented names, here is one not invented—very dear to him.

“ ‘I wish to speak an instant with one Alison Wilson, who resides here,’ said Henry.

“ ‘She’s no at hame the day,’ answered Mrs. Wilson in propri person—the state of whose headdress perhaps inspired her with this direct mode of denying herself—‘and ye are but a mislear’d person to speer for her in sic a manner. Ye might have had an M under your belt for Mistress Wilson of Milnwood.’ ” Read on, if you forget it, to the end, that third chapter of the last volume of ‘Old Mortality.’ The story of such return to the home of childhood has been told often; but never, so far as I have knowledge, so exquisitely. I do not doubt that Elphin’s name is from Sandy-Knowe also; but cannot trace it.

Secondly, note his grandfathers’ medical treatment of him; for both his grandfathers were physicians,—Dr. Rutherford, as we have seen, so professed, by whose advice he is sent to Sandy-Knowe. There, his cattle-dealing grandfather, true physician by diploma of Nature, orders him, whenever the day is fine, to be carried out and laid down beside the old shepherd among the crags or rocks around which he fed his sheep. “The impatience of a child soon inclined me to struggle with my infirmity, and I began by degrees to stand, to walk, and to run. Although the limb affected was much shrunk and contracted, my general health, which was of more importance, was much strengthened by being frequently in the open air; and, in a word, I, who in a city had probably been condemned to hopeless and helpless decrepitude, (italics mine,) was now a healthy, high-spirited, and, my lameness apart, a sturdy child,—non sine dÎs animosus infans.”

This, then, is the beginning of Scott’s conscious existence,—laid down beside the old shepherd, among the rocks, and among the sheep. “He delighted to roll about in the grass all day long in the midst of the flock, and the sort of fellowship he formed with the sheep and lambs impressed his mind with a degree of affectionate feeling towards them which lasted throughout life.”10

Such cradle, and such companionship, Heaven gives its favourite children.

In 1837, two of the then maid-servants of Sandy-Knowe were still living in its neighbourhood; one of them, “Tibby Hunter, remembered the child Scott’s coming, well. The young ewe-milkers delighted, she says, to carry him about on their backs among the crags; and he was ‘very gleg (quick) at the uptak, and soon kenned every sheep and lamb by head-mark as well as any of them.’ His great pleasure, however, was in the society of the ‘aged hind’ recorded in the epistle to Erskine. ‘Auld Sandy Ormistoun,’ called, from the most dignified part of his function, ‘the cow-bailie,’ had the chief superintendence of the flocks that browsed upon ‘the velvet tufts of loveliest green.’ If the child saw him in the morning, he could not be satisfied unless the old man would set him astride on his shoulder, and take him to keep him company, as he lay watching his charge.

“The cow-bailie blew a particular note on his whistle which signified to the maid-servants in the house below when the little boy wished to be carried home again.”

“Every sheep and lamb by head-mark;”—that is our first lesson; not an easy one, you will find it, if you try the flock of such a farm. Only yesterday (12th July, 1873,) I saw the dairy of one half filled with the ‘berry-bread’ (large flat-baked cakes enclosing layers of gooseberries) prepared by its mistress for her shearers;—the flock being some six or seven hundred, on Coniston Fells.

That is our first lesson, then, very utterly learned ‘by heart.’ This is our second, (marginal note on Sir Walter’s copy of Allan Ramsay’s Tea-table Miscellany, ed. 1724): “This book belonged to my grandfather, Robert Scott, and out of it I was taught ‘Hardiknute’ by heart before I could read the ballad myself. It was the first poem I ever learnt, the last I shall ever forget.”11 He repeated a great part of it, in the forests of La Cava, in the spring of the year in which he died; and above the lake Avernus, a piece of the song of the ewe-milkers:—

These I say, then, are to be your first lessons. The love, and care, of simplest living creatures; and the remembrance and honour of the dead, with the workmanship for them of fair tombs of song.

