Waverley

EDITOR’S NOTE.

The purpose of the added matter in this edition of the Waverley Novels—a
reprint of the magnum opus of 1829–1832—is to give to the stories
their historical setting, by stating the circumstances in which they were
composed and made their first appearance.

Sir Walter’s own delightful Introductions, written hastily, as Lockhart
says, and with a failing memory, have occasionally been corrected by Lockhart
himself. His “Life of Scott” must always be our first and best
source, but fragments of information may be gleaned from Sir Walter’s
unpublished correspondence.

The Editor owes to the kindness of Mrs. Maxwell Scott permission to examine the
twenty-four large volumes of letters to Sir Walter, and some other manuscripts,
which are preserved at Abbotsford. These yield but little of contemporary
criticism or remark, as is natural, for Scott shared his secret with few, and
most topics were more grateful to him than his own writings. Lockhart left
little for his successors to do, and the more any one studies the Abbotsford
manuscripts, the more must he admire the industry and tact of Scott’s
biographer.

The Editor has also put together some examples of contemporary published
criticism which it is now not uninteresting to glance over. In selecting these
he has been aided by the kindness of Mrs. Ogilbie. From the Abbotsford
manuscripts and other sources he has added notes on points which have become
obscure by lapse of time. He has especially to thank, for their courteous and
ready assistance, Lady Napier and Ettrick, who lent him Sir Walter’s
letters to her kinswoman, the Marchioness of Abercorn; Mr. David Douglas, the
editor and publisher of Scott’s “Journal,” who has generously
given the help of his antiquarian knowledge; and Mr. David MacRitchie, who
permitted him to use the corrected proofs of “Redgauntlet.”

ANDREW LANG

ADVERTISEMENT TO THE WAVERLEY NOVELS

It has been the occasional occupation of the Author of “Waverley”,
for several years past, to revise and correct the voluminous series of Novels
which pass under that name, in order that, if they should ever appear as his
avowed productions, he might render them in some degree deserving of a
continuance of the public favour with which they have been honoured ever since
their first appearance. For a long period, however, it seemed likely that the
improved and illustrated edition which he meditated would be a posthumous
publication. But the course of the events which occasioned the disclosure of
the Author’s name having, in a great measure, restored to him a sort of
parental control over these Works, he is naturally induced to give them to the
press in a corrected, and, he hopes, an improved form, while life and health
permit the task of revising and illustrating them. Such being his purpose, it
is necessary to say a few words on the plan of the proposed Edition.

In stating it to be revised and corrected, it is not to be inferred that any
attempt is made to alter the tenor of the stories, the character of the actors,
or the spirit of the dialogue. There is no doubt ample room for emendation in
all these points,—but where the tree falls it must lie. Any attempt to
obviate criticism, however just, by altering a work already in the hands of the
public is generally unsuccessful. In the most improbable fiction, the reader
still desires some air of vraisemblance, and does not relish that the
incidents of a tale familiar to him should be altered to suit the taste of
critics, or the caprice of the Author himself. This process of feeling is so
natural, that it may be observed even in children, who cannot endure that a
nursery story should be repeated to them differently from the manner in which
it was first told.

But without altering, in the slightest degree, either the story or the mode of
telling it, the Author has taken this opportunity to correct errors of the
press and slips of the pen. That such should exist cannot be wondered at, when
it is considered that the Publishers found it their interest to hurry through
the press a succession of the early editions of the various Novels, and that
the Author had not the usual opportunity of revision. It is hoped that the
present edition will be found free from errors of that accidental kind.

The Author has also ventured to make some emendations of a different character,
which, without being such apparent deviations from the original stories as to
disturb the reader’s old associations, will, he thinks, add something to
the spirit of the dialogue, narrative, or description. These consist in
occasional pruning where the language is redundant, compression where the style
is loose, infusion of vigour where it is languid, the exchange of less forcible
for more appropriate epithets—slight alterations in short, like the last
touches of an artist, which contribute to heighten and finish the picture,
though an inexperienced eye can hardly detect in what they consist.

The General Preface to the new Edition, and the Introductory Notices to each
separate work, will contain an account of such circumstances attending the
first publication of the Novels and Tales as may appear interesting in
themselves, or proper to be communicated to the public. The Author also
proposes to publish, on this occasion, the various legends, family traditions,
or obscure historical facts which have formed the ground-work of these Novels,
and to give some account of the places where the scenes are laid, when these
are altogether, or in part, real; as well as a statement of particular
incidents founded on fact; together with a more copious Glossary, and Notes
explanatory of the ancient customs and popular superstitions referred to in the
Romances.

Upon the whole, it is hoped that the Waverley Novels, in their new dress, will
not be found to have lost any part of their attractions in consequence of
receiving illustrations by the Author, and undergoing his careful revision.

ABBOTSFORD, January, 1829.

GENERAL PREFACE TO THE WAVERLEY NOVELS

And must I ravel out
My weaved-up follies?
          Richard II, Act IV.

Having undertaken to give an Introductory Account of the compositions which are
here offered to the public, with Notes and Illustrations, the Author, under
whose name they are now for the first time collected, feels that he has the
delicate task of speaking more of himself and his personal concerns than may
perhaps be either graceful or prudent. In this particular he runs the risk of
presenting himself to the public in the relation that the dumb wife in the
jest-book held to her husband, when, having spent half of his fortune to obtain
the cure of her imperfection, he was willing to have bestowed the other half to
restore her to her former condition. But this is a risk inseparable from the
task which the Author has undertaken, and he can only promise to be as little
of an egotist as the situation will permit. It is perhaps an indifferent sign
of a disposition to keep his word, that, having introduced himself in the third
person singular, he proceeds in the second paragraph to make use of the first.
But it appears to him that the seeming modesty connected with the former mode
of writing is overbalanced by the inconvenience of stiffness and affectation
which attends it during a narrative of some length, and which may be observed
less or more in every work in which the third person is used, from the
Commentaries of Cæsar to the Autobiography of Alexander the
Corrector.(a)[*]

[* See Editor’s Notes at the end of the Volume. Wherever a similar
reference occurs, the reader will understand that the same direction applies.]

I must refer to a very early period of my life, were I to point out my first
achievements as a tale-teller; but I believe some of my old schoolfellows can
still bear witness that I had a distinguished character for that talent, at a
time when the applause of my companions was my recompense for the disgraces and
punishments which the future romance-writer incurred for being idle himself,
and keeping others idle, during hours that should have been employed on our
tasks. The chief enjoyment of my holidays was to escape with a chosen friend,
(b) who had the same taste with myself, and alternately to recite to
each other such wild adventures as we were able to devise. We told, each in
turn, interminable tales of knight-errantry and battles and enchantments, which
were continued from one day to another as opportunity offered, without our ever
thinking of bringing them to a conclusion. As we observed a strict secrecy on
the subject of this intercourse, it acquired all the character of a concealed
pleasure, and we used to select for the scenes of our indulgence long walks
through the solitary and romantic environs of Arthur’s Seat, Salisbury
Crags, Braid Hills, and similar places in the vicinity of Edinburgh; and the
recollection of those holidays still forms an oasis in the pilgrimage which I
have to look back upon. I have only to add, that my friend still lives, a
prosperous gentleman, but too much occupied with graver business to thank me
for indicating him more plainly as a confidant of my childish mystery.

When boyhood advancing into youth required more serious studies and graver
cares, a long illness threw me back on the kingdom of fiction, as if it were by
a species of fatality. My indisposition arose, in part at least, from my having
broken a blood-vessel; and motion and speech were for a long time pronounced
positively dangerous. For several weeks I was confined strictly to my bed,
during which time I was not allowed to speak above a whisper, to eat more than
a spoonful or two of boiled rice, or to have more covering than one thin
counterpane. When the reader is informed that I was at this time a growing
youth, with the spirits, appetite, and impatience of fifteen, and suffered, of
course, greatly under this severe regimen, which the repeated return of my
disorder rendered indispensable, he will not be surprised that I was abandoned
to my own discretion, so far as reading (my almost sole amusement) was
concerned, and still less so, that I abused the indulgence which left my time
so much at my own disposal.

There was at this time a circulating library in Edinburgh, founded, I believe,
by the celebrated Allan Ramsay, which, besides containing a most respectable
collection of books of every description, was, as might have been expected,
peculiarly rich in works of fiction. It exhibited specimens of every kind, from
the romances of chivalry and the ponderous folios of Cyrus and Cassandra, down
to the most approved works of later times. I was plunged into this great ocean
of reading without compass or pilot; and, unless when some one had the charity
to play at chess with me, I was allowed to do nothing save read from morning to
night. I was, in kindness and pity, which was perhaps erroneous, however
natural, permitted to select my subjects of study at my own pleasure, upon the
same principle that the humours of children are indulged to keep them out of
mischief. As my taste and appetite were gratified in nothing else, I
indemnified myself by becoming a glutton of books. Accordingly, I believe I
read almost all the romances, old plays, and epic poetry in that formidable
collection, and no doubt was unconsciously amassing materials for the task in
which it has been my lot to be so much employed.

At the same time I did not in all respects abuse the license permitted me.
Familiar acquaintance with the specious miracles of fiction brought with it
some degree of satiety, and I began by degrees to seek in histories, memoirs,
voyages and travels, and the like, events nearly as wonderful as those which
were the work of imagination, with the additional advantage that they were at
least in a great measure true. The lapse of nearly two years, during which I
was left to the exercise of my own free will, was followed by a temporary
residence in the country, where I was again very lonely but for the amusement
which I derived from a good though old-fashioned library. The vague and wild
use which I made of this advantage I cannot describe better than by referring
my reader to the desultory studies of Waverley in a similar situation, the
passages concerning whose course of reading were imitated from recollections of
my own. It must be understood that the resemblance extends no farther.

Time, as it glided on, brought the blessings of confirmed health and personal
strength, to a degree which had never been expected or hoped for. The severe
studies necessary to render me fit for my profession occupied the greater part
of my time; and the society of my friends and companions, who were about to
enter life along with, me, filled up the interval with the usual amusements of
young men. I was in a situation which rendered serious labour indispensable;
for, neither possessing, on the one hand, any of those peculiar advantages
which are supposed to favour a hasty advance in the profession of the law, nor
being, on the other hand, exposed to unusual obstacles to interrupt my
progress, I might reasonably expect to succeed according to the greater or less
degree of trouble which I should take to qualify myself as a pleader.

It makes no part of the present story to detail how the success of a few
ballads had the effect of changing all the purpose and tenor of my life, and of
converting a painstaking lawyer of some years’ standing into a follower
of literature. It is enough to say, that I had assumed the latter character for
several years before I seriously thought of attempting a work of imagination in
prose, although one or two of my poetical attempts did not differ from romances
otherwise than by being written in verse. But yet I may observe, that about
this time (now, alas! thirty years since) I had nourished the ambitious desire
of composing a tale of chivalry, which was to be in the style of the
“Castle of Otranto”, with plenty of Border characters and
supernatural incident. Having found unexpectedly a chapter of this intended
work among some old papers, I have subjoined it to this introductory essay,
thinking some readers may account as curious the first attempts at romantic
composition by an author who has since written so much in that department.[*]
And those who complain, not unreasonably, of the profusion of the Tales which
have followed Waverley, may bless their stars at the narrow escape they have
made, by the commencement of the inundation, which had so nearly taken place in
the first year of the century, being postponed for fifteen years later.

[* See the fragment alluded to, in the Appendix No I.]

This particular subject was never resumed, but I did not abandon the idea of
fictitious composition in prose, though I determined to give another turn to
the style of the work.

My early recollections of the Highland scenery and customs made so favourable
an impression in the poem called the “Lady of the Lake” that I was
induced to think of attempting something of the same kind in prose. I had been
a good deal in the Highlands at a time when they were much less accessible and
much less visited than they have been of late years, and was acquainted with
many of the old warriors of 1745, who were, like most veterans, easily induced
to fight their battles over again for the benefit of a willing listener like
myself. It naturally occurred to me that the ancient traditions and high spirit
of a people who, living in a civilised age and country, retained so strong a
tincture of manners belonging to an early period of society, must afford a
subject favourable for romance, if it should not prove a curious tale marred in
the telling.

It was with some idea of this kind that, about the year 1805, I threw together
about one-third part of the first volume of “Waverley.” It was
advertised to be published by the late Mr. John Ballantyne, bookseller in
Edinburgh, under the name of “Waverley; or, ’Tis Fifty Years
Since,”—a title afterwards altered to ’Tis Sixty Years Since,
that the actual date of publication might be made to correspond with the period
in which the scene was laid. Having proceeded as far, I think, as the seventh
chapter, I showed my work to a critical friend, whose opinion was unfavourable;
and having then some poetical reputation, I was unwilling to risk the loss of
it by attempting a new style of composition. I therefore threw aside the work I
had commenced, without either reluctance or remonstrance. I ought to add that,
though my ingenious friend’s sentence was afterwards reversed on an
appeal to the public, it cannot be considered as any imputation on his good
taste; for the specimen subjected to his criticism did not extend beyond the
departure of the hero for Scotland, and consequently had not entered upon the
part of the story which was finally found most interesting.

Be that as it may, this portion of the manuscript was laid aside in the drawers
of an old writing-desk, which, on my first coming to reside at Abbotsford in
1811, was placed in a lumber garret and entirely forgotten. Thus, though I
sometimes, among other literary avocations, turned my thoughts to the
continuation of the romance which I had commenced, yet, as I could not find
what I had already written, after searching such repositories as were within my
reach, and was too indolent to attempt to write it anew from memory, I as often
laid aside all thoughts of that nature.

Two circumstances in particular recalled my recollection of the mislaid
manuscript. The first was the extended and well-merited fame of Miss Edgeworth,
whose Irish characters have gone so far to make the English familiar with the
character of their gay and kind-hearted neighbours of Ireland, that she may be
truly said to have done more towards completing the Union than perhaps all the
legislative enactments by which it has been followed up.

Without being so presumptuous as to hope to emulate the rich humour, pathetic
tenderness, and admirable tact which pervade the works of my accomplished
friend, I felt that something might be attempted for my own country, of the
same kind with that which Miss Edgeworth so fortunately achieved for
Ireland—something which might introduce her natives to those of the
sister kingdom in a more favourable light than they had been placed hitherto,
and tend to procure sympathy for their virtues and indulgence for their
foibles. I thought also, that much of what I wanted in talent might be made up
by the intimate acquaintance with the subject which I could lay claim to
possess, as having travelled through most parts of Scotland, both Highland and
Lowland, having been familiar with the elder as well as more modern race, and
having had from my infancy free and unrestrained communication with all ranks
of my countrymen, from the Scottish peer to the Scottish plough-man. Such ideas
often occurred to me, and constituted an ambitious branch of my theory, however
far short I may have fallen of it in practice.

But it was not only the triumphs of Miss Edgeworth which worked in me
emulation, and disturbed my indolence. I chanced actually to engage in a work
which formed a sort of essay piece, and gave me hope that I might in time
become free of the craft of romance-writing, and be esteemed a tolerable
workman.

In the year 1807–08 I undertook, at the request of John Murray, Esq., of
Albemarle Street, to arrange for publication some posthumous productions of the
late Mr. Joseph Strutt, distinguished as an artist and an antiquary, amongst
which was an unfinished romance, entitled “Queen-Hoo Hall.” The
scene of the tale was laid in the reign of Henry VI., and the work was written
to illustrate the manners, customs, and language of the people of England
during that period. The extensive acquaintance which Mr. Strutt had acquired
with such subjects in compiling his laborious “Horda Angel-Cynnan,”
his “Royal and Ecclesiastical Antiquities,” and his “Essay on
the Sports and Pastimes of the People of England,” had rendered him
familiar with all the antiquarian lore necessary for the purpose of composing
the projected romance; and although the manuscript bore the marks of hurry and
incoherence natural to the first rough draught of the author, it evinced (in my
opinion) considerable powers of imagination.

As the work was unfinished, I deemed it my duty, as editor, to supply such a
hasty and inartificial conclusion as could be shaped out from the story, of
which Mr. Strutt had laid the foundation. This concluding chapter[*] is also
added to the present Introduction, for the reason already mentioned regarding
the preceding fragment. It was a step in my advance towards romantic
composition; and to preserve the traces of these is in a great measure the
object of this Essay.

[* See Appendix, No. II.]

“Queen-Hoo Hall” was not, however, very successful. I thought I was
aware of the reason, and supposed that, by rendering his language too ancient,
and displaying his antiquarian knowledge too liberally, the ingenious author
had raised up an obstacle to his own success. Every work designed for mere
amusement must be expressed in language easily comprehended; and when, as is
sometimes the case in “Queen-Hoo Hall,” the author addresses
himself exclusively to the antiquary, he must be content to be dismissed by the
general reader with the criticism of Mungo, in the “Padlock,” on
the Mauritanian music, “What signifies me hear, if me no
understand?”

I conceived it possible to avoid this error; and, by rendering a similar work
more light and obvious to general comprehension, to escape the rock on which my
predecessor was shipwrecked. But I was, on the other hand, so far discouraged
by the indifferent reception of Mr. Strutt’s romance as to become
satisfied that the manners of the middle ages did not possess the interest
which I had conceived; and was led to form the opinion that a romance founded
on a Highland story and more modern events would have a better chance of
popularity than a tale of chivalry. My thoughts, therefore, returned more than
once to the tale which I had actually commenced, and accident at length threw
the lost sheets in my way.

I happened to want some fishing-tackle for the use of a guest, when it occurred
to me to search the old writing-desk already mentioned, in which I used to keep
articles of that nature. I got access to it with some difficulty; and, in
looking for lines and flies, the long-lost manuscript presented itself. I
immediately set to work to complete it according to my original purpose. And
here I must frankly confess that the mode in which I conducted the story
scarcely deserved the success which the romance afterwards attained.

The tale of “Waverley” was put together with so little care that I
cannot boast of having sketched any distinct plan of the work. The whole
adventures of Waverley, in his movements up and down the country with the
Highland cateran Bean Lean, are managed without much skill. It suited best,
however, the road I wanted to travel, and permitted me to introduce some
descriptions of scenery and manners, to which the reality gave an interest
which the powers of the Author might have otherwise failed to attain for them.
And though I have been in other instances a sinner in this sort, I do not
recollect any of these novels in which I have transgressed so widely as in the
first of the series.

Among other unfounded reports, it has been said that the copyright of
“Waverley” was, during the book’s progress through the press,
offered for sale to various book-sellers in London at a very inconsiderable
price. This was not the case. Messrs. Constable and Cadell, who published the
work, were the only persons acquainted with the contents of the publication,
and they offered a large sum for it while in the course of printing, which,
however, was declined, the Author not choosing to part with the copyright.

The origin of the story of “Waverley,” and the particular facts on
which it is founded, are given in the separate introduction prefixed to that
romance in this edition, and require no notice in this place.

“Waverley” was published in 1814, and, as the title-page was
without the name of the Author, the work was left to win its way in the world
without any of the usual recommendations. Its progress was for some time slow;
but after the first two or three months its popularity had increased in a
degree which must have satisfied the expectations of the Author, had these been
far more sanguine than he ever entertained.

Great anxiety was expressed to learn the name of the Author, but on this no
authentic information could be attained. My original motive for publishing the
work anonymously was the consciousness that it was an experiment on the public
taste which might very probably fail, and therefore there was no occasion to
take on myself the personal risk of discomfiture. For this purpose considerable
precautions were used to preserve secrecy. My old friend and schoolfellow, Mr.
James Ballantyne, who printed these Novels, had the exclusive task of
corresponding with the Author, who thus had not only the advantage of his
professional talents, but also of his critical abilities. The original
manuscript, or, as it is technically called, copy, was transcribed under Mr.
Ballantyne’s eye by confidential persons; nor was there an instance of
treachery during the many years in which these precautions were resorted to,
although various individuals were employed at different times. Double
proof-sheets were regularly printed off. One was forwarded to the Author by Mr.
Ballantyne, and the alterations which it received were, by his own hand, copied
upon the other proof-sheet for the use of the printers, so that even the
corrected proofs of the Author were never seen in the printing office; and thus
the curiosity of such eager inquirers as made the most minute investigation was
entirely at fault.

But although the cause of concealing the Author’s name in the first
instance, when the reception of “Waverley” was doubtful, was
natural enough, it is more difficult, it may be thought, to account for the
same desire for secrecy during the subsequent editions, to the amount of
betwixt eleven and twelve thousand copies, which followed each other close, and
proved the success of the work. I am sorry I can give little satisfaction to
queries on this subject. I have already stated elsewhere that I can render
little better reason for choosing to remain anonymous than by saying with
Shylock, that such was my humour. It will be observed that I had not the usual
stimulus for desiring personal reputation, the desire, namely, to float amidst
the conversation of men. Of literary fame, whether merited or undeserved, I had
already as much as might have contented a mind more ambitious than mine; and in
entering into this new contest for reputation I might be said rather to
endanger what I had than to have any considerable chance of acquiring more. I
was affected, too, by none of those motives which, at an earlier period of
life, would doubtless have operated upon me. My friendships were formed, my
place in society fixed, my life had attained its middle course. My condition in
society was higher perhaps than I deserved, certainly as high as I wished, and
there was scarce any degree of literary success which could have greatly
altered or improved my personal condition.

I was not, therefore, touched by the spur of ambition, usually stimulating on
such occasions; and yet I ought to stand exculpated from the charge of
ungracious or unbecoming indifference to public applause. I did not the less
feel gratitude for the public favour, although I did not proclaim it; as the
lover who wears his mistress’s favour in his bosom is as proud, though
not so vain, of possessing it as another who displays the token of her grace
upon his bonnet. Far from such an ungracious state of mind, I have seldom felt
more satisfaction than when, returning from a pleasure voyage, I found
“Waverley” in the zenith of popularity, and public curiosity in
full cry after the name of the Author. The knowledge that I had the public
approbation was like having the property of a hidden treasure, not less
gratifying to the owner than if all the world knew that it was his own. Another
advantage was connected with the secrecy which I observed. I could appear or
retreat from the stage at pleasure, without attracting any personal notice or
attention, other than what might be founded on suspicion only. In my own person
also, as a successful author in another department of literature, I might have
been charged with too frequent intrusions on the public patience; but the
Author of “Waverley” was in this respect as impassible to the
critic as the Ghost of Hamlet to the partisan of Marcellus. Perhaps the
curiosity of the public, irritated by the existence of a secret, and kept
afloat by the discussions which took place on the subject from time to time,
went a good way to maintain an unabated interest in these frequent
publications. There was a mystery concerning the Author which each new novel
was expected to assist in unravelling, although it might in other respects rank
lower than its predecessors.

I may perhaps be thought guilty of affectation, should I allege as one reason
of my silence a secret dislike to enter on personal discussions concerning my
own literary labours. It is in every case a dangerous intercourse for an author
to be dwelling continually among those who make his writings a frequent and
familiar subject of conversation, but who must necessarily be partial judges of
works composed in their own society. The habits of self-importance which are
thus acquired by authors are highly injurious to a well-regulated mind; for the
cup of flattery, if it does not, like that of Circe, reduce men to the level of
beasts, is sure, if eagerly drained, to bring the best and the ablest down to
that of fools. This risk was in some degree prevented by the mask which I wore;
and my own stores of self-conceit were left to their natural course, without
being enhanced by the partiality of friends or adulation of flatterers.

If I am asked further reasons for the conduct I have long observed, I can only
resort to the explanation supplied by a critic as friendly as he is
intelligent; namely, that the mental organisation of the novelist must be
characterised, to speak craniologically, by an extraordinary development of the
passion for delitescency! I the rather suspect some natural disposition of this
kind; for, from the instant I perceived the extreme curiosity manifested on the
subject, I felt a secret satisfaction in baffling it, for which, when its
unimportance is considered, I do not well know how to account.

My desire to remain concealed, in the character of the Author of these Novels,
subjected me occasionally to awkward embarrassments, as it sometimes happened
that those who were sufficiently intimate with me would put the question in
direct terms. In this case, only one of three courses could be followed. Either
I must have surrendered my secret, or have returned an equivocating answer, or,
finally, must have stoutly and boldly denied the fact. The first was a
sacrifice which I conceive no one had a right to force from me, since I alone
was concerned in the matter. The alternative of rendering a doubtful answer
must have left me open to the degrading suspicion that I was not unwilling to
assume the merit (if there was any) which I dared not absolutely lay claim to;
or those who might think more justly of me must have received such an equivocal
answer as an indirect avowal. I therefore considered myself entitled, like an
accused person put upon trial, to refuse giving my own evidence to my own
conviction, and flatly to deny all that could not be proved against me. At the
same time I usually qualified my denial by stating that, had I been the Author
of these works, I would have felt myself quite entitled to protect my secret by
refusing my own evidence, when it was asked for to accomplish a discovery of
what I desired to conceal.

The real truth is, that I never expected or hoped to disguise my connection
with these Novels from any one who lived on terms of intimacy with me. The
number of coincidences which necessarily existed between narratives recounted,
modes of expression, and opinions broached in these Tales and such as were used
by their Author in the intercourse of private life must have been far too great
to permit any of my familiar acquaintances to doubt the identity betwixt their
friend and the Author of “Waverley;” and I believe they were all
morally convinced of it. But while I was myself silent, their belief could not
weigh much more with the world than that of others; their opinions and
reasoning were liable to be taxed with partiality, or confronted with opposing
arguments and opinions; and the question was not so much whether I should be
generally acknowledged to be the Author, in spite of my own denial, as whether
even my own avowal of the works, if such should be made, would be sufficient to
put me in undisputed possession of that character.

I have been often asked concerning supposed cases, in which I was said to have
been placed on the verge of discovery; but, as I maintained my point with the
composure of a lawyer of thirty years’ standing, I never recollect being
in pain or confusion on the subject. In Captain Medwyn’s
“Conversations of Lord Byron” the reporter states himself to have
asked my noble and highly gifted friend, “If he was certain about these
Novels being Sir Walter Scott’s?” To which Lord Byron replied,
“Scott as much as owned himself the Author of ‘Waverley’ to
me in Murray’s shop. I was talking to him about that Novel, and lamented
that its Author had not carried back the story nearer to the time of the
Revolution. Scott, entirely off his guard, replied, ‘Ay, I might have
done so; but—’ there he stopped. It was in vain to attempt to
correct himself; he looked confused, and relieved his embarrassment by a
precipitate retreat.” I have no recollection whatever of this scene
taking place, and I should have thought that I was more likely to have laughed
than to appear confused, for I certainly never hoped to impose upon Lord Byron
in a case of the kind; and from the manner in which he uniformly expressed
himself, I knew his opinion was entirely formed, and that any disclamations of
mine would only have savoured of affectation. I do not mean to insinuate that
the incident did not happen, but only that it could hardly have occurred
exactly under the circumstances narrated, without my recollecting something
positive on the subject. In another part of the same volume Lord Byron is
reported to have expressed a supposition that the cause of my not avowing
myself the Author of “Waverley” may have been some surmise that the
reigning family would have been displeased with the work. I can only say, it is
the last apprehension I should have entertained, as indeed the inscription to
these volumes sufficiently proves. The sufferers of that melancholy period
have, during the last and present reign, been honoured both with the sympathy
and protection of the reigning family, whose magnanimity can well pardon a sigh
from others, and bestow one themselves, to the memory of brave opponents, who
did nothing in hate, but all in honour.

While those who were in habitual intercourse with the real author had little
hesitation in assigning the literary property to him, others, and those critics
of no mean rank, employed themselves in investigating with persevering patience
any characteristic features which might seem to betray the origin of these
Novels. Amongst these, one gentleman, equally remarkable for the kind and
liberal tone of his criticism, the acuteness of his reasoning, and the very
gentlemanlike manner in which he conducted his inquiries, displayed not only
powers of accurate investigation, but a temper of mind deserving to be employed
on a subject of much greater importance; and I have no doubt made converts to
his opinion of almost all who thought the point worthy of consideration.[*] Of
those letters, and other attempts of the same kind, the Author could not
complain, though his incognito was endangered. He had challenged the public to
a game at bo-peep, and if he was discovered in his “hiding-hole,”
he must submit to the shame of detection.

[* Letters on the Author of Waverley; Rodwell and Martin, London,
1822.(d)]

Various reports were of course circulated in various ways; some founded on an
inaccurate rehearsal of what may have been partly real, some on circumstances
having no concern whatever with the subject, and others on the invention of
some importunate persons, who might perhaps imagine that the readiest mode of
forcing the Author to disclose himself was to assign some dishonourable and
discreditable cause for his silence.

It may be easily supposed that this sort of inquisition was treated with
contempt by the person whom it principally regarded; as, among all the rumours
that were current, there was only one, and that as unfounded as the others,
which had nevertheless some alliance to probability, and indeed might have
proved in some degree true.

I allude to a report which ascribed a great part, or the whole, of these Novels
to the late Thomas Scott, Esq., of the 70th Regiment, then stationed in Canada.
Those who remember that gentleman will readily grant that, with general talents
at least equal to those of his elder brother, he added a power of social humour
and a deep insight into human character which rendered him an universally
delightful member of society, and that the habit of composition alone was
wanting to render him equally successful as a writer. The Author of
“Waverley” was so persuaded of the truth of this, that he warmly
pressed his brother to make such an experiment, and willingly undertook all the
trouble of correcting and superintending the press. Mr. Thomas Scott seemed at
first very well disposed to embrace the proposal, and had even fixed on a
subject and a hero. The latter was a person well known to both of us in our
boyish years, from having displayed some strong traits of character. Mr. T.
Scott had determined to represent his youthful acquaintance as emigrating to
America, and encountering the dangers and hardships of the New World, with the
same dauntless spirit which he had displayed when a boy in his native country.
Mr. Scott would probably have been highly successful, being familiarly
acquainted with the manners of the native Indians, of the old French settlers
in Canada, and of the Brulés, or Woodsmen, and having the power of observing
with accuracy what I have no doubt he could have sketched with force and
expression. In short, the Author believes his brother would have made himself
distinguished in that striking field in which, since that period, Mr. Cooper
has achieved so many triumphs. But Mr. T. Scott was already affected by bad
health, which wholly unfitted him for literary labour, even if he could have
reconciled his patience to the task. He never, I believe, wrote a single line
of the projected work; and I only have the melancholy pleasure of preserving in
the Appendix[*] the simple anecdote on which he proposed to found it.

[* See Appendix, No. III.]

To this I may add, I can easily conceive that there may have been circumstances
which gave a colour to the general report of my brother being interested in
these works; and in particular that it might derive strength from my having
occasion to remit to him, in consequence of certain family transactions, some
considerable sums of money about that period. To which it is to be added that
if any person chanced to evince particular curiosity on such a subject, my
brother was likely enough to divert himself with practising on their credulity.

It may be mentioned that, while the paternity of these Novels was from time to
time warmly disputed in Britain, the foreign booksellers expressed no
hesitation on the matter, but affixed my name to the whole of the Novels, and
to some besides to which I had no claim.

The volumes, therefore, to which the present pages form a Preface are entirely
the composition of the Author by whom they are now acknowledged, with the
exception, always, of avowed quotations, and such unpremeditated and
involuntary plagiarisms as can scarce be guarded against by any one who has
read and written a great deal. The original manuscripts are all in existence,
and entirely written (horresco referens) in the Author’s own hand,
excepting during the years 1818 and 1819, when, being affected with severe
illness, he was obliged to employ the assistance of a friendly amanuensis.

The number of persons to whom the secret was necessarily entrusted, or
communicated by chance, amounted, I should think, to twenty at least, to whom I
am greatly obliged for the fidelity with which they observed their trust, until
the derangement of the affairs of my publishers, Messrs. Constable and Co., and
the exposure of their account books, which was the necessary consequence,
rendered secrecy no longer possible. The particulars attending the avowal have
been laid before the public in the Introduction to the “Chronicles of the
Canongate.”

The preliminary advertisement has given a sketch of the purpose of this
edition. I have some reason to fear that the notes which accompany the tales,
as now published, may be thought too miscellaneous and too egotistical. It
maybe some apology for this, that the publication was intended to be
posthumous, and still more, that old men may be permitted to speak long,
because they cannot in the course of nature have long time to speak. In
preparing the present edition, I have done all that I can do to explain the
nature of my materials, and the use I have made of them; nor is it probable
that I shall again revise or even read these tales. I was therefore desirous
rather to exceed in the portion of new and explanatory matter which is added to
this edition than that the reader should have reason to complain that the
information communicated was of a general and merely nominal character. It
remains to be tried whether the public (like a child to whom a watch is shown)
will, after having been satiated with looking at the outside, acquire some new
interest in the object when it is opened and the internal machinery displayed
to them.

That “Waverley” and its successors have had their day of favour and
popularity must be admitted with sincere gratitude; and the Author has studied
(with the prudence of a beauty whose reign has been rather long) to supply, by
the assistance of art, the charms which novelty no longer affords. The
publishers have endeavoured to gratify the honourable partiality of the public
for the encouragement of British art, by illustrating this edition with designs
by the most eminent living artists.

[Footnote: The illustrations here referred to were made for the edition of
1829]

To my distinguished countryman, David Wilkie, to Edwin Landseer, who has
exercised his talents so much on Scottish subjects and scenery, to Messrs.
Leslie and Newton, my thanks are due, from a friend as well as an author. Nor
am I less obliged to Messrs. Cooper, Kidd, and other artists of distinction to
whom I am less personally known, for the ready zeal with which they have
devoted their talents to the same purpose.

Farther explanation respecting the Edition is the business of the publishers,
not of the Author; and here, therefore, the latter has accomplished his task of
introduction and explanation. If, like a spoiled child, he has sometimes abused
or trifled with the indulgence of the public, he feels himself entitled to full
belief when he exculpates himself from the charge of having been at any time
insensible of their kindness.

ABBOTSFORD,
1st January, 1829.

APPENDIX
No. I.[*]

FRAGMENT OF A ROMANCE WHICH WAS TO HAVE BEEN ENTITLED

THOMAS THE RHYMER.

[* It is not to be supposed that these fragments are given as possessing any
intrinsic value of themselves; but there may be some curiosity attached to
them, as to the first etchings of a plate, which are accounted interesting by
those who have, in any degree, been interested in the more finished works of
the artist.]

CHAPTER I.

The sun was nearly set behind the distant mountains of Liddesdale, when a few
of the scattered and terrified inhabitants of the village of Hersildoun, which
had four days before been burned by a predatory band of English Borderers, were
now busied in repairing their ruined dwellings. One high tower in the centre of
the village alone exhibited no appearance of devastation. It was surrounded
with court walls, and the outer gate was barred and bolted. The bushes and
brambles which grew around, and had even insinuated their branches beneath the
gate, plainly showed that it must have been many years since it had been
opened. While the cottages around lay in smoking ruins, this pile, deserted and
desolate as it seemed to be, had suffered nothing from the violence of the
invaders; and the wretched beings who were endeavouring to repair their
miserable huts against nightfall, seemed to neglect the preferable shelter
which it might have afforded them, without the necessity of labour.

Before the day had quite gone down, a knight, richly armed, and mounted upon an
ambling hackney, rode slowly into the village. His attendants were a lady,
apparently young and beautiful, who rode by his side upon a dappled palfrey;
his squire, who carried his helmet and lance, and led his battle-horse, a noble
steed, richly caparisoned. A page and four yeomen, bearing bows and quivers,
short swords, and targets of a span breadth, completed his equipage, which,
though small, denoted him to be a man of high rank.

He stopped and addressed several of the inhabitants whom curiosity had
withdrawn from their labour to gaze at him; but at the sound of his voice, and
still more on perceiving the St. George’s Cross in the caps of his
followers, they fled, with a loud cry that the Southrons were returned. The
knight endeavoured to expostulate with the fugitives, who were chiefly aged
men, women, and children; but their dread of the English name accelerated their
flight, and in a few minutes, excepting the knight and his attendants, the
place was deserted by all. He paced through the village to seek a shelter for
the night, and despairing to find one either in the inaccessible tower or the
plundered huts of the peasantry, he directed his course to the left hand, where
he spied a small, decent habitation, apparently the abode of a man considerably
above the common rank. After much knocking, the proprietor at length showed
himself at the window, and speaking in the English dialect, with great signs of
apprehension, demanded their business. The warrior replied that his quality was
an English knight and baron, and that he was travelling to the court of the
king of Scotland on affairs of consequence to both kingdoms.

“Pardon my hesitation, noble Sir Knight,” said the old man, as he
unbolted and unbarred his doors,—

“Pardon my hesitation, but we are here exposed to too many intrusions to
admit of our exercising unlimited and unsuspicious hospitality. What I have is
yours; and God send your mission may bring back peace and the good days of our
old Queen Margaret!”

“Amen, worthy franklin,” quoth the knight,—“Did you
know her?”

“I came to this country in her train,” said the franklin;
“and the care of some of her jointure lands, which she devolved on me,
occasioned my settling here.”

“And how do you, being an Englishman,” said the knight,
“protect your life and property here, when one of your nation cannot
obtain a single night’s lodging, or a draught of water, were he
thirsty?”

“Marry, noble sir,” answered the franklin, “use, as they say,
will make a man live in a lion’s den; and as I settled here in a quiet
time, and have never given cause of offence, I am respected by my neighbours,
and even, as you see, by our forayers from England.”

“I rejoice to hear it, and accept your hospitality. Isabella, my love,
our worthy host will provide you a bed. My daughter, good franklin, is ill at
ease. We will occupy your house till the Scottish king shall return from his
Northern expedition. Meanwhile call me Lord Lacy of Chester.”

The attendants of the baron, assisted by the franklin, were now busied in
disposing of the horses and arranging the table for some refreshment for Lord
Lacy and his fair companion. While they sat down to it, they were attended by
their host and his daughter, whom custom did not permit to eat in their
presence, and who afterwards withdrew to an outer chamber, where the squire and
page (both young men of noble birth) partook of supper, and were accommodated
with beds. The yeomen, after doing honour to the rustic cheer of Queen
Margaret’s bailiff, withdrew to the stable, and each, beside his
favourite horse, snored away the fatigues of their journey. Early on the
following morning the travellers were roused by a thundering knocking at the
door of the house, accompanied with many demands for instant admission, in the
roughest tone. The squire and page, of Lord Lacy, after buckling on their arms,
were about to sally out to chastise these intruders, when the old host, after
looking out at a private casement, contrived for reconnoitring his visitors,
entreated them, with great signs of terror, to be quiet, if they did not mean
that all in the house should be murdered.

He then hastened to the apartment of Lord Lacy, whom he met dressed in a long
furred gown and the knightly cap called a mortier, irritated at the
noise, and demanding to know the cause which had disturbed the repose of the
household.

“Noble sir,” said the franklin, “one of the most formidable
and bloody of the Scottish Border riders is at hand. He is never seen,”
added he, faltering with terror, “so far from the hills, but with some
bad purpose, and the power of accomplishing it; so hold yourself to your guard,
for—”

A loud crash here announced that the door was broken down, and the knight just
descended the stair in time to prevent bloodshed betwixt his attendants and the
intruders. They were three in number. Their chief was tall, bony, and athletic,
his spare and muscular frame, as well as the hardness of his features, marked
the course of his life to have been fatiguing and perilous. The effect of his
appearance was aggravated by his dress, which consisted of a jack, or jacket,
composed of thick buff leather, on which small plates of iron of a lozenge form
were stitched, in such a manner as to overlap each other and form a coat of
mail, which swayed with every motion of the wearer’s body. This defensive
armour covered a doublet of coarse gray cloth, and the Borderer had a few
half-rusted plates of steel on his shoulders, a two-edged sword, with a dagger
hanging beside it, in a buff belt; a helmet, with a few iron bars, to cover the
face instead of a visor, and a lance of tremendous and uncommon length,
completed his appointments. The looks of the man were as wild and rude as his
attire; his keen black eyes never rested one moment fixed upon a single object,
but constantly traversed all around, as if they ever sought some danger to
oppose, some plunder to seize, or some insult to revenge. The latter seemed to
be his present object, for, regardless of the dignified presence of Lord Lacy,
he uttered the most incoherent threats against the owner of the house and his
guests.

“We shall see—ay, marry shall we—if an English hound is to
harbour and reset the Southrons here. Thank the Abbot of Melrose and the good
Knight of Coldingnow that have so long kept me from your skirts. But those days
are gone, by St. Mary, and you shall find it!”

It is probable the enraged Borderer would not have long continued to vent his
rage in empty menaces, had not the entrance of the four yeomen, with their bows
bent, convinced him that the force was not at this moment on his own side.

Lord Lacy now advanced towards him. “You intrude upon my privacy,
soldier; withdraw yourself and Your followers. There is peace betwixt our
nations, or my servants should chastise thy presumption.”

“Such peace as ye give such shall you have,” answered the
moss-trooper, first pointing with his lance towards the burned village, and
then almost instantly levelling it against Lord Lacy. The squire drew his
sword, and severed at one blow the steel head from the truncheon of the spear.

“Arthur Fitzherbert,” said the baron, “that stroke has
deferred thy knighthood for one year; never must that squire wear the spurs
whose unbridled impetuosity can draw unbidden his sword in the presence of his
master. Go hence, and think on what I have said.”

The squire left the chamber abashed.

“It were vain,” continued Lord Lacy, “to expect that courtesy
from a mountain churl which even my own followers can forget. Yet before thou
drawest thy brand,” for the intruder laid his hand upon the hilt of his
sword, “thou wilt do well to reflect that I came with a safe-conduct from
thy king, and have no time to waste in brawls with such as thou.”

“From my king,—from my king!” re-echoed the
mountaineer. “I care not that rotten truncheon,” striking the
shattered spear furiously on the ground, “for the king of Fife and
Lothian. But Habby of Cessford will be here belive; and we shall soon know if
he will permit an English churl to occupy his hostelry.”

Having uttered these words, accompanied with a lowering glance from under his
shaggy black eyebrows, he turned on his heel and left the house with his two
followers; they mounted their horses, which they had tied to an outer fence,
and vanished in an instant.

“Who is this discourteous ruffian?” said Lord Lacy to the franklin,
who had stood in the most violent agitation during this whole scene.

“His name, noble lord, is Adam Kerr of the Moat, but he is commonly
called by his companions the Black Rider of Cheviot. I fear, I fear, he comes
hither for no good; but if the Lord of Cessford be near, he will not dare offer
any unprovoked outrage.”

“I have heard of that chief,” said the baron; “let me know
when he approaches. And do thou, Rodulph,” to the eldest yeoman,
“keep a strict watch. Adelbert,” to the page, “attend to arm
me.” The page bowed, and the baron withdrew to the chamber of the lady
Isabella, to explain the cause of the disturbance.

No more of the proposed tale was ever written; but the Author’s purpose
was that it should turn upon a fine legend of superstition which is current in
the part of the Borders where he had his residence, where, in the reign of
Alexander III. of Scotland, that renowned person, Thomas of Hersildoune, called
the Rhymer, actually flourished. This personage, the Merlin of Scotland, and to
whom some of the adventures which the British bards assigned to Merlin
Caledonius, or the Wild, have been transferred by tradition, was, as is well
known, a magician, as well as a poet and prophet. He is alleged still to live
in the land of Faery, and is expected to return at some great convulsion of
society, in which he is to act a distinguished part,—a tradition common
to all nations, as the belief of the Mahomedans respecting their twelfth Imaum
demonstrates.

Now, it chanced many years since that there lived on the Borders a jolly,
rattling horse-cowper, who was remarkable for a reckless and fearless temper,
which made him much admired, and a little dreaded, amongst his neighbours. One
moonlight night, as he rode over Bowden Moor, on the west side of the Eildon
Hills, the scene of Thomas the Rhymer’s prophecies, and often mentioned
in his story, having a brace of horses along with him which he had not been
able to dispose of, he met a man of venerable appearance and singularly antique
dress, who, to his great surprise, asked the price of his horses, and began to
chaffer with him on the subject. To Canobie Dick—(for so shall we call
our Border dealer)—a chap was a chap, and he would have sold a liaise to
the devil himself, without minding his cloven hoof, and would have probably
cheated Old Nick into the bargain. The stranger paid the price they agreed on;
and all that puzzled Dick in the transaction was that the gild which he
received was in unicorns, bonnet-pieces, and other ancient coins, which would
have been invaluable to collectors, but were rather troublesome, in modern
currency.

It was gold, however, and therefore Dick contrived to get better value for the
coin than he perhaps gave to his customer. By the command of so good a
merchant, he brought horses to the same slot more than once; the purchaser only
stipulating that he should always come by night, and alone. I do not know
whether it was from mere curiosity, or whether some hope of gain mixed with it,
but after Dick had sold several horses in this way, he began to complain that
dry-bargains were unlucky, and to hint that since his chap must live in the
neighbourhood, he ought, in the courtesy of dealing, to treat him to half a
mutchkin.

“You may see my dwelling if you will,” said the stranger;
“but if you lose courage at what you see there, you will rue it all your
life.”

Dicken, however, laughed the warning to scorn, and having alighted to secure
his horse, he followed the stranger up a narrow foot-path, which led them up
the hills to the singular eminence stuck betwixt the most southern and the
centre peaks, and called, from its resemblance to such an animal in its form,
the Lucken Hare. At the foot of this eminence, which is almost as famous for
witch meetings as the neighbouring wind-mill of Kippilaw, Dick was somewhat
startled to observe that his conductor entered the hill-side by a passage or
cavern, of which he himself, though well acquainted with the spot, had never
seen or heard.

“You may still return,” said his guide, looking ominously back upon
him; but Dick scorned to show the white feather, and on they went. They entered
a very long range of stables; in every stall stood a coal-black horse; by every
horse lay a knight in coal-black armour, with a drawn sword in his hand; but
all were as silent, hoof and limb, as if they had been cut out of marble. A
great number of torches lent a gloomy lustre to the hall, which, like those of
the Caliph Vathek, was of large dimensions. At the upper end, however, they at
length arrived, where a sword and horn lay on an antique table.

“He that shall sound that horn and draw that sword,” said the
stranger, who now intimated that he was the famous Thomas of Hersildoune,
“shall, if his heart fail him not, be king over all broad Britain. So
speaks the tongue that cannot lie. But all depends on courage, and much on your
taking the sword or the horn first.” Dick was much disposed to take the
sword; but his bold spirit was quailed by the supernatural terrors of the hall,
and he thought to unsheathe the sword first, might be construed into defiance,
and give offence to the powers of the Mountain. He took the bugle with a
trembling hand, and a feeble note, but loud enough to produce a terrible
answer. Thunder rolled in stunning peals through the immense hall; horses and
men started to life; the steeds snorted, stamped, grinned their bits, and
tossed on high their heads; the warriors sprung to their feet, clashed their
armour, and brandished their swords. Dick’s terror was extreme at seeing
the whole army, which had been so lately silent as the grave, in uproar, and
about to rush on him. He dropped the horn, and made a feeble attempt to seize
the enchanted sword; but at the same moment a voice pronounced aloud the
mysterious words,—

“Woe to the coward, that ever he was born,
Who did not draw the sword before he blew the horn!”

At the same time a whirlwind of irresistible fury howled through the long hall,
bore the unfortunate horse-jockey clear out of the mouth of the cavern, and
precipitated him over a steep bank of loose stones, where the shepherds found
him the next morning with just breath sufficient to tell his fearful tale,
after concluding which he expired.

This legend, with several variations, is found in many parts of Scotland and
England. The scene is sometimes laid in some favourite glen of the Highlands,
sometimes in the deep coal-mines of Northumberland and Cumberland, which rim so
far beneath the ocean. It is also to be found in Reginald Scott’s book on
Witchcraft, which was written in the sixteenth century. It would be in vain to
ask what was the original of the tradition. The choice between the horn and
sword may, perhaps, include as a moral that it is foolhardy to awaken danger
before we have arms in our hands to resist it.

Although admitting of much poetical ornament, it is clear that this legend
would have formed but an unhappy foundation for a prose story, and must have
degenerated into a mere fairy tale. Dr. John Leyden has beautifully introduced
the tradition in his “Scenes of Infancy”:—

“Mysterious Rhymer, doomed by fate’s decree
Still to revisit Eildon’s fated tree,
Where oft the swain, at dawn of Hallow-day,
Hears thy fleet barb with wild impatience neigh,—
Say, who is he, with summons long and high,
Shall bid the charmed sleep of ages fly,
Roll the long sound through Eildon’s caverns vast,
While each dark warrior kindles at the blast,
The horn, the falchion, grasp with mighty hand,
And peal proud Arthur’s march from Fairy-land?”[*]

[* Scenes of Infancy, Part I.]

In the same cabinet with the preceding fragment, the following occurred among
other disjecta membra. It seems to be an attempt at a tale of a
different description from the last, but was almost instantly abandoned. The
introduction points out the time of the composition to have been about the end
of the eighteenth century.

THE LORD OF ENNERDALE.

IN A FRAGMENT OF A LETTER FROM JOHN B______, ESQ., OF THAT ILK, TO WILLIAM
G______, F.R.S.E.

“Fill a bumper,” said the knight; “the ladies may spare us a
little longer. Fill a bumper to the Archduke Charles.”

The company did due honour to the toast of their landlord.

“The success of the archduke,” said the muddy vicar, “will
tend to further our negotiation at Paris; and if—”

“Pardon the interruption, Doctor,” quoth a thin, emaciated figure,
with somewhat of a foreign accent; “but why should you connect those
events, unless to hope that the bravery and victories of our allies may
supersede the necessity of a degrading treaty?”

“We begin to feel, Monsieur L’Abbé,” answered the vicar, with
some asperity, “that a Continental war entered into for the defence of an
ally who was unwilling to defend himself, and for the restoration of a royal
family, nobility, and priesthood who tamely abandoned their own rights, is a
burden too much even for the resources of this country.”

“And was the war, then, on the part of Great Britain,” rejoined the
Abbé, “a gratuitous exertion of generosity? Was there no fear of the
wide-wasting spirit of innovation which had gone abroad? Did not the laity
tremble for their property, the clergy for their religion, and every loyal
heart for the Constitution? Was it not thought necessary to destroy the
building which was on fire, ere the conflagration spread around the
vicinity?”

“Yet if upon trial,” said the doctor, “the walls were found
to resist our utmost efforts, I see no great prudence in persevering in our
labour amid the smouldering ruins.”

“What, Doctor,” said the baronet, “must I call to your
recollection your own sermon on the late general fast? Did you not encourage us
to hope that the Lord of Hosts would go forth with our armies, and that our
enemies, who blasphemed him, should be put to shame?”

