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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
The Complete Works of Sir Walter Scott (Illustrated) is a seminal collection of the works of one of the most influential figures in European literature. Known for his historical novels set in Scotland, Scott's unique literary style combines vivid storytelling with deep historical research, providing readers with a rich tapestry of characters and events. This comprehensive collection includes all of Scott's major works, from the popular Waverley novels to his poetry and non-fiction writings. The illustrations included in the book enhance the reader's experience, bringing to life the landscapes and characters that Scott so masterfully portrays. This collection is a must-read for anyone interested in romantic literature and historical fiction. With its stunning visuals and gripping narratives, The Complete Works of Sir Walter Scott is sure to captivate readers for generations to come. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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The Complete Works of Sir Walter Scott
(Illustrated)
Published by
Books
Table of Contents
Introduction
This illustrated collection assembles the complete writings of Sir Walter Scott alongside a substantial body of contemporary and later commentary, offering a panoramic view of an oeuvre that helped define the historical imagination of modern literature. Readers will find the full sequence of novels traditionally grouped as the Waverley Novels, the companion cycles published under various editorial masks, dramatic experiments, short fiction in several modes, the poetical works that first made Scott famous, and a rich array of non‑fiction: journals, letters, biographies, histories, and essays. The aim is both comprehensive and contextual, presenting Scott’s creative achievement together with the testimonies it inspired.
The opening section, Famous Authors on Scott, situates his work within the judgment of eminent peers and successors. Victor Hugo’s Sir Walter Scott and Lady Morgan, Robert Louis Stevenson’s reflections in Memories and Portraits, and Charles Dickens on Scott and his publishers register admiration, debate, and practical insight into authorship and the literary marketplace. Complementing these are later appreciations in the Literary Essays by Andrew Lang, Henry James, Leslie Stephen, William Hazlitt, and William Ker. Together with the Biographies by George Saintsbury, Richard H. Hutton, and J. G. Lockhart, these perspectives illuminate Scott’s stature and evolving reputation without displacing the primacy of the works themselves.
At the center stand the Waverley Novels, which establish the model of the historical novel by casting imagined lives against documented events and social change. From Waverley’s young officer encountering the convulsions of eighteenth‑century Scotland to the urban, courtly, and continental scenes of later books, Scott fuses narrative momentum with careful antiquarian texture. His method privileges plausible motives over melodrama, allowing readers to witness how communities reshape themselves under pressure. The sequence’s variety—Highland glens, royal chambers, market towns, and battlefield margins—sustains a broad canvas while maintaining intimate human stakes, a balance that underlies the enduring appeal of these fictions.
Scott extended his reach through linked cycles issued under fictional editorships and thematic banners. Tales of My Landlord, Tales from Benedictine Sources, and Tales of the Crusaders gather narratives that explore covenanting struggles, monastic and Reformation tensions, and medieval chivalry abroad. The organizing devices—frames, prefaces, and putative editors—both amuse and guide, placing each story within a larger cultural archive. These cycles house some of his most searching examinations of law, conscience, and clan memory, while displaying his gift for dialogue in regional idiom. Their design rewards slow reading, in which peripheral figures and local customs often prove central to historical understanding.
The range of settings is notable. Ivanhoe reimagines medieval England through fealty and contest; Kenilworth evokes the perils and pageantry of the Elizabethan court; Quentin Durward follows intrigue among the courts of France and Burgundy. In Scotland, Rob Roy stage‑manages commerce and kinship in a time of unrest, and The Pirate turns to the Northern Isles for a tale of seafaring and settlement. The Fortunes of Nigel moves to early Stuart London, while Peveril of the Peak and Woodstock revisit the upheavals surrounding the Civil Wars and Restoration. Redgauntlet and St. Ronan’s Well show Scott’s readiness for experiments in form and for contemporary satire.
