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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
The Complete Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott is a collection of timeless poems that encapsulate the essence of romanticism and historical fiction. Scott's use of vivid imagery and poetic language creates a captivating literary experience, transporting readers to different time periods and settings. His narratives are intertwined with themes of chivalry, love, and adventure, making each poem a masterpiece in its own right. The book also includes notable works such as 'The Lady of the Lake' and 'The Lay of the Last Minstrel'. Scott's ability to blend history with fiction showcases his profound understanding of human emotions and societal norms during the Romantic era. Through his poems, readers can explore the complexities of human relationships and the impact of historical events on individuals. The Complete Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott is a must-read for poetry enthusiasts, history buffs, and anyone seeking a literary journey through the realms of imagination and emotion. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - An Introduction draws the threads together, discussing why these diverse authors and texts belong in one collection. - Historical Context explores the cultural and intellectual currents that shaped these works, offering insight into the shared (or contrasting) eras that influenced each writer. - A combined Synopsis (Selection) briefly outlines the key plots or arguments of the included pieces, helping readers grasp the anthology's overall scope without giving away essential twists. - A collective Analysis highlights common themes, stylistic variations, and significant crossovers in tone and technique, tying together writers from different backgrounds. - Reflection questions encourage readers to compare the different voices and perspectives within the collection, fostering a richer understanding of the overarching conversation.
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THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF SIR WALTER SCOTT
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection presents the complete poetic imagination of Walter Scott in dynamic context. It draws together the narrative romances—Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Rokeby, The Lord of the Isles, Harold the Dauntless—with visionary pieces such as The Vision of Don Roderick and battlefield meditations like The Field of Waterloo. It includes the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and its related contributions, as well as Translations and Imitations from German Ballads, Notable Poems, and Poems from Novels and Other Poems. Framing these works are assessments by Victor Hugo, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, and Andrew Lang.
The unifying thread is Scott’s exploration of nation, memory, and moral choice through story-songs that bind landscape to character. From Highland loch to Border keep, place becomes conscience; honor and hospitality contend with secrecy, oath, and feud. Martial pageantry in Marmion and The Lord of the Isles meets the inward reckoning of The Bridal of Triermain and the second sight of The Vision of Don Roderick. The Field of Waterloo brings modern war beneath the gaze of history, while contributions to the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and Thomas the Rhymer renew the authority of legend in a changing world.
The aim is to trace Scott’s range from local balladry to European resonance. Translations and Imitations from German Ballads—The Wild Huntsman, William and Helen, Frederick and Alice, The Fire-King, The Noble Moringer, The Battle of Sempach, The Erl-King—converse with The Eve of St. John, Cadyow Castle, The Gray Brother, and Glenfinlas; or, Lord Ronald’s Coronach. Notable Poems and Poems from Novels and Other Poems reveal a lyric grain within the larger architecture. “Famous Authors on Scott,” together with Andrew Lang’s Letters to Dead Authors and The Poems of Sir Walter Scott, offers a reflective counterpoint to the verse itself.
Unlike isolated presentations of a single romance or a handful of songs, this gathering stages Scott’s poetry amid informed, sometimes challenging, contemporary and later appreciations. It invites comparison across modes—narrative, ballad, German-ballad engagements, ode-like memorial—without privileging one as the “true” Scott. By aligning Marmion with The Field of Waterloo, or The Lady of the Lake with The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, readers witness shifts of scale and purpose. The presence of Victor Hugo, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, and Andrew Lang widens the horizon, placing Scott among European voices while preserving his rootedness in Scottish storytelling.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
Among the long poems, dialogue emerges through contrast. The Lay of the Last Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake entwine hospitality, misrecognition, and courtesy within landscapes that seem to speak; Marmion probes honor and deception against the march of armies. Rokeby explores conflict within a beleaguered household, while The Lord of the Isles carries maritime statecraft into song. The Bridal of Triermain frames desire and vision through questing fantasy, as The Vision of Don Roderick turns prophetic spectacle upon public destiny. The Field of Waterloo, concise and grave, tests the heroic register against the sobering arithmetic of loss.
The ballads draw a tighter circle of fate. In Translations and Imitations from German Ballads, The Wild Huntsman, William and Helen, Frederick and Alice, The Fire-King, The Noble Moringer, The Battle of Sempach, and The Erl-King transmit ordeal through supernatural counsel, vows, and sudden reckoning. Contributions to the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border—The Eve of St. John, Cadyow Castle, Thomas the Rhymer, The Gray Brother, Glenfinlas; or, Lord Ronald’s Coronach—return the pattern home, where prophecy, oath, and kinship govern choice. Together they supply a grammar of warning that echoes through the romances, sharpening both temptation and duty.
Shorter pieces in Notable Poems and Poems from Novels and Other Poems operate as lyric apertures, concentrating themes that the longer works diffuse. Moments of parting, pledges sealed by landscape, and sudden recognitions recur in miniature, offering a counter-tempo to campaigns and quests. The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, presented alongside these, functions as chorus and source, where communal memory molds individual action. Read together, lyric, romance, and ballad weave recurring emblems—torchlight, ford, banner, and bell—that move between private impulse and public ceremony, allowing Scott’s poetry to balance spectacle with tenderness and the recognitions of ordinary conscience.
The prose meditations open a further register of dialogue. In Sir Walter Scott and Lady Morgan, Victor Hugo considers stature and cultural position; in Memories and Portraits, Robert Louis Stevenson reflects on character and influence; in Scott and His Publishers, Charles Dickens examines professional entanglements; in Letters to Dead Authors and The Poems of Sir Walter Scott, Andrew Lang addresses the poet with learned affection and measured judgment. Together these voices contour the poems’ reception, proposing rival emphases—heroism or humor, grandeur or simplicity—that illuminate how Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, and the ballads continue to invite competing, fruitful readings.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
Scott’s poems remain vital for their negotiation between communal story and individual conscience. The Lay of the Last Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake stage belonging through ritual and song; Marmion dramatizes honor under pressure; the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border sustains a living archive of tale and tune; The Field of Waterloo and The Vision of Don Roderick measure contemporary turmoil against prophetic pattern. Such interplay models how art remembers while judging action. In a world still shaped by contested identities and public spectacle, Scott’s fusions of legend, place, and moral testing continue to instruct and challenge.