The Border district of Scotland was at this time, of all districts of the inhabited world, pre-eminently the singing country,—that which most naturally expressed its noble thoughts and passions in song.

The easily traceable reasons for this character are, I think, the following; (many exist, of course, untraceably).

First, distinctly pastoral life, giving the kind of leisure which, in all ages and countries, solaces itself with simple music, if other circumstances are favourable,—that is to say, if the summer air is mild enough to allow repose, and the race has imagination enough to give motive to verse.

The Scottish Lowland air is, in summer, of exquisite clearness and softness,—the heat never so great as to destroy energy, and the shepherd’s labour not severe enough to occupy wholly either mind or body. A Swiss herd may have to climb a hot ravine for thousands of feet, or cross a difficult piece of ice, to rescue a lamb, or lead his flock to an isolated pasture. But the borderer’s sheep-path on the heath is, to his strong frame, utterly without labour or danger; he is free-hearted and free-footed all the summer day long; in winter darkness and snow finding yet enough to make him grave and stout of heart.

Secondly, the soldier’s life, passing gradually, not in cowardice or under foreign conquest, but by his own increasing kindness and sense, into that of the shepherd; thus, without humiliation, leaving the war-wounded past to be recalled for its sorrow and its fame.

Thirdly, the extreme sadness of that past itself: giving pathos and awe to all the imagery and power of Nature.

Fourthly, (this a merely physical cause, yet a very notable one,) the beauty of the sound of Scottish streams.

I know no other waters to be compared with them;—such streams can only exist under very subtle concurrence of rock and climate. There must be much soft rain, not (habitually) tearing the hills down with floods; and the rocks must break irregularly and jaggedly. Our English Yorkshire shales and limestones merely form—carpenter-like—tables and shelves for the rivers to drip and leap from; while the Cumberland and Welsh rocks break too boldly, and lose the multiplied chords of musical sound. Farther, the loosely-breaking rock must contain hard pebbles, to give the level shore of white shingle, through which the brown water may stray wide, in rippling threads. The fords even of English rivers have given the names to half our prettiest towns and villages;—(the difference between ford and bridge curiously—if one may let one’s fancy loose for a moment—characterizing the difference between the baptism of literature, and the edification of mathematics, in our two great universities);—but the pure crystal of the Scottish pebbles,12 giving the stream its gradations of amber to the edge, and the sound as of “ravishing division to the lute,” make the Scottish fords the happiest pieces of all one’s day walk. “The farmhouse itself was small and poor, with a common kailyard on one flank, and a staring barn of the doctor’s (‘Douglas’) erection on the other; while in front appeared a filthy pond, covered with ducks and duckweed,13 from which the whole tenement had derived the unharmonious designation of ‘Clarty Hole.’ But the Tweed was everything to him: a beautiful river, flowing broad and bright over a bed of milk-white pebbles, unless where, here and there, it darkened into a deep pool, overhung as yet only by the birches and alders which had survived the statelier growth of the primitive forest; and the first hour that he took possession he claimed for his farm the name of the adjoining ford.”14 With the murmur, whisper, and low fall of these streamlets, unmatched for mystery and sweetness, we must remember also the variable, but seldom wild, thrilling of the wind among the recesses of the glens; and, not least, the need of relief from the monotony of occupations involving some rhythmic measure of the beat of foot or hand, during the long evenings at the hearth-side.

In the rude lines describing such passing of hours quoted by Scott in his introduction to the ‘Border Minstrelsy,’15 you find the grandmother spinning, with her stool next the hearth,—“for she was old, and saw right dimly” (fire-light, observe, all that was needed even then;) “she spins to make a web of good Scots linen,” (can you show such now, from your Glasgow mills?) The father is pulling hemp (or beating it). The only really beautiful piece of song which I heard at Verona, during several months’ stay there in 1869, was the low chant of girls unwinding the cocoons of the silkworm, in the cottages among the olive-clad hills on the north of the city. Never any in the streets of it;—there, only insane shrieks of Republican populace, or senseless dance-music, played by operatic-military bands.