“It may please a kind father to chasten even his beloved children,”
answered the vicar.

“I think,” said a gentleman near the foot of the table, “that
the Covenanters made some apology of the same kind for the failure of their
prophecies at the battle of Danbar, when their mutinous preachers compelled the
prudent Lesley to go down against the Philistines in Gilgal.”

The vicar fixed a scrutinizing and not a very complacent eye upon this
intruder. He was a young man, of mean stature and rather a reserved appearance.
Early and severe study had quenched in his features the gaiety peculiar to his
age, and impressed upon them a premature cast of thoughtfulness. His eve had,
however, retained its fire, and his gesture its animation. Had he remained
silent, he would have been long unnoticed; but when he spoke, there was
something in his manner which arrested attention.

“Who is this young man?” said the vicar, in a low voice, to his
neighbour.

“A Scotchman called Maxwell, on a visit to Sir Henry,” was the
answer.

“I thought so, from his accent and his manner,” said the vicar. It
may be here observed that the Northern English retain rather more of the
ancient hereditary aversion to their neighbors than their countrymen of the
South. The interference of other disputants, each of whom urged his opinion
with all the vehemence of wine and politics, rendered the summons to the
drawing-room agreeable to the more sober part of the company.

The company dispersed by degrees, and at length the vicar and the young
Scotchman alone remained, besides the baronet, his lady, daughters, and myself.
The clergyman had not, it would seem, forgot the observation which ranked him
with the false prophets of Dunbar, for he addressed Mr. Maxwell upon the first
opportunity.

“Hem! I think, sir, you mentioned something about the civil wars of last
century. You must be deeply skilled in them indeed, if you can draw any
parallel betwixt those and the present evil days,—davs which I am ready
to maintain are the most gloomy that ever darkened the prospects of
Britain.”

“God forbid, Doctor, that I should draw a comparison between the present
times and those you mention; I am too sensible of the advantages we enjoy over
our ancestors. Faction and ambition have introduced division among us; but we
are still free from the guilt of civil bloodshed, and from all the evils which
flow from it. Our foes, sir, are not those of our own household; and while we
continue united and firm, from the attacks of a foreign enemy, however artful,
or however inveterate, we have, I hope, little to dread.”

“Have you found anything curious, Mr. Maxwell, among the dusty
papers?” said Sir Henry, who seemed to dread a revival of political
discussion.

“My investigation amongst them led to reflection’s which I have
just now hinted,” said Maxwell; “and I think they are pretty
strongly exemplified by a story which I have been endeavouring to arrange from
some of your family manuscripts.”

“You are welcome to make what use of them you please,” said Sir
Henry; “they have been undisturbed for many a day, and I have often
wished for some person as well skilled as you in these old pothooks, to tell me
their meaning.”

“Those I just mentioned,” answered Maxwell, “relate to a
piece of private history savouring not a little of the marvellous, and
intimately connected with your family; if it is agreeable, I can read to you
the anecdotes in the modern shape into which I have been endeavouring to throw
them, and you can then judge of the value of the originals.”

There was something in this proposal agreeable to all parties. Sir Henry had
family pride, which prepared him to take an interest in whatever related to his
ancestors. The ladies had dipped deeply into the fashionable reading of the
present day. Lady Ratcliff and her fair daughters had climbed every pass,
viewed every pine-shrouded ruin, heard every groan, and lifted every trap-door,
in company with the noted heroine of “Udolpho.” They had been
heard, however, to observe that the famous incident of the Black Veil
singularly resembled the ancient apologue of the Mountain in labour, so that
they were unquestionably critics, as well as admirers. Besides all this, they
had valorously mounted en croupe behind the ghostly horseman of Prague,
through all his seven translators, and followed the footsteps of Moor through
the forest of Bohemia. Moreover, it was even hinted (but this was a greater
mystery than all the rest) that a certain performance, called the
“Monk,” in three neat volumes, had been seen by a prying eye, in
the right-hand drawer of the Indian cabinet of Lady Ratcliff’s
dressing-room. Thus predisposed for wonders and signs, Lady Ratcliff and her
nymphs drew their chairs round a large blazing wood-fire, and arranged
themselves to listen to the tale. To that fire I also approached, moved
thereunto partly by the inclemency of the season, and partly that my deafness,
which you know, cousin, I acquired during my campaign under Prince Charles
Edward, might be no obstacle to the gratification of my curiosity, which was
awakened by what had any reference to the fate of such faithful followers of
royalty as you well know the house of Ratcliff have ever been. To this
wood-fire the vicar likewise drew near, and reclined himself conveniently in
his chair, seemingly disposed to testify his disrespect for the narration and
narrator by falling asleep as soon as he conveniently could. By the side of
Maxwell (by the way, I cannot learn that he is in the least related to the
Nithsdale family) was placed a small table and a couple of lights, by the
assistance of which he read as follows:—

“Journal of Jan Von Eulen.

“On the 6th November, 1645, I, Jan Von Enlen, merchant in Rotterdam,
embarked with my only daughter on board of the good vessel
‘Vryheid,’ of Amsterdam, in order to pass into the unhappy and
disturbed kingdom of England.—7th November. A brisk gale; daughter
sea-sick; myself unable to complete the calculation which I have begun, of the
inheritance left by Jane Lansache, of Carlisle, my late dear wife’s
sister, the collection of which is the object of my voyage.—8th
November. Wind still stormy and adverse; a horrid disaster nearly
happened,—my dear child washed overboard as the vessel lurched to
leeward.—Memorandum, to reward the young sailor who saved her, out of the
first moneys which I can recover from the inheritance of her aunt
Lansache.—9th November. Calm P.M. light breezes front N. N. W. I
talked with the captain about the inheritance of my sister-in-law, Jane
Lansache. He says he knows the principal subject, which will not exceed £1000
in value.—N. B. He is a cousin to a family of Petersons, which was the
name of the husband of my sister-in-law; so there is room to hope it may be
worth more than be reports.—10th November, 10 A.M.
May God pardon all our sins! An English frigate, bearing the Parliament flag,
has appeared in the offing, and gives chase.—11 A. M. She nears us every
moment, and the captain of our vessel prepares to clear for action. May God
again have mercy upon us!”

“Here,” said Maxwell, “the journal with which I have opened
the narration ends somewhat abruptly.”

“I am glad of it,” said Lady Ratcliff.

“But, Mr. Maxwell,” said young Frank, Sir Henry’s grandchild,
“shall we not hear how the battle ended?”

I do not know, cousin, whether I have not formerly made you acquainted with the
abilities of Frank Ratcliff. There is not a battle fought between the troops of
the Prince and of the government, during the years 1745–46, of which he is not
able to give an account. It is true, I have taken particular pains to fix the
events of this important period upon his memory by frequent repetition.

“No, my dear,” said Maxwell, in answer to young Frank
Itatcliff,—“No, my dear, I cannot tell you the exact particulars of
the engagement, but its consequences appear from the following letter,
despatched by Garbonete Von Enlen, daughter of our journalist, to a relation in
England, from whom she implored assistance. After some general account of the
purpose of the voyage, and of the engagement, her narrative proceeds
thus:—

“The noise of the cannon had hardly ceased, before the sounds of a
language to me but half known, and the confusion on board our vessel, informed
me that the captors had boarded us and taken possession of our vessel. I went
on deck, where the first spectacle that met my eyes was a young man, mate of
our vessel, who, though disfigured and covered with blood, was loaded with
irons, and whom they were forcing over the side of the vessel into a boat. The
two principal persons among our enemies appeared to be a man of a tall, thin
figure, with a high-crowned hat and long neck band, and short-cropped head of
hair, accompanied by a bluff, open-looking elderly man in a naval uniform.
‘Yarely! yarely! pull away, my hearts,’ said the latter, and the
boat bearing the unlucky young man soon carried him on board the frigate.
Perhaps you will blame me for mentioning this circumstance; but consider, my
dear cousin, this man saved my life, and his fate, even when my own and my
father’s were in the balance, could not but affect me nearly.

“‘In the name of him who is jealous, even to slaying,’ said
the first—”

Cetera desunt.

No. II.

CONCLUSION OF MR. STRUTT’S ROMANCE OF
QUEEN-HOO HALL.

BY THE AUTHOR OF WAVERLEY.

CHAPTER IV.

A HUNTING PARTY.—AN ADVENTURE.—A DELIVERANCE.

The next morning the bugles were sounded by daybreak in the court of Lord
Boteler’s mansion, to call the inhabitants from their slumbers, to assist
in a splendid chase, with which the baron had resolved to entertain his
neighbour Fitzallen and his noble visitor St. Clere. Peter Lanaret the falconer
was in attendance, with falcons for the knights, and tiercelets for the ladies,
if they should choose to vary their sport from hunting to hawking. Five stout
yeomen keepers, with their attendants, called Bagged Robins, all meetly arrayed
in Kendal green, with bugles and short hangers by their sides, and
quarterstaffs in their hands, led the slow-hounds, or brackets, by which the
deer were to be put up. Ten brace of gallant greyhounds, each of which was fit
to pluck down, singly, the tallest red deer, were led in leashes by as many of
Lord Boteler’s foresters. The pages, squires, and other attendants of
feudal splendour, well attired in their best hunting-gear, upon horseback or
foot, according to their rank,—with their boar-spears, long bows, and
cross-bows, were in seemly waiting.

A numerous train of yeomen, called in the language of the times retainers, who
yearly received a livery coat and a small pension for their attendance on such
solemn occasions, appeared in cassocks of blue, bearing upon their arms the
cognizance of the house of Boteler as a badge of their adherence. They were the
tallest men of their hands that the neighbouring villages could supply, with
every man his good buckler on his shoulder, and a bright burnished broadsword
dangling from his leathern belt. On this occasion they acted as rangers for
beating up the thickets and rousing the game. These attendants filled up the
court of the castle, spacious as it was. On the green without, you might have
seen the motley assemblage of peasantry convened by report of the splendid
hunting, including most of our old acquaintances from Tewin, as well as the
jolly partakers of good cheer at Hob Filcher’s. Gregory the jester, it
may well be guessed, had no great mind to exhibit himself in public after his
recent disaster; but Oswald the steward, a great formalist in whatever
concerned the public exhibition of his master’s household state, had
positively enjoined his attendance. “What,” quoth he, “shall
the house of the brave Lord Boteler, or such a brave day as this, be without a
fool? Certes, the good Lord St. Clere and his fair lady sister might think our
housekeeping as niggardly as that of their churlish kinsman at Gay Bowers, who
sent his father’s jester to the hospital, sold the poor sot’s bells
for hawk-jesses, and made a nightcap of his long-eared bonnet. And, sirrah, let
me see thee fool handsomely,—speak squibs and crackers, instead of that
dry, barren, musty gibing which thou hast used of late; or, by the bones! the
porter shall have thee to his lodge, and cob thee with thine own wooden sword
till thy skin is as motley as thy doublet.”

To this stern injunction, Gregory made no reply, any more than to the courteous
offer of old Albert Drawslot, the chief park-keeper, who proposed to blow
vinegar in his nose, to sharpen his wit, as he had done that blessed morning to
Bragger, the old hound, whose scent was failing. There was, indeed, little time
for reply, for the bugles, after a lively flourish, were now silent, and
Peretto, with his two attendant minstrels, stepping beneath the windows of the
strangers’ apartments, joined in the following roundelay, the deep voices
of the rangers and falconers making up a chorus that caused the very
battlements to ring again.

Waken, lords and ladies gay,
On the mountain dawns the day;
All the jolly chase is here,
With hawk and horse and hunting-spear
Hounds are in their couples yelling,
Hawks are whistling, horns are knelling,
Merrily, merrily, mingle they,
“Waken, lords and ladies gay.”

Waken, lords and ladies gay,
The mist has left the mountain gray;
Springlets in the dawn are streaming,
Diamonds on the brake are gleaming,
And foresters have busy been,
To track the buck in thicket green;
Now we come to chant our lay:
“Waken, lords and ladies gay.”

Waken, lords and ladies gay,
To the green-wood haste away;
We can show you where he lies,
Fleet of foot, and tall of size;
We can show the marks he made
When ’gainst the oak his antlers frayed;
You shall see him brought to bay,
“Waken, lords and ladies gay.”

Louder, louder chant the lay,
“Waken, lords and ladies gay;”
Tell them, youth and mirth and glee
Run a course as well as we.
Time, stern huntsman, who can baulk,
Staunch as hound, and fleet as hawk?
Think of this, and rise with day,
Gentle lords and ladies gay.

By the time this lay was finished, Lord Boteler, with his daughter and kinsman,
Fitzallen of Harden, and other noble guests had mounted their palfreys, and the
hunt set forward in due order. The huntsmen, having carefully observed the
traces of a large stag on the preceding evening, were able, without loss of
time, to conduct the company, by the marks which they had made upon the trees,
to the side of the thicket in which, by the report of Drawslot, he had
harboured all night. The horsemen spreading themselves along the side of the
cover, waited until the keeper entered, leading his bandog, a large blood-hound
tied in a leam or band, from which he takes his name.

But it befell this. A hart of the second year, which was in the same cover with
the proper object of their pursuit, chanced to be unharboured first, and broke
cover very near where the Lady Emma and her brother were stationed. An
inexperienced varlet, who was nearer to them, instantly unloosed two tall
greyhounds, who sprung after the fugitive with all the fleetness of the north
wind. Gregory, restored a little to spirits by the enlivening scene around him,
followed, encouraging the hounds with a loud tayout,[*] for which he had the
hearty curses of the huntsman, as well as of the baron, who entered into the
spirit of the chase with all the juvenile ardour of twenty. “May the foul
fiend, booted and spurred, ride down his bawling throat, with a scythe at his
girdle,” quoth Albert Drawslot; “here have I been telling him that
all the marks were those of a buck of the first head, and he has hollowed the
hounds upon a velvet-headed knobbler! By Saint Hubert, if I break not his pate
with my cross-bow, may I never cast off hound more! But to it, my lords and
masters! the noble beast is here yet, and, thank the saints, we have enough of
hounds.”

[* Tailliers-hors; in modern phrase, Tally-ho]

The cover being now thoroughly beat by the attendants, the stag was compelled
to abandon it, and trust to his speed for his safety. Three greyhounds were
slipped upon him, whom he threw out, after running a couple of miles, by
entering an extensive furzy brake which extended along the side of a hill. The
horsemen soon came up, and casting off a sufficient number of slowhounds, sent
them, with the prickers, into the cover, in order to chive the game from his
strength. This object being accomplished, afforded another severe chase of
several miles, in a direction almost circular, during which the poor animal
tried every wile to get rid of his persecutors. He crossed and traversed all
such dusty paths as were likely to retain the least scent of his footsteps; he
laid himself close to the ground, drawing his feet under his belly, and
clapping his nose close to the earth, lest he should be betrayed to the hounds
by his breath and hoofs. When all was in vain, and he found the hounds coming
fast in upon him, his own strength failing, his mouth embossed with foam, and
the tears dropping from his eyes, he turned in despair upon his pursuers, who
then stood at gaze, making an hideous clamour, and awaiting their two-footed
auxiliaries. Of these, it chanced that the Lady Eleanor, taking more pleasure
in the sport than Matilda, and being a less burden to her palfrey than the Lord
Boteler, was the first who arrived at the spot, and taking a cross-bow from an
attendant, discharged a bolt at the stag. When the infuriated animal felt
himself wounded, he pushed franticly towards her from whom he had received the
shaft, and Lady Eleanor might have had occasion to repent of her enterprise had
not young Fitzallen, who had kept near her during the whole day, at that
instant galloped briskly in, and ere the stag could change his object of
assault, despatched him with his short hunting-sword.

Albert Drawslot, who had just come up in terror for the young lady’s
safety, broke out into loud encomiums upon Fitzallen’s strength and
gallantry. “By ’r Lady,” said he, taking off his cap, and
wiping his sun-burnt face with his sleeve, “well struck, and in good
time! But now, boys, doff your bonnets, and sound the mort.”

The sportsmen then sounded a treble mort and set up a general whoop, which,
mingled with the yelping of the dogs, made the welkin ring again. The huntsman
then offered his knife to Lord Boteler, that he might take the say of the deer;
but the baron courteously insisted upon Fitzallen going through that ceremony.
The Lady Matilda was now come up, with most of the attendants; and the interest
of the chase being ended, it excited some surprise that neither St. Clere nor
his sister made their appearance. The Lord Boteler commanded the horns again to
sound the recheat, in hopes to call in the stragglers, and said to Fitzallen:
“Methinks St. Clere, so distinguished for service in war, should have
been more forward in the chase.”

“I trow,” said Peter Lanaret, “I know the reason of the noble
lord’s absence; for when that moon-calf, Gregory, hallooed the dogs upon
the knobbler, and galloped like a green hilding, as he is, after them, I saw
the Lady Emma’s palfrey follow apace after that varlet, who should be
trashed for overrunning, and I think her noble brother has followed her, lest
she should come to harm. But here, by the rood, is Gregory to answer for
himself.”

At this moment Gregory entered the circle which had been formed round the deer,
out of breath, and his face covered with blood. He kept for some time uttering
inarticulate cries of “Harrow!” and “Wellaway!” and
other exclamations of distress and terror, pointing all the while to a thicket
at some distance from the spot where the deer had been killed.

“By my honour,” said the baron, “I would gladly know who has
dared to array the poor knave thus; and I trust he should dearly aby his
outrecuidance, were he the best, save one, in England.”

Gregory, who had now found more breath, cried, “Help, an ye be men! Save
Lady Emma and her brother, whom they are murdering in Brockenhurst
thicket.”

This put all in motion. Lord Boteler hastily commanded a small party of his men
to abide for the defence of the ladies, while he himself, Fitzallen, and the
rest made what speed they could towards the thicket, guided by Gregory, who for
that purpose was mounted behind Fabian. Pushing through a narrow path, the
first object they encountered was a man of small stature lying on the ground,
mastered and almost strangled by two dogs, which were instantly recognized to
be those that had accompanied Gregory. A little farther was an open space,
where lay three bodies of dead or wounded men; beside these was Lady Emma,
apparently lifeless, her brother and a young forester bending over and
endeavouring to recover her. By employing the usual remedies, this was soon
accomplished; while Lord Boteler, astonished at such a scene, anxiously
inquired at St. Clere the meaning of what he saw, and whether more danger was
to be expected?

“For the present, I trust not,” said the young warrior, who they
now observed was slightly wounded; “but I pray you, of your nobleness,
let the woods here be searched; for we were assaulted by four of these base
assassins, and I see three only on the sward.”

The attendants now brought forward the person whom they had rescued from the
dogs, and Henry, with disgust, shame, and astonishment, recognized his kinsman,
Gaston St. Clere. This discovery he communicated in a whisper to Lord Boteler,
who commanded the prisoner to be conveyed to Queen-Hoo Hall and closely
guarded; meanwhile he anxiously inquired of young St. Clere about his wound.
“A scratch, a trifle!” cried Henry; “I am in less haste to
bind it than to introduce to you one without whose aid that of the leech would
have come too late. Where is he? Where is my brave deliverer?”

“Here, most noble lord,” said Gregory, sliding from his palfrey and
stepping forward, “ready to receive the guerdon which your bounty would
heap on him.”

“Truly, friend Gregory,” answered the young warrior, “thou
shalt not be forgotten; for thou didst run speedily and roar manfully for aid,
without which, I think verily, we had not received it. But the brave forester
who came to my rescue when these three ruffians had nigh overpowered me, where
is he?”

Every one looked around; but though all had seen him on entering the thicket,
he was not now to be found. They could only conjecture that he had retired
during the confusion occasioned by the detention of Gaston.

“Seek not for him,” said the Lady Emma, who had now in some degree
recovered her composure; “he will not be found of mortal, unless at his
own season.”

The baron, convinced from this answer that her terror had, for the time,
somewhat disturbed her reason, forebore to question her; and Matilda and
Eleanor, to whom a message had been despatched with the result of this strange
adventure, arriving, they took the Lady Emma between them, and all in a body
returned to the castle.

The distance was, however, considerable, and before reaching it they had
another alarm. The prickers, who rode foremost in the troop, halted, and
announced to the Lord Boteler, that they perceived advancing towards them a
body of armed men. The followers of the baron were numerous, but they were
arrayed for the chase, not for battle; and it was with great pleasure that he
discerned, on the pennon of the advancing body of men-at-arms, instead of the
cognizance of Gaston, as he had some reason to expect, the friendly bearings of
Fitzosborne of Diggswell, the same young lord who was present at the May-games
with Fitzallen of Marden. The knight himself advanced, sheathed in armour, and,
without raising his visor, informed Lord Boteler, that having heard of a base
attempt made upon a part of his train by ruffianly assassins, he had mounted
and armed a small party of his retainers, to escort them to Queen-Hoo Hall.
Having received and accepted an invitation to attend them thither, they
prosecuted their journey in confidence and security, and arrived safe at home
without any further accident.

CHAPTER V.

INVESTIGATION OF THE ADVENTURE OF THE HUNTING.—A DISCOVERY.
—GREGORY’S MANHOOD.—FATE OF GASTON ST.
CLERE.—CONCLUSION.

So soon as they arrived at the princely mansion of Boteler, the Lady Emma
craved permission to retire to her chamber, that she might compose her spirits
after the terror she had undergone. Henry St. Clere, in a few words, proceeded
to explain the adventure to the curious audience. “I had no sooner seen
my sister’s palfrey, in spite of her endeavours to the contrary, entering
with spirit into the chase set on foot by the worshipful Gregory than I rode
after to give her assistance. So long was the chase that when the greyhounds
pulled down the knobbler, we were out of hearing of your bugles; and having
rewarded and coupled the dogs, I gave them to be led by the jester, and we
wandered in quest of our company, whom, it would seem, the sport had led in a
different direction. At length, passing through the thicket where you found us,
I was surprised by a cross-bow bolt whizzing past mine head. I drew my sword
and rushed into the thicket, but was instantly assailed by two ruffians, while
other two made towards my sister and Gregory. The poor knave fled, crying for
help, pursued by my false kinsman, now your prisoner; and the designs of the
other on my poor Emma (murderous no doubt) were prevented by the sudden
apparition of a brave woodsman, who, after a short encounter, stretched the
miscreant at his feet and came to my assistance. I was already slightly
wounded, and nearly overlaid with odds. The combat lasted some time, for the
caitiffs were both well armed, strong, and desperate; at length, however, we
had each mastered our antagonist, when your retinue, my Lord Boteler, arrived
to my relief. So ends in my story; but, on my knighthood, I would give an
earl’s ransom for an opportunity of thanking the gallant forester by
whose aid I live to tell it.”

“Fear not,” said Lord Boteler; “he shall be found if this or
the four adjacent counties hold him. And now Lord Fitzosborne will be pleased
to doff the armour he has so kindly assumed for our sakes, and we will all
bowne ourselves for the banquet.”

When the hour of dinner approached, the Lady Matilda and her cousin visited the
chamber of the fair Darcy. They found her in a composed but melancholy posture.
She turned the discourse upon the misfortunes of her life, and hinted that
having recovered her brother, and seeing him look forward to the society of one
who would amply repay to him the loss of hers, she had thoughts of dedicating
her remaining life to Heaven, by whose providential interference it had been so
often preserved.

Matilda coloured deeply at something in this speech, and her cousin inveighed
loudly against Emma’s resolution. “Ah, my dear Lady Eleanor,”
replied she, “I have to-day witnessed what I cannot but judge a
supernatural visitation, and to what end can it call me but to give myself to
the altar? That peasant who guided me, to Baddow through the Park of Danbury,
the same who appeared before me at different times and in different forms
during that eventful journey,—that youth, whose features are imprinted on
my memory, is the very individual forester who this day rescued us in the
forest. I cannot be mistaken; and connecting these marvellous appearances with
the spectre which I saw while at Gay Bowers, I cannot resist the conviction
that Heaven has permitted my guardian angel to assume mortal shape for my
relief and protection.”

The fair cousins, after exchanging looks which implied a fear that her mind was
wandering, answered her in soothing terms, and finally prevailed upon her to
accompany them to the banqueting-hall. Here the first person they encountered
was the Baron Fitzosborne of Diggswell, now divested of his armour; at the
sight of whom the Lady Emma changed colour, and exclaiming, “It is the
same!” sunk senseless into the arms of Matilda.

“She is bewildered by the terrors of the day,” said Eleanor;
“and we have done ill in obliging her to descend.”

“And I,” said Fitzosborne, “have done madly in presenting
before her one whose presence must recall moments the most alarming in her
life.”

While the ladies supported Emma from the hall, Lord Boteler and St. Clere
requested an explanation from Fitzosborne of the words he had used.

“Trust me, gentle lords,” said the Baron of Diggswell, “ye
shall have what ye demand, when I learn that Lady Emma Darcy has not suffered
from my imprudence.”

At this moment Lady Matilda, returning, said that her fair friend, on her
recovery, had calmly and deliberately insisted that she had seen Fitzosborne
before, in the most dangerous crisis of her life.

“I dread,” said she, “her disordered mind connects all that
her eye beholds with the terrible passages that she has witnessed.”

“Nay,” said Fitzosborne, “if noble St. Clere can pardon the
unauthorized interest which, with the purest and most honourable intentions, I
have taken in his sister’s fate, it is easy for me to explain this
mysterious impression.”

He proceeded to say that, happening to be in the hostelry called the Griffin,
near Baddow, while upon a journey in that country, he had met with the old
nurse of the Lady Emma Darcy, who, being just expelled front Gay Bowers, was in
the height of her grief and indignation, and made loud and public proclamation
of Lady Emma’s wrongs. From the description she gave of the beauty of her
foster-child, as well as from the spirit of chivalry, Fitzosborne became
interested in her fate. This interest was deeply enhanced when, by a bribe to
Old Gaunt the Reve, he procured a view of the Lady Emma as she walked near the
castle of Gay Bowers. The aged churl refused to give him access to the castle,
yet dropped some hints, as if he thought the lady in danger, and wished she
were well out of it. His master, he said, had heard she had a brother in life,
and since that deprived him of all chance of gaining her domains by purchase,
he, in short, Gaunt wished they were safely separated. “If any
injury,” quoth he, “should happen to the damsel here, it were ill
for us all. I tried, by an innocent stratagem, to frighten her from the castle
by introducing a figure through a trap-door and warning her, as if by a voice
from the dead, to retreat from thence; but the giglet is wilful, and is running
upon her fate.”

Finding Gaunt, although covetous and communicative, too faithful a servant to
his wicked master to take any active steps against his commands, Fitzosborne
applied himself to old Ursely, whom he found more tractable. Through her he
learned the dreadful plot Gaston had laid to rid himself of his kinswoman, and
resolved to effect her deliverance. But aware of the delicacy of Emma’s
situation, he charged Ursely to conceal from her the interest he took in her
distress, resolving to watch over her in disguise until he saw her in a place
of safety. Hence the appearance he made before her in various dresses during
her journey, in the course of which he was never far distant; and he had always
four stout yeomen within hearing of his bugle, had assistance been necessary.
When she was placed in safety at the lodge, it was Fitzosborne’s
intention to have prevailed upon his sisters to visit, and take her under their
protection; but he found them absent from Diggswell, having gone to attend an
aged relation who lay dangerously ill in a distant county. They did not return
until the day before the May-games; and the other events followed too rapidly
to permit Fitzosborne to lay any plan for introducing them to Lady Emma Darcy.
On the day of the chase he resolved to preserve his romantic disguise and
attend the Lady Emma as a forester, partly to have the pleasure of being near
her, and partly to judge whether, according to an idle report in the country,
she favoured his friend and comrade Fitzallen of Marden. This last motive, it
may easily be believed, he did not declare to the company. After the skirmish
with the ruffians, he waited till the baron and the hunters arrived, and then,
still doubting the further designs of Gaston, hastened to his castle to arm the
band which had escorted them to Queen-Hoo Hall.

Fitzosborne’s story being finished, he received the thanks of all the
company, particularly of St. Clere, who felt deeply the respectful delicacy
with which he had conducted himself towards his sister. The lady was carefully
informed of her obligations to him; and it is left to the well-judging reader
whether even the raillery of Lady Eleanor made her regret that Heaven had only
employed natural means for her security, and that the guardian angel was
converted into a handsome, gallant, and enamoured knight.

The joy of the company in the hall extended itself to the buttery, where
Gregory the jester narrated such feats of arms done by himself in the fray of
the morning as might have shamed Bevis and Guy of Warwick. He was, according to
his narrative, singled out for destruction by the gigantic baron himself, while
he abandoned to meaner hands the destruction of St. Clere and Fitzosborne.

“But, certes,” said he, “the foul paynim met his match; for,
ever as he foined at me with his brand, I parried his blows with my bauble, and
closing with him upon the third veny, threw him to the ground, and made him
cryrecreant to an unarmed man.”

“Tush, man!” said Drawslot, “thou forgettest thy best
auxiliaries, the good greyhounds, Help and Holdfast! I warrant thee that when
the humpbacked baron caught thee by the cowl, which he hath almost torn off,
thou hadst been in a fair plight, had they not remembered an old friend and
come in to the rescue. Why, man, I found them fastened on him myself; and there
was odd staving and stickling to make them ‘ware haunch!’ Their
mouths were full of the flex, for I pulled a piece of the garment from their
jaws. I warrant thee that when they brought him to ground, thou fledst like a
frighted pricket.”

“And as for Gregory’s gigantic paynim,” said Fabian,
“why, he lies yonder in the guard-room, the very size, shape, and colour
of a spider in a yewhedge.”

“It is false!” said Gregory; “Colbrand the Dane was a dwarf
to him.”

“It is as true,” returned Fabian, “as that the Tasker is to
be married on Tuesday to pretty Margery. Gregory, thy sheet hath brought them
between a pair of blankets.”

“I care no more for such a gillflirt,” said the Jester, “than
I do for thy leasings. Marry, thou hop-o’-my-thumb, happy wouldst thou be
could thy head reach the captive baron’s girdle.”

“By the Mass,” said Peter Lanaret, “I will have one peep at
this burly gallant;” and leaving the buttery, he went to the guard-room
where Gaston St. Clere was confined. A man-at-arms, who kept sentinel on the
strong studded door of the apartment, said he believed he slept; for that after
raging, stamping, and uttering the most horrid imprecations, he had been of
late perfectly still. The falconer gently drew back a sliding board, of a foot
square, towards the top of the door, which covered a hole of the same size,
strongly latticed, through which the warder, without opening the door, could
look in upon his prisoner. From this aperture he beheld the wretched Gaston
suspended by the neck, by his own girdle, to an iron ring in the side of his
prison. He had clambered to it by means of the table on which his food had been
placed; and in the agonies of shame and disappointed malice, had adopted this
mode of ridding himself of a wretched life. He was found yet warm, but totally
lifeless. A proper account of the manner of his death was drawn up and
certified. He was buried that evening in the chapel of the castle, out of
respect to his high birth; and the chaplain of Fitzallen of Marden, who said
the service upon the occasion, preached, the next Sunday, an excellent sermon
upon the text, “Radix malorum est cupiditas,” which we have here
transcribed.

[Here the manuscript from which we have painfully transcribed, and frequently,
as it were, translated this tale, for the reader’s edification, is so
indistinct and defaced that, excepting certain “howbeits,”
“nathlesses,” “lo ye’s!” etc. we can pick out
little that is intelligible, saving that avarice is defined “a
likourishness of heart after earthly things.”] A little farther there
seems to have been a gay account of Margery’s wedding with Ralph the
Tasker, the running at the quintain, and other rural games practised on the
occasion. There are also fragments of a mock sermon preached by Gregory upon
that occasion, as for example:—

“Mv dear cursed caitiffs, there was once a king, and he wedded a young
old queen, and she had a child; and this child was sent to Solomon the Sage,
praying he would give it the same blessing which he got from the witch of Endor
when she bit him by the heel. Hereof speaks the worthy Dr. Radigundus Potator.
Why should not Mass be said for all the roasted shoe souls served up in the
king’s dish on Saturday? For true it is that Saint Peter asked father
Adam, as they journeyed to Camelot, an high, great, and doubtful question:
‘Adam, Adam, why eated’st thou the apple without
paring?’”[*]

[* This tirade of gibberish is literally taken or selected from a mock
discourse pronounced by a professed jester, which occurs in an ancient
manuscript in the Advocates’ Library, the same from which the late
ingenious Mr. Weber published the curious comic romance of the “Limiting
of the Hare.” It was introduced in compliance with Mr. Strutt’s
plan of rendering his tale an illustration of ancient manners. A similar
burlesque sermon is pronounced by the Fool in Sir David Lindesay’s satire
of the “Three Estates.” The nonsense and vulgar burlesque of that
composition illustrate the ground of Sir Andrew, Aguecheek’s eulogy on
the exploits of the jester in “Twelfth Night,” who, reserving his
sharper jests for Sir Toby, had doubtless enough of the jargon of his calling
to captivate the imbecility of his brother knight, who is made to exclaim:
“In sooth, thou wast in very gracious fooling last night when thou
spokest of Pigrogremitus, and of the vapours passing the equinoctials of
Quenbus; ’t was very good, i’ faith!” It is entertaining to
find commentators seeking to discover some meaning in the professional jargon
of such a passage as this.]

With much goodly gibberish to the same effect, which display of Gregory’s
ready wit not only threw the whole company into convulsions of laughter, but
made such an impression on Rose, the Potter’s daughter, that it was
thought it would be the jester’s own fault if Jack was long without his
Jill. Much pithy matter concerning the bringing the bride to bed, the loosing
the bridegroom’s points, the scramble which ensued for them, and the
casting of the stocking, is also omitted, from its obscurity.

The following song, which has been since borrowed by the worshipful author of
the famous “History of Fryar Bacon,” has been with difficulty
deciphered. It seems to have been sung on occasion of carrying home the bride.

BRIDAL SONG.

To the tune of “I have been a Fiddler,” etc.

And did you not hear of a mirth befell
    The morrow after a wedding-day,
And carrying a bride at home to dwell?
    And away to Tewin, away, away!

The quintain was set, and the garlands were made,—
    ’T is pity old customs should ever decay;
And woe be to him that was horsed on a jade,
    For he carried no credit away, away.

We met a consort of fiddle-de-dees;
    We set them a cockhorse, and made them play
The winning of Bullen, and Upsey-fires,
    And away to Tewin, away, away!

There was ne’er a lad in all the parish
    That would go to the plough that day;
But on his fore-horse his wench he carries,
    And away to Tewin, away, away!

The butler was quick, and the ale he did tap,
    The maidens did make the chamber full gay;
The servants did give me a fuddling cup,
    And I did carry ’t away, away.

The smith of the town his liquor so took
    That he was persuaded that the ground looked blue;
And I dare boldly be sworn on a book
    Such smiths as he there’s but a few.

A posset was made, and the women did sip,
    And simpering said they could eat no more;
Full many a maiden was laid on the lip,—
    I’ll say no more, but give o’er (give o’er).

But what our fair readers will chiefly regret is the loss of three declarations
of love: the first by St. Clore to Matilda, which, with the lady’s
answer, occupies fifteen closely written pages of manuscript. That of
Fitzosborne to Emma is not much shorter; but the amours of Fitzallen and
Eleanor, being of a less romantic cast, are closed in three pages only. The
three noble couples were married in Queen-Hoo Hall upon the same day, being the
twentieth Sunday after Easter. There is a prolix account of the marriage-feast,
of which we can pick out the names of a few dishes, such as peterel, crane,
sturgeon, swan, etc., with a profusion of wild-fowl and venison. We also see
that a suitable song was produced by Peretto on the occasion, and that the
bishop, who blessed the bridal beds which received the happy couples, was no
niggard of his holy water, bestowing half a gallon upon each of the couches. We
regret we cannot give these curiosities to the reader in detail, but we hope to
expose the manuscript to abler antiquaries, so soon as it shall be framed and
glazed by the ingenious artist who rendered that service to Mr. Ireland’s
Shakspeare manuscripts. And so (being unable to lay aside the style to which
our pen is habituated), gentle reader, we bid thee heartily farewell.

No. III.

ANECDOTE OF SCHOOL DAYS,
UPON WHICH MR. THOMAS SCOTT PROPOSED TO FOUND A TALE OF FICTION.

It is well known in the South that there is little or no boxing at the Scottish
schools. About forty or fifty years ago, however, a far more dangerous mode of
fighting, in parties or factions, was permitted in the streets of Edinburgh, to
the great disgrace of the police, and danger of the parties concerned. These
parties were generally formed from the quarters of the town in which the
combatants resided, those of a particular square or district fighting against
those of an adjoining one. Hence it happened that the children of the higher
classes were often pitted against those of the lower, each taking their side
according to the residence of their friends. So far as I recollect, however, it
was unmingled either with feelings of democracy or aristocracy, or, indeed,
with malice or ill-will of any kind towards the opposite party. In fact, it was
only a rough mode of play. Such contests were, however, maintained with great
vigour with stones and sticks and fisticuffs, when one party dared to charge,
and the other stood their ground. Of course mischief sometimes happened; boys
are said to have been killed at these “bickers,” as they were
called, and serious accidents certainly took place, as many contemporaries can
bear witness.

The Author’s father residing in George Square, in the southern side of
Edinburgh, the boys belonging to that family, with others in the square, were
arranged into a sort of company, to which a lady of distinction presented a
handsome set of colours. Now this company, or regiment, as a matter of course,
was engaged in weekly warfare with the boys inhabiting the Crosscauseway,
Bristo Street, the Potter Row,—in short, the neighbouring suburbs. These
last were chiefly of the lower rank, but hardy loons, who threw stones to a
hair’s-breadth, and were very rugged antagonists at close quarters. The
skirmish sometimes lasted for a whole evening, until one party or the other was
victorious, when, if ours were successful, we drove the enemy to their
quarters, and were usually chased back by the reinforcement of bigger lads who
came to their assistance. If, on the contrary, we were pursued, as was often
the case, into the precincts of our square, we were in our turn supported by
our elder brothers, domestic servants, and similar auxiliaries.

It followed, from our frequent opposition to each other, that though not
knowing the names of our enemies, we were yet well acquainted with their
appearance, and had nicknames for the most remarkable of them. One very active
and spirited boy might be considered as the principal leader in the cohort of
the suburbs. He was, I suppose, thirteen or fourteen years old, finely made,
tall, blue-eyed, with long fair hair, the very picture of a youthful Goth. This
lad was always first in the charge, and last in the retreat,—the
Achilles, at once, and Ajax of the Crosscauseway. He was too formidable to us
not to have a cognomen, and, like that of a knight of old, it was taken from
the most remarkable part of his dress, being a pair of old green livery
breeches, which was the principal part of his clothing; for, like Pentapolin,
according to Don Quixote’s account, Green-Breeks, as we called him,
always entered the battle with bare arms, legs, and feet.

It fell that once upon a time, when the combat was at the thickest, this
plebeian champion headed a sudden charge so rapid and furious that all fled
before him. He was several paces before his comrades, and had actually laid his
hands on the patrician standard, when one of our party, whom some misjudging
friend had intrusted with a couteau de chasse, or hanger, inspired with
a zeal for the honour of the corps worthy of Major Sturgeon himself, struck
poor Green-Breeks over the head with strength sufficient to cut him down. When
this was seen, the casualty was so far beyond what had ever taken place before
that both parties fled different ways, leaving poor Green-Breeks, with his
bright hair plentifully dabbled in blood, to the care of the watchman, who
(honest man) took care not to know who had done the mischief. The bloody hanger
was flung into one of the Meadow ditches, and solemn secrecy was sworn on all
hands; but the remorse and terror of the actor were beyond all bounds, and his
apprehensions of the most dreadful character. The wounded hero was for a few
days in the Infirmary, the case being only a trifling one. But though inquiry
was strongly pressed on him, no argument could make him indicate the person
from whom he had received the wound, though he must have been perfectly well
known to him. When he recovered, and was dismissed, the author and his brothers
opened a communication with him, through the medium of a popular gingerbread
baker, of whom both parties were customers, in order to tender a subsidy in
name of smart-money. The sum would excite ridicule were I to name it; but sure
I am that the pockets of the noted Green-Breeks never held as much money of his
own. He declined the remittance, saying that he would not sell his blood, but
at the same time reprobated the idea of being an informer, which, he said, was
“clam,” i.e., base or mean. With much urgency, he accepted a pound
of snuff for the use of some old woman—aunt, grandmother, or the
like—with whom he lived. We did not become friends, for the
bickers were more agreeable to both parties than any more pacific
amusement; but we conducted them ever after under mutual assurances of the
highest consideration for each other.

Such was the hero whom Mr. Thomas Scott proposed to carry to Canada and involve
in adventures with the natives and colonists of that country. Perhaps the
youthful generosity of the lad will not seem so great in the eyes of others as
to those whom it was the means of screening from severe rebuke and punishment.
But it seemed, to those concerned, to argue a nobleness of sentiment far beyond
the pitch of most minds; and however obscurely the lad, who showed such a frame
of noble spirit, may have lived or died, I cannot help being of opinion, that
if fortune had placed him in circumstances calling for gallantry or generosity,
the man would have fulfilled the promises of the boy. Long afterwards, when the
story was told to my father, he censured us severely for not telling the truth
at the time, that he might have attempted to be of use to the young man in
entering on life. But our alarms for the consequences of the drawn sword, and
the wound inflicted with such a weapon, were far too predominant at the time
for such a pitch of generosity.

Perhaps I ought not to have inserted this schoolboy tale; but besides the
strong impression made by the incident at the time, the whole accompaniments of
the story are matters to me of solemn and sad recollection. Of all the little
band who were concerned in those juvenile sports or brawls, I can scarce
recollect a single survivor. Some left the ranks of mimic war to die in the
active service of their country. Many sought distant lands, to return no more.
Others, dispersed in different paths of life, “my dim eyes now seek for
in vain.” Of five brothers, all healthy and promising in a degree far
beyond one whose infancy was visited by personal infirmity, and whose health
after this period seemed long very precarious, I am, nevertheless, the only
survivor. The best loved, and the best deserving to be loved, who had destined
this incident to be the foundation of literary composition, died “before
his day,” in a distant and foreign land; and trifles assume an importance
not their own, when connected with those who have been loved and lost.

WAVERLEY;

OR,

’T IS SIXTY YEARS SINCE.

“Under which King, Bezonian? Speak, or die!”
Henry IV., Part II.

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION TO WAVERLEY.

“What is the value of a reputation that probably will not last above one
or two generations?” Sir Walter Scott once asked Ballantyne. Two
generations, according to the usual reckoning, have passed; “’T is
Sixty Years since” the “wondrous Potentate” of
Wordsworth’s sonnet died, yet the reputation on which he set so little
store survives. A constant tide of new editions of his novels flows from the
press; his plots give materials for operas and plays; he has been criticised,
praised, condemned: but his romances endure amid the changes of taste,
remaining the delight of mankind, while new schools and little masters of
fiction come and go.

Scott himself believed that even great works usually suffer periods of
temporary occultation. His own, no doubt, have not always been in their
primitive vogue. Even at first, English readers complained of the difficulty
caused by his Scotch, and now many make his “dialect” an excuse for
not reading books which their taste, debauched by third-rate fiction, is
incapable of enjoying. But Scott has never disappeared in one of those
irregular changes of public opinion remarked on by his friend Lady Louisa
Stuart. In 1821 she informed him that she had tried the experiment of reading
Mackenzie’s “Man of Feeling” aloud: “Nobody cried, and
at some of the touches I used to think so exquisite, they laughed.”[*]
His correspondent requested Scott to write something on such variations of
taste, which actually seem to be in the air and epidemic, for they affect, as
she remarked, young people who have not heard the criticisms of their
elders.[**] Thus Rousseau’s “Nouvelle Héloïse,” once so
fascinating to girls, and reputed so dangerous, had become tedious to the
young, Lady Louisa says, even in 1821. But to the young, if they have any fancy
and intelligence, Scott is not tedious even now; and probably his most devoted
readers are boys, girls, and men of matured appreciation and considerable
knowledge of literature. The unformed and the cultivated tastes are still at
one about Scott. He holds us yet with his unpremeditated art, his natural
qualities of friendliness, of humour, of sympathy. Even the carelessness with
which his earliest and his kindest critics—Ellis, Erskine, and Lady
Louisa Stuart—reproached him has not succeeded in killing his work and
diminishing his renown.

[* Abbotsford Manuscripts.]

[** See Scott’s reply, with the anecdote about Mrs. Aphra Behn’s
novels, Lockhart, vi. 406 (edition of 1839).]

It is style, as critics remind us, it is perfection of form, no doubt, that
secure the permanence of literature; but Scott did not overstate his own
defects when he wrote in his Journal (April 22, 1826): “A solecism in
point of composition, like a Scotch word, is indifferent to me. I never learned
grammar. . . . I believe the bailiff in ‘The Goodnatured Man’ is
not far wrong when he says: ‘One man has one way of expressing himself,
and another another; and that is all the difference between them.’”
The difference between Scott and Thackeray or Flaubert among good writers, and
a crowd of self-conscious and mannered “stylists” among writers not
so very good, is essential. About Shakspeare it was said that he “never
blotted a line.” The observation is almost literally true about Sir
Walter. The pages of his manuscript novels show scarcely a retouch or an
erasure, whether in the “Waverley” fragment of 1805 or the
unpublished “Siege of Malta” of 1832.[*] The handwriting becomes
closer and smaller; from thirty-eight lines to the page in
“Waverley,” he advances to between fifty and sixty in
“Ivanhoe.” The few alterations are usually additions. For example,
a fresh pedantry of the Baron of Bradwardine’s is occasionally set down
on the opposite page. Nothing can be less like the method of Flaubert or the
method of Mr. Ruskin, who tells us that “a sentence of ‘Modern
Painters’ was often written four or five times over in my own hand, and
tried in every word for perhaps an hour,—perhaps a forenoon,—before
it was passed for the printer.” Each writer has his method; Scott was no
stippler or niggler, but, as we shall see later, he often altered much in his
proof-sheets.[**] As long as he was understood, he was almost reckless of
well-constructed sentences, of the one best word for his meaning, of rounded
periods. This indifference is not to be praised, but it is only a proof of his
greatness that his style, never distinguished, and often lax, has not impaired
the vitality of his prose. The heart which beats in his works, the knowledge of
human nature, the dramatic vigour of his character, the nobility of his whole
being win the day against the looseness of his manner, the negligence of his
composition, against the haste of fatigue which set him, as Lady Louisa Stuart
often told him, on “huddling up a conclusion anyhow, and so kicking the
book out of his way.” In this matter of dénouements he certainly
was no more careful than Shakspeare or Molière.

[* A history of Scott’s Manuscripts, with good fac-similes, will be found
in the Catalogue of the Scott Exhibition, Edinburgh, 1872.]

[** While speaking of correction, it may be noted that Scott, in his
“Advertisement” prefixed to the issue of 1829, speaks of changes
made in that collected edition. In “Waverley” these emendations are
very rare, and are unimportant. A few callidæ juncturæ are added, a very
few lines are deleted. The postscript of the first edition did not contain the
anecdote about the hiding-place of the manuscript among the fishing tackle. The
first line of Flora Macdonald’s battle-song (chapter xxii.) originally
ran, “Mist darkens the mountain, night darkens the vale,” in place
of “There is mist on the mountain and mist on the vale.” For the
rest, as Scott says, “where the tree falls it must lie.”]

The permanence of Sir Walter’s romances is proved, as we said, by their
survival among all the changes of fashion in the art of fiction. When he took
up his pen to begin “Waverley,” fiction had not absorbed, as it
does to-day, almost all the best imaginative energy of English or foreign
writers. Now we hear of “art” on every side, and every novelist
must give the world his opinion about schools and methods. Scott, on the other
hand, lived in the greatest poetical age since that of Elizabeth. Poetry or the
drama (in which, to be sure, few succeeded) occupied Wordsworth, Byron,
Coleridge, Shelley, Crabbe, Campbell, and Keats. Then, as Joanna Baillie
hyperbolically declared, “The Scotch novels put poetry out of
fashion.”[*] Till they appeared, novels seem to have been left to readers
like the plaintive lady’s-maid whom Scott met at Dalkeith, when he beheld
“the fair one descend from the carriage with three half-bound volumes of
a novel in her hand.” Mr. Morritt, writing to Scott in March, 1815, hopes
he will “restore pure narrative to the dignity from which it gradually
slipped before it dwindled into a manufactory for the circulating
library.” “Waverley,” he asserted, “would prevail over
people otherwise averse to blue-backed volumes.” Thus it was an
unconsidered art which Scott took up and revived. Half a century had passed
since Fielding gave us in “Tom Jones” his own and very different
picture of life in the “’forty-five,”—of life with all
the romance of the “Race to Derby” cut down to a sentence or two.
Since the age of the great English novelists, Richardson and Fielding and Miss
Burney, the art of fiction had been spasmodically alive in the hands of Mrs.
Radcliffe, had been sentimental with Henry Mackenzie, and now was all but
moribund, save for the humorous Irish sketches of Miss Edgeworth. As Scott
always insisted, it was mainly “the extended and well-merited fame of
Miss Edgeworth” which induced him to try his hand on a novel containing
pictures of Scottish life and character. Nothing was more remarkable in his own
novels than the blending of close and humorous observation of common life with
pleasure in adventurous narratives about “what is not so, and was not so,
and Heaven forbid that it ever should be so,” as the girl says in the
nursery tale. Through his whole life he remained the dreamer of dreams and
teller of wild legends, who had held the lads of the High School entranced
round Luckie Brown’s fireside, and had fleeted the summer days in
interchange of romances with a schoolboy friend, Mr. Irving, among the hills
that girdle Edinburgh. He ever had a passion for “knights and ladies and
dragons and giants,” and “God only knows,” he says,
“how delighted I was to find myself in such society.” But with all
this delight, his imagination had other pleasures than the fantastic: the
humours and passions of ordinary existence were as clearly visible to him as
the battles, the castles, and the giants. True, he was more fastidious in his
choice of novels of real life than in his romantic reading. “The whole
Jemmy and Jessamy tribe I abhorred,” he said; “and it required the
art of Burney or the feeling of Mackenzie to fix my attention upon a domestic
tale.” But when the domestic tale was good and true, no man appreciated
it more than he. None has more vigorously applauded Miss Austen than Scott, and
it was thus that as the “Author of ‘Waverley’” he
addressed Miss Edgeworth, through James Ballantyne: “If I could but hit
Miss Edgeworth’s wonderful power of vivifying all her persons, and making
them live as beings in your mind, I should not be afraid.”
“Often,” Ballantyne goes on, “has the Author of
‘Waverley’ used such language to me; and I knew that I gratified
him most when I could say, ‘Positively, this is equal to Miss
Edgeworth.’”

