NOVELS, FINANCIAL RUIN, DEATH
This period was the zenith of Scott’s apparent prosperity. Five thousand guineas were given, or were to be given, by Constable for the remaining copyright of Ivanhoe, The Monastery, The Abbot, and Kenilworth. “Scott must have reckoned on clearing £30,000 at least in the course of a couple of years, by the novels written within such a period,” says Lockhart. Constable granted bills for four unnamed and unimagined “works of fiction,” and they proved to be Peveril, Quentin Durward, St. Ronan’s Well, and Redgauntlet. Scott’s eldest son was now in an expensive cavalry regiment; his second son was preparing for the University, Abbotsford was growing in extent and expense, and Scott was keeping open house. Lockhart, then living in the tiny neighbouring cottage of Chiefswood, was a man who did not suffer bores gladly, and he saw Abbotsford full of bores of all kinds—inquisitive foreigners, University prigs, condescending great people, and local lairds with their families. He reckoned that at least a sixth
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 of the peerage of England passed through Abbotsford, and all the distinguished people of Scotland! With these came obscure citizens of Edinburgh, old college mates and office mates of Scott: “These were welcome guests, let who might be under that roof,” and Scott “contrived to make them all equally happy, with him, with themselves, and with each other.”
He was the genius of hospitality: he lavished his time on his guests, who had him with them for the whole of the day, except when he rode early to Chiefswood and wrote The Pirate on a bureau which remains in the cottage. He seemed the idlest of men, while scores of essays, and letters not to be counted, in addition to the novels, flowed from his pen in the unbroken hours of early morning. Only his extraordinary strength and buoyancy could enable him to be at once the most lavish host and the most prolific writer of his age, perhaps of any age. Merely to “refresh the machine” he was writing these admirable imitations of the correspondence of the sixteenth century which he called “Private Letters.” They might have deceived the elect of Antiquarians, but they could not have been popular with the public, though one character was a bona roba, an unaccustomed apparition in Sir Walter’s work. He threw the Letters aside, in his last days he fancied that he had
 
Abbotsford.
Photo by Valentine & Sons. Dundee.
“THE BEACON”
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finished them, and that they were a valuable asset. In fact, he turned from them and began Nigel, a romance of the same period, apparently before he had brought The Pirate to a close.
That “splendid romance,” as Lockhart calls it, based on Scott’s visit to the Orcades in 1814, was published in December 1821. Though the fair and dark sisters, Minna and Brenda, were popular, and Cleveland himself had a vogue, the humours of the Udaler and of the agriculturist were not enjoyed, and Norna of the Fitful Head, a kind of civilized Ulrica, was never much appreciated.
It is not necessary here to enter into the details about a luckless Tory newspaper, The Beacon, which had Scott’s support, but was conducted in an amateur and bludgeonly fashion, in spite of his advice. There was nothing but blundering and bad language, and Scott declined to see the paper. Yet he was one of its early supporters, and there is evidence suggesting (I have not seen this evidence) that he was nearly involved in a duel, while his friend, Sir Alexander Boswell of Auchinleck, was unfortunately shot in an affair arising out of a successor to The Beacon. “I have kept Lockhart out of this scrape, in which some of the young men are knee deep,” writes Sir Walter. “I hope,” he wrote to Lockhart, after Auchinleck’s duel, “that this catastrophe will end the species of per
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sonal satire and abuse which has crept into our political discussions. The lives of brave and good citizens were given them for other purposes than to mingle in such unworthy affrays.”
