Walter Scott - The Man Behind the Books. Walter Scott
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in the New Year with the usual forms of song and flagon.
Looking back to the conclusion of 1826, I observe that the last year ended in trouble and sickness, with pressures for the present and gloomy prospects for the future. The sense of a great privation so lately sustained, together with the very doubtful and clouded nature of my private affairs, pressed hard upon my mind. I am now perfectly well in constitution; and though I am still on troubled waters, yet I am rowing with the tide, and less than the continuation of my exertions of 1827 may, with God’s blessing, carry me successfully through 1828, when we may gain a more open sea, if not exactly a safe port. Above all, my children are well. Sophia’s situation excites some natural anxiety; but it is only the accomplishment of the burthen imposed on her sex. Walter is happy in the view of his majority, on which matter we have favourable hopes from the Duke of Wellington. Anne is well and happy. Charles’s entry upon life under the highest patronage, and in a line for which I hope he is qualified, is about to take place presently.
For all these great blessings it becomes me well to be thankful to God, who in his good time and good pleasure sends us good as well as evil.
1828 — January
“As I walked by myself,
I talked to myself,
And thus myself said to me.”
January 1. — Since the 20th November 1825, for two months that is, and two years, I have kept this custom of a diary. That it has made me wiser or better I dare not say, but it shows by its progress that I am capable of keeping a resolution. Perhaps I should not congratulate myself on this; perhaps it only serves to show I am more a man of method and less a man of originality, and have no longer that vivacity of fancy that is inconsistent with regular labour. Still, should this be the case, I should, having lost the one, be happy to find myself still possessed of the other.
January 2. — Cæcæ mentes hominum. — My last entry records my punctuality in keeping up my diary hitherto; my present labour, commenced notwithstanding the date, upon the 9th January, is to make up my little record betwixt the second and that latter date. In a word, I have been several days in arrear without rhyme or reason, — days too when there was so little to write down that the least jotting would have done it. This must not be in future.
January 3. — Our friends begin to disperse. Mrs. Ellis, who has been indisposed for the last two days, will I hope bear her journey to London well. She is the relict of my dear old friend George Ellis, who had more wit, learning, and knowledge of the world than would fit out twenty literati. The Hardens remained to-day, and I had a long walk with the laird up the Glen, and so forth. He seemed a little tired, and, with all due devotion to my Chief, I was not sorry to triumph over some one in point of activity at my time of day.
January 4. — Visited by Mr. Stewart of Dalguise, who came to collect materials for a description of Abbotsford, to be given with a drawing in a large work, Views of Gentlemen’s Seats. Mr. Stewart is a wellinformed gentlemanlike young man, grave and quiet, yet possessed of a sense of humour. I must take care he does not in civility over-puff my little assemblage of curiosities. Scarce anything can be meaner than the vanity which details the contents of China closets, — basins, ewers, and chamberpots. Horace Walpole, with all his talents, makes a silly figure when he gives an upholsterer’s catalogue of his goods and chattels at Strawberry Hill.
January 5. — This day I began to review Taschereau’s Life of Molière for Mr. Gillies, who is crying help for God’s sake. Messrs. Treuttel and Wurtz offer guerdon. I shall accept, because it is doing Gillies no good to let him have my labour for nothing, and an article is about £100. In my pocket it may form a fund to help this poor gentleman or others at a pinch; in his, I fear it would only encourage a neglect of sober economy. When in his prosperity he asked me whether there was not, in my opinion, something interesting in a man of genius being in embarrassed circumstances. God knows he has had enough of them since, poor fellow; and it should be remembered that if he thus dallied with his good fortune, his benevolence to others was boundless.
We had the agreeable intelligence of Sophia being safely delivered of a girl; the mother and child doing well. Praised be God!
January 6. — I have a letter from the Duke of Wellington, making no promises, but assuring me of a favourable consideration of Walter’s case, should an opening occur for the majority. This same step is represented as the most important, but so in their time were the lieutenancy and the troop. Each in its turn was the step par excellence. It appears that these same steps are those of a treadmill, where the party is always ascending and never gains the top. But the same simile would suit most pursuits in life.
The Misses Kerr left us on Friday — two charming young persons, well-looked, well-mannered, and well-born; above all, well-principled. They sing together in a very delightful manner, and our evenings are the duller without them.
I am annoyed beyond measure with the idle intrusion of voluntary correspondents; each man who has a pen, ink, and sheet of foolscap to spare, flies a letter at me. I believe the postage costs me £100 [a year], besides innumerable franks; and all the letters regard the writer’s own hopes or projects, or are filled with unasked advice or extravagant requests. I think this evil increases rather than diminishes. On the other hand, I must fairly own that I have received many communications in this way worth all the trouble and expense that the others cost me, so I must “lay the head of the sow to the tail of the grice,” as the proverb elegantly expresses itself.
News again of Sophia and baby. Mrs. Hughes thinks the infant a beauty. Johnnie opines that it is not very pretty, and grandpapa supposes it to be like other new-born children, which are as like as a basket of oranges.
January 7. — Wrought at the review, and finished a good lot of it. Mr. Stewart left us, amply provided with the history of Abbotsford and its contents. It is a kind of Conundrum Castle to be sure, and I have great pleasure in it, for while it pleases a fantastic person in the style and manner of its architecture and decoration, it has all the comforts of a commodious habitation.
Besides the review, I have been for this week busily employed in revising for the press the Tales of a Grandfather. Cadell rather wished to rush it out by employing three different presses, but this I repressed (smoke the pun!). I will not have poor James Ballantyne driven off the plank to which we are all three clinging. I have made great additions to volume first, and several of these Tales; and I care not who knows it, I think well of them. Nay, I will hash history with anybody, be he who he will. I do not know but it would be wise to let romantic composition rest, and turn my mind to the history of England, France, and Ireland, to be da capo rota’d, as well as that of Scotland. Men would laugh at me as an author for Mr. Newbery’s shop in Paul’s Churchyard. I should care little for that. Virginibus puerisque. I would as soon compose histories for boys and girls, which may be useful, as fictions for children of a larger growth, which can at best be only idle folk’s entertainment. But write what I will, or to whom I will, I am doggedly determined to write myself out of the present scrape by any labour that is fair and honest.
January 8. — Despatched my review (in part), and in the morning walked from Chiefswood, all about the shearing flats, and home by the new walk, which I have called the Bride’s Walk, because Jane was nearly stuck fast in the bog there, just after her marriage, in the beginning of 1825.
My post brings serious intelligence to-day, and of a very pleasing description. Longman and Company, with a reserve which marks all their proceedings, suddenly inform Mr. Gibson that they desire 1000 of the 8vo edition of St. Ronan’s Well, and the subsequent series of Novels thereunto belonging, for that they have only seven remaining, and wish it to be sent to their printers, and pushed out in three months. Thus this great house, without giving any previous notice of the state of the sale, expect all to be boot and saddle, horse and away, whenever they give the signal. In the present case this may do, because I will make neither alteration nor