[* Abbotsford Manuscripts. Hogg averred that nobody either read or wrote poetry
after Sir Walter took to prose.]

Thus Scott’s own taste was catholic: and in this he was particularly
unlike the modern novelists, who proclaim, from both sides of the Atlantic,
that only in their own methods, and in sharing their own exclusive tastes, is
literary salvation. The prince of Romance was no one-sided romanticiste;
his ear was open to all fiction good in its kind. His generosity made him think
Miss Edgeworth’s persons more alive than his own. To his own romances he
preferred Mrs. Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”[*] As a critic, of
course, he was mistaken; but his was the generous error of the heart, and it is
the heart in Walter Scott, even more than the brain, that lends its own
vitality to his creations. Equipped as he was with a taste truly catholic,
capable in old age of admiring “Pelham,” he had the power to do
what he calls “the big bow-wow strain;” yet he was not, as in his
modesty he supposed, denied “the exquisite touch which renders ordinary
commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the
description and the sentiment.”[**]

[* Scott reviewed “Frankenstein” in 1818. Mr. Shelley had sent it
with a brief note, in which he said that it was the work of a friend, and that
he had only seen it through the press. Sir Walter passed the book on to Mr.
Morritt, who, in reply, gave Scott a brief and not very accurate history of
Shelley. Sir Walter then wrote a most favourable review of
“Frankenstein” in “Blackwood’s Magazine,”
observing that it was attributed to Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley, a son-in-law of
Mr. Godwin. Mrs. Shelley presently wrote thanking him for the review, and
assuring him that it was her own work. Scott had apparently taken
Shelley’s disclaimer as an innocent evasion; it was an age of literary
superscheries.—Abbotsford Manuscripts.]

[** Journal, March 14, 1826.]

The letter of Rose Bradwardine to Waverley is alone enough to disprove
Scott’s disparagement of himself, his belief that he had been denied
exquisiteness of touch. Nothing human is more delicate, nothing should be more
delicately handled, than the first love of a girl. What the
“analytical” modern novelist would pass over and dissect and place
beneath his microscope till a student of any manliness blushes with shame and
annoyance, Scott suffers Rose Bradwardine to reveal with a sensitive shyness.
But Scott, of course, had even less in common with the peeper and botanizer on
maidens’ hearts than with the wildest romanticist. He considered that
“a want of story is always fatal to a book the first reading, and it is
well if it gets a chance of a second.” From him “Pride and
Prejudice” got a chance of three readings at least. This generous
universality of taste, in addition to all his other qualities of humour and
poetry, enabled Scott to raise the novel from its decadence, and to make the
dry bones of history live again in his tales. With Charles Edward at Holyrood,
as Mr. Senior wrote in the “Quarterly Review,” “we are in the
lofty region of romance. In any other hands than those of Sir Walter Scott, the
language and conduct of those great people would have been as dignified as
their situations. We should have heard nothing of the hero in his new costume
‘majoring afore the muckle pier-glass,’ of his arrest by the host
of the Candlestick, of his examination by the well-powdered Major Melville, or
of his fears of being informed against by Mrs. Nosebag.” In short,
“while the leading persons and events are as remote from ordinary life as
the inventions of Scudéry, the picture of human nature is as faithful as could
have been given by Fielding or Le Sage.” Though this criticism has not
the advantage of being new, it is true; and when we have added that
Scott’s novels are the novels of the poet who, next to Shakspeare, knew
mankind most widely and well, we have the secret of his triumph.

For the first time in literature, it was a poet who held the pen of the
romancer in prose. Fielding, Richardson, De Foe, Miss Burney, were none of them
made by the gods poetical. Scott himself, with his habitual generosity, would
have hailed his own predecessor in Mrs. Radcliffe. “The praise may be
claimed for Mrs. Radcliffe of having been the first to introduce into her prose
fictions a beautiful and fanciful tone of natural description and impressive
narrative, which had hitherto been exclusively applied to poetry. . . . Mrs.
Radcliffe has a title to be considered the first poetess of romantic
fiction.” When “Guy Mannering” appeared, Wordsworth sneered
at it as a work of the Radcliffe school. The slight difference produced by the
introduction of humour could scarcely be visible to Wordsworth. But Scott would
not have been hurt by his judgment. He had the literary courage to recognize
merit even when obscured by extravagance, and to applaud that in which people
of culture could find neither excellence nor charm. Like Thackeray, he had been
thrilled by Vivaidi in the Inquisition, and he was not the man to hide his
gratitude because his author was now out of fashion.

Thus we see that Scott, when he began “Waverley” in 1805, brought
to his labour no hard-and-fast theory of the art of fiction, but a kindly
readiness to be pleased, and to find good in everything. He brought his wide
knowledge of contemporary Scottish life “from the peer to the
ploughman;” he brought his well-digested wealth of antiquarian lore, and
the poetic skill which had just been busied with the “Lay of the Last
Minstrel,” and was still to be occupied, ere he finished his interrupted
novel, with “Marmion,” “The Lady of the Lake,”
“Rokeby,” and “The Lord of the Isles.” The comparative
failure of the last-named no doubt strengthened his determination to try prose
romance. He had never cared much for his own poems, he says, Byron had outdone
him in popularity, and the Muse—“the Good Demon” who once
deserted Herrick—came now less eagerly to his call.

It is curiously difficult to disentangle the statements about the composition
of “Waverley.” Our first authority, of course, is Scott’s own
account, given in the General Preface to the Edition of 1829. Lockhart,
however, remarks on the haste with which Sir Walter wrote the Introductions to
the magnum opus; and the lapse of fifteen years, the effects of disease,
and his habitual carelessness about his own works and mode of working may
certainly to some extent have clouded his memory. “About the year
1805,” as he says, he “threw together about one third part of the
first volume of ‘Waverley.’” It was advertised to be
published, he goes on, by Ballantyne, with the second title, “’T is
Fifty Years since.” This, obviously, would have made 1755 the date of the
events, just as the title “’T is Sixty Years since” in 1814
brought the date of the events to 1754. By inspecting the water-mark of the
paper Lockhart discovered that 1805 was the period in which the first few
chapters were composed; the rest of the paper was marked 1814. Scott next
observes that the unfavourable opinion of a critical friend on the first seven
chapters induced him to lay the manuscript aside. Who was this friend? Lockhart
thinks it was Erskine. It is certain, from a letter of Ballantyne’s at
Abbotsford,—a letter printed by Lockhart, September 15, 1810,—that
Ballantyne in 1810 saw at least the earlier portions of “Waverley,”
and it is clear enough that he had seen none of it before. If any friend did
read it in 1805, it cannot have been Ballantyne, and may have been Erskine. But
none of the paper bears a water-mark between 1805 and 1813, so Scott must
merely have taken it up, in 1810, as it had been for five years. Now Scott says
that the success of “The Lady of the Lake,” with its Highland
pictures, induced him “to attempt something of the same sort in
prose.” This, as Lockhart notes, cannot refer to 1805, as the “Lady
of the Lake” did not appear till 1810. But the good fortune of the
“Lady” may very well have induced him in 1810 to reconsider his
Highland prose romance. In 1808, as appears from an undated letter to Surtees
of Mainsforth (Abbotsford Manuscripts), he was contemplating a poem on
“that wandering knight so fair,” Charles Edward, and on the
adventures of his flight, on Lochiel, Flora Macdonald, the Kennedys, and the
rest. Earlier still, on June 9, 1806, Scott wrote to Lady Abercorn that he had
“a great work in contemplation, a Highland romance of love, magic, and
war.” “The Lady of the Lake” took the place of that poem in
his “century of inventions,” and, stimulated by the popularity of
his Highland romance in verse, he disinterred the last seven chapters of
“Waverley” from their five years of repose. Very probably, as he
himself hints, the exercise of fitting a conclusion to Strutt’s
“Queenhoo Hall” may have helped to bring his fancy back to his own
half-forgotten story of “Waverley.” In 1811 Scott went to
Abbotsford, and there, as he tells us, he lost sight of his
“Waverley” fragment.[*] Often looked for, it was never found, till
the accident of a search for fishing-tackle led him to discover it in the
drawer of an old bureau in a lumber-garret. This cabinet afterwards came into
the possession of Mr. William Laidlaw, Scott’s friend and amanuensis, and
it is still, the Editor understands, in the hands of Miss Laidlaw. The
fishing-tackle, Miss Laidlaw tells the Editor (mainly red hackles, tied on
hair, not gut), still occupies the drawer, except a few flies which were given,
as relics, to the late Mr. Thomas Tod Stoddart. In 1813, then, volume i. of
“Waverley” was finished. Then Scott undertook some articles for
Constable, and laid the novel aside. The printing, at last, must have been very
speedy. Dining in Edinburgh, in June, 1814, Lockhart saw “the hand of
Walter Scott” busy at its task. “Page after page is finished, and
thrown on the heap of manuscripts, and still it goes on unwearied.”[**]
The book was published on July 7, the press hardly keeping up with the activity
of the author. Scott had written “two volumes in three summer
weeks” and the printers had not shown less activity, while binders and
stitchers must have worked extra tides.

[* Mr. R. P. Gillies says that in 1811 “Waverley, in three volumes, had
been announced by John Ballantyne, and a sheet or two set in types”
(Recollections of Sir Walter Scott, p 204).]

[** Lockhart, iv, 172.]

“Waverley” was published without the Author’s name.
Scott’s reasons for being anonymous have been stated by himself.
“It was his humour,”—that is the best of the reasons, and the
secret gave him a great deal of amusement. The Ballantynes, of course, knew it
from the first; so did Mr. Morritt, Lady Louisa Stuart, and Lord and Lady
Montague, and others were gradually admitted. In an undated letter, probably of
November, 1816, Scott says to the Marchioness of Abercorn, a most intimate
friend: “I cannot even conjecture whom you mean by Mr. Mackenzie as
author of ‘The Antiquary.’ I should think my excellent old friend
Mr. Harry Mackenzie [author of the ‘Man of Feeling,’ etc.] was too
much advanced in years and plunged in business to amuse himself by writing
novels; and besides, the style in no degree resembles his.” (Lady
Abercorn meant “Young Harry Mackenzie,” not the patriarch.)
“I am told one of the English reviews gives these works by name and upon
alleged authority to George Forbes, Sir William’s brother; so they take
them off my hands, I don’t care who they turn to, for I am really tired
of an imputation which I am under the necessity of confuting at every corner.
Tom will soon be home from Canada, as the death of my elder brother has left
him a little money. He may answer for himself, but I hardly suspect him, unless
much changed, to be possessed of the perseverance necessary to write nine
volumes.” Scott elsewhere rather encouraged the notion that his brother
Thomas was the author, and tried to make him exert himself and enter the field
as a rival. Gossip also assigned the “Scotch novels” to Jeffrey, to
Mrs. Thomas Scott, aided by her husband and Sir Walter, to a Dr. Greenfield, a
clergyman, and to many others. Sir Walter humorously suggested George Cranstoun
as the real offender. After the secret was publicly confessed, Lady Louisa
Stuart reminded Scott of all the amusement it had given them. “Old
Mortality” had been pronounced “too good” for Scott, and free
from his “wearisome descriptions of scenery.” Clever people had
detected several separate hands in “Old Mortality,” as in the
Iliad. All this was diverting. Moreover, Scott was in some degree protected
from the bores who pester a successful author. He could deny the facts very
stoutly, though always, as he insists, with the reservation implied in alleging
that, if he had been the author, he would still have declined to confess. In
the notes to later novels we shall see some of his “great denials.”

The reception of “Waverley” was enthusiastic. Large editions were
sold in Edinburgh, and when Scott returned from his cruise in the northern
islands he found society ringing with his unacknowledged triumph. Byron,
especially, proclaimed his pleasure in “Waverley.” It may be
curious to recall some of the published reviews of the moment. Probably no
author ever lived so indifferent to published criticism as Scott. Miss
Edgeworth, in one of her letters, reminds him how they had both agreed that
writers who cared for the dignity and serenity of their characters should
abstain from “that authors’ bane-stuff.” “As to the
herd of critics,” Scott wrote to Miss Seward, after publishing “The
Lay,” “many of those gentlemen appear to me to be a set of tinkers,
who, unable to make pots and pans, set up for menders of
them.” It is probable, therefore, that he was quite unconcerned about the
few remarks which Mr. Gifford, in the “Quarterly Review” (vol. xl.,
1814), interspersed among a multitude of extracts, in a notice of
“Waverley” manufactured with scissors and paste. The
“Quarterly” recognized “a Scotch Castle Rackrent,” but
in “a much higher strain.” The tale was admitted to possess all the
accuracy of history, and all the vivacity of romance. Scott’s second
novel, “Guy Mannering,” was attacked with some viciousness in the
periodical of which he was practically the founder, and already the critic was
anxious to repeat what Scott, talking of Pope’s censors, calls “the
cuckoo cry of ‘written out’!” The notice of
“Waverley” in the “Edinburgh Review” by Mr. Jeffrey was
not so slight and so unworthy of the topic. The novel was declared, and not
unjustly, to be “very hastily, and in many places very unskilfully,
written.” The Scotch was decried as “unintelligible” dialect
by the very reviewer who had accused “Marmion” of not being Scotch
enough. But the “Edinburgh” applauded “the extraordinary
fidelity and felicity” with which all the inferior agents in the story
are represented. “Fastidious readers” might find Callum Beg and
Mrs. Nosebag and the Cumberland peasants “coarse and disgusting,”
said the reviewer, who must have had in his imagination readers extremely
superfine. He objected to the earlier chapters as uninteresting, and—with
justice—to the passages where the author speaks in “the smart and
flippant style of modern makers of paragraphs.” “These form a
strange and humiliating contrast with the force and freedom of his manner when
engaged in those dramatic and picturesque representations to which his genius
so decidedly inclines.” He spoke severely of the places where Scott
explains the circumstances of Waverley’s adventures before he reaches
Edinburgh; and Scott himself, in his essay on Mrs. Radcliffe, regrets that
explanatory chapters had ever been invented. The reviewer broadly hints his
belief that Scott is the author; and on the whole, except for a cautious lack
of enthusiasm, the notice is fair and kindly. The “Monthly Review”
differed not much from the Blue and Yellow (the “Edinburgh
Review”).

“It is not one of the least merits of this very uncommon production that
all the subordinate characters are touched with the same discriminating force
which so strongly marks their principals; and that in this manner almost every
variety of station and interest, such as existed at the period under review, is
successively brought before the mind of the reader in colours vivid as the
original.
    “A few oversights, we think, we have detected in the conduct of the
story which ought not to remain unnoticed. For example, the age of Stanley and
Lady Emily does not seem well to accord with the circumstances of their union,
as related in the commencement of the work; and we are not quite satisfied that
Edward should have been so easily reconciled to the barbarous and stubborn
prejudices which precluded even the office of intercession for his gallant
friend and companion-in-arms.
    “The pieces of poetry which are not very profusely scattered through
these volumes can scarcely fail to be ascribed to Mr. Scott, whatever may be
judged of the body of the work. In point of comparative merit, we should class
them neither with the highest nor with the meanest effusions of his lyric
minstrelsy.”

Lord Byron’s “Grandmother’s Review, the British,” was
also friendly and sagacious, in its elderly way.

“We request permission, therefore, to introduce ‘Waverley,’ a
publication which has already excited considerable interest in the sister
kingdom, to the literary world on this side the Tweed.
    “A very short time has elapsed since this publication made its
appearance in Edinburgh, and though it came into the world in the modest garb
of anonymous obscurity, the Northern literati are unanimous, we
understand, in ascribing part of it, at least, to the pen of W. Scott.
    “We are unwilling to consider this publication in the light of a
common novel whose fate it is to be devoured with rapidity for a day, and
afterwards forgotten forever, but as a vehicle of curious and accurate
information upon a subject which must at all times demand our
attention,—the history and manners of a very large and renowned portion
of the inhabitants of these islands. We would recommend this tale as faithfully
embodying the lives, the manners, and the opinions of this departed race, and
as affording those features of ancient days which no man probably, besides its
author, has had the means to collect, the desire to preserve, or the power to
portray.
    “Although there are characters sufficient to awaken the attention and
to diversify the scenes, yet they are not in sufficient number to perplex the
memory or to confuse the incidents. Their spirit is well kept up till the very
last, and they relieve one another with so much art that the reader will not
find himself wearied even with the pedantic jargon of the old Baron of
Bradwardine.
    “Of Waverley himself we shall say but little, as his character is far
too common to need a comment; we can only say that his wanderings are not
gratuitous, nor is he wavering and indecisive only because the author chooses
to make him so. Every feature in his character is formed by education, and it
is to this first source that we are constantly referred for a just and
sufficient cause of all the wandering passions as they arise in his mind.
    “The secondary personages are drawn with much spirit and fidelity,
and with a very striking knowledge of the peculiarities of the Scotch temper
and disposition. The incidents are all founded on fact, and the historical
parts are related with much accuracy. The livelier scenes which are displayed
are of the most amusing species, because they flow so naturally from the
personages before us that the characters, not the author, appear to speak. A
strong vein of very original humour marks the whole: in most instances it is
indeed of a local and particular nature, but in many cases it assumes a more
general appearance.
    “Of the more serious portions we can speak with unqualified
approbation; the very few pathetic scenes which occur are short, dignifed, and
affecting. The love-scenes are sufficiently contracted to produce that very
uncommon sensation in the mind,—a wish that they were longer.
    “The religious opinions expressed in the course of the tale are few,
but of those few we fully approve.
    “The humorous and happy adaptation of legal terms shows no moderate
acquaintance with the arcana of the law, and a perpetual allusion to the
English and Latin classics no common share of scholarship and taste.”

The “Scots Magazine” illustrated the admirable unanimity of
reviewers when they are unanimous. The “Anti-jacobin”
objected that no Château-Margaux sent in the wood from Bordeaux to Dundee in
1713 could have been drinkable in 1745. “Claret two-and-thirty years old!
It almost gives us the gripes to think of it.” Indeed, Sir Walter, as
Lochhart assures us, was so far from being a judge of claret that he could not
tell when it was “corked.” One or two points equally important
amused the reviewer, who, like most of his class, detected the hand of Scott.
There was hardly a possibility, as Mr. Morritt told Sir Walter, “that the
poems in ‘Waverley’ could fail to suggest their author. No man who
ever heard you tell a story over a table but must recognize you at once.”
To his praise of “Waverley” Mr. Morritt hardly added any adverse
criticism, beyond doubting the merit of the early chapters, and denouncing the
word “sombre” as one which had lately “kept bad company among
the slipshod English of the sentimental school.” Scott, in defence,
informed Mr. Morritt that he had “left the story to flag in the first
volume on purpose. . . . I wished (with what success Heaven knows) to avoid the
ordinary error of novelists, whose first volume is usually their best.”

It must be admitted that if Scott wished to make “Waverley”
“flag” in the beginning, he succeeded extremely well,—too
well for many modern readers, accustomed to a leap into the midst of the story.
“These introductory chapters,” he observes in a note on the fifth
of them, “have been a good deal censured as tedious and unnecessary; yet
there are circumstances recorded in them which the Author has not been able to
persuade himself to retract or cancel.” These “circumstances”
are probably the studies of Waverley, his romantic readings, which are really
autobiographic. Scott was, apparently, seriously of opinion that the
“mental discipline” of a proper classical education would have been
better for himself than his own delightfully desultory studies. Ballantyne
could not see what Waverley’s reading had to do with his adventures and
character. Scott persisted in being of another mind. He himself, writing to
Morritt, calls his hero “a sneaking piece of imbecility;” but he
probably started with loftier intentions of “psychological
analysis” than he fulfilled. He knew, and often said, in private letters,
as in published works, that he was no hand at a respectable hero. Borderers,
buccaneers, robbers, and humorsome people, like Dugald Dalgetty and Bailie
Nicol Jarvie and Macwheeble, whom he said he preferred to any person in
“Waverley,” were the characters he delighted in. We may readily
believe that Shakspeare too preferred Jacques and the Fat Knight to Orlando or
the favoured lover of Anne Page. Your hero is a difficult person to make
human,—unless, indeed, he has the defects of Pendennis or Tom Jones. But
it is likely enough that the Waverley whom Scott had in his mind in 1805 was
hardly the Waverley of 1813. His early English chapters are much in the
ordinary vein of novels as they were then written; in those chapters come the
“asides” by the author which the “Edinburgh Review”
condemned. But there remains the kindly, honourable Sir Everard, while the calm
atmosphere of English meadows, and the plump charms of Miss Cecilia Stubbs, are
intended as foils to the hills of the North, the shy refinement of Rose, and
the heroic heart of Flora Mac-Ivor. Scott wished to show the remote extremes of
civilization and mental habit co-existing in the same island of Scotland and
England. Yet we regret such passages as “craving pardon for my heroics,
which I am unable in certain cases to resist giving way to,” and so
forth. Scott was no Thackeray, no Fielding, and failed (chiefly in
“Waverley”) when he attempted the mood of banter, which one of his
daughters, a lady “of Beatrice’s mind,” “never got from
me,” he observes.

In any serious attempt to criticise “Waverley” as a whole, it is
not easy to say whether we should try to put ourselves at the point of view of
its first readers, or whether we should look at it from the vantage-ground of
to-day. In 1814 the dead world of clannish loyalty was fresh in many memories.
Scott’s own mother had often spoken with a person who had seen Cromwell
enter Edinburgh after Dunbar. He himself knew heroes of the Forty-five, and his
friend Lady Louisa Stuart had been well acquainted with Miss Walkinshaw, sister
of the mistress of Charles Edward. To his generation those things were personal
memories, which to us seem as distant as the reign of Men-ka-ra. They could not
but be “carried off their feet” by such pictures of a past still so
near them. Nor had they other great novelists to weaken the force of
Scott’s impressions. They had not to compare him with the melancholy
mirth of Thackeray, and the charm, the magic, of his style. Balzac was of the
future; of the future was the Scott of France,—the boyish, the witty, the
rapid, the brilliant, the inexhaustible Dumas. Scott’s generation had no
scruples about “realism,” listened to no sermons on the glory of
the commonplace; like Dr. Johnson, they admired a book which “was amusing
as a fairy-tale.” But we are overwhelmed with a wealth of comparisons,
and deafened by a multitude of homilies on fiction, and distracted, like the
people in the Eyrbyggja Saga, by the strange rising and setting, and the
wild orbits of new “weirdmoons” of romance. Before we can make up
our minds on Scott, we have to remember, or forget, the scornful patronage of
one critic, the over-subtlety and exaggerations of another, the more than papal
infallibility of a third. Perhaps the best critic would be an intelligent
school-boy, with a generous heart and an unspoiled imagination. As his remarks
are not accessible, as we must try to judge “Waverley” like readers
inured to much fiction and much criticism, we must confess, no doubt, that the
commencement has the faults which the first reviewers detected, and which Scott
acknowledged. He is decidedly slow in getting to business, as they say; he
began with more of conscious ethical purpose than he went on, and his banter is
poor. But when once we enter the village of Tully-Veolan, the Magician finds
his wand. Each picture of place or person tells,—the old butler, the daft
Davie Gellatley, the solemn and chivalrous Baron, the pretty natural girl, the
various lairds, the factor Macwheeble,—all at once become living people,
and friends whom we can never lose. The creative fire of Shakspeare lives
again. The Highlanders—Evan Dhu, Donald Bean Lean, his charming daughter,
Callum Beg, and all the rest—are as natural as the Lowlanders. In Fergus
and Flora we feel, indeed, at first, that the author has left his experience
behind, and is giving us creatures of fancy. But they too become human and
natural,—Fergus in his moods of anger, ambition, and final courageous
resignation; Flora, in her grief. As for Waverley, his creator was no doubt too
hard on him. Among the brave we hear that he was one of the bravest, though
Scott always wrote his battlepieces in a manner to suggest no discomfort, and
does not give us particular details of Waverley’s prowess. He has spirit
enough, this “sneaking piece of imbecility,” as he shows in his
quarrel with Fergus, on the march to Derby. Waverley, that creature of romance,
considered as a lover, is really not romantic enough. He loved Rose because she
loved him,—which is confessed to be unheroic behaviour. Scott, in
“Waverley,” certainly does not linger over love-scenes. With Mr.
Ruskin, we may say: “Let it not be thought for an instant that the slight
and sometimes scornful glance with which Scott passes over scenes, which a
novelist of our own day would have analyzed with the airs of a philosopher, and
painted with the curiosity of a gossip, indicates any absence in his heart of
sympathy with the great and sacred elements of personal happiness.” But
his mind entertained other themes of interest, “loyalty, patriotism,
piety.” On the other hand, it is necessary to differ from Mr. Ruskin when
he says that Scott “never knew ‘l’amor che move ’l sol
e l’altre stelle.’” He whose heart was “broken for two
years,” and retained the crack till his dying day, he who, when old and
tired, and near his death, was yet moved by the memory of the name which thirty
years before he had cut in Runic characters on the turf at the Castle-gate of
St. Andrew, knew love too well to write of it much, or to speak of it at all.
He had won his ideal as alone the ideal can be won; he never lost her: she was
with him always, because she had been unattainable. “There are
few,” he says, “who have not, at one period of life, broken ties of
love and friendship, secret disappointments of the heart, to mourn
over,—and we know no book which recalls the memory of them more severely
than ‘Julia de Roubigné.’” He could not be very eager to
recall them, he who had so bitterly endured them, and because he had known and
always knew “l’amor che move ’l sol e l’altre
stelle,” a seal was on his lips, a silence broken only by a caress of Di
Vernon’s.[*]

[* In a letter to Lady Abercorn, written when he was busy with the “Lady
of the Lake,” Scott complained that he could not draw a lover, in spite
of his own experience.]

This apology we may make, if an apology be needed, for what modern readers may
think the meagreness of the love-passages in Scott. He does not deal in
embraces and effusions, his taste is too manly; he does not dwell much on Love,
because, like the shepherd in Theocritus, he has found him an inhabitant of the
rocks. Moreover, when Scott began novel-writing, he was as old as Thackeray
when Thackeray said that while at work on a love-scene he blushed so that you
would think he was going into an apoplexy. “Waverley” stands by its
pictures of manners, of character, by its humour and its tenderness, by its
manly “criticism of life,” by its touches of poetry, so various, so
inspired, as in Davie Gellatley with his songs, and Charles Edward in the
gallant hour of Holyrood, and Flora with her high, selfless hopes and broken
heart, and the beloved Baron, bearing his lot “with a good-humoured
though serious composure.” “To be sure, we may say with Virgilius
Maro, ‘Fuimus Troes’—and there’s the end of an auld
sang. But houses and families and men have a’ stood lang eneugh when they
have stood till they fall with honour.”

“Waverley” ends like a fairy-tale, while real life ever ends like a
Northern saga. But among the good things that make life bearable, such
fairy-tales are not the least precious, and not the least enduring.

INTRODUCTION

The plan of this edition leads me to insert in this place some account of the
incidents on which the Novel of Waverley is founded. They have been already
given to the public by my late lamented friend, William Erskine, Esq.
(afterwards Lord Kinneder), when reviewing the Tales of My Landlord for the
Quarterly Review in 1817. The particulars were derived by the critic from the
Author’s information. Afterwards they were published in the preface to
the “Chronicles of the Canongate”. They are now inserted in their
proper place.

The mutual protection afforded by Waverley and Talbot to each other, upon which
the whole plot depends, is founded upon one of those anecdotes which soften the
features even of civil war; and, as it is equally honourable to the memory of
both parties, we have no hesitation to give their names at length. When the
Highlanders, on the morning of the battle of Preston, 1745, made their
memorable attack on Sir John Cope’s army, a battery of four field-pieces
was stormed and carried by the Camerons and the Stewarts of Appine. The late
Alexander Stewart of Invernahylewas one of the foremost in the charge, and
observing an officer of the King’s forces, who, scorning to join the
flight of all around, remained with his sword in his hand, as if determined to
the very last to defend the post assigned to him, the Highland gentleman
commanded him to surrender, and received for reply a thrust, which he caught in
his target. The officer was now defenceless, and the battle-axe of a gigantic
Highlander (the miller of Invernahyle’s mill) was uplifted to dash his
brains out, when Mr. Stewart with difficulty prevailed on him to yield. He took
charge of his enemy’s property, protected his person, and finally
obtained him liberty on his parole. The officer proved to be Colonel
Whitefoord, an Ayrshire gentleman of high character and influence, and warmly
attached to the House of Hanover; yet such was the confidence existing between
these two honourable men, though of different political principles, that, while
the civil war was raging, and straggling officers from the Highland army were
executed without mercy, Invernahyle hesitated not to pay his late captive a
visit, as he returned to the Highlands to raise fresh recruits, on which
occasion he spent a day or two in Ayrshire among Colonel Whitefoord’s
Whig friends, as pleasantly and as good-humouredly as if all had been at peace
around him.

After the battle of Culloden had ruined the hopes of Charles Edward and
dispersed his proscribed adherents, it was Colonel Whitefoord’s turn to
strain every nerve to obtain Mr. Stewart’s pardon. He went to the Lord
Justice Clerk to the Lord Advocate, and to all the officers of state, and each
application was answered by the production of a list in which Invernahyle (as
the good old gentleman was wont to express it) appeared “marked with the
sign of the beast!” as a subject unfit for favour or pardon.

At length Colonel Whitefoord applied to the Duke of Cumberland in person. From
him, also, he received a positive refusal. He then limited his request, for the
present, to a protection for Stewart’s house, wife, children, and
property. This was also refused by the Duke; on which Colonel Whitefoord,
taking his commission from his bosom, laid it on the table before his Royal
Highness with much emotion, and asked permission to retire from the service of
a sovereign who did not know how to spare a vanquished enemy. The Duke was
struck, and even affected. He bade the Colonel take up his commission, and
granted the protection he required. It was issued just in time to save the
house, corn, and cattle at Invernahyle from the troops, who were engaged in
laying waste what it was the fashion to call “the country of the
enemy.” A small encampment of soldiers was formed on Invernahyle’s
property, which they spared while plundering the country around, and searching
in every direction for the leaders of the insurrection, and for Stewart in
particular. He was much nearer them than they suspected; for, hidden in a cave
(like the Baron of Bradwardine), he lay for many days so near the English
sentinels that he could hear their muster-roll called. His food was brought to
him by one of his daughters, a child of eight years old, whom Mrs. Stewart was
under the necessity of entrusting with this commission; for her own motions,
and those of all her elder inmates, were closely watched. With ingenuity beyond
her years, the child used to stray about among the soldiers, who were rather
kind to her, and thus seize the moment when she was unobserved and steal into
the thicket, when she deposited whatever small store of provisions she had in
charge at some marked spot, where her father might find it. Invernahyle
supported life for several weeks by means of these precarious supplies; and, as
he had been wounded in the battle of Culloden, the hardships which he endured
were aggravated by great bodily pain. After the soldiers had removed their
quarters he had another remarkable escape.

As he now ventured to his own house at night and left it in the morning, he was
espied during the dawn by a party of the enemy, who fired at and pursued him.
The fugitive being fortunate enough to escape their search, they returned to
the house and charged the family with harbouring one of the proscribed
traitors. An old woman had presence of mind enough to maintain that the man
they had seen was the shepherd. “Why did he not stop when we called to
him?” said the soldier. “He is as deaf, poor man, as a
peat-stack,” answered the ready-witted domestic. “Let him be sent
for directly.” The real shepherd accordingly was brought from the hill,
and, as there was time to tutor him by the way, he was as deaf when he made his
appearance as was necessary to sustain his character. Invernahyle was
afterwards pardoned under the Act of Indemnity.

The Author knew him well, and has often heard these circumstances from his own
mouth. He was a noble specimen of the old Highlander, far descended, gallant,
courteous, and brave, even to chivalry. He had been out, I believe, in
1715 and 1745, was an active partaker in all the stirring scenes which passed
in the Highlands betwixt these memorable eras; and, I have heard, was
remarkable, among other exploits, for having fought a duel with the broadsword
with the celebrated Rob Roy MacGregor at the clachan of Balquidder.

Invernahyle chanced to be in Edinburgh when Paul Jones came into the Firth of
Forth, and though then an old man, I saw him in arms, and heard him exult (to
use his own words) in the prospect of “drawing his claymore once more
before he died.” In fact, on that memorable occasion, when the capital of
Scotland was menaced by three trifling sloops or brigs, scarce fit to have
sacked a fishing village, he was the only man who seemed to propose a plan of
resistance. He offered to the magistrates, if broadswords and dirks could be
obtained, to find as many Highlanders among the lower classes as would cut off
any boat’s crew who might be sent into a town full of narrow and winding
passages, in which they were like to disperse in quest of plunder. I know not
if his plan was attended to, I rather think it seemed too hazardous to the
constituted authorities, who might not, even at that time, desire to see arms
in Highland hands. A steady and powerful west wind settled the matter by
sweeping Paul Jones and his vessels out of the Firth.

If there is something degrading in this recollection, it is not unpleasant to
compare it with those of the last war, when Edinburgh, besides regular forces
and militia, furnished a volunteer brigade of cavalry, infantry, and artillery
to the amount of six thousand men and upwards, which was in readiness to meet
and repel a force of a far more formidable description than was commanded by
the adventurous American. Time and circumstances change the character of
nations and the fate of cities; and it is some pride to a Scotchman to reflect
that the independent and manly character of a country, willing to entrust its
own protection to the arms of its children, after having been obscured for half
a century, has, during the course of his own lifetime, recovered its lustre.

Other illustrations of “Waverley” will be found in the Notes at the
foot of the pages to which they belong. Those which appeared too long to be so
placed are given at the end of the chapters to which they severally relate.
[Footnote: In this edition at the end of the several volumes.]

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

To this slight attempt at a sketch of ancient Scottish manners the public have
been more favourable than the Author durst have hoped or expected. He has
heard, with a mixture of satisfaction and humility, his work ascribed to more
than one respectable name. Considerations, which seem weighty in his particular
situation, prevent his releasing those gentlemen from suspicion by placing his
own name in the title-page; so that, for the present at least, it must remain
uncertain whether WAVERLEY be the work of a poet or a critic, a
lawyer or a clergyman, or whether the writer, to use Mrs. Malaprop’s
phrase, be, “like Cerberus, three gentlemen at once.”

The Author, as he is unconscious of anything in the work itself (except perhaps
its frivolity) which prevents its finding an acknowledged father, leaves it to
the candour of the public to choose among the many circumstances peculiar to
different situations in life such as may induce him to suppress his name on the
present occasion. He may be a writer new to publication, and unwilling to avow
a character to which he is unaccustomed; or he may be a hackneyed author, who
is ashamed of too frequent appearance, and employs this mystery, as the heroine
of the old comedy used her mask, to attract the attention of those to whom her
face had become too familiar. He may be a man of a grave profession, to whom
the reputation of being a novel-writer might be prejudicial; or he may be a man
of fashion, to whom writing of any kind might appear pedantic. He may be too
young to assume the character of an author, or so old as to make it advisable
to lay it aside.

The Author of “Waverley” has heard it objected to this novel, that,
in the character of Callum Beg and in the account given by the Baron of
Bradwardine of the petty trespasses of the Highlanders upon trifling articles
of property, he has borne hard, and unjustly so, upon their national character.
Nothing could be farther from his wish or intention. The character of Callum
Beg is that of a spirit naturally turned to daring evil, and determined, by the
circumstances of his situation, to a particular species of mischief. Those who
have perused the curious Letters from the Highlands, published about 1726, will
find instances of such atrocious characters which fell under the writer’s
own observation, though it would be most unjust to consider such villains as
representatives of the Highlanders of that period, any more than the murderers
of Marr and Williamson can be supposed to represent the English of the present
day. As for the plunder supposed to have been picked up by some of the
insurgents in 1745, it must be remembered that, although the way of that
unfortunate little army was neither marked by devastation nor bloodshed, but,
on the contrary, was orderly and quiet in a most wonderful degree, yet no army
marches through a country in a hostile manner without committing some
depredations; and several, to the extent and of the nature jocularly imputed to
them by the Baron, were really laid to the charge of the Highland insurgents;
for which many traditions, and particularly one respecting the Knight of the
Mirror, may be quoted as good evidence.[*]

[* A homely metrical narrative of the events of the period, which contains some
striking particulars, and is still a great favourite with the lower classes,
gives a very correct statement of the behaviour of the mountaineers respecting
this same military license; and, as the verses are little known, and contain
some good sense, we venture to insert them.]

THE AUTHOR’S ADDRESS TO ALL IN GENERAL

Now, gentle readers, I have let you ken
My very thoughts, from heart and pen,
’Tis needless for to conten’
          Or yet controule,
For there’s not a word o’t I can men’;
          So ye must thole.

For on both sides some were not good;
I saw them murd’ring in cold blood,
Not the gentlemen, but wild and rude,
          The baser sort,
Who to the wounded had no mood
          But murd’ring sport!

Ev’n both at Preston and Falkirk,
That fatal night ere it grew mirk,
Piercing the wounded with their durk,
          Caused many cry!
Such pity’s shown from Savage and Turk
          As peace to die.

A woe be to such hot zeal,
To smite the wounded on the fiell!
It’s just they got such groats in kail,
          Who do the same.
It only teaches crueltys real
          To them again.

I’ve seen the men call’d Highland rogues,
With Lowland men make shangs a brogs,
Sup kail and brose, and fling the cogs
          Out at the door,
Take cocks, hens, sheep, and hogs,
          And pay nought for.

I saw a Highlander, ’t was right drole,
With a string of puddings hung on a pole,
Whip’d o’er his shoulder, skipped like a fole,
          Caus’d Maggy bann,
Lap o’er the midden and midden-hole,
          And aff he ran.

When check’d for this, they’d often tell ye,
Indeed her nainsell’s a tume belly;
You’ll no gie’t wanting bought, nor sell me;
          Hersell will hae’t;
Go tell King Shorge, and Shordy’s Willie,
          I’ll hae a meat.

I saw the soldiers at Linton-brig,
Because the man was not a Whig,
Of meat and drink leave not a skig,
          Within his door;
They burnt his very hat and wig,
          And thump’d him sore.

And through the Highlands they were so rude,
As leave them neither clothes nor food,
Then burnt their houses to conclude;
          ’T was tit for tat.
How can her nainsell e’er be good,
          To think on that?

And after all, O, shame and grief!
To use some worse than murd’ring thief,
Their very gentleman and chief,
          Unhumanly!
Like Popish tortures, I believe,
          Such cruelty.

Ev’n what was act on open stage
At Carlisle, in the hottest rage,
When mercy was clapt in a cage,
          And pity dead,
Such cruelty approv’d by every age,
          I shook my head.

So many to curse, so few to pray,
And some aloud huzza did cry;
They cursed the rebel Scots that day,
          As they’d been nowt
Brought up for slaughter, as that way
          Too many rowt.

Therefore, alas! dear countrymen,
O never do the like again,
To thirst for vengeance, never ben’
          Your gun nor pa’,
But with the English e’en borrow and len’,
          Let anger fa’.

Their boasts and bullying, not worth a louse,
As our King’s the best about the house.
’T is ay good to be sober and douce,
          To live in peace;
For many, I see, for being o’er crouse,
          Gets broken face.

WAVERLEY

OR

’TIS SIXTY YEARS SINCE

Volume I.

CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY

The title of this work has not been chosen without the grave and solid
deliberation which matters of importance demand from the prudent. Even its
first, or general denomination, was the result of no common research or
selection, although, according to the example of my predecessors, I had only to
seize upon the most sounding and euphonic surname that English history or
topography affords, and elect it at once as the title of my work and the name
of my hero. But, alas! what could my readers have expected from the chivalrous
epithets of Howard, Mordaunt, Mortimer, or Stanley, or from the softer and more
sentimental sounds of Belmour, Belville, Belfield, and Belgrave, but pages of
inanity, similar to those which have been so christened for half a century
past? I must modestly admit I am too diffident of my own merit to place it in
unnecessary opposition to preconceived associations; I have, therefore, like a
maiden knight with his white shield, assumed for my hero,
WAVERLEY, an uncontaminated name, bearing with its sound little
of good or evil, excepting what the reader shall hereafter be pleased to affix
to it. But my second or supplemental title was a matter of much more difficult
election, since that, short as it is, may be held as pledging the author to
some special mode of laying his scene, drawing his characters, and managing his
adventures. Had I, for example, announced in my frontispiece, “Waverley,
a Tale of other Days,” must not every novel-reader have anticipated a
castle scarce less than that of Udolpho, of which the eastern wing had long
been uninhabited, and the keys either lost, or consigned to the care of some
aged butler or housekeeper, whose trembling steps, about the middle of the
second volume, were doomed to guide the hero, or heroine, to the ruinous
precincts? Would not the owl have shrieked and the cricket cried in my very
title-page? and could it have been possible for me, with a moderate attention
to decorum, to introduce any scene more lively than might be produced by the
jocularity of a clownish but faithful valet, or the garrulous narrative of the
heroine’s fille-de-chambre, when rehearsing the stories of blood
and horror which she had heard in the servants’ hall? Again, had my title
borne, “Waverley, a Romance from the German,” what head so obtuse
as not to image forth a profligate abbot, an oppressive duke, a secret and
mysterious association of Rosycrucians and Illuminati, with all their
properties of black cowls, caverns, daggers, electrical machines, trap-doors,
and dark-lanterns? Or if I had rather chosen to call my work a
“Sentimental Tale,” would it not have been a sufficient presage of
a heroine with a profusion of auburn hair, and a harp, the soft solace of her
solitary hours, which she fortunately finds always the means of transporting
from castle to cottage, although she herself be sometimes obliged to jump out
of a two-pair-of-stairs window, and is more than once bewildered on her
journey, alone and on foot, without any guide but a blowzy peasant girl, whose
jargon she hardly can understand? Or, again, if my Waverley had been entitled
“A Tale of the Times,” wouldst thou not, gentle reader, have
demanded from me a dashing sketch of the fashionable world, a few anecdotes of
private scandal thinly veiled, and if lusciously painted, so much the better? a
heroine from Grosvenor Square, and a hero from the Barouche Club or the
Four-in-Hand, with a set of subordinate characters from the elegantes of Queen
Anne Street East, or the dashing heroes of the Bow-Street Office? I could
proceed in proving the importance of a title-page, and displaying at the same
time my own intimate knowledge of the particular ingredients necessary to the
composition of romances and novels of various descriptions;—but it is
enough, and I scorn to tyrannise longer over the impatience of my reader, who
is doubtless already anxious to know the choice made by an author so profoundly
versed in the different branches of his art.

By fixing, then, the date of my story Sixty Years before this present 1st
November, 1805, I would have my readers understand, that they will meet in the
following pages neither a romance of chivalry nor a tale of modern manners;
that my hero will neither have iron on his shoulders, as of yore, nor on the
heels of his boots, as is the present fashion of Bond Street; and that my
damsels will neither be clothed “in purple and in pall,” like the
Lady Alice of an old ballad, nor reduced to the primitive nakedness of a modern
fashionable at a rout. From this my choice of an era the understanding critic
may farther presage that the object of my tale is more a description of men
than manners. A tale of manners, to be interesting, must either refer to
antiquity so great as to have become venerable, or it must bear a vivid
reflection of those scenes which are passing daily before our eyes, and are
interesting from their novelty. Thus the coat-of-mail of our ancestors, and the
triple-furred pelisse of our modern beaux, may, though for very different
reasons, be equally fit for the array of a fictitious character; but who,
meaning the costume of his hero to be impressive, would willingly attire him in
the court dress of George the Second’s reign, with its no collar, large
sleeves, and low pocket-holes? The same may be urged, with equal truth, of the
Gothic hall, which, with its darkened and tinted windows, its elevated and
gloomy roof, and massive oaken table garnished with boar’s-head and
rosemary, pheasants and peacocks, cranes and cygnets, has an excellent effect
in fictitious description. Much may also be gained by a lively display of a
modern fête, such as we have daily recorded in that part of a newspaper
entitled the Mirror of Fashion, if we contrast these, or either of them, with
the splendid formality of an entertainment given Sixty Years Since; and thus it
will be readily seen how much the painter of antique or of fashionable manners
gains over him who delineates those of the last generation.

Considering the disadvantages inseparable from this part of my subject, I must
be understood to have resolved to avoid them as much as possible, by throwing
the force of my narrative upon the characters and passions of the
actors;—those passions common to men in all stages of society, and which
have alike agitated the human heart, whether it throbbed under the steel
corslet of the fifteenth century, the brocaded coat of the eighteenth, or the
blue frock and white dimity waistcoat of the present day.[*] Upon these
passions it is no doubt true that the state of manners and laws casts a
necessary colouring; but the bearings, to use the language of heraldry, remain
the same, though the tincture may be not only different, but opposed in strong
contradistinction. The wrath of our ancestors, for example, was coloured
gules; it broke forth in acts of open and sanguinary violence against
the objects of its fury. Our malignant feelings, which must seek gratification
through more indirect channels, and undermine the obstacles which they cannot
openly bear down, may be rather said to be tinctured sable. But the deep-ruling
impulse is the same in both cases; and the proud peer, who can now only ruin
his neighbour according to law, by protracted suits, is the genuine descendant
of the baron who wrapped the castle of his competitor in flames, and knocked
him on the head as he endeavoured to escape from the conflagration. It is from
the great book of Nature, the same through a thousand editions, whether of
black-letter, or wire-wove and hot-pressed, that I have venturously essayed to
read a chapter to the public. Some favourable opportunities of contrast have
been afforded me by the state of society in the northern part of the island at
the period of my history, and may serve at once to vary and to illustrate the
moral lessons, which I would willingly consider as the most important part of
my plan; although I am sensible how short these will fall of their aim if I
shall be found unable to mix them with amusement—a task not quite so easy
in this critical generation as it was “Sixty Years Since.”

[* Alas! that attire, respectable and gentlemanlike in 1805, or thereabouts, is
now as antiquated as the Author of “Waverley” has himself become
since that period! The reader of fashion will please to fill up the costume
with an embroidered waistcoat of purple velvet or silk, and a coat of whatever
colour he pleases.]

CHAPTER II.
WAVERLEY-HONOUR—A RETROSPECT

It is, then, sixty years since Edward Waverley, the hero of the following
pages, took leave of his family, to join the regiment of dragoons in which he
had lately obtained a commission. It was a melancholy day at Waverley-Honour
when the young officer parted with Sir Everard, the affectionate old uncle to
whose title and estate he was presumptive heir.

A difference in political opinions had early separated the Baronet from his
younger brother Richard Waverley, the father of our hero. Sir Everard had
inherited from his sires the whole train of Tory or High-Church predilections
and prejudices which had distinguished the house of Waverley since the Great
Civil War. Richard, on the contrary, who was ten years younger, beheld himself
born to the fortune of a second brother, and anticipated neither dignity nor
entertainment in sustaining the character of Will Wimble. He saw early that, to
succeed in the race of life, it was necessary he should carry as little weight
as possible. Painters talk of the difficulty of expressing the existence of
compound passions in the same features at the same moment; it would be no less
difficult for the moralist to analyse the mixed motives which unite to form the
impulse of our actions. Richard Waverley read and satisfied himself from
history and sound argument that, in the words of the old song,

Passive obedience was a jest,
And pshaw! was non-resistance;

yet reason would have probably been unable to combat and remove hereditary
prejudice could Richard have anticipated that his elder brother, Sir Everard,
taking to heart an early disappointment, would have remained a bachelor at
seventy-two. The prospect of succession, however remote, might in that case
have led him to endure dragging through the greater part of his life as
“Master Richard at the Hall, the Baronet’s brother,” in the
hope that ere its conclusion he should be distinguished as Sir Richard Waverley
of Waverley-Honour, successor to a princely estate, and to extended political
connections as head of the county interest in the shire where it lay.

But this was a consummation of things not to be expected at Richard’s
outset, when Sir Everard was in the prime of life, and certain to be an
acceptable suitor in almost any family, whether wealth or beauty should be the
object of his pursuit, and when, indeed, his speedy marriage was a report which
regularly amused the neighbourhood once a year. His younger brother saw no
practicable road to independence save that of relying upon his own exertions,
and adopting a political creed more consonant both to reason and his own
interest than the hereditary faith of Sir Everard in High-Church and in the
house of Stuart. He therefore read his recantation at the beginning of his
career, and entered life as an avowed Whig and friend of the Hanover
succession.

The ministry of George the First’s time were prudently anxious to
diminish the phalanx of opposition. The Tory nobility, depending for their
reflected lustre upon the sunshine of a court, had for some time been gradually
reconciling themselves to the new dynasty. But the wealthy country gentlemen of
England, a rank which retained, with much of ancient manners and primitive
integrity, a great proportion of obstinate and unyielding prejudice, stood
aloof in haughty and sullen opposition, and cast many a look of mingled regret
and hope to Bois le Due, Avignon, and Italy.[*] The accession of the near
relation of one of those steady and inflexible opponents was considered as a
means of bringing over more converts, and therefore Richard Waverley met with a
share of ministerial favour more than proportioned to his talents or his
political importance. It was, however, discovered that he had respectable
talents for public business, and the first admittance to the minister’s
levee being negotiated, his success became rapid. Sir Everard learned from the
public News-Letter, first that Richard Waverley, Esquire, was returned for the
ministerial borough of Barterfaith; next, that Richard Waverley, Esquire, had
taken a distinguished part in the debate upon the Excise Bill in the support of
government; and, lastly, that Richard Waverley, Esquire, had been honoured with
a seat at one of those boards where the pleasure of serving the country is
combined with other important gratifications, which, to render them the more
acceptable, occur regularly once a quarter.

[* Where the Chevalier St. George, or, as he was termed, the Old Pretender,
held his exiled court, as his situation compelled him to shift his place of
residence.]