Nigel was published in May 1822, and Constable, who was in London, saw people reading it, in Macaulay’s fashion, as they walked along the streets. The ship which carried the edition arrived on a Sunday, by Monday 7,000 copies had been dispersed. So Constable asked Scott to write a trifle, like the poem of Halidon Hall (for which he paid £1,000) every quarter: every poem to be on a battle. Lockhart thought that Constable’s brain was “well nigh unsettled.” Quite unsettled, if he expected the public to buy £4,000 worth of battle poetry every year, while the press was producing 30,000 volumes of Peveril of the Peak. Ballantyne’s press was turning out at this date 145,000 volumes of works by Scott, and Constable was about buying an estate called Balniel. Yet, all the while, the old £12,000, the price for a set of copyrights, had not been and never was fully paid. There seems to have been the slenderest metallic basis for waggon loads of bills, which all concerned looked on as being as good as bullion.
“NIGEL”
The Fortunes of Nigel (May 1822) was the last novel written by Scott before his labours produced an ominous change in his health. It is, no
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 doubt, as Lockhart says, in the first rank of his romances. The story is vécu: Scott had lived as long among the dramas, pamphlets, histories, and documents of the late Elizabethan and the Jacobean times, as in any part of our history, and his Scottish types of character he knew by heart. All that Jacobean comedy, mainly the play of Ben Jonson, could tell him, he had fresh in his memory, or could “bring out with a wet finger.” Hence the brilliance and vivacity of the street scenes, the rufflers in Alsatia, the scenes at Court, and at the ordinary. He caught the moment when the heavy-hilted broad sword of the Scottish sire was becoming the long rapier of the Scottish son. In gentle King Jamie he had a model of which the grotesque absurdity needed pruning rather than exaggeration, and of all Scott’s many portraits of Kings, the slobbering trotting figure of James is the most truthful and the most comic. These moralists who denounce dissimulation and incontinence, Baby Charles and Steenie, are delicately touched: Ritchie Moniplies is a worthy pendant to Andrew Fairservice: the prentices are as excellent as the bullies and the old miser with his stern daughter in Alsatia: the whole life of Jacobean London is placed before us as vividly as the life of Georgian Edinburgh in The Heart of Midlothian. The “hero,” too, the unheroic hero, is, for once, a living and
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 even realistic character. The ancestral Puritanism of Nigel degenerates into the cautious gambling of “The Sparrow Hawk,” who plays with prentices for small sums, and takes care to leave off a winner. Nobody can deny that this is a natural metamorphosis, though the effect is to make us rather detest Nigel. He is supposed to throw off his mean vice, but he cannot be styled amiable. George Heriot is a better kind of man, and Ritchie is as superior to his master, morally, as Strap to Roderick Random. The young women of the tale, the pretty daughter of the goldsmith, and the mysterious lady, do not distinguish themselves among Scott’s young women. But the book is certainly in the foremost rank.
VISIT OF GEORGE IV
The visit of George IV to Edinburgh, with the death of Erskine, slain by a calumny at which most men would have laughed, put a strain upon Scott, in July and August 1822, from which he never recovered. The toil of organizing the reception of the first crowned King of England who had visited Scotland since 1650 fell upon Sir Walter. Scott was, in great part, the cause of the Royal visit, and his whole strength was given to organizing success. There was “a grand terryfication” (dramatization in the manner of Terry the actor) “of the Holyrood chapters in Waverley.” The Highlanders were much to the front, “all plaided and
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 plumed in their tartan array,” and the fat white legs of George IV appeared under the once forbidden philabeg. His Majesty, a man of vivid imagination, conceived himself to be a true Stuart, come to his own again; and Scott, himself in the Campbell tartan and trews, appears to have accepted him in that romantic character. He himself was the Baron Bradwardine of the hour, and we know how the Baron sat down on a glass which had touched the lips of His Most Sacred Majesty, and cut himself rather badly. In the sultry weather he “had to arrange everything, from the ordering of a procession to the cut of a button,” and he had also to amuse the perplexed old poet Crabbe, who seized on this frantic moment for a visit to a nation which he did not understand.
