The Complete Autobiographical Writings of Sir Walter Scott. Walter Scott
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few comedies act better. After this came Rob Roy, where the Bailie played with his usual excellence. The piece was not over until near one in the morning, yet I did not feel tired — which is much.
March 7. — To-day I wrought and corrected proof-sheets; went to the Court, and had a worry at the usual trashy small wares which are presented at the end of a Session. An official predecessor of mine, the facetious Robert Sinclair, was wont to say the three last days of the Session should be abolished by Act of Parliament. Came home late, and was a good deal broken in upon by visitors. Amongst others, John Swinton, now of Swinton, brought me the skull of his ancestor, Sir Allan Swinton, who flourished five hundred years ago. I will get a cast made of the stout old carle. It is rare to see a genuine relic of the mortal frame drawing so far back. Went to my Lord Gillies’s to dinner, and witnessed a singular exhibition of personification.
Miss Stirling Grame, a lady of the Duntroon family, from which Clavers was descended, looks like thirty years old, and has a face of the Scottish cast, with a good expression in point of good sense and good humour. Her conversation, so far as I have had the advantage of hearing it, is shrewd and sensible, but no ways brilliant. She dined with us, went off as to the play, and returned in the character of an old Scottish lady. Her dress and behaviour were admirable, and the conversation unique. I was in the secret, of course, did my best to keep up the ball, but she cut me out of all feather. The prosing account she gave of her son, the antiquary, who found an auld wig in a slate quarry, was extremely ludicrous, and she puzzled the Professor of Agriculture with a merciless account of the succession of crops in the parks around her old mansion-house. No person to whom the secret was not intrusted had the least guess of an impostor, except one shrewd young lady present, who observed the hand narrowly and saw it was plumper than the age of the lady seemed to warrant. This lady, and Miss Bell of Coldstream, have this gift of personification to a much higher degree than any person I ever saw.
March 8. — Wrote in the morning, then to Court, where we had a sederunt till nigh two o’clock. From thence to the Coal Gas Committee, with whom we held another, and, thank God, a final meeting. Gibson went with me. They had Mr. Munro, Trotter, Tom Burns, and Inglis. The scene put me in mind of Chichester Cheyne’s story of a Shawnee Indian and himself, dodging each other from behind trees, for six or seven hours, each in the hope of a successful shot. There was bullying on both sides, but we bullied to best purpose, for we must have surrendered at discretion, notwithstanding the bold face we put on it. On the other hand, I am convinced they have got a capital bargain.
March 9. — I set about arranging my papers, a task which I always take up with the greatest possible illwill and which makes me cruelly nervous. I don’t know why it should be so, for I have nothing particularly disagreeable to look at; far from it, I am better than I was at this time last year, my hopes firmer, my health stronger, my affairs bettered and bettering. Yet I feel an inexpressible nervousness in consequence of this employment. The memory, though it retains all that has passed, has closed sternly over it; and this rummaging, like a bucket dropped suddenly into a well, deranges and confuses the ideas which slumbered on the mind. I am nervous, and I am bilious, and, in a word, I am unhappy. This is wrong, very wrong; and it is reasonably to be apprehended that something of serious misfortune will be the deserved punishment of this pusillanimous lowness of spirits. Strange that one who, in most things, may be said to have enough of the ‘care na by’, should be subject to such vile weakness! Well, having written myself down an ass, I will daub it no farther, but e’en trifle till the humour of work comes.
Before the humour came I had two or three long visits. Drummond Hay, the antiquary and lyon-herald, came in. I do not know anything which relieves the mind so much from the sullens as trifling discussion about antiquarian oldwomanries. It is like knitting a stocking, diverting the mind without occupying it; or it is like, by Our Lady, a milldam, which leads one’s thoughts gently and imperceptibly out of the channel in which they are chafing and boiling. To be sure, it is only conducting them to turn a child’s mill; what signifies that? — the diversion is a relief, though the object is of little importance. I cannot tell what we talked of; but I remember we concluded with a lamentation on the unlikelihood that Government would give the Museum £2000 to purchase the bronze Apollo lately discovered in France, although the God of Delos stands six feet two in his stocking-soles, and is perfectly entire, saving that on the right side he wants half a hip, and the leg from the knee, and that on the left his heel is much damaged. Colonel Ferguson just come to town — dines with us.
