The Antiquary | Page 6

1828).
Yet it is almost impossible but that the plot of "The Antiquary" should
have been duly considered. Scott must have known from the first who
Lovel was to turn out to be, and must have recognised in the hapless
bride of Lord Glenallan the object of the Antiquary's solitary and
unfortunate passion. To introduce another Wandering Heir immediately
after the Harry Bertram of "Guy Mannering" was rather audacious. But
that old favourite, the Lost Heir, is nearly certain to be popular. For the
Antiquary's immortal sorrow Scott had a model in his own experience.

"What a romance to tell! --and told, I fear, it will one day be. And then
my three years of dreaming and my two years of wakening will be
chronicled doubtless. But the dead will feel no pain." The dead, as
Aristotle says, if they care for such things at all, care no more than we
do for what has passed in a dream.
The general sketch probably began to take full shape about the last day
of 1815. On December 29 Scott wrote to Ballantyne:--
DEAR JAMES,--
I've done, thank'God, with the long yarns Of the most prosy of
Apostles--Paul,1 And now advance, sweet heathen of Monkbarns, Step
out, old quizz, as fast as I can scrawl.
In "The Antiquary" Scott had a subject thoroughly to his mind. He had
been an antiquary from his childhood. His earliest pence had been
devoted to that collection of printed ballads which is still at Abbotsford.
These he mentions in the unfinished fragment of his "Reliquiae
Trotcosienses," in much the same words as in his manuscript note on
one of the seven volumes.
"This little collection of Stall tracts and ballads was formed by me,
when a boy, from the baskets of the travelling pedlars. Until put into its
present decent binding it had such charms for the servants that it was
repeatedly, and with difficulty, recovered from their clutches. It
contains most of the pieces that were popular about thirty years since,
and, I dare say, many that could not now be procured for any price
(1810)."
Nor did he collect only--
"The rare melody of some old ditties That first were sung to please
King Pepin's cradle.
"Walter had soon begun to gather out-of-the-way things of all sorts. He
had more books than shelves [sic]; a small painted cabinet with Scotch
and Roman coins in it, and so forth. A claymore and Lochaber axe,
given him by old Invernahyle, mounted guard on a little print of Prince
Charlie; and Broughton's Saucer was hooked up on the wall below it."
He had entered literature through the ruined gateway of archleology, in
the "Border Minstrelsy," and his last project was an edition of Perrault's
"Contes de Ma Mere l'Oie." As pleasant to him as the purchase of new
lands like Turn Again, bought dearly, as in Monkbarns's case, from
"bonnet lauds," was a fresh acquisition of an old book or of old armour.

Yet, with all his enthusiasm, he did not please the antiquaries of his
own day. George Chalmers, in Constable's "Life and Correspondence"
(i. 431), sneers at his want of learning. "His notes are loose and
unlearned, as they generally are." Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, his
friend in life, disported himself in jealous and ribald mockery of Scott's
archaeological knowledge, when Scott was dead. In a letter of the
enigmatic Thomas Allen, or James Stuart Hay, father of John Sobieski
and Charles Edward Stuart, this mysterious person avers that he never
knew Scott's opinion to be held as of any value by antiquaries (1829).
They probably missed in him "a sort of pettifogging intimacy with
dates, names, and trifling matters of fact,--a tiresome and frivolous
accuracy of memory" which Sir Arthur Wardour reproves in
Monkbarns. Scott, in brief, was not a Dry-as- dust; all the dead bones
that he touches come to life. He was as great an archeologist as a poet
can be, and, with Virgil, was the greatest antiquary among poets. Like
Monkbarns, he was not incapable of being beguiled. As Oldbuck
bought the bodle from the pedlar at the price of a rare coin, so Scott
took Surtees's "Barthram's Dirge," and his Latin legend of the tourney
with the spectre knight, for genuine antiquities. No Edie Ochiltree ever
revealed to him the truth about these forgeries, and the spectre knight,
with the ballad of "Anthony Featherstonhaugh," hold their own in
"Marmion," to assure the world that this antiquary was gullible when
the sleight was practised by a friend. "Non est tanti," he would have
said, had he learned the truth; for he was ever conscious of the
humorous side of the study of the mouldering past. "I do not know
anything which relieves the mind so much from the sullens as a trifling
discourse about