Scott’s short fiction condenses his larger preoccupations. Chronicles of the Canongate, framed by the narrator Chrystal Croftangry, binds The Highland Widow, The Two Drovers, and The Surgeon’s Daughter into a meditation on memory, obligation, and risk. The Keepsake stories—My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror, The Tapestried Chamber, and Death of the Laird’s Jock—were composed for an annual, demonstrating his command of spectral suggestion and concentrated pathos. Other short pieces, including Christopher Corduroy, Phantasmagoria, The Inferno of Altisidora, A Highland Anecdote, and Depravity Among Animals, show his play with anecdote, parody, and translation, enlarging the tonal spectrum of the collection.
The dramatic works complement the narrative corpus by foregrounding spectacle, speech, and public action. Scott’s translation of Goethe’s Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand brought a landmark German drama into English, revealing early interests in feudal honor and revolt. His own plays—Halidon Hill, Macduff’s Cross, The Doom of Devorgoil, and Auchindrane—draw on chronicle, legend, and legal record. They reveal a dramatist attentive to ceremonial form, martial cadence, and the tensions between private oath and civic order. Read beside the novels, these scripts clarify how Scott choreographs confrontation, testimony, and verdict across genres.
Scott’s poetical works established his fame before the prose romances and continue to inform their atmosphere. The poems blend border legend, heraldic coloring, and vivid landscape description with a forward-driving narrative measure. They cultivate a broad, clear diction capable of sudden elevation, and they register the sounds of place—river, moor, and march—as moral as well as scenic features. The verse romances model many of the novelist’s later strategies: entrance by pageantry, revelation by dialogue, and release by reconciliatory cadence. In this collection, the poems speak not as preludes but as concurrent achievements in Scott’s evolving art.
The non‑fiction gathers Scott’s own documentary voice. The Journal of Sir Walter Scott records the pressures of work, health, friendship, and the responsibilities of authorship. Paul’s Letters to His Kinsfolk transmits observations from post‑Napoleonic Europe, while the Letters of Malachi Malagrowther intervene in public debate over Scottish banking and civic rights. Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft surveys belief and folklore with a legal mind’s skepticism and a storyteller’s curiosity. These texts reveal habits of noting, classifying, and comparing that give the fiction its dense verisimilitude and its characteristic balance between empathy and restraint.
Historical and biographical writings further display Scott’s range as a man of letters. Tales of a Grandfather offers accessible narratives of Scottish history for younger readers, shaping a national story with pedagogic clarity. The Life of John Dryden and the Life of Napoleon Buonaparte apply his archival patience to figures central to literature and power. Various articles and essays—engaging with Burns, John Home, stage memoirs, natural history, planting, landscape gardening, and notable trials—show Scott as reviewer, commentator, and practical improver. These labors clarify his dual vocation: to preserve the past and to advise the present in concrete, intelligible prose.
Across genres, certain signatures recur. Scott places ordinary duty at the hinge of grand events; he treats law, custom, and belief as living forces; and he peoples his pages with humor as well as dignity. He uses frames, prefaces, and invented editors to stage questions of evidence, reminding readers that history is mediated. His dialogue—often in dialect—achieves character by cadence as much as by statement. Above all, he returns to the problem of change: how communities negotiate loss and renewal. This consistency of moral and social inquiry underwrites the lasting significance of his work beyond any single plot or period.
The present arrangement respects original groupings while inviting free exploration. The illustrations aim to clarify setting, costume, architecture, and artifact, assisting the reader’s historical imagination without imposing interpretation. The contextual essays and biographies are placed to enrich rather than direct, offering orientation on publication, reception, and method. Taken together, the novels, tales, poems, plays, letters, journals, histories, and critical responses trace a complete arc—from the making of a writer to the making of a tradition. This edition invites a continuous conversation with Scott, in which past and present mutually illuminate.