The poems have enjoyed a broad afterlife in culture, often reappearing in performance, illustration, and public ceremony, and repeatedly furnishing phrases and scenes to later storytellers. The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border has been a touchstone for renewed interest in ballad forms, while the German pieces keep the European conversation audible. Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, and The Lord of the Isles, with their vivid settings and pageantry, have proved especially adaptable to shifting tastes. Such endurance reflects not only narrative momentum but also an ethical steadiness that artists and audiences continue to revisit amid changing political and aesthetic climates.
Recognition within letters is marked here by the company Scott keeps. Victor Hugo’s Sir Walter Scott and Lady Morgan positions him within continental debate; Robert Louis Stevenson’s Memories and Portraits registers lived admiration; Charles Dickens’s Scott and His Publishers views the public figure through professional relations; Andrew Lang’s Letters to Dead Authors and The Poems of Sir Walter Scott sustain informed advocacy. Together these writings attest to a durable consensus that the poems established a standard for narrative vigor and humane sentiment. Their perspectives, diverse in method yet harmonious in esteem, have helped stabilize Scott’s presence across generations of readers.
Read as a whole, the volume discloses Scott’s distinctive orchestration of pace, scene, and refrain. The romances move with breadth, the ballads press close, the shorter pieces concentrate feeling, and the testimonies of Hugo, Stevenson, Dickens, and Lang refract the achievement through complementary lenses. The sequence encourages new constellations: Marmion next to The Field of Waterloo; The Lady of the Lake within earshot of The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border; German phantoms shadowing Border prophecies. What emerges is not a monument but a living exchange, where courage, courtesy, and conscience are measured against the claims of memory and imagination.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
Sir Walter Scott’s poetical works emerged amid the consolidation of the British state after the Union, when Scottish institutions sought accommodation within a Hanoverian constitutional framework. His project, evident from The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border to The Lay of the Last Minstrel, mediates between regional memory and national polity. Border narratives of feud and redress are re-situated within a wider British story of law, sovereignty, and civic order. The anthology’s introductory voices—Famous Authors on Scott—likewise situate his verse at the hinge between local tradition and metropolitan authority, assessing how his poems convert clan reputations and frontier justice into literary capital compatible with a modern state.
European warfare shaped both subject and audience. During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, patriotic mobilization and anxiety intensified readers’ appetite for martial narrative and commemoration. The Field of Waterloo responds directly to a defining battle of the age; The Vision of Don Roderick reflects on the Peninsular struggle through a visionary frame; and The Lord of the Isles recovers older campaigns to think about leadership and loyalty. Marmion, set against the catastrophe of Flodden, echoes contemporary dread of national vulnerability even as it celebrates fortitude. These poems turn armed conflict into ethical reflection, inviting readers to weigh sacrifice, reputation, and the uses of victory.
Scott’s interest in Highland and Border history also engages contested memories of Jacobite rebellion and the restructuring of Scottish governance. The Lady of the Lake, rooted in Trossachs landscapes and clan politics, imagines royal authority meeting local codes of honor. Ballads such as Thomas the Rhymer and Glenfinlas; or, Lord Ronald’s Coronach distill tensions between prophecy, charisma, and rule of law. The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border memorializes regions once marked by private war, even as central institutions claimed new reach. By staging encounters between customary power and national sovereignty, the poems dramatize the price of pacification and the allure of a chivalric past.
Questions of reform and representation shadow the period, culminating in measures that rebalanced political participation. While the poems rarely sermonize about specific statutes, their recurrent concern with legitimacy and consent—apparent in Harold the Dauntless’s drama of allegiance and spiritual authority—registers the era’s constitutional unease. Charles Dickens’s Scott and His Publishers adds another dimension, emphasizing how the commercial republic of letters governed writers’ fates. His account highlights speculative finance, risk, and the leverage of metropolitan houses, reminding readers that the production and circulation of Scott’s verse unfolded within energetic markets where credit, publicity, and reputation became instruments of power.
Maritime reach, trade, and imperial horizons furnish additional settings and pressures. The Lord of the Isles surveys sea power and archipelagic connectivity, while translations and imitations from German ballads signal a cosmopolitan traffic in ideas and forms that paralleled commercial routes. The Battle of Sempach, by recalling a Swiss assertion of liberty, sharpens reflection on civic militias and national self-definition. Such texts invite readers to compare local traditions with continental struggles over sovereignty. The anthology as a whole shows how maritime mobility, military alliances, and diplomatic news cycles shaped taste, and how narrative poetry became a medium for imagining Britain’s place among nations.
Domestic governance and ecclesiastical authority leave their signatures across the Border pieces. The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border juxtaposes communal justice with emerging bureaucratic norms; The Gray Brother and The Eve of St. John present conscience, superstition, and clerical oversight in stark relief against customary practice. The Lady of the Lake places the monarch within landscapes of negotiation, suggesting that rule requires attentiveness to culture as well as law. Such poems trace the movement from charismatic authority to institutional regulation, mapping how parochial jurisdictions, sheriffdoms, and royal progresses recalibrated daily life, and how communities understood security, sanctuary, and the limits of obedience.
The anthology’s critical interlocutors clarify these political stakes. In SIR WALTER SCOTT AND LADY MORGAN, Victor Hugo appraises Scott’s historical imagination through continental debates about aristocracy, democracy, and the theatre of power. Robert Louis Stevenson, in Memories and Portraits, measures Scott’s civic virtues against late Victorian ideals of industry and benevolence. Dickens’s Scott and His Publishers reveals how law, contract, and print capitalism shaped the poet’s livelihood and public authority. Andrew Lang, in his essays and in Letters to Dead Authors, reconsiders Scott’s national role from a later imperial vantage, giving readers perspectives from differing constitutional and journalistic climates.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
Scott’s verse advances a Romantic antiquarianism that merges scholarship with storytelling. The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border collects survivals, variants, and local lore, while the narrative poems—The Lay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion especially—transform archival detail into swift romance. This method elevates custom, dialect, and legend without abandoning the historian’s apparatus. Prefaces and notes authorize the performance of tradition, so that poetry becomes both spectacle and commentary. The result is a poetics of documentation: scenes of castle, foray, and vigil are framed by evidence and gloss, training readers to experience beauty and proof as allied forms of persuasion.