In one light the visit of George was very well. It reconciled the furious feuds which had raged around The Beacon, and it was a proof that Scotland, at last, was content with the Hanoverian in the disguise of the Stuart dynasty. The Highland chiefs were anxious about their precedence, which is said to have depended on the station occupied by each clan at Bannockburn, a point probably to be decided on the extremely diverse traditions of the clan bards or sennachies. Scott, aided by General Stewart of Garth, the historian of the Highland regiments, was the Montrose who brought harmony
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 among the clans, no easy task where Glengarry and Clanranald were at odds about the chiefship of the Macdonalds, and Cluny and Mackintosh were not of one mind as to the headship of Clan Chattan. Be it remarked that, when in tartans, Scott wore the trews, not the philabeg. Glengarry, whether in the philabeg or not, rode in the procession, followed by “Tail,” pedestrians. The King, and Sir William Curtis, a stout dignitary of London town, both wore the Royal Stuart tartans, invented, it was said, for Prince Charles. No Stuart king, of course, had ever worn the Highland costume, except in expeditions beyond the Highland line. These amusing pageantries were “making every brain dizzy but his own,” when the death of Erskine, the mild, quiet, timid man who had been his dearest friend, fell upon Scott.
The main results of “the right royal row,” as Scott called it, were that, by his suggestion, the attainders of 1715 and 1745 were redressed, and that Scott, pursued to Abbotsford by crowds of guests, appears to have suffered from a slight seizure of an apoplectic kind. “I have not been very well,” he wrote to Terry in November, “a whoreson thickness of blood, and a depression of spirits arising from the loss of friends ... have annoyed me much, and Peveril will, I fear, smell of the apoplexy.” This, says Lockhart, is the first allusion
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 to Sir Walter’s fatal malady, the malady which had caused the death of his father. Lockhart suspected that he had sustained and concealed slight attacks of this nature. The machine was showing signs of overwork, which appear in the straggling Peveril of the Peak with its missed opportunities. Yet Quentin Durward was in progress in company with Peveril, and there is no smell of the apoplexy in that stirring tale, which made Scott’s fortune in France. The pictures of Louis XI, of his strange funereal servitors, of the delightful Le Balafré, a pendant of Dugald Dalgetty, with the bustling events of the story, have won popularity, though the romance, at first, was received with little enthusiasm. Perhaps this coldness, or a relapse into commonsense, made Constable announce that he would enter into no more bargains for books not only unchristened but unborn. The novels were appearing in uniform collected editions: the market was glutted. Scott thought of a set of dialogues on “superstitious” beliefs, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and witchcraft, as an alternative to romance. But the public was, by this time, solely devoted to fiction. Quentin Durward, too, began to sell in the old way, and Scott postponed his dealings with things
On the margin grey
’Twixt the soul’s life and day.
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Scott had written no novel of contemporary society since The Antiquary, and Laidlaw, on the Eildon hill above Melrose, suggested a romance of the little town, in the actual year, 1823. The hint resulted in St. Ronan’s Well (December 1823); the scene is not Melrose, but the Spa of Innerleithen on the upper Tweed. The plot of St. Ronan’s Well was paralyzed by the prudery of James Ballantyne. A mischance on the part of the heroine was suppressed, to please James, consequently there is no reason in life for Clara’s ruined brain, or for anything else that is essential to the progress and conclusion of the narrative. There is a similar error, caused by a remonstrance from Jeffrey, in Dombey and Son, where the conduct of Edith towards Mr. Carker is inexplicable, as it is perfectly clear, from a passage which Dickens vainly tried to explain away, that Edith had been Mr. Carker’s mistress. The third or fourth rate society of the Spa may be true to nature, but is neither convincing nor amusing, and Meg Dods cannot cover the multitude of sins of confusion in St. Ronan’s Well. Miss Edgeworth wrote that the author of the last thirty pages of the book should be “carbonadoed,” and, practically, James Ballantyne would have been the sufferer, for he was the only begetter of the “incredible and unaccountable conclusion.”
