Scott's Juvenilia
New Love-Poems. By Sir Walter Scott. Edited by Davidson Cook. (Oxford : Basil Blackwell. 58.) Ma. DAVIDSON COOK, one of Professor Grierson's colleagues in the centenary edition of Scott's letters, had occasion to do some wcrk in the library of South Kensington Museum, and there came across a manuscript volume on Scott and his contem- poraries, written apparently in the late thirties, and unpub- lished, no doubt, because of the resounding success of Lockhart's Life. The manuscript contained the story of an early love affair of Scott, and a number of letters and verses addressed to the lady, the authenticity of which there seems to he no reason to doubt Portions were printed in Professor Crierson's first volume, but it was a happy thought to make a book of the curious little collection.
At seventeen the young Walter Scott, having been two years a clerk in his father's office, decided -to go to the Scots Bar, and began to take the law classes at Edinburgh University. The love story seems to have begun about that time, when he spent his holidays between his Aunt Janet's house in Nelso and his Uncle Robert's villa of Roiebank, a little below the tovin: Of the girl we only know that her name was Jessie, and that she
was the daughter of a Kelso tradesman. The correspondence was wholly on one side. It had to be desperately secret, for both his and her parents would have interfered drastically with the courtship had they known of it. This concealment was no doubt an added charm to one who had always a passion for mystification. The couple met often during his Kelso visits ; he wrote to her when he was back at the office ; and when she came to Edinburgh to nurse a sick relative, his love-making was conducted under difficulties, for he had to spend long hours shut up in a cupboard. As he grew older he seems to have become a little embarrassed by the connexion, and gradually cooled off—Greetunantle had begun to appear on his horizon. But the girl had wrought herself into a genuine attachnwnt and resented the inevitable separation. Ultimately she mar- ried a medical student and lived happily in London. The whole story has a prosaic innocence about it which is not common in the early love affairs of poets.
The narrative consists of ruriosa rather than memorabilia. None of the verses are good, though, they are not worse than the first attempts of -Byron and Tennyson. The earliest lyrics,. echoing many masters like Burns, George Wither, Shenstone and Miekle, are fairly tuneful, but occa- sionally descend to the bathos of a line like
"Feeding our mutual love in a thousand different ways."
Presently .Scott attempts to reproduce for her ballads which he had heard in his childhood from an Irish maid, and gives indifferent versions of the stories of "May Colvin" and " Lamntikin." He had not yet discovered Liddesdale and the true ballad- spell. In the end, after the fashion of youth, he attempts the light satiric vein, with slightly more success. The prose-of his letters is far more mature and vigorous than
his halting verse. For a long time past," he tells the lady, " Ihave been spoiling a vast quantity of good paper with my attempts at the poetical. I have addressed the moon—that most be-rhimed of planets—so often I am ashamed to look her in the face. I have made odes to nightingales so numerous they might suffice for all that ever were hatched." Jessie had told him that she liked poetry, and she certainly got her fill oftt,, for one of her lover's tributes was to be "an epic poem t;if hundreds and hundreds of lines." JO/IN BUCHAN,'
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