Translations and Imitations from German Ballads disclose a transnational Romantic exchange in which folklore, terror, and moral fable travel freely. The Erl-King, The Wild Huntsman, Frederick and Alice, The Fire-King, and The Noble Moringer rework continental materials into English measures attuned to British readers. Scott adapts tones of fatalism and supernatural visitation to his own narrative economy, emphasizing pace, refrain, and climactic revelation. The Battle of Sempach adds civic virtue to the supernatural register, balancing wonder with republican memory. These experiments broaden the repertoire available to the longer romances, normalizing abrupt tonal shifts, prophetic speech, and choruses within historical settings.
Landscape, sentiment, and the picturesque shape the sensory world of these poems. The Lady of the Lake codifies a way of seeing the Highlands in which cataract, island, and pass are aesthetic as well as geographic facts. Rokeby and The Bridal of Triermain turn ruined houses and grottoes into stages where memory and desire negotiate with time. The careful orchestration of stanzaic movement and scenic pause secures a reader’s itinerary—an imaginative tourism that anticipates real travel. The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border supplies the emotional palette for this gaze, teaching how ballad topographies—ford, moss, and tower—become coordinates of feeling and cultural allegiance.
Historicism is not just Scott’s subject; it is his technique. The Vision of Don Roderick uses a visionary structure to re-situate contemporary war within cycles of rise and fall, turning prophecy into analysis. The Field of Waterloo, an occasional poem, wrestles with the ethics of commemoration when news is fresh and grief proximate. The Lord of the Isles fuses chronicle with romance, embedding statecraft within quest. Notes, appendices, and cited customs confer authority on the marvelous, while the marvelous animates the archive. The result is an aesthetic that renders documentary fragments as living episodes, allowing poetry to adjudicate between rumor and record.
The anthology’s critical frames also map aesthetic debates. Andrew Lang’s The Poems of Sir Walter Scott defends narrative vigor and folkloric color against charges of stylistic diffuseness, situating Scott within a longer lineage of tale-telling verse. In Letters to Dead Authors, Lang’s addressed portrait of Scott underscores durability rather than fashion. Dickens’s Scott and His Publishers foregrounds typographic means and market timing as aesthetic determinants, while Victor Hugo’s SIR WALTER SCOTT AND LADY MORGAN celebrates theatricality and the capacious stage of history. Stevenson, in Memories and Portraits, prizes character and tone, ensuring that reception includes ethics of conduct as well as technique.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Scott’s poems first secured the wide fame that later novels consolidated. The Lay of the Last Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake shaped habits of looking, speaking, and celebrating the Scottish past, while Marmion became a touchstone for discussions of honor and defeat. The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border furnished materials for recitation and song, entering schoolrooms and drawing rooms. The Field of Waterloo established a pattern for timely poetic memorial. Early readers took these works as both entertainment and instruction, building ceremonies, excursions, and patriotic tableaux around them, and treating poetic narrative as a guide to national self-understanding.
As the nineteenth century advanced, the cultural place of long narrative verse narrowed while Scott’s novels rose. Yet the poems persisted through abridgments, school selections, and popular editions. Dickens’s Scott and His Publishers preserved a cautionary tale about literary work and risk, making the poet a lesson in professional conduct. Stevenson’s Memories and Portraits offered a chivalric model of character grounded in industry and sociability. The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border continued to supply historical fiction and theatre with scenes and idioms. By century’s end, Scott’s verse was canonical even as tastes favored briefer lyrics and prose realism.
Twentieth-century upheavals recast the martial poems. The Field of Waterloo was read with skepticism and sorrow by generations acquainted with new forms of mechanized war, while The Vision of Don Roderick invited comparisons between visionary rhetoric and propaganda. Modernist critics often distrusted the expansive stanza and public pose, yet border communities and folklore societies kept the ballads vital in performance. Andrew Lang’s editorial and essayistic advocacy helped secure textual standards and classroom pathways. The translations and imitations from German ballads were increasingly valued as evidence of transnational Romantic formation, less derivative than adaptive, and crucial to comparative literary study.
Late twentieth-century criticism widened the lens. The Lord of the Isles and The Lady of the Lake attracted attention from scholars examining nation, region, and the politics of display. Environmental readings emphasized how Scott’s descriptions encode resource use, travel, and stewardship. The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border was mined for its editorial staging of oral culture, while the German imitations became case studies in cultural transfer. Famous Authors on Scott, together with Andrew Lang’s essays, provided historiography from within the tradition, allowing new work to measure shifts in valuation across a century and to trace how criticism itself became part of the archive.
In the present, digitization and renewed attention to historical poetics have refurbished the corpus. Annotated editions make Scott’s apparatus newly legible; mapping projects and battlefield tourism intersect with The Field of Waterloo; and debates over commemoration and national identity give Marmion and Rokeby fresh urgency. Scottish constitutional conversations frame readings of The Lady of the Lake, while transnational perspectives revisit The Battle of Sempach and the imitations from German ballads. Victor Hugo, Stevenson, Dickens, and Andrew Lang remain indispensable guides, their essays offering prisms through which to reread the poems. Poems from Novels and Other Poems testify to ongoing adaptation across media.
Synopsis (Selection)
Introduction: Famous Authors on Scott
Three essays by Victor Hugo, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Charles Dickens frame Scott’s poetry within a broader conversation about Romanticism, craft, and the literary marketplace. Hugo sets Scott beside Lady Morgan to test the reach of historical romance and national character; Stevenson offers a working writer’s appraisal of Scott’s narrative vigor and moral feeling; Dickens examines the professional pressures and practicalities surrounding authors and publishers. Together they chart admiration and critique in equal measure, establishing themes—imagination, industry, and public taste—that recur across the collection.
Notable Poems
A selection of shorter pieces shows Scott’s range beyond his long narratives, from martial strains and border laments to tender songs and playful epigrams. These poems often compress his hallmarks—swift storytelling, clear melody, and landscape-driven mood—into compact forms. They converse with the ballads and romances by distilling shared themes of loyalty, fate, and memory.
Marmion
A chivalric romance set against a looming Anglo-Scottish clash follows ambition, intrigue, and perilous courtship as reputations and nations edge toward open conflict. The poem’s high pageantry and moral undercurrents drive toward a climactic battlefield reckoning without dwelling on individual outcomes. Its tone fuses gallantry with caution, inviting comparison to Scott’s other martial panoramas.
The Lady of the Lake
In the Trossachs, a pursuit through Highland terrain entangles clan loyalties, concealed identities, and competing claims of love and power. Scenic description and musical narrative build toward reconciliation between personal honor and political authority. The poem contrasts courtly expectations with Highland codes, echoing the collection’s ongoing dialogue between tradition and state.