“REDGAUNTLET”
Meanwhile a very different romance, the last of
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 Scott’s before ruin fell on him, was in progress, Redgauntlet. In Redgauntlet we may surely say that Scott has found himself again, at his best, or very nearly at his best. The form of narrative, partly told in letters, as by Richardson, is no longer popular, and we are not sorry when the author deserts it. The plot of the story is rather baffling, and, as the tale goes on, we almost forget our curiosity as to why Darsie Latimer should not go near the English border. The reason, when we do learn it, is far fetched, Darsie was not worth all that mechanism of intrigue. But the pictures of old Edinburgh life about 1763, of Scott’s own father as the elder Fairford, with his good heart, and his “pernickety” ascetic lawyer’s ways, is delightful. Peter Peebles, the litigant maddened by law and drink, is pathetic no less than humorous; if the legal business appears dull, it is, none the less, or perhaps the more, Balzacian, supposing Balzac to have had the humour of Dumas. The Quakers are borrowed from what Scott saw, in boyhood, of a Quaker household at Kelso. Excellent is Geddes’s nonresisting courage, and his shamefaced pride in his armorial bearings, the ged, or pike, the freebooter of fresh water. The scene of salmon spearing on the Solway flats is a description of a sport dear to Scott as pursued in a boat on Tweed. Things like huge snow-shoes were used in my boy
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hood, the spearman stood erect above the water, one foot in each wooden shoe, he could spear a fish between them, and the exercise demanded much gift of balance, and a cool head, while the torches flared above the swift black running waters. Green-Mantle again recalls the Manteau Vert of Scott’s youth. He borrowed the horse-shoe frown of old Redgauntlet from the face of the wicked witch, the sister of the Wizard, Major Weir, in the legend given by Sinclair, in “Satan’s Invisible World Disclosed,” and he also borrowed thence the name of the jackanapes in “Wandering Willie’s Tale.” The scenes in the mysterious Redgauntlet’s cottage are as good romance as those in the Provost’s house at Dumfries, with the story of “Pate in Peril” are good comedy. The brokenhearted Nanty Ewart is full of an original pathos not common in Scott; his story of his own life of miserable adventure, with the foreknowledge of his doom, is a masterpiece, and as a masterpiece “the fallen and faded Ascanius” of the tale, Prince Charles, the battered stately wanderer, with the despotic mistress, was universally accepted.
“REDGAUNTLET”
There is evidence that the Prince really did pursue his fleeting vision of a crown into England, in 1763, and was actually seen by Murray, the actor, a friend of Scott’s, then a boy. When the Prince was in England, in disguise, there is always a com
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plete break in his correspondence, and I find such a gap at this period. He still had a few adherents, and would stray across the Channel to see and frighten them, and slip back again to his hermit life at Bouillon. Miss Walkinshaw, the original of the lady who accompanies him in the tale, had forsaken him at the date of the romance, and she was not a fair but a dark beauty. There is a mournful grace in Charles’ last good-bye to the few Jacobite gentry who surround him in the novel when “there was an end of an auld song.” The romance “contains perhaps more of the author’s personal experiences than any other, or even than all of them put together.” As for “Wandering Willie’s Tale,” the corrections and admirable additions in the proof sheets show p. 118 that this chef d’oeuvre, unlike “the rest of them,” was written with all the care that it deserved. If it has anything to be called a rival, that rival is Mr. Stevenson’s story of about the same period, in the latest dusk of the day of the Covenant, Thrawn Janet. But there is no rivalry—Scott’s legend is unapproachable.
