Old Mortality | Page 6

the "high-flying" friends
of the Covenant. Scott had Cavalier sympathies, as Macaulay had
Covenanting sympathies. That Scott is more unjust to the Covenanters
than Macaulay to Claverhouse historians will scarcely maintain.
Neither history or fiction would be very delightful if they were warless.
This must serve as an apology more needed by Macaulay--than by Sir
Walter. His reply to Dr. McCrie is marked by excellent temper, humour,
and good humor. The "Quarterly Review" ends with the well known
reference to his brother Tom's suspected authorship: "We intended here
to conclude this long article, when a strong report reached us of certain
transatlantic confessions, which, if genuine (though of this we know
nothing), assign a different author to those volumes than the party
suspected by our Scottish correspondents. Yet a critic may be excused
for seizing upon the nearest suspected person, or the principle happily
expressed by Claverhouse in a letter to the Earl of Linlithgow. He had
been, it seems, in search of a gifted weaver who used to hold forth at
conventicles: 'I sent for the webster, they brought in his brother for him:
though he, maybe, cannot preach like his brother, I doubt not but he is
as well principled as he, wherefore I thought it would be no great fault
to give him the trouble to go to jail with the rest.'"
Nobody who read this could doubt that Scott was, at least, "art and
part" in the review. His efforts to disguise himself as an Englishman,
aided by a Scotch antiquary, are divertingly futile. He seized the chance
of defending his earlier works from some criticisms on Scotch manners
suggested by the ignorance of Gifford. Nor was it difficult to see that
the author of the review was also the author of the novel. In later years
Lady Louisa Stuart reminded Scott that "Old Mortality," like the Iliad,
had been ascribed by clever critics to several hands working together.

On December 5, 1816, she wrote to him, "I found something you wot
of upon my table; and as I dare not take it with me to a friend's house,
for fear of arousing curiosity"--she read it at once. She could not sleep
afterwards, so much had she been excited. "Manse and Cuddie forced
me to laugh out aloud, which one seldom does when alone." Many of
the Scotch words "were absolutely Hebrew" to her. She not unjustly
objected to Claverhouse's use of the word "sentimental" as an
anachronism. Sentiment, like nerves, had not been invented in
Claverhouse's day.
The pecuniary success of "Old Mortality" was less, perhaps, than might
have been expected. The first edition was only of two thousand copies.
Two editions of this number were sold in six weeks, and a third was
printed. Constable's gallant enterprise of ten thousand, in "Rob Roy,"
throws these figures into the shade.
"Old Mortality" is the first of Scott's works in which he invades history
beyond the range of what may be called living oral tradition. In
"Waverley," and even in "Rob Roy," he had the memories of
Invernahyle, of Miss Nairne, of many persons of the last generation for
his guides. In "Old Mortality" his fancy had to wander among the relics
of another age, among the inscribed tombs of the Covenanters, which
are common in the West Country, as in the churchyards of
Balmaclellan and Dalry. There the dust of these enduring and
courageous men, like that of Bessie Bell and Marion Gray in the ballad,
"beiks forenenst the sun," which shines on them from beyond the hills
of their wanderings, while the brown waters of the Ken murmur at their
feet.
Here now in peace sweet rest we take, Once murdered for religion's
sake,
says the epitaph on the flat table-stone, beneath the wind tormented
trees of Iron Gray. Concerning these /Manes Presbyteriani/, "Guthrie's
and Giffan's Passions" and the rest, Scott had a library of rare volumes
full of prophecies, "remarkable Providences," angelic ministrations,
diabolical persecutions by The Accuser of the Brethren,--in fact, all that
Covenanteers had written or that had been written about Covenanteers.
"I'll tickle ye off a Covenanter as readily as old Jack could do a young
Prince; and a rare fellow he is, when brought forth in his true colours,"
he says to Terry (November 12, 1816). He certainly was not an

unprejudiced witness, some ten years earlier, when he wrote to Southey,
"You can hardly conceive the perfidy, cruelty, and stupidity of these
people, according to the accounts they have themselves preserved. But
I admit I had many prejudices instilled into me, as my ancestor was a
Killiecrankie man." He used to tease Grahame of "The Sabbath," "but
never out of his good humour, by praising Dundee, and laughing at the
Covenanters." Even as a boy he had been familiar with