Author Biography
Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) stands as a foundational figure of the historical novel and one of the defining voices of Romantic-era literature. A poet, novelist, translator, dramatist, editor, and biographer, he fused antiquarian learning with storytelling that made past ages vivid for a broad readership. His “Waverley Novels” created a new grammar for narrative history, balancing pageantry with social observation, and inspired an international vogue for historical fiction. Beyond fiction, Scott wrote influential biographies, letters, and a personal journal that illuminate his method and milieu. The present collection reflects the breadth of his achievement and the scale of his subsequent critical reception.
Born in Edinburgh and educated there, Scott trained in law and combined a legal career with literary pursuits. A childhood illness left him partially lame, contributing to formative periods in the Scottish Borders that sharpened his interest in balladry, oral tradition, and local history. Early engagements with German literature, including his translation of Goethe’s Goetz of Berlichingen, widened his sense of Romantic drama and chivalric ethos. Service as Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire and as a principal clerk of court anchored him in the practices of the Scottish Enlightenment, giving his fiction its distinctive mix of legal realism, social range, and historical curiosity.
Scott first gained wide fame as a poet before turning decisively to prose fiction. Publishing anonymously at the outset, he issued Waverley and, in quick succession, a panorama of “Waverley Novels” that captivated readers with their historical sweep and variety. Works such as Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, Rob Roy, Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, The Fortunes of Nigel, Peveril of the Peak, Quentin Durward, and The Fair Maid of Perth exemplify his method: carefully researched settings, energetic plotting, and a humane interest in the conflicts that accompany social change. His eventual acknowledgment of authorship confirmed what readers had long inferred from style and scope.
Scott extended this achievement through linked cycles and experiments in tone. Under the banner Tales of My Landlord, he issued Old Mortality, The Black Dwarf, The Heart of Midlothian, The Bride of Lammermoor, and A Legend of Montrose, combining legal insight with intimate studies of community and conscience. He pursued medieval and continental scenes in novels like Woodstock, St. Ronan’s Well, and Anne of Geierstein, and returned to national legend and urban life with characteristic tact. Throughout, he balanced romance with documentary habits—dialect, topography, and archival lore—creating a narrative architecture in which individuals move within, and are shaped by, credible historical pressures.
His range encompassed drama and short fiction. In the theater he translated Goetz of Berlichingen and wrote plays including Halidon Hill, Macduff’s Cross, The Doom of Devorgoil, and Auchindrane. His Chronicles of the Canongate gathered tales and novellas—among them The Highland Widow, The Two Drovers, and The Surgeon’s Daughter—while later pieces such as My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror, The Tapestried Chamber, and Death of the Laird’s Jock reveal his interest in memory, the supernatural, and sporting lore. Further late novels—Count Robert of Paris and Castle Dangerous—along with The Monastery and The Abbot (from Benedictine sources) and the Crusader pair The Betrothed and The Talisman, attest to his persistent versatility.
Scott’s non-fiction broadened his reputation as a historian and commentator. The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte and The Life of John Dryden reflect narrative biography at ambitious scales; Tales of a Grandfather made Scottish history accessible to younger readers; Paul’s Letters to His Kinsfolk and the Letters of Malachi Malagrowther show his engaged public voice; and Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft registers a late curiosity about belief and folklore. Reviews and essays—touching subjects from Robert Burns to landscape and planting—display critical breadth. After the commercial collapse of his publishers in the mid-1820s, he undertook prodigious writing to discharge debts, recording discipline and strain in his Journal.
Scott’s later years were marked by declining health, but his stature continued to grow. Posthumous assessments shaped his legacy: Lockhart’s Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott remains central, alongside biographies by George Saintsbury and Richard H. Hutton. Critical appreciations by Victor Hugo, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, Andrew Lang, Henry James, Leslie Stephen, William Hazlitt, and William Ker chart evolving views of his art, methods, and publishing history. Scott’s fusion of romance with documentary habits influenced fiction across Europe and beyond, and his novels, letters, and journal retain vitality for readers interested in how literature animates national memory and historical change.