There was but this one novel in 1824; if Scott’s advisers concealed from him the relative slackness of his sales, they did not hesitate to warn him against “over-cropping.” He wrote his tribute to Byron, on the news of the poet’s death, and he
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 worked at a new edition of his Swift. As a Director of the Edinburgh Academy, founded in this year, Scott remarked that he did not love his country better than truth, and that Dr. Johnson was not wholly wrong when he said that, in learning, “every Scot had a mouthful and none had a bellyful.” Boys were now to learn Greek earlier, and to learn more Greek than in his own days at the High School. In fact the new school has produced some Grecians of merit and distinction in its eighty years of existence. Scott did not tell the boys that of Greek he had less than Shakespeare, and he despised the contemptible clamour over his own famous brace of false quantities in the two elegiac lines for the epitaph of his deerhound Maida. One of the false quantities, after all, was the fault of a transcriber who wrote “jaces” in place of “dormis”; that transcriber was James Ballantyne. “We could have written as good longs and shorts as the English, if it had not been for the—Covenant,” an old gentleman used to say, but Porson opened Buchanan on a false quantity, and surely Dr. Pitcairn erred when he began his famous epitaph on Dundee (admirably Englished into poetry by Dryden)—“Ultime Scotorum.” Yet he could hardly write Ultime Pictorum, and so save his prosody at the expense of his ethnology.
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THE FIRST AND LAST BALL
“Surely if Sir Walter Scott be not a happy man, which he seems truly to be, he deserves to be so,” wrote Basil Hall at Abbotsford in the Christmas of 1824. January 7, 1825, saw “the first regular ball given at Abbotsford—and the last.” As in Marmion,
It was his blithest and his last.
The occasion of the festivity was the wedding of Scott’s eldest son, a young cavalry officer “of strict and even severe principles,” to a Miss Jobson, of Lochore, “with a fortune of £50,000 in land.” The name of Jobson is neither suggestive of wealth nor of heraldic additions to the quarterings of the Scotts. Sir Walter speaks of his daughter-in-law with unconcealed affection; she was a pretty, shy, candid, innocent girl, in the manner of Rose Bradwardine. The lovers lately wed crossed to Ireland, where the Regiment was quartered, and whither Scott himself went for a holiday later in 1825. Scott now backed the credit of his friend, the actor manager Terry, for £1,250, plus £500 guaranteed by James Ballantyne. Whoever lends a friend money for the purposes of his business is absolutely certain to see no more of the coins, and to lend Terry money, Terry being a manager and lessee of a theatre, was laying the longest possible odds on a hopeless horse. Like Steenie denouncing incon
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tinence, and Baby Charles reproving dissimulation, Scott read Terry a lecture against raising money by bills and discounts, a ruinous system, he declared, very wisely, which was assiduously practised by Constable, and Ballantyne & Co.
“NAPOLEON”
Constable now had a new project, which Lockhart describes with infinite humour. We have mentioned evidence given before a Parliamentary Commission, to the effect that libraries ceased to be formed about the time when Waverley appeared (1814). The same evidence showed that real books had never prospered since cheap little volumes of boiled down information, the tinned meats of the intellectual life, were introduced. It was Constable who now introduced them. He came out to Abbotsford enormously big with a project. He unloaded himself of a packet, the annual schedule of assessed taxes. From the items of taxes paid on many things which profit not, such as hair powder, he inferred, justly, that the British public spent money on every thing conceivable, except books. Hundreds of thousands of people had obviously plenty of money, and in the article of books alone did they economize. Scott remarked that all down Tweed were the houses of lairds of whom none spent £10 yearly on literature. Of course they did not, and of course they do not, and never will. One extravagance our countrymen and country
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-women avoid, as they would the devil, and that is buying a book. They are like the Highland crofter who was implored to give at least five shillings to the “Sustentation Fund,” and for the salvation of his immortal part. “Me give five shillings to save my soul! I haena five shillings to buy mysel’ tobacco!”