March 10. — I had a world of trumpery to do this morning: cards to write, and business to transact, visits to make, etc. Received letters from the youth who is to conduct The Keepsake, with blarney on a £200 Bank note. No blarney in that. I must set about doing something for these worthies. I was obliged to go alone to dine at Mr. Scott Gala’s. Met the Sinclair family. Lady Sinclair told me a singular story of a decrepit man keeping a lonely toll at a place called the Rowan-tree, on the frontiers, as I understood, between Ayrshire and Dumfriesshire [Wigtownshire?]. It was a wild, lonely spot, and was formerly inhabited by robbers and assassins, who murdered passengers. They were discovered by a boy whom they had taken into the cottage as a menial. He had seen things which aroused his attention, and was finally enlightened as to the trade of his masters by hearing one of them, as he killed a goat, remark that the cries of the creature resembled those of the last man they had dealt with. The boy fled from the house, lodged an information, and the whole household was seized and executed. The present inhabitants Lady Sinclair described as interesting. The man’s feet and legs had been frost-bitten while herding the cattle, and never recovered the strength of natural limbs. Yet he had acquired some education, and was a country schoolmaster for some time, till the distance and loneliness of the spot prevented pupils from attending. His daughter was a reader, and begged for some old magazines, newspapers, or any printed book, that she might enjoy reading. They might have been better had they been allowed to keep a cow. But if they had been in comfortable circumstances, they would have had visitors and lodgers, who might have carried guns to destroy the gentleman’s creation, i.e. game; and for this risk the wretches were kept in absolute and abject poverty. I would rather be — himself than this brutal Earl. The daughter showed Lady Sinclair a well in the midst of a small bog, of great depth, into which, like Thurtell and Probert, they used to thrust the bodies of their victims till they had an opportunity of burying them. Lady Sinclair stooped to taste the water, but the young woman said, with a strong expression of horror, “You would not drink it?” Such an impression had the tale, probably two centuries old, made upon the present inhabitants of this melancholy spot. The whole legend is curious; I will try to get hold of it.
March 11. — I sent Reynolds a sketch of two Scottish stories for subjects of art for his Keepsake — the death of the Laird’s Jock the one, the other the adventure of Duncan Stuart with the stag.
Mr. Drummond Hay breakfasted with me — a good fellow, but a considerable bore. He brought me a beautiful bronze statue of Hercules, about ten inches or a foot in height, beautifully wrought. He bought it in France for 70 francs, and refused £300 from Payne Knight. It is certainly a most beautiful piece of art. The lion’s hide which hung over the shoulders had been of silver, and, to turn it to account, the arm over which it hung was cut off; otherwise the statue was perfect and extremely well wrought. Allan Swinton’s skull sent back to Archibald Swinton.
March 12. — The boy got four leaves of copy to-day, and I wrote three more. Received by Mr. Cadell from Treuttel and Wurtz for articles in Foreign Review £52, 10s., which is at my credit with him. Poor Gillies has therefore kept his word so far, but it is enough to have sacrificed £100 to him already in literary labour, which I make him welcome to. I cannot spare him more — which, besides, would do him no good.
March 13, [Abbotsford]. — I wrote a little in the morning and sent off some copy. We came off from Edinburgh at ten o’clock, and got to Abbotsford by four, where everything looks unusually advanced; the birds singing and the hedges budding, and all other prospects of spring too premature to be rejoiced in.
I found that, like the foolish virgins, the servants had omitted to get oil for my lamp, so I was obliged to be idle all the evening. But though I had a diverting book, the Tales of the Munster Festivals, yet an evening without