The Lay of the Last Minstrel
An aged bard recounts a border feud shot through with omens and enchantments, blending antiquarian interest with living superstition. The framed tale lets Scott celebrate the minstrel tradition while probing how legend shapes communal memory. Its elegiac-romantic tone links it closely to the border ballads gathered elsewhere in the collection.
Rokeby
Set during the English Civil War, this narrative turns from open battle to espionage, disguise, and domestic peril in a northern estate. Interlaced plots of love, loyalty, and treason test characters more by conscience than by arms. The poem’s subtler, more psychological emphasis offers a counterweight to Scott’s large-scale martial epics.
The Vision of Don Roderick
A prophetic panorama bridges Spain’s legendary past with its contemporary struggle against a conquering empire, casting history as a sequence of visionary tableaux. The poem elevates current events into pageant and omen, aligning national resistance with moral destiny. It speaks in concert with Scott’s other occasional war pieces, especially in its patriotic solemnity.
The Bridal of Triermain
A romance-quest intertwines modern skepticism with medieval enchantment as a knight seeks an idealized bride beyond the ordinary world. The poem toys with illusion and belief, adopting a playful, ornate manner to test the durability of chivalric desire. Its self-aware medievalism converses with Scott’s broader project of reanimating legend for modern readers.
The Field of Waterloo
A commemorative narrative honors valor and leadership while confronting the grim cost of a recent, decisive battle. Catalogues of arms and aftermath balance patriotic tribute with sober reflection. In tone and purpose it pairs with Scott’s other war-themed poems, expanding his historical canvas into living memory.
The Lord of the Isles
Against sea-lashed coasts and island strongholds, national destiny and private vows intersect as Scotland moves toward deliverance under a storied leader. Maritime spectacle and courtly romance share the stage, linking intimate promises to public triumph. The poem’s blend of pageantry and nation-making resonates with Scott’s sustained interest in how personal loyalty undergirds history.
Harold the Dauntless
A Northumbrian romance follows a proud Danish warrior wrestling with faith, fate, and the pull of a courageous heroine amid trials and portents. Folkloric humor and irony lighten its supernatural color, making conversion and courage feel both adventurous and reflective. It counters the grand-epic mode with a more capricious, ballad-friendly energy.
Translations and Imitations from German Ballads
These pieces channel German Romantic balladry—spectral riders, fatal lovers, fiery spirits, returning knights, embattled patriots—into swift English narrative verse. The set showcases Scott’s feel for cadence and atmosphere in tales like The Wild Huntsman, The Erl-King, The Battle of Sempach, and others. Their dark glamour and moral fatalism converse with the Scottish ballads, revealing cross-European currents in the supernatural and heroic.
Contributions to 'The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border'
Scott’s original ballads here—ranging from prophecies and nocturnal visitations to clan laments and highland hunts turned uncanny—extend the Border’s storied landscape into verse. Pieces such as The Eve of St. John, Thomas the Rhymer, Cadyow Castle, The Gray Brother, and Glenfinlas emphasize omen, feud, and penance. Their compact drive and folkloric intensity illuminate themes that the longer narratives elaborate.
Poems from Novels and Other Poems
Songs and occasional verses embedded in narratives or composed alongside them serve as character-voices, scene-setters, and emotional refrains. They run from martial or marching strains to love lyrics and elegies, sharpening mood and theme in quick strokes. These pieces thread Scott’s fiction and poetry together, reinforcing motifs of loyalty, loss, and landscape.
The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
This body of Border ballads and narrative songs maps a frontier culture of feud, prophecy, and second sight, with Scott’s own contributions set amid traditional matter. The collection foregrounds oral memory and rugged terrain, making place and custom central characters. It forms a foundation for the larger poems’ historical imagination, showing how legend and history cohabit the same imaginative ground.
Andrew Lang’s View of Scott
In a playful homage from Letters to Dead Authors and a measured appraisal in The Poems of Sir Walter Scott, Andrew Lang praises the verse’s clarity, pace, and songful narrative while weighing shifts in later taste. His scholarship is genial rather than severe, reading Scott’s achievements through charm, craft, and cultural reach. The perspective stands in productive tension with Victor Hugo’s sharper, comparative lens elsewhere in the collection, highlighting Continental and British responses to Scott.
THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF SIR WALTER SCOTT
INTRODUCTION:
Famous Authors on Scott
SIR WALTER SCOTT AND LADY MORGAN by Victor Hugo
Sir Walter Scott is a Scotchman; his novels are enough to to convince us of this fact. His exclusive love of Scottish subjects proves his love for Scotland; revering the old customs of his country, he makes amends to himself, by faithfully portraying them, for not being able to observe them more religiously; and his pious admiration for the national character shines forth in the willingness with which he details its faults. An Irish lady ã Lady Morgan ã presents herself, as the natural rival of Sir Walter Scott, in persisting, like him, in writing only on national topics ; hut there is in her works much more love of celebrity than attachment to country, and much less national pride than personal vanity.
Lady Morgan seems to paint Irishmen with pleasure ; but it is an Irish woman whom she, above everything and everywhere, paints with enthusiasm ; and that Irish woman is herself. Miss O’Hallogan in O’Donnell, and Lady Clancare in Florence Maccarthy, are neither more nor less than Lady Morgan, flattered by herself.
We must say that, after Scott’s pictures, so full of life and warmth, the sketches of Lady Morgan seem but pale and cold. The historical romances of that lady are to be read; the romantic histories of the Scotchinan to be admired. The reason is simple enough : Lady Morgan has sufficient tact to observe what she sees, sufficient memory to retain what she observes, and sufficient art aptly to relate what she has retained; her science goes no farther. This is the reason her characters, though sometimes well drawn, are not sustained ; apart from a trait, the truth of which pleases you, because it is copied from nature, you will find another which offends you by its falsity, because she invented it.
Walter Scott, on the contrary, conceives a character after having often observed only one trait; he sees it at a glance, and directly paints it. His excellent judgment prevents him from being misled ; and what he creates is nearly always as true as that which he observes. When talent is carried to this point, it is more than talent: we can draw the parallel in two words ã Lady Morgan is a woman of talent ã Walter Scott is a man of genius.
License covers its hundred eyes with its hundred hands.
Some rocks cannot arrest the course of a river; over human obstacles, events roll onward without being turned aside.
