TOPICS OF THE DAY.
PORTRAIT OF SIR. WALTER SCOTT.
THE Literary Souvenir for 1829 contains a gem, which, independently of the other merits of that elegant volume, ought to sell the entire work. This is an engraving of LESLIE'S admirable por-' trait of SIR WALTER SCOTT; which is much the nearest approximation to an adequate likeness of the poet novelist that has yet fallen within the reach of the majority of his admirers. All who are conversant—and who so mere a clod as not to be conversant ? —with the mind and sentiments of the Author of Waverley; must needs desire to become accmainted with his face ;—it is a species of inquisitiveness pardonable when extended to even the minutest peculiarities of genius. The engraving, however, is far from being a fair representative of the portrait,—a sight of which is almost as good as a sight of the Bard,—for, bating the head, on which Time does seem to have shed its honours, and the eyebrows too redundant for early manhood, the rest of the thee has absolutely the smugness and the smoothness of youth, instead of the deep furrows and rugged outline of hoar antiquity. The posture too, which in the painting is expressive of so much ease and bodily satisfaction, has in the engraving contracted a portrait-like formality, as of one sitting for his picture, which is anything but characteristic of the subject. ha ill is there—what no other eneraving we have seen possesses—something of the eye with its blended expression of good nature, " gude heed," and sagacity ;—of the eyebrows, which, in the act of meditation, promise to fall over and hide entirely the grey lights below ;—of the high forehead and conical-shaped head, with the silvery shine of the hair, which in the painting is so exquisite, as would almost make you believe in the achievements of the artists who are fabled to have beguiled the birds and each other. It was our great fortune to behold the Bard and his portrait at the same moment ; and as you turned from the or to the other, it is hardly talking hyperbolically to say, that you might have conceived the Author of Waverley to be sitting opposite a mirror ; so truly did the portrait reflect his features, countenance, and the amenity and Pair de bonhownie, which mitigate the awe that so great a name might otherwise inspire. The artist too was there, for the picture was in progress,— a man of simple manners and few words.
Yet, after all has been done which the art perhaps can achieve, veneration is not satisfied. Memory supplies finer portraits than LESLIE'S. In the latter you are at no loss to descry the shrewd observer and humorous delineator of life --the Baron and the Bane, Charlie's Hope and Monkbarns, with a crowd of .tamiliar visions, spring up readily at the sight of it. Not so readily, with reverence he it spoken, rise to view the long train of chiefs and heroes, "stern to do and stubborn to endure,' and of yet higher minded dames, with a fortitude as feminine as it is enduring, which, equally with the ploughman and the preacher, have sprung from that all-creative imagination. The Author of Waverley has not been caught by Lasata in a moment of inspiration ;—he wears his every-day looks ; and for that very reason, perhaps, the portrait is the dearer to his friends. To our mind's eye there rises a vision more poetic, more picturesque, more intellectual. The Bard, as he sits in his chair, rests !Ali hands on the stick you see in the engraving, and betiding forward, recites the lament of a clan for time loss of its chief, which an accomplished daughter of the Isles has just sung to the harp in its original Gaelic. Memory, unworthy of the precious deposit—which, however, may be extant in print— has preserved but a single line—" They slew my chief at dead of night,"—which probably was repeated thus—" At dead of night they slew my clad ;"—but time poetic light of the eye and the pathos of the deep, tremulous voice, are still seen and heard. It was the countenance, the attitude, and the tone with which the last minstrel—but onc—may be supposed to have sung his lay of the deeds of the days of old. What, we have often since reflected, would the poet-scholars of lane given for a sight of the blind old bard of" rocky Chios," sitting amidst a listening group of Delian girls, and winning, by the recitation of a portion of his rhapsody, their kind remembrance in after years, and the title of their favourite poet P—Or what would any English enthusiast proffer for a view of that other bard, " equalled in fate," and, beyond his modest hope, " equalled" too with ins predecessor in " renown," dictating to his daughters strains unheard before, but thenceforward never to be forgotten? Whilst we long extravagantly for what is impossible, we are not always fully aware of the value of the privileges we actually enjoy : it is certain that the enthusiasts of 2028 or 3028, (if a comet singe not our orb before that sera), will a ish as devoutly to see and hear what we have seen and heard, as we desire to see and hear what the contemporaries of Hosant and ' MILTON saw aud heard.
Come arouse thee, Memory, and give us another picture of the Author of Waverley.—A couple of greyhounds have just been let slip at a hare, which the eye of threescore was the first to discover, and which the veteran sportsman set up with a " viewIlona" would have done honour to the lungs of thirty, just as he tramps up the steep hill-side with a sturdiness would have done equal honour to the legs of thirty. But the hare is killed, and the party pause on the hill above Newark, looking clown upon the old ruin with its venerable trees, haunted by rooks and daws and the cooing stock-dove ; whilst the corn-rigsss below are dotted with bhsck cocks, whose whirr ever and anon breaks the silence, and which a raw Englishman mistakes for crows*: It was a sullen evening in autumn, and the figures in the fore-ground were shown by the lurid light, peculiar to the season and the hour, in which the fitces of men are glaringly conspicuous. The night was beginning to close over the distant landscape, and the Yarrow was heard tumbling along its secret course, shrouded from the ken. In this light, leaning on his stick, his white hair gleaming from below his Lowland bonnet, stood the Author of Waverley, looking out on the prospect. There was a silence of a moment—perhaps an involuntary homage to the genius of the still and solemn hour—which was broken by the deep tones of the Bard, repeating to himself, or to the surrounding group, these lines of Wordsworth
" Nought was seen but the coming night,
Amid nothing heard but the roar of Yarrow."
