Walter Scott: Waverley, Guy Mannering & The Antiquary (3 Books in One Edition). Walter Scott
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to wander in rags about the village, no sooner beheld him decently clothed, provided for, and even a sort of favourite, than they called up all the instances of sharpness and ingenuity, in action and repartee, which his annals afforded, and charitably bottomed thereupon a hypothesis that David Gellatley was no farther fool than was necessary to avoid hard labour. This opinion was not better founded than that of the Negroes, who, from the acute and mischievous pranks of the monkeys, suppose that they have the gift of speech, and only suppress their powers of elocution to escape being set to work. But the hypothesis was entirely imaginary; David Gellatley was in good earnest the half-crazed simpleton which he appeared, and was incapable of any constant and steady exertion. He had just so much solidity as kept on the windy side of insanity, so much wild wit as saved him from the imputation of idiocy, some dexterity in field-sports (in which we have known as great fools excel), great kindness and humanity in the treatment of animals entrusted to him, warm affections, a prodigious memory, and an ear for music.
The stamping of horses was now heard in the court, and Davie’s voice singing to the two large deer greyhounds,
Hie away, hie away,
Over bank and over brae,
Where the copsewood is the greenest,
Where the fountains glisten sheenest,
Where the lady-fern grows strongest,
Where the morning dew lies longest,
Where the black-cock sweetest sips it,
Where the fairy latest trips it.
Hie to haunts right seldom seen,
Lovely, lonesome, cool, and green,
Over bank and over brae,
Hie away, hie away.
‘Do the verses he sings,’ asked Waverley, ‘belong to old Scottish poetry, Miss Bradwardine?’
‘I believe not,’ she replied. ‘This poor creature had a brother, and Heaven, as if to compensate to the family Davie’s deficiencies, had given him what the hamlet thought uncommon talents. An uncle contrived to educate him for the Scottish kirk, but he could not get preferment because he came from our GROUND. He returned from college hopeless and brokenhearted, and fell into a decline. My father supported him till his death, which happened before he was nineteen. He played beautifully on the flute, and was supposed to have a great turn for poetry. He was affectionate and compassionate to his brother, who followed him like his shadow, and we think that from him Davie gathered many fragments of songs and music unlike those of this country. But if we ask him where he got such a fragment as he is now singing, he either answers with wild and long fits of laughter, or else breaks into tears of lamentation; but was never heard to give any explanation, or to mention his brother’s name since his death.’
‘Surely,’ said Edward, who was readily interested by a tale bordering on the romantic, ‘surely more might be learned by more particular inquiry.’
‘Perhaps so,’ answered Rose; ‘but my father will not permit any one to practise on his feelings on this subject.’
By this time the Baron, with the help of Mr. Saunderson, had indued a pair of jack-boots of large dimensions, and now invited our hero to follow him as he stalked clattering down the ample stair-case, tapping each huge balustrade as he passed with the butt of his massive horse-whip, and humming, with the air of a chasseur of Louis Quatorze, —
Pour la chasse ordonnee il faut preparer tout.
Ho la ho! Vite! vite debout!
33 The learned in cookery dissent from the Baron of Bradwardine, and hold the roe venison dry and indifferent food, unless when dressed in soup and Scotch collops.
Chapter XIII
A More Rational Day than the Last
The Baron of Bradwardine, mounted on an active and well-managed horse, and seated on a demi-pique saddle, with deep housings to agree with his livery, was no bad representative of the old school. His light-coloured embroidered coat, and superbly barred waistcoat, his brigadier wig, surmounted by a small gold-laced cocked-hat, completed his personal costume; but he was attended by two well-mounted servants on horseback, armed with holster-pistols.
In this guise he ambled forth over hill and valley, the admiration of every farm-yard which they passed in their progress, till, ‘low down in a grassy vale,’ they found David Gellatley leading two very tall deer greyhounds, and presiding over half a dozen curs, and about as many bare-legged and bare-headed boys, who, to procure the chosen distinction of attending on the chase, had not failed to tickle his ears with the dulcet appellation of Maister Gellatley, though probably all and each had hooted him on former occasions in the character of daft Davie. But this is no uncommon strain of flattery to persons in office, nor altogether confined to the barelegged villagers of Tully-Veolan; it was in fashion Sixty Years Since, is now, and will be six hundred years hence, if this admirable compound of folly and knavery, called the world, shall be then in existence.
These Gillie-wet-foots, as they were called, were destined to beat the bushes, which they performed with so much success, that, after half an hour’s search, a roe was started, coursed, and killed; the Baron following on his white horse, like Earl Percy of yore, and magnanimously flaying and embowelling the slain animal (which, he observed, was called by the French chasseurs, faire la curee) with his own baronial couteau de chasse. After this ceremony, he conducted his guest homeward by a pleasant and circuitous route, commanding an extensive prospect of different villages and houses, to each of which Mr. Bradwardine attached some anecdote of history or genealogy, told in language whimsical from prejudice and pedantry, but often respectable for the good sense and honourable feelings which his narrative displayed, and almost always curious, if not valuable, for the information they contained.
The truth is, the ride seemed agreeable to both gentlemen, because they found amusement in each other’s conversation, although their characters and habits of thinking were in many respects totally opposite. Edward, we have informed the reader, was warm in his feelings, wild and romantic in his ideas and in his taste of reading, with a strong disposition towards poetry. Mr Bradwardine was the reverse of all this, and piqued himself upon stalking through life with the same upright, starched, stoical gravity which distinguished his evening promenade upon the terrace of Tully-Veolan, where for hours together — the very model of old Hardyknute —
Stately stepp’d he east the wa’,
And stately stepp’d he west
As for literature, he read the classic poets, to be sure, and the ‘Epithalamium’ of Georgius Buchanan and Arthur Johnston’s Psalms, of a Sunday; and the ‘Deliciae Poetarum Scotorum,’ and Sir David Lindsay’s ‘Works’, and Barbour’s ‘Brace’, and Blind Harry’s ‘Wallace’, and ‘The Gentle Shepherd’, and ‘The Cherry and The Slae.’
But though he thus far sacrificed his time to the Muses, he would, if the truth must be spoken, have been much better pleased had the pious or sapient apothegms, as well as the historical narratives, which these various works contained, been presented to him in the form of simple prose. And he sometimes could not refrain from expressing contempt of the ‘vain and unprofitable art of poem-making’, in which, he said,‘the only one who had excelled in his time was Allan Ramsay, the periwigmaker.’ 34
But although Edward and he differed TOTO COELO, as the Baron would have said, upon this subject, yet they met upon history as on a neutral ground, in which each claimed an interest. The Baron, indeed, only cumbered his memory with matters of fact, the cold, dry, hard outlines which history delineates. Edward, on the contrary, loved to fill up and round the sketch with the colouring of a warm and vivid imagination, which gives light and life to the actors and speakers