Historical Context
Sir Walter Scott’s career unfolded between the late Enlightenment and high Romanticism, amid Britain’s industrial ascent and imperial expansion. Born in Edinburgh in 1771 and active through the 1820s, he wrote as Europe emerged from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars and as Scotland negotiated its identity after the 1707 Union. This collection spans medieval to contemporary settings, pairing the Waverley Novels with poems, plays, tales, letters, and histories. It captures transitions from feudal obligation to commercial society, from oral custom to codified law, and from local loyalties to national and imperial frameworks—contexts central to Scott’s art and to his age’s debates.
Scott pioneered the historical novel in English by linking private destinies to public events and by grounding romance in archival habits. Waverley revisits the 1745 Jacobite rising; Old Mortality dramatizes the late seventeenth‑century Covenanters; The Heart of Midlothian confronts the 1736 Porteous Riots. Scott’s method—frames, prefaces, footnotes, and pseudo‑editors—mimics antiquarian scholarship while animating social worlds. He mined chronicles, legal records, and oral reminiscence to stage conflicts of class, creed, and region. The result is a literature that treats history as lived experience, illuminating how ordinary people navigate change, and how memory reshapes political defeat into culture and legend.
Scotland’s transformation after the failed Jacobite risings forms a continuous backdrop. Disarming laws, new roads, and market integration reoriented Highland society, while Lowland agriculture and coastal trade accelerated. Guy Mannering evokes Galloway’s smuggling economy; Rob Roy traces the 1715 crisis and the expanding world of credit; The Highland Widow and The Two Drovers in Chronicles of the Canongate measure cultural friction—between Highland military service and traditional codes, and between Gaelic honor and English law. Waverley’s crossing from courtly romance to Hanoverian order stages the broader passage from clan allegiance to a British state increasingly defined by commerce and administration.
Finance, speculation, and publicity marked Scott’s era and life. The 1825–26 credit crisis collapsed his publishers’ firms, leaving him to write toward repayment, a struggle documented in the Journal. Dickens’s “Scott and His Publishers” reads this entanglement as a tale of modern authorship and risk. Letters of Malachi Malagrowther (1826) defended Scottish banking practices—especially small‑denomination notes—against proposed restrictions, illustrating Scotland’s vigorous public sphere. Within the fiction, The Fortunes of Nigel exposes Jacobean credit networks; Peveril of the Peak observes rumor and politics during the Popish Plot; Redgauntlet imagines lingering Jacobitism under a regime of newspapers, mail coaches, and expanding surveillance.
Medievalism and chivalric revival are central to Scott’s international impact. Ivanhoe popularized twelfth‑century England’s Norman‑Saxon tensions, while Tales of the Crusaders—The Betrothed in the Welsh Marches and The Talisman amid the Third Crusade—recast knighthood within complex diplomacy and religious pluralism. Count Robert of Paris turns to Byzantium during the First Crusade, and The Monastery and The Abbot examine Scotland’s Reformation ruptures; Kenilworth dramatizes Elizabethan pageantry and intrigue. Scott’s early translation of Goethe’s Götz of Berlichingen brought German medieval drama to British readers, helping to stimulate a broader Gothic and neo‑chivalric taste that later European writers, including Victor Hugo, would adapt.
Scott also mapped continental power politics at moments of state formation. Quentin Durward studies Louis XI’s crafty centralization against Burgundian might; Anne of Geierstein places the nascent Swiss Confederation within late fifteenth‑century struggles; The Fair Maid of Perth uses a fourteenth‑century tournament and urban guild life to consider royal authority and clan feud. The Pirate relocates attention to Scotland’s northern isles, where Norse inheritances and maritime economies complicate British integration. Across these works, feudal custom, mercenary warfare, and princely realpolitik collide with emergent institutions—standing armies, bureaucracies, and fiscal states—offering readers an education in Europe’s uneven transition to modern sovereignty.