Another view presented by memory, which, if we lorded it over colours and canvass like LESLIE, should be fixed beyond escape, would show the bard on " hospitable thoughts intent," and engaged in :; duly never so fully and freely discharged as beneath " the stately roof of Abbotsford." ALLEN CustanNonam's American friend has accurately enotieh described Nvhatever could be observed in a morning's visit ; yet has he omitted to commemorate the remarkable stone eit;gy of a deer-hound reposing before the porch of the hall. Still less has he commemorated,—for he was so unhappy as to visit Abbotsford when its lord was absent in Ireland,-111e Author of Waverley, as seen through the lofty arch of the embattled wall, sitting on this very effigy, leaning his hand as usual on the accustomed slick, with his bounet on, and listening like one of his own :sifted seers, for the tramp of horses and the approach of the expected guests, seen the day before, in a vision of second sight ; and, tottering by his side, the original of the stone montunent, that very " old :Heide alio now lies below his own effigy—" Sit libi terra levis"—prays the inscription ; which piously as it is wished, can hardly be hoped for, under time weight of so ponderous a monument. If the peinter will but tarry a moment, he may have "all the tail canine"—the gent-rations of Ginger and Mustard, yelping and barking in full chorus around. One of these he vill not fail to immertalize—one that you might swear by his weasel shape, long back, long snout, and short legs, to be a " fell chief(' at the vermin." And this idea is upheld by the respeet paid to that individual of the Pepper blood on the occasion of crossing the ford, from which we may suppose that Abbotsford obtained its name:—" Stop," sail the kindly voice of LAIDLAW'S master, in the good Scotch he seems to love,—" we nutunna forget the little doggie ;" and the " Nve.e (loggie" was accordingly handed into the vehicle. For another characteristic view, we nligilt suppose him standing under his own porch, wills his head slightly depressed, the nether lip drawn far under the upper jaw, his thoughts flown centuries back or haply brooding on alihirs of yesterday. In the Anniversaroi accompanying the American gentleman's account of Abbotsford, is another engraving of its master, from a picture of ALLAN'S—ALLAN, to whom the kind mention of him in Waverley has secured an immortality that his own more perishable works might have failed to bestow. A better idea of the Bard's ordinary outward man may be got from this than from LESLIE'S portrait, in which he appears dressed for dinner. In ALLAN'S picture he is sitting in his sanctum, evidently in his green coat and drab trowsers, worn well enough to be comfortable wear, with a black kerchief tied carelessly about his neck, and the waistcoat partially open. The half-closed eyes and close shut mouth are happily significant of the process of mental conception, which the pen in hand and paper before him show to be going on. Here are the high crown and silver hair of the bard ;—otherwise the character of the face is too rustic—too Lowland farmer like, for the man of letters and the gentleman. They make very free with the " Lion's den ;"—we felt all the sin of intrusion when, having strayed into a less sacred retirement, and being in the act of handling certain " thumbikens," we heard the floor of the hall hard by smote heavily by an approaching footstep. It might be the Lion, or it might not ; so with a back resolute not to see, we waited its approach, expecting it to pass by without deigning a notice : but it halted ; and from behind, as we stood surveying the various gear on the walls, it breathed forth in deep, good-humoured accents
" He has a fouth o' auld nick-nackets. Rusty aim n caps and jinglin' jackets."
Turning, we modestly asked what might be the story attached to a certain old hat, that hung above, and which we had been conjecturing to have been lost on Magus Muir by some of the Whig caries who there "did take James Sharpe, the Bishop's life"—But no—it had been due.'' out of a neighbouring bog, and brought to Abbotsford,—" for they bring every thing they find in all the country round to me"—in the same way as, we remember, they do to Monkbarns.
An American describer of Abbotsford, in the Anniversary, says that a Frenchman has called it a " romance in lime and stone." We suspect it comprises, in a stricter sense, several romances ; and have thought that its truly antique and picturesque confusion of gables and turrets might in some measure have arisen from its gradual growth, and its receiving from time to time augmentations which the original design perhaps did not at first contemplate. " Certes," says Jedediah Cleishbotham to the reader, speaking of the first series of the Tales of my Landlord, "if thou hast chuckled over their facetious and festivous description. . . I have also simpered when I beheld a second story with attick, that has risen on the basis of my small domicile at Gandercleugh." Marmion was possibly the last which did not contribute its wing or turret to the domicile ;—it was born at Ashestiel ; a long, low, comfortable farm-house, romantically situated on your left as you journey to Peebles.—Why is it that we look back on this forsaken and hum bler residence of the mighty minstrel with more interest than on the stately roof of his present residence? We cannot tell, unless it be from the same feelings that, in the splendour and heat of the sun declining from his meridian, we look back with a melancholy pleasure to the early morning, when the genius of the day had newly risen to run his course, and reddened the gray dawn with his ascending glory.
Previous page