And one of the most curious points connected with the study of Border-life is this connection of its power of song either with its industry or human love, but never with the religious passion of its “Independent” mind. The definite subject of the piper or minstrel being always war or love, (peasant love as much honoured as the proudest,) his feeling is steadily antagonistic to Puritanism; and the discordance of Scottish modern psalmody is as unexampled among civilized nations as the sweetness of their ballads—shepherds’ or ploughmen’s (the plough and pulpit coming into fatalest opposition in Ayrshire); so that Wandering Willie must, as a matter of course, head the troop of Redgauntlet’s riotous fishermen with “Merrily danced the Quaker’s wife.” And see Wandering Willie’s own description of his gudesire: “A rambling, rattling chiel he had been, in his young days, and could play weel on the pipes;—he was famous at ‘Hoopers and Girders;’ a’ Cumberland could not touch him at ‘Jockie Lattin;’ and he had the finest finger for the back-lilt between Berwick and Carlisle;—the like o’ Steenie was na the sort they made Whigs o’.” And yet, to this Puritan element, Scott owed quite one of the most noble conditions of his mental life.

But it is of no use trying to get on to his aunt Janet in this letter, for there is yet one thing I have to explain to you before I can leave you to meditate, to purpose, over that sorrowful piece of Scott’s diary with which it began.

If you had before any thoughtful acquaintance with his general character, or with his writings, but had not studied this close of his life, you cannot but have read with surprise, in the piece of the diary I quoted, the recurring sentences showing the deep wounds of his pride. Your impression of him was, if thoughtfully received, that of a man modest and self-forgetful, even to error. Yet, very evidently, the bitterest pain under his fallen fortune is felt by his pride.

Do you fancy the feeling is only by chance so strongly expressed in that passage?

It is dated 18th December. Now read this:—

“February 5th, 1826.—Missie was in the drawing-room, and overheard William Clerk and me laughing excessively at some foolery or other in the back room, to her no small surprise, which she did not keep to herself. But do people suppose that he was less sorry for his poor sister, or I for my lost fortune? If I have a very strong passion in the world, it is pride; and that never hinged upon world’s gear, which was always, with me—Light come, light go.”

You will not at first understand the tone of this last piece, in which two currents of thought run counter, or, at least, one with a back eddy; and you may think Scott did not know himself, and that his strongest passion was not pride; and that he did care for world’s gear.

Not so, good reader. Never allow your own conceit to betray you into that extremest folly of thinking that you can know a great man better than he knows himself. He may not often wear his heart on his sleeve for you; but when he does, depend upon it, he lets you see deep, and see true.

Scott’s ruling passion was pride; but it was nobly set—on his honour, and his courage, and his quite conscious intellectual power. The apprehended loss of honour,—the shame of what he thinks in himself cowardice,—or the fear of failure in intellect, are at any time overwhelming to him. But now, he felt that his honour was safe; his courage was, even to himself, satisfying; his sense of intellectual power undiminished; and he had therefore recovered some peace of mind, and power of endurance. The evils he could not have borne, and lived, have not been inflicted on him, and could not be. He can laugh again with his friend;—“but do people suppose that he was less sorry for his poor sister, or I for my lost fortune?”

What is this loss, then, which he is grieving for—as for a lost sister? Not world’s gear, “which was always, with me, Light come, light go.”

Something far other than that.

Read but these three short sentences more,16 out of the entries in December and January:—

“My heart clings to the place I have created: there is scarce a tree on it that does not owe its being to me.”

“Poor Will Laidlaw—poor Tom Purdie—such news will wring your hearts; and many a poor fellow besides, to whom my prosperity was daily bread.”

“I have walked my last on the domains I have planted, sate the last time in the halls I have built. But death would have taken them from me if misfortune had spared them.—My poor people, whom I loved so well!”

Nor did they love him less. You know that his house was left to him, and that his “poor people” served him until his death—or theirs. Hear now how they served.