Although these events followed each other so closely that the sagacity of the
editor of a modern newspaper would have presaged the two last even while he
announced the first, yet they came upon Sir Everard gradually, and drop by
drop, as it were, distilled through the cool and procrastinating alembic of
“Dyer’s Weekly Letter.”^[1] For it may be observed in passing, that
instead of those mail-coaches, by means of which every mechanic at his
six-penny club, may nightly learn from twenty contradictory channels the
yesterday’s news of the capital, a weekly post brought, in those days, to
Waverley-Honour, a Weekly Intelligencer, which, after it had gratified Sir
Everard’s curiosity, his sister’s, and that of his aged butler, was
regularly transferred from the Hall to the Rectory, from the Rectory to Squire
Stubbs’s at the Grange, from the Squire to the Baronet’s steward at
his neat white house on the heath, from the steward to the bailiff, and from
him through a huge circle of honest dames and gaffers, by whose hard and horny
hands it was generally worn to pieces in about a month after its arrival.

This slow succession of intelligence was of some advantage to Richard Waverley
in the case before us; for, had the sum total of his enormities reached the
ears of Sir Everard at once, there can be no doubt that the new commissioner
would have had little reason to pique himself on the success of his politics.
The Baronet, although the mildest of human beings, was not without sensitive
points in his character; his brother’s conduct had wounded these deeply;
the Waverley estate was fettered by no entail (for it had never entered into
the head of any of its former possessors that one of their progeny could be
guilty of the atrocities laid by “Dyer’s Letter” to the door
of Richard), and if it had, the marriage of the proprietor might have been
fatal to a collateral heir. These various ideas floated through the brain of
Sir Everard without, however, producing any determined conclusion.

He examined the tree of his genealogy, which, emblazoned with many an
emblematic mark of honour and heroic achievement, hung upon the well-varnished
wainscot of his hall. The nearest descendants of Sir Hildebrand Waverley,
failing those of his eldest son Wilfred, of whom Sir Everard and his brother
were the only representatives, were, as this honoured register informed him
(and, indeed, as he himself well knew), the Waverleys of Highley Park, com.
Hants; with whom the main branch, or rather stock, of the house had renounced
all connection since the great law-suit in 1670.

This degenerate scion had committed a farther offence against the head and
source of their gentility, by the intermarriage of their representative with
Judith, heiress of Oliver Bradshawe, of Highley Park, whose arms, the same with
those of Bradshawe the regicide, they had quartered with the ancient coat of
Waverley. These offences, however, had vanished from Sir Everard’s
recollection in the heat of his resentment; and had Lawyer Clippurse, for whom
his groom was despatched express, arrived but an hour earlier, he might have
had the benefit of drawing a new settlement of the lordship and manor of
Waverley-Honour, with all its dependencies. But an hour of cool reflection is a
great matter when employed in weighing the comparative evil of two measures to
neither of which we are internally partial. Lawyer Clippurse found his patron
involved in a deep study, which he was too respectful to disturb, otherwise
than by producing his paper and leathern ink-case, as prepared to minute his
honour’s commands. Even this slight manœuvre was embarrassing to Sir
Everard, who felt it as a reproach to his indecision. He looked at the attorney
with some desire to issue his fiat, when the sun, emerging from behind a cloud,
poured at once its chequered light through the stained window of the gloomy
cabinet in which they were seated. The Baronet’s eye, as he raised it to
the splendour, fell right upon the central scutcheon, inpressed with the same
device which his ancestor was said to have borne in the field of
Hastings,—three ermines passant, argent, in a field azure, with its
appropriate motto, sans tache. “May our name rather perish,”
exclaimed Sir Everard, “than that ancient and loyal symbol should be
blended with the dishonoured insignia of a traitorous Roundhead!”

All this was the effect of the glimpse of a sunbeam, just sufficient to light
Lawyer Clippurse to mend his pen. The pen was mended in vain. The attorney was
dismissed, with directions to hold himself in readiness on the first summons.

The apparition of Lawyer Clippurse at the Hall occasioned much speculation in
that portion of the world to which Waverley-Honour formed the centre. But the
more judicious politicians of this microcosm augured yet worse consequences to
Richard Waverley from a movement which shortly followed his apostasy. This was
no less than an excursion of the Baronet in his coach-and-six, with four
attendants in rich liveries, to make a visit of some duration to a noble peer
on the confines of the shire, of untainted descent, steady Tory principles, and
the happy father of six unmarried and accomplished daughters.

Sir Everard’s reception in this family was, as it may be easily
conceived, sufficiently favourable; but of the six young ladies, his taste
unfortunately determined him in favour of Lady Emily, the youngest, who
received his attentions with an embarrassment which showed at once that she
durst not decline them, and that they afforded her anything but pleasure.

Sir Everard could not but perceive something uncommon in the restrained
emotions which the young lady testified at the advances he hazarded; but,
assured by the prudent Countess that they were the natural effects of a retired
education, the sacrifice might have been completed, as doubtless has happened
in many similar instances, had it not been for the courage of an elder sister,
who revealed to the wealthy suitor that Lady Emily’s affections were
fixed upon a young soldier of fortune, a near relation of her own.

Sir Everard manifested great emotion on receiving this intelligence, which was
confirmed to him, in a private interview, by the young lady herself, although
under the most dreadful apprehensions of her father’s indignation.

Honour and generosity were hereditary attributes of the house of Waverley. With
a grace and delicacy worthy the hero of a romance, Sir Everard withdrew his
claim to the hand of Lady Emily. He had even, before leaving Blandeville
Castle, the address to extort from her father a consent to her union with the
object of her choice. What arguments he used on this point cannot exactly be
known, for Sir Everard was never supposed strong in the powers of persuasion;
but the young officer, immediately after this transaction, rose in the army
with a rapidity far surpassing the usual pace of unpatronised professional
merit, although, to outward appearance, that was all he had to depend upon.

The shock which Sir Everard encountered upon this occasion, although diminished
by the consciousness of having acted virtuously and generously had its effect
upon his future life. His resolution of marriage had been adopted in a fit of
indignation; the labour of courtship did not quite suit the dignified indolence
of his habits; he had but just escaped the risk of marrying a woman who could
never love him, and his pride could not be greatly flattered by the termination
of his amour, even if his heart had not suffered. The result of the whole
matter was his return to Waverley-Honour without any transfer of his
affections, notwithstanding the sighs and languishments of the fair tell-tale,
who had revealed, in mere sisterly affection, the secret of Lady Emily’s
attachment, and in despite of the nods, winks, and innuendos of the officious
lady mother, and the grave eulogiums which the Earl pronounced successively on
the prudence, and good sense, and admirable dispositions, of his first, second,
third, fourth, and fifth daughters.

The memory of his unsuccessful amour was with Sir Everard, as with many more of
his temper, at once shy, proud, sensitive, and indolent, a beacon against
exposing himself to similar mortification, pain, and fruitless exertion for the
time to come. He continued to live at Waverley-Honour in the style of an old
English gentleman, of an ancient descent and opulent fortune. His sister, Miss
Rachel Waverley, presided at his table; and they became, by degrees, an old
bachelor and an ancient maiden lady, the gentlest and kindest of the votaries
of celibacy.

The vehemence of Sir Everard’s resentment against his brother was but
short-lived; yet his dislike to the Whig and the placeman, though unable to
stimulate him to resume any active measures prejudicial to Richard’s
interest, in the succession to the family estate, continued to maintain the
coldness between them. Richard knew enough of the world, and of his
brother’s temper, to believe that by any ill-considered or precipitate
advances on his part, he might turn passive dislike into a more active
principle. It was accident, therefore, which at length occasioned a renewal of
their intercourse. Richard had married a young woman of rank, by whose family
interest and private fortune he hoped to advance his career. In her right he
became possessor of a manor of some value, at the distance of a few miles from
Waverley-Honour.

Little Edward, the hero of our tale, then in his fifth year, was their only
child. It chanced that the infant with his maid had strayed one morning to a
mile’s distance from the avenue of Brerewood Lodge, his father’s
seat. Their attention was attracted by a carriage drawn by six stately
long-tailed black horses, and with as much carving and gilding as would have
done honour to my lord mayor’s. It was waiting for the owner, who was at
a little distance inspecting the progress of a half-built farm-house. I know
not whether the boy’s nurse had been a Welsh or a Scotch-woman, or in
what manner he associated a shield emblazoned with three ermines with the idea
of personal property, but he no sooner beheld this family emblem than he
stoutly determined on vindicating his right to the splendid vehicle on which it
was displayed. The Baronet arrived while the boy’s maid was in vain
endeavouring to make him desist from his determination to appropriate the
gilded coach-and-six. The rencontre was at a happy moment for Edward, as
his uncle had been just eyeing wistfully, with something of a feeling like
envy, the chubby boys of the stout yeoman whose mansion was building by his
direction. In the round-faced rosy cherub before him, bearing his eye and his
name, and vindicating a hereditary title to his family, affection, and
patronage, by means of a tie which Sir Everard held as sacred as either Garter
or Blue-mantle, Providence seemed to have granted to him the very object best
calculated to fill up the void in his hopes and affections. Sir Everard
returned to Waverley-Hall upon a led horse, which was kept in readiness for
him, while the child and his attendant were sent home in the carriage to
Brerewood Lodge, with such a message as opened to Richard Waverley a door of
reconciliation with his elder brother.

Their intercourse, however, though thus renewed, continued to be rather formal
and civil than partaking of brotherly cordiality; yet it was sufficient to the
wishes of both parties. Sir Everard obtained, in the frequent society of his
little nephew, something on which his hereditary pride might found the
anticipated pleasure of a continuation of his lineage, and where his kind and
gentle affections could at the same time fully exercise themselves. For Richard
Waverley, he beheld in the growing attachment between the uncle and nephew the
means of securing his son’s, if not his own, succession to the hereditary
estate, which he felt would be rather endangered than promoted by any attempt
on his own part towards a closer intimacy with a man of Sir Everard’s
habits and opinions.

Thus, by a sort of tacit compromise, little Edward was permitted to pass the
greater part of the year at the Hall, and appeared to stand in the same
intimate relation to both families, although their mutual intercourse was
otherwise limited to formal messages and more formal visits. The education of
the youth was regulated alternately by the taste and opinions of his uncle and
of his father. But more of this in a subsequent chapter.

CHAPTER III.
EDUCATION

The education of our hero, Edward Waverley, was of a nature somewhat desultory.
In infancy his health suffered, or was supposed to suffer (which is quite the
same thing), by the air of London. As soon, therefore, as official duties,
attendance on Parliament, or the prosecution of any of his plans of interest or
ambition, called his father to town, which was his usual residence for eight
months in the year, Edward was transferred to Waverley-Honour, and experienced
a total change of instructors and of lessons, as well as of residence. This
might have been remedied had his father placed him under the superintendence of
a permanent tutor. But he considered that one of his choosing would probably
have been unacceptable at Waverley-Honour, and that such a selection as Sir
Everard might have made, were the matter left to him, would have burdened him
with a disagreeable inmate, if not a political spy, in his family. He therefore
prevailed upon his private secretary, a young man of taste and accomplishments,
to bestow an hour or two on Edward’s education while at Brerewood Lodge,
and left his uncle answerable for his improvement in literature while an inmate
at the Hall. This was in some degree respectably provided for. Sir
Everard’s chaplain, an Oxonian, who had lost his fellowship for declining
to take the oaths at the accession of George I, was not only an excellent
classical scholar, but reasonably skilled in science, and master of most modern
languages. He was, however, old and indulgent, and the recurring interregnum,
during which Edward was entirely freed from his discipline, occasioned such a
relaxation of authority, that the youth was permitted, in a great measure, to
learn as he pleased, what he pleased, and when he pleased. This slackness of
rule might have been ruinous to a boy of slow understanding, who, feeling
labour in the acquisition of knowledge, would have altogether neglected it,
save for the command of a taskmaster; and it might have proved equally
dangerous to a youth whose animal spirits were more powerful than his
imagination or his feelings, and whom the irresistible influence of Alma would
have engaged in field-sports from morning till night. But the character of
Edward Waverley was remote from either of these. His powers of apprehension
were so uncommonly quick as almost to resemble intuition, and the chief care of
his preceptor was to prevent him, as a sportsman would phrase it, from
over-running his game—that is, from acquiring his knowledge in a slight,
flimsy, and inadequate manner. And here the instructor had to combat another
propensity too often united with brilliancy of fancy and vivacity of
talent—that indolence, namely, of disposition, which can only be stirred
by some strong motive of gratification, and which renounces study as soon as
curiosity is gratified, the pleasure of conquering the first difficulties
exhausted, and the novelty of pursuit at an end. Edward would throw himself
with spirit upon any classical author of which his preceptor proposed the
perusal, make himself master of the style so far as to understand the story,
and, if that pleased or interested him, he finished the volume. But it was in
vain to attempt fixing his attention on critical distinctions of philology,
upon the difference of idiom, the beauty of felicitous expression, or the
artificial combinations of syntax. “I can read and understand a Latin
author,” said young Edward, with the self-confidence and rash reasoning
of fifteen, “and Scaliger or Bentley could not do much more.” Alas!
while he was thus permitted to read only for the gratification of his
amusement, he foresaw not that he was losing for ever the opportunity of
acquiring habits of firm and assiduous application, of gaining the art of
controlling, directing, and concentrating the powers of his mind for earnest
investigation—an art far more essential than even that intimate
acquaintance with classical learning which is the primary object of study.

I am aware I may be here reminded of the necessity of rendering instruction
agreeable to youth, and of Tasso’s infusion of honey into the medicine
prepared for a child; but an age in which children are taught the driest
doctrines by the insinuating method of instructive games, has little reason to
dread the consequences of study being rendered too serious or severe. The
history of England is now reduced to a game at cards, the problems of
mathematics to puzzles and riddles, and the doctrines of arithmetic may, we are
assured, be sufficiently acquired by spending a few hours a week at a new and
complicated edition of the Royal Game of the Goose. There wants but one step
further, and the Creed and Ten Commandments may be taught in the same manner,
without the necessity of the grave face, deliberate tone of recital, and devout
attention, hitherto exacted from the well-governed childhood of this realm. It
may, in the meantime, be subject of serious consideration, whether those who
are accustomed only to acquire instruction through the medium of amusement may
not be brought to reject that which approaches under the aspect of study;
whether those who learn history by the cards may not be led to prefer the means
to the end; and whether, were we to teach religion in the way of sport, our
pupils may not thereby be gradually induced to make sport of their religion. To
our young hero, who was permitted to seek his instruction only according to the
bent of his own mind, and who, of consequence, only sought it so long as it
afforded him amusement, the indulgence of his tutors was attended with evil
consequences, which long continued to influence his character, happiness, and
utility.

Edward’s power of imagination and love of literature, although the former
was vivid and the latter ardent, were so far from affording a remedy to this
peculiar evil, that they rather inflamed and increased its violence. The
library at Waverley-Honour, a large Gothic room, with double arches and a
gallery, contained such a miscellaneous and extensive collection of volumes as
had been assembled together, during the course of two hundred years, by a
family which had been always wealthy, and inclined, of course, as a mark of
splendour, to furnish their shelves with the current literature of the day,
without much scrutiny or nicety of discrimination. Throughout this ample realm
Edward was permitted to roam at large. His tutor had his own studies; and
church politics and controversial divinity, together with a love of learned
ease, though they did not withdraw his attention at stated times from the
progress of his patron’s presumptive heir, induced him readily to grasp
at any apology for not extending a strict and regulated survey towards his
general studies. Sir Everard had never been himself a student, and, like his
sister, Miss Rachel Waverley, he held the common doctrine, that idleness is
incompatible with reading of any kind, and that the mere tracing the
alphabetical characters with the eye is in itself a useful and meritorious
task, without scrupulously considering what ideas or doctrines they may happen
to convey. With a desire of amusement, therefore, which better discipline might
soon have converted into a thirst for knowledge, young Waverley drove through
the sea of books like a vessel without a pilot or a rudder. Nothing perhaps
increases by indulgence more than a desultory habit of reading, especially
under such opportunities of gratifying it. I believe one reason why such
numerous instances of erudition occur among the lower ranks is, that, with the
same powers of mind, the poor student is limited to a narrow circle for
indulging his passion for books, and must necessarily make himself master of
the few he possesses ere he can acquire more. Edward, on the contrary, like the
epicure who only deigned to take a single morsel from the sunny side of a
peach, read no volume a moment after it ceased to excite his curiosity or
interest; and it necessarily happened, that the habit of seeking only this sort
of gratification rendered it daily more difficult of attainment, till the
passion for reading, like other strong appetites, produced by indulgence a sort
of satiety.

Ere he attained this indifference, however, he had read, and stored in a memory
of uncommon tenacity, much curious, though ill-arranged and miscellaneous
information. In English literature he was master of Shakespeare and Milton, of
our earlier dramatic authors, of many picturesque and interesting passages from
our old historical chronicles, and was particularly well acquainted with
Spenser, Drayton, and other poets who have exercised themselves on romantic
fiction, of all themes the most fascinating to a youthful imagination, before
the passions have roused themselves and demand poetry of a more sentimental
description. In this respect his acquaintance with Italian opened him yet a
wider range. He had perused the numerous romantic poems, which, from the days
of Pulci, have been a favourite exercise of the wits of Italy, and had sought
gratification in the numerous collections of novelle, which were brought
forth by the genius of that elegant though luxurious nation, in emulation of
the “Decameron.” In classical literature, Waverley had made the
usual progress, and read the usual authors; and the French had afforded him an
almost exhaustless collection of memoirs, scarcely more faithful than romances,
and of romances so well written as hardly to be distinguished from memoirs. The
splendid pages of Froissart, with his heart-stirring and eye-dazzling
descriptions of war and of tournaments, were among his chief favourites; and
from those of Brantome and De la Noue he learned to compare the wild and loose,
yet superstitious, character of the nobles of the League with the stern, rigid,
and sometimes turbulent disposition of the Huguenot party. The Spanish had
contributed to his stock of chivalrous and romantic lore. The earlier
literature of the northern nations did not escape the study of one who read
rather to awaken the imagination than to benefit the understanding. And yet,
knowing much that is known but to few, Edward Waverley might justly be
considered as ignorant, since he knew little of what adds dignity to man, and
qualifies him to support and adorn an elevated situation in society.

The occasional attention of his parents might indeed have been of service to
prevent the dissipation of mind incidental to such a desultory course of
reading. But his mother died in the seventh year after the reconciliation
between the brothers, and Richard Waverley himself, who, after this event,
resided more constantly in London, was too much interested in his own plans of
wealth and ambition to notice more respecting Edward than that he was of a very
bookish turn, and probably destined to be a bishop. If he could have discovered
and analysed his son’s waking dreams, he would have formed a very
different conclusion.

CHAPTER IV.
CASTLE-BUILDING

I have already hinted that the dainty, squeamish, and fastidious taste acquired
by a surfeit of idle reading had not only rendered our hero unfit for serious
and sober study, but had even disgusted him in some degree with that in which
he had hitherto indulged.

He was in his sixteenth year when his habits of abstraction and love of
solitude became so much marked as to excite Sir Everard’s affectionate
apprehension. He tried to counterbalance these propensities by engaging his
nephew in field-sports, which had been the chief pleasure of his own youthful
days. But although Edward eagerly carried the gun for one season, yet when
practice had given him some dexterity, the pastime ceased to afford him
amusement.

In the succeeding spring, the perusal of old Isaac Walton’s fascinating
volume determined Edward to become “a brother of the angle.” But of
all diversions which ingenuity ever devised for the relief of idleness, fishing
is the worst qualified to amuse a man who is at once indolent and impatient;
and our hero’s rod was speedily flung aside. Society and example, which,
more than any other motives, master and sway the natural bent of our passions,
might have had their usual effect upon the youthful visionary. But the
neighbourhood was thinly inhabited, and the home-bred young squires whom it
afforded were not of a class fit to form Edward’s usual companions, far
less to excite him to emulation in the practice of those pastimes which
composed the serious business of their lives.

There were a few other youths of better education and a more liberal character,
but from their society also our hero was in some degree excluded. Sir Everard
had, upon the death of Queen Anne, resigned his seat in Parliament, and, as his
age increased and the number of his contemporaries diminished, had gradually
withdrawn himself from society; so that when, upon any particular occasion,
Edward mingled with accomplished and well-educated young men of his own rank
and expectations, he felt an inferiority in their company, not so much from
deficiency of information, as from the want of the skill to command and to
arrange that which he possessed. A deep and increasing sensibility added to
this dislike of society. The idea of having committed the slightest solecism in
politeness, whether real or imaginary, was agony to him; for perhaps even guilt
itself does not impose upon some minds so keen a sense of shame and remorse, as
a modest, sensitive, and inexperienced youth feels from the consciousness of
having neglected etiquette or excited ridicule. Where we are not at ease, we
cannot be happy; and therefore it is not surprising that Edward Waverley
supposed that he disliked and was unfitted for society, merely because he had
not yet acquired the habit of living in it with ease and comfort, and of
reciprocally giving and receiving pleasure.

The hours he spent with his uncle and aunt were exhausted in listening to the
oft-repeated tale of narrative old age. Yet even there his imagination, the
predominant faculty of his mind, was frequently excited. Family tradition and
genealogical history, upon which much of Sir Everard’s discourse turned,
is the very reverse of amber, which, itself a valuable substance, usually
includes flies, straws, and other trifles; whereas these studies, being
themselves very insignificant and trifling, do nevertheless serve to perpetuate
a great deal of what is rare and valuable in ancient manners, and to record
many curious and minute facts which could have been preserved and conveyed
through no other medium. If, therefore, Edward Waverley yawned at times over
the dry deduction of his line of ancestors, with their various intermarriages,
and inwardly deprecated the remorseless and protracted accuracy with which the
worthy Sir Everard rehearsed the various degrees of propinquity between the
house of Waverley-Honour and the doughty barons, knights, and squires to whom
they stood allied; if (notwithstanding his obligations to the three ermines
passant) he sometimes cursed in his heart the jargon of heraldry, its griffins,
its moldwarps, its wyverns, and its dragons, with all the bitterness of Hotspur
himself, there were moments when these communications interested his fancy and
rewarded his attention.

The deeds of Wilibert of Waverley in the Holy Land, his long absence and
perilous adventures, his supposed death, and his return on the evening when the
betrothed of his heart had wedded the hero who had protected her from insult
and oppression during his absence; the generosity with which the Crusader
relinquished his claims, and sought in a neighbouring cloister that peace which
passeth not away;^[2]—to these
and similar tales he would hearken till his heart glowed and his eye glistened.
Nor was he less affected when his aunt, Mrs. Rachel, narrated the sufferings
and fortitude of Lady Alice Waverley during the Great Civil War. The benevolent
features of the venerable spinster kindled into more majestic expression as she
told how Charles had, after the field of Worcester, found a day’s refuge
at Waverley-Honour, and how, when a troop of cavalry were approaching to search
the mansion, Lady Alice dismissed her youngest son with a handful of domestics,
charging them to make good with their lives an hour’s diversion, that the
king might have that space for escape. “And, God help her,” would
Mrs. Rachel continue, fixing her eyes upon the heroine’s portrait as she
spoke, “full dearly did she purchase the safety of her prince with the
life of her darling child. They brought him here a prisoner, mortally wounded;
and you may trace the drops of his blood from the great hall door along the
little gallery, and up to the saloon, where they laid him down to die at his
mother’s feet. But there was comfort exchanged between them; for he knew,
from the glance of his mother’s eye, that the purpose of his desperate
defence was attained. Ah! I remember,” she continued, “I remember
well to have seen one that knew and loved him. Miss Lucy Saint Aubin lived and
died a maid for his sake, though one of the most beautiful and wealthy matches
in this country; all the world ran after her, but she wore widow’s
mourning all her life for poor William, for they were betrothed though not
married, and died in—I cannot think of the date; but I remember, in the
November of that very year, when she found herself sinking, she desired to be
brought to Waverley-Honour once more, and visited all the places where she had
been with my grand-uncle, and caused the carpets to be raised that she might
trace the impression of his blood, and if tears could have washed it out, it
had not been there now; for there was not a dry eye in the house. You would
have thought, Edward, that the very trees mourned for her, for their leaves
dropt around her without a gust of wind, and, indeed, she looked like one that
would never see them green again.”

From such legends our hero would steal away to indulge the fancies they
excited. In the corner of the large and sombre library, with no other light
than was afforded by the decaying brands on its ponderous and ample hearth, he
would exercise for hours that internal sorcery by which past or imaginary
events are presented in action, as it were, to the eye of the muser. Then arose
in long and fair array the splendour of the bridal feast at Waverley-Castle;
the tall and emaciated form of its real lord, as he stood in his
pilgrim’s weeds, an unnoticed spectator of the festivities of his
supposed heir and intended bride; the electrical shock occasioned by the
discovery; the springing of the vassals to arms; the astonishment of the
bridegroom; the terror and confusion of the bride; the agony with which
Wilibert observed that her heart as well as consent was in these nuptials; the
air of dignity, yet of deep feeling, with which he flung down the half-drawn
sword, and turned away for ever from the house of his ancestors. Then would he
change the scene, and fancy would at his wish represent Aunt Rachel’s
tragedy. He saw the Lady Waverley seated in her bower, her ear strained to
every sound, her heart throbbing with double agony, now listening to the
decaying echo of the hoofs of the king’s horse, and when that had died
away, hearing in every breeze that shook the trees of the park, the noise of
the remote skirmish. A distant sound is heard like the rushing of a swoln
stream; it comes nearer, and Edward can plainly distinguish the galloping of
horses, the cries and shouts of men, with straggling pistol-shots between,
rolling forwards to the Hall. The lady starts up—a terrified menial
rushes in—but why pursue such a description?

As living in this ideal world became daily more delectable to our hero,
interruption was disagreeable in proportion. The extensive domain that
surrounded the Hall, which, far exceeding the dimensions of a park, was usually
termed Waverley-Chase, had originally been forest ground, and still, though
broken by extensive glades, in which the young deer were sporting, retained its
pristine and savage character. It was traversed by broad avenues, in many
places half grown up with brush-wood, where the beauties of former days used to
take their stand to see the stag coursed with greyhounds, or to gain an aim at
him with the crossbow. In one spot, distinguished by a moss-grown Gothic
monument, which retained the name of Queen’s Standing, Elizabeth herself
was said to have pierced seven bucks with her own arrows. This was a very
favourite haunt of Waverley. At other times, with his gun and his spaniel,
which served as an apology to others, and with a book in his pocket, which
perhaps served as an apology to himself, he used to pursue one of these long
avenues, which, after an ascending sweep of four miles, gradually narrowed into
a rude and contracted path through the cliffy and woody pass called Mirkwood
Dingle, and opened suddenly upon a deep, dark, and small lake, named, from the
same cause, Mirkwood-Mere. There stood, in former times, a solitary tower upon
a rock almost surrounded by the water, which had acquired the name of the
Strength of Waverley, because in perilous times it had often been the refuge of
the family. There, in the wars of York and Lancaster, the last adherents of the
Red Rose who dared to maintain her cause carried on a harassing and predatory
warfare, till the stronghold was reduced by the celebrated Richard of
Gloucester. Here, too, a party of Cavaliers long maintained themselves under
Nigel Waverley, elder brother of that William whose fate Aunt Rachel
commemorated. Through these scenes it was that Edward loved to “chew the
cud of sweet and bitter fancy,” and, like a child among his toys, culled
and arranged, from the splendid yet useless imagery and emblems with which his
imagination was stored, visions as brilliant and as fading as those of an
evening sky. The effect of this indulgence upon his temper and character will
appear in the next chapter.

CHAPTER V.
CHOICE OF A PROFESSION

From the minuteness with which I have traced Waverley’s pursuits, and the
bias which these unavoidably communicated to his imagination, the reader may
perhaps anticipate, in the following tale, an imitation of the romance of
Cervantes. But he will do my prudence injustice in the supposition. My
intention is not to follow the steps of that inimitable author, in describing
such total perversion of intellect as misconstrues the objects actually
presented to the senses, but that more common aberration from sound judgment,
which apprehends occurrences indeed in their reality, but communicates to them
a tincture of its own romantic tone and colouring. So far was Edward Waverley
from expecting general sympathy with his own feelings, or concluding that the
present state of things was calculated to exhibit the reality of those visions
in which he loved to indulge, that he dreaded nothing more than the detection
of such sentiments as were dictated by his musings. He neither had nor wished
to have a confidant, with whom to communicate his reveries; and so sensible was
he of the ridicule attached to them, that, had he been to choose between any
punishment short of ignominy, and the necessity of giving a cold and composed
account of the ideal world in which he lived the better part of his days, I
think he would not have hesitated to prefer the former infliction. This secrecy
became doubly precious as he felt in advancing life the influence of the
awakening passions. Female forms of exquisite grace and beauty began to mingle
in his mental adventures; nor was he long without looking abroad to compare the
creatures of his own imagination with the females of actual life.

The list of the beauties who displayed their hebdomadal finery at the parish
church of Waverley was neither numerous nor select. By far the most passable
was Miss Sissly, or, as she rather chose to be called, Miss Cecilia Stubbs,
daughter of Squire Stubbs at the Grange. I know not whether it was by the
“merest accident in the world,” a phrase which, from female lips,
does not always exclude malice prepense,—or whether it was from a
conformity of taste, that Miss Cecilia more than once crossed Edward in his
favourite walks through Waverley-Chase. He had not as yet assumed courage to
accost her on these occasions; but the meeting was not without its effect. A
romantic lover is a strange idolater, who sometimes cares not out of what log
he frames the object of his adoration; at least, if nature has given that
object any passable proportion of personal charms, he can easily play the
Jeweller and Dervise in the Oriental tale,[*] and supply her richly, out of the
stores of his own imagination, with supernatural beauty, and all the properties
of intellectual wealth.

[* See Hoppner’s tale of The Seven Lovers.]

But ere the charms of Miss Cecilia Stubbs had erected her into a positive
goddess, or elevated her at least to a level with the saint her namesake, Mrs.
Rachel Waverley gained some intimation which determined her to prevent the
approaching apotheosis. Even the most simple and unsuspicious of the female sex
have (God bless them!) an instinctive sharpness of perception in such matters,
which sometimes goes the length of observing partialities that never existed,
but rarely misses to detect such as pass actually under their observation. Mrs.
Rachel applied herself with great prudence, not to combat, but to elude, the
approaching danger, and suggested to her brother the necessity that the heir of
his house should see something more of the world than was consistent with
constant residence at Waverley-Honour.

Sir Everard would not at first listen to a proposal which went to separate his
nephew from him. Edward was a little bookish, he admitted, but youth, he had
always heard, was the season for learning, and, no doubt, when his rage for
letters was abated, and his head fully stocked with knowledge, his nephew would
take to field-sports and country business. He had often, he said, himself
regretted that he had not spent some time in study during his youth: he would
neither have shot nor hunted with less skill, and he might have made the roof
of Saint Stephen’s echo to longer orations than were comprised in those
zealous Noes, with which, when a member of the House during Godolphin’s
administration, he encountered every measure of government.

Aunt Rachel’s anxiety, however, lent her address to carry her point.
Every representative of their house had visited foreign parts, or served his
country in the army, before he settled for life at Waverley-Honour, and she
appealed for the truth of her assertion to the genealogical pedigree, an
authority which Sir Everard was never known to contradict. In short, a proposal
was made to Mr. Richard Waverley, that his son should travel, under the
direction of his present tutor Mr. Pembroke, with a suitable allowance from the
Baronet’s liberality. The father himself saw no objection to this
overture; but upon mentioning it casually at the table of the minister, the
great man looked grave. The reason was explained in private. The unhappy turn
of Sir Everard’s politics, the minister observed, was such as would
render it highly improper that a young gentleman of such hopeful prospects
should travel on the Continent with a tutor, doubtless of his uncle’s
choosing, and directing his course by his instructions. What might Mr. Edward
Waverley’s society be at Paris, what at Rome, where all manner of snares
were spread by the Pretender and his sons—these were points for Mr.
Waverley to consider. This he could himself say, that he knew his Majesty had
such a just sense of Mr. Richard Waverley’s merits, that, if his son
adopted the army for a few years, a troop, he believed, might be reckoned upon
in one of the dragoon regiments lately returned from Flanders.

A hint thus conveyed and enforced was not to be neglected with impunity; and
Richard Waverley, though with great dread of shocking his brother’s
prejudices, deemed he could not avoid accepting the commission thus offered him
for his son. The truth is, he calculated much, and justly, upon Sir
Everard’s fondness for Edward, which made him unlikely to resent any step
that he might take in due submission to parental authority. Two letters
announced this determination to the Baronet and his nephew. The latter barely
communicated the fact, and pointed out the necessary preparations for joining
his regiment. To his brother, Richard was more diffuse and circuitous. He
coincided with him, in the most flattering manner, in the propriety of his
son’s seeing a little more of the world, and was even humble in
expressions of gratitude for his proposed assistance; was, however, deeply
concerned that it was now, unfortunately, not in Edward’s power exactly
to comply with the plan which had been chalked out by his best friend and
benefactor. He himself had thought with pain on the boy’s inactivity, at
an age when all his ancestors had borne arms; even Royalty itself had deigned
to inquire whether young Waverley was not now in Flanders, at an age when his
grandfather was already bleeding for his king in the Great Civil War. This was
accompanied by an offer of a troop of horse. What could he do? There was no
time to consult his brother’s inclinations, even if he could have
conceived there might be objections on his part to his nephew’s following
the glorious career of his predecessors. And, in short, that Edward was now
(the intermediate steps of cornet and lieutenant being overleapt with great
agility) Captain Waverley, of Gardiner’s regiment of dragoons, which he
must join in their quarters at Dundee in Scotland, in the course of a month.

Sir Everard Waverley received this intimation with a mixture of feelings. At
the period of the Hanoverian succession he had withdrawn from parliament, and
his conduct in the memorable year 1715 had not been altogether unsuspected.
There were reports of private musters of tenants and horses in Waverley-Chase
by moonlight, and of cases of carbines and pistols purchased in Holland, and
addressed to the Baronet, but intercepted by the vigilance of a riding officer
of the excise, who was afterwards tossed in a blanket on a moonless night, by
an association of stout yeomen, for his officiousness. Nay, it was even said,
that at the arrest of Sir William Wyndham, the leader of the Tory party, a
letter from Sir Everard was found in the pocket of his night-gown. But there
was no overt act which an attainder could be founded on, and government,
contented with suppressing the insurrection of 1715, felt it neither prudent
nor safe to push their vengeance farther than against those unfortunate
gentlemen who actually took up arms.

Nor did Sir Everard’s apprehensions of personal consequences seem to
correspond with the reports spread among his Whig neighbours. It was well known
that he had supplied with money several of the distressed Northumbrians and
Scotchmen, who, after being made prisoners at Preston in Lancashire, were
imprisoned in Newgate and the Marshalsea, and it was his solicitor and ordinary
counsel who conducted the defence of some of these unfortunate gentlemen at
their trial. It was generally supposed, however, that, had ministers possessed
any real proof of Sir Everard’s accession to the rebellion, he either
would not have ventured thus to brave the existing government, or at least
would not have done so with impunity. The feelings which then dictated his
proceedings were those of a young man, and at an agitating period. Since that
time Sir Everard’s Jacobitism had been gradually decaying, like a fire
which burns out for want of fuel. His Tory and High-Church principles were kept
up by some occasional exercise at elections and quarter-sessions; but those
respecting hereditary right were fallen into a sort of abeyance. Yet it jarred
severely upon his feelings, that his nephew should go into the army under the
Brunswick dynasty; and the more so, as, independent of his high and
conscientious ideas of paternal authority, it was impossible, or at least
highly imprudent, to interfere authoritatively to prevent it. This suppressed
vexation gave rise to many poohs and pshaws which were placed to the account of
an incipient fit of gout, until, having sent for the Army List, the worthy
Baronet consoled himself with reckoning the descendants of the houses of
genuine loyalty, Mordaunts, Granvilles, and Stanleys, whose names were to be
found in that military record; and, calling up all his feelings of family
grandeur and warlike glory, he concluded, with logic something like
Falstaff’s, that when war was at hand, although it were shame to be on
any side but one, it were worse shame to be idle than to be on the worst side,
though blacker than usurpation could make it. As for Aunt Rachel, her scheme
had not exactly terminated according to her wishes, but she was under the
necessity of submitting to circumstances; and her mortification was diverted by
the employment she found in fitting out her nephew for the campaign, and
greatly consoled by the prospect of beholding him blaze in complete uniform.

Edward Waverley himself received with animated and undefined surprise this most
unexpected intelligence. It was, as a fine old poem expresses it, “like a
fire to heather set,” that covers a solitary hill with smoke, and
illumines it at the same time with dusky fire. His tutor, or, I should say, Mr.
Pembroke, for he scarce assumed the name of tutor, picked up about
Edward’s room some fragments of irregular verse, which he appeared to
have composed under the influence of the agitating feelings occasioned by this
sudden page being turned up to him in the book of life. The doctor, who was a
believer in all poetry which was composed by his friends, and written out in
fair straight lines, with a capital at the beginning of each, communicated this
treasure to Aunt Rachel, who, with her spectacles dimmed with tears,
transferred them to her commonplace book, among choice receipts for cookery and
medicine, favourite texts, and portions from High-Church divines, and a few
songs, amatory and Jacobitical, which she had carolled in her younger days,
from whence her nephew’s poetical tentamina were extracted when
the volume itself, with other authentic records of the Waverley family, were
exposed to the inspection of the unworthy editor of this memorable history. If
they afford the reader no higher amusement, they will serve, at least, better
than narrative of any kind, to acquaint him with the wild and irregular spirit
of our hero:—

Late, when the Autumn evening fell
On Mirkwood-Mere’s romantic dell,
The lake return’d, in chasten’d gleam,
The purple cloud, the golden beam:
Reflected in the crystal pool,
Headland and bank lay fair and cool;
The weather-tinted rock and tower
Each drooping tree, each fairy flower,
So true, so soft, the mirror gave,
As if there lay beneath the wave,
Secure from trouble, toil, and care,
A world than earthly world more fair.

But distant winds began to wake,
And roused the Genius of the Lake!
He heard the groaning of the oak,
And donn’d at once his sable cloak,
As warrior, at the battle-cry,
Invests him with his panoply:
Then, as the whirlwind nearer press’d
He ’gan to shake his foamy crest
O’er furrow’d brow and blacken’d cheek,
And bade his surge in thunder speak.
In wild and broken eddies whirl’d.
Flitted that fond ideal world,
And to the shore in tumult tost
The realms of fairy bliss were lost.

Yet, with a stern delight and strange,
I saw the spirit-stirring change,
As warr’d the wind with wave and wood,
Upon the ruin’d tower I stood,
And felt my heart more strongly bound,
Responsive to the lofty sound,
While, joying in the mighty roar,
I mourn’d that tranquil scene no more.

So, on the idle dreams of youth,
Breaks the loud trumpet-call of truth,
Bids each fair vision pass away,
Like landscape on the lake that lay,
As fair, as flitting, and as frail,
As that which fled the Autumn gale.—
For ever dead to fancy’s eye
Be each gay form that glided by,
While dreams of love and lady’s charms
Give place to honour and to arms!

In sober prose, as perhaps these verses intimate less decidedly, the transient
idea of Miss Cecilia Stubbs passed from Captain Waverley’s heart amid the
turmoil which his new destinies excited. She appeared, indeed, in full
splendour in her father’s pew upon the Sunday when he attended service
for the last time at the old parish church, upon which occasion, at the request
of his uncle and Aunt Rachel, he was induced (nothing both, if the truth must
be told) to present himself in full uniform.

There is no better antidote against entertaining too high an opinion of others
than having an excellent one of ourselves at the very same time. Miss Stubbs
had indeed summoned up every assistance which art could afford to beauty; but,
alas! hoop, patches, frizzled locks, and a new mantua of genuine French silk,
were lost upon a young officer of dragoons who wore for the first time his
gold-laced hat, jack-boots, and broadsword. I know not whether, like the
champion of an old ballad,—

His heart was all on honour bent,
    He could not stoop to love;
No lady in the land had power
    His frozen heart to move;

or whether the deep and flaming bars of embroidered gold, which now fenced his
breast, defied the artillery of Cecilia’s eyes; but every arrow was
launched at him in vain.

Yet did I mark where Cupid’s shaft did light;
It lighted not on little western flower,
But on bold yeoman, flower of all the west,
Hight Jonas Culbertfield, the steward’s son.

Craving pardon for my heroics (which I am unable in certain cases to resist
giving way to), it is a melancholy fact, that my history must here take leave
of the fair Cecilia, who, like many a daughter of Eve, after the departure of
Edward, and the dissipation of certain idle visions which she had adopted,
quietly contented herself with a pis-aller, and gave her hand, at the
distance of six months, to the aforesaid Jonas, son of the Baronet’s
steward, and heir (no unfertile prospect) to a steward’s fortune, besides
the snug probability of succeeding to his father’s office. All these
advantages moved Squire Stubbs, as much as the ruddy brown and manly form of
the suitor influenced his daughter, to abate somewhat in the article of their
gentry; and so the match was concluded. None seemed more gratified than Aunt
Rachel, who had hitherto looked rather askance upon the presumptuous damsel (as
much so, peradventure, as her nature would permit), but who, on the first
appearance of the new-married pair at church, honoured the bride with a smile
and a profound curtsy, in presence of the rector, the curate, the clerk, and
the whole congregation of the united parishes of Waverley cum Beverley.

I beg pardon, once and for all, of those readers who take up novels merely for
amusement, for plaguing them so long with old-fashioned politics, and Whig and
Tory, and Hanoverians and Jacobites. The truth is, I cannot promise them that
this story shall be intelligible, not to say probable, without it. My plan
requires that I should explain the motives on which its action proceeded; and
these motives necessarily arose from the feelings, prejudices, and parties of
the times. I do not invite my fair readers, whose sex and impatience give them
the greatest right to complain of these circumstances, into a flying chariot
drawn by hippogriffs, or moved by enchantment. Mine is a humble English
post-chaise, drawn upon four wheels, and keeping his Majesty’s highway.
Such as dislike the vehicle may leave it at the next halt, and wait for the
conveyance of Prince Hussein’s tapestry, or Malek the Weaver’s
flying sentrybox. Those who are contented to remain with me will be
occasionally exposed to the dulness inseparable from heavy roads, steep hills,
sloughs, and other terrestrial retardations; but with tolerable horses and a
civil driver (as the advertisements have it), I engage to get as soon as
possible into a more picturesque and romantic country, if my passengers incline
to have some patience with me during my first stages.[*]

[* These Introductory Chapters have been a good deal censured as tedious and
unnecessary. Yet there are circumstances recorded in them which the author has
not been able to persuade himself to retrench or cancel.]

CHAPTER VI.
THE ADIEUS OF WAVERLEY

It was upon the evening of this memorable Sunday that Sir Everard entered the
library, where he narrowly missed surprising our young hero as he went through
the guards of the broadsword with the ancient weapon of old Sir Hildebrand,
which, being preserved as an heirloom, usually hung over the chimney in the
library, beneath a picture of the knight and his horse, where the features were
almost entirely hidden by the knight’s profusion of curled hair, and the
Bucephalus which he bestrode concealed by the voluminous robes of the Bath with
which he was decorated. Sir Everard entered, and after a glance at the picture
and another at his nephew, began a little speech, which, however, soon dropt
into the natural simplicity of his common manner, agitated upon the present
occasion by no common feeling. “Nephew,” he said; and then, as
mending his phrase, “My dear Edward, it is God’s will, and also the
will of your father, whom, under God, it is your duty to obey, that you should
leave us to take up the profession of arms, in which so many of your ancestors
have been distinguished. I have made such arrangements as will enable you to
take the field as their descendant, and as the probable heir of the house of
Waverley; and, sir, in the field of battle you will remember what name you
bear. And, Edward, my dear boy, remember also that you are the last of that
race, and the only hope of its revival depends upon you; therefore, as far as
duty and honour will permit, avoid danger—I mean unnecessary
danger—and keep no company with rakes, gamblers, and Whigs, of whom, it
is to be feared, there are but too many in the service into which you are
going. Your colonel, as I am informed, is an excellent man—for a
Presbyterian; but you will remember your duty to God, the Church of England,
and the—” (this breach ought to have been supplied, according to
the rubric, with the word “king;” but as, unfortunately, that word
conveyed a double and embarrassing sense, one meaning de facto and the
other de jure, the knight filled up the blank
otherwise)—“the Church of England, and all constituted
authorities.” Then, not trusting himself with any further oratory, he
carried his nephew to his stables to see the horses destined for his campaign.
Two were black (the regimental colour), superb chargers both; the other three
were stout active hacks, designed for the road, or for his domestics, of whom
two were to attend him from the Hall; an additional groom, if necessary, might
be picked up in Scotland.

“You will depart with but a small retinue,” quoth the Baronet,
“compared to Sir Hildebrand, when he mustered before the gate of the Hall
a larger body of horse than your whole regiment consists of. I could have
wished that these twenty young fellows from my estate, who have enlisted in
your troop, had been to march with you on your journey to Scotland. It would
have been something, at least; but I am told their attendance would be thought
unusual in these days, when every new and foolish fashion is introduced to
break the natural dependence of the people upon their landlords.”

Sir Everard had done his best to correct this unnatural disposition of the
times; for he had brightened the chain of attachment between the recruits and
their young captain, not only by a copious repast of beef and ale, by way of
parting feast, but by such a pecuniary donation to each individual as tended
rather to improve the conviviality than the discipline of their march. After
inspecting the cavalry, Sir Everard again conducted his nephew to the library,
where he produced a letter, carefully folded, surrounded by a little stripe of
flox-silk, according to ancient form, and sealed with an accurate impression of
the Waverley coat-of-arms. It was addressed, with great formality, “To
Cosmo Comyne Bradwardine, Esq., of Bradwardine, at his principal mansion of
Tully-Veolan, in Perthshire, North Britain. These—By the hands of Captain
Edward Waverley, nephew of Sir Everard Waverley, of Waverley-Honour,
Bart.”

The gentleman to whom this enormous greeting was addressed, of whom we shall
have more to say in the sequel, had been in arms for the exiled family of
Stuart in the year 1715, and was made prisoner at Preston in Lancashire. He was
of a very ancient family, and somewhat embarrassed fortune; a scholar,
according to the scholarship of Scotchmen, that is, his learning was more
diffuse than accurate, and he was rather a reader than a grammarian. Of his
zeal for the classic authors he is said to have given an uncommon instance. On
the road between Preston and London, he made his escape from his guards; but
being afterwards found loitering near the place where they had lodged the
former night, he was recognised, and again arrested. His companions, and even
his escort, were surprised at his infatuation, and could not help inquiring,
why, being once at liberty, he had not made the best of his way to a place of
safety; to which he replied, that he had intended to do so, but, in good faith,
he had returned to seek his Titus Livius, which he had forgot in the hurry of
his escape.^[3] The simplicity of
this anecdote struck the gentleman, who, as we before observed, had managed the
defence of some of those unfortunate persons, at the expense of Sir Everard,
and perhaps some others of the party. He was, besides, himself a special
admirer of the old Patavinian, and though probably his own zeal might not have
carried him such extravagant lengths, even to recover the edition of Sweynheim
and Pannartz (supposed to be the princeps), he did not the less estimate
the devotion of the North Briton, and in consequence exerted himself to so much
purpose to remove and soften evidence, detect legal flaws, et cetera,
that he accomplished the final discharge and deliverance of Cosmo Comyne
Bradwardine from certain very awkward consequences of a plea before our
sovereign lord the king in Westminster.

The Baron of Bradwardine, for he was generally so called in Scotland (although
his intimates, from his place of residence, used to denominate him
Tully-Veolan, or more familiarly, Tully), no sooner stood rectus in
curia than he posted down to pay his respects and make his acknowledgments
at Waverley-Honour. A congenial passion for field-sports, and a general
coincidence in political opinions, cemented his friendship with Sir Everard,
notwithstanding the difference of their habits and studies in other
particulars; and, having spent several weeks at Waverley-Honour, the Baron
departed with many expressions of regard, warmly pressing the Baronet to return
his visit, and partake of the diversion of grouse-shooting, upon his moors in
Perthshire next season. Shortly after, Mr. Bradwardine remitted from Scotland a
sum in reimbursement of expenses incurred in the King’s High Court of
Westminster, which, although not quite so formidable when reduced to the
English denomination, had, in its original form of Scotch pounds, shillings,
and pence, such a formidable effect upon the frame of Duncan Macwheeble, the
laird’s confidential factor, baron-bailie, and man of resource, that he
had a fit of the cholic, which lasted for five days, occasioned, he said,
solely and utterly by becoming the unhappy instrument of conveying such a
serious sum of money out of his native country into the hands of the false
English. But patriotism, as it is the fairest, so it is often the most
suspicious mask of other feelings; and many who knew Bailie Macwheeble
concluded that his professions of regret were not altogether disinterested, and
that he would have grudged the moneys paid to the loons at Westminster
much less had they not come from Bradwardine estate, a fund which he considered
as more particularly his own. But the Bailie protested he was absolutely
disinterested—

“Woe, woe, for Scotland, not a whit for me!”

The laird was only rejoiced that his worthy friend, Sir Everard Waverley of
Waverley-Honour, was reimbursed of the expenditure which he had outlaid on
account of the house of Bradwardine. It concerned, he said, the credit of his
own family, and of the kingdom of Scotland at large, that these disbursements
should be repaid forthwith, and, if delayed, it would be a matter of national
reproach. Sir Everard, accustomed to treat much larger sums with indifference,
received the remittance of £294, 13s. 6d. without being aware
that the payment was an international concern, and, indeed, would probably have
forgot the circumstance altogether, if Bailie Macwheeble had thought of
comforting his cholic by intercepting the subsidy. A yearly intercourse took
place, of a short letter and a hamper or a cask or two, between Waverley-Honour
and Tully-Veolan, the English exports consisting of mighty cheeses and mightier
ale, pheasants, and venison, and the Scottish returns being vested in grouse,
white hares, pickled salmon, and usquebaugh; all which were meant, sent, and
received as pledges of constant friendship and amity between two important
houses. It followed as a matter of course, that the heir-apparent of
Waverley-Honour could not with propriety visit Scotland without being furnished
with credentials to the Baron of Bradwardine.