Religious conflict and accommodation are treated with unusual breadth. Old Mortality depicts Covenanter resistance during the “Killing Times,” while The Monastery and The Abbot narrate the Scottish Reformation and the fortunes of Mary, Queen of Scots. Scott, trained in law and serving as Sheriff‑Depute of Selkirkshire, brings a jurist’s sense of evidence and precedent to sectarian controversy. Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft surveys witch beliefs, second sight, and popular magic, setting them against Enlightenment skepticism and changing judicial standards after early modern witch trials. The Heart of Midlothian refracts questions of justice, mercy, and conscience through ordinary lives, linking moral law to public order.
Imperial circuits and long‑distance trade widen Scott’s canvas. The Surgeon’s Daughter follows East India Company medicine, patronage, and fortune‑seeking; The Two Drovers examines border economies and the legal ambiguities of seasonal migration. Chronicles of the Canongate frames provincial stories within Edinburgh’s legal and literary milieu, registering social mobility in a Britain joined by roads, posts, and colonies. Paul’s Letters to His Kinsfolk reports on post‑Waterloo France in 1815, capturing occupation, diplomacy, and everyday observation just after Europe’s settlement. These texts situate Scottish experience within a British and global network of capital, service, and communication in the early nineteenth century.
Urbanization, leisure industries, and print culture appear in Scott’s contemporary and near‑contemporary settings. St. Ronan’s Well depicts spa life—hotel sociability, newspapers, and fashion—as a microcosm of status competition and speculative enterprise. The Antiquary sets antiquarian clubs and military alarms amid fears of French invasion, exploring how local knowledge and national anxiety mingle in a coastal town. Short fiction for gift annuals—the Keepsake pieces such as My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror and The Tapestried Chamber—belongs to a booming market for illustrated miscellanies, made possible by improved engraving and expanding middle‑class readership, where Gothic and domestic curiosity met polite consumption.
Scott’s poems helped fix the Romantic image of Scotland. The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, and The Lady of the Lake, though earlier than many novels, popularized Border legends and Highland scenery, intensifying tourism to places like the Trossachs. Their chorography—careful mapping of terrain, castles, and routes—links landscape to memory and nationality. Scott also played a visible role in the 1822 visit of George IV to Edinburgh, encouraging tartan pageantry that reinforced a reconciled Scottish identity within the Union. The poetical works collected here thus document Romanticism’s fusion of topography, lineage, and national myth with modern travel and spectacle.
Drama in this collection shows Scott’s response to both national history and continental aesthetics. His 1790s translation of Goethe’s Götz of Berlichingen introduced British readers to Sturm und Drang’s rebellious medieval hero. Original plays like Halidon Hill revisit a 1333 Scottish defeat to examine chivalry and tactics; Auchindrane reworks a notorious Ayrshire feud from the early seventeenth century; Macduff’s Cross and The Doom of Devorgoil experiment with local legend and stagecraft. Though his plays had mixed theatrical fortunes, they illuminate the period’s fascination with historical tragedy and the contemporary stage culture connected to figures like John Philip Kemble and Michael Kelly.
Scott’s historical and biographical prose served mass education and nation‑making. The Life of John Dryden anchors Restoration literature in politics and patronage; Tales of a Grandfather (1827–30) narrates Scottish history for younger readers with clarity and sympathy; the vast Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1827) synthesizes memoirs and state papers for a broad audience soon after the wars. These works reflect a post‑Waterloo hunger for accessible history and the new publishing ventures that satisfied it. Scott combines anecdote with documentary citation, modeling a narrative historiography that Victorian writers and schoolrooms would adopt for decades.