There are some unfortunate men in the world. Christopher Columbus cannot attach his name to his discovery; Guillotin cannot detach his from his invention.
Glory, ambition, armies, fleets, thrones, crowns: the playthings of great children. Empires have their crises, as mountains have their winter. A word spoken too loud brings down an avalanche.
The conflagration of Moscow: an aurora borealis lit up by Napoleon.
I have heard men of the present day, distinguished in politics, in literature, in science, complain of envy, of hatred, of calumny. They are wrong. It’ is law, it is glory. The high-renowned afford examples. Hatred follows them everywhere. Nothing escapes it. The theatre openly yielded to it Shakspeare and Moliere; the prison could not take away from it Christopher Columbus; the cloister did not preserve St. Bernard; the throne did not save Napoleon. There is only one asylum for genius in this world : it is the tomb .
MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS by Robert Louis Stevenson
Walter Scott is out and away the king of the romantics. “The Lady of the Lake” has no indisputable claim to be a poem beyond the inherent fitness and desirability of the tale. It is just such a story as a man would make up for himself, walking, in the best health and temper, through just such scenes as it is laid in. Hence it is that a charm dwells undefinable among these slovenly verses, as the unseen cuckoo fills the mountains with his note; hence, even after we have flung the book aside, the scenery and adventures remain present to the mind, a new and green possession, not unworthy of that beautiful name, “The Lady of the Lake,” or that direct, romantic opening — one of the most spirited and poetical in literature — ”The stag at eve had drunk his fill.” The same strength and the same weaknesses adorn and disfigure the novels. In that ill-written, ragged book, “The Pirate,” the figure of Cleveland — cast up by the sea on the resounding foreland of Dunrossness — moving, with the blood on his hands and the Spanish words on his tongue, among the simple islanders — singing a serenade under the window of his Shetland mistress — is conceived in the very highest manner of romantic invention. The words of his song, “Through groves of palm,” sung in such a scene and by such a lover, clinch, as in a nutshell, the emphatic contrast upon which the tale is built. In “Guy Mannering,” again, every incident is delightful to the imagination; and the scene when Harry Bertram lands at Ellangowan is a model instance of romantic method.
“’I remember the tune well,’ he says,’though I cannot guess what should at present so strongly recall it to my memory.’ He took his flageolet from his pocket and played a simple melody. Apparently the tune awoke 146 the corresponding associations of a damsel…. She immediately took up the song —
“’Are these the links of Forth, she said;
Or are they the crooks of Dee,
Or the bonny woods of Warroch Head
That I so fain would see?’
“‘By heaven!’ said Bertram, ‘it is the very ballad.’”
On this quotation two remarks fall to be made. First, as an instance of modern feeling for romance, this famous touch of the flageolet and the old song is selected by Miss Braddon for omission. Miss Braddon’s idea of a story, like Mrs. Todgers’s idea of a wooden leg, were something strange to have expounded. As a matter of personal experience, Meg’s appearance to old Mr. Bertram on the road, the ruins of Derncleugh, the scene of the flageolet, and the Dominie’s recognition of Harry, are the four strong notes that continue to ring in the mind after the book is laid aside. The second point is still more curious. The reader will observe a mark of excision in the passage as quoted by me. Well, here is how it runs in the original: “a damsel, who, close behind a fine spring about halfway down the descent and which had once supplied the castle with water, was engaged in bleaching linen.” A man who gave in such copy would be discharged from the staff of a daily paper. Scott has forgotten to prepare the reader for the presence of the “damsel”; he has forgotten to mention the spring and its relation to the ruin; and now, face to face with his omission, instead of trying back and starting fair, crams all this matter, tail foremost, into a single shambling sentence. It is not merely bad English, or bad style; it is abominably bad narrative besides.
Certainly the contrast is remarkable; and it is one that throws a strong light upon the subject of this paper. For here we have a man of the finest creative instinct touching with perfect certainty and charm the romantic junctures of his story: and we find him utterly careless, almost, it would seem, incapable, in the technical matter 147 of style, and not only frequently weak, but frequently wrong in points of drama. In character parts, indeed, and particularly in the Scots, he was delicate, strong, and truthful; but the trite, obliterated features of too many of his heroes have already wearied three generations of readers. At times his characters will speak with something far beyond propriety — with a true heroic note; but on the next page they will be wading wearily forward with an ungrammatical and undramatic rigmarole of words. The man who could conceive and write the character of Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot, as Scott has conceived and written it, had not only splendid romantic but splendid tragic gifts. How comes it, then, that he could so often fob us off with languid, inarticulate twaddle? It seems to me that the explanation is to be found in the very quality of his surprising merits. As his books are play to the reader, so were they play to him. He was a great daydreamer, a seer of fit and beautiful and humorous visions, but hardly a great artist. He conjured up the romantic with delight, but had hardly patience to describe it. Of the pleasures of his art he tasted fully; but of its cares and scruples and distresses never man knew less.
SCOTT AND HIS PUBLISHERS by Charles Dickens
I
[March 31, 1839]
When the Refutation, to which this pamphlet1 is a reply, was put forth, we took occasion to examine into the nature of the charges of misstatement and misrepresentation which were therein brought against Mr. Lockhart, to point out how very slight and unimportant they appeared to be, even upon the refuter’s own showing, and to express our opinion that the refutation originated in the overweening vanity of the Ballantyne family, who, confounding their own importance with that of the great man who condescended (to his cost) to patronise them, sought to magnify and exalt themselves with a degree of presumption and conceit which leaves the fly on the wheel, the organ bellows-blower, and the aspiring frog of the fable, all at an immeasurable distance behind.
1 The Ballantyne Humbug Handled; in a letter to Sir Adam Fergusson. By the Author of Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott. Cadell, Edinburgh; Murray, London.
Much as we may wonder, after an attentive perusal of the pamphlet before us, how the lad, James Ballantyne’s son, can have been permitted by those who must have known from the commencement what facts were in reserve, to force on this exposure of the most culpable negligence and recklessness on the part of the men who have been paraded as the victims of erring and ambitious genius, it is impossible to regard the circumstance in any other light than as a most fortunate and happy one for the memory of Sir Walter Scott. If ever engineer were ‘hoist with his own petard,’ if ever accusations recoiled upon the heads of those who made them, if ever the parties in the witness-box and the dock changed places, it is in this case of the Ballantynes and Sir Walter Scott. And the proof, be it remembered, is to be found — not in the unsupported assertions of Mr. Lockhart or his ingenious reasoning from assumed facts, but in the letters, accounts, and statements of the Ballantynes themselves.