When this matter was explained and settled, Mr. Pembroke expressed his wish to
take a private and particular leave of his dear pupil. The good man’s
exhortations to Edward to preserve an unblemished life and morals, to hold fast
the principles of the Christian religion, and to eschew the profane company of
scoffers and latitudinarians, too much abounding in the army, were not
unmingled with his political prejudices. It had pleased Heaven, he said, to
place Scotland (doubtless for the sins of their ancestors in 1642) in a more
deplorable state of darkness than even this unhappy kingdom of England. Here,
at least, although the candlestick of the Church of England had been in some
degree removed from its place, it yet afforded a glimmering light; there was a
hierarchy, though schismatical, and fallen from the principles maintained by
those great fathers of the church, Sancroft and his brethren; there was a
liturgy, though woefully perverted in some of the principal petitions. But in
Scotland it was utter darkness; and, excepting a sorrowful, scattered, and
persecuted remnant, the pulpits were abandoned to Presbyterians, and, he
feared, to sectaries of every description. It should be his duty to fortify his
dear pupil to resist such unhallowed and pernicious doctrines in church and
state as must necessarily be forced at times upon his unwilling ears.

Here he produced two immense folded packets, which appeared each to contain a
whole ream of closely written manuscript. They had been the labour of the
worthy man’s whole life; and never were labour and zeal more absurdly
wasted. He had at one time gone to London, with the intention of giving them to
the world, by the medium of a bookseller in Little Britain, well known to deal
in such commodities, and to whom he was instructed to address himself in a
particular phrase and with a certain sign, which, it seems, passed at that time
current among the initiated Jacobites. The moment Mr. Pembroke had uttered the
Shibboleth, with the appropriate gesture, the bibliopolist greeted him,
notwithstanding every disclamation, by the title of Doctor, and conveying him
into his back shop, after inspecting every possible and impossible place of
concealment, he commenced: “Eh, Doctor!—Well—all under the
rose—snug—I keep no holes here even for a Hanoverian rat to hide
in. And, what—eh! any good news from our friends over the
water?—and how does the worthy King of France?—Or perhaps you are
more lately from Rome? it must be Rome will do it at last—the church must
light its candle at the old lamp.—Eh—what, cautious? I like you the
better; but no fear.”

Here Mr. Pembroke with some difficulty stopt a torrent of interrogations, eked
out with signs, nods, and winks; and, having at length convinced the bookseller
that he did him too much honour in supposing him an emissary of exiled royalty,
he explained his actual business.

The man of books with a much more composed air proceeded to examine the
manuscripts. The title of the first was “A Dissent from Dissenters, or
the Comprehension confuted; showing the Impossibility of any Composition
between the Church and Puritans, Presbyterians, or Sectaries of any
Description; illustrated from the Scriptures, the Fathers of the Church, and
the soundest Controversial Divines.” To this work the bookseller
positively demurred. “Well meant,” he said, “and learned,
doubtless;” but the time had gone by. Printed on small-pica it would run
to eight hundred pages, and could never pay. Begged therefore to be excused.
Loved and honoured the true church from his soul, and, had it been a sermon on
the martyrdom, or any twelve-penny touch—“why, I would venture
something for the honour of the cloth. But come, let’s see the other.
‘Right Hereditary righted!’—Ah! there’s some sense in
this. Hum—hum—hum—pages so many, paper so much,
letter-press—Ah—I’ll tell you, though, Doctor, you must knock
out some of the Latin and Greek; heavy, Doctor, damn’d heavy—(beg
your pardon) and if you throw in a few grains more pepper—I am he that
never preached my author. I have published for Drake and Charlwood Lawton, and
poor Amhurst.^[4] Ah, Caleb! Caleb!
Well, it was a shame to let poor Caleb starve, and so many fat rectors and
squires among us. I gave him a dinner once a week; but, Lord love you,
what’s once a week, when a man does not know where to go the other six
days? Well, but I must show the manuscript to little Tom Alibi the solicitor,
who manages all my law affairs—must keep on the windy side; the mob were
very uncivil the last time I mounted in Old Palace Yard—all Whigs and
Roundheads every man of them, Williamites and Hanover rats.”

The next day Mr. Pembroke again called on the publisher, but found Tom
Alibi’s advice had determined him against undertaking the work.
“Not but what I would go to—(what was I going to say?) to the
Plantations for the church with pleasure—but, dear Doctor, I have a wife
and family; but, to show my zeal, I’ll recommend the job to my neighbour
Trimmel—he is a bachelor, and leaving off business, so a voyage in a
western barge would not inconvenience him.” But Mr. Trimmel was also
obdurate, and Mr. Pembroke, fortunately perchance for himself, was compelled to
return to Waverley-Honour with his treatise in vindication of the real
fundamental principles of church and state safely packed in his saddle-bags.

As the public were thus likely to be deprived of the benefit arising from his
lucubrations by the selfish cowardice of the trade, Mr. Pembroke resolved to
make two copies of these tremendous manuscripts for the use of his pupil. He
felt that he had been indolent as a tutor, and, besides, his conscience checked
him for complying with the request of Mr. Richard Waverley, that he would
impress no sentiments upon Edward’s mind inconsistent with the present
settlement in church and state. But now, thought he, I may, without breach of
my word, since he is no longer under my tuition, afford the youth the means of
judging for himself, and have only to dread his reproaches for so long
concealing the light which the perusal will flash upon his mind. While he thus
indulged the reveries of an author and a politician, his darling proselyte,
seeing nothing very inviting in the title of the tracts, and appalled by the
bulk and compact lines of the manuscript, quietly consigned them to a corner of
his travelling trunk.

Aunt Rachel’s farewell was brief and affectionate. She only cautioned her
dear Edward, whom she probably deemed somewhat susceptible, against the
fascination of Scottish beauty. She allowed that the northern part of the
island contained some ancient families, but they were all Whigs and
Presbyterians except the Highlanders; and respecting them she must needs say,
there could be no great delicacy among the ladies, where the gentlemen’s
usual attire was, as she had been assured, to say the least, very singular, and
not at all decorous. She concluded her farewell with a kind and moving
benediction, and gave the young officer, as a pledge of her regard, a valuable
diamond ring (often worn by the male sex at that time), and a purse of broad
gold-pieces, which also were more common Sixty Years Since than they have been
of late.

CHAPTER VII.
A HORSE-QUARTER IN SCOTLAND

The next morning, amid varied feelings, the chief of which was a predominant,
anxious, and even solemn impression, that he was now in a great measure
abandoned to his own guidance and direction, Edward Waverley departed from the
Hall amid the blessings and tears of all the old domestics and the inhabitants
of the village, mingled with some sly petitions for sergeantcies and
corporalships, and so forth, on the part of those who professed that
“they never thoft to ha’ seen Jacob, and Giles, and Jonathan go off
for soldiers, save to attend his honour, as in duty bound.” Edward, as in
duty bound, extricated himself from the supplicants with the pledge of fewer
promises than might have been expected from a young man so little accustomed to
the world. After a short visit to London, he proceeded on horseback, then the
general mode of travelling, to Edinburgh, and from thence to Dundee, a seaport
on the eastern coast of Angus-shire, where his regiment was then quartered.

He now entered upon a new world, where, for a time, all was beautiful because
all was new. Colonel Gardiner, the commanding officer of the regiment, was
himself a study for a romantic, and at the same time an inquisitive youth. In
person he was tall, handsome, and active, though somewhat advanced in life. In
his early years he had been what is called, by manner of palliative, a very gay
young man, and strange stories were circulated about his sudden conversion from
doubt, if not infidelity, to a serious and even enthusiastic turn of mind. It
was whispered that a supernatural communication, of a nature obvious even to
the exterior senses, had produced this wonderful change; and though some
mentioned the proselyte as an enthusiast, none hinted at his being a hypocrite.
This singular and mystical circumstance gave Colonel Gardiner a peculiar and
solemn interest in the eyes of the young soldier.^[5] It may be easily imagined that the officers,
of a regiment commanded by so respectable a person composed a society more
sedate and orderly than a military mess always exhibits; and that Waverley
escaped some temptations to which he might otherwise have been exposed.

Meanwhile his military education proceeded. Already a good horseman, he was now
initiated into the arts of the manege, which, when carried to perfection,
almost realise the fable of the Centaur, the guidance of the horse appearing to
proceed from the rider’s mere volition, rather than from the use of any
external and apparent signal of motion. He received also instructions in his
field duty; but I must own, that when his first ardour was past, his progress
fell short in the latter particular of what he wished and expected. The duty of
an officer, the most imposing of all others to the inexperienced mind, because
accompanied with so much outward pomp and circumstance, is in its essence a
very dry and abstract task, depending chiefly upon arithmetical combinations,
requiring much attention, and a cool and reasoning head to bring them into
action. Our hero was liable to fits of absence, in which his blunders excited
some mirth, and called down some reproof. This circumstance impressed him with
a painful sense of inferiority in those qualities which appeared most to
deserve and obtain regard in his new profession. He asked himself in vain, why
his eye could not judge of distance or space so well as those of his
companions; why his head was not always successful in disentangling the various
partial movements necessary to execute a particular evolution; and why his
memory, so alert upon most occasions, did not correctly retain technical
phrases and minute points of etiquette or field discipline. Waverley was
naturally modest, and therefore did not fall into the egregious mistake of
supposing such minuter rules of military duty beneath his notice, or conceiting
himself to be born a general, because he made an indifferent subaltern. The
truth was, that the vague and unsatisfactory course of reading which he had
pursued, working upon a temper naturally retired and abstracted, had given him
that wavering and unsettled habit of mind which is most averse to study and
riveted attention. Time, in the mean while, hung heavy on his hands. The gentry
of the neighbourhood were disaffected, and showed little hospitality to the
military guests; and the people of the town, chiefly engaged in mercantile
pursuits, were not such as Waverley chose to associate with. The arrival of
summer, and a curiosity to know something more of Scotland than he could see in
a ride from his quarters, determined him to request leave of absence for a few
weeks. He resolved first to visit his uncle’s ancient friend and
correspondent, with the purpose of extending or shortening the time of his
residence according to circumstances. He travelled of course on horse-back, and
with a single attendant, and passed his first night at a miserable inn, where
the landlady had neither shoes nor stockings, and the landlord, who called
himself a gentleman, was disposed to be rude to his guest, because he had not
bespoke the pleasure of his society to supper.^[6] The next day, traversing an open and
uninclosed country, Edward gradually approached the Highlands of Perthshire,
which at first had appeared a blue outline in the horizon, but now swelled into
huge gigantic masses, which frowned defiance over the more level country that
lay beneath them. Near the bottom of this stupendous barrier, but still in the
Lowland country, dwelt Cosmo Comyne Bradwardine of Bradwardine; and, if
grey-haired eld can be in aught believed, there had dwelt his ancestors, with
all their heritage, since the days of the gracious King Duncan.

CHAPTER VIII.
A SCOTTISH MANOR-HOUSE SIXTY YEARS SINCE

It was about noon when Captain Waverley entered the straggling village, or
rather hamlet, of Tully-Veolan, close to which was situated the mansion of the
proprietor. The houses seemed miserable in the extreme, especially to an eye
accustomed to the smiling neatness of English cottages. They stood, without any
respect for regularity, on each side of a straggling kind of unpaved street,
where children, almost in a primitive state of nakedness, lay sprawling, as if
to be crushed by the hoofs of the first passing horse. Occasionally, indeed,
when such a consummation seemed inevitable, a watchful old grandam, with her
close cap, distaff, and spindle, rushed like a sibyl in frenzy out of one of
these miserable cells, dashed into the middle of the path, and snatching up her
own charge from among the sunburnt loiterers, saluted him with a sound cuff,
and transported him back to his dungeon, the little white-headed varlet
screaming all the while, from the very top of his lungs, a shrilly treble to
the growling remonstrances of the enraged matron. Another part in this concert
was sustained by the incessant yelping of a score of idle useless curs, which
followed, snarling, barking, howling, and snapping at the horses’ heels;
a nuisance at that time so common in Scotland, that a French tourist, who, like
other travellers, longed to find a good and rational reason for everything he
saw, has recorded, as one of the memorabilia of Caledonia, that the state
maintained, in each village a relay of curs, called collies, whose duty
it was to chase the chevaux de poste (too starved and exhausted to move
without such a stimulus) from one hamlet to another, till their annoying convoy
drove them to the end of their stage. The evil and remedy (such as it is) still
exist. But this is remote from our present purpose, and is only thrown out for
consideration of the collectors under Mr. Dent’s Dog Bill.

As Waverley moved on, here and there an old man, bent as much by toil as years,
his eyes bleared with age and smoke, tottered to the door of his hut, to gaze
on the dress of the stranger and the form and motions of the horses, and then
assembled, with his neighbours, in a little group at the smithy, to discuss the
probabilities of whence the stranger came and where he might be going. Three or
four village girls, returning from the well or brook with pitchers and pails
upon their heads, formed more pleasing objects, and, with their thin
short-gowns and single petticoats, bare arms, legs, and feet, uncovered heads
and braided hair, somewhat resembled Italian forms of landscape. Nor could a
lover of the picturesque have challenged either the elegance of their costume
or the symmetry of their shape; although, to say the truth, a mere Englishman
in search of the “comfortable”,—a word peculiar to his native
tongue, might have wished the clothes less scanty, the feet and legs somewhat
protected from the weather, the head and complexion shrouded from the sun, or
perhaps might even have thought the whole person and dress considerably
improved by a plentiful application of spring water, with a quantum
sufficit of soap. The whole scene was depressing; for it argued, at the
first glance, at least a stagnation of industry, and perhaps of intellect. Even
curiosity, the busiest passion of the idle, seemed of a listless cast in the
village of Tully-Veolan: the curs aforesaid alone showed any part of its
activity; with the villagers it was passive. They stood, and gazed at the
handsome young officer and his attendant, but without any of those quick
motions and eager looks that indicate the earnestness with which those who live
in monotonous ease at home look out for amusement abroad. Yet the physiognomy
of the people, when more closely examined, was far from exhibiting the
indifference of stupidity; their features were rough, but remarkably
intelligent; grave, but the very reverse of stupid; and from among the young
women an artist might have chosen more than one model whose features and form
resembled those of Minerva. The children also, whose skins were burnt black,
and whose hair was bleached white, by the influence of the sun, had a look and
manner of life and interest. It seemed, upon the whole, as if poverty, and
indolence, its too frequent companion, were combining to depress the natural
genius and acquired information of a hardy, intelligent, and reflecting
peasantry.

Some such thoughts crossed Waverley’s mind as he paced his horse slowly
through the rugged and flinty street of Tully-Veolan, interrupted only in his
meditations by the occasional caprioles which his charger exhibited at the
reiterated assaults of those canine Cossacks, the collies before
mentioned. The village was more than half a mile long, the cottages being
irregularly divided from each other by gardens, or yards, as the inhabitants
called them, of different sizes, where (for it is Sixty Years Since) the now
universal potato was unknown, but which were stored with gigantic plants of
kale or colewort, encircled with groves of nettles, and exhibited here
and there a huge hemlock, or the national thistle, overshadowing a quarter of
the petty inclosure. The broken ground on which the village was built had never
been levelled; so that these inclosures presented declivities of every degree,
here rising like terraces, there sinking like tan-pits. The dry-stone walls
which fenced, or seemed to fence (for they were sorely breached), these hanging
gardens of Tully-Veolan were intersected by a narrow lane leading to the common
field, where the joint labour of the villagers cultivated alternate ridges and
patches of rye, oats, barley, and pease, each of such minute extent that at a
little distance the unprofitable variety of the surface resembled a
tailor’s book of patterns. In a few favoured instances, there appeared
behind the cottages a miserable wigwam, compiled of earth, loose stones, and
turf, where the wealthy might perhaps shelter a starved cow or sorely galled
horse. But almost every hut was fenced in front by a huge black stack of turf
on one side of the door, while on the other the family dunghill ascended in
noble emulation.

Tully-Veolan

About a bowshot from the end of the village appeared the inclosures proudly
denominated the Parks of Tully-Veolan, being certain square fields, surrounded
and divided by stone walls five feet in height. In the centre of the exterior
barrier was the upper gate of the avenue, opening under an archway,
battlemented on the top, and adorned with two large weather-beaten mutilated
masses of upright stone, which, if the tradition of the hamlet could be
trusted, had once represented, at least had been once designed to represent,
two rampant Bears, the supporters of the family of Bradwardine. This avenue was
straight and of moderate length, running between a double row of very ancient
horse-chestnuts, planted alternately with sycamores, which rose to such huge
height, and nourished so luxuriantly, that their boughs completely over-arched
the broad road beneath. Beyond these venerable ranks, and running parallel to
them, were two high walls, of apparently the like antiquity, overgrown with
ivy, honeysuckle, and other climbing plants. The avenue seemed very little
trodden, and chiefly by foot-passengers; so that being very broad, and enjoying
a constant shade, it was clothed with grass of a deep and rich verdure,
excepting where a foot-path, worn by occasional passengers, tracked with a
natural sweep the way from the upper to the lower gate. This nether portal,
like the former, opened in front of a wall ornamented with some rude sculpture,
with battlements on the top, over which were seen, half-hidden by the trees of
the avenue, the high steep roofs and narrow gables of the mansion, with lines
indented into steps, and corners decorated with small turrets. One of the
folding leaves of the lower gate was open, and as the sun shone full into the
court behind, a long line of brilliancy was flung upon the aperture up the dark
and gloomy avenue. It was one of those effects which a painter loves to
represent, and mingled well with the struggling light which found its way
between the boughs of the shady arch that vaulted the broad green alley.

The solitude and repose of the whole scene seemed almost monastic; and
Waverley, who had given his horse to his servant on entering the first gate,
walked slowly down the avenue, enjoying the grateful and cooling shade, and so
much pleased with the placid ideas of rest and seclusion excited by this
confined and quiet scene, that he forgot the misery and dirt of the hamlet he
had left behind him. The opening into the paved court-yard corresponded with
the rest of the scene. The house, which seemed to consist of two or three high,
narrow, and steep-roofed buildings, projecting from each other at right angles,
formed one side of the inclosure. It had been built at a period when castles
were no longer necessary, and when the Scottish architects had not yet acquired
the art of designing a domestic residence. The windows were numberless, but
very small; the roof had some nondescript kind of projections, called
bartizans, and displayed at each frequent angle a small turret, rather
resembling a pepper-box than a Gothic watchtower. Neither did the front
indicate absolute security from danger. There were loop-holes for musketry, and
iron stanchions on the lower windows, probably to repel any roving band of
gypsies, or resist a predatory visit from the caterans of the neighbouring
Highlands. Stables and other offices occupied another side of the square. The
former were low vaults, with narrow slits instead of windows, resembling, as
Edward’s groom observed, “rather a prison for murderers, and
larceners, and such like as are tried at ’sizes, than a place for any
Christian cattle.” Above these dungeon-looking stables were granaries,
called girnels, and other offices, to which there was access by outside stairs
of heavy masonry. Two battlemented walls, one of which faced the avenue, and
the other divided the court from the garden, completed the inclosure.

Nor was the court without its ornaments. In one corner was a tun-bellied
pigeon-house, of great size and rotundity, resembling in figure and proportion
the curious edifice called Arthur’s Oven, which would have turned the
brains of all the antiquaries in England, had not the worthy proprietor pulled
it down for the sake of mending a neighbouring dam-dyke. This dove-cot, or
columbarium, as the owner called it, was no small resource to a Scottish laird
of that period, whose scanty rents were eked out by the contributions levied
upon the farms by these light foragers, and the conscriptions exacted from the
latter for the benefit of the table.

Another corner of the court displayed a fountain, where a huge bear, carved in
stone, predominated over a large stone-basin, into which he disgorged the
water. This work of art was the wonder of the country ten miles round. It must
not be forgotten, that all sorts of bears, small and large, demi or in full
proportion, were carved over the windows, upon the ends of the gables,
terminated the spouts, and supported the turrets, with the ancient family
motto, Bewar the Bar, cut under each hyperborean form. The court was
spacious, well paved, and perfectly clean, there being probably another
entrance behind the stables for removing the litter. Everything around appeared
solitary, and would have been silent, but for the continued plashing of the
fountain; and the whole scene still maintained the monastic illusion which the
fancy of Waverley had conjured up. And here we beg permission to close a
chapter of still life.^[7]

CHAPTER IX.
MORE OF THE MANOR-HOUSE AND ITS ENVIRONS

After having satisfied his curiosity by gazing around him for a few minutes,
Waverley applied himself to the massive knocker of the hall-door, the
architrave of which bore the date 1594. But no answer was returned, though the
peal resounded through a number of apartments, and was echoed from the
court-yard walls without the house, startling the pigeons from the venerable
rotunda which they occupied, and alarming anew even the distant village curs,
which had retired to sleep upon their respective dunghills. Tired of the din
which he created, and the unprofitable responses which it excited, Waverley
began to think that he had reached the castle of Orgoglio as entered by the
victorious Prince Arthur,—

When ’gan he loudly through the house to call,
        But no man cared to answer to his cry;
    There reign’d a solemn silence over all,
Nor voice was heard, nor wight was seen in bower or hall.

Filled almost with expectation of beholding some “old, old man, with
beard as white as snow,” whom he might question concerning this deserted
mansion, our hero turned to a little oaken wicket-door, well clenched with
iron-nails, which opened in the court-yard wall at its angle with the house. It
was only latched, notwithstanding its fortified appearance, and, when opened,
admitted him into the garden, which presented a pleasant scene.[*] The southern
side of the house, clothed with fruit-trees, and having many evergreens trained
upon its walls, extended its irregular yet venerable front along a terrace,
partly paved, partly gravelled, partly bordered with flowers and choice shrubs.
This elevation descended by three several flights of steps, placed in its
centre and at the extremities, into what might be called the garden proper, and
was fenced along the top by a stone parapet with a heavy balustrade, ornamented
from space to space with huge grotesque figures of animals seated upon their
haunches, among which the favourite bear was repeatedly introduced. Placed in
the middle of the terrace between a sashed-door opening from the house and the
central flight of steps, a huge animal of the same species supported on his
head and fore-paws a sun-dial of large circumference, inscribed with more
diagrams than Edward’s mathematics enabled him to decipher.

[* At Ravelston may be seen such a garden, which the taste of the proprietor,
the author’s friend and kinsman, Sir Alexander Keith, Knight Mareschal,
has judiciously preserved. That, as well as the house is, however, of smaller
dimensions than the Baron of Bradwardine’s mansion and garden are
presumed to have been.]

The garden, which seemed to be kept with great accuracy, abounded in
fruit-trees, and exhibited a profusion of flowers and evergreens, cut into
grotesque forms. It was laid out in terraces, which descended rank by rank from
the western wall to a large brook, which had a tranquil and smooth appearance,
where it served as a boundary to the garden; but, near the extremity, leapt in
tumult over a strong dam, or wear-head, the cause of its temporary
tranquillity, and there forming a cascade, was overlooked by an octangular
summer-house, with a gilded bear on the top by way of vane. After this feat,
the brook, assuming its natural rapid and fierce character, escaped from the
eye down a deep and wooded dell, from the copse of which arose a massive, but
ruinous tower, the former habitation of the Barons of Bradwardine. The margin
of the brook, opposite to the garden, displayed a narrow meadow, or haugh, as
it was called, which formed a small washing-green; the bank, which retired
behind it, was covered by ancient trees.

The scene, though pleasing, was not quite equal to the gardens of Alcina; yet
wanted not the “due donzellette garrule” of that enchanted
paradise, for upon the green aforesaid two bare-legged damsels, each standing
in a spacious tub, performed with their feet the office of a patent
washing-machine. These did not, however, like the maidens of Armida, remain to
greet with their harmony the approaching guest, but, alarmed at the appearance
of a handsome stranger on the opposite side, dropped their garments (I should
say garment, to be quite correct) over their limbs, which their occupation
exposed somewhat too freely, and, with a shrill exclamation of “Eh,
sirs!” uttered with an accent between modesty and coquetry, sprung off
like deer in different directions.

Waverley began to despair of gaining entrance into this solitary and seemingly
enchanted mansion, when a man advanced up one of the garden alleys, where he
still retained his station. Trusting this might be a gardener, or some domestic
belonging to the house, Edward descended the steps in order to meet him; but as
the figure approached, and long before he could descry its features, he was
struck with the oddity of its appearance and gestures. Sometimes this mister
wight held his hands clasped over his head, like an Indian Jogue in the
attitude of penance; sometimes he swung them perpendicularly, like a pendulum,
on each side; and anon he slapped them swiftly and repeatedly across his
breast, like the substitute used by a hackney-coachman for his usual flogging
exercise, when his cattle are idle upon the stand, in a clear frosty day. His
gait was as singular as his gestures, for at times he hopped with great
perseverance on the right foot, then exchanged that supporter to advance in the
same manner on the left, and then putting his feet close together he hopped
upon both at once. His attire also was antiquated and extravagant. It consisted
in a sort of grey jerkin, with scarlet cuffs and slashed sleeves, showing a
scarlet lining; the other parts of the dress corresponded in colour, not
forgetting a pair of scarlet stockings, and a scarlet bonnet, proudly
surmounted with a turkey’s feather. Edward, whom he did not seem to
observe, now perceived confirmation in his features of what the mien and
gestures had already announced. It was apparently neither idiocy nor insanity
which gave that wild, unsettled, irregular expression to a face which naturally
was rather handsome, but something that resembled a compound of both, where the
simplicity of the fool was mixed with the extravagance of a crazed imagination.
He sung with great earnestness, and not without some taste, a fragment of an
old Scottish ditty:—

False love, and hast thou play’d me this
    In summer among the flowers?
I will repay thee back again
    In winter among the showers.
Unless again, again, my love,
    Unless you turn again;
As you with other maidens rove,
    I’ll smile on other men.[*]

[* This is a genuine ancient fragment, with some alteration in the two last
lines.]

Here lifting up his eyes, which had hitherto been fixed in observing how his
feet kept time to the tune, he beheld Waverley, and instantly doffed his cap,
with many grotesque signals of surprise, respect, and salutation. Edward,
though with little hope of receiving an answer to any constant question,
requested to know whether Mr. Bradwardine were at home, or where he could find
any of the domestics. The questioned party replied, and, like the witch of
Thalaba, “still his speech was song,”—

The Knight’s to the mountain
    His bugle to wind;
The Lady’s to greenwood
    Her garland to bind.
The bower of Burd Ellen
    Has moss on the floor,
That the step of Lord William
    Be silent and sure.

This conveyed no information, and Edward, repeating his queries, received a
rapid answer, in which, from the haste and peculiarity of the dialect, the word
“butler” was alone intelligible. Waverley then requested to see the
butler; upon which the fellow, with a knowing look and nod of intelligence,
made a signal to Edward to follow, and began to dance and caper down the alley
up which he had made his approaches. A strange guide this, thought Edward, and
not much unlike one of Shakespeare’s roynish clowns. I am not over
prudent to trust to his pilotage; but wiser men have been led by fools. By this
time he reached the bottom of the alley, where, turning short on a little
parterre of flowers, shrouded from the east and north by a close yew hedge, he
found an old man at work without his coat, whose appearance hovered between
that of an upper servant and gardener; his red nose and ruffled shirt belonging
to the former profession; his hale and sunburnt visage, with his green apron,
appearing to indicate

“Old Adam’s likeness, set to dress this garden.”

The major domo, for such he was, and indisputably the second officer of state
in the barony (nay, as chief minister of the interior, superior even to Bailie
Macwheeble in his own department of the kitchen and cellar)—the major
domo laid down his spade, slipped on his coat in haste, and with a wrathful
look at Edward’s guide, probably excited by his having introduced a
stranger while he was engaged in this laborious, and, as he might suppose it,
degrading office, requested to know the gentleman’s commands. Being
informed that he wished to pay his respects to his master, that his name was
Waverley, and so forth, the old man’s countenance assumed a great deal of
respectful importance. “He could take it upon his conscience to say, his
honour would have exceeding pleasure in seeing him. Would not Mr. Waverley
choose some refreshment after his journey? His honour was with the folk who
were getting doon the dark hag; the twa gardener lads (an emphasis on the word
twa) had been ordered to attend him; and he had been just amusing himself in
the mean time with dressing Miss Rose’s flower-bed, that he might be near
to receive his honour’s orders, if need were; he was very fond of a
garden, but had little time for such divertisements.”

“He canna get it wrought in abune twa days in the week at no rate
whatever,” said Edward’s fantastic conductor.

A grim look from the butler chastised his interference, and he commanded him,
by the name of Davie Gellatley, in a tone which admitted no discussion, to look
for his honour at the dark hag, and tell him there was a gentleman from the
south had arrived at the Ha’.

“Can this poor fellow deliver a letter?” asked Edward.

“With all fidelity, sir, to any one whom he respects. I would hardly
trust him with a long message by word of mouth—though he is more knave
than fool.”

Waverley delivered his credentials to Mr. Gellatley, who seemed to confirm the
butler’s last observation, by twisting his features at him, when he was
looking another way, into the resemblance of the grotesque face on the bole of
a German tobacco pipe; after which, with an odd congé to Waverley, he
danced off to discharge his errand.

“He is an innocent, sir,” said the butler; “there is one such
in almost every town in the country, but ours is brought far ben. He used to
work a day’s turn weel enough; but he helped Miss Rose when she was
flemit with the Laird of Killancureit’s new English bull, and since that
time we ca’ him Davie Do-little; indeed we might ca’ him Davie
Do-naething, for since he got that gay clothing, to please his honour and my
young mistress (great folks will have their fancies), he has done naething but
dance up and down about the toun, without doing a single turn, unless
trimming the laird’s fishing-wand or busking his flies, or may be
catching a dish of trouts at an orra time. But here comes Miss Rose, who, I
take burden upon me for her, will be especial glad to see one of the house of
Waverley at her father’s mansion of Tully-Veolan.”

But Rose Bradwardine deserves better of her unworthy historian than to be
introduced at the end of a chapter.

In the mean while it may be noticed, that Waverley learned two things from this
colloquy: that in Scotland a single house was called a “town”, and
a natural fool an “innocent”.^[8]

CHAPTER X.
ROSE BRADWARDINE AND HER FATHER

Miss Bradwardine was but seventeen; yet, at the last races of the county town
of——, upon her health being proposed among a round of beauties, the
Laird of Bumperquaigh, permanent toast-master and croupier of the
Bautherwhillery Club, not only said “More” to the pledge in a pint
bumper of Bourdeaux, but, ere pouring forth the libation, denominated the
divinity to whom it was dedicated, “the Rose of Tully-Veolan”; upon
which festive occasion three cheers were given by all the sitting members of
that respectable society, whose throats the wine had left capable of such
exertion. Nay, I am well assured, that the sleeping partners of the company
snorted applause, and that although strong bumpers and weak brains had
consigned two or three to the floor, yet even these, fallen as they were from
their high estate, and weltering—I will carry the parody no
farther—uttered divers inarticulate sounds, intimating their assent to
the motion.

Such unanimous applause could not be extorted but by acknowledged merit; and
Rose Bradwardine not only deserved it, but also the approbation of much more
rational persons than the Bautherwhillery Club could have mustered, even before
discussion of the first magnum. She was indeed a very pretty girl of the
Scotch cast of beauty, that is, with a profusion of hair of paley gold, and a
skin like the snow of her own mountains in whiteness. Yet she had not a pallid
or pensive cast of countenance; her features, as well as her temper, had a
lively expression; her complexion, though not florid, was so pure as to seem
transparent, and the slightest emotion sent her whole blood at once to her face
and neck. Her form, though under the common size, was remarkably elegant, and
her motions light, easy, and unembarrassed. She came from another part of the
garden to receive Captain Waverley, with a manner that hovered between
bashfulness and courtesy.

The first greetings past, Edward learned from her that the dark hag,
which had somewhat puzzled him in the butler’s account of his
master’s avocations, had nothing to do either with a black cat or a
broomstick, but was simply a portion of oak copse which was to be felled that
day. She offered, with diffident civility, to show the stranger the way to the
spot, which, it seems, was not far distant; but they were prevented by the
appearance of the Baron of Bradwardine in person, who, summoned by David
Gellatley, now appeared, “on hospitable thoughts intent,” clearing
the ground at a prodigious rate with swift and long strides, which reminded
Waverley of the seven-league boots of the nursery fable. He was a tall, thin,
athletic figure, old indeed and grey-haired, but with every muscle rendered as
tough as whip-cord by constant exercise. He was dressed carelessly, and more
like a Frenchman than an Englishman of the period, while, from his hard
features and perpendicular rigidity of stature, he bore some resemblance to a
Swiss officer of the guards, who had resided some time at Paris, and caught the
costume, but not the ease or manner, of its inhabitants. The truth was,
that his language and habits were as heterogeneous as his external appearance.

Owing to his natural disposition to study, or perhaps to a very general
Scottish fashion of giving young men of rank a legal education, he had been
bred with a view to the bar. But the politics of his family precluding the hope
of his rising in that profession, Mr. Bradwardine travelled with high
reputation for several years, and made some campaigns in foreign service. After
his démêlée with the law of high treason in 1715, he had lived in
retirement, conversing almost entirely with those of his own principles in the
vicinage. The pedantry of the lawyer, superinduced upon the military pride of
the soldier, might remind a modern of the days of the zealous volunteer
service, when the bar-gown of our pleaders was often flung over a blazing
uniform. To this must be added the prejudices of ancient birth and Jacobite
politics, greatly strengthened by habits of solitary and secluded authority,
which, though exercised only within the bounds of his half-cultivated estate,
was there indisputable and undisputed. For, as he used to observe, “the
lands of Bradwardine, Tully-Veolan, and others, had been erected into a free
barony by a charter from David the First, cum liberali potest. habendi curias
et justicias, cum fossa et furca (lie, pit and gallows) et saka et soka,
et thol et theam, et infang-thief et outfang-thief, sive hand-habend, sive
bak-barand.” The peculiar meaning of all these cabalistical words few or
none could explain; but they implied, upon the whole, that the Baron of
Bradwardine might, in case of delinquency, imprison, try, and execute his
vassals at his pleasure. Like James the First, however, the present possessor
of this authority was more pleased in talking about prerogative than in
exercising it; and excepting that he imprisoned two poachers in the dungeon of
the old tower of Tully-Veolan, where they were sorely frightened by ghosts, and
almost eaten by rats, and that he set an old woman in the jougs (or
Scottish pillory) for saying “there were mair fules in the laird’s
ha’ house than Davie Gellatley,” I do not learn that he was accused
of abusing his high powers. Still, however, the conscious pride of possessing
them gave additional importance to his language and deportment.

At his first address to Waverley, it would seem that the hearty pleasure he
felt to behold the nephew of his friend had somewhat discomposed the stiff and
upright dignity of the Baron of Bradwardine’s demeanour, for the tears
stood in the old gentleman’s eyes, when, having first shaken Edward
heartily by the hand in the English fashion, he embraced him à la mode
Française, and kissed him on both sides of his face; while the hardness of
his gripe, and the quantity of Scotch snuff which his accolade communicated,
called corresponding drops of moisture to the eyes of his guest.

“Upon the honour of a gentleman,” he said, “but it makes me
young again to see you here, Mr. Waverley! A worthy scion of the old stock of
Waverley-Honour—spes altera, as Maro hath it—and you have
the look of the old line, Captain Waverley; not so portly yet as my old friend
Sir Everard—mais cela viendra avec le temps, as my Dutch
acquaintance, Baron Kikkitbroeck, said of the sagesse of madame son
épouse. And so ye have mounted the cockade? Right, right; though I could
have wished the colour different, and so I would ha’ deemed might Sir
Everard. But no more of that; I am old, and times are changed. And how does the
worthy knight baronet, and the fair Mrs. Rachel?—Ah, ye laugh, young man!
In troth she was the fair Mrs. Rachel in the year of grace seventeen hundred
and sixteen; but time passes—et singula prædantur anni—that
is most certain. But once again ye are most heartily welcome to my poor house
of Tully-Veolan! Hie to the house, Rose, and see that Alexander Saunderson
looks out the old Château Margaux, which I sent from Bourdeaux to Dundee in the
year 1713.”

Rose tripped off demurely enough till she turned the first corner, and then ran
with the speed of a fairy, that she might gain leisure, after discharging her
father’s commission, to put her own dress in order, and produce all her
little finery, an occupation for which the approaching dinner-hour left but
limited time.

“We cannot rival the luxuries of your English table, Captain Waverley, or
give you the epulæ lautiores of Waverley-Honour. I say
‘epulæ’ rather than prandium, because the latter phrase is popular:
epulae ad senatum, prandium vero ad populum attinet, says Suetonius
Tranquillus. But I trust ye will applaud my Bourdeaux; c’est des doux
oreilles, as Captain Vinsauf used to say; vinum primæ notæ, the
principal of Saint Andrews denominated it. And, once more, Captain Waverley,
right glad am I that ye are here to drink the best my cellar can make
forthcoming.”

This speech, with the necessary interjectional answers, continued from the
lower alley where they met up to the door of the house, where four or five
servants in old-fashioned liveries, headed by Alexander Saunderson, the butler,
who now bore no token of the sable stains of the garden, received them in grand
costume,

In an old hall hung round with pikes and with bows,
With old bucklers and corslets that had borne many shrewd blows.

With much ceremony, and still more real kindness, the Baron, without stopping
in any intermediate apartment, conducted his guest through several into the
great dining parlour, wainscotted with black oak, and hung round with the
pictures of his ancestry, where a table was set forth in form for six persons,
and an old-fashioned beaufet displayed all the ancient and massive plate of the
Bradwardine family. A bell was now heard at the head of the avenue; for an old
man, who acted as porter upon gala days, had caught the alarm given by
Waverley’s arrival, and, repairing to his post, announced the arrival of
other guests.

These, as the Baron assured his young friend, were very estimable persons.
“There was the young Laird of Balmawhapple, a Falconer by surname, of the
house of Glenfarquhar, given right much to field-sports—gaudet equis
et canibus—but a very discreet young gentleman. Then there was the
Laird of Killancureit, who had devoted his leisure until tillage and
agriculture, and boasted himself to be possessed of a bull of matchless merit,
brought from the county of Devon (the Damnonia of the Romans, if we can trust
Robert of Cirencester). He is, as ye may well suppose from such a tendency, but
of yeoman extraction—servabit odorem testa diu; and I believe,
between ourselves, his grandsire was from the wrong side of the
Border—one Bullsegg, who came hither as a steward, or bailiff, or
ground-officer, or something in that department, to the last Girnigo of
Killancureit, who died of an atrophy. After his master’s death,
sir,—ye would hardly believe such a scandal,—but this Bullsegg,
being portly and comely of aspect, intermarried with the lady dowager, who was
young and amorous, and possessed himself of the estate, which devolved on this
unhappy woman by a settlement of her umwhile husband, in direct contravention
of an unrecorded taillie, and to the prejudice of the disponer’s own
flesh and blood, in the person of his natural heir and seventh cousin, Girnigo
of Tipperhewit, whose family was so reduced by the ensuing law-suit, that his
representative is now serving as a private gentleman-sentinel in the Highland
Black Watch. But this gentleman, Mr. Bullsegg of Killancureit that now is, has
good blood in his veins by the mother and grandmother, who were both of the
family of Pickletillim, and he is well liked and looked upon, and knows his own
place. And God forbid, Captain Waverley, that we of irreproachable lineage
should exult over him, when it may be, that in the eighth, ninth, or tenth
generation, his progeny may rank, in a manner, with the old gentry of the
country. Rank and ancestry, sir, should be the last words in the mouths of us
of unblemished race—vix ea nostra voco, as Naso saith. There is,
besides, a clergyman of the true (though suffering) Episcopal church of
Scotland. He was a confessor in her cause after the year 1715, when a Whiggish
mob destroyed his meeting-house, tore his surplice, and plundered his
dwelling-house of four silver spoons, intromitting also with his mart and his
mealark, and with two barrels, one of single and one of double ale, besides
three bottles of brandy.^[9] My
baron-bailie and doer, Mr. Duncan Macwheeble, is the fourth on our list. There
is a question, owing to the incertitude of ancient orthography, whether he
belongs to the clan of Wheedle or of Quibble, but both have produced persons
eminent in the law.”—

“As such he described them by person and name,
They enter’d, and dinner was served as they came.”

CHAPTER XI.
THE BANQUET

The entertainment was ample and handsome, according to the Scotch ideas of the
period, and the guests did great honour to it. The Baron ate like a famished
soldier, the Laird of Balmawhapple like a sportsman, Bullsegg of Killancureit
like a farmer, Waverley himself like a traveller, and Bailie Macwheeble like
all four together; though, either out of more respect, or in order to preserve
that proper declination of person which showed a sense that he was in the
presence of his patron, he sat upon the edge of his chair, placed at three feet
distance from the table, and achieved a communication with his plate by
projecting his person towards it in a line which obliqued from the bottom of
his spine, so that the person who sat opposite to him could only see the
foretop of his riding periwig.

This stooping position might have been inconvenient to another person; but long
habit made it, whether seated or walking, perfectly easy to the worthy Bailie.
In the latter posture it occasioned, no doubt, an unseemly projection of the
person towards those who happened to walk behind; but those being at all times
his inferiors (for Mr. Macwheeble was very scrupulous in giving place to all
others), he cared very little what inference of contempt or slight regard they
might derive from the circumstance. Hence, when he waddled across the court to
and from his old grey pony, he somewhat resembled a turnspit walking upon its
hind legs.

The nonjuring clergyman was a pensive and interesting old man, with much of the
air of a sufferer for conscience’ sake. He was one of those

“Who, undeprived, their benefice forsook.”

For this whim, when the Baron was out of hearing, the Bailie used sometimes
gently to rally Mr. Rubrick, upbraiding him with the nicety of his scruples.
Indeed, it must be owned, that he himself, though at heart a keen partisan of
the exiled family, had kept pretty fair with all the different turns of state
in his time; so that Davie Gellatley once described him as a particularly good
man, who had a very quiet and peaceful conscience, that never did him any
harm.

When the dinner was removed, the Baron announced the health of the King,
politely leaving to the consciences of his guests to drink to the sovereign
de facto or de jure, as their politics inclined. The conversation
now became general; and, shortly afterwards, Miss Bradwardine, who had done the
honours with natural grace and simplicity, retired, and was soon followed by
the clergyman. Among the rest of the party, the wine, which fully justified the
encomiums of the landlord, flowed freely round, although Waverley, with some
difficulty, obtained the privilege of sometimes neglecting the glass. At
length, as the evening grew more late, the Baron made a private signal to Mr.
Saunders Saunderson, or, as he facetiously denominated him, Alexander ab
Alexandro, who left the room with a nod, and soon after returned, his grave
countenance mantling with a solemn and mysterious smile, and placed before his
master a small oaken casket, mounted with brass ornaments of curious form. The
Baron, drawing out a private key, unlocked the casket, raised the lid, and
produced a golden goblet of a singular and antique appearance, moulded into the
shape of a rampant bear, which the owner regarded with a look of mingled
reverence, pride, and delight, that irresistibly reminded Waverley of Ben
Jonson’s Tom Otter, with his Bull, Horse, and Dog, as that wag wittily
denominated his chief carousing cups. But Mr. Bradwardine, turning towards him
with complacency, requested him to observe this curious relic of the olden
time.

“It represents,” he said, “the chosen crest of our family, a
bear, as ye observe, and rampant; because a good herald will depict
every animal in its noblest posture, as a horse salient, a greyhound
currant, and, as may be inferred, a ravenous animal in actu
ferociori, or in a voracious, lacerating, and devouring posture. Now, sir,
we hold this most honourable achievement by the wappen-brief, or concession of
arms, of Frederick Red-beard, Emperor of Germany, to my predecessor, Godmund
Bradwardine, it being the crest of a gigantic Dane, whom he slew in the lists
in the Holy Land, on a quarrel touching the chastity of the emperor’s
spouse or daughter, tradition saith not precisely which, and thus, as Virgilius
hath it—

“‘Mutemus clypeos, Danaumque insignia nobis
Aptemus.’

Then for the cup, Captain Waverley, it was wrought by the command of Saint
Duthac, Abbot of Aberbrothock, for behoof of another baron of the house of
Bradwardine, who had valiantly defended the patrimony of that monastery against
certain encroaching nobles. It is properly termed the Blessed Bear of
Bradwardine (though old Doctor Doubleit used jocosely to call it Ursa Major),
and was supposed, in old and Catholic times, to be invested with certain
properties of a mystical and supernatural quality. And though I give not in to
such anilia, it is certain it has always been esteemed a solemn standard
cup and heirloom of our house; nor is it ever used but upon seasons of high
festival, and such I hold to be the arrival of the heir of Sir Everard under my
roof; and I devote this draught to the health and prosperity of the ancient and
highly-to-be-honoured house of Waverley.”

During this long harangue, he carefully decanted a cob-webbed bottle of claret
into the goblet, which held nearly an English pint; and, at the conclusion,
delivering the bottle to the butler, to be held carefully in the same angle
with the horizon, he devoutly quaffed off the contents of the Blessed Bear of
Bradwardine.

Edward, with horror and alarm, beheld the animal making his rounds, and thought
with great anxiety upon the appropriate motto, “Beware the Bear”;
but, at the same time, plainly foresaw that, as none of the guests scrupled to
do him this extraordinary honour, a refusal on his part to pledge their
courtesy would be extremely ill received. Resolving, therefore, to submit to
this last piece of tyranny, and then to quit the table, if possible, and
confiding in the strength of his constitution, he did justice to the company in
the contents of the Blessed Bear, and felt less inconvenience from the draught
than he could possibly have expected. The others, whose time had been more
actively employed, began to show symptoms of innovation—“the good
wine did its good office.”[*] The frost of etiquette and pride of birth
began to give way before the genial blessings of this benign constellation, and
the formal appellatives with which the three dignitaries had hitherto addressed
each other were now familiarly abbreviated into Tully, Bally, and Killie. When
a few rounds had passed, the two latter, after whispering together, craved
permission (a joyful hearing for Edward) to ask the grace-cup. This, after some
delay, was at length produced, and Waverley concluded the orgies of Bacchus
were terminated for the evening. He was never more mistaken in his life.

[* Southey’s Madoc.]

As the guests had left their horses at the small inn, or change-house,
as it was called, of the village, the Baron could not, in politeness, avoid
walking with them up the avenue, and Waverley from the same motive, and to
enjoy after this feverish revel the cool summer evening, attended the party.
But when they arrived at Luckie Macleary’s the Lairds of Balmawhapple and
Killancureit declared their determination to acknowledge their sense of the
hospitality of Tully-Veolan by partaking, with their entertainer and his guest
Captain Waverley, what they technically called deoch an doruis, a
stirrup-cup, to the honour of the Baron’s
roof-tree.^[10]

It must be noticed that the Bailie, knowing by experience that the day’s
jovialty, which had been hitherto sustained at the expense of his patron, might
terminate partly at his own, had mounted his spavined grey pony, and, between
gaiety of heart and alarm for being hooked into a reckoning, spurred him into a
hobbling canter (a trot was out of the question), and had already cleared the
village. The others entered the change-house, leading Edward in unresisting
submission; for his landlord whispered him, that to demur to such an overture
would be construed into a high misdemeanour against the leges
conviviales, or regulations of genial compotation. Widow Macleary seemed to
have expected this visit, as well she might, for it was the usual consummation
of merry bouts, not only at Tully-Veolan, but at most other gentlemen’s
houses in Scotland, Sixty Years Since. The guests thereby at once acquitted
themselves of their burden of gratitude for their entertainer’s kindness,
encouraged the trade of his change-house, did honour to the place which
afforded harbour to their horses, and indemnified themselves for the previous
restraints imposed by private hospitality, by spending what Falstaff calls the
sweet of the night in the genial license of a tavern.

Accordingly, in full expectation of these distinguished guests, Luckie Macleary
had swept her house for the first time this fortnight, tempered her turf-fire
to such a heat as the season required in her damp hovel even at Midsummer, set
forth her deal table newly washed, propped its lame foot with a fragment of
turf, arranged four or five stools of huge and clumsy form upon the sites which
best suited the inequalities of her clay floor; and having, moreover, put on
her clean toy, rokelay, and scarlet plaid, gravely awaited the arrival of the
company, in full hope of custom and profit. When they were seated under the
sooty rafters of Luckie Macleary’s only apartment, thickly tapestried
with cobwebs, their hostess, who had already taken her cue from the Laird of
Balmawhapple, appeared with a huge pewter measuring-pot, containing at least
three English quarts, familiarly denominated a Tappit Hen, and which, in the
language of the hostess, reamed (i.e., mantled) with excellent claret
just drawn from the cask.

It was soon plain that what crumbs of reason the Bear had not devoured were to
be picked up by the Hen; but the confusion which appeared to prevail favoured
Edward’s resolution to evade the gaily circling glass. The others began
to talk thick and at once, each performing his own part in the conversation
without the least respect to his neighbour. The Baron of Bradwardine sung
French chansons à boire, and spouted pieces of Latin; Killancureit
talked, in a steady unalterable dull key, of top-dressing and
bottom-dressing,[*] and year-olds, and gimmers, and dinmonts, and stots, and
runts, and kyloes, and a proposed turnpike-act; while Balmawhapple, in notes
exalted above both, extolled his horse, his hawks, and a greyhound called
Whistler. In the middle of this din, the Baron repeatedly implored silence; and
when at length the instinct of polite discipline so far prevailed that for a
moment he obtained it, he hastened to beseech their attention “unto a
military ariette, which was a particular favourite of the Maréchal Duc de
Berwick”; then, imitating, as well as he could, the manner and tone of a
French musquetaire, he immediately commenced,—

“Mon cœur volage, dit elle,
    N’est pas pour vous, garçon;
Est pour un homme de guerre,
    Qui a barbe au menton.
        Lon, Lon, Laridon.

“Qui port chapeau à plume,
    Soulier à rouge talon,
Qui joue de la flute,
    Aussi du violon.
        Lon, Lon, Laridon.”

[* This has been censured as an anachronism; and it must be confessed that
agriculture of this kind was unknown to the Scotch Sixty Years Since.]

Balmawhapple could hold no longer, but broke in with what he called a d—d
good song, composed by Gibby Gaethroughwi’t, the piper of Cupar; and,
without wasting more time, struck up,—

It’s up Glenbarchan’s braes I gaed,
And o’er the bent of Killiebraid,
And mony a weary cast I made,
    To cuittle the moor-fowl’s tail.[*]

[* Suum cuique. This snatch of a ballad was composed by Andrew
MacDonald, the ingenious and unfortunate author of “Vimonda”.]