His practical essays register Enlightenment “improvement” alongside Romantic taste. On Planting Waste Lands and On Landscape Gardening discuss afforestation, estate design, and the aesthetics of the picturesque, reflecting both agricultural modernization and the remaking of rural Scotland. Abbotsford itself functioned as a showplace for mixed farming, forestry, and historical display. Scott’s engagement with Salmonia (on fly‑fishing and natural observation) shows an interest in scientific leisure and the period’s polite discourse on nature. This material situates his fiction’s attention to land, enclosure, and tenure within the broader eighteenth‑ and nineteenth‑century program of environmental and social engineering.
Legal culture, folklore, and the limits of evidence run through the collection. The Trial of Duncan Terig alias Clerk, and Alexander Bane Macdonald preserves a notable Scottish criminal case associated with apparition testimony, a reminder of how belief and law intersected in the eighteenth century. Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft maps similar boundaries between testimony, superstition, and skepticism. The Heart of Midlothian’s treatment of mob action, clemency, and penal practice reflects ongoing debates about authority and reform. Scott’s own service as sheriff lent credibility to depictions of warrants, prisons, and petitions at a moment when British criminal justice was consolidating procedures and publicity.
Scott’s publication history mirrors the modernization of authorship. The Waverley Novels appeared anonymously from 1814, their secret fueling publicity and debate about authorship and value. His identity was openly acknowledged in 1827, followed by the “Magnum Opus” edition (1829–33) with authorial introductions and illustrations under publisher Robert Cadell. Three‑decker volumes, circulating libraries, stereotype plates, and improved engraving widened distribution at home and abroad. The Keepsake stories illustrate the annuals market built on steel‑plate illustration and gift‑book etiquette. Dickens’s reflections on Scott’s publishers situate these experiments within a volatile commercial environment reshaped by credit and competition.
Contemporary and later criticism chart changing tastes. Lockhart’s Memoirs (1837–38) established the canonical life; Richard H. Hutton and George Saintsbury offered Victorian and late‑Victorian reassessments of the style, ethics, and historical method. William Hazlitt’s early essay weighed popularity against poetic truth; Leslie Stephen considered Scott within the emergent tradition of the English novel; Henry James probed characterization and social breadth from a later nineteenth‑century vantage. Andrew Lang’s studies reconnected Scott to balladry and folklore. Victor Hugo’s tribute registers a continental reception that viewed Scott as architect of a democratic historical imagination, reconciling romance with documentary realism.
The short fiction underscores themes of mobility, honor, and belief across Britain and empire. The Two Drovers exposes Anglo‑Scottish misunderstandings within a common market; The Highland Widow considers conscription and clan duty after 1745; The Surgeon’s Daughter follows medical ambition into India’s patronage networks. The Keepsake pieces—My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror, The Tapestried Chamber, Death of the Laird’s Jock—adapt Gothic and border themes to an illustrated gift‑book format for a broad readership. Other brief narratives and curiosities show Scott’s appetite for anecdote, parody, and translation, mapping how periodicals and annuals circulated historical sentiment and supernatural speculation in polite society.
Synopsis (Selection)
Famous Authors on Scott
Victor Hugo's Sir Walter Scott and Lady Morgan places Scott within a European context, weighing his narrative power against another prominent novelist to illuminate differing ideals of romance and national character. The essay underscores Scott's union of history and imagination, framing him as a maker of modern legend while probing the cultural stakes of historical fiction.
Robert Louis Stevenson's Memories and Portraits offers reflective sketches in which Scott figures as a touchstone for artistry, character, and the pleasures of reading. The tone is affectionate yet discriminating, using personal recollection to show how Scott's storytelling shaped literary taste and a sense of moral adventure.
Charles Dickens's Scott and His Publishers examines the nexus between authorship and the book trade, using Scott's career to explore ambition, reputation, and the economics of success. It balances professional admiration with practical insight, highlighting how literary fame depends on both imagination and marketplace.
