The Life of Sir Walter Scott: A Biography. S. Fowler Wright
popular. The Duke of Buccleuch, the young Earl of Dalkeith, Lord Montague, and a dozen others united their efforts. It is an incidental evidence of Scott’s numberless friendships that Mr. Henry Dundas (Viscount Melville) who had control of the Crown patronage in Scotland, found the nomination supported by his oldest son (who had known Scott at the High School), and his two nephews, Robert Dundas, the Lord Advocate, and William Dundas, the Secretary to the Board of Control.
With this din in his ears, Mr. Henry Dundas, who had himself (of course) met Mr. Walter Scott previously, and been favourably impressed, made the recommendation, and on December 16th, 1799, the patent of appointment was formally issued, and Scott was in office as Sheriff.
The appointment necessitated the refusal of the offer of the summer residence at Craignethan. Strictly, it required that there should be actual residence in the county for not less than four months in the year, but it was not until the Lord Lieutenant of Selkirkshire had made a formal protest, about three years later, that Scott fulfilled this condition. Until the summer of 1804 he continued to reside at Lasswade so far as he was at home during the summer months. He visited Jedburgh regularly in the autumn, maintaining his practice at the Head Court there. He spent the winter in Edinburgh during the legal terms. The house which had been rented in South Castle Street was exchanged for one of a similar size in North Castle Street, which he was now able to purchase, and which would continue to be his winter home for the next twenty-five years. For the rest of his life, circumstances would require or enable him to divide his year between a city and country life, as it would be divided between professional and literary work.
He found a little inn at Clovenford on the road to Selkirk, at which he made a habit of putting up, when the duties of his appointment required his presence in that neighbourhood. He made (needless to say) new friends in that district. Two of them William Laidlaw and James Hogg, will require more than a passing mention, as will John Leyden, whom he met at Edinburgh at about this time.
The winter of 1799-1800 was a time not only of its own successes but of far greater dreams, many of which were to be the facts of the future, and yet none of which may have been audacious enough to forecast how great that future was soon to be.
In April 1800, Scott wrote to Mr. Ballantyne suggesting that he should leave Kelso, and set up a printing business in Edinburgh. He thought that he saw an opening for “a man of talent and education”. He, and a friend, were prepared to influence business to such a firm, and some capital might be found in return for a share of the profits, if that were necessary. There was business to be done in the printing of legal documents. Beyond that, why should not Ballantyne succeed with a weekly newspaper in Edinburgh, as he had established the Mail in Kelso?
Why not a monthly? Why not an Annual Register?
Vaguely, if not definitely, Scott had the vision of a press which should be under his own control.
CHAPTER XXII.
Before suggesting to James Ballantyne that he should remove his business to Edinburgh, Scott had given him expectation of an order for a book which could be printed at Kelso, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, a project which may have been in his mind for a long previous period, and was now taking definite shape.
For the past ten or fifteen years he had been collecting Scottish ballad poetry with a tireless energy, and with the assistance of every friend he could discover who had a kindred interest.
Now, if not earlier, this work was being pursued with the definite object of ultimate publication, and Scott was anxious that the date should not be long deferred.
He had new helpers during this winter. Mr. Richard Heber, a scholar who specialised in the literature of the Middle Ages, and who sat in Parliament as representative of Oxford University, spent some months in Edinburgh, and was of assistance, not only by his own knowledge and the resources of his own library, but indirectly to a greater extent by his discovery of John Leyden.
John Leyden was a literary phenomenon, who, like so many of the numberless friends whom Scott accumulated, deserves a central stage rather than the passing reference which is all that there is space to give.
Born in poverty, in a cottage hovel in Roxburghshire, he was at this time a self-taught youth whose exact and various scholarship could confound those who were of greater repute in a dozen branches of learning. Rough and uncouth in speech and manner, he is said to have united the characteristics of boor and scholar in a way which was as bewildering as his own attainments. He had no money to purchase books, but Archibald Constable, a young man who had started a small second-hand store in a side-street of Edinburgh, would let him come to his shop, and read as long as he would.
Mr. Heber, searching for worm-eaten treasures, came to Constable’s shop also, and his attention was attracted by the uncouth visitor, and the recondite nature of the volumes with which he would observe him to be sitting absorbed, either on stool or ladder. Conversation followed, and when Heber discovered that Leyden’s miscellaneous learning included an exceptional knowledge of, and enthusiasm for the old ballad-poetry of the country, he told Scott, and Scott came quickly on the scene.
From that time, for the two years that they were working together, the assistance which John Leyden gave to Scott’s enterprise was of a primary importance, and was not overpaid by the fact that their friendship opened many doors of social or literary eminence to the poorer man.
John Leyden had already contributed for several years under the semi-anonymity of his own initials to Jeffrey’s Edinburgh Review. He had shown himself to be an expert translator of the poetry of several languages. Now he contributed an original ballad to Lewis’s slowly-growing collection. His suggestions enlarged the intended scope of Scott’s own scheme of a Border Minstrelsy volume. It was now to be two volumes or more, with an original section, to which Leyden would contribute three ballads. The work of preparation went on during these spring months with a two-fold energy.
Heber went back to London when the spring came, and was followed by a letter from Scott, asking him to look out for a phaeton, which Mrs. Scott was very anxious to have. It was to cost no more than £31. 10. 0 and was to be “strong, low, and handsome”. There is significance in this combination of qualities. Doubtless the handsome aspect was for Charlotte’s contentment, and it must be strong and low because they had planned that she should be with him on his next summer’s raid into Liddesdale, which was therefore to be undertaken with more thought for comfort than had been his custom. The phaeton was destined for many spring-straining jolts on pathless hills and moors, where no wheeled vehicle had ventured previously.
The difficult commission appears to have been successfully executed. Anyway, there was a phaeton in the Lasswade coach-house when the summer came, a phaeton that found its way over the hills to Hermitage, where Lord Dalkeith had made timely provision that its occupants should have a welcome somewhat more liberal, if not more kindly, than the moorland farmers would have been able to give.
It was during this summer that Sir John Stoddart, touring Scotland, paid a visit to Lasswade, to which he made reference in an account of his wanderings which he published in the following year. He had a pleasant memory of the encounter, and gushed accordingly. It appears that he observed Scott to be engaged inter alia in ‘the daily exercise of the most precious sympathies as a husband, a father, and a friend’. His fatherhood was “daily exercised” at this time upon one baby girl of about nine months. No doubt Sir John was well entertained, and saw the interior of a happy well-ordered home, but there would be more cause to thank him had he recorded a single fact, instead of a paragraph of vague superlatives.
Scott was an excellent father, showing love and sympathy, and a discreet wisdom, tolerant yet without weakness, as the years passed. His attitude towards small babies was that to which a large number of men would plead guilty, if they had the courage to do so, as is shown by a note in his Journal, nearly thirty years later, when that nine-months baby was herself a mother, and he was in London inspecting his own grandchildren. “My name-son, a bright and blue-eyed rogue, with flaxen hair, screams and laughs like an April morning; and the baby is that species of dough which is called a fine baby. I care not for children till they care a little for me.”
It was during this summer of 1800 that Scott also made