The Baron, whose voice was drowned in the louder and more obstreperous strains
of Balmawhapple, now dropped the competition, but continued to hum “Lon,
Lon, Laridon,” and to regard the successful candidate for the attention
of the company with an eye of disdain, while Balmawhapple proceeded,—

If up a bonny black-cock should spring,
To whistle him down wi’ a slug in his wing,
And strap him on to my lunzie string,
    Right seldom would I fail.

After an ineffectual attempt to recover the second verse, he sung the first
over again; and, in prosecution of his triumph, declared there was “more
sense in that than in all the derry-dongs of France, and Fifeshire to
the boot of it.” The Baron only answered with a long pinch of snuff and a
glance of infinite contempt. But those noble allies, the Bear and the Hen, had
emancipated the young laird from the habitual reverence in which he held
Bradwardine at other times. He pronounced the claret “shilpit,” and
demanded brandy with great vociferation. It was brought; and now the Demon of
Politics envied even the harmony arising from this Dutch concert, merely
because there was not a wrathful note in the strange compound of sounds which
it produced. Inspired by her, the Laird of Balmawhapple, now superior to the
nods and winks with which the Baron of Bradwardine, in delicacy to Edward, had
hitherto checked his entering upon political discussion, demanded a bumper,
with the lungs of a Stentor, “to the little gentleman in black velvet who
did such service in 1702, and may the white horse break his neck over a mound
of his making!”

Edward was not at that moment clear-headed enough to remember that King
William’s fall, which occasioned his death, was said to be owing to his
horse stumbling at a mole-hill; yet felt inclined to take umbrage at a toast
which seemed, from the glance of Balmawhapple’s eye, to have a peculiar
and uncivil reference to the Government which he served. But, ere he could
interfere, the Baron of Bradwardine had taken up the quarrel.
“Sir,” he said, “whatever my sentiments tanquam
privatus may be in such matters, I shall not tamely endure your saying
anything that may impinge upon the honourable feelings of a gentleman under my
roof. Sir, if you have no respect for the laws of urbanity, do ye not respect
the military oath, the sacramentum militare, by which every officer is
bound to the standards under which he is enrolled? Look at Titus Livius, what
he says of those Roman soldiers who were so unhappy as exuere
sacramentum, to renounce their legionary oath; but you are ignorant, sir,
alike of ancient history and modern courtesy.”

“Not so ignorant as ye would pronounce me,” roared Balmawhapple.
“I ken weel that you mean the Solemn League and Covenant; but if a’
the Whigs in hell had taken the—”

Here the Baron and Waverley both spoke at once, the former calling out,
“Be silent, sir! ye not only show your ignorance, but disgrace your
native country before a stranger and an Englishman”; and Waverley, at the
same moment, entreating Mr. Bradwardine to permit him to reply to an affront
which seemed levelled at him personally. But the Baron was exalted by wine,
wrath, and scorn above all sublunary considerations.

“I crave you to be hushed, Captain Waverley; you are elsewhere,
peradventure, sui juris,—foris-familiated, that is, and entitled,
it may be, to think and resent for yourself; but in my domain, in this poor
Barony of Bradwardine, and under this roof, which is quasi mine, being
held by tacit relocation by a tenant at will, I am in loco parentis to
you, and bound to see you scathless. And for you, Mr. Falconer of Balmawhapple,
I warn ye, let me see no more aberrations from the paths of good
manners.”

“And I tell you, Mr. Cosmo Comyne Bradwardine of Bradwardine and
Tully-Veolan,” retorted the sportsman in huge disdain, “that
I’ll make a moor-cock of the man that refuses my toast, whether it be a
crop-eared English Whig wi’ a black ribband at his lug, or ane wha
deserts his ain friends to claw favour wi’ the rats of Hanover.”

In an instant both rapiers were brandished, and some desperate passes
exchanged. Balmawhapple was young, stout, and active; but the Baron, infinitely
more master of his weapon, would, like Sir Toby Belch, have tickled his
opponent other gates than he did had he not been under the influence of Ursa
Major.

Edward rushed forward to interfere between the combatants, but the prostrate
bulk of the Laird of Killancureit, over which he stumbled, intercepted his
passage. How Killancureit happened to be in this recumbent posture at so
interesting a moment was never accurately known. Some thought he was about to
insconce himself under the table; he himself alleged that he stumbled in the
act of lifting a joint-stool, to prevent mischief, by knocking down
Balmawhapple. Be that as it may, if readier aid than either his or
Waverley’s had not interposed, there would certainly have been bloodshed.
But the well-known clash of swords, which was no stranger to her dwelling,
aroused Luckie Macleary as she sat quietly beyond the hallan, or earthen
partition of the cottage, with eyes employed on Boston’s “Crook the
Lot,” while her ideas were engaged in summing up the reckoning. She
boldly rushed in, with the shrill expostulation, “Wad their honours slay
ane another there, and bring discredit on an honest widow-woman’s house,
when there was a’ the lee-land in the country to fight upon?” a
remonstrance which she seconded by flinging her plaid with great dexterity over
the weapons of the combatants. The servants by this time rushed in, and being,
by great chance, tolerably sober, separated the incensed opponents, with the
assistance of Edward and Killancureit. The latter led off Balmawhapple,
cursing, swearing, and vowing revenge against every Whig, Presbyterian, and
fanatic in England and Scotland, from John-o’-Groat’s to the
Land’s End, and with difficulty got him to horse. Our hero, with the
assistance of Saunders Saunderson, escorted the Baron of Bradwardine to his own
dwelling, but could not prevail upon him to retire to bed until he had made a
long and learned apology for the events of the evening, of which, however,
there was not a word intelligible, except something about the Centaurs and the
Lapithæ.

CHAPTER XII.
REPENTANCE AND A RECONCILIATION

Waverley was unaccustomed to the use of wine, excepting with great temperance.
He slept therefore soundly till late in the succeeding morning, and then
awakened to a painful recollection of the scene of the preceding evening. He
had received a personal affront—he, a gentleman, a soldier, and a
Waverley. True, the person who offered it was not, at the time it was given,
possessed of the moderate share of sense which nature had allotted him; true
also, in resenting this insult, he would break the laws of Heaven as well as of
his country; true, in doing so, he might take the life of a young man who
perhaps respectably discharged the social duties, and render his family
miserable, or he might lose his own—no pleasant alternative even to the
bravest, when it is debated coolly and in private.

All this pressed on his mind; yet the original statement recurred with the same
irresistible force. He had received a personal insult; he was of the house of
Waverley; and he bore a commission. There was no alternative; and he descended
to the breakfast parlour with the intention of taking leave of the family, and
writing to one of his brother officers to meet him at the inn midway between
Tully-Veolan and the town where they were quartered, in order that he might
convey such a message to the Laird of Balmawhapple as the circumstances seemed
to demand. He found Miss Bradwardine presiding over the tea and coffee, the
table loaded with warm bread, both of flour, oatmeal, and barleymeal, in the
shape of loaves, cakes, biscuits, and other varieties, together with eggs,
reindeer ham, mutton and beef ditto, smoked salmon, marmalade, and all the
other delicacies which induced even Johnson himself to extol the luxury of a
Scotch breakfast above that of all other countries. A mess of oatmeal porridge,
flanked by a silver jug, which held an equal mixture of cream and butter-milk,
was placed for the Baron’s share of this repast; but Rose observed, he
had walked out early in the morning, after giving orders that his guest should
not be disturbed.

Waverley sat down almost in silence, and with an air of absence and abstraction
which could not give Miss Bradwardine a favourable opinion of his talents for
conversation. He answered at random one or two observations which she ventured
to make upon ordinary topics; so that, feeling herself almost repulsed in her
efforts at entertaining him, and secretly wondering that a scarlet coat should
cover no better breeding, she left him to his mental amusement of cursing
Doctor Doubleit’s favourite constellation of Ursa Major as the cause of
all the mischief which had already happened and was likely to ensue. At once he
started, and his colour heightened, as, looking toward the window, he beheld
the Baron and young Balmawhapple pass arm in arm, apparently in deep
conversation; and he hastily asked, “Did Mr. Falconer sleep here last
night?” Rose, not much pleased with the abruptness of the first question
which the young stranger had addressed to her, answered drily in the negative,
and the conversation again sunk into silence.

At this moment Mr. Saunderson appeared, with a message from his master,
requesting to speak with Captain Waverley in another apartment. With a heart
which beat a little quicker, not indeed from fear, but from uncertainty and
anxiety, Edward obeyed the summons. He found the two gentlemen standing
together, an air of complacent dignity on the brow of the Baron, while
something like sullenness or shame, or both, blanked the bold visage of
Balmawhapple. The former slipped his arm through that of the latter, and thus
seeming to walk with him, while in reality he led him, advanced to meet
Waverley, and, stopping in the midst of the apartment, made in great state the
following oration:

“Captain Waverley—my young and esteemed friend, Mr. Falconer of
Balmawhapple, has craved of my age and experience, as of one not wholly
unskilled in the dependencies and punctilios of the duello or monomachia, to be
his interlocutor in expressing to you the regret with which he calls to
remembrance certain passages of our symposion last night, which could not but
be highly displeasing to you, as serving for the time under this present
existing government. He craves you, sir, to drown in oblivion the memory of
such solecisms against the laws of politeness, as being what his better reason
disavows, and to receive the hand which he offers you in amity; and I must
needs assure you that nothing less than a sense of being dans son tort,
as a gallant French chevalier, Mons. Le Bretailleur, once said to me on such an
occasion, and an opinion also of your peculiar merit, could have extorted such
concessions; for he and all his family are, and have been, time out of mind,
Mavortia pectora, as Buchanan saith, a bold and warlike sept, or
people.”

Edward immediately, and with natural politeness, accepted the hand which
Balmawhapple, or rather the Baron in his character of mediator, extended
towards him. “It was impossible,” he said, “for him to
remember what a gentleman expressed his wish he had not uttered; and he
willingly imputed what had passed to the exuberant festivity of the day.”

“That is very handsomely said,” answered the Baron; “for
undoubtedly, if a man be ebrius, or intoxicated, an incident which on
solemn and festive occasions may and will take place in the life of a man of
honour; and if the same gentleman, being fresh and sober, recants the
contumelies which he hath spoken in his liquor, it must be held vinum
locutum est; the words cease to be his own. Yet would I not find this
exculpation relevant in the case of one who was ebriosus, or an habitual
drunkard; because, if such a person choose to pass the greater part of his time
in the predicament of intoxication, he hath no title to be exeemed from the
obligations of the code of politeness, but should learn to deport himself
peaceably and courteously when under influence of the vinous stimulus. And now
let us proceed to breakfast, and think no more of this daft business.”

I must confess, whatever inference may be drawn from the circumstance, that
Edward, after so satisfactory an explanation, did much greater honour to the
delicacies of Miss Bradwardine’s breakfast-table than his commencement
had promised. Balmawhapple, on the contrary, seemed embarrassed and dejected;
and Waverley now, for the first time, observed that his arm was in a sling,
which seemed to account for the awkward and embarrassed manner with which he
had presented his hand. To a question from Miss Bradwardine, he muttered in
answer something about his horse having fallen; and seeming desirous to escape
both from the subject and the company, he arose as soon as breakfast was over,
made his bow to the party, and, declining the Baron’s invitation to tarry
till after dinner, mounted his horse and returned to his own home.

Waverley now announced his purpose of leaving Tully-Veolan early enough after
dinner to gain the stage at which he meant to sleep; but the unaffected and
deep mortification with which the good-natured and affectionate old gentleman
heard the proposal quite deprived him of courage to persist in it. No sooner
had he gained Waverley’s consent to lengthen his visit for a few days
than he laboured to remove the grounds upon which he conceived he had meditated
a more early retreat. “I would not have you opine, Captain Waverley, that
I am by practice or precept an advocate of ebriety, though it may be that, in
our festivity of last night, some of our friends, if not perchance altogether
ebrii, or drunken, were, to say the least, ebrioli, by which the
ancients designed those who were fuddled, or, as your English vernacular and
metaphorical phrase goes, half-seas-over. Not that I would so insinuate
respecting you, Captain Waverley, who, like a prudent youth, did rather abstain
from potation; nor can it be truly said of myself, who, having assisted at the
tables of many great generals and marechals at their solemn carousals, have the
art to carry my wine discreetly, and did not, during the whole evening, as ye
must have doubtless observed, exceed the bounds of a modest hilarity.”

There was no refusing assent to a proposition so decidedly laid down by him,
who undoubtedly was the best judge; although, had Edward formed his opinion
from his own recollections, he would have pronounced that the Baron was not
only ebriolus, but verging to become ebrius; or, in plain
English, was incomparably the most drunk of the party, except perhaps his
antagonist the Laird of Balmawhapple. However, having received the expected, or
rather the required, compliment on his sobriety, the Baron
proceeded—“No, sir, though I am myself of a strong temperament, I
abhor ebriety, and detest those who swallow wine gulæ causa, for the
oblectation of the gullet; albeit I might deprecate the law of Pittacus of
Mitylene, who punished doubly a crime committed under the influence of Liber
Pater; nor would I utterly accede to the objurgation of the younger
Plinius, in the fourteenth book of his ‘Historia Naturalis.’ No,
sir, I distinguish, I discriminate, and approve of wine so far only as it
maketh glad the face, or, in the language of Flaccus, recepto
amico.”

Thus terminated the apology which the Baron of Bradwardine thought it necessary
to make for the superabundance of his hospitality; and it may be easily
believed that he was neither interrupted by dissent nor any expression of
incredulity.

He then invited his guest to a morning ride, and ordered that Davie Gellatley
should meet them at the dern path with Ban and Buscar. “For, until
the shooting season commence, I would willingly show you some sport, and we
may, God willing, meet with a roe. The roe, Captain Waverley, may be hunted at
all times alike; for never being in what is called pride of grease, he
is also never out of season, though it be a truth that his venison is not equal
to that of either the red or fallow deer.[*] But he will serve to show how my
dogs run; and therefore they shall attend us with David Gellatley.”

[* 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.]

Waverley expressed his surprise that his friend Davie was capable of such
trust; but the Baron gave him to understand that this poor simpleton was
neither fatuous, nec naturaliter idiota, as is expressed in the brieves
of furiosity, but simply a crack-brained knave, who could execute very well any
commission which jumped with his own humour, and made his folly a plea for
avoiding every other. “He has made an interest with us,” continued
the Baron, “by saving Rose from a great danger with his own proper peril;
and the roguish loon must therefore eat of our bread and drink of our cup, and
do what he can, or what he will, which, if the suspicions of Saunderson and the
Bailie are well founded, may perchance in his case be commensurate
terms.”

Miss Bradwardine then gave Waverley to understand that this poor simpleton was
dotingly fond of music, deeply affected by that which was melancholy, and
transported into extravagant gaiety by light and lively airs. He had in this
respect a prodigious memory, stored with miscellaneous snatches and fragments
of all tunes and songs, which he sometimes applied, with considerable address,
as the vehicles of remonstrance, explanation, or satire. Davie was much
attached to the few who showed him kindness; and both aware of any slight or
ill usage which he happened to receive, and sufficiently apt, where he saw
opportunity, to revenge it. The common people, who often judge hardly of each
other as well as of their betters, although they had expressed great compassion
for the poor innocent while suffered 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 ordonnée il faut preparer tout.
Ho la ho! Vite! vite debout!”

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 curée) 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.

[* A bare-footed Highland lad is called a “gillie-wet-foot.”
Gillie, in general, means servant, or attendant.]

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 “Deliciæ 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.”[*]

[* The Baron ought to have remembered that the joyous Allan literally drew his
blood from the house of the noble earl whom he terms,—

“Dalhousie of an old descent
My stoup, my pride, my ornament.”]

But although Edward and he differed toto cœlo, 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 in the drama of past ages. Yet with tastes so opposite,
they contributed greatly to each other’s amusement. Mr.
Bradwardine’s minute narratives and powerful memory supplied to Waverley
fresh subjects of the kind upon which his fancy loved to labour, and opened to
him a new mine of incident and of character. And he repaid the pleasure thus
communicated by an earnest attention, valuable to all story-tellers, more
especially to the Baron, who felt his habits of self-respect flattered by it;
and sometimes also by reciprocal communications, which interested Mr.
Bradwardine, as confirming or illustrating his own favourite anecdotes.
Besides, Mr. Bradwardine loved to talk of the scenes of his youth, which had
been spent in camps and foreign lands, and had many interesting particulars to
tell of the generals under whom he had served and the actions he had witnessed.

Both parties returned to Tully-Veolan in great good-humour with each other;
Waverley desirous of studying more attentively what he considered as a singular
and interesting character, gifted with a memory containing a curious register
of ancient and modern anecdotes; and Bradwardine disposed to regard Edward as
puer (or rather juvenis) bonæ spei et magnæ indolis, a
youth devoid of that petulant volatility which is impatient of, or vilipends,
the conversation and advice of his seniors, from which he predicted great
things of his future success and deportment in life. There was no other guest
except Mr. Rubrick, whose information and discourse, as a clergyman and a
scholar, harmonised very well with that of the Baron and his guest.

Shortly after dinner, the Baron, as if to show that his temperance was not
entirely theoretical, proposed a visit to Rose’s apartment, or, as he
termed it, her “troisième étage.” Waverley was accordingly
conducted through one or two of those long awkward passages with which ancient
architects studied to puzzle the inhabitants of the houses which they planned,
at the end of which Mr. Bradwardine began to ascend, by two steps at once, a
very steep, narrow, and winding stair, leaving Mr. Rubrick and Waverley to
follow at more leisure, while he should announce their approach to his
daughter.

After having climbed this perpendicular corkscrew until their brains were
almost giddy, they arrived in a little matted lobby, which served as an
anteroom to Rose’s sanctum sanctorum, and through which they
entered her parlour. It was a small, but pleasant apartment, opening to the
south, and hung with tapestry; adorned besides with two pictures, one of her
mother, in the dress of a shepherdess, with a bell-hoop; the other of the
Baron, in his tenth year, in a blue coat, embroidered waistcoat, laced hat, and
bag-wig, with a bow in his hand. Edward could not help smiling at the costume,
and at the odd resemblance between the round, smooth, red-cheeked, staring
visage in the portrait, and the gaunt, bearded, hollow-eyed, swarthy features,
which travelling, fatigues of war, and advanced age, had bestowed on the
original. The Baron joined in the laugh. “Truly,” he said,
“that picture was a woman’s fantasy of my good mother’s (a
daughter of the Laird of Tulliellum, Captain Waverley; I indicated the house to
you when we were on the top of the Shinnyheuch; it was burnt by the Dutch
auxiliaries brought in by the Government in 1715); I never sate for my
pourtraicture but once since that was painted, and it was at the special and
reiterated request of the Maréchal Duke of Berwick.”

The good old gentleman did not mention what Mr. Rubrick afterwards told Edward,
that the Duke had done him this honour on account of his being the first to
mount the breach of a fort in Savoy during the memorable campaign of 1709, and
his having there defended himself with his half-pike for nearly ten minutes
before any support reached him. To do the Baron justice, although sufficiently
prone to dwell upon, and even to exaggerate, his family dignity and
consequence, he was too much a man of real courage ever to allude to such
personal acts of merit as he had himself manifested.

Miss Rose now appeared from the interior room of her apartment, to welcome her
father and his friends. The little labours in which she had been employed
obviously showed a natural taste, which required only cultivation. Her father
had taught her French and Italian, and a few of the ordinary authors in those
languages ornamented her shelves. He had endeavoured also to be her preceptor
in music; but as he began with the more abstruse doctrines of the science, and
was not perhaps master of them himself, she had made no proficiency farther
than to be able to accompany her voice with the harpsichord; but even this was
not very common in Scotland at that period. To make amends, she sung with great
taste and feeling, and with a respect to the sense of what she uttered that
might be proposed in example to ladies of much superior musical talent. Her
natural good sense taught her that, if, as we are assured by high authority,
music be “married to immortal verse,” they are very often divorced
by the performer in a most shameful manner. It was perhaps owing to this
sensibility to poetry, and power of combining its expression with those of the
musical notes, that her singing gave more pleasure to all the unlearned in
music, and even to many of the learned, than could have been communicated by a
much finer voice and more brilliant execution unguided by the same delicacy of
feeling.

A bartizan, or projecting gallery, before the windows of her parlour, served to
illustrate another of Rose’s pursuits; for it was crowded with flowers of
different kinds, which she had taken under her special protection. A projecting
turret gave access to this Gothic balcony, which commanded a most beautiful
prospect. The formal garden, with its high bounding walls, lay below,
contracted, as it seemed, to a mere parterre; while the view extended beyond
them down a wooded glen, where the small river was sometimes visible, sometimes
hidden in copse. The eye might be delayed by a desire to rest on the rocks,
which here and there rose from the dell with massive or spiry fronts, or it
might dwell on the noble, though ruined tower, which was here beheld in all its
dignity, frowning from a promontory over the river. To the left were seen two
or three cottages, a part of the village, the brow of the hill concealed the
others. The glen, or dell, was terminated by a sheet of water, called Loch
Veolan, into which the brook discharged itself, and which now glistened in the
western sun. The distant country seemed open and varied in surface, though not
wooded; and there was nothing to interrupt the view until the scene was bounded
by a ridge of distant and blue hills, which formed the southern boundary of the
strath or valley. To this pleasant station Miss Bradwardine had ordered coffee.

The view of the old tower, or fortalice, introduced some family anecdotes and
tales of Scottish chivalry, which the Baron told with great enthusiasm. The
projecting peak of an impending crag which rose near it had acquired the name
of Saint Swithin’s Chair. It was the scene of a peculiar superstition, of
which Mr. Rubrick mentioned some curious particulars, which reminded Waverley
of a rhyme quoted by Edgar in King Lear; and Rose was called upon to sing a
little legend, in which they had been interwoven by some village poet,

Who, noteless as the race from which he sprung,
Saved others’ names, but left his own unsung.

The sweetness of her voice, and the simple beauty of her music, gave all the
advantage which the minstrel could have desired, and which his poetry so much
wanted. I almost doubt if it can be read with patience, destitute of these
advantages, although I conjecture the following copy to have been somewhat
corrected by Waverley, to suit the taste of those who might not relish pure
antiquity.

ST. SWITHIN’S CHAIR

On Hallow-Mass Eve, ere ye boune ye to rest,
Ever beware that your couch be bless’d;
Sign it with cross, and sain it with bead,
Sing the Ave, and say the Creed.

For on Hallow-Mass Eve the Night-Hag will ride,
And all her nine-fold sweeping on by her side,
Whether the wind sing lowly or loud,
Sailing through moonshine or swath’d in the cloud.

The Lady she sat in Saint Swithin’s Chair,
The dew of the night has damp’d her hair:
Her cheek was pale; but resolved and high
Was the word of her lip and the glance of her eye.

She mutter’d the spell of Swithin bold,
When his naked foot traced the midnight wold,
When he stopp’d the Hag as she rode the night,
And bade her descend, and her promise plight.

He that dare sit on Saint Swithin’s Chair,
When the Night-Hag wings the troubled air,
Questions three, when he speaks the spell,
He may ask, and she must tell.

The Baron has been with King Robert his liege
These three long years in battle and siege;
News are there none of his weal or his woe,
And fain the Lady his fate would know.

She shudders and stops as the charm she speaks;—
Is it the moody owl that shrieks?
Or is it that sound, betwixt laughter and scream,
The voice of the Demon who haunts the stream?

The moan of the wind sunk silent and low,
And the roaring torrent had ceased to flow;
The calm was more dreadful than raging storm,
When the cold grey mist brought the ghastly Form!

“I am sorry to disappoint the company, especially Captain Waverley, who
listens with such laudable gravity; it is but a fragment, although I think
there are other verses, describing the return of the Baron from the wars, and
how the lady was found ‘clay-cold upon the grounsill ledge.’”

“It is one of those figments,” observed Mr. Bradwardine,
“with which the early history of distinguished families was deformed in
the times of superstition; as that of Rome, and other ancient nations, had
their prodigies, sir, the which you may read in ancient histories, or in the
little work compiled by Julius Obsequens, and inscribed by the learned
Scheffer, the editor, to his patron, Benedictus Skytte, Baron of
Dudershoff.”

“My father has a strange defiance of the marvellous, Captain
Waverley,” observed Rose, “and once stood firm when a whole synod
of Presbyterian divines were put to the rout by a sudden apparition of the foul
fiend.”

Waverley looked as if desirous to hear more.

“Must I tell my story as well as sing my song? Well—Once upon a
time there lived an old woman, called Janet Gellatley, who was suspected to be
a witch, on the infallible grounds that she was very old, very ugly, very poor,
and had two sons, one of whom was a poet and the other a fool, which
visitation, all the neighbourhood agreed, had come upon her for the sin of
witchcraft. And she was imprisoned for a week in the steeple of the parish
church, and sparely supplied with food, and not permitted to sleep until she
herself became as much persuaded of her being a witch as her accusers; and in
this lucid and happy state of mind was brought forth to make a clean breast,
that is, to make open confession of her sorceries, before all the Whig gentry
and ministers in the vicinity, who were no conjurors themselves. My father went
to see fair play between the witch and the clergy; for the witch had been born
on his estate. And while the witch was confessing that the Enemy appeared, and
made his addresses to her as a handsome black man,—which, if you could
have seen poor old blear-eyed Janet, reflected little honour on
Apollyon’s taste,—and while the auditors listened with astonished
ears, and the clerk recorded with a trembling hand, she, all of a sudden,
changed the low mumbling tone with which she spoke into a shrill yell, and
exclaimed, “Look to yourselves! look to yourselves! I see the Evil One
sitting in the midst of ye.” The surprise was general, and terror and
flight its immediate consequences. Happy were those who were next the door; and
many were the disasters that befell hats, bands, cuffs, and wigs, before they
could get out of the church, where they left the obstinate prelatist to settle
matters with the witch and her admirer at his own peril or pleasure.”

“Risu solvuntur tabulæ,” said the Baron; “when they
recovered their panic trepidation they were too much ashamed to bring any
wakening of the process against Janet
Gellatley.”^[11]

This anecdote led to a long discussion of

All those idle thoughts and fantasies,
Devices, dreams, opinions unsound,
Shows, visions, soothsays, and prophecies,
And all that feigned is, as leasings, tales, and lies.

With such conversation, and the romantic legends which it introduced, closed
our hero’s second evening in the house of Tully-Veolan.

CHAPTER XIV.
A DISCOVERY—WAVERLEY BECOMES DOMESTICATED AT TULLY-VEOLAN

The next day Edward arose betimes, and in a morning walk around the house and
its vicinity came suddenly upon a small court in front of the dog-kennel, where
his friend Davie was employed about his four-footed charge. One quick glance of
his eye recognised Waverley, when, instantly turning his back, as if he had not
observed him, he began to sing part of an old ballad:—

“Young men will love thee more fair and more fast
    (Heard ye so merry the little bird sing?);
Old men’s love the longest will last
    (And the throstle-cock’s head is under his wing).

“The young man’s wrath is like light straw on fire
    (Heard ye so merry the little bird sing?);
But like red-hot steel is the old man’s ire,
    (And the throstle-cock’s head is under his wing).

“The young man will brawl at the evening board
    (Heard ye so merry the little bird sing?);
But the old man will draw at the dawning the sword,
    (And the throstle-cock’s head is under his wing).”

Waverley could not avoid observing that Davie laid something like a satirical
emphasis on these lines. He therefore approached, and endeavoured, by sundry
queries, to elicit from him what the innuendo might mean; but Davie had no mind
to explain, and had wit enough to make his folly cloak his knavery. Edward
could collect nothing from him, excepting that the Laird of Balmawhapple had
gone home yesterday morning “wi’ his boots fu’ o’
bluid.” In the garden, however, he met the old butler, who no longer
attempted to conceal that, having been bred in the nursery line with Sumack and
Co. of Newcastle, he sometimes wrought a turn in the flower-borders to oblige
the Laird and Miss Rose. By a series of queries, Edward at length discovered,
with a painful feeling of surprise and shame, that Balmawhapple’s
submission and apology had been the consequence of a rencontre with the
Baron before his guest had quitted his pillow, in which the younger combatant
had been disarmed and wounded in the sword arm.

Greatly mortified at this information, Edward sought out his friendly host, and
anxiously expostulated with him upon the injustice he had done him in
anticipating his meeting with Mr. Falconer, a circumstance which, considering
his youth and the profession of arms which he had just adopted, was capable of
being represented much to his prejudice. The Baron justified himself at greater
length than I choose to repeat. He urged that the quarrel was common to them,
and that Balmawhapple could not, by the code of honour, evite giving
satisfaction to both, which he had done in his case by an honourable meeting,
and in that of Edward by such a palinode as rendered the use of the
sword unnecessary, and which, being made and accepted, must necessarily
sopite the whole affair.

With this excuse, or explanation, Waverley was silenced, if not satisfied; but
he could not help testifying some displeasure against the Blessed Bear, which
had given rise to the quarrel, nor refrain from hinting that the sanctified
epithet was hardly appropriate. The Baron observed, he could not deny that
“the Bear, though allowed by heralds as a most honourable ordinary, had,
nevertheless, somewhat fierce, churlish, and morose in his disposition (as
might be read in Archibald Simson, pastor of Dalkeith’s
“Hieroglyphica Animalium”) and had thus been the type of many
quarrels and dissensions which had occurred in the house of Bradwardine; of
which,” he continued, “I might commemorate mine own unfortunate
dissension with my third cousin by the mother’s side, Sir Hew Halbert,
who was so unthinking as to deride my family name, as if it had been quasi
Bear-Warden, a most uncivil jest, since it not only insinuated that the
founder of our house occupied such a mean situation as to be a custodier of
wild beasts, a charge which, ye must have observed, is only entrusted to the
very basest plebeians; but, moreover, seemed to infer that our coat-armour had
not been achieved by honourable actions in war, but bestowed by way of
paranomasia, or pun, upon our family appellation,—a sort of
bearing which the French call armoires parlantes, the Latins arma
cantantia, and your English authorities canting heraldry, being indeed a
species of emblazoning more befitting canters, gaberlunzies, and such like
mendicants, whose gibberish is formed upon playing upon the word, than the
noble, honourable, and useful science of heraldry, which assigns armorial
bearings as the reward of noble and generous actions, and not to tickle the ear
with vain quodlibets, such as are found in jestbooks.”^[12] Of his quarrel with Sir Hew he said nothing
more than that it was settled in a fitting manner.

Having been so minute with respect to the diversions of Tully-Veolan on the
first days of Edward’s arrival, for the purpose of introducing its
inmates to the reader’s acquaintance, it becomes less necessary to trace
the progress of his intercourse with the same accuracy. It is probable that a
young man, accustomed to more cheerful society, would have tired of the
conversation of so violent an assertor of the “boast of heraldry”
as the Baron; but Edward found an agreeable variety in that of Miss
Bradwardine, who listened with eagerness to his remarks upon literature, and
showed great justness of taste in her answers. The sweetness of her disposition
had made her submit with complacency, and even pleasure, to the course of
reading prescribed by her father, although it not only comprehended several
heavy folios of history, but certain gigantic tomes in high-church polemics. In
heraldry he was fortunately contented to give her only such a slight tincture
as might be acquired by perusal of the two folio volumes of Nisbet. Rose was
indeed the very apple of her father’s eye. Her constant liveliness, her
attention to all those little observances most gratifying to those who would
never think of exacting them, her beauty, in which he recalled the features of
his beloved wife, her unfeigned piety, and the noble generosity of her
disposition, would have justified the affection of the most doting father.

His anxiety on her behalf did not, however, seem to extend itself in that
quarter where, according to the general opinion, it is most efficiently
displayed, in labouring, namely, to establish her in life, either by a large
dowry or a wealthy marriage. By an old settlement, almost all the landed
estates of the Baron went, after his death, to a distant relation; and it was
supposed that Miss Bradwardine would remain but slenderly provided for, as the
good gentleman’s cash matters had been too long under the exclusive
charge of Bailie Macwheeble to admit of any great expectations from his
personal succession. It is true, the said Bailie loved his patron and his
patron’s daughter next (though at an incomparable distance) to himself.
He thought it was possible to set aside the settlement on the male line, and
had actually procured an opinion to that effect (and, as he boasted, without a
fee) from an eminent Scottish counsel, under whose notice he contrived to bring
the point while consulting him regularly on some other business. But the Baron
would not listen to such a proposal for an instant. On the contrary, he used to
have a perverse pleasure in boasting that the barony of Bradwardine was a male
fief, the first charter having been given at that early period when women were
not deemed capable to hold a feudal grant; because, according to Les
coustusmes de Normandie, c’est l’homme ki se bast et ki
conseille, or, as is yet more ungallantly expressed by other authorities,
all of whose barbarous names he delighted to quote at full length, because a
woman could not serve the superior, or feudal lord, in war, on account of the
decorum of her sex, nor assist him with advice, because of her limited
intellect, nor keep his counsel, owing to the infirmity of her disposition. He
would triumphantly ask, how it would become a female, and that female a
Bradwardine, to be seen employed in servitio exuendi, seu detrahendi,
caligas regis post battaliam? that is, in pulling off the king’s
boots after an engagement, which was the feudal service by which he held the
barony of Bradwardine. “No,” he said, “beyond hesitation,
procul dubio, many females, as worthy as Rose, had been excluded, in
order to make way for my own succession, and Heaven forbid that I should do
aught that might contravene the destination of my forefathers, or impinge upon
the right of my kinsman, Malcolm Bradwardine of Inchgrabbit, an honourable,
though decayed branch of my own family.”

The Bailie, as prime minister, having received this decisive communication from
his sovereign, durst not press his own opinion any farther, but contented
himself with deploring, on all suitable occasions, to Saunderson, the minister
of the interior, the laird’s self-willedness, and with laying plans for
uniting Rose with the young Laird of Balmawhapple, who had a fine estate, only
moderately burdened, and was a faultless young gentleman, being as sober as a
saint—if you keep brandy from him and him from brandy—and who, in
brief, had no imperfection but that of keeping light company at a time; such as
Jinker, the horse-couper, and Gibby Gaethroughwi’t, the piper o’
Cupar; “o’ whilk follies, Mr. Saunderson, he’ll mend,
he’ll mend,” pronounced the Bailie.

“Like sour ale in simmer,” added Davie Gellatley, who happened to
be nearer the conclave than they were aware of.

Miss Bradwardine, such as we have described her, with all the simplicity and
curiosity of a recluse, attached herself to the opportunities of increasing her
store of literature which Edward’s visit afforded her. He sent for some
of his books from his quarters, and they opened to her sources of delight of
which she had hitherto had no idea. The best English poets, of every
description, and other works on belles-lettres, made a part of this precious
cargo. Her music, even her flowers, were neglected, and Saunders not only
mourned over, but began to mutiny against, the labour for which he now scarce
received thanks. These new pleasures became gradually enhanced by sharing them
with one of a kindred taste. Edward’s readiness to comment, to recite, to
explain difficult passages, rendered his assistance invaluable; and the wild
romance of his spirit delighted a character too young and inexperienced to
observe its deficiencies. Upon subjects which interested him, and when quite at
ease, he possessed that flow of natural, and somewhat florid eloquence, which
has been supposed as powerful even as figure, fashion, fame, or fortune, in
winning the female heart. There was, therefore, an increasing danger in this
constant intercourse to poor Rose’s peace of mind, which was the more
imminent as her father was greatly too much abstracted in his studies, and
wrapped up in his own dignity, to dream of his daughter’s incurring it.
The daughters of the house of Bradwardine were, in his opinion, like those of
the house of Bourbon or Austria, placed high above the clouds of passion which
might obfuscate the intellects of meaner females; they moved in another sphere,
were governed by other feelings, and amenable to other rules than those of idle
and fantastic affection. In short, he shut his eyes so resolutely to the
natural consequences of Edward’s intimacy with Miss Bradwardine, that the
whole neighbourhood concluded that he had opened them to the advantages of a
match between his daughter and the wealthy young Englishman, and pronounced him
much less a fool than he had generally shown himself in cases where his own
interest was concerned.

If the Baron, however, had really meditated such an alliance, the indifference
of Waverley would have been an insuperable bar to his project. Our hero, since
mixing more freely with the world, had learned to think with great shame and
confusion upon his mental legend of Saint Cecilia, and the vexation of these
reflections was likely, for some time at least, to counterbalance the natural
susceptibility of his disposition. Besides, Rose Bradwardine, beautiful and
amiable as we have described her, had not precisely the sort of beauty or merit
which captivates a romantic imagination in early youth. She was too frank, too
confiding, too kind; amiable qualities, undoubtedly, but destructive of the
marvellous, with which a youth of imagination delights to dress the empress of
his affections. Was it possible to bow, to tremble, and to adore, before the
timid, yet playful little girl, who now asked Edward to mend her pen, now to
construe a stanza in Tasso, and now how to spell a very—very long word in
her version of it? All these incidents have their fascination on the mind at a
certain period of life, but not when a youth is entering it, and rather looking
out for some object whose affection may dignify him in his own eyes than
stooping to one who looks up to him for such distinction. Hence, though there
can be no rule in so capricious a passion, early love is frequently ambitious
in choosing its object; or, which comes to the same, selects her (as in the
case of Saint Cecilia aforesaid) from a situation that gives fair scope for
le beau idéal, which the reality of intimate and familiar life rather
tends to limit and impair. I knew a very accomplished and sensible young man
cured of a violent passion for a pretty woman, whose talents were not equal to
her face and figure, by being permitted to bear her company for a whole
afternoon. Thus, it is certain, that had Edward enjoyed such an opportunity of
conversing with Miss Stubbs, Aunt Rachel’s precaution would have been
unnecessary, for he would as soon have fallen in love with the dairy-maid. And
although Miss Bradwardine was a very different character, it seems probable
that the very intimacy of their intercourse prevented his feeling for her other
sentiments than those of a brother for an amiable and accomplished sister;
while the sentiments of poor Rose were gradually, and without her being
conscious, assuming a shade of warmer affection.

I ought to have said that Edward, when he sent to Dundee for the books before
mentioned, had applied for, and received permission, extending his leave of
absence. But the letter of his commanding officer contained a friendly
recommendation to him not to spend his time exclusively with persons who,
estimable as they might be in a general sense, could not be supposed well
affected to a government which they declined to acknowledge by taking the oath
of allegiance. The letter further insinuated, though with great delicacy, that
although some family connections might be supposed to render it necessary for
Captain Waverley to communicate with gentlemen who were in this unpleasant
state of suspicion, yet his father’s situation and wishes ought to
prevent his prolonging those attentions into exclusive intimacy. And it was
intimated, that, while his political principles were endangered by
communicating with laymen of this description, he might also receive erroneous
impressions in religion from the prelatic clergy, who so perversely laboured to
set up the royal prerogative in things sacred.

This last insinuation probably induced Waverley to set both down to the
prejudices of his commanding officer. He was sensible that Mr. Bradwardine had
acted with the most scrupulous delicacy, in never entering upon any discussion
that had the most remote tendency to bias his mind in political opinions,
although he was himself not only a decided partisan of the exiled family, but
had been trusted at different times with important commissions for their
service. Sensible, therefore, that there was no risk of his being perverted
from his allegiance, Edward felt as if he should do his uncle’s old
friend injustice in removing from a house where he gave and received pleasure
and amusement, merely to gratify a prejudiced and ill-judged suspicion. He
therefore wrote a very general answer, assuring his commanding officer that his
loyalty was not in the most distant danger of contamination, and continued an
honoured guest and inmate of the house of Tully-Veolan.

CHAPTER XV.
A CREAGH, AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

When Edward had been a guest at Tully-Veolan nearly six weeks, he descried, one
morning, as he took his usual walk before the breakfast hour, signs of uncommon
perturbation in the family. Four bare-legged dairy-maids, with each an empty
milk-pail in her hand, ran about with frantic gestures, and uttering loud
exclamations of surprise, grief, and resentment. From their appearance, a pagan
might have conceived them a detachment of the celebrated Belides, just come
from their baling penance. As nothing was to be got from this distracted
chorus, excepting “Lord guide us!” and “Eh sirs!”
ejaculations which threw no light upon the cause of their dismay, Waverley
repaired to the fore-court, as it was called, where he beheld Bailie Macwheeble
cantering his white pony down the avenue with all the speed it could muster. He
had arrived, it would seem, upon a hasty summons, and was followed by half a
score of peasants from the village who had no great difficulty in keeping pace
with him.

The Bailie, greatly too busy and too important to enter into explanations with
Edward, summoned forth Mr. Saunderson, who appeared with a countenance in which
dismay was mingled with solemnity, and they immediately entered into close
conference. Davie Gellatley was also seen in the group, idle as Diogenes at
Sinope while his countrymen were preparing for a siege. His spirits always rose
with anything, good or bad, which occasioned tumult, and he continued frisking,
hopping, dancing, and singing the burden of an old ballad,—

“Our gear’s a’ gane,”

until, happening to pass too near the Bailie, he received an admonitory hint
from his horse-whip, which converted his songs into lamentation.

Passing from thence towards the garden, Waverley beheld the Baron in person,
measuring and re-measuring, with swift and tremendous strides, the length of
the terrace; his countenance clouded with offended pride and indignation, and
the whole of his demeanour such as seemed to indicate, that any inquiry
concerning the cause of his discomposure would give pain at least, if not
offence. Waverley therefore glided into the house, without addressing him, and
took his way to the breakfast-parlour, where he found his young friend Rose,
who, though she neither exhibited the resentment of her father, the turbid
importance of Bailie Macwheeble, nor the despair of the handmaidens, seemed
vexed and thoughtful. A single word explained the mystery. “Your
breakfast will be a disturbed one, Captain Waverley. A party of Caterans have
come down upon us last night, and have driven off all our milch cows.”

“A party of Caterans?”

“Yes; robbers from the neighbouring Highlands. We used to be quite free
from them while we paid blackmail to Fergus Mac-Ivor Vich Ian Vohr; but my
father thought it unworthy of his rank and birth to pay it any longer, and so
this disaster has happened. It is not the value of the cattle, Captain
Waverley, that vexes me; but my father is so much hurt at the affront, and is
so bold and hot, that I fear he will try to recover them by the strong hand;
and if he is not hurt himself, he will hurt some of these wild people, and then
there will be no peace between them and us perhaps for our life-time; and we
cannot defend ourselves as in old times, for the government have taken all our
arms; and my dear father is so rash—O what will become of
us!”—Here poor Rose lost heart altogether, and burst into a flood
of tears.

The Baron entered at this moment, and rebuked her with more asperity than
Waverley had ever heard him use to any one. “Was it not a shame,”
he said, “that she should exhibit herself before any gentleman in such a
light, as if she shed tears for a drove of horned nolt and milch kine, like the
daughter of a Cheshire yeoman!—Captain Waverley, I must request your
favourable construction of her grief, which may, or ought to proceed, solely
from seeing her father’s estate exposed to spulzie and depredation from
common thieves and sornars, while we are not allowed to keep half a score of
muskets, whether for defence or rescue.”

Bailie Macwheeble entered immediately afterwards, and by his report of arms and
ammunition confirmed this statement, informing the Baron, in a melancholy
voice, that though the people would certainly obey his honour’s orders,
yet there was no chance of their following the gear to ony guid purpose, in
respect there were only his honour’s body servants who had swords and
pistols, and the depredators were twelve Highlanders, completely armed after
the manner of their country. Having delivered this doleful annunciation, he
assumed a posture of silent dejection, shaking his head slowly with the motion
of a pendulum when it is ceasing to vibrate, and then remained stationary, his
body stooping at a more acute angle than usual, and the latter part of his
person projecting in proportion.

The Baron, meanwhile, paced the room in silent indignation, and at length
fixing his eye upon an old portrait, whose person was clad in armour, and whose
features glared grimly out of a huge bush of hair, part of which descended from
his head to his shoulders, and part from his chin and upper-lip to his
breast-plate,—“That gentleman, Captain Waverley, my
grandsire,” he said, “with two hundred horse,—whom he levied
within his own bounds, discomfited and put to the rout more than five hundred
of these Highland reivers, who have been ever lapis offensionis et petra
scandali, a stumbling-block and a rock of offence, to the Lowland
vicinage—he discomfited them, I say, when they had the temerity to
descend to harry this country, in the time of the civil dissensions, in the
year of grace sixteen hundred forty and two. And now, sir, I, his grandson, am
thus used at such unworthy hands.”

Here there was an awful pause; after which all the company, as is usual in
cases of difficulty, began to give separate and inconsistent counsel. Alexander
ab Alexandro proposed they should send some one to compound with the Caterans,
who would readily, he said, give up their prey for a dollar a head. The Bailie
opined that this transaction would amount to theft-boot, or composition of
felony; and he recommended that some canny hand should be sent up to the
glens to make the best bargain he could, as it were for himself, so that the
Laird might not be seen in such a transaction. Edward proposed to send off to
the nearest garrison for a party of soldiers and a magistrate’s warrant;
and Rose, as far as she dared, endeavoured to insinuate the course of paying
the arrears of tribute money to Fergus Mac-Ivor Vich Ian Vohr, who, they all
knew, could easily procure restoration of the cattle, if he were properly
propitiated.

None of these proposals met the Baron’s approbation. The idea of
composition, direct or implied, was absolutely ignominious; that of Waverley
only showed that he did not understand the state of the country, and of the
political parties which divided it; and, standing matters as they did with
Fergus Mac-Ivor Vich Ian Vohr, the Baron would make no concession to him, were
it, he said, “to procure restitution in integrum of every stirk
and stot that the chief, his forefathers, and his clan, had stolen since the
days of Malcolm Canmore.”

In fact his voice was still for war, and he proposed to send expresses to
Balmawhapple, Killancureit, Tulliellum, and other lairds, who were exposed to
similar depredations, inviting them to join in the pursuit; “and then,
sir, shall these nebulones nequissimi, as Leslæus calls them, be brought
to the fate of their predecessor Cacus,

“Elisos oculos, et siccum sanguine guttur.”

The bailie, who by no means relished these warlike counsels, here pulled forth
an immense watch, of the colour, and nearly of the size, of a pewter
warming-pan, and observed it was now past noon, and that the Caterans had been
seen in the pass of Ballybrough soon after sunrise; so that, before the allied
forces could assemble, they and their prey would be far beyond the reach of the
most active pursuit, and sheltered in those pathless deserts, where it was
neither advisable to follow, nor indeed possible to trace them.

This proposition was undeniable. The council therefore broke up without coming
to any conclusion, as has occurred to councils of more importance; only it was
determined that the Bailie should send his own three milkcows down to the mains
for the use of the Baron’s family, and brew small ale, as a substitute
for milk, in his own. To this arrangement, which was suggested by Saunderson,
the Bailie readily assented, both from habitual deference to the family, and an
internal consciousness that his courtesy would, in some mode or other, be
repaid tenfold.

The Baron having also retired to give some necessary directions, Waverley
seized the opportunity to ask, whether this Fergus, with the unpronounceable
name, was the chief thief-taker of the district?

“Thief-taker!” answered Rose, laughing; “he is a gentleman of
great honour and consequence, the chieftain of an independent branch of a
powerful Highland clan, and is much respected, both for his own power and that
of his kith, kin, and allies.”

“And what has he to do with the thieves, then? Is he a magistrate, or in
the commission of the peace?” asked Waverley.

“The commission of war rather, if there be such a thing,” said
Rose; “for he is a very unquiet neighbour to his unfriends, and keeps a
greater following on foot than many that have thrice his estate. As to
his connection with the thieves, that I cannot well explain; but the boldest of
them will never steal a hoof from any one that pays black-mail to Vich Ian
Vohr.”

“And what is black-mail?”

“A sort of protection-money that Low-Country gentlemen and heritors,
lying near the Highlands, pay to some Highland chief, that he may neither do
them harm himself, nor suffer it to be done to them by others; and then if your
cattle are stolen, you have only to send him word, and he will recover them; or
it may be, he will drive away cows from some distant place, where he has a
quarrel, and give them to you to make up your loss.”

“And is this sort of Highland Jonathan Wild admitted into society, and
called a gentleman?”

“So much so,” said Rose, “that the quarrel between my father
and Fergus Mac-Ivor began at a county meeting, where he wanted to take
precedence of all the Lowland gentlemen then present, only my father would not
suffer it. And then he upbraided my father that he was under his banner, and
paid him tribute; and my father was in a towering passion, for Bailie
Macwheeble, who manages such things his own way, had contrived to keep this
black-mail a secret from him, and passed it in his account for cess-money. And
they would have fought; but Fergus Mac-Ivor said, very gallantly, he would
never raise his hand against a grey head that was so much respected as my
father’s.—O I wish, I wish they had continued friends!”

“And did you ever see this Mr. Mac-Ivor, if that be his name, Miss
Bradwardine?”

“No, that is not his name; and he would consider master as a sort
of affront, only that you are an Englishman, and know no better. But the
Lowlanders call him, like other gentlemen, by the name of his estate,
Glennaquoich; and the Highlanders call him Vich Ian Vohr, that is, the son of
John the Great; and we upon the braes here call him by both names
indifferently.”

“I am afraid I shall never bring my English tongue to call him by either
one or other.”

“But he is a very polite, handsome man,” continued Rose; “and
his sister Flora is one of the most beautiful and accomplished young ladies in
this country; she was bred in a convent in France, and was a great friend of
mine before this unhappy dispute. Dear Captain Waverley, try your influence
with my father to make matters up. I am sure this is but the beginning of our
troubles; for Tully-Veolan has never been a safe or quiet residence when we
have been at feud with the Highlanders. When I was a girl about ten, there was
a skirmish fought between a party of twenty of them and my father and his
servants behind the mains; and the bullets broke several panes in the north
windows, they were so near. Three of the Highlanders were killed, and they
brought them in wrapped in their plaids, and laid them on the stone floor of
the hall; and next morning, their wives and daughters came, clapping their
hands, and crying the coronach, and shrieking, and carried away the dead
bodies, with the pipes playing before them. I could not sleep for six weeks
without starting and thinking I heard these terrible cries, and saw the bodies
lying on the steps, all stiff and swathed up in their bloody tartans. But since
that time there came a party from the garrison at Stirling, with a warrant from
the Lord Justice Clerk, or some such great man, and took away all our arms; and
now, how are we to protect ourselves if they come down in any strength?”