Early Scottish Waverley Novels: Waverley; Guy Mannering; The Antiquary
These foundational novels follow travelers, soldiers, and scholars drawn into the textures of Scottish life, where personal growth intersects with local custom and historical change. Scott blends romance with social comedy and antiquarian detail, using shifting loyalties and misunderstandings to test honor and identity. The tone moves from pastoral charm to brisk adventure, establishing the author’s signature balance of history, character, and place.
Pageant and Chivalry: Ivanhoe; Kenilworth; Quentin Durward; The Fair Maid of Perth; Anne of Geierstein
Set amid courts, tournaments, and city guilds, these romances stage conflicts of allegiance and ambition against vividly realized medieval and early modern backdrops. Scott juxtaposes spectacle with moral inquiry, showing how ceremony and reputation can both mask and reveal character. The tales prize swift plotting and color while probing the costs of loyalty, reputation, and reform.
Romance and Rebellion: Rob Roy; The Pirate; The Fortunes of Nigel; Peveril of the Peak; St. Ronan's Well; Redgauntlet; Woodstock
From Highland pathways and North Sea coasts to Stuart London and civil-war England, these novels place private fortunes amid political and social upheaval. Scott contrasts law, conscience, and clan or party loyalty, often using a stranger’s perspective to mediate between competing claims. Adventure and satire coexist, tracing the tensions between tradition and modern manners.
Tales of My Landlord I–III: Old Mortality; The Black Dwarf; The Heart of Midlothian; The Bride of Lammermoor; A Legend of Montrose
These interlinked cycles turn to justice, faith, and fate in times of national strain, from covenanting conflicts to personal trials. Scott pairs intimate moral quests with public turmoil, creating pathos from ordinary courage and the pressures of custom. The tone ranges from stark drama to tender realism, developing his theme of reconciliation without denying tragedy.
Tales of My Landlord IV: Count Robert of Paris; Castle Dangerous
These later tales widen the canvas to imperial courts and contested fortresses, where ceremony, siege, and culture-clash test chivalric codes. Scott emphasizes perilous hospitality, misread signals, and the ambiguities of honor under pressure. The mood is martial and reflective, weighing legend against lived experience.
Tales from Benedictine Sources: The Monastery; The Abbot
Centered on religious houses and the shifting ground of reform, these novels examine conscience, authority, and the pull of sacred tradition. Scott mixes gothic atmosphere with satire and domestic incident, showing how faith and policy reshape communities. The result is a study of allegiance where private vows meet public change.
Tales of the Crusaders: The Betrothed; The Talisman
These companion romances set vows of love and faith against crusading enterprise and frontier politics. Scott explores oath-keeping, misprision, and cross-cultural encounter, balancing pageantry with strategic maneuver. The tone is brisk and exotic, emphasizing magnanimity under trial.
Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand: A Tragedy (Translation)
This tragic chronicle follows a beleaguered knight whose iron will and emblazoned identity face shifting allegiances and fraught justice. The translation preserves a rugged blend of chivalric defiance and political realism. The atmosphere is stark and martial, attentive to honor’s limits in a fracturing order.
Stage Plays: Halidon Hill; Macduff's Cross; The Doom of Devorgoil; Auchindrane
These verse dramas condense Scott’s historical method into scenes of trial, combat, and family reckoning. Each play pits inherited duty against new pressures—legal, political, or supernatural—in spare, theatrical form. The tone is austere and tragic, emphasizing moral consequence over spectacle.
Chronicles of the Canongate
Framed as recollections gathered from varied lives, this collection showcases Scott’s interest in voice, local color, and the ethics of storytelling. The narrator’s wry distance highlights how memory and community shape reputation and justice. The mood is humane and observational, alternating between irony and sympathy.
The Highland Widow; The Two Drovers; The Surgeon’s Daughter pair crisp plots with charged cultural encounters—from clan custom and commercial rivalry to professional ambition. Scott examines miscommunication and honor’s demands, allowing small decisions to acquire grave weight. The stories are taut and sobering, notable for moral clarity without simplification.