Constable admitted that the gentry were content with a magazine, and, at most, a subscription to a circulating library. But he would produce books so cheap and good that even the gentry would buy them. To the sanguine soul of the projector this seemed a splendid speculation, though even he did not think of sinking to a sixpenny price. Monthly volumes at half-a-crown or three-and-sixpence were in his eye, as if the public could afford to give nearly forty shillings annually for books. The public “has not time,” setting the pecuniary extravagance aside, to read twelve volumes yearly. However Scott accepted the golden dream, and proposed a short Life of Napoleon. It grew into ten tomes of Constable’s Miscellany, and was mainly written after Sir Walter’s ruin, in eighteen months. A critic mentions a dozen people then alive in England, including Carlyle, who could have done a better Life of Napoleon. Perhaps they could have done it, “if they had the mind,” but certainly they could not have done it better
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 than Scott, in eighteen months. Constable provided about a hundred volumes of Le Moniteur, and quantities of printed works, as materials, while MSS. were collected. But no Life written at that time could be satisfactory; most documents were inaccessible, and Scott made great use of second-hand authorities. Though the book won £18,000 for Sir Walter’s creditors, and though it is very readable, the task work (and few forms of drudgery are so tedious as history writing in a hurry) did not suit Scott, and adds nothing to his reputation.
RUIN
THE BALLANTYNE FIRM
Meanwhile he wrote The Betrothed, which Ballantyne discouraged, and The Talisman, a work as pleasing to boyhood as Ivanhoe. We all have been fond of Coeur de Lion, and hated Conrad de Montserrat, and adored Saladin. The book was amazingly popular, and Woodstock was undertaken next, and finished when the evil days began. Scott now made a pleasant tour in Ireland, and visited Wordsworth on his homeward way. The two poets eternally quoted the Bard of Rydal, but not the most distant allusion was made by either, says Lockhart, to the verses of the Minstrel of the Forest. On returning to Abbotsford it was a sad sight for Lockhart to see Sir Walter “read, note, and index with the pertinacity of some pale compiler in the British Museum,” for the Napoleon,
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 and rising from his toil, “not radiant and buoyant,” but with an aching brow and weary eyes. Lockhart himself was leaving Scotland for London, and the editorial chair of The Quarterly Review. The shadows were thickening in the prison house, and the health of Scott’s grandson, Lockhart’s son, was of all the shadows the deepest. There were to be no more happy summers in the cottage of Chiefswood—the scene, many years later, of happiness cujus pars fui. In November 1825, Lockhart, in London, wrote a long letter to Scott on rumours unfavourable to Constable’s solvency. He anticipated nothing worse for Scott than the loss of the price of Woodstock. Returning to Chiefswood, he received a letter of warning, and showed it to Scott, who made a night journey to see Constable, who reassured him. Lockhart now suspected that Scott was deeply concerned in his publisher’s affairs. On November 20 Scott began his famous Journal, now published in full. On December 22 he wrote Bonny Dundee, new words to an old tune, accompanying ribald words, in which the town, not the Viscount of Dundee, is “bonny.” “I wonder if the verses are good,” Scott notes, and laments poor Will Erskine—“thou couldst and wouldst have told me.” The song is his latest and not least splendid tribute to Claverhouse, and rings across the Empire with its
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 “cavalry canter.” On Christmas Day Scott wrote, “I have a particular call for gratitude.” “Thus does Fortune banter us.” The earliest notes of 1826 show Scott already anxious about the money affairs of Ballantyne and Constable. They also (January 5) show him “much alarmed” by a sudden attack of agraphia, impotence to write the words he would. He explained this as the result of an anodyne, for his old complaint had returned with its cruel agonies. On January 11 there is “anxious botheration about the money market.” On January 14 there comes a mysterious letter from Constable, then in London, where he made to Lockhart wild proposals for advances of huge sums by Scott. On January 16, in Edinburgh, the blow fell. “Hurst and Robinson let a bill come back upon Constable.” Nevertheless Scott dined with Mr. Skene of Rubislaw, whose little daughter, recently dead at a great age, regretted by all who knew her, was a child friend and consoler of Sir Walter. Next day came James Ballantyne “with a face as black as the crook”: Ballantyne & Co. must suspend payment. Scott at once consulted Mr. John Gibson, W.S., and, as he would not consent to be made bankrupt, his affairs were put under trustees, acting for the creditors. If bankrupt, his financial position would improve, his future gains would be his own. But he at once braced himself
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 to pay off everybody, pledging brain and life to that colossal task. He did not as yet know the full extent of his losses.