Waverley could not help starting at a story which bore so much resemblance to
one of his own day-dreams. Here was a girl scarce seventeen, the gentlest of
her sex, both in temper and appearance, who had witnessed with her own eyes
such a scene as he had used to conjure up in his imagination, as only occurring
in ancient times, and spoke of it coolly, as one very likely to recur. He felt
at once the impulse of curiosity, and that slight sense of danger which only
serves to heighten its interest. He might have said with Malvolio,
““I do not now fool myself, to let imagination jade me!” I am
actually in the land of military and romantic adventures, and it only remains
to be seen what will be my own share in them.”

The whole circumstances now detailed concerning the state of the country seemed
equally novel and extraordinary. He had indeed often heard of Highland thieves,
but had no idea of the systematic mode in which their depredations were
conducted; and that the practice was connived at, and even encouraged, by many
of the Highland chieftains, who not only found the creaghs, or forays, useful
for the purpose of training individuals of their clan to the practice of arms,
but also of maintaining a wholesome terror among their Lowland neighbours, and
levying, as we have seen, a tribute from them, under colour of
protection-money.

Bailie Macwheeble, who soon afterwards entered, expatiated still more at length
upon the same topic. This honest gentleman’s conversation was so formed
upon his professional practice, that Davie Gellatley once said his discourse
was like a “charge of horning.” He assured our hero, that
“from the maist ancient times of record, the lawless thieves, limmers,
and broken men of the Highlands, had been in fellowship together by reason of
their surnames, for the committing of divers thefts, reifs, and herships upon
the honest men of the Low Country, when they not only intromitted with their
whole goods and gear, corn, cattle, horse, nolt, sheep, outsight and insight
plenishing, at their wicked pleasure, but moreover made prisoners, ransomed
them, or concussed them into giving borrows (pledges) to enter into captivity
again;—all which was directly prohibited in divers parts of the Statute
Book, both by the act one thousand five hundred and sixty-seven, and various
others; the whilk statutes, with all that had followed and might follow
thereupon, were shamefully broken and vilipended by the said sorners, limmers,
and broken men, associated into fellowships, for the aforesaid purposes of
theft, stouthreef, fire-raising, murther, raptus mulierum, or forcible
abduction of women, and such like as aforesaid.”

It seemed like a dream to Waverley that these deeds of violence should be
familiar to men’s minds, and currently talked of as falling within the
common order of things, and happening daily in the immediate vicinity, without
his having crossed the seas, and while he was yet in the otherwise well-ordered
island of Great Britain.^[13]

CHAPTER XVI.
AN UNEXPECTED ALLY APPEARS

The Baron returned at the dinner-hour, and had in a great measure recovered his
composure and good-humour. He not only confirmed the stories which Edward had
heard from Rose and Bailie Macwheeble, but added many anecdotes from his own
experience, concerning the state of the Highlands and their inhabitants. The
chiefs he pronounced to be, in general, gentlemen of great honour and high
pedigree, whose word was accounted as a law by all those of their own sept, or
clan. “It did not indeed,” he said, “become them, as had
occurred in late instances, to propone their prosapia, a lineage which
rested for the most part on the vain and fond rhymes of their seannachies or
bhairds, as æquiponderate with the evidence of ancient charters and royal
grants of antiquity, conferred upon distinguished houses in the Low Country by
divers Scottish monarchs; nevertheless, such was their outrecuidance and
presumption, as to undervalue those who possessed such evidents, as if they
held their lands in a sheep’s skin.”

This, by the way, pretty well explained the cause of quarrel between the Baron
and his Highland ally. But he went on to state so many curious particulars
concerning the manners, customs, and habits of this patriarchal race that
Edward’s curiosity became highly interested, and he inquired whether it
was possible to make with safety an excursion into the neighbouring Highlands,
whose dusky barrier of mountains had already excited his wish to penetrate
beyond them. The Baron assured his guest that nothing would be more easy,
providing this quarrel were first made up, since he could himself give him
letters to many of the distinguished chiefs, who would receive him with the
utmost courtesy and hospitality.

While they were on this topic, the door suddenly opened, and, ushered by
Saunders Saunderson, a Highlander, fully armed and equipped, entered the
apartment. Had it not been that Saunders acted the part of master of the
ceremonies to this martial apparition, without appearing to deviate from his
usual composure, and that neither Mr. Bradwardine nor Rose exhibited any
emotion, Edward would certainly have thought the intrusion hostile. As it was,
he started at the sight of what he had not yet happened to see, a mountaineer
in his full national costume. The individual Gael was a stout, dark, young man,
of low stature, the ample folds of whose plaid added to the appearance of
strength which his person exhibited. The short kilt, or petticoat, showed his
sinewy and clean-made limbs; the goatskin purse, flanked by the usual defences,
a dirk and steel-wrought pistol, hung before him; his bonnet had a short
feather, which indicated his claim to be treated as a duinhé-wassel, or
sort of gentleman; a broadsword dangled by his side, a target hung upon his
shoulder, and a long Spanish fowling-piece occupied one of his hands. With the
other hand he pulled off his bonnet, and the Baron, who well knew their
customs, and the proper mode of addressing them, immediately said, with an air
of dignity, but without rising, and much, as Edward thought, in the manner of a
prince receiving an embassy, “Welcome, Evan Dhu Maccombich; what news
from Fergus Mac-Ivor Vich Ian Vohr?”

“Fergus Mac-Ivor Vich Ian Vohr,” said the ambassador, in good
English, “greets you well, Baron of Bradwardine and Tully-Veolan, and is
sorry there has been a thick cloud interposed between you and him, which has
kept you from seeing and considering the friendship and alliances that have
been between your houses and forebears of old; and he prays you that the cloud
may pass away, and that things may be as they have been heretofore between the
clan Ivor and the house of Bradwardine, when there was an egg between them for
a flint and a knife for a sword. And he expects you will also say, you are
sorry for the cloud, and no man shall hereafter ask whether it descended from
the hill to the valley, or rose from the valley to the hill; for they never
struck with the scabbard who did not receive with the sword, and woe to him who
would lose his friend for the stormy cloud of a spring morning.”

To this the Baron of Bradwardine answered with suitable dignity, that he knew
the chief of Clan Ivor to be a well-wisher to the king, and he was sorry
there should have been a cloud between him and any gentleman of such sound
principles, “for when folks are banding together, feeble is he who hath
no brother.”

This appearing perfectly satisfactory, that the peace between these august
persons might be duly solemnised, the Baron ordered a stoup of usquebaugh, and,
filling a glass, drank to the health and prosperity of Mac-Ivor of
Glennaquoich; upon which the Celtic ambassador, to requite his politeness,
turned down a mighty bumper of the same generous liquor, seasoned with his good
wishes to the house of Bradwardine.

Having thus ratified the preliminaries of the general treaty of pacification,
the envoy retired to adjust with Mr. Macwheeble some subordinate articles with
which it was not thought necessary to trouble the Baron. These probably
referred to the discontinuance of the subsidy, and apparently the Bailie found
means to satisfy their ally, without suffering his master to suppose that his
dignity was compromised. At least, it is certain, that after the
plenipotentiaries had drunk a bottle of brandy in single drams, which seemed to
have no more effect upon such seasoned vessels than if it had been poured upon
the two bears at the top of the avenue, Evan Dhu Maccombich, having possessed
himself of all the information which he could procure respecting the robbery of
the preceding night, declared his intention to set off immediately in pursuit
of the cattle, which he pronounced to be “no that far off; they have
broken the bone,” he observed, “but they have had no time to suck
the marrow.”

Our hero, who had attended Evan Dhu during his perquisitions, was much struck
with the ingenuity which he displayed in collecting information, and the
precise and pointed conclusions which he drew from it. Evan Dhu, on his part,
was obviously flattered with the attention of Waverley, the interest he seemed
to take in his inquiries, and his curiosity about the customs and scenery of
the Highlands. Without much ceremony he invited Edward to accompany him on a
short walk of ten or fifteen miles into the mountains, and see the place where
the cattle were conveyed to; adding, “If it be as I suppose, you never
saw such a place in your life, nor ever will, unless you go with me or the like
of me.”

Our hero, feeling his curiosity considerably excited by the idea of visiting
the den of a Highland Cacus, took, however, the precaution to inquire if his
guide might be trusted. He was assured that the invitation would on no account
have been given had there been the least danger, and that all he had to
apprehend was a little fatigue; and, as Evan proposed he should pass a day at
his Chieftain’s house in returning, where he would be sure of good
accommodation and an excellent welcome, there seemed nothing very formidable in
the task he undertook. Rose, indeed, turned pale when she heard of it; but her
father, who loved the spirited curiosity of his young friend, did not attempt
to damp it by an alarm of danger which really did not exist, and a knapsack,
with a few necessaries, being bound on the shoulders of a sort of deputy
gamekeeper, our hero set forth with a fowling-piece in his hand, accompanied by
his new friend Evan Dhu, and followed by the gamekeeper aforesaid, and by two
wild Highlanders, the attendants of Evan, one of whom had upon his shoulder a
hatchet at the end of a pole, called a Lochaber-axe,^[14] and the other a long ducking-gun. Evan, upon
Edward’s inquiry, gave him to understand that this martial escort was by
no means necessary as a guard, but merely, as he said, drawing up and adjusting
his plaid with an air of dignity, that he might appear decently at
Tully-Veolan, and as Vich Ian Vohr’s foster-brother ought to do.
“Ah!” said he, “if you Saxon duinhé-wassel (English
gentleman) saw but the Chief with his tail on!”

“With his tail on?” echoed Edward in some surprise.

“Yes—that is, with all his usual followers, when he visits those of
the same rank. There is,” he continued, stopping and drawing himself
proudly up, while he counted upon his fingers the several officers of his
chief’s retinue; “there is his hanchman, or right-hand man;
then his bàrd, or poet; then his bladier, or orator, to make
harangues to the great folks whom he visits; then his gilly-more, or
armour-bearer, to carry his sword and target, and his gun; then his
gilly-casfliuch, who carries him on his back through the sikes and
brooks; then his gilly-comstrian, to lead his horse by the bridle in
steep and difficult paths; then his gilly-trushharnish, to carry his
knapsack; and the piper and the piper’s man, and it may be a dozen young
lads beside, that have no business, but are just boys of the belt, to follow
the Laird and do his honour’s bidding.”

“And does your Chief regularly maintain all these men?” demanded
Waverley.

“All these?” replied Evan; “ay, and many a fair head beside,
that would not ken where to lay itself, but for the mickle barn at
Glennaquoich.”

With similar tales of the grandeur of the Chief in peace and war, Evan Dhu
beguiled the way till they approached more closely those huge mountains which
Edward had hitherto only seen at a distance. It was towards evening as they
entered one of the tremendous passes which afford communication between the
high and low country; the path, which was extremely steep and rugged, winded up
a chasm between two tremendous rocks, following the passage which a foaming
stream, that brawled far below, appeared to have worn for itself in the course
of ages. A few slanting beams of the sun, which was now setting, reached the
water in its darksome bed, and showed it partially, chafed by a hundred rocks
and broken by a hundred falls. The descent from the path to the stream was a
mere precipice, with here and there a projecting fragment of granite, or a
scathed tree, which had warped its twisted roots into the fissures of the rock.
On the right hand, the mountain rose above the path with almost equal
inaccessibility; but the hill on the opposite side displayed a shroud of
copsewood, with which some pines were intermingled.

“This,” said Evan, “is the pass of Bally-Brough, which was
kept in former times by ten of the clan Donnochie against a hundred of the
Low-Country carles. The graves of the slain are still to be seen in that little
corri, or bottom, on the opposite side of the burn; if your eyes are
good, you may see the green specks among the heather. See, there is an
earn, which you Southrons call an eagle. You have no such birds as that
in England. He is going to fetch his supper from the Laird of
Bradwardine’s braes, but I’ll send a slug after him.”

He fired his piece accordingly, but missed the superb monarch of the feathered
tribes, who, without noticing the attempt to annoy him, continued his majestic
flight to the southward. A thousand birds of prey, hawks, kites, carrion-crows,
and ravens, disturbed from the lodgings which they had just taken up for the
evening, rose at the report of the gun, and mingled their hoarse and discordant
notes with the echoes which replied to it, and with the roar of the mountain
cataracts. Evan, a little disconcerted at having missed his mark, when he meant
to have displayed peculiar dexterity, covered his confusion by whistling part
of a pibroch as he reloaded his piece, and proceeded in silence up the pass.

It issued in a narrow glen, between two mountains, both very lofty and covered
with heath. The brook continued to be their companion, and they advanced up its
mazes, crossing them now and then, on which occasions Evan Dhu uniformly
offered the assistance of his attendants to carry over Edward; but our hero,
who had been always a tolerable pedestrian, declined the accommodation, and
obviously rose in his guide’s opinion, by showing that he did not fear
wetting his feet. Indeed he was anxious, so far as he could without
affectation, to remove the opinion which Evan seemed to entertain of the
effeminacy of the Lowlanders, and particularly of the English.

Through the gorge of this glen they found access to a black bog, of tremendous
extent, full of large pit-holes, which they traversed with great difficulty and
some danger, by tracks which no one but a Highlander could have followed. The
path itself, or rather the portion of more solid ground on which the travellers
half walked, half waded, was rough, broken, and in many places quaggy and
unsound. Sometimes the ground was so completely unsafe that it was necessary to
spring from one hillock to another, the space between being incapable of
bearing the human weight. This was an easy matter to the Highlanders, who wore
thin-soled brogues fit for the purpose, and moved with a peculiar springing
step; but Edward began to find the exercise, to which he was unaccustomed, more
fatiguing than he expected. The lingering twilight served to show them through
this Serbonian bog, but deserted them almost totally at the bottom of a steep
and very stony hill, which it was the travellers’ next toilsome task to
ascend. The night, however, was pleasant, and not dark; and Waverley, calling
up mental energy to support personal fatigue, held on his march gallantly,
though envying in his heart his Highland attendants, who continued, without a
symptom of abated vigour, the rapid and swinging pace, or rather trot, which,
according to his computation, had already brought them fifteen miles upon their
journey.

After crossing this mountain and descending on the other side towards a thick
wood, Evan Dhu held some conference with his Highland attendants, in
consequence of which Edward’s baggage was shifted from the shoulders of
the gamekeeper to those of one of the gillies, and the former was sent off with
the other mountaineer in a direction different from that of the three remaining
travellers. On asking the meaning of this separation, Waverley was told that
the Lowlander must go to a hamlet about three miles off for the night; for
unless it was some very particular friend, Donald Bean Lean, the worthy person
whom they supposed to be possessed of the cattle, did not much approve of
strangers approaching his retreat. This seemed reasonable, and silenced a qualm
of suspicion which came across Edward’s mind when he saw himself, at such
a place and such an hour, deprived of his only Lowland companion. And Evan
immediately afterwards added, “that indeed he himself had better get
forward, and announce their approach to Donald Bean Lean, as the arrival of a
sidier roy (red soldier) might otherwise be a disagreeable
surprise.” And without waiting for an answer, in jockey phrase, he
trotted out, and putting himself to a very round pace, was out of sight in an
instant.

Waverley was now left to his own meditations, for his attendant with the
battle-axe spoke very little English. They were traversing a thick, and, as it
seemed, an endless wood of pines, and consequently the path was altogether
indiscernible in the murky darkness which surrounded them. The Highlander,
however, seemed to trace it by instinct, without the hesitation of a moment,
and Edward followed his footsteps as close as he could.

After journeying a considerable time in silence, he could not help asking,
“Was it far to the end of their journey?”

“Ta cove was tree, four mile; but as duinhé-wassel was a wee
taiglit, Donald could, tat is, might—would—should send ta
curragh.”

This conveyed no information. The curragh which was promised might be a
man, a horse, a cart, or chaise; and no more could be got from the man with the
battle-axe but a repetition of “Aich ay! ta curragh.”

But in a short time Edward began to conceive his meaning, when, issuing from
the wood, he found himself on the banks of a large river or lake, where his
conductor gave him to understand they must sit down for a little while. The
moon, which now began to rise, showed obscurely the expanse of water which
spread before them, and the shapeless and indistinct forms of mountains with
which it seemed to be surrounded. The cool and yet mild air of the summer night
refreshed Waverley after his rapid and toilsome walk; and the perfume which it
wafted from the birch trees,[*] bathed in the evening dew, was exquisitely
fragrant.

[* It is not the weeping birch, the most common species in the Highlands, but
the woolly-leaved Lowland birch, that is distinguished by this fragrance.]

He had now time to give himself up to the full romance of his situation. Here
he sate on the banks of an unknown lake, under the guidance of a wild native,
whose language was unknown to him, on a visit to the den of some renowned
outlaw, a second Robin Hood, perhaps, or Adam o’ Gordon, and that at deep
midnight, through scenes of difficulty and toil, separated from his attendant,
left by his guide. What a variety of incidents for the exercise of a romantic
imagination, and all enhanced by the solemn feeling of uncertainty at least, if
not of danger! The only circumstance which assorted ill with the rest was the
cause of his journey—the Baron’s milk-cows! this degrading incident
he kept in the background.

While wrapt in these dreams of imagination, his companion gently touched him,
and, pointing in a direction nearly straight across the lake, said,
“Yon’s ta cove.” A small point of light was seen to twinkle
in the direction in which he pointed, and, gradually increasing in size and
lustre, seemed to flicker like a meteor upon the verge of the horizon. While
Edward watched this phenomenon, the distant dash of oars was heard. The
measured sound approached near and more near, and presently a loud whistle was
heard in the same direction. His friend with the battle-axe immediately
whistled clear and shrill, in reply to the signal, and a boat, manned with four
or five Highlanders, pushed for a little inlet, near which Edward was sitting.
He advanced to meet them with his attendant, was immediately assisted into the
boat by the officious attention of two stout mountaineers, and had no sooner
seated himself than they resumed their oars, and began to row across the lake
with great rapidity.

CHAPTER XVII.
THE HOLD OF A HIGHLAND ROBBER

The party preserved silence, interrupted only by the monotonous and murmured
chant of a Gaelic song, sung in a kind of low recitative by the steersman, and
by the dash of the oars, which the notes seemed to regulate, as they dipped to
them in cadence. The light, which they now approached more nearly, assumed a
broader, redder and more irregular splendour. It appeared plainly to be a large
fire, but whether kindled upon an island or the mainland Edward could not
determine. As he saw it, the red glaring orb seemed to rest on the very surface
of the lake itself, and resembled the fiery vehicle in which the Evil Genius of
an Oriental tale traverses land and sea. They approached nearer, and the light
of the fire sufficed to show that it was kindled at the bottom of a huge dark
crag or rock, rising abruptly from the very edge of the water; its front,
changed by the reflection to dusky red, formed a strange and even awful
contrast to the banks around, which were from time to time faintly and
partially illuminated by pallid moonlight.

The boat now neared the shore, and Edward could discover that this large fire,
amply supplied with branches of pine-wood by two figures, who, in the red
reflection of its light, appeared like demons, was kindled in the jaws of a
lofty cavern, into which an inlet from the lake seemed to advance; and he
conjectured, which was indeed true, that the fire had been lighted as a beacon
to the boatmen on their return. They rowed right for the mouth of the cave, and
then, shifting their oars, permitted the boat to enter in obedience to the
impulse which it had received. The skiff passed the little point or platform of
rock on which the fire was blazing, and running about two boats’ lengths
farther, stopped where the cavern (for it was already arched overhead) ascended
from the water by five or six broad ledges of rock, so easy and regular that
they might be termed natural steps. At this moment a quantity of water was
suddenly flung upon the fire, which sunk with a hissing noise, and with it
disappeared the light it had hitherto afforded. Four or five active arms lifted
Waverley out of the boat, placed him on his feet, and almost carried him into
the recesses of the cave. He made a few paces in darkness, guided in this
manner; and advancing towards a hum of voices, which seemed to sound from the
centre of the rock, at an acute turn Donald Bean Lean and his whole
establishment were before his eyes.

The interior of the cave, which here rose very high, was illuminated by torches
made of pine-tree, which emitted a bright and bickering light, attended by a
strong though not unpleasant odour. Their light was assisted by the red glare
of a large charcoal fire, round which were seated five or six armed
Highlanders, while others were indistinctly seen couched on their plaids in the
more remote recesses of the cavern. In one large aperture, which the robber
facetiously called his “spence” (or pantry), there hung by the
heels the carcasses of a sheep, or ewe, and two cows lately slaughtered. The
principal inhabitant of this singular mansion, attended by Evan Dhu as master
of the ceremonies, came forward to meet his guest, totally different in
appearance and manner from what his imagination had anticipated. The profession
which he followed, the wilderness in which he dwelt, the wild warrior forms
that surrounded him, were all calculated to inspire terror. From such
accompaniments, Waverley prepared himself to meet a stern, gigantic, ferocious
figure, such as Salvator would have chosen to be the central object of a group
of banditti.^[15]

Donald Bean Lean was the very reverse of all these. He was thin in person and
low in stature, with light sandy-coloured hair, and small pale features, from
which he derived his agnomen of “Bean” or white; and although his
form was light, well proportioned and active, he appeared, on the whole, rather
a diminutive and insignificant figure. He had served in some inferior capacity
in the French army, and in order to receive his English visitor in great form,
and probably meaning, in his way, to pay him a compliment, he had laid aside
the Highland dress for the time, to put on an old blue and red uniform and a
feathered hat, in which he was far from showing to advantage, and indeed looked
so incongruous, compared with all around him, that Waverley would have been
tempted to laugh, had laughter been either civil or safe. The robber received
Captain Waverley with a profusion of French politeness and Scottish
hospitality, seemed perfectly to know his name and connections, and to be
particularly acquainted with his uncle’s political principles. On these
he bestowed great applause, to which Waverley judged it prudent to make a very
general reply.

Being placed at a convenient distance from the charcoal fire, the heat of which
the season rendered oppressive, a strapping Highland damsel placed before
Waverley, Evan, and Donald Bean three cogues, or wooden vessels composed
of staves and hoops, containing eanaruich,[*] a sort of strong soup,
made out of a particular part of the inside of the beeves. After this
refreshment, which, though coarse, fatigue and hunger rendered palatable,
steaks, roasted on the coals, were supplied in liberal abundance, and
disappeared before Evan Dhu and their host with a promptitude that seemed like
magic, and astonished Waverley, who was much puzzled to reconcile their
voracity with what he had heard of the abstemiousness of the Highlanders. He
was ignorant that this abstinence was with the lower ranks wholly compulsory,
and that, like some animals of prey, those who practise it were usually gifted
with the power of indemnifying themselves to good purpose when chance threw
plenty in their way. The whisky came forth in abundance to crown the cheer. The
Highlanders drank it copiously and undiluted; but Edward, having mixed a little
with water, did not find it so palatable as to invite him to repeat the
draught. Their host bewailed himself exceedingly that he could offer him no
wine; had he but known four-and-twenty hours before, he would have had some,
had it been within the circle of forty miles round him. But no gentleman could
do more to show his sense of the honour of a visit from another than to offer
him the best cheer his house afforded. Where there are no bushes there can be
no nuts, and the way of those you live with is that you must follow.

[* This was the regale presented by Rob Roy to the Laird of Tullibody.]

He went on regretting to Evan Dhu the death of an aged man, Donnacha an Amrigh,
or Duncan with the Cap, “a gifted seer,” who foretold, through the
second sight, visitors of every description who haunted their dwelling, whether
as friends or foes.

“Is not his son Malcolm taishatr (a second-sighted person)?”
asked Evan.

“Nothing equal to his father,” replied Donald Bean. “He told
us the other day, we were to see a great gentleman riding on a horse, and there
came nobody that whole day but Shemus Beg, the blind harper, with his dog.
Another time he advertised us of a wedding, and behold it proved a funeral; and
on the creagh, when he foretold to us we should bring home a hundred
head of horned cattle, we gripped nothing but a fat bailie of Perth.”

From this discourse he passed to the political and military state of the
country; and Waverley was astonished, and even alarmed, to find a person of
this description so accurately acquainted with the strength of the various
garrisons and regiments quartered north of the Tay. He even mentioned the exact
number of recruits who had joined Waverley’s troop from his uncle’s
estate, and observed they were “pretty men”, meaning, not handsome,
but stout warlike fellows. He put Waverley in mind of one or two minute
circumstances which had happened at a general review of the regiment, which
satisfied him that the robber had been an eye-witness of it; and Evan Dhu
having by this time retired from the conversation, and wrapped himself up in
his plaid to take some repose, Donald asked Edward, in a very significant
manner, whether he had nothing particular to say to him.

Waverley, surprised and somewhat startled at this question from such a
character, answered, he had no motive in visiting him but curiosity to see his
extraordinary place of residence. Donald Bean Lean looked him steadily in the
face for an instant, and then said, with a significant nod, “You might as
well have confided in me; I am as much worthy of trust as either the Baron of
Bradwardine or Vich Ian Vohr. But you are equally welcome to my house.”

Waverley felt an involuntary shudder creep over him at the mysterious language
held by this outlawed and lawless bandit, which, in despite of his attempts to
master it, deprived him of the power to ask the meaning of his insinuations. A
heath pallet, with the flowers stuck uppermost, had been prepared for him in a
recess of the cave, and here, covered with such spare plaids as could be
mustered, he lay for some time watching the motions of the other inhabitants of
the cavern. Small parties of two or three entered or left the place, without
any other ceremony than a few words in Gaelic to the principal outlaw, and,
when he fell asleep, to a tall Highlander who acted as his lieutenant, and
seemed to keep watch during his repose. Those who entered seemed to have
returned from some excursion, of which they reported the success, and went
without farther ceremony to the larder, where, cutting with their dirks their
rations from the carcasses which were there suspended, they proceeded to broil
and eat them at their own pleasure and leisure. The liquor was under strict
regulation, being served out either by Donald himself, his lieutenant, or the
strapping Highland girl aforesaid, who was the only female that appeared. The
allowance of whisky, however, would have appeared prodigal to any but
Highlanders, who, living entirely in the open air and in a very moist climate,
can consume great quantities of ardent spirits without the usual baneful
effects either upon the brain or constitution.

At length the fluctuating groups began to swim before the eyes of our hero as
they gradually closed; nor did he re-open them till the morning sun was high on
the lake without, though there was but a faint and glimmering twilight in the
recesses of Uaimh an Ri, or the King’s Cavern, as the abode of Donald
Bean Lean was proudly denominated.

CHAPTER XVIII.
WAVERLEY PROCEEDS ON HIS JOURNEY

When Edward had collected his scattered recollection, he was surprised to
observe the cavern totally deserted. Having arisen and put his dress in some
order, he looked more accurately round him; but all was still solitary. If it
had not been for the decayed brands of the fire, now sunk into grey ashes, and
the remnants of the festival, consisting of bones half burnt and half gnawed,
and an empty keg or two, there remained no traces of Donald and his band. When
Waverley sallied forth to the entrance of the cave, he perceived that the point
of rock, on which remained the marks of last night’s beacon, was
accessible by a small path, either natural or roughly hewn in the rock, along
the little inlet of water which ran a few yards up into the cavern, where, as
in a wetdock, the skiff which brought him there the night before was still
lying moored. When he reached the small projecting platform on which the beacon
had been established, he would have believed his further progress by land
impossible, only that it was scarce probable but what the inhabitants of the
cavern had some mode of issuing from it otherwise than by the lake.
Accordingly, he soon observed three or four shelving steps, or ledges of rock,
at the very extremity of the little platform; and, making use of them as a
staircase, he clambered by their means around the projecting shoulder of the
crag on which the cavern opened, and, descending with some difficulty on the
other side, he gained the wild and precipitous shores of a Highland loch, about
four miles in length and a mile and a half across, surrounded by heathy and
savage mountains, on the crests of which the morning mist was still sleeping.

Looking back to the place from which he came, he could not help admiring the
address which had adopted a retreat of such seclusion and secrecy. The rock,
round the shoulder of which he had turned by a few imperceptible notches, that
barely afforded place for the foot, seemed, in looking back upon it, a huge
precipice, which barred all further passage by the shores of the lake in that
direction. There could be no possibility, the breadth of the lake considered,
of descrying the entrance of the narrow and low-browed cave from the other
side; so that, unless the retreat had been sought for with boats, or disclosed
by treachery, it might be a safe and secret residence to its garrison as long
as they were supplied with provisions. Having satisfied his curiosity in these
particulars, Waverley looked around for Evan Dhu and his attendants, who, he
rightly judged, would be at no great distance, whatever might have become of
Donald Bean Lean and his party, whose mode of life was, of course, liable to
sudden migrations of abode. Accordingly, at the distance of about half a mile,
he beheld a Highlander (Evan apparently) angling in the lake, with another
attending him, whom, from the weapon which he shouldered, he recognised for his
friend with the battle-axe.

Much nearer to the mouth of the cave he heard the notes of a lively Gaelic
song, guided by which, in a sunny recess, shaded by a glittering birch-tree,
and carpeted with a bank of firm white sand, he found the damsel of the cavern,
whose lay had already reached him, busy, to the best of her power, in arranging
to advantage a morning repast of milk, eggs, barley-bread, fresh butter, and
honey-comb. The poor girl had already made a circuit of four miles that morning
in search of the eggs, of the meal which baked her cakes, and of the other
materials of the breakfast, being all delicacies which she had to beg or borrow
from distant cottagers. The followers of Donald Bean Lean used little food
except the flesh of the animals which they drove away from the Lowlands; bread
itself was a delicacy seldom thought of, because hard to be obtained, and all
the domestic accommodations of milk, poultry, butter, etc., were out of the
question in this Scythian camp. Yet it must not be omitted that, although Alice
had occupied a part of the morning in providing those accommodations for her
guest which the cavern did not afford, she had secured time also to arrange her
own person in her best trim. Her finery was very simple. A short
russet-coloured jacket and a petticoat of scanty longitude was her whole dress;
but these were clean, and neatly arranged. A piece of scarlet embroidered
cloth, called the snood, confined her hair, which fell over it in a profusion
of rich dark curls. The scarlet plaid, which formed part of her dress, was laid
aside, that it might not impede her activity in attending the stranger. I
should forget Alice’s proudest ornament were I to omit mentioning a pair
of gold ear-rings and a golden rosary, which her father (for she was the
daughter of Donald Bean Lean) had brought from France, the plunder, probably,
of some battle or storm.

Her form, though rather large for her years, was very well proportioned, and
her demeanour had a natural and rustic grace, with nothing of the sheepishness
of an ordinary peasant. The smiles, displaying a row of teeth of exquisite
whiteness, and the laughing eyes, with which, in dumb show, she gave Waverley
that morning greeting which she wanted English words to express, might have
been interpreted by a coxcomb, or perhaps by a young soldier who, without being
such, was conscious of a handsome person, as meant to convey more than the
courtesy of an hostess. Nor do I take it upon me to say that the little wild
mountaineer would have welcomed any staid old gentleman advanced in life, the
Baron of Bradwardine, for example, with the cheerful pains which she bestowed
upon Edward’s accommodation. She seemed eager to place him by the meal
which she had so sedulously arranged, and to which she now added a few bunches
of cranberries, gathered in an adjacent morass. Having had the satisfaction of
seeing him seated at his breakfast, she placed herself demurely upon a stone at
a few yards’ distance, and appeared to watch with great complacency for
some opportunity of serving him.

Evan and his attendant now returned slowly along the beach, the latter bearing
a large salmon-trout, the produce of the morning’s sport, together with
the angling-rod, while Evan strolled forward, with an easy, self-satisfied, and
important gait, towards the spot where Waverley was so agreeably employed at
the breakfast-table. After morning greetings had passed on both sides, and
Evan, looking at Waverley, had said something in Gaelic to Alice, which made
her laugh, yet colour up to her eyes, through a complexion well embrowned by
sun and wind, Evan intimated his commands that the fish should be prepared for
breakfast. A spark from the lock of his pistol produced a light, and a few
withered fir branches were quickly in flame, and as speedily reduced to hot
embers, on which the trout was broiled in large slices. To crown the repast,
Evan produced from the pocket of his short jerkin a large scallop shell, and
from under the folds of his plaid a ram’s horn full of whisky. Of this he
took a copious dram, observing he had already taken his “morning”
with Donald Bean Lean before his departure; he offered the same cordial to
Alice and to Edward, which they both declined. With the bounteous air of a
lord, Evan then proffered the scallop to Dugald Mahony, his attendant, who,
without waiting to be asked a second time, drank it off with great gusto. Evan
then prepared to move towards the boat, inviting Waverley to attend him.
Meanwhile, Alice had made up in a small basket what she thought worth removing,
and flinging her plaid around her, she advanced up to Edward, and with the
utmost simplicity, taking hold of his hand, offered her cheek to his salute,
dropping at the same time her little curtsy. Evan, who was esteemed a wag among
the mountain fair, advanced as if to secure a similar favour; but Alice,
snatching up her basket, escaped up the rocky bank as fleetly as a roe, and,
turning round and laughing, called something out to him in Gaelic, which he
answered in the same tone and language; then, waving her hand to Edward, she
resumed her road, and was soon lost among the thickets, though they continued
for some time to hear her lively carol, as she proceeded gaily on her solitary
journey.

They now again entered the gorge of the cavern, and stepping into the boat, the
Highlander pushed off, and, taking advantage of the morning breeze, hoisted a
clumsy sort of sail, while Evan assumed the helm, directing their course, as it
appeared to Waverley, rather higher up the lake than towards the place of his
embarkation on the preceding night. As they glided along the silver mirror,
Evan opened the conversation with a panegyric upon Alice, who, he said, was
both “canny” and “fendy,” and was, to the boot of all
that, the best dancer of a strathspey in the whole strath. Edward assented to
her praises so far as he understood them, yet could not help regretting that
she was condemned to such a perilous and dismal life.

“Oich! for that,” said Evan, “there is nothing in
Perthshire that she need want, if she ask her father to fetch it, unless it be
too hot or too heavy.”

“But to be the daughter of a cattle-stealer—a common thief!”
“Common thief!—no such thing: Donald Bean Lean never lifted
less than a drove in his life.”

“Do you call him an uncommon thief, then?”

“No; he that steals a cow from a poor widow, or a stirk from a cotter, is
a thief; he that lifts a drove from a Sassenach laird is a gentleman-drover.
And, besides, to take a tree from the forest, a salmon from the river, a deer
from the hill, or a cow from a Lowland strath, is what no Highlander need ever
think shame upon.”

“But what can this end in, were he taken in such an appropriation?”

“To be sure he would die for the law, as many a pretty man has
done before him.”

“Die for the law!”

“Ay; that is, with the law, or by the law; be strapped up on the
kind gallows of Crieff,^[16] where his father died, and his goodsire
died, and where I hope he’ll live to die himsell, if he’s not shot,
or slashed, in a creagh.”

“You hope such a death for your friend, Evan?”

“And that do I e’en; would you have me wish him to die on a bundle
of wet straw in yon den of his, like a mangy tyke?”

“But what becomes of Alice, then?”

“Troth, if such an accident were to happen, as her father would not need
her help ony langer, I ken nought to hinder me to marry her mysell.”

“Gallantly resolved,” said Edward; “but, in the meanwhile,
Evan, what has your father-in-law (that shall be, if he have the good fortune
to be hanged) done with the Baron’s cattle?”

“Oich,” answered Evan, “they were all trudging before
your lad and Allan Kennedy before the sun blinked ower Ben Lawers this morning;
and they’ll be in the pass of Bally-Brough by this time, in their way
back to the parks of Tully-Veolan, all but two, that were unhappily slaughtered
before I got last night to Uaimh an Ri.”

“And where are we going, Evan, if I may be so bold as to ask?” said
Waverley.

“Where would you be ganging, but to the Laird’s ain house of
Glennaquoich? Ye would not think to be in his country, without ganging to see
him? It would be as much as a man’s life’s worth.”

“And are we far from Glennaquoich?”

“But five bits of miles; and Vich Ian Vohr will meet us.”

In about half an hour they reached the upper end of the lake, where, after
landing Waverley, the two Highanders drew the boat into a little creek among
thick flags and reeds, where it lay perfectly concealed. The oars they put in
another place of concealment, both for the use of Donald Bean Lean probably,
when his occasions should next bring him to that place.

The travellers followed for some time a delightful opening into the hills, down
which a little brook found its way to the lake. When they had pursued their
walk a short distance, Waverley renewed his questions about their host of the
cavern.

“Does he always reside in that cave?”

“Out, no! it’s past the skill of man to tell where he’s to be
found at a’ times; there’s not a dern nook, or cove, or
corri, in the whole country that he’s not acquainted with.”

“And do others beside your master shelter him?”

“My master? My master is in Heaven,” answered Evan,
haughtily; and then immediately assuming his usual civility of manner,
“but you mean my Chief;—no, he does not shelter Donald Bean Lean,
nor any that are like him; he only allows him (with a smile) wood and
water.”

“No great boon, I should think, Evan, when both seem to be very
plenty.”

“Ah! but ye dinna see through it. When I say wood and water, I mean the
loch and the land; and I fancy Donald would be put till ’t if the Laird
were to look for him wi’ threescore men in the wood of Kailychat yonder;
and if our boats, with a score or twa mair, were to come down the loch to Uaimh
an Ri, headed by mysell, or ony other pretty man.”

“But suppose a strong party came against him from the Low Country, would
not your Chief defend him?”

“Na, he would not ware the spark of a flint for him—if they came
with the law.”

“And what must Donald do, then?”

“He behoved to rid this country of himsell, and fall back, it may be,
over the mount upon Letter Scriven.”

“And if he were pursued to that place?”

“I’se warrant he would go to his cousin’s at Rannoch.”

“Well, but if they followed him to Rannoch?”

“That,” quoth Evan, “is beyond all belief; and, indeed, to
tell you the truth, there durst not a Lowlander in all Scotland follow the fray
a gun-shot beyond Bally-Brough, unless he had the help of the Sidier
Dhu.”

“Whom do you call so?”

“The Sidier Dhu? the black soldier; that is what they call the
independent companies that were raised to keep peace and law in the Highlands.
Vich Ian Vohr commanded one of them for five years, and I was sergeant mysell,
I shall warrant ye. They call them Sidier Dhu because they wear the
tartans, as they call your men—King George’s men—Sidier
Roy, or red soldiers.”

“Well, but when you were in King George’s pay, Evan, you were
surely King George’s soldiers?”

“Troth, and you must ask Vich Ian Vohr about that; for we are for his
king, and care not much which o’ them it is. At ony rate, nobody can say
we are King George’s men now, when we have not seen his pay this
twelve-month.”

This last argument admitted of no reply, nor did Edward attempt any; he rather
chose to bring back the discourse to Donald Bean Lean. “Does Donald
confine himself to cattle, or does he ‘lift,’ as you call it,
anything else that comes in his way?”

“Troth, he’s nae nice body, and he’ll just tak onything, but
most readily cattle, horse, or live Christians; for sheep are slow of travel,
and inside plenishing is cumbrous to carry, and not easy to put away for siller
in this country.”

“But does he carry off men and women?”

“Out, ay. Did not ye hear him speak o’ the Perth bailie? It cost
that body five hundred merks ere he got to the south of Bally-Brough. And ance
Donald played a pretty sport.^[17]
There was to be a blythe bridal between the Lady Cramfeezer, in the howe
o’ the Mearns (she was the auld laird’s widow, and no sae young as
she had been hersell), and young Gilliewhackit, who had spent his heirship and
movables, like a gentleman, at cock-matches, bull-baitings, horse-races, and
the like. Now, Donald Bean Lean, being aware that the bridegroom was in
request, and wanting to cleik the cunzie (that is, to hook the siller), he
cannily carried off Gilliewhackit ae night when he was riding dovering
hame (wi’ the malt rather abune the meal), and with the help of his
gillies he gat him into the hills with the speed of light, and the first place
he wakened in was the cove of Uaimh an Ri. So there was old to do about
ransoming the bridegroom; for Donald would not lower a farthing of a thousand
punds—”

“The devil!”

“Punds Scottish, ye shall understand. And the lady had not the siller if
she had pawned her gown; and they applied to the governor o’ Stirling
castle, and to the major o’ the Black Watch; and the governor said it was
ower far to the northward, and out of his district; and the major said his men
were gane hame to the shearing, and he would not call them out before the
victual was got in for all the Cramfeezers in Christendom, let alane the
Mearns, for that it would prejudice the country. And in the meanwhile
ye’ll no hinder Gilliewhackit to take the small-pox. There was not the
doctor in Perth or Stirling would look near the poor lad; and I cannot blame
them, for Donald had been misguggled by ane of these doctors about Paris, and
he swore he would fling the first into the loch that he catched beyond the
pass. However some cailliachs (that is, old women) that were about
Donald’s hand nursed Gilliewhackit sae weel that, between the free open
air in the cove and the fresh whey, deil an he did not recover maybe as weel as
if he had been closed in a glazed chamber and a bed with curtains, and fed with
red wine and white meat. And Donald was sae vexed about it that, when he was
stout and weel, he even sent him free home, and said he would be pleased with
onything they would like to gie him for the plague and trouble which he had
about Gilliewhackit to an unkenn’d degree. And I cannot tell you
precisely how they sorted; but they agreed sae right that Donald was invited to
dance at the wedding in his Highland trews, and they said that there was never
sae meikle siller clinked in his purse either before or since. And to the boot
of all that, Gilliewhackit said that, be the evidence what it liked, if he had
the luck to be on Donald’s inquest, he would bring him in guilty of
nothing whatever, unless it were wilful arson or murder under trust.”

With such bald and disjointed chat Evan went on illustrating the existing state
of the Highlands, more perhaps to the amusement of Waverley than that of our
readers. At length, after having marched over bank and brae, moss and heather,
Edward, though not unacquainted with the Scottish liberality in computing
distance, began to think that Evan’s five miles were nearly doubled. His
observation on the large measure which the Scottish allowed of their land, in
comparison to the computation of their money, was readily answered by Evan with
the old jest, “The deil take them wha have the least pint
stoup.”[*]

[* The Scotch are liberal in computing their land and liquor; the Scottish pint
corresponds to two English quarts. As for their coin, every one knows the
couplet—

How can the rogues pretend to sense?
Their pound is only twenty pence.]

And now the report of a gun was heard, and a sportsman was seen, with his dogs
and attendant, at the upper end of the glen. “Shough,” said Dugald
Mahony, “tat’s ta chief.”

“It is not,” said Evan, imperiously. “Do you think he would
come to meet a Sassenach duinhé-wassel in such a way as that?”

But as they approached a little nearer, he said, with an appearance of
mortification, “And it is even he, sure enough; and he has not his tail
on after all; there is no living creature with him but Callum Beg.”

In fact, Fergus Mac-Ivor, of whom a Frenchman might have said as truly as of
any man in the Highlands, “Qu’il connoit bien ses gens” had
no idea of raising himself in the eyes of an English young man of fortune by
appearing with a retinue of idle Highlanders disproportioned to the occasion.
He was well aware that such an unnecessary attendance would seem to Edward
rather ludicrous than respectable; and, while few men were more attached to
ideas of chieftainship and feudal power, he was, for that very reason, cautious
of exhibiting external marks of dignity, unless at the time and in the manner
when they were most likely to produce an imposing effect. Therefore, although,
had he been to receive a brother chieftain, he would probably have been
attended by all that retinue which Evan described with so much unction, he
judged it more respectable to advance to meet Waverley with a single attendant,
a very handsome Highland boy, who carried his master’s shooting-pouch and
his broadsword, without which he seldom went abroad.

When Fergus and Waverley met, the latter was struck with the peculiar grace and
dignity of the Chieftain’s figure. Above the middle size and finely
proportioned, the Highland dress, which he wore in its simplest mode, set off
his person to great advantage. He wore the trews, or close trowsers, made of
tartan, chequed scarlet and white; in other particulars his dress strictly
resembled Evan’s, excepting that he had no weapon save a dirk, very
richly mounted with silver. His page, as we have said, carried his claymore;
and the fowling-piece, which he held in his hand, seemed only designed for
sport. He had shot in the course of his walk some young wild-ducks, as, though
“close time” was then unknown, the broods of grouse were yet too
young for the sportsman. His countenance was decidedly Scottish, with all the
peculiarities of the northern physiognomy, but yet had so little of its
harshness and exaggeration that it would have been pronounced in any country
extremely handsome. The martial air of the bonnet, with a single eagle’s
feather as a distinction, added much to the manly appearance of his head, which
was besides ornamented with a far more natural and graceful cluster of close
black curls than ever were exposed to sale in Bond Street.

An air of openness and affability increased the favorable impression derived
from this handsome and dignified exterior. Yet a skilful physiognomist would
have been less satisfied with the countenance on the second than on the first
view. The eyebrow and upper lip bespoke something of the habit of peremptory
command and decisive superiority. Even his courtesy, though open, frank, and
unconstrained, seemed to indicate a sense of personal importance; and, upon any
check or accidental excitation, a sudden, though transient lour of the eye
showed a hasty, haughty, and vindictive temper, not less to be dreaded because
it seemed much under its owner’s command. In short, the countenance of
the Chieftain resembled a smiling summer’s day, in which,
notwithstanding, we are made sensible by certain, though slight signs that it
may thunder and lighten before the close of evening.

It was not, however, upon their first meeting that Edward had an opportunity of
making these less favourable remarks. The Chief received him as a friend of the
Baron of Bradwardine, with the utmost expression of kindness and obligation for
the visit; upbraided him gently with choosing so rude an abode as he had done
the night before; and entered into a lively conversation with him about Donald
Bean’s housekeeping, but without the least hint as to his predatory
habits, or the immediate occasion of Waverley’s visit, a topic which, as
the Chief did not introduce it, our hero also avoided. While they walked
merrily on towards the house of Glennaquoich, Evan, who now fell respectfully
into the rear, followed with Callum Beg and Dugald Mahony.

We shall take the opportunity to introduce the reader to some particulars of
Fergus Mac-Ivor’s character and history, which were not completely known
to Waverley till after a connection which, though arising from a circumstance
so casual, had for a length of time the deepest influence upon his character,
actions, and prospects. But this, being an important subject, must form the
commencement of a new chapter.

CHAPTER XIX.
THE CHIEF AND HIS MANSION

The ingenious licentiate Francisco de Ubeda, when he commenced his history of
“La Picara Justina Diez,”—which, by the way, is one of the
most rare books of Spanish literature,—complained of his pen having
caught up a hair, and forthwith begins, with more eloquence than common sense,
an affectionate expostulation with that useful implement, upbraiding it with
being the quill of a goose,—a bird inconstant by nature, as frequenting
the three elements of water, earth, and air indifferently, and being, of
course, “to one thing constant never.” Now I protest to thee,
gentle reader, that I entirely dissent from Francisco de Ubeda in this matter,
and hold it the most useful quality of my pen, that it can speedily change from
grave to gay, and from description and dialogue to narrative and character. So
that if my quill display no other properties of its mother-goose than her
mutability, truly I shall be well pleased; and I conceive that you, my worthy
friend, will have no occasion for discontent. From the jargon, therefore, of
the Highland gillies I pass to the character of their Chief. It is an important
examination, and therefore, like Dogberry, we must spare no wisdom.

The ancestor of Fergus Mac-Ivor, about three centuries before, had set up a
claim to be recognised as chief of the numerous and powerful clan to which he
belonged, the name of which it is unnecessary to mention. Being defeated by an
opponent who had more justice, or at least more force, on his side, he moved
southwards, with those who adhered to him, in quest of new settlements, like a
second Æneas. The state of the Perthshire Highlands favoured his purpose. A
great baron in that country had lately become traitor to the crown; Ian, which
was the name of our adventurer, united himself with those who were commissioned
by the king to chastise him, and did such good service that he obtained a grant
of the property, upon which he and his posterity afterwards resided. He
followed the king also in war to the fertile regions of England, where he
employed his leisure hours so actively in raising subsidies among the boors of
Northumberland and Durham, that upon his return he was enabled to erect a stone
tower, or fortalice, so much admired by his dependants and neighbours that he,
who had hitherto been called Ian Mac-Ivor, or John the son of Ivor, was
thereafter distinguished, both in song and genealogy, by the high title of Ian
nan Chaistel, or John of the Tower. The descendants of this worthy were so
proud of him that the reigning chief always bore the patronymic title of Vich
Ian Vohr, i.e. the son of John the Great; while the clan at large, to
distinguish them from that from which they had seceded, were denominated
Sliochd nan Ivor, the race of Ivor.

The father of Fergus, the tenth in direct descent from John of the Tower,
engaged heart and hand in the insurrection of 1715, and was forced to fly to
France, after the attempt of that year in favour of the Stuarts had proved
unsuccessful. More fortunate than other fugitives, he obtained employment in
the French service, and married a lady of rank in that kingdom, by whom he had
two children, Fergus and his sister Flora. The Scottish estate had been
forfeited and exposed to sale, but was repurchased for a small price in the
name of the young proprietor, who in consequence came to reside upon his native
domains.^[18] It was soon
perceived that he possessed a character of uncommon acuteness, fire, and
ambition, which, as he became acquainted with the state of the country,
gradually assumed a mixed and peculiar tone, that could only have been acquired
Sixty Years Since.

Had Fergus Mac-Ivor lived Sixty Years sooner than he did, he would in all
probability have wanted the polished manner and knowledge of the world which he
now possessed; and had he lived Sixty Years later, his ambition and love of
rule would have lacked the fuel which his situation now afforded. He was
indeed, within his little circle, as perfect a politician as Castruccio
Castracani himself. He applied himself with great earnestness to appease all
the feuds and dissensions which often arose among other clans in his
neighbourhood, so that he became a frequent umpire in their quarrels. His own
patriarchal power he strengthened at every expense which his fortune would
permit, and indeed stretched his means to the uttermost to maintain the rude
and plentiful hospitality which was the most valued attribute of a chieftain.
For the same reason he crowded his estate with a tenantry, hardy indeed, and
fit for the purposes of war, but greatly outnumbering what the soil was
calculated to maintain. These consisted chiefly of his own clan, not one of
whom he suffered to quit his lands if he could possibly prevent it. But he
maintained, besides, many adventurers from the mother sept, who deserted a less
warlike, though more wealthy chief to do homage to Fergus Mac-Ivor. Other
individuals, too, who had not even that apology, were nevertheless received
into his allegiance, which indeed was refused to none who were, like Poins,
proper men of their hands, and were willing to assume the name of Mac-Ivor.

