Sir Walter Scott | Page 3

he could to these mortuary ceremonies;
but feeling I was not, like him, either useful or ornamental, I escaped as
often as I could." This strong dash of the conventional in Scott's father,
this satisfaction in seeing people fairly to the door of life, and taking his
final leave of them there, with something of a ceremonious flourish of
observance, was, however, combined with a much nobler and deeper
kind of orderliness. Sir Walter used to say that his father had lost no
small part of a very flourishing business, by insisting that his clients
should do their duty to their own people better than they were
themselves at all inclined to do it. And of this generous strictness in
sacrificing his own interests to his sympathy for others, the son had as
much as the father.

Sir Walter's mother, who was a Miss Rutherford, the daughter of a
physician, had been better educated than most Scotchwomen of her day,
in spite of having been sent "to be finished off" by "the honourable Mrs.
Ogilvie," whose training was so effective, in one direction at least, that
even in her eightieth year Mrs. Scott could not enjoy a comfortable rest
in her chair, but "took as much care to avoid touching her chair with
her back, as if she had still been under the stern eyes of Mrs. Ogilvie."
None the less Mrs. Scott was a motherly, comfortable woman, with
much tenderness of heart, and a well-stored, vivid memory. Sir Walter,
writing of her, after his mother's death, to Lady Louisa Stewart, says,
"She had a mind peculiarly well stored with much acquired information
and natural talent, and as she was very old, and had an excellent
memory, she could draw, without the least exaggeration or affectation,
the most striking pictures of the past age. If I have been able to do
anything in the way of painting the past times, it is very much from the
studies with which she presented me. She connected a long period of
time with the present generation, for she remembered, and had often
spoken with, a person who perfectly recollected the battle of Dunbar
and Oliver Cromwell's subsequent entry into Edinburgh." On the day
before the stroke of paralysis which carried her off, she had told Mr.
and Mrs. Scott of Harden, "with great accuracy, the real story of the
Bride of Lammermuir, and pointed out wherein it differed from the
novel. She had all the names of the parties, and pointed out (for she was
a great genealogist) their connexion with existing families."[1] Sir
Walter records many evidences of the tenderness of his mother's nature,
and he returned warmly her affection for himself. His executors, in
lifting up his desk, the evening after his burial, found "arranged in
careful order a series of little objects, which had obviously been so
placed there that his eye might rest on them every morning before he
began his tasks. These were the old-fashioned boxes that had garnished
his mother's toilette, when he, a sickly child, slept in her
dressing-room,--the silver taper-stand, which the young advocate had
bought for her with his first five-guinea fee,--a row of small packets
inscribed with her hand, and containing the hair of those of her
offspring that had died before her,--his father's snuff-box, and
etui-case,--and more things of the like sort."[2] A story, characteristic
of both Sir Walter's parents, is told by Mr. Lockhart which will serve

better than anything I can remember to bring the father and mother of
Scott vividly before the imagination. His father, like Mr. Alexander
Fairford, in Redgauntlet, though himself a strong Hanoverian, inherited
enough feeling for the Stuarts from his grandfather Beardie, and
sympathized enough with those who were, as he neutrally expressed it,
"out in '45," to ignore as much as possible any phrases offensive to the
Jacobites. For instance, he always called Charles Edward not the
Pretender but the Chevalier,--and he did business for many Jacobites:--
"Mrs. Scott's curiosity was strongly excited one autumn by the regular
appearance at a certain hour every evening of a sedan chair, to deposit a
person carefully muffled up in a mantle, who was immediately ushered
into her husband's private room, and commonly remained with him
there until long after the usual bed-time of this orderly family. Mr.
Scott answered her repeated inquiries with a vagueness that irritated the
lady's feelings more and more; until at last she could bear the thing no
longer; but one evening, just as she heard the bell ring as for the
stranger's chair to carry him off, she made her appearance within the
forbidden parlour with a salver in her hand, observing that she thought
the gentlemen had sat so long they would be better of a dish of tea, and
had ventured