Premising that Mr. Lockhart, in glancing at the ‘ unanswerable
refutation’ and ‘the overwhelming exposure’ notices of the Ballantyne pamphlet in other journals, might fairly and justly have noticed this journal as an exception (in whose columns more than one head of his reply was anticipated long ago), we will proceed to quote — first, Mr. Lockhart’s statement of his reasons for introducing in the biography detailed descriptions of the habits and manners of the Ballantynes, which we take to have been the head and front of his offence; and secondly, such scraps of evidence bearing upon the allegation that the Ballantynes were ruined by the improvidence and lavish expenditure of Scott, as we can afford space for, in a very brief analysis of the whole.
With regard to the first point, Mr. Lockhart writes thus: — ‘The most curious problem in the life of Scott could receive no fair attempt at solution, unless the inquirer were made acquainted, in as far as the biographer could make him so, with the nature, and habits, and manners of Scott’s partners and agents. Had the reader been left to take his ideas of those men from the eloquence of epitaphs — to conceive of them as having been capitalists instead of penniless adventurers — men regularly and fitly trained for the callings in which they were employed by Scott, in place of being the one and the other entirely unacquainted with the prime requisites for success in such callings — men exact and diligent in their proper business, careful and moderate in their personal expenditure, instead of the reverse; had such hallucinations been left undisturbed, where was the clue of extrication from the mysterious labyrinth of Sir Walter’s fatal entanglements in commerce? It was necessary, in truth and justice, to show — not that he was without blame in the conduct of his pecuniary affairs — (I surely made no such ridiculous attempt) — but that he could not have been ruined by commerce, had his partners been good men of business. It was necessary to show that he was in the main the victim of his own blind over-confidence in the management of the two Ballantynes. In order to show how excessive was the kindness that prompted such over-confidence, it was necessary to bring out the follies and foibles, as well as the better qualities, of the men.”
Does any reasonable and dispassionate man doubt this? Is there any man who does not know that the titles of a hundred biographies might be jotted down in half an hour, in each and every of which there shall be found a hundred personal sketches of a hundred men, a hundred times more important, clever, excellent, and worthy, than Mr. James Ballantyne, the Printer of Edinburgh, and whilom of Kelso, regarding which the world has never heard one syllable of remonstrance or complaint?
Of Mr. John Ballantyne, the less said the better. If he were an honest, upright, honourable man, it is a comfort to know that there are plentiful store of such characters living at this moment in the rules of our Debtors” Prison, and passing through the Insolvent Court by dozens every day. As an instance of Mr. Lockhart’s easy mode of assertion, we were given to understand in the Refutation that Mr. John Ballantyne had never been a banker’s clerk. Mr. Cadell and another gentleman bear testimony that he used to say he had been (which seems by no means conclusive evidence that he ever was), and if he were, as Mr. Lockhart tells us he has since learnt, a tailor, or superintendent of the tailoring department of the father’s general shop at Kelso, a previously unintelligible fragment in one of Scott’s letters becomes susceptible of a very startling and simple solution. ‘If it takes nine tailors to make a man, how many will it take to ruin one?’
The descendants of Mr. James Ballantyne charge Sir Walter Scott with having ruined him by his profuse expenditure, and the tremendous responsibilities which he cast upon the printing concern. Mr. Lockhart charges Mr. James Ballantyne with having ruined the business by his own negligence, extravagance, and inattention. Let us see which of these charges is the best supported by facts.
Scott entered into partnership with James Ballantyne in May 1805. James Ballantyne’s brother John (being then the bookkeeper) enters the amount of capital which James had invested in the concern, at £3694, 16s. 11d.; but of these figures no less than £2090 represents ‘stock in trade,’ which it appears from other statements that the same John Ballantyne was in the habit of valuing at most preposterous and exaggerated sums; and the balance of £1604, 16s. lid. is represented by ‘book debts’ to that amount. Scott came in as the monied partner — as the man to prop up the concern; even then his patrimonial fortune was £10,000 or £12,000; he possessed at the time, independently of all literary exertions, an income of £1000 per annum; he advanced for the business £2008, ‘including in the said advance the sum of £500 contained in Mr. Ballantyne’s promissory note, dated 1st February last’ — from which it would seem pretty clear that the affluent Mr. James Ballantyne ran rather short of money about this time — and £40 more, also advanced to Mr. Ballantyne previous to the execution of the deed. Scott, in consideration of this payment, was to have onethird of the business, and James Ballantyne two; his extra third being specially in consideration of his undertaking those duties of management, for the neglect and omission of which, throughout the long correspondence of a long term of years, we find him apologising to Scott himself in every variety of humble, maudlin, abject, and whining prostration.
The very first entry in the very first ‘State,’ or statement of the partnership accounts, is a payment on behalf of James Ballantyne for ‘an acceptance at Kelso? — at Kelso, observe, in his original obscurity and small way of business — ‘£200.’ There are advances to his father to the amount of £270, 19s. 5d., there are his own drafts during the first year of the partnership to the enormous amount of £2378, 4s. 9d., his share of the profits being only £786, 10s. 3d.; Scott’s drafts for the same period being £100 and his share £393, 5s. Id.! At the expiration of five years and a half, the injured and oppressed Mr. James Ballantyne had overdrawn his share of the profits to the amount of £2027, 2s. 5d., while Scott had underdrawn his share by the sum of £577, 2s. 8d. Now let any man of common practical sense, from Mr. Rothschild’s successor, whoever he may be, down to the commonest light-porter and warehouseman who can read and write and cast accounts, say, upon such a statement of figures as this, who was the gainer by the partnership, who may be supposed to have had objects and designs of his own to serve in forming it, and in what pecuniary situation Mr. James Ballantyne — the needy and embarrassed printer of Kelso — must have been placed, when Scott first shed upon him the light of his countenance.