He was enabled to discipline these forces, from having obtained command of one
of the independent companies raised by government to preserve the peace of the
Highlands. While in this capacity he acted with vigour and spirit, and
preserved great order in the country under his charge. He caused his vassals to
enter by rotation into his company, and serve for a certain space of time,
which gave them all in turn a general notion of military discipline. In his
campaigns against the banditti, it was observed that he assumed and exercised
to the utmost the discretionary power which, while the law had no free course
in the Highlands, was conceived to belong to the military parties who were
called in to support it. He acted, for example, with great and suspicious
lenity to those freebooters who made restitution on his summons and offered
personal submission to himself, while he rigorously pursued, apprehended, and
sacrificed to justice all such interlopers as dared to despise his admonitions
or commands. On the other hand, if any officers of justice, military parties,
or others, presumed to pursue thieves or marauders through his territories, and
without applying for his consent and concurrence, nothing was more certain than
that they would meet with some notable foil or defeat; upon which occasions
Fergus Mac-Ivor was the first to condole with them, and after gently blaming
their rashness, never failed deeply to lament the lawless state of the country.
These lamentations did not exclude suspicion, and matters were so represented
to government that our Chieftain was deprived of his military
command.^[19]

Whatever Fergus Mac-Ivor felt on this occasion, he had the art of entirely
suppressing every appearance of discontent; but in a short time the
neighbouring country began to feel bad effects from his disgrace. Donald Bean
Lean, and others of his class, whose depredations had hitherto been confined to
other districts, appeared from thenceforward to have made a settlement on this
devoted border; and their ravages were carried on with little opposition, as
the Lowland gentry were chiefly Jacobites, and disarmed. This forced many of
the inhabitants into contracts of black-mail with Fergus Mac-Ivor, which not
only established him their protector, and gave him great weight in all their
consultations, but, moreover, supplied funds for the waste of his feudal
hospitality, which the discontinuance of his pay might have otherwise
essentially diminished.

In following this course of conduct, Fergus had a further object than merely
being the great man of his neighbourhood, and ruling despotically over a small
clan. From his infancy upward he had devoted himself to the cause of the exiled
family, and had persuaded himself, not only that their restoration to the crown
of Britain would be speedy, but that those who assisted them would be raised to
honour and rank. It was with this view that he laboured to reconcile the
Highlanders among themselves, and augmented his own force to the utmost, to be
prepared for the first favourable opportunity of rising. With this purpose also
he conciliated the favour of such Lowland gentlemen in the vicinity as were
friends to the good cause; and for the same reason, having incautiously
quarrelled with Mr. Bradwardine, who, notwithstanding his peculiarities, was
much respected in the country, he took advantage of the foray of Donald Bean
Lean to solder up the dispute in the manner we have mentioned. Some, indeed,
surmised that he caused the enterprise to be suggested to Donald, on purpose to
pave the way to a reconciliation, which, supposing that to be the case, cost
the Laird of Bradwardine two good milch cows. This zeal in their behalf the
House of Stuart repaid with a considerable share of their confidence, an
occasional supply of louis-d’or, abundance of fair words, and a
parchment, with a huge waxen seal appended, purporting to be an earl’s
patent, granted by no less a person than James the Third King of England, and
Eighth King of Scotland, to his right feal, trusty, and well-beloved Fergus
Mac-Ivor of Glennaquoich, in the county of Perth, and kingdom of Scotland.

With this future coronet glittering before his eyes, Fergus plunged deeply into
the correspondence and plots of that unhappy period; and, like all such active
agents, easily reconciled his conscience to going certain lengths in the
service of his party, from which honour and pride would have deterred him had
his sole object been the direct advancement of his own personal interest. With
this insight into a bold, ambitious, and ardent, yet artful and politic
character, we resume the broken thread of our narrative.

The chief and his guest had by this time reached the house of Glennaquoich,
which consisted of Ian nan Chaistel’s mansion, a high rude-looking square
tower, with the addition of a lofted house, that is, a building of two
stories, constructed by Fergus’s grandfather when he returned from that
memorable expedition, well remembered by the western shires under the name of
the Highland Host. Upon occasion of this crusade against the Ayrshire Whigs and
Covenanters, the Vich Ian Vohr of the time had probably been as successful as
his predecessor was in harrying Northumberland, and therefore left to his
posterity a rival edifice as a monument of his magnificence.

Around the house, which stood on an eminence in the midst of a narrow Highland
valley, there appeared none of that attention to convenience, far less to
ornament and decoration, which usually surrounds a gentleman’s
habitation. An inclosure or two, divided by dry-stone walls, were the only part
of the domain that was fenced; as to the rest, the narrow slips of level ground
which lay by the side of the brook exhibited a scanty crop of barley, liable to
constant depredations from the herds of wild ponies and black cattle that
grazed upon the adjacent hills. These ever and anon made an incursion upon the
arable ground, which was repelled by the loud, uncouth, and dissonant shouts of
half a dozen Highland swains, all running as if they had been mad, and every
one hallooing a half-starved dog to the rescue of the forage. At a little
distance up the glen was a small and stunted wood of birch; the hills were high
and heathy, but without any variety of surface; so that the whole view was wild
and desolate rather than grand and solitary. Yet, such as it was, no genuine
descendant of Ian nan Chaistel would have changed the domain for Stow or
Blenheim.

There was a sight, however, before the gate, which perhaps would have afforded
the first owner of Blenheim more pleasure than the finest view in the domain
assigned to him by the gratitude of his country. This consisted of about a
hundred Highlanders, in complete dress and arms; at sight of whom the Chieftain
apologised to Waverley in a sort of negligent manner. “He had
forgot,” he said, “that he had ordered a few of his clan out, for
the purpose of seeing that they were in a fit condition to protect the country,
and prevent such accidents as, he was sorry to learn, had befallen the Baron of
Bradwardine. Before they were dismissed, perhaps Captain Waverley might choose
to see them go through a part of their exercise.”

Edward assented, and the men executed with agility and precision some of the
ordinary military movements. They then practised individually at a mark, and
showed extraordinary dexterity in the management of the pistol and firelock.
They took aim, standing, sitting, leaning, or lying prostrate, as they were
commanded, and always with effect upon the target. Next, they paired off for
the broadsword exercise; and, having manifested their individual skill and
dexterity, united in two bodies, and exhibited a sort of mock encounter, in
which the charge, the rally, the flight, the pursuit, and all the current of a
heady fight, were exhibited to the sound of the great war bagpipe.

On a signal made by the Chief, the skirmish was ended. Matches were then made
for running, wrestling, leaping, pitching the bar, and other sports, in which
this feudal militia displayed incredible swiftness, strength, and agility; and
accomplished the purpose which their Chieftain had at heart, by impressing on
Waverley no light sense of their merit as soldiers, and of the power of him who
commanded them by his nod.^[20]

“And what number of such gallant fellows have the happiness to call you
leader?” asked Waverley.

“In a good cause, and under a chieftain whom they loved, the race of Ivor
have seldom taken the field under five hundred claymores. But you are aware,
Captain Waverley, that the disarming act, passed about twenty years ago,
prevents their being in the complete state of preparation as in former times;
and I keep no more of my clan under arms than may defend my own or my
friends’ property, when the country is troubled with such men as your
last night’s landlord; and government, which has removed other means of
defence, must connive at our protecting ourselves.”

“But, with your force, you might soon destroy or put down such gangs as
that of Donald Bean Lean.”

“Yes, doubtless; and my reward would be a summons to deliver up to
General Blakeney, at Stirling, the few broadswords they have left us; there
were little policy in that, methinks. But come, captain, the sound of the pipes
informs me that dinner is prepared. Let me have the honour to show you into my
rude mansion.”

CHAPTER XX.
A HIGHLAND FEAST

Ere Waverley entered the banqueting hall, he was offered the patriarchal
refreshment of a bath for the feet, which the sultry weather, and the morasses
he had traversed, rendered highly acceptable. He was not, indeed, so
luxuriously attended upon this occasion as the heroic travellers in the
Odyssey; the task of ablution and abstersion being performed, not by a
beautiful damsel, trained

To chafe the limb, and pour the fragrant oil,

but by a smoke-dried skinny old Highland woman, who did not seem to think
herself much honoured by the duty imposed upon her, but muttered between her
teeth, “Our fathers’ herds did not feed so near together that I
should do you this service.” A small donation, however, amply reconciled
this ancient handmaiden to the supposed degradation; and, as Edward proceeded
to the hall, she gave him her blessing in the Gaelic proverb, “May the
open hand be filled the fullest.”

The hall, in which the feast was prepared, occupied all the first story of Ian
nan Chaistel’s original erection, and a huge oaken table extended through
its whole length. The apparatus for dinner was simple, even to rudeness, and
the company numerous, even to crowding. At the head of the table was the Chief
himself, with Edward, and two or three Highland visitors of neighbouring clans;
the elders of his own tribe, wadsetters and tacksmen, as they were called, who
occupied portions of his estate as mortgagers or lessees, sat next in rank;
beneath them, their sons and nephews and foster-brethren; then the officers of
the Chief’s household, according to their order; and lowest of all, the
tenants who actually cultivated the ground. Even beyond this long perspective,
Edward might see upon the green, to which a huge pair of folding doors opened,
a multitude of Highlanders of a yet inferior description, who, nevertheless,
were considered as guests, and had their share both of the countenance of the
entertainer and of the cheer of the day. In the distance, and fluctuating round
this extreme verge of the banquet, was a changeful group of women, ragged boys
and girls, beggars, young and old, large greyhounds, and terriers, and
pointers, and curs of low degree; all of whom took some interest, more or less
immediate, in the main action of the piece.

This hospitality, apparently unbounded, had yet its line of economy. Some pains
had been bestowed in dressing the dishes of fish, game, etc., which were at the
upper end of the table, and immediately under the eye of the English stranger.
Lower down stood immense clumsy joints of mutton and beef, which, but for the
absence of pork,^[21] abhorred in
the Highlands, resembled the rude festivity of the banquet of Penelope’s
suitors. But the central dish was a yearling lamb, called “a hog in
har’st,” roasted whole. It was set upon its legs, with a bunch of
parsley in its mouth, and was probably exhibited in that form to gratify the
pride of the cook, who piqued himself more on the plenty than the elegance of
his master’s table. The sides of this poor animal were fiercely attacked
by the clansmen, some with dirks, others with the knives which were usually in
the same sheath with the dagger, so that it was soon rendered a mangled and
rueful spectacle. Lower down still, the victuals seemed of yet coarser quality,
though sufficiently abundant. Broth, onions, cheese, and the fragments of the
feast regaled the sons of Ivor who feasted in the open air.

The liquor was supplied in the same proportion, and under similar regulations.
Excellent claret and champagne were liberally distributed among the
Chief’s immediate neighbours; whisky, plain or diluted, and strong beer
refreshed those who sat near the lower end. Nor did this inequality of
distribution appear to give the least offence. Every one present understood
that his taste was to be formed according to the rank which he held at table;
and, consequently, the tacksmen and their dependants always professed the wine
was too cold for their stomachs, and called, apparently out of choice, for the
liquor which was assigned to them from economy.^[22] The bag-pipers, three in number, screamed,
during the whole time of dinner, a tremendous war-tune; and the echoing of the
vaulted roof, and clang of the Celtic tongue, produced such a Babel of noises
that Waverley dreaded his ears would never recover it. Mac-Ivor, indeed,
apologised for the confusion occasioned by so large a party, and pleaded the
necessity of his situation, on which unlimited hospitality was imposed as a
paramount duty. “These stout idle kinsmen of mine,” he said,
“account my estate as held in trust for their support; and I must find
them beef and ale, while the rogues will do nothing for themselves but practise
the broadsword, or wander about the hills, shooting, fishing, hunting,
drinking, and making love to the lasses of the strath. But what can I do,
Captain Waverley? everything will keep after its kind, whether it be a hawk or
a Highlander.” Edward made the expected answer, in a compliment upon his
possessing so many bold and attached followers.

“Why, yes,” replied the Chief, “were I disposed, like my
father, to put myself in the way of getting one blow on the head, or two on the
neck, I believe the loons would stand by me. But who thinks of that in the
present day, when the maxim is, ‘Better an old woman with a purse in her
hand than three men with belted brands?’” Then, turning to the
company, he proposed the “Health of Captain Waverley, a worthy friend of
his kind neighbour and ally, the Baron of Bradwardine.”

“He is welcome hither,” said one of the elders, “if he come
from Cosmo Comyne Bradwardine.”

“I say nay to that,” said an old man, who apparently did not mean
to pledge the toast;—“I say nay to that. While there is a green
leaf in the forest, there will be fraud in a Comyne.”

“There is nothing but honour in the Baron of Bradwardine,” answered
another ancient; “and the guest that comes hither from him should be
welcome, though he came with blood on his hand, unless it were blood of the
race of Ivor.”

The old man whose cup remained full replied, “There has been blood enough
of the race of Ivor on the hand of Bradwardine.”

“Ah! Ballenkeiroch,” replied the first, “you think rather of
the flash of the carbine at the mains of Tully-Veolan than the glance of the
sword that fought for the cause at Preston.”

“And well I may,” answered Ballenkeiroch; “the flash of the
gun cost me a fair-haired son, and the glance of the sword has done but little
for King James.”

The Chieftain, in two words of French, explained to Waverley that the Baron had
shot this old man’s son in a fray near Tully-Veolan, about seven years
before; and then hastened to remove Ballenkeiroch’s prejudice, by
informing him that Waverley was an Englishman, unconnected by birth or alliance
with the family of Bradwardine; upon which the old gentleman raised the
hitherto-untasted cup and courteously drank to his health. This ceremony being
requited in kind, the Chieftain made a signal for the pipes to cease, and said
aloud, “Where is the song hidden, my friends, that Mac-Murrough cannot
find it?”

Mac-Murrough, the family bhairdh, an aged man, immediately took the
hint, and began to chant, with low and rapid utterance, a profusion of Celtic
verses, which were received by the audience with all the applause of
enthusiasm. As he advanced in his declamation, his ardour seemed to increase.
He had at first spoken with his eyes fixed on the ground; he now cast them
around as if beseeching, and anon as if commanding, attention, and his tones
rose into wild and impassioned notes, accompanied with appropriate gestures. He
seemed to Edward, who attended to him with much interest, to recite many proper
names, to lament the dead, to apostrophise the absent, to exhort, and entreat,
and animate those who were present. Waverley thought he even discerned his own
name, and was convinced his conjecture was right from the eyes of the company
being at that moment turned towards him simultaneously. The ardour of the poet
appeared to communicate itself to the audience. Their wild and sun-burnt
countenances assumed a fiercer and more animated expression; all bent forward
towards the reciter, many sprung up and waved their arms in ecstasy, and some
laid their hands on their swords. When the song ceased, there was a deep pause,
while the aroused feelings of the poet and of the hearers gradually subsided
into their usual channel.

The Chieftain, who, during this scene had appeared rather to watch the emotions
which were excited than to partake their high tone of enthusiasm, filled with
claret a small silver cup which stood by him. “Give this,” he said
to an attendant, “to Mac-Murrough nan Fonn (that is, of the songs), and
when he has drank the juice, bid him keep, for the sake of Vich Ian Vohr, the
shell of the gourd which contained it.” The gift was received by
Mac-Murrough with profound gratitude; he drank the wine, and, kissing the cup,
shrouded it with reverence in the plaid which was folded on his bosom. He then
burst forth into what Edward justly supposed to be an extemporaneous effusion
of thanks and praises of his Chief. It was received with applause, but did not
produce the effect of his first poem. It was obvious, however, that the clan
regarded the generosity of their Chieftain with high approbation. Many approved
Gaelic toasts were then proposed, of some of which the Chieftain gave his guest
the following versions:—

“To him that will not turn his back on friend or foe.” “To
him that never forsook a comrade.” “To him that never bought or
sold justice.” “Hospitality to the exile, and broken bones to the
tyrant.” “The lads with the kilts.” “Highlanders,
shoulder to shoulder,”—with many other pithy sentiments of the like
nature.

Edward was particularly solicitous to know the meaning of that song which
appeared to produce such effect upon the passions of the company, and hinted
his curiosity to his host. “As I observe,” said the Chieftain,
“that you have passed the bottle during the last three rounds, I was
about to propose to you to retire to my sister’s tea-table, who can
explain these things to you better than I can. Although I cannot stint my clan
in the usual current of their festivity, yet I neither am addicted myself to
exceed in its amount, nor do I,” added he, smiling, “keep a Bear to
devour the intellects of such as can make good use of them.”

Edward readily assented to this proposal, and the Chieftain, saying a few words
to those around him, left the table, followed by Waverley. As the door closed
behind them, Edward heard Vich Ian Vohr’s health invoked with a wild and
animated cheer, that expressed the satisfaction of the guests and the depth of
their devotion to his service.

CHAPTER XXI.
THE CHIEFTAIN’S SISTER

The drawing-room of Flora Mac-Ivor was furnished in the plainest and most
simple manner; for at Glennaquoich every other sort of expenditure was
retrenched as much as possible, for the purpose of maintaining, in its full
dignity, the hospitality of the Chieftain, and retaining and multiplying the
number of his dependants and adherents. But there was no appearance of this
parsimony in the dress of the lady herself, which was in texture elegant, and
even rich, and arranged in a manner which partook partly of the Parisian
fashion and partly of the more simple dress of the Highlands, blended together
with great taste. Her hair was not disfigured by the art of the friseur, but
fell in jetty ringlets on her neck, confined only by a circlet, richly set with
diamonds. This peculiarity she adopted in compliance with the Highland
prejudices, which could not endure that a woman’s head should be covered
before wedlock.

Flora Mac-Ivor bore a most striking resemblance to her brother Fergus; so much
so that they might have played Viola and Sebastian with the same exquisite
effect produced by the appearance of Mrs. Henry Siddons and her brother, Mr.
William Murray, in these characters. They had the same antique and regular
correctness of profile; the same dark eyes, eye-lashes, and eye-brows; the same
clearness of complexion, excepting that Fergus’s was embrowned by
exercise and Flora’s possessed the utmost feminine delicacy. But the
haughty and somewhat stern regularity of Fergus’s features was
beautifully softened in those of Flora. Their voices were also similar in tone,
though differing in the key. That of Fergus, especially while issuing orders to
his followers during their military exercise, reminded Edward of a favourite
passage in the description of Emetrius:

“Whose voice was heard around,
Loud as a trumpet with a silver sound.”

That of Flora, on the contrary, was soft and sweet—“an excellent
thing in woman”; yet, in urging any favourite topic, which she often
pursued with natural eloquence, it possessed as well the tones which impress
awe and conviction as those of persuasive insinuation. The eager glance of the
keen black eye, which, in the Chieftain, seemed impatient even of the material
obstacles it encountered, had in his sister acquired a gentle pensiveness. His
looks seemed to seek glory, power, all that could exalt him above others in the
race of humanity; while those of his sister, as if she were already conscious
of mental superiority, seemed to pity, rather than envy, those who were
struggling for any farther distinction. Her sentiments corresponded with the
expression of her countenance. Early education had impressed upon her mind, as
well as on that of the Chieftain, the most devoted attachment to the exiled
family of Stuart. She believed it the duty of her brother, of his clan, of
every man in Britain, at whatever personal hazard, to contribute to that
restoration which the partisans of the Chevalier St. George had not ceased to
hope for. For this she was prepared to do all, to suffer all, to sacrifice all.
But her loyalty, as it exceeded her brother’s in fanaticism, excelled it
also in purity. Accustomed to petty intrigue, and necessarily involved in a
thousand paltry and selfish discussions, ambitious also by nature, his
political faith was tinctured, at least, if not tainted, by the views of
interest and advancement so easily combined with it; and at the moment he
should unsheathe his claymore, it might be difficult to say whether it would be
most with the view of making James Stuart a king or Fergus Mac-Ivor an earl.
This, indeed, was a mixture of feeling which he did not avow even to himself,
but it existed, nevertheless, in a powerful degree.

In Flora’s bosom, on the contrary, the zeal of loyalty burnt pure and
unmixed with any selfish feeling; she would have as soon made religion the mask
of ambitious and interested views as have shrouded them under the opinions
which she had been taught to think patriotism. Such instances of devotion were
not uncommon among the followers of the unhappy race of Stuart, of which many
memorable proofs will recur to the minds of most of my readers. But peculiar
attention on the part of the Chevalier de St. George and his princess to the
parents of Fergus and his sister, and to themselves when orphans, had riveted
their faith. Fergus, upon the death of his parents, had been for some time a
page of honour in the train of the Chevalier’s lady, and, from his beauty
and sprightly temper, was uniformly treated by her with the utmost distinction.
This was also extended to Flora, who was maintained for some time at a convent
of the first order at the princess’s expense, and removed from thence
into her own family, where she spent nearly two years. Both brother and sister
retained the deepest and most grateful sense of her kindness.

Having thus touched upon the leading principle of Flora’s character, I
may dismiss the rest more slightly. She was highly accomplished, and had
acquired those elegant manners to be expected from one who, in early youth, had
been the companion of a princess; yet she had not learned to substitute the
gloss of politeness for the reality of feeling. When settled in the lonely
regions of Glennaquoich, she found that her resources in French, English, and
Italian literature were likely to be few and interrupted; and, in order to fill
up the vacant time, she bestowed a part of it upon the music and poetical
traditions of the Highlanders, and began really to feel the pleasure in the
pursuit which her brother, whose perceptions of literary merit were more blunt,
rather affected for the sake of popularity than actually experienced. Her
resolution was strengthened in these researches by the extreme delight which
her inquiries seemed to afford those to whom she resorted for information.

Her love of her clan, an attachment which was almost hereditary in her bosom,
was, like her loyalty, a more pure passion than that of her brother. He was too
thorough a politician, regarded his patriarchal influence too much as the means
of accomplishing his own aggrandisement, that we should term him the model of a
Highland Chieftain. Flora felt the same anxiety for cherishing and extending
their patriarchal sway, but it was with the generous desire of vindicating from
poverty, or at least from want and foreign oppression, those whom her brother
was by birth, according to the notions of the time and country, entitled to
govern. The savings of her income, for she had a small pension from the
Princess Sobieski, were dedicated, not to add to the comforts of the peasantry,
for that was a word which they neither knew nor apparently wished to know, but
to relieve their absolute necessities when in sickness or extreme old age. At
every other period they rather toiled to procure something which they might
share with the Chief, as a proof of their attachment, than expected other
assistance from him save what was afforded by the rude hospitality of his
castle, and the general division and subdivision of his estate among them.
Flora was so much beloved by them that, when Mac-Murrough composed a song in
which he enumerated all the principal beauties of the district, and intimated
her superiority by concluding, that “the fairest apple hung on the
highest bough,” he received, in donatives from the individuals of the
clan, more seed-barley than would have sowed his Highland Parnassus, the
bard’s croft, as it was called, ten times over.

From situation as well as choice, Miss Mac-Ivor’s society was extremely
limited. Her most intimate friend had been Rose Bradwardine, to whom she was
much attached; and when seen together, they would have afforded an artist two
admirable subjects for the gay and the melancholy muse. Indeed Rose was so
tenderly watched by her father, and her circle of wishes was so limited, that
none arose but what he was willing to gratify, and scarce any which did not
come within the compass of his power. With Flora it was otherwise. While almost
a girl she had undergone the most complete change of scene, from gaiety and
splendour to absolute solitude and comparative poverty; and the ideas and
wishes which she chiefly fostered respected great national events, and changes
not to be brought round without both hazard and bloodshed, and therefore not to
be thought of with levity. Her manner, consequently, was grave, though she
readily contributed her talents to the amusement of society, and stood very
high in the opinion of the old Baron, who used to sing along with her such
French duets of Lindor and Cloris, etc., as were in fashion about the end of
the reign of old Louis le Grand.

It was generally believed, though no one durst have hinted it to the Baron of
Bradwardine, that Flora’s entreaties had no small share in allaying the
wrath of Fergus upon occasion of their quarrel. She took her brother on the
assailable side, by dwelling first upon the Baron’s age, and then
representing the injury which the cause might sustain, and the damage which
must arise to his own character in point of prudence—so necessary to a
political agent, if he persisted in carrying it to extremity. Otherwise it is
probable it would have terminated in a duel, both because the Baron had, on a
former occasion, shed blood of the clan, though the matter had been timely
accommodated, and on account of his high reputation for address at his weapon,
which Fergus almost condescended to envy. For the same reason she had urged
their reconciliation, which the Chieftain the more readily agreed to as it
favoured some ulterior projects of his own.

To this young lady, now presiding at the female empire of the tea-table, Fergus
introduced Captain Waverley, whom she received with the usual forms of
politeness.

CHAPTER XXII.
HIGHLAND MINSTRELSY

When the first salutations had passed, Fergus said to his sister, “My
dear Flora, before I return to the barbarous ritual of our forefathers, I must
tell you that Captain Waverley is a worshipper of the Celtic muse, not the less
so perhaps that he does not understand a word of her language. I have told him
you are eminent as a translator of Highland poetry, and that Mac-Murrough
admires your version of his songs upon the same principle that Captain Waverley
admires the original,—because he does not comprehend them. Will you have
the goodness to read or recite to our guest in English the extraordinary string
of names which Mac-Murrough has tacked together in Gaelic? My life to a
moor-fowl’s feather, you are provided with a version; for I know you are
in all the bard’s councils, and acquainted with his songs long before he
rehearses them in the hall.”

“How can you say so, Fergus? You know how little these verses can
possibly interest an English stranger, even if I could translate them as you
pretend.”

“Not less than they interest me, lady fair. To-day your joint
composition, for I insist you had a share in it, has cost me the last silver
cup in the castle, and I suppose will cost me something else next time I hold
cour plénière, if the muse descends on Mac-Murrough; for you know our
proverb,—“When the hand of the chief ceases to bestow, the breath
of the bard is frozen in the utterance.”—Well, I would it were even
so: there are three things that are useless to a modern Highlander,—a
sword which he must not draw, a bard to sing of deeds which he dare not
imitate, and a large goat-skin purse without a louis-d’or to put into
it.”

“Well, brother, since you betray my secrets, you cannot expect me to keep
yours. I assure you, Captain Waverley, that Fergus is too proud to exchange his
broadsword for a maréchal’s baton, that he esteems Mac-Murrough a far
greater poet than Homer, and would not give up his goat-skin purse for all the
louis-d’or which it could contain.”

“Well pronounced, Flora; blow for blow, as Conan^[23] said to the devil. Now do you two talk of
bards and poetry, if not of purses and claymores, while I return to do the
final honours to the senators of the tribe of Ivor.” So saying, he left
the room.

The conversation continued between Flora and Waverley; for two well-dressed
young women, whose character seemed to hover between that of companions and
dependants, took no share in it. They were both pretty girls, but served only
as foils to the grace and beauty of their patroness. The discourse followed the
turn which the Chieftain had given it, and Waverley was equally amused and
surprised with the account which the lady gave him of Celtic poetry.

“The recitation,” she said, “of poems recording the feats of
heroes, the complaints of lovers, and the wars of contending tribes, forms the
chief amusement of a winter fire-side in the Highlands. Some of these are said
to be very ancient, and if they are ever translated into any of the languages
of civilised Europe, cannot fail to produce a deep and general sensation.
Others are more modern, the composition of those family bards whom the
chieftains of more distinguished name and power retain as the poets and
historians of their tribes. These, of course, possess various degrees of merit;
but much of it must evaporate in translation, or be lost on those who do not
sympathise with the feelings of the poet.”

“And your bard, whose effusions seemed to produce such effect upon the
company to-day, is he reckoned among the favourite poets of the
mountains?”

“That is a trying question. His reputation is high among his countrymen,
and you must not expect me to depreciate it.[*]

[* The Highland poet almost always was an improvisatore. Captain Burt met one
of them at Lovat’s table.]

“But the song, Miss Mac-Ivor, seemed to awaken all those warriors, both
young and old.”

“The song is little more than a catalogue of names of the Highland clans
under their distinctive peculiarities, and an exhortation to them to remember
and to emulate the actions of their forefathers.”

“And am I wrong in conjecturing, however extraordinary the guess appears,
that there was some allusion to me in the verses which he recited?”

“You have a quick observation, Captain Waverley, which in this instance
has not deceived you. The Gaelic language, being uncommonly vocalic, is well
adapted for sudden and extemporaneous poetry; and a bard seldom fails to
augment the effects of a premeditated song by throwing in any stanzas which may
be suggested by the circumstances attending the recitation.”

“I would give my best horse to know what the Highland bard could find to
say of such an unworthy Southron as myself.”

“It shall not even cost you a lock of his mane. Una, Mavourneen!
(She spoke a few words to one of the young girls in attendance, who instantly
curtsied and tripped out of the room.) I have sent Una to learn from the bard
the expressions he used, and you shall command my skill as dragoman.”

Una returned in a few minutes, and repeated to her mistress a few lines in
Gaelic. Flora seemed to think for a moment, and then, slightly colouring, she
turned to Waverley—“It is impossible to gratify your curiosity,
Captain Waverley, without exposing my own presumption. If you will give me a
few moments for consideration, I will endeavour to engraft the meaning of these
lines upon a rude English translation which I have attempted of a part of the
original. The duties of the tea-table seem to be concluded, and, as the evening
is delightful, Una will show you the way to one of my favourite haunts, and
Cathleen and I will join you there.”

Una, having received instructions in her native language, conducted Waverley
out by a passage different from that through which he had entered the
apartment. At a distance he heard the hall of the Chief still resounding with
the clang of bagpipes and the high applause of his guests. Having gained the
open air by a postern door, they walked a little way up the wild, bleak, and
narrow valley in which the house was situated, following the course of the
stream that winded through it. In a spot, about a quarter of a mile from the
castle, two brooks, which formed the little river, had their junction. The
larger of the two came down the long bare valley, which extended, apparently
without any change or elevation of character, as far as the hills which formed
its boundary permitted the eye to reach. But the other stream, which had its
source among the mountains on the left hand of the strath, seemed to issue from
a very narrow and dark opening betwixt two large rocks. These streams were
different also in character. The larger was placid, and even sullen in its
course, wheeling in deep eddies, or sleeping in dark blue pools; but the
motions of the lesser brook were rapid and furious, issuing from between
precipices, like a maniac from his confinement, all foam and uproar.

It was up the course of this last stream that Waverley, like a knight of
romance, was conducted by the fair Highland damsel, his silent guide. A small
path, which had been rendered easy in many places for Flora’s
accommodation, led him through scenery of a very different description from
that which he had just quitted. Around the castle all was cold, bare, and
desolate, yet tame even in desolation; but this narrow glen, at so short a
distance, seemed to open into the land of romance. The rocks assumed a thousand
peculiar and varied forms. In one place a crag of huge size presented its
gigantic bulk, as if to forbid the passenger’s farther progress; and it
was not until he approached its very base that Waverley discerned the sudden
and acute turn by which the pathway wheeled its course around this formidable
obstacle. In another spot the projecting rocks from the opposite sides of the
chasm had approached so near to each other that two pine-trees laid across, and
covered with turf, formed a rustic bridge at the height of at least one hundred
and fifty feet. It had no ledges, and was barely three feet in breadth.

While gazing at this pass of peril, which crossed, like a single black line,
the small portion of blue sky not intercepted by the projecting rocks on either
side, it was with a sensation of horror that Waverley beheld Flora and her
attendant appear, like inhabitants of another region, propped, as it were, in
mid air, upon this trembling structure. She stopped upon observing him below,
and, with an air of graceful ease which made him shudder, waved her
handkerchief to him by way of signal. He was unable, from the sense of
dizziness which her situation conveyed, to return the salute; and was never
more relieved than when the fair apparition passed on from the precarious
eminence which she seemed to occupy with so much indifference, and disappeared
on the other side.

Advancing a few yards, and passing under the bridge which he had viewed with so
much terror, the path ascended rapidly from the edge of the brook, and the glen
widened into a sylvan amphitheatre, waving with birch, young oaks, and hazels,
with here and there a scattered yew-tree. The rocks now receded, but still
showed their grey and shaggy crests rising among the copse-wood. Still higher
rose eminences and peaks, some bare, some clothed with wood, some round and
purple with heath, and others splintered into rocks and crags. At a short
turning the path, which had for some furlongs lost sight of the brook, suddenly
placed Waverley in front of a romantic waterfall. It was not so remarkable
either for great height or quantity of water as for the beautiful
accompaniments which made the spot interesting. After a broken cataract of
about twenty feet, the stream was received in a large natural basin filled to
the brim with water, which, where the bubbles of the fall subsided, was so
exquisitely clear that, although it was of great depth, the eye could discern
each pebble at the bottom. Eddying round this reservoir, the brook found its
way as if over a broken part of the ledge, and formed a second fall, which
seemed to seek the very abyss; then, wheeling out beneath from among the smooth
dark rocks which it had polished for ages, it wandered murmuring down the glen,
forming the stream up which Waverley had just ascended.^[24] The borders of this romantic reservoir
corresponded in beauty; but it was beauty of a stern and commanding cast, as if
in the act of expanding into grandeur. Mossy banks of turf were broken and
interrupted by huge fragments of rock, and decorated with trees and shrubs,
some of which had been planted under the direction of Flora, but so cautiously
that they added to the grace without diminishing the romantic wildness of the
scene.

Here, like one of those lovely forms which decorate the landscapes of Poussin,
Waverley found Flora gazing on the waterfall. Two paces further back stood
Cathleen, holding a small Scottish harp, the use of which had been taught to
Flora by Rory Dall, one of the last harpers of the Western Highlands. The sun,
now stooping in the west, gave a rich and varied tinge to all the objects which
surrounded Waverley, and seemed to add more than human brilliancy to the full
expressive darkness of Flora’s eye, exalted the richness and purity of
her complexion, and enhanced the dignity and grace of her beautiful form.
Edward thought he had never, even in his wildest dreams, imagined a figure of
such exquisite and interesting loveliness. The wild beauty of the retreat,
bursting upon him as if by magic, augmented the mingled feeling of delight and
awe with which he approached her, like a fair enchantress of Boiardo or
Ariosto, by whose nod the scenery around seemed to have been created an Eden in
the wilderness.

Flora, like every beautiful woman, was conscious of her own power, and pleased
with its effects, which she could easily discern from the respectful yet
confused address of the young soldier. But, as she possessed excellent sense,
she gave the romance of the scene and other accidental circumstances full
weight in appreciating the feelings with which Waverley seemed obviously to be
impressed; and, unacquainted with the fanciful and susceptible peculiarities of
his character, considered his homage as the passing tribute which a woman of
even inferior charms might have expected in such a situation. She therefore
quietly led the way to a spot at such a distance from the cascade that its
sound should rather accompany than interrupt that of her voice and instrument,
and, sitting down upon a mossy fragment of rock, she took the harp from
Cathleen.

“I have given you the trouble of walking to this spot, Captain Waverley,
both because I thought the scenery would interest you, and because a Highland
song would suffer still more from my imperfect translation were I to introduce
it without its own wild and appropriate accompaniments. To speak in the
poetical language of my country, the seat of the Celtic Muse is in the mist of
the secret and solitary hill, and her voice in the murmur of the mountain
stream. He who woos her must love the barren rock more than the fertile valley,
and the solitude of the desert better than the festivity of the hall.”

Few could have heard this lovely woman make this declaration, with a voice
where harmony was exalted by pathos, without exclaiming that the muse whom she
invoked could never find a more appropriate representative. But Waverley,
though the thought rushed on his mind, found no courage to utter it. Indeed,
the wild feeling of romantic delight with which he heard the few first notes
she drew from her instrument amounted almost to a sense of pain. He would not
for worlds have quitted his place by her side; yet he almost longed for
solitude, that he might decipher and examine at leisure the complication of
emotions which now agitated his bosom.

Flora had exchanged the measured and monotonous recitative of the bard for a
lofty and uncommon Highland air, which had been a battle-song in former ages. A
few irregular strains introduced a prelude of a wild and peculiar tone, which
harmonised well with the distant waterfall, and the soft sigh of the evening
breeze in the rustling leaves of an aspen, which overhung the seat of the fair
harpress. The following verses convey but little idea of the feelings with
which, so sung and accompanied, they were heard by Waverley:—

There is mist on the mountain, and night on the vale,
But more dark is the sleep of the sons of the Gael.
A stranger commanded—it sunk on the land,
It has frozen each heart, and benumb’d every hand!

The dirk and the target lie sordid with dust,
The bloodless claymore is but redden’d with rust;
On the hill or the glen if a gun should appear,
It is only to war with the heath-cock or deer.

The deeds of our sires if our bards should rehearse,
Let a blush or a blow be the meed of their verse!
Be mute every string, and be hush’d every tone,
That shall bid us remember the fame that is flown.

But the dark hours of night and of slumber are past,
The morn on our mountains is dawning at last;
Glenaladale’s peaks are illumined with the rays,
And the streams of Glenfinnan[*] leap bright in the blaze.

O high-minded Moray,[**] the exiled! the dear!
In the blush of the dawning the STANDARD uprear!
Wide, wide on the winds of the North let it fly,
Like the sun’s latest flash when the tempest is nigh!

Ye sons of the strong, when that dawning shall break,
Need the harp of the aged remind you to wake?
That dawn never beam’d on your forefathers’ eye,
But it roused each high chieftain to vanquish or die.

O, sprung from the Kings who in Islay kept state,
Proud chiefs of Clan Ranald, Glengarry, and Sleat!
Combine like three streams from one mountain of snow,
And resistless in union rush down on the foe!

True son of Sir Evan, undaunted Lochiel,
Place thy targe on thy shoulder and burnish thy steel!
Rough Keppoch, give breath to thy bugle’s bold swell,
Till far Coryarrick resound to the knell!

Stern son of Lord Kenneth, high chief of Kintail,
Let the stag in thy standard bound wild in the gale!
May the race of Clan Gillean, the fearless and free,
Remember Glenlivat, Harlaw, and Dundee!

Let the clan of grey Fingon, whose offspring has given
Such heroes to earth and such martyrs to heaven,
Unite with the race of renown’d Rorri More,
To launch the long galley and stretch to the oar.

How Mac-Shimei will joy when their chief shall display
The yew-crested bonnet o’er tresses of grey!
How the race of wrong’d Alpine and murder’d Glencoe
Shall shout for revenge when they pour on the foe!

Ye sons of brown Dermid, who slew the wild boar,
Resume the pure faith of the great Callum-More!
Mac-Neil of the islands, and Moy of the Lake,
For honour, for freedom, for vengeance awake!

[* The young and daring adventurer, Charles Edward, landed at Glenaladale, in
Moidart, and displayed his standard in the valley of Glenfinnan, mustering
around it the Mac-Donalds, the Camerons, and other less numerous clans, whom he
had prevailed on to join him. There is a monument erected on the spot, with a
Latin inscription by the late Doctor Gregory.]

[** The Marquis of Tullibardine’s elder brother, who, long exiled,
returned to Scotland with Charles Edward in 1745.]

Here a large greyhound, bounding up the glen, jumped upon Flora and interrupted
her music by his importunate caresses. At a distant whistle he turned and shot
down the path again with the rapidity of an arrow. “That is
Fergus’s faithful attendant, Captain Waverley, and that was his signal.
He likes no poetry but what is humorous, and comes in good time to interrupt my
long catalogue of the tribes, whom one of your saucy English poets calls

“‘Our bootless host of high-born beggars,
Mac-Leans, Mac-Kenzies, and Mac-Gregors.’”

Waverley expressed his regret at the interruption.

“O you cannot guess how much you have lost! The bard, as in duty bound,
has addressed three long stanzas to Vich Ian Vohr of the Banners, enumerating
all his great properties, and not forgetting his being a cheerer of the harper
and bard—‘a giver of bounteous gifts.’ Besides, you should
have heard a practical admonition to the fair-haired son of the stranger, who
lives in the land where the grass is always green—the rider on the
shining pampered steed, whose hue is like the raven, and whose neigh is like
the scream of the eagle for battle. This valiant horseman is affectionately
conjured to remember that his ancestors were distinguished by their loyalty as
well as by their courage. All this you have lost; but, since your curiosity is
not satisfied, I judge, from the distant sound of my brother’s whistle, I
may have time to sing the concluding stanzas before he comes to laugh at my
translation.”

“Awake on your hills, on your islands awake,
Brave sons of the mountain, the frith, and the lake!
’T is the bugle—but not for the chase is the call;
’T is the pibroch’s shrill summons—but not to the hall.

“’T is the summons of heroes for conquest or death,
When the banners are blazing on mountain and heath:
They call to the dirk, the claymore, and the targe,
To the march and the muster, the line and the charge.

“Be the brand of each chieftain like Fin’s in his ire!
May the blood through his veins flow like currents of fire!
Burst the base foreign yoke as your sires did of yore,
Or die like your sires, and endure it no more!

CHAPTER XXIII.
WAVERLEY CONTINUES AT GLENNAQUOICH

As Flora concluded her song, Fergus stood before them. “I knew I should
find you here, even without the assistance of my friend Bran. A simple and
unsublimed taste now, like my own, would prefer a jet d’eau at
Versailles to this cascade, with all its accompaniments of rock and roar; but
this is Flora’s Parnassus, Captain Waverley, and that fountain her
Helicon. It would be greatly for the benefit of my cellar if she could teach
her coadjutor, Mac-Murrough, the value of its influence: he has just drunk a
pint of usquebaugh to correct, he said, the coldness of the claret. Let me try
its virtues.” He sipped a little water in the hollow of his hand, and
immediately commenced, with a theatrical air,—

“O Lady of the desert, hail!
That lovest the harping of the Gael,
Through fair and fertile regions borne,
Where never yet grew grass or corn.

But English poetry will never succeed under the influence of a Highland
Helicon. Allons, courage!

O vous, qui buvez, à tasse pleine,
A cette heureuse fontaine,
Où on ne voit, sur le rivage,
    Que quelques vilains troupeaux,
Suivis de nymphes de village,
    Qui les escortent sans sabots—”

“A truce, dear Fergus! spare us those most tedious and insipid persons of
all Arcadia. Do not, for Heaven’s sake, bring down Coridon and Lindor
upon us.”

“Nay, if you cannot relish la houlette et le chalumeau, have with
you in heroic strains.”

“Dear Fergus, you have certainly partaken of the inspiration of
Mac-Murrough’s cup rather than of mine.”

“I disclaim it, ma belle demoiselle, although I protest it would
be the more congenial of the two. Which of your crack-brained Italian romancers
is it that says,

Io d’Elicona niente
Mi curo, in fe de Dio; che’l bere d’acque
(Bea chi ber ne vuol) sempre mi spiacque![*]

[* Good sooth, I reck nought of your Helicon;
Drink water whoso will, in faith I will drink none.]

But if you prefer the Gaelic, Captain Waverley, here is little Cathleen shall
sing you Drimmindhu. Come, Cathleen, astore (that is, my dear), begin;
no apologies to the Cean-kinné.”

Cathleen sung with much liveliness a little Gaelic song, the burlesque elegy of
a countryman on the loss of his cow, the comic tones of which, though he did
not understand the language, made Waverley laugh more than once.[*]

[* This ancient Gaelic ditty is still well known, both in the Highlands and in
Ireland. It was translated into English, and published, if I mistake not, under
the auspices of the facetious Tom D’Urfey, by the title of “Colley,
my Cow.”]

“Admirable, Cathleen!” cried the Chieftain; “I must find you
a handsome husband among the clansmen one of these days.”

Cathleen laughed, blushed, and sheltered herself behind her companion.

In the progress of their return to the castle, the Chieftain warmly pressed
Waverley to remain for a week or two, in order to see a grand hunting party, in
which he and some other Highland gentlemen proposed to join. The charms of
melody and beauty were too strongly impressed in Edward’s breast to
permit his declining an invitation so pleasing. It was agreed, therefore, that
he should write a note to the Baron of Bradwardine, expressing his intention to
stay a fortnight at Glennaquoich, and requesting him to forward by the bearer
(a gilly of the Chieftain’s) any letters which might have arrived
for him.

This turned the discourse upon the Baron, whom Fergus highly extolled as a
gentleman and soldier. His character was touched with yet more discrimination
by Flora, who observed he was the very model of the old Scottish cavalier, with
all his excellencies and peculiarities. “It is a character, Captain
Waverley, which is fast disappearing; for its best point was a self-respect
which was never lost sight of till now. But in the present time the gentlemen
whose principles do not permit them to pay court to the existing government are
neglected and degraded, and many conduct themselves accordingly; and, like some
of the persons you have seen at Tully-Veolan, adopt habits and companions
inconsistent with their birth and breeding. The ruthless proscription of party
seems to degrade the victims whom it brands, however unjustly. But let us hope
a brighter day is approaching, when a Scottish country gentleman may be a
scholar without the pedantry of our friend the Baron, a sportsman without the
low habits of Mr. Falconer, and a judicious improver of his property without
becoming a boorish two-legged steer like Killancureit.”

Thus did Flora prophesy a revolution, which time indeed has produced, but in a
manner very different from what she had in her mind.

The amiable Rose was next mentioned, with the warmest encomium on her person,
manners, and mind. “That man,” said Flora, “will find an
inestimable treasure in the affections of Rose Bradwardine who shall be so
fortunate as to become their object. Her very soul is in home, and in the
discharge of all those quiet virtues of which home is the centre. Her husband
will be to her what her father now is, the object of all her care, solicitude,
and affection. She will see nothing, and connect herself with nothing, but by
him and through him. If he is a man of sense and virtue, she will sympathise in
his sorrows, divert his fatigue, and share his pleasures. If she becomes the
property of a churlish or negligent husband, she will suit his taste also, for
she will not long survive his unkindness. And, alas! how great is the chance
that some such unworthy lot may be that of my poor friend! O that I were a
queen this moment, and could command the most amiable and worthy youth of my
kingdom to accept happiness with the hand of Rose Bradwardine!”

“I wish you would command her to accept mine en attendant,”
said Fergus, laughing.

I don’t know by what caprice it was that this wish, however jocularly
expressed, rather jarred on Edward’s feelings, notwithstanding his
growing inclination to Flora and his indifference to Miss Bradwardine. This is
one of the inexplicabilities of human nature, which we leave without comment.

“Yours, brother?” answered Flora, regarding him steadily.
“No; you have another bride—Honour; and the dangers you must run in
pursuit of her rival would break poor Rose’s heart.”

With this discourse they reached the castle, and Waverley soon prepared his
despatches for Tully-Veolan. As he knew the Baron was punctilious in such
matters, he was about to impress his billet with a seal on which his armorial
bearings were engraved, but he did not find it at his watch, and thought he
must have left it at Tully-Veolan. He mentioned his loss, borrowing at the same
time the family seal of the Chieftain.

“Surely,” said Miss Mac-Ivor, “Donald Bean Lean would
not—”

“My life for him in such circumstances,” answered her brother;
“besides, he would never have left the watch behind.”

“After all, Fergus,” said Flora, “and with every allowance, I
am surprised you can countenance that man.”

“I countenance him? This kind sister of mine would persuade you, Captain
Waverley, that I take what the people of old used to call “a
steakraid,” that is, a “collop of the foray,” or, in plainer
words, a portion of the robber’s booty, paid by him to the Laird, or
Chief, through whose grounds he drove his prey. O, it is certain that, unless I
can find some way to charm Flora’s tongue, General Blakeney will send a
sergeant’s party from Stirling (this he said with haughty and emphatic
irony) to seize Vich Ian Vohr, as they nickname me, in his own castle.”

“Now, Fergus, must not our guest be sensible that all this is folly and
affectation? You have men enough to serve you without enlisting banditti, and
your own honour is above taint. Why don’t you send this Donald Bean Lean,
whom I hate for his smoothness and duplicity even more than for his rapine, out
of your country at once? No cause should induce me to tolerate such a
character.”

“No cause, Flora?” said the Chieftain significantly.

“No cause, Fergus! not even that which is nearest to my heart. Spare it
the omen of such evil supporters!”

“O but, sister,” rejoined the Chief gaily, “you don’t
consider my respect for la belle passion. Evan Dhu Maccombich is in love
with Donald’s daughter, Alice, and you cannot expect me to disturb him in
his amours. Why, the whole clan would cry shame on me. You know it is one of
their wise sayings, that a kinsman is part of a man’s body, but a
foster-brother is a piece of his heart.”

“Well, Fergus, there is no disputing with you; but I would all this may
end well.”

“Devoutly prayed, my dear and prophetic sister, and the best way in the
world to close a dubious argument. But hear ye not the pipes, Captain Waverley?
Perhaps you will like better to dance to them in the hall than to be deafened
with their harmony without taking part in the exercise they invite us
to.”

Waverley took Flora’s hand. The dance, song, and merry-making proceeded,
and closed the day’s entertainment at the castle of Vich Ian Vohr. Edward
at length retired, his mind agitated by a variety of new and conflicting
feelings, which detained him from rest for some time, in that not unpleasing
state of mind in which fancy takes the helm, and the soul rather drifts
passively along with the rapid and confused tide of reflections than exerts
itself to encounter, systematise, or examine them. At a late hour he fell
asleep, and dreamed of Flora Mac-Ivor.

CHAPTER XXIV.
A STAG-HUNT AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

Shall this be a long or a short chapter? This is a question in which you,
gentle reader, have no vote, however much you may be interested in the
consequences; just as you may (like myself) probably have nothing to do with
the imposing a new tax, excepting the trifling circumstance of being obliged to
pay it. More happy surely in the present case, since, though it lies within my
arbitrary power to extend my materials as I think proper, I cannot call you
into Exchequer if you do not think proper to read my narrative. Let me
therefore consider. It is true that the annals and documents in my hands say
but little of this Highland chase; but then I can find copious materials for
description elsewhere. There is old Lindsay of Pitscottie ready at my elbow,
with his Athole hunting, and his “lofted and joisted palace of green
timber; with all kind of drink to be had in burgh and land, as ale, beer, wine,
muscadel, malvaise, hippocras, and aqua-vitæ; with wheat-bread, main-bread,
ginge-bread, beef, mutton, lamb, veal, venison, goose, grice, capon, coney,
crane, swan, partridge, plover, duck, drake, brissel-cock, pawnies, black-cock,
muir-fowl, and capercailzies”; not forgetting the “costly bedding,
vaiselle, and napry,” and least of all the “excelling stewards,
cunning baxters, excellent cooks, and pottingars, with confections and drugs
for the desserts.” Besides the particulars which may be thence gleaned
for this Highland feast (the splendour of which induced the Pope’s legate
to dissent from an opinion which he had hitherto held, that Scotland, namely,
was the—the—the latter end of the world)—besides these, might
I not illuminate my pages with Taylor the Water Poet’s hunting in the
braes of Mar, where,—