By the admission of one of Ballantyne’s trustees, the books of the firm, eleven years later, were still unbalanced. Into the affair of the bills and counter bills between Ballantyne and Constable, whereby, according to Lockhart, Scott’s business debts were doubled, it is not possible to go in this place. Ballantyne’s representatives regarded the whole story as the result of a confusion in the mind of Lockhart. But Lockhart’s source was Mr. Cadell, the partner of Constable, and Mr. Cadell, in 1837, stood by his guns, and sent confirmatory documents. “John Ballantyne suggested the double bills!”[7] Scott never blamed James Ballantyne, who owed to him, he said, his difficulties in the present as well as his prosperity in the past. But the books of the firm were never balanced! Without balance-sheets, and there were none, how could Scott know the amount of his liabilities? But, again, why did he not extort accounts from the lazy James? Lockhart himself meted out the blame to all concerned, as far as his knowledge, instructed by Mr. Cadell, enabled him to do. He was blamed by the Press for making precisely the statements which he never made. Scott, to his
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 own loss, insisted on employing James Ballantyne alone as his printer after 1826. But he transferred his publishing business from Constable to Cadell, with good reason. Constable “was all spectral together.” As late as 1851 Lockhart wrote that “the details of Scott’s commercial perplexities remain in great measure inexplicable.” Scott himself (January 29) writes: “Constable’s business seems unintelligible ... neither stock nor debt to show. No doubt trading almost entirely on accommodation is dreadfully expensive.” So Scott had just warned Terry!
“WOODSTOCK”
From his old rival, Sir William Forbes, from the Royal Bank, from an unknown person, offering £30,000, Scott had many proffers of assistance. But he took the whole debt, £117,000, on his own shoulders, he borrowed from no man, he lived retired, and worked at Woodstock steadily throughout the days which brought Job’s messengers of ruin. “I experience a sort of determined pleasure,” he said to Skene, “in confronting the very worst aspect of this sudden reverse....” His mind was free from the awful apprehension caused by his attack of agraphia. “Few have more reason to feel grateful to the Disposer of all than I have.” Any spleen which Scott may have felt, he worked off in Malachi Malagrowther’s Letters, a criticism of an effort made by his own party to
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 dethrone the Scot’s one pound note, the Palladium of the ancient kingdom.
On March 15 Scott left his house in Castle Street for the last time. Ha til mi tulidh—“I return no more!” The words are those of the lament of Macleod’s second-sighted piper, foreseeing his own fall in The Rout of Moy (1746). At Abbotsford he finished Woodstock on March 26. The book sold for £8,228, a first instalment of the Sisyphean task of payment.
Tastes differ, but to myself Woodstock seems to possess great merits. Considering the circumstances in which it was written, it is a wonderful book. Cromwell is not the conventional hypocrite of the then current estimate: he is a religious man, something of a mystic, involved in politics, and displaying the habitual “jesuitry” of political religious men. Wildrake is a tipsy cavalier of the best, and of the best in his song for King Charles. The various Puritan officers, and their various conduct in face of the poltergeist, or noisy devil of Woodstock, are excellently discriminated. Scott never could remember where he read that “Funny Joe of Oxford” confessed to being the poltergeist, nor have I been able to discover his source. My earliest trace of the explanation is in Joseph Taylor’s Apparitions (1815, Second Edition). Taylor gives us Funny Joe Collins, his pulvis fulminans,
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 and all the rest of it, almost in the same words as Scott’s, who must have possessed Taylor’s book. But who goes bail for Funny Joe? If he did make a confession, how did it escape Dr. Plot, whose Natural History of Oxfordshire is one of Scott&r............