‘Scott, in those days,’ says Mr. Lockhart, ‘had neither bought land, nor indulged in any private habits likely to hamper his pecuniary condition. He had a handsome income, nowise derived from commerce. He was already a highly popular author, and had received from the booksellers copy-monies of then unprecedented magnitude. With him the only speculation and the only source of embarrassment was this printing concern; and how, had the other partner conducted himself in reference to it as Scott did, could it have been any source of embarrassment at all? He was, I cannot but think, imperfectly acquainted with James Ballantyne’s pecuniary means, as well as with his habits and tastes, when the firm was set up. He was deeply injured by his partner’s want of skill and care in the conduct of the concern, and not less so by that partner’s irreclaimable personal extravagance; and he was systematically mystified by the States, etc., prepared by Mr. John. In fact, every balance-sheet that has been preserved, or made accessible to me, seems to be fallacious. They are not of the company’s entire affairs, but of one particular account in their books only — viz. the expenditure on the printing work done, and the produce of that work. This delusive system appears to have continued till the end of 1823, after which date the books are not even added or written up.’
In 1809 the bookselling firm started, Scott having one moiety for his share, and the two brothers the remaining moiety for theirs. He put down £1000 for his share, and lent Mr. James Ballantyne £500 for his (!), and by the month of June 1810 he had embarked £9000 in the two concerns. Mr. James Ballantyne, even now, had no capital; he borrowed capital from Scott to form the bookselling establishment; he rendered the system of accommodation bills necessary by so egregiously overdrawing so small a capital as they started with; and not satisfied with this, he grossly neglected and mismanaged the business (by his own confession) during the whole time of its superintendence being entrusted to him.
In 1815 (the year of Mr. James Ballantyne’s marriage) the bookselling business was abandoned; there were no resources with which to meet its obligations but those of the printing company, and Scott, in January 1816, writes thus to him —
‘The burthen must be upon you and me — that is, on the printing office. If you will agree to conduct this business henceforth with steadiness and care, and to content yourself with £400 a year from it for your private purposes, its profits will ultimately set us free. I agree that we should grant mutual discharges as booksellers, and consider the whole debt as attaching to you and me as printers. I agree, farther, that the responsibility of the whole debt should be assumed by myself alone for the present — provided you, on your part, never interfere with the printing profits, beyond your allowance, until the debt has been obliterated, or put into such a train of liquidation that you see your way clear, and voluntarily reassume your station as my partner, instead of continuing to be, as you now must consider yourself, merely my steward, bookkeeper, and manager in the Canongate.”
Now, could the dullest and most addle-headed man alive be brought to believe — is it in human nature, in common sense, or common reason — that if Mr. James Ballantyne had the smallest ground of just complaint against Scott at this time, he would have listened to such a proposition? But he did listen to it, and eagerly embraced it; and in the October of that very year this same Mr. James Ballantyne, whose besotted trustees have dragged the circumstance to light from the concealment in which Mr. Lockhart mercifully left it — this same Mr. James Ballantyne, the plundered and deluded victim of Scott, announces to him that, being pressed by a younger brother at Kelso for a personal debt — not a partnership liability — a personal debt of £500, he had paid away to him a bill of the company, and, but for this bill being dishonoured by an accidental circumstance, Scott would, in all human probability, have never heard one word of the matter down to the day of his death.
Does Mr. James Ballantyne brazen this proceeding out, and retort upon Scott, ‘I have been your tool and instrument. But for you I should have been by this time a man in affluent circumstances, and well able to pay this money. You brought me to this pass by your misconduct; it was your bounden duty to extricate me, and I had a right to extricate myself by the use of your name for my own purposes, when you have so often used mine for yours,? Judge from the following extracts from his letters on the subject: —
‘It is needless for me to dwell on my deep regret at the discreditable incident which has taken place… . I was not aware of the terrible consequences arising from one acting partner’s using the copartnery signature for his personal purposes. I assure you, Sir, I should very nearly as soon forge your own signature as use one which implicated your credit and property for what belonged to me personally.”
And then he goes on in a tone of great humility, endeavouring to excuse himself thus: —
‘I respectfully beg leave to call to your recollection a very long and not very pleasant correspondence two years ago, on the subject of the debts due to my brother Alexander, and I may now shortly restate, that the money advanced by him went into the funds of the business, and at periods when it was imperiously wanted. No doubt it went in my name, to help up my share of stock equal to yours; but I honestly confess to you, that this consideration never went into my calculation, and that when I agreed that the name of James B. and Co. should be given to the bills for that money, I had no other idea than that it was an easy mode of procuring money, at a very serious crisis, when money was greatly wanted; nor did I see that I should refuse it because the lender was my brother. His cash was as good as another’s. Personally, I never received a sixpence of it.’
Personally he never received a sixpence of it! Oh, certainly not. That is to say, Mr. James Ballantyne paid the money to the partnership banking account towards his share of the joint capital, and immediately set about drawing private cheques as fast as he could draw for three times the sum.
