Sir Walter Scott

Sir Walter Scott

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Title: Sir Walter Scott (English Men of Letters Series)
Author: Richard H. Hutton
Release Date: April 5, 2006 [EBook #18124]
Language: English
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SIR WALTER SCOTT

BY

RICHARD H. HUTTON.

London:
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1878

PREFATORY NOTE.
It will be observed that the greater part of this little book has been taken
in one form or other from Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter Scott, in ten
volumes. No introduction to Scott would be worth much in which that
course was not followed. Indeed, excepting Sir Walter's own writings,
there is hardly any other great source of information about him; and
that is so full, that hardly anything needful to illustrate the subject of
Scott's life remains untouched. As regards the only matters of
controversy,--Scott's relations to the Ballantynes, I have taken care to
check Mr. Lockhart's statements by reading those of the representatives
of the Ballantyne brothers; but with this exception, Sir Walter's own
works and Lockhart's life of him are the great authorities concerning
his character and his story.
Just ten years ago Mr. Gladstone, in expressing to the late Mr. Hope
Scott the great delight which the perusal of Lockhart's life of Sir Walter
had given him, wrote, "I may be wrong, but I am vaguely under the
impression that it has never had a really wide circulation. If so, it is the
saddest pity, and I should greatly like (without any censure on its
present length) to see published an abbreviation of it." Mr. Gladstone
did not then know that as long ago as 1848 Mr. Lockhart did himself
prepare such an abbreviation, in which the original eighty-four chapters
were compressed into eighteen,--though the abbreviation contained
additions as well as compressions. But even this abridgment is itself a
bulky volume of 800 pages, containing, I should think, considerably
more than a third of the reading in the original ten volumes, and is not,

therefore, very likely to be preferred to the completer work. In some
respects I hope that this introduction may supply, better than that bulky
abbreviation, what Mr. Gladstone probably meant to suggest,--some
slight miniature taken from the great picture with care enough to tempt
on those who look on it to the study of the fuller life, as well as of that
image of Sir Walter which is impressed by his own hand upon his
works.

CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
ANCESTRY, PARENTAGE, AND CHILDHOOD
CHAPTER II.
YOUTH--CHOICE OF A PROFESSION
CHAPTER III.
LOVE AND MARRIAGE
CHAPTER IV.
EARLIEST POETRY AND BORDER MINSTRELSY
CHAPTER V.
SCOTT'S MATURER POEMS
CHAPTER VI.
COMPANIONS AND FRIENDS
CHAPTER VII.

FIRST COUNTRY HOMES
CHAPTER VIII.
REMOVAL TO ABBOTSFORD, AND LIFE THERE
CHAPTER IX.
SCOTT'S PARTNERSHIPS WITH THE BALLANTYNES
CHAPTER X.
THE WAVERLEY NOVELS
CHAPTER XI.
SCOTT'S MORALITY AND RELIGION
CHAPTER XII.
DISTRACTIONS AND AMUSEMENTS AT ABBOTSFORD
CHAPTER XIII.
SCOTT AND GEORGE IV
CHAPTER XIV.
SCOTT AS A POLITICIAN
CHAPTER XV.
SCOTT IN ADVERSITY
CHAPTER XVI.
THE LAST YEAR

CHAPTER XVII.
THE END OF THE STRUGGLE

SIR WALTER SCOTT.
CHAPTER I.
ANCESTRY, PARENTAGE, AND CHILDHOOD.
Sir Walter Scott was the first literary man of a great riding, sporting,
and fighting clan. Indeed, his father--a Writer to the Signet, or
Edinburgh solicitor--was the first of his race to adopt a town life and a
sedentary profession. Sir Walter was the lineal descendant--six
generations removed--of that Walter Scott commemorated in The Lay
of the Last Minstrel, who is known in Border history and legend as
Auld Wat of Harden. Auld Wat's son William, captured by Sir Gideon
Murray, of Elibank, during a raid of the Scotts on Sir Gideon's lands,
was, as tradition says, given his choice between being hanged on Sir
Gideon's private gallows, and marrying the ugliest of Sir Gideon's three
ugly daughters, Meikle-mouthed Meg, reputed as carrying off the prize
of ugliness among the women of four counties. Sir William was a
handsome man. He took three days to consider the alternative proposed
to him, but chose life with the large-mouthed lady in the end; and found
her, according to the tradition which the poet, her descendant, has
transmitted, an excellent wife, with a fine talent for pickling the beef
which her husband stole from the herds of his foes. Meikle-mouthed
Meg transmitted a distinct trace of her