The Keepsake Stories: My Aunt Margaret's Mirror; The Tapestried Chamber; Death of the Laird's Jock
These compact tales blend the uncanny with domestic and martial pathos, using visions, haunted spaces, and the afterglow of fame to test resolve. Scott favors suggestion over exposition, letting rumor and relics carry emotional force. The tone is elegiac and eerie, with precision of incident rather than breadth.
Other Short Stories: Christopher Corduroy; Phantasmagoria; The Inferno of Altisidora; A Highland Anecdote; Depravity Among Animals
These shorter pieces display Scott’s playful and satirical range, from light sketches and burlesque to moralized anecdote. They experiment with tone and topic, testing how voice and vignette can reveal habit, vanity, or communal wisdom. Concision and wit predominate, offering quick studies alongside the larger canvases of the novels.
Poetical Works
Scott’s poetry marries ballad vigor to narrative breadth, celebrating border landscapes, martial rhythms, and communal memory. He balances lyric sentiment with story drive, often staging honor, hospitality, and reprisal as songs of place. The style is accessible and stirring, a foundation for his later historical prose.
The Journal of Sir Walter Scott
This private record tracks the writer’s working days, travels, and shifting fortunes, revealing method, resilience, and appetite for detail. Observations on people and places sit beside plans and reckonings, giving a fuller portrait of temperament than fiction alone. The tone is candid and steady, attentive to duty and perspective.
Letters and Pamphlets: Paul's Letters to His Kinsfolk; Letters of Malachi Malagrowther; Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft
These epistolary works range from reportage and commentary to civic advocacy and cultural inquiry. A crafted persona sharpens debate on public matters, while the survey of demonology and witchcraft weighs folklore against reasoned skepticism. Together they show Scott’s public voice—topical, instructive, and wryly humane.
Historical and Biographical Studies: Tales of a Grandfather; The Life of John Dryden; The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte
Scott’s historical narratives join clarity with anecdote, making national and literary history intelligible without losing complexity. His life studies balance admiration with appraisal, tracing careers as cases in ambition, style, and statecraft. The tone is instructive and engaged, linking character to circumstance.
Various Articles and Essays: Reliques of Robert Burns; Life and Works of John Home; Life of Kemble — Kelly's Reminiscences; Salmonia; On Planting Waste Lands; On Landscape Gardening; Trial of Duncan Terig alias Clerk, and Alexander Bane Macdonald
This miscellany ranges from literary memorials and theatrical portraits to practical counsels on land and taste, and a close look at a notable trial. Scott shifts easily between affectionate tribute, critical overview, environmental advice, and case analysis. The pieces reveal a mind equally drawn to culture’s monuments and the workings of everyday improvement.
Biographies of Scott: George Saintsbury; Richard H. Hutton; J. G. Lockhart
These studies map Scott’s life, art, and reputation from concise critical profiles to an expansive memoir. They weigh achievement against context, tracing how a public storyteller forged a private ethic and a national image. The tone balances admiration with inquiry, showing the construction and endurance of Scott’s legend.
Andrew Lang’s View of Scott: Letters to Dead Authors; The Poems of Sir Walter Scott; Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy
Lang approaches Scott through imaginative address and critical appreciation, linking the poems to the living stream of song and story. He highlights cadence, folklore, and the shaping of tradition, showing how Scott mediates between oral past and printed present. The essays are genial and learned, valuing pleasure as a mode of criticism.
Critical Essays and Lectures on Scott: Henry James; Leslie Stephen; William Hazlitt; William Ker
These critics assess Scott’s narrative method, character drawing, and historical sense, debating breadth versus depth and romance versus realism. Their lectures and essays frame Scott as both popular entertainer and serious artist, testing the durability of his forms. The tone varies from analytic to rhetorical, together charting the evolution of Scott’s standing in literary debate.
The Complete Works of Sir Walter Scott (Illustrated)
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: —