“The butler,” says Lockhart, visiting Abbotsford in 1827, “instead of being the easy chief of a large establishment, was now doing half the work of the house, at probably half his former wages. Old Peter, who had been for five-and-twenty years a dignified coachman, was now ploughman-in-ordinary, only putting his horses to the carriage upon high and rare occasions; and so on with all the rest that remained of the ancient train. And all, to my view, seemed happier than they had ever done before. Their good conduct had given every one of them a new elevation in his own mind; and yet their demeanour had gained, in place of losing, in simple humility of observance. The great loss was that of William Laidlaw, for whom (the estate being all but a fragment in the hands of the trustees and their agent) there was now no occupation here. The cottage which his taste had converted into a loveable retreat had found a rent-paying tenant; and he was living a dozen miles off, on the farm of a relation in the Vale of Yarrow. Every week, however, he came down to have a ramble with Sir Walter over their old haunts, to hear how the pecuniary atmosphere was darkening or brightening, and to read, in every face at Abbotsford, that it could never be itself again until circumstances should permit his re-establishment at Kaeside.

“All this warm and respectful solicitude must have had a preciously soothing influence on the mind of Scott, who may be said to have lived upon love. No man cared less about popular admiration and applause; but for the least chill on the affection of any near and dear to him, he had the sensitiveness of a maiden. I cannot forget, in particular, how his eyes sparkled when he first pointed out to me Peter Mathieson guiding the plough on the haugh. ‘Egad,’ said he, ‘auld Pepe’ (this was the children’s name for their good friend), ‘auld Pepe’s whistling at his darg. The honest fellow said a yoking in a deep field would do baith him and the blackies good. If things get round with me, easy shall be Pepe’s cushion.’ ”

You see there is not the least question about striking for wages on the part of Sir Walter’s servants. The law of supply and demand is not consulted, nor are their wages determined by the great principle of competition—so rustic and absurd are they; not but that they take it on them sometimes to be masters instead of servants:—

“March 21.—Wrote till twelve, then out upon the heights, and faced the gale bravely. Tom Purdie was not with me; he would have obliged me to keep the sheltered ground.”17

You are well past all that kind of thing, you think, and know better how to settle the dispute between Capital and Labour.

“What has that to do with domestic servants?” do you ask? You think a house with a tall chimney, and two or three hundred servants in it, is not properly a house at all; that the sacred words, Domus, Duomo, cannot be applied to it; and that Giotto would have refused to build a Buzzing Tower, by way of belfry, in Lancashire?

Well, perhaps you are right. If you are merely unlucky Williams—borrowing colossal planes—instead of true servants, it may well be that Pepe’s own whistling at his darg must be very impossible for you, only manufactured whistling any more possible. Which are you? Which will you be?

I am afraid there is little doubt which you are;—but there is no doubt whatever which you would like to be, whether you know your own minds or not. You will never whistle at your dargs more, unless you are serving masters whom you can love. You may shorten your hours of labour as much as you please;—no minute of them will be merry, till you are serving truly: that is to say, until the bond of constant relationship—service to death—is again established between your masters and you. It has been broken by their sin, but may yet be recovered by your virtue. All the best of you cling to the least remnant or shadow of it. I heard but the other day of a foreman, in a large house of business, discharged at a week’s warning on account of depression in trade,—who thereupon went to one of the partners, and showed him a letter which he had received a year before, offering him a situation with an increase of his salary by more than a third; which offer he had refused without so much as telling his masters of its being made to him, that he might stay in the old house. He was a Scotchman—and I am glad to tell the story of his fidelity with that of Pepe and Tom Purdie. I know not how it may be in the south; but I know that in Scotland, and the northern Border, there still remains something of the feeling which fastened the old French word ‘loial’ among the dearest and sweetest of their familiar speech; and that there are some souls yet among them, who, alike in labour or in rest, abide in, or will depart to, the Land of the Leal.