In 1821 Mr. John Ballantyne died, and Mr. James Ballantyne, petitioning Scott that a termination might be put to his stewardship, and that he might be admitted to a new share in the business, he becomes, under a deed bearing date on the 1st of April 1822 (the missive letter, in Scott’s handwriting, laying down the heads of which, is given by Mr. Lockhart at length), once more a partner in the business. The circumstances under which his stewardship had been undertaken — and this request for a new partnership was conceded by Scott — are thus stated by Mr. Lockhart; and the statement is, in every respect in which we have been able to examine it, borne out by facts: —
‘For the preparation of the formal contract of 1822, Sir Walter selected Mrs. James Ballantyne’s brother. We have seen that this Mr. George Hogarth, a man of business, a Writer to the Signet, a gentleman whose ability and intelligence no one can dispute, was privy to all the transactions between Scott and James, whereupon the matrimonial negotiation proceeded to its close; — and that Mr. Hogarth approved of, and Mr. Ballantyne expressed deep gratitude for, the arrangements then dictated by Sir Walter Scott. Must not these Trustees themselves, when confronted with the evidence now given, admit that these arrangements were most liberal and generous? Scott, “the business being in difficulties,” takes the whole of these difficulties upon himself. He assumes, for a prospective series of five or six years, the whole responsibility of its debts and its expenditure, including a liberal salary to James as manager. In order to provide him with the means of paying a personal debt of £3000 due to himself — and wholly distinct from copartnery debts — Scott agrees to secure for him a certain part of the proceeds of every novel that shall be written during the continuance of this arrangement. With the publishing of these novels James was to have no trouble — there was no risk about them — the gain on each was clear and certain, — and of every sum thus produced by the exertion of Scott’s genius and industry, James Ballantyne was to have a sixth, as a mere bonus to help him in paying oft* his debt of £3000, upon which debt, moreover, no interest was to be charged. In what respect did this differ from drawing the pen, every five or six months, through a very considerable portion of the debt? Scott was undertaking neither more nor less than to take the money out of his own pocket, and pay it regularly into James’s, who had no more risk or trouble in the publication of those immortal works than any printer in Westminster. The Pamphleteers must admit that James, pending this arrangement, was not the partner, but literally the paid servant of his benefactor, and that while “ the total responsibility of the debts and expenditure of the business” lay on Scott, Scott had the perfect right to make any use he pleased of its profits and credit. They must admit, that after the arrangement had continued for five years, James examined the state of the concern, and petitioned Scott to replace him as a partner; that so far from finding any reason to complain of what Scott had done with the business while it was solely his, without one word of complaint as to this large amount of floating bills so boldly averred in the Pamphlet to have been drawn for Scott’s personal accommodation, James, in praying for readmission, acknowledged that down to the close of that period (June 1821) he had grossly neglected the most important parts of the business whereof he had had charge as Scott’s stipendiary servant; — acknowledged, that notwithstanding his salary as manager of the printing-office, another salary of £200 a year as editor of a newspaper, and the large sums he derived from novel-copyrights given to him ex mera gratia, — he had so misconducted his own private affairs, that having begun his stewardship as debtor to Scott for £3000, he, when he wished the stewardship to terminate, owed Scott much more than £3000; but that, acknowledging all this, he made at the same time such solemn promises of amendment for the future, that Scott consented to do as he prayed; only stipulating, that until the whole affairs of the printing business should be reduced to perfect order, debts discharged, its stock and disposable funds increased, each partner should limit himself to drawing £500 per annum for his personal use. They must admit that James made all these acknowledgments and promises; that Scott accepted them graciously; and that the moment before the final copartnership was signed, James Ballantyne was Sir Walter Scott’s debtor, entirely at his mercy; that down to that moment, by James’s own clear confession, Scott, as connected with this printing establishment, had been sinned against, not sinning.
‘The contract prepared and written by Mr. Hogarth was signed on the 1st of April 1822. It bears express reference to the “missive letter dated the 15th and 22nd of June last,” by which the parties had “concluded an agreement for the settlement of the accounts and transactions subsisting between them, and also for the terms of the said new copartnery, and agreed to execute a regular deed in implement of said agreement”; and “therefore and for the reasons more particularly specified in the said missive letters, which are here specially referred to, and held as repeated, they have agreed, and hereby agree, to the following articles.” Then follow the articles of agreement, embodying the substance of the missive. Scott is to draw the whole profits of the business prior to Whitsunday 1822, in respect of the responsibility he had undertaken. Ballantyne acknowledges a personal debt of £1800 as at Whitsunday 1821, which was to be paid out of the funds specified in the missives, no interest being due until after Whitsunday 1822. Sir Walter having advanced £2575 for buildings in the Canongate, new types, etc., James is to grant a bond for the half of that sum. It further appears by the only cashbook exhibited to me, that James, notwithstanding his frugal mode of living, had quietly drawn £1629 more than his allowance between 1816 and 1822, but of this, as it is stated, as a balance of cash, due by James at Whitsunday 1822, Scott could not have been aware when with his own hand he wrote the missive letter. Sir Walter, I have said, was to be liable for all the debts contracted between 1816 and 1822, but to have the exclusive right of property in all the current funds, to enable him to pay off these debts, and as the deed bears, “to indemnify him for his advances on account of the copartnery” — i.e. from 1816 to 1822. Finally, James becomes bound to keep regular and distinct books, which are to be balanced annually. Now, on looking at the import of this legal instrument, as well as the missive which it corroborated, and the prior communications between the parties, whom would an unbiassed reader suppose to have been the partner most benefited by this concern in time past, — whom to be the person most likely to have trespassed upon its credit, and embarrassed its resources?’
How did Mr. James Ballantyne perform his part of this contract? From January 1822 to May 1826, when the affairs were wound up, he was entitled to have drawn in all about £1750. He drew in all £7581, 15s. 5d. Of whose money? Assuredly not his own.
For Mr. Lockhart’s explanation of the Vidimus, and of the refuter’s construction and distortion of certain important items which go a long way towards accounting for the great increase in the accommodation bills, and show how improperly, and with what an appearance of wilful error, certain receipts and charges have been fixed upon Scott, which might with as much justice have been fixed upon the Chancellor of the Exchequer, or the Bank of Scotland, we must refer our readers to the pamphlet itself, and merely state these general results: That in 1823, the accommodations of James Ballantyne and Co. amounted to £36,000; that there is no shadow or scrap of evidence to show that any of these accommodation bills had been issued for Scott’s private purposes; that it is made a matter of charge in the Refutation pamphlet that in 1826 they had increased to £46,000; that we now find that of this additional £10,000 Mr. James Ballantyne himself pocketed (calculating interest) more than £8000, and that all the expenses of stamps and renewals have to be charged against the remaining £2000; finally, that Scott, who is asserted to have ruined these Ballantynes by his ambition to become a landed proprietor, invested in all, up to June 1821, £29,083 in the purchase of land, having received since 1811 an official income of £1600 per annum, and gained, as an author, £80,000. Let any plain, unprejudiced man, who has learnt that two and two make four, and who has moved in the world in the ordinary pursuits of life, put these facts together, read this correspondence with acknowledgments of error and misconduct on the part of the Messrs. Ballantyne repeated from day to day and urged from year to year — let him examine these transactions, and find that in every one which is capable of explanation now the parties are in their graves, the extravagance, thoughtlessness, recklessness, and wrong have been upon the part of these pigmies, and the truest magnanimity and forbearance on the side of the giant who upheld them, and under the shadow of whose protection they gradually came to lose sight of their own stature, and to imagine themselves as great as he — let any man divest himself of that lurking desire to carp and cavil over the actions of men who have raised themselves high above their fellows, which unhappily seems inherent in human nature, and bring to this subject but the calmest and most plodding consideration of facts and probabilities — and say whether it is possible to arrive at any conclusion but that Messrs. Ballantyne and the Messrs. Ballantyne’s descendants owe a deep and lasting debt of gratitude to Sir Walter Scott as the originator of all the name, fame, and fortune they may possess, or to which they can ever aspire — and that this attempt to blacken the memory of the dead benefactor of their house would be an act of the basest and most despicable ingratitude, were it not one of the most puling and drivelling folly.
