QUARREL WITH HAMILTON 205 mentions his pain at the impression which the author of " Hypocrisy Unveiled" made on "the mind of Wilson, and that of his amiable wife," a lady of whom he ever spoke (and notably in his "Life of Scott") with the highest respect and affection, and, after her death, with a tender regret.1 1 The Rev. Lawrence Lockhart has left a brief record of the cause of estrangement between Lockhart and Hamilton. It arose, he says (as we have remarked), from a hasty word of Sir William's. But he dates it at the time of "The Chaldee," and though his account is, no doubt, essentially correct, we find that, more than a year after the date of "The Chaldee," Lockhart and Hamilton were on the best terms. CHAPTER VIII EDINBURGH, 1819-1820 "Peter's Letters."-Scott's bequest of his baton.-Scott's politics.His comments on "Peter's Letters" in Blackwood.-On Allan, the painter.-Lockhart revisits Abbotsford.-Rides with Scott.Scott's illness.-Praises "Peter's Letters."—Analysis of "Peter's Letters."-Mr. Wastle of Wastle.-Jeffrey.-Goethe.-A Burns Dinner. Wilson.-The Shepherd.-Neglect of Greek.-Lockhart's supposed irony.-The Edinburgh Review.-Jeffrey as a critic.-Lockhart compared with Carlyle.-Defence of Coleridge. -The booksellers.—Mr. Blackwood.-Story of Gabriel's Road. -John Hamilton Reynolds.-Description of Scott at Abbotsford. -His woods.-The Kirk.-Letters to Coleridge.-Reynolds suggested as editor of a Tory paper.-Popular commotions.Lockhart as a yeoman.-Ballads attributed to him.-His betrothal to Miss Sophia Scott.-Her letters.-Prince Gustavus.-Descriptions of Miss Scott.-Scott asleep. WHILE trailing his gown in the Parliament House, where "nae man speered his price," and "dancing after young ladies" (or one young lady), and scribbling comic rhymes for Blackwood, and caricaturing the lieges, Lockhart was busy, at this time, on his singular work, "Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk."1 On March 23, 1819, Scott wrote to him from Abbotsford, where cramp held him in torment. 1 The name, of course, is borrowed from Scott's "Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk." SCOTT'S BATON 207 "I thought of you amid all this agony, and of the great game which, with your parts and principles, lies before you in Scotland." For long Scott had been the only Tory man of letters north of Tweed, the sole writer not dazzled by the radiance of 'enlightenment." This very solitude might have given Scott pause, but he deemed that he was "at least standing by, if he could not support, the banner of ancient faith and loyalty." In his physical anguish he was mentally bequeathing his baton to Lockhart, he said, and the ladies who attended him were astonished to hear him quote— "Take thou the vanguard of the Three, Why Scott had Lockhart and the dying Douglas in his mind during his torments, shall be explained later. Sir Walter had a habit of uttering these unexpected snatches of old song, which showed his companions where his mind was, often enough in an unlooked-for situation. Thus during his last days in Italy, at a point where the Lake of Avernus, the Lucrine Lake, Misenum, and Baiæ, and the sea are all in view, Sir William Gell heard him murmur "Up the craggy mountain, And down the mossy glen, His mind's eye looked on Moidart, "and he in dreams beheld the Hebrides." 1 So it was with him when he quoted "The Hunting of Cheviot" in his racking pains, for his heart was with his cause, as he, and he only, conceived of that cause, and the death-words of the Douglas he was applying to Lockhart, as his own successor. There could be no such successor. Scott's peculiar Toryism, like that of his own Invernahyle, was a loyalty to the old feudal order which, though now forlorn, had once, in ideal if not in reality, been a reasoned system of life and of society. No other system to be called rational has risen on its ruins. Whiggery is the negation of a system, an inn, not a dwelling. Socialism was, as yet, incoherent. Scott's sympathies were certainly more with some of the tenets of Socialism, with many of its aims at least, than with a Whiggish industrialism. He himself, in his relations with peasants and peers, lived in the light of the ideal of Feudalism; the friend and protector of all beneath him, his "men" ;-the friend and true "man" of his chiefs. His political creed was a transferred allegiance from the rightful kings, who (in the male line) were no more, to the king whom, by some odd cantrip of logic, he regarded as their legitimate His loyalty so hateful and so incomprehensible to Hazlitt, for example-blossomed like a white rose, among the ruins of what had been successor. 1 The explanation occurs later in a letter of Lockhart's from Italy. THE PLEADERS' PORTRAITS 209 a stately tower, and above the graves where the royal and exiled dead sleep after their lifelong wanderings. This was the creed, these were the politics, of a poet and a dreamer of dreams. That airy baton of his he could bequeath to no man. And Lockhart (though, as I shall show later, his imagination could share and nobly interpret the creed of Scott), must have known the truth very well, and smiled sadly enough at the bequest. Though a free lance of Toryism, he was not essentially a party man, as he discovered before the end came. But it is plain that Lockhart had bewitched his future father-in-law from the first, and that for Rodrigue this Don Diègue had les yeux de Chimène. Descending from his characteristic dream, and his snatch of minstrelsy, Scott, in his letter, thanks Lockhart for "the pleaders' portraits," in Blackwood (Nos. xxiii., xxiv.) sketches of Cranstoun, Clerk, and Jeffrey, which later appeared in "Peter's Letters." The articles in Blackwood pretended, but with a most transparent pretence, to offer extracts from "Peter's" first edition,-which never existed. In fact the Reviewer says, like Coleridge of his journal, The Friend, "it is as good as MS." The latest extracts were those which so much pleased Scott. In his letter of March 23, 1819, he adds remarks (now first published) on a scheme of Lockhart's for assisting Mr. Allan, the Scotch painter. VOL. I. |